Cole, Juan R.I. 1952- (Juan Ricardo Irfan Cole)

PERSONAL:

Born October 23, 1952, in Albuquerque, NM; son of John Herbert (an electronics engineer) and Laura Katherine Cole; married Shahin Malik (an attorney), January 7, 1982; children: Arman Haris. Education: Northwestern University, B.A. (with honors), 1975; American University in Cairo, M.A., 1978; University of California, Los Angeles, Ph.D., 1984. Politics: Social Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Bicycling, science fiction, the World Wide Web.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, 1029 Tisch Hall, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Monday Morning Co. (publisher of newspapers and magazines), Beirut, Lebanon, journalist and translator, 1978-79; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, assistant professor, 1984-90, associate professor, 1990-95, professor of Middle Eastern history, 1995—, director of Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, 1992-95. Member of editorial board, Iranian Studies, 1991—.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Association for Asian Studies, American Academy of Religion, Middle East Studies Association, Society for Iranian Studies, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellow of Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies in Pakistan, India, and England, 1981-83, grant for England, 1986; Fulbright fellow in India, 1982, and Egypt, 1985-86; University of Michigan, 1988, Horace H. Rackham faculty grant for Egypt, named Rackham research partner, 1992-93, travel grant for Turkey from International Institute, 1999; grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1991.

WRITINGS:

(Translator and author of annotations) Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani, Miracles and Metaphors, Kalimat (Los Angeles, CA), 1982.

The Concept of Manifestation in the Baha'i Writings, Association for Baha'i Studies (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), 1982.

(Editor, with Moojan Momen, and contributor) From Iran East and West: Studies in Babi and Baha'i History, Volume 2, Kalimat (Los Angeles, CA), 1984.

(Translator) Mirza Abu'l-Fadl Gulpaygani, Letters and Essays, 1886-1913, Kalimat (Los Angeles, CA), 1985.

(Editor, with Nikki Keddie) Shi'ism and Social Protest, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1986.

Roots of North Indian Shi'ism in Iran and Iraq: Religion and State in Awadh, 1722-1859, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

(Editor) Comparing Muslim Societies: Knowledge and the State in a World Civilization, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1992.

Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1993.

(Translator) Kahlil Gibran, Spirit Brides (short stories), White Cloud Press (Santa Cruz, CA), 1993.

(Translator) The Vision of Kahlil Gibran (prose poetry), White Cloud Press (Ashland, OR), 1994.

Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Translator) Kahlil Gibran, Broken Wings, White Cloud Press (Ashland, OR), 1998.

Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi'ite Islam, I.B. Tauris (London, England), 2002.

Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Religion and Politics in Iran, edited by Nikki Keddie, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1983; contributor to reference books. Contributor of articles and reviews to Middle East studies journals. International Journal of Middle East Studies, book review editor, 1988-92, editor, 1999-2001.

SIDELIGHTS:

Juan R.I. Cole once told CA: "My belief in the oneness of mankind and the underlying unity of the great world religions impels me to make my small contribution to East-West understanding through writing history. The practice of history is always an act of human self-comprehension, even if it is the history of another culture.

"I became interested in the Middle East as a teenager when my father, then a communications specialist in the U.S. Army, was stationed in Eritrea from 1967 to 1968. I went to the Middle East as a senior at Northwestern University on a year-abroad program, in the course of which I wrote a thesis on the Christian-Muslim dialogue movement in Lebanon. I wanted to begin a master's degree program at the American University of Beirut in the fall of 1975 but finally left because of the civil war, spending the rest of the school year in Jordan and going then to the American University in Cairo. The highlight of my return to Lebanon in 1978 was when, in October, the fighting grew so fierce in Beirut that it knocked out the electricity. I had to translate news articles by candlelight until midnight in case the lights should come back on and we could go to press. The candle and the bombs in the distance remain a vivid memory. As a conscientious objector, I missed the Vietnam War, so it was ironic that I should nevertheless end up in a war zone. I had gone back to Lebanon because I thought the civil war there was over.

"I went to Pakistan and India in 1981 from the University of California partially because I had long been interested in South Asian culture and because I could only find the Persian manuscripts for an Iran-related dissertation in the subcontinent, given the situation in Iran and Iraq. My feeling is that the history of the Muslim world has been underwritten, for the years from 1500 to 1850 especially, that major indigenous archival and manuscript collections are increasingly available for the study of this period, and that in order to understand the modern development of the Middle East we must comprehend better its late medieval and early modern background. I also think the rise of social history makes it easier to write the history of the Middle East in that period, for which we often lack the state papers and even court chronicles that traditional political historians depended on. Islamic court archives, which have survived in abundance, shed great light on groups such as guilds, merchants, and women."

Later, Cole added: "I believe in writing history as a means to understanding the world. How things came to be as they are is not immediately apparent. Careful historiography can contribute to our understanding of how our world has been constructed by our predecessors, and how we ourselves participate in that continued endeavor, by our selective memory. History is subversive because it reminds us of things we have deliberately forgotten, things that open up alternative paths to the ones on which we find ourselves.

"Philosophically, I suppose that Emerson, Thoreau, Goethe, Wittgenstein, Iqbal, and Habermas have meant the most to me. Religiously I owe a great deal to John Hick, Ibn al-'Arabi, and Baha'u'llah for their ideas of religious pluralism. Professionally I've been influenced by a number of authors and discrete bodies of work. When I was young the Anglo-Marxists—E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and Raymond Williams—were very important to me. So too were the Annales historians—Braudel, LeRoy Ladurie, and others. Like everyone else, I've more recently had to wrestle with postmodernism, but for me the match isn't over. Within my own field of Middle East studies, Nikki R. Keddie, along with A.J. Arberry, Albert Hourani, Amin Banani, Afaf Marsot, Roy Mottahedeh, Roger Owen, Dick Bulliet, Gabriel Baer, and Mohammad Arkoun should be mentioned.

"I got interested in the Middle East to begin with because my family lived in a Muslim area, Eritrea in Ethiopia, in 1967 and 1968. After my first year at Northwestern, I became a Baha'i. It was still the early seventies, a time of interest in Oriental religions and of social turmoil in the United States. That further piqued my interest and led me to learn Arabic. I lived in the Arab world for most of the period between 1974 and 1979, and spent another year in Cairo in the 1980s. I went off to South Asia in 1981 because it was clear that I could not do research in Iran, as I had planned, and India and Pakistan had the accessible Persian manuscripts. After a while, though, the richness and attractiveness of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures became the primary reason why I studied them. The attraction is aesthetic and spiritual and has long outlasted my initial enthusiasm for Baha'i. I was forced out of Baha'i in 1996, as a result of threats of being shunned by the community. That experience of being treated like a heretic by a community I thought I had served well for twenty-four years was probably the most wrenching of my life, although living in Beirut for part of the civil war there was a close second."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1994, James Jankowski, review of Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's 'Urabi Movement, p. 276.

History of Religions, May, 2000, Margit Warburg, review of Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha'i Faith in the Nineteenth-Century Middle East, p. 393.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 20, 1986, review of Shi'ism and Social Protest, p. 1.