June 7, 2020

Academic malfeasance: Khaled Abou El Fadl on Judeo-Christian values

Khaled Abou El Fadl, who revels in the title of Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor in Islamic Law at the UCLA School of Law, has a big theory. As explained in a talk on April 21, 2018, titled “What It Takes for Islamic Intellectual...

September 29, 2019

Fifty Years of Fascination: The Middle East and Me

At the start of my junior year in college, precisely fifty years ago this month, I changed my college major, making the leap from mathematics to Middle East studies. Math had become too hard, the region too interesting. I wrote about this lif...

December 28, 2017

Beauty and Nausea in Venice

"On or about December 1910, human character changed," wrote British novelist Virginia Woolf in 1924.  "I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen ...