Welcome back to another instalment of our new segment, "Interview with a Prof!" Please enjoy this weeks interview with the Graduate Chair, Dr. Adnan Husain!
1. What is your favourite part about being a professor?
There are many wonderful aspects of being a professor. To have a career exploring the past--in my case the religious cultures of the Medieval Mediterranean world from the vantages of Latin Christians, Jews and Muslims—and sharing in scholarship and the classroom the outcomes of my curiosity and my ideas about cross-cultural and interreligious interactions strikes me as an enormous privilege. My favourite experience has always been an enriching and engaging intellectual conversation with students or colleagues that leads me to think about historical experience or agency in a new way. This happens frequently when reading good historical scholarship on my own, but I enjoy the experience even more when it is a collaborative enterprise that emerges through social and intellectual engagement. It really is fulfilling when this happens in a seminar discussion. I can admit that my least favourite part of the job remains the administrative dimensions of working in a large and increasingly corporatized institution with less and less opportunities for close interaction with students and increasing constraints on time for careful reading, thinking, and writing. If I had wanted to join a government bureaucracy or the corporate world, I could have done so. That has never been attractive to me.
2. If you could give your students one piece of advice, what would it be?
Take risks out of curiosity. I meet many students who are shy to study aspects of history with which they are less familiar because they think they have no background in the area and worry they will do poorly. The best history students have confidence to immerse themselves in an unfamiliar past, to challenge themselves and to follow their curiosity. As a result, they learn more and, ultimately, are better prepared to face future intellectual challenges. One problem with our Eurocentric and nationalistic history curriculum at primary, secondary and even university levels remains the way in which the history of the vast majority of humanity has been so undervalued and underappreciated. Unless the curriculum is reformed to encourage students to challenge their presuppositions and be curious about unfamiliar cultures and histories, education really fails and merely reproduces suppositions that often myopically overvalue the familiar. That isn’t really studying history. So, I advise students to seek out the unfamiliar and expose themselves to the challenge of learning beyond what they have been conditioned to value.
3. Who is a person in history that you would most like to meet, and why?
There are so many figures I would be interested to meet and learn more about, eras I would be curious to experience, and events I would wish to witness that I can hardly narrow down my list. So, I will select seven figures I could actually have a chance to communicate with in a common language.
1) Augustine of Hippo-one of the most sophisticated literary and religious thinkers who had interesting and influential ideas on almost every issue facing the Christian community. He wrote in beautiful Latin prose.
2) Muhammad in Mecca—prophet of Islam and, perhaps, the most influential figure of the last 1500 years. The Qur’an, the scripture of Islam and the transmitted reports of his words and deeds are in classical Arabic.
3) St. Francis of Assisi—he preached to the birds, he preached to the Muslims during the 5th Crusade while seeking martyrdom in “imitation of Christ”, and radically altered Christian spiritual practice in the 13th century and beyond. His hagiographical were composed in Latin, but his own writings suggest he was not especially educated in Latin but could compose amazing religious poetry in his Umbrian dialect of Italian. His “Canticle of the Sun” revalues the natural world as a means of worship of the divine.
4) Frederick II (d. 1250)—King of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, excommunicated as a reluctant crusader but retrieved Jerusalem through diplomacy and was never forgiven by Popes for it. He built a unique castle in Lucera on the Italian mainland which he populated with Sicilian Muslims he forcibly relocated after suppressing a rebellion, filled his court with scholars, philosophers and, according to papal partisans and critics, Arab women singers. He wrote a Latin treatise on the art of falconry, spoke the Sicilian dialect, Old French, Middle High German and, it seems, even Arabic in which he corresponded with a famous Muslim philosopher and mystic.
5) Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406)— the most interesting social thinker of the pre-modern age, whose introduction to his major chronicle in Arabic developed a new form of knowledge: social science as a discipline for understanding the principles and rules of societies and history. He’s often called the father of sociology.
6) John Brown—the controversial and radical abolitionist evangelical Christian who fought slaveholders in the territory of Kansas during the 1850’s to prevent the spread of slavery westward and tried to start a wide-spread slave insurrection by attacking Harper’s Ferry in Virginia in 1859.
7) Malcolm X—I’ve been fascinated by him since my youth when I first read his autobiography. He’s well-known a radical black nationalist and former minister of the Nation of Islam. I would like to meet him after his break with the Nation of Islam during his pioneering efforts to connect the black struggle for freedom in the US with anticolonial struggles in Africa and the Third World. What has never been explained satisfactorily is the role of his religious belief, after his conversion to Sunni orthodoxy, and his political activism.
4. What is your favourite or least favourite historical fiction movie/tv show?
Almost all of them are disappointing in some respects, though I do enjoy the costumes and settings. I have hardly seen a movie or tv series that attempts to capture the context, the mentalité, the social world in a meaningful way. Most of the time, the characters are essentially modern people in period-piece costume and props. I did enjoy The Last Kingdom, however. Similarly, I have always preferred to all other Arthurian films or series.
5. Astrology was a big part of history. So, what’s your star sign?
Astrology was quite important for political prophecy since the fate of kingdoms and peoples was imagined as depending on the ruler’s fortune and fate. I am a Capricorn.
Thank you for reading, and a big thank you to Dr. Husain for the great answers!