After anthropologist Zahra Jamal presented her doctoral research to the Islam in the West research workshop last November, one of her peers, sociology student Pete Dewan, admitted he had not fully followed her analysis. At first perplexed, they soon realized their fields employ different definitions for a term. After comparing terminology, Jamal laughed and said, “This is why interdisciplinary discussions are so valuable.” This article is reproduced with the permission of the Winter 2007
Colloquy , the GSAS Alumni Magazine.
I set out this summer to begin dissertation fieldwork on the question of Coptic Orthodox Christian encounters with the miraculous in Egypt, an endeavor funded in part by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Although I used the summer funds I received from CMES to buy a digital camera and a digital audio recorder, I provide here a summary of the questions I had going into the field and a reflection on the work that I have begun to do. 
Muslims in this West African country form more than fifty percent of the entire population. Visiting Scholar, Ondrej Beranek, shares his photos of a recent trip to the region. 
CMES AM student Sabeen Virani reviews Vali Nasr's historical account of sectarian conflicts in the Muslim world.
More than a century before it was showered by outsiders with mantras about “freedom agendas” and “good governance,” the Arab world had a figure for whom these concepts represented imperatives for stanching the decline of the Arab-Muslim realm and restoring its position in the world. So argues Ryuichi Funatsu (AM 2005) in “Al-Kawākibī’s Thesis and its Echoes in the Arab World Today.” This article appears in the latest issue of the Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review. 
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