Kesher Talk

Exchange program. This is pretty nifty: The Scholar Rescue Fund.

Ahmed Subhy Mansour was a scholar at Cairo's venerated Al-Azhar University. He studied the history of dictatorship in Islam and the place of death and paradise in the Koran. But some aspect of his research did not go over well with the authorities, and in 1987 he was fired from his position and jailed for two months. Since then he has searched for a place to continue his work and his life, particularly after a number of newspapers accused him of upholding Zionism, a crime punishable by death in Egypt. After 15 years of wandering, last year he finally found a new home — as a research fellow at Harvard University.

The match was made through the Scholar Rescue Fund, started two years ago by the Institute of International Education. Since it was created, the rescue fund has enabled Mansour and 44 other scholars to escape persecution in their home countries, and — just as importantly for many of them — to continue their scholarly work with a position at an American university. At Harvard, for example, Mansour has pushed ahead with the creation of a center for studying and reforming the Wahabi influence on Islamic institutions in America.

. . . During the 1930s and 1940s, the institute's Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars helped bring more than 330 scholars, most of them Jewish, from Nazi Germany to the United States, including such luminaries as philosopher Martin Buber, physicist Enrico Fermi and novelist Thomas Mann. Descendents of several of those earlier scholars, along with families of other Jewish refugees, gathered recently at the Park Avenue apartment of Jewish philanthropist Patti Kenner to raise money to help revive the rescue program. . . .

Charles notes the latest bit of America-hating at the easily mocked DU. I suggest an exchange program; if the DUmmies really hate it here, they can move to Iran and Pakistan, and threatened scholars can come here.

posted by Judith @ 4/25/2004 07:37:48 PM