Mention social protest, rebellion and counter-cultural revolution and most Americans immediately conjure up some stereotypical image of the 1960s -- long hair, tambourines, strange clothes and lots of hallucinogens. Some Americans, no doubt, would like to stamp the whole anti-establishment movement as something made in the USA, another byproduct of American ingenuity sweeping the globe.
Ahmet Karamustafa, Ph.D., associate professor of Islamic thought and Turkish literature in Arts and Sciences, would beg to differ.
Those who think of hippies as an American icon might gain valuable insight, he suggests, by reading his treatise on the Qalandars, a 13th-century Islamic dervish movement that also favored tambourines and psychoactive drugs, not to mention drums and naked revelry.
Among dervishes, he explains, such bizarre anti-establishment behavior was considered an intensely spiritual act of pious self-denial, an outward sign of disdain for earthly societal norms. It's an intellectual tidbit that might prove useful to anyone seeking answers to social unrest in the '60s.
"I think we in the modern world are all a bit too arrogant at times," Karamustafa said. "We're much too quick to write off whole chapters of human history as intellectually unimportant or irrelevant, when in truth, we have much to learn from thinkers who came long before us. We don't realize it sometimes, but we are always reinventing the wheel."
A native of Turkey and a faculty member here since 1986, Karamustafa is a respected scholar who has traced the evolution of legal, spiritual and philosophical thought throughout the premodern Islamic world. He also is a sincere and thoughtful advocate for the intrinsic value to be gained by mining the intellectual riches of forgotten cultures.
"Ahmet Karamustafa is one of my Washington University colleagues whose intellectual companionship I miss dearly," said Engin Akarli, Ph.D., a former Washington University Islamic historian now at Brown University. "He can bring the Medieval Muslim mystics to us not only in their authentic words but also as people to whom we can relate as fellow human beings. This is because Ahmet makes an effort to understand them in their social contexts as well as in comparison with other people around the world in different times who had similar concerns and asked similar questions."
"Ahmet's knowledge of various religions and sects is impressive but so is the depth and sophistication of his understanding of the place of religion in human life," Akarli said. "Moreover, his knowledge is really not to understand religion as such but as a means to understand the complexities and the beauties of the creature we call a human being."
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In his 1994 book, "God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200 - 1500," Karamustafa tells of Barak Baba, who led about 100 dervishes into Syria in 1306. Baba, who made a point of thumbing his nose at authority, liked to wander around nearly naked, wearing only a red cloth around his waist and a reddish turban on his head. His turban sported buffalo horns protruding from either side.
Baba's dervishes were renowned for their "immoral" ways, which included consumption of illegal foods and drugs and failure to observe the ritual Islamic fast. Like the free-spirited flower children of this century, dervishes were castigated as no-account beggars, idiots, lunatics and impostors, both by contemporary church leaders and waves of subsequent religious scholars.
The strange behavior of dervishes had long been written off as an odd and unimportant aberration in the evolution of mainstream Islamic traditions. Karamustafa began to suspect otherwise during his days at McGill University in Montreal, where he earned master's and doctoral degrees in Islamic Studies in 1981 and 1987.
Karamustafa began to explore accounts of dervishes in an obscure treatise on mysticism written in 1522 by a largely unknown Turkish scholar named Vahidi. His research ended up as a chapter in his doctoral dissertation, but before he could go further, he had to address inconsistencies among a dozen known versions of Vahidi's manuscript.
His research took him to Turkey, where from 1982 to 1983 he combed through ancient documents in the great libraries of Istanbul. From 1983 until 1987, he conducted research from London, completing his dissertation and working as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter. After locating 20 different versions of Vahidi's manuscript, he began the painstaking detective work necessary to establish which versions most accurately reflect the author's original work. His critical edition of the manuscript was published in 1993 by Harvard University.
"The scholarly spade work involved in publishing a critical analysis of an ancient manuscript is like piecing together the shards of a shattered ceramic vase," Karamustafa said. "First you have to determine if the shard is part of your vase, and then you figure out where it fits. In my work, that requires competence in the languages, the sheer tenacity to find manuscripts lost in the holdings of vast libraries and then having the detective skills to establish a reliable text."
Karamustafa's research requires an intimate understanding of the Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish languages. But he also is fluent in English, German and French and reads Azeri, Chaghatay and Uzbek.
While he is adamant on the significance of linguistic and textual-critical skills, Karamustafa is anxious to point out that these crafts should be harnessed to real research questions. His own ventures into premodern Islamic history have largely centered around the issue of individualism. In exploring this thorny cluster, he tries to combine social and intellectual history.
Having probed the social dimensions of Islamic mysticism in his book on the dervishes, he is now at work on two manuscripts, one on conceptions of the human soul and the other on the concept of the person in Islamic thought. He is interested in both the philosophical questions of personal identity, consciousness and agency, as well as historical questions that relate to the story of individualism in Islamic societies.
It was while pouring through manuscripts in the libraries of London that he met his future wife, Fatemeh Keshavarz, Ph.D., then an Iranian student at the University of London and now associate professor of Persian language and literature in Arts and Sciences at Washington University.
They married in London in 1986 and moved here in 1987 after Karamustafa was offered a job at the University, the only place he applied. Keshavarz's daughter from a previous marriage, Atefeh, attended the University and is now an architect in Chicago. They are now raising two more children, a daughter, Ayla, 9, and a son, Ali, 7. Both are trilingual, speaking English as well as Turkish and Persian.
Karamustafa admits a "serious interest" in music, especially western classical and all sorts of traditional music, including classical Turkish, Iranian and Indian music. He has long played the saz, a Turkish folk instrument in the lute family, on which "he is much more accomplished than he will admit," said Keshavarz.
Keshavarz, a well-regarded literary critic, specializes in classical and modern Persian poetry. She teaches a women's studies course here on family and gender issues in Islamic cultures. And she recently replaced her husband as director of the University's Center for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations, which he ran from 1994 to 1997.
"What's really striking for me about Ahmet's work," said Keshavarz, "is that his life and his work are so one and the same. Questions that come up for him in his research are questions from life, questions that we as human beings need to confront and engage. He doesn't choose a research topic because it is currently in fashion. He looks into issues he considers vital, concepts he needs to tackle for himself and his students."
Another colleague impressed with the range of Karamustafa's expertise is Patout Burns, Ph.D., professor of classics in Arts and Sciences and the Thomas and Alberta White Professor of Christian Thought.
"Ahmet has detailed knowledge of such a variety of aspects of Islamic culture -- from law to map-making," Burns said. "He is also intellectually adventuresome. Next fall he'll be teaching a course that compares Jewish, Christian and Muslim views on the soul and the self. We had been talking about this, and he just decided he was going to plunge into it. The registration for the course closed on the second day, and a waiting list began to form."
"I think my understanding of Islamic religious and cultural issues will be tremendously valuable to me as I pursue a career in international business," Rodriguez said. "All students should be exposed to these, especially those in law and business."
Describing Karamustafa as "one of the few true sages that I've encountered as a student," history doctoral candidate Edward Curtis said he has looked for excuses to work with Karamustafa since taking his course on modern Islam.
"It was not simply Ahmet's razor-sharp intellect or his incredible knowledge of Islamic history and religion that attracted me to him; it was also his quiet, generous and compassionate spirit," Curtis said. "His teaching ultimately demands that the student question his or her most fundamental assumptions not only about Islam but about religion, history and the nature of human consciousness in general."
For Karamustafa, the greatest reward of his work is the opportunity to serve as a translator, a medium or link among great thinkers and scholars of the past and present. While reading a recent book on the philosophy of quantum mechanics, for instance, he was excited to note clear similarities to work by an early Islamic philosopher.
"It's incomprehensible to me that these two thinkers -- if they could somehow be brought together -- would not have ideas of great value to share with each other," he said. "That's the role that I would most like my work to play, to provoke a lively and informative discussion among scholars from different cultures and times."
-- Gerry Everding
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