Tal Bachman wrote:
If you're right about Peterson's standing, you should be able to totally embarrass me. What glory would be yours! Embarrassing the evil Tal Bachman! Go ahead and do it, Ray. Pick ten TOP ISLAMIC SCHOLARS AROUND THE WORLD - scan the directories of Oxford and Cambridge, Columbia, ANU perhaps, Michigan, UCLA, wherever they have Near or Middle Eastern Studies programs at top flight universities, and then email as many professors as you want and ask them if they have ever heard of the "Islamist" (which is what Peterson calls himself) Daniel C. Peterson, and what their professional opinion of his research is.
DO IT. Show the world your cojones, Ray. Show the world what a puny, dishonest wretch I am, and how right you are! Show us that you yourself are not a fraud.
If you really believe what you are saying, you should have no hesitation whatsoever.
In advance I'd like to apologize for what is probably going to be a drive-by posting. I work too many hours & have too many commitments at home to do much posting this days (anyone who knows me on the MA&D board or any other email lists, knows that I post infrequently). I do, however, have opportunities to lurk. Some time back I remember reading Tal's comments on RFM that Dan Peterson was unknown among Islamic scholars. One day, out of curiousity, I sent an email to Dr. Hossein Ziai (professor of Islamic and Iranian Studies at UCLA [see his bio here:
http://www.nelc.ucla.edu/Faculty/Ziai.htm]). I asked him if he knew Dr. Daniel Peterson of BYU & if so, what he thought of him. (I mentioned that I did not personally know-- and I haven't read-- any of Dr. Peterson's Islamic research, but that, instead, I was simply familiar with Dr. Peterson's writings on LDS issues.) Following, is his unedited reply:
Dear Mr. Ash,
Thank you. Dr. Peterson is a fine scholar of Islam. He has played a
very important, leadership role in helping to establish the Middle
East Text Initiative (METI) at BYU. His work as Managing Editor of
the METI publications is superb. The publication series has made
lasting contribution to the scholarly activity on Islamic
intellectual traditions. This has provided a forum and a means of
allowing meaningful, non polemic, and non apologetic studies and
texts in Arabic and Persian philosophical and other intellectual
traditions to be published in a bilingual format and thus made
available to wider audiences. This is especially important as there
is need both within Islamic studies to encourage and indeed nurture
the role of reason and solidify rationality, and also to inform the
non specialist audiences that there is a place for reason in Islam
which we must recognize, solidify, and uphold. These are very complex
times and the more we devote studies to the rationalist traditions of
philosophy and science in Islam the more we may be able to combat
irrational and hate driven polemics and other propagandist work. Dr.
Daniel Peterson has indeed established himself as a well respected
scholar and publisher of much needed scholarly work in Islamic
studies in general, and of the philosophical tradition in particular.
I personally have a great deal of respect for Dr. Peterson's work.
Please share this with Dr. Peterson in and related to LDS studies you
are involved at BYU, or elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Hossein Ziai
Quite frankly, I don't have the time or desire to poll nine other Islamacists.
Mike
