…probably not in our lifetimes. Money doesn’t appear to be the problem:
The reason for the current moribund state of Muslim higher education in America, according to Yvonne Haddad, a professor at Georgetown, is that as an immigrant group Muslims are still quite young and economically unstable. To form a college, she maintains, “you have to have surplus wealth, like the Rockefellers.” But others deny that money is the issue. Nader Hashemi, who is writing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto on secularism, democracy and Islam, remarks: “The money is there. There are a lot of affluent doctors and engineers in the community. They are willing to spend money on lavish weddings, or fund-raisers to fight discrimination. But to transfer resources to, and appreciate the value of a liberal education, that hasn’t sunk in.” He cites a university in Ottawa that, after deciding to establish a chair in Islamic studies, found that the area’s upper-middle-class Muslim community could not come up with the $1 million that was needed.
Right. Don’t tell me the community doesn’t have the money when it blows it on other things. The problem is that the community per se isn’t interested in higher education, except parasitically (“we’ll pay tuition, sure, but give money to higher ed? Don’t be ridiculous…I need to finance the imam’s latest fatwa against the university’s obvious bias — it lets Jews in.”).
It occurs to me that Jews and Christians spend a lot of moolah on things like weddings, too (ours cost my father-in-law nearly $15K, but he was relieved that his daughter was getting married to someone who got a real paycheck, owned a home and a car, and paid his taxes, even if I was a Republican), but this doesn’t even begin to equal the amount of money we lavish on higher learning. I can think of a couple of endowed chairs with Jewish names on them without even trying very hard. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an endowed chair with an Arabic-sounding name.
For a culture with a history of learning and great universities, Muslims sure have slid a long way since the Reconquest.