As a graduate student, R. Michael Feener journeyed more than 20 hours by bus
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over unpaved roads to a small Indonesian town called Mamuju. He arrived covered with mud, and although he knew no one, within hours local Muslims were treating him as an honored guest. They fed him a lunch of rice and curried fish, and gave him fresh clothes. When they learned he was in town to watch a tournament of competitors reciting passages from the Koran, they led the way. “It gave me a chance to talk with people about what the reading of the Koran, a very distant text, means to them,” says Mr. Feener.
His drive and charisma, along with his deep knowledge of Islam and extensive language skills, made him a must-hire at the University of California at Riverside. As a new assistant professor of Islamic studies, he is one of only a handful of young Islamic scholars to land a tenure-track job anywhere this year.
Although Mr. Feener received his Ph.D. from Boston University in religious studies -- the department he’ll reside in at Riverside -- he is part historian and part ethnographer. He painstakingly analyzes original Islamic texts. (Arabic is one of his eight languages.) Because his interest is in contemporary interpretations of those texts, he relies on his interactions during his travels. He has shared tofu -- and conversation -- with Muslims at a Cairo mosque, and visited the remote Indonesian island of Buton where natives told him how decaying documents on Sufi cosmology influenced their culture. “I work back and forth between serious textual work and looking at how it impacts Muslims today,” he explains.
John U. Wolff, a professor of linguistics and Asian studies at Cornell University, calls Mr. Feener “a kind of intrepid explorer.” Adds Mr. Wolff, who taught Mr. Feener an intensive Indonesian-language seminar during the religion scholar’s graduate-school years: “He thinks of looking in places nobody else has.”
Mr. Feener’s combination of interests made him a hot commodity in his specialty this year, his first time on the job market. In addition to Riverside, he had two other offers -- from Reed College and the University of Puget Sound. San Diego State University was interested in hiring him, too, but funds for the post dried up at the last moment.
The market in Islamic studies was particularly strong this year, as universities scrambled to offer courses in the field following September 11. But positions at most top universities went to candidates who’d already been on the tenure track at other institutions. Mr. Feener will be the first -- and only -- tenure-track Islamicist at Riverside.
Mr. Feener, who is 33, is known as a demanding teacher and an exacting scholar who has written for the Journal for Islamic Studies and Islamic Law and Society, and is editing a textbook on contemporary Islamic societies for high-school and college students.
“He generates so much,” says Michael E. Foat, an assistant professor of religion and humanities at Reed, where Mr. Feener taught after getting his Ph.D. “I’ve seen him write brilliant papers on the back of an envelope.”
The Indonesian Connection
Mr. Feener never planned on an academic career. He was raised in an Irish-Catholic, working-class household near Salem, Mass., where his father was a truck driver and his mother a school crossing guard. He frequently visited his hometown museum and was mesmerized by stories of sea captains and their travels to distant lands. But he wasn’t a particularly studious kid. After high school, he studied computer science for two years before following a friend to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
There, as fate would have it, he took an Islamic-studies course to fulfill his religion requirement and was one of the few Americans assigned to the dormitory for foreign students. In the afternoons, he’d return from Islamic studies to discuss what he’d learned with dormmates from Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey.
“I grew up Catholic, and religion was always background music,” recalls Mr. Feener. But his friends were passionate about Islam. “How was it that this stuff really meant something to other people my age?” he wondered.
His friends invited him to Indonesia -- something he at first considered “outlandish” given his provincial roots -- but he eventually went just before he graduated from Boulder in 1991, staying with friends, friends of friends, and relatives of friends. “I really got to learn the language that way -- getting on buses and boats, and showing up on people’s doorsteps,” says Mr. Feener. “After three months, I was completely hooked.”
Since then, Mr. Feener has made four more trips to Indonesia, which has been the focus of his study of Islam. That makes sense: There are 200 million Muslims in Indonesia, more than in any other nation in the world. Most of Mr. Feener’s scholarship deals with tracing the historical movement of Islam some 500 years ago from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, which had been populated by Buddhists and Hindus. His dissertation covers one aspect of that, the development of Muslim jurisprudence in Indonesia. Mr. Feener is also interested in how Indonesians have developed a more modern version of Islam, and how that in turn has influenced what is practiced today in the Middle East.
After earning his B.A. in religious studies from Colorado, Mr. Feener went home to Salem. Although he says he knew nothing about being a graduate student, he took the T to Boston University to talk to Merlin Swartz, a professor of religious studies, and ended up enrolling as a Ph.D. student.
The college isn’t exactly a powerhouse for Islamic studies -- Mr. Feener was the only doctoral student the year he earned his degree. But Mr. Swartz let him chart his own educational course, working with anthropologists at Boston University and attending intensive language and history institutes at the University of Chicago, Cornell, and the University of Washington, as well as in Yemen, Egypt, and Indonesia. For eight summers, Mr. Feener studied languages, learning Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. “At BU, I spent at least as much time off campus as on,” he says.
After graduate school, Mr. Feener took the temporary position at Reed and discovered he liked teaching. He quickly became popular with dozens of students and faculty members, who congregated in the evenings at the house near campus that Mr. Feener shared with his Japanese wife, Mayuko T. Feener. At departmental social gatherings, Mr. Feener passed around his traditional Middle Eastern water pipe filled with tobacco and fruit juice.
Reed wanted to keep Mr. Feener, and offered him a tenure-track job last spring. But the department there ultimately had to buy its own water pipe; Riverside promised less time in the classroom and more for research, in addition to the chance to work with its new program in Southeast Asian studies, which combines scholarship in the humanities and the arts. As Riverside’s only Islamic-studies professor, Mr. Feener will have a broad opportunity to determine the curriculum and build a library. He’ll earn around $55,000 a year.
Mr. Feener’s unconventional academic training is part of what made him attractive to Riverside. “He’s original and fresh,” says Ivan Strenski, a professor of religious studies who hired Mr. Feener. “He didn’t go to Harvard and then go to Berkeley. He’s made his own way.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 3, Page A11