I came to the study of the Middle East very much as an outsider, since my family has no discernible ethnic or professional connection with the region. From the moment my ancestors first showed up in Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century, they slowly made their way westwards through the border states (Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas), guided by a flawless instinct for the most beautiful and poorest landscapes. Around 1910, my grandparents on both sides abandoned the hill country of western Virginia and northwest Arkansas for the plains of central Kansas. That is where I was born and spent my first eighteen years. My only contact with the Middle East was the informal education on ancient Israel and its neighbors that I received from my grandmother, a woman of strict evangelical principles and vast intellectual curiosity. It turned out to be a rather good background for my later career.

I went East to college, and there, at Amherst College in faraway New England, I discovered a few things about myself. First, I had no talent for calculus and hence no hope of becoming an engineer. Second, I had an instinctive affinity for historical studies—a fortunate happenstance, since Amherst had a remarkable History Department, which over some decades produced more graduates who became professional historians than any other institution in the country. In particular, I had the good fortune to study Middle Eastern history with John Petropulos, a son of Greek immigrants. He was a man of great integrity, who showed me that it was possible even for a scholar with strong loyalties to his ancestral homeland to give an honest and sympathetic account of the dreaded Other—in his case, the Turks and the Ottoman Empire. He also pushed me to learn Arabic, and that was my third discovery, an abiding love for a language and literature that remains difficult but always compelling even now.

Graduate studies took me to the University of Michigan, where I encountered an array of very demanding teachers with remarkably diverse personalities. How much I learned from them and still owe to them has only become clear over the succeeding three decades, so perhaps this is the moment to express my thanks to Andrew Ehrenkreutz, Oleg Grabar, James Bellamy, James Stewart-Robinson, and George Scanlon. My gratitude to those who are no longer with us is no less deep: George Hourani, Richard Mitchell, Kenneth Allin Luther, and Paul Alexander. I really had no idea what I was doing or where I was at the time, but I could not have been luckier. At Michigan I also encountered an amazing cohort of fellow graduate students, people whose talents and background often led me to reflect on just what I could hope to bring to our field. I cannot name everyone, and it would be invidious to name only a few, but they have been lifelong friends.

During my graduate career and the decades following, I have traveled and sometimes resided in many parts of the Muslim world, not only in the Middle East but in East and Southeast Asia as well. Unlike some of my colleagues, I have never made a particular locale my second home, a fact which I often regret. On the other hand, I have had an unusual opportunity to become acquainted with the wondrous breadth and variety of Muslim societies and cultures, and that is good compensation for this gap in my experience.

My teaching career has spanned thirty-two years and four universities. Like everyone at my stage of life, I can only wonder where the time went and what I did with it. Each of the universities at which I have taught has presented me with challenges of its own, but also with great opportunities. I now reside at the University of California in Santa Barbara. UCSB demonstrates that even in the most beguiling of places, it is still possible to build a first-class university. You don’t need blizzards, ice storms, and tornadoes to drive you into your study. (Of course you may work on your veranda rather than in your study, but that is a topic for another day.) So I close with sincere thanks to my colleagues in History and in Middle Eastern Studies for inviting me to join them eleven years ago, and for providing such support and intellectual stimulation in the years since.