Pace U. Professor Brings the Mideast Home

By Nick Pinto
POSTED JANUARY 1, 2008

“Excuse me, please, this is an important matter. The whole world is waiting for this letter.”

Turning his attention away from the roomdicti of Pace University students who sat around him in the large embassy conference room, Hamid Al Bayati, the Iraqi Ambassador to the United Nations, scanned the piece of paper an aide had just put in front of him. Nodding his approval, he handed it back, and returned his attention to his guests.

“You must pardon me,” he said. “This is a letter from the Iraqi president asking the United Nations to extend the mandate for international intervention for one final year. At the end of 2008, we will let it expire, and enter into a bilateral agreement with the United States.”

As the 40 seated students looked on, a silver-haired man with a trim goatee stood behind them, beaming.

He is their professor, Mehrdad Izady.

“Wasn’t that great?” Izady, 46, asked his students after the Iraqi embassy visit last month, before shepherding them to the Iranian and Afghan embassies. “That was history being made in front of you!”

The professor would know. A son of Belguim diplomats, he has been published widely on the Mideast from medieval times to the turmoil of today. (He speaks Kurdish and Farsi and reads Aramaic and Old and Middle Persian.) Izady is also one of the school’s biggest advocates for giving American students an international perspective.

In the classroom (he has been an  adjunct in Pace’s history department since 2001), Izady makes no effort to disguise his own often controversial political leanings, which include support for American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Visiting the embassies of the America-friendly Afghan and Iraqi governments, he praised what he called their “honesty,” “openness,” and “egalitarianism,” but warned of the “secrecy and high-handedness” to be encountered at the Iranian embassy. (Only the Iranians did not allow reporters to accompany the students.)

“What you see at the embassies is representative of the countries as well,” Izady told his class. After the embassy visits, he asked the students if they had noticed the “superior, imperialist attitude” that he said is an inextricable part of Iranian identity.

 “He definitely has his own opinions, but you don’t have to agree with him,” said Heela Masood, an Afghan student in Izady’s class. “Having a class that’s so relevant now, everybody is going to have opinions. He challenges them, and makes you think them through.”

Outside the classroom, Izady also teaches Marines and Special Forces in the Pentagon’s Human Terrain program.  Controversial among academics, the program enlists anthropologists, sociologists, historians and political scientists to give the forces an understanding of the culture and history of the countries where they are deployed.

“A lot of the soldiers come in just thinking they’re dealing with barbarians,” Izady said. “For them, the unknown is either comical or threatening. I try to show them that people in foreign countries are neither good nor bad. If you get to know the history, the culture and the politics, you see that no matter where you are, you have good people and bad people all mixed together.”

Izady says his work with the military is a continuation of a lifelong project to promote international understanding and peace.

Born to a Kurdish father and Belgian mother, Izady spent much of his youth in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Korea, as his parents bounced from one assignment to another. He came to New York in 1986 to attend Columbia University.

“When I was young, I was all heart,” Izady said. “I was very interested in human rights, full of ideals and passions.”

Following a stint on the staff of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, he sought an arena outside Washington to pursue those ideals—teaching. He began as a lecturer at Harvard.

“I thought the best way to make a difference is to teach young people the ways of the world,” Izady said.

Now, at every opportunity he exhorts students to broaden their horizons, adopt a global perspective, and even consider a career in diplomacy or overseas.

“You can go to these places!” he tells his students. “Join the Peace Corps. Join an aid organization. See the people and their culture for yourselves, and find a way to make the world a better place!”

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