Toward a Comparative Classics

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• Toward a Comparative Classics
• Paul Allen Miller (bio)

Last March I found myself in the Sultanate of Oman preparing to give a commencement address at the National University of Science and Technology. I had flown in a few days earlier to recover from the jet lag, and I decided to take advantage of my time to leave the bustling, modern city of Muscat and journey to the ancient capitol of Nizwa in the interior. Historically, Oman was known as Oman and Muscat because it had two centers of power. Muscat was on the coast and was ruled by the Sultan. It faced outward toward India and Africa and is thought to have been the original home of Sinbad the Sailor. Nizwa in the interior was ruled by the Imam. It was a center of Islamic learning and home of the Ibadi sect, which claims to be the oldest form of Islam, predating the Shia/Sunni split. There are many beautiful things to see in Nizwa and its environs, including its famous goat and camel souk, but the most striking thing I saw was the Shawadhna Mosque, first built in the seventh century, shortly after the Prophet had sent a letter in 630 asking the inhabitants to convert, which they did immediately and without coercion. The mosque is a simple structure without minarets or a dome, made of plaster and mud brick.

I stood before it and I considered the young people I would address the next day, young men and women (more women than men), engineers, doctors, and pharmacists, who were not only ambitious soon-to-be professionals but also committed to the development of Oman. Beneath their caps and gowns they would wear traditional dress. The young women would have their hair covered. The ceremony would open with a prayer and a recitation of the Qur'an, as do all significant events in Oman. And as I stood there, I asked myself, if I were one of these young women, modern, well educated and yet traditional, what could it possibly mean to be Omani and not be Islamic? How could Islam, even if one were secular, not be fundamental to your identity, your aesthetic, your language, the structure of your dreams? How could forsaking that identity not mean becoming Western and consumerist, adopting the culture of the powers that had sought to colonize you, surrendering what made you you? [End Page 38]

Oman, in this regard, is not unique. It is part of a larger Islamic culture that has many regional and sectarian variations, that includes both the Arab and the Persian world, that intersects with Western classical culture in various ways, from the Islamic conquests to the great Muslim scholars, who preserved and commented upon Aristotle, to the mathematicians in Baghdad who built on the studies of the Pythagoreans and their successors. There is a complex, multi-layered cultural world here that intersects with our own but has no desire to be ours. It has its own tradition of poetry, philosophy, and spiritual belief. That tradition structures the identity and the assumed verities of millions of people in much the same way as that of Greece and Rome does our own.

Of course, the world is not so simple as to divide between a monolithic East and West, and it certainly cannot be characterized by something so crass as a "clash of civilizations." Nonetheless, when one of my Classics colleagues at another university said she teaches her students that the West is nothing more than one of the cardinal points on the compass, I had to cringe. Not because I feared the degradation of our tradition. The guiding assumptions most Europeans and Americans have inherited from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Ovid, often unbeknownst to them, about what it means to have a republic, how we define freedom, how we define democracy, how we understand the knowing subject, and how we imagine being in love will continue on whether she acknowledges them or not. Neither she nor I can kill Homer, even if we tried. I cringed because in failing to acknowledge the salience and importance of these deep structuring traditions, these lines of transmission and paths of reception...