Jayson Browder, PCS ’13, and Mohamed Sweify, S.J.D., LAW ’21, were both included on the list of people “shaping the present and future of U.S.–Middle East relations,” according to the council, which aims “to contribute to American understanding of the political, economic and cultural issues that affect U.S. interests in the Middle East.”

Browder, a decorated veteran of the U.S. Air Force, is the founder and chairman of Veterans in Global Leadership, a nonprofit that provides executive-level leadership development programs for veterans. Previously, he was an assistant dean at New York University Abu Dhabi, a presidential management fellow at the White House, and a military adviser to former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke.

“I’m truly appreciative for being recognized among such inspiring individuals who are committed to building better relationships between the United States and the Middle East,” Browder said. “Fordham has been an integral part in this journey of mine, as I earned my Fulbright scholarship to Turkey while a student at Fordham, which I’ll forever be grateful for.”

Sweify is a bilingual, dual-qualified attorney in civil and common law with expertise in both Egyptian and U.S. law. He is a co-chair and executive member of the International Dispute Resolution Committee and an executive member of the Domestic Arbitration Committee at the New York State Bar Association. Sweify has taught and been a guest speaker on Islamic law at Fordham Law School, and while studying, he was on the student advisory board of the Institute on Religion, Law and Lawyer’s Work. Before joining the S.J.D. program at Fordham in 2017, Sweify practiced international arbitration in an international law firm in the Middle East and then joined the financial crimes department of the Egyptian public prosecution office.

“Fordham Law has enabled me to bridge the gaps between the United States and the Middle East,” Sweify said. “As a civil and common law legal practitioner and scholar, I tried to bring the advantages of both systems through Fordham’s message in advancing the legal practice. This award could not have been obtained without my work at Fordham and the support I have had from its administration.”

The Middle East Policy Council, founded in 1981, publishes the quarterly journal Middle East Policy, hosts the Capitol Hill Conference Series for policymakers and their staffs, and performs national outreach for students, educators, and civic leaders.

If we recognize, however, that some of Syriac Christianity’s most important ancient centers—Nineveh, Babylon, and Beroea—are today’s Mosul, Baghdad, and Aleppo, we get a better understanding of how it is imperiled by today’s violent conflicts.

Now, some of the most beautiful and sophisticated Syriac manuscripts of the ancient world are at risk of being lost forever, said one of the world’s leading experts on Syriac texts.

Columba Stewart, O.S.B., professor of theology at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota has spent the last decade in a passionate quest to locate and preserve the vast textual heritage of the Syriac Christian world. On Feb. 6, he shared stories about this work with a capacity audience at the Lincoln Center campus in a lecture titled “Out of the Flames: Preserving the Manuscript Heritage of Endangered Syriac Christianity in the Middle East.”

Father Stewart, a Benedictine monk, is the executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at St. John’s, which began photographing manuscript collections for microfilm in the 1960s, focusing mainly on Europe.

“In 2003,” said Father Stewart, “we made two important decisions—number one, we decided to turn toward Eastern Christian collections in the Middle East, and number two, we went digital.”

As of today, the project has digitized approximately 21,000 manuscripts from the Middle East, about 12,000 of which can be viewed online through the Hill Museum’s digital library, vHMML.  Father Stewart sees the online collection eventually growing to 100,000 manuscripts.

“So this, we hope, is going to launch a new era of Syriac scholarship, opening up these collections which were off the radar of Western scholars,” he said.

A Semitic language that was the Aramaic dialect of ancient Edessa, Syriac came to be an essential language for the transmission of writings throughout Mesopotamia and Asia, Father Stewart said. His team was able to digitize an invaluable 14^th-century Syriac world chronicle, which contains an account of the Crusades from the perspective of indigenous Middle Eastern Christians.

A Lost Manuscript

However, the fate of the original manuscript is now less certain, as it had resided in Aleppo since 1923, when an entire Syriac Christian community from Edessa was forced to flee there with only their manuscripts and the key to their church.

“What’s the present state of the manuscript, its present location in Aleppo? Who knows,” said Father Stewart.

To raise awareness about the rich history of Syriac Christianity and the need for its safeguarding in the present, Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center has created the Syriac Studies Series, launched with Father Stewart’s lecture. The Department of Theology has also begun to feature Syriac studies in its curriculum.

The event was co-sponsored by the Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Theology.

–Nina Heidig

Now, Terrafranca is out experiencing the world again, this time not in uniform.

Through his academic achievements at Fordham, he received a Boren Scholarship from the National Security Education Program to study Arabic and international policy in Jordan for 11 months.

Terrafranca began taking classes in international relations at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies in 2015. Through sharing ideas with his professors, he realized that there was a side to the Middle East he did not see during his deployment.

“While I was in the military, I couldn’t stop and reflect on anything I saw and did,” said Terrafranca. “Learning about the Middle East in the classroom spiked my interest even more, but I was learning at a distance. I wanted to learn things that couldn’t be taught in the classroom.”

The Boren Scholarship is an award that focuses on language comprehension and research studies in underrepresented countries. For Terrafranca, Jordan had a special pull.

“I think Jordan is one of the most interesting countries in the world,” he said. “It’s in the heart of the Middle East. It’s exciting for me, and there’s important work to do here.”

 Terrafranca said that seeing the provocative images in the media of the Syrian crisis, forced migration, and refugee problems over the past century greatly affected him. Currently, Jordan is the temporary home to over two million Palestinian and Syrian refugees.

“Now is the time to act,” he said, “so I need to be where the action is.”

As a Boren Fellow, Terrafranca is working with AMIDEAST, a nonprofit organization (NGO) trying to strengthen understanding and collaboration between North America and the Middle East and North Africa. He is taking classes in modern Arabic, Jordanian Arabic, political science, and gender studies while participating in service learning projects.

For his current project, he is stationed at EDAMA, an NGO that promotes sustainable development in the energy, water, and environment sectors of Jordan.

“Working at EDAMA gives me a chance to see an NGO that is committed to Jordan’s sustainable development,” said Terrafranca. “One aspect of their sustainable development plan that surprised me is their focus gender equality. I want to see whether these types of changes will build an environment that fosters democracy.”

In addition to his studies and his service learning, Terrafranca is also working on researching the effects of NGOs on developing countries. He hopes to measure NGOs’ influences, to determine whether the organizations change the culture of their host countries—he notes that NGOs have been viewed as “a form of imperialism” by some factions.

“That fascinates me,” he said. “I want to see how NGOs are changing the relationships between the people and the state—if they have any effect on the development of democracy in these countries.”

While serving  his Boren, Terrafranca hopes to also explore the poorest areas of the capital city, Amman, to “better understand what the people are up against.”

He admits, however, that his initial expectation of Jordan was wrong. The country is modernized and factions are working together for change—something he did not anticipate.

“It completely rose above my expectations,” he said. “This country has a fraction of the resources we have, but it uses them to a great extent.”

When he returns to Fordham in May 2017, Terrafranca plans to finish his degree and eventually enroll in graduate school. One requirement of the Boren Scholarship is that awardees must work for the federal government for at least one year; he said he’s looking forward to doing that public service.

“I want to take my skills and the lessons I learned at Fordham into the public sector and make certain America is a country that sticks to its values,” said Terrafranca. “I love America. I want it to be respectable in the eyes of the world.”

—Mary Awad

A recipient of a Boren scholarship, she’s living in Amman, Jordan—taking classes, absorbing the culture, and learning Arabic so that after graduation she can help seek solutions to water-related problems that are readily apparent in day-to-day life.

“Water conservation is second nature for everyone” in Jordan, Morton said, noting that most households get water delivered only once a week and have to make it last. “When the water runs out, the water runs out.”

The Boren Scholarship, part of the National Security Education Program, was founded to expand America’s expertise in the needs and perspectives of countries that are underrepresented in study abroad programs. It sends undergraduates to regions that are important for U.S. interests so they can learn the language; in return, the students spend at least a year working for the federal government in the national security arena after graduating.

Morton has set her sights on the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. She hopes to help with policies that balance water security and environmental protection and that ease tensions between Middle East nations that have water-sharing agreements.

The scholarship has brought her a world away from where she was just two years ago, when, in the middle of her junior year, her growing qualms about her pre-med focus prompted her to make a change.

With “a lot” of support from Assistant Dean William Gould, she switched to international studies and started to actively seek learning opportunities in global affairs. A Fordham travel grant sent her to Scandinavia for a backpacking and leadership program that jumpstarted her interest in sustainability, an interest she developed in senior year as a youth representative in the United Nations public information department.

Morton needed a fifth undergraduate year to complete her major, and chose Jordan because it’s the best place to learn Arabic—“a beautiful language,” she said. She takes classes offered by the Council on International Educational Exchange at the Princess Sumaya Institute for Technology in Amman.

In addition to her classes in Arabic, area studies, and other topics, she’s been finishing up a senior thesis focused on the links between water problems and social unrest, with a focus on Syria. In her Boren application she noted the importance of helping Jordan—a key U.S. ally—address its own water issues as a way of avoiding political instability.

Doing something about water problems could promote peace in the region, she said, giving the example of a proposed Red Sea-Dead Sea pipeline project that would require talks between Palestine, Israel, and Jordan.

“I think that’s an important step,” she said. “If you sit down and try to have a political discussion among these three parties, I don’t know how much success you’re going to have. But when you are talking about a specific issue, such as water, I think it is easier to make an agreement. Because everyone needs water.”

Jordanians have been outspokenly curious about why she’s there—“always wanting to know why I study Arabic,” she said. And their hospitality seems to be showing in the actions of their government, which has been “truly incredible” in welcoming Syrian refugees despite Jordan’s water woes and tight resources, she said.

“Jordan doesn’t have oil, Jordan doesn’t have a huge economy, Jordan certainly relies on a lot of foreign aid, and so to put those resources to work for the refugees that are coming from Syria, I think that’s very impressive,” she said.

She and a few friends recently visited some of those refugees outside the Za’atari refugee camp, playing with a group of Syrian girls to help keep their spirits up. Rather than being a service activity, she said, the trip was about “just being there and being physically present and understanding more and seeing it myself.”

The experience reminded her of her Global Outreach projects at Fordham, she said. “The emphasis was always on walking in solidarity with others and in finding common ground.”

America’s failure to commit to Afghanistan and Iraq for the long haul has created an environment in which extremists are once again creating chaos in the countries we sought to liberate from despotic regimes, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told a Fordham University audience this week.

“When you go in and occupy a country, when you occupy Afghanistan, when you occupy Iraq, you take on a 40- or 50-year responsibility,” said retired Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace on Nov. following a leadership lecture at the Fordham Law School. “Not four years or five years. Not ‘let’s go in, topple the government, give them a little bit of help’ and then say ‘good luck’ and leave.”

Pace served as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Bill Clinton and chairman under President George W. Bush. Both men, he said, made thoughtful, considered decisions on the use of military force, but Bush’s decisions were not accompanied by a strongly made case to his constituents.

“President Bush could have done a better job of educating the American people about what this really means,” Pace said of the wars.

Click here to read the full story on Gabelli Connect.

Under the guidance of his mentor, John Entelis, Ph.D., professor of political science and director of the Middle East studies program at Fordham, Azari tore up his original thesis and turned to the Iranian Revolution.

“After the revolution, I was active in promoting democracy in Iran,” said Azari, who immigrated to the United states in 1970 and later earned a master’s degree in engineering at Polytechnic University (now part of NYU). “There were times when we came in conflict with the current regime. I devoted my time to learning about the alliance of social forces that caused the revolution and how these forces could possibly lead to a democratic system.”

After earning his doctorate in political science at Fordham in 1988, Azari worked as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He started his own engineering and development firm, which he ran for more than two decades while continuing to study the unfolding events in Iran. And in 1989, he and his wife, Pari, opened Azari Vineyards, a winery in Sonoma County. He produces pinot noir and a secondary crop of cool-climate shiraz, a nod to his Persian heritage.

When he’s not running the vineyard, Azari is working on a book about democracy and government. In it, he and his co-author, a colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology, argue for a return to community government.

“We’re proposing this model of government that may be futuristic,” he said, “but it would be based on the problems that the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen 220 years ago. The country has changed a lot.”

The book fits in nicely with Azari’s lifelong pursuit of figuring out how the world works—whether it’s from an engineering, horticultural, or historical perspective.

“I really enjoy understanding history and social changes,” he said, “and how those changes contribute to the creativity of individuals.”

It also allows him to think deeply about the complicated politics of his native country, analyzing what he calls “the narrow narrative that exists in Iran.”

A proud Fordham alumnus, Azari hosted a 2009 reception at his winery for members of the University’s Northern California Alumni Chapter. And this spring, he returned to Fordham to participate in the 2012 Spring Gannon Lecture with his mentor and friend Entelis, sharing with the Fordham community his thoughts about Iran, the Arab Spring, and the Middle East.

“I’ve been sharing with Fordham like a community, like a family,” he said. “You feel a certain affinity, a certain connection with Fordham graduates.”

Father Moore has lived for the past six years in the Israeli capital, and has written articles on that experience for America: The National Catholic Weekly; and Jivan, published by the Jesuits of India. He praised groups like the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), who physically block the bulldozing of Palestinian homes; and Machsom Watch, a group of Israeli women who monitor checkpoints and report inequities.

“For some Palestinians, these actions are a revelation, for they only know the Israelis as soldiers,” said Father Moore. He said he was also impressed by the fortitude of the Bereaved Families Forum, comprising Israelis and Palestinians who have lost loved ones to the violence, yet renounce retribution and further militarization.

In his lecture “A View from Jerusalem: Palestinian and Israeli Peacemaking Efforts,” on Nov. 29 at St. Peter’s College, Father Moore said that peace activists in Israel and Gaza are often called collaborators and traitors by their own people, yet they persist. “My goal is to support the people who are speaking out, and let them know someone cares and will give them a voice,” he said.