Middle East Scholar Norton Presents on the "Middle East Storm"

Date: 8/23/06   
Contact: Kathy Beal

Illinois State University will host Middle East scholar and decorated career Army officer Augustus Norton on Tuesday, Sept. 5, when he will present "Avoiding the Perfect Middle East Storm" at 7 p.m. in 130 Schroeder Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Norton's talk will address the tough dilemmas facing the U.S. in the Middle East, including the tumult in Iraq, the challenge of Iran and the rise of militant Islamist movements across the region. He has expressed serious concerns about the Bush administration's foreign policy. In an interview earlier this month on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, Norton observed that the U.S. has "established a relationship with its adversary which is totally, totally nonproductive."

Norton retired as a Colonel and as a political science professor at the U.S. Military Academy before going to Boston University as a professor in the departments of International Relations and Anthropology. He is co-editor of the Princeton University Press Muslim Politics series and is a contributing editor to Current History. His many publications on Lebanon include Amal and the Shi'a and Hizballah of Lebanon, and his new book on Hizballah and Shi'i politics in Lebanon is forthcoming from the Princeton University Press. Among his latest publications are "Pity the Nation," in The Nation and "Ritual, Blood, and Shiite Identity: 'Ashura in Nabatiyya," in The Drama Review.

In the 1990s, Norton headed the Ford Foundation-funded Civil Society in the Middle East program at New York University and was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he heads a multi-year project on Muslims in the West, based at Boston University. Norton has been selected as a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow for 2006-07 in Egypt, Kuwait and Bangladesh.

A recipient of the Legion of Merit and the Purple Heart, Norton served 12 years on the West Point faculty, two years in combat in Vietnam and fourteen months in 1980-81 as an unarmed observer in southern Lebanon, where he was present at the rejuvenation of Shi'i politics. Recently he accepted a position as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group, which is mandated by the U.S. Congress to take a fresh look at the U.S. position in Iraq. The group is co-chaired by former Secretary of State James F. Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton.

Norton's talk is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of the Provost, the Sage Fund, and the departments of English, History, Politics and Government and Sociology and Anthropology.