هستی ابن عربی

Thank you for your inquiry about graduate studies with me here at BC.   Since I receive similar inquiries each month from at least 2-3 graduates (usually from Iran or Turkey, but also from other foreign university systems), I’ve decided to put into writing all of the relevant considerations that I usually have had to mention in responding to these questions, which come from students interested in various areas of Islamic Philosophy, theology, Sufism/‘irfan, spirituality and other related fields.  Please just skip over any irrelevant sections below, but I do hope that some of the points mentioned below will be useful to you in focusing and continuing your search for the right PhD program for your purposes.

I.        Limited or no PhD opportunities in my department (Theology Department; “Comparative Theology” section) at Boston College (BC):

Our department does not have any MA program (the Philosophy Department does offer an MA), and our entire “Comparative Theology” PhD section (4-5 faculty supervisors) usually has one or two full PhD scholarships (covering tuition and ca. $18,000 in annual living support for 5 years of studies and teaching leading to the PhD) available for all of the applicants wishing to work with the 4-5 faculty in this section, who specialize in Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Judaic (and hopefully soon, East Asian religions) studies.   On the Islamic side alone, which has at most one PhD scholarship slot potentially available, we usually have at least 3-5 excellently prepared PhD applicants who have mastered the relevant languages (Arabic, etc.) and who have completed the minimum of 6 years of preceding university studies (4-year BA and 2-year MA) in Islamic and other religious studies—normally together with an intensive concentration in some related areas of Christian thought.  Given the similarly prepared applicants in the other religious areas of our CT section, it is nearly impossible to be a successful applicant without this combination of MA-level preparation in both Islamic and Christian studies.   In order to understand what is required to apply in the CT section, you need to read all the scattered sections of the Theology department website relating to the CT program.

The practical upshot of this is that graduate students applying from abroad, without that complex mix of prior preparation (especially in related areas of Christian theology, thought and history) have little chance of winning a PhD scholarship in this CT area. 

On the other hand, my graduate seminars are open to graduate students from many Boston-area universities (Harvard, Boston University, Tufts University, and Brandeis, among others), and I often teach and advise (for their PhD) grad students from Harvard (both NELC and Study of Religion PhD programs), so you should consider relevant departments in those schools as well.

II.  Thinking clearly about the ultimate purpose of your PhD application and studies:

     It is very important, before undertaking any PhD applications, to have a clear idea of what you actually want to do after receiving your doctorate.   What is your ultimate purpose?  Is it to teach at a university level—and if so, in what department(s) and subjects?  And in what specific country and language?  Or do you simply want to pursue advanced research in a particular figure or topic that interests you, without any related vocational goals?

    The PhD degree anywhere in the US and Canada (in religious studies, Islamic studies, etc.) now takes a minimum of five years on top of two or three years of MA-level preparation.  It is carefully designed—with two or more years of advanced coursework, followed by highly demanding field exams in at least three broad subjects that usually correspond to course areas you will soon be teaching, and supplemented by extensive practical teaching experience—to prepare future university/college teachers, primarily for wide-ranging subjects (like “Religious Studies”) at the introductory level in 4-year undergraduate colleges or with some MA students, since almost no one begins teaching at the advanced graduate (PhD) level without first proving their effective teaching abilities in those other university settings.    

     This situation is radically different from—and much longer and more demanding--than the (3-year) BA, (1-year) MA and (3-year) PhD degrees that are now standard in the UK and Europe, as well as some other countries.  Potential graduate students who inquire about studying with me would normally be preparing to teach either about Islamic Studies within North American Religion/Religious Studies undergraduate programs, or much more rarely in Philosophy departments, which are now becoming increasingly open to scholars with knowledge of non-Western philosophical traditions.  (I do currently supervise a PhD student in Islamic Philosophy from BC’s Philosophy department, for example.)

    None of the above institutional settings and concerns may apply in your own home country and its educational settings.  But if your ultimate purpose is to acquire a solid and prestigious foreign doctoral training in order to return to teaching in universities in your home country, then the cost in time and money of studying for your PhD in the UK/Europe (where the PhD often simply means a few years writing a good research book/thesis, without the wide-ranging preparation, coursework and teaching preparation/experience normally included in American PhD programs) is likely to be much less than in the US or Canada.

III.  Background needed and expected for PhD competition/scholarships in US/Canadian universities:

     Most of the available PhD programs with a specialist in some area of classical (not contemporary) Islamic Thought in the US and Canada  [see section IV below] offer at most 1 full scholarship (normally for at least 5 years of tuition and living stipend, and requiring some level of teaching commitment as well) per year.  That means that each year the same “pool” of highly qualified applicants (with the relevant languages and high level of MA preparation) tend to apply at the handful of universities offering such PhD’s. 

    The requisite preparation for this competition is NOT a matter of specific degree levels (since most foreign “MA” degrees are at best the equivalent of the 4-year BA from the most selective US colleges), but of a specific set of competencies.  These include above all the five following key prerequisites: fluent reading and interpretive ability in classical Arabic texts; some knowledge of a second major Islamic language (usually Persian, but could be Urdu, Turkish, Swahili, Jawi/Indonesian, etc.) relevant to the student’s particular research interests; profusely demonstrated ability (i.e., MA thesis and body of related research/seminar papers) to write clear, focused, analytically sound research publications in flawless academic English; on-the-ground extensive living and traveling experience in at least two significantly different regions of the Islamic world; and a thorough, wide-ranging grounding in the relevant research methods and forms of historical contextualization directly relevant to the applicant’s research and teaching interests. 

     For foreign PhD applicants who have not done their BA and MA degrees in entirely English-language medium universities, it is therefore practically essential to demonstrate proficiency in the 3^rd and 5^th of the five basic prerequisites mentioned above.  In practice, this means that to have any success in the difficult competition for US PhD scholarships (at the type of rare and top-level universities offering PhD work at that level), it is usually essential to have completed an entirely English-language (or French or German, in certain cases) specialized MA degree and MA thesis in the field in which you want to apply for PhD support.  (ESL/TOEFL scores, even in written English, don’t begin to capture the multitude of different skills [not just language mastery] that are needed to write a thorough, original, and carefully analytical research paper.  One can be totally fluent in speaking and reading English, without being able to write properly in academic prose.)

   Thus the major practical hurdle for most people who write me about PhD studies in the US is where and how to complete the practically pre-requisite specialized English-language MA (again, 2 years in most US universities) in their future field of PhD work—above all because MA-level scholarships are almost non-existent.   All  I can do here is to urge potential applicants to check out MA-level costs (not just tuition, but also government-supported student restaurants and the like) at a number of non-UK European universities, since many European countries with student-supportive policies for foreign students (low tuition, student restaurants and housing, etc.) have been increasingly offering graduate studies and teaching in an English-language format.

IV.  Universities (US/Canada) offering PhD scholarships and supervision in Islamic thought:

      NB: The following list (item IV-e below) is definitely NOT complete, and must be supplemented by your own extensive internet research.  [For example, I was recently consulted by an Iranian PhD student working on his doctorate at in the Religion/Religious Studies program at Rice University (Houston), which doesn’t really have any specialist in Islamic thought.  But he had come to the Boston area to find the library resources and expertise needed for his thesis on Mulla Sadra, and had a formal thesis advisor in that department at Rice.]

A couple of fundamental points to keep in mind wherever you are thinking of applying for a PhD program:

(a)  E-mail and consult directly, before applying anywhere, with the particular specialist/advisor that you’d like to work with for your PhD.  PhD studies anywhere are an apprenticeship, and you really need to know a lot about the person you will be taking on as your mentor for many years (including whether or not he plans to still be teaching when you’ll be completing your degree, since most of the leading specialists in PhD programs are now up in years and approaching retirement).   Given the many competitors for a very limited number of scholarships, you have nothing to lose from such personal inquiries, since you can be sure that the most promising applicants will have taken the initiative to talk to their future mentors and advisors (as well as other grad students in their hoped-for PhD programs).

(b)  Don’t be discouraged by “failure” in one year’s competition at any given school: the odds for admission in these prestigious PhD programs are a bit like a lottery, with usually only one (at most) “winner” each year, among many capable and qualified applicants.  So it is reasonable to find out what deficiencies might need to be remedied, and then (having responded to that practical advice) to apply again for the next year’s round, or even for several years.

(c)   Make sure that you have at hand and available, if requested, one or more examples, in excellent English, of your own previous MA thesis or other substantial original research papers (in English), even if those aren’t formally required for the admissions process.  That is the only way that you have of concretely and effectively demonstrating to skeptical admissions committees that your writing and analytical/contextualizing abilities are equal to those of the applicants from excellent US/UK/Canadian BA and MA programs.  Recommendations from faculty in such English-language universities are sufficient to indicate their solidly grounded awareness of your English writing, analytical and theoretical skills in writing research papers.  But if you’re coming from graduate studies in another language, faculty recommendations, however positive, simply can’t provide that proof of mastery of those essential proficiencies in English.

(d)  Talk (or e-mail or otherwise contact, if you’re too far away), with actual graduate students in the university departments you are thinking of applying to.  As you might imagine, they can fill you in on all sorts of relevant considerations (living costs, faculty strife or enmities, chronic illnesses, planned sabbaticals or retirements, and so on) that you’ll never get from a website, or even from contacting the professors you’d like to work with.  You ignore this advice at your own peril—rather foolishly, considering that at least 5 years of your life are at stake.  Most grad students are delighted to talk frankly about their PhD programs.

(e)  Since you really need to have firsthand and up-to-date knowledge of each university department where you may be applying for the PhD, it is preferable here just to list some universities which have recently been offering PhD studies in areas of classical, text-based “Islamic Studies”—although this list is not complete, nor probably entirely up-to-date.  [The range of departments and schools offering contemporary studies in related ideologies, politics, social and religious movements, and the like for various regions of the Islamic world would include many more departments of Religion, Anthropology, Political Science/Government, and Sociology: see the MESA and AAR websites for initial orientation in those areas.]   Subject to the above qualifications, universities with specialists recently offering suitable PhD supervision (& usually a possibility of PhD scholarships at the same time) in the textual traditions of Islamic philosophy, science, ‘irfan, Sufism, and the like would include:  McGill (Montreal, CA); Harvard; Yale; Princeton; Duke; U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Emory; U. of Chicago; U. of Indiana (Bloomington, IN); Toronto; UCLA.   When a specialist PhD supervisor retires in these areas, there is no guarantee that they  will be replaced, nor that the next faculty person hired in that department will specialize in one of these current areas of coverage.