From her trove of teachable moments, Dr. Sachiko Murata recalled a conversation with a student who unabashedly, and with what she hoped was benign ignorance, disparaged an Arabic title he’d spotted on her office bookshelf. “ ‘You’re such a nice person, how do you study this terrible thing?’” she was asked. “This was just seven years ago. Oh, that kind of attitude …”
Her voice trails off.
That a college student would be so reactionary troubled her, she explains, especially in an era when the essence of Islam is being obscured by terrorists twisting the message to serve their own purposes.
Japanese-born Murata, 68, has been studying Islam and its followers since the early 1970s, when she landed at Tehran University to get a doctorate in Persian literature. This was followed by a master’s degree in jurisprudence from TU’s Faculty of Theology (the first woman and first non-Muslim to do so) and a doctorate in Islamic and Confucian dictates over family life and structure.
A professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook since 1983, Murata was tapped as one of this year’s Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellows — a nod to her authorship of several books on Islam, her teaching on the topic and a body of associated work.
“Being chosen for a Guggenheim Fellowship is a most esteemed honor and reflects the highest levels of scholarship and professionalism,” says SUNY-Stony Brook President Samuel L. Stanley, Jr.
For the past seven years she’s been translating and analyzing the cosmology, metaphysics, theology and spiritual psychology of the first known text on Islam written in Chinese, Wang Daiyu’s The Real Commentary on the True Teaching, published in 1642.
