BEYOND BURKAS

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES-

My hotel room is chilled to a crisp, cool 23 degrees Celsius, but sometimes in the evening I like to open my window anyway.

It lets in the intense heat-above 100 degrees Fahrenheit even now, two or three hours after dark-but it also lets in the sounds of hustle and bustle beneath, of men (mostly men, at least) visiting the numerous groceries, laundries, barbershops and hookah bars.

And if I open the window at the right time, I might hear the muezzin from the mosque down the street, the sound of the intoned call to prayer lofting over the heavy automotive rumble of the big city.

Even to this Midwest-reared Episcopal choir boy, it's a beautiful thing.

Along with the rest of the United States, Dukies have turned their gaze eastward since the attacks of September 11. A donation in 2005 established the Duke Islamic Studies Center. In addition to starting a new certificate program, the center has begun bringing in top-notch faculty members in various disciplines-with the faculty roster set to double when classes resume is August. The need to get involved in the Middle East is "obvious", President Richard Brodhead wrote to me via e-mail.

"The Islamic world contains over a billion people," he says. "In a globalized society, many more Americans must learn to appreciate and navigate Islamic cultures. I trust many Duke students will be included in the list."

And that's why I'm here. In May, I hope to graduate in Duke's first crop of certificate recipients. If it seems unusual for students to have to travel halfway around the world, it shouldn't, says the University's own Lawrence of Arabia. Bruce Lawrence, professor of religion, director of DISC and half of Duke's first family of Islamic studies (his wife, Miriam Cooke, runs the Arabic language program and is a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies).

Ordinarily, business isn't my thing. It's the vibrant medieval period of Islam that drove me to study Muslim cultures-and it's a mythologized image of that same period that appeals to the likes of Osama Bin Laden. But Lawrence insists we should look deeper.

"Terrorists represent less than .01 percent of all Muslims," he says. "They dominate the headlines but not the daily pathways of Africa and Asia where Muslims dominate, nor the workplaces of Europe and America where other Muslims have come to find a better future."

What I've discovered is that there's more to the Arab world (which, to be fair, accounts for only a small percentage of the globe's Muslim population) than what happened here centuries ago. And there's more to it than al Qaeda and Iranian subterfuge and centrifuge, the thriving oil business in the Persian Gulf and the festering morass in Iraq. Revelations like mine are exactly the aim of immersing students in the world of Islam, Lawrence says.

"What Islamic studies tries to do, and must do, is to make sense of the local and global, in constant tension as well as vital synergy, throughout the Muslim world," he explains.

Those "vital synergies" should make the Middle East and South and South East Asia as much-if not more-relevant to the University's often business-obsessed student body than to bookish amateur historians like me.

While Wall Street struggles to regain its footing in the wake of a weakening dollar, the burst housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis, investment banks in the Gulf region are thriving. Let me put another way: Looking to score that prized McKinsey & Co. gig? Maybe you should look to the consulting firm's Dubai office.

Take Islamic finance. As Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants look backward, forward-thinking Muslim bankers are finding innovative ways to merge Islam's centuries-old prohibition on interest, which makes traditional mortgages and bonds forbidden. Instead, "Islamic banks" buy properties for clients and sell them on at a slightly increased price: the banks profit, and believers don't have to forfeit their creed in order to enter the global market.

Sukuk and other Islamic finance tools, are big business, worth hundreds of billions of dollars in places like Dubai's scorching hot real estate market. Authorities in secular Hong Kong and Singapore, looking for alternate markets to the stumbling West, are changing laws to encourage sukuk trading in their markets-after all, it's every bit as profitable as any other trade.

American universities are trying to get in on the act, too. Johns Hopkins University runs a medical school in Qatar; New York University is opening a branch in Dubai and dozens of other schools are looking for ways to tap into a market thirsty for education.

Duke is considering more possibilities as well. In Fall 2006, Brodhead, accompanied by Lawrence and John Mack, Morgan Stanley's chair and CEO and a Duke trustee, stopped in Dubai and Doha, the capital of Qatar. Blair Sheppard, dean of the Fuqua School of Business, has also visited recently.

"I traveled to Dubai and Qatar in 2006 to see an interesting part of the world and to learn what opportunities there might be for Duke to partner with their future projects," Brodhead says. "Nothing has been decided, but it made for fascinating exploration."

Well, President Brodhead, from one egghead to another: Get in while the getting's good.

David Graham is a Trinity senior and currently welcoming any advice on the finer points of Islamic business reporting via e-mail.