Main Menu Professor Speaks on Muslim Storytellers at Prestigious French Institute Jonathan Berkey Jonathan Berkey, associate professor of history and humanities, served as a visiting professor of one of France's most prestigious research institutions recently. Berkey, a specialist in medieval Islamic culture, was invited to spend a month at the cole des Hautes tudes en Science Sociales in Paris, where he gave three lectures and consulted with students and scholars. It's an idyllic environment for social scientists. The cole des Hautes tudes was established after World War II as France's premier graduate-level teaching and research institution in social science.
Faculty members are all active researchers, and build seminars around their research topics.
Berkey's sponsor at the cole was his long-time friend Professor Houari Touati, who was conducting a seminar on the use of books as windows to understanding the organization of learned Muslim society. Speaking in French, Berkey addressed two seminar sessions and a general colloquium about the problems that Medieval Muslim popular preachers and storytellers posed to the religious establishment of the era, known as the ulama . He derived his lectures from his forthcoming book, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic Near East, which will be published by the University of Washington Press later this year. Because Islam has no consecrated priesthood, Berkey explained that it has always struggled with transmission of the faith to the masses. During the Medieval era, the public often learned of Islam from people referred to as storytellers - street preachers who were not formally educated in the faith.