I'm taking a Humanities course this semester about Islamic art and culture. Now that there's only a couple weeks left in the semester we have moved from the ancient history of Muslim civilization to present-day. Today in class we watched a film about "Orientalism," or the West's fascination with the Near and Far East. It was inspired by Edward Said, a Palestinian-American professor at Columbia U who wrote the book Orientalism. According to Wikipedia [I know, only so authoritative], he had been under FBI surveillance since 1971, probably until he died in 2003.

Odd how time chances perceptions.