BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative continues to produce

I’m pleased to note that BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI), which I conceived and founded, and which I led until my relatively recent ouster from the Maxwell Institute (into which, foolishly and suicidally in retrospect, I had brought METI for ease of administration), has now published the first bilingual Arabic/English volume John Walbridge’s translation of The Alexandrian Epitomes of Galen, which includes the treatises On the Medical Sects for Beginners, The Small Art of Medicine, and On the Elements According to the Opinion of Hippocrates.

This project was in the works before my banishment, and I’m pleased that it’s beginning to produce fruit.

Professor Walbridge, of Indiana University, is a productive scholar of the first rank.  He’s also a very pleasant man.  I met him years ago, and we’ve had some fun experiences together, including a conference in Tehran where he and I and his late wife Linda, an anthropologist, enjoyed a visit to the site of the former American embassy (which almost resulted in my camera being confiscated by angry soldiers), among other things, and a short guided tour of early Mormon historic sites in New York and Pennsylvania that I was able to take him on, at his request, following an academic conference several years ago at the Binghamton campus of the State University of New York.

The Middle Eastern Texts Initiative is, if I must say so myself, one of the best and most solid academic projects that Brigham Young University has ever hosted.  The books that it publishes will last for many decades, if not much longer, as enduring contributions to such fields as Islamic studies, Jewish studies, the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of medicine, and, indirectly, Arabic lexicography.