Inside Higher Ed: Scholar of Peace in the Line of Fire
Saoud El Mawla was a year late in accepting a position as professor at Earlham College. He was supposed to start in the 2003-4 academic year. But the tightening of visa rules post-9/11 meant that Lebanese citizens like El Mawla were unable to get the necessary documents to come to the United States. It didn’t matter that El Mawla has been hired to teach peace studies, and was an outspoken advocate for non-violent solutions to the problems of the Middle East. It took nearly a year of negotiations, in which Earlham’s president and other top officials lobbied the State Department, for El Mawla to gain the visa he needed to get to Indiana.
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