Juan Cole

John Ricardo Irfan "Juan" Cole (born October 23, 1952) is an American academic and commentator on the modern Middle East and South Asia.

He is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

Cole converted to the Baháʼí Faith in 1972 and spent 25 years writing and travelling in support of the religion.

He had several works published through Baháʼí publishers and co-edited an online journal (Occasional Papers in the Shaykhi, Babi, and Baha'i Religions).

Some of these were unofficial translations, and two volumes by/about early Baháʼí theologian Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl.

Cole was awarded Fulbright-Hays fellowships to India (1982) and to Egypt (1985–1986).

In 1991 he held a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for the study of Shia Islam in Iran.

In 1994 Cole participated in a discussion group that became a forum for dissent among Baháʼí academics against the Baháʼí administration.

Cole was perceived as leading a dissident faction, and resigned his membership in 1996 after being confronted by Baháʼí leadership.

He declared himself a Unitarian Universalist.

Soon after his resignation, Cole created an email list and website called H-Bahai, which became a repository of both primary source material and critical analysis on the religion.

Cole went on to critically attack the Baháʼí Faith in several books and articles written from 1998–2002, describing a prominent Baháʼí as "inquisitor" and "bigot", and accusing Baháʼí institutions of cult-like tendencies.

From 1999 until 2004, Juan Cole was the editor of The International Journal of Middle East Studies.

He has served in professional offices for the American Institute of Iranian Studies and on the editorial board of the journal Iranian Studies.

After September 11, 2001, Cole turned increasingly to writing on radical Muslim movements, the Iraq War, United States foreign policy, and the Iran crisis.

He calls his work not "contemporary history" but "current affairs history".

Since 2002, he has written a weblog, Informed Comment (juancole.com).

Cole was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

His father served in the United States Army Signal Corps.

When Cole was age two, his family left New Mexico for France.

His father completed two tours with the U.S. military in France (a total of seven years) and one 18-month stay at Kagnew Station in Asmara, Eritrea (then Ethiopia).

Cole was schooled at twelve schools in twelve years, at a series of dependent schools on military bases but also sometimes in civilian schools.

Some schooling occurred in the United States, particularly in North Carolina and California.

Since 2002, Cole has published the blog Informed Comment, covering "History, Middle East, South Asia, Religious Studies, and the War on Terror".

In 2002, Cole rejected the Bush administration's early claims of Iraqi cooperation with Al-Qaeda, commenting that Saddam Hussein had "persecuted and killed both Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists in great number", as well as claims to the effect that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

Rather than making America safer, he says, the war has ironically had the opposite effect: inspiring anti-U.S. militants.

Cole testified on Iraq before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2004.

Cole's prominence quickly rose through his blog, and Foreign Policy commented in 2004, "Cole's transformation into a public intellectual embodies many of the dynamics that have heightened the impact of the blogosphere. He wanted to publicize his expertise, and he did so by attracting attention from elite members of the blogosphere. As Cole made waves within the virtual world, others in the real world began to take notice".

In a 2005 speech at the Middle East Policy Council, Cole was critical of the U.S. allying itself with offshoots of the Islamic Dawa Party in Iraq but vehemently opposing Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Cole and Christopher Hitchens traded barbs regarding the translation and meaning of a passage referring to Israel in a speech by Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Fathi Nazila of The New York Times's Tehran bureau translated the passage as "Our dear Imam [Khomeini] said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map."

In an article published at the Slate website, Hitchens accused Cole of attempting to minimize and distort the meaning of the speech, which Hitchens understood to be a repetition of "the standard line" that "the state of Israel is illegitimate and must be obliterated."

Hitchens also denigrated Cole's competence in both Persian and "plain English" and described him as a Muslim apologist.

He is a member of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, and served as the organization's president for 2006.

In 2006, he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism administered by Hunter College.

He is a member of the Community Council of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Cole founded the Global Americana Institute to translate works concerning the United States into Arabic.

The first volume was selected works of Thomas Jefferson, and the second was a translation of a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. along with selected speeches and writings.

In 2006 National Journal called Cole "the most respected voice on foreign policy on the left" and his blog ranked the 99th most popular in 2009, but it has since fallen off the list.

Leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Cole chastised several candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney, for making bellicose statements about Iran in order to present themselves in a tougher or more conservative light.