Vartan Gregorian remembers nostalgically his childhood and youth -- the sights, the smells, the sounds -- in Tabriz. He remembers Hafiz, and Sa'adi, and can quote them to you,  if you would like to listen. But he has interpreted his own past, during the time of the Shah, whose regime forced something like legal (and, at least in Teheran, social) equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. He does not know, does not want to know, the kind of things about Islam that, for example, Vahakh Dadrian (who knows him) has tried to explain. He has not read, does not want to read, Bat Ye'or. Furthermore, Armenians have, among all the non-Muslim groups represented in Iran, in modern times the easiest time of it. While Shah Abbas forced the conversion of Armenians in Tabriz back in the seventeenth century (see Arakel of Tabriz) , later the Persians decided to invite Armenians into the empire so as to encourage economic development (google "New Urfa"). Possibly Vartan Gregorian, a charmer (look at how he charmed Brooke Astor), at the New York Public Library, and then as President of Brown, and now at the Carnegie, gives little sign of possessing sufficient curiosity, or for that matter sufficient stamina to burn the midnight oil (he's been in what is essentialy the fund-raising empyrean too long -- and for more on this empyrean, and the dangers of false philanthropy, see Jacques Barzun's keen analysis of this phenomenon).

Under Gregorian the whole thing got started at Carnegie. And now it is continuing, with a vengeance. If it not the espositos pocketing Saudi money, it is the "Brave Young Muslim Reformers" who will now pocket Carnegie Foundaton money. What they will produce, how they will explain, or explain away, the texts and tenets and attitudes of Islam, and contribute to continued misunderstandings that lead to such follies as the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project in Iraq, and to continued inability to see that Muslims themselves must be forced to consider the possibility that their political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual failures are directly attributable to Islam itself, is perfectly predictable.

One would like to hear from Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, among others, on this plan, this farcical use of largesse made possible by American tax  laws, and hence, in part, by you, if you are an American taxpayer.