After leaving university I
had very few opportunities to communicate with people from academia. I do have
a very dear friend who is a researcher with Oxford University, but that’s about
it. I also have a short and very unpleasant encounter with a foreign lecturer
who teaches at one of the universities in Almaty. So those two people are
pretty much the only academics I spoke to in the past 3.5 years.
Last week I visited
Washington and there I have been granted an opportunity to meet quite an
extraordinary person – Dr. Frederick Starr. Dr. Starr is a Founder and Chairman
of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University in
Washington.
The very first time I met
Dr. Starr he was moderating a discussion on US Policy on Religious Freedom in
Central Asia and the Caucus. What amazed me the most were very simple and
straightforward questions he asked the speakers who participated in the
discussion. But these questions looked right into the root of the problem. Through
those matter-of-fact questions he pointed out some clear drawbacks in the
research carried out by US researchers on religious freedom in Central Asia.
Those drawbacks were not so major as to question the entire research, but they
were important enough to raise some questions.
After the discussion my
colleague and I have been introduced to Dr. Starr and have been offered to visit
him the next day for a friendly chat. I am not going to relay the content of
this meeting, because it has already been nicely outlined in the article published in Astana Times newspaper. What I do want to talk about is the
academic persona of Dr. Starr. I already encountered such extraordinary
individuals, but sadly not in my home country.
