Ethan Lazuk
Born in Montana in 1989, I attended high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and college at Northern Arizona University and The University of Connecticut, before finally coming to The University of Montana, from which I recently earned a Bachelor's degree in Central and Southwest Asian Studies. I currently live in Washington D.C.
Although American English is my first language, I also have an intermediate/advanced knowledge of Modern Standard Arabic, with some Lebanese and Gulf vocabulary, as well as a basic knowledge of Farsi-Persian. My academic areas of interest include Cultural Anthropology, Islamic Studies, and Environmental and Human Geography. While my research interests include pre-Islamic religions and socio-political structures from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian regions; the formative years of Islam and the subsequent developments of alternative interpretations, or madhabs; intra-communal and inter-religious relationships in a pre-colonial context; the effects of colonial encounters on indigenous community structures and socio-religious ideologies; Orientalist versus indigenous historical narratives and interpretations; and political Islam and modern-day social movements, especially in response to Western foreign policy. In 2010, I was a summer intern with the Department of Defense, working on Ft. McNair Army Base in the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, and I have traveled in Istanbul, Turkey and lived for three months in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
I am a third-generation American of Polish descent. My great-grandparents fled Eastern Europe during the Bolshevik Revolution and entered the United States through Ellis Island. Today, my parents and sister live in Colorado, where they are surrounded by the beautiful Rocky Mountains. I am also happily married to the love of my life named Dania. Originally from al-Madinah, Saudi Arabia, she came to the United States two years ago as an exchange student. She is a practicing Muslim. But I am a searcher who finds beauty in all religions, and therefore I do not belong to any one religion in particular. But her and I having different religious beliefs has not negatively affected our marriage. In fact, it has brought us closer together. We respectfully embrace our differences, while cherishing our infinite similarities. If being in an inter-faith marriage has taught me one thing, it is that religious differences are not a cause for division, but for collaboration.