A graduate student at UCLA months away from completing his dissertation, Babak Nahid already has a full-time job as a communications officer for the world's largest independent medical relief organization, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres*. In addition, as a new issue slowly evolves, he remains the editor of the literary and cultural journal, Suitcase. And by March 2000, he must complete his dissertation in comparative literature, an examination of how and why the collection of stories known as A Thousand and One Nights impacted the political and philosophical thought of the Enlightenment period.

It might seem that Babak is going off in three different directions at once, but the links become apparent as he describes his activities

Perhaps the strongest connector is Suitcase. Conversations started by Babak among fellow graduate students in comparative literature in 1994 and 1995 led to the founding of the multidisciplinary, multicultural journal, whose unifying theme is an internationalism based on transcultural community-building and human rights. Contributors from more than 40 countries have appeared in the pages of Suitcase, writers and artists from places that include Tehran, Tel Aviv, Belgrade, and Sarajevo.

Because of this theme, Suitcase invited humanitarian organizations to become involved at Suitcase readings, conferences, and festive public events surrounding its publication. One such organization was Doctors Without Borders. After the event, key members of the organization stayed in touch with Babak. As Suitcase's editor and as the co-founder of a Los Angeles based relief agency in 1993, Babak offered occasional advice, and when he proposed a more formal relationship, Doctors Without Borders hired him to help educate the media and the public about the critical issues that define the global humanitarian arena.

Babak finds it "an amazing experience to go from academia into the gritty and sometimes difficult real world" where volunteer medical and non-medical personnel are being called to assist endangered populations. "Because they are ethically bound to report what they see and because they are often the first ones to arrive at the scene of an emergency" the volunteers also "bear witness to human rights violations," Babak says. "I've crossed over into something I hope I'll continue in because it's a very rich and eye-opening world."

But that doesn't mean Babak, who describes himself as a "restless soul" who "needs to straddle worlds," plans to leave academia behind. For one thing, he still has a dissertation to finish, and in a sense, that work may offer a model for the kind of career he's hoping to build.

In his dissertation, Babak has been studying the role of the cosmopolitan scholar who, 300 years ago, gave the West a literary masterpiece. Antoine Galland was a scholar attached to the court of the French king Louis XIV as the 17th century was giving way to the 18th century. Part of the diplomatic delegation to the Ottoman Empire, Galland's "day job" was to translate diplomatic documents and acquire rare coins and Greco-Roman relics for the growing royal library of the "Sun king." But as he moved through the towns and marketplaces of the Orient, he became "somewhat privately obsessed with the translation of stories he'd gathered there," Babak says.

A restless, nocturnal reader of both the profane Nights and the holy Quran, Galland prepared a translation of A Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic using a 14th-century version of the text and delivered it to Versailles in 1704. Thus, he introduced to the West a text that "played itself out in the culture of the Enlightenment as an export from the Orient and today almost enjoys the ubiquity of the Bible."

The framing story of the text particularly interests Babak. In that story, "the very masculine king" of a "brutal dictatorship" acting in revenge for illicit relationships among his harem and his slaves decides to wed every unmarried woman in his kingdom for one night only to execute each the next, post-nuptial, morning. Shahrzad, whom Babak describes as "a philosopher, a scientist, a multidisciplinary person," decides to talk her way out of this predicament. When her turn comes, she "doesn't use logic to try to stop gynocide, she tells stories," Babak says, turning "a mass serial killer into a stable and generous sovereign."

In his dissertation, Babak proposes that these tales had a great impact on thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot who often dressed their philosophical treatises in fictional narratives. A Thousand and One Nights, Babak believes, "gave a space to the libertarian, even democratic tendencies that were beginning to grow" during this time when, scholars suggest, "the seeds of the modern West were sown."

Multiple itineraries like those exemplified by Babak are becoming less anamolous in today's world. In other countries, there is a deep tradition of university-trained intellectuals becoming public figures and political leaders. "Travelling and translating across seemingly divergent trades and disciplines," suggests Professor Emily Apter, chair of Comparative Literature and one of Babak's mentors, "can engender fresh thinking and new knowledge. The idea of forming public intellectuals and not just academics or the two going together more is something we [in Comparative Literature] are not afraid to support at all," she says.

A native of Iran who came to Los Angeles because he got a free ticket on People Express and applied only to UCLA for undergraduate and graduate studies, Babak is pleased with the outcome. Like Galland in the 18th century, he and his fellow "immigrants bring a lot of baggage with them," Babak says, "cultural, personal, and political." Whether speaking of the energy and skills supplied by the motley multicultural group who helped produce Suitcase or recalling the many faculty members who have advised and supported him, Babak is thankful. "I feel fortunate that I have come here and am enjoying the conditions that allow me to unpack in such a productive way."

Published in Fall 1999, Graduate Quarterly