To some people, Zoroasterianism might sound like a strange, new political philosophy, but at least one Harvard professor is educating students about what is actually an ancient Iranian religion to further Americans' understanding of the Near East and its history.

The Aga Khan Professor of Iranian History, Richard N. Frye has studied and taught courses on subjects from Zoroasterianism to the study of languages like Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, Kurdish and Pashto. A member of the Near Eastern Studies Center, the Linguistics Department and the History Department, not to mention the chairman of the Committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Affairs and a former editor of an archeological journal, Frye is involved in as many academic concerns as the numbers of languages he speaks.

`The Earth Shaker'

One of Frye's earliest academic concerns as a faculty member at Harvard was to persuade the University to establish a Middle Eastern Studies Center.

An undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana and a former graduate student of Harvard's History Department, Frye has studied Middle Eastern subjects since he was in junior high, when a copy of Tamerlane, the Earth Shaker fascinated him for the first time with that part of the world. With his extensive background in oriental studies, both at Illinois and at Harvard--and later in 1946 as a member of the Society of Fellows here--Frye felt that Harvard needed to offer a more comprehensive program of study on the Middle East. It was at that point, four decades ago, that he became involved in an effort to promote the study of that part of the world.

"When we started there was nothing about the Middle East here [at Harvard] in the post-World War II era," he says. "So I was working with the anthropologist Carl Coon trying to get a program started. At that time there was only the Semitic Languages Department, and that was kind of dormant."

Unfortunately, Frye says, Coon soon left to do work at the University of Pennsylvania, where he felt there was more support for a Middle Eastern Studies Program. Frye was left to administrate most of the expansion of Harvard's program alone. Despite this seeming setback, he succeeded in capturing the interests of University officials, who decided to consider how Harvard could set up a Middle Eastern Studies Center.

"People got interested here [at Harvard]," he says. "They brought in the State Department and the Rockefeller Foundation and [the oil company] ARAMCO to decide if there was a need for a Center for Middle Eastern Studies."

Frye says the center finally opened in 1956, at about the same time that Russian and East Asian Studies Centers were set up at the University. He also says that it was at this time that the Aga Khan endowed a chair for Middle Eastern history, to which Frye was appointed.

"This field has to be endowed," Frye says, "because no university will support it. It's too esoteric. `Iran? Iraq?' people ask, `Where is that?' No one wants to study anything west of Wooster."

"The University looks at the department and says, `You haven't got hundreds of students,' so it doesn't offer money." says Frye, who lectures in six different Indo-European languages. "The problem is that people haven't found out about the Middle East yet. There's a war in Afghanistan, but people in America think the country is in Africa."

And Frye says that the students the department does recruit tend to be from Europe or the Middle East itself.

"It's really pretty much an international program," he says. "There's not much interest here. People in Asia and Europe know the importance of the area, but in Kansas people are not as concerned."

With few students--there are about 14 graduate students in the center this year--and even fewer professors, Frye has had to expand his expertise to teach the myriad languages, art and anthropology courses that are required for the complete study of the Near East.

"Over the years I've taught Hebrew, Arabic, early, middle and late Persian, Turkish and Pashto," Frye says. "And that's actually pretty difficult. One of the things people don't realize is that all those languages are very different. It would be like having one professor of romance languages."