Hello and welcome to this interview.

Today I'm interviewing Dr Jeffrey Bail,

who is an emeritus professor in the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies

program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterrey.

Dr Jeffrey Bail, I'm very pleased to be interviewing you.

Welcome to the Low to Cedars.

I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you very much.

Would you tell us some stuff about your background?

Yes, I'm basically a historian.

I received my BA in Middle Eastern Islamic and Central Asian history at the

University of Michigan and then I received my PhD in Modern European history at the University of California at Berkeley.

So I was trained as a historian and originally I studied medieval Islamic and Central Asian history.

And then at a certain point I switched over to modern history because I realized I was spending more time

studying the world's most difficult languages than I was spending more time studying the world's most difficult languages than I was actually doing history.

I studied Arabic and Persian and some Turkish and in addition to several European languages so I could read secondary sources and then I was at the point where I was going to have to learn Mongolian and then if I wanted to the eastern part of the step I would have to learn Chinese and Japanese.

So I thought to myself, you know, however fascinating

it is to study the nomadic tribes in Central Asia.

I didn't want to spend like another 10 years just studying difficult languages and not getting around to doing history and that of course ultimately start thinking, well if you're really studying things that are that seem to have so little relevance to the present that maybe you you want to do something shift to a more

modern era of history so that the things you're studying have more contemporary

salience or more contemporary relevance. Of course it turns out that to study

medieval Islamic history has a tremendous amount of contemporary relevance and salience given the rise of Islamism and the threat of jihad and terrorism.

But anyway, I shifted to modern European history and then my, I've always been interested in and unusual topics and so I my focus has really been on on political and religious extremism of various kinds.

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