Professor of Arabic barred from returning to U.S.
An assistant professor of Arabic at San Francisco State University has been stranded in Canada for three months, unable to return to campus, after the U.S. State Department canceled his visa and began reviewing his security status.
Mohammad Ramadan Hassan Salama's troubles began in June, when he arrived in Canada for what he thought was a two-day stay to change his temporary scholar visa, which was due to expire. He planned to exchange it at the U.S. Consulate in Toronto for the more coveted O-1 visa, granted only to those with extraordinary ability in sciences, arts, education, business or athletics. By law, he had to go outside the country to get the visa.
But the Egyptian-born academic got a rude awakening June 20 when a consular official, without explanation, stamped "canceled'' on his temporary visa and refused to issue another visa. Instead, Salama said, he was fingerprinted, questioned and told he could not return to the United States until he received security clearance.
"It was just a shock for me," he said by phone on Monday. "It is very Kafkaesque. They just say, 'We will contact you.' I am Egyptian, and Egypt is a very hot country right now that has produced terrorists. They disregarded my Ph.D., my scholarship. My marriage, my kids were blindly disregarded, and I was told I could not come back."
San Francisco State hired him last fall as its first Arabic scholar to help build its Arabic and Middle Eastern programs, which have become popular since 9/11.
When Paul Sherwin, dean of the School of Humanities, learned Salama couldn't get back from Canada, he had to scramble to find a replacement to start teaching two Arabic language classes and a literature course last month. Salama is now teaching one of his classes, a seminar on Arabic novels, online.
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