My 1998 Princeton NES Statement

Below is a supplement to the application statement I made in 1998 while applying to Princeton University’s Near Eastern Studies Ph.D program.  At the time, Chicago was pretty much giving me the boot (long story), and I was searching for an alternative while gradually descending into insanity.  The below statement, meant to demonstrate familiarity with medieval/early modern Islamicate correspondence protocols, instead seems to have demonstrated the aforementioned insanity:

Huwa

Professors of Princeton, generous and grand; Orientalists of the East (Coast), reticent and renowned: [1]

When your celestial garden was visited last, matters of deep import were discussed between your most humble servant and the lofty presence exhibited within the august shadow of your side filled with exoteric knowledge and esoteric learning.  Since that moment, further developments and deportments have manifested themselves within this provincial grain-gathering depôt unworthy of the slightest consideration within the confines of the lofty boardrooms of your paradisical Jersey-i Jadid.  Your weakest son can no longer rest his unworthy yet weary head amongst the natives and newcomers of the flatlands within the contested Gharb al-Awsat.  Naysayers of the nattering sort, together with well-wishers of the flattering sort, have urged this exhausted petitioner to the shore of your limitless virtue.  Having resided in the protected capitals of Constantine and Cairo as well as the Peace-less City of Peace; having visited the epicentre of divine divisiveness known as Holy, the central and western parts of Turan and Iran, and the various vicissitudinous loci of provincial piety between the land of black and the sea known as black; having exhausted all epistemological options and departmental cautions – following upon arduous and ponderous years of five within which were contained the holy vessel of learning connected to the esoteric believing tongues of exacting Arabic, poetic Persian, and terrifying Turkish, as well as the accursed Frankish tongues of the fluid if not so fluent French, and gradable if not so grand German, the estimable Classical Sources, inestimable Ottoman esotericisms, and uncontainable secrets of Middle Period Islamica; having expended the balance of masterly support and teacherly rapport within the brotherly confines of the Park of Hyde; the request of this butcher-bewildering apprentice and forest-infuriating servant is thus: should your sublime paragons of professorly charm choose to extend their lofty pinkies of garden-like grace toward this unworthy penitent marked by the unfortunate anomaly of academic anemia and symptomatic syntactic amnesia; should the clouds of Chicagoan disapproval dissipate in favor of the clear rays of Princetonian penitence; this humble petitioner would be so bold as to beg entrance into the hallowed Hall known as Jones.  What remains is merely your exalted response.

Written in the second third of days within the second third of months within the ninth year after the first tenth of years within the fourth century following the first millennium:

Weakest of Servants of the South,

Abu La Ahad Khayr al-Din Nabil ibn Sirri ibn Khudayr al-Tikriti al-Orleans al-Jadidi al-Amriki

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[1] While composed somewhat in jest, this sample hopefully demonstrates a modicum of familiarity with early modern Ottoman chancery style as it might appear in an English rendition.  The original inspiration for this passage was the du‘a composed by E.G. Browne for the prologue of his A Year Amongst the Persians, London, 189_.