In addition to teaching him when Tim was an undergraduate student, Morgan later shepherded him through the graduate school in pursuit of his master’s degree and his doctorate in Islamic history and culture and Arabic language studies. In ways that would serve him so well in Cairo and then in Rome, Tim had developed an abiding interest in Islam and the Middle East under Morgan’s tutelage at the university: Mecca and Medina, the Prophet and the Koran, the glorious days of the caliphates and the Arab learning in philosophy and mathematics, the Moorish conquest of Iberia, the greatness and the fall; the scholars, warriors, and poets; the modern age of kings and nationalists, and the incalculable wealth of petroleum destined to recreate the ancient power of Islam—or lead to another collapse. In Father Morgan, Tim had found the perfect mentor. Himself an Islamic scholar, Morgan progressed from his own earlier work on ethics to the Christian concepts of “Just Wars” and, consequently, to the role of the Church in Holy Land crusades and, inevitably, to Islam proper.
