Jersey Shore to Sidi Bou Said

As a kid, Ken Perkins had a front-seat view on the road trip of a lifetime: a cross-country trek from New Jersey to California. 

His mother drove and his grandmother took in the scenery from the backseat. Perkins was in charge of navigating the road maps of every state they traversed. It was a 1956 adventure — no turn-by-turn GPS directions or boring interstate highways. 

“My mother was an elementary schoolteacher and very interested in history and geography,” he says, recalling that his father’s idea of vacation would have been a trip to the Jersey Shore. “That isn’t what my mother wanted to do. She wanted to get in the car and go places.”

The California trip was just the warm-up. Every summer until he finished high school they would hit the road for weeks, taking in whatever historic and geographic point of interest caught their fancy. Eventually, Perkins and his mom toured all the lower 48 states, but she wanted her son to see even more. 

“My high school graduation present was a trip to Europe, my first travel abroad,” he says. “Two years later, we went to the Middle East — Palestine/Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon.”

Staying in a hotel near Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo, Perkins was awestruck by the neon lights and the billboards with their distinctive Arabic characters. “I stood there thinking it’d be really cool if I could figure out what all these dots and squiggles meant,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll study this one day.’”

At the time, Perkins was enrolled at Virginia Military Institute, which didn’t offer courses on the history and politics of the Middle East. But an assignment in a political science class gave him the opportunity to write about that part of the world, and the professor was impressed — and encouraged him to apply to graduate school.

As an Air Force ROTC cadet, Perkins was scheduled to be commissioned when he finished his degree. But with the Vietnam War on, the Air Force mainly wanted pilots, which excluded Perkins and his poor eyesight. Military obligation waived, Perkins began studying in Princeton University’s Middle East program.

Five of the six graduate students admitted that semester had extensive experience and deep language skills in various Middle Eastern countries. “And then there was me,” Perkins says. “My mother had bought me a book called Teach Your­self Arabic, which I would now contend is a pretty far-fetched idea.”

The program director took matters in hand. “After advising the other students, he turned to me and said, ‘Mr. Perkins, you don’t know anything about anything so you’re going to work on Tunisia, where I can keep an eye on you.’”

Perkins had recently married — he met Margaret on a blind date during his VMI days — and the newlyweds headed off to Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco to begin his research. Sidi Bou Said, a seaside town in Tunisia, caught their fancy, and they pipe-dreamed about returning in retirement. Years later, when email became a thing, Perkins adopted “Sidibouboy” as his permanent email moniker. 

He finished his Ph.D. in 1973, a terrible time for finding academic jobs in the humanities, so his advisor helped him land a visiting position at McGill University in Montreal. He stayed there a year, then gladly accepted an offer from the University of South Carolina.

In the years ahead, Perkins taught courses in Islamic civilization, Middle Eastern history, and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, along with a smattering of graduate seminars. During the summers, he often traveled to North Africa to gather fodder for scholarly books, then wrote them during sabbaticals. 

“Our family lived for an academic year in Khartoum in the Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco. Margaret always ended up having a teaching position or a Fulbright, and I would write whatever book project I had at the time,” he says. 

Margaret Perkins completed a graduate degree at USC for teaching English as a second language, then taught 
in the university’s English Program for Internationals. She later advised students applying for national scholarships and fellowships.

While instructing undergraduates was his bread and butter, Ken Perkins found ample opportunities to teach outside of the classroom. He took Honors College students to Morocco for a Maymester course and a group of students from various universities to Tunisia, where they had an impromptu audience with Yasser Arafat, then head of the Palestine Liberation Organization. On several Smithsonian-led tours for adult travelers in the Middle East, Perkins was the tour scholar.

Perkins retired in 2008 after 34 years of teaching, more than half a dozen books and 200-plus encyclopedia entries, articles and book reviews. But his interest in Middle Eastern affairs is as keen as ever; he recently wrote several chapters on Tunisian history for a forthcoming book and updated the introduction for a book he wrote 40 years ago that’s now being republished. 

“I think people whose career focus is on a particular region come to see themselves sort of like missionaries. I’ve had a mission to try to help Americans understand the Middle East,” Perkins says. “I still consider myself primarily a teacher, but now outside the classroom.”

Perkins has led seminars on Middle Eastern topics at the Shepherd Center for Adults at Trenholm Road United Methodist Church and gives talks at the retirement community where he lives in Columbia. 

“I’ve got lots of great stories about adventures in the Middle East, but I try to make my talks a learning experience about the area and the people there,” he says. “People everywhere want the same things — decent, healthy lives, a better life for their kids. I try to help people wrap their head around that and say, ‘I may not understand the particulars of what these people want, but I can accept them on the level of being human, just like I am,’ and look at their conditions and try to understand them on their own terms.”