He received his M.A. in Arabic from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language, and has taught Arabic to undergraduate students representing a diverse variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and interests. In addition to modern Arabic literature and the Arabic short story, Michael’s interests include teaching Arabic as a foreign language, learning language through culture, and Arabic dialect variation and similarity to Modern Standard Arabic. "Inasmuch as the book is about the impossibility of the Islamic state, it is also pronouncedly a sustained critique of modernity… the native Islamic heritage provides as good an example and model for constructing forms of Islamic governance as any Western model, if not even better."