Just for kicks I emailed Dr. Hossein Ziai, professor in the Near Eastern Languages & Culture Dept. at UCLA. He has authored numerous works on his specialty (his bio can be found here:
http://www.nelc.ucla.edu/Faculty/Ziai.htm)
I asked him if he was familiar with Dr. Peterson & his scholarship (I had no reason to question Dr. Peterson's academic integrity, but I was curious about Tal's "survey" when he first published it on RFM). This was Dr. Ziai's reply in its entirety:
Dear Mr. Ash,
Thank you. Dr. Peterson is a fine scholar of Islam. He has played a
very important, leadership role in helping to establish the Middle
East Text Initiative (METI) at BYU. His work as Managing Editor of
the METI publications is superb. The publication series has made
lasting contribution to the scholarly activity on Islamic
intellectual traditions. This has provided a forum and a means of
allowing meaningful, non polemic, and non apologetic studies and
texts in Arabic and Persian philosophical and other intellectual
traditions to be published in a bilingual format and thus made
available to wider audiences. This is especially important as there
is need both within Islamic studies to encourage and indeed nurture
the role of reason and solidify rationality, and also to inform the
non specialist audiences that there is a place for reason in Islam
which we must recognize, solidify, and uphold. These are very complex
times and the more we devote studies to the rationalist traditions of
philosophy and science in Islam the more we may be able to combat
irrational and hate driven polemics and other propagandist work. Dr.
Daniel Peterson has indeed established himself as a well respected
scholar and publisher of much needed scholarly work in Islamic
studies in general, and of the philosophical tradition in particular.
I personally have a great deal of respect for Dr. Peterson's work.
Please share this with Dr. Peterson in and related to LDS studies you
are involved at BYU, or elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Hossein Ziai