Author: Martin Kramer

What about Dubai?

On By Martin Kramer

Until last year, I’d never been to Dubai. I’m not a big shopper and I don’t sell anything. But I wound up spending four days there in the spring, and the place surprised me. Dubai is over the top, daringly cosmopolitan, and all about business and pleasure. Across the Arab Middle East, economically productive minorities have been driven out. The Emiratis of Dubai, by contrast, have turned themselves into a minority in their own country, bringing in foreigners of every kind to build up and partake in the boom. Anyone who can do anything better (and cheaper) is welcomed in Dubai. They’ve perfected the Arab version of the American ethos, short on democracy but long on opportunity.

The Arab world has always had privileged nodes through which it has transacted fast-track business with the world. In the colonial period, Alexandria in Egypt served as the great gateway, relying crucially on foreign minorities. Nasser put an end to that. In the immediate post-colonial period, Beirut in Lebanon emerged on top, building upon its long tradition of open exchange with East and West. Extreme brands of nationalism destroyed that. In our time, Dubai is the great entrepôt. It exemplifies that larger shift of power away from the decaying, ideology-ravaged Arab Mediterranean and toward the worldly crust of the Arabian Gulf.

As a whole, the United Arab Emirates is much more of a mixed bag. In Abu Dhabi, the capital, they yearn to be political players in the Arab world, which has led them to buy off bad guys and offer money for Arab or Islamic studies to places like Harvard and Columbia. I don’t look with equanimity upon gifts from governments that don’t respect academic freedom at home. But the UAE’s pushing ideas about the Middle East in classrooms seems a lot more problematic to me than its moving containers in Baltimore.

Whatever happens to the port deal, it’s important to strengthen the tie to Dubai. In time, and beneath the glitz, all sorts of interesting cultural interactions might take place. It will also be a very American-inflected exchange. Alexandria in its heyday revolved around Europe. Beirut tilted both to Europe and America. Dubai seems destined to vacillate culturally between New York and Las Vegas, for better or worse.

One afternoon in Dubai, I had a bit of spare time on my hands, so I went out to the brand new Ibn Battuta Mall, named after the 14th-century Muslim traveler who journeyed from his birthplace in Morocco across North Africa and Asia to China. The mall is set up as a series of arcades, themed around the various highlights on Ibn Battuta’s route: Andalusia, Tunisia, Egypt, Persia, India, and China. The place gives new meaning to the familiar phrase “shopping mecca.” The Persian arcade is a giant dome, itself a work of art on a considerable level, no doubt meant to be admired by the many Iranians who come through Dubai. Smack in the middle of it, as this photo shows, is a Starbucks.

Orientalist kitsch? Definitely. But Arabs have built it. Such cross-cultural play is possible only where people are comfortable with amalgams. To see the incredible mix of people strolling this mall, happily shopping for designer labels and making their choice at the 21-cinema “megaplex,” restores one’s faith in the Arabs’ potential for embracing a global future. It’s no doubt fragile, this odd experiment in our own style of consumerism, on a stretch of hot sand a world away from us. That’s all the more reason not to turn Dubai into a whipping boy for our disappointment with the rest of the Arab world.

Cole and Yale

On By Martin Kramer

On Tuesday, Juan Cole posted this appeal on his website, Informed Comment:

If among my loyal readers there are any attorneys with expertise in libel law, in the US or UK, who might be willing to consult on a possible series of lawsuits for reckless defamation of character resulting in professional harm–done on a contingency basis–I’d much appreciate hearing from you.

Cole doesn’t say who he’s got in mind as targets of a suit, but a few likely candidates come to mind. One is David Horowitz, who’s included a Cole entry in his new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. According to a press report, “Cole called the chapter on him ‘dishonest’ and said that it is ‘if not libelous, then verging on it.’ He declined to say if he’s planning any legal action.” (A propos, Cole’s written before that Horowitz “has extremely wealthy backers.”) But in the very same press article, Cole seems to undercut any possible claim that Horowitz has done him harm: “I think [Horowitz] has no impact whatsoever. He’s not relevant to our academic governance or the way we make decisions in the academy.” So Cole himself has dismissed Horowitz as harmless.

Just how does anyone do “professional harm” to a tenured full professor? It’s a question posed in the (moderated) comments section of Cole’s weblog appeal. Writes one reader: “If you were fired from your job as a professor over these published defamatory statements that would be one thing. Short of that I can’t see it.” Writes another: “If one is a middle aged college professor whose primary source of income remains intact, it starts to get to be difficult to prove how much income has been lost.” In fact, it’s obvious that Cole has a job for life at the University of Michigan. Tenured American academics are the most protected and secure class in the history of all humankind. No one could say anything about Cole–and there is nothing that Cole could say–that could cost him his Ann Arbor sinecure.

So what “professional harm” could possibly have been done to him? It’s here that Cole’s commentators have missed the point. In American academe, the coming of middle age is the moment of truth. Every professor fantasizes about getting the summons from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. They may have reached the summit of achievement in their own institutions, but they covet the prestige of the top three. Cole seems to be no exception, as we read in an article published last week in the Yale Herald. There it’s confirmed that Cole is a candidate for a new contemporary Middle East slot at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

The article also quotes a few of Cole’s critics, including Alex Joffe of Campus Watch, and Michael Oren, who’s a visiting professor at Yale. The reporter got this reaction from Oren to a typical Colecism:

On Feb. 17, 2003, Cole wrote in an online post, “Apparently [Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon’s ass.” Oren said of this comment, “Clearly, that’s anti-Semitism; that’s not a criticism of Israeli policy. If you’re accusing Jews of manipulating the American government to fight wars for Israel without any evidence, then that’s not legitimate criticism; that’s in the area of racial hatred.”

A named Michigan student is also quoted, to the effect that when she met Cole to discuss her interest in studying Arabic in Egypt, she deliberately avoided mentioning her Judaism or Zionist beliefs. “I didn’t want him to see me in his eyes as a Jewish student, but as a serious student of Middle East studies who wanted to talk to him about Arabic.”

All this doesn’t bode well for Cole at Yale, which may be why he’s feeling professionally harmed these days, and wondering whom to sue over it. After all, isn’t he obviously deserving of a Yale professorship? Isn’t he the most famous professor of Middle Eastern studies in America today? President of the Middle East Studies Association? Regular columnist at Salon.com? Doesn’t he “command Arabic”? (And he’s studied eight or nine languages!) And look at that weblog! Those insinuations of antisemitism are blocking his path to destiny! (And by making an appeal for legal advice on his website, Cole also is setting up his “loyal readers” should Yale turn him down. It will be because he was libelously tarred with antisemitism by the Likudniks and neocons.)

Of course, that would suggest that appointments at Yale are subject to manipulation by Likudniks and neocons, an absurd notion. So in the event that Yale does pass Cole over, it’s likely to be because his scholarship, and commitment to scholarship, fall short of Yale standards. How might Yale reach that conclusion?

Celebrity and scholarship aren’t necessarily correlated. An argument could be made–it’s one I’d accept–that Cole hasn’t produced a single scholarly work of significance to Middle Eastern studies as a whole. He’s produced a few specialized monographs and conference volumes, a couple of compendia of his own articles, and translations of Kahlil Gibran (which sell better than anything else he’s written). Some of his major areas of interest (Bahai studies, 19th-century Iran, Shiism) also overlap those of Yale historian Abbas Amanat (who happens to be on the search committee), so it’s not exactly clear how much added value Cole would bring to Yale.

Moreover, in the years since 9/11, while people like Fawaz Gerges and Mary Habeck have belted out important books on Al-Qaeda, Cole has spent his time obsessively blogging, summarizing news reports and spewing out political invective. In his middle age, at a time when serious historians produce their great works of synthesis, Cole has turned into a journalist. Academics would be right to wonder how anyone can blog with this intensity and still produce any sustained scholarship. I certainly wonder, and I say that as an academic blogger of long standing. The price of blogging is paid in scholarship.

But the major objection to Cole surely must be that he doesn’t know the contemporary Middle East. Cole did all his scholarly work on the 19th century (his monographs on the Urabi revolt, Shiite Lucknow, and Bahai modernization). He has not made a speciality of the contemporary Middle East, and it shows. Time and again, I’ve expressed wonderment at his errors. (On the right sidebar here at Sandbox, scroll down to “Juantanamo!” for links to my major Cole-itis attacks.) Tony Badran has done the same for Cole’s purported knowledge of Lebanon, and IraqPundit has covered Cole’s Iraq gaffes. When it comes to Israel, which is also situated in the contemporary Middle East, not only is Cole embarrassingly ignorant but, worse, he doesn’t seem to be aware of it.

So I would be surprised, and even shocked, if Yale appointed Juan Cole. The fact that he’s under serious consideration (and that Princeton has considered Rashid Khalidi) is just more evidence of the enormous generation gap in Middle Eastern studies. For over thirty years, the best people have avoided the field, and mediocre people have flourished in it. Now that there’s intense student demand for courses on the modern Middle East, provosts and deans are in a quandary. It’s at times like this that our “great universities” earn the name. They do so by upholding scholarly standards and protecting their students from “professional harm.”

Karen Hughes: avoid this man

On By Martin Kramer

U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a join project of Brookings and Qatar, gets underway in Doha tomorrow. I attended the forum last year (and the two previous years), and found it a splendid opportunity to meet people. There are also people who should be studiously avoided. I’m not attending this year, but if I were, I’d be sure to avoid one man: Sheikh Rachid Ghannouchi.

Ghannouchi is the head of the Tunisian Islamist organization Al-Nahda. He’s been been living in exile in London since 1991. In the early 1990s, I followed Ghannouchi’s various doings and sayings, at a time when Georgetown’s John Esposito was retailing him as a great Islamic reformer. I read and listened, and concluded that Ghannouchi’s anti-American extremism far outweighed whatever commitment he had to “reform.”

In May 1994, Ghannouchi was scheduled to visit the United States, to speak at a roundtable organized by a then-obscure institute at the University of South Florida. (A flyer for the event later became exhibit 222 in the Sami al-Arian trial.) The U.S. government hesitated to issue Ghannouchi a visa, because the Tunisian government opposed it. Still, the visa debate went back and forth, because Esposito and some of the people in the State Department thought (as usual) that it would be a splendid idea to have an authentic Islamist on the line.

So I spent a weekend putting together this compendium of Ghannouchi’s worst statements. It wasn’t hard work; there was a lot of material. Ghannouchi’s gems included this one, on the eve of the Kuwait war: “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world… Muslim youth must be serious in their warning to the Americans that a blow to Iraq will be a license to strike American and Western interests throughout the Islamic world.” And this, on a visit that year to Tehran: “The greatest danger to civilization, religion and world peace is the United States Administration. It is the Great Satan.” Read the compendium yourself—it hasn’t been available on the web until today—to savor the flavor of Ghannouchi’s “moderation.” My weekend’s work, published by The Washington Institute, was enough to kill his chance of a visa then, and I don’t think he’s tried again since.

Still, Ghannouchi is a temptation. Like Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who keeps him in London, Ghannouchi condemned the 9/11 attacks. He’s gotten the occasional plug, most notably by Noah Feldman in his book After Jihad. And as it happens, Ghannouchi is also something of a guru for UK-based adherents of the Palestinian Hamas. One of them, shahid–wannabe Azzam Tamimi, even wrote a biography of Ghannouchi. So Ghannouchi is still the sort of guy the State Department would love to engage, if only no one were looking.

Well, I’m looking, and it was with some alarm that I saw his name on the participants’ list for the U.S.-Islamic World Forum. With Karen Hughes and other U.S. officials scheduled to participate, it’s almost as bad as bringing Ghannouchi to Washington. And with all those warm and fuzzy feelings about faith-based comity in the room, anything could happen. Remember, too, that when TIME recently asked Hughes what she’d been reading on Islam, she said she’d read a lot of Esposito. In Esposito’s unfortunate book The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he describes Ghannouchi as someone who has moved “from a militant Qutb-inspired activism to more pragmatic, moderate, accommodationist activism.”

Don’t be so sure. “Ghannouchi’s assertions never match his thinking. Like most double-faced Islamists, he rarely says explicitly what he believes and rarely thinks what he says.” That’s Lafif Lakhdar, a courageous secular liberal who’s kept the heat on Ghannouchi. (More here and here.) Ghannouchi was apparently so put out by Lakhdar that he falsely accused him of authoring a defamation of the Prophet. Liberal intellectuals rallied around the endangered Lakhdar, and Ghannouchi backed down. Ghannouchi also couldn’t help himself at the height of the second intifada, appearing on Al-Jazeera to sing the praises of the mothers of Palestinian suicide bombers.

The organizers of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum haven’t put Ghannouchi on a panel, and that’s a good thing. Now it’s the job of U.S. officials to avoid Ghannouchi in the banquets and elevators. He’s not hard to identify. That’s why I’ve put his picture on this entry.