Author: Martin Kramer

Suffering in silence at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

An Israeli newspaper over New Year’s weekend ran a profile of Anat Malkin-Almani, a violinist and child prodigy who had performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of 16. Malkin-Almani was born in Israel, but moved to California at the age of five, and then to New York, where she enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music and Julliard. Between her junior and senior years at Julliard, her left hand was badly mauled in an automobile accident. Now 29, and twelve surgeries later, she has made her way back to full-time performing. The profile is a moving story of dogged devotion to music in the face of adversity.

After Malkin-Almani’s accident, she considered a career in politics and foreign affairs. So she decided to study for a degree in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. Big mistake:

Malkin-Almani: Every week I would get e-mails about anti-Israel demonstrations, lectures that were virtually a form of incitement. The whole atmosphere in the department was hostile, and it was orchestrated by Edward Said. In one class the lecturer cited an article about how the Israelis were raping Palestinian women in the prisons and then sending them back to the territories. I raised my hand and said that no friend of mine had raped a Palestinian, and he started to shout at me.

Haaretz: Was that the only case?

Malkin-Almani: There were cases like that all the time. In one class I asked the lecturer where the border between East and West Jerusalem ran. He started to shout that you Israelis are so stupid, you don’t know anything. All the students in the class joined him and started shouting at me. That was the routine. Once I met with Said, who was a good friend of Daniel Barenboim, and I told him I wanted to join the Arab-Jewish orchestra they had established. He asked me where I was born and I told him Israel. Straight off he told me that Israel had not permitted the entry of a few musicians from Syria who wanted to play with the orchestra in Bethlehem. Suddenly he started to shout at me as though I were the one who stamps the permits. After two years of studies I said enough is enough and I left the university.

Haaretz: Did you share your experiences with anyone on the faculty?

Malkin-Almani: I had an Israeli lecturer whom I told what happened in the classes and I gave her all the articles we were given. She said that we must not meet in the university. A month later she told me, “We checked it out, it is dangerous to act and the best thing is to be silent.”

Malkin-Almani didn’t appear in the film Columbia Unbecoming, and her name didn’t surface in the subsequent controversy. She was a silent victim of faculty intimidation in a department run wild. Columbia isn’t in the news these days, but now is the time to pose this question to the university’s president, Lee Bollinger: how are you using this hiatus to clean up the mess? We’re waiting. And we’re watching.

Update: The New York Sun has spoken to Malkin-Almani, and she confirms that the offending professor was Joseph Massad. She also testified before the ad hoc grievance committee. Columbia’s legal laundryman, Floyd Abrams, says he doesn’t recall the testimony.

You say Hourani, I say Ajami, let’s call the whole thing off

On By Martin Kramer

Back in the fall, Garth Hall, a grad student and research assistant at the American University in Cairo, sent an email to 202 professors of Middle Eastern studies. Hall asked them to “jot down what you think are the ten most interesting, informative, and readable nonfiction books in the last century of Middle East studies… And if you could, please write one sentence on why you chose the book you did for your first choice.” (Details here.)

Of those queried, 52 responded, and so did I. Having skimmed Hall’s instructions, I forgot them when I got around to the chore: I thought he wanted ten books, in no particular order, and a comment on each. Maybe that’s why I don’t see my name on the list of respondents: I disqualified myself by not making a top choice. In any case, here’s my list in alphabetical order by author, with my original comment on each book. I did this in a hurry, and I wouldn’t fight to the death for every choice, but the list gives an idea of the approach that I value. (Caveat: I kept to books on modern history and politics. Otherwise I’d have filled up quickly with Oleg Grabar on Islamic art, S.D. Goitein on medieval Egypt, André Raymond on the Ottoman city—for starters.)

  • The Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami. Still the most eloquent and precise account of the impasse of Arab nationalism since independence.
  • Islam in European Thought by Albert Hourani. Hourani wrote bad books but elegant essays, and these are some of his best, on a theme he knew best.
  • Sayyid Jamal ad-din al-Afghani by Nikki R. Keddie. The ideal biography, masterful use of sources, correcting a hundred myths.
  • The Chatham House Version by Elie Kedourie. I constantly reread these essays, which turn assumptions about nationalism and imperialism on their heads.
  • Muslim Extremism in Egypt by Gilles Kepel. Pioneering on-the-ground reportage that preceded all accounts of Islamism and has yet to be surpassed.
  • The Arab Cold War by Malcolm H. Kerr. No one had a better feel for the cut-and-thrust of inter-Arab politics.
  • The Emergence of Modern Turkey by Bernard Lewis. Essential to understanding the late Ottoman period and the early Turkish republic.
  • Cruelty and Silence by Kanan Makiya. Treason of the Arab intellectuals, exposed meticulously and passionately.
  • A House of Many Mansions by Kamal S. Salibi. The best account (in essays) of the persistence of primordial identities.
  • Nasser and His Generation by P.J. Vatikiotis. Nasser’s Egypt thoroughly revealed, at a time when other scholars engaged in social science obfuscation.

So much for my choices. Here are the first ten results of the survey, in descending order of preference—and to make it more interesting, I offer an irreverent aside on each selection.

There are another eleven books on the list, but the sample isn’t large enough for any of these choices to mean much. The same goes for an additional list of thirteen runners-up. (Do note this, however: nothing by Rashid Khalidi made the cut.)

Of course, a few fatal problems with the methodology and sample size render the survey worthless, so Garth Hall promises to do it again, presumably in a more systematic manner. No matter how many times he repeats it, two things are certain: Said’s Orientalism will come out on top, and my Ivory Towers on Sand won’t be anywhere in sight.

Update: Check out Robert Irwin’s best ten. Three of his choices overlap those in the survey.

Squeezing goobers in Congress

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday, President Bush announced a new National Security Language Initiative, which has the potential to fix America’s debilitating deficit in foreign language proficiency in the military and government. I’ll say more about it later, but I’ve already been struck by a few of the reactions in Middle Eastern studies.

Consider this one. F. Gregory Gause III is a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the University of Vermont, and member of the academic freedom committee of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). When my book Ivory Towers on Sand appeared in 2001, he wrote a critical review essay in Foreign Affairs. To my suggestion that Congress reexamine its subsidies to Middle Eastern studies, he offered this rejoinder, piously couched in the language of the national interest:

Now more than ever the United States has a compelling national interest in encouraging its citizens to study the difficult languages of the Muslim world, and that costs money…. In fact, given the lack of official linguistic capacity evident during the post-[9/11] attack crisis, the federal government’s current Middle Eastern studies funding priorities should be languages first, second, and third…. Only increased federal support can sustain and expand the language instruction necessary to turn students into the careful and knowledgeable observers that everyone wants them to be.

Gee, readers must have thought, here is a Middle Eastern studies prof who defies Kramer’s generalization, and who has our security at heart–the kind of clean-cut guy MESA might want to send up to Capitol Hill to lobby for Title VI money.

So what are we to make of Gause’s response to Bush’s new initiative, made yesterday in the comments section of a weblog?

In this country, where we even had to use “national defense” as the justification to build our interstate highway system, you just can’t squeeze enough money out of the mountebanks, charlatans, ideologues and goobers who represent us in Congress to fund these programs unless they can be sold as “national defense” (or now, “homeland security”).

Bingo. I’ve argued all along that the mandarins of Middle Eastern studies are scamming Congress. In public, they announce that they’re eager to put their shoulders to the wheel in the nation’s defense, if Congress comes up with the budgets. In private, they have nothing but contempt for the Congress that subsidizes them, and for the Congressional obligation to assure that America is defended and secure. They look down on elected representatives as a bunch of “goobers,” who can be efficiently “squeezed” for money by mouthing patriotic platitudes about “national security” (in sneering scare quotes).

The sad thing is that Gause is probably the best of the bunch. Unlike most of his colleagues, he’s willing to hold his nose and take taxpayers’ money even when it comes in defense packaging. The diehards around him would strangle any federal program for students who want to study languages in order to serve.

Well, I’m glad Gause has told us how he feels. I’ll be happy to convey his latest message to the appropriate charlatans on the Hill.