Author: Martin Kramer

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.

My long road with Ariel Sharon

On By Martin Kramer

I heard Ariel Sharon speak on several occasions, but I only met him once.

In 1996, as director of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, I set about scheduling a speaker for the annual address in Dayan’s memory. In practice, the Center’s Israeli board of governors, composed largely of Dayan’s old friends, selects the speaker. That year, we held the board meeting at the museum-home of David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv. The subject of the address came up, and someone floated the name of Ariel Sharon.

At the time, Sharon was minister of national infrastructure in the Likud-led government of Benjamin Netanyahu, and he was still very much a bête noire. At the mention of his name, my eyes immediately turned to Yael Dayan, Moshe Dayan’s daughter and a Labor party politician active in Peace Now. To my surprise, she pronounced Sharon to be the perfect choice as her father’s memorial speaker. I realized then, as I’ve realized many times since, that the old Israeli elite is bound by ties that go much deeper than the party politics of the moment.

So Sharon got the invitation, and he accepted it. For my academic colleagues, it was as if I had summoned Satan from the depths. While I awaited Sharon’s arrival on the appointed evening, I scanned the audience and saw few if any of them in attendance. (Yael Dayan wasn’t there either.) I recall feeling relieved that the honor of introducing Sharon had been claimed in advance by Zalman Shoval, a board member. I would have been hard-pressed to come up with enough admiring words.

Sharon came, spoke, and went. The speech got some coverage on an inside page of a newspaper, but it wasn’t a headline event. Yet it stayed with me, as did another Sharon speech I attended in Washington during those same years. Listening to Sharon, I didn’t hear a radical ideologue bent on “politicide” of the Palestinians—his usual portrayal in Israeli academe. I heard a hard-nosed former soldier concerned first and foremost with Israel’s security and preservation as a Jewish state.

The second Palestinian intifada resurrected Sharon, thanks to people like me. I had supported the Labor-led peace process, knowing it would involve far-reaching compromises. I voted for Ehud Barak in 1999. But when Yasir Arafat tried to leverage Israel by promoting mass terrorism, he changed my mind. I thought it important to erase from the record those concessions that had been offered by Israel at Camp David and, more importantly, at Taba. I saw Sharon as personifying strength, determination, and a willingness to act boldly, not in pursuit of a utopian  “New Middle East,” but of Israel’s national survival. So I cast my ballot for him in 2001, as did a decisive majority of Israeli voters.

The situation was very different in my university setting, where I was a lone soul, both then and in 2003, when I voted for Likud. Since the disengagement and Sharon’s creation of Kadima, I’ve run into people on campus who’ve announced their intention to cast a ballot for the man they once reviled. Now they never will. No elected leader ever meets all expectations, and to believe that they might is to subscribe to a dangerous sort of secular messianism. But of all the votes I’ve cast, I least regret the two I cast for Ariel Sharon, and I would have cast another one.

As to the future, I claim no special insight.