Author: Martin Kramer

Orhan Pamuk and Bernard Lewis

On By Martin Kramer

There’s a great deal of indignation in Europe and America over the possible prosecution of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, for words he spoke in an interview to a Swiss newspaper back in February. “Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and no one dares to speak out on this but me,” he told an interviewer. By speaking of “a million Armenians” killed in 1915-17, Pamuk greatly exceeded the number generally admitted by Turkey, and put the losses on the scale of a genocide. For these remarks, a prosecutor in Istanbul has indicted Pamuk for “public denigration” of Turkish identity, which is a crime under the country’s penal code. Pamuk is expected to go on trial on December 16.

Pamuk is widely admired as a Nobel-class author, and the decision to indict him is almost beyond explanation. It’s played straight into the hands of the legions of Turkey-bashers, especially in Europe, who’ve mounted their pedestals to declare that Turkey is still the heart of darkness. But the outrage goes beyond the usual suspects. That someone can be prosecuted for interpreting history as he or she sees fit is offensive to all people who value freedom of speech. The New York Times has just run an editorial criticizing the way Turkey “chooses to patrol its own history.” This time, the Times is right.

Unfortunately, Europe’s own record on this score is still tarnished by a disgraceful precedent set in Paris. I refer to the criminal and civil cases brought against Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, for words he spoke in an interview with Le Monde in 1993. Lewis had his own take on the Armenian massacres (he thought they weren’t genocide), and found himself hauled before a court for expressing it—the victim of benighted legislation similar to Turkey’s. Lewis lost one of the civil cases brought against him, and had to pay a symbolic fine and court costs. (The chilling verdict, right out of Orwell, is here.)

Where were the European intellectuals, authors, and parliamentarians back then, when a French court trampled on free speech? The historian Maxime Rodinson sided with Lewis’s right to speak freely, but I can’t recall any other overt expressions of solidarity. Fortunately, the great and free newspapers of America saw the issue with perfect clarity. The Washington Post, for one, ran an editorial on the case (September 9, 1995), reaching this conclusion:

When a court is willing to punish a scholar for expressing an ‘insulting’ opinion on a historical matter, even when debate on the point in question has been raging worldwide for years, the absurdity and the perniciousness of such laws is on full display. Once a court or a disciplinary body can be enlisted in lieu of argument to silence an unpopular viewpoint, all manner of trouble can and will result.

Indeed. If prosecuting Pamuk is wrong—and it is—then the finding against Lewis was just as wrong. Europe is right to hold Turkey to Europe’s standards, if Turkey wishes to join the EU. What Europe isn’t entitled to do is play by double standards. If you’re a Turk, you risk Turkish prosecution if you say the wrong things about history. If you’re anyone, you risk a French lawsuit if you say the wrong things about history. These crude laws look identical to me, and if the EU is serious about bringing Europe up to America’s gold standard of free speech, it can start by getting oppressive anti-speech laws off European books. Do that, and then preach to Ankara—in good faith.

MESA jumps in Massad’s trench

On By Martin Kramer

You remember Joseph Massad (how could you not?), the assistant professor who’s been at the heart of Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies scandal. Last spring, a university panel investigated allegations that he intimidated a student over her politics. Massad denied it, but the panel found the student credible, and a cloud hangs over his tenure prospects.

Massad is one of Edward Said’s less successful clones. Once, on a flight, I ended up watching a film called Multiplicity. It’s a light comedy about a man who can’t meet all his responsibilities at work and home, so he allows a mad geneticist to clone him twice. Alas, each clone is a bit like a photocopy–distorted and not quite up to the original. Then one of the clones has himself cloned, producing a total idiot. Massad’s doings, writings, and posturings are like an Edward Said gone really bad. So bad, in fact, that while Said achieved Columbia’s highest rank, of University Professor, Massad strikes me as falling far below the minimal requirements for tenure.

But the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has a stake in Massad. Why? Beyond fealty to Said and collegial solidarity, MESA once gave Massad its award for outstanding doctoral dissertation. Not a single MESA-acclaimed dissertation has made for a lasting and influential book, and Massad’s was no exception. The resulting tome, soaked in the impenetrable prose of postcolonial theory, isn’t on anyone’s must-read list. But MESA’s reputation is now invested in Massad, as he himself emphasized in his response to the findings of Columbia’s panel:

An attack on my scholarship therefore is not only an attack on me and on MEALAC [his department at Columbia] but on Columbia’s political science department [which graduated him], on prestigious academic presses, including Columbia University Press [which published his thesis], and on the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), an opinion expressed by Martin Kramer who also condemns Middle East Studies at Columbia and MESA itself.

Massad couldn’t be more right. All those who have accredited, acclaimed, and published him have scraped bottom, and that applies especially to Columbia University and MESA.

Columbia may redeem itself yet, by spitting him out. But MESA, it’s now clear, is digging itself an even deeper hole. Without fanfare, it has just added Massad to the editorial board of its flagship journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies. That is, it has anointed him formally as an arbiter of quality in scholarship. This effectively destroys whatever credibility the journal still had (after the damage it sustained under the editorship of Juan Cole). Even if this appointment is a mere honorific, Massad’s name on the masthead brings disrepute.

But the mandarins of MESA have gone further. Each fall, MESA’s rank-and-file elect a new president and two members of its six-member board of directors. A nominating committee selects the candidates. Lo and behold, among this year’s candidates for the board is Joseph Massad. He’s a mere assistant professor, with only one book (two more are said to be forthcoming), but he’s being offered to MESA’s members for possible selection as one of the pillars of the field.

Personally, I wish Massad luck in the race. I endorse him. His victory would make the efforts of critics like me even easier. (And I thought it would be hard to surpass Juan Cole’s election last year as MESA’s president. That shows how little I know.) The MESA elections run through October 28. As we get closer to that date, I’ll make my prediction.

Oh, and yes, I’ve also noticed that Zachary Lockman of New York University and Mark Tessler of Michigan are the two candidates for the presidency of MESA. I’ve written about Lockman, and he’s written about me. I intend to come back to that race later in the fall.

Disappointment: Massad’s long-awaited book, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question, has been announced by its publisher, Routledge, and I’m disappointed. It’s just a collected volume of his essays. “The essays, which have been previously published in a variety of academic journals, are brought together with a new introduction and conclusion.” So this won’t be an integrated sequel to Said’s famous Question of Palestine. Like I said: the clone’s never up to the original.