Author: Martin Kramer

Who threatens Columbia?

On By Martin Kramer

In Professor Joseph Massad’s mid-March statement to the ad hoc committee investigating faculty intimidation of students at Columbia, he listed the support he’d received from various quarters, including petitions and letters. He then added this:

The Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Committee also issued a letter defending my academic freedom, as did the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

I’d seen all of these missives, with a major exception: the letter from the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP has much more weight than any of the other outfits: it’s the union of professors, and the prime defender of their academic freedom and tenure rights. It can and does censure universities for infringements. I’d assumed that the AAUP hadn’t entered the Columbia fray, so Massad’s reference to an AAUP letter surprised me. I asked the AAUP.

The AAUP confirmed to me that it wrote not once but twice to the Columbia administration the first time, prior to Massad’s appearance before the ad hoc committee, and the second time, after the committee issued its report on March 31. When I asked the AAUP whether it had plans to release the texts of these letters, it answered in the negative. So I asked a journalist to follow up, and he confirmed that neither the AAUP nor Columbia is prepared to release the letters.

Why? Let me propose a hypothesis: the AAUP laid down the law to Columbia. Do this, and we’ll stay silent. Do that, and we’ll go against you. It’s all hush-hush, of course, but it’s massive secret pressure. For all we know, the first letter may have framed the ad hoc committee report, which has been so widely criticized as a whitewash. The second letter may well set the parameters of Columbia’s future treatment of Massad and the Middle East department.

Isn’t it ironic? The ad hoc committee and the Columbia profs have denounced the outside pressure of the tiny David Project, Campus Watch, etc. Well, at least they applied their pressure in a public way, fully above the board. It now turns out that the AAUP, a national advocacy organization with 45,000 members and 500 campus chapters, has been sending missives straight to Low Library missives that Columbia and the AAUP are resolved to keep secret.

When the ad hoc committee issued its report, it said the following: “Although we originally anticipated producing two documents (a confidential report to the Vice President and a public summary), in the interests of transparency we have prepared a single document.” If the interests of transparency are so paramount in this case, let Columbia release the AAUP letters. Let’s determine whether they contain explicit or implicit threats. Let’s find out whether the members of the committee knew the contents of the first letter as they deliberated. (After all, Massad told them it existed.)

Until we see the secret letters, they’ll hang like a black cloud over the ad hoc committee report and over whatever the university might do to resolve the faculty crisis in future.

Update: Guess who’s the featured speaker at the AAUP’s annual convention in Washington in June? It’s Lisa Anderson, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was Massad’s thesis adviser, she later defended him in a letter to Columbia’s president and she still somehow wound up as a member of the ad hoc committee. (A New York Times editorial said the university had “botched this job” by appointing her.) I imagine she knew precisely what the AAUP expected of the committee. How about letting the rest of us in on the secret?

Massad’s bad book

On By Martin Kramer

I was on the road when the Columbia story peaked, so I haven’t had my say yet. Be patient. For starters, I’ll begin with Joseph Massad, the most egregious of Columbia’s faculty miscreants, who released his statement to the ad hoc committee after publication of its report. It’s a bizarre collage of self-serving lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories. I’ll confine myself (for now) to one example.

At one point, Massad is eager to parade as someone whose scholarship is above reproach. This brings him to his only book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. Massad: “The only unfavorable review, out of seventeen favorable reviews, it received was in Martin Kramer’s unscholarly magazine, Middle East Quarterly.”

Now Massad can think what he likes about the Middle East Quarterly, which I used to edit. The reviewer was a genuine scholar, and a renowned historian of Jordan: Asher Susser. Indeed, so redoubtable a scholar is Susser that even Massad, in his book, cites Susser’s authority on Jordan three times (p. 343, note 123; p. 344, note 135; and p. 348, note 180).

So for the record, here is Susser’s review of Massad’s Colonial Effects (which, in dissertation form, won a prize from the Middle East Studies Association). It’s short (all reviews in Middle East Quarterly are), and it isn’t pretty. Susser:

Massad has done a thorough job of mastering the source material, but his ideological bias runs deep and devalues the results. Massad portrays Jordanians as the malleable creatures of others, non-participants in their own national enterprise who think only the thoughts Westerners imbed in their minds. Or, in the characteristically obtuse jargon of this book: the “juridical-military dyad introduced by British colonialism was both a repressive and a productive success. Today’s Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture are living testament to that achievement.”

Since these Westerners, like Glubb Pasha, were infected by Orientalist biases, they imparted an Orientalist mindset to their hapless Jordanian wards, from King Hussein on down: “Note, how the king’s nationalist views … are in tandem with Glubb’s Orientalist views of Jordanians as Bedouins … the latter being part of Glubb’s … de-Bedouinization and re-Bedouinization campaigns in the country.” To believe Massad, Glubb simply de-Bedouinizes and re-Bedouinizes the mindless Jordanians at will, and King Hussein, without a thought of his own, trails along as if on a leash. Jordanians, incapable of imagination, are but putty in the hands of one grand mental manipulator: Glubb Pasha.

Had Massad given the Jordanians their due in the molding of their own identity, he might have redeemed part of his argument. The “colonial effects” are there; no one would sensibly deny them. But by inflating them, Massad deflates his own credibility.

Factual distortion and sheer invention would also seem perfectly permissible in Massad’s account. Three examples of many:

(1) Massad refers to the Israeli raid and “massacre” in Samu’ in November 1966. The Jordanians themselves, however, did not claim that a massacre had been committed. Samir Mutawi, author of the semiofficial version of Jordan’s role in the 1967 war, wrote that Jordanian troops engaged the Israelis at Samu’, and in “the ensuing battle eighteen Jordanians were killed and many more wounded.” No massacre. A few pages later Massad himself gives similar figures (fifteen soldiers and three civilians killed). So after throwing in the word “massacre,” Massad ends up debunking himself.

(2) Massad would have us believe that domestic opponents of the regime alone assassinated Jordanian prime minister Hazza’ al-Majali in August 1960. In fact, it was masterminded by the intelligence services of the Syrian province of the United Arab Republic. This was so well known at the time that King Hussein considered retaliating with a military strike against Syria.

(3) Massad writes of the battle of Karamah in March 1968 that the Israeli army “could not escape unscathed (as it had during the 1967 war and on many other occasions). For the first time in its history, it received heavy damages in personnel and materiel.” This is pure bunk. Yes, Israel sustained heavy losses at Karamah: twenty-eight of its soldiers were killed there. But Massad seems to have forgotten (or never to have known) that 800 Israeli soldiers were killed in June 1967, and that 6,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians perished in the 1948 war. Ignorance? Dehumanization? A bit of both? What is certain is that when it comes to Israeli losses, Massad isn’t counting.

(This last error is especially appalling, as Massad has been allowed to teach “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society.” Columbia’s standards are that low.)

In the amen corner of Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies, they may fawn over Massad’s book. But how many of the fawners have devoted their careers to the study of Jordan? Massad’s own elision concealing the fact that his book got a thumbs-down from a major scholarly authority is typical of his method. (Columbia University Press, the book’s publisher, isn’t much better: its website quotes the first half-sentence of Susser’s review—”Massad has done a thorough job of mastering the source material”—as an endorsement.) Ah, how they whitewash on Morningside Heights.

U.S.-Islam in Qatar

On By Martin Kramer

The last leg of my just-concluded travels took me to Doha, Qatar, for the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, an annual conference coproduced by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and the state of Qatar. For the concept, read this new interview with Saban Center head Martin Indyk.

This year’s forum was sedate compared to its predecessors. The two previous meetings (I witnessed both) coincided with peaks of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. The presence of the fire-breathing Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on both prior occasions at the first conference, he spoke in favor of attacks on Israeli civilians generated headlines but got in the way of everything else. This time, the organizers dispensed with his services.

A few of the announced celebrities canceled: Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, and Qazi Hussain Ahmad (head of the Pakistani Jamaat-e Islami) bowed out for health reasons, and Tariq Ramadan (hero of Euro-Islam) didn’t show. That left the conference somewhat short of star power, and there were no fireworks. But a few sparks flew over the main theme of the conference: reform. The key questions: how can the “Arab spring” be turned into something more? And what role should the United States assume?

Not surprisingly, most Muslim participants adamantly rejected “foreign intervention.” At the same time, they begged the United States to use every kind of “soft power” against their own authoritarian governments, to create more political space. J. Scott Carpenter, deputy assistant secretary of state for the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), gave a strong speech promising the United States would do just that. It was too unequivocal for my taste, since I wonder just how far Washington is prepared to push friendly rulers to reform especially if push comes to shove. But Carpenter talks the talk very persuasively.

The willingness of liberal reformers to welcome Islamists into the arena surprised me. They’re either talking to Islamists, or they’re just resigned to impossibility of excluding them. Most notably, the reformers are extending this blanket acceptance to Hezbollah and Hamas. Their theory is that these groups, once given a stake in the system, will stop roaring and begin to purr. Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim emerged as the weightiest champion of this idea. It all sounds like wishful thinking to me, and in a few private conversations I got a whiff of apprehension from some members of the reform camp. (Names withheld.) At the forum two years ago, I gave a strong presentation against inclusion of Islamists, but that case seems lost as far as the reformers go. They’ve crossed the Rubicon.

I don’t want to end without a word of praise for Richard Holbrooke. Last year he tackled Qaradawi. This year he appeared on a panel with Palestinian strongman Mohammad Dahlan, who gave a retro speech. Holbrooke told Dahlan and the audience the truth: they have it in their own power to make Israel flexible, if they say and do the right things. Badgering the United States to squeeze Israel won’t work. He was particularly tough on the anti-Israel incitement that permeates education systems. (Last year, Bill Clinton administered the same pill to this audience, albeit with more sugar-coating.)

The most colorful personalities? I’d say it was a toss-up between Sadig al-Mahdi, the beturbanned, white-robed Oxonian and descendant of the Sudanese Mahdi, who heads the Umma Party in Sudan and who fires off bullet points like… bullets; and Mustafa Ceric, the enlightened and witty grand mufi of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who studied in Al-Azhar and got his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Both made insightful interventions all along the way.

The highlight for me? Anwar Ibrahim, former Malaysian deputy prime minister and finance minister who was thrown into jail by the mad Mahathir in 1998, sought me out to tell me that he’d read many of my writings during his six years in prison. (He was finally acquitted and released last September. Here’s a taste of his present line: Muslims should set aside suspicions and make the most of the U.S. democracy drive.) I can’t imagine a higher compliment.