Author: Martin Kramer

Noah Feldman: no more Baghdad

On By Martin Kramer

Noah Feldman is the young NYU law professor who was tapped by the Coalition Provisional Authority back in 2003 to help Iraqis write their constitution. He later fell out with the CPA and returned to New York in a huff. Feldman has recently lamented that he’s infamous in the Arab world, because Edward Said wrote an article noting he was raised as an Orthodox Jew. “The article morphed and spread [in Arabic translation], until I became known as a Zionist agent. I became nervous, and I believe it would be dangerous for me to go back.”

The irony is that Feldman set himself up. It was he who, in spring 2003, pumped the New York Times and the Israeli press with the self-promotional saga of his Orthodox background. This is what I wrote in those glory days, before there was any Iraqi resistance or beheading of foreigners: “I question the wisdom of all the to-do about Feldman’s Jewish upbringing. In America, it’s part of the novelty—so much so that Feldman seems to think that there’s no reason not to dwell on it…. [But] there are undoubtedly people in Iraq who would be delighted to bag an American Jew. I urge Feldman to watch his back.” Feldman didn’t understand enough about the temperament of the region to know that he was making a mistake, and Said made sure it caught up with him. Feldman once told an interviewer that being in Baghdad was “invigorating—there is nothing like putting your money where your mouth is.” Well, up to a point. And since Professor Feldman has written an entire book enumerating the mistakes of his lessers in Iraq, he might acknowledge just one of his own.

My friends, the Crimean Tatars

On By Martin Kramer

In my very first book, Islam Assembled (1986), I devoted a chapter to the (unsuccessful) efforts of the Crimean Tatar reformer, Ismail Bey Gaspirali, to convene a pan-Islamic congress in Cairo in 1907. Now that chapter has been translated into Turkish and included in a huge collected volume on Gaspirali, published in Ankara by the Association of Crimean Turks for Culture and Mutual Aid. I’m flattered to have been included. And this gives me the opportunity to note that if you’re on a campus, you can read Islam Assembled online, via the History E-Book Project of the American Council of Learned Societies. (Yeah, I know. I should have stuck to that stuff.)

Orientalism and the Jews

On By Martin Kramer

Back in 1996, to honor Bernard Lewis on his 80th birthday, I organized a conference. The proceedings appeared as a book, The Jewish Discovery of Islam. Now there appears a new book, Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar, who develop other aspects of the subject. (Jacket blurb here.) It’s got some interesting pieces, but a few of the contributors are firmly in the orbit of Edward Said. I’ll grant them this: just as an Arab can be an anti-Semite (even though he’s a putative Semite), a Jew can be an (anti-Arab) orientalist (even though he’s a putative oriental). But the notion that Zionism in toto is just a variety of orientalism is riddled with contradictions, because Zionism is contradictory, simultaneously embracing (and repelling) East and West. There isn’t any room for such ambivalence in Said’s us-and-them framework, which is just one of its many flaws. Why anyone would still want to operate in such an intellectual straightjacket should be a mystery. But fashion slavery in academe has its rewards, and some of these authors are sure to collect them. (You can read the intro to the book here.)