Author: Martin Kramer

Congress Probes Middle Eastern Studies

On By Martin Kramer

Consider this assessment of the influence of Edward Said on Middle Eastern studies:

In a work published in 1978, [Edward Said] argued that Western meddling in the Middle East throughout much of the 20th Century produced the conflict and turbulence that continues to plague that region of the world….This theory reached its apex of popularity more than a decade ago and has been waning ever since. Even a cursory review of the syllabi of the Middle East Centers clearly shows this work only occasionally appears as an assigned reading or on a resource list. Indeed, historians and political scientists rarely find this theory useful.

Hands on hearts, fellow academics: is this assessment even remotely accurate? Has Edward Said’s influence been in a decade-long decline? Is his 1978 book Orientalism only “occasionally” assigned or listed as a resource? Is he “rarely” invoked by scholars in the field?

The claim is absolute nonsense, as anyone who inhabits academe knows. Said is one of only two academics today (the other is Noam Chomsky) who draws an overflow crowd on any campus he visits and who always gets a standing ovation. (It happened again this spring at Berkeley and UCLA.) Just this past fall, on the anniversary of 9/11, American and European scholars of the Middle East, meeting in their first “world congress,” honored Said (and only Said) with their first-ever award for “outstanding contributions to Middle Eastern studies.” And needless to say, you cannot finish an undergraduate education in Middle Eastern studies without being assigned Orientalism several times over.

So who is the fellow making this absurd assertion about Said, and why is he making it?

His name is Terry Hartle, he’s a top lobbyist at the American Council on Education, and he made his claim in testimony last Thursday before the House Subcommittee on Select Education. His purpose: to absolve Middle Eastern studies of the charge that they remain under the spell of academe’s most virulent critic of American power and policy in the Middle East. Why should this interest Congress? Because there are people who are beginning to ask why American taxpayers should subsidize the activities of Edward Said’s acolytes, to the tune of several millions of dollars a year.

Poor Dr. Hartle. The Subcommittee, with very little notice, decided to conduct a hearing on Title VI, the federal program that subsidizes area studies, including Middle Eastern studies, at American universities. Since 9/11, higher education lobbyists like Hartle have been pushing for more Title VI funding, citing the threats emanating from the Middle East. The paradox is that the very Middle East “experts” who have been getting Title VI money for decades have been anything but prescient about changes in the Middle East. Even worse, a lot of them subscribe to Edward Said’s notion that the proper role of American scholars is to agitate against the alleged excesses of American neo-imperialism, both in the classroom and outside of it. The most brazen abusers have done this on the government’s nickle.

So Dr. Hartle was very busy on Thursday, covering up the sins of Middle Eastern studies. His job wasn’t made any easier by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution, an indefatigable critic of the excesses of Title VI-subsidized centers and scholars. You can view the proceedings yourself, or read about them in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Sun, and the Subcommittee’s press release.

I do feel sorry for all the decent folk in other fields who get Title VI funding and make good use of it. Their colleagues in Middle Eastern studies, whom they’ve never held in particularly high regard anyway, have fouled the nest. A recent study of the membership of MESA shows that the age of members is rising, and that fewer of them have junior positions—all signs that departments have been avoiding the odious task of making new appointments in the field. Now schools of international affairs are faced with the prospect that the reckless antics of Middle East “experts” might undercut their own support in Washington. Thus, Hartle was quick to point out that Middle East centers are only a “small and specific part of the Title VI programs,” and that it is “a fairly small part of Title VI that has generated controversy.” The problem is that the rotten apples in Title VI specialize precisely in that part of the world that’s likely to remain at the top of the U.S. foreign policy agenda for years to come.

Title VI comes under the Higher Education Act, which is up for reauthorization, so now is the time to suggest fixes. Stanley Kurtz proposed to the Subcommittee a fair and equitable way to help Middle Eastern studies back to their senses, without gutting Title VI. (And believe me, there are some on Capitol Hill who would gut it in a flash.) The key proposal is establishment of a supervisory board for Title VI, similar to the boards that govern the Fulbright program, the National Security Education Program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and other federally-supported educational and fellowship programs. Title VI is presently administered with a light hand by the Department of Education bureacracy, and money is disbursed through a peer-review process. All this is way too cozy and convenient for the academics, who have turned what began as a defense program into a semi-entitlement. A supervisory board would reestablish the exchange among academe, government, and society which is the intent of the law.

The academics won’t like another layer of accountability, but they’ll get used to it. In fact, one of them already has: Gilbert Merkx, a Latin Americanist and vice-provost at Duke, who is also co-chairman of the Council of Directors of Title VI National Resource Centers for Foreign Language and Area Studies. He also testified on Thursday, and offered strong support for Title VI. When asked by the chair of the Subcommittee panel for his view of a supervisory board, he said he didn’t favor the idea. But he added this:

If there is to be a review panel, I think it should be composed of the clients of the program, not of political appointees. I would recommend that there be an interagency group which would include representatives of the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, and other agencies like Homeland Security, which are the kinds of agencies that hire people with the skills we produce. Those other agencies could work with the Department of Education to see that these programs are producing the manpower required.

Professor Merkx, you’re on. The board (or panel) would need some appointees by the White House and Congress—after all, Title VI mandates “outreach” programs, and that makes the general public a “client” as well. But I’d be perfectly happy to have a board with a majority of members appointed ex officio from the agencies named by Merkx.

I urge the Subcommittee to build on the opening offered by Merkx in his testimony, and to begin to work on draft legislation for the establishment of a Title VI board. If you feel similarly, e-mail the Subcommittee chair, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Michigan), at this address:

tellhoek@mail.house.gov

You can write him at this address:

Committee on Education and the Workforce
U. S. House of Representatives
2181 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

And you can fax him at this number: (202) 226-0779.

Jihad is Over! (If Noah Feldman Wants It.)

On By Martin Kramer

The newest face thrust upon us by America’s insatiable appetite for novelty belongs to one Noah Feldman. He’s a 32-year-old assistant professor of law at New York University and author of a new book (his first) entitled After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. He’s also been anointed chief U.S. adviser to Iraq for the writing of its new constitution. This announcement has been greeted by laudatory pieces, in places as varied as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Israeli daily Ma’ariv. The novelty? It’s the combination. Feldman is Jewish (raised in an Orthodox home); summa cum laude at Harvard (Near Eastern studies); conversant in Arabic; a Rhodes scholar with an Oxford D.Phil. in Islamic studies; and a law graduate from Yale. “The East is a career,” wrote Disraeli. What he really meant was that the East is a great place to launch a career. It’s now done that for young Professor Feldman, who will never again know obscurity.

The understanding of the Middle East can always use a new face. After all, America’s most credible interpreter of the Middle East and Islam is about to turn 87 (happy birthday to Bernard Lewis, May 31!), so you know there is a generation gap. But you expect new ideas from new faces. The problem with Noah Feldman is that his idea isn’t new. In fact, it’s the same idea first advanced about a decade ago by John L. Esposito, a professor at Georgetown University and America’s foremost apologist for Islamism. If you purchase Feldman’s After Jihad, you should shelve it between Esposito’s 1992 book, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, and his co-authored 1996 book, Islam and Democracy. They’re all essentially the same book.

The Esposito/Feldman idea goes like this: Islamists are really no worry at all. In fact, they are actually the best hope for democracy in the Middle East. Leading Islamist thinkers want democracy, and if Islamist parties were allowed to take power—which they certainly would do in free elections—it would be an improvement over the situation today. Even if Islamists declared “Islamic” states on assuming power, these regimes would probably be more or less democratic, provided you don’t insist on a narrow, culture-bound definition of democracy. The United States is making a big mistake by allying itself with autocratic rulers in the region, and it’s betraying its values too. It should encourage inevitable change in the Islamists’ favor, which is really in the U.S. interest.

To make this argument stick, you need to claim that “jihad is over.” Why? While it’s still on, too many so-called “moderates” apologize for it or even cheer it on. This is what happened in the decade between the Gulf war and 9/11. Esposito and his crowd were telling us that Islamism was evolving in new, peaceful, and democratic directions. In his 1992 book, Esposito assured us that the Islamist violence of the 1980s would recede, and that “the nineties will prove to be a decade of new alliances and alignments in which the Islamic movements will challenge rather than threaten their societies and the West.”

In fact, exactly the opposite happened. Islamist movements kept spinning off terrorism that grew ever more deadly, all of it justified as jihad, destroying the flagship American project—the “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians—and finally killing 3,000 innocents in New York. This wave of terrorism was made possible in part by the refusal of the so-called Islamist “moderates” to condemn violent jihad in all its forms. Some even justified it in roundabout ways. They were effectively accomplices to the violence, and American apologists of the Esposito school contributed to the general complacency that made 9/11 an easy job.

Now Noah Feldman comes along to reassure us that the jihad has really abated this time. 9/11 and subsequent attacks are “the last, desperate gasp of a tendency to violence that has lost most of its popular support.” Al-Qa’ida is “politically irrelevant.” The “alarmist argument is behind the curve.” The mainstream Islamists don’t want jihad, they want democracy: “The Islamists’ call for democratic change in the Muslim world marks a fundamental shift in their strategy.” Feldman:

The Islamists never got a chance, really, to govern, and if there’s one central argument that I’m trying to press in the book, it’s that Islamists who say they are committed democrats, who tell you that they believe in democracy, who believe that Islam and democracy are deeply compatible, not incompatible, should be given a chance to govern. They’ve never been given that chance anywhere [sic!], and I think many, many people in the Muslim world—not all, but many—would vote for them.

As for U.S. interests, it would be a “mistake” to think that Islamists “are inevitably or unalterably opposed to the United States.” The United States should push governments, including friendly ones, to allow political parties and free elections, and let the chips fall where they may. “The experiment of Islamic democracy deserves to be run,” writes Feldman. In fact, “Islamic democrats are the best hope for the future of the Muslim world—and they deserve our admiration and our support.”

I won’t take on these arguments point by point. I did that in 1993, 1997, and 1998, and little has changed since then. The Feldman version suffers from exactly the same weaknesses as Esposito’s. When you get beyond generalities—Feldman’s empathetic attempt to think like a Muslim reformist—you discover that his real-life “Islamic democrats” are the usual suspects. The names and groups mentioned are either part-time “moderates,” or people who have too little influence in their own societies. The part-timers accept that democracy and Islam might be reconciled (up to a point), but they detest democracy’s greatest champion, the United States, and they loathe the one democracy in their midst, Israel. (Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who gets included in Feldman’s list of “Islamic democrats,” fits this profile perfectly. Feldman calls him “complex.” That doesn’t do justice to Qaradawi, whose performance I’ve witnessed first-hand. The great sheikh is against violent jihad on alternate weekdays.) As for Islam’s would-be Martin Luthers, these poor souls fill the footnotes of Western journal articles, but can’t get any traction at home. In fact, a lot of them aren’t even at home. They are in distant exile, because they’ve offended their governments or enraged the Islamists.

In my book on Middle Eastern studies, I devote a chapter to the overly optimistic thesis of Esposito and friends, and how it came to ruin. In After Jihad, Feldman picks it up, brushes it off, and presents it as state-of-the-art thinking. It isn’t. But it connects with something new in the United States: the idea that America’s next mission in the world should be the conversion of the Muslims to democracy. In the absence of broad-based democracy movements, the Islamist movements remain a constant temptation to wishful thinkers, some of whom occupy high office. And they’re more likely to believe Feldman than Esposito, because 9/11 struck Esposito full-force. He had to rush a book into print to cover his tracks, but he’s no longer taken at his word in Washington. Feldman, in contrast, is a complete newcomer, and has no tracks to cover.

Well, almost no tracks. Not only is Feldman an Esposito emulator. He is also an Esposito collaborator. In January of last year, he and Esposito co-organized a conference at New York University’s Law School, in cooperation with Bill Clinton’s presidential foundation. The topic: “Islam and America in a Global World.” NYU reported their collaboration in these words: “The Law School’s Professor Noah Feldman and Georgetown Professor John Esposito, both scholars of Islam and democracy, have worked closely with President Clinton’s office in structuring the day.” The “moderates” assembled for this exercise ganged up on the United States and its policies so relentlessly that Clinton felt driven to intervene after his formal speech. The New York Post covered the event under this headline: “Bill Fires Back at US-bash Powwow.” It would not be an exaggeration to say that Feldman’s sole previous attempt at organizing “moderate” Muslims on behalf of a U.S. president backfired.

So I am not persuaded by all the testimonials collected by the New York Times, from people who think that Noah Feldman is just the right man for the job. In an interview with the BBC, he was reported to have said that the United States “should back [an] Islamic Iraq.” In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Feldman warned against excluding “Islam-inspired politicians” from government, and added this: “An established religion that does not coerce religious belief and that treats religious minorities as equals may be perfectly compatible with democracy. The U.K. is a democracy notwithstanding the Church of England.” Well, the Shiite clerics in Najaf and Karbala are not the Church of England, and as a collective they can hardly be described as ecumenical. That sort of analogy, the stock-in-trade of Esposito, obscures much more than it enlightens.

And it leaves me wondering whether Feldman might be just the wrong man. Last night I attended a public lecture by Kanan Makiya, who stated that an Islamic republic in Iraq would be “a sure-fire formula for civil war.” In the first chapter of After Jihad, Feldman argues that Algeria might have been spared its traumatic civil war had the Islamists been allowed to assume power. It’s an open question. But Iraq is not Algeria, and an attempt to establish Islam in Iraq’s far more diverse society could provoke a civil war. It could also undo U.S. strategic achievements: Islamists, even the cheery Islamists of Turkey, have not been great friends of U.S. security interests. It would be tragic if what now looks like a victory were to be turned into a defeat, by our own lawyers. Feldman might know the feeling: I see that during the recount of the Florida presidential ballot in 2000, he went down there as a volunteer, and ended up as chief legal researcher to the Gore campaign. Feldman must know that the rules are half the contest, even in the most perfect of democracies. So why stack them against your best friends—and yourself? The United States is not an umpire, it has an interest in the future of Iraq, and its appointees on the ground have a duty to protect that interest. The completely disinterested promotion of democracy should be left to NGOs and Jimmy Carter.

I conclude. I wouldn’t have written at such great length if I didn’t think Feldman worth the attention. He’s very much worth it—and not because of his mission to Iraq. He’s smart, well spoken, and young enough to change. In an earlier entry on Esposito, I wrote that despite his “long record of error in interpreting Islamism, I haven’t despaired of him yet.” So I certainly don’t despair of Feldman, especially since a first book is always a source of later regret. Kirkus Reviews writes of After Jihad that it is “undercut by stolid academese and unduly rosy speculation”—a fair half-sentence judgment. But Feldman, I assume, will eventually give us an account of his Iraq tutorial at the hands of its scarred and avid power-seekers. Now that should be interesting.

Here’s a final point of order. 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. He has even said that his interest in the Middle East was kindled during a family trip to Israel. Oxford University’s former rabbi has published a testimonial to Feldman’s brilliance—in The Jerusalem Post.

Actually, Jewish scholarly appreciation of Islam is not at all novel: there have been plenty of Jews, including those of Orthodox upbringing, who have taken a sympathetic interest in Islam, and some who have even converted to it. (See my essay on the subject.) But these days—precisely because of the Islamists—you can’t be too careful. The last thirty-something American Jew who went out there, thought he had a rapport with Islamists, and even wrote favorably about Sheikh Qaradawi, was the journalist Daniel Pearl, who met a grisly end at the hands of his interlocutors. Pearl’s father has written that his son “showed that being Jewish does not mean being anti-Islam….Danny’s articles in The Wall Street Journal served in fact as Islam’s best advocates.” Unfortunately, Islam right now isn’t looking for Jewish advocates, but there are undoubtedly people in Iraq who would be delighted to bag an American Jew. I urge Feldman to watch his back. After Jihad? Don’t bet your life on it.

And that billboard? Ah, you’re curious about that billboard at the top of this entry. The “Jihad is Over!” message cropped up mysteriously on a Manhattan billboard one day in May 2002. It’s an allusion to a famous Times Square billboard that John Lennon and Yoko Ono sponsored in 1969, during the Vietnam war. That one read: “War Is Over! If You Want It.” For a few days, the motive behind the unauthorized posting was a mystery, until Ron English, a Manhattan pop artist, took credit. To Muslims, jihad may or may not mean violent struggle, but to publicity hounds it always spells self-promotion. By the way, the billboard sign is located in the East Village, on East 14th Street, a short walk up from NYU Law School (Washington Square South, or West 4th). Dare I speculate?

Too Few Yalies Know Arabic? Don’t Lose Sleep

On By Martin Kramer

Niall Ferguson, the historian who goes back and forth between New York University and Jesus College, Oxford, had an essay entitled “The Empire Slinks Back,” in The New York Times Magazine the weekend before last. After describing himself as a “member of the neoimperialist gang,” he questions whether Americans have the staying power to maintain a far-flung empire in places like Iraq. It’s a good question, and I share his doubts. It’s his solution that’s dubious.

Ferguson writes that in the British empire, “colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins.” He then asks:

How many members of Harvard’s or Yale’s class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a ”clash of civilizations,” America’s brightest students show remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.

Actually, it’s not remarkable at all. Britain’s brightest students, even at the height of empire, didn’t show much interest in other civilizations either. The Oxford historian D.W. Brogan wrote this in 1937: “The history of the Overseas Dominions has for many persons a very faint attraction….there may be full agreement that someone ought to know about them; but the normal attitude is that the someone is always someone else.”

Those mandarins-to-be in Oxford didn’t study the Bhagavad Gita or immerse themelves in Persian and Arabic poetry. They read Aristotle’s Ethics and studied Greek and Latin history, philosophy, and literature (“the Greats”). These were the firm foundations of their own civilization, and this was the education that sustained them as they trudged through jungles and across deserts. Empire is about defending and disseminating your own civilization. If you aren’t fully persuaded of its manifest superiority, you won’t bear up under the rigors of governing hostile peoples in unfriendly places.

Forty years ago, the Oxford orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb (who also spent a few futile years trying to bring Harvard up to speed) complained of how the British government “dismissed any proficiency in Oriental Studies, or even the knowledge of an oriental language, as irrelevant to its interests and useless, or worse than useless, as a qualification for the recruitment of its officers.” Worse than useless? Gibb alluded here to an attitude in the halls of power that rested on no little experience: persons too knowledgeable in their ways and languages might see things rather too readily from their point of view. And knowledge, turned into sympathy, could paralyze.

Since Ferguson chose Yale, here’s an example from Yale of how cultural knowledge can be trotted out to rationalize inaction. If you were a student there over the past two years, you would have heard the following pearls of wisdom from Dimitri Gutas, chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and professor of Arabic. On bombing Osama and the Taliban during Ramadan: “Because there is this resentment there, the bombing during Ramadan will be seen as an additional insult. It will be interpreted as such by the ideologues and seen as such by the moderates, the ones that America should be trying to win over.” On bombing Saddam and his minions in Baghdad, last month: “How would we feel now if Rome was being bombarded and was in imminent danger of being destroyed? Basically this is the kind of resonance that Baghdad has in the Islamic world. It is going to be a huge wound to the soul of over a billion people on this earth.”

So as a member of the elect one percent of Yale students enrolled in a course on the Near East, you would have learned all the historical and religious excuses for not dropping guided munitions, even on the worst of the lot. Why is this better preparation for exercising power than, say, the baseball team?

It is because of professors like these that I’m skeptical about Ferguson’s recommendation. He argues that the only way to pry Americans out of their stay-at-home insularity is to inculcate knowledge of places like the Middle East in the elite universities.

Where, then, is the new imperial elite to come from? Not, I hope, exclusively from the reserve army of unemployed generals with good Pentagon connections. The work needs to begin, and swiftly, to encourage American students at the country’s leading universities to think more seriously about careers overseas—and by overseas I do not mean in London. Are there, for example, enough good scholarships to attract undergraduates and graduates to study Arabic?

This seems to me to be a particularly bad example of how to recruit an imperial elite. At the best universities, students who major in Middle Eastern studies do learn languages, but they also get indoctrinated by a professoriate that is dead-set against the exercise of American power against anyone for any reason. This sort of preparation is more likely to produce a human shield than a proconsul. Middle Eastern studies in America, as presently constituted, are worse than useless to the defense of American interests. The U.S. government’s decision, after 9/11, to double the number of scholarships in Muslim languages will only mean that in the next crisis, there will be even more “experts” urging us to stay home, lest we enrage the “Arab street.”

The United States doesn’t need a lot of new grads to explain “why they hate us.” What it needs are people who are so persuaded of its mission in the world that they are prepared to undergo some hardship and risk to advance it. I happen to think that calling that mission “empire” just gets in the way. But whatever the mission is called, its bearers have to be persuaded that it is the worthiest of causes. That demands cultural self-esteem and self-mastery—the true purpose of an elite education. It doesn’t require a working knowledge of Arabic.