Author: Martin Kramer

The Expulsion That Never Was

On By Martin Kramer

Among the predictions about the war that didn’t pan out, there is one that hasn’t been subjected to post-war ridicule, but that very much deserves it. This is the December letter, signed by over 1,000 academics, predicting and warning against Israel’s possible “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians in the “fog of war.” The letter ended with this recommendation: “We urge our government to communicate clearly to the government of Israel that the expulsion of people according to race, religion or nationality would constitute crimes against humanity and will not be tolerated.”

The United States made no such communication to the Israeli government, yet lo and behold, no expulsion took place. In the “fog of war,” the Palestinian street demonstrated wildly for Saddam, Palestinian politicians jockeyed for position, and Israel prepared with gas masks and duct tape, like a proper ally/client of the United States. All of this was completely forseeable by anyone with an iota of expertise, experience, and common sense. It was not foreseen by many of America’s leading Middle East “experts,” who put their names to this ridiculous letter, and who in fact seem to have initiated it.

One of the original signatories was Zachary Lockman, professor of Middle Eastern studies and history at New York University. Lockman justified the letter in this way:

People [in the Israeli government] have been calling for expulsion for years, but the Israeli government, including Sharon, realizes that it would not be acceptable under normal circumstances. But in middle of a war in Iraq, especially if they attack Israel, there would be panic and one can imagine all sorts of horrible scenarios. The public could countenance this, or the U.S. could turn a blind eye.

My comment back in December: “Let me not put too fine a point on it: anyone signing this letter, effectively condemning Israel in advance for something it has no intention of doing, is either an ignoramus or a propagandist.” Now that we are after the fact, it’s a point worth reiterating.

I sorted out the Middle East “experts” among the signatories and listed them back in December, so I won’t waste space here. But let me just list the original signatories (eight of fifteen) who are professors of Middle Eastern studies:

Joel Beinin, Stanford
Beshara Doumani, UC Berkeley
Zachary Lockman, New York University
Timothy Mitchell, New York University
Gabi Piterberg, UC Los Angeles
Glenn E. Robinson, Naval Postgraduate School
Ted Swedenburg, University of Arkansas
Judith Tucker, Georgetown University

And among the “additional signatories,” special mention should be made of Laurie Brand, University of Southern California, who is president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

These people have (once again) brought shame on their discipline. Those among them who claim special expertise on Israel and its policies have discredited themselves as interpreters and teachers of that country’s politics and society. And they are now collectively in the moral position of owing apologies to the Israeli people and the Israeli government—of Ariel Sharon. I suggest they make them at the next MESA conference.

America’s Archaeologists: Armchair Savants?

On By Martin Kramer

We now have a fairly full account of the efforts made by American archaeologists, professors, and curators to safeguard the “heritage” sites and museums of Iraq. They wrote a lot of letters and e-mails. They placed some op-eds. A group visited Washington, and met with low-level officials at the Pentagon. Their best-known member, McGuire (“Mac”) Gibson of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, presented the Pentagon with a bewildering list of 5,000 “no-strike” sites to be avoided by the U.S. military—one for every year since the first cuneiform tablet. There was a follow-up meeting at the State Department. All of this was eventually distilled into a March memo by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). It gave high priority to protecting the Iraq Museum, but U.S. commanders in Baghdad never read it.

Archaeologists have sustained a tangible loss. For as long as living archaeologists have been digging, there has been no legal export of finds from Iraq. All the artifacts discovered by American achaeologists—before the embargo suspended their digs in 1990—rested in Iraq’s museums.

Now listening to the scholars, you might be persuaded that the looting of the Iraq Museum is the greatest loss to human knowledge since the Library of Alexandria burned down. Gibson has compared the stolen artifacts to the most famous archaeological treasures in the world: “The Baghdad museum is the equivalent of the Cairo museum. It would be like having American soldiers 200 feet outside the Cairo museum watching people carry away treasures from King Tut’s tomb or carting away mummies.” All of these comparisons are pure hyperbole, much of it self-serving, all of it lapped up by anti-war activists, and some of it believed by editorial writers. Still, for archaeologists and students of later periods of Iraq’s history, this has been an unmitigated catastrophe.

But since Egypt has been cited as a metaphor for Iraq, let’s take it one step further. Napoleon set out to conquer and occupy Egypt in 1798. There were no journalists, but his ships did carry 167 savants: physicists, chemists, engineers, botanists, zoologists, geologists, physicians and pharmacologists, architects, painters, poets, musicians, and antiquarians. Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence tells their story in a few evocative pages. Their prime mission was the careful study of Egypt as they encountered it. Conditions were difficult: not only did the savants have to march like soldiers, but they had to endure the mockery of soldiers, who couldn’t fathom their obsession with Egypt’s ancient sites and modern customs. Napoleon’s campaign was a military failure, writes Barzun, but it was a cultural success, “the Enlightenment in action.” Its ultimate legacy was the monumental Description de l’Égypte: twenty volumes that put Europe’s fascination with ancient Egypt on a sound scholarly footing.

It’s a pity that some of America’s savants weren’t along for the ride to Baghdad. Their presence, like that of embedded journalists, would have reminded field commanders of the need to respect and pursue goals deemed important by influential constituencies at home. But our savants didn’t propose it. Indeed, they would have found the idea preposterous.

Why? Imagine you operate in an academic environment of alienation from American power and its masters. Imagine that your discipline is increasingly subject to post-colonial commissars, who warn that even the idea of Mesopotamia is an imperialist construct, and that scholars will be banished on the mere suspicion of association with the imperium’s legions. Add the fact that your personal access to archaeology, art, and architecture requires that you kowtow to third-world despots. You are more likely to know Tariq Aziz than Paul Wolfowitz. Are you going to don a flak jacket and jump into a Humvee, even to prevent a predictable cultural disaster? We know the answer.

And so the role of alerting American forces on the ground fell to… Robert Fisk of The Independent, who saw the Quran library go up in flames.

I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that “this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire.” I gave the map location, the precise name—in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene—and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.

Before you judge the Marines, I ask you: when was the last time you believed Robert Fisk?

The Egyptian Expedition Under the Command of Bonaparte by Léon Cogniet (1835).

Edward Said and Twelve Disciples at Post-Orientalist Passover

On By Martin Kramer

Today, Columbia University marks twenty-five years to the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism, with a day of lectures at the Casa Italiana. Twelve panelists and discussants will consider the book and its author, who will offer his own concluding remarks this evening.

Don’t expect a critical appreciation of Orientalism and its influence. These are Said’s academic admirers and acolytes, who have come to adore him. It’s a familiar ritual. The Daily Star in Beirut (March 27) reported his most recent appearance at the American University with a sense for atmosphere. “The wired crowd, the dough-faced groupies, the misunderstood artist, the ritual riffs of emotion, moments of clarity—it was all there, and in stereo.” During Said’s speech, “the young and the not-so-young nodded hypnotically to his five-syllable words.” He carried himself “like the star who keeps a seductive, almost annoyed distance from the devotions of his congregants.” I’ve seen this performance in person on a couple of occasions, and the description rings true. No doubt there will be more of the same this evening.

Five years ago, the Middle East Studies Association held a plenary session in honor of the book, and Said said one interesting thing about it. He conceded that at the end of the day, he was also a philologist, and that Orientalism, like orientalism, was a philological exercise in textual exegesis. Orientalism is usually regarded as a revolution against the preeminence of philology—an abandonment of dry texts and a reengagement with the living Middle East. The problem is, the book is focused rather narrowly on the interpretation of texts, most of them works of Western literary imagination without documentary pretensions.

It is this preoccupation with how we see them—one that now pervades fields like Middle Eastern studies—that has opened a chasm between the East as it is studied, and the East as it is lived. Middle Eastern studies have become self-obsessed and self-reflective to the point of distraction. And at that point, they no longer have anything to say to anyone outside Western academe. Said excepted, the post-Orientalists have a negligible presence in the American public arena.

Nor do they have much stature over there. Whatever one might think of the old orientalists, Arabs and Muslims could and did read them. By contrast, the published translation of Orientalism into Arabic is so obtuse that even Said has felt the need to apologize for it. Post-orientalism feeds many mouths in Western academe, for which the participants in today’s meeting are suitably grateful. Whether it has done anything for enhanced understanding between East and West over the last quarter-century is a question.

So philology replaces philology, bias replaces bias, professors replace professors, and the wheel turns. After twenty-five years, the Saidians are the greying establishment in a range of fields. I predict that within ten years, they will be turned out of my field, Middle Eastern studies, by a new generation for whom Orientalism already reads like a cuneiform inscription. The gap between its third-worldist premises and verifiable reality has become so wide that another approach is bound to unseat it.

In honor of the “Silver Jubilee” of Orientalism I offer my on-line readers, for the first time, the full text of “Said’s Splash,” which is chapter two of my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. It’s devoted to the influence of Orientalism upon Middle Eastern studies. Click, read, ‘n weep.

ASIDE: One of the things I did learn from Orientalism was that the most effective way to damn someone is to quote him. Said, in his walk through the valley of orientalist texts, left no quote unturned. I recently deployed this technique in dealing with one of today’s discussants, Columbia’s Joseph Massad, who wrote an anti-Israel article in the Ahram Weekly full of self-incriminating hyperbole. All I had to do was quote him.

Now Massad has replied, also in the Ahram Weekly, in an article loaded with sweeping assertions. According to Massad, I am “keen to defend Israel’s prerogative to kill and bomb anyone who stands in its way.” I seek to “extend Israeli violence to the U.S. academic arena.” I have “not yet eliminated anyone physically,” but I and my “young dupes” have the “express aim of imploding freedom.” I am guilty of “virulent anti-Arab racism.” And so on.

What disappoints me about this rambling text of 2,300 words is that Massad does not quote me even once. Of course, nowhere have I written that Israel has the “prerogative to kill and bomb anyone,” but surely I must have written something worth quoting, even out of context, which would damn me. Massad, alas, has failed to master the ingenious technique of Orientalism, despite reading and rereading it. (He’s also failed to learn from Said that you lie low until you have tenure, but that’s another matter.)

It’s just another reminder that the unique and irreplaceable Edward Said will have no successors. The Daily Star likened Said’s recent Beirut lecture to “an American rock concert for the learned and the not-so.” An apt comparison—and when Said is gone, we’ll be left with the Edward impersonators.