Author: Martin Kramer

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.

Columbia Prof Plumbs the Shiite Mind

On By Martin Kramer

A lot is being written these days about Iraq’s Shiites, and the media avidly pursue anyone who seems like an expert. When demand exceeds supply, expect tendentious analysis.

Consider, for example, Professor Hamid Dabashi, head of the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at Columbia. The other day, a correspondent from the Boston Globe asked him about the mood among the Shiites. “The Shiites are horrified,” announced Dabashi.

Not only are their fellow Shiites and, in fact, their fellow Muslims maimed and murdered right in front of their eyes by the Americans, but the most sacrosanct sites in their collective faith are now invaded by foreign armies. The next time the British and Americans ask themselves, “Why do they hate us?,” they better remember the horrid scenes of their armies trampling on the sacred sites.

What in the world is Dabashi talking about? Coalition forces have been absolutely scrupulous about avoiding the sacred Shiite shrines in Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, and elsewhere. There have been no “horrid scenes” of coalition forces “trampling” on these sites. As for “murder,” the really horrid scene so far has been the brutal murder of two Shiite clerics—by their “fellow Shiites”—inside the shrine-tomb of the Imam Ali in Najaf. “They cut his body to pieces!” another Shiite leader said about one of the victims. “To pieces!” And if the Shiites are so “horrified” by this war, why did so many of them turn out in Najaf to greet the 101st Airborne as liberators? And how is it that even Robert Fisk reports that, “for the moment,” the massive Shiite slum in Baghdad “smiles at the West”?

Dabashi, of course, doesn’t have a clue as to what “the Shiites” think. He simply knows what he thinks. Dabashi has been a militant opponent of the war from day one. Most recently, he participated in that infamous “teach-in” at Columbia, in which one professor-participant called for “a million Mogadishus.” Dabashi’s contribution to the festival:

Because there are no answers to our questions about this war, we just get angrier and angrier. But this is where the blessed thing called “teach-in” comes in handy. Tonight, we think for ourselves. Revenge of the nerdy “A” students against the stupid “C” students with their stupid fingers on the trigger.

Again, one is left wondering just what Dabashi is talking about. And just what are Columbia students to conclude from such a quote in their campus newspaper? That a pro-war position might drop them to a “C”? Professors (especially departmental chairs) have no business suggesting even the most tenuous correlation between grades and politics. It’s just one more example of Dabashi’s egregiously flawed judgment.

Dabashi finds the war horrid, therefore when asked what “the Shiites” think about it, he says they are “horrified.” It’s pure projection, which is what passes for “expertise” on the Middle East when people don’t know what they are talking about. So we are told that “the Arabs” think this, or “the Muslims” believe that, when in fact they’re just racks on which to hang the prejudices and preferences of the “expert.” Here’s another fresh example. Last week, UCLA’s Gabriel Piterberg, a habitual anti-war demonstrator, told a “teach-in” that the Iraqis who defaced Saddam’s images and welcomed U.S. troops were not representative of typical Iraqi sentiment. How could Piterberg possibly know that? Answer: he doesn’t. He just wants to believe it.

And so the “experts” dwell on events that never happened (the “trampling” of Shiite holy sites), and dismiss events that did (the defacing of Saddam’s icons by Iraqis). Maybe the next time around, U.S. forces should “embed” academics. No group is more desperately in need of a dose of Middle Eastern reality.

UPDATE: Readers of Sandstorm will recall that last month, the renowned composer John Corigliano criticized the politicization of MEALAC during an acceptance speech at a Columbia University award dinner in New York. Department chair Dabashi dashed off an intemperate rejoinder. Since then, Corigliano has weighed in once more. After reviewing Dabashi’s hodge-podge of assertions, Corigliano composes this coda:

Students deserve real self-discipline from their professors. I miss evidence of this quality in the illiberalism, sloppy research, and near-hysterical tone of these statements Dabashi has written for publication. It’s deeply disturbing to me that—at this time, of all times—such a person chairs the department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia.

I do hope the administration has the courage—for it will take a lot of courage—to stand up to demagoguery of this nature. Columbia has done so in the past, and, if it is still the institution I remember, I expect it will do so in the future.

The logic for regime change at MEALAC gains momentum.