Author: Martin Kramer

Saudi Oil Lobby Puffs Middle East Centers

On By Martin Kramer

When my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies appeared just after 9/11, the Middle Eastern studies crowd panicked. They feared that unfavorable publicity would damage them in Washington, and endanger the millions of dollars they receive in government subsidies. The then-president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) talked about hiring a “professional communicator.” But who could do the job, and how would MESA pay for it? I’m not sure how those questions were answered, but the magazine Saudi Aramco World has just published the biggest puff job ever done on Middle Eastern studies.

It’s a twelve-page cover story, lavishly produced, with big glossy photographs of noted professors and MESA officers in thoughtful poses (here is a text-only version) The author is a former staffer of the magazine, who now bills himself as a “corporate communications expert.” And the focus is very precise: it’s about the invaluable role of Middle East centers that receive U.S. government subsidies under Title VI, the Department of Education’s international education program. The centers are presented as loci of deep knowledge, as oases of wisdom in a desert of soundbites. Here are the real experts, and they deserve every penny they get.

I would guess that Saudi Aramco World is sent gratis to a lot of influential people, including congressmen. They’re clearly the target audience of this lobbying piece. One of them is even quoted: David Obey (D-Wis.), patron saint of Title VI funding, who helped the centers land a major increase in funding just after 9/11. Obey: “We need more understanding of the Middle East, its cultures and the issues facing the region. Area-studies centers… [are] critically important in resolving the immediate crisis and in developing long-term solutions.” More understanding obviously will cost more money, and if Obey is to be believed, there is no such thing as a wasted taxpayer dollar when it comes to Middle Eastern studies.

My book showed otherwise, and more evidence has accumulated since it appeared. But at no point is the reader told that Middle Eastern studies are controversial. Instead, the article makes the story of Middle Eastern studies in America sound like a march of linear progress. More programs, more funding, more enrollments—Middle Eastern studies are celebrated as a growth industry. In fact, the article reads like a promotional piece on oil exploration. So does its title: “The New Push for Middle Eastern Studies.” Let’s get in there with some investment, and develop and pump those reservoirs of expertise.

Yet despite the federal focus, this piece is an excellent reminder of how indebted Middle Eastern studies are to Saudi largesse. Because this is Saudi Aramco Magazine, it has to fuss over the recently-endowed Saudi programs at the centers. The article reports that Saudi businessman Khalid Alturki last year added $500,000 to the $1.5 million he’d already given to establish the Contemporary Arab Studies Program at Harvard. And the article reminds us of the biggest of the Saudi endowments at a major center: the Sultan Endowment for Arab Studies, established in 1998 with a $5 million gift from the Prince Sultan Charity Foundation. That’s the same Prince Sultan who is long-time defense minister of Saudi Arabia, and whose son is Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador in Washington.

What does it mean for a place like Berkeley’s center to land this kind of gift? Well, start with accommodations, as described in this account from the San Francisco Chronicle:

In Stephens Hall at UC Berkeley, the Center for African Studies occupies a two-room office marked by cracked walls and scuffed linoleum floors.

Down the hall, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies operates out of a sumptuously appointed suite of offices with stained glass, gleaming copper paneling and a trickling fountain.

A few years ago, these centers were virtually the same. Both made do with modest budgets and tiny offices. They shared a copier.

Then Nezar AlSayyad, chairman of Middle Eastern Studies, took two trips to Saudi Arabia with UC Berkeley chancellors.

The rest is history. Prince Bandar showed up in person at Berkeley in November 1998 to deliver the check. Not only did the royal family buy an Arab studies program on prime academic real estate. The Sultan Foundation records that a million dollars of the Sultan Endowment at Berkeley is earmarked for “outreach”—that is, activities beyond the campus.

At this point you may be scratching your head, asking why the Saudis are putting their money and public relations clout at the service of left-leaning academics, whose sympathies are decidedly not with oil monarchies. Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? They may be left-leaning, but they’d all like sumptuous suites with trickling fountains. Needless to say, academics who dream of princes bearing gifts are not going to throw bolts of criticism at Saudi Arabia, or even tell you whether the Saudi monarchy might be in trouble.

Which is why it makes perfect sense for Saudi Aramco World to handle the public relations for Middle Eastern studies. It keeps the professors indebted. But it also makes the MESA crowd look good. On the pages of Saudi Aramco World, they don’t come across as flakey radicals, recently led by Joel Beinin and always enamored of Edward Said. Instead they seem like part of that great machine that assures the steady supply of oil at reasonable prices.

Hey, it’s America. Slick salesmanship is perfectly legitimate. And I have to hand it to these people. They think Washington is run by a “cabal” and that the Saudis sleep with the Bushes. Yet they regularly manage to extract generous subsidies from both. Pecunia non olet (money doesn’t smell) seems to be their motto. Of course, the same can’t always be said of academia.

Basra looting

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer at The Corner, National Review Online, here. Posted retroactively at Sandstorm.

The looters have had a free reign in Basra, and people are being ruined in the process. British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon made light of the looting of palaces in the Commons on Monday—as though the mob would stop there. It hasn’t. Basrans would have been grateful had the British fired warning shots over the heads of looters—and then made an example of a few of them by shooting a tad low. It’s a bad start, and reflects too dogmatic an adherence to the “Iraqi freedom” mantra—which, in these circumstances, translates into Iraqi lawlessness. The Iraqis will get their freedom later, when they are ready to assume it. What they need now is firm policing from a resolute army of occupation.

The Ayatollah Who Spared Najaf

On By Martin Kramer

At yesterday’s military briefing in Qatar, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks announced that the leading Shiite cleric in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husayni Sistani, had issued a fatwa calling on the city’s inhabitants to remain calm and not to interfere with U.S. forces. “We believe this is a very significant turning point and another indicator that the Iraqi regime is approaching its end,” Brooks told reporters. (Whether Sistani issued a fatwa or statement seems to be in dispute. His office in Iran announced to news outlets that it could not confirm American claims of a fatwa, which Al-Jazeera promptly turned into a denial. It doesn’t matter now: Ayatollah Sistani achieved precisely the effect he desired, which was to spare Najaf a vicious battle.)

Back in the fall, and then more recently, Iraqi media released various statements and fatwas attributed to Sistani, in which he supported the regime. On Tuesday, one dubious “expert” cited these as evidence that the Shiites were “resolved to resist” the coalition, because of “their loyalty to Iraq.” In fact, the next day the 101st Airborne entered Najaf in a triumphal march. Inhabitants later swarmed over a huge equestrian statue of Saddam in the center of the city, toppled by American sappers.

The fact is that Saddam’s regime bled Najaf dry, killing off its flower, and it’s a city built upon the memory of martyrs. Ayatollah Sistani’s apparent reversal, and the glee of many of Najaf’s inhabitants, is indeed an indicator that Saddam’s last-ditch appeals for jihad are set to fail, at least among Shiites. (All this with the caveat that no harm is done to the golden-domed shrine-tomb of the Imam Ali, the religious centerpiece of Najaf, where some Saddam loyalists have taken refuge.)

When the 101st Airborne entered Najaf, one Lt.-Col. Chris Hughes paid his respects to Sistani through intermediaries, assuring him that American forces did not intend to harm the Shiites or their holy places. According to Hughes, Sistani asked for American protection, but a crowd stood down the detail, fearing that U.S. troops intended to move on the shrine-tomb. Hughes got the impression that Sistani was overwhelmed by the situation: “He’s kind of in shock as to really how to handle the responsibility of everybody looking up to him, asking him advice.”

That’s unlikely. In fact, Ayatollah Sistani’s function is to hand out advice—just not on politics, about which he’s had to be extremely guarded. Now people are going to look to him for political guidance, and what he says will matter.

Sistani is unquestionably a leading authority in Shiite Islam, and one of perhaps half a dozen clerics in the Shiite world to whom believers turn with complex questions of Islamic law and practice. He is from Mashhad in Iran, but he was also schooled in Qom and Najaf. While he presides over a key seminary in Najaf, he has offices in Qom, Mashhad, Damascus, and London, a considerable following in the Gulf countries and South Asia, and a representative in New York. (That cleric, who supports the war, met with Mayor Bloomberg on Friday.)

Sistani’s followers offer him a fixed part of their earnings, which he spends for educational and charitable purposes. Sistani’s office claims he supports 35,000 students in Qom, 10,000 in Mashhad, and 4,000 in Isfahan. He himself has lived very modestly near the tomb-shrine in Najaf—for years, under the close supervision of Iraqi intelligence agents, who’ve now fled. (Click here for a video clip of Sistani, apparently at home in Najaf. Pull up a mattress.)

Ayatollah Sistani now is in a delicate position. For Najaf, the removal and eradication of the Baath regime is a blessing. It offers the prospect of a revival of Najaf as a place of learning, pilgrimage, and creative thought. Sistani leans toward an enlightened pragmatism. His first priority has been protection of the shrine and the seminary, come what may. But Sistani’s overseas network incorporates a good number of clerics, including many in Lebanon, who regard the United States as the incarnation of the anti-Islam. These people will be looking to establish a strong base under Sistani’s umbrella, and they will do everything to turn Iraq’s Shiites against the American presence.

Ayatollah Sistani is someone who warrants an overture at the highest political level, and at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, it would be prudent to omit his name from future briefings in Qatar, and to work quietly and behind the scenes to assure his neutrality, if not his friendship.