Author: Martin Kramer

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.

Glasnost in MESA

On By Martin Kramer

Lisa Anderson, dean of international affairs at Columbia and president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), has sent a letter to members in the current MESA Newsletter. It contains a remarkably frank indictment of the performance of Middle Eastern studies over the past decade.

Anderson describes how the Middle East stagnated in the 1990s, dashing the academics’ hopes for democratization. “It was an ugly picture,” she admits, “and, to be candid, few American scholars of the Middle East did much to advertise it.”

Thousands of individually rational decisions, as my political science colleagues might observe, contributed to a collective abdication of responsibility. In the social sciences, graduate students who wanted jobs and junior faculty who wanted tenure mimicked their colleagues in other areas and looked for flickers of electoral politics and glimmers of economic privatization…and neglected the stubborn durability of the authoritarian regimes….More senior scholars, pained by the demoralization in the region and its neglect in their disciplines, suspended active research agendas in favor of administrative assignments in their universities….In the humanities, many scholars…were reluctant to jeopardize access to visas and research authorizations; in their excessive caution, they failed to speak out about the often appalling circumstances of their friends and colleagues there.

In sum, the practitioners either silenced themselves or parroted disciplinary dogmas. I made most of these points, with evidence, in the fourth chapter of my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. I’m glad to see them finally conceded, instead of denied. Anderson’s own joint appearance with me on a panel in Washington in November was the first sign of glasnost in MESA. This is another.

In another part of her letter, Anderson takes an unfair stab at Campus Watch, for “claiming that half of MESA’s membership is ‘of Middle Eastern origin'” and that some of these MESAns have “brought their views with them.” Actually, the first flagging of the Middle Eastern origins of the members surfaced in a MESA presidential speech, delivered in 1992 by Barbara Aswad (and quoted by me in Ivory Towers). Aswad: “Our membership has changed over the years, and possibly half is of Middle Eastern heritage.” Campus Watch wasn’t the first to make that estimate.

When I brought Aswad’s quote, it was to dispute another claim about MESA, made by Edward Said:

During the 1980s, the formerly conservative Middle East Studies Association underwent an important ideological transformation….What happened in the Middle East Studies Association therefore was a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.

I pointed out that so total an “ideological transformation” in MESA would not have taken place had there not been a massive shift in the ethnic composition of its membership, as attested by Aswad. And on the very same page, I quoted a political scientist who noted “the widespread, if undocumentable, impression that an individual’s ethnic background or political persuasion may influence hiring and tenure decisions” in Middle Eastern studies. The political scientist: Lisa Anderson.

Personally, I wouldn’t care if Middle Eastern studies were comprised entirely of people of “Middle Eastern heritage.” What I find objectionable is the way MESA has been transformed into “a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.” That agenda does sound like something pulled straight out of Damascus or Tehran, and it’s certainly not the proper role of an American professional association. The problem with MESA is that so many of its past officers have tried to whip it into an ethnic lobby or a popular front. It’s this abysmal legacy that Professor Anderson would do right to disown in her next message to the members.

Sovietology: The original title of this posting was Perestroika in MESA. A reader, Fryar Calhoun, wrote to ask whether glasnost is more appropriate. He’s right. While Professor Anderson does write that “we may have to become more assertive as an organization,” and makes some modest suggestions, it’s the self-critique that’s the important aspect of her letter. So glasnost it is.