Author: Martin Kramer

The Incredible Shrinking MESA

On By Martin Kramer

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) will convene next weekend in Washington, for its annual conference. An article in the current issue of The Nation reports that “at its upcoming annual conference, MESA is expected to pass a resolution condemning Campus Watch, similar to the one it unanimously endorsed 18 years ago censuring the efforts of the ADL and AIPAC.” (The Anti-Defamation League and the pro-Israeli lobby AIPAC had issued campus guides that offended the guild.)

Without even asking my friends over at Campus Watch (a project I’ve endorsed), I can easily imagine their response: “Condemn us. Make our day.”

That wasn’t the attitude of the ADL and AIPAC, all those years ago. Their condemnation by MESA persuaded them to back off their name-naming of academics. So what has changed? Why has MESA’s opinion become worthless? Why will Campus Watch welcome a MESA condemnation as though it were an endorsement?

I’ve written a book about it, but the bottom line is this: Middle Eastern studies have become intellectually incestuous and thoroughly politicized. Eighteen years ago, MESA still had the aura of a professional association. Today its reputation lies somewhere between that of an ethnic lobby and a radical front. Eighteen years ago, MESA still counted respected founders of the field among its leaders. Today it is regarded as the plaything of a few masters of agitprop, exemplified by its current president. This is a MESA that made Edward Said one of its ten honorary fellows (“internationally recognized scholars who have made major contributions to Middle East studies”)—yet never got around to including Bernard Lewis. (For more MESA madness, see my MESA Culpa in the current issue of the Middle East Quarterly.)

I don’t intend to zap MESA in the Wall Street Journal on the eve of its conference (as I did last year). And I don’t go where I’m not welcomed. But I’m sure to get plenty of reports on the proceedings: the presidential address, the plenary, and the business meeting. If there is any good hearsay, you’ll hear it from me.

And since I’ve mentioned an article in The Nation (a piece that misrepresents my views), here’s a postscript. The previous time my name figured in its pages, in 1996, Edward Said blacklisted me. “What matters to ‘experts’ like [Judith] Miller, Samuel Huntington, Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Barry Rubin, plus a whole battery of Israeli academics, is to make sure that the [Islamic] ‘threat’ is kept before our eyes.” That’s seven at one blow. Since this is the most Professor Said has ever managed to say about my arguments, it seems to me that MESA ought to investigate. I’m waiting for their call.

Hour of power with an Islamist superstar

On By Martin Kramer

“Saudi Arabia has Mecca and Medina. We have Qaradawi.” That’s how a former Qatari minister described the role of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Qatar, where I spent a weekend last month, in a conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.

The sheikh, educated in Islamics at the Azhar university in Cairo, lives in Doha, where he has become a television preacher with a mass audience. His regular program on Al-Jazeera is the satellite television station’s most popular offering. It attracts 45 million viewers—so I was told at Al-Jazeera—and it’s the only program to which Al-Jazeera adds English subtitles. In Qatar, they think very highly of the sheikh, whose silky Arabic and effortless command of Qur’anic verses have made him a culture hero.

Not surprisingly, the Qatari government, co-sponsor of the conference (with the Saban Center at Brookings), was eager to have Qaradawi address the gathering. But Qaradawi is not without blemish in American eyes. While he has rejected the 9/11 attacks and has condemned the Bali bombing, he has hailed the suicide bombers who kill Israelis as “martyrs” whose acts are justifiable. Israel, he claims, is a militarized society that mobilizes men and women for service. They are all legitimate targets. (Children are a case of collateral damage, their deaths are not intentional.) Hamas leaders cite Qaradawi’s rulings when they justify suicide bombings and, presumably, when they recruit new bombers. Presumably, too, it is this endorsement of suicide bombings that led the United States to cancel his multi-entry visa and refuse him entry.

So it was decided by the conference organizers that Qaradawi’s appearance should take the form of a debate on suicide bombings, entitled “Killers or Martyrs?” The other principal: Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian-American professor of Islamic law at UCLA. We all looked forward to the encounter with immense anticipation.

How did it go? Perhaps I’ll just quote a new piece on Abou El Fadl, which Franklin Foer has done for The New Republic:

In a conference room at the Doha Ritz Carlton, Abou El Fadl pointed out the logical inconsistencies in al-Qaradawi’s defense of suicide bombing and cited pre-modern Islamic jurists on the ethics of revenge. But such details were of no interest to al-Qaradawi. According to Abou El Fadl, al-Qaradawi told the crowd of Muslim intellectuals and foreign journalists, “I don’t know why brother Abou El Fadl keeps needlessly complicating things; Islam is against such complications,” before going on to cite statistics about the murders of Palestinian children. By the end of the debate, Abou El Fadl felt that he’d been mocked, ignored, and rhetorically run over. Al-Qaradawi stopped addressing him by his proper title—sheikh—and, as he left the stage, refused to shake hands. “It wasn’t a fair fight,” one participant told me later.

And the response of the secular Muslim “intellectuals” who had been invited to this dialogue? Weak. Qaradawi had already blasted them in a radio interview before the conference. They didn’t represent Islam, he said. Who chose them? And it soon became clear that they weren’t going to get out further on a limb by contradicting the sheikh. To the contrary: one after another, they rationalized the suicide bombings as the inevitable outcome of the occupation. To listen to them, you would have thought that suicide bombings were instances of spontaneous combustion, without any guidance or strategy—no recruiters, no planners, no target selection.

So Qaradawi was home free. Nearly. In the Q&A I threw a small bolt at him. He himself had opened by saying that violence was permissible in Islam only after persuasion and proofs had failed. First means came first. But didn’t the bombings put the last means first—just as Osama bin Laden did? Had all means of persuasion been exhausted? Had all Israeli military targets been attacked? I said that such bombings had a place only in a strategy aimed at the destruction of Israel, and I accused Qaradawi of not speaking frankly about why he justified the killings: his own belief that Israel must be eliminated.

Qaradawi’s reply dodged the issue. He didn’t explain his own position; instead, he argued that the bombers themselves were reacting to the horrors of the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, not to visions of liberating Haifa and Jaffa. (The next day’s newspapers cleaned up Qaradawi’s remarks. He was quoted as calling only for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza to allow creation of a Palestinian state; there’s no intention of throwing Israel into the sea, he was reported to have said. I’ve listened to the tape again, and there is no mention of a Palestinian state as a goal, and no pledge not to throw Israel into the sea. It may be usual in Qatar for the press to soften up Qaradawi’s stance on Israel for domestic consumption. After all, Qatar and Israel do have ties.)

The next day, Qatar’s major daily, Al-Sharq, ran this headline: “Marian Kramer [sic] says supporters of Qaradawi’s thought seek the destruction of Israel.” I was identified as a scholar from The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “known for its Zionist tendencies.” And our exchange was reported (in Arabic) on Qaradawi’s busy website. (Will I get a visa to visit Qatar again? Wait a minute, that was Marian Kramer, not me.)

IMG_5462

So that’s the story of an hour with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi—probably one hour too many. You will hear more about him in the months ahead, in connection another matter: Iraq. This is Qaradawi’s take on a war to remove Saddam:

I stood against Saddam and the Baath when he invaded Kuwait. But I will never accept the attack on an Arab people, an Arab country, an Arab army. We will not appoint America to deal with Iraq and deal with Saddam. The Iraqi people are the ones capable of changing their government if they wish. America has starved this people, murdered its children, and is not satisfied with that. It wants to finish off what remains of this people. Where is brotherhood? Where is Arab dignity and their aid? I say to the brothers in Kuwait: The invasion of Kuwait is one matter, but the attack on Iraq now is another matter.

Qatar may soon have to choose between its national interests and its one-man Mecca.

The Columbia Club of Middle Eastern Studies

On By Martin Kramer

Things go from bad to worse at Columbia University, the Bir Zeit of American academe. Articles in yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times and in today’s New York Sun report that Professor Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago is weighing an offer to join Columbia University, as the Edward Said Professor (of God-only-knows—there are no precise details). The donor is reported to be anonymous; an endowed chair at Columbia runs between $3 and $4 million. All this has been rumored for some time, but now that it’s in the newspapers, it’s fair game for comment.

Let me begin with the anonymity of the donor. In Middle Eastern studies, concealment of the identity of donors has become a major contributing factor to the field’s deepening corruption. Twenty years ago, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) passed a resolution calling “on institutions in Middle East Studies to make regular disclosure of the sources of funding for their programs.” It’s a dead letter. For example, a few years back, Harvard University established a program for contemporary Arab studies, “initiated by generous new funding not previously available to the university.” To my knowledge, that’s the most the program has ever said about its funding.

Now Columbia University wishes to establish a chair with an anonymous donor, for a person (and in the name of a person) known for Palestinian activism no less than for scholarship. Excuse me, but Columbia must make known the identity of the donor. Otherwise, kind reader, assume the worst: Palestine’s cause has its share of unsavory advocates, and when they don’t come forward, there is usually a good reason. In a couple of weeks, MESA meets in Washington. It should reiterate its resolution of 1982, especially as MESA’s incoming president, Lisa Anderson, is a dean at Columbia. Hopefully, she’ll get the message.

The other issue of overriding concern here is the apparent absence of any effort by the Columbia administration to promote diversity. Here I don’t mean the false diversity of academic mafias. They think it’s crucial to assemble people of different ethnic, national, religious, racial, gender, and disciplinary backgrounds—provided they say the same thing. I’m talking about intellectual diversity, which used to be a value at Columbia. The only historian of the modern Middle East at Columbia is another Palestinian, Joseph Massad, who is a militant follower of Edward Said. (He’s now up for tenure.) Imagine that Khalidi were added, and Massad were tenured, both to teach history. They work in the same area, and their politics, while not identical, are very similar. The whole thing begins to look like a cozy club of like-minded pals, who peer at the Middle East through exactly the same telescope, from exactly the same vantage point.

I leave aside Khalidi’s scholarship. It is sturdy, nationalist historiography—no stunning breakthroughs or departures, just the usual stuff, done with rather more polish and style. Others can (and will) pick through Khalidi’s political writings for nuggets. I’ve been rather more taken by how little he understands the Middle East generally, and by the sheer density of his ideological filters. (See my Ivory Towers on Sand, pp. 65-66, for the litany of Khalidi predictions about the Middle East that never panned out.) Of course, there’s no substantive penalty for being wrong about anything in Middle Eastern studies—as long as your politics are just right. Here, of course, Khalidi’s credentials are impeccable. I can’t imagine anyone more suited to a chair named in honor of someone who replaced scholarship with politics.

On top of that, Columbia now has a divestment petition, on which its Middle East faculty have an overwhelming presence. (I list them below). On the counter-petition which has many more signatories, there is almost no presence.

Self-referential groupthink is clearly running rampant at Columbia, now reinforced by hidden money, and the administration seems unwilling or impotent to stop it. So the time has come for alumni and supporters of Columbia to weigh in against the cozy conformism on Morningside Heights. The faculty will bleat “academic freedom,” but at Columbia it’s been reduced to their freedom to provide plum chairs for allies and chums. It’s a privilege they’ve so abused that it’s time for the administration to repossess it. I speak as an alumnus. I’m appalled. And I’m not alone.

_____________

The following are signatories of the Columbia divestment petition whose major field is the Middle East, or who hold appointments in the Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC).

Nadia Abu El-Haj, Anthropology, Barnard
Lila Abu-Lughod, Anthropology & Women’s Studies, Columbia
Samir Awad, MEALAC, Columbia
Gil Anidjar, MEALAC, Columbia
Janaki Bakhle, MEALAC, Columbia
Zainab Bahrani, Art History & Archaeology, Columbia
Elliot Colla, MEALAC, Columbia
Elaine Combs-Schilling, Anthropology, Columbia
Hamid Dabashi, MEALAC, Columbia
Joseph Massad, MEALAC, Columbia
Brinkley Messick, Anthropology, Columbia
Marc Nichanian, MEALAC, Columbia
Frances Pritchett, MEALAC, Columbia
George Saliba, MEALAC, Columbia
Nader Sohrabi, MEALAC, Columbia
Marc van de Mieroop, MEALAC, Columbia

UPDATE: Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, has rejected the divestment petition (as has Barnard president Judith Shapiro). That’s a good beginning. Now it’s time for the administration to ask whether there is enough intellectual diversity on the hallways where the petition found near-unanimous support.

UPDATE+: The Columbia Spectator reports that there are thirty donors, and that some of the names might be released. And Hamid Dabashi, chair of MEALAC, tells the Chronicle of Higher Education that the “notion of ideological conformity here is entirely obscene.” (I guess he hasn’t seen the list above.)

CORRECTION: Joseph Massad is not up for tenure. He just passed his third-year review, and will come up for tenure in four years. If Khalidi joins Columbia next year, students interested in subjects like Israel, Palestine, and the modern Arab world, will get a wide choice: Massad or Khalidi, for the next three years.