Author: Martin Kramer

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.

List Me or Else

On By Martin Kramer

The following was reportedly retrieved from the bottom of the mailbag of Campus Watch.

Dear Campus Watch,

I am outraged that you are listing professors with whose views you take issue. This is an appalling McCarthyite tactic, which is designed to shut people up and stifle free speech. It is a serious infringement of academic freedom, of the sort academe hasn’t witnessed since the terrible 1950s. You can be sure that I will be urging the American Association of University Professors, the Middle East Studies Association, and any association that includes Joel Beinin, to pass a resolution of condemnation against your despicable website.

Having said that, I notice that my name has been omitted from your list. This causes me considerable angst. For some years now, I have been more Palestinian than the Palestinians in advocating their rights—their right to a state, their right of return, their right to preferential campus parking. And there’s more. I’ve taken the lead on my campus in showing respect for Islam. In my noon class, there is even a prayer break, and the two sections are divided into male and female. And I have invited Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and Sami Al-Arian to speak, all on the same subject: “America’s War of Aggression against [speaker: please fill in the blank].”

So just what do I have to do to get on your list? I’ll be coming up for tenure in a couple of months, and a listing on Campus Watch would really help me out. I have a patchy publications record, although I’ve signed an impressive number of petitions. (In our department, we have a special section on our c.v.’s for “petitions signed.” It’s got the same weight as a co-publication.) Problem is, ever since Campus Watch appeared, getting listed there trumps everything else. My departmental chair has told me quite bluntly that without an entry at Campus Watch, my file will be borderline. Some of my senior colleagues are also cold-shouldering me. They see my omission as a sign of a certain lack of commitment to the profession.

In short, by leaving me off, you’ve effectively blacklisted me. It’s a notorious McCarthyite tactic, for which I intend to propose that Campus Watch be condemned at the next annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors, the Middle East Studies Association, etc.

Unless, that is, you include me.

Please?

Sincerely,

John Jones (Abu Courtney)
Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Narratives
Center for Middle Eastern Studies (excluding Israel)
Lower Michigan University
Dar al-Harb

UPDATE: I’m informed that this letter has been posted on at least one other site, on the presumption that it’s authentic. It’s a parody, folks. I’ll let you guess who wrote it.

Just Before Midnight at Al-Jazeera

On By Martin Kramer

I’m back from a long weekend in Doha, Qatar, an Arab Gulf country that’s best known in the West as the host of the Al-Jazeera satellite television station. The occasion: a conference on “U.S. Relations with the Islamic World,” sponsored by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and the government of Qatar.

On Sunday night, a producer from Al-Jazeera asked me to come down and appear on the 11:00 o’clock evening news program, “Harvest of the Day” (Hasad al-Yawm), which I did. (My bow to 35 million Arab viewers.) The subject: the American pursuit of UN resolutions on Iraq. I didn’t have any especially interesting insights on the subject, but I found plenty of interest in watching the famous Al-Jazeera in action. My host, a Jordanian senior producer, took me into just about every room in the place, and I learned a lot.

Al-Jazeera became famous during and after 9/11, and it’s had mountains of press since then. (Most notably, Fouad Ajami wrote a critical piece about it for the New York Times Magazine.) The U.S. government has been particularly peeved that Al-Jazeera provides a platform for every kind of anti-American extremist, including Osama bin Laden. “Al-Jazeera’s virulent anti-American bias undercuts all of its virtues,” wrote Ajami. “It is, in the final analysis, a dangerous force.” I confess that I’m not a daily viewer of Al-Jazeera, so I won’t venture my own comment on its content. But here are a few observations on the look and feel of the operation.

Al-Jazeera operates out of a matchbox of a building, within the compound of Qatari state broadcasting. Qatar is a place of monumental architecture—the shining white palace of the Emir, brash glass hotels, big shopping malls. Al-Jazeera, in contrast, is located in a modest, low-slung white building, surrounded by a dirt parking lot and a bank of satellite dishes. The newsroom and studios are small and cramped. There must be hundreds of local American television stations with more spacious quarters than Al-Jazeera. (And there isn’t much in the way of facilities for in-studio guests. For example, no one bothered to make me up—standard procedure in any television studio. Of course, very few people are interviewed in Doha, especially as Al-Jazeera doesn’t cover Qatar. The vast majority of interviews are feeds from the station’s bureaus elsewhere.)

There is talk of a new and larger building, which would take years to build. In the meantime, as someone pointed out to me, the whole thing could be taken down in a day. As long as it remains that way, one imagines that under the wrong circumstances, that might happen.

But the station is marvelously appointed with the best equipment. They’ve got everything they need to produce the tightly edited segments and the slick graphics that give the final product a professional look. The newsroom is like a trading room of information. It’s dominated by a wall of screens displaying the output of all possible competitors, and computer work centers feeding every kind of media via the web.

After my segment, I hung around the newsroom, chatting with various journalists, presenters, and producers. Even at midnight, the newsroom was hopping—it’s a round-the-clock operation, and many of the staff pull twelve-hour shifts. They shared with me various bits of Al-Jazeera lore, some of it with an Israeli angle. For instance, just before the Israeli elections in February 2001, Ehud Barak called Al-Jazeera and asked to be interviewed. He wanted another shot at addressing the Israeli Arab voter. Ariel Sharon balked on a scheduled interview last March, because he insisted that it be conducted face-to-face, and not through an earpiece. And so on. The bottom line of all the stories is that Al-Jazeera, despite its dimunitive quarters, is too big to be ignored—or manipulated.

It’s no surprise that the station has an aura of new-style pan-Arabism. The staff comes from everywhere in the Arab world. I met journalists from Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, even Mauritania. (There is only one Qatari journalist.) They’re a young crowd, who seem to thoroughly enjoy their notoriety. As one of them put it, the strategy of Al-Jazeera is to provoke people, and they revel in their roles as journalistic gadflies.

As I went briskly through the offices of this boutique operation, I remembered the last time I visited an Arab newsroom—in Cairo a couple of years back, when an editor of Al-Ahram took me through the vast, cavernous, densely populated and peeling halls of Egypt’s great press empire. Al-Ahram operates out of a ministry-sized building. The VIP dining room there is bigger than the newsroom of Al-Jazeera. I don’t pretend to know whether the future of the Arab media belongs to lean upstarts like Al-Jazeera, but there is every reason for the established media to feel threatened. I was told that Husni Mubarak also visited Al-Jazeera on a visit to Qatar, and I can’t imagine that he didn’t head home and ask his media bureaucrats why he’s getting less for more.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States government found itself compelled to deal with Al-Jazeera, in order to get its message across to the Arab world. Christopher Ross, a former U.S. ambassador and Arabic-speaker, made several appearances on the station, to mixed reviews. But my hosts told me quite explicitly that their audiences are eager to hear people like Ross explain U.S. policy, even if the Arabic isn’t perfect, or the interviewee has to be translated. Just as important, they were completely dismissive of Arab-Americans as spokespersons for U.S. policy. The Arab viewer, they claim, immediately discounts the Arab-American. They want what they regard as the “real article.”

That’s something to ponder as the United States builds up its public diplomacy reserves for the next big crisis. It completely contradicts the notion, expounded by a Council on Foreign Relations task force, that Arab-Americans should be preferred as messengers for U.S. policy. If the pros at Al-Jazeera are right, it’s just not so. One of them pointed out that when Al-Jazeera’s Moscow bureau needs someone to explain Russian policy, they have a list of several hundred fluent Russian Arabic-speakers. When the Arab viewer sees an Igor or an Ivan, he’s sure that he’s getting the inside story. If the United States is serious about public diplomacy, it will need a lot more people with names like Chris who are willing and able to do Al-Jazeera, and to do it well.

Could the United States ever create its own alternative to Al-Jazeera? I somehow doubt it, and in any case, it won’t be done before any prospective American move against Saddam. Al-Jazeera will have seven correspondents scattered around Iraq, in the hope of glimpsing the first American troops. It’s going to be Al-Jazeera’s war—again.