Author: Martin Kramer

MESA: Nothing Learned, Nothing Forgotten

On By Martin Kramer

A Washington friend has rushed ahead of me, reading through the program of the next annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). That conference will meet at the end of November in Washington. (Every third year, the meeting takes place in the nation’s capital, in order to demonstrate the health of Middle Eastern studies to government funders.) This is what my friend discovered:

I read through the MESA conference program. Amazingly, they still haven’t learned—not even enough to cover their tracks. The words “al-Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” are nowhere to be found. The word “terrorism” is either between quotation marks or in the context of “Arab Responses to America’s War on Terrorism.” Not a single panel on suicide bombings, the impact of Wahhabism, or the ideological roots of Osama. These people are still spending their time on “Sex, Gender and Family Structures in Modernizing Projects of the Early 20th Century” and “Perspectives on Today’s Middle East Textile Industry”—nail-biters all! You would think the smart people in this business would have led an in-house corrective movement, to forestall another attack. But evidently they either didn’t try or were rebuffed.

Now no one can object to lectures on clothes and sex. And reading through the program, I confess that many of the more obscure subjects appeal to my antiquarian tastes. But there is very little in this program to justify the notion that Middle Eastern studies serve the national interest, or that they deserve the massive increase in federal funding authorized by Congress last January. Given the fact that the conference is meeting in Washington, the omissions are even more striking.

Journalists should read the program as an invitation to find out whether anything has changed at MESA since Franklin Foer wrote his devastating New Republic piece on last year’s conclave in San Francisco. To the extent that the program reflects the research priorities approved by the mandarins of Middle Eastern studies, the answer would appear to be a resounding “no.”

Ask Professor Esposito

On By Martin Kramer

The fame of Professor John Esposito, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, rests upon his purported ability to sort Islamist extremists from Islamist moderates. Too often, he warns us, we wind up throwing all of the Islamists into one box. That’s a mistake, and to avoid it, we need none other than Professor Esposito, with his finely honed sense of who is extreme and who isn’t.

So I am puzzled. Professor Esposito has an academic partnership with one Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian residing in London. They have co-edited a book. Tamimi has published another book in a series edited by Esposito (in the preface, Tamimi calls Esposito “my ustadh,” my teacher). Tamimi also runs something called the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. Esposito sits on its board of advisors—the only American to do so. In short, this seems to be a close liaison. The problem is, Azzam Tamimi is Hamas.

This is no great secret. Palestinian political scientist Muhammad Muslih, in a study on the foreign policy of Hamas done for the Council on Foreign Relations, calls Tamimi “a Hamas member” (p. 18). Yes, he is an “academic” of sorts: he has a Ph.D. in political theory from the (ten-year-old) University of Westminster. And yes, he sometimes has interesting things to say about Islam and democracy. But would Professor Esposito have us believe that Tamimi is one of his Islamist “moderates”?

Consider, for example, an interview given by Tamimi to the Spanish daily La Vanguardia, issue of November 11, 2001. Headline: “I admire the Taliban; they are courageous.” Tamimi begins by assuring the interviewer that “everyone” in the Arab world cheered upon seeing the Twin Towers fall. “Excuse me,” says the interviewer, “did you understand my question?” Tamimi: “In the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy. That’s what you asked me, isn’t it?” The interview continues in this vein, to a point where Tamimi accuses the United States propping up all of the dictators in the Arab world. “They must be eliminated if anything is to change.” Interviewer: “And how to eliminate them?” Tamimi: “The people of those countries should rebel, fight, sacrifice, spill blood. The French Revolution cost lives. The American revolution cost lives. Liberty is not given, it is taken!” Later, Tamimi gives his solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “The Israelis stole our houses, which are today occupied by Jews from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Morocco, Ethiopia, Brooklyn. They should return to their homes, and give ours back to us!…That’s non-negotiable. Therefore I support Hamas.”

Want more? In March, Tamimi accused the United States of shutting down mosques; a spokesperson of the U.S. embassy in London replied that his accusations “don’t seem to be based on valid evidence or any evidence at all.” Yet lo and behold, in May he turned up at a mosque in northern Virginia, where he gave an extreme lecture calling for the elimination of Israel (a Muslim press report described him as “visibly agitated”). In July, he was in South Africa, hammering at the same theme: “You do not share your home with a burglar and a thief; why wish this for the Palestinians? All of Palestine is for them.” And those suicide bombers?

Do not call them suicide bombers, call them shuhada [martyrs] as they have not escaped the miseries of life. They gave their life. Life is sacred, but some things like truth and justice are more sacred than life. They are not desperate, they are hopefuls…[The Israelis] have guns, we have the human bomb. We love death, they love life.

Now I don’t maintain that Tamimi is a terrorist or a material supporter of terrorism. I don’t even suggest that the United States should keep him from his appointed rounds in this country. (He was on the program of a dubious “peace” conference convened last month at the University of Rhode Island.) Perhaps he comes and goes so freely as part of some brilliant State Department scheme to keep a line out to Hamas. But Tamimi should be recognized for what he is: an unabashed apologist for a listed terrorist group.

And this brings us back to Tamimi’s liaison with Ustadh Esposito. After all, if Tamimi is some sort of “moderate”—and a candidate for close scholarly collaboration—then one wonders just where Professor Esposito would draw the line. My impression is that he has never met an Islamist he didn’t like. And I am left puzzled at just what an Islamist would have to say to enter his bad books.

But Professor Esposito can always prove me wrong. For example, he might resign from the board of Tamimi’s institute, in light of Tamimi’s statements over the past year. I’d welcome such a move on this very weblog. For despite Professor Esposito’s long record of error in interpreting Islamism, I haven’t despaired of him yet.

Borders and Democracy

On By Martin Kramer

Last Monday, the Cairo daily al-Ahram published (in Arabic) an interview with David Welch, U.S. ambassador to Egypt. Toward the end of the interview, Welch was asked whether the United States would seek to remake the Middle East by redrawing its map. “Absolutely not,” replied Welch. “We do not want to draw new maps in the Middle East; we are not an imperial power. We have enough problems with the maps that were drawn in the past.”

There was nothing inappropriate about the answer, but it does get one thinking. The assumption of U.S. policy is that the region can be stabilized, “reformed,” even democratized, without creating any new states, eliminating any existing ones, or redrawing any of the region’s borders. It’s the regimes that have to be changed in some places, the nature of regimes in others.

Is that assumption a valid one? For example, is it a coincidence that the two most egregiously failed states in the region have been Iraq and Afghanistan? These are heterogenous polities that are difficult to rule at all, except through a centralizing dictatorship. Saddam Husayn is often cast as the man who destroyed Iraqi civil society. But the country has been plagued by strong-man interventions since its founding, precisely because none of its constituent elements—Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish—has ever felt secure. In Afghanistan, the lack of trust among its components—Tajik, Pashtun, Hazara—has given rise to warlordism and perpetuated it.

There are two possible solutions for these states. One is federalism, which has no record of success in the region, and many instances of failure (one thinks in particular of various “Arab federations” that came and went). Another is a kind of power-sharing that worked in Lebanon for about thirty years. It was the late Edward Shils who underlined the weakness of this kind of solution, well before it collapsed. Such a polity “revolves around an empty center.” It therefore has to “be kept completely still politically” in order to prevent distrust from exploding. Keeping Iraq and Afghanistan “completely still” will be an expensive business. A new study by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History says its would require a long-term commitment of 300,000 troops in Afghanistan, and 100,000 in Iraq.

Might it be less costly to the United States and more conducive to democracy, to allow the kinds of modifications that occurred in the map of Europe after the fall of communism? After all, the states of Iraq and Afghanistan were founded at about the same time as Czechoslovakia. And if the present configurations of Iraq and Afghanistan inherently encourage dictatorship and warlordism, what is the U.S. interest in perpetuating them? More important, is the United States prepared to sacrifice treasure and lives to maintain them?

I ask these questions; I haven’t answered them. I am familiar with the objections, and the quarters from which they might come. And the eve of an Iraq war is not the time for planners to discuss the issue, at least in public. But it is certainly not too early to begin thinking about it—and where can that be done, without commitment, if not on a weblog like this?

One thing I will say: only someone with no sense of the history of the Middle East believes that the region’s map will never change again. The question is not whether it will be redrawn, but when and where, by whom and in whose favor.