Author: Martin Kramer

Interim assessment

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 87-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

The autumn of 2001 will be remembered in Middle Eastern studies as the best of times. The media besieged the profs, who became “experts.” On campus, at special events and teach-ins, they commanded audiences of hundreds and even thousands. Their books sold briskly. Reports from around the land told of droves of students standing in the aisles and pleading to get into packed courses on Islam, the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Professors who command big enrollments are better positioned to demand raises from their deans, and you could almost hear the buzz over money. In one case, you did hear it: Anne Betteridge, the executive director of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), excitedly told a journalist that universities could find themselves in salary battles to lure the best of the long-ignored Middle East faculty.23

None of this will last. The academic repertoire is too limited to sustain general interest. Enrollments will fall back—they always do, since the performance of the professors just isn’t strong enough to keep students interested beyond a crisis. The academics will have had their moment in the limelight. They will cash their fattened royalty checks; where deans are impressionable, they will get their raises.

But, the true windfall of September 11 may be just around the corner. The U.S. Congress is asking why Johnny can’t read (or speak) Arabic, Dari, and Pashto. And, it wants Americans to know more about over a billion people, friends and enemies, who profess Islam. The international studies lobby is casting September 11 as the equivalent of the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957: a nasty surprise whose recurrence the profs can help to prevent, provided the public purse is opened wide to area studies. Vast new entitlements for Middle Eastern studies are under discussion, and academic salesmen are busy repackaging their wares for an eager market. Middle Eastern studies could strike the mother lode. Watch this column.

23 Quoted by Mark Clayton, “Standing Room Only,” The Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 2, 2001.

Outing “outreach”

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 87-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

In the United States, fourteen Middle East programs based in universities are National Resource Centers—that is, they benefit from a subsidy from the U.S. Department of Education. The subsidy is awarded following a competition held every three years. Programs that wish to be competitive must engage in “outreach”—that is, they must be active in their communities in spreading wisdom about the Middle East. Nearly all centers have “outreach coordinators,” who in normal times do very little: they’ll send a graduate student to lecture at a high school or loan a video to a church group. But in times of crisis, they are swamped with requests for speakers and information. How did they perform after September 11? In at least one case, disgracefully.

That case involves the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. On October 15, it held a workshop for K-12 teachers, entitled “The September 11 Crisis and Teaching Our Children.” Toward that noble aim, the center put together a collection of readings, later offered for general sale through the center’s website.22 It’s nothing other than a propaganda packet of anti-war, anti-American self-hate.

So you think perhaps a few texts by Muslims would be appropriate for the “Teaching about Islam” section? Forget it: instead digest an interview with Islamophile John Esposito, and two long articles by his known associate, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (from Esposito-edited tomes). Want to know more about Afghanistan and our major ally there, the Northern Alliance? Read about them in two disparaging articles by Robert Fisk, the militant British journalist who reviles America’s “filthy war.” Then go back and tell the sixth-graders that “Afghanistan Always Beats Its Invaders” (a Fisk selection).

But the best is the “Why Do They Hate Us?” section. You would think that an article by the eminently readable Bernard Lewis—perhaps his famous “Roots of Muslim Rage” from The Atlantic Monthly—would be appropriate for this section. Or maybe Lewis’ well-known article on bin Ladin’s jihad declaration from Foreign Affairs? Wrong again—because the message the kids need to hear is that they hate us, and rightly so. So, read through eleven articles by a parade of scribblers from the left. Here are two articles by Edward Said, and still another by Robert Fisk (all published abroad), suggesting America’s shared culpability for September 11. Read another British journalist, David Hirst, on “The Shame of Palestine.” (No American journalists need apply.) There are contributions from those old left standbys, Tariq Ali and Arundhati Roy, and entries from such tiresome journals of left opinion as Z Magazine and Open Democracy. The only author gone missing is Noam Chomsky.

As a reading list for an anti-war campus teach-in, this selection would be merely execrable. As fare for unsuspecting schoolteachers, dished up by a National Resource Center and subsidized by taxpayer dollars, it should be the subject of an investigation. It is one more argument, if one were needed, for taking the selection of National Resource Centers out of the hands of academic peer reviewers. Government officials should sit on the panels that select these centers and review all their mischief with a skeptical eye. And the sun-dried, Pacific-gazing Middle East “experts” who put out this “critical reader”? De-fund them in the upcoming cycle.

22 At http://www.cmes.ucsb.edu/teacheroutreach.html

Media Maulana

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Jihad 101,” Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2002, pp. 87-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

On October 5, Oprah Winfrey devoted her television show to Islam. The program claims to have more than twenty million viewers, who got to hear Queen Rania of Jordan and Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington reassure them about the peaceful nature of Islam.

But the show was also the big American debut of Akbar S. Ahmed, Pakistani anthropologist and the new Ibn Khaldun Professor of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington. True, it was not the most edifying exchange. Oprah: “How in the name of Islam does something as horrifying as what happened on September 11 happen?” Ahmed: “That’s a very difficult question you ask, Oprah, and a very complex question, but an important question. There is obviously something driving them.” Ahmed left it at that, except to say that it was “not Islam, because Islam clearly says that the killing of one innocent life is like killing all of humanity. It is just not allowed in Islam.”16 Following Ahmed’s appearance, his book Islam Today skyrocketed to the top forty in Amazon’s rankings.

The New York Times later misspelled his name (“Okbar”), but they’ll get it right eventually, because Akbar Ahmed is the Muslim media maven. During a decade in Britain (Selwyn College, Cambridge), he became the great talking head of Islam. BBC television and radio adored him (he narrated a six-part documentary for the BBC, Living Islam). On the eve of the Kuwait war, he gave a private lecture to Princess Diana at the Royal Anthropological Institute. (“I’m not Diana’s guru, says top academic,” screamed one tabloid.) “I was in danger of becoming the instant expert, the media guru, Mr. Know-All,” he acknowledged. 17

Twenty years ago, Ahmed wrote with authority about the Pashtun tribes of northern Pakistan. A decade ago, he wrote with some passion, but still with authority, about contemporary trends in Islam, and about Jinnah, founder of Pakistan. He now writes only with passion, and a large dollop of hubris, about America.

Some examples: America “seems within the short span of a few years to have collapsed.” It is a place where “society itself is threatened as never before in history.” The O.J. Simpson trial was “symptomatic of imperial decay. … We are plunging into an era of uncertainty and O.J. confirms it for us.”18 The country’s mass media “have achieved what American political might could not: the attainment for America of world domination. Hollywood had succeeded where the Pentagon had failed.”19 (One wonders why al-Qa‘ida bothered to fly an airliner into the Pentagon. Perhaps the victory in Afghanistan is just a special effect.)

But this most recent observation, on the American reaction to September 11, tops them all: “Commentators associated Muslims with the attacks from the moment the news broke … If a Peruvian or a Japanese cult had stepped forward and claimed that they had organized the attacks, they would not have been believed. In the public mind, Islam was to blame.”20

As for the first part, it is simply untrue: commentators showed impeccable restraint in not jumping to conclusions. As for the last part, it is also untrue: the public did not blame Islam per se. And what can one say about the absurd part in the middle? While Professor Ahmed was punting on the Cam back in 1993, an earlier group of terrorists tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and they were not members of a Peruvian or Japanese cult. It is always astonishing when Muslims, who recall every grievance going back to the battle of Poitiers, rebuke Americans for having any memory at all.

Americans do have memories, but they also give newcomers the benefit of the doubt. There is no reason not to extend the same courtesy to Ahmed. He left Britain (where he served briefly as Pakistan’s ambassador) under a cloud of controversy. But Pakistan has not always been fair to its great men, and Ahmed may be one of them. In that spirit, it would be fitting for Ahmed to return the same courtesy to a country that has given him a very big break. “American University is ideally placed,” he has said. “Perhaps I can help clarify for policy makers what the pitfalls, the dangers [are], what the landscape is like.”21 That sounds useful and promising—providing the new star practices a bit more caution in interpreting the complex landscape of America.

Welcome to Washington, Professor Ahmed. Break a leg.

16 At http://www.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/tows_past_20011005_c.jhtml.
17 Akbar S. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam: Predicament and Promise (London: Routledge, 1992), p. viii.
18 Akbar S. Ahmed, “Where the Normal American Meets the Muslim Cleric,” New Perspectives Quarterly, Spring 1995, at http://www.npq.org/issues/v122/p13.html.
19 Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam, p. 241.
20 Akbar Ahmed, “I’ve spent my life trying to repair the image of Islam. Has it all been in vain?” The Independent (London), Sept. 20, 2001.
21 Sally Acharya, “‘Ambassador for Islam’: Akbar S. Ahmed Works to Connect Two Worlds,” American Weekly, Oct. 2, 2001, at http://veracity.univpubs.american.edu/weeklypast/100201/story_6.html.