Category: Sandbox

The Colephate

On By Martin Kramer

Juan Cole’s penchant for specious analogies misleads his readers once again, this time in regard to the caliphate. Here is Cole:

There are different conceptions of the caliphate, sort of a Sunni papacy. At some points in history the caliph was both a temporal and a spiritual leader. But over time there was a separation of religion and state of sorts in medieval Islam, and civil rulers such as the Buyids or Seljuks exercised material rule, reducing the caliphs of the tenth through thirteenth centuries to largely a spiritual function.

Note that the link for this authoritative analysis is to the Wikipedia entry for “Caliph,” written by… well, God only knows.

So let’s quote instead from the entry “Caliph” in a genuine encyclopedia, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World an entry expertly written by Glenn E. Perry. It seems to contradict Cole head-on:

The caliph is not the Muslim equivalent of the pope, that is, the head of a Muslim Church, for Islam has no such institution that may be differentiated from the state. It is misleading to think of the caliphate as a spiritual office; it is a religious office mainly in the sense that the purpose of the state itself is religious in Islam.

Of course, Cole manages not only to mislead his readers, but to contradict another specious analogy he made a year and a half ago: “Sunni Islam most resembles, it seems to me, Protestant Christianity in its authority structures…. As in Protestantism, there is no over-arching authority.” Now wait a minute: if Sunni Islam resembles Protestant Christianity in its authority structures, what’s it doing with “sort of a papacy”? (And what does the Shiite authority structure look like? Elsewhere Cole has explained that “you can choose, in Shiite Islam, which ayatollah to follow.” That sounds sort of Protestant, too.)

Or maybe the whole business of analogies with Christian denominations is pointless? Here’s a real expert, Bernard Lewis:

Some, in trying to explain the difference between Sunnis and Shi’a to Western audiences, have described them as the equivalents of Protestants and Catholics…. The absurdity of the comparison is shown by a very simple test. If the Shi’a and Sunnis are Protestants and Catholics, then which are the Protestants and which are the Catholics? The impossibility of answering this question will at once demonstrate the falsity of the comparison.

Juan Cole is a virtual storehouse of misleading, absurd, and false “juanalogies,” which cut against more than a century of scholarly efforts to explain Islam in its own terms. It’s thanks to those efforts that no one calls Islam Mohammedanism anymore. When Cole draws analogies between Saudi Arabia and Amish country (“Saudi Arabia is an extremely conservative society; going to Saudi Arabia is kind of like going to Amish country in the United States”), or between Al-Qaeda and David Koresh, he functions as an anti-expert, obscuring the very complexities whose elucidation we expect from someone who’s spent years studying Islam. Cole’s only possible excuse is that he’s talking down to his fans, because they’re not smart enough to grasp the intricacies. Well, maybe they aren’t: after all, they’re his fans.

Suffering in silence at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

An Israeli newspaper over New Year’s weekend ran a profile of Anat Malkin-Almani, a violinist and child prodigy who had performed at Carnegie Hall at the age of 16. Malkin-Almani was born in Israel, but moved to California at the age of five, and then to New York, where she enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music and Julliard. Between her junior and senior years at Julliard, her left hand was badly mauled in an automobile accident. Now 29, and twelve surgeries later, she has made her way back to full-time performing. The profile is a moving story of dogged devotion to music in the face of adversity.

After Malkin-Almani’s accident, she considered a career in politics and foreign affairs. So she decided to study for a degree in Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University. Big mistake:

Malkin-Almani: Every week I would get e-mails about anti-Israel demonstrations, lectures that were virtually a form of incitement. The whole atmosphere in the department was hostile, and it was orchestrated by Edward Said. In one class the lecturer cited an article about how the Israelis were raping Palestinian women in the prisons and then sending them back to the territories. I raised my hand and said that no friend of mine had raped a Palestinian, and he started to shout at me.

Haaretz: Was that the only case?

Malkin-Almani: There were cases like that all the time. In one class I asked the lecturer where the border between East and West Jerusalem ran. He started to shout that you Israelis are so stupid, you don’t know anything. All the students in the class joined him and started shouting at me. That was the routine. Once I met with Said, who was a good friend of Daniel Barenboim, and I told him I wanted to join the Arab-Jewish orchestra they had established. He asked me where I was born and I told him Israel. Straight off he told me that Israel had not permitted the entry of a few musicians from Syria who wanted to play with the orchestra in Bethlehem. Suddenly he started to shout at me as though I were the one who stamps the permits. After two years of studies I said enough is enough and I left the university.

Haaretz: Did you share your experiences with anyone on the faculty?

Malkin-Almani: I had an Israeli lecturer whom I told what happened in the classes and I gave her all the articles we were given. She said that we must not meet in the university. A month later she told me, “We checked it out, it is dangerous to act and the best thing is to be silent.”

Malkin-Almani didn’t appear in the film Columbia Unbecoming, and her name didn’t surface in the subsequent controversy. She was a silent victim of faculty intimidation in a department run wild. Columbia isn’t in the news these days, but now is the time to pose this question to the university’s president, Lee Bollinger: how are you using this hiatus to clean up the mess? We’re waiting. And we’re watching.

Update: The New York Sun has spoken to Malkin-Almani, and she confirms that the offending professor was Joseph Massad. She also testified before the ad hoc grievance committee. Columbia’s legal laundryman, Floyd Abrams, says he doesn’t recall the testimony.

You say Hourani, I say Ajami, let’s call the whole thing off

On By Martin Kramer

Back in the fall, Garth Hall, a grad student and research assistant at the American University in Cairo, sent an email to 202 professors of Middle Eastern studies. Hall asked them to “jot down what you think are the ten most interesting, informative, and readable nonfiction books in the last century of Middle East studies… And if you could, please write one sentence on why you chose the book you did for your first choice.” (Details here.)

Of those queried, 52 responded, and so did I. Having skimmed Hall’s instructions, I forgot them when I got around to the chore: I thought he wanted ten books, in no particular order, and a comment on each. Maybe that’s why I don’t see my name on the list of respondents: I disqualified myself by not making a top choice. In any case, here’s my list in alphabetical order by author, with my original comment on each book. I did this in a hurry, and I wouldn’t fight to the death for every choice, but the list gives an idea of the approach that I value. (Caveat: I kept to books on modern history and politics. Otherwise I’d have filled up quickly with Oleg Grabar on Islamic art, S.D. Goitein on medieval Egypt, André Raymond on the Ottoman city—for starters.)

  • The Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami. Still the most eloquent and precise account of the impasse of Arab nationalism since independence.
  • Islam in European Thought by Albert Hourani. Hourani wrote bad books but elegant essays, and these are some of his best, on a theme he knew best.
  • Sayyid Jamal ad-din al-Afghani by Nikki R. Keddie. The ideal biography, masterful use of sources, correcting a hundred myths.
  • The Chatham House Version by Elie Kedourie. I constantly reread these essays, which turn assumptions about nationalism and imperialism on their heads.
  • Muslim Extremism in Egypt by Gilles Kepel. Pioneering on-the-ground reportage that preceded all accounts of Islamism and has yet to be surpassed.
  • The Arab Cold War by Malcolm H. Kerr. No one had a better feel for the cut-and-thrust of inter-Arab politics.
  • The Emergence of Modern Turkey by Bernard Lewis. Essential to understanding the late Ottoman period and the early Turkish republic.
  • Cruelty and Silence by Kanan Makiya. Treason of the Arab intellectuals, exposed meticulously and passionately.
  • A House of Many Mansions by Kamal S. Salibi. The best account (in essays) of the persistence of primordial identities.
  • Nasser and His Generation by P.J. Vatikiotis. Nasser’s Egypt thoroughly revealed, at a time when other scholars engaged in social science obfuscation.

So much for my choices. Here are the first ten results of the survey, in descending order of preference—and to make it more interesting, I offer an irreverent aside on each selection.

There are another eleven books on the list, but the sample isn’t large enough for any of these choices to mean much. The same goes for an additional list of thirteen runners-up. (Do note this, however: nothing by Rashid Khalidi made the cut.)

Of course, a few fatal problems with the methodology and sample size render the survey worthless, so Garth Hall promises to do it again, presumably in a more systematic manner. No matter how many times he repeats it, two things are certain: Said’s Orientalism will come out on top, and my Ivory Towers on Sand won’t be anywhere in sight.

Update: Check out Robert Irwin’s best ten. Three of his choices overlap those in the survey.