Category: Sandbox

Those other Orientalists

On By Martin Kramer

A few months back, art historian Kristian Davies sent me a copy of his new book The Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India. This is more than a lavishly illustrated decoration for a coffee table. It’s a provocative dissent from the Saidian take on nineteenth-century Orientalist art. I’ll let Davies say it himself:

In the 1980s, the great age of deconstructionism, Orientalist paintings were thoroughly deconstructed and dismantled from every angle: the questionable authenticity of what the paintings depicted, the subliminal intentions of the artist, the genre’s ties to imperialism, the supposedly unavoidable corruption of an artist’s perception of the East before even traveling abroad, the way in which artists portrayed women, violence, commerce, the streets, poverty, and architecture, and what the Orient even was. Everything was implicated, every brushstroke, until as is often the final outcome of deconstructionism, one was left with the feeling that one should believe nothing and suspect everything.

“Fortunately,” Davies adds, “in the twenty-plus years since Said’s Orientalism was published, many of his theories have been sufficiently and successfully refuted.” And he goes on to quote Bernard Lewis, John MacKenzie, and myself–very gratifying.

Davies is plainly moved by these paintings. He describes the moment he succumbed to their allure: he turned a corner in the Musée d’Orsay, “and there I saw it: a painting of a camel procession coming directly at me.” It was Léon Belly’s Pilgrims Going to Mecca (1861) and Davies “felt a very potent sensation brewing.” (A detail from that painting is on the book jacket, and an entire chapter is devoted to analyzing it.) The Orientalists is potent, too, written in an accessible style for non-specialists, and the quality of the reproductions is outstanding. (For more, see this review.)

Of course, what keeps the interest in nineteenth-century Orientalist art in an upward trajectory is the fact that, pace Said, today’s “Orientals” are enamored of it. It’s a market that was pioneered by a London dealer in the 1980s, and today some of the most impressive collections are held by private enthusiasts in the Gulf countries. When Christie’s opened shop in Dubai earlier this year, it sent over some outstanding examples of the genre for a showing, in advance of a June auction in London. At that sale, John Frederick Lewis’s A Mid-day Meal, Cairo (1875), which had been shown in Dubai, fetched $4.5 million. It’s mind-boggling.

If you’re in New York City, make a point of seeing the very respectable collection of Orientalist art at the Dahesh Museum, which is now showing off its best pieces in a tenth-anniversary exhibition. (The one I personally most appreciate is Gustav Bauernfeind’s vast and dramatic 1888 depiction of Ottoman forced conscription in the port of Jaffa. Davies devotes a chapter to Bauernfeind as well, and includes two spendid details from this painting.) The best time to visit the Dahesh? The evening of Thursday, September 1: Kristian Davies will be lecturing in the auditorium.

Cole-ture shock

On By Martin Kramer

The Ora-Cole of Ann Arbor, author of the mega-blog “Informed Comment,” and El Presidente-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Professor Juan Cole, shares his keen ethnographic insights into the killing of American journalist Steven Vincent in Basra last week. An article in the London Telegraph (to which I also linked) reported that investigators were exploring whether Vincent’s murder was some sort of “honor killing.” The thesis: his relationship with his (Iraqi female) translator offended local sensibilities. This provides Cole with an opportunity to dismiss Vincent as a cultural novice:

In Mediterranean culture, a man’s honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

In other words, Vincent got himself killed, out of ignorance. Implication: his journalism should be dismissed.

It’s certainly refreshing to see Cole slip into the style of Raphael Patai, going on about honor and shame and all that. Pentagon, take note: it’s all true. (But you knew that.)

What reeks of bad taste is Cole’s superior dismissal of Vincent, as if his death somehow proves his ignorance. Point of fact: you can know everything “serious” about Middle Eastern culture and never criticize it even in the mildest way, and still get yourself killed by fanatics.

Examples? Take Malcolm Kerr, a former president of MESA who left UCLA to run the American University of Beirut at the worst possible time, and got himself killed by gunmen on campus. Take Michel Seurat, French sociologist of Islam, who stayed in Beirut at the worst possible time, got himself kidnapped by Islamic Jihad (Hezbollah’s kind), got himself mistreated by his captors, and got himself dead by falling seriously ill in his dungeon. (His body still hasn’t been recovered.) These two Western scholars were born in the Arab world (Kerr in Lebanon, Seurat in Tunisia), spoke fluent Arabic, spent decades in the region, knew all about the dangers and still they died. Should we conclude they were “acting in an extremely dangerous manner”? Or does sole responsibility for their deaths lie with their killers and torturers? And if it does, why should Vincent be an exception?

But maybe what’s really at issue here is Cole’s ego (on his website, it usually is). Beneath his haughty dismissal of Vincent (“did not know anything serious”) lies the fact that Vincent had the audacity to challenge him. Vincent didn’t think much of Cole’s armchair expertise or his claim to be driven by concern for Iraqis, and told Cole just that on his weblog:

You might want to review your own site and how well it reflects love and concern for the Iraqi people. After all, on “Informed Comment,” pro-liberation Iraqi bloggers are accused of being CIA agents, the elections are practically dismissed as window-dressing and every terrorist—no, I mean guerrilla, as Cole would have it—attack is given marquis billing, as if their psychopathic bloodlust discredits the liberation of 26 million people. Whoops, I mean 23.5 million because according to Cole’s Wednesday post, 2.5 million Iraqis support the “resistance.”

Well, I thank Cole for revealing his gut-level concern for the Iraqi people… My question to the Professor is, which Iraqi people—the fascist thugs he calls the “resistance,” or the police, National Guardsmen, politicians, everyday people and eight million voters who comprise the true Iraqi “resistance”? We await his Informed Comment.

Cole didn’t respond then. But now that Vincent is dead, Cole has seized the last word in the argument. Vincent shamed him, but now he has his honor back. He’s taken his revenge. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown among full professors.

I will give Cole this: he does have cultural knowledge—enough to keep away from Iraq, which he’s never visited. Nothing he’s written has endeared him to any Iraqi faction outside the insurgency—quite the opposite. He’d have no protectors. And as someone who spent years in the Middle East as a Bahai missionary, his life wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel if he fell into the wrong hands in Shiite country. Were Cole to surface in Iraq, he’d be “acting in an extremely dangerous manner.” So far, he hasn’t.

But as it happens, Cole will be headed for Beirut in December, on the tab of Saudi billionnaire Prince Alwaleed, to whip up support for his Americana Translation Project. (Is it a coincidence that Cole has just written a fawning puff piece at Salon.com, praising the new King Abdullah who “has the smile and goatee of a genial beatnik” and defending the kingdom against all comers, from Michael Moore to the neocons? Who knows? The Saudis have a long history of suborning the Middle East studies establishment.) And once in Beirut, Cole could pop over to Baghdad…

Don’t do it, Juan! Think of your readers! Think of MESA! We’ll keep visiting your blog, we promise, even if you remain a pundit of the armchair.

Addendum: Helena Cobban, another “expert” well out of harm’s way, does much the same thing as Cole: Vincent’s ignorance killed him, and anyway why is his death so significant, when so many other journalists have died? (Well, he was deliberately murdered, for starters.) Here again, Vincent is in good company: look at how Cobban, sidling up to Hezbollah on a visit to Beirut, wants us to understand the murder of Malcolm Kerr: “Killing Malcolm Kerr, an evidently noncombatant community leader, was clearly a major rights abuse”—a “rights abuse”! —but “hundreds of Lebanese Shiites were being killed, kidnapped, and otherwise abused by the occupation forces in those years.” Thanks for the perspective, Helena. We’ll remember it if the fiery ones ever grab you.

Follow-up: Tony Badran brings quotes from Juan Cole and Raphael Patai, and asks if you can tell the difference.

My Virtual Lecture Series, 2004-2005

On By Martin Kramer

Many years ago, I developed the habit of writing out lectures before delivering them. There are some scholars, like my mentor Bernard Lewis, who can lecture from one-word cues scribbled on a scrap of paper. More power to them. But I learned through experience that you don’t always know the shape you’ll be in when you step off a long flight and get behind the lectern. Better to have done all the thinking and formulating in the comfort of your office, than in front of the multitudes after a less-than-agreeable trip.

The advantage of my way is that I have the texts of my lectures for later deployment. So here are links to seven lectures I delivered over the past academic year. Take them together as kind of virtual lecture series.

The first four lectures deal with crucial issues related to policy and politics in the Middle East. I gave three of them at events organized by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

  • When Minorities Rule is a presentation I delivered on a Washington Institute panel I shared with Syrian dissident Ammar Abdulhamid. I point to the long legacy of minority rule in the Middle East, and the fear in the region that democracy promotion could overturn long-established ethnic and religious hierarchies.
  • Shiites and U.S. Policy: Between Allies and Adversaries is a talk delivered at the annual fall conference of The Washington Institute. I consider the U.S. tilt toward the Shiites in Iraq and beyond, and the Shiite suspicion that the United States is destined to betray them.
  • Mr. Sharansky, Ease My Doubts is a presentation I gave on a Tel Aviv University panel featuring Natan Sharansky and devoted to his influential book, The Case for Democracy. I draw distinctions between different concepts of “freedom,” and suggest that the Middle East may be different after all.
  • Islam, Islamism, and U.S. Foreign Policy is a talk I delivered at The Washington Institute, on a panel I shared with Gilles Kepel. (The occasion: publication of his book, The War for Muslim Minds.) I argue that it would be a mistake to parley with the the so-called “moderate” Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood school, and that it is impossible to turn the Muslim Brothers against the jihadists. And I add this on Islamism in Europe: “What Europeans are discovering is that deals with Islamists, once cut, don’t always last. The U.S.-Islamist deal over Afghanistan did not last, and the European-Islamist deal is coming apart now. Europe’s unique dilemma is that Islamism is so thoroughly implanted in vast emigre communities (17 million), that it may be necessary for Europe to cut still another deal, even less favorable than the previous one.”

The next three lectures deal with the predicament of Middle Eastern studies in America.

  • Arab Studies: My Critical Review is a lecture I delivered at the annual symposium of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, on a panel with Michael Hudson and As’ad AbuKhalil. I look at the many ways the field has prospered thanks to 9/11, and I paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld: you go to war with the Middle Eastern studies you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have. But I suggest that the time has come for scholars to step back and look critically at their endeavor, without demonizing their critics or fearing for their subsidies. (If you prefer, you can listen to this lecture.)
  • Middle Eastern Studies: What is the Debate About? is a presentation I made at the inauguration of the new Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, where I shared the podium with Steven Caton and Malik Mufti. There I emphasize that the new center will have to take a stand on two issues: Who is an expert? And what is the proper relationship between academe and the national interest?
  • Columbia University: The Future of Middle Eastern Studies at Stake is a talk I gave by videocast to a conference on academic integrity held at Columbia University. I seek to place the crisis of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia in a larger context, showing that it exemplifies the dysfunctional nature of the field as a whole. “Up close,” I note, “this looks like a story about Columbia and Israel. In proper perspective, it is a test case for Middle Eastern studies and American preparation for its enhanced role in the Middle East.”

There’s no charge for admission to this year’s virtual lecture series. Just sit back, click, and enjoy. The great thing about a virtual series is that audience members can come and go as they please, and the lecturer doesn’t have to answer pesky questions. It’s the best of all possible worlds.