Category: Sandbox

Middle East Studies: What is the Debate About?

On By Martin Kramer

On April 4-5, 2005, Brandeis University convened the inaugural conference of the new Crown Center for Middle East Studies. The opening session bore the title “Middle East Studies in the United States: What is the Debate About?” Panelists included Steven Caton, director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University; Malik Mufti, director of the Middle East Studies Program at Tufts University; and Martin Kramer. The following are Martin Kramer’s remarks, as delivered.

It’s an honor for me to be the first speaker at the opening panel of this inaugural conference. Professor Shai Feldman [the director of the new center] and Brandeis President Jehuda Reinharz are both old friends, and I’m delighted to celebrate this inauguration with them. Congratulations, too, to Lester Crown and the Crown family, whose endowment of this new center is an act of inspired generosity. I hope it meets all their expectations.

I’ve said on more than one occasion that I myself have expectations of this initiative. These expectations don’t approach in significance those of the people directly involved. Still, what I propose to do here is explain not only “what the debate is about,” but more importantly, what I think the role of a new center like this one should be, in a field riven by controversy.

What is the debate about? The article in the Boston Globe the Sunday before last purported to give a primer, and noted that Professor Feldman doesn’t really know that much about it. Let me save Professor Feldman some time. He can function perfectly well without knowing all about the skirmishes over Campus Watch, H.R.3077, and the film Columbia Unbecoming. They’re not the essence of the debate. To some extent, these crises are a convenient substitute or shorthand for debate. Behind each of them looms some larger principle, but it’s not always crystal clear what that principle is, or how the crisis will affect it. It would be a mistake for Professor Feldman to immerse himself in the details of these controversies, because they consume time, and he won’t be in a position to affect their outcome anyway. It’s part of my job, not his.

But there is a debate in which each of us must take a position, including the Crown Center. It revolves around two questions. The first is this: what is academic expertise on the Middle East? And the second: what should be the role of the academic expert at a time of crisis and war?

Professor Feldman has dealt with these issues in the Israeli context, and indeed struck what may be described as a fine balance in the Jaffee Center. Here the context is rather different. Middle Eastern studies as a field have given the wrong answers to these questions for the past twenty-five years answers that represent a break from an earlier American tradition, and bear no resemblance to answers Professor Feldman gave at the Jaffee Center.

Let us start with this question: What is academic expertise on the Middle East? Or put another way, who is an expert? The question has dogged Middle Eastern studies from the outset. You might think that this is a simple matter: an academic expert is someone with a doctorate in Middle Eastern studies or in a mainstream discipline with a Middle East emphasis.

But it’s much more complex, thanks to the late Edward Said. In his book Orientalism, he threw out the old definitions of expertise and proposed a radical new one. Said argued that whatever the level of competence achieved by Western scholars, it was negated by a profound prejudice against their subject matter. That prejudice had roots in the long history of Western aggression and imperialism against the East. Orientalism, in Said’s lexicon, became a kind of antisemitism against “the Other,” and against Arabs and Muslims in particular.

The repudiation of established expertise unfolded in a striking passage in Orientalism that effectively cancelled the validity of any Western scholarship on the East: “For a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second.”

In one sweep, this passage added two implicit credentials to the list of criteria for expertise. The first was ethnic. Who could escape the Orientalist bind, if not the Oriental himself? All things being equal (or even unequal), should not the authentic voice be preferred? The second was political. Said offered the prospect of redemption from Orientalism through politics: he praised the work of some Westerners as having transcended prejudice, as evidenced by their willingness to identify with the political causes of “the Other,” and above all, with the cause of the Palestinians, which he established as a litmus test.

Said’s message revolutionized Middle Eastern studies. It turned what had been an old-fashioned guild of practitioners into a popular front of Third Worldist activists. Said’s ideas rode the crest of the academic tsunami that brought radicalism from grad student lounges to faculty clubs. And this popular front, once empowered, purged doubters and dissenters. Left-wing progressive, emancipatory Third Worldism became the ethos of the academic establishment of Middle Eastern studies, and so it is today.

This new guard promised to get things right where the old guard had been wrong. Alas, despite the elevation of these new criteria of expertise, they didn’t save post-Orientalist Middle Eastern studies from error. This is the theme of my book, Ivory Towers on Sand. It isn’t about bias; it’s about error. In a sentence, post-Orientalist Middle Eastern studies underestimated the rising power of Islamism, and overestimated the potential of civil society. The new mandarins predicted revolutionary change by progressive forces, the very forces admired and promoted by Edward Said; the Middle East instead got Islamism, whose trajectory the academic experts plotted erroneously. The right politics or the right ethnicity, or the right combination of the two, didn’t provide protection against error. In fact, it may have invited it, by shutting out consideration of other possibilities.

This is the face of Middle Eastern studies, and it hasn’t changed, at least not yet. And this brings me to my first piece of advice to Professor Feldman. On the question of “what is expertise,” or “who is an expert,” you can’t profess agnosticism. The core idea of Edward Said is an error that has produced still more errors. People will come to you urging that you include the Saidian side, for the sake of balance or diversity. I urge you to stand your ground, to refrain from endorsing expertise that’s really just advocacy in disguise, and that’s directly responsible for the epistemological crisis in Middle Eastern studies today.

To find expertise that hasn’t been compromised, you will have to go outside the box, well beyond conventional Middle Eastern studies that is, beyond the people who hold Ph.D.s from Middle East programs. You’ll need some Middle East academics, because this isn’t a center for strategic studies. But much expertise in many disciplines can be tapped from other sources. Ignore the carping of the gatekeepers in the other centers and in the Middle East Studies Association. Doctorates in Middle Eastern studies aren’t the ultimate credential, and they haven’t spared their holders from error or dogmatism. Your criteria should be excellence, not ethnicity; proficiency, not politics.

Good people are as widely available outside the academy as inside it. This is particularly true in the Middle East itself. Brandeis was once famed for taking in people whose career development had been fractured by the rise of Nazism in Europe. The Middle East, which is seized by so many problems, still spits out people at all stages of their careers. It would be fully in accord with the Brandeis tradition to search out the best of these people, regardless of their formal credentials, and make space for them.

I come now to the second question at the heart of the debate: what should be the role of the academic expert at a time of crisis and war? Of course, this issue goes far beyond Middle Eastern studies, but it has special relevance to the field, for this reason: because of crisis and war, the U.S. government is lavishing new resources on Middle Eastern studies.

Post-9/11, the Congress and the Administration expanded its subsidies to the field dramatically, and added to the number of subsidized centers. There are seventeen National Resource Centers for the Middle East, more than at any time in American history. Other new federal programs are at stages of implementation or planning. After 9/11, I urged that no new money be put into the field, unless and until Congress made a reassessment. I was ignored. The Bush administration will go down as the greatest material benefactor of Middle Eastern studies ever. The attitude in the administration is perhaps best conveyed by paraphrasing Secretary Rumsfeld: you go to war with the Middle Eastern studies you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have.

But here is the paradox. The field is full of people whose perspective is Third Worldist, often militantly so. They distrust or detest every and any U.S. policy, from preemptive war through democracy promotion. They have an attitude to the American use of force as predictable as any antiwar group. Edward Said warned them against complicity with power, especially imperial power, and they have done everything to distance themselves from it.

Well, almost. They remain hopelessly addicted to the public treasury, which has opened to them in the name of national security, and they’d like it to open still further. They, too, want the spoils of war. And they’re intensely jealous and resentful of the Washington think tanks that have inserted themselves in the policy arena, especially those think tanks devoted to the Middle East.

As a result, a debate is underway about the relationship between Middle Eastern studies and Washington. It is most intense in the subsidized National Research Centers. The last time this debate took place, with the same urgency, was twenty years ago at Harvard. The director of the Harvard center at the time took CIA money for a conference and research, and was pilloried and disgraced as a result. Washington saw the reaction, and disengaged almost entirely from the field. But post-9/11, the agencies of government are knocking at the doors of academe once more, seeking cooperation in training and research.

Among today’s students and a few younger faculty, there are many who would partner with Washington; but among the tenured radicals who form the establishment, there is a profound suspicion. Middle Eastern studies, in this regard, are entirely different from strategic studies and public policy studies. The culture is really a counter-culture, which holds the ideas of the national interest and national service to be foreign to its purposes.

What does this mean for the Crown Center? Again, on this question, I don’t think there’s room for agnosticism. It is true that the center isn’t funded from the public purse. It has no contractual obligation to government. But while the other centers debate, the Crown Center has an opportunity to act. The United States faces many difficult choices in the Middle East, and for its benefit and the benefit of the region, it’s crucial that these choices be well-informed.

In addition to the center’s purely academic role, it can actually propel itself to the new forefront of Middle Eastern studies, by entering a partnership with Washington. It need not emulate the think tanks, which tend to generate work of immediate policy relevance. But there is an immense demand for deeper research on the state, Islamism, civil society, and democratization.

These are actually the areas where academic Middle Eastern studies have had some impact in Washington. I’ve been surprised to see how certain concepts, popular in Middle Eastern studies in the 1990s, have migrated across ideological and political divides, into the think tanks and then into government. U.S. policy is predicated on some of them. It’s important, I think, to reexamine some of these ideas, from an academic platform, and to share the results with Washington. There is opportunity here to make a difference, at a crucial moment when the United States weighs its ideals against Middle Eastern realities, in planning its forward strategy for democracy.

I conclude. There aren’t two camps in Middle Eastern studies, between which the Crown Center must maneuver. Middle Eastern studies are only one camp. But it’s dangerous to enter it, because a fever rages inside it. Until it passes, it’s important for the Crown Center to pitch its own tent, on its own ground. It cannot and must not accept the standard answers of Middle Eastern studies to the two questions at the core of debate. In that respect, it can’t but assume a dissident position, for now and for some time to come.

But I’m also fundamentally optimistic. The fever will pass. I see many signs that it’s abating, especially among a younger generation of students and scholars, who think that the status quo must change. In the past, a new Middle East center would eagerly seek to conform to the establishment model, and win acceptance. This is tempting. It’s also a trap. I have expectations of the Crown Center, and they are these: that it celebrate its difference, that it provide an alternative, that it prove there is another way forward. It mustn’t waste time reinventing the wheel. Instead, it should figure out how to fly.

My best wishes, once more, to the center on its inauguration. May it prosper.

Is Zionism Colonialism? The Root Lie

On By Martin Kramer

Remarks delivered by Martin Kramer to a closed forum of New York-area students, convened by CAMERA at Columbia University on April 3, 2005. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Strategies to Combat Bias against Israel?

I have been asked to speak about strategies to combat bias against Israel among professors. This is Jewish organization-speak. Advocacy organizations have strategies, and I am not an advocacy organization. I am an academic and an intellectual. My strategy, if you want to call it that, is simple: it is to identify and speak truth. It is also to acknowledge when truth is elusive, as it sometimes is, and to try to uncover it. So I will leave it to the pro-Israel professionals to give you strategies, if they have any. I don’t have any, unless it is telling the truth.

Edward Said, who was a professor at this university, always used to say that the role of the intellectual is to “speak truth to power.” I could never understand what that addition of “to power” meant. It placed an obvious reservation on the truth-speaking obligation of intellectuals: they should tell the truth, but this truth-speaking should be selective. The powerful deserve the truth, and the powerless … well, what do they get? For Said, the powerful meant the United States, Israel, the West, Arab governments. But the truth is indivisible, and to withhold it from those who have less power, such as the Palestinians, is not only a disservice to them, it places them in jeopardy.

There is one lie that has been told to the Palestinians by a variety of people, and that has done them an immense amount of harm. The failure of intellectuals, and especially of academics supportive of the Palestinians, is that they have become disseminators of this lie. On some campuses, like this one, it has been taught. I would call it the root lie a lie from which grow many other lies.

It is this: Zionism is a form of colonialism. It was not the national movement of the Jewish people to create a state. It was a foreign-backed colonial project, by which settler-colonizers dispossessed an indigenous people. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a tragic clash of nationalisms between peoples who have comparable or even equal claims. This is not a contest between two nations, with national identities and narratives. It is a straightforward case of nineteenth-century-style colonialist dispossession, committed by a non-nation—a collection of land robbers—against a nation from time immemorial, the Palestinian people.

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Zionism and its progeny, Israel, are therefore inherently unjust. They are not the rebirth of a long-suppressed and oppressed people. They are the last breath of a dying colonialism, sustained not by hope but by hatred. Zionism has created the myth of Jewish nationhood. But the Jews are not a nation, and as such they cannot have nationalism. They have only racism: a false sense of their own supremacy and the inferiority of others, above all the Palestinians.

This is a very great lie, and it is a self-serving lie. Those who believe it can sustain in their hearts the hope that in any given span of a few years, Israel will disappear. America will decide to dismantle it, or the Jews will decide that it is too costly to maintain and so will go to other countries that are safer and more comfortable. For colonialism is something that is transient and lasts only so long as it is cost-effective. But authentic nations are forever, the ties of nations to their land are never really severed, and nations are bound by ties of solidarity that cross the generations.

This lie, told to the Palestinians by others and by themselves, explains why they have repeatedly underestimated Zionism, Israel, and Israelis. By now it should be self-evident to any objective observer that Zionism and Israel are driven by nationalism as deep as any other nationalism. Israeli aspirations and contradictions are comparable to aspirations and contradictions in all nationalisms. But to acknowledge this is to accept Israel’s permanence, and even its de facto legitimacy.

A Haven for Falsehood

The tragedy of the academy is that it has become home to countless people whose mission is to prove this lie. They do research, write books, and deliver lectures, all with the same purpose: to establish the truth of a falsehood. Who does this? They include Palestinians, who have paid a price for Israel’s creation and who would like to believe that Israel is a transient affair, destined to end in the state’s demise. They include Jews who do not want to belong to a Jewish nation because they believe they belong to another nation, or to no nation, and feel the need to demonstrate their other loyalty by denying Jewish nationhood not only for themselves but for others. And the list goes on.

For reasons that have to do with the political history of the American academy, these people are represented disproportionately in universities, where they reinforce one another by making a cult of the lie. In an Orwellian way, one earns membership in the cult by declaring black to be white, day to be night and with feeling. At this university, a faculty member has even gone so far as to declare Zionism a form of anti-Semitism against Palestinians. The more far-fetched the lie, the more its inventor is lionized for his courage.

So lie begets lie. Israel, like any state, is not immune to error. The more power a state has, the more consequential its errors, and Israel has succeeded in amassing more power than its neighbors. But for believers in the lie, Israel’s power on any scale is illegitimate, and therefore its every use must serve nefarious ends. Its exercise for any purpose, at any time, is disproportionate by definition. It is not that the Palestinians can do no wrong; believers in the lie will sometimes criticize Palestinians, and some of them enjoyed criticizing Arafat. It is that Israel can do no right. Its very power is a crime against humanity, however it is used.

I have no unique strategies about telling the truth, except to tell it. In a classroom setting, it is not always easy to tell a specific truth in response to a specific lie. Evidence must be investigated and substantiated. I would urge all of you to master as much history as you can from reliable sources. No strategy can substitute for knowledge.

But even without detailed knowledge, you are in a position to challenge the root lie. The root lie is not about details. It is not about precisely what happened in Jenin. It is about starting propositions. If you challenge and puncture this lie from the outset, you have prevailed, even if you are unable to counter lesser lies in real time.

Challenging the Lie at Columbia

This brings me to the case of Columbia. It is not always easy to tell what the controversy is about. Is it about harassment? Bias? Academic freedom? Or is it just another Middle East squabble? Perhaps it is about all these things: after all, there are so many players involved.

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At a profound level though, I think it is also about speaking truth. Who speaks it reliably? Who twists it, and even lies?

This is the significance of the ad hoc committee report. This is a flawed document by a flawed committee. Even so, it reached a striking conclusion. An encounter took place in the classroom between a professor and a student. The student alleged that the professor threatened her: if she denied Israeli atrocities, she must leave the classroom. The professor denied the exchange ever took place. The student stood by her account and other students corroborated it. Weighing the evidence, the committee found the student’s claim to be credible.

This is an official finding by academic peers that the professor in question lied. By finding the student credible, the committee has determined that the professor is incredible. In a university where truth is so elastic and where lies can be purveyed under the protections of academic freedom, this determination is of no mean significance. When students are more credible than professors, even in the eyes of the university itself, and when students are deemed to have told the truth, and professors are deemed to have lied, this is a world turned upside down.

The university does not manufacture widgets. Its product is supposed to be the truth. When someone plagiarizes, cheats, or lies in an academic setting, these are the equivalent of theft. An act of theft is not always an isolated act. Often it forms part of a pattern, even part of a culture.

The point that students should press at Columbia is this: we are tired of being lied to, even in a postmodern environment where truth is fungible. There is a pattern and a culture, and it does not just relate to classroom conduct. Much more consequential lies are in evidence in the works of the professors in question. They are no longer deserving of trust. This is not a demand for balance or diversity. This is a demand for truth, and this is what Columbia owes us.

Resolving Columbia’s crisis is a matter of practicalities. But these practicalities must be subordinate to principles. Advocacy teaching is antithetical to the truth-speaking mission of the university. Columbia has been compromised; it must now redeem itself. And it must do so not only by reaffirming its commitment to academic freedom, but by reaffirming its commitment to truth.

Arab Studies: My Critical Review

On By Martin Kramer

On April 1, 2005, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University hosted a panel on “Arab Studies in the Cross-hairs,” as part of the center’s thirtieth-anniversary symposium entitled “Arab Studies: A Critical Review.” Participants on the panel including Michael Hudson, As’ad AbuKhalil, and Martin Kramer.

The following are Martin Kramer’s remarks, as delivered. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

It’s a privilege for me to address this symposium. It’s no secret that I’ve been an occasional critic of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. So I commend the organizers of this symposium for including me in the program. The leadership position of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies is so unassailable, that it can afford to do what no other Title VI center has deigned to do since I published Ivory Towers on Sand: offer me a platform. It’s a sign of your strength that I am here today.

This conference has yet to live up to its title. It is devoted to Arab studies, but it hasn’t been a critical review. It’s been a self-validating review. Virtually all the criticism has been directed against perceived rivals. That’s telling, and it leaves me wondering what a conference called “Arab Studies: A Celebration” might look like.

This lack of deep introspection would bewilder a complete outsider. The hand-wringing lament about the think tanks; the ritual denunciations of any U.S. policy, from preemptive war through democracy promotion; the hagiographic embellishments of the Edward Said legend; the exorcism of Bernard Lewis—and none of that rigorous self-criticism that was the hallmark of Hisham Sharabi, to whose memory this symposium is devoted. I have a professional interest in these things, because they validate my own assertions, sometimes even beyond my expectations. But to anyone else, these proceedings must seem fundamentalist in the narrowness of their range.

Then again, I am here, and my mission is very simple. It isn’t to convince anyone in this room—that’s beyond my power. It is to plant a seed of doubt. If you find yourself, against every impulse and instinct, agreeing with just one thing I say, I will regard this morning as well spent.

No one has bothered to characterize Middle Eastern studies since your last state-of-the-art conference fifteen years ago. In the 1990s, I would argue, Middle Eastern studies became comfortable, routine, and self-congratulatory. The revolutionaries, the grad students of the 1970s, had become much-titled members of the establishment. Edward Said’s insights had hardened among his disciples into dogmatic pieties. Students had ceased to rebel. MESA presidents grumbled about the rise of the think tanks, but no one rose to the challenge. Federal funding stayed reliably constant, and people stopped worrying about it. There was a ripple of concern when the concept of area studies came under question, but the threat soon passed. As for the Middle East itself, the field shared in the general complacency that preceded 9/11, and perhaps even contributed to it. So Ivory Towers on Sand was a shot well placed, and perfectly timed.

Or so it seemed at the time. Since then, I have watched in wonder as Middle Eastern studies have advanced from gain to gain. On the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I warned Congress not to put another penny into Middle Eastern studies, and a month later it invested millions more. Title VI funding rose from $80 million to over $100 million a year, and most of the increase has gone to the study of Muslim areas. Today, there are seventeen National Resource Centers for the Middle East, more than at any time in American history. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States wanted to boost study of the Middle East, and it had no alternative to the edifice built over the previous fifty years. President Bush will go down as the Title VI president, and the greatest material patron of Middle Eastern studies in American history. The prevailing sentiment in this administration might be conveyed by paraphrasing Secretary Rumsfeld: you go to war with the Middle Eastern studies you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have.

There’s more. The governing ideas of Middle Eastern studies in the 1990s have become the bedrock of current U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The first of these ideas is that a vibrant civil society exists just beneath the surface of Middle Eastern polities, and that a major reason it hasn’t surfaced is U.S. acquiescence in or support for authoritarian regimes. This presumption was the basis of the “civil society” industry of the 1990s in Middle Eastern studies. The second idea is the diversity of Islamism, and its openness to moderation through inclusion in the political process. Professor Esposito famously championed this idea from this university. These two concepts governed Middle Eastern studies in the 1990s. They are a powerful current in the Middle East policy of the Bush administration today, occupying a point of convergence among liberalism, post-Orientalism, and neoconservatism. That point is this: a repudiation of Arab-Muslim exceptionalism.

The existence of such a convergence isn’t acknowledged in academe. The self-perception of Middle Eastern studies, these past several years, has been one of a field under virtual siege, a field whose dominant ideas have been totally ignored by the powers-that-be. This notion of a field besieged and scorned is a self-serving myth. Those who repeat it show no grasp of the complex and ironic processes by which academic paradigms can and do percolate to the top of the decision-making pyramid. By such a process, an idea like pressuring friendly regimes to yield to “moderate” Islamists as a way-station to democracy winds its way from the academy to the American Enterprise Institute and then to the inner sanctums—trimmed, adjusted, and repackaged, but essentially intact. U.S. policy has come to depend in good part on paradigms that originated in the workshops of Middle Eastern studies. Just as there were no other Middle Eastern studies into which government could pour money, there were no alternative paradigms about state and society which it could appropriate.

So the state-society paradigms of Middle Eastern studies won by default. You might lament that your specific ideas on Iraq and Palestine do not resonate. But on the use of American force and the primacy of Palestine, you have a reputation of being as doctrinaire as an anti-war group, and as predictable as an ethnic lobby. Where you claim some exclusive expertise, though, your ideas have percolated upwards.

Even the attacks on the field have not harmed the field, and probably benefited it. Their effect has been to alleviate the traditional isolation of Middle Eastern studies within the academy.

Campus Watch bore sufficient resemblance to a 1950s blacklist that it could be portrayed as such, and this had the effect of rallying academics around the field.

H.R.3077, as misrepresented in the academy, rallied all of international and area studies around Middle Eastern studies, to repel the assault. In the process, Middle Eastern studies gained something they had never had: high-level academic allies. The tangible result of the controversy has been almost $2 million in contracts to the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council, to study Title VI. In all likelihood, they will pronounce Title VI healthy—and in need of a lot more money.

As for the Columbia affair, the endgame will involve a significant expansion of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, which is likely to be emulated by other universities that encounter similar problems.

In sum, Middle Eastern studies, post-9/11, are not plunged into an existential crisis. To the contrary: they’re awash in resources, their ideas have resonated in high places, and all of academe has rallied to their defense. It’s been impossible to exclude them from their share of the spoils of war—and not for want of trying.

Is this not the moment for the leaders of the field finally to address the well-grounded critique of Middle Eastern studies? It seems to me that from the position of strength enjoyed by Middle Eastern studies—and this Center is an example—debate and reassessment pose no danger.

Let me remind you of the nature of that critique, as I made it in Ivory Towers. It wasn’t primarily about bias. It was about error. The book’s two core chapters dealt with errors in assessing the aims and the trajectory of Islamism; and errors in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the state and of civil society. In a sentence, the perils of Islamism had been underestimated, the potential of civil society had been overestimated. In pointing out errors, I hoped to compel a reexamination of underlying paradigms.

I was disappointed. This is not the place to consider the arguments of the reviewers in detail. For now, I note that a few themes recur, the most common being that I read selectively, and so missed this or that article, which would have proved that insiders knew precisely of the pitfalls I pointed to; or that I misunderstood what I did read because of my inadequate grounding in the social sciences, especially as I seemed to insist on accurate prediction as a measure of their validity. (I’m amused, a few years later, to see how some of the very same academics now claim validity for their expertise by citing their predictions on Iraq.) Interestingly, quite a few reviewers were suddenly at pains to protest that the field did not answer to Edward Said; and one reviewer even boxed Said and I together, as the authors of two equally outrageous attacks on the field.

Now I actually think I did rather better than Said did in Orientalism in at least one respect, in identifying the actual center of the field I critiqued. But I will accept the parallel, for the sake of argument. Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, may have been selective in its use of evidence. Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, may have lacked nuance in representing the state of certain disciplines. Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, may have had a polemical edge, since it named names. But Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, also spoke a fundamental truth, and it is the same truth: that the Western academy still represents the Middle East as it needs it to be, and as it wants it to be.

Edward Said wrote this nearly twenty-five years ago, and I quote:

There is no denying that a scholar sitting in Oxford or Boston writes and researches principally, though not exclusively, according to standards, conventions, and expectations shaped by his or her peers, not by the Muslims being studied. This is a truism, perhaps, but it needs emphasis just the same.

This is just as true now as it was then, even though the standards, conventions and expectations largely conform to those established by Said himself. In fact, it’s even truer, because, over the past twenty years, those conventions have grown rigid and unforgiving. Under the illusion that scholars had escaped Said’s truism, that they now really knew “the Muslims being studied,” a quiet purge swept Middle Eastern studies. The old guild, which tended to value proficiency, gave way to a popular front, which insisted upon conformity. The idea spread that Middle Eastern studies, a small and incestuous field at the best of times, didn’t need diversity. Their mission was to stand as a bulwark against the media, the government, and the think tanks.

In Ivory Towers, I showed how “the Muslims being studied” still somehow managed to elude even this popular front, which had erred precisely because it had failed to diversify. And I concluded that this problem could only be solved by deliberately reopening Middle Eastern studies. The Middle Eastern studies nomenklatura may be impossible to abolish, I wrote, but it must permit opposition. And I would argue that there is no better moment to run that risk than now.

Why now? The history of Middle Eastern studies is largely one of boom and bust. At the moment, the field is booming. But there is another truism I bring in the book, this one from Gustav von Grunebaum. I quote:

No group, society, or civilization, so history allows us to postulate, will consistently support an intellectual endeavor unless it believes this effort to be serviceable either to its practical or to its existential needs.

Middle Eastern studies cannot escape this truism either, and it means they must always justify themselves, at some level, by meeting practical and existential needs. And they must do so more insistently than, say, postcolonial studies, precisely because they’re addicted to the public treasury, which has opened up to them in the name of national security.

Earlier I said that Middle Eastern studies have prospered by default since 9/11. But the fact that they don’t prioritize what the nation prioritizes isn’t a secret anymore. Of course no one expects the field to chain itself to meeting practical and existential needs. The problem is that it stigmatizes and punishes the very few who are willing to consider issues from just that angle. As a result, the genteel game, by which vice-provosts go to Washington to pitch area studies in the nation’s service, and Washington gives them benefit of the doubt, has become a little too transparent.

I get messages all the time from latecomers and newcomers who say they want to do things differently, and directly answer the needs not being met by Middle Eastern studies. These aren’t think tankers, these are academics, and they have identified a willingness in university administrations to generate entirely new academic programs that do meet those needs. I go from here to Brandeis, which is inaugurating a new Middle East center. Others are in the planning stage. Academe is full of entrepreneurs and poachers.

If the present boom is not to end in another bust, along with the creation of a parallel universe of Middle Eastern studies—in addition to the think-tank parallel universe—von Grunebaum’s truism must be acknowledged and accepted. The most effective way to do that is to allow a more diverse range of scholars to find their places at the table. The myth of the siege should be set aside; the convergence I alluded to should be acknowledged; the gatekeepers should reopen the gates.

As someone who was educated in Middle East programs and centers at Princeton and Columbia, who taught in or alongside major centers at Chicago and here at Georgetown, who for years attended MESA, I prefer to share one table. If those days are gone forever, then I would like to hear it—I will have learned something important at this meeting. If others share my preference, then I would like to hear that too, and so would many others through me. Then perhaps this meeting will have been a beginning.

My congratulations to the Center on its thirtieth anniversary. I admire its many achievements.