Category: Sandbox

Bulliet on target at Columbia

On By Martin Kramer

This week’s New York Magazine runs a big feature story on the mess in Columbia’s Middle East department (MEALAC), and it’s well worth reading. I’m quoted there, but I said predictable things. Not so Professor Richard Bulliet, who teaches Islamic and Middle Eastern history in the History department:

The university should have looked at MEALAC five or ten years ago. It’s become locked into a postmodernist, postcolonialist point of view, one that wasn’t necessarily well adapted to giving students instruction about the Middle East…. We’ve had advocacy in the classroom for a long time. But in the areas where it’s most visible, like black studies and women’s studies, the point of view tends to coincide with the outlook of the Columbia community… But here we have an area where no consensus exists. And that’s the problem.

Bulliet and I have crossed swords a few times (he’s had the last word for now, in his recent book), but we’re on speaking terms, and I’d heard this from him in person. That someone of his standing at Columbia should have come forward now to criticize MEALAC in the media is testament to the damage the rogue department is doing to the university. And it’s another sign that the spell of intimidation cast by the radicals has been broken. Professor Bulliet: Bravo aleik.

Noah Feldman: no more Baghdad

On By Martin Kramer

Noah Feldman is the young NYU law professor who was tapped by the Coalition Provisional Authority back in 2003 to help Iraqis write their constitution. He later fell out with the CPA and returned to New York in a huff. Feldman has recently lamented that he’s infamous in the Arab world, because Edward Said wrote an article noting he was raised as an Orthodox Jew. “The article morphed and spread [in Arabic translation], until I became known as a Zionist agent. I became nervous, and I believe it would be dangerous for me to go back.”

The irony is that Feldman set himself up. It was he who, in spring 2003, pumped the New York Times and the Israeli press with the self-promotional saga of his Orthodox background. This is what I wrote in those glory days, before there was any Iraqi resistance or beheading of foreigners: “I question the wisdom of all the to-do about Feldman’s Jewish upbringing. In America, it’s part of the novelty—so much so that Feldman seems to think that there’s no reason not to dwell on it…. [But] there are undoubtedly people in Iraq who would be delighted to bag an American Jew. I urge Feldman to watch his back.” Feldman didn’t understand enough about the temperament of the region to know that he was making a mistake, and Said made sure it caught up with him. Feldman once told an interviewer that being in Baghdad was “invigorating—there is nothing like putting your money where your mouth is.” Well, up to a point. And since Professor Feldman has written an entire book enumerating the mistakes of his lessers in Iraq, he might acknowledge just one of his own.

My friends, the Crimean Tatars

On By Martin Kramer

In my very first book, Islam Assembled (1986), I devoted a chapter to the (unsuccessful) efforts of the Crimean Tatar reformer, Ismail Bey Gaspirali, to convene a pan-Islamic congress in Cairo in 1907. Now that chapter has been translated into Turkish and included in a huge collected volume on Gaspirali, published in Ankara by the Association of Crimean Turks for Culture and Mutual Aid. I’m flattered to have been included. And this gives me the opportunity to note that if you’re on a campus, you can read Islam Assembled online, via the History E-Book Project of the American Council of Learned Societies. (Yeah, I know. I should have stuck to that stuff.)