Tag: 9/11

The War on Terror

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered these remarks on October 20, 2001, at the Weinberg Founders Conference, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. They were published in War on Terror: The Middle East Dimension (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2002), pp. 17-24. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

THERE IS AN OLD ADAGE that the first casualty of war is the truth. If offering up this casualty can spare you real casualties in lives, it is worth sacrificing some truth. I heard it said the other day, by a very accomplished analyst of the Middle East, that this is not the time for too deep an analysis. There is something to be said for that: the focus must be on winning. Yet, it is still important to get basic assumptions right, and not to let certain untruths — let us call them myths — go unchecked for too long. Practicing certain economies of truth is supposed to handicap the enemy. But if these turn into our own myths, they could wind up handicapping us.

In that spirit, I want to focus on some myths that have emerged in the aftermath of September 11. Some myths, of course, have had a very short shelf life. I no longer see any need to explode the myth that September 11 was a protest against Israel. This myth flourished briefly in the first few days after the attacks, but now it has been relegated to the furthest margins of the public arena. Yes, most people think progress between Israelis and Palestinians would help. But very few people believe that the actual attacks were motivated by the breakdown of the “peace process,” especially as we know that September 11 was set in motion long before that breakdown. And few think that progress in the peace process would deter future attacks. The more we learn about this plot, the more it seems to have operated on several regional levels. September 11 certainly did not constitute a chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and it seems to belong properly in another book.

Yet, two other myths have taken root, largely because they have arisen within influential quarters in this country. The first purports to explain the motives of the attackers, the second purports to interpret the reaction of the Arab world. These myths are already powerfully ensconced in the American understanding of September 11. Unfortunately, they are both dangerous. By misreading the terrorist motive and the Arab response, the United States, in the best instance, could cloud the objectives of this war. In the worst instance, it could effectively invite further terrorist attacks.

The first myth has to do with motive in the most general sense, and it has been propagated most effectively by a part of the media. Perhaps it reached fullest flower in the cover article of the October 15, 2001 issue of Newsweek: Fareed Zakaria’s mega-essay “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” In that piece, Zakaria argues that the failed states and collapsing societies of the Arab world are awash in resentment against the creativity, wealth, and democracy of the West. The success of America, and the influence radiated by that success, drives them to distraction — and to terrible deeds. The world’s greatest losers, the Arabs, are seeking revenge against the world’s greatest winners, the Americans. Francis Fukuyama has written something similar, and it can well be argued that it has become the preferred spin of those who think history has truly ended with the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. What we are dealing with, they seem to say, is a rear-guard action by the losers in the great battle among organizing principles of humankind. Needless to say, by this analysis, we do flatter ourselves a bit.

I want to propose to you a different thesis. Yes, America is hated by many Muslims, and it is a reflection of their resentment against American success and power. But it is actually worse, because this rage against America is mingled with contempt — contempt for America’s perceived weakness, a weakness most manifest in the Middle East. It is the contempt, not the hatred, which poses the immediate danger. And while you cannot do anything about the hatred — after all, it is a side effect of your success — you can and must do something to diminish the contempt.

Let me frame the question this way: are we certain that in Arab and Muslim eyes, the United States really does look like the great winner? It is not difficult to see why Osama bin Laden and his cohorts have a rather different view. After all, they defeated another superpower, the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. You think you won the Cold War. They think they won it. To them, the United States is a similar giant with similar feet of clay. And they summon their best evidence right from their doorstep, in the Middle East.

The new contempt dates from the Iranian revolution, “Exhibit A” for American weakness. In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini threw out the Shah, held America hostage, sent his agents to kill Americans by the hundreds in Lebanon, and got away with it. Iran is a shining instance of successful defiance of the United States, evidence that you can run a major state in the region for more than twenty years completely outside the orbit of American influence. The list of most-wanted terrorists was published recently. Several of those on that list killed Americans sixteen years ago, and still roam free in Iran.

In the 1990s, the record was no better. Saddam Husayn crossed every line in the sand, spit in the face of the United States, and got pummeled in return — but he still stands on his own two feet. Other Arabs may not have a lot of sympathy for Saddam. But he is living, breathing proof in their eyes that the United States never presses its advantage, that it remains highly “risk-averse” in the Middle East, that it does not always get its man, and that you can defy the last superpower and live to fight another day.

Do you remember the horror of Pan Am 103? Lockerbie? A single Libyan operative went to prison for this, while Muammar Qadhafi recently celebrated his thirty-second year in power. Perhaps removing Qadhafi would have been a very tall order. But what about removing the Somali warlord Muhammad Aideed, against whom a previous administration sent the Marines? It turned out that getting him was too tall an order as well.

Consider Osama bin Laden. He has been America’s “most wanted” for years. Yet, aside from a few misguided cruise missiles, no serious operation was mounted against him until now. Many Muslims admire him not just because of what he says about the United States, but because the United States has not killed him yet. The bin Laden we saw in the most recent video was not spewing hate, he was displaying outright contempt, wagging his finger at America while sipping tea.

Perhaps there is rage against American power in these attacks. But there is even more contempt for America’s weakness — its perceived lack of resolve; its quickness to forgive, or at least forget; its penchant for creating categorical boxes, like the state sponsors of terrorism list, and then ignoring them altogether. This is perceived as weakness, and when you are perceived as weak in the Middle East, you become a tempting target and the vultures begin to circle. Needless to say, the images of the Twin Towers in flames have only compounded the problem. America now appears still weaker, more vulnerable than ever.

But paradoxically, Americans seem almost too concerned with the hatred. America wants and even expects to be loved in the world. It wants to be admired and respected. And it is shocked to discover that in many quarters, it is hated. The desire to be loved, the bewilderment at being despised, are endearing American foibles. And it is curiously endearing to see American statesmen running to mosques, telling the world that Islam is a religion of peace — in the hope that this love will be returned.

But September 11 has to bring America to two realizations. First, while it is good to be loved and admired, it is more important to be feared. The United States is not sufficiently feared in the Middle East. If it wants to maintain its interests or even simply deter attacks against its own homeland, it is going to have to rectify that impression. And second, although no one likes to be the target of hatred, it is far worse to be the subject of contempt. Look, for example, at the suicide pilots, the men who spent long months, even years, here in America. What is striking is not their hatred for this country, but their contempt: the fact that this country is so naively trusting of foreigners, that it gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, that it is willing to sell the very training needed to destroy it.

The people in the streets of Karachi or Cairo who burn U.S. president George W. Bush in effigy are in a blind rage, but they are not dangerous. They do not know enough about America to be dangerous. The dangerous ones are like these suicide pilots — those who are familiar with America, who know where to find a Wal-Mart or how to get a credit card, whose idea of the “women of paradise” probably owes more to MTV than to anything they saw back in their dusty corner of Saudi Arabia. Their own familiarity with America has bred a deep contempt, far more deadly than impotent rage. The hatred will always be there. It comes with the turf, and it is the price of success. Get used to it. But contempt is another story. It is much more dangerous, and it will eat away at your deterrence,

Contempt can be banished, however, if you work at it. Let me summarize this way: nothing engenders greater respect in the Middle East than the rewarding of your friends and the certain punishment of your enemies. Over the past two decades, the United States has gained a reputation for inconsistency on both counts. And this has left America more vulnerable. American credibility cannot be reestablished overnight. But the United States has now been given an opportunity, a license, to rebuild it. It is the gift given by the thousands who perished, and it seems to me absolutely crucial that this second chance not be missed — not only if U.S. interests are to be defended abroad, but if the American way of life is to be preserved at home.

And in the region, this means you must smite your enemy in a decisive and demonstrative way. This requires two things. First, you must get rid of the Taliban regime. The United States has not deposed a regime in the Middle East in fifty years. It must do so now. Second, you must get Osama bin Laden — and not in one, two, or sixteen years. Every day he lives is an affront to American credibility.

Let me be clear: nothing you do will ever even the score for September 11. But do these two things, and you will rebuild the gaping hole left in your wall of deterrence. Do these two things, and you will create awe and fear among the multitudes. Fail, and you will engender derision and contempt — and the fear will be yours. Fail, and the “war against terror” could become something like the “war on drugs” — not a matter of a few years but of decades, a struggle waged indecisively against a succession of bin Laden impersonators who continue along the path of terror because the gains outweigh the risks, and in the end it pays off.

I come now to the second myth, regarding the Arab response. This one has its origins not in the media but in government. It is best appreciated in a quotation, from Secretary of State Colin Powell: “Out of a deep sense of shared humanity, and a chilling appreciation of common vulnerability to terrorism, we see new scope to strengthen our relations with the Islamic world.”

No one can doubt all of our shared humanity, or that it includes the Islamic world. And no one can doubt that it is in America’s interest to strengthen relations with the Islamic world. But I would like to focus on an assumption that I found perplexing: that the Arab world shares with America “a chilling appreciation of common vulnerability to terrorism.” Or as someone else put it, “Saudi and Egyptian support is not a favor to us; it is an act of self-defense.” When I first read these arguments, I was perplexed, because something about them did not ring precisely true. Now, after over a month of American diplomacy predicated on this assumption, I am more certain than ever that it is not true — and because it is false, any attempt to build a coalition on this assumption is destined to falter and fail.

Obviously, Osama bin Laden is a Saudi, and the perpetrators of the crimes in New York and Washington were Saudis and Egyptians. Bin Laden’s network is made up primarily of nationals of the Arab countries in the Middle East. It is also true that this network would like to topple Arab regimes. But Osama bin Laden wound up in Afghanistan for a reason. And the reason, in a nutshell, is this: his brand of Islamic fundamentalism has been driven out of the Arab Middle East, where it has ceased to be much of a problem.

Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the lot of them are in Afghanistan precisely because they failed in the Middle East. When the Afghan jihad ended, bin Laden and many other Arabs left Afghanistan to return to the region. Once in place, they did try to terrorize the regimes, assassinate leaders, and seize power. But they failed. By the late 1990s, those regimes had them cornered. The rulers in the Arab world were not about to be terrorized out of their presidential or royal palaces, and they unleashed a massive counteroffensive. Egypt put some 50,000 fundamentalists in its prisons; hundreds went to the gallows. In Saudi Arabia, those who were not beheaded were exiled. Today, no Arab regime faces a credible threat from Islamist extremists.

In fact, what happened in New York and Washington was, to some extent, a consequence of the Arab success in pushing those like bin Laden to the margins. Since the extremists could not defeat the Arab regimes, they went over their heads and attacked the American patron of those regimes. Since they could not build a network in Saudi Arabia or Egypt without it being betrayed and its members being sent off to torture chambers, they built networks in East Africa, and even in America itself.

Osama bin Laden and his crowd want to drive America from the entire Middle East, in order to topple regimes. But they have no strong base in the Middle East itself, nor can they easily strike there. So they have gone straight for the jugular — and there is no greater jugular than lower Manhattan.

This means that, at the moment, there is no one in the Middle East who shares a sense of “common vulnerability” to terrorism, except Israel. In the 1990s, the Arab states had a terrorism problem, and they got rid of it by the usual methods: mass arrests, torture, expulsions, “disappearances,” and so on. These states are not threatened in any way by terrorism, which they have pushed out to Afghanistan and the West where it is somebody else’s problem — above all, America’s. In the region, there is some sympathy for bin Laden because he symbolizes defiance of the West. But only the smallest minority of Arabs would want to live under a Taliban-style regime. Actually, there seems to be less “turmoil” in the Arab street than there was during the Gulf War. The Arab world is riveted by the September 11 story, but so far it has not been moved by it.

The regimes are not threatened, and this is why the Arabs are not going to be very predictable partners in this coalition. Every time Americans sit down to talk to them about terrorism, they are going to want to talk about other things that really do worry them: what they want from Israel, how many weapons they need, how much their debts weigh on them, or how much they want for their oil.

One can understand why some American diplomats might look upon this “war against terror” as a possible theme around which to organize the Middle East. Right now, there is no organizing theme, and that is a problem. During the Cold War, the United States tried to organize the region on the basis of the Soviet threat, which inspired the Baghdad Pact, CENTO, and so on. This never worked particularly well, because the states of the region felt more threatened by one another than by the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War, the United States tried to organize the Middle East around the “peace process” and economic cooperation, the so-called “new Middle East.” This, too, never quite worked, since Arabs feared it might become a form of veiled Israeli hegemony.

Now some seem intent on organizing the region around the “war against terror,” buttressed by the ancillary notion that America is the true defender of Islam. All of this is perfectly understandable, but let us be frank. The war on terror is shaky scaffolding for a new Middle East architecture — even shakier than the Soviet threat and the “peace process.” Already the Saudis are stonewalling, the Egyptians are balking — and these are America’s friends. Arab governments do not need American help to fend off fundamentalist terrorism these days; they are looking for some bigger payoff before they get on board.

But even if the Arab governments were willing, and there were something to be gained from their cooperation, chasing after these fickle friends has a major downside: it signals that the United States needs the blessings of others to respond to an attack on its own territory. America is saying that even its own self-defense is legitimate only if it is approved by a “rainbow coalition,” which ironically includes not a few veteran America-bashers. There is something unseemly in this image of the United States seeking the support of a lot of tin pots. If the United States smashes the Taliban and gets bin Laden, no damage will have been done. But if this whole grand coalition fails to meet minimal goals, it could contribute to the kind of contempt that made September 11 an appealing strategy in the first place.

These then, it seems to me, are two myths that must be challenged before the end of hostilities. The war’s outcome must create awe and banish contempt. No amount of kowtowing to Islam can substitute for victory. And since America is going to win this war anyway, this victory should be made to look unquestionably like America’s triumph, not the triumph of a gerrymandered coalition. The less credit you share out, the more awe you will induce.

Finally, do not neglect your friends. There is an old adage: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. Be careful not to confuse the two. Israel does not need to be a big cog in this coalition — the latter is unlikely to last very long anyway. But America will do itself more harm if it even appears to be shunning its friends. This will not produce more Arab respect; it will only invite more Arab contempt — adding to the problem, rather than subtracting from it.

The best guarantee that there will not be a next time is for America to rely on itself to win this war, and on your proven friends to build a common wall of deterrence. So far, the going has been easy in the American offensive against terror. At some point, it will get tough. When it does, the United States will find out who its real friends are. And on that day, it will need more than Arabic.

Q&A

Kanan Makiya, Iraq Research and Documentation Project: Martin, in your address, why did you not include regime change in the Arab world at large — not just in Afghanistan — as one prong of a new, more decisive U.S. policy in the region. If the United States wants to send a message to the Arab world, should it not also have a target in the Arab world?

Martin Kramer: I do not think anyone wants to become involved in a war on two fronts simultaneously. First, achieve these two minimal goals [of removing the Taliban and getting Bin Laden] in Afghanistan. Then America can look across the region, take the measure of other opportunities, and see what can be done to reverse — not just stall — this trend of growing contempt for the United States. There are other possibilities, but the United States will not be able to pursue other options until it has had clear success in the war that it has declared. First, there has to be something that looks and tastes like victory in Afghanistan.

Philip Gordon, Brookings Institution: Even if America deals successfully with Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan, is there not great potential for the larger issue — that is, the nature of the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt — to remain an American problem? Should we not think much more seriously about how to deal with that problem?

Kramer: The United States has first to decide what the meaning of September 11 is for the Middle East. Is it “day one” of an entirely new era in which all past sins are forgiven and everyone is judged by their conduct henceforth? To some extent, that is the message the United States has sent in constructing its coalition. Lots of regimes have had their slates wiped clean. It seems that at this moment the only troublemaker who has carried a balance over into this new era is Iraq, although it is not at all clear just how much has been carried over. A decision will have to be made as to whether September 11 has created a new world in which everyone begins anew with a tabula rasa.

I am worried by the notion that the next phase, whether or not Iraq is a target, should involve American-initiated efforts to reform the politics of the Middle East, to create political space, and so forth. Right now, the United States does not have enough Arabic speakers to translate and analyze all of the plots fomenting against it; how will Washington reform the politics of the Arab world? It is a very tall order indeed.

A little humility is in order here. The United States, unlike Britain and France, has always been most effective when it operates “over the horizon” and “offshore.” Those arguing for engagement in political reform are talking about a deep and intimate kind of involvement in an incredibly complex labyrinth.

The Arab world looks like a swamp, but it actually could be worse. When the Soviet Union collapsed, everyone assumed that things would get better in the Balkans. In much of Europe they did, but in that corner of Europe things got much worse. There has not been a Bosnia or a Rwanda in the Arab world in the last decade, and there has to be some caution in tinkering with the existing order. Yes, it would be wonderful if there were more space in the politics of the Arab world. But it would be disastrous if we had one or two or more Bosnias on our hands as a result.

Book launch: Ivory Towers on Sand

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer offered these remarks at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy on October 16, 2001, on the occasion of the launch of his book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

A book launching is a curious sort of event. There’s no point in summarizing the book itself. Here it is, and the gist of my argument is summarized in at least three places: the back cover, the preface, and the introduction. Nor do I want to give away the plot—the whodunit. The plot is pretty intricate, it has a stellar cast, and I don’t want to spoil the reading. In a launching, the author’s job is not so much to enlighten you as to tease you, and the message is simple: read my book.

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If you do read it, you’ll find confirmation for something many of you have probably suspected for a long time: for more than twenty years, Middle Eastern studies in this country have been a thoroughly unreliable guide to the Middle East itself. A generation ago, a group of younger scholars ritually assassinated the character of their orientalist forebears, and took over the institutions of the field. Those forebears had created a remarkable little empire, but they were sideswiped by the Palestinian “awakening,” the Lebanese civil war, and the Iranian revolution. Edward Said led the assault on the Bastille, and a new generation took over from the mid-1980s. These self-described post-orientalists promised to get things right. As one of their leaders put it, “Middle Eastern politics are much less unpredictable than is often supposed.” This book takes Middle Eastern studies up on that claim. And what I demonstrate is this: the record of Middle Eastern studies, in prediction and analysis, has been one of repeated, collective failure.

Of course, many issues came to the top of the agenda in Middle Eastern studies during these two decades, and I don’t cover them all. Instead, I focus on the two that seem to me most central, because they require deft analysis of state and society. Anyone can make a mistake in analyzing the acts of an individual leader, or the outcome of a battle. Getting these things right is the job of intelligence agencies, not scholars. The essence of academic expertise is an understanding of the larger forces at work on society and state—the shifts of landscape that are only visible from some height above the daily rush of events. There were two issues of this magnitude that preoccupied Middle Eastern studies in the 1980s and 1990s: Islamism and civil society.

Had one spent the last twenty years locked up in a room only with the work of academic scholars, or been condemned, as in an episode of the Twilight Zone, to attend every panel of every conference of the Middle East Studies Association, one would have emerged into daylight expecting to see the following: first, a Middle East full of benign and non-violent Muslim movements, the end result of an “Islamic Reformation,” all promoting political pluralism in their respective polities; and second, a flourishing of “civil society,” and a withering of the authoritarian state.

None of this came to pass. Muslim movements never moved toward pluralism and tolerance. The influence of Osama bin Laden exceeds the combined impact of all the “Muslim Martin Luthers” unearthed by the academics. “Civil society” is either dead or coopted across the region. And the authoritarian state has only strengthened its hold. The reams of articles and the shelves of books produced to sustain academic paradigms and win tenure are now silent monuments to what one scholar rather unscientifically described as “wishful thinking.” This is how the academics wanted the Middle East to evolve; this is how their theories predicted it would evolve. And they were wrong.

Of course, the interesting question is why. Experts always make mistakes. Anyone who has had dealings with a stockbroker, a physician, or a car mechanic, knows this for a fact. None of us has a perfect record; our reputations rest, at best, on getting things right over fifty percent of the time. Far more interesting is collective error, when a whole bevy of experts get things wrong in the identical way. This happens when the internal dynamics of a group are so intense that they overwhelm, even shut out, external evidence.

This is precisely what has happened in Middle Eastern studies. Take a tiny field with under 3,000 practitioners; add to it a whole mish-mash of ethnic rivalries and political disagreements; subject it to the influence of an academic celebrity, speaking in the name of powerful extra-disciplinary theories; limit accountability to “peer review;” and then tell the whole crowd that the possibility for future expansion is next to nil. The result will be a group of people who are insecure, defensive, self-obsessed, and more focused on academic survival than on the ostensible subject of their study. This is exactly what has happened in Middle Eastern studies. Their product will tell you an immense amount about the norms and expectations of their American surroundings, academic fashion, and ethnic politics—and very little about the Middle East. As a result, the credibility of Middle Eastern studies in the general public has seen a steady decline. I devote an entire chapter to the ways in which Washington has come to write off Middle Eastern studies. I’ve written an entire chapter on how the think tanks and journalists filled the gap, and how the foundations and the disciplines withdrew their favor. For some time now, Middle Eastern studies have been in dire straits—and until September 11, no one really cared.

That’s a bit surprising, since for over forty years, Middle Eastern studies have been supported by taxpayer dollars. Under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, the U.S. government supports over a dozen National Resource Centers for the Middle East. You’ll find a listing in the appendix. You would think that from time to time, at least the government might take an interest in what was happening. But while government money has been crucial for this tiny field, it’s a speck on the federal budget—so much so that, basically, the academics are allowed to divvy it up themselves, according to their own criteria. The Title VI appropriation has effectively become a semi-entitlement, with no real measures of how it serves the national needs of the United States.

Until September 11, then, Middle Eastern studies had become a kind of educational backwater—disconnected from the Middle East, isolated from the public and government, shunned by the disciplines, engrossed in self-contemplation. That was where I picked up the research and writing of this book. But over the last month, the world has changed—and it has certainly changed for Middle Eastern studies.

Not that anyone in Middle Eastern studies was ready for it. Nothing you would have read from academe would have given you the least inkling that September 11 was even possible. I will be kind, and describe this as a failure of imagination. Now of course, it was not just Middle Eastern studies that failed. After all, we’re in Washington today. But Middle Eastern studies were a special case. It was here that one found an actual denial of the potential of terrorism, even a reluctance to use the word terrorism as an analytical category. (Look at the Middle East Studies Association statement on September 11: it is an exercise is avoiding recourse to this one word.) It was here that one found the most profound contempt for the journalists and mavericks who did argue that a September 11 was possible. Nearly all of us were surprised; but few of us were as surprised as the mandarins of Middle Eastern studies. “Middle Eastern politics are much less unpredictable than is often supposed,” one of their leaders had written. That same professor, returning from Europe, wound up stuck in Nova Scotia when the United States closed its airspace on September 11.

In fact, September 11 took all of Middle Eastern studies by surprise—and left them stranded intellectually in Nova Scotia. The dominant paradigm of Middle Eastern studies could never have predicted this event, and cannot explain it after the fact. At the start of the 1990s, one of the champions of this paradigm wrote the following: “The nineties will prove to be a decade of new alliances and alignments in which the Islamic movements will challenge rather than threaten their societies and the West.” Instead, America got a decade punctuated by the bombing of the World Trade Center, Khobar, Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam; the region got indiscriminate terror from the GIA, Hamas, and the Gamaa Islamiyya, and the proliferation of suicide bombings. Usama bin Ladin is but the culmination of this process. And when he did appear, this same champion wrote that focusing on him, and I quote, “risks catapulting one of many sources of terror to center stage.” Now we have had September 11, and I submit that it is inexplicable if you accept the assumptions that have governed Middle Eastern studies these last twenty years. In the book, I resist invoking Thomas Kuhn, but this is the kind of event that should compel a paradigm shift.

Instead, Middle Eastern studies are enjoying a windfall. Let me divide it into three categories: enrollments, media exposure, and money.

I’m sure you’ve seen the reports about how Middle East courses are overflowing. September 11 fell during the first week or so of classes, when students were still shopping for courses. The heightened interest drove students in their multitudes into courses on the Middle East, Islam, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Christian Science Monitor ran a story entitled “Standing Room Only,” which described the influx as a “student stampede.”

One of the courses in which the media took a special interest is the big introductory undergraduate course at Harvard, “Thought and Change in the Contemporary Middle East.” One of the students lost her father at the World Trade Center, the media reported; students jammed the aisles. Enrollment was 100 students last year; 300 showed up this year, and six new teaching assistants had to be added to the original three. By the way, if you want a hint at what they might hear, the professor who teaches that class offered one, in an article in the Harvard Crimson. (Pardon the fractured grammar here.) “September 11 was obviously an act of blood revenge, a subject about which anthropologists have long written about in terms of the tribal codes of the Middle East. There is, regrettably, nothing very surprising in this. There had been too much murder going on in Israel and the West Bank for no extreme reprisals to take place.” Harvard, ladies and gentlemen. Undergraduate tuition this academic year is $34,269.

Another interviewed professor claimed this would not be a one-time surge of student interest: “We’ve moved to a different level. This attack was on American soil, and my guess is there will be a lot more interest for years in Middle East and Islamic studies on campus.” The Middle East experts, sweating away in relative obscurity over the past decade, are set to be big men and women on campus.

Then there is the media. I was struck by how few academics appeared in the media in the first couple of weeks. This wasn’t an “Islam” story yet, probably because of the early fear of hate crimes. The mainstream media didn’t want to contribute to an atmosphere that might encourage such crimes. But once this possibility receded, it became more of an “Islam” story, especially over the last ten days, and we’ve seen the academics as talking heads in growing numbers. Frankly, some of them look like deer caught in the headlights—they’ve been working so long out of the limelight. But you’re familiar with the best of them, and they front for the field as a whole, giving America a false sense of reassurance that, well, at least somewhere, these things are studied seriously.

Student enrollments and media exposure are but a prelude. Then comes the most important windfall of them all. Listen, for example, to Anne Betteridge, executive director of MESA. She told the Christian Science Monitor that colleges may soon find themselves in salary battles to lure the best of the long-ignored Middle East faculty. I don’t think I’ll ever live to see that day, but her comment says something about the wild expectations that are running rampant through the field at this moment.

Then there will be the grants. The National Science Foundation has already made two grants, to look at the impact of anti-Arab backlash in this country, and to compare Islamic movements. The U.S. Institute of Peace website says the Institute “will seek additional funding” for four separate initiatives on terrorism and the Middle East. The grant-award process at the USIP will be accelerated. The Middle East academics who are fastest off the mark will have no difficulty landing major funding from these institutions.

And can it be long before an initiative comes for a special government program? There’s a precedent. As I write in my book, the Gulf War a decade ago led to the passage by Congress of the Near and Middle East Research and Training Act. For some seven years, this special appropriation pumped grant money into Middle Eastern studies, under the rubric of “national security.” The program ended up funding all sorts of esoteric research, on everything from Nubian dance to Egyptian masculinities, and it was eventually dropped; I tell the sad story in the chapter entitled “Beltway Barrier.”

But how long will it be before the academics get the ear of some senator or congressman, and persuade him or her that America’s performance in the “war on terror” could be enhanced if only more funds were pumped into Middle Eastern studies? Perhaps the Social Science Research Council will move to speak on behalf of Middle Eastern studies, as it did ten years ago.

The Title VI lobby will want its share, too. They will try to ride the language train. Don’t you see? There’s a drastic shortage of Arabic- and Persian- and Pashto- and Dari-speakers. To teach these languages, we need crash programs based in the universities, more faculty hirings and student fellowships. The National Foreign Language Center has already recommended more funding of Title VI centers with this rationale.

Let me be as unequivocal as I can about this. In my book, I do not call for a cessation of Title VI funding for Middle Eastern studies. Even if I thought it were a good idea, it would be pointless to recommend it. Title VI is one indivisible package for all area studies, and Middle Eastern studies only account for one tenth of it. I call for procedural reforms; not a cut-off. Middle Eastern studies should be given a chance to reconstruct themselves in the very different climate that now prevails.

But let there be no doubt: any additional funding for Middle Eastern studies, either through reallocation within Title VI or a special new appropriation, would not only be a complete waste of money. It would delay all the much-needed rethinking of the basic paradigms that have dominated the field. It would reward a guild that has, these last twenty years, deliberately refused to render any service in return for its subsidy, and that has fostered a culture of irrelevance and contempt for Washington. This is the time to call Middle Eastern studies to account, not to pamper them. Provosts and deans won’t do that, especially now that enrollments have inflated. Only Congress, on behalf of the public, can assure that the denizens of the ivory tower realize that the rest of us out here are sorely disappointed.

If Congress does choose to appropriate funds, there are other instruments that could efficiently absorb more resources to improve the situation in languages and area studies. Probably the most efficient is the National Security Education Program, which provides student fellowships with a language emphasis, in return for a modest service obligation. The elites of area studies at the big centers fought the establishment of this program, and still look down on it because of its “security” designation. But it has an excellent record of bringing students into international studies, especially from non-humanistic disciplines. I wouldn’t oppose more money for campus-based research offered through the USIP, the NSF, or the Defense Department—provided there is a careful review of previously-funded Middle East research, to see whether it’s been on track. We should be very wary about crash programs, instant grants, and accelerated grant-awarding procedures. It goes without saying that more should be done at the defense colleges and the service academies.

Recently it’s been reported that the Defense Department wants to create a language ROTC on a few campuses, including those strong in Arabic. It’s an excellent idea, with one problem: the culture of the Middle East centers is incredibly hostile to it. For example, the University of Michigan, which has always been strong in Arabic instruction, has so far resisted the idea. As one Michigan professor of Arabic put it, “We didn’t want our students to be known as spies in training. By intertwining intelligence and academics, we’d essentially be recruiting Arabs to later inform on members of their own community.” That, in a nutshell, is the prevailing culture. At these centers, you can prepare openly for careers in academe, business, law, even diplomacy—but not defense. More money here will not add one iota to the capability of the United States to defend itself, and that’s true across the board for all the centers. Hopefully, student demand in the wake of September 11 will compel these centers to give students a choice.

But government can only do so much. As I emphasize in my book, the reform of Middle Eastern studies will have to come from within, and it will be accelerated by generational change. Here I can only hazard a guess, but my sense is that as the radicals of my generation grow gray, the grip of their dogmas will diminish. Over the next ten to twenty years, a new generation will emerge throughout academe, with a different agenda. Perhaps they will recall September 11 as some sort of watershed, the point of departure for forging a new paradigm. So I am not pessimistic; and it’s because I’m basically optimistic that I took the trouble to write this book. Middle Eastern studies can change, must change, and will change—of this, I have no doubt.

I’d like to end on a personal note. I wrote this book more in sorrow than in anger. The reason is simple: I myself am a product, in part, of Middle Eastern studies in America. I hold all my degrees from major American universities; I’m criticizing not only a world I know, but the world that accredited me.

So I would have been happier had someone else written this book. Here and there, I detected hints of auto-critique in the field, and I’m careful to mention them in my book. But no one was coming forward to do a systematic job, and at some point I realized that no one would—that the guild would be too unforgiving of anyone who dared. If I didn’t do it, no one would. In academe, you’re always told that the noblest mission is to tell truth to power. When academics say this, they usually mean their telling truth to Washington-type power. But that’s an easy day’s work; academe rewards it. Who will tell truth to academic power? Only what I call an “intimate stranger” like myself can afford to do it.

The most difficult part of writing this book was naming people I know, including a few people with whom I’ve had amicable relationships over the years. About ten years ago, when the Islamism debate was at its height, I shadow-boxed some of them. In this book, I not only box; I take my gloves off. But I certainly didn’t decide to do so out of an impulse to do gratuitous damage, and I anguished over not a few of the passages in this book.

I named names because past experience proves that no other approach has any impact. When Edward Said, another “intimate stranger,” wanted to have an impact on Middle Eastern studies, he understood there was only one way to do it, and it wasn’t by understatement. I felt I had no choice but to follow his model—although I could never bring myself to describe any scholar as “utterly ninth-rate”—see Said’s quote on page 38. I’ve adhered to my own red lines, but I know my approach will leave some people sore. Alas, there’s no other way to get a hearing for change.

The book will stir controversy, and I’ll be attacked for having written it. Hell hath no fury like a professor scorned, and academics have all the time in the world to settle scores. The index of this book is a pretty good guide to the sources of the coming rebuttals. But I hope that once all the fur has flown, and after all the dust has settled, there will be a few students who will have taken it to heart, and a few key scholars who will say at least this: “Martin Kramer went too far, but he made some valid points, and we’d better address them fast.” If I get that much of an admission, I’ll consider the book a tremendous success—the first step toward revitalizing a field I love too much to abandon.

Hijacking Islam

On By Martin Kramer

This article by Martin Kramer was published at National Review Online on September 19, 2001. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Islam, the religion of more than a billion believers, has been hijacked. If the first week’s suspicions are confirmed, the suicide attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the capstones of nearly twenty years of terrorism perpetrated in the name of Islam. As layer upon layer of violence has accumulated, Islam itself has come to be associated in many Western minds with terrorism. It is a tragic turn — and one for which the vast majority of moderate Muslims bears some responsibility.

Islam is no more inclined to terrorism than any other monotheistic faith. Like its sisters, Christianity and Judaism, it can be both merciful and stern in practice; like them, it also teaches the love of God and the humanity of all mankind, believers and unbelievers alike. In times past, Islam has served as the bedrock of flourishing, tolerant, and peaceful orders.

But sociologists will say that a religion, at any point in time, is whatever its adherents understand it to be. If that is so, then Islam, as understood by too many Muslims, is in danger of deteriorating into a manifesto for terror. The reason: Too many Muslims have been silent in the face of horrific deeds committed by an extremist minority.

“Islamic terrorism” first entered the lexicon on a Beirut morning in 1983, when two suicide bombers destroyed the barracks of American and French peacekeepers. The American toll came to 241 dead; the planners, Shiites inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini, claimed credit in the name of Islamic Jihad. For decades, modernizing Muslim thinkers had worked to demilitarize the concept of jihad — struggle waged “in the path of God.” Secular revolutionaries had mothballed the term, employing the vocabulary of “resistance” and “liberation.” But it was an act of jihad that drove America from Lebanon, with electrifying effect.

A new era had begun — an era in which Muslim extremists interpreted their faith as a license to kill foreign “enemies of God.” Radical Muslim clerics scoured Islam’s sacred texts for justifications of violence, and found them. In the years to come, the clerics and the terrorists widened their license. At first, it included only “intruders” in Muslim lands: foreign forces, embassies, and civilians. Later it was extended to include “enemy” installations in third countries, and finally, civilians in the “lands of unbelief.” No moral red line could stop the escalation.

In a parallel process, suicide operations became a matter of routine. Suicide is forbidden in Islam. Back in 1983, only a handful of radical clerics were prepared to classify kamikaze-type acts as deeds of “self-martyrdom,” guaranteeing immediate entry to Paradise. After the first operations, an intense debate ensued over religious law, some clerics ruling in favor of the tactic and many against.

But as the years passed, “self-martyrs” became popular heroes and the resolve of the critics waned. When, last April, Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti suggested that such acts were no more than suicide, the head of Egypt’s Azhar University, supposed bastion of moderation, waffled. (It was permissible, he said, but not against civilians.) In some quarters, the “self-martyr” is hailed as the most noble of all believers; according to one particularly respected Sunni cleric, “these operations are the supreme form of jihad.”

In this climate, it is now possible to recruit “self-martyrs” not one at a time, but by the dozen. And for the first time, terrorist planners can envision what was once unthinkable: large numbers of simultaneous suicide operations, carried out by teams of “self-martyrs.”

Paradoxically, the Middle East itself is less vulnerable to extremist violence than it was a few years ago. The regimes in most countries — most notably, Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia — have suppressed their own Muslim opponents. But the regimes have opened a “safety valve” — not against themselves, but against America. As a result, the region is awash in incitement.

This has combined with a moral timidity among Muslim moderates. They have condemned and disavowed the atrocities in New York and Washington, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. But these same people were silent in the face of similar deeds, done on a smaller scale in other places. Each small outrage undermined those very religious inhibitions that might have prevented last week’s mass murder. And in a globalized world, a red line erased in the Middle East is erased everywhere.

In recent years, some Western observers of Islam have claimed that it is moving toward an enlightened reformation. What happened last week was the opposite: a dangerous slide toward a medieval holy war. To stop the regression, the moderate majority will have to argue against the mobilization of Islamic religion for war. Individuals may rely on their faith to inspire them in adversity. Religion may be invoked at times of loss. But it is impossible to deploy religion to justify killing and self-immolation, without undermining the foundations of the religion itself.

In the pained expressions of decent Muslims, there is more than regret at America’s loss. There is a growing realization that the men who brought down the twin towers put Islam in peril. Only Muslims can redeem it.