Tag: Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis and MESA’s Shame

On By Martin Kramer

The president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has just published a letter to members of the association. So I have exercised my prerogative as the anti-MESA, to write my own letter to the members. Check back soon: letters to MESA could become a habit.

Dear MESA members,

We last met in Chicago in December 1998—the MESA conference that celebrated and canonized Edward Said on the twentieth anniversary of his book Orientalism. Many of you will recall the occasion. A diverse panel—not diverse intellectually, but diverse in the ways that really count in academe (ethnicity and gender)—hailed Said as the conquering hero of the field. MESA’s multitudes celebrated this achievement with repeated standing ovations for Said. The atmosphere was one of feverish triumphalism.

It was also premature. Since then, you have entered a state of disarray. One younger scholar has claimed that you have embraced a “bunker mentality.”

Recently, in order to fend off criticism, your leaders have told the public that yours is a diverse association, hospitable to every view, an arena of real contention. So explain this piece of evidence to the contrary.

Prior to 9/11, MESA had nine honorary fellows, “outstanding internationally recognized scholars who have made major contributions to Middle East studies.” Ten persons may be so honored at any one time; one was Edward Said. Shortly after 9/11, I suggested to one of your influential members that the easiest way for the field to apologize for past error (without admitting it) would be to honor Bernard Lewis by offering him the vacant slot. It would do nothing for Lewis, but it would signal to the American public that MESA wasn’t blind to his monumental scholarly contribution.

I understand that a board member of MESA did propose Lewis, formally—and that the proposal was shot down for a lack of support. Last fall, Said died, and a second slot opened. A short time later, both vacant slots were filled by two scholars whose works, whatever their merits, do not begin to approach Lewis’s contributions to Middle Eastern studies. To refresh your memories, here is your list.

What sentient being would compile a list of the ten major living contributors to Middle Eastern studies, and exclude Bernard Lewis? One of your own past presidents, in an important and fair assessment of Lewis, cited “the extraordinary range of his scholarship, his capacity to command the totality of Islamic and Middle Eastern history from Muhammad down to the present day. This is not merely a matter of erudition; rather, it reflects an almost unparalleled ability to fit things together into a detailed and comprehensive synthesis. In this regard, it is hard to imagine that Lewis will have any true successors.” Since that appraisal, Lewis has raised the bar still higher, writing two international bestsellers.

What possible reason could there be for the exclusion of Lewis from your list, and the inclusion of Edward Said (and lesser figures), except political bias? Your current president tells you this: “There is no desire on the part of [MESA’s] board to turn MESA into a political organization.” This claim is easy and convenient to make. The difficulty is that MESA is already a political organization, as the Lewis case demonstrates.

A group within MESA—I cannot say whether it is a majority or a minority—has used the organization consistently as an instrument of political advocacy. It has done so by grading scholars on the basis of their politics. This happens all the time in university appointments and promotions. It is therefore the role of the professional association—if it is professional and not political—to establish a purely professional measure of distinction, for the emulation of its members. Instead, MESA has followed the basest political instincts of its most benighted segments. No denial can conceal this fact.

You now have before you a proposal to change MESA’s mission statement, to include the defense of academic freedom among its functions. MESA is profoundly unsuited to this task. By the choices I have described, MESA has undercut academic freedom. It has excluded on the basis of politics; its very standing as a professional association is open to question. MESA’s honorary fellows are distinguished scholars all. But the list, as a whole, is a badge of MESA’s shame.

I hope you will pardon me if I take the liberty of writing to you again, about other matters of mutual concern.

Yours respectfully,

Martin Kramer

Professorial Pundits Place Iraq Bets

On By Martin Kramer

The war is underway, and most of the rationales for and against it are based on predictions. No one reasonably expects professors of Middle Eastern studies to predict military outcomes. But political outcomes, especially in the long term, are supposed to be their forte. And so here, for the record, are the predictions of four chaired professors of Middle Eastern studies, at leading American universities. At the end of the day, events will prove two of them right, and two of them wrong.

John Esposito is a University Professor (his university’s highest professorial honor) at Georgetown. His prediction, looking five years past a war:

It is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker. A military attack by the United States and installation of a new government in Iraq will not have fostered democratization in the Arab world but rather reinforced the perception of many… that the United States has moved… to a war against Islam and the Muslim world. To move to a military strike before exhausting nonmilitary avenues, and without significant multilateral support from our European and Arab/Muslim allies, as well as from the United Nations, will have inflamed anti-Americanism, which will have grown exponentially in the region and the non-Muslim world.

That’s a grim prophecy, although the very first part may already be falsifiable: could Esposito now name an Arab country that might be less democratic in five years—given that not one of them is democratic now?

In the opposite corner is Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, past member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and best-selling author. He makes the opposite prediction:

I see the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive and—yes, I will say the word—democratic regime arising in a post-Saddam Iraq. They will have been fully inoculated against the Fascist-style governments that otherwise seem to prevail.

Lewis again, with a bit more caution, but a steady optimism:

Clearly, Iraq is not going to turn into a Jeffersonian democracy over-night, any more than did Germany or Japan. Democracy is a strong medicine, to be administered in gradually increasing measures. A large dose at once risks killing the patient. But with care and over time, freedom can be achieved in Iraq, and more generally in the Middle East.

Do you prefer that your experts on “the Arabs” have Arabic names? Then take your choice. In one corner: Rashid Khalidi, who in September will become the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University. His prediction:

Irrespective of its cost or length, this war will mark not the end, but the beginning, of our problems in this region. Because, however much Iraqis loathe their regime, they will soon loathe the American occupation that will follow its demise. No expert on Iraq… believes that the creation of a democracy in Iraq will be a swift or simple matter; some believe it is not possible as a consequence of an American military occupation…. So we will not have democracy in Iraq. We will have a long American military occupation that will eventually provoke resistance…. Via a lengthy and bloody occupation of Iraq, via the establishment of U.S. bases there, via the direct control of Iraqi oil, we will be creating legions of new enemies throughout the Middle East.

In the other corner: Fouad Ajami, the Majid Khadduri Professor at Johns Hopkins. Ajami argues that the United States should aim high: “The driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world.” His prediction: an American commitment will be decisive.

In the end, the battle for a secular, modernist order in the Arab world is an endeavor for the Arabs themselves. But power matters, and a great power’s will and prestige can help tip the scales in favor of modernity and change…. [U.S. victory] would embolden those who wish for the Arab world’s deliverance from retrogression and political decay…. It has often seemed in recent years that the Arab political tradition is immune to democratic stirrings. [But] the sacking of a terrible regime with such a pervasive cult of terror may offer Iraqis and Arabs a break with the false gifts of despotism.

So there you have them: the divided opinions of America’s leading authorities on the Middle East. Needless to say, they can’t all be right, so some of these predictions are going to come up losers. Will anyone remember? Possibly. But here is a safe prediction: it won’t matter, certainly not to the professional standing of the professors. Another professor (Robert Vitalis, head of the Middle East Center of the University of Pennsylvania), has put things in precisely the right perspective. The future, he maintains, “is unknowable.”

Administration figures are in fact gambling but there are real and predictable consequences to their betting wrong. Consequences for them personally I mean. This is not the case for virtually any op-ed writer or trusted ally of the Saudis or scholars who, from their perches in Palo Alto and Morningside Heights (or Center City), tell us what is really going to happen. There are no costs to them to being wrong, which is in part why so many pretend to be able to see the future with such remarkable acuity. Even after getting it wrong time and time again in the past 10 years.

How very, very true.

(Palo Alto and Morningside Heights…. Has Professor Vitalis been reading my Ivory Towers on Sand?)

ASIDE: Edward Said, who disagrees with Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, now claims that neither “has so much as lived in or come near the Arab world in decades.” Anyone with an ear to the ground knows that both of them show up somewhere in the Arab world every year. And I believe it’s been thirty years since Said left Morningside Heights to spend one of his sabbaticals in an Arab country. The amazing thing is that in the very same article, Said makes this admission: “In all my encounters and travels I have yet to meet a person who is for the war.” New York Times/CBS reports: “74% [of polled Americans] now approve of the U.S. taking military action against Iraq, up from 64% among these same respondents two weeks ago.” Perhaps it is Professor Said who ought to get out more.