Tag: Edward Said

Saidiana

On By Martin Kramer

Here is interesting news about Edward Said, Columbia University’s celebrity professor of English literature, Palestine, Islam, and what-have-you. Said has a long-standing connection to King’s College, Cambridge. He has the status of a member, and has been an occasional visitor there, most recently this past fall. The College is a redoubt of the left. Its provost, Patrick Bateson, signed a letter to The Guardian last April, calling for an academic moratorium on contacts with Israel. That unleashed a tidal wave of publicity and criticism that shook the Provost’s Lodge and the College.

So it was particularly unwise for Edward Said’s friends to choose this moment to nominate their hero for an honorary fellowship of the College. The inner deliberations of the College congregation are not public, but The Guardian picked up enough gossip to make a story. Details are murky, but the bottom line is that two fellows who had criticized Bateson also spoke persuasively against Said’s nomination, and apparently succeeded in nixing it.

It’s not often that Edward Said gets turned down for honors these days, and I find it refreshing. No one has done more than Said to confuse scholarship and advocacy, and it frankly looks pathetic when his partisans rush to his defense by declaiming his scholarly virtues. Edward Said is a package deal. At King’s College there are people who rightly understood that honoring Said would be interpreted as honoring his politics. I don’t know exactly how it happened, or what the arguments were, but King’s College has kept its honor.

Of course, in America it’s another story. Berkeley is about to enjoy a visit by Said, hosted by its (federally-funded) Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and paid for in part by the Chancellor’s fund. The Daily Californian carries a strange quote from the vice-chair of the Center: “We’re inviting him in his capacity as a university professor. Edward Said is an important advocate of Palestinians but also a professor of English.” You would think that Said had been invited to lecture on Austen or Conrad. But I doubt there will be much literature in a lecture with this title: “The U.S., the Islamic World and the Question of Palestine.” My prediction: the lecture’s only relationship to English will be that it is delivered in English. You can judge for yourself from the webcast, which is supposed to become available on February 20.

By the way, note this sentence in the report of The Daily Californian: “Born in Jerusalem in 1948, Said’s family was forced to settle in Cairo, Egypt after the establishment of Israel.” First, there is the grammar. Perhaps if Berkeley’s English department actually taught English, instead of The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance, this wouldn’t happen. Second, Said was born in 1935. Third and last, his parents were already settled in Cairo even before his birth, and Said has written a whole memoir of his Cairo childhood. The news item is more evidence of how people continue to assume that Said is a 1948 refugee. No amount of counter-evidence, or even Said’s own account, has made any difference. People believe what they need to believe, and I imagine that if Edward Said did not exist, the denizens of Columbia and Berkeley would have invented him. Perhaps they did.

ADDENDUM: I’ve been informed by a reader that The Daily Californian ran a correction. It admitted that its original article “erroneously stated that Said was born in 1948. Actually, he was exiled from Jerusalem in 1948.” Wrong again. Said went on an extended family visit to Jerusalem in 1947, and left it near the end of that year, returning home to Cairo. The crucial point of Said’s memoir is that as a boy, he didn’t feel the loss of Palestine, and that at home, the subject was “repressed, undiscussed, or even unremarked on.” The refugees, he wrote, were regarded as “those Others.” (Read the first part of Chapter VI.) His Palestinian awareness and activism flowered only later, in the 1960s. Said has given an accurate representation of himself. He’s acknowledged that his personal sense of exile (from more than one place) is a matter of sensibility, not a fact with a date. It’s others who keep stretching his biographic envelope, because they need him to be a perfect icon of dispossession. That need apparently extends to The Daily Californian, which cannot get it right in two tries.

ADDENDUM+: The administrators at Aston University, in Birmingham, England, have intervened to cancel a live video-link with Edward Said, organized by a student anti-war group. The reason: it might disturb public order. This is all too reminiscent of the mindset that almost kept Daniel Pipes off the York University campus in Toronto. Aston has an absolute obligation to rescind the ban and let the show go on.

Edward Said CRASSHes

On By Martin Kramer

Edward Said, celebrity professor and advocate for Palestine, has just ended a stretch at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities—acronym CRASSH—at Cambridge University in England. Between his lectures on “The Example of Auerbach’s Mimesis” and “Return to Philology” (serious people never left it), Said huddled in his rooms to settle an old score with the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya. The result is an emission that is truly breathtaking for its sheer hypocrisy.

The Said-Makiya feud is more than a decade old, and it’s not easy to map all its labyrinthine passages. So here is a crib note. Makiya, an Iraqi who first found politics in the bosom of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, later went into exile and set about exposing the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book, Republic of Fear, shattered the complacency surrounding the Iraqi regime, bringing evidence that situated Saddam and his gangs outside civilization. A subsequent book, Cruelty and Silence, brought more evidence of Saddam’s crimes, and also served an indictment against Arab writers who either swooned before the Iraqi dictator, or didn’t see his misdeeds as sufficient cause for America to act. (For more, see my review of the book.)

Palestinian “intellectuals” beat loud drums for Saddam; some of them played shrill flutes against American intervention. Edward Said was the first flautist. In the fray, Makiya accused Said of sacrificing the Iraqi people to the unappeasable god of “Palestine first.” Said in turn denounced Makiya as a traitor to the mother of all Arab causes. The feud later subsided, but the current U.S.-led drive for “regime change” in Iraq, coming as it does in the midst of yet another Palestinian drama, has gotten Said stirred up again—and against Makiya. That’s because it’s hard to read a major newspaper, or listen to National Public Radio, or even thumb your favorite magazine, without bumping into Kanan Makiya. One reason: Makiya is prominent in the “Democratic Principles Working Group,” composed of some 30 Iraqis who belong to the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project.” This has enraged Said to the boiling point; in his column in the Ahram Weekly, he boils over. Take a deep breath, and read it.

Makiya doesn’t need me to defend him, and I won’t. I’m more interested in the patent hypocrisy of Said’s charges. He hardly makes an accusation against Makiya that couldn’t be made—usually with more justification—against himself. I’d describe it as a suicide character-bombing.

For example, Said tells us that that before Makiya went into exile, he was “an associate of his father’s architectural firm in Iraq.” That firm did business with the regime. In the next paragraph, Said steals second base: Makiya was a “beneficiary of the Iraqi regime’s munificence.” By the end of that paragraph, Said has stolen home plate: “Makiya himself had worked for Saddam.” It’s a crude spin on a typical case of son-works-for-dad. And the irony here is that Said’s own father, a Cairene businessman, also kept his son in the office, and compromised him. In fact, according to Said’s own memoirs (p. 289), he signed a business contract for his father that criminalized him. “For the next fifteen years,” writes Said, “I was unable to return to Egypt because that particular contract, and I as its unsuspecting signatory, were ruled to be in contravention of the exchange-control law.” So shall we visit the sins of businessmen fathers on their sons? If we were to apply Said’s severe judgment of Makiya to himself, we would have to include money laundering among his past occupations. (On Makiya’s tortured relations with his father, see the chapter “Oedipus in Samara” in Lawrence Weschler’s Calamities of Exile.)

Said then announces that Makiya “never wrote in an Arab country…whatever meager writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.” And just where in the Arab world would it have been safe for Makiya to have written and published Republic of Fear under his own name? Come to think of it, has Said ever written in an Arab country? Said told an interviewer in 1989 that even were a Palestinian state created, he wouldn’t live in it. “It’s too late for me,” he said. “I’m past the point of uprooting myself again.” “I could have gotten a job at Bir Zeit,” he later said. “But I realized this is something I cannot do. My fate is to remain in New York.”

Said’s “fate” at Columbia University in New York has been—well, prosperous and risk-free. “I get promotions, salary increases, all the perks,” Said admitted in that 1989 interview. Columbia has backed him to the hilt, and his politics have helped to make him a prize-class celebrity. So it’s frankly bizarre to see Said take Makiya to task for finding refuge in these United States, and seeking to work from this seat of unrivalled freedom, power and wealth to free his native country. Isn’t this exactly what Said claims to be doing? And it’s jolting to read Said’s characterization of Makiya as someone caught “between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to his upwardly mobile career).” Said’s whole story (or myth) is that of a man “out of place,” caught between countries and cultures. (“Whether I’m with Americans or with Arabs, I always feel incomplete.”) And has anyone been more bent on upward mobility?

But the heart of Said’s complaint is Makiya’s role as an interlocutor between the US government and the Iraqi opposition, and Makiya’s effort to fashion a post-war vision for Iraq. Never mind that in the late 1980s, Said did the same sort of thing on behalf of the PLO, lobbying George Shultz’s State Department for US recognition. (In Said’s words, Arafat “used a number of people, including me, as go-betweens with the US Administration.”) What really offends Said is Makiya’s vision of Iraq’s future. Makiya believes that “federalism is a necessary condition of democracy and that it means devolving power away from Baghdad to the provinces.” And he believe that “a democratic Iraq has to be an Iraq that exists for all its citizens equally, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. That means a non-Arab Iraq.” Said’s scornful rejoinder: it would require “magic” to “de-Arabize the country,” the evidence that the Iraqis want federalism is “pretty negligible,” and federalism never works anyway. (“One would have thought,” writes Said, “that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country’s federalism was a total success.”)

Wait a minute. The last time I looked, Said was proposing precisely this for Palestinians and Israelis: a one-state solution for Arabs and Jews, who are supposed to downgrade their Arab and Jewish identities, and live as citizens in one de-nationalized state, based on “the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community.” In this one state, which is now Said’s “solution,” Jews and Arabs would live in “federated cantons.”

So let me get this right, Professor Said: Iraqis can’t possibly be “de-Arabized,” but Palestinians apparently can; Iraqis don’t want federalism, but Palestinians do; and federalism hasn’t worked anywhere, but in Israel-Palestine it’s not only doable, it’s the only “solution.”

Have I found a contradiction here? You bet. It’s rooted in Said’s belief that the Palestinians are a chosen people among the Arabs, and that they must be the first to break their shackles. Who are the Iraqis to hope for more than Saddam? They’re more or less accustomed to the iron fists of dictators. It’s enough to insist that the Americans don’t bomb them. But the Palestinians? They deserve so much more: sympathy, solidarity, secularism, democracy—and, Said has decided, all of Palestine. A couple of years ago, an Israeli correspondent asked him: “So what you envision is a totally new situation in which a Jewish minority would live peacefully within an Arab context?” Said: “Yes. I believe it is viable. A Jewish minority can survive the way other minorities in the Arab world survived.” Clearly we are dealing here with someone who really doesn’t know much about, say, Iraq. Introduce this man to an Iraqi Kurd.

My point here is not to defend Makiya’s vision of Iraq’s future, which I don’t necessarily share. My point is to demonstrate that Edward Said, as a master of self-awareness, is much overrated. He can’t see the obvious parallels between his predicament and Makiya’s; he sees only the differences, and naturally they all work in his favor. And he is so fixated upon Palestine that the rest of the Arab world is reduced to a blur. Now for Said-watchers, pro and con, there’s nothing new in all this, but it’s still disappointing. A few years ago, Said told the New York Times that his own circumstances had prompted him to consider writing a book on “late style,” about writers and composers “full of unresolved dissonances,” people who “go out with more complexity and more energy than they came in.” No one knows how late in the day it is for Said, but I see no new complexities here. All I see in this latest character-bombing (not just against Makiya, but against Bernard Lewis) is an attempt to score one last point before the curtain falls.

With Makiya poised to make a dent in history, and Lewis riding a runaway best-seller, I’d say it’s too little, too late.

Terrorism? What terrorism?!

On By Martin Kramer

This op-ed by Martin Kramer appeared in the Wall Street Journal on November 15, 2001. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

The Middle East Studies Association of North America convenes Saturday in San Francisco. Its membership includes 2,600 “experts” on the Middle East, most of them based in universities. On Sept. 21, MESA’s board issued a statement on the terror attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It encapsulates all the ills of this very sick discipline—one that did nothing to prepare America for the encounter with Muslim extremism, and that can’t contribute anything to America’s defense.

Before we get to the statement, a little background is necessary. For 50 years, American universities and foundations, along with the U.S. government, have fostered the growth of Middle Eastern studies. Today, most Americans can take degrees in Middle Eastern politics, history, and languages without crossing a state line. Fourteen Middle East programs are National Resource Centers—that is, they enjoy an annual subsidy from the American taxpayer, through the Department of Education.

Some of these scholars have done important work. But when it comes to contemporary affairs, their record has been abysmal. The last time they basked in the national limelight, a decade ago, they warned that a war to expel Iraq from Kuwait would be disastrous. Later, in order to burnish the image of contemporary Islam, they downplayed the growth of Muslim extremism, helping to lull America into complacency.

In so doing, they dutifully followed the lead of Columbia University’s Edward Said, an honorary member of MESA. In introducing the latest edition of his book, “Covering Islam,” Mr. Said mocked “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies.” Such talk was based on “highly exaggerated stereotyping.”

Many denounce U.S. policy in extreme terms, believing the Middle East is subjected to a “neoliberal, repressive ‘pax Americana'”—a description of the American role offered by incoming MESA president Joel Beinin of Stanford. The past head of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, Richard Bulliet, has called American efforts to promote democracy part of “a world hegemonic discourse of Western cultural imperialism.”

This is the necessary background to understanding MESA’s statement. Its most striking feature is a studied avoidance of the words “terror,” “terrorism,” and “terrorist.” These were “violent acts,” “horrific acts,” and “tragic events.” But even now, the board members of MESA cannot bring themselves to describe any Arabs or Muslims—even suicide kamikazes who kill thousands of American civilians—as terrorists.

It’s not surprising. For years the academics’ response to terrorism has been to act as amplifiers for the “grievances” behind it. For the professors, terrorism was a kind of political protest—and since they sympathized with its supposed motives, they expelled the word “terrorism” from their lexicon. This weekend’s conference demonstrates the neglect: With the exception of a hastily announced special panel, nothing in the program deals with terrorism.

MESA urges calm while “those who planned and perpetrated the crimes are identified and brought to justice in courts of law.” Crimes—not acts of war. The same professors, who in one breath will tell you that the roots of terrorism are political, will tell you in the next breath that mass murder should be treated like a felony.

And the scholars imply that lone men committed these “crimes,” ignoring the role of the state or states that must have aided, abetted and sheltered the terrorists. MESA’s bottom line: No use of force is legitimate, even against terrorists and their accomplices.

Finally, MESA’s board members are “deeply concerned that innocent people in the Middle East may become the targets of misguided retaliation.” Needless to say, no one wants “misguided retaliation.” But where is the companion sentence expressing “deep concern” that attacks could recur? It isn’t there, despite the fact that the Middle East may be pregnant with more such attacks.

In short, the academics remain in a state of denial. They refuse to acknowledge that their paradigms collapsed with the Twin Towers. But the record of failure exacts no price. Ironically, the very same professors who helped to anesthetize America to the dangers of radical Islam are enjoying a windfall: Their phones don’t stop ringing, their books sell briskly, and their courses fill to overflowing.

During or after this crisis, they will find some pliant senator or congressman willing to propose additional budgets for Middle Eastern studies under the rubric of national security. The State Department already wants to use professors for “public diplomacy” in Muslim countries.

But as we begin to ask why the country was so unprepared, one conclusion is inescapable: The academics are part of the problem, not its remedy. It will be necessary to start from scratch in building the understanding that must inform America’s future actions. There are no quick fixes, and no steps should be taken before a comprehensive assessment of national needs in Middle Eastern studies.

In the meantime, there is no danger in simply ignoring the professors who meet this weekend in San Francisco. MESA’s board called on “those with responsibility for U.S. policy in the Middle East and the Islamic world to avail themselves of the insights of scholarship.” Mr. President, don’t waste your time. The professors don’t meet the course prerequisites. Members of Congress: There is no justification for an additional penny of support for this empire of error—and no better time to reexamine the federal subsidies it already enjoys.

This letter by Edward Said appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 4, 2001.

In regard to Martin Kramer’s Nov. 15 editorial-page piece “Terrorism? What Terrorism?”:

Mr. Kramer’s current book, “Ivory Towers on Sand,” from which his critique was taken, was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the academic arm of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). This most certainly is not a serious account of modern Islam.

What Mr. Kramer quotes from my book, “Covering Islam,” is as misleading as everything else in his polemic. My book was originally published by Pantheon in 1981; the preface I wrote for it appeared in the Vintage edition of 1997. In it, I make absolutely clear my disagreement with Islamist politics, rejecting them entirely as an alternative for Arabs and Muslims. The passage Mr. Kramer quotes occurs in a context—that a fixation on violence and terror in Western accounts of Islam distorts the complexities and diversity of a world that includes 1.5 billion Muslims, about whom little other than a relative handful of militants is widely known—that he suppresses, making it seem that I wasn’t aware of the potential for disaster.

Like Ariel Sharon, Mr. Kramer tries to exploit the current crisis as a way of obscuring Israel’s terrorist military occupation (now in its 35th year) of Palestine.

Edward W. Said
University Professor
Columbia University
New York