Tag: Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad: orientalist!

On By Martin Kramer

Last week, I brought this quote from Columbia University student-abuser Joseph Massad, regarding his book Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan: “The only unfavorable review, out of seventeen favorable reviews, it received was in Martin Kramer’s unscholarly magazine, Middle East Quarterly.” So I reproduced that review, which happened to have been written by a highly regarded scholar of Jordan, Asher Susser–someone Massad himself cites as an authority.

It turns out that this wasn’t the only unfavorable review. A Jordanian friend recalled reading a negative review in Jordan’s leading daily newspaper, Al-Ra’i, and went to the trouble of tracking down its author to get it. The reviewer, Jehad Al-Mheisen, is a researcher at the Jordan Press Foundation in Amman, and the author of a book (in Arabic) on tribe and state in Jordan. His review of Massad’s book appeared in Al-Ra’i on July 18, 2003, page 25. Here it is, in Arabic (pdf). (I also have the newspaper page, which I’ll get around to scanning, uploading and posting. The last bit of page one in the pdf version is cut off.)

The title of Al-Mheisen’s review is an apt synopsis of what follows: “An Orientalist View of the Making of Jordanian Identity.” Massad, he writes, is fixated on the top-down role of the army and the law in forging a Jordanian identity. But he completely overlooks the country’s social structure, most importantly the tribes. The integration of the bureaucracy with traditional social groups like tribes forms the core of Jordanian identity, which is durable, deep-rooted, and authentic. In that respect, Jordan isn’t any different than other Arab countries, including Egypt. Unfortunately, suggests Al-Mheisen, Massad is less interested in historical analysis than in political posturing. The resulting study is marred by “numerous distortions” and “conclusions that have no bearing on reality.” As for Massad’s invocation of Foucault and Gramsci, it’s just a formality. The analysis itself “serves Massad’s a priori orientalist perspective.”

Not being a Jordan expert myself, I won’t venture an opinion on the substance of Al-Mheisen’s critique. Of course, it’s wonderfully ironic that a Jordanian should charge Massad with orientalism. If that means seeing the West as prime mover, and denying Arab-Muslim “subjects” all agency, then Massad seems vulnerable. Even a sympathetic reviewer has complained that “the mass of the population barely get a mention in Massad’s account, the key subjects of which are the ‘Great Men’ of Jordanian history.” The greatest man is Glubb Pasha, the British commander of the Arab Legion and the anti-hero of Colonial Effects. “There is an impression that one, white, male, colonial subject is privileged with potency, whereas the agency of others is effaced. For the colonizer, one theory of the subject, for the colonized, another.” Hmmm, sounds like orientalism to me.

Al-Mheisen’s review gets effaced too. If, like Massad, you’re Jordanian-born and raised, you’re a regular visitor to Jordan, and you’re author of a book on Jordan, you’re going to know that your book was hammered in the kingdom’s leading daily newspaper. But why spoil the impression of scholarship above reproach? Anyway, the thumbs-down review appeared in Arabic, and who reads that? A committee in faraway Manhattan won’t be the wiser, so why not keep the narrative simple and elegant? Only one unfavorable review! And Kramer published it!

Alas for Massad, there are people in Jordan who do read the country’s top newspaper, and even remember what they’ve read, especially when it has to do with their “identity.” So he’s been caught in yet another lie, this one easily documented. Is there a pattern here? You tell me.

Who threatens Columbia?

On By Martin Kramer

In Professor Joseph Massad’s mid-March statement to the ad hoc committee investigating faculty intimidation of students at Columbia, he listed the support he’d received from various quarters, including petitions and letters. He then added this:

The Middle East Studies Association’s Academic Freedom Committee also issued a letter defending my academic freedom, as did the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

I’d seen all of these missives, with a major exception: the letter from the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP has much more weight than any of the other outfits: it’s the union of professors, and the prime defender of their academic freedom and tenure rights. It can and does censure universities for infringements. I’d assumed that the AAUP hadn’t entered the Columbia fray, so Massad’s reference to an AAUP letter surprised me. I asked the AAUP.

The AAUP confirmed to me that it wrote not once but twice to the Columbia administration the first time, prior to Massad’s appearance before the ad hoc committee, and the second time, after the committee issued its report on March 31. When I asked the AAUP whether it had plans to release the texts of these letters, it answered in the negative. So I asked a journalist to follow up, and he confirmed that neither the AAUP nor Columbia is prepared to release the letters.

Why? Let me propose a hypothesis: the AAUP laid down the law to Columbia. Do this, and we’ll stay silent. Do that, and we’ll go against you. It’s all hush-hush, of course, but it’s massive secret pressure. For all we know, the first letter may have framed the ad hoc committee report, which has been so widely criticized as a whitewash. The second letter may well set the parameters of Columbia’s future treatment of Massad and the Middle East department.

Isn’t it ironic? The ad hoc committee and the Columbia profs have denounced the outside pressure of the tiny David Project, Campus Watch, etc. Well, at least they applied their pressure in a public way, fully above the board. It now turns out that the AAUP, a national advocacy organization with 45,000 members and 500 campus chapters, has been sending missives straight to Low Library missives that Columbia and the AAUP are resolved to keep secret.

When the ad hoc committee issued its report, it said the following: “Although we originally anticipated producing two documents (a confidential report to the Vice President and a public summary), in the interests of transparency we have prepared a single document.” If the interests of transparency are so paramount in this case, let Columbia release the AAUP letters. Let’s determine whether they contain explicit or implicit threats. Let’s find out whether the members of the committee knew the contents of the first letter as they deliberated. (After all, Massad told them it existed.)

Until we see the secret letters, they’ll hang like a black cloud over the ad hoc committee report and over whatever the university might do to resolve the faculty crisis in future.

Update: Guess who’s the featured speaker at the AAUP’s annual convention in Washington in June? It’s Lisa Anderson, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was Massad’s thesis adviser, she later defended him in a letter to Columbia’s president and she still somehow wound up as a member of the ad hoc committee. (A New York Times editorial said the university had “botched this job” by appointing her.) I imagine she knew precisely what the AAUP expected of the committee. How about letting the rest of us in on the secret?

Massad’s bad book

On By Martin Kramer

I was on the road when the Columbia story peaked, so I haven’t had my say yet. Be patient. For starters, I’ll begin with Joseph Massad, the most egregious of Columbia’s faculty miscreants, who released his statement to the ad hoc committee after publication of its report. It’s a bizarre collage of self-serving lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories. I’ll confine myself (for now) to one example.

At one point, Massad is eager to parade as someone whose scholarship is above reproach. This brings him to his only book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan. Massad: “The only unfavorable review, out of seventeen favorable reviews, it received was in Martin Kramer’s unscholarly magazine, Middle East Quarterly.”

Now Massad can think what he likes about the Middle East Quarterly, which I used to edit. The reviewer was a genuine scholar, and a renowned historian of Jordan: Asher Susser. Indeed, so redoubtable a scholar is Susser that even Massad, in his book, cites Susser’s authority on Jordan three times (p. 343, note 123; p. 344, note 135; and p. 348, note 180).

So for the record, here is Susser’s review of Massad’s Colonial Effects (which, in dissertation form, won a prize from the Middle East Studies Association). It’s short (all reviews in Middle East Quarterly are), and it isn’t pretty. Susser:

Massad has done a thorough job of mastering the source material, but his ideological bias runs deep and devalues the results. Massad portrays Jordanians as the malleable creatures of others, non-participants in their own national enterprise who think only the thoughts Westerners imbed in their minds. Or, in the characteristically obtuse jargon of this book: the “juridical-military dyad introduced by British colonialism was both a repressive and a productive success. Today’s Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture are living testament to that achievement.”

Since these Westerners, like Glubb Pasha, were infected by Orientalist biases, they imparted an Orientalist mindset to their hapless Jordanian wards, from King Hussein on down: “Note, how the king’s nationalist views … are in tandem with Glubb’s Orientalist views of Jordanians as Bedouins … the latter being part of Glubb’s … de-Bedouinization and re-Bedouinization campaigns in the country.” To believe Massad, Glubb simply de-Bedouinizes and re-Bedouinizes the mindless Jordanians at will, and King Hussein, without a thought of his own, trails along as if on a leash. Jordanians, incapable of imagination, are but putty in the hands of one grand mental manipulator: Glubb Pasha.

Had Massad given the Jordanians their due in the molding of their own identity, he might have redeemed part of his argument. The “colonial effects” are there; no one would sensibly deny them. But by inflating them, Massad deflates his own credibility.

Factual distortion and sheer invention would also seem perfectly permissible in Massad’s account. Three examples of many:

(1) Massad refers to the Israeli raid and “massacre” in Samu’ in November 1966. The Jordanians themselves, however, did not claim that a massacre had been committed. Samir Mutawi, author of the semiofficial version of Jordan’s role in the 1967 war, wrote that Jordanian troops engaged the Israelis at Samu’, and in “the ensuing battle eighteen Jordanians were killed and many more wounded.” No massacre. A few pages later Massad himself gives similar figures (fifteen soldiers and three civilians killed). So after throwing in the word “massacre,” Massad ends up debunking himself.

(2) Massad would have us believe that domestic opponents of the regime alone assassinated Jordanian prime minister Hazza’ al-Majali in August 1960. In fact, it was masterminded by the intelligence services of the Syrian province of the United Arab Republic. This was so well known at the time that King Hussein considered retaliating with a military strike against Syria.

(3) Massad writes of the battle of Karamah in March 1968 that the Israeli army “could not escape unscathed (as it had during the 1967 war and on many other occasions). For the first time in its history, it received heavy damages in personnel and materiel.” This is pure bunk. Yes, Israel sustained heavy losses at Karamah: twenty-eight of its soldiers were killed there. But Massad seems to have forgotten (or never to have known) that 800 Israeli soldiers were killed in June 1967, and that 6,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians perished in the 1948 war. Ignorance? Dehumanization? A bit of both? What is certain is that when it comes to Israeli losses, Massad isn’t counting.

(This last error is especially appalling, as Massad has been allowed to teach “Palestinian and Israeli Politics and Society.” Columbia’s standards are that low.)

In the amen corner of Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies, they may fawn over Massad’s book. But how many of the fawners have devoted their careers to the study of Jordan? Massad’s own elision concealing the fact that his book got a thumbs-down from a major scholarly authority is typical of his method. (Columbia University Press, the book’s publisher, isn’t much better: its website quotes the first half-sentence of Susser’s review—”Massad has done a thorough job of mastering the source material”—as an endorsement.) Ah, how they whitewash on Morningside Heights.