Tag: Middle East Studies Association

Gullible MESAn Walked the “Arab Street”

On By Martin Kramer

This evening, the participants in the annual Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference in San Francisco will assemble in plenary session, to hear an address by MESA’s president, Laurie Brand. The title: “Scholarship in the Shadow of Empire.” (Presumably that’s the American empire, not the Abbasid.)

When Brand delivers her address, she’ll be preaching to the choir—the very people who elected her two years ago. MESA’s members show a marked propensity for electing political activists to lead them. Indeed, MESA elections have become a kind of referendum, by which members express their political views indirectly. Brand’s election is a case in point. She has all the credentials of an activist academic: a Columbia Ph.D. (Edward Said on the dissertation committee), published work dealing largely with the Palestinians, and a five-year stint at the Institute of Palestine Studies before her hire by the University of Southern California. Her election in late 2002 was MESA’s way of endorsing the Palestinian cause in the midst of the intifada.

That said, Brand didn’t have a reputation as an over-the-top propagandist—until the lead-up to the Iraq war. In the spring of 2003, Brand was in Beirut on sabbatical leave. As Operation Iraqi Freedom got underway, she penned an anti-war letter (scroll to last item) addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell, on behalf of “Americans living in Lebanon.” The letter cited various far-out predictions (e.g., over a million Iraqis might die because of damage to Iraq’s water supply), added that “‘regime change’ imposed from outside is itself completely undemocratic,” and ended in these words: “We refuse to stand by watching passively as the US pursues aggressive and racist policies toward the people around us. We reject your claim to be taking these actions on our behalf. Not in our name.” Seventy Americans signed it.

Brand and a dozen of her colleagues then scheduled a meeting with Vincent Battle, U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, to deliver their letter. But on the appointed day, the road to the embassy was closed because of raucous anti-American demonstrations by Lebanese students. Brand and five other Americans would not be deterred. “Intent upon doing something, we took to the median strip of the Corniche,” Beirut’s seaside boulevard. “We stood near Beirut’s International College with our protest signs identifying us as Americans and calling for an end to the war.” According to Brand, passersby greeted them with thanks and blessings. It must have been quite a spectacle: the president-elect of MESA, literally walking the “Arab street” at the head of a honk-if-you-hate-U.S.-policy protest.

There’s irony here too, since Brand may be the most taxpayer-subsidized academic in Middle Eastern studies. She’s held four Fulbright fellowships, for research in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Tunisia, and she’s received at least three major U.S. government regrants, mostly for work in Jordan. She’s been on government-funded lecture junkets to Kuwait, Jordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Oman. And her own bio lists her as a past consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of State, and the U.S. Information Agency. Support for U.S. policy isn’t a prerequisite for any of these subsidies and perks, and Brand didn’t sign away her rights when she took them. But it does make one wonder what she said on those lecture tours, what sort of benefit Washington derived from her consultancies, and what sort of process plied this one academic with so many Fulbrights. That looks like a case of incestuous peer review run amuck; Congress should insist that Fulbright diversify its investments.

To return to Brand’s pounding the Beirut pavement in a sandwich board: she admitted she was surprised when an elderly gentleman drove by and told her, in English, “You are so gullible.” “I have given this sentence some thought,” wrote Brand, “wondering exactly what ideas or beliefs prompted it….Perhaps this gentleman thought our gullibility lay in an expectation that our protests would end the war.” Now old gentlemen in Lebanon who speak English are quite likely to use the language with precision (unlike most American professors), and he didn’t say naive. He said gullible. Yes, it would have been naive to think that protests would end the war. But to be gullible is to be subject to easy manipulation by others, and I’ll bet the old man meant this: you’re a dupe, for standing in the median strip of the “Arab street” to demonstrate in defense of the Arab world’s most despicable regime.

And this brings me back to the title of this evening’s MESA presidential address, “Scholarship in the Shadow of Empire.” In fact, the Middle East has languished in the shadow of despotic regimes, intolerant nationalists, and religious extremists for as long as MESA has been in the business. Regrettably, none of this ever troubled MESAns to the point of bringing them out into the street. When they weren’t looking away, they were explaining away, claiming that the benighted state of their region was really the fault of the West. In a profound sense, then, the entire guild of Middle Eastern studies has been gullible—an easily-manipulated fifth column for the most retrograde forces in the Middle East. That’s also why the guild has been stuck in an epistemological median strip. The MESA presidential address that will bear these tidings won’t be delivered tonight.

So MESA is full of the gullible, but Washington shouldn’t be, at least when it comes to Laurie Brand. At a Beirut conference three months after Baghdad was liberated, Brand announced that the Bush administration had lied more than any other administration, and that it showed a “systematic disregard for democratic institutions and values.” From Beirut, she e-mailed her campus newspaper: “Americans have been seduced by the Bush administration’s lies about its reasons behind this war.” She’s recently written of U.S. policy that “I cannot remember when I have been more continuously outraged.” Well, it’s a free country, but I’d like an assurance from the Department of State that she won’t be sent off on any taxpayer-funded speaking junkets over the next four years. Not in our name—and not on our nickel.

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

Glasnost in MESA

On By Martin Kramer

Lisa Anderson, dean of international affairs at Columbia and president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), has sent a letter to members in the current MESA Newsletter. It contains a remarkably frank indictment of the performance of Middle Eastern studies over the past decade.

Anderson describes how the Middle East stagnated in the 1990s, dashing the academics’ hopes for democratization. “It was an ugly picture,” she admits, “and, to be candid, few American scholars of the Middle East did much to advertise it.”

Thousands of individually rational decisions, as my political science colleagues might observe, contributed to a collective abdication of responsibility. In the social sciences, graduate students who wanted jobs and junior faculty who wanted tenure mimicked their colleagues in other areas and looked for flickers of electoral politics and glimmers of economic privatization…and neglected the stubborn durability of the authoritarian regimes….More senior scholars, pained by the demoralization in the region and its neglect in their disciplines, suspended active research agendas in favor of administrative assignments in their universities….In the humanities, many scholars…were reluctant to jeopardize access to visas and research authorizations; in their excessive caution, they failed to speak out about the often appalling circumstances of their friends and colleagues there.

In sum, the practitioners either silenced themselves or parroted disciplinary dogmas. I made most of these points, with evidence, in the fourth chapter of my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. I’m glad to see them finally conceded, instead of denied. Anderson’s own joint appearance with me on a panel in Washington in November was the first sign of glasnost in MESA. This is another.

In another part of her letter, Anderson takes an unfair stab at Campus Watch, for “claiming that half of MESA’s membership is ‘of Middle Eastern origin'” and that some of these MESAns have “brought their views with them.” Actually, the first flagging of the Middle Eastern origins of the members surfaced in a MESA presidential speech, delivered in 1992 by Barbara Aswad (and quoted by me in Ivory Towers). Aswad: “Our membership has changed over the years, and possibly half is of Middle Eastern heritage.” Campus Watch wasn’t the first to make that estimate.

When I brought Aswad’s quote, it was to dispute another claim about MESA, made by Edward Said:

During the 1980s, the formerly conservative Middle East Studies Association underwent an important ideological transformation….What happened in the Middle East Studies Association therefore was a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.

I pointed out that so total an “ideological transformation” in MESA would not have taken place had there not been a massive shift in the ethnic composition of its membership, as attested by Aswad. And on the very same page, I quoted a political scientist who noted “the widespread, if undocumentable, impression that an individual’s ethnic background or political persuasion may influence hiring and tenure decisions” in Middle Eastern studies. The political scientist: Lisa Anderson.

Personally, I wouldn’t care if Middle Eastern studies were comprised entirely of people of “Middle Eastern heritage.” What I find objectionable is the way MESA has been transformed into “a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.” That agenda does sound like something pulled straight out of Damascus or Tehran, and it’s certainly not the proper role of an American professional association. The problem with MESA is that so many of its past officers have tried to whip it into an ethnic lobby or a popular front. It’s this abysmal legacy that Professor Anderson would do right to disown in her next message to the members.

Sovietology: The original title of this posting was Perestroika in MESA. A reader, Fryar Calhoun, wrote to ask whether glasnost is more appropriate. He’s right. While Professor Anderson does write that “we may have to become more assertive as an organization,” and makes some modest suggestions, it’s the self-critique that’s the important aspect of her letter. So glasnost it is.