Tag: Middle Eastern studies

Arab Studies: My Critical Review

On By Martin Kramer

On April 1, 2005, the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University hosted a panel on “Arab Studies in the Cross-hairs,” as part of the center’s thirtieth-anniversary symposium entitled “Arab Studies: A Critical Review.” Participants on the panel including Michael Hudson, As’ad AbuKhalil, and Martin Kramer.

The following are Martin Kramer’s remarks, as delivered. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

It’s a privilege for me to address this symposium. It’s no secret that I’ve been an occasional critic of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. So I commend the organizers of this symposium for including me in the program. The leadership position of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies is so unassailable, that it can afford to do what no other Title VI center has deigned to do since I published Ivory Towers on Sand: offer me a platform. It’s a sign of your strength that I am here today.

This conference has yet to live up to its title. It is devoted to Arab studies, but it hasn’t been a critical review. It’s been a self-validating review. Virtually all the criticism has been directed against perceived rivals. That’s telling, and it leaves me wondering what a conference called “Arab Studies: A Celebration” might look like.

This lack of deep introspection would bewilder a complete outsider. The hand-wringing lament about the think tanks; the ritual denunciations of any U.S. policy, from preemptive war through democracy promotion; the hagiographic embellishments of the Edward Said legend; the exorcism of Bernard Lewis—and none of that rigorous self-criticism that was the hallmark of Hisham Sharabi, to whose memory this symposium is devoted. I have a professional interest in these things, because they validate my own assertions, sometimes even beyond my expectations. But to anyone else, these proceedings must seem fundamentalist in the narrowness of their range.

Then again, I am here, and my mission is very simple. It isn’t to convince anyone in this room—that’s beyond my power. It is to plant a seed of doubt. If you find yourself, against every impulse and instinct, agreeing with just one thing I say, I will regard this morning as well spent.

No one has bothered to characterize Middle Eastern studies since your last state-of-the-art conference fifteen years ago. In the 1990s, I would argue, Middle Eastern studies became comfortable, routine, and self-congratulatory. The revolutionaries, the grad students of the 1970s, had become much-titled members of the establishment. Edward Said’s insights had hardened among his disciples into dogmatic pieties. Students had ceased to rebel. MESA presidents grumbled about the rise of the think tanks, but no one rose to the challenge. Federal funding stayed reliably constant, and people stopped worrying about it. There was a ripple of concern when the concept of area studies came under question, but the threat soon passed. As for the Middle East itself, the field shared in the general complacency that preceded 9/11, and perhaps even contributed to it. So Ivory Towers on Sand was a shot well placed, and perfectly timed.

Or so it seemed at the time. Since then, I have watched in wonder as Middle Eastern studies have advanced from gain to gain. On the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I warned Congress not to put another penny into Middle Eastern studies, and a month later it invested millions more. Title VI funding rose from $80 million to over $100 million a year, and most of the increase has gone to the study of Muslim areas. Today, there are seventeen National Resource Centers for the Middle East, more than at any time in American history. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States wanted to boost study of the Middle East, and it had no alternative to the edifice built over the previous fifty years. President Bush will go down as the Title VI president, and the greatest material patron of Middle Eastern studies in American history. The prevailing sentiment in this administration might be conveyed by paraphrasing Secretary Rumsfeld: you go to war with the Middle Eastern studies you have, not the ones you might want or wish to have.

There’s more. The governing ideas of Middle Eastern studies in the 1990s have become the bedrock of current U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The first of these ideas is that a vibrant civil society exists just beneath the surface of Middle Eastern polities, and that a major reason it hasn’t surfaced is U.S. acquiescence in or support for authoritarian regimes. This presumption was the basis of the “civil society” industry of the 1990s in Middle Eastern studies. The second idea is the diversity of Islamism, and its openness to moderation through inclusion in the political process. Professor Esposito famously championed this idea from this university. These two concepts governed Middle Eastern studies in the 1990s. They are a powerful current in the Middle East policy of the Bush administration today, occupying a point of convergence among liberalism, post-Orientalism, and neoconservatism. That point is this: a repudiation of Arab-Muslim exceptionalism.

The existence of such a convergence isn’t acknowledged in academe. The self-perception of Middle Eastern studies, these past several years, has been one of a field under virtual siege, a field whose dominant ideas have been totally ignored by the powers-that-be. This notion of a field besieged and scorned is a self-serving myth. Those who repeat it show no grasp of the complex and ironic processes by which academic paradigms can and do percolate to the top of the decision-making pyramid. By such a process, an idea like pressuring friendly regimes to yield to “moderate” Islamists as a way-station to democracy winds its way from the academy to the American Enterprise Institute and then to the inner sanctums—trimmed, adjusted, and repackaged, but essentially intact. U.S. policy has come to depend in good part on paradigms that originated in the workshops of Middle Eastern studies. Just as there were no other Middle Eastern studies into which government could pour money, there were no alternative paradigms about state and society which it could appropriate.

So the state-society paradigms of Middle Eastern studies won by default. You might lament that your specific ideas on Iraq and Palestine do not resonate. But on the use of American force and the primacy of Palestine, you have a reputation of being as doctrinaire as an anti-war group, and as predictable as an ethnic lobby. Where you claim some exclusive expertise, though, your ideas have percolated upwards.

Even the attacks on the field have not harmed the field, and probably benefited it. Their effect has been to alleviate the traditional isolation of Middle Eastern studies within the academy.

Campus Watch bore sufficient resemblance to a 1950s blacklist that it could be portrayed as such, and this had the effect of rallying academics around the field.

H.R.3077, as misrepresented in the academy, rallied all of international and area studies around Middle Eastern studies, to repel the assault. In the process, Middle Eastern studies gained something they had never had: high-level academic allies. The tangible result of the controversy has been almost $2 million in contracts to the National Research Council and the Social Science Research Council, to study Title VI. In all likelihood, they will pronounce Title VI healthy—and in need of a lot more money.

As for the Columbia affair, the endgame will involve a significant expansion of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, which is likely to be emulated by other universities that encounter similar problems.

In sum, Middle Eastern studies, post-9/11, are not plunged into an existential crisis. To the contrary: they’re awash in resources, their ideas have resonated in high places, and all of academe has rallied to their defense. It’s been impossible to exclude them from their share of the spoils of war—and not for want of trying.

Is this not the moment for the leaders of the field finally to address the well-grounded critique of Middle Eastern studies? It seems to me that from the position of strength enjoyed by Middle Eastern studies—and this Center is an example—debate and reassessment pose no danger.

Let me remind you of the nature of that critique, as I made it in Ivory Towers. It wasn’t primarily about bias. It was about error. The book’s two core chapters dealt with errors in assessing the aims and the trajectory of Islamism; and errors in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the state and of civil society. In a sentence, the perils of Islamism had been underestimated, the potential of civil society had been overestimated. In pointing out errors, I hoped to compel a reexamination of underlying paradigms.

I was disappointed. This is not the place to consider the arguments of the reviewers in detail. For now, I note that a few themes recur, the most common being that I read selectively, and so missed this or that article, which would have proved that insiders knew precisely of the pitfalls I pointed to; or that I misunderstood what I did read because of my inadequate grounding in the social sciences, especially as I seemed to insist on accurate prediction as a measure of their validity. (I’m amused, a few years later, to see how some of the very same academics now claim validity for their expertise by citing their predictions on Iraq.) Interestingly, quite a few reviewers were suddenly at pains to protest that the field did not answer to Edward Said; and one reviewer even boxed Said and I together, as the authors of two equally outrageous attacks on the field.

Now I actually think I did rather better than Said did in Orientalism in at least one respect, in identifying the actual center of the field I critiqued. But I will accept the parallel, for the sake of argument. Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, may have been selective in its use of evidence. Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, may have lacked nuance in representing the state of certain disciplines. Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, may have had a polemical edge, since it named names. But Ivory Towers, like Orientalism, also spoke a fundamental truth, and it is the same truth: that the Western academy still represents the Middle East as it needs it to be, and as it wants it to be.

Edward Said wrote this nearly twenty-five years ago, and I quote:

There is no denying that a scholar sitting in Oxford or Boston writes and researches principally, though not exclusively, according to standards, conventions, and expectations shaped by his or her peers, not by the Muslims being studied. This is a truism, perhaps, but it needs emphasis just the same.

This is just as true now as it was then, even though the standards, conventions and expectations largely conform to those established by Said himself. In fact, it’s even truer, because, over the past twenty years, those conventions have grown rigid and unforgiving. Under the illusion that scholars had escaped Said’s truism, that they now really knew “the Muslims being studied,” a quiet purge swept Middle Eastern studies. The old guild, which tended to value proficiency, gave way to a popular front, which insisted upon conformity. The idea spread that Middle Eastern studies, a small and incestuous field at the best of times, didn’t need diversity. Their mission was to stand as a bulwark against the media, the government, and the think tanks.

In Ivory Towers, I showed how “the Muslims being studied” still somehow managed to elude even this popular front, which had erred precisely because it had failed to diversify. And I concluded that this problem could only be solved by deliberately reopening Middle Eastern studies. The Middle Eastern studies nomenklatura may be impossible to abolish, I wrote, but it must permit opposition. And I would argue that there is no better moment to run that risk than now.

Why now? The history of Middle Eastern studies is largely one of boom and bust. At the moment, the field is booming. But there is another truism I bring in the book, this one from Gustav von Grunebaum. I quote:

No group, society, or civilization, so history allows us to postulate, will consistently support an intellectual endeavor unless it believes this effort to be serviceable either to its practical or to its existential needs.

Middle Eastern studies cannot escape this truism either, and it means they must always justify themselves, at some level, by meeting practical and existential needs. And they must do so more insistently than, say, postcolonial studies, precisely because they’re addicted to the public treasury, which has opened up to them in the name of national security.

Earlier I said that Middle Eastern studies have prospered by default since 9/11. But the fact that they don’t prioritize what the nation prioritizes isn’t a secret anymore. Of course no one expects the field to chain itself to meeting practical and existential needs. The problem is that it stigmatizes and punishes the very few who are willing to consider issues from just that angle. As a result, the genteel game, by which vice-provosts go to Washington to pitch area studies in the nation’s service, and Washington gives them benefit of the doubt, has become a little too transparent.

I get messages all the time from latecomers and newcomers who say they want to do things differently, and directly answer the needs not being met by Middle Eastern studies. These aren’t think tankers, these are academics, and they have identified a willingness in university administrations to generate entirely new academic programs that do meet those needs. I go from here to Brandeis, which is inaugurating a new Middle East center. Others are in the planning stage. Academe is full of entrepreneurs and poachers.

If the present boom is not to end in another bust, along with the creation of a parallel universe of Middle Eastern studies—in addition to the think-tank parallel universe—von Grunebaum’s truism must be acknowledged and accepted. The most effective way to do that is to allow a more diverse range of scholars to find their places at the table. The myth of the siege should be set aside; the convergence I alluded to should be acknowledged; the gatekeepers should reopen the gates.

As someone who was educated in Middle East programs and centers at Princeton and Columbia, who taught in or alongside major centers at Chicago and here at Georgetown, who for years attended MESA, I prefer to share one table. If those days are gone forever, then I would like to hear it—I will have learned something important at this meeting. If others share my preference, then I would like to hear that too, and so would many others through me. Then perhaps this meeting will have been a beginning.

My congratulations to the Center on its thirtieth anniversary. I admire its many achievements.

Columbia: The Future of Middle Eastern Studies at Stake

On By Martin Kramer

Address delivered to a conference on “The Middle East and Academic Integrity on the American Campus,” convened at Columbia University on March 6, 2005. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

A Battle in a Larger War

In the midst of claims and counterclaims at Columbia, it is perhaps easy to lose sight of the larger picture. The larger stakes are the future of Middle Eastern studies in America. The Columbia crisis is many things, but it is also a battle in the struggle for the future of a field that is growing, and that has become vital to the well-being of the United States. The Columbia crisis may even be a turning point. Let me explain why.

I won’t dwell here on the problems that have plagued Middle Eastern studies over the last twenty-five years. You will find them discussed in some detail in my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. There I show how Middle Eastern studies became a field where scholarship took a backseat to advocacy, where a few biases became the highest credentials, where dissenting views became thought-crimes.

This transformation I attributed to the influence of the late Professor Edward Said of Columbia University. For Professor Said, no understanding of the Middle East had validity unless it was joined at the hip with political sympathy for the cause and the struggle. The cause was the empowerment of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. The struggle was against an axis of evil comprised of Western Orientalism, American imperialism, and Israeli Zionism.

The Corruption of Middle Eastern Studies

In the 1980s and 1990s, this new orthodoxy swept through Middle Eastern studies, carried on the shoulders of radicals who made their way through graduate schools and into faculty positions. These radicals, once tenured and vested with academic power, began a systematic purge of Middle Eastern studies. They promoted one another, and they shut out alternative views. Middle Eastern studies, under their domination, became very much like Middle Eastern regimes: full of rhetoric about liberation, but dead-set against all expressions of dissent. And like Professor Said, the Middle East academics showed less interest in the actual Middle East than in exposing the West’s so-called “stereotypes.”

More than any other university, Columbia stood at the very forefront of this transformation. Each and every department became the target of a takeover attempt, and none more so than the Middle East department, MEALAC. But Columbia was simply the most egregious example of a process that took place in Middle Eastern studies programs across the United States. By the late 1990s, the radicals could look smugly up and down their hallways and see only like-minded colleagues. They understood perfectly how best to play the politics of American academe, to conform to its fashionable orthodoxies.

But while their trendy theories may have won them tenure, they also became ever more detached from the realities of the Middle East. Nowhere was this more so than in regard to the character of Islamism. Professor Said himself, not long before 9/11, mocked what he called “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners and poison water supplies.” Such talk, he wrote, was based on “highly exaggerated stereotyping.”

Post-9/11 Opportunism

9/11 should have been the turning point for Middle Eastern studies. Columbia’s Professor Richard Bulliet, speaking to a student forum in the week after the attack, made this quip: “Does this mean I’m throwing my copy of [Edward Said’s] Orientalism out the window? Maybe it does.” Some people in the field may have felt the same doubts in their hearts–that they had been wrong about the Middle East, and that the errors had their origins in the biases that permeated the field.

But they wouldn’t express those doubts openly, and for a reason: thanks to 9/11, they hoped that Washington would lavish new subsidies on them. Despite my book, which appeared only a month after 9/11, there wasn’t sufficient awareness in Washington of the problems in Middle Eastern studies. And so in December 2001, while the ruins of the Trade Center still smoldered, Congress authorized the greatest onetime increase in federal subsidies for area studies in history. The subsidy program is called Title VI, and Congress and the administration of George W. Bush increased it by 26 percent in one swoop, most of it going to Middle Eastern studies.

The Fate of Title VI

That was a setback to the cause of change. But a second chance presented itself a year and a half ago when the Higher Education Act came up for reauthorization. Title VI is part of that act, and the chair of the House Subcommittee with jurisdiction over Title VI introduced a bill to reform the program. The International Studies in Higher Education Act would have established an International Advisory Board to advise Congress and the Department of Education on how best to match the priorities of Title VI to the rapidly expanding needs of the United States.

After the bill passed the House and went to the Senate, forces in academe launched a campaign of disinformation against it, deliberately obscuring both the bill’s language and its intent. I speak personally when I say that the nature of this campaign persuaded me, more than anything else, that academics have no more respect for the truth than any other lobby when they perceive the slightest risk to their subsidies and entitlements. Columbia University, as an institution, deployed its own lobbyists in this campaign of deceit.

People often ask me what happened to the Title VI reform bill. It was never defeated. It expired because for the first time in history, Congress failed to reauthorize the Higher Education Act on time. But there is a new Congress, the reauthorization has begun anew, and the Title VI reform measure is back in play. Nevertheless, passage and implementation are well down the road.

In short, until this past fall, the cause of reform in Middle Eastern studies remained stuck. It was at this moment of impasse that the film Columbia Unbecoming cast a spotlight on a dark corner of Middle Eastern studies.

The Case of Columbia and Its Implications

What did Columbia Unbecoming achieve? It put a human face on the dysfunction of Middle Eastern studies. I and others had been talking for years about bias and suggesting that this bias had victims. You cannot establish total control over a field, and you cannot eliminate dissent, without frustrating the careers of countless aspiring scholars. But this is always hard to prove and it is obscured by layers of bureaucracy, the workings of committees, and the secrecy by which universities make their choices.

Columbia Unbecoming demonstrated how the same mechanisms that had purged the field were at work in the classroom, and it found victims prepared to speak out. The fact that it happened at Columbia, the birthplace of Saidian doctrine, and the fact that Professor Said’s direct disciples committed the alleged offenses, added to the effect.

Now some will say that the crisis at Columbia has nothing to do with Middle Eastern studies more broadly, but reflects conditions unique to Morningside Heights. This is perhaps why, beyond Columbia, leading figures of Middle Eastern studies have hesitated to come forward and take a stand in defense of MEALAC. With a few exceptions, they have not rallied to MEALAC and for a good reason: they don’t want the Columbia case to be regarded as typical of the field as a whole.

There is no doubt that the Columbia case has unique features. It is so extreme that it is almost a parody. And yet, as any careful student of this field knows, there are dozens of Middle East programs and departments that are potential MEALACs. They developed in the same way at the same time, with similar biases and the same disdain for diversity. Of course, not every biased professor is abusive. Like dysfunctional families, each such program is miserable in its own way. But the potential for similar blowups is ever-present on many other campuses. As the author of a book on Middle Eastern studies, I get constant reports of MEALACs-in-the-making. Columbia is an extreme case of a general problem.

There is another way in which the Columbia case connects to the very mainstream of Middle Eastern studies. The doyens of Middle Eastern studies are always quick to claim that the field is capable of regulating itself. But two former presidents of the Middle East Studies Association are on the faculty of Columbia. They preside over a Title VI National Resource Center for the Middle East, yet they have both been complicit in the promotion of the most radical element in MEALAC. Neither came forward before the crisis to provide a check or balance to MEALAC’s excesses.

Now they have both been assigned corrective roles: one sits on the ad hoc committee, the other has been detailed to the MEALAC advisory committee. I will not prejudge the outcome of these committees, but where were these leaders of the field before the crisis? The Columbia case is proof positive that the mainstream leaders of Middle Eastern studies are unwilling or incapable of checking the extremists whom they themselves have promoted and who flourish alongside them.

This isn’t a problem unique to Columbia; it is endemic throughout Middle Eastern studies. There are reasonable and thoughtful people in the field, who know intellectual and professional excesses when they see them. But they are too indifferent or timid or intimidated to provide a balance.

Incestuous Academe

And that brings me to another way in which Columbia’s crisis exemplifies a larger problem. Middle Eastern studies are a small field. The professional association includes only 2,500 members. Everyone knows everyone else, and there is a serious problem of intellectual inbreeding, compounded by the relentless efforts of radicals to fill every slot with their own protégés and acolytes.

At Columbia, this inbreeding reached unprecedented proportions. The member of MEALAC at the center of the controversy did his Ph.D. at Columbia, had it published by Columbia University Press, and received his tenure-track teaching appointment at Columbia. He is the ultimate Columbia product; to deny him now would throw into question the entire quality control mechanism of the university.

But it is precisely that mechanism that failed at Columbia, just as it has failed across Middle Eastern studies. This is a small and incestuous field. Higher administration cannot allow Middle East departments to run themselves without close supervision and occasional intervention. Academic freedom does not include the right to bring in one’s own allies and friends and promote them shamelessly without reference to the standards and priorities of the university as a whole.

In a new interview, President Bollinger suggests he intends to restructure and re-form MEALAC, even as he expands the study of the Middle East at Columbia. This is precisely what is needed in dozens of other departments across the country: expansion, to meet growing demand; and thorough restructuring, to break up monopolies and promote diversity. A university president needs tremendous courage to face down the vested interests of Middle East departments. I believe that President Bollinger’s tenure will be judged by his success or failure in doing just that. Other university presidents, whose programs are ticking away, will be watching.

A Student Revolt?

I have made it clear that the Columbia case has tremendous significance beyond the campus, for Middle Eastern studies as a whole. I will go further. I expect the kind of student revolt we have seen at Columbia to spread to other campuses and to spread beyond Jewish students. In one of the most-quoted instances of intimidation at Columbia, a MEALAC professor allegedly asked an Israeli student: “How many Palestinians did you kill?” Middle Eastern studies programs are going to fill with veterans of American military service in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are going to fill with beneficiaries of new government scholarship programs, offered in return for a service obligation in the military and intelligence agencies.

Given the predilections of the faculty in this field, the danger of widespread intimidation of students by faculty is very real. How long will it be before a student is asked how many Iraqis he killed, or is accused of being a spy in training for the evil American empire? That is why the outcome of the Columbia case, in regard to students’ grievances, has a significance that goes way beyond the pro-Israel community. It is of crucial importance to the U.S. effort to recruit the best intellectual capital and train it in American universities, both for the war on terror and for the challenges arising from the coming transformation of the Middle East.

I conclude. Up close, this looks like a story about Columbia and Israel. In proper perspective, it is a test case for Middle Eastern studies and American preparation for its enhanced role in the Middle East. It will affect the way all universities manage and regulate their expanding Middle East programs, and it has implications for an entire generation of students who are already streaming to Middle East programs because they want to serve the nation. My message to the students and supportive faculty of Columbia is this: remain steadfast. You are the turning point for Middle Eastern studies in America, and to that extent, for America in the Middle East.

Pipes’s Partner

On By Martin Kramer

The following item appeared alongside a profile of Daniel Pipes in Harvard Magazine, January-February 2005. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

No study of Daniel Pipes would be complete without a few words about the trenchant Martin Kramer, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former editor of Pipes’s Middle East Quarterly, who earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Princeton, where he studied with Dodge professor (now emeritus) Bernard Lewis. For both Kramer and Pipes, Lewis is the greatest twentieth-century representative of the group of Jewish scholars who played a key role in the development of “an objective, nonpolemical, and positive evaluation of Islamic civilization,” to use Lewis’s own words, someone far above what Pipes calls the “postmodern practice of stuffing the complexities of political science and history into bottles labeled race, gender, and class” characterizing the current field.

In his 2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand, Kramer launches a withering attack on the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), asserting that there were acknowledged problems with competency and standards from its very inception, in 1966—indeed, as far back as 1955, when Sir Hamilton Gibb was brought in to head the new Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. Gibb, who “had wanted to bring Oriental studies and the social sciences together,” later lamented:

…it was not long before I realized how inchoate, indeed how naïve, all my previous ideas had been, in face of the actual problems involved in developing a programme of area studies that could stand up to the high standards demanded by the Harvard Faculty—and equally so to the best academic standards in this country.

“To speak plainly,” said Gibb, “there just are not yet enough fully-qualified specialists in any of the required fields to go round.” “When Gibb departed in 1964,” writes Kramer, “Harvard’s center nearly folded, and for years it relied upon visiting faculty. Harvard tolerated its Middle East center (it brought in money), but never respected it.”

It was the Arab-Israeli conflict in June 1967 that ignited what Kramer describes as the deepening politicization, the substitution of indoctrination for scholarship, and the Arab-Israel obsession that debilitated MESA. William Brinner, a Berkeley historian, saw it, and warned in his 1970 presidential address: “We do not seek an end to controversy, but we must realize that the price we will pay for political involvement is the destruction of this young Association and the disappearance of a precious meeting place of ideas.” And in 1974, the University of Chicago’s Leonard Binder, in his presidential address to MESA, cautioned: “Some day peace may break out, and then people will cease to be willing to pay us to tell them what they want to hear. What will we then do if we have no scholarly standing?”

But the coup de grâce for Middle Eastern studies, Kramer asserts, was delivered by Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American critic and University Professor and professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, in his 1978 book Orientalism. Said, writes Kramer,

situated the Palestinians in a much wider context. They were but the latest victims of a deep-seated prejudice against the Arabs, Islam, and the East more generally—a prejudice so systematic and coherent that it deserved to be described as “Orientalism,”the intellectual and moral equivalent of anti-Semitism. Until Said, orientalism was generally understood to refer to academic Oriental studies in the older, European tradition….Said resurrected and resemanticized the term, defining it as a supremacist ideology of difference, articulated in the West to justify its dominion over the East.

“The decadence that pervades Middle Eastern studies today,” wrote Kramer, “the complete subservience to trendy politics, and the unlikelihood that the field might ever again produce a hero of high culture—all this is owed to Edward Said.”

It didn’t take long for “Orientalist” to become a nasty word in Middle Eastern studies circles, as, for example, when Said himself, writing in Counterpunch in June 2003, referred to “Neanderthal publicists and Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes.” To which Pipes responded a day or two later, “How impressive to be called an Orientalist by the person who transformed this honorable old term into an insult.”