Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America

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Summary: The truth is a hard pill to swallow.
Review: A much needed declaration on the failures of Middle East scholarship. Academia has continued on its liberal path to build a Middle East paradigm rooted in hegemony and keeping up with the most modern intellectual jargin while ignoring the real situation in the Middle East. If the professors of Middle East Studies and MESA were more competant their opinions would be heralded througout America. However, MESA and academia aim at subverting those that do not buy into the dominant paradigm that America is imperalistic. Kramer dismantles this innaccurate paradigm in an accurate and revolutionary way.

Middle East Academia on college campuses has become a uniform mass saying in unison that imperialistic America's foreign policy has created this "Oriental" attitude that patronizes the Middle East. The academics reply they are simply telling the truth. I have yet to see a Middle East country not accept American aid. Middle East scholars have missed the reality boat on the Middle East. Where is the scholarship on Middle East terrorism? Fundamentalist Islam? Kramer is brutal, but honest in this assault and anyone thinking about Middle East Studies as an academic discipline must read this first!

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Summary: Do the lunatics run the asylums?
Review: Martin Kramer provides abundant evidence that the politically correct Leftists dominate the academic field of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States. These individuals are also intellectually incompetent and possess an intense hostility toward the values of Western Civilization. The author quotes esteemed scholar Bernard Lewis as deploring the painful fact that "Professional advancement in Middle East studies can be achieved with knowledge and skill well below what is normally required in other more developed fields or more frequented disciplines, where standards are established and maintained by a large number of competent professionals over long periods." The situation has worsened considerably since the 1978 publication of Edward Said's "Orientalism" which essentially perceives most Middle Eastern scholarship as bigoted imperialistic attacks upon the Muslim world. All cultures are basically equal and it is outrageous, according to Said, to claim that the West has surpassed the Islamic nations in all of the sciences, literature, and the arts. However, it is impossible to hold Said's position without ignoring the solidly established truth concerning the 500 year decline of the followers of Mohammed. This collapse occurred long before the so-called Western imperialists directly impacted the events and decisions of the Muslim leaders of the Middle Ages. Scapegoating the West is absurd and illogical. Martin Kramer seems to shy away from pointing out Said's tacit, if not explicit, Marxist intellectual underpinnings. Needless to add, I have no such reluctance. It is virtually impossible to understand these Leftist academics unless one addresses the Marxism pervading their writings.

Kramer warns that the radical Liberal Middle Eastern academic agenda is politically motivated. These academics feel uncomfortable with the very notion of objective and disinterested scholarship. Instead, they prefer to embrace the thinking of Michael Foucault who argues that truth really doesn't exist and ultimately those in power mandate what is to be the accepted interpretation of any given set of facts. Should we still be pessimistic even after the attacks of 9/11? Haven't Liberal academics like John Esposito been thoroughly humiliated by their gross underestimation of the threat of Islamic militancy? Isn't their day in the sun over because the general public is now aware of their malicious shenanigans? Alas, the author fears that these Leftist extremists are solidly ensconced within their academic departments. It is therefore incumbent upon us to consistently take them to task when they fall into error. The intellectual wars must not be avoided if we are to have any chance whatsoever in fighting the war on terrorism. You must read Martin Kramer's "Ivory Towers on Sand" if you truly desire to comprehend what is at stake. A visit to the author's new web site, Campus Watch, should be strongly considered. Moreover, it is also incumbent upon you to do your share in this battle for the hearts and minds of the students attending these universities. We are not morally allowed to sit on the sidelines.

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Summary: Debunking prescription and prophecy
Review: Martin Kramer's monograph had its genesis before September 11, but its opportune arrival directly raises the question of how 2,600 specialist academics from 125 American universities and colleges had practically nothing to say - except after September 11 - about Bin Laden?

Kramer's monograph answers this question by placing it in the context of the ideological transformation of Middle Eastern studies since the Second World War.

As Kramer shows, the field was originally an antiquarian and linguistic guild that after the Second World War became highly politicized, dominated by sociologists and political scientists, and by 1966, embodied in the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).

Kramer demonstrates that Middle Eastern studies has been characterized by political advocacy of Arab nationalism that specialists view as a beneficent force in a Middle East which they hold to be a region of burgeoning modernization.

Kramer's does not encompass a detailed aetiology of these ideas (which can be traced in large part to the Englishmen Arnold Toynbee and Sir Hamilton Gibb) but explains well the effects of these notions.

Kramer indicates how the discipline suffered a crisis of confidence in the late 1970s, which spawned the "triumph" of Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism (1978). Said's work, as Kramer shows, was a pungent critique of Western scholarship, producing a new discipline called post-colonialism, which regarded all previous Western scholarship as a tool of Western dominance which deprived Middle Eastern societies of their own narrative, fostered racist assumptions and stimulated discriminatory practices. This new orthodoxy now accused "Zionists" like Bernard Lewis, and even Arab nationalist champion Gibb himself, of committing this alleged heresy.

But as Kramer ably shows, the new orthodoxy has not stood the test of time, with MESA failing to accurately predict Middle Eastern developments. The progressive forces expected to overthrow oppressive American Cold War arrangements, as Kramer shows, never materialised. Instead we got the decidedly non-secular, revivalist Islam offered to Muslims with Iran's fall to Khomeini in 1979.

Few MESA members, Kramer also notes, had anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein, who invaded and annexed Kuwait before MESA was inspired to consider his brand of Ba'athist Arab nationalism malevolent. These specialists, Kramer also shows, forecast disaster for what was instead a decisive US intervention in Kuwait that reaffirmed American prestige.

In answer to his critics, Kramer would concede that even the finest specialist cannot necessarily predict the choices of men. But he sees in Middle East specialists a more pervasive deficiency. For world wide, they mysteriously viewed Saddam as capable and likely to carry the enthusiasm of the Arab world when, given the opportunity of Desert Storm, his army deserted in droves and his subject peoples rebelled.

Kramer also indicates that the series of American policy errors in the 1990s - leaving Saddam in place, decamping from the scene of American blood-lettings, chartering an open-ended Israeli-Palestinian peace process dependent on the probity of Yasser Arafat - were inspired largely by the orthodox MESA attitudes.

Readers interested in how post-colonial texts serve as ammunition for Islamists and a handicap for secularist reformers in the Middle East, will find much of interest in Kramer's book. One example: Malcolm Kerr, one of the few MESA members not to have prevented his abiding concern for the Arab world to dispel his misgivings about Orientalism, was gunned down in 1984 outside his office in Beirut. He had become two years before president of the American University of Beirut. "There is surely irony," writes Kramer, that Said and the "progressive" scholars ... should have delegitimised the one university in the Arab world where academic freedom had meaning, thanks to its American antecedents."

Kramer duly notes that Said was later to say he regretted the enthusiastic reception of his book by the Islamists. But Kramer also observes that Said failed to explain why his writings were received thus, and Said's confessed inability to explain Islam to the West is a remarkably candid disclosure - which is widely neglected.

Kramer rightly devotes attention to the ascendancy of John Esposito, who progressed from a remote scholar on the fringes of Middle Eastern studies to its epicentre in the mid-1990s. Kramer defines Esposito's winning formula as the ability to produce scholarly and favourable volumes on Islam and Islamic society, shorn of Said's rancid anti-American and post-colonial baggage, and tailored to the needs of college texts. He refurbished the Islamist phenomenon as representing democratic, participatory movements, thereby sanitising them for the public and confounding patterns of social tension in the Middle East with those in democracies.

Kramer credits Esposito with popularising much of the outlook and attitudes of the post-colonial school and thus duplicating with the US government and public Said's success with the academy. As Kramer shows, Esposito has been duly followed by Augustus Richard Norton, whose new doctrine holds that `civil society' in the Middle East is the wave of the future that threatens to uproot Middle Eastern despotisms.

Only such a doctrine, Kramer notes, could explain the appearance of historian John Voll before a US congressional committee in 1992. Voll argued, apparently with seriousness, that Sudan was a democracy when in fact it was (and remains) governed by a junta without political parties and the scene of savage persecution of Christians and animists.

As Kramer's readers will infer, we presently find ourselves at a potential crossroads, where matters could take a new course. In short order we have witnessed the collapse of Oslo, September 11, the speedy American military successes in Afghanistan, and subsiding Islamist fervour in the wake of demonstrated Western resolve. Kramer's monograph provides a timely explication of the larger and detailed issues involved. Its hostile reception at the latest MESA Conference forewarns us how it will be resisted. But as Kramer amply demonstrates, resisting the duty to deconstruct ideological fixations among Middle Eastern specialists has impoverished the field and misled government and now is not the time to compound the error.

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Summary: Excellent dissection of the failure of Middle East studies
Review: Martin Kramer, an erudite and respected scholar, has taken a long overdue look at the state of Middle East studies in the United States and his findings are disturbing. He documents the fact that the principal practitioners in Middle East Studies programs are more polemicists than scholars, with an overwhelming anti-Israel bias, and funded largely by Arab interests. It was not always thus. Kramer gives an excellent history of the field and explains how the study of the Middle East was once considered a noble and scholarly pursuit. This is an important book for anyone who is interested in how the history and politics of this important region of the world is taught.

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Summary: Partisan, but useful
Review: The topic, at first glance, is very narrow. This is not a book about how to study the Middle East, nor about American academia, but about the intersection of these: how the Arab Middle East in fact is and has been studied in American universities.

Once this narrow focus is understood and accepted by the reader, there is a fascinating read here. Kramer is very knowledgeable about the inner workings of "Middle Eastern Studies," and more particularly about the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The story he has to tell is actually more entertaining than most of the novels with academic settings, and the humor more mordant, because it is all true, alas. The second chapter about Edward Said is worth the price of the book.

Of course the Marxists and other Israel-bashers won't like this book -- it tells us too much about them.

That said, there are regretful lacunae in Kramer's book. It would seem that "area studies," of which the Middle Eastern is but one, can lend themselves to superficiality perhaps more than the traditional disciplines of history, language study, sociology, religious studies, etc. Kramer is a bit evasive on this. And Kramer is also a tad too fond of social science jargon. "Paradigm," a word introduced with the present meaning by Thomas Kuhn back in 1962, appears on practically every page of Kramer's book. Kuhn himself, in the second edition of his book, in 1970, found himself obliged to clarify his meaning.

But these are minor quibbles. I learned a great deal from this book, especially about the pretensions of (some of) America's academics. Five stars here, well earned.

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Summary: An appeal to the American taxpayer
Review: This book is not so much about the blatant bias which most Middle Eastern Studies Departments display in regard to the various conflicts in the Middle East. It is rather about the errors which those in those departments have been consistently guilty of. The two major ones according to Kramer relate to Islamism and Middle Eastern civil society. In the seventies and eighties these faculties were filled with people publishing articles which suggested the Middle East was about to enter a new period of 'enlightened Islam'. There was not a hint in these departments about what was to happen in the United States on Sept.11, 2001. There was no real effort to understand the process of radical Islamicization which was taking place throughout the era.
The second major set of errors related to the character of the societies themselves. The experts were talking about a transformation to a new civil order in the Middle East. Instead what has occurred is an ever- deepening backwardness in which individual rights, the rights of women, free inquiry , democratic institutions are given no place.
Kramer shows how the in-built prejudice of the Middle Eastern Studies department made their batting average in seeing the future of the area, zero.
Beyond this Kramer takes a look at the way the US government has funded programs in these departments, and given free lunches and worse to investigators who are hostile or at best indifferent to the needs of American society. The Middle Eastern studies departments have not contributed in an adequate way to the education of scholars, students of Arabic, experts who could help in the worldwide US campaign against Terror which has a good part of its base in the Arab Middle East.
Kramer sees that the throwing of federal funds at these departments have led them to go in their own often Anti- American ways.
What he would like to see is Middle Eastern studies departments which have some sense of responsibility to the US society which they belong. He would like to see more diversity, true diversity in the kinds of scholars which are hired, and opinions debated. He sees one key to this in the Federal funding which provides the research money for graduate students and post- doctoral studies. He is not asking for a curtailing of academic freedom but rather suggesting that there be on the part of Middle East studies faculty an awareness that they live in American society and have obligation to its norms and standards. He understands that given the entrenched faculties of most of these institutions great change will not come overnight. But he believes the United States government and its citizens should not be content with a situation where ninety percent or more of the faculties opposed the 1991 Bush invasion of Iraq , and oppose US goals for the area.
This is a well- argued, clearly written piece of work, an overwhelming indictment of intellectual and moral corruption in the Middle East Studies departments of America.
Congress should take note, and when the next time comes for appropriating funds for ' Middle Eastern scholars' make certain that the present situation of corruption is not allowed to persist.

Rating:
Summary: Partisan, but useful
Review: Without exception, every reviewer here seems to think that the only way to respond to this book is to blindly react based on your partisan feelings - conservatives (the American sort, that is) love it, liberals hate it. How pathetically predictable. Admittedly, this book has an ideological axe of its own to grind, but pretty much every author has one of those, so you have to read this sort of work by looking for the positive contributions you can find for yourself. I mean, come on, people! The best way to be a smart Marxist sure as hell isn't to read the Manifesto over and over - you have to read what you _disagree_ with to find any useful information. Challenge yourselves a little!

Ok. I'm off the soapbox now, and I'll try to be more specific. Keep in mind that I haven't read Said's Orientalism, so my comments are less informed than they could be.

-The book falls into the same intellectual trickery that it accuses Said of - anyone can offer up an academic looking book with endnoted arguments and superscripted numbers. In this case, the title (and subtitle) of the book should be enough to convince anyone with a shred of academic honesty to reformat - this is NOT a journal article or a scholarly publication! It is an editorial work! This is not to say that I disagree with the thesis - but the book is clearly designed to look "scientific" and objective, when in fact it is not.
-Arguments about academia in general are out of place. Yes, in the 1970s, lot of women and minorities got hired at the expense of Yale-educated white men. Was this a good idea? Sometimes, sometimes not. But the fact that actual people who were from the Middle East took over many academic positions during this time doesn't contribute to the argument. Kramer makes special note that at least *50%* of the faculty of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies departments are now actual (or former) residents of these areas. Shocking! And I bet most African-American studies professors are black, too! Call the Cato Institute!
-Arguments about academic failures (especially of area studies in general - more on this would have been good) are convincing. It doesn't take much to argue that the political and academic intercept of Middle Eastern studies in the United States is less than suited to objective and professional scholarship. Kramer does a good job pointing out that the discipline (if indeed it should be one) has failed by most academic standards to contribute to understanding or prediction. Of course, the same could be said of political science or economics generally.

In short, a dishonest book with more than a kernel of truth. Flame on!

-Walt