69 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Debunking prescription and prophecy, October 17, 2002
This review is from: Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Policy Papers (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), No. 58.) (Paperback)
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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47 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Truth is More Entertaining Than Fiction, December 18, 2002
This review is from: Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Policy Papers (Washington Institute for Near East Policy), No. 58.) (Paperback)
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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