28 March - 3 April 2002
Issue No.579
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 March - 3 April 2002 Issue No.579 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Towering misrepresentation
Roger Owen* discovers he is a post-modern mandarin
Martin Kramer is an Israeli/American with a number of indifferent books on political Islam to his name, none of which I've seen on any British or American academic reading lists. He is probably better known as a former director of the Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv University, with its strong connections to Israeli military intelligence.
But it is in his self-appointed role as general gadfly and polemicist that he succeeded for a brief period in electrifying the world of North American Middle Eastern studies with the publication of his Ivory Towers Built on Sand just after last September's World Trade Center attack. Sand is, of course, a favourite Israeli word for describing the Arab world, while the "ivory towers" in question are the university Middle Eastern centres which, in Kramer's account, failed the United States by their inability to "predict or explain the major evaluations of Middle East politics and society over the past two decades."
This absurd accusation was then taken up by countless newspapers and chat-shows, giving Kramer's argument a second airing in its trimmed-down form as a failure to provide the federal government in Washington with the insights it needed to understand the Middle East. Nevertheless, irritating as this was to the persons named by Kramer for their particular failure to engage properly with what he takes to be Middle Eastern reality, the whole thing proved to be something of a storm in a tea-cup as the federal government, realising that it needed Middle Eastern expertise more than ever before, proved ready and willing to multiply the sums it provides to support language and other kinds of training.
Coming from the Dayan Centre, it may be that Kramer regards it as his first duty to brief his own government on Middle Eastern possibilities. But few of his North American interviewers had the wit to ask why the same duties should apply anywhere else. It must be clear to even those with the meanest intelligence what happens to scholarship when it is guided by a government agenda. Our duty is to provide the information, in my case the examination of the underlying political and socio-economic structures, which will allow others to use them for teaching, analysis or joint projects. This is also recognised by the United States government, which provides Harvard and other Middle Eastern centres with money for language instruction, seminars and workshops, outreach into the local community, but not academic research.
For the rest, Kramer's brief tour d'horizon of the history of North American Middle Eastern studies over the past 50 years is tendentious, wildly contradictory and talks of an incipient crisis in area studies to which few of those in field now ascribe. It also assumes a division of Middle Eastern scholars into two camps: the righteous followers of Bernard Lewis and the misguided intellectual slaves of an allegedly post- modern Edward Said, an idea so ludicrous and so far from the truth that it is difficult to believe that Kramer has the slightest idea of what he is writing about.
Kramer's manichean world also supposes an ability to impose teachers' ideas on their students which is as misconceived as it is insulting to the intelligence of those we teach. In my nine years at Harvard I have never once been able to influence a PhD candidate in his or her choice of topic, never once supervised a thesis in modern Middle Eastern studies which paid even lip service to the ideas of Michel Foucault, let alone Bourdieu or Homi Bhabah. I sometimes wish I could get more students to work on subjects closer to my own interests in the venerable practice of political economy. But this, it seems, is not the Harvard way.
I should add that my own name appears six times in the book. On two occasions, the reference is a complimentary one. It is a good thing, it would seem, that I was the Oxford supervisor of Robert Satloff, the director of the Washington Institute for Near East policy. And a perhaps a good thing that, as Kramer's avid researchers discovered, I once made the surely unexceptional statement that "Middle Eastern politics are much less unpredictable than is often supposed."
I also appear in the ridiculous guise of a "post- modern mandarin," "transported" from Oxford to Harvard, and bringing the bacillus of Saidism with me. Now the phrase "post-modern mandarin" has a nice ring to it. And, in a way I feel quite flattered to have been awarded such a title. But it is so far from the truth as to make me wonder, yet again, whether Kramer has the slightest idea about either post-modernism or my own work in political and economic history. Perhaps it was my use of the notion of the "state" to structure some of my analysis, a dangerously ideological concept in Kramer's world-view and certainly not to be found in the recent works of Bernard Lewis. But not, of course, in the works of Edward Said either.
One last mention of my name strikes a nasty low blow. Kramer quotes a statement I made in my Al-Hayat column -- also published in Al- Ahram Weekly -- about the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, to the effect that I did not think it worthwhile running campaigns in Washington or speaking to local newspaper reporters when my own students were troubled and made to feel uncomfortable by having to experience the crisis in "unfriendly surroundings."
Anyone who has taught even a short time at a centre containing young people from Turkey, Israel, Iran and the Arab countries will immediately recognise how careful one should be at making public statements at such times and how uncomfortable they themselves so often are, far from home and, as they see it, exposed to insult and belittlement on many sides. Our first duty at such times is to create an academic environment in which scholarship can proceed in as calm an atmosphere as possible. Our second duty is to provide our universities and our local communities with the facts with which to make up their own minds about what is going on. I and my colleagues have worked extra hard to do both things since 11 September, and we will continue to do both in the future, whatever Martin Kramer might have to say.
*The writer is professor of history at Harvard University's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page