The
Political Nature of Today's Middle East Studies
by Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review Online
August 10, 2015
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It would be a mistake to say Middle East Studies have been corrupted.
For the program's very purpose has been to serve as a corrupting agent.
Specifically, it puts the essence of study — the objective pursuit
of knowledge — in disrepute.
Here, of course, I am referring to the modern incarnation of Middle
East Studies: an amalgam of leftist and Islamist political dogma that
masquerades as an academic discipline. By contrast, the actual study of
Middle Eastern history, like the intimately related study of Islamic
civilization, is a venerable and vital pursuit — and is still pursued as
such by, to take the best example, ASMEA, the Association for the Study of the Middle
East and Africa. Alas, in our hyper-politicized society, the traditional
notion of study seems quaint: a vestige of a bygone time when the
designations "Orientalist" and "Islamist" referred to
subject-matter expertise, not political activism, much less radicalism.
Yet, for Edward Said, the seminal figure in modern Middle East
Studies, the object of the game was to slander knowledge itself. Joshua
Muravchik nailed it in a 2013 profile of the renowned academic. Said's
animating theory held that "knowledge" was the key that enabled
the West to dominate Orientals: The point of pursuing knowledge about
"the languages, culture, history, and sociology of societies of the
Middle East and the Indian subcontinent," Said elaborated, was to
gain more control over the "subject races" by making
"their management easy and profitable." With real study
caricatured as the engine of colonial exploitation, the way was paved for
a competing construction of "study" — political agitation to
empower the have-nots in the struggle against the haves.
Said was a fitting pioneer for such a fraud. To begin with, he was a
professor not of Middle East Studies but of comparative literature.
Moreover, the personal history he touted to paper over his want of
credentials was sheer fiction: Far from what he purported to be (a
Palestinian victim exiled by Jews from his Jerusalem home at age twelve),
Said was actually a child of privilege, raised in Cairo and educated in
top British and American schools. His Palestinian tie of note was
membership in the PLO's governing council. Like Rashid Khalidi — his
protégé, who was later awarded the chair in Modern Arab Studies that
Columbia University named in Said's honor — Said was a reliable apologist
of Yassir Arafat, the indefatigable terrorist who infused Palestinian
identity with a Soviet-backed Arab nationalism.
To thrive in an Islamic culture, it was not only useful but necessary
for Palestinian militancy to accommodate the Islamist sense of divine
injunction to wage jihad. From its roots, then, modern Middle East
Studies is a political movement aligning leftism and Islamism under the
guise of an academic discipline. It is not an objective quest for
learning guided by a rich corpus of history and culture; it is a project
to impose its pieties as incontestable truth — and to discredit
dispassionate analysis in order to achieve that end.
The embrace of Islamism usefully advances this project because
Islamist ideology similarly stigmatizes the pursuit of knowledge. Where
the leftist frames the West's reverence for reason as imperialism, the
Islamist attacks it on theological grounds.
Sharia, they maintain, is the complete and perfect societal framework
and legal code, the path to human life lived in conformity with Allah's
design. Thus, what the West calls "reason" or "the
objective pursuit of knowledge" is merely a rationalization for
supplanting Allah's design with the corrupting preferences of Western
civilization.
We see how this teaching plays out in practice. Muslim countries that
supplement sharia with other legislation add the caveat that no man-made
law may contradict Islamic principles. The Organization of Islamic
Cooperation — a group of Islamic governments that form a large bloc in
the United Nations — even found it necessary in 1990 to promulgate a Declaration
on Human Rights in Islam, because Islamists could not accept the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights spearheaded by non-Muslim
governments after World War II.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the world's most influential Islamist
organization, refers to this enterprise as "the Islamicization of
knowledge," the weaving of historical events and cultural
developments into Islamist narratives that confirm sharia-supremacist
tenets. The "Islamicization of knowledge" is the express and
unapologetic mandate of the International Institute of Islamic Thought
(IIIT), the Virginia-based think tank established by the Brotherhood in
1981.
There are two pertinent observations to be made about the IIIT. First,
it has provided an enthusiastic endorsement of Reliance of the Traveller, the English
translation of Umdat al-Salik, a classic Arabic sharia manual. The
publisher found this seal of approval sufficiently significant to be
included in the manual's preface, along with an endorsement from scholars
at the ancient al-Azhar University in Cairo.
The manual is an eye-opener. In addition to detailing sharia's
gruesome hudud penalties (e.g., scourging and death for such
offenses as extramarital or homosexual relations), it provides
instruction on Islam's brutally enforced proscriptions against blasphemy
and apostasy. These are salient to our consideration: They include
prohibitions not only against renunciation and ridicule of Islam but even
against objectively true statements that contradict sharia, promote other
belief systems, or might otherwise sow discord in the Islamic community.
Obviously, the animating purpose of these principles is to discourage
severely the robust exchange of ideas, and even more the scholarly
examination of Islamic doctrine and culture. The Islamicization of
knowledge is possible only if the objective pursuit of knowledge is not
permitted to compete.
That brings us to the second noteworthy observation about the IIIT: It
has longstanding ties to the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
Several of these were traced by Cinnamon Stillwell in a 2014 American Thinker essay.
This alliance, the sponsorship by the IIIT of Middle East Studies
programs throughout North America, the collaborations between the IIIT
and MESA scholars — these are easy to understand. Modern Middle East
Studies is a counter-scholarship enterprise that subverts truth to the
ends of leftist and Islamist politics. To be clear, it is not an
alternative interpretation of reality competing in the marketplace of
ideas; it is an anti-Western program that is oblivious to reality and
seeks to shut down the marketplace.
We do ourselves and the search for truth great harm by indulging the
fiction that anti-American power politics is credible American
scholarship.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review
Institute, thanks the Middle
East Forum for its sponsorship of this column.
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text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
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