It was recently noted at Jihad Watch that generally those who teach Arabic or Islam become apologists and propagandists for Islam. There are several reasons for this. One is that many who go into this field may be self-selecting. Something about it "attracts" them and makes it "appealing" to them.
This is not because of the fascination of what's difficult, or from an interest in what needs to be studied by Westerners because it is only they who can dare to study, say, the origins of the Qur'an or the Hadith (think of Ignaz Goldziher) with the mental freedom and the scholarly resources that only the West, but not the Islamic world, provides. If you want to find out about the warsh and nafs versions of the Qur'an, you do so in the West. If you want to study and publish on the Qur'an the way Mingana did, or Arthur Jeffery in that lavish publication on foreign words in the Qur'an, paid for by the Gwakior of Baroda, you do so in the West. If you want to study, as Joseph Schacht did, Muhammadan Law, you may spend time in Egypt gathering material (when Schacht lectured in Cairo, he was capable of doing so in Arabic), but you will write in the West.
Those were different people, entirely of a different level of linguistic and other training, and of broad cultivation -- as is true in so many academic fields based on the study of history and literature. They above all were steeped in, and had been from an early age, a system of rigorous education that assured their knowledge of, and therefore the natural appreciation for, the artists, the scientists, the thinkers, of the Western world, of the Western tradition.
The Western world has not quite realized how difficult, if not impossible, it is for a Believer who is a teacher of any subject having anything to do with Islam, to be, at the same time, anything other than a stout if sly Defender of the Faith -- a Defender who has no conception of, or fealty to, the idea of disinterested academic study. This Believer will most likely attempt to prevent others from learning about, much less teaching about himself, the real progress being made in Western study of early Islam. Indeed, he will not permit any study of Islam that appears to open up Islam to Western criticism. Thus the entire subject of the dhimmi is either ignored, or reduced, in the Lewisian manner, to a few paragraphs, or a single completely misleading phrase, of the kind any of us can so easily compose.
Here's my version: "Non-Muslims living in the Islamic world were treated with far more tolerance than were non-Christians living in Christian-ruled countries; they could live quietly, practice their religion, and of course everyone knows that the Ottoman Sultans, just like the chivalrous Saladin, always had Jewish doctors." Sometimes, if the instructor thinks the undergraduates may have heard about it and wants to pre-empt any doubters in the house, he will refer to the "Jizya" as "a tax on non-Muslims which was simply a substitute for the 'zakat’ that Muslims had to pay." All completely false in the sly meaning so slyly conveyed -- but to deconstruct every phrase, to show what is misrepesented, and what is omitted entirely, takes time -- and most students will have no idea how deeply and gravely they have been misled.
MESA, or as it is more accurately known around here, MESA Nostra (the Middle East Studies Association) in 1970 had a membership consisting of perhaps 5% Muslims. Now the Muslims among its members constitute 60%. But that is not the only important thing. Non-Muslims must work with and attend departmental meetings with these Muslim colleagues. How awkward it would be to be in the same department with people who will bear an eternal grudge against you if you dare say one word about Islam that they find is not to their liking, if you dare to present Islam as anything other than something wonderful, and if you dare to suggest that the Muslim and Arab view of the universe is not always and everywhere to be endorsed. Non-Muslims must rely on Muslim colleagues, who have and will always have power over them -- whether for obtaining grants as a graduate student, or on a doctoral examination committee, or vetting your thesis, or recommending that one’s thesis be published by a certain press, or later giving one teaching assignments, and then voting on tenure. Many are not deemed suitably compliant, insufficiently "collegial," as that curious criterion is now officially deemed important in judging one's fitness for academic promotion and tenure -- an absurdity that would have appalled Joseph Schacht and Franz Rosenthal and so many others. This is, of course, part of the simpering sentimentality that would have kept out so many great teachers and scholars, and favors the careful-to-offend-no-one mediocrity. Thus are whole departments ruined, degree by degree, appointment by appointment.
If you are a non-Muslim professor, you are at the mercy of your Muslim colleagues. Forever you will need those book blurbs, those easier teaching assignments, those recommendations for grants, grants, grants, that trip to Bellagio and the Lago di Como. It never ends. And if that depends on your not offending so many powerful Defenders of the Faith -- well, you are not going to say a word about Luxenberg or Patricia Crone, or Ibn Warraq's anthologies of scholarly writing. You are not going to say a word about "Jihad" that makes any real sense. You will never refer to the Shari'a in a way that conveys just what it means for non-Muslims. You will not discuss the tenets of Islam and their incompatibility with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You will not discuss the real treatment of non-dhimmis. You will never mention the killings of 60-70 million Hindus under Muslim rule, never come to grips with what it is in the statements of Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri and so many others that come straight from the Qur'an, the Hadith, the details of Muhammad's life. You will never discuss inshallah-fatalism in courses on "economic development in the Arab/Muslim world," will never discuss the Islamic suppression of free and skeptical inquiry, or the narrow limits placed on acceptable vehicles for artistic expression. You will, essentially, lie and be a collaborator in lies. And your courses will be almost entirely worthless. The keenest students, capable of reading on their own, capable of comprehending along the way what is happening, are likely simply to leave the field, not to enter it. And the ones who enter it will be those well-satisfied with what, say, Hamid Dabashi or Omid Safi or any number of others tell them about Islam. They will enter clutching their copies of Sells's bowdlerized Approaching the Qur'an (the "lyrical" parts only, so as not to trouble anyone), or Carl Ernst's apologetics, or that favorite for Muslim instructors, that compilation of old romantic cliches and up-to-date misinformation, Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World, all about that "convivencia" in Islamic-ruled Spain that so many still want to believe in -- because if it somehow was true somewhere, then won't, please won't it be again, in the islamized Europe toward which we are heading, and which we do not know how to stop?
MESA, MESA Nostra. And it is just as bad wherever, of course, Arab money has managed to create "Centers of Islamic Studies," or endow certain chairs for certain purposes. When the Saudis and other Arabs give money, they make sure that their rules are applied, and they install local enforcers in those centers, and departments, to make sure that they get their money's worth. Look at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, at Georgetown, run by lean, mean, jogging apologist John Esposito, making a living far beyond what he ever dreamed of before he found his true calling. Look at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, also at Georgetown, so convenient to both the corridors of uninformed and unwary power and to those members of the press and television who will call you up to take advantage of your proffered, amiable, furrowed-brow serious, "expertise."
I could go on. But you get the dismal picture. A crock, almost everywhere you look.
Academic crockery abounds in unexpected places; this is not my field, but I understand that the *brings tears to the eyes* story of *tolerant* Spain under the *enlightened* Moors was mostly an invention of German historians who happened to be Jewish writing after the unification of Germany who totally disliked Bismarck's kulturkampf. Why do we seem always to long for a golden age from which we have fallen? Ah, the myth of Islamic tolerance and enlightenment, will it never go the way of Washington's cherry tree?
Duvaldoxy: I wish. I have a friend who is from Texas, and as a child - that was ten years ago, mind you - she was not only taught the cherry tree story as fact, but saw her teacher take points away from well-read students who knew that it was a legend and had the bad taste to say so. In America this sort of thing is perhaps a freak - although the monumental American ignorance of history suggests that it is not well taught in schools - but this sort of story shows you that that kind of mentality is natural and universal. It is an evil that must be fought everywhere. If, however, it has on its side the powers of a whole culture dedicated to the denial of reason and evidence, the wealth of oceans of oil, and the obstinacy of mass error - in which human beings subconsciously reinforce each other in what they instinctively perceive to be error, to preserve their self-regard - then this evil becomes a monster: a dragon that devours human beings and brings fire to the world.
Hugh: MESA-type tendencies were always present in academia. You know as well as I do that some of the greatest specialists in any area were banned from professorships or promotion because they were too much like real human beings for their attenuated colleagues to tolerate. C.S.Lewis, the most brilliant Anglicist of his generation, remained a lecturer in Oxford till Cambridge woke up - after he had already written and published The Discarded Image, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Allegory of Love and his Oxford History of Sixteenth-century English literature - and created a chair especially for him. He was lucky. Karl Popper, the most eminent philosopher of the twentieth century - and one who had made his home in England by choice - never got to Cambridge or Oxford at all; they could not forgive him his bashing of Hegelism and language philosophy. Instead, he helped make the fledgling LSE into one of the world's pre-eminent academic institutions. Georges Dumezil only ever taught in out-of-the-way places like Uppsala or Istanbul until that strange academic hybrid, the College de France, offered him a chair; no European or American university would offer him a place - he had trod on too many professorial corns. To be a giant has never made anyone's life easier in any university.
From Frontpage Mag:
Arabist Indoctrination at Middlebury College
Paolo's story of Popper's influence on the academic ascention of the LSE caught my eye. Why can't there be just one Western institution that caters to serious scholars of ME history and the history of islam and the civilizations it conquered? Perhaps it could be governed by a charter that protects the standing of anyone doing serious scholarship, regardless of where it leads, and which forbids accepting any funding from saudi princes and other promoters of the jihad. Of course, undergraduate dabblers would still get their heavy dose of perfumed islam at Georgetown and Columbia, but serious graduate students, doctoral students, and associate professors would know where they could pursue their academic interests unmolested by jihadists. Perhaps such an institution already exists?
Hugh, great entry and thanks a million for bringing this to my attention. I am an American with a Christian Arab heritage. I speak the language and teach it to the military here in the US. Since I started practicing here in the US I have been amazed by the amount of control MESA and other unions for Arabic language teachers practice here in the US. In one military school the power of MESA and unions is such that the military cannot change the curriculum being taught by these people. Members of our armed forces, who need correct indoctrination on Islam and terrorism do not end up getting the kind of education there need to succeed. Thanks for bringing this up Hugh and I hope that MB's leadership will take note.
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Infidel33 wrote (in part):
Why can't there be just one Western institution that caters to serious scholars of ME history and the history of islam and the civilizations it conquered?
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There is already such an institution. Kinda small. I've been studying over a year now, after having been challenged to do so by Mr Fitzgerald. I am not personally in touch with other students, have to buy all my own study materials, but I am free to research whatever I want. I am not at all bothered by local jihadists or their mentors, which suits me, because I do not want to draw unwelcome attention.
Ok, at the risk of being a smart ass, its Living Room University. And really, is it not better to have several million individuals studying up on Islam, underneath Islams radar, than to have yet another major institution that only serves as a lightning rod?
I am sorry if I have offended any sensibilities, but its just so obvious.
Hmmm ... this might be interesting.
Maybe a web forum and self-help site for non-islamics who wish to study islam and arabic?
Some kind of institution needs to be set up to create non-islamic translators and such for government/military/intelligence employment needs and such.
Hmmm ... this might be interesting.
Maybe a web forum and self-help site for non-islamics who wish to study islam and arabic?
Some kind of institution needs to be set up to create non-islamic translators and such for government/military/intelligence employment needs and such.
I have had a wish to study arabic myself ... but without having to deal with moslems who are trying to meet their religious duty to evangelize.
I Second Infidel 33's comment " pursue their academic interests unmolested by jihadists. Perhaps such an institution already exists?"
If a totally unmolested middle eastern studies department does exist . . . inquiring minds would like to know and participate in such a facility.
Along with Mr. Jones, I've participated in "Living Room University" and have received quite the unexpected education.
Anti-jihad U would do well to obtain greater co-ordination to rival the likes of CAIR, MSA, etc.
Well, Dr. Bostrom has certainly set the standard for what can be achieved by graduates of the "living room university". But I hope there are also opportunities, or at least AN opportunity in the traditional academic setting.
Hugh,
I'm not sure that's any different from the teaching of other languages.
Way back during the Cold War, I took Elementary Russian at Columbia. And the study units in the textbook, "Introductory Russian Grammar" (which I still own), are full of pleasant-sounding cultural references to Soviet life: photographs and appealing descriptions of the Bolshoi Ballet, the GUM Department Store, the Moscow subway, happy students at Moscow University, etc. None of the practice Russian sentences deal with Stalin or the GULAG or Solzhenitsyn or the KGB.
My instructors and professors in the Columbia Russian Language Department were themselves Russians. They had been to the USSR many times, and in our practice labs speaking Russian with us students, they would regale us with nostalgic recaps of the pleasant times they spent over there.
Why? Because one of the main reasons someone learns a foreign language is to be able to learn something about the foreign culture. And if the foreign culture were presented as a real downer, no one would want to learn either it or the language. Not in peacetime, anyway.
Whether you like it or not, the vast majority of people don't learn a foreign language in order to deconstruct and criticize the foreign culture.
Infidel33:
Don't Israeli universities and colleges teach an unsanitized version of ME history and Islam? I find it hard to believe that Israeli universities accept any funding from the Saudis.
Steven L, that's what I'm wondering. I've seen a lot of tiptoeing in the Israeli media lest they upset their million-muslim 5th column, so I don't know if that's the case or not. BYU might be another good candidate, while Notre Dame is apparently not.
Hugh-
Boris Yeltsin once said that the worst thing that Communism did to Russia and the USSR was that it created a society of hypocrites. Everyone became interested in defending the faith, hiding inconsistencies, telling half-truths that told whole lies. Meanwhile, the people who were telling the truth about the Soviet system were treated as bigots against the faith-apostates to be killed or exiled. It was all a desperate attempt to flee from Reality.
Fitzgerald, it is indeed a crock, almost everywhere you look.
"I am an American with a Christian Arab heritage. I speak the language and teach it to the military here in the US. Since I started practicing here in the US I have been amazed by the amount of control MESA and other unions for Arabic language teachers practice here in the US. In one military school the power of MESA and unions is such that the military cannot change the curriculum being taught by these people. Members of our armed forces, who need correct indoctrination on Islam and terrorism do not end up getting the kind of education there need to succeed. Thanks for bringing this up Hugh and I hope that MB's leadership will take note."
[Posted by: stevedecatur at August 8, 2006 11:28 AM]
Look at above.Think of what the generals are given for their reading list (google "General Vines" and "Readinig List" and "Hugh Fitzgerald"). Think of the indoctrination that goes on at the service academies, with those who know better, or suspect that there is in some Arabic classes or on "Middle Eastern culture" either deliberate apologetics about Islam, or simply a failure to discuss that belief system in a truthful way.
Start yourself by reading, for example, John Laffin's overlooked 1975 book on the Arabs and Islam, "The Arab Mind." Or an earlier book by Raphael Patai, which does not have enough on Islam, or one still earlier, by Sania Hamady. Start there, and with "Onward Muslim Soldiers" and "The Myth of Islamic Tolerance" and "The Legacy of Jihad" and "The Dhimmi" and "Islam and Dhimmitude." Educate yourself because at this point, there is no other way -- most academic departments, even those teaching officers in the military, have been thoroughly infiltrated and fatally compromised.
See the report by one teacher of Arabic at Middlebury's famous Summer Language School: "Middlebury's Arabic Morass" by Franck Salameh, at the following link:
http://www.meforum.org/article/986
Other good sources on Arabic-using Christians, too carelessly defined by some as "Christian Arabs" when their only "Arabness" is the fact that their ancestors had the Arabic language, and Arab proper names, imposed on them over the centuries. That no more should make them Arabs than Amine Maalouf, writing in French, should be considered a Frenchman, or R. S. Narayan, writing in English, be considered an Englishman.
"Something about it 'attracts" them and makes it 'appealing' to them."
Hugh, I believe that's basically what the Brits used to call "going native."
"My instructors and professors in the Columbia Russian Language Department were themselves Russians. They had been to the USSR many times, and in our practice labs speaking Russian with us students, they would regale us with nostalgic recaps of the pleasant times they spent over there."
-- from a posting above
There was some of that, the kind of instructors who, as Nabokov describes them in "Pnin," gave the students songs about Mother Volga and so on. But on the whole, and certainly at the best Russian programs -- that at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, with such teachers as Vladimir Pereleshin, and two generations of Chvanys, and others who knew perfectly well what the Soviet Union was like (Solzhenitsyn came over from Cavendish one summer), or at Middlebury College, there was none of that nonsense. Many of the those who taught grammar, or who served as repetiteurs for those practice sessions ("kakaya segodnya pogoda"? "kak vas zovut"? "chto lezhit v etom chemodane"? "chto u vas khoroshego i vkusnogo v restorane"?) were simple people who had been in DP camps after the war; their Russian might not always be the best Russian, but their attitudes toward Soviet Communism were clear.
No one, or hardly anyone, was an apologist for the Soviet Union. Some were known to be solider than others, such as the late Adam Ulam, or Richard Pipes (or Leopold Labedz, with his one-man "Survey" or Karel van het Reeve, in Amsterdam). But if you compare those who teach or pretend to teach today, teach undergraduates, graduates, and even supposedly hard-headed military men who can't be fooled (o yes they can, not least by nice, soft-spoken Muslim colleagues who tell part of the truth, but leave out the grim essence), the changes are clear.
At the same institution where Ulam and Pipes taught, you can now find out about "Islamic civilization" by reading from a highly selective syllabus (don't worry -- I'm sure Maria Rosa Menocal is on there), from the likes of Roy Mottahedeh, whose fitness as a guide to Islam you can judge from several things -- his 1992 essay "Toward an Islamc Theolgoy of Toleration," an exercise in pure apologetics, his Op/Ed article in The New Duranty Times that appeared in the fall of 2001, claiming that "Jihad" was mainly a spiritual struggle (even Lewis called it "disgraceful"), and his sponsorship, as the "rabbi" for that thrusting young academic, Noah Feldman, who is still interviewed on NPR, and is still called an "expert on Islam" but whose title, for his last book, tells you almost all you need to know about Feldman. The title: "After Jihad."
No, Russian studies were never such an uninterrupted waste land or desert of apologetics. Look at the contents of the Slavic Review. Was that full of apologetics for Soviet Communism? Was the American Association of Teachers of Slavic full of fellow-travellers? No, and no. Now look at the publications to which members of MESA Nostra subscribe, and look at the Witches's Sabbath of MESA meetings. There is a great difference.
Everyone should be alarmed. And up in arms. Academic centers and departments and even language courses in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu have been taken over by those who are apologists, sly or unsubtle, and it is difficult for Americans to learn truthfully, unless they behave as auto-didacts and return to Arthur Jeffrey, Antoine Fattal, Franz Rosenthal, C. Snouck Hurgronje, St. Clair Tisdall, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, and all the others who wrote before everyone became so fearful of offending Muslims or, still worse, were determined to join them not in offering studies but rather apologetics. Apologetics is practically all there is, save in a very few unusual academic situations, where the holdouts are holding out.
It has to change.
I daresay that the Caner brothers, both professors..one at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA, wouldn't be muslim apologists:
About Ergun Mehmet and Emir Fethi Caner
Ergun Mehmet Caner:
(D. Min., Emmanuel University; Th. D., University of South Africa) is currently at Liberty University and was previously Professor of Theology and Church History at The Criswell College in Dallas, Texas. During his seventeen years as a pastor and now as a professor, Dr. Caner has lectured on apologetics, world religions, and theology in eleven countries and has been interviewed on CNN, The 700 Club, and the BBC, among many others.
Emir Fethi Caner:
(Ph.D., University of Texas) is currently Assistant Professor of Church History and Anabaptist Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. He speaks around the world on church history and Islam, and on such programs as Janet Parshall's America and Billy Graham's Decision Today Radio. His experience includes pastoring, missions work, and church planting.
stevendecatur mentioned the Arab nationalist bias even at the US army language schools. Here's an example that appeared in the Jerusalem Post Magazine about 10 years ago.
Now, everybody knows that Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages, and their grammars are very similar, although Arabic grammar is much more complicated, and the Arabic alphabet is infinitely more difficult than the Hebrew, although based on the same principles. Consequently Arabic takes longer to learn. At the Monterrey Army language school in the USA, the intensive course in Hebrew took 4 weeks and the intensive course in Arabic took six weeks [as I recall]. So the Hebrew teachers proposed to teach two languages for the price of one and a half. That is, a course of five and a half to six weeks for both languages. They too knew Arabic of course. They proposed that students begin with studying the simpler language, Hebrew, which would give them the basic knowledge/understanding of Arabic grammar as well. And then they would move on to Arabic, eventually learning two "critical" languages. The Arabic department indignantly rejected this proposal.
by the way, a link to an article by Franck Salameh about the Middlebury program in Arabic teaching is given above. The Eccelibano blog [link at left on the DW site] includes an account by Dr Louis-Noel Harfouche about his experiences at Middelbury which is extremely revealing [this posting was about 9 or 10 months ago].
To Steven L:
I did (part of) my masters in ME history at Tel Aviv University. The program is taught by many of Israel (and the world's) foremost experts on the subject and the Arabic prof is a Jew.
Let's not forget that possibly the greatest living scholar on the subject of the history of Arabs, the Middle East and Islam is Bernard Lewis: A British Jew who teaches at Princeton.
I went to one of his lectures where he systematically dismantled "Orientalism"'s central thesis that anyone who is not a Muslim is only studying Islam with ulterior motives such as colonialism.
Mr. Lewis also talks about a different phenomenon: The percentage of non-Muslim non-Arabs who study Islam or ME History (high) vs the percentage of Muslim Arab academics who specialize in fields not related to their own religion and culture (very low).