Jihad Watch Vice President, Hugh Fitzgerald, discusses the continuing crisis at one of our leading educational institutions at Campus Watch.
The Edith Porada Associate Professor of Archeology, Zainab Bahrani is the author of two books, Women of Babylon (a feminist interpretation of Near Eastern art), and a second work, The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria on Mesopotamian art. With Mark van de Mieroop (the former chair of MEALAC), with whom she has a close association, she has translated a book on Mesopotamian history by the French scholar Jean Bottero called Mesopotamia, Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods.Van de Mieroop, incidentally, shares Bahrani's distaste for Israel (he has signed the same petitions on divestment from Israel), and is apparently convinced that a reasonable facsimile of the Gestapo is abroad in the land: "I know that my phone is tapped, that e-mails are read, that mail is opened. I have the sense of unease, the loss of privacy, and also the fear to speak out, to write – will what I say tonight be held against me when I have to appear in court."
Bahrani has been much in the news, having written a number of anguished, and furious accounts of what she takes to have been gross negligence by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Despite her bitterness, in May 2004 the State Department appointed Bahrani as a "Senior Consultant for Culture" to the Coalition Provisional Authority, so as to help in the reconstruction of the National Museum. She attended to this but for a few months before returning to academia.
This study by necessity must quote Bahrani at great length, for it is otherwise not possible to appreciate the repetitious, banal, suffocating quality of her prose, the running-on of non-thought. The Graven Image goes for more than 200 pages. Virtually every page overflows with "discourse" and "colonial" and "postcolonial" as all-purpose lexical fillers. Her meaning is so diffuse and obscure, and at the same time so obviously modish, that to read her is an experience that cannot be conveyed by mere summary...
Go ahead, read it all, it gets better.
Best...conclusion...ever. Your counter-battery fire needs no adjustment.
Three cheers, Hugh!
The level of blather in her writing is paralyzingly common to this generation of politicized "scholars", who, like the biologists under Stalin (Lysenko-ism) or the scientists under Hitler (Judenfrei, of course) essentially weakened both the Soviet and Nazi regimes enough for them to fall under the weight of their crank-ism.
All of this "post-colonial" "deconstuction" piffle made me an unpopular guy in Philosophy classes in the late '80's when I would interrupt some quiveringly respectful exposition of the vital worth of Derrida ("To the texts, boys!") or Irigaray ("I" is no longer necessary) or Heidegger ("What, me Nazi?") by the instructor to ask: "Isn't the already-existing word 'analysis' what this new faux concept 'deconstuction' simply means, with the disadavantage of more syllables and less sense?".
Flapdoodle, wrapped in flim-flam and couched in an obfuscation.
Stupido-centric, at best.
Logo-rhea, at worst.
With titles like:
"The Phallo-mytho-imperialism Inherent in the Gouged Eye Holes in the bronze Head of Sargon from Uruk".
(They hate it when you can over-construct their pseudo-intimidating neo-arcana.)
The book of poems entitled "The Tablets" is an early hilarious assault on this stultifying scholastic somnabulism.
Oops.. I deconstructed "deconstruction" and left out the "r" 's.
(That's how much I subconsciously despise this naff neologism.)
Arrrrr!
When one digs in the dirt and measures depth, or when one compares an artifact with others for similiarities and differences to try to discern date, function and such like, or when one sends something off to the lab for carbon dating, are there ways to do these kinds of things without getting tangled up in colonial discourse or imperialist epistemology? Maybe not. The European Orientalist imperialists should just hand all of this over to the indigenous people, like local Muslim scholars in the case of Mesopotamia, who are in a far better position to know how to interpret the historical record, which will not exist without digging and preserving artifacts, but we shouldn't worry about that. They just know these things, you know.
The only hope for the corrupted Western researcher is immersion. Immersion, immersion, immerson in the historical record. If I say it enough times I might start to get it. Forget about everything you think you known, throw out all your preconceptions, even forget about what you think the historical record is. But then, how will I know what to immerse myself in? Well, don't worry about that, do it anyway, and just take your best guess. Then buy some shades manufactured in the indigenous land, with indigenous materials, by indigenous people. Eat, drink, and smoke the requisite indigenous things that allow for indigenous feeling, experience and imagination, take down all measurements in an indigenous language, even if it means, in the case of a very old Babylonian dig, using a sexigesimal number system and making mistakes in the placement of '0's in counting tens. No, let's forget about that, because that may be an imperialist reconstruction, so let's not count anything. Counting presupposes an imperialist order of thinking. Who needs mathematics anyway. When in doubt, let's ask an indigenous scholar who will know far better than you with your imperialist, colonialist tools constructed for the sole purpose of domination and subordination. Local scholars have been know to date an artifact accurately to within a month just by feeling the ground and sniffing the air.
Somewhere along the line, the monumental and amazingly stratified and complex project of the Western study of other cultures -- ancillary to its beneficent Colonialism of other cultures (to which the West was and remains on certain important levels obviously superior) -- became infected with emotional pangs of guilt and intellectual constructions of Western inferiority (if not outright demonization) often masked as objectively neutral cultural equivalency.
became infected with emotional pangs of guilt and intellectual constructions of Western inferiority (if not outright demonization) often masked as objectively neutral cultural equivalency.
Posted by: Dr. Pepper [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 7, 2006 12:52 PM
when one uncovers the real truth of history of mankind, one is not feeling guilty of anything! it has come full circle for me, and l have no guilt feelings! of course the liberal media and left leaning political parties thrive on making anyone who has achieved success to cause them to feel guilty! that is why we let them tax us so much! this author Edith Porada, is a allowing herself to be a victim, and cannot think logically, and therefor her writings show this emotionally thread to her research.
The part of my brain designed to grasp sarcasm, congenitally small to begin with, must have evaporated with my first hit of herb when I was 13 years old.
Humiliation is an interesting sensation, alot like an anal fissure.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
The following is a pertinent anecdote demonstrating the ease with which history can be falsified:
In 1938, the year she died, Lenin's widow Krupskaya kept making a nuisence of herself to Stalin and other members of the Politburo by interceding on behalf of old comrades who were being swept up in the 'Great Purge.'
Stalin finally had enough, insisting that if she didn't cease and desist: "we will find someone else to be Lenin's widow."
Her death was suspiciously timely. Stalin probably figured it was less work to liquidate her than to re-write the history books. But his warning to her was a testimonial.
And so it is today in the halls of academe.
The syllabus at the U of Georgia's 'Islamic Studies' course is nothing but apologia right down to the last essay. I'm sure it's little different at most every other university in the country.
Which leaves me remembering the old saying, "history is written by the winners." It was applicable right up until the late 60s/early 70s, when the most affluent, successful civilization the world has ever produced turned on itself.
Bully for the Left.
Krupskaya? His widow, yes, but the real romantic attachment of the stony-hearted Lenin was to Inessa Armand, beginning in that important year 1905, and lasting at least through 1915 and possibly beyond. By the time Stalin threatened to find a replacement for Krupskaya, Inessa Armand was no longer available. She had predeceased Lenin, in 1920, in Petrograd, dying of cholera. What he might have done was simply find a plausible double, then dispose of the original. Who outside the Kremlin would have known? Who inside the Kremlin would have dared to say a word?
"Having established postmodern theory as an authentic Third World product, and defined any criticism as – shudder – imperialism."
(from the article)
I believe that's an incomplete sentence, which technically renders it nonsensical. Not that it makes one bit of difference, given the overall gist of the article. :-)
HUGH: "Who outside the Kremlin would have known? Who inside the Kremlin would have dared to say a word?"
Orwell caught the essence of Stalinism...and his only benchmark was from far-away Spain. What a truly perceptive individual, to grasp in the late 30s what it took the rest of the world close to another two decades (1956) to ascertain (except of course those inside the vast prison that constituted the Eastern bloc).
Kirov's murder in '34 might be described as the crime of the century, more than anything else because of its aftermath, but 1937 has to go down in history as one of the most infamous years in the history of the 21st century (oddly, one that few outside Russia are even aware of).
You see my man, as much of a pain-in-the-ass as I am, at least we've got something in common.
PS - American football is glorious.
What "we have in common" -- and it is something that we share with a few thousand others -- is this: we both post at this website.
It's hard to tell when the road runner will turn into the billy goat...der alte...the gruff one.
If we really want the ancient artifacts in Egypt and Mesopotamia [Babel], etc., to be preserved perhaps we should be give them over to the indigenous. But not to the Arabs. Look at how much of the ancient Egyptian heritage has been destroyed since the depictions made by Napoleon's expedition of savants [accompanying his army]. Maybe we should give the Egyptian mounments over to the Copts, the Mesopotamian to the Assyrians, and of course the ancient remains in the Land of Israel to Jews. Since Arabs/Muslims consider everything non-Islamic and pre-Islamic to be either jahiliyy or infidel, then nothing is safe in their hands. There are several instances of deliberate wrecking of ancient artifacts here in Israel by Arabs, even officially by the waqf.
Thanks to Hugh for this enlightenment.
Arab-Muslims have another reason for wrecking ancient remains: If they are identified with a non-Arab people or culture, then they tend to delegitimate Arab control of such places/countries today. Hence, arafat and his gang denied that the Temple Mount was the site of the ancient Jewish Temple, etc. One of the pro-Arab writers in the 1980s, one Grace Halzell, asserted that the ancient Jewish Temple was somewhere else in Jerusalem which he stated on the authority of one of the qadis or imams officiating in the waqf.
Neither Eddy Said nor his disciples want to admit that the Arabs themselves were imperialists/colonialists just as much as the Europeans. In fact, under Nasser, Egyptian authors asserted that Egypt and the Arabs had a civilizing mission in Africa since Arab/Muslim culture was superior. [check out Jacques Baulin's book on the Arab Role in Africa //I think "Baulin" is the correct spelling].
"Since Arabs/Muslims consider everything non-Islamic and pre-Islamic to be either jahiliyy or infidel, then nothing is safe in their hands. There are several instances of deliberate wrecking of ancient artifacts here in Israel by Arabs, even officially by the waqf."
-- from a posting above
Near Eastern artifacts are safe from depredation,and deliberate vandalism, only when within the safekeeping of Western (i.e. non-Muslim) museums. Both the Cairo Museum (founded by a Frenchman) and the Baghdad Museum are not so much museums in the Western sense, devoted to gathering, preserving, classifying, and studying at a high level the artifacts of the past; they are more like warehouses, stacked with stuff, with a few locals, some of them Western-trained, and of course presented to the world (and to themselves) as fully the equals of Western-style museums.
But even here they are looted, and not only during times of obvious trouble (as during the American invasion in the late spring of 2003).
As for destruction of artifacts, there are many reasons for this:
1) Statuary is itself a violation of Islam, and should be destroyed or at least vandalized, as Al-Qaradawi's handbook on the Halal and the Haram suggests, so that it cannot be an object of veneration -- reliigious or otherwise. Allah wouldn't like it.
2) Anything from the pre-Islamic period is a matter of indifference to the local Muslims, except for two considerations:
a) attracting Western tourists and hence Western money and
b) here and there, an advanced part of the population may take pride in the pre-Islamic stuff and even try to enroll it in some longer narrative, the way the Turks did, claiming that "Turks" had been in Anatolia since the time of the Hitties -- every damn thing in the area, including Byzantium, somehow came back to the Turks.
In Egypt, the most fanatical Muslims used to talk about destroying the Pyramids. That talk has died down -- what about all those people dependent on tourism? -- but one never knows when it will start up again.
It should be kept in mind that the discovery, and recovery, of the artifacts of the ancient Near East, and the diligent study of their civilizations, is entirely a product of Westerners. From Champollion to Lepsius to Sir Howard Carter exploring the tomb of Tutankhmen, Egyptology was a Western enterprise, and the pretensions of the occasional Zaki Hawass do not change this history. In Mesopotamia and Syria it was no different. Austen Henry Layard discovers the antiquites of Assyria, and Leonard Woolley arrives at Ur to see scholarly justice done, and Henri Frankfort and others perform analysis and study in Europe or the United States.
The absurd cult of "authenticity" to which the likes of the lady in question, very much in question, above, subscribe, is merely a jobs program, self-serving and transparent. It goes something like this: Only authentic Middle Easterners, Muslims and Arabs, can authentically study with real authenticness the products of civilizations that existed a few thousand years before Islam or the Arabs ever arrived on the scene.
So Zainab Bahrani is a fit student of Near Eastern civilization, whereas Layard, Woolley, Frankfort, and others -- all those quiet scholars who labored for nearly two centuries in Berlin, or Leipzig, or St. Petersburg, or Oxford, or Paris, or the Oriental Institute in Chicago -- they were in-authentic. They weren't Arabs. They weren't Muslims. They weren't, you see, born in Baghdad or somewhere. How could they possibly understand, understand "from within," the way that Zainab Bahrani does, the true spirit, and real meaning, of what was created by non-Arabs and non-Muslims (but given honorary, backdated status as Arab Muslims) can only by the likes of -- well, by the likes of her.
If you can't really claim that these artifacts and these civilizations had the slightest thing to do with Islam and the Arabs, and if, further, you wish to somehow divert attention from the embarrassaing fact that these were the objects of study by archeologists in the field, and linguists and scholars who subsequently organized, classified, preserved, studied, analyzed, and reconstructed as intelligently as they could -- sometimes reconsidering earlier hypotheses and explanations -- were all Westeners, Europeans and Americans, and not the locals, who had no interest, save for a handful who, being made aware of the significance attached to those civilizations of the ancietn Near East, began to get the idea that they should not share the general indifference to such things, a natural result of the attitudes that Islam inculcates toward all pre-Islamic and non-Islamic civilizations, artifacts, anything and everything at all -- save of course for what is considered really useful from that non-Muslim, such as weapons technology and electronic gewgaws).
So, today, there are a few Muslim Arabs interested in archeology and the pre-Islamic past, but as a result of being exposted first to Western interest, Western studies, Western examples of how to do it. For the entire enterprise is most un-Islamic in spirit. If Islam is everything, contains everything, who cares about the lions of Babylon and the Ishtar Gate? Who cares about the Code of Hammurafi, or what happened in the time of Ashburnipal I or Ashburnipal II? There is one exception: the Persians, who managed to stave off arabization (famously, so the story goes, through the work of its poets in Persian, particularly Firdowsi with the Shahnameh), also did not forget their pre-Islamic civilization. It is fun to divide those Iranians between the elite that bears, and hands down, such names as Cyrus and Darius or local, non-Arab names (e.g. Kaveh) and the general run-of-the-mill Mohammeds. (In the same way, the Maronite-detector for foreigners in Lebanon is to look for such names as Antoine and Charles and Franck and Brigitte, and you are likely to be in safe -- in every sense -- company).
The discovery and study of the civilizations of the Near East had as little to do with Arabs and Muslims as did the creation of those civilizations originally. Such undertakings, in the field, at digs, and back in libraries, and studies, was entirely product of the non-Muslim West, with its wide-ranging, even voracious, curiosity. This was something the Edward Said simply couldn't comprehend -- the very idea that you might study another society or language or civilization simply out of disinterested curiosity was beyond his primitive view of things.
Bahrani, like many of her fellows, relies as part of the jobs-program that certain notions promote, on Saidism. The premise is that Western archeologists, Western curators, Western scholars, are involved, necessarily, with the "colonialist" enterprise or "project" (the word "project" is a dead giveaway), that therefore their studies, their discoveries, are tainted, are suspect -- suspect in their motivation, suspect in how and what they study. This is on its face absurd. How could the study of civilizations that lived and died two thousand years before the arrival of Arabs and of Islam, have anything to do with the "colonialist project" that somehow, in the eyes of the bahranis of this world, define the Western connection to Mespotamia (that it was Great Britian that freed the Arabs from the Turks, and that Great Britain held its mandate in Iraq from roughly 1920-1932, that is a dozen years of League-of-Nations-designated "colonialism" and left not because it had exhausted all possibilities of colonial "exploitation" but becuase it cost the British too much to stay and try to ciivlize the place, and its warring tribes and assorted representatives of varying levels, and varieties, of mendacity, greed, and hostility toward Infidels). In the bahrani word, since it is no longer possible to keep thrusting down everyone's throat the anachronistic word "colonialist" its successor, which is never quite explained -- the word "postcolonialist" -- is now used with abandon. The word is useful for tendentious purposes. It bears no sell-by date, no scadenza, but is the perfect ideological excuse-gift that keeps on giving, just the thing to give your girlfriend, if she is essentially unable to produce real scholarship but needs a job (oh, and since there are nepotism rules, if you happened to have married her, quickly unmarry her so that you can be instrumental in having her hired by the deparment of which you are the head -- a little reference meant entirely for the cognoscenti).
And if those whose scholarship must forever be tainted by that "postcolonialist" project of which, because of their birth, they must necessarily be a part, so that they suffer from an Original Sin that cannot leave them, there is a corollary to the idea.
And that is this: Geography is Destiny. Or rather, destiny in the sense that if you, or any of your relatives, are Arab and Muslim, born or raised in the very places where the civilizations of the ancient Near East arose, not only are you of course permanently exempt from any hint of "colonialism" or "post-colonialism" which would vitiate your scholarship, but you and those like you are the only ones fully qualified to study those areas because the spirit or geist, geographically rather than civilizationally conceived, of civilizations that had nothing to do with Islam or Arabs, nonetheless is, as if by magic, accessible to you. Curiously, however, your ability to comprehend -- as an Arab and Muslim from, say, Baghdad, is not in turn surpassed by the even greater, one would think, comprehension of, say, the civilization of the Assyrians, either by Jews from Iraq, or by present-day Assyrians, both of whom can trace their ancestry back in Mesopotamia to a thousand or two thousand years before the arrival of Muslim Arabs, and so, one would think, if one is going to pretend to believe any of this nonsenese, then surely the Christian or Jew with Mesopotamian roots has the greatest claim to "insight" into the civlization of Mesopotamia, just as Copts, but not Muslim Arabs in Egypt, should be the ones who, untainted by the later imperialist ideology of Islam and Arab supremacism, should make the best Egyptologists.
Well, you get the idea. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the...
In other words, two can play this game. Or rather, any number can play.
Hugh,
to continue my complaint against Eddy Said, he turned a lot of things upside down. First, the Arabs/Muslims wrecked the civilization/s/ of the ancient East. How can they be seen as representing what they have wrecked?
Second, the British in particular [talking about the govt, the Colonial Office, Foreign Office, BBC, generals like Allenby, etc.] were very often pro-Arab, pro-Muslim. Indeed, this became policy by 1939 with the "Palestine White Paper." Further, British officials [I think it was Anthony Eden] urged the Arabs to form the Arab League. Hence, if Britain was an imperialist power, then imperialism [at least the British variety] was pro-Arab/pro-Muslim. Only a fantastic turning of history upside down can make "imperialism" pro-Zionist, for example, when the 1939 White Paper was a clearly anti-Zionist policy. Then, as early as 1922, almost all of the major Western powers --plus the USSR-- were pro-Ataturk, pro-Turkish nationalism, and against Greek and Armenian claims in and on Anatolia. Consider the 1922 Smyrna Affair. When Allenby took the Land of Israel in 1917-18, he adopted a clearly anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, pro-Arab nationalist policy, despite the Balfour Declaration. So Western policy generally, and British policy in particular were pro-Muslim, pro-Arab way back before WW2. Copts in Egypt were complaining over an anti-Copt, pro-Muslim policy in Egypt BEFORE WW One. Hence, Eddy Said turned history upside down [as the Bolsheviks had done before him]. And this is outrageous. And I'm not only talking about Said's lies regarding the 20th Century. Go back to his treatment of earlier periods.
Now, back to the issue of ancient remains and authenticity, or who is truly indigenous and aboriginal in the Middle East. If a mosaic is dug up of a synagogue from the Byzantine period with an inscription in Hebrew, or Hebrew and Greek or Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic [in letters used today to write Hebrew], then this tends to undermine Arab and/or "palestinian" claims to authenticity, as indigenous/aboriginal in the Land of Israel [of course, there are many such inscriptions; for those who are unaware: Sepphoris/Zippori, Beth Alpha, Eyn Gedi, Gaza, etc.]. Likewise, a Syriac inscription in Syria or northern Iraq or a Coptic or Greek inscription in Egypt, etc. Likewise, the success of Zionism may put in question Arab-Muslim legitimacy of rule and supremacy in Egypt, etc.
Alot to digest here, both with the titled piece and your later comments. I admire you for your unwillingness to let Darfur be swept under the rug.
Here are some questions that may be peripheral to Darfur but are pertinent to your strategic vision.
1) Ethiopea is currently occupying portions of Eritrea after a border war 2 years ago. UN demarcators have determined that Eritrea is the aggrieved party, yet the Ethiopians are showing no willingness to withdraw back to internationally recognizes boundaries.
Question: Do we want to avail ourselves to an aggressor that is currently occupying the national territory of a neighboring state *a state by the way that has been a cooperative ally of the USA in our fight against Al Qaeda)?
2) Khartoum has recently signed a peace accord with the SPLA, giving the 3 region complete autonomy now with a referendum on independence in 5 years.
Questions: As Sudanese Christians from the diaspora begin returning with investment money and the South appears poised for a period of peace and prosperity, is it appropriate policy to push the two sides back to war? With America's appetite for foreign adventures utterly satiated right now, isn't there the distinct possibility that after stirring things up, there will be no staying power, to the great detriment of the Southern Sudanese?
Sorry, wrong thread.