In "Has the ANU got sand in its eye?" in The Herald Sun (thanks to Rosie), Andrew Bolt takes the Australian National University and other universities in Australia and the U.S. to task for accepting Saudi money:
I don't say the ANU is unusual in accepting Middle Eastern cash to teach about Islam and its lands.Melbourne University, for one, was so grateful to get $1.5 million from the Sultan of Oman that it agreed to name its chair in Arab and Islamic Studies after him.
It's the same story at top universities in Britain and the United States, where tankers of Arab money have been shipped to fund the teaching of tomorrow's Middle East analysts. And so Exeter University's Chair of Arabic Studies is named after the Emir of Sharjah. The University of Southern California's King Faisal Chair in Islamic Thought and Culture is named after the late Saudi ruler.
FrontPage Magazine two years ago listed just some of the other American universities funded by the Saudis: the University of Arkansas, which received $27 million for its Middle East Study Centre; Cornell, which got $15 million; and Rutgers, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, UCLA and others.
What do the Saudis want for all this cash? Academics warning about Arab autocracies and Muslim hate-preachers? I don't think so.
But I repeat: I'm sure the ANU's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies does not tailor its teaching in exchange for Arab dollars. Why would it, when it tends to teach already from an Arabist, Muslim and anti-American perspective without any encouragement?
That perspective may be best judged from the writings of the centre's director, Prof Amin Saikal, brother of Afghanistan's Deputy Foreign Minister.
Here is a sample of his brand of Muslim victimology from his recent lecture on the war on Islamic terror.
"Key figures in the Bush Administration -- specifically neo-conservatives and reborn Christians who have assumed the dominant role in the Administration -- have overlooked some of the more salient points about Islam as a religion advocating nothing less than virtuous living, peaceful coexistence and societal harmony," he sighed. Sweet Islam. Bad Christians.
"Starting with the Crusades and European colonialism and finally the US's rise to globalism following World War II, the Muslim domain has been constantly subjected to suppression and humiliation," he added, skipping over the fact Muslims sacked Rome, invaded France, held Sicily, ruled Spain and as recently as 1683 besieged Vienna. Poor Islam. Bully Christians....
Read it all.
"'Starting with the Crusades and European colonialism and finally the US's rise to globalism following World War II, the Muslim domain has been constantly subjected to suppression and humiliation," he added, skipping over the fact Muslims sacked Rome, invaded France, held Sicily, ruled Spain and as recently as 1683 besieged Vienna. Poor Islam. Bully Christians.... "
Like what didn't Mohammed and his successors sack? He wasn't to the manor borne nor did he acquire territory and possessions by industry. The assumption that Islam was native to Asia Minor and Judaism and Christianity are some kind of European transplant is unbelieveably offensive.
I beg to differ. I have no qualms about taking Saudi money. I have qualms about doing anything for the Saudis with that Saudi money. The money may be pocketed -- just the way Egypt and Pakistan have for years pocketed American aid, or the "Palestinians" pocket Jizyah-aid from Europe and America. But what is done with it has to be watched like a hawk. It cannot be left to those who, one after the other, have crept into, and risen high, in the departments of Middle East Studies or studies in Islam. Look what a determined Leila Khaled can do with a little help from that very aggressive Diane Eck, and that very timid (afraid people will begin to discuss why he never received tenure from his department, but has silkily, at a moment of divinity-school crisis, managed to slip his way into the deandship, William Graham), both of them apologists for Islam (say, did anyone hear the Muezzin's Wail at 1 p.m. this past Monday, right in Harvard Yard? With his megaphone? It was all part of "Muslim Awareness Week" at Harvard.)and both manipulated by Leila Ahmed, the so-called "feminist" who has suddenly drops any real interest in protecting battered (in all kinds of senses) Muslim women when it looks like one of the parties to be charged might be Islam itself. She has failed, Leila Ahmed, to push her absurdly unqualified candidate -- Omid Safi -- onto the other members of the Diviniity School, but she'll keep trying. And she is not the only one. All over the Western world, with or without Arab money, apologists for Islam are doing their best to make sure that American students of Islam never quite find out about Islam, never quite encounter or study the Qur'an as can still be done here and there in Europe (as at Aix-en-Provence, or the University of Leiden or in certain German universities).
Take the money. Then use it to appoing a professor who will specialize in "Studies in the Jihad" or "Studies in the Comparative History of Dhimmis: Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Jews." That's the ticket: Jihad and Dhimmi Studies.
Take the money. And ignore the donor's sinister wishes. What will those indignant Muslim donors do? Protest that their funds are not being used as they wanted them to be used, to "protect the image of Islam"?
Tough. They won't be coming round your development-office door again. So what? What's the point of taking the money if all it does is help in hiring nonentities and apologists, who merely get in the way of the real teachers and scholars, who in this age of everyman-a-tenured-professor, have enough trouble simply wading through all the nonsense that passes for scholarship when those not to the intellectual manner born flood the market, to find the real thing.
Don't you mean Leila Ahmed?
The intellectual jihad is already under way across many universities throughout the west.
It is a real pity that so many US and European universities cozy up to the wealthy Arabs who donate huge sums of money in order to install a Midlle Eastern Studies program that often distorts history and presents a middle eastern and Muslim view of the world.
I am sure that the Muslim professors at these universities will continue to teach innaccuracies and distotions about the Christian crusades and Christianity. Islam will be portrayed in clean brushes on more university campuses.
Any good historian in world history understands that invading Muslims made conquests into Europe as Robert indicated above ( Rome, Sicily, France, Spain, Venice, Austria, Serbia, etc).
Actually, Muslims invaded and conquered Christian N. Africa before their made conquests into Europe.
Muhammad was a conquerer and invader. He set the low standard for the Muslims and stole riches from his enemies after he invaded them.
Muhammad was no holy man.
Read this hadith.
Book of Zakat
Book 005, Number 2309:
Anas b. Malik reported: We conquered Mecca and then we went on an expedition to Hunain. The polytheists came, forming themselves into the best rows that I have seen. They first formed the rows of cavalry, then those of infantry, and then those of women behind them. Then there were formed the rows of sheep and goats and then of other animals. We were also people large in number, and our (number) had reached six thousand. And on one side Khalid b. Walid was in charge of the cavalry. And our horses at once turned back from our rear. And we could hardly hold our own when our horses were exposed, and the bedouins and the peoplewhom we knew took to their heels. (Seeing this) the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) called thus: 0 refugees,0 refugees. He then. said: 0 Ansar,0 Ansar. (Anas said: This hadith is transmitted by a group of eminent persons.) We said: At thy beck and call are we, Messenger of Allah. The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) then advanced and he (Anas) said: By Allah, we had not yet reached them when Allah defeated them. and we took possession of the wealth and we then marched towards Ta'if, and we besieged them for forty nights. and then came back to Mecca and encamped (at a place), and the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) began to bestow a hundred camels upon each individual. The rest of the hadith is the same.
NO Islamically-tainted money should be accepted -or even allowed- into any Western Universites (does the phrase "cuckoo's egg" mean nothing outside of their biology departments?) until counter "chairs" and equivalent "courses" in "Christian studies", "Hebrew Thought", "Buddhist Insight", "Jain Wisdom", "Zen Paradox" and "Hindu and Yogic Religious Analysis" are freely permitted in Saudia Arabia, and every other bulwark of the Da'wa.
One-way ideological streets need to be barricaded.
And mined.
I also believe it is incumbent upon the parent of a student who attends these universities to keep informed about the faculty, and to be prepared to offer reasoned counsel to their student as they select which courses they choose to take. I look forward to the day when the presence of an Eck, an Esposito, or a Qumsiyeh on your faculty will count against you in those Princeton and U.S. News rankings.
Qumsiyeh is out. Spending just a little too much time on "Palestine" and not enough on genetics. Esposito's Center is permanently there (and he too, jogging safely through Washington while the kind of people who tell the truth about Islam have to watch their backs), but if James V. Schall and Georgetown trustees, not to mention the Vatican itself, could insist that Esposito sever his use of the Georgetown name, that would only be good for Georgetown (say, are there some alumni of Georgetown, or would-be donors to it, who will make known that whatever moneys Georgetown thinks Espositio may bring it, that money gets in the way of real education about Islam, and that those would-be donors will not be giving Georgetown that ten, or twenty, or hundred million dollars, that they might otherwise have given it? Remember, the beating heart of all universities is the Development Office.)
As for Eck, she has her tenure and of course she is delighted to see Summers go (just before he goes, or after, can someone replace Graham as the Dean -- he's a big part of the problem in selecting reasonable, non-apologist, scholars of Islam, and someone has to stand up to Leila Ahmed). But the students, curiously, have the number of these professors. And of the whole thing. No, they are beginning, despite those professors, to comprehend. Not everyone is going to turn out to be a Noah Friedman. There will be real scholars of Islam, even of Islamic law -- despite the assorted versions of Frank Vogel (Guardian of the Two Noble Sanctuaries Adjunct Professor of Islamic Law at Harvard Law School, a remunerative adjunct, in another sense, to his salary as a regular Professor of Law) trying to keep the lid on real discussions of the tenets of Islam, the meaning of Shari'a, and the long history of Jihad-conquest and imposition of the status of dhimmi on the conquered non-Muslims. You won't find out much about that at Harvard Law School -- except if you study on your own. And that is what is happening. It is exactly like dissidents in Soviet Russia. Talking quietly, almost in secret, sometimes in code, findiong out -- despite the apologists and the hirelings -- all about Islam. And the enforcers of the MESA-Nostra party-line, like the Soviet enforcers of that other Party-line, can't hide the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira forever, can't pretend that Joseph Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, David Margoliouth, Armand Abel, Hans Jansen, Edmond Fagnan, K. S. Lal, Ivo Andric (in his doctoral dissertation), Joseph Hacker, Henri Lammens, St. Clair Tisdall,,and so many others, simply do not exist.
No, it is the false, bought-and-paid for "scholars" and the Muslim "scholars" doing it out of deep belief that is convinced Islam must be protected from prying Infidel scholarly eyes, who will have a much harder time, as their own students, not quite the uninquisitive sheep they have taken them to be, and treated as such, begin to disover, and read avidly and with admiration, those scholars of the Great Age of Western Study of Islam, which is to say, 1880-1960, before the Big Shutdown began.
So what else is new? The ANU is chock full of dhimmis - toadying Indonesianists who happily sucked up to the Suharto regime, like their counterparts at the Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade. Now that Suharto is out of the picture, they can find another odious regime to be sycophantic about.
Has Harvard's Middle East studies banned Andrew Bostom's The Legacy of Jihad yet? Such an evil book, it sows suspicion among the Middle East studies students of their Islam professors and doubt about what they are taught. So offensive. It should be banned. Let's have a bonfire and burn all the books by Spencer, Ye'or, Trifkovic, Bawer, and Warraq. They are poisoning our students' minds. After all, to quote innumerous Muslims, free speech "doesn't give you the right to offend."
/sarcasm off
"Don't you mean Leila Ahmed?"
-- from a posting, from distant London, above
Yes, and I've changed it.
I should not have confused the person who Promotes the Faith by hijacking airplanes and participates in other acts of terror, with the person who Promotes the Faith by misleading others about the tenets of that faith and the way in which passages in the Qur'an and Hadith, and the example of Muhammad, help to explain the treatment and position of women in Islam. The first attempted to intimidate or terrorize non-Muslims, the second merely to mislead them about the nature of Islam. Both are acting, however, out of a deep loyalty, as each interprets it, to Islam.
"Has Harvard's Middle East studies banned Andrew Bostom's The Legacy of Jihad yet?"
-- from a posting above
No need to ban anything. Simply fail to mention it altogether, or make sure the students hear, again and again, before they ever manage to open such an anthology, all sorts of bad things about the old Orientalist fogies -- I mean, just imagine reading Snouck Hurgronje or Schacht or Armand Abel -- and then finding other ways to deride that book, and of course all the books of Bat Ye'or, or others, so that both undergraduate and graduate students taking subjects related to Islam will often be Muslim, or will be eager-to-ingratiate-themselves non-Muslim classmates, all too willing to listen to the clever, plausible, sly apologetics (Mottahedeh rather than that Palestiniain groupie, as J. B. Kelly once described him to me, Roger Owen -- but even he has cleverly realized he has to assign Kramer's "Sandstorm" and ride that "Sandstorm" out, rather than pretend it doesn't exist. He's no fool -- he managed to rise on the basis of not very much from a lowly position at St. Antony's to that ample seat, that venerable pile, the Chair called the "A. J. Meyer Professorship in Middle Eastern Economics." Come to think of it, A. J. Meyer was no great shakes either. But you're not going to find Joseph Schacht or Snouck Hurgronje being taken in, and promoted, at any MESA-Nostra Department these days. Such people, in esse or more likely in posse, will be hounded out early.
No, the closest to the truth you might come to on the subject of the dhimmis is the anthology by Braude and Lewis (and especially the essay by Joseph Hacker). Bat Ye'or -- don't even dream of finding her works on a syllabus.
No, Harvard students will have to discover Bat Ye'or's works, and for that matter Henri Lammens, Schacht, Margoliouth, Fagnan, and all the rest of those whose works, in parvo, are on display for sampling in the pages of "The Legacy of Jihad." Most will remain dutifully loyal to their "brilliant" professors who wouldn't mislead them, would they?
Eventually it will dawn on the cleverer ones. Some will stay, lie low, say nothing, fininsh their theses, hope to find jobs, and some day pay back those who so misled them. Others will leave -- law school, here I come. Some might find their way to the government, and there, one hopes, will be able to watch carefully to make sure that government money does not go to the kind of langugage-training-cum-brainwashing so carefully described in an essay on the Middlebury Arabic Language Program, at a website run by someone of Lebanese Christian background -- i.e. a "user of Arabic" but not, therefore, "an Arab." A big distinction, and one that more people, especially Christians in Lebanon, are making every day.
So Western Universities can restructure around the same Core Curriulum as Saudi Universities which turns out so many Theology graduates that they are unemployable................at least new opportunities beckon in The West
Hugh, you were referring to a posting on the eccelibano webblog, when you mentioned Middelbury.
Now, what has been said by Hugh and others on this post boils down to saying that the American universities --and their "scholarship"-- are unreliable when it comes to the Arabs and Islam.
This conclusion has to be repeated over and over.
Moreover, as you know, British and French universities often follow the same line of apologetics for the Arabs and Islam. I'd would like to point out the deceptive work of one Henry Laurens in a 2 vol book called, I think, La Question de Palestine. Laurens does have a lot of info in the book, especially about the history of French diplomacy in the Middle East, so the book is worth reading. But he also overlooks much that does not fit his pro-PLO purposes, and seems to be not above inventing accusations against the Jews. His book is overflowing with reference notes, but he claims in a full paragraph that Jewish farming settlers in Israel in the 19th century, circa 1880, habitually beat Arab farm workers. This assertion is totally devoid of any documentary reference or footnote or endnote. Meanwhile, he overlooks the abundant 19th century accounts of how Jews were humiliated in Arab Muslim society in general and in Israel in particular, accounts mainly by non-Jews, for instance, the Greek monk Neophitos [or NeoPhytos] in his chronicle published as Annals of Palestine. Other accounts in this vein are by the American John Lloyd Stephens, the French diplomat Cesar Famin [an account relayed by Karl Marx, no less], Chateaubriand, Felix Bovet, Pierre Loti, James Finn, etc. Despite his deceptive and tendentious writing, Laurens is going to be a lecturer at the prestigious College de France in Paris.