Some of the worst, most misleading, departments of Middle Eastern studies are at schools deemed -- in the U.S. News & World Report pecking order -- the most "prestigious." Columbia, for example. Practically from soup to nuts. Who would wish to hire someone coming out of the Columbia program, someone that is who was taught by, inter alia, Hamid Dabashi, Joseph Massad, Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Abu-Lughod, Zainab Bahrani, George Saliba, not to mention Gary Sick and Lisa Anderson?
As possibly the only person in the world to have read everything written in English by Hamid Dabashi, I can grimly report that his primitive notion of scholarship, the laborious piling on of details, never given shape, never subject to analysis, never endowed with any significance, makes him one of the greatest embarrassments of Columbia today, the school where Jacques Barzun once taught, once administered. Simultaneously cheer yourself up and depress yourself: simply google "Hamid Dabashi" and "Edward Said," in order to read the former's treacly tribute to the latter, in the style of assorted Odes to Stalin.
Go ahead. Google. Read. Laugh. Cry.
Then there are the Apologists Lite at Yale, which actually thought seriously about appointing Juan Cole, although, to its credit, decided not to do so. At Harvard, meanwhile, that Palestinian groupie, the egregious Roger Owen, who was once a lowly lecturer at St. Antony's, has managed somehow to wangle an appointment as that appetizing thing, the "A. J. Meyer Professor of Middle East Economics." (A. J. Meyer himself was -- see J. B. Kelly -- hardly a major scholar of the Middle East; the chair is one more reflection of oil money.) Owen has sensed the way things are going and come out with a perfectly standard biography of Lord Cromer, which in the new environment helps him to re-position and re-package himself (just like Richard Bulliet, who is now delivering lectures not on the coming confluence of Islam and Christianity, but rather on cotton growing). These are not Sami al-Arians. Careers and careerism even before the "Palestinians" and Islam.
What value can such a word as "prestigious" conceivably have, when an English department may be "good" and a History department deplorable, or vice-versa, in the same institution? And what does it mean to say that a "department" is good or bad, except as a general statement that the non-spouters of nonsense outnumber the spouters, but not much more than that? In the end, the individual teacher, his elan and knowledge, is what counts the most.
It is not all darkness. Here and there Bat Ye'or's books are assigned Very much here and there. One assumes that parts of one or another may be assigned. In the war colleges some are using this or that book -- and no doubt, it will be harder and harder to ignore her, as her book Eurabia continues to look not like fantasy but every day more like a modest description of an even more horrific reality. Bernard Lewis, as far as I know, has never given her a boost, and there is reason to believe that in the past he has actually belittled her as "polemical," without feeling the need for more.
Lewis's anthology (done with Benjamin Braude, who teaches at Boston College, and who according to reports becomes deeply disturbed when others focus on Islam as the explanation for the behavior of Muslims) on Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire does contain Joseph Hacker's uncompromising discussion of the difficulties faced by Jews. One wonders if Lewis was happy with that contribution, or distinctly uneasy. Those who assign chapters from that book in various courses on "Islam and the West" (Maria Rosa Menocal is often included), seldom assign the article by Hacker. In his attempt in "The Middle East: the Last 2000 Years" at haute vulgarisation, Bernard Lewis offers that intended common reader, out of some 400 pages, three paragraphs, two of them exculpatory, on the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam. In other words, the fate of tens of millions of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, in the Middle East (and North Africa, ordinarily treated now as part of that Middle East) under Islam is mentioned glancingly. Nothing about the many disabilities save for the hastily mentioned Jizyah. Nothing about forced conversions (Shah Abbas with Armenians and Jews, Copts in the 12th century). Nothing about massacres overnight. Just a paragraph or two.
Sometimes just a paragraph or two can speak volumes. As it does here, but not in the way that Lewis would wish. But such is what garners “prestige” in these latter days.
Perhaps off topic, but on the topic of education and dhimmification
On airliners.net, an indian student, most likely a muslim, asked this question:
I am concerned maily about the 747, 777, 737, A340 and A330. Suppose you walk into a plane parked and in a bay.. and have to start it up.. what do u do? turn a key? press some buttons?
I suggested that such a question is suspicious. Several posters gave him the exact list of commands to start such an aircraft, while others berated me for my suspicion. One man from New Zealand suggested those that want to keep such knowledge secret are dictators.
Ah, the web. The realm of the loopy liberals and laughing Leftists. In any non-political website forum, the main political bent is always left when such issues arise.
No wonder we get such a pro-Islamaniac slant in both the media and the government. These schools bring in instructors filled with anti-West baloney and then they teach it to the next generations. The results are endless editorials and speeches on how Islam is peaceful, how the Palestiians are victims of evil Zionists and how we shouldn't mind too much about Iran's "peaceful" nuclear program, among other infamous lies and distortions. These universities shamelessly shilled for Communism during the Cold War and now they shill for those "oppressed" Muslims because it's chic to be anti-West, even though they are probably well aware of the truth. Some of these "instructors" who come from the Middle East are nothing but Bin Loser wannabes who have wormed their way into these colleges to spew their toxic nonsense.
Why some of them are even allowed into Western countries, much less to teach in their universities, is beyond me. At the rate they're going we could ban all immigrants coming from Islamia now and still have sharia thanks to all the native born students being turned into mindless Islamic robots. In their own way, these "educators" are even more deadly to the West than any of Bin Loser's heinous henchmen.
"Who would wish to hire someone coming out of the Columbia program, ..."
U.S. Department of State, U.N., NY times, WaPo, FBI, CIA, NSA, World Bank, a.c.l.u., "moveon dot org", Tides Foundation, Ford Foundation, and similar "prestigious" institutions - academic and public, etc., etc.
Which is why Western Civilization is in the mess we are.
Bernard Lewis, as far as I know, has never given (Bat Ye'or) a boost...
Lewis is too far sunk into the depravity of self-congratulation to recover his embarrassing ass.
The demise of history is directly related to the rise of Fictive Reality. The big fascinating subintellectual question is which caused the other, as if that matters in these dire straights. But not even that question is put on the table.
Prof. Lewis is a worthless jackass to be dismissed without consideration.
610 * 623 * 732 * 1066 * 1215 * 1453 * 1492 * 1683 * 1928 * 1938 * 1948 * 1996 * 2001
The collapse of the academy over the last 30 yrs is one thing, but what we really need to worry about are the law schools. True, they're islands of Marxism just like the history departments, but, when you're a judge, you're able to point the business end of a gun at your ideological opponents. All justice, real or imagined, comes from the barrel of a gun.
Straits.
Another appeaser just won the "Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels" in the Frankfurt Book-Fair.
Without going any further into it, it seems obvious that Wolf Lepenies is one of those commissioned writers with the task to put lipstick on a pig, to generate hope, to tell the world that 'not all is lost' and that there is something cooking called "European Islam" and of course the 'tiny minority of extremists' shouldn't worry us...
Not everyone buys this crap anymore and even England seems to get more and more fed up of Dhimmitude:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=22879_Report-_UK_Metro_Police_Chief_Issues_Ominous_Warning&only
...the fate of tens of millions of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, in the Middle East ....under Islam is mentioned glancingly.
here is the fate:
http://www.farsinet.com/dibaj/hovsepian.html
Don't need no prestigious school to tell me which way the wind blows. I'm being raised on Hugh's Home Schoolin' Curriculum. It's arduous and rewarding.
Last night after having read half way through Eurabia, I had a dream: I was making a presentation to my book club (I've never belonged to one) and describing the details in the chapter on The Islamization of Christianity and everyone was frozen in shock. After I finished, a man came up to
me, offered his hand and commendations and began insisting I come to work for him, make pamphlets,
make speeches; get the word out and then he left.
That man was George Bush. -- Damndest dream I've ever had. And I'm just a retired Texas art teacher, but damn if I'm not going to get the word out and I'm starting with you George, cause I don't think you've heard this tale told by Ms. Ye'or and
Mr. Spencer and Mr. Fitzgerald, professors extraordinaire.
Hugh mentioned Richard W Bulliet (The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization) and his new focus on cotton growing.
Bulliet wrote in the Preface to his deplorable book that, immediately following 9/11:
"Like most Americans, I felt an overwhelming urge to do something useful. This book is my response to that urge."
Let's take a 'useful' typical paragraph almost at random:
"Western critics of Islam persistently propose civilizational litmus tests: Does Islam meet, or is it on its way to meeting, Western standards of gender equality? Can Islam conceive of human rights in a manner that sufficiently resembles Western conceptions to be counted as civilized? Does Muslim understanding of religious toleration and secularism come close to Western ideals for inclusion in the civilization club? Tests like these, conceived in willful denial of the appalling failure to live up to the same standards, are intended as rhetorical devices for finding Islam wanting rather than as serious questions." (p.12)
Bulliet should have resisted 'the urge to do something useful' and gone straight on to cotton. Much more useful. Interestingly, as each month goes by, the thesis contained in the book's title becomes more and more threadbare, even laughable. It now reads like a dhimmi text, classically exemplifying Bat Ye'or's warning that we should be very alert to attempts at the Islamization of Christianity.
And fortunately recent events such as those involving Benedict, and the Anglican Church, suggest Christians are not falling for it.
But it probably still goes down big at Columbia among the undergrads.
HUGH: "Here and there Bat Ye'or's books are assigned Very much here and there."
Do you know this for a fact or is it conjecture? What schools would be assigning something so politically incorrect this day and age?
I'm genuinely curious.
Mcademics for Wacademics...
Education in the form of 'fast food'- calories as a substitute for nourishment and taste...?
Is there any university in the US that is not politically correct regarding Islam, is there any place at all where one can send his kids in order to study the perversion of a belief-system that threatens all of us in order to whack us into submission and to pay the Jiziyah while being humiliated and subdued?
Is there perhaps any place of higher learning where our kids could study how to counter the global jihad and to defeat those who are our enemies which we treat as if they were our friends?
This is why our "institutions of higher learning" are a farce. College has become total B.S.. But, if you make it past the p.c. profs, your eyes are certainly opened. I feel bad for the kids that actually believe the crap that spews out. It doesn't matter though, pretty soon the only folks at our colleges will be illegals that get free education vouchers. The rest of us won't be able to afford it.
Bulliett did do one very useful piece of research. The mathematically inclined might want to look at his "Conversion to Islam in the medieval period" which shows how, under coercion or for economic preservation, the dhimmi populations slowly but steadily converted to Islam.
These self-absorbed professional "scholars" are quick to call writers with a divergent point of view "polemicists" or "dilettantes" or "amateurs". But by their distortions, lies and refusal to face reality, they have left an immense vacuum in their chosen field that others, however imperfectly, have attempted to fill. The bottom line is that the WTC was brought down on their watch.
Bostom's Legacy of Jihad devotes more than 3 paragraphs to the fate of non-muslims under muslim rule. Draws extensively from Bat Ye'or, and many, many others. Should be required reading.
Hugh,
In college, I read John L. Esposito's Islam: The Straight Path and Huston Smith's The Religions of Man.
Obviously I was completely unprepared for the threats we would face from Islam.
Throughout the 1990s, those organizations and leaders in society that were supposed to be keeping an eye on the hateful, bigoted and violent (such as the ACLU and the ADL), were ignoring Islam. Instead, their focus was on monitoring the religious right. The ACLU is still actively working against infidel interests.
Fortunately, since 9/11, I have read many articles by Robert, Hugh, Ali Sina, Bat Ye'or, Andrew Bostom, Andrew McCarthy, Walid Shoebat and books by Robert, Brigitte Gabriel, Orianna Fallaci, Steve Emerson, Ken Timmerman, Eraim Karsh, Ruth Wisse, Ya'acov Lozowick, Stephanie Guttmann, Bernard Lewis (I consider him a transitional figure between Esposito and Ibn Warraq) and many, many more.
I don't have a masters or Phd, but I believe most of those programs would have taught more of the same nonsense as I learned in college.
I recently visited a very large state university. I wanted to see what the students were reading this fall on Islam, the Middle East, etc.
Unfortunately, they are still reading Esposito, "Religions of Man", Rashid Khalidi, Karen Armstrong, Edward Said.
And it seemed that just about every liberal arts class had assigned Thomas Freidman's "The World is Flat." Sickening.
http://dailyinfidel.blogspot.com/
"Tests like these, conceived in willful denial of the appalling failure to live up to the same standards..." -- Richard Bulliet, quoted above.
Like most minds deformed by PC MC, Bulliet's capacity for discerning significant differences in degree has grotesquely atrophied. Put in terms of a simple arithmetic analogy:
The ideal of liberal values of gender equality and tolerance of minorities = 10
Approximation toward that ideal in the West = 7
Approximation toward that ideal in the Muslim world = 2 (averaging the more "progressive" Muslim countries with the majority of regressive Muslim countries).
Now, Prof. Bulliet keeps his deformed eye on the distance of 7 from 10, and ignores both the distance of 2 from 10 as well as 2 from 7. (Prof. Bulliet would accept this arithmetic analogy, reluctantly, after having his teeth pulled, and kicking and screaming, when the easily gathered evidence would be put before him.)
His deformed eye also fails to account for another factor in this process -- the dynamic and geometrical rate of progress of the West: it is moving from a 7 to an 8, and will move from an 8 to a 9. In the Muslim world, we are now seeing a positive regression from their paltry modern spasm of progress due mostly to Western Colonial and immediately post-Colonial influences.
Judging by Hugh's silence, it would assume he was indeed employing conjecture in asserting that Bat Ye'or is being studied 'here and there'.
Can ANYONE tell me if she is required or even suggested reading ANYWHERE in academe?
Cornelius,
I asked an Associate Professor of Religious Studies last year if he had read any of Bat Ye'or's work.
He replied no, but was intending to read him.
Oh, dear.
Check the various university library catalogues to get a rough estimate of what may be on reading lists. You won't find much. You may need to enter both bat ye'or and ye'or bat and with and without the apostrophe
My own library had a copy of her earlier book on dhimmitude and gratefully accepted donations of Eurabia and her later book on dhimmitude:
http://voyager.auckland.ac.nz/
Hope this helps.
I have mixed emotions on Bernard Lewis. One the one hand, he's clearly smart as hell(how old is he now?), he was an intel officer in WWII(for the Brits, not the Turks one hopes). I have respect for an older person who shuns being put out to pasture and treasures reading and writing.
ON THE OTHERHAND, this glaring neglect of the treatment of Christians, Jews and many others under the glowing sun of Islam is a bit too much. He was bought off by the Turks. Not necsessarily with cash, but with charm, and admiration. This must have created the glass-half-full outlook.
AND EVEN WHEN HE GETS IT RIGHT, he still manages to get it wrong in the end. He wrote the small volume What Went Wrong after 911. It talked about the cultural stagnation within Islam, the lack of symphony music(I kid you not) . . . without looking at 'why' this is so??? His conclusion(s), endorsed with respect by R. Cheney and Bush, are the lack of freedom within the Arab World, the stagnation of corrupt governments . . . ect . . . The solution is democracy. So even where Lewis 'gets it right,' he still manages to(on purpose or by chance)miss the 981 green Muslim thought process as being a(or any)part of the problem!
In his book . . . What went wrong(I think thats it)--he talks about the only music introduced into the Islamic Court somewhere or another was by the Italians. Lewis avoids the religious import of this!
It's as if a patient develops gangrene in one leg, then another, then in the arm . . . and his doctor says, "Yes, I see, now a leg is dead, now another. Now the arm is rotting. Yes I see." No, Mr. Lewis, you do not see. I suspect it might be easier for him to play dumb at this point, than to admit error within his research.
Biorabbi,
As someone who knew little about Islam (only the apologistic version taught in religion classes), I consider Lewis a transitional figure. By that I mean...much of what is discussed on this site would have seemed extreme, and even bigoted, had I not read what I call the transitional writers (folks who either leave out some key aspects of Islam, downplay its overall importance or lack a full understanding of it).
People I consider transitional writers (in my move along the spectrum from Esposito and NPR to Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerld): Lewis, Irshad Manji, Victor Davis Hanson, Ralph Peters, and many of the writers for magazines like the National Review and Weekly Standard. The value of these writers is that that they are critical of the Muslim world, even if they go somewhat soft on Islam. For those who get their news from CNN, AP stories and the New York Times editorial page, Lewis is a step in the right direction.
Today my reading list includes Robert Spencer, Hugh Fitzgerald, Ibn Warraq, Serge Trefkovic, Bat Ye'or, Ali Sina, Brigitte Gabriel, Walid Shoebat, Efraim Karsh (some might consider him a transitional figure), etc., etc. While I don't take a completely positive view of Lewis, I think he helped me to get where I am today in my understanding of Islam.
http://dailyinfidel.blogspot.com/
Thank you MBR.
"Judging by Hugh's silence, it would assume he was indeed employing conjecture in asserting that Bat Ye'or is being studied 'here and there'.
Can ANYONE tell me if she is required or even suggested reading ANYWHERE in academe?"
-- from a posting above
No, my silence was due not to being unaware of colleges where courses are given in which Bat Ye'or's books are either required (in whole or in part), or on supplementary or Recommended Reading lists. It was due to a different consideration.
In some places the teachers are hostile, but now know they somehow must immunize their students from her too-truthful, too-devasating, studies of the dhimmi (as in "The Dhimmi," "Islam and Dhimmitude," and in "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam"). So they first blacken her name, do all they can to mock her in a pre-emptive attack, and only then, do they assign some excerpts from her writing -- and then they can show that they are grandly open to "all sides" and do not "censor" when, of course, their entire effort is to prevent students from encountering her, and grasping her material, without the intermediary of the apologist for Islam -- that is, their teacher. Teachers have not only the power of the grade, but are quite able to influence students, for a little of their learning can go a long way, and students are often impressionable, and also easily impressed (these are not the same thing) even by an academic fraud, as so many in MESA Nostra (which google) are.
But why do I not list the colleges and universities where her works are assigned because the instructor finds her, as so many must, of great value? For a very good reason. CAIR and other groups are quick to go to town, painting as "islamophobic" any texts which they do not like. I don't want to discourage the usee of her books, or to cause trouble for those who do assign them.
That, and only that, is the reason I did not respond to the request to list some of the instutitions in which her books are assigned -- in courses on Islam, or MIddle Eastern history (how can one conceivably study Middle Eastern history without considerning how the Muslim conquests suppressed tens of millions of people, and turned what were centers of Christiianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, both in the Middle East, and North Africa, and Sassanian Persia, and then all of Byzantium, into places where non-Muslims were subject to a status that guaranteed that they would permanently endure humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity?
The silent dissidents within MESA may have to wait until they are not only tenured, but also powerful within their departments, but their day is coming. It is coming because the behavior of Muslims, not leasst in the Western countries, is forcing all of us to study on our own, and to question the authority of those who claim to know what they are talking about, but whose "scholarship" is so easy to dismember, and whose apologetics have become so transparent, and their presentation of Islam so divergent from what any of us can easily find out about both the doctrine, and the putting into practice of that doctrine by adherents, of the belief-system known as Islam.
Thanks Hugh. I agree with the wisdom of your reluctance to "name names" in this instance.
I do wonder how you are privy to the apparent denigration of Bat Ye'or by teachers in MESA. Is this based on more than one incident?
I only hope that the dissidents within MESA that you refer to are more than just a handful.
Yes.
"The silent dissidents within MESA may have to wait until they are not only tenured, but also powerful within their departments, but their day is coming."
Just want to point out that this is critical.
The way things currently are, one can read and study as much as possible, but if one doesn't have the certificate from the right (and quite possibly deeply biased) organization, one is sharply limited in one's ability to translate that knowledge into action.
The university is powerful. It is also susceptible to ideological takeover. This can create a seriously long lag in the shifting of perspective of government officials, even when that shift is necessary for our survival and defence.
This is a serious problem with the university system, and with how the government interlocks with the university system (supporting it finanically, with few checks on its performance; hiring on the basis of the certificates it grants to people (and thereby increasing demand for its product, tuition being another major way in which it gets funds)).
I don't have any ideas about what should be done about it in the long term (most potential changes I can think of introduce even more problems). In the short term, kudos to the academics waiting it out for tenure.