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Fred is in the running for the correct answer at the Jihad Watch Mesa Nostra contest too. Irfan Khawaja writes in Campus Watch:
It can be amazing sometimes to discover the frequency with which appeals to academic expertise end up concealing utter nonsense. For a remarkable example of this, consider a letter from Fred M. Donner, professor of Near East Studies at the University of Chicago, in the Nov. 16 issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly, the alumni magazine of Princeton University. (To get to the Donner letter, click the preceding link, go to "current issue," and then go to "letters to the editor." The magazine typically goes by its abbreviation, PAW.)For a few months now, a controversy has raged at Princeton over the possibility that Princeton might hire Columbia University's Rashid Khalidi to serve as its (Princeton's) Niehaus Chair of Near East Studies. Generally speaking, opinion on the matter falls into three relatively neat camps: (1) those opposed because of Khalidi's views on the Israel-Palestine issue, (2) those in favor for the same general reasons, and (3) the indifferent. For months, the controversy has consisted of partisans of camp (1) attacking partisans of camp (2) and vice versa. (Personally, I fall into camp (3).)
One opens the Nov. 15 issue of PAW with the pro-Khalidi camp responding to the anti-Khalidi's camp's claim that Khalidi is "a pseudo-academic," and "a person with a political agenda rather than a scholar…" The chief representative of the pro-Khalidi faction turns out to be Prof. Donner, a Princeton alum. The defense he offers of Khalidi is notable only for its astonishing illogic—illogic that does little to help Khalidi and less to enhance Donner's credibility as a witness in Khalidi's defense.
"I had the good fortune to be a colleague of Khalidi's for almost 20 years," Donner tells us. "I can assure [the reader] that Khalidi is truly a scholar of the first caliber, not a ‘pseudo'-anything."
Fair enough: being someone's colleague for 20 years can in principle give you a chance to get to know him well enough to comment on his capacities as a scholar. The trouble is, having been Khalidi's colleague for twenty years, Donner doesn't profess to know very much about Khalidi's scholarship: "I do not follow the Israel-Palestine debates, or Khalidi's writing, closely enough to know whether he has in fact declared his endorsement of a ‘one-state' solution" to the Israel-Palestine debate.
Too bad that Khalidi's scholarship is on…the Israel-Palestine debate.
Read it all.
Posted by Rebecca at November 17, 2005 4:14 PM
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Since the dawn of Post-Modernism, when the search for objective knowledge (i.e. truth) was replaced with advocacy for one's particular value set, the standard of scholarship has plummetted. In Middle Eastern Studies, in particular, oil money has completely muddied the waters. The Saudis et. al. pay for propagandists who will apologize for Islam and vilify Israel and Western values. I would love to see the correspondence between these people and their masters: "Was that article all right? Did I criticize the West appropriately? Do you think I should criticize other religions more?" And so on.
Of course, as with Marxism, "useful idiots" always come into play as well. These people are just wilfully blind, obdurate and stupid. Or, as Ibn Warraq pointed out, in his introduction to Dr. Bostom's "The Legacy of Jihad", Isaiah Berlin was said to have said that an ideologue is someone who is willing to suppress what they suspect to be true. Or, as Fred Donner would put it, we should suppress what is true about Islam to avoid offending Muslims. Well, I guess we had better suppress what is true about Nazism or Marxism to avoid offending Nazis and Marxists.
The bottom line is: will these paid propagandists be able to convince the majority of people that Islam means peace, that Jihad is an internal moral struggle, etc.? In other words, can large amounts of money - paid to produce large amounts of lies - actually convince enough people in the West to commit civilizational suicide? Stay tuned.
Posted by: Mentat![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 17, 2005 5:37 PM
That book review site is a GOLDMINE.
Besides Donner, here's a few other reviewers that appear on the site: the Muslim revert, Jeremiah McAuliffe Jr., PhD, the professor that compared the 9/11 hijackers to the Minutemen, M. Shahid Alam, and Our Edward.
They hate anything that challenges the apologia of the Unholy Trinity (Michael Sells, Karen Armstrong, and John Esposito) so anything written by Ibn Warraq, Christoph Luxembourg, and Bernard Lewis will get a bad review. I noticed there were no reviews of Bat Ye'or's books, but I guess since she's a "Zionist bigot" in their minds, the judgement has already been made.
This really amazes me. The likes of Rashid Khaladi, Juan Cole, and John Esposito are praised for their objectivity and academic ability whereas Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye'or, and Daniel Pipes, all of whom are far more adept than those three clowns, are dismissed as biased and bigoted when they have been publishing groundbreaking work and shattering the myths set into motion by the Islamic aplogists of yore. It really highlights the desperate situation mainstream Islamic academics have found themselves in. With a PLO propagandist, a post-modernist hack, and a well connected Christian Arabist sitting at the head of the table, is it any wonder why students taking their classes learn absolutely nothing of value?
Posted by: igor at November 17, 2005 5:49 PM
Since the dawn of Post-Modernism, when the search for objective knowledge (i.e. truth) was replaced with advocacy for one's particular value set,posted by Mentat
I see that argument quite frequently, only one question who or what is the purveyor or guardian of objective knowledge (truth). Most certainly Muslims say that they are, as do Christians and Jews and Hindus, my two cents is placed on science, and a science that says, frame a hypothesis, test, evaluate, retest and the more you test the more you learn.
But your truth Mentat is not my truth, nor the truth of your neighbor, certainly religious truth is not truth at all, but accumulated beliefs that justify policies and actions that assuage fears and fulfill needs.
You must acknowledge that, after all much of Jihad Watch is dedicated to refuting at least one set of truths.. The Islamic Truth.
Then again provide me concrete evidence of your truths and I'll be glad to change my mind and acknowledge them.
Posted by: Nariz at November 17, 2005 10:47 PM
Nariz,
You believe in objective truth, or you wouldn't be opposing Islam.
Posted by: Dr. Pepper at November 17, 2005 10:49 PM
Do look up Fred Donner's long history of anti-Israel bloviating -- and more than bloviating. Do look up what is on offer as Fred Donner's contribution to the study of early Islam, and compare it, then, to the carefully compiled anthologies, each with its own lucid essay that compresses so much material, which would not have been possible had not all the material been thoroughly grasped and its significance weighed, by Ibn Warraq himself.
No, you know what -- I'll get to it myself and post something here by the weekend.
Donner praises and stands by his man Rashid Khalidi as a "scholar." Donner denigrates, on the other hand, the scholarship of Ibn Warraq.
Let's look into that just a bit more.
Posted by: Hugh at November 18, 2005 12:44 AM
It still boggles the mind how so many folks like Donner have come to hold chairs at such well respected institutions. What in the world happened? And how could a literary-philosophical movement as misty as post-modernism provide any sort of authority and grounds to educated people to transform Near East Studies into a wasteland of political rhetoric? On an optimistic note: this sort of thing, that is, mediocrity endemic to a discipline, has never persisted for long in the history of Western thought. Genuine critique, the desire for the truth, the lessons of hard experience, eventually win out; but it can take a while and may require a little pain. But, in the end, it will go away and these people and their work will be utterly forgotten; unless, of course, we have cause to remember them they way we remember Nazi sympathizers, or Judas like characters, that sort of thing.
Posted by: JTF at November 18, 2005 2:36 AM
Some relevant links on Fred Donner:
"The inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock, which closely follow but are not identical in all respects to passages in the Qur'an, have also been used by some to question the stability of the Qur'anic text at the time of the Dome's construction. The most recent analysis[6] of this phenomenon, however, suggests that the disparities are "minor textual variations... introduced to fit the sense," and in no way lend support to Wansbrough's hypothesis of a late date for the Qur'an's codification; moreover, it argues that broader patterns of inscriptional evidence suggest that the traditional Muslim view, that the Qur'an was codified during the caliphate of `Uthman, is reliable.[7]"
"What if the Likud government in Israel uses the distraction of an American war on Iraq to implement its long-cherished dream of expelling all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza? (This is not unlikely: a memo circulated last fall by a long list of Israeli academicians warned that the Sharon government was contemplating just this.) Will the U.S. let this ethnic cleansing of Palestinians happen? What troops would we use to stop it?"
"University of Chicago professor Fred Donner, in his book The Early Islamic Conquests, theorizes that there may be something intrinsic to Islam that spurs a conquering attitude: "[T]here is the possibility that the ideological message of Islam itself filled some or all of the ruling elite with the notion that they had an essentially religious duty to expand the political domain of the Islamic state as far as practically possible; that is, the elite may have organized the Islamic conquest movement because they saw it as their divinely ordained mission to do so." Though these conquests were at swordpoint, many Muslim scholars argue that conversions to Islam by the vanquished were done of free will. Donner suggests, however, conversion was in part accomplished with the promise of booty from further conquests."
In 1991, professor Fred Donner of the University of Chicago published an insightful article under the title "The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War." This was part of an edited volume entitled Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace in Western and Islamic Traditions.n20 In this [*11] article, professor Donner began by questioning the propriety of relying solely on the Qur'an, the Sunna or the books of Islamic law for an understanding of the substance and the logic underlying the medieval Muslim concept of jihad. Rather, according to professor Donner, the Muslim valuation and articulation of jihad was just as much, if not more, a product of history as it was of religion. This insight yielded two extremely important implications. First, just as Islamic theology, philosophy and jurisprudence had been informed by perspectives brought by Hellenized and other converts from the world of Late Antiquity, so had jihad, in its classical formulation, been informed by such Roman-Byzantine concepts as "charismatic victoriousness," according to which God would aid the expansionist endeavors of the empire against all enemies of the religion or the state.n21 Second, and more important, the whole Qur'anic rationale undergirding the verses on jihad could be seen as resting on a particularly intractable reality in 7th century Arabia. Speaking of this reality, professor Donner writes,
In this society, war (harb, used in the senses of both an activity and a condition) was in one sense a normal way of life; that is, a 'state of war' was assumed to exist between one's tribe and all others, unless a particular treaty or agreement had been reached with another tribe establishing amicable relations.n22
Posted by: igor at November 18, 2005 3:56 AM
nariz~ which conspiracy best fits Your 'truth'?
I think these do quite well:
A tangled Web of Lies:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/suzannefields/2005/11/17/175916.html
No terrorist lawsuits:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/robertnovak/2005/11/17/175914.html
The Cut and RUNNNN! Party (ie, How to Embolden Terrorists):
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/monacharen/2005/11/18/176025.html
How to Lose a War:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/ollienorth/2005/11/18/176024.html
Withdrawal Mania:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/davidlimbaugh/2005/11/18/176021.html
at November 18, 2005 6:52 AM
The quotes above are instructive. Donner is aware of Luxenberg's work (a few months ago went to a conference devoted to the subject), and of course would prefer to minimize it, or explain it away. When it comes to Wansbrough, Patricia Crone, Michael Cook, he becomes a more sophisticated Defender of the Faith who, unlike Muslim defenders, does have to take into account, and cannot simply dismiss as Infidel nonsense, such scholars -- but his distaste for questioning the Received Version of Islam is clear.
From another link above, quoting from one of Donner's articles on Jihad and "early" Islam (what does he think happened throughout the history of Islam?):
"T]here is the possibility that the ideological message of Islam itself filled some or all of the ruling elite with the notion that they had an essentially religious duty to expand the political domain of the Islamic state as far as practically possible; that is, the elite may have organized the Islamic conquest movement because they saw it as their divinely ordained mission to do so."
Compare this timidity and tentativeness with all the great scholars of Islam of the last century. Just take a look at the samples -- samples, the the full texts -- of those whose articles are collected in "The Legacy of Jihad." Compare them with Donner.
Look at the words, the tone, the whole attitude, and ask yourself, after you have read, say, not only an article by C. Snouck Hurgronje on Islam, but one or two or more of his books, or do the same for Margoliouth, or Fagnan, Huart, K. S. Lal, or others, once you have read Antoine Fattal, or Majid Khadduri (who told the truth in his War and Peace in Islam) -- and remember, this has been for thirty years the full-time activity of Donner, who has no other tasks except to comprehend Islam, early, middle, late -- and see which you think is a trustworthy guide, and which you find has managed to interpret the sometimes necessary reserve and tentativeness of the scholar with being, in essence, a mealy-mouthed quasi-apologist who cannot bring himself to see certain things, or even to consider them, and hence is ultimately misleading about Islam.
Posted by: Hugh at November 18, 2005 8:54 AM
Nariz:
Thanks for your comments.
Since you are a new poster to JW/DW, you aren't aware of any of my intellectual positions; yet, nevertheless, you assume that you know what they are. I'll give you a tip, Nariz; never assume; it makes an ass of you and me.
Now, with regard to trying to encapsulate 5000 years of intellectual history in a few sentences, I'll give it a go.
As far as objective truth goes, I acknowledge that other than in the hard sciences, there is no such thing as knowledge that can be "easily" tested by empirical evidence (i.e such as the boiling point of water at a certain atmospheric pressure). In short, there is no such thing as "truth" per se in the humanities, either divine or manmade. (Needless to say, I do not believe in anything supernatural). In other words, knowledge in the humanities is not like that in the hard sciences. Yet, even in the humanities (within which I include economics, sociology, etc. - the so-called "soft" sciences), you can see what works and what does not. By which I mean, if you take a utilitarian, pragmatic view of particular forms of government or economics or urban plans or ways of life, etc., you can say, with some certainty (after you have tried it out someplace) that this particular form of government or this particular economics or this urban plan or this particular way of life produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Hardly anyone, except for people like Pol Pot, would dispute, for instance, the role of an educated populace in ensuring a functional, modern economy.
Now, as far as "truth" goes, I even then do not abandon this notion. I think that in some areas of study you must proceed in an "as if" fashion, meaning you should proceed "as if" truth existed in order to come out with some useful knowledge. In the study of history, this approach is imperative in my opinion. If you approach history as if it were a body of knowledge that should be simply manipulated so as to advocate for a particular value set then the study of history becomes meaningless. You might as well just make up anything you want to justify your position, which is, for example, what many holocaust deniers do. As Orwell said, "He who controls the present, controls the past; he who controls the past, controls the future."
Needless to say, that is why so many totalitarian belief systems, including Islam, strive valiantly to eliminate any vestige of the past which conflicts with their vision of how society should be. Muslims, in particular, do not want people to remember that once they were Hindus or Zoroastrians or Yazidi, etc.. To do so, would raise an element of doubt about their current religious inclination.
BTW, Nariz, here is one of my favorite websites, which I think that you might enjoy:
Posted by: Mentat at November 18, 2005 10:01 AM
Yes. Professor Ernst Mayr, even were he still alive, and the others appearing at or mentioned at that site won't be receiving the Templeton Prize any time soon.
Posted by: Hugh at November 18, 2005 11:35 AM
If the Donner critique of Luxenberg were as far as it went, I wouldn't be bothered. Experts are expected to dispute over such things--and, while I find Luxenberg's thesis fascinating, I expect the last word to be said by an Arabist.
But, concerning the political corruption of MES, we've seen it in Far Eastern studies as well. There was a time when any criticism of Mao Zedong or pointing out that a blood bath did follow the 1975 Communist victory in Indochina was about as gauche as farting in the face of royalty.
Posted by: Kepha at November 18, 2005 5:44 PM
No Western "Arabist" knows Arabic of that period as well as Luxenberg.
Posted by: Hugh at November 18, 2005 6:10 PM
"in Far Eastern studies as well."
-- from a posting above
Yes, quite a few who applauded at one point Mao and the Cultural Revolution managed later to change or least cover their spots -- James in Far Eastern studies as well.Thomson at Harvard, Jonathan Mirsky (now working for what? the Financial Times?), and the inimitable Orville Schell (now dean of some school of journalism) all come to mind. "Chinese Shadows" by Simon Leys (the sinologist Pierre Ryckmans, who later wrote a novel about Napoleon on St. Helena) may have covered this and while it did not name names, it may have nonetheless identified a great many for those who knew the cast of characters. Ryckmans is someone who could polish the whole crew off, if he felt like it. He probably doesn't.
Not quite as bad, but bad, are those celebrators and worshippers of the new get-rich-quick China. More than a few in China must feel like shutting out the crazed capitalists as before one shut out or tried to forget the the crazed Communists, taking out a scholar's brush, and and ink, and seeking refuge in calligraphy and the classics.
Posted by: Hugh at November 18, 2005 11:24 PM
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