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Jihad Watch Board Vice President discusses the impending apotheosis of Juan Cole:
What can one expect from Yale vis-à-vis Juan Cole? If the Director of the Whitney Center for the Humanities, Maria Rosa Menocal, has not been taken to scholarly task for her ill-informed feelgood Ornament of the World (which makes no mention of the relevant authorities, such as Levi-Provencal, in her bibliography), but rather has just been rewarded with a Sterling Professorship, that says a lot about Yale. Her Sterling Professorship, what’s more, is one of four such appointments, and the only one outside of science, with its more rigorous no-nonsense standards.As for Juan Cole, everything Martin Kramer has written about him should be digested thoroughly by those at Yale who are even thinking of touching Cole with a ten foot pole. Then read around. Go to the Yale Library. Check out Joseph Schacht, C. Snouck Hurgronje, David Margoliouth, Arthur Jeffery. Start with those four. Or, if you prefer, read the samples of a few dozen great Western scholars of Islam, those included in the tremendously useful The Legacy of Jihad. Ask a few European scholars -- say, Alfred de Premare, or Hans Jansen -- or for that matter those who have received their scholarly formation in Europe but are presently in the United States, such as Bernard Lewis, Patricia Crone, and Michael Cook -- what they think of the level of Coke's "scholarship." For that matter, since the subject at hand is "contemporary" political developments, surely Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya should be asked (for there they will be truth-tellers) what they think of Juan Cole's "scholarship."
If this charlatan is appointed, it would be a final nail, or rather several final nails, in several coffins. One would be the coffin of MESA Nostra. The American government – or better, qualified and moneyed private individuals who know the truth -- should simply set up institutes to teach Americans about Islam and the Middle East, going carefully around the universities -- or perhaps carefully vetting every department that would wish to get in on the money. The second coffin, a far more luxurious affair (possibly on display at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home), will be that of Yale itself. Universities live and die now by phony "prestige" and by working up would-be students into a frenzy about it, and by keeping "in touch" with Alumni to remind them of how prestigious their prestigious university prestigiously is, and how all that prestige comes at a price -- the price that generous and loyal alumni, basking in that never-ending "prestige," should be happy to pay, and pay, and pay. (Have you gotten a call, or ten, or fifty, from your university yet? Have you had the good sense to tell them to stop their endless begging, and you choose not to swell their endowment still further?)If such a scholarly nonentity, is appointed in the "full light of history," when his work can be easily compared with that of real scholars (Jeffery, Snouck Hurgronje, Schacht, etc.) of the past, and present scholars -- Cook, Crone, Lewis, De Premare, Jansen -- can give their opinions, what does that tell us about this prestige? And don't tell us that John Esposito, or Roger Owen, or Hamid Dabashi, or the egregious rock-musician and self-described polymath Mark LeVine (about whom more has been written here) have been the people supplying references for Cole, or that others, including the more plausible representatives of the apologist-lite school, such as Roy Mottahedeh, have been doing so. For god's sake, the mixture as before is not acceptable. We can't take more misinformation, nonsense and lies, about Islam. It's costing us too much -- just look at tarbaby Iraq and the dream of a Light Unto the Muslim Nations.
Donations do not matter to MESA Nostra. But they do, very much, to Yale. Yale should be made to suffer, suffer, suffer, if the apotheosis of MESA Nostra and all that is wrong with it, one Juan Cole, is rewarded for his nonstop nonsense by being elevated to the "prestige" of "prestigious" Yale. It is bad enough that the Mearsheimer-Walt parody of scholarship is allowed to go about the world as a "Harvard" product (the imprimatur was removed too late). To have "Professor Juan Cole of Yale” -- that's more of the same.
It may not be possible to recreate an atmosphere in American universities, or in other universities of the Western world, in which disinterested study, rather than transparent apologetics, would be offered to innocent students. Certainly the number of schools where such study is possible has diminished over the past 30 years. Esposito is the rule, not the exception. But one should at least try. And administrators at Yale and members of other departments, such as the history faculty at Yale, now have a duty to inform themselves fully of the extent of the scandal, and not to permit the fellow-travelers of MESA Nostra already ensconced at Yale to manage to smuggle in one more of their number. This was, incidentally, tried recently at Harvard Divinity School by Leila Ahmed, trying through her tools William Graham and Diana Eck to push through the appointment of Omid Safi. Fortunately, she was foiled. Surely those pushing, pushing, pushing for Juan Cole -- because he is one of them, and they are with him all the way -- can also be foiled at the last minute. They must be -- for the sake of Yale's innocent students, and for the continued support of Yale. For all of the faculty will suffer in the end from a decline in financial support that such an appointment will at this point, and fortunately, automatically trigger.
They might start by reading up on the phrase "MESA Nostra." They can even, if they wish, enter the "MESA Nostra Contest." Yes, their entries will be given special consideration.
Posted by Robert at April 24, 2006 1:08 PM
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Juan King Cole? I loved his "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer."
Posted by: longtime lurker![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 24, 2006 2:07 PM
A reminder for those who want to enter the permanently open MESA Nostra Contest:
The prize for the first correct entry emailed to director@jihadwatch.org will be a nicely framed copy of Professor Hamid Dabashi’s celebrated Poem in Prose to Edward Said, which you may read now by googling “Hamid Dabashi” and “Edward Said.” For many, that will be prize enough.
Posted by: Hugh
at April 24, 2006 2:43 PM
NO NO NO!
No more contests until you cough up the answer to the last one!
Pay the jizya! Give me the answer!
Dirka dirka mohammed jihad!
Posted by: longtime lurker at April 24, 2006 2:54 PM
Crossword clue: apotheosis of the palindrome
Answer: deified
at April 24, 2006 3:09 PM
I've got to say, Mr. Fitzgerald, you got it all right in this one. The American university system sure seems like a sham from the inside, and it looks almost identical from the outside (though you maybe question whether your judgement is sound or not until you get inside and see that it is). I've been at NYU for two years so far, and I am wondering why I came.
It's so trendy ever since 9/11 to tell people you are studying Arabic, or are a Middle East Studies major.
"What classes are you taking next semester?"
"I'm taking a class on Arabic."
"Ooooooooooooh! Arabic? Wow, interesting choice! (eyes glaze over, tongue wags out)"
"(self-righteously) Yeah, well, it seems like it's going to be pretty important to know it in the coming years."
-or-
(at a party)
"So, what's your major?"
"Middle East Studies."
"Oh wow! That is so unique/open-minded and/or interesting!
"Yeah, well, ever since 9/11 I decided I wanted to figure out why people are attacking us, and how we can better communicate with them to avoid such problems in the future. I'm also really interested in Islamic culture and customs. I'm traveling to Egypt this summer to do some research on a paper I am writing on my own time about Muslim-Christian dialogue."
(conversation partner feints from how overwhelmingly sophisticated and thoughtful her fellow communicator is)
Meanwhile, I have been quietly learning Arabic on my own time with Rosetta stone (not to say I can, but so that I can maybe have some understanding of primary texts on my own) because I don't have the credit space in my schedule to take an Arabic course. I'm not going to spend time majoring in Middle Eastern Studies when I can better study and learn about the Middle East (and Islam) on my own time, as I do. And besides, I already know what those classes are like, and they're not academic in the slightest (I was privy to the discussion board activity for my friends "Muhammed and the Quran" class at NYU and suffice it to say there wasn't so much a discussion of the topic as there was a group castigation of Western society and its legacy of colonialism and imperialism and all the harm it did to the Muslim world and elsewhere... a real treat for the postmodernist's ears!). I admit, I kind of played "Big Brother" during the episode, asking my friend to keep me up to date on what they were learning and what they were talking about and providing criticisms when I felt his professor or his reading material was playing the role of apologist.
For example... this class was a historical/academic approach to the Qu'ran and Muhammed. Why then, did the professor find it relevant to discuss suicide bombings, and defend such actions in a correspondence like this one:
"Here is a link to an article where the U of CHicago prof, Robert Pape, is mentioned:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/07/03/why_do_suicide_bo
mbers_do_it/?page=full
One has to ask howcome there were no suicide bombings whatsover in the 1970’s or even 1980’s? The excerpts about virgins in heaven existed all throughout and if they are supposedly the reason behind the suicide bombings, why weren’t these fanatics interested in heaven?"
Sigh. For all the talk about how institutions like Yale, Harvard, etc. are just training grounds for the next generation of WASPs bent on maintaining the status quo, they sure do a good job of making all the WASPs (and other unlucky individuals who find themselves in NEED of an American higher education, and then sufficiently dazed, confused and disillusioned once we arrive) numb to the realities of Islam. They sure do a good job of "educating" (or re-educating) the young and impressionable, spirited minds of America's future that everything they stand for, the place they've come from, has been such a horrible ogre on the world scene, and that maybe if we only just accept some more oil money for a new "Relations" center we'll understand all of this and make some changes to rectify it!
What happened to searching for ascertainable, knowable truths? What happened to leaving behind "education" at the elementary level and instead rising up to the level or personal and individual inquiry and search for what is right and definite? Did anyone ever stop to consider, on the topic of Islam, that maybe the West's impressions of Islam are not based on Victor's History Syndrome but rather 1400 years of often bloody and confrontational relations with the Others?
Posted by: sologue at April 24, 2006 3:10 PM
A reminder for those who want to enter the permanently open MESA Nostra Contest
Is it one Zainab Bahrani?
If so, you unwittingly gave the answer away by re-using some of her precious sub-literate drivel in your comments on her The Graven Image: Representation in Babylonia and Assyria here:
http://www.campus-watch.org/docs/type/newsfromcampus
I found it by googling some of the stupider phrases in the assumption that the author might have re-used them elsewhere. Perhaps she hasn't, but you may well be quoting from her there.
God, why don't these people read Hume or Swift or Kipling or even Defoe with an attentive ear and learn how to write English? No, hang on, I know: this dense thicket of verbiage, of fake technicalities, is like the thorny hedge around the sleeping princess in the castle. The princess represents their claim to knowledge, and the hedge is there to keep outsiders off. So even if they could learn to write - not as easy as they probably imagine - they wouldn't wish to.
Posted by: Yojimbo at April 24, 2006 3:44 PM
Interested:
Crossword clue: apotheosis of the palindrome Answer: deified
Clue: Old Spanish clipper
Answer: Barber of Seville
at April 24, 2006 3:45 PM
Clue: Overloaded postman
How many letters?
Answer: Too many
Posted by: Interested at April 24, 2006 4:00 PM
Interested,
I've just discovered that there is an organization called The Islamic Thinkers' Society, which is presumably, as an LGF poster points out, a bunch of TITS.
You couldn't make it up.
Posted by: Yojimbo at April 24, 2006 5:07 PM
Oh, I probably could. Thanks for keeping me abreast of developments.
Posted by: Interested at April 24, 2006 5:29 PM
I guess celebrity alone is enough to get tenure at the 'top' places. Reminds me of Cornel West, who was snapped up by Princeton when Larry Summers asked him to be more professional. Evidently, celbrity is the basis of the all-important prestige factor these days.
Posted by: Benjamin at April 24, 2006 7:47 PM
"you unwittingly gave the answer..."
-- from a posting above
There isn't an unwitting bone in my body.
I was perfectly aware that I used bits and pieces of Bahrani in my own concoction, sandy bits around which the pearl of the parody could form itself. Most of the stew, however (changing metaphors in mid-stream) -- that crambo bis cocta that kept skirting sense -- was concocted in the kitchen of my overheated brain. The craziest and yet most plausible-sounding phrases, I allow myself to believe, were all mine, not Bahrani's, beginning with that unforgettable (just think of the image) "phallic hegemony of the Wehrmacht-helmeted Israeli soldiers" (something like that).
I will now turn again from dick wittingness, because continued curiosity might kill that cat, the one that ate the rat that lived in the House that Jack Built. But please note that in the very last contest offered here, the one to which the answers have been infuriatingly withheld by me until I can do them justice, the answers, or most of them, can be discovered by clever googling among the archives here at Jihad Watch. Could be fun.
Amusing, by the way, to think that Zainab Bahrani herself would prefer not to claim credit for her contribution to that MESA Nostra Contest? (Nor would such others like to do it for her, such as -- to pluck a name at random -- Prof. Marc Van der Mieroop; when it comes to related matters, or matters of relation, he has been known to keep such things close to his chest. Who, after all, would want her own gobbledygook to have been the source of inspiration for still more inspired because deliberate gobbledybook, and then those two kinds of gobbledygook, well-stirred, would be held up, not for the respectful attention of "fellow scholars" (that is, others in MESA Nostra who produce the same kind of unbearable stuff, each hoping that no one else will come along from the outside to call their individual or collective bluff), but for a different kind of attention. And that kind of attention would show that all along, as Falstaff would have said before he babbled 'a green fields, you had been all three things: not merely someone who was born with gobbledygook, not merely someone who achieved gobbledygook, but someone who even managed to be the cause of gobbledygook in other men. Who wants that known?
The horror, Kurtz. The horror.
Posted by: Hugh at April 24, 2006 10:22 PM
soloque,
Cantabs and Bulldogs are not as stupid and gullible as you imagine. Some of their professors are, likewise, not fooled by poseurs like cole.
Posted by: Infidel33 at April 25, 2006 12:41 AM
longtime lurker --
A, B, and C are the three writers. A's name begins with the letter "C," and "B's" name with the letter "P," and C's name with the letter "M." A died young, executed by the state; B died young, though not quite so young, shot by someone he knew, but not in the commission of a crime; C (the longest-lived) died of cholera. And the city is Constantinople.
I thought that might be enough to hold you for a day or two. A complete account will be posted -- sooner rather than later. Quite a phrase: "sooner rather than later."
Posted by: Hugh at April 25, 2006 12:48 AM
Yojimbo: if there is one thing I learned at college (the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a real stronghold of relativism and post-modernism), it is that when academic language becomes incomprehensible, it is because there is something that is being hidden - or rather, sneaked past us by the pretence of abstraction. It is as though they were saying: "We know what you THINK you are seeing, and that what you THINK is there is immoral, but in point of fact it is too abstract and too complex a matter for your feeble brain and your backward categories. You must take yourself further into our categories, difficult though they sound, to achieve the true inwardness of our meaning."
The truly great scholars, by contrast, are lucid, clear, even simple. There are plenty left, even in PC-endangered subjects such as anthropology - try, for instance, Mary Douglas. You understand what they are driving at, and when they have a complex and dangerously technical point to prove - which happens in all disciplines - they take the reader with them until the reader has the impression of having understood it all by himself. And, guess what? While there is such a thing as a great Marxist scholar - the historian Christopher Hill springs to mind - the vast majority of the truly good ones are moderate, conservative, or at any subscribe to a sense of morality we can all agree to.
Posted by: Paolo at April 25, 2006 1:52 AM
Hugh,
The writer A is Andre Chenier, I suppose; he was born in Istanbul and executed during the French Revolution. B is obviously Alexander Pushkin; he was killed on a duel, but I am at a loss figuring our his relationship to Constantinople, except that he supported the Greek was of independence. C must be Adam Mickiewicz; he died of cholera in Istanbul.
Am I right?
Posted by: Liggett at April 25, 2006 6:21 PM
"Am I right?"...
-- from a posting by Liggett
Yes. However, more is required for the complete answer, and since I not only identified the city but also provided the big hint of the initial letters in the names of all three, I declare you not the winner but the closest thing to it. However, just a few hours later, on another thread, Yojimbo (I am sure independently) came up with Chenier and Mickiewicz, but not Pushkin, and he too deserves some recognition. I would have thought, by the way, that Pushkin would have been the first one mentioned, with the other two far more obscure, for English and American entrants. I was wrong.
The hardest part is not the identification but the biographical details about each of the writers, their links to the city and to each other (or rather, what linked Chenier and Pushkin, and Pushkin and Mickiewicz, but not Chenier and Mickiewicz). The detailed answer should provide a picture, in parvo, of the period from the French Revolution to the Crimean War.
Posted by: Hugh at April 25, 2006 10:36 PM
The American government...(snip)...should simply set up institutes to teach Americans about Islam and the Middle East...
Right. And I wish I had a pony, and you all were paying for it. (Since I am not paying for it, naturally I'd like it to be the best of all possible ponies, and win races.)
Tip: The government already HAS these institutions, and they're spread out across the nation in every single city, town, parish and 'burg -- they're called schools; and every kid in America attends them for over a decade. If the government is incompetent or indisposed to teach Americans about Islam in its own wholly-controlled brain-prisons, why would anyone suppose that if would have any greater success via a parallel bureaucracy the citizens are free to ignore?
Whenever I see whistful denials of reality like this, I am reminded of David King's Cherishing the Zombie logical-fallacy.
Snipped portion: ...or better, qualified and moneyed private individuals who know the truth....
In the age of internet and $100 used computers, do you really suppose that anyone who WANTS to know the truth doesn't already possess it? What's the best you supposed "qualified and moneyed private individuals" could accomplish with their time and finances? I submit that something like Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" series on cable Showtime is as far as anyone could get when the government owns the airwaves.
Short of taking justice back into their own hands, what would you expect the newly-educated to do about it anyway? Uselessly vote, in the hope that one lying, corrupt, incompetent party-nominated de-facto socialist bum is less hideous than the other at performing irony tasks?
In the end, those who make a difference are those who act, not talk. For all its virtues, education still amounts to talking. The best it can do is make an influence upon those who act.
Posted by: Mike Schneider at April 25, 2006 11:26 PM
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