TEHERAN, Iran – Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular teachers from the country”s universities, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported in another step back to 1980s-style radicalism.
“Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities,” the agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students. — from this news article
Take the very best one. Take the one who is close to recognizing that the problem is not the regime, nor the “mullahs,” but is rooted within Islam itself, and what Islam does, and the attitudes and atmospherics that Islam creates. Take the real thing, the “moderate” who is on his way to becoming Ali Sina, rather than the “moderate” who is on his way to continuing to seek for that demmed elusive “true” Islam — the Islam that has no Jihad, no claim to stake on the entire world, no division of the universe between Believer and Infidel, no right to so cruelly mistreat all non-Muslims according not to a cruel ruler’s whim but according rather to the Holy Law of Islam, the Shari’a. For civilized people now understand and view it as just that: cruel mistreatment.
Take that person and bring him to, say, Columbia University. Make room for him by getting rid of at least one or two of the “construction-of-Palestinian-nationalism” boys. Get rid, for example, of as-yet untenured Joseph Massad. Make conditions for the others who managed to be tenured in the Esdrujula Period, that period of timidity and cupidity and stupidity during which there was a wholesale failure to detect, much less oppose, the Long March of Propagandists, both Muslims and non-Muslims (Carl Ernst, Michael Sells, Bruce Lawrence) for the Lesser and Greater Jihads through the ranks of MESA Nostra — until American universities, and their students, must endure the situation in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies that we all know so well today.
It is hard to slowly divest oneself — off, off, you lendings from the PLO office in Beirut — of such people as Khalidi and the inimitable panegyrist Hamid Dabashi, but perhaps they can be forced out, the way, one suspects, the permanently nasty and far too un-Lebanese Rami Khouri has been eased out of “The Daily Star.” His disgraceful views on Hezbollah must have gotten to Michael Young. But of course he will now be heading a specially funded Arab propaganda effort, one more of those pretend think-tanks designed to support Islam and the local Jihads.
With the money no longer going to the likes of Massad, or possibly Khalidi and Dabashi, hire that one Iranian. Let him show the students that there is more to the culture of Iran than the movies that Dabashi likes to show. (And what would Kierostami think of Dabashi’s Ode to Edward Said?) Let him actually give the students Sa’adi, Hafiz, Firdousi, Omar Khayyam to read, and also explain how very un-Islamic most of them were, and how they detected the Arab supremacism within Islam that made it so antipathetic to them.
Don’t choose, please, one of those mere “moderates” who just thinks the rabble has gotten the upper hand but who believes, with Daniel Pipes, that “moderate Islam” is the “solution.” Take someone whom you are sure is almost there — almost at the point of recognizing not that “Islam itself is not the problem, but only those who misinterpret it” (in some always unspecified way) but that core elements of Islam are the problem, and will always be the problem. Such an Iranian professor may be on his way to something else. He may possibly be in the process of rediscovering Zoroastrianism, for the purposes of having that damned “identity” that everyone in the Muslim world thinks everyone has to have, including himself, or perhaps of finding Christianity (on converts from Islam it always looks good). He may even be tasting the perils and pleasures of the obstinate non-believer.
Make room for that kind of hopeful duckling. But only by getting rid of at least a few of those myrmidons of MESA Nostra, taking up time, taking up space.