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September 11, 2002
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Tonight, Edward Said will be
Tonight, Edward Said will be honored by the First World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES). WOCMES will be commemorating the anniversary of last year's terrorist attacks by awarding the "WOCMES Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies" to the Columbia University professor who has arguably done more than any other scholar to set the present radically politicized tone of Middle Eastern studies and its interdisciplinary cousin, postcolonial studies. For those who are troubled by the moral relativism and ideological rigidity the academic left brings to its understanding of the 9/11 attacks and to subsequent events in the Middle East, the planned coincidence of Said's recognition and 9/11 remembrance will feel like a cruel joke at history's--and humanity's--expense.
Martin Kramer, dissenting Middle East scholar and editor of the Middle East Quarterly, explains with uncompromising power:
What seems totally inappropriate is the selection of Said for an award for his contributions to Middle Eastern studies. A contribution to an academic discipline usually takes the form of some epistemological breakthrough. Said's attack on Middle Eastern studies, made in his 1978 book Orientalism, prompted an epistemological breakdown. Yet he never provided a serious alternative, just a kind of floating over-identification with political causes like Palestine, Arab nationalism, and Muslim anti-imperialism. When pressed, he has always pointed out that it isn't his field anyway, and it isn't his brief to say anything about the Middle East as it really is. The decadence that pervades Middle Eastern studies today, the complete subservience to trendy politics, and the unlikelihood that the field might ever again produce a hero of high culture--all this is owed to Edward Said.The most manifest sign of this decadence is the guild's decision to kneel before its greatest detractor. And in the very depth of that kneel, we find decisive evidence for the complete atrophy of debate in Middle Eastern studies. Said's selection was virtually unanimous. Fifty-two members of the WOCMES International Advisory and Program Committee (comprising academics from eighteen countries) voted in favor of Said's nomination. Only three members abstained. No other nomination won support. The outcome was almost Syrian in its unanimity.
Kramer has written extensively on how Said, a Palestinian-American English professor with little expertise in Middle Eastern studies and a big chip on his shoulder, effectively hijacked the field when he published Orientalism, the scholarly blockbuster that has since set the tone for leftist academic thinking about imperialism, oppression, and Western attitudes toward the East (currently, the book is, according to Amazon.com, the 20th most popular book in Egypt) . Kramer devotes a great deal of space to Said's impact in his recent book, Ivory Towers on Sand (see sidebar); you can read Chapter Three, about Said's influential failure to grapple with Islam, at www.ivorytowers.org. We know all too well today the costs of Middle Eastern studies' failure to grasp the potential threat posed by radical Islam. Kramer helps us understand how it was that such a gross misunderstanding was possible, and he shows us, too, how Said helped to shape the academic climate that enabled that costly misunderstanding to occur.
Kramer has set off a firestorm with his book--it's covered in detail on the site. He's also recently launched MartinKramer.org, a rich site with links to lots of his writing about the contemporary Middle East. Spend some time with Kramer's work if you have not already. It's a good way to pay constructive, forward-looking tribute to last year's tragedy.
