Tag: academia

Rodenbeck on Oren

Max Rodenbeck reviews Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present,” finding it full of interesting anecdotes and well-researched but subtly biased in favor of both Israel and “America’s self-image as an innocent among Middle Eastern sharks.”

Some readers may remember that Oren, who holds Israeli citizenship and has served in the Israeli military, has been the subject of some controversy in US academic circles not only for being pro-Israel but also its vocal defender in the public arena. His previous book, “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” was lambasted by Norman Finkelstein for its apologetics.

Pfaff argues for “non-interventionism”

“Isolationist” is a term used derisively in American foreign policy circles, but one with which I increasingly identify. Non-Americans increasingly feel that way too: leave us the hell alone, America, they say. William Pfaff explores this argument in this NYRB piece:

It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new administration in two years’ time might change direction seems the relevant question.

Yet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.

The intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained.

The rest of the article posits a non-interventionist policy I wish could be embraced — and it took the Bush administration to make me realize that.

America’s Kingdom

Qahwa Sada has three guest posts about Bob Vitalis’ new book, America’s Kingdom, which I’ve just ordered and am very much looking forward to read during the holidays. One is by Vitalis himself, explaining what he was trying to do, which is not so much a history of ARAMCO as much as an intellectual attack on the idea of American exceptionalism and the blind spot Americans have in considering their country as just another imperalist state, not so different from the European imperialist states after all. Unfortunately, the two other contributors — Toby Jones and Gregory Gause — love the book, so there’s not that much debate. But I guess it means it’s really going to be quite an important book for Middle Eastern Studies and the study of American foreign policy and its relationship with the oil industry.

University professors protest thuggery against students

I received news that leftist academics are holding a protest tomorrow Wednesday, from 11am to 12 noon, at Ain Shams University to protest the state-sponsored thuggery against activist students over the past couple of weeks. The professors will assemble in front of Qasr el-Za’afarana, the university’s administration building.

Click to view slideshow of clashes

In recent weeks, Ain Shams University campus has been the scene of bloody clashes between the Free Student Union activists and the security-appointed official Student Union members. The latter brought into campus thugs armed with knives, swords, daggers, molotov cocktails in a terror campign to disrupt the FSU elections and intimidate the activists.

Irwin vs. Said

Confession: I am a huge fan of Robert Irwin, the very erudite Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Not because I know him or have worked for him (I wish!), although in this small word of Middle East journalism and commentariat I obviously know plenty of people who do. (They say he’s nice.)

I like Irwin mostly because of two books of his that I count, in their respective categories, as some of the best I’ve ever read. The Arabian Nightmare is dark, trippy fantasy written in the style of Edgar Allan Poe (if he had been an arabist and on acid), while his The Arabian Nights: A Companion is an indispensable guide to any serious lover of the Nights. Both are written in a rather difficult prose, and the second can be especially tough in parts, but they are very rewarding if you put the time and effort into them.

His latest work, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, appears to be more in line with the second. It is a basically academic text on the Orientalist tradition in Western letters, focusing mostly on the British, French and German in the fields. As anyone who has done Middle Eastern Studies or dabled in the field at all, these early Orientalists, who were often wonderfully eccentric characters who produced very serious scholarship, are now mostly known for their reputation as agents of empire than their work. Irwin apparently attempts to restore their reputation and refute the idea that these men are inherently suspicious because of their (possible) association with colonialism in the last three or four centuries.

From what I’ve been able to put together from the three reviews that I’ve seen so far — one new but predictably second-rate in the NYT, an excellent one from May by the ubiquitous Christopher de Bellaigue in the Times Literary Supplement and an equally excellent and more critical one in the London Review of Books back in June — the book tells the story of the Orientalists, their lives, their manias, their unusual lifestyle choices. But the big controversy about the book is that it takes on Edward Said’s Orientalism in one of its final chapters, attacking its many mistakes and, more generally, Said’s (alleged) unfounded political agenda in giving the orientalists a bad name. The reviews argue Irwin makes a convincing case that Said was at least partly wrong, but doesn’t really address the links between imperialism and colonialism or quite deliver the fatal blow to the theoretical behemoth that Orientalism has become.

I won’t say anymore until I get hold of a copy of the book (and re-read the relevant passages of Orientalism — by the way, while I admired Said’s advocacy work, I was never a big fan of his most of his (sometimes stultifying) writing style or the amount of political bile he could work up against people who didn’t really deserve it. But I know I would look forward to any book by Irwin, and can’t wait to read this one.

Buy it from the link below (or any of the links above) and arabist.net gets a cut!

“Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents” (Robert Irwin)

Clashes in Ain Shams University

Bloody clashes have been going on for the third day on the row at Ain Shams University campus in Abbassiya, as student union elections approach.
Pro-government students assaulted Muslim Brotherhood activists at the Faculty of Education at Ain Shams University, and tore down their electoral posters. The MB mobilized demos to denounce the attacks, but they were only met by violence.
Pro-government students, armed with sticks and knives, viciously attacked the Brothers, and brought into campus truckloads of Baltaggiya (criminal thugs), who have spread terror on campus.

Click on the pic below to watch a slideshow of the clashes…

Criminal thug, armed with knive, terrorizing students

Above: A criminal thug, armed with knife, brought to campus by pro-government students to participate in the assaults on opposition activists. Photo taken by MB students

And where was the University’s Security, which Minister of Education Dr. Hani Helal described in today’s Al-Masry Al-Youm as “without it, we would have been screwed”? (I’m not joking. That’s the quote.) NO WHERE! The security did not intervene to stop the assaults, and actually aided them. Under their watchful eyes that those herds of Baltaggiya were allowed into campus.

I’ve spoken with Emad Mubarak, the director of the Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression, who follows abuses against students closely, and he said this year the government is not taking it lightly at all with the SU elections. “Already the intimidations started before Eid,” he said. “Posters were torn down several times before, but for two days this bloodshed has went out of control. Three students at least have been hospitalized with serious injuries. This exposes what sort of lies the minister of education is spreading in the press about freedoms on campuses.”

UPDATE: Here’s also a report from the Socialist Students’ blog.

UPDATE: Protests at Helwan University after security banned MB candidates from running.