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Foreign Affairs
Who Lost Middle Eastern Studies?
By F. Gregory Gause III
F. Gregory Gause III is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont and the author of Oil Monarchies: Domestic and Security Challenges in the Arab Gulf States.
Martin Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, has rattled teacups at faculty clubs throughout the United States with a hard-hitting and personalized critique of the country's practitioners of Middle Eastern studies.
Were it not for the attacks of September 11, the controversies occasioned by his short book would be confined to the academic world, where it has been noted that the fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small. But the fact that the attackers were Arab Muslim extremists gives Kramer's polemic a broader relevance and urgency. Americans want to know why they were struck, whether the blows could have been averted, and what should be done now — not to mention to whom they should turn for guidance on these and related questions.
Kramer's analysis of this last topic is serious and substantive. Some in the field may be tempted to dismiss it out of hand because of a bias against his neoconservative politics and his ties to Israel, but to do so would be both unproductive and offensive. Books need to be judged by what is on the page, not by the characteristics of, or motives imputed to, the author. If Kramer deserves fair treatment, however, so do those he criticizes. Everyone in the Middle Eastern field can point to an opponent and say of an ad hominem attack, "He started it." Better to be known as the person who stopped it, an opportunity that Kramer fails to seize.
Far too often his valid points are overshadowed by academic score-settling and major inconsistencies. He accurately criticizes those who study Middle Eastern politics for their marginalization within the social sciences, then unfairly chastises them for adopting disciplinary paradigms remote from their regional subject matter. He finds those who refuse to speak to the immediate concerns of U.S. foreign policy dangerously disengaged but questions the motives of policy-relevant researchers with whom he disagrees. He scorns the current structure of academic Middle Eastern studies — multidisciplinary institutes outside regular academic departments — yet suggests no alternative. And his sweeping charges often ignore work in the field dealing with precisely the issues he contends are misunderstood or ignored. In short, the patient is not well, but Dr. Kramer's diagnosis is skewed and overly pessimistic, and some of his prescriptions would do more harm than good.
Guilty as Charged?
Kramer's subject is narrower than his subtitle implies. There is nothing in the book about those who teach language and literature or those who write the history of the region. Nor is there treatment of Middle Eastern anthropology, a vibrant field with a leading theoretical role in its discipline. The book deals solely with those who study contemporary Middle Eastern politics, and especially with three failures that, Kramer contends, demonstrate the bankruptcy of this part of the field.
The first problem is what he sees as the baleful influence of Edward Said, professor of comparative literature at Columbia University. . . .