Ivory Towers On Sand [Paperback]

 

 

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Without exception, every reviewer here seems to think that the only way to respond to this book is to blindly react based on your partisan feelings - conservatives (the American sort, that is) love it, liberals hate it. How pathetically predictable. Admittedly, this book has an ideological axe of its own to grind, but pretty much every author has one of those, so you have to read this sort of work by looking for the positive contributions you can find for yourself. I mean, come on, people! The best way to be a smart Marxist sure as hell isn't to read the Manifesto over and over - you have to read what you _disagree_ with to find any useful information. Challenge yourselves a little!

Ok. I'm off the soapbox now, and I'll try to be more specific. Keep in mind that I haven't read Said's Orientalism, so my comments are less informed than they could be.

-The book falls into the same intellectual trickery that it accuses Said of - anyone can offer up an academic looking book with endnoted arguments and superscripted numbers. In this case, the title (and subtitle) of the book should be enough to convince anyone with a shred of academic honesty to reformat - this is NOT a journal article or a scholarly publication! It is an editorial work! This is not to say that I disagree with the thesis - but the book is clearly designed to look "scientific" and objective, when in fact it is not.
-Arguments about academia in general are out of place. Yes, in the 1970s, lot of women and minorities got hired at the expense of Yale-educated white men. Was this a good idea? Sometimes, sometimes not. But the fact that actual people who were from the Middle East took over many academic positions during this time doesn't contribute to the argument. Kramer makes special note that at least *50%* of the faculty of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies departments are now actual (or former) residents of these areas. Shocking! And I bet most African-American studies professors are black, too! Call the Cato Institute!
-Arguments about academic failures (especially of area studies in general - more on this would have been good) are convincing. It doesn't take much to argue that the political and academic intercept of Middle Eastern studies in the United States is less than suited to objective and professional scholarship. Kramer does a good job pointing out that the discipline (if indeed it should be one) has failed by most academic standards to contribute to understanding or prediction. Of course, the same could be said of political science or economics generally.

In short, a dishonest book with more than a kernel of truth. Flame on!

-Walt

I have studied the Muslim world for most of two decades and lived in it for more than a decade and am sad to see this type of work masquerading as objective scholarship. Kramer's book can be counted as part of the smear ongoing campaign to discredit thousands of hardworking scholars with vast and diverse knowlege of the Middle East in dozens of disciplines spanning centuries of history with a broad demagogic brush. Hundreds of books on Islamic fundamentalism published in the 1990's with a wide variety of perspectives are clear evidence that scholars were sincerely engaged with the phenomenon and its dangers. The fact that they didn't "predict" 9/11 seems to bother a lot of folks, but that is not their job, but the job of the intelligence services who have long been sceptical of academia anyway in part from an anti-intellectual bias that informs a lot of the criticism. The role of social scientists has never been and shouldn't be to predict the future, whether it be the Iranian revolution, the fall of the Soviet Union, or 9/11. It should be to help us understand the origins of these events before and after they happen, and frankly, there was plenty of excellent work out there prior to 9/11, as opposed to most of what has come out after 9/11. Further, in the 1990's scholars were more concerned about fundamentialism than anyone else in government, business, or journalism. Savage wars such as those in Sudan and Algeria were faithfully covered by members of MESA while virtually no one else did. In fact, MESA conferences were one of the few places in the nation you could hear hundreds of speeches every year on topics that related directly to 9/11 about which no one seemed interested in hearing prior to 9/11. Scapegoating these intellectuals with many shades of grey of "rightness" and "wrongness" by constructing these fictitious "towers" of Middle East studies consensus only to knock them down in my opinion is a colossal waste of time. There is no one line in Middle East studies. Not even on Israel. And it has never existed. If most MESA members are sympathetic to Arabs does not diminish the vitality and importance of their wide-rangning debates before and after 9/11. And it is also due in part to the great lack of sympathy to hundreds of millions of Arabs and 1.2 billion Muslims that anyone that studies this region has to deal with. Every scholar of the region has to constantly plow through constantly reconstructed stereotypes and smear campaigns such as that created by this work to find the truth. And why lament that most sholars of these regions are from these regions. No one in Middle East Studies lamented for decades that, for example, most scholars of the Jewish, or Armenian, or African diasporas were Jewish, Armenian, or African. What's wrong with that? And the academic trends he decries are no different than those confronted by scholars in any other social scientific endeavor. The worst of it is that this book is now being used by a powerful campaign to defund Middle East studies across the nation's 3000 colleges and universities now that we need it most. This anti-Middle East studies campaign is just as sinister as the any kind of "smear" campaing, whether it be anti-semitism, or anti-Islamic invectives, or McCarthyism. It ends up making us all more polarized in our thinking and less informed. For this reason, not only did I gain nothing from this book, but this book is part of the problem. By seeking to smear and put Arab and Muslim intellectuals on the defensive, it can only serve to worsen the terms of the debate and set us back even further into ignorance. Fortunately, most serious scholars are ignoring it. Unfortunately, they just might succeed in their Washington campaign in the current increasingly fearful and increasingly ignorant environment of hunting for scapegoats, Manichean thinking, and bad policy making (such as the Charlotte Beer's marketing campaign at the State Department--one of many current initiatives that just make things worse) in the hasty search for easy answers and quick fixes. How can alienating and margnalizing thousands of dedicated scholars with a great variety of opinions help us in any way? Even their own debates mirror those of the Middle East and can be very instructive, but instead we are telling them that they are all biased, faddish, and monolithic in their views. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A much needed declaration on the failures of Middle East scholarship. Academia has continued on its liberal path to build a Middle East paradigm rooted in hegemony and keeping up with the most modern intellectual jargin while ignoring the real situation in the Middle East. If the professors of Middle East Studies and MESA were more competant their opinions would be heralded througout America. However, MESA and academia aim at subverting those that do not buy into the dominant paradigm that America is imperalistic. Kramer dismantles this innaccurate paradigm in an accurate and revolutionary way.

Middle East Academia on college campuses has become a uniform mass saying in unison that imperialistic America's foreign policy has created this "Oriental" attitude that patronizes the Middle East. The academics reply they are simply telling the truth. I have yet to see a Middle East country not accept American aid. Middle East scholars have missed the reality boat on the Middle East. Where is the scholarship on Middle East terrorism? Fundamentalist Islam? Kramer is brutal, but honest in this assault and anyone thinking about Middle East Studies as an academic discipline must read this first!

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Truth is More Entertaining Than Fiction
The topic, at first glance, is very narrow. This is not a book about how to study the Middle East, nor about American academia, but about the intersection of these: how the Arab... Read more

Published on Dec 18 2002 by Werner Cohn

5.0 out of 5 stars Debunking prescription and prophecy
Martin Kramer's monograph had its genesis before September 11, but its opportune arrival directly raises the question of how 2,600 specialist academics from 125 American... Read more

Published on Oct 17 2002 by Daniel Mandel

5.0 out of 5 stars Do the lunatics run the asylums?
Martin Kramer provides abundant evidence that the politically correct Leftists dominate the academic field of Middle Eastern Studies in the United States. Read more

Published on Oct 6 2002 by David Thomson

5.0 out of 5 stars belongs in every public library
This book ought to be in every public library, on the shelf right beside Edward Said's inadequate and biased Orientalism. Read more

Published on Jun 27 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth in Academia
An important and extensively documented expose of the inadequate scholarship and extreme political bias of Edward Said, John Esposito, et al. Read more

Published on Jun 27 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars IMPORTANT
Okay, so the style is a bit polemic, and far from smooth. The content is explosive. Kramer relates how our univeristies allowed themselves to sponsor second-rate scholarship by... Read more

Published on Jun 27 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars A Necessary Corrective
Charles D. Smith's negative review must be taken with a grain of salt. His own book, "Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict," is clearly biased against Israel. Read more

Published on May 4 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars Incisive, to the point and well supported
I'm glad someone has finally spoken up against Edward Said, John Esposito and some other pseudo scholars who don't know what they're talking about but are presumptious enough take... Read more

Published on April 4 2002

1.0 out of 5 stars How to lobby
Martin Kramer argues that US Middle East specialists have gone astray by misrepresenting the Middle East to their students and also to the US government. Read more

Published on Mar 29 2002 by charles d. smith

2.0 out of 5 stars An Inadequate Response to Orientalism
Kramer provides what seems to be a historic overview of how Middle Eastern Studies developed in the US. Read more

Published on Mar 29 2002

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