Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge 9781479850662

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middle east studies for the new millennium

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium infrastructures of knowledge Edited by Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

A Joint Publication of the Social Science Research Council and New York University Press

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© 2016 by Social Science Research Council All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-4798-2778-7

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Contents

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments

vii

ix

Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle East Studies Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

1

par t i. discipline s and their boundarie s

1

Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East Lisa Wedeen

2

Middle East in Sociology, Sociology in the Middle East Reşat Kasaba

3

Oil on the Waters? Middle East Studies and Economics for the Middle East 112 Karen Pfeifer

4

The Interdisciplinary Spatial Turn and the Discipline of Geography in Middle East Studies 152 Amy Mills and Timur Hammond

par t ii. middle e a s t s t udie s and the univer sit y

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The Dual Logics of International Education in the Global University: The Case of Middle East Studies at New York University 189 Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

31

82

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Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11: “Needs” and Challenges 225 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy M. Browne

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Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East within and across Disciplines: A Survey of PhD Dissertations, 2000– 2010 251 Laura Bier

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Islamic Studies in US Universities 320 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

par t iii. the p olitic s of knowled ge

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Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11 351 Seteney Shami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia

10

In the Shadow of Orientalism: The Historiography of US-Arab Relations 375 Ussama Makdisi

11

The Risk of Knowing Irene Gendzier

411

Afterword: Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge 432 Lisa Anderson Appendix: Producing Knowledge on World Regions: Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, 2000–Present 447 Jonathan Z. Friedman About the Contributors Index vi

463 Contents

457

Tables and Figures

Tables 3.1. Economic Research Forum Senior Affiliates’ Sources of PhDs in Economics 117 3.2. Number of EconLit Entries, by Region and Country Sample, 1969–2013 120 3.3. Number of Books in Print in English in the United States, by Region and Country, 1979–2013 123 5.1. Degrees Associated with Middle Eastern Studies at NYU 200 5.2. Graduate and Undergraduate Enrollment in Arabic Courses 200 5.3. Faculty Affiliated with Middle Eastern Studies at NYU 200 5.A1. Percentage of International Scholars in the United States, by World Region Origin 213 5.A2. Number of International Scholars in the United States, by World Region Origin 213 5.A3. Percentage of International Scholars in the United States, by Academic Specialization 214 5.A4. Number of International Scholars in the United States, by Academic Specialization 215 5.A5. Number of US Study Abroad Students, by World Region Destination 216 6.1. Arabic FLAS Fellowships Fulfilled in the United States, Overseas, or a Mixture of the Two, by NRC, 2000–2005 229 6.2. Description of Sites 232

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6.3. Descriptions of Universities with Middle East National Resource Centers Whose EELIAS Data Were Considered in This Report 234 6.4. Centers Included in Each Quantitative Analysis 235 6.5. Number of Middle East FLAS Fellows Studying Arabic 237 6.6. First-Year Arabic Fall Term Enrollment, by Center and Year, 2000–2003 243 8.1. Articles on Islam and Muslims in Social Scientific Flagship Journals 323 8.2. Centers for Islamic Studies in US Universities 326 8.3. US University Programs in Islamic Studies 328 8.4. Percentage of Departments of Religious Studies with an Islamic Studies Specialist on the Faculty 333 8.5. Percentage of MESA Members Listing Islam among Their Research Interests 337 A.1. Site Visits to Case Universities, by Project Phase 450 A.2. Use of Generic Titles 451 A.3. Interviews and Focus Groups, by Project Phase 453

Figures 3.1. Economic research forum senior affiliates’ sources of PhDs in economics. 118 3.2. EconLit entries, 1969–2013, per mn pop. 122 3.3. Books per mn pop. 124 6.1. Percentage of first-year Arabic sections taught in the fall term, by type of instructor and year. 244 6.2. Fall enrollment, by level of study and cohort year. 245 6.3. Percentage of total placements, by three sectors and hosting institution. 246 8.1. Percentage of dissertations with a focus on Islam and Muslims, 1960–2010. 321 8.2. Percentage of articles with a focus on Islam and Muslims in eight flagship journals, 1960–2010. 322 8.3. IJMES articles with a focus on Islam, 1970–2010. 338 viii Tables and Figures

Acknowledgments

This volume is the result of the confluence of research projects and conversations that have taken place over the past fifteen years (many of which continue) at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). As a core part of its mission and beginning in 1942, the SSRC has been an integral facilitator and supporter of area studies research in the United States as well as a key interlocutor in discussions and debates about the field. Since the mid-1990s, the SSRC has been concerned with the future of area studies and at the forefront of a number of transformations in the field, including the development of international programs with cross- and transregional components. It was only natural then that in 2000 a team of SSRC researchers became engaged in a long-term study of the production of knowledge on various world regions, with a focus on US universities. Data collection for a pilot project in the field of Middle East studies was funded by the Ford Foundation in 2000 (grant no. 1010– 0542). Starting in 2004, with the receipt of funding from the US Department of Education’s International Research and Studies Program, the project became a large-scale, multiyear endeavor focused on Middle East, Russia/Eurasia, South Asia, and Central Asia area studies centers at US universities. The US Department of Education provided funding through two successive grants for three phases of data collection and initial data analysis through 2010 (grant nos. P017A040075 and P017A060034). A subsequent grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation enabled further data analysis through 2014 (grant no. 31300136).

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This volume would not be possible without these sources of generous financial support. But the volume would also not be possible without the numerous collaborators and colleagues who participated in formal and informal conversations, consultations, and meetings over the course of the past fifteen years. Almost too numerous to include here by name, we will try anyway. Colleagues at the SSRC, long part of such conversations, informed our studies and enriched our discussions beyond measure. These colleagues include Craig Calhoun, Marcial Godoy-Anativia, Nicolas Guilhot, and Srirupa Roy, who, among various other contributions, provided a critical overview of the longue durée of debates surrounding area studies. Senior consultants joined the project as we progressed, including Charles Kurzman and Mitchell L. Stevens, who helped articulate the full potential of this project for various audiences. Finally, we wish to thank Nazli Parvizi, who helped conduct data collection for the pilot project; Mary Ann Riad, who worked to obtain the first US Department of Education grant; and Maureen Abdelsayad, who helped get this large-scale project off the ground and coordinated the first phase. Holly Danzeisen has ably managed Phases II and III of the project, as well as all data analysis phases, in the midst of many other responsibilities, and deserves special thanks for her support and invaluable help in materializing this project. Volume contributors Lisa Wedeen, Reşat Kasaba, and Karen Pfeifer served as steering committee members for the newly expanded project from 2004 to 2006, helping conceptualize the research and provide invaluable guidance throughout the first phase of research, funded by the US Department of Education. Preceding and informing these discussions were SSRC-sponsored consultation meetings at the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in 2000 and 2003 and a panel at the first World Congress of Middle East Studies (WOCMES) in Mainz in 2002. The SSRC held additional consultation meetings throughout the project’s tenure—in June 2007, October 2008, and May 2009—to present empirical research findings as they emerged. In addition to the project’s steering committee members, SSRC staff members, and project researchers, attendees at the workshop in June 2007 included Lisa Anderson (Columbia University), Laura Bier (Georgia Tech), Hoda Elsadda (University of Manchester), Dmitry Gorenburg (Harvard University), Mervat Hatem (Howard University), Sangeeta Kamat (University of Massachusetts), David Ludden (New York University), Zachary Lockman (New York

x Acknowledgments

University), Amy Newhall (University of Arizona), David Nugent (Emory University), Jennifer Olmsted (Drew University), Morton Valbjørn (Univerity of Aarhus), and Ulrich Wurzel (FHTW–University of Applied Sciences). Over two days, attendees discussed the changing landscape of knowledge production on world regions, area studies in the United States (“thinking nationally about international knowledge”), the ever-shifting relationship between disciplines and area studies, the impact of 9/11 on area studies, and themes and trends in Middle East studies both in the United States and in Europe. Many of the papers first presented at the workshop are included in this volume, and many other issues discussed, for example, concerns about academic freedom and Middle East studies and the divide between scholarship in regions and scholarship on regions, continue to resonate eight years later. In October 2008, consultations were held with numerous university presidents, senior officers, and educational sociologists who helped us think about the implications of this research and larger issues related to university restructuring and transformations. Many thanks to these attendees: Jeremy Adelman (Princeton University), Sada Aksartova (American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow), Selma Botman (University of Southern Maine), Diana Davies (Princeton University), Deborah Davis (Yale University), J. Nicholas Entrikin (UCLA), David Frank (UC Irvine), Michèle Lamont (Harvard University), Linda Costigan Lederman (Arizona State University), Vasuki Nesiah (Brown University), Jeffrey Riedinger (Michigan State University), Gideon Rose (editor, Foreign Affairs), Nancy Ruther (Yale University), and George Steinmetz (University of Michigan). As we moved toward the end of data collection, a meeting in May 2009 focused on the academy and the second wave of national security, or what happens to the conception of international research at the university when Department of Education Title VI funding becomes one of the few, if not the sole, sources of support for area and regional studies. Attendees included Thomas Bender (New York University), David Engerman (Brandeis University), Carl Ernst (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Robert Glew (Michigan State University), Kathleen Hall (University of Pennsylvania), Jerry Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania), Aly Kassam-Remtualla (Oxford), Charles Kurzman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Joe Miesel (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), Jennifer Olmsted (Drew University), Nancy Ruther (Yale University), Toby Alice Volkman (Henry Luce Foundation), and Steven

Acknowledgments xi

Wheatley (American Council of Learned Societies). We are forever grateful for the support, collaboration, and generosity of our colleagues before, during, and after these meetings and for the numerous insights and decades of collective expertise they brought to our discussions. Many thanks are due to Alyson Metzger and Michael Simon for shepherding this volume through to production and to Lina Shoumarova for her thoughtful and careful copyediting as well as contributions to the chapter summaries in the introduction. In addition, we are grateful to Ilene Kalish and Caelyn Cobb at NYU Press. Above all, we are deeply indebted to the project’s researchers, supervised by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who undertook the bulk of data collection and coding in three separate phases from 2005 to 2007, Elizabeth Anderson Worden, Nick Gozik, and Anthony Koliha. All devoted weeks to campus visits, immersing themselves in the intricacies of various campus ecologies while balancing other demands such as finalizing their dissertations and/ or managing full workloads. The breadth and depth of these field visits is explained fully in the data narrative (methodological appendix), but without these researchers’ careful and thoughtful interviews, field notes, and incisive analytic overviews we would not have the rich cache of qualitative data from which we drew for this volume and will continue to draw for some time to come. Jeremy Browne played a key role in unlocking the US Department of Education EELIAS database, helping decipher both what we could and what we would never be able to ascertain from this database and, importantly, steering us toward a more qualitative research project than originally envisioned, and continued to play a role in the project’s quantitative research design. Many thanks to our other researchers, including Lucine Taminian, who conducted the pilot research survey, and Alice Horner, who performed critical background research and compiled the impressive project bibliography. Additional research assistance, much of it funded through New York University’s (NYU’s) Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, was provided by doctoral research assistants Jennifer Auerbach (NYU), Christian Bracho (NYU), Jesse Foster (Stanford University), Shane Minkin (NYU), Naomi Moland (NYU), and Nina Pessin-Whedbee (NYU). Special thanks go to Jonathan Friedman (NYU), who, in addition to contributing a chapter to this volume and providing invaluable research assistance over the past five years, served as the project’s data manager from 2013 to 2015. In this role, Jon assumed the unenviable task of making all project

xii Acknowledgments

data accessible, synthesizing the work of many involved in the project before him, and ensuring consistency and accuracy across the volume and project as a whole. Finally, thank you to the volume’s contributors, many of whom have been active and engaged participants in this series of ongoing conversations for over a decade. We appreciate their intellectual energy and patience.

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: The Many Crises of Middle East Studies Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

It is hard to think of a world region today with more pressing social and political interest than the Middle East: hardly a day has passed in the previous decade without some event from the region making global front-page news. In academia, the region has long held a deep fascination for US scholars— from the establishment of departments of “Oriental” studies in the nineteenth century to the creation of federally funded, university-based national resource centers for Middle East studies (MES) in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Middle East—now often known in its expanded form as “the greater Middle East”—has also been at the center of ongoing controversy and debates about the relationships between knowledge and power, about the role of the federal government in the production of knowledge, and about ways of knowing “other” cultures and places. Current transformations of the university and the ways in which different forms of knowledge are valorized and institutionalized also have a profound impact on the study of the Middle East. It is a well-worn truth that knowledge and power exist in an intimate and complex relationship, and examining this relationship as it evolves in particular contexts, times, and spaces remains a critical and urgent task. This is due both to the responsibility that scholars and citizens bear toward informed public discussion and policy formulation but also in order to protect the spaces of academic freedom, critical inquiry, and independent commentary at times of crisis and conflict. We suggest that the greater Middle East is at the center of reassessments of the relationship between knowledge and power. The debates that are 1

taking place in the United States over the field of MES are local in many ways, focused on particular politics and policies through which control and resistance are being mounted. But the implications of these debates go beyond one small field of knowledge production and a limited number of US universities to encompass a much broader range of fields and academic inquiry more generally. At the heart of the matter are issues related to the securitization of academic knowledge in the name of the “national interest,” the challenges arising out of the possibilities of unbounded, transnational fields of scholarship and the future of the university as an institution. In this context, it is particularly important to reflect on how global events in the twenty-first century seem to have overturned some generalizations that had become widely accepted in the last decade of the twentieth century. As the world sees increased militarism, deepened suspicions, swelled refugee flows, and renewed obstacles to the circulation of ideas and people, the happy assumptions of global flows and creative hybridities seem a thing of the past. These trends have implications for the field of MES and the ways in which knowledge about the region is produced. These ongoing controversies and debates have culminated in a series of crises for MES, the analysis of which is at the heart of this volume. This book presents some of the findings of a decade-long (2000–2010) research project organized by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in New York, which began with examining MES and expanded to investigate other area studies fields as well as the thrust toward the global in US universities. In the first phases of the project—reflected in this book—the focus was on the infrastructures for the production of knowledge on the Middle East and the reproduction of new generations of specialists on the region.

The Middle East at Center Stage The Middle East, never far from the scene of world politics, is once again holding center stage as this volume goes to print in 2016. And once again, according to some powerful voices, much of the problems in the region and with the region are “in essence” a result of “age-old” enmities as well as fundamental differences between East and West, between Islam and the “JudeoChristian” civilization. Although new words have appeared in the discourse, or have taken on new valences (“freedom,” “democracy,” “rule of law”), the refrain is familiar.

2 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

The renewed invocation of “civilization,” “culture,” and “religion” as central problems in the present and future of the region, the (perceived) refraction of these traits through the phenomenon of “Islamic terrorism” and its newly global scope, reach, and impact as well as the direct American and European military and political interventions in the region’s states, societies, and economies have specific implications for scholars and others who profess expert knowledge of the region, especially in the human and social sciences. First, this situation focuses attention on the type of expertise available on the Middle East—its content, adequacy, and “utility” as evaluated by different actors. Second, it brings to the fore the characteristics of experts and their relationship to those who make policies and govern the forces that have an impact on the region. And third, at a time of heightened polemics and media focus, scholars and experts become—admittedly in partial and incomplete ways—among the shapers of public discussion and opinion. In other words, academia becomes mobilized and drawn into the public sphere in particular ways and for specific purposes at times of crisis. In the new millennium a number of important works have addressed the history of MES in the United States and the politics of knowledge that have shaped it. Some of this literature is occasioned by the public outcry on “the failure of Middle East studies” to predict the escalation of militant Islam generally and the events of September 11, 2001, specifically and has taken the form of short essays or journalistic articles. Other works have been longer in the making, indicating the felt need for a more in-depth assessment of the politics of the field and its relationship to US power and hegemony. The context in which the relationship between knowledge and power is currently articulated vis-à-vis the Middle East is shaped by a variety of influences, operates at different levels, and produces different outcomes. This volume focuses on the construction of an academic field of “Middle East studies” in the United States as one particular output of this confluence. It seeks to understand the ways in which such a field is constituted as a domain of knowledge that is able to intervene in, as well as become the object of, the exercise of power. The first part of this introductory chapter sketches the institutional context and the intellectual interests that have influenced the evolution of the study of the Middle East in the United States. It raises more questions than it answers, not least because the understanding of this long history of knowledge production is fraught with lacunae that future research may fruitfully

Introduction 3

address. The second part of the introduction focuses on the configuration of the field in the new millennium, based on the arguments and perspectives presented by the authors of the different chapters, and highlights the common concerns that cross-cut the contributions gathered in this volume.

Studying the Middle East: The Longue Durée In the past three decades perceptive and incisive studies on the relationship between knowledge and power with regard to the Middle East, the Orient, and Islam have emerged. Much of this work investigates the colonial period and the ways in which colonial imagination and governance constructed and transformed the peoples, cultures, and societies of the region. While some works trace the relationship between “East” and “West” and the scholarship that accompanied it over longer periods of time (see, e.g., Hentsch 1992; Lockman 2004, 2016), most are in-depth studies of particular moments in the connections between colonizer and colonized. These studies encompass a wide variety of topics ranging from the construction of state and nation to gender identities and to urban space. The types of knowledge production explored constitute Orientalism writ large: philology, literature, art, ethnology, history, folklore, statistics, architecture, military science, and so on. Central to a conceptual understanding of the region and its objects of study is also the practical arts of politics and domination. Much less researched are the ways in which similar relationships, forms of domination, and knowledge production operate in postcolonial situations of continued unequal economic and political power, though one might see significant exceptions to this generalization in gender studies and in the reflexive turn in anthropology. This is not to minimize the ways in which the human and social sciences have incorporated an awareness of the situatedness of all scholarship but rather to note that few scholars have shown an interest in examining the ways in which humanistic and social scientific knowledge articulate with national and global political power and economic extraction (for an exception, see Mitchell 2002). Among the lacunae is a perspective that emphasizes the long history of studying the Middle East in the United States (for an exception, see Lockman 2004, 2016). There are far more works on the practitioners of American Orientalism than on the twentieth-century institutionalization of scholarly interest in the Middle East. While there is a great deal of anecdotal

4 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

knowledge, much rigorous archival research is still needed. Studies that have laid the foundation for such research include Thomas Naff ’s (1993) examination of how certain scholars chose to work in the region and especially Nancy Gallagher’s (1994) collection of conversations with Middle East historians. Promising studies bringing new understandings to the project of history are included in the volume Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions (2002), edited by Israel Gershoni, Hakan Erdem, and Ursula Wokock. Excellent recent overviews of the development of the field in the twentieth century are provided by Timothy Mitchell (2004) and Zachary Lockman (2004, 2016).1 It is important to link the conceptual apparatus of American Orientalism and its successors to an institutional history of higher education in the United States, particularly how the study of world regions was institutionalized in the university through structural divisions of departments, disciplines, and interdisciplines. In addition, insight is needed into the ways in which this framework of institutions was reflected, shaped, and formed by their roles in the larger cultural and political contexts of American society. The interactions between the “producers, brokers, and users of knowledge” (Zunz 1994, 290) need to be explored through historical and chronological mapping benefiting from research in diverse disciplines such as American studies, the history of science, and the history of higher education. Historical research on the American university emphasizes the midnineteenth century and early twentieth century as key periods in the development of the modern organization of knowledge production with the creation of departments and disciplines, the redefinition of the role of intellectuals, and the rise of research methodologies (Bender 1993; Reuben 1996; Haskell 1998; Rothblatt and Wittrock 1993). Many of today’s scholarly societies were established during this time—for example, the American Oriental Society (1842), the American Ethnological Society (1842), and the Modern Language Association (1883)—and reflected their founders’ broader efforts to establish their authority to categorize and disseminate information. This was also America’s “golden age of museums,” when private philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst sponsored large-scale collecting expeditions (Conn 1998; AAAS 1999) and funded the construction of museums as centers of public enlightenment. Founded in this period also were the American Antiquarian Society (1812) and the Smithsonian Institution (1847), as well as the early and

Introduction 5

influential academic centers on the Middle East: the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, the Hartford Seminary, the Departments of Oriental Languages and Literatures at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. Many crucial questions emerged about knowledge production during this period: How was research on the region conceptualized, promoted, and presented? Which university departments and disciplines explored this area of the world, and how was knowledge about the Middle East defined and organized in the different disciplines? What kinds of alternative, perhaps competing, cultural and political geographies existed? Also part of this empirical set are questions about the students, the primary consumers of knowledge production: When did academic majors in these fields become possible and desirable? What individual courses were offered, and was the study of the Middle East part of more general courses? Which languages were taught, how, and by whom? Is it possible to develop profiles of students engaged in such study or obtain basic information about course enrollment and the like? Did students have or receive any firsthand experience of the region? Equally important is the nature of the relations between American universities and research institutions and those established by the United States in the Middle East: the American School for Girls (1835), which became the American Junior College for Women (1924); Robert College in Istanbul (1863), which is now Bogazici University; and the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (1866), which became the American University of Beirut. What interactions obtained between them? To what extent were personnel, including graduates of these institutions, moving between careers in the United States and in the Middle East? In this period, American museums and overseas centers focused on the collection and display of Middle East–related materials, including objects of natural history, archaeology, ethnography, and art. How did these institutional representations and publications influence the production of knowledge? Among the institutions and activities that can be mentioned here were the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, the American Schools of Oriental Research (founded in 1900), and the archaeological expeditions starting in the 1880s to Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley, organized by the University of Pennsylvania (see Kuklick 1996), and to Egypt, organized by the University of California, Berkeley, and funded by Phoebe Hearst. What were the constraints and opportunities afforded by different kinds of sponsorship? Were

6 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

there patterns in funding and in funding sources? Were there debates and justifications in the documentary record about the expenditures that were presented to institutional administrators, boards, or trustees? Through their shared interest in the region, a wide range of individuals moving within these networks formed epistemic communities and interacted with universities in particular ways. What was the nature of the relationship between academic knowledge and that generated by missionaries, travelers, colonial officers, journalists, and diplomats? What kinds of circulations and exchanges of personnel, information, and resources took place between departments, museums, and associations? The genealogies of scholarship should include pivotal scholars and other important figures, their institutional affiliations, personal histories, and academic mobility and professional legacies in developing research approaches, schools of thought, and intellectual networks. One important example in this respect is the Lebanese historian Philip Hitti, who was invited to Princeton University in 1927 and then founded its program in Arabic and Islamic studies (for other examples, see Hourani 1980; Gallagher 1994; Kaplan 1993; Naff 1993). Finally, emphasis should be placed on the formation of intellectual canons through an analysis of seminal books and set curricula about how to “properly” approach the study of the Middle East. What was the nature of these canons? How were they negotiated, consolidated, and changed? How did they unite, limit, or divide communities of inquirers? Who were the gatekeepers of these canons who pronounced on issues of intellectual authenticity and heresy? And to what degree do contemporary canons continue these traditions?

Studying the Middle East: Area Studies Currently, practitioners of MES in the United States labor under multiple and contradictory burdens: combating accusations of “failure,” dealing with increased political scrutiny and attempts to institute an apparatus of surveillance, high demands from students for courses and especially language teaching, high demands for media commentary and for public education and outreach. With 9/11, the war on Iraq, the “war on terror,” the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, and the “Arab Spring,” the political and ideological context determines to the greatest degree the politics of the field. However, other

Introduction 7

factors should also be considered. As emphasized in the historical overview, it is always important to understand the institutional infrastructure for the production of knowledge at any particular time. The size and characteristics of the scholarly community, the representation of disciplines in the field, the university structure, the availability of funding for training and research— all these contribute to the ability of scholars to respond to demands for particular kinds of knowledge and to shape how they deliver this knowledge. So too do the changing conditions of higher education more generally in the United States, as some of the contributors point out. The gradual erosion of tenure and the resulting challenges to academic freedom, the emergence of “civility” as a hiring criterion, and the growing power of private donors to not only name buildings but also create degree programs are all examples of the conditions that deeply affect US scholars’ ability to produce knowledge and their willingness to take perceived risks or challenge the status quo. The works by Lockman (2004, 2016) and Mitchell (2004) detail MES’s beginnings in the United States in the post–World War II era when “area studies” grew as a framework for constructing the kind of knowledge about world regions needed for the new role of the United States as a superpower. They describe how three institutional actors—universities, the federal government, and private philanthropic foundations—helped define the field. The ways in which funding was made available and in which universities organized training created area studies as interdisciplinary fields, which emphasized a strong foundation in the language, history, and culture of a world region but gave center stage to the social sciences as the depository of methodological and theoretical skills, which would enable the production of “useful” knowledge. The social sciences and their professionalization are a product and process of the twentieth century. Therefore, studies of colonial and Orientalist forms of knowledge production can help us only so much to understand how these new tools of power operated and the ways in which they constructed their object of study and methods of analysis. The works cited above emphasize the “dramatic growth” of area studies and MES especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet it is important to point out that MES remained one of the smallest of the area studies, with much lower numbers of affiliated faculty compared to scholars of Latin America (the largest group), Africa, and certainly Southeast Asia. The number of MES university centers and departments also reflected the small size of this field.

8 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

By the 1990s funding from private foundations sharply decreased (though the same was not true of federal government sources), and there was a turning away by donors as well as some scholars from area studies in general. This reflected two important trends: a methodological turn in the disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology, which led to strong emphasis on quantitative tools and methods that did not require in-depth field research and the concurrent currency of globalization theories that shifted the emphasis of research and analysis to a large degree from the local and national terrain to the global level. Universities responded, more or less swiftly, to the shifts in funding and perceived interest and utility by creating new centers and departments of “global” or “international” studies or by focusing on contemporary cross-national themes like the environment, migration, or terrorism rather than regions per se. Area studies centers became increasingly the domain of scholars inclined to produce in-depth, contextual work on particular places rather than to search for universal theories or explanations, which for many social scientists meant a major break with the mainstream scholarship in their disciplines. MES in the United States (like most of the other area studies) therefore entered the twenty-first century with a somewhat changed configuration from that of the previous four or five decades of its existence. The social sciences were retreating from regional study, while the humanities—and a broader cultural and linguistic turn—were becoming more central to the ways in which the field was defined and developed.

Studying the Middle East: Into the New Millennium Many of the widely accepted certainties of the last decade of the twentieth century have been challenged—if not completely overturned—by global events in the first decade of the new century. As mentioned above, increased militarism and security restrictions have created new obstacles to the circulation of ideas and people and have deepened suspicions. It will be important to observe the impact of these developments on the constitution of fields of international training and research and on the ways in which the Middle East will be represented and talked about in academic and public spheres. In terms of the securitization of knowledge, a great deal has been written in the press and academic newsletters about the worrying trends in the United States: attempts to control the uses of federal funding in MES centers

Introduction 9

at universities, increased scrutiny of course curricula and of the opinions and activities of faculty members, hindrance of exchanges and visits by international scholars, and establishment of new funding programs and research centers at universities with support from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. Three major claims inform the critiques launched by those who profess to speak for the “national interest”: that MES is largely irrelevant because it focuses on historical and literary studies, that it is pervaded by a postmodernist and anti-American perspective (due to the pernicious influence of Edward Said), and that it is peopled by scholars of Middle Eastern origins who, therefore, do not have the national interest at heart. These claims are not based on actual data but on anecdotal evidence and polemical arguments.2 Finally, it is worth noting the establishment, since the 1960s, of a large number of “think tanks” and private as well as governmental special purpose social science and public policy organizations. The extent to which MES appears as a largely humanistic field may be directly related to the burgeoning role of such centers in siphoning social scientists from the university. Such centers have the effect of narrowing knowledge to specific agendas and outcomes and limiting space for contending perspectives. The question becomes, to what extent can the university offer a space for a contrasting set of pluralistic, varied, and innovative visions?3

The SSRC Project and This Volume Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge emerges out of a large-scale comparative study of Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and Eurasia area studies centers carried out by SSRC in the period 2000–2010. An initial phase was funded by the Ford Foundation and included surveys and consultation meetings aiming at reenvisioning MES in global contexts. More expansive second and third phases were funded by the US Department of Education’s Title VI program. At this later stage, from 2005 to 2008, SSRC assembled a team of researchers to develop a detailed investigation of area studies centers on twelve US campuses. Through site visits that included interviews with key center personnel, senior administrators, deans, vice-provosts, and social science department chairs, as well as focus groups with faculty and doctoral students, the SSRC team amassed a rich cache of qualitative material: some ten thousand transcribed pages of

10 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

over two hundred interviews, thirty focus groups, and detailed information about relevant university programming. This book is informed by all of this evidence as well as by consultation meetings, workshops, and presentations in various forums. The contributors to this volume were participants in one or more consultation meetings or were directly involved with data collection and analysis at different stages of the project. (More details about data sources, activities, and outputs are provided in the methodological appendix.) All publications produced from this project use a uniform set of institutional pseudonyms, as discussed in the appendix. From the wealth of issues researched throughout this project, this volume is concerned with three main themes: the relationship between MES and various disciplines (political science, sociology, economics, and geography), current reformulations and new emphases in MES (in terms of university restructuring, language training, and scholarly trends), the politics of knowledge, and the impact on the field of MES of the many crises in the region.

Disciplines and Their Boundaries Part 1 of this volume takes up the issue of disciplines and area studies as interdisciplinary fields. The authors trace challenges and trajectories in the production of social scientific and disciplinary knowledge about the Middle East in the American academy, focusing on political science, sociology, economics, and geography. Taken together, these chapters remind us that area studies centers were meant to differ from earlier Orientalist/civilizational scholarly traditions because the social sciences were believed to be problem-solving disciplines. In the new, global context of American academia, however, questions arise about whether and how regionally organized intellectual traditions ought to fit in. Taken separately, the chapters demonstrate how the relationship between disciplines and area studies differs according to the definition of the “universal,” the connection with world regions, and the “prestige area” for theorizing and research within each discipline. This shows us that we need far more nuanced understandings of the ways in which area studies fit, or do not, within disciplinary priorities. Furthermore, the Middle East raises a set of specific problems for the various disciplines in ways that may not arise in the study of other world regions. Lisa Wedeen’s chapter challenges the ascendance of method in political science, as the discipline has become increasingly compelled by the uncritical

Introduction 11

positivist separation of fact and value in ways that have devalued area studies scholarship in the field. She points out that in the case of the Middle East, the discipline has too often produced institutionalist or culturalist analyses that are uncritical of American involvement in the region. Moreover, such studies often reduce culture to traits specific to Arabs or Muslims in order to point out characteristics deemed to prevent progress, without analyzing the broader historical context or power relations in the region. These approaches have helped define the Middle East, Wedeen argues, as a space in need of intervention. Wedeen traces the impact of rational choice theory in political science in the mid-1980s and the increasingly dismissive approach to cultural and symbolic systems of representation in favor of the study of politics focused on material interests. She shows that a number of studies in the 1990s began to draw attention to broader cultural processes reflected in postcommunist democratic transitions, ethnic violence, identity politics, and religious fundamentalism. But even then, Wedeen notes, political scientists resorted to a version of culture that denoted regional peculiarities or cultural differences that might explain political conflict or lack of democratic development. This kind of cultural essentialism became more pronounced in the discussions about the Middle East after 9/11. Thus political science’s ambivalence to area studies is defined on the one hand by its methodological turn toward the production of universal theories and the concomitant rejection of work that it deems overly relativistic and interdisciplinary and on the other hand by a reductionist approach to culture and an uncritical view of American engagement in the region. Only the subfield of American politics served as exception, Wedeen notes; it was understood as a nonarea that unifies liberalism and science and therefore sets the intellectual and methodological standards for the rest of the discipline. In such a scholarly and political context, the study of the Middle East “became too political for political science.” Turning to another major social science discipline, Reşat Kasaba examines from a historical perspective the connection between area studies and sociology and describes the cyclical relationship between the two as a push-andpull reaction to particular political imperatives. He traces variations between European and American sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century and focuses specifically on how American social science became intertwined with US foreign policy during the interwar period, as the demand for experts

12 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

on foreign regions grew. This led to a series of internal disciplinary critiques and crises about the relationship between the field and the US government’s defense and intelligence priorities, aptly illustrated by the Troy and Camelot projects. Furthermore, Kasaba discusses the importance of modernization theory in engaging American sociology in the study of “foreign areas.” Despite the possibility of applying alternative approaches to the study of international development, sociologists’ overall interest, he suggests, was to use the particular knowledge produced in area studies to prove the accuracy of broader theories and generalizations. Kasaba extends this discussion by turning to the development of sociology in the Middle East. The discipline was constituted there at the same time it was in the United States and Europe, and it was rooted in similar interests: social integration, state formation, and national identity. Tracing variation in the themes of interest to Middle Eastern sociologists, Kasaba argues that sociological thought in the region has challenged—at least since the 1990s—the discipline more broadly, contesting, for example, the modernization theory through a critique of the purported incompatibility of Islam and modernity. Overall, writes Kasaba, the challenge facing sociology in the United States and in the Middle East is increasing fragmentation and parceling within the discipline, which creates significant barriers to studying world regions like the Middle East. Title VI centers, he argues, have the potential to foster communication and collaboration in ways that might help unify some of the disjointed research on the region. However, parallels between the political climate today and during the Cold War in terms of the relationship between academia and the US government need to also be considered, particularly in terms of federal funding. Karen Pfeifer traces the persistent lack of interaction between the discipline of economics and MES, which she attributes to several differences between economists and area studies specialists: different methodological and intellectual preoccupations, varying means for dissemination of research, and variation in the criteria for hiring and promotion in universities. Pfeifer analyzes how international financial institutions (IFIs) influence economists’ approach to the study of the region and argues that the combination of stabilization, liberalization, and privatization programs has helped entrench Western and neoclassical economic ideas in research on and about the Middle East.

Introduction 13

She examines two regional networks as case studies—the Middle East Economic Association (MEEA), based in the United States, and the Economic Research Forum for the Arab World, Turkey, and Iran (ERF), based in Cairo—noting significant overlaps in their mission, membership, and training programs. Both networks act as focal points for disciplinary work on the region by mentoring and training future generations, shaping research agendas, and providing publication and dissemination outlets. But they differ in important ways as well, particularly in terms of their adherence to IFI research agendas. Neoliberal programs that apply the same policies to all situations have been increasingly criticized, Pfeifer observes, by both activists and academics. This leads her to posit a potentially more constructive dialogue between MES and economics in years to come. The final chapter in this part of the volume focuses on the “spatial turn” in the discipline of geography, analyzed by Amy Mills and Timur Hammond. Spatial methodologies, the authors contend, provide a means to understand the broader social, political, and economic processes that have underpinned the construction and experience of the Middle East by Western scholars. Although geography has played a relatively minor role in this spatial turn, Mills and Hammond show that debates within geography are closely connected to debates within area studies more generally. For example, initial federal investments in area studies during the Cold War era, with the intention to produce knowledge for national security purposes, led geography to embrace quantitative methods and universal theoretical models. Echoing much of the other disciplinary authors’ contributions in this part of the volume, Mills and Hammond point out that the kind of deep, contextual knowledge promoted by area studies became increasingly devalued, and the distance between area studies and geography grew. Even research that encompasses both geography and MES often proceeds with no formal links between the two disciplines, particularly because many Title VI MES centers are located in universities with no geography departments. Thus many graduate students who use spatial approaches in their work in MES do so from within departments other than geography. Mills and Hammond close with a positive view of a newer generation of geography scholars who are actively engaged in interdisciplinary work on the Middle East and point to the importance of scholarly networks, conferences, and publication series that elevate scholars beyond their university affiliation. The spatial turn’s interdisciplinary nature has the potential, the authors

14 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

suggest, to transform area studies by problematizing both regional boundaries and the extent to which knowledge is situated in a global context in which the Middle East and other regions are deeply interconnected.

Middle East Studies and the University Part 2 of the volume identifies trends in the organization of knowledge within MES itself, examining the conceptual and methodological scope of recent dissertations on the region, enrollments in courses in Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages, and the emergence or reemergence of thematic organizational forms, such as the rise of Islamic studies. The chapters in this part alert us to the changing institutional forms and architectures through which knowledge on the region is produced and to the capacities needed to meet current demands from students, university administrators, and outside (including government) interests. These changes are also related in an integral way to the emergence of “the global” as a major organizational form within the American university of the twenty-first century. The first chapter in this part, by Jonathan Friedman and Cynthia MillerIdriss, thus analyzes the position of the “area studies center” as a major institutional form in the context of a US university that seeks to transform itself into a global institution. They argue that area studies centers have for decades been a critical link between the national and the global in US academia but that their role has become more uncertain in the context of contemporary university internationalization. The authors ask whether and how current university internationalization efforts align with area studies centers’ goals to increase expertise on the world beyond US borders. To answer such questions, they look at the case of New York University (NYU) and its Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and find that two separate and distinct internationalization logics coexist at NYU and in the contemporary university more generally: the specialist and the cosmopolitan. The specialist logic promotes deep learning about foreign places, cultures, and languages by immersion in local settings through home stays or extended study abroad. Its roots are in the Cold War era when the world was seen as a set of discrete regions and when universities—and area studies in particular—were viewed as key partners in a collective aim to create an elite cadre of regional experts well versed in foreign cultural norms and languages. In contrast, the cosmopolitan logic promotes breadth over depth in global

Introduction 15

experiences. Rather than aim for deep specialist training, the goal of the cosmopolitan logic is to produce global citizens who would be able to address common problems of humanity, even if they lack the linguistic proficiency or deep knowledge to understand cultural difference in larger and historical contexts. Friedman and Miller-Idriss argue that both logics operate simultaneously in American universities but that it is the cosmopolitan logic that is currently on the rise. In the NYU case, the authors find that these logics work in largely separate but parallel ways rather than in integrated ones. There is no ideal or objective model for universities to follow in organizing knowledge about the rest of the world. But the authors suggest that the newer cosmopolitan logic may not be beneficial to area studies centers in their aim to promote a different kind of learning. In their contribution, Elizabeth Worden and Jeremy Browne take up an issue that has been the focus of attention since the events of 9/11 and the ensuing “critique” of MES: the question of whether and how universities provide adequate training for the study of Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages. The authors combine data from the US Department of Education’s Evaluation of Exchange, Language, International and Area Studies (EELIAS) database with findings from Worden’s qualitative research of six Title VI–funded Centers for Middle East Studies across the country in order to analyze course enrollment, attrition rates, language instructor status, and work placement of students after graduation. Worden and Browne trace the history of government funding for foreign language instruction in US universities through Title VI support since the end of World War II. This funding was provided with the hope that students from these programs would go on to work as diplomats, intelligence experts, or military officers. But, the authors argue, there is a disconnect between the government’s need for proficient speakers of Middle Eastern languages and the ability of Title VI centers to produce them, particularly at the MA level. Several structural and cultural factors help explain why it has been difficult for universities to produce significant numbers of fluent Arabic speakers. First, on a structural level, university curriculum requirements and the nature of MA programs often make it difficult for students to learn the language in the time constraints of a two-year graduate program. Second, language instructors do not enjoy high professional status—their salaries are lower than those of tenure-track faculty, and they have less job security—which makes it

16 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

harder for universities to attract qualified teachers. Third, some social science disciplines, such as political science, devalue and even discourage foreign language learning (along with conducting area studies research, often perceived as subjective) because of the additional time required to become proficient in the language, which delays graduation. Fourth, students often find languages such as Arabic difficult to learn, which leads them to abandon their language studies after the first or second year. In conclusion, Worden and Browne argue that more coordinated efforts and support from across the university are needed in order to help more students attain higher levels of linguistic competency and fluency. Suggestions range from increasing financial assistance for language instruction and reevaluating the roles and statuses of language teachers to implementing language courses at an earlier level of education—in undergraduate studies and even high school—and ensuring that the funding is also used to send students abroad for immersion study. Turning from language acquisition to the themes, topics, and methods taken up by a new generation of MES scholars, Laura Bier has analyzed 1,864 PhD dissertations across the disciplines in the decade 2000–2010. Because of the magnitude of the research, Bier presents a qualitative analysis of broad methodological and empirical trends in six out of the fourteen disciplines surveyed: political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, history, and MES. In examining dissertations in sociology, economics, and political science, Bier’s findings add to the analyses by Wedeen, Kasaba, and Pfeifer. Like these authors, Bier argues that the relationship between the social sciences and area studies is a tense one, as social scientists with regional training pursue universal models and at the same time try to challenge the dominance of the universalist approach. Bier notes that neoliberalism as a political project provides an analytical framework for many dissertations in sociology and that—echoing Pfeifer’s findings—economic knowledge about the Middle East is deeply embedded in the Washington Consensus and neoliberal economic agendas more broadly. In both disciplines, however, dissertations have increasingly focused on local and regional meanings, trajectories, and variation in ways that show that key assumptions about Islam and the Middle East are increasingly being challenged. For example, Bier points to a major trend in political science toward the study of Islamist political movements and the relationship between the state and Islam and between Islam and democracy,

Introduction 17

which she sees as a potential corrective to the assumption that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with democratization. But at the same time, she finds that many of the dissertations in her analysis assume an ontological problem between Islam and pluralism, compared to secularism. Bier’s analysis of dissertations in anthropology, history, and MES shows the enduring importance of studies of gender, colonialism, the nation, and Islam, situated within cultural studies and within poststructuralist, feminist, and postcolonial theories. Identity emerges as a dominant theme, as do questions of marginality, hybridity, difference, and governance. She notes that a new generation of scholars has found innovative ways to read and use evidence, drawing on autobiography, newspaper and magazine articles, and court records to tease out the meaning of social events and to offer new understandings of social history from the perspective of different actors. Across these themes, Bier identifies geographic gaps and understudied countries and societies. These gaps are partly explained by the institutional divisions between different area studies departments, which translate into epistemological divisions as well. Furthermore, Bier argues that trends in MES are not attributable only to changing political realities, but are also linked to methodological disciplinary currents as well as to the relationship between area studies and the broader norms and structures of the disciplines. She outlines several topics with cross-disciplinary salience: women and gender, Islam, ethnicity, the nation-state and the formation of national identities, and, increasingly, transnational processes. In the next chapter, Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst demonstrate that the renewed and substantial growth in the field of Islamic studies traced by Laura Bier is not just a thematic focus but also an institutional trend. The authors analyze the locations and contexts for the development of Islamic studies in US universities, explaining the field’s growth as attributable in part to exaggerated concerns about national security. They are critical of the field’s location within institutions, pointing out that across time—from the first departments of Oriental and Near Eastern studies to more recent interdisciplinary programs and departments—Islamic studies programs have been constrained by the field’s institutionalization within the academy. They trace the development of Islamic studies within various departments, such as Near Eastern languages and civilizations or religious studies, and suggest that the area studies framework can also impose constraints on Islamic studies if it is not attentive to issues that cross geographic boundaries, such as centuries-old

18 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

migration in and out of the region, the transregional character of religious movements, and the importance of global communication. More recently, scholars have been promoting cross-regional approaches to the study of the Middle East, but their efforts are sometimes hampered by institutional challenges that organize knowledge into clearly defined regions: from job definitions based on specific regions to disciplinary priorities, funding requirements, language skill requirements, the framing of professional associations, or disciplinary classifications of academic book publishers. Several US universities have encouraged cross-regional approaches to the study of Islam by creating more teaching positions and courses, joint programs in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and conferences. Yet Kurzman and Ernst also point out that these programs and centers face challenges and disadvantages, including access to federal funding. The authors see the expansion of Islamic studies as an interdisciplinary area of research as the best course of action for a successful future of this field.

The Politics of Knowledge In part 3 three chapters explore the politics of knowledge and the political environment animating MES in the contemporary context. What can and cannot be said? What forces structure and restrict freedom of speech, censorship and self-censorship, or the so-called chilling effects? Using political and diplomatic archives, interviews with faculty and administrators, and other sources, the contributors in this part trace not only how knowledge is produced but also how it is silenced, given the complex and changing politics characterizing US–Middle Eastern relations. The chapter by Seteney Shami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia focuses on the themes of campus surveillance and public criticism of MES to explore the immediate and enduring impacts of 9/11 and its aftermath on academic practices and institutional architectures. Regarding the field of MES as “the canary in the mineshaft,” the authors argue that many of these dynamics apply to other area studies as well and even further afield to neighboring disciplines and intellectual arenas. At the broadest level, the polemics surrounding MES call into question the “utility” of the social sciences and the humanities and the role of the university in society. Close investigation of these debates and their practical “applications”— establishing systems of surveillance and certain types of

Introduction 19

accountability—thus shows implications that go beyond the fate of one rather small intellectual field. From this vantage point, this chapter examines changes in daily practices on campuses, institutional architectures, and intellectual trends in MES, as perceived and articulated in interviews with faculty, students, and administrators. The research shows mixed results, both negative and positive: criticism concerning the “irrelevance” of MES is accompanied by increased public demand for academic information and outreach activities; attempts to establish mechanisms for outside intervention in university centers of MES is accompanied by increased interest by university administrators in the importance of the field; dismissal by some politicians of the ability of universities to teach Arabic to fulfill national needs is accompanied by skyrocketing demand from students for language classes. The intellectual gains and losses are soberly evaluated by the interviewees: from fears that the study of the Middle East will simply become “Terrorism 101” to hopes that more and more students will be drawn to a more meaningful intellectual engagement with the region. Importantly, all this takes place in a context of broader economic cutbacks, severe cuts in funding from federal sources, and a more general decline in resources across the university. Moreover, students are increasingly viewed as customers and the commercialization of the university institution is growing. The authors state that the twin processes of securitization and privatization of knowledge are at the heart of the challenges facing MES and its allied and neighboring fields. In the next chapter, Ussama Makdisi turns to the question of how American scholarship about the Middle East has changed over the past century, arguing that we are currently in a moment of major transformation toward a more critical, postnationalist approach that is more attentive to complexities within the United States and the region. This is a particularly strong trend in Middle East area studies as well as in the field of American studies, and Makdisi is intrigued by the use of new methodologies to illuminate the history of US-Arab relations. Not all work has moved in this direction, however; Makdisi points out the many ways in which stereotypes persist in the framing of both places, positioning innocent America against the “inherent depravity” of Islam and the people and places of the Middle East. Such stereotypes are particularly persistent in popular culture and in books written for a general audience, as well as in some academic circles where the notion of a clash of

20 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

civilizations or essentialist depictions of Arabs, Muslims, Islam, or the region endure. Makdisi begins his historical overview with nineteenth-century missionary chronicles and travelogues, which praised American virtues and framed the American attitude toward the region as an inherently benevolent one. Throughout the twentieth century, he argues, the theme of American benevolence and exceptionalism persisted, as did the image of the United States as a broker of peace between Palestine and Israel. Indeed, the author argues, the Arab-Israeli conflict and US support for Israel has been a major reason for the lack of critical historiography of US power in the region. In this politicized climate, Said’s seminal book Orientalism simultaneously challenged American historiography and pushed it in new interdisciplinary directions. According to Makdisi, Orientalism did not do this on its own, but it provided a foundation for further work to create deeper and more critical analyses of the region’s history and the history of empire in Middle Eastern countries. Orientalism thus led to a new, more critical engagement with questions of power, representation, and US-Arab relations. This evolution is incomplete, Makdisi suggests. More recent scholarship that has traced the impact of cultural opposition and engagement with the Middle East on American identity, for example, has still neglected to include voices from the region itself. Makdisi argues that this ought to be the task of the nascent critical American historiography of the region. It ought not to deny hierarchies of racial, economic, and political power but has to be critically aware of how concepts like “Islam” and “the West” are essentialized and how we can understand the meaning of cultural clashes involving different groups of Americans and Arabs. The final chapter in this part, by Irene Gendzier, critically examines issues of academic freedom and the kinds of knowledge and information presented by popular media and the press. She contends that ignorance has strategic value and explains the fear of informed public opinion, tracing efforts by the US government to stifle opposition to its policies in the Middle East using the example of official deception by the George W. Bush administration about the US invasion of Iraq and the mainstream US media’s complicity in this process. The practice of using military analysts as news commentators, as was the case in the lead-up to the war, is another example. Gendzier argues that media coverage of crises in the Middle East (most notably, the Israel-Palestine conflict) usually lacks adequate historical explanation and

Introduction 21

rarely allows for the voices of people from the region to be heard. Moreover, the perpetuation of stereotypical representations of the region—what Gendzier calls “the caricatured images that pass for analysis”—has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the taboo around the region while making it a frequent theme of discussion in popular and political discourse. Information that challenges conventional sources does exist, but it requires time and effort to retrieve. This is what Gendzier calls “the struggle for knowledge”: getting information about war and conflict and its various costs in the region, along with who supports those conflicts and why. Such stifling of criticism, Gendzier argues, significantly affects university campuses. She addresses right-wing critiques of universities’ liberal biases vis-à-vis the region as well as of the failure of Middle East experts to predict the events of 9/11. Such critiques push universities to promote allegiance to, rather than criticism of, US policies. She also discusses the proposed legislation, HR 3077, designed to amend the Title VI grant program. Among other provisions, this legislation called for the establishment of an advisory board to investigate the activities of grant recipients and make recommendations in line with the program’s purposes—which a number of professional associations and research institutions criticized for its infringement on academic freedom. More broadly, Gendzier reflects on how such external attacks on MES may have intimidated faculty and university administrators and have led to the cancellation of campus conferences or meetings and to blocking visits by internationally recognized scholars on Israel and Palestine; she argues, further, that such efforts reflect an impoverished intellectual and political environment.

Conclusion: Into the New Millennium In her masterful afterword to this volume Lisa Anderson deplores the state of Middle East social sciences, which she describes as demoralized, lacking academic freedom and reliable research data, and functioning in a general climate of repression, neglect, and isolation. Such conditions call into question the extent to which future social scientists will be able to build supportive scholarly communities or develop critical perspectives so key to social science research and the investigation of questions of public import. Echoing discussions in this volume on methodological shifts in the social science disciplines, Anderson argues that the quantitative turn has produced a narrow,

22 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

mechanical field unable to move forward in ways that attend to the diversity of the social and political world. As the field has emphasized technical skills over moral imperatives and as the institutional contexts of US universities has changed, the result has been a simultaneous narrowing of the field and a projection of greater universalization for a global world. For Anderson, the Middle East serves here as an instructive case study. Complex identities and persistent instability and volatility, combined with a lack of quantitative data on the region, defy Western social scientists trained to look for patterns and make predictions rather than untangle complex cultural phenomena. Few speak the languages of the region or have lived there. The Middle East will never be the kind of case for which Western social scientists have been trained because there is no “essence” to capture: it defies attempts to be presented as a contained or coherent entity. Anderson’s chapter reminds us that just as philology, ethnology/anthropology, and history fulfilled the needs of colonial power, so the social sciences emerged, in part, to fulfill the needs of global nation-state hegemons for external domination. This latter role remains less articulated, however. Better recognized is the social sciences’ contribution to the internal consolidation of nation-states, though more detailed investigations of this in both Western and postcolonial societies are needed. At the same time, fields of knowledge have their own lives and trajectories, centers and peripheries, hegemonic and marginalized practices. The relationship between knowledge and power is therefore not a simple, unilateral one, not least because power is not external to knowledge fields and institutions but operates within them. In this volume we have aimed to draw a portrait of the issues animating and challenging the field of MES in their academic and national contexts. Our contention is that the topic of the future of area studies and MES has been, in the main, treated in rather facile ways through polemics and vested interests, whether within the university or without. By examining the shaping of the field through epistemologies, trends, trajectories, themes and topics, this volume focuses on both disciplinary and institutional constraints and opportunities that shape the study of the Middle East region and its increasingly complex relationship with the United States. The chapters variously document, analyze, and critique prevailing concepts, practices, and architectures of knowledge. They examine how region, religion, language, and other notions have come to define and signify “the greater Middle East.” The authors look into the roles of different parts of the university (centers, departments, language labs, study

Introduction 23

abroad units, etc.) as well as the roles of federal agencies, professional associations, international organizations, and scholarly networks in creating and transforming the field. Scholarly location emerges as central to defining who is heard and who is not heard, and by whom. We see this exercise as the opening up of a research agenda and as “field building,” in the best traditions of SSRC, rather than as a masterful rejoinder to the debates and questions that launched this line of inquiry. The issues raised by the particular historical conjuncture in the first decade of the new millennium for the relations between knowledge and power are surely enduring.

Notes 1.

Interest in investigating their fields’ historical development has surfaced in other area studies as well, with attention to cultural and political contexts. Latin American studies has been especially cognizant of political aspects (Drake and Hilbink 2003; Berger 1995). Other publications that offer parallels and research models include Engerman’s (2003) work on Russian studies, with a focus on the motivations of American intellectuals; and Bond and Gibson’s (2002) book addressing the increasingly contested role of Africanists in the United States as gatekeepers of knowledge about Africa. This research is part of the considerable scholarship on and recent debates over the place and value of area studies within the US academy, much of which is outside the immediate concern and temporal limitations of this project. Yet in the process of discussing whether or not area studies continue to have scholarly relevance, some critical issues have been addressed (Mitchell 2003; Drake and Hilbink 2003; Mirsepassi, Basu, and Weaver 2003; Kramer 2001; Szanton 2001). Whereas earlier scholarship focused on the ways in which knowledge generated from area studies contributed to the development of particular disciplines (e.g., Binder 1976; McCaughey 1984; Bates, O’Barr, and Mudimbe 1993), in the past two decades there has been a discernible shift to examinations of how knowledge is a product of the interstices between disciplines (Rafael 1994; Tessler 1999; Cooper and Packard 1997; Szanton 2001; Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002; Vitalis 2002).

2.

It is interesting to note similarities to and differences from another time of internal and external conflict for the United States, the Vietnam War period. Noam Chomsky’s essay “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” first published in 1969, assesses the role of liberal scholarship in providing ideological legitimization for the policies of “rural pacification,” forced urbanization, and military violence in Vietnam. He

24 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

argues that liberal scholarship consistently underplays, if not denigrates, the role of mass movements in favor of “forces of order” that end up being complicit with the exercise of power in the interest of US hegemony. Chomsky quotes Senator William Fulbright’s statement that the university has betrayed “the public trust” because social scientists are not playing their role of providing a critique and counterweight to the military-industrial complex and being “responsible and independent critics of the government’s policies” (2003, 2– 3). Chomsky goes on to criticize the development of a “technical intelligentsia” (4), which looks to the social sciences (psychology, sociology, systems analysis, and political science) rather than “philosophy and history” to inform power. He argues that the more this intelligentsia is assimilated into the center of power, the less likely there is to be a critical social science that understands and is able to explain the nature of the conflicts that the United States is involved in, let alone critique its policies. 3.

For a critical examination of this question from the viewpoint of the discipline of anthropology, see Deeb and Winegar 2015.

References American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 1999. “America’s Museums,” special issue. Daedalus 128, no. 3. Bates, Robert H., Jean O’Barr, and V. Y. Mudimbe, eds. 1993. Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bender, Thomas. 1993. Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Berger, Mark T. 1995. Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Binder, Leonard, ed. 1976. The Study of the Middle East: Research and Scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. A Project of the Research and Training Committee of the Middle East Studies Association. New York: Wiley. Bond, George Clement, and Nigel C. Gibson. 2002. Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2003. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship. New York: New Press.

Introduction 25

Conn, Steven. 1998. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cooper, Frederick, and Randall Packard, eds. 1997. International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deeb, Lara, and Jessica Winegar. 2015. Anthropology’s Politics: Disciplining the Middle East. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Drake, Paul W., and Lisa Hilbink. 2003. “Latin American Studies: Theory and Practice.” In The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David Szanton, 34– 73. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engerman, David C. 2003. Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gallagher, Nancy E., ed. 1994. Approaches to the History of the Middle East: Interviews with Leading Middle East Historians. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press. Gershoni, Israel, Hakan Erdem, and Ursula Wokock, eds. 2002. Histories of the Modern Middle East: New Directions. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Haskell, Thomas L. 1998. Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hentsch, Thierry. 1992. Imagining the Middle East. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Hourani, Albert. 1980. Europe and the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaplan, Robert D. 1993. The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite. New York: Free Press. Kramer, Martin. 2001. Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Kuklick, Bruce. 1996. Puritans in Babylon: The Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life, 1880–1920. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lockman, Zachary. 2004. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. Field Notes: The Making of Middle East Studies in the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McCaughey, Robert. 1984. International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning. New York: Columbia University Press.

26 Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Mirsepassi, Ali, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver, eds. 2003. Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003. “Deterritorialization and the Crisis of Social Science.” In Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, edited by Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver, 148– 70. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ———. 2004. “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science.” The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, edited by David Szanton, 74–118. Berkeley: University of California Press. Miyoshi, Masao, and Harry Harootunian, eds. 2002. Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Naff, Thomas, ed. 1993. Paths to the Middle East: Ten Scholars Look Back. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rafael, Vincente L. 1994. “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States.” Social Text 41 (Winter): 91–111. Reuben, Julie A. 1996. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rothblatt, Sheldon, and Bjorn Wittrock, eds.1993. The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szanton, David. 2001. “Area and International Studies in the United States: Intellectual Trends.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil Smelser and P. Baltes, 692– 99. Oxford: Elsevier Science. Tessler, Mark, ed., with Jodi Nachtwey and Anne Banda. 1999. Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vitalis, Robert. 2002. “International Studies in America.” Items & Issues [Social Science Research Council] 3: 1–29. Zunz, Olivier. 1994. “Producers, Brokers, and Users of Knowledge: The Institutional Matrix.” In Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 1870– 1930, edited by Dorothy Ross, 290– 308. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Introduction 27

chapter one

Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire: American Political Science in the Modern Middle East Lisa Wedeen

This chapter takes up Michel Foucault’s invitation to “question ourselves about our aspirations to the kind of power that is presumed to accompany . . . science” (1980, 84). It investigates the contemporary fascination with science in political science; it also shows how basic assumptions and oft-repeated terms have operated to instantiate liberal values by making them seem selfevident. An epistemological community has been produced at the intersection of two sets of norms: belief in the inherent value of science as a method of producing objective truth about the real world, on the one hand, and a commitment to the value of preserving liberalism, on the other. Not simply a fortuitous coming together of two separate sets of norms, the intersection of science and liberalism speaks to a long-standing reciprocity and, as we shall see, an elective affinity between logics.1 Contemporary practitioners of science in political science not only validate scientific methods as value neutral but also tend to accept the same basic assumptions (about human nature, the good life, proper government, and acceptable forms of evidence). They deploy a vocabulary—a set of terms, juxtapositions, metaphors, and phrases—that describes their findings while also specifying which debates count as intelligible, meaningful, and worthy of scholarly attention. In the context of political science’s commitments to scientific objectivity and to the production, or at least protection, of the US liberal order, studying the Middle East has always been a vexed enterprise. In the immediate

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aftermath of 9/11, article after article appeared lamenting the shortage of experts at elite institutions and the seeming lack of interest political scientists had in covering the region. Grant agencies and universities scrambled to make up for lost time, creating programs and faculty positions, many of them dedicated to “understanding Islam” or to assessing the region’s risks to US security. The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq prompted critics of the George W. Bush administration to conjure images of a “resurrected empire” (Khalidi 2004), while administration supporters advanced arguments for imperial maintenance (e.g., Lewis 2002) or relied on hackneyed apologias for US militarism (e.g., Huntington 1993, 1996). On the whole, we have seen American military policy shift from outright intervention in places like Korea and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to “low-intensity proxy wars” in the 1970s and 1980s and then return to “high-intensity direct warfare” (Mamdani 2005, 178– 79) beginning with the invasion of Iraq in 1991.2 As the Obama administration became committed to reducing the number of American casualties, it increased significantly the number of drone attacks, replacing direct military occupation with a hybrid strategy of what Sofia Fenner calls “lowintensity direct warfare,” the policy followed recently in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and post-occupation Iraq.3 Scholarly production has not followed American military policy in lockstep, of course. But the renewed research interest in the Middle East after 9/11 has continued, with an intermittent focus on social movements, new media, and revolutionary possibility now overwhelmed, particularly in political science, by familiar concerns with insurgency and the ongoing “war on terror.” Edward Said (1978) famously underscored the connections between empire and distinct forms of knowledge, and in the spirit of his book Orientalism this chapter also specifies the normative conditions—in this case, in political science—that have helped make possible distinct visions of the Arab and Muslim Middle East as especially backward or inherently problematic. I argue that these visions are not simply embellishments of an independently existing imperial domination; they are an integral part of the imperial project itself.4 Such a claim is not meant to suggest that all political scientists participate in reproducing possibilities for empire or that they do so single-handedly and/or deliberately. For this reason, I also take issue with approaches (including those inspired by Said) that attribute political power to scholarly discourses without attending to the ways in which scholarship operates within broader discursive and institutional frameworks. Thus I attend to

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the ebb and flow of critical scholarship. But the main argument here focuses on the difficulties of discussing a host of questions—indeed the absence of the conceptual space needed for dealing with them—that bring American foreign policy pathologies front and center. In political science, we simply do not have a research agenda that centers on why the United States has been at war, in one way or another, since the 1930s. Political scientists, when considering the problems of civil war or the challenges to conflict resolution more generally, rarely discuss the multi-trillion-dollar US arms industry and the ways in which war profiteering forecloses peace. Admittedly, it is by no means self-evident how political science’s complicities with US empire would jibe with the two aspects of political science that, as I argue above, are currently defining the discipline—the convergence, or perhaps more historically accurate, the continuing coalescence in new forms, of science and liberalism. This chapter fleshes out those links while considering how scholarly convictions, combined with the realities of US foreign policy, have structured the terms in which the Middle East is studied today. The first section explores the discipline’s seemingly contradictory commitments to value-neutrality and liberal values. The second section foregrounds the constitutive relationship between science, liberalism, and empire in the making of modern Middle Eastern politics as an area of academic inquiry. One caveat worth noting from the outset: empire and imperialism are politically charged nouns these days. Following the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, by “empire,” I mean a state with extensive political, economic, and military dominion. In the age of nation-states, imperial states generally exercise this dominion over populations that are perceived (by conqueror and conquered) as different from (in the sense of ineligible for incorporation into) the dominant state exercising control.

The Convergence of Science and Liberalism: Context, Text, and Effects From the inception of the American Political Science Association in 1903 until the present, there have been repeated attempts within the association to “transform the study of politics into an independent science” (Ross 1991, 288; see also Heaney and Hansen 2006). Despite important variations among positivists and disagreements between positivists and nonpositivists (including about what “positivism” means), efforts to make political science a science

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have generally entailed separating facts from values, identifying lawlike principles governing political action, and subjecting these principles to empirical tests. In this context, objectivity enjoys an “aura of self-evidence”—a practical agreement about what counts as a fact and the modes through which knowledge about facts is produced (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 13–14). Committed to objectivity and value-free scholarship, dominant political science applications of positivist principles find expression in causal explanations that rely on a nomothetical understanding of what causation entails. Formulated by David Hume and formalized by Carl Hempel, the task of science in this view is to discover a “covering law” that, in the context of observable initial conditions, can be said to produce the observed event (Hempel 1965; on positivism, see Hacking 1983; Cederman 1997; Johnson 2006). Yet contrary to scientific commitments to objectivity and value-free scholarship, much research in “mainstream” political science has also historically presupposed the value of liberal politics (Ross 1991; Ricci 1984; Gunnell 1993). Like positivism, liberalism has embodied divergent ideas and has been identified variously in different geographic and historical locations. Despite these variations, the liberal tradition in political science can be characterized by four interrelated assumptions about the connection between human subjectivity and good government (Ricci 1984, 72– 73). First, human beings are born as rights-bearing individuals; a good government is one that protects the individual’s inalienable rights. Second, human beings are capable of thinking clearly and rationally; good institutions are ones that cultivate human proclivities to reason. Third, individuals naturally come together and form groups in order to promote their interests and check those of rival factions; good institutions are ones that encourage pluralistic interests while dampening potentially incendiary conflicts. Fourth, individuals are capable of creating governments that operate democratically, that is, that are responsive to the will of the people; good democratic governments are those that provide procedural mechanisms such as elections that enable people to exercise their will as individuals.5 The entanglements of political science and liberalism, coupled with assertions of separating fact and value, might suggest that what we need is better, more coherent science, but this is not my point.6 Nor am I claiming that positivist social science is bad. Rather, I want to bracket the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the enterprise and consider how the insistence on separating fact from value, in particular, has contributed to three persistent disciplinary moves. First, the

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division has excluded viewing science as a value in and of itself, indeed as a metaphysics. Political scientists do not tend to ask how scientific knowledge operates to cultivate passionate belief or why science is inherently the most valuable form of knowledge. Second, the split between fact and value has prevented thinking through how epistemological assumptions and national-political commitments coalesce to defend the stability of a liberal politics—how liberalism is itself ideological or “hegemonic” and how political science helps to make it so. Epistemologies have a politics, and knowledge production in political science tends to shore up certain liberal assumptions and aspirations even while overt prescription and “bias” are seen to be outside the objectivist goals of science. Third, the split between fact and value allows methodology, in particular, to be viewed as value neutral, as a technique devoid of normative assumptions. This view permits positivist political science to occupy the position of authorized (because disinterested) discoverer, teacher, and enforcer of what counts as true or justified statements about politics—a position congenial with liberals’ tendency to see liberalism as neutral as well. The ultimate effect of this sequestering of fact-finding from rigorous philosophical examination has been that dominant epistemological communities are maintained by institutional and practical-discursive means rather than by any exclusive purchase such conceptual frameworks could have on the truth. Disciplinary strategies (such as writing a methodological textbook designed to unify the discipline) and power-brokering practices (such as dismissing out of hand arguments that are epistemologically reflexive) help establish the rules and devise the evaluative criteria by which statements about the world are considered knowledge or not. At the same time, these activities supply and enforce norms about what may and may not be asked. They generally discourage scrutiny of the practices that bind and normalize a discipline, enabling certain kinds of knowledge to thrive while foreclosing or deauthorizing other ways of knowing. In other words, in addition to the tasks of socializing student-citizens and advising government officials, political science, not surprisingly, operates as a discipline that reproduces the norms, prohibitions, conventions, and constraints that generate standards for identifying expertise. In political science, this expertise affirms the possibility and importance of pursuing value-free science, on the one hand, and the vision of a rationalist liberal politics, on the other. Although this coalescence of liberalism and science has arguably been a feature of political science since its emergence, coalescence need not imply unity,

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nor does it mean that resistance to mainstream convictions has been absent. Theorists as radically different as Arendt and Strauss, and many inspired by them, have criticized the fact/value distinction, the social scientific preoccupation with “behavior,” and, for Arendtians at least, the consequent disregard of spontaneous action. They have also challenged the reduction of politics to liberal ideas of expedience—to instrumental interests and means/ends calculations. Critiques have also thrived outside of political theory, animating “realist” theories of international relations, for example. One has only to recall Hans Morgenthau’s Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, a book that is deeply skeptical of both political science’s aspirations to science and its ethical commitments to liberalism.7 Ido Oren (2002) pursues arguments congenial to some of those in this chapter, challenging American political science’s definition of itself as an objective science and spotlighting the discipline’s ideological underpinnings.8 Most apposite to this chapter’s claims is Oren’s discussion of some political scientists’ complicity with US war-making—for example, their participation in village “pacification” and in interrogating Viet Cong prisoners during the Vietnam War—as well as the discipline’s long-standing and ongoing relationship with US national security agencies (points to which I shall return below). Contestation in political science has also extended to various initiatives for change, including the Caucus for a New Political Science established in 1967 and the Perestroika movement founded in 2000. As the well-known scholar of American politics David Mayhew writes in his endorsement of a book chronicling the latter movement’s hopes and demands for methodological pluralism, “every now and then American political science has an uprising. Questions are asked, emperors are declothed, bastions are stormed or at least infiltrated.”9 These moments of resistance are important, not only because they suggest a less monolithic and more contingent image of the discipline than might otherwise be apparent, but because the presumed fragmentation prompts prominent scholars to lament divisions and work toward unity (on worries about division within political science, see Bunche 1954; Easton 1997; Almond 1990; for an overview, see Sigelman 2006). Anxiety about a “discipline divided” (Almond 1990) has generated repeated attempts to establish the intellectual coherence of political science. Efforts to unify the discipline have to be understood against the backdrop of a changing relationship of liberalism and science. Lee Sigelman, a former editor of the discipline’s flagship journal, the American Political Science Review (APSR), notes that in the early years

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“good government”– oriented reformism and the championing of direct democracy devices were regular features of Review articles. . . . Through the end of World War II, 10 percent to 20 percent of Review articles contained an explicitly prescriptive element, often in combination with the presentation of empirical findings. That element was particularly pronounced during and immediately after the Depression and World Wars I and II, when the nation’s energies were harnessed to economic recovery, the war effort, and the shaping of the postwar order. (2006, 467)

Sigelman charts how in the 1950s and 1960s political science became increasingly protective of its status as a scientific enterprise; the epistemological convictions of the “behavioral” revolution coincided with a “dramatic upsurge of quantitative research” (467). Notably, Sigelman sees this coupling of behaviorism and quantitative research as ushering in the decline of prescriptive articles in the Review. But whereas Review articles may have become less policy oriented in the 1960s and whereas they may have ceased to speak “truth to power” (467), behaviorism in political science continued to be prescriptive in the sense that it encoded liberal presumptions about good government, democracy, and the individual in its statistical analyses. It also developed survey research questions designed to assess individuals’ orientations to the political system in ways that upheld a US-inspired order in the context of Cold War communism and leftist domestic challenges to this American order. Although the behaviorism of the postwar period and the methodological individualism of the present share commitments to science and liberalism, there is a key difference: liberal political systems were explicitly valorized in behaviorism (e.g., Dahl, Truman), even when, as Sigelman suggests, there was a move away from explicit prescription and an insistence on a distinction between matters of fact (is) and normative judgments (ought). As the recovery from the war succeeded and the political threats diminished, the extent to which the existing order was in question—in other words, in need of prescription—became less obvious. In some contemporary rational choice paradigms and in most political methodology texts, the liberal “good society” touted among behaviorists (a society that safeguards equality of opportunity under the law; is politically pluralist and nonideological; is governed representatively; and is protected by a “neutral” state not captured by any single or permanent set of interests) is most often assumed to be irrelevant to an

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anarchic system (as in the case of the ethnicity and public goods literature). The prescriptive character of the approach thus becomes even less apparent, to the point of disappearing into a concern with “science” rather than “society” as such.10 It is this development toward work that specifies the procedures of good science to which I want to direct attention in the following pages. The exponential growth of rational choice in the 1980s is an important part of this story, and it reflects the turn of political science toward economics in search of inspiration. Not since the 1890s, according to Adam Przeworski, had the social sciences been subject to such a “deliberate thrust to impose the monopoly of the economic method over all study of society” (1985, 379). True, the use of mathematics to explain the decision-making calculus of actors who were themselves presumed to be mathematically rational (in the sense that actors could rank any two alternatives and have complete transitive and reflexive preferences) had arguably been dominant since the 1950s in economic theory, especially in microeconomics. Social choice theorists, a few of whom were prominent political scientists, also used rational choice approaches to address explicitly political economy concerns. But Przeworski’s periodization speaks to a profound transformation in the scale and scope of rational choice’s influence, as students of social choice theorists began to be hired in key political science departments and to influence the direction of the discipline.11 Przeworski’s article announced his own acceptance of the methodological validity of individualistic postulates, calling on his colleagues to recognize how all social phenomena could be understood as the product of individuals’ actions and formalized mathematically. Individuals’ behavior, moreover, was “rational in the instrumental sense of that term” (Przeworski 1985, 401). Thus the liberal understanding of the rational, self-interested, rights-bearing subject could come to undergird increasingly sophisticated economic models. Przeworski was one of a number of former Marxist-oriented political scientists who came to accept both the scientific potency of the game theory apparatus and a view of the individual as a maximizing, cost-benefit calculator. For him and his like-minded colleagues, game theory posed “irrefutable and salutary challenges to Marxism” (Przeworski 1985, 391). By 1990, historical events had followed suit, and a remarkable convergence occurred between the underlying presuppositions of rational choice theory, on the one hand, and statements heralding the triumph of liberal capitalism, on the other. In the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union and the fall of communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe, conceptual frameworks

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in political science became increasingly beholden to game theoretic perspectives, ones that in post hoc fashion could “anticipate” the tumultuous changes and map out subsequent “transitions” to “democracy.” Democracy, as defined by many rational choice theorists, was seen in institutional and procedural terms. A country qualified as a “democracy” as long as it held regular elections in which outcomes were uncertain (for influential versions of this definition of democracy, see Przeworski 1991; Przeworski et al. 2000). This definition, beholden to the earlier work of Joseph Schumpeter (1942), was exceedingly minimalist and driven in large part by methodological concerns for coding large-N, transhistorical cases. Others have described such formulations as “low-intensity” democracy, demonstrating how this methodological decision works to justify a specific political order and an image of the citizen as an atomistic, passive consumer of politics (Marks 2000; Scott 2012; Wedeen 2007, 2008). Indeed, the “transitions to democracy” literature is one that, to borrow the anthropologist David Scott’s words, “comports almost seamlessly with the contemporary self-image of American liberal democracy, the rightsoriented public philosophy of what Michael Sandel aptly calls the ‘procedural republic’” (2012, 217; see also Sandel 1996). In a scholarly world in which the assumptions of scientific inquiry in political science meshed particularly well with important tenets of contemporary liberalism (e.g., the rights-oriented individual who has “political preferences,” leaders who operate as rational calculators or “political entrepreneurs” in the “marketplace of ideas,” and democracy as contested elections in which procedures ensure uncertainty in principle if not in fact), a new book appeared on the scene— one that was to have a dramatic impact on conversations within the discipline and on the training and professionalization of graduate students: Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba’s Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (1994). By 2001, more than 20,000 copies had been sold, the book had already been reprinted six times, and more than 500 libraries had purchased it.12 Insisting that differences in traditions within the discipline were simply stylistic, the authors sought to produce a unified epistemological and methodological community, one in which the scientific methods familiar to quantitative researchers (both statistically minded practitioners and game theorists) would also become the norm in qualitative studies. The unity desired by King, Keohane, and Verba was not therefore based on the argument that qualitative work is potentially both nonscientific and legitimate. The claim, rather, was that there is simply no

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political science worthy of the name that does not conform to the putatively generalizable scientific strictures they defined. As the authors made explicit: Our main goal is to connect the traditions of what are conventionally denoted “quantitative” and “qualitative” research by applying a unified logic of inference to both. The two traditions appear quite different; indeed they sometimes seem to be at war. Our view is that these differences are mainly ones of style and specific technique. The same underlying logic provides the framework for each research approach. This logic tends to be explicated and formalized clearly in discussions of quantitative research methods. But the same logic of inference underlies the best qualitative research. (1994, 3)

According to the authors, the “best qualitative research,” like quantitative research, operates with “the same underlying logic of inference.” Whether causal or descriptive, this logic can be made “systematic and scientific” (4, 5). Indeed its value relies on its claims to the scientific method. Although the authors concede that not all questions of abiding concern for politics can be covered by learning the rules of inference, “the rules are relevant to all research where the goal is to learn facts about the real world” (6). The “real world” remains underspecified in this account, but, in drawing a sharp distinction between “what is” and “what ought to be” and by insisting on a strict separation between the “philosophical” and the “empirical,” the real world becomes that which is constituted by the “rules of inference.”13 Questions about “agency, obligation, legitimacy, citizenship, sovereignty, and the proper relationship between national societies and international politics” are located outside the domain of proper scientific inquiry (6). The authors’ approach thus not only reproduces a classic intradisciplinary divide between political science and political theory but also reads the manifestly political concerns of theory out of the discipline of political science, indeed out of the world of “facts” as such. The belief that such an approach is ontologically, rather than merely provisionally, adequate may signal the authors’ unacknowledged metaphysical commitments. Certainly such a conviction seems to limit the range of possibilities open for rigorous work in political science. For King, Keohane, and Verba, “the distinctive characteristic that sets social science apart from casual observation is that social science seeks to arrive at valid inferences by the systematic use of well-established procedures of inquiry” (6). “Good research,” for which the authors used “the word ‘scientific’” as the “descriptor,” is

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work that adheres to the dictates of explicitly scientific research (7). “Valid inferences” are those established by scientific work. Scientific work assures objectivity. King, Keohane, and Verba’s methodological treatise thereby rested on familiar understandings in the discipline: they not only assumed the intrinsic worth of scientific studies, but they also posited a specific and by no means self-evident understanding of science as a practice based on a clear divide between empirical facts and philosophical values. Science, in their view, requires testable, falsifiable hypotheses, an acknowledgment of the tentative nature of findings, and (therefore, arguably) a belief that acceptable results depend on a specific epistemological and methodological approach. Worried that the absence of consensus about what social science is would entail disagreement about what constitutes good work or shared standards, the authors ignored underlying philosophical problems raised by their position, attempting to impose one kind of rigor on the discipline at the expense of other rigorous forms of engagement with politics. In this sense, the book fit well with a number of others published in the 1980s and 1990s, many of which decried the divisions within political science and insisted on the methodological assumptions of the natural sciences.14 Although Designing Social Inquiry has yet to create the desired consensus, it was arguably more successful than any other text in specifying the terms under which scholarly work would be taken seriously in the field. The book has helped produce guidelines for hiring and tenure decisions, as well as for what is sayable and practicable in the discipline, participating in the discipline’s overall move toward quantitative, formal, and “mixed methods” research.15 It has defined the space of contestation over what “good” political science should look like, reinforcing for positivist qualitative researchers as well a common definition of scientific standards rather than calling underlying assumptions into question.16 The book’s impact should not be divorced from the institutional location of its authors and their reputations in the discipline, on the one hand, and the felicitous historical conditions that made this effort at unification particularly noteworthy, on the other. The authors first conceived the book in 1989 while teaching a graduate seminar on research design together during their years at Harvard University (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, ix). Methodological concerns had been most explicit in King’s preceding work, much of which was devoted to demonstrating the utility of statistical inference techniques for what could one day be a unified political science. King, more than the others,

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was at the forefront of a new subdisciplinary field. (Verba was a well-known behaviorist and advocate of liberal political systems who used survey methods to explain political behavior and public opinion; Keohane applied a range of explicitly scientific research methods to cases in international relations while also, like many theorists of international relations, holding implicit assumptions about the virtue of American values and the existence of an objective “national interest.”) King was a young methodologist whose career coincided with the growing importance of methodology as a field in its own right. As a former president of the Society for Political Methodology and a member of important editorial boards, including that of the APSR, King, among others, has been successful in helping to enhance political methodology as an autonomous institutional concern.17 King’s work, in particular, was not simply produced within an environment congenial to the subfield’s advancement; it also enabled the growth of political methodology as a subdisciplinary field with its own literature, job positions, relatively high salaries, and considerable cultural capital. Political methodologists have assumed high-profile roles in the American Political Science Association and publish, referee, and edit prominent journals. Their letters often carry considerable weight in securing jobs and promotions for epistemologically like-minded scholars in all of the subdisciplines of political science. The institutional power of game theoretic and statistical methods facilitated the book’s disciplinary work, registering how disputes over facts and over the rules for producing facts should be managed and adjudicated. Designing Social Inquiry exemplified ongoing efforts to secure assent, to generate collective agreement about what the discipline was and how its discursive and social practices should be conducted.18 At first glance, the book’s valorization of science and its guidelines for practicing it properly may not obviously have a connection to liberalism. Methodology was presented as a technique that carries no normative assumptions, liberal or otherwise. The book’s task was to specify the “right questions to ask,” show students how to avoid “bias” and “endogeneity,” help wouldbe scholars with case selection, and identify ways to estimate and report the tentative nature of conclusions. The book’s claims—that science moves us toward a fully adequate description of social life or that systematic knowledge is the kind that counts (Poovey 1998, 1)—found expression in formulations throughout political science drawing on the distinctions that King, Keohane, and Verba made between descriptive and causal inferences while separating

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both from matters of normative value. Ruled out of consideration were questions of what a fact is as well as discussion of the ways in which the distinction between facts and values is itself philosophically problematic (see Pitkin 1993).19 Of course, normative claims infuse the text—assumptions about what counts as a public act of research, the virtue of “societal judgments,” the nature of research as instrumentally rational, the conventions that ought to regulate controversy, and so on (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, 15). These norms may not be explicitly liberal. They nevertheless evince some of the worries about disagreement and methods for managing conflict central to a liberal politics. Assertions that the “content of ‘science’ is primarily the methods and rules, not the subject matter” (9), suggest that the rules supply their own content, a recourse to proceduralism that is itself a liberal move. And liberal content, presumptions about the individual, rational agency, and good government, do creep into the examples selected for special praise.20 Like the discipline more generally, the book discusses democratic peace theory, “social capital” studies on good governance, and the transitions to democracy literature without questioning the liberal premises undergirding each. The highly valued methodologies of game theory and statistical analysis, moreover, reproduce affinities between the rational actor and the “good society,” where the latter is defined as the outcome of rationality-based competition in the absence of destabilizing conflict, best achieved through procedural mechanisms (such as elections) that enable people to express their “preferences” as individuals. Game theoretic models and their underlying assumptions have also informed dominant theories of authoritarian regimes (Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, 2007; Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2003; Gandhi 2008; Lust 2005; Svolik 2012). But here the “good society” is the presumptive desirable other to which authoritarianism poses a problem. And for the Nobel Prize–winning economist Roger Myerson this problem is solvable because “constitutional government can develop [in authoritarian regimes] from basic problems of trust between political leaders and their supporters” (2008, 125). For him, publishing in political science’s flagship journal, “constitutional government” is a rational, almost natural outgrowth of innate human preferences, although he also shows how authoritarian rule can be in equilibrium. In the wake of the poor performance of science in anticipating the demise of the Soviet Union and as versions of the “cultural turn” came to inspire other social sciences, an increasing focus on methodology operated

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to reinvigorate political science. As methodology became a field in its own right and as formalized methods in particular gained ground (“second only to quantification” in the APSR, according to Sigelman), 21 the circulation of formal methodologies and game theoretic arguments could have the indirect effect of working on behalf of an undertheorized elision between science and liberalism. By combining empirical research with nonempirical techniques of logic and pure mathematics, abstract formal models required practitioners to hold assumptions (about the individual, cognition, and what democracy is) that were congenial to both projects. Terms like “trade-offs,” “cost-benefit analysis,” and “equilibria” could appear as neutral variables or consensually accepted standards rather than the product of a distinct political context. Sharing these assumptions has helped constitute a community that is epistemological (in the sense that it directs how we know what we know), methodological (in the sense that members adhere to the same sets of processes in producing and evaluating results), and ontological (members of the group identify themselves as participants in a community of argument whose conditions make questioning basic assumptions seem irrelevant, if not silly or embarrassing). Agreement on the procedures for research seems to entail distinguishing between descriptive and causal inferences and according the latter greater prestige, treating the individual as the unit of analysis and identification, presupposing a world in which it is sufficient to depict agents as if they act only instrumentally, and taking initial interpretations as descriptive facts or raw data rather than information mediated through the experience of a particular researcher. To conclude this section: epistemological assumptions and liberal political commitments get constituted in and through the workings of political science.22 Dominant scholarly production in political science continues to rest on particular views of science as the ultimate form of knowledge and liberalism as the desirable kind of politics.23 The positivist insistence on separating fact from value, moreover, obscures how science is itself an exalted value. Deciding what results political scientists want to explain (e.g., contested elections and procedures in place to ensure them, peace among democracies, conflict avoidance) can be seen in contemporary texts as simultaneously politically relevant and devoid of value. As political science has become more scientific, liberal values have seemed to retreat into the background or been partially concealed by an emphasis on methods over content. Yet political science remains implicated in reproducing the liberal moral-political world

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in which practitioners live, in part by enacting the norms of proceduralism through which political projects are selected for inquiry, imagined into existence, and sustained. And scholars’ everyday enmeshments in institutional relationships—the pleasures of status, funding, approval, inclusion, prominence, job security, and respect—have also worked to foreclose alternative political visions while defining what is valid, good, and praiseworthy. Or to put this differently, the connection between science and liberalism in political science is most substantively evident in what the “scientific” part of the discipline has maintained as a set of common features across the transformations from pre–World War II through behaviorism to King, Keohane, and Verba’s work. This includes, most fundamentally: 1. Objectivist reductionism: that the world exists “out there,” as a collection of facts to be apprehended and analyzed, independent of the values of the scholar who studies it, and that complex phenomena (such as “political cultures” or democratization) are to be explained in terms of elements that all phenomena of a given category share in common. 2. The epistemological primacy of method, entailing that the procedures of social scientific inquiry must be public and subject in principle to repetition, that is, validation, by other practitioners, a point nicely summarized by King, Keohane, and Verba when they insist that “the content is the method” (1994, 9).

This constancy has been achieved by means of considerable intradisciplinary policing, which itself has been a constant across fundamental changes in conceptual approach and methodology. As we have seen, the practice of political science has evolved along a number of axes since its beginnings early in the previous century. It has gone from openly prescriptive to less so, and from tentatively scientific to more assertively so; or, summarizing in more substantive terms since World War II, from behaviorism to rational choice to King, Keohane, and Verba. Throughout, when scholars acknowledge the absence of a satisfactory explanation for a recognized phenomenon, the mainstream practice has been to assume that the answer must be sought within the epistemic terms favored at the time (see Gould and Lewontin 2004 on pressures to conform to orthodoxy in evolutionary biology). The assumption that the needed explanations would be found by persisting with a given approach often involves shutting down alternatives, as institutional power is applied to Scientific Knowledge, Liberalism, and Empire 45

disqualify or dismiss other rigorous accounts with competing epistemological and political foundations. One obvious example is the marginalization of psychoanalysis as a way of discussing attitudes and behavior. Another is the more general sequestering of political theory from other aspects of disciplinary knowledge. Marginalizing political theory entails ignoring questions of reflexivity: what it means to separate fact from value, how the discipline works to construct the world as an objective “other” to meaningful political commitments and interests. It also means bracketing questions such as why, since its inception but continuing to the present day, this putatively objective science has produced finding after finding in support of liberal American/Western political superiority in the world. The tendency to reduce epistemological questions to methodology (e.g., asserting the importance of “rules of inference” without linking them to what counts as a fact or to the disciplinary conditions that make some inferences seem more plausible than others) is a form of proceduralism in its own right. In both this epistemological variety and in the proceduralism of liberal politics, valid results are taken to be strictly independent of intention, so that practitioners are relieved in principle of all moral and political responsibility for outcomes or findings. The claims to impartiality that derive from the discipline’s “scientific” reliance on procedure, with its attendant refusal of reflexivity, are critical to generating and maintaining what might be called a liberal universalism, a transnational moral imaginary that through a set of agreed upon, seemingly power-free procedures tends also to produce findings in line with Western liberal ones. Arguably, this “self-satisfaction effect,” for lack of a better term, has been particularly prominent in studies of the Middle East, where the frontiers of empire are subject to ongoing, brutal military contestation. I want to show how the study of Middle East politics fits into this story of the discipline’s commitments by considering political science’s enduring ambivalence to area studies; its emphasis on the field of American politics as a generalizable nonarea capable of providing the intellectual standards and methodological techniques for the rest of the discipline; the deployment of political culture arguments to affirm invidious distinctions between the West and “the rest”; and the decades-long use of liberal, procedural “democracy” as both an area of inquiry and a benchmark for progress.

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Middle East Studies in Contemporary Political Science: Liberalism, Empire, and Science The emergence of area studies programs in the United States, including ones focused on the Middle East, corresponded with the consolidation of American social sciences between the 1930s and 1950s (Mitchell 2003; Lockman 2004). By the 1950s, these programs had become a key feature of American national security initiatives and a symptom of Cold War anxieties. In part as a response to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of the satellite Sputnik, Congress was prompted to pass the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the first large-scale government funding package for higher education (Lockman 2004, 125). With the aim of cultivating knowledge about areas judged crucial for US national security, Title VI of that law secured funding for universitybased area studies centers and for graduate student fellows. Among the foreign languages deemed necessary for safeguarding national security were ones spoken in the Middle East—Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Much has been written about Title VI and about foundation funding, especially from Ford, Rockefeller, Social Science Research Council, and Carnegie (see especially Lockman 2004). My goal is not to rehearse those arguments here but simply to note that by the late 1960s this massive infusion of funds contributed to an increase in the number of PhDs being awarded to students of Middle East studies (Lockman 2004, 127) and arguably prompted more political scientists to become interested in the region (Mitchell 2003). By the 1970s, however, area knowledge had come increasingly under attack. Growing disaffection coincided with various transformations in area studies programs themselves, in notions of the scientific enterprise, and in the relation of political science to both of these matters. Initially, according to Timothy Mitchell, area studies were seen as a “supplement to social science, a supplement that would help make it whole” (2003, 23). Social science knowledge aimed at expressing “universal truths” and area studies would be part of that project, revealing through research in non-Western regions any “provincialism” (Herring 1947, quoted in Mitchell 2003, 23). The professionalization of area studies, achieved by the mid-1960s, coincided with a growing sense of the project’s problems and made it vulnerable to challenges from all sides (Mitchell 2003; see also Lockman 2004). The radicalization of politics within and outside the academy, the circulation of “Third World” scholars and ideas, the dynamics of exile, and stated visions

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of a moral-political future independent of former colonial powers helped spotlight area studies’ complicity with colonial and postcolonial forms of domination. The positivist social sciences, themselves vulnerable to the political crises of the 1960s and the economic ones of the 1970s, also increasingly raised doubts about area studies’ ability to contribute to universal knowledge. The presidential address at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in 1974, delivered by the political scientist and Middle East scholar Leonard Binder, registered area studies’ move to the defensive. As Mitchell points out, Binder could no longer represent the field as part of a “grand theoretical scheme of total science.” Instead, he justified area knowledge by appealing to the region as an “objective fact,” one of the “things that exist” and therefore a subject of “true knowledge” (16). As Binder stated: In my own opinion area studies rest upon a single key idea and that is that the object of study, the thing we want to know, is the determining and organizing principle of the intellectual enterprise and not the method or discipline. Research methodology and disciplinary paradigms are not to determine what is selected for study, and they are not to limit observation. Area studies, from this perspective, holds that true knowledge is only possible of things that exist, while methods and theories are abstractions which order observations and other explanations according to non-empirical criteria. . . . The quest[ion] . . . is whether Middle Eastern events constitute a valid unity so that the consequence of their study could reasonably be called knowledge. (Quoted in Mitchell 2003, 15)

Binder’s address affirmed political science’s commitments to objectivity and depicted areas as the raw material for testing and confirming scientific hypotheses or for discovering important variances. In this view, areas are filled with facts and regions can be treated as if they were objects to be apprehended by ostensive definition rather than as concepts and imaginaries constituted, at least in part, by the analyst. Although Binder’s defense responded primarily to the concerns of positivist social science, it was Said’s Orientalism (1978) that offered a particularly influential critique of the area studies project, challenging both Binder’s objectivist recuperation and the idea of universal science more generally. Said explicitly took up Binder’s presidential address to point out that “things that exist” are to some extent “constituted by the knower” (quoted in Mitchell 2003, 15). Said also argued that the relationship between modernity and

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imperialism was one of co-formation and mutual implication. He therefore placed an analysis of empire at the heart of studying the modern and invited scholars to shift attention away from the Orient to the ways in which it had been studied. As Nadia Abu El-Haj notes, “Orientalism” referred to a pattern of thinking that “made imaginable, even natural, imperial visions of the Arab-Muslim East,” a view that posited the region as a “space demanding intervention, a space radically, even incommensurably, different from the West,” one that “had to be remade by and in the image of (European [and now American]) civilization” (2005, 538). Said’s intervention was both a product of an increasing turn toward epistemological reflexivity in the social sciences and generative of further developments. His specific commitments to the Middle East helped transform how that region in particular was viewed as an object of study and an area vulnerable to great power intervention. And insofar as Said’s contribution was embedded in a broader intellectual project that was recognizably Foucauldian, his work could appeal to students across the disciplines, enjoining them to be more attentive to the ways in which concepts and styles of reasoning, as well as scholarly commitments, are historically situated, enmeshed in, and productive of power relationships.24 The Foucauldian turn more generally allowed scholars, particularly anthropologists, historians, and postcolonial and cultural studies theorists, to analyze the discursive and institutional dynamics of scholarly production. Instead of searching for truths, Foucauldian analysts examined how truth claims work. Political scientists tended to desert area studies at this time, criticizing such research (and the reflexivity that some practitioners inspired by Foucault and Said had come to demand) for failing to produce general, universalizable knowledge for the social sciences. The interdisciplinary focus and the emphasis on the particular could even be seen as especially threatening to science. Thus, whereas the study of “alien cultures” could initially be seen as forefending against “provincialism” within disciplines, as Pendleton Herring of the Carnegie Corporation asserted in 1947, by the 1980s it was not uncommon in the halls of political science departments to hear scholars register the opposite— decrying simultaneously the parochial specificities of area studies knowledge and the Foucauldian critiques of it. Revealingly, the discipline’s allergies to reflexivity and its entanglements with versions of liberalism and science allowed the subfield of American politics to avoid being understood as an “area study,” exempting American

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politics from the growing depreciation of area studies scholarship. The APSR provides us with a portrait of how dominant American politics continues to be in the study of political science. The United States was the subject of 59 percent of its articles during the first decade of its establishment and 65 percent during its second. Far from expanding geographic diversity over time, Review articles actually became narrower in focus, with the United States representing 72 percent of all articles by the end of the century. As Sigelman notes, “Even Britain, which ranked second over the entire century, was featured in just 96 articles, nowhere near the United States’ 1,108” (2006, 470). It was not only nation-states in the Middle East that received scant coverage but also China, India, Russia, the emerging “democracies” in Eastern Europe, and Mexico—in short, every country but the United States. The dominance of the United States, a constant in political science, was matched by increasing attention beginning in the mid-1950s to quantitative research as the primary method required for addressing political problems of universal import. American politics was at the cutting edge of the discipline’s celebration of statistical knowledge, and the embrace of statistics enhanced the subfield’s prominence. During the post–World War II era, quantitative research became the norm, at first favoring simple statistical analyses (such as percentages means, chi-squared tests, product-moment correlations) and then giving way to more sophisticated multivariate analyses. Facilitating the growth of quantification was the development of survey research (Sigelman 2006; Converse 1987), a key tool of the behaviorist quest to measure individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. With the increasing prominence of rational choice and game theory in the mid-1980s, political scientists began to engage in formal modeling, which became a regular form of analysis in mainstream journals. In volume 89 of the APSR (1995), 42 percent of the articles featured formal models (Sigelman 2006, 470). The use of these tools was not confined to American politics but also spread to the subfields of international relations and comparative politics. Although political scientists specializing in the study of the United States have always captured the lion’s share of disciplinary clout and funding for faculty positions, as other subfields adopted these methods their status also arguably improved.25 Despite this change, American politics continues to put forth many of the scientific models and the agenda-setting puzzles for the rest of the discipline. Having always occupied a status outside area studies debates, the United States is so central to the discipline that it is able to stand in for and produce knowledge about the

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general character of political life.26 Or, to return to the concerns animating the first part of this chapter, the field of American politics exemplifies the conjunction between liberalism and science, embedding in its favored methods the universal aspirations and procedural norms characteristic of each. The position of American politics as a nonarea has always been in tension with the treatment of other regions in the subfields of international relations and comparative politics. To some extent, such tensions could be resolved by viewing the rest of the world in friend-or-foe terms, at least during the Cold War. As Cold War concerns waned and area studies programs came increasingly under fire in the 1970s and 1980s, nation-states coded as “areas” remained important on the condition that the details they produced could be put in the service of universal knowledge about politics. In the words of one political scientist who began his career as an ethnographer in Africa, area studies offered a way of “tantalizing theorists with uncomfortable data” and the local knowledge derived from work in the field could be used to “discover interesting anomalies” (Laitin 1993, 3)—a view adumbrated in Binder’s presidential speech to the Middle East Studies Association twenty years before. In the context of embattled area studies programs and the persisting dominance of the United States as a nonarea, the study of Middle Eastern politics in particular chafed against scientific assertions of impartiality and value neutrality—at least until recently. Or to put it differently, for several decades the Middle East became too political for political science. In the late 1960s, “eight or more of the dozen leading political science departments had a tenured Middle East specialist,” compared to a “relatively weak field like Latin American studies” (Mitchell 2003, 14). Yet by 2005 a Washington Post article could lament the paucity of tenured professors specializing in the Middle East (Berkowitz and McFaul 2005), a lamentation that is now outmoded. The decline was real enough at the time, however, and it no doubt had to do with the marginalization of area studies in political science more generally. But the case of the Middle East was extreme, and it cannot be understood without considering the problem that Israel, in particular, posed for political science as a self-avowed scientific community. Efforts to unify the discipline could easily be thwarted by an issue as politically divisive as the Arab-Israeli conflict was, especially in the aftermath of the 1967 War when the presence of the United States in that part of the region became increasingly pronounced and one-sided. Perhaps too there was a sense that political scientists’ emotional investment in the conflict threatened to undermine their

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own principle of objectivity. After the events of September 11, 2001, political science departments started making up for lost time and were aided in their quest for experts by a new generation of scholars whose commitments to the methodological precepts outlined in the work of King, Keohane, and Verba could stave off concerns about political bias and case study particularities. This trend has continued in the wake of the Arab uprisings. Even during the decades when few senior scholars knowledgeable about the area occupied posts in major universities, political scientists who had no language training or professional experience in the region continued to discuss it. Take, as an admittedly tired but illustrative example, Samuel Huntington’s 1993 article in Foreign Affairs,“The Clash of Civilizations?,” and his subsequent book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Huntington was a comparative politics specialist with no training in Middle East studies. But his arguments could operate within a recognizable tradition of political culturalism in the discipline, representing perhaps the most prominent and polemical example of this literature in recent decades.27 Although Huntington’s thesis carried more weight outside the discipline than within it, political culture arguments have had an enduring life in political science. And they have been resurrected repeatedly in the study of the Middle East in particular, sometimes as a means of validating what is considered the “alternative” explanation to those focusing on formal institutions and processes.28 In their heyday in the immediate aftermath of World War II, political culture accounts contributed to a variety of policy initiatives, some of which were designed to reproduce the conditions of Western democratization abroad (Somers 1995, 114). Derived from Max Weber’s classic analysis of the “elective affinity” between the Protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism in the West ([1905] 1958), these accounts attempted to show how cultural attitudes and beliefs either hindered or enabled “progress” (Banfield 1958; McClelland 1961, 1963; Pye and Verba 1965).29 Conceived in terms of an alleged set of residual values and norms—what Sherry Ortner has aptly characterized as “a deeply sedimented essence attaching to, or inhering in particular groups” (1997, 8– 9)—this notion of culture was prominent in the sociology of Talcott Parsons, in modernization theory, in the American cultural anthropology of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, as well as in the behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. In political science, it was Gabriel Almond’s (1956) seminal essay, along with his subsequent collaboration with

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Sidney Verba (1963), that produced one of the most influential understandings of political culture in terms of “orientations toward the political system,” whereby some populations had civic “cultures” and others did not.30 With their tendencies toward cultural essentialism, political culture claims were subject to critique by political scientists of various stripes.31 Rejecting such views as either fundamentally tautological or empirically invalid, some critics opted for one or another strictly “materialist” approach, objecting to the consideration of cultural variables in any form (see, e.g., Tilly 1975, 603–21; Hirschman 1984; Jackman and Miller 1996).32 The ascendance of rational choice theory in the mid-1980s also led practitioners to argue that the analysis of group values or customs such as those associated with the term “culture” was irrelevant to political inquiry (Przeworski 1985). Politics concerned material interests and the relative success or failure of the individuals articulating them. Symbolic displays and rhetorical practices were dismissed as epiphenomenal. However, faced with explaining postcommunist upheavals, ethnic violence, “identity” politics, religious “fundamentalism,” and the ongoing problems of democratic transitions from the early 1990s on, even political scientists hostile to Huntington’s approach came to use culture as a “fallback” position, a way of accounting for divergent, and usually disappointing, political outcomes (Kuper 1999, 10). By claiming that “cultures” have “peculiarities” that explain the failure of some nation-states to democratize or by asserting that political conflict is the outcome of “irreducible cultural differences” (Rogowski 1997, 14; Bates, de Figueiredo Jr., and Weingast 1998; Greif 1994), some of the most scientifically minded theorists responded to what they perceived as explanatory needs by resorting to a Parsonian version of culture as group traits. This tendency toward cultural essentialism was perhaps most pronounced in post–September 11 discussions of the Middle East—in writings about the failures of democracy, the menace of militant Islam, and the overriding anxiety about terrorism.33 But it has been revived in the context of the heart-wrenching consequences of the Arab uprisings and the devolution of countries such as Syria into brutal civil wars. The discipline’s increasing concerns with methodological rigor may have changed the language and tenor of current political science writings and permitted political commitments to appear less obvious than they used to be in the early years of the discipline or in the “good society” days of behaviorism. But an enduring emphasis on political order provides the substance

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for the reproduction of norms that blend scientific certainties with normative endorsements of liberal democracy. At times cultural difference is used to explain challenges to liberalism, to US interests, or to the stability important to both. At other times support for liberal democracy finds expression in the ways scholars embed assumptions about human subjectivity, motivation, “interests,” and desirable institutions in their models. Studies of democracy arguably dramatize this commitment to liberalism and science best and link the two to US practices of empire. Democracy studies offer normative benchmarks of progress while simultaneously stimulating scientific inquiry into causes of success and failure. As David Scott writes in “Norms of Self-Determination: Thinking Sovereignty Through”: Democracy has become a new normative ‘standard’ taking over the conceptual-ideological work hitherto performed by ‘civilization’ in governing the conduct of international order, and disciplining, where necessary, and by diverse technologies (largely military and economic), its recalcitrant or otherwise uncooperative members. Or, perhaps, put slightly differently, democracy is the contemporary political name of an old civilizing project: it is now a regulative principle in the political rationality of international order by which the political prospects of (especially, if not only) the Third World are governed. (2012, 219)

This civilizing project has taken on various forms in the discipline of political science historically, instantiated previously in versions of modernization theory, 34 in theories of “underdevelopment,” and,for the past two to three decades, as Scott notes, most prominently in debates about “democratization.”35 Such civilizing impulses, importantly, are often concealed by takenfor-granted assumptions about the good life. As the French philosopher Alain Badiou points out provocatively, these days “it is forbidden not to be a democrat” (2005, 78). Scott’s analogy of democratization projects with earlier civilizing missions is helpful for thinking about how discourses on “other” colonial or occupied subjects work to shore up institutions of administrative rule or to make possible and justify political action. In considering the nature of power in the postcolonial world and in focusing on what seem to be continuing US efforts at domination in the Middle East, the differences between contemporary imperial projects (under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama) and colonial antecedents are equally illustrative. For example, there was a presumptively

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different ontology of the person in nineteenth-century British colonial enterprises when compared to the Bush administration’s stated project of democratization. In British colonial understandings, according to the anthropologist Bernard Cohn, the application of social evolutionary theories by a wide range of British officials and scholars generated a “crucial ruling paradigm: the Indian present was the European past. . . . India was seen as being capable of being changed through British beneficence” (1996, 121).36 But this would take time. The British had to create the conditions for the Indians to “advance up the social evolutionary ladder by introducing the ideas of private property and modern education, the English language and its thought on literature, railroads, modern sanitation and medicine,” and so on (121). In this view, the Indians were in the feudal stage, and change needed to be slow so that it was not too disorderly. To prevent dangerous outcomes, “Indians had to be managed, made to conform to the British conception of appropriate thought and action, for their own future good,” according to Cohn (122). In the eyes of the British, Indians were viewed in the first half of the nineteenth century as “misguided children,” subjects in need of civilizing (124). Colonial assessments changed after the mutiny in 1857–59, and Indians were then refigured as “treacherous and unchangeable” (124). Some of the Bush administration’s initially stated assumptions about Iraqis were importantly different from Cohn’s depictions of colonized Indians in nineteenth-century Britain, suggesting both extensions of and qualifications to civilizing mission analogies. No longer guided primarily by Darwinian versions of upward mobility, continual progress, and colonial conquest but by ruling paradigms of rational actors and procedural democracy, the Bush administration often portrayed Iraqis as inherently “born free,” as naturally, inalienably free. The language of occupation assumed, like many institutional design analyses in political science, that with the right institutions— electoral, judicial, and legislative—humans can be forced to realize, and quickly, what is, in fact, their nature. In other words, in the wake of the Bush administration’s military occupation, a different ontology of the person— and of the political community—was assumed, one that had some political scientists actively participating in what was envisioned as a quick process of “democracy building.” (Larry Diamond, for example, was an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority who described his task in those very terms.) This presumed ontology was often incoherently related to the continuing force of nineteenth-century ideas of tutelage in which a supposedly knowing

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authority (such as Paul Bremer) could be openly contemptuous of the very population whose transitional government he was charged with establishing. In contrast to the nineteenth-century British understanding and the Bush-era “born free” narrative, the Obama administration has insisted repeatedly, in reference to Libya, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, that “we can’t do it for them” or “this change needs to come from within.” What is implied here is that political communities will arrive at liberalism on their own schedule and that the inability to do so thus far is independent of ongoing Western marauding. It is as if interventions had not already happened, were not ongoing (albeit in varied forms), and did not have irreparable effects (see Bâli and Abu-Rish 2011; Bâli and Rana 2012). The Obama administration’s preference for drone warfare as opposed to boots on the ground not only keeps American soldiers out of harm’s way, but makes the victims of US violence more invisible—constructing targets as national security threats rather than subjects of tutelage. Political science does not cause shifts such as these in policy—and many policy makers and professors bemoan the discipline’s irrelevance to what they deem shared priorities like furthering the national interest or predicting cataclysmic political events or saving American lives, as debates about National Science Foundation (NSF) funding make clear. Senator Tom Coburn, architect of repeated attempts to end NSF sponsorship of political science research, has suggested, for example, that “studies of presidential executive power and Americans’ attitudes toward the Senate filibuster hold little promise to save an American’s life from a threatening condition or to advance America’s competitiveness in the world.”37 And efforts to instrumentalize political science by defending its policy relevance to the US government are themselves revealing— often insisting on the very unacknowledged entanglements of liberalism, science, and empire discussed in the previous pages. Better predictive science, in the service of goals that are presumptively shared and objective, requires a double commitment to liberalism’s proceduralism, both as scientific method and as substantive research agenda. It also seems to entail the cultivation of what Eyal Weizman (in Smith 2014) calls, in reference to schools of architecture, an almost willful “political naivety.” To put it differently, political science has played a structuring if not direct causal role in facilitating US intervention in non-European polities, not simply through the obvious advisory roles of policy makers or through CIA involvement, although these are real enough, but through the conceptual-ideological

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work that political scientists perform—by fixating on “transitions” to elections in other countries while ignoring the problems with democratic rule in the United States itself, for example. Institutional design models that scientifically demonstrate the merits of electoral systems (e.g., Przeworski et al. 2000) coexist alongside models that simply presuppose the desirability of elections, some of which view elections as coterminous with or tending to lead to democracy. Although the emergence of the literature on “competitive” authoritarianism showed how elections could shore up dictatorships, thereby offering a corrective to overly sanguine views, this literature nevertheless maintained political science’s fascination with the ballot box, and it did not grapple with the contradictions between democratic “deficits” and US empire, the ways in which the United States continues to be an important agent of authoritarian resilience—sometimes in contradiction to its avowed liberal commitments and sometimes by way of them (Schedler 2002, 2012; Carothers 2002; Magoloni 2006; Levitsky and Way 2010; Blaydes and Lo 2012; for a review of this literature, see Gandhi and Lust 2009; Haggard and Kaufman 2016). In other words, political science turns what could be obvious into a puzzle by sustaining a “pact of silence” around such critical issues as the discipline’s complex complicities with empire or the centrality of USdominated arms markets to both authoritarian persistence and war.38 “Why do they hate us?,” is a question that not only operated at the level of the Bush administration’s dubious justifications for launching its wars of choice but also animated academic conferences after 9/11, leading in one case to the production of an influential article and then volume that exemplifies the tendency to presuppose a virtuous America in a way that shrouds others’ loathing in mystery (see Katzenstein and Keohane 2007, especially the introductory essay, “Varieties of ‘Anti-Americanism’”). As should be evident from the above, dominant concerns in the discipline undergird studies of Islam and the Middle East specifically: failed or partial transitions to democracy, the puzzling “resilience” of authoritarianism, questions about why some Islamic activists are moderate and willing to work within the system (a good thing) while others are extreme and work to undermine it (a bad thing), and the role of women’s oppression in making the region deficient democratically all contribute to a view of the Middle East as a territory in need of transformation. Such studies also tend to reaffirm the discipline’s commitments to rationality as the preferred mode of being and procedural institutions as the best way to secure rational actors’

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“preferences.”39 Assumptions about the efficacy of institutions and the universal subjectivity of rational agents work in tandem with others, including ones steeped in political culturalism, even though the two orientations can seem to be at odds. Together these analyses help produce a powerful but potentially incoherent project— one in which institutions designed to facilitate expressions of political will are championed while the actual expressions of political will are often repudiated. The bifurcation of “good Muslims and bad Muslims” can be understood as a product of this tension (the phrase is from Mamdani 2005). To put it crudely: the “good Muslims” are those who are willing to realize their natures and build democratic institutions that contain conflict (a version of institutionalism) or to become westernized and thereby lose the group traits hobbling their progress (the culturalist orientation).40 In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the praise afforded to Tunisians for being democrats, the Tunisian uprising for being “successful” because it led to elections, and Tunisian “Islamists” for being moderate is a case in point.41 The prevailing trends of conventional scholarship, both from experts and dabblers, do not result in a complete absence of critical scholarship on the Middle East. Much of the literature that is critical has come from interpretivists who are not necessarily overly identified with conventional methodological or political norms (see Mitchell 1991, 2002, 2011; Vitalis 2006; Amar 2013; Massad 2001, 2007). But worth noting too is a post-Bush willingness on the part of a few scholars to reflect on aspects of American empire, largely by acknowledging pacts between local authoritarian elites and American officials but also, as suggested above, by questioning the role (if not exactly the privileging) of elections in authoritarian settings.42 Nevertheless, what remains striking, despite important variation and innovation, is the widespread refusal to bring these various insights into combination, to discuss how liberal proceduralism and procedural science are intertwined with American empire as well as the implications of this enmeshment for the political systems of the Middle East.43 Images of the region and its inhabitants as backward or in need of rescue help justify various forms of intervention. We know this, thanks to Said and others. More apposite in the contemporary era are the omissions and simplifications, the paucity of theoretical criticisms of entire lines of inquiry, which obscure how political science’s very efforts at scientific detachment combine with liberal presuppositions to undergird a world secured imperfectly by US imperial power.

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Conclusion Scholarly work and policy exist in the same semiotic world; the Bush and Obama administrations’ stated beliefs coincided well with prevailing liberal and scientific notions about the individual. The idea of human beings as rights-bearing, rational individuals who naturally form groups to protect their interests and check those of rival factions is part of the “horizon of the takenfor-granted” (Hall 1988, 4) in much of political science. The assumption too that a good government is one that protects inalienable individual rights, that is pluralistic and democratic (in procedural terms), has even prompted some political scientists to offer their services as “democracy experts” in post– Saddam Hussein Iraq. In this light, it is worth noting the contrast between the reception of anthropologists recruited to serve with military Human Terrain System (HTS) teams and the participation of political scientists in a host of American military projects: the American Anthropological Association (AAA) created a committee to study the issue and came out with a final report recommending that “the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers.” To the best of my knowledge, the participation of political scientists as advisers, while criticized in political terms (by scholars opposed to the war in Iraq, for example), has never been taken up as a potential violation of disciplinary standards and ethics.44 Not all political scientists participate in promoting US empire, or have liberal values, or pursue the scientific method. Nor do those who do espouse liberal values or who practice science necessarily support any particular aspect of US foreign policy. My argument is not about individuals, although there are individuals who exemplify the processes I highlight here. Rather, my contentions concern the discipline qua discipline, how mainstream normative assessments of what is valuable to study and the methods needed to study it combine with epistemological commitments and institutional routines (such as the subdisciplinary divisions that isolate political theory from science or that privilege American politics as the field with a geographic name but no area specificity) to generate scholarly thinking congenial to US imperial politics. To put my argument in schematic terms, the discipline of political science facilitated US imperialism in the Middle East in the following ways: (1) by supplying “democracy brokers,” to institutions such as the US Coalition

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Provisional Authority in Iraq (see Carapico 2013); 45 (2) by putting forth affirmative, specifically liberal ideas about “good governance” that work as standards of scientific assessment in awarding or denying countries financial aid or in justifying military intervention (for critical discussion of the proliferation of standards such as “good governance” and “social capital” in the World Bank, see Bebbington et al. 2006); (3) by failing to offer substantial and regular critiques of US imperialism as a general problem; (4) by maintaining subdisciplinary boundaries that have the effect of insisting on the divide between fact and value, of upholding scientific neutrality, and of viewing scientific methods as devoid of ideological underpinnings; (5) by creating a notion of American politics as a nonarea, a field of importance to the discipline whose standing comes from the cultivation of a generalized, specifically positivist methodological rigor and its concomitant refusal to “provincialize” America, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s sense of the term; (6) by bifurcating institutions from ideas, thereby failing to analyze how ideas saturate institutions or to consider how institutions are themselves reliant on the ideas that inspire their creation and maintenance; and relatedly (7) by producing problematic institutionalist or culturalist analyses that are a product of this split—institutionalist analyses about the Middle East that write out of history American involvement (e.g., Chaudhry’s 1997 study of state building in Saudi Arabia; see critiques by Mitchell 2003; Vitalis 1999) or studies that see culture as “group traits” specific to Arabs (or Muslims, or Middle Easterners), characteristics that hinder progress and are outside of history or power relationships. Studies more generally in political science about the “democratic peace” ask why democracies fail to fight one another without adequately interrogating what democracy means, or perhaps more important here, whether peaceful coexistence among democracies is itself a product of a colonial system in which “democracies” were actively waging war against people of color.46 My point is not that the latter is a valid inference—although it may be—but that political science tends to write such hypotheses out of consideration. Thus it is not only through explicit assertions and implicit assumptions that science, liberalism, and empire coalesce, but through omissions that both register and generate what is conceivable, discussable, and knowable. In short, in the post– Cold War period political science has helped to foster what David Scott aptly calls a “civilizing effect,” in which being a good Muslim or a good Arab state has come increasingly to “depend upon a willingness

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(sometimes coerced, sometimes induced)” (2012, 25) to accept the normative terms (if not the actual implementation) of procedural democracy as the ethos based on which models of political organization are constructed and evaluated. And in the name of this principle, the Middle East or Islam, as laggard or troublemaker, becomes the problem to be solved, the incommensurably “other” place that needs special attention and new assertions of control.

Notes The author would especially like to thank Paul Amar, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Laryssa Chomiak, Sharon Crasnow, Michael Dawson, Bruce Grant, Stephan Haggard, Reşat Kasaba, Zachary Lockman, Karen Pfeifer, Jennifer Pitts, Don Reneau, Jillian Schwedler, and Seteney Shami for their comments on drafts of this chapter. My gratitude also extends to audience members of the Comparative Politics Workshop at the University of Chicago for helpful suggestions—in particular, Rohit Goel, Daragh Grant, Todd Hall, Chris Haid, Diana Kim, John Mearsheimer, John Padgett, Sarah Parkinson, MJ Petersen, Erica Simmons, Nick Smith, and Steven Wilkinson. A colloquium on disciplinary innovation at Columbia University also allowed me to refine my ideas, and I am grateful to Gil Anidjar and Partha Chatterjee, my discussants, as well as to Akeel Bilgrami, James Chandler, and Joseph Massad for their questions. Presentations at the New School for Social Research and NYU were also extraordinarily helpful. Special thanks are also owed to Rohit Goel, Daragh Grant, and Sofia Fenner for research assistance. 1.

I am beholden to Mahmood (2006) for this formulation. This historical, mutually implicating relationship between science and liberalism can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century.

2.

I write “on the whole” because the United States has in fact engaged in wars or battles with direct intervention throughout this period (e.g., in Panama, Grenada, Libya, and Somalia). Despite evidence of a shift, what characterizes all of these wars is the asymmetry between the United States and its foes.

3.

Thanks are owed to Sofia Fenner here (pers. comm., November 2014).

4.

This formulation is a paraphrase of Geertz (1981) from his discussion of ceremonials in Negara’s theater state.

5.

Of course, each liberal postulate has always had its counter-conditions. The conviction that humans are born with inalienable rights has never prevented practices in liberal societies that enable some people to enjoy more or better rights than others. Indeed, definitions of what constitutes full humanness have been subject to

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contestation and revision; people of color, the poor, and gays and lesbians have often been treated as less than human in America’s political history, for example. The belief that all humans are capable of rational thinking—postulate 2— does not mean that all humans always regularly think rationally, or that scholars consensually understand what rationality means, or that rational calculations are necessarily always a desirable way of conducting political life in all circumstances. The third postulate—that individuals are likely to form factions in order to pursue their interests—is most famously articulated in James Madison’s Federalist Paper #10. Madison argued that compromises conducive to the public interest necessitated that factions of citizens must have their interests checked and balanced against other factions. In practice, such ideas have found institutional expression in political parties, but these vehicles of group interest have not been able, at least in the case of the United States, to advance all citizens’ interests or express all grievances adequately. Finally, arguments in favor of a government responsible to the people’s will generates familiar concerns about what constitutes the people’s will, “the people,” responsibility, etc. 6.

Proponents of experiments, the newest trend in the discipline, claim that their method gives scholars the scientific control lacking in other forms of research. My aim is to question the aspiration to scientific control.

7.

Morgenthau worries, in particular, about the trend toward identifying politics with science, science with ethics, and liberal conceptions of international affairs with reason ([1946] 1974, 35, 71). Like other positivists, however, he does have a notion of a genuine “political reality” that is separate from a liberal “misconception” of it. In reality, “power is pitted against power for survival and supremacy” (71), an understanding of the political beholden to Carl Schmitt. For Morgenthau, liberalism’s notions of “reason, of progress, and of peace” (6) failed to acknowledge fascism’s rootedness, not only historically in the “bankrupt age that preceded it” (7), but in human nature as well. Liberalism was part of the problem; its attachment to the rule of law, science, and social planning left democracy weak in the face of enemies (see John G. Gunnell’s discussion of Morgenthau in The Descent of Political Theory [1993, 209]). As Daragh Grant has pointed out to me, in the somewhat later Politics among Nations ([1948] 2006, 17– 26), Morgenthau titles his second chapter, “The Science of International Politics,” and his descriptions of realism appeal to an objectivity consonant with the discipline’s commitments to science: Realism, believing as it does in the objectivity of the laws of politics, must also believe in the possibility of developing a rational theory that reflects, however imperfectly and one-sidedly, these objective laws. It believes also, then, in the

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possibility of distinguishing in politics between truth and opinion—between what is true objectively and rationally, supported by evidence and illuminated by reason, and what is only a subjective judgment divorced from the facts as they are and informed by prejudice and wishful thinking. (4; see also 5) Morgenthau’s distinctions between scientific judgments and liberal wishful thinking are important, but so too is the conundrum he generates by suggesting that liberal democracy can only be saved (from fascism, for example) by being abandoned. Morgenthau’s views of science in Politics among Nations also reflect a tension between appeals to science and a Schmittian skepticism of it. Morgenthau doubts that scientific advances can transcend the political and produce perpetual peace. He sees the “scientific era of international relations” as abandoning “genuine political evaluations” and impeding “if not entirely destroy[ing] the ability to make any intelligent political decisions at all” (48). And he connects “the use of the scientific method in politics” to liberalism in ways that make clear his problems with both. John Mearsheimer believes that Morgenthau titled his second chapter “The Science of International Politics” not because he saw himself producing scientific theory but because he saw the discipline moving in that direction and “tipped his hat” to the trend (discussion with John Mearsheimer, April 3, 2008). 8.

Oren is less interested in political science’s commitments to liberalism or the intersections between liberalism and science and more concerned with the discipline’s early fascination with German fascism, another important if less persistent trend. He notes that John W. Burgess, often considered the founder of the discipline, viewed the “Teutonic race” as politically superior. He also cites Woodrow Wilson’s well-known admiration of Prussia’s efficient bureaucracy and the favorable review of Mein Kampf published in the American Political Science Review. I thank Jillian Schwedler and John Mark Hansen for drawing my attention to this work.

9.

Promotional review of Kristen Renwick Monroe’s Perestroika! The Raucous Rebel-

10.

Thanks are owed to Michael Dawson for discussing with me the features charac-

lion in Political Science. teristic of the “good society.” 11.

I have in mind, for example, the students of William Riker and Richard McKelvey (Ken Shepsle, John Aldrich, Skip Lupia, and Peter Ordeshook, among others). Chris Haid deserves thanks for his help in sorting out this history.

12.

Keisha Lindsay supplied this information through a WorldCat Internet database search (June 2001) and through a telephone interview with Eric Rohmann, sales director, Princeton University Press, June 11, 2001. Although Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba claim that their “goal is practical: designing research

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that will produce valid inferences about social and political life” (1994, 3), several political scientists, some of whom support regulating research in the discipline, have likened the project to a religious one— a “missionary effort” (Shively 1995); a book that has “the aim of evangelizing” (Rogowski 1995, 467); a “homily,” one that “puts forth a simple straightforward faith” (Brady 1995, 12). These are all cited in James Johnson’s excellent “Consequences of Positivism: A Pragmatist Assessment” (2006). That essay differs markedly from my analysis of King, Keohane, and Verba’s book here in that Johnson argues directly with the text and assesses its merits rather than analyzing how the book “works” in the Foucauldian sense. In other words, rather than bracketing whether the text is good or bad, he argues that the authors’ theory of inquiry hinders our ability to make sense of successful quantitative analyses and of causal explanation. He also argues that it fails in its mission to “impart intellectual unity to the discipline of political science” (224). I am more interested in asking why and how that unity matters. 13.

For a sophisticated discussion of the distinction between “is” and “ought,” see Pitkin 1993.

14.

The most obvious text is Gabriel Almond’s A Discipline Divided (1990). Gary King’s Unifying Political Methodology (1989) is an effort to unify statistical methods in political science. Designing Social Inquiry is more ambitious. King, Keohane, and Verba precipitated a disciplinary reaction among many scholars of positivist qualitative methods. Some of these scholars are committed to “shared standards” between quantitative and qualitative work, but others are not; what most share, despite differences, is an increased interest, post–King, Keohane, and Verba, in spelling out the rules according to which “good” qualitative research should be done. Critics are often no less disciplinary in their aspirations to regulate research than King, Keohane, and Verba. One of the most oft-cited critiques of Designing Social Inquiry in this vein is Rethinking Social Inquiry (Brady and Collier 2004); in addition, there is also Mahoney and Rueschemeyer’s 2003 book, Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, whose ambitions are admittedly less grand than either King, Keohane, and Verba or the Brady and Collier volume. That book was followed by Mahoney and Thelen, eds., Advances in Comparative-Historical Analysis (2015).

15.

Data collected by Daragh Grant on the top ten political science departments in the United States for the academic year 2006– 7 shows that approximately 71 percent of all junior faculty do quantitative, formal, or “mixed methods” research, another 16 percent are political theorists, and 13 percent are unambiguously identified with qualitative work. These numbers reflect a significant generational shift. Grant arrived at these figures by canvassing a broad sample of publications (including

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dissertations). Data are available from [email protected]. Twelve departments enjoy “top ten” rankings, according to the 2005 US News and World Report. Those rankings include the following universities (in alphabetical order): UC Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, UC San Diego, and Yale. In the 2013 ranking by US News and World Report, Duke joined the top ten and the University of Chicago dropped out, the latter maintaining its high ranking in political theory (at no. 3). This shift is itself suggestive of the ongoing marginalization of political theory relative to American politics, international relations, methodology, and the fast-growing field of comparative politics, whose methods have become increasingly inspired by scientific, technologically amped-up, methodological innovations. Chapter 7 by Laura Bier in this volume has more up-to-date figures and is more optimistic about the discipline’s diversity than I remain. If anything, I would suggest that the fascination with methods has become more intense than ever and that efforts to work against the grain are more difficult than they were when departments were expanding markedly in the first decade of the 2000s. At that point, faculty could afford to be inclusive and take risks. 16.

Brady and Collier’s self-styled critique Rethinking Social Inquiry (2004) is a case in point, as the title suggests.

17.

The National Science Foundation has also been a major force in the continuing growth of the subfield of political methodology, investing millions of dollars in such projects.

18.

For a remarkably stimulating book on how experiments secured assent about matters of fact and the rules of the game determining those facts, see Shapin and Schaffer 1985.

19.

It is important to recognize that there are quantitatively minded political scientists who recognize problems in treating “data” uncritically as factual in quantitative analyses. For example, Wilkinson’s (2010) critique does not undermine the belief that there are “objective developmental and other facts waiting to be found out” (email correspondence, April 1, 2008), and I am not arguing here that such a belief is wrong or that there are no such things as facts. Rather, there are different kinds of facts, not all of them subject to easy ostensive delimitation. Saying “this is a chair” and pointing to an example is not the same exercise as identifying a “developmental fact” and deploying it in social scientific discourse. Statements of “fact” that are value-laden or dependent on concepts that generate puzzlement, such as development, democracy, crime, or justice, may lead to especially important but neglected, at least in political science, disagreements about what a fact is or what makes it relevant.

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20.

To take one instance, citations of research on electoral democracy refer to its positive effects, while authoritarian rule is described parenthetically as suppressing labor organization and labor demands (142), a parenthetical that might also aptly describe some “stable democracies.”

21.

For data on the number of quantitative and formal analyses by volume of the APSR, see Sigelman 2006, 469, fig. 4.

22.

Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book (2001) on the ways in which distinct epistemological and national-cultural assumptions operated through archaeology as a field science in Israel has been helpful to my thinking about the dynamics of scholarly production in political science.

23.

One might argue that celebrators of science conflate science as the “ultimate” form of knowledge and science as the best currently available example of human knowledge. Perhaps my own critique is subject to a similar charge, but I want to consider that what might be regarded as the conflation of two different views often amounts to the same thing. Scientific thinking in the discipline might not claim that ultimate knowledge of x phenomenon is available to us now, but it does claim that there is no better way than itself to get to it. So a question that scientific thinking cannot currently answer does not get re-posed and answered in other terms. Rather, even the failures of scientific knowing count as success, with the add-on effect of foreclosing consideration of positivistic social science as a metaphysics. Thanks are owed to Sharon Crasnow and Don Reneau here.

24.

Abu El-Haj (2005) discusses the tensions between Said’s Western Enlightenment humanism and his indebtedness to Foucault. Rosalind Morris (2007, 33) suggests that there may be an affinity between Foucault’s concept of episteme and American anthropology’s notion of culture that explains anthropology’s receptivity to Foucault’s thought, especially under the influence of structuralism.

25.

The predominance of quantitative methods and formal models in key journals does not represent the discipline as a whole, of course, but it continues to correlate well with recent trends in departmental hiring at the top-ranked universities.

26.

Of course, the United States has its own particularities (one has only to recall the controversy over America’s “exceptionalism”); nevertheless, America’s status as a specific area is usually a nonissue, and it is rarely treated as a case among cases in comparative politics, although that might be changing.

27.

The following paragraphs on culture are excerpted in slightly modified form from my essay “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science” (Wedeen 2002).

28.

Mitchell (2003) makes a similar point and uses Kiren Chaudhry’s (1997) book on Saudi Arabia and Yemen as an example. But this practice is so typical that one

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would be at pains to find analyses in, for example, international relations that do not make the division between culture and institutions. Recent work in economics also speaks of an “institutional culture,” which suggests some blurring of the divide. To the extent that institutional explanations (which focus on underlying organizational structures and material interests) are juxtaposed to “ideational” ones (which sometimes include empirically untenable political culture assertions and sometimes simply connote “ideas”), political scientists end up ignoring the important interplay of political institutions and semiotic circumstances. Or to put it differently, institutions and ideas are constitutive of one another, they are constructed historically and change over time, and although they are analytically distinct, they are empirically entangled and co-forming (Wedeen 2008). An education system is not simply an institution; it presupposes ideas about what counts as pedagogy, who can be a student, etc. In other words, in addition to problematic notions of what “culture” is, political scientists tend to see culture and institutions as opposing explanations, each one respectively recruited to provide contending explanations of political outcomes. 29.

I have written about the political culture paradigm in “Conceptualizing Culture” (2002) and do not rehearse the full argument here. As noted above, some of this section is excerpted from that article.

30.

This summary of the political culture school admittedly simplifies a complex group of approaches. In political science, the “classic” study was Almond and Verba 1963; see also Verba 1965. For one of the most recent influential books in this genre, see Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti 1993; for an insightful extension of Putnam’s concept of “social capital,” see Boix and Posner 1998.

31.

In the mid-1980s, at an elite political science department, graduate students in an American politics class were told that political culture is the “refuge of scoundrels.”

32.

Middle East studies is one field in which the concept has been especially charged. I have in mind scholars such as Lisa Anderson, Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, and Michael Hudson, all of whom use “culture” to mean identifiable essences or sedimented values inhering in particular groups. Chaudhry (1994), in particular, tends to confuse Samuel Huntington’s invocations of the term with any interest in “culture” or cultural studies; see also Anderson 1995; Hudson 1995.

33.

As the political scientist Lisa Anderson has argued, “Democracy promoters assume that a country’s failure to embrace it [democracy] is evidence of political perversity or moral obtuseness on the part of its citizenry,” and this failure is often seen to be ahistorical or to have deep, centuries-long roots (cited in Gelvin 2005, 306). The debate within political science about “terrorism” has tended to pivot on the question

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of the rationality (or not) of “terrorists” and “terrorist” groups. Either “terrorists” are presented as irrational, their behavior a reflection of their deviance from the liberal ideal, or as rational, purposive actors who have rejected the (often implicitly preferable to the author) option of liberalism. 34.

On modernization theory, see especially the highly acclaimed work on the Middle East of the social scientist Daniel Lerner, whose book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958) was widely read throughout the discipline. Lerner had no training in Middle Eastern history or languages.

35.

Saba Mahmood (2006) shows that the United States has also waged a theological campaign aimed at changing the sensibilities of ordinary Muslims. In pursuing this project, she argues, the United States has found allies among moderate or liberal Muslims who, in this historical period, share an approach to “scriptural hermeneutics,” or interpretations of scripture. Mahmood argues compellingly that there is a convergence of US imperial interests and secular liberal reformers. This convergence has to be understood from “the standpoint of normative secularity and the kind of religious subjectivity it endorses” rather than simply as a “fortuitous coming together of political objectives and an indigenous social formation” (329).

36.

For a discussion in political theory of liberal theorists’ complicities with empire in previous eras, see Mehta 1999; Pitts 2005.

37.

Tom Coburn, Letter to NSF Director Subra Suresh, March 12, 2013. https:// web.archive.org/web/20140222024650;

www.coburn.senate.gov/public//index.

cfm?a=Files.Serve&File_id=60c99a67-2f0d-4c83-9b3d-1d65225d6abb. See also the reference to this letter at www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/tom-coburnnational-science-foundation_n_2921081.html. 38.

“Pact of silence” is Eyal Weizman’s phrase in Smith 2014. The United States is responsible for the vast majority of arms transactions worldwide. According to the New York Times, in 2011, the year in which the Arab uprisings began, American arms sales reached a record $66.3 billion, dwarfing second-place Russia’s $4.8 billion (Shanker 2012). Arms sales to dictatorial Gulf countries contributed to this increase, in marked contrast to US claims in favor of democratic transitions.

39.

There are a plethora of works on failed democratic transitions and/or authoritarian resilience, including Bellin 2002; Lust-Okar 2005; Brownlee 2007; Heydemann 2007; Pripstein and Angrist 2005. Many scholars have confirmed the relevance of their original findings, or at least the centrality of authoritarian resilience, in the aftermath of the “Arab Spring.” (Bellin 2012 is the classic example of such a statement in published form.) Jillian Schwedler’s award-winning Faith in Moderation (2006) exemplifies recurrent preoccupations with moderate Islamic activists; other

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work in this vein includes Wickham 2002, 2013; Hamid 2014; Bayat 2013; Brown 2012; Buehler 2013. Widely cited articles by nonspecialists, such as Fish (2002, 2011), Inglehart and Norris (2003), and Ross (2008), are concerned with gender dynamics in the Middle East and their relationship to authoritarianism. Other work attempts to specify which cultural identity (usually Arab or Muslim) is responsible for a particular political defect, be it authoritarianism or the economic marginalization of women (Stepan and Robinson 2003; Lakoff 2004; Rizzo et al. 2007). A cottage industry has arisen around the Arab Barometer survey, which aims to discover Arabs’ preferences through survey research (see Tessler and Jamal 2006, 2008; Tessler 2010; Diamond 2010). 40.

Even studies such as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby (2007) or Robert Pape’s Dying to Win (2005), which enjoin the United States not to engage in democratization or other civilizing projects, are still underwritten by a commitment to the importance of America’s place in the world and in the right of the United States to intervene when that intervention upholds the “national interest.” This appeal to the “national interest” may not be liberal in the way that, say, the democratic peace literature is, but it nevertheless defends an explicitly American liberal order while also presuming that such a defense is scientific (and therefore representative of how the world really is) rather than normative (and therefore representative of how the world ought to be). As noted earlier in the text, this distinction between “is” and “ought” has been subject to important critiques in political theory but ignored by the rest of the discipline. My point here is to underscore that such a distinction informs an ongoing coalescence of science, liberalism, and empire, even in studies that disavow America’s current democratization projects.

41.

An especially crude version of this argument, and its attendant reproduction of the myth of nonintervention, is Yasmine Ryan’s 2014 article in The Nation, “How One Country Emerged from the Arab Spring with a Democratic State.” She argues that “Tunisia’s success is at least partly attributable to the fact that it has never drawn the same degree of attention from the outside world as most other countries in the region. . . . Tunisia’s uprising and subsequent political transition have been overwhelmingly organic.” She also credits its culture (Tunisia’s “deep history of progressivism”) as well as its “strong institutions.” Thanks are owed to Sofia Fenner for drawing my attention to this article and for urging me to stress the Tunisian case.

42.

Jason Brownlee’s Democracy Prevention: The Politics of the U.S.-Egyptian Alliance (2012) uses the case of American-Egyptian relations to investigate how the United States helps shore up authoritarian regimes despite claims to the contrary. Located at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations, the book is

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attentive to US empire-making projects abroad. Brownlee focuses on contradictions in policy between the rhetoric of democracy promotion and sporadic efforts to support civil society actors, on the one hand, and the attempts to manage that participation and control unrest, on the other. As Brownlee rightly points out, stability has tended to be more important than freedom—whether that stability was made manifest in Sadat’s peace agreement with Israel or in efforts to maintain security as the war on terror escalated under Mubarak. Primarily historical, Brownlee’s account of the George W. Bush years in chapter 3 is especially illuminating, offering important revisions of dominant narratives in which Bush’s “freedom agenda” is seen as either a “strategic watershed,” a dramatic move toward democracy promotion, or simply a reiteration of politics as usual. Rather, these years offered important variations on the theme of imperial management and authoritarian retrenchment. Brownlee’s attunement to the US role in shoring up dictatorships places him at odds with many political scientists who tend to embrace American claims to be promoting democracy. He attends to the double standards, is cognizant of the systemic forms of injustice that make such democracy promotion hard to effect, and has a well-researched account of the elite pacts and strategic interests that undermine citizen participation. There is, to my knowledge, only one other mainstream book in political science in recent history that has attempted to privilege the US role in its understanding of authoritarian persistence, Amaney Jamal’s Of Empires and Citizens. Jamal, like Brownlee, recognizes that authoritarian resilience cannot be understood without examining the ways in which the United States has intervened to quash indigenous efforts to democratize. But her intervention is different from Brownlee’s. Relying on individual-level survey data to support the claim that the middle classes are anxious about democratization enabling populist sentiments to gain political traction, she argues that the middle classes have repelled efforts at major authoritarian reform, an argument congenial with Robert Vitalis’s When Capitalists’ Collide. (And yet the situation has proven more complicated in the context of the uprisings of 2011. Although Jamal is right to note that populism tends to be anti-American in the region, she does not seem able to account for how middle classes also uphold populist views, and she may place too much emphasis on the middle classes’ relationship to US aid.) The strength of her book, like Brownlee’s, lies in its attention to the varied role that an American imperial presence plays in efforts to maintain an authoritarian status quo. 43.

For a discussion of a shared “reluctance” in functional anthropology and Orientalist studies to discuss “explicitly and systematically” the “implications of European development for the political systems of non-European societies,” see Asad 1973, 11.

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44. For the full statement, see http://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-aaa/files/production/public/FileDownloads/pdfs/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/ CEAUSSIC_HTS_Final_Report.pdf. A similar controversy has surrounded doctors’ and nurses’ participation in torture, including the resignation of nurses involved in the force-feeding process at Guantanamo. See also an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of former GTMO detainees against two psychologists charged with devising the torture program. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/ cia-torture-survivors-sue-psychologists-aclu. 45.

Political science’s participation in imperial projects is not confined to the Middle

46.

The “democratic peace” has produced a cottage industry of supporters and detrac-

East, of course. tors; for proponents see Doyle 1983; Russett 1993; Owen 1994; Lipson 2005; and for critiques, see Layne 1994; Spiro 1994; Rosato 2003; many of the key articles are compiled in Brown, Lynn-Jones, and Miller 1996.

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chapter two

Middle East in Sociology, Sociology in the Middle East Reşat Kasaba There are moments in world affairs when a new atmosphere and a new direction can be perceived for the first time. I am apprehensive that we are at such a turning point in international relations. I fear that we may be moving from a time of adjustment and accommodation to a time of tension and conflict, from a time of international community building to one of chauvinism and militant nationalism, from a time of peaceful civilian programs for the advancement of human welfare to a time of armed might for the suppression of aggression, subversion, and revolution. —Senator J. W. Fulbright (quoted in Horowitz 1967, 196)

The above quote is from a speech given by Senator Fulbright in the mid1960s, expressing his apprehension about the heightening tensions during the Cold War and, in particular, about the growing involvement of the army and intelligence agencies in overt and covert operations to undermine unfriendly governments around the world. These words have become relevant once again, over forty years after they were first spoken. In the post-9/11 environment, characterized by high security surveillance, the debates about the relationship between academic pursuits and political interests and the related question of whether area studies or the scientific study of society provides the best way to respond to “national needs” have gained renewed currency. This chapter examines some of these discussions from a historical perspective by focusing on the relationship between Middle East studies (MES) and sociology as it evolved over the past century or so. As the other contributors to this volume show, some of the general arguments presented here also apply to other social science disciplines. As is also shown, however, each discipline has its own specific relationship with MES and area studies. This relationship is

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further complicated by the fact that area studies and MES are interdisciplinary by definition. In addition to the interference of political priorities, the relationship between sociology and MES has been overlain by debates that are internal to sociology as a discipline. Sociologists and other social scientists try to stay clear of the pursuit of deep knowledge about a specific region because such inquiries do not typically lead to testable hypotheses or generalizable conclusions about the human condition. Ironically, sociologists’ quest to generate scientific knowledge about society has rendered this “science of society” less comprehensive and more fragmented. The more “scientific” sociology has tried to become, the more it has focused on methodological rigor that is built on (preferably quantifiable) aspects of social phenomena. This has put a growing distance between sociological research and what is euphemistically referred to as the “real world,” especially the real world of non-Western areas like the Middle East. Consequently, for most of their existence in American academic institutions, sociology and MES have developed independently from each other as dictated by separately conceived research problems and agendas. They have come together in specific periods and under special conditions only to move apart again. However, brief as they have been, these intersections have had significant consequences for both sociology and MES. The first part of this chapter concentrates on three distinct periods in the history of the relationship between sociology and MES. In each of these periods, sociology and MES started in their separate but parallel trajectories. They then moved close to each other, even converging briefly, only to be pushed apart again. In each case, the pace and the shape of this pattern were conditioned primarily by prevailing political imperatives, which repeatedly pushed the Middle East to the center of US foreign policy. The first period goes back to the beginnings of sociology in France, to the ideas of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte concerning the new “science of society.” These thinkers paid a lot of attention to the Middle East, in particular, to the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, and were keen on asserting the universal applicability of their new science. Sociology and the study of the Middle East (and other non-Western societies) grew apart from each other when sociology moved to the United States, where it was recognized as a distinct discipline. To a certain extent, this divergence reflected the differences in the respective positions of Europe and the United States vis-à-vis the Middle East in the early decades of the twentieth century. As the United

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States did not have any of the colonial ties that had connected Europe to the Middle East for centuries—its imperial foray into the region was not to start for several more decades—early American sociologists found it easy to conceive of “society” in isolation from the rest of the world. The second period starts in the aftermath of World War II, when sociology and MES reconnected. It is no coincidence that this was also the period when the United States became a global power. The modernization school, which dominated the relationship between area studies and the social sciences in general in these years, identified the Middle East as a key area of interest. The region would serve not only as a test case for their theories of social change but also and more significantly as a field where the precepts of this theory could be applied, with the help of the US government, in order to hasten the outcomes that were thought to be desirable for all humanity. Macrosociology, which took modernization theory to task for its simplistic assumptions, was closer to area studies, and its growth also took place in this period. Both in modernization theory and in its macrohistorical critiques, area studies served at best as an appendage to the study of society. Limited as it was, this interest in area studies did not survive the end of the Cold War. In the euphoria of the early 1990s, it was expected by some that a single world society would either make non-Western cultural traits irrelevant or turn them into distinct, identifiable, and containable entities. Such visions quickly dissolved in the aftermath of 9/11, which marks the third period and a new interest in the sociology of the Middle East and Islam, in particular. In a crude repetition of the post–World War II pattern, this new closeness has been overdetermined by US government policies and has been conditioned by the high-security environment of the War on Terror. This relationship has become further complicated by the sweep of social uprisings that started in 2011 in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). While the long-term results of these upheavals will not be known for some time to come, it is clear that they have already led to a profound reconfiguration of the political order in the Middle East. This development is putting to test the accumulated wisdom of MES and all of the social sciences. In the second part of the chapter I consider the history of sociology in the MENA region. Unlike in the United States, the connection between area studies and sociology has always been close in MENA. Prominent local intellectuals, some of whom have been trained as sociologists, became supporters and even agents of westernizing/modernizing reforms, which endeared them

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and their societies to early European sociologists. In those parts of the Middle East that came under colonial rule, the discipline of sociology was introduced by European sociologists and social anthropologists who moved to the region primarily to take charge of programs designed to mold the transformation of these societies in service to the interests of the colonizing state. This compromised beginning notwithstanding, sociology reached new levels of prominence in MENA in the second half of the twentieth century. As colonial rule ended, some sociologists allied themselves with the forces of the new states, facilitating the formation of new governmental institutions and the definition of secular ideologies of nationalism, national liberation, and socialism. Others assumed a more critical stand and helped open spaces for the study of topics such as underdevelopment, dependency, urbanization, social classes, peasant societies, gender, and religion. This latter incarnation of sociology was considered to be so subversive that, for example, during the military interregnum of the early 1970s, sociology and socialism were used interchangeably by military rulers as an excuse to prosecute sociologists for their research. In recent decades, sociology in the West and sociology in the Middle East have started to look increasingly similar. This is partly due to the growing influence of American-trained sociologists in the region and partly to the agenda-setting power of international funding agencies (the most significant of which are US-based). As they acquired the methodological sophistication of their US-based colleagues, Middle Eastern sociologists have been focusing on local phenomena and generating massive amounts of local data and original research. At the same time, institutional fragmentation and intellectual diversification have made it increasingly difficult for researchers who are located in or outside the region to communicate the findings of their projects to each other. Potentially, interdisciplinary centers such as those funded by the US Department of Education’s Title VI program may play a role in ending the fragmentation that affects sociology. They can provide a context for bringing together the specialized findings of projects and generate knowledge about the Middle East as a whole by using the best tools of the social sciences, including those of sociology. Such centers have a similar impact internationally by linking academic institutions and their research activities.

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I. Sociology and the Middle East United in Europe, Separate in the United States The principles of sociology were articulated in the middle of the nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, who was a student of and secretary to the French intellectual and businessman Saint-Simon. Like Saint-Simon and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, Comte was interested in creating a universal science of society, which would not only help us understand the world, but provide the necessary tools for ordering it. This would be the basis of a new secular religion that would help fulfill the promise of the Enlightenment. Comte divided the new science of society into two parts: social statistics and social dynamics. Social statistics would study the interrelationships between the major institutions of society, such as family, economy, and polity; social dynamics would focus on whole societies and study how they developed over time. In the Middle East, Ottoman intellectuals of the nineteenth century found the ideas of both Comte and his mentor Saint-Simon very appealing. Saint-Simon and Comte, in turn, were enamored by the reform efforts in the Middle East. Saint-Simon traveled to Egypt in the 1820s. Impressed by Muhammad Ali and his reforms in Egypt, he saw this governor as the bearer of principles of social order and progress. His pupil Comte thought that the Ottoman Empire had the potential to be a place “where the Religion of Humanity could become the guiding beacon of governmental action” and that Islam did not constitute a barrier against such transformation (Mardin 1962, 155). It was the universalist tenets of the Enlightenment that informed Comte and Saint-Simon’s approach, and it was precisely this outlook that made them popular in the Middle East and in other parts of the world. Following in the footsteps of these founding figures, European sociology continued to ask big questions about social phenomena in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thinkers like Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Tönnies started with inquiries that were rooted in Western European history, but they did not intend their answers to be relevant only to that part of the world. Even when they were engaged in ideal typical constructs for the purposes of comparing Europe with the rest of the world, they saw the themes of these comparisons (capitalism, community, society, rationality) as fully relevant to non-Western settings as well. Although the term “sociology” was coined in France and the discipline was “invented” there, this new science was first constituted as a separate department

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in the United States in the 1890s, first at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia University (see Kennedy and Centeno 2007). Early sociologists in Europe were not overly specialized. They incorporated the methods of law, philosophy, and politics in their study of the dynamics of social systems. As sociology moved to the United States, however, it shed some of its expansive qualities. Of Comte’s two parts of sociology, it was “social statistics,” that is, the study of the interrelationship among the major social institutions, that interested the early American sociologists. As social reformers, early sociologists were motivated by a deep-seated desire to identify and propose solutions to problems that hampered the orderly functioning of their societies. For example, Franklin Henry Giddings, one of the founders of the Columbia school of sociology, devoted his attention to poverty and other social problems in the southern United States. His reformist convictions shaped not only his professional research but also his overall approach to his work. Giddings encouraged some of his female students at Bryn Mawr and Barnard Colleges to take an active role in society, especially as teachers in the South (Maclean and Williams 2005, 262). Their generally progressive outlook notwithstanding, early American sociologists paid little attention to the rest of the world (for an early and perceptive critique of American sociology published in the American Journal of Sociology, see Boran 1947).l A survey of the papers presented and published by the American Sociological Society between 1907 and 1933 shows that to the extent that there was an interest in foreign areas and cultures, it was limited to questions of war, peace, migration, and population in places where the United States had direct and immediate interests. Typically, such studies lacked in-depth knowledge and were designed to provide support for the fledgling imperial interests of the United States. Giddings wrote, “My studies of theoretical sociology long ago led me to believe that the combination of small states into larger political aggregates must continue until all the semicivilized, barbarian and savage communities of the world are brought under the protection of the larger civilized nations” (1900, v). He believed that it would be only through the creation of such a canvas that a human community that shared the same moral qualities could be formed and serve as the basis for creating the “wonderful phenomenon of the democratic empire” (11). Giddings saw the American involvement in Asia as indispensable for controlling the expansion of the Russian-Chinese “tradition of irresponsible authority” (289). He characterized the war in the Philippines as the “most nearly

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bloodless battle of any importance within the Christian era” (289), notwithstanding the fact that the resistance to US imperialism would end up causing more than 200,000 mostly Philippine casualties. Giddings’s perception of immigrant communities paralleled his views of the rest of the world and the people who were arriving as immigrants from those places. According to him, newcomers to America naturally gravitated toward the safety of small farming, minor manufacturing, and shopkeeping because these fit better their innate qualities; whereas the “native American mind” (meaning the early European settlers!) was characterized by “the love of risk and of great responsibilities” that make “our industrial and commercial undertakings” possible (275). In those early years of US expansion overseas, the only critical perspective on American imperialism and its effect on other societies was provided by the Communist Party (see Jenks 1928; Knight 1928; Marsh 1928; Nearing and Freeman 1925). The Middle East as a region figured very little in these discussions in the early decades of the twentieth century, despite the fact that a growing number of American missionaries, archaeologists, diplomats, journalists, and representatives of the oil industry had been generating a significant body of knowledge about the region. As early as World War I, the Armenian genocide and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire forced legal scholars as well as diplomats and politicians to focus on questions of ethnicity, religion, nationalism, sovereignty, and international governance, providing the foundation for much of the subsequent sociological literature on these topics (Mazower 2012; Balakian 2003; Power 2003). After the war, several studies on the Middle East grew directly out of the Western sociological tradition. A comprehensive survey of Istanbul was published in 1922, titled Constantinople Today or The Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople, a Study of Social Life. This study was conducted by a group of American social scientists and was edited by Clarence Richard Johnson, professor of sociology at Robert College. It contains extensive information about all facets of life in Istanbul—from work to leisure, from urban government to widows, orphans, and crime. The same group conducted a similar study in Izmir, but, due to the great fire that destroyed a large part of the city in 1922 and the chaos of the transitional period between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, it was never published. However, these efforts were linked to postwar conditions and did not serve as harbingers of a sociological tradition. In fact, it would take another three and a half decades for American

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sociologists to pick up from where these initial efforts left off and begin conducting sustained research on foreign areas, including the Middle East. Unlike the Americans whose interest in the Middle East did not become paramount until after World War II, the Europeans continued to be heavily involved in the region during the first part of the twentieth century. During these years, politics of empire and policies inspired by the Enlightenment gave way to direct European colonialism in the Middle East. Many of the Europeans who collected and published “social scientific” data and information about the Middle East were part of the diplomatic and/or military establishment. For example, Mark Sykes, who later negotiated the Sykes-Picot agreement, which provided the framework for the division of the Middle East between France and Britain, was a military officer who spent long years in the region. During his travels there, he wrote one of the earliest and most comprehensive descriptions of the Kurdish tribes who lived in eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia (Sykes 1908). Also in the early twentieth century, the French colonial government in Morocco created the Scientific Mission in Tangiers. Its founding director, the French sociologist Edouard Michaux-Bellaire, stated the mission’s aims as follows: The object of this mission . . . [is] to initiate sociological studies. . . . It [is] necessary to make an inventory of Morocco, its tribes, its cities, its brotherhoods, to find their origins, their ramifications, their wars and alliances, to trace their history in various dynasties, to study its institutions and customs, in other words, to understand as much as possible the area, where, one day, we might be called upon to take some action. (Quoted in Sabagh 1976, 516)

The historians, philologists, and linguists who were trained in European institutions and learned the languages, histories, and cultures of the colonized regions served as brokers of information and a source of knowledge about the Middle East, especially in Europe. These experts, however, were primarily interested in “classical” civilizations and had little to say about how people in the Middle East were living, working, and expressing themselves in the twentieth century (Said 1976). While this research would become the foundation of what was later described as “area studies,” it made little impression on American sociology prior to World War II. In a survey of sociology and international relations, Luther Lee Bernard and Jessie Bernard wrote in the early 1930s:

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Sociology has not been . . . particularly concerned with documentary materials. It has been one of [the] most persistent among the social sciences in adhering to the interpretation of contemporaneous data and in devising methods for collecting and generalizing these data. It is worthy of note in this connection that perhaps more works on methodology have been written in recent years by sociologists than by members of any other branch of the social sciences. (1934, 14)

The war years constituted an important turning point in the relationship between sociology and Middle East and other area studies in the United States. In a pattern that had been followed in Europe in earlier decades, social scientists and policy makers sought the expertise of researchers who were knowledgeable about foreign areas where the United States was fighting. Still, it would take somewhat longer for the Middle East to be included in the regions deemed critical to US interests, despite the growing importance of Middle Eastern oil. A position paper drafted by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) as late as 1946 described the “Near East” as being “completely neglected.” The report went on to state that “there are few scholars in the country who know anything about the area except in the field of languages” (Hall 1947, 84; see also Vitalis 2006). Modernization Theory, Its Critiques, and the Return of Area Studies to Sociology Building on the momentum of the war years, American social sciences focused on the world outside the United States more systematically in the 1950s and 1960s. It was primarily the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union that prompted the United States to make available grants in these years to study not only the “Communist bloc” but also Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, which had become the front-line zones in this new war. The scholarship that emerged out of these efforts would become the core of the modernization literature in the 1960s. Although modernization’s pedigree included research and writing by a wide variety of social scientists, it was a sociologist, Edward Shils, who first defined the contours of this approach at a conference on “the political problems and prospects of the ‘new states’ in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa” in New York in 1959 (Gilman 2003, 1). As it was first articulated by Shils, modernity echoed the socially liberal notions not only of democracy but also of

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“equalitarian, scientific, economically advanced, and sovereign” society (quoted in Gilman 2003, 1). The development of the modernization school represents an important turning point in sociology because it signaled the importance of focusing on “foreign areas” and reincorporating a global perspective into the discipline. Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of the Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Alex Inkeles and David Smith’s Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries, and other works in this genre included data from different countries (Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iran in Lerner; Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Nigeria, and Bangladesh in Inkeles and Smith) some of which were based on original ethnographic research. In terms of its substance, the modernization paradigm remained remarkably loyal to the social evolutionary approach that had shaped much of mainstream American sociology. Just as the social reformers had viewed everything that did not quite fit the privileged Western European Protestant path as signs of problems that needed to be solved (from poverty to race to crime) or as examples of arrested development against which little could be done (Jews and blacks were singled out here), the modernization theorists saw the non-European (and that included American) world as occupying a stage lower than that of the modern West. Also, with or without original research, these studies consisted of comparing these societies to an idealtypical notion of a modern society. Hence, it was not so much about Turkey or Bangladesh that one learned from reading these authors but all the ways in which these countries were different from the West and how they were (or could be) converging on the same path of modern universality. The US government believed that communist ideology, and in particular the closed nature of the states that were under the Soviet sphere of influence, constituted the most formidable barrier to non-Western societies converging with pro-Western governments on the path toward modernity. Hence the federal government developed a comprehensive policy of combating these ideologies and piercing shields that protected the countries from the Eastern bloc. A significant outcome of this new orientation was a new interest in area studies and increased government funding aimed at bringing them into conversation with the social sciences. The underlying premise of the US interest in non-Western areas was to understand what made these societies divergent. There was a similarity between how the US government articulated its policy of drawing the rest of the world into its orbit and how the

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modernization theory prescribed its path to universal progress. This affinity yielded several well-funded projects and institutions in which sociology acquired a prominent place in the articulation and implementation of US policy around the world. One such initiative was Project Troy, which started in 1950 “to bring together the best brains in the country to point the way toward the solution of the vexing problem of getting the truth behind the Iron Curtain” (Needell 1998, 3). MIT became the main university where Project Troy was housed, at the newly created Center for International Studies (CENIS). CENIS provided a home for scholars such as Daniel Lerner and W. W. Rostow and was thought of as the prototype of other centers that grew out of this collaboration (Needell 1998, 23; Gendzier 1998, 75). In these governmentfunded centers, “specialists in the various phases of political warfare [could] be trained in their tasks by assisting universities in political warfare research” (Needell 1998, 22). It was revealed later that the CIA was centrally involved in the creation, funding, and administration of CENIS during those years (Cumings 1998, 172). Another similar effort that began with even more fanfare in 1964 (only to be discarded amid widespread criticism in 1965) was Project Camelot. This initiative was to have an annual budget of $50 million and was launched to determine the “feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations of the world” (Horowitz 1967, 4–5). Among its objectives were “to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war within national societies” (5). The motivation for Project Camelot was political, or, more specifically, military. It was an attempt to suppress and thwart social movements in Latin America and Asia, since the USSR was believed to be exploiting these conditions and using them to enhance its own standing and influence in the world. The rationale and goals of Project Camelot were presented in terms that appealed to those sociologists who wanted to go back to doing “big range social science” (6). These sociologists wanted to create “social science of contemporary relevance, which would not suffer from a parochial narrowness of vision to which their own professional backgrounds had conditioned them” (6). Like their Comtean precursors, they believed in the “perfectibility of mankind” even if this required the help of the military establishment. The sites for the Camelot research were chosen primarily on the basis of their relevance to US foreign policy interests. While Latin America, specifically Chile, was the only place where Camelot

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actually funded projects, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey were among the countries listed as possible future sites (57). Troy, Camelot, and other projects that were tied to US defense and intelligence received scorn from some prominent names in American social sciences almost immediately. Many of these people did not want to jeopardize their own reputations or endanger their or their students’ involvement in overseas research by participating in projects that were overtly or covertly linked to US intelligence agencies. For instance, the sociologist John Galtung declined an invitation to participate in one of the meetings associated with Camelot by saying that he could not accept the notion of the army as an agency of development rather than as an agency for managing, or perhaps even promoting, conflict. Galtung also made sure that the true nature of Project Camelot was widely known in his circles in Latin America, making it impossible for this project to continue with a hidden agenda of any kind (13). Marshall Sahlins commented on the naïveté of Camelot social scientists for believing that they “could get in some good research, educate the military to foreign realities, and use this opportunity to reconstruct American attitudes and policies” (1967, 75). He continued, “The quixotic scholar enters the agreement in belief that knowledge breeds power; his military counterpart, in the assurance that power breeds knowledge” (76). While Projects Camelot and Troy and other similar initiatives were explicitly linked to promoting US interests abroad, several programs that grew in the 1950s and 1960s were interested in expanding research and knowledge in foreign areas from a more academic point of view, emphasizing scholarscholar exchanges; study of languages, culture, and history; and study abroad programs. Supporters of these programs, including, most prominently, Senator Fulbright, believed them to be a more effective way of enhancing the image and power of the United States overseas than getting involved in clandestine counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary operations. In spearheading the establishment of the program that would be named after him in 1946, Senator Fulbright sought “to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries” (Sahlins 1967, 76). Title VI of the National Defense Education Act, which was authorized in 1958 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, would provide funds for research and education in international and foreign areas and languages by supporting the establishment of resource centers and by making available grants and fellowships to graduate students for language study. The Title VI

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act was reauthorized in 1965 as part of the Higher Education Act, and its administration was placed under the Department of Education, where it continues to exist to this day. Private foundations and nonprofit research agencies joined in the growing interest in area and international studies in the postwar period. As a result of the Cold War rivalries and the growing importance of oil in the world economy, the Middle East became increasingly prominent as an area of interest in all of these initiatives. The SSRC was one of the first organizations to take this route. It established the Committee on World Area Research in 1946 and the Near and Middle East Committee in 1951 to support interdisciplinary and collaborative research in the Middle East (Lockman 2004, 125–26). Around the same time, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations started to offer institutional grants to create centers for international and area research in American universities. In some cases, these foundations and the US government worked closely together, as was the case with the Ford Foundation, which helped fund CENIS at MIT and set up a program in behavioral sciences that was similar to the one pursued under the umbrella of Project Troy. As the US involvement in Vietnam and other parts of the world became a target of criticism in the 1960s, many academics felt compelled to distance themselves from defense and intelligence agencies. Senator Fulbright himself became a vocal critic of counterinsurgency projects. It would be a signal service to the countries involved and to the national interests of the United States if the intellectual resources devoted to these dubious “studies” of insurgency and counterinsurgency were diverted to the more constructive projects of . . . social and economic reform that offer the only real hope of avoiding violent revolution. (1967, 199–200; see also 196)

Motivations that underlay the origins of area and international studies notwithstanding, academic, public, and private interest in them in the postwar era created a substantial body of knowledge about foreign areas, including the Middle East, in the 1960s and 1970s. The area studies centers that were set up with Title VI grants and the interdisciplinary work that was supported by them and by SSRC, the American Council of Learned Societies, and other private foundations fostered the development of deep knowledge about world regions, something that had been hard to do in disciplinary units. However, the overall impact and significance of such work should not be exaggerated. In each three- to four-year cycle, the Title VI grants help support ten

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to fifteen Middle East centers in the entire country. Several of these centers have been renewed in each cycle since the inception of the program, more than fifty years ago. Moreover, sociology and other social science disciplines were still averse to altering their own approaches and refused to integrate area studies centers and their activities into their programs. In major universities such as Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, the history of the Middle East is not studied as part of the general history curriculum but housed in separate Near or Middle East departments or institutes. If anything, the disdain with which mainstream sociology regarded area specialization increased over time; it continued to be just too hard for sociologists and other social scientists to find a place for area studies in their conception of what social science should be. Area research was still perceived as something that detracted from sociology’s overall goal to produce generalizable and testable hypotheses. Ironically, the parochialism of the discipline was increasing in tandem with its growing emphasis on generating universal hypotheses. One major exception to this trend was the emergence of macrosociology as a field of specialization in sociology in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the questions that eventually led to the emergence of comparative and historical “macro” sociology were similar to those of modernization theory, but there was a strong critical dimension that set this new field apart. In particular, modernization theory was criticized for becoming too closely aligned with the desirability of “order” and being too willing to work closely with the US government to “prevent conflict” around the world. The modernization brand of sociology was doing what the original practitioners had tried to do in the United States: define “social problems” from an ideological perspective and attempt to explain and solve them, albeit on an international level. Furthermore, many of the analyses and predictions generated by modernization theorists were turning out to be shortsighted or plain wrong (Frank 1971). Some social scientists argued that it was precisely because it had become too closely wedded to the established order that modernization theory had gone astray. In criticizing Project Camelot, for example, Sahlins noted that many of the scholars who were associated with it characterized demands for change as “social pathology.” He wrote, “What had been for some time a cultural common law marriage between scientific functionalism and the natural interest of a leading world power in the status quo became under the aegis of the Project Camelot an explicit and legitimate union” (1967, 77).

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Macrosociologists argued that dynamic processes such as state formation, social movements, and revolutions had to be examined from a long-term and large-scale historical and comparative perspective and that this could be done only if the functionalist, status quo–oriented premises of the modernization school were discarded (Skocpol 1984). Others recast the modernization school’s theories of stages of development and the expected, global convergence of its ideals in Marxist terms. By refocusing attention on the exploitative relations between the industrialized and underdeveloped countries, these scholars questioned the easy generalizations of the modernization theorists. A further extension of this critical school asserted that the proper unit of analysis for studying these stages was not the nation-state but a series of world systems. According to this line of thought, social change worldwide was moving, not toward an endless multiplication of types and repetition of trends, but toward inevitable tensions, crises, and total transformation. The questions raised by the comparative historical and world systems schools naturally led to close cooperation with area studies. Sociologists such as Anouar Abdel Malek, Hamza Alavi, Çağlar Keyder, Samir Amin, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Said Arjomand, Janet Abu-Lughod, Sami Zubaida, and Salim Tamari played an important role in bringing their area knowledge to bear on these discussions and in providing the new schools with depth that was absent from modernization studies. The International Sociological Association formed by UNESCO in 1949 provided an institutional basis for sociologists from all over the world to bring their work into communication with each other and with the broader theoretical debates. Although these new schools of thought were deeply critical of the discipline, the questions they raised eventually found a niche within sociology. They set up separate sections of Comparative and Historical Sociology and Political Economy of the World Systems in the American Sociological Association. Some of the macrosociological work has been received very well, winning awards and earning space in the lists of most influential research in the discipline. In fact, Randall Collins (1999) has described the 1970s and 1980s as the “golden age of macrohistorical sociology.” For area studies, the price of being admitted to mainstream sociology in the United States, however, was to concede that in-depth knowledge of world regions was of secondary importance to methodological rigor. The main interest of macrosociologists was not so much learning about different parts of the world but showing that their (macro) theories and generalizations were

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valid by relying on selective use of the accumulated knowledge in area studies. For example, Theda Skocpol’s theory of social revolutions was almost immediately tested and found wanting by the real-world challenge posed by the Iranian Revolution. In an article she wrote in 1981, Skocpol admitted that her previous framework may have been proven inadequate to account for this new major modern revolution, but she went on to suggest ways of thinking about the transformations in Iran so that the revolution could be interpreted in terms “analytically consistent with the explanatory principles I used in States and Social Revolutions” (1994, 243). There was a similar effort in the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011. This messy affair, whose origins and ultimate outcome are still far from being clear, was almost immediately put on the bed of theoretical analysis and “explained” by several disciplinary sociologists (see Perez-Oviedo 2015; Beck 2014). Eventually, many of the researchers in the United States in comparative and historical sociology also became overly concerned with methodological perfection, even though such exercises do not always make significant contribution to our collective knowledge of the world. For example, the articles collected in Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (2003), edited by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, accept the premise of positivist methodology that dominates sociology and strive to show that what is done in comparative historical analysis fits the general parameters of this methodology—that one can, for example, derive generalizable conclusions from a single case, that small-N and large-N studies can be equally rigorous, and that there are ways of doing qualitative research or combining qualitative with quantitative methodology so that their use does not undermine the scientific character of comparative historical research. Charles Kurzman’s 2004 book on the Iranian Revolution constitutes an important exception precisely because it allows the messy and unpredictable nature of the real world to enter his analytical framework.2 In part because of its intellectual origins in the French Annales school, the world systems school had a more direct and mutually beneficial relationship with area studies, but, compared to comparative historical sociology, it has remained in the margins of institutionalized sociology in the United States. Some of these shortcomings notwithstanding, macrosociology has built strong ties between area studies and sociology and has generated an important body of literature on the Middle East. Institutionally, however, the generation of this knowledge and the inclusion of Middle East specialists in

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sociology departments have resulted not from targeted decisions but as a byproduct of decisions that are made on the basis of more conventional needs of the departments and the discipline (see Anderson 2006). While American sociology maintained its distance from area studies, area studies did not show an interest in being included in sociology or other social science disciplines. In fact, many area specialists who were ensconced in the centers established with public or private funds refused to respond to even the meager overtures of sociologists claiming their subject matter was unique and impervious to theoretical generalizations. Consequently, except for several efforts closely identified with a limited number of prominent sociologists and historians, there has been little institutional or other effort to build bridges between MES and sociology in the United States in the post–World War II period. This separation appeared to reach its most contentious level in the 1990s, after the Cold War, when some major figures in the social sciences declared that area studies had become irrelevant. In a much cited and maligned statement, Robert Bates wrote in 1996 that area studies had “failed to generate scientific knowledge” (1–2; see also Bates 1997).This was an eerie echo of an objection to area studies that appeared in a 1947 report written for the SSRC: “Where is the hard core? . . . I can imagine a man trained in area as being a most charming gentleman, and interesting conversationalist but not as being a scholar” (Hall 1947, 20; emphasis in original). In the view of detractors of area studies, the only reason such specializations prospered was the external funding they received under the imperatives of the Cold War world. The availability of such support had provided a cocoon that made these studies immune to scientific requirements of testing and verification. Once the Cold War was over, this distorting influence on the orderly progress of science would disappear and sociology and other disciplines would resume their natural growth, generating and solving their own problems without having to worry about global disparities, which they saw as ephemeral. Sociology’s disinterest in substantive knowledge of areas in general and the Middle East in particular can be gauged from the small number of Middle East–related articles published in the discipline’s main journals in these years. The American Sociological Review published fifteen Middle East–specific articles between 1985 and 2015. There were thirty-four large-N studies that included the Middle East in their samples. Eight of the articles in the first group are on Israel, dealing with topics such as determinants of educational

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attainment, ethnic group mobility in the labor market, identity, terrorism, and segregation. Four of the remaining seven are on the Iranian Revolution, using this historical case to assess various theories of social movements. One article in the same journal compares the Ottoman Empire with France in terms of the role of peasants in social unrest, and another discusses the demography of rural Egypt. Large-N studies, on the other hand, typically seek answers to big sociological questions. The inclusion of countries in the Middle East in these data sets does not necessarily shed light on these places but helps test general hypotheses such as the relationship between industrialization and nation building or cultural values and modernization. For example, Inglehart and Baker’s article “Modernization, Cultural Change, and Persistence of Traditional Values” (2000) finds evidence of both massive cultural change and the persistence of distinctive cultural traditions in modernizing countries. Between 1995 and 2015, another major journal of the discipline, the American Journal of Sociology, published only five articles that dealt with the Middle East (Barkey and van Rossem 1997; Kurzman and Leahey 2004; Spilerman 2004; Shor and Simchai 2009; Rydgren, Sofi, and Hällsten 2013). One is on the Ottoman Empire, another focuses on Iran and the Ottoman Empire as case studies but also has a large data set with non–Middle East countries, one is on Iraq, and the other three are on Israel. All five articles are written by people with area knowledge of the cases they are studying. But like the articles in the American Sociological Review, these are structured to test general sociological propositions since this is a key criterion for being published in these journals. Hence Barkey and van Rossem find that villages located in an intermediary position in regional market networks are more prone to contention, Kurzman and Leahey show that intellectuals play an important role in revolutions, and Spilerman shows that parental wealth has a positive effect on the living standards of young couples in Israel. The annual number of Middle East–related graduate theses from sociology departments at US universities has varied between seven and twenty-one between 1995 and 2015. In 2004, this number rose from thirteen to eighteen, reflecting no doubt the growing interest in the region after 9/11. Another jump occurred in 2013, reflecting the interest in the Middle East in the wake of the “Arab Spring.” The total number of PhD degrees awarded in sociology by American universities each year was between 581 and 612 during this time period. In other words, each year between 2 and 3 percent of the total

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number of sociology dissertations have focused on the Middle East during this period.3 While sociology departments have not been particularly welcoming to Middle East (or any other area) specialists or research, the American Sociological Association (ASA) has been considerably more open. In 1997, the review journal of the association, Contemporary Sociology, commissioned articles on sociology in Turkey, Israel, and the Arab world (Ibrahim 1997). The theme of ASA’s hundredth annual meeting in 2005 was Comparative Perspectives and Competing Explanations, and it included a large number of papers on the Middle East organized in panels on religion, social movements, migration, demography, gender, nationalism, and state formation. There were also thematic sessions on Islam and the Arab world, as well as one titled “Competing Perspectives on Comparative Explanations: Area Studies vs. Comparative Sociology.” Despite this apparent interest, however, outside the thematic panels the program of annual meetings resembles the contents of the journals, with papers on the Middle East serving as one among several cases selected to test a general sociological proposition. As can be expected, the universities with Title VI centers, such as the University of Michigan, University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin, Emory, and University of California, Berkeley, are well represented among these presentations. Most recently, Contemporary Sociology featured a symposium on political Islam at which several sociologists from the Middle East and the United States reviewed the same three books, thereby providing different perspectives on the same set of issues.4 The representation of sociology in MESA has been considerably lower than political science or history. According to the latest numbers, there are 56 sociology faculty members and 22 sociology students among the members of MESA, compared to about 243 political scientists and more than 616 historians. It is also instructive to look at some of the papers presented by sociologists at MESA’s annual meetings.5 While the presentations at ASA clearly fit the guidelines of the discipline and concern themselves not so much with the Middle East but sociology as such, those at MESA are much broader in their understanding of sociology. Interdisciplinarity is clearly ingrained in many of these studies; it would be hard to tell whether some of them have been written by sociologists, anthropologists, or historians. It may not be an exaggeration to say that by the time they come to MESA, sociologists cease to be sociologists, at least in the sense that this

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term is understood by professional practitioners in the United States. It is not surprising that some of the more prescient accounts of the Arab Spring appeared not in the flagship journals of the discipline but in more specialized and interdisciplinary venues where sociologists with area expertise find a more receptive audience.6 The Middle East in a High-Security World: Post–9/11 Problems In the aftermath of 9/11, the Middle East area studies has become the beneficiary of government largesse on a scale that even surpasses the attention that the communist pact countries received during the Cold War years. Part of this attention is focused directly on the Middle East and has taken the form of increased funding for strategic languages (including Arabic, Persian, and Urdu), programs such as the National Security Education Program, FLAS Fellowships, and Title VI centers. Another, and more important, boost has come by way of the requirements of the so-called War on Terror. Since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency have jointly created twelve Homeland Security Centers of Excellence at six universities with grants that approach a total of $100 million.7 By creating these centers, the Department seeks to bring together the nation’s best experts and “focus its most talented researchers on a variety of threats that include agricultural, chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological, explosive, and cyber terrorism as well as the behavioral aspects of terrorism” (Department of Homeland Security n.d). Finally, we have seen a proliferation of private and public watchdogs monitoring how international affairs, in particular the Middle East, are studied on university campuses. The best known such private group is the website Campus Watch dedicated to “monitoring Middle East Studies.”8 On the public side, US Congress is considering creating a special body of “oversight” in order to keep track of the activities of Title VI centers and to make sure that the grants are not spent for purposes contrary to US interests (Doumani 2006). Some of these initiatives and the publications related to them have intimidated scholars and teachers (two titles written for this purpose are Kramer 2001 and Horowitz 2006). The discussions and debates concerning area studies in the post– 9/11 period remind one of the discussions reviewed above concerning Project Camelot. As was true then, today too scholars and institutions are making choices as to how to respond and position themselves in the face of these developments. Middle East in Sociology, Sociology in the Middle East 101

II. Sociology in the Middle East Sociology in the Middle East traces its origins to the medieval scholarstatesman Ibn Khaldūn, who was born in Tunis in 1332; he traveled, lived, and worked in a number of places in the Arab world and died in Cairo in 1406. Ibn Khaldūn’s major work, Muqaddimah, is considered one of the earliest systematic treatises on the question of what holds societies together—the question that would become the main focus of sociology in Europe in the nineteenth century. Ibn Khaldūn became well known for his explanations based on a theory of tribal solidarity and elite circulation and for considering the role of the environment and climate in the rise and fall of empires. He was widely known and respected during his lifetime, and his reputation has only increased with the passage of time. His writings were translated into Turkish and read by the Ottoman ruling elite as the clouds of defeat descended on the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century (Fleischer 1984). Today statues of Ibn Khaldūn adorn public squares in Arab capitals and his image appears on currencies and postage stamps. The Egyptian sociologist Hassan el-Saaty declared, “Egypt is the first country in the world where sociology was ever studied! The first teacher of the new science was its first originator and classifier[,] . . . Abd-al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun” (quoted in Sabagh 1976, 513). According to another sociologist, Ayad al-Qazzaz, Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddimah legitimizes sociology as part of Arab culture (in Sabagh 1976, 543). It is a sign of the high esteem in which he is held that the research center headed by Egypt’s most prominent sociologist, Sadd Eddin Ibrahim, is named after him. Ibn Khaldūn is seen as the precursor of what would become sociology in the Middle East only in light of the questions the discipline raised in Europe in the nineteenth century. The arrival of the discipline itself in the region coincided almost exactly with its articulation as a discipline and a new science in Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century. This was the period when intellectuals in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states were engaged in questions of social integration, state formation, and national identity—precisely the questions that occupied classical European and early American sociologists. Among them, the European thinker whose work was most relevant to these questions and who had a direct influence on the development of sociology in the Middle East was Émile Durkheim. In some cases, this influence was direct. Two Egyptians, Mansur Fahmi and

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Lucian Lévy-Bruhl, earned their PhDs under Durkheim’s supervision on the subjects of women and Islam and the social philosophy of Ibn Khaldūn in 1913 and 1918, respectively (Bagader 1997, 71). Ziya Gökalp, considered the founding father of Turkish sociology and the principal theoretician of Turkish nationalist ideology, was a prominent Durkheimian as well. Both in his discussions of social solidarity and the ideas that direct social life, Gökalp explicitly relied on Durkheimian concepts (on Gökalp, see Berkes 1959; Parla 1985; Heyd 1950). Sociology has played a dual role in the Middle East ever since it made its first appearance in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, early sociologists have been among the leading theoreticians and advocates of state and nation formation across the region. Ziya Gökalp was a member of the Young Turk party and was drafted by Riza Nur, minister of health and social solidarity in the new Republican regime, to research and write about the Kurdish communities in eastern Turkey, with a view to “educate the Kurds about their Turkish origins” (Gökalp 1992, 6). In Arab countries sociologists identified themselves with the secular “revolutionary” anticolonial regimes and put their science in the service of these projects in the aftermath of World War II. According to one Egyptian sociologist, the goal of the discipline was to establish a mobilizing ideology that would be at once “ethical, scientific, reformative, industrial, and Arab socialist” (Ibrahim 1997, 550). In Iran too there was a strong current of sociology that supported the Pahlavi regime in its quest to modernize the country as well as the opposition that grew in subsequent years (Mahdi and Lahsaeizadeh 1992, 61– 65). It is hard not to notice the similarities between these sentiments and the confidence in the transformative power of sociology, which had motivated the early European sociologists. Ibrahim describes this as the “overselling” of sociology in the Middle East, which produced a limited amount of genuine research and empirical information about Arab society in these years while generating support for various political projects. On the other hand, a large amount of sociological research has concentrated on social interactions that are outside the direct purview of the state. Urbanization, internal and international migration, peasant societies, and religion became subjects of sociological research and writing in the Middle East. In Turkey, the development of this critical perspective is traced to the work of émigré sociologists who had taken refuge in Turkey during World War II, for example, Gerhard Kessler, who after being fired from his position

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in Leipzig by the Nazis followed his teacher Franz Neumark to Turkey and founded the Department of Economic Sciences and Sociology at Istanbul University in 1935. He is credited with introducing a tradition of problemoriented sociological research in Turkey. A long and distinguished body of sociological research and writing grew from these beginnings.9 The underlying theme of most of this research acquired an increasingly critical tone in the 1960s and 1970s, with a growing emphasis on the disruptive effects of capitalist development and strong influence by neo-Marxist paradigms that emerged in Europe during these years.10 Many of these studies were in implicit, if not explicit, dialogue with the modernization theory and, by extension, with modernizing political leaders (İslamoğlu and Keyder 1977). The breach with modernization became particularly sharp in the 1990s with studies of religion. A number of sociologists in Turkey, especially Şerif Mardin and Nilüfer Göle, challenged a key tenet of the modernization school by arguing that religiosity and modernity may not be incompatible after all. The oppositional stand of sociology became further entrenched with research on civil society and gender, also in the 1990s (Norton 1995). In Iran too an indigenous critical perspective developed within sociology in the 1960s, inspired especially by Ali Shariati’s work. Shariati presented a unique blend of European-inspired universalist notions and a particular understanding of Shi’i tenets, thus creating a sociological perspective that was indigenous to the Middle East (Keddie 2003, 200–208). In subsequent years, the Islamic Republic would leave little room for autonomy or critical sociology in Iran. In terms of public debate and publications, Middle Eastern sociologists have not completely lost interest in asking big and pertinent questions about their societies. However, as a discipline institutionalized in universities, sociology in the Middle East is becoming the mirror image of its American counterpart; in places like Turkey, Egypt, and Israel it is becoming professionalized and fragmented in just the same way it is in the United States. This is due in part to the large and growing number of PhDs completed in American institutions by Middle Easterners who are returning home to practice their trade as they have learned it in the United States. The fragmentation of sociology in the Middle East originates from two sources. One is the process by which it has become separated from other disciplines, though it is inconceivable that an understanding of how societies cohere, function, or change could develop without the input of disciplines such as political science, economics, or history. The other source of fragmentation

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is the ironic result of the multiplication of higher education institutions and departments in the world. These institutions and the research that is conducted by scholars affiliated with them remain largely isolated from each other. For example, in six universities located in southeastern Turkey, twenty-three MA and PhD theses were written between 2001 and 2003 on topics related to that region of the country. For anyone who wishes to understand the dynamics of Kurdish society in Turkey, reading these works is essential. But the intellectual and institutional trends are such that these works and their findings are rarely incorporated into discussions about the Kurdish problem in Turkey. The theses themselves deal with fine-tuned questions on the immediate surroundings, with little effort to broaden the discussion to include bigger questions.11 A review of MA and PhD theses written in Cairo and Beirut similarly shows a trend toward studies with increasingly narrow foci dealing with the immediate setting of the research.12 While using these works as a bridge to a better understanding of the Middle East remains elusive, this does not undermine the value of empirical data produced by them.

Conclusion As we move further into the twenty-first century, sociology and MES remain far apart from each other on US campuses. It is likely that the new infusion of government money will strengthen certain parts of MES and leave others untouched and hence make knowledge about the Middle East even more fragmented. To arrive at a more holistic understanding of the region, we need institutional settings and means to facilitate cooperation and communication across subspecializations, disciplines, countries, and continents. Title VI centers can provide a space for the increasingly disparate and disjointed research on the Middle East to come together, communicate with each other, and work toward the creation of more complete knowledge about the region. It is hard to assess whether and to what extent these centers have fulfilled this mission and have become true hubs for interdisciplinary research. While anecdotal examples of cross-disciplinary collaboration can be found, these do not necessarily mean that the Title VI centers have in fact overcome the disciplinary parceling that is the most important hindrance to studying places like the Middle East (see Wallerstein 1999). The infusion of money has strengthened certain parts of MES such as political science, security studies, language studies, and religion. In today’s

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environment, however, even though there seems to be more money available, these centers may find it difficult to pull together the wealth of knowledge about the Middle East that remains scattered across universities, fields, and subfields. Like the overt emphasis on collaboration with intelligence and defense establishments had pushed many scholars away from area studies and their centers during the Cold War, we too are bound to see some scholars stay away from the centers either out of intimidation or principle. This cannot but continue to produce specialized and partial knowledge, which by itself is of little use both to those who want to reach a holistic understanding of the Middle East and to official circles that need comprehensive, accurate, and practical information on the region.

Notes 1.

Boran was fired from her position at the University of Ankara and later became a prominent socialist politician. Thanks to Ayşe Toksöz for pointing out this article.

2.

More recently, Kurzman wrote an essay on the Arab Spring, once again reminding us that revolutions are revolutionary precisely because they defy existing molds (see Kurzman 2012).

3.

Data were collected from the Proquest Sociological Abstracts database, accessed June 2015.

4.

See the special issue “A Symposium on ‘Political Islam,’” Contemporary Sociology 36, no. 6 (November 2007): 507– 24.

5.

For more information, see MESA’s website: www.mesa.arizona.edu.

6.

See the special issue on the Middle East, Mobilization: An International Quarterly (December 2012); the special section “Beyond Islam: A Tribute to Sami Zubaida,” Economy and Society 41, no. 4 (2012); the special issue on the Arab uprisings, International Sociology (July 2015); and articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History.

7.

These universities are Johns Hopkins, University of Southern California, Texas

8.

See the Campus Watch website, www.campus-watch.org.

9.

Some of the sociologists in this tradition are Niyazi Berkes, Behice Boran, Mübec-

A&M, University of Minnesota, University of Maryland, and Michigan State.

cel Kiray, Cahit Tütengil, Ruşen Keles, and Ismail Beşikçi. 10.

Such as in the works of Idris Küçükömer, Çağlar Keyder, Abbas Alnasrawi, Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Said A. Arjomand, and Janet Abu-Lughod.

11.

Among the topics of these theses are the following: discipline problems of parents with children, frustrations of the teaching profession, Internet cafés, family structure, and juvenile delinquency.

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12.

Such as attitudes of American University of Beirut students toward rape, family relations in Arab soap operas, addiction among Egyptian upper classes, alternative healing, and women’s perception of environmental change.

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Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, edited by Christopher Simpson, 159–88. New York: New Press. Department of Homeland Security, US Government. n.d. “Science & Technology Directorate Centers of Excellence.” Accessed October 15, 2015. www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/centers-excellence. Doumani, Beshara, ed. 2006. Academic Freedom after September 11. New York: Zone Books. Fleischer, Cornell. 1984. “Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism and ‘Ibn Khaldunism’ in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Letters.” In Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology, edited by Bruce Lawrence, 46– 68. Leiden: Brill. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1971. Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology. London: Pluto Press. Fulbright, J. W. 1967. “America in an Age of Revolution.” In The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, 196–200. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gendzier, Irene. 1998. “Play It Again Sam: The Practice and Apology of Development.” In Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, edited by Christopher Simpson, 57– 96. New York: New Press. Giddings, Franklin Henry. 1900. Democracy and Empire. London: Macmillan. Gilman, Nils. 2003. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gökalp, Ziya. 1992. Kürt Aşiretleri Hakkında Sosyolojik Tetkikler [Sociological Analyses about Kurdish Tribes]. Istanbul: Sosyal Yayınlar. Hall, Robert. 1947. Area Studies with Special Reference to Their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences. New York: Social Science Research Council. Heyd, Uriel. 1950. The Foundations of Turkish Nationalism: The Life and Teachings of Ziya Gökalp. London: Luzac. Horowitz, David. 2006. The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Washington, DC: Regnery. Horowitz, Irving Louis, ed. 1967. The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ibrahim, Saad Eddin. 1997. “Cross-Eyed Sociology in Egypt and the Arab World.” Contemporary Sociology 26, no. 5 (September): 547–51.

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Inglehart, Ronald, and Wayne E. Baker. 2000. “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values.” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1: 19–51. Inkeles, Alex, and David Smith. 1974. Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing Countries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. İslamoğlu, Huri, and Çağlar Keyder. 1977. “Agenda for Ottoman History.” Review 1, no. 1 (Summer): 31–55. Jenks, Leland. 1928. Our Cuban Colony: A Study in Sugar. New York: Vanguard. Johnson, Clarence Richard. 1922. Constantinople Today or The Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople: A Study of Social Life. Istanbul: Macmillan. Keddie, Nikki. 2003. Modern Iran. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kennedy, Michael, and Miguel Centeno. 2007. “Internationalism and Global Transformation in American Sociology.” In Sociology in America: A History, edited by Craig Calhoun, 666– 712. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knight, Melvin. 1928. Americans in Santo Domingo. New York: Vanguard. Kramer, Martin. 2001. Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Kurzman, Charles. 2004. The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2012. “The Arab Spring Uncoiled.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 17, no. 4 (December): 377– 90. Kurzman, Charles, and Erin Leahey. 2004. “Intellectuals and Democratization, 1905–1912 and 1989–1996.” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 4: 937–86. Lerner, Daniel. 1958. The Passing of the Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. New York: Free Press. Lockman, Zachary. 2004. Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maclean, Vicky M., and Joyce E. Williams. 2005. “Sociology at Women’s and Black Colleges, 1880s–1940s.” In Diverse Histories of American Sociology, edited by Anthony Blasi, 260– 316. Leiden: Brill. Mahdi, Ali Akbar, and Abdolali Lahsaeizadeh. 1992. Sociology in Iran. Bethesda, MD: Jahan Book Company. Mahoney, James, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds. 2003. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mardin, Şerif. 1962. The Genesis of the Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Marsh, Margaret. 1928. The Bankers in Bolivia. New York: Vanguard. Mazower, Mark. 2012. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. New York: Penguin Press. Nearing, Scott, and Joseph Freeman. 1925. Dollar Diplomacy: A Study in American Imperialism. New York: B. W. Huebsch and Viking Press. Needell, Allan. 1998. “Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences.” In Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, edited by Christopher Simpson, 3– 38. New York: New Press. Norton, Augustus Richard, ed. 1995. Civil Society in the Middle East. Leiden: Brill. Parla, Taha. 1985. The Social and Political Thought of Ziya Gökalp. Leiden: Brill. Perez-Oviedo, Wilson. 2015. “Citizens, Dictators, and Networks: A Game Theory Approach.” Rationality and Society 27, no. 1: 3– 39. Power, Samantha. 2003. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial. Rydgren, Jens, Dana Sofi, and Martin Hällsten. 2013. “Interethnic Friendship, Trust, and Tolerance: Findings from Two North Iraqi Cities.” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 6: 1650– 94. Sabagh, Georges. 1976. “Sociology.” In The Study of the Middle East: Research and Scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences: A Project of the Research and Training Committee of the Middle East Studies Association, edited by Leonard Binder, 511– 66. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Said, Edward. 1976. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Sahlins, Marshall. 1967. “The Established Order: Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate.” In The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship between Social Science and Practical Politics, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, 71– 79. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shor, Eran, and Dalit Simchai. 2009. “Avoidance, the Incest Taboo, and Social Cohesion: Revisiting Westermarck and the Case of the Israeli Kibbutzim.” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 6: 1803–42. Skocpol, Theda, ed. 1984. Vision and Methods in Historical Sociology. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 1994. Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spilerman, Seymour. 2004. “The Impact of Parental Wealth on Early Living Standards in Israel.” American Journal of Sociology 110, no. 1: 92–122. Sykes, Mark. 1908. “The Kurdish Tribes of the Ottoman Empire.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 38 (July– December): 451–86. Vitalis, Robert. 2006. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1999. The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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chapter three

Oil on the Waters? Middle East Studies and Economics for the Middle East Karen Pfeifer

The total volume of work on the economies of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region remains low in comparison to other “developing” regions of the world, but it has been growing since the 1990s. This growth is due in part to the opportunities for students from the region to receive doctoral degrees in the United States and other Western countries and in even greater measure to the dedication of resources by international agencies and organizations to the cultivation of MENA economists. However, the process entails more of a penetration by Western neoclassical economic ideas and modeling techniques into work in and on the region than it does a meeting of the minds between economists and Middle East area studies specialists. By way of introduction, this chapter reviews the reasons for the weak links between the fields of economics and Middle East studies (MES) in the United States. It then examines the growth of the economics profession and its work in the Middle East and the shaping of this work by international and regional organizations, especially the Middle East Economic Association (MEEA) and the Economic Research Forum for the Arab World, Turkey, and Iran (ERF). The chapter concludes by considering the contested boundaries between economics and MES and how the political uprisings of 2011 were both affected by and affect the work of economists in the region, as painful economic reality and the contest of economic ideas quietly underlay the louder and more dramatic political turmoil of 2011–13.

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Weak Links between Middle East Studies and Economics Within academia in the United States there is limited interaction between economists and departments of economics and MES. Economists tend not to be engaged in area studies, of the Middle East or elsewhere. They accounted for less than one percent of the 2,700 members of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in 2012, and it is a struggle to attract participation by economists from MEEA, an organization formally affiliated with MESA, at the annual MESA meetings (MESA n.d.). As an affiliate of the American Social Science Association (dominated by the American Economic Association), MEEA is marginalized, with only four slots at the annual meetings: three for panels and one for a poster session. MEEA handles this creatively by arranging an additional day’s meetings at a university in the same city where it usually runs nine panels over three sessions (MEEA 2012). Economics for the Middle East was also weakly represented in US universities and colleges in the 2000s. On the positive side, 52 percent of the 105 institutions examined for this report in 2006 offered MES in some form, and 56 percent of those offered at least one course in the “political economy” of MENA in a non-economics department.1 However, only 30 percent of the institutions offered an economics course through their economics departments, and only 23 percent listed an economics professor among their MES faculty. Even well-known universities with federally funded Centers for Middle East Studies (CMES) or Near East Languages Centers (NELC) listed neither an economist nor a course in economics.2 The six MES centers studied intensively in 2005– 6 as part of SSRC’s project on the relation between MES and the social sciences evidenced a similar pattern.3 There are three reasons for the lack of interaction between economics and MES in the United States.4 The first is the difference in philosophical outlook. As Jennifer Claire Olmsted (2007, 11–12) points out, and as I have experienced it, there is implicit disdain for economics on the part of MES specialists, generally because the latter are more relativistic in their understanding of the subtle historical, institutional, and cultural uniqueness of the region and tend to write off economics as naive, culture blind, and data driven. But the hostility and dismissal of the intellectual other is more potent from the side of economists, who tend to disparage area studies as too theoretically vague and empirically vacuous to be useful. Economists in the mainstream neoclassical tradition believe that their work is a kind of science akin to the physical and biological sciences and that the essential principles Oil on the Waters? 113

of economic theory are universal (e.g., Chetty 2013). The assumptions that underlie the theory lend an elegant simplicity to economic models: individual rationality and the pursuit of self-interest are the driving forces in economic behavior everywhere and at all times, and the most efficient economic system to harmonize the interests of many rational individuals is the free market (Olmsted 2007, 6, 12). The second reason for the MES/economics gulf is the difference in methodology. This affects not only how work is done, but what questions may be addressed, what form published output takes, and the criteria for hiring, promotion, and—in academia—tenure. The discipline of economics increasingly has come to be defined by the use of mathematical modeling and econometric techniques. As long as the economist has a large and reliable data set on which to run regressions, he or she can apply this methodology to any situation without actually knowing anything about its cultural or institutional settings. Research questions are constrained by the quantity and quality of data available, and questions that cannot be addressed with these techniques are considered either unworthy of being asked or outside the realm of economics (Olmsted 2007, 3–4). The preferred form of publication for this work is the journal article, with journals carefully ranked. Books and book chapters are not as highly valued because they take too long to produce and are inelegant in their length and potential for intrusion of noneconomic factors in their content. The preferred format for PhD dissertations is three essays, each of which can then be revised and published as journal articles— and voilà. The processes of hiring, promotion, and tenure entail first and foremost the counting and weighing of journal articles according to their number and the ranking of the journals in which they appear. For career purposes, graduate students in economics choose their dissertation topics and shape their output to conform to these criteria rather than on the basis of the intrinsic interest of the subject matter they address. Unless it can take this form, work in area studies is routinely downgraded in economics departments, and area studies specialists are not considered attractive candidates for employment or promotion, no matter how much expertise they have in the region they study (Olmsted 2007, 15–17). Indeed, subfields related to area studies, like economic development, economic history, and history of economic thought, have been marginalized in the profession and even eliminated entirely from many economics curricula.5

114 Karen Pfeifer

The third reason for the MES/economics gulf is the penetration of the economic programs of Western-led international agencies—the so-called Washington Consensus of neoliberal reform—into the politics and cultures of Middle Eastern societies. The most powerful and well-financed agencies are the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group, collectively known as international financial institutions (IFIs). Other international agencies, such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), take a more moderate tack but have much less international power and regional influence and much more modest resources with which to affect public policy in the region. While all of these agencies have representation in MENA countries, it was the neoliberal agenda of stabilization, liberalization, and privatization that drove the adoption of “economic reform” in the region in the 1990s and 2000s. Promoting the methods and ideological assumptions taught in Western economics as described above, these agencies treated the significant differences found in the region as deviance from the universal model of free market economics that needed correction through appropriate public policy (Olmsted 2007, 14). The agencies pursued the neoliberal agenda in the region on two parallel tracks. One was to use their resources, mainly in the form of conditional loans for balance of payments crises and for structural adjustment and “development” projects, to pressure regional governments to adopt the necessary policies to carry out liberalization and privatization. The second was to use their resources to cultivate the generation of systematic and reliable data sets for economic research and a cohort of region-based but mostly Westerneducated economists to carry out this research. Of the two economists’ organizations that work specifically on the MENA region, MEEA and ERF, the founding of the former antedated the agencies’ efforts. While there is overlap in personnel and methodology between MEEA and ERF, MEEA still carries traces of its independent roots but has little in the way of resources. ERF, in contrast, was created specifically by the international agencies and a group of region-based economists to carry out the neoclassical research agenda and to influence public policy in the direction of neoliberal reform.6 By the mid-2000s, some economists were raising questions about the negative aspects of neoliberalism in the region, but it was the shock of rising political discontent culminating in the Arab Spring of 2011 that led to a shift in the research program. In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, a

Oil on the Waters? 115

strong argument can be made that neoliberal reform policies were a major contributing factor to popular discontent by not solving but likely exacerbating economic problems like corruption, unemployment, and inequality. Yet the IFIs continued to push their agenda through the Deauville Partnership after 2011 (IMF 2012b), using the language of “sustainable development” and “inclusive growth,” while poorly resourced agencies such as the UNDP and ILO, as well as trade union movements and progressive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), struggled to propose more deeply inclusive, labor-friendly, and pro-poor alternatives. The dramatic public struggle over control of the state in the Arab Spring countries reflects but also distracts attention from a deeper, quieter, and equally pressing struggle over economic policy for the next period. This struggle defined the contested boundaries in economics for the Middle East as of 2013.

Growth of Middle East Economics Economics in the Middle East grew from the 1980s to the 2000s in terms of the number of economists working in the region and the magnitude of published output. The number of professionally trained economists working in the MENA region burgeoned in the 1990s and 2000s, to perhaps two thousand.7 As of 2010, most of these economists were of MENA origin and were employed in the region, in Europe, or in the United States. Of the seventy-six people listed as ERF’s Board of Trustees, Policy Affiliates, or Senior Associates, for example, all but nine have regional names. The emergence of this cohort is due partly to students from the region studying economics at the graduate level in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in Europe, as shown in Table 3.1. Of those for whom education is specified, thirty-three received their PhDs in the United States, and another twenty received their degrees in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada (a total of 70 percent). Only five received their PhDs in the region: one from METU in Turkey and four from Cairo University. The latter are all women Policy Affiliates residing and working in Cairo. Figure 3.1 shows the predominance of Western, particularly US, economics education. While social science in the MENA region has been criticized for the lack of both quality and quantity of its research output (Ben Hafaiedh 2007;

116 Karen Pfeifer

Table 3.1. Economic Research Forum Senior Affiliates’ Sources of PhDs in Economics Trusteesa

Policy Affiliatesb

Senior Associatesc

Total

United States

9

9

15

33

United Kingdom

1

5

10

16

France

1

2

3

Germany

1

1

Canada

1

1

Moscow

1

1

Czech Republic

1

1

Turkey (METU)

1

1

4

Egypt (Cairo University) Not PhD

2

2

No information TOTAL

12

4

22

4

11

11

42

76

Source: Economic Research Forum. Twelve of thirteen trustees are named on the ERF website, of whom two do not have PhDs. b Nine of the twenty-two policy affiliates listed on the website are women, seven of whom are based in Cairo. All four of the Cairo University PhD graduates are women based in Cairo. c No education information is provided on the website for eleven of the forty-two senior associates; two do not have PhDs. a

Ibrahim 2000), the growing production of economic knowledge about the region has been shaped by the provision of research fellowships, the promotion of economic modeling and econometric techniques, networking among scholars at conferences, and expansion of outlets for publication. Even as the international links and intraregional density of these opportunities grew from 1990 to 2010, so did the intensity of commitment to the economic philosophy and methodology described above. Below I review the types and number of research publications and then examine the organizations themselves and how they shape research agendas.

Oil on the Waters? 117

Figure 3.1. Economic research forum senior affiliates’ sources of PhDs in economics. Source: Economic Research Forum. Journals, Edited Volumes, and Dissertations as Indexed in EconLit Knowledge generated from research on the economies of MENA is disseminated by means of journal articles, edited volumes, and dissertations. Table 3.2 shows the numbers of EconLit entries for these three categories of literature for the period 1969–2013 for regions and for selected countries.8 As of 2013, the MENA region appeared to be relatively less well studied. The Middle East and the Maghreb together had a total of about 820 entries for the period 1969–2013, while sub-Saharan Africa had almost 1,400 and Latin America over 26,000. The picture for individual countries is, on average, only slightly better. Table 3.2 shows that the six most populous countries in the Middle East, with an aggregate population of 332 million, had fewer EconLit entries (6,809) than Brazil alone (8,788), with a population of 200 million. As illustrated in Figure 3.2, the number of entries per million inhabitants, a simple measure of relative magnitude, yields a value of 43.9 for Brazil versus 20.5 for the six MENA countries, giving the impression that Brazil is studied over two times more than the six MENA countries. Among these six, Turkey alone comes out ahead of Brazil in entries per million, but a few MENA countries with smaller populations, such as Tunisia, Jordan, and especially Israel, are even better studied by this standard.

118 Karen Pfeifer

Journal Articles A list of journal articles on the economics of the region is published annually in MEEA’s fall newsletter; the articles are selected “with the criteria of providing regional diversity[,] . . . [and] priority is given to articles in journals that are more highly ranked.” Many of the journals included in the Fall 2012 edition are highly ranked. There was one article each in Comparative Economic Systems, World Development, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, and Economic Modelling. There were two articles in Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, three each in Migration Letters and Energy Policy, and five in Defense and Peace Economics. Equally interesting is the appearance of articles in English in regionbased journals: three articles in Iktisat Isletme ve Finans, one in Journal of Persian Economics and Finance, one in Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, and five in Middle East Development Journal. Of the twenty-eight articles listed, seven concerned Turkey; seven were on migration; six each were on trade, investment and foreign exchange, energy and the environment; and four each were on conflict, the military, and economic reconstruction. A shift of emphasis can be observed since the early 2000s toward greater balance between monetary and financial topics, on the one hand, and realsector issues like investment in goods and services industries, employment, and human development, on the other.9 Specialized Journals on Economics of the Middle East In the 2000s, three journals dedicated to MENA economies were introduced. First, in 2000, MEEA began online publication of its proceedings journal, Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies. The main criterion for submission is that the work must be based on applied, original, empirical research. However, the range of topics is relatively broad, reflecting MEEA’s inclusive definition of economics. The journal has published papers on topics such as the economic history of Egypt, Palestinian labor migration, information technology, Islamic jurists’ debates on riba` (interest rate), school choice in Egypt, the possible comparative advantage of Turkish exports to the European Union (EU), economic finance in Turkey, modeling the manufacturing sector in Jordan, and post-independence “visions” of development in Algeria. Turkey was the single most fully researched country in the region, indicating the importance at that time of its association with the EU, its implementation

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Table 3.2. Number of EconLit Entries, by Region and Country Sample, 1969–2013a Edited Volume Chapters

Total Entries

Journal Articles

Asia

73,342

52,031

20,660

651

Latin America

26,115

18,393

7,354

363

Africa, all

8,786

6,141

2,595

50

Sub-Saharan Africa

1,384

789

572

23

34

20

14

0

783

391

388

4

Dissertations

By Region

Maghrebb Middle East

Population (millions)

Entries per Million Pop.

By Country China

15,819

11,519

4,132

168

1,351

11.7

India

14,057

10,827

3,132

98

1,237

11.4

Malaysia

2,277

1,759

505

13

29

78.5

South Africa

3,976

3,025

922

29

51

78.0

Mexico

5,498

3,995

1,397

106

120

45.8

Brazil

8,788

5,818

1,414

94

200

43.9

Turkey

3,566

3,112

417

37

74

48.2

Iran

1,388

1,244

140

4

77

18.0

Saudi Arabia

415

277

118

20

28

14.8

Morocco

382

270

106

6

33

11.6

Egypt

843

596

235

12

81

10.4

Highest Pop. MENA

Algeria Total 6 Large MENA countries

215

179

36

0

39

5.5

6,809

5,678

1,052

79

332

20.5

Table 3.2. Number of EconLit Entries, by Region and Country Sample, 1969–2013a (continued) Total Entries

Journal Articles

Edited Volume Chapters

Dissertations

Population (millions)

Entries per Million Pop.

7.9

127.6

WellStudied Small MENA Israel

1,008

708

297

3

Jordan

412

316

92

4

6.3

65.4

Tunisia

562

477

83

2

10.8

52.0

Source: World Development Indicators Online. Based on a search conducted on October 1, 2013, of the EconLit database for “region” or “country” as geographic descriptors and “economics” as subject. b A search of “North Africa” yielded only one item, a book chapter. a

of neoliberal policies, and the growing participation of Turkish economists in MEEA (Pfeifer 2009, 15–16). The second journal, Review of Middle East Economics and Finance (RMEEF), was founded in 2003 as an independent publication but associated with MEEA. RMEEF called for submissions of “applied original research” in “empirically based papers.” However, it defined the topics of interest more narrowly than MEEA’s Topics journal, focusing on monetary and fiscal policy, labor and welfare economics, international trade, finance, banking and portfolio investment, and financial instability and crisis. This definition of economics fit the trend during the economic and financial boom from the early to mid-2000s toward greater emphasis on the study of finance and market transactions over the productive sectors. The journal is produced in both electronic and paper formats by the commercial publisher de Gruyter. The third journal, Middle East Development Journal (MEDJ), is edited and published by ERF. Founded in 2009 under the leadership of Ahmed Galal, its aim is “to strengthen the research community in the Middle East and North Africa,” and its “ultimate goal is to provide a solid analytical and empirical base for the promotion of good policy in the region.” While its focus is “applied economics,” it also considers “contributions from other disciplines, especially political science and sociology.” According to its website, the journal has already gained “widespread recognition,” will soon “take its

Oil on the Waters? 121

Figure 3.2. EconLit entries 1969–2013, per mn pop 2012. Source: EconLit.

place among firmly established academic publications,” and will be indexed by the Journal of Economic Literature ( JEL) and EconLit. One measure of success is that four MEDJ articles were listed in MEEA’s fall 2012 newsletter. Books An examination of the numbers of books in print in English in the United States for the period 1979–2013, as displayed in Table 3.3, shows that the MENA region as a whole is about as well studied as East Asia and Southeast Asia and is better studied than sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. A country by country comparison shows that the six countries with the highest populations in the region fall, as a group, approximately in the middle of the range of absolute numbers of books. However, figure 3.3 illustrates that using the measure of books per million of the population, the countries of the MENA region are not so well studied, with the exceptions of Turkey (which is comparable to China, India, and Brazil) and Israel (which is by far the best studied country). Books about the economies of the Middle East show a broader commitment to interdisciplinarity than do journal articles. A sample of current books of interest is provided in the spring edition of MEEA’s newsletter each year. Topics of the thirty books listed in 2012, for example, included five on Islamic economics and finance and three on money, finance, and banking more 122 Karen Pfeifer

Table 3.3. Number of Books in Print in English in the United States, by Region and Country, 1979–2013 Total Entriesa By Region East Asia

346

Southeast Asia Pacific

310

South Asia

221

Latin America Sub-Saharan Africa North Africa Middle East

1,517 111 29 340 Population (millions)

Entries per Million Population

By Country China

2,553

1,351

1.88

India

1,768

1,237

1.43

Malaysia

135

29

4.66

Brazil

293

200

1.47

Mexico

639

120

5.33

South Africa

191

51

3.75

137

74

1.85

Iran

65

77

0.84

Saudi Arabia

19

28

0.68

Highest Pop. MENA Turkey

Morocco

9

33

0.27

Egypt

70

81

0.86

Algeria

11

39

0.28

311

332

0.94

Israel

83

7.9

10.51

Jordan

21

6.3

3.33

Tunisia

8

10.8

0.74

Total 6 MENA countries Well-studied countries in MENA

Source: World Development Indicators Online. a

Search was carried out with “economy” as the subject keyword.

Figure 3.3.

Books per mn pop. Source: Books in Print database.

generally, as money and finance was the single most popular topic during the 2000s. There were four books on oil, energy, and politics; three on the Arab uprisings; three on governance; three on Turkey; and one each on the Gulf, Iran, and Iraq. Other broad topics ranged from “the new world order” and “carbon diplomacy” to “the economic development process.” The range of this sample is similar to the range of books published in the early 2000s, but the emphasis has shifted from neoliberal reform to regionally defined problems.10 Books, like journals, are often sponsored by organizations and based on conferences. For example, MEEA and the economics department of the School of Business at the Lebanese American University cosponsored a fruitful conference in 1999, which anticipated issues that would come to the fore in the later 2000s. Editors representing the two organizations published the volume Income Inequality, Poverty, and Unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa in 2000. Similarly, MEEA sponsored an edited six-volume series, Research in Middle East Economics (1997–2005)11 (see Pfeifer 2009, Appendix C). MEEA has also been associated with the Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa series published by Routledge/Curzon and comprising thirteen titles (see Pfeifer 2009, “Routledge Political Economy” and Appendix D). In contrast to MEEA, ERF has the resources to publish its own books, a series of twenty-nine titles from 1995 to 2012. About half of the books are proceedings of annual conferences; the rest are edited volumes on the focal topics

124 Karen Pfeifer

of the times, from “transition” and “development of financial markets” in the 1990s to “trade policy,” “competitiveness” and “reform” of the labor market, and business regulation in the early 2000s to “governance,” “the changing role of the state,” and “labor market revisited” in 2007– 9 (ERF n.d., “Books”). The last shift in focus reflects recognition of defects in neoliberal reform outcomes and the push to the fore of problems like inequality, paralleling the emergence of the ERF journal MEDJ. Dissertations In her chapter in this volume, Laura Bier traces topical patterns in economics dissertations on the region similar to those in the books described above. In parallel with my findings about economists working on the region, she estimates that over 85 percent of these dissertations were written by scholars with regional names.

Organizations That Shape the Production of Knowledge about Middle Eastern Economies As of 2000, there were about one hundred interdisciplinary social science research institutes scattered across the various countries of the region (Ben Hafaiedh 2007), plus organizations based in southern Europe that specialize in Mediterranean societies and Euro-Med relations (e.g., FEMISE, ANIMA, the Robert Schuman Centre), but here I focus only on the two regionwide networks primarily for economists, MEEA and ERF. These two organizations have much in common in terms of overlapping membership, professional objectives, and training in economics, and both serve to connect economists working outside the region with those working in it.12 Furthermore, both embody the tension between Middle East area studies and the discipline of economics, as virtually all participants have intimate experience with the culture and institutions of the region and are sensitive to its political issues, operating at the “contested boundaries” of economic knowledge. However, the two organizations are quite different in terms of their histories, structures, and access to resources and thus have different connections with policy makers at the national and international levels, with the latter having a strong hand in shaping how economic knowledge is produced and disseminated.

Oil on the Waters? 125

The Role of IFIs The World Bank and the IMF and their affiliated institutions13 produce an important share of the economics literature in the form of reports on the region as a whole, on individual countries, or on issues that affect some or all regional economies (e.g., Silva, Levin, and Morgandi 2013; IMF 2012a; Khamis and Senhadji 2010; World Bank 2004). Until the early 2000s, experts employed or contracted by these organizations to conduct research and write up their results tended to be economists from various parts of the world with little connection to the region on which they were assigned to work. The assumptions were that an expert in economics or finance had technical knowledge that could be applied equally well to any part of the globe and that area studies–style acquaintance with the region was irrelevant to policyoriented economic research. As part of their project to spread neoclassical economic theory, econometric methodology, and neoliberal policy advice, the IFIs undertook the cultivation of region-based economists. The IMF’s Institute for Capacity Development was established in 1964 to bring officials of its member countries to Washington to receive “training in economic management,” with teaching in four languages, including Arabic. In 2011, the IMF set up its sole training program in the Arab world, the IMF–Middle East Center for Economics and Finance (CEF), in collaboration with the government of Kuwait. This center organizes courses in English and Arabic “for officials from Arab League member countries” for whom “admission is by invitation only” (IMF n.d.). As I discuss below, the World Bank took a long step beyond the IMF in shaping economic knowledge in the region when it helped found ERF in 1993. MEEA, which was founded in 1978, did not have a hand in this process as an organization, although a number of MEEA leaders and other members have worked for the IFIs and development agencies and have had a role in the governing institutions of ERF at various times. MEEA’s Origin, Mission, and Structure While MEEA and ERF share a common core mission to promote economics research in the region, MEEA’s unique origin and history bequeathed a broader overall mission and a less hierarchical structure. MEEA is based in the United States, and its founding was inspired by the leading Arab American economist of the time, Charles Issawi, who was elected its first president. Many of its founding members were of Iranian origin, having fled the shah’s 126 Karen Pfeifer

regime and arrived in the United States either as students or émigrés, and fewer were of other Middle Eastern or American origin. The majority had received their graduate degrees and worked in the United States, although members maintained their personal ties with and a vigorous intellectual interest in the region’s societies and politics. Part of this heritage is MEEA’s Committee on Human Rights and Academic Freedom (CHRAF), which protests against and publicizes the cases of economists and other social scientists whose right to freedom of expression or civil liberties have been curtailed by regimes in the region (see MEEA 2009, 4). Over the 1990s and 2000s, MEEA extended its reach from mainly US academia to include a higher proportion of economists from the region, especially from Turkey. As of 2009, less than 25 percent of members resided in the United States, while 26 percent resided in Europe, and most of the rest resided in the region: 23 percent in Turkey, 20 percent in the Arab world, 4 percent in Iran, and 2 percent in other countries (MEEA 2009, 2).14 The balance of leadership shifted in the same direction. Only two of the ten past presidents listed in the Fall 2012 newsletter had nonregional names, and only one of the nine members of the Board of Directors had a nonregional name. According to its mission statement: MEEA is a private, non-profit, non-political organization of scholars interested in the study of the economies and economics of the Middle East. The geographical term “Middle East” is used in its widest usage. Its objectives shall be: promotion of high standard scholarship, facilitation of communication among scholars through meetings and publications, and promotion of cooperation among persons and organizations committed to the objectives of MEEA. (MEEA n.d.)

Going beyond the website’s mission statement, the organization’s newsletter claims that “the main objective of MEEA is to foster scholarship and to establish lines of communication among specialists interested in the Political Economy of the Middle East” (2012, 6). MEEA uses “political economy” as opposed to the narrower term “economics” to include work in historical, institutional, post-Keynesian, neo-Marxian, and other heterodox approaches, as well as the neoclassical approach that prevails in most US academic departments. Furthermore, its definition of the region is broad and fluid and in addition to the Arab world includes Israel and other Mediterranean countries such as Malta and Cyprus and, especially for the purposes of comparative

Oil on the Waters? 127

work, Islamic countries in general, including those in Central and South Asia. MEEA newsletters reach across international and interdisciplinary boundaries with their broad array of announcements of research opportunities and upcoming conferences, citations of recent journal articles and new books, and notices of its affiliated online journals, Review of Middle East Economics and Finance and Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies. The newsletters also report on MEEA’s own and other international conferences, the activities of CHRAF, annual meetings in the United States, and announcements on behalf of ERF and other fraternal organizations. Decision-making authority on programs and policies rests with a board of directors elected by the membership, which conducts a general assembly of the members at MEEA’s annual conference in the United States. There is no central office or paid staff. Administrative responsibility is vested in a president and executive secretary, and the person who occupies the latter post usually runs for president in the next election. Similar to MESA’s governance, this system provides continuity of leadership while avoiding concentration of power. Membership is open to anyone, and the membership fee is low in comparison to other US-based organizations. As of 2012, dues were US$25 for faculty or other professionals, $20 for students, and $10 “for all members residing in a MEEA country” (MEEA 2012, 8). MEEA activities are funded by membership dues and by contributions from hosting institutions for its international conferences and annual meetings in the United States. Most US-based members are employed in academic economics departments and do not routinely participate in MES programs at their institutions. For the most part, they do not identify themselves as MES specialists as that field came to be defined in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s (see Mitchell 2003a, 2003b), nor are they members of the Middle East Studies Association. MEEA became an official affiliate organization of MESA only in the late 1990s and did not use its right to hold panels at the annual MESA conference until 2013. ERF’s Origin, Mission, and Structure In partnership with other development agencies, the World Bank helped found ERF in Cairo in 1993 as the home base for a MENA regional network— one among several regional groupings in the World Bank–sponsored Global Development Network (GDN). ERF is registered as an NGO in Egypt and 128 Karen Pfeifer

is financed by external sources (ERF n.d., “About”). The World Bank provided funding in the early years but now channels financial support through GDN and other projects. Meanwhile, ERF acquired an endowment of over $5 million, built with $3.2 million from the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD, a long-lived development aid agency based in Kuwait), $1 million from the Ford Foundation, and CAD$1 million from the Ottawa-based International Development Research Center (IDRC). AFESD, Ford, and IDRC remain partners in project development and provide additional funding on a regular basis. Three other partners, FEMISE (the European Union–sponsored program for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership), the GDN, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and State Secretariat for Education and Research also provide funding for specific contracted projects. The UNDP was a founding—but not a funding—partner and continues to provide “institutional support.” Notably absent is the overt representation of the US government. ERF’s scholarly mission is similar to MEEA’s but does not include Israel or other Mediterranean countries or neighboring regions, nor does it include “political economy” in the broad sense. According to its Institutional Charter, ERF is dedicated to promoting high quality economic research that contributes to inclusive and sustainable development in the ERF region, defined to include the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey. To this end ERF aims to: 1. support the development of the economic research community in the ERF region; 2. encourage the production of independent and high-quality economic (and related) research pertaining to public policy in the ERF region; 3. undertake and manage regional research projects with a view to filling knowledge gaps about the key development challenges facing the ERF region; and 4. disseminate research outcomes widely, through various channels including conferences, workshops and publications.

The phrase “inclusive and sustainable development” was added to ERF’s website in 2006. The stress on quality refers to the preferred application of econometric techniques, as illustrated below in the section discussing the shaping of research. The stress on quantity refers to the goal of increased production of knowledge on the economies of a region that has long been Oil on the Waters? 129

understudied (see Handoussa 2000 [Handoussa is ERF’s founding director]; for a separate review of the research deficits and proposals for research agendas for the region’s social scientists, see Ben Hafaiedh 2007; Ibrahim 2000). ERF’s mission also includes “building bridges between the research, policymaking and business communities in the region” through its senior associates and policy affiliates, as stated in Charter articles 30 and 32. Until the mid2000s, this meant pursuit of neoliberal reform programs. ERF’s governance structure is centralized and hierarchical, with some interaction between levels. Authority rests with a thirteen-member “distinguished Board of Trustees,” which appoints a managing director who supervises a professional staff of about twenty people. The board determines policies, monitors progress, approves the annual work program and budget, and appoints the Advisory Committee. It also approves nominations for the various categories of ERF affiliates, including research fellows. Serving fiveyear terms, seven members of the board are, in turn, elected by the research fellows at the annual conference, while the board itself appoints six of its own members: two for “regional balance” and four representing donor organizations (in 2012, the AFESD, World Bank, IDRC, and the Swiss Agency) ( ERF n.d., “Institutional Charter,” arts. 7–16; ERF n.d., “Board of Trustees”). In 2012, the board included a current and a former president of MEEA. The nine-person Advisory Committee is appointed by the Board of Trustees for indefinite terms to consult on technical issues and screen nominations for ERF affiliation in the categories described below. Advisory Committee members “are Research Fellows with an extensive publication record, professional expertise, and strong linkages with the international community of economists” (ERF n.d., “Advisory Committee”). Western-trained and US- and Europe-based economists wield great influence in ERF’s governance structure, but the organization has had success in recruiting region-based economists. Of the twelve board members listed in 2013, nine had regional names, as did seven of the nine Advisory Committee members. However, six of those advisors worked in the West—three in the United States, two in the United Kingdom, and one in Italy—while three worked in the region—Turkey, Tunisia, and Qatar.15 The 265 affiliates who worked with ERF in 2013 are described in this way: “The group is relatively diverse, covering most countries in the region, different age groups and gender. ERF affiliates represent 20 countries in the region with 70 percent of affiliates residing in the region” (ERF n.d., “ERF Affiliates”).

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The bulk of ERF’s working community is made up of economists organized in four groups. The upper two categories of membership are policy affiliates and senior associates, both of which serve to connect ERF to regional governments and influential institutions. As Table 3.1 demonstrates, a disproportionate share of the two groups had received their PhDs in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Europe, but only six of the sixty-four had nonregional names. Policy affiliates, of which there were twenty-two listed, “no longer engage in academic research but are active in conducting policy work . . . and are of enormous value to ERF in its effort to bridge the gap between research and policy as well as capacity building” (ERF n.d., “Policy Affiliates”).16 The senior associates group was developed to respond to the need for building bridges between the research, policymaking and business communities in the region. Senior Associates are senior professionals whose past research credentials and present position of influence provides an essential channel of communication with the policymaking community. Senior Associates are nominated by Research Fellows and/or Board members, according to criteria that takes [sic] into account past research track record, current position of influence, international reputation and potential contribution to the ERF mission. (ERF n.d., “Senior Associates”)

An illustration of this influence is the fact that two of the forty-two senior associates have served as prime minister and deputy prime minister for economic affairs in the post–July 3, 2013, government of Egypt, and two others had been ministers under Hosni Mubarak and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. In addition, ERF’s managing director, Ahmad Galal, took a leave of absence in July 2013 to become finance minister in the new government. The third and fourth categories of affiliation are the research fellows and research associates, of which there were 149 and 70, respectively, in 2013. The criteria for membership are strictly related to the organization’s mission of promoting research. Candidates in both cases must “originally be from the ERF region[,] . . . have a PhD or equivalent degree[,] . . . be a researcher in economics or related fields[,] . . . and submit a letter of intent and full CV including list of publications and research activities” (ERF n.d., “Become”). Candidates do not apply for admission but are nominated by existing fellows. Research fellows serve as ERF’s “core constituency”:

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[They] are highly qualified economists, holding PhDs in economics or related fields and having published at least two articles in refereed journals. They play an important role in ongoing ERF activities such as electing the Board of Trustees, nominating new Fellows, developing and leading research programs, refereeing papers, organizing meetings, and contributing to publications. Research Fellows are the only affiliates with voting rights. Fellows are nominated by peers, screened by ERF’s Advisory Committee and approved by the Board of Trustees. They are selected on the basis of a criteria proposed by the advisory committee and approved by the Board of Trustees. (ERF n.d., “Research Fellows”)

Research associates stand in a kind of apprentice relationship to the guild of master craftsmen in the research fellow group. They are “promising” younger economists in the region, no more than ten years beyond their PhDs, and their admission must be vetted by the Advisory Committee and approved by the Board of Trustees.

Shaping Research, Research Networks, and Publication of Output Both MEEA and ERF were active in the 1990s and 2000s in mentoring budding economists, encouraging more technically sophisticated economics research (i.e., formal modeling and econometrics), and building networks of economists in the region as well as internationally and across the social science disciplines. While the two networks overlap and complement each other, they have performed these professional services somewhat differently, and ERF’s support from institutional backers has given it an increasingly compelling presence in the region in the 2000s. MEEA has accomplished much but remains limited by its means. It had a head start insofar as it was created fifteen years earlier than ERF but now finds itself eclipsed in influence by ERF and other well-resourced organizations funded by the Gulf countries and the European Union. As MEEA’s last president put it in his letter to the membership in 2012: In sum, the MEEA has become a professional society that could successfully organize two reasonably well-attended meetings a year in different parts of the world— one that could re-locate one meeting from a country on a continent to another country on a different continent on short notice.17 This is certainly a good thing, something that we could be proud of. The

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sad thing though is we don’t do much, besides conference activities. The MEEA is still a society without a publication of its own . . . [and] we do not have the funds to partially or fully cover travel expenses of bright young scholars from the region to attend the MEEA meetings in the USA or elsewhere. . . . We need to . . . take a more active part in the whole policy debate about the areas and paths of reform needed in MENA economies in the years ahead . . . [and to use] MEEA as a channel to get our members’ voices heard by interested parties. (MEEA 2012, 3)

Mentoring Young Scholars MEEA had an early advantage in being based in the United States, where many students from the Middle East came to study. Its member economists have been training graduate students from the region for more than three decades, including many who would eventually become ERF affiliates. Increasingly, MEEA members also mentor graduate students in the growing universities of the region, especially in Turkey. The organization encourages younger scholars through the awarding of its annual Ibn Khaldun prize for best paper by a new PhD student. Virtually every year since 2002, it has coorganized international conferences—for example, those in Speyer, Germany, in March 2013 and in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2010—with academic or research institutions that can fund the participation of scholars who are based in the region. Using the organization’s newsletter and regional contacts, MEEA leaders and members also publicize conferences of other organizations and propose panels that include younger scholars, such as at the Mediterranean Research Meetings of the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. ERF has several programs for mentoring young scholars and encouraging their research in certain directions. Besides taking on recent PhD economists as research associates, it runs workshops in order to “upgrad[e] the capacity of researchers in the region”; workshop themes have included analyzing household survey data, constructing and using measurements of inequality, and writing effective policy briefs (ERF n.d., “Past Training Programs”). It runs annual competitions for research grants in several programs simultaneously. Examples of current or recent programs, each with a set of defined projects led by research fellows, are Economics of Informality in the ERF Region,

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Impact of Labor Market Regulations and Institutions on Labor Market Performance and Outcomes, and, jointly with Canada’s International Development Research Centre, Female Economic Empowerment (ERF 2013, 8–12). Defining Research Programs MEEA does not have the means to direct research programs itself, but it informs its membership of research opportunities offered by other organizations. That MEEA leaders and some members are in the inner circles of ERF— on the Advisory Committee and among trustees and research fellows—means that they, at least as individuals, play some role in setting the research agenda. ERF, on the other hand, shapes research through several institutional vehicles. One such vehicle is ERF’s active creation of databases for current and future research. It has announced, for example, that its Open Access Micro Data program using household surveys in a number of countries in the region will be available to the public “to enhance transparency and accountability” in public policy. For ERF’s purposes, Open Access is intended “for researchers to make use of this data to analyze questions, provide evidence and come up with solutions to current issues of our time,” such as “labor issues, human development, inequality and poverty” (Emara 2013). This kind of systematic data gathering and provision to researchers is a long-term project of the World Bank for all developing regions of the world (see Verme 2013). The potential kinks are, first, questions of privacy and the possible use of data for less noble purposes; and second, the need to synchronize data sets among various institutions in order to coordinate their work with each other and with national statistical agencies (see Emara 2013). There is also the methodological issue of what kinds of questions can be asked of a database constructed under certain assumptions. The provision of “micro data” is related to the frequently repeated policy preference of the IFIs and ERF to promote private enterprise—micro, small, and medium enterprises in particular—as the main vehicle for economic development (see, e.g., World Bank and International Finance Corporation 2012a, 11–19; 2012b, 7–18; Fergany 2007). As of 2013, ERF had several ongoing research programs with the ambitious multiple goals of creating data sets, building capacity for research, and using the results to influence public policy. The Research Initiative for Arab Development (RIAD), begun in 2008, is funded by multiyear grants from AFESD, the World Bank, and, as of 2012, the Swiss Agency. Its broad scope 134 Karen Pfeifer

makes it hard to distinguish from other smaller-scale projects but gives it flexibility in responding to the political upheavals of 2011–13. RIAD focuses on six themes, the result of extensive consultations with various stakeholders: inequality, regional integration, natural resources and economic diversification, environmental economics, institutional dynamics. In response to the changes wrought by the Arab Spring, the focus of the theme on institutional dynamics shifted to economic and political transformation as part of ERF’s contribution to addressing the resulting regional developments. Under RIAD, ERF has initiated work on 22 research projects and 3 micro data initiatives. As of September 2012, 9 of those projects have been completed while 16 remain ongoing. RIAD projects typically fall under one of three major categories: Research, including data sets; Capacity Building efforts and Outreach, where research project results are disseminated and made available to a wider audience. (ERF n.d., “RIAD”)

Another complex of research programs, the Arab Spring Development Initiative (ASDI), was launched in 2013 under a three-year contract with the World Bank. It has the same goals as RIAD, to promote “open access data, knowledge creation and policy dialogue.” The categories of knowledge to be created include four themes: The Economics and Politics of Arab Awakening which will focus on supporting the establishment of good governance in the post transition era. . . . Inequality where the emphasis will be on what causes inequality and how it can be measured. Employment . . . where more attention will be given to labor market regulations, labor market dynamics and adjustment to shocks and gender issues. . . . Natural Resources and Economic Diversification which will be assessing fiscal and monetary institutions, the political economy of oil rents, and financial management of large oil windfalls, especially in relation to Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs). (ERF 2013, 19)

As with the RIAD complex, it is difficult to distinguish this research agenda from others, or from RIAD itself, but there are seemingly unlimited funds to support these projects and to finance the army of researchers needed to work on them.

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Outlets for Sharing and Publication of Research Both MEEA and ERF organize annual conferences to encourage networking and sharing of current research. Both promote publication of the output, but ERF has the resources to do much more promoting and publishing than does MEEA. MEEA’s main vehicle for sharing work in progress are its biannual conferences: one in the United States in conjunction with the American Economic Association’s annual meetings and one held in cooperation with a cosponsoring institution in the region or in Europe. Members and others are invited to submit proposals for individual papers or whole panels based on their current work and the conference content is shaped from these submissions. At the January 2013 meetings, for example, MEEA ran a total of eleven panels, including three panels plus a poster session, at the American Social Science Association venue, and eight more at a neighboring university on a separate day. Three panels were on finance, two on the Arab Spring, two on human development, and one each on macroeconomics and investment policy, the environment, Turkey, and Algeria (MEEA 2012, 3–5; on the history of MEEA conference content, see Pfeifer 2009, Table 5). The programs for these conferences are published in MEEA’s newsletters and on its website. MEEA also sponsors an online proceedings journal, Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies, and has been associated with the Review of Middle East Economics and Finance published three times a year, and with several book series. ERF also holds annual conferences in various regional capitals but most frequently in Cairo. Each year the conference is given a distinct theme; in 2013, it was economic development and social justice. The calls for papers invite anyone engaged in research on the economies of the region, not just its own affiliates, to submit proposals. However, papers are expected to fit into one of six categories, which are the standard grouping for ERF research output: macroeconomics, finance, international economics, labor and human development, microeconomic or sectoral studies, and institutional economics and governance. According to ERF’s website: ERF holds a highly visible annual conference that provides a platform for approximately 250 economists (and professionals in related disciplines) across the region to discuss the most pressing development challenges facing the region . . . . In addition, if offers a vehicle for networking among

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researchers in the region as well as with invited international speakers. Very few events in the ERF region (Arab countries, Iran and Turkey) provide such a forum. (ERF n.d., “Annual Conference”; on the history of ERF conferences, see Pfeifer 2009, Table 6)

ERF publishes five sets of research output. One is the series of books discussed above, which includes edited volumes and selected papers from the annual conferences. A second outlet is the Middle East Development Journal, also discussed above. The third set of ERF publications, Reports, “provide advice and best practice to stakeholders on the basis of policy relevant research.” (ERF n.d., “Publications”). In the early years, the Reports included Economic Trends in the MENA Region (1996–2000), a format that effectively duplicated what the World Bank and IMF cover in their volumes on the region. The Reports series also included Country Profiles (1996–2008), which were coproduced with FEMISE, one of ERF’s partners (mentioned above). The rest of the Reports are on subjects related to the hot topics of the times. The two most recent, for example, are about political patronage and vertical integration in the Egyptian clothing industry and the economy and the environment in the Arab world (see El-Haddad 2013; Abou-Ali and Thomas 2012). Each document in the fourth series of publications, Policy Perspective, provides “a summary of policy-relevant research in a succinct manner . . . targeted towards a wide audience, including policymakers and development practitioners.” (ERF n.d., “Policy Perspective”). Two recent examples are “Inequality and Polarization in the Arab World” (2012) and “Egypt Post– January 2011: An Economic Perspective.” The latter, by then–managing director of ERF Ahmad Galal, describes his recommendations for action in Egypt in order to set the country on the right course in the short, medium, and long runs (see also Karshenas 1999). The policies he lays out do not differ that much from what is proposed by the IFIs (see, e.g., World Bank and International Finance Corporation 2012b). The fifth vehicle for sharing output is ERF’s Working Papers series. Numbering almost eight hundred as of November 2013, these papers embody the hard core of research undertaken by research fellows and research associates within the large research programs described above. The presentation of work in progress in this format is intended “to stimulate debate and encourage feedback to their authors. They represent a first step to publication in

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refereed journals or edited volumes.” (ERF n.d., “Working Papers”). This is where ERF’s drive to hew to neoclassical theory and econometric methodology is most clearly manifested. To illustrate, here is a sample of entries in reverse chronology in 2013: “Impact of Exchange Rate Volatility on Macroeconomic Performance in Sudan” “Palestinian Household Willingness and Ability to Pay for Public Utilities in the West Bank” “Students’ Achievement in the MENA Countries: The Heyneman-Loxley Effect Revisited Using TIMSS 2007 Data” “Competitiveness in Turkish Banking: 2002–2011” “The Effect of Tutoring on Secondary Streaming in Egypt”

These are useful topics for research and for policy making, and they could easily be papers given at MEEA conferences as well, but this short sample of a very long list indicates the success of ERF and its partners and donors in defining the research agenda for the economics of the region.

Contested Boundaries in Economics of and for the Middle East “Contested boundaries” in economics of and for the Middle East are part of a global debate about sustainable and inclusive development. The IFIs came under increasingly harsh criticism for the universal application of their onesize-fits-all neoliberal programs in the 1980s and 1990s, driven by the grinding and debt-ridden “lost decade” in Latin America and the deeply troubled “transition” of the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. After the oil revenue boom of 1973–82 collapsed, the Arab economies went into the doldrums, and IFI interventions began in this region, especially in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. However, higher growth rates did not return to the region until the 2002– 7 global boom, but by that time the negative aspects of neoliberalism had become more apparent. On a global scale, the growing criticism of IFI programs and the rise of alternative visions were expressed in official, popular, and academic form. First, the United Nations Development Programme began issuing its Human Development Report in 1990 as a complement, if not a competitor, to IFIs

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publications, “with the single goal of putting people back at the center of the development process in terms of economic debate, policy and advocacy” (UNDP n.d., “History”). The approach was based on “the need for an alternative development model due to . . . [g]rowing evidence that did not support . . . the ‘trickle down’ power of market forces to spread economic benefits and end poverty . . . [and the] human costs of Structural Adjustment Programmes” (UNDP n.d., “Origins”). As for the MENA region, the first edition of the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report in 2002 received intense attention by raising questions about public economic policy and lagging social welfare (UNDP 2002). The popular criticism of neoliberalism that arose in other developing regions of the world affected the MENA region as well. After the 50 Years Is Enough campaign, which went public in 1994 on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the IFIs at Bretton Woods (Danaher and Yunus 1994), came the Dakar Declaration for the Total Unconditional Cancellation of African and Third World Debt in 2000, a movement that resonates loudly among activists in Tunisia and Egypt (Gamal 2011; HRHF Oslo 2012; Yahia 2013). The Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 were a harbinger of the World Social Forum, which met for the first time in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 and subsequently in other “developing” countries.18 Academic criticism came both from economists who had worked at the IFIs, implementing structural adjustment programs and observing their results, and from independent economists, who were left out in the cold in the 2000s. Joseph Stiglitz was vice president and chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000 when he went public with his criticism (see Stiglitz 2002 for many examples of what he deemed wrong in the IFI programs). He founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University in 2000 to open the discussion of alternatives. Jeffrey Sachs was a famous implementer of stabilization programs in countries like Bolivia, Poland, and Russia in the 1980s and early 1990s, but he abandoned that work to advocate for “sustainable development” and antipoverty programs with the UNDP’s Millennium Development Project and then became director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in 2002. A third quasi-insider example is the paper “The Lost Decades: Developing Countries’ Stagnation in Spite of Policy Reform 1980–1998,” presented at a GDN meeting in Cairo in 2003 by William Easterly. Affiliated with the World Bank at that time, Easterly used the Global Development Network

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Growth Database to show that there had been greater economic growth from 1960 to 1990 in the developing countries than in the period after 1990 and suggested that neoliberal reforms did little to address the real causes of slow growth. The independent critic Dani Rodrik at Harvard’s Kennedy School had consistently challenged the logic and questionable results of the neoliberal approach by studying the successful examples of countries that followed their own paths to growth and development in the 1990s, including large countries like China and India and smaller ones like Botswana and Sri Lanka (see Rodrik 2004; Rodrik for examples from different regions, Rodrik 2003; and for a detailed analysis of Egypt, Mitchell 2002, chaps. 7– 9). By the mid-2000s, the World Bank, and to a lesser extent the IMF, seemed to become more open to local and regional considerations that did not fit the neoliberal model. One example is the report Unlocking the Employment Potential in the Middle East and North Africa: Toward a New Social Contract (2004), which acknowledges that the concept of a social contract between the state and the citizenry is key to finding a viable development path in Arab political culture. Another example is Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform (2005), which gives credence to views of critics like Rodrik (see Rodrik 2006 for a review of the World Bank 2005 volume, where he offers suggestions for alternative approaches). Dissenters from the neoliberal agenda began to participate in ERF and GDN research networks and make their voices heard, at least from the margin. One such voice was that of Eddy Lee, senior adviser with the International Labor Organization. At the ERF’s Twelfth Annual Conference in 2005 he described the unorthodox development policy of post-independence Malaysia—a successful East Asian newly industrializing country, which might serve as a model to MENA countries like Egypt (ERF 2006a, 6). GDN’s edited volume Globalization and Equity: Perspective from the Developing World (Dinello and Squire 2005)19 presented both the papers and the heated discussions that took place at its Cairo conference in January 2003, where scholars from the developing world offered independent evaluations of the impact of globalization on the countries in their regions. At the end of the conference, the six hundred participants approved the Cairo Consensus, in contrast to the Washington Consensus, which postulated, first, that increased integration in the world economy is necessary (though not sufficient) to avoid marginalization and to decrease inequality among countries but, second, that

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policies must be adapted to local conditions in order to minimize the negative effects of globalization (Dinello and Squire 2005, xii–xiii). Chapter 2 of the GDN Cairo conference volume “Globalization and Inequality in the Arab Region” by Ali Abdel Gadir Ali, formerly of the Arab Planning Institute in Kuwait, argues that inequality declined in the Middle East in the 1990s, even as the region experienced slower growth than elsewhere, and that the poor benefited only half as much as the nonpoor when growth was faster. Thus, he concluded, while the developing world should adopt technology and attract capital from the world market, globalization by itself did not lead to development: “Policymakers need to forge a domestic growth strategy, relying on domestic investors and domestic institutions” to resolve conflicts arising from increased integration with the world economy (Ali 2005, 60).20 As these ideas percolated in intellectual circles in the region, they were accommodated in MEEA and ERF conferences, and the two organizations began to publish work that either implicitly or explicitly dealt with them. One implicit example was the Egyptian Competitiveness Report, produced by ERF in conjunction with the Egyptian National Competitiveness Council in 2006. It credits improvements in Egypt’s rankings on competitiveness indicators to neoliberal policy changes introduced under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif in 2004. However, these successes actually worsened another indicator—Egypt’s debt to GDP ratio—and did not compensate for the decline in Egypt’s ranking on other indicators between 2000 and 2004, including health and primary education, market efficiency, and innovation. The report recommends not only more microeconomic reforms to raise labor productivity, stimulate private investment, and increase “Egypt’s very low level of research and development” but also “an appropriate industrial strategy” with “a comprehensive set of policies” (ERF 2006b, 5). Such a program requires long-range planning and state-directed resource allocation, contradicting the neoliberal commitment to the free market and turning policy into a question of who is in control of economic planning and the allocation of resources. Similar issues were raised explicitly by Radwan and Riesco (2007), whose work “demonstrates that a simplistic dichotomy between state and market must give way to a new paradigm” in which the state plays a critical role “for bettering the lives of citizens in societies at differing stages and paths of historical development.”

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The appointment of Ahmed Galal as ERF managing director in 2007 seemed to open the discussion to more challenging questions, especially in the MEDJ, which began under his leadership. Galal had been the executive director of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, a think tank for Egyptian economists endorsed by Gamal Mubarak and a number of business leaders in an apparent effort to adjust public policy to overcome some of the negative aspects of neoliberalism (Rutherford 2008, 211–22). Some of his major work was on industrial policy and the relevance of the East Asian stateled development model to the Arab world (Galal 2008). More papers dealing with industrial policy, inequality, poverty, and the underlying sources of the 2011 political upheavals began to be published, including one by Dani Rodrik (2009; see also Ali 2009; Bibi and Nabli 2009; Berenger 2010; Kaboub 2014; ERF n.d., “Working Papers”). After the Arab Spring, it appeared at first that these historical events might call forth new ways of interpreting and making policy for the economies of the Middle East—ways that would be more open to the cultural and historical sensibilities with which Middle East studies has been concerned. Several conferences and many papers attempting to grapple with the issues raised by the Arab Spring blossomed in the 2011–15 period. However, the IFIs worked assiduously to seize the reins of post–Arab Spring research, both in their own publications and under the auspices of the ERF. Without taking responsibility for neoliberalism’s negative sides, the IFIs’ burgeoning volume of output sought to define the region’s economic “problems” in ways that suited their continued promotion of hallowed neoliberal “solutions,” such as public-private partnerships, small and medium enterprises, liberalization of trade and investment, deregulation of the business environment, and labor market flexibility.21 They were grateful for the Gulf monarchies’ finance of “Arab countries in transition” and welcomed the military regime in Egypt as well as the electoral reinstallation of politicians from the pre-uprising regime in Tunisia. As of mid-2015, proposals for alternative paths to reform of the old economic regimes were being overshadowed by the restoration of neoliberalism dressed in inclusive garb and purporting to serve, however indirectly, the needs for bread, freedom, and social justice (for further elaboration, see Pfeifer 2015a, 2015b).

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Notes 1.

I carried out an online search with the keywords “courses in economics + Middle East” and “courses in Middle East economics,” in addition to conducting an email survey of MESA members listed under “economics” or “political economy” in the member directory (see Pfeifer 2009, Table 1).

2.

In 2006, these universities included Boston, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, New York, Princeton, Rochester, Texas, and Yale. A similar pattern was found for the eighteen universities listed in the document Africa and Middle East: Abstracts, compiling abstracts of “area and international studies projects, language training, and outreach activities to be conducted by NRC and/or FLAS grantee institutions during the FY 03– 05” (US Department of Education n.d., n.p.).

3.

At one school, an affiliated professor belonged to a regular economics department and five others worked in resource economics (a separate and less prestigious department). Only one center listed a course on the economies of the Middle East per se, taught once per year. Another had three courses (of which two were on agriculture), each including about 25 percent content on the Middle East. Four other centers listed one course each on political economy, development, or finance in the Middle East taught by professors in political science or international relations but not in economics (pers. comm., Elizabeth Anderson, project researcher, SSRC, April 18, 2006).

4.

The argument advanced here is developed cogently but at greater length by Jennifer Olmsted in a paper she contributed to the conference sponsored by SSRC in 2007 on the relation of the social sciences to MES (Olmsted 2007).

5.

I know this from having gone through the process myself— as department chair supervising hiring and participating in tenure reviews and as an outside reviewer evaluating departments and programs at other institutions.

6.

I learned this when I visited ERF’s office and library in 1993 soon after its founding and spoke with founding executive director Heba Handoussa. The ERF website specifies that the World Bank was a main founder and initial funder of ERF but that it now provides funds only for defined projects (ERF n.d., “Partners and Donors”).

7.

This is my estimate based on affiliation with MEEA of about 1,000 people over these years, counting turnover (not all dues-paying members at once) and another 1,000 with ERF, with 265 affiliates in 2012 in its four categories with term limits.

8.

The EconLit database can be accessed at www.aeaweb.org/econlit/.

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9.

In 2006, I examined a sample of English-language articles about MENA economies in peer-reviewed journals indexed in the Journal of Economic Literature from 2000 to 2005. About half were on economics and finance in the more restricted disciplinary sense, illustrating growing specialization in economic modeling and finance, and half were on institutional and real-sector research by other social scientists (see Pfeifer 2009, Table 4 and Appendix A). That sample showed that from two to ten articles related to MENA economies appeared in each of ten well-ranked economics journals and one to three articles appeared in eighteen interdisciplinary journals (Pfeifer 2009, 13–14).

10.

In 2006, I examined books published in English by academic publishers on Middle East economies from 2000 to 2005 (see Pfeifer 2009, Appendix B). Fifty-one of the 169 titles fell into the general category “economic development, backwardness, and reform,” while thirty-one treated issues of demography and human resources, twenty-seven dealt with politics or international relations, and eighteen dealt with economic history and geography. The interdisciplinary subjects accounted for 127 out of 169 titles, or 75 percent. Economics more narrowly defined accounted for just 13 percent, including Islamic economics, international trade, energy, and banking and finance.

11. 12.

The first three volumes were published by JAI Press, the other three by Elsevier. For example, the current president and a past president of MEEA, both professors at universities in the United States, were “elected by Economic Research Forum’s (ERF) research fellows as new members of the Board of Directors of ERF for a five-year term starting in 2012” (MEEA 2012, 6).

13.

The World Bank Group is made up of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Association, the International Finance Corporation, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (see IMF 2013 for listing of IMF-led groups and “clubs”). Both the World Bank and the IMF have relationships with regional institutions such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the African Development Bank, and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.

14.

Persons with regional names made up 77 percent of new members in the 2001– 6 period, and people working in the region constituted 46 percent (see Pfeifer 2009, Table 3).

15.

In 2006, the committee included four members working in institutions in the region and four in international organizations and academies, one of whom was also president of MEEA at that time (Pfeifer 2009, Table 2).

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16.

The website also specifies, “Membership in this category is not open for

17.

Because of political uncertainty, MEEA’s conference in Alexandria, Egypt, was

Application.” postponed from 2011 to 2012, and the 2011 international conference was moved to Barcelona and sponsored with another organization. 18.

For more information, see their website at www.fsm2013.org/en.

19.

In 2003, Lyn Squire was working at the World Bank as chief economist of the MENA vice presidency, as director of the research department, and as director of the 1990 World Development Report on Poverty. As of November 2013, he was an ERF senior associate and managing editor of MEDJ. View his profile at www. erf.org.eg/cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_senior_associates_details&affiliates_id=71 (accessed May 30, 2014).

20.

Ali Abdel Gadir Ali was a senior associate of ERF in 2013; see his profile at www. erf.org.eg/cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_senior_associates_details&affiliates_id=24 (accessed May 30, 2014).

21.

I can supply a list of examples of this literature upon request. The gist of IFIs’ patronizing approach is captured in the 2012 speech by the IMF director David Lipton, “Enabling Economic Transformation in the Middle East and North Africa,” at the London School of Economics; the text of the speech is available at www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2012/111312.htm (accessed July 17, 2015).

References Abou-Ali, Hala, and Alban Thomas. 2012. “The Environment and the Economy in the Arab World.” Economic Research Forum—Policy Research Reports. Accessed May 30, 2014. www.erf.org.eg/cms. php?id=NEW_publication_details_reports&publication_id=1576. Ali, Ali Abdel Gadir. 2005. “Globalization and Inequality in the Arab Region.” In Globalization and Equity: Perspectives from the Developing World, edited by Natalia Dinello and Lyn Squire, 37– 66. Cheltenham Glos, UK: Edward Elgar. ———. 2009. “The Political Economy of Inequality in the Arab Region and Relevant Development Policies.” Economic Research Forum, Working Paper Series, No. 502. Ben Hafaiedh, Abdel Wahab. 2007. “The Body of a Dinosaur and the Steps of a Tortoise: Narrowing the Gap of Social Sciences in the MENA.” Journal of North African Studies 12, no. 2: 173–83.

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Berenger, Valerie. 2010. “Multidimensional Fuzzy Poverty and Pro-Poor Growth Measures in Nonmonetary Dimensions in Egypt between 1995 and 2005.” Middle East Development Journal 2, no. 1: 15–28. Bibi, Sami, and Mustapha K. Nabli. 2009. “Income Inequality in the Arab Region: Data and Measurement, Patterns and Trends.” Middle East Development Journal 1, no. 2: 275– 314. Chetty, Raj. 2013. “Yes, Economics Is a Science.” New York Times, October 20. Accessed May 30, 2014. www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/opinion/yeseconomics-is-a-science.html?_r=0. Danaher, Kevi, and Muhammed Yunus, eds. 1994. Preface to Fifty Years Is Enough: The Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. San Francisco: Global Exchange and South End Press. Dinello, Natalia, and Lyn Squire, eds. 2005. Globalization and Equity: Perspectives from the Developing World. Cheltenham Glos, UK: Edward Elgar. Easterly, William. 2001. “The Lost Decades: Developing Countries’ Stagnation in Spite of Policy Reform 1980–1998.” Accessed November 28, 2013. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRES/ Resources/469232–1107449512766/The_Lost_Decades.pdf. Economic Research Forum (ERF). 2006a. Forum [newsletter] 1 (Spring). ———. 2006b. Egyptian Competitiveness Report 2005–2006: Executive Summary. Accessed May 30, 2014. www.imc-egypt.org/studies/FullReport/ Competitiveness%20Report%202005–2006.pdf. ———. 2013. “ERF launches the Arab Spring Development Initiative (ASDI).” Forum [newsletter] 20, no. 2 (Autumn): 19–20. ———. n.d. “About ERF.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/cms. php?id=about_erf_landing. ———. n.d. “Advisory Committee.” Accessed August 1, 2013. www.erf.org. eg/cms.php?id=103. ———. n.d. “Annual Conference.” Accessed November 28, 2013. www.erf. org.eg/cms.php?id=Annual_conference. ———. n.d. “Become an ERF Affiliate.” Accessed November 28, 2013. www. erf.org.eg/cms.php?id=become_erf_affiliate. ———. n.d. “Board of Trustees.” Accessed August 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=about_erf_board_of_trustees_board_members. ———. n.d. “Books.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/cms. php?id=publications_books_landing_page.

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———. n.d. “Conferences.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=Annual_conference. ———. n.d. “ERF Affiliates.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_main_landing. ———. n.d. “ERF Institutional Charter.” Accessed November 7, 2013. www. erf.org.eg/cms.php?id=ERF%20Charter. ———. n.d. “Mission.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/cms. php?id=about_erf_landing. ———. n.d. “Partners and Donors.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf. org.eg/cms.php?id=about_erf_partners_donors. ———. n.d. “Past Training Programs.” Accessed November 28, 2013. www. erf.org.eg/cms.php?id=capacity_building_past_training_workshops. ———. n.d. “Policy Affiliates.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_policy_affiliates. ———. n.d. “Policy Perspective.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org. eg/cms.php?id=publications_policy_breifs_landing_page; www.erf.org. eg/cms.php?id=publications_policy_breifs_list. ———. n.d. “Publications.” Accessed November 28, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=publications_landing_page. ———. n.d. “Reports.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/cms.php. ———. n.d. “Research Associates.” Accessed August 1, 2013. www.erf.org. eg/cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_research_associates. ———. n.d. “Research Fellows.” Accessed August 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_research_fellows. ———. n.d. “The Research Initiative for Arab Development (RIAD).” Accessed November 28, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/cms.php?id=RIAD. ———. n.d. “Senior Associates.” Accessed August 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=erf_affiliates_senior_associates. ———. n.d. “Working Papers.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/ cms.php?id=publications_working_papers_list. ———. n.d. “Workshops.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.erf.org.eg/cms. php?id=Workshops. El-Haddad, Amirah. 2013. “Political Patronage and Economic Opportunity: The Case of Vertical Integration in the Egyptian Clothing Industry.” Economic Research Forum—Economic and Social Development in the Arab Region. Accessed May 6, 2016. http://erf.org.eg/publications/

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political-patronage-economic- opportunity-case-vertical-integrationegyptian-clothing-industry/. Emara, Shahira. 2013. “ERF about to Launch Open Access Micro Data.” Economic Research Forum Blog. March 4. http://erfblog.org/2013/03/04/erf-aboutto-launch- open- access-micro- data/?utm_source=feedburner& utm_ medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+erfann. Fergany, Nader. 2007. Promoting Competitiveness on Micro and Small Enterprises in the MENA Region. Cairo: Economic Research Forum. Galal, Ahmed, ed. 2008. Industrial Policy in the Middle East and North Africa: Rethinking the Role of the State. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press. ———. 2011. “Egypt Post–January 2011: An Economic Perspective.” Economic Research Forum: Policy Perspective. Accessed May 30, 2014. www.erf. org.eg/cms.php?id=publication_details&publication_id=1391. Gamal, Wael. 2011. “We Will Not Pay the Debts of Tyranny.” Jadaliyya, October 28. Accessed May 30, 2014. www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2979/ we-will-not-pay-the-debts-of-tyranny. Handoussa, Heba. 2000. “Keynote Address to the Workshop.” In Research for Development in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Eglal Rached and Dina Craissati, 11–18. Toronto and Cairo: International Development Research Center. HRHF Oslo. 2012. “The Arab Spring and International Debt: Egypt’s Debt to Norway.” Human Rights House Network, March 27. Accessed May 30, 2014. http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/17846.html. Ibrahim, Saad-Eddin. 2000. “Arab Social Science Research in the 1990s and Beyond: Issues, Trends, and Priorities.” In Research for Development in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Eglal Rached and Dina Craissati, 111–40. Toronto and Cairo: International Development Research Center. International Monetary Fund (IMF). 2012a. Regional Economic Outlook, Middle East and Central Asia. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. ———. 2012b. Arab Countries in Transition: Economic Outlook and Key Challenges. Deauville Partnership Ministerial Meeting, October 12, 2012. Accessed May 6, 2016. www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2012/101212b. pdf. ———. 2013. “Factsheet: A Guide to Committees, Groups, and Clubs.” September 27. Accessed November 1, 2013. www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ facts/groups.htm.

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———. n.d. “About the IMF Institute for Capacity Development.” Accessed November 1, 2013. www.imf.org/external/np/ins/english/about.htm. Kaboub, Fadhel. 2014. “The Making of the Tunisian Revolution.” In Understanding the Political Economy of the Arab Uprisings, edited by Ishac Diwan, 57– 77. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific Publishing Co. Karshenas, Massoud. 1999. “Labor Market Flexibility and Economic Adjustment: A Cross-Regional and Cross-Country Analysis.” Economic Research Forum. Working Papers Series, no. 199938. Khamis, May, and Abdelhak Senhadji. 2010. “Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries and Challenges Ahead.” International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC. Middle East Economic Association (MEEA). 2009. MEEA Newsletter 20, no. 2 (Fall). Accessed November 1, 2013. http://meeaweb.org/pdf/MEEANewsFall09.pdf. ———. 2012. MEEA Newsletter 23, no. 1 (Winter–Spring). Accessed August 1, 2013. http://meeaweb.org/pdf/MEEAnewsletterWinterSpring12.pdf. ———. n.d. “About MEEA.” Accessed August 1, 2013. http://meeaweb.org/ aboutus.htm. Middle East Studies Association (MESA). n.d. “About MESA: Description.” Accessed November 28, 2013. www.mesa.arizona.edu/about/index.html. Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2003a. “Deterritorialization and the Crisis of Social Science.” In Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, edited by Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Weaver, 148– 70. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. ———. 2003b. “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science.” University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection (UCIAS), vol. 3, art. 3. Olmsted, Jennifer Claire. 2007. Does/Should Geography Matter for the Discipline of Economics? New York: Social Science Research Council. Pfeifer, Karen. 2009. “When the Twain Shall Meet: Middle East Area Studies and the Discipline of Economics.” Proceedings of MEEA’s 29th International Conference, San Francisco, January 2–5, 2009 and 7th International Summer Conference, Famagusta, North Cyprus, May 29– 31, 2008. Accessed August 1, 2013. www.luc.edu/orgs/meea/volume11/ PDFS/Paper-by-Pfeifer.pdf.

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———. 2015a. “Rebels, Reformers and Empire: Alternative Economic Programs for Egypt and Tunisia.” Middle East Report 45, no. 274: 2–8, 48. ———. 2015b. “The Tortuous Path to a New Economic Agenda in Egypt and Tunisia.” Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1, no. 1 (January). Accessed July 17, 2015. www.atiner.gr/journals/mediterranean/2015-1-1-1Pfeifer.pdf. ———. 2016. “Neoliberal Transformation and the Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.” In Political and Socio-Economic Change in the Middle East and North Africa: Gender Perspectives and Survival Strategies, edited by Roksana Bahramitash and Hadi Salehi Esfahani, 21– 73. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Radwan, Samir, and Manuael Riesco, eds. 2007. The Changing Role of the State. Cairo: Economic Research Forum. Rodrik, Dani. 2003. In Search of Prosperity, Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. “Rethinking Growth Policies in the Developing World.” Luca d’Agliano Lecture in Development Economics, Torino, Italy, October 8. ———. 2006. “Goodbye Washington Consensus. Hello Washington Confusion? A Review of the World Bank’s Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform.” Journal of Economic Literature 44, no. 4 (December): 973–87. ———. 2007. “Normalizing Industrial Policy.” Paper presented for the Commission on Growth and Development. Accessed May 30, 2014. www.hks. harvard.edu/fs/drodrik/Research%20papers/Industrial%20Policy%20_ Growth%20Commission_.pdf. ———. 2009. “Industrial Policy: Don’t Ask Why, Ask How.” Middle East Development Journal 1, no. 1: 1–29. Rutherford, Bruce K. 2008. Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam and Democracy in the Arab World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shahin, Wassim, and Ghassn Dibeh, eds. 2000. Income Inequality, Poverty, and Unemployment in the Middle East and North Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Silva, Joana, Victoria Levin, and Matteo Morgandi. 2013. Inclusion and Resilience: The Way Forward for Social Safety Nets in the Middle East and North Africa. Washington, DC: World Bank. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2002. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton.

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United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2002. Arab Human Development Report 2002. Accessed November 28, 2013. http://arabstates.undp.org/content/rbas/en/home/library/huma_development/arabhuman-development-report-2003-building-a-knowledge-society.html. ———. n.d. “Origins of the Human Development Approach.” Accessed November 28, 2013. http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/origins. ———. n.d. “History of the Human Development Report.” Accessed November 1, 2013. http://hdr.undp.org/en/humandev/reports/. US Department of Education. n.d. Africa and Middle East: Abstracts. Accessed November 28, 2013. www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/nrcflasafricamideast.pdf. Verme, Paolo. 2013. “A Silent Data Revolution in the Arab World.” World Bank: Voices and Views: Middle East and North Africa (blog), July 1. Accessed May 30, 2014. http://menablog.worldbank.org/ silent-data-revolution-arab-world. World Bank. 2004. Unlocking the Employment Potential in the Middle East and North Africa: toward a New Social Contract. [Lead author Tarik Yousef.] Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank and International Finance Corporation. 2005. Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade of Reform. Washington, DC: World Bank. ———. 2012a. Interim Strategy Note for the Republic of Tunisia for the Period FY13–14. Report no. 67692-TN. Washington, DC: World Bank. ———. 2012b. Interim Strategy Note for the Arab Republic of Egypt. Report no. 66443-EG. Washington, DC: World Bank. Yahia, Fadwa. 2013. “Campaign to Cancel the Odious Debt of Tunisia and Egypt.” Tunis Times, November 11. Accessed November 1, 2013. w w w.thetunistimes.com /2013 /11 /campaign-to- cancel-the- odiousdebt-of-tunisia-and-egypt-99653/.

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chapter four

The Interdisciplinary Spatial Turn and the Discipline of Geography in Middle East Studies Amy Mills and Timur Hammond

Space, place, and landscape—as foci of study and as conceptual methodologies— have become familiar theoretical frameworks that ground an interdisciplinary “spatial turn” in Middle East area studies. Disciplinary boundaries are increasingly blurred in this diverse body of work, which spans the social sciences and the humanities. While a spatial approach is considered one of the foundational structuring characteristics of geography as a discipline, research in the spatial turn in Middle East studies (MES) appears to be produced primarily by scholars trained in disciplines other than geography—in particular, anthropology and architectural, urban, and social history. In this chapter, we survey this interdisciplinary field and define it as constituted by research that explicitly focuses on space as a guiding concept for research topics or methodologies; positions space as “something which is more than a predefined territorial container of political life”; and uses “modes of analysis which disrupt static and rigid conceptualizations of space” (Space of Democracy 2009, 579). As geographers, we are interested in tracing how space has come to be conceptualized as a key analytical term in contemporary scholarship on the Middle East. We note that the recent spatial turn, as it began to flourish in the 1990s, signifies a shift in how interdisciplinary scholars approach space in MES and that this development is similar to the changing perspectives on space in geography after the critical social turn. Indeed, some of the key works that inspired this critical turn in geography (by Henri Lefebvre,

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Edward Soja, and David Harvey, for example) have also been influential in the spatial turn in MES. Interdisciplinary research in MES has moved from an understanding of space as an ontological subject—as static or objective—to an interest in examining space as ontogenetic— as unfolding and changing—produced through ongoing social processes. If an earlier generation of scholars was interested in mapping material form or analyzing space as the expression of social or cultural structure (in defining the particularity of the physical organization and social function of the Islamic city, for example), in later research both social and spatial processes are treated as deeply implicated with one another, and a spatial conceptual methodology is employed as a critical strategy to illuminate the work of power. Studies of place and landscape, for example, examine how diverse groups of people experience, interpret, negotiate, and challenge one another’s claims to power by articulating various narratives of the past (see Massey 1995). We begin this chapter with a brief survey of the literature that constitutes the present spatial turn in MES. While our review is not exhaustive, it points to some of the most important dimensions of this interdisciplinary research area. This review has two aims: to examine the (often undertheorized or loosely defined) understandings of space at work in MES research and to explore the central or emerging research interests in MES developed by this spatial turn. Approaching the literature in this way, we argue, gives us a better grasp of the kinds of knowledge on the region that a focus on space engenders. What does a spatial approach illuminate with regard to the larger social, political, and economic processes through which the region is both constructed and experienced? What new ways of thinking do spatial methodologies reveal about the connections between local realities and a global context? Our chapter then considers the theories of space discernible in research on the Middle East for many decades before the present spatial turn. We argue that not only does an interest in space have a far longer history in MES than recent critical research lets on, but that attention to this issue is important because it illuminates the ways in which evolving understandings of space accompany changing research agendas and, possibly, new theoretical, methodological, or conceptual assumptions in the interdisciplinary arena of MES more generally. In the third section we bring into our discussion questions of disciplinarity, particularly in relation to geography, and the ways in which disciplinary and institutional histories have shaped the contours of the spatial

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turn in Middle East area studies. We conclude by identifying new directions for research.

Genesis of the Spatial Turn The contemporary interdisciplinary spatial turn across the social sciences and the humanities is partly inspired by the work of Anglophone geographers who argued for the importance of space in the production and study of social and historical processes (see Warf and Arias 2008; Agnew 2005; Benko and Strohmayer 1997). Soja’s call for a “reassertion of a spatial critical perspective in social theory and analysis” (1989, 1) was a critique of the ways in which a spatial approach had become subordinated to a historicist perspective that had come to dominate Marxist and other critical theoretical explanations of social life. Soja’s book Postmodern Geographies inspired cross-disciplinary theoretical discussions about space, including in MES; for example, a discussion of the spatial turn in Jewish studies in the edited volume Jewish Topographies cites this work as foundational (Brauch, Lipphardt, and Nocke 2008, 1). Soja drew deeply on Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space, which wrote space back into a larger view of social processes and relations of power. In Lefebvre’s work, space is far more than merely the stage, template, or container for social action; space is produced through social processes, and also conditions them (Lefebvre 2000). This critical attention to space constitutes a conceptual methodology for studying power-laden social relations, as in Michel de Certeau’s (1984, 1998) work, which brings attention to the spatiality of everyday life. His analysis of spatial tactics and strategies provides an approach for examining the agency of ordinary urban residents within larger social relations of power and is often cited in interdisciplinary MES research (e.g., Ghannam 2002; Cinar 2005). Over the past two decades, a number of scholars have developed new ways of incorporating notions of space, place, landscape, and territory into their work—whether drawing on the work of David Harvey (1973) and Soja (1980) to analyze the spatial dimensions of capitalism, heeding Fredric Jameson’s (1984) call for new projects of cognitive mapping, taking inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s (1994) “poetics of space,” or examining the power relations that condition the production of urban spaces (Foucault 1995). It is clear that the spatial turn is characterized by a plurality of voices rather than by a

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single approach. That being said, we identify a few areas of research in which the spatial turn has proven particularly important for MES. First, working from both Marxist and world-systems traditions, some scholars have highlighted the ways in which the integration of the Middle East into the world economy has transformed spatial relationships in the region. Whether in studying the transformation of Istanbul into a global city (Keyder 1999), emphasizing the historical interconnectedness of urban and rural areas (Shields 2008), or foregrounding the transformative role of the city in nineteenth-century modernization (Hudson 2008; Zandi-Sayek 2012), space has been an important part of the analysis. In a similar way, scholars studying globalization—primarily, though not always, through the lens of global/local oppositions—have incorporated accounts of space and spatial practice into a rich body of work on the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of that process (Oncu and Weyland 1997). More recently, historians have conceptualized the Middle East not as a bounded space on the map but in terms of networks and circuits (Gelvin and Green 2013), characterized by long-standing movements of people, things, and ideas in the region. Furthermore, a strand of recent work in the field of critical geopolitics positions the Middle East in a larger global context (Bonine, Amanat, and Gasper 2011; Struckman and Sturm 2013), examining topics such as Arabic-language cartographic representations of the region (Culcasi 2012) or the ways in which warfare has created particular connections between the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan (Harvey 2009; Gregory 2004).1 Second, a range of scholars (to whose work we return below) focus on the social production of space and its connection to national identity, memory, politics, and religion. Rather than examining how spaces and spatial relationships are transformed by global flows, these works are characterized by an intonation of critical social theory and are concerned with power relations as they work through the production and organization of social space, territory, landscape, and place. This work opens a rich interdisciplinary debate about the spatial dimensions of imperialism, colonialism, and Orientalism (Mitchell 1988; Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber 2002). One prominent theme within this body of research is the multiplicity of spaces and identities and their contestation both in predominantly Muslim societies and in postcolonial, national, and global contexts (Deeb and Harb 2013). Scholars have also explored spatial transformation as a governmental tool to organize, arrange, and discipline populations or have studied the contestation of state power

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through residents’ appropriations of space and the spatial tactics and strategies of daily social life (Ismail 2006). A related body of work conceives of space in terms of imagination, cultural production, and mental life (Bertram 2008; Mills 2010), promoting new approaches to thinking about the relationship to place in urban life in the Middle East. Third, and perhaps most obviously, we see an important body of research cohering around the study of the material and social processes that transform urban spaces and landscapes. Themes here include examining the development of the built environment over time (Weber 2010), with attention to colonial transformations (Celik 2008); tracing planning practices (Kezer 2009); and looking at how memories and identities are produced and reproduced through spatial forms (Volk 2010). What links these various approaches are central questions concerning the relationships between space and society and the role of space within particular constellations of power. The research we evaluate below is not comprehensive but includes selected work by disciplinetrained geographers as well as social and architectural historians, anthropologists, and sociologists that helps us examine how space is understood in the spatial turn.

Major Research Topics in the Spatial Turn in Middle East Studies One of the research trends in the recent spatial turn in MES focuses on urban quarters and ethnic-religious minorities (see Celik 2009; Behar 2003). These studies are distinguished by their critical examination of minorities’ complicated positions within predominantly Muslim societies, through a focus on the planning, organization, experience, representation, and memory of minority quarters (see Miller and Bertagnin 2010). Much of this work centers on Jewish quarters, and a recent series of publications and conferences attests to the emergence of a spatial turn in Jewish studies.2 The study of minority quarters intersected with MES as early as 1968, although publications in this area increased in the 1990s. The spatial approach in these works is acutely summarized by Susan Gilson Miller’s question, “To what extent can Jewish space become a metaphor for understanding the tenor of MuslimJewish relations?” (2008, 104). Joelle Bahloul’s Architecture of Memory, a major work in this field, compares the memories of Muslim and Jewish members of an Algerian household and introduces an approach that examines how the memories of different groups of people converge in a particular place—a

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strategy that brings Muslim and Jewish memories into conversation with one another (see also Hirschberg 1968; Bilu and Levy 1996; Bornes-Varol 1994; Kastoryano 1992; Levy 2003; Rozen 1998; Schroeter 1993; Slyomovics 1998). A related spatial strategy underscores research on port cities as loci through which to understand minority-majority relations, urban connections between the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean world, and Europe, and geographies of cosmopolitanism (Driessen 2005; Keyder, Ozveren, and Quataert 1993; Eldem, Goffman, and Masters 1999; Della Dora 2006; Polycandrioti 2005; Jackson 2013). Another important body of literature links spatial approaches and historical studies, examining the production, control, and transformation of space as an inherently political project. Researchers have investigated, for example, the ways in which Ottoman imperial power was articulated through and depended on the imagination, structuring, planning, or appropriation of particular spaces, whether through Ottoman urban form, architecture, cartography, or city image (see Celik 1986; Bierman, Abou-El-Haj, and Preziosi 1991; Necipoglu 2005; Ebel 2002; Watenpaugh 2004; Manners 1997; Manners and Emiralioglu 2007; Kafescioglu 2009). Studies of colonial power have revealed the ways in which the disciplining and control of local populations, and the expression of European order and rationality, depended on the destruction and/or organization of urban space (Mitchell 1988; Celik 1997, 2008). In this work the colonial city is not juxtaposed to a static, Islamic city; rather, the creation of colonial urban space depended on either the romanticization or derision of an older, “other” city. A geographic imagination of Cairo as disorderly, for example, legitimized European reordering of the city (Mitchell 1988). Colonial urban processes had dramatic consequences for local residents and for the colonial project itself. As Zeynep Celik (1997) demonstrates through the case of Algiers in Algeria, the colonial imagining of European and Arab citizens as separate—which relegated the casbah, the crowded quarter of Algiers, to a subaltern social and spatial status—ultimately resulted in the powerful appropriation of the city as the site of national resistance to French colonial rule. Urban space, in this work, is not merely inscribed with European visions of colonial order, but is intimately constitutive of the intertwined envisioning and expression of both colonial and national power. An important theme in recent work on cities is the relationship between urban space and modernity in the Middle East (Watenpaugh 2006; Bozdogan 2001; Wright 1991). For example, in his study of the Ottoman creation of

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Beirut as an administrative province, Jens Hanssen (2005) examines the connection between material and social urban spaces and the lived experiences of urban life as residents imagined their modernity through the production of the city in the context of late Ottoman rule (see also Hudson 2008). The relation between urban modernity and nationalism or cosmopolitanism is also the focus of works on urban social spaces and urban planning (Bozdogan and Kasaba 1997; Ghannam 2002; Zandi-Sayek 2012). With regard to Turkey, for example, Zeynep Kezer (1998, 2010) argues that Ankara was a site through which the new nation-state was imagined and planned according to modernist design principles that distinguished it from Turkey’s prenational, nonmodern past (spatial approaches to studies of Turkish nationalism examining urban planning, design, architecture, or symbolism abound; see, e.g., Bozdogan 2001; Gul 2009; Gur 2006; Evered 2008; Sargin 2004). Other important topics examined in this literature are the commodification and consumption of space in the context of urban, national, and global economic processes. In his study of tourism in the Arab world, Waleed Hazbun (2008) analyzes tourism as a global economic spatial practice through which states maintain authoritarian control (see also Dallen and Daher 2009). In studies of heritage preservation and the gentrification of historic neighborhoods in Cairo, Damascus, and Fez, urban space is produced through ideological, political, and economic tensions embedded in competing efforts to represent and commodify particular visions of the city in material form (see AlSayyad, Bierman, and Rabbat 2005; McGuinness 2000; Ossman 1994; El Kadi and Elkerdany 2006; Salamandra 2004; Totah 2006; Porter 2003). Issues of memory, spatial practice, and territorial contestation are central in works on Palestine and Israel, including Susan Slyomovics’s (1998) study of competing Palestinian and Jewish claims to place, Nadia Abu El-Haj’s (2001) research on Israeli archaeology, and Oren Yiftachel and Haim Yacobi’s (2003) work on the production of space in an Israeli mixed city (see also Sawalha 2010). Some of this work focuses on the creation of place through narrative and imagery (Celik 2009; Ossman 1994; Slyomovics 2001; Bertram 2008). Amy Mills (2010) extends this approach to the study of the cultural landscape in Istanbul as a medium that obscures minority claims to urban places. The strategic emphasis on place (rather than a particular national or ethnic group, for example) allows these authors to examine the contestation and negotiation of cultural-political identities and the instability of conceptual categories such as religion or ethnicity in the context of emerging and

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competing nationalisms. These studies reflect Doreen Massey’s (1995) relational approach, which theorizes places as produced through their connections to other places and to their pasts and through competing stakes in the future. In other research, the social production of space is both a subject of study and a hermeneutic approach through which to examine complex and variable transformations of social life influenced by local, national, and global processes. Research on urban issues includes studies on poverty, migration, and urbanization. Ethnographic work in poor urban neighborhoods facilitates understanding of Islamist politics, political economy, and social practices (Bonine 1997; Keyder 1999; Singerman and Amar 2006; White 2002; Tugal 2009; Kuyucu and Unsal 2010). Some of this work brings a spatial approach to studying questions of religion. One example is Anna Secor’s (2002) research on the shifting regimes of veiling practices negotiated by women as they move through various spaces in Istanbul. Her work destabilizes essentialized notions of Islamic practices and of Muslim identities by focusing on their spatial contingency (see also Gokariksel 2007; Cinar 2005; Walton 2009). Similarly, Lara Deeb (2006) investigates the urban spaces of the southern suburb al-Dahiyya in Beirut in order to understand Shi’a female piety as modern. A related, vibrant body of work examines the relationship between urban space and the state by studying everyday urban life and by linking the city to questions of citizenship, democracy, civil society, and state power (Bayat 2009; Secor 2004; Ustundag 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Ozyurek 2006). Asef Bayat’s research, for example, examines political processes by looking at the actions, perspectives, experiences, and daily urban practices of residents. Berna Turam’s (2007, 2013) research on democratization in Istanbul similarly explores the ways in which ordinary residents negotiate and appropriate state power. This recent research on urban space shows not only that people, as citizens, use their power to interpret state-authored as well as counterhegemonic symbols and ideologies but also that urban societies in the Middle East are dynamic and open to change rather than merely subject to the forces of secularism or Islamism, of globalization, urbanization, or the authority of a strong state. A long-standing interest in the relationship between nature and society has paralleled the concern for urban environments. Most of this research has been conducted by geographers, and it was once the strongest subfield in geographic

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research on the Middle East. Early research in this area concentrated on studies of resource use, adaptation to environmental change, and cultural and political ecology (English 1966; Miller 1984; Hobbs 1989; Beaumont, Bonine, and McLachlan 1989; Manners and Sagafi Nejad 1985). Contemporary environmental studies in geography more explicitly examine the relationships between space, discourse, and power. Leila Harris and Samer Alatout (2010), for example, investigate the ways in which the Turkish and Israeli states employ scalar language to legitimize state territorial control over water resources, and Diana Davis (2007) illustrates the role of French environmental narratives in the colonial appropriation of land in North Africa (see also Cohen 2002; Davis 2006; Harris 2009; Evered 2011; Atalan-Helicke 2012). Meanwhile, environmental studies are becoming an important trend in MES, particularly in history (Mikhail 2011; White 2011), and integrate critical social theories in similar ways as other research areas in the spatial turn.

Space and the “Islamic City” Questions of space have been studied and debated for many years in MES. This is evident in the literature on the Islamic city, central to much of the work in MES (for a more complete historiographic review of the concept, see Jayyusi et al. 2008, pt. 1). Reviewing the understandings of space that structured research on the Islamic city provides a useful starting point from which to discuss changing conceptual understandings of space as they flourished in the spatial turn. Early literature on the Islamic city posited space as the product of Islam— considered an urban religion and an important structuring element of society that created specific types of spatial organizations. In this literature, space was implicitly understood as static, the material outcome of social and cultural processes. Since the 1970s the idea of the Islamic city has been extensively criticized, rethought, and revised in ways that parallel changing views of the relationships between space and society and that reflect developments in the theorization of space more generally (the central and most cited critique is Abu-Lughod 1987; see also Lapidus 1967, 1969, 1973; Hourani and Stern 1970; Brown 1973; Eickelman 1974; AlSayyad 1991, 1996; Raymond 1994; Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber 2002). One line of critique questions the extent to which Islam plays a role in shaping the built environment. While recent scholarship avoids privileging

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religion as a determining factor in social life or in social spaces, the importance of Islam, or what it means to build Islamically, continues to be a muchdebated topic. A second critique reveals the larger geographic context in which the Islamic city was produced as a subject of study; colonialist and Orientalist frameworks made the idea of this kind of city possible. A third critique centers on the problem of temporality in the Islamic city paradigm. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the model of the Islamic city was often predicated on its unchanging nature, framed as backward, traditional, and antimodern or as a museum set against the modern. This model involved a perspective of space, too, as static and unchanging. Finally, space was treated largely as an empty category. This is not to say that the topic of space did not emerge in discussions about the Islamic city. Measured against Weber’s European city, which was seen as modern, progressive, and secular, Islamic city spaces seemed to be defined in terms of various absences, such as the lack of civil society institutions, rational town planning, or modernity itself. During the 1970s and 1980s, a renewed emphasis on Islam as the “traditional” culture of many Middle Eastern cities heralded scholarship that revived the Islamic city. In a range of conferences, seminars, and edited volumes, the Islamic city was cast as a “traditional” resource for societies in the Middle East (Holod and Safran 1980; Holod 1980; Serjeant 1980; Akbar 1988). Some scholars have argued that the traditional Islamic city model has contemporary relevance. Besim Selim Hakim, for example, draws on close readings of the Qur’an, hadith (the sayings and teachings of the prophet Muhammad), and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) to argue for an organized and planned Islamic city, in contrast to previous accounts that stressed the disaggregated and unplanned nature of Islamic urban spaces (Hakim and Rowe 1983; Hakim 1986, 1998, 1994). In this literature, references to the “Islamic” nature of cities or architectures often appeal to normative versions of Islam. While Hakim impressively catalogs the textual evidence of city planning, for example, his model is curiously static and timeless. As Andre Raymond (1994, 8) has argued, most recent Arab and Muslim researchers have “ignored the fact that the highly stressed ‘Islamic’ character of the city and housing originated . . . from a local tendency to define as ‘Muslim’ any feature particular to the Arab population of the territories in which French colonial domination was established.” Finally, space is still consigned to a secondary role in social life and understood as a product of a normative, textually based Islam. This kind of thinking about space not

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only overlooks the lived dimensions of everydaily life, but it pays little attention to the ways in which particular spaces shape society, culture, politics, and economics. Interdisciplinary circulations of theory can help transform such implicit understanding of space into more critical research agendas.

After the Islamic City One major trend in scholarly responses to the Islamic city develops a more theoretically nuanced sense of space, focusing on its role (its control, transformation, etc.) in ruling cities. A second approach explores the social dimensions of space. Rather than argue that Islam generates spaces, scholars have studied how particular spatial patterns and forms do or do not reflect a religious orientation. Michael Bonine (1979), for example, argues that the arrangement of street systems in the Iranian city of Yazd should not automatically be read as expressions of Islam. Rather, social, political, and cultural conditions that might have shaped urban space should be part of the analysis. Elsewhere, Bonine (1990) explores whether a correlation exists between the orientation of a Friday mosque and street patterns and city structure. Using aerial photographs and standard compass readings for what the qibla (the direction to Mecca) would have been, he attempts to establish the extent to which it influenced the planning of the town in an “Islamic” way. More recently, Paul Wheatley (2001) has combined central place theory with the accounts of Arab travelers from the seventh to the tenth century in order to draw broad connections between “Islamic” cities. Neither Bonine nor Wheatley argues that Islam produced particular spaces. Instead, they use the measurement of spatial relationships to identify possible correlations between Islam and space. Working in a different tradition but pursuing a similar project, Nezar AlSayyad (1991) argues that the use of space must be understood within the framework of a specific sociocultural system and examines the social, political, and economic considerations shaping the organization of urban space. The work of these scholars has introduced a more dynamic understanding of the city. Instead of expressing a static and ahistorical “Islamic” essence, space—its measurement, organization, and development—has become a means for scholars to engage in productive comparisons of diverse cities.

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Disciplinarity, Institutionality, and the Spatial Turn Research in the critical spatial turn is produced both in disciplinary perspectives and in interdisciplinary conversation, and it shares a common set of spatial ontologies, methodologies, and conceptual frameworks. We begin this section by highlighting some of the discipline-based research groups that have produced scholarship in this field in the United States. We then conclude with a discussion on the practical and theoretical reasons why geography, as spatially oriented discipline, has not played a more significant role in the spatial turn in MES. In this way, to borrow a phrase from Janet AbuLughod, we study the isnads (lineages) of space, place, and landscape to consider the geography of knowledge in the spatial turn and the disciplinary and institutional factors that condition this production of knowledge. At least three institutions have contributed in important ways to the spatial turn, and we identify several other centers emerging and interacting in this interdisciplinary arena. The University of California, Berkeley, has produced some of the most important work on architecture and urban space in MES. Whether students and colleagues of the late Spiro Kostof or scholars trained in anthropology, a diverse group of researchers has emerged from Berkeley, benefiting from PhD training or other kinds of affiliations with the institution.3 At the State University of New York, Binghamton, in tandem with Immanuel Wallerstein’s work on world systems, Anthony King and ÇaŞlar Keyder have been instrumental in the mentoring of scholars working in the field of MES.4 Finally, the University of Texas at Austin for many years had the strongest and most productive training program for MES in geography,5 although the faculty intersections between geography and MES at this university no longer exist. Of those three institutions, Texas is the only one in which a geography department played a major role in spatially concerned research on the Middle East. While Berkeley’s Department of Geography is highly ranked and historically significant, it has had relatively little presence in MES. SUNY– Binghamton’s Department of Geography has only a terminal MA program and lacks faculty with specialization in the Middle East; similarly to Berkeley, training and research in the spatial turn here takes place in other departments. The presence of MES centers and geography departments has been important in nurturing the spatial turn, but it has not been a determining

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factor. For example, faculty connections between the geography department at the University of Arizona and the MES Title VI program there produced relatively few MES-focused, discipline-trained geographers. Conversely, at UCLA, despite the lack of strong faculty links between the geography department and the MES program, several graduates have contributed with their research to the spatial turn. Overall, the lack of explicit institutional networks or formal faculty-department connections between geography and MES has not precluded the development of a growing cohort of midcareer and young geography scholars active in research and in graduate training in the spatial turn in MES. While they do not constitute a single institutional cluster, their work is produced in conversation with one another and by applying geography-specific theories and methodologies as a bridge to other interdisciplinary research. This trend has also generated a new cohort of academic advisers in geography whose students are producing dissertations on the Middle East.6 Interdisciplinary research is facilitated not only by core institutions but also by emerging networks that operate extrainstitutionally. For example, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (at MIT and Harvard) nurtures important studies of Middle Eastern architecture. The series Studies in Modernity and National Identity, edited by Sibel Bozdogan and Reşat Kasaba and published by the University of Washington Press, has issued significant recent works (Bozdogan 2001; Isenstadt and Rizvi 2008; Celik 2008). The e-zine Jadaliyya, produced in partnership with the Arab Studies Institute at Georgetown, publishes new research, commentaries, and reviews “promoting critical understandings and investigations of urban life and space” (Arab Studies Institute n.d.). Occasional special meetings, such as the 2014 Stanford University conference “Ottoman Topologies: Spatial Experience in an Early Modern Empire and Beyond,” bring scholars together for the presentation and discussion of spatially oriented research. The annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association also provides a forum for collaboration and discussion on the spatial turn (Bertram and Jelidi 2012). We emphasize that despite the openness and excitement of the spatial turn in MES, practical conditions of disciplinarity and institutionality continue to shape the production of knowledge in this field. Given its institutional and epistemological history, geography faces some specific constraints. Interestingly, however, many of geography’s disciplinary debates parallel those that have taken place in area studies. In what follows,

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we sketch the histories of these two disciplines in order to emphasize that understanding geography’s trajectory as a discipline helps us position what has been termed the “crisis in area studies” as part of a broader process within the social sciences— one that challenges interdisciplinary training and research programs in area studies.7

Geography’s Disciplinary History and the Shifting Status of Area Studies Geography’s strength—its integrative approach to understanding human and physical systems—became, historically, its weakness when the production of knowledge was divided into disciplines in universities and various areas of its study were defined as constituting discrete parts. Debates within geography regarding the nature of the discipline have often taken place in institutional contexts in which geographers feel pressured to define their research or justify geography departments as distinct or valuable. Neil Smith (1987) argues that tensions and insecurity within the discipline about how to define its boundaries and ontological subject of study, combined with its relative institutional weakness, resulted in the closure of the geography department at Harvard in 1948. Many other geography departments were subsequently closed, including those at other Ivy League universities (with the exception of Dartmouth’s, which offers no advanced degrees) and at the University of Chicago (1980). Today, PhD-granting geography departments are located mostly in large state universities. They may house faculty with diverse areas of expertise, ranging from physical sciences, geographic information technologies, and social science to the humanities. Alternatively, geography may be grouped with other departments such as history, international studies, or environmental sciences. Although enrollments in geography programs have increased in the past fifteen years at all levels in higher education (Foote 2010), geography has a relatively minor institutional profile in the American academy and nationally compared to other social science disciplines8 and to university systems in other countries, such as the United Kingdom. This is an important factor in the production of geographic research in MES. Many of the prominent Title VI MES centers, for example, exist in universities without geography departments, and many PhD students who apply spatial approaches to their work graduate from departments and disciplines other than geography

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but which offer resources for area studies or stronger disciplinary and institutional profiles in MES. In the Cold War era, after geography’s exclusion from the Ivy League, its disciplinary trends shifted toward quantitative geography and spatial modeling, diverging from the priorities of area studies as they would develop in Title VI centers. Federal moneys flowed to universities to produce knowledge useful for national security, and while area studies flourished in other disciplines, geography embraced science. Instead of drawing on its tradition of studying regions and interregional relationships, geography experienced a quantitative revolution in the postwar era, benefiting from federal funds that fostered spatial science and the use of technology in scientific paradigms. The quantitative revolution can be seen as a movement to delineate the territory of the discipline with a methodology—that of quantitative spatial science. In this way, geography’s intellectual history parallels that of other social science disciplines pressured by the “deterritorialization” of global history in the postwar context to define their distinctive approaches to knowledge in new ways (Mitchell 2004, 80). Research employing the concept “region” was no longer concerned with empirical description and the mapping of particular cultural characteristics across an area of space: the region was transformed into a theoretical unit of analysis in service of American geopolitical concerns (Barnes and Farish 2006). In geography, the “region” played a different role, instead serving as a foundation for debates about how to define and advance the discipline as a field of study (Hammond 2013). The most influential early work to frame geography in the concept of the region was Richard Hartshorne’s book The Nature of Geography (1939). Hartshorne was responding to debates over the status of the discipline, a status rooted in part in its relationship to geology and in the need, voiced by some physical geographers, for a scientific foundation to support geography’s merit and status among other disciplines. Hartshorne argued that geography was a science based on the collection of empirical facts, which would be ordered regionally, thus producing knowledge of the “areal differentiation of the world” (quoted in Barnes and Farish 2006, 812). By defining the region as the ontological subject of geography, however, Hartshorne aimed also to defend the discipline against critics from other fields. While attempts to resurrect various forms of regional geography surfaced occasionally in the speeches of the presidents of the Association of American Geographers and in other forums throughout the 1980s (see Pudup

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1988, 372), these calls “for geography to be fully engaged in area studies came just as what became known as the ‘quantitative revolution’ took the discipline elsewhere” (Sidaway 2013, 988). Indeed, the discipline’s quantitative turn was the main reason that geography did not play a major role in postwar area studies (Sidaway 2013, 988), and area studies scholarship in geography was diminished (de Blij 2004, 996). The kind of regional knowledge fostered by area studies, including linguistic skills and comprehension of historical, political, and cultural context, was devalued, and area studies in geography, as in other social sciences (Mitchell 2003), was marginalized for its nonscientific, nontheoretical, descriptive nature. Area studies priorities diverged from the disciplinary imperative to produce universal theoretical models, as in quantitative spatial science. Indeed, the postcolonial orientation of area studies exposes the contexts of the production of theoretical models and thus criticizes the entire project of producing a universalizing theory. By the 1970s the postcolonial and other critical theories proven productive for MES research were generating significant trends in geography. However, this intellectual shift did not work to encourage area studies in geography because of the discipline’s peculiar historic relationship to “regional studies” and new disciplinary agendas that aimed to deconstruct concepts such as region, place, and culture (Duncan 1980; Agnew 1989). Thus the poststructural shift of the 1980s resulted not in the rethinking of “regions” but in the marginalization of the concept as a whole (Entrikin 1989). Geography would continue to be a predominantly white and Anglophone (Pulido 2002) discipline, mostly producing research related to Euro-American concerns (Robinson 2003; Panelli 2008), and geographers did not play a major role in the important intellectual debates on international conflicts, global security, and America’s role in the Middle East after September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, MES scholarship blossomed with new research agendas, including work in the spatial turn, and nearly all of it was taking place in disciplines other than geography. Disciplinary and institutional concerns continue to challenge area studies– focused research in geography. As in other social sciences, research, training, and hiring practices reflect the theoretical areas, skills, or research agendas that are given priority by the discipline. Geography departments most often hire by subspecialty (human, physical, economic, or urban geography; geographic information systems) or by research theme (environmental resource management, dimensions of global change, terrestrial climate science). Area

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studies expertise is thus secondary to disciplinary agendas, making it difficult for geographers to justify time and resources devoted to the production of area studies knowledge, which aims to achieve deep familiarity with the local contexts of “other” places. As a result, in terms of graduate training, threeto four-year PhD programs may be insufficient to fulfill the time-intensive linguistic and interdisciplinary coursework and field research required for an enriching area studies–based scholarship. This pressure to produce knowledge within disciplines (for a discussion of this issue in relation to MES, see Mitchell 2003; Pfeifer this volume) is exacerbated by the ongoing economic crisis of universities. Furthermore, as funding for state universities (where, as mentioned above, most geography departments reside) continues to decrease, the role of outside funding agencies in supporting teaching and research as core university practices increases. Economic and disciplinary pressures thus converge. In geography, this results in increasing pressure to produce “scholarship, applied geography, and instruction that attract external funding (particularly from for-profit and public organizations, who can be charged indirect costs)” (Sheppard 2004, 746). This imperative may weaken possibilities for area studies research because the qualitative work characteristic of area studies is less likely to attract the types of large grants that geographic subdisciplines such as earth science, quantitative geography, and geographic information science can obtain (Sheppard 2004, 746). Departmental rankings represent another source of concern that shapes the production of knowledge. In the metrics it uses to rank science departments, the National Research Council privileges publications by multiple authors (Sheppard 2012). Thus geography scholars are pressured to publish more journal articles (and they privilege discipline-specific journals) and eschew book publication—practices that limit the possibility for interdisciplinary readership or for framing research contributions in area studies, rather than disciplinary, terms. The disciplinary trends that challenge a specialization in geography in area studies resonate with the challenges facing area studies as a whole (including departmental and disciplinary hiring practices that discourage regional concentration and disciplinary trends that embrace large-scale quantitative analysis) identified in the Social Science Research Council’s 2006 report on internationalization and interdisciplinarity (Anderson 2006). However, geography’s internal diversity and relative marginality has also resulted in a wide-ranging array of geographic research questions, strategies,

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and approaches. Geographers have potentially greater license to employ diverse methodologies borrowed from other disciplines. In spite of ongoing institutional and extramural pressures to maintain disciplinarity, on a conceptual level many scholars recognize that, for example, the economy and the political system are not truly separate from experiences of belief, social practices, or the conditions of daily life. Geographic perspectives, like those of area studies, make it possible to examine how these various dimensions are integrated and negotiated in particular spaces and places.

Toward a New Middle East Studies Spatial approaches are generating new research directions in MES by transcending disciplinary boundaries and creating new understandings of empirical circumstances. For example, the increasing relevance of environmental studies, in the context of ongoing competition for resources in a changing climate, provides opportunities for greater collaboration between MES scholars and those in social and physical sciences. Social theoretical approaches to examining spatial relationships between media, politics, and community can enhance research on current political activism in the Middle East by examining its interconnections with physically distant but electronically proximate movements and people. Another research direction is the critical study of the interdependence of people and places within and outside the Middle East, given the ongoing issues of migration and transnationalism that link political and resource conflicts in diverse places. New trends also include studies of critical geopolitics and attention to migrants’ lived experiences; sexuality and gendered identity as spatial processes (see Basdas 2007); integrating research and community-based activism with participatory GIS; youth geographies; international and local regulatory regimes that condition the production and availability of food; geographies of neoliberalism and the spaces of capital; and the relationships between surveillance, technology, and space. Each of these priorities is inherently political. These words represent the thinking of the many scholars in the Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space Network: Contemporary turnings toward the spatial in the social sciences and humanities are no doubt changing the ways in which people relate to politics— they are shaping how we understand representation and participation,

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ethics, political identity, material practices, neoliberalism. Just as religions, institutions, moral codes or professional practices have disciplined ways of thinking and living in the past, today “new spatial turns in thinking” are having their own disciplinary consequences upon how people understand and constitute spaces of politics. (2009, 583)

The spatial turn not only has “disciplinary consequences,” but it also offers opportunities for dialogue and exchange in ways that may extend and transform area studies. One such opportunity coalesces around the question of whether the “region” continues to hold any meaning or relevance for area studies (see the contributions by Anderson and Kurzman and Ernst in this volume). New research critically exposes the constructed nature of national and imperial boundaries in ways that illuminate the interdependent connections between seemingly distant places and that undermine conceptualizations of the region as an ontologically existing, coherent, bounded entity (see Bonine, Amanat, and Gasper 2011). Historical and contemporary phenomena can no longer be conceptualized through East/West or European/Middle Eastern paradigms that grounded earlier scholarship. For example, a focus on the connections between Istanbul, Paris, Aleppo, and London after World War I, or of Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, England, and the United States after the events of September 11, displaces conventional framings of the power relations at work in those moments. Understanding place relationally also has important implications for scholarship across the humanities and the social sciences because this way of thinking illuminates how the “region” as a concept structures research agendas or is invoked in federal and institutional decision-making processes that condition the training of future scholars. Indeed, it is precisely because the “Middle East” as an object of analysis has been shaped by shifting empirical, theoretical, political, and economic contexts that it continues to challenge MES scholars to be reflexive about the nature of their research. Rather than simply study universal phenomena as they touch ground in various parts of the world, our collective interdisciplinary research on the “Middle East” has helped complicate assumed universal phenomena, thus enabling a richer understanding of how spaces of all shapes and scales are situated products of particular connections between people, things, and ideas (Massey 1994). In their chapter in this volume, Shami and Godoy-Anativia cite the work of Anna Tsing; we, too, find that her words encapsulate the present moment in

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area studies and can, in part, direct its scholarly future: “Since the globe is a region made large, the making of global scale brings forward questions of the various forms of region making that both facilitate and interrupt global claims” (quoted in Poblete 2003, xxi). It is our hope that the new trends shaping scholarship across disciplines continue to bring together ideas and insights gained from research about the histories, languages, and geographies of peoples and places distant from Anglophone academia.

Appendix: Middle East–Related Dissertations Awarded in US Geography Departments, 2000–2013 2000 • Kaldjian, Paul Jeremy. “Urban Food Security and Contemporary Istanbul: Gardens, Bazaars and the Countryside.” University of Arizona. • Secor, Anna Jean. “Islamism in Istanbul: Gender, Migration and Class in Islamist Politics.” University of Colorado at Boulder.

2001 • Ari, Yilmaz. “Visions of a Wetland: Linking Culture and Conservation at Lake Manyas, Turkey.” University of Texas at Austin. • Avram, Michal. “The Israel Pharmaceutical Industry and the State: From Remedies to Commodities.” Clark University. • Davis, Diana K. “Overgrazing the Range? A Political Ecology of Pastoralism in Southern Morocco.” University of California, Berkeley. • Steinmann, Susanne H. “Gender, Pastoralism and Intensification: Changing Patterns of Resource Management in Eastern Morocco.” Clark University

2002 • Ebel, Kathryn. “City Views, Imperial Visions: Cartography and the Visual Culture of Urban Space in the Ottoman Empire, 1453–1603.” University of Texas at Austin. • Evered, Kyle Thomas. “Romancing the Region: Mapping the Discursive Terrains in Turkish Constructs of a ‘Turk Dunyasi.’” University of Oregon.

2003 • Gokariksel, Pervin Banu. “Situated Modernities: Geographies of Identity, Urban Space and Globalization.” University of Washington.

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2004 • Freeman, Amy “Contingent Modernity: Moroccan Women’s Narratives in “Post” Colonial Perspectives.” University of Washington. • Harris, Leila Marie. “Modernizing Gender: Social Geographies of Waterscape Evolution in Southeastern Turkey.” University of Minnesota. • Amy Mills, “Streets of Memory: The Kuzguncuk Mahalle in Cultural Practice and Imagination.” University of Texas at Austin.

2006 • Roberson, George F. “Worlds of Tangier, Morocco: Experiential, Narrative, and Place-Based Perspectives,” University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

2007 • Basdas, Begun. “Cosmopolitanism in the City: Contested Claims to Bodies and Sexualities in Beyoglu, Istanbul.” University of California, Los Angeles. • Orzeck, Reecia. “On the Palestinian Question: A Critique of International Law.” Syracuse University.

2008 • Atia, Mona. “Building a House in Heaven: Islamic Charity in Neoliberal Egypt.” University of Washington. • Cohen, Nir. “State, Migrants and the Production of Extra-Territorial Spaces: Negotiating Israeli Citizenship in the Diaspora,” University of Arizona. • Smith, Ben. “Dubai, Landscape and the Production of Attractive Markets.” University of Kentucky. • West, Jeffrey. “We Are Obligated to Think That the State Is Just: The AKP’s Geographies of Islam and the State in Turkey.” University of Kentucky.

2009 • BinTouq, Ahmad. “GIS Diffusion in the Government of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.” Indiana State University.

2011 • Atalan-Helicke, Nurcan. “The Seeds of Change: The State, the Politics of Development, and Conservation in Neoliberal Turkey.” Ohio State University. • Jensen, Natalie. “Mobility within Constraints: Gender, Migration, and New Spaces for Palestinian Women.” University of South Carolina.

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• Smith, Ron. “Occupation ‘from the River to the Sea’: Subaltern Geopolitics of Graduated Incarceration in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories.” University of Washington. • Sturm, Tristan. “The Future Is a Foreign Country: Landscapes of the End of the World and Christian Zionists in Israel and Palestine.” University of California, Los Angeles.

2012 • Clark, Jessie Hanna. “Security at the Public-Private Divide: Women, Development, and the Everyday Geographies of the Kurdish Question in Turkey.” University of Arizona. • Keceli, Arif. “Effects of Rapid Urbanization on Livability in Turkish Cities: A Case Study of Denizli.” University of Oklahoma. • Necati, Anaz. “Mapping geopolitical imaginations: Turkish Audiences and ‘Valley of the Wolves–Palestine.’” University of Oklahoma. • Quiquivix, Linda Elizabeth. “The Political Mapping of Palestine.” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

2013 • Haberly, Daniel Gray. “Sovereign Wealth Funds, Dependent Development, and the New Alliance Capitalism.” Clark University. • Kutz, William. “Financing Demand-Side Urbanism: Lessons from the ‘Spatial Fix’ in Tangier, Morocco.” Clark University. • Marshall, David. “A Children’s Geography of Occupation: Imaginary, Emotional, and Everyday Spaces of Palestinian Childhood.” University of Kentucky.

Notes 1.

Recent articles on geopolitics, the state, territoriality, and citizenship in the context of the War on Terror have appeared in geography journals such as Antipode, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and Political Geography.

2.

In their introduction to Jewish Topographies, Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke enumerate these conferences and outline the spatial turn in the

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field. Only one publication in that volume examines a Jewish quarter of an old, predominantly Muslim city (see Miller 2008). 3.

Zeynep Celik’s pathbreaking work on nineteenth-century Istanbul originated as a dissertation in Berkeley’s Department of Architecture. The work of Nezar AlSayyad has been a driving force in framing the relationships between globalization, architecture, and urban space. Many other prominent MES scholars, including Ayfer Bartu, Mia Fuller, Susan Miller, Susan Slyomovics, and Gwendolyn Wright, have also had important relationships with Berkeley.

4.

Keyder’s book Istanbul between the Global and the Local (1999) is a pivotal publication of the spatial turn. Keyder has played a key role in establishing bridges between American and Turkish universities. Many of his former students continue to bring forward—in Turkish- and English-language publications— debates about space, place, and landscape.

5.

Eleven MES scholars completed their PhDs in that department: Ibrahim M. I. AlBut’hie, Yilmaz Ari, Paul Blank, Michael Bonine, Katherine Ebel, Joseph Hobbs, James Miller, Amy Mills, Barbara Parmenter, William Rowe, and Will Swearingen. MES faculty in the department also directed at least twenty-eight MA theses. Ian Manners and Paul English were core faculty in the Department of Geography and at the Center for Middle East Studies. Karl Butzer (with research specialties in physical geography and historical archaeology) also had research expertise in the Middle East, in geography. Ian Manners served for a number of years as chair of the Center for Middle East Studies. Michael Bonine was head of the Department of Near East Studies at the University of Arizona from 2001 to 2011 and executive director of MESA from 1982 to 1989.

6.

For recent themes in research and the institutions where this work has been produced, see the Appendix to this chapter, which lists dissertations in geography related to the Middle East.

7.

Much of this section was developed from a discussion in Mills 2011.

8.

According to data collected by the National Science Foundation, between 1920 and 1999, 5,729 doctorates were awarded in geography and 12,508 in anthropology (NSF 2006).

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chapter five

The Dual Logics of International Education in the Global University: The Case of Middle East Studies at New York University Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

In many US universities, the past decade has seen a concerted focus on internationalization, with institutions expanding their study abroad programs, cross-national partnerships, and international student recruitment.1 Today universities are expected to be “global” in various ways, 2 and it is common that their leaders speak of producing graduates who possess intercultural awareness and have a sense of “global citizenship.” Focusing on the world outside US borders is not completely new for universities, of course; universities have long offered courses on foreign languages and peoples as well as opportunities for educational study abroad. But the scope and scale of university internationalization, in terms of its rationales, visions, and organizational structures, have changed dramatically in recent years. In short: a new logic guides universities concerning what students ought to know about the world. In an organization as large and segmented as a university, however, change does not happen instantaneously or uniformly. While these institution-wide efforts seem all-encompassing when looked at from a macrolevel, there remain units within the university that retain alternative philosophies about international education. One such set of units are area studies centers. For nearly sixty years they have followed a mission that arose during the Cold War: to train experts on foreign languages and cultures and to conduct

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educational outreach for the American public concerning world regions. Although federal funding for them has declined over time, area studies centers remain active hubs of international activity today, whether facilitating connections with scholars and universities abroad or serving as gateways for incoming and outgoing students, faculty, visiting scholars, and dignitaries (see Biddle 2002; Friedman and Miller-Idriss 2014, 2015; Miller-Idriss and Worden 2010). Over time, numerous other academic units and administrative offices have joined them in operating in the international realm. These include business schools; scientific laboratories; interdisciplinary centers that adopt a transnational approach to subjects like security, diplomacy, and migration; and offices for study abroad, admissions, marketing, and human resources, to name a few (Goodwin and Nacht 1991; Lambert 2001). Increasing activity across national borders by a larger number of participants has raised questions about the purposes of international engagement and international education for universities as a whole. Much existing scholarship concerning university internationalization consists of either anecdotal accounts of change efforts or theories of how an institution can engage its multiple stakeholders in this collective project (Brustein 2007; Dewey and Duff 2009; Hudzik 2011; Kreber 2009; Lewin 2009; Siaya and Hayward 2003; Turner and Robson 2008). This dominant orientation to internationalization as a normative, positive, and united undertaking has hindered the generation of other kinds of empirical research or theory concerning the phenomenon. While some scholars have focused on how internationalization has proceeded within various academic disciplines (Clifford 2009; Groennings and Wiley 1990; Miller-Idriss and Shami 2012; Schoorinan 1999), only recently have there been efforts to connect intellectual differences among groups of academics to broader university-wide internationalization efforts (Kennedy 2015). Herein, we build on this line of analysis. Scholars have identified and theorized multiple waves of internationalization in the history of the American academy (de Wit 2002; Merkx 2003). They suggest that internationalization has been advanced in surges, partially in response to significant world events such as World War II or the launching of Sputnik. How then does the current wave influence and intersect with the infrastructures set up during a prior wave, namely, the area studies centers institutionalized during the Cold War? How do current efforts to internationalize the American university affect research and teaching on world cultures and foreign languages, as

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conducted by traditional area studies centers? To what extent do institutionwide internationalization efforts align with these centers’ goals to increase expertise on the world beyond US borders? And are area studies centers driving, benefiting, interfering, or operating alongside more contemporary internationalization efforts? In this chapter we begin to answer these questions by looking at the case of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University (NYU). NYU is a compelling case for several reasons. First, it exemplifies well the recent efforts to refashion American universities as global entities. It operates multiple sites worldwide, including campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, and makes concerted efforts to produce globally aware, cosmopolitan students. In recent years, the university has branded itself the “global network university” to signal its new global orientation.3 Second, the Kevorkian Center at NYU is a quintessential example of the area studies approach initiated during the Cold War. It has a long history of federal government support and a national reputation for training experts on the region. In addition, together with NYU’s Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS), it has emerged as a major center for critical, postOrientalist scholarship. Amid geopolitical developments over the past twenty years—including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the 9/11 attacks, the rise of ISIS, and Israeli-Palestinian tensions—it has pressed the case for increasing teaching and research about the Middle East as a region (see Shami and Miller-Idriss this volume; Shami and Godoy-Anativia this volume). Located on a campus with ambitious institution-wide internationalization efforts, the Kevorkian Center offers an ideal case for examining how the classic model of area studies centers is faring amid this newer wave of change. In the remainder of this chapter, we argue that two distinct logics of international education coexist at NYU and in the contemporary US university more broadly. We call these the specialist logic and the cosmopolitan logic and contend that they encompass divergent ways of thinking about the best way to educate students about the world. Our case highlights the emergence of different ways of thinking about international education, and we conclude with a discussion of the merits and challenges involved in each of these logics.

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Data and Methodology This study uses multiple sources from a series of interrelated research projects. First, we analyze a variety of observed data, including spaces such as university websites and the campus store as well as observations from our experiences as a former faculty member and graduate student at the university. For example, we reviewed the content of presidential messages, slogans, and texts from NYU webpages from 2007 to 2014 in order to highlight the way the institution presents its global orientation to both its constituents and the public. Overall, this part of the data permits us to outline observed, public institutional changes related to internationalization at NYU and puts our two empirical sets of data (described below) in richer context. Second, we examine a variety of reports and evaluations pertaining to the operation of the Kevorkian Center since the early 1990s in order to analyze trends in the center over time in areas such as course offerings, enrollments, and faculty affiliations. In addition, we draw on the findings from a formal evaluation of the Kevorkian Center that we conducted in 2013, which included twenty-nine interviews as well as focus groups with students, faculty, and administrators affiliated with the study of the Middle East at NYU. These qualitative data were used to confirm and deepen the analysis of the center’s reports and evaluations. All quotations herein are used with the participants’ explicit consent. Third, we draw on two sets of data external to NYU in order to place the university in the broader national context in terms of trends in internationalization. This includes, on the one hand, descriptive data from Open Doors reports, published annually by the Institute of International Education. These reports use surveys of American universities to track the presence of international scholars in the United States over time and the outgoing and incoming student populations. To examine this circulation to and from the Middle East relative to other world regions, we draw on data reported for six academic years between 1989 and 2011 (specifically, 1989– 90, 1993– 94, 1997– 98, 2002– 3, 2006– 7, 2010–11).4 On the other hand, we draw on some of the formal interviews conducted in Phases I and II of the project Producing Knowledge on World Regions (see the introduction to this volume). Excerpts from these interviews, with the faculty and administrative staff of area studies centers and with senior-level administrators responsible for overseeing internationalization initiatives at eight US universities, have been included

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to demonstrate similarities between our findings in the case of NYU and the other universities in the long-term study of which this volume is a part.

NYU’s Institution-Wide Internationalization University internationalization is commonly defined as “the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education” (Knight 2003, 2). Internationalization efforts aim to bring about wide-ranging changes, exemplified in diffuse areas such as faculty research, academic curricula, institutional partnerships, the creation of branch campuses, and university branding strategies (see Hudzik 2011; Maringe and Foskett 2010; Siaya and Hayward 2003; Turner and Robson 2008). NYU, which operates sixteen academic sites in thirteen countries, is widely recognized for its deliberate and unique approach to internationalization, via systematic expansion of physical campuses. The institution ranks among the highest in the country in both sending students to study abroad and receiving foreign students and scholars.5 The university’s institution-wide internationalization has involved much more than the acquisition and construction of a network of study abroad sites. NYU has developed a particular discourse surrounding its practice. This has included, as mentioned above, the adoption of the moniker ‘global network university’ and its acronym, GNU. NYU also altered its motto from “In and of the city” to “In and of the world” (NYU n.d., “Office of the President”). Study abroad sites are known as global academic centers, and the institution’s original campus in Washington Square in Manhattan is now referred to as one in a trio of “portal campuses,” with the other two located in Abu Dhabi (opened in 2010) and Shanghai (opened in 2013).6 The portal campuses are independent degree-granting institutions, and it is through them that students access the “global network,” consisting of these three campuses and an additional eleven “study away sites.” Administrative offices oversee and support these efforts, each with the word global in its name, such as Vice-Chancellor for Global Programs, Vice-Provost for Global Student Leadership Initiatives, and Office of Global Services. There has also been a significant expansion in the administrative staff of the university relative to faculty. From 2004 to 2012, the number of full-time faculty at the Washington Square campus increased by 562, while the number of full-time administrators grew by 587 (as reported in NYU n.d., “NYU by the Numbers”). Though

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this is part of broader administrative growth in US universities (see Ginsberg 2011; Schrecker 2010), at least some of these new positions are devoted to the university’s expansive internationalization agenda. In conjunction with the creation of this global infrastructure, students and faculty are encouraged to “circulate” within it. For undergraduate students at NYU the question is increasingly not whether they will study abroad but when, and Washington Square faculty and departments are incentivized to spend time teaching at the other global sites through increased salary, research funds, or potential departmental faculty lines. Faculty members are also encouraged to develop and lead study abroad courses, especially for short, three- or six-week terms, either in January or over the summer, following a trend in many US universities (Chieffo and Griffiths 2009). These changes took place incrementally, starting in the mid-2000s, but the cumulative effect has been a major shift in university priorities. The global is also signified in the day-to-day lives of the university’s constituents through the use of various symbols and slogans that appear not just on the university’s digital platforms but in the campus space as well. University buildings have been adorned with walls of clocks showing the current time in the various cities of the world where NYU campuses are located. Each time university students, faculty, and employees log out of their individualized NYU Home websites, they are bid farewell in a different language. To request a book through NYU’s Interlibrary Loan, students and faculty have to select the campus location where they would like the book to be delivered: for example, Washington Square or Abu Dhabi. In 2012, NYU’s bookstore carried a T-shirt for purchase with the phrase “Go Global with NYU” on the front, laid over a map of the world, and the back listed the cities with NYU campuses. Official speeches by NYU’s leadership and the text on the university’s website routinely reference the world as a whole. This unity is stressed on different university webpages, as the following quotations illustrate. NYU has embarked on the project of becoming a global network university, a university that challenges the idea that a university can only deliver education at a single home campus. Instead, we have created a structure that allows students and faculty to gather in a set of key locales around the globe to forge new ideas, advance the questions we ask about the world, and create solutions for the problems that beset us all. (NYU 2012; emphasis added)

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For one thing, as our world’s cultures are brought together ever faster and more forcefully, a global experience will be an indispensable part of a student’s full college experience. (Sexton 2007; emphasis added) They apply what they learn and develop the skills and qualities—both needed and expected in this increasingly integrated, global climate—to make a real difference in the world. (NYU n.d., “Global Programs”; emphasis added)

As these examples show, NYU’s institution-wide mantra enforces various tropes concerning globalization, including the pace of integration and interconnectedness and the belief that the world collectively faces a set of universal problems (and, presumably, universal solutions). Much of NYU’s internationalization is similarly predicated on the notion that this larger world is accessible to all of its students. The webpage of NYU’s global academic centers opens by asking students, “Where is it that you’d like to go?”7 Similar examples abound on the “global” pages of its website, which include subsections titled “Access to the World” and “All Kinds of Opportunities.” The following excerpts are typical. • “Beyond NYU’s portal campus in New York City lies a whole world of NYU global opportunity.” • “NYU offers global experiences to all members of its community.” • “Earn NYU credit and be immersed in the culture of the world’s cities.” (NYU 2012; emphasis added) • “As you move with ease between locations within NYU’s global network, you may find yourself spending a semester in Buenos Aires and from there going to Berlin for another.” (NYU n.d., “Global Academic Centers”; emphasis added)

These messages, and others found on university websites and brochures, reflect the university’s belief that all of its students can and should pursue opportunities to travel abroad. The sentiment may be gleaned from the university’s Global Programs site, which refers to students as having “an anchor in New York City” (NYU n.d., “New York”), presumably because of the temporary nature of any stay at Washington Square. The effort to promote travel is also evident in the “Go Global with NYU” T-shirt and posters with similar slogans around campus. These examples bespeak NYU’s new focus on giving as many students as possible a “global experience.”

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Simultaneously, NYU’s institution-wide efforts encourage students not just to spend time abroad but to visit many locales. This is linked, in institutional discourse, to the production of cosmopolitan, global citizens. The attitude is well exemplified in NYU president John Sexton’s 2010 reflection on the creation of the “global network university.” The circulatory quality of the system will allow cosmopolitans to savor a ragout of places, experiences, and research and learning opportunities. And, even as it increasingly magnetizes talented cosmopolitans to it, the global network university will be a place where, in a reinforcing cycle, cosmopolitans can find each other, meet and re-meet, engage and re-engage in a kaleidoscopic set of contexts and relationships. The highly interconnected architecture of the global network university thus becomes key to its success.

In this way, the university’s expansion to include more global sites is rationalized as important to producing individuals who are open to the cultural and geographic diversity of the world. Toward this end, NYU contends that it has an “unparalleled international presence” (NYU n.d., “Redefining Global Education”), a proposition likely arrived at by a process of summation in which NYU is unmatched because of the number of places in its network. Likewise, when Sexton (2007) states that “today, approximately one-third of our students study abroad, many in new sites on new continents, including Asia and Africa,” there is a sense that Asia and Africa have now been added to the university’s tally, as new destinations for students. In the lists of NYU worldwide sites across the physical spaces of the Washington Square campus, the university’s web domains, and even merchandise in the bookstore, the university constantly reminds students of the broader world and both their opportunities to see it and their responsibilities for it. NYU has thus boldly embraced the current wave of internationalization among US universities, offering a unique vision of what it means to be a “global university.” In the process, it promotes an understanding of the world as facing a set of problems that require international openness and global awareness and which all students can one day help to solve. The focus of international education, under this rubric, is to make students more cosmopolitan.

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NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies Although the emphasis on global circulation and the creation of the global network university is new, there are other ways in which NYU has long had a global or international presence, particularly through its area studies centers.8 The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies is one such example. Since its creation in 1966, the Kevorkian Center has been among the most consistent recipients of federal government support through the Title VI program, having been awarded funding in all but nine years of its forty-sevenyear operation.9 It is well regarded in the academic field of Middle East studies and exemplifies many hallmarks of Title IV–funded area studies centers. Its mission, “to foster the interdisciplinary study of the modern and contemporary Middle East and to enhance public understanding of the region” (Hagop Kevorkian Center n.d.), is achieved through graduate MA training, a commitment to conduct public events, and outreach programs for K–12 teachers, all of which are stated Title VI priorities. The Center is significantly aided in these activities by its close affiliation with NYU’s MEIS department, which has its own tenured faculty and offers bachelor’s and PhD degrees. Indeed, the reputation and the work of the Center are inextricably tied to those of the department and its affiliated faculty, though it also maintains connections with faculty working on the Middle East in other departments and schools across NYU. To understand the work of the Kevorkian Center, it is necessary to look at the broader state of Middle East studies in the United States. This region has long been viewed as an important one to US strategic interests; but the events of 9/11, the War on Terror, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to a political climate in which the need for Arabic speakers and experts on the Middle East is especially strongly felt. However, this interest has not led to significant growth in the circulation of students and scholars to and from the Middle East in general, when compared with growth to and from other world regions. For example, though there has been a rise in the numbers of foreign scholars in the United States over the past twenty years (the total number has more than doubled), Open Doors data show that scholars with origins in Middle Eastern countries have declined relative to other world regions.10 Meanwhile, significantly more scholars have come to the United States over this period to work in the health and life science fields (25,000) and engineering (7,000), compared to specialists in area studies,

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foreign languages, and literatures (2,300).11 Likewise, though the number of US students studying abroad has expanded significantly over this time frame, the Middle East has not seen considerable growth in this respect.12 According to Open Doors, the number of students going to every world region increased between the 1998– 99 and 2010–11 academic years: to Oceania, by 6,800; to Africa, by over 10,000; to Asia, by over 24,000; to Latin America, by 20,500; and to Europe, by 68,000. The growth in the number of students going to the Middle East, by 1,400 (from 3,500 in 1998– 99 to almost 5,000 in 2010–11), is much smaller by comparison. Thus the Kevorkian Center staff and faculty work in the context of a heightened public interest in the Middle East, significant interest from NYU in “the global,” and increased student willingness to go abroad in general, even if not to the Middle East region in particular. How do these conditions affect the Center’s work? Analyses of past evaluations of the Center and reports and applications for funding to the US Department of Education reveal that the core activities of the Center have remained relatively stable since the late 1990s, though there has been significant growth in Middle East studies at NYU generally. Between 1995 and 1999, for example, the existing MEIS department was reshaped from a traditional Orientalist languages and literatures department to one with a multidisciplinary focus. This shift is attributable both to intergenerational change following faculty retirements and to deliberate investment by the university with the aim of making Middle East studies a flagship program.13 The university added twelve new full-time faculty members with training in social science and humanities disciplines and expanded the course offerings of the Center in terms of both disciplinary and geographic coverage. Since the early 2000s, instruction in Middle Eastern languages at NYU has been broadened and upgraded with the hiring of many instructors with PhDs to teach Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and Turkish.14 These overall changes in the MEIS department have affected greatly the work of the Kevorkian Center, as the two are closely related. For example, the MA degree, which the Center has run since the late 1990s, has benefited immensely from the expansion of MEIS faculty and courses. Meanwhile, although the Kevorkian Center had historically teamed with Princeton University’s program in Near Eastern studies to operate the joint National Resource Centre, the partnership dissolved following the 2000–2002 Title VI funding cycle, and since then each has applied separately for this funding. More recently, a clinical professorship was added to the Center in 2012, but

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otherwise it does not have its own academic appointments. Since the Center director must hold an academic appointment in another unit, the expansion of Middle East faculty in the MEIS department and others provides a more robust group of faculty for the Center to draw on for its directorship and its various programming needs. The number of public events organized by the Center has also increased, from 136 events in the period 2002–5 to 237 events over the next three years. Faculty associated with Middle East studies whom we interviewed for our 2013 evaluation regularly spoke of the impressive array of events and emphasized their importance in the fulfillment of the Center’s mission. Meanwhile, student enrollment in degrees offered by the Center has generally increased over the past decade, and general enrollments in Arabic-language programs offered by the department grew significantly through 2007–8 but have slightly decreased in recent years (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2 below). Over time, the Center has increased its linkages with the various professional schools and research institutes across NYU, as shown in the increasing number of affiliated faculty (see Table 5.3).15 Meanwhile, the training of MA students remains one of the Center’s priorities. During our interviews, faculty members affiliated with the Center expounded in depth about the importance of student learning and detailed the multiple ways in which they support this endeavor: individual attention by faculty advisers on MA theses, biweekly lunchtime research workshops at which faculty present their work, small-size courses in advanced foreign languages, and a robust array of funding opportunities to attract high-quality talent to the program. The addition of the nontenure clinical professor position at the Center in 2012 has allowed the expansion of courses specifically for MA students and has improved supervision of student progress. The director of the Center emphasized that unlike many other MA programs, theirs was not a “cash cow,” as the training of students was taken extremely seriously.

Internationalization and Middle East Studies at NYU NYU’s institution-wide internationalization efforts, such as the creation of a campus in Abu Dhabi or its global site in Tel Aviv, seem like natural bedfellows of the Kevorkian Center and the study of the Middle East. Yet interviews with faculty and administrators associated with Middle East studies suggested that much of the institution’s internationalization has happened in

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Table 5.1. Degrees Associated with Middle East Studies at NYU 1992–95

1995–98

2001– 4

2006–9

2010–12

BA

126

104

216

428

209*

MA

91

66

74

82

93

PhD

30

22

26

34

28

Table 5.2. Graduate and Undergraduate Enrollment in Arabic Courses 1995–96

1998–99

2004–5

2007–8

2009–10

2011–12

167

124

325

422

385

370

Table 5.3. Faculty Affiliated with Middle East Studies at NYU 1996

1999

2005

2009

Number of affiliated faculty

59

40

58

87

Number of departments/schools with affiliated faculty

12

11

15

21

*Data in these tables have been compiled from multiple sources (see note 7, below). Until the 2010–12 fiscal cycle, the Center counted in the BA category all students who took at least four courses in Middle East studies, even if their degrees were in a different discipline. Beginning in 2010 the Center more stringently recorded only students with official major and minor degrees in the field. This explains the steep drop from 2006 to 2009 in the BA total, even though the MEIS department has increased its offering of undergraduate courses over time.

parallel to their work to promote the study of the region. Most faculty members, for example, viewed neither global site as an appropriate place for learning Arabic, since it is not the “language of the streets” in either locale. In Abu Dhabi, because of the high numbers of expatriate residents from the Indian peninsula, students were seen as more likely to hear Urdu in public than Arabic and would thus be unable to experience full Arabic-language immersion there as they could in other Middle Eastern cities. Tel Aviv, meanwhile, was described as useful for Hebrew, but in terms of learning Arabic, some felt that Jerusalem would be more suitable to this goal. To complicate matters further, students who do spend time at the global sites and then return to the Washington Square campus create “headaches” for language instructors since the Arabic instruction that students receive in 200 Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv may not match the level or pace of instruction in the United States. Efforts to make Arabic learning at these sites more experiential, for example, has meant that instructors have to progress through the same textbooks at a slower pace. Instructors at NYU explained that, paradoxically, undergraduate students returning from these global sites often have to repeat language levels in New York, because their progress has lagged behind—rather than outpaced—that of their peers. The locations of NYU’s sites in the region do not match the needs of students who want language immersion in Arabic, so the Center continues to encourage its students to study abroad at well-established Arabic instruction programs in Cairo or Jordan rather than at the sites NYU has set up in the region. Though some faculty members are starting to use the overseas sites on an individual basis, systematic connections between faculty across the campuses have not been the norm. As the Kevorkian Center’s associate director explained, “You know we’re involved, but that’s not the Center. It’s sort of opportunistic and based on whatever the individual faculty members are doing.” NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, perhaps surprisingly, thus remains somewhat at the margins of the work of the Kevorkian Center. Despite encouragement for faculty to travel to that campus and use its resources, some of the faculty involved with the MA program expressed concern that their absences, especially if for a semester or a year, would disturb relationships with students and could jeopardize the advisement of MA theses, which many highlighted as the core of student training. While some faculty members expressed support and interest in Abu Dhabi and the global network in terms of their research, few saw it as an asset in teaching students about the cultures, languages, or history of the region. This parallel operation of the Center and the university is also noticeable in the absence of references to the Kevorkian Center— or any other area studies center—in places where NYU promotes its new global ethos. The university’s global programs webpage, for example, does not use the Middle East as a regional category, opting instead only to refer to continents: Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and Australia. There is no mention of the work of the Kevorkian Center or Middle East studies at NYU in any of the university’s webpages detailing its global reach. The Center’s affiliations with the region are also absent from the webpage showing NYU’s links to Asia, where one might expect to find them, as are any references to

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institutional connections established and housed in the university’s academic units. These examples illustrate the ways in which NYU’s institution-wide internationalization efforts and those of the Kevorkian Center and the MEIS department have developed in differentiated rather than integrated ways.

The Dual Logics of International Education in the Global University The question of how to structure postsecondary education with regard to learning about the world is not a new challenge for universities. We believe that the difference in approaches between the Kevorkian Center and broader university internationalization practices can be explained in part by the different visions and principles that each promotes about how best to approach research and teaching about the “rest” of the world. Borrowing a concept from organizational sociology, we call this a difference in institutional logics. By this term, we refer to a set of organizing principles and beliefs that underpin decisions about how to behave, or in this case, how to organize the pursuit of knowledge. Roger Friedland and Robert Alford (1991) have argued that such logics accompany major social institutions such as the market, the state, the family, religion, or science, and a great deal of scholarship has expanded this idea with regard to different organizational settings (Berman 2012; Scott et al. 2000; Thornton, Ocasio, and Lounsbury 2012). In suggesting that there are at least two different logics of international education at work in the modern university, we follow others who have sought to untangle the multiple, overlapping structures that define the institution. Christopher Loss (2012), for example, has traced how the care for students’ well-being, now a common feature of the American university, was built into the institution through successive reforms related to advances in the discipline of psychology over the twentieth century. Several scholars have shown that a market or commercialization logic has increasingly shaped the sciences (Berman 2012) and the university more broadly (Bok 2003; Clark 1998; Slaughter and Leslie 1997). This argument has also been extended to the current wave of internationalization, as many see it as primarily motivated by desires for— or hereby, a logic of—institutional revenue (Altbach and Knight 2007). We draw on these prior works on institutional logics and extend this analytic frame to the NYU case. Thus, on the one hand, we find a specialist logic in the Kevorkian Center. This logic promotes deep learning about particular foreign places and

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languages, supported by immersion in overseas places, cultures, and languages through family home stays, foreign university enrollment, and lengthy study. Part of the university’s task according to this logic is to create an elite cadre of regional experts and specialists well versed in foreign cultural norms and languages. This logic emphasizes depth over breadth and acquisition of historical, regional, and cultural expertise that would help one distinguish, in Clifford Geertz’s (1973) parlance, a “wink” from a mere twitch of an eye. Area studies centers are at the heart of the university’s specialist logic of international education, but so are other topical research centers that promote and support in-depth, context-specific knowledge acquisition in the global context—for instance, on water and the environment, security and terrorism, and citizenship and migration. The specialist logic is inherited from the Cold War era, in which universities were a key partner in the federal government’s aim to educate the broader populace about the world and produce experts on foreign places (Engerman 2009; Loss 2012; McCaughey 1984). It has benefited, since the late 1950s, from continued (although reduced) federal funding.16 During the Cold War, the world was understood primarily as a set of discrete regions, which was institutionalized in the American university in regional area studies centers. Middle East studies, among other region-oriented academic fields, were the organizing structures for university internationalization in this logic, which promoted long-term training, linguistic expertise, and significant fieldwork and time spent overseas. This approach was never intended for all students. Rather, the focus was on intensive training for a limited number of promising scholars, aimed primarily at the graduate level. The second logic we observe is reflected in institution-wide internationalization efforts at NYU. We call this the cosmopolitan logic. This logic aims to quantitatively increase student, faculty, and scholarly circulation in and across global contexts in a more general way, with less emphasis on in-depth knowledge of specific regions or foreign language facility. In this logic, universities aim to broaden a larger number of undergraduate and graduate students’ access to the rest of the world, most typically through short-term study abroad programs or even one-week courses overseas, often taught in English by domestic faculty members traveling with the group. Though students might be mandated to take a course in the history or culture of their host country, or may enroll in foreign language courses, the emphasis of these programs is not on creating “specialists” with advanced country-specific knowledge.

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Some students and faculty may be motivated to go to overseas sites because of their desire to deepen their knowledge, expertise, or research on a particular place; but the university’s institutional aim is to produce global citizens who are concerned with solving humanity’s collective problems, open to cultural differences, and comfortable navigating time zones and international currencies, even if they lack fluency in a language other than English (for more on the issue of language training, see Worden and Browne this volume). Rather than focus on deep immersion, this logic promotes a breadth of diverse experiences, typically relying heavily on student and scholar circulation to global cities that are easily accessible for short-term study. NYU’s overseas sites, in fact, are located in cities that President Sexton calls “idea capitals” (2010), and the sites are identified by the city in which they are located. So rather than study abroad in Ghana or Germany, students go to NYU Accra or NYU Berlin. The establishment of the NYU network—in particular, the global sites that the institution controls—facilitates this circulation from an administrative perspective and reduces some of the complications of relying too heavily on foreign partners or working with institutions that may not offer sufficient courses in English.17 This logic requires more centralized university administrative structures, since the expansion of student and faculty mobility meets more operational hurdles than those encountered by the smaller, more scholarly focus of the specialist logic. Further, this cosmopolitan logic is motivated by principles and ideals different from the specialist logic. First, it is undeniably related to the rise in global consciousness of recent decades that Roland Robertson (1994), among others, has defined as a core tenet of globalization. In addition to— or rather than—being interested in the kinds of particular places that underpin the specialist logic, global consciousness is characterized by a general interest in global issues, like climate change and global health and poverty. Second, the cosmopolitan logic echoes the specialist logic in its belief that the best way to encourage intercultural learning, world peace, or international understanding is to expand people’s face-to-face encounters with cultural difference. But it diverges from the specialist logic by emphasizing that such opportunities for international education must be made accessible to all. Intercultural knowledge and understanding are not only a specialized skill, but a critical one for virtually all workers in the globalized knowledge economy. Hence initiatives motivated by this cosmopolitan logic are aimed at widening access to the world for a greater number of students.

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Third, the two logics diverge in their beliefs about the importance of foreign language training. While both logics rely on the notion of experiential learning as a pedagogical strategy, whereby the best way to grasp a social fact is to encounter, experience, and wrestle with it, their enthusiasm for experiential learning is grounded in different learning objectives. For the specialist logic, experiential learning is the best way to gain foreign language fluency, because it allows one to struggle with everyday language use and interact with native speakers in an immersed setting. For the cosmopolitan logic, experiential immersion is also critical, but it is possible with only English, for simply being there is enough to experience cultural difference, challenge stereotypes, and raise one’s awareness of global matters. The fourth critical difference between the two logics has less to do with principles and ideals and more to do with the university’s financial bottom line. In an era of declining public funding for universities and rising costs overall, the cosmopolitan approach has proven to be financially viable, which adds to its appeal. Although area studies centers have been sustained for nearly sixty years with support from the federal government and philanthropic foundations, the cosmopolitan logic provides a means for institutions to increase revenue. Examples of this are increasing recruitment of international students (who are usually charged higher fees), expanding the number of undergraduate enrollments by housing students overseas who pay regular tuition, and building satellite campuses or research centers both at home and abroad that are driven by external patronage, including in some cases foreign governments. NYU’s expansion to global sites has allowed it to increase student enrollment without significantly straining existing dormitory and classroom space. For example, freshmen enrollments rose by nearly 1,000 students between 2002 and 2013, from 4,169 students to 5,110.18 Indeed, because of the singular global network the university can charge students the same tuition to go abroad, whereas under the area studies model of partnering with foreign universities tuition potentially flowed away from the home institution while students transferred credits after their study abroad experience. The rise of this cosmopolitan logic of international education is thus related to the broader commercialization of the American academy, although we wish to emphasize that this connection alone is insufficient to explain the logic’s ascendance. Thus both logics—specialist and cosmopolitan—are simultaneously operating in the US university.19 NYU is a paradigmatic example of how

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these logics can be supported in parallel ways. While support for area studies programs has in many cases declined, especially with cuts from philanthropic foundations and the US Congress (Shami and Danzeisen 2011), the Kevorkian Center has seen its core university support increasing in recent years. At the same time, the university has promoted the cosmopolitan logic institution-wide through various other means. Understanding the differences between these logics helps to explain the way in which some scholars associated with Middle East studies at NYU viewed the central administration’s efforts to cement the global network university. Language faculty, for example, expressed concern that the cosmopolitan logic does not emphasize foreign language acquisition. Preparation to go overseas, contended one faculty member, “needs to be language based,” because language is critical to “cultural sensitivities” and “adequate behavior” when abroad. The faculty member elaborated: “That is the reason why you’re there, not because you need to be in the classroom as a student, but the experience outside of the classroom. Students are not ready for that, and the university is not taking the responsibility to get them ready, because the way to get them ready is through language instruction.” This instructor’s concerns about the university’s efforts reflect the specialist logic in which contextual, linguistic-based knowledge about the world is highly valued. In the cosmopolitan logic of international education, though, foreign language acquisition is not seen as critically important for exposing students to a variety of cross-cultural encounters. These dual logics also help us understand the creation—and contestation— of NYU’s campus in Abu Dhabi. NYU’s leaders, along with other university leaders nationally, have operated from a logic that has positioned the idea of “world regions” as restrictive and outdated. Their emphasis on global cities is in line with this position, and it makes sense, according to this logic, that Abu Dhabi is a foreign “idea capital” in which students can experience the world. When the staff of the Kevorkian Center hypothesize that NYU administrators did not focus on the study of Arabic or the Middle East region more broadly when they were setting up the Abu Dhabi campus, they signal their belief that the institution was operating from a cosmopolitan rather than a specialist logic of international education. To be sure, some faculty saw the Abu Dhabi campus as a “missed opportunity” for the Kevorkian Center, particularly as a means of expanding their intellectual coverage of the Gulf region. We believe our model of these dual logics, however, helps explain why there is such fragmentation in their approaches.

206 Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Internationalization Logics Elsewhere NYU is not the only university to experience divergence in approaches to internationalization. Our broader study of area studies centers (see the introduction to this volume) included interviews with area studies faculty and senior leaders overseeing international programs, and these often reflected the same tensions and ambivalences. Across these campuses, area studies center directors were trying to understand how they “fit in” with what they depicted as a new wave of internationalization. In many cases, broader university internationalization efforts involved the appointment of new senior administrators in charge of international studies or global programs, and center staff were optimistic that they would be consulted in the crafting of new endeavors. Others were more skeptical of those leading their institutions and disagreed with the ways in which they were approaching new international programs. As the director of the Center for Russia/Eurasian Studies at Southern State (a pseudonym) explained:20 I mean . . . [this person] has a particular view of what study abroad is. It’s a bit different from my own and to that extent we do clash sometimes about what . . . because my version says there needs to be a language quotient. You know, our region does not do English. . . . Every language in our region is a language other than English. So we really need to focus on that and [his] notion is, you know, you get everybody abroad even if it means to go to Italy and study in English while you are in Italy. Let them be abroad. And that certainly has its benefit to it, but for our purpose, for our purposes, no, we are really looking to get them abroad with language training as one of the important quotients there.21

In line with their emphasis on foreign language training, many center directors saw themselves and their affiliated faculty as the vanguard of international knowledge on campus. Explained the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at North Urban: What is done within this rubric, even though it may seem to be an outdated rubric of area studies, what is done within it, which is the interdisciplinary stuff, the language stuff, the bringing of faculty together that wouldn’t otherwise work with each other, and the advocacy for knowledge, of a certain kind of deep, deep knowledge within the university, if it is not done by us, it can’t be done by anybody, and this is crucial. You can’t do anything without

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language, and you can’t do anything without interdisciplinarity, and you can’t do anything without deep knowledge.22

Opinions like this, encountered on many campuses, explain the strong expectation by area studies staff that senior administrators would consult them in their internationalization efforts. For example, the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at Western Flagship related this expectation of their newly appointed vice-provost for international affairs: “She knows enough to know that there are people on campus who she needs to be talking to.”23 While on some campuses center directors related that they did feel that they were being consulted in these efforts and were linked to the internationalization plans of their senior administrators, in others, center directors lamented the direction they felt that new institution-wide internationalization efforts were going. Some senior administrators seemed to recognize this divide between their offices and the position of area studies faculty. An associate dean at Eastern Elite put it this way: When it came to undergraduates, there has been a long-standing debate among the faculty as to what kinds of academic experiences students would get studying abroad. And there is a contingent of the faculty who believes that the experiential side of it is adequate and that the exposure to language and the exposure to foreign culture is an adequate experience. And there has been a group of faculty who felt that that in no way substituted for the academic rigor of courses. . . . It’s one of the reasons why [this university] has very deliberately not set up campuses, because one of the very strong feelings of the faculty is that if you isolate your students and they happen to be studying in Paris, it’s still not, I mean, it’s very nice, but it’s not the kind of rigorous experience that they’re hoping that they’ll get.24

These comments show that multiple logics of international education are at work in the US university: at the very least, one focused on academic knowledge and specialist expertise and another on experiential cosmopolitanism.

Conclusion Our analyses of these different logics, which focus respectively on depth and breadth, reveal that there is no single or objective model for structuring

208 Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

university education to teach about the world. The area studies model institutionalized during the Cold War was driven by the political and cultural dynamics of the era. Meanwhile, the current wave of institution-wide internationalization reflects a drive to spread access to international education to more students, the quickening pace of global travel, and broader trends in the commercialization of higher education. The impact of these institutional logics is illustrated clearly in the NYU case. There are some examples where the two logics intersect, such as the development of an academic Arab Crossroads program at NYU Abu Dhabi. By and large, however, the growth of the Kevorkian Center over the past decade and of Middle East studies in general at NYU seems to have developed in parallel to the broader internationalization goals of the institution. In our concluding discussion, we refrain from evaluating whether one logic is better than the other; to do so would require significantly more clarity regarding objectives for internationalization and student learning as well as rigorous empirical research assessing the outcomes of both approaches. Instead, we frame our remarks around a discussion of challenges and advantages of each approach, which may shed some light on why university administrators choose to adopt them. We call here for more research on the tangible outcomes of both logics in the hope that future scholars will extend our work with additional empirical data. Finally, we acknowledge a normative frame here in which we support universities’ internationalization efforts in general, regardless of which logic is pursued. Readers who disagree with us on this point might have additional disadvantages to contribute. For enthusiasts of internationalization in general, the cosmopolitan logic has the obvious advantage of scale and scope. In the NYU case, it has the potential power to move virtually all faculty and students around the globe, requiring them to have a passport, become experienced travelers, and learn to navigate daily life in a foreign city. It has also introduced an everyday banality to the global, even on the Washington Square campus. The university tries to pair freshmen in on-campus housing with peers from other countries, encourages students and faculty to travel the world, and promotes ideas about the singularity and accessibility of the world through a range of mundane symbols, such as wall clocks and world maps. The impact has been clear, particularly for undergraduate students, hundreds of whom per semester now study at each of the overseas sites. They can do so despite having majors that have traditionally made it difficult or

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impossible to study abroad, because they are not held back by lack of foreign language competency and because individual overseas sites have developed specialized facilities to support particular majors, such as studios for art majors. Short-term study abroad options, as well as new international travel scholarships, have the potential to increase the diversity of study abroad participants, because they make it easier for nontraditional students to go overseas (e.g., students working full-time or who have parenting or caregiver responsibilities that preclude extended overseas study). The cosmopolitan logic can thus help make international experiences more equitable for a broader range of students and faculty. And while the specialist logic is primarily suited for humanities and social science majors, the university’s cosmopolitan logic is more easily woven into the generalist, liberal arts orientation of its core undergraduate programs. Finally, the cosmopolitan logic is financially viable—perhaps even advantageous—for the university, allowing retention or the increase of student enrollments. But this logic has challenges as well. Because it is targeted more at breadth than depth, it is likely to be more effective at developing international experience rather than international expertise. In the words of a Kevorkian Center administrator, the current wave of internationalization at NYU is more “decontextualized” than the Center’s own visions of globality. The cosmopolitan logic is also not particularly well suited to promoting deep knowledge or effective immersion for foreign language learning. We suggest that this experiential cosmopolitanism may lead to a kind of “folk ethnography,” in the words of Elijah Anderson (2011), where individuals in culturally diverse settings develop their own cognitive understandings of those they perceive as different, through intense observation rather than open dialogue and exchange. Thus, as NYU Shanghai encourages students to “Make the world your major” (NYU n.d., “NYU Shanghai”) and NYU Abu Dhabi prompts them to “Become a global citizen” (NYU n.d., “NYU Abu Dhabi”), there is reason to be concerned that such slogans, while appealing, may not adequately convey to students the complexity of working across cultural difference. Others have made similar observations about the marketing of study abroad programs (see Zemach-Bersin 2009). Moreover, due to its emphasis on experience over expertise, the cosmopolitan logic does not lend itself well to a notion of world knowledge in the service of a broader, collective national interest, which was the rationale for federal government and foundation investments in universities during the Cold War.

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The specialist logic, on the other hand, has the advantage of depth. Area studies centers remain focused on foreign language training and creating “deep knowledge” about the world’s regions for a limited number of future experts. They promote foreign language fluency and deep knowledge of foreign countries’ or regions’ political, cultural, social, and economic contexts. They are particularly well suited to advanced undergraduates majoring in internationally related fields (e.g., African studies, global public health) or to graduate-level studies where dissertations using comparative designs require extensive overseas fieldwork or study. Programming on “home” campuses— through hundreds of public events, conferences, and workshops— extends the deep knowledge of various faculty members about particular places in the world to the broader university community. And because of federal funding requirements, Title VI–funded area studies centers also provide significant outreach to K–12 educators and local communities, offering teacher training seminars, study tours, or curricular development to help enrich elementary and secondary student learning about the world. The specialist logic presents challenges as well. By its very design, it is not for everyone. Extensive time overseas is required to gain serious fluency in foreign languages—at least a semester or year abroad for most European languages and years of immersed study for Mandarin or Arabic. Not all students or faculty have the ability to spend extended stretches of time overseas. The specialist logic may also lead to a sort of regional myopia, leading scholars to examine phenomena from within national or regional contexts rather than compare trends in areas such as migration or the environment. Finally, it is challenging for graduate students to spend adequate time in the field acquiring specialist fluency and competencies while also gaining top-notch methodological training and theoretical foundations in their various disciplines (Miller-Idriss and Shami 2012). In sum, we suggest that more ought to be done within individual universities to explore how the two logics might be developed in complementary ways rather than as parallel activities. Further research is necessary to assess the extent to which the patterns we observe at NYU hold true elsewhere. Indeed, some campuses may have been more successful at integrating these two logics more closely or involving specialists from area studies centers in their broader cosmopolitanizing efforts. The case of NYU, however, makes clear that these logics of international education can operate fairly independently of one another, and thus, as Kennedy (2015) has suggested, there may

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never be a truly universal vision of the global university and its responsibilities. In its absence, scholars and administrators from area studies and other university domains might benefit from more open dialogue about the kinds of graduates they hope to produce and the ways in which they will be encouraged to reshape and reimagine the world.

Appendix Open Doors data on foreign scholars and destinations of US study abroad students. 1989–90 to 2010–11 Note: Because Open Doors data rely primarily on the completion of annual surveys, there is great fluctuation in the completion rates and size of the sample over time. The Institute of International Education has recruited significantly more universities to complete the survey over time, and that expansion can explain to some extent the growth that these numbers show. Further, in some cases numbers have been rounded, so whole numbers may not be entirely accurate. The tables below illustrate comparison of totals and trends over time only generally. It is also important to note that Cyprus and Turkey were moved from the Middle East to the Europe category in 2004–5. Data compiled below are drawn from Open Doors reports for six academic years between 1989 and 2011.

212 Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Table 5.A1. Percentage of International Scholars in the United States, by World Region Origin

1989– 90 Africa

1993– 94 1998–99 2002–3 2006–7

2010– 11

% Change from First to Last Time Point

3.0

3.3

3.0

3.1

2.6

2.4

-19

Asia

46.9

45.7

42.3

46.4

50.4

54.4

16

Europe

33.9

35.6

37.7

32.0

31.0

28.8

-15

Latin America

5.5

5.7

6.4

7.3

6.7

6.1

10

Middle East

5.3

4.0

4.0

4.3

3.2

3.1

-42

North America

3.5

4.1

4.4

5.0

4.5

4.1

18

Oceania

1.9

1.6

2.1

1.8

1.5

1.1

-41

46,479

59,981

70,501

84,281

176

347

301

255

Number of scholars reported Number of institutions reporting data

98,239 115,313

242

359

Table 5.A2. Number of International Scholars in the United States, by World Region Origin

1989– 90

1993– 94

1998– 99

2002–3

2006–7

2010– 11

% Change from First to Last Time Ppoint

1,184

1,833

2,132

2,608

2,591

2,790

136

Asia

18,511

25,383

29,848

39,119

49,549

62,736

239

Europe

13,380

19,773

26,613

26,960

30,458

33,160

148

Latin America

2,171

3,166

4,479

6,154

6,588

6,988

222

Middle East

2,092

2,222

2,814

3,662

3,128

3,572

71

North America

1,381

2,277

3,130

4,228

4,406

4,750

244

750

889

1,479

1,547

1,511

1,302

74

46,479

59,981

70,501

84,281

98,239

115,313

176

347

301

255

242

359

Africa

Oceania Number of scholars reported Number of institutions reporting data

Table 5.A3. Percentage of International Scholars in the United States, by Academic Specialization

2006– 7 2010–11

% Change from First to Last Time Point

1989– 90

1993– 94

1998– 99

2002– 3

Health sciences

24.9

27.4

26.2

25.0

19.7

17.0

-32

Biological and biomedical sciences (life sciences)

15.1

13.1

15.4

17.5

24.3

24.5

62

Engineering

12.1

11.6

12.6

11.8

12.0

12.9

7

Area & ethnic studies

1.7

1.7

1.8

1.4

1.5

1.6

-6

Foreign languages & literature

2.1

2.2

2.3

2.5

2.3

2.4

14

Number of scholars reported

46,479

59,981

70,501

84,281

98,239

115,313

Number of scholars for whom specialization is known

35,796

46,785

61,900

47,282

86,450

93,519

176

347

301

255

242

359

Number of institutions reporting data

Table 5.A4. Number of International Scholars in the United States, by Academic Specialization

1989– 90

1993– 94

1998– 99 2002–3

% Change from First 2006– to Last 7 2010–11 Time Point

Health sciences

8,913

12,819

16,218

11,820

17,031

15,898

78

Biological and biomedical sciences (life sciences)

5,405

6,129

9,533

8,274

21,007

22,912

324

Engineering

4,331

5,427

7,799

5,579

10,374

12,064

179

Area & ethnic studies

609

795

1,114

662

1,297

1,496

146

Foreign languages & literature

752

1,029

1,424

1,182

1,988

2,244

199

Number of scholars reported

46,479

59,981

70,501

84,281

98,239

115,313

Number of scholars for whom specialization is known

35,796

46,785

61,900

47,282

86,450

93,519

176

347

301

255

242

359

Number of institutions reporting data

Table 5.A5. Number of US Study Abroad Students, by World Region Destination % Change from First to Last Time Point

1998–99

2002–3

2006–7

2010–11

Africa

3,672

4,827

10,066

14,087

284

Asia

7,781

9,751

24,969

32,081

312

Europe

81,367

109,907

138,871

149,663

84

Latin America

19,464

26,643

36,339

40,000

106

3,578

648

2,759

4,997

40

North America

850

1,251

1,327

1,426

68

Oceania

6,353

12,749

13,820

13,156

107

—

18

62

37

-—

6,702

8,835

13,573

18,549

177

129,767

174,629

241,791

273,996

1,093

1,022

992

908

Middle East

Antarctica Multiple Destinations Number of students reported Number of institutions reporting data

Note: Cyprus and Turkey were moved from the Middle East to the Europe category in 2004– 5. If they are counted as part of the Middle East for the year 2010–11, the total number of study abroad students going to this region increases to 6,628. This tempers the difference between the Middle East and other leading world regions but does not counter the overall trend that most other areas have vastly outpaced growth in the number of students going to this region. North African countries, which are occasionally categorized as part of the Middle East, are counted here as part of Africa rather than the Middle East since this is how data were reported at the first time point (in 1998– 99). The growth in study abroad is generally well attested in this table. While the number of institutions responding to the survey has been decreasing over these years, the total number of students reported on study abroad programs has been increasing.

Notes This chapter draws in part from the data collected for the long-term research project Producing Knowledge on World Regions, based at the Social Science Research Council and of which this volume is a part. We are grateful to Mitchell Stevens and Seteney Shami for formative discussions about the university’s production of knowledge on world regions, which will be published in a forthcoming manuscript they are co-authoring with Cynthia Miller-Idriss. For more information, see Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, included as the appendix to this volume. 1.

Throughout, we use the term “internationalization” rather than “globalization” to refer to the deliberate efforts to orient university education to the global, in keeping with current scholarship.

2.

Both the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, for example, measure the ratio of international to domestic students and faculty as part of their ranking of the world’s leading universities.

3.

For another analysis of the state of area studies amid NYU’s global transformation, see Looser 2012.

4.

These data can be found in the appendix to this chapter.

5.

The following descriptive data are drawn from the Open Doors reports consulted for this chapter: among US research/doctoral institutions, NYU ranked first in the number of study abroad students in 2010–11 (4,156 students), 2006– 7 (2,809 students), and 2002– 3 (1,872 students). It ranked third in terms of total numbers of international students in 2010–11 (7,988 students), third in 2006– 7 (5,827 students), and second in 2002– 3 (5,454 students). NYU ranked thirty-seventh for number of international scholars in 2010–11 (841), and it was not ranked in the top forty hosting institutions in 2006– 7 or in the top thirty in 2002– 03.

6.

The opening of multiple campuses, and the Abu Dhabi campus in particular, has been marked by a series of controversies (see, e.g., Krieger 2013; Kaminer and O’Driscoll 2014). We do not explore such controversies here because our intent is to analyze the underlying logic motivating the institution’s efforts rather than their impact or reception by various parties, but further research and discussion on intersections of these and other controversies with internationalization efforts is sorely needed.

7.

In 2013, this phrase was amended to, “Where is it that you’d like to learn and engage?”

8.

Information in this section was compiled from multiple sources, including interviews with the current and past leadership of the Kevorkian Center as well as grant

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applications to the federal Title VI program submitted in November 1996, November 1999, November 2005, and March 2010. In 1996 and 1999, these were joint applications by the Kevorkian Center and the Program for Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, as the two programs shared the Title VI resources prior to the 2003– 5 fiscal cycle. Data are also drawn from a self-study report to the NYU Faculty of Arts & Science Policy & Planning Committee in 1998 as well as annual reports submitted to the federal Title VI program from 2007 to 2012. 9.

The Kevorkian Center did not receive federal funding during the following grant cycles: August 1979–August 1981 and August 1994–August 1997. There is no record of any Middle East centers receiving funding in the August 1970–August 1973 grant cycle.

10.

These data are gathered by survey of US institutions. Even though the number of participating institutions tends to fluctuate, the data offer a useful window into trends over time. See Tables 5.A1 and 5.A2 in the appendix to this chapter.

11.

See Tables 5.A3 and 5.A4 in the appendix to this chapter.

12.

See Table 5.A5 in the appendix to this chapter.

13.

This follows a strategy at NYU of revamping a department with exciting new hires and multiple new faculty lines, which has been undertaken by the institution in different academic fields (see VanAntwerpen and Kirp 2003).

14.

Many of these language instructors have been hired as clinical professors rather than as language lecturers. This is significant because, according to NYU faculty title distinctions, clinical professors can be promoted to the level of full professor, though not with formal tenure.

15.

The field of Middle East studies, like other disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields, has evolved over time. See Mills and Hammond in this volume for an example of emerging trends in the field around the concept of space.

16.

At the time of their founding, in the mid-twentieth century, area studies centers were generously supported by philanthropic foundations such as Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, as well as by the US government. This support has gradually eroded, as the foundations withdrew support in the 1990s and the US government reduced support in the early twenty-first century (see Biddle 2002; Engerman 2009; Lambert 1990; Merkx 2003; Shami and Danzeisen 2011).

17.

It is important to note that there may be significant differences for other kinds of satellite campuses, such as those set up primarily to offer stand-alone degrees to an international student body in an overseas setting, as opposed to bringing students in to circulate among a broad network of campus sites.

18.

Information on freshmen enrollments is publicly available from NYU’s Office of Institutional Research and Program Evaluation. Data cited here are available

218 Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss

at www.nyu.edu/ir/factbook/download.tables.html (accessed February 4, 2014). 19.

While we focus on these “specialist” and “cosmopolitan” logics of international education in this chapter, we believe there are other logics operative in other disciplines and academic programs. We note, for example, that some academic programs focus on knowledge of the world as a whole, while others require some knowledge of specific countries or regions, without mandating foreign language study or requiring students to complete numerous courses on the cultures or histories of these places. Mapping the landscape of these different logics of international education is important and has been a neglected area of inquiry. We focus on these two logics herein since their parallel nature is clearly illustrated by the NYU case.

20.

Institutional pseudonyms in this section refer to those from the Producing Knowledge on World Regions project, discussed in the introduction to this volume and the appendix.

21.

Director, Center for Russia/Eurasian Studies, Southern State, 2006– 7.

22.

Director, Center for Middle East Studies, North Urban, 2006– 7.

23.

Director, Center for South Asian Studies, Western Flagship, 2006– 7.

24.

Associate Dean, Eastern Elite, 2005– 6.

Data Sources Bhandari, Rajika, and Patricia Chow. 2007. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. ———. 2008. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. Chin, Hey-Kyung Koh, ed. 2003. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. ———. 2004. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. Chow, Patricia, and Rajika Bhandari. 2011. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. Davis, Todd, ed. 1994. Open Doors 1993/94: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. ———. 1999. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. ———. 2000. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education.

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Farrugia, Christine A., Rajika Bhandari, and Patricia Chow. 2012. Open Doors: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education. Zikopoulos, Marianthi, ed. 1990. Open Doors 1989/90: Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institute of International Education.

References Altbach, Philip G., and Jane Knight. 2007. “The Internationalization of Higher Education: Motivations and Realities.” Journal of Studies in International Education 11, nos. 3–4: 290– 305. Anderson, Elijah. 2011. The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life. New York: W. W. Norton. Berman, Elizabeth Popp. 2012. Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bhandari, Rajika Bhandari, and Peggy Blumenthal, eds. 2010. International Students and Global Mobility in Higher Education: National Trends and New Directions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Biddle, Sheila. 2002. Internationalization: Rhetoric or Reality? New York: American Council of Learned Societies. Bok, Derek. 2003. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brustein, William I. 2007. “The Global Campus: Challenges and Opportunities for Higher Education in North America.” Journal of Studies in International Education 11, no. 3–4: 382– 91. Chieffo, Lisa, and Lesa Griffiths. 2009. “Here to Stay: Increasing Acceptance of Short-Term Study Abroad Programs.” In The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global Citizenship, edited by Ross Lewin, 365– 79. New York: Routledge. Clark, Burton R. 1998. Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. Oxford: Pergamon. Clifford, Valerie Anne. 2009. “Engaging the Disciplines in Internationalising the Curriculum.” International Journal for Academic Development 14, no. 2: 133–43. Dewey, Patricia, and Stephen Duff. 2009. “Reason before Passion: Faculty Views on Internationalization in Higher Education.” Higher Education 58: 491–504.

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de Wit, Hans. 2002. Internationalization of Higher Education in the United States of America and Europe: A Historical, Comparative, and Conceptual Analysis. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Engerman, David C. 2009. Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friedland, Roger, and Robert R. Alford. 1991. “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions.” In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, edited by Walter W. Powell and Paul DiMaggio, 232– 63. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, Jonathan Z., and Cynthia Miller-Idriss. 2014. “Gateways and Guest Homes: How Area Studies Centers Serve as Arbiters of Scholar Mobility.” In Internationalization of Higher Education and Global Mobility, edited by Bernhard Streitwieser. Oxford: Symposium Books. ———. 2015. “The International Infrastructure of Area Studies Centers: Lessons for Current Practice from a Prior Wave of Internationalization.” Journal of Studies in International Education 19, no. 1: 86–104. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books. Ginsberg, Benjamin. 2011. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the AllAdministrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodwin, Craufurd D., and Michael Nacht. 1991. Missing the Boat: The Failure to Internationalize American Higher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Groennings, Sven, and David S. Wiley, eds. 1990. Group Portrait: Internationalizing the Disciplines. New York: American Forum. Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. n.d. “About Us.” Hagop Kevorkian Center. Accessed January 5, 2014. http://neareaststudies.as.nyu. edu/page/about. Hudzik, John K. 2011. Comprehensive Internationalization: From Concept to Action. Washington, DC: NAFSA, Association of International Educators. Kaminer, Ariel, and Sean O’Driscoll. 2014. “Workers at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi Site Faced Harsh Conditions.” New York Times, May 18. Accessed June 17, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/nyregion/workers-at-nyus-abudhabi-site-face-harsh-conditions.html

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Kennedy, Michael D. 2015. Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities, and Publics in Transformation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Knight, Jane. 2003. “Updating the Definition of Internationalization.” International Higher Education 33, no. 6: 2– 3. Kreber, Carolin, ed. 2009. Internationalizing the Curriculum in Higher Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Krieger, Zvika. 2013. “The Emir of NYU: John Sexton’s Abu Dhabi Debacle.” The Atlantic, March 13. Accessed June 17, 2015. www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/ the-emir-of-nyu-john-sextons-abu-dhabi-debacle/273982/. Lambert, Richard D. 2001. “Domains and Issues in International Studies.” In Changing Perspectives on International Education, edited by Patrick O’Meara, Howard D. Mehlinger, and Roxana Ma Newman, 30–48. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lewin, Ross. 2009. The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global Citizenship. New York: Routledge. Looser, Tom. 2012. “The Global University, Area Studies, and the World Citizen: Neoliberal Geography’s Redistribution of the ‘World.’” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 1: 97–117. Loss, Christopher P. 2012. Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Margine, Felix, and Nick Foskett, eds. 2010. Globalization and Internationalization in Higher Education: Theoretical, Strategic and Management Perspectives. London: Continuum. McCaughey, Robert A. 1984. International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning. New York: Columbia University Press. Merkx, Gilbert W. 2003. “The Two Waves of Internationalization in US Higher Education.” International Educator 12, no. 1: 6–12. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, and Seteney Shami. 2012. “Graduate Student Training and the Reluctant Internationalism of Social Science in the USA.” Research in Comparative and International Education 7, no. 1: 50– 60. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, and Elizabeth A. Worden. 2010. “Internationalisation in US Higher Education: Studying the Middle East in the American University.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 8, no. 3: 393–409.

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New York University (NYU). 2012. “Global.” New York University: Global. Accessed March 16, 2012. www.nyu.edu/global.html#below. ———. n.d. “All NYU Programs.” New York University: Global. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/global/all-nyu-programs.html. ———. n.d. “Global Academic Centers.” New York University: Global. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/global/global-academic-centers1. html. ———. n.d. “Global Programs.” New York University: About NYU. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-universityadministration/office- of-the-president/office- of-the-provost/globalprograms.html. ———. n.d. “New York: The World’s Capital.” New York University: Global. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/global/the-global-networkuniversity.html. ———. n.d. “NYU Abu Dhabi.” New York University: Global. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/global/nyu-abu-dhabi.html. ———. n.d. “NYU by the Numbers: 2002–2012.” New York University: About NYU. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/nyubythenumbers/. ———. n.d. “NYU Shanghai.” New York University: Global. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/global/nyu-shanghai.html. ———. n.d. “Office of the President.” New York University: About NYU. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-universityadministration/office-of-the-president.html. ———. n.d. “Redefining Global Education.” New York University: Prospective Students. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/students/graduates/ prospective-students/redefining-global-education.html. Robertson, Roland. 1994. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Schoorinan, Dilys. 1999. “The Pedagogical Implications of Diverse Conceptualizations of Internationalization: A US Based Case Study.” Journal of Studies in International Education 3, no. 2: 19–46. Schrecker, Ellen. 2010. The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University. New York: New Press. Scott, W. Richard, Martin Ruef, Peter J. Mendel, and Carol A. Caronna. 2000. Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations: From Professional Dominance to Managed Care. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Sexton, John. 2007. “NYU Abu Dhabi, and Our Global Future.” New York University: About NYU. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/about/ leadership-university-administration/office-of-the-president/redirect/ speeches-statements/nyu-abu-dhabi-and-our-global-future.html. ———. 2010. “Global Network University Reflection.” New York University. Accessed January 5, 2014. www.nyu.edu/about/leadership-universityadministration/office-of-the-president/redirect/speeches-statements/ global-network-university-reflection.html. Shami, Seteney, and Holly Danzeisen. 2011. “Midnight Surprise: Preliminary Reactions to the Federal International Education Budget Cuts.” Items & Issues: The Social Science Research Council. July 20. Accessed January 5, 2014. http://itemsandissues.ssrc.org/midnight-surprise-preliminary-reactionsto-the-federal-international-education-budget-cuts. Siaya, Laura M., and Fred M. Hayward. 2003. Mapping Internationalization on US Campuses. Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry L. Leslie. 1997. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. .Thornton, Patricia H., William Ocasio, and Michael Lounsbury. 2012. The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure, and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tilly, Charles. 2004. “Past, Present and Future Globalizations.” In The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending, edited by Gita SteinerKhamsi, 13–28. New York: Teachers College Press. Turner, Yvonne, and Sue Robson. 2008. Internationalizing the University. London: Continuum. VanAntwerpen, Jonathan, and David L. Kirp. 2003. “Star Wars: New York University.” In Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, edited by David L. Kirp, 66–89. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zemach-Bersin, Talya. 2009. “Selling the World: Study Abroad Marketing and the Privatization of Global Citizenship.” In The Handbook of Practice and Research in Study Abroad: Higher Education and the Quest for Global Citizenship, edited by Ross Lewin, 303–20. New York: Routledge.

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chapter six

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11: “Needs” and Challenges Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

The US government’s “need” for Middle East experts and linguists no longer makes newspaper headlines. But in the years after September 11, 2001, there was heightened emphasis on the government’s “shortage” of international specialists and the need for Arabic language experts. This seeming crisis was much publicized in political rhetoric and the mainstream media, with headlines such as “FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills: 33 of 12,000 Have Some Proficiency” from the Washington Post (Eggen 2007), “International Education: Demand Soars for Arabic Speakers” from the International Herald Tribune (Smith 2005), and “Surge in Students Studying Arabic Outstrips Supply of Teachers” from USA Today (Yahalom 2007). Yet Mary Ellen O’Connell and Janet Norwood (2007) identified serious problems associated with language learning during this time, and government officials conceded that the government was years away from fulfilling its needs (“Know Thine Enemy” 2005). In spite of these challenges, the faculty and staff of federally funded Centers for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) felt pressure to produce competent linguists and regional specialists quickly. In this chapter we explore trends in Arabic-language learning during this time in American history—the years before and after 9/11—to shed light on the relationship between the federal government’s pressing need for regional specialists and the ability of federally funded Title VI area studies centers to

225

meet this demand in a relatively short time and while under pressure from both policy makers and the general public. Drawing from extensive qualitative and quantitative data, we found that Title VI centers face two interrelated challenges associated with language learning: a dearth of qualified language instructors to meet student demand and high attrition rates because of the difficulty of learning Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages. Although other studies have made similar claims (see O’Connell and Norwood 2007; Newhall 2006), our research includes rich ethnographic data in addition to the quantitative data, and we thus extend current knowledge on the subject by arguing that these challenges are more nuanced than previously demonstrated because of underlying institutional structures that discourage advanced language learning. These include curriculum requirements, the nature of MA programs, and the status of language teachers. In addition, disciplinary departments, which have the potential to develop area specialists, have policies that devalue foreign language acquisition (for complementary findings, see Miller-Idriss and Shami 2012; Graham and Kantor 2007; Wallerstein et al. 1996). These structures and policies further reduce the potential pool of specialists who may be candidates for government service. Our analysis began with the qualitative data, from which we concluded that the difficulty of language acquisition, the priorities of some academic disciplines, and even the structure of the university itself hinder advanced language learning. We then drew from the quantitative data to verify, complement, or refute these findings. Through an analysis of attrition rates, the quantitative data verified the difficulty of learning languages such as Arabic for American university students. Through an analysis of language instructor qualifications, quantitative data supported the finding that university structures may hinder language learning. In addition, the data revealed that despite the claims of some faculty members that their centers prepare students for government service, only a modest percentage of students actually work for the government after graduation. We begin this chapter with an overview of language instruction at Title VI centers and the government’s need for Middle East specialists after 9/11. We follow with a description of our data and methods. From there, the format of the chapter reflects our data-gathering procedures by discussing first our qualitative and then our quantitative findings. We conclude by challenging

226 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

the premise that universities should— or are even able to—produce regional specialists with language expertise to fill the government’s need.

Overview of Language Study at Title VI Centers The US government has long sought to create and expand its cadre of regional and language specialists. Linguistic competence came to be perceived as a “national security issue,” and as such “the mission of achieving it became a federal responsibility” (Newhall 2006, 206). The launch of Sputnik in 1957 “generated a new spirit of political, military, technological, and scientific competition that in turn stimulated public federal-academic partnerships, including those concerning language training” (208). In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) into law, which formalized federal support of language and area studies (referred to as Title VI). Today there are ten Title VI programs, including National Resource Centers, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, the Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages Program, and Centers for International Business Education and Research (O’Connell and Norwood 2007, 17). This study focuses on the National Resource Centers (NRCs), which provide for the following: (i) teaching of any modern foreign language; (ii) instruction in fields needed to provide full understanding of areas, regions, or countries in which such language is commonly used; (iii) research and training in international studies, and the international and foreign language aspects of professional and other fields of study; and (iv) instruction and research on issues in world affairs that concern one or more countries. (Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, P.L. 89– 329, 20 U.S.C. 1122 (1999), Sec. 602)

On average, and during the period of our study, the centers received $305,000 a year in Title VI funds,1 with additional funding for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) awards. The NRCs support language study in many ways: they administer FLAS scholarships, provide language instruction for less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), organize informal language circles, sponsor seminars and workshops, encourage study abroad programs,

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 227

and maintain overseas networks to facilitate students’ language study in the region. FLAS grant administration is an important part of many centers’ role, though not every NRC participates. FLAS is a competitive fellowship for all graduate students with US citizenship who are enrolled in a modern foreign language program and who demonstrate potential for academic achievement. Among the goals of FLAS are “to assist in the development of knowledge, resources, and trained personnel for modern foreign language and area/international studies” and “to develop a pool of international experts to meet national needs” (US Department of Education 2011). FLAS grants provide funding for an academic year or summer study at a student’s home institution or at an approved overseas institution. Despite the opportunities that FLAS provides for study abroad, policies tying Middle East FLAS fellowships to foreign travel are far from universal. Our findings in a review of data on FLAS fellows from the Department of Education’s Evaluation of Exchange, Language, International and Area Studies (EELIAS) database echoes those in the National Research Council’s report on Title VI programs: slightly more than one-fourth of Arabic FLAS fellows from 2000 to 2005 spent any of their funds for travel abroad, and this figure varied widely between centers. Table 6.1 details this situation. This tendency to not use FLAS funds to study abroad was also noted in the National Research Council report, which found that several Department of Education policies hinder the use of FLAS fellowships for overseas study (O’Connell and Norwood 2007). For example, the Department of Education requires advance approval for individual requests to study abroad, which is seen as a barrier to CMES faculty, staff, and students (O’Connell and Norwood 2007, 133). Thus, despite the apparent benefits of studying a foreign language in a country where the target language is spoken, the majority of FLAS recipients remain in the United States. The centers fund language instruction for LCTLs, such as Pashto or Dari. Title VI provides funding to hire LCTL instructors and supports intensive summer workshops and seminars and other activities related to language study. The National Research Council report found that Title VI funds often act “as a vital catalyst for developing language instruction” (148) at some universities. For example, an NRC may use Title VI funds initially to underwrite classes with the goal of attracting students. Once adequate enrollment has been established, the university may absorb the costs for the language

228 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

Table 6.1. Arabic FLAS Fellowships Fulfilled in the United States, Overseas, or a Mixture of the Two, by NRC, 2000–2005 FLAS Location University

Both

Total

% Abroad

A

United States 62

Abroad 7

2

71

13

B

99

20

0

119

17

C

47

13

0

60

22

D

45

1

0

46

2

E

82

43

1

126

35

F

111

34

0

145

23

G

62

4

0

66

6

H

81

44

0

125

35

I

70

60

2

132

47

J

90

78

0

168

46

K

83

2

0

85

2

L

24

13

0

37

35

M

51

8

1

60

15

N

77

28

0

105

27

O

71

14

0

85

16

P

39

14

8

61

36

Q Total

10

7

0

17

41

1,104

390

14

1,508

27

Note: University names have been removed and the order of rows randomized to ensure the anonymity of the centers that participated in the ethnographic component of this research.

program and the NRC will then focus on another LCTL (O’Connell and Norwood 2007). Many LCTLs are taught only at NRCs. The National Research Council found that of forty-eight LCTLs, thirty-six were taught only at NRCs. They emphasize this point with the following example: “Languages only offered at NRC institutions include such significant languages as Kazak, Bengali, Bulgarian, Malay, Slovak, and Uzbek. Bengali, for example, is spoken by 270 million people and is an official language of both Bangladesh and India” (149). Without Title VI, many of these “significant languages” would be taught at even fewer US universities.

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 229

The “Need” for Middle East Specialists and Linguists A range of agencies across the federal government, from the Department of State to the Department of Education, employ foreign area and language experts. Following 9/11 there was a flurry of media attention to the shortage of Middle East experts in the government. A typical news story of the time was reported by the Washington Post: Five years after Arab terrorists attacked the United States, only 33 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in the sections of the bureau that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, according to new FBI statistics. Counting agents who know only a handful of Arabic words—including those who scored zero on a standard proficiency test—just 1 percent of the FBI’s 12,000 agents have any familiarity with the language, the statistics show. (Eggen 2007, A1)

Similarly, the Economist revealed that “some [army] brigades [in Iraq] have only one fluent Arabic-speaker. There are said to be just 1,850 known Arabicspeakers in the army. . . . By and large, the demand in Iraq has been filled by locals of variable quality—and loyalty” (“Know Thine Enemy” 2005, 50). Prior to 9/11 government reports found that state agencies lacked adequate international expertise and that the intelligence community did not have enough translators to handle counterterrorism; one report emphasized that “readiness level was only 30 percent when it came to the ability to translate languages used by terrorists” (O’Connell and Norwood 2007, 47). Attention to these shortages was heightened after 9/11. The National Research Council compiled multiple sources and studies addressing the government’s need for international expertise and found that the number of experts remained low. For example, a recent Iraq Study Group report found that of a thousand-person staff at the US Embassy in Baghdad, thirty-one spoke Arabic, only six fluently (52). Overall, the National Research Council estimates that “25,000 to 34,000 federal positions require foreign language skills, and these tend to be concentrated in defense, intelligence, and law enforcement. The estimated range of need for people with area or international studies expertise is a little wider, from 19,000 to 44,000 federal positions” (49). It also notes that an exact number of federal employees who have international expertise is difficult to determine because intelligence agencies disclose limited information (48).

230 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

The government made some efforts to relieve the shortage by increasing the funding to critical language study. In 2006, President George W. Bush launched the National Security Language Initiative to “dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical need foreign languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Farsi, and others through new and expanded programs from kindergarten through university and into the workforce” (US Department of Education et al., n.d.). Government agencies also introduced new scholarships, such as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program in 2004, which funds students with career interests in intelligence and area expertise coupled with academic training in fields primarily related to national security and international affairs (see CIA 2012).

Data and Methods Qualitative Data Our research combined data from two studies, qualitative and quantitative, to produce new understandings of the pressures and realities of Middle East language learning at American institutions of higher education. The qualitative component consisted of weeklong, in-depth case studies conducted between December 2005 and March 2006 at six universities across the United States, as part of Phase I for the project Producing Knowledge on World Regions (see the introduction to this volume).2 At each site, the researcher aimed to determine the breadth and depth of activities, programs, events, and expertise on the region and to identify the challenges of Middle East studies on campus. The data collected from these visits included a range of information—from understanding each center’s role in the production of knowledge about the Middle East on each campus to individual centers’ programming and administration to Middle East language instruction and learning. The case studies included semistructured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation on all six campuses, each of which houses a Title VI– funded CMES. To create a representative sample, the selected sites included centers with and without degree-granting programs, centers based in both public and private universities, and centers located in different regions of the United States. In addition to a CMES, the case universities were required to have Title VI–funded centers for Latin American studies and Russia/Eurasian studies, 3 which we could compare to the CMES. Table 6.2 outlines the

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 231

Table 6.2. Description of Sites Site/Center

Public/ Private

Degree/ Non-Degree Granting through Center

Years Since

Regional

University Size

Establishment

Location

(graduates and undergraduates)

Eastern Elite

Private

Degree

> 50 yrs

East Coast

< 20,000

Quadrangle

Private

Degree

> 40 yrs

Mid-West

< 15,000

Open Plains

Public

Non-Degree

< 20 yrs

Mid-West

> 25,000

UWest

Public

Non-Degree

> 30 yrs

West Coast

> 25,000

Southern State

Public

Degree

> 40 yrs

South

> 25,000

Northern Urban

Private

Non-Degree

> 50 yrs

East Coast

< 25,000

individual sites.4 To maintain confidentiality, we labeled the sites with pseudonyms and changed all participants’ names and identifying characteristics. We conducted thirty formal interviews with CMES directors, assistant directors, associate directors, and/or center administrators; directors of centers for Latin American studies and Russia/Eurasian studies; and the provost or dean who oversaw international initiatives. We tape-recorded these interviews, which we designed in a way that would allow us to draw comparisons across the six centers. We also conducted forty-seven informal interviews. Instead of recording them, we took detailed handwritten notes during the interviews, which we later transferred into typed field notes and coded during data analysis.5 Informal interviews served the primary purpose of providing depth and detail about the landscape of Middle East studies on each campus and included discussions with directors of related programs, center faculty, and language and outreach coordinators. In total, we conducted seventy-seven interviews, ranging in length from twenty minutes to two hours. We coded all interviews using both inductive and deductive codes (either in written transcription, written field note, or audiofile form) in Annotape and Atlas.ti, qualitative software programs. In addition to the data from the six sites in Phase 1, we drew information from interviews that were conducted during the later phases of the project, from 2007 to 2009. Although the later data collection included two additional sites and interviews with faculty from centers for South Asian and 232 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

Central Asian studies, for the purposes of this chapter we analyzed only the interviews that corresponded to the first phase of research—that is, interviews with CMES faculty and staff, representatives of social science departments, and the provost or dean who oversaw international initiatives—to be consistent with the six centers on which this chapter primarily focuses. Quantitative Data To establish the generalizability of the ethnographic findings, we extracted quantitative data from the EELIAS database. Later redesigned and renamed IRIS, EELIAS stored all data reported by Title VI–funded projects and centers beginning with the 2000–2001 academic year. These data included languages and courses offered, section-by-section enrollment, detailed descriptions of outreach activities, and other information. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the Social Science Research Council obtained fifty-six EELIAS data tables, containing a total of more than a million records. Despite this amount of data, some important information was missing, and the structure of the database had to be reverse engineered before the data were usable. Still, the information extracted from EELIAS was considered the most complete and reliable available for the purpose of supporting the ethnographic study. Because we completed this quantitative analysis independently of the site visits and because the quantitative data are public information, we can provide complete descriptions of the participating institutions in Table 6.3. Unfortunately, not all EELIAS data were usable for this study. Some reports were missing (whether they had never been submitted or they had been removed is unknown); other records were marked as deleted in the data tables; and centers that either lost or gained funding during the period considered in this study had to be excluded from trend analyses. For example, Georgia State and Yale did not receive their Middle East NRC funding until 2003, and the Middle East NRC at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was not renewed in 2003. Table 6.4 displays which centers’ data we included in which quantitative component of this study. Enrollment Data Certain annual EELIAS reports described every language course taught during the previous year, the type of instructor, and the undergraduate,

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 233

Table 6.3. Descriptions of Universities with Middle East NRCs Whose EELIAS Data Were Considered in This Report University

Location*

Status*

Classification*

Size*

Arizona

Tucson, AZ

Public

RU/VH

Large

California, Berkeley

Berkeley, CA

Public

RU/VH

Large

Los Angeles, CA

Public

RU/VH

Large

Santa Barbara, CA

Public

RU/VH

Large

Chicago, IL

Private

RU/VH

Large

New York, NY

Private

RU/VH

Large

Atlanta, GA

Private

RU/VH

Large

Washington, DC

Private

RU/VH

Large

California, Los Angeles California, Santa Barbara Chicago Columbia Emory Georgetown Georgia State

Atlanta, GA

Public

RU/H

Large

Harvard

Cambridge, MA

Private

RU/VH

Large

Michigan, Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor, MI

Public

RU/VH

Large

New York

New York, NY

Private

RU/VH

Large

Ohio State

Columbus, OH

Public

RU/VH

Large

Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, PA

Private

RU/VH

Large

Princeton, NJ

Private

RU/VH

Medium

Princeton Texas, Austin Utah Washington, Seattle Yale

Austin, TX

Public

RU/VH

Large

Salt Lake City, UT

Public

RU/VH

Large

Seattle, WA

Public

RU/VH

Large

New Haven, CT

Private

RU/VH

Large

Note: Columns marked with an asterisk (*) contain data from the 2005 Carnegie Classifications. RU/VH = Research University/Very High Research Activity.

graduate, and “other” enrollment for each section of those courses. Each NRC reported its own data, and there were no mechanisms or procedures to verify the accuracy of the submitted information. This was initially problematic because some institutions listed all of their language courses under the language category “Other.” Similarly, some institutions reported non– Middle East language courses under “Arabic.” Therefore, we carried out a case-by-case evaluation of each course’s language and course title (e.g., Introduction to Modern Standard Arabic) to verify each course’s classification.

234 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

Table 6.4. Centers Included in Each Quantitative Analysis Included in analyses of Center

Enrollments / Instructors

FLAS Location

Placements

Arizona

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

California, Berkeley California, Los Angeles

✓

California, Santa Barbara

✓

Chicago

✓

✓

Columbia

✓

✓

✓

✓

Emory Georgetown Georgia State Harvard

✓ ✓

Michigan, Ann Arbor

✓

✓

✓

✓

New York

✓

✓

✓

Ohio State

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Pennsylvania Princeton

✓

✓

Texas, Austin

✓

✓

Utah

✓

✓

✓

✓

Washington, Seattle Yale

✓

✓

✓

This evaluation resulted in courses with 1,733 associated sections. However, eighty-six of these sections were marked in EELIAS as “deleted” for unknown reasons and another forty-two sections had a total of zero enrollment. (Although a zero could indicate the actual enrollment, it could also be the default value for unreported enrollment.) Finally, institutions reported 256 of these sections twice (identical course numbers, semester/term identifiers, and enrollment figures). Therefore, this study was only able to consider 1,351 sections of Arabic language instruction. The presence in EELIAS of enrollment data for each center was rather sporadic. Only seven centers reported enrollment for each of the four full Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 235

academic years considered in this study. Because comparing pre- and post9/11 enrollment, instructor status, and attrition rates was important to our research, we only considered data from those seven centers. EELIAS Placement Data Centers reported annually to EELIAS the number of students who “graduated” from their programs. The EELIAS report forms defined a graduate as a student who received a degree from the center’s university and had taken fifteen credits of center-affiliated courses. Again, these data were far from pristine, and, unlike the course or FLAS fellow data, there was no further information to lessen the ambiguity. Of the 10,157 graduate placements reported to EELIAS, 78 percent were classified as “Unknown,” and another 1 percent were listed as “Unemployed.” We removed those graduates from consideration in the analyses. In addition, centers defined several new placement categories as they were entering the data (e.g., “Filmmaker,” “Bilkent University, Turkey”). We either reassigned these placements to an existing major job sector or removed them as “Unknown.” This process resulted in 2,104 placements. Though the process of reverse engineering the EELIAS database structure and independently evaluating the data stored therein was arduous, the resulting data set was more accurate and defensible than the raw data.

Qualitative Findings CMES faculty and staff were aware of the government’s need for linguists and Middle East experts and were working to meet this need, though some faculty members questioned the role of their center in producing government specialists. One faculty member at UWest disputed the government’s claim that there is a shortage of experts, and others criticized the government’s rush to fund “critical” languages instead of providing sustained funding for all languages. Other faculty and staff discussed the government’s need in reference to their students’ career goals and stressed the importance of preparing students for employment related to government service. While the centers’ goals aligned with the government’s need, we uncovered specific challenges that the centers face in reaching those goals. Here we detail the institutional structures that challenge the development of language experts: (1) institutional structures, such as curriculum requirements and the 236 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

Table 6.5. Number of Middle East FLAS Fellows Studying Arabic Language

Number of Fellows

Arabic, Algerian

2

Arabic, Egyptian

27

Arabic, Gulf

9

Arabic, Levantine Bedawi

10

Arabic, Modern Standard

1,403

Arabic, Moroccan

23

Arabic, North Levantine

2

Arabic, South Levantine

4

Other

38

Note: Twenty-eight of the “Other” language fellows were in fact studying Arabic.

status of language instructors, discourage advanced language learning; and (2) some academic departments devalue advanced foreign language acquisition. The difficulty of language learning within the time constraints of an academic program is an undercurrent throughout these challenges. University Structures The structure of the curriculum requirements at the degree-granting universities hinders MA students’ ability to reach advanced language proficiency. These structures often lead to a disconnection between student expectations and what they can reasonably achieve in the duration of their program. MA students often begin a Middle East studies program in order to pursue a career with the Department of State or another government agency. One first-year MA student described her career goal as ‘working for the government someday or perhaps working for a nonprofit development organization.’6 In preparation for this future work and in recognition of the importance of language skills, she applied for an additional year of Arabic study in Qatar, which she hoped would make her more competitive on the job market. A language instructor explained the importance of study abroad in supplementing on-campus coursework: ‘Immersion is essential [because we have] severe diglossia [two levels of language: informal and formal] in Arabic, so many dialects, shortage of staff, cannot cover all dialects, so students must have immersion. . . . [T]hey go to Syria, Lebanon, North Africa, and Palestine. The bulk of students go to Cairo.’7

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 237

Even when students do study abroad, there is a gulf between their expectations when they enter an MA program and what they can reasonably accomplish over the course of two years. One assistant director said: I don’t think that the folks in the academy have been very forthcoming in really making sure that folks understand that you don’t produce somebody who is fluent in Arabic in two years. It just doesn’t happen . . . at the end of couple of years of [language training at] Middlebury in the summers, they have the polished speaking skills of an Egyptian third grader. But they can’t read. I mean that’s a real problem. It’s something we grapple with here all the time.8

The associate director of Eastern Elite expressed similar concerns and frustrations. She thought the MA students did not have enough time to think deeply and thoughtfully about issues. As a result, she thought her students’ analytical skills and writing required improvement. The degree-granting centers in our study (Eastern Elite, Quadrangle, and Southern State) had varying language requirements for an MA. Eastern Elite required students to attain a “reading and speaking competency” in a language, Open Plains required one and a half years of study, and Southern State required two years of study. The average duration of an MA program from our sample is two years. Unless students begin language study before entering an MA program, it is unlikely that they will complete their degrees with a high level of proficiency. During the later phases of data collection (beyond the six centers in the initial part of the study), center directors and faculty also discussed the difficulty of producing proficient speakers. One center, located at a large public university, was attempting to counter this challenge. The center’s director reported that languages with a non-Latin alphabet are even more challenging to students, and thus students are less likely to continue after one or two years. To address this, the center had developed a new program. In order to kind of combat that, we have instituted some Foreign Language across the Curriculum courses, we are calling them FLAC, where you take a course like the history course or the poli sci [course] . . . and . . . students who have had a year or two of Arabic or Hebrew can take those courses and actually read original documents in Arabic or in Hebrew, just to give them a sense that, ‘Oh, I really can do something, even though I have only had

238 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

a year.’ You know, so we are trying to do more of that so that we can keep them interested and actually get them to the third and fourth year.9

The results of the program have yet to be assessed, but it is an example of how centers have reacted to the challenges they face while remaining focused on students’ needs. Faculty members discussed the tension between learning a language in a classroom and using it in a practical context. One center has begun to emphasize teaching “conversational” Arabic and deemphasize the more traditional teaching style that focuses on grammar and memorization. Some faculty members questioned this approach. The assistant director remarked that students who learn through the conversational approach will be able to visit the region and “be better at ordering meals in restaurants and talking to taxi drivers about where they want to go and doing that kind of thing.” She continued, “They reach a level of kind of survival Arabic, or whatever it is, faster,” but these students’ ability would eventually plateau. In contrast, those who have learned the grammar will be “less functional in terms of a certain level of survival” but “will also have the grounding to go on beyond that level [and] to be able to function with some real, you know, elegance and nuance and subtlety, and to say, as I once heard fluency described, being able to say what you want to say, the way you want to say it.”10 These remarks reflect the larger challenge for centers: the development of competent speakers in a short time. And this assistant director raises an important question: should centers aim for teaching “survival Arabic” or concentrate on traditional pedagogy that emphasizes grammar and structure, which will lead a few students to high levels of proficiency? In addition to the brevity of the MA programs, the status of language faculty may also impede advanced language acquisition. As enrollment in Arabic courses increased after 9/11, hiring competent instructors became more difficult; four of the centers struggled to find and hire qualified people. A staff member at Eastern Elite noted that “interest in Arabic had gone through the roof,” and they were “struggling to keep up with demand.”11 When asked what has changed for his center since 9/11, one language coordinator exclaimed, ‘Languages!’ He explained that there was an increase in student demand but ‘not enough competent faculty’ to fill instructor positions and that there was inadequate university funding to recruit and retain those who were qualified.12 To emphasize his point, he held up a large stack

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 239

of applications—mostly from unqualified candidates—that had been submitted for a single instructor position. Hiring was especially difficult because the language instructor positions were not tenure track, and larger universities were offering much higher salaries, which increased the competition for instructors. He found it difficult to attract top candidates to his university. Other centers also reported difficulty hiring instructors because the positions offer lower salaries and less job security than tenure-track positions. Interviews from the later phases of data collection echoed these sentiments. One assistant director put the issue in a new context. It may not necessarily be a problem specific to Arabic, other Middle Eastern languages, or LCTLs but rather a reflection of the American attitude toward language learning. She explained, “We’ve come in American life back to a kind of realization that having, you know, teaching people to speak languages is important, but we have—but you know—since at least the early twentieth century there has been a tendency to think about language instruction as not really an intellectual activity but as a technical activity.”13 As such, those who teach language are not highly regarded and have less importance in university structures. She commented that many think that “writing a history book is a real intellectual activity,” but teaching language is not. She further noted that hiring more Arabic instructors is a financial issue because of the teacher-to-student ratio. She noted that unlike other introductory classes, such as biology, which could have “150 students or 800 students,” language classes must be small. To meet student demand, universities cannot simply increase class size; rather they have to hire more instructors. Disciplinary Departments and Language Study If students cannot achieve high levels of language proficiency in MA programs, PhD programs may be an alternative pathway for developing Middle East experts. However, unless a student is earning a PhD specifically in Middle East or another area studies, a doctoral program may not require foreign language proficiency. As noted above, the American government needs language experts specifically for defense and intelligence purposes. These experts may come from political science or economics departments or even from the emerging field of security studies. During the fieldwork portion of this study, we interviewed faculty in charge of advising graduate students in political science and economics departments, several of whom expressed disdain for area studies and, by extension, language study. The economics adviser at North Urban stated, 240 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

‘Nobody cares about regional specialization.’14 None of these departments had a foreign language requirement. If students were interested in learning a foreign language, they had to do so through extra course work. A political science adviser noted that his department’s students are discouraged from pursuing research outside the United States because course work for language acquisition could add as many as two years to their degree programs. In addition to the disincentive of taking longer to graduate, there is little incentive for students to pursue area studies. The dean at North Urban discussed disciplinary trends and the fact that lack of incentives results in a dearth of social scientists with regional expertise. I think universities could be faulted for not trying to push interdisciplinary work a little bit more, and that’s the kind of work that supports doing area studies. On the other hand, universities are not ranked on interdisciplinary grounds—they have the best political science department, they have the fifth best economics department, they have the twentieth best English department, or whatever it is. So as long as those kinds of rankings make a difference to faculty and applicants and all sorts of things like that, then universities have to play by the rules of the disciplines. Now the disciplines in the social sciences have, as I say, drifted into a very scientific definition of their purposes and standards, which means, I think, two things. One is that there is no reward to doing work that’s out in the field when basically the hard definition of science tends to be numbers. And there’s also actually a disincentive to working with what most scientists would call ‘dirty data sets.’ That is to say, if you go up into the field and you realize the numbers are bad, what are you going to do? So why should you bother doing that kind of work at all? So I think there are those kinds of disincentives.15

If there is “no reward” for undertaking field research outside the United States or for working with “dirty data sets” and if studying a foreign language may delay your graduation, then there is little incentive for PhD students to pursue regional expertise, thus undermining the government’s hope of recruiting competent Arabists from doctoral programs. A chair of the economics department at North Urban during the later phase of research confirmed that studying a foreign language and doing fieldwork abroad would delay graduation. In fact, his department discouraged it. He explained:

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 241

I think it would be hard for . . . say, if you took a student who knew nothing about a different language, they decided they wanted to be a Latin American specialist and learn Spanish. It would be kind of hard to do that because we have very demanding course work and then we have a relatively short time to degree. We expect people to get out of here in five or six years, so it’s not like they can take some courses, then they can take a couple of years and learn a language, then they can find a topic that has something to do with that language, and write a thesis . . . unfortunately we couldn’t really in good conscience encourage somebody to go out and do something like learn another language from scratch, because they wouldn’t get any credit for it in the economics marketplace.16

The chair of the sociology department at Quadrangle echoed this view during the later phase of data collection: “I do not advise American-born sociologists to work on China, because the Chinese sociologists can run circles around them unless they are really skilled in language acquisition and started early . . . Or even undergraduates unless they’re really, really dedicated. I do not advise they do it.”17 These quotations reflect the difficulty or nearimpossibility of training social scientists who are also area specialists.

Quantitative Findings Our analysis of the quantitative data confirmed our findings that university structures hinder advanced language study and acquisition. These data highlight the lack of qualified language instructors and confirms the challenge of keeping students enrolled in classes beyond the first or second year. Lack of Qualified Instructors After 9/11, enrollment in Arabic language classes greatly increased across the centers. One faculty member noted that the ‘only noticeable change is the quintupling of Arabic language classes. Thirty years ago, in 1975, we only had one section of first year and one section of second year. Now we have five sections of first year, and four sections of second year, and two sections of third year.’18 He noted, however, that there has been less of an increase in Persian or Turkish class enrollment. Although EELIAS did not contain data going back thirty years, it did provide the most detailed and accurate information available on enrollment

242 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

Table 6.6. First-Year Arabic Fall Term Enrollment, by Center and Year, 2000–2003 University

2000

2001

2002

2003

Arizona

33

27

72

49

California, Los Angeles

63

48

45

54

Harvard

79

91

133

83

New York

24

57

62

79

Ohio State

59

68

87

106

Princeton Washington Total

9

19

36

35

67

71

92

42

334

381

527

448

Note: To more accurately reflect enrollment trends, only centers that reported enrollment in all four years were included in this analysis.

trends at Middle East NRCs. The first-year Arabic fall semester/term enrollments reported by centers support the comments above (see Table 6.6). The average enrollment by center rose from 47.7 students in 2000 to 54.4 in 2001 but then mushroomed after 9/11. Centers averaged 75.2 first-year students in 2002, dropping to 64 in 2003. The analysis of EELIAS data also shows that other centers have struggled to keep up with demand for Arabic language instruction. Again, considering only first-year fall term enrollment, the average students-per-section increased by 30 percent between 2001 and 2002. Even though some universities were able to add sections to meet demand, per-section enrollment in 2003 was higher than in 2000 at every center. In fact, three centers offered fewer sections of first-year Arabic in 2003 than they had in 2000, despite the obvious increased interest. The data reported to EELIAS also support the claim that centers are grappling with staffing issues. Figure 6.1 shows that the percentage of firstyear Arabic courses taught by non-tenure-track professionals increased steadily from 2000 to 2003. High Attrition Rates Despite the large increase in class enrollment and promise of government careers, it is difficult to maintain enrollment in demanding languages such as Arabic. Figure 6.2 clearly shows the high attrition rate in Arabic enrollment

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 243

Figure 6.1. Percentage of first-year Arabic sections taught in the fall term, by

type of instructor and year.

from the seven centers that reported enrollment in the fall terms from 2000 to 2003. The average attrition by cohort between the first and second years of Arabic study was 56 percent, with the largest cohort (2002, n = 527) showing the highest attrition (65 percent). In percentage of first-year enrollments, these attrition trends flatten somewhat between Years 2 and 3 (34 percent) and Years 3 and 4 (18 percent). It should be noted that because EELIAS stored per-section enrollment figures, the enrollment at the upper levels was most likely an overestimate of the number of individual students who continued to study Arabic. There was almost no chance that a first- or second-year student would enroll in more than one Arabic course, while the odds were fairly high that third- and fourth-year students would enroll in conversation, literature, and/or dialect courses. A single student enrolled in two courses would be counted twice, thus distorting the comparison somewhat. Career Placement CMES faculty and staff often supported the training of young professionals for government service. While the quantitative data demonstrated that NRCs place graduates in government and military positions, the rate at which this

244 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

Figure 6.2. Fall enrollment, by level of study and cohort year.

occurs is dwarfed by the training of “the next generation of scholars and professionals,” which one staff member remarked was the role of his CMES. Again, considering the data reported by the centers between 2000 and 2005, 144 NRC graduates (7 percent)19 were placed in government or military positions, while 325 (15 percent) found employment in higher education and 796 (38 percent) went on to work in the private sector. As with the analysis of FLAS fellows, the placement figures were not consistent across all centers. The percentage of graduates placed in government/military positions ranged from 23 percent at Georgetown to less than 1 percent at NYU, which makes it very difficult to generalize from one institution to another. However, in total, around 7 percent of known NRC graduate placements were in government or military positions, and this total remained constant (fluctuating between 20 and 50 placements per year) from before 9/11 to 2004. In addition, comparing the percentage of NRC graduates placed in different sectors is less meaningful than a comparison of NRC placement rates to those of university graduates at large. If only 1 percent of graduates in general find employment in the military or the government, then 7 percent placed by NRCs in that sector would indeed be significant; however, gathering data on the general population of university graduates was beyond the scope of this research.

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 245

Figure 6.3. Percentage of total placements, by three sectors and hosting institution. Note: UC Santa Barbara was not included because only one graduate was placed by its center during the time for which data were submitted.

Conclusion and Discussion We have explored the disconnection between the government’s need for competent Middle East language specialists and the CMES’s ability to meet this need. The quantitative data revealed that only a low percentage of Title VI graduates actually work for the government. To explain this, we presented several factors that impede the development of these specialists. Structures within the university— curriculum requirements and the nature of MA programs—make it difficult to produce linguists within the time constraints of a graduate program. Though the issue that some disciplines discouraged advanced language study could not be verified through a quantitative measure, our findings echo those of Cynthia Miller-Idriss and Seteney Shami (2012),

246 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

who argue that cultural and organizational dynamics within the disciplines of political science, sociology, and economics may work against internationalization efforts as graduate students in these departments are discouraged from international fieldwork and foreign language learning. Coupled with this is the difficulty that American students have learning languages such as Arabic, which contributes to high attrition rates. The low status of language teachers also makes it difficult for universities to hire qualified instructors to meet student needs. Finally, some social science disciplines devalue and discourage language learning, which further hinders the potential development of experts for government service. These challenges are present at a time when American universities are internationalizing in profound ways. More and more students are studying abroad, there are new undergraduate and graduate majors on international or global themes, and universities have opened satellite campuses all over the world (see, e.g., Altbach and Knight 2007; Biddle 2002). Despite these internationalizing efforts, foreign language learning in universities is undervalued. With this in mind, we question the premise that universities, and in particular Title VI centers, should or can create a substantial pool of specialists to meet the government’s need for experts. As we discuss in earlier sections of this chapter, Title VI is historically situated; what was proposed and developed in the 1950s may no longer be feasible for today’s university. Although there continues to be a need for expertise, Title VI centers alone cannot produce regional specialists because they are limited by university structures. To produce more experts, there must be a more coordinated effort and support across the university. Centers would benefit from increased support for language instruction, both financial assistance and a rethinking of the role and status of language teachers. Because students have difficulty learning languages such as Arabic in two years, more undergraduate language classes should be encouraged or more intensive language programs should be developed for MA students. In interviews, center faculty and staff stressed the benefits of language immersion during study abroad, but our analysis of FLAS grants shows that most students are not using their FLAS funding for this purpose. This seems to be a point that could be remedied easily. From outside the university, the government should support foreign language study at much earlier levels, in undergraduate study or even in high school. Yet the government must also recognize the current limitations of the university. If language learning continues to be undervalued, then perhaps universities

Arabic Language Learning on US Campuses after 9/11 247

should no longer be expected to produce experts. If universities have different priorities from those of the government, then perhaps the government should reconsider its very relationship with the university. Overall, there needs to be greater awareness and communication about all of these issues. Universities and centers need to be more forthcoming with both their students and the government about the challenges to language learning and what one can reasonably accomplish during an MA program.

Notes We are indebted to co-principal investigators Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, to Holly Danzeisen for her support, and to Jonathan Friedman for research assistance. This chapter draws in part from the data collected for the long-term research project Producing Knowledge on World Regions, based at the Social Science Research Council and of which this volume is a part. For more information, see Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, included as the appendix to this volume. 1.

As calculated from figures provided in Title VI proposals for the funding cycle 2006–10.

2.

Elizabeth Anderson Worden was the field researcher for the project Producing Knowledge on World Regions in 2005– 6 and collected the qualitative data for this chapter. Jeremey Browne, a research consultant on the project from 2005 to 2008, extracted and analyzed data from the EELIAS database.

3.

The exact title and geographic scope varies across the sites. Some centers also include “Slavic” in their titles.

4.

Exact figures for enrollment and years since establishment are not provided in order to preserve the confidentiality of each research site.

5.

This chapter employs the following conventions in order to distinguish between quotations from formal and informal interviews: direct quotations, which come from transcribed audiotapes, are distinguished by double quotation marks (“ ”) or are included as block quotations; direct quotes from handwritten notes are noted by single quotation marks (‘ ’).

6.

Student, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Open Plains, 2005– 6.

7.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

8.

Center Administrator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

9.

Center Administrator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Big State, 2006– 7.

10.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2006– 7.

248 Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne

11.

Center Administrator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern Elite, 2005– 6.

12.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

13.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2006– 7.

14.

Director of Graduate Studies, Economics, North Urban, 2005– 6.

15.

Dean, International Studies, North Urban, 2005– 6.

16.

Department Chair, Economics, North Urban, 2006– 7.

17.

Department Chair, Sociology, Quadrangle, 2006– 7.

18.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

19.

The EELIAS report forms define an NRC “graduate” as any student who received a degree that year and had taken fifteen credits of NRC-associated courses. The percentages reported here are calculated by dividing the number of graduates placed in the specific sector by the total number of known graduate placements. Most centers classify the majority of their placements as “unknown” because they lack the ability to track every graduate. We did not consider these unknown placements in the analyses.

References Altbach, Philip, and Jane Knight. 2007. “The Internationalization of Higher Education: Motivations and Realities.” Journal of Studies in International Education 11, no. 3–4: 290– 305. Biddle, Sheila. 2002. “Internationalization: Rhetoric or Reality?” ACLS Occasional Paper No. 56. American Council of Learned Societies, New York. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). 2012. “Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP).” Last modified April 11. www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/pat-roberts-intelligence-scholars-program-prisp.html. Eggen, Dan. 2007. “FBI Agents Still Lacking Arabic Skills: 33 of 12,000 Have Some Proficiency.” Washington Post, October 11, A1. Accessed May 22, 2013. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-yn/content/article/2006/10/10/ AR2006101001388_pf.html. Graham, Loren, and Jean-Michel Kantor. 2007. “‘Soft’ Area Studies versus ‘Hard’ Social Science: A False Opposition.” Slavic Review 66, no. 1: 1–19. “Know Thine Enemy: America Is Still Struggling to Address Its Shortage of Arabic Linguists.” 2005. Economist 375, no. 8425 (May 7): 50. Accessed May 22, 2013. www.economist.com/node/3941222. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, and Seteney Shami. 2012. “Graduate Student Training and the Reluctant Internationalism of Social Science in the

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USA.” Research in Comparative and International Education 7, no. 1: 50– 60. Newhall, Amy. 2006. “The Unraveling of the Devils’ Bargain: The History and Politics of Language Acquisition.” In Academic Freedom after 9/11, edited by Beshara Doumani, 203– 36. New York: Zone Books. O’Connell, Mary Ellen, and Janet L. Norwood, eds. 2007. International Education and Foreign Languages: Keys to Securing America’s Future. Committee to Review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays International Education Programs. National Research Council, Center for Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Smith, Rick. 2005. “International Education: Demand Soars for Arabic Speakers.” International Herald Tribune, February 15. Accessed May 22, 2013. www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/style/14iht-rarab.html?_r=0. US Department of Education. 2011. “Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program: Purpose.” Last modified June 22. www.ed.gov/programs/iegpsflasf/index.html. US Departments of Education, State, Defense, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. n.d. National Security Language Initiative. Accessed May 23, 2013. www.aplu.org/NetCommunity/Document. Doc?id=50. Wallerstein, Immanuel, et al. 1996. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yahalom, Tali. 2007. “Surge in Students Studying Arabic Outstrips Supply of Teachers.” USA Today, September 4. Accessed May 22, 2013. www.usatoday.com /news/education/2007– 09– 04-arabic-teachers_n.htm.

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chapter seven

Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East within and across Disciplines: A Survey of PhD Dissertations, 2000–2010 Laura Bier

The Legacies of 9/11? In the decade since September 11, 2001, the context for knowledge production in the field of Middle East studies (MES) changed radically, shaped by new geopolitical realities, institutional pressures and constraints, and the attempts of area studies scholars to respond to new challenges in an increasingly politicized context. And yet, despite the claims—largely by Far Right political pundits—that MES has remained politically and intellectually moribund in the face of new circumstances, very few attempts have been made to assess in a systematic way the epistemological and methodological directions in MES that developed during the ten years after 9/11. This chapter surveys topical, methodological, and geographic trends in the production of knowledge about the Middle East in doctoral dissertations written over the decade 2000–2010. In part, it offers an assessment of the extent to which the post-9/11 political and academic climate influenced knowledge production about the Middle East.1 I argue that while scholarship on the Middle East has undoubtedly been both constrained and inspired by geopolitics and the various political, popular, and media responses to 9/11, the relationship between the two is not necessarily coherent, unilinear, or predictable. This research shows that trends in MES are the product of changes in political climate, methodological currents within disciplines (themselves related to shifts in the post– Cold War geopolitical order), the peculiarities and engagements of MES as a distinct discipline, and the relationship

251

between area studies and wider disciplinary norms, organizations, and institutions.

Methodology and Summary of Quantitative Findings Sylvia Marsans-Sakly, assistant professor of history at Fairfield University, and I undertook a broad survey of humanities and social sciences dissertations in the field of MES. Marsans-Sakly was primarily responsible for data gathering on dissertations written between 2007 and 2010. For the purposes of this chapter, humanities and social sciences comprise the following disciplines: history, anthropology (including ethnomusicology and folklore studies), Middle East area studies, sociology, political science, international relations, literature (including comparative literature and cinema studies), education, economics, religious studies, geography, art history and architecture, communications and mass media, management and public administration, and demography. Using the database Proquest Dissertation Abstracts, we conducted geographically and topically based searches and then grouped the results according to discipline. During our research, it became clear that Dissertation Abstracts is, at best, an imperfect medium for such an endeavor. Proquest does not specify the discipline within which the PhD has been awarded, and the keyword tags reflect the content of the thesis and its subject matter rather than the name of the discipline. In addition, keyword tags were not assigned systematically: dissertations written in history were often given the subject tag “Middle East studies” or “Middle East history,” while dissertations in anthropology were sometimes given the “Middle East” subject tag but were more often identified only as “cultural anthropology.” It was often (but not always) possible to find out the discipline by looking at the title page of the dissertation, included in the preview of the entry. In cases where the discipline could not be determined in Proquest, we used the departmental affiliation of the dissertation adviser as a guide. Despite its difficulties, categorizing by disciplines was necessary both to avoid the conceptual slipperiness of categorizing by subject and to identify exchanges, methodologies, and trends across and within disciplines. Moreover, dissertations are not immediately entered into Proquest after they are completed, which means that the information for the years 2009 and 2010—when this research was conducted—is partial. Numbers should thus be interpreted as approximations and used loosely as indicators

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of broader trends rather than as an exact statistical representation of the state of the field. Surveying and describing a field inevitably means participating in its construction. For the purposes of this research, we interpreted MES to include studies that focus not only on the geographic region encompassing the Arabic-speaking world, Turkey, and Iran but also diaspora populations originally from that area. There may be arguments for excluding studies on Middle Eastern communities living outside of the region: there is a risk of presuming some artificial and ahistorical coherence of experience or unity based on ethnicity rather than considering the extent to which other social, political, and economic factors may contribute to and shape identities and commonalities of experience. It may, for example, make more sense to think about the relationship that recent immigrant populations maintain with their countries of origin than it would with communities who are several generations removed from those countries. However, excluding some or all of these studies would also mean excluding the work of scholars who identify themselves as actively contributing members of the MES academic community. It would also efface interesting recent research being undertaken as the conceptual boundaries of “the Middle East” have expanded over the decade to encompass work, for instance, on Muslim populations in Europe and the United States. This example points to an area of interest that in part resulted from the post-9/11 political climate, in which such populations are often positioned as potentially problematic for liberal, secular democracies. In the period 2000–2010, approximately 1,864 dissertations were written under the broad rubric of MES. The largest number of PhDs were awarded in history (246 dissertations), 2 followed by MES (243), 3 political science and literature (both with 172), education (169), anthropology (153), international relations (94), sociology (82), communications and mass media (78), economics (67), art history and architecture (63), and religious studies (58).4 Given the sheer amount of material involved it was not possible— despite the title of this chapter—to analyze trends within and across all disciplines. Therefore, this chapter presents qualitative analysis of trends observable in six disciplines only: political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, history, and MES. Even within this framework, it is impossible to include and cite every dissertation, so commentary is confined to works that fit within the broad methodological and empirical trends identified for the purposes of this study.

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The Social Sciences: Sociology, Political Science, Economics As is argued in other chapters of this book, the “hard” social sciences— sociology, economics, and political science—have had a fraught relationship with area studies. The tensions between the two approaches—reliance on universal models to explain social phenomena and the need to attend to regional specificities in area studies—have led in some cases to these disciplines’ comparative underrepresentation within the corpus of dissertations (in the case of sociology and economics) and/or the marginalization of Middle East social scientists within their disciplines. At the same time, the social sciences bear the greatest burden of “policy relevance” in the post-9/11 world. A look at dissertations in sociology, economics, and political science reveals that regionally specialized social scientists both succumb to the reliance on universal models and attempt to call those models into question. Sociology Our research showed that many dissertations in sociology written in 2000– 2010 continue some of the discipline’s traditional concerns: social movements (Abdulhadi 2000; Rinalducci 2000; Tugal 2003), class stratification (Caki 2001; Cohen 2000; Kaya 2007), and comparative revolutions (Beck 2009; Moazami 2004). However, it could be observed that Middle East sociology dissertations generally support Reşat Kasaba’s contention (in this volume) that Middle Eastern sociology as a whole is highly interdisciplinary, overlapping (in both research concerns and methodologies) with studies in anthropology, history, and political science. Despite the relatively wide range of topics in the relatively small sample of this study, some thematic and methodological trends stand out, including the prevalence of studies on Islam and/or Islamic movements and more recent attention to processes of assimilation and acculturation of Middle Eastern populations in Europe and the United States. Of the eighty-two sociology dissertations surveyed for this study, twenty are concerned with various aspects of Islam, and nearly half of these were written between 2007 and 2010. These run the gamut from studies on how Islamist political movements in Turkey mobilize supporters (Tugal 2003) to studies on the ways in which Islam, approached primarily as a cultural framework for practices and behaviors, contributes to attitudes associated with obesity in Moroccan women (Batnitzky 2005).

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An interesting aspect of many of these works (and of sociology dissertations in general) is the extent to which the tenets of neoliberalism as a political project— capitalism, democratization, secularism, tolerance of subordinated groups (however variously defined)—provide a framework for sociological research on the Middle East. Some of the dissertations use such categories more or less unproblematically (Dixon 2006) by assessing the success or failure of Middle Eastern states, political movements, or populations in living up to the normative claims of neoliberal ideology. More commonly, the dissertations call into question neoliberalism’s pretensions to universality by analyzing how such processes may have locally specific meanings and trajectories (Adas 2003; Aliabadi 2005; Rizzo 2000; Salime 2005). Emin Baki Adas’s study of Islamic entrepreneurs in Turkey, for example, looks at what he terms “religious adjustment programs” as a corollary to the structural adjustment policies advocated and carried out by the Turkish state. Zakia Salime’s study of Moroccan women’s movements aims to bring into focus local alternatives to global (universalistic) discourses of women’s rights by exploring the interactions between secular feminist and Islamist women’s groups. This emphasis on local specificities points to the influence in sociology of anthropological discourses on alternative modernities, and to the ways in which Middle East sociologists aim to both engage with and critique the tenets of universalist social science, which are part of their wider discipline. Besides the focus on Islam and neoliberalism, a trend in sociology dissertations, which suggests the influence of contemporary political concerns, is the increasing interest in Muslim and/or Middle Eastern populations (these are often, but not always, conflated) living in the United States and Europe. This interest is a telling one in light of the increasingly alarmist political discourses about the Islamization of Europe; the growing influence of xenophobic rightwing political parties in countries formerly committed to multiculturalism, such as the Netherlands; and rising public concerns about the possible radicalization of America’s Muslim population. Some of these studies are focused on recent immigrant populations; others look at Middle Eastern or Muslim communities of longer standing. Most of these studies address the processes of assimilation and acculturation that recent immigrants undergo (Al-Hihi 2004; Godin 2005; Hashemi 2006; Islam 2009; Saatci 2003; Yurdakul 2006).5 Many investigate questions of identity formation, particularly the challenges that American Muslims (Bilici 2008), Arabs living in the United States (Witteborn 2005), and Arab Canadians (Wannas-Jones 2003) face as

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they negotiate identities in a context where their membership in the nation is increasingly challenged by anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies, on the one hand, and the growing pull of transnational forces and globalization, on the other. More recently, the focus has started to shift from issues of acculturation, identity, and experience to consideration of the ways in which immigrant populations are constructed by states and political parties as problematic for liberal multiculturalism (de Jong 2009; Morrison 2008). JungWhan de Jong, for example, compares the ways in which Dutch, British, and US political parties deploy discourses on gender and sexuality in discussions about Muslims, Islam, and cultural diversity.6 What these studies have in common is their focus on populations considered problematic for the hegemonic nation-state’s narratives of citizenship, national identity, and, tellingly, secularism—a trend that seems at least to some degree to be a response to post-9/11 cultural and political concerns about “internal others” who live in the heart of Western secular democracies.

Political Science Dissertations on the Middle East produced in political science departments represent the third-largest category (tied with literature) of works surveyed for this research. As Lisa Wedeen argues in this volume, the intersection between “science” and “liberalism,” which structures the methodological apparatuses, epistemological assumptions, and production of knowledge within the discipline of political science, generally also obtains in studies of Islam and the Middle East more specifically. This intersection manifests itself in the preoccupation with questions of democratic “transition,” often described as failed or partial (Ahmed 2009; Al-faqih 2003; Angrist 2000; Blind 2007; Brownlee 2004; Eyadat 2004; Harb 2002; El-Hasan 2005; Hochman 2009; Hull 2001; Matsunaga 2006; Mazie 2002; Moustafa 2002; Polisar 2001; Singh 2005; Tiruneh 2001; Vaidyanathan 2010; VanDenBerg 2000; Yom 2009); economic reform and privatization (Aidi 2003; Alameddine 2000; Anninos 2000; Baylouny 2003; Carroll 2001; Paczynska 2002; Salem 2001); and the rule of law (Campbell 2009; Hochman 2009; Sezgin 2007). These elements, along with other measures of social and political reform, such as the participation of women, the growth of civil society, the treatment of minorities, and the (circumscribed) role of Islam in the “public sphere,” undergird a broader post– Cold War vision of the region as

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being in need of intervention and transformation, a vision embodied in both US foreign policy and the Washington Consensus (the neoliberal program of reforms laid out for the developing world by the International Monetary Fund [IMF], the World Bank, and the US Treasury Department). While it is not accurate to say that political science dissertations on the Middle East unproblematically reiterate the normative judgments of US neoliberalism (in fact, studies that take on these questions are often critical of many of neoliberalism’s more simplistic assumptions about universalism and teleological trajectories of development), the dissertations surveyed suggest that, at the very least, the intersection of scientific knowledge and US foreign policy in the post-9/11 period is shaping research agendas in political science in more obvious and pronounced ways than in other disciplines, particularly those in the humanities. Dissertations that explore the relationship between Islam and politics make up the single largest category of work produced in political science departments, focusing primarily either on Islam, Islamism, and the state (Abdel Fattah 2004; Baskan 2006; Cook 2003; Gregg 2004; Hibbard 2006; Kuru 2006; Mousa 2005; Rubin 2009; Taylor 2004; Yasar 2006) or on the emergence and dynamics of Islamist political movements (Abdelwahid 2008; Al-Mekaimi 2003; Cline 2000; Eligur 2006; Glicksberg 2003; Huang 2004; Kurtoglu 2003; Lahlou 2005; Langohr 2000; Langston 2005; Makdisi 2006; Mecham 2006; Medani 2003; Schwedler 2000). Dissertations that analyze the relationship between religious elites, Islamist movements, and states seek to answer questions such as the following: What strategies do states employ to confront Islamist challenges to authority and rule? What are the patterns of conflict and cooperation between states and Islamist movements? What is the impact of state building on religious institutions? Thus most dissertations frame their analyses of the politics of religion and the state as a matter of accommodation versus conflict (or, in some renderings, incorporation versus exclusion), with different patterns of conflict and cooperation determined by the interests and strategies of state and nonstate actors.7 Posing the questions (and answers) in such a way suggests not only the influence of rational choice models of explanation (popular in the discipline of political science as a whole) but also a tendency to analyze states and religion as separate categories. Dissertations that attempt to look beyond the state/society division by analyzing Islam both as a “voice of opposition and a sanction for state authority” (Hibbard 2006; Yadav 2007) remain in the minority.

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The reasons for the emergence and growing support of Islamist movements constitute a central question in the study of Islam and politics in political science departments. Scholarship produced on Islam and politics in the 1980s and early 1990s, and which focused on the emergence and political success of Islamist movements, tended to stress the socioeconomic roots of Islamism. It located growing support for Islamist political alternatives within the increasing political and economic disenfranchisement of urban populations as a result of market liberalization and the retreat of the state from social service provision. In contrast, studies from the first decade of this century have largely moved away from approaches that foreground socioeconomic factors. One alternative approach is the attempt to reframe Islamism not as a product of social and political confrontation with the state but as a partial consequence of state institutions, policies, and official discourses on national identity (Glicksberg 2003; Langohr 2000). Another is to analyze Islamist movements from a perspective influenced by social movement theory, which means studying the dynamics, processes, and organization of Islamic activism. Such studies focus on the formation of Islamist parties and organizations, strategies of mobilization, and the interaction between Islamist parties and the state (Al-Mekaimi 2003; Berna 2008; Eligur 2006; Langston 2005; Makdisi 2006; Masoud 2008; Usenmez 2007). Another area of inquiry is the relationship between Islamism and democratization posed as the question, Is the entry of Islamist movements into politics a barrier to democratization, a product of it, or a potential impetus to the growth of democratic politics (Abdel Fattah 2004; Lahlou 2005; Mady 2005; Mousa 2005; Tezcur 2005)? Such studies can be a useful corrective to those who argue that Islamism (often conflated with Islam) is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. However, an unstated but nonetheless implicit assumption of such studies (even those arguing that Islamist movements can operate peacefully in the democratic process) is that Islam is ontologically more problematic for pluralism than secularism, despite the history of violence, exclusion, and authoritarianism that characterizes secular regimes in the region. The formation and dynamics of ethnic and, to a lesser extent, national identities is also a popular topic in the surveyed political science dissertations, although interest in ethnic movements and identities seems to have waned after 2005 (Behar 2001; Celik 2002; Dehzani 2008; Erdem 2006; Gokcek 2004; Haklai 2004; Hovsepian 2004; Kassem 2005; Lowrance 2004; Nanes

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2003; O Murchu 2000; Otucu 2004; Ozdemir 2000; Romano 2002; Watts 2001; Zack 2001). Like studies of Islamist movements, dissertations on ethnic politics reflect the influence of social movement analysis with an emphasis on modes of activism, strategy, and mobilization as critical elements in the formation of ethnic identities (Celik 2002; Romano 2002; Watts 2001; Zack 2001). Other works examine the role of state policies and institutions in the inculcation of identities (Corstange 2008; Haklai 2004; Hovsepian 2004; Kassem 2005; Nanes 2003). Worthy of note is the prevalence of works on the Kurds and on ethnic minorities in Israel. More dissertations in political science use comparative approaches to research than in any other discipline surveyed for this report—not surprising, given that comparative politics is a relatively well established subfield within the discipline. Its underlying aim is to discern patterns of political behavior and phenomena generalizable across different geographic and political contexts or to explain deviations from an explicit or implicit ideal typology (Aidi 2003; Al-Mekaimi 2003; Alsudairy 2000; Ben-Porat 2002; Campbell 2009; Corstange 2008; Gokcek 2004; Hull 2001; Kuru 2006; Park 2000; Salem 2001; Shankar 2002; Shungur 2006; Toronto 2007). Some of this work is quite nuanced, providing an analysis of historical and contextual specificities. However, quantitative comparative work—based on large-N studies and statistical analysis—tends to subordinate local context to the task of discerning wider patterns that transcend regional particularities (Abdel Fattah 2004; Hughes 2008; Strakes 2008; Tiruneh 2001). In contrast to comparative studies are works on globalization, which engage with the ways in which transnational forces translate in local contexts (Altan 2006; Amar 2003; Caliskan 2005; Hendrick 2009; Hussin 2008; Lieberman 2006; Medani 2003; Wolfe 2000). Unlike comparative work, in which methodologies are often quantitative, the methodological tools used here are qualitative, employing fieldwork and ethnography rather than statistics and data sets, and they tend to work as a corrective to narratives and assumptions of universalism, allowing for a consideration of wider patterns and attention to local specificities. However, the number of studies employing such an approach remains relatively low in the corpus of political science dissertations. Finally, I would like to mention briefly studies on women, gender, and politics. According to Sue Tolleson-Rinehart and Susan J. Carroll (2006), studies on women and gender overall have grown in number and have become

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increasingly institutionalized. Nonetheless, research on women and gender in politics remains relatively marginal. Only seven out of the 128 surveyed dissertations on the Middle East awarded in political science departments have women and gender as a central theme (Bodur 2005; Habasch 2000; Halfon 2000; Kavakci 2007; Simmons Levin 2003; Stachowski 2005; Warrick 2002). This relatively low number is likely a reflection of the subject’s overall marginality in the discipline. However, it is also likely that the study of women and gender in the Middle East suffers from being a subfield of a subfield—an issue that I discuss in the section on history. Issues of identity construction, so prevalent in studies of women and gender in history and anthropology, are largely absent from this literature, which focuses more on the role of nongovernmental organizations in the promotion of women’s rights and empowerment (Habasch 2000; Halfon 2000; Stachowski 2005), the political dynamics of feminist movements (Simmons Levin 2003), and women’s participation in the labor market (Nachtwey 2001). Only two dissertations— one on the relationship of discourses of gender and political legitimacy in Jordan (Warrick 2002) and another on challenges to the gendered underpinnings of Kemalism and visions of democratization in Turkey (Bodur 2005)— employ gender as a central category of analysis. This suggests that the turn to the study of gender (as opposed to women) has yet to make inroads in political science as has occurred in history and anthropology. With some notable exceptions (Hourani 2005; Kalem 2010; Lawrence 2004; Ozdemir 2000; Schwedler 2000; Shehata 2000), one category of analysis comparatively absent from political science dissertations is culture, defined here as symbols inscribed in practices to produce observable political effects (Wedeen 2002). Political science methodologies, with their focus on political strategies, state institutions, patterns of mobilization, and the interests of elites and other state and nonstate actors, have the benefit of suggesting what aspects of politics in the Middle East may be generalizable and comparable to those in other places, but they have been less adept at suggesting what is specific about “Islam,” “Kurdishness,” “Arabness,” and so on, as systems of meaning and identity as well as bases for collective action.

Economics Comparatively marginal in the discipline of economics and few in number in area studies, dissertations on the Middle East coming out of economics

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departments from 2000 to 2010 constitute a relatively small percentage of the overall number of dissertations on the region.8 And more than any other field, the production of economic knowledge about the Middle East has been overtly shaped by the Washington Consensus and neoliberal economic agendas. The majority of economics dissertations are concerned, broadly, with economic development conceptualized as the study of “emerging markets”— shorthand for the constellations of reforms, programs, and practices that mirror the priorities of the IMF, the World Bank, and affiliated agencies. Some of the central themes that emerge from this body of works are reform of banking and finance to remove barriers to finance (Ahmad 2000; Al-Nassar 2000; Al-Tammam 2005; Ismail 2009; K. Smith 2006), the establishment of stock markets (Abou-Zaid 2008; Abumustafa 2002; Alsalman 2002; Alsuhaibani 2004; Saleh 2008; Wei 2000), rationalizing and removing regulatory impediments to international trade and capital flows (Abdelbaky 2006; Abou Hamia 2007; Al Hinai 2004; Al-Hadiah 2004; Al-Mashaikhi 2000; Al-Shammari 2007; Almounsor 2007; Boumaza 2004; El-Said 2005), promoting labor productivity (Abu-Ghaida 2000), and the effects of privatization and structural adjustment in various countries (Al-Otaibi 2006; Attia 2001; Elbeshbishi 2000). The oil and petroleum industries constitute another prominent theme (Al-Abdulkarim 2004; Al-Hassoon 2005; Al-Nefaee 2005; Al-Salem 2005; Aljebrin 2006; Alkhuzaim 2005; Alomar 2003; Yang 2004). Research here ranges in scope from studies of the behavior of rentier economies and their essential differences from other types of economies (Alomar 2003; Aljebrin 2006) to studies of the economic behavior of OPEC and its influence on the global economy (Yang 2004). The prevalence of studies on the Gulf countries is high compared to other disciplines, as is the relatively high percentage of doctoral graduates with Arab- or Turkish-sounding names writing about the region.9 Both of these factors constitute an interesting contrast to work in other fields, particularly in the humanities. In her chapter in this volume, Karen Pfeifer writes that as of the early 2000s there have been signs of a growing and productive dialogue between MES and economics, exemplified by scholarship that challenges the formalistic assumptions of neoliberal discourses on development and advocates for studies that both critique such assumptions and engage with local and regional variation. There is some evidence that such challenges are beginning

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to shape research conclusions among a new generation of Middle East economists. In a 2009 study on the growth of private equity and venture capital in Egyptian firms, for example, Ayman Ismail notes that this growth is not attributable primarily to the adoption of global “best practices” but to firms’ willingness to tailor their practices and business models to local needs. Wafa Fahmi Abdelati’s 2004 dissertation on industry productivity in Egypt from the 1960s to the 1980s argues that structural adjustment policies have had little to no effect on industry productivity and that age and size of the firm are better determinants of outcomes. In a study of Islamic banking in Kuwait— one of the rare dissertations that deal centrally with Islam—Kristin Smith (2006) argues that the liberalization of Gulf economies may actually hasten the Islamization of Gulf societies. Nonetheless, such a trend remains nascent, and heralding the beginning of a possible paradigm shift, which may bring MES and economics into a more productive dialogue, may be premature.

Anthropology In her 1989 article, “Zones of Theory in the Arab World,” which surveys the theoretical and methodological scope of the field of Middle East anthropology, Lila Abu-Lughod identifies the central preoccupation of Middle East anthropologists as “tribes, gender, and Islam.” A survey of anthropology dissertations from 2000 to 2010 reveals both some striking transformations in the scope of anthropological knowledge about the region and some instructive continuities. While work on tribes (Akers 2001; Joseph 2002) has almost disappeared from the list of topics, work on gender and Islam (and usually the two together) continues to be well represented and, in fact, has come to define the specificities of Middle East anthropology (Deeb and Winegar 2012).10 In general, gender as a category of analysis is more mainstream in anthropology than in other disciplines. It is, for example, one of the axes of difference in studies on migration and diaspora populations (Alaoui 2009; Deubel 2010; King 2000; Tetreault 2004; Vora 2008), ethnomusicology (Jackson 2008), memory and place (Pandey 2010), tourism (Wynn 2003), and public health (Allen 2002), among others. At the same time, however, the anthropology of gender, including studies of masculinity (Conway-Long 2000; Lang 2000), is a well-developed field in its own right. It encompasses studies ranging from more traditional topics that have pride of place in symbolic and structuralist approaches, such as women’s linguistic expression (Ciucci

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2008; Malik 2003) or women’s participation in various social and/or religious rituals (Eltahir 2003; Kelly Spurles 2004), to studies that suggest a more recent turn in the discipline to poststructuralism and approaches inspired by Foucauldian philosophy. Such studies focus on identity, subject formation, agency, and questions of how gender is inflected within various intersecting structures, domains, and registers of power, be they local, national, or transnational (Adely 2007; Altinay 2001; Ciucci 2008; Conway-Long 2000; Crivello 2003; Deeb 2003; Elyas 2005; Hafez 2007; Hart 2005; Isik 2007; Kelly Spurles 2004; Lang 2000; Limbert 2002; Malik 2003; Newcomb 2004; O’Rourke 2006; Pearl 2006; Petzen 2008; Potuoglu-Cook 2008; Raanan 2009; Sa’ar 2000; Shively 2002; Young 2005; Zaatari 2003). One striking characteristic of this body of work is that it tends to focus on Muslim women, even in cases where Islam is not an explicit theme of analysis—a characteristic it shares with studies on women and gender in other disciplines. Moreover, recent burgeoning literature in the anthropology of Islam in the Middle East (Agrama 2005; Deeb 2003; Doerre 2004; Eltahir 2003; Hamdy 2006; Henkel 2004; Herrera 2000; Hirschkind 2000; Pearl 2006) has also resulted in the emergence of research situated at the intersection of anthropology of gender and anthropology of Islam (Adely 2007; Hafez 2007; Hart 2005; Pearl 2006; Shively 2002). Unlike previous studies of Muslim women, more recent research eschews a focus on religious ritual (most often among rural or working-class urban women) for an approach influenced by the work of Talal Asad that views Islam as a “discursive tradition.” Attention to issues of piety, agency, and the formation of ethical selves has led to a focus on the religiosity of urban middle-class women, which is a useful corrective to older studies but also risks marginalizing the experiences of rural working-class women. As in history, anthropology of the nation, nationalism, and national identity is prevalent (109 of 153 dissertations mention the term “nation” or “nationalism” in their abstracts). Some directly explore hegemonic nationalist narratives from the perspective of elites or majority communities (Altinay 2001; Libal 2001; Mills 2005; Rousso-Schindler 2007; Shively 2002). Other approaches unpack the various meanings of nation, homeland, citizenship, and identity through ethnographies of ethnic minority populations who are often positioned in uneasy, ambivalent ways within national projects (Ahmetbeyzade 2004; Boum 2006; Brenneman 2006; Brink-Danan 2005; Clarkin 2005; Fernando 2006; Hood 2002; King 2000; King-Irani 2003; Kosansky 2003; Oram 2004; Parla 2005; E. Smith 2006). Still other anthropological

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work has investigated constructs of the nation and national identity from the vantage point of heritage preservation (de Cesari 2009; Fenichel 2005; Goldstein 2003) and memory (Boum 2006; Davis 2002; Na’amneh 2005). While studies that either directly explore or presume the nation as a foundational construct are still relatively dominant, more recently (following trends in the anthropology of the state) Middle East anthropologists have also begun to produce ethnographies of state power (Baroni 2007; Talebi 2007; Turkoz 2004; Vora 2008). Moreover, work on the transnational movement and circulation of people, ideas, and commodities (including work on refugee and diaspora populations) is, proportionally, better represented than in other disciplines, providing something of a counterweight to nationally framed studies (Al-Sharmani 2005; Alaoui 2009; Balasescu 2004; Budiani 2005; Chiba 2001; Clarkin 2005; Curtis 2007; Daughtry 2005; Fernando 2006; Gabiam 2008; Hanoosh 2008; Ho 2000; Karam 2004; Karnes 2009; Latif 2010; Leichtman 2006; Levine 2007; Pastor de Maria y Campos 2009; Tetreault 2004; Yukleyen 2007). A large number of dissertations point Middle East anthropology in new directions by exploring different topics. The most prominent of these are studies on sexuality (Mahdavi 2006; Merabet 2009; Petzen 2008), biomedicine and the body (Allen 2002; Coker 2001; Cousins 2000; Dole 2002; Kangas 2002; Loeffler 2001; Sanal 2005; Terzioglu 2008), the anthropology of art (Scheid 2005; Winegar 2003), performance (Pahwa 2007; Shannon 2001), youth (Algan 2003; Collins 2000; Volk 2001), tourism (Kelly Spurles 2004; Schmid 2007; Wynn 2003), and human rights (Allen 2005; Karnes 2009; Young 2005). The locations of ethnographic research have also shifted—from rural Morocco and North Yemen (identified by Abu-Lughod in 1989 as prestige zones for anthropologists) to Egypt, Lebanon, and, more recently, Palestine. The increasing importance of Egypt and Lebanon is due to some degree to the relative ease of doing fieldwork there but may derive more from the overwhelming shift to urban-based studies, typical of the anthropological work produced in the decade 2000–2010. Studies of rural populations (and attention to topics such as tribalism, kinship, folklore, and ritual) have all but disappeared from anthropology, marking a fundamental shift in ethnographic knowledge on the region (Deeb and Winegar 2012). Understudied Arab countries include Algeria, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman.

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History According to Juan Cole’s (n.d.) survey of monographs written on the Middle East from 1980 to 2002, social history is a dominating force, and the “cultural turn” seems to have had little effect: “Unlike in mainstream US Historiography, where social history was challenged from the 1980s or so by the linguistic turn and the new cultural history, the latter two made little headway at the Middle East Studies Association. For better or worse, postmodernism and the new cultural history have had relatively little influence.” I would argue that for most of the younger generation of Middle East historians, this is not the case. While social history methodologies have produced some excellent and innovative histories (Ergut 2000; Chalcraft 2001; Ergene 2001; Gutelius 2001; Matthews 2001; Joseph 2005; Deal 2006; DeGeorges 2006; Khalek 2006), as well as some more traditional ones that deal primarily with social and economic change during various eras of the Ottoman Empire (Tabak 2000; Toksoz 2000; Schad 2001; Zens 2004; Birdal 2006; Mirkova 2006), many of the dissertations surveyed bear the implicit or explicit imprint of the theoretical and epistemological concerns of poststructuralism, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies. In fact, the number of dissertations written in the later years of this survey and focusing primarily or solely on questions of concern to social historians has declined dramatically. Instead, questions about marginality, hybridity, difference, subject formation, the technologies of governance, and, perhaps most prominently, the construction of identities, which have been a central preoccupation of poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists, provide the foundation for many of the dissertations. Moreover, the increasingly common use of literature, autobiography, mass media, and popular culture as sources for historical research (as well as the use of conventional sources read in new ways) suggests that this new generation of scholars is more willing (and perhaps more able) to draw from the methodological tool box of other disciplines than its predecessors. In order to elucidate some of the trends in historical scholarship on the Middle East mentioned above, this section provides an overview of how this new generation of historians has addressed the subjects of nations and nationalisms, gender and women’s history, religious and ethnic identities, the local and the transnational, and colonialism.

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Nations and Nationalisms In the two decades since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s now canonical work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, the nation, as a locus of identity and a framework for political, social, cultural, and economic processes, has become a primary preoccupation for modern Middle East historians (Afkhami 2003; Aksit 2004; Bass 2005; Bier 2006; Bracy 2005; Cagaptay-Arikan 2007; Durukan 2007; Eissenstat 2007; Fahmy 2007; Gasper 2004; Jacob 2005; Katz 2001; Kenan 2000; Khalili 2005; Khan 2006; Marashi 2003; Martin 2005; Morrison 2009; Panev 2000; Reeves-Ellington 2001; Rostam-Kolayi 2000; Salhi 2006; Sbaiti 2008; Spiegel 2001; Taspinar 2002; Velcamp 2001; Wyrtzen 2009; Yaghoubian 2000). The scholarship produced by Middle East historians in the period 2000– 2010 bears the imprint of Anderson’s general insights on the constructed and historically contingent nature of nations, national identities, and national communities but has moved beyond it in terms of both methodologies and conceptualizations of the nation itself (work of this nature, which is to found in recent studies of women and gender and ethnic minorities, is discussed in subsequent sections). Work that conceptualizes the nation solely or primarily as an act of political imagining located in the textual productions of secular elites (Bracy 2005; Salhi 2006) has largely been replaced. Recent scholarship ranges from attention to the role of nation-state policies, reforms, and institutions in the formation of national identities (Cagaptay 2003; Childress 2001; Marashi 2003; Yilmaz 2006; Zorlu-Durukan 2006)11 to how visions of nation and community are created and contested in historiography (Kenan 2000), urban space (Katz 2001), and the discourses and practices of consumption (Reynolds 2003; Seikaly 2007). Dissertations that foreground the role of ritual, ceremony, and performance in representing and reinterpreting the nation and the national past are interesting examples of work that attempts to go beyond analysis of discourses, laws, and institutions. Two examples could be mentioned here: one explores practices and rituals of commemoration among stateless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (Khalili 2005) and another, the physical culture of Jewish festivals and competitions in Mandatory Palestine (Spiegel 2001). While they provide new theoretical and methodological insights, dissertations on the construction of the nation and national identities also tend to reproduce some of the common elisions in the study of the nation. One constant characteristic of such work is that it tends to examine the construction

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of nationalism from the perspective of political and cultural elites. While such an approach has the advantage of making clear the ways in which definitions of the nation and citizenship entail the exclusion of particular groups, practices, and histories and the ways in which they are thus fundamentally implicated in creating and maintaining relations of power, the targets of such policies and discourses (i.e., the nonelites) are often relegated to the role of passive recipients. Insights from anthropology, particularly work on memory and commemoration, may be useful here as a way to transcend elite discourses and state institutions and to explore the ways in which ordinary people negotiate and contribute to the process of “imagining” the nation in everyday life. Gender and Women’s History Since 1985, the year of the founding of the Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS), work on the history of Middle Eastern women has been growing in status and has become a recognized and accepted subfield within the history of the region. Initially, most of the work in this area was situated within the framework of women’s history, aimed at recovering the voices and experiences of women and adding them to historical narratives that, for the most part, had already been established. Beginning in the mid1990s, however, a new generation of historians attempted (with greater and lesser success) to move beyond women’s history paradigms and look at how the notion of gender difference itself has been articulated, deployed, negotiated, and contested in various political and social projects and legal and institutional regimes at particular historical moments. Such studies understand gender not as immutable and fixed but as constructed, constitutive of (and constituted by) other sorts of power relations. The dissertations surveyed here are products of this shift in focus, even as they reproduce many of the omissions of these earlier works. Moreover, the number of dissertations in the category of women and gender history has been steady (from nineteen in the period between 1990– 99 to twenty in the period under review), without making many gains, suggesting that the establishment of women and gender in Middle Eastern history as a field of study continues to face challenges (for an overview of the gains and challenges, see Sharoni 1997). This may reflect the marginalized status of the history of Middle Eastern women in history departments as a subspecialty of a subspecialty, or it may reflect, paradoxically, an increasing “mainstreaming” of gender as a category of analysis: that is, more and younger scholars are addressing Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East 267

issues of gender in research where women and gender are not the primary object of study (Amster 2003; Armanios 2003; Brodsky 2004; Ekmekcioglu 2010; Gasper 2004; Gualtieri 2000; Marashi 2003; Sbaiti 2008; Scalenghe 2006; Scheiwiller 2009; Schull 2007; Spiegel 2001; Stanton 2007; Trumbull 2005; Woodall 2008; Yilmaz 2006). The overview of dissertations indicates that gender history has largely overtaken work in women’s history, although social histories of women’s labor are represented (Abisaab 2001; Weber 2003; Karakisla 2004), as is history of feminism in the Middle East, although in a single dissertation (Weber 2003) and a history of Iranian immigrant women’s activism in Los Angeles (Kia 2008). As with other, earlier works, in these recent dissertations on gender the nation tends to be predominantly in focus, whether as a site for the construction and articulation of gendered identities (Rostam-Kolayi 2000; Reeves-Ellington 2001; Aksit 2004), as a category constituted by normative definitions of gender difference and the appropriate relations between men and women (Bier 2006; Lopez 2004), or as the emerging framework for institutions and practices that attempt to regulate ideals of masculinity, femininity, and gendered respectability (Kozma 2006). Another field of concern for Middle East gender historians is colonialism. These works attempt to use gendered analysis to move beyond the binary categories of East and West, colonizer and colonized, characteristic of some scholarship on colonialism, and to focus instead on the complicated relations between European and indigenous populations on the ground (Othman 2009; Ross-Nazzal 2001; Ruiz 2004; Stockdale 2000). Others investigate the ways in which colonial epistemologies, practices, and gender categories have been translated by colonized elites and eventually proved foundational to the constitution of gendered national subjects and anticolonial politics (Abugideiri 2001; Jacob 2005). Despite the inroads that gender (as opposed to women’s history) has made, certain lacunae remain. Perhaps the most significant is the persistent conceptual slippage between “gender” and “women.” In our survey, only one history dissertation deals centrally with the construction of masculine identity (Jacob 2005), although several others attempt to give equal focus to the construction of both masculinity and femininity (Lopez 2004; Ruiz 2004). Other gaps in the literature concern periodization and geographic coverage. The vast majority of dissertations on gender focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of the history dissertations surveyed, only three deal

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with gender in the pre-1800 period (Scalenghe 2006; Semerdjian 2002; Tug 2009). Moreover, work in gender history is heavily dominated by studies on Egypt, followed by Turkey, Iran, and, to a lesser extent, the Levant. Histories of women and gender in the Gulf countries and Iraq have yet to be written. Religious and Ethnic Identities The works on religious and ethnic identity in the Middle East reproduce some of the patterns described above. The majority address questions in the construction of identity among ethnic and religious minorities. That is not surprising, given that the nation remains a prevalent framework for Middle Eastern history. The presence of ethnic and religious minorities is problematic for nation-states and profoundly destabilizing to ideas of a primordial national identity that exists outside of time and place. Moreover, such works challenge the simplistic but dismayingly persistent assertions of timeless ethnic and religious hatreds and conflicts. Some of the dissertations in this category focus on the construction of ethnic and sectarian identities in the context of nation-state nationalisms (Amanat 2006; Haiduc-Dale 2010; Robson 2009; Weiss 2007; Yaghoubian 2000) or the emergence of national identities among minority populations under Ottoman rule (Gokcek 2008; Panev 2000; Shlala 2009). Two dissertations offer a departure from this direction by tracing the origins of sectarian conflict and identity in the late Ottoman Empire (Campos 2003; Evered 2005), discussing Ottoman notions of citizenship and civic pluralism rather than the emergence of individual nationalisms. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this work is the argument that for residents of a multiethnic, multireligious, multilinguistic empire there was nothing inevitable about the emergence of ethnic, sectarian identities and national identities; the coexistence of local, regional, and imperial identities in the late nineteenth century was suggestive of other possible futures. This is a needed addition to historical work on the emergence of nationalism in the region in which the nation, in spite of scholars’ attempts to deconstruct it as a category, can often seem the inevitable end point to the historical processes of modernity. Worth noting is the comparatively sizable number—five— of dissertations about the Jewish community in Algeria under French colonial rule. This may be explained in part by the fact that Jewishness represents a liminal and problematic category for both French and Algerian national identities. Four of these dissertations focus specifically on issues of nationalism, national Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East 269

identity, and affiliation (Shurkin 2000; Sussman 2002; Younsi 2003; Godley 2006); the fifth examines French attempts to “civilize” both its metropolitan and colonial Jewish populations and suggests that colonial civilizing missions were not limited to colonized populations but extended to religious and ethnic minorities within the metropole (Schreier 2003). As with gender, little has been written on the construction of religious and ethnic identities prior to the nineteenth century. In the case of ethnicity this is not surprising: notions of ethnic identity and belonging and their politicization are a relatively recent phenomenon, and scholarship on the nation has largely delegitimized studies that posit ethnic and national identities as stretching back hundreds of years and as being complicit in the political claims of nationalism itself. There is a small body of research on the construction of religious, primarily Christian, identities (Armanios 2003; Jones 2004; MacEvitt 2002; Werthmuller 2007), including one on the Ottoman Balkans, which deals with identity in the context of conversion from Christianity to Islam (Krstic 2004). Surveying the work produced by younger scholars suggests that studies on religious identity remain, as in earlier scholarship, dominated by a focus on religious minorities. Scholarship on the history of Islam produced in history departments tends to privilege work on great Muslim thinkers, leaders, or canonical texts (Bryson 2000; Cory 2002; Yucesoy 2002; Mourad 2004; Fancy 2006; Wright 2006), the articulation of laws and legal systems (Khalafallah 2000; Lahmuddin 2004; Joseph 2005), or Sufi groups (Bernikho-Canin 2004; Curry 2005; Gutelius 2001). Within Islamic history, the construction of notions of religious belonging and affiliation remains largely unexplored. This suggests that in the case of both religious and ethnic identity, scholarship continues to accord (whether explicitly or implicitly) normative status to majoritarian religious and ethnic groups. In addition to the paucity of works on Muslim identity, there was not a single dissertation on the construction of “Arabness,” whether as the foundation of a transnational movement (Pan-Arabism) or as a constituent part of other kinds of identities. Moreover, the development of the very categories “majority” and “minority” has yet to be analyzed historically. Beyond the Nation and the Imperial Center: The Local and the Transnational Perhaps in part because of the continued interest in the nation-state and histories of regional empires, which have traditionally focused on imperial 270 Laura Bier

administration, politics, and governance, there has been a marked tendency in Middle East historiography to view “the center” as a representative of one whole and to treat nations and empires as bounded entities. One of the most encouraging developments over the decade 2000–2010 is the number of dissertations that deal with the transnational (and/or transimperial) flow of ideas (Arai 2004; El-Shakry 2002; Khan 2006; Manela 2003; Robinson 2006; Rothman 2006; Rouighi 2005; Weber 2003) and people (Arai 2004; Aslanian 2007; Ghazal 2005; Kooshian 2002; Mirzai 2004; Sood 2008; Trivellato 2004). In fact, in recent years such studies seem, if not poised to displace the nation from its epistemological pride of place in history writing, to at least challenge its hegemony, a trend also evident in the discipline of history as a whole. Several of these studies deal with Middle East immigrant and diaspora populations and the development of distinctive immigrant identities (Velcamp 2001; Brodsky 2004; Karam 2004; Martos 2007; Kia 2008) but tend to position them in the national context of their countries of residence. However, two of the dissertations (Gualtieri 2000; Logrono Narbona 2007) make the argument that transnational processes of migration (and the influence of diaspora communities) must be accounted for in discussions of how nationhood is defined and contested in the country of origin. Another challenge to center-dominated accounts of imperial rule is the growing body of research that examines the workings of empire from the perspective of its frontiers, in ways that work to displace the very notion of periphery. Informed by the recent insights of frontier studies in the United States, these dissertations analyze border regions as sites where global, regional, and local histories intersect (Ates 2006; Blumi 2005; Kuhn 2005; Meyer 2007; Racine 2003). Others examine how local and regional identities interact in complicated ways with broader notions of affiliation and belonging (Antrim 2005; Gingeras 2006; Hanley 2007; Minkin 2009). The influence of such work, increasingly felt in Ottoman studies, has just begun to translate into changes in how nation-states are studied and analyzed, and it represents a potentially fruitful source of inspiration for future studies. Colonialism One of the most significant areas of study emerging from the work of a new generation of scholars is colonialism (Abi-Mershed 2002; Abugideiri 2001; Alghailani 2002; Amster 2003; Barakat 2007; Blecher 2002; Brower 2005; Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East 271

El-Shakry 2002; Fakher Eldin 2008; Hale 2005; Hanifi 2001; Hill 2006; Jacob 2005; Keller 2001; Maghraoui 2000; Mokhiber 2002; Nickels 2007; Onyedum 2010; Power 2007; Roberts 2010; Robinson 2005; Schad 2001; Schreier 2003; Segalla 2003; Seikaly 2007; Stanton 2007; Stebbins 2009; Stockdale 2000; Trumbull 2005). Much of this work displays the influence of postcolonial studies, in particular, its interest in the epistemologies, institutions, and technologies of colonial rule; its attempt to deconstruct the binary oppositions between tradition and modernity; as well as its interrogation of the complicated legacies of colonial rule for postcolonial states and societies. Areas of interest (not including those already touched on in other sections of this chapter) include colonialism and education (Abi-Mershed 2002; Sbaiti 2008; Sedra 2006; Segalla 2003), colonial medicine (Abugideiri 2001; Amster 2003; Blecher 2002; Keller 2001; Onyedum 2010), and the production of colonial knowledge (El-Shakry 2002; Trumbull 2005). In general, one can observe that over this decade Middle East historians, regardless of their subspecialties or particular foci of analysis, are reading old evidence in new ways: autobiography and the political press (used in political history to help reconstruct events) are now read against the grain as a way to understand constructions of identity. Focus on social meanings of various categories for different groups of actors, rather than a limited scope of social and political processes, suggests influence from anthropology. Court records, used as a source for social history, are now examined for issues of gender and sexual morality. In spite of these developments, significant gaps in historical writing about the region remain, the most glaring of which are geographic. Histories of the Gulf countries, largely treated in the context of foreign policy history (AlMadkhli 2007; Galpern 2002; Nadaner 2002; Nardulli 2002), are only now becoming the subject of other kinds of histories, particularly those treating issues of state building, modernization, and governmentality (Jones 2006; Parker 2008). North Africa (with the exception of work on colonialism) also remains significantly understudied, as does the Sudan. In both cases (but specifically North Africa) this is the result of the peculiar politics of disciplinary boundaries: only occasionally claimed by MES, North Africa also exists on the margins of African studies, which tend to define their object of analysis as sub-Saharan Africa. The artificiality of such divisions is further highlighted by the concurrent overrepresentation of studies on Egypt, whose history as a

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regional political and cultural hegemon grounds it firmly within the purview of Middle East area studies. Remedying the gaps in the literature, therefore, will necessitate not only acts of inclusion but also, perhaps more important, unpacking of the divisions that operate within area studies in view of exploring what alternative histories and geographies have been left out in the drawing and maintaining of such boundaries. Finally, it should be pointed out that there are only two dissertations on Iraq (Bashkin 2005; Romero 2008), which is unsurprising given the extremely limited access that foreign researchers have had to historical archives in Iraq since the 1980s—first because of the repressive and authoritarian regime of Sadam Hussein and, more recently, because of the violence and instability caused by the 2003 US invasion and occupation. Given the reported damage to archives in Iraq, historians are confined to consulting documents preserved in collections outside of the country, or they will have to redefine what constitutes “an archive” for historical research—an approach that may yield methodologically significant results with the potential to set the agenda for new approaches to Middle East history in the coming decade.

Area Studies Departments Area studies is the second largest category in the study. The exact titles and scope of Middle East area studies departments vary—Islamic Studies (University of California, Los Angeles, and McGill), Middle Eastern Studies (University of Texas), Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (Harvard, University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Washington, University of Pennsylvania), Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (New York University), Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (Columbia), Near Eastern Studies (Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Arizona)— although much of the work produced in these departments focuses on the areas that fall within the geographic boundaries of the contemporary Middle East. Area studies departments are often categorized as interdisciplinary to distinguish them from more mainstream disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. While these departments produce work that ranges from history to literature to religious studies, this work, for the most part, is not itself interdisciplinary. It would perhaps be better to describe Middle East and Islamic studies departments as multidisciplinary.

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Given the sheer scope of work in area studies, it is impossible to give a thorough account of all or even the majority of it here. For the sake of expediency, I will make a few broad generalizations and then chronicle research in three overlapping areas: the study of Islam, the social history of Muslim and non-Muslim communities, and work on women and gender. Although the number of studies on the nation and constructions of nationalisms is sizable within the corpus of works on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (BenBassat 2007; Brockett 2003; Chalabi 2003; Davaran 2005; Di-Capua 2004; EzzelArab 2000; Fishman 2007; Goknar 2004; Halabi 2007; Jayyusi-Lehn 2007; Kaufman 2000; McLarney 2004; Methodieva 2010; Nassar 2006; Radulescu 2002; Salmoni 2002; Semmerling 2000; M. Smith 2006; Stone 2002; Wilson 2006; Yosmaoglu-Turner 2005), they tend to reproduce many of the strengths (and shortcomings) of work already discussed in other sections and are thus not addressed again here. Even though work on the contemporary period is well covered in area studies dissertations, historical studies dominate, particularly those on periods prior to the nineteenth century. This is partly what distinguishes recent area studies research from that produced in mainstream history departments, not to mention anthropology and politics, where historical studies remain in the minority. Geographic coverage overlaps with the trends noted in other disciplines but with a proportionally higher number of works on what could be referred to as the early Islamic heartland: the Arabian peninsula and the region of today’s Iraq and Syria. This may be explained by the predominance of research on early Islam in area studies departments. It is also undoubtedly a consequence of the availability of sources for research on early Islamic history outside of the region. Obtaining permission to do archival or field research on modern or contemporary topics can be challenging in Syria and even more so in Saudi Arabia, as it was in Iraq prior to the American occupation (let alone after it). Sources for the modern or contemporary histories of these countries may be available, but ultimately they are limited to holdings in colonial- or Ottoman-themed archives in European countries. With the significant number of canonical texts, chronicles, and manuscripts available in US and European libraries, scholars of early and medieval Islam have a comparative advantage in this regard.

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History of Islam The history of religion, and the history of Islam in particular, is a significantly better represented category. It is here that interdisciplinary methodologies appear most uneven. Despite the rich theoretical and methodological work on Islam produced in the past two decades and which argues for the need to go beyond considerations of Islam’s textual and intellectual heritage, this work appears to have had limited impact on studies of religion in area studies departments in the period 2003–2010 (Ahmad 2005; Ajhar 2001; AlTikriti 2004; Ali 2005; Ali 2004; Alshech 2004; Anthony 2009; Dakake 2000; Davis 2005; de Gifis 2010; El-Omari 2006; Emon 2005; Garden 2005; GhaneaBassiri 2003; Gunaydin 2006; Heck 2000; Hilloowala 2000; Hollenberg 2006; Hussain 2001; Ibrahim 2003; Massoud 2005; Mavani 2005; Medoff 2007; Musa 2004; Neale 2007; Papan-Matin 2003; Parsa 2000; Pomerantz 2010; Riedel 2004; Sadeghi 2006; Sahin 2001; Sands 2000; Seyhun 2002; Seymore 2001; Shahin 2009; Stearns 2007; Tayyara 2005; Terkan 2004; Wahyudi 2002; Williams 2007). While much of this work is attentive to situating texts (and their authors) in the intellectual and political context in which they were produced, their methods of textual analysis appear largely uncritical of the texts themselves and of the ways in which they discursively stake claims to truth and authority. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions (Anthony 2009; Brown 2006; Campbell 2003; Ford 2000; Jayyusi-Lehn 2007; Sajdi 2002), the role of texts in actively constructing particular visions of history, community, and orthodoxy (as opposed to passively reflecting them) largely goes unanalyzed, suggesting that “the literary turn,” with its emphasis on critical textual analysis, has made limited inroads in this part of area studies, which (after literary studies) is most focused on textual analysis. On the other side of the spectrum, studies that situate disputes over orthodoxy and doctrine within the social and political struggles of elites (Omar 2001; Turner 2001) largely reduce religion to a function of politics, an approach prevalent in political science, as discussed previously. In comparison to works discussing Islam’s textual tradition, the number of works that examine issues of piety, faith as embedded in the material culture and practices of daily life, and notions of religious selfhood (a growing focus within anthropology) is slim (Rustomji 2003; Weber 2001). This suggests that there is an almost complete disconnect in area studies between the prevalent ethnographic method and the dominant approach to religion (interestingly, this disconnect is less evident in religious studies dissertations;

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see, e.g., Iskander 2001; Schroeder 2002; Reid 2005; el Hadidi 2006). Perhaps, then, the most significant gap in the treatment of Islam in area studies dissertations is analyses that link Islam, as an actively produced (as opposed to simply transmitted) discursive tradition, to the practices through which moral selves are formed. Histories of Muslim and Non-Muslim Communities Despite the preponderance of textually focused studies of Islam, dissertations attempting to shed light on the social and political worlds in which Muslims (and other religious communities) live are well represented. These include studies on how Islamic law is practiced and understood in particular social and historical contexts (Meshal 2007; Othman 2005; Stilt 2004), marriage, kinship, and family (Yazigi 2001; Rapoport 2002; Abouali 2004), the social and political dynamics of religious elites (Ahmed 2007; Bein 2006), and the social, religious, and political histories of Sufi orders (Bazzaz 2002; Niyazioglu 2003; Connell 2004; Ohlander 2004). In addition, a number of dissertations examine the social and political histories of religious minority communities (Ackerman-Lieberman 2007; Allen 2000; Ayalon 2009; Barakat 2007; Leal 2003; Osman 2001; Philliou 2004; Raj 2004; Rustow 2004; Simonsohn 2008; Sisman 2004; Wittman 2008). Such studies tend to analyze religious communities in isolation from one another. However, an emerging body of research seeks to bridge the gap between studies of Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Such is the cluster of dissertations on conversion (Minkov 2000; Baer 2001; Zaborowski 2003; el-Leithy 2005) that study the different registers on which conversion is experienced, negotiated, and represented by converts themselves and various religious communities. Another approach foregrounds the complex relations and interrelated histories of religious communities by redirecting focus from the communities themselves to the dynamics of particular locations—whether the dynamics of urban trade, space, and governance in a single city (Margariti 2002) or the incorporation of a particular region under Muslim rule in the first centuries of Islam (Mikhail 2004). Such studies are particularly important in view of the fact that social histories on religious topics often reproduce the assumption that “Muslim world” is synonymous with Muslims. On the other hand, while studies of Muslim minority communities are a useful corrective to this assumption, they also risk making these communities seem marginal, cut off from the history of the majority. Histories that take the 276 Laura Bier

interrelatedness of various communities as a foundational premise, as well as those that interrogate the nature of communal relations, would go a long way toward enriching our understanding of the social and political dynamics that shaped the early and medieval Islamic world. Women and Gender Women and gender in area studies have not yet been established as significant subjects for analysis. Not only is there a relatively low percentage of dissertations concerned with this theme, but the mainstreaming of gender as a category of analysis (discussed in the section on history) is almost nowhere in evidence here (exceptions are Goknar 2004; Stone 2002). The goals of women’s history—to recover women’s voices, contributions, and experiences and add them to the historical record—are reflected in these studies, which either deal with the literary and historical contributions of famous women (Sursal 2003; Kayaalp-Aktan 2005; Oehler-Stricklin 2005), highlighting the important roles of elite women in early Islamic history (Sayeed 2005), or chart how ordinary women experienced and negotiated social and legal institutions (Rapoport 2002). Gender as a category of analysis is utilized more often in literary studies foregrounding issues of identity, as opposed to focusing on individual women’s writings (Rowe 2000; Alsarhan 2003; Landress 2004). Gender as a component of identity is a characteristic that gender studies dissertations produced in area studies share with those in history (and, to a lesser extent, anthropology). In a departure from the theme of gender and identity formation, one dissertation employed a gendered analysis to interrogate forms of literary authority, conceptions of artistic mastery, and practices of criticism to chart the historical construction of a classical Arabic canon and women’s exclusion from it (Hammond 2003). Another, comparing various historical accounts of the life and death of a nineteenth-century female Moroccan Jewish saint, uses gender to interrogate modes of historical writing and truth-telling and the construction of literature and literary audiences (Vance 2005). Furthermore, two dissertations bring gender as an analytical category to bear on the study of Islam: one examines the role of gender in the constitution of notions of sanctity in an early twentieth-century collection of miracle stories by the Sunni writer Shaykh, and another uses gender as a lens through which to analyze the sources of tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis) and its historical development (Bauer 2008; Ford 2000). Both exemplify the possibilities and pitfalls Trends in the Production of Knowledge about the Middle East 277

of adopting gendered approaches to the study of religion. On the one hand, both understand notions of sanctity and pious authority not as transparent and self-evident but as actively constituted by relations of power. On the other hand, they reproduce the trend evident in area studies dissertations of treating Islam as a compendium of texts rather than as lived and practiced. In addition, the tendency noted in other disciplines to treat gender as a synonym for women is also evident here; only one of the dissertations uses masculinity as a focus of analysis (Loewen 2001), and studies on sexuality are almost entirely absent (with the exception of Kadish 2001).

Conclusion: Interdisciplinarity and the Market While the use of theoretical and methodological tools that transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries among a new generation of MES scholars is uneven, certain topics of study are beginning to have cross-disciplinary salience. Women and gender, Islam, ethnicity, the making of nations and national identities, and, increasingly, transnational processes are all areas of focus common to the disciplines surveyed for this chapter. Other common trends include a focus on identities and identity formation and the prevalence of the nation and the nation-state as the framework of analysis. Institutions like the Middle East Studies Association and the Association of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies exist to foster interdisciplinary conversations and scholarship, and to a certain extent they have been successful. By way of conclusion, however, I would like to suggest that in the future it may well be the structural transformations in academic publishing that will become the greatest impetus to interdisciplinarity in MES. With declining budgets and increasing competition from electronic forms of publishing, academic publishing is widely acknowledged to be experiencing a crisis. In such a climate, academic presses aim to publish books that can be marketed across disciplines and to multiple audiences. For example, Princeton University Press markets Lara Deeb’s 2006 book, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Islam, under the headings Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, Religion and Anthropology; and Lisa Hajjar’s 2005 work, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza, is included by University of California Press in the categories Law, Politics, Anthropology, Sociology, and Middle East Studies. Moreover, publishers’ marketing strategies are redefining what constitutes MES by listing,

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for example, studies on Islam in China (Stanford University Press), Middle Eastern diaspora populations (University of Texas, University of California, and University of Indiana Presses), and work on Central Asia (University of California and Duke University Presses) under the MES rubric. The pressure on academic publishers to produce monographs that appeal to audiences within and across multiple disciplines coupled with the pressure on young academics at most universities to publish a monograph as a precondition for tenure may well mean that the biggest incentive to interdisciplinary scholarship in MES in the future is the market.

Notes 1.

There are other crucial aspects of this question that lie beyond the purview of this chapter but that bear mentioning. These include the environment in which scholars, teachers, and students conduct their activities and the varied institutional architectures through which research and teaching on the Middle East are undertaken both within and outside the university. See Shami and Godoy-Anativia 2007, 346.

2.

This number includes seventeen dissertations awarded jointly by history and Middle East studies departments and two awarded jointly by history and anthropology departments.

3.

This number includes seventeen dissertations awarded jointly by history and MES departments and two awarded in MES and anthropology.

4.

Other disciplines with relatively few dissertations were business, geography, public policy, and demography.

5.

Jean-François Godin’s dissertation, which explores immigration and labor markets in Quebec, does not deal exclusively with Middle Eastern immigrants but looks at Arab and Maghrebi immigrant communities as case studies of a failure to be assimilated into the labor market in Montreal.

6.

Interestingly, de Jong’s is the only sociology dissertation in the period studied for this chapter that deals centrally with issues of sexuality.

7.

As Lisa Wedeen points out in this volume, underlying such an approach is often the implicit or explicit assumption that the Islamist parties working within the legal and political structures of the state are made up of and supported by “good Muslims,” whereas those who employ revolutionary or other sorts of strategies are “bad Muslims.” See also Chernov’s 2007 comparative study of Islamist movements in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey.

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8.

For an in-depth explanation for this relative lack, see Karen Pfeiffer’s chapter in

9.

Roughly fifty-eight out of sixty-seven.

10.

I would like to thank Laura Deeb and Jessica Winegar for sharing their article with

this volume.

me before its publication, and Jessica in particular for her many insightful observations about the state of Middle East anthropology in the post-9/11 period. 11.

These are heavily dominated by work on Turkey, perhaps a reflection of the overwhelming weight of the Kemalist legacy for contemporary Turkish politics, culture, and society.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1989. “Zones of Theory in the Anthropology of the Arab World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 267– 306. Cole, Juan. n.d. “Middle East Studies in a Recent Decade.” Unpublished report. Social Science Research Council, New York. Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deeb, Lara, and Jessica Winegar. 2012. “Anthropologies of Arab-Majority Societies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 4: 537–58. Hajjar, Lisa. 2005. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shami, Seteney, and Marcial Godoy-Anativia. 2007. “Did the Events of 9/11 Change the Field of Middle East Studies? Pensée 2: Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Middle East Studies in the Aftermath of 9/11.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3: 346–49. Sharoni, Simona. 1997. “Women and Gender in Middle East Studies: Trends, Prospects and Challenges.” Middle East Reports 205: 27–29. Tolleson-Rinehart, Sue, and Susan J. Carroll. 2006. “‘Far from Ideal’: The Gender Politics of Political Science.” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4: 507–13. Wedeen, Lisa. 2002. “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science.” American Political Science Review 96, no. 4: 713–28.

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Theses and Dissertations Used for This Study Abdel Fattah, Moataz Bellah Mohamed. 2004. “Islam and Democracy: An Empirical Examination of Muslims’ Political Culture.” PhD diss., Western Michigan University. Abdelati, Wafa Fahmi. 2004. “Productivity and Productive Efficiency of Manufacturing Firms in Egypt, 1966–1986.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Abdelbaky, Mahmoud. 2006. “Exchange Rate Regimes in Middle East and North Africa (MENA): A Markov Switching Model Approach.” PhD diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Abdelwahid, Mustafa. 2008. “The Rise of the Islamic Movement in Sudan, 1945–1989.” PhD diss., Auburn University. Abdulhadi, Rabab Ibrahim. 2000. “Palestinianness in a Comparative Perspective: Inclusionary Resistance, Exclusionary Citizenship.” PhD diss., Yale University. Abi-Mershed, Osama Walid. 2002. “Domination by Consent: The Bureaux arabes and Public Instruction in Colonial Algeria, 1831–1870.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Abisaab, Malek Hassan. 2001. “A History of Women Tobacco Workers: Labor, Community and Social Transformation in Lebanon, 1895–1997.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Abou Hamia, Mohamad Ahmad. 2007. “Currency Substitution and Dollarization in Lebanon: Elasticity of Substitution, Capital Mobility and Hysteresis.” PhD diss., Fordham University. Abou-Zaid, Ahmed. 2008. “The Transmission of U.S. Financial and Monetary Shocks to Emerging MENA Stock Markets.” PhD diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Abu-Ghaida, Dina Naim. 2000. “Family Background and Labor Market Outcomes in Jordan and Egypt.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Abugideiri, Hibba E. 2001. “Egyptian Women and the Science Question: Gender in the Making of Colonized Medicine, 1893–1929.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Abumustafa, Naser Ibrahim. 2002. “Potential Integration of Middle Eastern Countries’ Stock Markets.” PhD diss., Fordham University. Ackerman-Lieberman, Phillip Isaac. 2007. “A Partnership Culture: Jewish Economic and Social Life Seen through the Legal Documents of the Cairo Geniza.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

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Adas, Emin Baki. 2003. “Profit and the Prophet: Culture and Politics of Islamic Entrepreneurs in Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Adely, Fida J. 2007. “Gender Struggles: Nation, Faith, and Development in a Jordanian High School for Girls.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Afkhami, Amir Arsalan. 2003. “Iran in the Age of Epidemics: Nationalism and the Struggle for Public Health: 1889–1926.” PhD diss., Yale University. Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2005. “Law Courts and Fatwa Councils in Modern Egypt: An Ethnography of Islamic Legal Practice.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Ahmad, Ahmad Atif. 2005. “Structural Interrelations of Theory and Practice in Islamic Law: A Study of Takhrīj al-Furī` `alī al-Uīīl Literature.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Ahmad, Taha Khaled. 2000. “The Efficiency of the Banking System in Jordan, 1990–1996.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Ahmed, Asad Q. 2007. “Between the Acts: The Hijazi Elite and the Internal Politics of the Umayyad and Early `Abbasid Empires.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Ahmed, Moustafa. 2009. “Promoting Democracy through the Middle East Partnership Initiative: An Egyptian Example.” PhD diss., Walden University. Ahmetbeyzade, Cihan. 2004. “Struggling to Be Kurdish: Diasporic Legacy of Violent History.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Aidi, Hisham. 2003. “State Withdrawal and Political Change: Corporatism, Capacity, and Coalition Politics in Egypt and Mexico.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Ajhar, Abdel Hakim. 2001. “The Metaphysics of the Idea of God in Ibn Taymiyya’s Thought.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Akers, Deborah Sue. 2001. “The Tribal Concept in Urban Saudi Arabia.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Aksit, Elif Ekin. 2004. “Girls’ Education and the Paradoxes of Modernity and Nationalism in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Al Hinai, Abdul Aziz Mohammed. 2004. “Regional Integration and the Gulf Cooperation Council: An Assessment of the Trade Provisions of the Unified Economic Agreement.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University.

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Al-Abdulkarim, Bander B. 2004. “An Analysis of Macroeconomic Fluctuations for a Small Open Oil-Based Economy: The Case of Saudi Arabia.” PhD diss., Clark University. Al-faqih, Abdullah Mohammed. 2003. “The Struggle for Liberalization and Democratization in Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.” PhD diss., Northeastern University. Al-Hadiah, Ahmad. 2004. “Essays on Macroeconomic and Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations in Kuwait.” PhD diss., Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Al-Hassoon, Ibrahim M. A. 2005. “Estimating the Relationship between GDP Growth and Government Spending in Four GCC Countries: A Comparison of GDP and Non-Oil GDP Growth.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Al-Hihi, Mahmoud Moh’d. 2004. “The Aftermath of the Gulf War Immigrants and Refugees in the Greater Metropolitan Detroit Area.” PhD diss., Wayne State University. Al-Madkhli, Nawaf Ahmed. 2007. “Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Policy during King Khalid’s Reign, 1975–1982.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas. Al-Mashaikhi, Abid Abdallah. 2000. “The Impact of Exchange Rate Fluctuations on International Trade: A Case Study of Saudi Arabia.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Al-Mekaimi, Haila Hamad. 2003. “The Politics of Islamic Social Movements: Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait: A Comparative Study.” PhD diss., Boston College. Al-Nassar, Ahmed Abdulmohsen. 2000. “Current Account Imbalances and Adjustment Policies: A Case Study of Saudi Arabia.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Al-Nefaee, Saad Mohammed. 2005. “Determinants of Disaggregate Private Investment in an Oil-Based Economy: Case of Saudi Arabia.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Al-Otaibi, Mohamed Meteb. 2006. “Economic Study of Relationship between Privatization and Economic Growth from a Sample of Developing Countries.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Al-Salem, Hamza. 2005. “The Demand for International Foreign Reserves of Energy-Exporting Countries.” PhD diss., Clark University. Al-Shammari, Nayef. 2007. “Exchange Rate Policy and International Trade Linkages and Impacts.” PhD diss., Syracuse University.

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Al-Sharmani, Mulki. 2005. “Refugees and Citizens: The Somali Diaspora in Cairo.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Al-Tammam, Mohammed G. 2005. “Causality between Financial Development and Economic Growth: The Cases of Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Al-Tikriti, Nabil Sirri. 2004. “Sehzade Korkud (ca. 1468–1513) and the Articulation of Early 16th-Century Ottoman Religious Identity.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Alameddine, Mohamad A. 2000. “État, société et conditionnalite: La réforme économique en Egypte (1975–1997).” PhD diss., Université de Montréal (Canada). Alaoui, Oum-Hani. 2009. “Migratory Trajectories: Moroccan Borderlands and Translocal Imaginaries.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Algan, Ece. 2003. “Courting via Talk Radio: An Ethnography of Local Media and Youth in Southeast Turkey.” PhD diss., Ohio University. Alghailani, Said Ali. 2002. “Islam and the French Decolonization of Algeria: The Role of the Algerian Ulama, 1919–1940. PhD diss., Indiana University. Ali, Jamal. 2005. “A Study in Early Isma`ili Lexicography: The Kitab alZina of Abu Hatim Ahmad b. Hamdan al-Razi.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Ali, Souad Tagelsir. 2004. “`Ali `Abd Al-Raziq’s ‘al-Islam wa Usul al-Hukm’: A Modern, Liberal Development of Muslim Thought.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Aliabadi, Ali M. 2005. “Abdolkarim Soroush and the Discourse of Islamic Revivalism.” PhD diss., New School University. Aljebrin, Mohammad. 2006. “Analysis of Inflation Determinants in Developing Oil-Export Based Economies” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Alkhuzaim, Waleed M. 2005. “Export-Led Growth Hypothesis: Causality Analysis for Oil-Based Gulf Cooperation Council Countries.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Allen, Lori A. 2005. “Suffering through a National Uprising: The Cultural Politics of Violence, Victimization, and Human Rights in Palestine.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Allen, Mary Barbot. 2002. “Medical Pluralism in Operation in a Squatter Settlement (Gecekondu) in Istanbul: Tradition, Exchange and Agency.” PhD diss., University of Florida.

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Allen, Phillip C. 2000. “The Last Despot: Ethnic Consciousness, Power Politics, and the Orthodox Church in Late Ottoman Syria.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Almounsor, Abdullah. 2007. “Capital Flight and Foreign Direct Investment in the Middle East and North Africa: Comparative Development and Institutional Analysis.” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Alomar, Mohammad Ali. 2003. “Why the Rentier Economy Fails in Economic Development? The Case of Kuwait.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University. Alsalman, Abdullah E. 2002. “Empirical Issues of Financial Market Volatility in Kuwait Stock Exchange.” PhD diss., Howard University. Alsarhan, Asma Ahmed. 2003. “The Quest for Feminist Identity in Kuwaiti Fiction: A Cultural Approach.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Alshech, Eli. 2004. “Notions of Privacy in Classical Sunni Islamic Thought.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Alsudairy, Waleed Bin Nayef. 2000. “Regime Types and Development Performance: An Empirical Study of the Effect of Military Controlled Regimes on Economic Development.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Alsuhaibani, Saleh I. 2004. “Financial Integration of Stock Markets in the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries.” PhD diss., Colorado State University. Altan, Ozlem. 2006. “The American Third World: Transnational Elite Networks in the Middle East.” PhD diss., New York University. Altinay, Ayse Gul. 2001. “Making Citizens, Making Soldiers: Military Service, Gender, and National Identity in Turkey.” PhD diss., Duke University. Amanat, Mehrdad. 2006. “Negotiating Identities: Iranian Jews, Muslims, and Baha’is in the Memoirs of Rayhan Rayhani (1859–1939).” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Amar, Paul Edouard. 2003. “Arrested Democracy: Urban Struggles between Transnational Criminality and World Citizenship.” PhD diss., New York University. Amster, Ellen Jean. 2003. “Medicine and Sainthood: Islamic Science, French Colonialism, and the Politics of Healing in Morocco, 1877–1935.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Angrist, Michele Lee. 2000. “Political Parties and Regime Formation in the Middle East: Turkish Democratization in Comparative Perspective.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

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Anninos, Sophia C. 2000. “Creating the Market: An Examination of Privatization Policies in Kazakhstan and Egypt.” PhD diss., New York University. Anthony, Sean. 2009. “The Caliph and the Heretic: Ibn Saba’, the Saba’iya, and Early Shi’ism between Myth and History.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Antrim, Zayde Gordon. 2005. “Place and Belonging in Medieval Syria, 6th/12th to 8th/14th Centuries.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Arai, Kazuhiro. 2004. “Arabs Who Traversed the Indian Ocean: The History of the Al-`Attas Family in Hadramawt and Southeast Asia, c. 1600– c. 1960.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Armanios, Febe Y. 2003. “Coptic Christians in Ottoman Egypt: Religious Worldview and Communal Beliefs.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Aslanian, S. 2007. “From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: Circulation and the Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa/Isfahan, 1605–1747.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Ates, Sabri. 2006. “Empires at the Margin: Towards a History of the Ottoman-Iranian Borderland and the Borderland Peoples, 1843–1881.” PhD diss., New York University. Attia, Joseph Shawki. 2001. “Financial and Economic Performance of Privatized Firms: The Case of Egypt.” PhD diss., University of Virginia. Ayalon, Yaron. 2009. “Plagues, Famines, Earthquakes: The Jews of Ottoman Syria and Natural Disasters.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Baer, Marc David. 2001. “Honored by the Glory of Islam: The Ottoman State, Non-Muslims, and Conversion to Islam in Late SeventeenthCentury Istanbul and Rumelia.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Balasescu, Alexandru. 2004. “Fashioning Subjects, Unveiling Modernity: The Co-Motion of Aesthetics between Paris and Tehran.” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine. Barakat, Rena. 2007. “Thawrat Al-Buraq in British Mandate Palestine: Jerusalem, Mass Mobilization, and Colonial Politics, 1928–1930.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Baroni, Samiah. 2007. “Color Me Green: Saudi Arabian Identity and the Manifestations of Power.” PhD diss., Florida Atlantic University. Bashkin, Orit. 2005. “Intellectuals in Monarchic Iraq: Representations of Iraqi Intellectuals, 1921–1941.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

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Baskan, Birol. 2006. “Religious Institutions and State Building: Incorporation vs. Exclusion?” PhD diss., Northwestern University. Bass, Jeffrey David. 2005. “Cold Warrior Coterie: Senate Democrats and Presidential Foreign Policy, 1953–1973.” PhD diss., University of Connecticut. Batnitzky, Adina Keryn. 2005. “Household Roles and Obesity: Gender, Culture, and Social Class in Morocco.” PhD diss., Brown University. Bauer, Karen. 2008. “Room for Interpretation: Qur’anic Exegesis and Gender.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Baylouny, Anne Marie. 2003. “Privatizing Welfare, Creating Families: The Politics of Social Provision in Jordan.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Bazzaz, Sahar. 2002. “Challenging Power and Authority in Pre-Protectorate Morocco.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Beck, Colin. 2009. “Ideological Roots of Waves of Revolution.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Behar, Moshe. 2001. “Nationalism at Its Edges: Arabized Jews and the Unintended Consequences of Arab and Jewish Nationalisms (1917–1967).” PhD diss., Columbia University. Bein, Amit. 2006. “The Ulema, Their Institutions, and Politics in the Late Ottoman Empire (1876–1924).” PhD diss., Princeton University. Ben-Bassat, Yuval. 2007. “Local Feuds or Premonitions of a Bi-National Conflict? A Reexamination of the Early Jewish-Arab Encounter in Palestine at the End of the 19th Century.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Ben-Porat, Guy. 2002. “Globalization, Peace, and Discontent: Israel and Northern Ireland.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Berna, Dustin D. 2008. “A Revolutionary Perspective on Social Movements: Fundamentalism in the Islamic World.” PhD diss., University of New Orleans. Bernikho-Canin, Rhimou. 2004. “Saints, Sufis, and Sultans: The Zawiya of Wazzan, a Moroccan Sufi Order (1792–1892).” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Bier, Laura Elizabeth. 2006. “From Mothers of the Nation to Daughters of the State: Gender and the Politics of Inclusion in Egypt, 1922–1967.” PhD diss., New York University. Birdal, Murat. 2006. “The Ottoman Public Debt Administration and Its Role in the Peripheralization of the Ottoman Empire.” PhD diss., University of Southern California.

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Bilici, Mucahit. 2008. “Finding Mecca in America: American Muslims and Cultural Citizenship.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Blecher, Robert Ian. 2002. “The Medicalization of Sovereignty: Medicine, Public Health, and Political Authority in Syria, 1861–1936.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Blind, Peride. 2007. “Neoliberal Democratization: A Comparative Perspective on Turkey and Argentina.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Blumi, Isa. 2005. “The Consequences of Empire in the Balkans and Red Sea: Reading Possibilities in the Transformations of the Modern World.” PhD diss., New York University. Bodur, Marella. 2005. “Modernity, Social Movements and Democracy: Feminist Movements in Post-1980 Turkey.” PhD diss., Carleton University (Canada). Boum, Aomar. 2006. “Muslims Remember Jews in Southern Morocco: Social Memories, Dialogic Narratives, and the Collective Imagination of Jewishness.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Boumaza, Cherif. 2004. “Trade and Foreign Investment Liberalization in Morocco: Country-Wide and Regional Effects.” PhD diss., University of South Carolina. Bracy, R. Michael. 2005. “Building Palestine: `Isa al-`Isa, “Filastin,” and the Textual Construction of National Identity, 1911–1931.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas. Brenneman, Robert Lee. 2006. “We Have No Friends but the Mountains: Transmitting Kurdish Indigenous Knowledge, Culture, and Identity in Changing Contexts.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota. Brink-Danan, Marcy. 2005. “Reference Points: Text, Context, and Change in Definitions of Turkish-Jewish Identity.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Brockett, Gavin Douglas. 2003. “Betwixt and Between: Turkish Print Culture and the Emergence of a National Identity, 1945–1954.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Brodsky, Adriana Mariel. 2004. “The Contours of Identity: Sephardic Jews and the Construction of Jewish Communities in Argentina, 1880 to the Present.” PhD diss., Duke University. Brower, Benjamin Claude. 2005. “A Desert Named Peace: Violence and Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Brown, Jonathan A. C. 2006. “The Canonization of Al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon.” PhD diss., University of Chicago.

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Brownlee, Jason. 2004. “Durable Authoritarianism in an Age of Democracy.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Bryson, Jennifer S. 2000. “The Kitab al-Hawi of Razi (ca. 900 AD), Book One of the Hawi on Brain, Nerve, and Mental Disorders: Studies in the Transmission of Medical Texts from Greek into Arabic into Latin.” PhD diss., Yale University. Budiani, Debra A. 2005. “Quests for Refuge, Quests for Therapy: Displacement, Illness, and the Body in Urban Egypt.” PhD diss., Michigan State University. Cagaptay, Soner. 2003. “Crafting the Turkish Nation: Kemalism and Turkish Nationalism in the 1930s.” PhD diss., Yale University. Cagaptay-Arikan, Suna. 2007. “Visualizing the Cultural Transition in Bithynia (1300–1402): Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Caki, Fahri. 2001. “New Social Classes and Movements in the Context of Politico-Economic Development in Contemporary Turkey.” PhD diss., Temple University. Caliskan, Koray. 2005. “Making a Global Commodity: The Production of Markets and Cotton in Egypt, Turkey, and the United States.” PhD diss., New York University. Campbell, Kirk. 2009. “Civil-Military Relations and Political Liberalization: A Comparative Study of the Military’s Corporateness and Political Values in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Pakistan.” PhD diss., George Washington University. Campbell, Sandra Sue. 2003. “Telling Memories: The Zubayrids in Islamic Historical Memory.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Campos, Michelle Ursula. 2003. “A ‘Shared Homeland’ and Its Boundaries: Empire, Citizenship and the Origins of Sectarianism in Late Ottoman Palestine, 1908–1913.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Carroll, Katherine Blue. 2001. “Business as Usual? Economic Reform in Jordan.” PhD diss., University of Virginia. Celik, Ayse Betul. 2002. “Migrating onto Identity: Kurdish Mobilization through Associations in Istanbul.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Chalabi, Tamara Ahmad. 2003. “Community and Nation-State: The Shi’is of Jabal ‘Amil and the New Lebanon, 1918–1943.” PhD diss., Harvard University.

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Chalcraft, John Terrell. 2001. “The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914.” PhD diss., New York University. Chernov, Julie. 2007. “What Went Right: Political Participation, State Capacity, and Peaceful Islamic Mobilization.” PhD diss., University of Colorado, Boulder. Chiba, Naoki. 2001. “Iranians in the United States and Japan: Self-Imagery and Individual-Collective Dynamics.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Childress, Faith James. 2001. “Republican Lessons: Education and the Making of Modern Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Ciucci, Alessandra. 2008. “Poems of Honor, Voices of Shame: The ‘Aita and the Moroccan Shikhat.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Clarkin, Allison Joy. 2005. “Claiming Place and Legibility in the Republic: The Making of Berber Citizens in France.” PhD diss., New School University. Cline, Lawrence Elliot. 2000. “Islamic Insurgencies: A Comparative Study.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo. Cohen, Shana Rebecca. 2000. “Waiting for a Different Future: Market Reform and the Transformation of the Middle Class in Morocco.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Coker, Elizabeth Marie. 2001. “The Making of the Egyptian Psychiatric Patient: Reinterpreting Cultural Symbols through Biomedical Discourse.” PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University. Collins, John Martin. 2000. “Children of the Stones: The Intifada, Popular Memory, and the ‘Generation’ of Palestinian Nationalism.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota. Connell, Michael Paul. 2004. “The Nimatullahi Sayyids of Taft: A Study of the Evolution of a Late Medieval Iranian Sufi Tariqah.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Conway-Long, Don. 2000. “Dreadfully Changing: The Pressures of Mutability on Men and Masculinities in Morocco.” PhD diss., Washington University. Cook, Steven A. 2003. “The Military Enclave: Islam and State in Egypt, Turkey and Algeria.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Corstange, Daniel. 2008. “Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Lebanon and Yemen.” PhD diss., University of Michigan.

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Cory, Stephen Charles. 2002. “Chosen by God to Rule: The Caliphate and Political Legitimacy in Early Modern Morocco.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Cousins, Andrew Leonard. 2000. “Ideology and Biomedicine in the Palestinian West Bank.” PhD diss., Emory University. Crivello, Gina. 2003. “Dreams of Passage: Negotiating Gender, Status, and Migration in the Moroccan Rif.” PhD diss., University of California, Riverside. Curry, John J. 2005. “Transforming Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of the Sa’baniyye Order in Kastamonu and Beyond.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Curtis, Maria. 2007. “Sound Faith: Nostalgia, Global Spirituality, and the Making of the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Dakake, Maria Massi. 2000. “Loyalty, Love, and Faith: Defining the Boundaries of the Early Shi’ite Community.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Daughtry, Carla Nichelle. 2005. “Shifting Grounds: Southern Sudanese Asylum-Seekers in Cairo.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Davaran, Fereshteh. 2005. “Continuity in Iranian Identity: A Study of Andarz and Adab.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Davis, Dennis Morgan, Jr. 2005. “Al-Ghazali on Divine Essence: A Translation from the ‘Iqtisad fi al-i`tiqad’ with Notes and Commentary.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Davis, Rochelle Anne. 2002. “The Attar of History: Palestinian Narratives of Life before 1948.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Deal, Roger A. 2006. “Violent Crime in Hamidian Istanbul, 1876–1909.” PhD diss., University of Utah. de Cesari, Chiara. 2009. “Cultural Heritage beyond the ‘State’: Palestinian Heritage between Nationalism and Transnationalism.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Deeb, Lara. 2003. “An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety among Islamist Shi’i Muslims in Beirut.” PhD diss., Emory University. DeGeorges, Thomas Patrick. 2006. “A Bitter Homecoming: Tunisian Veterans of the First and Second World Wars.” PhD diss., Harvard University. de Gifis, Adrian. 2010. “The Theory of Virtuous Leadership in the Works of Al-Jahiz: An Analysis of the Depictions of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib.” PhD diss., University of Chicago.

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Dehzani, Jalal. 2008. “Nihilism and Technologies of Othering: The Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Turkey.” PhD diss., Carleton University (Canada). de Jong, Jung-Whan. 2009. “Gender and Sexuality in Dutch, British, and US Political Debates on Multiculturalism, Islam, and Muslims between 1999 and 2006.” PhD diss., University of Southern California. Deubel, Tara. 2010. “Between Homeland and Exile: Poetry, Memory, and Identity in Sahrawi Communities.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Di-Capua, Yoav. 2004. “The Thought and Practice of Modern Egyptian Historiography, 1890–1970.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Dixon, Jeffrey C. 2006. “Where Does Turkey Belong? Examining Europeans’ Attitudes and Liberal-Democratic Values in Turkey, the European Union, and the Muslim World.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Doerre, Sharon Louise. 2004. “Children of the Zawiya: Narratives of Faith, Family, and Transformation among Sufi Communities in Modern Damascus.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Dole, Christopher Todd. 2002. “Outlaws, Swindlers, and Authentic Healers: Legitimacy, Identity, and Religious Healing in Urban Turkey.” PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University. Durukan, Kaan. 2007. “Ideology and Historiography: State, Society, and Intellectuals in Modern Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Eissenstat, Howard. 2007. “The Limits of Imagination: Debating the Nation and Constructing the State in Early Turkish Nationalism.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Ekmekcioglu, Lerna. 2010. “Improvising Turkishness: Being Armenian in Post-Ottoman Istanbul (1918–1933).” PhD diss., New York University. El Hadidi, Hager. 2006. “Survivals and Surviving: Belonging to Zar in Cairo.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. El-Hasan, Hasan Afif. 2005. “Democracy Prevention in the Arab World: A Study of Democracy Prevention in Egypt.” PhD diss., University of California, Riverside. el-Leithy, Tamer. 2005. “Coptic Culture and Conversion in Medieval Cairo, 1293–1524 AD.” PhD diss., Princeton University. El-Omari, Racha Moujir. 2006. “The Theology of Abu l-Qasim al-Balhi/ al-Ka`bi (d. 319/931): A Study of Its Sources and Reception.” PhD diss., Yale University.

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El-Shakry, Omnia S. 2002. “The Great Social Laboratory: Reformers and Utopians in Twentieth-Century Egypt.” PhD diss., Princeton University. El-Said, Moataz. 2005. “Growth and Distributional Effects of Trade Liberalization and Alternative Free Trade Agreements: A Macro-Micro Analysis with an Application to Egypt.” PhD diss., George Washington University. Elbeshbishi, Amal Nagah. 2000. “Evaluating the World Bank’s Role in Supporting Structural Adjustment in Developing Countries with Special Reference to Egypt.” PhD diss., Fordham University. Eligur, Banu. 2006. “The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey (1980– 2002): An Application and Revision of the Political Process Model.” PhD diss., Brandeis University. Eltahir, Eltigani Gaafar. 2003. “Comparing the Incomparable: Religion, Chanting, and Healing in the Sudan, the Case of Zar and Zikr.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Elyas, Amal. 2005. “Arwah Abiya from the Arabian Peninsula: A Narrative Inquiry of Seven Women with Fiery Resistor Spirits.” PhD diss., University of Victoria (Canada). Emon, Anver Munaver. 2005. “Natural Law and Natural Rights in Islamic Law: History and Theory.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Erdem, Ebru. 2006. “Political Salience of Ethnic Identities: A Comparative Study of Tajiks in Uzbekistan and Kurds in Turkey.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Ergene, Bogac Alaeddin. 2001. “Local Court, Community, and Justice in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Ergut, Ferdan. 2000. “State and Social Control: The Police in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Republican Turkey, 1839–1939.” PhD diss., New School for Social Research. Evered, Emine Onhan. 2005. “The Politics of Late Ottoman Education: Accommodating Ethno-Religious Pluralism amid Imperial Disintegration.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Eyadat, Zaid. 2004. “An Alternative Model of Transition in the Middle East: Bounded Consociationalism.” PhD diss., University of Southern California.

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EzzelArab, AbdelAziz. 2000. “Nineteenth Century Expressions of Economic Nationalism in Egypt.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Fahmy, Ziad. 2007. “Popularizing Egyptian Nationalism: Colloquial Culture and Media Capitalism, 1870–1919.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Fakher Eldin, Munir. 2008. “Communities of Owners: Land Law, Governance, and Politics in Palestine, 1858–1948.” PhD diss., New York University. Fancy, Nahyan A. G. 2006. “Pulmonary Transit and Bodily Resurrection: The Interaction of Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in the Works of Ibn al-Nafis (d. 1288).” PhD diss., University of Notre Dame. Fenichel, Deborah. 2005. “Exhibiting Ourselves as Others: Jewish Museums in Israel.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Fernando, Mayanthi L. 2006. “‘French Citizens of Muslim Faith’: Islam, Secularism, and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary France.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Fishman, Louis. 2007. “Palestine Revisited: Reassessing the Jewish and Arab National Movements, 1908–1914.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Ford, Heidi Amanda. 2000. “Constructing Sanctity: Miracles, Saints, and Gender in Yusuf ibn Isma’il al-Nabhani’s Jami’ karamat al-awliya’.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Gabiam, Nell. 2008. “In Order Not to Forget: Dignity and Development in Syria’s Palestinian Refugee Camps.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Galpern, Steven Gary. 2002. “Britain, Middle East Oil, and the Struggle to Save Sterling, 1944–1971.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Garden, Kenneth. 2005. “Al-Ghazali’s Contested Revival: ‘Ihya’ `Ulum AlDin’ and Its Critics in Khorasan and the Maghrib.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Gasper, Michael. 2004. “Civilizing Peasants: The Public Sphere, Islamic Reform, and the Generation of Political Modernity in Egypt, 1875–1919.” PhD diss., New York University. Ghanea Bassiri, Kambiz. 2003. “A Window on Islam in Buyid Society: Justice and Its Epistemological Foundation in the Religious Thought of ‘Abd alJabbar, Ibn al-Baqillani, and Miskawayh.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Ghazal, Amal Nadim. 2005. “Islam and Arabism in Zanzibar: The Omani Elite, the Arab World and the Making of an Identity, 1880s–1930s.” PhD diss., University of Alberta (Canada).

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Gingeras, Ryan Scott. 2006. “Imperial Killing Fields: Revolution, Ethnicity and Islam in Western Anatolia, 1913–1938.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Glicksberg, Joseph Benjamin. 2003. “The Islamist Movement and the Subversion of Secularism in Modern Egypt.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Godin, Jean-François. 2005. “Immigrants et travail à Montréal: La dynamique de l’établissement professionnel des dix premières années.” PhD diss., Université de Montréal (Canada). Godley, Nathan Charles. 2006. “‘Almost-Finished Frenchmen’: The Jews of Algeria and the Question of French National Identity, 1830–1902.” PhD diss., University of Iowa. Gokcek, Gulriz Gigi. 2004. “Why Some Ethnic Conflicts Lead to Interstate War: An Investigation of the Kashmiri, Kurdish, and Basque Cases.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Gokcek, Mustafa. 2008. “A Kazan Tatar Contribution to the Late Ottoman Debates on Nationalism and Islam: The Life and Works of Halim Sabit Şibay.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Goknar, Erdag Mithat. 2004. “Between ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turk’: Literary Narrative and the Transition from Empire to Republic.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Goldstein, Kaylin Rebecca. 2003. “On Display: The Politics of Museums in Israeli Society.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Gregg, Heather Selma. 2004. “The Causes of Religious Wars: Holy Nations, Sacred Spaces, and Religious Revolutions.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gualtieri, Sarah M. A. 2000. “Making the Mahjar Home: The Construction of Syrian Ethnicity in the United States, 1870–1930.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Gunaydin, Muhammet. 2006. “Al-Sirafi’s Theory of ‘Lingua-Logical’ Grammar: An Analytical Study of the Grammatical Work of Al-Sirafi (Sharh Kitab Sibawayhi) within the Context of a Discussion on Language and Logic in Medieval Islam.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Gutelius, David Payne. 2001. “Between God and Men: The Nasiriyya and Economic Life in Morocco, 1640–1830.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Habasch, Rima. 2000. “The Palestinian Authority and Civil Society: A Case Study of Women’s and Health Organizations in the West Bank.” PhD diss., Boston University.

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Hafez, Sherine. 2007. “Women’s Islamic Movements in Question: Reconsidering Desire, Religion, and Secularism.” PhD diss., University of California, Davis. Haiduc-Dale, Noah. 2010. “Nationalism and Religious Identification: Palestinian Christians in Mandate Palestine, 1918–1948.” PhD diss., New York University. Haklai, Oded. 2004. “Institutions, Institutional Change and the Evolution of Minority Strategies: The Palestinian Arab Citizens of Israel.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Halabi, Eddie. 2007. “The Transformation of the Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1917–1937: From Local and Islamic to Modern and Nationalist Celebration.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Hale, Bradley Rainbow. 2005. “The Soul of Empire: The Society of Missionaries of Africa in Colonial Algeria, 1919–1939.” PhD diss., University of Connecticut. Halfon, Saul E. 2000. “Reconstructing Population Policy after Cairo: Demography, Women’s Empowerment, and the Population Network.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Hamdy, Sherine F. 2006. “Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam, Medical Science, and Ethical Reasoning in Egyptian Life.” PhD diss., New York University. Hammond, Martha Latane. 2003. “The Poetics of S/Exclusion: Women, Gender, and the Classical Arabic Canon.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Hanifi, Shah Mahmoud. 2001. “Inter-Regional Trade and Colonial State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Hanley, Will. 2007. “Foreignness and Localness in Alexandria, 1880–1914.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Hanoosh, Yasmeen. 2008. “The Politics of Minority Chaldeans between Iraq and America.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Harb, Imad Kamel. 2002. “Military Disengagement and the Transition to Democracy in Egypt and Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Hart, Kimberly. 2005. “Aci Tatli Yiyoruz: Bitter or Sweet We Eat. The Economics of Love and Marriage in Orselli Village.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Hashemi, Mahasti. 2006. “Immigrants and Exiles: Iranian Women in the United States.” PhD diss., Rutgers State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick.

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Heck, Paul Lincoln. 2000. “Qudama b. Ja`far (d. 337/948) and His Kitab al-Kharaj wa-sina`at al-kitaba: Administrative Contributions to Knowledge.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Hendrick, Joshua. 2009. “Globalization and Marketized Islam in Turkey: The Case of Fethullah Gulen.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz. Henkel, Heiko Michael. 2004. “Pious Disciplines and Modern Lives: The Culture of Fiqh in the Turkish Islamic Tradition.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Herrera, Linda Ann. 2000. “The Sanctity of the School: New Islamic Education and Modern Egypt.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Hibbard, Scott W. 2006. “Religion as Mass Politics: State and Religion in Egypt, India, and the United States.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Hill, Tom M. 2006. “Imperial Nomads: Settling Paupers, Proletariats, and Pastoralists in Colonial France and Algeria, 1830–1863.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Hilloowala, Franak. 2000. “An Analysis of Ibn Abi Usaybi`ah’s `Uyun alanba’ fi tabaqat al-atibba’.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Hirschkind, Charles Kendal. 2000. “Technologies of Islamic Piety: Cassette-Sermons and the Ethics of Listening.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Ho, Engseng. 2000. “Genealogical Figures in an Arabian Indian Ocean Diaspora.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Hochman, Dafna. 2009. “The Dictator’s Dilemma: Rule-of-Law Reforms in the Middle East and North Africa, 1960–2005.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Hollenberg, David. 2006. “Interpretation after the End of Days: The Fat. imid-Isma’ili ta’wil (Interpretation) of Ja’far ibn Mansur al-Yaman (d. ca. 960).” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Hood, Kathleen Ann. 2002. “Music and Memory in a Global Age: Wedding Songs of the Syrian Druzes.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Hourani, Najib B. 2005. “Capitalists in Conflict: A Political Economy of the Life, Death, and Rebirth of Beirut.” PhD diss., New York University. Hovsepian, Nubar. 2004. “Palestinian State Formation, Political Rent, and Education Policy: Development and the Construction of Identity.” PhD diss., City University of New York.

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Huang, Min-Hua. 2004. “Why Do People Support Political Islam? A Comparative Study of Eight Muslim Societies.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Hughes, Melanie. 2008. “Politics at the Intersection: A Cross-National Analysis of Minority Women’s Legislative Representation.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Hull, Adrian Prentice. 2001. “Political Parties, Civil Society, and the Formation of Liberties and Rights in the Postcolonial World.” PhD diss., University of Colorado at Boulder. Hussain, Ali J. 2001. “A Developmental Analysis of Depictions of the Events of Karbala in Early Islamic History.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Hussin, Iza. 2008. “The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Ibrahim, M. Zakyi. 2003. “Prophecy of Women in the Holy Qur’an with a Special Focus on Ibn Hazm’s Theory.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Isik, Damla. 2007. “Woven Assemblages: Globalization, Gender, Labor, and Authenticity in Turkey’s Carpet Industry.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Iskander, John Lowrie. 2001. “Saints or Charlatans: The Social Construction of Sanctity in Contemporary Egypt.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Islam, Suad. 2009. “Cultural Reproduction, Segmented Assimilation, and the Religious Schooling Experiences of Immigrants at an Islamic Academy: Learning by Choice.” PhD diss., Temple University. Ismail, Ayman. 2009. “Private Equity and Venture Capital in Emerging Markets: A Case Study of Egypt and the MENA Region.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jackson, Maureen. 2008. “Mixing Musics: The Urban Landscape of Late Ottoman and Turkish Synagogue Music.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Jacob, Wilson Chacko. 2005. “Working out Egypt: Masculinity and Subject Formation between Colonial Modernity and Nationalism, 1870–1940.” PhD diss., New York University.

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Jayyusi-Lehn, Ghada. 2007. “The Life and the Career of the Caliph alMu`tasim: A Problem in Historiography.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Jones, Linda Gale. 2004. “The Boundaries of Sin and Communal Identity: Muslim and Christian Preaching and the Transmission of Cultural Identity in Medieval Iberia and the Maghreb (12th to 15th Centuries).” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Jones, Toby Craig. 2006. “The Dogma of Development: Technopolitics and the Making of Saudi Arabia, 1950–1980.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Joseph, Sabrina E. 2005. “Islamic Law on Tenancy and Sharecropping in Late Sixteenth- through Early Nineteenth-Century Syria.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Joseph, Suzanne Ezzat. 2002. “Forms of Production and Demographic Regimes: An Anthropological Demographic Study of Bedouin AgroPastoral Tribes in the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon.” PhD diss., University of Georgia. Kadish, Ruti. 2001. “Mothers and Soldiers: Israeli Lesbian and Gay Negotiations of Jewish, National, and Sexual Identity.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Kalem, Seda. 2010. “Contested Meanings—Imagined Practices: Law at the Intersection of Mediation and Legal Profession. A Socio-Legal Study of the Juridical Field in Turkey.” PhD diss., New School University. Kangas, Beth Ellen. 2002. “The Lure of Technology: Yemenis’ International Medical Travel in a Global Era.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Karakisla, Yavuz Selim. 2004. “Women and Work in the Ottoman Empire: Society for the Employment of Ottoman Muslim Women (1916–1923).” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Karam, John Tofik. 2004. “Distinguishing Arabesques: The Politics and Pleasures of Being Arab in Neoliberal Brazil.” PhD diss., Syracuse University. Karnes, Jesse. 2009. “‘It’s Our Country Too!’: Palestinian Identity and the Islamic Claim to Human Rights in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.” PhD diss., University of California, Riverside. Kassem, Lina M. 2005. “The Construction of Druze Ethnicity: Druze in Israel between State Policy and Palestinian Arab Nationalism.” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati.

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Katz, Kimberly B. 2001. “Holy Places and National Spaces: Jerusalem under Jordanian Rule.” PhD diss., New York University. Kaufman, Asher. 2000. “Reviving Phoenicia: The Search for an Identity in Lebanon.” PhD diss., Brandeis University. Kavakci, Merve. 2007. “Questioning Turkey’s Role Model Status: A Critical Examination of The Social and Political Implications of the Headscarf Ban in Turkey.” PhD diss., Howard University. Kaya, Yunus. 2007. “Globalization, Industrialization, and Social Class in Less Developed Countries, 1980–2005.” PhD diss., Duke University. Kayaalp-Aktan, Pinar. 2005. “The Atik Valide Mosque Complex: A Testament of Nurbanu’s Prestige, Power, and Piety.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Keller, Richard Charles. 2001. “Action psychologique: French Psychiatry in Colonial North Africa, 1900–1962.” PhD diss., Rutgers State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick. Kelly Spurles, Patricia L. 2004. “Henna for Brides and Gazelles: Ritual, Women’s Work and Tourism in Morocco.” PhD diss., Université de Montréal (Canada). Kenan, Orna. 2000. “Between History and Memory. Israeli Historiography of the Holocaust: The Period of ‘Gestation,’ from the mid-1940s to the Eichmann Trial in 1961.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Khalafallah, Haifaa Genidi. 2000. “Rethinking Islamic Law: Genesis and Evolution in the Islamic Legal Method and Structures: The Case of a Twentieth-Century ‘Alim’s Journey into His Legal Traditions. Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917–1996).” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Khalek, Nancy A. 2006. “From Byzantium to Early Islam: Studies on Damascus in the Umayyad Era.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Khalili, Laleh. 2005. “Citizens of an Unborn Kingdom: Stateless Palestinian Refugees and Contentious Commemoration.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Khan, Noor-Aiman Iftikhar. 2006. “The Enemy of My Enemy: Indian Influences on Egyptian Nationalism, 1907–1930.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Kia, Parandeh. 2008. “An Iranian Eden: Women Activists and the Emergence of an Iranian Immigrant Community in Southern California, 1979–1993.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University.

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King, Diane Elizabeth. 2000. “When Worlds Collide: The Kurdish Diaspora from the Inside Out.” PhD diss., Washington State University. King-Irani, Laurie Elizabeth. 2003. “Maneuvering in Narrow Spaces: An Analysis of Emergent Identity, Subjectivity, and Political Institutions among Palestinian Citizens in Israel.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Kooshian, George Byron, Jr. 2002. “The Armenian Immigrant Community of California: 1880–1935.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Kosansky, Oren. 2003. “All Dear unto God: Saints, Pilgrimage, and Textual Practice in Jewish Morocco.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Kozma, Liat. 2006. “Women on the Margins and Legal Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt, 1850–1882.” PhD diss., New York University. Krstic, Tijana. 2004. “Narrating Conversions to Islam: The Dialogue of Texts and Practices in Early Modern Ottoman Balkans.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Kuhn, Thomas. 2005. “Shaping Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1872–1919.” PhD diss., New York University. Kurtoglu, Gul M. 2003. “Toleration of the Intolerants? Accommodation of Political Islam in the Muslim World.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Kuru, Ahmet T. 2006. “Dynamics of Secularism: State-Religion Relations in the United States, France, and Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Lahlou, Aicha. 2005. “Intermestic Strategies for Democratization in the Arab World and the Rise of the Islamist Threat: The Case of Morocco.” PhD diss., University of Houston. Lahmuddin, Lahmuddin. 2004. “Sunni `Ulama and the Reform of Religious Offices in Medieval Egypt, 637– 676 AH/1240–1277 AD.” PhD diss., University of Arkansas. Landress, Barbara Ann. 2004. “Her Glory All Within: Rejecting and Transforming Orthodoxy in Israeli and American Jewish Women’s Fiction.” PhD diss., New York University. Lang, Sharon Denise. 2000. “Sharaf Politics: Constructing Male Prestige in Israeli-Palestinian Society.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Langohr, Vickie Anne. 2000. “Religious Nationalism 101: How the Growth of State Educational Systems Strengthened Religious Nationalist Movements in Colonial-Era Egypt, North India, and Indonesia.” PhD diss., Columbia University.

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Langston, Elizabeth Mechelle. 2005. “The Islamist Movement and Tribal Networks: Islamist Party Mobilization amongst the Tribes of Jordan and Yemen.” PhD diss., University of Kentucky. Latif, Nadia. 2010. “In Partitioned Territory: Kinship and Belonging in a Palestinian Refugee Camp.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Lawrence III, William A. 2004. “Representing Algerian Youth: The Discourses of Cultural Confrontation and Experimentation with Democracy and Islamic Revival since the Riots of 1988.” PhD diss., Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Leal, Karen Alexandra. 2003. “The Ottoman State and the Greek Orthodox of Istanbul: Sovereignty and Identity at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Leichtman, Mara A. 2006. “A Tale of Two Shi’isms: Lebanese Migrants and Senegalese Converts in Dakar.” PhD diss., Brown University. Levine, Laure J. 2007. “Defending Children’s Rights: Global Discourse and Local Interpretations among Palestinian Camp Refugees in Jordan.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Libal, Kathryn R. 2001. “National Futures: The Child Question in Early Republican Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Lieberman, Jessica Dumes. 2006. “Global Means, Local Ends? A Case Study of Transnational Human Rights Networks in Jordan.” PhD diss., George Washington University. Limbert, Mandana E. 2002. “Of Ties and Time: Sociality, Gender, and Modernity in an Omani Town.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Loeffler, Agnes Gertrud. 2001. “Allopathy Goes Native: Models, Motives, and Medicine in Iran.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Loewen, Arley Alaire. 2001. “The Concept of jawanmardi (Manliness) in Persian Literature and Society.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Logrono Narbona, Maria del Mar. 2007. “The Development of Nationalist Identities in French Syria and Lebanon: A Transnational Dialogue with Arab Immigrants to Argentina and Brazil, 1915–1929.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Lopez, Shaun Timothy. 2004. “Media Sensations, Contested Sensibilities: Gender and Moral Order in the Egyptian Mass Media, 1920–1955.” PhD diss., University of Michigan.

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Lowrance, Sherry Renee. 2004. “Ethnic Identity, Grievance, and Political Behavior: Being Palestinian in Israel.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. MacEvitt, Christopher Hatch. 2002. “Creating Christian Identities: Crusaders and Local Communities in the Levant, 1097–1187.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Mady, Abdel-Fattah. 2005. “Islam and Democracy: Elite Political Attitudes and the Democratization Process in the Arab Region.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University. Maghraoui, Driss Sidi. 2000. “Moroccan Colonial Troops: History, Memory, and the Culture of French Colonialism.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2006. “Passionate Uprisings: The Intersection between Sexuality and Politics in Post-Revolutionary Iran.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Makdisi, Ismaeel Ibraheem. 2006. “Collective Action in Authoritarian States: The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago. Malik, Saadia I. 2003. “Exploring aghani al-banat: A Postcolonial Ethnographic Approach to Sudanese Women’s Songs, Culture, and Performance.” PhD diss., Ohio University. Manela, Erez. 2003. “The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, 1917–1920.” PhD diss., Yale University. Marashi, Afshin. 2003. “Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1941.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Margariti, Roxani Eleni. 2002. “Like the Place of Congregation on Judgment Day: Maritime Trade and Urban Organization in Medieval Aden (ca. 1083–1229).” PhD diss., Princeton University. Martin, Kevin W. 2005. “Enter the Future! Exemplars of Bourgeois Modernity in Post–World War II Syria.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Martos, Sofia D. 2007. “The Balancing Act: Ethnicity, Commerce, and Politics among Syrian and Lebanese Immigrants in Argentina, 1890–1955.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Masoud, Tarek. 2008. “Why Islam Wins: Electoral Ecologies and Economies of Political Islam in Contemporary Egypt.” PhD diss., Yale University.

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Massoud, Sami G. 2005. “An Analysis of the Annalistic Sources of the Early Mamluk Circassian Period.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Matsunaga, Yasuyuki. 2006. “Struggles for Democratic Consolidation in the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979–2004.” PhD diss., New York University. Matthews, Joyce Hedda. 2001. “The Ottoman Inheritance Inventory as an Exercise in Conceptual Reclamation (ca. 1600–1675).” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Mavani, Hamid. 2005. “Doctrine of Imamate in Twelver Shi’ism: Traditional, Theological, Philosophical and Mystical Perspectives.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Mazie, Steven Victor. 2002. “Faith in Liberalism: Exploring Religion and Democracy in the State of Israel.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. McLarney, Ellen Anne. 2004. “State of the Family: Domestic Politics in the Arabic Novel.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Mecham, Robert Quinn. 2006. “From the Sacred to the State: Institutional Origins of Islamist Political Mobilization.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Medani, Khalid Mustafa. 2003. “Globalization, Informal Markets, and Collective Action: The Development of Islamic and Ethnic Politics in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Medoff, Louis. 2007. “Ijtihad and Renewal in Qur’anic Hermeneutics: An Analysis of Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i’s al-Mizan fi Tafsir alQur’an.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Merabet, Sofian. 2009. “Queer Beirut: Social Transformations in a War-Torn City.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Meshal, Reem. 2007. “The State, the Community and the Individual: Local Custom and the Construction of Orthodoxy in the Sijills of Ottoman Cairo, 1558–1646.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Methodieva, Milena. 2010. “Reform, Politics, and Culture among the Muslims in Bulgaria, 1878–1908.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Meyer, James. 2007. “Turkic Worlds: Community Representation and Collective Identity in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1870–1914.” PhD diss., Brown University. Mikhail, Maged S. A. 2004. “Egypt from Late Antiquity to Early Islam: Copts, Melkites, and Muslims Shaping a New Society.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

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Mills, Kimberly L. 2005. “Reproducing the Nation: The Politics of Family Planning in Tunisia.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Minkin, Shane. 2009. “In Life as in Death: The Port, Foreign Charities, Hospitals, and Cemeteries in Alexandria, Egypt, 1865–1914.” PhD diss., New York University. Minkov, Anton. 2000. “Conversion to Islam as Reflected in Kisve Bahasi Petitions: An Aspect of Ottoman Social Life in the Balkans, 1670–1730.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Mirkova, Anna M. 2006. “Land Ownership and Modernization in the Transition from Imperial Ottoman to National Bulgarian Rule (1878–1908).” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Mirzai, Behnaz A. 2004. “Slavery, the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the Emancipation of Slaves in Iran (1828–1928).” PhD diss., York University (Canada). Moazami, Behrooz. 2004. “The Making of the State, Religion, and the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1796–1979).” PhD diss., New School University. Mokhiber, James Pardee. 2002. “‘Native Arts’ and Empire: The ‘Renovation’ of Artisanal Production in French Colonial North Africa, 1900–1939.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Morrison, Heidi. 2009. “Childhood, Modernity, and Nation-Building in Egypt, 1890–1939.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Morrison, Ian. 2008. “The Secular and the Limits of the Political: The Problem of Religion in Quebec.” PhD diss., York University (Canada). Mourad, Suleiman Ali. 2004. “Early Islam between Myth and History: Hasan al-Basri (d. 110 H/728 CE) in Classical and Modern Scholarship.” PhD diss., Yale University. Mousa, Waleed. 2005. “Islam, Democracy, and Governance: Sudan and Morocco in a Comparative Perspective.” PhD diss., University of Florida. Moustafa, Tamir M. 2002. “Law versus the State: The Expansion of Constitutional Power in Egypt, 1980–2001.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Musa, Aisha Yusef. 2004. “A Study of Early and Contemporary Muslim Attitudes toward Hadith as Scripture with a Translation of al-Shafi`i’s ‘Kitab Jima` al-`Ilm.’” PhD diss., Harvard University. Na’amneh, Mahmoud M. 2005. “Collective Memory and National Identity in Jordan.” PhD diss., University of California, Davis.

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Nachtwey, Jodi Lee. 2001. “Women, Employment, and Possibilities for Empowerment: A Comparative Analysis of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Nadaner, Jeffrey Michael. 2002. “Shifting Sands: John F. Kennedy and the Middle East.” PhD diss., Yale University. Nanes, Stefanie Eileen. 2003. “Citizenship and National Identity in Jordan: A National Dialogue.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nardulli, Bruce R. 2002. “Dance of Swords: United States Military Assistance to Saudi Arabia, 1942–1964.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Nassar, Maha Tawfik. 2006. “Affirmation and Resistance: Press, Poetry, and the Formation of National Identity among Palestinian Citizens of Israel, 1948–1967.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Neale, Harry. 2007. “Sufism, Godliness, and Popular Islamic Storytelling in Farid al-Din ‘Attar’s Tadkiratu-l-’awliya’.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Newcomb, Rachel. 2004. “‘Singing to So Many Audiences’: Negotiations of Gender, Identity, and Social Space in Fes, Morocco.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Nickels, Benjamin. 2007. “Unsettling French Algeria: Settlement, Terror, and Violence in the French-Algerian War (1954–1962).” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Niyazioglu, Asli. 2003. “Ottoman Sufi Sheikhs between this World and the Hereafter: A Study of Nev’izade `Ata’i’s (1583–1635) Biographical Dictionary.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Oehler-Stricklin, Dylan. 2005. “‘And This Is I’: The Power of the Individual in the Poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Ohlander, Erik Stefan. 2004. “Abu Hafs `Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 632/1234) and the Institutionalization of Sufism.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Omar, Hanaa H. Kilany. 2001. “Apostasy in the Mamluk Period: The Politics of Accusations of Unbelief.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. O Murchu, Niall Fionnbarra. 2000. “Labor, the State, and Ethnic Conflict: A Comparative Study of British Rule in Palestine (1920–1939) and Northern Ireland (1972–1994).” PhD diss., University of Washington. Onyedum, Jennifer. 2010. “Humanizing Warfare: The Politics of Medicine, Health Care, and International Humanitarian Intervention in Algeria, 1954–1962.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

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Oram, Elizabeth E. 2004. “Constructing Modern Copts: The Production of Coptic Christian Identity in Contemporary Egypt.” PhD diss., Princeton University. O’Rourke, Sheila. 2006. “Gender, Selfhood, and Media: Hatay in the Context of Turkish Modernity.” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine. Osman, Ghada. 2001. “The Christians of Late Sixth- and Early SeventhCentury Mecca and Medina: An Investigation into the Arabic Sources.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Othman, Aida. 2005. “And Sulh Is Best: Amicable Settlement and Dispute Resolution in Islamic Law.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Othman, Enaya. 2009. “Middle Ground in the Middle East: American Quakers and Palestinian Women at the Friends Girls School in Ramallah, 1889–1948.” PhD diss., Marquette University. Otucu, Filiz Oztalas. 2004. “Severe Ethnic Violence: An Integrated Explanation of the Turkish-Kurdish Case.” PhD diss., University of Kentucky. Ozdemir, Haluk. 2000. “Uprooted Cultures: Cultural Identities after Globalization and the Crisis of Turkish National Identity.” PhD diss., Purdue University. Paczynska, Agnieszka. 2002. “Historical Legacies and Policy Choice: Labor and Public Sector Reform in Poland, Egypt, Mexico, and the Czech Republic.” PhD diss., University of Virginia. Pahwa, Sonali. 2007. “Staging Difference: An Ethnography of NewGeneration Egyptian Theatre.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Pandey, Annarose. 2010. “Nostalgic Lives: Memory and Place in Sidi Ifni.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Panev, Aleksandar. 2000. “Orthodoxy, Modernity and Nationality in Macedonia, 1800–1878.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Papan-Matin, Firoozeh. 2003. “Death, Vision, and Self in `Ayn al-Qudat Hamadhani.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Park, Chan Ki. 2000. “Political Steel: A Comparison of the Steel Industry in Egypt and Korea.” PhD diss., New York University. Parker, Chad. 2008. “Transports of Progress: The Arabian American Oil Company and American Modernization in Saudi Arabia, 1945–1973.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Parla, Ayse. 2005. “Terms of Belonging: Turkish Immigrants from Bulgaria in the Imagined Homeland.” PhD diss., New York University. Parsa, Ali. 2000. “Causation and Perso-Islamic History: A Case Study. The ‘Zayn al-Akhbar’ of Gardizi.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

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Pastor de Maria y Campos, Camila. 2009. “The Mashreq in Mexico Patronage, Property, and Class in the Postcolonial Global.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Pearl, Laura K. 2006. “The Girls from the Prayer Room: The Women’s Islamist Movement at Yarmouk University, Jordan.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Petzen, Jennifer. 2008. “Gender Politics in the New Europe: ‘Civilizing’ Muslim Sexualities.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Philliou, Christine M. 2004. “Worlds, Old and New: Phanariot Networks and the Remaking of Ottoman Governance in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Polisar, Daniel Aaron Roy. 2001. “Electing Dictatorship: Why Palestinian Democratization Failed.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Pomerantz, Maurice. 2010. “Licit Magic and Divine Grace: The Life and Letters of al-Sahib ibn `Abbad (d. 385/995).” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Potuoglu-Cook, Oyku. 2008. “Night Shifts: Moral, Economic, and Cultural Politics of Turkish Belly Dance across the Fin de Siècle.” PhD diss., Northwestern University. Power, Jane. 2007. “Different Drummer, Same Parade: Britain’s Palestine Labour Department, 1942–1948.” PhD diss., Simon Fraser University (Canada). Raanan, Yeela. 2009. “Expanding Their Future: The Social Use of Education by Adolescent Arab Girls in the Israeli Galilee.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Racine, Matthew Thomas. 2003. “‘A Most Opulent Iliad’: The Portuguese Occupation of Southern Morocco (1505–1542). The Fortunes of a Frontier Society.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Radulescu, Miruna Catalina. 2002. “The Coming to Being of the Nationalistic Myth in the Romanian Principalities during the Ottoman Domination, as Described in ‘The Third Letter’ of Mihai Eminescu: The Importance of the Orthodox Church and the Refusal of Islam.” MA thesis, McGill University (Canada). Raj, Ferenc. 2004. “A History of the Jews in Hungary during Ottoman Domination: 1526–1686.” PhD diss., Brandeis University. Rapoport, Yossef. 2002. “Marriage and Divorce in the Muslim Near East, 1250–1517.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

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Reeves-Ellington, Barbara A. 2001. “‘That Our Daughters May Be as Corner Stones’: American Missionaries, Bulgarian Nationalists, and the Politics of Gender, 1832–1872.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Reid, Megan Hibler. 2005. “Exemplars of Excess: Devotional Piety in Medieval Islam, 1200–1450 CE.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Reynolds, Nancy Young. 2003. “Commodity Communities: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices, and Social Power in Egypt, 1907–1961.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Riedel, Dagmar A. 2004. “Searching for the Islamic Episteme: The Status of Historical Information in Medieval Middle-Eastern Anthological Writing.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Rinalducci, Edward James, Jr. 2000. “Authenticity Movements in Ethnic and Religious Revivalism: A Reconceptualization and Examination of Cultural Communal Identity Movements.” PhD diss., Georgia State University. Rizzo, Helen Mary. 2000. “Islam, Democracy, and the Status of Women: The Case of Kuwait.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Roberts, Nicholas. 2010. “Rethinking the Status Quo: The British and Islam in Palestine, 1917–1929.” PhD diss., New York University. Robinson, Marsha R. 2006. “Crossing the Strait from Morocco to the United States: The Transnational Gendering of the Atlantic World before 1830.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Robinson, Shira Nomi. 2005. “Occupied Citizens in a Liberal State: Palestinians under Military Rule and the Colonial Formation of Israeli Society, 1948–1966.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Robson, Laura. 2009. “The Making of Sectarianism: Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine.” PhD diss., Yale University. Romano, David. 2002. “Kurdish Nationalist Movements: Opportunity, Mobilization and Identity.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Romero, Juan. 2008. “The Iraqi Revolution of 1958 and the Search for Security in the Middle East.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Ross-Nazzal, James Anthony. 2001. “Traveling with the Ladies: American Women’s Travel Accounts on Palestine in the Nineteenth Century.” PhD diss., Washington State University. Rostam-Kolayi, Jasamin Karin. 2000. “The Women’s Press, Modern Education, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century Iran, 1900–1930s.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

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Rothman, Ella-Natalie. 2006. “Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Rouighi, Ramzi. 2005. “Mediterranean Crossings, North African Bearings: A Taste of Andalus in Bejaia (1250–1400).” PhD diss., Columbia University. Rousso-Schindler, Steven. 2007. “Israeli and Palestinian National Narratives: National and Individual Constructions, Social Suffering Narratives, and Everyday Performances.” PhD diss., University of Southern California. Rowe, Victoria. 2000. “The ‘New Armenian Woman’: Armenian Women’s Writing in the Ottoman Empire, 1880–1915.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Rubin, Lawrence. 2009. “Why Arab States Fear Islamist Regimes: Threat Perception and Soft Power Politics.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Ruiz, Mario M. 2004. “Intimate Disputes, Illicit Violence: Gender, Law, and the State in Colonial Egypt, 1849–1923.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Rustomji, Nerina. 2003. “The Garden and the Fire: Materials of Heaven and Hell in Medieval Islamic Culture.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Rustow, Marina. 2004. “Rabbanite-Karaite Relations in Fatimid Egypt and Syria: A Study Based on Documents from the Cairo Geniza.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Sa’ar, Amalia. 2000. “‘Girls’ and ‘Women’: Femininity and Social Adulthood among Unmarried Israeli-Palestinian Women.” PhD diss., Boston University. Saatci, Mustafa. 2003. “Turkish Immigrants in the United States: Historical and Cultural Origins.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Sadeghi, Behnam. 2006. “The Structure of Reasoning in Post-Formative Islamic Jurisprudence (Case Studies in Hanafi Laws on Women and Prayer).” PhD diss., Princeton University. Sahin, Harun. 2001. “A Textual Analysis of the Concepts Laid Down in the First Verses of Qur’anic Revelation: Language and Meaning.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin.

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Sajdi, Dana. 2002. “Peripheral Visions: The Worlds and Worldviews of Commoner Chroniclers in the 18th-Century Ottoman Levant.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Saleh, Gehan. 2008. “The Dynamic Relation between Stock Prices and Exchange Rates in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago. Salem, Samira Hamdy. 2001. “A Comparative Examination of the Impact of Business-Government Relations on Labor Market Reform in Egypt and Mexico, 1975–1995.” PhD diss., University of Southern California. Salhi, Muhannad. 2006. “The Lost South: Syria and the Palestine Question, 1918–1920.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Salime, Zakia. 2005. “Between Islam and Feminism: New Political Transformations and Movements in Morocco.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana, Champaign. Salmoni, Barak Aharon. 2002. “Pedagogies of Patriotism: Teaching SocioPolitical Community in Twentieth-Century Turkish and Egyptian Education.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Sanal, Aslihan. 2005. “Flesh Yours, Bones Mine: The Making of the Biomedical Subject in Turkey.” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sands, Kristin L. 2000. “Commentary (tafsir) and Allusion (ishara): A Comparative Study of Exoteric and Sufi Interpretation of the Qu’ran in Classical Islam.” PhD diss., New York University. Sayeed, Asma. 2005. “Shifting Fortunes: Women and Hadith Transmission in Islamic History (First to Eighth Centuries).” PhD diss., Princeton University. Sbaiti, Nadya. 2008. “Lessons in History: Education and the Formation of National Society in Beirut, Lebanon, 1920–1960s.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Scalenghe, Sara. 2006. “Being Different: Intersexuality, Blindness, Deafness, and Madness in Ottoman Syria.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Schad, Geoffrey D. 2001. “Colonialists, Industrialists, and Politicians: The Political Economy of Industrialization in Syria, 1920–1954.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Scheid, Kirsten. 2005. “Painters, Picture-Makers, and Lebanon: Ambiguous Identities in an Unsettled State.” PhD diss., Princeton University.

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Scheiwiller, Staci. 2009. “Mirrors of Memory: Nineteenth-Century Imagery in Contemporary Iranian Photography.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Schmid, Karl. 2007. “Losing Your Place: Tourism and the Making of Enclaves in Luxor, Egypt.” PhD diss., York University (Canada). Schreier, Joshua Samuel. 2003. “From Jewish Regeneration to Colonialism: The Ideology and Practice of Civilizing in France and Algeria, 1815–1870.” PhD diss., New York University. Schull, Kent. 2007. “Penal Institutions, Nation-State Construction, and Modernity in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1908–1919.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Schwedler, Jillian Marie. 2000. “Framing Political Islam in Jordan and Yemen.” PhD diss., New York University. Sedra, Paul. 2006. “Textbook Maneuvers: Evangelicals and Educational Reform in Nineteenth-Century Egypt.” PhD diss., New York University. Segalla, Spencer David. 2003. “Teaching Colonialism, Learning Nationalism: French Education and Ethnology in Morocco, 1912–1956.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook. Seikaly, Sherene. 2007. “Meatless Days: Consumption and Capitalism in Wartime Palestine 1939–1948.” PhD diss., New York University. Semerdjian, Vivian Elyse. 2002. “‘Off the Straight Path’: Gender, Public Morality, and Legal Administration in Ottoman Aleppo, Syria.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Semmerling, Tim Jon. 2000. “The Presentation of the National-Self: Semiotics of National Identity and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Postcards.” PhD diss., Indiana University. Seyhun, Ahmet. 2002. “Said Halim Pasha: An Ottoman Statesman and an Islamist Thinker (1865–1921).” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Seymore, Jennifer Ann. 2001. “The Life of Ibn Ridwan and His Commentary on Ptolemy’s ‘Tetrabiblos.’” PhD diss., Columbia University. Sezgin, Yuksel. 2007. “The State’s Response to Legal Pluralism: The Case of Religious Law and Courts in Israel, Egypt, and India.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Shahin, Aram. 2009. “Struggling for Communitas: Arabian Political Thought in the Great Century of Change (ca. 560–ca. 660 AD).” PhD diss., University of Chicago.

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Shankar, Shylashri. 2002. “The War of the Worlds: Political Equality and Religious Freedom in India and Israel.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Shannon, Jonathan Holt. 2001. “Among the Jasmine Trees: Music, Modernity, and the Aesthetics of Authenticity in Contemporary Syria.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Shehata, Samer Said. 2000. “Plastic Sandals, Tea, and Time: Shop Floor Politics and Culture in Egypt.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Shively, Kim Louise. 2002. “Body and Nation: The Female Body, Religious Radicalism, and Nationalist Discourse in Modern Turkey.” PhD diss., Brandeis University. Shlala, Elizabeth. 2009. “Mediterranean Migration, Cosmopolitanism, and the Law: A History of the Italian Community of Nineteenth-Century Alexandria, Egypt.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Schroeder, Caroline Theresa. 2002. “Disciplining the Monastic Body: Asceticism, Ideology, and Gender in the Egyptian Monastery of Shenoute of Atripe.” PhD diss., Duke University. Shungur, Shantarene. 2006. “Cooperation among Adversaries: Managing Transboundary Water Disputes in Conflict Settings.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Shurkin, Michael Robert. 2000. “French Nation Building, Liberalism, and the Jews of Alsace and Algeria, 1815–1870.” PhD diss., Yale University. Simmons Levin, Leah Karen. 2003. “The Women’s International Zionist Organization at the Critical Juncture of Statehood: A Political Analysis of the Israeli Women’s Movement, 1918–2001.” PhD diss., York University (Canada). Simonsohn, Uriel. 2008. “Overlapping Jurisdictions: Confessional Boundaries and Judicial Choice among Christians and Jews under Early Muslim Rule.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Singh, Ranjit. 2005. “Rulers, Dissent, and Durable Authoritarianism in the Middle East.” PhD diss., University of Virginia. Sisman, Cengiz. 2004. “A Jewish Messiah in the Ottoman Court: Sabbatai Sevi and the Emergence of a Judeo-Islamic Community (1666–1720).” PhD diss., Harvard University. Smith, Elizabeth A. 2006. “Tributaries in the Stream of Civilization: Race, Ethnicity, and National Belonging among Nubians in Egypt.” PhD diss., New York University.

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Smith, Kristin. 2006. “From Petrodollars to Islamic Dollars: The Strategic Construction of Islamic Banking in the Arab Gulf.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Smith, Matthew Chaffee. 2006. “Literary Courage: Language, Land, and the Nation in the Works of Malik al-Shu’ara Bahar.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Sood, Gagan. 2008. “Pluralism, Hegemony, and Custom in Cosmopolitan Islamic Eurasia, ca. 1720–1790, with Particular Reference to the Mercantile Arena.” PhD diss., Yale University. Spiegel, Nina S. 2001. “Jewish Cultural Celebrations and Competitions in Mandatory Palestine, 1920–1947: Body, Beauty, and the Search for Authenticity.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Stachowski, Natalie. 2005. “An Examination of NGOs: The State and Women’s Rights in the Middle East.” MA thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo. Stanton, Andrea. 2007. “A Little Radio Is a Dangerous Thing: State Broadcasting in Mandate Palestine, 1936–1949.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Stearns, Justin. 2007. “Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Medieval Islamic and Christian Thought.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Stebbins, H. Lyman. 2009. “British Consuls and ‘Local’ Imperialism in Iran, 1889–1921.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Stilt, Kristen Ann. 2004. “The Muhtasib, Law, and Society in Early Mamluk Cairo and Fustat (648–802/1250–1400).” PhD diss., Harvard University. Stockdale, Nancy Lea. 2000. “Gender and Colonialism in Palestine, 1800– 1948: Encounters among English, Arab, and Jewish Women.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Stone, Christopher Reed. 2002. “The Rahbani Nation: Musical Theater and Nationalism in Contemporary Lebanon.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Strakes, Jason. 2008. “The Evolution of State Systems: A Comparative Analysis of State Formation and Conflict Processes in Developing Regions.” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University. Sursal, Hilal. 2003. “Gulten Akin, a Pioneering Turkish Woman Poet: Her Life, Poetry and Poetics within Their Social, Historical and Literary Context.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Sussman, Sarah Beth. 2002. “Changing Lands, Changing Identities: The Migration of Algerian Jewry to France, 1954–1967.” PhD diss., Stanford University.

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Tabak, Faruk Yasur. 2000. “The Ottoman Countryside in the Age of the Autumn of the Mediterranean, c. 1560–1870.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Talebi, Shahla. 2007. “The Discriminatory Discourses of Self-Sacrifice: State and Dissident Martyrs in Post-Revolutionary Iran.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Taspinar, Omer. 2002. “Kemalist Identity in Transition: A Case Study of Kurdish Nationalism and Political Islam in Turkey.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University. Taylor, Julie Elaine. 2004. “Prophet Sharing: Strategic Interaction between Islamic Clerics and Middle Eastern Regimes.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Tayyara, Abed el-Rahman. 2005. “The Reflection of Non-Islamic Cultures in Early Islamic Universal Histories.” PhD diss., New York University. Terkan, Fehrullah. 2004. “Recurrence of the Perennial Encounter? AlGhazali and Ibn Rushd on God’s Knowledge.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Terzioglu, Aysecan. 2008. “Experiencing and Explaining Cancer: A Critical Study of Turkish Modernity through the Cancer Patients’ Illness Narratives.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Tetreault, Chantal Marie. 2004. “Communicative Performances of Social Identity in an Algerian-French Neighborhood in Paris.” PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin. Tezcur, Murat Gunes. 2005. “How Do Political Religious Groups Develop Sustainable Democratic Commitments: The Cases of Iran and Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Tiruneh, Gizachew. 2001. “Democratization in Africa: A Cross-National Analysis.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Toksoz, Meltem. 2000. “The Cukurova: From Nomadic Life to Commercial Agriculture, 1800–1908.” PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton. Toronto, Nathan W. 2007. “Why War Is Not Enough: Military Defeat, the Division of Labor, and Military Professionalization.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Trivellato, Francesca. 2004. “Trading Diasporas and Trading Networks in the Early Modern Period: A Sephardic Partnership of Livorno in the Mediterranean, Europe, and Portuguese India (ca. 1700–1750).” PhD diss., Brown University.

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Trumbull, George Rea I. V. 2005. “An Empire of Facts: Ethnography and the Politics of Cultural Knowledge in French Algeria, 1871–1914.” PhD diss., Yale University. Tug, Basak. 2009. “Politics of Honor: The Institutional and Social Frontiers of ‘Illicit’ Sex in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia.” PhD diss., New York University. Tugal, Cihan Ziya. 2003. “Islamism among the Urban Poor of Turkey: Religion, Space, and Class in Everyday Political Interaction.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Turkoz, Meltem F. 2004. “The Social Life of the State’s Fantasy: Memories and Documents on Turkey’s 1934 Surname Law.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Turner, John Persons. 2001. “Inquisition and the Definition of Identity in Early Abbasid History.” PhD diss., University of Michigan. Usenmez, Ozgur. 2007. “Backlash: A Neo-Gramscian Approach to the Rise of Political Islam in Turkey.” PhD diss., City University of New York. Vaidyanathan, Karthik. 2010. “Explaining Unexpected Electoral Openings in Authoritarian Systems: A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Elections.” PhD diss., University of California, San Diego. Vance, Sharon. 2005. “Sol Ha-Saddikah: Historical Figure, Saint, Literary Heroine.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. VanDenBerg, Jeffrey Allan. 2000. “Democratization and Foreign Policy in the Middle East: A Case Study of Jordan and Egypt.” PhD diss., University of Cincinnati. Velcamp, Theresa Alfaro. 2001. “Peddling Identity: Arabs, Conflict, Community, and the Mexican Nation in the Twentieth Century.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Volk, Lucia. 2001. “Missing the Nation: Lebanon’s Post-War Generation in the Midst of Reconstruction.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Vora, Neha. 2008. “Participatory Exclusion: The Emirati State, Forms of Belonging, and Dubai’s Indian Middle Class.” PhD diss., University of California, Irvine. Wahyudi, Yudian. 2002. “The Slogan ‘Back to the Qur’an and the Sunna’: A Comparative Study of the Responses of Hasan Hanafi, Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri and Nurcholish Madjid.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada).

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Wannas-Jones, Jenny. 2003. “Globalization and the Reconciliation of Dissonant Hybrid Identities: A Case Study of Canadian-Arab Youths.” PhD diss., University of Alberta (Canada). Warrick, Catherine Elizabeth. 2002. “Law in the Service of Legitimacy: Gender and the Political System in Jordan.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Watts, Nicole Frances. 2001. “Routes to Ethnic Resistance: Virtual Kurdistan West and the Transformation of Kurdish Politics in Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Weber, Charlotte E. 2003. “Making Common Cause? Western and Middle Eastern Feminists in the International Women’s Movement, 1911–1948.” PhD diss., Ohio State University. Weber, Elka Naomi. 2001. “Traveling through Text: Message and Method in Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts.” PhD diss., New York University. Wei, Li. 2000. “Call Auction or Continuous Trading: An Empirical Investigation of Investors’ Preference at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Weiss, Max. 2007. “Institutionalizing Sectarianism: Law, Religious Culture, and the Remaking of Shi`i Lebanon, 1920–1947.” PhD diss., Stanford University. Werthmuller, Kurt. 2007. “An In-Between Space: An Archival and Textual Study of Coptic Identity and Ayyubid Politics in Egypt, 1171–1250 CE.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Williams, Rebecca. 2007. “An Analysis of the Supernatural Archetype of the Prophet Muhammad as Found in the Sira/Ta’rikh and Tafsir Works of al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir.” PhD diss., McGill University (Canada). Wilson, Stephanie Gerber. 2006. “‘Cultural Citadel’: Creating Jerusalem’s Tower of David Museum.” PhD diss., Brandeis University. Winegar, Jessica R. 2003. “Claiming Egypt: The Cultural Politics of Artistic Practice in a Postcolonial Society.” PhD diss., New York University. Witteborn, Saskia. 2005. “Collective Identities of People of Arab Descent: An Analysis of the Situated Expression of Ethnic, Panethnic, National, and Religious Identifications.” PhD diss., University of Washington. Wittman, Richard. 2008. “Before Qadi and Grand Vizier: Intra-Communal Dispute Resolution and Legal Transactions among Christians and Jews in the Plural Society of Seventeenth-Century Istanbul.” PhD diss., Harvard University.

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Wolfe, Elizabeth Reynolds. 2000. “Cold War Cities: Taipei, Isfahan, Havana. Competitive Grand Strategy and Urban Change.” PhD diss., New York University. Woodall, G. Carole. 2008. “Sensing the City: Sound, Movement, and the Night in 1920s Istanbul.” PhD diss., New York University. Wright, Christopher James. 2006. “Ibn ‘abd al-Hakam’s ‘Futuh Misr’: An Analysis of the Text and New Insights into the Islamic Conquest of Egypt.” PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara. Wynn, Lisa Lorraine. 2003. “From the Pyramids to Pyramids Road: An Ethnography of the Idea of Egypt.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Wyrtzen, Jonathan. 2009. “Constructing Morocco: The Colonial Struggle to Define the Nation, 1912–1956.” PhD diss., Georgetown University. Yadav, Stacey. 2007. “Islamist Parliamentary Politics and the Remaking of Democracy: Hizballah and Islah in Comparative Perspective.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Yaghoubian, David Nejde. 2000. “Ethnicity, Identity, and the Development of Nationalism in Iran.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley. Yang, Bo. 2004. “OPEC Behavior.” PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University. Yasar, Gamze. 2006. “A Comparison between State Strategies toward Islamism in Turkey and Egypt.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Yazigi, Maya Ramez. 2001. “The Politics of Kinship: The Family of Abu Bakr during the First Century of Islam.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Yilmaz, Hale. 2006. “Reform, Social Change and State-Society Encounters in Early Republican Turkey.” PhD diss., University of Utah. Yom, Sean. 2009. “Iron Fists in Silk Gloves: Building Political Regimes in the Middle East.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Yosmaoglu-Turner, Ipek. 2005. “The Priest’s Robe and the Rebel’s Rifle: Communal Conflict and the Construction of National Identity in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908.” PhD diss., Princeton University. Younsi, Rochdi Ali. 2003. “Caught in a Colonial Triangle: Competing Loyalties within the Jewish Community of Algeria, 1842–1943.” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Young, Amy Elizabeth. 2005. “Convincing Women: Global Rights, Local Families, and the Moroccan Women’s Rights Movement.” PhD diss., Harvard University.

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Yucesoy, Hayrettin. 2002. “The Seventh of the ‘Abbasids and the Millennium: A Study of the Fourth Civil War and the Reign of al-Ma’mun (193–218 AH/808–833 CE).” PhD diss., University of Chicago. Yukleyen, Ahmet. 2007. “The European Market for Islam: Turkish Islamic Communities and Organizations in Germany and the Netherlands.” PhD diss., Boston University. Yurdakul, Gokcecicek. 2006. “Mobilizing Kreuzberg: Political Representation, Immigrant Incorporation and Turkish Associations in Berlin.” PhD diss., University of Toronto (Canada). Zaatari, Zeina Mohamad Bassam. 2003. “Women Activists of South Lebanon.” PhD diss., University of California, Davis. Zaborowski, Jason R. 2003. “The Neo-Martyr John of Phanijoit: A Late Coptic Text Describing a Public Conversion from Islam to Christianity in Ayyubid Cairo.” PhD diss., Catholic University of America. Zack, Lizabeth Anne. 2001. “The Formation of ‘French’ and ‘Algerian’ Political Identities.” PhD diss., New School University. Zens, Robert W. 2004. “The Ayanlik and Pasvanoglu Osman Pasa of Vidin in the Age of Ottoman Social Change, 1791–1815.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison. Zorlu-Durukan, Sefika Akile. 2006. “The Ideological Pillars of Turkish Education: Emergent Kemalism and the Zenith of Single-Party Rule.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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chapter eight

Islamic Studies in US Universities Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

The study of the Islamic religious tradition in US universities is an enterprise carried out across a variety of institutional frameworks, each of which presents certain limitations. As in Europe, Islamic studies in the United States originated in the tradition of Orientalist scholarship and Christian theology, with its strong textual emphasis, but it has gradually expanded to overlap with Middle East area studies as well as a number of humanistic and social science disciplines, especially religious studies. This brief overview of the institutional locations and political context of Islamic studies in American universities is intended to clarify the different kinds of research and teaching relevant to Islamic studies and how they relate to the contemporary political and cultural situation. We conclude with a discussion of some of the organizational challenges facing Islamic studies in US higher education (for a comparative international overview of the field, see Subject Centre for Languages et al. 2008; Hafez 2014).

The Boom in Islamic Studies Over the past several decades, and especially since 9/11, scholarly interest in Islamic studies has mushroomed. “Everyone is interested in Islam now and in different topics related to Islam,” as one scholar put it in an interview for the project Production of Knowledge on World Regions (see the introduction to this volume).1 We can track this rise in a variety of ways. First, let’s look at the number of doctoral dissertations produced on Islam and Muslims over

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Figure 8.1. Percentage of dissertations with a focus on Islam and Muslims, 1960–2010.

the past half century. As a percentage of all dissertations in the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database, Islamic studies themes grew from less than 1 percent prior to the late 1970s to 3 percent in the 1980s and 1990s to over 4 percent since 2001 (Figure 8.1).2 Another indicator of scholarly interest in Islamic subjects is the percentage of articles in the flagship journals of various academic disciplines. Figure 8.2 shows rolling five-year rates for eight such journals over the past half century: the American Academy of Religion’s Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the American Anthropological Association’s American Anthropologist, the American Economics Association’s American Economic Review, the American Historical Association’s American Historical Review, the American Political Science Association’s American Political Science Review, the American Public Health Association’s American Journal of Public Health, the American Psychological Association’s American Psychologist, the American Sociological Association’s American Sociological Review, and the Association of American Geographers’Annals.3 The numbers jump around considerably, and we do not know if these patterns hold for other journals, but we can draw several preliminary conclusions: The rates of scholarly attention to Islam and Muslims remain low, under 10 percent of articles for all but a handful of five-year periods. These eight journals published 252 articles on these subjects, out of 11,172 total articles, or 2.3 percent.

Islamic Studies in US Universities 321

Figure 8.2. Percentage of articles with a focus on Islam and Muslims in eight flagship journals, 1960–2010. Note: The thick line is the average for the eight journals; the thin lines are five-year moving averages.

The rates differ by discipline: psychology and public health are consistently among the lowest; anthropology and religious studies are generally among the highest. These rates are affected significantly by special issues, such as the eight articles in the thematic supplement on the Qur’an and Qur’anic exegesis in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion ( JAAR) in 1979 and the five articles on the historiography of the Middle East in the American Historical Review (AHR) in December 1991, each of which accounts for the jumps in the five-year rates for the JAAR in the early 1980s and the AHR in the early 1990s (Welch 1979; “The Modern Middle East” 1991, iv). The average rate rose throughout the past half century but accelerated after 2001. This is particularly clear when the time periods are dichotomized, as

322 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

Table 8.1. Articles on Islam and Muslims in Social Scientific Flagship Journals

American Economic Review

American Historical Review

American Psychologist

American Sociological Review

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Journal of American Academy of Religion

American Political Science Review

Percentage of articles on Islam and Muslims, before and after 9/11

American Anthropologist

Period

1960–2001

6.6

1.0

1.5

1.9

0.9

1.1

2.8

4.4

2002–2010

9.5

1.5

6.1

3.9

3.8

3.6

3.2

11.2

in Table 8.1: seven of the eight journals devoted more coverage to Islam and Muslims since 2002 than before, and five of eight more than doubled their coverage.

This jump in attention to Islamic studies has spurred an “avalanche” of books and articles intended “to give us a crash course in, as the phrase goes, ‘understanding Islam’” (Geertz 2003, 27). Those of us who chose to study Islamic subjects prior to 2001 have mixed feelings about the sudden surge of interest. Naturally, we are gratified to be taken seriously, and we welcome the improved career prospects. At the same time, it is disconcerting that this attention derives in large part from overblown fears of security threats: “It’s not just that the field benefits from Muslims committing atrocities, but that it benefits also from non-Muslims’ ignorance and paranoia. As a result, Islamic studies scholars spend much of their time in the limelight trying to dispel the very stereotypes that helped bring them to prominence” (Kurzman 2007b, 519–20). The rise in attention to Islamic studies also raises the question of how to organize this sort of work in the context of American academia. Over the past century, universities have experimented with several institutional formats for this field, and none of them has proved entirely satisfactory.

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The Organization of Islamic Studies in the United States The first professor of Islamic studies in the United States may have been Duncan Black Macdonald, a professor of Semitic languages at the Hartford Theological Seminary, who was appointed director of the “Mohammedan department” at the Kennedy School of Missions when the seminary established the school in 1911. However, interest in Islam was noticeable among intellectuals in America as early as the eighteenth century. Thomas Jefferson owned a translation of the Qur’an, and there were a number of American subscribers to the publications of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the 1790s (e.g., Asiatick Researches). This interest began to be institutionalized with the formation of the American Oriental Society in New Haven in 1843. Arabic language was taught first at Yale University in 1841, though it was only available at half a dozen universities by 1900 (Starkey 1965). In the early twentieth century, several departments of Oriental studies were established at the older American universities, typically including within their purview everything from China and Japan to India and the Near East. By the 1960s, Oriental studies was typically split into different sections, with departments of Near Eastern languages and civilizations emerging as the home for research on Islam and Muslim societies, alongside study of the ancient Near East (for a brief overview, see Mahdi 1997). Near Eastern studies departments were found primarily in the older universities of the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia) but were also established at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan. Eventually they were joined by a dozen or so other leading universities, both public and private. In a 1976 review of the field, Charles Adams distinguished four main approaches to the study of the Islamic religious tradition: (1) normative or religious approaches, whether by Christian missionaries, Muslim apologists, or advocates of interfaith dialogue; (2) philological and historical approaches; (3) social scientific approaches; and (4) the phenomenological approach associated with the history of religions. Nevertheless, he concluded that “the study of Islam as a religion is grossly underdeveloped in the centers of higher learning in North America” (Adams 1976, 53; see also 34–54). The discipline of Islamic studies, as a rubric for a field of study, emerged in the mid-twentieth century (Hitti 1941, 292– 94). The first entity in North America to take on this title was the Institute of Islamic Studies founded at McGill in 1952. In the United States, the field of Islamic studies was

324 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

popularized by the writings of Gustave E. von Grunebaum, who had joined the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1949, although the center he founded there in 1957 was called the Center for Near Eastern Studies (von Grunebaum 1954; Laroui 1973; Banani 1975). The first Islamic studies center in the United States was the Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the Hartford Theological Seminary in 1973— a somewhat specialized center at a seminary rather than a university (see Bijlefeld 1993).4 Villanova established its Center for Arab and Islamic Studies in 1983, but a listing of Islamic studies centers in the United States in 1992 identified only two more centers based at colleges and universities: the American Institute for Islamic Affairs at American University and the Institute for Islamic-Judaic Studies at the University of Denver (Koszegi and Melton 1992, 303– 5). Both are now defunct, as are the Institutes for Muslim Studies at two Christian schools: Wheaton College and William Tyndale College. Since then, more than two dozen centers have emerged, most since 9/11 (see Table 8.2). Many of these centers combine Islamic studies with an area studies or interfaith focus; several are designed for missionary training at Christian seminaries. A similar pattern emerges for interdisciplinary programs and departments in Islamic studies. This is difficult to pin down with any accuracy, but it appears that the first such program in the United States was established in the 1960s by von Grunebaum’s Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Ohio State University founded an Islamic studies program in the mid-1980s, separate from the campus’s Center for Middle East Studies. At Columbia University, the School of General Studies has offered the Liberal Studies MA Program in Islamic Studies since 1987, administratively separate from Columbia’s Middle East Institute and its Department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures. Texas’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies started Islamic studies programs in the 1990s, and at least two dozen schools have established interdisciplinary Islamic studies programs since 2001, most of them offering undergraduate majors or minors (Table 8.3). At least two area studies departments have added Islamic studies to their titles: Georgetown’s Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and New York University’s Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies, both of which changed their names in 2004 (NYU’s department, founded in 1966, was called Near Eastern Languages and Literatures until 1995).

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Table 8.2. Centers for Islamic Studies in US Universities School

Center

Year Established

Hartford Theological Seminary

Duncan Black Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations

1973

Villanova University

Center for Arab and Islamic Studies

1983

American University

American Institute for Islamic Affairs

Before 1992 (now defunct)

University of Denver

Institute for Islamic-Judaic Studies

Before 1992 (now defunct)

Wheaton College

Institute for Muslim Studies

Before 1992 (now defunct)

William Tyndale College

Institute for Muslim Studies

Before 1992 (now defunct)

Georgetown University

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding

1993

Youngstown State University

Center for Islamic Studies

1995

University of California, Santa Barbara

Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies

1997

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill–Duke University–Emory University

Carolina–Duke–Emory Institute for the Study of Islam

1997 (now inactive)

University of Arkansas

King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies

2000

Columbia International University

Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies

2000

San Diego State University

Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies

2000

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations

2003

United States Naval Academy

Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies

2005

Boston University

Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations

2006

Duke University

Duke Islamic Studies Center

2006

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice

2006

Table 8.2. Centers for Islamic Studies in US Universities (continued) School

Center

Year Established

Graduate Theological Union

Center for Islamic Studies

2007

Merrimack College

Center for Jewish-ChristianMuslim Relations

2008

University of Southern California and the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion

Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement

2008

Chicago Theological Seminary Center for Jewish, Christian and Islamic Studies

2009

George Mason University

Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies

2009

Lehigh University

Center for Global Islamic Studies

2009

Assemblies of God Theological Seminary

Center for Islamic Studies

2010

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam

2011

Southern Evangelical Seminary

Institute of Islamic Studies

2011

University of Florida

Center for Global Islamic Studies

2014

St. Bonaventure University

Center for Arab and Islamic Studies

2015

Note: This list may not be comprehensive.

The institutional arrangements for Islamic studies programs vary tremendously. Some are hosted in a Middle East studies department (e.g., Texas and Washington) or a Middle East center (e.g., Berkeley). Some are hosted by campus international centers (e.g., Michigan State, UCLA, and the University of Michigan). At schools without Middle East departments or centers, the programs are housed in a particular department (e.g., religious studies at University of North Carolina– Charlotte) or in the college of arts and sciences (e.g., George Mason, Ohio State, and San Francisco State). Similarly, universities and donors have begun to establish endowed chairs in Islamic studies, most of them open to a variety of disciplines, not just religious studies. The first ones in the United States seem to have been the Ibn Khaldun Chair in Islamic Studies at American University (1981), the King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of California,

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Table 8.3. US University Programs in Islamic Studies School

Year Established

University of California, Los Angeles

1960s

Columbia University

1980s

Ohio State University

1980s

University of California, Berkeley

1990s

University of Texas at Austin

1990s

Boston College (Middle East and Islamic Studies; renamed Islamic Civilization and Societies in 2007)

2002

University of Kentucky

2002

George Mason University

2003

Stanford University

2003

DePaul University (Islamic World Studies)

2004

Georgetown University (Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, formerly Department of Arabic Studies)

2004

New York University (Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, formerly Department of Middle Eastern Studies)

2004

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

2004

Harvard University

2005

Michigan State University (Muslim Studies)

2005

University of Louisville

2006

University of Nebraska at Omaha

2006

University of Washington (added to the Arabic Program)

2006

Boston University (Muslim Cultures and Muslim Societies)

2007

San Francisco State University

2007

Swarthmore College

2007

University of Delaware

2007

Lake Forest College

2008

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Middle East and Islamic Studies)

2009

Indiana University

2010

University of Michigan

2010

University of Central Florida

2011

California State University at Northridge

2012

Emory University (Islamic Civilizations Studies)

2012

University of Detroit, Mercy

2012

Johns Hopkins University

2014

Connecticut College (Global Islamic Studies)

2015

Note: This list may not be comprehensive.

Santa Barbara (1990), the King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies at Harvard Law School (1993), and the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago (1997). More than a half dozen chairs have been founded since 9/11, including the Humphrey Distinguished Visiting Chair in Islamic World Studies at Macalester College (2003), the Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies at John Carroll (2003), the Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies at Toledo (2006), the Gorter Chair in Islamic Studies at Duke (2007), the Gorter Chair of Islamic World Studies at Lake Forest College (2007), the IIIT Chair at George Mason (2008), and the Mirza Family Professorship of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies at Notre Dame (2015). These developments suggest a variety of avenues for the institutionalization of Islamic studies in US universities. We look at several of these in turn and address some of the uncomfortable limitations that they present.

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations The first academic units to house Islamic studies in the United States were Departments of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, sometimes known by the abbreviation NELC. Since the range of specialties of these departments extended from the cuneiform civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia to medieval Islam and Judaism and eventually to the contemporary literatures of the Middle East, they were really to be seen as loose collections of linguistic and textual expertise, housed together for convenience because of their geographic association. If Near Eastern studies departments shared any intellectual perspective, it was the Orientalism that was fostered by a reliance on philological methods and a nearly exclusive focus on texts. Much has been written on this subject, particularly since the 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which may be said to have overstated the case by painting all Orientalist scholars with the same brush, suggesting active collusion with colonialism or, at best, bad faith as a standard characteristic of the profession. Nevertheless, it may be observed that many Orientalist scholars shared basic presuppositions of European (and by implication American) superiority to the African and Asian peoples whom they colonized. The scientific West was opposed to the superstitious mystic East, and scientific racial theory and the consequent widely accepted racism supported these generalizations. But the philological method encouraged the notion that, armed with a dictionary

Islamic Studies in US Universities 329

and a grammar, the armchair scholar of Oriental languages could decipher all that was important about the culture and character of Orientals. For many European and American intellectuals nineteenth-century ideas of culture and religion included the widespread notion that religion could be defined in terms of an unchanging essence determined by scriptural texts (the Protestant underpinnings of this presupposition often went unchallenged). Religion could thus in principle be detached from history and understood from texts alone (Ernst and Martin 2010). In a lengthy review article written in 1978, Marilyn Robinson Waldman remarked, “In Islamic studies, interdisciplinary research is still in its prehistory, as full of hazards as it is of potential . . . [because] linguistic, not theoretical, expertise has continued to be the sine qua non for writing Islamic history” (545– 46). This legacy of Orientalist scholarship is very much alive in Near Eastern languages and civilizations departments today, in terms of the persistence of the philological approach and a disinterest in applying other disciplinary approaches, although to be sure there have been notable contributions in these areas of textual study and in the study of modern history. Many dissertations in Islamic studies coming out of these departments focus nearly exclusively on primary texts from the eighth to twelfth centuries, with emphasis on normative disciplines like Islamic law. These studies are often unrelieved by anything more than a modicum of reference to theoretical studies of modern authors in fields like literary theory or moral philosophy; in other words, they replicate medieval texts rather than interpret them in terms of contemporary disciplinary and interdisciplinary issues. Such an approach has very little to do with the kind of teaching and research that goes on in the vast majority of jobs available in liberal arts colleges, since few graduates of NELC departments will find placement in the kind of department in which they were trained. The occasional students who attempt to go outside the narrow framework of Near Eastern texts—and there are a few—have to overcome significant institutional obstacles in order to include, for example, an examination field in Buddhism as a comparative tonic to alleviate the monotony of the standard diet. The traditional NELC approach to Islamic studies has faced increasing challenges from post-Orientalist Islamic studies, which has sought to address not only the canon of classical texts but also the recent history of Muslims and non-Muslims, not only in the traditional homelands of Islam but also in Europe and America. Increasing attention was paid to stereotypes and negative images of Muslims, from medieval times to the colonial and postcolonial contexts. 330 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

Media and popular culture representations of Islam, which for many Americans are the only source of information about Muslims, themselves became the subject of analysis. Feminism and gender studies brought valuable new perspectives, particularly concerning the roles of women but also in terms of reconsideration of all aspects of gender. Ethnography and anthropology focused on small-scale societies with intensive study of the actual practices found in particular locations, providing an important corrective to the often idealized pictures to be found in classical texts. The new ideologies of the late twentieth century, including fundamentalism, Salafism, and Wahhabi movements, claimed attention as legitimate subjects of inquiry. And while there was much superficial instant analysis of terrorism by journalistic “experts,” the nature of jihadist movements also became a subject of serious academic research. Also spurring these changes was the changing demographics of North America, which brought increasing numbers of Muslims—and Hindus, Buddhists, and others—into college classrooms and eventually into the professoriate as well. The presence of Muslims in Europe and North America, though the focus of strident anti-immigrant sentiment, has also contributed to a rethinking of colonial oppositions, including the increasingly threadbare binary of “the West and Islam” as articulated by ideologues promoting or predicting a clash of civilizations. It is increasingly accepted that there is no separate “Muslim world” on a separate planet that is unconnected from “the West.” Scholars have had to acknowledge that there is no society that is 100 percent Muslim, therefore any concrete social situation of Muslims will include interactions with members of other religious traditions. The comparative dimension is also enriched by regional and cross-regional studies that not only examine distinctive and rich local traditions that intersect with Islamic scriptural resources but also permit examination of different Muslim regions in terms of a single category or variable. Other disciplines such as literary theory, alongside social science analyses, help to provide a needed depth and breadth of thought to take Islamic studies research outside of the Orientalist framework. Most of these developments were already taking place well before 2001 (Hermansen 1991, 1993; Wheeler 1998; Ernst 1998).

Religious Studies A second academic home for Islamic studies on American campuses has been religious studies departments, which are located in over 1,400

Islamic Studies in US Universities 331

undergraduate colleges and universities throughout North America (this figure does not include predominantly religious institutions such as seminaries, Bible colleges, yeshivas, or Islamic academies).5 Religious studies played an important role in the establishment of American private universities, beginning with the foundation of Harvard in 1636 for the training of ministers. Gradually, most church-related colleges and universities have severed their formal connections with the religious organizations that sponsored their beginnings. By the 1960s, the discipline of religious studies was seen as playing an important role in the American understanding of religious pluralism and the legal doctrine of separation of church and state. Intellectually speaking, religious studies therefore took a descriptive and analytical perspective instead of performing a prescriptive or authoritative function in the public regulation of religion. Legally speaking, the US Supreme Court distinguished “teaching about religion” as an academic activity taking place in schools and universities from “teaching religion” as the inculcation of doctrines and habits appropriate for the formation of particular religious communities. These Court decisions not only authorized “teaching about religion” in the public schools but also confirmed the importance of the comparative study of religion in public universities as an appropriate method for educating citizens in a pluralistic society.6 From its original typical concentration on biblical studies and Protestant theology, which reflected the religious origins of many American colleges, the curriculum of these religious studies departments began to expand in the 1960s (for overviews of the development of religious studies as a discipline, see Sharpe 1986; de Vries 1967). It was not long before Judaism, Catholicism, and the Asian traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shinto began to be commonly encountered as academic subjects. Islamic studies has also been incorporated into religious studies curricula. However, the number of specialists in this field remains very low, according to the faculty listings in the Directory of Departments and Programs of Religious Studies in North America, which was published annually from the late 1970s until 2002. These directories had to be counted by hand, so we selected three years to check for change during this period: 1981, 1991, and 2001 (see Table 8.4).7 Among all departments in the directory in these years, the percentage with an Islamic studies specialist on their faculty almost doubled, though it was still under 10 percent in 2001. Among the religious studies departments with graduate programs— the approximately two dozen members of the Council of Graduate Studies

332 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

Table 8.4. Percentage of Departments of Religious Studies with an Islamic Studies Specialist on the Faculty Year

Council on Graduate Studies in Religion

All Departments

1981

36.0

4.6

1991

48.0

5.7

2001

57.9

9.0

in Religion—the ratio rose from 36 to 58 percent, though even among these departments the commitment to Islamic studies varies considerably.8 Part of this increase is due to the growing number of scholars who have been trained in Islamic studies (as shown in Figure 8.1) and the growing number of jobs in this field (discussed below). Part of the change may also be due to scholars who were trained in Islamic studies and hired and listed under the category “history of religions,” a broad field that includes many traditions from around the world, and later changed their profiles to refer specifically to Islam. John L. Esposito, for example, was listed in 1981 and 1991 as a scholar of “history of religions (Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism)”; in 2001, he was listed as a professor of “religion and international affairs, Islamic studies.” Despite a lack of formal training in the field, others appear to have added Islamic studies to their profiles as student interest has increased the demand for courses in this area. Since 9/11 the demand for Islamic studies has grown considerably in the field of religious studies. The number of advertised academic positions in Islamic studies, which averaged about five per year before 2001, jumped to twenty-two per year in 2002–5 and thirty-two jobs per year in 2006– 9, according to statistics maintained by Omid Safi of the Islam Section of the American Academy of Religion.9 Three quarters of these jobs were in religious studies departments, and many were in private liberal arts colleges. A similar pattern is visible at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the major national academic organization in the field of religious studies, formed in 1964 as a transformation of the National Association of Biblical Instructors. The AAR conference had only a single paper on the topic of Islamic studies in 1973 (Adams 1974). There are now six academic sections devoted to Islamic studies at the AAR’s annual conference, with over a hundred papers presented annually on Islamic topics. The conference also holds workshops on best practices in teaching topics like

Islamic Studies in US Universities 333

performance, gender, American Islam, and visual/literary culture, encouraging scholars of Islamic studies to gain exposure to methodologies outside their specialist training. One drawback to the hosting of Islamic studies efforts in religious studies departments is the perception that it limits the interdisciplinarity of the field. To the extent that religious studies is seen as a single discipline, rather than an interdisciplinary home for studies related to religion, placing Islamic studies in this department may generate jealousies among Islamic studies scholars whose primary appointments are in other disciplines. These scholars may feel that any program in religious studies necessarily privileges the religious aspects of Muslim societies and undervalues other aspects, such as culture, demography, history, or politics, despite the broadened understandings of religious studies in recent years.

Middle East Studies If Islamic studies in the United States grew out of Arabic language study and Orientalist textual analysis, Middle East studies emerged from contemporary geopolitical concerns. The term “Middle East,” as a region of the world, first came into use just over a century ago. The earliest usage we have located, using newly available digital databases of nineteenth-century periodicals, is in Harper’s Bazaar in 1883: “Locusts and wild honey were the food of John the Baptist in the wilderness; Aristotle gives advice about eating grasshoppers; and the Persians, Arabians, and other people of the dry Middle East have always included them, and do yet, in their bill of fare” (“Curiosities of Diet” 1883, 154). By the end of the century, the term had migrated east from Arab lands toward Iran and Afghanistan and was used specifically with reference to the Great Game being played in this region by the United Kingdom and Russia. Years ago there was a Pennsylvania man, said to have been born a Quaker, who plunged into the Middle East among the Afghans, became a soldier there, and wrote a strange book detailing his adventures. (“Strange Career” 1898, BR462) Now that the country has done its crying over spilt milk in the Far East, we venture to put to Downing Street the question in regard to the Middle East which we asked some weeks since: Has it taken advantage of Sir

334 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

Mortimer Durand’s trip home to formulate a British policy in Persia? If nothing has been settled, it is as certain as there are Cossacks in Turkestan that we shall have a Port Arthur “surprise” in the Land of the Lion and the Sun one of these days. (D. L. 1898, 455– 56) It may be assumed that the most sensitive part of our external policy in the Middle East is the preservation of the independence and integrity of Persia and Afghanistan. (Gordon 1900, 413; see also Koppes 1976, 95–98)

The most famous early usage of the term came from Alfred Thayer Mahan, an American naval strategist (and namesake of the building that now houses the Naval Academy’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies), who envisioned the region as crucial territory that commanded the sea routes in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean: “The Middle East, if I may adopt a term which I have not seen, will some day need its Malta, as well as its Gibraltar”— that is, colonized docking stations for imperial fleets (Mahan 1902, 27–45; see also Davison 1960; Keddie 1973; Adelson 1995; Bonine, Amanat, and Gasper 2011). The region we refer to today as the Middle East came to be institutionalized in British and US government bodies during and after World War II. It remained a foreign policy category, even as it was exported to university structures as part of the area studies framework of the Cold War, along with South Asia, East Asia, and other “regions” that were the chief theaters for the political dramas of the time. In academic circles the term “Middle East” came to be applied primarily to North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and regions to the east as far as Afghanistan and Pakistan (Kurzman 2007a). The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA), for example, includes in its coverage Spain, India, and Central Asia in connection with the periods of Islamicate civilization in those areas. “Middle East” threw together disparate ethnolinguistic communities that had no sense of themselves as a single region. A half century later, however, the term has been translated word for word in the region, though it is used more widely in some languages than others: al-sharq al-awsat in Arabic, mizrah ha-tikhon in Hebrew, khavar-i miyanah in Persian, and orta doīu in Turkish. By the 1960s, area studies emerged as a new academic category, supported by the US Department of Education under its Title VI program (named after the authorizing legislation). Currently there are over one hundred Title VI National Resource Centers devoted to different fields of area studies, of

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which presently sixteen are devoted to Middle East studies. From a practical point of view, it is important to note that the centers receiving support from the Department of Education frequently benefit from graduate fellowships that can be offered to students specializing in the study of relevant languages; formerly these were known as National Defense Foreign Language fellowships, a name evidently designed to stress the connection to national security, though they were later retitled Foreign Language Area Studies fellowships. Area studies as a field by its very nature stresses contemporary policy issues and encourages a multidisciplinary approach to a particular region. While some universities offer academic degrees in Middle East studies at different levels, ranging from BA to MA to PhD, it is more common for students to receive degrees in other disciplines (anthropology, history, political science) with a specialization in a particular area such as the Middle East. The scholars who led Middle East studies were hostile to Orientalist modes of inquiry, which they saw as antiquarian and unsuited to contemporary, policy-relevant research. Leonard Binder, a pioneer in Middle East studies, expressed this view respectfully but forcefully in an assessment of the field in the 1970s: “We are nearly all agreed now that we wish to study Islamic civilization as related to the living societies of the Middle East today. This goal leads us beyond the possibilities of Orientalism and must naturally subvert the orientalist’s notion of good scholarship” (1976, 10). Several years later, Edward Said famously denounced Binder and Middle East studies as the “new American Orientalism” for the assumption that their subject of study existed objectively, outside of their efforts to conjure it up (1979, 300). In keeping with modernizationist theories of secularization, which were popular at the time when area studies was founded, the first decades of Middle East studies treated Islam as a premodern phenomenon that was projected to recede in importance as the region “entered history” (Lerner 1958). The Iranian Revolution of 1978– 79 caused some in the field to rethink this position, but the real rise in interest in Islamic studies within Middle East area studies came in the 1990s, as shown in MESA’s Roster of Members, which has been published almost every other year since 1968. Since 1984, the Roster has included an open-field list of each member’s research interests. We looked at the rosters for every eight years since that time (see Table 8.5). “Islam” appeared in the research interests of 24 percent of MESA members in 1984 and 1992, then jumped to 34 percent in 2000 and 38 percent in 2008.

336 Charles Kurzman and Carl W. Ernst

Table 8.5. Percentage of MESA Members Listing Islam among Their Research Interests Year

Percent

1984

23.8

1992

24.0

2000

33.8

2008

37.6

By 2000, this increased interest in Islam had found its way into the pages of MESA’s flagship journal, International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). Figure 8.3 uses the Historical Abstracts database to count every research article with “Islam*” in its title or abstract each year from IJMES’s founding in 1970 through 2010.10 From the 1970s through the 1990s, 17 percent of the titles and abstracts made some reference to Islam; in 2000, this rate jumped to 44 percent, and it has averaged 33 percent since then. The Challenge of Crossing Regional Boundaries Any regional boundary divides neighbors from neighbors.11 The Middle East, like all geographic regions, imposes constraints on research subjects that cross over regional boundaries. As some scholars have pointed out: Migration has flowed for centuries in and out of the region. Several societies of the Middle East are composed heavily of immigrants from outside of the region: large communities of laborers from South and Southeast Asia in the Gulf, for example, or Russian Jews in Israel, and return migrants from the Americas and Europe throughout the region. Migration of Hadhramautis to and from Yemen has marked Indian Ocean populations for centuries (Ho 2006). Religious movements reverberate between the Middle East and Muslim communities across the globe. One dramatic image of this phenomenon is ripped from the headlines: If al-Qaeda terrorists move from Saudi Arabia or Yemen to Pakistan or Malaysia, must Middle East studies stop studying them? Less hyperbolically, but involving far larger numbers, the transregional character is crucial to some Sufi orders (Ernst and Lawrence 2002).

Islamic Studies in US Universities 337

Figure 8.3. IJMES articles with a focus on Islam, 1970–2010.

Educational centers such as al-Azhar in Cairo and Islamic colleges in Mecca and Medina attract students from around the world, drawing on Islamic traditions of traveling for studies that date back more than a millennium. Indonesian nationalism, for example, emerged in large part in the dormitories of Cairo and Arabia (Laffan 2003). Global communications are actively consumed via the Internet and satellite television in many parts of the Middle East. In Iran, for example, despite the government’s periodic attempts to crack down on satellite dishes, contraband DVDs, and Internet usage, many young people are more familiar with the oeuvre of Jean-Claude Van Damme and other Hollywood immigrants than US-based academics are.

As Islamic studies continues its evolution from ancient texts to contemporary religious developments, these sorts of region-busting themes are increasingly important, as described by the three-year Thematic Conversation on CrossRegional Approaches to Middle East Studies held at MESA’s annual meetings in 2005– 7.

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Studying flows and linkages across regional boundaries. Research that focuses on the movement of ideas, cultures, people, and goods in and out of the territory defined as “Middle East” follows the subject of study wherever it may lead. Studying our subjects’ geographic visions, whether these may be regional, network-based, diasporic, or religious. Regional boundaries as a subject of study. The construction and maintenance of regional definitions are themselves worthy of research, especially the ways in which places and peoples come to be included and excluded. Redefining regions as cores without boundaries. In practice, MESA is moving in this direction, embracing work that is tangential to the core areas of the Middle East while maintaining its primary focus on the lands and peoples that are central to the post–World War II definition of the region. Comparison of cases in different regions. The particularities of any single place can only be identified by contrast with other places. Collaboration teams of scholars may be necessary in order to explore such contrasts systematically. Exploring questions of interest to multiple regions. Rather than research subjects of interest exclusively or primarily to Middle East specialists, scholars may engage in disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that are central to broader intellectual circles.

Yet scholars who wish to explore these approaches frequently face institutional challenges of various sorts, as reported by participants in the Thematic Conversation: Language skills. It is hard enough to learn one or more Middle Eastern languages; must we learn the languages of all the regions we study? And how should language instruction be organized if not along regional lines? Job definitions. Disciplines such as anthropology, history, political science, and languages and literatures often create positions based on regional boundaries, creating “Middle East” job openings that may be a poor fit for specialists working across regions. Disciplinary priorities. Middle East–based cases may not be considered important to the discipline at large; or the only Middle East–based issues that are considered important have to do with oil or violence.

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Funding agencies. Especially the regional definitions used by the US Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Center competition (more on this below). Book publishing. Editors and librarians often develop their book lists along region-based lines, creating constituencies for work that fits these categories. Professional associations. MESA and other area studies associations are invaluable settings for expertise and training, but they necessarily limit scholarly interactions along regional boundaries. Flawed alternative geographic conceptualizations. The “Muslim world,” for example, is as much an invention as the “Middle East,” since it suggests that Muslims live apart from members of other faith traditions and that Muslims are to be defined primarily by their faith.

The Social Science Research Council’s (SSRC’s) interviews with area studies faculty and administrators show a variety of academic attitudes toward collaboration across regional lines. Some schools appear to be committed to the area studies model to the point that collaboration seems unnecessary or at least not imminent. So, there’s been no need [at our campus] for something that you see happening at other universities that suddenly has to become a center of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies.12 Several people . . . involved in various quadrants of the university: the divinity school obviously, public policy, South Asia, Middle East, Central Asia . . . all have had not only faculty and students with interests in Islam but also, I think, internationally recognized expertise, and yet those components haven’t come together in a coherent kind of way or we haven’t seized what might be all of the benefit for intellectual programs by pulling these elements together.13

At many schools, various efforts have been made to improve cross-regional collaboration. For example, they have joint outreach programs to train high school teachers in Islamic studies and other world affairs14 or jointly fund thematic conferences on aspects of Islam that address multiple area studies regions.15 A few schools have pushed hard to promote cross-regional approaches to the study of Islam, notwithstanding the traditional turfs of the area studies centers. One respondent reported to the SSRC interviewers that the school’s

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“new Islamic studies initiative . . . is a fairly significant commitment by the university. And it’s research, it’s public affairs programming, it’s some, what we call, high visibility conferences, and it’s developing the curriculum.”16 Another school that has decided to make an investment in Islamic studies across regional lines is San Francisco State, which announced a cluster of faculty hires in 2002 and has created an exciting hybrid Middle East and Islamic studies program, which offers courses and organizes conferences both on area studies themes and on Islamic subjects in the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere. Our own school, the University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill (UNC), has also pushed hard to establish a cross-regional center as a strong complement to its existing area studies centers, thus forging collaborations without stepping on toes. Over the past several decades, a handful of exceptional scholars at UNC has generated a long and fruitful cross-regional approach to Middle East and Islamic studies. In the Department of History, Herbert Bodman did not teach solely Middle East history courses. In 1958, he developed and taught for years a course on Islamic civilizations that ranged beyond the Middle East region, and it continues to be offered at UNC every year. On a national scale, Bodman directed the American Council of Learned Societies’ Islamic Teaching Materials Project, which produced a variety of resources, including a set of primary texts that spanned “Islamic life and culture in countries from Spain to Indonesia and from Central Asia to India and Africa” (Graham, Waldman, and Rozen 1983, i), as well as a set of slides that cover “not only the old Islamic lands of the Middle East and North Africa, but also those vast areas where Islam has established itself only in early modern and recent times—Sub-Saharan Africa, central and eastern India, Indonesia, etc.” (Bodman and Humphreys 1987, i). The Ellen-Fairbanks D. Bodman collection has the largest holding of films from the Middle East and the Islamic world in the United States. Julio Cortes, who developed UNC’s Arabic program after it was founded more than half a century ago, worked in the Department of Romance Languages and explored literary linkages between Arab and Iberian societies. By 2001, there was a good framework in place at UNC for envisioning Islamic studies as a field. The attacks of September 2001 galvanized scholars engaged with the study of Islam to respond to a nearly overwhelming demand for information from a public that felt it had little grasp on the subject despite the efforts of earlier scholars. In the months after 9/11, a UNC

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faculty and graduate student working group met to begin planning for a new center that would build on the school’s heritage of cross-regional approaches to Middle East and Islamic studies. The enthusiasm for collaboration and the sense of purpose that we felt addressing the urgent policy issues of the day helped us through difficult negotiations about the focus and scope of the center that we wanted to establish. Spirited debates took place on proper terminology, eventually resulting in a lengthy title, the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. The majority opinion reflected in this title emphasized a combination of Middle East area studies and a transregional emphasis on the theme of Muslim societies and civilizations. A number of compromises had to be made in order to secure agreement on this hybrid title, although some of the debates remain in a sense unresolved. Some Middle East experts were concerned that cross-regional approaches would dilute the Mideast focus and training, and some opined that an emphatic connection with “Islam” would exclude or deemphasize the study of non-Muslims in the Middle East. At the same time, social scientists were worried that the term “Islamic studies” focused too heavily on Muslims’ religious identities and on the discipline of religious studies, which they regarded as being excessively theological. In addition, scholars who studied Islam or Muslims outside of the Middle East worried that their fields were portrayed as just a somewhat irrelevant add-on to Middle East studies. In practice, this hybrid approach has proved to be fruitful. It has spawned numerous courses, faculty-graduate student seminars and workshops, and campus and community events that bring together Middle East studies, as commonly practiced around the United States, with explicit attention to comparisons and connections outside of the region. Many of these events are organized jointly with UNC’s neighbor and frequent collaborator, Duke University; indeed, pooling scholarly resources in this area has generated a critical mass for the new approach that would not otherwise have existed, especially in the early years. UNC has sought to build on its comparative advantage in this area through faculty hires and graduate student recruitment in Middle East and Islamic studies that treat cross-regional research interests as a special strength rather than a bureaucratic problem or an irrelevant curiosity. The UNC center sponsored the thematic conversation on crossregional approaches to Middle East studies at MESA’s annual meetings (2005– 7), mentioned above. Most recently, after another debate mirroring the concerns outlined above, faculty members approved a new minor in Middle

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Eastern and Islamic Studies (housed in the Department of Religious Studies) with a variable set of course requirements: two courses in Middle East studies plus three from Islamic studies, or vice versa. Conversations about this minor demonstrated that there is still some debate about the most appropriate form of training in this hybrid field. Yet we hesitate to suggest a single institutional model for Islamic studies. The decentralization and diversity that is so typical of American higher education requires more flexible approaches based on local situations. UNC and other programs that seek to move Islamic studies beyond regional and disciplinary boundaries face a serious disadvantage with regard to federal funding through the Title VI National Resource Center program. Islamic studies is primarily located in the sixteen Title VI Middle East studies centers, although it is obvious that Muslim societies figure prominently in the Title VI regions South, Southeast, and Central Asia and Africa. Conversations with staff in the International and Foreign Language Education office of the Department of Education have yielded inconclusive results regarding the treatment of applications focused on Islamic studies rather than the Middle East region. While there is wide acknowledgment that a broad focus on Islamic studies would have merit, it has been pointed out that reviews of Title VI Middle East applications are typically done by the standard combination of area studies and language specialists from universities that do not have Title VI programs in that field (for conflict of interest reasons). Therefore, unless the applicant university is willing to take a chance on defining its proposal outside standard categories, it is necessary to formulate the proposal rather strictly in terms of the Middle East region as commonly understood.17 Thus the premier program that supports research in Islamic studies is itself tilted against the recognition of that field as an autonomous subject of study. Here again, if possible, an interdisciplinary approach to Muslim societies in the Title VI program could have a beneficial effect on the entire field. Beyond the reorganization of university programs, Islamic studies faces a larger challenge in the United States, one that cannot be so easily resolved through administrative reforms. This challenge involves politicized attempts to associate Islam with security threats. While this sense of threat accounts in large part for the rise of Islamic studies since 9/11, it also binds the hands of scholars who work in this field and universities that wish to promote this work. Specialists in Islamic studies are under pressure from hostile political movements to predict al-Qaeda’s next terrorist attack and to expose

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the unchanging “essence” of Islam, but neither of these tasks is achievable. Islamic studies as an academic field is not designed for intelligence work and the state of the art has long since abandoned the notion of religious “essences.” Like other scholarly endeavors that happen to come under public scrutiny, including various area studies programs, Islamic studies is searching for institutional buffers that will protect academic freedoms from politicized demands. The most attractive course of action for securing a successful future for Islamic studies will be one that solidifies the intellectual basis of the field through authentic interdisciplinary engagements, in order to make Islamic studies a significant contributor to meeting the genuine needs of the humanities and social sciences in the American academy.

Notes This chapter draws in part on the data collected for the long-term research project Production of Knowledge on World Regions, based at the Social Science Research Council, of which this volume is a part. For more information, see Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, included as the appendix to this volume. 1.

All interviews in this chapter are quoted from transcripts from the project The Production of Knowledge on World Regions. We are indebted to co-principal investigators Seteney Shami and Cynthia Miller-Idriss, senior consultant Mitchell Stevens, and Holly Danzeisen for making this material available. This quotation is from the Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, U West, 2006– 7.

2.

ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses Database. Search terms: PhD dissertations only, Islam* or Muslim* in title, abstract, subject, or keyword. Includes a few nonUS dissertations.

3.

Geographic focus is determined from article titles and, where available, abstracts. Articles whose geographic focus could not be determined are excluded from this analysis, as are articles shorter than six pages in length. We thank Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, James Knable, and Katherine Locke for their assistance with this coding.

4.

W. A. Bijlefeld divided the century-long history of the study of Islam at Hartford seminary into three periods: (1) The “Muslim Lands” Department, 1892–1966; (2) Islamic studies within the history-of-religions context, 1967– 73; (3) the Duncan Black McDonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 1973–present.

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5.

A. M. Mohamed Mackeen, in a 1965 essay on the design of an Islamic university, demonstrated a theological trend toward establishing Islamic studies as a normative discipline within Muslim societies, and we note in passing that there are numerous such institutions in majority Muslim countries today (see Mackeen 1965, 246– 60, 297– 303).

6.

The Supreme Court’s distinction between “teaching religion” and “teaching about religion,” spelled out in the case School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), is discussed in Haynes and Thomas 2001.

7.

Directory of Departments and Programs of Religious Studies in North America, published by the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion (1981, 1991, 2001 editions). The directory has apparently not been updated since 2002; not all departments paid to be included in it.

8.

For a list of PhD programs in Islamic studies in religious studies departments, see

9.

For a list of current job openings in Islamic studies, see the Job Postings website of

www.unc.edu/~cernst/reliprograms.htm (accessed July 20, 2015). the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, http://mideast.unc.edu/jobs/ (accessed May 27, 2015). 10.

These abstracts are written by the Historical Abstracts staff, not by the articles’ authors; IJMES does not run abstracts. An alternative method, counting articles with the word “Islam” in the full text of IJMES articles, shows no trend over the period 1970– 2003. However, this method, using JSTOR’s Data for Research service (http://dfr.jstor.org), does not allow for truncation (a search would have to be run separately for the word “Islamic,” for example) and picks up a large number of articles that do not focus primarily on Islam.

11.

The following discussion draws on Kurzman 2007a.

12.

Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2006– 7.

13.

Director, Center for South Asian Studies, Quadrangle, 2006– 7.

14.

Center Administrator, Center for South Asian Studies, North Urban, 2006– 7; Director, Center for South Asian Studies, Southern State, 2006– 7.

15.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, U West, 2006– 7; Director, Center for South Asian Studies, Western Flagship, 2006– 7.

16.

Vice-Provost, International Affairs, Big State, 2006– 7.

17.

To our knowledge, only one university has succeeded in the former route: Indiana University, whose Islamic Studies Program won a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) award in the 2010–14 Title VI grant cycle, in addition to the university’s National Resource Center and FLAS awards in Middle East studies.

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References Adams, Charles J. 1974. “The History of Religions and the Study of Islam.” ACLS Newsletter 25, no. 3–4: 1–10. ———. 1976. “Islamic Religious Tradition.” In The Study of the Middle East: Research and Scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, edited by Leonard Binder, 29– 95. New York: Wiley. Adelson, Roger. 1995. London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902–1922. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. American Historical Review. 1991. “In This Issue: The Modern Middle East.” Editor’s statement. American Historical Review 96, no. 5 (December): iv. Banani, Amin. 1975. “G. E. Von Grunebaum: Toward Relating Islamic Studies to Universal Cultural History.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, no. 2 (April): 131–47. Bijlefeld, Willem A. 1993. “A Century of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary.” Muslim World 83, no. 2 (April): 103–17. Binder, Leonard. 1976. “Area Studies: A Critical Reassessment.” In The Study of the Middle East: Research and Scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, edited by Leonard Binder, 1–28. New York: Wiley. Bodman, Herbert L., and R. Stephen Humphreys, eds. 1987. The Lands and People of Islam: A Traditional Perspective. New York: American Council of Learned Societies. Bonine, Michael E., Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper. 2011. Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. “Curiosities of Diet: Locusts and Wild Honey.” 1883. Harper’s Bazaar 16, no. 10 (March 10): 154. D. L. 1898. “Problem of the Middle East.” The Outlook (London) 1 (May 14): 455–56. Davison, Roderic H. 1960. “Where Is the Middle East?” Foreign Affairs 38: 665–75. de Vries, Jan. 1967. The Study of Religion: A Historical Approach. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Ernst, Carl W. 1998. “The Study of Religion and the Study of Islam.” Paper presented at the “Integrating Islamic Studies in Liberal Arts Curricula” workshop, University of Washington, Seattle, March 6–8. Accessed June 7, 2013. www.unc.edu/~cernst/study.htm. Ernst, Carl W., and Bruce B. Lawrence. 2002. Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ernst, Carl W., and Richard C. Martin. 2010. “Introduction: Toward a PostOrientalist Approach to Islamic Religious Studies.” In Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism, edited by Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, 1–19. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Geertz, Clifford. 2003. “Which Way to Mecca?” New York Review of Books 50, no. 10 (June 12): 27– 30. Gordon, Thomas Edward. 1900. “The Problem of the Middle East.” Nineteenth Century 37 (March): 413–24. Graham, William A., Marilyn Robinson Waldman, and Miryam Rozen, eds. 1983. Islam-Fiche. Zug, Switzerland: Inter Documentation Co. Hafez, Farid. 2014. “Disciplining the ‘Muslim Subject’: The Role of Security Agencies in Establishing Islamic Theology within the State’s Academia.” Islamophobia Studies Journal 2, no. 2 (Fall): 43–57. Haynes, Charles C., and Oliver Thomas. 2001. Finding Common Ground: A Guide to Religious Liberty in Public Schools. Nashville, TN: First Amendment Center. Accessed June 7, 2013. www.freedomforum.org/templates/ document.asp?documentID=3979. Hermansen, Marcia K. 1991. “The State of the Art of Islamic Studies in the United States and Canada.” Islamic Culture: An English Quarterly 65, no. 1: 1–22. ———. 1993. “Trends in Islamic Studies in the United States and Canada since the 1970s.” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 10, no. 1: 96–118. Hitti, Philip K. 1941. “Arabic and Islamic Studies in Princeton University.” Moslem World 31: 292– 94. Ho, Engseng. 2006. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keddie, Nikki R. 1973. “Is There a Middle East?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4: 255– 71. Koppes, Clayton R. 1976. “Captain Mahan, General Gordon, and the Origins of the Term ‘Middle East.’” Middle Eastern Studies 12, no. 1 (January): 95– 98. Koszegi, Michael, and J. Gordon Melton, eds. 1992. Islam in North America: A Sourcebook. New York: Garland. Kurzman, Charles. 2007a. “Cross-Regional Approaches to Middle East Studies: Constructing and Deconstructing a Region.” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 41, no. 1 (June): 24–29. ———. 2007b. “Islamic Studies and the Trajectory of Political Islam.” Contemporary Sociology 36, no. 6 (November): 519–24.

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Laffan, Michael Francis. 2003. Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma below the Winds. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Laroui, Abdallah. 1973. “For a Methodology of Islamic Studies: Islam Seen by G. von Grunebaum.” Diogenes 21, no. 83 (September): 12– 39. Lerner, Daniel. 1958. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Mackeen, A. M. Mohamed. 1965. “Islamic Studies: A University Discipline.” Muslim World 55, no. 3–4 (July– October): 246– 60, 297– 303. Mahan, Alfred Thayer. 1902. “The Persian Gulf and International Relations.” National Review 40 (September): 27–45. Mahdi, Muhsin. 1997. “The Study of Islam, Orientalism and America.” In Mapping Islamic Studies: Genealogy, Continuity, and Change, edited by Azim Nanji, 149– 79. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sharpe, Eric J. 1986. Comparative Religion: A History. 2nd ed. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Starkey, John. 1965. “Arabists in the USA.” Saudi Aramco Magazine (July– August): 16–25. “A Strange Career.” 1898. New York Times, Saturday Review of Books and Art, July 9, BR462. Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies and Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. 2008. International Approaches to Islamic Studies in Higher Education (A Report to Higher Education Foundation Council for England [HEFCE]). Accessed June 6, 2013. www.hefce.ac.uk/data/year/2008/ internationalapproachestoislamicstudiesinhighereducation/. von Grunebaum, Gustave. E. 1954. “Islamic Studies and Culture Research.” In Studies in Islamic Cultural History, 1–22. Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association. Waldman, Marilyn Robinson. 1978. “Islamic Studies: a New Orientalism?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8: 545– 62. Welch, Alford T., ed. 1979. “Qur’an and Tafsir.” Special issue. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47, no. 4S (December): 619– 758. Wheeler, Brannon W. 1998. “Report on the International Workshop on the Integration of Islamic Studies into Liberal Arts Curricula.” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 15, no. 2: 159– 66.

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chapter nine

Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11 Seteney Shami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia We have embarked on this century without a compass. —Amin Maalouf, Disordered World

The first decade of the twenty-first century marked a watershed (one of many) in the production of knowledge about world regions in the US academy. Area studies are central to this intellectual history and have been subject to manifold rethinking and critique since their inception and institutionalization in the American university in the middle decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter, we propose to examine the complex intersection of intellectual, institutional, and political processes that have, after the events of 9/11, cumulatively contributed to the current state of this national scholarly enterprise. We focus on the decade 2001–11 and base our analysis on the extensive interviews, surveys, and focus groups that the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) project researchers conducted with directors and administrators of different area studies centers as well as with students. The decade of our analysis opens with the attacks by Islamic jihadists on New York City and Washington, DC, and goes through the war on Afghanistan and on “terror,” the war and occupation of Iraq, the economic recession of 2008, and the drastic 2011 federal cutbacks in funding for international and area studies. In an unhappy coincidence, the end of this decade conjoins the federal budget cuts with the dramatic Arab uprisings against authoritarian regimes. Thus, just

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as a new era opened up in the Middle East that threw into question prevailing assumptions and certainties about the region, the research and training capacities of the US academy were significantly curtailed.1 Much as the end of the Cold War interrupted the long-standing frameworks that had organized the study of world regions in the United States since the late 1940s, the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, set into motion forces and processes of both national and global significance that called into question many of the intellectual and analytical certainties of the 1990s. The events of 9/11 intervened in the ongoing intellectual crisis and critiques in the area studies field and neighboring disciplines, with multiple and complex results: they simultaneously denounced, reinforced, reproduced, transformed, and nullified the area studies enterprise and also brought into the debates a new array of actors, voices, and critiques. But unlike the welloiled (and well-heeled) transition from the epistemologies of the Cold War to the millennial dreams of capitalist globalization, the interruption of the globalization paradigm that drove many of the intellectual and institutional initiatives during the 1990s was not replaced by clearly defined analytical frameworks in the 2000s. The discursive consequences of 9/11 had much to do with interrupting the possibility of the seamless coalescence of new millennial frameworks. The impacts of 9/11 on area studies need to be understood and assessed in a multifaceted manner, taking into account the varied structures and processes that shape academic enterprises and the diversity of what is glossed as the “area studies field.” Responses and adjustments after 9/11 have been markedly uneven and at times paradoxical across specific area studies fields and their constitutive disciplines and institutions. Our research suggests that rather than give rise to new paradigms, 9/11 (understood as a signifier, marker, and watershed rather than as an event) threw some of the key intellectual and institutional imperatives of the previous decade into disarray and generated political pressures of various sorts on individual scholars, campus-based area studies centers, and international area studies associations. While these pressures had an uneven impact on specific fields and disciplines, they significantly affected the campus environments in which area studies teaching and research take place as well as the national political spaces in which federal funding for area studies is deliberated and implemented. To stay with the metaphor invoked in the epigraph to this chapter from the Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, the field appears like a compass caught between multiple

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magnetic fields: the needle skitters left, right, and all around without settling into, and pointing toward, a clear direction.

Middle East Studies: The Canary in the Mine Shaft There is little doubt that the most profound impact of 9/11 on area studies has been on the field of Middle East studies (MES).2 For better or worse the field has changed, explained the associate director of one Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES): “The downside is that it is more political than ever. It is sort of comparable to what Soviet studies were during the time of the Cold War.”3 And a director of Latin American studies noted: What they study is much more polemical than what we study . . . we don’t face the kind of threats and censorship, and boycotts, and swastikas on posters that you know Middle Eastern stuff does. You know, so we don’t have that kind of embattled feeling . . . we do have controversial topics, but we don’t get burned if we confront them directly, and there is almost no pressure on us for self-censorship . . . [Our controversies are] light-years away from the kind of delicacy of so many topics that Middle East centers have to face.4

Such comments compiled in our surveys and interviews suggest that the impact on MES should be evaluated across three distinct, yet interrelated arenas: (1) the quotidian environment in which scholars, teachers, and students conduct their activities; (2) the varied institutional architectures through which research and teaching on the Middle East are undertaken within and outside the university; and (3) the long-term intellectual history of the field. Campus Environments In the words of one associate director of a CMES, “In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was, you know, fairly hysterical in terms of the pace, and now I would say it has gone from hysterical to frenetic.”5 Much of this attention heightened a sense that MES programs in universities were, or should be, in some way in “service to the nation.”6 Center administrators repeatedly talked about their outreach to local communities, synagogues, churches, mosques, and school systems that wanted explanations of Islam or of the political dynamics in the Middle East. “From September 11, 2001, to September 11, 2002, I gave about 167 public [lectures],” noted another CMES director.7 Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11 353

But these developments also brought Middle East scholars directly into the fray of partisan politics. Center personnel complained that their efforts were maligned and misunderstood and that they felt hampered in their efforts to teach students to be critical thinkers without being attacked as unpatriotic. Outsiders assume, contended one CMES director, that all Middle East scholars are politically on the Left and “that we’re all just kind of little iterations of one another[,] . . . and nothing could be further from the truth. You know, we’ve got people whose political views are really diverse.”8 MES scholars also felt the pressure to serve the needs of the federal government in ways that their peers in other regional studies fields have not experienced. The associate director of a CMES explained that this is “a very politicized field. And you know, there . . . is sometimes a sense that it is constantly under surveillance from the media, from, you know, all sorts of political organizations.”9 She went on to discuss her wish that the Middle East would not be singled out: “We should be treated as any other field, American studies or Slavic studies, and that is . . . we are not just providing services for, you know, the government or whoever wants to know about Islam . . . we should enjoy the variety, the ability to handle whatever topic we find interesting.” One senior international officer (interviewed in 2005– 6) presciently said she expected the next five to ten years to be especially difficult, because “the sort of environment in which we are operating, in which ‘Arab,’ or ‘Middle Eastern,’ or ‘Muslim’ is a code word for ‘bad,’ is just going to make this harder and harder for us to do this for a while.”10 She then explained that—following a controversy on campus—a local newspaper ran a two-page spread that listed faculty members with Arab or Muslim names, some of whom had nothing to do with the controversy. She reflected: So there really is an element of pure unadulterated racism that people can get away with now, and again, I think that’s infecting the atmosphere of discourse in the United States, and these universities are in the United States . . . We can’t be taken out of context as much as we might wish some days, sometimes . . . and I don’t really think we should be, I mean, I don’t think universities should be completely disconnected from the world in which they operate, but that means when the world gets ugly it makes it harder to do what’s right.

A major point that arises in these interviews is that 9/11 had the effect of making campuses more open but also more vulnerable to outside interests,

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demands, and criticisms. The rise of neoconservatives to power in the United States in the period under study empowered and mobilized specific segments of both the state and civil society around a political agenda that, in the context of the university, was advanced through “code words such as balance, fairness, diversity, accountability, tolerance, and not least, academic freedom to justify the enforcement of a political orthodoxy that undermines these very values” (Doumani 2006a, 30). Following a model pioneered by organizations like the Center for Equal Opportunity in the context of the affirmative action debate, organizations like Campus Watch in conjunction with campus chapters of conservative groups developed systems of surveillance through which they targeted individual scholars of the Middle East as well as entire institutions for what they claimed to be their “analytical errors, extremism, intolerance, apologetics, and abusive power over students.”11 Lists of “unpatriotic” faculty members were created; prominent scholars had their syllabi impugned and their lectures interrupted and filmed without their authorization, and they were subject to defamatory accusations in widely circulated print and digital media. University administrators had to establish committees to investigate student complaints, while wealthy alumni threatened to withhold financial contributions as a pressure tactic. There were even cases of attempts on the part of nonuniversity actors to influence tenure processes and decisions concerning specific individuals.12 These political attacks on MES targeted the field’s intellectual thrust as much as its perceived shortcomings, and thus their effects on academic environments cannot be underestimated. Our surveys and interviews showed that some campuses had been affected more than others by this “chill factor” depending on the combination and history of campus programs, centers, and faculty. Several interviewees pointed out that Campus Watch had started its work before 9/11. However, by mid-decade, 9/11 had become the signifier of many changes in everyday academic practices on the affected campuses. Faculty members reported selfcensorship in order to be able to continue teaching students who had intense and differing opinions. In the student focus groups, participants discussed their unease about attending CMES activities that had become a locus of controversy. They reported that watchdog student groups attended classes on the Middle East or taught by Muslim or Middle Eastern professors (even if the subject was not the Middle East) and that certain statements would be booed. They felt that faculty and teaching assistants were afraid to express opinions in class, especially about current events.

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There is little doubt that actions of “private” external actors had an enormous impact on universities where research and teaching on the Middle East take place. However, state practices also influenced and changed campus dynamics. Interviewees noted with dismay that the number of international students, especially from the Middle East, declined due to visa problems and that even senior visiting faculty were being denied visas or held up and questioned at airports, so that many scholars were refusing invitations in order not to face these kinds of problems.13 Interviewees talked about the “waste of energy” of having to defend the CMES or particular faculty members and having to deal with increased reporting loads. As we discuss further below, following congressional debates, the US Department of Education increased its reporting demands through the commissioning of evaluation studies, which exacerbated the feeling expressed by one faculty affiliate of a CMES that “everyone is aware of someone watching over your shoulder.”14 Institutional Architectures While the public’s rush of interest in the Middle East ebbs and flows according to events in the region and US involvement in them, the dynamics described above also have implications for the more long-standing institutional architectures of research and teaching on the Middle East. In this context, HR 3077 may be seen as the emblematic attempt to bring the neoconservative agenda to bear on these architectures (see Gendzier this volume). Submitted on September 11, 2003, HR 3077 focused on federal funding for area studies at universities and passed unanimously through the House of Representatives. It stalled in the Senate and was reissued as HR 509 the following year but was never enacted as law. The bill mandated the establishment of a “supervisory board” (later ameliorated to “advisory board”) to “study, monitor, apprise, and evaluate” centers receiving Title VI funding to make sure that these activities would “reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of view on international affairs” (International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003, HR 3077, 108th Cong. (2003)). The bill stipulated that two members of the board should represent agencies with “national security responsibilities” (i.e., the Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security). Furthermore, the board could call upon any national agency to obtain information that it might need to carry out its tasks. As it made its way through the legislature, the public debates stirred up by the bill became increasingly vitriolic.15 Proponents of HR 3077 claimed 356 Seteney Shami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia

that federally funded MES centers were failing to meet “national needs” and thus breeched their responsibilities stipulated by Title VI grants. They also indicted the whole field and its practitioners for “postmodern” (and, censured in a nonspecified manner, anti-American) approaches and for succumbing to the influence of Edward Said as the major figure in such intellectual (and political) approaches to knowledge (Kurtz 2003). Daniel Pipes, one of the founders of Campus Watch, argued for the need for HR 3077 on the grounds that, in his view, scholars of the Middle East were incompetent, adversarial, intolerant, apologetic, and abusive (of their students) (Pipes 2003). Even while HR 3077 reaffirmed international education and foreignlanguage training as strategic needs, the much-rumored increases in federal funding following 9/11 failed to materialize in ways that supported or strengthened existing structures (COSSA 2007). The new resources that materialized—beyond a onetime increase in Title VI funding for teaching Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages—were directed away from area studies centers and toward institutions requiring security clearances, such as the National Defense University, the centers for the study of terrorism funded by the Department of Homeland Security, or the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland.16 In response, and often mentioned in the interviews we conducted, MES scholars and centers adopted various strategies to counter these charges— from asserting that MES did serve the national interest and that graduates of centers and departments did go on to government jobs to arguing against HR 3077 in terms of academic freedom and university autonomy. The responses pointed to the fact that, despite attempts at mobilization by some area studies associations and by individuals, there was hardly a unified community of interest, whether in MES itself or in area studies as a whole (for responses to the attack on MES, see, e.g., Cole 2003; Heydemann 2002; and Prashad 2003). There were certainly voices saying that the criticisms inherent in the bill were valid, but that these only applied to a few departments and programs and that Said was not an important intellectual influence in MES; and many scholars in other area studies fields did not feel concerned by these debates since they saw them as specific to MES. The banality (but also insidiousness) of this so-called debate was illustrated at a student-led roundtable at the 2003 Middle East Studies Association annual meeting where a first-year graduate student stated that he was entering the field at a time of crisis exemplified by having to choose between Martin Kramer and Edward Said, which (to his

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understanding) also meant choosing between “policy-relevant research” and the “ivory tower.” These developments, disagreements, and pressures only compounded uncertainties about the institutional forms that international studies and language training should take on US campuses.17 While circumstances vary significantly among institutions, our surveys and interviews with MES center directors suggest that these centers still exercise little or no control over permanent faculty appointments and generally “make do” with far fewer resources than they need to adequately fulfill their mission (Anderson 2006). At the same time, interviewees reported that after 9/11, in addition to the dramatically heightened demand for Arabic language classes and outreach, there was greater interest in and even ‘increased respect for MES’ by administrators on campus.18 Course enrollments increased across the board, and new courses were added, especially on the contemporary Middle East and on Islam, in departments as diverse as anthropology, history, and comparative religion and in schools of divinity, law, government and public policy. As one CMES associate director reported: The law school, which had never taught Islamic law before, is now teaching Middle East law and we are supporting that. We helped pay for that, and we are actually in our NRC [National Resource Center] budget trying to make that absolutely a formal thing and an ongoing thing . . . You know, before 9/11 . . . Islamic studies were offered on this campus. I just think it’s a new kind of interest . . . there are a lot of people who don’t necessarily know much about the Middle East but know a lot about US foreign policy or nongovernmental organizations’ involvement in different areas of the world, who now want to focus on the Middle East. So you have like the [names an institute on campus] putting together a huge conference on political Islam . . . They came and consulted with us and we helped them but it was their thing. And it was kind of amusing in some ways to watch to see who would show up on their list. . . . It was a different list of people than we would have invited, but it was really interesting. You know, so I think that it’s more that, that units that have already kind of, you know, organized around theoretical ideas, some of them that would now all of a sudden focus on the Middle East.19

It should be noted that these changes were a result of, in equal or even greater measure of the invasion of Iraq than of the events of 9/11. This increased

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interest in the Middle East, however, whether as area studies or as contextspecific courses in other departments, took place in a general atmosphere in which the “global,” rather than regional and local contexts, was the focus. This period also saw the growth of umbrella or “alternative” structures, such as “global” or “international” studies institutes, as well as the creation of senior administrative positions, such as vice presidents, deans, and provosts, for “global” affairs. Finally, much of the energy (and resources) for global and international initiatives began to shift toward professional schools, such as schools of health, law, education, and government. Years later, campuses have not yet resolved the challenges of how to organize research and teaching in ways that adequately reflect actual processes in a world that is simultaneously globalizing and regionalizing, renationalizing and transnationalizing. The sometimes reductionist imperative to “rethink” area studies immediately after the Cold War did produce some much-needed critical perspectives and stimulated researchers to adopt more transnational and collaborative approaches, for example, by strengthening networks between US scholars and their counterparts in the rest of the world. However, the eager focus on the global to the neglect, and even denigration, of research on the local and the regional had its negative impacts as well. The fallout from 9/11 on academia did, in many ways, rein in the impetus toward internationalization and globalization that so powerfully marked the institutional debates of the 1990s. In the words of one director of a Russia/Eurasia center, “The other thing 9/11 did, was it reversed the pendulum swing against area studies that had been operating throughout the ’90s.”20 Intellectual Trajectories Our interviews took place mid-decade (2005– 7), and many respondents pointed out that intellectual interests and pursuits are slow to change and that it was too soon to tell how topics and themes of academic research might be influenced by unfolding events and geopolitical shifts in the aftermath of 9/11. However, from the interviews themselves, one sees the emergence and even consolidation of particular directions. First, as discussed by Wedeen, Kasaba, and Pfeiffer in this volume, the disciplinary/area studies divergences were becoming deeper and the boundaries between them sharper. Second, as shown by the review of PhD dissertations across disciplines by Bier in this volume, a focus both on neoliberal economies and polities and on political Islam is clearly apparent. Another direction, evident in the work of centers Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11 359

for the study of terrorism funded by the Department of Homeland Security, is that the study of the Middle East would be undertaken, at least in certain quarters, within conceptual and institutional frameworks that do not center on the region’s variety and diversity but rather on what is purported to be its main characteristic(s)—terrorism, Islam, or both.21 Also important for the intellectual future of the field, and in a more positive vein, is the observation that MES scholars became increasingly engaged in sustained dialogue with colleagues from other interdisciplinary and area studies fields (such as gender or ethnic studies) as a result of the perceived shared threat, opportunity, and impact of the political climate after 9/11.22 Younger scholars also began organizing to create resources and support for one another in order to negotiate heightened tensions in university environments.23 Furthermore, scholars of the Middle East became key participants in broader debates about academic freedom (see Doumani 2006b; McNeil 2002) and responsibility and ethics in higher education (see Cohen and Kennedy 2005), 24 and some of them began to play important roles in communicating to publics that extend well beyond the university.25 Other important issues brought up by our respondents concern the ways in which MES was molded and shaped by intellectual interests on campus and faculty as well as student responses to these interests. One example is the expansion of the conceptual geographies of the region: scholars became more interested in the Gulf states, to the point that now the “Gulf is a much more active place in the academic mind,” as one of our interviewees stated; and the definition of the “Middle East” was extended to include such countries and areas as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia. As one director of a center for South Asian studies put it: The links between South Asia and points west and north, meaning Central Asia and the Middle East, are better than they have ever been, and there [have] been a couple of events in the last couple of years, which actually we wrote money, all of us wrote money into our Title VI grants so that we could do stuff together, and that was clearly a response to a political instinct, namely the need to kind of react to some of the 9/11 stuff that was coming out. Perhaps slightly less driven by a purely intellectual vision of what that could look like.26

Expanding geographies also meant that faculty began to include in their courses the topic of Islam and Muslims in the West, specifically, in Europe and North America, as a response to the heightened interest in Islam.

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Thus course offerings became more transregional and transnational, and Islam became one powerful way through which the synthesis of the regional and the global could be articulated (see Kurzman and Ernst this volume). One interviewee spoke about this development specifically, stressing the global relevance and, rather curiously, the contemporary competence of Islamic studies in MES: ‘MES is not world-wide like Islamic studies. MES is lacking real expertise in contemporary Middle East. This is a key problem and its gotten worse, because we had economics and political science positions in the 1990s . . . but for ten years, nothing.’27 In another informal interview, a similar endorsement of the contemporary relevance and interdisciplinary reach of Islamic studies was expressed: We developed the idea for an Islam conference because Islam is the biggest topic in US foreign policy. Post-9/11, the terrorists come from Europe now, it is bigger than the Middle East. We took an interdisciplinary approach. . . . It was not a question about area studies but a question about globalization. Terrorists are from all over; they are rootless. Individualization of religion. This kind of Islam is created from nowhere, it has created a fake community. . . . Our conference was interdisciplinary, inter-area, it bridged all fields.28

Over and over, the interviewees stressed the importance of strengthening campus capacity on the contemporary Middle East by hiring faculty and offering new courses, only to be confronted with obstacles from social science disciplinary departments. At the same time, they expressed worries that the interest in the “contemporary” was leading the field (and students) in directions that were not necessarily productive. One associate director of a CMES explained how she had tried to ensure that students had a realistic understanding of what they could gain from any particular course. You come here to learn about Iraqi history so that you know more and you can understand . . . what is going on, but if you think that after this class is over, you can, you know, devise an exit strategy for the US Army, this is not the purpose of this class.29

She continued: So again, it inspired interest and that’s wonderful. But, personally, I feel that as a professor, you sort of, you have to overemphasize that . . . this is

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not the face of the Middle East, there is more. There is more to it, there is more to the histories, the cultures, and actually, that not everything that we teach, should, and must explain 9/11.

Her colleague put it more bluntly: I would put the challenge this way, just not to get dragged down by just the sheer, wretched, awful idiocy that is out there, and just to concentrate on doing what we know we do best and not to be dragged into justifying Middle Eastern studies in terms of very partisan political imperatives. I mean I think what we need to resist at all costs . . . is Middle East studies becoming Terrorism 101.30

In the same vein, interviewees discussed how the word “modern” has begun to change. An associate director of a CMES put it this way: I teach modern Middle East history survey that starts in 1750 and, you know, ends, God-willing, will end yesterday, you know, depending on how fast I can march through the centuries. And . . . the first thing that happened, you know, at the end of the first lecture was that a certain, so there were like eighty students in this class, and at the end of the first lecture, you know, three or four came up and said, “You mean the whole class isn’t going to be on everything that’s happened since 2001?” . . . Because that’s what they think a modern Middle East class is, right? . . . Part of my job certainly is to say, well, you know, knowing, like, the nineteenth century, let’s say, or the first part of the twentieth century has a sort of intrinsic value . . . and in the end of the day, make them believe that knowing all this other stuff I’m going to teach you might actually help them understand what’s happened since 2001, more than they would have than if I had just taught a class that started with the World Trade Center.31

Despite these worries about how teaching may have been skewed by current events, student interest in studying the Middle East, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, may be the best indicator of long-term shifts in the field. The interviews constantly emphasized the growing interest, better quality, and greater numbers of applicants to graduate programs. One CMES director said: Well, you know, the good news, look at the students. The kids understand better than the morons in politics. They are taking Arabic, they are

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studying the Middle East. I mean I have never had so many students asking for recommendations for jobs because there have never been so many jobs, because there have never been so many universities opening up Middle East positions, the little schools, universities that never had . . . why is that? They only do it because there is overwhelming student interest over multiple years. What does that mean? It means that the kids are smarter than their parents’ generation, than their seniors.32

Area Studies as an Embattled Paradigm Since the globe is a region made large, the making of global scale brings forward questions of the various forms of region making that both facilitate and interrupt global claims. —Anna Tsing (quoted in Poblete 2003, xxi)

Just as HR 3077 was not restricted to MES but, to achieve its aims and prove its point, used MES strategically as the main object of attack, the dynamics discussed above apply to all area studies fields and more broadly to the university community and institution.33 Throughout the 1990s and well into the new millennium, spirited debates about the nature, place, and future of area studies in US higher education have been of central concern for scholars and administrators in universities and private foundations. On the one hand, the area studies field was lauded, in the words of former SSRC president Kenneth Prewitt, as “the most successful, large-scale interdisciplinary project ever in the humanities and the social sciences” (1996, 15); on the other, many voices regarded the endeavor as obsolete and inadequate to new realities (see Glover and Kollman 2012). In many ways, the disintegration of the Soviet Union freed scholarly thinking from binary oppositions that had long structured knowledge production about the world. However, it also threw particular fields into disarray or obsolescence and more generally raised questions about the usefulness of, or indeed the need for, area- and place-based knowledge. With federal support through the Title VI program steadily declining since its peak during the 1970s, the emergence of what then appeared to be unipolar post– Cold War order and the emergence of the globalization paradigm as its central corollary gave rise to a particular conjuncture in which both long-standing and newly emergent critiques of area studies converged. As the

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focus of research and analysis shifted away from the nation-state and its internal localities toward a global scale, many rightly questioned the suitability of existing area studies frameworks for apprehending the nature of emerging socioeconomic processes and geographic formations that were if not increasingly global at least transcending national and regional boundaries as they had been defined. The challenges to, and in some cases attacks against, the area studies paradigm displayed a broad array of institutional stakeholders and reflected a surprising political and intellectual diversity. Among these were the selfreflexive critiques of area studies practitioners themselves, sustained on a national scale by robust private foundation investments in the “rethinking” of area studies during the 1990s; the long-standing and at times acrimonious debates between discipline-oriented scholars and their area studies counterparts regarding the merits and shortcomings of their respective scholarly practices and contributions; the accusations of failure for not predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 9/11 attacks; the invectives from certain sectors of the academic Left locating area studies within genealogies of colonialism and empire; and, as discussed above, the attacks from sectors aligned with the neoconservative Right for being too internationalized (read: too many scholars from problematic world regions) and insufficiently committed to “national needs.” Thus the current crisis of US area studies—understood as both an overall paradigm and as a set of distinct, geographically defined fields of research—must be seen in the context of the evolution of the national institutions of higher education within which it takes place and in relation to historical and political developments of the different regions it studies. Another key development in our decade of analysis was the rapid emergence of the institutional impetus to internationalize the university (see Friedman and Miller-Idriss this volume). Citing the very developments that were central to the critique and reformulation of area studies—the rise of the global economy, changing geopolitical affinities, and the rapid emergence of global communication technologies—university faculty and administrators nationwide saw the need to strengthen and expand the international dimension of research, curricular offerings, study abroad opportunities, and available networks of international institutional partners. And while the impetus to internationalize was described as the need to produce globally informed citizens and professionals, it was also seen as a strategy for strengthening the ability of universities to attract top students in an increasingly competitive

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higher education market and to better capture resources for research, institutional endowments, and capital-intensive infrastructural expansion, including territorial expansion overseas, in the Middle East, among other destinations (Miller-Idriss and Worden 2010; Miller-Idriss and Hanauer 2011). A third and closely related process that should not be overlooked here is the broader consolidation of the “deep” economic restructuring that took place during the 1990s in US higher education and its ramifications in the present. Neoliberalism arrived. As Craig Calhoun remarks in a compelling essay titled “Is the University in Crisis?”: But, of course, all this is not happening uniquely in universities. Quite the contrary, academics are merely among the more surprised (perhaps because longerbuffered) of the many members of established institutions who confront the new social trend of marketizing everything. Call it neoliberalism. It is basically a collapsing of semi-autonomous social fields into markets. (2006, 18)

While the origins of neoliberalization can be traced to the late 1970s and early 1980s—particularly to the 1980 passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities the right to patent products developed with federally funded research, opening the way for them to pursue revenues from intellectual property—it was during the 1990s that these trends fully materialized as institution-wide administrative restructurings across campuses and public university systems. The large-scale expansion of universities during the economic bonanza of the Clinton years was driven in large measure by the expansion of science and engineering faculties and professional schools and was achieved by means of financial arrangements in which private donations and corporate investment played an increasingly central role. This expansion significantly altered the scale and importance of these administrative units within the university as well as the role of corporate moneys in matters of research and infrastructure. During this period, the power of Wall Street financiers and other interests was consolidated on the governing boards of universities, both private and public. In relative if not absolute terms, these transformations diminished the prestige and institutional capital of both the social sciences and the humanities—and thus area studies—among university administrators precisely at a time when external funding for these fields was either stagnant or in decline. Thus the imperative toward internationalization and the expansion and restructuring of the university defined the institutional environments in

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which the rethinking of area studies took place during the 1990s. On campuses, these processes created multiple and at times conflicting pressures on area studies and the disciplines. At a number of universities, the rise of global or international studies institutes during this period drew upon the faculty and networks of area studies centers but in ways that did not necessarily strengthen or benefit these units, which continued to administer core Title VI and FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) funds. At least in some instances, rapidly expanding science and engineering faculties and professional schools implemented the internationalization mandate by building networks and establishing programs that bypassed area studies centers altogether and that were often created in partnership with public and corporate benefactors (see Friedman and Miller-Idriss this volume). In the context of neoliberal restructuring, moreover, internationalization initiatives tended to privilege particular curricular and programmatic offerings for undergraduates and professional students rather than for graduate training and research. This had a disproportionate impact on the humanities and the social sciences, given their clear disadvantage in the patenting and profitability game. As part of their endless pursuit of competitiveness and rankings, many universities expanded study abroad opportunities for undergraduate and professional students who were increasingly perceived as consumers of a wide range of higher education products. This logic had a strong impact on the humanities as language instruction was reorganized and commoditized in ways that separated it from the study of literatures and cultures to which it had been historically tied, thus administratively segmenting language and literature departments into more market-friendly language instruction units and less market-friendly sites of training and research, to the evident detriment of both. Finally, it is no surprise that amid such restructuring the core social science disciplines would once again retreat to the natural sciences for their theoretical truths. While the retreat of the disciplines from area studies is part of a complex history that dates back to the professionalization and institutionalization of the social sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the methodological turn toward formal modeling and universal applicability must also be understood, at least in part, in the context of these more recent processes and transformations. In the midst of these restructurings buffeting area studies as a whole came the economic recession of 2008, which not only hit university campuses hard but also reinforced the trends discussed above. Consequently, the “midnight

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surprise” of more than a 45 percent cut in federal funding for Title VI in 2011 came at a time when the centers depending on this funding were particularly vulnerable and no longer able to rely on the safety net previously provided by their universities (see Shami and Danzeisen 2011). The fact that these cuts had an impact on faculty and student research, study abroad programs, and dissertation fieldwork (including the complete cancellation of the FulbrightHays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad [DDRA] program, which grants approximately 150 awards each year) and that they were announced at the beginning of the summer meant that hundreds of students, not to mention faculty, were left scrambling to reconstitute their plans.34 In addition, these cuts had an impact on course offerings, faculty retention, and new hiring, language teaching, outreach activities, center staffing, and collaborations.35 Even elite research universities relied on Title VI funding for the teaching of small classes or one-on-one tutoring of certain languages. Also heavily affected were library collections, to which Title VI centers routinely contributed funding to cover costs of materials on their respective regions. Thus the very “gains” that accrued after 9/11 were threatened exactly one decade later. Ironically, among the plans canceled on many campuses, as centers froze their spending, were events that had been scheduled in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. More ironic still was the fact that these cuts came at a time of deep changes in the Middle East itself, with the Arab uprisings and revolutions sending US foreign policy circles into a tailspin.

Conclusion A dense confluence of social and educational rethinking and restructuring in the United States characterized the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 and thus shaped the intellectual and institutional environments within which the impact of 9/11 must be carefully assessed. In this respect, it is important to assert the somewhat obvious observation that institutions change slowly, as Sheila Biddle remarks in the introduction to her 2002 report on internationalization: “None [change] more slowly than universities; administrative structures and practices do not change with the calendar, new initiatives must build on those already in place” (4–5). And just as changes in university institutions have their own cadences and confront particular constraints, the diverse challenges facing areas studies come with their own genealogies and temporal horizons.

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This chapter discusses, through the lens of MES, some of the challenges— their origins, implications, and particular intersections at the level of the university—that are shaping the future of area studies as a knowledge enterprise. Understanding why area studies became an “embattled paradigm” in the twenty-first century involves a number of related and/or parallel processes: changing geopolitical and economic realities that create new levels of seemingly deterrritorialized connections, thus privileging the study of global flows over grounded practices, the ways in which the university as an institution changes and adapts to neoliberalism and globalization, and the increasing securitization of public life and goods. As these processes unfold in the real world they are mirrored in knowledge production. Everyday relations on campus; the academic units through which teaching, research, and writing takes place; and the concepts and frameworks that become hegemonic—these are the sinews and tissue through which thought is made solid and acquires power. Thus what seem to some as petty academic squabbles over campus resources and prestige reflect and refract much broader and perhaps more significant sets of relations that enmesh the university in its multiple contexts. It is interesting to consider how long-term trends and incremental changes in institutional and intellectual practices are thrown into sharp relief through disjunctures, ruptures, and shocks. The fall of the Berlin wall was such a shock; the attacks of 9/11 are another. While their geopolitical implications and fallouts were quite different, both events led to a rethinking of academic priorities and architectures in US universities. The impact of 9/11 included an increased opening up of the university to outside interests and forces both in positive ways (increased engagement and public outreach) and in negative ones (attacks on academic freedom and autonomy). It also led to a restructuring of interests in research and teaching, including the expansion of the boundaries of MES and the search for connections (for example, with South Asia), the focus on some areas and countries that were hitherto neglected (Afghanistan, Central Asia), and an increased interest and investment in certain themes (such as contemporary Islam). Finally, 9/11 and the “war on terror” led to a perhaps unprecedented reflection on the part of the academy in terms of how and to whom faculty teach, write, and speak. The interviews undertaken by the SSRC project uniquely engaged academics in talking about themselves, their own practices and choices. In the years since 9/11 one can see important changes in how courses are taught, the emergence of new venues for publishing such as online journals

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and blogs that transform the very nature of academic writing, and a heightened awareness of the broader significance of academic knowledge. Thus “there is a greater degree of reflexivity, creativity and consequence around international and area studies within American universities today than ever before” (Kennedy 2012, 112). While the needles of the compass of area studies continue to spin, certain directions and magnetic pulls can be discerned. Much more remains to be done to identify the more enduring of these directions and to determine to what extent the compass itself will survive. And we must question whether, in the long run, 9/11 will endure as a watershed moment for MES. In the words of one interviewee: We don’t want to be a child—like how Slavic studies wouldn’t want to be a child of the Cold War and that stuff—we wouldn’t want to be a child of 9/11 so we kind of want to shed that legacy and say, you know, let’s talk about stuff not related to Israel and Palestine, not related to 9/11. Let’s talk about Persian culture and poetry. Let’s talk about the Turkic world . . . and this huge, rich culture that influenced our culture to a great degree and focus on those things that we know are never going to go away. 9/11 will eventually . . . you know, it’s not a foundation for a program.36

Notes This chapter draws in part on the data collected for the long-term research project The Production of Knowledge on World Regions, based at the Social Science Research Council, of which this volume is a part. For more information, see Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, included as the appendix to this volume. 1.

For analytical purposes we retain our focus on the decade 2001–11, even though much of what we have to say has over time gained in importance and relevance. As this volume goes to print, the Middle East region is experiencing even more decisive and violent internal upheavals and foreign interventions, and US relations with and policies on the region are tested as never before. Academia in the United States has consequently become even more riven and politicized, as noted later in this chapter.

2.

The phrase “canary in the mine shaft” used in the subhead above is from comments by Lisa Anderson, which she made in her capacity as chair of the SSRC Board of

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Directors during a board meeting discussion of HR 3077. For an earlier version of this section of the chapter, see Shami and Godoy-Anativia 2007. Some of the findings reported here were also discussed in an earlier article written by members of the project team; see Miller-Idriss and Worden 2010. 3.

All interviews in this chapter are quoted from transcripts from the project The Production of Knowledge on World Regions. In order to distinguish between quotations from formal and informal interviews, direct quotations, which come from transcribed audiotapes, are indicated by double quotation marks (“ ”), and quotations from handwritten notes are indicated by single quotation marks (‘ ’). This quotation is from the Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

4.

Director, Center for Latin American Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

5.

Center Administrator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

6.

Center Administrator, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

7.

Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Open Plains, 2005– 6.

8.

Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

9.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

10.

Dean, International Studies, North Urban, 2005– 6.

11.

See the section “The Problems in Middle East Studies” on the Campus Watch website: www.campus-watch.org/about.php (accessed July 2, 2014).

12.

See, among others, the case of Joseph Massad at Columbia University (“Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report” 2005) and, more recently, that of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (“Academic Freedom and Tenure” 2015).

13.

The problem of obtaining US visas for scholars extends well beyond MES. At the 2006 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 80 percent of the membership voted in favor of relocating the association’s congresses outside the United States to protest denial of visas to Cuban scholars and a growing number of Venezuelan and Bolivian colleagues. The 2007 congress was moved from Boston to Montreal, in 2009 it was held in Rio de Janeiro, and in 2010 it was held in Toronto, then returned to the United States. In the period 1968– 2007 only two congresses had been held outside the United States (both in Mexico).

14.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, North Urban, 2005– 6.

15.

These debates were foreshadowed in and largely informed by Martin Kramer’s 2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. Kramer was one of the advocates and most vocal supporters of HR 3077. See Kramer and Kurtz 2003.

370 Seteney Shami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia

16.

See the latter’s website: www.casl.umd.edu/ (accessed July 3, 2014).

17.

HR 3077 led to a congressional decision to fund an evaluation of Title VI by the National Research Council at the cost of $2 million, which produced the report, International Education and Foreign Languages: Keys to Securing America’s Future (O’Connell and Norwood 2007).

18.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Southern State, 2005– 6.

19.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, U West, 2005– 6.

20.

Director, Center for Russia/Eurasian Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

21.

See, e.g., the website of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism: www.start.umd.edu/ (accessed July 2, 2014).

22.

An example is the conference organized at Smith College in 2005 titled “Fear, Loathing and Surveillance: Postcolonial and Feminist Scholarship after 9/11.”

23.

See, for reference, the activities and publications produced by the Middle East Task

24.

Increasingly over time, conflicts and debates over MES, and over the politics of the

Force in Anthropology. Middle East more generally, began to attract attention to broader issues related to university governance, academic freedom, the role of intellectuals in society, and policy making. The best illustration of this, referred to above, is the Steven Salaita case at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which brought into the debates an array of commentators and academic institutions that normally would not be interested in MES, reinforcing the idea that MES is indeed the “canary in the mine shaft.” 25.

A prominent example is Juan Cole, whose blog Informed Comment and regular articles in well-established web-based publications such as Salon became in this period (and continue to be) a key reference for scholars, policy professionals, and concerned citizens across the United States. See www.juancole.com/.

26.

Director, Center for South Asian Studies, Southern State, 2006– 7.

27.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Eastern Elite, 2005– 6.

28.

Affiliated Faculty, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, U West, 2005– 6.

29.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

30.

Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2005– 6.

31.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Quadrangle, 2006– 7.

32.

Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, North Urban, 2005– 6.

33.

The subhead above is borrowed from Hershberg 1998.

34.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation stepped into the breach at this critical moment and announced a $3.6 million onetime grant to the International Institute of Education to provide support for PhD students in the humanities whose funding had

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been lost. This covered 80 of the 130 students nominated to receive funding in 2011– 12 through the DDRA program. 35.

For more details, see the unpublished report “Survey Results—Impact of Title VI NRC Budget Cuts.” The survey was conducted in August 2011 by the Council of National Resource Center Directors.

36.

Associate Director, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Open Plains, 2005– 6.

References “Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.” 2015. American Association of University Professors: Reports and Publications. April. Accessed October 7, 2015. www.aaup. org/report/UIUC. “Ad Hoc Grievance Committee Report.” 2005. Columbia News, March 28. Accessed October 7, 2015. www.columbia.edu/cu/news/05/03/ad_hoc_ grievance_committee_report.html. Anderson, Elizabeth A. 2006. Internationalization and Interdisciplinarity: An Evaluation of Title VI Funded Middle East Studies Centers—Fieldwork Report. New York: Social Science Research Council. Biddle, Sheila. 2002. “Internationalization: Rhetoric or Reality?” American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 56. Accessed December 28, 2013. www.acls.org/Publications/OP/56_Internationalization.pdf. Calhoun, Craig. 2006. “Is the University in Crisis?” Society 43, no. 4 (May– June): 8–18. Cohen, David William, and Michael D. Kennedy, eds. 2005. Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cole, Juan. 2003. “Why Are Arch-Conservatives Ganging Up on the Middle East Studies Association?” History News Network, January 20. Accessed October 7, 2015. http://hnn.us/articles/1218.html. Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA). 2007. “Proposed FY 2008 Budgets for Social and Behavioral Science.” COSSA Washington Update 26, no. 4. Doumani, Beshara. 2006a. “Between Coercion and Privatization: Rethinking Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century.” In Academic Freedom after September 11, edited by Beshara Doumani, 11–57. New York: Zone Books.

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———, ed. 2006b. Academic Freedom after September 11. New York: Zone Books. Glover, William, and Ken Kollman, eds. 2012. Relevant/Obsolete? Area Studies in the U.S. Academy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan with Lulu Publishing. Hershberg, Eric. 1998 (2000). “From Cold War Origins to a Model for Academic Internationalization: Latin American Studies at a Crossroads.” Dispositio/n 23, no. 50: 117– 31. Heydemann, Steve. 2002. “Middle East Studies after 9/11: Defending the Discipline.” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 3 (July): 102–8. Kennedy, Michael. 2012. “Keywords for Globalizing Knowledge across Contexts.” In Relevant/Obsolete? Area Studies in the U.S. Academy, edited by William Glover and Ken Kollman, 112– 38. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan with Lulu Publishing. Kramer, Martin. 2001. Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Kramer, Martin, and Stanley Kurtz. 2003. “Can Congress Fix Middle Eastern Studies?” Washington Institute Policywatch, December 9. Accessed October 7, 2015. www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/ can-congress-fix-middle-eastern-studies. Kurtz, Stanley. 2003. “Reforming the Campus: Congress Targets Title VI.” National Review Online, October 14. Accessed December 28, 2013. www. nationalreview.com/articles/208261/reforming-campus. McNeil, Kristine. 2002. “The War on Academic Freedom.” The Nation, November 15. O’Connell, Mary Ellen, and Janet L. Norwood, eds. 2007. International Education and Foreign Languages: Keys to Securing America’s Future. Committee to Review the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays International Education Program. National Research Council, Center for Education, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pipes, Daniel. 2003. “Saving Mideast Studies.” New York Post, September 18. Accessed October 7, 2015. www.danielpipes.org/1251/ campus-watch-and-saving-mideast-studies. Prashad, Vijay. 2003. “Confronting Evangelical Imperialists.” Counterpunch, November 13. Accessed October 7, 2015. www.counterpunch. org/2003/11/13/confronting-the-evangelical-imperialists/.

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Maalouf, Amin. 2011. “Preface to the Original Edition.” In Disordered World: Setting a New Course for the Twenty-First Century, xxi–xxiii. London: Bloomsbury. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, and Elizabeth Hanauer. 2011. “Exporting Higher Education: Offshore Campuses in the Middle East.” Comparative Education 47, no. 2: 181–207. Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, and Elizabeth Worden. 2010. “Internationalisation in US Higher Education: Studying the Middle East in the American University.” Globalisation, Societies and Education 8, no. 3 (September): 393–409. Poblete, Juan, ed. 2003. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Prewitt, Kenneth. 1996. “Presidential Items.” Items (SSRC) 50 (June– September): 31–40. Shami, Seteney, and Holly Danzeisen. 2011. “Midnight Surprise: Preliminary Reactions to the Federal International Education Budget Cuts.” Items and Issues (SSRC), July 20. Accessed July 2, 2014. http://itemsandissues.ssrc.org/midnight-surprise-preliminary-reactions-to-the-federalinternational-education-budget-cuts. Shami, Seteney, and Marcial Godoy-Anativia. 2007. “Pensée 2: Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Middle East Studies in the Aftermath of 9/11.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3: 346–49.

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chapter ten

In the Shadow of Orientalism: The Historiography of US-Arab Relations Ussama Makdisi

The attacks of September 11, 2001, precipitated a surge of interest in the United States in the Arabic language, Islam, and the relationship between America and the Middle East. The invasion of Iraq significantly added to this interest. Hastily written accounts of Islamic terrorism, about Islam’s oppression of women, and about the dangers the West faces from Arab Muslims crowd bookstore shelves. There are, not surprisingly, a variety of prescriptions for what America should do next in a “troubled” region of the world. In this new landscape of apparently universal expertise, academics who actually specialize in the history of American involvement with the Middle East are in a bind. The very rigor of their training and the review process at the heart of academic publishing work against the immediate demands of an eager but impatient public. Good history is not easy to distill into popular form. Furthermore, an evolutionary process in American academic historiography to expand the purview of traditional conceptions of what and who constitute the subject of American history has collided quite dramatically with a nationalist mood stoked by the attacks of September 11 and by the American occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. This chapter examines the historiography of US-Arab relations. It traces the attempted transformation of a discourse of American exceptionalism into a more critical postnationalist scholarship. At the same time, it reflects on the academic limits and political challenges of this attempted historiographical makeover.

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Although the vast majority of accounts of America and the region that spans from North Africa to Iran focus on the post–World War II period when US strategic interests in the region became manifest, sustained American cultural involvement began long before the discovery of oil in Arabia or the creation of Israel. The genesis of what is today a discourse of American and Middle Eastern (especially Arab) exceptionalism—the former seen as positive, anti-imperialist, and modern and the latter negative, oppressive, and medieval— occurred in these earlier moments of encounter and in the writings that they produced. A major American missionary presence in the Ottoman Empire played a crucial historiographical role in framing the American relationship to the Middle East as inherently benevolent. Subsequent descriptions and analyses of American involvement inherited and secularized this missionary story. Diplomatic histories for the most part, they interpreted American involvement in light of the assumptions of the missionary-dominated historiography, even as US material interests in the region became increasingly important. As in the study of other parts of the world, the Cold War provided a dominant interpretive frame for understanding the contemporary Middle East (for Latin America, see Grandin 2004; Mignolo 2005; for Africa and the Middle East, see Mamdani 2004; for a more general study, see Gendzier 1985). Following the era of decolonization and the rise of the field of postcolonial studies as well as a new diplomatic American history, the door has been opened for a new kind of scholarship about the Middle East, as about Latin America and Asia (for the United States and the Philippines, see Kramer 2006, 1– 34; Renda 2001; for a foundational text in American studies, see Kaplan and Pease 1993). This work does not assume the United States is, or has ever been, a benevolent power, and it has subjected the claims and sources of American missionaries, diplomats, officials, writers, and travelers to intense scrutiny. However, whereas the impetus for the current, inclusive, and transnational study of American history has come at a time when US involvement in Latin America has become less contentious than what it was during the Cold War, and long after the end of the Vietnam War, it coincides with an extraordinary US military posture in the Middle East (see Bradley and Young 2008; McAlister 2005; Zeiler 2009). The ongoing problem of terrorism and the specter of 9/11 have compounded the politicization of the study of the Middle East, as has an intense dispute about how to understand, narrate, and relate to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The presumed stakes

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and relevance of a critical historiography that can challenge a narrative of US exceptionalism, and that can do so in a manner that reaches a broad audience, are evident in the case of the Middle East. Indeed, against a backdrop of persistent US interventions in the region, and an equally persistent Arab and Iranian resistance to these interventions, stereotypes about the inherent depravity of the Middle East or the Arabs or Islam and the innocence of America abound in the United States—whether in Hollywood movies, sensationalist accounts of women’s oppression in the region, or ostensibly objective histories aimed at the general public (see Jamal and Naber 2008; Semmerling 2006; McAlister 2005; and for a comparative perspective, see Khatib 2006).1 These stereotypes draw sustenance from ideas advocated by several prominent academicians, especially by the widespread dissemination of the notion of a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West proposed by Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington (1996).2 Although it is important not to create a straw man of Lewis or Huntington, whose thesis finds its most powerful echo among journalists, in think tanks, and in government circles, and not among historians of the Middle East, it is also important not to presume that academic thinking is unaffected by the turbulent political currents that shape US-Arab relations. As this chapter illustrates, essentialist depictions of the Middle East or Islam still enjoy a significant measure of academic legitimacy and circulation. At the same time, however, it is also true that ahistorical depictions are being consistently contested by other forms of academic knowledge that refuse to take for granted American exceptionalism and that reject caricatures of Arab or other predominantly Muslim societies. The contest on how to represent the US role in the Middle East, in turn, brings to the fore the question that Edward Said first raised in 1978 in Orientalism about the nature of American understandings of the Middle East. More than three decades after the publication of his book, Said’s criticism of Orientalist scholarship—and his accompanying plea for a secular humanistic interpretation to replace it—remain both topical and enigmatic. It is one thing to criticize American representations of foreign cultures; it is an entirely different matter to study American engagements with them. These are by no means unrelated endeavors, but by the same token they entail very different conceptions of what constitutes a field of inquiry and how to go about studying it comprehensively. The recent emergence of a more critical scholarship of America and the Middle East, therefore, begs the question of

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whether it is possible to write a history that takes both the Americans and the Arabs equally seriously despite the prevailing political climate, and ultimately what kind of methodology this might entail for the rewriting of US-Arab relations and, more broadly, American involvement in the world. Like many other regions of the world, the Middle East was subjected to two traditional, often overlapping, genres of writing by Americans in the nineteenth century. The first was the missionary chronicle such as William Thomson’s The Land and the Book (1880) or Henry Harris Jessup’s Fifty-Three Years in Syria (1910). The second was the travelogue recorded by a variety of tourists, landscape artists, consuls, and sailors who passed through the late Ottoman Empire. In both cases, these were often celebratory accounts: they extolled American virtues as they described the East. Many of these books offered important and enduring information about the customs, architecture, and landscape of the area. Some evangelicals such as Eli Smith and Edward Robinson pioneered a field of biblical archaeology, offering what they considered an objective, dispassionate object of study—a “better guide than any native” one could find on the spot, proclaimed the mission apologist Thomas Laurie (1885, 73).3 Similar to contemporary American narratives about China, India, Latin America, or Africa, the traditional American perspective, despite its internal variety, refused to give any latitude to Middle Eastern perspectives or voices, let alone take seriously Arab, Turkish, or Iranian history. The interpretive authority of the American missionary remained high throughout the century. Missionaries founded some of the most important—if not the most important— overseas American educational institutions, such as the Syrian Protestant College, Assiut College, Robert College, and Constantinople Women’s College, and some evangelicals, such as Samuel Zwemer, provided influential, if tendentious, accounts of Muslim and Ottoman history. Missionaries also witnessed and publicized the Ottoman atrocities against Armenian Christians. And they oversaw immense relief operations in the area during World War I. American missionaries thus remained central in shaping how Americans viewed the Middle East as a place capable of being remade by American benevolence (for a sympathetic but important recent account about American missionary and evangelical perspectives and discourses related to the Middle East, see Kieser 2010). Even in dissenting cases such as Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, which featured scathing sarcasm of fellow Americans’ naive sense of piety,

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self-criticism was ineluctably coupled with ignorance and contempt for the Arabs and other inhabitants of the East (see Obenzinger 1999, 190– 97). The American missionary chronicle, as Twain’s criticism reveals, was not uncontested. By the late nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth century, there was an array of other competing American depictions of the region. These included tourist travelogues (such as Twain’s), a nascent Christian Zionist literature (such as William Blackstone’s 1891 memorial to President Harrison to “restore” the oppressed Jews of Russia to Palestine), and a slew of fictional representations of a dreamy and exotic Orient. But, although they underscored the diversity of American involvement with the region, all these genres continued to speak for and to represent the Oriental and the Orient. They provided, in short, the foundations for American orientalism (Edwards 2000). World War I was a crucible for the Middle East. It was also a platform from which to greatly expand the political significance and stakes of American representations of the Orient. The much-celebrated notion of Wilsonian “selfdetermination” found one of its most dramatic challenges in the scramble to claim the postwar Middle East. Indeed, during the war itself, myriad American sources routinely compared Wilsonian principles to Turkish despotism. The most famous such contemporary account was the former US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau’s depiction of the Armenian genocide. Morgenthau dedicated his book to Wilson, whom he described as “that exponent in America of the enlightened opinion of the world, which has decreed that the rights of small nations shall be respected and that such crimes as are described in this book shall never again darken the pages of history” (1918, v).4 What was fundamentally important about Morgenthau’s characterization of Turkish bestiality was the degree to which it secularized a long-standing evangelical impulse to remake the Middle East. Rather than call for the conversion of Turkey to Christianity, Morgenthau, who was Jewish, helped popularize a new American discourse about the need to convert the peoples of the region to civilization and freedom under benevolent American auspices. Though Wilson himself was deeply religious in his outlook on the world, the depiction of the despotism of the Young Turks paved the way for a new American approach and discourse that celebrated Wilsonianism precisely because it was allegedly disinterested and universal in a secular sense.

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Paternalism, not religious conversion, was the order of the day. The famous 1919 report of the American section of the Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, informally known as the King-Crane Commission, concerning the fate of the defeated Ottoman Empire further solidified this new secular language of American disinterestedness regarding the Middle East (the only book-length study of the King-Crane Commission is Howard 1963; see also Makdisi 2010, 138–45). The King-Crane report, for example, specifically lauded Wilson’s idealism, in contrast to what the commissioners depicted as old-style European imperialism. American evangelicals, businessmen, and philanthropists also took the lead in relief operations for both Armenian Christians and Syrian Arabs during and immediately after the war. For the advocates of such relief, American national (as opposed to more narrowly evangelical) benevolence toward the peoples of the region was self-evident. James Barton, who was head of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and who had called for American military involvement during the war, wrote a glorious account of American philanthropy and “humanitarian enterprise” titled Near East Relief in 1930 with an introduction by the former US president Calvin Coolidge. This more secular emphasis inaugurated a postmissionary and more formally academic discourse regarding the Middle East. The historian Edward Mead Earle, who described the “Near East” as a “problem,” published a bibliography of English-language works about the region under the auspices of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in September 1924. In an implicit rejection of nearly a century of missionary literature, Earle insisted that there was no “satisfactory” English-language general history of the Middle East and that the “objective treatments of Mohammedanism” were rare (1924a, 5, 13). As Earle’s review indicates, the study of what were now described as American “interests” in the region was sandwiched between the problems of British and French imperialism and the rise of nationalism. Earle himself noted that the United States was entering an “unchartered sea” in large part because its economic situation “seem[s] to forecast increasing American interest in imperialism” (1924b, 336, 337). The formal US acceptance of British and French mandates in the Arab world indicated US Open Door imperialism. The establishment of American diplomatic relations with secular Turkey and Wahabist Saudi Arabia made clear that, henceforth, commercial and material interests trumped missionary interests (a point made eloquently by Kieser 2010, 158).

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The development of Zionism in Palestine further complicated American representations of the Middle East. More than any other issue, the related questions of Zionism and Palestine would dominate US understandings of the region in the century ahead. Zionism, like evangelicalism, was predicated on dismissing and denying a salient or meaningful Arab history in Palestine. Unlike evangelicalism, however, Zionism was cast by its partisans as a modern and democratic movement at the same time that it depended on romantic and biblical narratives of redemption and repatriation to the Holy Land. Zionism enjoyed widespread political and public support in the United States and was supported by Wilson himself. As several scholars have indicated, information that portrayed the reality on the ground in Palestine differently was consistently ignored (see Mart 2006b; Davidson 2001). The King-Crane Commission findings, for example, which warned in 1919 about the dangerous contradiction between the idea of self-determination for the indigenous Arab majority and European Zionist colonization of Palestine, were dismissed and, in any case, rendered moot by the fait accompli of the mandate system agreed to by European powers at San Remo in 1920. Zionist hegemony within the United States, however, was by no means complete. Precisely because of the Palestine question, some Americans, especially diplomats, academics, and missionaries connected to the Arab world, warmly received George Antonius’s The Arab Awakening, published in London in 1938 (an American edition followed a year later; see also Cleveland 1997, 84–86; Jacobs 2011, 105– 9). Antonius not only painted a positive picture of American missionaries as responsible for an Arab national awakening; he also introduced Western readers to an Arab perspective backed by hitherto unpublished primary documents, including translations of the HusaynMcMahon correspondence, the Anglo-French declaration of 1918 that promised to respect Arab self-determination, and the recommendations of the King-Crane Commission. Antonius offered a romantic portrayal of the Arab nationalist movement, but his importance lay in being an Arab writing in English a powerful, well-documented history of the Arab quest for selfdetermination that had no equal at its time. His book was a landmark, not least because Antonius insisted that an objective history of Western involvement in the Arab world demanded an accounting of Arab agency—as well as, of course, a reckoning with solemn Western pledges for Arab independence that were serially betrayed by Great Britain.5 He illustrated dramatically how the story of Zionism would be turned on its head if Arabs were represented

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politically. William Yale, who had been a pro-Zionist member of the staff of the King-Crane Commission and who had dissented from its anti-Zionist recommendations, reviewed Antonius’s book favorably in 1939, acknowledging that it was a “timely book” and that “Arabs and Zionists would do well to study critically and with an open mind this illuminating volume” (908–10). So long as American political interests remained subordinate to the far more prominent British and French imperialism in the Middle East, however, the repercussions of the struggle over Palestine on American representations of the region were limited. Orientalist depictions, meanwhile, continued apace. The American popular writer Lowell Thomas was instrumental in the creation of the mythology of Lawrence of Arabia in the early 1920s, with its stark contrast between the romantic Lawrence and the medieval, if noble, Bedouin Arabs that Lawrence was ostensibly attempting to liberate (see Thomas 1924). The emergence of the United States as the world power in the post–World War II era coincided with and galvanized a renewed interest in the Middle East (for American influence on Oriental studies, see Lockman 2004b, 103– 7). The classic missionary heyday had already passed. The nature of American involvement changed dramatically and obviously: from missionary “disinterested benevolence” to a strategic Cold War obsession with the need for US control over the region’s vast oil resources. To the extent that historians such as John DeNovo (1963), Joseph Grabill (1971), and James Field Jr. (1969) recalled the nineteenth-century origins of America’s role in the Middle East, they did so in largely celebratory tones and as part of an overall secular story of American-inspired modernization. Nathan Citino (2008) and Matthew Jacobs (2011) have delved into the relationship between the Cold War and the study of the Middle East.6 In the 1950s, scholars such as Dankwart A. Rustow, Manfred Halpern, and J. C. Hurewitz praised Mustafa Kemal’s pro-Western Turkey (which recognized Israel in 1949 and joined NATO in 1952) as an example that the Arabs ought to have emulated. Cold Warriors who could contemplate reform in the Middle East but who were opposed to anti-Western revolution in it advised the US government through the Council on Foreign Relations on how to “contain” the Middle East. They saw problems in the region laying squarely with what were seen as “traditional” societies and with indigenous obstacles to a process of modernization. Both H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen’s

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1950 Islamic Society and the West and Bernard Lewis’s 1963 account, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, reflected this argument (Citino 2008, 589). Lewis, in particular, serves as a counterpoint to Antonius’s Arab Awakening. What for Antonius was a history of broken promises and a story of the dialectic between Arab national aspirations and colonialism was for Lewis a story of modernization as westernization, that is, a history of the emancipation of the people of the Middle East (Turkey first and foremost) from a medieval and reactionary Islam and into a putatively liberal and secular Western modernity. Jacobs, for his part, has amply documented the degree to which American scholars in this period, in connection with their European counterparts, oscillated between viewing Islam as a problem (as with Lewis) or as a potent counterforce to secular nationalism (2011, 58). More broadly, Irene Gendzier has demonstrated the degree to which social scientists such as Daniel Lerner in his Passing of Traditional Society laid the basis for a social scientific discourse that located the Arabs and other peoples in the Third World on a developmental trajectory that had at its apex the United States (Gendzier 1985, 4– 7, 130– 33). As Jacobs puts it, modernization theory reproduced America’s “sacred and secular mission of transforming the Middle East, and at last integrate the region’s people into the international economy and political arena as close allies of the United States” (2011, 171). Gendzier described this situation as an elitist notion of political development that was unable to appreciate, let alone understand, the complexities and realities of the Middle East itself (1985, 10–11). Though such modernization-enamored scholarship was inevitably divided into various, competing schools of thought, it unquestionably developed a new form of American discourse about the Middle East that was far more closely integrated into structures of US imperialism than the missionaries had ever been. Edward Said located the emergence of Orientalism in America in this period. The history of the Arab Middle East thus continued to be depicted in these works in largely static terms; it appeared to be a stage upon which to exhibit American qualities and a place that had to be modernized, if no longer evangelized directly. As Field described it, the experience of America in the Middle East in the nineteenth century reflected the “American genius for generalizing from American experience” (1969, 3). Most diplomatic and economic historians of the United States who turned to the Middle East focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Cold War. They invariably explored internal US politics and policy makers; for instance, they analyzed whether

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Truman was sincere or calculating in his precipitous recognition of Israel. There were, to be sure, substantial debates that occurred beneath this foreign policy consensus that fixated on US actors and American sources. The clash between pro-Israel and Arabist positions was one; the nature of the AngloAmerican relationship was another.7 However, the theme of US exceptionalism continued, buttressed by the historical identification of the British and French, and not the United States, with colonialism in the area, the history of American benevolent work, and the carefully constructed mythology of the pioneering days of Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO, which was favorably compared to the arrogant Anglo-Iranian Oil Company). The public stand Eisenhower took against the tripartite Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal and the self-styled American position as an “honest broker” to achieve peace between Arabs and Israelis augmented the discourse of American benevolence and difference from European imperialism. Most works that dwelled on US–Middle Eastern relations identified with the anticommunist language of the US government: “partnership” rather than imperialism was said to be a hallmark of the United States. In his account (which would go into several editions) of the history of US-Arab relations, the historian William Polk concluded that “in America as abroad, Americans certainly wish to see and intend to help to bring into being a better world than we have today” (1965, 287). But Polk also deplored what he regarded as a deep problem of American interpretation of the Middle East, namely, the refusal of many Americans to engage with a range of critical Middle Eastern perspectives. Following the Iraqi Revolution in 1958, he noted: We need to know what the native critics think. It is lamentable that we do not. We are not helped in getting this sort of information by the fact that almost half of our diplomatic corps have no useful command of a foreign language. More than half of our foreign service officers are unable to converse in any of the languages of Asia or Africa. Among our journalists the percentage is even lower. (1958, n.p.)

Indeed, what was striking was the emergence of a radical US historiography of foreign relations in Latin America and Asia, exemplified by the pioneering work of William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, Michael Hunt, and Marilyn Young. This scholarship had no immediate parallel among US

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historians studying the Middle East (for more on the historiography of US foreign relations and the Arab world, see Citino 2002, 4–17; Hunt 1987). A large part of the reason, to be sure, lay in the long history of US imperialism in Central America as well as in the Philippines, thus marking these areas as obvious focal points for the emergence of a critical scholarship of US empire. Another reason lay in the US war in Vietnam. Still another lay in the powerful legacy of orientalism and modernization theory—to say nothing of anticommunism—that shaped so much of how American scholars viewed the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s. Gendzier, for example, noted that in the study of Third World societies “radical critiques appeared to have bypassed those concerned with the Middle East, at least among established scholars” (1985, xi). But another reason for the lack of the emergence of critical American scholarship on the Middle East perhaps lay in the Arab-Israeli conflict in which Israel, until 1967 at least, successfully described itself to large swaths of American public and academic opinion as a bastion of Western civilization waging a war for survival against belligerent Arabs (Mart 2006b, 76– 77; Said 1978; see also Horne 1986, 283–84 for an assessment of W. E. B. DuBois’s support for Zionism). Given how openly the United States supported Israel and given how liberal and progressive currents within America embraced the creation of Israel as an essentially positive act, the possibility of articulating a critical historiography of US power in the region that historicized, as opposed to essentialized, Arabs diminished. If anything, Orientalist descriptions of the Arabs as irrational and hate-filled, especially their perceived role in fomenting and perpetuating conflict with Israel, gained considerable momentum after 1948 (Mart 2006a; 2006b, 45–47). Certainly, scholars such as Polk recognized, along with virtually all other American scholars of the Arab world, the enormous damage done to US prestige in the region because of its pro-Israel politics. But his concern was framed as one done to “our” interests in the region and the degree to which support for Israel might push Arabs into the hands of communists. Polk, in other words, accepted fully a Cold War framework that in essence divided the world into good Americans and pernicious Soviets. Using a refrain that was to become common, he insisted that America was “caught in the middle” between Arabs and Israel (Polk also refers to French colonialism in North Africa, 1952, 52; for an almost identical notion, see Hahn 1994, 280). As was the case with many diplomats and former missionaries with ties to the Arab world, he tended to romanticize the pre-1948 American relationship with

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the Middle East, even as this relationship was, in fact, overwhelmed by the extraordinarily diverse American (liberal and evangelical, Cold Warrior and civil rights campaigners) support for Israel. Yet, however much such multifaceted sympathy, identification, and advocacy worked to make Israel a key to US political hegemony in the region, inevitably, perhaps, it also called forth a dissenting countercurrent that insisted on an anti-Orientalist epistemology about the Middle East and American involvement in it. According to Edward Said, the tradition of orientalism traveled from nineteenth-century Europe into the post-1945 United States. Antiorientalism, too, may be said to have traveled, for some of its important roots lay in the Middle East following the turmoil of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. The loss of Palestine was a seminal event in the modern Arab world. Although the critical historiography of US empire penned by historians such as William Appleman Williams largely overlooked the Middle East, the United States became increasingly identified in the region as an imperialist power after 1948 and with the intensification of the Cold War. Nationalist and Marxist intellectuals in the Arab world denounced US policies in their countries, especially its support for Israel. Whereas many, if not most, Americans viewed the creation of Israel primarily as an act of atonement for a largely European history of anti-Semitism and, of course, the Holocaust, as well as through biblical and romantic nationalist perspectives, Arabs regarded the state as the culmination of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. For them, Zionism had been forced upon the region, and Israel had been founded at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs who were made stateless after 1948 (see Makdisi 2002). The development of an anti-Orientalist countercurrent is often said to have begun with the publication in 1963 of an influential essay titled “Orientalism in Crisis” by the Egyptian dissident intellectual Anouar AbdelMalek, who grew increasingly disenchanted with ahistorical Western representations of the Middle East. Abdel-Malek warned about the rise of what he called “neo-Orientalism” to answer what he described as a “crisis” in traditional orientalism whose emphasis on philology and the medieval past and whose consistent neglect of the modern was shaken by worldwide decolonization. Abdel-Malek noted also the emerging role of the United States in this “neo-Orientalism.” The Palestinian historian A. L. Tibawi, who wrote a seminal book in 1966 that offered the first genuinely historical, as opposed to hagiographic, monograph on American missionary work in

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nineteenth-century Syria, also wrote a series of essays along similar lines (see Tibawi 1963, 1979, 1980).8 Both Tibawi and Abdel-Malek reflected a historiographical moment when scholars from the Third World—and in America, when scholars of Native Americans, women, and African Americans—were increasingly demanding, and to an extent gaining, a say in how their cultures and histories were being portrayed. As Zachary Lockman has pointed out, these Arab intellectuals were joined by a new generation of American and European scholars who took issue with the traditional orientalism as well as with modernization theory (2004b, 162– 63). It was at this crossroad that Edward Said published his enormously influential Orientalism in 1978. Its impact on how the region has been studied academically has been immense and in some quarters immensely controversial (for the most comprehensive analysis of Said’s thesis and its various criticisms, see Lockman 2004b, 182–214). Said never taught a class on the Middle East, yet the Palestinian question was central for him, especially following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. For Said, the apparent paradox of Israeli colonization of Arab lands in an era of global decolonization led him to an exploration of the connection between demeaning representations of Arabs and Muslims and overt affiliations to US power. Through the lens of Palestine, therefore, he was able to appreciate and exemplify his thesis on modern orientalism, which is why the second book that immediately followed Orientalism was The Question of Palestine (1979). Said, however, set out in Orientalism a broader argument than Palestine temporally and geographically. He illustrated the degree to which the Orient, as represented by Western— mostly French, British, and ultimately American—experts, was based on certain dogmas. The first dogma stressed the difference between a rational, developed, humane, and superior “West” and an “Orient” constructed as aberrant and inferior. Another dogma Said denounced was the “abstractions” about the Orient meant to be representative of a “classical” tradition. Orientalists, Said charged, preferred textual abstractions to evidence drawn from “modern Oriental realities.” A third dogma had it that the Orient was incapable of defining itself, and a fourth was that the Orient was something to be either “feared” or “controlled” (Said 1978, 300– 301). Said underscored how such dogmas were sustained by a self-referential system of knowledge production, or what he called the “corporate institution for dealing with the Orient,” that routinely excluded Arab and other Eastern voices and perspectives (3). Finally, he illustrated how academic and abstract representations of the

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Orient aligned with popular stereotypes of Muslims, Arabs, and Iranians. He was by no means the first scholar to discuss demeaning and dehumanizing Western stereotypes of the East, but he became by far the most influential and widely read among them (Lockman 2004b, 148–81). Yet Said himself was dismissive of the importance of American orientalism before World War II: Cultural isolatos like Melville were interested in [the Orient]; cynics like Mark Twain visited and wrote about it; the American Transcendentalists saw affinities between Indian thought and their own; a few theologians and Biblical students studied the Biblical Oriental languages; there were occasional diplomatic and military encounters with Barbary pirates and the like, the odd naval expedition to the Far Orient, and of course the ubiquitous missionary to the Orient. But there was no deeply invested tradition of Orientalism. . . . Furthermore, the imaginative investment was never made either, perhaps because the American frontier, the one that counted, was the westward one. (1978, 290)

And so Said focused most of his criticism on figures such as H. A. R. Gibb and Bernard Lewis, British scholars who made the transition from the English to the American academic world in the post–World War II period and who helped transport Orientalist knowledge, with what Said saw as its attendant dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims, to American shores. As his compressed description of the state of American and Middle Eastern relations in the nineteenth century attests, Said was resolutely focused on American orientalism as a current problem rather than as one that had deep roots. Said did not elaborate on the nature of the connection between Western ideas of the Orient and what he enigmatically described as their “corresponding reality” on the ground. He insisted, rather, on a closed field of Western representation. “The Orient,” he wrote, “was almost a European invention” (1978, 1). Nor did he provide any analytic weight to the agency of indigenous perspectives, sources, or discourses in the production, legitimation, or circulation of Orientalist knowledge (this was one of many criticisms of the book and was most explicitly put by the Indian Marxist literary scholar Aijaz Ahmad; see Lockman 2004b, 195–201). Scholars have pointed out repeatedly these and other contradictions in Orientalism. The fundamental questions that Said raised, however, remain pertinent: Why is a certain set of Western representations of alien and fanatical

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Arabs and Iranians legitimated at a time of American dominion over large swaths of the Middle East, and what is the responsibility of a community of scholars—“secular humanists” in Said’s view—to criticize these representations? The crucial point, indeed, lay in the impact of Said’s work at a moment of a distinct liberalization of American historiography. His book opened the possibility for bringing together several disparate fields of inquiry, including a critical epistemology of knowledge as it relates to representations of the Middle East, an analysis of the role of empire in the shaping of American history, and a history of the Middle East itself. The foundation for an intersecting and dialectical, or what Said would later describe as a “contrapuntal,” approach to history that linked America and the Middle East, in short, was laid (Said 1993, 32). Neither Said nor his many disciples, however, immediately built upon this foundation. Instead, Orientalism inspired two parallel genres of scholarship: those in American literature and studies, which explored how Americans represented the Orient but overlooked the cultures and nations of the Middle East; and historians who sought to convey richer, and presumably non-Orientalist understandings of Ottoman, Arab, and Iranian history, but who had very little to say about American or European history itself. Ironically, despite the evident impact of the book on the way historians of the Middle East, South Asia, and more broadly speaking postcolonial studies view and describe their scholarly subjects, American diplomatic historians of the twentieth century have until recently ignored Said’s seminal work (see Rotter 2000; Little 1994, 538; Salman 1991). Rather, it was those scholars who delved into the cultural histories of American understandings of the Middle East who grappled most intently with Said’s thesis. A spate of books published in the aftermath of Said’s Orientalism fundamentally revolutionized the study of America’s cultural relationship with the Middle East. Almost all dealt in one manner or another with either the themes that Said had raised about the relationship between representation and power or directly with the thesis of Orientalism itself. In art history, geography, and cultural studies, works by John Davis (1996), Burke Long (2003), Malini Schueller (1998), and Hilton Obenzinger (1999) took their cue from Said directly.9 In different ways, these authors sought to deconstruct the politics and aesthetics of American visual and literary representations of Palestine. But of all these books on American interaction with the Middle East, Melani

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McAlister’s account Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East 1945–2000 has been the most prominent and has sought to engage with Said most directly. McAlister’s book seeks to explain how the Middle East came to matter to Americans in the post–World War II era. Picking up themes clearly evident in the work of Obenzinger and Davis, McAlister’s study seeks to introduce “culture” into a discussion of postwar American involvement typically dominated by the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict or oil. In this respect, her contribution is signal. Rather than assume that foreign policy reflects core American values (as Field and an earlier generation of American diplomatic historians have done) and rather than work primarily with the “Holy Land” as Davis, Long, and Obenzinger do, McAlister explains how foreign policy in the Middle East has broadly construed and helped create, along multiple registers, American nationhood. Elaborating Said’s argument in Orientalism, McAlister holds that the American constructions of the Middle East have been less functionalist—not simply knowledge in the service of power—but rather are products of “convergence, in which historical events, overlapping representations, and diverse vested interests came together in a power and productive, if historically contingent, accord.” Where Said sees an inexorable historical process, McAlister stresses contingency; whereas Said assumes, according to McAlister, a homogeneity of the “West” against which an “Orient” was represented, McAlister insists that the various American constructions of the Middle East have been “consistently obsessed with the problem of domestic diversity” (2001, 11). And so McAlister’s book analyzes various cultural forms that helped construct a multilayered and chronological narrative of American orientalism—from Hollywood Bible epics to African American liberation theology to the identification with Israel as a surrogate for power in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam to what she described as “military multiculturalism” of the 1990s with the first Gulf War. “Putting Orientalism in its place,” McAlister writes just before September 11, 2001, “then, becomes part of the analytical and historical task at hand” (12). Her assessment reflected a growing desire within the academy to move beyond Said’s Orientalism. McAlister describes her own work as an example of “postnationalist history of nationalism and its discontents” (274). Her work was thus part of a broader academic trajectory decades in the making. This trajectory, epitomized by the important 1993 edited volume by Amy Kaplan

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and Donald Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, at first sought to broaden conventional narratives of American history by uncovering hitherto silenced or hidden voices. More recently, the academic tendency has been to make US history more “transnational,” or as Thomas Bender has put it, “to mark the end of American history as we have known it” (2006, 3; see also Tyrell 1991). But there has also been an equally clear, and in the public realm far more evident, trajectory in the same period: to underscore and affirm a sense of American exceptionalism, as Samuel Huntington’s influential essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” seeks to do. Huntington posits that the post–Cold War world would be defined as a struggle between antithetical civilizations, and principally between what he referred to as “Islam” and the “West.” As Huntington put it, “the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (1993, 22). And his was by no means the only such representation of Islam as different, hostile, and alien to the West. The emeritus Princeton University professor Bernard Lewis was—and remains—central in this argument. These efforts were often, if not largely, based on a stigmatization of Islam, Arabs, and Muslims as a threat based not on politics but on something far deeper, that is to say, “culture” or “civilization.” These terms were used interchangeably to signify that the problem that divides America (and Israel) from the Arabs is not political in its essence but rather religious and cultural, that is, a problem internal to the Arab and Muslim world having to do with an alleged “Muslim” hostility to a presumably coherent and self-evident modernity of the “West” based on equality, democracy, and women’s rights. Islam, according to Lewis, remains obsessed with its centuries-old decline relative to its “millennial rival, Christendom.” Western colonialism and imperialism, in Lewis’s perspective, are epiphenomenal, and he maintains that Arabs point to them to indulge in a “blame game” to avoid examining what he regards as their own historic deficiencies (2002b, 151, 156). The shocking attacks of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath gave massive impetus to Lewis and Huntington’s thesis. Lewis’s fortuitously timed book What Went Wrong? provided a historical framework to consider the origins of Islamic terrorism.10 For Lewis, the attacks vindicated his thesis about the inability of Islam to adapt to modernity in the Middle East. As Lewis summarized his views in 2002, it was clear that in the twentieth

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century “things had gone badly wrong in the Middle East— and, indeed, in all the lands of Islam” (2002a, 43). And “the Muslim’s” response was habitually to blame others. For Lewis, Western imperialism was but a “plausible scapegoat” used by Arabs in modern times to deflect a reckoning with their own failings. Thus he insisted the inhabitants of the Middle East had placed themselves on a downward “spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression” (2002a, 45). The attacks of September 11 were followed by an intense display of American nationalism, the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq (with which Lewis was directly associated), the erection of a prison camp in Guantanamo, and the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib. President George W. Bush famously declared that the terrorists “hated” American “freedoms.” In turn, stridently pro-Israel figures such as Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes denounced the leading association of professional scholars of the Middle East known as the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for being anti-American and under the sway of Said’s allegedly pernicious influence (see Kramer 2001; Lockman 2004a; for more on the persistent attempts to stifle academic inquiry in relation to the Middle East, see Doumani 2006). Lewis and the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, who justified the US invasion of Iraq as the American “foreigner’s gift” to a stagnant and sectarian Arab world, took center stage in founding an alternative society for Middle Eastern studies to counter what they presumably regarded as the endemic bias of MESA (Ajami 2006). Building on Huntington and Lewis, Michael Oren—formerly a fellow at the Shalem center in Jerusalem and a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown and former Israeli ambassador to the United States—wrote a highly successful book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present (2007). Hailed as a pathbreaking account of the history of American involvement in the Middle East, Oren’s book portrays an idealistic America continually confronted by an alien Arab world. For Oren, the nature of American fantasies and the nature of American involvement in the Middle East may both change, but American values do not; America is “democratic, modern-minded, and free” (474), whereas the Middle East is “morally ambiguous” and a place filled by the “ubiquity of Arab terror” (518, 556). His tale is book-ended by the Barbary Wars and the terror attacks of 9/11. Throughout his book, Oren draws direct parallels between Arabs and the Barbary pirates, stressing that Arab Muslims represent the antithesis of a profound American Christian and Jewish Israeli community of values and interests.

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To make his argument work, however, Oren disregards the rich recent scholarship of the Ottoman Empire, American studies, the modern Middle East, and Zionism. He distorts the meaning of texts that he does cite to bolster a preconceived thesis of innate American goodness and philo-semitism. And he ignores virtually all evidence that contradicts his thesis. For example, he relies upon Levi Parsons’s 1819 sermon “The Dereliction and Restoration of the Jews,” which was delivered just before the departure of the first American Board missionaries to the Ottoman Empire, to make his case that American missionaries were proto-Zionist. Oren, however, fundamentally misrepresents the meaning of the sermon. He transforms Parsons’s admiration for the “children of Israel” into a homily about the profound ties that supposedly bound American Christians and Jews, whom Oren insists were regarded by missionaries as their “cousins in faith” (Oren 2007, 88). The very sermon from which Oren selectively quotes, however, contains numerous references that clearly contradict his anachronistic thesis of simple philosemitism on the part of missionaries. Oren writes that Parsons was grateful for the “Jews’ munificence,” but he leaves out of his account Parsons’s actual words: “After their hands were imbued in the blood of the Son of God, the judgments of heaven were not long suspended.” Or what soon followed, according to Parsons: “The Holy Spirit departed from the maddened people forever” (1819, 5). Or: “To this day, they remain the objects of universal abhorrence, and contempt. Thus the blood of Jesus has been upon them, and upon their children; thus for ages they have been suffering the vengeance of an incensed Judge” (6; emphasis in original). Or Parsons’s reference to the Jews as the “degenerate children” of God. Or finally, and most obviously, Parsons’s hope that “the Children of Israel shall seek the Lord their God.” And: “The veil will then be taken from their hearts. They will look upon him, whom they have pierced, and mourn” (20, 12–13; emphasis in original). He desired their “return” not with the ultimate goal of creating an independent state for Jews but as a necessary step on their way to becoming Christians, along with the millions of other “heathens” and “infidels” whom the missionaries sought to convert in the same period. Such is the misleading nature of Oren’s historical method. Whatever fits his preconceived thesis is hastily incorporated into a largely derivative account; whatever does not is simply omitted, as if not dealing with abundant historical evidence is the same thing as it not actually being there. He fixates on supposedly representative moments of Arab depravity and antimodernity

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but does not include a single Arabic source to back up his various assertions about Arab culture, motives, politics, or history. His book, symptomatically, ends with a celebration of George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq, which Oren, resuscitating a nineteenth-century language of benevolence, describes as “trying to assist native peoples” (2007, 596). In no recent book are the arguments of American exceptionalism and orientalism intertwined so aggressively and anachronistically. Yet the book has received accolades from an array of major American media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek. It was also praised by established scholars of US foreign relations, John Lewis Gaddis and Douglas Little, and by the British historian Niall Ferguson. Ferguson hailed the book as “deeply researched and brilliantly written history.”11 Little, himself the author of the respected American Orientalism, praised the work as a “magnificent new book” (2007).12 The implications of works such as Oren’s (or Lewis’s) that achieve widespread circulation for a burgeoning, but still restricted, critical scholarship of America and the Middle East are troubling. They point clearly to how resilient American orientalism is. To be sure, the narrative of American exceptionalism at the heart of Oren’s narrative is not unique to coverage of the Middle East. Stanley Karnow’s Pulitzer Prize–winning In Our Own Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, for example, is a sweeping journalistic account of American empire building in the Philippines. Like Oren, Karnow upheld American innocence; he internalized, according to the historian Michael Salman, the “ideology inscribed in its [American] sources” (1991, 222).13 There is in the case of the Middle East, however, both a longevity and a proliferation of sensationalist, often mendacious, accounts of Islam and Arabs (related most recently to both gender and terror; see Alsultany 2012, 71– 99; Mahmood 2008, 81–114; Abu-Lughod 2002; Qureishi and Sells 2003). Even informed journalistic accounts that offer stinging rebukes of specific US policies, and, therefore, take an opposite tack to works such as Oren’s, are often similarly framed in extraordinary assumptions about the “Arab mind” and the “shame” in Arab culture or in gross, unsupportable generalizations about the nature of religiosity in the Sunni Arab world (see, e.g., Hersh 2005, 23, for a discussion of Arab culture; Tyler 2008, 45, for a discussion of the “Arab mind”; and Kinzer 2008 for his ideas of an essential, fatalistic Iranian Shi’i

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religiosity and his assumptions about Arab Sunni religiosity). They assume the narrative of American innocence or at the very least an overt identification with American power that is undercut by a certain, crucial set of US policy decisions invariably tied to the Cold War. They swathe American history in what Tony Judt has described as “a sort of prelapsarian glow” (2006, 3). There is also an intense US partisanship in the Arab-Israeli conflict that very clearly impinges radically on how the Arab world is depicted and, more pertinently, on how US relations to the Middle East are understood. Because the creation of Israel has been often understood in the United States as a moral reaction to a pernicious history of anti-Semitism and to the Holocaust, that is, as the antithesis of injustice rather than a story of colonialism in Palestine and a denial of Arab self-determination (as Arabs see it), the American identification with Jewish Israelis remains strong (on the origins of the American embrace of Israel, see Mart 2006b; for Arab views, see Makdisi 2010). Perhaps most obviously, there is an American “colonial present” in the Middle East (to borrow a phrase from the geographer Derek Gregory [2004]). Collectively, these works indicate how difficult is the task of making genuinely scholarly work on the America and the Middle East relevant beyond narrow academic audiences. There is, however, also a case for cautious optimism. For one, there is an unprecedented number of scholars who are pushing back in the public sphere against stereotypes of the Arab world, Middle Eastern history, and USArab relations, notably Rashid Khalidi (2004), Juan Cole (2009), Mahmood Mamdani (2004), and Moustafa Bayoumi (2008). These scholars confront a paradoxically hostile yet demanding public climate that evidently thirsts for rudimentary knowledge about Islam, the Arab world, and American involvement in it. The trend in the proper academic historiography, furthermore, continues the crucial task of contextualizing the history of American representations of self and other. McAlister, for instance, updated her book in 2005 following the events of September 11 and the scandal at Abu Ghraib. She significantly rewrote her conclusion, muting her earlier criticism of Orientalism by folding it into a much longer meditation on how culture has continued to mold a negative American view of the Middle East. Douglas Little published a book titled American Orientalism in 2002, which argues that long-standing, nineteenth-century-era, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiment in America

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inevitably colored twentieth-century US policy makers’ views of Arab and Iranian nationalism and the Middle East (see also Citino 2002, 95– 97). Brian Edwards, for his part, published Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express in 2005. His work is the first to focus on American cultural engagement with the Maghreb in the post–World War II era, but unlike McAlister, who concentrated on domestic American representations of the Middle East, Edwards emphasizes how sustained American military, literary, cinematic, and anthropological engagements in and with North Africa not only produced an American sense of the United States as a global power but also elicited a series of Arab and Berber responses, investments, and contributions to this emerging idea of a global America. Timothy Marr’s 2006 The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism has delved more deeply than other books into nineteenth-century American views of Islam. Marr describes the “heritage of Islamic Orientalism” but disputes Said’s characterization that Americans had never had a significant “imaginative investment” in the Orient before the mid-twentieth century. He points to the fact that the main difference between the Americans and the British and French, who made up the heart of Said’s nineteenth-century Orientalist matrix, was that until the invasion of the Philippines the Americans possessed a “cultural imagination ungrounded in a colonial bureaucracy.” For Americans after the Barbary Wars and the Greek War of Independence, he adds, the Eastern Question was less a political than a “religious question” (18). McAlister, Edwards, and Marr are exemplars of the field of American studies. They have taken the lead in exploring how facets of American identity have been shaped by cultural opposition to but also engagement with Islam and the Middle East. Collectively, their works are clearly valuable for reminding scholars of how little we should take for granted constructions of national identity and how often the metaphorical and actual experiences of foreign worlds—in this case the Muslim world—need to be analyzed contextually. All of them, moreover, appear to subscribe to Said’s idea of secular humanism. Marr, for instance, calls for a “fuller declaration of the interdependence that joins all peoples of differing backgrounds in the intercultural dialogue that compromises the world’s shared cultural and religious history” (2006, 297). Salutary as this call is, it nevertheless raises the important question of how scholars who study America and the Middle East—whether their emphasis is

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on the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, Israel, or the region as a whole—can actually contribute to “intercultural dialogue.” Even if one were to leave aside the problems of the politicization of the American study of the Middle East mentioned above and ignore the undeniable evidence of an undiminished stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in the public realm that undercuts the possibility of dialogue, another obstacle emerges. Academic works such as Marr’s are mostly preoccupied with refuting, if not dismantling, a thesis of American exceptionalism, not with actually giving form or voice to the Muslims and Arabs. To be sure, there is no single way of studying the complex phenomenon of American orientalism, nor is there any reason to presume that Palestinian, Afghan, or Iraqi voices are necessarily relevant to the study of how Americans represent themselves. Yet Marr’s call does indicate a significant lacuna in much of current “transnational” American academic work. It is “transnational” in a limited sense—how Americans acted and understood their encounter with the foreign, in which the foreign remains analytically unimportant, a stage upon which an American story can be told, albeit in a decidedly more critical fashion than previous histories (for a criticism of transnationalism in American studies, see Traister 2010). If pioneering work in American studies has pushed for a far more engaged and nuanced understanding of the nature of American orientalism than Said initially outlined, several academic books published in the past decade—mostly the work of historians—point the way to a deepening of the historiographical revolution signaled by the intersection of Orientalism and the new critical American historiography. These accounts strive to give a far more relational picture of what has been, after all, a long-standing American engagement, and not simply an American representation of an engagement, with the Middle East. Heather Sharkey’s American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (2008), Ussama Makdisi’s Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (2008), Hans-Lukas Kieser’s Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East (2010), and Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (2014) amplify how an American missionary historiography ought not simply be read against the grain but against existing, contemporary Arab and Ottoman interpretations of the same period in order to more fully understand the context, competition, and implications

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of dynamic American evangelical interpretations of both America and the Middle East. American understandings of self and other, in short, were not occurring in a vacuum but in a dense and often enmeshed historical and historiographical landscape. The substantive benefits of a methodological approach that takes in, and grapples with, both American and Middle Eastern historiographies simultaneously become clear. In the older, hagiographical or exceptional versions of American missionary history told with only one dramatic set of actors, American benevolence was considered a reflection of innate American values. These values were, it was assumed, exported to the world; they allegedly inspired a liberal awakening in a dormant Middle East. As we have seen, critical American studies challenged the idea of benevolence but often rendered non-American voices and perspectives irrelevant, if not illegible. In the new transnational historiography of American missions, however, American benevolence takes on several contingent meanings and implications in radically different contexts. The genealogy of liberal thought emerging out of missionary encounters is thus recast as a result of highly contested encounters between Americans, Arabs, and (until their demise) Ottomans. Americans, in short, do not gift liberalism to the region as the traditional accounts assumed. Rather, a transnational process in which Americans are intimately involved does, such that by the end of the missionary heyday—by the mid-twentieth century—there is both an unprecedented ecumenism among some American missionaries who are able to think about Islam as part of modern spirituality and an unprecedented willingness among some Arabs to elaborate a secular and inclusive cultural and national identity. Instead of dismissing Lewis and Huntington’s spurious “clash of civilizations” thesis, the latest wave of historiography deciphers the meaning and implications of often intense and violent cultural clashes that implicate and involve different groups of Americans and Arabs, not “Islam” and the “West.” What works for the rewriting of the history of American benevolence presumably works for American imperialism as well. The studies by Nathan Citino (2002) on the formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Salim Yaqub (2004) on the Eisenhower Doctrine, and Robert Vitalis (2007) on the genesis of American oil interests in Saudi Arabia demonstrate the degree to which American orientalism has always had Middle Eastern intermediaries, agents, and dimensions. American exceptionalism appears to have non-American foundations. Some Arabs and

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others have invested in the idea of American difference at particular points in time—whether because of missionary institutions in the nineteenth century, in Saudi Arabia in the mid-twentieth century, or in Iraq today—and these investments mattered to a greater or smaller degree in understanding what America means and how Americans have interacted with and represented themselves in the world. Saudi Arabia may have been “America’s kingdom,” in Vitalis’s evocative phrase, but the Americans would not have been in Saudi Arabia and ARAMCO could not have spun its powerful tale of benevolence without Saudi agency and legitimation (for an account of the development of the Saudi state power that goes well beyond the conventional narrative of American benevolence and that emphasizes a range of Saudi views, see Jones 2010). The point of a more encompassing historiographical approach, of course, is not to justify American imperialism, nor is it to deny or minimize unequal relations of power and the racial, economic, and political hierarchies that have shaped American-Arab relations. Rather, it is to insist that by focusing only on one side of the equation scholars can miss, quite profoundly at times, the full nature of the object of their critique: whether this is American exceptionalism or orientalism or imperialism in the Middle East. The task of deconstructing interpretations, assumptions, and representations of American officials and policy makers is clearly valuable in its own right. For the foreseeable future, there is no indication that US-Arab relations are going to be any less fraught than they are today, or that American orientalism is going to diminish (see Lesch and Haas 2011).14 The task of sifting through declassified State Department papers and other government or agency archives will also remain vital.15 But an equally important task lies in reconstructing the mutuality of American and Middle Eastern actions and representations, that is, how they have interacted with and shaped each other in the past and continue to do so. Historians need to encourage a new sensibility that can engage in more than one historiographical conversation and that can historicize Middle Eastern perspectives as deeply as it does American ones (for a similar perspective on internationalizing American history, see Iriye 2002, 49). Matthew Connelly’s multiarchival book A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post– Cold War Era (2002), for instance, posited a transnational system of international relations emerging from the conjoined moments of Cold War and decolonization that implicated Americans, French, and Algerians together in an

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uneven modernity. Paul Chamberlain’s The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post– Cold War Order (2012) similarly situates the bitter relationship between the US government and the Palestine Liberation Organization in a global perspective that includes the Viet Cong. His work points to the tremendous possibilities of rethinking how to read standard US diplomatic materials within regional and global perspectives simultaneously, for Chamberlain recognizes that the “third world” actors were just as engaged in a “global field” as were the Americans (2012, 3). The coincidence of a post-Orientalist Middle East (area) studies with the internationalization of the study of American foreign relations may not be seamless; the push for local agency and historiography and what Fredrik Logevall describes as an “America-centric international history” militate against a full convergence (2009, 1076; see also del Pero 2009, 1080–81, for criticism of what he calls the “insularism” and “historiographical unilateralism” that underlies the recent internationalization of US diplomatic history). Logevall’s point echoes one that Ian Tyrell made succinctly over a decade ago when he insisted that the interpretive problem has not been an absence of comparative or international perspectives in US history but the “failure of comparative history to transcend the boundaries of nationalist historiography” (Tyrell 1991, 1033). Diplomatic historians have long seen the world as an American stage. More recent literature on the “global cold war” has tended, it is true, to prioritize a global perspective over a regional one, but such perspectives are not and should not be thought of as mutually exclusive. It would be folly to insist on a new historiography of US–Middle Eastern or Arab relations without bearing in mind global dynamics. But it would be just as misplaced to pretend that one can interpret the “global” without coming to terms with profound regional, historical, linguistic, and geopolitical specificities that animate so many of the problems that have confronted Americans in the Middle East or problems that Arabs have had to endure because of the power of the United States in the region. Everything depends on the question being asked, but before the hubris of the “global,” after cherishing for so long an exceptionalist “American” vantage point, let us first appreciate that the world is made up of a number of regions, histories, and peoples that have consistently defied being lumped together in a single perspective. This caveat is especially true if the object of “globalizing” history is not simply to give students of US diplomatic history, and the

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institutional investments that correspond to this venerable field, a new lease on life but, rather, to produce denser interpretations of historical moments and contexts that involve layers of American and Arab (and any other relevant) history and that, therefore, do not belong exclusively to any national tradition (see Karl 2008 for criticism of the “Eurocentrism” of Erez Manela’s book The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (2007). Thomas Bender was right when he challenged US historians to be “cosmopolitan” and “to restore some sense of strangeness” to the writing and appreciation of history involving Americans and the United States (2002, 11), though Bender himself insists that he aims to write “enriched national history,” a point he reiterates in his later book A Nation among Nations. This is why the coming together of new, critical, and postnationalist ways of thinking about American and Middle Eastern history affords the best possibility to realize what Edward Said called for but never fully realized, namely, a history of secular interdependence in the face of—and not simply as opposed to— easy narratives of national or religious triumphalism. There is some solace, then, to be taken from the fact that the burgeoning academic field of America and the Middle East is now defining a new paradigm, one that treats with equal respect, integrity, and diligence both sides (if we must compress this into two sides only). To a large extent, predictably perhaps, those scholars with background and training in pertinent foreign languages and histories have taken the lead in breaking down the artificial boundary that has separated Middle East studies (where Americans have acted and how they have been interpreted by non-Americans) from the history of American foreign relations or of the culture of the United States more broadly (what Americans have said and done), as if these questions of where, what, how, and why have not been, if not from the outset of contact, then very soon thereafter, utterly intertwined.16 The historical convergence brought about by the reality of American involvement in the Middle East for nearly two centuries demands a historiographical convergence as well. But to identify, analyze, and narrate this convergence is not only a question of languages and sources. Orientalists, after all, have mastered Middle Eastern languages, but most have not been able or willing to question key assumptions about the West that have consistently framed their judgments of the Middle East. The answer to Americacentrism cannot be nativism of a Middle Eastern sort. Rather, what is needed

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is an appreciation of the uneven and unequal dialectic that has long bound Americans and the peoples of the Middle East together and an exposition of the layers of historical and historiographical entanglement that have always gone along with it. There is no single method, no single prescription, no single correct way of getting at these myriad encounters. Nevertheless, there has to be, at the very least, an appreciation of the constitutive qualities of these entanglements that goes beyond a perfunctory acknowledgment of the world in US relations with the world, and then on to business as usual that, in effect, continues to segregate the United States from the world. The story of American relations with the world ought not be a story prepared for only American historians, nor should it be narrated only or primarily as an aspect of American history. In and of itself, this scholarly endeavor to make both the history of America less exceptional and the Middle East less mystifying will not prevent the publication of more books encouraging and inculcating an American sense of superiority over the Arabs and Muslims. Nor will such an endeavor alter relations of power. But it can expand dramatically the perspective of what constitutes the history worth writing of US–Middle Eastern relations and thus further consolidate what has become a truly vibrant field of inquiry.

Notes This chapter is a slightly modified version of an essay that was originally published as “After Said: The Limits and Possibilities of a Critical Scholarship of U.S.-Arab Relations,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 3 (2014): 657– 84. 1.

It goes without saying, as Khatib’s book demonstrates, that there are also stereotypes of America in the Arab world and in Iran, but these are beyond the purview of this chapter.

2.

Lewis actually coined the term “clash of civilizations” in reference to Islam and the

3.

Robinson’s book Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea was

West in his essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990). published in 1838, a landmark study of biblical geography and archaeology. See Kuklick 1996, 20. 4.

The claims, originality, and authorship of the account have been disputed by proTurkish authors such as Heath Lowry in The Story behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (1990) and Justin McCarthy in The Turk in America: The Creation of an

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Enduring Prejudice (2010). Whatever the merits of the criticisms of Morgenthau’s account, Lowry and McCarthy do not contend with Ottoman Turkish brutality. 5.

Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1994, 245–49), compares Antonius and his Arab Awakening to C. L. R. James and his famous history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins.

6.

My discussion of the Cold War derives from Citino’s analysis.

7.

I thank Nathan Citino for this observation; see also Little 1995.

8.

Needless to say, much of what was written about America and American missionaries was polemical and ahistorical. Chauvinistic nationalistic Arabic accounts of missions, such as Umar Farrukh and Mustafa Khalidi’s Al-tabshir wa al-isti‘mar fi al-bilad al-‘arabiyya (1957), viewed American missionaries as the bridgehead to later American imperialist Cold War policies. See also Sharkey 2004, 112–18.

9.

There are, to be sure, many other authors directly influenced by Said one could cite.

10.

For the paperback edition of Lewis’s What Went Wrong? the subtitle of the book

See Macfie 2000, esp. 273– 345. was changed from Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response to The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. 11.

See Ferguson’s praise for the book on the back cover of the cloth edition (1st ed.) of Oren’s Power, Faith, and Fantasy.

12.

It ought to be pointed out that many historians of the modern Middle East were appalled by Oren’s book. See, e.g., Smith’s (2009) review of the book as a “work of propaganda,” raising an interesting point about the different reception of the book in different academic communities.

13.

I thank Paul Kramer for drawing my attention to Karnow’s book.

14.

This is one of the most respected and updated (now in its 5th edition) volumes that covers US Middle Eastern policy and that has tried to give a deeper historical view and include at least some Middle Eastern views.

15.

This is a well-established tradition, and excellent examples are Gendzier 2006 and the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which was founded in 1985 and is available online at www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/index.html.

16.

More broadly, Ann Laura Stoler has led the way for championing a new politics of comparison between and across imperial formations that can open up entirely new historiographical domains. See Stoler 2001.

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Sharkey, Heather J. 2004. “Arabic Anti-Missionary Treatises: Muslim Responses to Christian Evangelism in the Modern Middle East.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, no. 3: 98–104. ———. 2008. American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smith, Charles D. 2009. “Review of Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, by Michael B. Oren.” Historian 71: 344. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2001. “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies.” Journal of American History 88, no. 3: 829– 65. Thomas, Lowell. 1924. With Lawrence in Arabia. New York: Century. Thomson, William M. 1880. The Land and the Book, or Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and the Scenery, of the Holy Land. New York: Harper & Brothers. Tibawi, A. L. 1963. “English-Speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism.” Muslim World 53, no. 4: 298– 313. ———. 1979. “A Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists and Their Approach to Islam and the Arabs.” Islamic Quarterly 23, no. 1: 3–54. ———. 1980. “On the Orientalists Again.” Muslim World 70, no. 1: 56– 61. Traister, Bryce. 2010. “The Object of Study, or, Are We Being Transnational Yet?” Journal of Transnational American Studies 2, no. 1. Accessed March 13, 2014. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/864843hs. Tyler, Patrick. 2008. A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Tyrell, Ian. 1991. “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History.” American Historical Review 96: 1031–55, 1068– 72. Vitalis, Robert B. 2007. America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Yale, William. 1939. “Review of The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, by George Antonius.” American Historical Review 44, no. 4: 908–10. Yaqub, Salim. 2004. Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zeiler, Thomas W. 2009. “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field.” Journal of American History 95, no. 4: 1053– 73.

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chapter eleven

The Risk of Knowing Irene Gendzier

This chapter was not designed as an inquiry into the place of journalism in the academy, although an examination of the curricula of journalism schools, as well as an investigation of the recommended survival techniques to make it as a “successful” journalist, are surely worth the time of those who wonder about the training of the official purveyors of the news that is considered “fit to print.” The problems encountered by the journalist as opposed to the researcher and instructor in the social science disciplines often overlap. Those working in areas such as political science, history, and international relations may well face the problem of government secrecy. As the following discussion on thought control on university campuses indicates, academic centers are scarcely free to operate when dependent on government funding whose dissemination is closely monitored to assure results that conform to policy. Similar problems may affect funding and publication of works that question dominant approaches to past events. Who decides what is acceptable in such circumstances, and on the basis of what criteria? What connections exist between university administrators, trustees and donors, and government? These are by no means simple questions, but considering them is essential if we are concerned with the circumstances surrounding the production of knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is to encourage reflection on the operation of the media in a democratic society. Its starting point is that the function of the

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press in a democracy is to inform the public in order to enable it to understand the nature of the politics and policies of those in power. It takes little effort to realize that this objective has little in common with the practices of the mainstream media, which in many cases have become a form of entertainment that successfully advocates its political conformism. In this respect, it contributes to deception and systematic disinformation campaigns that are designed to avoid public dissent and the risk of knowing.

Deception and the Role of Misinformation, Iraq 2003 The deceptive claims offered by the George W. Bush administration to justify the US invasion of Iraq are on record. They implicated Congress and the mainstream media, which supported them in violation of international laws and the American Constitution. Deception was designed to blunt the feared impact of public opposition to the war, thus confirming the fear of an informed and incited public opinion among those whose overt contempt appears to belie any such position. In the summer of 2008, the New York Times reported that the media had demoted the war in Iraq to “the back burner,” allegedly due to lack of public interest, the expense of wartime coverage, and the competition for media space of the presidential campaign. Iraq had become “like a conversation killer,” according to an American correspondent in Baghdad, which was meant to explain why its coverage was “scaled back” (Stelter 2008, C4). But was the scaling back a response to lack of public interest or, rather, loss of public confidence in media coverage of the war, or something more? A photograph of a weeping Iraqi woman accompanied the New York Times story. The caption read: “For the people in Iraq, the war is fulltime. A woman wept as the body of a relative was borne to burial in Najaf.” The juxtaposition of the image and the story underlined the contrast between those for whom the war is “fulltime” and those who have no time for it. But what explanation is there for the apparent failure to connect, the inability to see, understand, and empathize with human loss, and to feel some sense of responsibility? Was it indifference or a reflexive numbing that had become a long-term habit? Other crises in the Middle East have also appeared to have been scaled back in the media or reported with inadequate or absent historical explanation. Washington’s backing of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 fits in this category. The coverage— or lack thereof— of the

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continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank and Gaza is not any different. It is viewed largely through the eyes of Israeli officials, excluding left-leaning Israeli critics. Accounts of the region that would allow Americans to hear the “voices of a people’s history”1 are rare insofar as the mainstream media are concerned. To include them could open a Pandora’s box of awkward questions about who determines what we know and why, and worse, who makes policy and in whose interests. Transposing such questions to an analysis of Middle Eastern elites and regimes with a “special relationship” to Washington would be no less important but remains taboo. In practice, the Middle East has been and still is a taboo subject, which does not contradict the fact that it has become an increasingly popular topic of discussion. The taboo refers to the habit of political cover-up and the absence of straight talk—the caricatured images that pass for analysis. Those images offer a depiction of the Arab world as a largely undifferentiated monolith defined by its predilection for violence, ethnic hatreds, and tradition-bound behavior. In this allegedly wretched context, the recurring theme is of nasty oil-producing monarchs, the forever warring and quarreling Arabs, the permanently intransigent Palestinians, and—in contrast—the image of Israel whose peacemaking efforts are unappreciated. The rest—state and nonstate actors—are arrayed on a continuum that tilts heavily in the direction of the robed “extremists,” without explanation as to why the opposition has assumed such a form save as proof of the pervasive and fearsome “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1993, 1996). Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution and even more after the events of September 11, the tendency to reduce all politics and conflict in the region to religious differences, notably the Sunni-Shi’i divide, has become commonplace. In practice, religious designations often serve as the exclusive identifiers of Arab and Iranian politics and society, producing a hardened pattern of reductive simplicity, seldom challenged in the absence of an alternative understanding of the “troubled region.” This approach remains in place. Saddam Hussein was not a case apart in this context, except that what really attracted Washington to Iraq, namely, its oil wealth, was routinely excluded from official accounts of policy. It was Iraqi oil and the geopolitics of the region that shaped US policy, which explains American support for the Iraqi dictator after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that ended the Shah’s reign. In the 1980–88 war between Iraq and Iran, Washington provided support that included the sale of weapons of mass destruction, as the US congressional

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hearings disclosed (see Gendzier 2006). With Saddam Hussein’s wrong turn in Kuwait, however, the former recipient of US favors became anathema. The first Gulf War followed, then the sanctions and the buildup to the second Gulf War and to the war in Iraq. For those committed to knowing what had happened and why, the information existed, though it was not always readily available. Internet access to national and international news sources, the formidable efforts of independent organizations in making past and present US policies known to the public, the availability of the National Security Archive, with all of its evident limitations—all of these combined to make a difference in the struggle for knowledge. But for many, competing obligations defeated the time and effort involved in retrieving such information. And for others, the absence of prior knowledge and reliance on distorted media coverage combined to promote a confident indifference to, if not arrogance about, unconventional sources that challenge official news and views on the Middle East. The effort of maintaining such a state of ignorance is difficult to overstate. In the case of Iraq, as the discussion that follows indicates, the fear of negative public opinion led to collaborations of military analysts with major mainstream media to assure that the proper message was communicated. That message was designed to block the risks of independent critical judgment on a war that provoked criticism from the outset. Other cases involving US support for declared and undeclared wars in the Middle East generated the similar concern that public opinion would demand more information about government policies and challenge them. Such risk is particularly acute in democracies, as Alex Carey (1997), Noam Chomsky (1989), and Edward Herman (see Herman and Chomsky 1998) have pointed out, where the manufacture of consent is designed to secure the legitimation of policies and accompanying interests without resort to overt coercion. In order to avoid the risk of the public knowing the human, social, and political costs of war and conflict in the Middle East, along with who supported them and why, the government’s efforts to influence media, shape legislation, and monitor academia assumed importance. Consider first the information wars on US policy in Iraq. On April 20, 2008, the New York Times ran a front-page story that exposed the “Pentagon’s hidden hand” in television and radio news of Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and “terrorism coverage.” In its opening paragraphs, the story revealed that the Pentagon men—former officers assigned to shape the news—

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represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavy weights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. (Barstow 2008, 1)

Some of those who accepted such assignments later conceded that their function was to tell their audiences what to think. As one of the former analysts admitted, “Night and day, I felt we’d been hosed” (24). The hosing began at the same time as the planning for the war. Planning for the organization of media coverage began in 2002. At the time, according to the New York Times, polls showed many Americans were “uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance” (24). The connection between the public’s “unease” and possible opposition and the attempt to contain it by the mobilization of propaganda was revealed through the decision to inject military analysts into the mainstream media. As the story reported, “A strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. ‘We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out’” (24). In the prewar period, military analysts were given Pentagon “talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive ‘war of liberation’” (25). When, at one of the prepared briefings, the select analysts asked for evidence of “illicit weapons,” they were told that “we don’t have any hard evidence,” a point that was neither relayed to the public nor considered damaging enough to lead to resignation (1). The reason? The feared loss of “access” to connections and contracts. In short, the participating military analysts followed the script. So did the embedded media, and so did many individuals—although by no means everyone—among the public. As to the military analysts who showed signs of independence, they understood that “there is a price for sustained criticism,” which was an indirect reference to the risks of losing access to lucrative military contracts (1).

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Some of the people who became skeptical may have had prior knowledge of US foreign policy and/or may have had access to alternative sources of information on Iraq. Moreover, some may have been aware that the New York Times, the “paper of record,” had been obliged to publish a mea culpa for its one-sided reporting on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (see Schell 2004; Massing 2005). The Times coverage was also strongly criticized by legal scholars for its indifference to the Bush administration’s violation of international laws in its justification of the invasion of Iraq. Such indifference reinforced an increasingly passive US Congress that has been derelict in upholding its constitutional role in the area of war and peace, mainly, its responsibility to ensure that all wars fought under an American flag have been authorized by a proper congressional declaration of war in accordance with Article 1, section 8 of the US Constitution. (Friel and Falk 2004, 2)

The Times was singled out in such accounts because of its preeminence in American media, but the scope of media crisis in the United States extended far beyond it (Massing 2005). Official deception was highly organized and, judging by the delayed response to it, effective. “Information warfare,” “PSYOPS,” and other terms that referred to the organization of deceit leveled at foreign and domestic audiences were no longer news in 2008 (see Collins 2006; Fogleman and Widnall 1997; and discussion in Gendzier 2004, 452). Its effects, however, remained toxic as public opposition to the continuing war in Iraq and the threat of further wars were ignored by an administration claiming immunity from public opinion. In 2004, the Defense Department’s Office of Strategic Influence led by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith had the purpose to “oversee, coordinate, and augment standing DOD [Department of Defense] efforts to influence foreign public opinion” (Conetta 2004, 4). When that department was closed in response to adverse publicity, another one was created—the Science Applications International Corporation (Conetta 2004, 4). Among its major concerns: Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “War on Terrorism,” with “information warfare” among its weapons. The strategic value of ignorance was affirmed, albeit in different terms, by the US military in an essay by Kenneth Payne titled “The Media as an Instrument of War” (2005), published in Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly, whose principal argument was that modern wars rely on domestic

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and foreign public opinion as much as on military defeat of the enemy. Hence the importance of using “deception, distortion, omission or obfuscation” in the media (81–82). Examples of the approach abound (Miller 2004).

Considering the 2006 War on Lebanon and Middle East Studies The case of the Iraq war was not isolated, although the war served to constrain some in the media from an aggressive questioning of policy. The resulting political climate reinforced not only the taboo on the Middle East but also the caricatured images of the region and its policies. Mainstream coverage of Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 2006 echoed US support for Israel. Beyond its perimeters a campaign to undermine the credibility of accounts by the UN and other international organizations sought to delegitimize the evidence of the extent of devastation rained on Lebanon in the thirty-three days of Israel’s carpet bombing and relentless use of cluster bombs. Among the targets of denial: UN accounts of the Mine Action Coordination Center in South Lebanon, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports of casualties, and international press coverage of Israeli destruction of southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut proper (see Friel and Falk 2007, chap. 7, which contains extensive documentation). Yet confirmation of these reports and more was available in the Lebanese press, where journalists and writers documented the effects of the bombings and the havoc of their impact (see E. Khoury 2008; R. Khoury 2008; Salman 2008; Salti 2008; Scheid 2008; Traboulsi 2007). Why were they not heard in the United States? What was the risk? And why were Israeli journalists and writers critical of Israel’s bombings similarly muted in the mainstream US media (see Laor 2008; Piterberg 2008)? Hanady Salman, managing editor of one of Lebanon’s newspapers, AsSafir, may have provided the answer in her parting letter from August 15, 2006, published on her blog in which she discusses the war. Thanking her readers, she wrote: This will probably be my last letter to you. I will miss you all. Some of you I have never met, but I feel that you are all so close to me. More than that, you probably already know: without you I would not have made it through this hell. You were there by my side and that made me stronger. Every day, you gave more meaning to all this. People’s stories were heard, people’s suffering was shared. This was what I could do for my people: tell some of their

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stories. Knowing that you would listen, knowing that you cared, made the whole difference. (2007, 126)

And therein lies the risk. If confronting the Israeli bombing of Lebanon without blinders constituted a risk, far more hazardous was the risk of confronting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, judging by media coverage and the campaign targeting academia in the wake of September 11. Avoiding such risks or, more to the point, voiding them by delegitimizing those who addressed such issues required undermining the sources that contradicted prevailing views, an increasingly difficult task given the wide access to alternative news sources, including critical Israeli press coverage. The emphasis in the discussion that follows is largely on developments in academia affecting Middle East studies with the understanding that these developments reflect a more pervasive attack on academic freedom and civil liberties in the period since September 11. As Laurie A. Brand, chair of the Middle East Studies Committee on Academic Freedom, has observed, such attacks are symptomatic of “the desire to silence critical voices from universities, which, given the ongoing emasculation of the fourth estate, remain one of the few sites of wide-ranging public exchange” (2008, 189). And they remain the site of ongoing research and exchange, albeit regularly and rudely interrupted by harassment and intimidation. Yet the university is also the site of institutions such as libraries and research centers that provide access to national and international sources—from media to scholarly works and government archives—that are the bedrock of knowledge, including on subjects currently deemed out of bounds. Short of banning access and burning books, such access remains open to those interested. The campaign to “reform the campus” and undo what is claimed by rightwing critics to be the academy’s unconscionable bias took off after September 11. It found a receptive climate in an administration staffed by influential neoconservatives who shared a common view of US relations with Israel and Israel’s role in the Middle East that precluded criticism. But the organization of efforts targeting criticism of US policy in the Middle East began years earlier. It coincided with the period following the 1967 war in the Middle East and continued to grow in direct proportion to the increased public criticism of Israeli policies and US support for them. In 1967 and again after 1982, such opposition intensified among a minority of academics and intellectuals who

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often joined with Israelis, Palestinians, and others from the Middle East on and off university campuses where increased interest was apparent. It continued to grow, within modest circles, until the first Gulf War, which inspired a questioning of US policy from a broader constituency. In the interim, the growth of the field of Middle East studies was manifested in the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the professional organization with international membership that provided a regular forum for diverse explorations of past and present developments in the region. The above period corresponded to the mobilization of various organizations that focused their efforts increasingly, though hardly exclusively, on exposing and curbing the emergence of critics of US and Israeli policies, on and off university campuses. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), some of whose members joined the ranks of the administrations of Presidents George H. Bush and Bill Clinton, were among the most active and influential (Beinin 2006, 242). Efforts at surveillance and monitoring of Middle East studies met with formal opposition from MESA. But intimidation continued and assumed considerable proportions as it enveloped more diverse constituencies, as in April 1993, for example, when “the San Francisco police seized over ten thousand files from the ADL’s local office” (251). Those files included information from “the San Francisco Labor Council, International Longshore Workers Union Local 10, the Oakland Educational Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Irish Northern Aid, the International Treaty Council, the faculty of Mills College, and the Asian Law Caucus” (251). As Joel Beinin reports in his comprehensive review, “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East,” the above campaign ended with ADL making an “out-of-court cash settlement with the city of San Francisco, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and three individuals” (251). September 11 marked a further turn in this dismal history. Within a month after the attacks, WINEP published Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America (2001). And the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), whose organizers included Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman, published its report, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It in November 2001

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(Martin and Neal 2001). In addition, Daniel Pipes’s Middle East Forum issued Middle East Quarterly, with Kramer as editor, and Campus Watch, whose function was to monitor academia and the media, publicizing its findings to enhance intimidation of individuals, institutions, and publications of which it disapproved (see “Campus Watch Documents”; “Campus Watch in the Media”; Cohler-Esses 2007; Kramer 2002). Its objective was to uncover what it considered anti-Israel and anti-American bias. But, as Sara Roy has remarked, “not only does Campus Watch monitor universities for signs of ‘sedition,’ i.e., views on US foreign policy, Islam, Israeli policy, Palestinian rights, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that Dr Pipes considers unacceptable—it encourages students to inform on professors whose views they find offensive” (2005, 149). President Bush’s nomination of Pipes to the board of the US Institute of Peace (USIP) inspired opposition from Senators Edward M. Kennedy (DMA), Christopher Dodd (D-CT), and Tom Harkin (D-IA), who described Pipes “as a ‘provocative’ and ‘highly controversial’ candidate whose ‘decidedly one-sided’ views would be in ‘direct contradiction’ to USIP goals” (“Action Alert” 2003). And the Action Alert of the Middle East Anthropology Task Force added, referring to the backers of HR 3077 (discussed below) as well as Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, “These conservative radicals are not supporters of ideological, ethnic, and political diversity; instead they promote (especially anti-Muslim, anti-Arab) prejudice, which should raise questions about the legislation they are pushing” (“Action Alert” 2003). Other groups and associations were similarly inspired, such as the David Project, Students for Academic Freedom, and FrontPageMag.com. They viewed the university as having failed in its calling, failed to predict the terrorist attacks of September 11, and failed to promote allegiance to US policies, promoting instead criticism of those policies. In addition, they denounced the reception given to high-risk luminaries such as Edward Said, whose 1978 book, Orientalism, they denounced as a literary and historical fraud produced by a figure whose eminence—judging by the preoccupation with Said and the rage against his book—was close to intolerable (Berkowitz 2008). The galaxy of Said’s other works, including his call for the establishment of universal standards in matters of social justice, was ignored. The effort to influence public opinion was part of a broader strategy, as Jason Vest’s 2002 account of the operations of JINSA and the Center for Security Policy (CSP), reveals. Describing the activities of JINSA, Vest explained that it

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facilitates meetings between Israeli officials and the still-influential US flag officers, who, upon their return to the States, happily write op-eds and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line. (Sowing seeds for the future, JINSA also takes US service academy cadets to Israel each summer and sponsors a lecture series at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies.) In one such statement, issued soon after the outbreak of the latest intifada, twenty-six JINSAns of retired flag rank, including many from the advisory board, struck a moralizing tone, characterizing Palestinian violence as a “perversion of military ethics” and holding that “America’s role as facilitator in this process should never yield to America’s responsibility as friend to Israel.”

HR 3077: International Studies in the Higher Education Act of 2003 In 2003, attention focused on legislative reform. As Stanley Kurtz, fellow of the Hoover Institution and contributing editor of the National Review explained, he “testified before a House subcommittee investigating charges of bias in academic programs of area studies (including Middle East studies) funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Subsequently, late last month, a House Committee approved legislation (HR 3077) that would finally bring reform to academic area studies” (Kurtz 2003a; see also Kurtz 2003b). Quickly recognized as a fraudulent claim of malpractice that was a thinly veiled attempt to destroy academic freedom with Middle East studies as its prime target, HR 3077 elicited sharp resistance and rebuttals from professional associations as well as research institutions and individual faculty members (see “Academic Freedom at Stake” 2006; AAUP 2007; Doumani 2006; Lockman 2004, 2007; Makdisi 2005; Roy 2005; Schrecker 2005; Shami and Godoy-Anativia 2007; “Action Alert” 2003). HR 3077 was designed to amend Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. It was formally dedicated to promoting international education, including language study, with a number of critical provisions (in Section 2, for example), such as the aim of “helping the national effort to educate and train citizens to participate in homeland security efforts” (International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003, HR 3077, 108th Cong. [2003]; also reproduced in Doumani 2006, 283– 97). In Section 6, the act “establishes an independent international Education Advisory Board to advise Congress and

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the Secretary on title VI programs in relation to national needs with respect to homeland security, international education, international affairs, and foreign language training.” Section 7 identified “Federal Government agency recruiter access to students and student recruiting information.” And Section 8 “directs the Secretary to study and report to Congress on foreign language heritage communities of US residents or citizens, particularly those that include speakers of languages critical to US national security.” The compilation of lists of names of those so identified has led to minority groups joining with civil liberties organizations in opposing a practice that is reminiscent of a period in World War II that led to the internment of Japanese Americans (Newhall 2006, 235). HR 3077 passed in the House of Representatives in October 2003 but did not become law as it failed to pass the Senate. It was revived in the 109th Congress as HR 509 but did not become law. Critics of such proposed legislation have rejected its premises and implications for control of scholarship through government intervention and funding. The proposal to establish an advisory board has drawn criticism from those who have pointed out that it “has extraordinary investigative authority, its own staff, and no requirement that it report to the Secretary of Education” (Newhall 2006, 220). Further, the same board is enabled to “make recommendations for improving programs and ensuring that they meet the title’s purposes. This authorization would enable the board to investigate the activities of grant recipients, including those of individual faculty members” (220). As MESA’s executive director, Amy Newhall, noted in the same passage, the board’s right to conduct probes and engage any number of agencies, whether at the state or federal levels for assistance, was reminiscent of “the activities of the FBI during the Cold War” (220). Given that Middle East studies centers form a small part of the far larger circuit of centers devoted to regional area studies that receive federal funding (16 of 118), the practical implications are severe: “Middle East and other area centers would either be forced to adopt government dictates, which would seriously erode the quality of instruction or, by refusing funds, would have to reduce and possibly end their programs altogether” (Roy 2005, 152). HR 3077 was not the only legislation proposed. In the case of the Solomon Amendment, for example, the biblical-sounding legislation was designed to deny federal funding to campuses prohibiting military recruitment, which, in the words of the former president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Roger W. Bowen, “could jeopardize $35 billion in

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funding to academic institutions” (quoted in Canavan 2006). Pointing to the dangers facing academic freedom, Bowen’s warning applied to HR 3077 as well. As reported by Canavan, Bowen indicated that the danger to academic freedom stemmed from federal oversight over accreditation; resolutions centering on ideological balance on campuses; corporate sponsorship of research; government oversight of academic departments, including Middle Eastern studies; lack of protection for university employees in the health care system; the percentage of campus budgets spent on athletics; and the view of college campuses as another part of the economy. (Canavan 2006)

Among the arguments in favor of HR 3077 and other legislation designed to exercise control over area studies and make them compatible with policy was the claim that government-backed programs were often closed to those who supported US policy. But some former supporters of US policy familiar with the world in which such critics operated had a rather different assessment of what such supporters had achieved, using Iraq as an example. Consider the words of Ali A. Allawi, former Iraqi finance minister: In official Washington, the ignorance of what was going on inside Iraq before the war was monumental. None of the proponents of the war, including the neoconservatives, and also no one in the institutes and think tanks that provided the intellectual fodder for the war’s justification, had the faintest idea of the country that they were to occupy. The academics and researchers who congregated around the Washington think tanks and the vice-president’s office, who had made Iraq their pet project, were blinkered by their dogmatic certainties or their bigotries. There was a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of Iraqi society and the effects on it of decades of dictatorship. Each strand of American thinking that combined to provide the basis for the invasion was isolated from any direct, even incidental, engagement with Iraq. The State Department, supposedly a citadel of realist thinking, had little first-hand experience of the country, instead relying on inference and analogous reasoning when trying to unravel the possible outcomes in the post-war period. The only certainty was provided by the American military who knew that the Iraqis were no match for their kind of warfare, and who also knew that they were facing a dispirited and ineffectual army.

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It was not only the absence of any systematic analysis, based on a wealth of information and experience about the country that was the cause of this woeful condition. It was more a deliberate reveling in the debunking of whatever knowledge on Iraq existed. (2007, 7)

Allawi’s exposé applies to the combined arrogance and ignorance afflicting the official discourse on other areas, including Israel and Palestine.

The Consequences of Not Knowing Considering this dismal context one can ask, What did the efforts to undermine Middle East studies achieve? One can argue that they succeeded in heightening awareness of the forces bent on crushing the open discussion of US policy in the Middle East and, more particularly, discussion of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict that risked undermining conventional accounts. Such efforts may have succeeded in intimidating vulnerable faculty, in threatening university administrations with dire financial and other crises, in having conferences and meetings banned from campuses, and, in notorious instances, in blocking appearances and appointments by some of the preeminent scholars on Israel and Palestine who have achieved international recognition and who are the subject of violations of academic freedom in the United States, as in the case of Norman Finkelstein, among several others (see Menetrez 2008; Pappé 2006). Such efforts reflect more on the poverty of the intellectual and political environment that tolerates them than on those who are abused. As Joseph Massad, professor at Columbia University who has been a consistent target of right-wing attack, points out, part of the difficulty facing those who speak out on the Israeli-Palestinian question is that they often address audiences that are poorly informed. As Massad (2005) explains, referring to the attacks against the university and Middle East studies, what makes such attacks possible “is the existence of a major discrepancy, even a radical disconnect, between popular knowledge and media coverage about the Palestine/Israel conundrum and established scholarly knowledge about the topic.” Among the examples of discrepancy is the conventional versus the scholarly reading of the origin of the Palestinian refugee problem. Israeli research on the subject, including the works of historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, and, earlier, the Mapam activist Simha

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Flapan, has radically altered the scholarly and political landscape. It is at the very root of the contrast between image and reality of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, about which Norman Finkelstein has written a book with the same title first published in 1995. Thus far, the exposé of major myths surrounding Israel’s formation and policies has remained a subject of analysis within the intellectual community of Middle East scholars. Largely unknown or unacknowledged by scholars of US foreign policy, it is a subject seldom broached in media coverage. The exception is to be found in the attacks published in the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, and FrontPageMagazine.com. An article in the latter, titled “Israel’s Howard Zinn,” for example, sought to demolish Ilan Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and one of the major figures of the New Historians group in Israel (Levy and Seid 2004; see also Joffe and Romirowsky 2005). The same treatment has not been meted out to Benny Morris since the publication of his latest work on the subject, 1948. In a commentary in the Los Angeles Times in January 2004, Morris did not disclaim his original research, which confirmed the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, describing it as “an element of the partial ethnic cleansing that rid Israel of the majority of its Arab inhabitants at the very moment of its birth.” But, he bluntly stated: today— after looking afresh at the events of 1948 and at the context of the whole Arab-Zionist conflict from its inception in 1881 until the present day—I find myself as convinced as ever that the Israelis played a major role in ridding the country of tens of thousands of Arabs during the 1948 war, but I also believe their actions were inevitable and made sense. (Morris 2004)

Writing in the Jerusalem Post on April 10, 2008, David Horowitz of FrontPageMagazine.com, found Morris’s evolution praiseworthy. The response to Pappé’s work and to that of other revisionist historians is reminiscent of an exchange that occurred in Israel in the summer of 2007 in which the Education Ministry’s attempt to alter Arab textbooks raised hackles from the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party’s “strategic affairs minister,” Avigdor Lieberman. As reported by the New York Times, the ministry had issued a statement indicating its approval of “a textbook for use in the state’s Arab schools that for the first time described Israel’s 1948 war of independence as a ‘catastrophe’ for the Arab population” (Kershner 2007).2

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Lieberman described such action as a sign of “the masochism and defeatism of the Israeli left.” As the Times article made clear, such changes were reserved for Arab students only, even as some Hebrew texts “have over the years come to broach once-taboo subjects surrounding the establishment of the state, and the curriculum for Arab schools has also been slowly changing to take Arabic culture more into account.” But in this instance, “the Hebrew version of the third-grade book does not include the Palestinian version of the events of 1948.” According to the “national supervisor of homeland, society and citizenship studies,” Ms. Dalia Fenig, “While the Arabic translation was adjusted to address Arab sensitivities and culture, Jewish third graders were considered too young to cope with the conflicting narratives.” The same applies to those committed to making certain that no such conflicting narratives disrupt the academic and political environment in the United States. In retrospect, the attack on Israeli historians and on those in American universities who dare to further public knowledge of a history that has altered the fate of generations in the Middle East is part of a larger struggle in which the alignment of the United States with Israel is of paramount importance. To the extent that the media and academia contribute to questioning the policies at the root of such a connection, they remain primary targets of concern. Save for those prepared to break the silence and deception and in so doing to challenge the risks of knowing.

Notes 1.

This phrase is taken from Zinn and Arnove 2004. See Kevin Lewis, letter to the editor, New York Times Book Review, responding to a review of Zinn’s Young People’s History, July 1, 2007, 5. Writing about his experience in Amman, where Zinn’s book was enthusiastically adopted, Lewis wondered whether it represented “retaliation for our superficial caricaturing of Middle Eastern social, cultural and political histories” (5).

2.

All subsequent quotations in this paragraph come from Kershner 2007.

References “Academic Freedom at Stake: AAUP Postpones Conference on Academic Boycotts, Bowing to Political Pressure.” 2006. Accessed June 6, 2013. www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=141.

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“Action Alert, HR 3077 Talking Points.” 2003. Task Force on Middle East Anthropology, December. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=crit-geog-forum;91c04560.0511. Allawi, Ali A. 2007. The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. American Association of University Professors (AAUP). 2007. Freedom in the Classroom. Accessed June 6, 2013. www.aaup.org/report/ freedom-classroom. Barstow, David. 2008. “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand: Courting Ex-Officers Tied to Military Contractors.” New York Times, April 20, A1. Beinin, Joel. 2006. “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In Academic Freedom after September 11, edited by Beshara Doumani, 237– 68. New York: Zone Books. Berkowitz, Peter. 2008. “Answering Edward Said.” Policy Review 149 (June– July). Accessed June 3, 2013. www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/ article/5664. Brand, Laurie A. 2008. “Academic Freedom: Responsibilities in the Current Environment.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 40, no. 2 (May): 188– 90. Campus Watch. n.d. “Campus Watch Documents.” Accessed June 3, 2013. www. campus-watch.org/docs/publication/The+Chronicle+of+Higher+Education. ———. n.d. “Campus Watch in the Media.” Accessed June 3, 2013. www. campus-watch.org/docs/type/inthenews. Canavan, Kathy. 2006. “AAUP Leader Cites Threats to Academic Freedom.” UDaily, February 24. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.udel.edu/PR/ UDaily/2006/feb/forum022406.html. Carey, Alex. 1997. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty. Edited by Andrew Lohrey, foreword by Noam Chomsky. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1989. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Boston: South End Press. Cohler-Esses, Larry. 2007. “The New McCarthyism.” The Nation, November 12. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.thenation.com/article/new-mccarthyism. Collins, Steven. 2006. “Mind Games.” In Crimes of War: Iraq, edited by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton, 242–47. New York: Nation Books.

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Conetta, Carol. 2004. “Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Idea of a ‘New Warfare.’” Project on Defense Alternatives, Research Monograph 9, Commonwealth Institute, Cambridge, MA. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/0402rm9.pdf. Doumani, Beshara, ed. 2006. Academic Freedom after September 11. New York: Zone Books. Finkelstein, Norman. [1995] 2003. Image and Reality of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict. London: Verso Books. Fogleman, Ronald R., and Sheila E. Widnall. 1997. “Cornerstones of Information Warfare.” Accessed June 3, 2013. www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/ GetTRDoc?AD=ADA323807. Friel, Howard, and Richard Falk. 2004. The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy. London: Verso Books. ———. 2007. Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East. London: Verso Books. Gendzier, Irene. 2004. “Consensual Deception and US Policy in Iraq.” New Political Science 26, no. 3: 449–58. ———. 2006. “Democracy, Deception, and the Arms Trade: The U.S., Iraq, and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” In Crimes of War: Iraq, edited by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton, 202–12. New York: Nation Books. ———. 2008– 9. “The Risk of Knowing.” In “Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University,” ed. Edward J. Carvalho, special issue Works and Days 26 and 27, nos. 51–52 and 53–54. Accessed August 1, 2015. www.worksanddays.net/2008– 9/File15.Gendzier_011309_ FINAL.pdf. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. [1988] 2002. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (Summer): 22–49. ———. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Joffe, Alexander H., and Asaf Romirowsky. 2005. “Academics against Israel.” Jerusalem Post, October 19. Kershner, Isabel. 2007. “In Arabic Textbook, Israel Calls ’48 War Catastrophe for Arabs.” New York Times, July 23. Accessed June 3, 2013. www. nytimes.com/2007/07/23/world/middleeast/23mideast.html.

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Khoury, Elias. 2008. “Meditations upon Destruction.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 165– 68. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Khoury, Rami. 2008. “Remember, Palestine Is the Region’s Festering Sore.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 392– 94. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Kramer, Martin. 2001. Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ———. 2002. “Middle East Studies in the News: The Columbia Club of Middle Eastern Studies.” Campus Watch, November 5. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.campus-watch.org/article/id/316. Kurtz, Stanley. 2003a. “Reforming the Campus: Congress Targets Title VI.” National Review Online. October 14. Accessed June 3, 2013. http://old. nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200310140905.asp. ———. 2003b. “Studying Title VI: Criticisms of Middle East Studies Get a Congressional Hearing.” National Review Online, June 16. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.nationalreview.com/node/207236. Laor, Yitzhak. 2008. “You Are Terrorists, We Are Virtuous.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 254–59. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Levy, Janet, and Roberta Seid. 2004. “Israel’s Howard Zinn.” FrontPageMagazine.com, November 24. Accessed June 3, 2013. http://frontpagemag. com /Articles /Printable.aspx? GUILD = 798688F01– 94D7– 4D9DB97E-637B7C696D6B. Lockman, Zachary. 2004. “Behind the Battles over Middle East Studies.” Middle East Research and Information Project. January. Accessed June 3, 2013. www. merip.org/mero/interventions/behind-battles-over-middle-east-studies. ———. 2007. “Did the Events of 9/11 Change the Field of Middle East Studies? Pensée 1: Of Course—But How?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3 (August): 343–45. Makdisi, Saree. 2005. “Neocons Lay Siege to the Ivory Towers.” Los Angeles Times, May 4. Martin, Jerry L., and Anne D. Neal. 2001. Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It. Washington, DC: American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Massad, Joseph. 2005. “Targeting the University.” Counterpunch, June 3–5. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.counterpunch.org/2005/06/03/targeting-the-university/.

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Massing, Michael. 2005. “The End of News?” New York Review of Books 52, no. 19, December 1. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.nybooks.com/articles/ archives/2005/dec/01/the-end-of-news/?pagination=false. Menetrez, Frank J. 2008. “The Case against Alan Dershowitz.” Counterpunch, February 11. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.counterpunch.org/2008/02/11/ the-case-against-alan-dershowitz/. Miller, David, ed. 2004. Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq. London: Pluto Press. Morris, Benny. 2004. “In ’48, Israel Did What It Had to Do” (commentary). Los Angeles Times, January 26. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la- oe-morris26jan26,1,1348983. story?coll=la-news. Newhall, Amy. 2006. “The Unravelling of the Devil’s Bargain: The History and Politics of Language Acquisition.” In Academic Freedom after September 11, edited by Beshara Doumani, 203– 36. New York: Zone Books. Pappé, Ilan. 2006. “Occupation Hazard: Norman Finkelstein Challenges the Conventional Line in Israel.” Review of Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, by Norman G. Finkelstein. Bookforum, February–March. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.bookforum.com/ archive/feb_06/pappe.html. Payne, Kenneth. 2005. “The Media as an Instrument of War.” Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly 35 (Spring): 81– 93. Piterberg, Gabriel. 2008. “Travels in Israel.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 260– 73. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Roy, Sara. 2005. “Strategizing Control of the Academy.” Thought and Action (Fall): 147– 62. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.nea.org/assets/img/ PubThoughtAndAction/TAA_05_15.pdf. Salman, Hanady. 2007. “Beirut War Diary.” In Inside Lebanon: Journey to a Shattered Land, with Noam and Carol Chomsky, edited by Assaf Kfoury, 110–27. New York: Monthly Review Press. ———. 2008. “We Will Never Forget.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 169– 75. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Salti, Rasha. 2008. “Notes from the Siege.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 134– 61. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press.

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Scheid, Kirsten. 2008. “No Innocent Victims: Postwar Activism & Lebanon’s Civil Society.” In The War on Lebanon: A Reader, edited by Nubar Hovsepian, 176– 99. Northhampton, MA: Olive Branch Press. Schell, Orville. 2004. “Why the Press Failed.” TomDispatch.com. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.tomdispatch.com/post/1543/. Schrecker, Ellen. 2005. “The New McCarthyism in Academe.” Thought and Action (Fall): 103–18. Shami, Seteney, and Marcial Godoy-Anativia. 2007. “Did the Events of 9/11 Change the Field of Middle East Studies? Pensée 2: Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Middle East Studies in the Aftermath of 9/11.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3 (August): 346–49. Stelter, Brian. 2008. “Correspondents Say Networks Put Wars on the Back Burner.” New York Times, June 23, C4. Traboulsi, Fawwaz. 2007. “An Arab Perspective on the ‘New Middle East.’” In Inside Lebanon: Journey to a Shattered Land, with Noam and Carol Chomsky, edited by Assaf Kfoury, 165– 69. New York: Monthly Review Press. Vest, Jason. 2002. “The Men from JINSA and CSP.” The Nation, August 15. Accessed June 3, 2013. www.thenation.com/doc/20020902/vest/print. Zinn, Howard, and Anthony Arnove. 2004. Voices of a People’s History of the United States. New York: Seven Stories Press.

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afterword

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures of Knowledge Lisa Anderson

As I reflect on the contributions to this volume, I am reminded of a seminal moment in my graduate career. While I was doing my dissertation research in the late 1970s, Salah Hamzaoui, a Tunisian sociologist, a generation my senior, asked me why I was studying state formation and peasants. (His own work was on labor unions, class consciousness, and labor activism in the Tunisian nationalist movement.) I replied that they seemed like “interesting topics.” At that very moment my lifelong education in self-reflective academic practice began. Hamzaoui gently questioned what I had read for my comprehensive exams and what kinds of debates were taking place in US political science classes at the time, finally to conclude our collegial exchange with the observation that the Vietnam War had left a deep if invisible mark on a generation of American social scientists who thought they were studying peasants and state formation merely because they were “interesting.” By that time, the Vietnam War’s “strategic hamlets” counterinsurgency program had been relegated to the ever lengthening list of the war’s mistakes—indeed, the US had withdrawn from Vietnam, the Communists had won, and most Americans of my generation wished only to forget the embarrassing debacle—but traces were visible throughout US social science for at least a decade longer, not least in our interest in how peasant societies organize to confront state power. There are several elements in this anecdote I think are instructive about both the substance and the circumstances of the research that social scientists

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do in the Middle East. Let me begin first, however, with some general observations about the practice of social science in the early twenty-first century in general and in Middle East studies specifically. As Hamzaoui knew, all social science is born in engagement with real-life issues of public moment. This has been a source of anxiety and regret for its practitioners virtually from the beginning of political science as a discipline, but, as Lisa Wedeen argues in this volume, it became a matter of existential importance to American social scientists with the midcentury assumption of “leadership of the free world” by the United States and the subsequent rise of neoliberal ideologies around the world with the end of the Cold War. The turn in the US academy to formalistic models of a self-consciously scientific social science after World War II and particularly after the Vietnam War reflected neoliberal hopes that social science and public policy could and should be stripped of explicit moral or normative content— apart, of course, as Wedeen points out, from the presumed universal appeal of liberal values. The old-fashioned and messy art of politics would be reduced to technical paint-by-numbers approaches based on ostensibly universal human attachments to individualism, both political and methodological, and procedural neutrality. The collapse of the Soviet Union provided the final death knell for the earliest version of this “agnostic” scientism—modernization theory (the “non-Communist manifesto,” as W. W. Rustow [1960] had called it), which was designed to provide a scientific interpretation of history at once opposed to Marxism and supportive of US influence in the world. Whether or not this science-in-the-service-of-the-national-interest contributed to the end of the Cold War, it certainly resonated with the ensuing triumphalist conviction that there is no intellectually or politically defensible alternative to the capitalist market and liberal democracy. The prevailing faith (and that is what it is) in the capacity of markets to produce general prosperity and of elections to produce legitimate governments out of infinite apparently uncoordinated individual decisions was to mean that societal judgments about things like freedom, integrity, or justice could, and should, be left to market and electoral mechanisms. In these circumstances, the job of the social scientist is to understand how these mechanisms work and to improve their efficiency but not to assess the merits of the outcomes (after all, the first endeavor is “scientific” but the second clearly “normative”). Scientific inquiry, so understood, is best accomplished utilizing the dispassionate and “objective” methods of

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quantitative research and formal modeling; hence the rise of economics as the premier social science discipline and of analytical formal and statistical methods borrowed from economics elsewhere in the social sciences. As the post– Cold War “Washington consensus”1 advocated market capitalism as the singularly successful economic model throughout the world, the promotion of democracy and “democratization” succeeded “modernization” as the prevailing frame for American foreign policy and American political science. This device comfortably served to confirm the well-intentioned normative bias of its liberal advocates while simultaneously preserving the technical objectivity of those who study it, since it is, after all, “only” a procedural device designed to serve as an impartial aggregator of popular preferences. It is not surprising that neoliberalism’s stripping of politics of apparent moral purposes led those in need of less diffident ethical imperatives and more assertive moral guidance to find refuge in religion. This turn to religion was a global phenomenon: the rise of the Christian fundamentalists in the United States; the ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish community in the United States, Europe, and Israel; the Hindu Right in India; and, most famously, the increasing religious observance and activism in the Muslim world all attest to a turn to faith traditions as the moral authority of the state withered. And, again, small wonder that this development is reflected in turn in the sustained fascination of social scientists with “the role of religion” in virtually everything—documented here by Laura Bier and Charles Kurzman and Carl Ernst—at almost exactly the same time that we are trying to quantify and formalize our models of political and social life. The apparent hostility of activist religious practice to democracy was inevitably attributed to the specifics of various and varied (but all presumably unenlightened) faith traditions and practices. It did not seem to occur, much less matter, to anyone that resort to religion in search of moral guidance might reflect something lacking in democratic proceduralism, such as its deliberate disregard for moral purpose in favor of instrumental process. Yet failure to recognize the unique epistemological bases of both the practice and the science of liberal democracy was to mean that the study of “nondemocratic” regimes, states, and societies became increasingly incoherent. The search for impersonal and formal techniques, procedures, and institutions analogous to those of established democracies came up empty. The category “nondemocratic or authoritarian regime” was in fact a hodgepodge of the “traditional” practices that had once helped define “modernity,”

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combined with lists of what seemed to be absent—no popular accountability, no defined tenure in office for rulers, no rule of law (that is, oddly enough, no democratic institutions)—and stitched together, often as “hybrid” systems. But in the absence of either explicitly normative purposes, which are excluded as objects of scientific study, or putatively impartial institutional procedures, which are virtually unique to established democratic regimes, it is not clear how modern political science is actually meant to study nondemocratic regimes. The correspondence between the liberal proceduralism of democracy and the scientific formalism of the academic scholarship on democracy and democratization reinforces an apparently virtuous affinity that disqualifies other practices and methods as undeserving of political support or, except insofar as they may be prerequisites for democratization, scientific study. As a result, “nonpolitical” causes—religious traditions, for example, or as Wedeen points out, too casual references to “culture”—are served up as an explanation of last resort for otherwise puzzling or “irrational” behavior. Like the “tradition” that was to be transcended by “modernity,” the “authoritarianism” from which democracy is to liberate the peoples of the world proved to be frustratingly “resilient.” We cannot claim that, as social scientists, we are untouched by the world around us or that what we do has no “real world” consequences; indeed, that pretense distorts both the value of our work and its reception. The conceit that we operate in a vacuum of ideas deprives us of the context that gives our work its parameters and purpose; in other words, nothing is just “interesting,” though what is important, useful, redemptive, or beautiful may also be interesting. Our reluctance to define the purpose of our work also invites interpretations of what we do by those whose intentions are quite alien or even hostile to the project. The post-9/11 attacks on academic Middle East studies, chronicled here by Kurzman and Ernst, Irene Gendzier, and Seteney Shami and Marcial Godoy-Anativia, should not have been the surprise they were, nor should those subject to them have been quite as hesitant and selfdeprecating in their responses. In fact, social scientists who do not know why they are doing what they are doing are asking for trouble. This is true in each of the arenas identified by Shami and Godoy-Anativia: the quotidian environment in which we conduct our activities, the institutional architectures within which we work, and the long-term intellectual trajectory of our fields. Let me take each in turn. In many ways the first arena—how we have organized our daily lives— may be the most important. Evidently, we all believe that there is something

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important about knowledge— our own and that of our students, our colleagues, our readers and viewers. But what is it? Do we believe that knowledge produces power, humility, aesthetic satisfaction, emancipation? Perhaps we are just satisfying our curiosity. Or we think we must understand the world in order to change it. Or is it the search itself that is important—a sense of being part of the human quest, or perhaps nothing more than a way to pass time from this life to the next. As Shami and Godoy-Anativia observe, the move to privilege engineering, business, and other “professional” domains within universities has heightened the importance of the “so what?” question; our collective sense of disappointment, or at least doubt, about what we accomplish as social scientists may reflect our failure to clarify exactly what it is we expect to get out of all this work. As we tell our students to be practical— see Karen Pfeifer’s description of a “good” economics doctoral dissertation and Elizabeth Anderson Worden and Jeremy Browne’s report of political science advisers who discourage time-consuming language study—it would behoove us, before we set another generation of technically proficient young social scientists aloft without a compass, directionless except for an aspiration to tenure at a good university, to think again about why it is we do what we do. On a less existential level, concern about the institutional design of the modern American university—including how it reproduces itself—mirrors not only the contemporary (and entirely merited) fascination with the myriad impacts of new information and communication technologies but also the profound uncertainty about how these tectonic shifts in the means and mode of production of knowledge will be reflected in the social world we live in. In January 2015, one of the most influential people in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, announced that his “challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week,” observing, “Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I’m looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.”2 Obviously, the world in which scholarship thrives—in which we “fully explore topics”—is changing. Indeed, I venture to say, most readers of this volume did not even know they had a “media diet,” much less that the staple of their scholarship—the book—is fast becoming an exotic heirloom. Zuckerberg’s challenge also illustrates the extent to which received authority and conventional wisdom are being tested by both the instantaneous and virtually limitless availability of information afforded by the new media and, equally importantly, by the disproportionate facility of young

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people with these media. When students routinely coach their teachers in the use of communication and research tools that are vital to their instructors’ academic research and teaching, deference to the deep erudition and credentialed expertise of the professoriate cannot help but erode. The privileging of engineering and business in universities reflects efforts to capture and promote the creativity of this technological revolution but also, more troublingly, a profound paralysis in the social sciences and humanities as they contemplate an obscure and inscrutable future. Indeed, for most of the social sciences, the magnitude of what we now realize we cannot anticipate— captured prosaically in debates about “policy making in conditions of scientific uncertainty,” as if that were a novel dilemma—is enormous. As a result, the trajectories of the fields are stalled. Our hesitation and puzzlement reflect two phenomena: the narrowing of the empirical or experiential reach of social science work and the simultaneous broadening of its abstract and theoretical claims. In the first instance, in large measure because they are based in and about societies that have enjoyed remarkable stability and prosperity over the past sixty or seventy years (where research is deemed “feasible”), our social sciences encompass societies in which the range of life possibilities are fairly narrow by the standards of human history. Relatively few Americans—and certainly no American social scientists—are going to slip uncontrollably into a life without clean water, electricity, and adequate shelter, to live and die malnourished, illiterate, and diseased. Indeed, most Americans alive today have enjoyed lives almost completely free from want and fear. This narrowing of the range of human and social possibility has given rise to social science research that assumes our life possibilities are something to calculate and manage: the standard deviations of American lives are pretty predictable. We make politics into policy making and we reduce policy to questions of technical analysis. As we consign our future to the wizards of actuarial tables, it is not surprising that the emblematic figure of modern postindustrial warfare today is the anonymous deskbound engineer somewhere in the southwestern United States, guiding drones to deadly strikes in Afghan and Yemeni mountain passes thousands of miles away. And bloodless politics makes for bloodless social science. Social science has come to prize technical skill over the moral sentiments that Adam Smith knew to be essential to the workings of the world in part because consideration of moral imperatives is excluded by contemporary

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neoliberal ideologies—democratic procedures, like the market, will produce the “values” and “goods” we do not even know we want— and in part because the progressive narrowing of life possibilities has seemed to make it superfluous. Disciplinary progress and innovation is measured by analytical advances, while exploration of vital questions about how human communities form and re-form, often violently, sometimes slowly but rarely without anguish, is precluded. And this is reflected in the very organization of the American academy today because these questions transcend disciplines and exceed the limits of our institutional architecture and its intellectual furnishings. And yet, narrow as our experiential base is, our conceptual ambition is limitless. We project our thin, bloodless, technical approach to understanding social life into the distant reaches of time and space, exporting our covering laws and hypotheses, our thought experiments, generalizations, and extrapolations to the kingdoms of ancient history and to the patronage networks of remote villages. This ostensibly technical universalization of our identities and institutions supports and fosters the construction of what Reşat Kasaba calls “world society,” which is captured in the contemporary American university’s embrace of “globalization.” Rather than directly address the debility of the social sciences and the disarray of area studies, as the contribution of Jonathan Z. Friedman and Cynthia Miller-Idriss shows, with “global initiatives”—from branch campuses to sponsored study tours and trips—American universities are sidestepping decades of institutional development and substituting “cosmopolitan experience” for both analytical tools and cultural competencies. And this leads us to the particular challenges of studying the Middle East. Let me say in the first instance that with the partial exception of our geographers (see the contribution by Amy Mills and Timur Hammond) I think it is a mistake to say we study a region. We study things that happen in a region. Most of these are universal—power, states, poetry, families, livelihoods, jokes, corruption, prisons, pollution, sermons, music, marriages, blogs—and we merely study particular expressions. Some of what we study may be unique to the region, especially that connected, for example, to language or artistic expression, but we do not actually “study the Middle East.” Nonetheless, the expression persists not least because, as Kasaba points out, area studies in the United States are structured as self-conscious alternatives to disciplines: “the Middle East” exists to be studied in the same way that “the economy” is treated as a coherent self-contained and knowable artifact of human activity.

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This issue is particularly fraught for the Middle East because resorting to ostensibly internal features, such as language, religion, or geography, to provide the defining feature of the object of study always falls afoul of the diversity of the region; try as we might, we cannot find the “essence” of the Middle East. In fact, as Kurzman and Ernst show, this region is defined from the outside: it is the last remaining area of the world universally known by a term born in imperialism. The “Far East” has graduated to “East Asia,” the Indian subcontinent has become “South Asia.” The geographically, linguistically, religiously, politically incoherent region we know as the Middle East continues to be held together by its place in the imperial imagination. And that itself is a clue about the defining feature of what we are studying, if the stories rehearsed here by Gendzier and Usama Makdisi are not enough. The region is delimited by its place in an imperial order that is so pervasive and so well naturalized that it is nearly invisible to many who live in the metropole and even many in the region itself. This obscure but essential element of life in the Middle East not only shapes daily life there, but it colors all interactions between the American academy and the region. Indeed, the American preoccupation with democracy promotion seems to betray a century-old conviction that, as it was put in 1919, the peoples of the region are “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” and they require “the tutelage of . . . advanced nations.”3 In part because of the remarkably constricted horizons of American political and social life and because of the imperial past and present of the region, we must confront the technical limits of our disciplines and the urgent need to address morally significant and momentous issues. The collision of cramped and mechanical social science with the variety and vastness of the possibilities in the Middle East accounts for much of the profoundly hesitant and unsatisfying character of the analysis of the Arab uprisings. The range of actors, the volatility of opinion, the instability of preferences were so much broader than is typically the case even in other political upheavals—after all, how many illiterate peasants protested at Gdansk, how many bankers and jihadis collaborated against Pinochet, how many Salafis joined with Communists to support General De Gaulle at the end of the Fourth Republic in France?—that our mental risk tables and our conventional calculations of probabilities are as much liabilities as assets. We run through our mental heuristics: is this the French Revolution, the fall of communism, Indonesia in 1998, Brazil in 1985? Is it 1848 in Europe, 1992 in Algeria, or De Gaulle and

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the Fourth Republic? Perhaps this is the Thirty Years’ War that preceded the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a long and deadly war that was finally extinguished only by the bankruptcy of the outside powers that had bankrolled the combatants. Our increasingly desperate efforts to find patterns, establish parameters, and make predictions reveal as much about the inadequacy of our analytical frameworks as they do about the events we want to understand. The region’s resistance to conventional social science reflects a global political economy, which is rarely factored into our social science analysis. In the Middle East, there is very little data, so understood. Governments that have not collected taxes have not needed to know how many people are not paying them, so even simple numbers, like population figures, are vague, approximate, and contested. Where half the commercial transactions are unrecorded, the records that do exist are really more like novelistic impressions than statistical handbooks. Evidence is necessarily anecdotal; and so “evidence-based policy making” is built on stories heard, convictions held, hopes cherished. And conflict, far from the sterile robotic surgical strike, is not even managed by the rough-and-tumble of institutionalized political competition. Far from the quietly purring machines of public policy in Brussels or Washington, or even Seoul, politics and administration here is— sometimes quite literally—hand-to-hand combat, or worse, trench warfare. Why is it that governments in this part of the world do not make serious efforts to collect taxes, keep population records, or monitor cross-border trade? Why is this region exempt from the laws of political economy that seem to obtain everywhere else—that taxation and welfare provision are inextricably linked and that both require a good deal of data? Here we see the debilitating connection between the unacknowledged imperial influence in the region during the Cold War and subsequent American hegemony and the absence of any requirement that governments actually attend to their own citizens. In many ways, since the mid-twentieth century, the states of the region have been undeclared protectorates, reminiscent of their nineteenthcentury counterparts. And like those counterparts, their governments have been as beholden to parliaments and congresses in London, Paris, Moscow, or Washington as to their own citizens. Lubricated since the oil shocks of the 1970s by vast discretionary spending, both at home and in the region, on the part of governments supported by the inexhaustible appetite for petroleum in the industrialized world, this imperial system brought “stability” to a region whose people grew increasingly impatient for change.

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The costs in repression were great, and the results are apparent in endemic anger, frustration, suspicion, and resentment. Citizens in the Middle East came to mistrust each other, their governments, their governments’ supporters, and, of course, Americans. The attacks of 9/11 were ample evidence of that anger and frustration, if any were needed, and both earlier and subsequent attempts to enhance US influence in the region by dislodging recalcitrant rulers, from Libya’s Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi in 1986 to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 2003, merely confirmed the skepticism of most of the region’s residents about US intentions. For American social scientists, the results have been a progressive limitation of research sites; in the winter of 2014, the US government had travel warnings or alerts in place for Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tunisia, and Yemen. (This is in addition to the routine bureaucratic obstacles imposed by the United States and by funding agencies, as well as local governments, to study and research in the region.) American students who wish to study Arabic in the region now have a choice of Morocco, Jordan, or Oman; most, as Anderson Worden and Browne point out, stay in the United States for the duration of their studies. The combination of repression, neglect, and isolation has also had corrosive effects on the regional academic landscape. As Kasaba observes, for much of modern Turkish history sociology was deemed subversive, and that was certainly true elsewhere as well. Yet Friedman and Miller-Idriss report that the proportion of US-based scholars with origins in the Middle East has declined relative to other world areas. In other words, the social sciences of the Middle East are not working effectively at home or abroad. Several generations of talented young academics in the region, including many social scientists, have simply given up on their youthful ambitions to create a field, build a discipline, and teach new skills and instead languish, dispirited and disaffected, in mediocre universities and ineffectual think tanks, publishing little and influencing few. Their American counterparts make ostensible virtues of their own necessities, either surrendering to the quantitative turn of their discipline or focusing on a policy audience, attempting to influence the Middle East policy of whatever US administration is in office. However understandable such resorts may be, in neither case, of course, do they serve to sustain or fortify genuine social science research in, or for that matter about, the region itself. The complexity, confusion, and uncertainty of the Arab uprisings of 2011

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium 441

increased attention to the region briefly: Cairo-based social scientists looked with bemusement on the cavalcade of social science colleagues who suddenly turned up for a week or so during the year after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, all eager to fit the events of the moment into their comparative framework, but as these apparent transitions proved complicated, protracted, and difficult, the stream of visits slowed to a trickle and then essentially ended. And that matters for all of us, more than we might acknowledge. We can anticipate a new generation of American social scientists without lived experience in most of the Middle East and a scholarly and scientific community in the region that risks continuing to be beleaguered and demoralized, deprived of both reliable data and academic freedom. If that happens, we have little prospect of examining, much less understanding, the questions that are of public moment in the region. We will simply bring tool kits designed for a very different context and apply these analytical approaches and techniques mechanically to issues of marginal consequence in the region while neglecting what is actually of import to Middle Easterners (and, therefore presumably, to all of us). As Pfeifer puts it, the recent growth of economics in the region “entails more of a penetration by Western neoclassical economic ideas and modeling techniques . . . than it does a meeting of minds between economists and Middle East area studies specialists.” And this is true of all the social sciences. As I conclude, I return to my Tunisian colleague and adviser, Hamzaoui. Had I not had the opportunity to live and work in Tunisia and Libya as a graduate student, I would never have encountered the perspective that so profoundly reshaped my conception of the very purpose of my work. Hamzaoui saw what I could not—and what I would never have seen from my graduate student carrel in the library. Perhaps that was a simpler time and “engaged scholarship” was less fraught, but the suggestion that I was studying peasants and state power merely because they were “interesting” was, as Hamzaoui so gently pointed out, profoundly misguided. I learned many things in those eighteen months—not least how wrong my original research hypothesis was and, in that, how valuable actually doing research is!—but nothing more important than the value of the guild of scholars who guide and support, correct and instruct, prod and celebrate social science and its practitioners. Today, when the academic communities in the region are exhausted and beleaguered and their US colleagues are inhibited and uncertain, the need for the critical perspectives that remind social scientists around the world that

442 Lisa Anderson

the purpose of these disciplines is deeply political and moral is ever greater. Encounters like mine with Hamzaoui may be more difficult to arrange during the spasms of turmoil in the Middle East today, but they are ever more important. And there is reason to believe that the same technologies that are eroding conventional structures of political authority and challenging traditional academic institutions may also offer alternative vehicles for precisely the conversations, debates, and disputes that will restore vitality, immediacy, and ethical imperative to the study of the Middle East. Initiatives like Jadaliyya, an independent online journal established in 2010 to provide what it describes as “a unique source of insight and critical analysis that combines local knowledge, scholarship, and advocacy with an eye to audiences in the United States, the Middle East and beyond,” is a case in point. Similarly, efforts by scholars in the United Kingdom and the Middle East to develop an English-Arabic MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) will provide exposure to social science and humanities theories and methods in comparative, interdisciplinary, and global frameworks in the Arab world. Operating in multiple languages across multiple continents, these efforts are designed to disseminate research, promote collaboration, and broaden audiences for both experienced research scholars and fresh voices. As Jadaliyya describes itself, it encourages “discussing the Arab world on its own terms. Where others see only a security threat, conflict, or data on a graph, we see a region inhabited by living communities and dynamic societies.” So, too, initiatives designed to make visible and to strengthen social science in the region will contribute to strengthening social science of the region, and not only by strength of numbers. The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), established in 2010, has funded work in the region that no American institution would have countenanced—work by Syrian social scientists in refugee camps and in towns and cities under occupation, for example—in an effort to, as Mohammed A. Bamyeh, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh and lead author of the first ACSS Arab Social Science Report put it, develop an “indigenous social science with its own methods.” The proposition is not that there is a different science as such in the region but that it provides “an opportunity to acquire new knowledge. . . . We need an independent Arab social science that feels its own right to ask questions, questions not asked by the European and American academy. It’s not nationalistic, although it might sound that way. It’s really a question of a scientific approach that comes out of a local embeddedness” (quoted in Cambanis

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium 443

2015). Just as US social science is embedded in the US experience, a universal, genuinely scientific enterprise will draw on the insights and approaches born of local knowledge everywhere. That, said the Cairo historian Alia Mosallam, will be supported when networks like ACSS force the researchers in the region itself to consider their purposes, audiences, and context and to examine: “Are we asking questions that really matter? Are we trying to reach a wider public?” (quoted in Cambanis 2015).4 These kinds of efforts not only transcend the hurdles of local and global politics, but, more important, provide a venue for experimentation, transparency, debate, and community—many of the classical values of scientific inquiry. Indeed, a return to the fundamental elements of the enterprise of teaching and research— of promoting inquiry—would be a fruitful place from which to start rebuilding the moral purpose on which scientific innovation truly rests. As researchers, we want to learn more about our world; as teachers, we want to ensure that our students are equipped to learn about their world, and in contributing to better-informed and more thoughtful popular discourse and public policy, we strive to inspire a disposition of lifelong inquiry, an appreciation of the complexity of the world, and a spirit of humility in the face of the responsibilities we share. It is from there that we will be able to tell the next generation of young scholars—American or Middle Eastern—that they need to know not just what they are doing, but why.

Notes 1.

The term “Washington consensus” was coined in 1989 by the English economist John Williamson to refer to a set of economic policy prescriptions that Washington-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury Department advocated for developing countries. Over time, the term came to be used more broadly to refer to strongly market-based approaches to economic reform, sometimes described as market fundamentalism or neoliberalism.

2.

The full text of Zuckerberg’s post is available at www.facebook.com/zuck/

3.

This language is from Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations estab-

posts/10101828640656261 (accessed August 16, 2015). lishing the Mandates system. 4.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that one of this volume’s coeditors, Seteney Shami, is the ACSS’s founding director.

444 Lisa Anderson

References Cambanis, Thanassis. 2015. “Revolutionary Times.” Carnegie Corporation of New York, International Peace and Security. July 27. Accessed August 18, 2015. www.carnegie.org/news/articles/revolutionary-times/. Rostow, Walt Whitman. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium 445

Appendix

Producing Knowledge on World Regions: Overview of Data Collection and Project Methodology, 2000–Present Jonathan Z. Friedman

Since 2000, a team of researchers at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has been engaged in a long-term study of the production of knowledge on world regions with a particular focus on US universities. Data collection for a pilot project on Middle East studies began in 2000, funded by the Ford Foundation (grant no. 1010– 0542), while the bulk of the data collection for this project was funded through the US Department of Education’s International Research and Studies Program from 2004 to 2010 (grant nos. P017A040075 and P017A060034). Support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 2013 to 2014 enabled the continued analysis and writing up of this project data (grant number 31300136). Though work on this research agenda began before the events of 9/11, it gained new urgency in their aftermath, as Middle East experts in the United States came under scrutiny for the adequacy of their training and acuity to predict threats to national security. The focus of the research has widened over the tenure of the project to examine the organization of international knowledge and international education in the US university more broadly. Area studies centers have been the focal point of this study from the outset, given their central role in supporting the production and dissemination of knowledge on the world beyond US borders. Our effort to examine these

447

centers and their broader intellectual enterprise has been animated by the following challenges that they have faced over the past decade: • the academic and institutional challenge emerging out of the post– Cold War context, with its emphasis on global processes and deemphasis of local contextual and linguistic knowledge, and the concomitant shift away from particularistic cultural knowledge in social scientific fields like economics, political science, and sociology; • the public challenge arising in the aftermath of 9/11 and the “war on terror,” which has increased the workload of some of these centers in terms of student demand and public outreach as well as the resulting sense of heightened responsibility and accountability; • the financial challenge facing area studies centers particularly dependent on federal Title VI funding given severe budget cutbacks by Congress in 2011; • the structural and conceptual challenge of reorganizing the training of scholars on global phenomena and “crossover” areas, such as Central Asia, given that expertise, language training, and research resources tend to be scattered across, or fall between the cracks of, different area studies centers; and • the challenge of the relevance of area studies centers amid the new ecology of US higher education, which has witnessed both widespread “internationalization” of curricular offerings and ongoing digitization of academic learning.

Our lens on area studies centers and these various challenges has been multifaceted, as our long-term observations of them has proceeded through various phases of data collection and has involved multiple research collaborations, stakeholder consultations, workshops, invited lectures, and conference presentations at annual meetings of professional associations like the American Sociological Association and the Comparative and International Education Society. This included a panel organized for the Title VI 50th Anniversary Conference in 2009 as well as a presentation at the Worldwide Universities Network Conference in Hong Kong in 2011. The project has produced multiple reports, working papers, and journal articles related to campus internationalization and the production of interdisciplinary knowledge in the social sciences and the humanities, and our analysis of a broad cache of empirical data continues.

448 Jonathan Z. Friedman

Data Collected Empirical data collected as part of this nearly fifteen-year endeavor are diverse and wide-ranging. Owing to successive rounds of grant funding and multiple collaborations with different partners, including the Middle East Studies Association, our team has amassed rich quantitative and qualitative data on area studies centers dedicated to the study of multiple world regions, based at over fifteen US universities. The core of these data stems from three phases of data collection as part of a sequential mixed-methods research design, which involved seventeen weeklong site visits to twelve case study universities across the United States during the academic years 2005– 6, 2006– 7, and 2007–8. This methodology was adopted to provide in-depth pictures of the operation of area studies centers and the views and experiences of the faculty, students, and administrators affiliated with them. Though the first phase targeted centers for Middle Eastern studies in particular and involved some comparative study of centers for other regions (Latin America and Russia/Eurasia), the later phases expanded to target multiple world regions to get a sense of their general operation as a group. Our analytic shifted as well to the broad Eurasian continent, examining contiguous world regions to see how they vary in divvying up the broad geographic entity as well as go about providing adequate training to students in the particular languages, cultures, and histories of each region. These formal regions include the Middle East, Russia/Eurasia, South Asia, and Central Asia, though centers often differ in their definitions of the borders of each of these entities. Instruments for data collection were developed collaboratively and underwent months of revision and testing before being finalized. Field researchers checked in with the project team regularly from the field and debriefed the team after their return. Overall, case universities were selected on the basis of four criteria: (1) presence of funded Title VI area studies centers in the region(s) of interest for each phase; (2) public versus private universities (with an aim to achieve equal representation in the final sample); (3) degree-granting or non-degreegranting area studies centers (with an aim to achieve an equal balance in the final sample); and (4) geographic location (with an aim to achieve broad geographic diversity in the final sample). Table A.1 shows the distribution of these seventeen site visits across the twelve campuses in the study as well as their geographic locations. Pseudonyms

Appendix 449

Table A.1. Site Visits to Case Universities, by Project Phase PHASE I (2005–6)

PHASE II (2006–7)

PHASE III (2007–8)

1. U West (West) 2. Quadrangle (Midwest) 3. North Urban (Northeast) 4. Southern State (South) 5. Open Plains (Midwest) 6. Eastern Elite (Northeast)

1. U West (West) 2. Quadrangle (Midwest) 3. North Urban (Northeast) 4. Southern State (South) 7. Western Flagship (West) 8. Big State (Midwest)

6. Eastern Elite (Northeast) 9. Collegiate (Midwest) 10. Interstate (Midwest) 11. Lakeside (Midwest) 12. Bayside (Northeast)

were adopted for each university to maintain institution and participant confidentiality. Data collected during the qualitative site visits included ethnographic observation of the breadth and depth of activities, programs, and events at area studies centers; interviews on each campus with vice-provosts for international affairs (or related titles), area studies center directors and associate directors, directors of graduate studies, and/or department chairs in economics, political science, and sociology, and other faculty working on regional issues; and focus groups with students and faculty studying the region(s) of interest. Interview questions ranged from specific questions about the operational aspects of area studies centers to broader questions about challenges and issues related to internationalization on each campus and questions about the study of particular world regions on each campus. Participation in the study was completely voluntary for all participants. An ad hoc SSRC Institutional Review Board approved the study’s design, data collection plan, and research instruments. The study was described and announced at multiple conference venues, and recruitment took place through letters of invitation from the SSRC. Throughout the project, we have adopted a set of generic titles for centers and individuals to maintain the confidentiality of the research participants, which are outlined in Table A.2. Table A.3 illustrates the interviews and focus groups conducted as part of each of these three phases of data collection. In Phases II and III, interviews were often conducted jointly with center directors and associate directors, meaning that the number of individuals who participated in the study often exceeded the total number of interviews. In total, the team conducted 106 formal, tape-recorded interviews with 135 individuals; 100 informal interviews with 103 individuals, for which we took notes; 17 faculty focus groups 450 Jonathan Z. Friedman

Table A.2. Use of Generic Titles Generic Title Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Center for Russia/Eurasian Studies, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for South Asian Studies, Center for Central Asian Studies

All centers were given these generic titles using standard regional divisions of the world.

Related Center/Program

This refers to any non–area studies center or academic program that works in conjunction with a participating center in the study: for example, a center for public policy or an institute for water research.

Center Director

This refers to the most senior leader of a participating center, with a faculty appointment.

Associate Director

This refers to the deputy of a center, who may or may not have faculty appointments. Associate directors usually take an active role in center programming as well as organizing applications for federal Title VI funding.

Center Administrator

This refers to any other administrative staff in the participating centers who might oversee outreach to local schools, alumni, or program activities. Center administrators do not have faculty appointments.

Affiliated Faculty

This refers to any faculty member affiliated with a participating center, which could range widely in disciplinary expertise.

Dean of International Studies

This refers to any study participant who had a role overseeing or working with multiple area studies centers. Not all of these participants had this official title, but they shared similar organizational roles.

Department Chair

This refers to an individual who was serving the role of chair in departments of economics, political science, and sociology, though not all individuals had this exact title.

Other Titles

In all other instances, a generic form of participants’ titles was adopted, for example: “student,” “director of graduate studies,” “vice-provost,” or “associate dean.”

with 69 individual scholars who study one of our world regions; and 13 student focus groups with 61 graduate students developing expertise in one of these world regions. These interviews and focus groups constitute in-depth, engaging conversations with over 368 people, many of whom are prominent scholars at the forefront of expertise on the study of these regions. These site Appendix 451

visits also included countless hours of observation and have resulted in more than ten thousand pages of field notes and interview transcripts. Over the past decade, additional sources of data for the project overall have also been collected. These include the following: • Both qualitative and quantitative surveys of seventeen centers for the study of the Middle East in Canada and the United States for the academic years 2001–2 and 2002– 3. • A national survey of thirty-seven centers for the study of the Middle East, South Asia, Russia/Eurasia, and Central Asia conducted in 2008. Questions concerned centers’ institutional missions and priorities, day-to-day operations, faculty affiliations, and funding mechanisms. • A national survey of 235 students working in the regions of interest for this study (Middle East, South Asia, Russia/Eurasia, and Central Asia) conducted in 2008. Questions concerned students’ training and educational backgrounds, their use of the Title VI centers and other campus resources, as well as their career plans. • Analysis of the Middle East Studies Association Members Database, including summary statistics on background, specializations, and ranks, from 2001 and 2002. • Analysis of a national database (the US Department of Education EELIAS database) of area studies center information, including course offerings and enrollments, faculty appointments, and outreach efforts. • A cache of thirty-seven funding proposals to the Department of Education by area studies centers from the first eight of our case universities that were subsequently awarded Title VI funding. Within these reports are detailed accounts of center activities, course offerings, outreach events, academic programs, and lists of the faculty affiliated with each center, including details of their individual academic training and areas of expertise. They provide unique insights into the ecology of each center on each campus and the intellectual reach of their affiliated faculty. These include nine center proposals from the funding cycle that began in 1999; six proposals from the cycle that began in 2002; and twenty-two proposals from the cycle that began in 2006. • A database of the departments, centers, institutes, and programs dedicated to the study of the non-American world at each of the twelve case universities, which includes the year of their founding and tracks changes in their official titles and academic foci from 1860 to 2010.

452 Jonathan Z. Friedman

Table A.3. Interviews and Focus Groups, by Project Phase Phase I Focus: Centers for Middle Eastern studies, with some comparative data on centers for Latin American and Russia/Eurasian studies. Interview Type

# of Interviews

# of Individuals

Formal (recorded)

30

30

Informal (notes)

47

48

Faculty Focus Groups

3

9

Student Focus Groups

4

16

84

103

TOTAL

Phase II Focus: Centers for Middle Eastern, Russia/Eurasian, and South Asian studies. Interview Type

# of Interviews

# of Individuals

Formal (recorded)

43

61

Informal (notes)

42

43

Faculty Focus Groups

10

51

Student Focus Groups

6

31

100

186

TOTAL Phase III Focus: Centers for Central Asian studies. Interview Type

# of Interviews

# of Individuals

Formal (recorded)

33

44

Informal (notes)

11

12

Faculty Focus Groups

4

9

Student Focus Groups

3

14

51

79

TOTAL Overall Interview Type

# of Interviews

# of Individuals

Formal (recorded)

106

135

Informal (notes)

100

103

Faculty Focus Groups

17

69

Student Focus Groups

13

61

235

368

TOTAL

• An archive of published work, media articles, commentaries, and unpublished reports related to the research foci and a working bibliography of academic publications related to area studies, the production of knowledge, and the internationalization of higher education accessible on the project website.

Data Analysis and Usage in This Volume To date, this wide array of data has been analyzed in multiple ways by different members of the project team, and much of this work continues. Researchers utilizing the data have each signed agreements concerning data usage and sharing, including ethical considerations pertaining to confidentiality of the study participants. As detailed in different chapters in this volume, most researchers on the project team have used qualitative methodology to analyze the collected interview data, spending many hours listening to the interview audio files and reading interview transcripts. In the majority of cases, coding schemes were developed to hone in on patterns and themes in the perspectives of the interview subjects across the interviews, with the assistance of the software program Atlas.ti. Various conventions for using the data have also been followed, such as the use of pseudonyms and generic titles outlined above. Quotations from the recorded, formal interviews are distinguished by double quotation marks (“ ”), or are presented as large blocks of text. Quotations from hand-written notes from the informal interviews are distinguished by single quotation marks (‘ ’). Ellipses with three periods indicate pauses in the comments of the interview subjects, and ellipses with four periods indicate where some text was omitted. In some cases, false starts and extraneous utterances were removed. Several publications have resulted from these analyses or are in progress. More detailed information about the project, including a list of published material and manuscripts in progress, can be found on our project website at www.ssrc.org/programs/producing-knowledge-on-world-regions/.

454 Jonathan Z. Friedman

Project Team Principal Investigators • Seteney Shami (SSRC), 2000–present • Cynthia Miller-Idriss (American University), 2009–present

Steering Committee (Phase I) • Reşat Kasaba (University of Washington), 2004– 7 • Karen Pfeifer (Smith College), 2004– 7 • Lisa Wedeen (University of Chicago), 2004– 7

Senior Consultants • Charles Kurzman (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), 2009–10 • Cynthia Miller-Idriss (American University), 2005–present • Mitchell L. Stevens (Stanford University), 2008– 9

Project Managers • Maureen Abdelsayed, 2004– 6 • Holly Danzeisen (SSRC), 2006–present

Data Manager • Jonathan Z. Friedman (New York University), 2013–present

Former Project Staff Researchers • Jeremy Browne, consultant (Brigham Young University and SUNY Binghamton), 2006– 7 and 2008–10 • Nick Gozik, postdoctoral researcher (SSRC), 2007– 9 • Alice Horner, consultant (independent), 2008 • Anthony Koliha, staff researcher (SSRC), 2007– 9 • Lucine Taminian, consultant (independent), 2001–2 • Elizabeth Anderson Worden, postdoctoral researcher (SSRC), 2005– 6

Doctoral Research Assistants • Christian A. Bracho (New York University), 2009–11 • Jesse Foster (Stanford University), 2011–12 • Jonathan Z. Friedman (New York University), 2010–12

Appendix 455

• Shane Minkin (New York University), 2007–8 • Naomi A. Moland (New York University), 2009–10 • Nina Pessin-Whedbee (New York University), 2007–8

Project Assistant • Nazli Parvizi (SSRC), 2000–2003

456 Jonathan Z. Friedman

About the Contributors

Lisa Anderson served as president of the American University of Cairo from January 2011 to January 2016. A specialist on politics in the Middle East and North Africa, Anderson served as the university’s provost from 2008 to 2010. She is the author of several publications, including Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century and The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980. Past president of the Middle East Studies Association and past chair of the board of the Social Science Research Council, Anderson is also a former member of the Council of the American Political Science Association and served on the board of the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs. She is member emerita of the board of Human Rights Watch, where she served as co-chair of Human Rights Watch/Middle East and member of the International Advisory Council of the World Congress for Middle East Studies. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. Laura Bier is Associate Professor of History in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech and the author of Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity and the State in Nasser’s Egypt. Jeremy M. Browne is Assistant Research Professor and Coordinator of the Digital Humanities and Technology program at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Among a wide variety of research endeavors, he has worked 457

as a measurement specialist for the National Middle East Language Resource Center, and he consulted with the Social Science Research Council and the National Research Council on evaluations of federally funded foreign language and area studies programs. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Computer Assisted Language and Instruction Consortium Journal, Educational Technology, and Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. In 2007 the US Department of Education invited him to present a critique of the Title VI data-gathering system at its International Education Programs Service Language Workshop. The Society of Information Technology and Teacher Education gave him an Outstanding Paper award in 2009. Carl W. Ernst is a specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and he has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A former member of the Board of Directors of the Middle East Studies Association, he is the editor of Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of Intolerance. He received a PhD in the study of religion from Harvard University. Jonathan Z. Friedman is a PhD candidate in International Education at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. His current research centers on the sociology of globalization and higher education in the United States and the United Kingdom. Since 2010, Friedman has been research assistant for a long-term project housed at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) examining the way American universities organize and produce knowledge about the rest of the world. Irene Gendzier is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, writing in the areas of development, foreign economic policy, and postwar US foreign policy in the Middle East. She has also written on the evidence and consequences of official deception and self-deception in popular knowledge of US foreign policy in the Middle East. Her books include the anthology Crimes of War: Iraq, coedited with Richard Falk and Robert J. Lifton, and Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the Middle East, 1945–1958. Her most recent book is Dying to Forget: Oil, Power, Palestine, and the Foundations of US Policy in the Middle East (Columbia University Press, 2015)

458 About the Contributors

Marcial Godoy-Anativia is a sociocultural anthropologist and Associate Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. He is also editor, with Jill Lane, of e-misférica, the Institute’s trilingual online journal. From 2000 to 2007, he worked in the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean and the Program on International Collaboration at the Social Science Research Council. His publications include Rhetorics of Insecurity, coedited with Zeynep Gambetti. He serves on the Board of Directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) and on the Editorial Committee of NACLA: Report on the Americas. Timur Hammond completed his PhD in 2016 at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation, Mediums of Belief: Muslim Place Making in 20th Century Turkey, draws upon archival and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the changing place of Islam in Istanbul. Supported by a number of institutions, including the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Fulbright Institute for International Education, and the Institute of Turkish Studies, he is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Vermont. Reşat Kasaba is Stanley D. Golub Chair of International Studies and Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He recently edited volume 4 of the Cambridge History of Modern Turkey. His most recent book, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Empire, Migrants, and Refugees, received the Fuat Koprulu Award for Best Book in Turkish Studies from the Turkish Studies Association in 2010. Charles Kurzman is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Codirector of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. He is the author of The Missing Martyrs, Democracy Denied, 1905–1915 (Harvard University Press, 2008), and The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. In recent years, his research on Islamic terrorism has been cited by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and several members of Congress. Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and the first holder of the ArabAmerican Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University. In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named him a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies

About the Contributors 459

and communities, both in the United States and abroad. Makdisi is the author of Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of US-Arab Relations, 1820–2001 and Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East, which was the winner of the 2008 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, the 2009 John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, and a co-winner of the 2009 BritishKuwait Friendship Society Book Prize given by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is Associate Professor of Education and Sociology, and Director of the International Training and Education Program, at American University in Washington, D.C. Her publications include Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany (Duke University Press, 2009), and two forthcoming manuscripts, on the production of knowledge about the world in U.S. universities (with co-authors Mitchell Stevens and Seteney Shami) and on the commercialization of far-right youth culture in Germany. At American University, she also directs the Global Education Forum, a biannual event bringing expert academics and practitioners together for dialogue on pressing global issues in education. Amy Mills is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul. Mills serves on the international advisory boards of fe dergisi/fe journal, the Turkish Journal of Human Geography, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. She has held leadership positions in the Turkish Studies Association and in the Association of American Geographers and supports interdisciplinary scholarship in geography and Middle East studies. Karen Pfeifer is Professor Emerita of Economics at Smith College, having taught there from 1979 to 2010. She was named a Fulbright senior scholar in 1993–94 and 2001–2 and has done research in Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, Tunisia, and Turkey. She has served as an editor of Research in Middle East Economics, Review of Middle East Economics and Finance, and Middle East Report. Pfeifer earned her Ph.D. in economics at the American University in 1981.

460 About the Contributors

Seteney Shami is Founding Director-General of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (Beirut, Lebanon) since 2012 as well as Program Director for the Middle East, North Africa and InterAsia programs at the SSRC. She is an anthropologist from Jordan and obtained her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her fieldwork has focused on Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. Her research interests center on issues of ethnicity and nationalism in the context of globalization, urban politics and state-building strategies, and population displacement and transnational mobility. Recent publications include the edited volume Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa. Lisa Wedeen is the Mary R. Morton Professor of Political Science and the College and the Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her publications include Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999); “Conceptualizing ‘Culture’: Possibilities for Political Science” (2002); “Concepts and Commitments in the Study of Democracy” (2004), Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power and Performance in Yemen (2008), “Ethnography as an Interpretive Enterprise” (2009), “Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science” (2010), and “Ideology and Humor in Dark Times: Notes from Syria” (2013). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. She is currently working on a book about ideology, neoliberal autocracy, and generational change in present-day Syria. Elizabeth Anderson Worden is Associate Professor of Education at American University in Washington, DC. Her primary research examines how governments foster identities and belonging through formal education during social and political transition. Worden’s book National Identity and Education Reform: Contested Classrooms (Routledge, 2014) examines these issues in the context of post-Soviet Moldova. She has published articles in numerous journals, including Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education, Journal of European Education, and Comparative Education Review. In 2014–15, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. Worden’s larger research interests include history teaching, history textbooks, memory, citizenship education, nationalism and national identity, and international exchange.

About the Contributors 461

Index

Abdelati, Wafa Fahmi, 262

9/11, 375; transformations in, 278– 79,

Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 96; “Orientalism

436– 37. See also specific publications

in Crisis,” 386– 87 Abu El-Haj, Nadia, 49, 66n22, 66n24, 158 Abu Ghraib torture scandal, 392, 395 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 96, 106n10, 163 Abu-Lughod, Lila: “Zones of Theory in the Arab World,” 262 academic freedom, challenges to, 8, 9–10, 21– 22, 360, 363– 69, 371n24, 419– 24 academic institutions: changes and constraints, 367– 68, 436– 37; changing demographics, 331; commercialization

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 173n1 Action Alert of the Middle East Anthropology Task Force, 420 Adams, Charles, 324 Adas, Emin Baki, 255 Afghanistan, as part of Middle East, 334– 35, 360, 368 Afghanistan, US war in: critics and supporters of, 32, 392; Middle East Studies and, 197

of, 20, 205; financial cuts to, 20, 168,

African area studies, 24n1

351– 52, 366– 67; internationalization

African Development Bank, 144n13

of, 15– 16, 189– 219, 364– 66, 438;

Aga Khan Program for Islamic

military recruitment at, 422–

Architecture, 164

23; religion and, 332; right-wing

Ahmad, Aijaz, 388

critiques, 22. See also Middle

Ajami, Fouad, 392

East Studies centers, US; specific

Alatout, Samer, 160

institutions

Alavi, Hamza, 96

academic publishing: on economics, 118– 25; on Islamic subjects, 321– 23; post-

Albright Institute (Jerusalem), 6 Aldrich, John, 63n11

463

Alford, Robert, 202

in Central America, 385; political

Ali, Ali Abdel Gadir, 141, 145n20

science’s complicity in, 32– 33, 54– 56,

Allawi, Ali A., 423– 24

58, 59– 60; recent studies on, 398– 99;

Almond, Gabriel, 52– 53; A Discipline Divided, 64n14 Alnasrawi, Abbas, 106n10

sociology and, 87– 88 American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), 419

AlSayyad, Nezar, 162, 174n3

American Jewish Committee (AJC), 419

American Academy of Religion (AAR):

American Journal of Public Health, 321

annual conferences, 333– 34; Islam Section, 333 American Anthropological Association (AAA), 59 American Anthropologist, 321 American Antiquarian Society, 5 American benevolence, image of, 21, 376, 379– 80, 384, 394, 397– 98, 439 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 380 American Council of Learned Societies,

American Journal of Sociology, 99 American Oriental Society, 5, 324 American Political Science Association, 33– 34, 42 American Political Science Review (APSR), 36– 37, 50, 321 American Psychologist, 321 American School for Girls (later American Junior College for Women), 6 American Schools of Oriental Research, 6

94; Islamic Teaching materials Project,

American Social Science Association, 113

341

American Sociological Association

American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), 419– 20

(ASA), 96, 100, 448 American Sociological Review, 321

American Economic Association, 136

American Sociological Society, 87

American Economic Review, 321

American Sociology Review, 98– 99

American Ethnological Society, 5

American studies, 5, 20– 21, 354, 376, 393,

American exceptionalism: American

396– 98

politics studies, 12, 49– 51, 57, 59–

American University: American Institute

60, 66n26; image of, 21; real-life

for Islamic Affairs, 325; Ibn Khaldun

engagement and, 433– 34; US–Arab

Chair in Islamic Studies, 327

relations and, 375– 78, 384, 390, 391– 95,

American University of Beirut, 6

397, 398– 99

Amin, Samir, 96

American Historical Review (AHR), 321, 322 American imperialism: after 1948, 386, 390– 91; in Asia, 384– 85, 394; authoritarian regimes and, 69– 70n42;

464 Index

Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities, 266 Anderson, Elijah, 210 Anderson, Lisa, 22– 23, 67n32, 67– 68n33, 369– 70n2

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, 371n34, 447

Arab Spring uprisings: authoritarian resilience and, 68n39; cultural

Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 384

essentialist arguments on, 53, 58;

Annals of the Association of American

economics studies, 135, 142; Middle

Geographers, 173n1, 321 anthropology: dissertations on Middle

East area studies and, 351– 52, 367, 439–42; neoliberal reform policies

East topics, 17, 253, 262– 64; Islamic

and, 115–16, 142; political science and,

studies and, 331; knowledge-power

52; sociology and, 84, 97, 99–100, 101,

relationships in, 4, 59

106n2

Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 419 Antipode, 173n1 Antonius, George: The Arab Awakening, 381– 82, 383, 403n5 Arab Barometer survey, 69n39 Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), 443, 444 Arab Fund for Economic and Social

archaeology: biblical, 158, 378; expeditions, 6– 7, 88 architecture: dissertations on Middle East topics, 253; in Middle East area studies, 161, 163– 64 area studies: African, 24n1; centers for, 189– 90, 207– 8; comparative department sizes, 8; cultural and

Development (AFESD), 129, 134,

political contexts, 24n1; as embattled

144n13

paradigm, 363– 68; funding for, 93– 94,

Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), 384, 399 Arabic-language instruction: attrition

190, 205, 206, 218n16; geographical inquiry of, 169– 71; HR 3077 proposed legislation, 22, 356– 57, 363, 371n17,

rates, 16, 226, 243–44, 247; demands

421– 24; interdisciplinary nature of, 83,

for, 20, 226, 230– 31, 358; early,

100–101, 164– 69, 170– 71, 241, 273, 278–

324; enrollment data, 15, 236, 237t;

79, 438; internationalization and, 15–16,

government hiring and, 244–47;

189– 219, 364– 66; Latin American, 24n1;

language-acquisition difficulty, 15–16;

political science and, 12, 46, 59; Russian

“national needs” and, 47, 101, 230– 31,

and Eurasian, 24n1; social sciences’

236; at NYU, 200– 201, 206; post-9/11,

relationship with, 17, 18, 47–48, 254, 359,

225–49; study abroad, 237– 38, 247, 441.

366, 433– 38; sociology and, 13, 89– 90,

See also language (various Middle-

94– 95, 97– 98; specialist logic of, 202–

Eastern) instruction Arab-Israeli conflict: 1948 war, 386; as historiographical problem, 376, 383–

3, 204– 8, 210, 211–12; Title VI grants, 94– 95, 100, 105, 197, 198, 211, 218nn9–10, 335– 36. See also Middle East area studies

84, 385– 86; Orientalism and, 387; US

Arendt, Hannah, 36

partisanship in, 395. See also Israeli-

Ari, Yilmaz, 174n5

Palestinian conflict

Arjomand, Said A., 96, 106n10

Index 465

Armenian genocide, 88, 378, 379– 80, 402– 3n4

Bayh-Dole Act (1980), 365 Bayoumi, Moustafa, 395

arms industry, US, 33, 57, 68n38

Beşikçi, Ismail, 106n9

art history: dissertations on Middle East

Beinin, Joel: “The New McCarthyism,”

topics, 253; Orientalism in, 389 Asad, Talal, 263 Asiatick Researches, 324 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 324

419 Bender, Thomas, 391; A Nation among Nations, 400–401; Rethinking American History in a Global Age, 401

Assiut College, 378

Benedict, Ruth, 52

Association of American Geographers,

Berkes, Niyaki, 106n9

166 Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS), 267, 278 authoritarian regimes: American involvement with, 57, 58, 63n8, 69–

Bernard, Jessie, 89– 90 Bernard, Luther Lee, 89– 90 Biddle, Sheila, 367 Bier, Laura, 17– 18, 65n15, 125, 359, 434 Bijlefeld, W. A., 344n4

70n42; anger and frustration against,

Binder, Leonard, 48, 51, 336

441; Arab Spring uprisings and, 441–

Blackstone, William, 379

42; IFIs’ involvement with, 142; oil

Blank, Paul, 174n5

and, 440–41; resilience of, 68– 69n39;

Boas, Franz, 52

sociological research and, 85; studies of,

Bodman, Herbert, 341

43, 57, 434– 35; use of space by, 158

Bogazici University (Istanbul), 6 Bond, George Clement, 24n1

Bachelard, Gaston, 154

Bonine, Michael, 162, 174n5

Badiou, Alain, 54

Boran, Behice, 106n1, 106n9

Bahloul, Joelle: Architecture of Memory,

Bowen, Harold: Islamic Society and the

156– 57 Baker, Wayne E.: “Modernization,

West (with Gibb), 382– 83 Bowen, Roger W., 422– 23

Cultural Change, and Persistence of

Bozdogan, Sibel, 164

Traditional Values” (with Inglehart), 99

Brady, Henry E.: Rethinking Social Inquiry

Bamyeh, Mohammed A., 443

(with Collier), 64n14, 65n16

Barkey, Karen, 99

Brand, Laurie A., 418

Barnard College, 87

Brauch, Julia, 173– 74n2

Baron, Beth: The Orphan Scandal, 397

Bremer, Paul, 56

Barton, James, 380

Browne, Jeremy, 16–17, 248n2, 436

Bartu, Ayfer, 174n3

Brownlee, Jason: Democracy Prevention,

Bates, Robert, 98 Bayat, Asef, 159

466 Index

69– 70n42 Bryn Mawr College, 87

Burgess, John W., 63n8

Central Asian studies, 279, 335, 360, 368

Bush, George W., and administration:

Central Intelligence Agency, 92

deceptive information leading to

Certeau, Michel de, 154

Iraq War, 21– 22, 57, 412–17, 423– 24;

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 60

government analysts, 419, 420; ideology

Chamberlain, Paul: The Global Offensive,

of, 58, 392; imperial projects, 54– 56,

400

70n42; military policies, 32, 394;

Chaudhry, Kiren Aziz, 66n28, 67n32

National Security Language Initiative,

Cheney, Lynne, 419– 20

231

Chile, Project Camelot in, 92– 93

Al-But’hie, Ibrahim, M. I., 174n5 Butzer, Karl, 174n5

Chomsky, Noam, 414; “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” 24– 25n2 Citino, Nathan, 382, 398

Cairo Consensus, 140–41 Cairo University, 116 Calhoun, Craig: “Is the University in Crisis?,” 365

“civilizing project” notion, 54– 56, 60– 61, 67– 68n33, 439 “clash of civilizations” notion, 3, 377, 391– 92, 398, 402n2

Camelot project. See Project Camelot

Clinton, Bill, and administration, 365, 419

Campus Watch, 101, 355, 357, 420, 425

Coburn, Tom, 56

Carey, Alex, 414

Cohn, Bernard, 55

Carnegie, Andrew, 5

Cole, Juan, 265, 395

Carnegie Endowment for International

Collier, David: Rethinking Social Inquiry

Peace, 380 Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, 342

(with Brady), 64n14, 65n16 Collins, Randall, 96 colonialism (as general topic): British views of, 55; dissertations on, 18, 271– 73;

Carroll, Susan J., 259– 60

gender studies, 268; spatial dimensions

Caucus for a New Political Science, 36

of, 155, 157, 160

Celik, Zeynep, 157, 174n3

colonialism in the Middle East: European

censorship, 19– 22

vs. American positions, 12–13, 83– 84,

Center for Equal Opportunity, 355

86– 90, 380, 384; Israel and, 387; post-

Center for International Studies

World War I, 89, 103; sociological

(CENIS), 92, 94 Center for Security Policy (CSP), 420– 21

studies under, 85; studies on, 4 Columbia University: Department of

Centers for International Business

Oriental Languages and Literatures, 6;

Education and Research, 227

Earth Institute, 139; Initiative for Policy

Centers for Middle East Studies (CMES).

Dialogue, 139; Islamic studies program,

See Middle East Studies centers, U.S.

325; Near Eastern Studies department,

Index 467

324; political science department, 65n15; sociology department, 87 Committee on World Area Research (SSRC), 94 communications, dissertations on Middle East topics, 253 communist ideology, US interest in combating, 36, 90– 91, 384– 85

Davis, Diana, 160 Davis, John, 389, 390 Deauville Partnership, 116 Deeb, Lara, 159; An Enchanted Modern, 278 Defending Civilization (ACTA report), 419– 20 Defense, US Department of, 10; HR 3077

Communist Party, 88

and, 356– 57; information warfare and,

Comparative and International Education

93– 94, 106, 414–17; sociological studies

Society, 448

and, 92– 93

Comparative Economic Systems, 119

Defense and Peace Economics, 119

Comte, Auguste, 83– 84, 86, 87

de Jong, Jung-Whan, 256, 279n6

Connelly, Matthew: A Diplomatic

democracy and democratization:

Revolution, 399–400

authoritarian regimes and, 434– 35;

Constantinople Today or The Pathfinder

as benchmark of progress, 46, 54, 57,

Survey of Constantinople . . . , 88

59– 60, 92; as “civilizing project,” 54–

Constantinople Women’s College, 378

56, 60– 61, 67– 68n33, 439; concept of

Contemporary Sociology, 100

progress and, 52; cultural essentialism

Coolidge, Calvin, 380

and, 435; defined by rational choice

Cortes, Julio, 341

theorists, 39, 53, 58; dissertations on,

cosmopolitan logic of academic

256, 258; failed transitions, 68– 69n39,

internationalization, 15–16, 191, 202, 203– 6, 209–10, 438 Council on Foreign Relations, 382 Country Profiles, 137 cross-national studies, 9; dissertations

256; Islam and, 17–18, 258; neoliberalism and, 434; in United States, 57 democratic peace theory, 43, 60, 69n40, 71n46 DeNovo, John, 382

on, 18; increasing salience of, 278;

deregulation initiatives, 142

institutional challenges of, 19, 105;

Diamond, Larry, 55

Islamic studies and, 331, 338–42; on

difference as dissertation topic, 18, 265

space, 154

dissertations on Middle East topics, 15, 17–18, 251– 80; anthropology, 17, 18,

Dahl, Robert A., 37

253, 262– 64; architecture, 253; art

Dakar Declaration for the Unconditional

history, 253; communications, 253;

Cancellation of African and Third

economics, 17, 18, 118, 125, 253, 260– 62;

World Debt, 139

education, 253; geographic gaps, 18, 274;

David Project, 420

468 Index

geography, 17, 18, 171– 73; history, 17,

18, 253, 265– 73; international relations,

definition, 129; Research Initiative for

253; Islamic studies, 320– 21; literature,

Arab Development (RIAD), 134– 35;

253; mass media, 253; MES, 17, 18, 253,

scholar mentoring programs, 133– 34;

273– 78; political science, 17–18, 253,

senior affiliates’ sources of PhDs,

256– 60; post-9/11 legacy, 251– 52, 359;

116, 117–18t; shaping of knowledge

quantitative findings, 252– 53; religious

production by, 125– 32; shaping of

studies, 253; sociology, 17–18, 99–100,

research by, 132, 133– 35; working

253, 254– 56

community, 131– 32; World Bank’s help

Dodd, Christopher, 420 drone warfare, 32, 56 Duke University: Gorter Chair in Islamic

in founding, 126, 128– 29 economics: books on Middle East topics, 122, 123t, 124–25; contested boundaries

Studies, 329; Islamic studies, 342;

of and for Middle East, 138–42;

political science department, 65n15

dissertations on Middle East topics,

Durkheim, Émile, 86, 102– 3

17, 118, 125, 253, 260– 62; ERF affiliates’ sources of PhDs, 117–18t; free market

Earle, Edward Mead, 380

bias of, 113–14, 142; growth of Middle

Earth Institute, 139

East research, 116–25, 442; journals and

Easterly, William: “The Lost Decades,”

edited volumes on Middle East topics,

139–40 Eastern Bloc countries: economic

118–19, 121–22; language study and, 240– 41; methodological differences with area

transition after Soviet Union’s demise,

studies, 114; Middle East Studies and, 11,

138

13–14, 112–45, 254; neoliberal influences

Ebel, Katherine, 174n5

on, 13–14, 115–16, 130, 138, 139, 142,

EconLit, entries for Middle East topics,

433–34, 437–38; political science and,

118–19, 120– 21t, 121 Economic Growth in the 1990s (report), 140

38; publishing preferences, 114; social science research institutes, 125–32

Economic Modelling, 119

Economic Trends in the MENA Region, 137

Economic Research Forum for the Arab

Economist, The, 230

World, Turkey, and Iran (ERF): accommodation of views criticizing

education, dissertations on Middle East topics, 253

neoliberalism, 141; annual conferences,

Edwards, Brian: Morocco Bound, 396

136– 37; Arab Spring Development

EELIAS database, 233t, 234– 36, 242–43,

Initiative (ASDI), 135; books published

248n2

by, 124– 25, 137; Open Access Micro

Egypt: 1956 invasion of, 384; criticisms

Data program, 134; origin, mission,

of neoliberalism, 139; dissertations

and structure, 14, 112, 115, 128–

on, 272– 73; ERF’s involvement with

32; publications, 137– 38; regional

government of, 131; IFI interventions,

Index 469

Egypt (continued)

Feith, Douglas, 416

138; military regime in, 142; neoliberal

FEMISE, 129, 137

reform policies and Arab Spring

Fenig, Dalia, 426

uprising, 115–16, 141; nineteenth-

Fenner, Sofia, 32

century reforms in, 86; Obama

Ferguson, Niall, 394

administration views on, 56; sociology

Field, James, Jr., 382, 383, 390

in, 102– 3

50 Years is Enough campaign, 139

Egyptian Center for Economic Studies, 142

Finkelstein, Norman, 424, 425 Flapan, Simha, 424– 25

Egyptian Competitiveness Report, 141

Ford Foundation, 94, 129, 447

Egyptian National Competitiveness

Foreign Language and Area Studies

Council, 141 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 227, 384

(FLAS) Fellowships, 101, 227– 29, 236, 245, 247, 336, 345n17, 366

Eisenhower Doctrine, 398

Foucauldian analysis, 49, 66n24

emerging markets, studies of, 261, 262

Foucault, Michel, 31

Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, 119

freedom of speech restrictions, 19– 22

Emory University: Title VI center, 100

Friedland, Roger, 202

empire (defined), 33

Friedman, Jonathan Z., 15–16, 438, 441

Energy Policy, 119

FrontPageMag.com, 420, 425

English, Paul, 174n5

Fulbright, William, 25n2, 82, 93, 94

English-Arabic MOOC, 443

Fulbright program, 93, 367

Enlightenment, sociology and, 86

Fuller, Mia, 174n3

Environmental and Planning D: Society and Space, 173n1

Gaddis, John Lewis, 394

environmental studies, 160, 169

Galal, Ahmed, 121, 131, 142

Erdem, Hakan, 5

Gallagher, Nancy, 5

Ernst, Carl W., 18–19, 434, 435, 439

Galtung, John, 93

Esposito, John L., 333

game theory, 38– 39, 42, 43, 50

ethnomusicology, dissertations on, 262

Geertz, Clifford, 61n4, 203

European Bank for Reconstruction and

gender studies and women’s history:

Development, 144n13

dissertations on, 18, 256, 259– 60, 262– 63, 267– 69, 274, 277– 78; Islamic

Fahmi, Mansur, 102– 3 Farrukh, Umar: Al-tabshir wa al-istiīmar

studies and, 331; knowledge-power relationships in, 4; spatial processes, 169

fi al-bilad al-īarabiyya (with Khalidi),

Gendzier, Irene, 21– 22, 383, 385, 435, 439

403n8

gentrification, studies of, 158

fascism, 62n7, 63n8

470 Index

geography: disciplinary history, 165– 69;

dissertations on, 18; in Middle East

Guantanamo prison camp, 392

Studies, 11, 14–15, 152– 74; nature and

Gulf War, first, 390, 414, 419

society as research focus, 159– 60;

Gulf War, second, 414

Orientalism in, 389

Gunnell, John G.: The Descent of Political

George Mason University: college of arts

Theory, 62n7

and sciences, 327; IIIT Chair, 329 Georgetown University: Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 325

Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies (NYU), 15–16, 191, 197–99;

Gershoni, Israel, 5

activities of, 198; clinical professorship,

Gibb, H. A. R., 388; Islamic Society and the

198–99; creation of, 197; data and

West (with Bowen), 382– 83

methodology used in evaluating, 192–

Gibson, Nigel C., 24n1

93; educational approach, 191, 198–99,

Giddings, Franklin Henry, 87– 88

202–3, 209; faculty, 198–99; funding, 197,

Global Development Network (GDN),

206; NYU Abu Dhabi campus and, 201,

128, 129, 139–40 globalization: 1990s theories of, 9; academic institutions and, 15, 189–219; area studies

206; partnership with Princeton’s Near Eastern Studies program, 198, 218n8; public events, 199; specialist logic, 202–3

and, 363–64; cosmopolitan logic and,

Hajjar, Lisa: Courting Conflict, 278

203–6, 209–10, 400–401, 438; dissertations

Hakim, Besim Selim, 161

on, 259; economic inequality and, 141;

Halpern, Manfred, 382

historiography and, 400–401; Middle

Hammond, Timur, 14–15, 438

East and, 440–41; reassessments of, 2;

Hamzaoui, Salah, 432– 33, 442, 443

social sciences and, 23; spatial relationships

Handoussa, Heba, 143n6

and, 155. See also internationalization of

Hanssen, Jens, 158

academic institutions

Harkin, Tom, 420

Globalization and Equity (Cairo conference report), 140 Godin, Jean-François, 279n5 Godoy-Anativia, Marcial, 19–20, 170–71, 435–36 Gökalp, Ziya, 103 Göle, Nilüfer, 104 governance as dissertation topic, 18, 265 Grabill, Joseph, 382 Grant, Daragh, 64– 65n15; Politics among Nations, 62– 63n7

Harper’s Bazaar, 334 Harris, Leila, 160 Hartford Theological Seminary, 6; Macdonald Center, 325, 344n4 Hartshorne, Richard: The Nature of Geography, 166 Harvard Law School: King Fahd Chair for Islamic Shariah Studies, 329 Harvard University: Middle East Studies, 95; Near Eastern Studies department,

Grunebaum, Gustave E. von, 325

324; political science department, 41–

Guantanamo detention site, 71n44

42, 65n15; Semitic Museum, 6

Index 471

Harvey, David, 153, 154

HR 3077 (later HR 509) proposed

Hazbun, Waleed, 158

legislation, 22, 356– 57, 363, 371n17, 421–

Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 5, 6

24

Hempel, Carl, 34

Hudson, Michael, 67n32

Herman, Edward, 414

Human Terrain System (HTS) teams, 59

Herring, Pendleton, 49

Hume, David, 34

Hersh, Seymour, 394

Hunter, Michael, 384

Higher Education Act (1965), 94

Huntington, Samuel, 67n32, 377; “The

Histories of the Modern Middle East: New

Clash of Civilizations?,” 52, 391, 398;

Directions (Gershoni, Erdem, Wokock,

The Clash of Civilizations and the

eds.), 5

Remaking of World Order, 52, 53

historiography of US–Arab relations,

Hurewitz, J. C., 382

375–403; Arab-Israeli conflict and,

Hussein, Saddam, 273, 413–14, 441

386– 87, 425– 26; “clash of civilizations”

hybridity as dissertation topic, 18, 265

notion, 3, 377, 391– 92, 398, 402n2; Cold War framework, 385– 86; current

Ibn KhaldŞn, 102, 103

trends in scholarship, 395–402;

Ibrahim, Saad Eddin, 96, 102, 103, 106n10

nineteenth-century writings, 378– 79,

identity issues: dissertations on, 18, 255–

396; Orientalism and, 388– 91; post-

56, 258– 59, 260, 263– 64, 265, 269– 70;

9/11 challenges, 375– 78, 391– 95; post-

interdisciplinary study, 278; social use

World War I, 379– 82; post-World War

of space and, 155, 156, 276– 77

II, 382– 86; transnationalism and, 391 history: colonialism, 271– 73; dissertations on Middle East topics, 17, 253, 265– 73; gender and women’s history,

Iktisat Isletme ve Finans, 119 IMF-Middle East Center for Economics and Finance (CEF), 126 imperialism: American benevolence

267– 69; geographic gaps in studies,

contrasted with, 380, 382, 384; defined,

272– 73; nations and nationalisms,

33; image of Middle East and, 439;

266– 67; periphery and frontier, 271;

modernity and, 48–49, 380; oil and,

religious and ethnic identities, 269– 70;

382– 84; spatial dimensions of, 155. See

transnational, 270– 71 Hitti, Philip, 7

also American imperialism; colonialism Income Inequality, Poverty, and

Hobbs, Joseph, 174n5

Unemployment in the Middle East and

Homeland Security, US Department of,

North Africa (collected volume), 124

10, 101, 356, 357, 360 Homeland Security Centers of Excellence, 101 Horowitz, David, 425

472 Index

India, colonialism in, 55 Indiana University: Islamic Studies program, 345n17 Inglehart, Ronald: “Modernization,

Cultural Change, and Persistence of

institutions, 15–16, 189– 219; area studies

Traditional Values” (with Baker), 99

centers’ contrasting logic, 189– 91, 202–

Initiative for Policy Dialogue, 139

6, 207– 8, 364– 66; international scholars

Inkeles, Alex: Becoming Modern (with

in the U.S., 213–16t; neoliberalism and,

Smith), 91 Institute of International Education, 192, 212 Institute of Islamic Studies, 324 institutional architectures: cross-national studies and, 19; departmental rankings’ effect on knowledge production, 168;

438; New York University’s efforts, 193– 96, 199– 202; waves of, 190– 91 International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), 337 International Labor Organization (ILO), 115, 116, 140 International Monetary Fund (IMF):

institutional logics and, 202– 6, 209–

Institute for Capacity Development,

12, 219n19; Islamic studies and, 18–19;

126; neoliberal agenda, 115, 140, 257,

knowledge production affected by, 8,

261, 444n1; publications of economics

436– 38; language instruction and, 226,

literature, 126

236–40; neoconservative agenda and, 356– 59; relevance and, 20, 448 Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates. See King-Crane Commission International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 144n13 International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, 144n13 International Development Association, 144n13 International Development Research Center (IDRC), 129 International Finance Corporation, 144n13 international financial institutions (IFIs), 13–14, 115; Arab Spring uprisings and, 116; criticisms of, 138, 139–42; Middle

international relations: dissertations on Middle East topics, 253; political methodologies, 42, 50– 51, 63, 65n15, 67n28; realist theories of, 36; sociology and, 82, 89– 90; transnational processes, 399–400 International Research and Studies Program, Department of Education, 447 International Sociological Association, 96 international studies, departments of, 9, 94, 165, 207, 227– 28, 230, 358– 59, 366 interventionism, 3, 32, 441; dissertations on, 256– 57 Iran: emigres from, 126– 27; modernization in, 103; sociology in, 104– 5

East interventions, 138, 257; role in

Iranian Revolution, 97, 99, 336, 413

producing economics literature, 126;

Iraq: dissertations on, 273; oil interests in,

stabilization programs, 139 International Institute of Education, 371– 72n34 internationalization of academic

413–14 Iraq, post-occupation: military policies toward, 32; Obama administration views on, 56

Index 473

Iraqi Revolution, 384

dissertations on, 17– 18, 254, 257– 58,

Iraq Study Group, 230

359 ; essentialist arguments about,

Iraq War: critics and supporters of,

58, 60– 61, 413, 419– 20; moderate

32, 392, 394, 423– 24; “democracy-

and liberal Muslims, 68n35, 68–

building” and, 55– 56, 59– 60; lead-up

69n39

to, 21– 22, 412– 17; Middle East Studies

Ismail, Ayman, 262

and, 197, 358– 59, 375

Israel: bombing of Lebanon, 412,

IRIS database, 234

417– 21 ; publications on economic

Islamic studies, 320–45, 418–

topics, 118, 122 ; sociological

19; anthropological, 262– 63;

research, 99 ; sociolog y in, 104– 5 ;

anthropology and, 331; centers for,

US support for, 385– 86, 390, 391,

324– 25, 326– 27t; challenges, 339–40, 343–44; changes in focus, 330– 31;

395, 413, 417– 21 Israeli-Palestinian conflict: American

constraints on, 18– 19; dissertations,

image as broker in, 21; media coverage

254, 256, 257– 58, 270, 274, 275– 76,

of, 21– 22, 412– 13, 417– 21, 424– 26;

320– 21; endowed chairs in, 327,

Orientalism and, 387; as problem for

329; establishment as discipline, 15,

political science, 51– 52; revisionist

324– 25; gender and, 262– 63, 267–

historians, 424– 26

69, 331; growth of, 18– 19, 320– 23,

Issawi, Charles, 126

336– 37; institutional arrangements

Istanbul, sociological studies of, 88, 155

for, 327, 328t, 329; interdisciplinary programs and departments, 325;

Jacobs, Matthew, 382, 383

interdisciplinary topics, 278; Islamic

Jadaliyya e- zine, 164, 443

city and spatial organization, 153,

Jamal, Amaney: Of Empires and Citizens,

160– 62; journal articles on, 321– 23; literary theory, 331; Near Eastern languages and civilizations, 329–

70n42 James, C. L. R.: The Black Jacobins, 403n5

31; organization in United States,

Jameson, Fredric, 154

324– 29; Orientalism and, 329– 30,

Jefferson, Thomas, 324

396; post- 9/11, 375; religious studies,

Jessup, Henry Harris: Fifty-Three Years

331– 34, 337– 38, 413; sociological, 84; transnationalism and, 337–44 “Islamic terrorism” notion, 3, 53, 360, 391– 92; Middle East Studies and, 376; publications about, 375; rationality and, 67– 68n33 Islamist political movements:

474 Index

in Syria, 378 Jewish communities, studies of, 156– 57, 269– 70. See also Israel Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), 419, 420– 21 Jewish Topographies (collected volume), 154, 173– 74n2

John Carroll University: Nursi Chair in Islamic Studies, 329 Johnson, Clarence Richard, 88 Johnson, James: “Consequences of Positivism,” 64n12 Jordan: IFI interventions, 138; publications on economic topics, 118 journalism. See media and journalism on the Middle East

Kezer, Zeynep, 158 Khalidi, Mustafa: Al-tabshir wa al- isti, mar fi al-bilad al- ,arabiyya (with Farrukh), 403n8 Khalidi, Rashid, 395 Khatib, Lina, 402n1 Kieser, Hans-Lukas: Nearest East, 397 King, Anthony, 163 King, Gary, 41–42; Designing Social

Journal of Economic Literature (JEL), 122

Inquiry (with Keohane and Verba),

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 119

34–45, 52, 63– 64n12, 64n14; Unifying

Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 119 Journal of Persian Economics and Finance, 119 Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR), 321, 322 Judt, Tony, 395

Political Methodology, 64n14 King- Crane Commission, 380, 381, 382 Kinzer, Stephen, 394– 95 Kiray, Mubeccel, 106n9 knowledge-power relationships: epistemological assumptions, 34– 36, 42–43, 44–46, 53– 54, 59– 60, 66nn22– 23, 90– 93; Middle East Studies and,

Kaplan, Amy: Cultures of United States Imperialism (with Pease), 390– 91

1– 2, 4, 435– 36; organizations shaping production of knowledge about

Karl, Rebecca, 401

Middle Eastern economics, 125– 32;

Karnow, Stanley: In Our Own Image, 394

politics and, 19– 22, 51; Said on, 32,

Kasaba, Reşat, 12– 13, 17, 164, 254, 359, 438, 441 Keles, Ruşen, 106n9 Kemal, Mustafa, 382

48–49, 58; studies of, 24n1 Kostof, Spiro, 163 Kramer, Martin, 357– 58, 392, 420; Ivory Towers on Sand, 370n15, 419

Kennedy, Edward M., 420

Küçükömer, Idris, 106n10

Kennedy, Michael D., 211– 12

Kurdish people, 89, 103, 105

Keohane, Robert, 42; Designing Social

Kurtz, Stanley, 421

Inquiry (with King and Verba), 34–45, 52, 63– 64n12, 64n14 Kessler, Gerhard, 103–4

Kurzman, Charles, 18– 19, 97, 99, 106n2, 434, 435, 439 Kuwait, Gulf War and, 414

Kevorkian Center. See Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies Keyder, Çağlar, 96, 106n10, 163; Istanbul between the Global and the Local, 174n4

LaFeber, Walter, 384 Lake Forest College: Gorter Chair of Islamic World Studies, 329

Index 475

language (various Middle-Eastern) instruction: attrition rates, 16, 226,

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucian, 103 Lewis, Bernard, 377, 388, 398; The

243–44, 247; career placement, 244–45,

Emergence of Modern Turkey, 383; “The

246fig; challenges, 226, 236–42, 339;

Roots of Muslim Rage,” 402n2; What

cosmopolitan vs. specialist logics in,

Went Wrong?, 391

205, 206, 211; demands for, 7, 16–17,

liberalism: changing relationship with

20, 358; disciplinary departments and

science, 36– 37; concept of progress and,

language study, 240–42, 247; EELIAS

55– 56; counter-conditions, 61– 62n5;

placement data, 236; enrollment data,

democratic transition studies and,

15, 16; government hiring and, 244–47;

39, 43, 53, 57– 58; instantiating as basic

institutional problems, 236–42, 247;

value, 31– 33, 34– 38, 42–43, 44–46, 53– 54,

instructor dearth, 226, 240, 242–43; instructor status, 16–17, 239–40, 247; “national needs” and, 47, 101, 226, 227–

57– 58, 59– 60, 434 Libya, 441; military intervention in, 32; Obama administration views on, 56

29, 236, 246–47; at NYU, 198, 218n13;

Lieberman, Avigdor, 425– 26

qualitative data, 231– 33; qualitative

Lieberman, Joseph, 419– 20

findings, 236–42; quantitative data,

Lipphardt, Anna, 173– 74n2

234– 35, 235– 36; quantitative findings,

literary theory, 331

242–45; study abroad, 228– 29, 229t,

literature, dissertations on Middle East

237– 38; time constraints, 241–42, 246– 47; at Title VI centers, 16, 101, 226, 227– 29; work placement of students, 16. See also Arabic-language instruction Latin America: economic problems, 138; US involvement in, 376, 384– 85 Latin American area studies, 24n1, 90, 92– 93, 231– 33, 353 Lawrence of Arabia, 382 Leahy, Erin, 99

topics, 253 Little, Douglas: American Orientalism, 394, 395– 96 Lockman, Zachary, 5, 8, 387 Logevall, Fredrik, 400 Long, Burke, 389, 390 Loss, Christopher, 202 Lowry, Heath: The Story behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story, 402– 3n4 Lupia, Skip, 63n11

Lebanese American University, 124 Lebanon, Israeli bombing of, 412, 417– 21

Maalouf, Amin, 351, 352

Lee, Eddy, 140

Macalester College: Humphrey

Lefebvre, Henri, 152, 154 Lerner, Daniel, 92; The Passing of Traditional Society, 68n34, 91, 383 less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), 227– 29, 240

476 Index

Distinguished Visiting Chair in Islamic World Studies, 329 Macdonald, Duncan Black, 324 Mackeen, A. M. Mohamed, 345n5 macrosociology, 84, 95– 98

Madison, James: Federalist Paper #10, 62n5

Mead, Margaret, 52

Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 335

Mearsheimer, John, 63n7; The Israel Lobby

Mahmood, Saba, 68n35 Mahoney, James: Advances in

(with Walt), 69n40 media and journalism on the Middle East,

Comparative-Historical Analysis (with

21– 22, 411– 26; 2006 war on Lebanon,

Thelen), 64n14; Comparative Historical

417– 21; lead-up to Iraq War, 412–17,

Analysis in the Social Sciences (with

423– 24; new media and, 436– 37

Rueschemeyer), 64n14, 97 Makdisi, Ussama, 20– 21, 439; Artillery of Heaven, 397 Malaysia, development policy of postindependence, 140 Mamdani, Mahmood, 395

Melville, Hermann, 388 memory, spatial relationships to, 155, 156, 158, 262 METU, 116 Michaux-Bellaire, Edouard, 89 Middle East: changing geographic

Manela, Erez: The Wilsonian Moment, 401

definition of, 278– 79, 335, 360, 368,

Manners, Ian, 174n5

439; Cold War interpretive frame, 376,

Mardin, Şerif, 104

382– 86, 390; contested boundaries in

marginality as dissertation topic, 18, 265

economics, 138–42; development and

Marr, Timothy: The Cultural Roots of

economic reform agendas in, 115–16;

American Islamicism, 396, 397

discipline of sociology in, 13, 85, 102– 5;

Marsans-Sakly, Sylvia, 252

economics studies growth in, 116– 25;

Marx, Karl, 86

essentialist arguments about, 2– 3, 12,

Marxism, 96, 104, 155

20– 21, 52– 53, 57– 58, 67– 68n33, 391– 95,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

398, 419– 20; ethnic-religious minorities

Center for International Studies, 92,

living in, 156– 57, 276; European vs.

94; political science department, 65n15

American views of, 12–13, 83– 84, 86–

Massad, Joseph, 424

90; evolutionary views of, 90– 92;

Massey, Doreen, 159

exceptionalism notion, 376– 78, 384, 397;

mass media, dissertations on Middle East

expertise available on, 3; lack of data

topics, 253

from, 440; media and journalism on,

Mayhew, David, 36

21– 22, 411– 26; oil in, 90, 138, 261, 382–

McAlister, Melani: Epic Encounters, 389–

84, 398– 99, 413–14, 440–41; political

90, 395, 396 McCarthy, Justin: The Turk in America, 402– 3n4 McGill University: Institute of Islamic Studies, 324 McKelvey, Richard, 63n11

culture arguments, 52– 54, 66– 67n28, 67n32; pre-World-War-II American involvement, 88– 89; as “problem,” 380; research and study restrictions in, 441; self-determination and, 379– 80, 381– 82, 395; as term, 334– 35

Index 477

Middle East area studies: Binder-Said

conferences, 113, 136; Committee on

debate, 48–49, 336; challenges to, 448;

Human Rights and Academic Freedom

critiques of, 10, 47–48; development

(CHRAF), 127, 128; conferences

of, 7– 9, 47– 58; disciplines and their

resulting in books, 124; origin,

boundaries, 11–15; dissertations, 273– 78;

mission, and structure, 14, 112, 115,

economics in, 11, 13–14, 112–45, 261–

126– 28; publications, 128, 136; regional

62; efforts to undermine, 419– 24; as

definition, 127– 28; scholar mentoring

embattled paradigm, 363– 68; funding

programs, 133; shaping of knowledge

for, 47, 90, 105– 6, 218n16, 340; future

production by, 125– 32; shaping of

directions, 432–44; gender studies, 274, 277– 78; geography in, 11, 14–15,

research by, 132– 35 Middle Eastern populations in Europe

152– 74; history of Islam, 274, 275– 76;

and the United States: dissertations on,

interdisciplinary nature of, 83, 100–

255– 56, 262; studies of, 360

101, 164– 69, 170– 71, 241, 273, 278– 79,

Middle East Forum, 420, 425

360– 62, 438– 39; marginalization of,

Middle East Quarterly, 420

51– 52; nation and nationalism, 274; new

Middle East scholars and experts:

research directions, 169– 71, 438–44;

constraints on, 19– 22, 198, 352, 360,

Orientalist traditions differentiated

363– 67, 368– 69, 370n13, 411; criticism

from, 11; political science in, 11–12,

of, 22, 364; demands on, 7; ethnicity or

47– 58; post-9/11 directions, 351– 72;

nationality criticisms of, 10; Iraq War

post-9/11 funding, 101, 197, 351, 411,

lead-up and, 414–17, 423– 24; military

448; post-9/11 politicization, 353– 59,

analysts used as, 21– 22; new media and,

376– 77; post-World War II growth of,

436– 37; perceived shortage of, 32, 225,

8, 190; private funding decrease, 1990s,

230– 31, 236, 247–48; politics and, 3, 7– 8,

9, 218n16; “relevance” and, 361– 63, 435–

19– 22; regional students studying in the

36, 448; social history of Muslim and

West, 112, 116, 117–18t, 197– 98, 213–16t,

non-Muslim communities, 274, 276– 77;

356, 441; self-censorship of, 19– 22, 355;

sociology in, 11, 12–13, 82– 83, 98– 99,

sociologists, 13; surveillance of, 7, 101,

105– 6; SSRC project methodology and

355, 418– 24; visa problems, 370n13

data collection, 447– 54; terrorism and,

Middle East Studies Association

360; transnational cooperation, 340–41.

(MESA): Binder’s 1974 speech to,

See also specific institutions

48, 51; criticism of US policies, 418–

Middle East Development Journal (MEDJ), 119, 121– 22, 137, 142 Middle East Economic Association

19; economists in, 113; geographical coverage, 335; interdisciplinary encouragement by, 278; post-9/11

(MEEA): accommodation of views

criticism of, 392; post-9/11 relevance

criticizing neoliberalism, 141; annual

debate, 357– 58; regional limitations,

478 Index

340; sociology representation in, 100–

Mills, Amy, 14–15, 158, 174n5, 438

101; spatial turn discussion, 164

missionary chronicles and travelogues, 21,

Middle East Studies centers, US

376, 378– 79, 381, 397– 98

(CMES), 113; creation of, 1;

missionary training, 325, 393

internationalization of academic

Mitchell, Timothy, 5, 8, 47–48, 66n28

institutions and, 15–16; post-9/11

modernization theory, 52, 54, 68n34, 84,

campus environment, 353– 56; post-9/11

90– 93, 95, 96, 104, 336, 383, 385, 387, 433

politicization, 353– 59; Title VI funding

Modern Language Association, 5

for, 13, 100, 105, 165– 66, 197, 198, 211,

Morgan, J. P., 5

218nn9–10, 225– 26, 227–49, 335– 36, 340,

Morgenthau, Hans J., 62– 63n7; Scientific

343, 448. See also specific institutions Middle East Studies Committee on Academic Freedom, 418

Man vs. Power Politics, 36 Morgenthau, Henry, 379, 402– 3n4 Morocco: French sociological projects in,

Middle East Studies in the United States:

89; IFI interventions, 138

area studies development, 7– 9, 47–58;

Morris, Benny, 424; 1948, 425

career paths, 339; changes in scholarship,

Morris, Rosalind, 66n24

20–21; crises of, 1–25; dissertations, 15,

Mosallam, Alia, 444

17–18, 251–80; economics’ weak links

Mubarak, Gamal, 142

with, 113–16; history of, 4–10; intellectual

Mubarak, Hosni, 131, 442

trajectories, 359– 63; Islamic studies and,

Muhammad Ali of Egypt, 86

334–44; language instruction, 7, 15, 16–

Multilateral Investment Guarantee

17, 339, 358; matriculation of students

Agency, 144n13

from the region, 112; nineteenth–early

museum collecting expeditions, 5– 6

twentieth century, 5– 7; post-9/11

Muslim populations in Europe and United

criticism of, 19–20, 32, 251, 343–44, 352;

States: changing demographics, 331;

post-9/11 state of, 197– 98; qualitative

dissertations on, 255– 56, 262; post-9/11

turn, 22–23; relevance of, 2–4, 10, 435–36,

environment for, 354, 356; studies of,

448; sociology and, 82–107; university and, 15–19. See also Middle East area

360 Myerson, Roger, 43

studies; specific institutions Migration Letters, 119

Naff, Thomas, 5

military analysts as news commentators,

National Defense Education Act (NDEA,

21– 22 Miller, James, 174n5

1958), 47, 227 National Defense Foreign Language

Miller, Susan Gilson, 156, 174n3

fellowships, 336. See also Foreign

Miller-Idriss, Cynthia, 15–16, 246–47, 438,

Language and Area Studies (FLAS)

441

Fellowships

Index 479

National Defense University, 357 “national interest,” American: academic freedom and, 94; assumptions about,

neoconservativism, 355, 356– 57, 364, 418, 423 neoliberalism: Arab Spring uprisings

42, 56; Cold War and, 47, 51, 90,

and, 116, 138, 142; commercialization

98, 190, 203, 210, 227, 382– 86, 433;

of universities, 20, 205, 365; criticisms

cosmopolitan logic and, 210; geography

of, 139–42; dissenters from, 140–41;

and, 166; post-9/11, 356– 58; in post-

economics studies influenced by, 13–14,

World War I Middle East, 380;

115–16, 130, 261–62, 433–34, 437–38, 444n1;

Project Camelot and, 92– 93; relevance

as framework for dissertations, 17–18, 359;

of research and, 10, 56, 197– 98, 357;

as framework for sociological research,

securitization of knowledge and, 2, 20,

255, 256–57, 433–34, 437–38; geographies

69n40, 357; specialist logic and, 211 “national needs,” Middle East Studies

of, 169; triumphalism and, 433–34 Neumark, Franz, 104

and: Arabic language instruction, 20,

Newhall, Amy, 422

225–49; area studies and, 47–48, 51, 82,

New York Times, The, 412, 414–15, 416,

364, 422; neoconservative pressure on, 357

425– 26 New York University: Abu Dhabi campus,

National Research Council, 230

191, 199, 200– 201, 206, 209, 210, 217n6;

National Resource Centers (NRCs), 227–

cosmopolitan logic, 191, 202, 203– 6,

29, 245, 249n19

209–10; data and methodology used

National Resource Centre, 198

in evaluating, 192– 93; Department

National Review, 421

of Middle East and Islamic Studies

National Science Foundation, 56, 65n17

(MEIS), 191, 197, 198, 199, 325;

National Security Agency, 101

department revamping strategy,

National Security Education Program, 101

218n13; faculty incentives to teach at

National Security Language Initiative, 231

other NYU campuses, 194, 201; global

nation and nationalism: dissertations

branding, 193, 194, 201– 2, 210; Hagop

on, 18, 263– 64, 266– 67, 274;

Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern

interdisciplinary study, 278; post-9/11

Studies, 15–16, 191, 197– 99, 201, 202– 3,

American, 392; rise of, 380

206; internationalization efforts, 15–16,

Nazif, Ahmed, 141

191, 193– 96, 199– 202, 211–12; Middle

Near and Middle East Committee

East Studies and internationalization,

(SSRC), 94 Near Eastern Studies departments, 324, 329– 31 Near East Languages Centers (NELC), 113

480 Index

199– 202; Shanghai campus, 191, 210; specialist logic, 191, 202– 3, 204– 6, 211–12; students encouraged to study abroad, 194, 195– 96, 206; Tel Aviv site, 199, 200– 201

Nocke, Alexandra, 173– 74n2 North Africa: American cultural

Orientalism: Abu El-Haj on, 49; American, 378– 79, 383, 386– 89, 390–

engagement in, 396; economic studies,

91, 396; antiorientalism and, 386– 87;

112, 121; French colonialism in, 385; as

hostility toward, 336; legacy of, 385;

understudied region, 272– 73; viewed as

Middle East Studies and, 4, 329– 30,

part of Middle East, 335, 341. See also

377; Said’s book on, 21, 32, 48–49, 329,

Arab Spring uprisings; specific countries

387– 89, 420; spatial dimensions of, 155

Norwood, Janet, 225

Oriental studies departments, 1, 324

Notre Dame University: Mirza Family

Ortner, Sherry, 52

Professorship of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies, 329 Nur, Riza, 103

Ottoman Empire: American missionary presence, 376, 393; Armenian genocide and, 379– 80; collapse of, 88; Ibn KhaldŞn’s influence, 102; minorities

Obama, Barack, and administration: ideology of, 58; imperialist projects, 54– 56; military policies, 32 Obenzinger, Hilton, 389, 390 objectivist reductionism, 45, 46

in, 269, 270; sociological research, 99; sociology in, 86, 102– 3; spatial use in, 157, 158 “Ottoman Topologies” conference (Stanford University, 2014), 164

O’Connell, Mary Ellen, 225 Ohio State University: college of arts and sciences, 327; Islamic studies program, 325 oil in Middle East, 90; 1982 revenue

Pakistan, as part of Middle East, 335, 360 Palestine, Palestinians: 1948 war, 386; refugee problem, 424– 26. See also Israeli-Palestinian conflict

collapse, 138; American involvement

Palestine Liberation Organization, 400

and, 382– 84, 398– 99; dissertations on,

Pape, Robert: Dying to Win, 69n40

261; Iraq War and, 413–14; “stability”

Pappé, Ilan, 424; The Ethnic Cleansing of

notion and, 440–41

Palestine, 425

Olmsted, Jennifer Claire, 113, 143n4

Parmenter, Barbara, 174n5

Open Doors data, 192, 197– 98, 212, 213–16t

Parsons, Levi: “The Dereliction and

Ordeshook, Peter, 63n11

Restoration of the Jews,” 393

Oren, Ido, 36, 63n8

Parsons, Talcott, 52

Oren, Michael: Power, Faith, and Fantasy,

Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars

392– 94, 403n12 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 398 Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 6

Program, 231 Payne, Kenneth: “The Media as an Instrument of War,” 416–17 Pease, Donald: Cultures of United States Imperialism (with Kaplan), 390– 91

Index 481

Perestroika movement, 36

choice theory in, 12, 38– 39, 50, 53, 58,

Pfeifer, Karen, 13–14, 17, 261, 359, 436, 442

62– 63n7; real-life engagement and,

Philippines, the, 87– 88, 394

433– 34, 442–43

Pipes, Daniel, 357, 392, 420

Polk, William, 384, 385– 86

Political Geography, 173n1

postcolonialism: area studies orientation

political-ideological demands on Middle East Studies, 3, 7– 8, 9–10, 19– 22, 35, 423 political science: ambivalence to area

toward, 167; politics of, 47–48; studies of, 18, 23, 272, 376, 389 postcolonial Middle East: geographic

studies, 12, 254; American politics

studies of, 167; knowledge-power

studies, 12, 49– 51, 57, 58, 59– 60;

relationships in, 4, 54, 103, 265; space

behaviorism in, 36– 37, 45; complicity

and identity issues in, 155

in US war-making, 36, 56– 57, 59–

power, spatial relationships to, 155– 56, 157,

60; cultural essentialism and, 12,

159, 160, 169, 170

52– 53; current topics, 68– 69n39;

Prewitt, Kenneth, 363

demise of communist regimes and,

Princeton University: Department of

38– 39; democracy viewed in, 39, 52,

Oriental Languages and Literatures, 6;

57; development of discipline, 33– 34;

Middle East Studies, 95; Near Eastern

dissertations on Middle East topics,

Studies program, 198, 218n8, 324;

17–18, 253, 256– 60; epistemological

political science department, 65n15

assumptions questioned, 31– 33, 34– 38, 42–43, 44–46, 53– 54, 59– 60; failure to anticipate demise of Soviet Union, 43; fascism and, 63n8; game theory in, 38– 39, 42, 43, 50; imperialism and,

private donors, influence on institutions of higher education, 8, 94 privatization: dissertations on, 256; of knowledge, 20; neoliberalism and, 115, 142

32– 33; Islam and, 257– 58; language

Project Camelot, 13, 92– 93, 95, 101

study and, 240–41; liberal values

Project Troy, 13, 92, 94

in, 34– 37, 57– 58, 60; in Middle East

Proquest Dissertations Abstracts, 252

Studies, 11–12, 31– 71, 254; objectivist

Proquest Dissertations and Theses

reductionism, 45, 46; objectivity and,

Database, 321

34, 40–41, 48–49, 52, 65n19; political

Przeworski, Adam, 38

culture arguments, 52– 54, 66– 67n28,

public outreach demands of Middle East

67nn31– 32; political methodology as

scholars, 7, 20, 189– 90, 197, 211, 340, 353,

subfield, 42–43, 44; political theory in,

358, 367, 368, 448

65n15; psychoanalysis marginalized in,

public-private partnerships, 142

46; qualitative research, 39–45, 64n14, 64– 65n15; quantitative research, 37– 38,

al-Qaddafi, MuŞammar, 441

50, 64n14, 64– 65n15, 441–42; rational

al-Qazzaz, Ayad, 102

482 Index

radicalization of politics, 47–48

Ryan, Yasmine: “How One Country

Radwan, Samir, 141

Emerged from the Arab Spring with a

rational choice theory, 12, 38– 39, 50, 53, 58,

Democratic State,” 69n41

62– 63n7 Raymond, Andre, 161

el-Saaty, Hassan, 102

religion: neoliberalism’s effect on, 434;

Sachs, Jeffrey, 139

spatial relationships, 155, 159. See also

Safi, Omid, 333

Islamic studies

Sahlins, Marshall, 93

religious studies: conversion, 276;

Said, Edward: on connections between

democracy and, 434; dissertations on

empire and knowledge forms, 32, 58;

Middle East topics, 253, 269– 70, 276.

criticisms of, 10, 336, 357– 58, 392, 396,

See also Islamic studies

420; Culture and Imperialism, 403n5;

Research in Middle East Economics (1997– 2005), 124 Review of Middle East Economics and Finance (RMEEF), 119, 121, 128, 136 Riesco, Manuael, 141 right-wing critiques of universities’ purported liberal biases, 22, 418–21, 424

influence of, 389– 91; Orientalism, 21, 32, 48–49, 66n24, 329, 377, 383, 387– 89, 420; on Orientalism in post-1945 US, 386; The Question of Palestine, 387; secular humanist idea, 377, 389, 396 Saint-Simon, comte de, 83– 84, 86 Salaita, Steven, 371n24

Riker, William, 63n11

Salime, Zakia, 255

Robert College (Istanbul), 6, 378

Salman, Hanady, 417–18

Robertson, Roland, 204

Salman, Michael, 394

Robinson, Edward, 378; Biblical Researches

Sandel, Michael, 39

in Palestine, Mount Sinai, and Arabia Petraea, 402n3 Rockefeller, John D., 5 Rockefeller Foundation, 94 Rodrik, Dani, 140, 142

San Francisco State University: college of arts and sciences, 327 Saudi Arabia: American diplomatic relations with, 380; American oil interests in, 398

Rostow, W. W., 92

Schmitt, Carl, 62n7

Rowe, William, 174n5

scholarly societies, 5– 6

Roy, Sara, 420

Schueller, Malini, 389

Rueschemeyer, Dietrich: Comparative

Schumpeter, Joseph, 39

Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (with Mahoney), 64n14, 97

Schwedler, Jillian: Faith in Moderation, 68– 69n39

Russia/Eurasian area studies, 24n1, 231– 33

Scientific Mission in Tangiers, 89

Rustow, Dankwart A., 382

Scott, David, 39, 60– 61; “Norms of Self-

Rustow, W. W., 433

Determination,” 54

Index 483

Secor, Anna, 159 securitization of knowledge, 2, 9–10, 20, 357

Smith, David: Becoming Modern (with Inkeles), 91 Smith, Eli, 378

security studies, 105, 240–41

Smith, Kristin, 262

Segev, Tom, 424

Smith, Neil, 165

self-censorship, 19– 22, 355

Smithsonian Institution, 5

self-determination notion, 379– 80, 381– 82,

“social capital,” 43

395 Semitic Museum (Harvard University), 6 September 11 terrorist attacks: Arab

social revolution theory, 97 Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 2, 351; about the project, 10–11; area

language instruction after, 225–49, 358;

studies criticism, 98; generic titles

area studies after, 351– 72; authoritarian

used in project, 450, 451t; interviews

regimes and, 441; campus environment

and focus groups, 453t; position paper

after, 353–56; campus surveillance after,

(1946), 90; Producing Knowledge

19–20, 101, 355, 419–24; context for

on World Regions, 192– 93, 217, 231,

knowledge production after, 251, 352–

248n2, 320, 340–41, 344n1, 447; project

53, 375, 448; criticism of Middle East

methodology and data collection, 447–

Studies after, 19–20, 22, 32, 352, 364, 435;

54; report on internationalization and

cultural essentialist arguments after, 12,

interdisciplinarity, 168; support for

53, 57, 391– 95, 398, 413, 419–20; Islamic studies after, 320–21, 333, 341–42, 343–44;

Middle East research, 94 sociology: academic departments in the

political science departments after, 52;

US, 86– 87; area studies and, 13, 89–

sociological studies after, 84, 101

90, 94– 95, 97– 98, 254; beginnings in

Sexton, John, 196, 204

France, 83– 84; development in Middle

Shami, Seteney, 19– 20, 170– 71, 246–47,

East, 13, 85, 102– 5; difference between

435– 36, 444n4

European and American, 12–13, 83–

Shariati, Ali, 104

84, 86– 90; disciplinary debates, 83;

Sharkey, Heather: American Evangelicals

dissertations on Middle East topics,

in Egypt, 397

17–18, 99–100, 253, 254– 56; funding for,

Shepsle, Ken, 63n11

93– 94, 105– 6; imperialism and, 87– 88;

Shils, Edward, 90– 91

macrosociology, 84, 95– 98; in MENA

Shlaim, Avi, 424

region, 84– 85; Middle East Studies, 11,

Sigelman, Lee, 36– 37, 44, 50

12–13, 82–107, 105– 6; modernization

Skocpol, Theda, 97

theory, 52, 54, 68n34, 84, 90– 93, 95, 96,

Slyomovics, Susan, 158, 174n3

104; “national needs” and, 82; Project

Smith, Adam, 437– 38

Camelot, 92– 93, 95, 101; Project Troy,

Smith, Charles D., 403n12

92; representation in MESA, 100–101;

484 Index

social dynamics, 86; social statistics, 86,

Students for Academic Freedom, 420

87; world systems school, 97

Studies in Modernity and National

Soja, Edward, 153; Postmodern Geographies, 154 Solomon Amendment, 422– 23 South Asian studies, 360, 368 Southeast Asia: area studies, 90; US involvement in, 384– 85, 394 Soviet Union: Cold War competition with, 47, 90, 190, 203; demise of, 38– 39,

Identity, 164 Sudan, as understudied region, 272 surveillance and scrutiny of Middle East scholars, 7– 8, 9–10, 19– 20, 101, 355 Swearingen, Will, 174n5 Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and State Secretariat for Education and Research, 129, 134

43, 363, 433; economic transition after

Sykes, Mark, 89

demise, 138

Syria: civil war in, 53; military policies

Space of Democracy and the Democracy of Space Network, 169– 70 “spatial turn” in geography studies,

toward, 32; Obama administration views on, 56 Syrian Protestant College (Beirut), 6, 378

14– 15, 152– 74; conceptualization of, 152– 53; dialogue and exchange

Tamari, Salim, 96

opportunities, 170; disciplinarity and

tenure, erosion of, 8

institutionality, 163– 65; genesis of,

Thelen, Kathleen: Advances in

154; interdisciplinary nature of, 14–

Comparative-Historical Analysis (with

15, 152, 153, 164– 69, 170– 71; “Islamic

Mahoney), 64n14

City” and, 153, 160– 62; new research directions, 169– 71; research areas, 154– 56; research topics, 156– 60 specialist logic of academic internationalization, 15–16, 191, 202– 3, 204– 8, 210, 211–12

Thematic Conversation on CrossRegional Approaches to Middle East Studies, 338–40 think tanks, establishment of, 10 Third World scholars and ideas, 47–48, 383, 387, 400

Spilerman, Seymour, 99

Thomas, Lowell, 382

Squire, Lyn, 145n19

Thomson, William: The Land and the

Stanford University: political science department, 65n15 State University of New York,

Book, 378 Tibawi, A. L., 386– 87 Title VI funding and programs: 50th

Binghamton: spatially concerned

Anniversary Conference (2009), 448;

research on Middle East, 163

Arabic language instruction and, 235–

Stiglitz, Joseph, 139

36; declining support for, 363– 64, 366,

Stoler, Ann Laura, 403n16

367, 448; funding of Kevorkian Center,

Strauss, Leo, 36

197, 198, 218nn9–10; historically situated

Index 485

Title VI funding and programs

Turkey: American diplomatic relations

(continued)

with, 380; Ataturk’s pro-Western

nature of, 247; HR 3077 proposed

orientation, 382; identity formation

legislation, 22, 356– 57, 363, 371n17, 421–

in, 280n11; nationalist ideology, 103;

24; for language instruction, 16, 101,

publications on economic topics, 118–19,

226, 227–49; mismatch with geography

121, 122; sociological studies of, 88– 89;

departments, 165– 66; National

sociology in, 103– 5. See also Ottoman

Resource Center program, 340, 343;

Empire

passage of, 47, 93– 94; post-9/11, 101,

Tütengil, Cahit, 106n9

225– 26; potential of, 13; significance

Twain, Mark: Innocents Abroad, 378– 79,

and impact, 94– 95, 211; sociological research, 85, 100, 105 Tolleson-Rinehart, Sue, 259– 60

388 Tyler, Patrick, 394 Tyrell, Ian, 400

Tönnies, Ferdinand, 86 Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies, 119, 121, 128, 136

Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Languages Program, 227

Transcendentalist philosophy, 388

UNESCO, 96

transitions to democracy literature, 39, 43,

United Nations Development Programme

53, 256 transnational processes: in American historiography, 391; dissertations on, 18, 264, 270– 71; geographical studies, 169, 340; interdisciplinary study, 2, 278; international relations and, 399–400; Islamic studies and, 337–44, 361 travelogues. See missionary chronicles and travelogues

(UNDP), 115, 116, 129; Arab Human Development Report (2002), 139; Human Development Report, 138– 39; Millennium Development Project, 139 University of Arizona: Title VI program, 164 University of California, Berkeley: archaeological expeditions, 6; political science department, 65n15; spatially

Treasury, US Department of, 257, 444n1

concerned research on Middle East,

Troy project. See Project Troy

163; Title VI center, 100

Truman, David, 37

University of California, Los Angeles:

Truman, Harry S., 383– 84

Center for Near Eastern Studies, 325;

Tsing, Anna, 170– 71, 363

political science department, 65n15;

Tunisia: criticisms of neoliberalism, 139;

spatially concerned research on Middle

IFI interventions, 138, 142; publications on economic topics, 118; uprising in, 58, 115–16 Turam, Berna, 159

486 Index

East, 164 University of California, San Diego: political science department, 65n15 University of California, Santa Barbara:

King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies, 327, 329 University of Chicago: Avalon Foundation

urban studies, spatial dimensions of, 156– 58, 160– 62 US–Arab relations: American benevolence

Distinguished Service Professor of

notion and, 21, 376, 379– 80, 384,

Islamic Studies, 329; Middle East

394; “containment” policy, 382– 83;

Studies, 95; Near Eastern Studies

historiography of, 375–403; mutuality

department, 324; Oriental Institute,

of, 399–400; oil interests and, 382– 84;

6; political science department, 65n15; sociology department, 87 University of Denver: Institute for Islamic-Judaic Studies, 325

studies of, 20– 21 US Institute of Peace (USIP), 420 US military policies, 32, 376, 394 US national security agencies: CENIS

University of Maryland: Center for the

and, 92; language expertise and,

Advanced Study of Language, 357

240–41; language needs, 47, 230;

University of Michigan: Middle East

political science’s relationship with,

Studies department, 327; Near Eastern

36, 47, 56– 57; sociology’s relationship

Studies department, 324; political science

with, 92– 93, 106; War on Terror and,

department, 65n15; Title VI center, 100

101

University of North Carolina– Chapel

US Provisional Authority in Iraq, 60

Hill: as cross-regional Islamic studies center, 341–43; Ellen-Fairbanks D.

van Rossem, Ronan, 99

Bodman collection, 341; Title VI

Verba, Sidney, 42, 53; Designing Social

center, 343 University of North Carolina– Charlotte: religious studies department, 327 University of Pennsylvania: archaeological expeditions, 6; Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures, 6 University of Texas at Austin: Middle East Studies department, 327; spatially concerned research on Middle East, 163– 64; Title VI center, 100 University of Toledo: Imam Khattab

Inquiry (with King and Keohane), 34– 45, 52, 63– 64n12, 64n14 Vest, Jason, 420– 21 Viet Cong, 400 Vietnam War, 24– 25n2, 385, 432; academics’ distancing from, 94; “pacification” campaign, 36 Villanova University: Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, 325 Vitalis, Robert, 398, 399; When Capitalists Collide, 70n42

Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies, 329 University of Washington: Title VI center, 100 Unlocking the Employment Potential in the Middle East and North Africa (report), 140

Waldman, Marilyn Robinson, 330 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 163 Walt, Stephen: The Israel Lobby (with Mearsheimer), 69n40

Index 487

War on Terror, 7, 32, 84, 101, 197, 368, 415, 416, 448 Washington Consensus, 17, 115, 140, 257, 261, 434, 444n1 Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), 419

economics literature, 126; systematic data gathering, 134 World Development, 119 World Development Report on Poverty, 145n19 World Social Forum, 139

Washington Post, 230

world systems school, 96, 97, 155, 163

Weber, Max, 52, 86

World Trade Organization (WTO):

Wedeen, Lisa, 11–12, 17, 256, 279n7, 359, 433, 435 Weizman, Eyal, 56, 68n38 Wheatley, Paul, 162

Seattle protests, 139 Worldwide Universities Network Conference (Hong Kong, 2011), 448 Wright, Gwendolyn, 174n3

Wheaton College Institute for Muslim Studies, 325

Yacobi, Haim, 158

Wilkinson, Steven, 65n19

Yale, William, 382

Williams, William Appleman, 384, 386

Yale University: Department of Oriental

Williamson, John, 444n1

Languages and Literatures, 6; Near

William Tyndale College: Institute for

Eastern Studies department, 324;

Muslim Studies, 325 Wilson, Woodrow, 63n8; self-

political science department, 65n15 Yaqub, Salim, 398

determination viewpoint of, 379– 80;

Yemen, military policies toward, 32

support for Zionism, 381

Yiftachel, Oren, 158

Wokock, Ursula, 5

Young, Marilyn, 384

women’s history. See gender studies and

Young Turks, 103

women’s history Worden, Elizabeth Anderson, 16–17, 248n2, 436 World Bank Group: ERF and, 126, 128–

Zinn, Howard: Young People’s History, 426n1 Zionism, 379, 381– 82, 386, 387

29, 143n6; institutions constituting,

Zubaida, Sami, 96

144n13; neoliberal agenda, 115, 139–

Zuckerberg, Mark, 436

40, 257, 261, 444n1; publications of

Zwemer, Samuel, 378

488 Index