The Middle East is baffling. It is not easy for Americans to understand it (and I include myself). Consider America's academic experts who command the heights of Middle Eastern Studies departments. For almost 20 years they have warned us that the regimes of the Middle East are ready to collapse. We read that Islamism is bound to take one country after another. Academic experts at university campuses have warned of instability in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But the regimes in question have been remarkably stable. They have not collapsed.
Why does the Middle East leave our expectations so baffled?
Martin Kramer, editor of the "Middle East Quarterly" and past director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University has offered an explanation. His book is titled Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Kramer presents an eye-opening history of Middle East scholarship that traces the sad course of American scholarship. If you want to get the Middle East right, don't turn to academe. You are better off with a well-traveled journalist or a professor who has left the university to join an independent think tank.
It isn't that Middle Eastern studies in the U.S. have made a few bad calls. The whole field is a bad call. The president of MESA (Middle East Studies Association), Rashid Khalidi once bemoaned the fact that "we who actually know something about the Middle East, and have been there, and know the languages, are largely ignored, while ill-informed sensationalists like Steven Emerson and Robert D. Kaplan hog the headlines and grace the podiums of think-tanks and lecture halls." But the truth is, Emerson and Kaplan got the Islamic terror threat right. America's tenured professors got it wrong. Far from being a sensationalist, Steven Emerson's American Jihad accurately described the problem of radical Islamic activism in North America while CBS's Dan Rather, working from the notes of academic experts, accused Emerson of misleading the public.
According to Kramer, U.S. academics have served as apologists for the PLO; they have depicted radical Islam as a force for democracy and positive change; they have argued that the Islamist threat has been exaggerated by Western leaders in search of a "new enemy" to replace the fallen Soviet Union; they have predicted economic collapse in Israel and popular upheaval in Arab states - predictions that have fallen flat again and again. "Why had the new fief holders of Middle Eastern studies gotten it so utterly wrong?" asks Kramer. The answer: "Their analyses were politically driven."
Campus radicalism does not end with denouncing capitalism and American imperialism. The neo-Marxist tendencies of academics lead them to sympathize with anti-American personalities and movements. In terms of Middle East studies, we find an attitude that is uncritically pro-Arab, sometimes pro-Islamist, stridently pro-Palestinian, and rarely (if ever) pro-American.
Perhaps the most interesting error of our latter-day schoolmen has to do with their assumptions about the stability of Arab regimes. There has been a belief, perhaps grounded in wishful thinking, that non-democratic regimes are unpopular and therefore subject to sudden, violent overthrow. This belief has been applied to scholarly analysis of the regimes in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. But if we consult history we find that despotic governments have been known to last hundreds of years. We also find that Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have survived for many decades.
Even outside the academic community the claim of Arab instability is common. Anti-Saudi writers like Said K. Aburish or intelligence experts like Robert Baer warn of imminent Saudi collapse. But no collapse has occurred. Could it be that Arab regimes are more durable than we have been led to believe?
The Middle East is not a simple, straightforward place. Recently I met an Arab Christian from Egypt who reminded me that Christian Arabs are a significant minority in the Arab world. Yet how often is this minority mentioned in news reports or academic papers? My Egyptian acquaintance said that 25 percent of his countrymen are Christian. I am told that Christians are discriminated against in Egypt. They are not encouraged or readily promoted in government service or the army. Yet Christians form the backbone of the country's private sector. Could this be true in other Arab countries as well? My reference books say nothing on this topic. I should ask: Where are the books that tell about the lives of Arab Christians? It seems that our academic discourse on the Middle East, like our journalistic discourse, is missing pieces to the puzzle. In common discourse the Arabs are described as Muslims, the West is described as Christian - but things are not so simple.
As the United States has been drawn into the Middle East, as the Bush administration attempts to build democracy in Iraq, American ignorance of the region must be confronted. If Kramer's depiction of our academic experts is correct, then we haven't any special resources to fall back on at home. In terms of America's intelligence experts, former CIA officer and Middle East specialist Robert Baer recently lamented the ignorance of U.S. authorities in his book, Sleeping With the Devil. Satellite intelligence is fine up to a point, noted Baer, but what can this tell us when we lack human sources on the ground? The intricacies of Saudi court intrigues, the security mechanisms of Egypt and Syria, the double dealings of Iran, the inner world of the Muslim Brotherhood are poorly understood in Washington because satellites cannot deliver the on-the-ground understanding that human agents can deliver. If, in addition to this, our academic specialists have lost their way, how can rational policy be formulated?
As Martin Kramer explained in his book, "Were Middle Eastern studies an academic hobby, it would be possible to sit back and watch ... with bemusement. But Middle Eastern studies are not a hobby...." We need real knowledge because we face real problems and difficult choices. The West depends on a steady flow of oil from the Middle East. But can we maintain that flow without a parallel flow of vital information and solid analysis?
