the greycat blog

Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El Haj is a piece of one-sided puffery in which Abu El Haj is depicted as a martyr to the dark forces that threaten scholarly freedom of inquiry and expression in the academy, and any notion that there might be serious criticisms of her work based on scholarship rather than politics or ideological bias is dismissed out of hand. The less than even-handed approach taken by Kramer to Abu El Haj’s work is made clear from the outset, in passages such as this, discussing the responses to Facts on the Ground:

The book was praised by colleagues who responded to the critical tropes that were Abu El-Haj’s legacy from scholars like Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, Bruno Latour, and Edward Said, and dismissed by colleagues with a theoretical or a political or simply a turf interest in dismissing it.

So those who liked the book were scholars engaged with the intellectual movement of which it was part; those who didn’t were acting from motives of bias or vested interest.

Perhaps the most striking and questionable aspect of the article, however, is its depiction of Abu El Haj as an innocent abroad, a high-minded scholar taken aback by the very idea that anyone could see her work as controversial in any way that goes beyond ‘an exchange of letters in the kind of scholarly journals no one outside the academy reads’. Kramer quotes Abu El Haj’s description of herself as ’not a public intellectual. I’m drawn to archives, to disciplines where the evidence sits for a while. I don’t court controversy’. Perhaps she is sincere in saying that: after all the view that Israel is a repressive illegitimate colonial state is hardly controversial within the academy. On the contrary, it’s Middle East Studies Groupthink 101. It’s when people outside her own inward-looking peer group start to challenge the things she says - pointing out, perhaps, that she certainly didn’t let ‘the evidence [sit] for a while’ in her sympathetic account of the violent destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Facts on the Ground - that she finds things uncomfortable. If you write books containing that kind of thing, and publish them, and have people buy them and read them, controversy will find you out. If you don’t like it, perhaps you are in the wrong line of work.

The account given by Kramer of how Nadia Abu El Haj came to be working on Israel is rather touching. If we are to believe what Kramer tells us, Abu El Haj was this close to devoting herself to the anthropological study of Palestine: ‘She wanted to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there’. But her dissertation adviser at Duke University changed the current of her studies by suggesting that she look at Israel instead: ‘you need to understand the institutions that have the power - the institutions of Israeli nationalism’. And that was that. This promising young scholar would henceforth devote herself to the study of Israeli national identity and Israeli institutions of power. What a radical choice to make. Picture the scene:

Dissertation Adviser: So, you want to analyze and critique the sources and nature of Palestinian nationalism and national identity?
Promising Young Scholar: Yes, that’s right. Palestine needs serious study. I want to figure out the place, the issues, the source of nationalism there.
Dissertation Adviser: Nah. Power’s the thing. Israel has the power. Study Israel.
Promising Young Scholar: Gosh, could I? That had never occurred to me. I bet hardly anyone ever critiques Israeli nationalism.
Dissertation Adviser (thinks): Booya! Another victory for intellectual diversity in the academy.

It’s hard to see what good Kramer’s article, with its patent biases, will do: it doesn’t inform, it doesn’t analyze, it doesn’t investigate, it doesn’t question. Written as it is in the dead-in-the-water prose that characterizes so much American big-title journalism, it doesn’t even entertain. It fails to engage with any of the serious criticisms of Nadia Abu El Haj’s work, and barely acknowledges their existence. It seeks to relate the Facts on the Ground controversy to the wider issue of the politicization of Middle East Studies, but does so in a way so skewed and blinkered that what it tries to say is rendered worthless; how seriously can you take someone who quotes Rashid Khalidi as an authority on academic ethics, and does so apparently with a straight face?

On the plus side, this being The New Yorker, there are some good cartoons in there.

Jane Kramer on Nadia Abu El Haj: further reading
‘The Petition’: link to the original article in PDF format
Phoebe Maltz: A balanced account
Orthodox Anarchist: The New Yorker takes aim at the Zionist thought police
Solomonia: The New Yorker dances to Nadia’s tune
The Bwog: Nadia Abu El-Haj speaks
Martin Kramer: Are Columbia’s Palestinians … Palestinian?

In case you weren’t aware of the background to yesterday’s news that a group of Muslim scientists and clerics want a global time based on Mecca to replace GMT, two invaluable videos available at YouTube present the cutting-edge Islamic science underlying the Mecca Time movement. They both feature Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid, a scientific luminary from the Egyptian National Research Centre.

The first video, ‘Science in Islam: Mecca is the centre of the world’, is from Al-Majd TV, Saudi Arabia, and dates from 16 January 2005. Highlights of this discussion include the claim that the Ka’ba emits short-wave radiation, that ‘this radiation is infinite’, and that this is why anyone living in Mecca or travelling there will live long, be healthier, and be ‘less affected by Earth’s gravity’. The existence of the ‘zero-magnetism zone’ halfway between the north and south poles ‘where the pull is equal from both sides’ is also considered: ‘the magnetic force has no effect there’.

The companion piece to this is ‘Science in Islam: Mecca Time must replace GMT’ from Mihwar TV, Egypt, recorded on 26 December 2006, in which Dr ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid expounds the benefits of Mecca Time. In Greenwich the magnetic field is 8.5 degrees, while in Mecca ‘the magnetic field is zero’. This means that when time is measured from Greenwich there is a discrepancy of 8.5 minutes ‘between the northern and southern hemispheres’. ‘Air traffic’, warns the doc darkly, ‘cannot be organized in this way’. There’s also a lot of fascinating information about blood, circulation, magnetic force, and why circling the Ka’ba will fill you with energy (clue: it’s all about going from right to left).

Such is the world of modern Islamic science, in which religious fundamentalism meets Time Cube. You infidels are educated stupid, not comprehend the zero-magnetism Mecca Time truth of Earth-centre infinite radiation wisdom.

Even the time must submit. ‘Muslim scientists and clerics’ want the world to adopt Mecca Time, reports the BBC:

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth. … The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca’s was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

Some geologist. (1) Magnetic north is constantly on the move. (2) The line of longitude upon which Mecca is situated also passes through, for example, the Russian cities of Yaroslavl, Voronezh and Rostov-on-Don, so presumably those places (along with others in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia, Kenya …) would have equal claim to whatever divinely-ordained distinction is claimed for Mecca. (3) There are also alignments of the earth’s magnetic field where magnetic north and true north are the same, but such lines are not equivalent to lines of longitude and anyway Mecca isn’t on one.

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

I find the notion of Royal Navy battleships circling the globe coercing people into setting their watches according to British diktat rather appealing, but it didn’t really work like that. GMT was adopted as a standard by consent, not imposed by force. Perhaps the distinction between the two is not well understood in Islam.

According to the Gulf Times’s report on this gathering of dunces, a man called Yasin a-Shouk has invented an Islamic watch that runs anti-clockwise. If the standard of scientific knowledge on display at this conference is any guide, the symbolism is appropriate: for Islam, intellectually at least, time does indeed run backwards.

[P.S. How long are pious Muslims going to permit this infidel organization to go on associating the name of the Holy City with commercialism, gambling, and garish decor?]

Further to my earlier post on Jane Kramer’s article in The New Yorker: still haven’t read it. Phoebe Maltz has, and says what she thinks here. An alternative view can be found at the Orthodox Anarchist (where there is also a link to another PDF of the full article).

There’s also an audio interview from KPFK (Los Angeles) in which Jon Wiener talks to the writer of the article, Jane Kramer. It can be accessed from this page - the direct link to the audio is here. The relevant portion of the programme starts at 21:00 and is about 15 minutes in length.

As it happens, I have just republished my own ‘Was Nadia Abu El Haj treated fairly?’, an article originally commissioned by History News Network and published by HNN on 12 November 2007, here on greycat.org. You can find the article here.

Back from hospital, back at the keyboard, and the first new post in a while is on an old topic: Nadia Abu El Haj. I’m very grateful to Richard Silverstein for alerting me to ‘The Petition: Israel, Palestine, and a Tenure Battle at Harvard’ by Jane Kramer, published in the current issue of The New Yorker. I haven’t read it yet, but when I do I may say something about it here (but only if I have something worth saying).

Here’s the link to a copy of the article (in PDF, at Scribd) which Richard Silverstein provides in the entry on his blog.

‘Why the West is best’ by Ibn Warraq, City Journal, winter 2008:

A culture that gave the world the novel; the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems, that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50 percent of their citizens illiterate.

(Found via Campus Watch.)

A terrorist suicide bombing attack today has killed one Israeli civilian and injured at least six more in the southern town of Dimona. One of the two terrorists was killed by police before he could detonate his bomb. This is the first such bombing in Israel for over a year, and the emphasis in the BBC’s headline is on how unusual such attacks are these days: ‘Rare suicide bombing hits Israel’. The implication is clear: these things are rare, nobody should worry too much about them. Presumably if there were to be such an attack in London tomorrow the headline would be ‘Rare suicide bombing hits London’.

[UPDATE: the headline has been changed to ‘Israeli killed in suicide bombing’. The earlier versions with the ‘rare suicide bombing’ reference are preserved by the News Sniffer.]

Elsewhere, the Associated Press, in a report oddly headlined ‘1 Killed by Israel Suicide Bomber’, reveals itself as unable to spell ‘Mediterranean’.

For good updated coverage of the terrorist attack at Dimona, including the Gaza connection, see this post at Israellycool.

Robert Fisk’s name has been taken in vain by the author and publishers of a biography of Saddam Hussein. His name is given as author on the cover of the Cairo-published book, which he never wrote. In an article in The Independent he describes his unsuccessful hunt for the real author.

The book is called Saddam Hussein: From Birth to Martyrdom and is a fawning biography of the late Iraqi leader. It seems that is full of factual errors and distortions, plays fast and loose with history, is virulently anti-Western, and is written in lousy prose.

No wonder everyone finds it easy to believe Fisk wrote it.

… but not by the international press, for whom this 360km² strip of land seems to hold more fascination than the rest of the Middle East put together. Everything that happens there is much worse than comparable things happening elsewhere: hunger, illness, poverty, overcrowding, unemployment, even darkness is much darker there. The BBC, naturally, has been in the forefront of keeping the world up to date with just how unspeakably ghastly everything is, serializing an aid worker’s Gaza diary (’Poverty is deepening here, as is stress and despair, especially among the most vulnerable, women and children’), reporting on power cuts (’At least 800,000 people are now in darkness’), and making it clear where the blame lies (’Israel closed Gaza’s borders last Thursday’).

However, it turns out that the place has a border with Egypt too, and the BBC has been forced to adjust its usual choice of Gaza map - which didn’t mention Egypt at all - to one which accords more closely with reality. This isn’t a problem, though, for in the looking-glass world of the BBC, Egypt sealing its border with Gaza forms part of Israel’s blockade:

At the time of Israel’s “disengagement” or withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, an international agreement launched new policing of the Rafah border.

Essentially, a combination of CCTV cameras providing live pictures to the Israeli authorities and a team of EU monitors at crossing points was intended to ensure proper control, and protection against the smuggling of guns and explosives which could be used to launch attacks against Israel from Gaza.

Those arrangements broke down progressively, partly after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza of January 2006, and totally after the final seizure of all power in Gaza by Hamas in 2007.

The EU teams withdrew. The border closed.

It has become part of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which Israel says is a necessary response to rocket attacks from Gaza which kill and injure Israeli citizens.

Meanwhile the stage-managing of Gaza’s blackouts, the careful planning of the ’spontaneous’ breaching of the border, Hamas’s fabrication of Gazan ‘food shortages’, and the fact that Israel at no time has left Gaza deprived of electricity, are among the aspects of the situation disregarded by the BBC in favour of propaganda like this:

The border was destroyed by Hamas militants after an Israeli blockade of Gaza led to a shortage of food, fuel and other vital supplies.

Israel said the blockade was aimed at preventing rocket attacks by Palestinian militants on its settlements near the border.

So it’s all down to the Israeli ‘blockade’. Surely never in history has a state withdrawn from a territory that its critics had spent years demanding it withdraw from, only to find that it is still, by those very same critics, held to be responsible for everything that goes on there. Israel is expected to provide food, fuel and power to the very people who are dedicated to its destruction, and is savaged by the international community when it reduces (never cuts off, only reduces) that support.

Meanwhile, whatever Gaza’s hardships, the local manufacture of rockets never seems to be interrupted, and those deadly missiles continue to rain down upon the towns (not ’settlements’ as the BBC would have it) of Israel. Presumably they are putting them together by candlelight.

For more on the media’s delusions of Gaza, Cinnamon Stillwell’s ‘Pallywood’s latest attractions’ is strongly recommended. Read Cinnamon’s post, and follow her links.

UPDATE 30 January 2008: Der Spiegel has published a grimly fascinating article on the Gaza rocket industry, ‘A visit to a Gaza rocket factory’, in which engaging Gazan rocket-builder ‘Abdul’ (a geography student by day) shows off his propellant-making skills to reporter Ulrike Putz. Some highlights of Abdul’s cheery chatter: ‘Fertilizer for the rocket fuel … we get it in Israel’; ‘The Israeli blockade doesn’t affect us; it’s just intended to plunge the people into misery’; ‘If we kill soldiers, then we are more than happy. If it hits a child, then naturally we are not happy’. Naturally. (Information about this article came via Solomonia’s post ‘Why should Israelis continue to support this?’ - why indeed? Acknowledgements and thanks.)

Orientalism: the East systematically misrepresented and exploited to suit the ideology and purposes of the West. Here’s a prime example, from the BBC: ‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’, by BBC Middle East correspondent Kate Clark. It comes from a long-established BBC Radio Four programme called ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ which sits somewhat outside the constraints of regular reporting. The programme, writes one distinguished BBC journalist, offers BBC reporters the chance to ’say things you cannot say anywhere else. You are freer to be yourself … to react, draw broad conclusions and even step over that barrier so many BBC correspondents set up and say what you really feel about what you are doing’.

‘Hospitality in a suspicious world’ begins with an account of Clark’s conversation with a taxi driver in Kurdish Iraq. He told her his woes: ‘”Rent,” he said, “had gone up five-fold and petrol prices 20-fold since 2003″‘. No mention of what else might have changed for him as a Kurd in Iraq since 2003, but taxi drivers aren’t known for accentuating the positive. Anyway, moved by what he told her, Clark apparently ‘paid him a bit extra’. His reaction? ‘He called me back to argue over the money because he thought I had paid him too much’. This, we are led to conclude, is a noble soul. Mired in economic hardship that is the West’s fault (everything is much worse ’since 2003′, don’t forget) he nonetheless refuses to take more than his fair share of Ms Clark’s UK-taxpayer-funded expenses account. And, the report makes clear, this is not unusual: the Middle East is full of this kind of selfless generosity.

‘Why do you go to such dangerous places?’ people often ask me. They mean dangerous, Muslim countries. I usually report from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East.

‘Do you have to wear a headscarf?’ I’m asked.

‘Do you ever feel threatened as a woman?’

It is difficult to explain that the sort of generosity and open-heartedness shown by the Kurdish taxi driver is very compelling and very normal across the Islamic world. It is generally a good place to be a guest.

Ms Clark does indeed appear wearing a headscarf in a picture illustrating the article, and later admits to feeling nervous ‘just walking down the street in Kabul’. But that isn’t allowed to distract from her central point: the people of the Middle East (the people of the Muslim Middle East) are generous, hospitable, welcoming, noble, and if they aren’t, it’s our fault.

But it has become more complicated.

Bin Laden’s war and the US-UK military response, and the polarisation between the Western and Islamic worlds mean such ordinary human encounters have become more difficult.

Western journalists are now targets for some Muslims in some Muslim countries. And it does not matter what we actually do or believe, we may be considered enemies.

Before 2001 in Afghanistan ’there was very little anti-Western sentiment, not even from the Taleban’ whereas now ‘many Afghans, including some friends, speak darkly of Western conspiracies to oppress the Umma, the global Muslim community’. You see, it’s not just extremists who express anti-Western sentiment. Even friends of BBC journalists feel that way. But only since 2001, when we suddenly started being horrible to them.

Afghanistan, says Clark, is ‘a place where strangers offer you tea and a bed for the night, where proverbially, people say that, when faced with guests, what is important is not how big your house is, but how big your heart is’. The Taleban weren’t very hospitable: they threw Clark out in March 2001 because her reporting ‘was not based in reality and conflicted with the Taliban way of thinking’. In a report on her expulsion published in The Daily Mirror on 20 March 2001 Clark described a Taliban hitting her in the shoulder with the butt of his Kalashnikov:

‘He assumed that I was an Afghan woman who shouldn’t be where I was with my face uncovered. I yelled back at him, “How dare you? I’m from the BBC.” As soon as he realised who I was he was very apologetic - he kept smiling and saying sorry’.

Had she been an Afghan woman he would not have stopped at one blow, and smiles and apologies would, one imagines, have been in short supply. That particular Afghan’s heart was clearly not big enough to accommodate hospitable feelings for the women of his own country, only for foreign women working for news organizations.

Clark then moves on to her experiences in East Jerusalem and the West Bank during ‘the first Palestinian intifada’ which, she helpfully reminds us with the impartiality for with the BBC is famous, was ‘the uprising against Israeli military occupation’. She recounts an occasion when, in a Gaza refugee camp, ‘an adult carefully explain[ed] to a small child who had picked up a stone to throw at me, that this would be shameful - I was a guest’. If she’d been an Israeli - man, woman or child, soldier or civilian - stoning would have been fine and honourable. But no - Kate Clark was a guest, and a guest of a particularly useful kind, so to stone her would have been ’shameful’. Just as in Afghanistan, those hospitable hearts are not quite big enough.

Yet the Palestinians were wonderful, apparently: not a gun or a rocket, not a bomb or a riot to be seen. They bought her cans of cola, even though they couldn’t afford to. They were hospitable, generous, and, Clark tells us with a flourish of self-hating post-imperial guilt worthy of Robert Fisk himself, they graciously forgave her for being British and therefore, along with every other Westerner, responsible for their current plight:

Palestinians were generous despite their bleak, constrained lives. Lives which, they were usually too polite to point out, my country was historically, partly responsible for.

Yes, once again, it’s all our fault. Their ‘bleak and constrained lives’ are our fault - not their fault, for consistently rejecting peace and resorting to violence and terror, not the fault of their fellow Arabs, for doing nothing to ease their plight and exploiting them for their own political ends, not the fault of their corrupt, incompetent and thuggish leaders. Our fault. Politely, they refrain from blaming us, however, and we should be grateful to them for their civilized restraint.

‘You want to find out what is going on’, as a journalist, says Clark.’ And you particularly want to hear from the marginalised and powerless’. It’s strange that the marginalised and powerless so often occupy the centre of the stage for the Western media and dictate the script from which its representatives read.

Clark ends by telling us that visiting Iraqi Kurdistan was a ‘treat’. ‘It is Iraq and it is safe’, she declares. And that is thanks to who exactly? She doesn’t say. She then returns to her taxi driver:

When I eventually managed to pay the Kurdish taxi driver his extra fare, I thought, ‘this wouldn’t happen in London’.

But actually it does sometimes.

If the driver is Afghan or Pakistani or Iraqi and we chat about his home country, I do quite often end up trying to drive the fare up, while he endeavours to drive it down.

This glibly patronizing little tale is very hard to believe. For a start taxi fares in London are rigidly regulated - there’s no scope for haggling. And what if they’ve chatted about the driver’s home country and disagreed? If he’s a secularist Afghan, or a Pakistani Christian, for example (to name two truly ‘marginalised and powerless’ groups)? Does the same apply? But that wouldn’t happen, because we’re not dealing here with real people with diverse views: we are dealing with an orientalist stereotype, devised to flatter the self-lacerating sensibilities of a guilt-ridden, self-hating West.

Edward Said could never have predicted the intellectual back-flip that ‘orientalism’ has performed. Conceptualized by him as an ideology through which the West oppresses the East, it has become a means through which the West can oppress itself. Yet it still draws upon the same roots of caricature and stereotype: not least, a sentimentalized and romanticized view of the Middle East as a place inhabited by modern versions of the noble savage, who shame the decadent West with their generosity of spirit and their innate sense of hospitality. Meet the new orientalism, even more misleading and dangerous than the old sort.