Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Policy Paper)

By Martin S. Kramer

Unquestionably, this is one of the most important books about understanding the Middle East written during the last half-century.Jerusalem Post This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0944029493
• ISBN13: 9780944029497
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: Washington Institute for Near East Policy
• Length: 137 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.0" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

The truth is a hard pill to swallow.

A much needed declaration on the failures of Middle East scholarship. Academia has continued on its liberal path to build a Middle East paradigm rooted in hegemony and keeping up with the most modern intellectual jargin while ignoring the real situation in the Middle East. If the professors of Middle East Studies and MESA were more competant their opinions would be heralded througout America. However, MESA and academia aim at subverting those that do not buy into the dominant paradigm that America is imperalistic. Kramer dismantles this innaccurate paradigm in an accurate and revolutionary way.Middle East Academia on college campuses has become a uniform mass saying in unison that imperialistic America's foreign policy has created this "Oriental" attitude that patronizes the Middle East. The academics reply they are simply telling the truth. I have yet to see a Middle East country not accept American aid. Middle East scholars have missed the reality boat on the Middle East. Where is the scholarship on Middle East terrorism? Fundamentalist Islam? Kramer is brutal, but honest in this assault and anyone thinking about Middle East Studies as an academic discipline must read this first!

The Truth is More Entertaining Than Fiction

The topic, at first glance, is very narrow. This is not a book about how to study the Middle East, nor about American academia, but about the intersection of these: how the Arab Middle East in fact is and has been studied in American universities. Once this narrow focus is understood and accepted by the reader, there is a fascinating read here. Kramer is very knowledgeable about the inner workings of "Middle Eastern Studies," and more particularly about the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). The story he has to tell is actually more entertaining than most of the novels with academic settings, and the humor more mordant, because it is all true, alas. The second chapter about Edward Said is worth the price of the book. Of course the Marxists and other Israel-bashers won't like this book -- it tells us too much about them. That said, there are regretful lacunae in Kramer's book. It would seem that "area studies," of which the Middle Eastern is but one, can lend themselves to superficiality perhaps more than the traditional disciplines of history, language study, sociology, religious studies, etc. Kramer is a bit evasive on this. And Kramer is also a tad too fond of social science jargon. "Paradigm," a word introduced with the present meaning by Thomas Kuhn back in 1962, appears on practically every page of Kramer's book. Kuhn himself, in the second edition of his book, in 1970, found himself obliged to clarify his meaning. But these are minor quibbles. I learned a great deal from this book, especially about the pretensions of (some of) America's academics. Five stars here, well earned.

Debunking prescription and prophecy

Martin Kramer's monograph had its genesis before September 11, but its opportune arrival directly raises the question of how 2,600 specialist academics from 125 American universities and colleges had practically nothing to say - except after September 11 - about Bin Laden?Kramer's monograph answers this question by placing it in the context of the ideological transformation of Middle Eastern studies since the Second World War. As Kramer shows, the field was originally an antiquarian and linguistic guild that after the Second World War became highly politicized, dominated by sociologists and political scientists, and by 1966, embodied in the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).Kramer demonstrates that Middle Eastern studies has been characterized by political advocacy of Arab nationalism that specialists view as a beneficent force in a Middle East which they hold to be a region of burgeoning modernization.Kramer's does not encompass a detailed aetiology of these ideas (which can be traced in large part to the Englishmen Arnold Toynbee and Sir Hamilton Gibb) but explains well the effects of these notions. Kramer indicates how the discipline suffered a crisis of confidence in the late 1970s, which spawned the "triumph" of Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism (1978). Said's work, as Kramer shows, was a pungent critique of Western scholarship, producing a new discipline called post-colonialism, which regarded all previous Western scholarship as a tool of Western dominance which deprived Middle Eastern societies of their own narrative, fostered racist assumptions and stimulated discriminatory practices. This new orthodoxy now accused "Zionists" like Bernard Lewis, and even Arab nationalist champion Gibb himself, of committing this alleged heresy.But as Kramer ably shows, the new orthodoxy has not stood the test of time, with MESA failing to accurately predict Middle Eastern developments. The progressive forces expected to overthrow oppressive American Cold War arrangements, as Kramer shows, never materialised. Instead we got the decidedly non-secular, revivalist Islam offered to Muslims with Iran's fall to Khomeini in 1979.Few MESA members, Kramer also notes, had anything useful to say about Saddam Hussein, who invaded and annexed Kuwait before MESA was inspired to consider his brand of Ba'athist Arab nationalism malevolent. These specialists, Kramer also shows, forecast disaster for what was instead a decisive US intervention in Kuwait that reaffirmed American prestige.In answer to his critics, Kramer would concede that even the finest specialist cannot necessarily predict the choices of men. But he sees in Middle East specialists a more pervasive deficiency. For world wide, they mysteriously viewed Saddam as capable and likely to carry the enthusiasm of the Arab world when, given the opportunity of Desert Storm, his army deserted in droves and his subject peoples rebelled. Kramer also indicates that the series of American polic

Truth in Academia

An important and extensively documented expose of the inadequate scholarship and extreme political bias of Edward Said, John Esposito, et al. Notice that most of the reviews posted here are not asessments of the book itself, but mere expressions of the political opinions of the reviewers. If you have questions about the debate over Israel and the Arabs, about why they hate us, about Islam, or about Edward Said and Orientalism, read this book. It will explain to you who is writing what and with what sort of goal in mind. Then you can decide for yourself.

The Best Book on Middle East Studies

This is the book that many Middle East "experts" don't want you to read precisely because its arguments are so completely accurate and devastatingly true. Kramer has been vilified because his arguments cannot be challenged. This well-documented and finely written study is the best history of Middle East studies ever written. It explains why America has been psychologically unprepared and misinformed in approaching every major crisis in that region down to the present one.