Neocon Orientalists

Berman accuses liberals of being too naïve to see ‘Islamic terror’ for what it was: a species of an irrational reaction to liberalism which originates in the same impulse as totalitarianism in both its Bolshevik and fascist manifestations. The common impulse is a perception of an apocalyptic threat to the purity of the community, emanating both from foreign enemies and their accomplices at home. It is an ‘infection’ that ‘will require bloody internal struggles, capped by gigantic massacres’ in order to root it out. Movements generated by this impulse are by their very nature irrational, and the error of liberals is to believe that one could reason with them. However, truth is that only an all-out war with no quarters given, coupled with an equally merciless ideological struggle, could eliminate this threat.

In doing his bit for this ‘ideological jihad’, Berman follows Lewis’s example by enumerating possible grievances Muslims may have against America, Israel or former colonial powers, before dismissing them as an explanation for Muslim hostility. He admits that these are many, but argues that Palestinian hostility to Israel had nothing to do with dispossession and brutal repression. Similarly, anger against America has nothing to do with supporting Israeli injustices and all sorts of tyrannies, or with causing the death of millions of Iraqis. For even if Israel and America stopped robbing Palestinians and attacking Arabs, they would still be hated, because they were ‘liberal’ countries. So they might just as well get on with it.

The bad news, Berman argues, is that this irrationality is not restricted to a small faction of extremists, but is harboured by broad currents of Islamists and nationalists. In a sense, every Muslim or Arab is a potential Islamist or Baathist, and any of those is a potential terrorists. So we must prepare for an endless war against this implacable enemy. 

In this and later works (including his diatribe against Tariq Ramadan in The Flight of the Intellectuals), Berman goes into meticulous detail as he maps the links between fascism and Islamism. Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was friends with the Mufti of Palestine, who in turn had met Hitler; Qutb read authors with fascist sympathies; and so and so on. But after reading enough of Berman and the host of authors who converged onto this route, one gets the rather uncomfortable feeling that the boot may be on the other foot. These attacks on ‘naïve liberals’? This desperate unearthing of secret links and conspiracy circles? These ‘apocalyptic’ warnings about ‘apocalyptic’ happenings? They sound troublingly familiar. The circle was closed when, in July 2011, a Norwegian right wing fanatic cited the writings of many such a ‘liberal’ intellectual in his manifesto before going on his killing spree against ‘naïve’ Norwegian liberals who did not appear to sufficiently appreciate the gravity of the threat of Islam.

Return of Orientalism

The 9/11 terror attacks offered pretexts for many dubious deeds, from exhortations to ‘bury bad news’, to invading countries to recycling discredited literature and claims. Among the intellectuals, and in a context where attempts at an explanation were seen at worst as unpatriotic, and at best as naïve and misguided, the battle inevitably shifted to the level of theory and meta-theory: a struggle over which explanatory framework was more viable. And since Islam was a key term in this discourse, this in turn revived the old debate over Orientalism, that beleaguered discipline/ideological formation which represented the prism through which the West viewed the Muslim world for centuries. In a revealing coincidence, the terror attacks gave a boost to a determined and aggressive campaign by neo-conservative intellectuals seeking to revive the fortunes of Orientalism in tandem with the overall right wing shift in American politics.

Orientalism had earlier fallen victim to a constellation of developments that included a paradigm shift in social theory, the emergence of cultural criticism, a progressive radicalization of academia, an increased sensitivity to other cultures, more compassion for oppressed or disadvantaged groups (known popularly as ‘political correctness’), and the retreat of the conservative, ethnocentric perspectives which characterized earlier periods of modern western scholarship dealing with other cultures. As a result, the discipline/formation suffered a serious blow to its status and credibility following a series of critiques, not least by Ziauddin Sardar, from inside and outside Western academic circles.

However, Orientalism experienced what looked like a revival in response to the phenomena of ‘Islamic resurgence’ in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and continued to fend off its numerous critics, influence scholarship and even gain new adherents, including some  like of V S Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, dubbed as ‘Orientalized Orientals’ by Sardar.

In the meantime, a new related phenomenon emerged in the US, the so-called neo-conservative trend, with its paranoia, enmities, and conspiratorial grand plans. The two trends started first working separately on launching an ‘intellectual offensive’ against the ‘enemy within’: academia. In 1995 an organisation called the National Alumni Forum was set up by Lynne Cheney (wife of the then Vice-President) and (former Democratic vice-Presidential hopeful) Senator Joseph Lieberman. Later re-named the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), the Washington DC-based group claimed to be ‘dedicated to countering political correctness and keeping its eye on campus radicals’. Late in 2001, it issued a report entitled Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America, and What Can Be Done About it, which accused American academic institutions in general (and not just Middle Eastern Studies) of being the ‘weak link’ in America’s response to foreign threats, and of living in isolation from the public at large. ‘We learn from history’, the report affirmed,‘that when a nation's intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries’. 

In the same year, Daniel Pipes, another neo-conservative figure with links to the Middle East,  co-authored an article in which American Middle Eastern Studies were accused of succumbing to a ‘pronounced leftist bias and the proclivity toward apologetics for enemies of the United States’. In addition to these faults which the discipline ‘shares with other area-studies’, Middle Eastern scholarship displayed a ‘tendency to overemphasize the Arab-Israeli conflict, to engage in severe factional infighting’, and to adopt a jargon-ridden discourse. The field was also ‘dominated’ by scholars of Middle Eastern origin who tended to identify more with the countries they studied than with America. In general, the argument went, the field had become a preserve for ‘unpatriotic’ scholars  bent on blaming America for every ill under the sun, and acting as apologists for Islamism and other anti-American trends. 

‘The Treason of Academia’

The events of September 11 provided the diehard adherents of both trends, now firm allies, with a golden opportunity to launch a long-awaited Orientalist comeback. The determined fight back was spearheaded by figures such as Martin Kramer, former director of the Moshe Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv University, and his close associate, Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, a right wing think tank. They were helped in this by a host of neo-conservative figures, including Fouad Ajami of John Hopkins University, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute, and Bernard Lewis, the reputed ‘doyen’ of Orientalists who managed, at the age of 85, to produce a best-selling book immediately following the September 11 terror attacks. The determined intellectual onslaught was accompanied by various forms of public activism, including appeals to Congress, media campaigns and the formation in 2002 of a watch-dog named Campus Watch to name and shame ‘delinquent’ academics. It was also wholeheartedly embraced by top officials in the Bush administration, putting the Middle Eastern Studies establishment on the defensive.

Kramer blames the decline of Orientalism squarely on the influence of the late Edward Said (1935-2003), who was Columbia University’s Professor of Comparative Literature, and especially on his famous book Orientalism (1978). ‘For most academic commentators on things Islamic’, Kramer writes in The Islamism Debate, ‘1978 is a watershed –not because a stern Shiite cleric inspired a revolution, but because a stern Columbia literature professor published a book. Edward Said’s Orientalism persuaded them that their only legitimate role was to apologize and sympathize’. 

Said’s work, however, was preceded by earlier interventions, including some from within the ‘Orientalist’ tradition itself, most notably Marshall Hodgson, but mainly the input of an increasing number of scholars from within the Arab and Islamic traditions.  Its impact was enhanced by its appeal to critical audiences in the period between the end of the Vietnam War (and the concurrent democratic revolutions in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Southern Africa) in the mid-1970’s and the eruption of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua at the end of the decade. It was thus significant that the fight-back to rehabilitate Orientalism coincided with the ascendancy of the New Right in the Thatcherite-Reaganite era and the subsequent collapse of the Eastern Bloc. 

The counterattack built on earlier critiques from authors like Bernard Lewis, Ernest Gellner and even Maxime Rodinson (who was lavishly praised in Said’s book). However, these critiques and the insistent subsequent tirades did not dent the influence of Said’s seminal text, which maintained the status, to the consternation of these numerous critics, as Joshua Teitelbaum and Meir Litvak put it, of ‘a nearly sacred doctrine in the American academy’. In attempting to exploit the September 11 attacks, the critics added to the long list of sins ascribed to Middle Eastern scholars the charge of having failed to predict 9/11. This charge was made in Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. Like Lewis’ book (which was a collection of lectures delivered a couple of years back), Kramer’s book had also been long in preparation and providentially released just after the 9/11 attacks. It thus made a powerful case by trying to link the alleged theoretical shortcomings of the discipline to its failure to be of use to American foreign policy makers. An energetic media campaign brought the book to the attention of academics and policy makers alike. When Campus Watch was launched by Daniel Pipes in 2002, and Congress took steps to implement its recommendations shortly after that, academics had additional reasons to sit up and listen to this voice coming from beyond the tower walls.

While the political message regarding the unpatriotic bent of scholars was powerfully driven home, the intellectual one was not so easy to discern. As one perceptive reviewer  noted, it was difficult at first sight to gather what Kramer wanted to say, as his work was riddled with ‘major inconsistencies’: ‘he accurately criticizes those who study Middle Eastern politics for their marginalization within the social sciences, then unfairly chastises them for adopting disciplinary paradigms remote from their regional subject matter. He finds those who refuse to speak to the immediate concerns of U.S. foreign policy dangerously disengaged but questions the motives of policy-relevant researchers with whom he disagrees. He scorns the current structure of academic Middle Eastern studies -- multidisciplinary institutes outside regular academic departments -- yet suggests no alternative. And his sweeping charges often ignore work in the field dealing with precisely the issues he contends are misunderstood or ignored’. 

There are also additional inconsistencies not noted in the above review. For example, Kramer alleges that the over-theorized discipline ignores reality and is, for this reason, scorned by policy makers, who tend to rely more on the better funded and more healthily staffed think tanks outside campuses for policy relevant research. However, he also claims that policy makers have been misled by these ‘irrelevant’ scholars!

Kramer was also criticized by Zachary Lockman for blaming Edward Said ‘for everything that he believes has gone wrong with Middle East studies from the late 1970s onward’ and, in the process, ‘ignoring both the extensive critiques of modernization theory and Orientalism that preceded the publication of that book and the complex and often critical ways in which Said’s intervention was received and developed’. 

However, in an interesting way, Kramer appears to vindicate Said in his very attempt to undermine him. While Said accused Orientalism of being the handmaiden of imperialism, his main purpose was to direct attention to what he regarded as the subtle and complex interaction between knowledge and power in terms of blind spots, insidious ethnocentric prejudices and unquestioned presuppositions and paradigms. The field, he argued, rested on the artificial construction of rival and mutually exclusive identities for the purpose of exclusion and domination, and was inextricably connected to, and reproduced by, existing power structures of domination which in turn it helped to reproduce. Kramer, by contrast, sees Middle Eastern studies as an arena subject to the crude influences of funding bodies, personal academic ambition or factional affiliations. More interestingly, Kramer calls for more of the same: he wants academia to be harnessed directly to the dictates of policy and to remain at the beck and call of government in a way that even Said did not dare to accuse Orientalists of being. 

Ironically, the neo-Orientalist counterattack thus becomes a parody of the original sin. Instead of the Foucauldian ‘discursive police’ being deployed together with disciplinary regimentation to maintain and reinforce relations of domination, the actual uniformed police was being summoned to do the disciplining (as in the famous 1989 article in Commentary which dubbed Said “Professor of Terror”), while appeals were made to Congress to ‘discipline’ the disciplines. It is as if those who lost the match on the playing field decided to draw out their guns to even the scores.

An Intellectual Challenge

At this point an intriguing question poses itself: why do the neoconservatives appear so fixated with achieving dominance over an academic world which they constantly disparage as irrelevant and lacking in influence? One answer could be that the neoconservatives view the world of academia as a dangerous bastion of hostile ‘liberal’ forces in the same way British Conservatives under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher regarded the trade unions as a major threat that needed to be neutralised. The tactics advocated against academia (the mobilization of hostile media and public opinion, the resort to legislation, the creation of watchdog organizations to monitor them and the setting up rival think tanks) do indeed mirror the Thatcherite strategy of using a combination of legislation and political, economic and propaganda tactics to break the unions.

The neoconservatives themselves make the argument that this activism is dictated by the concern that the nation’s intellectuals must be enlisted in the defence of a threatened civilization. In this case, as with contest over the media, there are echoes of the old church-state battle. The intellectuals (and the media) are seen as the new priesthood, and those in power cannot afford to have them singing a different tune from the pulpit to the one being sung from the throne. 

There is, additionally, the inherent attractiveness of a great intellectual debate. Professional intellectuals, as Joshua Micah Marshall argues, crave the Chinese curse of living in interesting times: ‘Like doctors who want to treat the most challenging patients or cops who want to take down the worst criminals, it's only natural for people who think seriously about political and moral issues to seek out the most challenging and morally vexing questions to ponder and confront’. That is why intellectuals dread as a nightmare the ‘end of history’ vision of a bland and uninteresting post-communist era of eternal bourgeois rule ‘in which there would be no more great debates or challenges, but rather a bourgeois millennium of endlessly growing investment funds, a brave new world of consumer appliances’. (In the current economic climate, one might be inclined to add the remark: you wish!)

It was David Satloff, a leading neoconservative figure and one of the key protagonists in this contest, who, in a talk delivered at the Moshe Dayan Centre in 1996 (and later published in a book edited by Kramer), hailed the ‘Islamism debate’ as ‘one of the few remaining intellectual debates in US foreign policy’. This debate (which Satloff sums up in the question ‘how did we lose Iran’?) was seen as at once providing a fascinating intellectual challenge and carrying great risks for senior bureaucrats, where providing the wrong answers could destroy careers. And while US policy towards Islamism has, in Satloff’s view, evolved positively (towards successful containment) it has done so ‘despite an analytical framework that is flawed, overly simplistic and at times curiously counterproductive’.

In the same volume, Kramer takes up the issue of this ‘flawed analytical framework’ in a rehearsal of his Ivory Towers on Sand arguments, railing against what he describes as the ‘dominant paradigm’ in academic thinking about Islamism. This paradigm, Kramer argues, insisted on viewing Islamism as ‘the functional equivalent of democratic reform movements’ in other parts of the world. If the Islamic movements do not look to us very democratic, that is only ‘a consequence of our own age-old bias against Islam’. This paradigm, Kramer concludes, has failed. ‘It has mistaken virulent forms of hyper-nationalism for social and political reformism. It has misleadingly classified Islamist movements into “moderate” and “extreme” categories that do not exist. It has made hopelessly naïve assumptions about the effect of power on Islamist behaviour. And it postulated the inevitable triumph of a movement which is now in the throes of a crisis’.

Why, then, Kramer asks, is this paradigm still standing in spite of its composite failures? And the answer is, again, the influence of Edward Said, who had made apologetics fashionable: ‘Today it is difficult to find a scholarly discourse that is more self-conscious than the scholarly discourse on political Islam. Indeed many practitioners have only one eye on the movements they purport to study. The other eye is fixed squarely on disciplinary dogma, which holds that any feverish act done in the name of Islam should be shown respectful deference, repentance for historic wrongs done by the West against Muslims. This has been a major obstacle not only to understanding, but to open debate itself’.

Until 9/11, Kramer believed that he had remained a voice in the wilderness. But out of the heat of the burning towers, a new more receptive atmosphere emerged. No more political correctness, naïve credulity or guilt-ridden empathy. The truth can now be told straight. 

But what would the shape of this new truth be? What is the new paradigm which we are being offered to replace the erstwhile ‘dominant’ but now discredited one? Not, much apparently. It is intriguing that when one closely examines Kramer’s contribution in his Ivory Towers on Sand and other writings, there is no sign of the promised new paradigm that would replace the one being disparaged, apart from repeating endlessly his mantra that ‘the perils of Islamism had been underestimated, the potential of civil society had been overestimated’ in the ‘dominant paradigm’. What we are advised to do is to read and re-read Lewis over and over again, the same way Muslims recite the Quran, with a similar hope of getting eventual enlightenment. In fact, as one key proponent of this approach, Shmuel Bar, frankly avers, the counsel is to return not only to pre-Enlightenment ways, but straight to the Middle Ages, and accept ‘the fact that for the first time since the Crusades, Western civilization finds itself involved in a religious war’.

The policy implications of this position are thus a priori and irrelevant to the alleged scientific purport of the proposed approach. In so far as some correct assertions and criticisms are made, they are mainly truisms, such as the claim that Muslim and other non-Western communities may not necessarily evolve into copies of America.

Equally, the claim about Middle Eastern studies failing to predict revolutions and other cataclysmic occurrences in the region misses the point, since academic discourse is not a hermitically sealed area, using as it does as raw material policy statements and deeds. When policy fails, that is the failure of the bodies responsible for policy, not of academics. If anything, academics should be more critical towards current policies in order to improve the scholarly input into policy making, a legitimate objective. For example, one has to examine the reasons why American policy in Iraq has turned Islamic groups which had resorted to terrorism in the past into ‘moderate’ allies, and turned former allies into deadly enemies. And this would of necessity involve a very critical look at US policies. In this at least, the neoconservative pundits were right: it was inconceivable for one to speak of anti-Americanism in Iraq prior to the March 2003 any more than it was to speak to anti-Israeli sentiments among Lebanese Shiites prior to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. 

In this regard, it might be extremely dangerous (literally) to overload the debate with rigid ideological a priori positions as the neo-conservative crowd counsels, and even more dangerous to try to use bullying and intimidation to stifle debate on these vital issues. The functional differentiation between various levels and arenas of analysis must be respected, preserved and even promoted, not bludgeoned into conformity. The tasks of policy makers, intelligence analysts, free media, policy think tanks and the not-so-dispassionate academic institutions, diverge both in approach and purpose. Things should remain that way. It is for some good reason that even though government departments and policy think tanks address the same areas of concern, their functional differentiation is seen as beneficial and essential. The 9/11 Commission Report implicitly criticizes the CIA’s perception of itself as ‘a university gone to war’ (It would be even more daft and counterproductive to turn universities into the ‘FBI on campus’, as some appear to advocate.)

Orientalism Meets the ‘War on Terror’

The depth of feelings manifested in the ‘Orientalism debate’ is in itself revealing. The debate engages with some of the most fundamental questions of human existence and human knowledge, and raises a host of important philosophical and epistemological questions.

The core issue in this debate is the very status of ‘social science’ and the claims staked on its behalf. The crisis faced by Orientalism’s tenuous claims to the status of a science is symptomatic of a deeper malaise infecting modern ‘scientific’ discourse in general. As Edmund Burke III has noted, ‘as a species of Enlightenment discourse, orientalism has been a carrier of basic Western notions of the European self and the non-Western other which generated unfalsifiable propositions about the superiority of Europeans to non-Europeans. In this way, orientalists participated in the elaboration of modern European cultural identity’. 

The assertion of the uniqueness of the September 11 attacks is in a sense a moral statement: the enormity of these acts is such that they cannot (and should not) be contemplated with detached objectivity. But it is also a function of the overall narrative of self that defines modernity and the West’s central position in it. The self-description of the West’s uniqueness inhabits the multiple narratives which define Western identity, whether in Toynbee’s historical narrative of a civilization that appears to be immune from decline, in Weber’s or Marx’s take on the uniqueness and apparent finality of modern capitalism, or the related ‘end of history’ theses from Hegel onwards. 

This self-narrative of uniqueness is a reflection of Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘unthinkable’ assumptions about self and the world which are so self-evident to those involved that they need not be spelt out explicitly. They are also inherent in the concept of modernity, which, as Sardar notes, ‘is nothing more than extrapolation and abstraction of certain specifics of the historic process of Western development’. The Western experience is thus used as the only yardstick with which to measure other experiences. This meant also that the inbuilt prejudices of ages past were also built into the methodology and premises of the disciplines. When a typical Orientalist statement is made (for example, Elie Kedourie’s claim that ‘democracy is alien to the mind-set of Islam’), one accepts a host of assumptions and beliefs about ‘Islam’, ‘the West’, ‘democracy’, religion, society, history, culture and civilization, which remain largely unexamined because they are taken for granted. It is the internal erosion of these certainties which had worked to undermine classical Orientalism. 

The crisis was accentuated, to use the words of Burke III, by the rise of neo-Orientalism in ‘the superheated ideological climate of the Reagan/Bush years’, a turn that was characterised by an ‘increased ideologization of relations between the Middle East and the West’ and ‘a fear campaign which created the new category of "the Islamic terrorist," a useful supplement to that old standby, “the Arab terrorist”’: ‘over night, Islamic culture became highly toxic as a subject of intellectual investigation. One way of understanding what happened to Middle East studies in the 1980s is to say, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, that these changes inscribe the massive invasion of the intellectual field by the political field. In more familiar terms used by Said, it was an assertion of Orientalism (the discourse of power) over orientalism (the discipline)’. This can also be seen as a reflection of the general crisis of the post-Enlightenment ‘state-centered liberal project’ with its obsessive tendency ‘to quantify, map and control’ and the implication that the ‘kind of sociology of Islam that emerged is shaped to the deeply problematic history of the encounter in the West between religion and the state’. 

This crisis has also precipitated, and was impacted by, what Richard Rorty describes in Philosophy and Social Hope as the ‘important cultural war’ in America (and elsewhere), pitting the ‘progressivists’ against the ‘orthodox’. The former are those who continue to push for the US to progress along the trajectory defined by the Bill of Rights, the New Deal, the civil rights legislation and the feminist movement. The later could be seen as ‘the same honest, decent, blinkered, disastrous people who would have voted for Hitler in 193’. Rorty, inspired by Thomas Kuhn, argues that scientific disciplines can be seen as alternating between movements ‘leftward in revolutionary periods and rightward in stable, dull periods where you get what Kuhn called ‘normal science’. One could add that the social sciences, like the media, also pass through phases where social turmoil and looming threats cause them to lose autonomy, but regain more autonomy in periods of relative stability and prosperity. The significant autonomy enjoyed by the social sciences (and humanities) in the past few decades is responsible for the proliferation of a variety of ‘progressivist’ opinions and approaches, including the much debated postmodernist tendencies. The right wing has been attempting to fight this effervescence of ‘unconventional’ views for many years, and 9/11 has afforded a rare opportunity to mount a concerted attack on the gains of the ‘progressivists’.

Orientalism and Liberal Paranoia

Then something amazing happened: the ‘progressivists’ (or at least some of them) decided to join hands with those potential Hitler voters. As we have seen, this convergence has preceded 9/11, as was symbolised by the Liberman/Cheney alliance. And the focus and uniting factor became hatred and fear of Islam, Muslims and Arabs. The intersection of new aggressively resurgent right with the old ethnocentric colonial frame of mind (neo-conservatism plus Orientalism), now converged with the renegade, Islamophobic left. This marriage of convenience is not as outrageous as it appears, since the bulk of neo-conservative elite were also ex-Trotskyites.

The onslaught of these forces on academia has highlighted another important feature of the supposedly self-constituted and socially legitimated ‘scientific communities: that some of them are far less autonomous and free to pursue their own agendas than others. While most scientific communities have to justify their practices in terms of social utility, this utility in the case of the social sciences is much more closely linked to prevailing ideologies or even reigning regimes. The constitution of the communities and the selection of those who have a right to engage authoritatively in the debate are also more directly influenced by power. 

As we have seen, the onslaught on ‘Middle Eastern Studies’ has taken the form of a ‘guerrilla war’ and quasi-terrorist sniping by rank outsiders and agitators, mainly politicians, assisted by people who confess to having been marginalised in the internal conversation within the disciplines. They are using tactics other than the usual ‘scientific’ approach of writing papers and debating in conferences, resorting instead to intimidation through media campaigns, mobilisation of mass opinion, manipulation of funding and appeals to the authorities, including the police, to intervene on their behalf. Here, ideology and power came out in the open in the bid to influence ‘scientific’ practice, with right wing pro-Israeli intellectuals launching an offensive against academia as a whole to bring it in line with the dominant political ideology. 

This development has been helped along by a trend I would describe as ‘liberal paranoia’. The trend is largely a liberal/leftists backlash against Islam which has its roots in the controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, and vociferous (sometimes violent) Muslim protests against it. The novel, described by Sardar as ‘pure Orientalism aspiring to be art’, popularised the familiar Orientalist anti-Islam diatribes, recasting them in a playful postmodernist guise. In this the novel reversed the trajectory of another fellow-British novelist-turned-Orientalist, V S Naipaul, who was more content with reproducing his own straight non-fiction Orientalist lore in the form of travelogues such as Among the Believers (1981). But then Naipaul was a right wing author in any case, unlike Rushdie who claimed to belong to the progressive camp.

The progressives duly rallied to Rushdie’s side, and chastised the Muslims for their backward rejection of the freedom of expression. But as Rushdie himself confirms in his Vanity Fair obituary of Hitchens, (February 2011), the latter, just like Berman, ‘came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the Right… so… he made what looked to many people like a U-turn across the political highway to join forces with the warmakers of George W. Bush’s administration.’

A number of other incidents confirmed the liberals in their anti-Muslim, and increasingly Islamophobic inclinations. Some, like Tony Blair (who many might no longer regard as liberal and even fewer as intellectual) bought the Orientalist ware lock, stock and barrel, and now religiously peddles the discourse on terrorism as a product of Islamic theology and culture. This position, as we have seen, was pushed to the limit in Paul Berman’s description of the war against Islamist insurgencies as a war against totalitarianism.

Less weighty contributions from the likes of the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips and the novelist Martin Amis moved in the same direction, combining traditional right wing contempt for poor immigrants and people from other cultures with purported defence of lofty liberal values those immigrants could never relate to. In one fell swoop, it has become fashionable to hold fascist views and claim to be the foremost defender of liberalism. These new ‘liberals’ see the impoverished immigrant and the persecuted people of Gaza (once described by Pipes as ‘miserable… and deserve to be) as both the epitome of barbarism and backwardness and part of a conspiracy to Islamise America and the world! It is an astonishing combination of arrogance and insecurity not seen since the days of Hitler.

Orientalism has thus come to indirectly enjoy the support of the right and left in an  overlapping consensus, which is not that strange. While the right wing departs from its usual prejudices and xenophobia vis-à-vis Islam, the left is hostile to religion in general. It was prepared to accept Muslims as an ‘ethnic’ group and defend them, as long they obliged by leaving their religious identity behind. But the left is even more intolerant of religious identity politics than the xenophobic right. No wonder then their attacks on Islam and Muslims have become even more virulent and blatantly racist than the attacks from the right.

Conclusion

What is intriguing about the shifts in recent intellectual debates about Islam is this remarkable role reversal, where racism becomes fashionable and respectable, and even presents itself as ‘liberal’ anti-totalitarian stance in defense of ‘civilization’. The attacks on multiculturalism (joined in late 2009 and early 2010 by the leaders of Germany, Britain and France who all made speeches about its ‘failure’) became, as Bhikhu Parekh rightly pointed out, a code for attacking Islam:

These developments reveal a deeper intellectual shift, putting the critique of post-Enlightenment social science on its head. Redundant became Said’s Foucauldian systematic unmasking of the knowledge-power nexus at work at the mythic foundations of modern social science. There is no need to unmask anything anymore, since the “terror” inherent in this presumed social science, and the one being deployed to bring it under control, are coming together out there in the open for all to see, just as it was in the good old days of the Inquisition. In this contest over the “sacred” bastions of academia, all the gloves are off, and the social sciences are being enlisted openly as a form of sophisticated spin that is not even permitted to follow its own rules of production from which it derives legitimacy. 

And this was only part of a global dumbing down of the intellectual conversation. In the preface to the 2007 edition of his book Ideology, Professor Terry Eagleton likened the views of Amis (who had joined him as ‘Professor of creative writing’ at Manchester University), to those of a British National party thug. This analogy may not be that wide off the mark. In an era where it has become acceptable, even fashionable, to hurl vulgar slurs at whole communities, even advocate ethnic cleansing, and still call oneself ‘liberal’, the BNP might sue for defamation. More to the point, the bullying tactics of the new paranoid ‘liberals’ are not restricted to making outrageous remarks and claims. As we have seen above, actual bullying also became the order of the day. From calling Said the ‘Professor of Terror’, to using tabloids, pressure groups and congressional Inquisitions to intimidate academics, the main objective of the new Islamophobic discourse is not winning intellectual arguments, but rabble-rousing and blatant incitement. 

We only began to have the rudiments of what later came to be known as Western Civilization when learning circles in Europe took a hint from their Muslim neighbours and stopped resolving intellectual disputes by burning the other guy on the stake. 

It is not that there is not a lot in need of criticism in the House of Islam, for there is. But we all know the fine line between condemning Israeli excesses and sliding into anti-Semitic diatribes. The tirades of Islamophobic do not help address the problems facing Muslim cities, and are not intended to do so. In fact, they exacerbate the crisis and are exploited by extremists to point to Western duplicity, where those preaching Western liberal values to others were the first to act in contravention of those values. In the famous Quranic phrase, they recommend virtue to others, but overlook themselves. 

But the Muslim are changing from within. Luckily for all of us, the Arabs are again teaching everybody how to fight for freedom. And about time too.

Citations 

The neo conservatives mentioned include: Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (W W Norton, 2004); Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Responses (Oxford University Press, 2002); and ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990, pp. 47–60; Samuel P Huntington, ‘The clash of civilizations?’ Foreign Affairs; 72: 3 (1993), pp. 22-49; Norvell B. De Atkine and Daniel Pipes, ‘Middle Eastern Studies: What Went Wrong?’, Academic Questions, Winter 1995-1996, www.campus-watch.org/article/id/558; Martin Kramer Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Brookings Institution, 2001); Martin Kramer, editor, The Islamism Debate (Tel Aviv University, 1997) – his quotes are from p. 171 and 172; and Robert Satloff, ‘Islamism Seen from Washington,’ in Kramer, p. 101-2.

All the quotations from Edmund Burke III are from his ‘Orientalism and World History: Representing Middle Eastern Nationalism and Islamism in the Twentieth Century,” Theory & Society , 27: 4 (August 1998), pp. 589-607; the quotes form Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, (Penguin, New York, 1999) are from pp. 16-17 and p181; and the quotations from Ziauddin Sardar’s Orientalism. (Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1999) are from pp 78 and 92. The comments on Kramer are from F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Who Lost Middle Eastern Studies?’ Foreign Affairs, 81: 2 (2002). 

Other works cited: The 9/11 Commission Report: The Full Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (W. W. Norton & Co. (26 July 2004); Zachary Lockman, ‘Behind the Battles over US Middle East Studies’, Middle East Report Online, January 2004; Joshua Teitelbaum and Meir Litvak, ‘Students, Teachers, and Edward Said: Taking Stock of Orientalism’, Middle East Review of International Affairs, March 2006; Shmuel Bar, ‘The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism’, Policy Review, no. 125, June 1, 2004; Joshua Micah Marshall, ‘The Orwell Temptation: Are intellectuals overthinking the Middle East?’ Washington Monthly, May 2003 (accessed on December, 23, 2004 at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0305.marshall.html).

Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America, and What Can Be Done About it was published, in November 2001, by American Council of Trustees and Alumni, established by Lynne Cheney, Saul Bellow, Joe Lieberman and others. See also The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz (Regnery Publishing, Washington, 2006), where you will find M Shahid Alam, Hamid Algar, Miriam Cooke, Hamid Dabashi, John Esposito, Yvonne Haddad, Ali Mazrui and Critical Muslim’s Vinay Lal. It’s good to be ‘dangerous’ in the neo-con universe!

The quote from Bhikhu C. Parekh is from A new politics of identity: political principles for an interdependent world (Palgrave, London, 2008, p. 99.)

I would like to thank the ESRC and AHRC for their support for my current research.