The Al Qaeda Reader
by Raymond Ibrahim
New York: Doubleday, 2007. 352 pp. $15.95, paper.
Reviewed by Jonathan
Schanzer
Jewish Policy Center
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2143/the-al-qaeda-reader
Ibrahim, an Arabic language specialist at the Library of
Congress at the time he wrote The Al Qaeda Reader, has compiled a
collection of screeds by Al-Qaeda's top figures, Osama bin Laden and Ayman
al-Zawahiri, that reveal in full the deranged world-view that drives the
global Islamist terrorist network.
Ibrahim's translations are an important contribution to the
field. Rather than serve as a middleman, as most analysts do, Ibrahim
allows Al-Qaeda to articulate for itself the anti-Semitism, xenophobia,
paranoia, anti-modernism, and anarchism that drive its terrorist agenda
against the United States and America's "infidel" allies.
In tract after tract, bin Laden and Zawahiri draw
inspiration from radical exegetes Sayyid Qutb, Abul A'la Mawdudi, and Ibn
Taymiya to justify their terrorist actions. These and other extremist
scholars help Al-Qaeda build a Qur'anic case for killing Americans, Jews,
moderate Muslims, and even Muslims caught in the crossfire during a jihad
operation.
More than 300 pages of invective leave little doubt that
Al-Qaeda seeks nothing less than mass murder to overturn the world order.
As Ibrahim notes in the foreword, "millions died as a result of the
world's indifference to Hitler's straightforward words. This book provides
the world with Al-Qaeda's ultimate vision. The same mistake should not be
repeated twice." Related Topics: Radical Islam, Terrorism Jonathan
Schanzer
Baghdad at Sunrise
by Peter R. Mansoor
New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 376 pp. $28.
Reviewed by Michael Rubin
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2144/baghdad-at-sunrise
Few soldiers who write narratives of war attain a
perspective that transcends their own area of operation. Conversely,
historians who write of battle seldom convey the nuance and color evident
to those whose actions they describe. Mansoor is an exception. The chair
of military history at Ohio State University, he served as commander of a
brigade combat team in Baghdad, director of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps
Counterinsurgency Center, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff strategy
group, and finally, as executive officer for Gen. David Petraeus. He
weaves together an expertly written narrative that describes in detail his
service in Baghdad during a period of transition from tense calm in 2003
to full insurgency in 2004 with an eye toward the larger picture.
He begins his narrative in Adhamiya, the toughest Sunni
neighborhood in Baghdad, on April 7, 2004, less than a week after the
outbreak of insurgency. A firefight ensues, which Mansoor describes with
fluid precision, making Baghdad at Sunrise read as smoothly as a
Tom Clancy novel. He then flashes back to his arrival in Baghdad on June
26, 2003, to examine the run-up to the violence.
Amid first impressions, Mansoor analyzes the management of
the first year of U.S. occupation. He is sharply critical of Coalition
Provisional Authority director L. Paul Bremer's decision to formalize the
dissolution of the army, but his suggestion that "several hundred thousand
young Iraqi males" might simply have been called back, retooled, and
retrained beggars belief, given how they had traveled far and wide,
finally free from the oppressive conscription that Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein had forced upon them.
Mansoor's narrative does not exonerate the military. He
describes cooks and mechanics placed in charge of detention, a complex
operation for which they had no training, and criticizes military strategy
for failure to maintain a presence after clearing areas of insurgents,
allowing them to return.
The last twelve pages alone—"reflections"—are worth the
purchase price of the book as Mansoor places Iraq in context, pleading
that the United States "learn the strategic, operational, tactical, and
doctrinal lessons of the Iraq war and prepare to apply them, now and in
the future … [as] our enemies believe they have found a template for
victory against the West." Much rides on whether U.S. officials understand
the lessons that Mansoor so eloquently lays bare. Related Topics: Iraq Michael
Rubin
British Policy in Mesopotamia,
1903-1914
by Stuart A.
Cohen
Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 2008. 265 pp. $34.50.
Reviewed by Michael Rubin
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2145/british-policy-in-mesopotamia-1903-1914
As U.S. forces occupied Iraq in 2003, numerous historians
scrambled to elucidate lessons from the British occupation of Mesopotamia
during World War I.[1] Cohen, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan
University, has republished in paperback British Policy in
Mesopotamia, a 1976 St. Antony's monograph, itself a version of his
University of Oxford doctoral thesis.
Cohen provides an able if somewhat dry account of the
formation of British policies toward Mesopotamia at the beginning of the
twentieth century, a world in which oil had yet to play a significant role
but rather where concerns over India's defense, German railroad ambitions,
and a desire to expand commercial holdings dominated British
interests.
The study analyzes competing diplomatic, strategic, and
commercial concerns, each complicated by a bifurcation of policy input
from the Foreign and India offices. The result is a useful primer on the
development of British interests in the region in the decade immediately
prior to Britain's occupation of the Ottoman provinces, which, with the
defeat of the Ottoman forces, would formally become Iraq.
Cohen constructs his narrative from a range of British
archival sources with a smattering of German works. Unfortunately, though,
he has not revised or updated his account to incorporate new archival
material, Arabic sources, or even secondary sources published in the last
thirty years. His bibliography is a time-warp with no book more current
than 1973. This in itself is not necessarily a fault; after Cohen wrote
his original monograph, scholarship took a turn for the worse with the
injection of postmodernism and other theoretical trends, the result of
which has been few works of lasting historical value.
Nevertheless, Cohen's work could benefit by a
historiographical review placing his research into the context of
historical debate about the period. Instead, the only apparent
acknowledgment that a generation has passed since he last published
British Policy in Mesopotamia is a rather lackluster, one-page
foreward by Harvard University historian E. Roger Owen, whose comments are
so bland as to raise doubt that he even bothered to read the book. These
foibles aside, Cohen's work stands the test of time and provides a handy
reference for what remains an understudied period.
[1] See, for example, Michael Eisenstadt and Eric Mathewson,
eds. U.S. Policy in Post-Saddam Iraq: Lessons from the British
Experience (Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
2003). Related Topics: History, Iraq Michael
Rubin
Circle in the Sand
The Bush Dynasty in Iraq
by Christian Alfonsi
New
York: Vintage, 2007. 470 pp. $15.95.
Reviewed by Michael Rubin
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2146/circle-in-the-sand
"Bush derangement syndrome"—the irrational hatred of George
W. Bush and the embrace of conspiracy theories about him—has moved from
fringe websites to mainstream publishing houses. Circle in the Sand
seeks to show how the decisions and unfinished business of George H.W.
Bush's Iraq policy shaped his son's decision to invade Iraq. Alfonsi, a
New York-based writer trained as a political scientist, argues that
Operation Desert Storm reoriented U.S. policy toward Arab states,
reoriented Republican foreign policy, and made the second war inevitable.
Furthermore, he argues, the first Iraq conflict's inconclusive end sparked
a new generation of Al-Qaeda terrorists that led to 9/11.
For Alfonsi, none of these developments were inevitable but
instead resulted from foreign policy decisions about which the American
people are ignorant. With a tone of hubris, Alfonsi tells readers that he
has pieced together the hidden record that others have ignored or failed
to detect. What results might sway conversation in a coffee shop but will
appear silly to anyone ever involved in policy.
Alfonsi writes well and his narrative flows. In order to
develop his thesis, though, he glues together 80 percent truth with 20
percent supposition. He neither understands the complexity of policymaking
nor how little power any single individual has in the process. He depicts
the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act as a Republican and neoconservative plot but
omits mention of overwhelming Democratic support for the bill. He ignores
the National Security Council, Deputies Committee meetings, and Policy
Coordination committees, which taken together might meet ten or fifteen
times a week to hash out policy.
A close read suggests a tendency toward either omniscience
or fabrication. Thus, when Vice President Dick Cheney told "a few close
friends" that Bush's election victory opened "a whole range of new
opportunities in foreign policy," Alfonsi adds darkly that he meant
"opportunities to settle scores with old enemies." He transforms
think-tank panels on how best to defend U.S. national security—daily
occurrences in Washington—into evidence of a conspiracy of predetermined
change.
Omission also plagues Circle. In Alfonsi's world,
Al-Qaeda grew only because of Riyadh's decision to host U.S. troops to
protect the kingdom and the region while Saudi funding of radicals had
little to do with it.[1] Nor does Alfonsi explain what Washington should
have done differently: Let Saddam annex Kuwait and perhaps attack Saudi
Arabia?
U.S., Iraqi, and European documents show Circle in the
Sand to be more wrong than right. With hindsight, it appears Alfonsi's
chief sources—disgruntled officials such as Richard Haass, a former state
department policy planning chief—merely use the author to settle scores or
promote petty agendas. Vintage Press may not care, though, because nothing
sells books like conspiracy.
[1] For a better survey of Al-Qaeda ideology, see Uriya
Shavit, "Al-Qaeda's Saudi
Origins," Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2006, pp. 3-13. Related Topics: Iraq, US policy Michael
Rubin
Contesting the Saudi
State
Islamic Voices from a New
Generation
by Madawi
al-Rasheed
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 332 pp.
$30.
Reviewed by Taylor
Cashwell
Albuquerque, N.M.
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2147/contesting-the-saudi-state
Rasheed, professor of social anthropology at King's College
London, notes that much of the scholarly literature on politico-religious
discourse in Saudi Arabia merely establishes that it is strongly rooted in
Wahhabism. Her purpose in Contesting the Saudi State is to move
beyond that cursory understanding by analyzing the evolutionary dynamics
of that discourse, its fragmentation, and the resulting state of political
consent and contestation. This is done through a frank and compelling
analysis that could have been voiced only by a Saudi scholar living
outside of the kingdom.
The starting point for Rasheed's narrative is the political
consolidation of the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries by an alliance of the Saudi family and the Wahhabis, who
together established Wahhabism as the official discourse of the resulting
Saudi emirate. The Saud strategically allowed the Wahhabi ulema (religious
scholars) a wide sphere of social control in return for the religious
legitimization of their authoritarian rule. This legitimization was
accomplished through a creative interpretation of the Qur'an, in which
obeying one's rulers became a corollary of the mandate to obey God.
However, as Rasheed contends, within the religious requirement of
political consent lay the origins of dissent.
The author analyzes the breakdown of official Wahhabism
through the lenses of several dissenting discourses, but her argument
becomes fully nuanced only when she engages a singular voice: that of
Salafi dissident Lewis Atiyat Allah. As Atiyat Allah has at various times
been a proponent of competing interpretive discourses—Sahwi Islamism,
liberalism, and jihad—he personifies the complexity of the contemporary
Saudi politico-religious milieu in all of its fuzziness. The labels that
Atiyat Allah has attached to himself are not clear-cut and precise; around
their edges, there is room for both movement between them and debate about
what they actually signify.
Rasheed manages to analyze and clearly communicate the
evolution of Saudi politico-religious discourse, all the while
highlighting these complexities in a way that advances the readers'
understanding of Saudi Arabia beyond the categories of Salafi, Wahhabi,
Sahwi, or jihadi. Related Topics: Saudi Arabia
The Crescent and the
Eagle
Ottoman Rule, Islam, and the
Albanians, 1874-1913
by George Gawrych
London
and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006. 260 pp. $74.95.
Reviewed by Stephen
Schwartz
Center for Islamic Pluralism
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2148/the-crescent-and-the-eagle
Albanian studies have been neglected outside Albania and
other countries where Albanian is spoken, but with the present volume,
Gawrych, a Turkey specialist and associate professor of Middle East
history at Baylor University, has made an important contribution to
closing this gap. He has chronicled the late nineteenth-century romantic
nationalist movement known to Albanians as the rilindja or
rebirth.
The opening historical act in the Albanian national
awakening was the organization of the League of Prizren at a meeting of
300 notables in that city in Kosovo in 1878. The aims of the League of
Prizren were dual and, in some respects, contradictory. These were first,
to defend the Albanians from partition among the Balkan Christian powers
and Greece at the contemporaneous Congress of Berlin by keeping the
Albanian lands within the Ottoman domain and second, to preserve and
extend the rights of Albanians as a separate ethnicity within the same
Turkish polity.
Gawrych concentrates on Sami Frashëri (1850-1904), the
outstanding personality of the League of Prizren. Today better known as
Şemseddin Sami Bey, and as an educator and journalist rather than a critic
of imperial institutions and linguistic reformer, he was a major figure in
the late Ottoman Empire and is usually described as one of the Turkish
munevverler (intellectuals, Enlighteners).
While this concentration is understandable, especially as
Gawrych draws mainly on Turkish (rather than Albanian) sources, the volume
should have included a wider treatment of other prominent figures in the
Albanian independence movement, including the Catholic figure Gjergj
Fishta (1871-1940).
With the support of the beys of the northern Albanian
sancaklar (districts), the Frashëri and his two brothers, along
with the League of Prizren, began the struggle for independence that
culminated in the withdrawal of Turkish power and the proclamation of the
Albanian state in 1912.
If there is a flaw in this work, it is Gawrych's almost
exclusive dependence on non-Albanian sources. Still, the story of the
League of Prizren, the Frashëris, and their colleagues and successors is
remarkable and assists in understanding the continuing challenges of
Albanian identity today. Related Topics: History, Muslims in Europe
Stephen
Schwartz
Faith, Reason, and the War
against Jihadism
A Call to
Action
by George Weigel
New
York: Doubleday, 2007. 208 pp. $19.
Reviewed by Robert Spencer
Jihad
Watch
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2149/faith-reason-and-the-war-against-jihadism
Weigel, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, ably skewers numerous widely held assumptions about
the conflict between the Islamic world and the West. Chief among these is
the common illusion that—despite the ostentatious religiosity of Osama bin
Laden and jihadists in general—what the West faces is a threat of
"terrorism" that has no significant religious component, such that Western
governments need only focus on poverty and political disenfranchisement in
the Islamic world, and that Western strategists need not familiarize
themselves with Islamic theology and law. In contrast, Weigel argues
convincingly that the conflict is inherently and fundamentally theological
and that it ultimately involves two radically different conceptions of the
nature of the human person and the ideal way to order human society. But
this eludes all too many Western analysts as they are irreligious
themselves and have no idea of the importance and impact of religion on
individuals and societies—rendering them hopelessly unable to understand
the enemy and the civilizational challenge he presents to the West.
This understanding has also been impeded, of course, by
politically-correct fears of offending Muslims or of appearing
"Islamophobic"—a contemporary manipulative coinage intended to silence
criticism of the jihadist imperative. Weigel decries Western media
acquiescence to these charges of Islamophobia and argues for a more
realistic and honest discourse than has hitherto prevailed. He notes how
Western responses to the jihadist challenge have demonstrated a lack of
realism again and again as analysts trained during the Cold War try to
apply antiquated approaches to a problem they only dimly understand: For
example, Weigel points out that the concept of deterrence is meaningless
in the context of Islamic jihadist aggression, but this has not stopped
Western authorities from continuing to pursue it.
Weigel concludes with a strong call for the recovery of
Western cultural self-confidence and the discarding of false notions of
tolerance, combined with full-scale efforts to free ourselves from energy
dependence upon states that would ultimately like to see the United States
conquered and Islamized. Related Topics: Radical Islam, Terrorism Robert
Spencer
Foxbats over Dimona
The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day
War
by Isabella Ginor and Gideon
Remez
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 304 pp. $26.
Reviewed by Ariel Cohen and Lajos
Szaszdi
Heritage Foundation
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2150/foxbats-over-dimona
Foxbats over Dimona is a welcome addition to the
history of the Soviet role in the 1967 Six-Day War and the USSR's
strategic deception. The return of Russia's adversarial stance towards the
West makes it particularly relevant.
Through archival work and interviews, the authors
persuasively argue that the Soviet role in triggering the Six-Day War was
greater and more decisive than previously thought. Ginor of the Hebrew
University and Remez, a journalist, contend that the USSR provoked and
caused the Six-Day War, that the Kremlin wanted to destroy Israel's
nuclear weapons program, and that it planned to deploy its military power
directly against Israel in support of Egypt and Syria.
To achieve that, the Soviet Union's policy positions and
documents were shaped to reflect deception and outright propaganda. Soviet
disinformation, including doctored "aerial photographs," claimed that
Israel was massing troops for an attack against Syria and other Arab
states. The Soviets also engaged in military provocations such as the
flight of Soviet MiG-25 ("Foxbat") reconnaissance planes over Israel's
Dimona nuclear plant before the war. Its mischief led Egypt and Syria to
prepare for war and then Israel to launch a preemptive attack.
The authors find that the Soviets were on the brink of a
massive intervention in the Middle East which, had it occurred, would have
dramatically changed the balance of forces between the United States and
the USSR. It did not take place only because of the astounding Israeli
six-day victory.
Foxbats over Dimona is priceless in fostering
knowledge about the Kremlin's methods to provoke crises and conflicts to
advance its interests and power, knowledge that remains relevant. In
summer 2008, for example, Russia provoked a conflict with Georgia through
a disinformation campaign, then blamed Georgia for the conflict. It also
engaged in military provocations, such as Russian military flights over
Georgian territory, shooting down Georgian reconnaissance drones, and
Russian-instigated attacks by its South Ossetian proxies. Related Topics: Arab-Israel conflict &
diplomacy, History, Russia/Soviet Union
Israel and Palestine
Peace Plans from Oslo to Disengagement
by Galia Golan
Princeton:
Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007. 240 pp. $68.95 ($24.95,
paper).
Reviewed by Morton A.
Klein
Zionist Organization of America
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2151/israel-and-palestine
Golan, a professor of government at Haifa University,
provides a detailed dissection of the various agreements that emerged from
the Oslo negotiations (1993-2000). From the start of her book, she rejects
the notion that the conflict might be intractable and, therefore, better
suited to conflict management than diplomatic resolution. Instead, she
attempts to show that the agreements provide a framework for an eventual
peace and have in their own way brought the sides closer to that
day—despite outbreaks of violence including one collapse into war. She
argues by analogy that the 1979 Egyptian-Israel peace treaty has endured
but even that agreement has not led to any reconciliation between the two
peoples.
As a staunch and unrepentant advocate of the Oslo accords,
Golan naturally favors further negotiations today with Mahmoud Abbas's
Palestinian Authority (PA). As a result, she treats the Oslo agreements
and other signed diplomatic documents as evidence of what she is seeking
to prove—a mutual desire for peace that is not actually present on the
Palestinian side. Her methodology is to base a conception of peace on
documents that have never been honored or implemented on the Palestinian
side.
This is clearly deficient. Abbas's regime is filled with
unremitting incitement to hatred and murder in its controlled media,
mosques, schools, and youth camps, and the situation in Hamas-controlled
Gaza is even worse. Also, it is hard to find evidence in the PA of any
desire, let alone effort, to arrest terrorists and dismantle their
organizations. On the contrary, dead terrorists (George Habash) are
honored and freed ones (Samir Kuntar) feted.
Golan provides one telling example of the gulf between
stated intentions and facts on the ground. She refers to the 1993 Letters
of Mutual Recognition that preceded the Declaration of Principles in the
first Oslo agreement as a "historic breakthrough" and "perhaps the only
irreversible move in the whole process of mutual recognition." When PA
officials from Abbas down have been saying openly in recent years that
they will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state, such claims clearly lack
any firm basis. Related Topics: Arab-Israel conflict &
diplomacy Morton A.
Klein
The Israel/Palestine
Question
A Reader, 2nd ed.
Edited by Ilan Pappé.
Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2007. 292 pp. $39.95.
Reviewed by Steven
Plaut
University of Haifa
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2152/the-israel-palestine-question
Pappé, currently at the University of Exeter, having left
the University of Haifa under pressure,[1] has devoted his career almost
exclusively to demonizing Israel and Zionism; his newest book is no
exception. It consists of a collection of anti-Israel articles and
diatribes by both Arab and Israeli-Jewish haters of Israel who insist that
Israel is guilty of just about everything.
Significantly, this reader belongs to Routledge's "Rewriting
History Series," a hodgepodge of leftist, "anti-colonialist" volumes and
historical revisionism. The second edition of The Israel/Palestine
Question differs in interesting ways from the first, published in
1999. Benny Morris, an erstwhile New Historian who now denounces
anti-Zionist New Historians while endorsing the "Zionist narrative,"[2] no
longer appears as a contributor. (He had written the centerpiece of the
first edition.)
Arabs represented include Rashid Khalidi (Columbia
University), who demands that the 1947 U.N. resolution creating Israel be
revoked; Beshara Doumani (University of California, Berkeley), Butrus
Abu-Manneh (Haifa), and Nur Massalha (University of Surrey). For
"balance," the book includes such Jews as Avi Shlaim (Oxford University),
Uri Ram (Ben Gurion), and Gershon Shafir (University of California, San
Diego).
None of the authoritative Israeli historians of the
conflict, even those from the Left, are cited; rather, the footnotes refer
to almost every pseudo-scholar who has made a career out of bashing
Israel.
Every chapter but one reprints material that had appeared
elsewhere, the exception being a chapter by As'ad Ghanem, the anti-Israel
Arab political scientist from Pappé's old haunt, the University of Haifa's
department of political science. (Ghanem is on record as favoring a
so-called "one-state solution,"[3] in which Israel will cease to exist.
The same solution is favored by most of the other contributors in the
book.) Ghanem's contribution claims that "Israeli Palestinians" (i.e.,
Israeli Arabs) are living under Israeli "ethnocracy."
Rave reviews in Al-Ahram[4] and the PLO-controlled
Journal of Palestine Studies[5] confirm that this book lacks
scholarly objectivity or value.
[1] Neri Livneh, "Post-Zionism
Only Rings Once," Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), accessed Dec. 12,
2008.
[2] Jonathan D. Tepperman, "An Isfaeli
[sic] Who's Got Everybody Outraged," The New York Times,
Apr. 17, 2004.
[3] "Challenging the
Boundaries: A Single State in Israel/Palestine," London, Nov. 17-18,
2007; CBSNews, May
9, 2008.
[4] Amina Elbendary, "Rewriting
Palestine," Al-Ahram Weekly On-line, Dec. 14–20, 2000.
[5]
Quoted on the jacket and inside of the book. Related Topics: Arab-Israel conflict &
diplomacy Steven
Plaut
Nights in the Pink
Motel
An American Strategist's Pursuit of
Peace in Iraq
by Robert
Earle
Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008. 256 pp.
$34.95.
Reviewed by Michael
Rubin
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2153/nights-in-the-pink-motel
Hundreds of U.S. diplomats and officials have served in
Iraq, and scores have written books about their experience. Many of those
books attempt to amplify limited experience into policy treatises with
results that, in hindsight, are unremarkable. To these, add Earle's
account of his own time as a senior aid to John Negroponte, whose 2004-05
tenure as ambassador to Iraq following the departure of Coalition
Provisional Authority director L. Paul Bremer is now largely
forgotten.
Earle might have added insight. He worked in Iraq during the
height of the insurgency, a time during which many other diplomat-authors
had already left. Instead, Nights in the Pink Motel—the title
itself a cutesy name for the Green Zone—is full of inane anecdotes and
irrelevant details that reflect less the nature of Iraq and more the
culture shock of a pampered diplomat inserted into a military environment
who focuses on such details as signs proclaiming, "No long guns in the
dining facility." He conveys conversations in almost cartoonish terms.
Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich "barks," and Maj.-Gen. Michael
Streeter "moans." There is little insight into Negroponte's interactions
with Gen. George Casey, the senior military officer in Iraq, nor how
Negroponte and Earle decided which Iraqi politicians to meet and which to
shun, nor how U.S. officials sought to maximize their own influence at the
expense of U.S. adversaries.
Earle's narrative conveys little evidence of serious
planning or policymaking. His meetings convey little more sophistication
than descriptions of Negroponte constructing bullet point lists during
staff meetings. Perhaps Earle wishes to suggest his predecessors could not
understand the obvious, but instead he highlights the lack of insight into
the nuance of Iraqi politics with which Negroponte, Earle, and his team
arrived, treating Iraq as a blank slate and discarding the hard-earned
lessons of past experience.
Ultimately, Nights in the Pink Motel fails
completely. To contrast Earle's account with that of Peter Mansoor[1]
is to juxtapose an elementary school student's understanding of Iraqi
politics and the insurgency with that of a university professor. In many
ways, Iraq's occupation, the insurgency, and reconstruction are tales of
woe. Many books might elucidate decision-making and embarrass U.S.
policymakers. Nights in the Pink Motel will embarrass only its
author.
[1] Baghdad at Sunrise (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008). Related Topics: Iraq, US policy Michael
Rubin
Situating Islam
The Past and Future of an Academic
Discipline
by Aaron W. Hughes
London
and Oakville, Conn.: Equinox Publishing, 2007. 132 pp. $22,
paper.
Reviewed by Stephen
Schwartz
Center for Islamic Pluralism
Middle East
Quarterly
Spring 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2154/situating-islam
Hughes, an associate professor of religious studies at the
University of Calgary in Alberta, is benevolent in his intentions, and the
result is a volume on the Western academic discussion of Islam that is
almost stereotypically Canadian in its efforts at balance between and
fairness to the two main sides.
In Hughes's presentation of these competing viewpoints, the
two protagonists are familiar to most of the global intellectual public:
Bernard Lewis and the late Edward Said. Hughes begins this work with an
account of their bitter exchanges over the latter's Orientalism. As
Hughes indicates, Lewis's critique of Said was limited to intellectual
issues; Lewis accused Said of tendentious, arbitrary, reckless, and
incompetent formulations. Said replied with low blows:
pseudo-psychological and ideological smears, claiming that Lewis was
insecure and aligned with the most radical elements on the Zionist
spectrum, including the late Meir Kahane.
As Hughes aptly comments, "Welcome to the field of Islamic
Studies."
The Canadian scholar, in an understated but accurate manner,
clearly finds the legacy of Said wanting. Early on, he states, "My aim …
is to argue that Said's account is as fraught with political and
ideological assumptions as that of the Orientalism he sought to demolish.
Unless we face up to this legacy, realizing that Orientalism is
decidedly not a work of historiography, it becomes very difficult
to move forward [emphasis in original]."
Hughes goes on to review one of the flagrant weaknesses in
Said's work (as mainly detailed in The Lust of Knowing by Robert H.
Irwin,[1] who remains unacknowledged here): a failure to examine
adequately the pioneering research on Islam by Germans and Hungarians,
many of them Jewish, such as Abraham Geiger and Ignaz Goldziher. Hughes
also effectively joins the ranks of Said's opponents by his fair, if
chiding, treatment of Martin Kramer's 2001 study Ivory Towers on
Sand.[2] While Hughes scores Kramer's work as "over the top," he
stipulates that "there is often much of validity to be found within"
it.
As is appropriate for a guidebook intended for the use of
academics, Hughes also takes up, more briefly, the works of such leading
personalities in the field as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Marshall Hodgson,
Fazlur Rahman, Charles Adams, John Esposito, Karen Armstrong, Frederick M.
Denny, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Hughes is refreshingly critical of their
works, summarizing his comments by noting "the apologetic foundation on
which the edifice of Islamic studies currently exists."
Situating Islam shows flaws of its own, exemplified
by the sloppy references to neoconservatism and identification of the
Middle East Forum's Campus Watch effort as a form of political monitoring.
Nevertheless, as a survey of the current state of play in the field of
Islamic studies in the West, it could have been a great deal worse and is,
finally, a useful contribution.
[1] London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2007.
[2] Washington,
D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001. Related Topics: Academia, Middle East studies
Stephen
Schwartz
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