The Sept. 11 Canon: Week 2
Dear Judith, Geraldine, and both Chrises,
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StumbleUponI was relieved to be done with this "Book Club," having posted two long and suitably bookish entries on Karen Armstrong and Bernard Lewis. Neither author really ought to excite controversy, in my opinion—they spend far more time on the pre-modern period than on anything in any living person's lifetime. But now I have to come back to fend off Judith's serial distortions of my position and to answer a question from Chris Caldwell.
My rejoinder to the club last week was so mild that I'm surprised it excited Judith's reaction, which I think we can safely categorize as bilious. And I'm sorry to be put in this position because I so enjoy her writing on other subjects.
What exactly did I say? Simply these shocking words: that our club was veering toward "a reductionist position" on Islam and that "too easy denunciations of the Arab/Muslim worldview do little to help the problem." I purposefully named no names, because I thought it was a group problem—that we were all wildly generalizing about Islam, which happens to be a complex religion, though you'd have trouble finding evidence of that in a book as simple as Armstrong's.
But Judith's intuition was right that I thought she was the worst offender. It was not just that she persistently failed to distinguish between "Arab" and "Muslim" in her Armstrong review—Bernard Lewis tells us that first thing we need to do is get our terminology right. It was the malevolence that entered the review when she went after Armstrong as the latest version of Menace 2 Society. I mean, that's giving Armstrong way more credit than she deserves—her book is boring, but I don't think western civilization is going to keel over as a result.
I also thought that Judith overstated the danger of Armstrong's
Let's read it in full:
In 1948 the Arabs of Palestine lost their homeland to the Zionists, who set up the Jewish state of
Israel there, with the support of the United Nations and the international community. The loss of Palestine became a potent symbol of the humiliation of the Muslim world at the hands of the Western powers, who seemed to feel no qualms about the dispossession and permanent exile of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
It's true, there's an edge to the use of the word "Zionist" nowadays—but it's historically accurate to use in a discussion of the 1940s. And obviously the words "feel no qualms" imply some disapproval. But let's courageously face the fact that the creation of
What else did Judith get wrong? Well, she started her latest posting with the assumption that I had not read the Armstrong book (that claim has since been deleted). Not only did I read it, I agreed with her that it sucked. It's precisely because I read it that I'm responding to her overreaction. She also says that I think only well-read historians like Lewis are allowed to comment on Islam. I don't think anything of the sort. I may be a historian, but I'm not well-read on Islam, which is why I wanted to join this Book Club: to learn something. Now more than ever, I think it's a patriotic duty to understand what Islam is and is not—and I dislike shrill anti-Islamic generalizations as much as I dislike shrill pro-Islamic generalizations.
Bringing in Hannah Arendt? That's way harsh! How can anyone argue against her? In fact, I profoundly agree with Judith's important point that we have to fight evil as we understand it and that too many academics shrink from that fight. But I like to think that Arendt would understand the importance of truth at a hard moment like this—because that's exactly what the Nazis attacked before attacking everyone else. Of all people, book reviewers should understand their responsibility to the word. I'll repeat what I said in my first posting: It's precisely when emotions are high that we need to get our facts right.
True, there is a lot of nauseating denial and self-pity in the Arab and Muslim worlds. There are also heroic moderates who need our help, in every country. And there are nations like
I've gone on too long, but I wanted to get to Chris Caldwell's hilarious suggestion that I, as a historian, was required to weigh in on the B. Lewis/E. Said debate. Since when do historians take a stand on anything? We're invertebrates, ranked somewhere around mollusks on the phylogenetic scale.
But I'll do as he likes with a classic dodge, though sincere: I like both of them, though I think Lewis is a smoother read. It's unfortunate that they despise each other because I enjoyed the Lewis I read this week, and I think Orientalism is an important book (far more important than comes across in Emily Yoffe's gushing piece on Lewis). If Said commits inaccuracies, he still says something important: that Westerners often fail to understand the internal complexities of "the East" as they superimpose their own agendas on top of it. Does that sound familiar? I think he and Lewis are a good pair, to be honest. Together, they prove that Islam has never understood the West very well, and we have never understood it either.
Best,
Ted
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Bernard Lewis is the man of the moment: see also this "Assessment" and the Fray Notes at the end.
Comments:
Judith Shulevitz and several posters have argued that being educated about Islam and the Middle East is secondary to the conflict underlined by the September 11 attacks, that one can take a stand against evil without being informed as to its contours…
I don't see how one can fight a war against "terrorism," unless one knows enough to define the objective. Sure, we want to stop suicide bombers, but whom are we going to go after? This requires that we know something about the setting in which the acts are planned, the particular motivations of the actors, and the ideologies through which new terrorists are recruited. What is the history of these organizations? What alliances have been formed between violent anti-American groups? What apparent alliances are implausible? Should we carry the war on terrorism to Iraq? To Palestinians? Moreover, since these terrorists are foreigners, we are to some extent acting on the sufferance of their home countries; we have to have enough knowledge about these places to explain in effective terms why we want to kill or arrest their native sons…
We need to be able to provide at least minimally informed oversight of foreign policy, to be able to survey the broad contours of our war on terrorism and say, "This is a reasonable definition," or "this will be an effective intervention." We can't know that unless we have done some investigation on our own. And this investigation includes not only things like the history of the Deobandi madrasas set up by Zia ul-Haq in the 1970s, in which many of the Taliban studied, but also things like the Deobandi movement itself, the ideology that motivates it , the Islamic reform movement of Salafism that spawned both it and the Arabian Wahhabis, and so on…
--ADAS
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
Bernard Lewis is a highly erudite, and readable--hence his popularity--scholar of classical and medieval Islam. He is not, however, a social or cultural historian. His is extremely textual history. Lewis begins, continues, and ends with the text. As a literary critic and cultural historian, I find this somewhat limiting. It exposes him to a very serious difficulty: he all too often takes classical texts as definitive of history, and classical history as definitive of the present. They even define, he seems to believe, the very essence of Islam, an essence he feels he can capture.
We need first to understand that the "essence" of Islam will be just as diverse, and just as un-essential, as the "essence" of Christianity, whatever that might be. (Notice that when we ask questions about Islam, we rarely ask the exactly parallel question about Christianity; doing so would demonstrate the dubious intellectual footing of many of our questions.)
Second, Lewis's brand of history tends to start with a famous or important classical text, read it in a very erudite--and at times rather uncritical--way, and then state that what we find in that text demonstrates what was actually going on in the society that produced it. A cultural historian knows that while this may be a starting point for investigation, it's hardly workable as a general assumption. Lewis unfortunately tends to assume just this, forgetting that isolated texts or works of art by elite groups may tell us rather little about the overall picture, or even the day-to-day operations, of their culture.
For all that, he's a fine read. Indeed, probably a must-read, if we are looking for popular primers.
--Seth Graebner
(To find or answer this post, click here.)
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