Frustrated 2—I was amazed to find out about this whole scenario when I first ran across it, but I have seen ideology/group-think take over other academic specialties, and it really explains a lot.
As I posted earlier, starting with the 1979 publication of leftist Edward Said’s (http://tinyurl.com/7djr5y) “Orientalism”–the power and effect of which was tremendously boosted by the leftist Postmodernism that swept through the U.S. educational establishment at the same time—and in just a few years after it’s publication, Said & Co. succeeded in destroying the old “Orientalist” school.
Here is how Edward Kurtz, writing in the Weekly Standard, characterized “Orientalism”:
“The founding text of postcolonial studies, Orientalism effectively de-legitimated all previous scholarship on the Middle East by branding it as racist. Said drew no distinction between the most ignorant and bigoted remarks of nineteenth-century colonialists and the most accomplished pronouncements of contemporary Western scholars: All Western knowledge of the East was intrinsically tainted with imperialism.”
and after a very few years these “Orientalist” scholars and their works were thoroughly discredited, bypassed and, essentially, gone, and they were gradually replaced in various departments of Middle Eastern studies by people who were much more leftist in orientation, and who increasingly thought as Edward Said thought about the Middle East.
Then, at the same time—starting in the 1970s–came the Saudi push to fund and create a whole slew of new Middle Eastern departments, programs, chairs, study centers and scholarships at major U.S. universities, intended to turn out new generations of experts, hewing more closely to the Saudi/Wahabi line, and to gradually buy Saudi influence over our entire cadre of Middle East experts, and what they taught, wrote, said, and researched about the Middle East. Thus is created a new “standard view” of the Middle East and all the issues surrounding it.
In the early years, Saudi “donations” to U.S. universities used to be publicized; lately the Saudis and U.S. universities are usually much more reluctant to disclose details. One of the earliest Saudi donations had the requirement that the head of the new Saudi funded program was to be appointed by university authorities after the approval of the Saudi government’s Minister of Education (for a summary of some of these donations see here http://tinyurl.com/8k77ge and here http://tinyurl.com/7kyxln) .
Some examples of donations from the second source cited above:
“• $20 million to set up a Middle Eastern studies program by Saudi King Faud at the University of Arkansas
• $5 million to UC Berkley by two Saudi shaikhs with ties to al Queda,
• $22.5 million to Harvard
• $28.1 million to Georgetown,
• $11 million to Cornell,
• $5 million to MIT,
• $1.5 million to Texas A&M,
• $1 million to Princeton.
• Rutgers and Columbia each received a $5 million chair endowment. Columbia was apparently caught trying to conceal not only the monies received, but the source of it.”
Gradually, as these Saudi-friendly academics extended their influence throughout the Middle Eastern Studies community and amid the fertile ground of our leftist academic community and Saudi influence has gained increasing sway over decisions about who to hire, who to give book contracts, speaking engagements and various honors to, who to promote and, thus, to who gets tenure in the small, insular world of Middle Eastern Studies.
Gradually, too, the academics churned out by these new Saudi-funded Middle Eastern study organizations also took over academic organizations like the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA) (http://tinyurl.com/8s37rv) and whole university departments, like the one at Columbia, and such leftist, Saudi/Wahabi line influenced academics have now infiltrated and taken over practically the entire field of Middle Eastern studies, theirs is the new “received truth” and “the standard view”; the old Communist Party could not have done a more slick job.
So, the majority of students of Middle Eastern studies today are fed a constant diet of Saudi/Wahabi influenced and skewed propaganda by their teachers—a “party line.” If you want to get your PhD thesis approved, you need to have views and do research in areas that such Saudi-influenced academic apparatchiks approve of; you need to parrot the “party line.” Once you have your doctorate and start to look for an academic position, you will be interviewed and vetted by, and the decision to hire you will be made by, a committee made up mainly of such Saudi-influenced academics, and if hired, your entire academic career will be dependent on their approval of what and how you teach, write and speak.
A corollary of Said’s viewpoint is that no one who is not a Muslim from the Middle East can possibly analyze and write about the Middle East in an accurate and objective way, because all non-Muslims have an inherent racist bias. Thus, I would imagine, it would be harder and harder for non-Muslim academics–especially those who do not parrot the “party line”–to get their work published.
