Is There a Future for Middle East Studies? [MESA Bulletin, July 1995]


 

Is There a Future for Middle East Studies?
(1994 Presidential Address) Rashid Khalidi

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, July 1995 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 1995 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

SOME MAY ask why I have chosen this ominous-sounding title. For most of us, the MESA conference is a time for socializing, browsing among the latest books and hearing papers on recent research, generally in that order. It is certainly not a time for serious, introspective, potentially boring questions like this one. In the beautiful environment of this resort, it is even harder to focus on such unpleasant matters. In one of my last acts as President of MESA, however, I have decided to spoil the party, if only for a few minutes.

I want to speak on this subject for two main reasons. The first is that it has become clear in recent years that area studies in general are in serious trouble. This means that study of the Middle East is likely to face difficulties. We who deal with the Middle East have two extra disadvantages which exacerbate the general problem which affects area studies in general. The first is the unpopularity of the region we work on in the general culture: Middle Easterners are the people many Americans love to hate, and they clearly feel that they can do this with impunity. This can be seen from any number of films, songs, cartoons or other products of popular culture which denigrate and insult Middle Easterners. Secondly, with some notable exceptions, we have done a poor job of reaching out from the comfortable confines of the universities and research institutes where most of us are located to try to spread knowledge of the Middle East among the general public. This sort of outreach is the only way to combat the widespread stereotypes which caricature Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Muslims, and Middle Easterners in general, and by and large we are not doing it.

The second reason for my concern is more prosaic and perhaps more subjective, although it is linked in some ways to the first. It is based on my belief that we in Middle East Studies have frequently failed to reach beyond our own area of interest to make connections with those studying other regions, including neighboring ones with characteristics and problems quite similar to those of the Middle East—unlike Central Asia, Africa, South Asia and the Mediterranean. At the same time, many of us have failed to remain in touch with developments within our professional disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. This has meant that in some measure we have become provincial and over-specialized, virtually incapable of speaking to those who do not speak our own narrow technical language. Obviously, to some degree this specialization is unavoidable, and in some respects it is desirable. But recently, when reading applications for a major fellowship competition, I was struck by how much narrower the submissions by applicants in the Middle East field were by comparison with those by applicants from other fields. Indeed, to someone who was not a Middle East expert, much in these proposals was unintelligible, and as a result utterly uninteresting: it spoke to no universal concern, and shared no common language with the non-specialist reader. We are obviously convinced that this is a fascinating field, or we would not have gone into it. And yet we seem in some measure incapable of communicating this fascination to others not already converted to the joys of studying the Middle East.

To get an idea of why area studies are in trouble, let me refer to a recent article by Stanley Heginbotham, Vice President of the Social Science Research Council 1994. He argues that the transition from the Cold War era to a new one will have a profound effect on international scholarship in the United States, since in the past so much of the structure and funding of this scholarship was based directly or indirectly on the requirements of the Cold War. He adds that the implication of these changes will be a de-emphasis on specific areas and countries, and a shift to broader themes and greater sensitivity to context. In particular, he notes, funders are growing dissatisfied with area studies as traditionally defined. Area studies scholars and area studies centers will survive, Heginbotham concludes, but only by focusing less than in the past on in-depth understanding of the culture, history and language of a single area, and more on training those who work within other disciplines to understand how area specifics interact with their own broader concerns.

However one may regard this analysis, it is a cause for worry that the kinds of themes which we can assume will drive funding in the future -- the shift to market economies, the process of democratization, the growth of "civil society," the resurgence of nationalism, national identities and ethnic and religious rivalries -- are all trendy ones. This is not to denigrate such concerns. Indeed, some of my own current research focuses on one of those I just mentioned. It is just that at least two problems can be foreseen if we become even more dependent on this sort of flavor-of-the-month interest on the part of funding agencies. The first is that many whose research interests have no direct relevance to current problems -- those who deal with language, culture, religion, non-modern history and other such topics—will either have trouble obtaining support, or will have to pretend that their work is something that it isn’t in order to get funding. And for those whose research does relate to current issues, this trend has the potential for seriously distorting research priorities. At least during the Cold War, it was possible to reject outright the priorities of the policy-makers, and still find a receptive hearing among foundations and other possible sources of research support. It may be that this will be less possible in the future.

What are other symptoms of the malaise of area studies? A clear one is the stagnation of federal funding for international education generally. The overall federal budget for education has not been rising in recent years, and, indeed, that part of it which we in area studies in the universities see through Title VI and other types of funding for foreign language education and National Resource Centers has been shrinking in real terms. There seems every indication that given the environment which prevails in Washington after the elections, this trend will accelerate. In the private sector, while Ford Foundation support for area studies declined long ago, there are signs today that other foundations which are more recent supporters of this field, such as the Mellon and MacArthur Foundations, while still deeply interested in international studies, are moving away from “area studies, as they are traditionally defined,” to quote a recent letter from the Vice- President of the Mellon Foundation.

Given these facts about money for area studies drying up, and the particular unpopularity of the Middle East in society at large, we are certainly not doing ourselves any favors by being holier-than-thou about outreach to the general community. This attitude is not restricted to the Middle East field. A senior academic in a position of responsibility specializing in an area adjacent to the Middle East at a prestigious institution which shall remain unnamed said at a recent meeting I attended that the only reason we do outreach is because it is a priority in the federal guidelines for National Resource Centers.

This is a short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating point of view, not only because Department of Education officials are perfectly capable of telling when we are faking it as far as outreach is concerned and because this is therefore harmful to our relationship with them. More importantly, it is reminiscent of an earlier era in education, when those in academia could assume that what they did was valued by society, and that society would support them, if not lavishly, then at least comfortably, without their having to justify their existence. If any of you are still in any doubt that these days are gone for good, look around you: except for certain types of professional training, this society does not appear to value education. Look at the products of our public schools, and what they have been taught when they come to us as undergraduates; look at school teachers salaries, or your own salaries, and compare them to the salaries of newly minted MBA s or lawyers; look finally at the financial crisis facing both public and private universities. This is a society which has been disinvesting in education for well over a decade; it is a society which does not find the value of what most of us do in the universities to be self-evident. If we want society to continue to pay for what we do, we have to be much more convincing in arguing publicly about how valuable it is.

Given this situation, how important is it for us to do outreach? I would submit that it is crucial. Students who come to us from high school—and here I am talking of students arriving at both private universities and small and large public ones— have on average no usable knowledge of a foreign language, know little or no geography, and have only the spottiest understanding of history, culture, politics and economics. In this situation, we in area studies or international studies generally are at a disadvantage. Obviously, outreach by itself cannot change the priorities of a nation whose best high schools cannot produce graduates capable of speaking a foreign language passably. I learned this recently when I was a member of a committee which looked at the language qualifications with which freshmen arrive at the University of Chicago. Most of them know nothing useful as far as languages go. Most had one or two years of a European language, which they could not use for any practical purpose. This is not to speak of their ability to use English! Nevertheless, active and committed outreach does produce results, as is shown by follow-up with schools where teacher outreach has been done: more students become interested in languages, international studies and area studies. And since we operate under the particular disadvantages of the hostility to the Middle East in the general culture which I mentioned earlier, we must work all the harder at it: even the prospects of peace between the Arab states and Israel will not suffice to erase this hostility, for although the Arab-Israeli conflict probably contributed to enhancing it, this hostility antedates the Arab-Israeli conflict by centuries.

Let me move on to my second reason for concern regarding the future of Middle East studies, our lack of connections to the study of other regions and the related problem of our lack of involvement with the professional disciplines. There are many benefits to be gained from connections with the study of other regions. Among them is the possibility of learning about sophisticated approaches which may be of benefit to us, such as the Subaltern school and its critics in South Asian historiography, or the mutually beneficial interaction between historians and anthropologists in African studies, or the shared attention to the intertwining between political economy, history and culture in Latin American studies. These are only examples, and more could be offered, such as the interesting way in which questions of gender, or identity or class are being treated in work being done in several other regions. It is my strong impression that connections with other areas would benefit Middle East studies by bringing in some fresh ideas to what remains a rather cloistered preserve and at the same time would help us to understand the universal nature of at least some of the problems we study, which in itself is a benefit in a field which is perhaps too enamored of its own specificity.

As for connections with the disciplines, here there are several grave problems in my opinion, some of which we can little control, and some which we could certainly deal with were we to choose to do so. What we cannot perhaps do anything about is the disturbing tendency of some of the social sciences to ignore area studies in general and Middle East studies in particular in their new appointments and in the way they think of their fields. Some in the social sciences talk disparagingly of area studies as no more than “real estate studies,” and some actively discourage the study of languages by their students, while still others argue that there is a dearth of theoretically interesting work in the Middle East field. Whatever we may think of such attitudes, our options are limited in face of the rejection by some disciplines of the study of the Middle East, unless we can show them that work of interest to the central concerns of these disciplines is being done in the Middle East field.

This brings me to my main point, those things which we do control. Dealing with them will not be an easy matter: it involves seeing what we do as part of the larger enterprise of the humanities and the social sciences, and more specifically as part of the individual disciplines which make them up, not as a special, arcane branch of knowledge known as Middle East studies, or Near East studies, or Oriental studies or whatever. Certainly particular language training is necessary to study the Middle East, and of course this region has a specific cultural and religious and historical make-up. But at base what we are studying is just one branch of human history, or human literature or human sociology, or whatever, and not a discipline in and of itself with its own language and its own rituals. I exaggerate a bit, but sometimes that is what I think I am listening to when we talk to one another professionally.

Let me put the same point differently for greater emphasis. If we do not get out of the habit of seeing ourselves in this way, that is to say as almost a separate discipline, we are fated to go the way of the dodo and the dinosaur. Middle East studies is not a separate discipline: like the term "the Middle East" itself, "Middle East studies" is a recent and artificial construct whose underpinnings are currently slowly eroding for reasons which I have alluded to, and which are beyond our control. Nevertheless, our future lies in being part of the departments of comparative literature, political science, history, or whatever and not in remaining in a Middle Eastern ghetto. It may be argued, with some reasons, that many of these disciplines are constructs as artificial as Middle East studies; but they have either a longer pedigree, or more powerful institutional support, and most of them can legitimately claim to be more universal. That, in any case is where our future lies: in trying, for example, to bring an understanding of a society other than American society into the discipline of sociology as it is taught in this country, or understanding Middle Eastern literatures in terms of other world literatures, or doing whatever we do within the context of the discipline to which we rightly belong.

This is necessary if we want non-specialists to obtain the benefit of what can be learned from studying the Middle East. But it is also necessary to save us from stagnation, provincialism and, ultimately, extinction. The answer to the rhetorical question of my title is therefore ambiguous. If we fail to get out of our rut, fail to address the general public, fail to address other areas, and fail to address our own disciplines, we are doomed to increasing marginalization, and there is no future for Middle East studies. If we fail, our marginalization will spread beyond the current level of policy and public discourse. At that level today, we who actually know something about the Middle East, and have been there, and know the languages, are largely ignored, while ill-informed sensationalists like Steven Emerson and Robert D. Kaplan hog the headlines and grace the podiums of think-tanks and lecture halls. If we fail, our marginalization will go beyond this, and will extend into our own cherished preserve of academia, where old and sometimes distinguished units with names like the Departments of Near East Studies, Oriental Studies, Middle East Languages and Cultures and Near East Languages and Civilizations are being eyed with increasing eagerness by budget-conscious deans wielding large axes and planning big cuts.

I cannot, of course, promise that we will escape the deans with their axes, any more than will our compatriots in the academy facing identical challenges. If, however, we can do all these things, most notably learn to speak the languages of our disciplines, as well as the language of ordinary people, we will at least be able to resist and hopefully to reverse our intellectual marginalization, both within the universities and without.

There are peculiar things happening in some of the disciplines, and heaven knows some of these fads and trends are far better resisted than capitulated to. But there are exciting and revolutionary things happening as well in some disciplines, things which by and large do not penetrate the corridors of our Middle East departments and centers, although many similar units covering other regions have not missed them. In any case, we should be part of the internal discourse within the disciplines whereby these new ideas are resisted or accepted, instead of standing outside, in splendid isolation, turning up our noses at such ideas. In other words, it is time for people studying the Middle East to partake of some of the excitement which characterizes many of their respective disciplines, and to realize that the future of the field is ultimately there.

While nothing is sure in this world, if we do all these things, I would venture to guess that Middle East studies does have a future. In the end, of course, it is up to us, teachers, students and others interested in this field, to determine which way it will go. The future of Middle East studies is in our hands. Let us all hope that we decide wisely what to do with it.

References.
Heginbotham, Stanley J., “Rethinking International Scholarship,” Items 48(2-3): 33-40, 1994.