by Benjamin Baird
Hat tip: Dr. Charles Bensoussan
By assigning texts by Islamist sympathizers who in some cases have embedded with their subjects, Menoret portrays these radicals as harmless souls seeking escape from imperialist oppression through spiritual rebellion.
[NER title is "Brandeis Professor Advises Hanging Out with Terrorists."]
Pascal Menoret
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The Renée and Lester Crown Professor of Modern Middle East Studies, Menoret
specializes in the people and culture of Saudi Arabia, the epicenter of
Wahhabi Islam. Despite the strict and brutal application of Shariah law
in the Arabian peninsula, his scholarship overwhelmingly frames Islamists as the marginalized victims of state oppression.
Menoret teaches five
anthropology courses, two of which are examined below. The syllabi for
"Islamism" (Anthropology 141a) and "Culture and Power in the Middle East
(CPME)" (Anthropology 118b) exemplify his soft approach to Islamism. By
assigning texts by Islamist sympathizers who in some cases have
embedded with their subjects, Menoret portrays these radicals as
harmless souls seeking escape from imperialist oppression through
spiritual rebellion.
The readings for "Islamism" include Francois Burgat's Face to Face with Political Islam,
which attacks the West's "collective ignorance" of Islam and attempts
to hide its religious foundation by cloaking it in Arab nationalism:
"Much more than a hypothetical 'resurgence of the religious,' it should
be reiterated that Islamism is effectively the reincarnation of an older
Arab nationalism, clothed in imagery considered more indigenous."
Throughout the work, Burgat sympathizes with Islamism, which he prefers to call "political Islam," to imply a nonexistent moderation derived from adopting Western political ideas.
Also assigned is Charles Hirschkind's article
"The Ethics of Listening: Cassette-Sermon Audition in Contemporary
Egypt," which recounts the author's acculturation through participation
in a series of sessions with Egyptian Islamists as they listen to
recorded copies of radical sermons. The reader almost forgets that
Hirschkind is in the company of violent extremists, as they smoke
cigarettes, drink tea, and tell jokes, all the while listening to
impassioned exhortations from Islamist tapes banned in many Muslim
countries.
Naturally, Menoret assigns CPME his own 2014 book Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt. The culmination of years of study in Saudi Arabia, Menoret admits
he intended the book to "critique widespread stereotypes on Arab youth
and to show that Islamic groups were not the hotbeds of religious
radicalization." By accompanying young Islamist men as they participate
in exhilarating street races, Menoret echoes the theme so common in his
classroom: Islamists are nothing more than harmless, innocent
reflections of rebellious American youth—a Muslim version of Fast and Furious.
But Menoret's thesis collapses when, after spending time in a rural Saudi village, he is threatened with conversion and later forcibly expelled by conservative tribesmen grown weary of his presence. As a Western tourist, he is warned
that his host's relatives "have weapons, and they have been on the
lookout since this afternoon." Apparently, these harmless Islamists were
not as enamored with his cultural exoticism—a fitting example of the
dangers of jihad tourism.
CPME's readers of Paul Rabinow's book Reflections of Fieldwork in Morocco are instructed—as noted in a review
that quotes the book—to "completely subordinate one's own code of
ethics, conduct, and world view, to 'suspend belief.'" Jettisoning one's
critical faculties is a prescription for being propagandized, a
perversion of higher education. Since Islamist ideals are so radically
incompatible with universally acknowledged standards of human decency,
most students can accept them only by suppressing their reason and
morals.
By assigning one of the most politically divisive apologias for Islamism, Faisal Devji's essay
"The Terrorist as Humanitarian," Menoret teaches students in CPME that
Islamists are simply humanitarians and philanthropists. Devji quotes
approvingly Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and praises their
alleged underlying messages of victimhood and charity in the name of
Islam. He even contends that humanity "lies at the heart of militant
action"—an indefensible claim that whitewashes cold-blooded murder.
Yet
students enrolled in "Islamism" are taught that their preconceived
notions of Islam and Muslim culture are necessarily bigoted. Key among
its assignments is the late Edward Said's Orientalism, the fatally flawed
and regrettably influential work that proclaims a "subtle and
persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their
culture." (In fairness, Menoret assigns Bernard Lewis's comprehensive
critique of Orientalism in CPME, but in this course, Said stands alone.)
Menoret
shares Said's antipathy for Israel, having supported the boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as a professor at New York
University's Abu Dhabi campus by signing
a petition aimed at convincing the University to sever Israeli academic
and business relationships. More broadly, his syllabi indicate his
predisposition for Said's unfounded condemnation of Western scholarship
on the region.
Accordingly, Menoret frames ethical questions in the language of postcolonialism. In the CPME-assigned Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter,
author Tal Asad describes post-WWII anthropologists as "Europeanized
elites" studying the "'traditional' masses in the Third World" as part
of their "bourgeois disciplines."
For
Asad, Western research on the Middle East can only occur within a
dynamic of "power relationships" between the "dominating" Europeans and
the "dominated" non-Europeans. Consequently, he argues that most
traditional scholarship on the region has been conducted "toward
maintaining the structure of power represented by the colonial system."
Menoret's
reliance on postcolonial theory reflects its disproportionate influence
on the field of Middle East studies. Furthermore, he is part of a much
larger coterie of scholars who whitewash Islamism to portray it as
harmless despite all the chaos and violence it has spawned across the
Middle East and in the West. This approach is disarming the West by
blinding it to the enemies of liberal, pluralistic Western culture—a
deadly error we cannot afford to commit.
The Crown Center
for Middle East Studies at Brandeis claims to be "committed to a
balanced and dispassionate approach to the Middle East." Yet, by
"hanging out with Islamists" and demanding his students do the same,
Menoret reveals the cynicism and hollowness at the Crown Center's core.
Benjamin Baird is a graduate of Middle Eastern studies from the American Military University, an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a staff writer for the Conservative Institute. This article was sponsored by Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
Source: http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/17006
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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