In his seminal work on the rise and fall of paradigms, Structures of the Scientific Experience, Thomas Kuhn suggests that at all times while a body of ideas is ascendant in a culture, there is another opposing, though seemingly weak and marginal, body of ideas outflanking and challenging its legitimacy, till at an opportune moment in a society’s responsiveness, the upstart topples and replaces it. The moment the new paradigm is in place, however, the cycle begins again with a new body of ideas assaulting it.
So long as there are social systems around, with human beings there evolving, growing and giving voice to their collectivity, we are told by Kuhn, this dialectical process is a given.
Sure, there’s a bit of Hegel here, a bit of Darwin, a bit of Yin-Yang and, well, a bit of common sense, but there you have it — we live in a world where ideas, like life forms, compete for their hegemonic place in the sun.
This process is as applicable in the world of social sciences — perhaps more so there than elsewhere — as it is in the hard sciences, and that’s why there is something stirring these days in the world of Middle Eastern studies in the United States.
Maybe we expect a lot more from those lost souls engaged in area studies than we should. Look at how well over a decade ago we felt bad for American “Soviet experts,” those fellows who had devoted a large chunk of their lives to studying political, cultural and economic realities in the Soviet Union, not only because they were now out of a job but also because they were being “dissed” right left and center for their failure to anticipate the downfall. No expertise in the field of area studies these days is more in demand than that focused on our own part of the world. But with that has come an internal debate, most particularly after Sept. 11, initiated by Young Turks at Middle Eastern studies departments and think tanks who question their community’s track record, over the years, in making sense of the region. In this ambiance of self-criticism, the entire discipline is having its feet held to the fire for misunderstanding and even misrepresenting the Middle East as a whole — for getting it all wrong, as it were.
In the interest of balance, here’s an engaging portrait of Middle Eastern specialists, whose oracular pronouncements are avidly read by foreign-policy intellectuals and decision-makers in government circles: They are a civilized lot, really, intellectually astute, soft-spoken, nattily attired in corduroy suits (pipes are optional) and, above all, not given to bellicosity in debate. Their worst heated exchanges are often entre nous and confined to print in scholarly journals or to civil encounters at academic conferences held on a campus somewhere where papers are delivered to polite applause.
One extreme view holds that misrepresentation of the Middle East derives from the way specialists have, consciously or not, become too “sympathetic” to Muslims and Arabs. In a recent expression of this view, Martin Kramer wrote an animated, though highly incendiary, polemic that charged the field with ideological bias, which ignited a lively debate that continues to resonate to this day. His paper was titled “Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America,” and was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, though before Sept. 11.
Kramer claimed that his colleagues have “found potential for democratization where it does not exist” in the Arab world, and that for years scholars have chased that mirage because they were in effect chasing whatever “the latest theoretical fad” was knocking around at the time, regardless of its relevance to the objective realities in the region, rendering their findings of little value to “those responsible for American policy in the region.”
The devil with those responsible for American foreign policy, writes Steve Heydemann in the current July issue of Journal of Democracy. “That research has an obligation to serve foreign policy goals,” he says “is a dubious proposition.”
Heydemann asserts that far from coddling up to the region, most scholars engaged in Middle Eastern studies have objectively addressed the most salient issues afflicting the region, including “failed liberalization” and the “reversal of reform,” and were unstinting in researching questions relating to why “authoritarianism in the Middle East persisted despite the presence of virtually every factor that has been used to explain its collapse elsewhere, from failures in development to defeats in war.”
In other words, important questions — such as those attempting to deal with why the use of coercion did not keep authoritarian regimes alive in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America but it did so in the Middle East — are well-presented in Middle Eastern studies.
Heydemann’s defense of his discipline notwithstanding, it is clear that the field is far from being free of flaws or undeserving of criticism. As far back as 1976, a major volume, The Study of the Middle East (with a long and unwieldy subtitle that I’ll spare you here), edited by Leonard Binder, attempted a major audit of the field by assessing its success in understanding the dynamics of political, social and economic life in the Middle East. (With one or two exceptions, the conclusion of the contributors was not altogether the two thumbs up one would have expected.)
Today, the debate appears to center not only on whether the field is overly theoretical and conceptual and less practical and objective, but on integrity and methodology.
Why, asks the Egyptian-American scholar Ibrahim Karawan, in the same issue of Journal of Democracy, should Middle Eastern studies suffer “from an excessive preoccupation with the United States” and its policies toward the region? And he takes issue with his colleagues’ penchant for, as he calls it, “essentialism” of Islam in the scholarly discourse, where, say, egregious acts committed by individual Arabs are examined to see where they fit there. “I find arguments about whether this behavior or attitude belongs to or does not belong to the essence of Islam to be beside the point, and I am frankly surprised that so many able people have devoted so much time and spilled so much ink in hashing and rehashing them.
What practitioners in the field are saying, in effect, is that the traditional way of looking at the Arab world in general and Islam in particular no longer cuts it.
Mortals like us should have a say in this too: Should “prediction” of future events in the region, for example, constitute an important task of Middle Eastern as well as other regional studies? Clearly not.
Unless Middle Eastern experts have crystal balls, they should know better than to stake their academic reputations on predicting the course of these events. The fragile nature of human conduct in any society, in any part of the world, surely is not only determined by an interaction of an infinite number of forces, beyond any scholar’s ability to foresee, but the logic of that conduct stands, truly, at the intersection of several disciplines, such as psychology, anthropology, theology, linguistics, and indeed even cultural expressions like mythology, literature, art, dance, music and the like. Political science alone, with its exclusive emphasis on politics and economics, in other words, is way too one-dimensional an approach.
And Marxist theoreticians, especially those hailing from our own region, with their esoteric conceptualization of Arab society through the prism of “dialectical materialism,” have failed miserably over the years to coherently understand the subject, analytically and predictively. Have you not read that dialectical materialism hocus-pocus and found it, as I have, not much different from mysticism, a discipline that begins in mist and ends in schism? Thanks, but no thanks, there’s a lot of that going around in the Arab world already.
The traditional paradigm in Middle Eastern studies, whose ascendancy began to be challenged as far back as the late 1970s by the likes of Edward Said in Orientalism and is today being outflanked by the likes of John L. Esposito in Unholy War, may very well, I say, be toppled and supplanted by a new, more creative and humane one in the near future.
Were he with us today, Kuhn will nod.
