Scholarship about Islam & Daniel Pipes

Society Religion & Philosophy
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Interesting article, whats surprising is why isn’t there a similair number of Muslim scholars on other faiths?

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_5-7-2003_pg3_3
Akbar S Ahmed

One of the challenges facing America after Sept. 11 is how to deal with Islam. There is a need to understand the Muslim community, its history and its traditions. Who is better placed to act as a bridge than the scholar of Islam

When the White House recently nominated Daniel Pipes for an appointment at the United States Institute of Peace, the media controversy was not entirely unexpected. Scholarship about Islam in America has become controversial. It touches on questions of freedom of expression, respect for religious sentiment, racial profiling and deep, innate prejudices. As Pipes is a well-known scholar in the field, his appointment was bound to raise discussion and debate.

Muslim groups expressed outrage, accusing Pipes of being Islamophobic. They argued his appointment would further isolate and alienate the Muslim community and therefore was not a good political move.

The Muslim community has felt under siege since Sept. 11, 2001. The enormity of the crime on that day created a double outrage for the community: its beloved nation — the United States — had been attacked; and worse, the attackers were Muslim. The media depiction of all Muslims as extremists and terrorists further angered the community. They expected the scholars of Islam to explain to Americans this is not the case and that is why they were particularly disappointed in scholars like Pipes.

After his appointment, I was asked to comment. I had met Pipes only once, briefly, when we appeared together on a panel, so I went back to his work and the issues it raises. I discovered he has a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has spent several years in Egypt and can read Arabic. He has taught Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago and Harvard. He is the author of 11 books and is director of the Middle East Forum. He has published in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs and New Republic. Newspapers like The New York Times and Los Angeles Times publish him regularly.

After Sept. 11, Pipes became a familiar face as a commentator. He appeared not only on American television but also on Arabic television, including Al-Jazeera. He became an important voice to those parts of the media who tended to depict Islam in a negative light.

There is much to debate about the ideas of Pipes. But whether we agree or disagree with him, we need to draw general principles from an examination of his case. There is a need to examine closely — and coolly — the work of those who are accused of being anti-Islamic scholars such as Pipes. Is Pipes really anti-Islamic?

“Not being a Muslim,” Pipes has written, “I by definition do not believe in the mission of the Prophet Muhammad [pbuh]; but I have enormous respect for the faith of those who do. I note how deeply rewarding Muslims find Islam as well as the extraordinary inner strength it imbues them with. Having studied the history and civilization of the classical period, I am vividly aware of the great Muslim cultural achievements of roughly a millennium ago.”

Muslims need to accept that scholars must have space to develop their own ideas about Islam even if they are not in accord with traditional Muslim thinking. After all, the Muslim community in the United States is living in a society that cherishes freedom of expression. Responding to criticism or implied criticism with threats is not a convincing way in which to present a counter-argument.

The Salman Rushdie controversy should have taught everyone some lessons. The discussion about Islam should include the most sensitive areas of Muslim tradition — including the holy Book and the holy Prophet [pbuh]. There is a great need for Muslims to explain the core features of Islam calmly and convincingly to America. In the face of the media attacks on precisely these central features of Islam, the need is even more urgent.

Pipes has been highly critical of what he calls “Islamists,” whom he equates to the men of violence in Islam: “Islamism is a global affliction whose victims count peoples of all religions; Islamism is perhaps the most vibrant and coherent ideological movement in the world today; it threatens us all. Moderate Muslims and non-Muslims must cooperate to battle this scourge.”

Pipes does not see himself as a critic of the Muslim community. Indeed, he believes that if his words are heeded they may help in improving relations: “The Islamists’ approach is deeply antithetical to the American way, and so I predict that as they and their work became better known, major problems will follow, and these will first of all affect the American Muslim population. My urgent hope is that moderate Muslims get involved in communal affairs and take interest in these matters, and so to redeem the Muslim institutions from the extremists’ control.”

One of the challenges facing America after Sept. 11 is how to deal with Islam. There is a need to understand the Muslim community, its history and its traditions. Who is better placed to act as a bridge than the scholar of Islam? What better challenge for Daniel Pipes than to assist in creating genuine dialogue with the Muslim community?

Professor Akbar S Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, D.C., is the author most recently of “Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World,” published by Polity Press

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A related article :

‘Unholy alliances’

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/645/intrvw.htm
John Esposito acknowledges the fact that in the US he is “a controversial figure”. One of America’s foremost authorities and interpreters of Islam, as the Wall Street Journal once described him, Esposito is also considered to be one of the few voices of dissent within American academia. His opponents charge that he is an “apologist for Islam and soft on Muslims” and that he and his colleagues have misinformed the US administration about the true dangers of Islamist groups, contending that they underestimated the so-called Islamic threat.

Esposito dismisses such charges as “ideologically-inspired”. He defines himself as simply “a scholar of Islam”. For him it is almost an article of faith that there is a war being fought by some ideologues to win “the hearts and minds” of the American people. “In the old days, being controversial was fine because we had a more open society. Now we don’t, so we get nailed,” said 63- year-old Esposito in an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly during a brief stop in Cairo last week.

Over the past three decades, and long before the “green menace” replaced the red one, Esposito has been carving a niche for himself as an authority on matters Islamic. He is founding director of the reputable Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, a centre established in 1993 to address the issue of dialogue between Islam and the West. Esposito, once chair of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESNA), has written numerous articles, books and essays about Muslim politics, beliefs and cultures. His books are usually described as jargon-free and provide “a lucid introduction to truths on Islam which must become common knowledge”, as Karen Armstrong, the famous theologian once said of his latest book Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam.

Dressed in a simple T-shirt and shorts, Esposito spoke to the Weekly of another United States, “an America which promises freedom of speech, equality and multiple positions of thought”. He acknowledges that both the Arab world and the United States have been experiencing tense times since 9/11. Almost two years after the tragic events, Esposito and other like-minded scholars both in the US and the Arab world are still reeling from the fall-out of those events. “We still bounce between a feeling of being confused and depressed,” said Esposito. “It – 9/11 – was not just a passing war or some small situation. This was – in some ways – a major moment in modern history which was global in its proportions.”

That fateful day in September 2001 has indeed become the yardstick by which relations between the United States and the Arab and Muslim world are being measured. Esposito, however, is more alarmed by the forces that were unleashed as a result of the events. In particular, he is concerned about what he refers to as “an unholy alliance” between the extremist trend of the Christian right and a group of neo-conservatives that is exercising influence on the policies of the administration of US President George W Bush. Though he believes that those forces represent a minority that is even shunned within the ranks of conservative Republicans, they retain considerable sway over the administration simply because they are vocal, organised and have a propaganda machine of the highest order. “They use very positive notions like supporting democracy to promote their views, but I am often suspicious of what their ultimate agenda is. The endgame is to redraw the map of the Middle East, but the question is: to whose benefit and what would it look like?”

Such questioning of the real intentions and motivations of the neo-con cabal has made Esposito a target of a smear campaign led by such academics as Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes and Stanley Kurtz. In an article called “Exposing Esposito”, Kurtz who is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, accused Esposito of misleading Bill Clinton’s administration as to the real dangers posed by Osama Bin Laden. He argued that “Esposito’s bad advice may have had a great deal to do with the state department’s foolish refusal to look at critical intelligence on Osama Bin Laden’s activities.” In response, Esposito dismissed the very notion that he had exercised such influence over the Clinton administration and ridiculed charges of misleading the administration on the hard-core fringe Islamist groups. He noted that his advice had indeed been sought by Washington, but during the administration of the senior George Bush and during President Clinton’s first term when the US administration was trying to develop a policy on Islam. “There was an acknowledgment then among some administration members that the US is not only biased in its approach towards the Middle East but that it had a real problem with Islam.” Some of Esposito’s ideas about the need to address the root causes of 9/ 11 found their way into the administration’s thinking. This raised the ire of his opponents and the battle erupted.

Last week witnessed yet another episode of the conflict when Esposito’s opponents extended their battle to “silence him” to yet another venue: the US House of Representatives. They charged that federally financed international studies programmes at American colleges and universities are biased against US foreign policy and should be regulated. Last Thursday Kurtz told the education subcommittee in the House of Representatives that such centres “were not only ideologically biased but sought to undermine American foreign policy by actively discouraging working for the federal government.”

Esposito explained that this was part of the efforts exerted since 9/11 by those ideologues to discredit American experts on the Middle East simply because the vast majority of US experts has taken a very balanced approach to the study of the region. Esposito, however, does not think that the Congressional hearing will lead to federal aid being cut off. "I don’t think it [the hearing] will ultimately go anywhere, and it is unlikely that they will cut the aid. The problem is that people do not address the question of who are the people behind this? What about Kramer who has Israeli citizenship and spent his career at Tel Aviv University running the Moshe Dayan Centre? That is fine with me. But if you look at the track record of the likes of Kramer and Pipes, do they ever criticise the Sharon government? I would say that they are not arguing for what is in the best interests of America. They are, rather, arguing for what is in the best interests of Israel.

“After 9/11 there were growing fears that people would talk about the root causes and that they would focus on the Arab-Israeli crisis and if they focussed on it some Americans would want to address this imbalanced approach. These are ideologues who have an agenda and can no longer claim to be the academic experts they were trained to be. They are in fact stocking horses for the neo-cons agenda.”

Esposito believes that he and others represent an alternative school of thought within American academia – one that represents what America is truly about which is free speech, open dialogue, and a multiplicity of views. "Kramer and others began to say in public that there was now a second school of thought in American academia, which they claim that – whether rightly or wrongly – I represent, among others. What they want to do is to shut that out. But if you look at some of their criticism, when they quote my writings, they quote me out of context. They are too well educated and too trained to be that stupid. By the way, that is what members of the radical Christian right do when they quote the Qur’an out of context. They would quote the first part of the verse and not the second or they will take a verse like ‘slay the unbelievers wherever you find them’ and say that the unbelievers are the Jews and the Christians rather than the mushrekeen [polytheists].

“This is done deliberately and if someone did this to them in reverse – if he was to quote, for example, the Old Testament or the New Testament out of context – he would be accused of being anti-Christian, or anti-Jewish or the routine charge of anti-Semitic.”

Despite such attacks to discredit American scholarship on the Middle East, Esposito defended the Bush administration. Esposito spoke of the many differences and divergent voices that exist within the current administration. He once wrote that the policies of the Bush administration which tend to support dictatorial regimes in the region are more likely to radicalise the mainstream in the Arab world. Yet he does not believe that the Bush administration is purposefully provoking radicalism in the region. "I have been critical of elements of the Bush administration, I would not deny the fact that President Bush is doing the best job that he is capable of doing. Though I don’t think that this job has been done all that well on a number of issues, however, I don’t see him sitting there wanting to provoke extremism.

“I think there is a genuine concern about addressing it. I think he gets the wrong advice or follows the wrong advice too often. I regard those who give the advice as more part of the problem than part of the solution. But the onus is on this administration if it will do what no administration has done in the past be it Republican, Democrat or conservative and that is to strike a balanced policy when it comes to dealing with Arabs and Israelis.” Is it possible? “I think it is possible. Is it probable? I don’t think so, but I hope I will be proven wrong.”

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[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Zakk: *
**Such questioning of the real intentions and motivations of the neo-con cabal has made Esposito a target of a smear campaign led by such academics as Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes and Stanley Kurtz.*
[/QUOTE]

Interesting choice of these two articles.

i have read through, a little bit, of Daniel Pipes's website and a few of his writings (not many); it's very possible that i read them wrongly or misinterpreted them - i don't know why, to myself he doesn't seem to be genuinely interested in building bridges of communication between the "West" and Muslims. Dunno - i could be wrong, of course - it's probably because i'm biased and most of his stuff seems to focus upon the usual stereotypes of Islam/Muslims. To be honest, some of the stuff on his website reads as though he is writing for a racist, skinhead group:~/

It's strange to read that Daniel Pipes, of all scholars, has been critical of John Esposito - Esposito's one of the least-biased authors regarding Islam. He has done so much to raise accurate awareness of Islam, especially subsequent to the events on 11 September.

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IMO, Pipes should have been the last choice, if a choice at all. He claims repeatedly that in his view there is a difference between Political-Radical Islam that he criticizes and Islam as a spiritual doctrine the he appreciates and respects. None of his writings ever make this distinction, even non-Muslims intellectuals have tried to take him up on that.

He is also the originator for Campus Watch, supposedly a web-site that lists Anti-Semite professors in US universities, but critics say lists academics who are pro-Palestinian.

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**

Thanks, Ahmadjee.

i wasn’t aware of his involvement with Campus Watch - but it makes sense now. Many of his writings on his website have focused on the Palestine/Israel, and larger Middle East, issues.