Ahlan Wasahlan!

Welcome one and all to my new blog, Al-Merkaz, which means "The Center" in Arabic. I find the title to be appropriate for the intended purpose of the blog - namely, as a compendium for news, history, and analysis on the Middle East. The region, to me, is endlessly fascinating and endlessly obfuscated, particularly since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, called by one scholar as the beginning of "McCarthyism" in Middle East Studies. As one interested in the history of the region, and of its current trends and pathologies, I find it regrettable that this had to occur.

The region has to be open to multiple interpretations and analyses - the Saidian framework accepts but one - namely, any and all scholarship by any Westerner concerning the Middle East, at least before his seminal work, is necessarily racist, colonialist, and imperialist, and therefore should be ignored by any true student of the region. In other words, let's wipe the slate clean and start at Year Zero. To be on point, one must first accept the Saidian lens and only through that lens can one see the truth - without them, after all, you are just a blind supporter of Western imperialism. Actually, it is the Saidian lens through which our vision is blurred. In Orientalism and its sequel, Covering Islam, Said never suggests how exactly the region should be covered. The coverage just sucks, and it needs to change - Said wrote that it was not his intention to give any suggestions, only to criticize. And criticize he did, and criticize his proteges still do - and funnel all of their considerable wrath toward the United States and to Israel. All of the negativity that we have seen in the Arab world is merely the fault of Western colonialism and its outpost, the Zionist state. This is the analysis that are we supposed to applaud with uplifted hearts, and we are to shut our minds, ears, and eyes from any objective truth that might happen to belie it. This is the oversimplified, idiotic version of history that is now so prevalent - and is indicative of the whole post-modern mumbo jumbo that is threatening the very edifice upon which true scholarship stands.

Nearly all undergraduates in the social sciences and/or liberal arts have had some sort of exposure to the work of Edward Said. These very same undergraduates are told to sneer at the work and legacy of the uber-Orientalist (read: racist bastard), Bernard Lewis, and yet have never read a jot or tittle of his work. I know that this was my experience in undergrad. We read Covering Islam, which was terrible, oversimplified, and hypocritical on its face. When I mentioned Bernard Lewis to my professor, his lips curled into a contemptuous smirk. We read Samuel Huntingon's essay "The Clash of Civilizations" only to mock and ridicule it the next day in class. The major complaint by Edward Said in Covering Islam, the work that is really laughable here, is that the West oversimplifies Islam, and talks about "Islam" and judges it without realizing that Islam is not a monolithic block but rather a religion with various interpretations, nuances, etc. Of course, Islam is not monolithic - but neither is the West. So Said can lash out with his poison about how the West perceives Islam, but he can bash the West as one, monolithic, imperialist bloc all he wants. Nothing hypocritical about this, of course.

Edward Said is all too visible because he was actually an expert in the field of comparative literature, and particularly the work of Jane Austen. I am not familiar with his work in this field. However, he has made his major imprint on the fields of Middle Eastern Studies, history, and even philosophy. He is read in a wide-range of studies. His thought has become the thought of modern academia - namely, blame whitey for all the ills of mankind. Analyze the West as a monolithic bloc with a scalpel, but do not feel free to analyze the societies of Arabs, Africans, or Asians, because they are so complex that they cannot really be defined, let alone analyzed. And all of history begins with European colonialism, and all violence stems from their rapacity - forget the slave trade in Africa or the conquest of the Muslim dynasties. Of course the West has done some terrible things - but Westerners are not the only actors in history. This has, of course, extended to the here and now - in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israelis act (evilly, of course) and Palestinians react. This idiotic notion of history has come to poison our outlook on the world, and the way things actually are.

Sorry for the Two-Minute Hate. Had to get it out of my system. Needless to say, I will blog about more interesting stuff in the future.