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Intellectual
Mouth and Immoral Minds
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Fouad
Ajami: Anti-Arab ideologue?
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Positions are taken in whichever
direction and to whatever degree. But it is altogether different to
ideologically and morally convert and re-fabricate your positions
accordingly. To appreciate the conflicting course of your challenger
is a necessity that makes finding a middle ground and a privileged
perspective altogether easier in resolving any conflict
Whether
in the light of an honorable cause or in the shade of a desirable
hit — take your position; just know your moral pay-off. To sell it
all for stardom is too despicable of a deal.
With
all the gray zones that exist between the two poles —
sensationalized by 9/11 and its aftermath, the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq and backstage Sharonian audacity — America and the Muslim
world are at odds. In that, it’s not about your origin,
background, or even creed to have [n]either an innate desire [n]or a
sophisticated viewpoint that allows you to take sides. You can be an
American Jew and take the position of Noam Chomsky for example;
highly critical of American foreign policy worldwide and the blind
favoritism towards Israel, or you can be a Muslim Shi’ite like
Fouad Ajami, and take the opposite course. Nonetheless, we should
remember the respective difference in the degree of hardship
undergone to make it in the American academia when taking either of
those two conflicting positions. And more importantly, we should not
forget the relative advantages and disadvantages of coming from such
backgrounds when taking such positions.
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To
Ajami, it is solely the Arab side that is to be blamed. |
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But
in the case of Fouad Ajami, things went differently. Educated in the
US, Ajami started out as a Palestinian sympathizer and continued his
academic career in one of the most well-known and influential
schools in the field of American foreign policy: John Hopkins.
Although his books are not many, the road was paved for him to
become the needed expert on Arab issues, coming as he did from the
Arab and Muslim worlds. He has been a news consultant at CBS since
the eighties, and has an ever-increasing presence elsewhere, such as
in PBS’s News hour. After 9/11, he and the quintessential
Orientalist Bernard Lewis became the draftsmen and experts of the
Bush administration on the Middle East.
His
scholarship and contributions to the New Republic, Foreign Affairs
and U.S. News and World Report are designed to juxtapose a portrait
of the Arab world, intrinsically creepy, with mists of Gothic
barbarism and a savage, anti-tolerance mentality, which he holds is
solely accountable for the failure between the two camps.
It
is not that being an Arab Muslim should be a hereditary prevention
of self-criticism; it is that, to him, it is solely the Arab side
that is to be blamed, while Israel is nothing but a pretense used by
Arabs to conceal their domestic problems.
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Moral
bankruptcy is a decay that is blind to religion and
ideology. |
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The
articulation of half-ideas and the absurdity of a discourse versed
in events that can be taken two ways is apparently the crux of what
makes Ajami think that he is on the angels’ side. It is Islam and
pan-Arabism and all that stems from them that are behind it all, not
the sociopolitical realities or the historicity of the conflict. So
the Bush administration should do what it thinks is “right”
without worrying about angering allies and Arab sentiments.
Anti-American sentiments from Arabs and Muslims toward the United
States would continue anyway, regardless of what the United States
does — all according to him. So America should not bother at all
with Arab public opinion; a truly intelligent insight of
cross-cultural problem-solving. People in Iraq will be overjoyed
with an American invasion, too. Even watching al-Jazeera is the
raison d'être of Muslim opposition and outrage towards American
foreign policy, not vice versa. How simplistic and right!
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It
is better not to let one’s lips speak, than to please
other’s ears with what they want to hear. |
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Opposing
that self-inflicted negation is a dazzling example — Edward Said.
An Arab Christian who also took the road of scholarship in America,
Said has proven himself to be a prodigy of intellectualism through
his profundity and insightfulness, and is by far the most
respectable pro-Palestinian voice and activist. His work on the
Palestinian-Israeli calamity, the Arab world, and Islam are all well
thought-of scholarly works. Had he taken the road Ajami took, he
would have had triumphs far beyond those Ajami enjoys. Let's see
what Said says about him;
[B]y
the mid-1980s, he was teaching at Johns Hopkins; he'd become a
fervent anti-Arab ideologue and had been taken up by the right-wing
Zionist lobby (he now works for Martin Peretz and Mort Zuckerman)
and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is fond of describing
himself as a non-fiction Naipaul and quotes Conrad while sounding as
hokey as Khalil Gibran. He also has a penchant for catchy
one-liners, ideally suited to television… he has become
influential as a “native informant” - the Arab “expert” is a
rare species on American networks. Ten years ago, he started
deploying “we” as an imperial collectivity which, along with
Israel, never does anything wrong. Arabs are to blame for everything
and therefore deserve “our” contempt and hostility.
Ajami
has always had it in for Iraq. He was an early advocate of the 1991
war and has, I think, deliberately misled the American strategic
mind into believing that “our” power can set things straight.
Dick Cheney quoted him in a major speech last August as saying that
Iraqis would welcome “us” as liberators in “the streets of
Basra” - which still fights on as I write. Like Lewis, Ajami
hasn't been a resident of the Arab world for years.1
Moral
bankruptcy is a decay that is blind to religion and ideology. If
coming from an Arab and Muslim background was supposed to be to the
benefit of Mr. Ajami, he has yet to take advantage of that benefit,
rather than to exchange a long road of nobility for a cheap shortcut
to self-indulgent celebrity.
One
can customize the scope of his morality and intellect to correspond
to any agenda, be it American or Arab. What is at stake is not
intellectual honesty alone, nor it is the assumed higher moral
grounds that the US foreign policy architects can lean on by finding
an Arab Muslim scholar on their side. Rather, it is the hushing-up
of the voice of a well-educated conscience coupled with the
vocalization of a decomposed morality that otherwise could have
helped pave the way for a better understanding between the two
camps, and consequently, for a better world. It is better not to let
one’s lips speak, than to please other’s ears with what they
want to hear.
Tarek
A. Ghanem is a staff writer and editor of the Contemporary
Issues page of IslamOnline. He is specialized in comparative
politics and contemporary Islam. You can reach him at t.ghanem@islam-online.net
1-
London Book Review, Apr 17, 2003
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