We all have to lie a little: Middle East vs. Islamic Studies

Imagine using the hadith literature to explain Egypt’s elections, or asking an expert on the Quran to analyze the Syrian civil war.

It is an absurd way to go about understanding the Middle East, but consumers of post-9/11 media in North America and Europe know that this sort of analysis has become commonplace.

In a recent Mada Masr article, Paul Sedra argues that this backward approach toward the Middle East is increasingly being reflected in America’s universities, where job positions in “Islam and Modernity” or joint “Muslim Societies” have become more and more common. This fixation on Islam, he warns, risks reducing complex political, economic, and social phenomena to religion, while simultaneously marginalizing the role of Middle Eastern Christians, Druze, Jews, and atheists, among others.

But as someone whose own degree is from an Islamic studies program (albeit one that long predates 9/11), I worry that Sedra may be overselling his case. To be clear, I share many of his concerns. But I do think that for all its defects, a focus on Islam allows us to formulate questions and carry out analyses that can greatly enrich traditional area studies programs, helping them to overcome some of their weaknesses and answer questions they are ill equipped to pose.

First, the “regions” of area studies departments form noticeable gaps. For example, I can remember being informed by one of my professors (not rudely, but with genuine embarrassment) that my interest in Sudanese Islam put me outside of Middle East studies but not quite within African studies. And she was right – too African for one, too Arab for the other, Sudan is one of those liminal countries (like Mauritania and Azerbaijan) that has essentially been orphaned by the way that area studies programs draw their borders. With no geographic boundaries to police, Islamic studies programs are uniquely well suited to handle these cases, albeit in a way that forecloses some avenues of research even as it opens others.

Second, Islamic studies take globalization seriously in a way that area studies programs typically do not. I do not want to overstate the case here, since I know of many excellent trans-regional projects being produced by Middle East studies scholars. That said, it is not an approach that sits easily within the area studies framework, and this can lead to some bizarre outcomes. For example, this year’s annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association will feature papers on Islamic law in US courts, French multiculturalism and the veil, and Muslims in Interwar Europe. I am not complaining about these contributions – on the contrary, I whole-heartedly support them. But what exactly do they have to do with the Middle East? What does their inclusion suggest, if not a tacit admission that in an age of diaspora, empire, and neoliberalism, the area studies framework faces a significant challenge?

Ultimately, Sedra’s warnings about Islamic studies are not so different from those that the so-called “disciplines” have been leveling against area studies departments for decades, often to devastating effect. According to many political scientists, for example, area studies scholars lack the methodological skill and comparative knowledge needed to substantiate their arguments. They also point out that there is an element of fraud to the MENA specialist’s claims of regional expertise, which is often just code for expertise in one of the Big Four (language and literature, politics, history, anthropology). And they have a point: When was the last time a Middle East Studies department hired an economist? Or a demographer? Or an epidemiologist? If MENA specialists are going to take seriously their mission of regional expertise, why be so exclusionary? For that matter, why house experts in Akkadian and modern Iraqi Judaism in the same department, if not out of an irrational belief in the Middle East’s trans-historical unity?

At its root, I suspect Sedra’s argument is motivated by a deep anxiety with the current climate of Islamophobia, where any analysis that foregrounds Islam risks being co-opted by bigots and demagogues. It is an absolutely valid concern, but it is also a problem to which Middle East studies is equally vulnerable. For instance, focusing on the region to the exclusion of broader trends or comparative casework risks turning, say, the lack of democracy in Saudi Arabia into an Arab problem (i.e. a pathology of Arab culture), as opposed to a feature of many rentier states, including Gabon, Venezuela, and Angola.

The answer to this sort of bad scholarship is good scholarship. Everything else is incidental. Does an Islamic studies framework carry certain risks? Yes, of course. But what is the alternative? The academic division of labor has always depended on a conspiracy of silence. We all have to lie a little, pretend a little, force complex phenomena into rigid and unwieldy categories. In this regard, Middle East studies and Islamic studies have more in common than either may be willing to admit.