Through the Looking Glass [includes Middle East studies]

How many of you majoring in international affairs or political science have read the Qur’an? Not snippets here and there assigned to you by one of your professors, but the actual book in its entirety. George Washington University bills itself as an academic processing plant for Washington’s next generation of movers and shakers. It’s more likely than not that at least some of you will eventually find yourselves at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. This means wielding statecraft with utmost dexterity. A good education is extremely vital in this regard. How is it then that you can graduate from this university with a degree in International Affairs, including a further specialized sub-degree in Middle Eastern Studies, without ever having so much as picked up and held a translation of the Qur’an?

The way we treat religion in the classroom is appalling. Incurious students revel in their ignorance and pusillanimous professors are all too happy to let sleeping dogs lie. A host of topics deemed too hot to touch by academia’s polite society are cautiously circumvented on tiptoe by these skillful navigators of truth’s glacial front. As we now do with slavery, we will one day look back at this moment in history and bow our heads in shame, slowly shaking our faces side to side in bewilderment, wracking our minds — how could we have let this happen?

Analyzing the Middle East without having read the Qur’an is comparable to analyzing the Soviet Bloc without having read the Communist Manifesto. You can understand what is happening, but not why it’s happening. To be more accurate, you can’t understand the why in its entirety. Like everything, there is a Byzantine web of catalysts at play. Just as forces other than Marxism served to galvanize the Soviet Union – imperial ambition, historical bloodshed, the opportunities presented by a periphery of weakened states, etc. – so too do forces other than Islam impact the Middle East. But I feel not the slightest obligation to mention them here as they remain the total fixation of today’s curriculum to the detrimental exclusion of the religion in question, its details and its bearing on current events.

Why, when speaking of Leon Trotsky, does no one claim he was twisting the words of Karl Marx? Why is he not referred to as a communist fundamentalist? When he spoke of a permanent revolution that would unite the world under a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was easy to find justification in Marxist literature. Only the most blind could not see the connection. But make the same inferences with Islam and you’ll find you’ve miraculously transformed into a raving bigot.

No professor in his right mind would teach that Trotsky was really motivated by secular (Marxism is a faith) reasons completely unrelated to communism. Switch course to Osama bin Laden, however, and all of a sudden it has nothing to do with faith and everything to do with secular grievances over “The West,” Zionism and poverty. Bin Laden “distorts” Islam, he isn’t a true Muslim, the real Islam is a religion of peace – these dishonest tropes can be heard from both professors and students. Do not buy into them. The false axiom that the problems of the Middle East are at their core secular is the result of either deliberate falsehood or the good hearted liberal instinct to view all cultures as equal even if that means whitewashing reality.

Myriad societies and peoples around this globe suffer a fate similar or worse than those living in the Middle East. Secular grievances and historical humiliations abound. Britain conquered and governed the Indian Subcontinent for a century. The Dutch turned Indonesia into its own personal plantation. Spain’s Conquistadors raped and pillaged their way through Mesoamerica. The French brutalize the Central African Republic to this day. More than a million Tibetans have died under Chinese dominance. Why aren’t these disaffected people lining up to martyr themselves in ghastly acts of brutality?

Only a college student or professor could watch a reporter beheaded by robed assassins, read daily reports about bearded assailants blowing themselves up, see pictures from Iran of teenagers hanged for their homosexuality and listen to masked murderers say “We love death more than the infidel loves life,” and then think to him or herself: “Well, what’s the real cause behind all of this?!” It is as if they either do not hear or do not believe the words coming out of the mouths of the very people they profess an expertise in.

It is high time we start discussing religion in the classroom. What are its effects? Is it legitimate? How do the beliefs espoused by these dogmas translate into action in the real world? These are the kinds of questions that need to be confronted head on. There is no room for bashful flirtations with the data. The pursuit of truth cannot and should not be retarded by the desire not to offend the glass jawed.

I should hardly have to remind academia that beliefs matter. But unless you specifically take a religion class, you can graduate with a degree focusing on Middle Eastern affairs and still not have the faintest clue about Islam. Even with the cursory understanding of the religion granted to you by such a class, you still don’t know how the ideological specifics impact reality. It’s as if Islam matters only as a past time that is completely unhinged from the goings on of current events. This is a total disconnect from reality and it has to stop.

See more on this Topic
George Washington University’s Failure to Remove MESA from Its Middle East Studies Program Shows a Continued Tolerance for the Promotion of Terrorism
One Columbia Professor Touted in a Federal Grant Application Gave a Talk Called ‘On Zionism and Jewish Supremacy’
The Department of Education Has Granted Millions of Dollars in Funding to University Programs Taught by Anti-Israel Professors