Middle Eastern Studies Quotes

“Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.”
― A Memoir by Young, Initiation

“One does not have to be without sin to castigate someone else for being a rapist or murderer" (386).”
― Kenneth Pollack, Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy

“Qatar & The West (The Sonnet)

All of a sudden the entire west is peeved at Qatar,
Because only the west has exclusive rights to exposure.
All of a sudden we care about the migrant workers,
The Afghans, Palestinians and Kashmiris no longer matter.
Human rights issue here is, we don't care about human rights,
We only care about filling the air with hypocrisy and mania.
Our poster boy just dumped half his new workforce as garbage,
We buy Oscar, ditch Batgirl, and we diss Qatar for buying FIFA!
We are just peeved that the Arabs are showing off for a change,
Sure it's unacceptable, since showing off is a western tradition.
Yes, it's true that the Middle East reeks with human rights issues,
But it is also teeming with passion beyond western comprehension.
If you really care about human rights stick to a cause for more than a fortnight.
Otherwise keep your trap shut, lest you open and be proved a privileged white.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Syria has long been on the ‘axis of evil’ list and a pretext to intervene militarily in that country, without causing public outrage like that caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, had to be manufactured. If a reason for military action in Syria didn’t exist, it had to be invented.”
― Louis Yako

“Hiba S. is one of the pioneer Iraqi women academics and authors in the field of media and journalism, currently exiled in Amman. During a visit to her office in summer 2014, Hiba shared that the early days of the occupation in 2003 were the most difficult she had ever experienced. She recollected:
‘I was sitting in my garden smoking when I suddenly saw a huge American tank driving through the street. I saw a Black soldier on the top of the tank. He looked at me and did the victory sign with his fingers. Had I had a pistol in my hand, I would have immediately shot myself in the head right then and there. The pain I felt upon seeing that image is indescribable. I felt as though all the years we had spent building our country, educating our students to make them better humans were gone with the wind.’
Hiba’s description carries strong feelings of loss, defeat, and humiliation. Also significant in her narrative is that the first American soldier she encountered in post-invasion Iraq was a Black soldier making the victory sign. This is perhaps one of the most ironic and paradoxical images of the occupation. A Black soldier from a historically and consistently oppressed group in American society, who, one might imagine had no choice but to join the military, coming to Iraq and making the victory sign to a humiliated Iraqi academic whose country was ravaged by war. In a way, this image is worthy of a long pause. It is an encounter of two oppressed and defeated groups of people—Iraqis and African Americans meeting as enemies in a warzone. But, if one digs deeper, are these people really 'enemies' or allies struggling against the same oppressors? Do the real enemies ever come to the battlefield? Or do they hide behind closed doors planning wars and invasions while sending other 'oppressed' and 'diverse' faces to the battlefield to fight wars on their behalf?
Hiba then recalled the early months of the occupation at the University of Baghdad where she taught. She noted that the first thing the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) tried to do was to change the curriculum Iraqi academics had designed, taught, and improved over the decades. While the Americans succeeded in doing this at the primary and high school levels, Hiba believed that they did not succeed as much at the university level. Iraqi professors knew better than to allow the 'Americanization of the curriculum' to take place. 'We knew the materials we were teaching were excellent even compared to international standards,' she said. 'They [the occupiers] tried to immediately inject subjects like "democracy" and "human rights" as if we Iraqis didn’t know what these concepts meant.' It is clear from Hiba’s testimony, also articulated by several other interviewees, that the Iraqi education system was one of the occupying forces’ earliest targets in their desire to reshape and restructure Iraqi society and peoples’ collective consciousness.”
― Louis Yako, Bullets in Envelopes: Iraqi Academics in Exile