Raymond Ibrahim on Academic Myths About Islam
Raymond Ibrahim, the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum, Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, spoke to a February 11 Middle East Forum Webinar (video) hosted by Winfield Myers, director of the Middle East Forum's Campus Watch project, about the reasons for the academic myths that "proliferate in university life about Islam and the Middle East."
Ibrahim began with an overview of "the history of Islam, vis a vis the West" which was one of "continuous warfare from the seventh century on." According to Ibrahim, most people are unaware that "basically, three quarters of what was originally Christian territory was conquered and absorbed by Islam." Ibrahim focused on today's cultural atmosphere "where history isn't considered too important" in influencing the historical revisionism seen among academics. In an environment of "fake news," much of the media manipulates historical facts to suit their own agendas. Similarly, in academia, graduate students feel pressured to present Islam's history of warfare with the West in a "new interpretation ... that [goes] hand in hand with political culture since the sixties."
 Edward Said's Orientalism claimed Western scholars saw the East as barbaric. |
Ibrahim discussed the Palestinian Arab academic, Edward Said – a literary critic and "not a historian," – whose 1978 book Orientalism criticized "European academics who studied the Orient." Said claimed that Western scholars presented the "East as barbaric and ... primitive, especially Islam," and were therefore "not objective." At the time, the culture was ripe for Said's politicization of historical fact, including tarring the term "Orientalist" as a pejorative. Today, this trend has reached a zenith in the current climate among leftist academics and their fellow apologists. Western history is reframed largely as "racist ... imperialistic ... [and] xenophobic," while Islam's wars of conquest, which consisted of "nonstop violence," are minimized or justified. The culmination of the mythmaking has produced the "new" version of history in which Islam was "peaceful [and] progressive," while Western Europe was the "violent" aggressor.
Islamic conquests that began with "the Battle of Yarmuk in the year 636," and were halted temporarily in the Siege of Vienna in 1683, resumed their advance that included attacks by Barbary pirates against the "infidels" on American ships in 1785. It then hit a pause that was an "aberration," according to Ibrahim. "The Islamic world wane[d]" after Napoleon's entry into Egypt in 1799, an event marked "the [beginning of the] golden age for the Christian minorities of the colonial era." Ibrahim said that jihadists like ISIS bolster their anti-Western rhetoric with quotes hearkening back to Islamic leaders of the distant past who fought against the "Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire" only a few years after the death of Muhammad, Islam's prophet and military leader. Ibrahim said, "So yes, to me, it's definitely a continuum ... even if [Islam] took one or two centuries" off.
Ibrahim experienced firsthand the consequences of questioning academia's mythmaking orthodoxy. After lecturing about his book on Islamic warfare at the U.S. Army War College, Ibrahim was attacked for disagreeing with those who charge that Islamic wars were entirely the fault of the West. Ibrahim said the excuse academics assign to "Western machinations" is used as a rationalization "other than radical Islam to explain ... what we're seeing today [that] is an identical duplication of ... [what] Islam was doing ... for over a millennium." Myers referred to the plethora of centers devoted to the "propaganda of Islamophobia ... tied to intersectionality ... [as] part of the ... leftist push to silence critics." Ibrahim noted how the opposition, unwilling and unable to debate, is silenced when they are challenged with "objective truth."
Mythmaking academics blame the West for the continuation of Islamic warfare against it. |
Mythmaking academics resort to "anything and everything but Islam," instead blaming the victim for the continuation of Islamic warfare against the West, charging that it is either "colonialism ... [or] Israel and Zionism" that is at fault. To shore up their position, academics in many Middle East Studies departments are "obsessed" with Israel, Palestine, and the boycott, sanction, and divestment (BDS) movement targeting Israel. Ibrahim questioned the preoccupation of "non-Muslim, non-Arab, regular academics" who handily avoid discussing the "pandemic of Christian persecution by Muslim nations." He said, a reported "380 million Christians around the world are being persecuted ... eighty percent of [them] ... in the Islamic world."
Middle Eastern Christians, already a "second class minority ... ostracized and disenfranchised," are loathe to express any support for Israel because of their own fears of being "on a thin line" in Muslim host nations where Israel is considered "the arch enemy." Ibrahim found that the paucity of Western Christians advocating for their oppressed co-religionists in the Middle East is a result of the "ignorance of the media," which avoids reporting on the plight of Christians so as not to portray Islam in a "negative light."
Ibrahim: the "linchpin" uniting leftists and Islamists is their "hatred for ... Western tradition." |
Despite the "ecumenical talk" of interfaith efforts between religions, Ibrahim said that the Quran "appropriate[s]" the biblical figures of the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament by "recast[ing]" them to "[give] credibility to Islam [while] denigrat[ing] Christianity and Judaism." Ultimately, the Quranic text "creates obstacles" and divisions with its narrative of Islamic superiority. Ibrahim also cited the "Red-Green Alliance" where "hardcore leftists ... [are] embedded with Islamist types" because of both groups' animosity and hatred for "the West's background [of] Judeo-Christian tradition [and] ethical system." By applying the adage "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," the alliance between leftists and Islamists is "ironic because the left is antithetical to Islam in many social mores." Leftists who advocate for homosexual rights ally with radical Muslims "who would behead them in a heartbeat." Ibrahim believes the "linchpin" uniting these diverse groups is "hatred for ... Western tradition."
Ibrahim remarked on the glaring irony that academics are "supposed to be the ones who believe in free thought [and] inquiry," but now act as self-appointed guardians of censorship. He bemoaned the mythmaking "spirit ... in the academic world ... shutting down critics of Islamism." Far from being an isolated case in academia, Ibrahim said, "you're seeing it in so many different ways ... in American culture today."
Marilyn Stern is communications coordinator at the Middle East Forum.
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What's a little war?
By Ryan Saavedra
Read the Letter Biden’s SCOTUS Pick Wrote Calling a Journalist ‘Irredeemably Evil’
By Kevin Daley
While clerking for a federal judge, Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson denounced a Boston Herald columnist as "irredeemably evil" for criticizing unrestricted immigration.
Jackson wrote a letter to the editor of the Herald in response to a piece from columnist Don Feder that noted that the population of white people in America could decrease steeply as a result of open borders immigration policy. The text of both 1997 writings were obtained by the Free Beacon through a news archive.
"To my mind, he's also like the liberal's purported view of American history—irredeemably evil," Jackson wrote of Feder, whose column also attacked black civic leaders such as Louis Farrakhan. The judge disclosed the letter in a questionnaire for the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Law clerks seldom share political opinions in a public forum during their terms of service. Clerkships run one or two years in the federal courts and are highly coveted by law students. Clerks are expected to reflect their judge's neutrality in public and avoid overt political participation or expression to protect public perception of the courts as nonpolitical entities. Today, clerks often go dark on social media—or delete online accounts altogether—for the extent of their clerkships.
"The Code of Judicial Conduct that prohibits federal judges from engaging in any activity that would undermine their independence or impartiality likewise binds their law clerks, so it is troubling that Jackson would write such a letter while serving as a clerk," said Carrie Severino, the president of the Judicial Crisis Network. "It shows a lack of awareness on her part regarding the role of the judiciary."
The Herald letter is a mixed blessing for Republicans as they prepare for Jackson's confirmation hearings. Probing the judge's departure from normal law clerk practices is a legitimate avenue for lawmakers to assess her impartiality. But the Herald exchange broaches deep racial divides that Republican lawmakers might be wary of approaching, particularly since Democrats would like nothing more than to paint Judiciary Committee Republicans as racially obtuse throughout the proceedings.
Feder's column argued that race remains salient in America because of "race hustlers intent on exploitation" and Democratic coalition politics. He wrote the column to defend himself from allegations of racism arising from a prior piece, in which he expressed concern that an open border immigration policy will diminish the population of white people in America.
"I'd sleep a bit easier if Louis Farrakhan wasn't the most admired man in the black community," Feder wrote. "I wish minority voters didn't feel compelled to elect a gonif (the late Harold Washington), a total incompetent (David Dinkins), or a coke-head (Marion Barry) to high public office because he's a brother."
Jackson specifically takes issue in her letter with Feder for "denouncing black voters for selecting incompetent, incorrigible, or inebriated leaders."
"For someone who claims not to consider certain groups morally or intellectually inferior to his own," Jackson writes, "Don Feder spends much of his column spewing out disagreeable facts about the high-crime rate in the black community and denouncing black voters for selecting incompetent, incorrigible, or inebriated leaders," Jackson wrote.
"By his own definition, Feder is a racist," she added before calling him "irredeemably evil."
Efforts to reach Feder were unsuccessful. He left the Herald staff in June 2002 after almost two decades with the paper.
Though the fact of Jackson's intervention is striking, asking questions about it could be risky for the GOP.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) who chairs the Judiciary Committee, is already signaling he will hold Republican feet to the fire on tone. He accused Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) of disrespecting the nominee after Hawley aired concerns about Jackson's record on child pornography cases.
"I'm troubled by it because it's so outrageous," Durbin said in an interview with Politico. "It really tests the committee as to whether we're going to be respectful in the way we treat this nominee."
The fact that Jackson disclosed the piece to the committee is likely to assuage serious concern. In the past, omitting pertinent items has been a larger problem for judicial nominees than the substance of what they did or wrote.
The Trump administration had to withdraw one of its nominees for the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Ryan Bounds, after a disclosure dustup. As an undergraduate student at Stanford in the early 1990s, Bounds wrote opinion columns for the school's conservative paper that he failed to include on the standard Senate questionnaire because he did not understand the form to call for pieces he wrote as a college student.
Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups accused Bounds of concealing the writings when they came to light. Republican senators Tim Scott (S.C.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.) were troubled at both the substance of the writings and the manner in which they came to light, so they joined with Democrats to sink the nomination.
Jackson's confirmation hearing begins Monday with opening remarks and continues Tuesday and Wednesday with questions from lawmakers.
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