[Peace-discuss] Edward Said on Judith Miller

Thu Jul 7 10:32:08 CDT 2005

“Given her willingness to undercut even her friendly
sources, the most interesting question about Miller's
book is why she wrote it at all.” (see third to last
paragraph)

The Nation, August 12, 1996 v263 n5 p28(5) 

God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant
Middle East. (book reviews) Edward W. Said. 

Judith Miller is a New York Times reporter much in
evidence on talk shows and seminars on the Middle
East. She trades in "the Islamic threat"--her
particular mission has been to advance the millennial
thesis that militant Islam is a danger to the West.
The search for a post-Soviet foreign devil has come to
rest, as it did beginning in the eighth century for
European Christendom, on Islam, a religion whose
physical proximity and unstilled challenge to the West
seem as diabolical and violent now as they did then.
Never mind that most Islamic countries today are too
poverty-stricken, tyrannical and hopelessly inept
militarily as well as scientifically to be much of a
threat to anyone except their own citizens; and never
mind that the most powerful of them--like Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan--are totally within
the U.S. orbit. What matters to "experts" like Miller,
Samuel Huntington, Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis,
Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Barry Rubin, plus a
whole battery of Israeli academics, is to make sure
that the "threat" is kept before our eyes, the better
to excoriate Islam for terror, despotism and violence,
while assuring themselves profitable consultancies,
frequent TV appearances and book contracts. The
Islamic threat is made to seem disproportionately
fearsome, lending support to the thesis (which is an
interesting parallel to anti-Semitic paranoia) that
there is a worldwide conspiracy behind every
explosion. 

Political Islam has generally been a failure wherever
it has tried to take state power. Iran is a possible
exception, but neither Sudan, already an Islamic
state, nor Algeria, riven by the contest between
Islamic groups and a brutal soldiery, has done
anything but make itself poorer and more marginal on
the world stage. Lurking beneath the discourse of
Islamic peril in the West is, however, some measure of
truth, which is that appeals to Islam among Muslims
have fueled resistance (in the style of what Eric
Hobsbawm has called primitive, pre-industrial
rebellion) to the Pax Americana-Israelica throughout
the Middle East. Yet neither Hezbollah nor Hamas has
presented a serious obstacle to the ongoing
steamroller of the anything-but-peace process. Most
Arab Muslims today are too discouraged and humiliated,
and also too anesthetized by uncertainty and their
incompetent and crude dictatorships, to support
anything like a vast Islamic campaign against the
West. Besides, the elites are for the most part in
cahoots with the regimes, supporting martial law and
other extralegal measures against "extremists." So
why, then, the accents of alarm and fear in most
discussions of Islam? Of course there have been
suicide bombings and outrageous acts of terrorism, but
have they accomplished anything except to strengthen
the hand of Israel and the United States and their
client regimes in the Muslim world? 
The answer, I think, is that books like Miller's are
symptomatic because they are weapons in the contest to
subordinate, beat down, compel and defeat any Arab or
Muslim resistance to U.S.-Israeli dominance. Moreover,
by surreptitiously justifying a policy of
single-minded obduracy that links Islamism to a
strategically important, oil-rich part of the world,
the anti-Islam campaign virtually eliminates the
possibility of equal dialogue between Islam and the
Arabs, and the West or Israel. To demonize and
dehumanize a whole culture on the ground that it is
(in Lewis's sneering phrase) enraged at modernity is
to turn Muslims into the objects of a therapeutic,
punitive attention. I do not want to be misunderstood
here: The manipulation of Islam, or for that matter
Christianity or Judaism, for retrograde political
purposes is catastrophically bad and must be opposed,
not just in Saudi Arabia, the West Bank and Gaza,
Pakistan, Sudan, Algeria and Tunisia but also in
Israel, among the right-wing Christians in Lebanon
(for whom Miller shows an unseemly sympathy) and
wherever theocratic tendencies appear. And I do not at
all believe that all the ills of Muslim countries are
due to Zionism and imperialism. But this is very far
from saying that Israel and the United States, and
their intellectual flacks, have not played a
combative, even incendiary role in stigmatizing and
heaping invidious abuse on an abstraction called
"Islam," deliberately in order to stir up feelings of
anger and fear about Islam among Americans and
Europeans, who are also enjoined to see in Israel a
secular, liberal alternative. Miller says unctuously
at the beginning of her book that right-wing Judaism
in Israel is "the subject of another book." It is
actually very much part of the book that she has
written, except that she has willfully suppressed it
in order to go after "Islam." 
Writing about any other part of the world, Milla would
be considered woefully unqualified. She tells us that
she has been involved with the Middle East for
twenty-five years, yet she has little knowledge of
either Arabic or Persian. It would be impossible to be
taken seriously as a reporter or expert on Russia,
France, Germany or Latin America, perhaps even China
or Japan, without knowing the requisite languages, but
for "Islam," linguistic knowledge is unnecessary since
what one is dealing with is considered to be a
psychological deformation, not a "real" culture or
religion. 

What of her political and historical information? Each
of the ten country chapters (Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Sudan) begins with an anecdote and moves immediately
to a potted history that reflects not much more than
the work of a name-dropping college sophomore. Cobbled
up out of various, not always reliable authorities
(her pages of footnotes are tainted by her ignorance,
whether because she can only cite the sources she
already knows she wants in English, or because she
quotes only authorities whose views correspond to
hers, thereby closing out an entire library by
Muslims, Arabs and non-Orientalist scholars), these
histories are meant principally to display her command
of the material, but actually expose her lamentable
prejudices and failures of comprehension. In the Saudi
Arabia chapter, for instance, she informs us in a note
that her "favorite" source on the Prophet Mohammed is
the French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson, a redoubtable
Marxist scholar whose biography of the Prophet is
written with a bracing combination of anti-clerical
irony and enormous erudition. What Miller gets from
this in her short summary of Mohammed's life and ideas
is that there is something inherently risible, if not
contemptible, about the man whom Rodinson says was a
combination of Charlemagne and Jesus Christ; for
whereas Rodinson understands what that means, Miller
tells us (irrelevantly) that she is not convinced. For
her, Mohammed is the begetter of an anti-Jewish
religion, one laced with violence and paranoia. She
does not directly quote one Muslim source on Mohammed
just imagine a book published in the United States on
Jesus or Moses that makes no use of a single Christian
or Judaic authority. 
Most of Miller's book is made up not of argument and
ideas but of endless interviews with what seems to be
a slew of pathetic, unconvincing, self-serving
scoundrels and their occasional critics. Once past her
little histories we are adrift in boring, unstructured
meanderings. Here's a typical sentence of
insubstantial generalization: "And Syrians, mindful of
their country's chaotic history" (of what country on
earth is this not also true?) "found the prospect of a
return to anarchy or yet another prolonged, bloody
power struggle--" (is this uniquely true of Syria as a
postcolonial state, or is it true of a hundred others
in Asia, Africa, Latin America?) "and perhaps even the
triumph of militant Islam in the most secular" (with
what thermometer did she get that reading?) "of all
Arab states--alarming." Leave aside the abominable
diction and jaw-shattering jargon of the writing. What
you have is not an idea at all but a series of cliches
mixed with unverifiable assertions that reflect the
"thought" of "Syrians" much less than they do
Miller's. 
Miller gilds her paper-thin descriptions with the
phrase "my friend," which she uses to convince her
reader that she really knows the people and
consequently what she is talking about. I counted 247
uses of the phrase before I stopped about halfway
through the book. This technique produces
extraordinary distortions in the form of long
digressions that testify to an Islamic mind-set, even
as they obscure or ignore more or at least equally
relevant material like local politics, the functioning
of secular institutions and the active intellectual
contest taking place between Islamists and nationalist
opponents. She seems never to have heard of Arkoun, or
Jabri, or Tarabishi, or Adonis, or Hanafi or Djeit,
whose theses are hotly debated all over the Islamic
world. 

This appalling failure of analysis is especially true
in the chapter on Israel (mistitled, since it is all
about Palestine), where she ignores the changes caused
by the intifada and the prolonged effect of the
three-decade Israeli occupation, and conveys no sense
of the abominations wrought on the lives of ordinary
Palestinians by the Oslo accords and Yasir Arafat's
one-man rule. Although Miller is obsessed with Hamas,
she is clearly unable to connect it with the sorry
state of affairs in territories run brutally by Israel
for all these years. She never mentions, for instance,
that the only Palestinian university not established
with Palestinian funds is Gaza's Islamic (Hamas)
University, started by Israel to undermine the P.L.O.
curing the intifada. She records Mohammed's
depredations against the Jews but has little to say
about Israeli beliefs, statements and laws against
"non-Jews," often rabbinically sanctioned practices of
deportation, killing, house demolition, land
confiscation, annexation and what Sara Roy has called
systematic economic dedevelopment. If in her
breathlessly excitable way Miller sprinkles around a
few of these facts, nowhere does she accord them the
weight and influence as causes of Islamist passion
that they undoubtedly have. 

Maddeningly, she informs us of everyone's
religion--such and so is Christian, or Muslim Sunni,
Muslim Shiite, etc. Even so, she is not always
accurate, managing to produce some howlers. She speaks
of Hisham Sharabi as a friend but misidentifies him as
a Christian; he is Sunni Muslim. Badr el Haj is
described as Muslim whereas he is Maronite Christian.
These lapses wouldn't be so bad were she not bent on
revealing her intimacy with so many people. And then
there is her bad faith in not identifying her own
religious background or political predilections. Are
we meant to assume that her religion (which I don't
think is Islam or Hinduism) is irrelevant? 

She is embarrassingly forthcoming, however, about her
reactions to people and power and certain events. She
is "grief-stricken" when King Hussein of Jordan is
diagnosed with cancer, although she scarcely seems to
mind that he runs a police state whose many victims
have been tortured, unfairly imprisoned, done away
with. One realizes of course that what counts here is
her hobnobbing with the little King, but some accurate
sense of the "modern" kingdom he rules would have been
in order. Her eyes "filled with tears--of rage" as she
espies evidence of desecration of a Lebanese Christian
mosaic, but she doesn't bother to mention other
desecrations in Israel--for example, of Muslim
graveyards--and hundreds of exterminated villages in
Syria, Lebanon, Palestine. Her real contempt and
disdain come out in passages like the following, in
which she imputes thoughts and wishes to a
middle-class Syrian woman whose daughter has just
become an Islamist: 

She would never have any of the things a middle-class
Syrian mother yearned for: no grand wedding party and
traditional white dress with diamond tiara for her
daughter, no silver-framed photos of the happy wedding
couple in tuxedo and bridal gown on the coffee table
and fireplace mantel, no belly dancers wriggling on a
stage and champagne that flowed till dawn. Perhaps
Nadine's friends, too, had daughters or sons who had
rejected them, who secretly despised them for the
compromises they had made to win the favor of Assad's
cruel and soulless regime. For if the daughter of such
pillars of the Damascene bourgeoisie could succumb to
the power of Islam, who was immune? 

Such snide accounts trivialize and cheapen the people
whose houses and privacy she has invaded. 

Given her willingness to undercut even her friendly
sources, the most interesting question about Miller's
book is why she wrote it at all. Certainly not out of
affection. Consider, for instance, that she admits she
fears and dislikes Lebanon, hates Syria, laughs at
Libya, dismisses Sudan, feels sorry for and a little
alarmed by Egypt and is repulsed by Saudi Arabia. She
is relentlessly concerned only with the dangers of
organized Islamic militancy, which I would hazard a
guess accounts for less than 5 percent of the
billion-strong Islamic world. She supports the violent
suppression of Islamists (but not torture and other
"illegal means" used in that suppression; she misses
the contradiction in her position), has no qualms
about the absence of democratic practices or legal
procedures in Palestine, Egypt or Jordan so long as
Islamists are the target and, in one especially
nauseating scene, she actually participates in the
prison interrogation of an alleged Muslim terrorist by
Israeli policemen, whose systematic use of torture and
other questionable procedures (undercover
assassinations, middle-of-the-night arrests, house
demolitions) she politely overlooks as she gets to ask
the handcuffed man a few questions of her own. 

Perhaps Miller's most consistent failing as a
journalist is that she only makes connections and
offers analyses of matters that suit her thesis about
the militant, hateful quality of the Arab world. I
have little quarrel with the general view that the
Arab world is in a dreadful state, and have said so
repeatedly for the past three decades. But she barely
registers the existence of a determined anti-Arab and
anti-Islamic U.S. policy. She plays fast and loose
with fact. Take Lebanon: She refers to Bashir
Gemayel's assassination in 1982 and gives the
impression that he was elected by a popular landslide.
She does not even allude to the fact that he was
brought to power while the Israeli army was in West
Beirut, just before the Sabra and Shatila camp
massacres, and that for years, according to Israeli
sources like Uri Lubrani, Gemayel was the Mossad's man
in Lebanon. That he was a self-proclaimed killer and a
thug is also finessed, as is the fact that Lebanon's
current power structure is chock-full of people like
Elie Hobeika, who was charged directly for the camp
massacres. Miller cites instances of Arab
anti-Semitism but doesn't even touch on the matter of
Israeli leaders like Begin, Shamir, Eitan and, more
recently, Ehud Barak (idolized by Amy Wilentz in
TheNew Yorker) referring to Palestinians as two-legged
beasts, grasshoppers, cockroaches and mosquitoes.
These leaders have used planes and tanks to treat
Palestinians accordingly. As for the facts of Israel's
wars against civilians--the protracted, consistent and
systematic campaign against prisoners of war and
refugee camp dwellers, the village destructions and
bombings of hospitals and schools, the deliberate
creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees--all
these are buried in reams of prattle. Miller disdains
facts; she prefers quoting interminable talk as a way
of turning Arabs into deserving victims of Israeli
terror and U.S. support of it. She perfectly
exemplifies The New York Times's current Middle East
coverage, now at its lowest ebb. 
In her lame conclusion Miller admits that her scolding
may have been a little too harsh. She then puts it all
down to her "love" of the region and its people. I
cannot honestly think of a thing that she loves: not
the conformism of Arab society she talks about, or the
ostentatious culinary display she says that the Arabs
confuse with hospitality, or the languages she hasn't
learned, or the people she makes fun of or the history
and culture of a place that to her is one long tale of
unintelligible sound and fury. She cannot enter into
the life of the place, listen to its conversations
directly, read its novels and plays on her own (as
opposed to making friends with their authors), enjoy
the energy and refinements of its social life or see
its landscapes. But this is the price of being a Times
reporter in an age of sullen "expertise" and instant
position-taking. You wouldn't know from Miller's book
that there is any inter-Arab conflict in
interpretations and representations of the Middle East
and Islam and that, given her choice of sources, she
is deeply partisan: an enemy of Arab nationalism,
which she declares dead numerous times in the book; a
supporter of U.S. policy; and a committed foe of any
Palestinian nationalism that doesn't conform to the
bantustans being set up according to the Oslo accords.
Miller, in short, is a shallow, opinionated journalist
whose gigantic book is too long for what it ends up
saying, and far too short on reflection, considered
analysis, structure and facts. Poor Muslims and Arabs
who may have trusted her; they should have known
better than to mistake an insinuated guest for a
friend. 

Edward W. Said's latest book is Peace and Its
Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East
Peace Process (Vintage).

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