Inconvenient History
Berman’s book uses the case of Tariq Ramadan to show how intellectuals in both the United States and Europe have gone out of their way to whitewash the ideas of “moderate” Muslims among the intelligentsia. Lynch’s response only proves the point.
To take the clearest example in the Lynch/Berman exchange, regarding Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Berman faults Lynch’s review for minimizing Qaradawi’s anti-semitism by labeling Qaradawi merely as anti-Israel. In fact, Berman notes, “in Qaradawi's televised opinion, Allah inflicted Hitler on the Jews ‘to put them in their place.’ And Qaradawi has called for a renewal of Hitler's efforts: ‘Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.’”
How does Lynch respond? “Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the influential Qatar-based Islamist, exemplifies both our disagreement and its stakes. Indeed, Qaradawi has voiced extremely hostile views of Israel.” Lynch doesn’t claim that the words Berman cited came from someone else, or were mis-translated. But he still can only describe Qaradawi’s statements as “extremely hostile views” toward Israel. How many people who read Lynch’s original Foreign Affairs essay would ever have guessed that the Middle East Studies professor actually meant anti-semitic screeds when he used the politically correct description of “extremely hostile views of Israel”?
Herf, meanwhile, draws from his extraordinary recent book to fault Middle East Studies specialists for paying insufficient attention to how Nazi propaganda influenced Islamist ideology between the 1930s and 1950s. How does Lynch respond? “Ultimately, the historiographic debate is not the point. No matter what lay in the hearts of Haj Amin al-Husseini or Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood -- or in the hearts of the millions of Arabs and Muslims who have mobilized around the issues those two men raised -- those days are long past. Those arguments have little relevance to the more urgent question of how to best grapple with today's multifaceted and rapidly evolving Islam. It is not surprising that few Islamists or Muslims -- or academics, for that matter -- feel the need to return to the Nazi era to understand today's problems.”
Imagine a contemporary observer of American politics suggesting that we need not go back to the battles over Brown or Nixon’s Southern Strategy to understand the dominance of the Republicans in today’s South.
I should note that Lynch isn’t alone in insinuating that historians should refrain from examining events inconvenient to the ideological agenda of the contemporary academic majority. Here’s Ellen Schrecker, from a recent Reviews in American History piece about books on Soviet espionage in the United States: “I am, I must confess, mystified about the persistence of controversy over something as moribund as the Communist Party. It is hard to understand why scholars like Haynes and Klehr and the conservative foundations that back them still pick at the scabs of fifty-year-old struggles.” The world would be so much easier, I suppose, if only Schrecker or like-minded figures focused on picking “at the scabs of fifty-year-old struggles.” Dismissing inconvenient history and employing politically correct euphemisms. The “flight of the intellectuals” indeed.