Two distinct social contexts are involved in the creation of knowledge about the Middle East in the Western academia – the knowledge about the Middle East (first social setting) should be converted into knowledge which is comprehensible in another social context. Recognizing the political and economic power that has motivated Middle Eastern studies, this project seeks to investigate the intellectual linkages between Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern scholars in the process of the creation and circulation of knowledge. The research question asks whether the field of Middle Eastern studies is clustered based on scholars’ insider/outsider statuses. Assuming that the citation networks area valid representation of the intellectual linkages, I conduct an author co-citation analysis to draw a map of the intellectual structure of the field with a focus on authors’ insider/outsider statuses; the greater the number of co-citations, the stronger the cognitive relationship between two author. I employ Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to study insider/outsider homophily in the co-citation network, and Temporal Exponential Random Graph Models (TERGM) to conduct a longitudinal study of the changes in homophily over the time.

The field of Middle East studies continues to be dominated by a paradigm rooted in West/East comparisons. Despite some progress in the field following the post-colonial criticisms of the last few decades, the comparative paradigm remains evident in the researchers' topic choices. This paper will examine several works of note that have been published in the last few years and which have garnered much scholarly and media attention. It will show how the comparative mindset continues to ask 'what went wrong', extending this question into political, economic, institutional and social studies. The focus will be on the studies by Blaydes and Chaney (2011) and Chaney (2011). Both studies are serious scholarly works of political science, and have received widespread academic and media attention, focusing on 'divergence' between feudal Europe and medieval Islam. It will be shown that a careful study of the history of the period in question seriously challenges the arguments presented by the two papers, and that introducing other factors, including tribal society, produce a richer explanation for the observed phenomena. It will be shown that the studies in themselves are good articulations of political science, but suffer from the inherent limitations of the West/East comparative or divergence models. It will be shown that studies based on comparative or divergence models allows scholarship in the field to substitute broad readings of the region and its history in place of in-depth familiarity with its history, ultimately reinforcing the wider narrative hostile to Islam and the Middle East.

Based on archival research, this paper historicizes the creation of Middle Eastern library collections in the United States. During the mid-twentieth century, a series of paradigm shifts rewrote fundamental assumptions about the nature and purpose of American research libraries. The process began during the Second World War, when the military value of “open-source intelligence” from American research libraries popularized the idea of the library as a weapon of war. As the Cold War intensified, librarians launched unprecedented cooperative ventures to provide information to policymakers and researchers in the burgeoning field of area studies, lavishing attention on long-ignored regions suddenly deemed “critical” to national security. These ill-funded efforts had little effect until they received a boost from American agricultural aid. In 1954, Congress passed Public Law 480, allowing foreign governments to purchase American agricultural commodities in their own currencies in the hope of creating new markets of American goods. In 1958, an amendment allowed the Library of Congress to acquire books with these surplus currencies for a select group of American research libraries. Beginning in 1962, an unprecedented flood of books flowed into the United States. Within ten years, the PL 480 office in Cairo had selected, purchased, and distributed over ninety percent of Arabic-language volumes in American libraries. While these measures have built the most comprehensive Middle East collections in the world, enabling much of the scholarship produced in the United States, preoccupations with actionable scholarship and the national interest privileged the kinds of knowledge valued by the security establishment. Neglecting literature in favor of economics, or medieval philosophy in favor of modern political Islam, national interest challenged scholarly inquiry as the primary motive for selecting library materials. Rather than seeking to reduce inequality or increase access, meanwhile, the program has endowed a few elite American universities with even greater resources. This is particularly apparent on a global scale. Concepts of the library as a national security resource led to the collapse of internationalist visions of librarianship. Today, the largest library collections from the Middle East are concentrated in North America, out of reach of the very people they describe, and reinforcing the dominant position of American scholarship. Thus the flows of grain and books set in motion by Cold War fears reproduced the very inequalities and asymmetrical power systems that such aid and scholarship were supposed to manage.

In her book The Network Inside Out (2000) and her edited volume Documents (2006), anthropologist Annalise Riles introduces a theoretical approach to the aesthetics of institutional artefacts and underscores the important contribution that documents make to the understanding of transnational phenomena. As educational transplants are becoming commonplace, institutional accountability comprises an important cornerstone of contract negotiations. Marilyn Strathern (2000a; 2000b) also writes about the emergence of audit cultures within academia. Universities are implementing this global tool and are being structured in ways that make them “auditable” (e.g. mission statements, research and teaching assessments) and therefore more accountable. The audit process involves continuous performance and quality assessment and requires evidence of the realization of goals. Yet this concept of archiving was conspicuously absent during the period of my doctoral research in Education City in Qatar from 2006-2008. From the Msheireb Project to the British Library Qatar Foundation Partnership geared to digitize archival and manuscript material related to the Gulf, there is a flurry of archival activity currently underway in Qatar. This phenomenon, however, is relatively recent coinciding with the nation’s efforts to transition itself into a knowledge-based economy. The National Archive, the National Library, and the new National Museum - all of which are currently under construction - reflect the urgency and the importance of connecting Qatar to a tangible and documented historic narrative, formerly encapsulated in an oral tradition. The paper will explore the absence and presence of archival documents in Qatari organizations with a particular focus on the institutional artifacts associated with the conception and construction of Education City and its transnational branch campuses. In particular it will examine precedents (or lack of?), the motivations, competing legitimacies and the challenges encountered in the establishment of an archival culture in Qatar. Yet, whose narratives are being put forth and whose perspectives are silenced in this process?

The twenty-first century for the United States has been one defined by the “Global War on Terror” including major combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, both predominantly Muslim states. The signature event initiating this century of war occurred with the attacks of September 11, 2001. This event added first immediacy and then legitimacy to Samuel Huntington’s 1993 “Clash of Civilizations” paradigm which argues that the West are ‘primordially’ different and will inevitably experience a violent clash. The rhetoric of the Bush administration echoed the clash thesis in the speeches immediately following the events of September 2001. A little more than 1000 years earlier a similar event occurred when the Byzantines attacked of Aleppo, the Hamdanid capital of Sayf al-Dawlah in December of 962. The khatib of Sayf al-Dawlah, Ibn Nubatta, delivered a khutba (sermon) entitled “khutba fi thikr al-jihad wa taskin al-nas ladtrab wq’ bihim”, (a sermon mentioning jihad and calming the people when a turmoil was placed upon them). Rhetoric found in this khutba reinforces what must have been seen in the 10th century Levant as civilizations with primordial un-reconcilable differences. The west represented by the Byzantine Empire and Islam represented by Sayf al-Dawlah and his Hamdanid state. In the case of 9/11, the civilizations in conflict, Islam and the West, narrow to al-Qaeda portraying Islam and the United States portraying the West. However, the “Clash” thesis places a barrier to seeing or seeking commonalities, which hinder establishing trusting, equal and open dialogue between groups and peoples who identify with either of these civilizations. The sermon of Ibn Nubatta, the official court khatib (public orator/preacher), emphasizes jihad bil-sayf (jihad by the sword) using graphic language following an attack on the capital of the Hamdanid dynasty. This paper seeks to examine commonalities and use of rhetoric following catastrophic violence involving Islam and the West in ‘demonizing’ the other. This research utilizes textual analysis within the appropriate historical context to the speeches from both events identifying the similarities in how rhetoric and extreme “othering” following tumultuous events perpetuate and legitimize power, authority and war making.