Ivory Towers on Sand: the Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America
The author is the editor of Middle East Quarterly, and this book represents his attempt to explain why American academic specialists in Middle or Near Eastern Studies have failed so spectacularly and consistently to provide an analytical framework that is capable of predicting the advent or outcome of even a single event in their chosen field of study. Did you know, for instance, that the Islamic Revolution in Iran would lead to a flowering of democracy throughout the Middle East, or that Islamic "fundamentalism" was dead in the water by 1998? This is just a sample of the highly important information you were missing by not keeping up with the literature. The book traces the history of intellectual development, funding, academic politics, and shifting ideological commitments in the field and how all of these factors affect scholarship. According to Kramer's blog, this book is now required first-year reading for Near Eastern Studies concentrators at Harvard; selected chapters are available online here.