By Richard Landes

When the Academy Turned Oikophobic.

Of the three major failures of information professionals in the 21st century in dealing with the Caliphator challenge, the earliest to fail, the earliest to be occupied by Jihadi-compliant narratives, was academia.

And not just any field or university, but pretty much the entire range of the humanities and the social “sciences” were transformed, first by post-modernism and the prizing of the “other” — a good approach badly used — and then by post-colonialism, an anti-Western paradigm which provided the perfect medium with which to “westsplain” the Caliphator apocalyptic narrative of world conquest so that Westerners don’t notice the endgame.

Jihadi imperialism became resistance welcomed into the “global progressive left,” and resistance to that imperialism became occupation, the sin of apartheid, the root cause of the conflict between Muslims and infidels.

Edward Said and the Post-Colonial Turn

This process also began in 1400 AH, when Edward Said published Orientalism (1978/1399), a demopath’s delight that mobilized all the progressive villains — invidious, supremacist comparisons, racism, imperialism — to paint an older generation of scholars as hopeless “Orientalists” whose work served the Western imperial cause of asserting power over people of color.

Beneath the veneer of critical theory lay a stark warning:

Do not criticize Arabs, or other non-Westerners, at the risk of being accused of racism.

The arguments developed in Orientalism were then applied to Palestine and then to the defense of the Mullahs in Iran.

People who accurately described Khoumeini’s global ambitions were denounced, not for false information, but for — the word wasn’t yet invented — Islamophobia.

The Collapse of Academic Standards

The wider story of the collapse of higher educational standards in the US is itself an astonishing tale: from peak performance in the 1980s and ’90s to existential peril in the 2020s, in one generation, with the rot beginning at the top, at the elite universities.

What concerns us here is what happened to the knowledge our information professionals provided us with about our self-declared enemy.

Here the story is lamentable.

Already by the end of the 20th century, Middle East studies had been taken over by Saidian acolytes who chased the Orientalists from the field and saw “civil society” spreading everywhere in a world that, completely unbeknownst to them, was about to break down into fitna — civil war — and jihad — conquest.

Ivory Towers on Sand

On October 1, 2001, three weeks after 9/11, Martin Kramer came out with a book that traced the way, by a combination of liberal hopes about a coming civil society and tactful silence about the religious forces, Middle East experts had drawn a dramatically inaccurate picture of the Middle East:

Ivory Towers on Sand

The field was so badly positioned that after 9/11 MESA did not have one paper, much less panel, on jihad and terrorism, despite the ample evidence.

Nor was this by accident: their panel on terrorism pushed the same line as the journalists, discouraging its use as an inappropriately derogatory term.

When a graduate student at Princeton went to his advisor to ask if he could change his thesis research from Rumi to Jihad, he was told not to expect to get a position in academia with that specialty.

And so it went; his career has been in think-tanks.

Orientalism as Cognitive Warfare

Said’s attack may have played out well in the battle of shame-honor cultures — he tried to humiliate Bernard Lewis, and in the eyes of his followers, he did.

But it also played out in the battle for the Caliphate as an indispensable tool for cognitive warfare.

After twenty years of the most successful and worst book ever, Western academics were incapable of meeting the challenge of a religious movement they had systematically ignored.

Resources

Orientalism Controversy, 1978

• Edward Said, Orientalism — the post-colonialist’s bible.

• Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (2007).

• Robert Irving, For Lust of Knowledge: Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006).

• Landes, “Edward Said’s Honor and Shame”, Middle East Quarterly, December 2016.

• “9-11 Twenty-five Years Later: Has America Learned the Right Lessons?”, Tablet Magazine, September 11, 2026.

The State of the Academy, 2001

Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand (October 1, 2001).

A major critic of the monolithic direction of research, in which Islam and matters of shame and honor became background, and events were understood through Western notions of statehood and nationalism that had little purchase — certainly in comparison with Islam and honor — on the culture.

Instead, Western researchers told an optimistic tale of civil society about to flourish throughout the Arab world, a kind of therapeutic history, meant to make the subjects feel better.

Meantime, lest Westerners pursue a knowledge of the “Orient” that might serve imperial goals, the professoriate “cultivated irrelevance.”

9/11 may have given Kramer’s book an immediate relevance, but the forces he identified operating to the detriment of our knowledge of the Muslim world continue to dominate the academy.

Kramer has since revisited his findings in light of later developments:

• “The Shifting Sands of Academe” (200?).

• “Twin Towers and Ivory Towers, 20 Years Later” (2021).

Orientalism and Supremacist Islam

On the impact of Said’s Orientalism in blinding the West where supremacist Islam was concerned, in particular its most dangerous aspects, see:

Landes, “Orientalism as Caliphator Cognitive Warfare: Consequences of Edward Saïd’s Defense of the Orient”, Handbook of Research on Contemporary Approaches to Orientalism in Media and Beyond (2021).