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Is the ‘Orientalist’ past the future of Middle East studies?

‘Is there a future for Middle East studies?’ was the title of Rashid Khalidi’s presidential address to the annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association in 1994. Khalidi’s own answer was that, in order for Middle East studies to have a future, scholars would need to reach beyond their own area of interest to other areas, reach out to the general public via teach-in and outreach activities as well as through the media, and communicate to the rest of their colleagues in the broader social science disciplines (such as political science and economics). Khalidi’s was by no means the only response to this question. Characterising the current state of the field as a ‘crisis’, Jerrold Green argued that ‘some intellectual stock-taking is required’ and that when doing this ‘the conceptual horse should be put in front of the areal [sic] cart so that scholarly investigation is hung on a stronger intellectual need than the mere fact that the region is interesting’. Robert Bates’s suggestion echoed that of Green: area studies specialists should embrace the move towards a disciplinary-orientated view which would amount to scholars gaining new skills in the use of formal theory, statistical methods and mathematics, he argued. In Ivory Towers on Sand: the Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, Martin Kramer presents a critique of Middle East studies that is based less on disciplinary than on political grounds. It is time for Middle East specialists, he argues, to put their house in order and look critically at themselves and drop ‘fashionable’ theo-