Author: Daniel Pipes
Publication: New York Post
Date: February 24, 2003
'It was quiet in [Cooper Hall] 464
Thursday night," noted the student newspaper, "where [Sameeh] Hammoudeh's
6 p.m. Arabic IV class was scheduled to meet. Two students who hadn't heard
of his arrest came to class, and a substitute was assigned to teach in
Hammoudeh's place."
Hammoudeh missed teaching his Arabic
class last week due to a slight inconvenience: He had just been charged
with racketeering and conspiracy to murder.
In fact, he was one of eight men
indicted at a U.S. District Court in Florida as "material supporters of
a foreign terrorist organization," that organization being Palestinian
Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
It is striking that three of those
eight are academic specialists on Middle Eastern and Islamic subjects.
Their arrests reveal to what extent Middle East studies is a field that
serves as an extension of the region's radicalism. (Other defendants teach
computer engineering, manage a medical clinic, own a small business and
serve as imam in a mosque.)
The three instructors on Middle
East topics all have establishment credentials:
* Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, 45.
Born in the Gaza Strip, he earned a doctorate in economics from the University
of Durham in the United Kingdom.
He arrived in Tampa, Fla., in 1991,
taught Middle East studies as an adjunct professor at the University of
South Florida (USF) and headed the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE),
a think tank dealing with Middle East issues that was affiliated with USF
during the period 1992- 95. He left USF in 1995 and later that year turned
up in Damascus, where he is now secretary-general of PIJ.
* Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi, 50.
Born in Egypt, Nafi has two Ph.D.s and was a researcher at WISE. He was
deported for visa violations in 1996 and went to England where, as an Irish
citizen he lives in Oxfordshire. He teaches at two London institutions,
Birkbeck College of the University of London ("Social and Political Issues
in Islam") and the Muslim College ("State and Society in Islamic History").
Nafi is also associated with the
Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (which in 2000 published his
analysis, "The Rise and Decline of the Arab-Islamic Reform Movement").
He has written for the Virginia-based Middle East Affairs Journal and a
book of his appeared in Arabic in 1999, "Imperialism and Zionism: The Palestinian
Case." (He uses a pseudonym, Ahmad Sadiq, when writing for militant Islamic
journals.)
* Sameeh Hammoudeh, 42. Born in
the West Bank, he worked at the Arab Studies Society in Jerusalem before
reaching America in 1992. He began teaching at USF in 1995. At the time
of his arrest, he lived in the Tampa area, taught Arabic at USF and was
working toward a master's degree in religious studies at that university.
All three alleged terrorists succeeded
in talking the academic talk, fooling nearly everyone. Shallah wrote in
1993, in his capacity as director of WISE, that the organization's long-term
goal is "to contribute to the understanding of the revivalist Islamist
trends, misleadingly labeled 'fundamentalist' in Western and American academic
circles."
Almost any North American academic
specialist on Islam could have written those same sneering and duplicitous
words. Many do.
The three passed for genuine scholars.
Carrie Wickham, a specialist on Egyptian Islam at Emory University, said
she "felt deceived" on learning who Shallah really was and expressed surprise
that "a serious intellectual counterpart" like him could also be a terrorist.
Even after the indictment, Arthur
Lowrie, formerly vice chairman of USF's Committee for Middle Eastern Studies,
praises Shallah for his "good scholarly work." And Gwen Griffith-Dickson,
director of Islamic studies at Birkbeck, describes Nafi as "highly respected,"
lauding him for his efforts "with energy and commitment, to encourage critical
thinking about religious issues and academic balance in his students, and
thus to encourage social responsibility."
That three accused terrorists passed
without suspicion as genuine Middle East studies scholars points to the
crisis in this academic discipline. This academic field is already criticized
for providing refuge to what might be called intellectual terrorists -
scholars known for their extremism, intolerance, and dishonesty. Now we
learn it apparently has been harboring the real thing.
Conclusion: This field must be scrutinized
very closely, especially by the U.S. Congress, which provides vital subsidies
to Middle East studies programs.
- Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org)
is director of the Middle East Forum and author of "Militant Islam Reaches
America."