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Wednesday, August 25, 2004
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YAHOOS
UD does not stay up nights worrying about anti-Americanism abroad. Polly Toynbee, in The Guardian, wants me to grind my teeth about the "monster" the country has become in "a world that thinks America arrogant, less cultured, a worse place to live than their own countries." She notes that American Studies programs are shutting down in English universities, and suggests that this is because students there don't want to be associated with us. For her part, UD is happy to see American Studies departments shut down, since she can think of many richer academic fields. UD's concern in any case is not so much with international anti-Americanism as with encouraging a certain healthy anti-Americanism at home. UD's love of country is intense (this makes her bizarre among academics), but she thinks Americans should cultivate a contempt for what's contemptible here rather than get defensive about what foreign people think. And along those lines -- UD finds Homeland Security's recent denial of a visa to Professor Tariq Ramadan pretty contemptible. A respected scholar of Islam and the West, whose latest book the conservative historian Daniel Pipes calls "a thoughtful and moderate analysis," Ramadan was about to come to Notre Dame for a three-year appointment when the government decided he was a terror risk. Ramadan is no democrat - French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, debating Ramadan on tv last year, couldn't get him to condemn "lapidation" -- the stoning of adulterous women (though, somewhat confusingly, he did call for a "moratorium" on the practice). Ramadan thinks veiling women is a great idea. In 1993 he tried to censor a play that criticized certain features of Islam. He has written darkly about "French Jewish intellectuals" and their defense of Israel. But he is also (as his debate with Sarkozy suggests) eager to think about ways in which Islam may be assimilated into the modern West, and his scholarship appears respectable. UD thinks it's much more important for American students to be exposed to people like Ramadan, with all of his anti-democratic tendencies, than for them to study their own popular culture. They need to know more about the serious rejection of Western-style modernity than about the often mindless embrace of it. |