THE SEPTEMBER 11 terror attacks and the war on terror that followed have the Middle East studies establishment running scared. The recent events put the university scholars who should have been warning us about Islamic terror, and psychoanalyzing Osama bin Laden, on notice that their departments might be more closely scrutinized by the media and the public. Apparently, the ensuing criticism didn’t sit too well.

In The Scandal of Middle East Studies, Stanley Kurtz called the decline of Middle East studies, led by postcolonial theorist Edward Said, “a sobering story of intellectual failure.” American Middle Eastern scholars, he pointed out, “simply refused to study Islamic terrorism” throughout the 1990s. “Instead,” he wrote, “they searched in vain for a Muslim ‘Martin Luther,’ some thinker who might reinterpret the Islamic tradition so as to adapt it to democracy.”