The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays

177 Pages·2008·1.03 MB·English

by  Steven Salaita

The Uncultured Wars

The Uncultured Wars
Arabs, Muslims, and the
Poverty of Liberal Thought
NeW essays
steven salaita
zed books
London & New York
To the unheard victims of altruism
The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty
of Liberal Thought – New Essays was first published in 2008 by
zed books Ltd, 7 Cynthia street, London n1 9jf, uk and
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Copyright © steven salaita 2008
The right of steven salaita to be identified as the author
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Contents
Introduction
1
Anti-Arab racism, American liberals,
and the new civilian terrorists
5
The indispensably expendable
22
I was called up to commit genocide
33
open-mindedness on Independence day
51
Michael Moore does it again
53
v
Ambition, terrorism, and empathy
68
Is Jackass unjustifiable?
86
The perils and profits of doing comparative work
98
What is Michael Lerner really talking about?
117
Immigrants are not homogenous
126
distress and bluster at Columbia; or,
The day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to academe
and promptly emblematized terrorism
130
The zealots of clandestine faith
146
Conclusion
161
vi
acknowledgements
I have been blessed with a set of friends and mentors (usually
both at once) whose support enables me to write in the way
that I do and about the things I examine. This book was written
during a difficult personal time, and it never would have been
finished without my friends/mentors, who continue to love and
support me despite the fact that I never answer the phone.
An effusive metaphorical bear hug, then, to those kind
enough to have offered feedback: Mohammed Abed, an intel-
lectual ally and brilliant moral analyst; evelyn Azeeza Al-
sultany, who is expertly saving Arabs and Muslims from the
drudges of academic colonization; Rima Najjar kapitan, a
dear friend whose dedication to justice has never allowed my
own to lag; and deborah Alkamano, fellow traveler, all-around
inspiration, older sister.
I would also like to thank my wonderful colleagues in the
english department at Virginia Tech, particularly Virginia
vii
The uncultured wars
Fowler, whose reading of this book in manuscript form was
remarkably helpful. My students, both undergraduate and
graduate, have furnished my life with a constant intellectual
richness. I appreciate their astute insights and lively counter-
arguments, which have played a significant role in the way I
have developed the material in this book. ellen Mckinlay’s
constant professionalism is likewise appreciated.
There is no way I can express adequately what I would like
to say to Michael and danya, so I will leave it at this: I owe to
you all the words on these pages. My parents, Nasr and Miriam,
have supported my pursuits and career choices without fail,
and for that, and so many other things, I express to them my
love.
Last and most important, no work of mine could ever be
complete without the encouragement and keen critical eye of
diana, the most intelligent social critic I have yet encountered.
Thank you for this life, a by-product of your ambition.

viii
Introduction
These wars today are brutal, baleful, ubiquitous. They are
rhetorical and military. They are political and cultural.
They are individual and international. They are local and
universal. They are perpetually incongruous. but they have
something in common: they are all uncultured.
An absence of culture, of course, is construed in the Western
imagination as barbarity. This construal is possible through an
attenuated notion of culture as something that refined people
travel to encounter rather than something that is lived as an
unspoken realness in the minutiae of daily life.
To be uncultured these days isn’t merely to be unrefined.
It is to be complicit somehow in the grand topic of our age,
terrorism. Identifying terrorism is the sort of act that alters
jurisprudence and influences policy and so it is necessarily
tendentious. It is also a racialized act. Arabs and Muslims have
1