Academic Middle East Scholars Spent Two Decades Making Themselves Irrelevant

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, journalists, policymakers, and ordinary Americans turned to the university to seek information about the region, and the religion, with which their country had become deeply engaged. That same year, Martin Kramer argued in his book Ivory Towers in the Sand that the entire field of Middle East studies “consistently missed the most important developments in the region” and, worse still, that its practitioners rarely acknowledged their mistakes, but instead “disregarded or distorted the evidence” when it didn’t conform to their understandings. Twenty years later, academia hasn’t changed much. But something else has: