I would like to thank the MESA Secretariat for spending more lavishly on travel than the Democratic Party was willing to do thirty years ago so that I could fly this time!

The 1968 Democratic National Convention was a hard lesson for me in American politics. But, at least I wasn’t alone in my reactions to the Convention and to the first Mayor Daly’s treatment of the thousands who came to protest the escalating War in Vietnam.

A year earlier, as a result of the June 1967 War, I had had an even more difficult political lesson -- the lesson of what it is like to stand apart from a commonly held political position.

I grew up in Washington in an atmosphere of some privilege. I cannot claim any discrimination against me in my youth (or for that matter as an adult) owing to my being an Arab-American. Sure, there was the usual ribbing in school, but I was blessed with a sharp tongue which was my best defensive weapon.

June 1967 was different. I was about to graduate from high school. I remember driving around downtown Washington and seeing the large pro-Israeli demonstrations. I looked for some kind of Arab counter-demonstration, but I didn’t see one. The jokes of my classmates for the first time became painful. I remember one which I can almost laugh at now, but couldn’t then: "How many gears does an Arab tank have? Just one, Reverse!"

I was the Senior invited to speak at commencement that June. My audience included a good many of Washington’s power elite, the parents of my classmates. I had written and rehearsed my speech well in advance, and quite suddenly the opportunity to incorporate my personal thoughts on the alarming events in the Middle East presented itself. I tossed and turned all night, but my talk remained unchanged, full of the normal platitudes that are the stuff of commencement speeches.

One of the results of my political awakening in 1967 and 1968, and of my failure to speak up at graduation, was new interest in my origins. My maternal grandfather had been one of the first Arab professors at the American University of Beirut. I visited the AUB as a young boy and recall my grandfather dressed in his summer uniform -- a white linen suit and a pith helmet -- proudly leading me by the hand across that gorgeous campus. In winter, he wore a dark suit and a red fez, and he looked to me more like a Shriner than a professor.

In any case, I thought what better way to explore my roots than to spend my junior year at the AUB, which had educated so many members of my family and where my mother had once taught as well.

What immediately impressed me when I arrived in 1969 was the cosmopolitanism of the AUB: more than 50 nationalities, every religious community and sect imaginable, students and faculty from all over the world. What also impressed me was the excitement of politics. AUB had everything our campuses had back home, but the stakes seemed higher, student involvement went deeper, and the crises motivating students seemed closer, more real.

Yet, there was still a margin for play and experimentation. The nephew of a pro-Western Gulf amir could participate in anti-American demonstrations and throw stones at the American embassy from the tennis courts down by the women’s dormitories. His fiancée, who was also a member of the royal family and our classmate, gathered up the stones in her skirts and carried them to him. He didn’t have a strong arm and his stones fell short of the Embassy windows; but they did more damage, because they landed instead on the Lebanese security forces assigned to protect the Embassy. The Lebanese student leader of that same demonstration one year later was pursuing his MBA at the Harvard Business School.

Political life on campus was extraordinary and becoming extreme. The humiliation of 1967 had brought the Palestine Liberation Organization to the center of campus politics. The right wing Lebanese league associated with the Phalangists was equally active, though clearly a minority on campus.

But, politics was hardly limited to conflicts between Arab students. One of the biggest confrontations came when the Armenian students besieged the Turkish students who just happened to be celebrating the beginning of "Turkish Culture Week" on April 24th, the very day Armenians commemorate the massacres of World War I. Other Middle Eastern students were also politically active, though they had to be more cautious than the Arab students because they might lose their A.I.D. scholarships and be sent home. And then there was the highly visible contingent of Americans, mainly junior-year-abroad students from the Great Lakes Colleges and from the University of California system, who brought their own forms of protest and dissent from their embroiled campuses.

Politics wasn’t everything; there was also fashion. AUB students sported all the latest fashions from Europe and America, but also from India and West Africa. Students from the Gulf had seasonal wardrobe allowances tacked on to their government scholarships. I had a Lebanese friend whose rock album collection put WABC in New York to shame. When students weren’t in class, or haranguing each other at Speaker’s Corner, or demonstrating, they were holding Be-ins, with folks music and poetry readings. I felt right at home. The AUB was an American institution, and it was the sixties there, as it was in the States.

Looking back though, I see Beirut on the brink: bourgeois excess and entitlement mixed with the politics of liberation and identity. What chiefly impresses me now is not the atmosphere of strife, experimentation, and, yes, indulgence. What impresses me now are the remarkable teachers and scholars at the AUB who set me (and many others) on the road of studying the Middle East. They are emblematic of a generation, a place, and a time.

I want to exercise my historian’s license by defining my subject as I see fit. I have decided to recall a number of these remarkable teachers and to describe just some of the things they taught me and others -- lessons learned on the spot as well as lessons which took years to absorb. "Lessons from the Eastern Shore."

These teachers -- and I will talk about five of them -- have several things in common. They are all men, because in those not very distant days most university professors were men, much more so than today in any case. They belong roughly to the same generation in the Arab world, and today they are either recently retired or nearing retirement. All got their advanced training in the West. All became scholars of the Middle East. All at one time or another also taught in the United States. And two are even members of MESA. I hope my talk will cause the other three to join up.

These teachers have at least one other thing in common. Each took at times unorthodox positions and used unorthodox teaching methods. For one thing, none of them claimed to be "objective" or suggested that they were providing a balanced view of their subject, and in this way they were refreshingly candid, more so than I had been used to in classrooms back home. For another, all were in different ways "politically incorrect" for the times.

My effort at reconstructing my classroom experiences with these five teachers is based in part on my memory of them and in part on the volumes of notes I took in their courses. I confess to being an inveterate note-taker on practically everything. In fact, I only stopped taking notes altogether when I joined my university’s administration and learned the hard way that in personnel matters American lawyers can and will subpoena your notes, and use them against you!

I took Professor Yusuf Ibish’s course "Modern Islamic Political Institutions" in the fall of 1969. He preferred to teach mornings and then enjoy long lunches with leading intellectuals from all over the region across the street from the campus at Faysal’s Restaurant.

Ibish’s father was at one time the largest landowner of Damascus, and his maternal grandfather was Amir al-Hajj. One of his most fascinating lectures was on the organization of the Pilgrimage, and how before railroad and air travel Damascus was transformed annually, its population, economy, and cultural life swelling during the hajj season. He had an insider’s knowledge of the subject.

As an AUB undergraduate after World War II, Ibish, I am told, lived the high life, only to face a rude awakening at the end of the 1950s. The Syrian land reforms dramatically reduced his family’s wealth, driving him down into the middle class, so much so that he eventually ended up renting from my family in Beirut.

He still managed to get to Harvard where he studied with Gibb. His course was the Ibish version of how Muslim intellectuals and the Muslim popular classes confronted change from the beginnings of Islam. Hardly a man of the people, Yusuf Ibish nevertheless provided a people’s history, an Arab Muslim people’s history, through his systematic lectures.

When we reached the present, he spoke of a profound crisis that pulled the Arabs in two contradictory directions. The first pull was toward radical, secular authoritarian regimes that emerged out of the military. He argued that the difference between Middle Eastern military regimes in 1969 and those in the past was that the modern military was able to extend its power into the very institutions and sectors of society that had once been autonomous and that had once acted as a counter-balance to the military. The second pull was towards what he called "tentative movements" to rebuild autonomous social organizations on Islamic principles.

It is amazing to me, looking back, that Ibish was talking in 1969 about two concepts -- civil society and Islamism -- that have since become central to the study of the Middle East. Furthermore, he predicted that during the next three decades these Islamic movements would challenge Middle Eastern political establishments, producing explosive conflicts that would only deepen malaise across the region. And so they have.

My own strongly secular upbringing made me recoil from much of what Yusuf Ibish said thirty years ago, but I now realize how well he had divined the future, even if that future was not one I cared for. He offered important lessons that I wish I had absorbed then. The one advantage of being an historian, however, is that it is never too late to learn such lessons.

Hanna Batatu drove a truck for his family’s rug business in small town Connecticut after leaving Palestine and before studying at Georgetown and Harvard. If Yusuf Ibish -- patrician that he is -- had his sources come to him, Batatu was the opposite: he went out to his sources. Who else but Batatu could have managed to get himself into Iraqi prisons to interview Communists and other dissidents?

But even Batatu could miss an opportunity to uncover a new source. On the eve of the Iraqi revolution a soon-to-be famous military officer was Batatu’s next door neighbor in Baghdad and used to pass right by Batatu’s breakfast table: his name? `Abd al-Karim Qasim.

I took Batatu’s "Middle Eastern Governments" course in the fall of 1969. At every third class meeting he placed a chair in the front of the room and he called on a student, without warning, to sit in it facing the rest of the 100 students in the class. Then he asked that student, seated up front facing the rest of the class, about the weekly readings, which included narrative histories of Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. He began with rather simple questions and worked up to ruthless probing. If a student hesitated, even for an instant, Batatu immediately turned to the rest of the class. Invariably, some eager beaver would proffer a better answer, and the student on trial up at the front of the class would be embarrassed, maybe humiliated.

I recall a Princeton student who always got his hand into the air first and who always seemed to have the right answer. My course notes have scribbled in the margin: "Avoid Princeton for graduate school!"

By the latter part of the semester, Batatu’s unusual, even threatening pedagogical style eventually got me and my classmates to take the weekly assignments seriously and to learn what it means to read closely. We began to understand that God and the Devil are in the details. He showed us that historians can operate at different levels of analysis, and that one should never assume that narrative does not require rigorous analysis, for the very writing of good narrative demands a careful sifting of evidence which is, itself, a crucial analytic exercise. This lesson is one I am always impressing upon my MIT undergraduates who find history, indeed the humanities in general, much too untidy for their taste, and bereft of the elegant theories and verifiable data that grace the sciences.

I have a story to relate of a somewhat more personal nature which is indicative of the kind of teacher Batatu was and of the role of authority in the classroom. He invited several prominent political leaders to speak in our class. One was Anwar al-Khatib, the last mayor of pre-1967 Arab Jerusalem.

Khatib talked about the rise of the Palestinian Resistance. He spoke English, but somewhat haltingly, which confused some American students who left class with the distinct impression that the PLO was falling apart. I found this most unfortunate, for by then I believed that the Resistance was the future. And so I complained to Professor Batatu and urged him to invite someone else to the class to set the record straight. He gently responded that this was his class and that he decided whom to invite. I simply wouldn’t back off, and I pressed him harder. When I did so, he looked at me sternly and said: "Who are you to tell me how to run my class? Are you a member of the New Left in America? Because if you are, shouldn’t you be taking your politics to the streets rather than bringing them to the classroom?"

At one of the last sessions of the course, Batatu invited Professor Yusif Sayigh, who gave a fine lecture on the economics of the Arab-Israeli conflict and who discussed the PLO’s future in optimistic terms. I couldn’t contain myself. Batatu had taken my advice; my powers of persuasion clearly had worked.

After class, I thanked him profusely for accepting my recommendation. All he said was, "you flatter yourself." Suddenly, I realized that my earlier intervention had nothing whatsoever to do with Professor Sayigh’s appearance. I walked away with my tail between my legs, but also with a much clearer sense about why final authority in the classroom belongs to the teacher and not the student.

In 1978, Batatu’s The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq was published. 1978 was a very good year for landmark books on the Middle East; Edward Said’s Orientalism also appeared that year. I wonder if there’s been a better year since?

While Hanna Batatu’s approach to the study of the Middle East was formed by Toqueville, Marx, and the history of the Russian Revolution, especially Trotsky’s grand narrative, Samir Khalaf’s approach was rooted in Parsonian sociology. We are each, to a considerable degree, products of our generation and the trends that dominated it, and many in Samir Khalaf’s generation absorbed the dominant themes and methods in American social science of the post-World War II era. And one can see these influences in his first book on prostitution in Beirut and in his valuable essays on Lebanese clientelism and Lebanese exceptionalism.

Khalaf hails from the Lebanese mountain resort of `Aley, on the Beirut-Damascus Road, and he grew up in Ras Beirut around the American University. In his course, "Contemporary Arab Society," he spoke with such relish of `Aley and Ras Beirut, that his students playfully added a qualifier to his course title: "Contemporary Arab Society: From `Aley to Ras Beirut."

Khalaf and his identical twin graduated from the AUB in the mid-1950s and then went off to Princeton for their graduate studies. If the American missionaries had model students in mind they must have been the Khalaf twins: bright, decent, handsome, and athletic.

American students flocked to Samir Khalaf because he cared about them in ways few other Arab professors did. He didn’t prefer Americans to his own, but he enjoyed them in his classes mainly because of their willingness to speak up and provoke discussion, and not worry too much about being right or wrong. Oxford dons have observed this same refreshing characteristic in their American students.

Khalaf’s devotion to his American students also has another explanation: he knew they would eventually go home, and he wanted to send them home with a deep and abiding sympathy for Lebanon and the region. He understood how much the Arabs needed help in improving their image in the States, especially after Israel became America’s darling in the wake of June 1967.

The course readings in "Contemporary Arab Society" included Almond, Binder, Eisenstadt, and Parsons. While these texts were hardly the kind to keep you on the edge of your chair, Khalaf managed to bring them to life by showing where the ideas in them were applicable to our understanding of Arab society, and where they weren’t.

Samir Khalaf’s unabashed liberalism quite suddenly became unfashionable amidst the radicalization taking place on the AUB campus and all around it. It was hard, almost impossible, to be a liberal in those years, but Khalaf stubbornly held his position, and he encouraged students to do the same. He led by example.

One memorable example of his liberalism-in-action was that he invited Sadiq Jalal al-`Azm -- the philosopher and critic -- to lecture in his classroom. In 1968, Sadiq al-`Azm published in Arabic, Self-Criticism After the Defeat (Naqd al-Dhati ba`d al-Hazima), which Malcolm Kerr called "the most scathing of all indictments of Arab society and culture." And in 1969, he published A Critique of Religious Thinking (Naqd al-Fikr al-Dini), a book which so exercised the Mufti of Lebanon that he actually got `Azm jailed briefly in Beirut. Even before these events, Sadiq `Azm had run afoul of some of the most powerful conservative AUB faculty, and they helped to get him dismissed from his teaching post. He was banned from lecturing on the campus, and for a while even from entering it.

Samir Khalaf, liberal professor, someone whom I and other students thought was too much of a fence-straddler, it turns out was incensed by the official banning and the unofficial ostracism of `Azm. He and al-`Azm weren’t particularly close. They didn’t agree on much. But Khalaf saw in `Azm’s treatment a dangerous precedent. So he defied the wishes of his senior colleagues by becoming the first professor to invite `Azm to return to lecture at the AUB.

Sadiq al-`Azm gave a fascinating lecture, exquisitely countering the criticisms of his opponents while castigating the university and everyone to his Right, including, wouldn’t you know, his host. The class applauded `Azm’s assault. Still, when the dust had settled, and we understood the full import of Samir Khalaf’s invitation, a number of us made sure to tell him how much we admired what he had done. His simple act of defiance was an easy lesson to absorb, and I and other students did so in real time. It is also about as important a lesson as one can learn in the academy. It is why tenure was introduced into our universities in the first place.

Kamal Salibi is best known for his interpretive, provocative histories of Lebanon and the wider Middle East. Not so long ago, he told me that I was doubly in debt to him, and when I asked him why, he said "because not only was I your teacher, but my grandfather converted your grandfather to Protestantism, and so where would you and your family be without the divine intervention of the Salibis?" Latter day Crusaders those Salibis!

In recent years, I’ve enjoyed seeing him. He’s a delightful raconteur, and always good for a glass of whiskey and a cigar. But, when I first met him in 1970, he was "Public Enemy Number 1," at least with the pack I used to run with. He was the intellectual guru of the rightist Lebanese student league on campus. And so when I appeared in his course on "The Arab East, 1516-1920," I expected that I would be getting the Phalangist version of history, and that Mount Lebanon would be the center-piece of the story of the Arab East.

Salibi did have a distinctive slant to his version of Arab history, but I found the course full of eye-opening comparisons that I had not anticipated. Most important for me, he explained why Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian Christians embraced Arabism. Unlike other Christians in the Ottoman Empire, they had no distinct homeland of their own, and no distinct language or culture that differentiated them from the majority Arab Muslim communities. He acknowledged that even the Maronite stronghold in Mount Lebanon proved insufficient for such a purpose and that in the nineteenth century the Maronites were obliged to make compromises with the Druzes. The lack of cultural differentiation and the need for local political alliances gave the Christians a certain indigenous authenticity that I had not appreciated before. Perhaps you will understand why a young, staunchly secular Arab-American who was raised a Protestant and who was now searching for his roots might find Salibi’s explanation very reassuring.

Actually, my most valuable experience with Salibi occurred outside the classroom. I started visiting Syria at this time, and on one such trip during Spring break, I ran into him in central Syria. When I saw him walking around first in squares and then in circles, all the while scribbling notes to himself, I thought he must be loony. What could he be up to? And what was he doing in Syria in the first place? I didn’t expect someone with his reputed political views to be traveling there, not in its most radical era when Salah Jadid and the neo-Ba`thists were running the country. At first I stayed at a safe distance because I thought that Syrian Intelligence had to be following him.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I went up to ask him what he was doing. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. His response was simple and to the point, and it is one that has remained with me all these years. He said that he could not write history without first imagining how the land he was writing about looked. He said that he was preparing a book on Syria in classical Islamic times and that he needed to get a feel for the countryside and the towns and the distances between places, and to establish some reasonable metrics. This is how he spent his vacations, walking the land. The desire to see and touch the land, to walk all over it, to imagine how it might have been, and thus to render the past somehow tactile, is the most important lesson I took away from Kamal Salibi. I have tried to apply it to my own scholarship, but never with his imagination or success.

As for Syrian Intelligence, had I been less naive I might have figured out that if they were following anyone back then it was probably me, and not Professor Salibi.

To many, Walid Khalidi is a caricature of the Oxford don that he once was: Articulate, erudite, and somewhat eccentric, which in America translates as "absent-minded." How many people have come up to me over the years to ask: "Can this man really be a Palestinian? He seems so British, so Oxonian, so aristocratic." My response is always: "Well, he is an Oxonian and he is aristocratic, and I can assure you that every day Walid Khalidi wakes up a Palestinian."

I did not know much about Khalidi when I signed up for his seminar, "The Military in Arab Politics and Society." I did not know that his father had been one of Palestine’s leading educators or that his wife was the sister of a Lebanese Prime Minister. And I did not know that he had resigned his teaching post at Oxford in 1956 to protest the British invasion of Suez. But, by the time the seminar had ended, I felt that I had been present at every major political event in the Arab world since 1948. Khalidi always seemed to have been in the right place at the right time, and he related his memories with great immediacy.

In his seminar I was way out of my depth. The class was filled with the smartest and most politically engaged students at AUB. Khalidi’s own bearing and seriousness of purpose made me a bit uncomfortable. I once reminded him, later on, that I had been his student. He politely said he had remembered me, but I knew he hadn’t, even though my bumbling seminar presentation on the Free Officers Movement in Egypt must have caused him to regret the day he left Oxford.

There was a British graduate student in the seminar that spring who had taken his first degree in Oxford, and he spoke with considerable authority. He was always fastidiously dressed, but maintained what seemed to me a silly anachronism for 1970: he wore an ascot. But then so did Professor Khalidi! The Britisher wasn’t much liked by the other students in the seminar because he was a stark "realist" in international relations theory terms, and he never let us forget it.

When it came time for our classmate, fresh from field work in Jordan, to present his paper, he offered a taxonomy of the Palestinian Resistance in Jordan. He concluded -- and this was daring in the spring of 1970 -- that should the PLO try to unseat the Monarchy, the Palestinians would be in for a very rude awakening. He predicted that the Jordanian Army would defeat the Palestinian forces and cause irreparable damage to their movement in Jordan. He even added that the Resistance would not be able to count on Syrian support.

Well the nerve; the class erupted! Several students denounced his conclusions as outrageous, findings that had no foundation in reality. The Britisher held his own in the heated debate, so well in fact that a Palestinian student leader turned in frustration to Professor Khalidi and asked: "Sir, isn’t he simply wrong? Isn’t his evidence weak and therefore aren’t his conclusions suspect?" To this Professor Khalidi calmly replied: "My own investigation into the matter suggests that we should take our friend’s findings very seriously, indeed. A word to the wise is sufficient."

I could hear this student and others as they left class that day grumble to one another "what do you expect, he’s a Khalidi and they’re the past, not the future of Palestine."

That summer I visited Jordan to see for myself what was going on. The poet and PLO official Kamal Nasir -- the late Kamal Nasir -- hosted me, escorting me from one camp to the next, explaining the dynamics of Palestinian political life in and around Amman. I can tell you that the feeling was an eerie one, and Kamal Nasir didn’t try to paint a rosy picture either, though many others whom I met did. And though it appeared that the PLO controlled the streets of Amman, the near invisibility of Jordanian troops made me wonder what might be in store for the Palestinians. I kept returning to what my British classmate had described and analyzed and what Walid Khalidi had accepted as a perceptive prediction about a very complicated, perilous situation. Black September occurred just two months later.

Frankly, it took some time for this lesson to sink in: that there is no substitute for reasoned analysis based on sound evidence, not at least when it comes to matters of war.

When I started to think about this talk, I wanted to recall a place and time, and to remember some remarkable teachers and scholars at a remarkable institution. I hope I have done that, and perhaps also told you a little about myself. As I wrote it, however, a pattern emerged which surprised me. The teachers whom I remember most vividly, and those who taught me the most, weren’t teachers who told me what I wanted to hear, or who held views congenial with my own at that time, or who confirmed my own predilections. All to some degree stood aloof from common beliefs and expectations. Yusuf Ibish in a secular time maintained the importance of intellectual and political life organized within a Muslim context. Hanna Batatu, though left-leaning, had no patience for classroom political posturing or classroom democracy. Samir Khalaf was a staunch liberal and a moderate in extreme times. Kamal Salibi, though identified with the Lebanese Right at the time, did not follow an ideological imperative in his teaching or research. Walid Khalidi coolly acknowledged PLO vulnerability, despite student belief and his own wish that it be otherwise.

I learned from these teachers precisely because their analyses and interpretations did not agree with my own beliefs. They forced me to articulate what I thought and why I thought it, and in the process my own thoughts became clearer. I learned information from all of them, but more important, they helped me to see more clearly what lay beneath the transmission of information: certain habits of mind and of scholarship, and a certain moral fiber.

I am beholden to these five professors. I strive to follow their example. And I hold them up to you as exemplary teachers and significant contributors to our Middle East Studies guild.

Chicago
December 4, 1998