Yes, the Pope Is Catholic - Juan Cole As a Study In Pro-Jihadist Faux Liberal Sophistication (Updated)
MR published a series of over 40 posts about Pope Benedict XVI's speech and the ensuing anti-Papal riots. These posts included an extensive unpacking of the speech itself, as well as criticism of academic and media reactions to the controversy. 39 of those posts are categorized and indexed here.
Don't worry, there's no compulsion in religion.
Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. Juan Cole uses fake erudition to boost his ethos and give his readers something to take back to the comments section of DKos. There's the brand of Cole dishonesty where he leaves out context ("unless the hospital had been turned into a military base, this... was a war crime [by Israel]" when he knows quite well that the hospital had in fact been turned into a military base). This isn't that flavor of dishonesty. Then there's the brand Cole dishonesty that puts technically true sentences in close proximity to each other to make an implication that he couldn't otherwise defense ('Israel conducted an anti-terrorism campaign in the summer of 2001. Not long afterwards, Al Qaeda attacked the US' is the typical style that he shares with not a few journalists). That's not what we're dealing with here either.
What we're dealing with is about more or less true statements, but unlike in the last two examples here it doesn't really matter what the statements are - they just have to be really specific and historically more or less verified. They're not meant to convey to you any information, they're meant to impress upon you the feeling that Juan Cole Reads Arabic And You Don't. Not a particularly original tactic either - last Thursday we posted a 10 page essay on the way that pro-Arab foreign policy academics dismiss obvious Islamic trends and sensibilities by referencing irrelevant trivia:
Center-left foreign policy experts aren't evil, they're just wrong. They're creatures of bureaucratic and educational institutions that are invested in interpreting rather straightforward events in specialist terms that aren't at all appropriate for the context of the Middle East. So Ahmadinejad's speeches that Israel should be wiped off the map are understood in these foreign policy circles as power grabs by domestic Iranian hardliners rather than as declarations that Ahmadinejad will nuke Israel just as soon as he can... [T]he siren call of 'sophistication' is a strong incentive to keep 'decoding' Arab and Muslim statements as something other then their plain meaning... The mistake is in thinking that this dynamic is what's determining the behavior...
The problem with center-Left foreign policy elites is that they're so professionally, academically, and personally invested in the utility of decades of specialized study that, when policy-making time comes, they overemphasize the utility of that knowledge. And so they're not unaware of what everyone can obviously see and hear - they just tend to put too much emphasis on their own, more specific domains of expertise... So while it's true speeches about the honor and glory of attacking Israel, given to adoring Arab and Muslim crowds, sometimes involve subtle signals to diplomats sitting in obscure post-national European cities. But it's also true that those speeches are about the honor and glory of attacking Israel... very famously, the Arabs aren't Arabists. They aren't communicating with the West by coded telegram, where a Hamas leader screaming "we will liberate all of Palestine" is suddenly a sign of moderation because yesterday a different Hamas leader declared "we will liberate all of Palestine from the river to the sea".
Cole's rhetorical use of specialized knowledge, however, is substantially less innocent than, say, a State Department employee's memo. At State, you've got someone who has a professional and academic investment in believing that minute details of Arab and Muslim politics are what matter on the ground - these are professionals who exist in communities that are explain their value on the basis of their ability to describe Arab and Muslim history and intrigue. They need to do things that most people can't. Anyone, even someone 'simplistic', can see that Ahmadinejad is telling people that he's going to wipe Israel off the map. Ditto for Hamas refusing to recognize Israel. If that's what really matters - if there's not something deeper causing Ahmadinejad and Hamas to make those declarations - then those experts become overqualified in all the worst ways. And it's not that most of these professionals stack the deck deliberately - it's that they go through decades of inculcation and training oriented around these assumptions of what's valuable without ever making them explicit (which only makes IR like every other discipline on the planet, in that it builds assumptions about its own relevance into its methodologies).
But with Cole, the move is more deliberate and less innocent. For Cole, the specific details that he makes a show of off-handedly scribbling down have nothing to do with a professional sensibility for precision and everything to do with creating the impression of sophistication and complexity - and using it as a shiny object to make his readers feel proud of their conceit in 'seeing through' the obvious meaning of an event to the deeper dynamic. And that's what allows his readers to pull the argumentative equivalent of putting their hands over their ears and alternatively shouting "I can't hear you" and "he's an expert and you're not". We've written elsewhere that:
So much of the blogosphere is hackneyed and amateurish that even the gesture towards authority is a huge psychological boost. Cole plays on that, acting as the blogosphere's Edward Said: ostensibly translating and decoding complex Muslim history into contemporary problems in a way inaccessible to the uninitiated. The problem is that, in an age of politicized Middle East studies, Cole and his colleagues are little more than collections of conspiracy theories layered with self-righteous venom - barely more than Democratic Underground zombies with a rudimentary command of modern Arabic. That their work is considered scholarship undermines the crucially important task of education the American public about the Middle East.
So this name and history-dropping appears in almost all of his posts, and you can tell that it's a habitual rhetorical strategy because so often - as in precisely this post - the history is totally irrelevent to the argument:
The idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join, and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away. The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims. Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts and certainly weren't imposing their religion. The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith. But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.
This is so wildly beside the point that it's difficult to believe that a scholar of his stature could possibly think that it's relevant to the argument. It's not technically false, it just doesn't rise anywhere near to adequate or responsive. So what if when Muslims invaded Iraq they didn't forcibly convert people? The Pope's quote came after centuries of Muslim conquest and forced conversations (maybe even after the time of Cole's Iraqi governor!). This went on to a greater or lesser extent for more or less thirteen hundred years. And we recognize that no one who's still skeptical is going to be persuaded by Andrew Bostom's meticulously researched work - but it's not hard to demonstrate with pre-9/11 (or pre-1400) texts that Muslim rulers were sometimes less than loathe to "encourage" Jews and Christians to convert. Even Maimonides, who is often cited by apologists as a Jew who flourished under enlightened Muslim rule, wrote "the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us... Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they..." Which helps to show why Cole's argument is not just irrelevant but somewhat incoherent - the claim is that the Muslim governor of Iraq didn't want Jews and Christians to convert because he could get more taxes from them... but the only reason he was getting more taxes from them is because there were laws on the books meant to punish Jews and Christians who didn't convert. Those laws came from, what? Intuition about the Laffer curve?
This isn't quite as pathetic as the time we got suspicious about his disclosure - conveyed in insider-ish, "I have been told" passive voice - that an anonymous "former US government official" told him that "the US CIA intervened covertly in the [1957] Lebanese elections" (which he then found confirmation for "what [he] was told" by digging around LOC archives). It took us about 10 minutes of rummaging through our bookshelf to find out that this was a CIA operation so secret that the only way you could find out about it is if you read Juan Cole or checked out the footnotes of the Lebanon chapter in one of our basic undergrad textbooks.
But listen, it must be tough to be a scholar of medieval Arabic trying to sound like a grizzled international relations veteran - mistakes will inevitably get made. Those mistakes are sometimes the unnecessary result of trying to create the impression of deep knowledge (conveyed through years of study or secret contacts), but they're basically just simple factual errors (albeit conveyed in particularly self-important tones). These argumentative time-wasters are more annoying and inexcusable, because you don't have to have a Lebanon book sitting on your shelf to know that he's just trying to build his ethos - you just have to evaluate the argument on its own terms. You can know absolutely nothing about anything - and if you read the speech by Pope Benedict XVI and read Cole's response, you can know that he tried to waste your time in a pathetic attempt to sound smart.
And now consider that there are literally tens of thousands of people who read the same thing and leave satisfied that Cole has put the Pope in his place and that the concept of 'jihad' has yet again been defended from Westerners trying to imply that it's not entirely peaceful. It's simply not the case that all of those people are stupid - and yet they allow themselves to be 'persuaded' by this obviously inadequate 'demonstration'. It's not unreasonable to ask what it is that's so narrowing to their cognitive abilities that they don't even notice what's obvious to all but the most myopic observers: the open secret of Informed Comment is that Cole will make the barest effort to sound like he knows something conservatives don't, his readers will generously accept that effort as evidence of sophistication, and everybody leaves having confirmed everybody else's ideological predispositions.
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UPDATE: Updated and bumped. An old draft got pushed live. This is the final draft.
