I discovered later that the mohel in question was a brother of the comedian Jackie Mason. It obviously runs in the family.
Identity and Citizenship
During the war I attended a dinner party in London when suddenly we heard the sound of aircraft approaching from the distance, and the usual anxious question immediately arose—were they British or German, ours or theirs? One of my fellow guests, a colleague at the university, said he was pretty sure they were ours. I should mention that he had come to Britain as a Jewish refugee from Germany, had been a resident for eight years and was a naturalized British citizen. Our hostess looked at him coldly and said, “No, they are ours.” What she meant of course was that he was right in thinking that they were British, but wrong in using the word “ours” to convey that. I must confess that I felt a similar irritation myself, and this was then the normal response. In Britain, as in the United States, naturalization is possible after five years’ residence, and in principle brought with it all, or almost all, the rights of citizenship. But the reality was different, and most people in Britain felt at least a mild irritation when naturalized citizens, especially with foreign accents, used such words as “we” or “ours.”
When I came to America I found that the exact opposite was the case—that the naturalized citizen was expected to think of America as “we” and could sometimes be reprimanded if he failed to do so. The difference was more than one of just social usage. In Britain as elsewhere in Europe, naturalized citizens could achieve great success in scholarship, in science, in business, in sports and in other fields, but not in politics or government. Such figures as Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski would have been, and indeed probably still are, impossible in Britain. The same is true in Europe generally.
The difference lies in the very nature of those societies. To become a Frenchman or a German is a change of ethnic identity, a difficult process that can take several generations. To become an American is a change of political allegiance, a much less difficult and complex matter. In Britain, as so often, we had it both ways. The naturalized foreigner becomes British. He does not become English, still less Scottish or Welsh.
The process of acquiring citizenship differs from country to country. In England, since time immemorial, the rule has been clear and simple. Anyone born under British rule was British by birth, even if the birth took place in the transit lounge at Heathrow Airport. This centuries-old rule was changed, amid general applause, by the government headed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the law now reads, “Born in Britain to legally resident parents.” The parents do not have to be British, but they do have to be legally resident. I understand that there are some who would favor a similar change in the United States.
Sometime in the 1970s, not long after my move to Princeton, I was invited to participate in a seminar in Berlin on the new Muslim—primarily Turkish—minority in Germany. This sounded interesting and I was very happy to accept. The organizers of the conference were very liberal, very open-minded; painfully aware of their country’s history in the matter of racism and intolerance and desperately anxious in no way to repeat it. While I was in Berlin I was approached by a Turk who asked me if I would like to meet some members of the local Turkish community. I said that I would be delighted and was invited to dinner the same evening with a group of Turkish residents of Berlin. The picture I got from them was completely different. The Germans were making every effort to be tolerant, accepting, even welcoming; the Turks felt themselves to be the victims of prejudice, discrimination and even hostility. I was stunned by a parting remark by my Turkish host who, speaking of the Germans, said, “In a thousand years they couldn’t accept six hundred thousand Jews. What hope is there that they will accept two million Turks?” Since then the number, and with it the tension, has increased considerably. The district of Kreuzberg, a suburb of Berlin that is now overwhelmingly Turkish, is sometimes known as Klein-Kleinasien, little Asia Minor.
By now, the whole question of the Muslim presence in Europe has assumed a new aspect. Thanks to migration and demography on the one hand and a dwindling European birthrate on the other, the Muslim proportion of the population is increasing steadily. The Syrian scholar Sadiq al-‘Azm remarked in an essay that the only question that remains regarding the future of Europe is, “Will it be an Islamized Europe or a Europeanized Islam?” That question is very close to being answered.
A Difference of Degree
The fact that I came to the United States from England gave me some significant advantages over other foreigners—the most important being the English language. But I soon found that apparent resemblances could conceal real differences, not only in syntax but in university practice. An English poet I knew was invited to take the chair of poetry at Cornell University. He had a fellowship at an Oxford college but as the professor of poetry at Cornell he really had a sinecure. He was only required to give an occasional public lecture on a subject of his own choice and to be available to students who wanted to come and talk to him. And he had what by English standards was a princely salary. The last time I went to Cornell I met him again. To my surprise he told me he had decided to go back to England. I asked why, since he seemed to be having a marvelous time in the United States. He said that he was a poet and could only live where his language was spoken. I said I was under the impression that they spoke English at Cornell. And he said, “Yes, but not my kind of English.” I understood what he meant—a framework of allusion and reference which comes from a common background, common education, a common set of traditions and jokes and stories and so on. A poet needs that. The university teacher would like it, but it’s not absolutely indispensable.
Good undergraduate teaching is possible only if the students arrive knowing something. If you have to spend the first two years of undergraduate education teaching them what they should have known by the time they were fourteen, they aren’t going to get very far. Both in high school and at college, American students are no longer required to do history, not even general history. They do “social studies” which may include some history, but that can often be very specialized. A student may take a course on the history of France from 1789 to 1815. He will be extremely well informed on the revolutionary and Napoleonic period and have only the vaguest ideas about what happened before and perhaps none at all about what happened after.
Heinrich von Sybel, the German historian, said a long time ago that students should arrive at the university knowing their centuries. I think that puts it well. If you say fourteenth century or seventeenth century, this should immediately evoke something in the mind of a reasonably cultivated man or woman. When you say seventeenth century, an educated person will think of baroque buildings and Vivaldi or the wars of religion.
Over the years I have seen a decline of scholarly standards in my own field as well; nowadays people even undertake learned and synoptic projects, or efforts meant to be that way, without knowing the relevant language. Previously the study of Middle Eastern history was cultivated by very few teachers teaching very few students, and therefore reasonably high standards were maintained. In the fifties and sixties, there was an enormous growth of interest in the region for political reasons, military reasons, and commercial reasons, and the development of these studies was liberally irrigated with oil and other money. If there is a greater need for books than there are people who are capable of writing them, more appointments to be filled than people capable of filling them, then there will be a deterioration. It’s inevitable. You get a kind of Gresham’s law of scholarship, the bad driving out the good. But there are some very good young people writing in the field today and we can hope for some improvement.
In this country there is a great dichotomy in that we educate a few very well from the beginning, but we educate a lot of youngsters very poorly. I think we are moving toward a kind of mandarin class which is highly educated, sophisticated, capable of high-level interaction in ways that are unintelligible to others. Then there is a mass
of semiliterates whose highest aesthetic appreciation is a good commercial on television. I think that is a very dangerous development.
I have often been asked what differences I have found in the general intellectual climate, in the scholarly community, between England and the United States. That is a difficult question to answer. In England I was teaching at the University of London, a big university in the capital. In the United States I was teaching at Princeton, a small university in a small town. It is difficult to say whether the differences I observed should be attributed to the difference in size or the differences between England and North America. Another factor is the time period. It has been remarked that in the United States, one hundred years is a long time and in England one hundred miles is a long way. So much has happened since I moved. Now when I go to England, I find a good deal of what struck me as typically American is now also typically English.
And yet there are some points which are striking and they arise from differences in the systems of education. Much greater stress is laid in England on the last two years of high school, and therefore at university specialization occurs almost immediately. American universities reject this model and want students to have a more general education in the first two years of college with specialization occurring only in the last two years. Even at Princeton, which lays special stress on undergraduate education as compared with other American universities, the undergraduate years are seen as a period of general liberal education rather than professional training. That is why American graduate studies are much more complex than English graduate studies. In an English university, if you have a good B.A. honors degree, it is assumed that you are ready to write a thesis; whereas in an American university you still have a lot to go through before you can start writing a thesis.
The best way to get a really good education is to take a B.A. degree in an English university and then do a Ph.D. in an American university. Unfortunately what many people do is the other way around—they take an American B.A. and an English Ph.D., thereby getting the worst of both systems.
In the early 1960s an honors student at SOAS came to see me and said that she had decided to give up her course and leave school but didn’t feel that she should just disappear. She thought it a matter of courtesy to let me know. When she asked for an appointment I looked up her record and found she was one of our best undergraduates that year. Usually if students say they have to leave it’s for financial reasons. English rules say you don’t ask personal questions but I managed to indicate that if it were a financial matter, we might be able to help. She said it was nothing like that and explained that she had fallen in love with a young man and they were about to get married. The young man had so poor a high school record that he had not been able to get admitted to any university in the country. So at the age of eighteen he had to go to work.
I vividly remember this young woman. She, who must have been about nineteen, maybe twenty, said, “I don’t think it would make for a happy marriage if the wife were educated to a higher level than the husband.” I was shocked at this and wanted to say to her—if you happened to fall in love with a man with one eye would you feel obliged to poke out one of your eyes? I didn’t, of course, but I remember thinking that. There was nothing I could do. She left and I’ve never heard of her since. That unmistakably was the point at which I became a feminist. It made me acutely conscious, in a way that otherwise probably would never have happened, of some of the difficulties of female students, first admitted to Princeton in 1969, and the challenges they face.
When I came to America, this intensified, because the position of women in the universities was far worse in the United States than it was in England at that time. We had women students and even women professors at Oxford and Cambridge before there were women students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. When I was a beginner at the University of London, the vice chancellor, the head of an English university, was a woman. My very first article was published in 1937 thanks to a woman editor, the professor of medieval economic history at Cambridge University and the editor of one of the major journals.
In my early years at Princeton I found that women students had a feeling—how shall I put it?—of persecution, of discrimination, which on the whole I must say was not without reason. I always did what I could to help them. When I retired at age seventy, I had seven students preparing theses, six of whom were women. Apparently the word got around that I was sympathetic to women students. All six of them finished their Ph.D.’s and went into academic careers. The situation now is very much better than it was when I came to America, but there are still problems for women in the academic world.
America is a free society in which you can publish anything you like if you can find a publisher, and you can usually do that if you try hard enough. There are constraints, however, in the way in which one can discuss certain topics. This particularly affects university teaching. When I taught in England I could express myself on any subject and give expression to any opinion. In the United States one has to be more careful. There is a series of sensitivities which one must take care not to offend. One sometimes gets the impression that one is walking around in a room full of sensitive toes and that one must step warily not to tread on them.
There are many taboos. There have always been taboos, of course. For example, in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, there was the taboo of the church. It was simply not permissible to question or even raise questions about the basic dogmas of the Christian church. In the nineteenth century it was sex. The eighteenth century was fairly free and easy on the subject of sex but in Victorian England it became a taboo subject to such a degree that one couldn’t even use the word “leg,” not to speak of other more directly involved parts of the body. We got over the sexual taboo and we got over the religious taboo. But other taboos have taken their place. Like earlier taboos, they are strictly enforced. If you violate a taboo, you will suffer penalties in terms of professional advancement. As in the past, there are inquisitors who endeavor to detect heresy and punish it. Because these are taboo subjects, I won’t go into details.
8.
The Neighborhood
From the time when I began to read classical Arabic and later other Islamic texts, I was struck, and fascinated, by the rich vein of humor in Islamic civilization. I suppose that most if not all civilizations have their own distinctive form of humor but I cannot think of any other remotely comparable with the centrality and antiquity of humor in Islam. From the time of the Prophet in the seventh century to the present day Muslims have been telling, and recording, jokes about themselves, their rulers, their societies, their customs, even their sanctities. There are jokes about muftis and qadis, about imams and dervishes, and about every aspect of Muslim life, not excluding religious life. What is somewhat remarkable is that this humor is richly and amply documented in literary and even religious writings, in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and no doubt other Muslim languages, from the earliest times to the present day. The tradition continues to our own time notably in the form of the political joke. Political humor flourishes in every society but particularly in those that are repressive. There are no other outlets for frustration. In the Middle East, Egypt has perhaps the richest tradition of all.
A sample joke from the Nasser era, when there was a shortage of everything in Egypt: A man living by the Nile bank, desperately hungry, went fishing and managed to catch a fish in the Nile. He brought it triumphantly to his wife and said, “Here’s a fish, this should provide us with one meal.” And his wife said, “Only if you are prepared to eat it raw. We have no oil, no butter, no power; there is no way I can cook it.” And the man said in disgust, “I don’t eat raw fish,” and he threw it back in the river and the fish rose above the waters and yelled, “Long live President Nasser.”
A friend relayed to me that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who was on friendly terms with President Nasser, told him that Nasser was a keen collector of Egyptian jokes about himself a
nd was even willing to share them with suitable companions. (As a curious aside SOAS decided to confer an honorary fellowship on Haile Selassie; as I was acting dean at the time it fell upon me to make the formal presentation. I greeted His Imperial Majesty with the appropriate formulae and placed the diploma of his appointment in his hands. He thanked me and then asked, “Do you also have problems with students?”)
There is even a joke about Nasser’s collection of Nasser jokes. As the Egyptians tell the story, Nasser decided one day that enough was enough. He summoned his chief of police and ordered him to find and arrest the man who was inventing and circulating all these jokes. A week later the chief of police reappeared at the presidential palace bringing with him a man whom he had arrested. “This,” he said, “is the man who has invented all these jokes about you, Mr. President.” Nasser turned to the man and said, “Are you indeed the man who has been inventing and circulating jokes about me?” “Yes,” said the man.
As they tell the story, Nasser then tells one joke after another, as many as the audience can stand, and at the end of each one he asks the man, “Did you invent this story?” And the man says, “Yes, I did.” Finally Nasser says to him, “You are an Egyptian as I am. I presume that you love our country as I do. Why do you do this? You know that I have made Egypt great and free and respected.” To this the man says, “That joke I didn’t invent.”
Egyptian Identity and the 1967 War
I developed fairly good relations with people in Pakistan after my trip there for the opening of the University of Punjab in 1957 and was informed, probably improperly and inappropriately, of a very interesting development after the six-day 1967 war. After that war Nasser was naturally devastated by what had happened and believed the Egyptian armed forces were in urgent need of reconstitution and redevelopment. He felt he couldn’t turn to the West since they were not on his side and he did not want to turn to the Soviets since he felt that they had let him down rather badly. Pakistan had done rather well in its recent war with India, a much larger and stronger country. Nasser decided therefore to turn to Pakistan and ask for its help in reorganizing the Egyptian armed forces. The government of Pakistan was willing, but on condition that it be permitted to send a small feasibility mission to examine the situation and then advise on what, if anything, Pakistan could do. It told Nasser that the mission must be allowed to go wherever it wanted, and its questions must be answered truthfully and honestly. Nasser agreed, saying that there would be no point otherwise.
Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian Page 20
