Professors at universities throughout the Arab world are organizing protests and petition drives to show their opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Some academics in the region fear that this may cause a long-term estrangement between intellectuals in the Middle East and America.
Scholars warn that one of the unintended consequences of the war may be a long-lasting backlash against the United States by a generation of talented Arab students whose academic goal would normally be to pursue higher education in America. Many worry that American politics will cause students to be suspicious of Western instruction.
University of Nebraska associate history professor Moshe Gershovich said that the people who live in the Middle East and are familiar with its society feel very “ambivalent” about what’s happening in Iraq, especially in the region’s universities. He believes that there is a broader basis to their concerns.
“I don’t think the problem is so much that the Arab people do not want to come to the West,” Gershovich said. “My impression is that many students in Arab countries want to come to America to study, but the problem is after Sept. 11, 2001, there is quite an open policy of profiling these kind of students coming from the Arab world, and in many cases, rejecting them and giving them special treatment — not in a positive sense.”
Gershovich added that Arabs feel that there is insufficient sensitivity from the West to that aspect. He agrees that many people in the Middle East are very suspicious of, if not expressing outright hostility to, American intentions in the region.
University of Wisconsin sociology professor Joseph Elder has a different outlook on the relationship between Arab and American academe. He said Muslim academics view American intellectuals as “significant friends” and wish that there were more of them to educate people about Muslim and Arab culture.
“I think from the point of view of much of the Muslim world, they have been extraordinarily grateful to American faculty members here for being often their best presenters,” Elder said.
Elder added that the solutions to working together in order to make an impact are to institute more education and more protests.
“It is very important to see how large and how widespread and continuous these protests have been,” Elder said. “And in terms of long-range settlements of relations in complex parts of the world, it is very important for people to recognize what world opinion is.”
Demonstrations in the region continue to gain support from students at various universities. In Amman, Jordan, government police recently locked more than 20,000 demonstrators into the main campus of the University of Jordan. In Khartoum, Sudan, at least one student and a professor were killed when police officers broke up a march headed for the American embassy. In Yemen, students and authorities clashed violently at Sanaa University in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.
“If there’s going to be a continuing notion that [the war] is imperialism, you will continue to see great hostility among intellectuals and refusal to cooperate,” Gershovich said.
Some administrators and faculty members remain cautious. They have said that they do not want to appear as though they are trying to speak on behalf of the university and thereby misrepresent the views of the institution.
