Militant About “Islamism”

Pipes-final 12/7/04 5:57 PM Page 38 Militant about “Islamism” Daniel Pipes wages “hand-to-hand combat” with a “totalitarian ideology.” b y JANETTASSEL “It is a mistake to blame Islam, ichard pipes, Baird re- a religion 14 centuries old, for the at North American universities—“a kind search professor of history, of Consumer Reports,” he says, “for stu- recounts in his recent book, evil that should be ascribed to dents, parents, alumni, and legislators” Vixi, that when Daniel, his militant Islam, a totalitarian to air perceived biases and inaccuracies. first child, was born in 1949, This is yet another irritant to critics like he felt as if he himself were ideology less than a century old. Rashid Khalidi, Said professor of Arab Rbeing reborn. To mark the event he even Militant Islam is the problem, but studies and director of the Middle East quit smoking. Institute at Columbia University, who And, in a sense, with the birth of moderate Islam is the solution.” calls the Campus Watchers “intellectual Daniel, Richard Pipes was indeed reborn, �daniel pipes thugs”; Juan Cole, professor of history at perhaps even cloned. Daniel ’71, Ph.D. ’78 the University of Michigan, deems the (early Islamic history), is what old-timers project “cyberstalking.” “Crude Mc- would call a chip o≠ the old block. Both are essentially loners, Carthyism” and “totalitarianism” are among the less vitriolic non-belongers (the subtitle of Vixi is Memoirs of a Non-Belonger), terms used by other scholars to describe Campus Watch. In ad- and fighters. Pipes the elder, the fiercely anti-communist cold- dition, Pipes is now in his final year as a director of the federally warrior, head of President Ford’s Team B (formed to evaluate the funded U.S. Institute of Peace. CIA’s estimates of Soviet nuclear intentions) and Soviet policy The author of 12 books, Pipes churns out newspaper columns adviser to President Reagan, was cursed as a “wretched anti-So- and weblogs at a dizzying rate. His website receives about 50,000 vietist” by Pravda—and pretty well marginalized at Harvard for visits each week. He calls his work “applied scholarship.” “Just as his politics. technology is applied science, in my case applied scholarship is In some ways Daniel, a specialist on Islam as an influence in applied history; having studied the history, religion, culture, and history, is even more an outsider than his father. Founder and languages, I interpret what’s taking place right now through director of his own think tank, Middle East Forum (MEF), his these prisms.” In his case, applied scholarship is the weapon for current role in academe is gadfly. Though he taught world his- what he calls “hand-to-hand combat” with militant Islam (or tory from 1978 to 1982 at the University of Chicago, history at radical Islam, Wahhabism, or Islamism, terms he uses inter- Harvard from 1983 to 1984, and policy strategy at the Naval War changeably)— a “true successor,” in his words, of fascism and his College from 1984 to 1986, he has parted ways with the acad- father’s nemesis, communism. emy—to the satisfaction of both, it seems. “I have the simple This might be the place for one of Pipes’s definitions of the ad- politics of a truck driver,” he told an interviewer, “not the com- versary, a virtual catalog of frights: plex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with Militant Islam derives from Islam but is a misanthropic, institutions of higher learning.” More congenial was his stint on misogynist, triumphalist, millenarian, anti-modern, anti- the policy-planning sta≠ at the State Department in 1983 and his Christian, anti-Semitic, terroristic, jihadistic, and suicidal seven years as director of a Philadelphia think tank called the version of it. Fortunately, it appeals to only about 10 per- Foreign Policy Research Institute, before starting Middle East cent to 15 percent of Muslims, meaning that a substantial Forum in 1994. majority would prefer a more moderate version. At Middle East Forum, he is publisher of Middle East Quarterly, Nevertheless, this “totalitarian ideology,” even with “only” 10 which he says, “seeks out voices excluded from the scholarly de- to 15 percent signed on (roughly 100 to 150 million persons bate, voices more aligned with the pro-American views of main- worldwide), “regards itself as the only rival, and the inevitable stream Americans.” And he has initiated Campus Watch, a web- successor, to Western civilization.” To many people this is scary site and speakers’ bureau that monitors Middle Eastern studies stu≠. But such warnings are his specialty. Among his many dis- 38 January - February 2005 Pipes-final 12/7/04 5:57 PM Page 39 quieting predictions, he wrote, as early as March 1994: was at Harvard, he came to see me and said, ‘Dad, what is all this From [an American] point of view, the Middle East in- problem? Why are these people demonstrating?’ Well, President creasingly stands out as a region that develops and exports Pusey, who retired just about the time Daniel graduated, told me problems, including political radicals, terrorism, drugs, to tell him it was okay to be concerned, because he was in the unconventional weaponry, and conspiracy theories. We worst class in the history of Harvard.” should recognize that this region resembles the Pacific rim less than it does Africa; and we should ready ourselves for ne’s first impression of Daniel Pipes today completely be- the many troubles yet to come. Olies the nerdy stereotype. Tall, dashing, and trim-bearded, he So dedicated is Pipes to his self-appointed task—and such a seems straight from central casting for Mozart’s Don Giovanni or workhorse—that his parents complain they never see him ex- Boito’s Mefistofele. Instead of a sonorous bass to match the Lothar- cept on television. When asked how they feel about their son’s ian looks, however, he speaks in a voice that barely registers on a single-minded determination, they imply it was predictable, de- tape recorder. He greets the visitor in his attractive, tenth-floor scribing his boyhood as that of a pensive, overachieving book- corner o∞ce in downtown Philadelphia, where smaller o∞ces worm. Yet Pipes senior recalls, “When Daniel was in high school buzz with busy interns and associates. Middle East Forum, with and his first years in college, he had no political interests at all. its sta≠ of 15, has an annual budget of about $1 million; among its He was going to be a mathematician; his real passion was for donors are Robert Guzzardi, Lawrence Kadish, Nina Rosenwald playing chess. I remember, during the Vietnam War, when he (American Securities, L.P.) and institutions such as the Bradley Illustration by Matthew Trueman Harvard Magazine 39 Pipes-final 12/7/04 5:57 PM Page 40 Foundation. Its mission, turned to college, I took every course on the Middle East that I according to its website could, including an anthropology independent study on peoples (www.meforum.org), is of the Sahara with the legendary Carleton Coon. My senior the- to “define and promote sis was ‘A Medieval Islamic Debate: The World Created in Eter- American interests in nity,’ a study of al-Ghazali” [Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1050-1111), a the Middle East,” includ- key Islamic philosopher, theologian, and mystic]. ing strengthening this And the life change? “After graduation, I spent a couple of nation’s ties with Israel years in Egypt. UC-Berkeley ran a program in Cairo that initially and Turkey, “and oth- took me there. I intended to go on to Lebanon, but Cairo com- er democracies as they pletely absorbed me, so I stayed put. In a sense everything I’m emerge”; working “for doing is an o≠shoot of my experience living in Egypt, three years human rights through- in all. I studied Arabic in various institutions and also spent time out the region”; seeking a on my own—learning the language, learning the society, reading. “stable supply and a low I lived for some months with a family and spent a lot of time price of oil”; and promot- roaming the city, immersing myself in the culture. But then, just ing “the peaceful settle- as I got my Ph.D. in ’78 on Islam’s role in public life [his disserta- ment of regional and in- tion became his first book, Slave Soldiers and Islam (1981)], Khomei- ternational disputes.” ni was emerging in Iran. The tremendous interest in Khomeini Married (twice), with and Khomeinism presented me with an opportunity to apply three daughters, Pipes what I knew to current events.” grew up steeped in Har- Thus began his e≠orts to publicize the rise and perceived dan- vard and Harvard-related gers of militant Islam. In a profusion of books and articles, Pipes traditions—he even at- set out to prove, as he writes in his book Miniatures (a collection ASSOCIATED PRESS tended the now-defunct of essays, many well preceding September 2001), that Islamism’s Ayatollah Khomeini, shown here in Harvard pre-school, in war on America, far from having begun on that day, “began in 1980 assailing the Israeli occupation of Quonset huts on Lin- November 1979, not long after Ayatollah Khomeini rode the slo- Palestine, sparked Pipes’s interest in contemporary affairs. naean Street. After a pri- gan ‘Death to America’ to power. And sure enough, the attacks vate-school education, on Americans soon began.” In the Path of God, first published in including studies abroad, it was on to Harvard College. 1983, traces the connection between Islam and politics through Harvard, he feels, let him down.

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