NY Observer, March 30, 2005 Mamdani Uproar: Scion Of Ed Said Rocks Columbia
by Andrew Rice
On a recent Tuesday evening, Mahmood Mamdani, a bookishly handsome and relentlessly incendiary political theorist, spoke at a forum on the subject of academic freedom held at Columbia University, where he teaches.
Not long ago, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, he wrote that “the neoconservatives are a twin of al Qaeda”—the kind of rhetorical Molotov cocktail seldom tossed by the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On this evening, he was about to throw another one: into the already highly emotional battle at Columbia over anti-Semitism at the university.
Among the graduate students and faculty members that packed the top-floor conference room that night was a young correspondent from The New York Sun, which had ardently been fanning the story of the handful of Jewish students who have said they were ridiculed for expressing support of Israel in some classes taught by professors in the school’s department of Middle Eastern Studies.
The first speaker, a former university provost, gave a windy speech warning of a “rising tide of anti-intellectualism.” Then Mr. Mamdani rose, and announced he was planning to confront the issue directly. He was wearing a smart dark suit, his royal blue shirt open at the collar, his curly gray hair slightly mussed.
“The accusation involved is the worst you can hurl at anyone in contemporary American society,” he said, his voice audibly seething with indignation. Mr. Mamdani, who is from an Indian Muslim background, had not been accused, but he was passionate in his belief that outside groups, “with skills honed elsewhere in the Empire,” were mounting an attack on his university, his rights.
He posed the rhetorical question: What is academic freedom?
“First and foremost, it is the freedom of a professor to go against the grain. To commit heresy,” he said. “Any student who enters a university should be prepared for the discomfort that comes from having his or her most cherished truths questioned.”
With unwavering self-assurance, Mr. Mamdani has taken aim at a lot of cherished truths lately. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani, 58, was new to America and barely known outside his narrow academic discipline, African studies.
Since then, he has willed his way into the thick of the debate over the War on Terror, casting himself as a public intellectual for the jihadist age. Last year, he published a popular book on the roots of Middle Eastern extremism. He chats with highbrow talk-show hosts like Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose. His views have been attacked by The National Review and are dismissed by some Middle East experts, but he has won praise from academic heavyweights like Noam Chomsky, the economist Jeffrey Sachs and Columbia’s late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, a friend and admirer, who played a crucial role in assuring that Mr. Mamdani’s book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, ended up at his own major publishing house, Pantheon Books. Admirers say the book carries on the tradition of his revered (and sometimes reviled) patron; everybody at Columbia agrees that Said’s legacy is threatened. What happens next will test that ambition– and test many other things at Columbia besides.
A week before, Mr. Mamdani welcomed a visitor to his book-filled office, which is mostly decorated in red, appropriately enough for an old Marxist. He speaks softly, like many true radicals, with a lilting, cosmopolitan accent. He said he saw the controversy that now grips Columbia as part of a wider campaign against American teachers’ right to express unorthodox political views.
“I find it extremely worrying,” Mr. Mamdani said. He was especially incensed at Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, who recently called on professors “to resist the allure of certitude, the temptation to use the podium as an ideological platform, to indoctrinate a captive audience.
full: http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage3.asp
Louis Proyect
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