Terrorist Profs - article by Daniel Pipes


Pipes' latest essay concerns the fact that three of the eight men just indicted as "material supporters of a foreign terrorist organization," (the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) are also "academic specialists on Middle Eastern and Islamic subjects."


I love Pipes' work, but I have a slight gripe with this piece. Pipes implies that these men weren't real scholars, that they'd just been pulling the wool over the eyes of their coleagues.

[...]All three alleged terrorists succeeded in talking the academic talk, fooling nearly everyone. Shallah wrote in 1993, in his capacity as director of WISE, that the organization's long-term goal is "to contribute to the understanding of the revivalist Islamist trends, misleadingly labeled 'fundamentalist' in Western and American academic circles."


Almost any North American academic specialist on Islam could have written those same sneering and duplicitous words. Many do.


The three passed for genuine scholars. Carrie Wickham, a specialist on Egyptian Islam at Emory University, said she "felt deceived" on learning who Shallah really was and expressed surprise that "a serious intellectual counterpart" like him could also be a terrorist.[...]

I take a bit of issue with this one. It seems to me that the really disturbing part of this is that they are real scholars. They certainly have the credentials, which are not fake. In spite of this fact, however, in spite of their studies and credentials, they still could put themselves into the service of the "forces of darkness." That's the really unsettling bit.