http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/05/asmea_debut/

Ray Ibrahim is a member of Middle East Studies at Harvard

As a person who had (more or less) vowed never to bother with most Middle Eastern conferences-I have been to too many farces on both the university and governmental level-ASMEA’s recent inaugural conference was a breath of fresh air.

Why? What makes it different? Two main reasons come to mind:

First, the atmosphere of “you’re either with us or against us”-i.e., you’re either an apologist for radical Islam, who believes that Israel is the source of all woes, who filters all data through a secularist/materialistic epistemology, or otherwise you’re a hate-mongering, “Islamophobic,” simpleton-was refreshingly absent.

Which, of course, is the purpose of the organization: a return to objectivity-in all its ugliness.

Second, the presentations revolved around topics that actually mattered and were relevant-again, something of a rarity in this field. Presentations revolved around: Islamic jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) and hermeneutics; sharia law and jihad’s role; war and peace in Islam; the problematic practice of takfir; and apocalyptic discourse in Islam. Compare these pressing themes to one of the Center of Contemporary Arab Studies’ most recent presentations, “Orientalism and Sexual Rights.”

The point here is not so much that “orientalism” and “gender studies” are unimportant aspects when studying the Middle East; far from it. Rather, the point is that there are many extremely important and pressing topics-such as jihad, sharia law, and radical Islam-that the world needs answers to, but that are being virtually ignored by those who are most expected to provide an answer.

In the place of this void, it was inevitable that a more relevant and objective organization studying the Middle East, Africa, and the Islamic world would come into being. More’s the pity it did not come sooner.