Which Middle East Specialists Get Assigned and Read?

by Daniel Pipes
Tue, 22 Feb 2005
updated Thu, 13 Oct 2005

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The Center for History and New Media (whose slogan is "building a better yesterday … bit by bit") at George Mason University has tweaked google.com so as to produce a fascinating "Syllabus Finder." Put in an author's name and it churns out a listing of the syllabi where that author is assigned in U.S. classrooms, giving quantitative insight into whose writings are current.

Looking at Middle East studies, I ran twenty-four names of writers about history and politics who fit into three categories and got the following results:

Yesteryear's Greats

Name Courses Books

HAR Gibb 22 5,070

S D Goitein 12 4,900

Gustave von Grunebaum 1 102

Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall 10 72

Philip Hitti 5 131

Henri Lammens 3 102

Edward Lane 11 530

Louis Massignon 4 1,200

Middle East studies establishment

Name Courses Books

Joel Beinin 24 1,670

Juan Cole 129 443

John Esposito 114 617

Cornell Fleischer 6 110

Nikki Keddie 30 753

Rashid Khalidi 52 4,980

Edward Said 868 17,800 (many of which are not related to Middle East studies)

Michael Sells 62 356

Dissidents

Name Courses Books

Fouad Ajami 102 898

Bat Ye'or 25 193

Ibn Warraq 34 85

Elie Kedourie 34 1,780

Stanley Kurtz 41 104

Martin Kramer 52 1,090

Bernard Lewis 356 3,880

Daniel Pipes 120 2,710

Comments: (1) The old masters do indeed go largely unread. (2) The dissidents get a surprisingly good representation, even if in some cases they are supposed to be read negatively, perhaps because they are so few in number. (3) Being part of the establishment is not guarantee of being read (it is a big establishment, after all), but it offers the route to scoring highest of all. (4) What is assigned is partially a function of what publishers make available, but in the age of photostats and the internet, this is less the case than it used to be. That said, authors ubiquitous on the internet are likely to have a greater class readership than those less well represented. (February 22, 2005)

Oct. 12, 2005 update: Making use of Google Print, I have looked up the same names to see how many times they are cited in books whose contents are included in the Google Print feature. These are listed in the column on the right. In general, one finds a rough correlation between classroom use and number of book citations, with some glaring exceptions (Gibb, Goitein, and Khalidi in particular).

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