I’m a law professor and also a columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Late last year, I began a series on the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies, from which this article is derived. The coverage launched when the Honors College at UA Fayetteville announced a panel on the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorists that featured as the only presenters two anti-Israel professors from the King Fahd Center.
While the school canceled the one-sided discourse shortly after it was publicized, the broader question remains: How does Arkansas’s flagship public university have a subsidiary named after an autocratic monarch? And does that center provide students with a true educational experience or, rather, an unbalanced view of the area of the world it purports to cover?
How does Arkansas’s flagship public university have a subsidiary named after an autocratic monarch?This issue is particularly salient given today’s virtue-signaling, name-banning cultural revolution, which forces schools across America to de-name buildings and programs styled after historical figures on the basis of contemporary moral standards. Indeed, a committee at UA Fayetteville unsuccessfully proposed removing a statue of former U.S. senator J. William Fulbright from campus and de-naming the Fulbright Arts and Sciences College because of the Arkansas Democrat’s last-century congressional voting record. (Fulbright was also an old-white-male Southerner at one point—no greater embodiment of evil seemingly exists for the Left today—but that wasn’t the reason, stated at least, for the attempted purge.)
But, somehow, we haven’t observed a similar uproar over the campus center named after a modern-day patrilineal royal who, until rather recently, prohibited women from driving and appearing unaccompanied in public in a still-repressive country that murdered and dismembered a journalist and that Amnesty International currently characterizes as embracing “inherently discriminatory systems” for women. Where is the outrage? Where is that de-naming commission?
The cause of this drastic hypocrisy is the lingering effect of the unholy trinity that still characterizes Arkansas politics: money, the Clinton influence-peddling machine, and leftist double standards.
Neetu Arnold of the National Association of Scholars, in a 2022 paper aptly entitled “Hijacked: The Capture of America’s Middle East Studies Centers,” wrote the following:
[Saudi Prince Bandar] agreed to provide the seed money for [the King Fahd Center] at the University of Arkansas only after it became clear that Clinton would likely win the [presidential] election. […] The King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies was born from the $21.5 million it received in … 1992 and 1994. […] For the first seven years, the Center itself barely kept any records of its financial activity. In the meantime, professors and students from the Center traveled back and forth between Arkansas and the Middle East extensively.
But there is more to the King Fahd Center than just collecting Saudi donations. As Arnold showed, the center weighs in on controversies by pushing an ideology antagonistic to Western values and sympathetic to its donors:
[I]n 2017 … the King Fahd Center canceled feminist scholar Phyllis Chesler’s appearance at a conference on honor killings [after] Professors Mohja Kahf, Joel Gordon, and Ted Swedenburg penned a joint letter to [the] center director … that demanded the Fahd Center pull funds from the conference due to Chesler’s presence. These professors believed Chesler’s criticism of some Islamic practices “promote[d] bigotry.” [The center] revoked Chesler’s invitation to speak altogether.
The center’s concern for Middle Eastern money cannot be underestimated. The King Fahd Center seeks to recruit many students from Arab countries, who usually pay full tuition. Between 2013 and 2018, for example, the University of Arkansas received $42 million from the government of Iraq. Arnold again:
The Center’s programs clearly focus their attention on students with an Arab background. […] Recruiting these students substantially increases the university’s revenue, as foreign students (or the countries sponsoring them) typically pay the full price of out-of-state tuition to attend. For instance, as a result (in large part) of the university’s efforts to recruit Iraqi students, the University of Arkansas received $42 million from Iraq between 2013 and 2018, making it the largest recipient of Iraqi funds of all American universities (emphasis added).
How willing is the university to continue to prostitute its academic reputation?
Consider this: The recent course-offerings webpage for the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies listed 35 classes whose titles included “Arab,” “Arabic,” “Islam,” “Islamic,” or “Quran.” That seems fine until one notices that the same course-offerings page listed not even one class with the words “Jew,” “Christian,” “Hebrew,” “Torah,” or “Bible” in the title, notwithstanding that Hebrew preceded Arabic in the Middle East by millennia and remains there today; that Judaism preceded Islam in the Middle East by 2,500 years and remains there today; that Christianity preceded Islam in the Middle East by centuries and remains there today; and that the Bible preceded the Quran by thousands of years and underlies the beliefs of 2.5 billion Christians and Jews worldwide, millions of whom live in the Middle East today.
At the University of Arkansas, Middle East Studies is lopsided and misleading.At the University of Arkansas, Middle East Studies is lopsided and misleading.
One of the aforementioned Fahdians, Mohja Kahf, took issue with my published concerns. She disputed my description of European Jews—who, along with Middle Eastern Jews, were founders of modern Israel—as “indigenous” to the Holy Land. She claims, rather, that Jewish “Europeans newly arrived to Palestine, whose ancestors had been living in Europe for centuries despite Europe’s horrific levels of antisemitism (unmatched in the Arabic-speaking world), through violent takeover in 1948, imposed a colonial-settler state that marginalized indigenous Jews who had lived there continuously.”
Let’s unpack these misinformed tropes.
1. Kahf’s suggestion that European Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel is belied by science. DNA tests confirm the opposite. Kahf’s real claim is that Europeans Jews’ entitlement to their homeland expired, while the claim of subsequent Arab invaders somehow hasn’t. This anti-Israel charade—that forcibly displaced indigenous Jews no longer have the right to their ancestral homeland—is applied to no other displaced people.
2. Kahf’s assertion that “antisemitism in Europe [during WWII] … [is] unmatched in the Arabic-speaking world” is sadly untrue. Butchers beheading Jews, terrorists raping and mutilating Jewish girls and parading their bodies before cheering crowds, and murderers burning Jewish babies alive: These crimes against humanity were all committed by Palestinian terrorists. And their antisemitic rhetoric matches their actions. The Hamas charter mirrors the insane conspiracy theories underlying millennia of genocidal antisemitism:
The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. […] [Jews] have been scheming for a long time … and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media … stirred revolutions … formed secret organizations—such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions—which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. […] They stood behind World War I … and formed the League of Nations [to] rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains.
Who knew that Freemasons, Rotarians, and Lions were all part of a secret Jewish cabal—not to mention that the Jews orchestrated WWII?
3. Kahf’s contention that European Jews returning to Israel did so “through violent takeover in 1948” is revisionism on par with Holocaust denial.
In 1948, the United Nations divided land controlled by the British Empire—and the Ottoman Empire for centuries before—between Jews and the more-recent Arab invaders. The Jews (European and Middle Eastern alike) agreed and celebrated, while Arabs from throughout the Middle East attacked Israel. Both in 1948 and after October 7th, Jews responded to Arab attempts at annihilation, not the other way around.
Professor Kahf has given us a good look at the beliefs of one of the faculty supported by the King Fahd Center. And it’s clear that she’s not alone in the perspective that she advances.
Many have been surprised by the unrest manifesting across college campuses today. But the seeds for such hatred were planted years ago, when colleges eschewed objective academics in exchange for large foreign donations. It’s a tragic situation.
Robert Steinbuch holds the Arkansas Bar Professorship at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law. He is a Fulbright scholar, chair of the Arkansas Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a columnist for Arkansas’s state newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Steinbuch presents his views here in his individual capacity and not on behalf of any of the aforementioned organizations.