Our conference this year celebrates crossing borders with the theme “Without Boundaries: The Global Middle East, Then and Now.” In this spirit, I would like to reflect on some of what we have been facing recently in Middle East studies. We have seen challenges to the free circulation of people, ideas, and knowledge, and to the kinds of contacts and exchanges that invigorate our work. And, ironically enough, as restrictions on travel, study, and research have proliferated, the purloining of the cultural property of the region has been proceeding apace. Researchers, students, and scholars in general can move less and less, while the flow of cultural materials from the Middle East to the west has been moving more and more in ways that raise serious ethical questions. MESA and many of its members have been actively engaging these issues, and I will return to some of our accomplishments later in this piece.

Issues of borders are particularly resonant for our field. The Middle East has always been a place of movement, a region with a deep history of trade, travel, and migration. As the Prophet Muhammad was heard to say: “There are three whose prayers will be answered: the one who has known injustice, the parent, and the traveler.” Ours is a region of flows and exchanges, connected by caravans and ships, roads, rails and airplanes, radio and television broadcasts, and now social media. Ours is a region that has known some stunning achievements of integration and connection over deep historical time, from the early Arab empires to the encompassing framework of Dar al-Islam to anti-imperial solidarities.

The Mediterranean is one part of the Middle East where the ambition of crossing borders has been matched at times by practices on the ground, and its history can work for us as a microcosm of events on a wider regional and even global scale. The early modern Mediterranean was a place of deep connections and movement among southern, eastern, and northern shores. It was a sea sailed by ships whose crews of mixed ethnicity and race often shared a lingua franca and visited ports of call on the basis of trading opportunities, not narrow identities. It was a space of vibrant diasporic communities and circuits of news and knowledge that worked to create a shared culture or at the very least some mutual comprehension, as we have come to know from the work of historians such as Julia Clancy-Smith and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi.Footnote ²

This early modern Mediterranean dream also had its nightmarish aspects: piracy was rife and embarking on sea travel from any shore would have involved some amount of trepidation. The specter of capture and enslavement haunted travelers in the Mediterranean well into the nineteenth century. And, to be frank, the reality of the Mediterranean as a shared space of smooth and constant flows was always a tenuous one. Balances of power were precarious, and the history of the Mediterranean is entwined, in the modern period, with the rise of major imperial powers in Europe – the sea-based empires of the Dutch, the French, and the English – that came to contest and eventually control Mediterranean space, both its waters and its shores.

The Mediterranean dream of connection did not die altogether: in a sense, it was deferred to the post-colonial era. There was much talk of a Euro-Mediterranean partnership from the 1990s onward that envisioned new forms of cooperation and interaction in social and cultural affairs along northern, southern, and eastern shores.Footnote ³ It took its place beside other internationalist visions, including a United Nations where political, economic, and cultural connections could be developed in ways that eluded old-style imperial domination.

This latest aspiration of partnership has collapsed in recent years as the pressures of forced migration resulting from foreign invasions, internal conflicts, and climate change gathered. The Mediterranean is now very much a barrier, if a permeable one, seen as a wall, a line of defense against flows of desperate people escaping the disasters of war. And any dreams of heightened connection and communication have been shattered by the rise of anti-Muslim and right-wing populist movements on the northern shores. It is not all of a piece, certainly, and we have witnessed outpourings of popular support for the refugees of the Mediterranean – everyday heroes among ordinary people in Greece and Italy, and throughout Europe. I recently met a German woman from a small town outside Frankfurt where refugees from Syria had arrived in large numbers. She had joined with others in welcoming and trying to help them adjust to this new and no doubt very strange place in which they found themselves. She said she wanted to understand just how difficult it must be for refugees to learn a new language and a new culture so different from their own. So, she decided… to study Arabic! She admitted to me that she only made it through lesson five, a humbling experience for her and one with which many of us can empathize.

What has been happening in the Mediterranean is reflective of events on a global scale. We seem to be living in a kind of post-global age where visions of a post-national utopia have been transformed, or perhaps simply reverted, to a morass of obstacles and rejections. The hope we had placed in the growth of global connections, circuits, fusions, and hybridities appears to have dissipated in the face of ever greater distinctions, hierarchies, and privileges.

The resulting shifts in rhetoric and policy are well illustrated by developments in the United States. The U.S. decided last year to withdraw from UNESCO, effective at the end of December 2018, citing need for the organization's reform and its presumed anti-Israel bias because of its resolutions on protecting religious sites in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.Footnote ⁴ No one doubts that this decision is more complex than that. UNESCO, an organization the United States helped to establish after World War II to widen access to education and ensure the free flow of ideas, has evolved over time. The participation of a broad range of countries gradually diluted U.S. clout in the organization, and its mission moved from the championship of individual rights to focus more on the cultural rights of communities and peoples. It is not, by the way, the first time the United States has withdrawn – it did so previously under the Reagan administration. It is a good indication, however, of today's global dealings, at least U.S. style, that do not always look favorably on the claims of less powerful states and communities, and certainly do not embrace the idea that the world will be enriched by flows of people.

There is some self-serving amnesia at work here. The amnesia that erases the debts owed by the “West” – debts to ancient Egyptian civilization among others for all we inherited through Greece, debts to so many places in the global South where economic surpluses were siphoned off by colonialism, and debts to the indigenous people who were enslaved, defrauded, and impoverished. The debts of the United Kingdom to India, of France to Algeria, of the United States to its native populations and its former African slaves. All that is owed and should be compensated appears to be the farthest thing from the minds of those in charge today.

As you are all well aware, this country has moved to raise explicit barriers to the freedom of movement of individuals, including students, teachers, and scholars. We saw the third iteration of the Muslim Ban in October 2017, which was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018. The affected countries belong to our region: Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, with North Korea and Venezuela thrown in for cover as there is virtually no one arriving from North Korea in any case and the ban on Venezuela extends only to certain government officials. The Muslim Ban has been a major blow to Middle East Studies, with the impact being felt in the slowing of international student enrollments as a result and a less welcoming atmosphere overall. We have all experienced difficulties in the recruitment of visiting scholars and faculty, and in the attendance of international scholars at our conferences and workshops. There has also been additional scrutiny of many of our colleagues who have traveled to the banned countries for study and research.Footnote ⁵ There are empty seats in this room – some of our colleagues who had planned to be here were refused visas or subjected to interminable delays in processing. We have many other colleagues who did not even try to come, knowing full well that their chances of obtaining a visa were slim. The words of the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro have never been more apt: “The longest part of the journey is said to be the passing of the gate.”Footnote ⁶ The irony entailed in raising such barriers when U.S. interventions in the region are so heavily implicated in the creation of unstable conditions there should not be lost on us.

Restrictions on movement take other forms. We see active discouragement of study or research in the Middle East. The funding for international education, funding that supports our studies and our research and enables academic exchange, has faced new threats. During the U.S. budget approval process in the spring of 2018, the administration proposed major cuts, amounting to the elimination of international education programs in the form of attacks on Title VI, which funds our Middle East centers and language study, and Fulbright programs that fund academic research and teaching.Footnote ⁷ The current administration's position was that these programs, under the Department of Education, should be eliminated altogether. Any international education we needed, and it was only required apparently to support military operations, could be better located, the administration's thinking went, in a national security agency, although there was no clear vision of exactly how that would come about.

Attacks on Title VI programs and Middle East studies in particular are certainly not new – we have now decades of experience with virulent critiques of Title VI Middle East centers by outside groups with political agendas, such as Campus Watch, Middle East Forum, and now Canary Mission. What was new this round was the full-throated endorsement and amplification of these attacks by the current administration and the unabashed plan they formulated to eliminate Title VI programs altogether.

While there were many policies initiated to restrict flows of people, we simultaneously saw an appetite developing for the acquisition and transfer of these people's cultural property. According to this way of thinking, individuals should stay where they belong, but their cultural property, their artifacts, and their archives, can come our way. Questions about proprietorship, provenance, curation, access, and, above all, the movement of the cultural property of others had seemed to be settled issues in the postcolonial age. The Hague Convention of 1954 required the protection of cultural property in wartime, and the UNESCO Convention of 1970 called for the proper certification of all transfers of a wide range of artifacts and archives that held importance for the history and culture of a state and its people. Archivists, historians, ministers of culture, and others have embraced these principles and argued for respecting the rights of individuals, communities, and states to the materials that are the building blocks of heritage and self-knowledge. A community's archive should be understood in the broadest sense to consist of all the documents, artifacts, and traditions that contain its historical memory.

There are many archival complications: who decides what kinds of materials get preserved? How should materials be curated and accessed? How do we resolve tensions between the imperative of preservation and protection, and rights of access?Footnote ⁸ We can dream about free and open availability for all, evoking principles of freedom of information and the democratization of knowledge, but recent experience suggests that these visions of open access can cloak some high-handed operations tinged by neo-imperialism.

MESA has been engaged in some of the vigorous debates about cultural property arising from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Two acquisitions of cultural property in particular have drawn our attention: the transfer of the Iraqi Ba‘th archives to the U.S., currently held at the Hoover Institution, and the so-called ISIS Files that a New York Times reporter smuggled out of Iraq this year. Where do these documents belong? Do claims of rescue and preservation justify the removal of these documents from their place of creation? I'll return below to these specific cases as well as MESA's involvement.

There are also many disputes over the spoils of nineteenth-century colonialism. Greece has repeatedly demanded the return of the Elgin Marbles,Footnote ⁹ while Egypt has asked for the repatriation of the Rosetta Stone and the bust of Nefertiti,Footnote ¹⁰ among other pieces, all to no avail. At the end of October 2018, an Assyrian stone relief was sold at a Christie's auction for $31 million, triple the estimated $10 million it was predicted to fetch. This piece had been taken out of Iraq during Ottoman times under dubious circumstances. Protesters of the sale made the point that not only is the provenance of the relief not as clear as it is claimed to be, but the astronomical price is a direct result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq which then led to internal conflict and the rise of Da‘ish (perhaps more commonly known as ISIS). The destruction of ancient artifacts, major smuggling, and conflicts over war booty have raised popular interest as well as prices.Footnote ¹¹ So here we see a revisiting of the spoils of nineteenth-century imperialism that acquire additional commercial value thanks to twenty-first-century imperial activities. And there is no pretense that this particular piece of cultural property will be made accessible in any way to its community of origin: it was bought by a private collector and will be removed from public space.

Written records of various kinds also have been at the center of controversies. Archives are “houses of memory” according to Jean Pierre Wallot, former president of the International Council on Archives.Footnote ¹² The documents of the past and present are the material for the creation of collective memory – and it is a fundamental right of individuals, communities, and nations to access information concerning their own history and culture. Archives are creations, of course. We need to keep in mind how power is consolidated and wielded through the selective preservation of documents and voices, and there are many silences. Yet even if state archives amplify the voice of the powerful, and often serve to secure bureaucratic control, they are repositories of memory and can be read against the grain.

Archivists have helped us understand how best to curate archives. Records should not be fragmented – those originally from the same source should remain together since they gain meaning the more complete they are. Archives should be kept in the place of creation – the locale is an important element of their context. Archives should be housed in proximity to the people whose history is recorded, to enhance access. We have a long history of violation of these practices, particularly in the form of archival looting in wartime. Nazi Germany looted archives throughout its occupied territories. During the Opium War, the British took 2,000 Chinese language documents that were not rediscovered in British archives until 100 years later.

Other colonial regimes routinely transgressed all these “best practices” of curation. We have some prime examples from our own region. France still holds over 50,000 records created in Algeria in addition to a large number of Algerian artifacts. The French claim to this archive is the standard colonial one, namely that these records were produced by French officials in French offices and therefore belong to France. As the director of the French National Archives put it, the records “came from civil servants, police and military… [and] are considered under French law sovereign archives that are not transferable.” He also made the claim of good curation, noting that the records are being made available “for the needs of research and knowledge.”Footnote ¹³ Algerians note that no one asked them if they wanted to be ruled by France, and insist that documents and artifacts that originated on Algerian soil are part of Algerian cultural property. France holds maps that contain critical information about Algerian infrastructure, for example, and also material central to the national narrative, including the personal library of Emir Abdel-Kader, the leader of Algerian resistance. Such materials are the stuff of Algerian collective memory as well as potent national symbols. There are no plans for repatriation.

Despite the clear guidelines in international law governing the appropriation of cultural property as war booty, there are many examples of blatant and ongoing disregard of the rules. As those who do research on Palestine are well aware, Palestinian archives and artifacts are scattered far and wide. In 1948, for example, books and indeed whole libraries were taken from seized Palestinian homes and institutions, material that serves as a record of intellectual life in Palestine during the mandate period and before. Many of these items were irretrievably lost while others ended up in Israeli archives, many of them in the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University, which houses some 6,500 confiscated books and manuscripts catalogued as “abandoned property.”Footnote ¹⁴ The items in the abandoned property collection are open to the public, although not many Palestinians are allowed to travel to West Jerusalem to actually access them. There are, at present, no plans to restore this property to owners, and no intention of transferring this material to the newly opened Palestine National Archives in Ramallah.

Successive wars have occasioned still other transfers. In 1982, the Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and seized major war booty in the form of archival collections. Palestinian visual history, in particular, suffered an enormous blow. As the Israeli researcher Rona Sela has recently documented, the extensive archives of the Palestinian Cinema Institute and the PLO Cultural Arts Section were raided, and a wealth of films, photographs, audio recordings, and maps were carted off. It has only recently come to light that much of this material ended up in the IDF and Defense Ministry archives in Israel, including some 38,000 films, 2.7 million photographs, 96,000 audio recordings, and 46,000 maps and aerial photos, produced by and/or about Palestine and Palestinians.Footnote ¹⁵ It is next to impossible to write the history of Palestinian visual culture without the use of these materials, but even Sela, as an Israeli, experienced great difficulty in gaining any access at all, spending years and undertaking legal action in order to discover what the collection contained.

I do not mean to imply that the repatriation of records to their original place in the region would necessarily result in a utopian research situation and lead to a renaissance of community self-knowledge and narrative. We do research in the region and we know the many obstacles we face, to say nothing of those encountered by the general public, especially when it comes to any materials deemed sensitive by ruling regimes. And the research climate has arguably grown worse in recent years as the region has suffered from conflict and insecurity. It is not good enough, however, to accept a status quo that justifies the looting and then retention of someone else's cultural property under the guise of preservation.

It is not unheard of to return colonial archives. The Dutch recognized that their colonial records from Suriname, while produced by Dutch officials in Dutch colonial offices, belonged to the people whose history they record. Between 2009 and 2017, they repatriated the records of a 300-year colonial relationship through a process that entailed cooperation and support for the development of state-of-the-art facilities to receive them.Footnote ¹⁶ Is there any example of repatriation of colonial records to the Middle East region? I could not find even one. If anything, we are witnessing the ongoing removal of archives in ways that are transparently illegal.

I suspect many of you are quite familiar with the debates about the Ba‘th party records that are stored at the Hoover Institution located at Stanford University. But just in case, a quick review. In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States, there was extensive looting and destruction of heritage sites, a clear failure on the part of the occupying forces to protect cultural property, and then a pilfering of various kinds of written materials including whole archives. Some ten million pages of Ba‘th party records were gathered up under hazy circumstances, removed from the country, and eventually deposited at the Hoover Institution. Iraq has called, and continues to call, for immediate repatriation of these records. The Director of the Iraq National Library and Archives has taken a strong public position that these records are the property of the Iraqi people. They are material essential to the collective memory of the Iraqi nation. Professional archivists joined this discussion, raising critical issues concerning the legal and ethical standards that had been violated.Footnote ¹⁷ In what was, as I understand it, a rather bold and unprecedented move on their parts, the Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists issued a statement taking a clear position that the records were pillaged and should be returned.

I would like to call your attention to the tension within the differing points of view on the Iraqi Ba‘th archives. For those who support the act of removing the archive from Iraq and then Hoover's retention of the material, these are considered to be acts of protection and preservation. The archive was in danger, and Hoover has the knowledge and resources to preserve the materials and to digitize them for the purposes of general access. They also argue that the international community has some rights here, that the investigation of such a regime has meaning and importance beyond the boundaries of Iraq. For instance, cases of international human rights violations are involved and these records could be used to pursue claims for justice. It is somewhat difficult, however, to see what distinguishes this position from that of colonial paternalism. We have the knowledge and resources, we have the broader and higher goals, so therefore all cultural property should flow toward us in the wealthier countries?

The critics of the Hoover acquisition, on the other hand, rehearse arguments that are familiar to us by now. These records belong to their place of creation and should be returned to the local context that provides meaning. They should be made accessible to the people of the community whose lives they record – they are essential to nation-building and collective memory. Only the very rare Iraqi can reach Palo Alto to access them – a problem made worse by the increased barriers to entry to the United States. Even if they are made available online, most Iraqis do not have internet access. And finally, the refusal to return records is tantamount to a denial of Iraqi sovereignty, a colonial move par excellence.

We are dealing here, at one level, with an appeal to universal access versus proprietary claims of community and nation. There is, however, the larger picture of power. Who controls the movement of people and papers? There is a distinct irony in the fact that these archives flowed into Palo Alto while individuals from the region were facing barriers from bans and heightened vetting of all kinds. I should add that the issue of the Ba‘th party archive is far from resolved: Hoover says it will repatriate the documents “at a future date” that is yet to be specified.

And then, after all the discussion about the provenance, curation, and access pertaining to the Ba‘th archives, we suddenly found ourselves in a parallel moment in the spring of 2018. A reporter for the New York Times (NYT), Rukmini Callimachi, more or less smuggled a collection of documents generated by the administration of the defeated Islamic State in Iraq, the so-called “ISIS files,” out of Iraq and deposited them with the newspaper. Her “rescue” of these documents was heralded as a great achievement with total disregard for the legal and ethical issues involved in the removal of cultural property. When confronted, the response was a déjà vu straight from colonial history. The NYT offered paternalistic justifications about their superior ability to protect the documents, and universalist arguments that it would be able to provide access for all. A certain breeziness of tone prevailed. It was all about the reporter's right to the story, to getting and using information with small regard for the niceties of archival ethics.Footnote ¹⁸ After official Iraqi protest, the NYT did eventually decide to return the physical collection to Iraq, and transfer the full digital version it had made to George Washington University's Program on Extremism. The program promises to use them to preserve and learn lessons from history. I do not think any of these lessons will cover the workings of power that lie behind this acquisition: who gets to control whom, and what moves, and in what direction.

Where should MESA stand on these issues? I think most of us would embrace a world in which we all can move freely, some kind of pre- or post-national paradise of open borders, a world without walls or passports. Then we could have scholarly exchanges and cultural encounters to our hearts’ content. Arguably, some of us who hold passports of privilege already enjoy such freedoms. But what about the vast majority of our colleagues in the Middle East? And how do we balance advocacy for freedom of movement, of people and things, with our respect for the individuals and communities and states that have proprietary rights to the stuff of their heritage. When do our universalist aspirations run afoul of the needs and rights of communities to preserve and embrace their culture and identity? And how do we attend to the power differentials of today's world that provide the context for any discussion of the movement of people and things? What should MESA, as the advocate for Middle East studies and its scholars, be doing about the restrictions on travel for study, research, and collegial interactions? And, on the flip side, what is our responsibility when it comes to confronting lax standards for the movement of cultural property? How do we thread our way forward? We now arrive at what I hope is the good news.

MESA has been busy. We come together for this splendid annual meeting every year for a real celebration of our scholarship and our friendship. Between one annual meeting and the next, there is much else that transpires. Your association engages in a wide range of activities and many of them have been addressing these issues. I will just share a few of the more relevant ones.

Under the leadership of past president Beth Baron we joined the ACLU as a plaintiff in their valiant opposition to the Muslim Ban. It has been critically important to raise our voices against this discrimination on the basis of religion, a discrimination that affects many of our members. After a number of judicial victories over a year and a half, the Supreme Court ultimately upheld the ban in June 2018: it sanctioned a policy that targets people because of their religion, violating our basic principles of equality under the law and freedom of religion. It is, simply, one of the greatest missteps in the history of the Court. We will continue to oppose the ban and also to track its effects. And we can take some solace in the fact that our opposition helped force the government to soften the ban in each successive iteration.

Another initiative. Virtually all of us have benefitted from study and research in the Middle East region and from close contact with our colleagues from around the globe. Middle East studies has flourished in this country because of support for these activities. MESA took the threat of the elimination of Title VI and Fulbright programs very seriously, and Amy Newhall in the secretariat helped to mobilize Middle East Studies centers across the nation to prepare materials about what we do, materials that “wowed” the congressional committee in charge. The Title VI and Fulbright programs nicely survived the challenge of budget cuts, and federal support for international education endures. MESA will continue to pay close attention to what is happening on Capitol Hill and how it might affect our field.

I can also report on an exciting new MESA project, the MESA Global Academy, led by Aslı Bali, Beth Baron, and Greta Scharnweber, which responds to the deterioration in the conditions for our colleagues in the Middle East region as well as the narrowing opportunities we have to interact with our counterparts there. The MESA Global Academy will address both these problems through a program that provides two-year fellowships for scholars from the region who can join their colleagues in North American universities, an answer to the need for mobility and collaboration. This is a project in the planning and fund-raising stages, and we have every expectation that it will be a unique and successful model for others to follow.

MESA has also addressed the issue of transfers of cultural property by engaging the New York Times in a discussion of its decisions and responsibilities when it came to the ISIS files. MESA, under the guidance of Laurie Brand, the chair of our Committee on Academic Freedom, took the initiative to point out to the Times the questionable legality and lack of ethical considerations that surrounded the removal of these documents and the subsequent publication of parts of the material. I know for sure that we educated the editors of the Times about issues pertaining to the transfers of cultural property that were apparently new to them, and I would like to think that the Times decision to return the documents to Iraq was influenced, at least in part, by our intervention.

Over the past year the Committee on Academic Freedom has repeatedly protested assaults on the free speech and movement of our colleagues in this country and in the Middle East region in a broad array of contexts [see Laurie Brand's statement of Committee agendas in the last issue of RoMES here]. Under the leadership of Miriam Lowi, chair of the Middle East branch, and Zach Lockman, chair of the North American branch, the Committee on Academic Freedom has shone a fierce light on the persecution, silencing, and imprisoning of our colleagues here and abroad. I direct you to the MESA website for more details.

We will continue to navigate this rather tricky terrain of asserting our belief in the value of flows of people and ideas across the boundaries that have been drawn and the barriers that have been raised, while also being clear that the movement of people and cultural property should not be the prerogative or the sole decision of the privileged. I want to thank everyone who has made MESA the active and effective organization it is today and assure you that MESA is an exciting place where you can make important contributions on the issues that absorb us all.