Middle East Institute

The Middle East Institute was founded in Washington in May 1946 as a quasi-governmental institution for overseeing and sponsoring research interest in the Middle East. Edward Said places it at the institutional center of a postwar American research apparatus whose scholarly activity was closely bound to national security and public policy. Rather than marking a clean break with European Orientalism, the Institute helped accommodate and normalize its outlook within American Middle East studies.

Founding and Strategic Purpose

The Institute’s founding followed a marked increase in American interest in the Middle East during and after the Second World War. Cairo, Tehran, and North Africa had become important arenas of war, while Britain and France had pioneered the exploitation of the region’s oil, strategic, and human resources. The United States, preparing to assume a larger postwar imperial role, treated knowledge of the region as an instrument of that role.

A cultural-relations policy articulated by Mortimer Graves in 1950 made the security purpose explicit. Graves proposed acquiring every significant publication in every important Near Eastern language published since 1900, arguing that Congress should recognize this effort as a measure of national security. He described the principal forces contending with the American idea for acceptance in the Near East as communism and Islam. Said identifies the Institute, founded four years earlier in Washington under federal auspices though not wholly within or by the government, as a principal institutional expression of this strategic approach.

Research and Language Study

The Institute’s research model connected scholarship to policy objectives. A 1958 report produced by the Institute, Report on Current Research, included a contribution on the state of Arabic studies in the United States written by a professor of Hebrew. Its prefatory statement argued that foreign-language knowledge was no longer the preserve of humanities scholars but a working tool for engineers, economists, social scientists, and other specialists. The report emphasized Arabic’s practical value to oil-company executives, technicians, and military personnel.

The report also framed language learning through Cold War competition. It pointed to Russian universities producing fluent Arabic speakers and argued that the United States should develop its own foreign-language program rather than wait. In Said’s analysis, this orientation made the study of Oriental languages an instrument of policy and sustained propaganda: language knowledge mattered less as a means of reading literary works than as a tool for influencing what people could be made to think. Specialist expertise could confer authority and a mystique even when its purpose was strategic rather than humanistic interpretation.

Institutional Expansion and Influence

The Institute became a model for a broader network of American Middle East research. From organizations of this kind grew the Middle East Studies Association, foundation support including that of the Ford Foundation, federal programs supporting universities, and government research projects. The network also encompassed work by the Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute, alongside consultative and lobbying activity by banks, oil companies, and multinational corporations.

Said stresses that the Institute’s importance lay not only in its own research but in the institutional pattern it helped establish. The resulting apparatus could present itself as refined scholarship and employ sophisticated social-science methods, while retaining a strategic orientation toward the region. He argues that its general outlook and detailed operations continued the Orientalist tradition developed in Europe, even as that tradition was adapted to American institutions and postwar policy needs.

Place in American Orientalism

The Institute’s approach exemplifies a shift from traditional philological Orientalism toward an American form organized around expertise, area studies, and public policy. Said distinguishes this newer formation from the older scholarly tradition associated with H. A. R. Gibb and Louis Massignon: contemporary American work often reproduced cultural hostility and the authority of the expert without reproducing the older emphasis on philology or literary study.

The Institute thus stands in Said’s account at the intersection of knowledge production and imperial power. Its sponsorship of research and language study could produce useful scholarship, but those activities were embedded in national-security concerns and a competition over political influence. The Institute’s history shows how European Orientalist assumptions could be domesticated and popularized in the United States, acquiring new institutional forms while continuing to frame the Middle East through strategic interests.