Middle East Studies Association

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a professional organization founded in 1967 for scholars concerned with the Near East. In Edward Said’s account, it occupies a revealing position between academic study and American strategic interests: its growth belonged to a postwar research apparatus that expanded knowledge of the region while, he argues, carrying forward the European Orientalist tradition in a domesticated and modernized form.

Foundation and stated scope

Said identifies MESA as a professional association founded in 1967 and concerned with all aspects of the Near East, primarily from the rise of Islam onward and through social-scientific and humanistic disciplines. Its formation coincided with the growth of university programs and institutional support for Middle Eastern studies in the United States. The association thus represented a new professional framework for organizing scholarship about the region, not simply an isolated scholarly society.

The association’s academic identity appears alongside the strategic circumstances of its emergence. Said describes increased American interest in the Middle East during and after the Second World War, when Cairo, Tehran, and North Africa were important theaters of war and the region’s oil, strategic position, and human resources had already been exploited by Britain and France. The United States, he argues, was preparing for a postwar imperial role. MESA’s foundation belongs to this larger institutional moment.

Institutional setting and support

Said situates MESA within an expanding network of public and private support for regional studies. The 1958 National Defense Education Act, inspired by Sputnik, and links between the Social Science Research Council and Middle Eastern studies formed part of the support structure he describes. The network also included federal university programs and research projects, the RAND Corporation and Hudson Institute, and consultation and lobbying by banks, oil companies, and multinational corporations.

The Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946, was an earlier institutional model in this account. Said characterizes it as strategically oriented and responsive to public security and policy, rather than as an institution devoted solely to scholarship. He traces a wider apparatus outward from such organizations, encompassing MESA, foundation support—particularly from the Ford Foundation and others—and government-funded university and research programs. This institutional genealogy makes MESA part of a system in which scholarship, policy, and strategic interest could reinforce one another.

Scholarship, policy, and Orientalist continuity

Said’s criticism is not that MESA’s declared subject or disciplinary range is inherently illegitimate. Rather, he questions the claim that the postwar expansion of Middle East studies was simply an efflorescence of disinterested academic inquiry. The research apparatus, he argues, retained much of the traditional Orientalist outlook developed in Europe, even as that inheritance was adapted, normalized, domesticated, and popularized in the United States.

He stresses the contrast between contemporary refinement and intellectual continuity. Modern social-science techniques could make the field appear newly sophisticated without necessarily displacing inherited assumptions about the region. In Said’s analysis, the relevant issue is therefore not only what institutions study, but how their professional authority and policy connections shape the categories through which the Middle East becomes knowable. MESA serves as one institutional marker of the field’s postwar consolidation, while the broader network around it demonstrates how scholarship could remain entangled with imperial and strategic priorities.