Open letter to Dr Denis MacEoin

Dear Denis,

First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and for your comment as well as for summarising your Islamicist and Arabist credentials which, of course, I never challenged or questioned. For the benefit of the readers, I will recopy below your comment to my post :

Gabriele,
Before I bother to read your full comment, let me put you right. If you had actually taken the trouble to read my details on the report, you’d have seen that I have an MA in Persian, Arabic and Islamic Studies from Edinburgh, a PhD in Persian Studies (focussing on Shi’ite Islam) from Cambridge, have written several books and a great many articles on Islamic subjects, contributed to The Encyclopedia of Islam, the Encyclopedia Iranica, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam in the Modern World, and many other reference books. taught Islamic civilization and Arabic-English translation at the University of Fez, taught Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University, and some Persian at Durham. The fact that I’m also a novelist doesn’t figure in this at all. It’s totally irrelevant, but because you seem determined to attack the messenger instead of the message, you focus on the wrong thing. I’ll read your remarks in more detail later. But I already see denial writ large on what is there. Read the texts, then add to the 100 mosques we visited the estimated 1600 mosques in this country, and you may accept that we have a problem. And that the Muslims we worked with agreed it was a problem for them too.

As you can see, I faithfully reported your expertise in classic Islamic studies in my post. I thought also that it was relevant to highlight that at the present your main interest, as you have mentioned on your own webpage, is not researching and teaching sociological aspects of Islam.

Unfortunately, as by your own admission, before even reading my post, you have presented a defensive position thinking that, in your own words, I would have been ‘determined to attack the messenger instead of the message’. Of course, I am sure that you can notice from my post that I have challenged the very basis of your report, and asked clear questions, which if answered and substantiated will resolve my doubts.

But apparently in your comments there is not even the minimum attempt to refer to my issues with your overall methodology, and with the lack of transparency.

I am sure that you can clarify your methodology, tell us if interviews were conducted, and confirm that the overall research was carried out in an ethical manner. I will be happy to publish your answers to my questions, and if they are satisfactory, to acknowledge that the study was conducted with a substantial professionalism.

Yet I will still think that the report does not show very much in itself. On the one hand, it can be used to claim that mosques host material useful to preach hatred. On the other, it can be used to say that out of 1600 mosques and institutions very few possess radical material. Nothing in your report answers the main questions: how is this literature used? When? For which purposes? And so on.

Being an anthropologist and a social scientist, rather than an Islamicist and Arabist, I am very concerned about the lack of methodology and I have asked you to reply to some questions; the same questions I would have raised were I asked to peer-review your report for an academic journal.

Unfortunately, you did not engage, as everybody can see from your comment, in a useful discussion. Rather, as Narcissus, you fell in love with your Islamicist credentials which never were denied, and you referred to your being a novelist and involved in literature as something that could potentially diminish them; something that only you could have assumed from my post.

 

I look forward to read a more substantial answer to my legitimate questions.

 

With regards

Gabriele