Kanan Makiya

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Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi-American academic. He is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. Although he was born in Baghdad, he left Iraq to study architecture at M.I.T., later joining Makiya Associates to design and build projects in the Middle East.

[edit] Work

In 1981, he left the practice of architecture to write, using the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil to avoid endangering his family. In Republic of Fear (1989), which became a best-seller after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he argues that Iraq had become a full-fledged totalitarian state, worse than despotic states such as Jordan or Saudi Arabia. His next book, The Monument (1991), is an essay on the aesthetics of power and kitsch.

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World (1993) was published under Makiya's own name. It was awarded The Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on international relations published in English in 1993. In 2001 Makiya published The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem, a work of historical fiction that tells the story of Muslim-Jewish relations in the formative first century of Islam, culminating in the building of the Dome of the Rock. Makiya has collaborated on multiple films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The film was shown in the U.S. under the title 'Saddam's Killing Fields', and received the Edward R. Murrow Award For Best Television Documentary On Foreign Affairs in 1992.

Makiya also founded the Iraqi Memory Foundation.[1] Makiya worked closely with Ayad Rahim in the early development of the foundation. In October 1992, he acted as the convenor of the Human Rights Committee of the Iraqi National Congress, a transitional parliament based in northern Iraq. Makiya also writes an occasional column and has been published in The Independent and The New York Times among other places.

[edit] Criticism of Makiya

The late Edward Said, a professor of English at Columbia University and supporter of Palestinian rights, was a vocal critic of Makiya. Said contended that Makiya was a Trotskyist in the late 1960s and early '70s and later profited by designing and constructing buildings for Saddam Hussein. Said also claims that Makiya mistranslates Arab intellectuals so he can condemn them for not speaking out against the crimes of Arab rulers.