Osamah Khalil's book, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State, was recently reviewed by Al-Hayat, a prestigious Arabic-language daily newspaper.

Excerpt from the full article (in Arabic), titled "American universities and research centers in service of the security state."

The relationship of knowledge to power has received considerable attention from philosophers, sociologists, and historians. French philosopher Michel Foucault created new research approaches to analyze and discern bases of knowledge and their relationship to power as well as the dialectical relationship between them. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said developed this methodology further in his understanding and analysis of orientalism, in the book of the same name, published in 1978.

Osamah Khalil’s America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State belongs to studies on the relationship of knowledge to power, but it differs from the epistemological approach of Foucault and Said.

Khalil’s book is a historical analysis of the expansion of Middle East studies in American universities after the Second World War and their interdependence with the rise of the United States as the dominant world power. The difference between the approaches is Khalil’s detailing of the prevailing culture and historical processes that influence the production of knowledge which serves the American national security state and its global position. 

10/29/18