In his review of my book, Andrew Shryock asserts, “The interpretive key to Colonial Effects is located in its first paragraph,” in the preface, where I state that I am a “Palestinian Jordanian.” Indeed, this discovery—namely, that my national identity is the determining factor of my scholarship—is the interpretive key to Shryock's own grossly misrepresentative review. All his subsequent observations follow neatly in its footsteps.

The main misrepresentation on which Shryock insists is that Colonial Effects is not a book of scholarship but rather a “Palestinian Jordanian commentary,” limited by the inability of its author to escape his national origin and the ideology it dictates. This is to be contrasted with Western scholars of Jordan, like Shryock himself, who can be objective due to their constitutional ability to escape their imperial origins. In this Shryock does not deviate from attitudes he expressed in his own book on Jordan where he considers all Jordanians as unable to escape their subject positions and himself as the “objective” outsider who can arbitrate their disputes. (See my review of his book in the Journal of Palestine Studies 105 [Autumn 1997].) His review of my book is one more instance where he thinks he is the objective arbitrator of a dispute between natives: Jordanian nationalists and me—wherein my book is nothing short of “ideological” pronouncements with a “recognizable place within the field of Jordanian identity politics.”

In line with standard Western colonial views of native scholars, Shryock reminds us that a Western scholar, like himself, has little to learn from the limited analysis of a native scholar. His strategy is to dismiss not only the analysis the book provides as nothing new (thus showing the book's claim of novelty to be the typical hyperbole and false claims characteristic of natives), but also to dismiss its theoretical apparatus as nothing but the vulgar need of natives for showmanship: “Colonial Effects revisits [emphasis added] themes familiar to students of Jordanian history…. The theoretical pyrotechnics are, at times, excessive…. Much ink is given to asserting the novelty of this claim.” This is not to say that a Western scholar, especially an anthropologist like Shryock, cannot benefit greatly from the data natives can provide. Indeed he can and does: “the historiographical infrastructure on which Massad builds his analysis will be of use to a broad range of scholars. His account is meticulously documented throughout—with over 1,000 footnotes….”

Because the book offers no new analysis of value and, therefore, should not be engaged at the level of scholarship, it can be used as a native informant account that can—nay, must—be dissected by the colonial anthropologist. Basing himself on this “commentary,” Shryock diagnoses this native author as blind or at least as endowed with partial sight: “there is much he cannot see.” Unlike Western scholars who derive conclusions from data and analysis, it is not my theoretical analysis that allows me to “see” Jordan's history in the way I do, but rather—and this is to be expected of a native—it is my native identity as “Palestinian Jordanian” that dictates the way I “see” it: “Massad's attraction to the military and the law is actually a byproduct of his tendency to see Jordan—in its formative encounters with Palestinians and Palestine—as a bedouin-dominated army commanded by an English officer who valorized bedouin custom and specialized in codifying and enforcing tribal law.” This is a generalized problem in the book that can only become visible if the reader can find the key to unlock it. Shryock's discovery of this interpretive key is central to his argument, but it is not an isolated discovery. In his book on Jordan, he had discovered that Palestinian Jordanians, in general, are comparable to “Zionists” and “British imperialism” in their relationship to Jordan!

Shyrock's misrepresentations of my book are not limited only to dismissals of my native abilities to analyze in ways the Western anthropologist can, but also extend to the realm of facts. For example, I never claimed, as Shryock asserts, “It was Glubb, after all, who designed the red kaffiyeh Jordanians wear so proudly, brought bagpipes and massed bands to Jordan…..” I quoted Glubb himself saying that he introduced, not “designed,” the shmagh (p. 121) and “coined [it] as exclusively Jordanian” (p. 250). I also rather clearly stated that the bagpipes were introduced “in 1929 by the order of the Amir עAbdullah himself,” not Glubb (p. 156)! As for the Massed Bands, Shryock also gets it wrong: “In 1921, the first Massed Bands were formed…” (p. 155), nine years before the arrival of Glubb. Indeed, I explain that the “Massed Bands [were] founded under Peake,” not Glubb (p. 216). Shryock is undeterred by the amount of liberty he takes in misrepresenting facts. He adds, “Apparently, [Glubb] is even responsible for the fact that millions of Jordanians believe mansaf is their national dish.” Nowhere in my book do I credit Glubb with such responsibility. Indeed, I address how British “colonial trade relations” (p. 158) introduced some of the new ingredients of mansaf, namely rice. It is later and in a footnote that is critical of Shryock's own faulty claims in his scholarship that I assert that “mansaf's current ingredients were introduced by the Mandatory-Hashemite state and by the postindependence Hashemite state more recently, and that the new mansaf was repackaged as ‘traditional’ and then, and only then, nationalized” (p. 316).

Shyrock's acrobatics are not limited to dismissals of the scholarship of natives and misrepresenting facts in their work; his talent extends to misrepresenting their arguments as well. My book's argument and conclusion—“Like other post-colonial national identities, Jordanian national identity and Jordanian national culture are products and effects of colonial institutions” (p. 277)—are rendered by Shryock as equivalent to considering Jordanian national identity as “ersatz replacement culture devised by British colonial officers and then imposed on a subject population who unwittingly accepted it as the real thing,” and that it is “an elaborate display of false consciousness.” My theoretical approach is one that has no place for notions like the “real thing” when it comes to identity, much less notions like “false consciousness.” The point is not that there is a real Jordanian national identity and a false one, but that national identity, in all cases, is brought about through a series of disciplinary and institutional strategies of which it is the effect. This does not make it “true” or “false,” which are questions that can only be posed by nationalists, whose ideology is what is being studied in my book. What I point to is the contradiction of how Jordanian (indeed, all anticolonial) nationalists adopt colonially imposed aspects of their national identity while claiming to oppose colonialism simultaneously.

Contrary to Shryock's interminable series of misrepresentations, my book spends much time speaking about precolonial identities and cultural practices that were either repressed and eliminated or were taken over by the nation-state as marks of the new national identity. This especially relates to the bedouin way of life that was destroyed and those elements of it that were appropriated by the nation-state and Jordanian nationalists themselves (the whole book engages precisely these points). It also relates to gender and how precolonial forms of masculinity and femininity were nationalized by the nation-state. As gender analysis is central to the entire book and its method, it is surprising that Shryock did not make any reference to it in his review, anymore than he did to the large amount of space dedicated to analyzing cultural products—sports, music, songs, television, tea and coffee drinking, and so on—and not only to law and the military tout court. It is indeed in the realm of culture where I locate much nationalist agency and anticolonial resistance among Jordanians (more apparent in the political field and in the military, which I also discuss at length), whether bedouins, urbanites, women, or men. It is regrettable that IJMES readers will not be able to identify the substantive arguments of my book from the serious misrepresentations of Shryock's review.