Edward Said

Controversial literary critic and bold advocate of the Palestinian
cause in America


Edward Said, who has died aged 67, was one of the leading literary
critics of the last quarter of the 20th century. As professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia University, New York,
he was widely regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-
structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the most articulate
and visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the United States,
where it earned him many enemies.

The broadness of Said's approach to literature and his other great
love, classical music, eludes easy categorisation. His most
influential book, Orientalism (1978), is credited with helping to
change the direction of several disciplines by exposing an unholy
alliance between the enlightenment and colonialism. As a humanist
with a thoroughly secular outlook, his critique on the great
tradition of the western enlightenment seemed to many to be self-
contradictory, deploying a humanistic discourse to attack the high
cultural traditions of humanism, giving comfort to fundamentalists
who regarded any criticism of their tradition or texts as off-
limits, while calling into question the integrity of critical
research into culturally sensitive areas such as Islam.

Whatever its flaws, however, Orientalism appeared at an opportune
time, enabling upwardly mobile academics from non-western countries
(many of whom came from families who had benefited from colonialism)
to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to
engender by associating themselves with "narratives of oppression",
creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and
debating representations of the non-western "other".

Said's influence, however, was far from being confined to the worlds
of academic and scholarly discourse. An intellectual superstar in
America, he distinguished himself as an opera critic, pianist,
television celebrity, politician, media expert, popular essayist and
public lecturer.

Latterly, he was one of the most trenchant critics of the Oslo peace
process and the Palestinian leadership of Yasser Arafat. He was
dubbed "professor of terror" by the rightwing American magazine
Commentary; in 1999, when he was struggling against leukaemia, the
same magazine accused him of falsifying his status as a Palestinian
refugee to enhance his advocacy of the Palestinian cause, and of
falsely claiming to have been at school in Jerusalem before
completing his education in the United States.

The hostility Said encountered from pro-Israeli circles in New York
was predictable, given his trenchant attacks on Israeli violations
of the human rights of Palestinians and his outspoken condemnations
of US policies in the Middle East. From the other side of the
conflict, however, he encountered opposition from Palestinians who
accused him of sacrificing Palestinian rights by making unwarranted
concessions to Zionism.

As early as 1977, when few Palestinians were prepared to concede
that Jews had historic claims to Palestine, he said: "I don't deny
their claims, but their claim always entails Palestinian
dispossession." More than any other Palestinian writer, he qualified
his anti-colonial critique of Israel, explaining its complex
entanglements and the problematic character of its origins in the
persecution of European Jews, and the overwhelming impact of the
Zionist idea on the European conscience.

Said recognised that Israel's exemption from the normal criteria by
which nations are measured owed everything to the Holocaust. But
while recognising its unique significance, he did not see why its
legacy of trauma and horror should be exploited to deprive the
Palestinians, a people who were "absolutely dissociable from what
has been an entirely European complicity", of their rights.

"The question to be asked," he wrote in the Politics Of
Dispossession (1994), "is how long can the history of anti-semitism
and the Holocaust be used as a fence to exempt Israel from arguments
and sanctions against it for its behaviour towards the Palestinians,
arguments and sanctions that were used against other repressive
governments, such as South Africa? How long are we going to deny
that the cries of the people of Gaza... are directly connected to
the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of the
victims of Nazism?"

He insisted that the task of Israel's critics was not to reproduce
for Palestine a mirror-image of a Zionist ideology of diaspora and
return, but rather to elaborate a secular vision of democracy as
applicable to both Arabs and Jews. Elected to the Palestine national
council (PNC) in 1977, as an independent intellectual Said avoided
taking part in the factional struggles, while using his authority to
make strategic interventions. Rejecting the policy of armed struggle
as impermissible - because of the legacy of the Holocaust and the
special conditions of the Jewish people - he was an early advocate
of the two-state solution, implicitly recognising Israel's right to
exist. The policy was adopted at the PNC meeting in Algiers in 1988.

In adapting the English version of the Arabic draft text, Said used
his influence to rephrase the Arabic; although his modifications
were insufficient to satisfy the Reagan administration, which ended
by dictating the crucial words that appeared in Arafat's speech to a
special session of the UN general assembly (convened in Geneva
because the US state department refused to grant Arafat a visa to
attend the UN in New York), there can be little doubt that Said's
tireless representations in the American media, explaining that the
declaration amounted to a "historic compromise" on the part of the
Palestinians towards the Jewish state, opened the way for the US-PLO
dialogue that would lead to the Madrid conference and the Oslo peace
process.

As the peace process gained momentum, however, Said adopted an
increasingly critical stance and, in 1991, resigned from the PNC.
The Oslo declaration, he argued, was weighted unfairly towards
Israel; the scenario, previsioning an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza
and Jericho in advance of the other territories and agreement on the
final status of Jerusalem, amounted to "an instrument of Palestinian
surrender, a Palestinian Versailles".

To the end, he remained a thorn in the side of the Palestinian
authority. The best-known and most distinguished Palestinian exile
became the subject of censorship by the representatives of his own
people, one of the standard-bearers of the liberal conscience in the
increasingly illiberal climate of intolerance and corruption
surrounding President Arafat and his regime.

Said was born in Jerusalem into a prosperous Palestinian family. His
father Wadie, a Christian, had emigrated to the US before the first
world war. He volunteered for service in France and returned to the
Middle East as a respectable Protestant businessman - with American
citizenship - before making an arranged marriage to the daughter of
a Baptist minister from Nazareth.

In Out Of Place (1999), the memoir of his childhood and youth, Said
described his father, who called himself William to emphasise his
adopted American identity, as overbearing and uncommunicative. His
Victorian strictness instilled in Said "a deep sense of generalised
fear", which he spent most of his life trying to overcome. To his
father, Said owed the drivenness that brought him his remarkable
achievements. "I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more
particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement," he wrote. "Every
day for me is like the beginning of a new term at school, with a
vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before
it."

Wadie Said revealed little about himself or the source of his money,
but certainly Edward and his sisters never wanted for anything,
travelling with battalions of servants, summering (after 1947) in
the cultivated comfort of Dhour el Shweir in Lebanon, enjoying
sumptuous dinners on transatlantic liners. Said described his
mother, whom he evidently adored, as brilliant and man- ipulative,
neurotically difficult to please, giving always the impression
that "she had judged you and found you wanting" - yet instilling in
him a love of literature and music.

Said's first name, improbably inspired by the Prince of Wales, was
the creation of his parents, whom he would come to see as "self-
creations" out of an eclectic blend of elements and aspirations:
American lore culled from magazines and his father's memories,
missionary influence, incomplete and hence eccentric schooling,
British colonial attitudes. Arabic was forbidden at home, except
when speaking to servants; even the waiters at Groppis, the
fashionable Cairo cafe, were addressed in bad French.

According to Said, his un-Arab Christian name induced a split in his
adolescent sense of identity, between "Edward", his outer self, and
the "loose, irresponsible, fantasy-ridden metamorphoses of my
private inner life". Bright but rebellious, he described himself as
having been a leading troublemaker at Cairo's Victoria College, the
British-style public school whose snooty captain Michael Shalhoub
would later achieve celebrity as Omar Sharif.

Sent at his father's insistence to Mount Hermon, a private school in
Massachusetts, he blossomed academically, but lacked the right
attitude to be acknowledged as an outstanding student. He responded
positively to the American approach to essay-writing, which he found
more imaginative and stimulating than the buttoned-up British
approach in Cairo.

The contrast between his burgeoning academic distinction and the
absence of formal recognition clearly marked him deeply. He would
claim that it was this experience, as much as the work of his more
widely acknowledged intellectual mentors, including RP Blackmur,
Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams and Michel
Foucault, that influenced his anti- authoritarian outlook.

Said's engagement with Palestine drew on deep emo tional roots,
particularly his affection for his Jerusalem aunt Nabiha, his
father's sister, who, after 1948, devoted her life to working with
Palestinian refugees in Cairo, although she never discussed the
political aspects of the dispute in Said's presence. Until his 30s,
Edward was too preoccupied with his studies, progressing smoothly
through Princeton and Harvard graduate school, developing his
critical methodologies and indulging his passion for music,
especially the piano, at which he achieved an almost professional
level of competence, to take much interest in the politics of his
homeland.

It was the trauma of the Arab defeat in 1967, which unleashed a
second wave of refugees (many of them already refugees from the 1948
exodus), that shocked him out of what he would come to see as his
earlier complacency, reconnecting him with his former self.

Said's writings on English literature, such as Culture And
Imperialism (1993), and western classical music drew heavily on his
sense of being an outsider. Like Joseph Conrad, the subject of his
PhD thesis and first published book, he retained an "extraordinarily
persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality", which
enabled him to deploy a kind of double- vision in his readings of
the English novel, discerning the invisible colonial plantations
that guarantee the domestic tranquillity of Mansfield Park, or
finding in Conrad's self-consciously circular narrative forms the
sense of the potentiality of the challenges to western hegemony that
would erupt during the post-colonial era.

Where African writers such as Chinhua Achebe dismissed Conrad as a
racist, suggesting that, whatever his gifts as a writer, his
political attitudes must make him despicable to any African, Said
saw such reasoning as amounting to spiritual, intellectual and
aesthetic amputation. Contrary to the assumption sometimes made
about him, he did not consider that the hidden political agendas and
attitudes of cultural supremacy that he regarded as informing the
canons of western culture from Dante to Flaubert necessarily
diminished their artistic integrity or cultural power.

His achievement may have been to enhance artistic comprehension by
drawing attention to unstated political dimensions in the knowledge
that art must always escape enlistment for partisan ends. In a
brilliant essay on Die Meistersinger that grapples with Wagner's
anti-semitism, he quoted, with approval, Pierre Boulez's remark
that "Wagner's music, by its very existence, refuses to bear the
ideological message that it is intended to convey."

A similar statement could be made about Said's work as a critic. The
anti-colonial perspective that animates his work does not issue in
ideological consistency. Rather, it challenges conventional
assumptions about art, music and literature, opening up new avenues
of inquiry and questioning the criteria by which knowledge is
organised and husbanded. Like his hero, Theodor Adorno, Said
was "the quintessential intellectual, hating all systems, whether on
our side or theirs, with equal distaste".

Versatile and subtle, he was better at elucidating distinctions than
formulating systems. A Christian humanist with a healthy respect for
Islam, he was a member of the academic elite; yet he inveighed
against academic professionalism, venturing into territories well
outside his area of speciality, insisting always that the true
intellectual's role must be that of the amateur, because it is only
the amateur who is moved neither by the rewards nor the requirements
of a career, and who is therefore capable of a disinterested
engagement with ideas and values.

The unusual complexity of his background - privileged yet marginal,
wealthy yet powerless - allowed him to empathise with dispossessed
people, especially the victims of Zionism and its western
supporters, while enjoying in the fullest measure the cultural
riches of New York, a city that rang louder than any other with
Jewish achievement and success.

In his final years, Said's health grew ever more fragile, and,
though passionately concerned with the unfolding Palestinian
disaster in the wake of 9/11 and the Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq, he took a conscious decision to withdraw from political
controversy and channel his energies into music. The West-Eastern
Divan Orchestra he founded with the Israeli citizen Daniel Barenboim
in 1999 grew out of the friendship he forged with the musician who
shares his belief that art - and, in particular, the music of
Wagner - transcends political ideology. With Said's assistance,
Barenboim gave master classes for Palestinian students in the
occupied West Bank, infuriating the Israeli right.

The orchestra received a tumultuous reception at the BBC Proms last
month. It may prove a fitting legacy for an intellectual whose work
illuminated our crisis-ridden world by embracing its contradictions
and celebrating its complexities.

In 1970, he married Mariam Cortas, by whom he had a son and a
daughter.

· Edward Wadie Said, writer and academic, born November 1 1935; died
September 25 2003


=============


Orientalism
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html


Edward Said's evaluation and critique of the set of beliefs known as
Orientalism forms an important background for postcolonial studies.
His work highlights the inaccuracies of a wide variety of
assumptions as it questions various paradigms of thought which are
accepted on individual, academic, and political levels.

The Terms
The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political
forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western
consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West,
and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror
image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.
Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing,
vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and
ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image
of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and
scholarship.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is
depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a
threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be
dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a
sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless
cultural and national boundaries.

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about
what the Orient is. Its basic content is static and unanimous. The
Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different,
sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away
from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine
malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in
comparison to, the West, so it is always the Other, the conquerable,
and the inferior.

Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes
information and changes in knowledge about the Orient as well as
policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the
expression in words and actions of Latent Orientalism.

-----------

Earlier Orientalism
The first 'Orientalists' were 19th century scholars who translated
the writings of 'the Orient' into English, based on the assumption
that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the
conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present
throughout Said's critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to
own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the
object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the
observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.
Image: French harem fantasy with a black eunuch servant. The link
between popularized orientalism and libidinization is obvious. "Les
petits voyages de Paris-Plaisirs."--Paris Plaisir, Feb. 1930. (Image
and text from Jan Nederveen Pieterse's White on Black: Images of
Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture. New Haven: Yale UP,
1992)

One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is
that of the Orient itself. What is considered the Orient is a vast
region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries.
It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction
of this single 'Orient' which can be studied as a cohesive whole is
one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It
essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental--a biological
inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging--to
be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual
imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and
superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission
on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of
discourses and policies. The language is critical to the
construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of
the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists
for, and in terms of, its Western counterpart. The importance of
such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter where
none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the
Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist,
it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the
scholar who gives it life.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------

Contemporary Orientalism
Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western
depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as
irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--
perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas into which
Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as
foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the
Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind
is increased by the institutions built around them. For every
Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of
staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that
Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very
institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world,
therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with
the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning
certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force." He
continues, "One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable
as political propaganda--which is what it is, of course--were it not
accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the
impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that
Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that
Orientalists. . .writing about Muslims are, by definition, by
training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the
culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its
subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."
Said's Project



Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the
foundation of Orientalist thinking. A rejection of Orientalism
entails a rejection of biological generalizations, cultural
constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is a
rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual
pursuit. It is an erasure of the line between 'the West' and 'the
Other.' Said argues for the use of "narrative" rather than "vision"
in interpreting the geographical landscape known as the Orient,
meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a panoramic
view of half of the globe, but rather to a focused and complex type
of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human
experience. Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a
denial of the differences between 'the West' and 'the Orient,' but
rather an evaluation of such differences in a more critical and
objective fashion. 'The Orient' cannot be studied in a non-
Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to study more
focused and smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who
has until now been known as 'the Oriental' must be given a voice.
Scholarship from afar and second-hand representation must take a
back seat to narrative and self-representation on the part of
the 'Oriental.'


======================

"Remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere...
and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have
committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles
notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a
moral quest for equality and human rights."
--Prof. Edward W. Said (1935-2003)
http://www.edwardsaid.org/modules/news/


========================


Edward Said
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said


Edward SaidEdward Wadie Said (November 1, 1935 – September 25, 2003;
Arabic: إدوارد سعيد)
was a well-known American literary theorist,
critic, and outspoken Palestinian activist. According to Columbia
News (Columbia University, where Said spent most of his career), he
was "one of the most influential scholars in the world."

Life
Said was born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of
Palestine). His father was a a wealthy Christian Arab businessman
and an American citizen, while his mother was of Christian Lebanese
origin. According to Said's autobiography, he lived between Cairo
and Jerusalem until the age of 12 and in 1947 he attended the
Anglican St. George's Academy when he was in Jerusalem. According to
Said, his family became refugees in 1948 during the 1948 Arab-
Israeli War because the family home was in the affluent quarter of
Talbiya in the western part of Jerusalem that was annexed by Israel.

In 1999, Justus Reid Weiner, a scholar at the Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs, conducted a study in which he asserted that Edward
Said's family did not permanently reside in Talbiya and did not live
there during the final months of the British mandate, and thus they
could not be considered refugees. Said's parents never owned a house
in Jerusalem, says Weiner, the house in Talbiya belonged to Edward
Said's aunt and Edward Said's family visited Jerusalem only
occasionally. "On his [Edward Said's] birth certificate, prepared by
the ministry of health of the British Mandate, his parents specified
their permanent address as Cairo, and, indicating that they
maintained no residence in Palestine, left blank the space for a
local address."

According to Weiner, Edward Said grew up in Cairo and attended
Gezira Preparatory School there and probably never attended the St.
George's Academy in Jerusalem except during his family's brief stays
in that city. Justus Weiner argues that Edward Said's name does not
appear on the school registry and that David Eben-Ezra, whom Said
mentioned as his classmate, has no recollections of Edward Said.[1]

Said was defended by several respondents, including Christopher
Hitchens in The Nation, who wrote that schoolmates and teachers of
Said had confirmed Said's stay at St. George's School. Hitchens also
quoted Said as having written already in 1992 that he had spent a
large part of his youth in Cairo. Said himself responded to Weiner
in an article titled "Defamation, Zionist-style" published in Al-
Ahram Weekly. In the article, Said argues that "the family house was
in fact a family house in the Arab sense, which meant that our
families were one in ownership". Further, Edward Said says that
school records ended in 1946, while he attended St. George only in
1947, so his name could not possibly be on the registry.[2]
Counterpunch interviewed Haig Boyadjian who said he had been Said's
classmate at St. George's. [3] Said's autobiography Out of Place,
which appeared shortly after Weiner's article, described Said's
early life in great detail.

At age 14, Said entered Victoria College in Cairo, and then Mount
Hermon School in the United States. He received his B.A. from
Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.
He joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963 and served as
Professor of English and Comparative Literature for several decades.
Said also taught at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Yale universities.
He spoke English and French fluently, excellent colloquial and very
good standard Arabic, and was literate in Spanish, German, Italian
and Latin. Said was bestowed numerous honorary doctorates from
universities around the world and twice received Columbia's Trilling
Award and the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature
Association.

Said's writing regularly appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, the
London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al
Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat. He gave interviews alongside
good friend, fellow political activist, and colleague Noam Chomsky
regarding U.S. foreign policy for various independent radio programs.

Said also contributed music criticism to The Nation for many years.
In 1999, he jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra with the
Argentine-Israeli conductor and close friend Daniel Barenboim.

In January 2006, author David Price obtained 147 pages of Edward
Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act
request. The records reveal that Said was under surveillance
starting in 1971. Most of his records are marked as related to "IS
Middle East" ("IS" = Israel) and significant portions
remain "Classified Secrets".

Edward Said died at the age of 67 in New York after a decade-long
battle with chronic myelogenous leukemia.

Orientalism
Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism,"
which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions
underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism (1978),
Said decried the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice
against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture"[4]. He argued that
a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the
Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit
justification for Europe and America's colonial and imperial
ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab
elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas
of Arabic culture.

Writing in 1980, Said criticized what he saw as poor understanding
of the Arab culture in the West:

"So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a
slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially
seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of
the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has
entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to
report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude,
essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a
way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression"[5]

The British historian Bernard Lewis was among the scholars whose
work Said questioned in Orientalism and subsequent works. The two
authors came to frequently exchange polemic, starting in the pages
of the New York Review of Books following the publication of
Orientalism. Lewis's article "The question of orientalism" was
followed in the next issue by "Orientalism: an exchange." Other
scholars, such as Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, William
Montgomery Watt, and Albert Hourani, also regarded Orientalism as a
deeply flawed account of Western scholarship [6].

Activism
As a Palestinian activist, Said campaigned first for a creation of
an independent Palestinian state and then for a single Jewish-Arab
state. From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the
Palestinian National Council who tended to stay out of factional
struggles. He supported the two-state solution and voted for it in
Algiers in 1988.

He quit the PNC over the decision by Yasser Arafat and the PLO to
support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, a decision he considered
disastrous to the interests of Palestinian refugees living in Arab
League member states who supported the American-led coalition.
Thereafter, Said became critical of the role of Arafat in the
process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993,
feeling that the Oslo terms were unacceptable and had been rejected
by the Madrid round negotiators.

He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and
was inferior to a plan Arafat had rejected when Said himself
presented it to Arafat on behalf of the US government in the late
70's. In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short the right
of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel
and ignored the growing presence of Israeli settlements. He came to
prefer and support the binational solution - the creation of one
state in the entirety of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and pre-1967
Israel, in which Arabs and Jews would have equal rights over a two
state solution with a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Gaza and
East Jerusalem.

"I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years
advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-
determination, but I have always tried to do that with full
attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they
suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is
that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be
directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not
further suppression and denial" [7].

His relationship with the Palestinian Authority was so bad that PA
leaders banned the sale of his books in August 1995, but improved
when he hailed Arafat for rejecting Barak's offers at the Camp David
2000 Summit.

In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak,
and Mustafa Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National
Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt to build a third force in
Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both
the established Palestinian Authority and to Islamist militant
groups such as Hamas.

Said's books on the issue of Israel and Palestine include The
Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
and The End Of The Peace Process (2000).

[edit]
Publications
After the Last Sky (1986)
Beginnings (1975)
Blaming the Victims (1988) [contributor and co-editor with
Christopher Hitchens]
CIA et Jihad, 1950-2001: Contre l'URSS, une désastreuse alliance
(2002), with John K. Cooley
Covering Islam (1981)
Criticism in Society
Culture and Imperialism (1993)
The End Of The Peace Process (2000)
Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2005)
Edward Said: A Critical Reader
Freud and the Non-European
From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map (Collection of Essays) (2003)
Jewish Religion, Jewish History (Introduction)
Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966)
Literature and Society (1980)
Musical Elaborations (1991)
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature
On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (will be
published posthumously April 2006)
Orientalism (1978)
Orientalisme (1980)
Out of Place (1999) (a memoir)
Parallels and Paradoxes (with Daniel Barenboim)
The Pen and the Sword (1994)
The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
The Question of Palestine (1979)
Reflections on Exile (2000)
Representations of the Intellectual (1994)
The World, the Text and the Critic (1983)
[edit]
References
^ Justus Reid Weiner (1999). "My Beautiful Old House" and Other
Fabrications by Edward Said. (HTTP) Commentary Magazine. URL
accessed on 2006-02-09. Sep 1999.
^ Edward Said (1999). Defamation. Zionist-style. (HTTP) Al-Ahram
Weekly. URL accessed on 2006-02-10. Sep 1999.
^ Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (1999).
Commentary "Scholar" Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on
Said. (HTTP) CounterPunch. URL accessed on 2006-02-10.Sep 1999.
^ Keith Windschuttle (1999). Edward Said's "Orientalism revisited".
(HTTP) The New Criterion. URL accessed on 2005-12-05. 17(5), Jan
1999.
^ Edward W. Said (1980). Islam Through Western Eyes. (HTTP) The
Nation. URL accessed on 2005-12-05.
^ Edward Said (2003). Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders.
(HTTP) CounterPunch. URL accessed on 2005-12-05.
^ David Price (2006). How the FBI Spied on Edward Said. (HTTP)
CounterPunch. URL accessed on 2006-01-15.


=============


The Clash of Ignorance
Edward W. Said



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Samuel Huntington's article "The Clash of Civilizations?" appeared
in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, where it immediately
attracted a surprising amount of attention and reaction. Because the
article was intended to supply Americans with an original thesis
about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war,
Huntington's terms of argument seemed compellingly large, bold, even
visionary. He very clearly had his eye on rivals in the policy-
making ranks, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama and his "end of
history" ideas, as well as the legions who had celebrated the onset
of globalism, tribalism and the dissipation of the state. But they,
he allowed, had understood only some aspects of this new period. He
was about to announce the "crucial, indeed a central, aspect" of
what "global politics is likely to be in the coming years."
Unhesitatingly he pressed on:

"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this
new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic.
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of
conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most
powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of
global politics will occur between nations and groups of different
civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global
politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle
lines of the future."

Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague
notion of something Huntington called "civilization identity"
and "the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major
civilizations," of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and
the West, gets the lion's share of his attention. In this
belligerent kind of thought, he relies heavily on a 1990 article by
the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are
manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage." In both articles,
the personification of enormous entities called "the West"
and "Islam" is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters
like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where
Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more
virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary.
Certainly neither Huntington nor Lewis has much time to spare for
the internal dynamics and plurality of every civilization, or for
the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the
definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the
unattractive possibility that a great deal of demagogy and downright
ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole religion or
civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam Islam.





The challenge for Western policy-makers, says Huntington, is to make
sure that the West gets stronger and fends off all the others, Islam
in particular. More troubling is Huntington's assumption that his
perspective, which is to survey the entire world from a perch
outside all ordinary attachments and hidden loyalties, is the
correct one, as if everyone else were scurrying around looking for
the answers that he has already found. In fact, Huntington is an
ideologist, someone who wants to make "civilizations"
and "identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-off
entities that have been purged of the myriad currents and
countercurrents that animate human history, and that over centuries
have made it possible for that history not only to contain wars of
religion and imperial conquest but also to be one of exchange, cross-
fertilization and sharing. This far less visible history is ignored
in the rush to highlight the ludicrously compressed and constricted
warfare that "the clash of civilizations" argues is the reality.
When he published his book by the same title in 1996, Huntington
tried to give his argument a little more subtlety and many, many
more footnotes; all he did, however, was confuse himself and
demonstrate what a clumsy writer and inelegant thinker he was.

The basic paradigm of West versus the rest (the cold war opposition
reformulated) remained untouched, and this is what has persisted,
often insidiously and implicitly, in discussion since the terrible
events of September 11. The carefully planned and horrendous,
pathologically motivated suicide attack and mass slaughter by a
small group of deranged militants has been turned into proof of
Huntington's thesis. Instead of seeing it for what it is--the
capture of big ideas (I use the word loosely) by a tiny band of
crazed fanatics for criminal purposes--international luminaries from
former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Italian Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi have pontificated about Islam's troubles,
and in the latter's case have used Huntington's ideas to rant on
about the West's superiority, how "we" have Mozart and Michelangelo
and they don't. (Berlusconi has since made a halfhearted apology for
his insult to "Islam.")


But why not instead see parallels, admittedly less spectacular in
their destructiveness, for Osama bin Laden and his followers in
cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciples of the Rev. Jim
Jones at Guyana or the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo? Even the normally
sober British weekly The Economist, in its issue of September 22-28,
can't resist reaching for the vast generalization, praising
Huntington extravagantly for his "cruel and sweeping, but
nonetheless acute" observations about Islam. "Today," the journal
says with unseemly solemnity, Huntington writes that "the world's
billion or so Muslims are 'convinced of the superiority of their
culture, and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.'" Did he
canvas 100 Indonesians, 200 Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty
Bosnians? Even if he did, what sort of sample is that?

Uncountable are the editorials in every American and European
newspaper and magazine of note adding to this vocabulary of
gigantism and apocalypse, each use of which is plainly designed not
to edify but to inflame the reader's indignant passion as a member
of the "West," and what we need to do. Churchillian rhetoric is used
inappropriately by self-appointed combatants in the West's, and
especially America's, war against its haters, despoilers,
destroyers, with scant attention to complex histories that defy such
reductiveness and have seeped from one territory into another, in
the process overriding the boundaries that are supposed to separate
us all into divided armed camps.

This is the problem with unedifying labels like Islam and the West:
They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to make sense of
a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as
easily as all that. I remember interrupting a man who, after a
lecture I had given at a West Bank university in 1994, rose from the
audience and started to attack my ideas as "Western," as opposed to
the strict Islamic ones he espoused. "Why are you wearing a suit and
tie?" was the first retort that came to mind. "They're Western too."
He sat down with an embarrassed smile on his face, but I recalled
the incident when information on the September 11 terrorists started
to come in: how they had mastered all the technical details required
to inflict their homicidal evil on the World Trade Center, the
Pentagon and the aircraft they had commandeered. Where does one draw
the line between "Western" technology and, as Berlusconi
declared, "Islam's" inability to be a part of "modernity"?

One cannot easily do so, of course. How finally inadequate are the
labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for
instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in
ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only
between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and
them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and
nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A
unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake
crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism
and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations
entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see;
rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose
statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to
reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in
reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well
as "theirs."

In a remarkable series of three articles published between January
and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most respected weekly, the late
Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a Muslim audience, analyzed what he called
the roots of the religious right, coming down very harshly on the
mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical tyrants whose
obsession with regulating personal behavior promotes "an Islamic
order reduced to a penal code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics,
intellectual quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an
absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of
religion and a total disregard of another.

The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the
political process wherever it unfolds." As a timely instance of this
debasement, Ahmad proceeds first to present the rich, complex,
pluralist meaning of the word jihad and then goes on to show that in
the word's current confinement to indiscriminate war against
presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the Islamic--
religion, society, culture, history or politics--as lived and
experienced by Muslims through the ages."

The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are "concerned with power,
not with the soul; with the mobilization of people for political
purposes rather than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings
and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound political
agenda." What has made matters worse is that similar distortions and
zealotry occur in the "Jewish" and "Christian" universes of
discourse.

It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers at the end of
the nineteenth century could have imagined, who understood that the
distinctions between civilized London and "the heart of darkness"
quickly collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of
European civilization could instantaneously fall into the most
barbarous practices without preparation or transition. And it was
Conrad also, in The Secret Agent (1907), who described terrorism's
affinity for abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension
for "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's ultimate
moral degradation.

For there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations
than most of us would like to believe; both Freud and Nietzsche
showed how the traffic across carefully maintained, even policed
boundaries moves with often terrifying ease. But then such fluid
ideas, full of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold
on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical guidelines for
situations such as the one we face now. Hence the altogether more
reassuring battle orders (a crusade, good versus evil, freedom
against fear, etc.) drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition
between Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew its
vocabulary in the first days after the September 11 attacks. There's
since been a noticeable de-escalation in that discourse, but to
judge from the steady amount of hate speech and actions, plus
reports of law enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims
and Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

One further reason for its persistence is the increased presence of
Muslims all over Europe and the United States. Think of the
populations today of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Britain,
America, even Sweden, and you must concede that Islam is no longer
on the fringes of the West but at its center. But what is so
threatening about that presence? Buried in the collective culture
are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests, which began
in the seventh century and which, as the celebrated Belgian
historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his landmark book Mohammed and
Charlemagne (1939), shattered once and for all the ancient unity of
the Mediterranean, destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave
rise to a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany and
Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be saying, is to
resume defense of the "West" against its historical-cultural
enemies. What Pirenne left out, alas, is that in the creation of
this new line of defense the West drew on the humanism, science,
philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which had already
interposed itself between Charlemagne's world and classical
antiquity. Islam is inside from the start, as even Dante, great
enemy of Mohammed, had to concede when he placed the Prophet at the
very heart of his Inferno.

Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the
Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning
with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what
came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of
prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the
many-sided contest among these three followers--not one of them by
any means a monolithic, unified camp--of the most jealous of all
gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine
furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically
irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and
Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them
eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an
agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring to the men and women
who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters
of tradition and modernity."

But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and
others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history,
trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are
tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and
powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance,
and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander
off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary
satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. "The
Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the
Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for
critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our
time.


======================


Debunking Edward Said:
Edward Said and the Saidists:
or Third World Intellectual Terrorism
by Ibn Warraq
http://www.secularislam.org/articles/debunking.htm


Consider the following observations on the state of affairs
in the contemporary Arab world :

" The history of the modern Arab world – with all its
political failures , its human rights abuses , its stunning military
incompetences , its decreasing production , the fact that alone of
all modern peoples , we have receded in democratic and technological
and scientific development – is disfigured by a whole series of out-
moded and discredited ideas , of which the notion that the Jews
never suffered and that the holocaust is an obfuscatory confection
created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much –
far too much – currency;

....[T]o support Roger Garaudy , the French writer convicted earlier
this year on charges of holocaust denial , in the name of ` freedom
of opinion ' is a silly ruse that discredits us more than we already
are discredited in the world's eyes for our incompetence , our
failure to fight a decent battle , our radical misunderstanding of
history and the world we live in .Why don't we fight harder for
freedom of opinions in our own societies , a freedom , no one needs
to be told , that scarcely exists ? "[1][1].

It takes considerable courage for an Arab to write self-
criticism of this kind , indeed , without the personal pronoun `we'
how many would have guessed that an Arab , let alone Edward Said
himself , had written it ? And yet, ironically , what makes self-
examination for Arabs and Muslims , and particularly criticism of
Islam in the West very difficult is the totally pernicious
influence of Edward Said's Orientalism [2][2]. The latter work
taught an entire generation of Arabs the art of self-pity – " were
it not for the wicked imperialists , racists and Zionists , we would
be great once more "- encouraged the Islamic fundamentalist
generation of the 1980s , and bludgeoned into silence any criticism
of Islam , and even stopped dead the research of eminent
Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslims
sensibilities , and who dared not risk being
labelled "orientalist ".

The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called "
intellectual terrorism " , since it does not seek to convince by
arguments or historical analysis but by spraying charges of racism,
imperialism , Eurocentrism ,from a moral highground ; anyone who
disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him. The moral high
ground is an essential element in Said's tactics ; since he
believes his position is morally unimpeachable , Said obviously
thinks it justifies him in using any means possible to defend it ,
including the distortion of the views of eminent scholars ,
interpreting intellectual and political history in a highly
tendentious way , in short twisting the truth . But in any case , he
does not believe in the "truth" .

Said attacks not only the entire discipline of
Orientalism , which is devoted to the academic study of the Orient ,
but which Said accuses of perpetuating negative racial stereotypes ,
anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice , and the myth of an
unchanging , essential "Orient" , but he also accuses Orientalists
as a group of complicity with imperial power , and holds them
responsible for creating the distinction between Western superiority
and Oriental inferiority , which they achieve by suppressing the
voice of the "oriental" , and by their anti-human tendency to
make huge , but vague generalizations about entire populations ,
which in reality consist of millions of individuals .In other
words , much of what was written about the Orient in general , and
Islam and Islamic civilisation in particular , was false. The
Orientalists also stand accused of creating the "Other" – the non-
European ,always characterised in a negative way , as for example ,
passive , weak , in need of civilizing .( western strength and
eastern weakness )

But "Orientalism " is also more generally " a style of
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction
made between " the Orient " and (most of the time ) " the
Occident ." "[3][3] Thus European writers of fiction , epics ,
travel , social descriptions , customs and people are all accused
of "orientalism ". In short , Orientalism is seen "as a Western
style for dominating , restructuring , and having authority over the
Orient ." Said makes much of the notion of a discourse derived from
Foucault , who argued that supposedly objective and natural
structures in society , which , for example , privilege some and
punish others for noncoformity , are in fact " discourses of
power ". The putative "objectivity "of a discipline covered up its
real nature ; disciplines such as Orientalism participated in such
discourses . Said continues , " ...[ W]ithout examining Orientalism
as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously
systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage –
even produce – the Orient politically , sociologically ,
militarily , ideologically , scientifically , and imaginatively
during the post-Enlightenment period ."[4][4]


From Pretentiousness to Meaninglessness.

There are , as I shall show ,several contradictory theses
buried in Said's impenetrable prose , decked with post-modern
jargon ( " a universe of representative discourse ", "Orientalist
discourse "[5][5]) ( and some kind editor really ought to explain
to Said the meaning of "literally " [6][6] and the difference
between scatalogical and eschatological [7][7] ) , and pretentious
language which often conceals some banal observation , as when Said
talks of "textual attitude "[8][8] , when all he means is " bookish"
or " bookishness ". Tautologies abound , as in " the freedom of
licentious sex ".[9][9]

Or take the comments here [10][10] " Thus out of the
Napoleonic expedition there issued a whole series of textual
children , from Chateaubriand's Itinéraire to Lamartine 's Voyage
en Orient to Flaubert's Salammbô , and in the same tradition ,
Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and Richard
Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and
Meccah . What binds them together is not only their common
background in Oriental legend and experience but also their learned
reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of which they were
brought forth .If paradoxically these creations turned out to be
highly stylized simulacra , elaborately wrought imitations of what a
live Orient might be thought to look like , that by no means
detracts from their strength of their imaginative conception or from
the strength of European mastery of the Orient , whose prototypes
respectively were Cagliostro , the great European impersonator of
the Orient , and Napoleon , its first modern conqueror ."

What does Said mean by " out of the Napoleonic expedition
there issued a whole series of textual children" except that these
five very varied works were written after 1798 ? The pretentious
language of textual children issuing from the Napeolonic expedition
covers up this crushingly obvious fact . Perhaps there is a
profound thesis hidden in the jargon , that these works were somehow
influenced by the Napoleonic expedition , inspired by it , and
could not have been written without it . But no such thesis is
offered . This arbitrary group consists of three Frenchmen , two
Englishmen , one work of romantic historical fiction , three
travel books , one detailed study of modern Egyptians .

Chateaubriand's Itinéraire ( 1811 ) describes superbly his visit to
the Near East ; Voyage en Orient (1835) is Lamartine's impressions
of Palestine , Syria , and Greece ; Salammbô(1862) is Flaubert's
novel of ancient Carthage ; Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern
Egyptians ( 1836 ) is a fascinating first –hand account of life in
Egypt , particularly Cairo and Luxor , written after several years
of residence there ( first 1825-1828 , then 1833-1835), Burton's
account of his audacious visit to Mecca was first published in three
volumes between 1855-6 . Lane and Burton both had perfect command of
Arabic , Classical and Colloquial , while the others did not , and
Lane and Burton can be said to have made contributions to Islamic
Studies , particularly Lane , but not the three Frenchmen .

What on earth do they have in common ? Said tells us that
what binds them together is "their common background in Oriental
legend and experience but also their learned reliance on the Orient
as a kind of womb out of which they were brought forth ". What is
the background of Oriental legend that inspired Burton or Lane ?
Was Flaubert's vivid imagination stimulated by " Oriental legend " ,
and was this the same legendary material that inspired Burton ,
Lane and Lamartine ? "Learned reliance on the Orient as a kind
of womb... " is yet another example of Said's pretentious way of
saying the obvious , namely that they were writing about the Orient
about which they had some experience and intellectual knowledge .

Why are all these disparate works "imitations"? Take Lane
and Burton's works , they are both highly accurate accounts based on
personal , first-hand experience. They are not imitations of
anything .James Aldridge in his study Cairo ( 1969 ) called Lane's
account " the most truthful and detailed account in English of how
Egyptians lived and behaved ".[11][11] While Burton's accurate
observations are still quoted for their scientific value as in
F.E.Peters' The Hajj .[12][12]

Said also says of Lane , " For Lane's legacy as a scholar mattered
not to the Orient , of course , but to the institutions and agencies
of his European society ".[13][13] There is no " of course " about
it , Lane's Arabic Lexicon ( 5 vols; 1863-74 ) is still one of the
first lexicons consulted by any Muslim scholars wishing to
translate the Koran into English ; scholars like Maulana Muhammad
Ali, who began his English translation in 1909 , and who constantly
refers to Lane in his copious footnotes ; as does A.Yusuf Ali in
his 1934 translation . What is more the only place where one can
still buy a reasonably priced copy of Lane's indispensable work
of reference is Beirut , where it is published by the Librairie du
Liban .

What profound mysteries are unravelled by Said's final
tortuous sentence ? Count Alessandro Cagliostro ( 1743-1795) was a
Sicilian charlatan who travelled in Greece , Egypt , Zrabia ,
Persia , Rhodes , and Malta .During his travels he is said to have
acquired considerable knowledge of the esoteric sciences , alchemy
in particular.On his return to Europe , Cagliostro was involved in
many swindles , and seems to have been responsible for many
forgeries of one kind or another , but found time to establish many
masonic lodges and secret societies .

He died in prison in 1795 . He did not contribute anything
whatsoever to the scientific study of the Near or Middle East ,
neither of its languages , nor of its history or culture. He was not
a distinguished Orientalist in the way Lane was. Indeed apart
from `Letter to the French People'(1786 ) , I do not think
Cagliostro ever wrote anything worthy to be called scientific.
Cagliostro , according to Said , was the prototype of "their [ the
above five authors' ] imaginative conception ". Is he suggesting
that they too forged or made up their entire knowledge of the
Egypt , Near East and Arabia ? If that is what Said means , it is
false for reasons which I have already indicated above .

While , for Said , Napoleon was the prototype of the "
strength of European mastery of the Orient ", since he was the
Orient's first modern conqueror. This would be fine as a rather
contrived metaphor ,Lane and Burton mastered Arabic in the way
Napoleon mastered Egypt but unfortunately Said in the rest of his
book seems to suggest something far more literal and sinister in
the complicity of Orientalists with the imperial powers .

Orientalism is peppered with meaningless sentences .Take,
for example , "Truth , in short , becomes a function of learned
judgment , not of the material itself , which in time seems to owe
its existence to the Orientalist ".[14][14] Said seems to be
saying :`Truth' is created by the experts or Orientalists , and
does not correspond to reality , to what is actually out there . So
far so good . But then "what is out there " is also said to owe its
existence to the Orientalist .If that is the case , then the first
part of Said's sentence makes no sense , and if the first part is
true then the second part makes no sense . Is Said relying on that
weasel word

"seems" to get him out of the mess ? That ruse will not work
either ; for what would it mean to say that an external reality
independent of the Orientalist's judgement also seems to be a
creation of the Orientalist ? That would be a simple contradiction .

Here is another example : "The Orientalist can imitate the
Orient without the opposite being true ."[15][15] Throughout his
book , Said is at pains to point out that there is no such thing
as "the Orient " , which , for him , is merely a meaningless
abstraction concocted by Orientalists in the service of imperialists
and racists . In which case , what on earth could " The Orient
cannot imitate the Orientalist " possibly mean ? If we replace "
the Orient " by the individual countries ,say between Egypt and
India , do we get anything more coherent ? No , obviously not : "
India , Egypt , and Iran cannot imitate the Orientalists like
Renan , Bernard Lewis , Burton , et al.".We get nonsense whichever
way we try to gloss Said's sentence .


Contradictions .

At times , Said seems to allow that the Orientalists did
achieve genuine positive knowledge of the Orient , its history ,
culture , languages , as when he calls Lane's work Manners and
Customs of the Modern Egyptians " a classic of historical and
anthropological observation because of its style , its enormously
intelligent and brilliant details "; [16][16] or when he talks of "
a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient ",[17]
[17] since Said does not have sarcastic quotation marks around the
word knowledge , I presume he means there was a growth in genuine
knowledge .Further on , Said talks of Orientalism producing " a fair
amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient ".[18][18] Again
I take it Said is not being ironical when he talks of " philological
discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones , ..." .[19][19] To
give one final example , Said mentions Orientalism's " objective
discoveries ".[20][20]

Yet , these acknowledgements of the real discoveries
made by Orientalists is contradicted by Said's insistence that there
is no such thing as " truth "[21][21]; or when he characterizes
Orientalism as " a form of paranoia , knowledge of another kind ,
say , from ordinary historical knowledge "[22][22] .Or again , " it
is finally Western ignorance which becomes more refined and
complex , not some body of positive Western knowledge which
increases in size and accuracy ".[23][23] At one point Said seems to
deny that the Orientalist had acquired any objective knowledge at
all [24][24], and a little later he also writes , " the advances
made by a `science' like Orientalism in its academic form are less
objectively true than we often like to think ".[25][25] It is true
that the last phrase does leave open the possibility that some of
the science may be true though less than we had hitherto
thought .Said also of course wholeheartedly endorses Abdel Malek's
strictures against Orientalism , and its putatively false "
knowledge " of the Orient .[26][26]

In his 1994 Afterword , Said insists that he has " no
interest in , much less capacity for , showing what the true Orient
and Islam really are ".[27][27] And yet he contradicts this outburst
of uncharacteristic humility and modesty , when he claims that , "
[ The Orientalist's] Orient is not the Orient as it is , but the
Orient as it has been Orientalized ",[28][28] for such a formulation
assumes Said knows what the real Orient is .Such an assumption is
also apparent in his statement that " the present crisis dramatizes
the disparity between texts and reality ".[29][29] In order to be
able to tell the difference between the two , Said must know what
the reality is .This is equally true when Said complains that " To
look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental's human or
even social reality ...is to look in vain ".[30][30]


Historical and Other Howlers .

For a work that purports to be a serious work of
intellectual history , Orientalism is full of historical howlers
[31][31]. According to Said , at the end of the seventeenth
century , Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean ,
when in fact the Levant was still controlled for the next hundred
years by the Ottomans . British and French merchants needed the
permission of the Sultan to land .Egypt is repeatedly described as a
British colony when , in fact , Egypt was never more than a
protectorate; it was never annexed as Said claims[32][32] .Real
colonies ,like Australia or Algeria , were settled by large numbers
of Europeans ,and this manifestly was not the case with Egypt .[33]
[33]

The most egregious error surely is where Said claims Muslim
armies conquered Turkey before they overran North Africa.[34][34] In
reality , of course , the Arabs invaded North Africa in the seventh
century , and what is now Turkey remained part of the Eastern Roman
Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the Seljuk
Turks in late eleventh century [35][35].Said also writes " Macdonald
and Massignon were widely sought after as experts on Islamic matters
by colonial administrators from North Africa to Pakistan "[36][36] .
But Pakistan was never a colony , it was created in 1947 when the
British left India . Said also talks rather oddly about
the "unchallenged Western dominance " of the Portuguese in the East
Indies , China , and Japan until the nineteenth century [37][37].
But Portugal only dominated the trade , especially in the 16th
century , and was never , as historian J.M.Roberts points
out , "interested in the subjugation or settlement of large areas ".
[38][38]

In China, Portugal only had the tiniest of footholds in Macao.The
first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed the collapse of
much of the Portuguese empire in the East , to be replaced by the
Dutch .In the early eighteenth century there was a Dutch supremacy
in the Indian Ocean and Indonesia .However , the Dutch like the
Portuguese did not subjugate " the Orient "but worked through
diplomacy with native rulers ,and through a network of trading-
stations .[39][39]

Said thinks that Carlyle and Newman were `liberal
cultural heroes '! Whereas it would be more correct to characterize
Carlyle's works as the intellectual ancestry of fascism [40][40] .
Nor was Newman a liberal , rather a High Church Anglican who
converted to Catholicism .Said also seems to think that Goldziher
was German [41][41] ; Goldziher was of course a Hungarian . (One
hopes that it is simply a typographical error in his 1994 Afterword
which was responsible for the misspelling of Claude Cahen's name [42]
[42].) Said thinks `Muslims' designates a race.[43][43]


Intellectual Dishonesty and Tendentious Reinterpretations .

The above errors can be put down to ignorance , Said is
no historian , but it does put into doubt Said's competence for
writing such a book .On the other hand ,we can only qualify as
intellectual dishonesty for the way he deliberately misinterprets a
distinguished scholar's work and conclusions . Said quotes with
approval and admiration some of the conclusions of R.W.Southern's
Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages [44][44],

" Most conspicuous to us is the inability of any of
these systems of thought [ European Christian] to provide a fully
satisfying explanation of the phenomenon they had set out to explain
[ Islam ]– still less to influence the course of practical events in
a decisive way .At a practical level , events never turned out
either so well or so ill as the most intelligent observers
predicted ; and it is perhaps worth noticing that they never turned
out better than when the best judges confidently expected a happy
ending .Was there any progress [ in Christian knowledge of Islam ] ?
I must express my conviction that there was .Even if the solution of
the problem remained obstinately hidden from sight , the statement
of the problem became more complex , more rational , and more
related to experience ....The scholars who labored at the problem of
Islam in the Middle Ages failed to find the solution they sought and
desired ; but they developed habits of mind and powers of
comprehension which , in other men and in other fields , may yet
deserve success ." R.W.Southern .

Now here is Said's extraordinary misinterpretation of
the above quote from Southern,

" The best part of Southern's analysis ...is his demonstration
that it is finally Western ignorance which becomes more refined and
complex , not some body of positive Western knowledge which
increases in size and accuracy "[45][45]. According to Said ,
Southern says that positive Western knowledge of the Orient did not
increase.

This is not what Southern is saying . Southern explicitly asks a
question and replies : " Was there any progress [ in Christian
knowledge of Islam ]? I must express my conviction that there was ".
Yes , I am firmly convinced that Western knowledge did progress ,
that is what Southern states . Then Southern goes on to say that the
Medieval scholars' methodology became more and more sophisticated ,
they were more mature intellectually since they now developed
habits of mind and powers of comprehension which would pay
dividends later.

How Said can claim, with his usual pretentious vocabulary
of "Western ignorance which becomes more refined ...", otherwise is
a mystery , but all in keeping with his intellectual dishonesty ,
and his overriding concern to paint the West in as negative a
fashion as possible ? Incidentally , and ironically the very same
passage from Southern contradicts one of Said's principle theses
about Oriental Studies being a cause of imperialism .All this
thinking about the Orient failed , Southern says , " to influence
the course of practical events in a decisive way ".

Said also seems to reproach Friedrich Schlegel for
holding views that are in fact correct : "[Although by ] 1808
Schlegel had practically renounced his Orientalism , he still held
that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on
the other had more affinities with each other than with Semitic ,
Chinese , American , or African languages ".[46][46]One can only
conclude that Said does not know that what Schlegel held is indeed
the case : Sanskrit , Persian , Greek and German all belong to the
same family , the Indo-European , and have more in common with each
other than , by definition , with any other language in another
family like Semitic .

Said quotes Sir William Jones' famous encomium on
Sanskrit and its affinities to Greek and Latin as though it were of
some sinister significance , by prefacing the quote with remarks
that can only be described as plain silly :

" [ Jones'] most famous pronouncement indicates the extent
to which modern Orientalism , even in its philosophical beginnings ,
was a comparative discipline having for its principal goal the
grounding of the European languages in a distant , and harmless ,
Oriental source : ` The Sanscrit language , whatever be its
antiquity , is of a wonderful structure ; more perfect than the
Greek , more copious than the Latin , and more exquisitively refined
than either , yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity , both
in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar , than could
possibly have been produced by accident ; so strong indeed , that no
philologer could examine them all three without believing them to
have sprung from some common source '. ".[47][47]

What does Said mean by saying modern Orientalism had as
its goal " the grounding of the European languages in a distant and
harmless , Oriental source " ?.It is pretentious nonsense. Jones was
not the first one to see that there were remarkable similarities
between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin – as early as the 16 th century
Filippo Sassetti , and in 1767 P.Coeurdoux had noticed them – but
Jones' independent reflections led him to conclude that there was
a similarity , and this was a discovery , a very exciting
scientific discovery that has since been amply confirmed .

To say that Orientalists wanted to ground the European languages in
Oriental sources is absurd , they discovered that they were related
in some way ; they did not concoct some theory to fit their desire
to "ground European languages in Oriental sources ". What on earth
does " a harmless , Oriental source " mean , in any case ? Greek
and Latin do not have their "sources" in Sanskrit , they simply
belong to the same genetic family , possibly descended from some
common ancestral proto-Indo-European language .

As Professor K.Paddaya of Pune , India [48][48], said in
his appreciation of Sir William Jones , " [I]t was genuine curiosity
and admiration which made some of these officers [ of the East India
Company like Jones ] voluntarily take up the study of [ India's]
past conditions ".

Jones' eulogy on Sanskrit is still quoted with pride by many Indian
scholars , who honoured Jones' memory by holding conferences in
Calcutta and Pune in April , 1994 to mark the bicentenary of his
death . The bicentenary of the establishment of the Asiatic Society
which Jones founded was celebrated in 1984 in New Delhi and
Calcutta .

Said also does not come across as a careful reader of
Dante and his masterpiece , The Divine Comedy .In his trawl through
Western literature for filth to besmirch Western civilization , Said
comes across Dante's description of Muhammad in Hell , and
concludes " Dante's verse at this point spares the reader none of
the eschatological [ sic !] detail that so vivid a punishment
entails : Muhammad's entrails and his excrement are described with
unflinching accuracy ".[49][49] First , Said does not know the
difference between scatalogical and eschatological , and second ,we
may ask how does he know that Dante's description is unflinchingly
accurate ? He simply means , I presume , that it was highly
graphic .

Said then makes much of the fact that earlier in the
Inferno , three Muslims turn up in the company of virtuous heathens
like Plato and Aristotle . Said continues , " [B]ut the special
anachronisms and anomalies of putting pre-Christian luminaries in
the same category of "heathen " damnation with post-Christian
Muslims does not trouble Dante .Even though the Koran specifies
Jesus as a prophet , Dante chooses to consider the great Muslim
philosophers [ Avicenna and Averroës ] and king [ Saladin ] as
having been fundamentally ignorant of Christianity ".

This fatuous comment betrays Said's fundamental ignorance of
Christian doctrine , even though he himself is a Christian .
Although these people of much worth –gente di molto valore – had not
sinned , according to Christian doctrine , they could not be saved
outside the Church , that is without baptism , which is the first
Sacrament and thus the "gateway to the faith " .The three Muslims
were in the outer circle of Hell not because they were ignorant of
Christianity , but because they had died unbaptized . Since these
regions of Hell are timeless and its inhabitants are there for
ever , the question of anachronisms does not arise , especially as
these historical figures have an allegorical significance .Said was
surely aware that Virgil , who died in 19 B.C. was Dante's guide ,
and fulfills an allegorical function ; Virgil's voice is that of
reason or philosophical wisdom. Allegory is central to any
understanding of the Divine Comedy : literra gesta docet , quid
credas , allegoria – the literal sense teaches the facts; the
allegory what you should believe.

Furthermore these illustrious Muslims were included
precisely because of Dante's profound reverence for all that was
best in the non-Christian world , and their exclusion from
salvation , inevitable under Christian doctrine , saddened him and
put a great strain on his mind – gran duol mi prese al cor quando
lo 'ntesi - great grief seized me at heart when I heard this .
Dante was even much influenced by the Averroistic concept of
the "possible intellect ".The same generous impulse that made him
revere non-Christians like Avicenna and their nobleness made Dante
relegate Muhammad to eternal punishment in the eighth circle of
Hell, namely Dante's strong sense of the unity of humanity and of
all its spiritual values – universalis civilitas humani generis –the
universal community of the human race . He and his contemporaries
in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century had only the
vaguest of ideas about the history and theology of Islam and its
founder . Dante believed that Muhammad and Ali were the initiators
of the great schism between Christianity and

Islam .Dante like his contemporaries thought Muhammad was
originally a Christian and a cardinal who wanted to become a pope .
Hence Muhammad was a divider of humanity whereas Dante stood for
the unity – the essential organic unity -of humankind . What Said
does not see is that Dante perfectly exemplifies Western
culture's strong tendency towards universalism .[50][50]


Self –Pity , Post-Imperialist Victimhood and Imperialism

In order to achieve his goal of painting the West in
general , and the discipline of Orientalism in particular , in as
negative a way as possible , Said has recourse to several tactics .
One of his preferred moves is to depict the Orient as a perpetual
victim of Western imperialism ,dominance,and aggression.The Orient
is never seen as an actor , an agent with free-will , or designs or
ideas of its own . It is to this propensity that we owe that
immature and unattractive quality of much contemporary Middle
Eastern culture , self-pity , and the belief that all its ills are
the result of Western -Zionist conspiracies [51][51] . Here is an
example of Said's own belief in the usual conspiracies taken from "
The Question of Palestine "[52][52] : It was perfectly apparent to
Western supporters of Zionism like Balfour that the colonization of
Palestine was made a goal for the Western powers from the very
beginning of Zionist planning : Herzl used the idea , Weizmann used
it , every leading Israeli since has used it . Israel was a device
for holding Islam – later the Soviet Union , or communism – at
bay ". So Israel was created to hold Islam at bay !



As for the politics of victimhood , Said has "milked it
himself to an indecent degree "[53][53] . Said wrote :

" My own experiences of these matters are in part what made
me write this book. The life of Arab Palestinian in the West ,
particularly in America , is disheartening .There exists here an
almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist , and
when it is allowed that he does , it is either as a nuisance or as
an Oriental .The web of racism , cultural stereotypes , political
imperialism , dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the
Muslim is very strong indeed , and it is this web which every
Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny ".[54]
[54]

Such wallowing in self-pity from a tenured , and much-
feted professor at Columbia University , where he enjoys privileges
which we lesser mortals only dream of , and a decent salary , all
the while spewing forth hatred of the country that took him in and
heaped honours on him ,is nauseating . As Ian Buruma concluded in
his review of Said's memoir , Out of Place , " The more he dwells on
his suffering and his exile status , the more his admirers admire
him .On me , however , it has the opposite effect .Of all the
attitudes that shape a memoir , self-pity is the least attractive ".
[55][55]

The putative conquest of Egypt by Napoleon plays an
important symbolic role in Said's scheme of showing all that is evil
in Orientalism . For Said , Napoleon conquered , dominated ,
engulfed, possessed and oppressed Egypt[56][56] . Egypt is
described as the passive victim of Western rapacity . In reality ,
the French were defeated and had to retreat hastily after less than
four years ; Napoleon arrived in July 1798 , and left it for good
just over a year later , the French forces stayed until September
1801.But during this brief interlude , the French fleet was
destroyed at the Battle of the Nile , and the French failed to
capture Murad Bey.

Riots also broke out when a house act was introduced in Cairo , and
the French general Dupuy , lieutenant –governor of Cairo ,was
killed .Further riots broke out among the Muslims in Cairo when the
French left to confront the Turks at Mataria , but the chief victims
were Christians many of whom were slaughtered by the
Muslims .Kléber , the French general was also assassinated . Far
from seeing the Egyptians as "the Other " , and far from
denigrating Islam , right from 1798 , the French were highly
sensitive to Muslim opinion , with Napoleon showing an initimate
knowledge of the Koran . Perhaps the ultimate irony was that after
the assassination of Kléber , the command of the French army passed
to General J.F. ( Baron de Menou ), who had converted to Islam , and
who set about enacting various measures to conciliate the Muslims .

Naguib Mahfouz , the Nobel Prize winning Egyptian
novelist , once said it is thanks to Napoleon's campaign in Egypt
that his country has emerged out of centuries of obscurantism .Egypt
owes all her modernity to Napoleon ![57][57] So much for the evils
of the "Conquest of Egypt ".

Had he bothered to pursue the subsequent history of
Egypt , Said would have put all Western imperialism in
perspective , since he would have come across the history of
Muhammad Ali , often considered the founder of Modern Egypt . It was
never in the interest or even the intention of the Western powers to
see the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire , which time and time
again sought and received European support for the preservation of
their imperial possessions. After the humiliating retreat of the
French , the Ottoman's greatest challenger was a Muslim , the able
but ambitious governor of Egypt , Muhammad Ali Pasha , " who aspired
to nothing less than the substitution of his own empire for that of
the

Ottomans " .[58][58] Inspired by Napoleon , Muhammad Ali
modernized many of Egypt's archaic institutions . In his Imperial
dreams , Ali was thwarted by the Ottomans with the help , once
again, of the great powers , Britain , Russia , Austria , and
Prussia , who did not wish to use the Sultan's plight to expand
their imperial possessions . A little later Muhammad Ali's
grandson ,Ismail also dreamt of transforming Egypt into a modern
imperial power .By the mid-1870s " a vast Egyptian empire had come
into being , extending from the Mediterranean in the north to Lake
Victoria , and from the Indian Ocean in the esat to the Libyan
desert ".[59][59]

I have dwelt on these historical details to put nineteenth
century imperialism in context , and to show that Middle Eastern
history was created by Middle Eastern actors , who were

" not hapless victims of predatory imperial powers but active
participants in the restructuring of their region ".[60][60] But
this , of course , does not serve Said's purpose at all , which is
to show "the Orientals" as passive victims of Western imperialism
unable to control their own destiny . It is Said who is guilty of
the very sins that he accuses the Orientalists of , namely ,
suppressing the voice of the people of Egypt , the true history of
the Near East , which was created by indigenous trends , desires ,
and actions freely –chosen .

In Orientalism , Said writes : " Both before and during
World War I secret diplomacy was bent on carving up the Near Orient
first into spheres of influence , then into mandated ( or occupied )
territories ".[61][61] This is totally false ;here is how two
historians see it : " [T]he chain of events culminating in the
destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern
Middle East was set in motion not by secret diplomacy bent on
carving up the Middle East , but rather by the decision of the
Ottoman leadership to throw in its lot with Germany .This was by far
the single most important decision in the history of the modern
Middle East , and it was anything but inevitable .The Ottoman Empire
was neither forced into the war in a last-ditch bid to ensure its
survival , nor maneuvered into it by an overbearing Getman ally and
an indifferent or even hostile British policy . Rather , the [
Ottoman] empire's willful plunge into the whirlpool reflected a
straightforward [ Ottoman ] imperialist policy of territorial
aggrandizement and status acquisition ". [62][62][ Emphasis in the
original ]

Prime Minister Asquith noted in his diary in March ,
1915 : " [ Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and I ] both think
that in the interests of our own future the best thing would be if
at the end of the War we could say that we had taken and gained
nothing ...." Similarly , the Bunsen Committee of April/May , 1915
had a clear preference for the maintenance of an independent but
decentralized empire comprising of five major provinces :
Anatolia , Armenia , Syria , Palestine , and Iraq-Jezirah . Nearly a
year after the outbreak of the First World War , Britain still did
not wish to see the destruction of Turkey –in-Asia.[63][63] Whereas
it was an Arab , Sharif Hussein of Mecca ,who wanted to establish
his own empire on the ruins of that of the Ottomans .

Similarly , when referring to T.E.Lawrence , Said
writes : " The great drama of Lawrence's work is that it symbolizes
the struggle , first , to stimulate the Orient ( lifeless ,
timeless , forceless ) into movement ; second , to impose upon that
movement an essentially Western shape ".[64][64] Again , it is
Said who is assuming the Arabs were passive , and had decisions
taken for and imposed upon them , as though they were children or
imbeciles incapable of having desires , and acting
freely .Certainly , the forceful personalities of the Sharif of
Mecca , Hussein ibn Ali , and his son Faisal played the most
important part during the First World War , and were as
responsible for what emerged after it as the Western powers .

Thus Said's use of emotive language concerning
Western imperialism with all its supposed evils conceals the real
overall historical background of the entire region .Where the
French presence lasted less than four years when they were
ignominiously expelled by the British and Turks , the Ottomans had
been the masters of Egypt since 1517 , a total of 280 years ! Even
if we count the later British and French protectorates , Egypt was
under Western control for 67 years , Syria for 21 years , and Iraq
for only 15 . And , of course , Saudi Arabia was never under Western
control .Contrast this with Southern Spain , which was under the
Muslim yoke for 781 years , Greece for 381 years,and the splendid
new Christian capital that eclipsed Rome –Byzantium – is still in
Muslim hands [65][65]. But I do not know of any Spanish or Greek
politics of victimhood .


Said's Anti-Westernism .

In a rather disingenuous 1994 Afterword Said denies that he
is anti-Western , he denies that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a
synecdoche of the entire West , and claims that he believes there
is no such stable reality as " the Orient" and " the Occident " ,
that there is no enduring Oriental reality and even less an enduring
Western essence , that he has no interest in , much less capacity
for , showing what the true Orient and Islam really are . [66][66]

Denials to the contrary ,an actual reading of Orientalism is
enough to show Said's anti-Westernism . While he does occasionally
use inverted commas around "the Orient " and " the Occident " , the
entire force of Said's polemic comes from the polar opposites and
contrasts of the East and the West , the Orient and Europe , Us and
the Other , that he himself has rather crudely set up .

Said wrote , " I doubt that it is controversial , for
example , to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later
nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was
never far from their status in his mind as British colonies .To say
this may seem quite different from saying that all academic
knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed
with , violated by , the gross political fact [ of imperialism ] –
and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism ".[67]
[67][ Emphasis in original ]

Here is Said's characterisation of all Europeans : " It
is therefore correct that every European , in what he could say
about the Orient , was consequently a racist , an imperialist , and
almost totally ethnocentric ". [68][68] In other words not only is
every European a racist , but he must necessarily be so. Said claims
he is explicitly anti-essentialist particularly about " the West ".
But here is Said again : "Consider first the demarcation between
Orient and West .It already seems bold by the time of the Iliad .Two
of the most profoundly influential qualities associated with the
East appear in Aeschylus's The Persians , the earliest Athenian play
extant , and in The Bacchae of Euripides , the very last one
extant ....The two aspects of the Orient that set if of from the
West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European
imaginative geography . A line is drawn between two
continents .Europe is powerful and articulate ; Asia is defeated and
distant ."[69][69]

As Keith Windschuttle comments on the above passage :

" These same motifs persist in Western culture , [ Said ]
claims , right down to the modern period .This is a tradition that
accommodates perspectives as divergent as those of Aeschylus ,
Dante , Victor Hugo , and Karl Marx .However , in describing " the
essential motifs " of the European geopgraphic imagination that have
persisted since ancient Greece , he is ascribing to the West a
coherent self-identity that has produced a specific set of value
judgements – " Europe is powerful and articulate : Asia is defeated
and distant "-that have remained constant for the past 2500
years .This is ,of course , nothing less than the use of the very
notion of "essentialism " that he elsewhere condemns so
vigorously .In short , it is his own work that is essentialist and
ahistorical .He himself commits the very faults he says are so
objectionable in the work of Orientalists ".[70][70]

Just in case the above were not enough to prove Said's anti-
Western essentialism , here is another gem : " The Orient was
Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be "Oriental" in
all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-
century European ,,but also because it could be –that is ,submitted
to being – made Oriental ."[71][71] Here we have Said's ultimate
reductionistic absurdity :the average nineteenth-century European !

A part of Said's tactics is to leave out Western
writers and scholars who do not conform to Said's theoretical
framework. Since ,for Said , all Europeans are a priori racist ,
he obviously cannot allow himself to quote writers who are not .
Indeed one could write a parallel work to Orientalism made up of
extracts from Western writers , scholars , and travellers who were
attracted by various aspects of non-European cultures, which they
praised and contrasted favourably with their own decadence ,
bigotry , intolerance , and bellicosity.

Said makes much of Aeschylus' The Persians , and its
putative permanent creation of the "Other " in Western
civilization . But Aeschylus can be forgiven his moment of
triumphalism when he describes a battle in which he very probably
took part in 480 B.C. , the Battle of Salamis ,on which the very
existence of fifth-century Athens depended .The Greeks destroyed or
captured 200 ships for the loss of forty , which for Aeschylus was
symbolic of the triumph of liberty over tyranny , Athenian democracy
over Persian Imperialism , for it must not be forgotten that the
Persians were ruthless imperialists whose rule did not endear them
to several generations of Greeks .

Furthemore had he delved a little deeper into Greek
civilization and history , and bothered to look at Herodotus' great
history , Said would have encountered two features which were also
deep characteristics of Western civilization and which Said is at
pains to conceal and refuses to allow : the seeking after knowledge
for its own sake , and its profound belief in the unity of mankind ,
in other words its universalism . The Greek word , historia , from
which we get our "history" , means "research " or" inquiry", and
Herodotus believed his work was the outcome of research : what he
had seen , heard , and read but supplemented and verified by
inquiry .For Herodotus , "historical facts have intrinsic value and
rational meaning ". He was totally devoid of racial prejudice –
indeed Plutarch later branded him a philobarbaros, whose nearest
modern equivalent would be "nigger-lover " -and his work show
considerable sympathy for Persians and Persian civilization.

Herodotus represents Persians as honest – " they consider telling
lies more disgraceful than anything else "- brave , dignified , and
loyal to their king . As to the religions of the various peoples he
studied , Herodotus showed his customary intellectual curiosity but
also his reverence for all of them , because " all men know equally
about divine things ".[72][72]

Even in the Middle Ages , we find figures in the
Christian Church ready to make , in the words of Maxime Rodinson ,
an " outstanding effort ...to gain and to transmit an objectively
based scientific knowledge of the Islamic religion ".Rodinson is
talking about the remarkable Peter the Venerable , Abbot of Cluny (
c.1094-1156 ) . Rodinson is convinced that Peter the Venerable was
not only motivated for polemical reasons but " was moved by a
disinterested curiosity ...".[73][73]


A number of thinkers , writers and scholars in Europe
from the 16 century onwards took up the theme of the noble savage as
a means to criticise their own culture , and to encourage tolerance
of others outside the West .Perhaps the real founder of the 16th
century doctrine of the noble savage was Peter Martyr Anglerius (
1459 -1525 ). In his De Orbo Novo of 1516 , Peter Martyr criticised
theSpanish Conquistadores for their greed , narrow – mindedness ,
intolerance and cruelty , contrasting them with the Indians , " who
are happier since they are free from money , laws , treacherous
judges , deceiving books and the anxiety of an uncertain future" .
But it was left to Montaigne , under the influence of Peter Martyr ,
to develop the first full- length portrait of the noble savage in
his celebrated essay " On Cannibals " ,( c. 1580) which is also
the source of the idea of cultural relativism . Deriving his rather
shaky information from a plain , simple fellow , Montaigne describes
some of the more gruesome customs of the Brazilian Indians and
concludes :

" I am not so anxious that we should note the horrible
savagery of these acts as concerned that , whilst judging their
faults so correctly , we should be so blind to our own

I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him
dead ; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling , to
roast it by degrees , and then give it to be trampled and eaten by
dogs and swine - a practice which we have not only read about but
seen within recent memory , not between ancient enemies , but
between neighbours and fellow -citizens and , what is worse , under
the cloak of piety and religion - than to roast and eat a man after
he is dead " .

Elsewhere in the essay , Montaigne emphasises their
inevitable simplicity , state of purity and freedom from
corruption . Even their " fighting is entirely noble" . Like Peter
Martyr , Montaigne's rather dubious , second hand knowledge of
these noble savages does not prevent him from criticising and
morally condemning his own culture and civilisation : " [ We ]
surpass them in every kind of barbarity ".

The 17th century saw some truely sympathetic accounts of
Islam such as those of Jurieu and Bayle . Let us hear Mr .
Jurieu : " It may be truly said that there is no comparison
between the cruelty of the Saracens against the Christians , and
that of Popery against the true believers . In the war against the
Vaudois , or in the massacres alone on St .

Bartholomew's Day , there was more blood spilt upon account of
religion , than was spilt by the Saracens in all their persecutions
of the Christians . It is expedient to cure men of this prejudice ;
that Mahometanism is cruel sect , which was propagated by putting
men to their choice of death , or the abjuration of Christianity .
This is in no wise true ; and the conduct of the Saracens was an
evangelical meekness in comparison to that of Popery , which
exceeded the cruelty of the cannibals . "

The whole import of Jurieu's Lettres Pastorales (1686 -
1689 ) only becomes clear when we realise that Jurieu was a Huguenot
pastor , the sworn enemy of Bossuet ,and he

was writing from Holland after the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes . He is using the tolerance of the Muslims to criticise
Roman Catholicism - for him the Saracen's " evangelical meekness"is
a way of contrasting Catholocism's own barbarity as on St.
Bartholomew's Day.

Pierre Bayle was much influenced by Jurieu and continued to
sing the praise of Islamic tolerance .He contrasts the tolerance of
the Turks to the persecutions of brahmins in India by the
Portuguese , and the barbarities exercised by the Spaniards in
America . "[ The Muslims ] have always had more humanity for other
religions than the Christians ..." . Bayle was a

champion of toleration -was he not himself the victim of intolerance
and forced to flee to Holland ?

For Jurieu and Bayle in the 17th century , Turk was
synonymous with Muslim , thus Turkish tolerance turned into Muslim
tolerance in general . Later "Letters Written by a Turkish Spy " ,
published at the end of the 17th century , inaugurated the 18th
Century vogue for the pseudo-foreign letter , such as
Montesquieu 's Lettres Persanes ( 1721 ) , Madame de Grafigny's
Lettres d' une Peruvienne ( c. 1747 ) , D' Argen's Lettres Chinoises
(1750 ) , Voltaire's Asiatic in the Philosophical Dictionary (
1752) , Horace Walpole's Letter from Xo Ho , a Chinese Philosopher
at London , to his friend Lien- Chi , at Peking ( 1757 ) and
Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762 ) , in which Lien Chi Altangi
passes philosophical and satirical comments on the manners of the
English .

Count Henri de Boulainvilliers'( 1658 - 1722 ) apologetic
biography of Muhammad appeared posthumously in London in 1730 . It
is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this book in shaping
Europe's view of Islam and its founder, Muhammad ; it certainly much

influenced Voltaire and Gibbon .Boulainvilliers was able to use
Muhammad and the origins of Islam as " a vehicle of his own
theological prejudices " ,and as a weapon against Christianity, in
general , and the clergy , in particular . He found Islam
reasonable , it

did not require one to believe in impossibilities – no mysteries ,
no miracles . Muhammad, though not divine , was an incomparable
statesman and a greater legislator than any one produced by Ancient
Greece .

George Sale' s translation of the Koran ( 1734) is the
first accurate one in English .Like Boulainvilliers , whose
biography of Muhammad he had carefully read , Sale firmly believed
that the Arabs " seem to have been raised up on purpose by God , to
be a scourge to the Christian church , for not living answerably to
that most holy religion which they had received " .

The attitude of Voltaire can be seen as typical of the
entire century . Voltaire seems to have regretted what he had
written of Muhammad in his scurrilous, and to a Muslim

blasphemous,play Mahomet ( 1742 ) , where the Prophet is presented
as an impostor who enslaved men's souls : " Assuredly, I have made
him out to be more evil than he was".

But , Voltaire in his Essai sur les Moeurs ,1756 , and various
entries in the Philosophical Dictionary , shows himself to be
prejudiced in Islam's favour at the expense

of Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular .

In his The Sermon Of The Fifty ( 1762 ) , Voltaire
attacks Christian mysteries like transubstantiation as absurd ;
Christian miracles as incredible ; the Bible as full of
contradictions . The God of Christianity was a cruel and hateful
tyrant . By contrast , Voltaire finds the dogmas of Islam simplicity
itself : there is but one God ,and Muhammad is his Prophet . For
all deists, the supposed rationality of Islam was appealing : no
priests , no miracles , no mysteries . To this was added other
beliefs such as the absolute tolerance

of Islam of other religions , in contrast to Christian intolerance .

Gibbon , like Voltaire , painted Islam in as favourable a
light as possible in order to better contrast it with Christianity.
He emphasised Muhammad's humanity as a means of

indirectly criticising the Christian doctrine of the divinity of
Christ .His anti - clericalism led Gibbon to underline Islam's
supposed freedom from that accursed class , the priesthood .
Gibbon' s deistic view of Islam as a rational , priest free
religion , with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver enormously
influenced the way all Europeans perceived a

sister religion for years to come .

But the work that exemplifies the Enlightenment's openness to
the Other , and its universalism and tolerance is surely Gotthold
Lessing's Nathan The Wise , written in 1778/1779 . The two themes –
" it suffices to be a man " and " Be my friend "- run through
the play and give it its humanity . Preaching friendship among the
three monotheists religions ( Saladin , (1137-1193) the Great Muslim
leader who defeated the Christian Crusaders is one of the three
main characters ) , Lessing recounts the allegory of the father (
God ) who gives each of his three sons ( representing Islam ,
Christianity and Judaism ) a ring ( representing religion ) :

"If each of you

Has had a ring presented by his father,

Let each believe his own the real ring.

`Tis possible the father chose no longer

To tolerate the one ring's tyranny;

And certainly, as he much loved you all,

And loved you all alike, it could not please him

By favouring one to be of two the oppressor.

Let each feel honoured by this free affection.

Unwarped of prejudice; let each endeavour

To vie with both his brothers in displaying

The virtue of his ring; assist its might

With gentleness, benevolence, forbearance,

With inward resignation to the godhead ...."[74][74]


I could multiply examples of Said's quite deliberate
omissions , writers sympathetic to the Arabs , Turks and Islam ,
writers like W.S. Blunt [ 1840-1922] , whose travels in Egypt , and
Arabia" produced in him a violent reaction against British
Imperialism , and the second half of his life was spent in
publishing a stream of poems , books and pamphlets championing the
nationalist cause in Egypt , India ,Arabia and Ireland ".[75][75]
Writers like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [1689-1762 ] , who wrote , "
Sir , these people [ the Turks ] are not so unpolish'd as we
represent them .Tis true their magnificence is of a different taste
from our , and perhaps of a better . I am allmost [sic] of opinion
they have a right notion of Life , while they consume it in Music ,
Gardens , Wine , and delicate eating , while we are tormenting our
brains with some Scheme of Politics or studying some Science to
which we can never attain , ...."[76][76] Or writers like Marmaduke
Pickthall who eventually converted to Islam , translated the Koran ,
wrote novels of Egypt , and edited the journal Islamic Culture . Or
E.G.Browne ( 1862-1926 )who wrote the monumental Literary History of
Persia (1902-24), and who also took up the cause of Iranian
nationalism .

The important thing to emphasize here is the deliberately
biased nature of Said's apparently learned and definitive
selection ; I could just as easily go through Western Literature and
illustrate the opposite point to the one he is making .
Furthermore , my selection is not of some peripheral figures culled
from the margins of Western culture , but the very makers of that
culture , figures like Montaigne ,Bayle Voltaire , Gibbon , Lessing
and some I have not quoted like Montesquieu ( The Persian Letters ,
1721 ) and Diderot ( Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville ,
1772 ) , the latter two exemplifying the European Enlightenment's
appeal to reason , objective truth and universalist values .

Most of the time we have the impression that Said is simply
resentful at how thorough , scholarly , in short , scientific and
successful the Orientalists were ; Said is particularly jealous of
their mastery of the various languages .For example , Said
grudgingly admits that D'Herbelot read Arabic , Persian , and
Turkish , and then seems to resent the fact that D'Herbelot arranged
his Bibliothèque orientale alphabetically ! [77][77] Said talks
of "specific Orientalist techniques – lexicography , grammar ,
translation , cultural decoding ..." as though they were instruments
of torture , used to violate , subjugate , dominate the Orient .[78]
[78] The same resentment is expressed of " regulatory codes ,
classifications , specimen cases , periodical reviews ,
dictionaries , grammars , commentaries , editions , translations " ,
which can only be seen as Said's hatred of science .[79][79] Western
intellectual energy and curiosity , that is "activity , judgment ,
will-to-truth , and knowledge " is dimissed as " all aggression".
[80][80]


Misunderstanding of Western Civilization.

The golden thread running through Western civilization
is rationalism . As Aristotle said , Man by nature strives to know .
This striving for knowledge results in science , which is but the
application of reason . Intellectual inquisitiveness is one of the
hall marks of Western civilisation .As J.M.Roberts put it , " The
massive indifference of some civilisations and their lack of
curiosity about other worlds is a vast subject . Why , until very
recently , did Islamic scholars show no wish to translate Latin or
western European texts into Arabic ? Why when the English poet
Dryden could confidently write a play focused on the succession in
Delhi after the death of the Mogul emperor Aurungzebe , is it a safe
guess that no Indian writer ever thought of a play about the equally
dramatic politics of the English seventeenth-century court ? It is
clear that an explanation of European inquisitiveness and
adventurousness must lie deeper than economics , important though
they may have been . It was not just greed which made Europeans feel
they could go out and take the world . The love of gain is confined
to no particular people or culture .It was shared in the fifteenth
century by many an Arab , Gujarati or Chinese merchant . Some
Europeans wanted more . They wanted to explore ".[81][81]

Vulgar Marxists , Freudians , and Anti-Imperialists , who
crudely reduce all human activities to money , sex , and power
respectively ,have difficulties in understanding the very notion of
disinterested intellectual inquiry , knowledge for knowledge's sake.
European man by nature strives to know. Science undoubtedly owed
some of its impetus to finding ways of changing base metal into
gold , to attempts to solve practical problems , but surely owes as
much to the desire to know , to get at the truth and is the reason
why philosophers like Karl Popper have called it a spiritual
achievement . Hence the desperate attempts by Said to smear every
single Orientalist with the lowest of motives are not only
reprehensible , but fail to give due weight to this golden thread
running through Western civilisation .

One should remind Said that it was thanks to this
desire for knowledge on the part of Europeans that led to the people
of the Near East recovering and discovering their own past and their
own identity . In the nineteenth and early twentieth century
archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia , Ancient Syria , Ancient
Palestine and Iran were carried out entirely by Europeans and
later Americans – the disciplines of Egyptology , Assyriology ,
Iranology which restored to mankind a large part of its heritage
were the exclusive creations of inquisitive Europeans and
Americans . Whereas , for doctrinal reasons , Islam deliberately
refused to look at its pre-Islamic past , which was considered a
period of ignorance . [82][82]

It is also worth pointing out that often the motives ,
desires , and prejudices of a scholar have no bearing upon the
scientific worth of a scholar's contribution . Again , vulgar
Marxists , for example , dimiss an opponent's arguments not on any
scientific or rational grounds but merely because of the social
origins of the scholar concerned . Nöldeke's bigotry was well-
known , indeed a source of acute embarrassment to his
colleagues ,but no modern scholar of Islam can ignore his Geschichte
des Qorans ; similarly Henri Lammens' hatred for the Prophet
Muhammad is notorious but as Professor F.E.Peters once said ,
Lammens has never been refuted. Conversely , a scholar who
manifests sympathy for all aspects of Islam is not necessarily a
good scholar . Said , for instance , quotes with approval Norman
Daniel , but as Maxime Rodinson pointed out Daniel was not an
objective historian but an apologist of Islam : " In this way the
anti-colonialist left , whether Christian or not , often goes so far
as to sanctify Islam and the contemporary ideologies of the Muslim
world , ...An historian like Norman Daniel has gone so far as to
number among the conceptions permeated with medievalism or
imperialism , any criticisms of the Prophet's moral attitudes , and
to accuse of like tendencies any exposition of Islam and its
characteristics by means of the normal mechanisms of human
history .Understanding has given way to apologetics pure and
simple " .[83][83]

Rather surprisingly , Said also singles out Louis Massignon
for lavish praise for his sympathetic understanding of Islam.
Massignon's scholarship is not in doubt , his biography of Al-
Hallaj , for example ,is considered a masterpiece . But Massignon
also exemplifies the very qualities that Said himself dismisses in
others .The Frenchman is responsible for perpetuating the myth of
the spiritual East as against the materialist West .Said praises him
for " identifying with the `vital forces ' informing `Eastern
culture '[84][84] , and yet earlier Said informs us that " The
Orient was overvalued for its pantheism , its spirituality , its
stability , its longevity , its primitivity , and so forth ".[85]
[85] Massignon also displays other unattractive traits that Said
does not mention namely his anti-semitism , in the sense of
virulent anti-Jewish sentiments , something even Massignon's
biographers acknowledge.[86][86] Finally , Massignon was far from
the paragon of Christian spirituality that he becomes in Said's
eyes , since one of Massignon's interest in the East was to search
its cities for male prostitutes , something he dared not do in
the `decadent West '! Mircea Eliade recounts in his Journal , " This
evening I dine with Massignon .We talk for several hours .Terribly
voluble ! He is ,besides , obsessed with pederasty ; again and
again he brings the conversation around to " young male
prostitutes " and so on .".[87][87] Massignon was quite ready to
exploit the East when it suited him .

Maxime Rodinson was also criticize Massignon and others
for taking too far the idea of seeing the Koran on its own terms ,
though their perspective represented « a necessary reaction
against an understanding of a text in terms that were too often
foreign to the text , and a tendency to isolate themes from the
religious context to which they belong – tendencies which were
characteristic of the nineteenth century .However , the historian
must occasionally ask himself if the reaction has not gone too
far .Some of the methods of this school of thought [ Massignon and
others ] must be a matter of concern to historians .To study the
internal logic of a faith and to show respect are very legitimate
objectives .The scholar has a perfect right to attempt to re-
experience within himself the « fire » and the exigencies of the
religious consciousness under study .However , the elements that
comprise a coherent system could indeed have derived from a variety
of very different sources and might well have played an entirely
different role in other systems .Respect for the faith of sincere
believers cannot be allowed either to block or deflect the
investigation of the historian .The result derived from examining a
particular faith on a personal "mental testing bench" ought to be
made the object of a very severe critical examination .One must
defend the rights of elementary historical methodology …. » [88][88]


Said's Orientalism .

Orientalism reveals at times Said's own contempt for the
non-European , negative attitudes towards the Orient far greater
than that of some imperialists he constantly condemns. Said speaks
of " books and journals in Arabic ( and doubtless in Japanese ,
various Indian dialects and other Oriental languages )...".[89][89]
As Lewis says , this is indeed a contemptuous , sneering ,listing
with its "assumption that what Indians speak and write are not
languages but dialects " ; even earlier Said talks of "innumerable
Indian dialects "[90][90] , despite the fact that there are , in
India , more than fifteen languages each of which is spoken by more
than 40 million people , and each with a long and rich literary
tradition . Where Said , the anti-Orientalist taketh away , the
Orientalist restoreth , for , ironically, it was during the British
period in India that Sir George A. Grierson carried out The
Linguistic Survey of India (between 1866 and 1927) , which resulted
in his monumental study in several thousand pages where he
identified and studied 179 Indian languages . All later research is
indebted to this magnificent work of scholarship , which , for
Grierson , was a token of his love for India , and what is more ,
far from being neglected or reviled as Said would no doubt have
liked , this Orientalist classic is still in print in India ,
nearly eighty years after its publication in 1927. This work
illustrates perfectly the fact that much Orientalist research gave
back to , for instance,Indians , their own rich and varied heritage
of which they themselves were not
aware. .

Said also claims , " No Arab , or Islamic scholar can
afford to ignore what goes on in scholarly journals , institutes ,
and universities in the United States and Europe ; the converse is
not true .For example , there is no major journal of Arab Studies
published in the Arab world today ".[91][91] Said simply chooses to
ignore such distinguished journals as Majallat al-Ahfad (
Omdurman ), Alif:Journal of Comparative Poetics ( Cairo ) , Al-
Majalla al-`Arabiya li-l-`Ulum al-Insaniya ( Kuwait ), Al-Tawasul al-
Lisani (Fez) , Review of the Arab Academy ( Damascus ) , al-Abhath (
Beirut ) , the Review of Maghribi History ( Tunis ) , and the
Bulletins of the faculties of Arts and of Social Sciences of Cairo ,
Alexandria , Baghdad , to name a few .

Said , Sex , and Psycho-analysis

If Said can be said to have a bête-noir , it must
surely be Bernard Lewis . In a recent review of Lewis' book , What
Went Wrong ? in Harper's [92][92] , Said gave vent to his loathing
for Lewis , who is characterized as repetitious , having a veneer of
English sophistication , whose book is unrelieved rubbish ,an
intellectual and moral disaster , the terribly faded rasp of a
pretentious academic voice . " One can almost hear him[ Lewis ]
saying ", continues Said , " over a gin and tonic , `You know , old
chap , those wogs never really got it right , did they ? ' ". Then
there is Said's ultimate argument against Lewis : " His jowly
presence seems to delight his interlocutors and editors ...." !

But what struck me most was Said's sentence where he
accuses Lewis of persisting "in such `philological' tricks as
deriving an aspect of the predilection in contemporary Arab Islam
for revolutionary violence from Bedouin descriptions of a camel
rising ". Said , twenty five years on , still has not forgotten his
battle with Lewis on the issue of a camel rising , to which I will
now turn . In Orientalism [93][93], Said quotes from Lewis' essay "
Islamic Concepts of Revolution " :

" In the Arabic-speaking countries a different word was used for
[ revolution ] thawra .The root th-w-r in Classical Arabic meant
to rise up ( e.g. of a camel ) , to be stirred or excited , and
hence , especially in Maghribi usage , to rebel . It is often used
in the context of establishing a petty , independent sovereignty ;
thus , for example , the so-called party kings who ruled in eleventh
century Spain after the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordova are
called thuwwar ( sing. tha'ir ). The noun thawra at first means
excitement , as in the phrase , cited in the Sihah , a standard
medieval Arabic dictionary , intazir hatta taskun
hadhihi 'lthawra , wait till this excitement dies down – very apt
recommendation . The verb is used by al-Iji , in the form of
thawaran or itharat fitna , stirring up sedition , as one of the
dangers which should discourage a man from practising the duty of
resistance to bad government .Thawra is the term used by Arabic
writers in the nineteenth century for the French Revolution , and by
their successors for the approved revolutions , domestic and
foreign , of our own time ."[94][94]

Among Said 's conclusions is :

" Lewis's association of thawra with a camel
rising and generally with excitement ( and not with a struggle on
behalf of values ) hints much more broadly than is usual for him
that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being .Each of
the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is tinged with
sexuality: stirred , excited , rising up.But for the most part it is
a `bad' sexuality he ascribes to the Arab . In the end , since Arabs
are really not equipped for serious action , their sexual excitement
is no more noble than a camel's rising up .Instead of revolution
there is sedition , setting up a petty sovereignty , and more
excitement , which is as much as saying that instead of copulation
the Arab can only achieve foreplay , masturbation , coitus
interruptus. These , I think , are Lewis's implications ...."

Can any rational person have drawn any conclusion which
even remotely resembled that of Edward Said's from Lewis's
scholarly discussion of Classical Arabic etymology ? Were I to
indulge in some prurient psycho-biography , much in fashion , I
would be tempted to ask , "What guilty sexual anguish is Said
trying to cover up ? Just what did they do to him at his Cairo
English prep school ? " . Lewis's concise and elegant reply to
Said's conclusions is to quote the Duke of Wellington : " If you
believe that , you can believe anything ".

But that is not all. In Orientalism ,Said seems to be obssessed
with sexual imagery .He finds D.G.Hogarth's account of the
exploration of Arabia " aptly titled The Penetration of Arabia
(1904 )".[95][95] And yet ,Said himself wrote , " [ Sir Richard
Burton ] was able to penetrate to the heart of Islam and disguised
as an Indian Muslim doctor accomplish the pilgrimage to Mecca "[96]
[96] ; and also " For Lamartine a pilgrimage to the Orient has
involved not only the penetration of the Orient by an imperious
consciousness ....".[97][97] Or again , " The point here is that
the space of weaker or underdeveloped regions like the Orient was
viewed as something inviting French interest , penetration ,
insemination –in short , colonization ....French scholars ,
administrators , geographers, and commercial agents poured out their
exuberant activity onto the fairly supine , feminine Orient ". And
yet again :"Before Napoleon only two efforts ( both by scholars )
had been made to invade the Orient by stripping it of its
veils ....".[98][98] Just what did they do to Said at prep school ?

Orientalists' Complicity in Imperialism

One of Said's major theses is that Orientalism was not a
disinterested activity but a political one , with Orientalists
preparing the ground for and colluding with imperialists : " To say
simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to
ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by
Orientalism , rather than after the fact ".[99][99] The Orientalist
provides the knowledge that keeps the Oriental under control : "
Once again , knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes
their management easy and profitable ; knowledge gives power , more
power requires more knowledge , and so on in an increasingly
profitable dialectic of information and control ".[100][100]

This is combined with Said's thesis derived from the Coptic
socialist thinker , Anwar Abdel Malek that the Orient is always
seen by the Orientalists as unchanging , uniform and peculiar [101]
[101], and Orientals have been reduced to racist stereotypes , and
are seen as ahistorical `objects' of study " stamped with an
otherness ...of an essentialist character ....".[102][102] The
Orientalists have provided a false picture of Islam : " Islam has
been fundamentally misrepresented in the West ".[103][103]

Said adds Foucault to the heady mix ; the French guru convinced
Said that Orientalist scholarship took place within the ideological
framework he called `discourse ' and that " the real issue is
whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything , or
whether any and all representations , because they are
representations , are embedded first in the language and then in the
culture , institutions , and political ambience of the
representer.If the latter alternative is the correct one ( as I
believe it is ) , then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a
representationis eo ipso implicated , intertwined , embedded ,
interwoven with a great many other things besides the "truth ,"
which is itself a representation".[104][104]

It takes little thought to see that there is a contradiction
in Said's major thesis.[105][105]If Orientalists have produced a
false picture of the Orient , Orientals , Islam , Arabs , and
Arabic society – and , in any case , for Said , there is no such
thing as "the truth" –then how could this false or pseudo- knowledge
have helped European imperialists to dominate three –quarters of the
globe ? `Information and control' wrote Said , but what of `false
information and control '?

To argue his case , Said very conveniently leaves out German
Orientalist scholarship , for their inclusion would destroy – and
their exclusion does indeed totally destroy - the central thesis of
Orientalism , that all Orientalists' produced knowledge which
generated power ,and that they colluded and helped Imperialists
found empires. As we shall see, Germans Orientalists were the
greatest of all scholars of the Orient , but , of course , Germany
was never an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of
North Africa or the Middle East . Bernard Lewis wrote , " at no
time before or after the imperial age did [ the British and French]
contribution ,in range , depth , or standard , match the achievement
of the great centers of Oriental studies in Germany and neighbouring
countries .Indeed , any history or theory of Arabic studies in
Europe without the Germans makes as much sense as would a history or
theory of European music or philosophy with the same omission ".[106]
[106]

Those omitted are not peripheral figures but the actual
creators of the field of Middle Eastern , Islamic and Arabic
Studies ; scholars of the standing of Paul Kahle ( 1875-1964 )
Georg Kampffmeyer ( 1864-1936 ) , Rudolf Geyer (1861-1929 ) ,
F.Giese ( 1870-1944 ) , Jacob Barth ( 1851-1914 ) , August Fischer (
1865-1949) , Emil Gratzl (1877-1957), Hubert Grimme ( 1864-1942 ) ,
Friedrich Schulthess (1868-1922) , Friedrich Schwally (1863-1919) ,
Anton Baumstark (1872-1948 ) , Gotthelf Bergsträsser ( 1886-
1933) ;others not discussed include G.Wustenfeld , Von Kremer ,
J.Horovitz , A.Sprenger , Karl Vollers .Though Nöldeke (1836 -
1930 ), Fuck , G.Weil, Becker, E.Sachau , and Carl Brockelmann are
mentioned their work and significance are not discussed in any
detail ; Nöldeke , whose Geschichte des Qorâns (1860) was to become
the foundation of all later Koranic studies , is considered one of
the pioneers , along with Goldziher , of Islamic Studies in the
West .

But of course German scholars are not the only ones
omitted ; Russians ( e.g. Belayev , Tolstov ) , Italian (
Caetani ) , and many Jewish scholars who studied Islam with sympathy
considering it a sister religion ( e.g. Abraham Geiger , Paul
Kraus ) do not rate a mention .

Furthermore to argue that the French and British
Orientalists somehow prepared the ground for the imperialists is to
seriously distort history . The first chair of Arabic in France was
founded in 1538 at the Collège de France , and yet the first French
venture into an Arab country was Napoleon's in 1798 . In England ,
the first chair of Arabic was founded in 1633 , at Cambridge , and
yet the first British incursion into Arab territory was not until
the nineteenth century . Where is the complicity between
Orientalists and Imperialists here ? When the first two chairs of
Arabic were founded in the West , it was the Muslims who dominated
the Mediterranean , the Balkans were under Turkish rule , and the
Turkish Siege of Vienna was still to come . [107][107]

Said quotes at length speeches and essays by British
statesmen like Lord Cromer , Arthur Balfour , and Lord Curzon which
do mention the work of some Orientalists . But ,

as Windschuttle points out , "these quotations come from works
written between 1908 and 1912 , that is , more than twenty-five
years after the peak of Britain's imperial

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