But what is Orientalism, and who were the Orientalists, and how did Western scholars of Islamic culture come to be vilified as insidious agents of European imperialism? In Robert Irwin’s groundbreaking new history, he answers this question with a detailed and colorful story of the motley crew of intellectuals and eccentrics who brought an understanding of the Islamic world to the West. In a narrative that ranges from an analysis of Ancient Greek perceptions of the Persians to a portrait of the first Western European translators of Arabic to the contemporary Muslim world’s perceptions of the Western study of Islam, Irwin affirms the value of the Orientalists’ legacy: not only for the contemporary scholars who have disowned it, but also for anyone committed to fostering the cross-cultural understanding which could bridge the real or imagined gulf between Islamic and Western civilization. Dangerous Knowledge is a both riveting and entertaining history, a bold argument, and an urgent redress of our conceptions about Western culture’s relationship with its nearest neighbor.
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Book Description
The publication of Edward Said’s hugely influential Orientalism in 1981 called into question the entire history of the Western study of Islamic culture, condemning this scholarly tradition as one that presented inaccurate and deliberately demeaning representations of Islamic peoples and institutions—so much so that the words "Oriental" and "Orientalist" have come to take on the most negative connotations.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Almost 30 years ago, in his classic Orientalism, the late cultural critic Edward Said published a scathing denunciation of Oriental studies, blaming the field for the rise of Western imperialism and racist views about Arabs and other Eastern peoples. British historian Irwin (The Alhambra) fiercely condemns Said's misinterpretation, offering both a brilliant defense of Orientalism and a masterful intellectual history of the Orientalists and their work, which opened windows on the world of Asia in general and Islam in particular, providing the West with glimpses of the social and religious practices of these cultures. Irwin surveys the history of Orientalism from the Greeks through the Middle Ages to its height in the 18th and 19th centuries. He chronicles the lives and works of the men who introduced the ideas of Islamic and Asian culture to the West. Many of these men were biblical critics whose command of Hebrew allowed them to move easily to Arabic and to explore the Koran. In the 17th century, the dragomans, or translators, moved the study of Islam forward by providing translations of Turkish, Arabic and Persian texts. Irwin's wide-ranging study splendidly captures a time when intellectual polymaths traversed foreign territories in search of new and compelling ideas. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
Latter-day Orientalists and students of intellectual history will benefit greatly from this study. -- Kirkus Reviews, July 2006
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44 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Counter Polemic,
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This review is from: Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Hardcover)
This book seems to have been written in large part as a response to the late Edward Said's famous (some would say notorious) Orientalism. In the latter, Said argued the Orientalism (in the limited sense used by Irwin, though Said clearly had a broader use in mind), the scholarly activity of investigating the Orient, is inextricably bound up and indeed is a driver of Western racism, imperialism, and colonialism. Irwin disagrees strongly, and in this decently written book, provides some very good criticism of Said. Irwin attacks Said on a narrow but important front; is Said's account and interpretation of the scholarly tradition of Orientialism correct? Most of Dangerous Knowledge is a chronologically organized history of Western scholarly contact with Arabic traditions. Irwin limits himself primarily to Arabic studies because this is where Said concentrates his critique. Irwin makes a very good case that Said misrepresents this scholarly tradition and misunderstands much of its historic context. According to Irwin, and the examples he cites are convincing, Said appears to have done only a superficial job of examining this tradition, perhaps to the level of not actually reading some of the historic figures criticized. Its worth mentioning that this narrative is worth reading in its own right and that while Irwin has not produced an in depth intellectual history, his historical account is informative and quite readable. In the course of this narrative, Irwin addresses some of Said's broader assertions about the nature of Orientalism and the Western tradition. Most of these criticisms seem well founded. In the last chapters of the book, Irwin turns to specific discussion of other aspects of Said's book and some of his other writings. Irwin continues to be quite critical, and again his critique makes sense.
Its important to specify that Irwin, unlike some of Said's critics, does not have a contemporary political axe to grind. Said was best known in this country as an outspoken advocate of the Palestinian cause and critic of the state of Israel. Said's work has been attacked as much for his stands on these issues as for his scholarly work itself. Irwin is careful to specify that he shares many of Said's opinions on these controversial issues. One area where I disagree with Irwin is his repeated statements that Orientalism was written in bad faith, that is to say, Said knowingly produced the distortions and errors characteristic of his book. I find this unlikely. Most great deceptions involve self-deception and it is likely that Said sincerely believed that his interpretations were correct. Said's defect doesn't appear to be insincerity but a lack of intellectual rigor and a preference for highly intellectualized constructs over real data. This conclusion would be consistent with some of Said's other positions. His proposed solution, which he advocated without any irony, to the Israeli-Palestinian problem was a single, democratic state. A proposal so impractical as to be almost humorous.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Quite Convincing--But a Good Read!,
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This review is from: Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Hardcover)
Irwin is a well-known critic of Edward Said and "Orientalism". Here he marshals his considerable intellectual resources to define a workable timeline of Orientalist knowledge in order to make his essential point that Said was a late comer to this area of studies and didn't even know very much about it, being politically motivated in his outlook.
Does he succeed? Not quite. No doubt Irwin is far more knowledgeable than Said ever was about the history of Orientalism, but he fails to deal convincingly with Said's essential point that Orientalism was a biased body of knowledge that existed mostly for the purpose of subjugating the East. Furthermore, his hatred for Said's ideas sometimes teeters on the edge of paranoia. Nevertheless, this book provides a detailed history of Orientalist studies in the West from the very beginnings of Islam to the modern reemergence of religious conflict.
12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yet Another Exposé of Said's Villany and Feeble Mindedness,
This review is from: Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Paperback)
Whatever specialists thought of Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, the book had major impact on Middle East studies, as Nathan Alexander of Troy University points out. Its thesis was that "Orientalism" was a "hegemonic discourse of imperialism" that "constrains everything that can be written and thought in the West about the Orient, and particularly about Islam and the Arabs." Despite being panned by Arab and non-Arab critics, the book became a best-seller and its author a celebrity. Identifying himself as a Palestinian, Said launched vituperative attacks on his critics and demonized as "racist" those who opposed his views on the Middle East.
Irwin, Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement, accomplishes two things in his book Dangerous Knowledge. First, the book is a history of "Orientalism," or Western scholarship of the Middle East, India, and the Far East. Irwin begins with the ancient Greeks and concludes with a survey of Arab scholars writing on the Orient today. This magnificent survey covers French, German, Russian, Dutch, English, Latin, and Arabic scholarship. Irwin argues that while interest in the Orient was often influenced by Western Christianity, Western interest in the Islamic world was, for the most part, of negligible cultural significance. When scholarship on the Orient increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the "Orientalists" tended to either exaggerate the virtues of the Orient or be overt anti-imperialists. Irwin's second purpose is to counter the "malignant charlatanry" that lies behind Said's Orientalism. It was unlikely, Irwin writes, that Said bothered to read many of the Orientalists who serve as his arch villains. In fact, Said knew so little of the field he was writing about that he spent much of his time insulting the scholar to whom he was unwittingly most indebted: Bernard Lewis. While Said frequently failed to properly attribute the sources of Orientalism, it is possible he was simply unaware of them. Said's work, Irwin writes, has the merits of a good novel. "It is exciting; it is packed with lots of sinister villains, as well as an outnumbered band of goodies, and the picture that it presents of the world is richly imagined but essentially false." The real question posed by Orientalism is how it ever received acclaim in the first place. It is "a scandal and damning comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain," he concludes. The same scandal, sadly, exists in the rest of the Western world, and especially the United States, whence the study comes.
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