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Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

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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.

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.

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.

There are giants of scholarship whose greatness is in opening whole new areas of study. There are other figures in scholarship whose claim to fame is in undermining a field of studies , a way of thought. Edward Said's most important work 'Orientalism' discredited the work of generations of Orientalists, all of whom he reinterpeted as tools of British and French colonialism and imperialism.
Now Robert Irwin a distinguished Orientalist himself makes an all- out attack on Said's work in a rich and detailed study of the whole scholarly tradition. In it he focuses on the individual stories of great Orientalists such as Postel, Goldhizer and in our day Bernard Lewis and reveals how their dedication to scholarship, to the world of knowledge, and often to the 'exotic societies ' which they studied were the great moving factors in their works.
The greatest part of Irwin's book is devoted to providing a detailed record of 'Orientalist scholarship' and only towards the end of the work does Irwin specifically attack the faulty scholarship, and ideological distortions of Said. But this is done not on an ad hominem basis but only in terms of Said's trashing of Orientalist scholarship.
This book is filled with fascinating portraits of remarkable individuals, and will be a delight to the general reader.

DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE is really a book of two parts. In the first, Robert Irwin gives an overview of Orientalism. This is no easy feat since the term itself is unfamiliar to even otherwise well-educated Americans. The term does not lend itself to ready definition since it implies a focus on the Orient. Irwin does not limit Orientalism to China and Japan. He defines it as broadly speaking the discipline that relates to the entire spectrum of studies that includes all non-European areas of interest. Thus, it subsumes history, literature, music, mathematics and just about any segment of human endeavor that is founded in Asia, Africa, of nearby island societies. Irwin notes that Orientalism, using his broad definition, can be extended all the way back to classic Greek civilization. Irwin outlines a vast historical sweep of a myriad of names all of whom had something to say about civilizations that lay beyond the Euphrates. As he lists these names, one is impressed that the totality of their writings were often at odds with each other. Most of the early Orientalists tended to think of Arabic societies as their respective points of interest. Rather than seeing these Arabic societies as symbolic of an exotic "Other" as recent critics like Edward Said have charged, they instead were more likely to view Islam as a competitor to Christianity, and even here if there were truly any "other" it would be more likely that the myriad subsets of Christianity would be that other. The first part of DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE is tough reading since the reader must absorb an imposingly long list of names, dates, and movements, sort of like reading an arcane history text of an unknown civilization. The second part is easier to grasp since Irwin zooms in on the life, times, and writings of Edward Said. Said, who died in 2003, was a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, and anti-Western writer and thinker. His anti-American stance is not at all that unusual even given his tenured professor position at Columbia. Said is the author of many books, most of which exhibit his life-long obsession with justifying the deeds of the Palestinians as they sought to create a homeland in Jerusalem. Said's major book is ORIENTALISM, a surprise bestseller that is a confused mishmash of beliefs. Irwin takes exception to Said's claim that all of Western culture views all of Oriental culture as exotic, erotic, and just plain sexy. Irwin retorts that the vast majority of Orientalists from Plato to the present tended to see the East mostly in terms of the west. The allure of the east was anything but a vaguely defined "other." As Irwin was writing the first part of DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE, he was clarifying that the "danger" of the title lay more in Said's misreading of Oriental culture than in any threat by the west toward the east. DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE is an indispensable tool to counter the claims of the relativists and deconstructionists who assert that western culture is on its last and well-earned legs.

"Dangerous Knowledge" should serve as the standard work about those often quirky scholars in the West who pursued the difficult and mostly little regarded study of the languages and civilizations of the Middle East. However, a history of scholars is unfortunately less interesting than the history itself. "Dangerous Knowledge" seems to have been written largely for an opportunity to refut and criticize the works of the late Edward Said, who famously charged most Western scholarship as tainted by racist and imperialist attitudes. Author Robert Irwin makes a good case that this blanket condemnation is both wrong and unscholarly, and a disservice to our efforts to come to grips with problems that have suddenly become crucial.

I bought this book without realizing that except for the title, it is exactly the same as Irwin's book, "For Lust of Knowing." It has the same number of pages and the same words on each page. If you already have one of these books, you won't need the other!

Here is my review of the book. As you will see, I'm explaining the original title in this review. I think I prefer that title, but it isn't all that important.

This book is fun to read. It discusses the history of Orientalism and tells about some of the leading Orientalists. It also defends Orientalism as a legitimate scholarly field. And one may want to know why this topic of study needs any defense.

The reason becomes clear right from the start. Ed Said wrote a crazy rant against the whole enterprise. That ought to have had little effect on academia. But it did: plenty of people praised that book! And by now, to say that one is an Orientalist is to risk being branded as a servant of Imperialism, and maybe as a Zionistlover as well. I can see that Irwin is not too happy about the decline of Orientalism as a scholarly field.

Nor can Irwin be too happy with the discrediting of Middle Eastern Studies that has resulted from the acceptance of Said's nonsense by quite a few supposed intellectuals. That has resulted in Middle Eastern scholars being dismissed by some as a bunch of anti-scholarly racists and bigots who use their positions not to further knowledge but to propagandize against human rights and truth. Irwin is clearly embarrassed by the fact that his field is now associated with Said's polemical work. Yes, those who study the Middle East are under attack from both sides due to the politicization of the field.

I have to admit that I'm not the proper person to deliver an attack on Said's book "Orientalism." For one thing, the book is such garbage that I wouldn't know where to start. For another, what I say would count for very little. Not only am I not a scholar in that field, I also am an opponent of Said's entire war on human rights. I see Said as one of the biggest liars of the past century, and I feel that he was a truly evil creature. It would be difficult for me to convince most of those who like Said's works that I could write a genuinely unbiased and fair appraisal of the trash that he wrote.

That is one reason why it is good to have a view from an Orientalist who attacks Said on scholarly, rather than political grounds. Irwin certainly does not defend Israel or Zionism, and he defends Said from accusations of supporting terrorism (cleverly claiming that he merely praises terrorism "with faint damns"). I think Irwin is wrong here, but that's not the issue. The question is whether there is any merit in what Said wrote, and how much damage his stuff has done to the field of Orientalism.

Irwin says that "it is a scandal and a damning comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain in recent decades that Said's arguments could ever have been taken seriously." And he notes that in some cases, folks sided with Said just to be anti-Zionist and anti-American. It sure must be fun for some people to taunt those who support human rights for Jews. But I think that the cost is severe if the whole field of Middle Eastern history and Orientalist studies is thus mangled. As for Said himself, I wonder why he did such a thing in the first place. Why, instead of attacking the Israelis or the Jews, or the Blacks, or the Americans, or the Christians, or whatever group he wanted to slander did he pick on those who simply studied the Middle East? After all, many of those scholars were anything but Zionists! I don't know the answer to that question. Maybe Said felt that to truly smash the rights of Levantine Jews to life, liberty, and property, he'd have to smash truth. And I guess he figured that the best way to attack truth would be to outlaw the right to study it. That would leave Middle Eastern studies in the hands of lying and taunting propagandists and give some chance to get "scholarly" approval for the abolition of human rights in the Levant. That's just my wild guess. Irwin merely says that he can't believe that Said's work was written in good faith.

I would like to see Middle Eastern studies be a scholarly field once again. If I were a few decades younger, I might even want to work in that subject to help that happen. But I now think the first task here has to be to expose and repudiate the barrage of anti-Zionist lies that have become part of the canon offered to many students. And that can't be done by partisans alone. It needs works such as this one, written by those who value truth and want the field to be rescued from those who merely want to use words to fight a tribal war.

Oh yes, the title. In "The Golden Road to Samarkand" by James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915), Ishak says:

"We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We take the Golden Road to Samarkand."

Obviously, Irwin's point is that the Orientalists were not in their fields primarily to serve as agents of Imperialism, but, almost always, out of genuine love of knowledge.

I recommend this book.

This book is an extension of a political feud thats been going on in academic circles since Edward Said published his book "orientalism". As a short summary, that book contended that many western scholars in their studies of the other cultures had both gotten things wrong and served as an important extension of the european imperial/colonial governments who used to rule large parts of the world.

The feud actually has little to do with actual scholarship. In some sense, its an extension of the wars in the middle east. Said was Palestinian. Harsh lines were drawn on both sides and whole dispute is almost completely political. Ironically, the almost histerical tone of attacks on Said did more to spread his ideas than he himself did. As in many of these cases, a response was not sufficent. It had to be proved that he was a criminal liar whose book consisted of fabrications. The book and its ideas had to be banished from any serious discussion. At times it seemed that the concern was really over someone from the middle east speaking about it from an academic point of view rather than europeans or Americans.

And so Robert Irwin decided to ride to the defense of Orientalism in this book. His argument is basically that Orientialism is and always has been above politics. And that the people in the field didn't agree with each other enough to have an ideology as Said suggested. Problem is that Irwin himself digs up all kinds of material that goes counter to his own arguments. For example, he shows all kinds of scholars who did serve the ends of empire and government. But he tells us without proof that they are just exceptions in a sea of scholars with unquestionable motives. It didn't quite convince me.

For his own reasons, Irwin chooses not to engage in debate with Said. As with many Orientalists, he chooses the route of avoiding debate of the subject by a direct attack on the credibility of Said and his work. This can work in some cases (See Black Athena), but it requires that the errors and misrepresentations are such that the entire premise of the work of the false. Irwin doesn't reach anywhere close to that standard. In fact, his own analysis of orientialism tends to support Said's case. Its also a very difficult thing to discredit analysis of a field of study.

The field of "orientalism" as Robert Irwin and many others had known it is simply obsolete. Travel and computers have changed the world. There isn't a need anymore for western scholars to interprate for Americans or Europeans for that matter what "orientals" are like. There are large english-speaking academic communities made up of people from those cultures both in those countries and in the west. If we want to know about Iraqi culture/history for example, its much better to talk to an Iraqi professor from the culture rather than having an "orientalist" like Bernard Lewis offer outsider theories on what Iraqis might be like.

More generally, the time of outsider academic analysis of cultures and political systems is almost over. The debate over orientalism is largely meaningless these days. Its just a leftover extension of the wars of the middle east.

Like many other Orientalists, Irwin is bitterly obssessed with Edward Said and this book is dedicated to refuting Orientalism, the late thinker's classic masterpiece. Had Irwin read Said properly though, he would have not written this long celebration of supposedly disinterested scholarship highlighting orientalist academic achievements etc... To begin with, and to state a point that is a given in the humanities these days, Orientalism for Said was not just an academic discipline (which is all what Irwin talks about) but was a style of constructing and approaching the "Orient" as being inherently different from the "Occident" and as being static, unchanging, inferior. As such Said uses the term Orientalism with reference to literary figures such as Flaubert, philosophers such as Marx along with low grade Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis. He was not interested in writting a history of Oriental Studies. What he was concerned with was an analysis of the system of cultural representation and imaginative geography that was Orientalism in its political, academic, artisitc, and literary forms. His critque of Orientalism was not based on the idea that Oriental Studies made no academic contributions; he rather tackles the assumptions that inform it (along with other realms of cultural production such as literature) and its relationship with its imperial context etc... Ignoring Said's analysis, Irwin ends up with a weak Orientalist critique and a trite anecdotal study that has very little relevance to contemporary scholarship. In many ways this book illustrates rather than refutes Said's points (especially Said's critique of cults of specialists that refuse to recognise their contextual connections with the surrounding world)!