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Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism

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The late Edward Said often intimidated his critics with the false charge of racism. He more then hinted that only those who perceived dark skinned people to be inferior might possibly disagree with his conclusions. Ibn Warraq brilliantly shows him to have been an intellectually shallow and not altogether honest writer. At the very best, to be blunt, Said was a second rate mediocrity. He took full advantage, however, of the politically correct cultural zeitgeist dominating our so-called best universities. It is also very fair to accuse Said of slandering great scholars merely for being white skinned Westerners. The author takes him to task in a very careful and detailed manner. This book is not in any way a cheap shot attack on the memory of Edward Said. I dare anyone to find even one substantial mistake in the entire book.

This is a fine book by "Ibn Warraq." Rather than merely point out a few errors in Ed Said's "Orientalism," it launches into a full-scale defense of the West.

In my opinion, Ed Said was not the first human being to write an untruth, merely the first to put so many untruths in print. And while "Orientalism" is indeed ghastly garbage, one has to wonder about those on university campuses and elsewhere who have taken it seriously. Obviously, "Orientalism" should not be banned just as the words to the "Horst Wessel lied" should not be banned. But one would have to wonder about a university professor who, for political reasons, taught his class the Horst Wessel lied. And I have to wonder about the teaching of "Orientalism" as if it were scholarly work rather than trashy propaganda. As the author of "Defending the West" tells us, quoting Clive Dewey, "Orientalism" clearly touched "a deep vein of vulgar prejudice running through American academe."

Ibn Warraq gets off to a good start by mentioning the aggressive tone of "Orientalism," which he characterizes as "intellectual terrorism" given that it "seeks to convince not by arguments or historical analysis but by spraying charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism from a moral high ground; anyone who disagrees with Said has insult heaped upon him." And it is disgusting, as the author points out, to see Said's hatred of the country that gave him such privileges as a tenured professor at Columbia University (a university he did much to disgrace). As for his idea that French and British academic studies of Arab lands were part of an imperialist plan, Ibn Warraq reminds us that the first French university chair in Arab studies was founded in 1538 and the first British one in 1633, well before any French of British imperial adventures in the region.

On top of that, the author mentions that Said "always assumed the role in the West of an Islamic expert and has never flinched from telling us in unscholarly journalistic articles what the real Islam is." That's pretty rich of Said, a Christian agnostic. Ibn Warraq says that Said's work "has encouraged Islamic fundamentalists, whose impact on world affairs hardly needs underlining."

Of course, Said omits any context from which various Orientalists wrote. As Ibn Warraq puts it, "even a casual comparison of the rival imperialism of Islam" ought to show that the British Empire should not be dismissed as a purely negative historical force.

Does "Orientalism" at least make logical arguments, albeit using a distorted selection of material? No. It "displays all the laziness and arrogance of the man of letters who does not have much time for empirical research, or, above all, for making sense of its results." I found it interesting that a meritless work written by a propagandist can take years of work to refute, simply because some folks have decided to taunt others by honoring it.

Ibn Warraq applauds Western values as "a system that does not affront our reason and humanity." He warns us that "only within the framework of certain institutions can humankind hope to realize its humanity, that we discard our hard-won institutions at our own peril, the veneer of civilization of most people disappears outside their civilizing confines."

On the other hand, Ibn Warraq warns us that, a little paradoxically, Western rationalism, universalism, and self-criticism can lead to their opposites. For example, "limitless self-criticism leads to self-hatred, as witnessed in the buffooneries of Michael Moore, the exaggerations of Robert Fisk, and the fanaticism of Noam Chomsky."

I agree with the author's reaction to "Orientalism." And I recommend this book.

For 25 years, many leaders and candidates have accepted the willful misinterpretation of Western history instigated by Columbia University's infamous late professor, Edward Said. Western civilization could greatly benefit if current presidential hopefuls read this bromide of a book, identifying the damage Said caused---and providing a curative.

Politicians here gain a yardstick to measure Western cultural grandeurs (including intense self-criticism)---compared with ongoing social dysfunction, disintegration and horrors over 1,400 years of Islamic history.

Colleges requiring students to read Edward Said's Orientalism should also require this 24-karat tome, rebutting Said's flawed evaluation of the West---what Ibn Warraq identifies as inadequate methods, incoherence, tendentious interpretations---and amusing, but dangerous "historical howlers."

He credits Said for courage and self-criticism---in disparaging Arab writers insisting "the Jews never suffered..., the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion," or supporting criminal French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy.

But Orientalism's "pernicious influence" made Arab and Muslim self-examination---especially criticism of Islam within the West---nearly impossible, Ibn Warraq shows; it "taught an entire generation ... the art of self-pity," blaming all Arab and Muslim miseries on "wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists" whom Arabs and Muslims almost universally blame for their failure to reascend.

Alas, Said neglected historical Islamic imperialism---from Mohammed's invention of "one true faith" through the 17th Century, with reprises whenever wealth, time and war materiel sufficed. Petrodollars fueled the recent Islamic renewal of this effort---via "modernized" Muslim Brotherhood ancient Islamic strategy, supremacist jihad---and aggressive 21st century financial jihad through "shari'a finance."

Terror-advocating "experts" like former Pakistani Shari'a Court jurist, Taqi Usmani set Islamic banking standards for the MB construct that was established to promote Islamic supremacy. Usmani serves on the shari'a board of Saudi Arabia's terror-funding Dallah al-Baraka; in July 2007 he advised U.K. Muslims to live peacefully only until they acquire military strength to "establish the supremacy of Islam." Syrian Abdul Sattar Abu Ghuddah is a senior-level advisor to al-Baraka.

Christian, and not an Islamic scholar, Said nevertheless "bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam"---adding late-modern inadmissibility to ancient Islamic shari'a tradition: Muslims (or non-Muslims) criticizing Mohammed or Islam are guilty of blasphemy, punishable under Islamic law by death.

Ibn Warraq shows innumerable Western to Islam. Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz avowed, "Napoleon's campaign" ushered Egypt from "centuries of obscurantism" into modernity, including discoveries of pre-Islamic Egypt, which now anchor Egypt's tourism.

Said held, "the Orient was viewed as something inviting French interest, penetration, insemination--in short colonization...." He ignored the German, Russian, Italian and Western Jewish scholars who created Islamic, Middle Eastern and Arabic studies, thereby gutting his thesis.

Ibn Warraq finds Westerners and Western history and thought characterized by "three tutelary guiding lights,"--rationalism; universalism; and self-criticism. Pursuing truth and knowledge, Westerners accepted others and all humanity--and consistently criticized societies to improve them. Sir Jadunuth Sarkar credited the English with India's 19th century Renaissance---a mass-recovery from 500 years of Muslim jihad invasions (1000-1525), when an estimated 80 million Hindus perished.

But Islamic orthodoxy remains "suspicious of `knowledge for its own sake'." Unlimited intellectual inquiry is "dangerous to the faith." The 2003 Arab Human Development Report thus found fewer books translated into Arabic in the last 1,000 years than Spain translates in one year; Greece (population, under 11 million), annually translates five times the foreign books as all 22 Arab nations combined (population, 300 million).

Arab and Muslim pleas for assistance often brought Western "imperialists" to the Middle East to start with, Ibn Warraq notes. Sultan Selim III declared Jihad after Napoleon's 1789 Egyptian conquest---joining the infidel British and Russians to protect his imperial territories from the French. In 1804, the Ottomans got territorial guarantees from Russia and Austria; In 1809, they again allied with the British. In 1866, the Sultan permitted Suez canal construction, against British and French objections. Egypt's Khedive Ismail nearly bankrupted his protectorate---and in 1875 sold the Suez to Britain for its £4 million nominal value to unwind debts. Only reluctantly, the British helped quell riots that followed---yet the Sultan refused Britain's request that he repossess canal ownership.

Said ignored historical evidence, mimicking superficial French "existentialists, structuralists, deconstructionists and postmodernists" methods, and "grandiose theories" supported by "flimsy history or empirical foundations." Said's signature work displays "laziness and arrogance" of a literary man lacking time for empirical research or need to prove his results.

Said offended worst by neglecting comparisons. Using them, Ibn Warraq affirms the West.

Said excoriates Western slavery. But Muslim traders were far more culpable. From 1700 to 1929, Arabs traded over 17 million black slaves---including 1.5 million who perished crossing the Sahara; little over 11 million crossed the Atlantic. The Occident outlawed slavery. Muslims saw Western abolitionists as "a threat to their very livelihood but also as an affront to their religion."

Tenth century Arab geographer al-Maqdisi described "Zanj," Bantu-speaking East Africans, as "people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair and little understanding." A 10th century Persian treatise called Africans "people distant from the standards of humanity." A 13th century Persian wrote, "the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanji." Islamic social scientist, economist and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) argued, "Negro nations" submitted to slavery since they "have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals..."

Even "tolerant" Ottomans perpetuated slavery through tradition and religion---and lacked an abolitionist movement, write Ehud Toledano and Turkish historian Y.H. Erdem.

Ottomans also manufactured and traded eunuchs--boys castrated throughout southern Europe, North Africa and the Near East to maintain large Ottoman harems for the upper classes. Following "total removal of testicles and penis," eunuchs suffered extensive hemorrhaging and death rates upwards of 90% in sub-Saharan and west-central Africa.

Every Middle East scholar and library should own this book.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

DEFENDING THE WEST: A CRITIQUE OF EDWARD SAID'S ORIENTALISM is the first in-depth critique of a work that for three decades has received nearly unanimous recommendation and discussion. Said's thesis was that the Western image of the East was biased by colonialist attitudes and racism: this reconsideration offers a powerful rebuttal to college-level audiences, surveying misinterpretations in Said's original survey of scholarly literature and providing college-level collections strong in history and culture with a fine reinterpretation. Collections housing Said's work need this rebuttal.

Ibn Warraq, author of other brilliant and explosive books such as Why I Am Not a Muslim finally deals the death blow to Edward Said's mythmaking Orientalism (Penguin Modern Classics).

It is a needed critique because so many in the academy have been seduced by Mr. Said. Edward Said was a Anglican Arab raised to an upper class family that lived the life of the jet-set, travelling back and forth from mansions in Egypt, Lebanon and Jerusalem. Said, after his upbringing that included Armenian and Jewish servants, went on to claim that the west was racist for daring to write about the history of the 'East' from a western perspective. He claimed that only Muslims could tell Muslim history and only Arabs could write Arab history.

Warraq shows that not only was Said wrong in asserting that western portrayels of the 'east' were racist, but that in most cases the west romantisized the east and accepted it and learned from it. This is most true today when most western scholarship never critiqus the Koran or the 'east' but instead accepts all the myths it has itself created. This incisive and wonderful book dares to break down these myths and explode them.

Seth J. Frantzman

Edward Said's blaming the West and its "Orientalism" for all the problems of the Arab World has provided much fuel over the years for demagogues and refusniks throughout the middle east and has thus contributed to the continued backwardness of that region. His "victimization" mantra has been especially devastating to the Palestinians and their aspirations for statehood and international recognition. Since, by playing the "victimization" card and the scapegoat card, which is what Edward Said's "Orientalism" is all about, the peoples of that region have failed to see what is really wrong with their societies and have therefore failed to take any meaningful actions to remedy the situation. Anger towards the West (and the resultant terrorism) then becomes the only option. Sadly too many in the West, especially in academia, have also bowed down at the altar of Edward Said and elevated him to the status of prophet--or even deity--for telling them what they wanted to hear, which in turn has only provided all the more fuel for the victimizationers and scapegoaters in the middle east. However, Ibn Warraq brilliantly puts everything into perspective and totally demolishes Said's thesis. If one does nothing else they should read chapter 8 "The Pathological Niceness of Liberals, Antimonies, Paradoxes, and Western Values." While the entire book is most noteworty, chapter 8 should be required reading by every person in the West who has any desire at all to see our civilization survive the 21st century. To sum up, the research that went into this book is mind boggling, and every point he makes is thoroughly documented. Scholarly, yet accessible to the non-scholar.

Edward Said's fraudulent work, first published in 1978, has had a growing pernicious effect on the world, as have his hateful and deceitful works on the Arab-Israel conflict.
Said's polemic has very much become the accepted dogma of university departments across the world that study any of the subjects covered by 'Orientalism'. Ibn Warraq refutes the perfidious lies of Said meticulously and with brutal candour in this antidote to Said's pro-Islamo-Fascist and nihilist Far Left propaganda.

The effect of Said's work has been to slander the valuable work of generations of genuine scholars on the Middle East and Islamic world. but his work has gone much further than academia. He taught an entire generation of Muslims and Arabs 'the art of self-pity' which has led to the rise of Islamo-Nazi fundamentalism and terror that is the biggest threat to the freedom and decency of the world today.

Warraq points out Said in his fraudulent creation of the concept of "the other", a cliche rammed down the throats of university students around the world, is never used to apply to non-Muslims or even non-Arabs in the Islamic world.
Peoples such as the Copts, Maronites, Mandaens, Samaritans, Assyrians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Chaldeans, Berbers Zoroastrians, Baha'is and especially Jews are denied the status of Orientals and the protected status of 'the Other'. They simply do not exist in the world of Said and his intellectual followers.

I have long waited for the chance to voice my opinion that the concept of 'the Other' is a massive fraud perpetrated by leftwing intellectuals which simply means selected groups of people favoured and protected by the Left who ignore the suffering and victimization of other people, thus practising exactly what they accuse Westwerners, conservatives etc of doing to those they chosen to term 'the Other'
Warraq uses this term for convenience as he refers to as a 'temporary verbal surrender' , while identifying it for the dishonest cliche that it is.

Warraq's brilliant analysis of the engagement the West with Eastern and Islamic cultures go's some way to both explaining that there has been much positive in western civilization and influence and that Western culture has been most open to receiving and understanding the cultures of others while Islam since 900 CE at the latest has rejected input from other cultures and civilizations as well as rejecting the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, which is echoed in Said's contempt for science.

This loathing of science and the truth and denigration of Western civilization is revealed by an exhibit at the Ontario Science Center at Toronto which gives way to such unbelievable, almost surreal relativism claiming "Modern Western science puts the sun at the center of the solar system. but other points of view are not necessarily wrong or primitive"
Unbelievable

Warraq wishes to encourage progress and a true spirit of questioning in the Islamic and Arab world. but what males this almost impossible as well as any criticism of Islam in the West is Said's Orientalism which taught an entire generation the art of self-pity: 'Were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists we would be great once more".
The propaganda and falsehood by self-pity, postimiperialist victimhood and rantings about 'imperialism' is an "immature and unattractive quality" we owe of so much contemporary Middle Eastern culture. This paranoid conspiracy mentality is encapsulated by Said's 1980 work "The Question of Palestine" where he bizarrely charges that Zionism was created by the West purely to keep Islam at bay! Again unbelievable
Said and his followers interpret intellectual and political history in a highly, in short twisting the truth which Said does not seem to believe in anyway.
Warraq details the Arab role in beginning the slave trade which continues in Africa and the Middle East today and points out that the movement AGAINST slavery began in the West and it was in the West where slavery was first abolished.

Warraq takes apart the accepted blaming of only the West for all evils in the world today pointing out that "Europe has been guilty of terrible crimes but what civilization has not been?" Confining ourselves to the twentieth century the sins of the West are no worse than the crimes and follies of Asia. Warraq then documents the killing of 70 million Chinese by Mao, and one fifth of Cambodia's population by Pol Pot. The massacres of three hundred thousand people in Uganda by Idi Amin or of 800 000 in Rwanda in 1994. The genocide of 1.8 million people in Sudan, including at least three hundred thousand in Darfur. The crimes of Saddam Hussein, the chemical of the town of Hama by Hafez al Assad in 1982 in which 40 000 people die, and the 2 million people who have died in Iran because of the policies of the Islamic Republic.
Warraq dismantles Said's highly faulty and fraudulent methodology. He describes also how the very tolerance of the West has led to what he so eruditely refers to the bufooneries of Michael Moore, the exaggeration of Robert Fisk and the fanaticism of Noam Chomsky" all of these apologists for Islamo-Nazi atrocities and terror.

Warraq examines the real agenda of Islamism ignored in the mainstream media and universities. He also covers the horrific abuse of women and children in Islamic societies again condoned and ignored by leftwing intellectuals.
As he describes Iran: "The hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic of Iran should now be apparent The West does not need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in which women are kept in subjection, endure clitoridectomies, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, have acid thrown on their faces, are married off against their will at the age of nine. or where the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes are denied"
This book should be required reading for all students of the humanities brainwashed by Said's perfidious and dishonest agitprop.

It is a very serious and well documented study which is the true answer to the at times interesting but far too much "amateur" and one-sided E.Said's "Orientalism".I recommend it to everybody who wants sincerely to get a balanced and all-compassing view of the spiny problem of the relations between Islam and the Western World and civilization.

Defending The West is a detailed and devastating critique of Edward Said's influential book Orientalism as well as an articulate defense of western scholarship, values and civilization. First published in 1978, Orientalism was eagerly embraced by those intellectuals engaged in undermining and denigrating western achievements. The book rubbished the work of occidental scholars from classical antiquity to the British & French ones of the 20th century, reducing their contributions to "narratives" aimed at asserting the superiority of the west. Many great historians, linguists, anthropologists & artists are falsely accused of colonialism, imperialism and racism in Said's propagandistic text.

Ibn Warraq dissects Said's claims from multiple perspectives. For example, Said reduced the term `orientalism' in three ways: First by geographically narrowing its scope to the Middle East & North Africa, in the second place by ignoring the prominent work of German & other European Orientalists and thirdly by restricting the field of study to the Islamic cultures of the aforementioned region, for all intents & purposes ignoring ancient cultures like those of the Berbers, Chaldeans, Copts, Druze, Jews, Mandaeans, Nubians & Zoroastrians. The first pretends that no other oriental cultures exist; the reason for the second was no doubt that Germany never had colonies in the circumscribed region & on account of the monumental contribution of German Orientalists. The third betrays a disturbing chauvinism and political motivation on the part of Said.

Said's writing is indeed politicizing rhetoric of an accusatory, resentful nature. As Ibn Warraq proves with hundreds of examples, the text of Orientalism is rife with contradictions, obscurantism, intellectual dishonesty and gross errors of fact, like the statement that Britain & France controlled the Eastern Mediterranean during the closing years of the 1600s! Said never mentions Islamic Imperialism from the 7th century onwards, whether it be Arab, Ottoman or Mughal, nor its effects on Africa, Europe, India and the vanished Buddhist cultures of Central Asia. Contrary to Said's thesis, western scholars were driven by a quest for knowledge, made a beneficial contribution to expanding the corpus of knowledge and in many cases were instrumental in the rescue and revival of cultures on the verge of extinction. Without exception, they respected the peoples & cultures that they investigated as also demonstrated by Robert Irwin in For Lust Of Knowing. Quoting from Arabic writers like Al-Maqdisi & Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Warraq shows that the same cannot be said of oriental scholars.

The author argues that the west has an admirable record in its appreciation of the cultures of Asia and proves it by an in-depth survey of how the east is presented in western art, literature & music. To mention a few, Austen Layard, Henry Rawlinson, William Jones and Max Müller discovered and restored to various local peoples their forgotten heritage in which they took pride. Ibn Warraq easily refutes Said's misrepresentations by proving that writers from Hesiod & Herodotus to Kipling, artists like Delacroix, Decamps & Cordier and musicians like Mozart celebrated the orient and affirmed the positive humanity of its people.

While praising occidental rationalism, universalism and self-criticism, Ibn Warraq warns that these qualities are being subverted and used to undermine the west. The first may deteriorate into sterile scientism, the second can lead to a loss of rootedness and the third often turns into self-loathing. It was French intellectuals that first embraced Edward Said, people like Foucault who hailed the Ayatollah Khomeini as a great liberator. Today, characters like Michael Moore, Robert Fisk, John Pilger & Noam Chomsky are prime purveyors of this mindset. Academia is vulnerable to ideological and financial corruption; universities and think-thanks alike. Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and organizations like The Carter Center have been the recipients of huge amounts of Middle Eastern petrodollars. Martin Kramer exposes the negative impact of Said's work in Ivory Towers On Sand.

And yet, amongst the most courageous defenders of the West at this time, there are individuals born in Africa, the Middle East and India, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel, Kanan Makiya, Fouad Ajami, Dinesh D'Souza and Ibn Warraq himself. Combining consummate erudition with eloquent argumentation, Defending The West is a joy to read and an estimable reference source.

Read the first 50 pages and could honestly read no more without handicapping my intellectual integrity.

The reviewers who are giving this book 5 stars can't have read Said's original work, otherwise they'd recognize it's not a critique at all.

This is a thinly disguised rant by Ibn Warraq, the pseudonym of an India-born Muslim who has renounced his faith, and can be easily dismissed. The first section is a reprint of a rambling and vituperative essay from 2002. Its main thrust is a glorification of Western values, namely universalism, self-criticism, and rationalism, at the expense of the Islamic world. Ibn Warraq cherry-picks his way through Western history, ignoring such inconvenient events as the execution of Socrates and the Crusades, in order to bolster his position. This book is just a xenophobic diatribe unfortunately which isn't anything unusual for this author if you search for his other works.

There's a reason Edward Said's thesis has withstood decades of discussion despite its controversial stance and partly it's because of xenophobic writers like Ibn Warraq and and Daniel Pipes.

Despite horribly written books like this, I can gladly say that even in 2010, Said's Orientalism has withstood the tests of time, academia, and intellectualism and will continue to do so.

Thankfully, this misplaced tirade will merely be in vogue with the close-minded and Said's work will still be renowned in academic and intellectual cultures for even more decades as it has been since 1978.

1 star (because it's impossible to give it a 0)



IMPORTANT: Please be careful about some reviewers - they're not ordinary readers like most of us, rather they're professionals working for various biased organizations/groups to further an agenda. See below.
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