Until his death in 2003, Edward Said was one of the most influential post-colonial writers of the twentieth century. His best selling Orientalism (1978) set the standard for what was then cutting edge literary and social discourse on a very controversial issue: the relationship between a Western-style hegemonic colonialism and a host of Arabic states that saw themselves as vassals of a European mindset that praised the former as advanced and a model of international decorum even as it libeled the latter as backwards, passive, and exotic. This book and others that he wrote in a similar vein came along at just the "right" time historically speaking; Western culture was becoming aware of accusations by leftist critics like Said of perpetuating a wide range of sins: racism, anti-feminism, colonialism, Eurocentrism, just to name a few. Almost immediately, Said's books became required reading on hundreds of college and university syllabi. For the next thirty years, generations of impressionable eighteen year olds were taught that the United States, England, and France were guilty of the most heinous of sins: the stamping out and crushing down of the very essences and life blood of numerous third world nations that had for far too long been chafing under the heavy hand of a Western colonial hegemony. But not all critics were so quick to jump on the Said bandwagon of bashing the West. One such critic was Ibn Warraq, who deconstructed the entirety of Said to reveal a staggering host of fissures, discontinuities, paradoxes, and what Warraq has called "historic howlers." Those who even now continue to praise Edward Said must now take into account objections raised by critics like Ibn Warraq who accuse Said of the very same sins that he finds objectionable in the West.
Warraq takes the three chapters that comprise Orientalism and holds Edward Said to the same standards that apply to any scholarly book: accuracy, balance, and evidence. In all three criteria, Edward Said comes up short. This is not to say that there is no value in zeroing in on the admitted shortcomings of a mindset that clearly deserves some censure for its heavy-handed treatment of various former colonial states, but the problem here is one that Warraq knows well, that the binary thinking of Edward Said allows him to place all of Western and Eastern discourse under a true/false or yes/no relation. Binaries by their very nature do not allow for fine gradations of thought; one is either a crushing imperialist hegemonic power or one is not. To place blame on the left side of the binary slash is to ignore the realities of human cultural and social dynamics that truly are often at cross purposes. For Edward Said, all of Western thought occupies the left slash while all of Eastern culture occupies the other. It is this biased division of human thought that Warraq addresses in his Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism.
Just as Edward Said divides Orientalism into a tri-part division ("The Scope of Orientalism," "Orientalist Structures and Restructures," "Orientalism Now") so does Ibn Warraq have a comparable structure ("Edward Said and the Saidists," "The Three Golden Threads and the Misapprehensions of Edward Said," "Orientalism in Painting and Sculpture, Music and Literature") Both Said and Warraq have written closing codas; with the former an afterward; with the latter a conclusion. In his first chapter, Ibn Warraq takes Edward Said to task in the latter's overly loose use of "Orientalism." Said uses Orientalism as a general catch-all term that suggests that it has been used by the West in a static sense of a centuries old cabal stretching back to Aeschylus, one that has been designed to oppress the East. Warraq paraphrases Said as defining it as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (Warraq 19) Warraq responds that if Orientalism were truly only that, then how may Said account for other and competing definitions by those who called themselves Orientalists and spent lifetimes studying Oriental languages, customs, histories, and religions? Warraq also notes historical inaccuracies so staggeringly manifest that it is difficult to believe that Edward Said was so incompetent a historian. Just one inaccuracy may serve here. Edward Said mentions that French and British hegemonies marked a Western controlling influence in Egypt right up until World War One. The historical truth is more prosaic. The Ottoman Empire, not any Western powers, was this controlling colonial force. But to admit even this would have pulled away the curtain revealing the true motivation of Edward Said, his vitriolic spleen toward any and all vestiges of European hegemony. A proper definition of Oriental is not Edward Said's only problematic. He also has varying definitions of more basic terms like "truth" and "reality."
In Part 2 of Defending the West, Ibn Warraq notes the contributions of centuries of Orientalists ranging from those of classical Greece, to early Christianity, and to Indian Orientalists. These Orientalists struggled mightily to master the arcane languages and cultures of their respective areas of study. Edward Said would have replied (had he bothered to acknowledge such contributions) that these Orientalists sought to destabilize the cultural infrastructures of the native countries merely to make the West feel smugly superior. In Part 3, Warraq notes the cultural and artistic achievements of generations of Western sculptors, artists, writers, and musicians who sought only to learn from the arts of the Orient. Ultimately, what becomes evident from Defending the West is that as long as the still many supporters of Edward Said continue to flock under his anti-Western banner without considering the troubling questions posed by critics like Ibn Warraq then their vocal support of Edward Said will ring increasingly hollow.
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