Defending the west

Prometheus Books

Contents

Chapter One

EDWARD SAID AND THE SAIDISTS

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?

It takes 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, had written it? And yet, ironically, what makes self-examination for Arabs and Muslims, and especially criticism of Islam in the West, very difficult is the totally pernicious influence of Edward Said's Orientalism. 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, bludgeoned into silence any criticism of Islam, and even stopped dead the research of eminent Islamologists who felt their findings might offend Muslim sensibilities and who dared not risk being labeled "Orientalist." The aggressive tone of Orientalism is what I have called "intellectual terrorism," since 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. The moral high ground is an essential element in Said's tactics. Since he believes his position is morally unimpeachable, Said obviously thinks he is justified 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 and 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 being a group complicit 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 antihuman tendency to make huge, but vague, generalizations about entire populations that in reality consist of millions of individuals. In other words, much of what was written about the Orient in general, and Islam and Islamic civilization in particular, was false. The Orientalists also stand accused of creating "the Other"-the non-European, always characterized in a negative way, as, for example, passive, weak, and in need of civilizing by the advanced West (contrasting Western strength with 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'" (p. 2). 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 Michel Foucault, who argued that supposedly objective and natural structures in society, which privilege some and punish others for nonconformity, 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" (p. 3).

From Pretentiousness to Meaninglessness

There are, as I shall show, several contradictory theses buried in Said's impenetrable prose, with its endless postmodern jargon ("a universe of representative discourse," "Orientalist discourse" [p. 71]-and some kind editor really ought to have explained to Said the meaning of "literally" [pp. 19, 87, 93, 138, 179, 218, 307] and the difference between scatalogical and eschatological [p. 68]), and pretentious language that often conceals some banal observation, as when Said talks of "textual attitude" (pp. 92-93), when all he means is "bookish" or "bookishness." Tautologies abound, as in "the freedom of licentious sex" (p. 190).

Or take these comments:

Thus out of the Napoleonic expedition there issued a whole series of textual children, from Chateaubriand's Itinraire to Lamartine's Voyage en Orient to Flaubert's Salammb, 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. (pp. 87-88)

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 Napoleonic expedition covers up this 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, and one detailed study of modern Egyptians. Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand's Itinraire (1811) describes superbly his visit to the Near East; Voyage en Orient (1835) is Alphonse de Lamartine's impressions of Palestine, Syria, and Greece; Salammb (1862) is Gustave Flaubert's novel of ancient Carthage; Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) is a fascinating firsthand account of life in Egypt, particularly Cairo and Luxor, written after years of residence there (first 1825-28, then 1833-35); Richard Burton's account of his audacious visit to Mecca was first published in three volumes between 1855 and 1856. Lane and Burton both had perfect command of Arabic, classical and colloquial, while the others did not, and both, particularly Lane, made contributions to Islamic studies, but not the three Frenchmen.

What do they conceivably have in common? Said tells us that 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." 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 pompous way of saying the obvious, namely, that they were writing about an Orient of which they had some experience and intellectual knowledge.

Why are these disparate works "imitations"? Take Lane's and Burton's works: They are both highly accurate accounts based on personal, firsthand 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." Burton's observations are still quoted for their scientific value in such scholarly works as F. E. Peters's The Hajj. 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" (p. 164). 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 such as Maulana Muhammad Ali, who began his English translation in 1909 and refers constantly 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 in Beirut-the edition published by the Librairie du Liban.

What profound mysteries are unraveled by Said's final tortuous sentence? Count Alessandro Cagliostro was a Sicilian charlatan who traveled in Greece, Egypt, Arabia, 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 he 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, either of its languages or of its history or culture. He was not a distinguished Orientalist in the way Lane was. Indeed, apart from his "Letter to the French People" (1786), I do not think Cagliostro ever wrote anything worthy of being called scientific, or of scholarly value. Cagliostro, according to Said, was the prototype of "[the above five authors'] imaginative conception." Is he suggesting that they, too, fabricated their entire knowledge of the Egypt, the Near East, and Arabia? If that is what Said means, it is false, for reasons discussed above.

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 metaphor-Lane and Burton mastered Arabic in the way Napoleon mastered Egypt-but unfortunately, in the rest of his book Said 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" (p. 67). Said seems to be saying that "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 judgment 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." (p. 160). 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, those lying 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 attain genuine 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" (p. 15); or when he talks of "a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient" (p. 39), 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" (p. 52). Again, I take it Said is not being ironical when he talks of "philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones" (p. 98). At one point, Said mentions Orientalism's "objective discoveries" (p. 203).

Yet these acknowledgments of the discoveries made by Orientalists are contradicted by Said's insistence that there is no such thing as "truth" (p. 271), or when he characterizes Orientalism as "a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge" (p. 73). 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" (p. 62). At one point Said seems to deny that the Orientalists had acquired any objective knowledge at all (p. 122), 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" (p. 202). 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 wholeheartedly endorses Abdel Malek's strictures against Orientalism and its putatively false "knowledge" of the Orient" (p. 96-97).

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" (p. 331). 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" (p. 104), 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" (p. 109). 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 "[t]o look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental's human or even social reality ... is to look in vain" (p. 176).

Historical and Other Howlers

For a work that purports to be a serious work of intellectual history, Orientalism is full of historical howlers. 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 (p. 35). Real colonies, like Australia or Algeria, were settled by large numbers of Europeans, and this manifestly was not the case with Egypt.

(Continues...)

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