From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 01 Oct 2003 - 04:02:00 GMT
Said and ORIENTALISM
Ibn Warraq in Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2003
Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In
1998, he accused the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a
holocaust denier on grounds of free speech. After all, free speech
scarcely exists in our own societies. The history of the modern
Arab world was one of political failures, human rights abuses,
stunning military incompetences, decreasing production, [and]
the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in
democratic and technological and scientific development.
Those truths aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down
in history for having practically invented the intellectual
argument for Muslim Rage. Orientalism, his bestselling
manifesto, introduced the Arab world to victimology. The most
influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims,
Orientalism, blamed Western history and scholarship for
the ills of the Muslim world: Were it not for imperialists,
racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more.
Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the West a Satan that
oppresses Islam by its very existence. Orientalism lifted that
concept, and made it over into Western radical chic, giving
vicious anti-Americanism a high literary gloss.
In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman traces the absorption
of Marxist justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows
how it became a powerful philosophical predicate for Islamist
terrorism. Mr. Said was the most influential exponent of this
trend. He and his followers also had the effect of cowing many
liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence
about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11.
Mr. Saids rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put
writers on the Middle East and Islam in constant jeopardy of
being labeled Orientalist oppressorsa potent form of
intellectual censorship.
Orientalism was a polemic that masqueraded as scholarship. Its
historical analysis was gradually debunked by scholars. It became
clear that Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic license, not
empirical inquiry. Nevertheless he would state his conclusions as
facts, and they were taken as such by his admirers. His technique
was to lay charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on
the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab worldeffectively,
to claim the moral high ground and then to paint all who might
disagree with him as collaborators with imperialism. Western
writers employed a western style for dominating, restructuring,
and having authority over the Orient. They conspired to suppress
native voices that might give a truer account. All European
writings masked a discourse of power. They had stereotyped the
Other as passive, weak, or barbarian. [The Orientalists] Orient
is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been
Orientalized, he said.
By the very act of studying the East, the West had manipulated it,
politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically,
and imaginatively. This conspiracy of domination, he said, had
been going on from the Enlightenment to the present day. But
while deploring the disparity between texts and reality, Mr. Said
never himself tried to describe what that reality was, merely
sighing that, To look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an
Orientals human or even social realityis to look in vain.
Mr. Said routinely twisted facts to make them fit his politics. For
example, to him, the most important thing about Jane Austens
Mansfield Park was that its heroine, Fanny Price, lived on blood
money. In his writings, verbal allusion and analogy stood in for
fact, a device to reassure the ignorant of the correctness of his
conclusions. Of these he found many over the years in American
universities. His works had an aesthetic appeal to a leftist bent of
mind, but even this now can be seen as a fad of the late 20th
century. The irony, of course, is that he was ultimately
grandstanding for the West--for Western eyes, Western salons,
and Western applause.
(Ibn Warraq [a pseudonym used to protect himself and his family
from Islamists] is the author of Why I am Not a Muslim and the
editor of Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, published by
Prometheus Books in 1995 and 2003 respectively.)
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