> Kurtz at the National Review, has a bug up his ass about Edward Said.
Syrian marxist critique of Edwad Said noted here. The critique is in Edward Said Reader published by Routledge, if memory serves. http://home.uchicago.edu/~mahmed/Or_now.html Sadik Jalal al-Azm, in his "Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse", and James Clifford provide a fairly balanced critique of Said's book and the main points of debate. Both are unanimous in stating that Orientalism exposed a particularly stereotypical way of looking and understanding the "Oriental". al-Azm writes, "[Orientalism] is shot through and through with racist assumptions, barely camouflaged mercenary interests, reductionistic explanations and anti-human prejudices". Clifford writes, "[Orientalism] succeeds in isolating and discrediting an array of "Oriental" stereotypes: the eternal and unchanging East, the sexually insatiable Arab, the 'feminine' exotic, the teeming marketplace, corrupt depotism, mystical religiosity". Hence, Said was greatly successful in exposing these stereotypes and forcing a clearer, more precise picture of the East on the Western perception. Another positive achievement of Orientalism, according to al-Azm, "is its laying bare Orientalist's persistent belief that there exists a radical ontological difference between the natures of the Orient and the Occident-that is, between the essential natures of Eastern and Western societies, cultures and peoples". This distinction is crucial to the debate of Orientalism because it is based on supermacy of one upon the other and it dominates all theories about the Orient emanating from the Occident. By equating the Orient and the Occident, mainly through demonstrating that the "Orient" is a fabrication, Orientalism negates this power disparity and challenges the imperialism of Western societies. Clifford points out that, "the concept of culture used by anthropologists was, of course, invented by European theorists to account for collective articulations of human diversity". To Said it would, therefore, be inherently problematic. Is there a better way of looking at human society? Can there be a fair depiction of another society? Is Orientalism only for Orientals? These are the issues raised by Said that Clifford agrees are positive contributions of Orientalism. <SNIP>
Martin Kramer on Edward Said.
http://www.geocities.com/martinkramerorg/2003_02_11.htm
http://www.ivorytowers.org/pages/832317/index.htm
http://www.ivorytowers.org/pages/832320/ Chapter Three of Ivory Towers on Sand
“There are a number of reasons that might explain why Said says nothing about Islam. He might have intended to write only of the West. He might not know enough about Islam. He might have felt that it was sufficient instead to name those of whose work he disapproves. He might have felt it best to say nothing rather than to say some one thing. He might believe that it is inappropriate or impossible or even hostile for any outsider to speak of a belief system which he does not share. Whatever his reason, Said says nothing and says nothing about why he says nothing.”
—Leonard Binder (1988) 1
Said—like the practitioners of “critical scholarship”—had nothing to say about Islam for all these reasons and one more: his academic generation drew upon the experience of the 1960s and 1970s. They were products of late–Cold War third worldism, which they had worked into an epistemology and which could be summarized in three words: resistance, revolution, liberation.
They expected radical change, but of a very specific kind. After 1967, so their argument went, American-engineered schemes for the Middle East could no longer be concealed behind the remote threat of Soviet expansion. Peoples of the region—first and foremost, the Palestinians, followed by other Arabs and Muslims—would rise up against the hegemony of the United States and its clients, especially Israel. There were forces at work, deep in Arab and Muslim societies, which would no longer submit to a skewed order devised solely to preserve American interests.
These forces were progressive. They would not only undermine the old order; they would construct a new order that would raise up and empower the excluded: workers, women, students, intellectuals, refugees. The duty of the sympathetic scholar was to study these forces, prove their potential on a theoretical level, and support them as a practical matter. As the progressive forces seized the initiative in Middle Eastern capitals, their allies would do the same on American campuses.
Blinders and Blind Spots
As an assessment of what had gone before, this analysis was arguable. As a prediction of what was to come, it was lamentable. For as Said prepared the ground for the successful overthrow of the existing order in Middle Eastern studies, in the Middle East itself only Ayatollah Khomeini enjoyed any success in the art of overthrow.
The Achilles heel of Orientalism, and much of the “critical scholarship,” was its very narrow conception of the forces of change in the Middle East. Orientalism made no mention of modern Iran at all, or indeed of any movement framing its agenda in the language of Islam. To Said’s mind, it was an orientalist trope to invoke “the return of Islam.”2 “History, politics, and economics do not matter” to the orientalists, wrote Said mockingly. “Islam is Islam, the Orient is the Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland.”3 In many contexts, Said insisted upon writing “Islam” with quotation marks, as though it were a category created solely by and for orientalists. That “Islam” might actually serve to mobilize movements more readily than ideologies of left and right seemed not to occur to Said at all. Malcolm Kerr, in his review of Orientalism, was struck by the omission: “Does Said realize how insistently Islamic doctrine in its many variants has traditionally proclaimed the applicability of religious standards to all aspects of human life, and the inseparability of man’s secularand spiritual destinies? What does he suppose the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Muslim Brotherhood are all about?”4
It was a valid question, and one that Said consistently dodged. His Covering Islam, published in 1981, represented a scramble to cover the gaping hole in Orientalism. Said’s indictment of the media and “experts” for their failure to anticipate or explain the revolution in Iran was very much a diversionary tactic, given Said’s own failure to do the same in a book published only two years earlier. Nor did he risk offering an interpretation of his own. The closest Said came to an account of Islamism was to blame the orientalists: according to Said, Muslim Orientals, subjected to orientalist demonization, had entered a reactive mode, “acting the part decreed for them” by the experts.5 By this logic, Said could trace every Islamist excess to Western prejudice, and eventually he did. In 1989, Khomeini issued a fatwa (edict) condemning the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses. “Why is that ignorance there,” asked Said, “if not for the disregard, indifference and fear with which things Islamic are considered here? . . . Islam is reduced to terrorism and fundamentalism and now, alas, is seen to be acting accordingly, in the ghastly violence prescribed by Ayatollah Khomeini.”6 This mode of argumentation conveniently absolved Said and followers of the difficult job of accounting for Islamist deeds. Instead, each Islamist action became another opportunity for the repetitive and ritual denunciation of Western prejudice against Islam.
Still, the “return of Islam” was an unwelcome surprise to Said and Saidians. Even more surprising (and, for Said, unpleasant) was the way many Islamist “returnees” read Said’s texts. Almost invariably, they understood them as anti-Western, pro-Islamic polemical tracts and deployed them as intellectual ammunition against Islam’s “enemies,” including secularists in their own societies. By choice or by ignorance, Said had disregarded the prior existence of an elaborate discourse of anti-orientalism within the Muslim world. When these Muslim readers opened Orientalism and Covering Islam, they perceived nothing new, and read them merely as “insider” confirmation of long-standing suspicions that Western scholars were agents of their governments, that Western scholarship was part of a conspiracy to defame Islam.
In the 1980s, as Iran’s revolution resonated abroad, this reading produced some unexpected coincidences. For example, in Orientalism, Said determined that American hospitals and universities in the Middle East were tainted by “their specifically imperial character and their support by the United States government.”7 (Leftists of the MERIP group had leveled the same charge against the American University of Beirut in 1975, describing the university as a “base of operations” funded from Washington and bristling with“sophisticated equipment in the field.”)8 It was a telling coincidence that when a militant Islamist movement arose among the Shi‘ites of Lebanon in the 1980s, its zealots saw these institutions in just this light and deliberately targeted university and hospital personnel. (By that time, all of these personnel were in Lebanon against the advice of their own government, and had remained there out of sympathy for Lebanese and Palestinians.) <SNIP>