The Edward Said Reader

by Edward W. Said

  38. Quinet, Le Génie des religions, p. 47.

  39. Jean Thiry, Bonaparte en Égypte décembre 1797–24 août 1799 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1973), p. 9.

  40. Constantin-François Volney, Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (Paris: Bossange, 1821), 2: 241 and passim.

  41. Napoleon, Campagnes d’Égypte et de Syrie, 1798–1799: Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Napoléon (Paris: Comou, 1843), 1: 211.

  42. Thiry, Bonaparte en Égypte, p. 126. See also Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 12–20.

  43. Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery of Europe, p. 22.

  44. Quoted from Arthur Helps, The Spanish Conquest of America (London, 1900), p. 196, by Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiapelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 573.

  45. Thiry, Bonaparte en Égypte, p. 200. Napoleon was not just being cynical. It is reported of him that he discussed Voltaire’s Mahomet with Goethe, and defended Islam. See Christian Cherfils, Bonaparte et l’Islam d’après les documents français arabes (Paris: A. Pedone, 1914), p. 249 and passim.

  46. Thiry, Bonaparte en Égypte, p. 434.

  47. Hugo, Les Orientales, in Oeuvres poétiques, 1: 684.

  48. Henri Dehérain, Silvestre de Sacy, ses contemporains et ses disciples (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1938), p. v.

  49. Description de l’Égypte, ou Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites in Égypte pendant l’expédition de l’armée française, publié par les ordres de sa majesté l’empereur Napoléon le grand, 23 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1809–28).

  50. Fourier, Préface historique, vol. 1 of Description de l’Égypte, p. 1.

  51. Ibid., p. iii.

  52. Ibid., p. xcii.

  53. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Histoire naturelle des poissons du Nil, vol. 17 of Description de l’Égypte, p. 2.

  54. M. de Chabrol, Essai sur les moeurs des habitants modernes de l’Égypte, vol. 14 of Description de l’Égypte, p. 376.

  55. This is evident in Baron Larrey, Notice sur la conformation physique des égyptiens et des différentes races qui habitent en Égypte, suivie de quelques réflexions sur l’embaumement des momies, vol. 13 of Description de l’Égypte.

  56. Cited by John Marlowe, The Making of the Suez Canal (London: Cresset Press, 1964), p. 31.

  57. Quoted in John Pudney, Suez: De Lesseps’ Canal (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), pp. 141–42.

  58. Marlowe, Making of the Suez Canal, p. 62.

  59. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Lettres, journal et documents pour servir à l’histoire du Canal de Suez (Paris: Didier, 1881), 5: 310. For an apt characterization of de Lesseps and Cecil Rhodes as mystics, see Baudet, Paradise on Earth, p. 68.

  60. Cited in Charles Beatty, De Lesseps of Suez: The Man and His Times (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 220.

  61. De Lesseps, Lettres, journal et documents, 5: 17.

  62. Ibid., pp. 342–33.

  Chapter 5: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims

  1. Eqbal Ahmad, “An Essay in Reconciliation,” The Nation (March 22, 1980): 341.

  2. I. F. Stone, “Confessions of a Jewish Dissident,” in Underground to Palestine, and Reflections Thirty Years Later (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

  3. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 50.

  4. Ibid., p. 592.

  5. Ibid., p. 594–95.

  6. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pp. 153–57, 214, 228.

  7. Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York: Antheneum Publishers, 1976), p. 133.

  8. Ibid., p. 134

  9. See Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs of Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976), pass.; a powerful case is made also by The Non-Jew in the Jewish State: A Collection of Documents, ed. Israel Shahak (privately printed by Shahak, 2 Bartenura Street, Jerusalem), 1975.

  10. See Imperialism: The Documentary History of Western Civilization, ed. Philip D. Curtin (New York: Walker & Company, 1971), which contains a good selection from the imperialist literature of the last two hundred years. I survey the intellectual and cultural backgrounds of the period in Orientalism, chapters 2 and 3.

  11. Quoted in Desmond Steward, Theodor Herzl (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1974), p. 192.

  12. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers Co., 1971), p. 324. The full text is to be found in Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1975), vol. 2, p. 1363.

  13. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 129.

  14. Harry Bracken, “Essence, Accident, and Race,” Hermathena 116 (Winter 1973): 81–96.

  15. See Curtin, Imperialism, pp. 93–105, which contains an important extract from Knox’s book.

  16. George Nathaniel Curzon, Subjects of the Day: Being a Selection of Speeches and Writings (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), pp. 155– 56.

  17. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, in Youth and Two Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), p. 52.

  18. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

  19. Agnes Murphy, The Ideology of French Imperialism, 1817–1881 (Washington: The Catholic University of American Press, 1948), pp. 110, 136, 189.

  20. Amos Oz, a leading Israeli novelist (also considered a “dove”) puts it nicely: “For as long as I live, I shall be thrilled by all those who came to the Promised Land to turn it either into a pastoral paradise or egalitarian Tolstoyan communes, or into a well-educated, middle-class Central European enclave, a replica of Austria and Bavaria. Or those who wanted to raise a Marxist paradise, who built kibbutzim on biblical sites and secretly yearned for Stalin to come one day to admit that ‘Bloody Jews, you have done it better than we did,’” Time, May 15, 1978, p. 61.

  21. I have taken all of these quotations from an excellent, and invaluable, M.A. thesis submitted by Miriam Rosen at Hunter College in 1976, “The Last Crusade: British Archeology in Palestine, 1865–1920,” pp. 18–21.

  22. See Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), and Yehoshua Porath, The Emergence of the Palestinian-Arab National Movement, Vol. 1 1918–1929 (London: Frank Cass and Company, 1974).

  23. See the forthright historical account in Amos Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971; reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1972), pp. 218–24.

  24. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? trans. David Thorstad (New York: Monad Press of the Anchor Foundation, 1973), p. 39.

  25. Ibid., p. 38.

  26. Quoted in David Waines, “The Failure of the Nationalist Resistance,” in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. 220.

  27. Ibid., p. 213.

  28. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), p. 371.

  29. Ibid., p. 125.

  30. Ibid., pp. 128–29, 253.

  31. Ibid., p. 128.

  32. Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1972). Harkabi was chief of military intelligence until he was dismissed in 1959 by Ben Gurion. He later became a professor at the Hebrew University and an expert Arabist, indeed the principal propagandist in Israel against everything Arab and/or especially Palestinian. See, for example, his virulently anti-Palestinian book (distributed gratis in this country by the Israeli embassy) Palestinians and Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1974). Surprisingly, General Harkabi has recently become a “dove” and a supporter of the Peace Now Movement.

  33. Reproduced in Haolam Hazeh, May 15, 19
74. Haolam Hazeh ’s editor, Uri Avnery, has written an interesting, somewhat demagogic book, worth looking at for the light it sheds on Israeli politics: Israel Without Zionism: A Plea for Peace in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1968). It contains vitriolic attacks on people like Moshe Dayan, whom Avnery describes essentially as “an Arab-fighter” (cf. Indian-fighters in the American West).

  34. Weizmann, Trial and Error, p. 130.

  35. Ibid,. p. 188.

  36. Ibid., pp. 215–16.

  37. Ibid., p. 130.

  38. C. L. Temple, The Native Races and Their Rulers (1918; reprint, London: Frank Cass and Company, 1968), p. 41.

  39. Trial and Error, pp. 156–57.

  40. On the army as a matrix for organizing society, see Michel Foucault, “Questions à Michel Foucault sur la géographie,” Hérodote, 1, 1 (first trimester 1976), p. 85. See also Yves Lacoste, La Géographie ca sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre (Paris: Maspero, 1976).

  41. Details taken from Walter Lehn, “The Jewish National Fund,” Journal of Palestine Studies 3, no. 4 (Summer 1974): 74–96. It is worth noting here that during the academic year 1977–78, Lehn, a retired professor of linguistics, was visiting professor at Bir Zeit University, the only Arab institution of higher learning on the occupied West Bank. During the year he continued his research on the JNF, and also signed an open letter, on January 6, protesting (as an eyewitness) the savage beating of two young Palestinian students by Israeli soldiers (one of the two was hospitalized after he collapsed from the beating). Along with six other professors, Lehn was denied a work permit by the West Bank military authorities in early May 1978. Not one U.S. newspaper carried this news. But see also Uri Davis and Walter Lehn, “And the Fund Still Lives,” Journal of Palestine Studies 7, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 3–33.

  42. As an example, consider the fate of Umm al-Fahm, a large Arab village given to Israel by King Abdallah of Jordan in 1949 according to the Rhodes agreement. Before 1948 the village owned 140,000 dunams, with a population of 5,000. In 1978 there were about 20,000 Arab inhabitants of Umm al-Fahm, but the village’s land had been reduced to 15,000 dunams, almost all of it rocky and poor for cultivation. All the best land was confiscated by various “legal” decrees, including the 1953 Law of Land, Insurance and Compensation. The greatest irony perhaps is that two socialist kibbutzim—Megiddo and Givat Oz—were built on the confiscated Arab land. What was left was turned over to a moshav, or cooperative agricultural settlement.

  43. Joseph Weitz, My Diary and Letters to the Children (Tel Aviv: Massada, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 181–82.

  44. Jon and David Kimche, A Clash of Destinies: The Arab-Jewish War and the Founding of the State of Israel (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1960), p. 92. See also the two important articles by Walid Khalidi, “The Fall of Haifa,” Middle East Forum, 35, no. 10 (December 1959): 22–32; and “Plan Dalet: The Zionist Blueprint for the Conquest of Palestine,” Middle East Forum, 35, no. 9 (November 1961): 22–28.

  45. The most thorough study ever made of the Palestinian exodus, after a combing of every Arab newspaper and broadcst of the period, revealed absolutely no evidence of “orders to leave,” or of anything except urgings to Palestinians to remain in their country. Unfortunately, the terror was too great for a mostly unarmed population. See Erskine Childers, “The Wordless Wish: From Citizens to Refugees,” in The Transformation of Palestine, ed. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. 165–202. Childers, an Irish-man, was a free-lance journalist when he conducted his research; his findings are devastating to the Zionist case.

  46. See Avnery, Israel Without Zionism.

  47. Weitz, My Diary, vol. 3, p. 293.

  48. Ibid., p. 302.

  49. Tawfiq Zayyad, “Fate of the Arabs in Israel,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1976), 98–99.

  50. Yet in its editorial of May 19, 1976, The New York Times called the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza “a model of future cooperation” between the two peoples. Israeli destruction of Arab houses, torture, deporation, murder, administrative detention, all have been denounced by Amnesty International, the Red Cross, even the 1978 State Department Report on human rights abuses. And still the repression continues, both in the gross and coarsely brutal ways I have mentioned and in other ways, too. Collective punishment is common: In 1969 the military governor forbade the sale of mutton as a punishment for the whole town of Ramallah; during the middle of the grape season in 1970 the sale of grapes, harvesting, and the like were all prohibited unless notables denounced PLO publicity. In April 1978 a seven-day curfew was imposed on Nablus because “the inhabitants did not collaborate with the police.”

  51. Quoted in Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel, p. 70.

  52. See Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back (New York: The Viking Press, 1976), pp. 152–61 and passim.

  53. John Cooley, “Settlement Drive Lies Behind Latest Israeli ‘No,’” Christian Science Monitor, July 25, 1978, makes it clear that Israeli plans officially to populate the West Bank with a Jewish majority (1.25 million) by the year 2000, and that Yamit (in the Rafah salient—occupied Sinai) is being planned as a major Israeli city, under construction now. According to Arye Duzin, Chairman of the Jewish Agency, Yamit “must always remain under Jewish sovereignty” as forecast by the Zionist Executive in 1903. Many of the settlements are to be filled with South African Jews (hence Israel’s close military—indeed nuclear—cooperation with South Africa, and its particularly cordial relations with Prime Minister John Vorster, a convicted Nazi), Americans, and of course Russians.

  54. Jiryis, Arabs in Israel, p. 70.

  55. The full text of the Koenig Report was printed in an English translation in SWASIA, III, 41 (October 15, 1976).

  56. Take as an example the raid on Maalot by Palestinians in May 1974. This event has now become synonymous with Palestinian terrorism, yet no U.S. newspaper took note of the fact that for two consecutive weeks before the incident, Israeli artillery and air power were used to bombard southern Lebanon mercilessly. Well over 200 civilians were killed by napalm and at least 10,000 were made homeless. Still, only Maalot is recalled.

  Chapter 6: Islam as News

  1. Covering Islam (New York: Vintage, 1997): xlviii.

  2. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism, pp. 49–73.

  3. See Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1975); also his earlier and very useful Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: University Press, 1960. There is a first-rate survey of this matter, set in the political context of the 1956 Suez War, by Erskine B. Childers in The Road to Suez: A Study of Western-Arab Relations (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962), pp. 25– 61.

  4. I have discussed Naipaul in “Bitter Dispatches from the Third World,” The Nation, May 3, 1980, pp. 522–25.

  5. Maxime Rodinson, Marxism and The Modern World, trans. Michael Palis (London: Zed Press, 1979). See also Thomas Hodgkin, “The Revolutionary Tradition in Islam,” Race and Class, 21, no. 3 (Winter 1980): 221–37.

  6. There is an elegant account of this theme, done by a contemporary Tunisian intellectual: see Hichem Djaït, L’Europe et l’Islam (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979). A brillian psychoanalytic/structuralist reading of one “Islamic” motif in European literature—the seraglio—is to be found in Alain Grosrichard, Structure du sérail: La Fiction du despotisme asiatique dans l’Occident classique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979).

  7. See Maxime Rodinson, La Fascination de l’Islam (Paris: Maspéro, 1980).

  8. Albert Hourani, “Islam and the Philosophy of History,” in Europe and the Middle East (London: Macmillan & Co., 1980), pp. 19–73.

  9. As an instance, see the penetrating study by Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos, and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1977).

  10. Not that this has always meant poor writing and
scholarship: as an informative general account which answers principally to political exigencies and not mainly to the need for new knowledge about Islam, there is Martin Kramer, Political Islam (Washington, D.C.: Sage Publications, 1980). This was written for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and therefore belongs to the category of policy, not of “objective” knowledge. Another instance is the January 1980 (vol. 78, no. 453) special issue on “The Middle East, 1980” of Current History.

  11. Atlantic Community Quarterly, 17, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 291–305, 377–78.

  12. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974). See the important review of this by Albert Hourani, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 37, no. 1 (January 1978): 53–62.

  13. One index of this is the report “Middle Eastern and African Studies: Developments and Needs” commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1967, written by Professor Morroe Berger of Princeton, also president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). In this report Berger asserts that the Middle East “is not a center of great cultural achievement . . . and therefore does not constitute its own reward so far as modern culture is concerned. . . . [It] has been receding in immediate political importance to the U.S.” For a discussion of this extraordinary document and the context that produced it, see Said, Orientalism, pp. 287–93.

  14. Quoted in Michael A. Ledeen and William H. Lewis, “Carter and the Fall of the Shah: The Inside Story,” Washington Quarterly 3, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 11–12. Ledeen and Lewis are supplemented (and supported to a degree) by William H. Sullivan, “Dateline Iran: The Road Not Taken,” Foreign Policy 40 (Fall 1980): 175–86; Sullivan was United States ambassador to Iran before and during the revolution. See also the six-part series by Scott Armstrong, “The Fall of the Shah,” Washington Post, October 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 1980.

  15. Hamid Algar, “The Oppositional Role of the Ulama in Twentieth Century Iran,” in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Scholars, Saints, and Sufis: Muslim Religious Institutions since 1500 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 231–55. See also Ervand Abrahamian, “The Crowd in Iranian Politics, 1905–1953,” Past and Present 41 (December 1968): 184–210; also his “Factionalism in Iran: Political Groups in the 14th Parliament (1944–46),” Middle Eastern Studies 14, no. 1 (January 1978): 22–25; also “The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 10, no. 3 (August 1979): 381–414; and “Structural Causes of the Iranian Revolution,” MERIP Reports no. 87 (May 1980), pp. 21–26. See also Richard W. Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979).