by Robert Irwin
In part, Said’s wish to include Homer, Aeschylus and Dante in his gallery of Orientalist rogues stemmed from his humanist engagement with a canon of great books, somewhat on the pattern of Auerbach, though, of course, Said’s engagement was an adversarial one. The chronological issue is of some importance, for if Aeschylus, Dante and Postel are to be indicted for Orientalism, it follows that the necessary linkage between Orientalism and imperialism that Said posits elsewhere cannot be true. Until the late seventeenth century at least, Europe was threatened by Ottoman imperialism and it is hard to date Western economic dominance of the Middle East to earlier than the late eighteenth century. Britain acquired effective political and military control of Egypt in the 1880s. Britain and France secured mandates over other Arabterritories in the wake of the First World War.
At one point in Orientalism, Said argues that there was no essential difference between twelfth-and thirteenth-century views of Islam on the one hand and those held in the twentieth century on the other hand.13 From this, one would have to deduce that the invention and development of Orientalism from the eighteenth century onwards has had no impact whatsoever, for good or ill, on the way Europeans have thought and felt about Islam in modern times. Elsewhere, Said suggested that the schematization of the Orient, which began in antiquity, continued in the Middle Ages.14 He cited Dante’s treatment of Muslims in The Divine Comedy to make his point. According to Said, Dante was, like the eighteenth-century enyclopedist d’Herbelot, guilty of incorporating and schematizing the Orient.15 However, it must be evident from my chapter on medieval writers that Dante had no schematized view of Islam. He seems to have been almost wholly ignorant about it and he was not very interested in Arab culture.
Said’s presentation of the history of Orientalism as a canon of great but wicked books, almost all by dead white males, was that of a literary critic who wildly overvalued the importance of high literature in intellectual history. One of his favourite modes of procedure was to subject key texts to deconstructive readings – not just Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and The Cambridge History of Islam, but also such hardy staples of the literature department as Walter Scott’s The Talisman, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Flaubert’s diary and his letters from Egypt. Said, who also overvalued the contestatory role of the intellectual, seems to have held the view that the political problems of the Middle East were ultimately textual ones that could be solved by critical reading skills. As he saw it, it was discourse and textual strategies that drove the imperial project and set up the rubber plantations, dug out the Suez Canal and established garrisons of legionnaires in the Sahara. Since Orientalism is by its nature a Western sickness, the same must be true of imperialism. The Persians, who under Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes built up a mighty empire and sought to add Greece to that empire, were not denounced by Said for imperialism. On the contrary, they were presented as the tragic and innocent victims of misrepresentation by Greek playwrights. Later the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids and Ottomans presided over great empires, but those dynasties escaped censure. Indeed, they were considered to be the victims of Western misrepresentation.
WHAT WAS THE LANGUAGE OF ORIENTALISM?
To Said’s way of thinking, since Britain was the leading imperial power in modern times, it follows that it must have been the leading centre for Oriental studies and, since Germany had no empire in the Arablands, it followed that Germany’s contribution to Oriental studies must have been of secondary importance.16 But, as we have seen, the claim that Germans elaborated only on British and French Orientalism is simply not sustainable. Consider the cases of Hammer-Purgstall, Fleischer, Wellhausen, Goldziher (Hungarian, but writing and teaching in German), Nöldeke and Becker. It is impossible to find British forerunners for these figures. The reverse is much easier to demonstrate. We have seen how much Nicholson’s Literary History of the Arabs, Wright’s Arabic Grammar, Lyall’s translations of Arabic poetry and Cowan’s Arabic–English Dictionary explicitly owed to German scholarship. These works are not marginal, but central to Arabic studies in Britain. Is it really possible that British scholars were mistaken in their belief that they needed to follow German scholars of Arabic and Islam? And why did Renan, whom Said believes to have been a major French Orientalist, believe that Germans dominated the field? And what about the overwhelming pre-eminence of German scholars in Sanskrit studies? In ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, Said declared that objections that he had excluded German Orientalists from the argument ‘frankly struck me as superficial or trivial, and there seems no point in even responding to them’. The importance or unimportance of German Orientalism is hardly trivial as Said has tried to suggest, for if German scholarship was important, then Said’s argument that imperialism was dependent on the discourse of Orientalism collapses. (If one did want to argue for the near identity of imperialism and scholarly Orientalism, then surely Russia with its great empire over territories inhabited by Muslims is the place to start? But Said did not seem to have heard of Russian Orientalism.)
His neglect of Orientalist literature written in Latin was even more damaging than his neglect of German material. His failure to consider works written in Latin by Erpenius, Golius, Pococke, Marracci and many others may have contributed to his erroneous contention that Orientalism’s origins lay in the last decades of the eighteenth century, which was when it became fairly common to publish works of scholarship in the various vernaculars. But almost all the important work in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was published in Latin. Even in the nineteenth century and beyond scholars still published in Latin (see, for example, Flügel’s Concordantiae Corani Arabicae, first published in 1834, and de Goeje’s Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum, which was published in eight volumes from 1879 to 1939). Moreover, it was not just a matter of what language the scholars published in. It is also the case that, even in the early twentieth century, most scholars had received a classical formation and were likely to be better informed about the constitution of the Roman empire than that of the British empire. It is further arguable that when one considers the great British imperial proconsuls, such as Lord Curzon or Lord Cromer, their mindset and the ways in which they thought about the native peoples they governed owed more to their reading of Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius than it did to any substantial familiarity with Orientalist texts. At several points in his book, Said contends that the orient had no objective existence. In other places he seems to imply that it did exist, but that the orientalists systematically misrepresented it. If either proposition were true, what use would the writings of Orientalists be to the men who went out to govern the british and French empires?
If all that Said was arguing was that Orientalists have not always been objective, then the argument would be merely banal. Orientalists themselves would be the first to assent to such a proposition. Bernard Lewis is only one of many scholars who were ahead of Said in drawing attention to the ways in which those who wrote about Islam and Arabs in past centuries tended to write according to the prejudices of their age and culture. In particular, Lewis drew attention to the way in which Jewish Orientalists of the nineteenth century played a large part in creating a myth of a golden age of Muslim culture and tolerance in medieval times. Said’s vision of Orientalism owed more to Lewis’s writings than Said would have been happy to acknowledge.
Said veered wildly between praise and denunciation, between maximalist and minimalist positions, so that at times all Orientalists are racists and imperialists, whereas at other times Said asserts that he is not attacking Orientalists, for he would not dream of disputing their genuine achievements. As Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have pointed out in Impostures intellectuelles (translated as Intellectual Impostures), a book dedicated to exposing certain kinds of fraudulent post-modernist writing about science, the fraudsters frequently resort to ambiguities as their subterfuge, both advancing and denying their theses: ‘Indeed they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve t
o attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.’17
MASTERS TO THINK WITH
As Sokal and Bricmont also observe, ‘Not all that is obscure is profound.’18 Much of the obscurity in Orientalism arises from Said’s frequent references to Gramsci and Foucault. Said has sought to yoke these two maîtres à penser in the service of Orientalist bashing. This is difficult, as Foucault and Gramsci have different and contrasting notions of discourse. Foucault’s notion of discourse, unlike that of Gramsci, is something that cannot be resisted. Although at times Said finds it convenient to work with this idea and to present Orientalism as a discursive formation that cannot be escaped, at other times he wants to blame Orientalists for embracing the evil discourse, or even for actively engaging in fabricating that discourse. They are both victims and villains. Early in the introduction to Orientalism he declares that ‘unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual authors upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism’.19 But in the very next chapter he seems to be supporting and relying on ‘what Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it’.20 The slipperiness of the argument(s) is typical. Foucault’s notion of discourse is also incompatible with that of the canonical tradition that Said seems to have acquired from his reading of Auerbach, as Foucault rejected the notion of a tradition that could survive the great disjunction of the nineteenth century.21
Said’s dot-and-pick approach to Foucault is combined with a similar approach to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). Foucault and Gramsci had rather different ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge. The first believed that ‘Power is everywhere’, whereas the second thought in terms of hegemony. ‘Hegemony’ was the term used by Gramsci to describe the imposition of a system of beliefs on the ruled. Despite his allegiance to communism, he, like Said after him, was inclined to believe in the primacy of ideology in history (rather than that of economic factors). Intellectuals have a central role both in maintaining the status quo and in undermining it. They are experts in the legitimization of power; they are crucial figures in society. Gramsci disliked ‘common sense’, which he deemed to be hegemonic, a device for the upper class to secure the assent of the lower class to their rule. Although he had nothing to say about Orientalists as such, in his Prison Notebooks he did touch upon the arbitrariness of the concept of an Orient: ‘Obviously East and West are arbitrary and conventional, that is historical constructions, since outside of real history every point on earth is East and West at the same time. This can be seen more clearly from the fact that these terms have crystallized not from the point of view of a hypothetical melancholic man in general, but from the point of view of the European cultural classes who, as a result of their world-wide hegemony, have caused them to be accepted everywhere.’22
Said, having read Foucault and Gramsci, was unable to decide whether the discourse of Orientalism constrains Orientalists and makes them the victims of an archive from which they are powerless to escape, or whether, on the other hand, the Orientalists are the willing and conscious collaborators in the fabrication of a hegemonic discourse which they employ to subjugate others. When Said found it convenient to be a Foucaldian, he produced passages such as the following: ‘It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.’23 Earlier, as we have noted, he professed his belief in ‘the determining imprint of individual authors’. But the whole point about Foucault’s use of the term ‘discursive formation’ is that discursive formations do not have individual authors. Moreover, an archive in the Foucaldian sense is the law governing what can or cannot be said in certain situations. It is not a grab-bag of loaded terminology that individual authors can have recourse to when it suits them. Said, however, denounced Dante, Renan, Lewis and the rest as if they were evil geniuses who actively fashioned a racist and imperialist discourse. At the same time, there seems to be no option for the Orientalist other than to be constrained by the discursive formation of Orientalism.
Said presented Orientalism as a unified, self-confirmatory discourse, but in so doing he ignored Reiske’s outsider status, Goldziher’s quarrels with Vámbéry and Renan, Kedourie’s hostility towards Gibb, Rodinson’s suspicions of Massignon and Hodgson’s criticisms of most of his predecessors. Moreover, he is of course guilty of racially stereotyping Orientalists and Orientalism. Orientalism has become a reified ‘Other’. The ‘Other’ is a key concept in post-colonial theory. In his book, which was a major influence on post-colonial theory, Said suggests that Orientalists through the ages have consistently sought to present Islam and Arabs as the ‘Other’, something alien, threatening and, in a sense, dehumanized. The West confirmed its own identity by conjuring up a fictitious entity that was not Western. At first sight, this might seem plausible, but if one considers, for example, how medieval churchmen misrepresented Islam, they tended to portray it as a Christian heresy (usually Arianism), rather than as something exotic and alien. In the seventeenth century, many Orientalists thought of Islam as a kind of Unitarianism. Then again, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, quite a few German Orientalists argued that Islam was, together with Western Christendom and Byzantium, the joint heir of classical antiquity. In the twentieth century, Orientalists who studied Sufism, such as Massignon and Arberry, tended to Christianize what they studied. Moreover, if people in past centuries needed the notion of an ‘Other’ to shore up their own identity, Islam was not necessarily the obvious candidate. For most seventeenth-century Protestant Englishmen, the territories of Islam were remote and they knew little about them. A French or Catholic ‘Other’ was much closer at hand.
The postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard once notoriously declared that the first Gulf War never took place. Said’s insistence that the Orient does not exist, but is merely a figment of the Western imagination and a construction of the Orientalists, seems hardly less improbable. If indeed the Orient did not exist, it should not be possible to misrepresent it. But he was not consistent and at times he lapsed into writing about a real Orient and, for example, he wrote about Orientalism in the second half of the twentieth century facing ‘a challenging and politically armed Orient’.24
DOES THE SUBALTERN HAVE PERMISSION TO SPEAK?
Said also argued that Orientalism denied Orientals the possibility of representing themselves. I have tended in this chapter to concentrate on his attitude to Western historians of the Middle East, but it is worth noting that he was no less hostile to Arabscholarship. In many cases, the contributions of Arab academics are simply ignored: among the many are the modern political historian Philip Khoury, the economic historian Charles Issawi, the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi, the papyrologist Nabia Abbott, the political scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, the expert on religion Mohammed Arkoun, the in tellectual historians George Makdisi, Muhsin Mahdi and Aziz Al-Azmeh and the literary historians Pierre Cachia and Mustafa Badawi, the expert on pre-modern Cairo, Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, the architectural historian Nasser Rabat, the maritime historian George Hourani, the expert on the Arabic language Yasser Suleiman, the expert on Arabic and Persian literature Ihsan Abbas, and the political scientist Majid Khadduri. The above is only a selection of well-known Arabscholars who have published in English. (As we have noted in a previous chapter, American Orientalism was created by recruiting scholars from both Europe and the Arab world.) If one added well-known Arabscholars writing in Arabic, the list would fill the rest of this book. But Said did not want the Arabs to represent themselves and it is he who wishes to deny them permission to speak. Yet, if one reads the anti-Orientalist essays of the
Arab writers, Anouar Abdel-Malek, A. L. Tibawi and Abdallah Laroui (on all of whom see the final chapter), it becomes evident that Said could not have written Orientalism without drawing on these precursors.
Other Arabs, however, have been actively attacked by Said in Orientalism and later publications. ‘The Arab world today is an intellectual, political and cultural satellite of the United States.’ According to Said, Fouad Ajami is ‘a disgrace. Not just because of his viciousness and hatred of his own people, but because what he says is so trivial and so ignorant.’ Ajami’s crime was to have written in a downbeat way in The Arab Predicament (1981) and The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1998) about the betrayal of Arab hopes and ambitions in the second half of the twentieth century. Said never attempted to show exactly how Ajami’s criticisms of modern Arabregimes were ‘trivial and ignorant’.25 Shabbier yet was his attack on Kanan Makiya (who wrote under the pen name Samir al-Khalil) as the ‘epigone of Bernard Lewis’ and an ‘Iraqi publicist’.26 Said made no attempt to show what sort of connection, if any, there was between Lewis and Makiya. In Republic of Fear (1989), published some years before Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and his falling out with the Western powers, the Iraqi architect and writer Makiya, at considerable risk to his own life, denounced the Iraqi Ba‘ath party’s use of mass executions and torture to stay in power. Makiya’s crime was to have written in a critical way about an Arab regime. To return to the broader issue, the notion that the Orient is incapable of representing itself must be nonsense. In modern times Chinese scholars have overwhelmingly dominated Sinology and Indian scholars have dominated Indian studies. (Said himself cited K. M. Panikkar’s Asia and Western Dominance as a classic analysis of Western hegemony in the Orient.)
