by Robert Irwin
35. Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back, p. 142.
36. P. J. Vatikiotis, Among Arabs and Jews: A Personal Experience (1936–1990) (London, 1991).
37. P. J. Vatikiotis (ed.), Revolution in the Middle East, and Other Case Studies; Proceedings of a Seminar (London, 1972), pp. 8–9; cf. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), p. 313.
38. On the Hayter Report, see Philips, The School of Oriental and African Studies, pp. 57–8; McLoughlin, In a Sea of Knowledge, pp. 147–9.
39. Edward Ullendorff, ‘Alfred Felix Landon Beeston’, in C. E. Bosworth (ed.), A Century of British Orientalists 1902–2001 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 50–71; Michael Gilsenan, ‘A Personal Introduction’, in Alan Jones (ed.), Arabicus Felix: Luminosus Britannicus: Essays in Honour of A. F. L. Beeston (Reading, 1991), pp. xv–xx.
40. Personal knowledge.
41. On Montgomery Watt, see Jabal Muhammad Buaben, Image of the Prophet Muhammad in the West. A Study of Muir, Margoliouth and Watt (Leicester, 1996).
42. Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (Oxford, 1987).
43. J. Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford, 1978), p. 25.
44. On the life and works of Wansbrough, see Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 57, pt. 1 (1994) (In Honour of J. E. Wansbrough); Andrew Rippin, ‘Literary Analysis of Qur’an, Tafsir and Sira: The Methodologies of John Wansbrough’, in Richard C. Martin (ed.), Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (Tucson, 1985), pp. 151–63; Herbert Berg, ‘The Implications of, and Opposition to, the Methods and Theories of John Wansbrough’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 9 (1997), pp. 3–22;G. R. Hawting, ‘John Wansbrough, Islam, and Monotheism’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 9 (1997), pp. 23–38. See also the second edition of Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies (New York, 2004), which has a foreword, annotations and a decidedly necessary glossary by Andrew Rippin. The short story ‘Let Not the Lord Speak’ was published in Encounter, 54, pt. 5 (1980), pp. 3–7.
45. Humphreys, Islamic History, p. 84.
46. Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren, Crossroads to Islam: The Origins of the Arab Religion and the Arab State (New York, 2004). See also the review of this book by Chase Robinson in the Times Literary Supplement, 28January 2005, p. 7.
47. On Israeli scholarship in general, see articles by Kramer and Lazarus Yafeh in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam.
48. On Ayalon, see Reuven Amitai, ‘David Ayalon, 1914–1998’, Mamluk Studies Review, 3 (1999), pp. 1–10; Robert Irwin, ‘Under Western Eyes: A History of Mamluk Studies’, Mamluk Studies Review, 4 (2000), pp. 37–9; Humphreys, Islamic History, pp. 181, 207.
49. On Ashtor, see Irwin, ‘Under Western Eyes’, pp. 35–7; Humphreys, Islamic History, pp. 269, 303–4; Kramer, The Jewish Discovery of Islam, p. 31; Masashi Haneda and Toru Miura, Islamic Urban Studies: Historical Review and Perspectives (New York, 1994).
50. Some of Emmanuel Sivan’s articles are included in Sivan, Interpretations of Islam, Past and Present (Princeton, NJ, 1985). See also Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven, 1985) and Sivan, ‘Islamic Radicalism: Sunni and Shi‘ite’, in Sivan and Menachem Friedman (eds), Religious Radicalism and Politics in the Middle East (New York, 1990), pp. 39–75.
51. See note 11.
52. On Paul Kraus, see Joel L. Kraemer, ‘The Death of an Orientalist: Paul Kraus from Prague to Cairo’, in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery, pp. 181–223; Rodinson, Entre Islam et Occident, pp. 148–51.
53. On Stern, see John Wansbrough’s obituary of him in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 33 (1970), pp. 599–602 and that by Walzer in Israel Oriental Studies, 2 (1972), pp. 1–14; Shulamit Sela, ‘The Interaction of Judaic and Islamic Studies in the Scholarship of S. M. Stern’, in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery, pp. 261–71; Hourani, in Gallagher (ed.), Approaches to the History of the Middle East, p. 35.
54. Annemarie Schimmel, Morgenland und Abendland: Mein west–östliches Leben (Munich, 2002); Shusha Guppy’s obituary of Schimmel appeared in the Independent, 30 January 2003. The anonymous Times obituary appeared on 6February 2003. See also the obituary by Burzine Waghmar in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd series, vol. 13 (2003), pp. 377–9.
55. Stephan Conermann, ‘Ulrich Haarmann, 1942–1999’, Mamluk Studies Review, 4 (2000), pp. 1–25 (including bibliography); Irwin, ‘Under Western Eyes’, p. 41.
56. On post-war developments in German Orientalism, see Ulrich Haarmann, ‘L’Orientalisme allemand’, in MARS Le Monde Arabe dans la Recherche Scientifique, no. 4 (1994), pp. 69–78; Baber Johansen, ‘Politics, Paradigms and the Progress of Oriental Studies: The German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft) 1845–1989’ in MARS, no. 4 (1994), pp. 79–94.
9 An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic
1. Edward Said, Out of Place (London, 1999). He also features as a naughty boy in his sister’s autobiography: see Jean Said Makdisi, Teta, Mother and Me (London, 1994), pp. 49–51. Said’s ‘Between Two Worlds’, which appeared in the London Review of Books, 7 May 1998, pp. 3–7 and ‘On Writing a Memoir’ in the London Review of Books, 29 April 1999, pp. 8–11, both deal with thoughts arising from writing his autobiography. Gary Lockman provides a brief account of Said’s life and works in Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 182–214. See also the discussion of Said’s Orientalism and the responses it provoked in A. L. MacFie, Orientalism (London, 2002).
2. Said, Out of Place, p. 187.
3. Edward Said, ‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life’ in Said, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, edited by Gaury Viswanathan (New York, 2001), p. 79. See also Said, ‘Vico on the Discipline of Bodies and Texts’, in Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 83–92.
4. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (London, 1975), p. 81.
5. John Allen Paulos, Once Upon a Number: The Wider Mathematical Logic of Number (New York, c.1998), p. 28.
6. Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 1978), p. 71.
7. Bernard Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’, New York Review of Books, 24 June 1982, p. 53. ‘The Question of Orientalism’ was reprinted in Lewis, Islam and the West (London, 1993), pp. 99–118. Said replied to Lewis’s review and Lewis dealt with Said’s attempted rebuttal in the New York Review of Books on 12 August 1982. In addition, ‘The Question of Orientalism’ and various other documents relating to the controversy between Said and Lewis are reprinted in A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2000).
8. Said, Orientalism, p. 160 and cf. pp. 95 and 208 where it becomes clear that Said has created an imaginary composite Orientalist from the Swiss historian JacobBurkhardt (1818–97) with John Lewis Burkhardt (1784–1817), the explorer of the Middle East. The latter’s Arabic Proverbs was published in 1837.
9. Shelley Walia, Edward Said and the Writing of History (Cambridge, 2001), p. 8.
10. Edward Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, in Said, Reflections on Exile, p. 199. ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ was first previously published in Francis Barker et al. (eds), Europe and Its Others, vol. 1 (Colchester, Essex, 1985), pp. 14–27. It is also included in Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader.
11. Robert Bolt, Three Plays (London, 1967), p. 147.
12. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, Khamsin, 8 (1981), p. 6.
13. Said, Orientalism, pp. 62–3.
14. Ibid., p. 68.
15. Ibid., p. 210.
16. Ibid., p. 19.
17. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (London, 2003), p. 179. (The book was first published in Paris in 1997as Impostures intellectuelles.)
18. Ibid., p. 176.
19. Said, Orientalism, p. 23.
20. Ibid., p. 94.
21. The key works of Michel Foucault
include Folie et déraison. Historie de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1961); Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966); L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris, 1969); L’Ordre du discours (Paris, 1971); Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols (Paris, 1976–84). All have been translated into English.
22. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London, 1971), p. 447.
23. Said, Orientalism, p. 204.
24. Ibid., p. 104.
25. Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 381.
26. Said, Orientalism, ‘Afterword’, pp. 346–7; cf. Said, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 17 April 2002, p. 39.
27. Said, Orientalism, p. 98.
28. Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York, 1986), p. 152.
29. Said, Orientalism, p. 99.
30. Ibid., p. 127.
31. Ibid., p. 63. For the various ways Said traduced Lane, see John Rodenbeck, ‘Edward Said and Edward William Lane’, in Paul and Janet Starkey (eds), Travellers in Egypt (London, 1998), pp. 233–43.
32. Said’s main discussion of Marx is in pp. 153–6of Orientalism. For attacks on Said’s misrepresentation of Marx, see in particular Al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, pp. 5–26, and Aijaz Ahmad, ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’, Studies in History, 7 (1991), pp. 135–63. Both are reproduced in Macfie, An Orientalist Reader. See also Aijaz Ahmad’s ‘Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said’, in Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, 1992), in which Ahmad suggests, among other things, that Marx’s position on rural Indians was not significantly different from his position on rural Germans.
33. Al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, p. 15.
34. Said, Orientalism, p. 224.
35. Said, ‘Orientalism, an Afterword’, Raritan, 14 (1995), p. 40. This article was subsequently appended to later editions of Orientalism.
36. Said, Orientalism, p. 275.
37. Al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, p. 15.
38. Said, Orientalism, p. 326.
39. Said, ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, in Reflections on Exile, p. 203.
40. Geertz’s criticisms of Covering Islam appeared in the New York Review of Books, 27 May 1982, p. 28.
41. Albert Hourani, ‘The Road to Morocco’, New York Times Review, 8 March 1979, pp. 27–9. Jacques Berque, ‘Au-delà de l’Orientalisme: Entretien avec Jacques Berque’, Qantara, 13 (1994), pp. 27–8; Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam, translated by Roger Veinus (Seattle, 1987), pp. 130–31n. See also Hourani interviewed in Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher (ed.), Approaches to the History of the Middle East (Reading, 1994), pp. 40–41.
42. The views of Nadim al-Bitar and other Arabreviewers are summarized in Emmanuel Sivan, ‘Edward Said and his ArabReviewers’ in Sivan, Interpretations of Islam, Past and Present (Princeton, NJ, 1985), pp. 133–54. See also Donald P. Little, ‘Three ArabCritiques of Orientalism’, Muslim World, 69 (1979), pp. 110–31.
43. See note 32above.
44. Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham, 1999), pp. 65–76.
45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Psychoanalysis in Left Field and Fieldworking: Examples to Fit the Title’, in Sonu Shamdasani and Michael Münchow (eds), Speculations after Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Culture (London, 1994), p. 63. Postmodern Pooh (London, 2003) by Frederick Crews places Spivak’s thinking in an appropriate context.
46. Sheldon Pollock, ‘Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj’, in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van den Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 113.
47. The text of this debate appeared in ‘Scholars, Media and the Middle East’ in Edward Said, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 291–312.
48. Ibid.
49. On Ernest Gellner, see Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle (London, 1963), pp. 11–21, 35–40; Michael Lessnoff, Ernest Gellner and Modernity (Cardiff, 2002).
50. Ernest Gellner, ‘The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism’, Times Literary Supplement, 19February 1993, pp. 3–4.
51. Edward Said’s letter attacking Gellner’s review of his book appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 19 March 1993. Gellner’s reply to this was published on 9April. Said returned to the fray on 4June. Further letters for or against Gellner appeared on the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement on 10February, 17February and 2April 1993.
52. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (London, 1980), p. 9.
53. Ibid., p. 146.
54. Ibid., p. 218.
55. M. E. Yapp reviewed Covering Islam in the Times Literary Supplement of 9 October 1981. Said’s letter attacking the review appeared on 27 November and Yapp replied on 4December.
56. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, 1993), p. 3.
57. Justus Reid Weiner, “‘My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’, Commentary, September 1999. The text of Weiner’s article can be read online at
58. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London, 2003), p. 16.
59. The British obituaries and posthumous appraisals (overwhelmingly adulatory) included anonymous in The Times, 26 September 2003; anonymous in the Daily Telegraph, 26 September; Robert Fisk in the Independent, 26 September; Malise Ruthven in the Guardian, 26 September; Gabriel Pieterberg in the Independent, 27 September; Christopher Hitchens in the Observer, 28 September; Joan Smith in the Independent on Sunday, 28 September.
10 Enemies of Orientalism
1. On Kurd ‘Ali’s quarrel with the Orientalists, see above all, Joseph Escovitz, ‘Orientalists and Orientalism in the Writings of Kurd ‘Ali’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 15 (1983), pp. 95–109. On Kurd ‘Ali more generally, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, revised edn (London, 1967), pp. 223–4; Hourani, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History’ in Hourani, Europe and the Middle East (London, 1980), pp. 65–6; Memoirs of Kurd ‘Ali: A Selection, translated by Khalil Totah (Washington, 1954).
2. J. W.Fück, ‘Islam as an Historical Problem in European Historiography since 1800’, in Bernard Lewis and P. M. Holt (eds), Historians of the Middle East (London, 1962), pp. 308–9; Hourani, Arabic Thought, p. 173; Hourani, ‘Islam and the Philosophers of History’, pp. 65–6.
3. On Jalal Al-i Ahmad, see Hamid Algar’s introduction to Jalal Al-i Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, translated by R. Campbell (Berkeley, Calif., 1984). See also Michael C. Hillman’s introduction to Al-i Ahmad, Lost in the Crowd, translated by John Green (Washington, 1985); Michael C. Hillman, Iranian Culture: A Persianist View (Lanham, Md., 1990), pp. 119–44; Homa Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer (London, 1991), passim; Roy Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran (London, 1986), pp. 287, seq., passim.
4. Ahmad, Occidentosis, p. 27.
5. Ibid., p. 29.
6. Ibid., p. 33.
7. Ibid., p. 75.
8. Ibid., p. 98.
9. Khomeini, Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini: Political, Philosophical, Social and Religious, translated by Harold J. Salemson (New York, 1980), p. 9.
10. On the life and works of Muhammad Asad, see Martin Kramer, ‘The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss)’, in Kramer (ed.), The Jewish Discovery of Islam (Tel Aviv, 1999), pp. 225–47.
11. On René Guénon, Cahiers de l’Herne, 49 (1985), contains appraisals of the man and his work by various hands. See also Robin Waterfield, René Guénon and the Future of the West (n.p., 1987); Mircea Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions (Chicago, 1976), pp. 65–7; D. Gril, ‘Espace sacré et spiritualité, trois approches: Massignon, Corbin, Guénon’, in D’un Orient à l’autre, 2 vols (Paris, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 56–63.
12. René Guénon, Orient et Occident (Paris, 1924), pp. 147–54.
&n
bsp; 13. On Hossein Nasr, see June I. Smith, ‘Sayyed Hossein Nasr: Defender of the Sacred and Islamic Traditionalism’, in Y. Z. Haddad (ed.), The Muslims of America (New York, 1991).
14. Hossein Nasr, Islamic Spirituality (London, 1991), vol. 1, p. 9, n.1.
15. On Sayyid Qutb, see Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics (New Haven and London, 1985); Sivan, ‘Ibn Taymiyya: Father of the Islamic Revolution’, Encounter, 60, no. 5 (May 1983), pp. 41–50; Gilles Kepel, The Prophet and Pharaoh: Muslim Extremism in Egypt (London, 1985).
16. Sivan, Radical Islam, p. 68.
17. Qutb quoted in Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 174.
18. Maryam Jameelah, Islam Versus the West (Lahore, 1962).
19. Jameelah quoted in Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham, 1999), p. 51.
20. Hamid Algar, ‘The Problems of Orientalists’, Islamic Literature, 17 (1971), pp. 31–42.
21. A. L. Tibawi, ‘English-Speaking Orientalists: a Critique of Their Approach to Islam and ArabNationalism’, Islamic Quarterly, 8 (1964), pp. 25–45 and 73–88; ‘A Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists and Their Approach to Islam and the Arabs’, Islamic Quarterly, 23 (1979), pp. 3–43, and ‘On the Orientalists Again’, Muslim World, 70 (1980), pp. 56–61. These essays have been reprinted in A. L. Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader (Edinburgh, 2000).
22. Abdallah Laroui, L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine (Paris, 1967), p. 119.
23. Abdallah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual. Traditionalism or Historicism? (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976). The French original was published in Paris in 1974.
24. Ibid., p. 61.
25. Anouar Abdel-Malek, ‘Orientalism in Crisis’, Diogenes, no. 44 (1963), pp. 104–12. This essay has been reprinted in Macfie, Orientalism: A Reader.
26. Francesco Gabrieli, ‘Apology for Orientalism’, Diogenes, no. 50 (1965), pp. 128–36.
27. Ziya-ul-Hasan Faruqi, ‘Sir Hamilton Alexander Roskeen Gibb’, in Asaf Hussain, Robert Olson and Jamil Qureishi (eds), Orientalism, Islam and Islamists (Vermont, 1984), pp. 177–91.
