For Lust of Knowing (45 page)

One could go on and on listing the mistakes. Some are small ones, but others are large indeed. Sophisticated allies of Said have suggested that facts, or factual errors, are not the point. Indeed, recourse to ‘facts' and ‘evidence' are, it is hinted, a time-honoured recourse of reactionary Orientalists. It is suggested that such is the essential truth of Said's indictment of Orientalism that the sweep of his argument is not undermined by the lack of a detailed factual basis. The ‘tensions and contradictions' that so obsess his critics (including me) are ‘fundamental to his transnational framework'.
⁹
Said himself, in a later essay ‘Orientalism Reconsidered', appeared to have (obscure) doubts about the value of consistency, suggesting that ‘the claim made by some that
I am ahistorical and inconsistent would have more interest if the virtues of consistency, whatever may be intended by the term, were subjected to rigorous analysis'.
¹⁰
One may feel tempted by this sort of argument, though, of course, if Said and his allies do not feel bound to respect facts, there is no reason why their critics should do so either, for if it is permissible to misrepresent Orientalism, Christianity and British imperialism, it would not be so obviously wrong similarly to misrepresent Islam, Arab History or the Palestinian predicament. As Sir Thomas More observed in Robert Bolt's play,
A Man for All Seasons
, ‘This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast – Man's laws, not God's – and if you cut them down – and you're just the man to do it – d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (
Quietly
.) Yes, I'd give the Devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety's sake.'
¹¹
Others have suggested that, though
Orientalism
is full of mistakes, the book is still of enormous value because it stimulated discussion and debate about major problems. However, the value of a debate that is based on a fantasy version of past history and scholarship is not obvious.

Though there may indeed be a problem with the unanalysed ‘virtues of consistency', that is as nothing compared with the problems that arise from an argument that is frequently and flagrantly inconsistent, as it then becomes difficult even to discover what the argument is. To take one example, Said cannot make up his mind about when Orientalism began. A lot of the time he wishes to link its origins to Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. Orientalism is repeatedly presented as a secular Enlightenment phenomenon. (This would loosely parallel Foucault's argument in
The Order of Things
that before the late eighteenth century Man did not exist and that it was only then that God was displaced from the centre of the universe and Man became both the object and subject of knowledge.) But at other times, Said seems to regard d'Herbelot's
Bibliothèque orientale
(1697) as the founding charter of Orientalism. But then again, maybe Postel was the first Orientalist? Another possible date offered by Said is 1312when the Council of Vienne set up chairs in Hebrew, Arabic and other languages (though Said seems unaware that the Council's decrees regarding the teaching of Arabic were a dead letter).

We have already encountered the legendary Cluniac Orientalists of
the twelfth century. But one can go further back to discover typical Western and sinister anti-Oriental attitudes in the dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides. Their plays distilled distinctions between Europe and the Orient which ‘will remain essential motifs of European emotional geography'. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm (one of Said's many Arabcritics) describes the ensuing muddle rather well: ‘In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, as we thought earlier, but is the natural product of an ancient and irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples and their languages, in favour of Occidental self-affirmation, domination and ascendancy.'
¹²

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.

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 to 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

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