For Lust of Knowing (46 page)

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'.
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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.)

Sir William Jones and then the German Sanskritists established the undoubted relationship between Sanskrit and various Indo-European languages. Today no serious linguist doubts that Sanskrit, Latin, German and Greek all derive ultimately from a common ancestor. But, as we have seen, Said refused to acknowledge that there is such a thing as an Indo-Aryan family of languages and the German Romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel was denounced by him for persisting in his belief ‘that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American or African languages'.
²⁷
Said seemed to regard the establishment of the Indo-Aryan family of languages as a kind of clubthat had set up arbitrary rules in order to exclude the ‘wog' tongue, Arabic. More generally, Said appeared to hate any kind
of taxonomy, regarding attempts to classify languages, cultures or anything else as tools for the conquest and enslavement of the Third World. Taxonomy is one of the besetting sins of the West. On the other hand, one of his own favourite devices was to list strings of vastly disparate figures and, in so doing, briskly and cursorily tar the listed line-up with the same brush.

Said was proud to be a secular humanist. Although he took it upon himself to defend Islam in
Orientalism, Covering Islam
(1981) and other writings, he does not seem to have liked the religion very much. In
After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
(1986) Said wrote as follows: ‘Lift off the veneer of religious cant – which speaks of the “best and noblest in the Judaic, Christian, or Muslim tradition,” in perfectly interchangeable phrases – and a seething cauldron of outrageous fables is revealed, seething with several bestiaries, streams of blood and innumerable corpses.'
²⁸
Since he hated religion in all its forms, he was unable to accept that Islam has really been important in determining the shape of Arabculture, in the same way that Christianity has been important in the shaping of Europe and America. Said seemed to believe that when people were talking about religion, they were really talking about something else. Of course, as we have seen, certain Orientalists did go too far in talking about the Islamic city, the Islamic mind and so forth. In the nineteenth century, religion played such a large part in shaping Western culture (think of Matthew Arnold, Ernest Renan, Fyodor Dostoevsky and so many others) that some Orientalists may have overstressed the importance of religion in Middle Eastern culture and society. But Islam has been and remains a dominant feature in Middle Eastern life, affecting or at times even determining law, the educational curriculum, the rhythm of the working week, women's dress and other matters in the region. Again, because of his anti-religious prejudice, Said failed properly to engage with the Christian motivations of the majority of pre-twentiethcentury Orientalists, among them Ricoldo da Monte Croce, Postel, Pococke and Muir.

Though he detested all Orientalism, some of it was less detestable than the rest. Said claimed that the English tradition was more scientific and impersonal while the French was more aesthetic. He could be seen as guilty of racial stereotyping here, but, in any case, it does
not strike me as particularly true. It was after all the French who produced the
Bibliothèque orientale
and the
Description de l'Egypte
. According to Said, the ‘official genealogy of Orientalism would certainly include Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt'.
²⁹
But why then did he not actually discuss the works of Gobineau and Humboldt? Said noted that Renan and Gobineau shared a common Orientalist and philological perspective and that Renan took ideas from Gobineau for his
Histoire générale
, but he does not say what these ideas were. The conviction grows that he had never actually read Gobineau or Humboldt. And his acquaintance with Renan was of the slightest. The names of Renan and Gobineau come up many times in the book, but their ideas are not analysed or criticized in any detail. Their importance is something that is taken as a given, rather than as something that badly needs to be proved. As we have seen, the status of both Renan and Gobineau as Orientalists is somewhat marginal.

Said libelled generations of scholars who were for the most part good and honourable men and he was not prepared to acknowledge that some of them at least might have written in good faith. He accused de Sacy of doctoring texts.
³⁰
But he provided no evidence for this nor did he suggest why he should have done so. Lane was denounced for all sorts of things, including denying himself the sensual enjoyments of domestic life in order to preserve his superiority as a Western observer, but in fact, in his third period of residence in Egypt, he did marry a freed slave of Greek origin.
³¹

Karl Marx was not an academic Orientalist, nor a desert adventurer, nor an imperialist proconsul. Although there was no compelling reason to include him in a book on Orientalism, Marx did feature and his writings were travestied. A passage from Marx was quoted (selectively) in which he argued that the Indian villagers would suffer as a result of the transformation of their society by British colonialism, but that, though their sufferings might arouse compassion in Western breasts, these sufferings were necessary if economic and social progress was to be achieved in India. Typically, Said first conceded that Marx did feel some compassion for the Oriental peasant and then denied that he did. The numbing of Marx's capacity to feel compassion was then attributed to the grip Goethe's
West–östlicher Divan
held over his imagination, and to a racialist essentialism similar to that
found in Renan's writings. Thus, in the end, ‘the Romantic Orientalist vision' won out over Marx's humanity.
³²
Surely only the most literary-minded academic will find this sort of interpretation satisfactory? Why do we not find here some discussion of the Asiatic mode of production, Oriental despotism and Marx's belief that there was no private property in land in the East? For it was these elements – they could be termed
idées reçues
– that came to form Marx's vision of the Orient. It is of course true that Marx was the victim of Western generalizations about the Orient, but these were generalizations about types of government and land tenure, not born out of a romantic sentiment that the dark-skinned do not feel as much pain as the white-skinned. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm has summarized Marx's approach to the Raj as follows: ‘Like the European capitalist class, British rule in India was its own grave-digger. There is nothing particularly “Orientalistic” about this explanation.'
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