For Lust of Knowing (47 page)

Writing about individualist adventurers and Middle Eastern experts, Said observed: ‘they substituted a sort of elaboration of latent Orientalism, which was easily available to them in the imperial culture of their epoch. Their scholarly frame of reference, such as it was, was fashioned by people like William Muir, Anthony Bevan, D. S. Margoliouth, Charles Lyall, E. G. Browne, R. A. Nicholson, Guy le Strange, E. D. Ross and Thomas Arnold, who also followed directly in the line of descent from Lane.'
³⁴
This is the only reference to Edward Granville Browne in the whole book. As we have seen, Browne campaigned tirelessly for Persian independence and democracy. He was a bane of the British Parliament and Foreign Office. What on earth is he doing in this sneery list? And in what sense is he in the direct line of descent from Lane? Browne's
A Year Among the Persians
is, like Lane's
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
, set in the Middle East, but in other respects it is hard to imagine two more different books.

‘None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have intended an Oriental as a reader,' wrote Said in a later article.
³⁵
So why on earth did Hamilton Gibb write articles in Arabic? Why does Said not discuss Gibb's ‘Khawatir fi-Adab al-Arabi' (‘Reflections on Arabic Literature')? What about all the Western contributors to
Muslim World
and
Islamic Culture
, both periodicals with a largely Muslim
Indian readership? And what about Lewis's evident pride in his being translated into Arabic, Persian and Turkish? Said's treatment of Gibb was particularly harsh. He was presented by Said as a typical British Orientalist. In contrast to Massignon, who was ‘irremediably the outsider', Gibb was presented as an institutional figure. Lucky old Massignon, not only ‘irremediably an outsider figure', but also counsellor of Marshal Lyautey, head of the Near East section of the Ministry of Information during the Second World War, Director of the elite Ecole pratique des hautes études, member of the Académie arabe du Caire, President of the Institut d'études iraniennes, founder of the Comité Chrétien d'entente France Islam, founder of the Comité France Maghreband member of the Commission des Musées Nationaux.

Of course Said, the professor at Columbia and one-time president of the MLA (Modern Language Association), was also an outsider figure. Gibb, by contrast, was racially stereotyped by him as a typical British Orientalist and the product of ‘an academic-research consensus or paradigm'.
³⁶
But when Gibb was a young man there were so few Arabists in Britain that it is hard to imagine how they could have generated any sort of academic consensus or paradigm. Come to that, what would the consensus have been about? Muslim invasions of Central Asia? Saladin? Sunni Islam? Modern Arabic literature? Ibn Battuta (the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller)? One would not guess from Said's presentation of Gibb as an establishment hack that Gibb repeatedly denounced Zionism and the British betrayal of undertakings made to the Arabs and that he was also an enthusiastic supporter of Arabnationalism and of Sunni Islam. (Most of these things had made Gibb a target of Kedourie's writings.)

It may be that in Said's fantasy world Gibb stood in for the headmaster of Victoria College, Cairo. Said much preferred the charismatic, cranky, mystical, chauvinist Frenchman Louis Massignon. Massignon was more spiritual than Gibb and also more aesthetic. Not only did Said fail to note Massignon's anti-Semitism, he also failed to remark on his decidedly patronizing attitude towards Arabs as well as his debt to Renan in that respect. Said argued that Massignon's empathy for the Arabs was the result of his genius. (So one gets the impression that one had to be very clever indeed to like Arabs.) The
Syrian critic Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm remarked on Said's near deification of Massignon: ‘Now the question to which I have no ready answer is, how can the most acute and versatile critic of Orientalism praise so highly an Orientalist who obviously subscribed to the entire apparatus of Orientalism's discredited dogmas?'
³⁷
Just as Gibb was presented as representative of British Orientalism (but surely not a representative of his fiercest critic, Kedourie), so Massignon was presented as representative of French Orientalism. But it is hard to understand how Massignon represented the kind of Orientalism practised by the atheist Marxists, Rodinson and Cahen – or, for that matter, by André Raymond (a leading historian of pre-modern Cairo) and Jacques Berque.

Even so, it must be conceded that Said has perhaps as much as half a point, for it is evident from the foregoing chapters that not all Orientalists did write in good faith. However, once one has identified an intellectual agenda on the part of a scholar, this does not absolve one from the task of evaluating that scholar's evidence and conclusions. To take one example among many, Lammens certainly had a militantly Catholic agenda and the intensity with which he scrutinized the sources for the early history of Islam was in large degree motivated by his hostility towards that religion, but that does not in itself invalidate all his findings about those sources.

I have confined my discussion of
Orientalism
mostly to its (mis)treatment of academic Orientalists, as I think it is muddling and misleading to jumble them up together with poets, proconsuls and explorers as if they had very much in common.

In
Orientalism
Clifford Geertz had been highly praised as an excellent example of an anthropologist who had dispensed with the
idées reçues
of Orientalism and ‘whose interest in Islam is discrete and concrete enough to be animated by the specific societies and problems he studies and not by the rituals, preconceptions, and doctrines of Orientalism'.
³⁸
But five years later, in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered', Said wrote of the ‘standard disciplinary rationalizations and self-congratulatory clichés about hermeneutic circles offered by Clifford Geertz'.
³⁹
Had Geertz's methodology changed in those five years? Not really. What had changed was that Geertz had written critically of Said's
Covering Islam
in the
New York Review of Books
in 1982,
where he had referred to Said's ‘easy way with the evidence' and his ‘tone of high moral panic' and concluded that the book left ‘a bad taste in the mind'.
⁴⁰

Early reviews of
Orientalism
were mostly hostile. Even those praised by Said, such as Hourani, Watt, Berque and Rodinson, were highly critical.
⁴¹
But slowly the book acquired a cult status, particularly among people who were not Orientalists and who had no special knowledge of the field. Though specialists in the field listed its errors and misrepresentations, subsequent editions of the book were published with no corrections or retractions whatsoever. Criticisms of the book by Western Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis or Donald Little may be dismissed as the defensive posturing of the Orientalists' ‘guild'. But some of the book's hardest critics were Arabs. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm's bafflement regarding Said's adulation of Massignon, as well as his doubts about the chronology of Orientalism offered by Said, have already been mentioned. More generally, al-‘Azm in his brilliant article ‘Orientalism in Reverse' agreed with Said on the self-righteousness of Orientalists and their tendency to create ‘an ontological rift' between East and West, but he attacked Said for stereotyping Orientalism and for grotesquely misrepresenting Islam. Said was wrong to trace Orientalism's origins back to Homer and Dante, as that disguised the fact that it was essentially a modern phenomenon. Al-‘Azm suggested that for Said representation seemed more real than reality and that his hostility to the schematization and codification of knowledge was irrational. Nadim al-Bitar, a Lebanese Muslim, denounced Said for wildly over-generalizing about the nature of Orientalism, as well as grotesquely exaggerating the prevalence of racism in Western intellectual circles.
⁴²
Arabcritics were particularly offended by Said's dismissal of Arab cultural critiques as ‘secondorder' analyses and contemporary Arabthought as a shallow reflection of Western thinking.

In ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism', Aijaz Ahmad, an Indian Marxist teacher of English, was scathing about Said's old-fashioned,
Western-style humanism, as well as his muddled use of Derrida's ideas about identity and difference. He accused Said of trying ‘to exploit three quite different definitions of Orientalism', but it was Said's allegiance to Foucault that got him into the worst muddles, as Said accused Orientalists of wilfully misrepresenting objective reality, whereas Foucault denied the possibility of an objective reality.
⁴³
The British Muslim Ziauddin Sardar criticized Said for his location in a Western academy and for narrowness of scope. As Sardar pointed out, Islam is not confined to the Middle East and indeed most Muslims are found outside that region. He also criticized Said for not acknowledging his predecessors' work in the field. Sardar shared the Marxists' hostility towards Said's ‘humanism', which, he claimed, came from the same culture that produced Orientalism, imperialism and racism. Sardar had also noticed that a later book by Said,
The Question of Palestine
, revealed a strong dislike of Islam.
⁴⁴

Others, however, took a much more favourable view of
Orientalism
and in the long run the book set a trend for books that proposed to ‘negotiate the other', ‘reinvent alterity' and suchlike enterprises. Said was canonized by the Western intelligentsia and acclaimed as a leading proponent of post-colonial studies; there was a tendency to associate him with such figures as Homi Bhaba, the post-colonial theorist, and Gayatri Spivak, the Bengali cultural-literary critic. This school of writing has developed its own distinctive prose style. Consider, for example, this gem from Spivak: ‘The rememoration of the “present” as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no-(particular)place, the metropolitan project that can supplement the post-colonial attempt at the impossible cathexis of place-bound history as the lost time of the spectator.'
⁴⁵

Orientalism
fostered a plethora of narratives of oppression, and its arguments fed into subaltern studies. (In subaltern studies the voices of the colonized are given preference over those of the colonialists.) In
Orientalism
and the later
Culture and Imperialism
Said presented himself as engaged in a contestatory enterprise: this particular literary critic was on the front line in the struggle against post-colonial Western hegemony. But what had he achieved? Have Orientalists changed their working practices? They have not, as Said made no positive suggestions as to how they should change those practices and, indeed,
at several points he seemed to be suggesting that it was impossible to change. Were imperialists disturbed by Said's book? It seems not. Sheldon Pollock put his finger on the problem here: ‘Why, in other words, should central apparatuses of empire so hospitably embrace those who seek to contest it, and why is it that the empire should all the while be so thoroughly unconcerned? It may be a tired and tiresome issue (a reprise of the 1960s hit “Repressive Desublimation”), but late capitalism's blithe insouciance towards its unmaskers, its apparently successful domestication of anti-imperialist scholarship and its commodification of oppositional theory are hard to ignore and certainly give pause to those who seriously envision some role for critique in the project of progressive change.'
⁴⁶

Unsurprisingly the most magisterial of the responses to
Orientalism
came from Bernard Lewis. ‘The Question of Orientalism' was belatedly published in the
New York Review of Books
(24 June 1982). Lewis eloquently defended old-fashioned scholarship and concluded his defence as follows:

The most important question – least mentioned by the current wave of critics – is that of the scholarly merits, indeed scholarly validity, of Orientalist findings. Prudently, the anti-Orientalists hardly touch on this question and indeed give very little attention to the scholarly writings of the scholars whose putative attitudes, motives, and purposes form the theme of their campaign. Scholarly criticism of Orientalist scholarship is a legitimate and indeed a necessary, inherent part of the process. Fortunately, it is going on all the time – not a criticism of Orientalism, which would be meaningless, but a criticism of the research and results of individual scholars or schools of scholars. The most rigorous and penetrating critique of Orientalist, as of any other scholarship has always been and will remain that of their fellow-scholars, especially, though not exclusively, those working in the same field.

Lewis's defence of Orientalism as pure scholarship, or at least as a discipline that strives for objectivity, will strike many as absurd. But if one actually sits down and reads Pococke's edition of
Hayy ibn
Yaqzan
, or Cresswell on the chronology of Egyptian mosques, or Cahen on the topography of Syria in the Middle Ages, or de Slane on the classification of manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale, or Charles Burnett on the transmission of Arabic learning in medieval England, it is extremely difficult to detect a political agenda in such scholarship – even an unconscious one. There are such things as pure scholars. I have even had tea with a few of them.

In 1986 the American Middle East Studies Association tried to mount a debate between Lewis and Said, but though Lewis appeared on the same platform as Said, he scarcely debated with him, but coolly delivered what was in effect a prepared position paper. He did not deny that there were stereotypes, particularly with respect to Oriental despotism and to sexual licence in the harem. He asked for civility and cool debate rather than polemic.
⁴⁷
Said, in response, was not particularly civil. He argued that knowledge is never abstract, but always reflects power. He concentrated his attack on the American media and its coverage of Arabs and Islam (and that was of course a pretty soft target as American coverage of the Middle East and especially of Palestinian matters has mostly been disgraceful – biased, ignorant and abusive). He went on to suggest that media distortion of Middle Eastern realities had worked ‘because of the active collaboration of a whole cadre of scholars, experts and abettors drawn from the ranks of the Orientalists and special-interest lobbies'. Orientalists were malevolent plotters who knew better, or, at best, they were guilty of having failed to combat press stereotypes. Among the guilty experts he listed Lewis, Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. They were guilty, that is, of being hostile to the religion and culture of Islam. (But I suspect that their real crime was that they had all criticized Said.) Lewis was denounced for attempting to supply a medieval religious ancestry for modern hijackings. Gellner was alleged to maintain that ‘Muslims are a nuisance and viscerally anti-Semitic'. Why, Said wanted to know, had some Orientalists participated in a symposium on terrorism? He claimed that the only things Orientalists chose to study were Arab ignorance of Europe and Arabanti-Semitism and that they wholly neglected Arabliterature. Lewis in his concluding response said that ‘it is hardly honest or fair to try to refute someone else's point of view not in terms of what he says, but of motives which you choose to
attribute to him in order to make your refutation easier. It is hardly an example of truth or fairness to use the smear tactics that became well known in this country at an earlier stage, by lumping together writers, scholars and journalists of very disparate characters and origins, thereby conveying rather than asserting that they are all the same, that they constitute one homogenous, centrally directed, conspiratorial whole.'
⁴⁸