Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's 'Orientalism'
by Ibn Warraq
Prometheus Books, 2007,
343 pages.
It
is one of today’s sad truths that to be an open critic of Islam is to
incur mortal risk—even while living in the West. For this reason, the
author of such daring works as Why I Am Not a Muslim goes by
the pseudonym “Ibn Warraq,” an alias favored by Muslim apostates for
centuries. Since 1995, this 61-year-old, Indian-born, ex-Muslim
secularist has devoted his considerable talents to raising awareness in
the West of the dangers posed to democratic liberties by radical Islam.
He is also a strident opponent of the tendency—stemming from political
correctness and general academic culture—to refrain from critically
examining Islam. It is fitting, therefore, that his new work, Defending the West, is a spirited rebuttal of post-colonialist thought and its originator, the late Columbia University professor Edward Said.
For the most part, Warraq concentrates on Said’s seminal 1978 book, Orientalism,
a scathing assault on traditional Western scholarship of Islam and the
Middle East. There is a very good reason for this choice of target:
Said’s theories laid the groundwork for “post-colonial studies,” the
academic discipline whose founding principle is the belief that the
West—and everything identified with its intellectual and cultural
traditions—is guilty of oppressing and exploiting those foreign
cultures that came under its power and influence at one time or
another. Warraq’s critique of Said, therefore, is not only an
intellectual polemic, but also a forceful refutation of an academic
onslaught that for three decades has derogated and condemned almost
everything connected to the Western tradition.
Edward
Said, who played a defining role in this cultural polemic, was born in
1935 in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian family. Contrary to much
of what he said or implied before his eleventh-hour memoir, Out of Place
(2000), he was raised not in Jerusalem but in Egypt. He enjoyed a
childhood of considerable privilege, was educated at the Victoria
College in Alexandria, and eventually took up residence in the United
States. He subsequently studied literature at Prince-ton, Harvard, and
Oxford universities, establishing himself as a major literary theorist.
Eventually, he became a professor of English and comparative literature
at Columbia University. Said often noted that, his origins
notwithstanding, “most of my education, and certainly all of my basic
intellectual formation, are Western.”
Israel’s
crushing defeat of the neighboring Arab armies in 1967 was a source of
humiliation for many Arabs both in the Middle East and abroad. In the
case of Edward Said, it was the catalyst for his increasingly vocal
role on behalf of the Palestinian nationalist movement. Soon, he became
its intellectual spokesman in the West, publishing such polemics as The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), and The End of the Peace Process
(2000). In these and other works, he presented Zionism as a colonialist
movement imposed by the West upon a hapless and oppressed people.
During the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the Palestine Liberation
Organization was openly waging a terrorist campaign against Israel and
advocating its elimination and replacement with an Arab state, Said
penned the hagiography of the movement and its leader, Yasser Arafat.
According to Said’s heroic narrative, the Palestinian cause was a
national liberation movement in its purest form. In his 1983 essay,
“Solidly Behind Arafat,” Said claimed that Arafat “built institutions,
dispensed arms, and instilled a sense of hope and pride.” He went on to
say:
Beyond
that, Mr. Arafat did two supremely important things. First, he made the
PLO a genuinely representative body. Even his enemies knew that Mr.
Arafat and the Palestinian will—though not always clearly and
consistently articulated—were in a sense interchangeable.... Second, he
was the first popular Palestinian leader to formulate the notion that
Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews would—indeed must—seek a future
together on an equal footing in a shared territory.
Such
thoroughly disingenuous language—“equal footing,” for instance, is
misleading shorthand for an Arab-dominated unitary state—was typical of
Said. His adulation of Arafat, however, did not last: When the PLO
chairman signed the Oslo accords with Israel in 1993, Said denounced
the agreement as an “instrument of surrender.” Galvanized, perhaps, by
the Palestinian leader’s seeming betrayal of the anti-Zionist cause,
Said also wrote starkly of Arafat’s corrosive habits: “Political
discourse no longer exists: People discuss matters that affect
survival, and politics is discredited”—leaving one to wonder what
became of the “genuinely representative” leader he had once valorized.
Despite
occasional conciliatory words about Jews and criticism of Arafat, Said
was openly opposed to Israel’s existence. In an August 2000 interview
with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, he said of the Jews that
“They can certainly be a minority… in Israel. A Jewish minority can
survive the way other minorities in the Arab world survived.” Given the
historical treatment of Jews in the Muslim world, it is hardly
surprising that Said’s largesse met with little enthusiasm from its
intended beneficiaries. By the end of his life, Said had degenerated
into referring to New York City as “the citadel of Zionist power” and
promulgating conspiracy theories about Jewish domination of American
politics. At his passing in 2003, even some of his old comrades, most
notably the literary critic Christopher Hitchens, found it difficult to
sing his praises.
Orientalism,
however, has demonstrated remarkable staying power. Beyond turning Said
into an academic superstar, it turned “Orientalist”—once an entirely
unexceptionable term describing scholars of Islam and Eastern
cultures—into a dirty word: academic shorthand for racism, colonialism,
and oppression. At the beginning of Orientalism, Said declares:
I
doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman
in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in
those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as
British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that
all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and
impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact [of
imperialism]—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. (Emphasis in original.)
Said
put it most succinctly when he wrote that “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.”
Following the massive success of Orientalism,
Said’s work became ubiquitous in university syllabi, and his columns
appeared regularly in such bastions of the mainstream media as the New York Times.
As a result, Middle Eastern studies became deeply politicized, a
situation Said did his best to promote through the heated and often
personal rhetoric he employed against his opponents. None of this in
the least affected the cult of personality which grew up around him.
Following his death, a chair was endowed in his honor at Columbia,
largely as a result of donations provided by Saudi Arabian plutocrats.
To
be sure, Warraq is not the first to chronicle and critique Said’s
impact on the intellectual world: Distinguished Orientalists of diverse
political leanings—such as Ernest Gellner, Albert Hourani, Nikki
Keddie, Malcolm Kerr, Bernard Lewis, and Maxime Rodinson—repudiated
Said’s ideas in scholarly fashion decades ago, though they largely
proved exceptions to the acquiescent rule of their colleagues. Robert
Irwin, an Orientalist of note, published the book-length critique Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents
in late 2006, as Warraq’s own work was nearing completion. Nonetheless,
Warraq deserves credit for his pioneering work in this field,
particularly the long essay “Edward Said and the Saidists,” which has
been adapted—without major changes—into the first of the three parts
which constitute Defending the West.
Warraq
sees Said’s oeuvre as deeply pernicious. He believes that it laid the
foundation for the cultural and moral relativism of Western
intellectuals who indict the West for aggression and imperialism, all
the while exculpating the East of any responsibility for its own
dysfunctions. As a result, Said’s theories provided (and continue to
provide) aid and comfort to radical Islam’s assault on Western
liberties. Warraq sets out to demonstrate and critique this malign
influence, first by exposing Said’s defective scholarship, and second
by providing a survey of the Orientalist tradition that refutes Said’s
central claim that it is based on Western supremacism and imperial
power. Third, and last, Warraq defends Western works of art that depict
the Orient and demonstrate, he believes, impressive cultural
openness—something that, according to Saidian post-colonial theory, is
simply impossible.
Warraq’s
attempt to repudiate the claim that Western scholarship is inherently a
form of cultural imperialism begins with an exhaustive survey of
notable Orientalists, the details of whose lives and works render
accusations of racism, imperialism, and ethnocentricity absurd on their
face. He cites, for instance, the work of British Orientalist Simon
Ockley, renowned for his altruistic, scholarly devotion to the task of
producing his History of the Saracens (1708). Others include
Sir William Jones, the brilliant eighteenth-century lexicographer who
posited a linguistic connection between Britons and Indians—a far cry
from the “otherness” of the “colonized” that allegedly dominated the
Orientalist mind; Stamford Raffles, the British imperial administrator
who unearthed and preserved archaeological evidence of Buddhism in
Java, which had been stamped out by Muslim conquerors in the thirteenth
century; and Austen Layard, a nineteenth-century scholar who praised
the Turcomans and Turks he met on his travels in Anatolia for their
civility and hospitality and who elucidated the causes behind
resistance to British rule in India in terms that could scarcely
qualify him as an apologist for imperialism.
Warraq
also produces an impressive list of Western authors, translators, and
philosophers who favored Islam over Christianity. They lauded its
freedom from clerisy and dogma and considered the Christian West
inferior to it. For instance, Warraq discusses Ignaz Goldziher (a
Hungarian whom Said misidentified as German), an “objective but always
sympathetic observer” of Islam who despised Christian missionaries and
was, at one point, “inwardly convinced” that he was a Muslim. Peter
Martyr and Michel de Montaigne, for their part, wrote about
non-European civilizations with great sympathy and regard and denounced
those Europeans who had brutally conquered them. Said essentially
ignored such thinkers, or failed to discuss them in detail—most likely
because, according to his thesis, such people simply could not have
existed.
Warraq
finds Said’s professed admiration for certain Orientalists equally
disingenuous and sometimes outright inexplicable. He notes that Said
discussed both Raymond Schwab, the French autodidact and author of the
much admired book The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880
(1950), and R.W. Southern, the twentieth-century Oxford medievalist, as
if they somehow anticipated and endorsed his own views. In fact,
neither of them did anything of the kind. Both were emphatic in their
praise for many of the Orientalists denigrated by Said. These included
scholars such as William Jones, whom Said denounced for the basic
scholarly procedures of “codifying, tabulating, comparing,” tasks that
Said, following the lead of French post-modernist thinker Michel
Foucault, saw as exercises in power and control.
Warraq
finds Said’s praise for Louis Massignon equally bizarre in view of the
French scholar’s tendency to indulge in a fetishistic love of Eastern
spirituality, which Said usually condemned. Yet Massignon’s hostility
to Western civilization—well described in a posthumously published
essay by Elie Kedourie, another of Said’s many bêtes noires—surely
gives us something of an answer. Warraq notes Massignon’s virulently
anti-Jewish sentiments but ought to have elaborated on them, especially
Massignon’s conviction that banking and finance were instruments of
illicit domination which, along with homosexuality, were introduced
into the supposedly pristine Arab world by the West in general and the
Jews in particular. (As Warraq wryly recounts, these views did not
prevent Massignon from enthusiastically availing himself of the
opportunities for pederasty offered by Arab brothels.)
Another
aspect less than fully considered by Warraq is Said’s monopolization of
cultural criticism of the East. For the most part, Said arrogated this
right entirely to himself while simultaneously condemning it as one of
Orientalism’s most monstrous aspects. In his 1981 book, Covering Islam,
for example, Said savaged Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis for
describing contemporary Middle Eastern societies as intellectually
incurious. Yet, a decade and a half later, he said as much himself in
his book Peace and Its Discontents. Warraq notes ironically
that some of Said’s own criticisms of the Arab world turned out to be
ill-founded. Said claimed, for instance, that there were no credible
scholarly journals in the Arab world dealing with Arab studies. Warraq
happily provides a list of them for the reader.
Nonetheless,
Warraq does not underestimate the relative weakness of intellectual
culture in the Arab world. His book is filled with telling indices of
the fact, both past and present. He notes, for instance, that “even
after eight centuries of Muslim presence in Spain, we know of only a
single document that reveals any Muslim interest in a European
language.” Warraq also cites the Arab Human Development Report of 2003,
published by the United Nations Development Program, which disclosed
that the total number of books translated into Arabic over the last
thousand years is fewer than those translated into Spanish in a single
year; and Greece, with a population of 11 million, annually translates
five times more books than the 22 Arab countries combined, with roughly
300 million people.
This
malady, Warraq argues, has its roots in the Islamic past, one in which
Muslim interest in other civilizations was the exception rather than
the rule. He cites Bernard Lewis—a near-capital offense for
Saidians—whose book The Muslim Discovery of Europe demonstrated that, with few exceptions,
a lack of intellectual curiosity pervaded Muslim contact with the West.
Warraq does not absolve the West of its own responsibility for the
decline of Orientalist studies, however. In particular, he points to
the slow corruption of the Western intellectual tradition in its own
institutions of higher learning through the acceptance of vast sums of
money—with strings attached, of course—from Saudi Arabia, Brunei, and
other oil-rich countries. These countries have used their financial
power to establish chairs at major academic centers with the aim of
imposing an apologetic presentation of Islam on Western intellectual
discourse—a presentation, that is, in which Said’s theories are always
front and center.
Warraq
ends his book with an erudite refutation of Said’s attack on Western
literature and art, which he saw as wholly complicit in the imperial
project. A noteworthy example is Warraq’s adroit dissection of Said’s
perverse theory, based on a single reference to a character’s slave
plantation in the novel Mansfield Park, that Jane Austen
condoned slavery. Ignoring the evidence that Austen’s attitude, as it
emerges from this passage, is far more likely anti-slavery than not,
Said indicts her for having “prefigured” references to colonial
ventures in subsequent novels by other writers, some of them written
over a century later. One might expect a more rigorous and attentive
reading from a professor of English literature.
In
the realm of art, Warraq places a special emphasis on the cultural
openness of the West and its curiosity about other cultures. Genovese
and Venetian artists, he states, led the way in opening Western eyes to
the East. Their work was based on scrupulous observation of Eastern
locales visited by these seafaring merchant city states. Artists like
Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio did not distort or degrade the
Orient in their work; rather, Warraq argues, they depicted it through
the critical eye of the technically proficient artist. One of the most
interesting features of Warraq’s narrative is the manner in which
Western art has itself changed artistic styles in parts of the East,
such as the Italian influence discernible in Persian art since the
seventeenth century. Warraq is justifiably impatient with the arguments
of Said’s disciples, who have asserted that any kind of Western
artistic influence on the East constitutes some form of imperial
manipulation or derogation of other cultures.
Warraq
chooses not to speculate about the origins of Said’s animus to
Orientalism and the West in general. His book is about the coherence of
Said’s arguments—or lack thereof—and not their source. Readers will be
left to wonder why Said—the privileged son of a wealthy family,
educated in the finest American universities, and almost completely
Westernized—took the line he did. Having read Warraq, I remain of the
view that Said, perhaps like some Jewish intellectuals, responded to
the hostility—real or imagined—of his host society by remorselessly
deconstructing it; or in this case, by storming its literary citadels.
As with many of these intellectuals, one suspects that a measure of
guilt was at work: For members of minority groups, professional success
is often followed by a belated awakening to one’s distance from and
subtle non-acceptance by the majority. It is not a new experience for
educated people to move between continents and cultures, accompanied by
the vertiginous feeling of personal and psychological displacement. It
is a great pity that Said chose to address his feelings in such a
corrosive way, obscuring rather than clarifying the literary and
scholastic canon in the process. Warraq’s book is an invaluable
antidote to this poisonous legacy, and its impact, one hopes, will be a
lasting one.