We are finally getting revisionism on Said. But he still dominates our ME departments. Classic "Cultural Marxism."
The Sins of Edward Said (by Ibn Warraq and Lynn Chu)
By Ibn Warraq
THE SINS OF EDWARD SAID
Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In 1998, he accused the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a holocaust denier on grounds of free speech. After all, he observed, free speech "scarcely exists in our own societies." The history of the modern Arab world was, he admitted, one of "political failures," "human rights abuses," "stunning military incompetences," "decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development."
At last, Said was right about something. Sadly, Said will go down in history for having practically invented the contemporary intellectual argument for Muslim rage. Orientalism, Said's bestselling multiculturalist manifesto, introduced the Arab world to the art and science of victimology. Unquestionably the most influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims, Orientalism stridently blamed the entirety of Western history and scholarship for the ills of the Muslim world. It justified Muslim hatred of the West, taught them the Western art of wallowing in self-pity over one's victimhood, and gave vicious anti-Americanism a sophisticated, high literary gloss. Said was naturally quite popular in France.
Were it not for the wicked imperialists, racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more, Orientalism said. Islamic fundamentalism too, as we all now know, calls the West a great Satan that oppresses Islam by its very existence. Orientalism simply lifted that concept, and made it over into Western radical multiculturalist chic.
In his recent book Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman traces the absorption of 20th century Marxist justifications of rage and terror by Arab intellectuals, and shows how it became a powerful philosophical predicate for the current Muslim campaign of terror. Said was the last and most influential exponent of this trend. Said and his followers also had the effect of cowing liberal academics in the West into a politically correct, self-censoring silence about Islamic fundamentalist violence for much of the two decades prior to 9/11. Orientalism's rock star status among the literary elite put middle eastern scholars in constant jeopardy of being labelled "orientalist" oppressors. And some of these scholars, most famously Salman Rushdie, and less famously myself, must to this day remain in hiding in order to protect ourselves and our families from Islamic extremists who regard us apostates from Islam and targets for murder.
Orientalism was a political polemic that masqueraded as a work of scholarship. Its historical analysis was over the years gradually debunked, mostly in academic journals, by numerous scholars of impeccable skills and integrity. A literary critic, it became clear that Said used poetic license, not empirical inquiry, while couching his conclusions as facts. His scholarly technique was to spray his charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab world. This technique, familiar to anyone in the field of higher learning in America over the past 20 years, was to claim a moral high ground due to his race and his Ivy League faculty chair, then to deploy slippery, deceptive rhetoric, lies, and ad hominem smears to paint all scholars who might disagree as racists and collaborators with imperialism. Orientalism was larded with half-truths, errors and lies. Said had a convenient excuse for this. In his philosophy, he acknowledged, there was no "truth." Alleged "truths" were merely relative at best.
To Said, Western writers and scholars all employed, "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." They were all complicit with imperialism, and had conspired to suppress the emergence of native voices that might paint a truer picture. All European writings masked a "discourse of power." They had stereotyped the "Other" as passive, weak, or barbarian, and in need of civilizing. "[The Orientalist's] Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized," he said.
By the very act, it seemed, of studying the East, the West had dominated it and manipulated it, "politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively." This conspiracy of domination, he said, had been going on from the Enlightenment to the present day.
While deploring "the disparity between texts and reality," Said never himself tried himself to describe that betrayed reality was. He merely complained that, "To look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental's human or even social reality....is to look in vain." In response to critics who over the years have pointed to errors of fact and detail so mountainous as to destroy his thesis, he finally admitted that he had "no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are."
Employing the flowery yet turgid style of Marxist theory, Said routinely failed even to try to support any of his assertions with anything resembling evidence or logic. At best, his writings were poetic excursions filled with unsupported assertions and bitterness. He was fond of making lists of books with nothing in common, but seemed to display his erudition. In fact, any scholar of the field could see that they were grab bags to delude the ignorant; and of these he found many in American universities. Said used verbal allusions and analogies, and treated them as if they were statements of fact. Exercises in hyperbole and histrionics, they can be said to have an aesthetic appeal to a certain leftist bent of mind. REST AT: writersreps.com |
