Orientalism (60 page)

I regret to say that the Arabic reception of
Orientalism
, despite Kamal Abu Deeb’s remarkable translation, still managed to ignore that aspect of my book which diminished the nationalist fervor that some implied from my critique of Orientalism, which I associated with those drives to domination and control also to be found in imperialism. Abu Deeb’s painstaking translation was an almost total avoidance of Arabized Western expressions; technical words like
discourse, simulacrum, paradigm
, or
code
were rendered from within the classical rhetoric of the Arab tradition. His idea was to place my work inside one fully formed tradition, as if it were addressing another from a perspective of cultural adequacy and equality. In this way, he reasoned, it was possible to show that just as one could advance an epistemological critique from within the Western tradition, so too could one do it from within the Arabic.

Yet the sense of fraught confrontation between an often emotionally defined Arab world and an even more emotionally experienced Western world drowned out the fact that
Orientalism
was meant to be a study in critique, not an affirmation of warring and hopelessly antithetical identities. Moreover, the actuality I described in the book’s last pages, of one powerful discursive system maintaining hegemony over another, was intended as the opening salvo in a debate that might stir Arab readers and critics to engage more determinedly with the system of Orientalism. I was either upbraided for not having paid closer attention to Marx—the passages on Marx’s own Orientalism in my book were the most singled out by dogmatic critics in the Arab world and India, for instance—whose system of
thought was claimed to have risen above his obvious prejudices, or I was criticized for not appreciating the great achievements of Orientalism, the West, etc. As with defenses of Islam, recourse to Marxism or “the West” as a coherent total system seems to me to have been a case of using one orthodoxy to shoot down another.

The difference between Arab and other responses to
Orientalism
is, I think, an accurate indication of how decades of loss, frustration, and the absence of democracy have affected intellectual and cultural life in the Arab region. I intended my book as part of a pre-existing current of thought whose purpose was to liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems such as Orientalism: I wanted readers to make use of my work so they might then produce new studies of their own that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a generous, enabling mode. That certainly happened in Europe, the United States, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, Ireland, Latin America, and parts of Africa. The invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses; the analyses of subaltern history; the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast new developments in feminist and minority discourses—to all these, I am pleased and flattered that
Orientalism
often made a difference. That does not seem to have been the case (insofar as I can judge it) in the Arab world, where, partly because my work is correctly perceived as Eurocentric in its texts, and partly because, as Musallam says, the battle for cultural survival is too engrossing, books like mine are interpreted less usefully, productively speaking, and more as defensive gestures either for or against the “West.”

Yet among American and British academics of a decidedly rigorous and unyielding stripe,
Orientalism
, and indeed all of my other work, has come in for disapproving attacks because of its “residual” humanism, its theoretical inconsistencies, its insufficient, perhaps even sentimental, treatment of agency. I am glad that it has!
Orientalism
is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine. No one has convincingly shown that individual effort is not at some profoundly unteachable level both eccentric and, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sense,
original
; this despite the existence of systems of thought, discourses, and hegemonies, (although none of them are in fact seamless, perfect, or inevitable). The interest I took in Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon (like the culture of imperialism I talk about in
Culture and Imperialism
, its 1993 sequel) derives from its variability and unpredictability, both qualities that give writers like Massignon
and Burton their surprising force, and even attractiveness. What I tried to preserve in what I analyzed of Orientalism was its combination of consistency
and
inconsistency, its play, so to speak, which can only be rendered by preserving for oneself as writer and critic the right to some emotional force, the right to be moved, angered, surprised, and even delighted. This is why, in the debate between Gayan Prakash, on the one hand, and Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, on the other, I think Prakash’s more mobile post-structuralism has to be given its due.
²
By the same token the work of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashis Nandy, predicated on the sometimes dizzying subjective relationships engendered by colonialism, cannot be gainsaid for
its
contribution to our understanding of the humanistic traps laid by systems such as Orientalism.

Let me conclude this survey of
Orientalism
’s critical transmutations with a mention of the one group of people who were, not unexpectedly, the most exercised and vociferous in responding to my book, the Orientalists themselves. They were not my
principal
intended audience at all; I had in mind casting some light on their practices so as to make other humanists aware of one field’s particular procedures and genealogy. The word “Orientalism” itself has been for too long confined to a professional specialty; I tried to show was its application and existence in the general culture, in literature, ideology, and social as well as political attitudes. To speak of someone as an Oriental, as the Orientalists did, was not just to designate that person as someone whose language, geography, and history were the stuff of learned treatises: it also was often meant as a derogatory expression signifying a lesser breed of human being. This is not to deny that for artists like Nerval and Segalen the word “Orient” was wonderfully, ingeniously connected to exoticism, glamour, mystery, and promise. But it was also a sweeping historical generalization. In addition to these uses of the words
Orient, Oriental
, and
Orientalism
, the term
Orientalist
also came to represent the erudite, scholarly, mainly academic specialist in the languages and histories of the East. Yet, as the late Albert Hourani wrote me in March 1992, a few months before his untimely and much regretted death, due to the force of my argument (for which he said he could not reproach me), my book had the unfortunate effect of making it almost impossible to use the term “Orientalism” in a neutral sense, so much had it become a term of abuse. He concluded that he would have still liked to retain the word for use in describing “a limited, rather dull but valid discipline of scholarship.”

In his generally balanced 1979 review of
Orientalism
, Hourani formulated one of his objections by suggesting that while I singled out the exaggerations, racism, and hostility of much Orientalist writing, I neglected to mention its numerous scholarly and humanistic achievements. Names that he brought up included Marshall Hodgson, Claude Cohen, and André Raymond, all of whose accomplishments (along with the German authors who come up
de rigueur
) should be acknowledged as real contributors to human knowledge. This does not, however, conflict with what I say in
Orientalism
, with the difference that I do insist on the prevalence in the discourse itself of a structure of attitudes that cannot simply be waved away of discounted. Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of each Orientalist. But I do say that the
guild
of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant.

So while I sympathize with Hourani’s plea, I have serious doubts whether the notion of Orientalism properly understood can ever, in fact, be completely detached from its rather more complicated and not always flattering circumstances. I suppose that one can imagine at the limit that a specialist in Ottoman or Fatimid archives is an Orientalist in Hourani’s sense, but we are still required to ask where, how, and with what supporting institutions and agencies such studies take place
today
? Many who wrote after my book appeared asked exactly those questions of even the most recondite and otherworldly scholars, with sometimes devastating results.

Still, there has been one sustained attempt to mount an argument whose purport is that a critique of Orientalism (mine in particular) is both meaningless and somehow a violation of the very idea of disinterested scholarship. That attempt is made by Bernard Lewis, about whom I had devoted a few critical pages in my book. Fifteen years after
Orientalism
appeared, Lewis produced a series of essays, some of them collected in a book entitled
Islam and the West
, one of whose main sections is an attack on me, which he surrounds with chapters and other essays that mobilize a set of lax and characteristically Orientalist formulas—Muslims are enraged at modernity, Islam never made the separation between church and state, and so on and on—all of them pronounced with an extreme level of generalization and with scarcely a mention of the differences between individual Muslims, between Muslim societies, or between Muslim traditions and eras. Since Lewis has in a sense appointed himself a spokesman for the guild of Orientalists on which my critique was originally
based, it may be worth spending a little more time on his procedures. His ideas are, alas, fairly current among his acolytes and imitators, whose job seems to be to alert Western consumers to the threat of an enraged, congenitally undemocratic and violent Islamic world.

Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong. Of course, these are familiar attributes of the Orientalists’ breed, some of whom have at least had the courage to be honest in their active denigration of Islamic, as well as other non-European, peoples. Not Lewis. He proceeds by distorting the truth, by making false analogies, and by innuendo, methods to which he adds that veneer of omniscient tranquil authority which he supposes is the way scholars talk. Take as a typical example the analogy he draws between my critique of Orientalism and a hypothetical attack on studies of classical antiquity, an attack which, he says, would be a foolish activity. It would be, of course, but then Orientalism and Hellenism are radically incomparable. The former is an attempt to describe a whole region of the world as an accompaniment to that region’s colonial conquest, the latter is not at all about the direct colonial conquest of Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in addition, Orientalism expresses antipathy to Islam, Hellenism sympathy for classical Greece.

Additionally, the present political moment, with its reams of racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes (and no attacks on classical Greece), allows Lewis to deliver ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism.
³
Lewis’s work therefore is part of the present political, rather than purely intellectual, environment.

To imply, as he does, that the branch of Orientalism dealing with Islam and the Arabs is a learned discipline that can therefore be compared with classical philology is as appropriate as comparing one of the many Israeli Arabists and Orientalists who have worked for the occupation authorities of the West Bank and Gaza with scholars like Wilamowitz or Mommsen. On the one hand Lewis wishes to reduce Islamic Orientalism to the status of an innocent and enthusiastic department of scholarship; on the other he wishes to pretend that Orientalism is too complex, various, and technical to exist in a form for any non-Orientalist (like myself and many others) to criticize. Lewis’s tactic here is to suppress a significant amount of history. As I suggest, European interest in Islam derived not from curiosity
but from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor to Christianity. The earliest European scholars of Islam, as numerous historians have shown, were medieval polemicists writing to ward off the threat of Muslim hordes and apostasy. In one way or another that combination of fear and hostility has persisted to the present day, both in scholarly and non-scholarly attention to an Islam which is viewed as belonging to a part of the world—the Orient—counterposed imaginatively, geographically, and historically
against
Europe and the West.

The most interesting problems about Islamic or Arabic Orientalism are, first, the forms taken by the medieval vestiges that persist so tenaciously, and, second, the history and sociology of connections between Orientalism and the societies that produced it. There are strong
affiliations
between Orientalism and the literary imagination, for example, as well as the imperial consciousness. What is striking about many periods of European history is the traffic between what scholars and specialists wrote and what poets, novelists, politicians, and journalists then said about Islam. In addition—and this is the crucial point that Lewis refuses to deal with—there is a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) parallel between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France.

Although the connection between a routine British classical education and the extension of the British empire is more complex than Lewis might suppose, no more glaring parallel exists between power and knowledge in the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism. Much of the information and knowledge about Islam and the Orient that was used by the colonial powers to justify their colonialism derived from Orientalist scholarship: a recent study by many contributors,
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament
,
⁴
edited by Carl A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer, demonstrates with copious documentation how Orientalist knowledge was used in the colonial administration of South Asia. A fairly consistent interchange still continues between area scholars, such as Orientalists, and government departments of foreign affairs. In addition, many of the stereotypes of Islamic and Arabic sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation, and splendor to be found in writers from John Buchan to V.S. Naipaul have also been presuppositions underlying the adjoining field of academic Orientalism. In contrast, the trade in clichés between Indology and Sinology, on the one hand, and general culture, on the other, is not quite as flourishing, although there are
relationships and borrowings to be noted. Nor is there much similarity between what obtains among Western experts in Sinology and Indology and the fact that many professional scholars of Islam in Europe and the United States spend their lives studying the subject, yet still find it an impossible religion and culture to like, much less admire.