The world lost a great man the other day.
Bill
Not according to this piece from
the WSJ.
arthur
=================
September 29, 2003
COMMENTARY
Orientalism
By IBN WARRAQ
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, free speech "scarcely exists in our own
societies." The history of the modern Arab world was 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."
Those truths
aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down in history for having
practically invented the intellectual argument for Muslim rage. "Orientalism,"
his bestselling manifesto, introduced the Arab world to victimology. The most
influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims, "Orientalism" blamed
Western history and scholarship for the ills of the Muslim world: Were it not
for imperialists, racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more.
Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the West a Satan that oppresses Islam by its
very existence. "Orientalism" lifted that concept, and made it over into Western
radical chic, giving vicious anti-Americanism a high literary gloss.
In
"Terror and Liberalism," Paul Berman traces the absorption of Marxist
justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows how it became a powerful
philosophical predicate for Islamist terrorism. Mr. Said was the most
influential exponent of this trend. He and his followers also had the effect of
cowing many liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence
about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11. Mr. Said's
rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put writers on the Middle
East and Islam in constant jeopardy of being labeled "Orientalist" oppressors --
a potent form of intellectual censorship.
"Orientalism" was a polemic
that masqueraded as scholarship. Its historical analysis was gradually debunked
by scholars. It became clear that Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic
license, not empirical inquiry. Nevertheless he would state his conclusions as
facts, and they were taken as such by his admirers. His technique was to lay
charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on the whole of Western
scholarship of the Arab world -- effectively, to claim the moral high ground and
then to paint all who might disagree with him as collaborators with imperialism.
Western writers employed "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient." They conspired to suppress native voices that
might give a truer account. All European writings masked a "discourse of power."
They had stereotyped the "Other" as passive, weak, or barbarian. "[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 of studying the East, the West
had 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. But while deploring
"the disparity between texts and reality," Mr. Said never himself tried to
describe what that reality was, merely sighing that, "To look into Orientalism
for a lively sense of an Oriental's human or even social reality . . . is to
look in vain."
Mr. Said routinely twisted facts to make them fit his
politics. For example, to him, the most important thing about Jane Austen's
"Mansfield Park" was that its heroine, Fanny Price, lived on earnings from
Jamaican sugar -- imperialist blood money. In his writings, verbal allusion and
analogy stood in for fact, a device to reassure the ignorant of the correctness
of his conclusions. Of these he found many over the years in American
universities. His works had an aesthetic appeal to a leftist bent of mind, but
even this now can be seen as a fad of the late 20th century. The irony, of
course, is that he was ultimately grandstanding for the West -- for Western
eyes, Western salons, and Western applause.
Ibn Warraq (a pseudonym used to protect himself and his family from
Islamists) is the author of "Why I am Not a Muslim" and the editor of "Leaving
Islam: Apostates Speak Out," published by Prometheus Books in 1995 and 2003
respectively.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106478412860839100,00.html
Updated September 29,
2003
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Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 2:04
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To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
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Subject: [Futurework] Fw: Edward
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The world lost a great man the other day.
Bill
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Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 12:42:46 -0500
Subject: Edward Said
dead @ age 67
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