Arthur,
Thanks for sharing.
Of course, when the author of the piece wrote: "Mr. Said, who died last
week, will go down in history for having practically invented the intellectual
argument for Muslim rage", he failed to mention that Dr. Said was a Christian.
A fact that is often overlooked is that many of the initial Palestinian
'terrorists/guerrillas [depending on your perspective] were Christians. Said
might have invented the argument for Palestinian Christian rage but not Muslim.
Further, he was quite critical of Arab despots.
I certainly have no problem with the author, apparently an ex-Muslim,
leaving the faith. I do have a problem with an attack like this without any
supporting documentation.
Bill
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
-----Original
Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 2:04
PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Futurework] Fw: Edward
Said
The world lost a great man the other day.
Bill
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 12:42:46 -0500
Subject: Edward Said
dead @ age 67
|