Coming
in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Recent
Stories
August
5, 2003
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet the Real WMD Fabricator: Rolf
Ekeus
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
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One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
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Poets'
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1, 2003
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Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
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Stan Goff
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Wayne
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Wolfowitz the Censor
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Lisa Walsh
Thomas
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Sean
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Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
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Congratulations
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July
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J. Nagy
The Belligerent Dr. Pipes
Kurt Nimmo
Tom Delay Goes to Jerusalem
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Conn Hallinan
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Watch
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Impeach
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Click Here
for More Stories.
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August
4, 2003
Orientalism 25 Years Later
Worldly
Humanism v. the Empire-builders
By
EDWARD SAID
Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism
which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not
said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened
up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work
about representations of "the Orient" lent itself to
increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more
ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign
of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my
two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, Eqbal
Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as
well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on.
In my memoir Out
of Place (1999) I described the strange and contradictory
worlds in which I grew up, providing for myself and my readers
a detailed account of the settings that I think formed me in
Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But that was a very personal account
that stopped short of all the years of my own political engagement
that started after the 1967 Arab-
Israeli war.
Orientalism is very much a book tied
to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its first
page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War
that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of
human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure
of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada,
and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded
West Bank and Gaza. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared
with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic
of course than the events of September 11 2001 and their aftermath
in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines,
the illegal imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United
States proceeds. Its aftermath is truly awful to contemplate.
This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations,
unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not.
I wish I could say that general understanding
of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States
has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds
of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably
better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening
of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliché,
the  dominance of crude power allied
with simplistic contempt for dissenters and "others"
has found a fitting correlative in the looting and destruction
of Iraq's libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual
lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot
be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that "we"
might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms
of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common
to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing
the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad
peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this
has often happened with the "Orient," that semi-mythical
construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late
eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times.
In the process the uncountable sediments of history, that include
innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages,
experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored,
relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into
meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.
My argument is that history is made by
men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written,
so that "our" East, "our" Orient becomes
"ours" to possess and direct. And I have a very high
regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region
to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to
be. There's been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack
on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their
backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights
that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment,
and democracy are by no means simple, and agreed-upon concepts
that one either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the
living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists
who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no knowledge
at all of the language real people actually speak, has fabricated
an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there
an ersatz model of free market "democracy". You don't
need Arabic or Persian or even French to pontificate about how
the democracy domino effect is just what the Arab world needs.
But there is a difference between knowledge
of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding,
compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and
on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign
of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference
between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and
enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes
of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes
of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group
of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third
World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to
do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources,
but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for
by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.
The major influences on George W. Bush's
Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard
Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world
who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous
phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline
which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in
the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines
about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the
Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending
to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have
supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples.
Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox,
plus myriad evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable
tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling
the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as
to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.
Without a well-organized sense that these
people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate
"our" values--the very core of traditional Orientalist
dogma--there would have been no war. So from the very same directorate
of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors
of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia,
Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North
Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White
House, using the same clichés, the same demeaning stereotypes,
the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs
the chorus, power is the only language they understand) in this
case as in the earlier ones. These people have now been joined
in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs
to whom shall be confided every thing from the writing of textbooks
and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life
and its oil industry.
Every single empire in its official discourse
has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances
are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring
order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.
And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals
to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
Twenty-five years after my book's publication
Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modern
imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the Orient
since Napoleon's entry into Egypt two centuries ago. Arabs and
Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations
of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present.
You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern Orientalist.
This of course is also V.S. Naipaul's contribution to literature,
that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to
the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion
that is, how little it wishes to face the long succession of
years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives
say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis. Think
of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise
of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes
on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine
and, during the entire twentieth century in the struggle over
oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine,
and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism,
through the short period of liberal independence, the era of
military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism,
irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the
latest bunch of "natives." Each of these phases and
eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each
its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics.
My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic
critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer
sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts
of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us. I have
called what I try to do "humanism," a word I continue
to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term
by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first
of all attempting to dissolve Blake's mind-forg'd manacles so
as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for
the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover humanism is
sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and
other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there
is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
This it is to say that every domain is
linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our
world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence.
We need to speak about issues of injustice and suffering within
a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic
reality. Our role is to widen the field of discussion. I have
spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating
the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination,
but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to
the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way
of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the
struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed
toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further
suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism
and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would
seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always
to provide alternative models to the simplifying and confining
ones based on mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle
East and elsewhere for so long.
As a humanist whose field is literature,
I am old enough to have been trained forty years ago in the field
of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before
that I must mention the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista
Vico, the Neopolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas
anticipate those of German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf,
later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche,
Gadamer, and finally the great 20th Century Romance philologists
Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.
To young people of the current generation
the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian
and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative
of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably
in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular,
a consuming passion which led to the composition of the West-Östlicher
Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas about Weltliteratur,
the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic
whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved
the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole.
There is a considerable irony to the
realization then that as today's globalized world draws together
in some of the ways I have been talking about here, we may be
approaching the kind of standardization and homogeneity that
Goethe's ideas were specifically formulated to prevent. In an
essay he published in 1951 entitled "Philologie der Weltliteratur"
Erich Auerbach made exactly that point at the outset of the postwar
period which was also the beginning of the Cold War. His great
book Mimesis,
published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime
exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be
a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality
represented in Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf;
but reading the 1951 essay one senses that for Auerbach the great
book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret
texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively,
using erudition and an excellent command of several languages
to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for
his understanding of Islamic literature.
Positive knowledge of languages and history
was necessary, but it was never enough, any more than the mechanical
gathering of facts would constitute an adequate method for grasping
what an author like Dante, for example, was all about. The main
requirement for the kind of philological understanding Auerbach
and his predecessors were talking about and tried to practice
was one that sympathetically and subjectively entered into the
life of a written text as seen from the perspective of its time
and its author (einfühlung). Rather than alienation
and hostility to another time and a different culture, philology
as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit
deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality.
Thus the interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for
a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works
that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet
of the interpreter's mission.
All this was obviously undermined and
destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbach
notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and
greater specialization of knowledge gradually narrowed the opportunities
for the kind of investigative and everlastingly inquiring kind
of philological work that he had represented, and, alas, it's
an even more depressing fact that since Auerbach's death in 1957
both the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk
in scope as well as in centrality. Instead of reading in the
real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted
by the fragmented knowledge available on the internet and in
the mass media.
Worse yet, education is threatened by
nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the
mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the
distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical
precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction
produced by modern warfare. In the demonization of an unknown
enemy for whom the label "terrorist" serves the general
purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images
command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis
and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced.
Speaking both as an American and as an
Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind of simplified
view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian
elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic
worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral
regime change--backed up by the most bloated military budget
in history--are the main ideas debated endlessly and impoverishingly
by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called
"experts" who validate the government's general line.
Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based
on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history
have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American
or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context,
and regard other cultures with contempt.
Perhaps you will say that I am making
too many abrupt transitions between humanistic interpretation
on the one hand and foreign policy on the other, and that a modern
technological society which along with unprecedented power possesses
the internet and F-16 fighter-jets must in the end be commanded
by formidable technical-policy experts like Donald Rumsfeld and
Richard Perle. But what has really been lost is a sense of the
density and interdependence of human life, which can neither
be reduced to a formula nor brushed aside as irrelevant.
That is one side of the global debate.
In the Arab and Muslim countries the situation is scarcely better.
As Roula Khalaf has argued, the region has slipped into an easy
anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the
US is really like as a society. Because the governments are relatively
powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turn their energies
to repressing and keeping down their own populations, with results
in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing
to open up societies where secular ideas about human history
and development have been overtaken by failure and frustration,
as well as by an Islamism built out of rote learning and the
obliteration of what are perceived to be other, competitive forms
of secular knowledge. The gradual disappearance of the extraordinary
tradition of Islamic ijtihad or personal interpretation has been
one of the major cultural disasters of our time, with the result
that critical thinking and individual wrestling with the problems
of the modern world have all but disappeared.
This is not to say that the cultural
world has simply regressed on one side to a belligerent neo-Orientalism
and on the other to blanket rejectionism. Last year's United
Nations World Summit in Johannesburg, for all its limitations,
did in fact reveal a vast area of common global concern that
suggests the welcome emergence of a new collective constituency
that gives the often facile notion of "one world" a
new urgency. In all this, however, we must admit that no one
can possibly know the extraordinarily complex unity of our globalized
world, despite the reality that the world does have a real interdependence
of parts that leaves no genuine opportunity for isolation.
The terrible conflicts that herd people
under falsely unifying rubrics like "America," "The
West" or "Islam" and invent collective identities
for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse,
cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed. We
still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that
are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental
piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics
but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse.
The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings.
Critical thought does not submit to commands to join in the ranks
marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than
the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate
on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow
from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways
than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.
But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient
and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation
that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action
and reaction.
Humanism is centered upon the agency
of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than
on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read
as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm
in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by
no means excludes power, since on the contrary I have tried to
show the insinuations, the imbrications of power into even the
most recondite of studies.
And lastly, most important, humanism
is the only and I would go so far as saying the final resistance
we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure
human history. We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging
democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamt
of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of orthodoxies.
The world-wide protests before the war began in Iraq would not
have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative
communities all across the world, informed by alternative information,
and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian
impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet.
Edward Said
is a professor at Columbia University. He is a contributor to
Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press).
Weekend Edition Features for August 2/3, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet the Real WMD Fabricator: Rolf
Ekeus
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
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