The Said Factor

I like the thought, but I'm skeptical that Kathy G. is right to think that more widespread knowledge of Edward Said's work would have posed some kind of substantial stumbling block to the effort to sell the country on the Iraq War. The main intellectual drivers behind America's post-9/11 approach to the Middle East were, if not Said experts, at least broadly familiar with the general thrust of his work (I'd put myself in that category as well) which is precisely why you see things like The Weekly Standard publishing an Edward Said takedown piece by Stanley Kurtz on their October 8, 2001 issue.

Then they took another whack at Said in their November 12, 2001 issue. And Frank Foer offered a sweeping dismissal of Middle East Studies as a discipline in the December 3, 2001 issue of The New Republic tracing the field's flaws to none other than Said. In general, this was a period when "Arabist" became a term of disapprobation and it temporarily became conventional wisdom that foreign service professionals' judgment was mostly corrupted by excessive solicitousness of the opinions of foreign governments. Elites were generally familiar with the broad set of ideas that called the wisdom of invading Iraq into question -- from Middle East studies thinking to the realist tradition of international relations analysis to the mainstream opinion of the U.S. Army officer's corps -- it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken.

Comments

Here is a place where the Vietnam anaolgy holds true.

Back then one of the first things the Hawks did was discredit anyone who actually knew anything about Asia.

Posted by Eric k | May 6, 2008 3:17 PM

It should also be said (ahem) that Said became a straw man for war supporters to dismiss as somehow representative of anti-war opinion. Like you had to be a lefty postcolonial theorist to recognize that an Iraq invasion would be an extraordinarily bad idea.

Posted by Yossarian | May 6, 2008 3:17 PM

And Said was actually born in Jerusalem, so maybe that's relevant. (Actually, maybe not, I'm just repeating it to bug SLC.)

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 3:20 PM

Sorry, I'm not impressed by someone, like Kathy G., who takes Said seriously. Granted, Said found plenty of howlers in Western "scholarship," but, excuse me, what about Islamic "scholarship"? I'll take Western scholarship over Said's politically correct mishmash, not to mention old-fashioned Islamic fundamentalism. If you want an accurate picture of the history of Islam, read Edward Gibbon, a far greater historian than Said ever dreamed of being.

Posted by Alan Vanneman | May 6, 2008 3:21 PM

Good point Matt. After all, Christopher Hitchens is one the most prominent and diehard supporters of the Iraq War, and he was friend of Edward Said, and obviously versed in his writings (I suppose whether he understood them is another issue).

Posted by Will | May 6, 2008 3:25 PM

If you want an accurate picture of the history of Islam, read Edward Gibbon

Noted without comment.

For those not familiar with Gibbon, he was the author of "The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire" and died in 1794.

Posted by James Gary | May 6, 2008 3:25 PM

Alan Vanneman illustrated the idiocy of the nutjob critique of Said (the non-nutjob critique ios smarter -- but not relevant here). Said was opposed to both Orientaism and Occidentalism -- found in some modern Islamic "scholarship". And he was a professor of English, not a historian.

But Said has become an almost uniquely misrepresented figure -- probably becuase his books are pretty hard to read. Also maybe because he was a polically active Palestinian in New York.

Posted by Ikram | May 6, 2008 3:26 PM

I'll take Western scholarship over Said's politically correct mishmash, not to mention old-fashioned Islamic fundamentalism.

1. Said was such an "old-fashioned Islamic fundamentalist" that he brought groups of Palestinian teenagers to Dachau to teach them the horrors of the Holocaust.

2. Calling Said's work politically correct is just wrong, wrong, wrong. It most certainly is not the kind of multi-cultural stereotype that it's made out to be, and is in fact explicitly critical of that kind of scholarship. But what do I know? I've only actually read some of it.

Posted by Freddie | May 6, 2008 3:33 PM

I'm a graduate student in this very field, and it's true that Said's Orientalism is one of its foundations. But it is not an unquestioned work, and is definitely criticized as much as it is praised, and for failings which have nothing to do with the neocon criticism. The field has changed much since 1980 -- and the pre-1980 orientalists who were Said's targets are very different than both the academics and neocons of today.

A common critique in my department, for example, is that Said is far more of a scholar of certain 19th and 20th century European writers, more of a philologist and very traditional European-oriented litterateur, than he is familiar with a Middle Eastern reality. The Middle East, in a sense, was not his interest at all.

In any case, I think Kathy G is right here; familiarity with Said goes a long way. The book packs a powerful rhetorical punch if you give it patience, something which can't be encapsulated in a quick summary.

And as for Alan Vanneman: just pick up a copy of Orientalism and read the whole thing. You should be able to understand it (and it is not a difficult book -- that is why it is on so many undergraduate reading lists). When you have read it, then revise your opinion on whether it is motivated by 'political correctness'. It's much more sober and less 'post-modern' than it appears to you in your nightmares.

Posted by CG | May 6, 2008 3:33 PM

For those not familiar with Gibbon, he was the author of "The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire" and died in 1794.

Well to be fair the concluding chapters of Decline & Fall addressed the rise of Islam.

Not that his insights have much if any relevance to the contemporary Middle East.

Posted by LarryM | May 6, 2008 3:33 PM

While Said was far from the worst of the worst, Orientalism is still very much written in a lit crit style, making it a poor choice for changing perceptions of Arabs and Middle East in the U.S. military. It was written for fellow lit crits, not officers.

Posted by blah | May 6, 2008 3:38 PM

While Said was far from the worst of the worst, Orientalism is still very much written in a lit crit style, making it a poor choice for changing perceptions of Arabs and Middle East in the U.S. military. It was written for fellow lit crits, not officers.

Posted by blah | May 6, 2008 3:38 PM

Here's a bit of the history of Islam that I doubt ever made it into Said's ouevre.

"The kindness that Mehmed had shown to the Emperor's surviving ministers was of short duration.... Five days after the fall of the city [3 June] he gave a banquet. In the course of it, when he was well flushed with wine, someone whispered to him that Notaras's fourteen-year old son was a boy of exceptional beauty. The Sultan at once sent a eunuch to the house of the [Megas Doux] to demand that the boy be sent to him for his pleasure. Notaras, whose elder sons had been killed fighting, refused to sacrifice the boy to such a fate. Police were then sent to bring Notaras with his son and his young son-in-law, the son of the Grand Domestic Andronicus Cantacuzenus, into the Sultan's presence. When Notaras still defied the Sultan, orders were given for him and the two boys to be decapitated on the spot. Notaras merely asked that they should be slain before him, lest the sight of his death should make them waver. When they had both perished he bared his neck to the executioner. The following day nine other Greek notables were arrested and sent to the scaffold. (151)"

Posted by Hector | May 6, 2008 3:39 PM

"it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken"

By whom? Why? Not by me and the hundreds of thousands of men and women marching against the war more than once in early 2003, being pushed back by Michael Bloomberg's police and their horses, being entirely ignored by the cool kidz of the media. We knew bullshit when we saw it. So I ask, how does it happen that bullshit becomes "generally accepted"? Maybe you have an idea, Matt.

Posted by David in NY | May 6, 2008 3:41 PM

Well to be fair the concluding chapters of Decline & Fall addressed the rise of Islam.

OT: As I recall, it's actually about a third of the book--Gibbon was really into compare-and-contrasting Islam (which he saw as dynamic and relatively uncorrupt) with the Byzantine Empire (which he saw as decadent and moribund.)

I found the Islamic sections of Gibbon soporific, though, and I suspect that by present-day standards of scholarship they're pretty poorly researched as well.

Posted by James Gary | May 6, 2008 3:44 PM

Hey Hector, how would you know what Edward Said knew? You're just jerk, and your post is just the blog equivalent of "Yo' mama's a whore!" Grow up.

Posted by David in NY | May 6, 2008 3:46 PM

Edward Gibbon gave the first printing of his history to John McCain, but you know how the years tend to degrade a lot of books.

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 3:50 PM

"In a short space of time all the people in the Delhi fort were put to the sword, and in the course of one hour the heads of 10,000 infidels were cut off. The sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels, and all the goods and effects, the treasure and the grain which for many a long year had been stored in the fort became the spoil of my soldiers. They set fire to the houses and reduced them to ashes, and they razed the buildings and the fort to the ground....All these infidel Hindus were slain, their women and children, and their property and goods became the spoil of the victors. I proclaimed throughout the camp that every man who had infidel prisoners should put them to death, and whoever neglected to do so should himself be executed and his property given to the informer. When this order became known to the ghazis of Islam, they drew their swords and put their prisoners to death.

"One hundred thousand infidels, impious idolaters, were on that day slain. Maulana Nasiruddin Umar, a counselor and man of learning, who, in all his life, had never killed a sparrow, now, in execution of my order, slew with his sword fifteen idolatrous Hindus, who were his captives....on the great day of battle these 100,000 prisoners could not be left with the baggage, and that it would be entirely opposed to the rules of war to set these idolaters and enemies of Islam at liberty... no other course remained but that of making them all food for the sword."

--from the memoirs of Tamerlane, Emir of Samarkand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur

"Sources claim that when Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. In the city of Isfahan, he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded,[20][21] and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside of Aleppo.[22] Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,[23] and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and 90,000 more in Baghdad.[19][24] As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests

Posted by Hector | May 6, 2008 3:56 PM

Said was a serious lit-crit giant. He was not an expert on middle eastern history or the contemporary middle east....so he's really not that relevant to the discussion (his concerns were much more meta).

with that said, Bernard Lewis forgets more in a year than Said ever knew about middle eastern history, and he still predicted Iraq all wrong.

"expert" prognostications are always a crapshoot (and every rebuttal to this point will be subject to the winner's bias fallacy -- guaranteed).

the problem is that NO ONE really knows that much....and so when it comes to prognostications...10% knowledge doesn't really make you any more accurate than 2% knowledge.

Posted by Nathan | May 6, 2008 3:56 PM

Edward Said's enemies were and remain Bernard Lewis and the ziocon jews. In the same way, Martin Luther King's enemies were J. Edgar Hoover and the Klan.

Posted by Trevor | May 6, 2008 4:00 PM

Hector's rational persuasion has won me over. I am now willing to clearly state that I don't think we should elect Tamerlane, the 14th century Emir of Samarkand, to the 21st century Presidency of the USA.

That said, I'm still sitting on the fence, though, about Nero. I hear he's got a pretty good de-regulation plan to save us working people from having to pay for fire alarms in our houses as part of the building codes.

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 4:01 PM

"The Said Factor"

That was the best headline you could come up with for this post? Not, "She Said, They Said", "He Said, She Said", and so on?

"A common critique in my department, for example, is that Said is far more of a scholar of certain 19th and 20th century European writers, more of a philologist and very traditional European-oriented litterateur, than he is familiar with a Middle Eastern reality. The Middle East, in a sense, was not his interest at all."

This is an insightful paragraph.

Posted by Fred | May 6, 2008 4:01 PM

Gee - if you're "remotely familiar" with Said's work I don't think you're going to be turning to Stanley Kurtz to get an insightful critique (rather than say William Hart).

The point, rather, is that if Said was widely read before Kurtz and Foer came along, people would have seen that they're idiots and not paid any attention to them. Unfortunately, as any of the above posts aptly demonstrate, Said's been made into a boogeyman.

Posted by berger | May 6, 2008 4:01 PM

Don't forget your colleague, Robert Kaplan, and his awful book, "Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite"

Posted by Chris | May 6, 2008 4:03 PM

Gee - if you're "remotely familiar" with Said's work I don't think you're going to be turning to Stanley Kurtz to get an insightful critique (rather than say William Hart).

The point, rather, is that if Said was widely read before Kurtz and Foer came along, people would have seen that they're idiots and not paid any attention to them. Unfortunately, as any of the above posts aptly demonstrate, Said's been made into a boogeyman.

Posted by berger | May 6, 2008 4:04 PM

Hector-

You're dumb. And astonishingly ignorant. I mean really, the target of Said's Orientalism was WESTERN ORIENTALISTS, and you go ahead and attempt to refute Said's argument by.... citing the target of Said's critique? Way to go.

Posted by rickm | May 6, 2008 4:05 PM

I'm surprised that no one has pointed out yet that Said was a Christian. He also founded a foundation with a friend of his, a famous Jewish-Argentinean musician/composer whose name escapes me right now, to help financially support the re-emergence of Jewish artists as a cultural force after the Holocaust killed many Jewish artists and destroyed much of the Ashkenazim's cultural vitality as the artists were often dead and not around to help pass on certain artistic traditions.

The point of Said's work was to show a particular narrative prevalent in the West to be silly bullshit. Much Orientalist scholarship started with the premise Islam = strange and scary and just went on from there. It also reduced all of Middle Eastern culture to bare essentials that had little to do with how people lived. For centuries, Europeans felt they could be learned about the Middle East today by just reading the Koran. Such Europeans would then go to the Middle East (a term which started out as a strategic term to describe a place in the British Empire, originally referring to India and then later Egypt during WWII) with just the Koran in mind and filter everything through what the Koran said and ignore any ways that Arabs deviated from the Koran in their actual lives. Orientalist scholarship didn't exist to deepen European understanding of another people and their history and culture, but to reinforce stereotypes and make it more palatable to militarily dominate them (similar to how John Stuart Mill wrote in "On Liberty" how old societies like China and India had grown senile and scared and thus needed a dynamic Europe to control it). Orientalist scholarship wasn't history; it was an excuse.

Also, while Gibbon was a historian who wrote a bit about Islam, he was primarily a historian focused on the Roman Empire. That's like complaining that in a discussion about the contemporary UK that Clausewitz was a better political scientist than Zadie Smith. What is such a comment exactly supposed to tell us?

Posted by Reality Man | May 6, 2008 4:05 PM

I agree with El Cid. It sure sounds like this Tamerlane fellow would know how to deal with this Iraq mess we have on our hands.

Posted by blah | May 6, 2008 4:06 PM

Elites were generally familiar with the broad set of ideas that called the wisdom of invading Iraq into question ... it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken.

HAhaha! What do all your MSM critic friends say the passive voice means? You accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken. There were not any elites except Beltway courtiers and think tank propagandists who accepted that opposition to the war was mistaken. The American academic world was overwhelmingly opposed. Experts like Scowcroft, Baker, Brzezinski, Blix, and ElBaradei were opposed. The UN inspectors were opposed. Democratic voters, i.e. Democrats without political ambitions, were also overwhelmingly opposed. Outside America, everyone was opposed.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 6, 2008 4:08 PM

Re Matthew's comment "it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken. "
--------------
NOT "mistaken" so much as UNPROFITABLE.

As in "Not only will Israeli billionaire Haim Saban not give me $1 Million, he might give my opponent $1 Million instead.

Members of Congress may have the low intelligence of rats, but even rats can find their way to the food dish.

Posted by Don Williams | May 6, 2008 4:14 PM

It is rather telling that American foreign policy mavens hate Edward Said. However, I don't think many of the experts you believe to be familiar with Said actually are. Outside of Christopher Hitchens, who co-edited a magnificent book, Blaming the Victims, with Said, most of these experts betray any conception of the attitudes of middle eastern citizens. They were terribly familiar with their corrupt, autocratic governments which they wished to overthrow, but they have no idea about the average citizen.

All the FP types seem entirely wed to the mythological propagandized history of Israel and the Palestinian territories, and thus don't understand the grievances. Further, the "experts" all too common focus on power politics is glaring.

Case and point, when changing the Iraqi regime, they relied primarily on secular exiles with little contact to average Iraqi's. These exiles, and as a result, their American sponsors hardly new that Iraq had developed into a splintered society, with the Shia majority becoming fiercely religious. More importantly, they could not recognize that a unilateral American occupying force had very little support after supporting Sadaam, bringing crushing sanctions, increasing unemployment and failing to support the Shia uprising.

So, Im not sure these men are really familiar with Said. I mean, outside of trying to discredit his Palestinian heritage, they never really cam forward with serious critiques of his works--well, beyond Orientalism.

Posted by jeff | May 6, 2008 4:16 PM

That was the best headline you could come up with for this post? Not, "She Said, They Said", "He Said, She Said", and so on?

How about simply:

Read Said, Fred

Posted by Ryan | May 6, 2008 4:20 PM

Reality Man,

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Christians, Hindus and Zoroastrians have every reason to view Islam as "strange and scary"? I don't consider that silly bullshit at all.

From Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address of two years ago, on account of which a Christian nun in Somalia was murdered:

"The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.[7]"

Posted by Hector | May 6, 2008 4:22 PM

hector-

Thats because you are full of silly bullshit.

Posted by rickm | May 6, 2008 4:24 PM

Reality Man - His name is Daniel Barenboim.

Said's book is about seeing the world through simplistic dichotomies. Us vs. the Other. West vs. East. Christendom vs. Islam. Europe vs. the Orient. Masculine vs. Feminine. Active vs. Passive. Modernity vs. Antiquity. Science vs. Wisdom. Rationality vs. Emotion. Straight vs. Gay.

Take just about any pair of words you want and you can map it onto the West/Orient fault line. Top vs. Bottom. Light vs. Dark. Sun vs. Moon.

This, he says, tells us something about ourselves (ie Western intellectuals) but very little about the people we're supposedly studying.

Said's book could be a helpful corrective for people who look into mirrors and think they're windows, but it wouldn't help much past that.

Posted by Bloix | May 6, 2008 4:27 PM

Forget Said. The absurdity here is the idea--admittedly one cherished by intellectuals like Yglesias and Kathy G. (whoever she is)--that its books and the arguments contained therein that determine the actions of individuals and institutions. How unlucky it is, then, that the officer class was reading "the Arab Mind" and not "Orientalism"!--as though these books were picked at random! As though the officer class's predilection for "the Arab Mind" signals anything more than the fact that "the Arab Mind" served as justification for previously determined beliefs and future intended actions.

Books and ideas are promulgated to the extant that they serve the needs of power. The notion that there is a marketplace of ideas, from which emerge the "best ideas" that in turn influence the course of events is the self-delusion of intellectuals who themselves cherish fantasies of control.

Although in this case, it may simply be a symptom of the larger unwillingness among callow liberals to grapple with the nature of American institutions and the actual reasons underlying the invasion of Iraq. Better to blame the books!

Posted by Mark | May 6, 2008 4:30 PM

"How about simply:

Read Said, Fred"

"Right Said Fred" would be better.

Posted by Fred | May 6, 2008 4:30 PM

Disapprobation for "Arabists" (meaning Middle East experts who supposedly have a romantic attachment to Arab culture, and/or a view of US interests, that biases their judgment in an overly pro-Arab direction) in some circles long predates 9/11.

I'm reading Charles DeGaulle's memoirs of World War II, and, in discussing Free French dealings in the Middle East, he writes about the malign influence of "Arabophiles" in the British Foreign Service at that time.

In the 1940s, 50s and early 60s, before Israel occupied the West Bank territories and before the US was willing to supply Israel with lots of weapons, Zionists frequently complained about "Arabist" influence in the US State Department.

I don't know enough about the specific old policy disputes in question to have an opinion on how often the "Arabists" or "Arabophiles" were right and how often they were wrong.

Posted by Martin | May 6, 2008 4:30 PM

Thank God you said this, I was thinking this back in 2001. I was a freshman at the University of Virginia and my freshman English teacher added Orientalism to our curric the week after the Afghanistan war began. Several of my aunts and uncles were all for the Iraq war until I bought them all copies of Orientalism for X-mas in 2002.

I agree, had more people (read: not the idiots that lied us into the war) read his work, we'd have a better understand of how the Middle East works and the correct foreign policy to address the obvious danger it now presents.

Posted by Phil Gover | May 6, 2008 4:37 PM

Bloix, thanks for the info.

"Reality Man,

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Christians, Hindus and Zoroastrians have every reason to view Islam as "strange and scary"? I don't consider that silly bullshit at all."

And what does that tell us exactly? By the same token, Muslims also have a reason to see Christians (the Crusades, the Bosnian genocide, Russian genocide in Chechnya over centuries, etc.) as "strange and scary." For those of us who are not religious partisans in such squabbles, this is all rather silly and the people who wish to divide man against man over such foolishness are all on the same side, just on different spectrums of that same side (just as how a non-violent, meaning never personally killed anybody, intellectual who advocated violence like Sartre and a violent dictator like Mao were both on the communist spectrum). Reducing all of the individuals who belong to a certain religion down to an absolute, monolithic conception such as "strange and scary Islam" is simply silly. Writers like Dante were not content to say that Muslims had done bad things, but that Mohammed was an evil interloper who was burning in Hell while being eternally tortured by the Devil for trying to lead people away from Christianity.

Besides, by your logic, Jews have a reason to think of both Christians and Muslims as "strange and scary," yet I don't see you converting to Judaism.

Posted by Reality Man | May 6, 2008 4:38 PM

screw Said. he killed my homeboy Adebisi

Posted by Poet | May 6, 2008 4:41 PM

"Right Said Fred" would be better.

But Kathy G. was advocating that people (perhaps especially people of, ahem, your political persuasion, Fred) *read* Said.

Admittedly, though, my idea works much better for her post than for Matt's.

OK, better plays-on-words needed.

Posted by Ryan | May 6, 2008 4:44 PM

CG wrote
the pre-1980 orientalists who were Said's targets are very different than both the academics and neocons of today

Er -- one of Said's targets was Bernard Lewis -- a man much admired by the neocons of today (e.g. Dick Cheney). Same guys then, same guys now.

Posted by Ikram | May 6, 2008 4:47 PM

The problem with Said is that he got it wrong. He turned 19th century western arabists and their ideas into a misleading charicature in order to make sense of world history. In the process he failed to note that the real issue with Western projections of the oriental is that they were too romantic, not that they were too negative or 'imperialistic' (a very funny thing to assert against the 'enemies' of traditional islam which embodies religious imperialism as a sacrament).

In attacking the West's vision he also obscured and excused the real pathologies that exist in the islamic world. (which is even more interesting since his christian ancestors are the historical victims of one of those pathologies: violent religious intolerance.) In short it was a fun hypothesis but it has been proved wrong. Kind of like the lenninist interpretation of imperialism or the fanonesque view of colonialism.

Posted by Northern Observer | May 6, 2008 4:47 PM

Northern Observer wrote:
In attacking the West's vision he also obscured and excused the real pathologies that exist in the islamic world

Only in the sense that Danny Williams, in attacking Ottawqa, has excused the real pathologies that exist in Dublin.

Or, put another way, stop teh stupid. Said was not an Occidentalist.

Posted by Ikram | May 6, 2008 4:55 PM

Shorter Northern Observer-

Sure Said was right to criticize orientalists--but only because they weren't racist enough.

Posted by rickm | May 6, 2008 4:56 PM

"The problem with Said is that he got it wrong. He turned 19th century western arabists and their ideas into a misleading charicature in order to make sense of world history. In the process he failed to note that the real issue with Western projections of the oriental is that they were too romantic, not that they were too negative or 'imperialistic' (a very funny thing to assert against the 'enemies' of traditional islam which embodies religious imperialism as a sacrament).

In attacking the West's vision he also obscured and excused the real pathologies that exist in the islamic world."

Huh? Why couldn't the Orientalists have displayed both romanticism and imperialism (after all, fascists were products of both strains of thought)? The presence of one does not mean the other didn't exist or wasn't predominant.

Your second point here is also a false dichotomy, just like your first. Let's say a Chinese-American writer descended from 19th-century railroad workers writes a book about how horrible Maoist China was and doesn't mention how his ancestors were mistreated in the US. Does that invalidate his book? Should African-American writers not be allowed to say how horrible Charles Taylor was without bringing up the history of anti-black racism in American? Some people just think that unless a critique of the West doesn't also attack some part of the East for good measure, the writer either fails to personally acknowledge those faults, the writer just hates the West or that the writer must be in favor of the sins of whatever non-Western part of the world is under discussion. This is little more than a way of saying "I know you are, but what am I?"

Posted by Reality Man | May 6, 2008 4:56 PM

I do think it was not a good idea for a lot of people, particularly some rabid supporters, to conclude that a work (Orientalism) which seemed to me a to be mostly one of thematic criticism was instead a work of systematized) i.e. "social science") research.

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 5:24 PM

But Kathy G. was advocating that people (perhaps especially people of, ahem, your political persuasion, Fred) *read* Said."

Ryan,

Would you care to summarize a few the useful insights you've gleaned about the Muslim world from reading Said's Orientalism? If what you write sounds compelling to me, I'll consider reading it.

Posted by Fred | May 6, 2008 5:42 PM

Martin @ 4:30,

Prejudice against Arabists in the State Dept, certainly predates 9/11. This is a more general condemnation of FP professionals who "go native," i.e. learn the idiomatic (as opposed to formal or acadamic)language, study the culture from the inside, have real personal friends in country, even marry.... In other words, people who really know the country, not just about the country.

There was an article treating the subject about 20 years ago in a popular "intellectual" magazine. I believe it was.... the Atlantic.

Posted by Adams | May 6, 2008 5:53 PM

He was not an expert on middle eastern history or the contemporary middle east....so he's really not that relevant to the discussion (his concerns were much more meta).

Said was not an expert on the Middle East, Foucault was not an expert historian of medicine, Kant had little knowledge of and didn't even like art. They all got some aspects spectacularly wrong and totally ignored others.

Looking for all the answers in any one author or book is the sure sign of an uneducated mind - it's about the free exchange of interesting ideas and that's why they're all worth reading.

Posted by novakant | May 6, 2008 5:58 PM

The real Arabists -- Westerners with long ties to the Arab world and deep sympathy for it -- were smeared by Said's attack on them from the left as "Orientalists." Thus, Said inadvertently aided the subsequent neocon attack on Arabists from the right.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 6, 2008 6:10 PM

Gee, it seems like less than a week ago Kathy G. had been caught more or less plagiarizing another blogger's post! But, hey, she's part of "the progressive coalition" so that's all that matters, right? Back in the club, huh?

Okay, . . . um, I hate to break it to you kids, but Edward Said, despite his virtues, was an infamous moral coward. His family left Egypt when Islamic fundamentalists burnt down his father's paper factory. Said, of course, neglected to ever mention that until the embarrassing facts came out a few years prior to his death. It would've represented complexities babyboomer academic leftists couldn't deal with and, well, he had a career to build. And thus he shamefully downplayed the role of fundamentalist Islam throughout his career. Beyond pathetic.

A prepschool educated aristocrat-manque, Said was famous for luxurious suits and international world weary Bryan Ferry act. He wouldn't ride the subways in New York. He pretty much single handedly destroyed the Mideast Dept at Columbia and arguably much of the rest of the world.

Europeans and guilt-ridden Jewish liberals in New York and elsewhere -- Ben Sonnenberg, Victor Navasky, Daniel Barenboim, etc., etc. -- fell for it big time. (Ikram couldn't be more wrong. Said thrived in New York, in large part through the support of guilt-ridden liberal Jews.) And fools like Kathy G. and the kind of kids who like cartoon books that explain Noam Chomsky and Foucalt evidently still do. Then, yeah, you get posters like Trevor who've never read a word by the man, but want to work in their daily rant, however ignorant. Whatever.

On the plus side, hey, Said was a surprisingly good pianist with a real love of music.

Due note: this isn't an anti-Palestinian comment. I have a lot of sympathy for Palestinians. None of the ones I've met, for one thing, would be dishonest -- like Said was -- about the circumstances behind their coming the West.

But then most of them were struggling and they couldn't, say, fly in and pose for a picture throwing a rock during the Infatida like Said did (and from a safe spot too!), before jetting back to the international academic circuit. The guy was actually pretty pathetic as a moral figure or whatever.

That said, 'Orientalism' is still an important text and his points on Jane Ausetn's 'Mansfield Park' needed to be made, but, man, there still are some very real problems with 'Orientalism' (and we're not really talking about Jane Austen, are we?). Ian Buruma, among others, has addressed a few of them.

Posted by Z | May 6, 2008 6:15 PM

Damn, a comment thread tailor-made to get me angry. I'll try not to take the bait, let me just say a few things about Hector's breathtaking revelations.

1. The quote you got about Mehmed comes from a Byzantine-Ottoman historian named Doukas, who had an axe to grind with Mehmed particularly; a host of modern historians have cast doubt on a lot of his assertions, particularly this event (other Grecophone chroniclers have described it differently, including some who were closer to the action).

2. Tamerlane surely killed people, as conquerors usually do. But these accountings (I think they are from Ibn Arabshah but I could be wrong) are notable for exaggerating the scale of "infidel killing". Why would they do so? Because that kind of thing is a common trope of Middle Eastern chroniclers since the pre-Islamic period -- read Homer. Playing up one's defense of the faith, or of legitimizing principles more generally, increases your stock in the eyes of rivals -- in Timur's case, these were the Turkmen confederacies, and the Egyptian Mamluks, and Indian amirs, and various other Muslim states. What 16th C Spanish conquistador did not boast about how many Native American villages he brought under the sword of Christendom? Sober estimates of the death count of Tamerlane's conquests are actually very low, especially in comparison to the (non-Muslim!) Mongol conquests almost two centuries earlier.

Keep bringing up frivolous points, Hector, and I will have to refute them. I know more about this than you do.

Posted by CG | May 6, 2008 6:20 PM

Z writes"

"Okay, . . . um, I hate to break it to you kids, but Edward Said, despite his virtues, was an infamous moral coward. His family left Egypt when Islamic fundamentalists burnt down his father's paper factory. Said, of course, neglected to ever mention that until the embarrassing facts came out a few years prior to his death. It would've represented complexities babyboomer academic leftists couldn't deal with and, well, he had a career to build. And thus he shamefully downplayed the role of fundamentalist Islam throughout his career. Beyond pathetic."

Got that? Your getting your information from Commentary right? Yeah that article that claimed that Said wasn't from Jerusalem, um, not really true at all. But believe the smears.

Posted by Rickm | May 6, 2008 6:29 PM

Re El Cid

The question as to whether the late Prof. Said was actually born in Jerusalem, like whether Yasir Arafat was actually born in Jerusalem is rather academic. If they were, it was strictly by accident as their families did not reside there. Both Mr. Arafat and Prof. Said were Egyptians. Much like John McCains' birth in the Canal Zone was an accident because his father happened to be stationed there at the time.

Re Martin

The Arabists in the State Department were a group centered around a man named Harold Saunders, who was an official therein at the time. Mr. Saunders and his coterie were vehemently opposed to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and worked assiduously thereafter to undermine relations between Israel and the US. Basically, they counted heads. 150 million Arabs vs less then 1 million Jews (in 1948). The issue of the morality of either side was totally irrelevant to them.

Re General

It should be pointed out that Prof. Said opposed the Oslo accords, opposed the two state solution for Palestine, and opposed the existence of an independent Israel. His association with Daniel Barenboim, whose opinions about the State of Israel would accord well with that of Mr. Trevor, was nothing but two anti-Zionists collaborating with each other.

Re Don Williams

Leave it to white trash Don Williams to bring up Hiam Saban, his favorite appeaser. Given the millions donated by various Saudi princes to the Clinton library, which at least equals any monies they received from Mr. Saban, he will be hard put to claim the latter has them bought and paid for.

Posted by SLC | May 6, 2008 6:37 PM

Why is it right wing pin-heads are convinced that liberals and leftists would be surprised that there are reactionaries, thugs, simpletons, and nitwits in any culture, nation, or ethnic group?

Like the notion that it would be "shocking" to consider that in Arabic states such as Egypt there could be mobs, gangs, or political movements based in repression?

So, somehow someone who had found Edward Said's work interesting (but not the One True Document of Human Society) would be discouraged to find that his family might have been involved in or the victims of some societal or political violence in 1940s Egypt? What on Earth are you smoking?

Yeah. Pretty common. Not shocking.

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 6:38 PM

Seems like some very basic facts are being overlooked here.

Edward Said was a literary critic. "Orientalism" is a critique of the literature that was produced by the field of the same name. "Orientalism" is not a history text, except in the sense that it outlines the paths of some of the major Orientalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

("Orientalism" is also a somewhat typically byzantine example of contemporary literary criticism, which likewise makes it rather poor general reading).

Said's work _might_ have helped to a very small degree, post 9/11, but only inasmuch as it might have reminded the more reflective supporters of the GWOT just how unoriginal many of their cohorts' assumptions about the Middle East were.

Posted by faux facsimile | May 6, 2008 6:43 PM

The question as to whether the late Prof. Said was actually born in Jerusalem, like whether Yasir Arafat was actually born in Jerusalem is rather academic.

Posted by SLC

Maybe so, but it probably wasn't "academic" to you when you tried to claim the first time that he wasn't born in Jerusalem when he claimed to be -- no, no, at that time you thought it was an urgent thing to focus on that particular claim, not a broader contextualization of whether or not he was a local elite (which he never denied) or could claim any degree of dispossession at the hands of Israelis (and people can follow the debate on that by following the Justus Weiner articles).

It was you that brought it up, and although here I was just yanking your chain, you didn't bring it up because you thought it insignificant, but the very opposite.

PS Why do you spell Haim as Hiam? Is that some sort of an obscure insult?

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 6:47 PM

I think the charge against Said was that he covered up the fundamentalist violence against his family. Though I don't quite see the relevance of that.

Posted by AlanC9 | May 6, 2008 6:48 PM

"The point of Said's work was to show a particular narrative prevalent in the West to be silly bullshit." Which is exactly why the neocons had to discredit him, along with everyone else who knew anything about the mideast, because their particular narrative (our soldiers would be greated with flowers! the conquest of Iraq would pay for itself!) was not silly bullshit. It was deadly bullshit, and the direct cost in blood and money is not totalled yet.

Posted by Diana | May 6, 2008 7:30 PM

I think it's reaching to think that Said would have anything of particular value to say about the Iraq adventure which failed to stand the test of reason without any of Said's bs.

Posted by David Sucher | May 6, 2008 8:04 PM

I think it's reaching to think that Said would have anything of particular value to say about the Iraq adventure which failed to stand the test of reason without any of Said's bs.

Posted by David Sucher

Really?

My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install regimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is to say the least out of date and widely speculative....

I don't think the planning for the post-Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. [US Undersecretary of State Marc] Grossman and [US Undersecretary of Defense Douglas] Feith testified in Congress about a month ago and seemed to have no figures and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de-Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest.

The same is true about their views of the army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on. And to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise. Of course the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but given the recent French and Russian positions I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Said#cite_note-41

Yeah, really sounds like a bunch of crazy BS. Too bad he was such a freakish weirdo fraud that he didn't listen to all those better right wing scholars who were so proven right about the land of ponies & leprechauns and pots o'gold Iraq turned out to be.

Posted by El Cid | May 6, 2008 8:17 PM

"Then, yeah, you get posters like Trevor who've never read a word by the man (Said) but want to work in their daily rant, however ignorant. Whatever" (Z)

Speak for yourself, shit for brains. Why do I get the feeling you're like Richard Cohen - a whiny little sciolist whose dog-eared copy of "The Fountainhood" is always in the back pocket of his "relaxed fit Levis.

Not only read most of Said - but I was privileged to have had a 5-10 minute conversation with him after a talk he gave at the Univ. of Santa Cruz in the mid-80's. A nice, well-apointed guy who contributed a lot to this world.

Posted by Trevor | May 6, 2008 11:14 PM

typo - "The FountainHEAD" in the back pocket of Z's size 42 "relaxed fit" jeans., um

"The Fountainhood" on the other hand is gripping story about Ponce de Leon's collaboration with the Crips for control of Daytona Beach.

Posted by Trevor | May 6, 2008 11:20 PM

"I do think it was not a good idea for a lot of people, particularly some rabid supporters, to conclude that a work (Orientalism) which seemed to me a to be mostly one of thematic criticism was instead a work of systematized) i.e. "social science") research."

"Edward Said was a literary critic. "Orientalism" is a critique of the literature that was produced by the field of the same name. "Orientalism" is not a history text, except in the sense that it outlines the paths of some of the major Orientalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries."

1. Said's work was informed by social science, and continues to inform social science work. It isn't universally loved by anthropologists - the field that I'm most familiar with - but its influence is hard to ignore.

2. It is a historical work. It is an analysis of the ways in which the Middle East was represented in Western discourse. It places it within the historical context of colonialism. The way people throw "literary criticism" around here you'd think it was a book report. A lot of very good history and social science consists of talking about the ways people talk about things.

Posted by justaguy | May 7, 2008 12:14 AM

Malcolm Kerr, assassinated president of the American University of Beirut and father of Suns GM Steve, wrote a fairly harsh review of Orientalism that still rings quite true today:
http://www.geocities.com/orientalismorg/Kerr.htm

Posted by Mike | May 7, 2008 1:05 AM

"Keep bringing up frivolous points, Hector, and I will have to refute them. I know more about this than you do."

That isn't hard. Hector's a Christian freak who thinks the sum total of human knowledge is in the Bible - or the last sermon he heard.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 7, 2008 2:00 AM

justaguy: Many great works are also flawed, or their contextual value is often misjudged. So when people approach Orientalism as a coherent theory of imperial / subaltern relations, then there will be problems. To me, and apparently others, Said was more interested in looking at the intellectual lineage of certain forms of thought, rather than setting anyone up for a follow up study with this or that set of testable data -- as a lot of social science "theorists" assumed he must be doing. In fairness, though, he often sounded as though that is what he was aspiring to.

http://tinyurl.com/58n4fp

Is that more a problem with the work itself, or with its readers who either wished the work to contain more than it actually did or damned the work for not containing what it didn't?

I think that in the case of Orientalism, those problems which did arise were deeply rooted in the overinterpretation of the work by its readers -- for many of whom perhaps it was not one of many but the first attempt they had read by people from colonial environments reflecting upon dominant Western scholarship and artistic treatment of their places of origin -- but it was combined with Said's own manner of stating conclusions as though he had actually performed some systematic study of various areas of Western thought or research when he had not.

Posted by El Cid | May 7, 2008 4:00 AM

Reality Man,

The Crusades were noted for many atrocities committed by the Christians against Muslims and fellow Christians. But none of that changes the fact that they were a thoroughly justified response to Muslim aggression. Syria and Palestine were Christian lands that were stolen away by force and to reclaim them was a good and noble cause. Much like the NLF in Vietnam, the Crusaders fought dirty for a good cause, while the Muslims fought (relatively) cleanly for a bad one. The Crusades are a portrayal of man at his noblest in spite of sometimes sordid events. Would that there were more people like the Crusaders around today. As for the Bosnian genocide, it was also a terrible thing, but none of that changes the fact that Bosnia was traditionally a _Serb majority_ area. The only reason the Muslims are a slight _plurality_ today was because the Croats killed a million Serbs during World War II.

Obviously, I have no intent on converting to Judaism because I think that both Judaism and Islam are wrong and do a disservice to the name of God. I believe that Christ was of divine nature and therefore Islam is wrong for denying this fact. In fact, Islam's problems mostly stem from the fact that they deny the incarnation of God.

Your problem is that because you don't believe in God, you have lost the capability to dicriminate between two things that are obviously different. Unfortunately your problem is all too typical of the modern West which has lost the capability to discriminate between good and bad.

I notice that no one has seen fit to address the Pope's address at Regensburg-- is that because theology baffles you?

Re: Said's book is about seeing the world through simplistic dichotomies. Us vs. the Other. West vs. East. Christendom vs. Islam. Europe vs. the Orient. Masculine vs. Feminine. Active vs. Passive. Modernity vs. Antiquity. Science vs. Wisdom. Rationality vs. Emotion. Straight vs. Gay.

Bloix,

Do you deny that these are opposite things? The world is a dualistic place, and is dualistic at the deepest level, in terms of the division between God and the Devil.

And yes, I do think that Muhammed is in Hell today, for his pedophilia as much as for anything else.

Posted by Hector | May 7, 2008 8:40 AM

I notice that no one has seen fit to address the Pope's address at Regensburg-- is that because theology baffles you?

Of course not. Don't be silly. Theology bores me, particularly given its absolute vacuity. But "baffle" me? Hardly. The simplistic nostrums of theology are uninteresting precisely because of their dull emptiness.

Posted by El Cid | May 7, 2008 8:47 AM

El Cid,

Do you at least understand what the Pope was saying? Islam holds, contra Aquinas, that God is prior to reason and morality. The Muslim God could command what is evil, whereas the Christian God cannot. I would venture to suggest this is because Christianity sees God as three Persons, not one, and identifies Christian love with the relationship between them (again, Islam denies the Trinity). Whereas in Islam, love is an external attribute that God chooses to display or not, and not something inherent to his nature. This is why Islamic sacred scripture lacks an equivalent to, say, the Epistles of St. John.

Christian writers appear to have predicted the rise of Islam in the second century AD:

28 Behold an horrible vision, and the appearance thereof from the east:

29 Where the nations of the dragons of Arabia shall come out with many chariots, and the multitude of them shall be carried as the wind upon earth, that all they which hear them may fear and tremble.

30 Also the Carmanians raging in wrath shall go forth as the wild boars of the wood, and with great power shall they come, and join battle with them, and shall waste a portion of the land of the Assyrians.

31 And then shall the dragons have the upper hand, remembering their nature; and if they shall turn themselves, conspiring together in great power to persecute them.

-- 2 Esdras 15: 28-31

Posted by Hector | May 7, 2008 8:59 AM

Wow. I didn't sleep well last night, and so my thanks to Hector for helping me nod off with one of the world's best sleep aids, theology.

Posted by El Cid | May 7, 2008 9:03 AM

Hector has the zeal of the convert; on the other hand, El Cid finds theology vacuous by Edward Said's "Orientalism" full of deep truths: this had the makings of an interesting conversation, but, alas, El Cid's resort to snark seems to have quashed it. Oh well.

Hector,

You do realize that Christianity is essentially the mass-market version of Judaism -- and that Islam is the Reader's Digest version of Christianity's paper back for the east? I hope you do, because that's the shape of it. There are well-meaning sentiments in both of your borrowings: Christianity's emphasis on charity; Islam's concept of manumission, etc. There have also been horrible acts in the name of both religions. The main differences between your two religions aren't the scholastic distinctions you are attempting to make but the cultural adaptations made for different initial audiences (idol-worshiping Arabian nomads versus Jews turned off by the difficulties of adhering to Judaism).

By the way, before 'Palestine' and Syria were Christian lands, they were provinces of the pagan Romans, and before that, what the Romans renamed Palestine was ours. It is again.

Posted by Chaim | May 7, 2008 9:36 AM

El Cid finds theology vacuous by Edward Said's "Orientalism" full of deep truths...

I may not be into the whole intellectual Freudian obsession about casting one set of cultures as the Male Empire and another set as the Female Subalterns, but, good lord, at least Said brings up interesting and important topics having to do with the actual world and its history.

For unless you're talking about theology as anthropology or cultural studies, you're left with no content in any rational discussion.

Posted by El Cid | May 7, 2008 9:59 AM

Chaim,

I presume from your name that you're Jewish? so presumably you would view Christianity and Islam as heresies of Judaism. That's certainly your right and it's good that you appear to have an active faith. Conversely, as a Christian I believe that the basic purpose of Judaism is as a prologue to the incarnation, and a set of prophecies of Christ. Those aspects of Judaism that don't point to Christ are of interest to Jews, presumably, but not of interest to me.

Strictly as a matter of objective history, of course, it is not correct to say that Christianity is merely an adaptation of Judaism. There are many elements in Christianity that- correct me if I'm wrong- are absent from Judaism or at the very least not emphasized, and may owe more to other sources- Neoplatonic philosophy, Persian dualism, Jewish heresies like the Essenes, etc. (from my point of view of course the life, death and resurrection of Christ are the fulfilment of everything that was true in all the world religions).

E.g. the doctrine of original sin, Hell, the Devil, the Trinity, the war between God and the Devil, the Incarnation, the substitutionary atonement, etc. Jews do not believe that God can incarnate himself, isn't that correct?

Posted by Hector | May 7, 2008 11:26 AM

Would you care to summarize a few the useful insights you've gleaned about the Muslim world from reading Said's Orientalism? If what you write sounds compelling to me, I'll consider reading it.

It wasn't a book "about the Muslim world". It was about Western scholarship on the Muslim world.

And I last read it probably 15 years ago, so I'll beg off offering a summary. I was just trying to summarize Kathy G.'s argument about it, which I have to say I didn't find that convincing. Said seems less relevant nowadays, if only because the scholars and texts he criticized (with the major exception of Bernard Lewis) have been mostly superseded by a new generation of Western interpreters of the Muslim world. It amounts to "lit crit" of lit that no one reads anymore.

Posted by Ryan | May 7, 2008 11:40 AM

i trace this country's problems back to the louisiana purchase -- if the europeans had kept control of the various territories which they had acquired, instead of allowing the entire continent to become unified as one single nation, and several different "countries" had been established on the north american continent, americans might have somewhat less trouble understanding the concepts of compromise and playing well with others.

Posted by karen marie | May 7, 2008 8:14 PM