I am writing final papers right now and in the rhythm of writing. The New York Sun, unfortunately, felt a part of these drum beats as I posted the following respone to this article reagarding one of my intellectual heros, Edward Said. The one available there, unfortunately, is not formatted properly.
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Let me respond first by noting that Said’s influential book is indeed deeply flawed, and in Terry Eagleton’s apt phrasing, is a "flawed classic." The fact that it is a classic and spawned, as noted in the article, the vast field known as Postcolonial criticism is, for Mr. Warraq, a major problem. Many scholars sympathetic to Said’s project have noted most of the basic problems that Mr. Warraq points to, those of historical accuracy etc. Moreover, Postcolonial theory and criticism has moved well beyond Said’s text; the newer iterations of these projects would provide more fertile ground for thinking the contemporary situation. That is my first point.
My second point is that there is, at least in this article, a deeply flawed understanding of what Said’s argument is. "If Orientalists have produced a false picture of the Orient, Orientals, Islam, Arabs, and Arabic society… then how could this false or pseudo-knowledge have helped European imperialists to dominate three-quarters of the globe?"
Producing a false picture is precisely how the imperial project was accomplished. That is, Said is concerned with the ways conquest is justified, or even more perversely, thought to be helpful. A part of his argument, then, is ‘Orientalizing’ the Arab world meant dehumanizing its population, casting them into particular types such as the lascivious harem female or the equally perverse despot. Such debased creatures obviously need the help of Enlightened European empires whose universal rationalism will clearly see beyond their opium-induced irrationality. This is merely a gloss of the argument, but one that I hope illustrates the ways imperialism comes to be justified as, what Said calls, "the civilizing mission." One does not need much imagination to see how such dehumanizing logics–––based on sound epistemological practices no doubt–––duplicate themselves in the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africas, et al. Such logics, moreover, are not merely the scars of history but the present’s still bleeding wounds; the justification offered after invading Iraq, for instance, is a contemporary iteration of the ‘civilizing mission,’ namely the ‘democratizing mission.’
My final point, however, is less firm and more sympathetic to Mr. Warraq’s concerns. The question of how one avoids ethnocentrism without also collapsing into a toothless cultural relativism that remains mute to the persecution of women, homosexuals, and others, is a very serious one. Claiming, as Mr. Warraq does, that it is Said who paved the way for the Arab world to cry victim and hide cruel persecutions behind those tears is both reductive and historically inaccurate. The argument is reductive insofar as it denies the long and continuing history of Western involvement, often of the military kind, in the Arab world. More significantly, at least for Said’s case, is that a better part of the 30 year career following Orientalism was spent as an intellectual and cultural liaison. One article in particular, published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, entitled "The Other America," admonished his readers to shatter their crude one dimensional images of America, or the West generally. In that same article, Said also describes his lifelong efforts with Arab premiers to think more complexly about the West, lest they replicate the same dehumanizing gestures he spent his lifetime critiquing.
