Critique of Edward Said

A few years ago when the twin towers of New York were still there, a friend of mine, a journalist working for a newspaper run by an Islamic organisation, knocked me for a loop when he linked the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979. How could Prof. Said, one of my intellectual heroes, have inspired an event that gave a new lease of life to radical Islam? I felt that my friend, who is as staunchly (though stealthily) secular as I am, was naïve to connect the book with the Iranian revolution. Today, I feel that the idea of that linkage is worth exploring.
Prof. Said was a cult figure to my generation, especially to those who studied on Leftish campuses. I avidly read Orientalism during my post-graduate days and saw how the orient is a colonial construct of the West. This influential book, we were told, revolutionised the way we studied the East, especially the Middle East. Orientalism as a discipline, according to Prof. Said, is a body of knowledge that perpetuates pre-conceived notions and stereotypes about the people living in the Middle East and about Islam. He argues that the knowledge we have acquired about the Orient is not objective because it is the product of a process that reflects certain interests and notions.

Stripped of all intellectual paraphernalia, the book says that the West looks at the Arabs through a distorted prism. The central theme of the book is that the discipline of Orientalism is the Western imperialism’s way of understanding and representing and thereby taming the peoples it has conquered. Prof. Said’s idea of the Orient which he places in the history of the European colonialism was a perfectly simple way of understanding the world divided in black and white into the coloniser and the colonised with no grey areas in between. This charmingly uncomplicated model would have remained unquestioned for many more years, if there had not been 9/11 which has blown the lid off the claim that Arabs and Islam have been victims of the imperial West. The terrorist attacks on the United States have uncovered the cataclysmically dangerous potential of political Islam. Grey areas have emerged more prominent and blurred the black and white divisions since then.
Post-9/11, my friend’s observation continued to embarrass me though I revered Prof. Said and read his essays on the Middle East no less passionately. That continued till I found to my surprise that Orientalism was one of the most favourite books among fundamentalist Islamic circles. The break came when I started re-reading the book and found the apologetic tone of his Afterword to the book’s 1995 printing (by Penguin Books) exposing his own sense of uncertainty about the certitudes he espoused in his book.
Denying the charges of anti-Westernism and pro-Islamic fundamentalism often levelled against him by his critics, Prof. Said demolishes the neatly divided black and white world that he has conjured up in is book:

“Yet Orientalism has in fact been read and written about in the Arab world as a systematic defence of Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly that I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient or Islam really are.”(sic) (p.331)

Perhaps this gesture of repentance betrays Prof. Said’s deeper sense of the Islamist rage against the West that his book has fuelled. An entire industry of the Anti-West critique this book inaugurated has lent credence to the view that the plight of the Arab people in the Middle East would not have been what it is today had it not been for the colonial adventures of Europe in the Middle East. He blames the European awe of Islam’s territorial expansion for the Orientalist representation in which Islam has “come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians.” (p. 59). His argument is that European authors who internalised this fear of Islam showed no interest in the ‘high culture’ of Muslims:

“After Mohammed’s death in 632, the military and later the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam grew enormously. First Persia, Syria, and Egypt, then Turkey, then North Africa fell to the Muslim armies; in the eighth and ninth centuries Spain, Sicily, and parts of France were conquered. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Islam ruled as far east as India, Indonesia, and China. And to this extraordinary assault Europe could respond with very little except fear and a kind of awe.” (p. 59)

The Christian Europe that has failed to understand the magnificence of the conquering Muslims later started representing the Muslim, Ottoman or Arab as “a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient”. (p. 60) It is a way of political domination of the Orient, Prof. Said says in his book. The author who is obsessed with the European colonialism and its ‘distorted’ representation of the east shows very little interest the conquests of Islam which are always glorified in Islamic circles. Islamic expansion of the past is still part of the folklore of the golden age of Islam. The underlying theme of Orientalism is the myth of a ‘magnificent’ culture that Prof. Said conjures up to marginalise Islam’s own history of colonial expansion. Author Ibn Warraq in his critique of Prof. Said shows how an entire generation of Arabs have been taught the art of victimhood by the book:

“Said's emotionalism about Western imperialism's evils belies the real overall historical background of the region. The French presence lasted less than four years, being ignominiously expelled by the British and the Turks. The Ottomans had been the masters of Egypt since 1517, a total of 280 years. Counting the British and French protectorates, Egypt was under Western control for 67 years, Syria for 21 years, and Iraq for just 15. Saudi Arabia was never under Western control. Contrast this with Southern Spain, which was under the Muslim yoke for 781 years, and Greece for 381 years. The splendid new Christian capital that eclipsed Rome—Byzantium—is still in Muslim hands. At last report, neither the Spanish nor the Greeks have taken up the politics of victimhood.”

It is time Muslims disabused themselves of the belief that Islam would have been a glorious civilisation it once was had it not been for the pro-Zionist and imperialist West.
Writers like ibn Warraq are rendering great service to Muslims by making them understand history through historical analysis and not through concepts whose proponents would have us believe in conspiracy theories. My friend may not be accurate in academic sense about the relationship between Prof. Said’s book and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. But his understanding of that relationship shows his deeper observation of the destructive influence of Orientalism on political Islam driven by a revolutionary zeal.

(Read Warraq interview on his new book here)