Edward Said, CounterPunch
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.
