Fast Eddie Said

Played fast and loose with the truth about the Middle East in maligning "orientalism".
...
...Orientalism, by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, published in 1978, pioneered this paranoid approach to an essentially benign academic discipline. In his immensely influential book, Said presented a somewhat confusing survey of the way Europeans and Americans have written and thought about the orient and, more precisely, about the Arab world. Said argued that orientalism was a sinister discourse that constrained the ways westerners could think and write about the orient...

Orientalism was a work of misdirected spleen, written in anger and in haste. Had Said restricted himself to attacking the way Islam and Arabs have been portrayed in novels, films and popular journalism, this would have been a worthwhile enterprise...

...although Said sought to present orientalism as something that was inherently bound up with imperialism and the colonisation of the middle east by Britain and France, the chronology does not bear him out. The first great heyday of orientalism, especially in Britain, was in the 17th century. Edward Pococke was perhaps the leading Arabist in Europe. (His peers were mostly Dutch.) But Pococke's century was one in which the Turks were occupying a large part of the Balkans and still threatened Vienna [1683]. It was a time when thousands of Europeans were taken captive every year by the Barbary corsairs and shipped off to slavery in north Africa [see Captives by Linda Colley]. It was also an age when most serious scholars wrote in Latin. (Edward Said may have been unaware of this, as he omits discussion of the Latin works of such grand Arabists as Marracci or Golius.) The second great age of British orientalism extended from the 1940s to perhaps the 1970s, and therefore roughly coincided with the ending of what the political historian, Elizabeth Monroe has called "Britain's moment in the middle east."..

Indeed, in his book Said manages to avoid mentioning that most Arabs (he really does not care about any other Muslims) were under Turkish rule for some 400 years (1517-1918), while Britain only dominated Egypt from 1882 until 1952, and Iraq, Jordan and Palestine from 1918 until the late 1940s. Similarly French rule in Algeria lasted from 1834 until 1962, and domination of Syria and Lebanon from 1920 until the mid-1940s.

That he was nontheless able to convince a great proportion of the Western chattering classes of the terrible domination of Europeans over Arabs is just another reflection of our ignorance of history (see post immediately below on the Crusades).

H/t to Arts & Letters Daily.

Posted by markc at March 20, 2006 09:49 AM | TrackBack