Edward Said: The debate continues Charles Paul Freund

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Edward Said: The debate continues

Charles Paul Freund

The Daily Star, 9/27/03

Edward Said’s pen is stilled, its polymath elegance silenced. But though Said died this week at 67, after a long struggle with leukemia, he has left a great many other pens busy in the wake of a career that explored literature, politics and, most famously, the relationship between culture and power. A few of these pens are paying direct homage to his memory, of course, but many others are paying a more extended tribute by continuing to discuss and debate his legacy.
That debate has been as contentious as it has been important, and promises to become more contentious yet. Indeed, Said dies as his most pressing work has been encountering its most demanding tests. That work has to do with the relationship between the Western world and the East, and how the West sought to transform aspects of its imagination into power over the East through the process of “Orientalism.”
What is Orientalism? Said identified it as the political, cultural and intellectual system by which the West has for centuries “managed” its relationship with the Islamic world. The central stratagem of this process, Said wrote in Orientalism, his foundational 1978 book on the phenomenon, has been the West’s reductionist misrepresentation of the East. In brief, according to Said and the many critics and journalists he inspired, Orientalism has transformed the East and its people into an alien “Other.” That Other usually a Dark Other was in every way the inferior of the West: unenlightened, barbarous, cruel, craven, enslaved to its senses, given to despotism and, in general, contemptible. Having established an Eastern Other in these degrading terms, the West emerged at the center of its self-serving discourse as, by obvious contrast, enlightened and progressive.
The critique of Orientalism found supporting evidence for its severe charges in texts from the Crusades to contemporary foreign-policy debates. Shakespeare, in King Lear, expresses Orientalism. Sir Richard Burton’s famous translation of the Arabian Nights into a pseudo-archaic language that nobody ever spoke was 16 volumes of Orientalism. Imperial British anthropology texts were Orientalist. What else? Old studio paintings of nude odalisques, slave markets and eunuchs; desert travel literature; novels by Diderot, Montesquieu and Kipling; a mass of specialized historiography; Hollywood movies set in harems; the whole world of academic, “authoritative” Oriental studies; anything having to do with Sinbad the Sailor; and even Henry Kissinger’s ideas for resolving the Israeli-Arab impasse.
All of it, and much more about literature, politics, food and fashion, was studied as part of the immense edifice of Western misrepresentation and degradation of the East.
Was the critique valid? Even in its simplest form, it often was. Western treatments of the East regularly portrayed it as merely exotic, primitive and inferior. The West’s encounter with the East was not only imperial or mercantile; it was teleological, imputing to itself the purpose of enlightening and civilizing its Eastern subjects. Of course, citing self-serving imperialist stupidities was not always a particularly impressive achievement, nor necessarily relevant. But the counter-Orientalist critique often paid itself off with close readings of contemporary political and cultural texts, arguing that imperialist stupidities had transmuted into postcolonial subtleties that, according to the thesis, were no less damaging.
But there was a trap at the core of this critique of Orientalism, and it is to Said’s credit that he himself recognized it. As he noted in his 1993 work Culture and Imperialism, a binary East versus West approach to such complex issues threatens to become a reworking of the “us versus them” imperial worldview.
The resulting discourse, which has sought to address issues of Western power, threatens instead to depict aspects of Eastern powerlessness, if not, in some cases, cultural submission. Indeed, at a certain point the counter-Orientalist critique ceases to describe a system that, it maintains, the West uses to “manage” its relationship with a despised East, and instead emerges as a system of ideas used by some critics to “manage” their relationship with a despised West. In their efforts to address the West’s cultural power, critics of Orientalism may find themselves objectifying Westerners and actually creating an alternative intellectual system we can call “Occidentalism.”
Critics of Western Orientalism have spent a quarter-century sifting through the sins committed by the West against the East a rich and often ugly lode. But their point (and that of their critique) has rarely been to clarify and improve relations and mutual perceptions; the point has been to condemn the West, often by dissecting its imagination. It was simply never a sustained part of the counter-Orientalist critique to examine the East’s imagination and see if it, too, was cluttered with stereotypes, misconceptions, or other detrimental concepts.
Worse, when some scholars did inquire into the dehumanizing trends that may have been present in the East, they were likely to be labeled “Orientalists,” an epithet that eventually became tantamount to “racist,” and which served to marginalize them in the world of respectable scholarship.
This has turned out to be an agenda with consequences. What makes those consequences worth pondering is what made the critique both pressing and valuable to begin with: Orientalist issues were worth addressing not only for their own sake, but because the East-West encounter has been increasingly problematic, with explosive political, military, economic and cultural dimensions.
If the debate over Orientalism provides a better conceptual framework for addressing those issues, it will have been the right critique at the right time. But if, in the end, it has merely devised a one-sided apologia about Western sins and sinners without addressing similar issues in the East, then it will have proved to be merely another adventure in failed left-intellectual rationalization. Worse, if the critique ends up marginalizing or even delegitimizing others who have attempted to address the East’s potential problems, it will have left its subject in a poorer state than it found it. It will have helped shape a West debilitated by guilt about its past, yet with no useful framework for understanding those who hate Westerners enough to provoke mass murder against them (prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, many practitioners of the counter-Orientalist critique dismissed the term “terrorist” as a usage of Western propaganda), while simultaneously absolving the East of any responsibility in its own political failings.
This is an unfinished project. There are numerous voices, both Eastern and Western, still building on Said’s foundation, often in remarkable ways. Nadje al-Ali, a social anthropologist who teaches at the University of Exeter, has begun studying Islamic Occidentalism, based on years of work with the Egyptian women’s movement. She sees Occidentalism not as the equal of Orientalism, but as a reaction against it.
Mohammed Sharafuddin, a brilliant scholar of English literature, argues that Orientalism, while often negative, has been part of a complex cultural process that challenges the cultural barriers of both East and West. He believes that Orientalism has sometimes been a tool wielded by Western writers against Western institutions, and has thus played a liberationist role. John Drew, a scholar of India, has argued that the West’s encounter with the East shaped Romanticism. He offered his work specifically to meet Said’s demand for a more “libertarian” approach to Orientalism.
“There isn’t a single Islam,” Edward Said wrote in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, “there are Islams, just as there are Americas.” His was an invitation to ponder ever more carefully this global confrontation between Islamism and the West, and indeed between East and West, an invitation directed to all sides to consider the many dimensions of their real and imagined “Others.”
In Said’s memory, it is an invitation that all sides must accept.

Charles Paul Freund is a senior editor at Reason magazine in the US. He writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).