Another critic claims that :

Said  shows that there were plenty of nineteenth-century European travel writers and journalists who visited the Orient and quickly developed an ill-informed opinion of the Arabs and their religion. It is a surprise to find the historians Leopold von Ranke and Jacob Burckhardt expressing some agreement with such views. It is not so surprising to find genuine racists of the period—like Joseph Arthur Gobineau, whose Essay an the Inequality of the Human Races later provided the Nazis with a rationale—espousing such views. Although Said makes excuses for him, one of the worst offenders in this regard was plainly Karl Marx. Said cites the following passage:

We must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. . . . England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. 

But none of these examples, nor indeed all of them combined, are sufficient to sustain Said's thesis. It is not difficult to show that each of his three main claims about Orientalism is seriously flawed.

For a start, he should have realized that Abdel Malek's analysis of the essentialist failings of Oriental scholarship and Foucault's thesis that knowledge always generates power are quite incompatible. If, as Malek and Said claim, Orientalism's picture of the Arabs is false, then it is difficult to see how it could have been the source of the knowledge that led to the European imperial domination of the region. According to Said, Orientalist essentialism is not knowledge, but a series of beliefs that are both distorted and out of date. Surely, though, if these beliefs are wrong, they would have contributed to poor judgment, bad estimates, and mistaken policies. Hence the political power of Western imperialism must have been gained despite them, not because of them.

In fact, Said's whole attempt to identify Oriental Studies as a cause of imperialism does not deserve to be taken seriously. The only plausible connection he establishes between Oriental scholarship and imperialism is the example of the Comte de Volney, who wrote two travel books on Syria and Egypt in the 1780s suggesting that the decaying rule of the Ottoman Empire in those countries made them ripe for political change. Napoleon used Volney's arguments to justify his brief, ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798, though Volney himself was an opponent of French involvement there. But nowhere else does Said provide an analysis of the thoughts and reasons of the imperial decision-makers at the time they actually entered upon Europe's Oriental adventures. At most, Said establishes that Orientalism provided the West with a command of Oriental languages and culture, plus a background mindset that convinced it of its cultural and technological advance over Islam. But these are far from sufficient causes of imperial conquest since they explain neither motives, opportunities, nor objectives.

      Said gives the impression of offering more when he cites speeches and essays by Lord Cromer, Arthur Balfour, and Lord Curzon that paid some recognition to the work of Orientalist scholarship in helping to manage the Empire. But all of these quotations come from works written between 1908 and 1912, that is, more than 25 years after the peak of Britain's imperial expansion. Rather than expressing the aims and objectives of potential imperial conquests, these speeches are ex post facto justifications, sanctioned by hindsight. In Curzon's case, the speech, from which the extracts above are quoted, was given in the House of Lords in 1909, four years after he returned from India. It was made to support the funding of a new London school of Oriental Studies. He had been recruited to the school's founding committee and, not surprisingly, was painting its prospects in the best light he could.

       Apart from Foucault's grandiose hypothesis that knowledge always generates power, Said provides no support at all for his contention that "colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism" because he fails to cite evidence about the actual causal sequence that led to the annexation of any of the territories occupied by England or France in the nineteenth century. Where real historians have attempted this, they have come to quite different conclusions, with trade, investment, and military causes predominating. The decisions of the British to move into North Africa and the Middle East in the 1880s, for instance, were based on rivalry with the French, the need to guarantee the sea routes to India and China, and to protect British financial interests from nationalist challenges after Egypt became bankrupt. Philology did not come into it. Even Lenin has a more convincing explanation of imperialism than Said.

Said's inept handling of historical material is evident throughout the book. He claims that, by the end of the seventeenth century, Britain and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean, whereas in reality the Levant was still controlled for the next hundred years by the Ottomans, and British and French merchants could only land with the permission of the Sultan. Said describes Egypt as a "colony" of Britain, whereas the legal status of British occupation of Egypt was never more than that of a protectorate. This is not merely a semantic difference because a real colony, like Australia or Algeria, was a place where large numbers of Europeans settled, which never happened in Egypt. Even on Islamic history, Said is unreliable. He claims that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before they took over North Africa. The facts are that the Arabs invaded North Africa in the seventh century, but what is now Turkey remained part of the Eastern Roman Empire and was a Christian country until conquered by the Seljuk Turks late in the eleventh century. The fact that these howlers have been preserved in the 1995 edition of the book suggests that Said lacks friends, admirers, or advisers with expertise in history who might have sent him a list of corrections.

Said justifies his decision to omit German Orientalists from his analysis by claiming that German scholars came to the field later than the British and French, and merely elaborated on the work originally done by their European rivals. This claim has generated considerable scorn among contemporary Oriental scholars. Bernard Lewis argues that "at no time before or after the imperial age did their [British and French] contribution, in range, depth, or standard, match the achievement of the great centers of Oriental studies in Germany and neighboring countries" To omit German scholarship in this way is like trying to do a survey of the discipline of sociology without mentioning Weber, Simmel, or Tonnies. It is quite clear, however, where Said derived the incentive for this strategy. The Germans were prominent Orientalists, yet Germany never went on to become an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of North Africa or the Middle East. For the Germans, knowledge did not generate power in the way that Foucault’s theory said it should. So, rather than admit this or try to explain it away, Said conveniently omits Germany from his survey.

   The second part of Said's thesis has just as little to recommend it. The notion that Western culture has needed an "Other" to define its own identity derives from the structuralist version of Freudian theory that became prominent in France in the 1960s. An individual’s self-concept, this thesis maintains, emerges only when he recognizes himself as separate from and different from others. Cultures need to go through an analogous process, it is claimed, and so must identify themselves through an alter ego. In other words, the need for an "Other" is built into human nature at both the individual and collective levels. This is a central concept of Said's thesis but, unfortunately, it leads him into a direct contradiction with one of his core methodological dicta: his rejection of essentialism. In the afterward to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, he complains that the book has been misread by hostile critics as an essentialist polemic against Western civilization. He says he would condemn any "attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences. . . . This false position hides historical change." His own approach is "explicitly anti-essentialist." It is difficult, though, to reconcile this assertion with the way he characterizes Western identity. He argues that, from its origins, the West's self-concept was defined by its opposition to Asia.

Consider first the demarcation between Orient and the West. It already seems bold by the time of The Iliad. Two of the most profoundly influential qualities associated with the East appear in Aeschylus's The Persian, the earliest Athenian play extant, and in The Bacchae of Euripides, the very last one extant.. . . The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.

These same motifs persist in Western culture, he claims, right down to the modern period. This is a tradition that accommodates perspectives as divergent as those of Aeschylus, Dante, Victor Hugo, and Karl Marx. However, in describing "the essential motifs" of the European geographic imagination that have persisted since ancient Greece, he is ascribing to the West a coherent self-identity that has produced a specific set of value judgments—"Europe is powerful and articulate: Asia is defeated and distant"—that have remained constant for the past 2500 years. This is, of course, nothing less than the use of the very notion of "essentialism" that he elsewhere condemns so vigorously. In short, it is his own work that is essentialist and ahistorical. He himself commits the very faults he says are so objectionable in the work of Orientalists. The proposition that produces this contradiction is the claim that every culture needs to be defined by an Other. This is not an historical statement at all, but an epistemological assumption derived from structuralist theory. It is now such a standard refrain within cultural studies that it usually goes unquestioned. There is, however, very little to recommend it. Although they have long distinguished themselves from the barbarians of the world, Europeans do not primarily draw their identity from comparisons with other cultures. Instead, identity comes from their own heritage. Europeans identify themselves as joint heirs of classical Greece and Christianity, each tempered by the fluxes of medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modernism. In other words, Western identity is overwhelmingly defined by historical references to its earlier selves, rather than by geographical comparisons with others. To claim otherwise is to deny the central thrust of Western education for the past one thousand years.

The final component of Said's thesis, the allegedly false essentialism of Orientalism, not only contradicts his own methodological assumptions, but is a curious argument in itself Going back to the origins of a culture to examine its founding principles is hardly something to be condemned. This is especially so in the case of Islam where the founding book, the Koran, is taken much more literally by its adherents than the overt text of the Bible is taken by Christians today. In several countries, the Koran is both a religious and legal text. In others, like Egypt and Algeria, there are political movements prepared to resort to terrorism to have it made the basis of national law and authority. Moreover, one could not understand the most bitter division in the modern Islamic world, that between Shi'ites and Sunnis, without knowing its origins in the conflicts over succession after the death of Muhammad in 632, any more than one could properly understand events in contemporary Northern Ireland without some knowledge of the breach in the Christian world that occurred during the Reformation. One Muslim critic, Sadik Jalal al-Azm, has argued that the kind of religious essentialism of which Said indicts Orientalism is actually necessary to understand the Muslim mind:

     It is true that in general the unseen is more immediate and real to the common citizens of Cairo and Damascus than it is to the present inhabitants of New York and Paris; it is true that religion "means everything" to the life of the Moroccan peasants in a way that must remain incomprehensible to present-day American farmers.

Of course, Said would be right to complain were Western ideas about Islamic peoples confined solely to stereotypes derived from their founding texts and early history. But it is simply untrue that the whole body of Oriental scholarship has made this kind of mistake. Take Said's claims about economic studies of Islamic countries. He condemns the work of Western observers whose economic ideas never extended beyond asserting the Oriental's fundamental incapacity for trade, commerce, and economic rationality. In the Islamic field those cliches held good for literally hundreds of years—until Maxime Rodinson's important study Islam and Capitalism appeared in 1966.

   Anyone, however, who takes the trouble to read the one book he favors, Islam and Capitalism, will find it actually tells a different story. Rodinson is a Marxist sociologist and his work, like most in its mold, is based on secondary sources. A large section of the book is a debate with, and critique of, those Western economists and their Muslim allies who do not, in fact, see the Arabs as having an inherent "incapacity for trade," but instead regard these societies as capable of adopting capitalist commerce and industry. He discusses in some detail the work of six economic commentators who expressed views of this kind between the 1910s and the 1950s. Though Rodinson agrees there are many observers who share the assumptions identified by Said, and though his main aim is to see Islam adopt socialism, the evidence of his book is a clear refutation of Said's sweeping generalization about Orientalist economics. In a later work, Europe and the Mystique of Islam (1987), Rodinson dismisses the kind of homogeneity that Said wants to impose on Oriental Studies, insisting that the field has always included "a multiplicity of issues coming under the jurisdiction of many general disciplines."

Outside economic studies, Said's claims about the essentialism of Oriental Studies are just as misleading. Bernard Lewis has produced his own survey of European attitudes towards Islam since the Middle Ages, Islam and the West (1994). He argues that Europe's initial theological and ethnic prejudices had been largely overcome within serious scholarship by the end of the eighteenth century when the study of Islam was established as an academic subject worthy of attention and respect.

The Muslims were no longer seen purely in ethnic terms as hostile tribes, but as the carriers of a distinctive religion and civilization; their prophet was no longer a grotesque impostor or a Christian heretic but the founder of an independent and historically significant religious community.

In other words, rather than being necessarily ethnocentric and racist, Oriental Studies was one of the first fields within European scholarship to overcome such prejudices and to open the Western mind to the whole of humanity.

Although each of the three components of Said's thesis is therefore untenable, this is unlikely in the short term to affect his status as an academic celebrity among students of literature and cultural studies in the West. He is not only one of those writers who helped create the current hegemony of identity-group politics and multiculturalism within the university system, but is also one of its chief beneficiaries. In accomplishing this, he has both endorsed the prevailing cult of the victim, upon which identity-group politics are based, and milked it himself to an indecent degree. "My own experiences of these matters" he says in Orientalism, "are in part what made me write this book.

"The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny."

    Coming from any grown man, such wallowing in victimhood would be bad enough, but from a tenured full professor at Columbia University in New York City, that is, from one of the most materially and occupationally privileged human beings on the planet, who enjoys the added indulgence of being permitted to make whatever criticism he fancies of the country that sustains him—it is simply embarrassing. It certainly calls into question the judgment of his more ardent admirers, especially Camille Paglia, who sees him as "an inspiring role model for a younger generation of critics seeking for their cultural identity."

        In the East, however, Said is regarded today in quite different terms. While he acknowledges that translations of his book have won him support among Islamic fundamentalists who see him documenting the violation of Islam and the Arabs by a predatory West, he is much less of an influence in other circles. He has had a highly publicized falling out with the Palestine Liberation Organization, but a better indicator of the regard in which he is widely held would be the notice taken of his views on his own turf, as a cultural critic. It must be something of a disappointment to him to see his analysis of the European arrogance and Western prejudices purportedly built into Orientalist cultural artifacts being completely ignored. For instance, at the time he wrote his book in the late 1970s, about half of the nineteenth-century Orientalist art that was put to auction in London and Paris was being bought by dealers for Arab clients living in the West. Today, collectors of North African, Near and Middle Eastern descent totally dominate the market for these paintings; with Western and Japanese buyers all but priced out, Islamic collectors have voted with their petrodollars. Palaces and mansions throughout North Africa and the Persian Gulf are now liberally adorned with those same portrayals of their culture by Delacroix, Ingres, Gerome, Deutsch, and others that Said and his followers claim are so demeaning. How could their owners be so mistaken? The Moroccan curator Brahim Alaoui has explained that, despite Said, the romantic portrayal of the nineteenth-century Orient by European artists is now regarded as a valued part of Arab and Islamic heritage.

   There are some critics who think that the image of the Orient which set the Occident dreaming in the nineteenth century returns something to those Orientals who also seek an image of their past. They find in this painting a world on its way to disappearing: this Orient that is highly colored, shimmering, this Orient of arabesques, of costumes, and the richness of forms is in the process of being eclipsed by a much more modem world. The image that was fixed by the Occident in the nineteenth century—the Orientals are now attempting to recover it.

Another critic says:

  Edward W. Said is today perhaps the most important Palestinian intellectual to discuss the issues facing his people.  That is, of course, unless you believe the recent article in the September issue of Commentary written by Justus Weiner, attacking Said’s life story as a Palestinian (Said, CounterPunch).  He was in fact born in Jerusalem in 1935 to Palestinian Christian parents.  He received primary and secondary school education in Jerusalem and Cairo.  He subsequently gained his BA at Princeton and his MA and Ph.D. at Harvard.  He is currently a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and has lectured at over 150 universities around the world.  He is the author of many successful books such as Orientalism, After the Last Sky, Culture and Imperialism, and most recently his autobiography, appropriately titled Out of Place.  Said is also a classical music critic for The Nation as well as a contributor to numerous newspapers and periodicals worldwide.          "Much of the personal investment in [his] study derives from [Said’s] awareness of being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies." (Orientalism, 25) Said is perpetually fascinated by the ideas of classification versus the self-determination of identity by various peoples.   He shows a particular interest in Palestine where the refugee situation has garnered much of his attention.  Yet as an intrepid explorer of the conceptions that certain groups hold towards others, he does not blindly criticize Israel and its supporters without turning a critical eye towards Palestinian Arabs.  "Yes, we have been victimized and our identity has been threatened, but no, we have been neither passive nor innocent." (After the Last Sky, 5) The main problems that Palestinians face today are a direct result of the Israeli actions of 1948, but at least since Said recognized the state of Israel after the 1967 war has he noted a series of ineffective patterns in the way that the Palestinian leadership has dealt with the major issues.  Most recently, Said has criticized the extended leadership of Yasser Arafat and the PLO.  He claims that Arafat has dealt in personal politics so long now that those close to him and with strong principles have gradually moved away while he makes concession after concession to the Israelis.  His fear is, "that a man can so wrap himself in the mantle of self-delegated absolute authority that he can be used by his enemies to expedite the surrender of his own people." (Said, Al-Ahram)         For Said, "the only political vision worth holding on to is a secular bi-national one that transcends the ludicrous limitations of a little Palestinian state, declared for a second or third time, without much land or credibility, as well as the limitations that have been so essential to the Zionist form of apartheid imposed on us everywhere." (IAP, 10/11/98)  He has himself made peace proposals in 1978 and 1979, seeking a political independence that would achieve equality with the Israeli Jewish State. (IAP, 4/20/95) Said seeks a peaceful political approach to an agreement that would not let Palestinian needs be trounced by Zionist inflexibility.  I, as Edward Said, will play the role of an intellectual activist who has personal roots in the situation at hand.  My criticisms will be o both sides, wherever I see problems, all in the name of creating the most agreeable bi-national solution possible.

 David Gilmour wrote:  

THIS YEAR'S prize for the most fatuous piece of historical research should surely be awarded to Justus Reid Weiner, an obscure American Israeli working for a rather murky right-wing think-tank in Jerusalem. After three years' research into the background of Edward Said, Professor of literature in New York and eloquent champion of Palestinian rights, Weiner has announced that his subject invented much of his childhood in order to pose as a tragic refugee in exile.

          Weiner's "discoveries" include claims that the young Said spent more time in Egypt than in Palestine (true, but so what?), that the family home in Jerusalem was owned by his aunt not his father (true, but so what again?), that he may not even have gone to school in Jerusalem (false, he did), and that he was not an authentic refugee (true only if refugee status is restricted to Palestinians who survived the Irgun and Haganah massacres and were physically expelled from their homeland).
           It should have been obvious to anyone that this was not academic research but vulgar propaganda: a serious researcher would hardly spend three years without consulting the subject of his research. But it was not obvious to the mossbacks of the Daily Telegraph, who produced three articles in the same issue denouncing Said's integrity and mocking him as "a darling of the American Left" and "a guru of the Anglo-American Left". Daniel Johnson drooled over Weiner's "remarkable piece of investigative journalism" while pompously upbraiding Said as "an extreme case of mauvaise foi". (It's better in English, Danny, and it applies to your side here.)

Weiner's accusations looked silly enough in August but, with the appearance of this powerful introspective memoir, they become ludicrous: for the points he wasted so much time investigating are not ones which his subject makes. Nor can Weiner and his band of zealots salvage credibility by alleging (as they have done) that Said altered the contents of his book to take account of Weiner's "research". The contract for Out of Place was signed in 1989, the work was completed in 1997, and its author learnt of Weiner's existence a few weeks ago. Anyone who reads this book will recognise that it has been written over a long period with great difficulty, pain (Said was suffering from leukemia throughout the writing), and anguish.

Palestinians have written poignant memoirs of their lives before 1948, in villages that were razed to become kibbutzim and among orange groves that were uprooted for Tel Aviv, and also afterwards, in their diaspora, in the shanty-towns and refugee camps of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Out of Place is poignant in a very different, very personal sense. It is not a memoir of dispossession (although, despite Weiner, Said actually is a refugee whose family like all Palestinians were not allowed to return to their homeland after 1948) but of an intimate, interior dislocation.
On paper Said's childhood might seem to have held the Ingredients of happiness: a prosperous father, an adoring mother, the best schools in Cairo, summer holidays in Lebanon, and Princeton and Harvard afterwards. But in fact it was a repulsed alternately, while his father was an ogre, a grotesque disciplinarian who bullied him for more than 20 years. In their eyes the young Edward seldom did anything right: they criticised his appearance, his posture, his treatment of his sisters, his behavior at school, his inadequacies at sport and his inability to play bridge and backgammon, his father's favourite games. But Said does not insist that they were always wrong. Belonging to the appealing genre of self-deprecating memoirs, Out of Place admits that its protagonist was a pretty tiresome child with a talent to annoy almost everyone, parents, sisters, teachers and schoolmates.

The principal theme of the book is the search for an identity, which was peculiarly complicated for a child with a name that is half-English and half-Arab, for a Palestinian in Egypt, a Christian in the Muslim world, an Arab studying at English-speaking schools and American universities. In nearly every society he has lived in, Said has found himself in a tiny minority, usually of one. This feeling of being "out of place", in a social and familial sense as well as in a geographical one, is beautifully described in this intense and tormented work, which owes its power to the author's quality of memory and his austerely analytical intellect.

While the book is primarily a narrative of childhood, it is also a memoir of an extinct Levantine world, when numerous minorities co-existed in Beirut and Alexandria, when people moved unhindered within the boundaries of the old Ottoman Empire. The destruction of the Levant was begun by Britain and France, which carved it up and encouraged minorities to become nationalities, and continued both by Arab nationalism in Syria and Egypt and by the expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel. Said records the changes with sadness but without nostalgia he is no sentimentalist and rejects the traditional views of Paradise Lebanon, the Levant's last survivor before it destroyed itself at the end of a long orgy of garish self-indulgence.

Out of Place makes clear that Said never aspired to become a political or an heroic figure. After trying (and largely failing) to sort out who he was, he wanted to become either a pianist (he remains a talented musician) or an academic writer on literature. For 20 years after his family left Palestine he was remarkably unaware of both the problems and the undercurrents in the Arab world. Only the humiliations of the Six Day War in 1967 turned him towards what he is now, an outstanding spokesman for Palestine and an intellectual who has made an important and original contribution to the study of cultural and political connections between the west and "the Orient". One does not need to accept all the theories of Orientalism or its related books (still less those of his semi-literate imitators) to acknowledge that he is one of the leading thinkers of the age.

Said is hated by the extreme Right in Israel and American Jewry because he is eloquent and rational. And his enemies are eager to defame him because they believe the denigration of Palestine's most able spokesman will help undermine the claims of the refugees and deny them the right to return home whenever "peace" is made between Barak's regional superpower and Arafat's Bantustan.

Weiner is evidently unaware of the absurdity of his "logic". If Said is disqualified as an authentic Palestinian grew up mainly in Cairo, where does that leave every lsraeli leader before the ineffable Netanyahu? Should Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who were both born and brought up in Poland, have been disqualified from becoming (with Netanyahu) the three worst prime ministers in Israel's history? Or did their careers as terrorists in the 1940s with hundreds of British and Arab corpses to their credit make them eligible?

 Back