For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  Lewis’s defence of Orientalism as pure scholarship, or at least as a discipline that strives for objectivity, will strike many as absurd. But if one actually sits down and reads Pococke’s edition of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, or Cresswell on the chronology of Egyptian mosques, or Cahen on the topography of Syria in the Middle Ages, or de Slane on the classification of manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Nationale, or Charles Burnett on the transmission of Arabic learning in medieval England, it is extremely difficult to detect a political agenda in such scholarship – even an unconscious one. There are such things as pure scholars. I have even had tea with a few of them.

  In 1986 the American Middle East Studies Association tried to mount a debate between Lewis and Said, but though Lewis appeared on the same platform as Said, he scarcely debated with him, but coolly delivered what was in effect a prepared position paper. He did not deny that there were stereotypes, particularly with respect to Oriental despotism and to sexual licence in the harem. He asked for civility and cool debate rather than polemic.47 Said, in response, was not particularly civil. He argued that knowledge is never abstract, but always reflects power. He concentrated his attack on the American media and its coverage of Arabs and Islam (and that was of course a pretty soft target as American coverage of the Middle East and especially of Palestinian matters has mostly been disgraceful – biased, ignorant and abusive). He went on to suggest that media distortion of Middle Eastern realities had worked ‘because of the active collaboration of a whole cadre of scholars, experts and abettors drawn from the ranks of the Orientalists and special-interest lobbies’. Orientalists were malevolent plotters who knew better, or, at best, they were guilty of having failed to combat press stereotypes. Among the guilty experts he listed Lewis, Kedourie and Ernest Gellner. They were guilty, that is, of being hostile to the religion and culture of Islam. (But I suspect that their real crime was that they had all criticized Said.) Lewis was denounced for attempting to supply a medieval religious ancestry for modern hijackings. Gellner was alleged to maintain that ‘Muslims are a nuisance and viscerally anti-Semitic’. Why, Said wanted to know, had some Orientalists participated in a symposium on terrorism? He claimed that the only things Orientalists chose to study were Arab ignorance of Europe and Arabanti-Semitism and that they wholly neglected Arabliterature. Lewis in his concluding response said that ‘it is hardly honest or fair to try to refute someone else’s point of view not in terms of what he says, but of motives which you choose to attribute to him in order to make your refutation easier. It is hardly an example of truth or fairness to use the smear tactics that became well known in this country at an earlier stage, by lumping together writers, scholars and journalists of very disparate characters and origins, thereby conveying rather than asserting that they are all the same, that they constitute one homogenous, centrally directed, conspiratorial whole.’48

  Gellner, another of Said’s supervillains, had a remarkable intellectual career. He started as a professional philosopher and in 1959 published Words and Things. In this controversial book, Gellner vigorously attacked Professor Gilbert Ryle for the latter’s contention that there are no such things as minds, but only physical objects and physical happenings. The philosophical journal Mind (edited by Ryle) refused to review Gellner’s book and the ensuing academic scandal ensured the book’s author a great deal of publicity. Ved Mehta, the Indian author of a book on philosophers and historians, Fly and Fly-Bottle, visited Gellner just a few years later and described the thirty-four-year-old man as ‘dark, of medium height, and casually dressed. His hair was uncombed, and he had the air of an offbeat intellectual.’ (The talented writer Mehta was blind from birth.)49 When I first met Gellner in the 1970s, I was struck by the sense of intellectual power that seemed to radiate from the man. Subsequently, Gellner transformed himself into a sociologist and did anthropological fieldwork on Berber saints in the highlands of Morocco. A growing interest in Islam more generally led to the publication of a volume of essays, Muslim Society, in 1981. By then he was Professor of Social Anthropology in Cambridge. In 1992 he published Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. As the blurb on the back of the paperback put it: ‘Do we live in a postmodern world? If so, how can we explain the extraordinary resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism?’

  In 1993 he turned his baleful attention to Edward Said and in a lengthy review in the Times Literary Supplement of the latter’s Culture and Imperialism tore the book to pieces.50 The book and the review are chiefly concerned with cultural interaction as reflected in Western literature, but Gellner did touch on the question of Orientalism, remarking that ‘Said is left with an objectivism which hangs in thin air, without support, but allows him to explain and put down the “Orientalists” and reduce their vision to the allegedly important role it played in world domination.’ Gellner wondered how, while the Orientalists were the prisoners of a discursive formation, Said felt confident enough of the objectivity of his own moral judgements? Gellner went on to denounce Said’s misreadings of Gide, Camus, Fanon and others, before ending his review with these words: ‘Truth is not linked to political virtue (either directly or inversely). To insinuate the opposite is to be guilty of that sin which Said wishes to denounce. Like the rain, truth falls on both the just and the unjust. The problems of power and culture, and their turbulent relations during the great metamorphosis of our social world, is too important to be left to lit crit.’

  Said’s friends rallied to his defence and they did succeed in pointing out that Gellner’s review contained a number of factual errors. Said himself, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, unconvincingly tried to present Gellner as anti-Muslim. Gellner, in the course of his reply to this letter, referred to Orientalism as ‘quite entertaining but intellectually insignificant’ and pointed out that Said’s book recommended ‘cognitive discrimination’: ‘The ex-officio disqualification of “Orientalists” goes hand in hand with an endorsement or preferential treatment of those privileged and enlightened who see the problem “from within his subject”… Such a privileged insider status seems to be acquired primarily by origin, or sometimes by political stance.’ Said, in a further letter, denounced Gellner for making generalizations about Muslims without knowing any of the Islamic languages and for belittling the high status of literary criticism. He claimed that on page 322 he explicitly denied that ‘only an insider, a Muslim, a woman, a Black can write meaningfully about Islamic, women’s or Black experience’. But in only answering half of Gellner’s accusation, Said had failed to answer it at all, as it is evident that in Orientalism ‘political stance’ could also privilege certain kinds of commentator on, for example, Islam. He further claimed that making fun of lit crit, as Gellner had done, was to exhibit ‘bad faith and complicity with imperial power’.51 Elsewhere, Gellner referred to Said as ‘a dandy and a Manhattan bon viveur’. It was one of the finest intellectual dog-fights of recent decades. I believe that Gellner was working on a book-length attack on Orientalism when he died in 1995.

  THE REST OF THE SAIDIAN CANON

  Edward Said’s other books can be discussed more briefly. In The Question of Palestine (1980) he protested at the denial by the Israelis and their allies of a Palestinian identity. It is interesting that in order to bolster that identity, he found himself obliged to call on the support of the infernal Orientalists: ‘Read through any eighteenth-or nineteenth-century account of travels in the Orient – Chateaubriand, Mark Twain, Lamartine, Nerval, Disraeli – and you will find chronicled there accounts of the Arabinhabitants of Palestine.’52 Although Christian Arabs have from the first played a leading role in the Palestine Liberation Organization, Said’s attitude towards Arab Christians was militantly hostile: ‘I think it must also be said that militant minorities in the Middle East have almost always been aggressors against what Hourani called the universality, self-confidence, and sense of responsibility of Sunni – that is, majority Islam.’ On the same page that this quotation occurs, Said managed to conflate the Christian Arab polemicist al-Kindi
with the later and much more famous Muslim polymath of the same name.53 Presumably Said had not bothered to read either of the two writers in question. (For a directly contrasting view of the fate of the Christian communities in the Middle East, see William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain.) In The Question of Palestine, Said confidently declared that the fortunes of Islamic fundamentalism were in steep decline after 1967.54 For the rest of his life he would find it difficult to acknowledge the continuing vitality of Islamic fundamentalist movements.

  He went on to write several more books on the Palestine issue, including After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) and The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (2000), as well as articles too numerous to list. He rightly suspected that the Oslo agreement would be used as a device further to oppress and despoil the Palestinians. When writing about contemporary Palestine and the sufferings of its people, he had a straightforward case to make and he was clear and articulate. From 1977 onwards, he sat on the Palestinian National Council, but he became increasingly unhappy with the way it was being run by Arafat and resigned in 1991. As Said continued to denounce the corruption of the Palestinian administration, Arafat banned the sale of his books in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was also under attack by Zionists and right-wingers in the United States. His office was fire-bombed and he received death threats. Yet, despite being called ‘a professor of terror’ by the right-wing journal, Commentary, Said consistently rejected terrorism or the policy of armed struggle as the way forward. In 2001, after he was photographed throwing a stone at an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border, there were determined though unsuccessful attempts to get him expelled from his post at Columbia University.

  In 1981 Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world appeared. In this book Said returned to the attack on Orientalists, but he paid more (hostile) attention to the press and television, especially to their coverage of the American hostage crisis in Iran and the execution of a princess in Saudi Arabia. It was typical of his style of thought that he seemed to find Western coverage of the execution more reprehensible than the execution itself. The general drift of the book was to argue that Western society did not face a significant threat from terrorists of an Islamic fundamentalist persuasion. The real danger in the encounter between East and West arose from Western misrepresentations of Islam. Malcolm Yapp, an expert on the history of Afghanistan and British India, reviewed the book in the Times Literary Supplement (9 October 1981) and found much to disagree with, especially Said’s cavalier way with quotations. He drew attention to Said’s misrepresentation of an article that Edmund Bosworth, a historian of medieval Islam, had written in the Los Angeles Times. Said claimed that Bosworth had written that all political activity in the Muslim lands for almost twelve hundred years ‘can be understood as emanating from the Muslim call for jihad’. But Bosworth had written no such thing and Said must have known that. Said’s letter of response to the review was incandescent and incoherent, but Yapp returned to the charge in a further letter that began as follows: ‘One may understand Edward W. Said’s wounded feelings… A man charged with responsibility for guiding the studies of others must be uncomfortable when his methods are shown to be unscholarly. And that demonstration is unaffected by the bluster, the abuse, and the misrepresentation with which he endeavours to confuse the issue in his letter.’55

  Culture and Imperialism, which appeared in 1993, opened with a weasel-worded statement of the case for Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait: ‘As construed by the Iraqi Ba‘ath Party, modern Arab history shows the unrealized, unfulfilled promise of Arabindependence, a promise traduced by the “West” and Zionism. Iraq’s bloody occupation of Kuwait was, therefore, justified on Bismarckian grounds but also because it was believed that the Arabs had to right the wrongs done against them and wrest from imperialism one of its greatest prizes.’56 But of course, Said was in no way condoning what Saddam Hussein had done. Culture and Imperialism was primarily a work of literary criticism. Gellner was not the only critic to be unhappy with the particular way that this book had politicized and pilloried certain literary works. In particular, Said’s contention that colonial plantations must be significant in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park because they are barely mentioned attracted widespread ridicule. Said’s general argument in this book was that literature, in representing or reporting on colonialism, made it seem more part of the natural order of things and thus more acceptable.

  Until 1999 most of Said’s readers were under the impression that he was a Palestinian exile, having grown up in Jerusalem until, at the age of twelve, he and his family had to flee to Cairo and the state of Israel was established. However, in 1999 the Jewish scholar Justus Reid Weiner published an article in Commentary entitled ‘“My Beautiful Old House” and Other Fabrications by Edward Said’, in which, among other things, he queried Said’s credentials as a Palestinian.57 Weiner had spent several years researching Said’s youth and his article was based on eighty-five interviews. Said’s own account of his youth, the memoir entitled Out of Place, appeared only a month or so after Weiner’s article. It gave an account of his life up to 1962. It was an honest, self-searching, melancholy work. Said presented himself as an exile from happiness and his story makes depressing reading.

  Throughout his life Said was a consistent critic of whatever the United States was doing in the Middle East. As already noted, he also savagely attacked those Arabs in the West, such as Kanan Makiya and Fuad Ajami, who dared to be critical of Saddam Hussein. After the atrocity of the Twin Towers occurred on September 11, 2001, he wrote a long article for the Observer in which, while in no way condoning what the terrorists did (for he never did that), he explained why they did it (for he always did that). He put the terrorists’ case for them, just as he had put the case for Saddam Hussein. He never ever condoned the violence, terror or torture. He merely praised those things with faint damns.

  He was not fond of Arabmusic and he wrote (in Out of Place) about his dislike of the Egyptian Um Kulthum’s singing which he ‘found horrendously monotonous in its interminable unison melancholy and desperate mournfulness, like the unending moans and wailing of someone enduring an extremely long bout of colic’. On the other hand, he loved Western classical music and, late in life, he formed a friendship with the Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim. Together they produced a book, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), in which they mostly debated musical issues in a civilized and amiable fashion. Said’s last book, Freud and the Non-European (2003), an extended essay based on a lecture delivered in the London house where Freud spent his last years as an exile, concentrated on Moses and Monotheism. In this essay, Said drew attention to Freud’s Eurocentric view of culture, before continuing with unwonted tolerance: ‘But why should it not be? His world had not yet been touched by the globalization, or rapid travel, or decolonization, that were to make many formerly unknown or repressed cultures available to Europe.’58 (That is well said, but why was Said not prepared to extend the same charity to Dante, who must have been far less well informed about Asia and Africa?) Nevertheless, the main point of the essay was to emphasize Freud’s readiness to acknowledge ‘Judaism’s non-Jewish antecedents and contemporaries’, as in the case of ‘Moses the Egyptian’. The essay was in large part a tract for the times, as Said used Freud’s writings as a pretext for meditations on the fluidity of both Jewish and Palestinian identity and the consequent possibility of a single state solution in Israel/Palestine. Said’s advocacy of coexistence and tolerance in a single state may be applauded and admired. But currently it seems to have the same degree of political practicality as plans to establish the Kingdom of Shangri-La. Still, it would be a fine thing if his vision did one day become a reality.

  In 1991 Said had been diagnosed as having leukaemia. In his final platform appearances he seemed tired and drawn. He died, aged sixty-seven, on 24 September 2003. He received many respectful and affectionate obituaries.59 />
  But it is a scandal and damning comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain in recent decades that Said’s argument about Orientalism could ever have been taken seriously. Obviously I find it impossible to believe that his book was written in good faith. If Said’s book is as bad as I think it is, why has it attracted so much attention and praise in certain quarters? I am uncertain of what the correct answer might be. Perhaps part of it may be a resentment of the long-established ‘guild of Orientalists’ on the part of some adherents of younger disciplines such as cultural studies and sociology. Some writers have joined the fray on Said’s side, not because they care two hoots about the real history of Orientalism, but because they are anti-Zionist or anti-American. In such cases, sneering at Orientalists must serve as a soothing displacement activity. Said’s fashionable brandishing of Gramsci and Foucault must have attracted some students. His obscurely voiced and facile doubts about the possibility of objectivity also fitted in with recent intellectual fashions. The book’s general thesis fed upon the West’s hand-wringing and guilt about its imperialist past. There are, of course, some grains of truth in the charges that Said raised and, for example, a few Orientalists, including Snouck Hurgronje, Massignon and Berque did work for colonial authorities. On the whole, though, the good qualities of Orientalism are those of a good novel. It is exciting, it is packed with lots of sinister villains, as well as an outnumbered band of goodies, and the picture that it presents of the world is richly imagined, but essentially fictional.