Recycling today

From my Books and Ideas site, here is a recent post that has been read a lot. I am partly doing this to test what Word Press can do as well. Notice by the way that you can now access “My Books and Ideas Archives” on the left.

Robert Irwin For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies

Not a book I have read, but the article by Robert Irwin in the UK magazine Prospect linked above certainly gives plenty of food for thought.

How do we know what we think we know about Islam and the Arabs? Movies and novels have long been a rich source of misinformation and eloquent prejudice. Novels like Eric Ambler’s The Levanter, Frederick Forsyth’s The Key to Rebecca and Daniel Easterman’s The Last Assassin, as well as films like Cast a Giant Shadow, Jewel of the Nile and Operation Condor have fed on and refuelled such prejudice.

Arabs and Muslims commonly feature as terrorists, religious fanatics, drug dealers, pimps and so on. In the course of the last 50 years or so they have replaced the Nazis as hand-me-down villains. Films in which Arab points of view are realistically and sympathetically presented, such as David O Russell’s political action film Three Kings (1999), set in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf war, are hard to find.

The presentation of Islam by Muslim apologists, on the other hand, has little appeal for non-believers. In the 19th century, a significant sector of the British public read sermons for pleasure. Today’s readers have lost this taste. In any case, Muslim apologists tend to present current Islamic practice and past history as more perfect than would seem plausible to an outsider. Besides there are too many competing accounts of Islam in print—Wahhabi, Deobandi, Barelwi, Ahmadi, Sufi, liberal. As for journalism, its coverage of the middle east is crisis-driven, providing only a restricted context to the latest terrorist atrocity or rigged election. The longue durée of the middle east has been elided.

Orientalist writings, in the sense of books and articles written by academics specialising in Arab and Islamic studies, currently play a negligible part in informing and shaping public opinion. Orientalism is now a pejorative word and its practitioners have become losers in the politics of knowledge. Arabic studies has lost prestige and the resources devoted to it keep diminishing. In a debate in the House of Lords on 24th March 2004, several peers expressed disquiet at the way oriental studies and the teaching of difficult languages had declined in Britain…

Irony indeed, as according to Irwin the success of Christian Palestinian writer Edward Said’s work is largely to blame.

As far as large sections of the British intelligentsia are concerned, orientalism is thought of as an historical evil, something to be ashamed of and linked, however vaguely, to such wickednesses as crusading, racism, the slave trade, colonialism and Zionism. 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. He suggested that there was a malign tradition of disparaging and stereotyping orientals in various ways that went back to Homer, a tradition that was continued by such grand writers as Aeschylus, Dante, Flaubert and Camus. However, Said argued, in recent centuries academics in Islamic and middle eastern studies had been instrumental in framing a mindset that facilitated and justified imperial dominance over the Arab lands. According to Said (who died in 2003), the west possesses a monopoly over how the orient may be represented. His thesis has subsequently found incongruous allies among Islamist polemicists. They too see western scholarship as a conspiracy. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, a multi-volume work of mostly western scholarship whose second edition was recently published, has attracted particular criticism from some Muslims, who argue that this sort of reference work should have been written mostly, if not entirely, by Muslims, and should have been subject to Muslim censorship…

As you can see, there is already a lot to think about in those few extracts. Do read the whole thing. One does not have to throw out the insights of post-colonial studies in order to concede that Irwin has a point, so I am not proposing one’s response should be to become Keith Windschuttle. See ” The Rootless Cosmopolitan: Edward Said” in Nation (July 19, 2004) for a friendly assessment of Said’s life and work. On my Big Archive see The Great Book Clearance, where I posted this picture, a rather typical 19th century orientalist fantasy: