2001 Nights: The end of the Orientalist critique - Culture and Reviews

Reason, Dec, 2001 by Charles Paul Freund

IN THE AFTERMATH of September 11, Edward Said, one of the country's more elegant intellects, listened carefully to the anguish and anger pouring through the American media, and five days after the murders published a commentary about what he had heard. Writing in Britain's The Observer, the distinguished critic of literature and politics discerned "the vague suggestion that the Middie East and Islam are what 'we' are up against."

Obviously, Prof. Said missed the fact that broadcast and cable news anchors actually curtailed early speculation that the attacks had their origin in the Middle East or in Islam. Why? Because, as ABC's Peter Jennings told his viewers, "We don't want to create a 'mindset' here." Said apparently missed the numerous interviews with ordinary Arab-Americans expressing their own appalled grief at the attacks, appearances that enabled them to represent themselves through the media rather than be misrepresented by them. He seems to have missed the lightning-fast circulation by e-mail of the now-famous letter by Afghan-American Tamin Ansary, which rapidly created sympathy among its millions of recipients for common Afghans.

Said must have missed even the enormous pains taken by elite news outlets and public figures, especially President George W. Bush, to distinguish between the "true" Islam of peace, as they often characterized it, and any variant that could justify and celebrate acts of mass murder. In his address to Congress, Bush actually assumed the role of Islamic theologian, pronouncing any such violent variant to be "blasphemy." Even Ibra-him Hooper, head of the controversial Council on American-Islamic Relations and a tireless critic of the American media's portrayal of Arabs and the Middle East, pronounced himself "surprised," and pleasantly so, at the coverage.

But not Said. Passages of his Observer essay were certainly eloquent and insightful. Not only was he horrified by the carnage, but he was revolted by the perpetrators and by any ideas, religious or political, that might be used to justify such acts. Yet when it came to the American side of his story-what he saw as the vaguely anti-Islamic reaction to the attacks-he slipped back into the familiar litany of the Orientalist critique. That is, he suggested that the media had failed to critique American policy, instead reacting monolithically to "the Middle East and Islam." He implied that the media had portrayed them stereo typically and contentiously. That's not surprising, perhaps, since Said himself established that critique almost 25 years ago. His famous book Orientalism (1978) was a harsh interpretation of the West's attitude toward just these matters, and the critique he established has since dominated the intellectual appraisal of the West's political and cultural relationship to the Muslim world and othe r peoples of the East.

Yet the critique doesn't fit the aftermath of the attacks at all. Xenophobia remains a significant issue, but if anything, the irenic reaction to the attacks suggests that among American political and media elites, Orientalism has become a dead letter. Indeed, the attack and its aftermath suggest much more. They illustrate that, while the Orientalist critique deserves credit for its earned successes, it deserves to be judged anew for some no less significant sins. Above all, the attack itself reveals the florescence of a cultural phenomenon that has received almost no attention from anyone.

That phenomenon is dangerous, is widespread, and has long been developing beneath the radar and the contempt of the intellectual establishment. It portrays the West falsely and contentiously. It is, as one scholar has termed it, the other side of the Orientalist coin: Occidentalism.

What was Orientalism? Said identified it in his foundational work 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 has been reductionist misrepresentation. In brief, according to Said and the army of intellectual critics and journalists who have come in his wake, Orientalism transforms 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 Orientalist critique 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. British imperial anthropology texts were Orientalist. What else? Old studio paintings of nude odalisques, slave markets, and eunuchs; desert travel literature; novels by Diderot, Montesquieu, Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard; a mass of specialized historiography; Maria Montez movies; the whole world of academic, "authoritative" Orientalist studies; anything having to do with Sinbad the Sailor; and even Henry Kissinger's ideas for resolving the Israeli-Arab impasse.