Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid

Acknowledgments

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” remarked John Donne in a phrase that has been haunting introductory English literature texts ever since. Neither is a book. This book evolved out of a nagging iconoclastic impulse to open the blinds of my comfortable closeting in Ivory Tower isolation. There is no viably efficient way to recall all who in some way inflected—and at times deflected—the various nuances in my perilously long narrative, but a list of the primary names is more than perfunctory in my mind. Many authors save the most thanks to last or to the recipient of the book’s dedication . I prefer to up-end my beginning. One person, more than any other, has helped shape the existing contours of the ways I think, especially when I do so in an unreflexively male American manner. My wife, Najwa, colleague in the field as well as unflinching critic of virtually everything I write, has been the primary stimulus to not feel too comfortable with a particular point of view. She provides a necessary cudgel to batter my tendencies to be excessively “thick” in my description and thinly disguised in my frustration with canonized methodologies and solidified theories. The iconoclasm appears to be a rhetorical malady wired from birth. Those who have read early drafts or responded to my queries extend across formal discipline boundaries. Among anthropologists I thank Tom Abowd, Jon Anderson, Steve Caton, Matthew Cook, Dale Eickelman, Sayed el Aswad, Andre Gingrich, Engseng Ho, Diane King, Chris Leonard, Herbert Lewis, Leif Manger, Chris Matthews, and Larry Michalak. I benefited from the comments of students in Caton’s graduate anthropology seminar at Harvard and at lectures on Said at the University of London, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University. Historians, Arabists, and others include Jacques Berlinerblau, Magnus Bernhardsson, Richard Bulliet, François Charette, Fred Donner, Andrew Foster, McGuire Gibson, Peter Golden, David King, Kathy Kueny, George Makdisi, Jack Moore, Maggie Nassif, Sasha Naymarck, Laura Otis, Dagmar Riedel, Rex Smith, Marina Tolmacheva, Michel Tuchscherer, Bob Vitalis, and Patricia Welch. I thank a number of members of the Middle East Medievalist e-list and several colleagues who heard me out at Hofstra. Advice on transAcknowledgments ix lation clarification was gratefully received from Najwa Adra, Neil Donahue, Aykut Gürçaglar, Livnat Holtzman, Tad Krauze, and Giorgio Vercellin. With such significant help, I share the pragmatism of my friend and colleague Jacques Berlinerblau, whose Edward Said was Martin Bernal: “I do not expect to make many friends writing this volume, so let me hold on to the ones that I have now.”1 But neither do I wish to make enemies. x Acknowledgments ...