Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid

To the Reader

As an intellectual, I feel challenged by the theoretical incoherence ; I feel driven to strive for an answer that, if it has not yet attained universal validity, will at least have transcended the evident limitations of the dichotomized past. —Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Religious Diversity And is it not further tribute to his triumph to see more clearly what he was battling? —María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History2 You have before you two books about one book. The one book is Edward Said’s Orientalism, a copy of which should preferably be read before and after you tackle my critical engagement with this powerful text and the ongoing debate over it. More than a quartercentury after its first publication, Orientalism remains a milestone in critical theory. Yet, as the years go by, it survives more as an essential source to cite than as a polemical text in need of thorough and open-minded reading . I offer a commentary, not a new sacred text. Of the two books here, the first is the narrative that provides a critique of Said’s Orientalism thesis. Many of the details of my argument have been made before by a wide range of scholars, although not in one textual bundle . I add my own focus on Said’s rhetoric as a persuasive device, despite the manifest flaws in content and the important material left out of his work. My book can be read the way you would read Said’s original narrative, with one major caveat: Orientalism is a forceful polemic that demands not to be ignored, whereas Reading Orientalism is judicious satirical criticism that suggests we move beyond the polemicized rhetoric of the binary blame game. More than any other individual scholar in recent history, Edward Said To the Reader xi laid bare the discursive ideological undertones that have infested public and academic representation of an idealized “Orient.” No one reading his Orientalism can fail to appreciate that much of the previous writing and lecturing about Muslims, Arabs, and stylized “Orientals” reveals more about those doing the writing than about real people in a geographical space east of Europe. The “Orient” as framed in Orientalism is indeed an imaginary; but so is the very Occidental (and certainly not accidental) frame that Said reduces to Orientalist discourse. Said’s book stimulated a necessary and valuable debate among scholars who study the Middle East, Islam, and colonial history. Nearly three decades later, I suggest it is time to move beyond PhD cataloguing of what the West did to the East and self-unfulfilling political punditry about what real individuals in the East say they want to do to the West. Edward Said brought us a long way in this process, but the politics of polemics can only go so far, as he himself acknowledged in his later years. I prefer to reproach ongoing injustice across the colonial divide at the expense of verbose post-colonial indignation. The second book is in the endnotes and bibliography, where all the references are mercifully archived. Here you will also find the asides and gratuitous rhetorical overkill that even the author finds too profligate for the narrative. By simply ignoring the superscripted numbers you may read the narrative for entertainment, freed of the need to verify the critical exegesis . The anal citational flow of endnotes in itself illustrates the vast number of books and articles that in one way or another draw on Orientalism as a text. The sheer bulk of references for a seminal book available in multiple translations is staggering. Although I could no more sample all texts on Orientalism than Said could examine the thousands of “Orientalist” texts published, I have tried to err on the side of redundancy. Both of my books are intended as a reading against Orientalism but certainly not as a justification for past Orientalism, nor as a politicized dismissal of Edward Said, an impassioned advocate of human rights for all victims of past imperialism and present neo-colonial co-option. Said, the relentless critic, defined his intellectual role through worldly engagement with ideas that affect, and often disaffect, real people. No established theory was sacred, no argument innocent in a reality-checked world where Palestinians had their homes bulldozed, cluster bombs were dropped on Beirut suburbs, and Muslims were indiscriminately targeted as terrorists long before the fatal crashes into the Twin Towers. Among his many critics , some attacked the man and what he stood...