"Dangerous Knowledge" pretty much demolishes Said's attack on academic Orientalists. But does Irwin demolish Said's larger point that Western imperialism has generated a racist and condescending discourse about the Arab world, one that still operates today? The British literary critic Terry Eagleton argues that he does not, that Said was wrong about details but right about what really mattered. Eagleton mocks Irwin's "gentle, ivory-tower" belief that Orientalism "is mostly a story of individual scholars" and derides what he claims is Irwin's inability to comprehend Foucault's ideas: "He gives the impression that he could recognise an ideological formation about as readily as he could identify Green Day's greatest hits." Eagleton writes that "the current debacle in Iraq ... has rekindled a rabid Islamophobia in the west" and that "all Irwin needs to do to recognise the broad truth of Said's thesis is turn on the television set."
To attack Irwin for being unable to recognize "ideological formations" is to beg the question (that is, to assume the very point being debated), since Irwin's entire, meticulously argued point is that Orientalism was not such a formation. Eagleton's point that the current Islamophobia vindicates Said's thesis is more interesting. In a penetrating and largely favorable review of "Dangerous Knowledge" in the Times Literary Supplement, Christopher de Bellaigue argues that "Irwin's reluctance to expose his discipline to Said's charges of collusion in Empire, post-colonial domination and, more specifically, brutalities committed in the name of Zionism, is the main flaw in an otherwise meticulous and impressive book."
De Bellaigue gives some specific historical examples of such collusion and justly criticizes Irwin for ignoring them. He also makes a legitimate point that Irwin erred by ignoring the contemporary influence of the eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who, Bellaigue notes, has used his academic authority to push his support for Bush's "war on terror" and to issue "mischievous and misleading" pronouncements about an inevitable war with fundamentalist Islam. A strong supporter of Israel who has published widely in popular journals, Lewis was invited to the White House by Dick Cheney to discuss Mideast strategy. Lewis is, in effect, Said's right-wing counterpart -- but those who hold Said's views are never invited to the White House. (Jimmy Carter, a former president whose new book is critical of Israel, isn't even supported by his own party.) The wide acceptance of Lewis' neoconservative ideas in America, and their implementation by the Bush administration, support the idea that a racist "ideological formation" which sees the Arab/Muslim world as depraved and violent does indeed exist.
Irwin's book would have been stronger if he had grappled with these issues. But the (brief) triumph of neoconservative ideology in the United States does not prove Said's thesis. Lewis may be a one-man pinup for Orientalism, but he is the exception that proves the rule, at least in the academy and among specialists. The truth is that most experts on Islam and the Arab world are appalled at the Bush administration policies. Public prejudice against Arabs and Muslims exists, of course, but it is not the clanking monolith Said described. Public support for the "war on terror" (now rapidly dwindling) has had more to do with a visceral public reaction to 9/11, and the anomalous, single-issue sacred cow of Israel, than with a historic bias against the Middle East and Arabs that allegedly goes back to Aeschylus.
Ironically, Said himself recognized this. Criticizing the Arab world's crude polemics against America, he wrote, "It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist colonialism for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are complex societies not always truly represented by their governments' stupid or cruel policies." It is striking how little Said, the practical Palestinian politician, dealing with real-world issues, sounds like the grand theoretician of "Orientalism."
At the end of "Dangerous Knowledge," Irwin asks why "Orientalism" has been so successful. "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," he writes. "If Said's book is as bad as I think it is, why has it attracted so much attention and praise in certain quarters?" His answer: resentment of established Orientalists by partisans of new disciplines like cultural studies and sociology; anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism; the allure of trendy figures like Foucault and Gramsci; and general Western "hand-wringing and guilt about its imperialist past."
There is no doubt that the same reasons apply to certain quarters in the United States. The larger question raised by the success of "Orientalism" is the venerable one of ends and means. Its defenders say that the West really does have much to feel guilty about, and they argue that Said's book, though flawed, is praiseworthy because it has forced the West to be more self-critical.
But this position is a slippery slope, only a step removed from defending Stalinist realism and other "dialectically justified" hack work. An unflinching look at America's imperialist past -- and the crude stereotypes about the Middle East, ignorant hostility and out-and-out racism that underlie much of our current foreign policy and helped pave the way for the Iraq war -- is indeed necessary. But Said's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is counterproductive. It may have swelled the ranks of subaltern studies programs and provided grist for numerous postcolonial studies Ph.D. theses, but that doesn't make his argument correct. In the end, bad books are just bad books, and when they are canonized for instrumental reasons, the result is a coarsening of thought and an ever-widening and unhealthy divide between the academy and mainstream culture. Indeed, there is reason to believe that such sweeping indictments produce a public backlash and result in more bigotry, not less. Demands that villains du jour -- whether males, white people, the West, heterosexuals or thin people -- reflect on their guilt do not seem to lead to greater enlightenment.
In this regard, Irwin's refusal to genuflect before a hopelessly flawed work simply because it is politically correct is part of a salutary trend on the left to be willing to criticize propagandistic or tendentious works, no matter how "right thinking" they are. In America, this trend has manifested itself in the largely victorious (at least in mainstream culture, if not in the academy) counterattack, led by Robert Hughes, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Todd Gitlin, C. Vann Woodward and others, against the cruder forms of multiculturalism and identity politics.
As America tries to figure out how to deal with the Arab and Muslim world, and to educate the American people so that catastrophes like Iraq don't happen again, it is vital that a full spectrum of opinions be heard. The long history of Western imperialist meddling in the Middle East, the West's consistent stifling of Arab attempts at political reform, and many other such matters must be discussed. But it is equally important that the role of religion and culture be acknowledged, and that historical and even anthropological analyses of Middle Eastern societies not be ruled out by the left simply because they lead to certain conclusions that may make bien-pensant intellectuals uncomfortable. (The role of tribes and the importance of honor and revenge in Arab culture are two examples.) All of these complex issues must be put on the table and given a full national discussion -- for our sake, for the Middle East's sake and for the world's sake.
Said argued that Western knowledge about the Middle East serves only Western interests. Against that dark view, we need to insist that knowledge is always good. As we struggle not just to extricate ourselves from Iraq but also to forge a more humane and enlightened policy toward the Middle East, we need more Orientalism, not less.
About the writer
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.
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