Nine years ago I wrote an afterward for Orientalism which, in
trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed
not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book
appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about
representations of "the orient" lent itself to
increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more
ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign
of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two
main intellectual, political and personal mentors, the writers and
activists Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness
and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go
on.
In my memoir Out of Place (1999) I
described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grew up,
providing for myself and my readers a detailed account of the
settings that I think formed me in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon.
But that was a very personal account which stopped short of all
the years of my own political engagement that started after the
1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Orientalism is very much a book
tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its first
page opens with a description of the Lebanese civil war that ended
in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood
continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo
peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful
suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza.
The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous
damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events
of September 11 2001 and their aftermath in the wars against
Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal
occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds. Its
aftermath is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what
is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable,
irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not.
I wish I could say that general
understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the US
has improved, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds of
reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better.
What American leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem
incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean
like a blackboard, so that "we" might inscribe our own
future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser
people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in
Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle
East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up
like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with
the "orient", that semi-mythical construct which since
Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been
made and remade countless times. In the process the uncountable
sediments of history, a dizzying variety of peoples, languages,
experiences, and cultures, are swept aside or ignored, relegated
to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless
fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.
My argument is that history is made
by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, so
that "our" east, "our" orient becomes
"ours" to possess and direct. And I have a very high
regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to
struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be.
There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on
contemporary Arab and Muslim societies for their backwardness,
lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights that we simply
forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and
democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one
either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room.
The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the
name of foreign policy and who have no knowledge at all of the
language real people actually speak, has fabricated an arid
landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz
model of free market "democracy".
But there is a difference between
knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of
understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their
own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an
overall campaign of self-affirmation. It is surely one of the
intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war
confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged
against a devastated third world dictatorship on thoroughly
ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security
control and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent,
hastened and reasoned for by orientalists who betrayed their
calling as scholars.
The major influences on George W
Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as
Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic
world who helped the American hawks to think about such
preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and the centuries-old
Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today
bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing
screaming headlines about Islam and terror, the Arab threat and
the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists
pretending to knowledge imparted by experts who have supposedly
penetrated to the heart of these strange oriental peoples. CNN and
Fox, plus myriad evangelical and rightwing radio hosts,
innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, have recycled
the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to
stir up "America" against the foreign devil.
Without a well-organized sense that
the people over there were not like "us" and didn't
appreciate "our" values - the very core of traditional
orientalist dogma - there would have been no war. The American
advisers to the Pentagon and the White House use the same clichés,
the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power
and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only
language they understand) as the scholars enlisted by the Dutch
conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina
and North Africa. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a
whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom
shall be confided everything from the writing of textbooks and the
constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its
oil industry.
Every single empire in its official
discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its
circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize,
bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last
resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing
intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic
empires.
Twenty-five years after my book's
publication, Orientalism once again raises the question of whether
modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the
orient since Napoleon's entry into Egypt two centuries ago. Arabs
and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the
depredations of empire are only ways of evading responsibility in
the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern
orientalist. This of course is also VS Naipaul's contribution to
literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country
goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial
intrusion that is, how little it wishes to face the long
succession of years through which empire continues to work its way
in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or
Iraqis.
Think of the line that starts with
Napoleon, continues with the rise of oriental studies and the
takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in
Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire 20th
century, in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the
Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think of
the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of
liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency,
civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and
uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of
"natives". Each of these phases and eras produces its
own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive
images, its own disputatious polemics.
My idea in Orientalism was to use
humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to
introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the
short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison
us. I have called what I try to do "humanism", a word I
continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the
term by sophisticated postmodern critics. By humanism I mean first
of all attempting to dissolve Blake's "mind-forg'd
manacles" so as to be able to use one's mind historically and
rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover
humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other
interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking
therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
Thus it is correct to say that
every domain is linked, and that nothing that goes on in our world
has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. We need
to speak about issues of injustice and suffering within a context
that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic
reality. I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35
years advocating the right of the Palestinian people to national
self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full
attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they
suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing
is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be
directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not
further suppression and denial.
As a humanist whose field is
literature, I am old enough to have been trained 40 years ago in
the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back
to Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I must
mention too the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista
Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas
anticipate those of German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf, later
to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer,
and finally the great 20th-century Romance philologists Erich
Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.
To young people of the current
generation the very idea of philology suggests something
impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the
most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is
exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam
generally, and the 14th-century Persian Sufi poet Hafiz in
particular, a consuming passion which led to the composition of
the West-östlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas
about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world
as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as
having preserved the individuality of each work without losing
sight of the whole.
There is a considerable irony to
the realization that as today's globalized world draws together,
we may be approaching the kind of standardisation and homogeneity
that Goethe's ideas were specifically formulated to prevent. In an
essay published in 1951 entitled "Philologie der
Weltliteratur", Auerbach made exactly that point. His great
book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while
Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in
Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and
concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from
Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses
that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a
period when people could interpret texts philologically,
concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an
excellent command of several languages to support the kind of
understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of
Islamic literature.
Positive knowledge of languages and
history was necessary, but it was never enough, any more than the
mechanical gathering of facts would constitute an adequate method
for grasping what an author like Dante, for example, was all
about. The main requirement for the kind of philological
understanding Auerbach and his predecessors were talking about and
tried to practice was one that sympathetically and subjectively
entered into the life of a written text as seen from the
perspective of its time and its author. Rather than alienation and
hostility to another time and a different culture, philology as
applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit
deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality.
Thus the interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for a
foreign "other". And this creative making of a place for
works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important
facet of the interpreter's mission.
All this was obviously undermined
and destroyed in Germany by national socialism. After the war,
Auerbach notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and
greater and greater specialization of knowledge gradually narrowed
the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly
inquiring kind of philological work that he had represented; and,
alas, it's an even more depressing fact that since Auerbach's
death in 1957 both the idea and practice of humanistic research
have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. Instead of reading
in the real sense of the word, our students today are often
distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the internet
and in the mass media.
Worse yet, education is threatened
by nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the
media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant
electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision,
but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction
produced by modern warfare. In the deionization of an unknown
enemy for whom the label "terrorist" serves the general
purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images
command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis
and insecurity of the kind that the post-September 11 period has
produced.
Speaking both as an American and as
an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind of
simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon
civilian elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab
and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and
unilateral regime change - backed up by the most bloated military
budget in history - are the main ideas debated endlessly and
impoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of
producing so-called "experts" who validate the
government's general line. Reflection, debate, rational argument
and moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings
must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas
that celebrate American or western exceptionalism, denigrate the
relevance of context, and regard other cultures with contempt.
Perhaps you will say that I am
making too many abrupt transitions between humanistic
interpretation on the one hand and foreign policy on the other,
and that a modern technological society which along with
unprecedented power possesses the internet and F-16 fighter-jets
must in the end be commanded by formidable technical-policy
experts like Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle. But what has
really been lost is a sense of the density and interdependence of
human life, which can neither be reduced to a formula nor brushed
aside as irrelevant.
That is one side of the global
debate. In the Arab and Muslim countries the situation is scarcely
better. As Roula Khalaf has argued, the region has slipped into an
easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the
US is really like as a society. Because the governments are
relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turn
their energies to repressing and keeping down their own
populations, with results in resentment, anger and helpless
imprecations that do nothing to open up societies where secular
ideas about human history and development have been overtaken by
failure and frustration, as well as by an Islamism built out of
rote learning and the obliteration of what are perceived to be
other, competitive forms of secular knowledge. The gradual
disappearance of the extraordinary tradition of Islamic ijtihad -
the process of working out Islamic rules with reference to the
Koran - has been one of the major cultural disasters of our time,
with the result that critical thinking and individual wrestling
with the problems of the modern world have simply dropped out of
sight.
This is not to say that the
cultural world has simply regressed on one side to a belligerent
neo-orientalism and on the other to blanket rejectionism. Last
year's United Nations world summit in Johannesburg, for all its
limitations, did in fact reveal a vast area of common global
concern that suggests the welcome emergence of a new collective
constituency and gives the often facile notion of "one
world" a new urgency. In all this, however, we must admit
that no one can possibly know the extraordinarily complex unity of
our globalized world.
The terrible conflicts that herd
people under falsely unifying rubrics such as "America,"
"the west" or "Islam" and invent collective
identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite
diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed.
We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills
that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental
piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics
but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse.
The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings.
Critical thought does not submit to commands to join in the ranks
marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the
manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the
slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each
other, and live together. But for that kind of wider perception we
need time, patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in
communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a
world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism is centered upon the
agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather
than on received ideas and authority. Texts have to be read as
texts that were produced and live on in all sorts of what I have
called worldly ways. But this by no means excludes power, since on
the contrary I have tried to show the insinuations, the
imbrications of power into even the most recondite of studies. And
lastly, most important, humanism is the only, and I would go as
far as to say the final resistance we have against the inhuman
practices and injustices that disfigure human history.
