Reaction To Edward Said's Orientalism (pub. 1978)

Edward Said’s “Orientalism” thesis mates together cultural relativism, Foucault’s subjectivism and Gramsci’s ideas on cultural subversion. The result is less viable than a mule. Said could not get through the introduction without playing the victim card. This is fitting, given that his thesis contends that the Middle-East has been, and remains, the victim of Western imperialism. Here we can witness a tenured professor at Columbia University, a Harvard Ph.D., a past president of the Modern Language Association whose books are required reading in university classrooms throughout the country, whining about his “uniquely punishing destiny” (27) in the racist, imperialistic West. If this was not so pathetic and absurd, it would be funny.

Said’s sniveling connotes the purpose of his life’s work: to inculcate guilt and self-loathing into his Western readers in order to further his Gramsci-like cultural agenda. Said states his agenda in the context of a discussion on one of his many bêtes noires, Paul Johnson. Said was responding to an article where Johnson argued in favor of the neo-con enterprise that the civilized nations should impose their rule on the world’s failed states. Said correctly identifies a growing gulf between the “public consciousness” on the superiority of Western society and its values and “a wide sector of intellectuals, academics and artists” who have imbibed the ideas of cultural relativism and multiculturalism (348). Said’s purpose was to close that gap by corrupting the field of Middle East Studies and indoctrinating undergrads.

Said’s thesis is based on his view that there is no real difference between the Orient and the Occident. His position is that if not for Western “Orientalists” imposing their narratives upon the East, the very concept of “East is East and West is West” would never have arisen. Said unites this idea with his well-known view that the West requires the “Other” in order to define itself. Said agrees with Foucault and Thomas Kuhn that knowledge and scholarship are about power and domination and little else. In a passage on this topic, Said describes his view of Western scholarship as simply the result of a consensus which imposes a narrative structure based on authority (21-2). In this discussion, Said does not even acknowledge the existence or possibility of knowledge and truth. It is Said’s hope that his acid wash of literary theory will help intellectually disarm the West during its period of cultural decay and death: “indeed if it eliminates the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams called the ‘unlearning’ of ‘the inherent dominative mode’” (28).
 
It should go without saying that Said’s rubbish has been thoroughly eviscerated by such real scholars and historians as Keith Windschuttle, Ibn Warraq and Bernard Lewis. For example, in 2007 Warraq published his masterful Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Nevertheless, Said’s mendacious work is still de rigueur in American college classrooms. While on the other hand, most university libraries will never purchase a copy of Warraq’s book. Of course, Said’s continued popularity in academia says more about that institution’s culture than that of the Middle-East.