A window on the world

Edward Said article 
  
A window on the world

Western scholars helped justify the war in Iraq, says Edward Said, with
their orientalist ideas about the 'Arab mind'. Twenty-five years after the
publication of his post-colonial classic, the author of Orientalism argues
that humanist understanding is now more urgently required than ever before

Edward Said
Saturday August 2, 2003
The Guardian

Nine years ago I wrote an afterword 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 civilisations, 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 sandheap 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 generalisations so as to stir up "America" against the
foreign devil.

Without a well-organised 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, civilise, 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 realisation that as today's globalised
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 practise 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 standardisation of
ideas, and greater and greater specialisation 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 demonisation 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 globalised 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 civilisations, 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 centred 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.

· Adapted from the introduction to a new edition of Orientalism, published
by Penguin on August 28 at £10.99