Orientalism (59 page)

What makes all these fluid and extraordinarily rich actualities difficult to accept is that most people resist the underlying notion: that human identity is not only not natural and stable, but constructed, and occasionally even invented outright. Part of the resistance and hostility generated by books like
Orientalism
, or after it,
The Invention of Tradition
, and
Black Athena
,
¹
is that they seem to undermine the naive belief in the certain positivity and unchanging historicity of a culture, a self, a national identity.
Orientalism
can only be read as a defense of Islam by suppressing half of my argument, in which I say (as I do in a subsequent book,
Covering Islam
) that even the primitive community we belong to natally is not immune from the interpretive contest, and that what appears in the West to be the emergence, return to, or resurgence of Islam is in fact a struggle in Islamic societies over the definition of Islam. No one person, authority, or institution has total control over that definition; hence, of course, the contest. Fundamentalism’s epistemological mistake is to think that “fundamentals” are ahistorical categories, not subject to and therefore outside the critical scrutiny of true believers,
who are supposed to accept them on faith. To the adherents of a restored or revived version of early Islam, Orientalists are considered (like Salman Rushdie) to be dangerous because they tamper with that version, cast doubt on it, show it to be fraudulent and non-divine. To them, therefore, the virtues of my book were that it pointed out the malicious dangers of the Orientalists and somehow pried Islam from their clutches.

Now this is hardly what I saw myself doing, but the view persists anyway. There are two reasons for this. In the first place no one finds it easy to live uncomplainingly and fearlessly with the thesis that human reality is constantly being made and unmade, and that anything like a stable essence is constantly under threat. Patriotism, extreme xenophobic nationalism, and downright unpleasant chauvinism are common responses to this fear. We all need some foundation on which to stand; the question is how extreme and unchangeable is our formulation of what this foundation is. My position is that in the case of an essential Islam or Orient, these images are no more than images, and are upheld as such both by the community of the Muslim faithful and (the correspondence is significant) by the community of Orientalists. My objection to what I have called Orientalism is not that it, is just the antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies, and peoples, but that as a system of thought Orientalism approaches a heterogenous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above. This false position hides historical change. Even more important, from my standpoint, it hides the
interests
of the Orientalist. Those, despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire, can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.

I have in mind the striking contrast between the weaker and stronger party that is evident from the beginning of Europe’s modern encounters with what it called the Orient. The studied solemnity and grandiose accents of Napoleon’s
Déscription de l’Egypte
—its massive, serried volumes testifying to the systematic labors of an entire corps of
savants
backed by a modern army of colonial conquest—dwarfs the individual testimony of people like Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti, who in three separate volumes describes the French invasion
from the point of view of the invaded. One might say that the
Déscription
is just a scientific, and therefore objective, account of Egypt in the early nineteenth century, but the presence of Jabarti (who is both unknown and ignored by Napoleon) suggests otherwise. Napoleon’s is an “objective” account from the standpoint of someone powerful trying to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit; Jabarti’s is an account by someone who paid the price, was figuratively captured and vanquished.

In other words, rather than remaining as inert documents that testify to an eternally opposed Occident and Orient, the
Déscription
and Jabarti’s chronicles together constitute a historical experience, out of which others evolved, and before which others existed. Studying the historical dynamics of this set of experiences is more demanding than sliding back into stereotypes like “the conflict of East and West.” That is one reason why
Orientalism
is mistakenly read as a surreptitiously anti-Western work and, by an act of unwarranted and even willful retrospective endowment, this reading (like all readings based on a supposedly stable binary opposition) elevates the image of an innocent and aggrieved Islam.

The second reason why the anti-essentialism of my arguments has proved hard to accept is political and urgently ideological. I had absolutely no way of knowing that, a year after the book was published, Iran would be the site of an extraordinarily far-reaching Islamic revolution, nor that the battle between Israel and the Palestinians would take such savage and protracted forms, from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the onset of the
intifada
in late 1987. The end of the Cold War did not mute, much less terminate, the apparently unending conflict between East and West as represented by the Arabs and Islam on one side and the Christian West on the other. More recent, but no less acute, contests developed as a result of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan; the challenge to the
status quo
during the 1980s and ’90s made by Islamic groups in countries as diverse as Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Territories, and the various American and European responses: the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan; the Gulf War; the continued support of Israel; and the emergence of “Islam” as a topic of alarmed, if not always precise and informed, journalism and scholarship. All this inflamed the sense of persecution felt by people forced, on an almost daily basis, to declare themselves to be either Westerners or Easterners. No one seemed to be free from the opposition between “us” and “them,”
which resulted in a sense of reinforced, deepened, hardened identity that has not been particularly edifying.

In such a turbulent context
Orientalism
’s fate was both fortunate and unfortunate. To those in the Arab and Islamic world who felt Western encroachment with anxiety and stress, it appeared to be the first book that gave a serious answer back to a West that had never actually listened to or forgiven the Oriental for being an Oriental at all. I recall one early Arabic review of the book that described its author as a champion of Arabism, a defender of the downtrodden and abused, whose mission was to engage Western authorities in a kind of epic and romantic
mano-a-mano
. Despite the exaggeration, it did convey some real sense of the West’s enduring hostility, as felt by Arabs, and it also conveyed a response that many educated Arabs felt was appropriate.

I will not deny that I
was
aware, when writing the book, of the subjective truth insinuated by Marx in the little sentence I quoted as one of the book’s epigraphs (“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”), which is that if you feel you have been denied the chance to speak your piece, you will try extremely hard to get that chance. For indeed, the subaltern
can
speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century eloquently attests. But I never felt that I was perpetuating the hostility between two rival political and cultural monolithic blocks, whose construction I was describing and whose terrible effects I was trying to reduce. On the contrary, as I said earlier, the Orient versus Occident opposition was both misleading and highly undesirable; the less it was given credit for actually describing anything more than a fascinating history of interpretations and of contesting interests, the better. I am happy to record that many readers in Britain and America, as well as in English-speaking Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean, saw the book as stressing the actualities of what was later to be called multiculturalism, rather than xenophobia and aggressive, race-oriented nationalism.

Nevertheless
Orientalism
has been thought of rather more as a kind of testimonial to subaltern status—the wretched of the earth talking back—than a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself. Thus, as its author I have been seen as playing an assigned role: that of a self-representing consciousness of what had formerly been suppressed and distorted in the learned texts of a discourse specifically designed to be read not by Orientals but by other Westerners. This is an important point, and it adds to the sense
of fixed identities battling across a permanent divide that my book quite specifically abjures, but which it paradoxically presupposes and depends on. None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have intended an Oriental as a reader. The discourse of Orientalism, its internal consistency, and its rigorous procedures were all designed for readers and consumers in the metropolitan West. This goes as much for people I genuinely admire, like Edward Lane and Gustave Flaubert, who were fascinated by Egypt, as it does for haughty colonial administrators, like Lord Cromer, brilliant scholars, like Ernest Renan, and baronial aristocrats, like Arthur Balfour, all of whom condescended to and disliked the Orientals they either ruled or studied. I must confess to a certain pleasure in listening in, uninvited, to their various pronouncements and inter-Orientalist discussions, and an equal pleasure in making known my findings both to Europeans and non-Europeans. I have no doubt that this was made possible because I traversed the imperial East-West divide, entered into the life of the West, and yet retained some organic connection with the place from which I originally came. I would repeat that this is very much a procedure of crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers; I believe
Orientalism
as a book shows it, especially at moments when I speak of humanistic study as seeking ideally to go beyond coercive limitations on thought toward a non-dominative, and non-essentialist, type of learning.

These considerations did in fact add to the pressures on my book to represent a sort of testament of wounds and a record of sufferings, the recital of which was felt as a long overdue striking back at the West. I deplore so simple a characterization of a work that is—here I am not going to be falsely modest—quite nuanced and discriminating in what it says about different people, different periods, and different styles of Orientalism. Each of my analyses varies the picture, increases the difference and discriminations, separates authors and periods from each other, even though all pertain to Orientalism. To read my analyses of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, or of Burton and Lane, with exactly the same emphasis, deriving the same reductive message from the banal formula “an attack on Western civilization” is, I believe, to be both simplistic and wrong. But I also believe that it is entirely correct to read recent Orientalist authorities, such as the almost comically persistent Bernard Lewis, as the politically motivated and hostile witnesses that their suave accents and unconvincing displays of learning attempt to hide.

Once again, then, we are back to the political and historical context
of the book, which I do not pretend is irrelevant to its contents. One of the most generously perspicacious and intelligently discriminating statements of that conjuncture was laid out in a review by Basim Musallam (MERIP, 1979). He begins by comparing my book with an earlier demystification of Orientalism by the Lebanese scholar Michael Rustum in 1895
(Kitab al-Gharib fi al-Gharb)
, but then says that the main difference between us is that my book is about loss, whereas Rustum’s is not:

Musallam correctly notes that an Algerian would not have written the same kind of generally pessimistic book, especially one like mine that does very little with the history of French relations with North Africa, Algeria most particularly. So while I would accept the overall impression that
Orientalism
is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration—only a few years before I wrote
Orientalism
Golda Meir made her notorious and deeply Orientalist comment about there being no Palestinian people—I would also like to add that neither in this book, nor in the two that immediately followed it,
The Question of Palestine
(1980) and
Covering Islam
(1981), did I want only to suggest a political program of restored identity and resurgent nationalism. There was, of course, an attempt in both of the later books to supply what was missing in
Orientalism
, namely a sense of what an alternative picture of parts of the Orient—Palestine and Islam respectively—might be from a personal point of view.

But in all my works I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism. The picture of Islam that I represented was not one of assertive discourse and dogmatic orthodoxy, but was based instead on the idea that communities of interpretation exist within and outside the Islamic world, communicating with each other
in a dialogue of equals. My view of Palestine, formulated originally in
The Question of Palestine
, remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested instead a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war. (I should mention in passing that although my book on Palestine was given a fine Hebrew translation in the early 1980s by Mifras, a small Israeli publishing house, it remains untranslated into Arabic to this day. Every Arabic publisher who was interested in the book wanted me to change or delete those sections that were openly critical of one or another Arab regime (including the PLO), a request that I have always refused to comply with.)