Orientalism (61 page)

To say, as Lewis and his imitators do, that all such observations are only a matter of espousing “fashionable causes” is not quite to address the question of why, for example, so many Islamic specialists were and still are routinely consulted by, and actively work for, governments whose designs in the Islamic world are economic exploitation, domination, or outright aggression, or why so many scholars of Islam—like Lewis himself—voluntarily feel that it is part of their duty to mount attacks on modern Arab or Islamic peoples with the pretense that “classical” Islamic culture can nevertheless be the object of disinterested scholarly concern. The spectacle of specialists in the history of medieval Islamic guilds being sent on State Department missions to brief area embassies on United States security interests in the Persian Gulf does not spontaneously suggest anything resembling the love of Hellas ascribed by Lewis to the supposedly cognate field of classical philology.

It is therefore not surprising that the field of Islamic and Arabic Orientalism, always ready to deny its complicity with state power, had never until very recently produced an internal critique of the affiliations I have just been describing, and that Lewis can utter the amazing statement that a criticism of Orientalism would be “meaningless.” It is also not surprising that, with a few exceptions, most of the negative criticism my work has elicited from “specialists” has been, like Lewis’s, no more than banal description of a barony violated by a crude trespasser. The only specialists (again with a few exceptions) who attempted to deal with what I discuss—which is not only the content of Orientalism, but its relationships, affiliations, political tendencies, and worldview—were Sinologists, Indologists, and the younger generation of Middle East scholars, susceptible to newer influences and also to the political arguments that the critique of Orientalism entailed. One example is Benjamin Schwartz of Harvard, who used the occasion of his 1982 presidential address to the Asian Studies Association not only to disagree with some of my criticism, but also to welcome my arguments intellectually.

Many of the senior Arabists and Islamicists have responded with the aggrieved outrage that is for them a substitute for self-reflection;
most use words such as “malign,” “dishonor,” “libel,” as if criticism itself were an impermissible violation of their sacrosanct academic preserve. In Lewis’s case the defense offered is an act of conspicuous bad faith, since more than most Orientalists he has been a passionate political partisan against Arab (and other) causes in such places as the U.S. Congress,
Commentary
, and elsewhere. The proper response to him must therefore include an account of what politically and sociologically he is all about when he pretends to be defending the “honor” of his field, a defense which, it will be evident enough, is an elaborate confection of ideological half-truths designed to mislead non-specialist readers.

In short, the relationship between Islamic or Arab Orientalism and modern European culture can be studied without at the same time cataloguing every Orientalist who ever lived, every Orientalist tradition, or everything written by Orientalists, then lumping them together as rotten and worthless imperialism. I never did that anyway. It is beknighted to say that Orientalism is a conspiracy or to suggest that “the West” is evil: both are among the egregious fatuities that Lewis and one of his epigones, the Iraqi publicist K. Makiya, have had the temerity to ascribe to me. On the other hand it is hypocritical to suppress the cultural, political, ideological, and institutional contexts in which people write, think, and talk about the Orient, whether they are scholars or not. And as I said earlier, it is extremely important to understand that the reason Orientalism is opposed by so many thoughtful non-Westerners is that its modern discourse is correctly perceived as a discourse of power originating in an era of colonialism, the subject of an excellent recent symposium
Colonialism and Culture
, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks.
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In this kind of discourse, based mainly upon the assumption that Islam is monolithic and unchanging and therefore marketable by “experts” for powerful domestic political interests, neither Muslims nor Arabs nor any of the other dehumanized lesser peoples recognize themselves as human beings or their observers as simple scholars. Most of all they see in the discourse of modern Orientalism and its counterparts in similar knowledges constructed for Native Americans and Africans a chronic tendency to deny, suppress, or distort the cultural context of such systems of thought in order to maintain the fiction of its scholarly disinterest.

Yet I would not want to suggest that, current though such views as Lewis’s may be, they are the only ones that have either emerged or been reinforced during the past decade and a half. Yes, it is true that ever since the demise of the Soviet Union there has been a rush by some scholars and journalists in the United States to find in an Orientalized Islam a new empire of evil. Consequently, both the electronic and print media have been awash with demeaning stereotypes that lump together Islam and terrorism, or Arabs and violence, or the Orient and tyranny. And there has also been a return in various parts of the Middle and Far East to nativist religion and primitive nationalism, one particularly disgraceful aspect of which is the continuing Iranian
fatwa
against Salman Rushdie. But this isn’t the whole picture, and what I want to do in the remaining part of this essay is to talk about new trends in scholarship, criticism, and interpretation that, although they accept the basic premises of my book, go well beyond it in ways, I think, that enrich our sense of the complexity of historical experience.

None of those trends has emerged out of the blue, of course; nor have they gained the status of fully established knowledges and practices. The worldly context remains both perplexingly stirred-up and ideologically fraught, volatile, tense, changeable, and even murderous. Even though the Soviet Union has been dismembered and the Eastern European countries have attained political independence, patterns of power and dominance remain unsettlingly in evidence. The global south—once referred to romantically and even emotionally as the Third World—is enmeshed in a debt trap, broken into dozens of fractured or incoherent entities, beset with problems of poverty, disease, and underdevelopment that have increased in the past ten or fifteen years. Gone are the non-Aligned movement and the charismatic leaders who undertook decolonization and independence. An alarming pattern of ethnic conflict and local wars, not confined to the global south, as the tragic case of the Bosnians attests, has sprung up all over again. And in places like Central America, the Middle East, and Asia, the United States still remains the dominant power, with an anxious and still un-unified Europe straggling behind.

Explanations for the current world scene and attempts to comprehend it culturally and politically have emerged in some strikingly
dramatic ways. I have already mentioned fundamentalism. The secular equivalents are a return to nationalism and theories that stress the radical distinction—a falsely all-inclusive one, I believe—between different cultures and civilizations. Recently, for example, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University advanced the far from convincing proposition that Cold War bipolarism has been superseded by what he called the clash of civilizations, a thesis based on the premise that Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations, among several others, were rather like watertight compartments whose adherents were at bottom mainly interested in fending off all the others.
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This is preposterous, since one of the great advances in modern cultural theory is the realization, almost universally acknowledged, that cultures are hybrid and heterogenous and, as I argued in
Culture and Imperialism
, that cultures and civilizations are so interrelated and interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description of their individuality. How can one today speak of “Western civilization” except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel, and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western nations their present mixed identities? This is especially true of the United States, which today cannot seriously be described except as an enormous palimpsest of different races and cultures sharing a problematic history of conquests, exterminations, and of course major cultural and political achievements. And this was one of the implied messages of
Orientalism
, that any attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences exposes not only the misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but also the way in which understanding is complicit with the power to produce such things as the “Orient” or the “West.”

Not that Huntington, and behind him all the theorists and apologists of an exultant Western tradition, like Francis Fukuyama, haven’t retained a good deal of their hold on the public consciousness. They have, as is evident in the symptomatic case of Paul Johnson, once a Left intellectual, now a retrograde social and political polemicist. In the April 18, 1993, issue of
The New York Times Magazine
, by no means a marginal publication, Johnson published an essay entitled “Colonialism’s Back—And Not a Moment Too Soon,” whose main idea was that “the civilized nations” ought to take it upon themselves to re-colonize Third World countries “where
the most basic conditions of civilized life had broken down,” and to do this by means of a system of imposed trusteeships. His model is explicitly a nineteenth century colonial one where, he says, in order for the Europeans to trade profitably they had to impose political order.

Johnson’s argument has numerous subterranean echoes in the works of U.S. policy-makers, the media, and of course U.S. foreign policy itself, which remains interventionist in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, and frankly missionary everywhere else, especially with regard to its policies toward Russia and; the former Soviet republics. The important point, however, is that a largely unexamined but serious rift has opened in the public consciousness between the old ideas of Western hegemony (of which the system of Orientalism was a part) on the one hand, and newer ideas that have taken hold among subaltern and disadvantaged communities and among a wide sector of intellectuals, academics, and artists, on the other. It is now very strikingly no longer the case that the lesser peoples—formerly colonized, enslaved, suppressed—are silent or unaccounted for except by senior European or American males. There has been a revolution in the consciousness of women, minorities, and marginals so powerful as to affect mainstream thinking worldwide. Although I had some sense of it when I was working on
Orientalism
in the 1970s, it is now so dramatically apparent as to demand the attention of everyone seriously concerned with the scholarly and theoretical study of culture.

Two broad currents can be distinguished: post-colonialism and post-modernism, both in their use of the word “post” suggesting not so much the sense of going beyond but rather, as Ella Shohat puts it in a seminal article on the post-colonial, suggesting “continuities and discontinuities, but its emphasis is on the new modes and forms of the old colonialist practices, not on a ‘beyond’.”
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Both post-colonialism and post-modernism emerged as related topics of engagement and investigation during the 1980s and, in many instances, seemed to take account of such works as
Orientalism
as antecedents. It would be impossible here to get into the immense terminological debates that surround both words, some of them dwelling at length on whether the phrases should or should not be hyphenated. The point here is therefore not to talk about isolated instances of excess or risible jargon, but to locate those currents and efforts which, from the perspective of a book published in 1978, seem to some extent now to involve it in 1994.

Much of the most compelling work on the new political and economic order has concerned what, in a recent article, Harry Magdoff has described as “globalization,” a system by which a small financial elite expanded its power over the whole globe, inflating commodity and service prices, redistributing wealth from lower income sectors (usually in the non-Western world) to the higher-income ones.
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Along with this, as discussed in astringent terms by Masao Miyoshi and Arif Dirlik, there has emerged a new transnational order in which states no longer have borders, labor and income are subject only to global managers, and colonialism has reappeared in the subservience of the South to the North.
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Both Miyoshi and Dirlik go on to show how the interest of Western academics in subjects such as multiculturalism and “post-coloniality” can in fact be a cultural and intellectual retreat from the new realities of global power: “What we need,” Miyoshi says, “is a rigorous political and economic scrutiny rather than a gesture of pedagogic expediency,” exemplified by the “liberal self-deception” contained in such new fields as cultural studies and multiculturalism (751).

But even if we take such injunctions seriously (as we must), there is a solid basis in historical experience for the appearance today of interest in both post-modernism and its quite different counterpart post-colonialism. There is first of all the much greater Eurocentric bias in the former, and a preponderance of theoretical and aesthetic emphasis stressing the local and the contingent, as well as the almost decorative weightlessness of history, pastiche, and above all consumerism. The earliest studies of the post-colonial were by such distinguished thinkers as Anwar Abdel Malek, Samir Amin, and C. L. R. James, almost all based on studies of domination and control done from the standpoint of either a completed political independence or an incomplete liberationist project. Yet whereas post-modernism in one of its most famous programmatic statements (Jean-François Lyotard’s) stresses the disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, the emphasis behind much of the work done by the first generation of post-colonial artists and scholars is exactly the opposite: the grand narratives remain, even though their implementation and realization are at present in abeyance, deferred, or circumvented. This crucial difference between the urgent historical and political imperatives of post-colonialism and post-modernism’s relative detachment makes for altogether different approaches and results, although some overlap between them (in the technique of “magical realism,” for example) does exist.