Orientalism (68 page)

137
.
Morroe Berger,
The Arab World Today
(New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964), p. 140. Much the same sort of implication underlies the clumsy work of quasi-Arabists like Joel Carmichael and Daniel Lerner; it is there more subtly in political and historical scholars such as Theodore Draper, Walter Laqueur, and Élie Kedourie. It is strongly in evidence in such highly regarded works as Gabriel Baer’s
Population and Society in the Arab East
, trans. Hanna Szoke (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), and Alfred Bonné’s
State and Economics in the Middle East: A Society in Transition
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). The consensus seems to be that if they think at all, Arabs think differently—i.e., not necessarily with reason, and often without it. See also Adel Daher’s RAND study,
Current Trends in Arab Intellectual Thought
(RM-5979-FF, December
1969) and its typical conclusion that “the concrete problem-solving approach is conspicuously absent from Arab thought” (p. 29). In a review-essay for the
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
(see note 124 above), Roger Owen attacks the very notion of “Islam” as a concept for the study of history. His focus is
The Cambridge History of Islam
, which, he finds, in certain ways perpetuates an idea of Islam (to be found in such writers as Carl Becker and Max Weber) “defined essentially as a religious, feudal, and antirational system, [that] lacked the necessary characteristics which had made European progress possible.” For a sustained proof of Weber’s total inaccuracy, see Maxime Rodinson’s
Islam and Capitalism
, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 76–117.

138
.
Hamady, Character and Temperament, p. 197.

139
.
Berger,
Arab World
, p. 102.

140
.
Quoted by Irene Gendzier in
Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), p. 94.

141
.
Berger,
Arab World
, p. 151.

142
.
P. J. Vatikiotis, ed.,
Revolution in the Middle East
,
and Other Case Studies; proceedings of a seminar
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), pp. 8–9.

143
.
Ibid., pp. 12, 13.

144
.
Bernard Lewis, “Islamic Concepts of Revolution,” in ibid., pp. 33, 38–9. Lewis’s study
Race and Color in Islam
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971) expresses similar disaffection with an air of great learning; more explicitly political—but no less acid—is his
Islam in History: Ideas
,
Men and Events in the Middle East
(London: Alcove Press, 1973).

145
.
Bernard Lewis, “The Revolt of Islam,” in
The Middle East and The West
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 95.

146
.
Bernard Lewis, “The Return of Islam,”
Commentary
, January 1976, p. 44.

147
.
Ibid., p. 40.

148
.
Bernard Lewis,
History
—
Remembered, Recovered, Invented
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 68.

149
.
Lewis,
Islam in History
, p. 65.

150
.
Lewis,
The Middle East and the West
, pp. 60, 87.

151
.
Lewis,
Islam in History
, pp. 65–6.

152
.
Originally published in
Middle East Journal
5 (1951). Collected in
Readings in Arab Middle Eastern Societies and Cultures
, ed. Abdulla Lutfiyye and Charles W. Churchill (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1970), pp. 688–703.

153
.
Lewis, The Middle East and the West, p. 140.

154
.
Robert K. Merton, “The Perspectives of Insiders and Outsiders,” in his
The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations
, ed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 99–136.

155
.
See, for example, the recent work of Anwar Abdel Malek, Yves Lacoste, and the authors of essays published in
Review of Middle East Studies 1 and 2
(London: Ithaca Press, 1975, 1976), the various analyses of Middle Eastern politics by Noam Chomsky, and the work done by the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). A good prospectus is provided in Gabriel Ardant, Kostas Axelos, Jacques Berque, et al.,
De I’impérialisme à la décolonisation
(Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965).

1
.
Martin Bernal,
Black Athena
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Volume I, 1987; Volume II, 1991); Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

2
.
O’Hanlon and Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World;” Prakash, “Can the Subaltern Ride? A Reply to O’Hanlon and Washbrook,” both in
Comparative Studies in Society and History
, IV, 9 (January 1992), 141–184.

3
.
In one particularly telling instance, Lewis’s habits of tendentious generalization do seem to have gotten him in legal trouble. According to
Libération
(March 1, 1994) and the
Guardian
(March 8, 1994), Lewis now faces both criminal and civil suits brought against him in France by Armenian and human rights organizations. He is being charged under the same statute that makes it a crime in France to deny that the Nazi Holocaust took place; the charge against him is denying (in French newspapers) that a genocide of Armenians took place under the Ottoman empire.

4
.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

5
.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

6
.
“The Clash of Civilizations,”
Foreign Affairs
71, 3 (Summer 1993), 22–49.

7
.
“Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’,”
Social Text
, 31/32 (1992), 106.

8
.
Magdoff, “Globalisation–To What End?,”
Socialist Register 1992: New World Order?
, ed. Ralph Milliband and Leo Panitch (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 1–32.

9
.
Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Trans-nationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,”
Critical Inquiry
, 19, 4 (Summer 1993), 726–51; Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,”
Critical Inquiry
, 20, 2 (Winter 1994), 328–56.

10
.
Ireland’s Field Day
(London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. vii–viii.

11
.
Alcalay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Gilroy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Ferguson (London: Routledge, 1992).