Professor Lewis Strikes Back

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls—t.
Part 5: Back to the Pilot.
By Michael Isenberg.

I began this series on Orientalism with the feud between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said. I’ve now come full circle and will wrap it up in the same vein.

Orientalism was a 1978 book by Professor Said, in which he argues that most Western scholarship on the Middle East is tainted: racist and in the service of the Armies of Imperialism. Among Western scholars, he singled out Mr. Lewis in particular. In a book chock full of attacks on the works of Orientalists, and even occasional praise for them, the attack on Lewis stands out as an attack on him personally, and an unusually bitter and abusive one at that:

Lewis is an interesting case to examine further because of his standing in the political world of the Anglo-American Middle Eastern Establishment is that of the learned Orientalist, and everything he writes is steeped in the “authority” of the field. Yet for at least a decade and a half his work in the main has been aggressively ideological, despite his various attempts at subtlety and irony. I mention his recent writing as a perfect exemplification [of an] Establishment Orientalist [whose work] purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, very close to being propaganda against his subject material.

And,

One would find this kind of procedure objectionable as political propaganda—which is what it is, of course—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists like Lewis writing about Muslims and Arabs are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism.

And again,

To look for a conscious, fair, and explicit judgment by Lewis of the Islam he has treated as he has treated it is to look in vain.

What are these "aggressively ideological" works of Professor Lewis? This "political propaganda?" Professor Said objects to a series of articles, which I wrote about previously, in which Lewis argues that despite the apparent victory of secular, nationalist dictators in the Middle East, Islamic movements were a rising force, and “Though they have all, so far, been defeated, they have not yet spoken their last word.” In Orientalism, Said dismisses that as “a project to debunk, to whittle down, and to discredit the Arabs and Islam,” and “a charge intended by Lewis to explain to his latest public why it is that the Muslims (or Arabs) still will not settle down and accept Israeli hegemony over the Near East.” The role of Islam in the Arab world was certainly a topic over which reasonable people could disagree without either of them being guilty of trying to "discredit the Arabs." In any case, only a year after Orientalism was published, events in Iran would prove—in a tragic and spectacular fashion—that is was Lewis who was right.

Professor Said’s claim, that what this is really about is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, tells us more about Said than about Lewis. As I noted in Part 1, Said concedes in his Introduction that the subject was personal, “not for me an exclusively academic matter.” Nowhere does he let his personal feelings get in the way of his scholarly objectivity more than when it comes to the Jewish State. While he maintains a certain amount of academic detachment through most of the book, the final chapter, covering modern scholars, is entirely distorted by his partisanship as a Palestinian. Bernard Lewis is pro-Zionist and therefore must be at the receiving end of ad hominem attacks. But Louis Massignon, who viewed Zionism as “bourgeois colonialism,” possesses “sheer genius” and “overwhelming intelligence.” Said is even willing to give him a pass for equating the East with the ancient and the West with the modern, usually one of Said's top complaints against Orientalists.

Lewis calls Said out on this. In a rebuttal, published in The New York Review of Books, “the culmination of Orientalism” argues that what really bothers Said and other critics about so called-Orientalists is not their view of history, but rather their view of current events:

“Orientalism” has been emptied of its previous content and given an entirely new one—that of unsympathetic or hostile treatment of Oriental peoples. For that matter, even the terms “unsympathetic” and “hostile” have been redefined to mean not supportive of currently fashionable creeds or causes.

Or as we would put it today, the real sin of “Orientalists” is that they aren’t politically correct.

As for his overall assessment of the Orientalism hypothesis, Mr. Lewis sums it up in one word: “Absurd.” He points out that everything that Professor Said had to say about Western scholars of the Middle East could equally apply to scholars of Ancient Greece, until “the very name of classicist must be transformed into a term of abuse.” As ludicrous as that may seem, “if for classicist we substitute ‘Orientalist,’ with the appropriate accompanying changes, this amusing fantasy becomes an alarming reality.”

Or as we would put it today, “Orientalism” is bulls—t.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Haaretz, Bio.com

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls—t.
Part 4: The other things Said got wrong.
By Michael Isenberg.

In Part 3 of this series, “Polluters of the Brain,” I began to lay out all the flaws in Edward Said’s “Orientalism” hypothesis, the notion that Western scholarship of the Middle East is irredeemably tainted by imperialism and racism. In particular, I discussed how his eponymous book is polluted from intro to index by the philosophy of postmodernism. I quoted extensively from Said admirer and postmodernism critic Camille Paglia.

While Ms. Paglia was willing to overlook Professor Said’s postmodernist tendencies, she is too honest an intellectual to overlook his fundamental unfairness to Western scholars. Despite her praise for his brilliance, she felt compelled to point out “reservations” that she had about Mr. Said’s “caricature of the disciplines of anthropology, Egyptology, and Oriental studies.” (Which seems to me a little like saying that despite Camille Paglia’s brilliance, one has reservations about her views on feminism, the sixties, and that business about art and culture being man’s attempt to come to terms with nature.) Paglia is quite right that Orientalists’ “massive scholarship in the nineteenth century is the foundation of today’s knowledge…[Said] tends to accept others’ dismissal of a massive body of work of awesome learning and continuing relevance.” That massive body of work was sure relevant to my own research; it helped me out greatly.

Professor Said is so certain that Westerners can't tell Muslims anything about the Muslim world, that he ignores instances where they really have uncovered Muslim achievements long forgotten in the East. Abu Zayd ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), for instance, developed cyclical theories of history that were way ahead of their time. And in economics, no less a figure than Arthur Laffer acknowledges that ibn Khaldun preceded him by half a millennium in developing the principles underlying supply side theory and the Laffer curve. And yet, except for a brief revival in the seventeenth century Ottoman Empire, ibn Khaldun’s works were nearly dead to the world, until a French Orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy, breathed new life into them in the early 1800s.

More generally, Professor Said takes a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” attitude toward Western scholars. He condemns them for appropriation if they adopt the works of Middle Eastern culture, and Eurocentrism if they ignore them. Those who disparage the Muslim are “racist” and “ethnocentric,” those who embrace the “Wisdom of the East” are appropriators. On the one hand, he is infuriated by Western representations of Muhammad as a fraud and a child molester, or criticism that Islam is “totalitarian.” On the other hand, he is infuriated by any suggestion that Muhammad and Islam are of any relevance to the modern Middle East, which he thinks is better understood in terms of the socialist, nationalist revolutionary movements which seemed to be in the ascendant at the time he was writing. Similarly, he argues that Orientalism creates artificial barriers between people. Then he damns one of the greatest achievements of human history, the Suez Canal, for shortening the distance to the East and thereby bringing the barriers down. “The logical conclusion of Orientalist thought,” he calls it.

As I noted in Part 2, there is some merit to Professor Said’s argument that many Orientalists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were racist and in the service of imperialism. But it’s a stretch to extend that argument to the post-World War II era, when the European powers pulled up their stakes in their one-time colonies and the civil rights movement in America made racism socially unacceptable. Professor Said is the first to object when Western scholars characterize the Middle East as static and unable to evolve. And yet he is in denial that the West can evolve as well, even though he has to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to stay in denial.

The first hoop is language; in the absence of colonialists, he redefines his terms to create new ones. Oil companies are the new “empires,” America the new “imperium.” It’s been said that Americans make lousy imperialists—all they want to do is go home—but that doesn’t deter Professor Said from stretching the definition of “empire” beyond recognition in order to make his case.

Unable to find enough criticisms of twentieth century scholars by redefining his terms, he resorts next to package dealing by bringing pop culture into the mix. Yes, there are some pretty cringe-worthy stereotypes of Arabs in 1960s television, but one can hardly draw conclusions about the academics toiling in the Middle Eastern sections of university libraries based on what appeared on The Beverly Hillbillies.

Indeed, the very name that Professor Said chose for his book, Orientalism, is an exercise in package dealing. As I noted previously, the term was more common during the Imperialist era than it is today. Even at the time the book was published in 1978, it had fallen into disuse. The International Congress of Orientalists voted to drop the term in 1973 and is now the International Congress of Asian and North African Studies. Even Professor Said concedes that “Today an Orientalist is less likely to call himself an Orientalist,” although he correctly points out that the name lingers (even in 2018) in institutional names such as Oxford’s Faculty of Oriental Studies. But by reviving the nearly-extinct term, Professor Said is able to associate modern scholars with their imperialist predecessors, and thereby visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation.

Said has yet another technique to make his case against scholars: he has the clairvoyance to read between the lines and uncover the coded racism and imperialism in their work. For example, consider his analysis of Bernard Lewis’s article, “Islamic Concepts of Revolution.” As noted above, revolution is central to Said's understanding of the modern Middle East. He objects that Professor Lewis disagrees, and finds particular fault with Lewis’s discussion of—etymology. Lewis points out that the root of the Arabic word for revolution, thur, means to rise, excite, or stir up, and originally referred to the motion of a camel rising up. It's a mildly interesting if somewhat pedantic discussion. Professor Said's response is completely out of proportion: “The entire passage is full of condescension and bad faith. Why introduce the idea of a camel rising as an etymological root for modern Arab revolution except as a clever way of discrediting the modern?” [I don’t know—maybe because a camel rising is the etymological root for modern Arab revolution?] Furthermore Professor Said argues that words like rise, excite, and stir up, are Freudian in nature and therefore evoke the racist stereotype of the oversexed Arab. Said’s “gotcha” tone reminds me of Dennis, the anarcho-syndicalist in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “What a giveaway! Do you hear that? Do you hear that, eh? That’s what I’m on about. Do you see him repressing me?”

The only difference is that in the movie, King Arthur really does call Dennis “Bloody peasant,” whereas the insults to Professor Said in Lewis’s article are figments of his imagination.

But Professor Said’s attacks on Professor Lewis did not stop with the latter’s etymological analyses, and I shall discuss that in the final part of this series.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), Old Scholar; YouTube

Polluters of the Brain

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls—t.
Part 3: Orientalism and Postmodernism.
By Michael Isenberg.

In Part 2 of this series, I gave credit where credit is due to the things that Edward Said got right in his influential book Orientalism, in which he attacks Western scholars of the Middle East as racist lackeys of imperialist oppressors.

It will take two more posts for me to cover all the things he got wrong.

Let me start by addressing something that I don’t hold against him. Professor Said’s critics have made a great deal out of an infamous gaffe in Orientalism: “After Mohammed’s death in 632, the military and later the cultural and religious hegemony of Islam grew enormously. First Persia, Syria, and Egypt, then Turkey, then North Africa fell to Muslim armies.” Said got the sequence wrong—Turkey fell to Islam centuries after North Africa. But having written a couple books myself, I know just how hard it is to eliminate every last error and typo. I’m willing to give Said a pass on this one. If you consider the book as whole, it’s clear that he knows his history (Albeit I’m surprised the error wasn’t corrected in the book’s 25th Anniversary edition).

Of far more concern than a probably unintentional error of chronology is that Orientalism is based on a fundamentally flawed philosophy.

That philosophy is postmodernism.

Postmodernism is an approach to art and literary criticism that hit its stride on college campuses in the 1960s, just as Said was doing his graduate work. But its roots extend to older philosophies of the “we know that we know nothing” variety, such as the positivism of August Comte and the skepticism of David Hume. It’s closely associated with “poststructuralism,” “social constructionism,” “deconstructionism,” and the “French Theory” (or just “Theory”) of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault. Despite the nuanced theoretical distinctions that academics draw between these terms, as far as I can tell, in practice they’re used interchangeably.

The basic idea is that reality is ultimately unknowable by human beings. We can only know “narratives” and “representations,” which are inevitably warped by race, culture, language, socioeconomic group, and the interests of the powerful—especially the last. Foucault’s “big squishy pink-marshmallow word is ‘power,’” writes Said admirer and postmodernism critic Camille Paglia, “which neither he nor his followers fully understand.”

Needless to say, in a world where there is no truth, only “social constructs,” the effort to find Grand Themes running through history is pure folly (which is a problem for me personally, since my novel The Thread of Reason is the first installment in a series about one of those Grand Themes).

In Professor Said’s words, “The real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer.”

Applying that philosophy to western scholarship of the Middle East, he says, “My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence—in which I do not for a moment believe—but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting.” Note that he’s inconsistent on whether a thing called the Orient actually exists apart from its representations. Here he says he does “not for a moment believe” in the existence of an “Oriental essence,” but in another passage, which I cited in Part 2, he says that “human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures.” In any case, the inconsistency makes little difference in the postmodernist world view. We fallible humans can only grasp the representations anyway.

In her 1970 essay, “The Comprachicos,” Ayn Rand identifies the problem with this kind of philosophy, and the implications of teaching it to students. She was talking about “Progressive” ideas in general, but her critique certainly applies to postmodernism in particular.

They are being taught, by implication, that there is no such thing as a firm, objective reality, which man’s mind must learn to perceive correctly; that reality is an indeterminate flux and can be anything the pack wants it to be; that truth or falsehood is determined by majority vote. And more: that knowledge is unnecessary and irrelevant, since the teacher’s views have no greater validity than the oratory of the dullest and most ignorant student—and therefore, that reason, thinking, intelligence and education are of no importance or value.”

One has to wonder, if knowledge bears such little relationship to any sort of reality, what benefit there is in funding universities, or paying the comfortable salaries of postmodernist academics.

Camille Paglia has expressed similar reservations:

The fashionable French posturing—‘there are no facts’—has got to stop. There are no certainties, but there are well-supported facts which we can learn and build on, always with the flexible scholarly skepticism that allows us to discard prior assumptions in the face of new evidence. If there are no facts, surgeons couldn’t operate, buildings would collapse, and airplanes wouldn’t get off the ground.

Professor Paglia does not always employ such scholarly and measured tones when discussing postmodernism: “Empty word play,” she calls it. “Pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions.” “Positively idiotic.” “Abject philistinism masquerading as advanced thought.” And my favorite: “Polluters of the brain commit crimes against humanity. Dante’s Inferno has a special reserved foxhole for the followers of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, who will boil for eternity in their own verbal sludge.”

Remarkably, Ms. Paglia does not include Mr. Said among those she would boil for eternity. She writes, “Said’s thinking has been influenced by Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, but he uses their ideas sparingly and judiciously.” I find Professor Paglia's opinion mystifying in view of the implicit postmodernism that pollutes every page of Orientalism, not to mention Mr. Said’s own numerous explicit acknowledgments of his debt to Foucault. In all fairness, when she wrote this she was reviewing a different Said book, Culture and Imperialism. She may also have gone easy on him in view of their common ground on the New Historicism, yet another academic movement, this one popular in the 1990s. Said and Paglia both found it lacking in rigor.

It is now generally accepted that postmodernism has run its course. “Gone out of fashion,” say Jose Lopez and Garry Potter, editors of After Postmodernism. “Moribund,” says Paglia. Alas, reports of postmodernism’s near death are greatly exaggerated. Its noxious influence lives on in the persistent belief that there is no truth, only narrative. The main thing that's changed is now there’s less of a focus on text as a source of narrative, and more of a focus on race and gender, a trend to which Orientalism contributed in no small way.

And yet, getting into bed with postmodernism isn’t the only thing Orientalism gets wrong, as I shall discuss in Part 4, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Judy Horacek

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls--t

Part 2: What is Orientalism?
By Michael Isenberg.

In Part 1 of this series I introduced Edward Said and his 1978 book Orientalism. I observed that they “have been significant forces in the field of Middle Eastern studies—not for the better” and that “the book was a precursor to today’s ugly politically correct attacks on ‘dead white men,’ and ‘cultural appropriation’—decades before those terms were in common use.”

I did not say much, however, about what Orientalism is, which I’ll address in this part, along with some of the things that Said got right.

Professor Said never explicitly defines Orientalism anywhere in his 300 page magnum opus. The closest he comes is in the Introduction:

Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France [and later America] and the Orient…Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occident (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist.

Not a lot of help. Nevertheless, read the rest of the book and certain recurring themes emerge:

1. Orientalism is a discipline for studying the Middle East “systematically.”

2. Orientalism is a vocabulary, a body of work, and a set of structures.

3. Orientalism is about power. The relationship between Orient and Occident is one of weak to strong. “Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.”

4. Orientalism created the Orient. The distinction between Orient and Occident was made up by Western scholars. “For that is the main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism. Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences?”

5. Orientalism is racist. In creating the Orient, Orientalism imposed negative stereotypes on the Middle East. The Orient of Orientalists is monolithic. “Its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness” make it “static, frozen, fixed eternally.” The Oriental is passive (and therefore feminine), fatalistic, and sex-obsessed, possessed of “untiring sensuality, unlimited desire.” “Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals.”

6. Orientalism is the self-serving handmaiden of Imperialism. The Orient of Orientalists is a constant menace and must be dominated by the West, whose colonial officials then need the services of Orientalists in order to govern their subject peoples. Orientalism creates Imperialism creates Orientalism.

7. More self-serving: The technical training required to master the field ensured that Orientalists owned Orientalism, and therefore the Orient. “From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was represent itself.”

8. Orientalism is theft of Eastern culture. Well before the term “cultural appropriation” was in common use, Professor Said refers to the Description de l'Égypte, the collected findings of the scholars who accompanied Napoleon on his 1798 Egyptian adventure, as “that great collective appropriation of one country by another.” But serious scholars weren't the only thieves. European novelists such as Flaubert and Disraeli appropriated exotic Eastern characters and mythology to titillate their readers.

9. The collected body of work of Orientalism is a representation or simulacrum of the Orient, not the Orient itself. “It needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations.” Note Said’s ironic quotation marks around the word truth.

10. Designating the Oriental as an object of study is dehumanizing.

11. Orientalism is based on the study of classical texts, rather than “modern Oriental realities.” Learning about the modern Middle East by studying the Quran is “anachronistic.”

There are some things that are fair in Professor’s Said’s criticisms.

Nineteenth century writing on the Middle East is chock full of racism. While I don't generally approve of "trigger warnings," I'm going to make an exception in this case and say that the examples in the next two paragraphs are pretty egregious. Read them at your own risk.

Said cites the work of Ernest Renan (1823-1892) as among the worst. Despite considerable contributions to the field of philology, Renan held cringe-worthy opinions of Arabs and Jews: “The Semitic race appears to us to be an incomplete race…like those individuals who possess so little fecundity that, after a gracious childhood, they attain only the most mediocre virility, the Semitic nations experienced their fullest flowering in their first age and have never been able to achieve true maturity.”

Frankly, Said’s examples are mild compared to some of the racism I found in my own research. Alfred von Kremer (1828-1889), for example, laces his The Orient under the Caliphs with loathsome stereotypes about Arabs and money. In discussing the tribesmen who served the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750), he writes, “The Arab passion for gold had no limits,” and “The genuine Semitic character of these people shows itself clearly in money matters; love of gold is one of the most marked features of their national character. It is accordingly undoubted that the troops would scarcely allow any opportunity to escape for the enhancement of their pay. Matters soon went so far that in disputes about succession it was the golden purse that decided.” It was only by diluting the Arab blood in the ranks, Kremer tells us, with soldiers drawn from the conquered peoples, that later rulers were able to afford their militaries.

Said is also correct that Orientalism and Imperialism went hand-in-hand. Napoleon brought along a host of scholars to advise him in his occupation of Egypt. The party included one polymath who is near and dear to the hearts of those of us who have backgrounds in math and science, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier. A century and change later, on the eve of World War I, Imperialist icons like Lord Balfour and the Earl of Cromer were still extending their patronage to Orientalist scholars, writing learned essays and making speeches in Parliament on the necessity of cultivating Orientalism in order to lubricate the machinery of Empire.

Sadly, what Said got right pales in comparison to what he got wrong and it will take the next two installments in this series, "Polluters of the Brain" and "Damned if you do, damned if you don’t," for me to cover it all.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): Amazon.com

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, and why “Orientalism” is Bulls--t

Part 1: Who is Edward Said?
By Michael Isenberg.

In my recent obituary for Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), I noted that he had been party to a number of controversies during his long career. Among these were his involvement with the two Bush Administrations, his “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis, and the bitter accusations leveled against him in Edward Said’s book, Orientalism.

Professor Said and his Orientalism hypothesis have been significant forces in the field of Middle Eastern studies—not for the better—and they would be worth discussing in their own right, even if Professor Lewis had not been involved. In this post I will give some background on Professor Said and his magnum opus. Part 2 will go into more detail about what is Orientalism and give credit where credit is due for the things Professor Said got right. Then in Parts 3 and 4 I’ll cover what he got wrong. Finally, in Part 5, I’ll come full circle back to the Lewis/Said feud.

Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003) was born in Jerusalem, at the time part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His father was a Palestinian who had earned American citizenship through his service in the US Army during World War I. His mother was Lebanese. Both were Christian.

Growing up, shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem, Edward felt alienated, part of many worlds, belonging to none. As he wrote in 2002’s Between Worlds, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays,

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like "Saïd", connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired Edward VIII the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth) I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity, at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.

Said came to the United States in the 1950s (is it called “immigration” if you’re already a citizen?), where he completed his education, earning degrees from Princeton and Harvard. In 1963 he joined the faculties of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia.

Professor Said soon became an academic superstar. His colleague in the field of literary criticism, Camille Paglia sang his praises in her review of his book Culture and Imperialism. She called him “one of the leading literary critics of his generation…a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, aesthete, and political activist, an inspiring role model for a younger generation of critics searching for their cultural identity.” He penned over two dozen books, but Orientalism, published in 1978, is the one he is remembered for. The book was a precursor to today’s ugly politically correct attacks on “dead white men,” and “cultural appropriation”—decades before those terms were in common use.

The terms “Orient” and “Oriental” on the other hand, had a long history. For most of us in the twenty-first century, they are somewhat old-fashioned and possibly racist terms (opinions are divided) referring to the Far East: China, Japan, and so on. However, Said’s use of “Orient” hearkens back to an earlier era, the eighteenth century, when it referred to what we now call the Middle East. And although Said bemoans that the term “Orient” expanded along with nineteenth century European imperialism to encompass all of Asia, he generally continues to use it throughout the book to refer to the Middle East. His choice of this outdated usage is not accidental. I’ll have more to say about that in Part 4.

The Introduction to Orientalism is not promising, fraught as it is with opaque academic-ese. For example, “My whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints on writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting.” But don’t be discouraged by this. The language becomes marvelously readable once the introduction is over and the main body of the text begins.

The flow of the book is more or less chronological, a series of theatrical tableaus—to use one of Said’s favorites metaphors—tableaus that the West has staged to represent the East. These go back to ancient times, where Euripides’ The Bacchae portrays the drunken, demonic, and ultimately murderous acolytes of Dionysus as, according to Said, symbols of Asian Persia, in contrast to the Apollonian rationality of European Greece. From there, Said races through the millennia, slowing only when he gets to nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the bulk of his book. Along the way we meet a cast of prominent scholars and authors whose work has been indispensable to those of us who have done research in the field: William Jones, “the undisputed founder of [modern] Orientalism,” Silvestre de Sacy, Ernest Renan, Edward William Lane, Sir Richard Francis Burton, H.A.R Gibb, Louis Massignon, and of course, Professor Lewis.

Professor Said concedes that the book is personal for him.

In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. The nexus of knowledge and power creating “the Oriental” and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter.

As we shall see, when Said says that he does not always approach his subject in a spirit of unemotional, academic emotional detachment, we should believe him.

Perhaps you’ve notice that so far, I have not defined “Orientalism.” That’s problematic, because neither does Professor Said. At no point in his three hundred page doorstop does he provide a concise statement of what Orientalism is. Nevertheless, during the course of the book, certain recurring themes emerge, and we can piece together a definition from that. Which I will do in the next installment of this series.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo Credit(s): PalToday.ps

RIP Bernard Lewis

by Michael Isenberg.

The world has lost an icon in the field of Islamic studies: Princeton historian Bernard Lewis died May 19, a couple weeks shy of his 102nd birthday.

Born in London in 1916 to Jewish parents, Lewis was launched on a lifetime of language studies when he learned Hebrew in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1939, he earned his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London where he joined the faculty.

At that time, professional historians had little interest in the Muslim world. Such research as was done was carried out by “Arabists,” specialists in the Arabic language. Professor Lewis wrote in his 2012 autobiography, Notes On A Century (written in collaboration with longtime partner Buntzie Ellis Churchill), “As my teacher [H.A.R] Gibb told me more than once, I was the first professional historian to study, teach and write Arab history—the first, that is, in England.”

Like much of his generation, when World War II broke out, he entered military service. He was initially sent to tank school, but, “Either because of my aptitude for languages or my ineptitude with tanks, I was transferred from the tank corps to the intelligence corps.”

After the war, Professor Lewis made a name for himself with his first commercial success, 1950’s The Arabs in History, and his dive into the archives of the Ottoman Empire—he was the first Western scholar to be allowed access by the Turkish government. Professor Lewis takes little credit for that accomplishment:

It was my good fortune, rather than any particular merit on my part, which caused me to submit my application precisely at the moment when the custodians of the archive decided to adopt a more tolerant policy and no longer limit access only to their own nations. I was both astounded and delighted to receive the coveted permit. Feeling rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop or like an intruder in Ali Baba’s cave, I hardly knew where to turn first.

Still, accomplishment it was. In his article, “Bernard Lewis: an Appreciation,” R. Stephen Humphreys explains the significance of Lewis’s Ottoman scholarship:

For the first time, historians could hope to penetrate a premodern Islamic society in depth, to produce not only properly documented political studies, but also serious analyses of governmental structure, economic change, and demography. Moreover, the Ottoman archives were as valuable for the Arab and Balkan possessions of the Empire as for its Turkish core. Turkish scholars, notably Omer Lutfi Barkan and Halil Inalcik, had begun after World War II to make serious use of these treasures, but it is Lewis who revealed them to European and American scholars. In so doing he opened up what still remains the most dynamic and creative field in Middle Eastern history.

In his 1964 book, The Middle East and the West, Professor Lewis included a chapter “The Revolt of Islam,” in which he wrote,

From the beginnings of Western penetration in the world of Islam until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original movements of thoughts have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and of the community overwhelmed by infidels, rather than of the nation or country overrun by foreigners.

This was an astonishing statement at a time when the Muslim world was dominated by secular, nationalist, socialist dictators like Egypt’s Gamal Nasser. Even Professor Lewis had to concede that “In recent years these militant religious organizations appear to have lost ground, and in many countries they have been outlawed or restricted.” Still, he predicted, “Though they have all, so far, been defeated, they have not yet spoken their last word.” In particular he singled out Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as “The most active and most successful of these leagues.” He returned to this theme in a 1976 article (having moved to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the meantime), “The Return of Islam,” in Commentary magazine.

When, three years later, the Iranian Revolution proved him right in a spectacular and tragic fashion, Professor Lewis began his transformation from “mere” academic superstar to PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, a transformation that was completed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, perpetrated by Muslim Brotherhood alumni and their disciples. “Osama bin Laden made me famous,” he said.

His growing fame brought the US government a-calling. During the run-up to the first Gulf War, then-defense secretary Dick Cheney consulted him, together with “almost every Middle East expert in the country.” But Professor Lewis stood out. While most experts warned that the United States should not get involved in another Vietnam, Lewis correctly predicted that defeating the Iraqi Army would be “quick, cheap, and easy.” In Notes on a Century he conceded that he merely echoed the opinion of his friend, then-Turkish president Turgut Özal.

He was consulted again in the run up to the second Gulf War, prompting The New York Times to write in his obituary that “Few outsiders and no academics had more influence with the Bush administration on Middle Eastern affairs than Mr. Lewis.” Lewis himself, however, downplayed that influence. He insisted he opposed the second war and pointed out that the extent of his involvement with the Bush administration was little more than a few meetings with Vice President Cheney, meetings not important enough to warrant a mention in Cheney’s lengthy memoirs.

The role of Professor Lewis (or lack thereof) in advising the Bush Administration was not the only controversy of his long career. He was singled out by Columbia University’s Edward Said, who accused him of being the “culmination of Orientalism,” a term which Said never actually defines in the three hundred pages of his eponymous book, but which is apparently a form of racist scholarship in the service of Imperialism.

In recent years, Professor Lewis’s name has become synonymous with his “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis, a phrase he coined in a 1990 essay in The Atlantic, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and expanded upon in his 2003 book, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. Building on the ideas in “The Revolt of Islam,” Lewis argued that the conflict between Islam and the West was not the result of anything the West has done, but rather driven by the ideology of Islam itself.

(For more about the Clash of Civilizations, see my article, "Fighting for God." I'll cover Orientalism in a future post.)

Professor Lewis was well known for his bon mots and humorous anecdotes. One of his commanding officers during the war felt it necessary to note in his file “His sense of humor should not be taken as seditious.” Judging from Notes on a Century, Lewis was often content to play straight man in his own stories, and let other parties be the comedians. Thus, there is the story of the Turkish general with whom Professor Lewis was discussing Turkey’s entry into NATO. “The real problem with having Americans as your allies,” the general said, “is you never know when they will turn around and stab themselves in the back.”

On another occasion Professor Lewis was talking with a Pakistani general about the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Israel, Great Britain, and France made an abortive attempt to wrest the Suez Canal from Egypt's Nasser, who had nationalized it. “We are strongly opposed to military aggression,” the general said. “Especially when left unfinished.”

But perhaps the trait of Professor Lewis that contributed the most to his success as a scholar was his commitment to objectivity. “The historian should not set out to prove a thesis and select material to establish it,” he wrote, “but rather follow the evidence where it leads.”

Furthermore,

If you look back and find that in every single dispute between your group and other groups, yours has been right and the others have been wrong—then you should reexamine the hypothesis on the basis of which you are conducting your researches, because it is not in the nature of human entities to be always right.

And again, “It is perfectly legitimate to reject and refute someone else’s arguments, but you must not distort his arguments in order to make your task easier.”

He was even willing to reject and refute his own arguments when he thought that was warranted. Looking back at The Arabs in History late in life, he called it a “sin of my youth.” He felt it was unduly influenced by the Marxist phase he was going through at the time he wrote it. “Quasi-Marxism was my measles or chicken pox,” he said, “which I got over at the age when one recovers from these ailments. Some younger people presumably find it necessary to go through the same phase now but I don’t think one should make an intellectual virtue of childhood infections.”

Judging from the reaction to his work, he had some success in staying objective:

I am not an expert in theology or scripture, and I looked at these, if at all, only with a historian’s eye…This has not prevented my critics from attacking me for my treatment of Muslim scriptures and sacred biography. In this as in other matters, the attacks came from both sides. On the one side I am accused of traducing Islam and its sanctities, on the other of defending and even condoning its flaws. As long as the attacks continue to come from both sides, I shall remain confident of my scholarly objectivity.

The Arabic translator of The Middle East and the West wrote in his preface, “I don’t know who the person is but one thing is clear. He is, from our point of view, either a candid friend or an honest enemy and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.”

As another non-Muslim writing about the Muslim world, I can only dream that someday a Muslim writer will praise my work in this fashion.

RIP Bernard Lewis.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit: New York Times