Edward Said - Intellectual Criticism

Intellectual Criticism

Academic and philosophic

Orientalism (1978) provoked much theoretic criticism of the work, and personal controversy about Edward Saïd, the author and the man. In “The Mightier Pen? Edward Saïd and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism” (1993), Ernest Gellner said that Saïd’s contentions that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years were unsupportable, because, until the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) remained a great politico-military threat to Europe. In “Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Saïd” (2005), Mark Proudman reported that Saïd said that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the late 19th century, when, in fact, the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire also were active imperial actors in that geopolitical theatre. In Empire and Information (1999), C.A. Bayly said that, at the height of European imperialism, European power in the Orient was not absolute, and much depended upon local collaborators, who often subverted the imperial strategies of the European powers with whom they collaborated against their own peoples. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Robert Irwin said that Palestine and Egypt were poor historical examples of Orientalism, because they were under European control (imperial and hegemonic) only for short periods in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Conversely, that Saïd devoted less attention to the more apt examples of the British Raj in India, and to Russia’s Asian dominions — because he (Saïd) sought to score political points against Western misbehaviour in the Middle East.

The criticism by Orientalists such as Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya, addressed what the historian Keddie said was “some unfortunate consequences” of Orientalism upon the perception and the status of their scholarship. In Approaches to the History of the Middle East, Keddie said that Edweard Saïd’s critical Orientalism work had:

unfortunate consequences . . . I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word “Orientalism” as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the “wrong” position on the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged too “conservative”. It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So, “Orientalism”, for many people, is a word that substitutes for thought, and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Saïd meant, at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.

Moreover, the Anglo–American Orientalist Bernard Lewis was a nemesis especially at odds with the thesis of Orientalism, wherein Saïd identified Lewis as:

a perfect exemplification Establishment Orientalist purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, very close to being propaganda against his subject material. For sheer heedless anti-intellectualism, unrestrained or unencumbered by the slightest trace of critical self-consciousness, no one, in my experience, has achieved the sublime confidence of Bernard Lewis, whose almost purely political exploits require more time to mention than they are worth. In a series of articles, and one particularly weak book — The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982) — Lewis has been busy responding to my argument, insisting that the Western quest for knowledge about other societies is unique, that it is motivated by pure curiosity, and that, in contrast, Muslims neither were able, nor interested, in getting knowledge about Europe, as if knowledge about Europe were the only acceptable criterion for true knowledge. Lewis’s arguments are presented as emanating exclusively from the scholar’s apolitical impartiality, whereas, at the same time, he has become an authority drawn on for anti–Islamic, anti–Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades, all of them underwritten by a zealotry covered with a veneer of urbanity that has very little in common with the “science” and learning Lewis purports to be upholding.

Lewis replied to Saïd’s characterization of his works and of himself, with essays; and later was joined in rejoinder by the academics Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who said that Orientalism (1978) is a flawed account of Western scholarship about “The Orient”.

In the article “Edward Saïd’s Shadowy Legacy” (2008), Robert Irwin said that the serious flaw in "Orientalism" was Saïd’s not having distinguished among the different types of Orientalist writers, especially because such writers possessed different cultural perspectives towards the peoples and places of the Orient — writers such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who never travelled to the East); the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (who did tour Egypt); the French geographer Ernest Renan (whose work is racist in perspective); and the British Orientalist, translator, and lexicographer Edward William Lane, who was a fluent speaker of the Arabic tongue. In Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (2007), Ibn Warraq said that the varied origins and cultural attitudes of European Orientalists over-rode factual and historical considerations, which Saïd ignored in order to construct a stereotype of Europeans befitting his thesis about the nature of Orientalism. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, Robert Irwin said that Saïd ignored the domination of 19th-century Oriental studies by German and Hungarian Orientalists, scholars from countries without imperial colonies in the Orient.

In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (1988), O.P. Kejariwal said that Edward Saïd created a monolithic Occidentalism to oppose the monolithic Orientalism of Western discourse, by having failed to distinguish among the paradigms of Romanticism and the secular intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment. That he ignored the wide range and fundamental differences of opinion among Western scholars about the nature of Oriental peoples and things; that he failed to acknowledge that Orientalists, such as the philologist William Jones, sought to establish cultural kinship rather than cultural difference between The East and The West; and that such scholars often made discoveries that later provided the foundations of anti-colonial nationalism.

Generally, the critics of Edward Saïd argued that he, and his followers, failed to critically distinguish among the varieties of Orientalism presented in the Western mass communications media and in its popular culture — such as the fantastic Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) — and Western academic studies of Oriental languages and literatures, histories and cultures.

In the article “Who is Afraid of Edward Saïd?” (1999), Biswamoy Pati said that by establishing ethnicity and cultural background as the tests of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Edward Saïd drew attention to the question of his own ethnic and cultural identities as a Palestinian and as a Subaltern. In the article "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", D.A. Washbrook said that Saïd was disqualified from writing about the Orient because of his Anglophone rearing, schooling, and education at an élite school in Cairo; because he had lived most of his adult life in the U.S.; and because he was a distinguished university professor who argued that: “any and all representations . . . are embedded, first, in the language, and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer . . . interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth’, which is, itself, a representation”. That excessive cultural relativism trapped Saïd, and his post-colonial theorist followers, in a "web of solipsism", which limits him and them to speak only of "representations", whilst simultaneously allowing them to deny the existence of any objective truth about the Orient.

Some consequences of being a politically-militant public intellectual occurred in 1985, when the Jewish Defense League traduced his statements about Arab–Israeli relations, and officially stated that Edward Saïd was a Nazi, because of his anti–Zionism, which they misrepresented as anti-Semitism; an arsonist set afire his office at Columbia University; and continual, attempted intimidation, personal and familial, with “innumerable death threats”.