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Modern Day Orientalist

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<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/09/AR2006110901770.html?referrer=reddit" source="Washington Post" author="Michael Dirda">Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents</a> is a review of the book with the same name, by Robert Irwin. The review starts with a movie-trailer--worthy introduction of <iq>Thirty years after Edward Said's groundbreaking "Orientalism," a British scholar responds.</iq> This gives the reader the impression that Said's book from the seventies had, to date, enjoyed an unchallenged status in the world of cultural history---a status the brave author of the book being reviewed finally had the temerity to question. This straw man form of argument is a quite popular form today, especially when paired with the ad hominem one, which usually shortly follows. <h>Of Straw Men</h> Orientalism is summed up thusly by the review: <bq>The book proved wildly successful and made the young Said a star of the academy and of what has come to be called cultural studies. Indeed, Orientalism supported the central theoretical premise of many intellectuals at the time -- that the prejudices of dead white European males had utterly distorted and warped their scholarship, art, politics and human sympathies.</bq> Calling Said, who was 43 when he published Orientalism in 1978, <iq>young</iq>, allows the reader to form an image of a radical, wanna-be hippie eager to tear down the work of his forebears. In fact, the book has been continuously assailed since it was published---as can be expected from its premise. Though the prose is often dense (some sections take re-reading to fully understand) and the citations untranslated (a working knowledge of French, German and Italian are useful), the research is meticulous and the conclusions amply supported. From the review, we learn that Irwin's book is actually a history of his own of the Middle East, of no small scholarly value. His attack on Orientalism occurs only in the introduction and in the conclusions, ostensibly offering all that is in between as evidence supporting the hypothesis that Said was a man whose <iq>thinking and evidence are shoddy, unreliable and mean-spirited.</iq> The book sounds like an elongated form of hero-worship of the Orientalists of the past---a view which the reviewer apparently shares---and envy of Said's scholarly achievements. <h>Learned <> Unbiased</h> The known fact that many past Orientalists bothered to learn the languages of the lands that Said claims they denigrated is offered as evidence that they, in fact, revered the Middle East. <bq>Thomas Hyde knew Turkish, Malaysian, Armenian and Chinese; worked on the Persian, Arabic and Syriac texts of a polyglot Bible ... William Jones, famous for his discovery of the Indo-Aryan roots of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, "mastered thirteen languages and dabbled in twenty-eight." Silvestre de Sacy learned Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaean, Ethiopian, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Mandaean "and the usual number of European languages that any self-respecting nineteenth-century academic would expect to be at home in."</bq> How does any of that <i>disprove</i> Said's basic premise? James Bond knows a lot of languages too, but a critique that Bond's understanding of world politics is shallow and heavily skewed toward preservation of empire is neither unfounded nor unprovable. It doesn't matter how damned cool he is---he lives in a world of racist, outmoded ideals. People are perfectly capable of memorizing---and even cherishing---every step of an eastern tea ritual, while at the same time harboring notions that they are in every way superior to all of the other participants<fn>. Said made the case that these scholars painted a skewed picture of the Oriental world <i>despite</i> their love of it. Kipling loved India, but considered himself above it in every way. Many of the great, dropped names in Irwin's book are the same. Their bias doesn't affect their command of dozens of languages, nor the meticulousness of their research, nor their attention to detail---but it infused every word they wrote. Irwin justifies a continued reverence of the scholars of the past simply because they were amazing scholars at the time. Without questioning their scholarship, it is completely legitimate to question their motives; Irwin doesn't think so, believing that their earnestness and hard work earns them a free pass. <h>Implicit Racism</h> Irwin uses the following quote to show how open to discussion these scholars of the past were---and, in agreeing with them, shows how blinded to his own racism he is. He can't even see how infused his own views are with his own assumed superiority to "Orientals". They are not a people with which we must deal as equals, according to him. Instead, it is the height of civilization that we even consider offering them a niche in our enlightened society---albeit as clear underlings, and only in exchange for all of their material wealth and resources---rather than just wiping them off of the map, which we may, unfortunately, still have to do as the brutes may not be bright enough to appreciate the magnanimity in our grand gesture. <bq>Moreover, the 19th century was legitimately exploring the whole issue of race, with some people arguing, like Renan, that mixing ethnicities avoided softness and decadence, while others, like Gobineau, maintained that such mongrelization led to degeneracy (colonization, was, therefore, an "appetizing dish, but one which poisons those who consume it").</bq> In what way is referring to "interbreeding" with Arabs as "mongrelization" an enlightened view? Said's point was never that the scholars of the past were monsters, nor was it a point of moral relativism or imposing our mores on the past. It was simply that much of the European work was (and, apparently, still is) couched in terms of superior/inferior races. A look at news reporting on the Middle East (or Near East, depending on which continent you call home) provides ample evidence that this attitude is still alive and well in the 21st century. The western world's attitude toward Iraq---in particular, that of the media through which information is disseminated---is one of dealing with recalcitrant children who refuse to grow up and swallow their medicine. Palestinians and Iranis fare no better. <h>Burying Said</h> It's somewhat clear that Irwin's book continues in the same vein as classical Orientalism and thus, sees the need to remove the wart of Said's work from the accepted canon. To this end, Irwin accuses Said of not having even read some of the authors he so unjustly maligned. When he sums up his argument thusly, <iq>Said libelled generations of scholars who were for the most part good and honourable men and he was not prepared to acknowledge that some of them at least might have written in good faith</iq>, he leaves doubt that he has even read Orientalism himself. For the most part, Orientalism does not address the intentions of the authors of the past, instead concentrating on what they actually wrote. For that, we should be grateful, as the world is full of buffoons like Irwin, who are oh-so-ready to read between the lines when they need reality to line up with their established beliefs. After quoting Irwin slamming Said for a few pages, the reviewer sums up by admitting that Irwin may be going "too far" with his accusations. As with many such inflammatory reviews, it makes one's Google finger itch to find the corporate association between the publisher of the book and the magazine in which the review appears. The full-on support for Irwin throughout the review, only to cop out at the end, smacks of nigh-illicit promotionalism. Nonetheless, he wraps up with the following capitulation: <bq>Said too was admired, even revered, by many good and honorable men and women, many of them first-rate thinkers and theorists. Haven't we, after all, persistently tended to view the Middle East through prejudices and distorting lenses of one sort or another?</bq> After zigging with the above endorsement of Orientalism's main tenet, he tries for the feel-good, everybody-wins ending, by zagging back and saying that he <iq>strongly believe[s] that most scholars work hard to discover and tell us the truth</iq>.<fn> Of course they do. Very few people spend their whole lives learning languages and cultures and writing thousands of pages, in order to distort everything they've <i>really</i> learned in order to fit into the propaganda framework they'd like to promulgate. That's the point of Orientalism---the distortion happens automatically and by accident. It's the brainwashing of culture that causes the work of even the most erudite scholars to crumble under the critical eye of a society a century or two more enlightened. It's only the very rare scholar that can escape this cultural lensing; all the better that books like Orientalism makes more of them aware of it---and hopefully better armed against it. <hr> <ft>The ability to wholeheartedly believe two completely contradictory concepts is called cognitive dissonance and it, quite frankly, has a better claim on being "what makes the world go around" than does money.</ft> <ft>Meaning not just Said, but all the other Orientalist scholars of the past. How chummy and convivial.</ft>