Preface To Orientalism

In my memoir Out of Place (1999) I described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grewup, providing for myself and my readers a detailed account of the settings that I think formed me inPalestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But that was a very personal account that stopped short of all the years of myown political engagement that started after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Orientalism is very much a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its firstpage opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the uglyshedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, theoutbreak of the second Intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians in the reinvaded West Bank andGaza. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalypticof course than the events of 11 September, 2001 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.As I write these lines the illegal imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds. Itsaftermath is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilisations,unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not.

I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United Stateshas improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds of reasons the situation in Europe seems tobe considerably better. In the US the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaninggeneralisation and triumphalist cliché, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt fordissenters and "others" has found a fitting correlative in the looting and destruction of Iraq'slibraries and museums.

What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot beswept clean like a blackboard, clean so that "we" might inscribe our own future there and impose ourown forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washingtonand elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can beshaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the "Orient", thatsemi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century has been made andre-made countless times. In the process the uncountable sediments of history, that include innumerablehistories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept asideor ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that weretaken out of Baghdad.

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, so that"our" East, "our" Orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct. And I have a veryhigh regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of whatthey are and want to be. There's been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporarysocieties of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rightsthat we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple andagreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find, like Easter eggs in the living-room.

The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have noknowledge at all of the language real people speak has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American powerto construct there an ersatz model of free market "democracy". You don't need Arabic or Persian oreven French to pontificate about how the democracy domino effect is just what the Arab world needs.

But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result ofunderstanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of anoverall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will tounderstand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposesof control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected bya small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughlyideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguisedfor its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.

The major influences on George W Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as BernardLewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about suchpreposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power couldreverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam andterror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicistspretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart ofthese strange Oriental peoples. Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriadevangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of themre-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalisations so as to stir up "America"against the foreign devil.

Without a well-organised sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn'tappreciate "our" values -- the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma -- there would have beenno war. So from the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors ofMalaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies ofIndochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House, using the sameclichés, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs thechorus, power is the only language they understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. These people have nowbeen joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confidedevery thing, from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political lifeand its oil industry.

Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that itscircumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and thatit uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals tosay calming words about benign or altruistic empires.

Twenty-five years after my book's publication Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modernimperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon's entry into Egypt twocenturies ago. Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire isonly a way of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modernOrientalist.

This of course is also V S Naipaul's contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on whiletheir country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how littleit wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives,say, of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis. Think of the line that starts with Napoleon,continues with the rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similarundertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire 20th century in the struggle over oiland strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise ofanti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, ofinsurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against thelatest bunch of "natives". Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of theother, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics.

My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introducea longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury thatso imprison us. I have called what I try to do "humanism", a word I continue to use stubbornlydespite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first ofall attempting to dissolve Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles" so as to be able to use one's mindhistorically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover, humanism is sustained by asense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, therefore,there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.

This is to say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our worldhas ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. We need to speak about issues of injustice andsuffering within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio- economic reality. Our roleis to widen the field of discussion. I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocatingthe rights of the Palestinian people to national self- determination, but I have always tried to do that withfull attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution andgenocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed towardsa humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicatethat Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would seem to be a vital necessityfor independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the simplifying and confining ones basedon mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.

As a humanist whose field is literature I am old enough to have been trained 40 years ago in the field ofcomparative literature, the leading ideas of which go back to Germany in the late 18th and early 19thcenturies. Before that I must mention the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neopolitanphilosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate those of German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf, later tobe followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great 20th Century Romancephilologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.

To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossiblyantiquarian and musty though philology, in fact, is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. Itis exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular, aconsuming passion which led to the composition of the West-…stlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's laterideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole that could beapprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of thewhole.

There is a considerable irony to the realisation then that as today's globalised world draws together insome of the ways I have been talking about here, we may be approaching the kind of standardisation andhomogeneity that Goethe's ideas were specifically formulated to prevent. In an essay he published in 1951entitled Philologie der Weltliteratur Erich Auerbach made exactly that point at the outset of the postwarperiod, which was also the beginning of the Cold War. His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 butwritten while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testamentto the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in Western literature from Homer to VirginiaWoolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that for Auerbach the great book he wrote was an elegy for aperiod when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, usingerudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goetheadvocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.

Positive knowledge of languages and history was necessary, but it was never enough, any more than themechanical gathering of facts would constitute an adequate method for grasping what an author like Dante, forexample, was all about. The main requirement for the kind of philological understanding Auerbach and hispredecessors were talking about and tried to practise was one that sympathetically and subjectively enteredinto the life of a written text as seen from the perspective of its time and its author (einfühlung). Ratherthan alienation and hostility to another time and a different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteraturinvolved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thusthe interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a placefor works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter's mission.

All this was obviously undermined and destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbachnotes mournfully, the standardisation of ideas, and greater and greater specialisation of knowledge graduallynarrowed the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly enquiring kind of philological workthat he had represented, and, alas, it's an even more depressing fact that since Auerbach's death in 1957 boththe idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. Instead of readingin the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge availableon the Internet and in the mass media.

Worse yet, education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies, often disseminated by the massmedia as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the senseof surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern warfare.In the demonisation of an unknown enemy for whom the label "terrorist" serves the general purpose ofkeeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times ofcrisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced.

Speaking both as an American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind ofsimplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for US policyin the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change-- backed up by the most bloated military budget in history -- are the main ideas debated endlessly andimpoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called "experts" whovalidate the government's general line. Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on asecular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas thatcelebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultureswith contempt.

Perhaps you will say that I am making too many abrupt transitions between humanistic interpretation on theone hand and foreign policy on the other, and that a modern technological society which along withunprecedented power possesses the Internet and F-16 fighter-jets must in the end be commanded by formidabletechnical-policy experts like Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle.