The Ironic Death of Orientalism
The battle royale between Edward W. Said and Bernard Lewis radiates a timeless quality, especially given how events have turned out in the Near East and how globalization has altered journalism and the foreign policy community.
FORTY YEARS ago, Princeton University historian of the Near East Bernard Lewis and Columbia University professor of literature Edward W. Said assailed each other in the New York Review of Books. The subject was Said’s book, Orientalism, published four years earlier in 1978, which had become an academic sensation. In decrying what he considered the surreptitious imperialist motivations of Western writers and experts on the Near East, Said with just one book arguably did more than anyone else to invent the field of postcolonial studies. Lewis eviscerated Said’s book at great length, demonstrating, in the process, his own formidable knowledge in several Near Eastern languages and traditions. This prompted Said to respond with equal venom, again at great length, playing the role of the suave rebel who had invaded the house of the almighty savants. It was a case of the historian-expert armed with the corpus of source material versus the English professor who grasped the literary implications of it all, and thus the effect on people’s political imaginations.
The antagonists are now dead. Lewis, a British-born Jew, chose burial in the historic Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv. Said, who identified as an exiled Palestinian, elected to have his ashes interred at a Protestant cemetery near Beirut. Clearly, here were two Americans whose deepest sympathies lay elsewhere. Each was brilliant beyond words, and as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute lay deep in their psyches as the bedrock of their disagreement, it allowed for the presentation of two quite different scholarly approaches and worldviews. In fact, their duel of four decades ago wears very well. This battle royale radiates a timeless quality, especially given how events have turned out in the Near East and how globalization has altered journalism and the foreign policy community.
THE DRAMA begins with Said’s book.
Employing nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Leon Gerome’s glittering orientalist fantasy of a nude snake charmer in the East as the book’s cover, Said’s work immediately electrifies with both condemnation and exotica even before the reader encounters the first word. Said defines orientalism as nothing less than “the Western approach to the Orient” in its entirety, and because orientalism constituted the systematic study of the Orient, it also involved a province of “dreams, images, and vocabulary” that the West practically inhaled in order to come to terms with this seemingly hostile, “Other” world. Because this “Other” world was so different and outwardly opposite to that of European civilization, Europeans, Said claimed, used the Orient as a vehicle to define themselves by what they were against: a geography close-by and yet fantastically threatening. Said circumscribes the branch of orientalism with which he is especially concerned to mean the British and French imperialist encounter with the Near East: that part of the East that is geographically nearest to Europe, and thus the part which exercised the most elaborate effect on Europe’s political and intellectual imagination. Because the Near East (more-or-less interchangeable with the Middle East) is mainly Arab and Islamic, Orientalism is a book focused primarily on how Western imperialism succeeded in distorting the study and interpretation of Arab culture and politics.
Europe, Said alleges, is the “genuine creator” of the Near East as it has been imagined by scholars, journalists, and policymakers for centuries. For it was the blunt and violent fact of empire that facilitated the study and travels of generations of British and French scholars, who, whether they admitted it or not—whether they were aware of it or not—were directly or indirectly imperial agents. Said’s indictment includes Richard Francis Burton, T.E. Lawrence, D.G. Hogarth, Harry St. John Philby, Gertrude Bell, Hamilton A.R. Gibb, and many others stretching deep into the modern era, as well as novelists and travel writers, to say nothing of the Arabists and national-security experts who have regularly delivered expertise on the Near East from their perches in London, Paris, and Washington. And this expertise, as Said explains, was based on the Middle East of their imaginations; not on what it was in fact.
These mandarins “bandied about” cliches and generalizations concerning Arab Muslims that “no one would risk in talking about blacks or Jews.” This is how, for example, the myth of the so-called “Arab mind” took root. From imperialism to determinism and essentialism there was a straight line that poisoned everything from travel writing to scholarship to area studies to foreign policy. In short, military and economic dominance had delivered cultural stereotypes.
Keep in mind that the literary vehicle for this whole argument is an elegant and sumptuous tour de force of well over 300 pages that takes no prisoners and takes one’s breath away. Lewis is singled out by Said for particular obloquy. He was someone respected by the Anglo-American establishment as the “learned Orientalist,” and whose writings are “steeped in the ‘authority’ of the field,” yet who, Said wrote, became “aggressively ideological” later in life, writing “propaganda against his subject material.” Said wrote this in the mid-1970s, long before the Iraq War would tarnish Lewis’ reputation as a proponent of removing Saddam Hussein, and still decades before globalization would produce a whole new class of scholars from around the world, including from the Middle East itself, able to analyze their own societies, and for whom cultural generalizations constituted an abomination.
LEWIS’ COUNTERATTACK appeared in the June 24, 1982, edition of The New York Review of Books, four years after the publication of Orientalism. The fact that he did not reply much sooner was possibly due to the fact that the relentless success of the book at some point simply made it impossible for him to ignore. Lewis’ response certainly reads with the tight organization that betrays maturation and slow, meticulous writing.
Lewis begins with a rich description of the European classicists who translated and interpreted the work of the ancient Greek tragedians and historians, preserving the origins of the Western tradition in Greece in all its glory and brilliance. Lewis then pivots:
The time has come to save Greece from the classicists and bring the whole pernicious tradition of classical scholarship to an end. Only Greeks are truly able to teach and write on Greek history and culture from remote antiquity to the present day.
The only non-Greeks who should be permitted to join this great endeavor, Lewis continues in jest, would be those who demonstrated pro-Greek sentiments, such as support for the Greek cause in Cyprus or ill will toward the Turks. Lewis thus undermines the whole edifice of Orientalism as an absurdity, since what it amounts to is that only Arabs and other oppressed people are qualified to write about their own cultures. “The implication would seem to be,” Lewis argues, “that by learning Arabic, Englishmen and Frenchmen were committing some kind of offense.” Said, in Lewis’ words, misrepresents “what scholars do and what scholarship is about.” In fact, “orientalist,” as a professional term, Lewis goes on, was long ago discarded by the very people Said attacks, as modern historians and academically trained specialists have long since taken over the field. Orientalism survives only in Said’s mind as a term of “polemical abuse,” Lewis writes. As for the crimes of orientalism, Lewis quotes Said on how Western scholars “appropriate” and “ransack” the intellectual and aesthetic riches of the Middle East, as if those things were, Lewis writes, “commodities which exist in finite quantities.” In fact, nothing has been stolen or “appropriated” since such intellectual and other riches exist for endless interpretation by whomever wants to undertake it.
Citing Said’s attacks on Zionists and Marxists as rank orientalists, Lewis attacks Said for politicizing scholarship. This is in the course of, at least according to Lewis, Said’s hole-ridden, arbitrary account of academic orientalist literature. Lewis notes that Said maligns the nineteenth-century English scholar Edward Lane for a book on modern Egyptians, even though Lane’s book was a minor effort compared to his lifework: a multivolume Arabic-English lexicon, which represented a stupendous and landmark achievement. Said, though, “has nothing to say,” about it. It goes on like this, with Lewis painstakingly deconstructing Said’s source material. In fact, Said may have misfired in singling out Lewis for special treatment in Orientalism. As Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American academic and Lewis protégé, notes: Lewis’ “sheer longevity”—his first book was published in 1940, he was eighty-five on 9/11, and he died in 2018 at 101—makes it problematic for anyone, even Said, to capture the full extent of Lewis’ expertise and viewpoints. For example, as a young don in Great Britain, Lewis “criticized his Orientalist forebears for their insularity and called for ‘the integration of the history of Islam into the study of the general history of humanity.’” Lewis, to put it mildly, felt Said had badly distorted his views.
IN THE August 12, 1982, issue of The New York Review of Books, Said fired back. “Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong. Of course, these are familiar attributes of the Orientalists’ breed…” For Lewis, Said claims, orientalism is “barony violated by a crude trespasser.” It is normal in the concluding stages of a public dispute among intellectuals for the debate to descend into insults and trivia. But Said scores some important points. He rejects Lewis’ comparison between orientalism and classical Greek studies, because the latter constitutes true “philology” and thus is much more rigorous as a scholarly field. In any case, Greek classical studies are further removed from the tradition of empire than is orientalism. (The translation of Greek plays into English and French thus has little to do with imperialism.) Said also draws a link between orientalist scholarship and the foggy, romantic writings of European novelists, poets, journalists, and politicians about Islam, noting the migration of prejudice from one field of knowledge to the next. Said’s ultimate point is that contemporary orientalism of the kind represented by Lewis “is a discourse of power”—of one civilization dominating another—that thoughtful Arabs and Muslims now reject. Lewis got the final word: “It is difficult to argue with a scream of rage” composed of “sneer and smear, bluster and innuendo.” Whereas Said in the acknowledgments section of Orientalism thanks the hard Leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky for help with the book, Lewis would later achieve popularity among American conservatives and neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. Mapping out the social and professional connections of the two men offers a reminder that they emerged from two radically different and estranged intellectual worlds—and this was decades before the Iraq War, which did not so much create these divisions as expose them to a much wider audience.
THOUGH THE world and the Middle East, as well as intellectual and journalistic life, have evolved dramatically since this debate, whose backdrop was the final decade of the Cold War, the core issue of how one culture and civilization should regard another, and how all of us, as individuals, should report on and analyze cultures and civilizations different than our own, has become more urgent than ever. Globalization and the erasure of distance through technology have brought us all into a form of thrilling and yet uncomfortable proximity. This renders the disagreement between Lewis and Said of signal importance. Just consider that the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 thesis on The Clash of Civilizations actually borrowed the term from Lewis’ “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” which appeared in The Atlantic in September 1990. Though Lewis used the phrase in a somewhat different context, the connection with Huntington’s famous thesis is not incidental, since what Lewis and Said were really arguing about was, to repeat, the ability or inability of one civilization to comprehend another nearby.
The fact that it was a very different world in 1982 only further demonstrates the clairvoyance manifested unintentionally by both men in the course of intellectually assaulting one another. As a young freelance foreign correspondent in Greece covering the Near East and the Balkans in the 1980s, the world of journalism that I experienced was one of Americans and Europeans holding forth in print about the Arab world and Israel. The idea that Jews could not be expected to report objectively about Israel still held currency among journalists back then. Arabs could work as stringers in the Middle East bureaus of major publications but, though it was never openly stated, with few exceptions they were thought to lack the emotional distance of staff correspondents. Interpreting the Middle East was the province of Westerners who were neither Jewish nor Muslim. Indeed, the ideal situation was to write, report, and provide analysis about countries and peoples with which one had no emotional or personal links whatsoever. For to have any kind of a stake in any particular place could be professionally disqualifying. Foreign correspondents often had a familiarity with other languages: such as French or German, but rarely with Arabic. Rather than true area expertise, an Olympian degree of distance and objectivity was sought. Of course, the idea that merely being from the West burdened one with a viewpoint and cultural baggage all its own was rarely realized, or even considered.
In this world of Western observers of the Middle East during the Cold War, groups such as the State Department Arabists (about whom I wrote a book) were truly caught in the middle. Mainly Protestants who spoke Arabic, they were thought of by those like Said as diplomats-cum-imperialists, and by many others, especially the pro-Israel community, as having gone native with the culture that they were supposed to be analyzing and reporting on. Neither the Arabs nor the Washington policy community wholly trusted them.
This entire world has been rendered sepia-toned by the globalization that followed the end of the Cold War, which, by dramatically enlarging middle classes nearly everywhere and the air links between them, to say nothing of connecting everyone with digital platforms, has plunged the West and the Arab worlds both into the cross currents of multiple civilizations. Of course, the Arab encounter with the West began in earnest in the late eighteenth century with Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt. But attrition of the same adds up to big change. Thus, it is the very magnitude of this intermingling at the higher levels of the socioeconomic pyramid that has been so critical, fostered as it has been by technology. The consequence is a whole new generation of Arabs and Africans who are middle-class, extremely well educated, and filtering steadily into the ranks of the global elite, and thus into the ranks of journalism and policy studies.
For example, recently in Ethiopia, I befriended a young man who was multilingual, an expert on the politics of his country, and about to go to graduate school at a top university in England. When I asked what he would be studying there, he replied “Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa,” in order to further enhance his expertise and gain the academic credentials necessary to become a formidable area specialist on his own country. The developing world is full of such people whose knowledge base, however circumscribed geographically, completely overwhelms that of the Cold War-era European and American generalists, whose area of expertise was wide but thin, and thus given to the category of generalizations Said abhorred.
This new generation of experts is more analytically demanding than the old one. In such a professional environment, subjective observations about national cultures, even positive observations, rarely make it through editorial filters without substantial back-up. The exception is the work of anthropologists, who build cultural models out of particulars from the ground up. Nevertheless, the evidence for avoiding subjective generalizations is increasingly everywhere, in all the serious newspapers, magazines, and other public fora, where writers and experts from the countries themselves are now featured. Anecdotes can be instructive in this regard. The New York Times leads the way. For example, critical, even dire, reports about Middle Eastern and African countries are common, but more so than ever they are being written—and in a very precise manner—by local inhabitants. Sa’eed Husaini, an expert on Nigerian politics and a researcher at the University of Lagos, recently published a rather long, comprehensive, and devastating account of Nigeria as a failing state in the New York Times. Declan Walsh, the supremely accomplished foreign correspondent for the New York Times, in his book The Nine Lives of Pakistan, specifically warns against “orientalist” thinking and “orientalism” in describing the Pashtun ethnic group. That he feels the need to state this, despite his sensitive and understanding portrayal of the Pashtuns, underscores the growing extent of Edward Said’s intimidating influence over the span of the decades. A New York Times review of a recent book about the Amur River separating Russia and China by the famed British travel writer Colin Thubron warms to the subject by condemning Thubron—with a nod to Said—for Thubron’s romantic generalizations about Arabs written well more than a half-century before in the 1960s.
Truly, we inhabit Said’s world now. Though one has to wonder whether postcolonial thinking, with its denunciatory references to imperialism and racism, is but a phase that will dissipate somewhat as the distance between the present and the end of European empires lengthens in the coming decades. Keep in mind that empires have been the political rule for humanity for thousands of years, so we are still immediately in the shadow of them. This makes natural the current obsession.
If Edward Said rules the roost, then Bernard Lewis is a relic, like the old and gracious foreign correspondents I used to know in the 1980s. It is tragic that Lewis had his reputation tarnished by the Iraq War (which I, too, mistakenly supported). While Lewis’ influential support for finding a way to remove Saddam fits nicely with Said’s profile of him as the very personification of imperialism, it is also true that Lewis’ long and intimate association with the Arab world and its language—rather than make him cynical—gave him hope for liberal change. Saddam was not merely a dictator. He was a Stalinist tyrant and Lewis may have felt the opportunity to topple him just too good to pass up. And all this transpired in Lewis’ ninth decade of life.
To fairly judge Lewis we need to realize that, like postcolonialism itself perhaps, he represents a chapter in the accumulation and interpretation of knowledge that was already ending by the time Said set his sights on him. But that does not make his vast and learned experience of the Arab world—in addition to the Turkish and Persian ones whose languages he also knew—any less valuable. To judge Lewis we need to recognize not only what has come after him but what came before him. For the younger Lewis helped shake-up the world of scholarship just as Said would do much later.
LEWIS WAS the original modern historian of the Middle East, having devolved from that original orientalist and Victorian-era traveler in the Near East, Sir Richard Francis Burton, who was also fabulously multilingual. The likes of Burton gave way to the likes of Lewis, who gave way to the likes of Said. It is all part of an evolutionary process. It was Burton in 1885, working at his desk in Trieste, who translated into English from Arabic The Thousand Nights and a Night. Burton along with Lewis were among the principal targets of Said in Orientalism, who accused Burton in so many words of determinism and essentialism. And yet not to be able to generalize immobilizes discussion and analysis. “When people think seriously, they think abstractly,” writes Huntington; “they conjure up simplified pictures of reality called concepts, theories, paradigms,” without which intellectual life simply cannot advance. In particular, Burton’s translation of the Nights helped bring the genius of Arab-Persian-Indian literature and civilization to Europe, a giant step in constructing the cultural bridge we call cosmopolitanism—thus making Burton’s translation, after a fashion, a much earlier phase of Said’s own work. Before there can be understandings, there must be misunderstandings, which are the natural outgrowth of first contact.
Indeed, though Said and many others have refused to countenance it, often it was the imperialists themselves who experienced foreign locales firsthand, and who consequently gained a nuanced appreciation of foreign systems unavailable to their untraveled compatriots at home. This is how imperialism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism are all connected. Burton helped lead the way. Said sought to correct his errors. One paradigm replaced another, more or less as Huntington suggested. It is all part of a process that may eventually lead to a common world culture beyond East and West.
And Lewis, with his amazingly clear and concise histories of the Middle East, which buttress the literary sweep of events with telling details culled from his research in the Ottoman archives or some such, in terms of style and viewpoint lies midway between Burton and Said.
Nor is Lewis completely out of date. The whole business of political forecasting requires generalizations, often about countries and sometimes even about national cultures, since it is not only exceptional individuals who make history but the vast average of populations, which less and less make it into the reports of elite journalism and policy studies, as the victory of Said’s mindset has intimidated journalists and others from offering up analyses that might be criticized as orientalist. This partly explains the growth of the geopolitical forecasting industry since the end of the Cold War. As someone who worked for years as a senior analyst for both Stratfor and Eurasia Group, two prominent forecasting firms, I can attest that generalizations of the kind Huntington defends, Lewis employs, and Said condemns occasionally help advance the analytical process at those firms.
That is why the complete defeat of orientalism in journalism and policy studies has its ironic side, since it discourages the category of broad observations that, while risking prejudice, can also make readers and practitioners less surprised by the middle-term future in various countries. What is the solution? The late Russian-American poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky observed, “A semblance of objectivity might be achieved, no doubt, by way of a complete self-awareness at the moment of observation.” The whole trick is to be self-aware. Indeed, the more we are honest about ourselves, and who we are in the eyes of others, the surer will be our judgments about those we encounter in foreign places. Edward Said, though he may have overreached in his attack on Bernard Lewis and other orientalists, has certainly encouraged this process of criticism of ourselves and of our own culture as it relates to other cultures. Said’s work is thus fundamental to the spirit of globalization and to making the world smaller.
Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. A foreign correspondent for decades for The Atlantic, he is the author of twenty books, including The Arabists (1993), The Revenge of Geography (2012), and Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age, forthcoming in April with Random House.
Image: Reuters.