SOURCE: A review of Orientalism, in The New Republic, Vol. 180, No. 14, April 7, 1979, pp. 27-33.

[In the harsh review below, Wieseltier demonstrates how politics inform many of Said's arguments in Orientalism, suggesting that "the methodological gadgetry and 'iconoclastic' analysis of his book issue in little more than the abject canards of Arab propaganda."]

Edward Said's angry book [Orientalism] is about a collusion of knowledge with power. The knowledge is Orientalism and the power is imperialism. Said contends that images of the Orient in the West's traditions of learning and literature are of a piece with the institutions of conquest and administration that it loosed upon the East. Fictions about Islam and the Arabs were manufactured to justify, and even exalt, Europe's rapacious political and cultural designs. In Said's account the self-serving misperceptions appear already in Aeschylus (Peter Brown once called this sort of thing "the Plato-to-NATO" school of intellectual history); Said lingers, too, over hostile caricatures of Muslims in Dante's Inferno, as if Christians in 13th-century Arab works fared any better. But it is with Napoleon that his arraignment of the Orientalist abuse gets fully underway. Napoleon's campaign in Egypt was, according to Said, the first of many colonial enterprises under-written by the expertise of scholars and writers on the Orient:

For Napoleon Egypt was a project that acquired reality in his mind, and later in his preparations for its conquest, through experiences that belong to the realm of ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality. His plans for Egypt therefore became the first in a long series of European encounters with the Orient in which the Orientalist's special expertise was put directly to functional colonial use.

The philological and historiographical achievements of Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan, of Louis Massignon and H. A. R. Gibb, were all mortgaged to the global interest of capitalist France and Great Britain. The scholars furnished an Orient that was immobile, aberrant, supine, exotic—an Orient, in short, ripe for possession, and which possession would only improve. And the scholars' version became canonical, so that Europe knew only the Arabs in the texts, and nothing of what Arabs really were. "They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented"—Said cites this verse from Marx to describe exactly the powerlessness of the Arabs before the authority of Orientalism.

Said's indictment of the professors for their part in the cultural preparation of imperialism is, however, not a little skewed. The correlation of learning with policy was neither as tight nor as foul as he purports. Not as tight, because Orientalism's greatest strides of scholarship were made in countries that had no hand in the occupation of Arabia. They took place in the Netherlands, in Austria, and, of course, in Germany; by scholars such as de Groeje, Hurgronje, Noeldeke, Muller, Goldziher, Wellhausen, Becker, Weil, Dozy. These figures Said treats scoutishly or not at all. And not as foul, because Said's assumptions about the conduct of humanistic scholarship are decidedly contestable.

Said begins his book with an attack on objectivity. "No production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances." There are cultural values and political premises buried even in the tomes of the philologists. In fact that is most of what is buried there:

I believe 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…. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such…. The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original.

The human sciences tell primarily of themselves, of the real and perceived conditions to which they are in thrall.

Such strictures are not merely in order, they are commonplace. Of course objectivity is confounded by the impurities of the scholar's life in the world. Yet we continue to distinguish the study that is more precise, the judgment that is more just, from that which is less. And that is not because the scholar has transcended the presuppositions with which his work is overrun, or because "truth" has been miraculously discovered, but because it is possible for practicing historians—if not for voyeur theorists—to recognize a point at which the evidence stops and the interpretation begins, and to measure one against the other. This they do at least often and effectively enough to make their activity meaningful. Partisan scholars may turn up truths, and they may not. What will decide is their intellectual responsibility and professional competence; and, for these requirements not even the noblest intention may stand in.

Conor Cruise O'Brien has warned against the impairment of scholarly integrity by political inhibitions. Such vigilance is surely preferable to the well-heeled complacence of many political scientists and foundation boards. For objectivity may often be abused: much error and much evil have been the work of experts. Renan's racism, for example, is plain. But Renan's views must be rejected not only because they are villainous, but because they were wrong, and that is not the same. It is one thing to fear a betrayal by the intellectuals, and quite another to believe in the impossibility of knowledge.

How, then, evaluate the production of the human sciences? Having banished "correctness" and "fidelity," Said collapses egregiously into politics. "No person academically involved with the Near East—no Orientalist, that is—has ever … culturally and politically identified himself wholeheartedly with the Arabs." This, then, is what is wanting. Critical detachment is a chimera, malice breeds untruth: all that remains are sympathy, participation ("The Orientalist is outside the Orient," Said laments), and service. Said is entirely dead to the gains in understanding promised by an adversary attitude—gains of the sort illustrated, for instance, by the writings of Solzhenitsyn, the Medvedevs, Aleksandr Nekrich. Much of what we know about the political system and recent history of the Soviet Union we have learned from scholars and writers who oppose it. And those in the West most sympathetic have proved in many ways to be the most mistaken. Enlightenment is frequently the fruit of dissent, and certainly of skepticism.

But not for Said. Criticism, in his view, is only an expression of treachery. As in this passage:

Ignaz Goldziher's appreciation of Islam's tolerance toward other religions was undercut by his dislike of Mohammed's anthropomorphisms and Islam's too-exterior theology and jurisprudence; Duncan Black Macdonald's interest in Islamic piety and orthodoxy was vitiated by his perception of what he considered Islam's heretical Christianity; Carl Becker's understanding of Islamic civilization made him see it as a sadly undeveloped one; C. Snouck Hurgronje's highly refined studies of Islamic mysticism (which he considered the essential part of Islam) led him to a harsh judgement of its crippling limitations; and Louis Massignon's extraordinary identification with Islamic theology, mystical passion, and poetic art kept him curiously unforgiving to Islam for what he regarded as its unregenerate revolt against the idea of incarnation. The manifest differences in their methods emerge as less important than their Orientalist consensus on Islam; latent inferiority.

Inferiority? No, it is only imperfection of which Islam stands here accused, and for Said Islam must be perfect. Perhaps Mohammed's anthropomorphisms were not all that objectionable, and the limitations of Islamic mysticism not all that crippling. But monopoly capitalism seems strangely served by the belief to the contrary.

Scholarship for Said, we may conclude, must pass political muster. Only scholars who champion the Arabs comprehend them. These are not many, but they include Jacques Berque, Maxime Rodinson and Roger Owen. It suffices for Noam Chomsky to have written tirelessly on the Arabs' behalf to be also counted among the exemplary érudit. The mantle of the Orientalists, on the other hand, has fallen most firmly on Bernard Lewis. Said concludes his book with an hysterical attack on Lewis. At issue is the etymology of thawra, the Arabic word for revolution. Lewis proposed that "the root th-w-r in classical Arabic meant to rise up (e.g., as a camel), to be stirred, excited, and … hence to rebel." Said smells an enemy: "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?" And more: "Lewis's association of thawra with a camel rising and generally with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints … that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being." And still more: "But … it is a 'bad' sexuality he ascribes to the Arab. In the end, since [he is] not really equipped for serious action, the sexual excitement is no more noble than a camel's rising up." And, finally, because Lewis notes that thawra was "often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent sovereignty," and not to denote a full political and social revolution, his real meaning is "that instead of copulation the Arab can achieve foreplay, masturbation, coitus interruptus."

All that is patently fatuous, but it is precisely what Said is up to. I know of no word for revolution in any language whose root refers to "a struggle on behalf of values"; the English certainly does not. Said does not prove, moreover, that Lewis's etymology is wrong, only that it is politically unacceptable. It happens that none other than Jacques Berque has put forward an alternative. Berque maintains that thawra means "effervescence," and likens it to a usage in medieval physics which referred to the rising of a hair on a head. Now an upright hair flatters Ben Bella and Habash no more than an upright camel; and, if sex is at stake, camels rise more naturally and for longer than hairs. But of Berque's suggestion we hear nothing. Berque is with the revolution, and so may pass. (The revolution still eats its own: a few years ago there appeared in Les Temps Modernes a vigorous denunciation of Jacques Berque for just those Orientalist sins against which Said rails.)

As Said construes the human sciences, then, it would be impossible to regard skeptically any aspect of the Arab world without being a tool of imperialism. Scholarly integrity, intellectual responsibility, professional competence—these aspirations he would no doubt dismiss as sentimental and ingenuous. And they are, in a sense, ingenuous; or, rather, they are a matter of philosophical conviction. One believes in free inquiry or one does not. Said does not: "learned and imaginative writing are never free." There is no room in his scheme for an exercise of intelligence that is not exhaustively determined by its social, political and cultural environment. When the Orientalism is not "manifest" it is "latent." Or, as he bluntly puts it, "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was … a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric."

"Every European": there were malefactors outside the academy as well. The authority of Orientalism is, in fact, most apparent in its grip upon the imagination—upon writers such as Chateaubriand, Nerval and Flaubert, upon painters such as Gérôme and Delacroix. (Gérôme's languorous and very beautiful Snake Charmers may be consulted on the dust jacket of Said's book. Orientalism, it says, above the fetching little ass of an Arab boy displaying himself and a snake to a group of rapt Arab warriors. A shrewd advertisement, this: sort of like selling feminism with a Vargas girl.) Said does not discuss the painters—many of Delacroix's florid Orientals were Jews anyway—but he takes pains to describe the deployment of the Orient in the literary geography of the last century. This he does instructively. He is particularly good on those writers—Edward William Lane, most poignantly—who were caught between Orientalist expectations and their experience of the Orient. None entirely overcame this division. It was no mere prejudice, however, with which they wrestled. Orientalism is more than the sum of scholars' myths and poets' fancies. It is, we are finally admonished, an epistemology.

Presiding over Said's philippic is the mighty methodological vision of Michel Foucault. Foucault's subject is the incarceration of man in concepts; surely no historian of ideas has ever drawn so tenebrous a portrait of human life's enslavement to its own intellectual creations. Foucault's extraordinary books are chapters in a terrible history of utter domination by discourse: by the discourse of medicine, natural science, political economy, penology, sex. These are not so much departments of learning, Foucault counsels, but instruments of control; they are "discursive systems" which ordain their own "enunciative possibilities and impossibilities," what may and may not be said in their field, and so govern absolutely. Orientalism is nothing less than such a system, as insurmountable and as injurious. And yet, pleads Said, it must be unlearned.

Dissolve to the West Bank.

II

Our Zionist faith and aspirations were composed of two things, and two things only: the people of Israel and the land of Israel. This faith was not created or sustained by the Turks, or Kaiser Wilhelm, or Balfour.

                                       —Ben Gurion, 1937

Edward Said's essay is not, as Albert Hourani has timidly suggested, about "the way in which intellectual traditions are created and transmitted." It is about the way in which intellectual traditions bedevil contemporary politics. More specifically, it is about how Orientalism is responsible for the failure of Palestinian nationalism.

Hard as it is to detect amid the allusions and abstractions with which the book is swollen, the real argument of Orientalism is that Palestinians continue to elude their political destiny because the epistemological habits of the French and the British have been inherited by the Israelis and the Americans. The argument is in three parts: Zionism is colonialism, American policy in the Middle East is imperialism (thus are the Palestinians awarded the cachet of third world cant), the Palestinians remain unheeded. Orientalism establishes Edward Said as among the more formidable of Zionism's cultured despisers. For the methodological gadgetry and "iconoclastic" analysis of his book issue in little more than the abject canards of Arab propaganda.

"The Semitic myth bifurcated in the Zionist movement: one Semite went the way of Orientalism, the other, the Arab, was forced to go the way of the Oriental." Or, elsewhere: "The difference between Renan and Weizman is that the latter had already gathered behind his rhetoric the solidity of institutions whereas the former had not." The ignorance in such passages is staggering. Said knows virtually nothing about the modern history of the Jews, about the origins and nature of the Zionist impulse. Someone as incensed as he by hasty and politically duplicitous scholarship might have taken the trouble to examine more closely the ideological and political development of the movement he impugns. Said prefers his rage. He adduces Balfour, and Weizman to Balfour, and crudely concludes that Zionism was another monstrous colonial adventure.

Zionism was a movement of national liberation. With a difference, to be sure: it required for its fulfillment the resettlement of an oppressed (according to Albert Memmi, a colonized) Jewish population. This resettlement, which was a return from exile, and in the event disappointed all Zionist hopes, was the optical illusion which made many cry colonialism; it was, too, the movement's tragic feature, for it insured that Zionism would have victims. Yet Zionism was, in the words of the astute Hayim Greenberg, "in recent history … the first instance of colonization free from imperialist ambition or the desire to rule any part of the population." The leaders of the yishuv—not merely the lofty likes of Judah Magnes, but figures of real political consequence within Labor Zionism—were ardently committed to cooperation with the Arabs, with whom many wished to collaborate in the social and democratic reconstruction of Palestine. (Not so Jabotinsky, whose writings are sadly marred by slurs and stereotypes, and by a proclivity to empire.) They were, no doubt, too sanguine. The inhabitants of Palestine could hardly have blessed the Jewish pioneers, though it is interesting to note that neither the first nor the second aliyah was perceived by them as imperialistic. The opposition of the fellahin who had—and still have—their rights, however, has nothing to do with the legitimacy of Jewish nationalism. And as the decades passed the crisis in Europe grew dire, and Zionism became a program for return in an hour of emergency, and Europe became a charnel house for the Jews.

The doctrine that Zionism is colonialism is not new—even Orwell delivered himself of the opinion that "the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue, and an Indian nationalist … would probably side with the Arabs"—but it has in recent years enjoyed renewed currency, and so it is important to understand precisely in what the slander consists. It is not merely political. Would that it were: political differences allow for solutions, as Anwar Sadat has demonstrated. What is denied is rather that Jewish politics has a national motive—that is, that the Jews are a nation, that they possess the legitimate rights and privileges of a nation, that they have a history out of which certain practical conclusions must be drawn. Zionism is just such a conclusion. It is the genuine expression of a moral, psychological and political evolution within the Jewish world; it cannot be understood otherwise. Said and his ilk, therefore, have not understood it. They look to the history of the Europeans when they should be looking to the history of the Jews. The immolation of the Jews in Nazi Europe moves them not at all. (In a recent essay on "The Idea of Palestine in the West" Said observes sardonically that support for the idea of a Jewish state surged "with the advent of Fascism in Europe." He may be assured that the Zionists would have done without that particular stroke of fortune.) Said sees Zionists in Palestine representing not themselves, but others; he sees Jews in the service only of the British.

British interests were for a time identified with the growth of the Jewish community in Palestine, and that growth certainly owed something to the British endorsement of Zionist claims. But that endorsement, even Balfour's, was not why Zionism won, and anyway it did not always come. The instruments of policy emitted by the Foreign Office in the 1920s and 1930s were in the main designed to diminish the benefits accruing to the yishuv from Balfour's largesse. Zionism's struggle, furthermore, was as often with the mandatory as it was with the citrus crop and the fedayeen. "In every hour of our lives as Jews and as workers." Berl Katznelson remarked in 1931, "as citizens and in our colonization activity, we feel the [British] administration to be colonial and absolutistic. We are hurt by its degradations and its insults." The notion of Zionist fealty to the British in Palestine is, in short, preposterous. Nor was the attitude of the Palestinian community toward the British any less ambiguous. It courted the Crown as well, and turned against it whenever it appeared that Jews were all the burden the white man wanted to bear. Significant elements in the Palestinian leadership decided expediently to become clients of the Nazis. How Hitler's Orientalism must have grated!

Zionism has once in its parlous career allied itself proudly with the affairs of a great power. That power is the United States, for which Israel dependably speaks. And this makes Israel, in Said's view, an agent of imperialism. "From the beginning of the nineteenth century France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientals; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did." The prize this time around is oil. But this time may be the first that the profits have redounded to the natives. It is a curious kind of imperialism that distorts its own economy, imposes the hardship on its own people, and alters its own foreign policy, all to meet the gross political and commercial demands of the peoples it was supposed to plunder. The oil cartel is untouched, the oil fields uninvaded—which any imperialist worth his salt would have seen to long ago. And hundreds of millions of imperialist dollars annually feed and arm the vanguard of the revolution. (What does Said think is filling the PLO's coffers? Chomsky's royalties?) With enemies like these, who needs friends?

The desire to rid the region of major powers and their Mephistophelian bargains is very estimable. It is not, however, Said's. He is aware that lesser states and movements cannot prosecute their interests without the patronage of such a power. Their own weaknesses, and global rivalries, forbid it. And so his orations against Western imperialism and its wickedness translate into a concrete political choice: the Soviet Union. The preference appears coyly at various places in the book; but it is glaring in the absence of any even desultory consideration of Soviet Orientalism and the fitful development of Soviet policy toward the Arabs. Before Bandung the Arabs were treated by Russian academicians with ignorance or indifference. But by the 1950s it was clear to the Russians that the Arabs could be used; and new journals of Oriental studies began to appear, and the shibboleths of the restive third world came to be intoned by the supple Mikoyan and his successors. There is no reason to believe that Soviet scholars understand their subject any better than their Western peers. Their government, however, stands behind radical forces in the Arab countries, and that will do. The Marxist-Leninist minions training in the hills of Lebanon, Syria and Iraq seem not to care that they are fighting imperialism with imperialism, and neither does Said.

The gravest threat posed by the West, Said continues, may lie in the export of its civilization. The Arab world, he writes, is "an intellectual … and cultural satellite" of the United States. "The Arab and Islamic world as a whole is hooked into the Western market system"—as, indeed, is Israel, where the quality of culture is in some ways also imperilled by "transistors, blue jeans, and Coca Cola." Said is alarmed by the proliferation in the Middle East of American consumerism and its corruptions. But the influence of the West upon the Arab nations has surely been more complex. It might best be described as a mixed curse. And not merely because of the blandishments of modernization—which, as the glorious women of Iran have shown, will not be so swiftly renounced. From the West there has also been introduced into Arab society the ideological equipment for its own awakening, the very concepts of rationality and progress, nation and revolution, in the name of which Arabs criticize and revolt. The Arab left was not created out of the Koran. And here is Said, excoriating the West in the dialectical sonorities of Gramsci and Foucault.

III

Which brings us, at last, to the myth of the invisible Palestinian. "There exists [in America] an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist." Or, as Said wrote last spring, "we seem scarcely capable of making actual and legitimate the bare facts of our presence." The West simply does not see the Palestinian, we are told, because its episteme will not permit.

But this is dramatically untrue. The Palestinians are the political heroes of the season, and of many before and many to come. They have almost completely usurped the moral prestige which once attached to Zionism; and the obloquy into which Zionism has fallen is as good a sign as any of how twisted are the times. Bien-pensants everywhere are beside themselves in the Palestinians' support. The United Nations cannot pay them sufficient tribute. And they are the centerpiece of the solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict for which American policymakers most ache. Carter's pronouncement in Clinton in 1977 constitutes nothing less than a Balfour Declaration for the Palestinians: the president of the United States announced that his government views with favor the establishment of a homeland for them in Palestine. The Mideast expert in residence at the National Security Council is a scholar whose reputation was made in the study of Algerian and Palestinian nationalism. He and the other professor are plainly doing their very best to evict the Israelis from the West Bank. In high places the Palestinians are sitting rather pretty.

But perhaps not in lower places. "Since World War II, and more noticeably after each Arab-Israeli war, the Arab Muslim has become a figure in American popular culture." But an unsavory figure, complains Said: the American media depict the Arab always beside a gas pump or with a gun in his hands. How unfair. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the Palestinians and their supporters have relied most upon oil and murder. No anti-Arab bias, after all, robbed Sadat of America's admiration. But, we must recall, "the things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation or its fidelity to some great original." Study the Americans, not the Arabs.

In his account of Orientalist scholarship Said's method suffers for his politics. Here his politics suffers for his method. And yet it is not their reading of Renan that prods security guards at Western airports to have another poke at Libyan and Iraqi pouches. The application of a Foucault-like holism to the realities of the political world has the consequence only of absolving the actors of their accountability. There are politicians in Israel who, without such sophistication, arrive at a similar and equally explosive despair; Said resembles no one so much as those on the other side who attribute all that befalls them to anti-Semitism, for whom all there will ever be is war. But the Jews did not build their state with such self-pity or paranoia, and neither will the Palestinians.

Nor did Jews build it with terror; right-wing militants whose appetite for confrontation threatened the rewards of decades of hard work and slow growth were harshly brought into line, and may be again. On Palestinian strategy Said is silent. His jusq'auboutisme, however, is unmistakable. How, indeed, do battle with an epistemology? Strong measures are called for. To overthrow the triumphalist dogmas of Western consciousness it may be necessary to smuggle a few bombs into Israeli pickle barrels. Discursive systems die hard.

Said's foray into cultural history is, then, just another apology for rejectionism. And there is something morally pusillanimous about its appearance in the current political climate. In the wake of Sadat's initiative and the accords at Camp David—which Said attacked last September—the Israelis are in the throes of a strenuous reassessment of their designs upon the territories. Peace Now proved that it has finally become respectable in Israeli society to wish to exchange territories for peace. And as a growing number of Israelis come at last to question their claim to Nablus Said sets out to show that they have no claim even to Tel Aviv.

But where is Peace Now's counterpart among the Palestinians? Who among them has the courage to condemn their own crimes and engage the Israelis? Where is their Eliav, their Yariv, their Weizman? Where, indeed, is their Begin? Nowhere in the history of Palestinian nationalism since the 1920s is there to be found anything but boycott and violence. The Palestinians have their own feral and fruitless tactics to blame for their failure to achieve a state: the maximalists fulfilled their own fears. As they surely will again. The leadership of the PLO today is good only for assassinations and interviews. It still has no eye for the main chance. It dreams instead of social revolution, and lately of Islam. No wonder, then, that the architects of the region's first blueprint for peace have to speak for the Palestinians. They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.

It is a vital interest of Israel that the national and political needs of the people with whom it must live be met. The autonomy plan, for all its shortcomings, is at least the beginning of the end of Palestinian tutelage, and so should be honored. Reports in the Israeli press of proposals before the Israeli cabinet to restrict even further the scope of Palestinian self-rule are disturbing; bad faith now will only make matters worse. The Israeli government must stand up to fear, and greed, and the madness of petty messianists who disfigure Judaism even as they endanger Israel. ("The Jews did not come to Israel to be safe," Geula Cohen recently explained.) But it has made a fine opening move. It is finally Arafat and his pack, and not Gush Emunim, who make the Israelis go slowly. As the Israelis must, the imprecations of diplomats and intellectuals not-withstanding, until the Palestinians abandon their holy anger for credible objectives, and terrorism becomes statesmanship. The Palestinians have the right to determine their own future. They do not have the right to determine Israel's. For both it is the moment of truth.