The Sociology and Politics of Orientalism

A Refinement of the Intellectual Legacy

HE LATE EDWARD SAID vigorously opposed self-same fix, namely, a religious reformation.
T Orientalism. This is what it meant for him:
The southerners, Muslims included, cannot rep-
Tempting as this account is, however, it
misses the polemical origins of Orientalism in
resent themselves –— understand their plight the “war psychosis” that developed with the
and the ultimate cause of their primitiveness — “confrontation” between Christendom and Is-
and must be represented. Therefore, not sur- lam from the 12th to the 14th century. The lat-
prisingly, only the West or North can solve the est flare-up between the Vatican and the Mus-
South or East’s problems, developmentally lim world, courtesy of (the Catholic) Pope
speaking, via its superior knowledge. This is an Benedict XVI’s comments about Islam and the
academic version of Rudyard Kipling’s infamous Prophet Muhammad bring these origins to the
“white man’s burden” where the West must send fore, citing as he did a Medieval (Orthodox)
forth its best and brightest to serve altruisti- Christian text saturated with the usual themes:
cally the needs of its captives. It certainly is true how Islam swamped Christianity through vio-
that this attitude is strewn all over academic lence alone and the supposed Islamic anathema
Orientalism, the kind Said’s archfoe Bernard towards Reason as mandated by Christianized
Lewis represents. Greek philosophy.1
The bête noir of academic Orientalism is
the notion that there is a cultural entity, a civi- Conceptual Muddle
lization, whose essence is determined by a reli- IN FACT, PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING Edward
gion — Islam — and that this essence is some- Said has to say about Orientalism can be traced
how flawed, forcing Islamdom into perpetual back to the Medieval Christian “experience” of
stasis and decline. Worse than this, the author- Islam, as expertly catalogued by the late Nor-
itarianism of the political and religious elites mal Daniel in his seminal Islam and the West —
makes it impossible for the Muslims to become The Making of an Image, among other works.
self-aware of this fundamental affliction and The Orientalists of those times were Church-
therefore renders them impotent to rectify their men, polemicists to a man, whose chief and only
condition. So it is left up to the Orientalists to concern was not to “study” Islam, with the aim
do the job for these inevitably ungrateful Mus- of ruling Muslims more effectively, but to dis-
lims. Hence Lewis’ exhortation that Islam, this prove Islam altogether. They wanted to undo it,
homogeneous, uniform cultural totality, needs make it as if it had never happened, disaggre-
a dose of what got the Europeans out of their gate the theological glue that bounds Muslims

*Out of deference to English readers unfamiliar with

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The Int ellectual Legacy of Edward Said

together as Muslims. (There are still quite a few their minds up about what was the case long
Orientalists with this objective explicitly in mind before they ever took a look at the evidence.
— Michael Cook, Patricia Crone of Hagarism This is amply illustrated by the fact that the
fame). very first polemicists, the founders who drew
In the context of the Crusades the objec- the broad contours of all subsequent polemic,
tive was often to either convert or failing this, were Greek Orthodox Christians from Syria.
exterminate the Muslims, intellectually if not The great grandfather of Orientalism, irony of
literally. Muslims claim to believe in God, the ironies, John of Damascus (676-749 CE), was
an Arab and a Levantine one at that.2 Speaking
Arabic and having ample access to flesh and
In European eyes, the Ottoman blood Muslims did not daunt their absolutist
Empire was transformed from the faith that all that was not Christian was false
and evil out of necessity. Saint John was actu-
“scourge of Christendom” to the ally the chief councilor of Damascus under the
“sick man of Europe.” Umayyad Caliph Abdul Malek!
It was this absolutist rejection of Islam that
lead to the Orientalist insistence that Muslims
could not represent themselves but had to be
same God of the Christians and Jews; this can- represented. As Norman Daniel explains:
not be the case, therefore they must in reality Apparently, under the pressure of their sense
be polytheists and thus no different from pre- of danger, whether real or imagined, a de-
Islamic pagan Arabs. From here comes the myth formed image of their enemy’s beliefs takes
that Muslims worship the Ka’aba, or worship shape in men’s minds… even the facts are
pagan idols in the Ka’aba, or worship modified — and in good faith — to suit the
Muhammad himself as an idol — hence, the interpretation. A “real truth” is identified: this
term “Mohammedanism.” Muslims follow a is something that contrasts with what the
enemy say they believe; they must not be al-
Prophet who carried the same message of pre-
lowed to speak for themselves.3
vious Prophets; this cannot be the case and
Muhammad, thus, must be a false prophet, Passion overpowered reason and it is this
which is why biographies of the Prophet de- that takes us, methodologically, from Edward
generate into character-assassination. The Mus- Said’s understanding to a very different theori-
lims have a holy scripture, but it cannot be holy zation of Orientalism, Medieval or contempo-
and proof of this is contained in the stylistics of rary. Even the political quadrant of the academic
the Quran itself. It is written in a non-chrono- derogation of Islam, Oriental Despotism, bi-
logical, non-Biblical fashion, therefore it can- zarrely, originates in the Middle Ages as well,
not be authentic and must be nothing but the not exactly a period of European history known
ramblings of a copycat epileptic. for its political or religious pluralism. The Latin
The historical records of the Muslims pur- Church of Jerusalem, for instance, informed
port to prove that all this occurred in the past Innocent III that in Baghdad “Muhammad is
— monotheism, the Quran, the Prophet — so God and the caliph is Pope.”4
the very historiography of Muslims must be Orientalism of this kind is an instance of
wrong, historical accounts fraudulent at best, what I call the politics of knowledge, the moral
inaccurately exaggerated at worst. The polemi- compromises intellectuals often make — un-
cists fit the proper understanding of the word willingly or willingly — over academic veracity
“prejudiced” because they had already made in the real world if they want to be heard and

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get things done. I put forward this idea along- grit to the mill, with George Sale hundreds of
side the well-known and more benign notion years later saying: “Muhammad was, as the Ar-
of the “sociology of knowledge,” where the as- abs are by complexion, a great lover of women.”7
sumptions implicitly involved in social knowl- Even the supposed irrationality of the Arab
edge conceptually blind the social scientist in mind and the unscientific pretensions of Mus-
his/her work. Said’s account, rooted as it is in lims also originate in the (Dark Age) European
Michel Foucault’s post-modernism, belongs to frame of mind, with polygamy and divorce con-
this species of critique. When Orientalist dis- demned for being “illogical” and contrary to
course is dissected conscientious political con- both scripture and “natural law.” This emphasis
siderations appear repeatedly alongside the on what Greek philosophy had to tell them
more strictly paradigmatic problems of trans- about the irrationality of Islamic doctrines was
lation and interpretation. aimed at protecting pre-Christian European
civilization from Christianity itself as much as
Penis Envy protecting the Christian faith from Islam.
ACCORDING TO KAREN ARMSTRONG, formerly
a Catholic nun herself, Christian sexual polemic U-turn
against Islam came not coincidentally at the THEN SOMETHING CHANGED. With the clos-
same time that Catholic Popes were imposing ing of the Middle Ages polemic went from the
celibacy on their priests. Monks and priests hid defensive to the offensive as new horizons of
(rather badly) their envy of the Islamic position possibilities opened themselves up with the glo-
on sex and marriage through such self-indul- bal shift in power. Prior to the 17th century,
gent sexual polemic.5 Besides polygamy the very with Europe as the proverbial Third World,
idea of marriage in Islam was castigated because, Christian thinkers were more concerned with
God-forbid, “desire” was seen by that religion protecting their flock from the “temptations”
as an appropriate reason for marriage, whereas of Islamdom. Christians took refuge in their
in Christianity lust is a sin, even in the context anti-material spirituality. Even during the Cru-
of holy matrimony. Marriage is solely for the sades, missionaries to the holy lands were busy
sake of procreation, with what the Patriarchs consoling the troops or (willingly) getting them-
got up to before Christianity conveniently swept selves martyred. The temporary shift in the
it all under the carpet. militar y balance of power did not alter
This was partly a reflection of the ascetic, Islamophobia, leaving it as essentially propa-
spiritualist, anti-material nature of Christian- ganda designated strictly for domestic consump-
ity but the sexual angle was also deployed as a tion.
conscious propaganda tool, certainly of char- The Crusaders thought of themselves as
acter-assassination. Medieval Tabloid journal- (absolutely) right but they were quite well aware
ism, as it were; (more on this below). It was even of their own primitiveness. The first generation
used to rationalize the successes of Islam in first of Crusaders had to be handed catapults by the
defeating then converting the Christians of the Byzantines, catapults which they couldn’t fig-
holy lands. Muhammad was described as the ure out how to use by themselves,. Crusader
“seducer” of Orthodox Christians through the kings even employed Muslim doctors. From the
fleshy delights of the Quranic paradise, which 17th century onwards — the voyages of dis-
one Catholic preacher described as “not a Para- covery, the shift from feudalism to capitalism,
dise at all, but a brothel, and the most obscene the gunpowder revolution, etc. — Europe was
of places.”6 The same was said of Spanish Chris- on the move and the Arabs and Muslims were
tians. The Arab identity of Muhammad added on the run.

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The Int ellectual Legacy of Edward Said

The audience became “internationalized.” sionary (and colonial official) William Muir
Time now to civilize and convert them to our made clear in his The Mohammedan Controversy
modern, advanced ways (1897), the problem
by using the polemical posed by Islam, unlike
techniques of earlier The static picture of Islam other “pagan” faiths,
times — scandalizing was its intellectual so-
the sensuousness, des-
(ironically) is rooted in phistication and stub-
potism and irrationality hatred of Judaism. born resilience in the
of Islam. The polemi- face of repeated at-
cist put on the garb of tempts at conversion.
the missionary; out to convert Muslims to the He describes “Mohammedanism” as the only
path of salvation and — critically — worldly formidable antagonist to Christianity, in spite
prowess, confident that Islam’s history of great of Europe’s colonial supremacy. They couldn’t
creativity had now degenerated into, as Hegel be dazzled into conversion with the “obvious”
famously put it, “Oriental ease and repose.”8 superiority of the white man’s religion.
This is how, in European eyes, the Ottoman This is why many English Orientalists, such
Empire was transformed from the “scourge of as Kenneth Cragg and W. Montgomery Watt,
Christendom” to the “sick man of Europe,” the threw up their hands over converting Muslims
expected result of Islam’s (all of a sudden) flawed and decided it was more fruitful to “reform” Is-
essence. lam itself, Christianize it from the inside out.
They were open advocates of “secularizing” Is-
Parallax Vision lam on Protestant lines, long before Lewis.10
THE LONG-TERM RESULT OF THIS, psychologi- Said’s own immediate Orthodox ancestors were
cally, at the level of Western society is a kind of converted to Protestantism by waves of mission-
bipolar paradigm of the world, as Lawrence aries who switched targets after failing dismally
Davidson puts it, where the West is advanced to convert Levantine Muslims and Jews. Mus-
and progressive while the East is backward and lims, in short, were deserving of “special” intel-
in need of guidance, on a Western socio-politi- lectual treatment, and, boy, did they get it.
cal model. This developmental dualism is ac-
companied by the moralistic notion that the A Pinch of Salt
West possesses the superior religion of Chris- THIS PARADIGMATIC DEVELOPMENT, however,
tianity, which is a “prerequisite” itself for de- conceals a political continuity with the antago-
mocracy, industrial capitalism and free markets.9 nisms inherent in the polemical tradition. Or-
Europeans began confusing the superiority of thodox Christians were considered as heretical
the West with the superiority of Christianity, as Muslims and Eastern Christians got their fair
thinking that one led to the other, the Chris- share of massacres, conquests and sacking from
tian Dark Ages conveniently forgotten. Chris- their Latin brethren during the Crusades. In
tians, as it were, began to feel their oats. the imperial era, with the geographical shift of
The kind of imperial narratives Said saw Christian power, the Catholics lost their posi-
as constituting Orientalism originate in this tion as the prime representatives of Christian-
period of Western ascendancy, the 18th and ity. George Sale, for instance, felt it necessary
19th centuries. This is all true but we must re- to note — in the preface to his 1734 (sex-filled)
member that the Muslims and Arabs were never translation of the Quran — that, while he sees
really generically lumped into what we now call no “danger from so manifest a forgery,” it is the
the Third World, at the ideological level. As mis- “protestants alone [who] are able to attack the

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Koran with success; and for them, I trust, provi- Muhammad for the socialists and a constitu-
dence has reserved the glory of its overthrow.”11 tional liberal one for the liberals, etc.14 “All poli-
Max Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic was tics is local,” as the saying goes. This is even
directed at Catholics as much as it was against truer of Orientalism in the arts. Ziauddin
Muslims and other Orientals, a “rationalization” Sardar, much like Said, takes the poetry and
after-the-fact of the peculiar geographical rise plays of the chansons de geste much too seri-
of industrial capitalism. Much academic ously.15 These amateur dramatists did take up
Orientalism, moreover, is really just disguised the battle cry of a crusade against the polythe-
and updated anti-Semitism. What Hegel had istic Muslims, with quite a few Trinitarian, 666
to say about Islam was actually driven by an derogations of Islam, but they also generously
attempt to reconcile Christianity with the En- peppered their stories with “both Christian and
lightenment. This involved picking on the Ori- Saracen goodies and badies.”16
ent as a convenient scapegoat for everything that
was wrong with Europe prior to the Enlight- The Kipling Syndrome*
enment. This took the form, interestingly, of QUITE A FEW PLAYWRIGHTS, POETS AND NOV-
de-Judaizing Christianity, leaving only the ELISTS just used negative images of Islam as an
Greek rationalist tradition as a source for mod- indirect way to critique their own societies, at-
ern Christian civilization. tacking the authority of the Church or poking
The Young Hegelians characterized Juda- fun at the privileges of nobles when it came to
ism as an “Oriental religion,” static and irratio- concubines. This is even true of one of Edward
nally wedded to its legalist past with peculiar, Said’s classical literary Orientalists, the infa-
“archaic” customs — such as circumcision — mous Rudyard Kipling. David Pinault notes a
that separated Jews off from everyone else. The curious contradiction in how Kipling presents
static picture of Islam (ironically) is rooted in Muslims in his diverse writings. He admits to
hatred of Judaism and one can see this in at- how orderly and obedient many Muslims and
tempts to liken Allah to the vengeful, jealous Indians are under the Raj in his journalistic
God of the sword (supposedly) found in the scribblings for Lahore’s Civil and Military Ga-
Old Testament. The wellspring of the polemi- zette. Yet his novella On the City Wall portrays
cal tradition is also anti-Semitic to a consider- them as unruly and fanatically violent, restrained
able extent. John of Damascus himself desig- only by the civilized Brits.17
nated the Muslims to be Saracens — meaning Kipling knew, therefore, that Indians could
“empty of ” or “away from Sarah” — and very readily represent (and rule) themselves, but
Ishmaelites,12 drawing on St. Paul, in Galations is that what his British audience wanted to hear?
4, who describes Jews who reject Christ as Kipling thus was tailoring the facts to an audi-
Ishmaelites. They have become, ironically, the ence that would readily lap up what he had to
children of the slave Hagar and not worthy of
their original status as children of Isaac through
*I have adapted this term from Ekkehart Krippendor-
Sarah.13 ff ’s “Kissinger Syndrome,” taken from his chapter, “The
Orientalists themselves, thus, are not too Dominance of American Approaches in International
serious about Orientalism, using Islam as a talk- Relations,” in Hugh Dyer and Leon Margassarn, ed.s,
ing point in their own domestic, European The Study of International Relations: The State of the Art,
(London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 28-39. The term desig-
problems. Even Maxime Rodinson, an arch nates the kind of pressures and temptations the foreign
Orientalist himself, admitted that there was a policy intellectual is placed under when in a decision-
Muhammad for every different ideological and making position. (Please see Markus Euskirchen’s new
philosophical group in Europe, with a socialist Krippendorff blog, http://wbk.in-berlin.de/wp/?p=197).

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say, spicing up the political point he was trying temper the excesses of the ideologues and play
to make with generous dollops of violence, in a part in making history, even if that means
tabloid fashion, and getting popular and rich compromising on your true opinions. There is
in the process. (Interestingly enough, he takes little difference, then, between Bernard Lewis
a potshot at Catholicism along the way). And and Colin Powell in this regard, both backtrack-
he’s not the only one. If anything, this schizo- ing on former positions following 9/11, and for
phrenic presentation of Islam is endemic of pro- the most noble of motives.
fessional Orientalists to this day, an exemplary Therefore, I believe that the conceptual
illustration being, once again, Bernard Lewis. schema I put forward of the two separate dy-
Ian Buruma of The New Yorker character- namics behind Orientalism — the sociological
izes Lewis as having “Two Minds,” something and the political, paradigmatic misinterpreta-
brought out by his latest work, From Babel to tion and willful derision — with their common
Dragomans. While a collection of older publi- polemical origins provides a more accurate ac-
cations, this passage was notably absent: count than Said’s of this persistent phenom-
Islam is one of the world’s great religions . . .
enon. Not that we should take it too seriously.
Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind Orientalism may be a chimera altogether, just
to countless millions of men and women . . . an excuse for a handful of intellectuals who can
given dignity and meaning to drab and im- neither hack it in the real world — like most
poverished lives… taught people of different intellectuals — nor in the cloistered world of
races to live in brotherhood and people of dif- academia.
ferent creeds to live side by side in reasonable This forces them to seek glory, fame and
tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in
influence in other quarters instead. The inter-
which others besides Muslims lived creative
and useful lives and which, by its achievement, national target audience of Islam, following the
enriched the whole world.18 missionary transformations of the 18th-19th
centuries, becomes a psychological substitute for
In an interview with Elizabeth Wasserman what academics value the most — the respect
in the Atlantic Online, Lewis goes as far as tear- of their peers. I speak as an academic who faces
ing the Oriental Despotism argument to shreds, the self-same temptations. I just take my pa-
even explicating an account of democracy in thology out on my students!
Islamic jurisprudential and philosophical
terms!19 Buruma, then, is quite correct in argu- Special thanks to Lawrence Davidson, Maria Rosa
ing that Rashid Khalidi is wrong to lump Lewis Menocal, Markus Euskirchen, Hugh Nicol and Glada
in with the “enthusiastic ignorance and ideo- Lahn.
logical blindness” that went into the Iraq War.20
NOTES
The Punch-line 1. Please see Uri Avner, “Muhammad’s sword: Pope
THERE IS CERTAINLY A GALLING IGNORANCE Benedict XVI in the service of George W. Bush,”
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15089.htm,
of Islam and Arabs in Bush circles — while 24 September 2006.
Bush is ignorant of almost everything — but 2. Please see Jabal Muhammad Buaben, Image of the
what is actually taking place is something quite Prophet Muhammad in the West: A Study of Muir, Mar-
different. Orientalist stereotypes are being goliouth and Watt, (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 1996)
dredged up as propaganda tools by non- and Mervyn Hiskett, Some to Mecca Turn to Pray: Is-
lamic Values and the Modern World, (St. Albans: Clar-
Orientalists while the proper Orientalists them- idge P, 1993).
selves, many of whom know better, have de- 3. Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an
cided to hop onto the bandwagon as well to Image, (Oxford: Oneworld, 1993), Rev. ed., p. 12; Un-

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less otherwise noted, all italics are mine. with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is
4. Abbot Hope-in-God, quoted in Daniel, Islam and free, and she is our mother . . . Now you, brothers, like
the West, p. 339. Isaac, are children of promise.” Galatians 4:21-28, quot-
5. Please see Armstrong, “The Future of Islam in the ed in Revd Stephen R. Sizer, “Christian Zionism: Jus-
tifying Apartheid in the Name of God,” Evangelical
West,” English Public Lecture delivered at the Ameri-
can University in Cairo, 12 December 2006. Theological Society, Colorado Springs, Defining Evangeli-
calism’s Boundaries, 14-16 November 2001, www.al-
6. Daniel, Islam and the West, p. 19. bushra.org/ecu-inter/sizer.html, p. 24.
7. Daniel, Islam and the West, p. 322. 14. Please see Fred Halliday’s discussion of Oriental
8. Hegel, quoted in Bryan S. Turner’s masterful, Marx mystique in his Islam and the myth of confrontation: reli-
and the End of Orientalism, (London: Allen & Unwin, gion and politics in the Middle East, (London: I.B. Tau-
1978), p. 8. ris, 1996).
9. Lawrence Davidson, “Christian Zionism and Amer- 15. Please see Sardar’s other major work on Oriental-
ican Foreign Policy: Paving the Road to Hell in Pales- ism, with Merryl Wyn Davies, Distorted Imagination:
tine,” Logos 4.1 – Winter 2005, p. 1-10. Lessons from the Rushdie Affair, (London: Grey Seal,
10. Please see Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism, (Bucking- 1990).
ham: Open UP, 1999). 16. Daniel, Islam and the West, p. 342.
11. George Sale, The Koran, or Alcoran of Mohammed: 17. David Pinault, The Shiites: Ritual and Popular Piety
With Explanatory Notes and Readings from Savary’s Ver- in a Muslim Community (London: I.B.Tauris, 1992), p.
sion also Preliminary Discourse, (London: Frederick 66-69 for Kipling’s journalistic writings and p. 69-72
Warne, 1734), p. V. for On the City Wall.
12. Oleg Grabar, “The Umayyad Dome of the Rock in 18. Quoted in Ian Buruma, “Lost in Translation: The
Jerusalem,” Ars Orientalis, 1959, 3, p. 44. Two Minds of Bernard Lewis,” The New Yorker, Vol.
13. “Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you 80, No. 16, 14 June 2004, p. 185.
not aware of what the law says? For it is written that 19. Elizabeth Wasserman, “Islam’s Interpreter,” The At-
Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and lantic Online, 29 April 2004, www.theatlantic.com/doc/
the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman prem/200404u/int2004-04-29, p. 1-10.
was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free 20. Khalidi is Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at
woman was born as the result of a promise. These things Columbia and author of Resurrecting Empire: Western
may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East.
covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears The quotation above comes from Philip S. Golub’s re-
children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. Now Hagar view, “The Wasteland of Empire,” Logos 3.3 – Summer
stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to 2004, p. 141.
the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery

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