Some 30 years ago, American/Palestinian/Egyptian academic Edward Said wrote a book that has ever since colored Arab relations with the West. That book, Orientalism, might have had a few good points, as this Arab News editorial states, but it has also poisoned those relations. When I first read the book, I was struck by the intellectual dishonesty of it. Said took some clear examples of bad behavior based in the study of ‘the Orient’ and turned them into the lens through which all Western attempts to understand the Arab world should be seen, in his view. Selective use of examples—he completely ignored German and Russian Orientalists, for example—and selective quotation of those examples resulted in the paranoia of the Arab world on which this piece comments.

The editorial also points out that the Arab world could use some serious ‘Occidentalism’, study of the West. I can vouch for that. The US Embassy has been trying for decades to get the Saudi university system to introduce a program of American Studies; none exists across the country, outside of an element in the school in which Saudis train their diplomats. Of course, learning about a different culture takes work. It’s far easier—and likely more fun—to simply go with stereotypes and bogeymen than to actually bother to learn something…

Editorial: In praise of Orientalism

Orientalism used to mean the study in the West of the Orient, specifically the Middle East and the Muslim world. All that changed some 30 years ago when the late Edward Said, in his book “Orientalism” made it a dirty word. The study of the Arabs, the Middle East and Islam divided East and West, he claimed. It had been politically driven, the Orientalist’s aim being to understand the region so as to control it or to demonstrate Western superiority over it.

He had a point. One of the main British centers for Oriental studies, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, was established during World War I specifically to create a brigade of trained young men who, knowing the local languages and customs, could play the Great Game in India or ensure the success of British interests in the Middle East and Central Asia; “Knowledge is Power” remains its motto.

A point — but not a large one. To extrapolate from a few genuine cases that all British and French interest in the Middle East over the past 700 years has been conspiracy is a theory too far and has since been shown to be untenable by a host of academics, Arab as well as Western.

But a great deal of damage has been done in the meantime. Inevitably, given the weight of issues burdening the Middle East — Palestine and Israel, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Islamophobia, terrorism — together with the sense of victimhood that stalks the Middle East as a result, Edward Said’s thesis has been taken out of context and used to build the very walls that he wanted to tear down. In more vacant minds, the term “Orientalist” has come to mean “enemy” and Westerners interested in discovering Arab and Islamic culture viewed with hostility.
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