A linguistically exceptional and theologically undeveloped culture

Orientalism Revisited: Edward Said’s unfinished critique (Boston Review) by rjon on Thu 01 Feb 2007 03:21 PM PST Permanent Link

Robert Irwin, defending his discipline in his new book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, pulls no punches: “That book seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.” Irwin, building on our misgivings from the last chapter of Orientalism, writes that if Said was wrong about the present, his account of earlier Orientalists might be equally suspect. Then, like Said, Irwin takes us through the history of Western writings on the East, appraising the work of some famous scholars and some so obscure they may be unfamiliar even to specialists. Irwin probes for these writers’ foibles and eccentricities.

Thus Guillaume Postel (born 1510), “the first true Orientalist,” was “a complete lunatic” who thought everyone needed to return to speaking Hebrew; Abraham Wheelocke (c. 1593–1653), holder of the first chair in Arabic at Cambridge, was interested in sea monsters and mermaids; and Athanasius Kircher (1601–80), to whom “the torch of mad linguistics passed,” “devised a vomiting machine and eavesdropping statues, as well as a kind of piano powered by screeching cats.”

But Irwin has a larger story to tell. Those who may fairly be called Orientalists certainly were, in his view, men (and, very rarely, women) of their times, but they were devoted to studying the languages of the region and establishing the relation of Islam and its history to Jewish and Christian sources. They were not overtly political, he says, nor, except in rare and more recent times, even involved in conversation with policymakers. Irwin’s characteristic way of dealing with the inveterate racists is simply to read them out of the category of Orientalists. Thus, Ernest Renan’s (1823–92) hostility to Semites suggests he was not a real scholar; and like-minded writers “did not need to have Orientalists invent racism for them.”

He concludes that “racist attitudes in any period or region are the product of the natural tendency to think in generalities.” But this etiology of opinions avoids an essential point—not well expressed by Said—about consequences: whatever their origins and purposes, students of the region often set the terms of subsequent discussions. If Orientalists claimed that the East was a linguistically exceptional and theologically undeveloped culture with highly elaborate legal strictures, their framing had repercussions for political no less than common discourse. One does not have to be a policymaker to affect policy...

The disputes engendered by Said’s work may seem an academic spat that should be restricted to seminars and department cocktail parties. But two very important considerations suggest otherwise. First, the Orientalists’ expertise, whether situated in the academy or the think tank, has great influence on the terms by which non-specialists address the region...

Thus, secondly, choosing terms that suggest there is such a thing as “the Arab mind” or that all change in the region has been a form of cultural entropy, can have, even without direct consultation, a dramatic effect on national attitudes and policies. Lawrence Rosen is the Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton, an adjunct professor of law at Columbia, and a 2005 Carnegie Scholar. He is the author of The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life. Originally published in the January/February 2007 issue of Boston Review.