Page 241 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 20: Edward Said's Crisis [In Orientalism]: Textual Analysis

theologians but in the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination. This is pure Orientalism, Notes
of course, but even if one acknowledges the exceeding knowledge of institutional Islam that
characterizes the rest of the book, Gibb's inaugural biases remain a formidable obstacle for anyone
hoping to understand modern Islam. What is the meaning of 'difference' when the preposition
'from' has dropped from sight altogether? Are we not once again being asked to inspect the
Oriental Muslim as if his world, unlike ours -- 'differently' from it -- had never ventured beyond
the seventh century? As for modern Islam itself, despite the complexities of his otherwise magisterial
understanding of it, why must it be regarded with so implacable a hostility as Gibb's? If Islam is
flawed from the start by virtue of its permanent disabilities, the Orientalist will find himself
opposing any Islamic attempts to reform Islam, because, according to his views, reform is a
betrayal of Islam: this is exactly Gibb's argument. How can an Oriental slip out from these manacles
into the modern world except by repeating with the Fool in King Lear, 'They'll have me whipp'd
for speaking true, thou'lt have me whipp'd for lying; and sometimes I am whipp'd for holding my
peace.' Eighteen years later Gibb faced an audience of English compatriots, only now he was
speaking as the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. His topic was 'Area
Studies Reconsidered', in which, among other aperçus, he agreed that 'the Orient is much too
important to be left to the Orientalists'. The new, or second alternative, approach open to Orientalists
was being announced, just as Modern Trends exemplified the first, or traditional, approach. Gibb's
formula is well-intentioned in 'Area Studies Reconsidered', so far, of course, as the Western experts
on the Orient are concerned, whose job it is to prepare students for careers 'in public life and
business.' What we now need, said Gibb, is the traditional Orientalist plus a good social scientist
working together: between them the two will do 'interdisciplinary' work. Yet the traditional
Orientalist will not bring outdated knowledge to bear on the Orient; no, his expertise will serve to
remind his uninitiated colleagues in area studies that 'to apply the psychology and mechanics of
Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations is pure Walt Disney'.
In practice this notion has meant that when Orientals struggle against colonial occupation, you
must say (in order not to risk a Disneyism) that Orientals have never understood the meaning of
self-government the way 'we' do. When some Orientals oppose racial discrimination while others
practice it, you say 'they're all Orientals at bottom' and class interest, political circumstances,
economic factors are totally irrelevant. Or with Bernard Lewis, you say that if Arab Palestinians
oppose Israeli settlement and occupation of their lands, then that is merely 'the return of Islam', or,
as a renowned contemporary Orientalist defines it, Islamic opposition to non-Islamic peoples, 18
a principle of Islam enshrined in the seventh century. History, politics, and economics do not
matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right
wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland.
If such tautologies, claims, and dismissals have not sounded familiar to historians, sociologists,
economists, and humanists in any other field except Orientalism, the reason is patently obvious. For
like its putative subject matter, Orientalism has not allowed ideas to violate its profound serenity.
But modern Orientalists -or area experts, to give them their new name -- have not passively sequestered
themselves in language departments. On the contrary, they have profited from Gibb's advice. Most
of them today are indistinguishable from other 'experts' and 'advisers' in what Harold Lasswell has
called the policy sciences. Thus the military -- national-security possibilities of an alliance, say,
between a specialist in 'national character analysis' and an expert in Islamic institutions were soon
recognized, for expediency's sake if for nothing else. After all, the 'West' since World War II had
faced a clever totalitarian enemy who collected allies for itself among gullible Oriental (African,
Asian, undeveloped) nations. What better way of outflanking that enemy than by playing to the
Oriental's illogical mind in ways only an Orientalist could devise? Thus emerged such masterful
ploys as the stick-and-carrot technique, the Alliance for Progress, SEATO, and so forth, all of them
based on traditional 'knowledge' retooled for better manipulation of its supposed object.

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