Orientalism - autonomous learning

336 ORIENTALISM
of fixed identities battling across a permanent divide that my book
quite specifically abjures, but which it paradoxically presupposes and
depends on. None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have
intended an Oriental as a reader. The discourse of Orientalism, its
internal consistency, and its rigorous procedures were all designed
for readers and consumers in the metropolitan West. This goes as
much for people I genuinely admire, like Edward Lane and Gustave
Flaubert, who were fascinated by Egypt, as it does for haughty
colonial administrators, like Lord Cromer, brilliant scholars, like
Ernest Renan, and baronial aristocrats, like Arthur Balfour, all of
whom condescended to and disliked the Orientals they either ruled or
studied. I must confess to a certain pleasure in listening in, uninvited,
to their various pronouncements and inter-Orientalist discussions,
and an equal pleasure in making known my findings both to Europeans
and non-Europeans. I have no doubt that this was made
possible because I traversed the imperial East-West divide, entered
into the life of the West, and yet retained some connection
with the place from which I originally came. I would repeat that this
is very much a procedure of crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers;
I believe Orientalism as a book shows it, especially at moments
when I speak of humanistic study as seeking ideally to go beyond
coercive limitations on thought toward a non-dominative, and nonessentialist,
type of learning.
These considerations did in fact add to the pressures on my book
to represent a sort of testament of wounds and a record of sufferings,
the recital of which was felt as a long overdue striking back at the
West. I deplore so simple a characterization of a work that is-here
I am not to be falsely modest-quite nuanced and discriminating
in what it says about different people, different periods, and
different styles ofOrientalism. Each ofmy analyses varies the picture,
increases the difference and discriminations, separates authors and
periods from each other, even though all pertain to OrientaIism. To
read my analyses of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, or of Burton and
Lane, with exactly the same emphasis, deriving the same reductive
message from the banal formula "an attack on Western civilization"
is, I believe, to be both simplistic and wrong. But I also believe that
it is entirely correct to read recent Orientalist authorities, such as the
almost comically persistent Bernard Lewis, as the politically motivated
and hostile witnesses that their suave accents and unconvincing
displays of learning attempt to hide.
Once again, then, we are back to the political and historical con-
Afterword 337
text of the book, which I do not pretend is irrelevant to its contents.
One of the most generously perspicacious and intelligently discriminating
statements of that conjuncture was laid out in a review
by Basim Musallam (MERIP, 1979). He begins by comparing my
book with an earlier demystification of Orientalism by the Lebanese
scholar Michael Rustum in 1895 (Kitab al-Gharib ji al-Gharb), but
then says that the main difference between us is that my book is about
loss, whereas Rustum's is not:
Rustum writes as a free man and a member of a free a Syrian,
Arab by speech, citizen ofa still-independent Ottoman state .... unlike
Michael Rustum, Edward Said has no generally accepted identity, his
very people are in dispute. It is possible that Edward Said and his
generation sometimes feel that they stand on nothing more solid than
the remnants of the destroyed society of Michael Rustum's Syria, and
on memory. Others in Asia and Africa have had their successes in this
age of national liberation; here, in painful contrast, there has been
rl",,,,p·r,,·t,, resistance against overwhelming odds and, until now, defeat.
It is not just any "Arab" who wrote this book, but one with a
hachround and experience. (22)
Musallam correctly notes that an Algerian would not have written
the same kind of generally pessimistic book, especially one like mine
that does very little with the history of French relations with North
Africa, Algeria most particularly. So while I would accept the overall
impression that Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete
history ofpersonal loss and national disintegration-only a few years
before I wrote Orientalism Golda Meir made her notorious and
deeply Orientalist comment about there being no Palestinian peowould
also like to add that neither in this book, nor in the two
that immediately followed it, The Question of Palestine (1980) and
Covering Islam (1981), did I want only to suggest a political program
of restored identity and resurgent nationalism. There was, of course,
an attempt in both of the later books to supply what was missing in
Orientalism, namely a sense of what an alternative picture of parts of
the Orient- Palestine and Islam respectively-might be from a personal
point of view.
But in all my works I remained fundamentally critical ofa gloating
and uncritical nationalism. The picture of Islam that I represented
was not one of assertive discourse and dogmatic orthodoxy, but was
based instead on the idea that communities of interpretation exist
within and outside the Islamic world, communicating with each other