Orientalism - autonomous learning

338 ORIENT ALISM
in a dialogue of equals. My view of Palestine, fonnulated originally
in The Question ofPalestine, remains the same today: I expressed all
sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism and militant militarism
of the nationalist consensus; I suggested instead a critical look
at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities,
with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement between
the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide
respite from the unending war. (I should mention in passing that
although my book on Palestine was given a fine Hebrew translation
in the early 1980s by Mifras, a small Israeli publishing house, it
remains untranslated into Arabic to this day. Every Arabic publisher
who was interested in the book wanted me to change or delete those
sections that were openly critical of one or another Arab regime
(including the PLO), a request that I have always refused to comply
with.)
I regret to say that the Arabic reception of Orientalism, despite
Kamal Abu Deeb's remarkable translation, still managed to ignore
that aspect of my book which diminished the nationalist fervo( that
some implied from my critique of Orientalism, which I associated
with those drives to domination and control also to be found in
imperialism. Abu Deeb's painstaking translation was an almost total
avoidance of Arabized Western expressions; technical words like
discourse, simulacrum, paradigm, or code were rendered from within
the classical rhetoric of the Arab tradition. His idea was to place my
work inside one fully fonned tradition, as if it were addressing another
from a perspective of cultural adequacy and equality. In this
way, he re~soned, it was possible to show that just as one could
advance an epistemological critique from within the Western tradition,
so too could one do it from within the Arabic.
Yet the sense of fraught confrontation between an often emotionally
defined Arab world and an even more emotionally experienced
Western world drowned out the fact that Orientalism was meant to
be a study in critique, not an affirmation of warring and hopelessly
antithetical identities. Moreover, the actuality I described in the
book's last pages, of one powerful discursive system maintaining
hegemony over another, was intended as the opening salvo in a
debate that might stir Arab readers and critics to engage more determinedly
with the system of Orientalism. I was either upbraided for
not having paid closer attention to Marx the passages on Marx's
Own Orientalism in my book were the most singled out i?y dogmatic
critics in the Arab world and India, for instance-whose system of
Afterword 339
thought was claimed to have risen above his obvious prejudices, or
I was criticized for not appreciating the great achievements of Orientalism,
the West, etc. As with defenses of Islam,. recourse to Marxism
or "the West" as a coherent total system seems to me to have been
a case of using one orthodoxy to shoot down another.
The difference between Arab and other responses to Orientalism
is, I think, an accurate indication of how decades ofloss, frustration,
and the absence of democracy have affected intellectual and cultural
life in the Arab region. I intended my book as part of a pre-existing
current of thought whose purpose was to liberate intellectuals from
the shackles of systems such as Orientalism: I wanted readers to make
use of my work so they might then produce new studies of their own
that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others
in a generous, enabling mode. That certainly happened in Europe,
the United States, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean,
Latin America, and parts of Africa. The invigorated study of
Mricanist and Indological discourses; the analyses of subaltern history;
the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science,
art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast
new developments in feminist and minority discourses-to all these,
I am pleased and flattered that Orientalism often made a difference.
That does not seem to have been the case (insofar as I can judge it)
in the Arab world, where, partly because my work is correctly perceived
as Eurocentric in its texts, and partly because, as Musallam
says, the battle for cultural survival is too engrossing, books like mine
are interpreted less usefully, productively speaking, and more as
defensive gestures either for or against the "West."
Yet among American and British academics of a decidedly rigorous
and unyielding stripe, Orientalism, and indeed all of my other
work, has come in for disapproving attacks because of its "residual"
humanism, its theoretical inconsistencies, its insufficient, perhaps
even sentimental, treatment of agency. I am glad that it has! Orientalism
is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine. No one has convincingly
shown that individual effort is not at some profoundly
unteachable level both eccentric and, in Gerard Manley Hopkins's
sense, original; this despite the existence of systems of thought, discourses,
and hegemonies, (although none of them are in fact seamless,
perfect, or inevitable). The interest I took in Orientalism as a
cultural phenomenon (like the culture of imperialism I talk about in
Culture and Imperialism, its 1993 sequel) derives from its variability
and unpredictability, both qualities that give writers like Massignon
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