Orientalism - autonomous learning

340 ORIENTALISM
and Burton their surprising force, and even attractiveness. What I
tried to preserve in what I analyzed of Oriental ism was its combination
of consistency and inconsistency, its play, so to speak, which can
only be rendered by preserving for oneself as writer and critic the
right to some emotional force, the right to be moved, angered, surprised,
and even delighted. This is why, in the debate between Gayan
Prakash, on the one hand, and Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook,
on the other, I think Prakash's more mobile post-structuralism
has to be given its due. 2 By the same token the work of Homi
Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashis Nandy, predicated on the sometimes
dizzying subjective relationships engendered by colonialism,
cannot be gainsaid for its contribution to our understanding of the
humanistic traps laid by systems such as Orientalism.
Let me conclude this survey of Orientalism's critical transmutations
with a mention of the one group of people who were, not
unexpectedly, the most exercised and vociferous in responding to my
book, the Orientalists themselves. They were not my principal intended
audience at all; I had in mind casting some light on their
practices so as to make other humanists aware of one field's particular
procedures and genealogy. The word "Orientalism" itself has
been for too long confined to a professional specialty; I tried to show
was its application and existence in the general culture, in literature,
ideology, and social as well as political attitudes. To speak of someone
as an Oriental, as the Orientalists did, was not just to designate
that person as someone whose language, geography, and history
were the stuff of learned treatises: it also was often meant as a
derogatory expression signifying a lesser breed of human being. This
is not to deny that for artists like Nerval and Segalen the word
"Orient" was wonderfully, ingeniously connected to exoticism, glamour,
mystery, and promise. But it was also a sweeping historical
generalization. In addition to these uses of the words Orient, Oriental,
and Orientalism, the term Orientalist also came to represent the
erudite, scholarly, mainly academic specialist in the languages and
histories of the East. Yet, as the late Albert Hourani wrote me in
March 1992, a few months before his untimely and much regretted
death, due to the force of my argument (for which he said he could
not reproach me), my book had the unfortunate effect of making it
almost impossible to use the term "Orientalism" in a neutral sense,
so much had it become a term of abuse. He concluded that he would
have still liked to retain the word for use in describing "a limited,
rather dull but valid discipline of scholarship."
Afterword 341
In his generally balanced 1979 review of Orientalism, Hourani
formulated one of his objections by suggesting that while I singled
out the exaggerations, racism, and hostility of much Orientalist writing,
I neglected to mention its numerous scholarly and humanistic
achievements. Names that he brought up included Marshall Hodgson,
Claude Cohen, and Andre Raymond, all of whose accomplishments
(along with the German authors who come up de rigueur)
should be acknowledged as real contributors to human knowledge.
This does not, however, conflict with what I say in Orientalism, with
the difference that I do insist on the prevalence in the discourse itself
of a structure of attitudes that cannot simply be waved away or
discounted. Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy,
or uniformly the same in the work of each Orientalist. But I do say
that the guild of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with
imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant.
So while I sympathize with Hourani's plea, I have serious doubts
whether the notion of Orientalism properly understood can ever, in
fact, be completely detached from its rather more complicated and
not always flattering circumstances. I suppose that one can imagine
at the limit that a specialist in Ottoman or Fatimid archives is an
Orientalist in Hourani's sense, but we are still required to ask where,
how, and with what supporting institutions and agencies such studies
take place today? Many who wrote after my book appeared asked
exactly those questions of even the most recondite and otherworldly
scholars, with sometimes devastating results.
Still, there has been one sustained attempt to mount an argument
whose purport is that a critique of Orientalism (mine in particular) is
both meaningless and somehow a violation of the very idea of disinterested
scholarship. That attempt is made by Bernard Lewis, about
whom I had devoted a few critical pages in my book. Fifteen years
after Orientalism appeared, Lewis produced a series of essays, some
of them collected in a book entitled Islam and the West, one of whose
main sections is an attack on me, which he surrounds with chapters
and other essays that mobilize a set of lax and characteristically
Orientalist formulas-Muslims are enraged at modernity, Islam
never made the separation between church and state, and so on and
on-all of them pronounced with an extreme level of generalization
and with scarcely a mention of the differences between individual
Muslims, between Muslim societies, or between Muslim traditions
and eras. Since Lewis has in a sense appointed himself a spokesman
for the guild of Orientalists on which my critique was originally
aft !h))Jt·"itttWMtiH'dt'hln't6:btt,·'te!:IWt , ut' 'trw'"ti",\*tt' i'WI·.....H...t! l:..h;'lioI...... , .....:...'""'-l.......,~"".........a:.l~~"'"'l........ '..r.~
__ t ..,.,_d••.