Orientalism - autonomous learning

344 ORIENTALISM
relationships and borrowings to be noted. Nor is there much
similarity between what obtains among Western experts in Sinology
and Indology and the fact that many professional scholars of Islam
in Europe and the United States spend their lives studying the subject,
yet still find it an impossible religion and culture to like, much
less admire.
To say, as Lewis and his imitators do, that all such observations
are only a matter of espousing "fashionable causes" is not quite to
address the question of why, for example, so many Islamic specialists
were and still are routinely consulted by, and actively work for,
governments whose designs in the Islamic world are economic exploitation,
domination, or outright aggression, or why so many scholars
of Islam-like Lewis himself-voluntarily feel that it is part of their
duty to mount attacks on modern Arab or Islamic peoples with the
pretense that "classical" Islamic culture can nevertheless be the object
of disinterested scholarly concern. The spectacle of specialists in
the history ofmedieval Islamic guilds being sent on State Department
missions to brief area embassies on United States security interests in
the Persian Gulf does not spontaneously suggest anything resembling
the love of Hellas ascribed by Lewis to the supposedly cognate field
of classical philology.
It is therefore not surprising that the field of Islamic and Arabic
Orientalism, always ready to deny its complicity with state power,
had never until very recently produced an internal critique of the
affiliations I have just been describing, and that Lewis can utter the
amazing statement that a criticism of Orientalism would be "meaningless."
It is also not surprising that, with a few exceptions, most of
the negative criticism my work has elicited from "specialists" has
been, like Lewis's, no more than banal description of a barony violated
by a crude trespasser. The only specialists (again with a few
exceptions) who attempted to deal with what I discuss-which is not
only the content of Orientalism, but its relationships, affiliations,
political tendencies, and worldview-were Sinologists, Indologists
and the younger generation of Middle East scholars, susceptible to
newer influences and also to the political arguments that the critique
of Orientalism entailed. One example is Benjamin Schwartz of Harvard,
who used the occasion of his 1982 presidential address to the
Asian Studies Association not only to disagree with some of my
criticism, but also to welcome my arguments intellectually.
Many of the senior Arabists and Islamicists have responded with
the aggrieved outrage that is for them a substitute for self-reflection;
Afterword 345
most use words such as "malign," "dishonor," "libel," as if criticism
itself were an impermissible violation of their sacrosanct academic
preserve. In Lewis's case the defense offered is an act of conspicuous
bad faith, since more than most Orientalists he has been a passionate
political partisan against Arab (and other) causes in such places as
the U.S. Congress, Commentary, and elsewhere. The proper response
to him must therefore include an account of what politically and
sociologically he is all about when he pretends to be defending the
"honor" of his field, a defense which, it will be evident enough, is an
elaborate confection of ideological half-truths designed to mislead
·specialist readers.
In short, the relationship between Islamic or Arab Orientalism and
modern European culture can be studied without at the same time
cataloguing every Orientalist who ever lived, every Orientalist tradition,
or everything written by Orientalists, then lumping them together
as rotten and worthless imperialism. I never did that anyway.
It is beknighted to say that Orientalism is a conspiracy or to suggest
that "the West" is evil: both are among the egregious fatuities that
Lewis and one of his epigones, the Iraqi pUblicist K. Makiya, have
had the temerity to ascribe to me. On the other hand it is hypocritical
to suppress the cultural, political, ideological, and institutional contexts
in which people write, think, and talk about the Orient, whether
they are scholars or not. And as I said earlier, it is extremely important
to understand that the reason Orientalismis opposed by so
many thoughtful non-Westerners is that its modern discourse is correctly
perceived as a discourse of power originating in an era of
colonialism, the subject ofan excellent recent symposium Colonialism
and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks.s In this kind of disco].lrse,
based mainly upon the assumption that Islam is monolithic and
unchanging and therefore marketable by "experts" for powerful domestic
political interests, neither Muslims nor Arabs nor any of the
other dehumanized lesser peoples recognize themselves as human
beings or their observers as simple scholars. Most of all they see in
the discourse of modern Orientalism and its counterparts in similar
knowledges constructed for Native Americans and Africans a
chronic tendency to deny, suppress, or distort the cultural context of
such systems of thought in order to maintain the fiction of its scholarly
disinterest.