Orientalism - autonomous learning

346 ORIENT ALISM
II
Yet I would not want to suggest that, current though such views as
Lewis's may be, they are the only ones that have either emerged or
been reinforced during the past decade and a half. Yes, it is true that
ever since the demise of the Soviet Union there has been a rush by
some scholars and journalists in the United States to find in an
Orientalized Islam a new empire of evil. Consequently, both the
electronic and print media have been awash with demeaning stereotypes
that lump together Islam and terrorism, or Arabs and violence,
or the Orient and tyranny. And there has also been a return in
various parts of the Middle and Far East to nativist religion and
primitive nationalism, one particularly disgraceful aspect of which is
the continuing Iranianfatwa against Salman Rushdie. But this isn't
the whole picture, and what I want to do in the remaining part of this
essay is to talk about new trends in scholarship, criticism, and interpretation
that, although they accept the basic premises of my book,
go well beyond it in ways, I think, that enrich our sense of the
complexity of historical experience.
N one of those trends has emerged out of the blue, of course; nor
have they gained the status of fully established knowledges and practices.
The worldly context remains both perplexingly stirred-up and
ideologically fraught, volatile, tense, changeable, and even murderous.
Even though the Soviet Union has been dismembered and the
Eastern European countries have attained political independence,
patterns of power and dominance remain unsettlingly in evidence.
The global south-once referred to romantically and even emotionally
as the Third World-is enmeshed in a debt trap, broken into
dozens of fractured or incoherent entities, beset with problems of
poverty, disease, and underdevelopment that have increased in the
past ten or fifteen years. Gone are the non-Aligned movement and
the charismatic leaders who undertook decolonization and independence.
An alarming pattern of ethnic conflict and local wars, not
confined to the global south, as the tragic case ofthe Bosnians attests,
has sprung up all over again. And in places like Central America, the
Middle East, and Asia, the United States still remains the dominant
power, with an anxious and still un-unified Europe straggling behind.
Explanations for the current world scene and attempts to comprehend
it culturallv and politically have emerged in some strikingly
Afterword 347
dramatic ways. I have already mentioned fundamentalism. The secular
equivalents are a return to nationalism and theories that stress the
radical distinction-a falsely all-inclusive one, I believe-between
different cultures and civilizations. Recently, for example, Professor
Samuel Huntington of Harvard University advanced the far from
convincing proposition that Cold War bipolarism has been superseded
by what he called the clash of civilizations, a thesis based on
the premise that Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations,
among several others, were rather like watertight compartments
whose adherents were at bottom mainly interested in fending off all
the others. 6
This is preposterous, since one of the great advances in modem
cultural theory is the realization, almost universally acknowledged,
that cultures are hybrid and heterogenous and, as I argued in Culture
and Imperialism, that cultures and civilizations are so interrelated and
interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description
of their individuality. How can one today speak of "Western
civilization" except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying
a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas,
none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest,
immigration, travel, and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western
nations their present mixed identities'? This is especially true of
the United States, which today cannot seriously be described except
as an enormous palimpsest of different races and cultures sharing a
problematic history of conquests, exterminations, and of course
major cultural and political achievements. And this was one of the
implied messages of Orientalism, that any attempt to force cultures
and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences exposes not
only the misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but also the
way in which understanding is complicit with the power to produce
such things as the "Orient" or the "West."
Not that Huntington, and behind him all the theorists and apologists
of an exultant Western tradition, like Francis Fukuyama,
haven't retained a good deal of their hold on the public consciousness.
They have, as is evident in the symptomatic case of Paul Johnson,
once a Left intellectual, now a retrograde social and political
polemicist. In the April 18, 1993, issue of The New York Times
Magazine, by no means a marginal publication, Johnson published
an essay entitled "Colonialism's Back-And Not a Moment Too
Soon," whose main idea was that "the civilized nations" ought to
take it upon themselves to re-colonize Third World countries "where