Orientalism

"Interestingly, Batatu’s book came out in the same year as Edward Said’s Orientalism: 1978. Orientalism is not an easy read because it is dense and requires prior knowledge of the complex relationship between the Orient and Occident. I confess, I did not appreciate the book as an undergraduate as much as when I was a postgraduate student and then as an academic. I’ve read the book several times. It took me quite a bit of time and energy to appreciate the theoretical and philosophical significance of Orientalism . If you ask me, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, it’s one of the most influential intellectual histories of the relationship between a core of Western scholarship and the Arab/Islamic world. Said read widely, a broad range of scholarship, but he did not read everything. One of the major criticisms of Said is that he disects Orientalism without immersing himself in German or Russian Orientalism. To summarise the book, you could say that Orientalism is a study of Western representation, or misrepresentation of the Arab/Islamic world. It’s the study of an imagined Oriental world. Why is this book very important? I’d compare Orientalism to The Old Social Classes , because conceptually they’re original texts and overturn conventional wisdom. Batatu sidestepped the conventional approach on Iraq and the global south, by not focusing on sect, religion and tribe, but by focusing on Karl Marx and Max Weber, whose theoretical insights help us to understand the formation of social classes. Said’s work is a critique of a particular type of expert, the producer of knowledge about the Arab/Islamic world; specifically, the geostrategic expert, which was much needed in the Age of Empires, because the Empire and colonialism needed a particular expert to tell them about the Oriental people—the Iraqi people, the Egyptian people, different ‘collectivities’ as Said calls them. There were no individual, everyday people. So, in a way, the Orientalist expert or producer of knowledge simplified and imagined a certain Oriental representation of these collectivities. In fact, Orientalism had preceded the Empire and softened the defences of the Orient, thus allowing imperialism to penetrate the Orient and colonise it easily. The book itself is not the last word on Orientalism. It was one of the first poignant critiques of Orientalism, but some critics assert that it’s too broad, too general. Some scholars have taken Said to task for lumping all Orientalists together, as opposed to looking at the multiplicity of Orientalist voices and scholarships. But, to be fair to Said, he does focus on some progressive and humanistic Orientalists, who looked at the human dimension of the Arab and Islamic world, who were able to look at the diversity of the human experiences within the societies of the Middle East. I think Said was misunderstood a great deal because of the political debate around Orientalism . The book came out in 1978, a year before the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the American hostage crisis. The book is not a denunciation of Western scholarship on the Middle East. It’s not a nativist denunciation either. Said went to great lengths to say that he was fully aware of the organic crisis in the Middle East, the prevalence of dictatorship and autocracy, the failure of democracy in the region. Rather, Orientalism is a critique of what Said calls a ‘system of power knowledge’. It’s really about hierarchies of knowledge, about a small group of people—scholars—producing knowledge about people who are powerless, disadvantaged and who do not have the capacity to respond in kind. What fascinated me about the book is that Said hammers home the point that Orientalism is an intellectual failure. But he also makes clear that it was a human failure on the part of some Orientalists, a human failure to appreciate the decency of Middle Eastern societies, the decencies of Middle Eastern people, and a moral failure to look at these societies from the bottom up and from the inside out, as opposed to from the top down and outside in. Orientalism provided a corrective and provoked a great debate about how we study the ‘other’ as social scientists and historians and linguists. That’s why it’s very important theoretically and conceptually, because it provoked critical reflection and soul searching—and not just in the Arab/Islamic world—around how to use different analytical social science frameworks. It did not simply rely on texts and philology , which had been the approach used by most Orientalists up to then to study and generalise about cultures and societies. “As a mindset and a way of thinking, Orientalism has proved durable” In the 1980s and 1990s the book motivated young scholars to use critical theoretical approaches across the social sciences and produce critical studies of the modern Middle East. Nevertheless, now, more than 40 years after the release of Orientalism , Orientalism is alive and well. As a mindset and a way of thinking, Orientalism has proved durable. The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent US global ‘war on terror’ has given Orientalism a new lease on life. For example, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was sold as a crusade to democratise and liberalise an autocratic Arab world. Donald Trump publicly talked about the Middle East as a barren desert within nothing ‘except death and sand’. Some American commentators call the region a ‘bad’, ‘dangerous’ neighbourhood populated by Iranian mullahs and radical Islamists and terrorists, like Al Qaeda and ISIS. This reductionist depiction of the region overlooks the diversity and mosaic of Middle Eastern societies and peoples, as Said had proposed. Yes, there are bloody dictators and bloody autocrats in the Arab and Islamic world. But the people there have been struggling against tyranny and oppression and demanding freedom and justice. Thousands of people have died for their beliefs, whether you’re talking about Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. And the Arab Spring uprisings have provided us with a window onto public opinion in the region, a glimpse into the struggles of millions of everyday people. One would have expected Orientalism and the debate it provoked to have got rid of this lumping of Middle Eastern societies and people into tribes, sects, ethnicities and religions—collectivities. But, unfortunately, Orientalism has reared its ugly head with a vengeance in particular since 9/11. Edward Said is seen in US official political circles as a traitor to America. And, in fact, after 9/11, the US Congress legislated against Middle Eastern scholars who do not teach their students patriotism and Americanism. The idea of being critical is seen as synonymous with being treacherous and being un-American. There’s been a lot of regression regarding critical thinking and studies of the ‘other’ in the US in the past 20 years or so."