Unmasking AIT

[Guest]

Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American literary theorist, critic, and outspoken Palestinian activist. He was a University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is regarded as a founding figure in post-colonial theory. His book "Orientalist" is an important study to gain insight about the linkage between European imperialists and Orientalists.

Although Said is more concerned about European study of Muslim world, it also has links to British/German study of India.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->“All academic knowledge about India”, Edward Said wrote in the introduction to his book 'Orientalism', is “tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact” of Western colonialism. Reading these words recently, I was reminded of R. S. McGregor, who taught me Hindi when I was a Cambridge undergraduate in the early 1990s. McGregor was a tidy, inexpressive man whose desk was piled with pages in progress from the Hindi–English dictionary he went on to publish in 1993. He had not visited India in decades, and his interest in the here and now of South Asia was so slight that he greeted me on the morning after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by enquiring what I had understood of the Hindustani verses he had assigned me. If McGregor felt remorse that his long employment by the Faculty of Oriental Studies implicated him in a sinister enterprise that is aimed, in Said’s words, at “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”, he never let on.
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In Said’s view, the shared feature of all Orientalists is the “intellectual authority” – the italics are Said’s; he is constantly wringing his hands as he writes – that they assume “over the Orient within western culture”. What Said seems to be saying is, it doesn’t matter if you don’t subscribe to the Imperialist mindset, or oppose it, or if you couldn’t care either way, because you are completely occupied by what you imagine is a narrow and uncontroversial academic pursuit. By virtue of the fact that you are Western and have some expertise in an aspect of the East – and, crucially, that you presume to pronounce on this expertise, before a mainly Western public – you are of necessity tainted.
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Unlike Said, who somersaulted into Orientalism from a career in comparative literature, Irwin is an insider. He teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, has written books on Arabic literature and Islamic art, and is a member of prestigious bodies, such as the Royal Asiatic Society, that Said considered part of the whole invidious Orientalist superstructure.  He rejects Said’s belief that Western academics and artists looked at the East in an identical way. There may be an “overlap”, but he does not accept that, for instance, Flaubert and the Arabist and Islamicist Sir Hamilton Gibb were “contributing to essentially the same discourse”.
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Where, then, do Orientalism’s origins lie? Not, Irwin convincingly argues, in ancient Athenian plays such as the Persae and the Bacchae, in which Said claims to detect early Orientalist twitches – claims that are based partly on his attribution of prophetic powers to Aeschylus and Euripides. Irwin traces Orientalism back to the half-millennium that followed the advent of Islam, when pious European churchmen acquainted themselves with Arabic in order to understand, and impugn more effectively, the rival faith, and scholars translated books by Arabs and Persians on medicine, philosophy and mathematics.

Through the Renaissance and beyond, Europeans’ scholarly interest in the East was oscillating and inconsistent, tending to rise whenever the Ottoman Turks, who three times threatened to take Vienna, seemed most threatening. Some Orientalists, such as Guillaume Postel, who wrote Europe’s first grammar of classical Arabic and procured Arabic manuscripts for the French Crown, admired many aspects of Islam and Islamic societies. Others were abusive, and still others indifferent.
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Irwin writes of the Revd Edmund Castell (1606–85), a holder of the Adams Professorship that Browne and Nicholson would later occupy, that he was “not in the slightest interested in Islam. Rather, his chief enthusiasm was for trying to establish links with the Eastern Christian Churches”. Should we assume that these and other scholars had sympathy for what Said describes as “the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures”? Irwin doesn’t clearly answer this question, perhaps because he feels that, in a world that was delineated along religious lines, it would have been odd if they had not. Certainly, feelings of cultural superiority were not confined to the Christian West. Irwin refers to Arab scholars who depicted Christian Europeans as smelly fornicators and polytheists. Well into the nineteenth century, aspiring Ottoman statesmen were drilled on the merits of their religion and society over those of Europe.
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For all its errors and excesses, and its venerable age – it was first published in 1978 – Edward Said’s book reminds us why this academic discipline, more than most, connects with profound emotions and memories, and why distrust of Orientalists is not altogether deluded, all of the time.
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