Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Essentialism, Consistency and Islam: A Critique of Edward Said'sOrientalism

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13537120701444961

1743-9086

Irfan Khawaja,

Medieval and Classical Philosophy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Thanks to Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this essay, and especially to Philip Salzman and Edward Beck for their kind invitation to the SPME conference. Thanks also to Carrie-Ann Biondi for helpful comments and editorial advice. Notes 1. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam, Chicago and London, 1974, pp. 57–60. 2. See Irfan Khawaja, 'Should We Read the Koran to Understand Muslim Terrorism? A Response to Daniel Pipes', available at www.hnn.us/articles/3902.html. 3. David Kelley, The Art of Reasoning, 3rd ed., New York and London, 1998, p. 40, italics in original. In the sense described in the text, 'essentialism' has been a staple of introductory logic textbooks for at least a century, if not longer. For an earlier and more rigorous discussion, see H.W.B. Joseph, An Introduction to Logic, Oxford, 1906, chapters 4–5. For standard contemporary treatments, see Irving M. Copi and Keith Burgess-Jackson, Informal Logic, 2nd ed., New York, 1992, pp. 175–176, and Patrick Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic, 8th ed., Belmont, CA, 2003, p. 105. In the acknowledgements of The World, The Text and the Critic, Cambridge, MA, 1983, Said records his debt to 'Arthur Szathmary, professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, who taught me the essentials of critical thinking' (p. v). The 'essentials' taught at Princeton seem not to have included the elementary rules of definition. A separate question arises about the metaphysical and epistemological basis of claims about essences. This is indeed a difficult issue, but we no more need a full theory of essences to apply an elementary rule of definition than we need a full theory of numbers to balance our check books. On the deep issue, of course, philosophers differ widely about the nature of essences, as they do about everything else. The view presented in this essay follows that of Ayn Rand, as defended in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, expanded 2nd ed., Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff (eds.), New York, 1990, chapter 5, and elaborated by Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, New York: Dutton, 1991, pp. 96–105 and Allan Gotthelf, On Ayn Rand, Belmont, CA, 2000, chapter 7. For related but distinct approaches from the Aristotelian tradition, see Douglas B. Rasmussen, 'Quine and Aristotelian Essentialism', New Scholasticism, Vol. 58 (1984), pp. 316–335; Martha Nussbaum, 'Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism', Political Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (1992), pp. 202–246; and Nussbaum, 'Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics', in J.E.J Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, Cambridge and New York, 1995, pp. 86–131. For a historical discussion, see Charlotte Witt, 'Aristotelian Essentialism Revisited', Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1989), pp. 285–298. 4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th Anniversary Edition, New York: 1979 [2003], pp. 42, 58, 72, 113, 122, 124, 156, 161, 185, 201, 204, 216, 222, 242, 261, 263, 267, 284, 307; Covering Islam, New York, 1997, pp. 28, 53, 106, 150, 152; Culture and Imperialism, New York, 1994, pp. xi, xii, xxii, 13, 58, 59, 102, 113, 128, 150, 236; Gauri Viswanathan (ed.), Power, Politics and Culture, New York, 2002, pp. 9, 180, 201, 221, 340–341, 361, 386, 448. The list is far from exhaustive. Said makes no attempt whatsoever to reconcile his thunderous denunciations of essentialism with his ubiquitous reliance throughout his work on claims of essentiality. Instead, he excoriates Orientalists for their supposed lack of methodological self-consciousness for doing precisely what he himself repeatedly does (e.g., Orientalism, p. 261). 5. For essentialist treatments of Islam from a variety of perspectives, see the major works of H.A.R. Gibb, Albert Hourani, Philip Hitti, Ismail Faruqi, Fazlur Rahman, and David Waines. See also Mohammad Khalifa's neglected but interesting book, The Sublime Qur'an and Orientalism, London and New York, 1983—a believing Muslim's essentialist response to (what the author takes to be) Orientalist misinterpretations of the Qur'an. Throughout his writing, Said lavishes extensive praise on the work of Albert Hourani (Orientalism, pp. 274, 275, 276, 330, 335, 336, 340, 347, 348) and Louis Massignon (Orientalism, pp. 262–273). And yet it remains an unresolved (indeed unacknowledged) mystery why Hourani and Massignon are any less essentialist in their commitments than, say, Gibb, who comes in for extensive criticism (Orientalism, pp. 278–283). A particularly absurd series of inconsistencies arises when Said raises the possibility that Massignon, in offering a view of Islam unacceptable to its adherents, might well have misrepresented the religion (Orientalism, p. 272). He concludes on the same page that no misrepresentation was involved—by denying the very possibility of accurate representation! Oblivious to the fact that the latter denial destroys the very possibility of objective communication (and with it the book's thesis), Said proceeds on the same page to the claim that Islam has systematically been 'misrepresented' by the West. The evidence for this latter (obviously self-contradictory) claim comes in part from his analysis of Gibb, whom Said convicts of misrepresenting Islam. The misrepresentation, according to Said, consists in Gibb's offering an interpretation of Islam unacceptable to the religion's adherents (Orientalism, p. 283)—the very thing Said had excused in Massignon. The preceding combination of claims would be comical if expressed in a paper by a confused undergraduate; they are less so in a book described by one reviewer as 'bound to usher in a new epoch in the world's attitude to Oriental studies and Oriental scholarship' (Nissim Rejwans in The Jerusalem Post, quoted on the back cover of the first edition). 6. In the interests of space, a long section has been cut out of an original draft of the essay discussing the deep methodological problems with Said's attempts to define Orientalism—problems whose discussion would require a separate paper and happen to be subsidiary to the main theme of the present essay. 7. Said, Orientalism, p. 4. 8. Said, Orientalism, pp. 15–16. Said notes that he discusses issues of circularity in his book Beginnings: Intention and Method, but (pace Abdirahman Hussein's Edward Said: Criticism and Society, London and New York, 2002, pp. 224–232) nothing in that book resolves the circularity at issue. 9. Said, Orientalism, p. 5. 10. Said, Orientalism, pp. 40–41. 11. Said, Orientalism, p. 43. 12. Said, Orientalism, pp. 49–73. Said occasionally attempts various rhetorical retreats from the claim of systematic falsification, but there is no avoiding it. 'Imaginative geography', as he puts it, 'Orientalizes' the Orient, so that the Orientalized Orient becomes its basic object of study (Orientalism, p. 67). But the Orientalized Orient does not correspond to reality. There is for Said no 'Orient' or 'Islam' for it to focus on in the first place (Orientalism, p. 50). Orientalism thus freely constructs an Orientalized reality by analogy with a 'daydream' (Orientalism, pp. 52–55). This daydream either 'infuses or overrides' reality (Orientalism, p. 55) and leads directly to a culture-wide refinement of 'ignorance' (Orientalism, pp. 62, 75). In every case where Said qualifies his claims about falsification he does so to suggest that the commitment to falsification was understandable, not to deny that it was a falsification. 'It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures', Orientalism, p. 67. It is worth noting that this latter claim is a (vaguely Kantian) generalization about conceptualization that commits Said to essentialism about the mind. 13. Orientalism, p. 71. 14. See Said, Orientalism, pp. 4, 5, 9, 16, 21–24, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45–56, 50, 52, 53–55, 58, 59, 70–71, 72, 73, 74, 87, 88, 96, 98, 99, 100, 122, 154–155, 156–157, 200, 202, 204, 205, 206, 208, 221, 230–231, 260, 262, 297, 323, 336. 15. Orientalism, pp. 12, 60, 95–96; Covering Islam, p. 26; Culture and Imperialism, pp. 51–52. 16. Orientalism, p. 96; Afterword to 2003 edition of Orientalism, pp. 345, 341; Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 151. 17. Occasionally, Said—in a characteristic attempt to have things all ways at once—will assert that he does not intend the relation between Orientalism and imperialism to be understood as causal. But besides contradicting the causal claims he clearly does make, such protestations are simply incoherent. If a morally significant relation obtains between Orientalism and imperialism, and the relation explains the connection between the two things, what else could the relation be but causal? In a particularly ludicrous formulation, Said asserts that although Orientalism 'fortified' imperialism, he would not assert a causal relation between it and imperialism (Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 243; cf. Culture and Imperialism, p. 81). It is left to the reader's imagination to figure out how x can 'fortify' y without standing in a causal relation to it. The scandalous imprecision of Said's account of the causal relation between Orientalism and imperialism is one of the most glaring (and least commented-on) deficiencies of the book. For a cursory criticism, see Aijaz Ahmad, 'Orientalism and After', In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London and New York, 1992, pp. 181–182. 18. The quotations in this paragraph come, in order, from Orientalism, pp. 39, 41, 95, 123, 222, 204. 19. See Orientalism, pp. 11, 14, 39, 40, 41, 86–87, 95–96, 108–110, 123, 201–225, 253; Afterword to 2003 edition of Orientalism, pp. 343, 348; The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 264; Covering Islam, pp. lvii–lviii, 26, 30, 163; Edward Said, The Question of Palestine, New York, 1980, pp. 146–147; Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994, New York, 1995, p. 329; Culture and Imperialism, pp. 41, 48, 51–52, 108–110; Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 26, 151, 169, 237–238. 20. Said, Orientalism, p. 25. 21. Said, Orientalism, p. 274. 22. Hence Bernard Lewis's justified complaint that Said reinterprets 'the passages he cites to an extent out of all reasonable accord with their authors' manifest intentions' ('The Question of Orientalism', in Islam and the West, New York, 1993, p. 112). Among the most egregious examples in Orientalism are Said's interpretations of Dante, Edward Lane, William Robertson Smith, H.A.R. Gibb, and Bernard Lewis. The silliest of these is undoubtedly the interpretation of Dante's Inferno, which suffers from the fatal inability of being unable to reconcile Dante's supposed Orientalism with his partiality for Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, and Saladin—whom Dante puts morally on a par with Hector, Aeneas, Abraham, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (Said, Orientalism, p. 69). If Dante's treatment of these Muslims is evidence of Orientalism, is it not equally evidence of Occidentalism? For a cogent discussion of this issue, see Aijaz Ahmad, 'Orientalism and After', In Theory, pp. 187–190. 23. Said, Afterword to the 1994 edition of Orientalism, p. 331. 24. Edward Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA, 2002, p. 199. Said writes, 'I would not want it to be thought that this [essay] is an attempt to answer critics' (p. 198). Though the essay does in fact try to answer critics (thereby contradicting Said's stated intentions), it is for the most part a self-congratulatory advertisement for the book that highhandedly ignores or dismisses its critics as unworthy of a response. 25. See note 5. 26. Said concedes in two places that Islam does indeed have a defining essence. On pp. 57–59 of Covering Islam, he isolates what he calls 'the bedrock identity of Islamic faith'. Likewise, in 'Impossible Histories' (Harper's, July 2002, pp. 69–70) Said describes Islam in essential terms '[a]s a religious idea', protesting very quickly that this idea leaves one with a merely introductory and 'primitive' understanding of the nature of Islam. Two fatal problems arise here. The first is that these claims are flatly inconsistent with the bulk of Said's claims about Islam. The preceding two passages concede that Islam has an essence. But as has been argued in this essay, a large number of passages assert that it lacks one. Said nowhere resolves the inconsistency. At times, Said seems to suggest that although Islam has a core set of defining doctrines, this core bears no determinate relation to the many kinds of Islam we find in history and across various cultural contexts today (e.g., Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 70). But Said offers nothing in the way of an argument for this claim. Nor does he deal with the possibility that every genuine version of Islam bears some relation to the core doctrines within a determinate range of plausible possibilities. Nor, finally, does it occur to Said, despite his ritual invocation of the first-person perspective of the Muslim believer (Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 74), that his approach to Islam is incompatible with precisely that perspective. Serious Muslim believers profess faith in Islam qua Islam, not in species of Islam subdivided by secular criteria (e.g., 'eighteenth century Yemeni Islam', to use Said's example). No student of Islam, secular or religious, can afford to ignore this obvious fact. Said does. 27. Said, Orientalism, pp. 96–102, 105, 208, 236–240, 246–254, 272–273, 276, 280, 283, 296–297, 301–302, 305, 322; Said, Covering Islam, pp. 9–11, 57–62, 85, 148; Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 238; Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 70; Tony Judt, Introduction to Edward W. Said, 'Collective Passion', in From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, New York, 2004, p. 110. 28. Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 70. 29. Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 70. 30. Said, Orientalism, pp. 96–102, 234, 237–240, 246–254, 256, 301; Said, Covering Islam, pp. xxxi, lv, 62, 85, 148; Said, Politics of Dispossession, pp. 307–308. 31. See 'Impossible Histories', and 'Adrift in Similarity', in Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, pp. 119–124. 32. E.g., Said, Orientalism, pp. 272–273, 283; Said, Covering Islam, pp. 44–45, 168; Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 238; Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 74. 33. Said, Orientalism, p. 283. Cf. note 5 above for further discussion of some relevant issues here. 34. Said, Orientalism, p. 328. 35. Said, Afterword to the 1994 edition of Orientalism, pp. 340–341. 36. Said, Orientalism, pp. 307, 323. 37. Said, Afterword, Orientalism, 1994 edition, p. 341. 38. Sadiq al Azm, 'Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse', in Jon Rothschild (ed.), Khamsin: Forbidden Agendas—Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East, Beirut, 1984, p. 350. Al Azm cites p. 96 of Orientalism as evidence, but misconstrues Said's point. Although Said concedes Orientalism 'a great many' achievements on that page, he tells us on the same page that regardless of these achievements, we 'must be very clear' that Orientalism systematically falsified ('overrode') the Orient and abetted imperialism. Said's point then is that Orientalism's supposed achievements furnished the very materials by which it falsified the Orient. All things considered, that would make Orientalism a failure, which is precisely the word Said repeatedly uses for it (e.g., Said, Orientalism, pp. 322, 328). 39. For a clear example of the mistake, see Emmanuel Sivan, 'Edward Said and His Arab Reviewers', in Interpretations of Islam: Past and Present, Princeton, NJ, 1985. The mistake also arises in a somewhat milder form in Al Azm's 'Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse', e.g., p. 351 and in Aijaz Ahmad's 'Orientalism and After', In Theory, p. 183. It is worth noting that Al Azm's famous thesis of 'Orientalism in Reverse' (pp. 371–376), though similar to the criticism of Said expressed in this essay, is also different from it. Al Azm uses that phrase to denote the Islamist exploitation of Said's thesis in defence of Islam, whereas the thesis of this essay concerns the logic of Said's thesis, not its use or misuse by others. Remarkably, Said offers no sustained response to Al Azm's thesis anywhere in his writings. For a brief discussion of 'Orientalism in Reverse', see Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 184, 219–222. Aijaz Ahmad makes a criticism similar to Sadiq al Azm's in 'Orientalism and After', but unfortunately formulates it by way of an interpretive point about Said's use of Foucault, which considerably understates the essential problem, e.g., pp. 166–169. 40. Said, Orientalism, pp. 49–73. 41. Said, Orientalism, pp. 25–28. 42. Said, Orientalism, p. 272; Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 69. 43. Said, Orientalism, pp. 202–205, 272; Said, Covering Islam, pp. 44–47, citing C. Wright Mills. 44. Said, Orientalism, p. 317; Said, Covering Islam, pp. lviii, 44; Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 70. 45. On terrorism, see Said, Covering Islam, p. xxxii; Said, 'The Essential Terrorist', in Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens (eds.), Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, London and New York, 1988, p. 156; Said, The Politics of Dispossession, p. 345; Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, pp. 295, 239. On anti-Semitism, see Said, Politics of Dispossession, chapter 32. On censorship, see Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 383. 46. On Eqbal Ahmad, see Said, 'Adrift in Similarity', From Oslo to the Iraq War, pp. 122–124, citing Ahmad's columns in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, January–March 1999. On Shariati, see Said, Covering Islam, pp. 67–68. Elsewhere, Said asserts that Osama Bin Laden has misinterpreted Islam—a claim he asserts without analyzing a single word of Bin Laden's writings, Said, 'A Vision to Lift the Spirit', p. 129; and Said, 'Suicidal Ignorance', p. 133, both in Said, From Oslo to the Iraq War. 47. Said, Orientalism, pp. 302–305. Said is discussing P.M. Holt, Anne K.S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis (eds.), The Cambridge History of Islam, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1970. 48. Said, Orientalism, pp. 8, 24. Italics added. 49. Said, Orientalism, pp. 214–215. In Said, Culture and Imperialism, Said invokes J.S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy to the same end, pp. 59, 90, 91. 50. 'Further Reflections on the Hebron Massacre', Peace and Its Discontents, New York, 1996, pp. 54–55. 51. Said, The Question of Palestine, pp. 146–147. 52. On Christianity, see Said, Orientalism, pp. 67, 70–73, 115, 120. On anti-Semitism, Said, Orientalism, pp. 27–28, 286, 307. 53. Said, Orientalism, pp. 322–324. 54. Compare Said, Orientalism, p. 254, with the Afterword to the 1994 edition, p. 336, the Preface to the 2003 edition, pp. xxii–xxx, and Viswanathan, Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 174. 55. Said, 'Impossible Histories', p. 70. 56. Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 80. 57. Aristotle, Metaphysics IV.4, 1006a12–24. 58. Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, back cover. 59. Said, Orientalism, Afterword to the 1994 edition, p. 339; Richard Falk, 'Imperial Vibrations, 9/11, and the Ordeal of the Middle East', Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3 (2005), p. 72. 60. Martin Kramer, 'Edward Said's Splash', in Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, Washington, DC, 2001, chapter 2. 61. James Clifford, 'On Orientalism', in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988, chapter 11. 62. Dennis Porter, 'Orientalism and Its Problems', in The Politics of Theory, Colchester, UK, 1983, pp. 179–183, and Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said: A Critical Introduction, Malden, MA, 2000. A good deal of left writing consists of pure adulation for Said, e.g., Abdul Jan Mohammed, 'Worldliness-Without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward a Definition of the Secular Border Intellectual', in Michael Sprinker (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, 1992; Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, New York, 2002; Rashid Khalidi, 'Edward W. Said and the American Public Sphere: Speaking Truth to Power', Boundary 2, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1998), pp. 161–177. And some left-leaning theorists have used Said's work as the occasion for promulgating sheer unintelligible nonsense; for a spectacularly silly example see Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture, New York and London, 1997, pp. 71–74. 63. Lewis, 'The Question of Orientalism'; Sivan, 'Edward Said and His Arab Reviewers'. Joshua Teitelbaum and Meir Litvak make some good points in 'Students, Teachers, and Edward Said: Taking Stock of Orientalism', Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2006), pp. 23–43, but offer too many concessions to Said and formulate their critique too broadly. 64. Said, Orientalism, p. 236; Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', p. 199; Said, Reflections on Exile; Viswanathan, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 80. 65. Said's views on objectivity and truth are simply a mess. Occasionally, he will assert that objectivity is impossible; occasionally, he asserts the reverse and allows for approximations to truth. However, no intelligible position emerges from the claims he makes on the subject. For relevant passages, see Said, Orientalism, pp. 9–28, 55, 87, 104, 113–123, 201–210, 259–260; Said, Covering Islam, pp. lvii, lviii, 45–47, 135–136, 139–140. 66. See Orientalism, pp. 54–56, 96–97 119–120, 208, 237–240, 246–254, 297, 300; Said, Covering Islam, pp. 45–47. Said relies here on work by Claude Levi-Strauss, Anwar Abdel-Malek, Michel Foucault, Talal Asad, Abdullah Laroui, and C. Wright Mills. None of Said's references deals even in a cursory way with the material cited in note 3 of the present study. 67. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Chicago, 1962. At best, a charitable reading would permit one to say that pp. 159–160 of Levi-Strauss's book are broadly relevant to Said's claims. 68. Said, 'Michael Foucault, 1927–1984', in Reflections on Exile, pp. 192, 199. 69. Said, Orientalism, p. 3. For all the tortured verbiage written on this subject, Foucault's essentialism should be obvious to any moderately intelligent reader simply by inspection of the titles of his books, e.g., The History of Sexuality, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, New York, 1979: The Birth of the Prison, etc. Suffice it to say that the texts amply bear this out. For a very obvious example, see Discipline and Punish, pp. 264–270. 70. Said, Orientalism, pp. 322, 236. Additional informationNotes on contributorsIrfan KhawajaIrfan Khawaja is an Instructor in Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY, USA.