This blog post is a summary of the 1995 Afterword and 2003 Preface which Edward Said added to his classic work of cultural criticism, ‘Orientalism’, itself first published in 1978.
Afterword (1995)
Said starts off by remarking on the surprising success of the book, which had become a bestseller and been translated, as he wrote, into at least 10 languages, having an influence and life far greater than he ever expected.
Then he sets out to address several misconceptions. One is that the book aims to be a comprehensive attack on the West. The other is that it is an unquestioning defence of Islam or the Arab world. This second one couldn’t be further from the truth for the simple reason that he is not qualified:
I explicitly say that I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient or Islam are really like. (p.331)
Nonetheless, Muslim fundamentalists apparently welcomed the book as it was a huge indictment of Western Islamophobia. Said is not thrilled to find himself in this company which he regards as being as essentialist as its opposite, Orientalism. By essentialism he means the belief in fixed, unaltered, almost Platonic ideals or essences, in Islamic fundamentalism’s case, a belief in the timeless, unchanging, eternal truths of a primeval and pristine Islam.
Whereas Said again and again says he believes the opposite. He is anti-essentialist, he is trying to deliver the anti-essentialist message that history is made by people, that ideas are created, invented, nurtured and adapted by people who are themselves the products of societies with intellectual constraints and ideological pressures and so on. This view underpins his scepticism about academic world in general and the disciplines connected with Orientalism in particular.
My objection to what I’ve called Orientalism is not that it is just the antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies and peoples, but that as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; suggesting both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence which observes that Orient from afar and, so to speak, from above. This false position hides historical change. (p.333)
(The fact that he keeps having to restate his position reinforces my experience of his book as being slippery, obtuse, imprecise and hard to understand. He’s a desperately poor communicator. He sounds good, he sounds like he’s making awesome sense, but, in the end, there’s just a handful of ideas which he restates in countless ways.)
So he spends nearly a page recapping the facts about Napoleon’s Description of Egypt, the starting point of modern Orientalism, and the subtlety of its interplay with local Arab accounts of the same events because this is what he’s trying to achieve, a subtle sense of the complex interplay of texts and ideology which are continually changing ideologies and ideas, an ongoing dialectic – before repeating that he was not about something as vulgar and simplistic, as binary, as just pitting East and West against each other, let alone creating either an anti-Western or a pro-Islamic work.
Hmm. He can tell us that he intended it to be a subtle and sophisticated account all he likes (he flatters himself that his account is ‘nuanced and discriminating’) but, to be honest, I thought Said’s book was profoundly and howlingly anti-Western, fierce criticism of Western attitudes mentioned on every page, occasionally rising up to really angry diatribes against Western prejudice and racism and colonialism. One Arab reviewer, he tells us, described the author as:
a champion of the downtrodden and abused, whose mission was to engage Western authorities in a kind of epic and romantic mano-a-mano
The second reason why he thinks his subtle, ‘nuanced and discriminating’ message has been overlooked is the brutality of contemporary politics. Little did he know that the year after it was published Iran would witness the great Islamic Revolution and that this would be followed by new depths of brutality in the Arab-Israeli conflict i.e. the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the 1987 start of the Palestinian intifada. Then there was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to which the West responded by arming the mujihadeen, then the rise of Gorbachev, then the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, alongside the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
The thing is, Edward, if you tie your book to highly contentious issues in international affairs (Israel, Palestine, Islamic fundamentalism, Western neo-imperialism) then your book will inevitably get caught up in the maelstrom surrounding all these complex, continually changing events, with two results:
- People on all sides will try to co-opt you for their cause.
- ‘Events, dear boy, events’; the world carries on its violent unpredictable way and, if you’ve tied your text to the tiger’s tail, you’ll find yourself being dragged along behind it.
Like all his writings, this Afterword is long but goes round and round in circles, repeating that he wanted to avoid an ‘Orient-versus-Occident opposition’ and yet insisting on using the simple binary terms ‘the Orient’ and ‘the West’ that litter the main text; insisting that he thought he was offering ‘a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself’ while anyone who reads the book encounters impassioned protests against the abuse and exploitation of ‘the Orient’ and ‘Orientals’ at every turn.
He talks bravely about ‘crossing’ the barriers of the ‘imperial East-West divide’ in his own life, and seeking to rise above it, and yet…what has he just called it, what does he call it throughout the book? An ‘East-West’ divide. He insists that his analyses of each different author and each different era are distinctive, different, nuanced etc, but that’s not how I read it. Whatever distinctions he thinks he makes between eras and authors are continually being collapsed when he claims that they all are based on the same, basic latent Orientalism which underpins prejudicial views of ‘the East’ in 1780, 1860 or 1910.
In fact, the reader struggling to the end of this 350-page book emerges with a hugely expanded sense of a much deeper divide between East and West than I previously appreciated. Said’s book seems to me to exacerbate the very problem he claims to be curing.
He has an entertaining passage criticising (insulting) the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis, an expert in the field who, nonetheless, despises the Arab world and Islam he knows so much about, and who, predictably, wrote a scathing and personal review of Orientalism when it came out. Now Said returns the favour with some biting criticism.
The second part of the Afterword is much more understandable and interesting. It is a pithy overview of developments which had taken place between 1978 and 1994 in academia, in studies of culture and history. These were the rise of feminism, black studies, post-colonial studies and subaltern studies (a history-from-below perspective applied to south Asia i.e. India, Pakistan etc).
What they all had in common was the aim of restoring the voices of types of people erased or overlooked by the traditional white European male narratives of history and culture. And, as part of this, overturning monolothic and essentialist narratives. of East and West etc. Modern developments in all these fields have all tended to show that history is far more complex, mongrel and interactive than previously thought. And Said is (justifiably) proud that his book (profoundly flawed and difficult though I, personally, found it to be) has contributed to these developments.
Preface (2003)
Born in 1935, Said was 43 when Orientalism was published, 50 years old when he wrote the Afterword, and 68 when he wrote this Preface. He says he feels old. He was to die later the same year from leukaemia.
Said begins by expressing his ongoing amazement that a book he produced as a personal project has gone on to become a worldwide (academic) bestseller, translated into 40 languages, and hugely influencing the new(ish) disciplines of post-colonial and subaltern studies.
Then, as W.H. Auden wrote, ‘Let your last thinks all be thanks,’ and so Said generously thanks colleagues and the entire American university system, specifically Columbia University, New York, his employer for 30 years. He says in his entire career he published plenty of articles about Palestine, but never actually taught anything about the Middle East. His day job was teaching comparative literature for all those years, his first love and the profession he was trained to.
Whereupon he picks up the cudgels again to repeat all his arguments. He tells us (as he did in the Introduction and in his 1999 memoir, ‘Out of Place’) that he grew up between two contradictory worlds, the Arab world and the West.
One fundamental thing I find puzzling about Said’s entire schtick is that he repeatedly says he wrote Orientalism to try and abolish the naive binary of East and West, yet he invokes it every turn, as here, in the rather tired trope of growing up ‘between two worlds’. He asserts for the umpteenth time that neither term ‘the Orient’ nor ‘the West’ have any ontological stability and yet here he is, using them both in exactly the same way he did 25 years earlier, and as we do today (2023) i.e. as if they have exactly the ontological stability he claims they don’t have.
Back to current affairs and he tells us the fairly obvious fact that 2003 was an even more politically turbulent time than 1978 or 1994. Again I bridle at this idea, it’s a classic example of two tropes ever-present in our culture. One is presentism, which is where a political commentator claims that the present moment is more critical, urgent and crisis-ridden than ever before, evah!
Check out any one of the daily articles in the liberal press wringing their hands at the prospect that Donald Trump might be elected president again and that this time it will mean the end for democracy in America. In other words, fostering the same atmosphere of panic that they all did last time, for the long year of the presidential campaign and then the gruelling four years of Trump’s presidency, when the liberal press overflowed with outraged articles about every single presidential tweet.
But of course, a properly historical perspective, such as Said is always saying we must take, militates against the view that the present is somehow uniquely and unprecedently critical and urgent: the outbreak of World War Two was a pretty critical moment, the attack on Pearl Harbour, the dropping of the atom bomb, the outbreak of the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world nearly ended, I could go on.
To take one of cardinal years in Orientalism‘s publishing history, 1978 wasn’t a particularly turbulent year, but 1979 was the year of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which are both having repercussions to this day. To look closer at the year of the Afterword, 1995, this was just a year after the Rwanda genocide, a pretty turbulent year if you lived in Rwanda, and the terrible war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo was still ongoing, a running sore in Europe’s conscience.
Today, as this is published, is day 579 of the war in Ukraine, I don’t know how many days into the civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, a month of more into the civil war in Sudan, and month into the coup in Niger, and so on.
Plus climate change plus the Conservative government plus the collapse of the NHS plus the threat of another pandemic etc etc etc.
So my point is simple: it’s always terrible times.
The second reason this is such a tiresomely common trope is because political commentators have to make a living and so have a vested interest in persuading their editors and readers that we live in times of unprecedented jeopardy and that, if you want to understand why, you simply have to buy my article / magazine / book.
Quite obviously 9/11 was an epoch-making event which created a genuine sense of crisis around the world (or the Western world, anyway) and Said, writing in 2003, was doing so against the backdrop of a campaign of anti-Arab rhetoric being orchestrated by the Bush administration to justify its upcoming invasion of Iraq. It was a bad time for anyone trying to improve relations between ‘the West’ and ‘the Arab world’.
Trying to be even-handed, he laments that this is all taking place against a resurgence of pride and arrogance in both the West and the Arab world. It was definitely a bad time to be the kind of liberal exponent of calm and reason which Said tried to be and very bad to be the guy trying to speak up for the Arab world, or at least the Palestinian people, in the midst of such an avalanche of anti-Arab propaganda.
But, as he goes on to concede, the really interesting thing (for me) about all of this impassioned discourse is the question that, after 25 years of academic effort put into creating and teaching post-colonial and subaltern studies and the widespread dissemination of all the anti-racist, anti-colonial teachings promoted by Orientalism, had all this effort improved America’s image of the Arab world or Islam?
No, Said has to concede that, tragically – for the country soon to be invaded and ruined and for the region as a whole – the reverse is true, the situation has, if anything, gotten worse, with:
the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalisation and triumphalist cliché (p.xiii)
This interests me because it highlights the limitations of academic discourse, particularly the kind of critical theory Said made such a big contribution to, a discourse which overflows with bombastic claims to be ‘interrogating norms’ and ‘subverting stereotypes’ and ‘questioning prevailing ideologies’ etc etc and yet, when push comes to shove, turns out to have precisely zero effect in the wider world.
There’s something deeply comic about the massive discrepancy between the world-shattering rhetoric of so much critical theory, that it is ‘subjecting the discourse of power to radical scrutiny’ etc etc, and its actual impact on the world of power: zero.
Anyway, Said is right to nail the ignorant arrogance of the Bush administration which thought that a quick surgical invasion of Iraq could change the map of the Middle East, plant democracy and transform the entire region as if its ‘ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar’.
He’s right to wail that he Arabists, Islamists and ‘experts’ Bush’s White House gathered round itself were just the latest incarnation of the ‘Orientalist’ scholars who had produced 200 years of stereotypes designed to empower conquest and colonialism, who had provided power with ‘expedient forms of knowledge’ (p.xiii).
But I had the usual experience, in reading Said, of swinging from total agreement with his political analysis to coming up short and disagreeing with other aspects of his commentary.
For example, he mentions the terrible looting of Baghdad not once but twice, predictably, for an arts professor, dwelling on the ruination of the museums and their artefacts and for anyone who loves art and archaeology and history, it was of course a catastrophe.
But he irked me by implying that it was the direct fault of the invading Allies. It was the Iraqis who, the second there were no police on the street, looted everything from every possible public building, including all schools, ministries, factories, power stations, dams, water purification facilities, destroying their own country far more extensively than any conquering army could have done (see my reviews of detailed accounts of the Iraq War).
Certainly all the looting occurred because an army had invaded and overthrown the dictator, and in particular because the irresponsible moron Donald Rumsfeld ignorantly forbade the American army to take along enough military police to restore law and order to the streets once the Saddam regime was overthrown. The invading Americans certainly carry a huge burden of responsibility.
But, in the end, that invading army didn’t make the Iraqis loot their own country. When the Allies liberated France, the French population didn’t embark on an orgy of looting and destruction, burning down the Louvre and stealing everything they could from every single public building. The Iraqis did that to themselves.
Because Said sees absolutely everything through the spectacles of his obsessive monomania that ‘the West’ is responsible for everything bad that ever happened in the Middle East, his thought isn’t free, isn’t flexible enough to acknowledge real complexity. Which is ironic because it’s precisely this kind of ideological inflexibility that he continually accuses Orientalists and the West of displaying.
Said is right to castigate the intellectual bankruptcy of the American administration which, in its bottomless ignorance, not only of the country it was invading but of its own country, of the complex economic, religious, ideological and political roots of its own ideas, thought that ‘democracy’ and ‘free market capitalism’ are things you can take out of a suitcase and hand around like Smarties.
Said proceeds to name some of the guilty men, modern Orientalists who lent their ‘learning’ to neo-imperialism, singling out the egregious Bernard Lewis (see the his earlier criticism of Lewis in the 1995 Afterword) and Fouad Ajami, plus an army of journalists, shock jocks, right wing radio hosts, Fox News and so on, the vast mediascape of ignorance, prejudice and belligerence. Without the basic lies of Orientalism – those people aren’t like us, they don’t understand our values, we have to ‘liberate’ them, educate them, raise them up to be like us etc – the invasion couldn’t have happened.
This Preface is definitely the clearest thing, the most easily comprehensible 17 pages, in the whole book because a) his subject is so simple and universally known – the US invasion of Iraq is an act of gross imperialism justified by shameful lackey intellectuals – so b) his style is unusually frank and accessible; it reads more like a magazine article than the more gnarly and obtuse prose of the main text itself.
Said makes some good points. He refutes all the apologists who tell the formerly colonised people to stop belly aching about their imperial oppression and get on with building their countries (singling out the Anglo-Indian write V.S. Naipaul as guilty of this) and points out that the disastrous impacts of empire live on for generations, continuing to impact the impoverished lives of hundreds of millions of the voiceless and oppressed, in Algeria, the Congo, Iraq and Palestine. In his characteristically eccentric prose he makes the point that:
We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do? (p.xvii) (cf Orientalism p.262)
That’s a telling point, and he attributes the tragic succession across the Third World of colonisation, nationalist movements, liberation, the era of military coups, insurgencies against them, civil wars, the rise of religious fanaticism and the descent into ever more brutal chaos – in his view all of these disasters were the direct result of a century or more of European imperialism, which hasn’t just altered the consciousness of our time but makes up the consciousness of our time, for everyone, for the entire world, colonisers and colonised alike.
Said tells us that he wanted to use critical analysis to reveal the cultural and intellectual power structures which enabled and then justified imperialism. He did so in the name of ‘humanism’ i.e. the hope that calm, rational enlightened study creates its own environment of sympathy and inclusiveness, undermines idées recues and idées fixes, lets people escape from the tropes and clichés, ‘the reductive formulae’ of the past, confront the realities of the present, and establish a basis on which discussion and negotiation can take place for a better future. It’s incumbent on independent intellectuals such as him ‘to provide alternative models to the simplifying and confining ones, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long’ (p.xvii).
See what I mean by this is the clearest part of the book? Possibly you could read just these 17 pages and pick up virtually all you need to know about the book and Said’s political stance.
Then, unexpectedly, he shifts his ground entirely to mount a defence of philology as ‘the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts’. That’s the tradition he was raised in and he singles out as the peak of its achievement Erich Auerbach and his great book Mimesis. In this book Auerbach takes passages from the entire history of European literature, from the Iliad to Virginia Woolf, and enters into their worlds via a very close reading of the actual text, the words and their meanings and histories and connotations. That’s what Auerbach, and Said, mean by philology.
Huh. This is identical to what I feel and what I value about literature. Fully committing yourself to literary texts means entering into these other worlds, opening a space in your mind for other worlds, other peoples, other languages, other values, other stories.
Said then goes into grumpy old man mode and laments that this practice of wholesale immersion in books which he loves so much has disappeared from the academy of his time (2003). He accuses modern (2003) academia of a) having become compartmentalised into ever smaller specialisms, while b) students are encouraged to get bite-sized snips of information off the internet and no-one reads books any more – nothing like the expansive, curious, enquiring and committed way that he, Said, obviously grew up reading. God, what would he have made of the world of TikTok and Instagram?
But then, after this charming interlude, it’s back to contemporary politics, to 2003 and the war in Iraq and Said is warning his readers against the viciously simplistic influence of the handful of zealots (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz) who have taken control of the White House and disseminate the most appallingly simplistic messages about ‘Arabs’ and ‘Islam’. (See my forthcoming reviews of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
But then, in an effort to be even-handed, Said goes on to be just as hard on the Muslim world where, he says, repressive rulers (often backed by the West) crush their populations, who in response turn to simplistic slogans and rebellion, among which is an anti-Westernism every bit as stereotyped as Western Orientalism. In particular he laments the crushing of the Islamic tradition of free and flexible enquiry which he says has been replaced by fanaticism, purism and rote learning. Interesting that he concedes the charge of fanaticism which, throughout the main book, is viewed as an unjustifiable stereotype and slur. Now he’s admitting that it’s an empirical fact.
He concludes with a hymn of praise for humanism, for a humanism:
centred upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. (p.xxii)
Yes. I am in complete sympathy. That is what I try to do, how I try to approach texts, in this blog, and with the same motive: to set them in their historical context, to pay close attention to individual sentences and words, but also to be aware of how words and phrases are shaped by contemporary politics and have changed meanings over time as history has shifted our frames of reference. Paying attention to all of this, in my opinion, helps to broaden and widen and increase imaginative spaces and sympathies, for other times and places and people.
Practical criticism
See if you can identify the kind of essentialising Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs and Islam which Said describes, in Western (British) coverage of the recent Hamas attack on Israel (I’m just giving the BBC as a starting point):
Credit
Orientalism by Edward Said was first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978. References are to the 2003 Penguin paperback edition (with new Afterword and Preface).
Books & Boots 