December 12, 2007

BY MICHAEL WEISS

December 12, 2007

URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/67922

As of last April, the late Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” originally published in 1978, was no. 2 on the best-seller list in Cairo. No. 1was a book arguing that Saddam Hussein hadn’t really been executed — all cell phone video evidence to the contrary, the writer argued, was a fabrication of the CIA.

Ibn Warraq, a scholar of Islam and the author of the recently released “Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism,” pointed out this macabre fact to me over the phone as a sign of what went wrong with postcolonial studies — the academic field more or less founded by Said, which, in an effort to examine the relationship of conqueror to conquered, placed a dime-store psychology of empire at the center of every discussion of “East meets West.” Not only did the British and French colonize and expropriate the East, according to Said, their imperial prejudice clouded their understanding of those they conquered. More than that, they “invented” an entire sham epistemology, Said and his followers contend, with which every Western observer has since approached the East and used to his advantage in further colonizing and expropriating it. Said’s legacy, however, accomplished exactly what anyone professing sympathy with the Islamic world should have wished to avoid, Mr. Warraq believes. That is, in defending the virtue of traditional cultures, it gave that world a high-minded rationalization for a persisting status quo of medievalism and intellectual poverty throughout the Middle East.

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