In defence of Orientalism

Robert Irwin's new book is a response to Edward Said's take on Orientalism, the ideological justification for European attempts to penetrate and subdue the Arab Orient. But is Irwin just shooting himself in the foot, asks Conor McCarthy?For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies by Robert Irwin. London: Allen Lane, 2006 €37.25

Robert Irwin's new book, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, offers a history of the scholarly tradition of Orientalism – basically, the modes by which Europe, and more recently the United States, have produced knowledge of the Middle East and Asia. Irwin is a publisher, novelist and scholar, with an interest in the Middle East.
However, at the core of this book lies the intention to provide a defence of Orientalism from its “enemies”, and from one enemy in particular, the Palestinian-American writer, Edward Said. Said, who died in September 2003, was one of the most interesting and controversial literary and cultural critics in the world in the last three decades. He was also the most brilliant and effective spokesperson for the Palestinian cause in the West. In 1978, Said published Orientalism, a powerful critique of the discipline of Orientalism. In very broad terms, the upshot of Said's book was that Orientalism had been, certainly since the 1790s, intimately connected with the European imperial project. In particular, by producing knowledge of the Arab and Islamic Middle East that stressed its decadence and decay, its past glories, its licentiousness, its irrationality, its religious heresy, Orientalism, in Said's analysis, provided the ideological justification for European (and more recently, American) attempts to penetrate, subdue and control the Arab Orient.
Said's book attracted a great deal of attention, much of it hostile, sometimes bitterly so. In the academic world, it became (somewhat to Said's own bemusement) the foundational text for “postcolonial studies”. But Orientalism had ramifications much broader than merely in literary studies. Philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, film scholars, journalists, political scientists and theorists – the entire gamut of the academic humanities and social sciences – found themselves compelled to respond to Said's ideas. Orientalism has been translated into at least 35 languages, and it has elicited reactions from Ireland to Israel and Japan.
Here is not the place to investigate the reasons for Orientalism's success, which are manifold and complex. But it is safe to say that for Irwin, this success has been, in fact, a catastrophe. In Irwin's eyes, Said succeeded in politicising a neutral and objective academic discipline; he introduced a polemical, rancorous note into putatively polite and genteel academic debates; he impugned the reputations of decent and erudite scholars.
For Irwin, the questions he sets out to answer in his book include the following:
“Who taught whom and how does academic transmission work? How does one achieve recognition as a scholar? In any century what resources were necessary and available in order to pursue a proper study of another culture? Was the study of Arabic and Islam really important within the broader framework of Western intellectual life?”
That Irwin answers these questions is beyond doubt. The problem arises with the manner in which he answers these questions. For Irwin, Orientalism is a tradition of scholarship, that is constituted almost entirely from the efforts of individual scholars. These efforts are described, in case after case, from the earliest years of the European reaction to the rise of Islam in the eighth century onwards. Over and over again, Irwin sketches a brief biography of the scholar in hand, tells us a little about his (they are nearly all men) intellectual background and training, describes his main books or works, and possibly some personal detail. So, in this way, we learn about St John of Damascus, Guillaume de Postel, Sylvestre de Sacy, Edward Lane, Ernest Renan, Louis Massignon, HAR Gibb, and Bernard Lewis (the most famous Orientalist writing today, and a close advisor to the Bush Administration), to take only the most famous figures down through the centuries. Irwin is informative about these figures, and a great many others, in a necessarily telegraphic and anecdotal way. He tells us of their attitudes, for example, to Islam, to the Arabs, their experiences as researchers.
This, however, is the theoretical problem with his book, and the point at which the dispute with Said becomes important. Irwin is an English gentleman-amateur scholar, for whom “the Orientalists” are interesting as individuals and characters and, occasionally, brilliant eccentrics. In his conception, they are best understood as a long chain of discrete personalities, careers, intellectual projects, political positions. For him, the idea that such people could be swayed by a political ideology, or by a corporate or disciplinary identity, or by a repertoire of linguistic figures or vocabularies, is inconceivable.
But Edward Said's heresy was that he suggested precisely this: that Orientalism was and is a discourse, a rule-governed body of statements and practices that police the production of knowledge about a particular subject. So Said was keen to point out the continuities and similarities that underpin Western knowledge of the Islamic Orient, from the Renaissance right up to the present. Said's focus on discourse – a focus predicated in part on the ideas of the French philosopher Michel Foucault – is what makes his writing seem to Irwin scandalously to seek conspiracies where none lie. In response, Irwin is inclined to point out errors of fact in Said's book, or to remind us that Massignon, for example, was in fact an ardent anti-imperialist.
There are two points to make about this. Firstly, Irwin is somewhat belated in his wish to point out Said's factual mistakes: this work has been underway since Orientalism was published. More specifically, Said's work was critiqued by historians of empire, such as John MacKenzie, many years ago. Secondly, there is a real sense that Irwin does not get the point of Said's work, and feels he has to vindicate each and every notable Orientalist in the tradition. It is also worth noting that in his haste to condemn Said as a charlatan, Irwin misquotes and misconstrues Said's work, makes factual errors himself, and, more unpleasantly, impugns Said's origins as a Palestinian. He repeats the attack made on Said in 1999 by the rightwing American Zionist Justus Reid Weiner, suggesting that Said's parents were actually Lebanese, and that he had no real connection to Palestine. One is thus led to conclude that Irwin's primary purpose in this book is to take advantage of Said's death to destroy his reputation, in the ultimate betrayal of Irwin's own professed model of scholarship. For Lust of Knowing, for all of its erudition and enthusiasm, actually shoots itself in the foot, and reveals itself as a tract every bit as partisan as its target. π
Conor Mc Carthy teaches at the Mater Dei Institute of Education in Dublin City University