The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Insouciant, outrageous, arbitrary, false, absurd, astonishing, reckless—these are some of the words Bernard Lewis [NYR, June 24] uses to characterize what he interprets me as saying in Orientalism (1978). Yet despite these protestations, the sheer length of his diatribe and the four years of gestation he needed to produce it suggest that he takes what I say quite seriously, non-Orientalist though I may be. It is edifying to note that between Lewis and his Princeton co-luminary Clifford Geertz, whose rather trivial arguments against me were presented only a few weeks before, they seem to have unlimited indulgence to display their attitudes in The New York Review of Books (given that Orientalism was already reviewed in its pages three years ago). Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong. Of course, these are familiar attributes of the Orientalists’ breed, some of whom have at least had the courage to be honest in their active denigration of Islamic, as well as other non-European peoples. Not Lewis. He proceeds in his usual mode by suppressing or distorting the truth and by innuendo, methods to which he adds that veneer of omniscient tranquil authority which he supposes is the way scholars talk. The fact is that the present political moment allows him to deliver ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism.

To imply as he does that the branch of Orientalism dealing with Islam and the Arabs is a learned discipline that can be compared with classical philology is as appropriate as comparing Professor Menachem Milson, Israeli Orientalist and civilian governor of the West Bank, with Wilamowitz. On the one hand Lewis wishes to reduce Islamic Orientalism to the status of an innocent and enthusiastic department of scholarship; on the other he wishes to pretend that Orientalism is too complex, various and technical to exist in a form for any non-Orientalist (like myself and many others) to criticize. Lewis’s tactic here is blatantly to suppress a significant amount of history. European interest in Islam derived from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor to Christianity. The earliest scholars of Islam, as numerous historians have shown, were medieval polemicists writing to ward off the threat of Muslim hordes and of apostasy. In one way or another that combination of fear and hostility has persisted to the present day both in scholarly and non-scholarly attention to an Islam which is viewed as belonging to a part of the world, the Orient, counterposed imaginatively, geographically, and historically against Europe and the West.

The most interesting problems about Islamic or Arabic Orientalism are, first, the forms taken by the medieval vestiges persisting in it so tenaciously, and, second, the whole history and sociology of connections between it and the societies that produced it. There are strong affiliations between Orientalism and, for example, the literary imagination as well as the imperial consciousness. What is therefore striking about many periods of European history is the traffic between what scholars and specialists wrote and what poets, novelists, politicans, and journalists then wrote about Islam. In addition—and this is what Lewis neither can nor will deal with—there is a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) coincidence between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France.

Although the relationship of a classical education within British education contemporaneous with the extension of the British empire is more complex than Lewis might suppose, no such glaring coincidence exists in the modern history of classical studies. Much of the information and knowledge about Islam and the Orient that was used by the colonial powers to justify their colonialism derived from Orientalist scholarship. Even if the reverse is not entirely true, a fairly consistent interchange still continues between area scholars like Orientalists and government departments of foreign affairs. In addition, many of the stereotypes of Islamic sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation and splendor to be found in writers from John Buchan to V.S. Naipaul are also presuppositions underlying the adjoining field of academic Orientalism. In contrast, the trade in clichés between Indology and Sinology on the one hand, and general culture on the other is not as flourishing. Nor is there very much similarity between what obtains in Sinology and Indology and the fact that many professional scholars of Islam spend their lives studying it and still find it an impossible religion and culture to like, much less admire. To say that this is a matter of not espousing “fashionable causes” is not quite to address the question of why, for example, so many Islamic spècialists actively work for, were and still are routinely consulted by governments whose designs in the Islamic world are economic exploitation, domination or outright aggression, or why so many Islamic scholars—like Lewis himself—voluntarily feel that it is part of their duty to mount attacks on modern Arab or Islamic peoples with the pretense that “classical” Islamic culture can nevertheless be the object of disinterested scholarly concern. The spectacle of specialists in the history of medieval Islamic guilds being sent on State Department missions to brief area embassies on US security interests in the Gulf does not spontaneously suggest anything resembling love of Hellas. But it does suggest Lewis and of course Milson, the Orientalists who each in his own way put theory directly into practise.

It is therefore not surprising that the field of Islamic and Arabic Orientalism, always ready to deny its complicity with state power, has never produced a critique of the affiliations I have just been describing, and that Lewis can utter the amazing statement that a criticism of Orientalism would be “meaningless.” It is also not surprising that with a few exceptions most of the negative criticism my work has elicited from “specialists” has been, like Lewis’s, banal description of a barony violated by a crude trespasser. (Incidentally, Lewis is as usual inaccurate in saying that Le Monde reviewed the French translation of Orientalism unfavorably: there are two reviews, one of them favorable. As for the specialist reviews they were mixed and Lewis wrong again. The special issue of Annales on Islam gave it a good review, as did most of the contributors to a symposium on the book in the Journal of Asian Affairs.) The only specialists (again with a few exceptions) who attempted to deal with what I discuss—which is not only the content of Orientalism, but its relationships, affiliations, political tendencies, world-view—were Sinologists, Indologists, and the like: one example is Benjamin Schwartz of Harvard, who used the occasion of his presidential address to the Asian Studies Association not only to disagree with some of my criticism, but also to welcome my arguments intellectually. The Arabists and Islamicists have responded with the aggrieved outrage that is their substitute for self-reflection; most of them use words like malign, dishonor, libel, as if criticism itself were an impermissible violation of their sacrosanct academic preserve. In Lewis’s case the defense he offers is an act of breathtakingly bad faith, since as I shall show, more than most Orientalists he has been a passionate political partisan against Arab causes in such places as the US Congress, Commentary, and elsewhere. The proper response to him must therefore include an account of what politically and sociologically he is all about when he pretends to be defending the “honor” of his field, a defense which, it will be evident enough, is an elaborate confection of ideological half-truths designed to mislead non-specialist readers.

In short, the relationship between Islamic or Arab Orientalism and modern European culture can be studied without at the same time describing every Orientalist who ever lived, every Orientalist tradition, or everything written by Orientalists. It is idiotic to say that Orientalism is a conspiracy or to suggest that “the West” is evil: both are among the egregious fatuities that Lewis has the gall to ascribe to me. On the other hand it is rank hypocrisy to suppress the cultural, political, ideological, and institutional contexts in which people write, think, and talk about the Orient, whether they are scholars or not. And I believe it is extremely important to understand the fact that the reason why Orientalism is opposed by so many thoughtful Arabs and Muslims is that its modern discourse is correctly perceived as a discourse of power. In this discourse, based mainly upon the assumption that Islam is monolithic and unchanging and therefore marketable by “experts’ for powerful domestic political interests, neither Muslims nor Arabs recognize themselves as human beings or their observers as simple scholars. Most of all they see in the discourse of modern Orientalism a chronic tendency to deny, suppress or distort the cultural context of Orientalism in order to maintain the fiction of its scholarly disinterest. It is precisely this tendency that Lewis’s rejoinder to me exemplifies.

Take first his charges of inaccuracy, ignorance or tendentious analysis. He appeals to an audience that is most unlikely to know how deliberately imprecise his points are but is very likely to assume that since Clifford Geertz has told them I am an intemperate left-wing non-Orientalist Christian Palestinian, I cannot be trusted. This is not an epistemological issue but a political one, and Lewis exploits it shamelessly. He says that my knowledge of Arabic and Islam shows astonishing gaps—as if my knowledge of Arabic isn’t beside the point entirely. His example is my alleged mistranslation of the Arabic word tawhid which, borrowing without acknowledgement from H.A.R. Gibb, Lewis says is monotheism. I don’t wish to argue with Lewis or to show that no Muslim, no Islamic scholar, certainly no literate historian of religion would want to reduce as important a word as tawhid as clumsily as Lewis does to one meaning (especially when elsewhere in his polemics Lewis is at pains to show that words have many meanings). I just want to note that in his unseemly haste to attack me Lewis has overlooked the fact that what I said about tawhid occurs in a discussion of Louis Massignon that is footnoted, and that the reference is to Jacques Waardenburg quoting Massignon’s translation of tawhid verbatim. Now ask literally anyone—including Lewis—with any idea at all about Islam whether he or she would trust Massignon or Lewis and Gibb on the question of tawhid, and the matter would be closed. Fortunately, even that isn’t necessary since Lewis’s carelessness in reading English disqualifies him from argument well before we get to Arabic.

Then there is the meaning of thawra, the common modern Arabic term for revolution, and Lewis’s description of it. His discussion of thawra incidentally is one of two occasions in an enormous article in which Lewis reveals that he is writing not just as a defender of Orientalism, but as someone I had criticized in two of my books. His declaration of interest, as so often, is extremely discreet. With bogus learning, Lewis parades meanings of thawra acquired from a superifical survey of sources. His Orientalist account of the word has very little to do with what it means in contemporary usage; thus his method of proceeding is peculiar to a field that studiously places a greater value on what European scholars thought and said than on what users of a language thought and said. One of his examples is that thawra is associated with the act of rising up, after which Lewis affixes to “rising up” a parenthetical instance, “e.g., a camel.” This he says in his defense follows “the standard classical Arabic dictionaries, and would have been immediately recognized by anyone familiar with Arabic lexicography.” Arabic lexicography isn’t the issue here: the real issue is whether Lewis is right to associate rising camels with the contemporary meaning of the term thawra, and whether anyone using the term in Arabic, i.e., a native speaker, would find the rising camel of any relevance. In fact the standard Arabic dictionaries do not all use the camel example, and when they do (e.g., Lisan al Arab of Ibn Manzur, Tahdhib al lugha by al-Azhari, which are among the very earliest dictionaries) the camel is an insignificant illustration, usually given one or two inconspicuous lines out of a total of several pages. More correct than rising up is the association between thawra and anger as a cause for the movement of armies, people, etc. A very important dictionary, Zamakhshiri’s eleventh-century Assas al Balagha, doesn’t even mention the rising camel. So we see that Lewis deliberately chooses an unimportant example first in order to indulge the well-known Orientalist prejudice that all Semitic languages ought to be understood with reference to concrete or desert usages, and second, to score a point against the modern Arabs whose use of thawra is undercut by the word’s undignified origins. In so doing of course he scants actual usage, the elucidation of which is presumably why he wrote the article. Lewis’s master in this procedure is Renan whose hatred of Arabs and Jews was customarily laced with instances revealing the primitive arrested mentality of desert dwellers lurking beneath a superficially modern exterior.