Edward Said: Subject of a new book that takes Orientalism to task
Edward W. Said published his highly influential polemic “Orientalism” nearly 30 years ago, and Robert Irwin, a British specialist in the history and culture of the Middle East, has been fuming ever since. “Dangerous Knowledge” is his belated two-pronged response: a point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Said, folded into a history of Western scholarship devoted to the Middle East.
Mr. Irwin delays his direct attack until the penultimate chapter but throws down the gauntlet early. “Orientalism,” which indicts the entire field of Eastern studies as racist and imperialist, he characterizes in the introduction as “a work of malignant charlatanry.”
Its distortions are so fundamental, its omissions so glaring, that the first order of business, as Mr. Irwin sees it, is to offer a dispassionate account of what Western scholars did and did not do. The exercise is worthwhile, he argues, because Mr. Said’s book “has been surprisingly effective in discrediting and demoralizing an entire tradition of scholarship.”
A survey course in West-East encounters follows, beginning with the scattered observations of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the first attempts by Christian thinkers to make sense of Islam, a religion they interpreted as a new form of Christian heresy. Mr. Irwin points out that throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, Muslims, to the extent that they were thought about at all, were often regarded as pious, austere and a reproach to lax Christians. Saladin, in particular, was elevated to heroic status.
“The Arabs and Turks were not regarded as barbarians, nor were they consciously regarded as non-European, for there was little or no sense of any kind of European identity in this period,” Mr. Irwin writes....
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Mr. Irwin delays his direct attack until the penultimate chapter but throws down the gauntlet early. “Orientalism,” which indicts the entire field of Eastern studies as racist and imperialist, he characterizes in the introduction as “a work of malignant charlatanry.”
Its distortions are so fundamental, its omissions so glaring, that the first order of business, as Mr. Irwin sees it, is to offer a dispassionate account of what Western scholars did and did not do. The exercise is worthwhile, he argues, because Mr. Said’s book “has been surprisingly effective in discrediting and demoralizing an entire tradition of scholarship.”
A survey course in West-East encounters follows, beginning with the scattered observations of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the first attempts by Christian thinkers to make sense of Islam, a religion they interpreted as a new form of Christian heresy. Mr. Irwin points out that throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, Muslims, to the extent that they were thought about at all, were often regarded as pious, austere and a reproach to lax Christians. Saladin, in particular, was elevated to heroic status.
“The Arabs and Turks were not regarded as barbarians, nor were they consciously regarded as non-European, for there was little or no sense of any kind of European identity in this period,” Mr. Irwin writes....