[Quiniacab]

Samuel Huntington's Convenient Myopia
Most succinct description of orientalism is that it is set of western attitudes towards Arabs and Islam.
So when Samuel Huntington expounded on Bernard Lewis's thesis of clash of civilizations in Foreign Policy in 1993 he must have been aware of what Edward Said had already said. Here we shall explore that in this post.

Publication of Orientalism by Edward W. Said is not the first realization of this malaise, as we have already noted. Most pathological parts were already answered long back, at the end of nineteenth century by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and in the beginning of twentieth century by Shibli Nomani. What Said did in 1978 was a long overdue exercise, an exercise that should not have been due at all. If the west could dip into Islamic history and literature to see fictitious faults then it could have used the same formidable linguistic skills to see what these two Muslim scholars had written. This gap of eighty years or more between Sir Syed's take and Said's formulation is in itself a tribute to western lack of modesty - its refusal to register what Muslims were saying.

About fifteen years later Huntington would do the same with Said's thesis.

On page 32 Huntington begins with a mention of Muslim's division of world into Dar-al-Islam and Dar-al-Islam. This is a point that one will have to deal with sooner or later but we need not go into that here for Huntington is too busy in his creation of next superman series, the clash of civilizations, and is eager to jump on to the task at hand. On page 33 he admits that west and east division suffers from orientalism but then makes a very swift transition - merely using linguistics. Here is the excerpt :

The polarization of "East" and "West" culturally is in part another consequence of the universal but unfortunate practice of calling European civilization Western civilization. Instead of "East and West", it is more appropriate to speak of "the West and the rest", which at least implies the existence of many non-Wests. This is a trick at several levels. The least obnoxious is the facilitation of many non-Wests - a construct that is useful in the later clash of civilizations game plan. Firstly the transition from west and east to west and the rest is a disingenuous one - it sweeps the problem under the carpet by obfuscating the sordidness of orientalism by introduction of a new terminology. In his eagerness to have another round of next higher level of danger tackling, Hollywood style, Huntington is jumping from one dubious stand called orientalism to another one called the clash of civilizations. The west had not answered for colonial catastrophe, catastrophe for the colonized, and then we had the Clash proposition - a proposition it indeed was and not a theory.

The next sentence is :
The world is too complex to be usefully envisioned for most purposes as simply divided economically between North and South or culturally between East and West. This is a quantum jump in dis-ingenuity. What Said had done was the painstaking task of delineating this western attitude towards the east to the level where problems of definition will stop holding water. And that is what Huntington is trying to assert hear. In a sense orientalism should be taken as a spot on the west but Huntington has turned it into a spot on Said!

Then on page 109 Huntington also finds occidentalism in Mahathir Muhammed's remarks - a dubious argument in its best interpretation.

These superficialities were not lost on Said and in his 1995 afterword to his work he takes due cognition of this buries the deception in well deserved oblivion - except that physical reality of western onslaught against Arab and Islamic world is still there in its ugly glory for all to see - much more than in those times when Said wrote his initial assessment.

And lest we forget - Muslims had seen it long back and replied - intellectually.