| Reply to Thread New Thread |
09-02-2012, 03:36 PM
|
#1 |
|
|
Let us discuss the reactions to the book - reactions used on the current paperback edition.
The weakness of this will be that only positive ones will be included - but that is what we need here. Simon Louvish called it Said's most important book in New Statesman and Society. He also said that this established a benchmark for discussion of the West's skewed view of the Arab and Islamic world. This is an indictment and west takes pride in its freedom of speech. So should they not take the things a step further and make amends about it? John Leonard, in the New York Times, says that Said's case is not merely persuasive but conclusive. There we are again. But we are witness to western deception in face of reality. They simply have stopped talking about Said. You do not hear about him from the powerful western intellectuals - it is not possible for them to handle Said. We shall have little more specific to say in case of Samuel Huntington later on, Lord Most High willing. Here a general remark should suffice. During cricket matches in India the stadium is always full - irrespective of the fact whether India is playing or not and if playing then whether it is loosing or winning. Yours truly remembers once a match between India and Australia in Australia. The stadium was nearly deserted - Australia was loosing. The west is incapable of digesting its faults. Fred Inglis, in the Times Higher Education Supplement, says that Edward Said speaks for interdisciplinary, as well as for monumental erudition, ... the breadth of reading [is] astonishing. This comment gives us an insight into one of the strengths of Said's argument - his painstaking utilization of his expertize in comparative literature. The Observer simply found it a stimulating, elegant yet pugnacious essay. This too is in itself a very telling remark. Of course yours truly always finds it peculiar when a book is called simply an essay. But pugnacity of it ensures for oriental readers that Said has managed to convey the truth. The New York Times Book Review had a lame complement : exciting - for anyone interested in the history and power of ideas. Oh, yes. Make it blend and abstract - as if real human beings are not concerned in any way. Nicholas Richardson, again in the New Statesman and Society, says that it is beautifully pattered and passionately argued. It is difficult to speak of beauty when the argument is not supposed to be either artistic or creative, when the argument is academically dry. Also passionate will not be an accurate description because passion and emotion is perhaps the weakness that has delayed the communication of the idea to the intended audience - the west. The orient always knew the reality - it faced the music all along. But one does get the hint the reviewer is paying a complement to the author. |
|
|
09-02-2012, 04:21 PM
|
#2 |
|
|
A definition from wikipedia:
Orientalism is a term used by art historians, literary and cultural studies scholars for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Middle Eastern, and East Asian cultures (Eastern cultures) by American and European writers, designers and artists. In particular, Orientalist painting, depicting more specifically "the Middle East",[1] was one of the many specialisms of 19th century Academic art. Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, the term has arguably acquired a negative connotation. Today, it is commonly used to describe a form of racism or prejudice against peoples of 'the East', such as Arabs, Jews, Iranians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians or other Asian groups as "mysterious, dishonestly intelligent, overly sensual, warlike, and barbarically loyal to their 'tribe' instead of to humankind". he (Edward Said) used the term to describe a pervasive Western tradition, both academic and artistic, of prejudiced outsider interpretations of the East, shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Said was critical of both this scholarly tradition and of some modern scholars, particularly Bernard Lewis. Said was mainly concerned with literature in the widest sense, especially French literature, and did not cover visual art and Orientalist painting, though others, notably Linda Nochlin, have tried to extend his analysis to art, "with uneven results".[7] Said's work became one of the foundational texts of Postcolonialism or Postcolonial studies. Zionists who are quite powerful in the west including the universities of course hate Edward Said (A Christian Palestinian-American), and they like to paint his work as nonsense, Bernerd Lewis is a Zionist neo-conservertive. Zionist neo-conservertives working for George Bush the son of course want to make the orient look like it is bad and it needs 'invasions' by the west to fix it. Plenty of evidence exists to prove that without these Zionist neo-cons no invasion of Iraq would have taken place, and some suggestion that Afghanistan was set up by them as well. If the East is depicted in the western imagination as barbaric, it is easy to justify invasions to give them the light of democracy and humanism as 'gifts' from the occident. |
|
|
|
09-02-2012, 08:37 PM
|
#3 |
|
|
Salam alaykum
I will just make one very short lay observation and the truly knwoledgeable people can expand upon it: The colonizers took their mores mostly from books. This meant that they debased all sort of oral transmission of information, so when they met all other types of people - such Australian Aboregenes, or Native Americans, etc., they could not believe that anything they could say was possibily true, since in any case they did not think of them as being anything other than monkeys in semi-human shape. Same goes with their thinking Muslims: The Western-oriented cannot comprehend that such a complex religious system can have anything to do with oral transmission, which is why we have the useless research of non-Muslims into seeing when is the oldest written "proof" of the Qur'an, of the Hadith, of Muhammad's (SAW) existence. This has seeped down to our time and within our community, in the form of Hadith-rejecters and other modernists, who reject anything and everything that they do not see written in books, even though in Islam what is written in the books is normally a textualization of what was recited or said long before it was written down. |
|
|
|
09-02-2012, 09:39 PM
|
#4 |
|
|
Zionists who are quite powerful in the west including the universities of course hate Edward Said (A Christian Palestinian-American), and they like to paint his work as nonsense, Bernerd Lewis is a Zionist neo-conservertive. Zionist neo-conservertives working for George Bush the son of course want to make the orient look like it is bad and it needs 'invasions' by the west to fix it. Plenty of evidence exists to prove that without these Zionist neo-cons no invasion of Iraq would have taken place, and some suggestion that Afghanistan was set up by them as well. If the East is depicted in the western imagination as barbaric, it is easy to justify invasions to give them the light of democracy and humanism as 'gifts' from the occident. Ziauddin Sardar calls Bernard Lewis senior statesman of Zionist historiography and there is no reason for us not to expose him in all his ugly glory. Clash of Civilization is his phrase. In another post I intend to argue that Samuel Huntington's understanding in the matters that made him famous, orientalism, was rather superfluous. Someone might argue that it was shameless continuation of orientalism but the truth lies elsewhere - his inability to grasp what we have been saying all along - including Edward Said's tour de force. |
|
|
|
09-03-2012, 04:00 PM
|
#5 |
|
|
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. |
|
|
|
09-03-2012, 11:21 PM
|
#6 |
|
|
Orientalism
Orientalism is western conception of the orient.
Mainly French and British, and now American, attitude towards Islam and Muslims. In essence the attitude is negative. It has been post facto justification of colonialism which in itself can be taken as continuation of crusades. Muslims have been refuting it for more than a century. First one to do that was Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (RA). Then one of his proteges and colleague Allama Shibli Nomani. And there has been Urdu language literature from there on. In mid seventies of last century it was formulated by a Palestianian Christian in the US - Edward W. Said, in a book with the same title. This thread is about that book. |
|
|
|
09-03-2012, 11:21 PM
|
#7 |
|
|
Yours truly has been trying to grapple with this book for quite some time.
The problem was that yours truly did have a feeling that he is calling a spade a spade. But it was impossible to pinpoint that. And there was not a clue as to why that is the case. Some time back it dawned that the west has been at it, that is orientalism, for eons and hence considerable deftness is perceptible in these matters. As a result formulation of this problem, even as an academic exercise, was a task that required enormous amount of care. Edward W. Said was exceptionally well placed to do that. He was not a Muslim and thus will not be pooh poohed easily. He was an Arab and hence had the sense, sensibility of and empathy with those people. He was in west. He was privy, being a professor of comparative literature, to enormous amount of relevant data in English literature. No wonder a reviewer said that his case is not only persuasive but decisive. One more question should be answered here. If Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Allama Shibli Nomani had already done the needful then what was left for Edward Said to accomplish. The straightforward answer is that the west did not pay attention to Muslim refutation. In case of Said they have little option. At a technical level also there is a difference. Sir Syed and Shibli Nomani presented the technical data about the absurdities hurled at Islam. Said drove home the point that there is physical evidence for existence of orientalism. |
|
|
| Reply to Thread New Thread |
«
Previous Thread
|
Next Thread
»
Linear Mode
| Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests) | |
|
|
