Ibn Warraq's
DEFENDING THE WEST, A CRITIQUE OF
EDWARD SAID'S ORIENTALISM
reviewed by
JOHN BUTLER
____________________________________
Born in England
and educated there and in Canada, John Butler is currently Associate
Professor of Humanities at the University College of the North
in The Pas, Manitoba. He has taught university in Nigeria, Japan
and Canada, and has published extensively in the fields of Renaissance
and Seventeenth-Century Studies, particularly travel-writing.
His latest book, a scholarly edition of the Travels of Sir
Thomas Herbert, will be published this spring by the Medieval
and Renaissance Texts and Studies Series at the University of
Arizona. Dr. Butler is also Co-Editor of The
Quint, a humanities journal published by UCN.
Edward
Said, like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others, has
become, after his death, a sort of holy and untouchable figure
for many scholars of imperialism, literature, post-colonialism
and colonialism, a man whose attack on what he called “orientalism”
must be taken as gospel by anyone who wishes to write about
these subjects. Well, the problem with gospels, in any case,
is that they are largely based on unprovable assumptions or
blanket assertions and are often written simply for propagandistic
purposes. In the case of Edward Said, his beliefs and ideas
have been used simply to bash anything western and to inculcate
the proposition that any literature, art or travel-writing by
westerners, especially those from countries with an imperialist
bent, is there to service, support and reinforce the transferring
of non-Western cultures into “the other” (or, to
use trendy jargon, “alterity”) in order to assert
control over them or refashion them into something they never
were. The problem is that not only have Said’s disciples
taken this seriously, but Said himself believed it, and therefore
there is little point in attacking the monkeys for what the
organ-grinder is already playing quite loudly and clearly. Hence
Ibn Warraq (not his real name), an ex-Muslim scholar trained
in Arabic Literature at the University of Edinburgh who has
addressed the United Nations and has written for The Manchester
Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, launched,
in Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s
Orientalism, an all-out attack directly on Said’s
book, and although some of the monkeys become collateral damage,
he never loses sight of the main target.
To
get the negative out of the way first, it should be noted that
Ibn Warraq can be over-polemical and sometimes over-emotional
in his disgust with the way he sees the West has betrayed itself
and its values. He sets up Said as an anti-Western bigot and
decries what he calls in a chapter of that name “The Pathological
Niceness of Liberals, Antinomies, Paradoxes and Western Values,”
which for Ibn Warraq all feeds into Said’s theories. Occasionally
Ibn Warraq verges on the ad hominem, although this
is rare; the language is strong, direct, clear and unequivocal,
which of course would not suit the obfuscatory and jargon-ridden
hordes who follow Said. Ibn Warraq is appalled at how these
people have influenced museums, art galleries and university
courses so much that they are consigning significant works of
art to oblivion in storerooms or decrying great works of literature
as “imperialist” or “orientalist,” thus
depriving students of a chance to make their own decisions about
them. That’s why his tone may seem shrill at times to
some, even offensive to others. It is also easy to see why Ibn
Warraq might have become the darling of rightist American intellectuals
such as Daniel Pipes, who has spent his career attacking “radical”
Islamism, the British philosopher Roger Scruton, author of The
Meaning of Conservatism (1980), Paul Berman, the author
of Terror and Liberalism and a man who supported the
Iraq war yet opposed George W. Bush, and Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American
scholar from Johns Hopkins University who believed the Iraq
war to be “noble” yet strongly supports Palestinian
liberation. All these people are amongst the names on the back
cover endorsing Ibn Warraq’s book. They are all, to some
extent, right-wing polemicists, if the phrase “right-wing”
means anything much now, but that in itself doesn’t necessarily
make them suspect or unworthy of notice, and the book is not,
luckily for Ibn Warraq, endorsed by Sarah Palin. “I never
meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid,”
John Stuart Mill once told Parliament; “I meant to say
that stupid people are generally Conservative.” And it
might be noted that Ibn Warraq does, from time to time, lose
sight of Edward Said amongst the trees in the political forest,
moving away from the central thesis of his argument into interesting
but questionably relevant pathways.
This
reviewer had some problems with Ibn Warraq’s belief in
the inherent superiority of the West, although it needs to be
said that his admiration for Western culture and achievements
is sincere and in many cases justified. The West is more tolerant
of diversity than the East (think Iran, for example, or North
Korea), the West is more open to differing ideas and religious
beliefs than the East, and the West is largely politically free.
In the past that has not always been the case, and even now
is not one hundred per cent the case, but in comparison to the
Arab world and some Asian regions the West may be seen in a
positive light. None of these assets, however, make the West
superior, just not the same. It is nevertheless true that if
one digs deeper enough into the past and takes history contextually,
one will find, as Bruce Thornton notes on the back cover of
Ibn Warraq’s book, “an expansive and tolerant curiosity
evident in the true history of Western contacts with the [Muslim]
world.” For every Crusader there is a liberal-minded traveller,
for every conquistador there is a Las Casas, and now
we have the so-called “Arab Spring,” which may (or
may not) bring a more Western-style politics to the Middle East,
although some of the signs, particularly for women and religious
minorities, do not look good. Again, this does not mean that
Western values are superior, but that they are not the old values
of repression and intolerance. Ibn Warraq should, in some instances,
have paid more attention to the negative aspects of Western
civilization, although he does decry the homogenous world of
American pop-culture and bad Hollywood movies, and he is no
fan of George W. Bush. In the end, though, Western civilization
has shown itself big enough to want to right past injustices
(Ibn Warraq would argue that perhaps some of this has gone too
far) and to at least begin attempting to make sure they do not
happen again. Eastern civilization has done no such thing, and
it remains to be seen whether it ever will.
When
Ibn Warraq goes after Edward Said, however, he is right on the
mark. A careful examination of Said’s book shows that
in many places the scholarship is less than rigorous (“shoddiness”
is the word used by both Pipes and Bruce Thornton, a distinguished
classicist and author of Decline and Fall: Europe’s
Slow-Motion Suicide) and that his arguments, based on often-groundless
assumptions, do not hold up to scrutiny. Ibn Warraq shows clearly
that Said has simply lumped all Western writers and artists
who deal with the East into his category of “orientalists,”
that is people who are serving imperialism or refashioning the
East for their own ends. Said, he argues, has never understood
that the West, for all its shortcomings, has developed more
intellectual and cultural curiosity about the East than ever
went the other way, and that the vast majority of those who
were studying the East or writing about it were not the least
bit interested in taking it over or asserting their own cultural
superiority. Ibn Warraq believes that Western writers and travellers
were inspired mostly by the curiosity to know, not to conquer,
and that this curiosity was not reciprocated by the closed societies
of the East. Of course, there are exceptions on both sides,
and Ibn Warraq mentions them; there’s even a chapter on
“oriental” orientalists!
Ibn
Warraq’s argument against Said and the “Saidists,”
as he terms them, is mostly contained in the opening chapters
of the book. However, just as Darwin’s Descent of
Man provided massive evidence for his earlier work, The
Origin of Species, the rest of Ibn Warraq’s book
is evidence, too; he shows, from many examples drawn from painting,
sculpture, literature and even music (I didn’t know that
even this had come under attack by furious Saidists) that the
arguments of Said and his disciples move “from pretentiousness
to meaninglessness,” as Ibn Warraq puts it. Said employs
“endless postmodern jargon” (he uses “textual
attitude” for “bookish”) and “pretentious
language that often conceals some banal observation,”
for which Ibn Warraq provides numerous examples and page numbers
from the Master’s works. Said often makes elementary scholarly
mistakes, too; as an example of “shoddiness” this
editor noticed some years ago (and he was not alone) that in
Orientalism Said confused the Renaissance historian
Jakob Burkhardt with the Swiss explorer Jean-Louis Burkhardt,
and has the historian rushing around the Orient writing books
on it which may be found in no library or bookstore on this
planet. After several scholars wrote in about this one, it has
still not been corrected in later editions of Said’s work.
Ibn
Warraq’s overall thesis is quite simple, and is stated
in his conclusion. “It should be evident,” he writes,
“that one cannot reduce the colourful and gifted individuals
known as Orientalists and their works to yet another expression
of colonialism and imperialism.” In Orientalism
Said had proclaimed that “every European in what he could
say about the Orient was consequently a racist, an imperialist,
and almost totally ethnocentric” (204), which is not only
ridiculous and inaccurate, but is itself a racist insult. Ibn
Warraq exposes not simply Said’s racism and rabid anti-Westernism,
but his intellectual bankruptcy and dishonesty as well. He deals
with the actual methodology of Said’s works in Chapter
7, which opens with a polemical sentence: “Edward Said’s
Orientalism gave those unable to think for themselves
a formula,” and proceeds from there to systematically
dismantle the credibility of Said’s methodology. Ibn Warraq
shows how Said cherry-picked his evidence, conveniently saying
little or nothing about such topics as white slavery, Islamic
racism and anti-Semitism and Asian racism. He rarely mentions
the strong anti-imperial strain present from the beginning of
the modern period in writers, artists and even many politicians.
Humanists were at the forefront of opposition against conquest
and expansion; a famous example of this would be Bartolomé
de Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias (1552),
in which he attacks his fellow-countrymen for atrocities committed
in Central America. Other eminent critics of exploitation and
imperialism included James I’s old tutor George Buchanan,
Michel de Montaigne and John Milton, to name but a few. Said
makes no mention of any of them, because their very existence
would contradict his thesis.
This
book is a must-read for anyone who feels uncomfortable after
reading Said’s Orientalism. For people who are
not academics, Ibn Warraq provides a readable demolition of
a dangerous, questionably-researched and inaccurate book;
Defending the West should be on the shelves of every thinking
person. If he sometimes degenerates into polemics, so be it;
the West is always being subjected to polemics by mullahs, ayatollahs
and other like-minded people. Ibn Warraq might not like it,
but his book actually makes the case for what I’d like
to call “radical liberalism;” not a wishy-washy
apologetic kind of liberalism, but one that is robust, tolerant
and broadly-based.
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