A Student Remembers a Great Teacher

YLH:

``I think tahmed, Fuzair, and Stuka will do well to moderate their rhetoric against a great man who tried to follow his conscience all his life. ``

Let me make this clear. I have not said one word against Said. Maybe I am predisposed to read Fuzair`s original post because I admire his intellect and his vast knowledge and the whole debate was triggered by the denunciation he faced. (on a previous board)

As far as TAmed is concerned, I don`t understand why he is so dogged in his denunciation of Edward Said since he admittedly has not read much and maybe, like other complex personalities, Edward Said too was nuanced. However, what pisses me off is that certain individuals who do not shy away from crticizing , maligning and abusing public personalities they do not agree with are giving TAhmed a hard time for holding a contrary opinion.

One individual posts a thread asking why TAhmed is a cretin. Another says ``he is normally reasonable`` Who the hell gave these people the right to determine standards of ``reasonable opinions`` especially when they cast themselves as the proponents of free thought?

As far as Edawrd Said is concerned, I have said repeatedly that I have no opionion. But a certain intellectual pygmy insists upon casting that as a position to suit her personal vitriolic agenda.

To the Community College teacher with limited intellect bordering on Mmental Retardation:

re:
``They would make it a point always to ask questions that had little relevance to the theme of the teach-in – which was America’s invasion of Iraq – and made personal attacks on Mr Said, clearly because of his advocacy of the Palestinian cause. ``

Stuka: Ummm, the US did not ``invade`` Iraq in the first Gulf war. Iraq invaded Kuwait. The US liberated Kuwait but did NOT invade Iraq. Funnily enough, the left criticizes the US for not ``completing the job`` then, and also criticizes it for an invasion that did not occur. ``


The first paragraph is from this article on Chowk and not from anything Said said. My criticism was of Omar Qureshi the author of the above mentioned article and not Said.

``Said: ``...During the time I have been writing this book, the crisis caused by Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait (hope this is clear to our resident dumbo) has been in full flower:``


IDIOT, is it my fault that you lack the comprehension of a 12 year old? Now run along and cut and paste some articles to prove your worth.

PM #60 Since you overlooked explaining the reason why you have started seeing me as a cretin: You have earlier on chowk been defending the right of adults to have sexual relations with children (and gave the example of the 11 year old boy whom you, as the teacher, sexually molested). I told you that while you could get away with such business in pakistan (where the only crime that is punished is the crime of being poor or weak), in the US you would be considered a pedophile and put behind bars.

And of course you came back on that board with scholarly articles on why it is OK for children to have sexual relations with adults, and also lectured me on my insensitivity in calling your tender love for that boy ``sexual molestation``.

You see, , I dont come to chowk to win popularity contests. If a man lies (like Said does) on important issues that cause violence between communities and death of innocent people, I call it a lie, not an ``exaggeration``. If a teacher sexually molests a little child (as you proudly claim you did), I call it a ``sexual molestation``, not ``boylove`` as you would prefer to call it.

Now you can try to bury my post by deluging this board with posts (as you tried to do before) or whatever. I dont care.

Saminasha #74 I am afraid we are now going on circles on this discussion. You gave me and fuzair a lengthy passage from Said to comment on. I went through that passage, and provided you the explanation of the passage that you had asked for: namely, that the passage complains about the west thinking too much of itself, and of looking down on arabs. The passage contains lots of words presenting the opinions of one man, but is devoid of substantive information and devoid of any analytical thinking.

If you think I am wrong here, then please cut and paste anything from that passage that you consider to be substantive information or rigorous analysis or new insights. Coming back to me and saying that I should now summarize each paragraph tells me that you are merely playing games here.

And you can stop testing my scholarship: I could burden you with my resume, my educational qualifications and my work experience, and you may very well find yourself unseated from your scholarly pedestal. But I wont. I dont respect views based on someone`s education or status in life. If a rickshaw driver in Lahore says something that comes from the heart and makes sense, I will respect his words more than something coming from a PhD in nuclear physics if I know what he says is logically unsound or factually incorrect.

Saminasha #76 This is yesterday`s news. Or more accurately, two hundred year old news. We all know that when Marx and Engels lived, colonialism was the acceptable, and racism and slavery were legal (not just in the west, but across the Ottoman Empire as well).

Please climb out of your ivory tower and see the world as it is. Not as you read from Said`s passages (including the one you gave me as homework assignment and on which I have just commented). Racism is no longer legal or practiced (except in a couple of places like Sudan and, until 1962 in Saudi Arabia and in Mauritania). Europeans no longer force their way into other lands - it is muslims from north africa and middle east who try to enter Europe as immigrants by hook or by crook.

Those who live in the past, are condemned to fail in the future. (you may quote me on this).

precisely...

hence my criticism of the `occam`s razor`.

Mantolives,

Yes, you are right. But this kind of fluidity- the irony of being educated, middle class and without a nationality, the irony of being a Christian in a nation that is stereotyped as extremist Muslim, of being a spokesperson for a peoples -a minority of whom are organized on religious affiliation, the irony of being an academic and and social actor-there are too many ironies and complexities to number! And what eludes and continues to elude his critics are these complexities of identity-because his critics insist on operating on binaries that never could and still cannot service these multiplicities in any competent manner.

Furthermore, the WORLD exists in these multiple identities...the idea of a binary is a clumsy and doomed construct in all spheres of human culture and activity....

Saminasha,

I think the issue is that we are unable to take a holistic view that Edward Said was capable of... He was no friend of the autocratic regimes, or Islamic fundamentalism... he was their most outspoken enemy, but he could not bear to see the Islamic World being caricatured as one rag tag cartoon... that the western eye was ready to see it as. I am amazed at the sheer polarity on this website... it is this thing which I call using the `occam`s razor` in politics and history... this has blinded people. For men like Edward Said it is even more difficult, because they are placed in a position where they are taking on enemies from all sides... the autocratic dictators, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the Jewish right wing. Edward Said was given a poor hand to play with, and he played it excellently. That is his greatness.

Edward Said was a fine scholar and a man of integrity. He was as temporal described him an embodiment of `grace under fire`. One may not agree with all he might have said, but to castigate him the way people are on this website is just unfair... I think tahmed, Fuzair, and Stuka will do well to moderate their rhetoric against a great man who tried to follow his conscience all his life.

-YLH

Romair,

I`m glad you are reading Said. But we need your input here. Do you agree with Tahmed`s one sentence generalization of the passage I transcribed or can you offer a more complex summary?

PM,

Its a matter of honor.

Also Tahmed, since you brought up Hegel:


``...But these accounts also spirited away, occluded and elided the real power of the observer, who for reasons guaranteed only by power abd by alliance with the spirit of World History, could pronouince on the reality of native peoples as from an invisible point of super-objective perspective using the protocols and jargon of new sciences to displace ``the native`s`` point of view. As Romila Tharpar points out, for example,

-The history of India became one of the means of propogating those interests. Traditional Indian historical writing, with its emphasis on historical biographies and chronicles, was largely ignored. European writing on Indian history was an attempt to create a fresh historical tradition. The historiographical pattern of the Indian past which took shape during the colonial period in the 18th and 19th centuries were probably similar to the patterns which emerged in the histories of other colonial societies-

Even oppositional thinkers like Marx and Engels were no less capable of such pronouncements than the French and British governmental spokesmen: both political camps relied on colonial documents, the fully encoded discourse of Orientalism, for example, and Hegel`s view of the Orient and Africa as static, despotic and irrelevant ot world history. When on September 17, 1987, Engels spoke of the Moors of Algeria as a ``timid race`` because they were repressed but ``reserving nevertheless their cruelty and vindictiveness while in moral character they stand very low,`` he was merely echoing French colonialist doctrine. Conrad similarly used colonial accounts of lazy natives, much as Marx and Engels spun out their theories of Oriental and African ignorance and superstition. This is a second aspect of the wordless imperial wish; for if the obdurately material natives are transformed from subservient beings into inferior humanity, then the colonizer is similarly transformed into an invisible scribe, whose writing reports on the Other and at the same time insists on its scientific disinterestedness and (as Katherine George has noted) the steady improvement in the condition, character, and custom of primitives as a result of their contact with European civillization...`` (Consolidated Vision; Culture and Imperialism, pp 167-8)

And Mantolives,

Perhaps you ought to spend some time tutoring your buddy...he seems to miss obvious facts:

re:
``They would make it a point always to ask questions that had little relevance to the theme of the teach-in – which was America’s invasion of Iraq – and made personal attacks on Mr Said, clearly because of his advocacy of the Palestinian cause. ``

Stuka: Ummm, the US did not ``invade`` Iraq in the first Gulf war. Iraq invaded Kuwait. The US liberated Kuwait but did NOT invade Iraq. Funnily enough, the left criticizes the US for not ``completing the job`` then, and also criticizes it for an invasion that did not occur.

Said: ``...During the time I have been writing this book, the crisis caused by Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait (hope this is clear to our resident dumbo) has been in full flower: hundreds of thousands of the US’s troops, planes, ships, tanks and misslies arrived in Saudi Arabia; Iraq appealed to the Arab world (badly split among the US’ supporters like Mubarak of Egypt, the Saudi royal family, the remaining Gulf sheiks, Moroccans, and outright opponents like Jordan and Palestine) for help; the UN was divided between sanctions and the US’s blockade; and in the end the Us prevailed and a devastating war was fought...``

or at least put him on a leash....

Tahmed,

No. The summary of the passages typed from Orientalism is NOT ``the West thinks too much of itself and looks down upon Arabs``. Go back and summarize EACH main idea in EACH paragraph.

Hegel did found the idea of thesis and antithesis, but how does that apply to the idea of binariness? If you look at the passage I transcribed, does Said believe in the construct of binariness? Heres a hint: why not?

Fuzair,

I am hoping that Mantolives or some other able minded will be able to address:

``...But what’s odd about Covering Islam is that it never really gets around to the ticklish topic of Islam itself. Granted, the Western media have frequently simplified and caricatured the Islamic world – but then, they do this to everything. Besides, a substantial percentage of Moslems are in fact religious fundamentalists who despise individual liberty and sexual equality, who believe profoundly that all sorts of things should be punished by death, and who readily cheer acts of violence directed against innocent civilians in the West. Tirelessly, Said dances around or rushes past these facts. Time and again he dismisses ``fundamentalism`` as an anti-Moslem code word...”

which is such a intellectually questionable statement that one could only assume our resident rep dumb Stuka had posted it. Do you agree with this idea?

Mantolives,

Thanks for the dap, but, I wont stand by while people who havent read or understood Said are going to try to discredit him. That is the least I can do for someone who has spent his life the way Said has.

Plats8

why do you ask?

It is most certainly a serious post. I think the worth of great people is judged by the impact they have on reasonable people after they are dead.

Saminasha`s vehement defence of Edward Said is alone a great tribute to Edward Said not to dimish him in size in anyway.

-YLH

Manto #71,

Is this a serious post ? ....sorry, had to ask. (no disrespect intended to Saminasha).

Saminasha,

Though Edward Said doesn`t require patronizing, don`t you think it is enough that a person like you who is well grounded in reality and a scholar of immense substance is so vehemently sticking up for him? If he can inspire such devotion in a person like you, he has to be a great man ... even if one chooses not to consider his immense intellectual contribution independently.

Keep up the good work... People like Edward Said will live on in passionate and brilliant people like you.

-YLH

Mantolives #64,
How un-civil of you to admire such a man......brace yourself for a heavy dose of
righteous reprimand.

Stuka #67,
``Why the hell are you guys getting a fire up your backsides if Tahmed criticizes
Said?`` You haven`t seen people ganging up on Fuzair in quite the same way, have
you ? Perhaps there is a reason for it.