A Student Remembers a Great Teacher

hamidm #47 No doubt Romair is itching to write a long thesis on why I am a puppet of the west, but cant do it now that I have been defending his honor (or at least his brains) in absentia.

But in due course I shall no doubt get my comeuppance from Romair too.

No good deed goes unpunished. :-)

Any takers for my questions on the role of intellectuals? Or is the unexamined and rightwing life as usual?

Chowk Staff, can you please install blockers onto this website?

``Can a neutral person clear this up? Or is it impossible to be neutral about Edward Said? Manto..do you have an opinion, since you seem to be the closest to neutral on this and I assume you are well read about him? ``


Please, Yasser, some of us are too frigging lazy to pick up a book and read it.....why should we make any mental effort whatsoever?

Actually Tahmed Sahib,

What do you think of Said`s idea of binariness?

saminasha #50 Before chowk staff rush to install blockers against views contrary to yours, as you suggest, let me leave you with this:

You have consistently swept aside my comments on Said`s articles in al ahram by saying that I am not a scholar of his works. But keep in mind that the average arab newpaper is no scholar either. All he knows is that a ``scholar`` living in the west has written an article claiming that claims (and now I go back to the original cutandpaste piece from Said that I put up on the previous board (the quote is from his article in the online edition of Al-Ahram for August 7-14 2003, presumably among the last of his works):

``Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples. ``

What do you think this tells the average Arab about the US? Does the average Arab even know how far from the truth this is? Given the lack of concern for understanding other religions in muslim countries, it is only natural that the average reader of al ahram will assume this to be the truth.

Truth comes before scholarship. I have known PhDs and MBAs from Harvard and Princeton who proved to be complete failures in their careers due to their fundamental dishonesty that ultimately caught up with them.

tahmed32,
You call this a lie? A hyperbole more like. Bookstores filled with also could mean that they are so full that one could hardly walk in. He was lying about that too? He was right on about every tomdickandharry (so sue me for a cliche and exaggeration) rushing to publish something about mozlem terrrorists.
You`re fighting a lame battle here. There ought to be a law against googling as a substitute for scholarship.
It`s a matter of great irony that you, who has called pretty much everyone here a moron, at one time or another, should take umbrage at alleged ``personal`` attacks by someone against someone else. Didn`t you say you were leaving the thread to go get a life or something?

A major problem with Said`s work is his inability to stand back and be rational about anything that reflects badly upon the Arabs/Islam in any way, shape or form. For him, everything must be viewed through only the lens of unrelenting Western/Jewish designs on Islam and ``his`` Middle East. This not only makes him appear ridiculous, and so easy to dismiss, but paranoid to the extent of appearing almost dysfunctional. I don`t actually want to be anti-Said since I actually do agree with many of his most basic assertions BUT he carries it to the point of absurdity. Just like those Indians say that because Pakistan`s ISI had a hand in the creation of the Taliban, the ISI knew-about/planned 9-11. A basic (true) point stretched to the point of absurdity. By writing such patently false things, he makes it easy for his critics to dismiss everything he says.

In ``Covering Islam,`` Said apparently wrote about the highly respected ``Fundamentalism Project`` of the University of Chicago:

``My suspicion,`` he says darkly, ``is that the project itself was started precisely with Islam in mind, although Judaism and Christianity are in fact discussed.`` They certainly are discussed, and at great length; nowhere in the Fundamentalism Project can one find evidence that Said’s ``suspicion`` has any basis.
http://www.brucebawer.com/said.htm

I use the word ``apparently`` because the source (and I`ve seen this quotation repeated more than once) are articles very critical of Said. Since I refuse to actually spend my money on buying anything he has written, will Samina or MNI or some others of his passionate defenders check this book and see if it is actually true? If he never actually said this, and it is nothing but Zionist propaganda to tarnish Said, I will apologize unreservedly. If he did write this, it is yet more evidence for Tahmed`s thesis that Said was polemical to the point of outright lies.

BTW, I picked this particular quotation of his since I actually do know something about the ``Fundamentalism Project`` and it is laughable for Said to suggest that this is yet another aspect of ``Orientalism,`` designed to make the Arabs/Muslims appear to be wild, eyed nut-cases who undersand only force, etc., etc., etc.,

Here is the relevant website. Check out the Fundamentalism Project`s books and Table of Contents for yourself and see just how anti Arab/Islam it is: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/FP.html

Tahmed, Fuzair, Romair

I want you to read this passage and explain what it means:


``...The asymmetry is striking. In one instance, we assume that the better part of history in colonial territories was a function of the imperial intervention; in the other, there is an equally obstinate assumption that colonial undertakings were marginal and perhaps even eccentric to the central activities of the great metropolitan cultures. Thus, the tendency in anthropology, history, and cultural studies in Europe and the US is to treat the whole of world history as viewable by a kind of super-subject, whose historicizing and disciplinary rigor either takes away or, in the post colonial period, restores history to people and culture “without history”. Few full scale critical studies have focussed on the relationship between modern Western imperialism and its culture, the occlusion of that deeply symbiotic relationship being the result of the relationship itself. More particularly, the extraordinary formal and ideological dependence of the great French and English novels on the facts of Empire has also never been studied from a general theoretical standpoint. These elisions and denials are all reproduced, I believe, in the strident journalistic debates about decolonisation, in which imperialism is repeatedly on record as saying in effect, You are what you are because of us; when we left, you reverted to your deplorable state.; know that or you will know nothing, for certainly there is little to be known about imperialism that might help either you or us in the present.

Were the disputed value of knowledge about imperialism merely a controversy about methodology or academic perspectives in cultural history, we would be justified in regarding it as not really serious, though perhaps worth notice. In fact, we are talking about a compellingly important and interesting configuration in the world of power and nations. There is no question, for example, that in the past decade the extraordinary intense reversion to tribal and religious sentiments all over the world has accompanied and deepened many of the discrepancies among polities that have continued since-if they were not actually created by- the period of high European imperialism. Moreover, the various struggles for dominance among states, nationalisms, ethnic groups, regions and cultural entities have conducted and amplified a manipulation of opinion and discourse, a production and consumption of ideological representations, a simplification and reductions of vast complexities into easy currency, the easier to deploy and exploit them in the interests of state policies. In all of this, intellectuals have played an important role nowhere in my opinion more crucial and compromised than in the overlapping region of experience and culture that is colonialism’s legacy where the politics of secular interpretation is carried on for very high stakes. Naturally, the preponderance of power has been on the side of the self constituted “Western” societies and the public intellectuals who serve as their apologists and ideologists.

But there have been interesting responses to this imbalance in many formerly colonized states. Recent work on India and Pakistan in particular (e.g., Subaltern Studies) has highlighted the complicities between the post colonial security state and the intellectual nationalistic elite; Arab, African and Latin American oppositional intellectuals have produced similar critical studies. But I shall focus here more closely on the unfortunate convergence that uncritically propels the Western powers into action against anti colonialist peoples. 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. Two central ideas clearly were held over from the past and still hold sway: one was the great power’s right to safeguard its distant interests even to the point of military invasion; the second was that lesser power were also lesser peoples, with lesser rights, morals, claims.

Perceptions and political attitudes molded and manipulated by the media were significant here. In the West, representations of the Arab world ever since the 1967 War have been crude, reductionist, coarsely racialist, as much as critical literature in Europe and the US has ascertained and verified. Yet films and tv shows portraying Arabs as sleazy “camel jockeys”, terrorists, and offensively wealthy sheiks pour forth anyway. When the media mobilized behind President Bush ‘s instructions to preserve the American way of life and roll Iraq back, little was said or shown about the political, social, cultural actualities of the Arab world (many of them deeply influenced by the US), actualities htat made possible both the appalling figure of Saddam Hussein and at the same time a complex set of configurations-the Arabic novel (whose pre-eminent practitioner, Naguib Mafouz, won the 1988 Nobel Prize) and the many institutions surviving in what was left of civil society. While it is certainly true that the media is far better equipped to deal with caricature and sensation than with the slow processes of culture and society, the deeper reason for these misconceptions is the imperial dynamic and above all its separating, essentializing, dominating and reactive tendencies.

Self definition is one of the activities practiced by all culture: it has a rhetoric, a set of occasions and authorities (national feasts, for example, times of crisis, founding fathers, basic texts and so on) and a familiarity all its own. Yet in a world tied together as never before by the exigencies of electronic communications, trade, travel, environmental and regional conflicts that can expand with tremendous speed, the assertion of identity is by no means a ceremonial matter. What strikes me as esp. dangerous is that is can mobilize passions atavistically, throwing people back to an earlier imperial times when the West and its opponents championed and even embodied virtues designed not as virtues so to speak, but for war.

One perhaps trivial example of this atavism occurred ina column written for the Wall Street Journal on May 2, 1989, by Bernard Lewis, one of the senior Orientalists working in the US. Lewis was entering the debate about changing the “Western canon”. To the students and professors at Stanford University who had voted to modify the curriculum to include texts by more non-Europeans, women, and so on, Lewis-speaking as an authority on Islam-took the extreme position that if “Western culture does indeed go a number of things would go with it and others would come in and take their place.” No one had said anything so ludicrous as “Western culture must go”, but Lewis’s argument focussed on much grander matters than strict accuracy, lumbered forward with the remarkable proposition that since modifications in the reading list would be equivalent to the demise of Western culture, such subjects (he named them specifically) as the restoration of slavery, polygamy, and child marriage would ensue. To this amazing thesis Lewis added that “curiosity about other cultures”, which he believes is unique to the West would end.

This argument, symptomatic and even a trifle comic, is an indication not only of our highly inflated sense of Western exclusivity in cultural accomplishment, but also tremendously limited, almost hysterically antagonistic view of the rest of the world. ..Lewis’s argument has the effect of driving the non Westerner into a violent rage or, with equally unedifying consequences into boasting about the achievements of non Western cultures. Rather than affirming the interdependence of various histories on one another, and the necessary interactions of contemporary societies with one another, the rhetorical separation of cultures assured a murderous imperial contest betweeen them-the sorry tale is repeated again and again….” (Culture and Imperialism; pp 36-38)

This was printed in 1993

No discussion until you do this work.

Fuzair,

My immediate thoughts on http://www.brucebawer.com/said.htm

“…For years, he was a familiar face on the network news – an urbane, articulate man, invariably dressed in an elegant suit and tie, who could always be counted on to provide polished, unaccented, pro-Palestinian (or, more generally, pro-Arab or pro-Moslem) spin on recent Mideast developments…”

Why the emphasis on appearance, on accent? As opposed to whom? Should Said be a stereotype to make Americans feel better about their policies? Or is Said what and who he has maintained the world is increasingly becoming in the fluidities of identity?


“Orientalism made some valid points: there is something wrong, for example, with the fact that many American students who receive comprehensive educations in Western civilization gain only the most rudimentary understanding of the world’s other civilizations. (The fact that many students are graduated knowing very little about any civilization is another topic altogether.) “

So Fuzair…is this begrudging admission what got you to back down on your earlier position? And you know, since we are being brave about things, fire does burn when you plunge your hand in it. Tricky Dick did commit some criminal acts in the White House. Lets not be so hard on our American boys and girls…it is a nasty little world out there with billions of envious brown and black people…what a ridiculous apology for a country whose youth largely couldn’t point out Canada on an unmarked world map.



“But ultimately, Said’s thesis amounts to a truism: that people look at the ``other`` through their own eyes, and tend to judge alien cultures by their own culture’s standards. A problem? Yes. But Said’s take on it is problematic, too. Almost consistently, he condemns any negative commentary by any Westerner on any aspect of the Orient. Often he seems to imply that the only proper Western posture toward the East is to suspend judgment entirely and bathe everything in sympathy. “

No, This is NOT what Said calls for. Said calls for a more nuanced research and study into the interdependent relationships between the West and East. Said points out that the various cultures and belief systems and practices in Asia are richly complex and variegated-much too variegated for simple classification. Again, this is NOT news-look at Sara Sulieri’s essay on the British Empire’s attempt to racially and ethnically classify South Asians. What seems to be obvious here, is that Bruce is missing the main point of Said’s theory. Go back and read what he has written in the passage I posted.

“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.”

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. Anyone?

Saminasha #56 I actually read through the entire passage. Honestly. I even tried to figure out the point he was trying to make underneath all the words.

The only point of this entire passage can I think be summarized as follows (this is the explanation you asked for): the West thinks too much of itself and looks down upon Arabs.


This is the sum total of what he is saying here. I dont see an hard information here. Nor do I see any rigorous analysis here. Nor do I see any fresh insights here. It is simply the tired mutterings of a man with a hurt ego that the west does not bow down in admiration to the Arabs.

I wont comment on the writing style other than this: I think our own Romair could convey more substance in fewer words.

Perhaps you can tell me if I am missing something in my summarization above.

What were you thinking when you

Saminasha #52 That was clever (your test of my scholarship about Said when you ask me I know about Said`s idea of binariness). I will grant you that :-)

This is what I know: It wasnt Said`s idea. Ha! Ha!

The idea is associated most closely with Hegel (to the best of my knowledge).

And I know this too. Read my post #53, last para: Truth comes before scholarship. Indeed, scholarship rests upon a foundation of truth. No matter how profound this fellow was, I really dont care. Even if he had originated the idea of binariness, I still wouldnt care.


Soysauce: you have come late into this discussion, and I have already responded enough times to the issues you raise (i.e. you call it ``exaggeration`` - my God! do you people ever think of what such ``exaggerations`` by a prominent arab ``thinker`` in a prominent arab newspaper means? have you ever thought of the number of innocent people of all nationalities who have been killed due to such exaggerations? And the above laudatory article was published in Dawn as well. And this fooling of the arab people by Said thus carried over to the fooling of the Pakistani people.

Please go back and read the entire discussion before giving me what i am sure is meant to be good advice.

Or better yet: Read Fuzair #55. Unlike me, he has studied Said`s works including his magnum opus, orientalism. I can only speak for the little that I have read. Fuzair has spent much more time studying this guy.

Best of all: go read his works for yourself. Then decide whatever you want to decide.

faisal: ok, you`ve bowled your one for the over... and to a tail-ender too!
then again, maybe it was the stature of the batsman more than the height of the ball.

``re. #50 and #18 Saminasha:
``Samina, i think your questions are pertinent. I trust you have yourself given sufficient thought to #6 lately.
rgds,
PM``

P.S. I`d like to add a question of my own: (#7) Should otherwise intelligent people really be dignifying the attention-seeking, self-righteous, self-serving mindless banter of cretins for whom one apparent swallow makes a winter?``

Please, Yasser, some of us are too frigging lazy to pick up a book and read it.....

whereas others are too stupid to actually comprehend anything in a book...



....why should we make any mental effort whatsoever?...when it is so much easier to read study guides and cut and paste articles to look intelligent.

``Any takers for my questions on the role of intellectuals? Or is the unexamined and rightwing life as usual? ``

As usual, the Left wing locks itself up in ivory towers while the Right wing runs the country.

``Chowk Staff, can you please install blockers onto this website? ``

LOL!!! And the above moronic statement says it all....HAHAHAHA!!!

Saminasha,

I am not neutral. I am an admirer of Edward Said... I`ve always been. My opinion about the man is very similar to yours.

-YLH