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| The cover of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) |
It has been 25 years since Edward Said published his groundbreaking study, Orientalism. Twenty years ago this month, the world lost Edward Said to leukemia. Said, one of the 20th century's most prominent public intellectuals, combined political activism with writing. His writings shook up Middle Eastern studies in the West, brought the Palestinian cause to the world's attention and had a major impact on the development of the field of post-colonial studies.
With the failures of the Arab Spring, the spread of violence, instability and failed states throughout the MENA region and the signing of the Abraham Accords, it may be time to take stock of Orientalism, Said's most important academic and political contribution. The book earned him numerous accolades but much criticism as well. What was Orientalism's contribution and has that contribution been preserved over time?
Said's juxtaposition of Occident and Orient has a long historical pedigree. For at elast 2 centuries, the study of the "Orient" has been central to university academic units in the West whose concern is the MENA region. In Said's framing, the Occident and Orient have been pitted against each other along a vertical cleavage which has overtones of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations." This cleavage funds its origins in the struggle between Europe and the Arab world after the spread of Islam beyond the MENA region to Europe in the 7th century CE.
Orientalism's conceptual framing is based in culture and hence ideas. While this approach yields great insights into the thinking of many Orientalist thinkers, it ignores other aspects of the relationship between the West and the East. One core relationship is the powerful economic ties which developed in the beginning of the 20th century after the discovery of massive oil reserves in Iran, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.
Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse In an important but long overlooked critique of Orientalism, the late Syrian philosopher, Sadiq al-'Azm, argued that Said was guilty of what he called "Orientalism in reverse." In his article published in the Arab-Israeli journal, Khamsin, al-'Azm views Orientalism as replacing Western Orientalism with an Arab Occidentalism. He also argues that Said's use of culture prevents him from breaking conceptually and hence epistemologically with Western Orientalist modes of thought Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse – Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm
Of particular concern to al-'Azm is Said's failure to theorize the political economy of relations between the West and the MENA region. Despite the negative views of Islam and Muslim majority countries generally, he points out that the sociocultural cleavage on which Said focuses hasn't prevented Western nation-states from developing alliances with Arab oil-producing states and benefitting from their energy supplies. Arab oil-producers and other Arab regimes, such as Egypt, have historically been major purchasers of American, British and French weaponry.
Here al-'Azm changes the conceptual focus to social class. Instead of a vertical sociocultural cleavages between Occident and Orient, al-'Azm substitutes a horizontal cleavage based in mutual financial and security interests between many Arab states and Western powers, especially the United States.
While true that many Westerners view the "Orient" as an exotic and irrational region, and that many, e.g., many Republicans in the United States, view Islam as an "ideology," not a religion, the main drivers of realtions between the East and West are those based in powerful political and financial elites, i.e., what al-'Azm considers the ruling classes.
Implicit in al-'Azm's critique of Orientalism is a critique of post-colonial discourse. Rarely does this discourse engage the concept of social class. While al-'Azm never denies the importance of culture, religion and ethnicity, Orientalism as defined by al-'Azm becomes a hegemonic trope used in the modern period to divert attention away from the cross-regional collaboration which serve the ruling classes of the West band the MENA region but not subaltern groups's interests in the two different areas of the world.
The Abraham Accords al-'-Azm's analysis was prescient in predicting the establishment of clser ties between ruking elites in the MENA region. Alredy in the 1970s, after the October 1973 War, Egypt and the United States, together with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, began informal consultations with Israel on regional security, especially threats posed by Iran and, later, terrorist groups. Once the Palestine National Council was formed in 19xx, Palestinian intelligence joined this security group as well.
The September 2020 "Abraham Accords," which were signed between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrayn and Israel during the Trump administration, represented a codification of the informal consultation and coordination among Israel and the Arab world. The accords broke another barrier in Arab-Israeli relations because it sharply divided the UAE and Bahrayn, and later Morocco and Sudan, which joined in December 2020 and January 2021 respectively through formal recognition of Israel.
Syria, Algeria, Lebanon, Qatar, Iraq, Libya and Yemen refused to join the accords. One of the key criticisms of these Arab states (in Libya's case, 2 ruling groups competing for control of the country) because they failed to address the issue of Palestinian self-determination. Nevertheless, what the Abraham Accords demonstrated was that political-security and financial interests trump Arab ethnic solidarity.
Israel turn to the far-right and the Occupied West Bank The extent to which Said's model suffers from conceptual shortcomings is seen in the recent efforts of the Biden administration to create a tri-partite defense pact between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Despite the aggressive effort by the far-right religious nationalist government of Benjamin Netanyahu to seize and occupy as much as possible of the Palestinian National Authority (West Bank), the Biden administration and Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) have failed to prevent the progressive ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. MBS has sent a Saudi diplomatic representative to the PNA, but nothing has come of it that can be viewed as postive for the Palestinians
For Biden, Israel's far-right government's policies are highly distasteful. Creating an Iranian defense alliance, however, is much higher on his foreign policy priorities list than reigning in Netanyahu's effort to transform Israel into an autocracy and end Palestinian hopes for an independent state. The proposed alliance will shut down the GOP howl when and if Biden can entice the Tehran regime to enter a new JCPOA and become serious about reigning in its nucelar weapons ambitions.
MBS wants to develop Saudi Arabia as an economic powerhouse whose economy is not dependent on oil production and revenues. Israel can play a central part in his Vision 2030. Its high tech sector can help Saudi Arabia develop a more diversified economy and, as the Israeli firm NSO has demonstrates in multiple nations around the world, help the Saudi regime use its Pegasus spyware to more efficiently police its citizens.
Orientalism and the Palestinian future Clearly, the Arab-Israeli dispute and the question of Palestine were key subtexts to Edward Said's Orientalism. His subsequent study, Covering Islam (1981), was, with its double-entendre, an attack on the rage at the time resulting from the so-called 1978-79 Islamic revolution in Iran, that Islam was a religion of extremism, violence and irrationality. The book's title also hit the bias of many Western journalists in covering Islam for their respective news outlets.
No one would argue that culture no longer plays a key role in relations between the West and the MENA region. Radical Islamists like Sayyid Qutb, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and many others of their ideological ilk claim that, ipso facto, Western culture in its current form constitutes an attack on Islam. Indeed, the recent banning of the film Barbie in most MENA region countries - with Saudi Arabis being a notable exception - was based on the corrosive effect of Western culture on Muslim youth.
Orientalism has allowed many Westerners to question how they think about the Arab world, Islam and the larger MENA region. Its impact on younger scholars in the West has been profound. In Gramscian terms, it has helped the Palestinians develop a more effective "war of position" in winning over the support of the inter national community.
Still, at the end of the day, difficult political struggle is required if the Palestinians are to achieve their goals of national self-determination, namely a state of their own, and socila justice. Changing the way the West thinks about Arab culture, the Palestinian people and Islam is core to Edward Said's legacy. Now the powerful political economic ties which bind the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Gulf present a much higher mountain for the Palstinians to climb
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