Bernard Lewis, The Question of Orientalism

Bernard Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," The New York Review of Books (June 24, 1982)

A friend of mine once said: if you need to write about something to which you have a strong personal disliking, you should be double careful in your writing, otherwise emotions will prevail upon reason, and your criticism will be simply not that effective, as it will be based on emotional argument which is less appealing in academia than rational. This is the case with Bernard Lewis who is, perhaps, the most biased person to write about Said, and as he was unable to cope with his emotions, he’d better avoid that. His very first analogy – that of imagined critics of classical studies – is false, because in case of Greece, Europeans never dealt with the Other. In case of the Orient, they did. He also distorts Said: in no place in his book Said says that Europeans should not study the Orient or praises Islam radical leaders. His message is very different. Or when Lewis discusses that by omitting Edward Lane’s main work, the Arabic-English lexicon, Said intentionally distorts his academic legacy (“On this Mr. Said has nothing to say”), he once again reveals his total misunderstanding of Said’s research agenda. 

Lewis also loses his temper a number of times – when he thinks he ironizes upon Said, he actually reveals his anger: as, e.g., when he speaks of Said’s “projected sexual phantasies.”

But let’s come back to Lewis

What did the word mean before it was poisoned by the kind of intellectual pollution that in our time has made so many previously useful words unfit for use in rational discourse?

 What does he mean by “useful words,” I wonder. “Negro”? “Racial superiority”?

Basically these early scholars were philologists concerned with the recovery, study, publication, and interpretation of texts. This was the first and most essential task that had to be undertaken

From what Lewis writes is clear that he still believes in pure knowledge which is unbiased and not based on irrational things. He also thinks that Said seems to be concerned with the nominological nature of Orientalism, and goes in detail discussing the shifts in meanings of this and relevant terms.

When Lewis switches to Said and starts to discuss assumption upon which Said’s work is based, it becomes obvious that Lewis had missed a HUGE new wave of historiographic tradition, initiated by Michel Foucault’s writing. This makes his review a sort of attack of a supporter of Newtonian celestial mechanics at Einstein’s relativity theory.

For Mr. Said, it would seem, scholarship and science are commodities which exist in finite quantities; the West has grabbed an unfair share of these as well as other resources, leaving the East not only impoverished but also unscholarly and unscientific.

This is exactly Said’s point, and would be a point gladly supported by Foucault.

Sometimes he doesn’t bother to read Said carefully at all: when he attacks the statement that “Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on,” he doesn’t see that Said speaks of European nations.

In general, his attack on Said is the worst kind of academic criticism one can expect to read: “worst” because of its poor scholarly quality. In this, Lewis resembles of Ebenezer Scrooge, shouting each time he encounters Said and his vision of Orientalism: “Bah! Humbug!” One could only wish that the three spirits of Orientalism had visited Lewis before he wrote this ill-fated essay.