Who was Edward Said? He was one of the leading founders of postcolonial studies, an academic discipline which, simply put, seeks to discredit Western scholars’ writings about non-Western societies – because they’re tainted by racism and imperialism, naturally – and to blame the failings of those non-Western societies, whatever they may be, on the malevolent Western powers that once upon a time so cruelly colonized them. The goal of all this was simple: to demonize the West – and exalt the rest.
Said, author of
Orientalism (1978), never saw a non-Western society whose worst attributes he couldn’t excuse, lie about, or ignore. But, as the son of a Palestinian Christian father and a Lebanese Christian mother, he was especially preoccupied with Arabs and Islam. For many years Said, who identified as a Palestinian-American, even claimed – in numerous essays, interviews, reference books, and a BBC documentary – to have been brought up in Jerusalem and fled from there to Cairo with his family when he was twelve; in fact, as a 1999
Commentary article by Justus Reid Weiner revealed, Said was raised in Cairo and only spent brief periods in Jerusalem.
Indeed, the Jerusalem house in which he claimed to have grown up, and in which “the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber lived” after the Saids were supposedly forced to leave for Cairo (“Buber of course was a great apostle of coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but he didn’t mind living in an Arab house whose inhabitants had been displaced”), belonged in fact to Said’s aunt – and it was
she who evicted the Bubers, not the other way around. Far from being a poor child refugee, Said was the son of a rich Cairo businessman who sent him to an elite prep school in Massachusetts and then to Princeton and Harvard.
Weiner wasn’t alone in exposing Said’s deceptions. In a 1982
article for the
New York Review of Books, Bernard Lewis, the longtime dean of Islamic Studies, punched innumerable holes in Said’s arguments. Orientalism, Said contended, was principally a project of former imperial powers – Britain and France. In fact, Lewis pointed out, the historical study of Arabic and other Eastern cultures originally “had its main centers in Germany and neighboring countries,” none of which had ever been colonial powers in north Africa or south Asia. Lewis proceeded to make a devastating case that Said, in his treatments of Islam and of Western coverage thereof, exhibited a “disdain of facts” and betrayed “surprising gaps” in his knowledge of Islam and Arabic.
(full article online)
He died 20 years ago, but after October 7, Edward Said is bigger than ever.
www.frontpagemag.com