The Iraq War, Orientalism, and The Arab Mind

There’s others that could have addressed the situation as directly.

Wouldn’t, say, Bernard Lewis’ Islam and the West achieve the desired effect without the reliance on a widely discredited book?

Nah, it’s all backwards. Power elites don’t crave approval of academics. They couldn’t care less. Academics (on average), OTOH, do crave approval of the power elite, they serve the elite, and they always will. Present company excluded, obviously.

I agree with you Tom S. It’s not just cover, though. It’s a whole structure to hang their fears on and they seem to have used it as an instruction manual of some kind. So Kathy G. could be right that this book may have had an important causal role in the incidents at Abu Ghraib and a host of other horrifying incidents.

It seems I don’t know how to properly use the tags, as I meant only to italicize the book titles.

Let’s see now, is there a country- one in which Patai spent part of his life- in which virulent anti-Arab racism is widespread in the population and especially in the political / military elite? And has that country ever been known to have (deleterious) influence on US foreign and military policy by means a lot more direct than Patai’s vile book? Perhaps we’re confusing cause and effect here, as well as ignoring the elephant in the living room. The book is not exactly converting people who would not otherwise have looked favorably on its message.

Kathy,

In what way did ‘The Arab Mind’ and the ideas contained in it contribute to the Iraq war in general and torture in particular? While the book surely reinforces anti-Arab and Muslim sentiment, I don’t see any positive judgments in the book which would support the case for intervention, or for torturing people. I can’t really see how Orientalist ideas infected the decision making process of the policy-making elite.

There simply really isn’t anything in the documentary record to suggest that Orientalist ideas shaped the thinking of the makers of US foreign policy toward the Middle East in the postwar period.

Choosing Orientalism as the paragon for a book intended to influence U.S. policy in the “Middle East,” is, as others have noted, a peculiar choice, given the serious problems with Said’s scholarship. And I’m not sure a two-sentence conclusory statement that the book’s “central argument stands” and the “critics miss the forest for the trees” really bolsters your point. If you’re going to hold Said’s work up as an exemplum, I think you need to say quite a bit more about why the serious errors in scholarship that Said seemed to be repeatedly guilty of do not undermine your position.

I find the choice even stranger as there are no shortage of excellent books on the Arab world, whose scholarship is, as far as I know, not subject to the same concerns as Said. Ajami’s The Arab World is quite good, or, for a really wonderful Islamic feminist take, Fatima Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy.

Can someone please direct me to some criticisms of Said’s scholarship? As far as I know, nearly all the trenchant criticisms are of Said’s methodology–which is something to be expected when a scholar of comparative literature invades the realm of historians.

Said’s book created a paradigm; a paradigm that explains more about how the West views the middle east than nearly any other paradigm. Pointing out that Germany had fair-minded and objective orientalists doesn’t undermine Said’s point.

I believe we can add, “The Closed Circle” to the list of books to be banned. That is another popular book in military circles. If you think “The Arab Mind” is bad for your attitude, try reading that.

I agree with the other posters, that it is not a matter of what you read. You can find racist elements in books such as “A History of the Arab Peoples”, which is allegedly a straight forward history.
Perhaps I make the argument here by saying that having lived in the Middle East for years, you can find elements of truth in all the books. The bigger issue is walking into any culture trying to “find” something that confirms or denies anything you hold a priori to your encounter with it.

Just some random thoughts

“widely discredited”, “serious problems with scholarship” etc etc – like “devastating critique”, when I see these sonorous phrases deployed with no specifics accompanying them, they tend to make me think a little better of the person being criticised and a little worse of the person doing the criticising.

Curious to base a post on an opinion about a book one hasn’t read.

First, in response to Steve Labonne, I’ve heard from a left-wing scholar of the middle east (at Wright State University in Dayton, OH) that Pipes is a distinguished scholar–of middle ages Islam. Obviously, that doesn’t mean he has anything sane to say about the contemporary middle east.

Second, re: Patai’s book: I actually think it doesn’t support Kathy G’s point at all. Maybe I’m missing something, but if you genuinely thought that Arabs only understand force and that they’re so different from us, etc., etc., then the idea of trying to democratize them and make them like us would actually lose plausibility. I think Patai’s book is much more related to the phenomenon of thinking that Palestinians are constitutionally incapable of democracy, and not the phenomenon that Iraqis are easily convertible to midwestern Americans.

I haven’t read it, but that seems to be the theme of this thread, so…

A few people have complained that no one is citing any names for the anti-Said scholarship. But this is unfair, as Patrick O’Donnell cited one above: Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge.

Which leads us to the questions: has anyone read that? Does it make its case?

In any event, I think that Daniel Goldberg’s point is fair: if you’re going to hold a book aloft as your banner, even while acknowledging that it’s been legitimately criticized, a bit more explanation is called for. There are a lot of other good books out there to suggest as replacements for racist drivel, after all.

“Second, re: Patai’s book: I actually think it doesn’t support Kathy G’s point at all. Maybe I’m missing something, but if you genuinely thought that Arabs only understand force and that they’re so different from us, etc., etc., then the idea of trying to democratize them and make them like us would actually lose plausibility.”

You’d think so, but in fact the 19th century imperialists had the same strange mix on the one hand, a messianic zeal and grand visions of instantly transforming and “civilizing” the conquered nations, and on the other a fierce racist contempt for the inhabitants.

Stephen-

Dangerous Knowledge’s central argument is that Said ignores German orientalists and a few French and British orientalists. Which is to say, Irwin argues Said overstates his thesis. Big deal. My point is that the arguments against Orientalism point to specific instances where the paradigm does not apply–they never claim that Said engaged in faulty scholarship or distorted facts. That’s because he didn’t. His book was a textual analysis of various French and British orientalists, and I defy anyone to outsmart Said in the realm of textual analysis. He then took that analysis and used Foucault’s ideas and applied them to interpreting how the Western world constructed itself through an ideology of difference against the East in order to facilitate imperialism. The only way of really arguing against that aspect of Said’s thesis is to reject applying Foucault.

And Ibn Warraq is in the same boat as Daniel Pipes.

To be clear about what we mean by military circles, the Marines specifically cite Patai’s book as one to read. The Air Force is heavily in B. Lewis sycophant land. The Navy has nothing of note really. The army is light on the reading, believe it or not.

Let’s not paint with too broad a brush here. We should also remember that the military is conservative by nature and certain writers will tend to “agree” with the military mindset.

Additionally, while I know people find it inherently racist to state that certain countries are incapable of democracy. I think it is better and more accurate to say that nations and countries for that matter are not presently capable. There is something to the argument that a winner take all attitude prevents the sort of compromises demanded in a democracy. We struggle with that here in the West. You can’t just walk into a country who has known repression and one vote one time politics and expect the parties to just recognize compromise as a powerful tool. It is a process.

Again, random thoughts here.

A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan has been my guide to the Iraq war, and so far I haven’t been wrong.

I’m trying to figure out what conceivable benefit the US military would gain from Orientalism; like most of Kathy’s ideas, this one seems to suffer from a rather entire lack of comprehension of the point.

Au contraire, samchevre. If the military had assigned Orientalism as reading, we would have won the war.

As Reza Aslan put it, Ajami is the last brown Orientalist, so citing him as a better alternative is not the best idea. Ajami’s opinions on key topics like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also change overnight depending on where his next meal ticket is coming from. I’m not saying everyone should take Khalidi as gospel, but there are better alternatives for a general study of the Middle East than Ajami.

Also, Daniel Pipes was not even able to finish his PhD program, so doubts about how much he is an actual expert at anything are doubtful.

Stephen, I only just heard of Robert Irwin, but I found this London Review of Books review of a different book of his attacking Said, which says “Irwin’s factual corrections, however salutary, do not so much knock down the theoretical claims of Orientalism as chip away at single bricks.” The reviewer seems to suggest that Irwin thinks his critques are much more devastating than they are.

samchevre, surely the mindset that asks only “If I’m fighting so-and-so, what’s most likely to make him lose?” is part of the problem. Or at least, the mindset that doesn’t see that understanding the local people is key to answering that question; in order to “win” in Iraq (under whatever definition that is) we would’ve had to get the Iraqis to not support our enemies (whoever they happened to be at the time). A book that describes Arabs as indiscriminately violent isn’t going to help there.

Most likely, a true understanding of the Iraqi people would’ve revealed that, like every other people on the face of the planet, they don’t like military occupations, and so our war aims (whatever they are) were hopeless. But that still would’ve been worth knowing.

Matt,

Fair enough; but it seems worth pointing out that there were factual corrections and that Irwin did think his criticism was devastating, whether or not others agreed. (Other reviewers certainly did think Irwin devastated Said’s argument. (Again, I don’t know who’s right.))

Oh, and I think it’s the same book — certainly sounds like it — maybe it had different UK/US titles? (I’ve never understood the logic behind those, but they happen a lot.)

And, far be it from me to invoke “expertise”, but I do teach Said every year to my Masters students and I teach all the major critiques, and my cleverest students have very good critiques that Irwin doesn’t (can’t) even approach….

Those people who think Irwin demolishes Said are in the same boat as him: thinking that Said’s argument is about the fusty orientalists, rather than the interrelation of orientalist knowledge and imperial domination.

Which is why Rickm at 31 (“Dangerous Knowledge’s central argument is that Said ignores German orientalists and a few French and British orientalists. Which is to say, Irwin argues Said overstates his thesis. Big deal.”) is absolutely right.

A better discussion of War And ‘Anthropology’ by Helena Cobban. With context, including, importantly, Palestine and Sadr City

I have been concerned about the Pentagon’s program to enlist anthropologists into its “Human Terrain System” (HTS) program ever since I first heard about it. The relationship between western “anthropology” (literally, in Greek, a “study of the human condition”) and various extremely exploitative colonial ventures over the past 120 years is very well-known.
Recently, I identified one of my key concerns with this latest version of the same-old, same-old attempt to use specialized knowledge about the condition of other peoples in order to subjugate and control them. It is this idea that our fellow-humans around the world could be considered, in the military sense or any other sense, to be merely “terrain” to be fought over, won, and controlled.
In military science, geographical terrain (from the Latin, meaning “earth”) is something that is to be studied, mapped, and understood– and then, that understanding is used in order to control and exploit that terrain.
So what are we saying about our fellow-humans if we say they are merely “terrain”?

In fact, why “understand Arabs”? Would we try to “understand Europeans”? Or “South Americans”?

Yes indeed, we would. For example, Americans routinely misunderstand European attitudes toward religion because we have no experience with state religions operating as instruments of oppression. There is a huge amount of understanding that even a small amount of historical and cultural context can provide.

What’s more interesting to me that the legitimacy or otherwise of invoking Said in this context is that the substance of many of the anti-Arab stereotypes sound a lot like some of the pop cultural left’s attack on Christian fundamentalism and conservative culture generally, particularly in the 60s/70s heyday of the pop left. Homophobic are they? Hung up with shame about sex and the (especially female) body? Sexually repressed and therefore sexually obsessed? Sexually frustrated and therefore prone to violence? Bigoted against those not like them? Worshipful of arbitrary ethnic/religious divisions? All this sounds like hippiedom railing against the establishment circa 1971.

I think the hippy critique was quite shallow but not completely without merit on some points. But the military now is, by many accounts, permeated with conservative Christian culture. Do they see themselves in how they see their enemies, and are they trying to kill an image of themselves that they have seen in the popular culture, but are trying to deny?

Orientalism could only be influential by reputation because it’s written in impenetrably dense postmodern jargon

It naffing isn’t. I’ve got a copy right here on my desk, by chance. This is another of those critiques which makes me think rather better of Said – frankly, I read the book and rather disagreed with him on a lot of points, but then I read Irwin’s book and I now more or less worship Said as a demigod.

the substance of many of the anti-Arab stereotypes sound a lot like some of the pop cultural left’s attack on Christian fundamentalism and conservative culture generally, particularly in the 60s/70s heyday of the pop left.

But the military now is, by many accounts, permeated with conservative Christian culture. Do they see themselves in how they see their enemies, and are they trying to kill an image of themselves that they have seen in the popular culture, but are trying to deny?

Good points. It’s worth noting, though, that it’s not only conservative Christians in the military that are in an awkward ideological situation. The left/liberals themselves are torn between two poles, namely multiculturalism and anti-colonialism vs. fight against oppression/for universal human rights.

That’s an interesting article about Obama lining up with AIPAC by the way:

“Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. …Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.””

I would assign the introduction and the first chapter of Said and leave out the rest. Culture and Imperialism I just don’t see being that convincing to military folks, but maybe I underestimate them…

I really object to the whole Said school of deligitimizing inquiry because it serves a cultural project that he disagrees with.

Said absolutely does not delegitimize inquiry. This is a common, probably often willful misunderstanding of Said. He doesn’t oppose studying of any of the topics Orientalists studied. What he objects to is framing that activity as study of The East(TM), as opposed to the study of the shari’ah, history of mysticism, history of Central Asia, etc. Most scholars of Islamic history (for example) weren’t taking silly ideas like “the Arab mind” seriously as a framework for inquiry in Said’s day, and hadn’t been for a long time.

Said makes it pretty clear that he sees things that way too, by singling out Bernard Lewis as the exemplary figure of ‘those trends still existing in contemporary Area Studies scholarship’ (paraphrasing Said here).

Though, even relatively recently (e.g. 1970s or later), there has been serious scholarship with major flaws of the type Said describes. One example is Andre Miquel’s work on Arabic geographical works: he posits a decline in Islamic geographical knowledge based on (so he claims) fewer works of geography being written in Arabic after the 11th century, failing to realize that people started writing geography in Persian and Turkish instead of Arabic. There is also some work that adheres to a ‘decline’ paradigm of some sort, which I think it’s safe to say is a legacy of “Orientalism” of the type Said talks about, maybe also a result of present-day prejudices.

Bottom line is, the things in the old Orientalists’ scholarship that Said criticizes aren’t helpful for inquiry anyway.

I hope those who have yet to read Irwin’s book will do so despite some of the comments above. His argument is, in the main and in particulars, devastating to Said’s thesis. Incidentally, the hagiographic attitude some take to Foucault’s work is troubling (not unlike the veneration of Gramsci among many New Left academics of my generation). Said himself faced insuperable difficulties in reconciling Gramsci and Foucault, and his appropriation of the latter was ambivalent if not contradictory, as Irwin explains. “[H]aving read Foucault and Gramsci, [Said] was unable to decide whether the discourse of Orientalism constrains Orientalists and makes them victims of an archive from which they are powerless to escape, or whether, on the other hand, the Orientalists are the willing and conscious collaborators in the fabrication of a hegemonic discourse which they employ to subjugate others.”

Let’s sample just a taste of what he has to say:

“I really am attacking the book rather than the man. I have no significant disagreements with what Said has written about Palestine, Israel, Kipling’s Kim, or Glenn Gould’s piano playing.”

Irwin grants that Said and others have “raised profound and difficult questions about the nature of discourse, the ‘Other,’ ‘the Gaze,’ and a wide range of epistemological issues.”

“Orientalism has the look of a book written in a hurry. It is repititious and contains lots of factual mistakes [many of which Irwin lists*].” Indeed, “…it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.”

Said uses the term “Orientalism” “in a newly restrictive sense, as those who travelled, studied or wrote about the Arab world [so much for Turkish and Persian studies!] and even here he excluded consideration of North Africa west of Egypt.”

“Until the nineteenth century, Orientalism had little in the way of institutional structures and the heyday of institutional Orientalism only arrived in the second half of the twentieth century.”

“Since there was no overarching and constraining discourse of Orientalism, there were many competing agendas and schools of thought.”

“…[E]ach generation of Arabists found the previous generation’s work unsatisfactory.”

“Clealy, a great deal of misinformation about Islam circulated throughout medieval Christendom. Equally obviously, this was because those who touched on Islamic matters did not trouble to get their facts rights and polemical fantasy answered their need. Getting things right was what the Orientalists did from the sixteenth century onwards.”

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Orientalists were “those who were interested in Islam, Arabic and the Arabs [recalling that ‘not many people were so intersted’]. Those who were tended to be somewhat detached from worldly affairs and their approach to Islam and the Arabs was usually scholarly and antiquarian rather than utilitarian. [….] The Orientalists tended to model their study of Oriental languages on the way Latin and Greek were studied by their contemporaries.”

“[T]he scholarly invasion of Egypt [in the late 18th and early 19th century] was a milestone in the history of Egyptology, effectively its founding document, it had little or no influence on the way Arabic and Islamic studies developed in the following century.”

“‘Orientalism Now’ is the most polemical chapter. Jewish academics and journalists are the particular objects of Said’s denunciations here. It is obvious that bitterness about what had been happening to the Palestinians since the 1940s fuelled the writing of this book. But rather than blame British, American and Soviet politicians, Zionist lobbyists, the Israeli army and, for that matter, poor Palestinian leadership [which Said in fact elsewhere critizes at some length], in a wierd kind of displacement Arabist scholars of past centuries, such as Pococke and Silvestre de Sacy, were presented as largely responsible for the disasters of Said’s own time.”

Irwin provides convincing evidence that Said could not make up his mind when Orientalism began: “A lot of the time he wished to link its origins to Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Orientalism is repeatedly presented as a secular Enlightenment phenomenon. [….] But at other times, Said seems to regard d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale (1697) as the founding charter of Orientalism. But then again, maybe Postel was the first Orientalist? Another possible date is 1312 when the Council of Vienne set up chairs in Hebrew, Arabic and other languages (though Said seems unaware that the Council’s decrees regarding the teaching of Arabic were a dead letter).”

“At several points in his book Said contends that the Orient had no objective existence. In other places he seems to imply that it did exist, but that the Orientalists systematically misrepresented it. If either proposition were true, what use would the writings of Orientalists be to the men who went out to govern the British and French empires? If all that Said was arguing was that Orientalists have not always been objective, then the argument would be merely banal. Orientalists themselves would be the first to assert such a proposition.”

*After noting some of Said’s conspicous errors, Irwin writes that one “could go on and on listing the mistakes. Some are small ones, but others are large indeed. Sophisticated allies of Said have suggested that facts, or factual errors, are not the point. Indeed, recourse to ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ are, it is hinted, a time-honoured recourse of reactionary Orientalists. It is suggested that such is the essential truth of Said’s indictment of Orientalism that the sweep of his argument is not undermined by the lack of a detailed factual basis.”

Irwin writes that for Said political problems tend, in the end, to be textual ones.

Blimey, that is a lot of words and indignation over a book you haven’t read. I dread to think of the frenzies there might be in store if you ever get round to turning a few pages.

I agree with the sceptical comments on here about Said’s Orientalism. Some of his fans are doing him a disservice by promoting one of his weakest books so determinedly. It would be a shame if his reputation stood too much on this book because it could well mean the end of his reputation.

if the neocons made a racist mistake it was that the Arab peoples of Iraq were culturally too like American and European westerners…

Where’s the evidence of this? Here’s their “Carthago delenda est” manifesto from 1998:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm
…try to find anything in there that isn’t garden variety imperialism or scaremongering.

The ‘flowers and chocolate’ stuff has nothing to do with anything but building public support for the war. I’m not saying that the document is racist, on the contrary, I’m saying that they view Iraq as a geopolitical entity and nothing else. So, I guess, basically I’m with you on this, it’s just that you go a little too far, to the other side.

Instead of Patai’s book the military should have turned to one of its own, republishing and passing around an article in the Fall 2000 edition of the online journal American Diplomacy, “Why Arabs Lose Wars” by Col. (Ret.) Norvell B. De Atkine.

As has been remarked over and again, if the neocons made a racist mistake it was that the Arab peoples of Iraq were culturally too like American and European westerners, not that they were too ‘other’

Yes, because as everyone knows, if you illegally invade and occupy a country whose people are white, you will be greeted with universal gratitude.

And why does Meredith imagine that anyone could give a crap what his estimation of Said’s ‘reputation’ is?

“Irwin provides convincing evidence that Said could not make up his mind when Orientalism began”.

And a “start date” for orientalism is necessary for his argument because…?