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

Badger
As’ad AbuKhalil – The Legacy of Rafiq Hariri: Dahlan Plan for Lebanon.

Jimmy Carter – On Gaza

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.
This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.
Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

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?

Silly, George? I disagree, though you’re right to dock it for style points. What I was trying to argue was that it’s a scenic route from Orientalism to the neocon project in Iraq. C&I is the expressway.

I’ve read Orientalism, and I assume most commenters here have, too, and I’ve found it to be a useful work as far as my own epistemology is concerned, without being able to critique Said’s sources. Unless I put in the homework I don’t think I can comment much on this post, however.

…Except to say that, while I thought Buruma and Margalit’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies was execrable, it does seem to me that relying on torture and sexual humiliation rather confirms the whole perverted-Babylon trope about the West that they refer to, and makes even me (a Westerner) wonder if some ‘elective affinity’ wasn’t at work in selecting Patai as a guide for abusing prisoners.

It is everywhere you look. We all remember how the troops would be greeted by flag waving crowds eager to adopt western style democracy, don’t we? The letter you link to is neither here not there. You may disagree with its prescriptions but I don’t see how it is an example of racism of any kind (unless you consider waging war to be necessarily racist or ‘orientalist’ in some way?), certainly not of the Said-style ‘orientalist’ flavour.

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.

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.

Can’t agree, Richard. Culture and Imperialism is a silly book, as I’ve argued here: http://www.georgescialabba.net/archive/000021.php.

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.

“Said’s earlier classic Orientalism has been supplemented by his newer book Culture and Imperialism, which makes the case that the literary ascendancy of the West has created a self-validating picture of an incurably inferior Near East. In Said’s latest articles he has modified his thesis somewhat to link the now-admitted inferiority of the Arab world to a malaise, a “sense of powerlessness,” marked by the tendency to substitute words for action. This is a trait of Arab culture depicted by Raphael Patai in his much-maligned classic The Arab Mind, still far and above the best exposition of Arab culture.” (Norvell B. DeAtkine, “The Middle East: The Question Is Not Why We Care but Rather Should We?” Parameters, Summer 1999, pp. 141-47)