Edward Said: Bad Scholar and Bad Character

Edward Said is someone who is on the must-read list for many students. His writing on Middle-Eastern history has come to be seen as almost gospel-like in its arguments on how Westerners view Middle-Eastern history and the people who made it. He is someone who is seen as having blown away the cobwebbed way of doing things, ushering in a new age of openness, tolerance, and diversity. As Joshua Muravchik notes, Said’s works have been assigned as reading in many courses in American colleges and universities. These included “literary criticism, politics, anthropology, Middle East studies, and other disciplines including post-colonial studies, a field widely credited with having grown out of Said’s work that examines the ongoing effects of colonialism.” Stuart Schaar wrote that “the academic community has been transformed and the field of literary criticism has been revolutionized as a result of [Said’s] legacy.” The problem is that his scholarship is ill-informed and ideologically-driven. And, personally, Said was a resentful, ideologically-driven charlatan.

The book that launched Edward Said to fame was his magnum opus Orientalism.

First, let us look at what “Orientalism” was before Said redefined it. Before Said, Orientalism was divided in two: one part was a school of art adopted by painters who visited North Africa and the Middle East and painted what they saw or imagined. Sometimes the depictions were less than flattering and did show “Orientals” as decadents who were happy to spend the day seeking mindless pleasure, while their societies decayed away. The other part of Orientalism concerned the study of language. As Bernard Lewis writes, “There were Hellenists who studied Greek, Latinists who studied Latin, Hebraists who studied Hebrew; the first two groups were sometimes called classicists, the third Orientalists. In due course they turned their attention to other languages … Basically these early scholars were philologists concerned with the recovery, study, publication, and interpretation of texts.” Back when this scholarship was at its height, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Orientalism was concerned only with Middle Eastern languages and cultures, but this gradually expanded. As exploration discovered more regions, languages and cultures, the term became less and less useful, until in 1973, at the Twenty-ninth International Congress of Orientalists where it was decided that the name should be dropped. The problem was that this term was then reused as a term of abuse; changing the meanings of previously understood words is what ideologues do.