The Significance of Edward Said’s Notion of “Secular” Criticism in his Work
on Islam and the Problematic of Palestine-Israel
Submitted by Colleen Marie Keyes to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theology March 2014.
This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright
material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper
acknowledgement.
I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified
and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of
a degree by this or any other University.
(Signature)___________________________________
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Abstract
The present study argues that the central notion and practice unifying Edward
Said’s oeuvre is that of “secular” criticism, which he conceives of as the defining
activity and tool of the humanistic intellectual. We also argue that Said sees the
intellectual’s moral mission of “secular” criticism as based in Said’s understanding
of “humanism” as intellectual production aimed at concrete change in the real world
of human struggles for universal justice and human emancipation from oppression
of all types. Related to Said’s particular and perennial upholding of a particular
understanding of humanism, Said wields a religious-secular rhetoric as a weapon
to expose and question the ironic fact of the “religiosity” of those persons,
movements, and ideologies claiming their basis in the unswervingly “secular.”
Within the overall body of Said commentary, Said’s effort to recover humanism as
a useable praxis of human emancipation from oppressive systems has been
largely neglected. This is largely due to the misrecognition of Orientalism as Said’s
defining project and the consequent sublation of equally if not more significant,
defining elements in the Saidian oeuvre than Orientalism , e.g. “secular” criticism.
This study finds that the religious-secular trope conveys Said’s notion of what
criticism is and does in a re-constructed humanism, a “humanism of liberation,”1 as
Saree Makdisi has aptly called it, and not, as some commentators have seen it, an
expression of a self-contradictory disdain for religion with a concomitant defensive
posture toward Islam. In this thesis, Said’s religious-secular rhetoric is analyzed for
its meaning, for its role in Said’s idea of criticism, and for its significance in Said’s
Saree Makdisi, “Said, Palestine and the Humanism of Liberation,” in Homi Bhaba
and W.J.T. Mitchell, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 80.
1
3
effort to re-construct humanism as an emancipatory practice. Finally, this study
argues that Said’s writing to and on the Arab-Islamic world, and particularly his
writing on Palestine-Israel, exemplifies what Said means by the term “secular”
criticism. In this sense, Said’s work on the problematic of Palestine-Israel is a
synechdoche of his entire critical project. This interpretation is unique in that it
challenges the idea that Said’s work on Palestine-Israel is an endeavor outside his
professional vocation as a humanist and is motivated merely by Said’s passionate
attachment to his homeland. This thesis aims to show how Said’s work on the
problematic of Palestine-Israel is not only a model of what Said means by the term
“secular criticism,” but avers further that, coupled with Said’s writing to and on the
Arab Islamic world, his work on Palestine-Israel represents the most significant
labor of his “non-humanist” humanism, or the “humanism of liberation” as a still
valid practice, and as an intellectual, ethical framework, and a means of concretely
furthering the struggle for universal human emancipation—which Said defines as
completely in line with his work as a humanist. In other words, Said’s work on the
problematic of Palestine-Israel is not a political side-line apart from his work as a
man of letters but is a body of quintessentially humanistic production at the heart of
the concept of “secular criticism.”
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Acknowledgments
I wish to express to my supervisors, Dr. Ian Richard Netton, of the University of Exeter,
and to Dr. Mahmoud Ayoub, of Hartford Seminary my deepest gratitude for their patience
as mentors and their excellent scholarly advice. Their forbearance, encouragement, and
guidance have sustained me throughout this effort.
Without the inspiration of Dr. Ibrahim Abu Rabi,’ my first intellectual mentor, I would not
have begun this study. His sudden death in 2011 caused me to re-visit his hometown of
Nazareth, where coincidentally Edward Said had familial connections. That farewell
journey as well as study tours I had taken with Dr. Abu Rabi ’ in the Muslim world inspired
some of the work and insights of the final chapters.
Finally, to my very patient and loving husband, Bilal Ansari, I wish to express my most
sincere thanks for listening to me and for encouraging me to complete this work especially
when the struggle to think and write collided with the need to care for my mother near the
end of her life.
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Table of Contents
Abstract .................................................................................................................. 2
Acknowledgments................................................................................................. 4
Table of Contents .................................................................................................. 5
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 8
Chapter Plan, Methodology, and Review of the Literature ............................................ 20
Chapter One : ....................................................................................................... 34
Existential Roots of Edward W. Said’s Notion of the Religious and the Secular.... 34
1.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 35
1.2 Memoir: Memory and History................................................................................. 37
1.3 Identity Formation and Language .......................................................................... 43
1.4 Familial Relationships, Religion, and Culture in Said’s Development ..................... 47
1.5 The Experience of Dispossession.......................................................................... 56
1.6 Religion, Ideology, and the Arab World ................................................................. 62
1.7 Said’s Colonial Educational Experience and Identity ............................................. 64
1.8 Said’s American Education: Identity and Intellectual Foundations ......................... 66
1.9 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 70
Chapter Two......................................................................................................... 72
Said’s “Humanism of Liberation” in Joseph Conrad and The Fiction of
Autobiography, Beginnings: Intention and Method, and Orientalism .................... 72
2.1 Said and Conrad ................................................................................................... 74
2.2 The Beginnings of Said’s “Secular” Humanism--Beginnings: Intention and Method
..................................................................................................................................... 89
2.3 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 113
Chapter Three .................................................................................................... 116
Critique of Said’s Construction of the Religious and the Secular: William D. Hart
............................................................................................................................ 116
3.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 117
3.2 Denotation, Connotation and Said’s Rhetorical Strategies: Metaphor and
Catachresis ................................................................................................................ 119
3.3..The World, The Text, and the Critic: A Key to Said’s Religious-Secular Rhetoric 123
6
3.4 Examining the Metaphysical, the Religious, and the Theological in Said’s Rhetoric
................................................................................................................................... 124
3.5 Said and the Idea of the “Secular” ....................................................................... 132
3.6 From the Critique of Idolatry through the Critique of Religion to the Critique of
Ideology: Halbertal and Margalit ................................................................................ 134
3.7 The First Critical Study of Said’s Religious-Secular Thematic: William D. Hart ... 144
3.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 174
Chapter Four ...................................................................................................... 177
Secular Criticism: Mathieu Courville, Gauri Viswanathan, and Vincent Pecora... 177
4.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 177
4.2 Mathieu Courville’s Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular .................................. 178
4.3 Courville’s Interpretation of Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular: An Implicit Critical
Theory of the Religious and the Secular ..................................................................... 179
4.4 Said’s Critical Theory of the Religious and the Secular and the Critical Theory of
Religion ...................................................................................................................... 194
4.5 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 216
Chapter Five....................................................................................................... 218
Said on Islam and the Arab-Islamic World as “Secular” Criticism........................ 218
5.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 218
5.2 Said’s Humanistic Critique: Not a Defense of Islam but a Call for Self-Criticism in
the Arab-Islamic World ............................................................................................... 220
5.3 What Said’s Critique Lacks .................................................................................. 223
5.4 Edward Said and Islam........................................................................................ 227
5.5 Said on the Role of Arabic in Islam: “Living in Arabic”......................................... 239
5.6 Edward Said’s Humanism of Liberation and the Arab Islamic World: The Secular
Imperative of Democracy in a Religious World ........................................................... 250
5.7 Said, the Secular, and The Question of Nationalism ............................................ 261
5.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 277
Chapter Six ........................................................................................................ 283
Said on the Question of Palestine as “Secular” Criticism .................................... 283
6.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 283
6.2 The Question of Palestine ................................................................................... 291
6.3 Said’s Essays 1969-1994: The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for
Palestinian Self-Determination ................................................................................... 313
6.4 An Ideology of Difference .................................................................................... 314
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6.5 “Secular” Criticism and the Arab World ................................................................ 325
6.6 A “secular” dilemma for Said? The “New Leadership”.......................................... 330
6.7 Said’s Influence on Palestinian Resistance ......................................................... 336
6.8 Said’s “Secular” Influence on Israeli Scholarship ................................................. 342
6.9 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 346
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 352
Bibliography ...........................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Introduction
It is customary to associate Edward Said with his thesis on Orientalism2 or to
remember him as the impassioned spokesperson for the human, civil and political
rights of the Palestinian people. To my knowledge, Said commentary has
examined discrete elements of Said’s works as emanating from disparate interests
and motivations within Said and no one has yet attempted to understand Said’s
entire oeuvre as a unified intellectual project. The present study seeks to show
firstly that Said’s oeuvre from beginning to end is a unified and comprehensive
project of “critical humanism.”3 Secondly, the meaning of Said’s pervasive secularreligious rhetoric is re-examined for its role and its significance in Said’s effort to reorient humanism as a useable intellectual praxis whose aim is the effectuation of
universal human emancipation. Thirdly, this study intends to demonstrate that
Said’s writing to and on the Arab-Islamic world, and particularly his writing on
Palestine-Israel, exemplifies what Said calls “secular” criticism, the quintessential
activity of the humanist intellectual/activist.
Comprehensive analysis of Said’s oeuvre reveals not two disparate areas of
endeavor broadly labeled “literary/cultural criticism” and “Middle East politics;”
2
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978).
See Paul A. Bové’s analysis of Said i Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of
Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.) The term critical
humanism is used by Paul Bové to describe the intellectual projects that have
endeavored to re-construct humanism with the idea that, contrary to traditional
humanism, the goal of humanism is the emancipation of humanity from oppressive
systems, whether rooted in religious epistemologies, political ideologies, economic
or social systems (or all of these.)
3
9
rather, Said’s oeuvre consists of an unfolding over a forty year period of one unified
body of work whose foundation is a critical humanism formulated on the classical
idea that what is human is set apart both from the rest of nature and from the
supernatural or metaphysical;4 and that everything human, ”wherever it may be
found and however remote it may be from the more vivid presence of the
parochial,” is the realm of humanism.5 For Said, humanistic self-knowledge, as the
Muslim Indian philosopher Akeel Bilgrami points out in his preface to Said’s
posthumously published Humanism and Democratic Criticism, is linked inextricably
to the urgent task of exploring the creations and monuments of the human and,
most importantly, extending the scope of humanism’s concern to the whole of
humanity rather than maintaining it within the geographical boundaries of “our
Western, metropolitan sites of self-interest.”6
Central to Said’s conception of humanism is the idea that self-knowledge must
be understood as a process involved in, even constituted by, self-criticism, the truly
unique aspect of the human ability to know the self. Humanistic knowledge then-arts and letters, language and literature—in fact the whole constellation we call “the
humanities”—must engage both in knowledge and valuing of both “Self” and
“Other” in order to accomplish its own mission. In this conception of humanism,
the idea of the use of knowledge as power enabling the domination or
subordination of the “Other” stands in opposition to humanism’s central goal. Said’s
4
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), x.
5
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, x.
6
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, x.
10
notion of humanism then necessitates the interrogation of much knowledge and
representation that has been considered to be humanistic.7 For Said, the goal of
humanism is help emancipate mankind from oppressive systems, and for him this
is a goal to be achieved for all of humanity not just a self-selected portion of it.
To be fully human, in Said’s view, the “Self,” in its encounter with the “Other”
develops self- knowledge through self-criticism because the “Other” is both “source
and resource” for self-knowledge.8 The reciprocal process of self-knowledge/selfcriticism results in what Saree Makdisi, in his discussion of Edward Said’s
humanism, calls “the humanism of liberation.”9 Said calls it a “non-humanist
humanism.”10 However, humanism, in Said’s view, as well as those anti-humanists
beginning with Nietzsche, had lost (if it ever had) its emancipatory role and had
settled into a highly academic endeavor of extolling the monuments of western
civilization while universal human rights and emancipation from oppressive
7
In the introduction to Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and
Representation, editors Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, write for example,
“Said’s appreciation for literature did not extend to romanticizing it, which would
have called for denying the political realities of empire at the time of a work’s
composition. One of the axioms of what he called his ‘contemporary reality’ was
the blurring of distinctions between ‘pure and political knowledge.’ Through this
hermeneutics of literature, critics need to place works of fiction in historical context.
By extension, they have a duty to express narratives representing subaltern
cultures and histories while preserving the ability to critique them as works of
literature…” (10) Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, eds.,Edward Said: A Legacy
of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2010), 9-10.
8
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, xii.
9
See William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said (Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2009), “Edward W. Said and the Poststructuralists,” 1-25: “An
Introduction.”
10
Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 77.
11
systems remained a distant ideal to which traditional Western humanism might
give lip-service –but which humanists did not maintain as their central mission.
In the expression “non-humanist humanism,” Said implies the difference
between his own notion of humanism and the post-Enlightenment Western
humanism of the universities and intellectual circles. Said seeks to re-orient
humanism toward a worldly praxis in which leading public intellectuals would
engage through social, political and other types of criticism. Said simultaneously
rejects both Right and Left “anti-humanism.”11 Though initially drawn to the thought
and methodology of poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida, Said, by the late seventies had become critical of poststructuralism as a
critique of humanism.12
Though he had appropriated concepts, practices and
tools of analysis inaugurated by poststructuralists –from the genealogical method
to Foucault’s concept of discourse and episteme, Said remained committed to four
primary principles of humanism: firstly, that the human is defined by his difference
from the rest of the natural world as well as from the transcendental or
supernatural; secondly, that our highest value should be the emancipation of the
human being from tyranny of every sort; thirdly, that all that is human should be
the object of human regard and concern for the purposes of self-knowledge/selfcriticism; and finally, that in spite of the structures and hegemony of power, human
See Spanos, 2009, 2-3. See also Paul A. Bove, “Continuing the Conversation,”
in Homi Bhaba and W. J. T Mitchell, editors, Edward Said: Continuing the
Conversation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36-42.
11
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said, 1-25: “ An Introduction,” and 70-110:
“Orientalism: Foucault, Genealogy, History.”
12
12
agency is yet possible.13 Related to these principles, Said insists that the
humanist, to be worthy of the name, must, through his intellectual production,
function in the public square to lead the charge toward universal emancipation from
tyrannical systems. Humanistic work then should facilitate opposition to systems of
mind and culture that prevent critical thought and action. This idea of humanism
sees the role of the humanist as one who furthers the ability of the “Self” to remain
in a dialogue with the “Other”--this in a continuous dynamic of reflection and selfcriticism. Knowledge of “Self” and “Other” for Said must further the goal of human
emancipation rather than participate in, support, or acquiesce to systems that
result in human oppression. Though Said loved the works of traditional humanism
as aesthetic creations, he questioned whether many humanistic works and their
authors ultimately contributed to the emancipatory goals of humanism. He further
questioned whether the critics of society, literature, and culture were furthering the
liberatory objectives of criticism or simply upholding and glorifying civilizational
R. Radhakrishnan critiques Said’s humanism for what he sees as contradictory
distinctions in “Edward Said’s Literary Humanism” (Cultural Critique 67 [Fall 2007]:
24-25: “Does Said really believe that he can hold on to the good vibes and
connotations of the mere adjective ‘essential,’ while at the same time cast himself
as an uncompromising antagonist of ‘essentialism’ as a philosophical-theoreticalepistemological position?…. Not an ontological thinker and not a philosopher, Said
chooses not to do battle with essentialism per se, but with identitarian historical
modes of living and being that are underwritten by essentialism, in particular,
nationalism.”
13
Why then does Said, who believes in, or would like to believe in, the
epistemological assailability of humanism, not take poststructuralism to heart
(poststructuralism whose very life breath is the ‘death of essentialism’); or for that
matter Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’ which Said rightly identifies as a
‘thorough examination of its [humanism’s] metaphysical relationship to a prior
Being,’ but only to say, as a consequence, that ‘what really concerns me is
humanism as a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics?’ Would not the
epistemological deconstruction of humanism be perfectly compatible with Said’s
critical text?”
13
monuments—and thereby behaving as servile acolytes of a dominant and
domineering Europe that had subjugated and sacrificed large portions of humanity
on the altars of imperial gods.
Said’s oeuvre as a whole aims to effectuate the re-(en)vision(ing) and reorientation of humanism, reclaiming its liberatory mission, and highlighting the
paradoxes of conventional humanism and anti-humanism, both of which had
become, to Said’s mind, dogmatic, narrow, and grounded in parochial rather than
universal concerns. The work of the intellectual, rather than upholding and
glorifying the “great works” of civilization, must, in Said’s view, be the work of
social, cultural, and political criticism. Said is a believer in the possibility of human
agency and specifically in the role of the intellectual who is
not a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in it. And
because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction
where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or
what we might also call criticism. A knowledge of history, a recognition of
the importance of social circumstance, an analytical capacity for making
distinctions: these trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably
at home among one’s people, supported by known powers and acceptable
values, protected against the outside world.”14
Though the anti-humanists starting with Nietszche attempted to de-struct or
deconstruct the ontotheological tradition through their critique of the Greco-Roman
Logos, the Christian theo-logos, and the Enlightenment anthropo-logos,15 Said’s
rejection of traditional humanism as well as Left anti-humanism hinges on what he
sees as the “return of repressed religiosity”16 in nationalism, Orientalism and
14
Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 15-16.
15
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said, 21.
16
William D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46.
14
imperialism –and perhaps ironically, in the poststructuralist critiques of culture,
society, and traditional humanism. Said, after Antonio Gramsci,17 conceives of
“secular” criticism as seeking to uncover and even undo the workings of culture—
that powerful, unconscious, pervasive influence over human thought and action
that acts in a hegemonic way over the life of a society. Said’s concern for the
retreat of the intellectuals18 of the humanities is expressed in his charge that
“Literary theory” (Left and Right) “has turned its back on” …”the social world,
human life, and of course the historical moment in which they are located or
interpreted.”19 Said’s criticism of poststructuralism as well as of nationalism,
neoimperialism, Orientalism, colonialism and the systems that support the
dispossession of peoples from their native lands and the denial of basic human
rights, begins to take on a more political tone and becomes more polemical by the
late nineteen seventies. Said’s notion of “secular” criticism and the “critical
consciousness” ramps up in the nineteen eighties and is expressed in dramatic
religious rhetoric in the following passage:
Said, 1978, 7. See Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in Antonio Gramsci,
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and Quintin Hoare, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971); also see Adam David
Morton, Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global
Political Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2007.)
17
Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic , 2., 14-15 “This is the trahison des
clercs of which Julien Benda spoke in the 1920s. Expertise in foreign affairs, for
example, has usually meant legitimization of the conduct of foreign policy and,
what is more to the point, the sustained investment in revalidating the role of
experts in foreign affairs.”
18
19
Edward Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 4, 14-15. Said discusses Benda’s idea about the
vocation of the intellectual to stand against “organized collective passions.” He
also discusses Gramsci’s organic vs. traditional intellectual.
15
…with the ascendancy of Reaganism…a massive turn to the right on
matters touching the economy, social services and organized labor. In
having given up the world entirely (my emphasis) for the aporias and
unthinkable paradoxes of a text, contemporary criticism has retreated
from its constituency, the citizens of modern society, who have been left
to the hands of ‘free’ market forces, multinational corporations, the
manipulations of consumer appetites. A precious jargon has grown up,
and its formidable complexities obscure the social realities….
Criticism can no longer cooperate in or pretend to ignore this enterprise. It is
not practicing criticism either to validate the status quo or to join up with a
priestly caste of acolytes and dogmatic metaphysicians….(my emphasis)
The realities of power and authority—as well as the resistances offered by
men, women and social movements to institutions, authorities, and
orthodoxies (my emphasis)—are the realities that make texts possible, that
deliver them to their readers, that solicit the attention of critics. I propose
that these realities are what should be taken account of by criticism and the
critical consciousness.20
Because both humanism as a post-Enlightenment phenomenon and the
antihumanist twentieth century reaction to humanism’s failures imagine themselves
as eminently secular, in his rhetorical use of terms such as “the religious” and “the
secular,” Said creates a trope intended as a critical tool of irony. In the chapters
“Religious Criticism,” and “Secular Criticism,” in The World, The Text, and the
Critic, as in numerous other places, Said utilizes this trope, rhetorically framing its
message: that the activity of criticism must be the work of the intellectual lest
solidarity with the status quo and with “the tradition” turn into “religion.” The
following is an example in which the religious-secular trope is used to make his
point about the work of the critic:
The idea of the Orient, very much like the idea of the West that is its
polar opposite, has functioned as an inhibition on what I have been
20
Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 4-5. (italics are my emphasis,
highlighting Said’s use of words conveying associations with religion/ the
religious.)
16
calling secular criticism. Orientalism is the discourse derived from
and dependent on “the Orient.” To say of such grand ideas and
their discourse that they have something in common with religious
discourse is to say that each serves as an agent of closure, shutting
off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the
authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the otherworldly. Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of
authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to
compel complete subservience or to gain adherents. This in turn
gives rise to organized collective passions whose social and
intellectual results are often disastrous. The persistence of these
and other religious-cultural effects testifies amply to what seem to
be necessary features of human life, the need for certainty, group
solidarity, and a sense of communal belonging. Sometimes of
course these things are beneficial. (my emphasis) Still it is also true
that what a secular attitude enables—a sense of history and of
human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the
various official idols venerated by culture and by system—is
diminished, if not eliminated, by appeals to what cannot be thought
through and explained, except by consensus and appeals to
authority.21
What is significant about Said’s scattered, rhetorical usages of the words
“secular,” “religious,” “adherents,” “idols” and other terminology that displays a
positive regard for the secular and a negative regard for the religious? Though this
is a salient element in Said’s work, scant attention was paid to it until William D.
Hart’s s 2000 book entitled Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture.22
The present thesis began as an argument on the significance of Said’s concept
of “secular criticism” and its relationship to Said’s work on the Arab Islamic world,
and more specifically on Said’s work on the Palestinian-Israeli problematic. It will
21
Said The World, The Text, and The Critic, 290.
22Hart’s
Princeton University Dissertation: Religious Traditions and Secular
Criticism: Edward Said as Cultural Critic, 1993 was the basis for the 2000 book,
Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture.
17
offer a very different interpretation to that of Hart whose analysis employs a
polemical methodology aimed at showing Said to be anti-religion but selfcontradictorily pro-Islam. In contrast, the current study is based in a hermeneutical
and phenomenological method that aims to show that Said is neither anti-religion
nor pro-Islam though as a humanist, he sees a place for religious epistemologies
provided they do not have oppressive political consequences that increase unjust
systems. What previous work on Said’s notion of the secular have not done is to
explore the connections among Said’s existential and intellectual genealogy, his
epistemology, and his notions of criticism and humanism as evidenced in his
ouevre. This thesis aims to make these connections explicit in an effort to argue
the significance of Said’s notion of the secular, particularly in his writing on the
Arab Islamic world and the problematic of Palestine-Israel.
As the present study began in 2009 to take shape arguing against Hart’s
interpretation, Matthieu E. Courville, published a University of Ottawa thesis
entitled Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular.23 Courville links Said’s rhetoric to
an implicit critical theory of the religious and the secular. Also, published in recent
years have been analyses that touch on the the religious-secular trope in Said’s
works.24 However, what still remains to be done is to understand this trope in
Mathieu E. Courville, Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular (New York:
Continuum Press, 2010).
23
Other than Hart’s major book, most of these attempts are in the form of journal
articles or book chapters. Among those writing on the topic of Said’s view of the
secular and/or the religious are William V. Spanos, Stathis Gourgouris, Aamir
Mufti, Gauri Viswanathan, Bruce Robbins. Besides William V. Spanos, 2009 book,
previously cited, see William V. Spanos. Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and
Edward W. Said in Counterpoint (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).
Also see the following: Bruce Robbins, “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other
Transgressions: On Edward Said’s ‘Voyage In’”(1994), in Feeling Global:
24
18
Said’s writing in relation to the aims and purposes of Said’s entire oeuvre.
Furthermore, the connections between Said’s notion of the “secular” and his
practice of “secular’ criticism have not been fully examined. The argument of the
present study incorporates the contributions of these scholars and expands upon
them to offer a reading of Said’s work that sees Said’s trope of the “religious” and
“secular” as a tool in Said’s attempt to re-orient humanism and to model what he
calls “secular” criticism. To establish the significance of this trope in relation to
Said’s work on the Arab Islamic world and particularly his twenty-five year critical
engagement with the Palestinian-Israeli problematic is imperative because such a
body of work on “representation and emancipation”25 should not be understood as
has been claimed as the intellectual rant of the post-colonial subject, “the empire
writing back,”26 “Ph.D. cataloguing of what the West did to the East…,”.”27 or any
other overly simplified dismissal of such a major critical effort. Rather, it is hoped
that the case can be made both to see Said’s oeuvre as a life-long project of
Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 115-26;
Stathis Gourgouris, "Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular
Criticism," Social Text 24, no. 2 87 (2006); Aamir R. Mufti, "Auerbach in Istanbul:
Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture," Critical
Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1998): 95-125; Gauri Viswanathan, “Said, Religion, and Secular
Criticism,” in Edward W. Said, Müge Gürsoy. Sökmen, and Bașak Ertür, Waiting for
the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said (London: Verso Press) 2008; Bruce
Robbins, "Homelessness and Worldliness," Diacritics 13, no. 3 (Fall: 1983): 69.
25
From the title of Iskandar and Rustom,eds., Edward Said: A Legacy of
Emancipation and Representation.
26
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory
and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).
27
Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2007), xii. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge:
Orientalism and Its Discontents (New York: Overlook, 2006), 280.
19
secular criticism, most effectively modeled in Said’s significant production on the
question of Palestine-Israel.
Hart has set the parameters of the questions that must be re-visited in regard to
what Said’s religious-secular rhetoric means. It is therefore necessary to examine
the question that Said’s rhetorical treatment of the religious and the secular raises:
Is it part of a secularist agenda that is in irresolvable tension with and contradictory
to Said’s perceived “defense” of Islam and the Arab-Islamic world as is claimed by
a number of his commentators?28 Hart states, for example:
Said’s hostile critique of religion stands in sharp contrast to his defense of
Islam. Why is this? Does it support the contention of some of his critics that
he is ‘soft’ on Islam, an apologist, a secret admirer? How does he manage
the feat of criticizing religion and defending Islam? For good or for ill, Islam
is regarded as a constitutive feature of Arab and Oriental identity. For
pragmatic reasons, Said accepts this association. So he feels compelled to
defend Islam and thus Arabs and Orientals against the misrepresentations
of Orientalism. The reader should note well, in what follows, the specificity
and sympathetic character of Said’s account of Islam compared to his
abstract and hostile depiction of religion.29
Contrary to Hart’s view, the present study sees the religious-secular trope in
Said as a tool meant to stimulate social, political and cultural criticism, not to attack
religion and yet defend Islam. Furthermore, this study seeks to show that Said’s
writing on Palestine-Israel and on the Arab Islamic world is “secular” criticism and
28
Hart, Edward Said the the Religious Effects of Culture,76.. As has been noted
earlier, surprisingly, Courville also misinterprets Said’s writing on Islam and the
Arab-Islamic world as a defense of Islam and the world of Islam, which is baffling
because as shall be shown, Courville is a perceptive and thoughtful interpreter of
Said. See Courville, 2010, 68.
29
Hart, Edward Said the Religious Effects of Culture , 76.
20
as such is synecdochal of his major conceptual and practical contribution to
contemporary thought: “secular” criticism and a humanism of liberation. The
conclusion of the present study is precisely that the value of Said’s work on the
Arab Islamic world and Palestine-Israel is that it models a useful, practicable model
of humanism and its centrally important practice of criticism. It may be called
“secular” (deriving from the Latin root saeculum) because it is carried out in the
world, has effects on the world, and is done to improve the world. It resonates with
Marx’s famous dictum: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The
point, however, is to change it in various ways.”30
Chapter Plan, Methodology, and Review of the Literature
This thesis argues that Said’s use of the term “secular” before the word
“criticism” and before “humanism” bears neither its denoted nor its connoted
meaning, but rather conveys a unique—perhaps it should be called “eccentric”-meaning for Said. The implication of this assertion is that while Said’s humanism
and hence, the underlying premises of his thought, emanate from a non-religious
worldview and a social constructivist epistemology, contrary to the interpretation of
William D. Hart in his book Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, Said
is not arguing against religion and in favor of secularism.31 Secularism is not
30
Theses on Feurbach, Karl Marx, XII, accessed December 28, 2011,
http://www.marxist.com/classics-old/marxengels/thesesfeur.html.
Courville’s thesis Edward Said and the Rhetoric of the Secular argues this as
well, seeing Said’s work and the trope of the secular as a critical theory of the
religious and the secular. The present argument extends this line of thinking to
examine Said’s work on the Arab-Islamic world and especially his writing on the
31
21
humanism though they share points of convergence. Said is a non-religious
humanist, not a secularist. Neither Said nor Said’s idea of humanism denies
religion the possibility of an emancipatory role for humanity, provided that religion
does not become and is not conflated with political ideology. Similarly, Said’s
negatively charged implications for words like “religious” and “theological” and
positively charged implications for the word “secular” are not intended to convey a
rejection of religion qua religion. What Said is interested in combatting is ideology
that paradoxically devolves to idolatry of systems and dogmas that result in human
oppression, injustice, and suffering.
The role of Said’s “exilic” consciousness is central to Said’s emancipatory
vision.32 This conclusion is drawn from an examination of the existential and
historical context from which the young humanist Said emerges. It becomes clear
in chapter one how a critical consciousness and attitudes toward the religious, the
theological, and the metaphysical arise out of various types of experiences of
problematic of Palestine-Israel as synecdoche—i.e., the part represents the
whole—of Said’s entire critical project.
32
Spanos, Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint,
2, analyzes the theme of exile, the secular and the city, referring frequently to Said
and Arendt’s “exilic” consciousness--what Said terms in his article “Secular
Criticism” in The World The Text and the Critic, as “critical consciousness.” Said,
1983, 16. R. Radhakrishnan in a review of Spanos’ book writes: “The arguments
on behalf of exilic consciousness are worked out by way of Said and Arendt, and
the complex positions taken by these authors are interpreted and contextualized
from a sophisticated theoretical perspective that blends the progressive politics of
humanism with the theoretical rigor of poststructuralist critique.”
https://ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?books/book%20pages/spanos%20exiles.html,
accessed, December 20, 2013. See also, Robert Spencer’s “‘Contented Homeland
Peace’: The Motif of Exile in Edward Said” in Iskandar and Rustom, 2010, 389-413
for an excellent analysis. See also Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and
Other Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000),
especially the introduction, “Criticism and Exile, ” xi-xxxv, and an essay by the
same title: “Reflections on Exile,”173-186.
22
exile—physical, social, and cultural. Said’s existential uprootedness and his
subsequent attraction to thinkers who were also exiles, such as Erich Auerbach,
Joseph Conrad and Theodore Adorno, and those who were concerned primarily
with questions of the quest for universal justice and human rights, such as Antonio
Gramsci and Frantz Fanon,33 and not surprisingly Arab and other third world
intellectuals, are treated in chapters one and two. The connections between the
centrality of Said’s early life experiences and his later intellectual concerns and
constructions of the religious and the secular are examined in the first two
chapters. Said’s life experiences and the historical circumstances in which the
people of historical Palestine (as did the rest of the non-Western world)
experienced the opposite of the Enlightenment’s lofty goals at the hands of
Western Europe’s colonizing armies and immigrants, provide the existential
catalyst for Said’s engagement with these questions.
The purpose of chapters one and two is to lay the groundwork for
understanding Said’s project of criticism, the core of which has been focused on
diagnosing the ironic deformations that have occurred in post-Enlightenment
modernity. Said’s paradoxical critiques of humanistic work such as that of the
Orientalists and his simultaneous ironic attachment to humanism, albeit a “nonhumanist humanism,” are concerned with the way in which post- Enlightenment
intellectual production has been selectively and ingenuously utilized and have
resulted, not in human emancipation, but in destructive and oppressive historical
30 Said
frequently references the work of the Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon as a
theorist of human liberation. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York:
Grove Press, 2008), Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington, The
Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1965), Frantz Fanon, A Dying
Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
23
facts across vast swathes of the globe in the past three centuries.34 The antihumanists and poststructuralists such as Foucault that Said initially saw as
addressing the failures of humanism provided Said with both the archeological and
genealogical method that he uses to critique the traditional humanists of
Orientalism.
Following Nietzsche’s critique of “science,”35 and the genealogical critical
methodology inaugurated by him and developed famously by Foucault as well as
Heidegger,36 the early Said in Beginnings: Intention and Method positively
assesses and later utilizes genealogy as a critical method.37 He also uses this
methodology in Orientalism to expose the relationship between Western
34
See Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said, “Said and the Poststructuralists, 1-25.
See Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said “Heidegger, Foucault, and the Empire
of the Gaze: Thinking the Territorialization of Knowledge,” 26-69.
36
See Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said “Heidegger, Foucault, and the Empire
of the Gaze: Thinking the Territorialization of Knowledge,” 26-69.
36
37
In Edward W. Said. Beginnings: Intention and Method. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1975).
Said’s ideas are influenced by Michel Foucault’s 1961 Madness and Civilization,
his 1963 The Birth of the Clinic, his 1966 The Order of Things, and his 1971 The
Discourse of Language. This is Foucault the archealogist/structuralist. Later
Foucault, and with him Said, throws structuralism overboard as an essentially
metaphysical scheme. See Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power”, Power/Knowledge,
112-113, in which Foucault says of his earlier analyses, mentioned above, “…what
was lacking (in his archaeological phase) was the problem of the ‘discursive
regime,’ of the effects of power peculiar to the play of statements. I confused this
too much with systematicity, theoretical form, or something like a paradigm. The
same problem of power, which at that time I had not yet properly isolated, emerges
in two very different aspects at the point of juncture of Madness and Civilization
and The Order of Things.”
24
knowledge of the Orient and the power used to subjugate it38 and again in Culture
and Imperialism to demonstrate the responses that colonial and postcolonial
intellectuals formulated to the knowledge/power relationship, utilizing knowledge
and cultural production as a tool of resistance.39 However, in contrast to the antihumanist left, Said ultimately decides to remain within humanism for a variety of
reasons that shall be clarified.
To establish the relationship of Said’s first two books to his life-long critical
project, the second chapter demonstrates how Said’s existential and intellectual
genealogy and the concerns that would remain central throughout his oeuvre, are
already present in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography40 and in
Beginnings: Intention and Method, two major works that precede Orientalism. One
claim we wish to make concerning these books, though very different in style and
method to those from Orientalism on, do present the themes that occupied Said
until his death, initiating the development of his “humanism of liberation.” Contrary
to claims that these works are of minor importance and are to be seen as set apart
from the body of Said’s major works, the present thesis argues that they are
organically rooted both to Said’s historical moment and to the thought and body of
work that he is most associated with --Orientalism.
See Said, Orientalism, 127, in which Said acknowledges his debt to Foucault’s
analysis of the relations between the classificatory table and disciplinary power.
See Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 248, note number 11.
38
39
40
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
Edward W. Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1966, 2008).
25
Abdirahman Hussein argues that Said’s “critical practice has potentially
revolutionary implications for the humanities and social sciences” and that his
oeuvre defines Said as a “radical humanist” dedicated to “enhancing, amplifying
and extending the best that secularism has to offer an increasingly globalized
world, while also exposing modernity’s scandalous secrets, its unacknowledged or
deliberately suppressed barbarism.”41 The argument of the present study sees
Hussein’s interchanging humanism and secularism as a mischaracterization but
finds Hussein’s overall analysis of Said’s ouevre to be on of the most insightful and
thorough and has uniquely captured the true relationship of Said’s first two books
to the rest of his project accurately.
The third chapter of this thesis aims to explicate Said’s catachrestical use
of the words “secular” and “religious.” Among scholars of religion in particular, the
significance of Said’s rhetoric is contested: Is Said’s religious-secular trope
expressive of his ideas about religion and secularism? Does this trope express
what Hart sees as a Manichean dualism42 in his approach to religion and
secularism which is in contradiction with Said’s professed anti-essentialism?
These questions are taken up in chapter three where Hart’s thesis is examined. In
Abdirahman A. Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of
Metaphysics and Theology, in Iskandar and Rustom, eds., Edward Said: A Legacy
of Emancipation and Representation, 415. While Hussein’s statement generally
illuminates Said’s project well, his choice of the word “secularism” seems
inaccurate if it is meant to say that Said sought to foster the secular over the
religious in an ideological way. Said was precisely anti-ideology, including the
ideology of secularism. Even the best minds tend to conflate humanism with
secularism. Secularism has multiple meanings and it is impossible to tell which
meaning Hussein is employing here. Humanism is the more accurate epithet
Hussein might have used.
41
Hart, Edward Said the Religious Effects of Culture. Hart sees Said’s thought as
paradoxically Manichean. See his statements on 8, 11, 41.
42
26
chapters three and four interpretations of other commentators on Said’s notion of
secular criticism such as Vincent P. Pecora,43 Giles Gunn,44 Stathis Gourgouris45
and Aamir Mufti46 are presented in relation to Hart’s inaugural thesis on Said’s
religious-secular thematic.
An alternative interpretation to that of Hart is that this trope points to an implicit
critical theory of the religious and the secular in Said’s thought as Canadian
scholar of religion Mathieu Courville suggests. Chapter four examines the evidence
for Courville’s interpretation and looks at the related and germane ideas of other
Said commentators including Spanos, Viswanathan and Pecora. Is Said’s notion of
the secular, or what Said also calls “worldly” orientation to action and criticism,
consistent with a humanistic critique of religion or is it more consistent with poststructuralist critique as Spanos insists in spite of Said’s assaults on the poststructuralists’ “religious” tendencies?47 Chapter four examines the evidence for
these conflicting claims. Also in the fourth chapter, the possibility that Said
43
Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and
Modernity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
44
Giles B. Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987).
45
See Stathis Gourgouris, "Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular
Criticism,” Social Text 24, no. 2 87, 2006, and “Transformation, Not
Transcendence,” in Aamir Mufti, ed., Critical Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004),55-79.
46
See Aamir Mufti, ed., Critical Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004) “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,” 1-9.
47
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, and Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt
and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint. In both books, Spanos, a poststructuralist
humanist argues that Said is also both poststructuralist and humanist, but that Said
overgeneralized all poststructuralism to be anti-humanist.
27
recognized in Islam the liberatory potential of its message is explored in an
exposition of Gauri Viswanathan’s essay, “Said, Religion and Secular Criticism”48
and in answer to both Hart’s and Courville’s assertions that Said’s attitude to Islam
is defensive.
After having examined the perspectives of these commentators on Said’s notion
of the religious and the secular, the present study argues for the place of this
rhetoric as a tool Said employs to further his central case that a critical humanism
focused on universal human rights and justice is still man’s best hope over and
against anti-humanism and that the role of the leading intellectual is to practice
secular criticism bravely and openly, willing to withstand the assaults from every
side. When we examine the full meaning of what Said means by humanism, it
becomes clear that for him the term “secular” humanism does not contain a
redundancy, nor is it coeval with the manifesto of those who identify themselves as
secular Humanists, (upper case H); rather it serves to distinguish what Said means
by humanism from what humanism had become. Said’s notion of humanism
opposes post-Enlightenment humanism because attachment to solidarities based
in dogmatic systems even when they posit no transcendent Being, Creator, God,
Origin, First Cause or other super-natural or meta-physical essence or existence
result in the same oppressive structures, systems, and effects on the world as the
religious systems they seek to replace. Said’s humanism, like the anti-humanism of
the poststructuralists, also seeks to critique the self-contradictions in a Western
world that portrays its values, world view and culture as the source of human
liberation while devouring non-Western lands and their resources, destroying
48
Gauri Viswanathan, in Sökmen and Ertür, Waiting for the Barbarians, 164-175.
28
indigenous cultures, suppressing any opposition, and maiming and murdering
native inhabitants. To restate the claim of the present work: Saidian humanism is
not seen by Said as an antidote to religion; it is an antidote to ideology—whether
religious or secular-- as enslaving idolatry. This is an important distinction that has
not been articulated previously.
Said’s critique of both traditional humanistic scholarship exemplified by the
Orientalist scholars as well as the work of the poststructuralist theorists exposes
behaviors of both groups who would seem to have little in common with all that had
been traditionally associated with religion and religious behavior, i.e. blind
adherence to doctrine, otherworldly focus, and the tendency to create new objects
of worship (idolatry) out of texts and schools of thought, that are held to be
previously liberated from the realm of religion and its authority, or, in common
parlance “secular.” Said’s premise is that with the transfiguration of religion to
culture,49 new forms of idolatry have developed under the guise of humanistic
studies and poststructuralist theory, not to mention fundamentalist revivals within
religions, most of which form the basis for a counter-cultural resistance to Western
hegemony.50 All of this calls into question what the secularization process and the
49
This phrase should be explicated with at least a brief history of this multi-leveled
historical process of the transfiguration of religion to nationalism and the general
category of culture. Hart’s account in Chapter 1, “Culture as the transfiguration of
religious thought,” is an excellent analysis. Also see Vincent Pecora,
Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity, chapter
three, “Durkheim’s Modernity,” and chapter four “Arnoldian Ethnology.”
50
See Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabiʻ, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the
Modern Arab World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) for an
exploration of the development of the idea of a return to a perceived pure Islam as
a vehicle of resistance to the West. Both Abu Rabi’ and Said believe that such
ideas are based on false assumptions of a recoverable or original purity. Both
29
project of modernity51 have accomplished in terms of emancipating human thought
and behavior from the bondage of unexamined, culturally induced allegiances to
family, tribe, nation, religion, or other ideological and social groupings. Said’s call
for secular criticism is, in the end, a call to oppose idolatry because idolatry turns
that which is finite into “the sacred.” This too is a highly significant element in
Said’s thought that has not been previously highlighted or given the attention it
deserves.
After examining various interpretations of Said’s religious-secular rhetoric, the
present study offers the thesis that Said’s writing on the Arab Islamic world (and
addressed to that world) a body of writing that includes his writing on PalestineIsrael, is Said’s exemplification of what he means by “secular” criticism. This is a
novel argument and understanding the significance of Said’s notion of secular
criticism is essential to a comprehensive analysis of Said’s oeuvre. For this
reason, Chapter five focuses on examples of Said’s lesser known and relatively
unexamined writing on Islam and the Arab Islamic world demonstrating that Said’s
positions are consonant with his role as a “secular” humanist and that they do not
conflict with his estimation of Islam both as a religion and as a civilization with a
strong tradition of debate, critical thought, and tolerance for diverse schools and
currents of religious thought. Said’s objective in his writing on the Arab-Islamic
world and on the question of Palestine is to return the project of criticism of culture
and knowledge production to what he sees as the truly “secular” (from the Latin
eschew simplistic ideas that engage in overgeneralizations such as the Muslim
Brotherhood slogan expresses in its “Islam is the answer.”
51
See Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and
Modernity, 92.
30
root saeculum),52 which, in its focus on the time, place, and needs of the human
being in this world, is the historical, political world of real human beings and their
struggles for emancipation from oppressive systems. Furthermore, Said proposes
that the work of truly secular criticism emanates only from a particular type of
consciousness that eschews identitarian thinking and for which the experience of
exile, of willed homelessness, of not being at home in one’s home, is requisite. 53 It
should be noted that Orientalism and the voluminous commentary on it is not a
major focus of chapter five. While Orientalism is considered to be Said’s major
thesis on the use of knowledge as power made by the West in relation to the Arab
Islamic world, this study takes the view that Orientalism is an opening argument,
the basic thesis of which is correct, but which is flawed in several ways which both
sympathetic and antagonistic commentators have argued. The argument of the
present study is that The Question of Palestine and Said’s subsequent writings,
interviews and lectures of twenty-five years on the Palestinian-Israeli problematic is
the case-study providing the support for the basic argument of Orientalism.
See Millbank’s discussion of the meaning of “saeculum” from which “secular” is
derived. John Millbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular
Reason,(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9. See Pecora, Secularization and Cultural
Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity, 2.
52
53
Said, his family and the Palestinian people, having been exiled in 1948,
experienced actual physical exile but he also acknowledges the value of
metaphorical exile as well. He speaks of “the ascetic code of willed homelessness”
in his eloquent discussion of Erich Auerbach’s magisterial production of Mimesis:
the representation of reality in Western Literature in exile in Istanbul during the
Nazi reign in Germany from which as a Jew he had fled. More will be said about
Said’s appreciation of Auerbach, the influence of his exilic consciousness on Said
in chapter 2. The concept of not being at home in one’s home as an aspect of
morality is that of Theodore Adorno for whom this notion was central. See Theodor
W. Adorno and E. F. N. Jephcott, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged
Life (London: Verso, 1978). See Caren Kaplan’s excellent analysis of the meaning
of willed homelessness in Said: Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern
Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 16-118.
31
Furthermore, it is in this work and that on the Arab Islamic world that Said
concretely develops the meaning of “secular” criticism which is exemplified in his
journal and newspaper editorials addressed primarily to the Arab world but also
published in capitals around the world. In chapter five then, examinations of key
elements of Said’s writing about Islam and the Arab world--what he does, how he
does it—develops the argument of this study.
Finally, in chapter six, Said’s work on the problematic of Palestine-Israel is
presented as the most concrete exemplification of Said’s concept of “secular”
criticism and as Said’s most important and best work, a claim that even one of
Said’s strongest opponents, Robert Irwin, does not argue against.54 It is his best
work because it models what Said advocates, representing a sustained example of
what the “humanism of liberation” seeks to bring about. It is highly idealistic and it
is clearly futuristic in vision. This study then sees an inseparable and organic
connection between Said’s “political” writing on Palestine and the Arab Muslim
world –which has often been inaccurately interpreted as a personal and passionate
endeavor set apart from his professional expertise and training –and his work as a
humanist, a comparatist, a literary critic, and a critic of society and culture.
54
Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London,
England: Allen Lane, 2006), 4. Though in this book, on page 3 Irwin states in the
Introduction that Orientalism seems to him to be “a work of malignant charlatanry in
which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentation,” of his
work on the Palestinian question, he writes on page 4: “ I have no significant
disagreements with what Said has written about Palestine, Israel, Kipling’s Kim, or
Glenn Gould’s piano playing. ”See also, Ahmad Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 186 and 198, where Ahmed, an Indian Marxist
who attacks Said stridently in the chapter entitled “Orientalism and After,” finds
Said’s work on Palestine-Israel to “constitute not only the most enduring part of
Said’s work but also, by any standards, the most persuasive insertion of a national
liberation struggle into the American imagination, which is otherwise substantially
formed by Zionist-colonial presumptions.”
32
While the way in which Said has adopted and valued the methodology
(archaeology/genealogy) and conceptual tools (discourse, episteme) of Foucault
has been seen as evidence of Said’s affinity with poststructuralist critique, Said
avers that he prefers to understand his own work as criticizing humanism in the
name of humanism.55 His oeuvre has been aptly characterized as “diagnostic” in its
uncovering of the discrepancies between humanism’s professed aims and its
historical realities.56 Much has been written about Said’s assaults upon Foucault
and Derrida and other poststructuralists, as well as on his attack on Orientalists,
Right antihumanists of the American neo-conservative stripe, his late reidentification with humanism, and his paradoxical employment of poststructuralist
methodologies and concepts.57 Indeed the effort to establish Said in one camp or
the other has resulted in an extraordinary debate and a good deal of serious
thought about the paradoxes of both humanism and antihumanism and the
impossibility of pigeon-holing Said.
The concluding chapter of this study offers an analysis of the merits of Said’s
rhetoric of the religious and the secular and his notion and practice of secular
criticism in his humanism of liberation. A question to return to is whether Said’s
55
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 11.
56
Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso,
2002, 12. Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and
Spivak(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 115. Both Hussein
and Varadharajan use the term “diagnostic” in reference to Said’s project on
culture pointing to a major aim of Said’s intention.
57
For this last he is criticized by commentators of diverse affiliations--from Aijaz
Ahmed (Indian Marxist) in In Theory to Paul Clifford (poststructuralist) in
Predicament of Culture. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentiethcentury Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University
Press, 1988).
33
religious-secular rhetoric is an effective tool of Said’s “humanism of liberation.” To
this end, we reflect on the effectiveness of Said’s effort to re-orient and re-construct
humanism throughout the prolific writings, interviews, and lectures that compose
his oeuvre. Finally, we reflect on the value and significance of Said’s work written
to and on the Arab Islamic world and on the problematic of Palestine-Israel as an
enduring model of secular criticism in the execution of the mission of the humanist
of liberation.
34
Chapter One :
Existential Roots of Edward W. Said’s Notion of the Religious and
the Secular
There are few opportunities for us Palestinians, or us Palestinians and Israelis, to
learn anything about the world we live in that is not touched by, indeed soaked in,
the hostilities of our struggle. And if it isn’t the Palestinian-Zionist struggle, there
are the pressures of religion, of every conceivable ideology, of family, peers, and
compatriots, each of them bearing down on us, pushing, kneading, prodding every
one of us from childhood to maturity.1
In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The starting –point of critical elaboration
is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing oneself’ as a product of
the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces,
without leaving an inventory…’ therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile
such an inventory.2
The image of traveler depends not on power but on motion, on a willingness to go
into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises,
masks, and rhetorics.3
1
Edward Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986), 44.
2
3
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books), 25.
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 403.
35
1.1 Introduction
The three epigrams above express significant themes within Edward Said’s life;
they are foundational to the development of his humanism, and with it, his notions
of the religious and the secular. The Palestinian struggle with Zionism and the
religious and ideological forces catalyzing that struggle; Said’s intimate encounter
with British colonial education; and the cultural milieu of Arab-Islamic, Lebanese
and Palestinian Christian, and American elements form the existential backdrop
upon which his ideas developed. Complex familial relationships, and the
experience of exile from his family home in Jerusalem, the place of his birth, form
within Said the sense of being forever more a “traveler”—a person without roots in
one place,-- a person homeless in a sense, and yet with strong ethno-cultural
identifications.. This is the ground of what has been called the “exilic”
consciousness of Edward Said on which his concept of and belief in humanism and
criticism of society formed and developed. To comprehend the import of Said’s
conceptualizations of humanism and criticism, we begin with an exploration of the
existential roots of his organic connections to the ideas of a diverse group of
thinkers including Joseph Conrad, Giambattista Vico, Matthew Arnold, Antonio
Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Erich, Auerbach, Max Horkheimer,
Theodore Adorno, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, to
name a few. Before examining his formulations of humanism and criticism, we shall
examine the existential basis of Said’s perspectives on religion, the theological, the
metaphysical, the human, the circumstantial, and the secular.
Said’s insistence that the role of the intellectual is criticism; that the intellectual
must publicly confront power; that criticism must be “secular;” that solidarity
36
disables criticism; and that the experience of both physical and metaphorical exile
enables “secular” humanism and criticism—all of these ideas shall be seen to
emanate from experience and then develop through intellectual engagement with
both the Western literary and philosophical canon and the classical Arab-Islamic
thought that Said encounters in early adulthood.4 Thus, in this chapter which
attempts to situate Said historically, it is argued that the role of exile—physical,
geographical and psychological exile—plays a highly significant catalytic and
cognitive role in the development of Said’s work and particularly in his thought
about Islam and the question of Palestine.
The existential backdrop of Said’s thought emerges from his 1998 memoir Out
of Place. His 1986 book After the Last Sky also contains autobiographical elements
and provides a view for the researcher and commentator on Said into the deeply
formative factor of the psychology of exile and dispossession. After the Last Sky
expresses Said’s reflections on the effects of exile as experienced by
dispossessed Palestinians captured on camera by Jean Mohr. As such After the
Last Sky is not primarily autobiographical although Said’s reflections encompass
his own experience as well as the experience of other Palestinians. In his memoir
especially, Said, born in Jerusalem in 1935, recounting memories through the mid1960s, presents the existential elements that form the psychological and
intellectual resonances between him and those thinkers from whom he draws the
intellectual charge for his critical project. The experience of often lacking a sense of
belonging within his own family, his experience of being treated as a colonial
subject in the British schools in Cairo and at the Gezira social club, the sadness of
It is interesting to see Said’s memoir as self-interpretation. For those interested
in the place of autobiographical writing in the Arabic literary tradition, see Dwight F.
Reynolds, Interpreting the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
4
37
being a Palestinian outsider in Lebanon, an exile from Palestine, and the odd boy
out in his American secondary school—all result for Said in a perennial sense of
being in exile, a subject-object position of insider-outsider who forms an ability to
step into and out of various identities.
1.2 Memoir: Memory versus History
Ioana Luca in a detailed analysis of contemporary thought on autobiography and
its relationship to history examines Said’s memoir and finds that what is most often
missed by critics of Out of Place is the significance of the insights Said shares on
his psychological development, which points up an aporia in Said commentary that
deserves attention. Luca insightfully addresses the effects of missing the
significance of the existential and psychological in critiques of Said’s memoir:
…none of the early critics and reviewers of the book focused on the
psychological valences of this memoir, which Said himself probably
intended. Almost no review tackled the ‘self’ part of the ‘self-life-writing’ of
his autobiography. Without exception, the book was initially analyzed either
in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or in relation to Said’s
commitment to the Palestinian cause…5
It is likely that critics and reviewers who have failed to attend to these connections
in reading Said’s autobiography, also miss these connections between the author
and his ideas in assessing and analyzing his works. It is certainly acceptable and
appropriate to examine any work simply on the merit of its ideas, the accuracy of
Ioana Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” Social Text, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006, 131.
5
38
its facts and the logic of its arguments.6 However, it is argued here that a
comprehensive analysis of Said’s significant ideas cannot be done adequately
without contextualizing Said historically, and therefore culturally. In this study,
Said’s notion of a re-constructed humanism, and within it, the centrality of what he
calls secular criticism, is the constellation of concepts that requires this prior
contextualization. This claim is made in opposition not only to those Said
commentators who ignore or deny the importance of context in interpretation but
also to those who go to lengths to deny the factual historical context from which
Said’s thought emerges. For this reason, Iona Luca’s insights on Said’s memoir
and After the Last Sky merit consideration.
Luca presents summaries of several politically implicated responses to Said’s
memoir, the most famous among them Justus Weiner’s attempt to discredit Said,
arguing that Said and his family were not exiled from Palestine.7 Luca points out
that the issues surrounding the heated debates that ensued with the publication of
Out of Place are “… intertwined along the axes created by such complicated and
uneasy relationships as those built between autobiography and history, history and
6
Said is criticized on these points by many commentators. Robert Irwin, For Lust
of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (London, England: Allen Lane,
2006) Varisco, Daniel Martin. Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2007. Bernard Lewis, "Letter to the Editor,
"Orientalism," New York Times Book Review, December 16, 1976, 36-37. Bernard
Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism," New York Review of Book 29s, June 24,
1982, 49-56. Bernard Lewis, “Orientalism: An Exchange. New York Review of
Books 29 (August 12, 1982), 46-47. See also.
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” 132.
7
39
memory, exile and identity.”8 As an alternative to the prevailing views of Said’s
detractors, Luca suggests that Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire as a
method for reading Out of Place and other autobiographical writing such as is
found in After the Last Sky, provides a different set of assumptions on memoir
writing and hence results in a different interpretation that which invokes the
concept that memoir is history.9 Nora’s idea is helpful in appreciating the value that
Said’s autobiographical writing brings to interpreting his ideas.10 Luca elaborates
Nora’s differentiation between what he terms “real memory” and history:
Memory surrounding the rememberer, memory in process, memory as a
continually re-negotiated ground of social interaction, this “real memory” is,
according to him social and unviolated. History, on the other hand is an
artificial form of remembering, composed of ‘sifted and sorted historical
traces…of mediation, of distance’; it is, ‘the reconstruction, always
problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.’ The means by which ‘our
hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” 135.
8
On this point concerning history versus memory, see Harry Hartoonian, “Said’s
Antinomies,” in Müge Gursoy Sökmen and Basak Ertür, Waiting for the Barbarians
(New York: Verso, 2008), 156-158.
9
For reviews of Said’s memoir which attack the idea that the Said family were
exiled from Jerusalem, where they indeed owned a family home, see Justus Reid
Weiner, “ ‘My Beautiful Old House’ and Other Fabrications by Edward Said,”
Commentary, September 1999, 23-31, “Justus Reid Weiner Writes,” Commentary,
January 2000, 9-16; Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Israel v Palestine: Which Side Is the
Left On?” New Statesman, 18 October 1999,32-33; Timothy Mo, “Alpha or Gamma
for Behaviour,” Spectator, 18-25 December 1999, 66-68; Meron Benvenisti, “Blank
Spaces: Talbiyah and Rehavia,” SAIS Review November 1999, 12-15.See also
Muhammad A. Shuraydi, “Edward Said & His “Beautiful Old House”: A Response
to Weiner, in Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi, Revising Culture,
Reinventing Peace: the influence of Edward W. Said (New York: Olive Branch
Press, 2001), 170-78. Robert Irwin is dismissive of Said’s Palestinian roots and of
the fact that the Saids and their extended family lost their home in the Talbiyah
section of Jerusalem, claiming that both Said’s parents were from Lebanon. This is
a distortion of Said’s family history. See Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge, 278.
10
40
past,’ history is a representation of the past, while memory is the perpetually
actual phenomenon. 11
Nora’s concept of lieux de memoire, or sites of memory, is essential, Luca insists,
because in the “acceleration of history, these sites” originate with the sense that
there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately create archives,
maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies…because such
activities no longer occur naturally.”12 Nora asserts that lieux de memoire are
necessary because there are no longer milieux de memoire, or real environments
of memory. Luca emphasizes the importance of Nora’s idea that such sites of
memory are ‘bastions’ upon which ‘we buttress our identities,’ but as he rightly
adds, “if the defeated were not threatened, there would be no need to build
them.”13 Luca goes on to make summative comments concerning his view of Out
of Place. These reflect how we may integrate our insights from Said’s
autobiographical writing to the present study of his significant concepts of secular
humanism and secular criticism, and the meaning of his rhetoric of the religious
and the secular:
…for Said his autobiography had a thoroughly existential and profoundly
human dimension. It had an existential dimension for him as an individual in
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” 136.
11
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” 136.
12
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,”137.
13
41
a moment of personal crisis, as well as for him as a spokesman for the
Palestinian cause, a cause in crisis.14
In fact, beyond consideration of its existential dimension for understanding the
major thrust of Said’s oeuvre or his role as spokesman in the U.S. for the
Palestinian cause, his memoir’s existential dimension provides a bridge to a better
grasp of Said’s intellectual production tout court by providing a beginning point for
the elaboration of Said’s intellectual genealogy. The benefit of considering Luca’s
understanding of the significance of Said’s memoir is that Luca returns
commentary on Said to its proper beginning.
Luca offers an assessment, quoted below, which is particularly applicable to
how we may see Said’s memoir and his other autobiographical writing such as
After the Last Sky as relevant to such concepts and methodologies that he
employs in his works such as humanism, genealogy, and contrapuntal analysis.
These concepts and methodologies enable the formation of a gestalt which
integrates highly disparate, conflicting divisions and which allows the internal
contradictions of Said’s ultimate upholding of humanism after having utilized antihumanist (poststructuralist) methodologies and concepts (i.e. Said’s use of the
genealogical method in Orientalism) to be managed intellectually. Said’s use of
genealogy to uncover the deformative aspects of humanism while simultaneously
upholding the value of humanism and honoring the achievements of the Orientalist
humanists he criticizes is misunderstood by his commentators as self-
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” 140.
14
42
contradiction. Another way to see this is that Said’s thought overcomes binary
categories which create the impression of absolute divisions. This is why, as shall
be shown, Said utilizes the musical concept of counterpoint: the contrapuntal
approach to analysis permits irreconcilable tensions to exist without having to
harmonize them by allowing them to be played against each other. Luca sees this
and expresses an appreciative response to Said’s practice of allowing conflict to
exist while supporting continuing co-existence:
(Out of Place) marks points of crisis, spaces where conflicting values, ideas,
and beliefs converge only to diverge anew along lines that construct even
wider splits and conflicts. As a Palestinian lieu de memoire, his book
surprises us by its capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of
meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of its ramifications.15
Adopting Nora’s and Luca’s views of memoir then, a look at Said’s experiences
within his family, and within other socio-cultural environments such as the church,
the social club, and the schools becomes an essential part of creating a gestalt that
enables a comprehensive view of the paradoxical elements within Said’s oeuvre .
Beginning with the geographical, a central fact of Said’s life until the age of
fifteen is that it takes place in three locations in the Arab world: Jerusalem, Cairo,
and Dhour El Schweir, Lebanon. From 1935 when he was born in Jerusalem, until
1951 when he leaves Cairo for Mount Hermon School in the United States, Egypt
is under British colonial rule. The Second World War occurs and directly impacts
the Said family’s life in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. Israel is established in 1948
on the land of historic Palestine and three quarters of a million Palestinians,
Luca, “Edward Said’s Lieux de Memoire: Out of Place and the Politics of
Autobiography,” 140.
15
43
including the Saids, are forced into permanent exile. The Arab world responding to
colonialism and Zionism in a multiplicity of ways undergoes rapid political change
with effects on the way of life, and the development of social, political and religious
movements and institutions. These cataclysmic facts and their consequences,
occurring within Said’s “home” environment, in the very center of the Arab world,
impinge deeply on the consciousness of the young Said.
1.3 Identity Formation and Language
In Said’s autobiographical writing the issue of his struggle to establish his
identity is a clearly formative theme. Said begins his memoir calling it “a record of
an essentially lost or forgotten world,”16 adding that he had had all his life the
overriding sensation of always being out of place.”17 It is important to note that
Said’s sense of not belonging to a place or fitting in, then, began within his
experiences of family. Said relates feelings of being insecure in his identity and of
having multiple identities in conflict with each other from a very early age. 18
He also describes a “split” in himself between “Edward” and Said”—a public
outer self and a “loose, irresponsible, fantasy ridden, churning metamorphoses of
(his) private, inner life” and a sense that “the eruptions from (his) inner self grew
not only more frequent but also less possible to control.”19 Concerning his
16
Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, (New York: Vintage Books) 1999, ix.
17
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 3.
18
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 5, 18, 19, 27, 28, 137.
19
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 137.
44
character, he notes that he vacillated between willful intransigence and timidity,
uncertainty and lack of will.20
Even his own name made him uncomfortable. His discomfort carries a sense
of torn and painful identity:21
…it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or more exactly, to
feel less uncomfortable with, “Edward,” a foolishly English name yoked
forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said….For years, and
depending on the exact circumstances, I would rush past “Edward” and
emphasize “Said”; at other times I would do the reverse, or connect these
two to each other so quickly that neither would be clear. The one thing I
could not tolerate, but very often would have to endure, was the
disbelieving, and hence undermining, reaction: Edward? Said?22
Certain, however that both English and Arabic “(had) always been together in
(his) life, one resonating in the other, sometimes ironically, sometimes
nostalgically…,”23 Said’s bilingualism appears an enabling source of identity, one
experienced primarily as a bridge between worlds. And it is in this recollection
concerning his earliest connections with Arabic that Said connects both languages
with his relationship with his mother, since from his youngest age his mother used
20
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 137.
21
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 3-4.
Stathis Gourgouris offers an interpretation of Said’s reflection on his discomfort
with his dual identity expressed in his very name, suggesting that by immersing
“the name into the flux of historical contingency, so as to set up an interpretive
mode that is radically skeptical toward the minutest tendency to grant the principle
of identity a natural and transparent authority,” Said is implying that not only is
“Edward Said out of place,” but that “identity itself is out of place.” See Stathis
Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” in boundary 2, Critical
Secularism, volume 31, number 2, summer 2004, ed. Aamir R. Mufti.
22
23
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 4.
45
both languages with him and he recalls that they even wrote to each other in
English on a weekly basis. The language of maternal-filial love, however, seems to
have been Arabic and Said emotes a sense of the unconscious sense of the Arabic
phrases as “part of her infinitely maternal atmosphere…”24 Yet when she was
displeased with him, it was English that let him know he was “naughty.” 25
Her English deployed a rhetoric of statement and norms that has never left
me. Once my mother left Arabic and spoke English there was a more
objective and serious tone that mostly banished the forgiving and musical
intimacy of her first language, Arabic.26
Though confident and comfortable operating in Arabic as a child, Said learns as
an adolescent that one’s particular dialect is an essential ingredient in social
acceptance where different national affiliations are expressed through the
particular dialect one uses. At the self-conscious age of fifteen in Beirut, Said
experiences his Arabic for the first time as a barrier that excluded him from
intimacy with Beirutis joking in their dialect, one that Said did not know, having
grown up in Cairo in a Palestinian family.27 While in this instance his own Arabic is
experienced as a factor of isolation, in another in Cairo, Said expresses the
adolescent sense of Arabic as the language of resistance and defiance.
It was in Cairo at Victoria College in 1949 and Said was almost fourteen upon
enrollment. A British school, where all the students were Arab and all the faculty
24
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 4.
25
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 4.
26
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 4.
27
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 176.
46
English other than the French and Arabic teachers, Victoria College was described
to Said by the geography master as “a school designed to be the Eton of the
Middle East,”28 but where Said felt that the Arab students “were viewed either as a
distasteful job or as a group of delinquents to be punished anew each day.” 29 Said
cites Rule I of Victoria College: “English is the language of the school. Anyone
caught speaking other languages will be severely punished.”30 The result was to
turn Arabic into a
“…haven, a criminalized discourse where we took refuge from the world of
masters and complicit prefects and anglicized older boys who lorded it over
us as enforcers of the hierarchy and its rules. Because of Rule I we spoke
more, rather than less Arabic, as an act of defiance against what seemed
then, and seems even more so now, an arbitrary, ludicrously gratuitous
symbol of their power. What I had formerly hidden at CSAC became a proud
insurrectionary gesture…31
At this point in his life Said sees Arabic as part of identity in response to the sense
of the denigration of the self-implied in the outlawing of Arabic language throughout
the school. Said expresses his pride in his mother’s insistent use of Arabic in social
situations where French was the marker of class.32
Said had recognized the connection between language and identity, language
and self-esteem, and was, in an atmosphere of resistance to colonization, taking
28
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 180.
29
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 184.
30
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 184.
31
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 184.
32
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 184.
47
up a position in which Arabic is not only a linguistic but a cultural tool, a tool of
critique. This strong sense within Said of the identification of Arabic with a sense of
peoplehood and nation and of the right of the Arab-Islamic world to define and
represent itself, is in Said linked to his effort to correct a defeated and weak selfimage but also to correct a denigrating narrative that casts the non-European as
innately inferior, colonized, controlled. This becomes the central theme in Said’s
oeuvre. The powerfully catalyzing effect of the existential on intellectual
development in Said is undeniable.
1.4 Familial Relationships, Religion, and Culture in Said’s
Development
Said’s fraught relationship with his mother and his incipient sense of
national/ethnic identity brought about in the oppositional relationship Said
perceived between Egypt’s British colonialists and the elite class of Arab youth
enrolled in the British schools of Cairo typify struggles within Said to try to achieve
a sense of self and to obtain the right to make independent choices apart from the
dominant centers of parental or colonial authority. 33 The theme of exile, of
33
Though Said was able to achieve enough independence to defy the school
prohibition of Arabic, he was not able to simultaneously act independently of his
parent’s, especially his mother’s, wishes. His self-identity remained weak in this
area and fear of disapprobation prevented him from taking any direct action or
decisions that would have removed whatever sense of belonging he managed to
acquire by being compliant with parental expectations. Said sought emotional
nourishment, affirmation, and identity primarily in his relationship to his mother
within which his English and his Arabic identities shared a comfort zone and an
equal playing field Said’s Arab identity was clearly strengthened more in relation to
his mother. Often seeking the approval and generosity of a mother who knew his
need and his weakness, Said found himself unable to stand on his own especially
in facing the hurtful effects of his early school experience at the British Gezira
Preparatory School (GPS). Said’s mother provided his only sense of being “at
48
homelessness, of not being at home anywhere in the world, of living life in
intersections of different worlds which becomes a constant in Said’s writing,
particularly the collection of essays produced over a period of three decades
entitled Reflections on Exile is born both of the familial experience of being the
outsider even in within the family circle and the national experience of
dispossession. The connection between Said’s inability to experience a sense of
security, of wholeness, of acceptance, of “at-homeness,”—the frequent lack of
certainty of his own value even with the one person with whom he could at times
feel most secure and whole—and Said’s experience of self in relation to culture,
ethnicity, nationality, identity, and religion—in a world where it was normative to
strongly identify oneself with the familial, cultural, religious, national identity --clearly acts as a significant catalyst in Said’s idea that criticism of authority, of the
“sacred,” of the established and the accepted—is the role of the intellectual in any
society, as opposed to the idea that the intellectual is the upholder of the tradition,
of that which is or has become sacred within the culture or the civilization.
In relation to Said’s later distancing himself from the “religious” and embracing
the “secular”, one notes the quasi-religious elements in Said’s relationship with his
mother: the need for the love and the validation of the all-powerful and life giving
and the need to please the source of love. In Said’s words above, that he felt a
metaphysical panic if he experienced any discontinuation or withdrawal of his
mother’s love and approval, it is evident that there is a sense that Said experienced
being cut off from his mother in the way that sin cuts off a believer from connection
home,” and even that was experienced very tentatively due to the mother’s
frequent manipulative withdrawal of approval and affection.
49
with the divine. The neediness of the creature for the giver of life for Said is
experienced most negatively. The theological concept of a self-subsisting life-giver
on whom the creation is dependent creates a connection between panic/anxiety
and God which the mother represents for Said in existential terms. Said will
generally remain distant in his estimation of such an unequal and inequitable
relationship and will intellectually and emotionally favor universal justice and
freedom as the highest good of humankind rather than an all-powerful life-giving
self-subsisting God being. Religion will generally for Said represent slavery,
inequality, weakness, and hence injustice. A great deal of Said’s work will take up
the cause of justice for all humankind.
Besides Said’s mother, his aunt Nabiha’s dedication to the cause of the
Palestinian refugees impressed on Said a sense of responsibility to his own
people. Nabiha, a Jerusalemite, forced along with thousands of others to leave her
home in 1948, represents a model of activism and compassion for Said. Of her
Said writes:
It was through Aunt Nabiha that I first experience Palestine as history and
cause in the anger and consternation I felt over the suffering of the
refugees, those Others, whom she brought into my life. It was also she who
communicated to me the desolations of being without a country or a place to
return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions, of no
longer being able to make sense of the past except as bitter, helpless regret
nor of the present with its daily queuing, anxiety-filled searches for jobs, and
poverty, hunger, and humiliations. I got a very vivid sense of all this from her
conversation, and by observing her frenetic daily schedule.34
34
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 119.
50
The theme of exile, inequality, and weakness develops forcefully in Said’s
relationship with a demanding father as well. Said’s sharing of a statement his
father made to him that resulted in his sense that his sonship was always
“contingent,”35 and that it might somehow be “improper” to think of himself as a
son, resulted in Said’s inability to ask for anything without great apprehension and
“hours of desperate preparation.”36 This relationship to his father seen along with
Said’s always contingent relationship with his mother creates the impression that
Said experienced complete fear and helplessness with regard to his weak selfesteem especially viewed against his parents’ superior power and strength.
Experiences significant beyond the family circle, such as the loss of Palestine in
1948 and along with it, the family home in Jerusalem, the inability to return “home,”
his parent’s insistence on sending him to the United States to the Mount Hermon
school, and the continued sense of being a Palestinian outsider in Lebanon where
the family summered, add to Said’s existential trauma of being perpetually “out of
place.”37 Held to impossible standards by a father who from an early age had
35
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 118.
36
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 118.
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 119. Said writes of his father: “The most terrible
thing he ever said to me—I was twelve then—was, ‘You will never inherit anything
from me; you are not the son of a rich man,’ though literally of course I was…From
the moment I became conscious of myself…I found it impossible to think of myself
as not having both a discrediting past and an immoral future in store; my entire
sense of self during my formative years was always experienced in the present
tense, as I frantically worked to keep myself from falling back into an already
established pattern, or from falling forward into certain perdition. Being myself
meant not only never being quite right, but also never feeling at ease, always
expecting to be interrupted or corrected, to have my privacy invaded and my
unsure person set upon. Permanently out of place, the extreme and rigid regime of
discipline and extracurricular education that my father would create and in which I
became imprisoned from the age of nine left me no respite or sense of myself
beyond its rules and patterns.”
37
51
identified with the West, with the United States specifically, after fleeing Ottoman
conscription to fight the Allies in Bulgaria, the psychological, cultural, and spiritual
connections that Said must inevitably have drawn between his own misery and his
father’s identity, preferences, and demands, another piece of the puzzle is put in
place.
Said’s father’s paradoxical pro-American and anti-Arab attitude seen in
relationship to the way in which it affected the lowering of Said’s self-esteem,
seems likely to have had an effect on what may be interpreted as Said’s love-hate
relationship with both the United States and the Arab world. Said’s father’s advice
to him “to stay away from the Arabs”38(in the United States), reinforces an (at best)
ambivalent attitude toward Arabs by the elder Said. Said elaborates further on his
father’s words: “They’ll never do anything for you and will always pull you
down…They’ll always be a hindrance. They neither keep what’s good about Arab
culture, nor show any solidarity with each other.”39 In examining Said’s strong
criticism of the Arab world and his exhortation to his compatriots to be self-critical
and not engage in Occidentalist thinking, it seems that Said’s father’s attitudes
impinged on his consciousness in a significant way. 40
38
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 119.
39
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 229.
40
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 1986, 14. His father, born in Jerusalem, was not
fond of the city, even prior to the Zionist takeover. As a young man, he had
become enamored of the United States, fighting for the United States, in World
War I, and thereby gaining citizenship. Wadie Said maintained and conveyed his
admiration of the West, a common attitude especially among Arab Christians, even
changing his name from Wadie to William and naming his only son with an English
name rather than an Arab one. Of Jerusalem, Said writes that his father said that
he was reminded of death by the holy city. And yet, the roots to the land and its
history ran deep even in the elder Said. Considering the subtle psychological
52
Said offers a thoughtful analysis that connects both his parents to their
national/ethnic and religious locations and his own inability to fit within or identify
with that world. This is another highly influential element in the formation of Said’s
dual identity. Said’s analysis implies how his own fraught identity emanates from
that of his parents’ ethnic and religious incongruence in their adopted home in
Cairo. Said’s awareness that his parents’ religious identification as Protestant
Christians, a minority confession within the Arab Christian minority of the more
indigenous Greek Orthodox Church, was essentially a connection that gave them a
minimal sense of “belonging”--being Palestinians in Cairo, always out of the
mainstream in Egypt as well as in Lebanon--aligned religiously with the faith
tradition of the colonial power—a fact that seems to have widened the identity gulf
for himself while narrowing it for his parents.
As anyone who has lived there for any length of time knows, and often
proclaimed by both Arabs and Israelis, religion in the Middle East is identity. But for
Said, Protestant Christianity was too associated with the very institutions and
persons who represented domination, injustice, arrogance and lack of compassion.
Religion as a cultural element associated with a foreign occupying power in Egypt
and doubly as a foreign occupying power seen as betrayer of the Palestinian
people becomes an entity to oppose and to critique for Said. Protestant
Christianity, an essential element in the identities of both parents was part of a
reconnecting with his origins that occurred in Wadie later in life and after the loss of
their familial home, Said writes: “But as he grew older he reverted to old
Jerusalemite expressions that I did not understand, never having heard them
during the years of my youth.”
53
system that seems to have prevented Said from a healthy sense of himself. This
point shall be further elaborated in the next section of the chapter.
When Said describes his father’s end of life period and his inclinations at that
time, he reveals a key to the motivations of his own career—as oppositional
intellectual and eventually the passionate voice of the buried Palestinian narrative
and of the Arab-Islamic world. Edward Said was finally forging a self-identity of his
own, unmoored from what he perceived in his parents as obsequious striving for
acceptance from a dominant power, human or divine.
I was eager for him to be well again so that we could return to the familiar
terrain of dominance and subterranean resistance where “Edward” would be
hectored and bullied, while my other diffuse and generally hidden self bided
its time and sought avenues of its own over which my father’s commanding
presence could cast no great shadow. Yet I also knew that, however
unpleasant, his force and sheer presence had provided me with an
internalized framework in a world of volatile change and turbulent upheaval,
and that I could no longer rely directly on him for that sort of support. 41(my
emphasis)
Following this description Said shares a moment of epiphany, one that late in
Said’s life is more than an important realization, one that signifies a spiritual
experience in the office of the therapist. Of this epiphany, twenty years after his
father’s death, Said writes:
I was overcome with emotion because I could suddenly see how all those
years he had struggled to express himself in a way that both by
temperament and background he was not equipped to do. Perhaps, for
Oedipal reasons, I had blocked him, and perhaps my mother with her skill at
41
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 261.
54
manipulating ambivalence had undermined him. But whether this was true
or not, the gap between my father and me was sealed with a longstanding
silence, and it was this in my therapist’s office that I confronted with tears,
allowing me a redemptive view of him for all his awkwardness and the rough
but perceptible care that he had shown his only son.42 (my emphasis)
Said’s description of this late reconciliation with his father –within himself—late in
the sense that it occurred long after his father’s passing on—is evocative in its
language of a religious experience, an enabling “redemptive view” -- Said’s sudden
ability to see his father in a generous spirit, a spirit of reconciliation and redemption
for both the father and the son. Said is for once—perhaps quite unconsciously-admitting of a positive sense --and experience--of a theological concept, that of a
spiritually cleansing experience of final reconciliation that heals a broken
relationship between a father and a son, somewhat reminiscent of the Gospel
parable of the Prodigal Son. Though Said was far from “prodigal” in any
conventional sense, it is clear from Said’s many descriptions of his own sense of
never feeling worthy of his father’s esteem that Said felt himself incapable of
pleasing his father, and perhaps had grown resistant to even trying. In fact,
resistance to injustice and to the unexamined premises of authority and power had
become Said’s lifelong vocation. His “secular” humanism which drove his criticism
of culture, society and politics had precluded the “religious” from being a part of his
life. Said’s need to resist the injustices of power and authority in human society
was at least in part related to the silent wall that Said had built up in his relationship
to his father. Said was only able to break down this barrier through a therapeutic
process, late in his life at a point when, afflicted with a rare form of leukemia, he
42
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 262.
55
was facing his own mortality. It is in this period that the idea of the “contrapuntal”
approach to divisions, disparities, and exclusivist tendencies is particularly strong
in Said’s work though he first writes of “contrapuntal analysis” in 1993 in Culture
and Imperialism as a methodology for confronting discrepant experiences of
different times, peoples, and groups within society in ways that obviate essentialist
and binaristic approaches to conflict and discrepant perspectives.43
The fact that Said experiences this cleansing and restorative moment in the
office of a therapist in New York, demonstrates another reason why for Said,
spirituality and the restorative, healing process of psychological catharsis brought
about in the secular, non-religious environment of psychological therapy remains
connected with the secular and not the religious. It is clear that Said’s significant
experiences or realizations all come about in a secular and not a religious milieu.
Said’s positive attitude toward what he refers to as the secular and his negative
estimation of the religious is conveyed throughout his works in a rhetoric
embedded in his evolving critical positions on the larger cultural and political
matters that occupied him.
43
On contrapuntal analysis, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New
York: Knopf, 1993), 18, 32, 43, 51, 66, 67, 11, 114, 125, 146, 178, 194, 259, 279,
281, 318, 331, 336. Counterpoint and polyphony are two musical concepts that
Said adopts as part of his critical methodology particularly from the time of Culture
and Imperialism on. See Rokus de Groot, “Perspectives of Polyphony in Edward
Said’s Writings.” In Alif 25 (2005): 219-240.
56
1.5 The Experience of Dispossession
It is important to look at this theme in terms of Said’s identity as a Palestinian as
well as in terms of his identity as an Arab, a member of the larger circle
encompassing Palestine, that of the Arab-Islamic world. In the introduction to
Orientalism, Said, though speaking of what would become his best-known work,
also points implicitly to the role that Out of Place, not yet written, would play in
providing background to this and other works:
Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of
being an ‘Oriental’ as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my
education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States,
has been Western and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In
many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the
traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has
been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.44
Central to Said’s quest to attempt this inventory of traces is the fact of the
Palestinian dispossession of 1947-48, in which hundreds of Palestinian towns and
villages were erased from existence, lands and homes were stolen from their
owners, a “milieu de memoire” as Nora calls, it ceases to exist. In the post World
War I period in Palestine, the Zionist aspiration for a Jewish state collided with
Palestinian aspirations for a state for all its citizens and occurred in the larger
geographical context of the Arab-Islamic world which, in response to European
colonialism and imperialism, was experiencing a variety of secularly and religiously
conceived responses and which exerted a powerful effect on the consciousness of
its society’s members. Said, of course, lived within this socio-political milieu, with
44
Said, Orientalism, 25.
57
three existential connections to the Arab-Islamic world: his Palestinian identity
based on his birth in Jerusalem in 1935 to Palestinian parents and his visits to
relatives in the various cities of Palestine and schooling and life in 1947 in
Jerusalem; his life and schooling in Cairo; and his summers in Dhour El Schweir,
Lebanon, a predominately Lebanese Christian community. Said, though, born an
American citizen because his father had obtained citizenship in the United States,
having served in the American military, had a political connection to the United
States from birth, and after he was sent to finish secondary school in the United
States, acquired an existential connection to the United States as well.
Said’s reflections on his experiences in Palestine and particularly the events of
1947-48 convey Said’s response to the dashed hopes and pain of the Palestinian
people as well as his own feelings and recollections about the way in which his
family experienced these events. He begins chapter VI with these words: “On
November 1, 1947—my twelfth birthday—I recall the puzzling vehemence with
which my oldest Jerusalem cousins, Yousif and George, bewailed the day, the eve
of the Balfour Declaration, as ‘the blackest day in our history.’” 45 A few months
later, the family’s Talbiyah house was abandoned because the whole Western
quarter of the city had fallen to the Hagganah and his Aunt Nabiha’s family had
been driven out of the city. Said recalls the last time before his own family decided
to depart from Jerusalem to Cairo that he saw his Jewish classmate, Ezra, an
experience of “ruptured connection” that “came to symbolize both the unbridgeable
gap, repressed for want of words or concepts to discuss it, between Palestinian
Arabs and Jews, and the terrible silence forced on our joint history from that
45
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 107.
58
moment on.”46 Examining the sense and the words Said uses to express it, there is
an overwhelming sorrow for the loss of connection between the two peoples of the
land, made sadder for the silence imposed. It was this silence and rupture with a
people Said sees as sharing in history with the Palestinians that Said would
eventually seek to break and this rupture that he would seek to re-connect through
his ideas. Said offers an extended meditation on not only the loss of Palestine but
the subsequent public silence on the subject imposed by his parents in their effort
to shield their children from the repercussions of politicization as things in Egypt
became more tenuous for the foreign community under Gamal Abdel Nasser in the
fifties:
It seems inexplicable to me now that having dominated our lives for
generations, the problem of Palestine and its tragic loss, which affected
virtually everyone we knew, deeply changing our world, should have been
so relatively repressed, undiscussed, or even remarked on by my parents.
Palestine was where they were born and grew up, even though their life in
Egypt (and more frequently in Lebanon) provided a new settling for
them….But the repression of Palestine in our lives occurred as part of a
larger depoliticization on the part of my parents who hated and distrusted
politics, feeling too precarious in Egypt for participation or even open
discussion.47
The sense of insecurity that the elder Saids felt turned out not to be unfounded.
The Palestinian problem was part of a wider historical process related to Europe’s
Jewish Question, to politics in the United States, to Western imperialism in the
Arab-Islamic world and the young Said would eventually determine to engage in a
46
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 112.
47
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 117.
59
resistance of the word, of the pen, and of the tongue, founded on a knowledge
base developed in some of the best schools in the United States. However,
remembering his parents’ strong admonishments against involving himself in
politics, it would take the young Said about a dozen years to gain the selfconfidence to take on the discourses of knowledge and power that he came to
believe were the foundation of so much of the world’s politically induced suffering.
In a confused state between his parents’ wishes and what his sharp mind was able
to perceive and understand, Said speaks of the fact that he was
suffering a dissociation …about Palestine, which I was never able to resolve
or fully grasp until quite recently, when I gave up trying. Even now the
unreconciled duality I feel about the place, its intricate wrenching, tearing,
sorrowful loss as exemplified in so many distorted lives, including mine, and
its status as an admirable country for them (but of course, not for us),
always gives me pain and a discouraging sense of being solitary,
undefended, open to the assaults of trivial things that seem important and
threatening, against which I have no weapons.48
Ana Dopico discusses Said’s “evocative self-disclosures” in After the Last Sky.
In it Said “articulates a lyrically critical meditation, a singular and binding voice that
grounds the anonymous faces that are the exemplars of human rights or
catastrophe photography.”49 Like his memoir, the earlier 1986 text “opens a
biographical door, assembling personal disclosure from an Edward Said who, by
virtue of his connection to a multiplicity of faces, and eyes and mouths, speaks as
a phenomenological or communal voice, a representative, writing…the spaces,
48
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 142.
Ana Dopico, “The Recourses of Necessity: Repetition, Secular Mourning, and
Edward Said’s Inventories of Late Return, Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer
2006, 117.
49
60
themes, and variations of a displaced culture.”50 In Dopico’s recognition that while
Said speaks of his own personal experience, in his rendering of his experience he
simultaneously “helps connect the estrangement from home and the selfestrangement suffered by refugee or exile to the public and political estrangements
that continuously rend Palestinians as strangers to humanity, culture, and
progress, to their homeland, and which, circularly, render them strangers to
themselves.”51 This insight on the connection between Said’s memoir, his effort to
express his own struggle to establish a durable and resilient identity, and that of
the silent strangers whose narrative is untold, unknown, and unheard, that is, the
other diasporic Palestinians, is important to understanding the larger social and
political role of Said’s recollecting his early life.
As a Palestinian, who like the other three quarters of a million Palestinians,
relocated in various parts of the world, Said came to grapple with the various
currents of thought attracting followers across the Arab world as solutions whose
foundations lay in differing nationalisms, some utilizing a religious base and others
employing foundations in socialism, Marxism, and Communism.
The winds of Arab nationalism, Nasserism, and Marxism, that were to pull Egypt
apart were still about five or six years away. Islamism in the form of the Muslim
Brotherhood had begun to lend “more anxious uncertainty to those…Arabs who
were neither Egyptian nor Muslims.”52 These currents of political thought in Egypt
Dopico, “The Recourses of necessity: Repetition, Secular Mourning, and
Edward Said’s Inventories of Late Return,” 117.
50
51
Dopico,“The Recourses of necessity: Repetition, Secular Mourning, and Edward
Said’s Inventories of Late Return,”117.
52
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 180.
61
began to insinuate themselves in Said’s consciousness through personal
experience that he could scarcely comprehend long before he was able to deal
intellectually with their competing claims and methodologies. In January 1952, the
Said business in Cairo, Standard Stationery, was gutted in a mob riot allegedly of
the Muslim Brotherhood.
Undoubtedly also, Said was impacted intellectually by the effects of extremes of
ideology on real human beings for he was now a young man of seventeen
becoming more aware of the historical background to current struggles. Said says
that his family’s embrace of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism and absence of
prejudice [toward Arab Muslims] constituted at least disloyalty if not betrayal
among relatives in Lebanon.”53 Said describes his mother as becoming “…a true,
believing Nasserite, a mirror image of her no less doctrinaire cousins and friends in
the ultra-right Christian factions,” indicating his annoyance at her “often preachy
disquisitions on Nasser’s socialist pan-Arabism…” though he admits his admiration
for her ability to stand up to her family and for her “…fairness of mind and an ability
to think beyond ‘our’ minority interests,” (referring to the Saids and others in the
elite expatriate community of Cairo) pointing out that “It’s the porter, the driver, the
worker for whom Nasser’s reforms have changed their lives and given them
dignity.”54 This identification with the underclasses, the oppressed of society, and
the valuing of other than their own minority interests shall be seen in Said’s work,
another example of the exilic consciousness at work.
53
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir,180.
54
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 199.
62
1.6 Religion, Ideology, and the Arab World
The experiences Said had with religion in his early life, all of which took place
between Cairo, Palestine, and Lebanon, and therefore can be viewed as part of
Said’s experiences within the Arab world clearly seem to result in Said’s overall
estimation of the preponderant effects of religion as negatively affecting human
beings and human life, as leading away from critical thought, as imposing blind
acceptance and imitation, which in his view impedes the liberation of the human
spirit, and therefore ultimately fails to further the highest goals of human life such
as universal justice. Having considered the way in which Said experienced religion
early in life as well as the way he experienced ideologies such as the pan-Arabism
of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the political ideologies of the Christian Lebanese, the
political theology of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, as well as that of political
Zionism, it is clear that Said’s predominately negative experience of religion
imbricated in political ideologies, are a factor in Said’s embrace of a kind of
consciousness and way of thinking that begins with being outside the borders of
places (both political and religious) where “belonging”—being at home in one’s
home—is seen as the antithesis of the liberating element of critical thought and
action. A major contention of the present study is that out of the ground of this
“exilic consciousness” that Said’s discourse on Islam and the Islamic world, and his
work on Palestine as a synecdoche of his thesis on Orientalism arises.
Said’s experiences of religion, always interwoven with political issues and
positions, are seen by him as having disastrous results for human beings. Not only
had Said experienced a phenomenon that it would take years for him to
understand, the results of a religious nationalism turned political ideology that had
63
resulted in Palestinian dispossession, but as a young man he began to experience
the meaning of religious sectarianism in Lebanon. Said describes his mother’s
family, the Badrs, who
With their Protestant counterparts in Palestine…continued their affiliation
with the American Protestant mission in Lebanon but also had an embattled,
even belligerent, sense of what it meant to be Christian in a Muslim part of
the world. My mother’s first cousins and her uncles were educated at the
American University (formerly the Syrian Protestant College), and all had
been or were still avidly religious, and further developed these affiliations
through frequent trips to the United States and graduate studies there, plus,
in my later view, too close an identification with American views on Islam as
a depraved and unregenerate religion.
But there were early signs of this hostility toward Islam, which I caught
glimpses of beneath the merry atmosphere of familial gatherings in Dhour.
They seemed to emerge as expressions of unquestioning enthusiasm for
Christianity, unusual even within Jerusalem’s pious confines. As “Edward
Said” I found myself counted as a Christian in Lebanon, though even today
after years of internecine civil conflict there I must confess I am able to feel
any identification at all with Christianity as threatened by Islam.55
Said points out the paradoxical nature of “this aggressively Christian ideology” that
induced his Lebanese relatives’ skeptical attitudes toward “the Arabs collectively
and Arabism as a creed”56 since as he notes, “their language, culture, and
education, their love of the music, their closeness to family tradition, their ways of
doing things struck me as much more unequivocally Arab than ours.”57 He adds
that while this “religious hostility” toward Muslims was growing in Lebanon, he and
his family, living primarily in Cairo, did not have any sense of this. Terming what he
55
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 169.
56
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 169.
57
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 169.
64
saw later as “Christian ideology” in Lebanon, correlates to Said’s view that religion
often becomes ideology and ideology religion, that is, in the real world where
religion is co-opted as a powerful force for solidarity that is easily manipulated to
gain blind adherence to dogma that the culture easily promotes and inculcates with
little resistance, so easy is it to imbricate religious devotion and belief with
nationalistic or other ideological formation based on boundary-drawing.
1.7 Said’s Colonial Educational Experience and Identity
Said’s experiences of schooling in the Arab world as a child and a young
adolescent convey, except for a year in 1947 at St. George’s School in Jerusalem,
a generally negative estimation related to the colonial relationship between the
British schools he attended and himself. His schooling in Cairo represents painful
experiences that have a lasting, perhaps scarring consequence. Said begins his
third chapter in Out of Place with the statement: “Schoolteachers were supposed to
be English, I thought. Students, if they were fortunate, might also be English, or, as
in my case, if they were not, not.”58 Said spent a total of four years at the Gezira
Preparatory School in Cairo, divided between some schooling in Jerusalem at St.
George’s, since the Said family spent time between the two cities. Said points out
that the imported curriculum of the British system, taught him, for example, “a great
deal about the Enclosure Act”… but not about the irrigation system of Egypt where
he was living.59 Said experienced GPS as “an organized system set up as a
58
59
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 36.
Edward W. Said and Gauri Viswanathan, Power, Politics, and Culture:
Interviews with Edward W. Said (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 421.
65
colonial business…”60 and found it “not interesting as a place of learning,”61 but
most of all as a place where he experienced at age eight for a minor class
infraction a caning by the headmaster, one that left an indelibly negative
recollection of feeling unjustly humiliated. Said describes the school’s atmosphere
as “one of unquestioning assent framed with hateful servility by teachers and
students alike.”62 The fact that the headmaster who mercilessly beat the small Said
was a published poet, a group of “minor British writers known as the Salamander
poets who were resident in wartime Cairo,”63 struck Said as ironic in the extreme.
On the heels of this school experience, Said experienced another “even more
acute, and much more explicit colonial encounter.” 64 The Said’s were members of
the Gezira Club in Cairo. A Mr. Pilley, the “Hon. Sec’y” of the Club, confronted Said
demanding “What are you doing here, boy?” When Said answered, “Going home,”
and began to add that he was a Club member, Pilley barked back, “Don’t answer
back, boy. Just get out, and do it quickly. Arabs aren’t allowed here, and you’re an
Arab!”65 Once again, when Said shares the encounter with his father, he receives
a non-committal answer, letting Said know that his father would never stand up for
him even when the issue was unadulterated racism. Said’s reflection on how this
60
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 42.
61
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 42.
62
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 42.
63
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 43.
64
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 44.
65
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 44.
66
affected him for the rest of his life provides additional background to his later
thought and work:
What troubles me now, fifty years later, is that although the episode
remained with me for such a long time and although it smarted both then
and now, there seemed to be a fatalistic compact between my father and
myself about our necessarily inferior status. He knew about it; I discovered it
publicly for the first time face to face with Pilley. Yet neither of us saw it then
as worth a struggle of any kind, and that realization shames me still.66
A few years later at Victoria College, Said was caned again for having been seen
throwing stones in the schoolyard on lunch break. This, along with prior negative
experiences at the British schools in Cairo, engendered in Said a rebellious attitude
that grew along with his adolescent body. However, one positive aspect of the
school was its ethnically and religiously mixed student population which provided
him significant interaction with Jewish, un-Westernized Egyptian, and Indian
students. Of this he writes: “What intrigued and still entrances me about these
social groupings is that none was exclusive, or watertight, which produced a
dancelike maze of personalities, modes of speech, backgrounds, religions, and
nationalities.”67
1.8 Said’s American Education: Identity and Intellectual
Foundations
In 1951 at the age of fifteen, after the debacle at Victoria College, Said is
brought by his father to Mount Hermon, an elite secondary school in
66
67
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 44.
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 190.
67
Massachusetts. This is the beginning of Said’s life in the United States, marking
the end of his residence in the Arab world. In every way, Said’s American
experience begins on a negative note and his first two years in the United States,
he experiences essentially as a forced exile from his home in Cairo. Said found, in
spite of its beautiful New England setting, “alienating and desolate,”68 away from
everything which spoke of home, away from the only person he felt close to (his
mother). At Mount Hermon Said experiences deep loneliness and a sense of being
cut off from the Arab world. The most mystifying and hurtful aspect of the
experience was that Said felt he could never find out on what basis he was judged.
Said explicitly links this experience with what develops in him into a “lifelong
struggle and attempt to demystify the capriciousness and hypocrisy of a power
whose authority depended absolutely on its ideological self-image as a moral
agent, acting in good faith and with unimpeachable intentions.”69 This is where
Said consciously asserts the need to be on his guard “against authority (and to)
develop some mechanism or drive not to be discouraged by what (he) took to be
efforts to silence or deflect (him) from being who (he) was rather than… who they
wanted (him) to be.”70
Aside from the social conditioning exerted by the school, Said, for the first time,
experiences the excitement of learning and a pedagogy that Said finds “more
rational and thoughtful than in previous schools,” invigorating, challenging and
stimulating of his “critical and imaginative faculties” which began as a “complicated
68
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 226.
69
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 230.
70
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 230.
68
process of intellectual discovery (and self-discovery) [that has] never stopped
since. The fact that I was never at home or at least at Mount Hermon, out of place
in nearly every way, gave me the incentive to find my territory, not socially but
intellectually.”71(my emphasis) This is a significant moment for Said, one that
establishes a trajectory that is catalytic in Said’s intellectual and personal
development. Paul Armstrong comments that this statement and Said’s final
statement in Out of Place are emblematic of his “defining contradiction:”72
“…longing for a wholeness and harmony that others seem to have but he does not”
and yet forging from dissonance and multiplicity “liberating values” related to this
fundamental contradiction within himself.73 This insight of Armstrong’s conveys the
strong relationship between the formative experiences that inclined Said toward a
particular intellectual resonance with thinkers as different as Adorno and Auerbach,
Vico and Foucault, Benda and Gramsci. Said develops ideas and utilizes thinkers
and terms that appear highly paradoxical in the minds of many commentators while
for others the paradoxes are able to be perceived as coherent.
Israeli commentator, Alon Confino concludes his critical view of Out of Place
with an important statement that aptly and eloquently insinuates a number of
important considerations when assessing the value of taking into account the
existential dimension in order to develop a comprehensive view of Said’s work.
71
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 230.
Paul B. Armstrong, “Being ‘Out of Place’: Edward W. Said and the Contradictions
of Cultural Differences,” Modern Language Quarterly 64:1, March 2003, 101.
72
Armstrong, “Being ‘Out of Place’: Edward W. Said and the Contradictions of
Cultural Differences,” 101.
73
69
Confino offers the idea that there is a meaningful role for memoir when understood
for both its inherent limitations and its rich existential ground of testimony:
As a Palestinian, Said has written a testimony more eloquent than all his
political writing; the personal is often more powerful than the purely political.
As an intellectual, his memoir shows that even a most self-conscious
intellectual can never reach, as Said would agree, a cultural Archimedean
point from which one can interpret the world from the “outside.” Intellectuals
are always “inside” culture; they are a product of the cultural traditions and
historical mentalities of the society, while attempting at the same time to
explain and criticize it. And they always work with words that are infinitely
ambiguous, even tricky. In his memoir, Said exposes himself to an
exceptional degree, even among intellectuals, by laying bare the links
between his private life and public aspirations, personal experience and
intellectual values.74
The exilic consciousness of Said is expressed in his concluding words to his
memoir:
I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this
to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach such
significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during
the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no
harmonizing….A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being
totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I
particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have
learned to prefer bring not quite right and out of place.”75
How is the paradoxical related to the theme of exile in Said? Among the important
images, metaphors and notions Said conveys in his 2000 book of collected essays
entitled Reflections on Exile, he invokes the image of the traveler, another
metaphor of the exilic consciousness, one which establishes a defining
characteristic of his “secular” humanism, a humanism which eschews the
identitarian thinking and essentialism that underlies the solidarities of culture and
Alon Confino, “Remembering Talbiyah: On Edward Said’s Out of Place,” Israel
Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 196.
74
75
Said, Out of Place: A Memoir, 235.
70
religion. If one thinks of the humanist as a traveler rather than as a representative
of a civilization or a purveyor of a heritage or tradition, a thinker who moves and
crosses bridges of thought and a multiplicity of traditions through the medium of the
exilic consciousness, Said’s emphasis on the “secularity” of humanism becomes
divorced from the religious-secular binary that it typically conveys. “The image of
traveler depends not on power but on motion, on a willingness to go into different
worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks, and
rhetorics.”76
Related to Said’s sense of self-authorization, expressed in that statement, Said
comments on how he began to think, when writing his second book, Beginnings,
on what it means to start again, as Gourgouris sees it “in the absence of even the
most elemental authorities, such as home, family, religion, nation, language.”77
Said states, ”It involved acts of choice…rather than things coming from heaven.
That is why the emphasis on the secular is so great…”78
1.9 Conclusion
In this chapter Edward Said’s autobiographical writing has been examined for
what it reveals about the convergence of existential and intellectual connections by
establishing the central themes of his early life and relating them to the later
directions of his thought. This existential context presented here assists in
76
Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press), 403.
77
Gourgouris, “Transformation, Not Transcendence,” 71.
Edward W. Said, “People’s Rights and Literature,” interview by Jonathan Ree
(Cairo, 1993), in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed.
Gauri Viswanathan (New York Pantheon, 2001), 257.
78
71
considering the reasons for the major intellectual currents to which Said resonates
as he becomes exposed to liberal studies at Princeton University as an
undergraduate and later expands as he encounters in post-graduate studies at
Harvard University the major philosophical and literary thinkers of the modern
period, and particularly those who dominated nineteenth and early twentieth
century thought. In the next chapter, the connections between the existential roots
of Said’s developing exilic consciousness will be made with the intellectual
resonances that develop throughout Said’s education and training in literary
studies and his first two works, Joseph Conrad The Fiction of Autobiography and
Beginnings: Intention and Method. Said’s “humanism of liberation,” most
effectively conveyed in his writing on the problematic of Palestine-Israel, but
germinated in his earliest works, will evolve from the existential roots of this exilic
consciousness meeting thinkers from both the Arab-Islamic and Western literary
and philosophical traditions
72
Chapter Two
Said’s “Humanism of Liberation” in Joseph Conrad and The Fiction
of Autobiography, Beginnings: Intention and Method, and
Orientalism
2.1 Introduction
Having situated Edward Said in terms of his historical moment, we turn now to
how the early Said explored questions of the relationship of humanism and its
twentieth century responses to issues of human liberation and human oppression
in his two earliest works, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography and
Beginnings: Intention and Method. We are particularly interested in establishing
the relationship between the concerns, themes, and major ideas of these books to
those Said would expound from Orientalism on, with special attention given in later
chapters to how these early works demonstrate Said’s early engagement the
questions of the meaning and work of humanism. This struggle of Said’s—this
effort to re-cover humanism against the arguments of the poststructuralists who
would eschew humanism as a useable intellectual praxis—leads Said to develop a
practice and notion he calls “secular criticism. We shall see in later chapters how
Said’s work on the Arab Islamic world1 and especially on the problematic of
Palestine-Israel, exemplifies Said’s notion of “secular” criticism, which he sees as
the chief activity of the humanist. But first, through an examination of Said’s
earliest major works we uncover the links between the emergent ideas in his
Here, we refer particularly to Said’s less well-known and shorter works on the
Arab Islamic world which have been under-examined.
1
73
literary, cultural, and political criticism and the major concerns and concepts that
would suffuse his later works.
Said’s humanism of liberation and concerns with the failure of the project of
Enlightenment and its manifestations in the world of nineteenth century British
empire come into view through his examination of Conrad’s work in Joseph Conrad
and the Fiction of Autobiography.2 His second book, Beginnings is a meandering
“meditation” (Said’s word) on questions implicit to the debates generated by
modern Enlightenment rationality and its postmodern responses. Whereas the
work on Conrad (originally his Harvard dissertation) is written in the clear style and
conventional idiom of most literary criticism of the time, the second book explores
the ideas of numerous thinkers; among them philosophers such as Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard, and Stern, as well as poets, novelists, and philologists such as
Wordsworth, Dickens, Auerbach and Vico.
Said inspired by Vico’s focus on the differences between “beginnings” and
origins, examines the questions of originality and authority, each of which, he
shows, has several meanings -- some opposite to each other. The result of this
exploration is that Said’s exposition of these terms sets the foundations for the
project of ideological critique that, over the course of his career, will include his
thesis on Orientalism, his treatment of Islam and the Arab-Muslim world, as well as
his work on the question of Palestine. In Beginnings Said looks at the foundations
2
To be referred to from here on as The Fiction.
74
of modern thought.3 This investigation is Said’s own beginning into his project of
“secular” criticism. His first book of literary criticism had set the intellectual stage for
Beginnings, in which Said reflects on the philosophical (as distinct from the purely
literary, existential, or political) concerns inaugurated in Joseph Conrad and The
Fiction of Autobiography.”4 With this brief introduction to Said’s first two works, we
shall explore each of them individually for their relationship to his major thesis,
Orientalism, and the works that evolve from that beginning as well as for the
emergent ideas and concerns that would remain intellectual centerpieces of all his
works and would be framed in a debate about humanism, liberation and the
practice of criticism—a debate that is couched in a rhetoric that pits Said’s notion of
the “religious” against his notion of the “secular.” For Said, the debate on the
meaning of modernity centers on the question of whether man has
2.2 Said and Conrad
Said’s existential, phenomenological monograph on Conrad explores Conrad’s
life, thoughts, and reflections as expressed in his personal letters and in relation to
his fiction. It explores those passages in Conrad’s literary production that expose
through the language of his protagonists the attitudes common in British society
toward the colonized territories and peoples of East Asia and Africa. This political
dimension of Western Europe’s effects on the rest of the world and Said’s concern
with what he later termed “the worldliness of texts “ opens a forty-year critical
3
For a detailed investigation of Beginnings that challenges other appraisals of the
book, see Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London:
Verso, 2002), 75.
4
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 63.
75
project that begins in this monograph with Said’s critique of the Western subject’s
struggle with modernity. Other important themes in Said’s book on Conrad include
what Abdirahman Hussein has eloquently summarized as “the perceptual opacity
of truth; about the way in which ideas and ideals almost inevitably merge into
ideological doctrines; about human agency’s co-activation of the will to truth and
the will to power—all these concerns, which we have encountered in the study of
Conrad, are addressed in Beginnings (Said’s second book) too.”5
In considering Said’s examination of Joseph Conrad, one is struck by the fact
that not only is he the subject of the only monograph Said wrote but he is also the
subject of additional extended analyses in three other major texts by Said. 6 Said’s
extensive attention to Conrad suggests both biographical and intellectual
resonances for Said, the exploration of which yield insights into Said’s critical
project at its inception. Having examined Said’s existential moorings in the
previous chapter, we have seen the centrality for Said of the theme of exile and the
paradox of identity. The exilic or critical consciousness then becomes the
intellectual’s weapon in the struggle for human liberation.
There are two inter-related conjunctures between Said and Conrad: the
similarities of early experiences of exile and the intersection of topics of concern.
Both are interested in European imperialism and all that it entailed for Europe and
5
6
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 56.
See Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1975), 9,10,11, 24,25,84-85, 128, 151,229,230,232-234,237,240
261,262,263, 287-88. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the
Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 90-110, 97-98, 99100,107-110, and Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf,
1993) 22-30,163-164.
76
its “Others” and the relationship between human consciousness and the will to
truth and power. These concerns bring both Conrad and Said into the same arena
where, through their writing, they struggle to construct a coherent view of human
rationality and the relationship between the subject and the object.
Though Conrad and Said experience the phenomenon of exile at different
historical moments and in different circumstances, the convergence of the
concerns identified above leads to Said’s fascination with Conrad as the starting
point for his cultural critique. Conrad’s position as exiled Pole who escapes
Russian domination and becomes the successful insider who is always yet an
outsider in his adopted England seems to be a factor in Said’s long term interest in
his work. This may be seen at least in part as a resonance for Said given his own
status as a Palestinian exile who becomes a successful writer, teacher, and critic in
the United States and who similarly maintains his insider/outsider existence. But
another part of Said’s interest in Conrad is that Conrad is the only British novelist in
the age of high imperialism who exhibits, through some of his characters, at least
an implicit consciousness of concern over the meaning and effects of empire on
both sides of the imperial equation. Conrad displays through his characters an
almost unquestioning acceptance of Europe’s, and specifically Britain’s, activity in
the world, while he also paradoxically displays an awareness of the ethical
problems with empire. In nineteenth century British literature this is a perspective
unique to Conrad’s characters and this fact intrigues Said. What emerges as Said’s
life-long project-- the critique of ideology and culture -- within which his
idiosyncratic rhetoric of the religious and the secular develops —commences with
Said’s study of Conrad. This point that is far from self-evident, and one which,
77
when grasped, enables the accurate apprehension of Said’s project of criticism
and the rhetorical use he makes of the religious/secular trope throughout his
oeuvre.
Said’s incipient critique as an exploration of the relationship between Western
rationality and empire causes Said to reflect in The Fiction on Conrad’s
protagonists’ statements and actions in works such as Heart of Darkness and
Nostromo. Said returns in several analyses, to a few narrations from the Heart of
Darkness, in which Marlow, Conrad’s narrator, evinces an attitude typical of the
period, one which provides examples of several significant aspects of the problem
of empire, ideology, and Said interprets as “religious” underpinnings in spite of the
prevalent turn towards humanism and rationality in mid-nineteenth century Britain,
the setting for Heart of Darkness. Marlow shares this thought with his mates on the
nature of empire:
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from
those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than
ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What
redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental
pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you
can set up, and bow down to, and offer sacrifice to.7
Said’s assessment of this expression of European belief in the redeeming idea—
one that conveys a sense of something akin to a religious mission-- behind
Europe’s imperialism and colonization of Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century,
is evident a few pages later in The Fiction:
7
Quoted in Said, Culture and Imperialism, 69.
78
The trouble with unrestrained and militant egoism as Conrad saw it was that
it becomes an imperialism of ideas, which easily converts itself into the
imperialism of nations. In spite of the obvious injustice done to those upon
whom one’s idea can be imposed, it is important to understand that the
reason an individual imposes his idea is that he believes he is serving truth.
The stronger the sense of one’s own individuality, the stronger the
consequent impulse to dedicate oneself ‘unselfishly’ to an idea of the truth.
A writer of strong individuality must therefore search within himself for an apt
and correct image that best expresses his own idea of the truth for, despite
the perils of imperialism, the process was a necessity for coping with the
internal darkness and the external world.8
Here Said explains that Conrad’s ambivalence toward the fact of injustices done
to the colonized world in the name of a putative idea of truth imagined by people
who ascribe to their motivations a sense of higher purpose, derives from a concern
that members of imperialist societies turn their self-gratifying behavior into
something sanctified by the “higher” goals of the society and of the nation. Implied
is the idea of la mission civilisatrice conjoined with nineteenth century concepts
about “subject races,” “subordinate peoples,” “dependency,” and the like 9 --concepts which acquire the cover of right and of truth steeped in a sense of the
whole imperial enterprise as connected with the sacredness of the nation and of its
culture. Yet, in acknowledging that, “when you look into it too much,” the reality for
the “objects” of Europe’s exploration, colonization, and extension of empire, that is,
the human beings of the colonized territories, is “not a pretty thing,” Conrad’s
8
Said, The Fiction, 140.
Said, 1993, 9. Said is referring to “the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century
imperial culture” as being “plentiful with words and concepts such as these,
referring to the fact that imperialism and colonialism was not only “simple
accumulation and acquisition,” and that “Both are supported and perhaps even
impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain
territories and people require and beseech domination.”
9
79
character, in these words, evinces a sense of internal conflict, one that in his being
part of the grand exploration and conquest, he is unable to do anything about.
Conrad here is affirming the consciousness of Europeans engaged in the imperial
effort of the conflict between ends and means, of might and right. What causes
Said to give such analytical attention to Conrad, beyond the aesthetic quality of his
works and his importance in nineteenth century British literature, is that Conrad’s
consciousness of the ethical-political problem of empire is evident in a way that no
other writer of his time displays. This issue is central to Said’s attempt to come to
grips with the way in which the Enlightenment’s goals and the hope that it held for
humanity, when translated into action in the historical world, has resulted more
often than not in oppression and injustice for Europe’s “Others.” The paradoxes of
modernity grip Said intellectually because as an intellectual schooled in and deeply
enamored of post-Enlightenment thought, humanism, for him must somehow
intrinsically have the capacity to recover, re-discover or revive its original liberatory
mission. It becomes Said’s life-work to re-establish and model what he sees as
true humanism, which ironically, requires humanism to become “secular.”
Connected with this consciousness of the paradox of imperialism felt by
Conrad’s characters, and apparently the conscience-assuaging factor for those
engaged in or supporting the predatory side of empire (from the viewpoint of the
“natives”) is the other important idea exposed in Marlow’s statement quoted above,
which merits more reflection and which is closely connected to the religious-secular
thematic in Said that shall be examined closely further on—the suggestion that
there is a redeeming idea that justifies imperialism. As Said points out,
80
There was a commitment to (imperialism and colonialism) over and above
profit, a commitment in constant circulation and recirculation, which, on the
one hand, allowed decent men and women to accept the notion that distant
territories and their native peoples should be subjugated, and on the other,
replenish metropolitan energies so that these decent people could think of
the imperium as a protracted, almost metaphysical obligation to rule
subordinate, inferior, or less advanced peoples. We must not forget that
there was very little domestic resistance to these empires, although they
were very frequently established and maintained under adverse and even
disadvantageous conditions.10
Said’s assertion of a European sense of an “almost metaphysical obligation,”
toward the rest of the world echoes Conrad’s idea expressed through Marlow of a
redemptive idea, a culturally constructed idea that pervades his society. The idea
of culture and the ideas that are common within a culture as being religion
transfigured is proposed by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy,11 the
implications of which are important to Said’s concept of “secular criticism.” This will
be fully explored in chapter four. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that in his
discussion of Conrad’s work, Said is suggesting parallels between the way
nineteenth century people embraced culturally accepted notions such as the
subjugation of the people of Africa and Asia and religious beliefs, attitudes, and
behaviors.
In connection with the goals of humanism and the idea that self-knowledge
and self-criticism only come about, not in a devaluing of but in dialogue with the
“Other”, Said utilizes the implications excavated from Conrad’s work as a way to
10
11
Said, Joseph Conrad and The Fiction of Autobiography, 10.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1960).
81
focus analysis on the philosophical and existential conflicts that emanate from
post-Enlightenment rationality. This becomes his point of departure—his
beginning--for instigating a critique of contemporary cultural, military and economic
imperialism, one that other critics of the Enlightenment, such as Foucault and other
poststructuralists, in Said’s view, abandoned in their resignation to the facts of
power and their turn toward self-care and self-development as well as in their
“pious” adherence to avant-garde criticism-turned-dogma. Said continued to see
humanism as the way forward toward a more just world and a more free human
being. But Said’s re-construction of humanism was only beginning to be formulated
in his first two books. It would be in his work on the Palestinian-Israeli problematic
that his (“non-humanist”)12 humanism would find its fullest expression.
After setting out his major themes and intellectual concerns in his book on
Conrad and in Beginnings, Said embarks on his deconstruction of Western
humanistic study of the Arab-Islamic world in his major thesis Orientalism. In its
sequel, Culture and Imperialism, Said provides analysis of the literature of
resistance demonstrating that the colonized engaged in resistance to Western
power—an idea that was missing in Orientalism giving rise to the presumption by
many Said critics that Said denied agency to the colonized. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Perhaps the misinterpretation of Said’s failure to
demonstrate the resistance to power in the Arab Islamic world catalyzed the writing
of Culture and Imperialism. In this book which selects prime examples of the
resistance efforts of colonial intellectuals, Said expresses his abiding belief in the
12
Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), 77.
82
possibility and the reality of human agency, a thoroughly humanistic idea, but one
which by the mid-nineties when Culture and Imperialism appeared, had been
thoroughly denied by poststructuralist (left anti-humanist) thinkers such as Foucault
and Althusser.13. The sequence of intellectual endeavors that results from Said’s
days of Conrad scholarship and the concerns that his work on Conrad enunciates
represent an opening to an extended argument on the centrality of “secular”
criticism to the enterprise of the humanist that arises out of Said’s optimistic belief
in the possibility of subjectivity in spite of the effects of hegemony, cultural
systems, and repressive apparatuses at work in modern societies.
Though Said uses Conrad’s work, including his consciousness and honest
presentation of the cost of imperialism and colonization as a point of departure for
his own critique of rationalism and imperialism, he points up Conrad’s inability, for
all his consciousness, to see the colonized peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America as anything more than “natives,” people who are innately inferior to the
European and for his inability to imagine any world other than the one he inhabited.
Conrad’s deterministic attitude is demonstrated in a passage from Nostromo, a
novel set in a fictitious Central American Republic, “independent” (unlike the
13
Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984). Louis Althusser, On
the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. The
Marxist, Louis Althusser (1918-1990) addressed the question of subjectivity. He
essentially denies the possibility of human agency due to the workings of
ideological state apparatuses. See analysis in Donald E. Hall, Subjectivity (New
York: Routledge, 2004), Chapter 3, 84-87. On Foucault’s belief in the “meager
possibility for human agency,” Hall, 90. See Michel Foucault and Colin
Gordon, Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 55-62, 78-108. The question and debate
over how Foucault theorizes power, and what his definition of power is, and how
Said’s view of human agency differs with that of Foucault is discussed in numerous
articles and books:
83
colonies in Africa and East Asia of Conrad’s earlier works), yet controlled by
European and American interests at the same time because of its immense silver
mine. In this scene Holroyd, the American financier who backed Charles Gould, the
British owner of the San Tome mine, expresses both the sense of omnipotence
over the hapless populations outside Britain and America and the powerlessness
of all, including themselves, to resist the tides of culture and imperialism:
We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound
to. But there’s no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in
the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything—
industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn
clear over to Surith’s Sound, and beyond it, too, if anything worth taking hold
of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in
hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the
world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—
and neither can we, I guess.14
Said comments on the underlying beliefs and attitudes exposed by Nostromo’s
Western characters such as Holroyd as exhibiting what he explains as Conrad’s
understanding that the imperialism of the San Tome’s British and American owners
is so “ingrained as to blind him to other histories, other cultures, other aspirations.
All Conrad can see is a world totally dominated by the Atlantic West..…” 15 What
causes Conrad to ignore “…other histories, other cultures, other aspirations?” We
find in a letter written by Conrad in 1897 that his view of existence is that of a huge
14
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (1904; reprinted Garden
City: Doubleday, 1925) 77. Said says in his note on this quotation in his Culture
and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books,) p. 337 that Ian Watt, “one of
Conrad’s best critics,’ says little about the imperialism of the United States. See
also Said’s Conrad: “Nostromo” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
15
Said, Culture and Imperialism, xviii.
84
knitting machine evolved “out of a chaos of scraps and iron.”16 Said quotes part of
the letter to convey the sense that Conrad held that existence is controlled by a
great, insentient, mechanical force which man has no control over. His is a
pessimistic, mechanistic, hopeless world, one in which the concept of human
agency has no place. In The Fiction Said discusses the influence on Conrad of
Schopenhauer’s will philosophy and his resulting highly pessimistic worldview. 17
The concept that truth is “nothingness,” dark, unknowable, beyond human grasp
except insofar as man enters into the nothingness of existence is prevalent
throughout Conrad’s works at this time. Imbued with a deterministic attitude
completely lacking in hope, Marlow, whose consciousness of the negative
consequences of British imperialism is expressed, has no impulse to pursue any
course of action other than the normative imperial adventures of his time. To
convey more directly the idea of the extent to which Conrad held deeply
mechanistic views of the human condition, we share an extended quotation from a
letter of Conrad’s in 1898 displaying what Said rightly calls “a terrifying revelation”
– statements typical of a number of letters of this period. It conveys the utter
despair that lay within the spirit of Joseph Conrad:
The machine is thinner than air and as evanescent as a flash of lightning.
The attitude of cold unconcern is the only reasonable one. Of course reason
is hateful,--but why? Because it demonstrates (to those who have the
courage) that we, living, are out of life, ---utterly out of it. The mysteries of a
universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the
least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not
16
17
Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, 33.
See Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 35-40 for a detailed analysis
of Said’s utilization of both both Sartrean and Schopenhauerian insights on
Conrad’s consciousness.
85
worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable
tragedy. If you believe in improvement, you must weep, for the attained
perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view
the ardour for reform, improvement, for virtue, for knowledge, and even for
beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances, as though one were
anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men.
Life knows us not and we do not know life, ---we don’t know even our
own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the
other half man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and
conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore: thoughts
vanish: words, once pronounced, die: and the memory of yesterday is as
shadowy as the hope of tomorrow,--only the string of my platitude seems to
have no end. As our peasants say: “Pray brother, forgive me for the love of
God.” And we don’t know what forgiveness is, nor what love is, nor where
God is. Assez!18
With such a view of existence, expressed in several of Conrad’s personal letters
and incorporated into Said’s The Fiction, would it be possible for Conrad’s
protagonists to do other than to accept the inevitability, even the acceptability, of
the consequences to the non-European world wrought by European imperialism?
Returning to a consideration of Said’s motivation for such attention to Conrad in
the present effort to establish foundational influences in Said’s work, it is useful to
consider evident convergences between the biography of Said and Conrad. The
experience of exile, and from it, the sense of being continually out of place19,
coupled with a high degree of success in the world of letters, experienced in the
place of exile, are striking similarities in the lives of both men. It is not an
overstatement to say that the experience of exile permanently affected the
18
19
Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, 35-36.
This sense of not fitting in was part of Said from an early age and is
documented in his memoir, Out of Place, 1999. This is discussed at length in
chapter one of the present study.
86
personalities and characters of both men. As we shall see further on, exile-- both
physical and metaphorical-- becomes an essential element in the “critical
consciousness”20 that facilitates “secular” criticism that Said develops and
advocates as the essential element in a humanism that fulfills the liberatory
mission. The impact of early exile for Conrad, on the other hand, is unclear except
insofar as it may have influenced his unique though fugitive insights on imperialism
that protagonists, such as Marlow, express. Conrad’s ability to assimilate to British
society may have remained incomplete due to his early experiences as an
oppressed and exiled Pole, hence leaving open some questions in his mind
considering the imperial project of his adopted country.
The Fiction devotes lengthy analysis to what Conrad’s letters reveal about his
works and what Conrad’s letters and his works reveal about his consciousness. As
has been noted, Conrad displays a generally gloomy sense of human
powerlessness. Here is where biographical parallels between Said and Conrad do
not translate into philosophical parallels, for Said is ever the proponent of the
possibility and importance of human agency. Though Said conveys a strong belief
in the inaccessibility of truth, he nevertheless maintains a commitment to the
possibility of human choice and action in spite of the limitations that systems of
power exert on human life. This position on human agency being possible in spite
of power and the knowledge-power nexus will form the primary ground of Said’s
20
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 16, 24-30. Said discusses the meaning of “critical
consciousness” which he relates to the experience of both physical and
metaphorical exile, or the “exilic,” as when he discusses Erich Auerbach’s passage
from Hugo of St. Victor, as an “exilic credo” associated with the notions of
paupertas, terra aliena and the “ascetic code of willed homelessness.” (7).
87
humanistic contentions against the poststructuralists and will be discussed further
on in chapter five, six, and seven.
A brief summary of biographical details related to the experience of exile and
dislocatedness by Conrad and Said should serve to establish this point of
commonality between them: Conrad, living in the nineteenth century, chose exile
at a young age from his native Poland where his parents were killed in the Polish
struggle against the regime of Czarist Russia. Conrad, though he maintained a
love of and preoccupation with Poland, managed to achieve a place of honor as a
novelist in Victorian England, writing for a European audience from a context in
which Western Europe controlled eighty percent of the world’s surface and a
similar proportion of the world’s population. As a result, though an immigrant of
difficult early circumstances shot through with the effects of trauma, Conrad, for all
his pessimism and personal insecurity as a writer, was fully conscious of the
superiority of his position vis-à-vis the “natives” of Britain’s colonies. This
consciousness appears to be a factor in the personalities of several of his
protagonists.
A brief summary of Said’s experience of exile must highlight the fact that Said
experienced several dislocations (from Lebanon and from Egypt) as well as the
forced exile resulting in the loss of the Jerusalem family home that effectively and
permanently ended Said’s-- and his compatriots-- right to live in their ancestral
homes. Said and his family, though living primarily between Egypt and Lebanon at
the time of the Zionist takeover of seventy-eight per cent of historic Palestine in
1948, lost their family home in Jerusalem and with them roughly three quarters of a
million Palestinians living on ancestral land who were either displaced or killed, the
88
displacements occurring either within or outside historic Palestine with the creation
of the state of Israel on the same land. Said had experienced British colonial life in
Egypt, his significant memories of which have been discussed in chapter one. He
had experienced being a minority Christian in a majority Muslim environment both
in Egypt and in Lebanon. His experience of exile from Palestine, both physical and
metaphorical, the sense of being homeless, dispossessed and destabilized,
became the ground for an enduring sense and experience of exile that developed
into a significant theme in Said’s thought even as he cultivated the appropriate
skills that would enable him to live on the margins of things and places. This
experience, significant aspects of which have been presented in chapter one, also
enabled the development in Said of multiple identities that would facilitate his ability
to live between various worlds and even to thrive in them while simultaneously
experiencing the pain of forced dislocation from his homeland, of being a native of
the colonized world, of being the other of the dominant power who controls the
accepted narrative of one’s dispossession. While Conrad, after achieving his status
in England of a Victorian man of letters, wrote from his perceived position of being
part of a dominant imperial nation, Said, while achieving a similar status in postWWII America, wrote back to the empire from the position of the colonized, the
disenfranchised and the dispossessed, choosing not to shake off his identification
with the other Palestinians displaced around the world. Hussein has aptly
described his view of the connection of Said to Conrad:
Said’s fascination with Conrad, then involves a multiplicity of agendas: the
homeless citizen of the world; the postcolonial critic of Eurocentrism and
Western imperialism; the corrosive genealogist—that profoundly suspicious
historian of ideas and their interconnections with the material realities of
bodies, institutions, artifacts, and societies, the interpreter-historian of
89
literary culture; the demystifier of ideological epiphenomena—all these
different Saidian personas can find specifically appropriate points of
departure in Conrad’s large body of writing.21
Considering together the major experiences of Said’s early life discussed in
chapter one, along with Said’s literary relationship to Conrad, then, shall help to
form a basis for the analysis of Said’s oeuvre as a critical project whose
philosophical formation arises in part out of the existential content of Said’s
experience. This existential content connects in Said’s consciousness with his
intellectual excursions into the relationship between reason and empire, between
critical thought on the one side and dogma/ideology on the other. It becomes
clearer, seeing it in this way, how the rhetoric of the religious and the secular
becomes a major trope in the Saidian oeuvre, one not evincing an anti-religion
motive, but an anti-ideology preoccupation. This claim will be further developed in
chapters three and four when we examine the literature on Said’s religious/secular
rhetoric.
2.3 The Beginnings of Said’s “Secular” Humanism--Beginnings:
Intention and Method
Following the 1966 literary study of Conrad which, among other things, opens
up Said’s questioning of the epistemological basis for empire and poking at its
ideological and ontological assumptions, Said’s second book Beginnings: Intention
and Method, Said sets about laying out and endorsing a tradition of thought that
21
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 22.
90
runs counter to the “Cartesianism rampant in literary and cultural theory” 22 and
which also had laid the foundations for modern Western ideas that underwrote
colonialism and empire. In his sympathetic exposition of the thought of the
eighteenth century philologist and historian of ideas, Giambattista Vico, Said seeks
to further and uphold a humanistic tradition that denies the mathematical
rationalism of the Cartesian line of empiricist philosophies and the
metaphysical/theological thinking of pre and post-Enlightenment idealism as well
as Biblically-based religion. A brief summary of Said’s interest in Vico’s ideas
explicated in Beginnings demonstrates how formative Vico is for Said’s later work.
Said reads Vico as representing a “major shift in perspective and knowledge,”23
a new model for man as inquirer, a notion of humanist investigation that runs
counter to both structuralist and (most) poststructuralist conceptions. Said casts
the human as one who thinks and asks questions, who begins. Influenced by Vico
who rejected any concept of the transcendental Origin, and who proposed that
human beings make their own world, Vico presaged the understanding of the
beginning that Said takes as the starting point for what he calls “secular” criticism.
Essential to Said’s critique of the epistemological and ontological assumptions
of many post-Enlightenment philosophies and their consequences in the world,
Said in invoking Vico’s thought is arguing for a central place for the human being in
the historical world, making his own history, but with a science of history (Vico’s
Timothy Brennan, “The Making of a Counter-Tradition,” in Edward W. Said,
Müge Gürsoy. Sökmen, and Bașak Ertür, Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to
Edward W. Said (London: Verso, 2008), 8.
22
23
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 372.
91
“new science”) that sees history as “conditioned by repetition,”24 a historical
approach based on the concept of “complementarity: the lateral as opposed to the
linear and sequential, the concept of beginning as a repetition of worthy
precursors, the conceiving of language itself as ‘the rewriting [which is to say the
writing again] of history,” and the unfolding of a thesis, not in prophetic explosions,
but by way of ‘a gradually developing exemplary discourse.’”25 This is to say that
Vico (and with him Said) confronts claims to novelty, espouses the concept of
continuity (even with “beginnings”), and rejects the concept that a “beginning” is a
rupture. In line with this idea is Vico’s suggestion that “only by reproducing can we
know what was produced and what the meaning is of verbal production for a
human being.”26
Continuing along with Vico’s radically historicist line of thinking, Said in
Beginnings discusses the important difference between the concept of origins and
the concept of beginnings, an idea that has significance for Said’s later usage of
the terms “religious” and “secular.” In this passage, the connections between the
concept of continuity as opposed to rupture, the concept of complementarity as
opposed to linearity, and some of the ideas of the early Foucault are alluded to.
Said argues that
The state of mind that is concerned with origins is, I have said, theological.
By contrast, and this is the shift, beginnings are eminently secular, or
gentile, continuing activities. Another difference must be noted briefly here,
since in my discussions of Freud and of modern texts I have already
24
Brennan, “The Making of a Counter-Tradition,” 8.
25
Brennan, “The Making of a Counter-Tradition,” 8.
26
Brennan, “The Making of a Counter-Tradition,” 8.
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examined one aspect of this difference in detail: a beginning intends
meaning, but the continuities and methods developing from it are general
orders of dispersion, of adjacency, and of complementarity. A different way
of putting this is to say that whereas an origin centrally dominates what
derives from it, the beginning (especially the modern beginning) encourages
nonlinear development, a logic giving rise to the sort of multileveled
coherence of dispersion we find in Freud’s text, in the texts of modern
writers, or in Foucault’s archaeological investigations.27
This passage is extremely significant for what it reveals about Said’s Vichian
concepts and the extent to which he has absorbed them into his own thinking. His
use of words with religious-secular overtones such as “theological” in reference to
the concept of origins and “gentile” as a synonym for “secular” exhibits his
developing rhetoric that serves as a shorthand for his favoring of the open-ended
and unorthodox over the closed systems of any sort of orthodoxy, not only as they
relate to truly religious matters, but as they relate to what are normally viewed as
secular perspectives such as those the various schools of antihumanism, such as
structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction enunciate. Related to these
views we can then understand, for example, Said’s critical examination in
Beginnings of the ideas of the popular thinking of the linguistically based theory of
structuralism, represented in the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Emile
Benveniste, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and others. Said’s charge is that
structuralism promotes a type of determinism (even after disposing of the
constructions of metaphysics) and therefore Said does not see structuralism as an
improvement epistemologically over earlier positions on truth. What Said
27
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 372-73.
93
particularly finds unsatisfying about the structuralist turn is that in it the idea of man
as inquirer or creator is a fiction. Said writes of structuralism:
The structuralists, in short, do not believe in the immediacy of anything; they
are content to understand and to contemplate the alphabetical order of
sense as a mediating function rather than as a direct meaning. Order, they
claim, is just on our human side of nothingness; it preserves us from the
oblivion of unremarked durations. To perceive this order one can not have
recourse to a direct unfolding (as in the Enfaltung of hermeneutical
interpretation) of the kernel of meaning within a statement; that alternative,
we recall, disappeared with the primordial Origin. We are left only with a way
of experience conceived of as a gigantic script or musical score—works,
how it hangs together. We search for structure as Zusammenhange, the
“principle of solidarity” among parts according to Barthes.
Structure hides the actuality of our existence because it is the nature of
structure to refuse to reveal its presence directly; only language can solicit
structure out of the background in which it hovers. Structure is nonrational; it
is not thought thinking about anything, but thought itself as the merest
possibility of activity. It can offer no rationale for its presence, once
discovered, other than its primitive thereness. In a most important way, then
as an ensemble of interacting parts, structure replaces the Origin with the
play of orderly relationships. A univocal source has ceded to a proliferating
systematic web.28
In other words, Said opposes the structuralist negation of human creativity or
agency in its positing of a “systematic web of orderly relationships”29 replacing the
Origin, essentially resulting in placing man into a determined universe just as
metaphysics and theology do. Said rejects this view in favor of Vico’s philological
historicism, and by so doing aligns himself intellectually with the humanistic
tradition described by Brennan as based in a “left-Hegelian posture…as heterodox
28
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 327.
29
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 327.
94
(‘in the prevailing critical winds of right-moving prejudice, scientism and political
intolerance’) as was secularity in the Middle Ages.”30
Brennan, “The Making of a Counter-Tradition, 10. Brennan goes on to develop
what he means by this as follows and we shall quote his explanation at length
because it sheds light on Said’s further development and usages of the terms
“religious” and “secular” throughout his work. Brennan states that (concerning
Said’s alignment with Vico):
30
…we should not …fail to recognize what he meant by this combination of
ideas. Let us begin with the notion of ‘providence’ which any reader of The
New Science cannot fail to notice or puzzle over. How can a tract like The
New Science—which nods to religious convention, but that no attentive
reader can interpret as anything but counter-religious—be simultaneously
about so apparently religious a concept as ‘providence’? Vico is saying,
among other things, that humans, however separated they are by culture, by
geography, by historical experience, or mode of production—as they in fact
have been throughout much of their pre-history—all happened, remarkably,
to arrive at similar civil institutions in isolation from one another, and without
any one group having exported the key or model as a gift of their unique
genius. Each people found its way to society, to laws, to cultural
achievement, to economic self-sufficiency; or, as he puts it in The New
Science, ‘ploughed lands were the first altars of the gentiles.’ How could
this have happened, Vico asks, if there were not some secular logic to
humans themselves as social creatures, some innate capacity to express
their humanity in forms recognizable to, and valued by, all?
This logic he…calls ‘providence’—flirting,…with the prevailing religious
rhetoric he was in fact mocking—and although it is exactly the idea taken up
by others more famously later. For example, it is the exact idea found in
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in his account of the Mind’s coming to selfconsciousness, the Mind’s coming to recognize its common destiny with
others; or it is found in Aimé Césaire’s famous lines on there being room for
everyone at the ‘rendezvous of victory’—an important element in all national
independence struggles for equal sovereignty, which are often based on an
equal claim to having contributed, in unrecognized ways, to a world culture
now monopolized by an appropriating imperial power.
This whole line of argument was counter-posed to Vico’s opening gambit
in The New Science, which freely conceded to orthodoxy that one people
had precedence over all others—that, according to Biblical verities, the Jews
as the people chosen by God were first, were exceptional, and existed as it
were outside of history. The brilliance of Vico’s study in part is that this
apparent place of honor is actually a justification for ignoring Biblical verities,
precisely on the ground that they are “outside of history.” All the action of
his book…lies in what is purportedly only “left over” after establishing the
95
The argument of Beginnings is Said’s initial foray into the history of ideas, how they
have been formulated, reformulated and transformed as well as how they have
been appropriated and misappropriated. Perhaps most importantly he examines
the way they suffuse themselves within the texture of human cultural life. The
notion of border regions of thought or what might be called the in-between location
is considered in Said’s meditations of how ideas live in the worldly circumstances
of space and time.31 Hussein points out the significance of this “beginning,” one
which has both spatial and temporal implications and calls Beginnings a “groundclearing exercise, a theoretical cleaning of the slate which fuses together—and
activates—a highly idiosyncratic history of modern ideas and an obliquely directed
but far-reaching critique of ideology.”32 Unlike the earlier work on Conrad,
Beginnings illuminates “a vast discursive/intentional stage”33 on which are played
out the conflicts between seeing modernity as rupture versus continuity, and
gradual versus radical transformation.
Said conceived this exploration as shared intellectual space where thought
can be viewed in its lateral dimensions as opposed to the more normative
study which always sees intellectual history in a linear and sequential
fashion. Beginnings departs from The Fiction’s effort to analyze the
anguished struggles of a single self in favor of a larger conversation among
exalted character of the chosen. Let the chosen have God, he seems to say;
for the rest of us, we have men and women, who are much more interesting
and, in the end, more consequential. This is the basis upon which his
providential history is built: the complete and radical non-priority of any
people.
31
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 8.
32
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 64.
33
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 64.
96
more thinkers who have posited different philosophical answers to the
questions and debates arising out of the Enlightenment.34
Relating this effort back to his first book’s philosophical moorings, in Beginnings
Said is consciously making a foray into philosophical35 critiques of empiricism and
idealism, which Said sees as aspects of “rationalism” (Said’s term), the sociopolitical consequences of which are at great variance and ambiguous depending
on whose perspective is considered, that of “Europe” or its “Others.” In
Beginnings, Said asserts that there are aspects of reason which must be taken into
account in order to explain the historicity or situatedness from which modern
thought develops. This essay -- an early attempt by Said to think through the
consequences of modernity “conceived in these terms for normativity in the realm
of ideas, ideals, and…ideologies” 36-- and its conception of rationality --is in direct
conversation with the ideas of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Vico.37 Its purpose is to
raise questions about the authority that sustains realities in the sociopolitical world
and to explore the requirements of truly critical thought, thought that is oriented
toward questions of being and truth and toward developing approaches to sociopolitical realities that accord with Vico’s idea (which Said shares) that human
beings make their own world and their own history.
34
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 64.
In agreement with Hussein, the word “philosophical” is used here referring to the
broad use of the term as it has been used in continental European thought rather
than the more narrow, formalistic sense it is often used in Britain and the U.S. Said
did not engage in formal discussions of philosophy, nor utilize philosophical
nomenclature consistently.
35
36
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 64.
37
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 64.
97
Beginnings also presents through a consideration of a variety of modern
thinkers, the dilemma that though “truth” remains inaccessible, human nature,
paradoxically continues its demand for “truth.” Said expresses his idea that
thinkers of modernity had no option but to provide historicist solutions to the
problem, both logical and epistemological, presented by the double-binds that arise
out of every philosophical position. The invention of historicist solutions to the
problem of “truth” in Said’s view, given the perceived absence of definitive
satisfying answers from metaphysics or theology, left open the question of
authority and normativity and in this open space, modern thinkers have deposited
what Hussein describes as “mythopoetic fictions created by human agency in
historically contingent circumstances.”38 Yet the resulting schools of thought—
poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and other antihumanist responses to the
double-binds of Enlightenment rationalism-- have created an impression of
legitimacy which may simply be new philosophical fictions. Furthermore, the
ideological positions arising from these schools of thought, in Said’s view, have
taken on, similar to the metaphysical and theological “certainties” of yore, an
almost sacred aura. It is to these ideological formations that a great deal of Said’s
religious-secular rhetoric is directed, as we shall see in chapter four.
Said calls for a new examination of what has been known as “history” and the
history of ideas. History on this view can not be conceived as a linear, unitary
progression, nor a single narrative of human progress. The idea of the originary,
the dynastic, or the notion of there being a conceptual oneness undergirding
history are radically questioned by Said who proposes that instead of seeing the
38
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 68.
98
historian as a mere narrator or interpreter of events, he must “excavate and
dramatize this constellation of archival sites.”39 In Beginnings, Said posits a “logic
of multiplicity (as opposed to unity), complementarity (as contrasted with
opposition) and contiguity (as opposed to rupture or discontinuity)”40—all of which
he finds inherent in the double-bind of inaccessible truth coupled with concomitant
human demands and requirements for the inaccessible truth. The spatial side of
the historical coin merits Said’s attention and the geographical becomes a major
element in Said’s thought, especially in his works such as Culture and Imperialism
and within his writing on Palestine-Israel. The centrality of the geographical as
opposed to the merely historical in Said’s thought shall be explored in this analysis
in due course.
Said’s preoccupation with “beginnings” then and a host of notions related to the
concept such as innovation, novelty, originality, revolutions, change, convention,
tradition, authority and influence (among others) has to do with this idea that the
historian of ideas must excavate terrains of thought and to do this requires an
intellectual expedition into the meaning of words relevant to the project. This is the
philological turn of Vico which Said appropriates in what may be termed his
philological historicism. This is exhibited in the fact that Said gives significant
attention to the words “origin/originality” and “authority,” as they express an
overriding concern in Said’s investigation of modern thought—the foundational
dimension of modern thought given that intellectuals had concluded that “…origins
39
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 68.
40
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 68.
99
and their authority—the transcendent warrants of meaning and value—are no
longer either attractive or even available.”41
In a passage from Beginnings where Said differentiates his conception of
origins and beginnings, he enunciates simultaneously his notion of the “theological”
and the “secular” which has importance and centrality within his critical project
throughout his career and which has, implications for the comprehensive
perspective and evaluation of Said’s corpus, its meaning and its legacy, in this
study. Said’s choice of words is quite deliberate in this inaugural presentation of his
own construction of origins versus beginnings:
A major thesis of this book is that beginning is a consciously intentional,
productive activity, and that, moreover, it is activity whose circumstances
include a sense of loss. Furthermore, as Vico’s New Science demonstrates,
the activity of beginning follows a sort of historical dialectic that changes its
character and meaning during the processes of writing and intellectual
production. Thus beginning has influences upon what follows from it: in the
paradoxical manner, then, according to which beginnings as events are not
necessarily confined to the beginning, we realize that a major shift in
perspective and knowledge has taken place. The state of mind that is
concerned with origins is…theological. By contrast, and this is the shift,
beginnings are eminently secular, or gentile, continuing activities. Another
difference… [is that] a beginning intends meaning, but the continuities and
methods developing from it are generally orders of dispersion, of adjacency,
and of complementarity. A different way of putting this is to say that whereas
an origin centrally dominates what derives from it, the beginning (especially
the modern beginning) encourages nonlinear development, a logic giving
rise to the sort of multileveled coherence of dispersion we find in Freud’s
texts, in the texts of modern writers, or in Foucault’s archeological
investigations.42
41
42
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 75.
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 372-73.
100
Said’s concept of origins has to do with such ontological concepts as have been
elaborated in both religious and philosophical systems of thought which rest on the
idea of primeval existences alternatively terms, as God/gods, Being, First Principle,
Center, that is, all the constructions of truth that begin with a posited logic of unique
agency that explains natural processes of life as well as the phenomena of
apprehended “reality.” Said asserts that both the philosophical as well as the
religious systems that have provided narratives and methodologies that facilitate
human comprehension of life events and processes and that satisfy man’s eternal
demand for “truth” have been over-turned for many thinkers from the seventeenth
century on by the “rational” subject of both the idealist and empiricist schools of
thought. This, we know, forms the philosophical ground of modernity.
Exploring the development of modern thought, Said includes a look at how
Milton’s Paradise Lost conceives loss and how man copes with the consequences
of the loss of Paradise and his connection with the Divine through the development
of language. Said suggests that the once accepted theological doctrines and
notions of divine authority have given way to ideas that are anthropomorphic, now
that the Divine, the origin of all being has been “lost” irrevocably.
Milton’s theme is loss, or absence, and his whole poem represents and
commemorates the loss at the most literal level. Thus Milton’s anthropology
is based on the very writing of his poem, for only because man has lost
does he write about it, must he write about it, can he only write about it—‘it’
here being what he cannot really name except with the radical qualification
that ‘it’ is only a name, a word. To read Paradise Lost is to be convinced, in
Ruskin’s phrase, of the idea of power; by its sheer duration and presence,
and by its capacity for making sense despite the absence at its center,
Milton’s verse seems to have overpowered the void within his epic. Only
when one questions the writing literally does the obvious disjunction
between words and reality become troublesome. Words are endless
analogies for one another, although the analogies themselves are for the
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most part orderly ones. Outside the monotonous sequence of analogies, we
presume, is a primeval Origin, but that, like Paradise, is lost forever.
Language is one of the actions that succeeds [sic] the lost Origin: language
begins after the Fall. Human discourse, like Paradise Lost, lives with the
memory of origins long since violently cut off from it: having begun,
discourse can never recover its origins in the unity and unspoken Word of
God’s Being. This, we know, is the human paradigm incarnated in Paradise
Lost.43
While man has lost the originary foundation, he has also not succeeded
perfectly in replacing what has been “lost” with anything of his own construction
that satisfies the demands of his innate quest for “truth.” Though great thinkers,
writers, and artists have struggled to create answers to the questions posed by
humanity in the absence of the traditional frameworks of metaphysics or theology,
artistic works of the modern age display throughout the sense of loss, lack of
rootedness, and ambivalence based in alienation. Said proposes that human
beings continue to seek beginnings of all types and in all aspects of cultural life in
order to recover what the human mind has lost in the process of total dependence
on only that which the human, himself, creates, thinks, or is. Inevitably, Said finds
the paradox of man’s incessant tendency to return to the idea of origins, the idea of
the pure, the notion of perfection, etc.—a disturbing contradiction that he sees as
infusing every modern trend of thought, thus bringing even the most radically
conceived ideas, theories, and movements back to the some concept of originary
purity associated with the sacred. This contradiction within modernity, its
problematic aspects as seen and experienced historically by real human beings
struggling with competing claims to “truth”, remains a central concern in Said’s
43
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 280.
102
work and gets particular expression in his critique of culture and ideology, with its
rhetoric of the religious and the secular running throughout.
Having discovered Said’s earliest articulations of the basis of his critique of
modernity, its cultural and its ideological basis, as well as its central dilemma, the
loss of the Origin or originary foundation outside of human history, we can proceed
to look at Said’s concern with the modern alternative of beginnings which Said
says, take effect and take place in the midst of things, that is, that everything
begins in a web of historical events, of other beginnings, of other endings, and of
continuities. There is no beginning in the world of history that is really “a
beginning.” Beginnings have intention and purpose and preside over “created
inclusiveness.”44 Said elaborates this concept of the role of beginnings as being of
two types, those which are “transitive” and those which are “intransitive.” 45
Said scoffs at intransitive beginnings seeing them as mystifications, an event
which is “unknown”, therefore unknowable, something which is outside of history. It
is equivalent to the concept of origins. Philosophers such as Heidegger and
Husserl who pursue “essence”, are seen by Said as still engaged in pursuing
notions that begin with the self-reliant, self-referential and which hence create a
closed system, a tautology,46 that results to Said’s mind in “sentiment of beginning
purged of any doubt…yet from the standpoint of knowledge [it is] thoroughly aloof,
44
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 12.
45
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 50.
46
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 79.
103
because always at a distance, and thus almost incomprehensible.47 Said’s
description of the intransitive beginning is explicated in this way:
[This] archetypal unknown is the beginning, which is also the certification of
what we presently do. Newman called such a beginning an economy of God
and Vaihinger called it a summational fiction. We might call it radical
inauthenticity, or, looking as far back as Husserl and Stevens did, the
tautology at the end of the mind, or with Freud, the primal word, literally, with
an antithetical meaning: the beginning that is not the one. Such a beginning
is the partially unknown event that makes us—and with us, our world—
possible as a vessel of significance.48
Since the intransitive beginning is unconcerned with any question of causation, or
ontology, Said views this type of “beginning” as an obfuscation because of its
mystifying/mystified or inexplicable nature.
Said’s concept of the “transitive” beginning, in contrast to the “intransitive,”
always departs from a point, a point in the world, that is it is both a spatial and a
temporal point, and therefore is not a tautology but is a trajectory, a continuity. Of it
Said says: “…This kind of beginning is suited for work, for polemic, for discovery. It
is what…allows us to initiate, to direct, to measure time, to construct work, to
discover, to produce knowledge.”49 Said names thinkers and their constructions
that have emanated from this type of “transitive” beginning: Marx’s “class and
capital,” Kuhn’s “scientific paradigms,” Darwin’s “natural selection,” Nietzsche’s
“Dionysus,” Freud’s “unconscious,” and Foucault’s “episteme.”50 All of these and
47
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 49.
48
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 78.
49
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 76.
50
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 80.
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many others are ways that modern thinkers have constructed systems of
knowledge in which “authority” is established in historical and “secular” ways as
opposed to having the originary foundations inherent in metaphysics and
theologies. Hussein summarizes this change in his statement that “…whereas The
Fiction was concerned with the existential psychology of knowledge in the writings
of one modernist writer, Beginnings is in a fundamental sense a historicophilosophical inquiry into the sociology of knowledge in the context of modernity as
such.”51 What Said’s excavations of modern thought and methodology in
Beginnings seeks to address are questions about how the post-Enlightenment
thinkers have theorized modernity and what have been the consequences of the
claimed liberation of humanity from religious dogma and superstitions.
Additionally, what has the flourishing of scientific knowledge, the implementation of
technological skill and the development of rationalized ideas of the self and society
wrought in the real world of human beings? Looking at the history of the past two
centuries, with its wars, the projection of Western imperial power, the most
massive genocides in history, the status –existential, epistemological, and moral—
of the putative “rational” subject has to be called into question. Specifically, one
has to wonder if the philosophers, historians, novelists, and those who conceive of
themselves as constructing the human as the self-made “master” of the planet
succeed at any level in demonstrating that “rational’ man is capable of attaining
“truth.”
Said’s concern with patterns of thought that engender the opposite of
humanism--- that is anti-humanism—relates to his view that antihumanism then
51
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, 81.
105
leads also to the opposite of humanism’s goals of establishing in this world the
freedom of humans from oppressive originary foundations of metaphysics and
theologies; it, in his view, ironically leads to oppression. This is the basis for Said’s
critique of humanism from within a humanist position. Hence, Said’s critique, which
as we have seen, includes an antistructuralist critique, could be seen as
poststructuralist in this sense. As Spanos explains, poststructuralists, as
antihumanists of the Left inaugurated a revolutionary effort to delegitimize the truth
discourse of the West that culminated in modernity. Their idea was to establish a
critical tradition which created a “geographic/cultural space in a larger world that,
under the aegis of a secularized transcendental eye (I), coerced or (in its modern
phase) accommodated the singular phenomena of this entire world to an unworldly
(universal) principle of identity, the essence of which was the idea the West had of
itself.”52 Spanos goes on to point out that in metaphorical terms that came into use
in post-structural criticism, a sense of the imperial is evident particularly in dualisms
such as center/periphery, visible/invisible/clearing/ forest, sedentary/nomadic, and
other terms common within their critical rhetoric.53 These are also notions evident
in Said’s language and why many see him as part of the poststructuralist turn in
spite of his own views to the contrary. In the fourth chapter of the present study,
the questions of whether Said’s intellectual genealogy puts him closer to
poststructuralist antihumanism or closer to the antihumanism of the critical
theorists of the Frankfurt school, or whether he should still be considered to be a
52
William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2009), 12.
53
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 12.
106
humanist who has turned humanism on its own head through his critique of
humanism will be explored more fully.
Spanos makes a detailed effort at examining Said’s relationship with
poststructuralism in an examination of his legacy. He begins by making the case
that the question of Said’s relationship to poststructuralist theory depends on which
Foucault one invokes in determining the answer. He further contends that while the
Said of Beginnings was developing some of his ideas in conversation with the
Foucault of The Archeology of Knowledge and The Order of Things, the Said of
Orientalism (three years later), was mainly influenced by the Foucault of Surveiller
et punir54. Spanos asserts that shortly before he began Orientalism, Said “turned to
Nietzschean genealogy after reading Heidegger.”55 This genealogy, as we shall
discuss further in the next chapter which includes examinations of Orientalism and
Said’s other works, indicates the connection between Heidegger’s de-struction of
the onto-theological tradition, Foucault’s critical genealogy of the modern nationstate, and the affiliation between their ontological and textual perspectives and
Said’s political one.56 The relationship between Heidegger’s de-structive and
Foucault’s genealogical “critiques of Occidental ontology and language and Said’s
political critique of the polyvalent discourse of Occidental Orientalism in Orientalism
makes clear the links between
54
Spanos prefers the original French title because Surveiller conveys a different
sense than Discipline does and relates to the concept of an administered society
under the surveillance of an all-seeing apparatus which has a constricting and
limiting effect on human behavior and hence the entire society.
55
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 19.
56
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 20.
107
The spectral “nothing”/”madness” precipitated by the fulfillment of the binary
ontologic of metaphysical thinking/discourse in the “age of the world picture”
(Heidegger) or, what is the same thing, the ‘age of panopticism’ (Foucault)
and the dehumanized humans precipitated by the fulfillment of the binary
logic of European imperialism…which Said thematizes at the end of Culture
and Imperialism, the aptly titled sequel to Orientalism.”57
Spanos’ analysis which draws out the relationship between Foucault’s rejection of
Western metaphysics (shared by poststructuralists generally), 58 and Said’s critique
of what he characterizes as early and modern Orientalism, also examines what
Spanos calls “the vexed question of Said’s humanism, introduced by James
Clifford in his…review of Orientalism.”59 What makes this genealogical tracing of
the connections between thinkers both important and useful is not only that it aids
an assessment of how the early Said of his book on Conrad and his second book,
Beginnings, connects his thought to Orientalism and subsequent work published
before his death in 2003, but it also helps to clarify Said’s late writings on his
commitment to humanism and his ideas about the antihumanism of Heidegger,
Foucault and the poststructuralists as expressed in his posthumously published
Humanism and Democratic Criticism.60 Both of these elements of Spanos’ study
57
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 20-21.
58
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 21. Spanos explains that this rejection
of Western metaphysics is a rejection of the concept of the transcendental Logos in
all its conceptions from antiquity to modernity—that is, the onto-logos of the
Greeks, the theo-logos of Christianity, and the anthropo-logos of modernity.
59
60
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 21.
Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004).
108
offer a worthy, even if prejudicial, analysis, provided that one maintains
consciousness of Spanos’ ultimate goal—recovering Said as a poststructuralist.
Though Said eventually takes a distance from the later Foucault, the Said of
Beginnings provides a basically sympathetic critique of the early Foucault and it
can be seen in his works moving forward that he appropriates a number of
Foucauldian terms and notions which shall be discussed in more detail in the next
chapter. As has been demonstrated, Said also exhibits an appreciative evaluation
of the humanist, Vico. Central to Said’s thought in Beginnings are these two
thinkers whose ideas about the power of language, about the nature of historical
understanding, about rationality, knowledge, and truth –though at odds with each
other—are the two thinkers Said draws from in constructing his own foundation. As
this is a paradoxical beginning, we shall see paradox continue to be a hallmark of
Said’s thought, and an aspect for which he is often criticized, as we shall explore
further on.
Beginnings in its investigations of the question of Being, seeks to establish an
alternative to the idea of being as Origin, to discover a new conceptualization of the
human, to open up new methods of inquiry, and to overturn the
“teleological/identitarian One that had dominated in the West since the rise of
modernity in the Enlightenment, if not from the beginning of Western civilization.”61
Spanos reads Said’s ontological concerns with beginnings as being distinct
from origins, and specifically his assent to Vico’s idea that “the beginning” neither
depends on an Origin, nor on an end, and hence his opposition to the traditional
61
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 11.
109
view of this binary as placing Said ultimately and intellectually close to Foucault,
even the later Foucault.62 Spanos explains his view as follows:
… [Said] was acknowledging the belonging-togetherness of language (and
deferral) and the historical world, ontology, epistemology, and politics. Like
the Foucault of Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir), he was in some
degree intuiting the indissoluble relationality of the various sites of being—
being as such, the ecos, the subject, language, gender, race, and so on—in
opposition to a Western tradition that ever since Aristotle and his Roman
heirs had increasingly compartmentalized them in the form of disciplines in
the name of achieving more efficient knowledge of—and power over—their
singularity: their living, differential, ineffable, ungraspable force.
It is precisely this symptomatic intuition into the polyvalent repressiveness of
the Western teleological/disciplinary understanding of being—its tactics of
divide, gain knowledge about, and conquer—and the polyvalent
emancipatory dynamics of the decentering of the Origin (and the binary
logic, i.e., the borders, it ultimately demands) that renders the Said of
Orientalism the collaborative genealogical colleague, if not exactly the
student of, the Foucault of Discipline and Punish.63
Spanos in differentiating between the later Said of Orientalism and the earlier Said
of Beginnings also points to the differentiation between the Foucault of the
Archaelogy of Knowledge and The Order of Things), the one of whom Said in
Beginnings displays an appreciative critique, and the later Foucault of Discipline
62
In a comprehensive, insightful exploration of the philosophical debates between
humanism and the antihumanism of the left, that is, poststructuralism, Spanos sifts
the positions and counter-positions of the various responses to the project of
modernity, ultimately claiming for Said’s “worldly (secular) criticism the (near)
fulfillment of the unfulfilled logic of the earlier poststructuralist critiques of Western
metaphysical thinking, especially in its latest, ‘anthropological’ or ‘humanistic”
phase.’ Aside from whether one agrees with Spanos’ conclusion about Said’s
proper location and affiliation in the discourse of modernity –and his assertion that
indeed, though Said eschewed poststructuralism for the last twenty years of his
life-- that his work is most congruent with poststructuralist criticism, there is a great
deal of value in his discussion of the philosophical discourse of modernity that
assists the present excavation of intellectual imprints left on Said.
63
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 11.
110
and Punish, from whom Said distances himself. What Spanos carefully delineates
in his exposition of the relationship between Said’s thought and Foucault’s is the
sequence of influences on Foucault and their relationship to Foucault’s work which
is then examined in the light of Said’s corpus, with particular attention to
Beginnings, Orientalism, Covering Islam, The Question of Palestine, Culture and
Imperialism, and Said’s posthumously published Humanism and Democratic
Criticism. In the conclusion to a forty-two page chapter that painstakingly analyzes
the relationship between Heidegger’s and Foucault’s thought starting at the point
when he wrote Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir) and which demonstrates
unambiguously the relationship between what Spanos shows to be the
“Heideggerian” Foucault who had discovered Nietzsche the genealogist through
reading Heidegger, and the Said who “discovered a powerful vehicle not simply for
the critique of Orientalism and other discursive practices vis-à-vis the Occident’s
‘Others’ but also for the reclamation of the very human beings that ‘we have from
the beginning of ‘our’ history denied ‘them.’’’64
In spite of Said’s quarrel with structuralism and poststructuralism, in his
extensive analysis of Foucault’s thought prior to Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et
punir), Said upholds Foucault “the archeologist” who in two of his three historical
64
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 79. Add to this note relevant
elaborations of Spanos’s conclusion from chapter 2 “Heidegger, Foucault, and the
‘Empire of the Gaze’” p. 42-69. Because Spanos’ examination of the relationships
among these thinkers provides important insights to continuing an
archaeology/genealogy of Said’s thought, we shall return at various points to his
analysis as an aid to comprehending the genesis of Said’s critical project along
with a phenomenological approach to the way in which Said’s thought develops in
relationship to his own life experiences and historical developments.
111
studies, Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la folie a l’age classique and Les Mots et les
choses, describes
how language has permitted the social discriminations of ‘otherness,’ and
the cognitive connections between the orders of ‘sameness.’ In the former
work it is madness, isolated in a silence outside rational language, that is
made by society to carry the weight of an alienated ‘otherness’: in the latter
work it is through the powers of language that words are made into a
universal collection of signs for everything. As with most of the structuralists,
Foucault must presume a conceptual unity –variously called an historical a
priori, an epistemological field, an epistemological unity, or episteme—that
anchors and informs linguistic usage at any given time in history; no
structuralist to my knowledge has gone to such lengths to articulate this
‘unconscious positivity,’ In Les Mots et les choses he writes that ‘in a
culture, and at a given moment there is never more than one episteme that
defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge.’ 65
Said goes on to remark in an emphasis on Foucault’s argument about the
singularity of the episteme of any given epoch that
For according to Foucault, language in the Renaissance was intimately
connected with things; words were believed to be inherent in the script of an
ontological discourse (God’s Word) that only required reading for the
guarantee of their meaning and truth. Words existed inside Being: they
reduplicated it; they were its signature; and man’s decipherment of language
was a direct whole perception of Being.66
Besides the notion of episteme which Said finds useful for understanding how truth
discourses operate, Said also highlights Foucault’s notion of discourse, one that
will become central to Said’s own argument in Orientalism and about which more
will be said further on. However, in Beginnings in a discussion of Foucault’s
65
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 284.
66
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 284.
112
historical portrayal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of how
notions of language changed and how the idea of man developed, Said displays
his suspicion of Foucault’s concept of history as rupture and discontinuity:
how much (Foucault’s) vision of history preceding the modern age is
projected back from his apprehension of the contemporary. For like many of
the structuralists, Foucault is obsessed with the inescapable fact of
ontological discontinuity. In language, for example, ‘the thing being
represented falls outside of the representation itself; thus the signifying
power of language far exceeds, indeed overwhelms what is being signified.
Another example: the emergence of the idea
of man (an idea whose advent Foucault associates exclusively with the
nineteenth century) coincides with the breakdown in the representative
power of language. Man, therefore, is what essentially resists language; he
links together what Foucault calls an ‘empirico-transcendent doublet,’ two
parallel zones of raw human experience on the one hand and human
transcendence on the other, that together are alien to discourse. And
discourse is the ‘analytic of finitude’ that conquers modern knowledge and
which is made possible by man’s alienation from it; for according to
Foucault, the discourse of modern knowledge always hungers for what it
cannot fully grasp or totally represent. Thus knowledge is perpetually in
search of its elusive subject. Here again the fact of discontinuity—or
difference, as it is also called -–is paramount.67
Said’s Vichian counter-position on the adjacency, complementarity and
continuity within historical periods and across cultures becomes a hallmark of his
thought. Foucault’s and the poststructuralists’ insistence on discontinuity and
rupture alienates Said from their fold. As shall be shown, the poststructuralist
positions on power (it can’t be fought; it is too pervasive) and its flight toward
dogmatism and orthodoxy-- which Said will label pejoratively the “theological” or
“religious” --will become the object of a good portion of Said’s “secular” criticism.
67
Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, 285.
113
2.3 Conclusion
As Hussein rightly indicates, Beginnings, in spite of its affirmation of the authority
of reason, employing a non-polemical meditational structure, takes issue with
Enlightenment rationality and its philosophical directions in idealism and empiricism
particularly for the fact that the metaphysical/theological simply transforms from
religion to culture, an idea that is more fully developed in Orientalism and works
which followed it. In Beginnings Said critically approaches the Enlightenment
critiquing its totalizing tendencies yet acknowledging its importance for a
humanistic conception of culture. This attachment to humanism-- Said’s insistence
on the possibility of recovering the goals and value of humanism—remains always
an integral aspect of his critical project as much as does the critique of ideology for
its distortions of reality and debilitations of what Said sees as the highest goals of
human endeavor, of human thought, and of human action in the real world. 68
While Beginnings can indeed be said to have “cleared theoretical space for all
of Said’s later writings,” The Fiction lays out the “adumbrative contours of this
theoretical space,”69 displaying thus a “direct methodological link” between Said’s
first two books. What can be concluded from an examination of Said’s memoire
and these first two books is that this Said of the period between the publication of
68
Poststructuralists, left anti-humanists, and post-humanists deny that humanism
can be re-oriented, re-constructed or recuperated as a useable intellectual praxis in
the service of universal human emancipation due to its moorings in the European
ethnocentric worldview of the Enlightenment, its inherent imbrication with
colonialism and imperialism. William V. Spanos, who following Foucault ‘s
perspective formed reading Nietzche after reading Heidegger, in The Legacy of
Edward Said argues this persuasively and questions Said’s effort to remain within
humanism.
69
Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society,15.
114
his first two books, 1966-1975, has begun to display concerns relating to the
relationship between the Western and non-Western world, has begun to align
himself with a historicist and philological humanism, and has begun to declare
paradoxical theoretical affinities to oppositional positions within the academy in his
simultaneous appropriation of both Vichian and Foucauldian concepts. He has also
demonstrated a secular hermeneutic of history, one that distances him from
theological or religious views of truth and being. His concerns are completely
secular, that is, concerned with matters of the socio-historical world. His early
methodology is genealogical and phenomenological and his style of expression is
expository and non-polemical. His paradoxical affinities to diametrically opposed
humanist and antihumanist thinkers such as Vico and Foucault put him on the
margins of both traditions, a place that he will inhabit throughout his life in
accordance with an exilic consciousness that has developed through the
exigencies of existence as well as intellect. These early foundations are the point
of departure for Said’s project of “secular” criticism, which we will see in his
persistent critiques of culture and of ideology.
In the third and fourth chapters Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the secular and
critical responses to it are examined. Chapter five then explores Said’s writing on
Islam and the Arab-Islamic world in relation to his idea of secular criticism and its
centrality in the work of the humanist. William D. Hart has argued in his 2000
Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture that Said’s work exhibits major
self-contradictory positions which go beyond the definition of the paradoxical. The
thesis presented here, by contrast, is that Said’s catachrestical use of the terms
“religious” and “secular,” his concept of “secular criticism,” and his statements
115
concerning religion are best understood as an effort to re-construct humanism and
to further the idea of “theory with practical intent”70 which “seeks not only to
understand the world but also to transform it.”71 Inherent in this thesis is the
specific claim that Said’s writing on Islam and the Arab-Islamic world, the focus of
the fifth chapter, therefore, is neither a mysterious deviation from Said’s humanism,
nor is it a logical failure in his position as a humanistic critic. On the contrary, this
thesis argues that Said’s writing on Islam and the Arab-Islamic world convey Said’s
conceptualization of humanism, which arose initially in the Islamic world prior to its
development in Europe.72 We shall further argue in chapter six that Said’s writing
and positions on the question of Palestine-Israel, should be seen as a synecdoche
of his entire critical project -- exemplifying the concept of “secular” criticism as a
tool in a “humanism of liberation.”73
70
Joan Alway, Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of
Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and
Habermas. (Westport, CT: Greenword Press, 1995), 2.
71
Joan Alway, Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of
Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and
Habermas, 2.
72
This is documented in the seminal study of George Makdisi, The Rise of
Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West: With Special Reference to
Scholasticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).
Saree Makdisi, “Said, Palestine and the Humanism of Liberation,” in Homi Bhaba
and W.J.T. Mitchell, Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 80.
73
116
Chapter Three
Critique of Said’s Construction of the Religious and the Secular: William
D. Hart
Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism (not as a modification but
as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. If criticism is reducible neither to a
doctrine, nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the
world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other
cultural activities and from systems of thought or of method. In its suspicion of
totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with
guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind,
criticism is most itself and if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the
moment it starts turning into organized dogma. ‘Ironic’ is not a bad word to use
along with ‘oppositional.’ For in the main… criticism must think of itself as lifeenhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and
abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of
human freedom. Edward Said, The World, The Text and The Critic, 29-30.
I … still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of
humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and
empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and
text-and-language based in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from,
say Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer, and more recently from Richard Poirier, and
still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of
them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American. For my
purposes here the core of humanism is the that the historical world is made by men
and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally according to
the principle formulated by Vico in New Science that we can know only what we
have made. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 10-11.
117
3.1 Introduction
We have situated Said in historical and existential context in chapter one in a
hermeneutical approach to the interpretation of Said’s construction of the religious
and the secular. We then considered in chapter two Said’s two earliest works for
the ways in which in these initial texts Said announces a preoccupation with the
meaning of “the secular” in view of post-Enlightenment thought and the paradox of
Western empire and colonization. As a humanist critic of culture, Said’s is a
concern about the veiled, paradoxical reconstitution of “the religious” into Western
culture and politics, the never extirpated residuum of the theological and the
metaphysical.1 In this chapter, Said’s religious-secular rhetoric is examined in
relationship to commonly held conceptions of the meaning of the religious and the
secular and in terms of how this rhetoric has been interpreted in his oeuvre.
Among scholars of religion the significance of Said’s rhetoric is contested: Is it
primarily expressive of his ideas about religion and secularism? In other words,
does this rhetorical trope indicate Said’s project as a concern about incomplete
secularization or as Habermas sees it, the incomplete project of modernity?
Specifically does it indicate a desire on Said’s part for the demise of religion?
Does Said exhibit through this rhetoric a Manichean dualism in his approach to
For a full exposition of this idea, see Abdirahman Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’
Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and Theology,” in Adel Iskandar and
Hakem Rustom, eds., Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and
Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 414-430.
1
118
religion and secularism which, among other ironies, is in contradiction with Said’s
professed opposition to essentializing and hence a self-contradiction in his work?2
This chapter proposes that while William D. Hart’s 2000 study, Edward Said and
the Religious Effects of Culture, opened up exploration of these questions
neglected by other commentators on Said, Hart misconstrues the meaning of
Said’s use of this trope to a large degree, in spite of his impressive analysis of
Said’s idea that Orientalism, imperialism and nationalism are “religious” effects of
culture and his examination of Said’s diverse and paradoxical intellectual
genealogy. We argue that Hart’s misconstruction of Said’s rhetoric of the religious
and the secular misses the relationship of this trope with Said’s “critic(ism) of
humanism in the name of humanism” and his modeling of what he calls worldly or
secular criticism as the real work of the humanist-- rather than being merely a
secularist’s argument against religion. Additionally, we shall lay the conceptual
foundation here for examination of other critiques and interpretations of Said’s
religious-secular rhetoric which is the subject of the fourth chapter. The insights
and conclusions of the fourth chapter will then provide the foundation for the
interpretation of Said’s less-known writing on the Arab-Islamic world presented in
chapter five and his significant thinking on Palestine-Israel in chapter six as
2
William D. Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77. Mathieu Courville, Edward Said's
Rhetoric of the Secular (London: Continuum, 2010).14. Courville disputes Hart’s
claim. Stathis Gourgouris also finds Hart’s analysis a failure to “understand…Said’s
grasp of the secular imagination…” See Stathis Gourgouris,”Transformation, Not
Transcendence,” 56, in boundary 2, Critical Secularism, volume 31, number 2,
summer 2004, ed. Aamir R. Mufti.
119
“secular” criticism, the central element of Said’s effort to redefine humanism as an
emancipatory project.3
3.2 Denotation, Connotation and Said’s Rhetorical Strategies:
Metaphor and Catachresis
Said’s use of such words as “religious,” “sacred,” “theological,” “otherworldly”
and “metaphysical,” is often rhetorical. As stated earlier, the purpose of this and
the subsequent chapter is to examine interpretations of Said’s rhetoric and to offer
a reading that takes previous interpretations into account. Said’s use of these
words, of course, is not always rhetorical, however. When referring to religion per
se, or when referring to a politically disestablished relationship between church and
3
This re-definition, or if the semantic irony can be tolerated, this re-orientation of
humanism, this effort to recover the original liberatory intent of the postEnlightenment belief that the liberal values (such as the rights of man, universal
equality, democracy) at the heart of humanism, had been rejected by the critics of
humanism and the Enlightenment. Starting with Nietzsche’s critique, further
developed by Heidegger, who influenced Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist
criticism, humanism and the Enlightenment were seen as based in impossible selfcontradictions and in fact not as aberrations or deformations but as structurally,
inherently un-emancipatory. For poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault,
Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles DeLeuze, Felix
Guattari, Helene Cixoux, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigarry, Roland Barthes and others,
humanism was unable to be recovered or redefined as an emancipatory practice
due to its essentializing of the human on many categories, leading to its
necessarily supporting imperialism and colonialism. Similarly Marxists such as
Louis Althusser took an anti-humanist position. Though brilliant interpreters of Said,
William V. Spanos and R. Radakrishnan take issue with Said’s attempt to reconstruct humanism and see flaws particularly in Said’s unawareness of the
Roman effects on Western thinking of empire and truth as opposed to the Greek
view. See Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said and R. Radakrishnan’s “Edward
Said and the Possibilities of Humanism,” in Iskandar and Rustom, 2010, 431-430.
Other perceptive analyses of Said’s humanism include that of W.J.T Mitchell in
“Secular Divination: Edward Said’s Humanism,” 490-498 in Iskandar and Rustom,
2010, and Lecia Rosenthal’s “Between Humanism and Late Style,” also in Iskandar
and Rustom. 462-489.
120
state as “secular,” Said uses these words and their other forms in their denoted
meaning. At times Said modifies the adjectival forms with “quasi” to clearly indicate
metaphorical use. When speaking metaphorically with a rhetorical purpose, Said
uses roughly synonymous adjectives such as “religious” and “theological”
interchangeably, though in their definitions these words are distinct.4 A valid
criticism of this rhetoric is that it conflates very different concepts in reckless
disregard of their differences. This reduces the effectiveness of the rhetoric
because readers who take note of the lack of distinctions in meaning are likely to
take issue with the presumed underlying attitudes. Said also rhetorically uses other
words that arise primarily from Christian religious vocabulary such as “priestly” and
“acolytes” to refer, for example, to members of an ostensibly “secular” school of
thought who he sees as “blind” followers. This is more effective rhetorically but the
fact that this language comes from the Christian lexicon may seem, as Hart claims,
to belie some negativity in Said toward Western Christianity, which then leads to a
misinterpretation of Said’s purpose. This is exactly what happens with Hart, who is
not only a scholar of religion, but by his own admission a practicing Christian. One
of the problems of interpretation of texts is the question of how much of the
interpreter’s own subjectivity affects the way he reads the text.
A major assertion of the present interpretation of Said’s rhetoric is that Said’s
use of the polysemous term “secular” in expressions such as “secular criticism”
4
This cavalier using of distinctive terms interchangeably perhaps for some implies
a lack of precision as well as respect for the differences between words related to
religion, possibly conveying a disregard that generates or sustains the general idea
that Said is anti-religious. Also, Said by using these words interchangeably,
particularly the word “metaphysical” displays a disregard for the word’s true
meaning.
121
requires apprehension of his meaning by examining several contexts, not just that
of its placement in the particular sentence or paragraph or essay. Rather, it must
be interpreted in terms of Said’s existential and intellectual genealogy as well as
within his works and their development more generally. Quite significantly, though
this seems to have been missed by several scholars of religion commenting on
Said’s rhetoric, Said’s usage and intent is almost always closely related to the
original Latin root saeculum from which the word “secular” arose.5. This meaning is
atypical in contemporary usage and therefore what Said intends can easily be
missed because to use an anachronistic meaning –without any overt explanation in
many cases-- may be regarded as a type of catachresis. That is, it is what may be
seen as a deliberate “misuse” of a word for rhetorical effect.6 Said’s decision to
employ “secular” anachronistically, returning in a sense to the original root within
“secular” and using it to describe what criticism and humanism should be is
5
As has been said earlier, this is not the case when he is clearly referring to a
politically disestablished system that separates church ands state. Concerning the
Latin root saeculum in his Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 9, John Milbank writes, “The saeculum, in the medieval
era, was not a space, a domain, but a time—the interval between fall and eschaton
where coercive justice, private property, and impaired natural reason must make
shift to cope with the unredeemed effects of sinful humanity.” Secular also referred
to members of the Catholic clergy who were not cloistered but active in the world
as priests, abbots, etc. and so in this sense as Said uses it in-the world, or worldly,
but this worldliness, it should be noted was originally thought as intrinsic to religion,
as a kind of religiously committed service in the world ultimately a service to the
Divine, and thus the concept of the secular truly in its most radical (root) sense
emanates out of religion. However, the idea of the secular as a way of being
“religious” is one that the anti-religious and non-religious tend to reject for all sorts
of historical reasons which the history of secularization clarifies. See Vincent
Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).
“Misuse” is put in scare quotes here because it is not precisely a misuse of a
word to use it in its original meaning or in the way that the English word is derived
from the Latin root and as it was originally used in English.
6
122
eccentric, significant and displays Said’s philological humanistic bent. Said is
aware of the religious connections of the original root word and his decision to use
secular to refer to the worldly aspect or connection of the religious indicates his
recognition that the secular coexists with the religious and in fact is part of the
religious in essence. This seems to challenge some of the criticisms by Giles
Gunn, and William D. Hart which charge that Said is unaware of the inseparable
nature of the secular (worldly) from the religious. This point seems not to be
acknowledged by those who apply to Said’s statements their own preferred
definitions of his words and hence read into Said’s work their own biases, which
results in readings which illuminate very little in any effort to understand the place
of Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the secular. This judgment applies to the
minor works of Paul Mellor, Darren Dahl, Carl Olson, Alain Epp Weaver and, of
course, the major study by Hart.
The catachrestical creation is a rhetorical strategy intended to focus attention
on how the word is being used to convey an idea which may be novel or
challenging. However, catachresis undoubtedly results in misunderstanding when
the reader, not aware of the word’s novel misuse or re-creation, interprets the
misused word by applying any of its normal meanings. Similarly, if a reader fails to
perceive the metaphorical use of a word and the connection between the word and
that to which it is being compared, the larger meaning of an entire piece may be
misread, particularly if the comprehension of the metaphor or catachresis is central
to the overall objectives of the written piece. So metaphor and catachresis as
rhetorical strategies can potentially undermine the proper reception of a piece,
particularly when the language used already carries either contested meanings or
123
has ideological associations that are known to generate unconscious emotional
and attitudinal reactions.7 The question of whether Said’s rhetorical strategy is
successful or not is one to which deserves further consideration and will be taken
up further on in the conclusion.
3.3 The World, The Text, and the Critic: A Key to Said’s ReligiousSecular Rhetoric
The World, the Text, and The Critic, published in 1983, contains fourteen
essays mostly written during the mid nineteen seventies while Said was also
writing Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam:
How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See The Rest of the World
(1980). This is the period when Said’s writing becomes overtly polemical and
political. This indicates that these essays have a relationship with the overall
concerns of the trilogy of works that immediately preceded it. The World, the Text,
and the Critic focuses on the way in which the critic of society and culture relates to
the social and political environment in which the criticism is produced. It looks at
the role of the critic, the way in which texts become reified within culture, and the
interrelationships texts have with the real world of men and women. Thus, Said
grapples in The World, The Text and The Critic with the questions of what criticism
is and is not and the role of the critic. It is within this context that his opening and
7
This raises the question of whether misreadings that arise from lack of accurate
understanding of a catachresis or a metaphor are the problem of the writer or the
reader. And even if such misreadings are the fault of the reader, as most would
probably say, can the rhetorical strategy be viewed as effective if it does not lead
readers to understand the point and intent and instead to see something else in the
words used?
124
closing chapters, which he entitles “Secular Criticism” and “Religious Criticism”
should be examined as guides both to Said’s critical project and to the meaning
and significance of his rhetoric.8
3.4 Examining the Metaphysical, the Religious, and the Theological
in Said’s Rhetoric
Said’s opening paragraph to the concluding essay in The World, The Text, and
The Critic, “Religious Criticism,” conveys contextually how he is using the word
“religious” and provides a good illustration of how much of this language he uses to
drive home his point:
The idea of the Orient, very much like the idea of the West that is its polar
opposite, has functioned as an inhibition on what I have been calling secular
criticism. Orientalism is the discourse derived from and dependent on “the
Orient.” To say of such grand ideas and their discourse that they have
something in common with religious discourse is to say that each serves as
an agent of closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in
deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the
other-worldly. Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of
authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel
complete subservience or to gain adherents. This in turn gives rise to
organized collective passions whose social and intellectual results are often
disastrous. The persistence of these and other religious-cultural effects
testifies amply to what seem to be necessary features of human life, the
need for certainty, group solidarity, and a sense of communal belonging.
Sometimes of course these things are beneficial. (my emphasis) Still it is
also true that what a secular attitude enables—a sense of history and of
human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the various official
idols venerated by culture and by system—is diminished, if not eliminated,
Mathieu Courville, Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular. Courville correctly
sees The World, The Text and the Critic as a “pivotal” text, 25.
8
125
by appeals to what cannot be thought through and explained, except by
consensus and appeals to authority.9
Here Said’s negative estimation of what has been historically associated with the
coercive, dogmatic, authoritarian and destructive aspects of religion is being
applied to the work of ostensibly “secular” Orientalist scholars. Said had earlier
caused a firestorm that still burns in his positing of the “religious” residue inhering
in the purportedly secular and humanistic work of the Orientalist scholars of
Europe. Said adopts the notion of Meyer Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism,10
which argues that the metaphysical, theological, and supernatural have been
constant elements in post-Enlightenment thought. In Said’s thesis on Orientalism
he expresses this idea unequivocally:
My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and
praxis (from which present-day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not
as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of
structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed
by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized
and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism.11 (my
emphasis)
So while Said depicts Orientalist scholarship, not as it was thought to be by the
scholars of the field, as an effort in objective—and presumably secular-- research
and presentation of knowledge, but rather as foundationally “religious,” he also
9
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 290.
10
Meyer H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in
Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971).
11
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 122.
126
attacks French theory, some of the critical theorists (Walter Benjamin in particular)
associated with the Frankfurt School, and some of the neo-Marxists, as well as
secular Zionists, as “religious” as well. His point is that academic disciplines such
as Orientalism as well as social and political critical thought that systematizes
under a name and a set of established postures, beliefs, or principles inevitably
behaves the same way as religion has traditionally. By the early nineteen eighties
Said had discovered that the avant-garde poststructuralists had ironically and
disturbingly become “systematic” and “unworldly.” In The World, The Text and The
Critic, he turns this criticism on the poststructuralists as well as other purportedly
“secular” thinkers. Said speaks of what he perceives as “a curious transmutation of
the secular world—in particular, the human effort that goes into the production of
literary texts—reveals itself as neither fully human nor fully apprehensible in human
terms,”12 and the “dramatic increase in the number of appeals to the extra-human,
the vague abstraction, the divine the esoteric and secret.”13 Here Said is attacking
the “fixed special languages, many of them impenetrable, deliberately obscure,
willfully illogical…” referring to the discourse of Orientalism as well as
deconstruction and semiotics,14 and calling “intellectual debate” a “high pitched
monologue in narrow corridors.”15 In this claim, he is particularly addressing the
fact that what is supposed to be criticism intended to have an effect on a problem
in the world, remains restricted to clubby, ivory tower circles that fail to be
12
13
Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, 291.
Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, 291.
14
Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, 292.
15
Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, 292.
127
emancipatory in the historical world. The historical world is the world that Said
believes humanism and its chief activity, criticism, is supposed to affect. Said’s
idea is that in the practices of the out-of –touch poststructuralists engaged in
criticism that no one can understand and that have no practical application in the
world of real men and women, they have become no different to religious
approaches that look to an other-worldly Being or Creator to affect or change in
human and planetary affairs (theisms).16
Said’s opposition to radically dualistic views of the world caused by identitarian
thinking is expressed in his statement that “…impossibly huge generalizations like
the Orient, Islam, Communism, or Terrorism play a significantly increased role in
the contemporary Manichean theologizing of ‘the Other,’ and this increase is a sign
of how strongly religious discourse has affected discourse pertaining to the secular,
historical world.”17 The rhetorical strategy intends to shock and disturb given the
general perception of the poststructuralists as the avant-garde of the intellectual
world and Said’s earlier role in introducing “theory” to the American literary
academy. Does it and his other “cryptic, persistent, and fugitive references to the
sacred, religious, theological, and Manichaen”18 support Hart’s conclusion that Said
16
Several scholars have detailed and commented on this turn in Said. See
Stathis Gourgouris, “The Late Style of Edward Said,” 37-45; David LeHardy Sweet,
“Edward Said and the Avant-Garde,”149-176; Terry Eagleton, “Edward Said,
Cultural Politics, and Critical Theory,” 254-269; Ruben Chuaquí,”Notes on Edward
Said’s View of Michel Foucault,” 89-119, in Ferial J. Ghazoul, Edward Said and
Critical Decolonization (New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2007).
17
Said, The World, The Text and the Critic, 292.
18
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, ix.
128
is “anti-religious?”19 Examination of another statement in the same essay where
Said declares that religious “forms in both the theory and practice of criticism are
varieties of unthinkability, undecidability, and paradox together with a…consistency
of appeals to magic, divine ordinance, or sacred texts,”20 makes clear that it is
(supposedly secular) poststructuralist criticism that Said is speaking about and not
religion qua religion. Said is blasting the uncritical behaviors of the poststructuralist critics, the essence of whose ideas “is some version of theory liberated
from the human and the circumstantial.”21 Said draws the ironic parallel between
“professed political neoconservatives and the religiously inclined critics, for both of
whom the privatized condition of social life and cultural discourse are made
possible by a belief in the benign quasi-divine marketplace,”22 calling into question
what the real difference is between the right and the so-called left critics23 and with
19
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, ix.
20
Said, Orientalism, 290.
21
Said, Orientalism, 291.
22
Said, Orientalism 292.
Said, Orientalism, 172-73. In his essay in The World “Reflections on “Left”
Literary Criticism, Said assails the failure of the American Left to play any role in
oppositional criticism that relates to the world, saying “Left oppositional criticism
contributes very little to intellectual debate in the culture today. Our bankruptcy on
the once glamorous question of human rights alone is enough to strip us of our title
to humanism, and as for dealing with the subtle distinction between
authoritarianism and totalitarianism, we are not even willing to analyze these terms
semantically, much less politically. Yet I do not wish to downgrade the period of
almost Renaissance brilliance through which technical criticism has passed in the
last few decades. We can gratefully acknowledge that and at the same time add
that it has been a period characterized by a willingness to accept the isolation of
literature and literary studies away from the world. It has also been a period during
which very few of us have examined the reasons for this confinement, even while
most of us have tacitly accepted, even celebrated the State and its silent rule over
culture—without so much, during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam period, as a polite
23
129
his use of “quasi-divine” signals a clear metaphorical meaning for those who think
his word “religiously inclined” has to do with religious believers in the literal sense.
Said assails “the current vogue for Walter Benjamin not as a Marxist but as a
crypto-mystic, or those versions of such actively radical positions as Marxism,
feminism, or psychoanalysis that stress the private and hermetic over the public
and social…”24 He again emphasizes the inherent contradictions in “criticism”
parading itself as “secular” but which “refused to see its affiliations with the political
world it serves…25 In a strong metaphor intended to jar and disturb Said paints
contemporary critics as “cleric(s) in the worst sense of the word”26 ending the
essay with a challenge to critics to return to their role as intellectuals whose
mission is to motivate change in the real world where men, women and children
suffer from every form of oppression and most of it can be traced back to the
filiative relationships based in ethnocentrism, nationalism, racism, and religious
exclusivity. Said ends the essay asking, “How their discourse can once again
become a truly secular enterprise is, it seems to me, the most serious question
critics can be asking one another.”27
murmur.” Said also invokes Gramsci’s term “experts in legitimation” a term that
Gramsci applied to what he called the traditional intellectuals.
24
Said, Orientalism, 292.
As will be shown in the next section that discusses the word “secular” in Said’s
rhetoric, Said is often using “secular” as meaning “connected with or concerned
with this world,” that is the human world, which harkens back to the original
meaning of the word “secular” from the Latin saeculum.
25
What Said is implying is not that “clerics” is in his view an inherently negative
category but that the well-known excesses and wrongs done by the religious class
historically where Church and State were (or are) unified, is the utter opposite of
what contemporary critics should represent or support.
26
27
Said, Orientalism, 292.
130
Said chooses these essay titles (“Secular Criticism” and “Religious Criticism”) in
a rhetorical move that implies the parallels between the dogmatic thought and
behaviors of modern and postmodern intellectual movements and the “religious,”
“theological” and “metaphysical” from which they portray themselves to be
liberated. Said doubts the “secularity” of the poststructuralists whose criticism of
culture and society has become in his view a new type of religious and cloistered
community removed from the real work of criticism which is to change society in
the direction of human struggles for emancipation and justice.28 Concerned with
the tendencies exhibiting themselves in French poststructuralism where Said sees
the subordination of history to textuality (‘il n’y a pas hors text’)29 [there is nothing
outside the text])—much as religious thinkers of the past, removed from the world,
enclosed in exclusivist circles of thought, made texts their concern and their realityand turned textuality and the arcane debates about texts into an “otherworldly”
discourse. It is this tendency that Said felt had come to dominate and command
adherence in the halls of universities and professional associations which then
causes Said to question whether these intellectuals were practicing criticism at all,
whether they were living up to the calling of the intellectual30 or whether they had
28
Though Said was not a Marxist, many of his intellectual influences were Western
Marxists. In addition, Said’s concern with critique of ideology with the aim of
humanistic change is clear.
29
Spanos, William V. Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in
Counterpoint. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012.), 65. See Jacques
Derrida, Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979.
Said, Orientalism, 14. Said’s ideas of the intellectual’s calling is influenced both
by Julien Benda and Antonio Gramsci. In “Secular Criticism” Said writes that
“…there is some very compelling truth to Julien Benda’s contention that in one way
or the other it has often been the intellectual, the clerc, who has stood for values
and activities that transcend and deliberately interfere with the collective weight
30
131
become like religious clerics proponents of a fatalistic cabal arguing the futility of
human effort to change the world in struggles for greater justice and human
liberation and hence become de facto supporters of the status quo in spite of their
self-conception as critics of society, power, and culture.31 As Spanos summarizes it
Just as theology represented the infinite variety of secular phenomena---that
is, the man-made historical world---from “above”…as a predetermined and
systematic teleological and identical whole, in which “lowly” human beings
were denied agency, so, according to Said, the new, ostensibly antitheological, “textuality” came paradoxically to represent secular—manmade—history from above, as a predetermined totalized system of
unworldly (my emphasis) undecidability in which lowly human beings were
denied agency.32
In other words, poststructuralist criticism, though it challenged what in their view
were the failures—even the impossibility-- of humanism to help to bring about a
more just world, and though it pointed up what it believed to be its false premises,
was seen by Said as failing the test of true secularity in its tendency to behave like
religion among its practitioners. In fact, the purportedly ultra-radical
imposed by the nations-state and the national culture.” He also relates this idea to
Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual “allied with an emergent class against
ruling-class hegemony.” (15). Said compares at length Benda’s and Gramsci’s
notion of the intellectual in Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual:
The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 3-13.
31
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam argues view that Foucault remains committed to the
possibility of resistance in “Can the (sub) altern resist? A dialogue between
Foucault and Said,” in Ian Richard Netton, Orientalism Revisited: Art, Land and
Voyage (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013). For another view on
Said and Foucault, see Paul A., Intellectuals In Power: A Genealogy of Critical
Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), chapter 5, “Intellectuals
at War: Michel Foucault and the Analytics of Power,” 208-237.
32
William V. Spanos, Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward Said in
Counterpoint (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2012), 65.
132
poststructuralists seemed to invite the question of whether any critique, school of
thought and practice can be or can remain truly secular, that is, free of filiative
bonds such as family, tribe, nation; furthermore, Said questions even the possibility
of intellectuals (i.e. those conceptual leaders of society who see themselves as the
vanguard of rational thought and objectivity) independent of affiliative bonds of
membership in a chosen group, party, or ideology which one attaches oneself to in
the same blind manner as one is attached by blood relations, tribe, nation. Said,
though he was one of the first American intellectuals to engage with poststructuralist thought and introduce it to the American academy, expresses
skepticism that poststructuralism is any more effective in the accomplishment of or
even the support for struggles for human emancipation and clearly calls, especially
in the essays of his posthumously published, Humanism and Democratic Criticism
for a re-envisioning and re-orientation of humanism to the liberatory mission.
3.5 Said and the Idea of the “Secular”
Said’s abiding effort to promote “secular” criticism is related, as has been said,
to his using the word “secular” as it was originally used from its original Latin
meaning “of and in the world” (saeculum).33 Thus, Said’s secularism can accurately
be called radical in the sense that it is literally rooted in the original meaning of the
Latin word, and yet the epithet “radical secularist” due to its connotations would be
a gross misconstruction of Said’s identity and of his project. Said’s valorization of
the secular and worldly is used in contrast to the idea of the dogmatic, ideological,
religious and other-worldly. It is, as Hart has correctly adduced, intended to
33
Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and
Modernity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2.
133
contrast with what Said sees as the too narrow attachments or nationalism qua
religion. It is also intended as a counter to the missionary zeal in the
imperialist/colonialist view that the modern West would redeem, save, and improve
the backward East.
“Worldliness” is a key theme in Said’s writing and has been examined by several
commentators, among them Bruce Robbins and Abdul J. JanMohamed. Robbins
captures an aspect of the paradox of what JanMohamed calls Said’s
“homelessness-as home.” JanMohamed thinks that Robbins attaches a negative
connotation to homelessness-as-home and sees it in opposition to worldliness,
relating both terms to Said’s concept of “secular” and “religious” criticism. Robbins
writes:
If criticism is not to be subsumed by the interests of the homeland, Said
suggests, it can only be located in dislocation itself in the always shifting,
always empty space ‘between culture and system.’ But he also argues that if
criticism is not to withdraw into harmless seclusion, it must accept the taint and
constraint of placement in the world—and even, perhaps, make a home for
itself there. Homelessness or worldliness? Between them there is nothing so
satisfying as a lively project of critical self-discovery.34
JanMohamed, however, in his incisive examination of the subject position of the
specular border intellectual who may be equally familiar with two cultures is at
home in neither of them, using his “interstitial cultural space as a vantage point
from which to define, implicitly or explicitly, other, utopian possibilities of group
34
Bruce Robbins, Homelessness and Worldliness, Diacritics, 13:3 (Fall 1983), 69.
See also Abdul J. JanMohamed, “The Specular Border Intellectual,” in Michael
Sprinker, Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 113.
134
formation,”35 sees “worldliness-without-world” and “homelessness- as- home,”
as different formulations of the same subject position, which he sees Said as
inhabiting. He interprets Said’s reading of Louis Massignon’s work as
“noncoercive knowledge”36 and sees the congruences of Said and Massignon
whose work and style Said characterizes “as if it wishes constantly to embody
distance and the alternation of presence and absence, the paradox of sympathy
and alienation, the motif of inclusion and exclusion, grace and disgrace,
apotrpaic prayer and compassionate love.”37 JanMohamed points out that Said
who sees Massignon (as himself) not at home but operating in “homelessness
–as-home” between Arabic and European cultures; her the status of an outsider
becomes a “positive vocation.”38
3.6 From the Critique of Idolatry through the Critique of Religion to
the Critique of Ideology: Halbertal and Margalit
William D. Hart’s work provides a thorough excavation of the historical layers of
how, according to Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, the critique of idolatry
(from within the monotheistic religions) became the critique of religion generally,
35
JanMohamed,”The Specular Border Intellectual,” in Sprinker, 97.
36
JanMohamed,”The Specular Border Intellectual,” in Sprinker, 112.
Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic, “Islam, in Philology, and
French Culture, 287.
37
38
JanMohamed,”The Specular Border Intellectual,” in Sprinker, 112-13.
135
and how from here the critique of ideology arose.39 Halbertal and Margalit‘s study
is particularly valuable in that it offers an account of religious criticism within which
it is possible to place Said’s critique. This genealogy helps to see Courville’s thesis
(which will be examined in the next chapter) in light of the development of criticism
of religion and critical theory of religion as will be discussed further in chapter four.
It also helps to see why Said’s critique is called by Abdirahman Hussein a “critique
of ideology,”40 discussed in chapter four as well.
Halbertal and Margalit trace the history of the concept of the critique of ideology,
which, they posit as a four-stage process whose first stage was the critique of
religion as idolatry.41 Hart points out that Francis Bacon’s notion of idols of the
tribe, cave, marketplace and theatre, explicated by Jorge Larrain,42 “is
decisive…for a number of thinkers who wrestled with the function of religion in
social and political life. Bacon says that ‘certain idols (or false notions) are inherent
in human nature.’43 “…Imposing order and regularity on natural disorder and
irregularity, dogmatic adherence to presuppositions that tailor” experienced events
39
See Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
40
Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso,
2002), 8-18.
41
Hart, Edward Said the Religious Effects of Culture, 89-97.
42
Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia
Press, 1979), traces the historical path of the religious history of idols. In his study
he includes Niccolo Machiavelli who believed that religion, power and domination
were natural bedfellows. From Machiavelli Larrain moves to Francis Bacon’s ideas
in New Organon in which Bacon’s concept of idols is presented, an analysis
frequently invoked by thinkers who treat the issues of the function of religion in
society and politics. See Hart’s discussion, Hart, Edward Said and the Religious
Effects of Culture, 89-91.
43
Quoted in Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 90.
136
or “data” and which lead humans “to ignore contrary evidence, the need for final
causes, and a tendency toward abstract thought” are the function of the “idols of
the tribe.”44 Hart correctly suggests that Said seems to be invoking this notion of
idolatry when he refers to “the various official idols venerated by culture and by
system.”45 Halbertal and Margalit see Bacon as being in the tradition of ideology
critique, of which the biblical critique of idolatry is the prototype.46 The key element
of the biblical critique of idolatry is that idolatry is a “moral offense…within the Godhuman relationship.47 Halbertal and Margalit trace the change in the way idolatry
comes to be seen. What they find is that modern thinkers, moving away from the
earlier view, have seen idolatry as a cognitive error defined as
anthropomorphism.48 In Halbertal and Margalit’s four-stage history of ideology
critique, they propose a “conceptual chain” of intra- and (later) extra-religious
criticism that ironically resulted in “the critique of religion itself as idolatry.” 49 This
has fascinating implications. The four stages in the change from the religious
critique of idolatry to the critique of ideology include “the criticism of idolatry by the
monotheistic religions, the criticism of folk religion by the religious Enlightenment,
the criticism of religion in general by the secular Enlightenment, and finally the
criticism of ideology.”50 The religious Enlightenment, as Margalit and Halbertal see
44
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 90-1.
45
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 91.
46
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 91
47
Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, 11.
48
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 91.
49
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 92.
50
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 91-94.
137
it, was an intra-Jewish and intra-Christian criticism of the crude anthropomorphism
of pagan folk religion. Eventually the critique was turned in the direction of
critiquing even “enlightened forms of monotheism” thus setting off the beginning of
“secular” – or non-religious critique, that is, critique from outside of religion carried
out by those who are not believers in the religions that they critique. With the
Enlightenment, criteria are set by men, not God and all authority comes under
scrutiny and is subject to requiring justification by human reason. What is relevant
and essential to note is that while the earlier religious Enlightenment traced the
sources of epistemological error to imagination and tradition in its understanding of
idolatry, the secular Enlightenment focused on the structure of the human will and
cognition as Descartes and Kant argue respectively. 51 As Hart correctly asserts
concerning this shift, “By shifting the focus of critique from folk religion to religion in
general, the secular Enlightenment paved the way for the explicit idea of religion as
ideology.”52 This idea of religion which becomes ideology is the idea of religion
which Said attacks. Similarly the idea of a non-religious school of thought, that
which has come to be called secular, which is both religious and ideological, also
concerns Said, and to this he applies the religious-secular trope.
As is well known, Marx along with Nietzsche are the most important figures in
the fourth stage of critique of religion (with Freud as the third). The Marxist and
Nietzschean critiques eschew religion as idolatry itself. Religion thus becomes
viewed “as an alien belief in which man subordinates himself to the creatures of his
51
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 93.
52
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 93.
138
illusional [sic?] imagination and is thus alienated from his most vital interests.”53
Hence religion is for Marx the quintessential form of “false consciousness.”54 Hart
extends Marx’s idea from this notion asserting that “Ideology is idolatry in secular
form.”55 Note that here Hart is equating “secular” with “non-religious” or “antireligious,” and sees secularization as a process that begins with only with ideology
53
Hart takes this from Halbertal, Idolatry, 112-114. Hart provides a thorough
explication of the fourth state of ideology critique. The young Marx is the
culmination of the Fichte-Hegel-Feuerbach train of philosophy of religion in
German idealism. Central to this movement is the idea that the Ego posits its
other, the non-Ego, which is a precondition of consciousness. Feuerbach
postulates that the conscious subject makes himself an object of reflection and
comes to know himself thus. Only through this process of self-othering (of
externalizing consciousness or subjectivity), which then sees the self as an object,
can the self be realized. We know ourselves or become self-conscious only
through the external or objective embodiment of the subjective consciousness.
“Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is selfknowledge. By his God though knowest the man, and by the man his God; the two
are identical.” See Ludwig Feurbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George
Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 5-6, 12-13. If Feuerbach reduces
Hegel’s God—who comes to self-knowledge and self-realization in history by going
out from himself (self-alienation) and returning to himself (reconciliation)—to the
constructive projective activities of the human mind, then Marx regards the
consequences of that activity idolatry. Religion represents an alienated
relationship to the self, where aspects of the self are posited as an outside power
to which one submits. Thus Marx sees religion as debasement of the human being,
suffering and simultaneously protest against that suffering and for that reason calls
for the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men. (Hart 93-94) See also
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 91 and for discussion
of Marx’s “epistemological break” claimed by Louis Althusser in For Marx (London:
Verso, 1996) about the change that Marx underwent after 1845 when his Left
Hegelian-Feurbachian humanism became the later Marx of Capital. For
comparison of Capital to his pre-1845 thought, see Economic and Philosophic
Manuscrpt of 1844 and The Holy Family. Althusser also sees Marx’s The Jewish
Question and “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as
humanist. However some argue that although there is an epistemological break,
the Hegelian language, themes and logic still inhere in the mature Marx, i.e.,
Capital.
54
55
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture 95.
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 95. Here Said is
obviously using “secular” in its denoted meaning, not rhetorically.
139
critique. It can be argued that secularization began with the earlier religious
Enlightenment. Hart points out that for Marx there is no recuperation of alienated
subjectivity in religion as there is for Hegel and Feuerbach.56 According to Hart’s
interpretation of Marx, “If capitalism is the fetishism of commodities, then religion is
the fetishism of the alienated subject (man).”57 This fourth stage of idolatry-critique,
exemplified by Marx, represents the radicalization of the secular Enlightenment.
The struggle against the public authority of religion qua religion has largely been
won. For this reason, Marx claims famously, “For Germany, the criticism of religion
has largely been completed.”58 But as a result of Marx’s (and previous thinkers’)
reasoning about the nature of religion, the word “religion” now can become in
Hart’s words “a metaphor for all forms of mystification –violent and non-violent,
passive and aggressive.”59 This is an important point that should help to clarify how
Said is using the word “religious.” Hart also perceptively observes, “If ideology is a
form of collective illusion, mass self-alienation, or a make-believe world, then
religion is its root metaphor. Nationalism, class, race, and a host of other
reifications—Said’s religious-cultural effects—become the new idols of
veneration.”60 Said sees nationalism, Orientalism and imperialism as the religious
effects of European Christian culture transfigured. This religion –to- culture
transfiguration, an outcome of the humanistic secular Enlightenment paradoxically
56
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture 94-95. Hart draws out
the difference between Marx and Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel’s abstract thought.
57
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 95.
58
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 96.
59
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 97.
60
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 97.
140
leads to historical manifestations and results that call into question whether the
secular Enlightenment had succeeded in moving humanity forward and out of
oppressive and unjust systems. Thinkers of the counter-Enlightenment asked
whether the putative achievements of modernity were real or a chimera, whether
man had really been liberated or if oppression and lack of human freedom and
rights had simply continued under new systems that the West thought of as
secular. Critics of the Enlightenment from Nietzsche (anti-humanist) to Marx
(humanist) and eventually, in the wake of the failure of both Western Capitalism
and Marxism (coopted and unfulfilled in the Communist state), the critical theorists
of the Frankfurt School, which shall be a topic of discussion in the next chapter, as
well as Foucault and the critics making up French “theory” end up forming a critical
response to the failures of the Enlightenment. This radicalization of the secular
Enlightenment, which begins with humanism and develops dialectically to antihumanism is explicated in Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment.61
Marx’s object of critique becomes class ideology. Ideology, which pervades
societies but which seems invisible, imperceptible—due to the efficacy of
ideology’s tools of control and hegemony62-- serves one set of social interests at
61
Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment ,Trans.
Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
62
See Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society. 14 for a brief discussion of
how much Gramsci’s idea of the hegemony of culture influenced Said in addition to
Foucault’s notion of the power of discursivity with its “associated baggage of
anonymity, determinism and (potential?) totalism.” But he also notes that counterhegemony, and resistance along with the role of the organic intellectual is still
possible and this is very much part of Said’s thinking. While Marx believes in
human agency as does Said, later Marxists largely abandoned the belief.
Althusser’s thought on ideology and the ISA’s or ideological state apparatuses is
141
the expense of another.63 According to Marx as well as Gramsci, after him, it is in
the realm of culture that ideology works and has its consequences.64 This is the
Gramscian concept of hegemony.
Said sees culture as the transfiguration of religion as being in need of critique
and hence, culture to Said’s mind, has acquired the same authorizing,
authoritative, and limiting, qualities as religion traditionally had in its saturating and
overpowering presence in and effects on society. Thus Said, while upholding the
Arnoldian idea of high culture as the “best that has been said and thought in the
world,”65 is generally skeptical and ambivalent about cultural authority and its
effects on society particularly its “ideology-spinning institutions” (churches, schools,
corporate media). While Said and Arnold converge in their ideas about culture as a
quest and vehicle for human edification and improvement, “as a humanitarian
impulse, a desire to overcome human error, confusion, misery, and ‘the noble
aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it.’”66 In this way
Said follows in the tradition of cultural thought that goes back to the ideas of the
very pessimistic about the possibility of human agency. Said remains the optimist,
Foucault aside.
63
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture ,97. A brief comment
about Halbertal and Margalit’s study of the critique of idolatry: Their analysis of the
logical progressive stages of idolatry critique that arises within religion, is then
turned against religion from outside religion through rational thought which then
again becomes like religion in its ideological humanistic phase of becoming a
substitute system of authority for religion, resulting in the same negative
consequences for human life, is a useful framework for understanding the thought
of Marx, Said, and other critics of religion or “the religious.”
64
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 97.
65
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) 8.
66
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 44.
142
English Marxist critic, Raymond Williams’ whose Culture and Society is one to
which Said turns often in explicating his own ideas. Arnold and Said are both within
this tradition, but Said differs in his views on culture from Arnold on a number of
significant points.
Arnold’s idea of modern culture starts with the idea that culture is the
“disenchantment and reconstitution of the Christian gospel”67 and is “a response to
the decline of traditional religion as a public authority.”68 Invoking Peter Berger’s
apt phrase in his book entitled The Sacred Canopy, Hart writes of Arnold’s notion
of culture that “It is an attempt to reconstruct a viable canopy on sacred ruins.”69
Thus, Arnold’s idea is that the core of Christianity which is its moral truth and
efficacy are preserved in culture, playing the same role in his scheme as reason
does in Hegel’s.70 Arnold sees culture as life-enhancing, in an industrialized world
that had led to a great deal of social anarchy due to the conditions of life for the
working class in England’s cities in the middle of the nineteenth century. He sees
culture as a refuge providing safety and security and as an ally of the State, which
he sees as “sacred.” He values order above all else and argues against the right of
anyone or any group to challenge the state, especially if the challenge brings
anarchy. He advocated brutal suppression of protest, seeing order as the highest
good of society and the police power of the State as the sacred vehicle for social
order. The Hyde Park demonstration of 1866 catalyzed Arnold’s thought in Culture
67
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 20.
68
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 19-20.
69
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 20.
70
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 17.
143
and Anarchy in which he theorized culture as “a collective super-ego”71 and a”
bulwark against the apotheosis of science, technology, and market forces in
modern industrial society.”72
Said takes issue with Arnold’s view that the absolute power of the State is
positive and of the idea that culture should serve as a tool of the State, aiding in
increasing State veneration and thereby decreasing critical oppositional thought.
He also takes issues with Arnold’s expressed racialism73 and his narrow
conceptualization of the “the best that had been thought and said in the world”
which was highly Eurocentric. This stems from Said’s view of humanism as that
which values all that is human, including that which is non-European. Said opposes
the racialism and ethnocentrism in Arnold and Ernest Renan of whom Said writes
in Orientalism attacking the dualistic thinking that sees certain races and classes
as innately superior to their “Others.” Said, though a believer in humanism,
deconstructs the post-Enlightenment idea of the European subject of history.
What gave writers like Renan and Arnold the right to generalities about race
was the official character of their formed cultural literacy. “Our” values were
(let us say) liberal, humane, correct; they were supported by belles-lettres,
informed scholarship, rational inquiry; as Europeans (and white men) “we”
shared in them every time their virtues were extolled. Nevertheless, the
human partnerships formed by reiterated cultural values excluded as much
as they included. For every idea about “our” art spoken by Arnold, Ruskin,
Mill, Newman, Carlyle, Renan, Gobineau, or Comte, another link in the
71
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 24.
72
Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939,
244-45.
73
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 138-152. Arnold lays out his views which can only
be characterized as nineteenth century racial ideology, which ascribed what he
called the qualities of Hebraism and Hellenism to the Semitic and Indo-European
people respectively.
144
chain binding “us” together was formed while another outsider was
banished. Even if this is always the result of such rhetoric, wherever and
whenever it occurs, we must remember that for nineteenth-century Europe
an imposing edifice of learning and culture was build, so to speak, in the
face of actual outsiders (the colonies, the poor, the delinquent), whose role
in the culture was to give definition to what they were constitutionally
unsuited for.74
3.7 The First Critical Study of Said’s Religious-Secular Thematic:
William D. Hart
“The religious-secular thematic,”75 as Williams D. Hart notes, is a significant
trope in Said’s work that Hart, in his1993 Princeton dissertation, was the first to
identify as an unsettling and paradoxical element in Said’s thought. The epigram
that opens this chapter is particularly significant in conveying how Said thinks of
criticism in terms of what it is, what it does, and what its goals are. The two essays
that open and close his 1983 volume of essays The World, The Text, and The
Critic are entitled “Secular Criticism” and “Religious Criticism” respectively and
convey much about the intention and significance not only of that book, but of
Said’s entire critical project, and, possess as Hart suggests “an interpretive
preeminence,”76 and a synecdochal relationship to Said’s critique of culture.77
Said’s use of the words “secular” and “religious,” as well as their grammatical
derivatives and their synonyms, are neither ornamental nor incidental. Referring to
74
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978 [1979,2003]),
227-28.
75
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, x.
76
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture 8.
77
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture 8.
145
the “hieroglyphic character”78 of Said’s use of these terms, Hart calls these two
essays, “…a Rosetta stone that helps to decipher…what we may previously have
regarded as merely a curiosity of Said’s style, a rhetorical flourish.”79 It may be that
passages such as the following, lead Hart to detect an anti-religious tone in Said
which superficially appears to explain Said’s idea of the “secular” as related to the
anti-religious. However, other readings are possible. From his essay “Religious
Criticism” Said’s idea of the religious and the secular is expressed through his
invocation of Giambattista Vico’s idea of the secular as that which is historical and
able to be known and understood by humans because they have created their own
histories, their own societies; Vico also suggests that the secular is inscribed in the
diverse world made up of various currents and goes through various types of
changes in a dynamic relationship of all the parts to each other and not in
relationship to the Divine. Conversely Said accepts Vico’s construction of the
“sacred” as outside human history and therefore unknowable. Due to the inability of
the sacred to be known by humans, therefore, Said wishes to concentrate on that
which man does, can know, and can change by his own effort, that is, what he
would call “the secular” or being-in-the-world.
There is a great difference between what in The New Science Vico
described as the complex, heterogeneous, and “gentile” world of nations
and what in contrast he designated as the domain of sacred history. The
essence of that difference is that the former comes into being, develops in
various directions, moves toward a number of contaminations, collapses,
and then begins again—all in ways that can be investigated because
historians, or new scientists, are human and can know history on the
grounds that it was made by men and women. Knowing is making, Vico
78
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture 8.
79
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture 8.
146
said, and what human beings can know is only what they have made, that
is, the historical, social, and secular. As for sacred history, it is made by God
and hence cannot really be known, although Vico understood perfectly well
that in a priest-ridden age, such as his, God had to be respected and loudly
celebrated.80
Hart thinks that Said’s is a secularist project. This study, as well as Courville’s
and Spanos’s, each treated in subsequent chapters, read Said very differently.
Hart insists that he chooses a literal interpretation of Said’s language in spite of his
own early admission that this trope is metaphorical, a strange incongruity in Hart.
One of Hart’s most significant criticisms of Said’s rhetoric denies its value as a
“tool of analysis” in his statement that “These references provide his analysis with a
certain mood and tone, but of themselves are not tools of analysis. He does not do
with theology what Marx does, even on the level of metaphor. Marx took full
advantage of his dialectical connection to Hegel’s “System” (which if anything is a
theo-logic) and to Feuerbach’s anthropological reduction of that philosophy.” 81
Hart is right in the sense that Marx’s critique specifically takes aim at religion for
creating false consciousness. What shall be shown is that Said is not trying to do
anything with theology per se for religion is not his concern, Hart’s view to the
contrary. Furthermore, Hart’s claim that Said’s rhetoric of the religious (and
secular) is not a tool of analysis is the converse of Courville’s idea that it
enunciates or at least implies a critical theory of religion. This will be explored
further in chapter six where Courville’s thesis is examined. What may be said at
80
Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 290-91.
81
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 53.
147
this point is that if Said’s rhetoric is not per se a tool of analysis, it certainly has
caused a great deal of analysis to be done.
Turning again to Said’s use of the word “secular,” it is essential to emphasize
that “secular” for Said rarely means what it means in common contemporary
parlance (academic or general).82 There are also the associated forms of “secular”
Contrasted to Said’s eccentric, catachrestical meaning that shall be explored
throughout this chapter, there is, of course, a variety of meanings in use among the
general population and even among scholars. There are the dictionary definitions,
i.e. its denotations. There are also multiple connotations, i.e., attitudinal or
emotional associations, positive or negative, to the word (depending on the user’s
beliefs). In addition to the definitions of the many dictionaries of the English
language, there are the meanings that are generally associated with these words in
any given social, religious, or political locality. This is one of the reasons why
rhetorical use of words like “religious” and “secular” may achieve the desired
effect—or may do the very opposite because rarely are users in agreement about
the meaning of these words. These are words that everyone assumes they know
the meaning of. In fact, what is “known” is usually what has come to be
associated unconsciously with these words. The associations made with the word
“secular” are based often on ideologically influenced attitudes and beliefs. In
common usage by “secular” is often meant “non-religious” -–that is, not having or
being associated with (a) religion. Another common usage of “secular” makes it
synonymous with “unreligious” by which is usually meant something along the lines
of not believing in God/gods or religion. “Secular” then generally has a positive
ring to an atheist or agnostic. However, for believers in (a) religion, the word
“secular” is often associated with being a-religious or non-religious which is then
often carried a step further and is sometimes interpreted as meaning “antireligious” and from there extrapolated to indicate being actively or assertively
opposed to belief in the divine or in religion.
82
The word “secular” for many religious believers is thus often negatively
perceived. Finally, the word “secular” is also often properly used in its denoted
meaning to refer to the quality of maintaining a clear boundary between the public,
government-associated domain and the private, religious domain, that is,
maintenance of the political disestablishment of religion and its authority. In this
case, the word can have a positive or negative connotation depending on whether
disestablishment is favored or not. While in polities where disestablishment is the
law of the land, most people agree that religion is a private matter and not a matter
in which government should be connected either for or against, there are still
numerous debates and struggles about the meaning of “secular” when it comes to
questions of whether religious law can be considered in adjudications of civil
matters or whether a monument to the Ten Commandments can be present in a
government building, or whether religious dress or symbols can be worn by
148
such as secularity, secularism, and secularization. They each mean something
different, and each has multiple, even contested meanings, yet, in usage they
become conflated at times even by a scholar of religion like Hart as well as
others.83 In the passage below, Hart shows that regardless of Said’s authorial
intention, Hart insists on interpreting Said’s use of these words by their dictionary
denotations.84 Here Hart (as a scholar of religion) surprisingly ignores a number of
employees of the public sector. Everything being said here by way of explanation
of the way that the word “secular” and its derivatives is used in common parlance is
well-known to the academic audience reading this. But the point being made in
pointing out the obvious is that the ambiguities inherent in the multiplicity of notions
about the meanings of these words, creates additional interpretational hurdles
when these words are used as part of a rhetorical strategy.
W.J.T. Mitchell has written an important article entitled “Secular Divination:
Edward Said’s Humanism,” published initially in Critical Inquiry’s special issue
“Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation,” co-edited by Mitchell and Homi
Bhabha, vol. 31, no 2 (Winter 2005): 365-529 and subsequently reissued as a
chapter in Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, eds., Adel
Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010),
490-8. Though Mitchell provides several valid insights concerning what he calls
Said’s “division of the secular from the sacred,” he too appears to focus too much
on religion and conveys the impression that religion is the primary target of Said’s
rhetoric stating for example “Religion for Said is an expression of the alienated
capacities of the human imagination, a system of ideological deception and
coercive authority.” (Iskandar and Rustom, 2010, 494) He also asserts: “But it is in
the domain of religion, which Said so often characterizes in terms of fairly reductive
stereotypes: dogmatic, fanatical, irrational, intolerant, and obsessed with mystery,
obfuscation, and human helplessness in the presence of the inscrutable divine (or
demonic) design.” (494) And yet again, Mitchell confidently insists “And of course
there is Said’s almost structural distaste for religion and myth, as opposed to his
secular or ‘rational civil theology,’ the phrase that Vico uses to describe his own
position.” (496-7). Mitchell creates that Said’s notion of the secular is essentially
the traditional humanist’s Enlightenment concept that does battle with religion per
se instead of showing religion as simply one type of identitarian and possibly
ideological attachment that Said’s notion of the secular sees as in need of
challenge through critical engagement. In this sense he is not far from Hart or Irwin
though he expresses his view more maturely and elegantly. See Richard Irwin’s
statements on Said’s “hatred” of religion in Dangerous Knowledge, 2006, 294.
83
84
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 201, note 13 shows that
Hart consulted Webster’s New World College Dictionary and surprisingly thinks
149
things: first, the fact that there are other (better) dictionaries and that there are
additional meanings of these words; second, the right of any author to define,
directly or indirectly through context, explication, and example, the way s/he is
using the chosen terms; third, and most importantly, the fact that Hart is
contradicting his own acknowledgement that Said’s use of the word “secular” (as
well as the word “religious,” its synonyms and derivatives) is “rhetorical.”
Rhetorical uses of words are generally figurative or metaphorical uses for the
purpose of making a particular point or for pointing the audience in the direction of
a new understanding of a concept. That means that the words are not used in their
denotated (definitional) meaning which has the additional effect that the word in its
rhetorical usage is being compared to something else and refers not its denoted
referent but to something else which has characteristics of the denoted meaning.
Though Hart acknowledges Said’s rhetorical use, he fails to understand Said’s
intended meaning. In fact, he declares that he will insist always that Said means
and must mean the denoted meanings of these words and that essentially he
interprets Said according to the particular definitions Hart chooses to use (out of
the various denotations that exist) for these words, Said’s rhetorical usage be
damned. It is no wonder then, that Hart’s reading of Said is really not a reading of
Said but rather an imposition of Hart’s religious and ideological assumptions on
Said’s ideas. In other words, and in Said’s notion conveyed by this rhetoric of the
religious and the secular, Hart offers a “religious” reading of Said and his study is
ironically to some extent, particularly in his interpretation of Said, a piece of what
Said would call “religious criticism.” His conclusions are thus disturbing but not
that the denotations of this vocabulary found therein is an adequate and complete
way to interpret Said.
150
surprising as are the conclusions of those who have written on Said using Hart
uncritically or who approach Said with the same biases.85 The following passage
expresses Hart’s intent to impose his chosen “dictionary definitions” on all the
words Said uses related to the religious and the secular.
When I use the words religion, religiosity, religious, and sacred or
secularism, secularity, secularization and secular, I have ordinary dictionary
definitions in mind. Besides more familiar meanings, religion refers to ‘any
object of conscientious regard and pursuit,’ to any form of piety. Sacred,
among other things, refers to ‘respect or reverence accorded holy things’
and to things ‘set apart for, and dedicated to some person, place, purpose,
sentiment,’ and so on. Secularism, and its various linguistic forms, refers to
the separation of church and state, ‘to release by church authority from
religious vows and from connection with a monastery or similar religious
institute.’ Secularism also refers ‘to change from religious to civil ownership
or use,” to the act of depriving something of its “religious character,
influence, or significance.’ Manichaen refers to a world-view that is radically
dualistic…. Theological refers to ‘God-talk,’ to anything related to God or
godly things. I think that Said has many if not all of these things in mind
when he uses these words. He does not define them with the care that I do.
But I shall not hold that against him, which means that I shall hold him
responsible for the various meanings of these words.86
Aside from the problems that Hart’s methodology imposes on interpreting Said’s
rhetoric, it is well to note that there are, in fact, some aspects of Said’s rhetoric that
may be seen as problematic: First, it uses polysemous terms that convey a simple
Among these are Phillip A. Mellor, “Orientalism, Representation and Religion:
The Reality behind the Myth,” Religion 34 (2004): 99-112; Darren Dahl, “Criticizing
‘Secular Criticism’: Reading Religion in Edward Said and Kathryn Tanner,”
Studies in Religion/ Science Religieuses 31/3-4 (2002): 359-371; Alain Epp
Weaver, “On Exile: Yoder, Said, and a Theology of Land and Return,”
Crosscurrents, Winter (2003): 439-461; and Carl Olson, “Politics, Power, Discourse
and Representation: A Critical look at Said and Some of his Children,” Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion 17 (2005)317-336.
85
86
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 11.
151
dichotomy, thus creating the impression that Said sees the religious and the
secular agonistically and this seems to be the main effect on Hart’s interpretation
as well as those such as Olson and Epp Weaver who read Said through Hart. Giles
Gunn and W.J.T Mitchell also seem to have been convinced that Said’s view is
more binarist and divisive than other commentators such as Courville and Spanos.
Additionally, these words are what in common parlance is called “loaded” which
thus calls forth the emotional coloring they have for the audience, and this perhaps
is its greatest drawback. Emotionally loaded words affect rationality and invite
misreading. They are ambiguous and hence almost endlessly interpretable due to
their various possible denoted meanings and even more so due their various
connotations which vary with the beliefs and attitudes of the person using them.
For these reasons, when used for rhetorical effect, the metaphor may not be
perceived as intended in spite of efforts to convey a particular meaning as Said
clearly does. Thus, “secular,” “criticism,” and “religious” when they are joined
together as in “secular humanism,” “secular criticism,” and “religious criticism,” take
on whichever meaning the reader of them has already formed. The ability to hear
or see another sense of the word –because of the “baggage” that these words
carry -–is limited.87 How is it that Hart reads Said and finds his call for “secular
criticism” a failure for Said’s failure to have “explicated the varieties of secularism,”
while Courville reads Said’s concept of “secular criticism” as a useful and powerful
term, and an element in an implicit critical theory of religion? Spanos interprets
So the question about Said’s rhetorical use of these words becomes: Is this
Said’s problem as author or is this the reader’s problem? If there is
misinterpretation, is it because Said chooses “loaded” words in a rhetorical move
that backfires or is there misinterpretation because certain (and many) readers
bring to the text all their own presumptions, and impose their own biases on what
Said says?
87
152
Said’s rhetoric of the secular in terms of an existential ground of human
consciousness he calls “exilic” which is the basis for a new meaning for the
secular. Hussein sees Said’s entire project as a critique of ideology88 which is
exactly what Said posits as the “religious.” Vincent Pecora sees Said challenging
“dogmatism of every stripe. It is aimed not simply at religion, but at all modes of
thought that simulate the certainty and unquestioned authority of religious dogma:
racism, nationalism, imperialism, indeed any form of system-building… that seems
divorced from personal experience.”89 Aamir Mufti describes Said’s meaning of
secular as “a practice of unbelief…directed, however, not simply at the objects of
religious piety but at secular ‘‘beliefs’’ as well,....”90 Stathis Gourgouris offers an
assessment of “secular criticism” that is in keeping with those of Courville,
Spanos, Hussein and Mufti:
Said’s uncompromising secular thinking does not aim at the mere critique of
religious or theological discourses or modes of cognition. Secular criticism,
as I understand it, is only symptomatically a mode of thought antithetical to
religion. That is to say, we must liberate the secular from the strict
opposition to the religious — which in our era means we must take away
from the religious the agency of determining what is secular — and seek
instead, in the secular, another epistemological mode that points to
whatever is open to contention and critique, interrogation and doubt; to what
has no genuine need for transcendental structures because the finitude of
life and the world is insurmountable and thus conditions of existence
become more precious than promises of salvation; to what prefers instead
to consider conditions of transformation in the real worldly domain of selves
and others instead of the fantasy of otherworldly solutions.
88
Abdirahman A. Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London and New
York: Verso, 2002), See 8-18.
89
Vincent Pecora, Secularizaton and Cultural Criticism (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2006) 32.
Aamir Mufti, “Critical Secularism: A Practice for Perilous Times,” Boundary 2,
Summer, 2004, 1.
90
153
Secular thinking, in this respect, is political thinking — which, to my mind,
means above all remaining alert to the discourses and practices of power
that shape our lives daily and, nowadays, on a global scale.91
Bruce Robbins understands Said’s notion of the secular as “an opposing term
not to religion but to nationalism.”92
Said’s interview with Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker sets the "ideal of
secular interpretation and secular work" against "submerged feelings of identity, of
tribal solidarity," of community that is "geographically and homogeneously
defined."93 "The dense fabric of secular life," Said says, is what "can't be herded
under the rubric of national identity or can't be made entirely to respond to this
phony idea of a paranoid frontier separating 'us' from 'them'-which is a repetition of
the old sort of orientalist model."94 The term secular (though not necessarily Said’s
particular meaning of it), as Robbins points out, “has usually served as a figure for
the authority of a putatively universal reason, or (narratively speaking) as the ideal
end-point of progress in the intellectual domain.”95 Of course, this concept accords
with the nineteenth century humanist idea that “the secular” implies progress and
enlightenment.96 "What we have to realize," Peter van der Veer writes in
Stathis Gourgouris, “Orientalism and the Open Horizon of Secular Criticism,”
Social Text, No. 24 (Summer 2006), 11-20.
91
Bruce Robbins, “Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On
Edward Said's "Voyage in," Social Text, No. 40 (Autumn, 1994), 26.
92
93
Michael Sprinker, ed., Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell Publishers, 1992) 232-233.
94
Sprinker, Edward Said: A Critical Reader, 233.
95
Tim Brennan, "Places of Mind, Occupied Lands: Edward Said and Philology," in
Sprinker, 1992, 92, and quoted in Robbins, 1994, 27.
96
Critics of Eurocentrism such as R. Radhakrishnan, for example, in "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity," (in a volume from the University of
154
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, "is that the very distinction between
religious and secular is a product of the Enlightenment that was used in orientalism
to draw a sharp opposition between irrational, religious behavior of the Oriental and
rational secularism, which enabled the westerner to rule the Oriental." 97
Does one conclude, based on the interpretations of those such as Hart, Mellor,
Epp Weaver, and Olson who have not apprehended how Said intends the meaning
of “secular,” that the ambiguities inherent in these words and Said’s catachrestical
and metaphorical use of them have created more heat than light? Does this
rhetoric deny or mask a complexity inherent in the way that the secular is
imbricated in the religious? Giles Gunn has expressed the problem of Said’s
rhetorical strategy thoughtfully and elegantly:
On the one hand, the distinction seemed to treat as almost ontological a set
of terms that since the early modern era can only be understood in specific
historical contexts. On the other hand, it treated these same terms as
oppositional when they have rarely functioned historically, or for that matter
theologically, as a simple binary. Quite apart from whether such stark
oppositions can be thought, much less practiced,…the so-called secular has
often been created in no small measure out of elements of the religious that
emerge as much from a relaxation of its constraints as from an outright
repudiation of them. Thus, what appears in actual process of secularization
to be a rejection or negation of the religious—merely consider the history of
the novel—is more often than not a reconstruction of the world out of those
Minnesota Press) objects to how "'the secular' as a western norm is made to
operate naturally and therefore namelessly." Radakrishnan also questions the
coherence of such insignias of Said’s humanism as “the secular” and his verbal
guerilla campaign against the ugly unenlightening and unemancipatory side of the
Enlightenment. See “Edward Said and the Possibilities of Humanism,” in Iskandar
and Rustom, eds., 2010, 431-47.
97
Quoted in Robbins, 1994, 27. From Peter van der Veer, "The Foreign Hand:
Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Communalism," in Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge
and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 39.
155
interpretive activities that must be brought into play if some other form of
certitude is to take place.98
Gunn’s statement seems to get to the heart of Said’s rhetorical problem. Gunn’s
emphasis on the history of religion in the West that uniquely created the religioussecular binary foregrounds a problematic examined by such thinkers as Dipesh
Chakrabarty, R. Radakrishnan and Gauri Viswanathan, Ranajit Guha, to mention
only a few scholars who have highlighted the problematic conception offering nonWestern perspectives on the dynamic relationship of the so-called religious to the
so-called secular.99
Hart’s interpretation of Said ‘s religious-secular rhetoric denies the complexity of
Said’s notions of the secular and the religious and leads him to the conclusion
that Said is simply a radical secularist who opposes religion but ironically and selfcontradictorily defends Islam. Hart’s study is replete with reductive hyperbolic
98
99
Giles Gunn, “On Edward W. Said,” Raritan, 23 no. 4 (Spring 2004), 77.
See Robbins,1998., 27. See also Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of CounterInsurgency," in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 81. ; Dipesh
Chakrabarty, "The Death of History? Historical Consciousness and the Culture of
Late Capitalism," Public Culture 4, no. 2 (Spring 1992), 52-53: "Nationalist history,
in spite of its anti-imperialist stance and substance, shared a deeply embedded
meta-narrative with imperialist accounts of British India. This was the metanarrative of the modern state." Another example comes from Faisal Fatehali Devji,
"Hindu/Muslim/Indian," Public Culture 5, no. 1 (Fall 1992), 5: "Ideologically, I think,
Hindu nationalism has emerged as the only mode of resistance to the 'secular'
state---indeed as the only credible, organized form of alternative politics in a
country where the ruling elite has appropriated secular nationalism so completely
as to allow no room for dispute in its terms. Even the Left collapses into secularnationalist attitudes when faced with a 'communalism' it is incapable of
understanding or dealing with apart from a largely irrelevant rhetoric of class
conflict. Secular nationalism itself, in other words, has become a kind of state
'fundamentalism.’” See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion,
Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).
156
statements expressing a surprisingly oversimplified interpretation of the purpose of
Said’s critical project and specifically his rhetoric of the religious and the secular as
a critical tool: “As with Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, before him, religion is the
great conceptual dragon that Said must slay.” He goes on to say that he
“…explore(s) the degree to which religion is as important to Said’s critique of
culture and imperialism as it is to Marx’s critique of capital, Nietzsche’s critique of
decadence, and Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics.”100 It is necessary to reiterate
that rarely does Said write about religion per se and when he does his attitude is
positive if the religious aspect he is describing is humane, rational, and just.
Conversely and not surprisingly, he takes a negative tone toward religious
elements that exhibit a “form of tyranny, domination, and abuse.” Consistent with
the view that Said is a voice for the humanistic as well as the humane and just, he
is uniformly negative about anything that becomes a “form of tyranny, domination,
and abuse.” The degree to which religion qua religion is important to Said’s
critique of culture and imperialism, as well as of nationalism, is the degree to which
naturalized supernaturalism operates within these categories of belief, and modes
of life.
Hart also makes a rather excessive leap when he states without any
qualifications of meaning or textual support, “… where Marx regards this fetishism
(religion) as pathetically ineffective, Said regards it as socially and politically
dangerous.” Hart’s insistence that Said attacks religion in his promoting of what he
calls “secular” criticism is a baffling aspect of Hart’s analysis since Hart seems to
have been able to place Said’s thought within the intellectual traditions from which
100
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, ix.
157
it developed quite accurately. But this is not enough to ensure that he is able to
perceive accurately the true point of Said’s rhetorical religious-secular rhetoric101
Said sees as “religious” identity-thinking and its political manifestations, including
the ideological underpinnings that are based in motivations for solidarity and
inclusivity-exclusivity, rooted in the similarities between the cohesion created by
the rallying around the “sacred,” whether that “sacred” is God, nation, race,
homeland, party, or another social grouping. Said does see identitarian thinking
and politics as a danger to the struggle for justice and human emancipation from all
forms of oppression for its proofs abound in history present and past. Hart has
correctly noted that following the secular Enlightenment (using Halbertal’s and
Margalit’s four stages of the critique of idolatry) and particularly after Marx,
“religion” becomes “a metaphor for all forms of mystification.” “Religion” then,
following this understanding, is, generally for Said a metaphor for systems of
authority that operate hegemonically through various means of mystification and
imagination. Yet in spite of a great deal of insightful research into Said’s intellectual
moorings placed in the context of the development of the critique of religion, Hart
remains convinced that Said’s project is simply a self-contradictory clarion-call to
the ideology of secularism. Said’s use of rhetoric to motivate thought about how
certain ostensibly “secular” movements, Said’s project is simply one that is for
criticism that has the goal of changing the status quo and that breaks out of the
mystifying, stultifying straightjacket that culture imposes so stealthily. Criticism can
be directed at any social entity including religion where religious interpretations
have become political theologies that support oppressive government and
Courville’s analysis also confirms this and he faults Hart for this
misinterpretation, Courville, Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular, 6, 11, 67.
101
158
economic systems or where religion is conflated with the unexamined and
hegemonic effects of culture. Said opposes and critiques the coercion of thought
and inadmissibility of real criticism through the hegemonic workings of culture and
system whether within cultures using religion qua religion to coerce mindless
submissive herd behaviors or within purportedly “secular” social formations where
thought and behavior is equally controlled though by different and more invisible
means such as the media, the education system and the economic system.
One of the greatest misinterpretations Hart displays is in his concluding remarks
where he says, again in a leap that is not rooted in Said’s thought at all, that Said’s
“critique of religion as a cultural effect --a temptation for the secular critic and a
piece of repressed infantilism that threatens to ‘return’--misfires when it takes
religion as something that can be completed or terminated. Pace Said and Marx,
the criticism of religion, as far as we can see, is interminable.”102 Pace Hart, Said
would undoubtedly agree, especially in the sense that religion and ideology in
Said’s view both require continual critique because they are worldly, historical, and
always evolving. 103 This is precisely Said’s point—that criticism of any system,
religious or otherwise, should be on-going, especially where coercion, dogma,
orthodoxy, and authoritarianism of a system of thought and belief continue to deny
human beings justice and the freedom to think and to act outside of method and
102
103
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 162.
See Aamir Mufti, Critical Secularism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004, 3. Here Mufti says,” In this sense, the secularism implied in secular criticism
is a critical secularism, as I am calling it here, a constant unsettling and an ongoing
and never-ending effort at critique, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration of the
overcoming of the religious, theological, or transcendental impulse.” Mufti credits
Jonathan Arac with the reversal to “critical secularism.” This point will be discussed
further in the next chapter.
159
system. In fact, in numerous places, he shows a high positive regard for religious
thought that is critical (the position on the interpretation of Quranic language of the
Zahirites of Andalucia in the 12th century for example 104 ), admits the positive
aspects of religion and even the aspects of his own religious experiences that
meant a great deal to him (his experience of discovering philosophy in a religion
class at Mount Hermon, the Book of Common Prayer and the Gospel of John, and
his Quranic Arabic studies that led him to use Ibn Khaldun to illuminate Foucault, to
study Ibn Mada’ al-Qurtubi and the Zahirite theologian Ibn Hazm 105), and lauds the
critical consciousness of Muslim oppositional thinkers (Malcolm X and Ali
Shariati 106 Laith Shubeilat, Mohamed Arkoun, Fuad Zakariy, Fatima Mernissi,
Hanan al-Shaykh, Hassan Hanafi and others107). To reiterate, it is precisely Said’s
point that the critique of religion—and ideology—is interminable; this is exactly
what he is advocating. It is the point of his entire oeuvre. How to read Said and
miss that?
Hart makes a statement that he apparently thinks Said would find revelatory:
“One can be religious and thoroughly secular or secular and thoroughly religious.”
This would be true both according to Hart’s dictionary denotations of “secular” and
“religious” and Said’s rhetorical meaning of secular which arises from Said’s
104
Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic, 36-39.
105
Edward Wadie Said, Out of Place (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2000) 144, 205, 244;
See Said, 1983, 36-39; and Said, “The Text as Practice and as Idea”, Modern
Language Notes, 88, no.6 (Dec. 1973) 1072-3.
106
Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Books,
1994), xvii, 37.
Edward Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” The Politics of Dispossession (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994), 384-411.
107
160
appreciation for the fact that the word secular derives from the Latin root word
saeculum which referred to the clergy who, instead of retiring to the cloister or
monastery, worked and acted in the world, taking care of the human needs and
issues of the believers. Thus, Said’s notion of the secular employs a literal, and
therefore truly radical –that is, in the sense of being rooted in the original meaning
of the word saeculum—sense of the word. What this does is to emphasize the
contingent, the human, the earthly rootedness of that which is secular. This is a
crucial value for Said, “an ethical issue that functioned as much as a matter of
scruple as of principle…”108 In human relations and human discourse, then, “one
dare not presume, “ as Wallace Stevens had warned “to say more than human
things with human voice,” nor “to say human things with more than human voice.”
The secular implies that one speaks “humanly from the height or from the depth of
human things: that is acutest speech.”109
In another surprisingly imprecise interpretive move, Hart confounds two words
formed of the root word “secular” conflating secularism (an ideology) with
secularization (a process) saying, “Secularism as secularization means the political
disestablishment of churches and other religious institutions and traditions.
Sometimes it refers to the critique of traditional religious belief. Those who regard
witchcraft as a false belief or deny the existence of an immaterial essence called
soul or spirit, or dispute the biblical account of the Battle of Jericho in which the sun
108
Giles B. Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987),73.
109
Gunn, The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture 74. Gunn quotes
Wallace Stevens’ “Chocorua to Its Neighbor.”
161
stood still, are secular in this second respect.”110 Hart’s conflations are surprising
for a scholar of religion for surely he knows that neither “secularism” nor
“secularization” is precisely synonymous with “the critique of traditional religious
belief,” though this critique may play a role in both secularism and secularization.
Hart’s use of these two terms clearly indicates an interpretation of Said’s
rhetoric, and more importantly of the meaning he intends for these words, that is
both too limited given the richness of Said’s many contextual uses of “secular” as
well as misleading. It seems it should be unnecessary to specify when speaking in
the field of theology and religious studies what any first year student would be
expected to know, that “the critique of traditional religious belief” may be carried out
from within or outside religion. If the critique of traditional religious belief is carried
on from outside religion, in common parlance it most likely would be considered a
secular critique. If the critique is carried out from within religion, it would be
considered a religious critique. “The critique of traditional religious belief” may well
be carried out by religious believers who favor the political disestablishment of
religion from state as it often has been historically, and it may also well be carried
out by the non-religious (here used in its denoted meaning) who believe in
disestablishment. Yet it is essential to note as well that “the critique of traditional
religious belief” may even be carried out by those who believe in religious states or
theocracies, but this critique does not make them secularists.111 Thus, critique of
110
111
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 161-2.
This is true for example of the Salafis who critique the traditional fiqh of the
Sunni madhahab. They engage in religious critique, use rational methodology, and
yet, most of them favor the establishment of an Islamic state on the model of the
first Islamic state in Medina. Sayyid Qutb was a modernist thinker who critiqued
traditional Islamic thought and practice but was not a secularist. Ronald Judy,
162
traditional religious belief does not necessarily make one secular or a secularist nor
a proponent of secularization. The differences and meanings of these terms and
their derivatives can fill volumes and has. But it must be said once again: Said’s
critical project is actually not about either secularism or secularization. It is about
oppositional, worldly based criticism of the aspects of culture, system and method
that permeate, saturate and consciously or unconsciously oppress human beings;
what Said critiques is the hegemonic aspect of culture and system that infiltrate
human life and cognition so that assumptions are unexamined as it is the
unexamined and unquestioned and unresisted assumptions of culture that
ultimately stand in the way of human beings’ being able to press forward the
establishment of (a more universal) justice and human freedom from oppression of
all types.112 Said’s project is neither about abolishing religion nor about promoting
any ideology including the ideology of secularism. It is not about abolishing or
supporting either the religious or the non-religious (in its denoted meaning). Once
one apprehends what Said means by “secular criticism” and once one apprehends
that his entire oeuvre and each piece in it can be seen and judged for whether it
meets Said’s own criteria for “secular criticism,” one has then understood the
however, has written an article in which he argues that Qutb was a secularizing
influence, nonetheless, in Egypt. See Ronald A. T. Judy, “Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh alwaqi ‘I, or New Realist Science,” in Aamir R. Mufti, ed., boundary 2, Critical
Secularism, volume 32, number 2, summer 2004.
112
The hegemony of culture is a Gramscian idea which essentially sees that the
ruling class is able to convince the rest of the society that what is in the ruling
class’ interest is in everyone’s interest. See Antonio Gramsci, A Gramsci Reader:
Selected Writings 1916-1935, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988) and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) See Hussein’s assessment of the
Gramscian theoretical insight underpinning Orientalism as compared with the
Foucauldian. 14-15.
163
significance and role of Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the secular.
Acknowledging Said’s religious-secular rhetoric but then trying to force the
meanings of the words religious and secular into one’s own preferred meanings for
these words results in gross misinterpretations of Said. Conversely, properly
apprehending Said’s rhetoric and conceptual schema enables one to interpret
aspects of his work that have been seen by many as paradoxical, even selfcontradictory in a way that results in a more holistic, reconciled view, though
certainly not all paradoxes are resolved, the reasons for which are discussed in
chapter 4, a summation of Said’s intellectual genealogy. Said himself resisted
concepts of synthesis and harmony and emphasized this in his very last work on
what he calls “late style” which is further explored in chapter four.
Returning to the last of Hart’s concluding assessments of Said’s “secular”
criticism, Hart faults Said for what his critical project is not about suggesting what
Hart thinks it should be about. Once again he seems to ignore the meaning of
Said’s key term, “secular,” --–as Said is using it-- when he concludes, “Said’s
secular criticism suffers from his failure to explicate the varieties of secularism (my
emphasis).”113 Presumably Hart’s problem is with Said’s use of the word “secular”
(and not with his use of the word “criticism’). It appears that he is saying that Said’s
concept of “secular criticism” cannot be understood without a full explication of “the
varieties of secularism,” yet close attention to Said’s statements, read in relation to
each other and read in relation to the rest of Said’s oeuvre, seems to provide
sufficiently clear defining characteristics both as to what “secular” criticism is and
as to what its opposite is to enable comprehension of his terms:
113
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 162.
164
Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism (not as a
modification but as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. If criticism is
reducible neither to a doctrine, nor to a political position on a particular
question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then
its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of
thought or of method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent
with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, special interests,
imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself
and if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts
turning into organized dogma. ‘Ironic’ is not a bad word to use along with
‘oppositional.’ For in the main… criticism must think of itself as lifeenhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination,
and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the
interests of human freedom.114
Hart also thinks that Said is unconscious that the value and centrality that he
gives to criticism has developed through his intellectual formation in conversation
with his existential, filiative115 religious and ethnic background, in fact denying what
Spanos sees as the existential basis of Said’s notion of the secular,116 when he
writes, “Said errs, however, to the extent that he construes secularism as the other
of religion. Secularism is incomprehensible without religion; it is often an aspect of
religion and always a product of a religious culture.... There is no Said, the secular
critic, the Palestinian Christian by birth, without the contending messianic
eschatologies--Jewish, Christian, and Islamic--of which Derrida spoke....”117 Here
114
Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic, 29-30.
Said, The World, The Text and The Critic, 29-30. Said’s concept of filiation and
affiliation, the kinds of natural, natal, ties with kin, country, and religion and the
chosen associations or choices of connection such as party, ideology, etc. are
explicated in 16-24.
115
This point will be further explicated in the next chapter in which Spanos’s
interpretation of Said’s rhetoric of the secular is discussed.
116
117
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 161.
165
Hart shows himself not to perceive the relationship between the existential,
phenomenological and intellectual in Said’s oeuvre, an essential element in an
accurate interpretation of Said which was presented in chapters one and two.118
Perhaps because Said’s autobiography was not available to Hart at the time of
writing his study119 there may not have been enough information about Said to
enable an accurate apprehension of the textual clues throughout Said’s work that
point to an existential wellspring in which Said’s intellectual influences swam as he
constructed an understanding of the world and conceived of what his own role as
intellectual and what the role of criticism should be. In chapter one, Said’s
experiences as a young boy growing up in a Palestinian Christian family that lived
between Cairo, Jerusalem and Dhour El Schweir in Lebanon, how his early
experiences of religion and nationalism, as well as the religious, cultural and
political environment of his early life converged to spark his interest in thinkers and
writers such as Conrad, Heidegger, Adorno, Gramsci, Fanon, Foucault and
Auerbach, among others, and finally to enter the world of criticism through his
engagement with literature is elaborated.
Hart goes on to insist that Said fails to perceive the role of the concept of
religion when he asserts, “… religion makes Said’s project more comprehensible,
especially his scattered but persistent reference to religion and secularism. This
Hart’s lack of insight into Said is explained by Hart’s expressed opposition to
the existential-phenomenological influence on Said and his own preference for a
polemical methodology in his own critique. See Hart, Edward Said and the
Religious Effects of Culture, 75.
118
Said’s memoir Out of Place came out in 1999. As shall be seen in chapters five
and six, both Courville and Spanos, as well as other commentators clearly perceive
the relationship between existential and intellectual genealogy and Said’s most
central ideas.
119
166
highlights the many meanings and complexities of secularism which Said never
explicates.”120 In insisting on an explication of the varieties of secularism, Hart
seems to be missing the proverbial boat: Said’s oeuvre is not concerned with
secularism as such. Hart’s obsession has no place in Said’s project. One may
argue that it is an unsuccessful or inappropriate metaphor, one that has confused
rather than clarified important issues by causing commentary to become wrongly
focused or that there are problematic presuppositions in Said’s humanism that
underlie Said’s rhetoric which deserve critique which as shall be shown William
Spanos takes on in his book on Said and Arendt, Exiles in the City. Hart chooses
to apply particular denotations to terms used as rhetoric and “hold(s) Said
accountable” to those definitions that he, as reader, wishes to apply. This harms
Hart’s interpretation even after he has explicated well in four significant and
insightful chapters Said’s concern with the religious effects of culture, of
nationalism, of Orientalism and of imperialism and has perceptively and insightfully
analyzed the Said-Walzer dispute over Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution which
skillfully integrates and comments on Said’s work on Freud and the NonEuropean.121
One of Said’s most insightful commentators, Aamir Mufti, conceives Said’s
project of “secular” criticism thus:
Above all, his concern has been with domination through the classification
and management of cultures, and of human collectivities, into mutually
distinct and immutable entities, be they nations, properly speaking, or
civilizations or ethnicities. To the great modern system for the classification
120
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 162.
121
Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture, 1-15.
167
of cultures Said gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of
this system as marking the presence of a ‘reconstructed religious impulse, a
naturalized supernaturalism.122
Probing deeper into the epistemological basis for this “reconstructed religious
impulse” that Said sees in Orientalism and in post-Enlightenment humanism
generally, Abdirahman Hussein provides a valuable insight concerning the genesis
of and raison d’être for Said’s focus on the centrality of “secular criticism” to the
vocation of the public intellectual. Hussein argues, not only in his significant and
detailed study Edward Said: Criticism and Society,123 but more so, quite succinctly
in “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and Theology,”
that Kant’s
…proclamation that he had effectively deposed ‘the queen of all the
sciences’ was decidedly premature; or worse, it may have given his
philosophical heirs a false sense of security in the belief that scientific and
humanistic knowledge born and bred in the wake of Kant was mature, that
to be post-Kantian also meant, ipso facto, to be post-metaphysical.124
Aamir R. Mufti, “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,” in
Aamir Mufti, ed., Critical Secularisms, special edition, boundary 2 (31, no.2
[Summer 2004], 3.
122
123
Abdirahman Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (London: Verso,
2002).
Abdirahman Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of
Metaphysics and Theology” in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, eds., Edward
Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010) 426.
124
168
Hussein avers, however, that “every…discipline, discourse, or cultural construct
deployed in the last two centuries is infected with a metaphysical virus to some
degree or other.”125 Of central importance is this somewhat hidden irony that Said’s
critical project aims to illuminate: that despite the “radical” nature of the dialectic
this “ontotheological core” which has remained within modernity and postmodernity
as well,
entails the strategic and systematic fusion of conservation and expenditure,
consumption and discharge, formation and transformation—all of which are
primed for the unparalleled preservation and expansion of ‘the West,’ at the
expense of the ‘non-West,’ as a set of identities, ideas, ideals, institutions
and practices.126
Hussein here proposes that in spite of Kant’s much-vaunted ‘Copernican
Revolution,’ a largely sublimated but otherwise dogmatically insistent substratum of
both metaphysics and theology…is continually (re)fashioned (and in turn gives
sustenance to) the dialectical interplay between the two forces he occasionally
called culture and system—that is, the cultural authority derived from the
humanistic and social/scientific disciplines in conjunction with sociopolitical
institutions and technological power.127
Hussein suggests that Said’s work “reengage(s)…ontotheology” because the
evidence suggests that in spite of Kant, “notions that have traditionally been
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology,” 426.
125
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 416.
126
127Hussein,
“A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 416.
169
framed in leftist parlance as ideological illusions cannot be clearly understood (or
adequately critiqued) unless one fully recognizes their subterranean connections
with this metaphysical and theological residuum.”128
Foundational to Said’s work is his concern to demonstrate that the power of this
residuum continues to hamper what he posits as the essential element of thought
(and praxis) humanistic imperatives of justice and emancipation to be realized
universally. That essential element is what Said calls throughout his work “critical
consciousness”129 and it forms the basis for what Said posits as the practice of
“secular criticism”130 and which he opposes to “religious criticism.”131 Said’s use of
a rhetoric of the religious and the secular in his work, then, is an expression of
Said’s concern about the persistent and, for him, troubling presence of a
theological/metaphysical attitude in the most “radical” postmodern thinkers who
represent themselves as “secular” and fully liberated of theological/metaphysical
premises. Said’s critiques leveled at some of the most “avant-garde” of avowed
secular positions such as those of the deconstructionists, poststructuralists, and
Western Marxists, as well as those of the traditional liberal academy such as the
Orientalists, express his rejection of all unacknowledged theological/metaphysical
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 417.
128
Said discusses his meaning of the term and uses the term “critical
consciousness” first in a reference to Swift in “Secular Criticism” in Said, The World
1983, 24, 28. But he uses it elsewhere in his works as a central concept. See
Hussein, 2002, for his discussion under the subtitle, “Critical Consciousness,
Methodology, and History.” 210-223.
129
“Secular Criticism” in Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1-30
130
“Religious Criticism” in Edward W. Said, The World The Text, and the Critic
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 290-2.
131
170
attitudes for their tendency to result in the same types of oppressive consequences
as religiously based epistemologies. Said’s greatest struggle then as a humanist is
to reveal the blind persistence of the theological/metaphysical residuum never
extirpated from Western thought and consciousness. Said’s concern is for
recognition and overcoming of this failure through the development of true “critical
consciousness”132 that resists systems, dogma, unexamined biases, closures and
other elements of identitarian thought and behavior, which he sees as the primary
obstacle to the humanistic goals of human emancipation and enlightenment. He
posits specific elements and understandings necessary to critical consciousness
among which three notions stand out: “worldliness;” the embrace of an exilic
element in consciousness; and a concept of representation of the other that is not
the product of a deformation of subject-object conceptualizations and relations.
Though Said found theory useful and employed theoretical insights drawn from
a variety of sources, in his anti-system-building attitude, he opposed adherence to
theories. Said’s intellectual and practical affiliation to the insights of
phenomenology and existentialism prevented him from absolute commitment to
theoretical totalities and privileged instead the dialectic of human agency struggling
with (or against) sociocultural, historical realities. This aspect of Said, in essence,
is the foundation of his critical practice. This difference from Kant’s position as
philosophical system builder separates him from the Kantian tradition.
132
Said uses the term in The World, The Text and The Critic (1983), pages 1516,24-30, 88 and announces it as his real subject on page 15. See discussion in
Paul, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 269, 280-1, 287, 289, 301.
171
Said and Kant also display divergent views on reason. Hussein eloquently
summarizes Said’s conception of rationality thus: “to him, reason was not a cool,
neutral light democratically casting its substance to reveal the good and the
beautiful; nor was it a sure-footed, punctual geist—a continual fusion of telos and
logos to shepherd life ineluctably to an assigned locus of perfection;” it was rather
a turbulent force that (in his words) “includes rational sentiment, passion, and
urgency.”133 Kant, on the other hand, proposes a “rational systematicity”134 at odds
with Said’s idea of what reason is and what reason is meant to do. Kant’s idea
that the use of reason as “the ultimate practical and theoretical court of appeal” can
only result in the good of humanity is skeptically received by Said since it is
abundantly clear that the use of reason has just as often resulted in human
oppression as in human liberation.
Kant’s idea of consciousness in which representation (form) is privileged over
matter and his belief that the thing-in-itself (the nominal reality) is beyond any
complete human rational understanding and tends to result in a turning of
“philosophical attention away from the domain of sociohistorical reality.” 135 Said’s
understanding of consciousness puts him closer to the existential and
phenomenological approaches to matter and form. Kant also seemed to
understand language as a neutral medium of communication, a view at odds with
133
Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1985), 40.
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 421.
134
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 421.
135
172
Said’s view on language as culture and history-bound and therefore lacking
neutrality as a way of interpreting materiality. Kant’s view of history and historical
change is evolutionary and less focused than Said’s on the interactivity of the
individual consciousness and agency with the socioculturally specific conditions
within which it operates. Kant’s great effort –and as many see it—his success--was to move thought in the direction of scientifically based rationality which could
then be foundational to ethical political practices, while simultaneously moving
away from metaphysics. His transcendental logic, viewed by many as his greatest
contribution, was however, later “appropriated in a way that considerably toned
down the ethico-political uses of criticism because it was far more oriented to form,
structure, and system than to the urgent, quotidian concerns of everyday life.”136
Here we arrive at a nexus in history and the philosophical, theoretical interactions
with history that resulted in the subsequent directions taken in modern thought with
Kant’s catalytic thought pivotal to subsequent philosophical directions taken
including those anti-Kantian formulations of modern thought. But as Hussein
indicates-- and this is precisely what Said’s project of “secular criticism” is, in plain
terms, “all about--” the effort to leave metaphysics and theology, not only as
epistemologies but as intellectual substrata, was incomplete. On Hussein’s
account137
…even when critique gained considerable power with the rise of Marxism,
its practitioners rarely recognized, let alone tried to dismantle, the Kantian
glass ceiling that severely circumscribed their intellectual freedom: most
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 422.
136
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 422-3.
137
173
leftist thinkers, with the possible exception of Horkheimer and Adorno, did
not feel compelled to revisit the metaphysical domain that Kant had opened
up for criticism; instead, they opted for a quarrel (and occasional truces) with
Hegel, whose philosophy was assumed to embody the ultimate
metaphysical bogeyman. And, of course, much of what is known as
classical Marxism is itself burdened with positivist pretensions, thereby
smuggling in a scientific version of metaphysical realism through the back
door while at the same time condemning idealism for being too
metaphysical. However, philosophers—like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and
Derrida—who did recognize the need to dismantle the conceptual armor of
metaphysics at its foundations—never warmed up to ideology critique as
practiced on the left. Hence, the idea of critique launched by the Kantian
project split into divergent currents that were largely alienated from one
another. The result has been, in my opinion, disastrous, especially for
philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. It also has had a
crippling effect on secular modernity and humanism as a whole…. We
could, therefore conclude…by saying that Said’s critical project ultimately
amounts to a strategic reversal of Kant’s project, even while we
acknowledge the uncanny affinities between them.
Said’s project intended not only to heal the split in the heart of critique but
also to recuperate the power, cogency, and comprehensiveness that this
notion has lost since the eighteenth century.138
What is valuable in Hussein’s summation is that he highlights the fact of Said’s
challenge to the notion that the metaphysical and theological attitudes of preKantian philosophy were nullified in secular modernity. Though it had become
accepted that Kant had disposed of metaphysics, the implicit core of Said’s critique
expressed in his rhetoric of the religious and the secular is that the modern—
equated with the “secular” of the post-Enlightenment age-- is not secular. The
corollary of Said’s critique is that to be “secular” is to be free of dogmatism, not to
be free, necessarily, of religion. As we proceed to analyze more deeply the
Hussein, “A New ‘Copernican’ Revolution: Said’s Critique of Metaphysics and
Theology, 422-3.
138
174
postmodern critiques that have addressed the need for this re-examination, it
becomes clearer that Said’s project arises as a response to a deeply felt
responsibility as a humanist to return humanism to its real goals. In relation to the
ever-mounting evidence in worldly historical terms that modernity (read
“secularization”) had not resulted in anything even approaching universal human
liberation, Said saw the responsibilities of humanistic criticism to be essential to
human progress, perhaps even to human survival.
3.8 Conclusion
What “Secular Criticism” and all the essays of Said’s 1983 The World, The Text,
and the Critic express is that, instead of promoting state veneration, nationalist
political theology, conformity to the commodity fetishism of modern culture, racial,
ethnic, national, religious or cultural superiority complexes, or new “secular”
religions of various post-modern stripes, cultural, social, political and religious
criticism must be the tool of leading intellectuals of their times, aiming at the
enhancement of life for not only the comfortable, well-connected, the successful,
and the powerful of the status quo, but for the masses, the downtrodden, the “they”
of our “we.” In this way Said’s idea of criticism is that it works to improve the
worldly conditions of the “not belonging,” those living marginally and in the margins,
those who don’t count in the opinion of those who do count. Said sees criticism as
performing this function from a position of not belonging, not joining, of not being of
and among those who have and maintain power and advantage over those who
don’t. The resonances to the ideas of Theodore Adorno and Frantz Fanon and
other radical critics of nationalism and other kinds of filiation/affiliation are in this
sense greater than his resonances to the cultural views of Arnold. Said clearly
175
shares with Arnold the belief in the value of the works of culture that exemplify the
“best that has been thought and said,” including the classics of Europe but at the
same time wants to include in humanistic discourse non-European classics that
also offer edification of the human spirit and prefers that intellectuals connect their
work with “secular” worldly life that speaks of and to those outside their circles of
knowledge and experience. These are the qualities of what he is getting at when
he speaks of “Secular Criticism.” This is why for Said Jonathan Swift with his
anarchical tendencies is seen as an exemplary critic because of his ability to
transgress sacred orders of meaning.139
For Said, as he expressed in Orientalism, if the secularizing process initiated by
the Enlightenment was a type of political, social, and religious liberation and led to
the fact that “notions of human association and human possibility acquired a very
wide general—as opposed to parochial—legitimacy, ”140 and at the same time the
secularization of the religious tradition enabled the more precise, controlling, and
scientific disciplines, including “lexicography, grammar, translation, [and] cultural
decoding,”141 but it also caused modern Europe and its intellectual handmaiden
Orientalism to “fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings
and territories,”142 doing so, as Samuel Huntington admits, not by the value of its
See “Swift’s Tory Anarchy” and “Swift as Intellectual” in Said, 1983, 54-71 and
72-89 respectively.
139
140
Said, Orientalism, 120.
141
Said, Orientalism, 121.
142
Said, Orientalism, 121.
176
ideas, nor the superiority of its religion, but by the application of systematic
violence…143
For Said there is a paradox in this that needed to be fully exposed, and to which
his notion of “secular” criticism” and criticism of humanism in the name of
humanism is applied. This paradox of secularization is akin but not identical to
what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “dialectic of enlightenment.”144 What will
be seen is that Said’s response to the deformations of the Enlightenment and its
secularizing tendencies is his development of a methodology of contrapuntal
reading of culture and historical narratives elaborated in Culture and Imperialism.
143
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations: The Remaking of the World
Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 50.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” presented in
their co-authored book of the same title, will be discussed in the next chapter in
relation to Said’s response to the enlightenment and in relation to the development
of the critical theory of society and specifically of religion.
144
177
Chapter Four
Secular Criticism: Mathieu Courville, Gauri Viswanathan, and
Vincent Pecora
There is a great difference, however, between the optimistic mobility, the
intellectual liveliness, and “the logic of daring” described by the various
theoreticians on whose work I have drawn …and the massive dislocations, waste,
misery, and horrors endured in our century’s migrations and mutilated lives. Yet it
is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the
resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, is now
shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamic of culture to its
unhoused, de-centered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is
the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile,
the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and
between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter,
original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see the “complete
consort dancing together” contrapuntally.
—Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
4.1 Introduction
This chapter attempts to arrive at an accurate understanding of how Said uses
the word “secular” in relations to “criticism” as the driving force within his reconstruction of humanism. To do so, it continues the examination of the merits of
the commentary that treats Edward Said’s rhetorical notion of the religious and the
secular. In this regard it examines Mathieu Courville’s thesis that Said’s rhetoric of
the secular implies a critical theory of the religious;1 Gauri Viswanathan’s analysis
of the possibility that Said acknowledged the liberating possibilities of religion
1
Mathieu Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular (London: Continuum,
2010).
178
which yield some rich insights into Said’s concept of the intellectual; and Vincent
Pecora’s reading of Said’s construction of the secular which connects Said’s notion
with what he sees as Said’s significant methodological contribution to confronting
discrepant historical narratives and competing world views---i.e. Said’s use of the
musical concepts of polyphony and counterpoint. Utilizing Courville’s,
Viswanathan’s and Pecora’s insights, in this chapter, we propose an understanding
of Said’s notion of “secular” criticism, which, contrary to Hart’s perception is not a
matter of extolling the commonplace understandings and conceptions of the word
secular and eschewing religion qua religion; rather we connect Said’s catachrestic
usage of these terms in relation to the notions of the religious and the secular in
Max Horkheimer’s critical theory of religion which leads us to understand “secular”
criticism as evidenced in Said’s work on Islam and the Arab-Islamic world, and the
problematic of Palestine-Israel, which shall be the subjects of Chapters five and
six.
4.2 Mathieu Courville’s Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular
Mathieu Courville’s University of Ottawa doctoral dissertation, Edward Said’s
Rhetoric of the Secular, examines the significance of the religious-secular trope in
his work and offers a reading that takes a completely different view to that of Hart
on what he has called Said’s “rhetoric of the secular.” Courville proposes that
Said’s work deserves to be seen as adding a significant though implicit contribution
to the critical theory of religion.2 Courville’s perspective on the meaning of Said’s
rhetorical construction of the secular—and the religious -- based in an existential,
2
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, ix,1, 6-11, 17.
179
archeological, genealogical, and phenomenological approach to Said,3 following
Said’s existential-phenomenological methodology in his study of Joseph Conrad
and his genealogy of Orientalism.
4.3 Courville’s Interpretation of Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular: An
Implicit Critical Theory of the Religious and the Secular
Of the contributions Courville’s 2010 study makes both to Said scholarship and
to the study of notions of the secular, his most important achievement, one that no
other commentator on Said’s work had previously clarified in a full-length study,
was that Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the secular conveyed an implicit critical
theory of the religious and of the secular. Although Courville’s idea that Said’s
theory is implicit and not explicit and that it specifically addresses not religion per
se but the religious and the secular, in this chapter, we shall build upon and offer
further analysis in the direction Courville’s work invites. He began by addressing
the critical theory of religion and the larger discourse of religion in which Said’s
thought may be seen. Said’s work seems to raise both explicit and implicit
questions within debates in the discourse on religion and in theories of the
religious and the secular, but should be viewed as central to the contemporary
occasion in which religion plays a highly significant role in political life globally.4
3
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular 7, 16, 17, 18. Courville explains
the various elements of his approach as existential, archaeological, genealogical
and phenomenological on these pages which have been adopted as well in the
present study.
4
See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003) Asad’s important work
Formations of the Secular: Chrisitanity, Islam and Modernity4 methodically
advances a clear thesis that challenges the viability of the secularization thesis and
180
Courville asserts rightly that Said’s catachrestic use of the terms “religious” and
“secular” forms a trope that, contrary to the judgments of Hart and other scholars of
religious studies, does not belie an anti-religious stance, nor does it support
secularism per se, but rather that it conveys an idiosyncratic rhetorical use of the
two terms (religious and secular) as part of a critical project which he sees as one
which would “reform what one may call—inspired by the rhetoric of Said’s
expressed-thought—imperialistic or religious epistemologies. Such epistemologies
help create and maintain discursive creations and practices that serve some but
not all.”5 Let us remember that we shall, further on, relate this—Said’s notion of
the religious and the secular—to Said’s effort to recoup humanism as opposed to
rejecting it as a useable praxis of the intellectual whose role is to provide
intellectual leadership toward universal justice and emancipation. This is the larger
goal of the present thesis.
Courville relates this overarching objective of Said’s work as enabled by his
concept of the critic whose calling is
to call attention to the way the discursive creations and practices that
constitute civilization, culture, and the religious have served to build and to
bolster, section off and shield, certain domains against being questioned
his other work since the nineteen eighties offers significant challenges to received
opinion on the question of the secular. Although Said and Asad have different
views on questions such as whether nationalism is “religious,” or whether Islamism
is a type of nationalism, both argue against common theorizations of the religious
and the secular and address very concrete examples of contemporary importance.
5
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 2. He expresses the
implications of what he thinks Said’s oeuvre s about: “unlearn(ing) the desire to
seek mastery over any human ‘other,’ and therefore, the big ‘o’ Other, or ‘wholly
other,’ need not retain one; if one wishes to make no claim to complete
understanding of an other, how much the more humble one’s potential vis-à-vis the
Other, should such an Other exist beyond human varieties of g-d talk.” (1-2)
181
concerning their relations to our collective human failure to create a more
humane global world in which to possible make ‘real’ homes.”6
Courville’s close reading of Said confirms and expands ideas previously
enunciated by Aamir Mufti, Stathis Gourgouris and Bruce Robbins who have
glossed Said’s rhetoric insightfully and whose ideas in this regard were discussed
in chapter three.7 Robbins’ idea that Said’s notion of the “religious” is a trope for
nationalism gets at a major part of his intent, but this study proposes that Said’s
goal is larger than that. Courville expresses it thus: “...the excessive nationalism of
established nations is largely where Said sees kinship between imperialism,
colonialism, nationalism and the religious.”8 Courville’s perceptive juxtaposition of
Said, Adorno, and Fanon and his attention to Said’s intellectual and existential
proximity to Fanon (which he posits as greater than his affinity with Foucault)9
supports overall assessment of the significance, intent, unity, and coherence of
Said’s oeuvre as well as his thesis that Said’s rhetoric announces an implicit critical
theory of the religious and the secular.
6
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 3.
Though Mufti, in utilizing Jonathan Arac’s verbal reversal (the clever “critical
secularism”), although I understand the aspect of this term that does apply to
Said’s secular rhetoric, creates a misimpression which implies that Said’s rhetoric
somehow advocates secularism per se. Said’s rhetoric of the secular implies
opposition to ideology tout court.
7
8
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 140.
Mathieu Courville, “Genealogies of Postcolonialism: A Slight Return from Said
and Foucault back to Fanon and Sartre,” Studies in Religion/Sciences
Religieuses,V 36/2, 215-240.
9
182
Courville’s hermeneutical analysis10 which approaches some aspects of Said
with an existential and phenomenological method11 and examines others with a
genealogical-archeological method12 and which furthermore employs insights from
a diversity of academic disciplines is successful as a comprehensive attempt to
examine Said’s oeuvre in terms of this religious-secular trope. Among Courville’s
most incisive perceptions of Said, we highlight a few which form a significant
subthesis to be developed in this study in the next two chapters. Courville
emphasizes Said’s utilization of biography and autobiography exemplified in his
books The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam. Of this Courville asserts the
following:
Said’s concern for peoples, cultures, nations, and civilizations… may be
described as analogous to, as an extension of, his concern for biography
and autobiography. (note 14) This is indeed a broad expansion of these
terms’ semantic fields and yet not etymologically unsound insofar as one
understands ‘bio-graphy’ as ‘life-writing,’ the writing of life, be it that of a
person or of a people. (note 15) In this, the two subsequent volumes to his
‘Orientalism trilogy,’ The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam: How
the Media and the Experts Determine How We see the Rest of the World,
are no different: they are concerned with the life process of peoples (i.e.,
the Palestinians and Israelis as well as the Islamic world and the West.)”13
See Courville’s discussion of his methodology, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the
Secular, 16.
10
11
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 7,17. See further explanations
of Courville’s methodological approach.
12
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular 16,18. See additional
comments on Courville’s methodology.
13
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 25.
183
Courville’s insight here is intimately connected with Said’s concept of the secular
as “in the world”14 of which Bill Ashcroft’s essay “Edward Said: The Locatedness
of Theory” speaks, assigning to Said’s concept of “worldliness” and the worldliness
of texts, a central position. Ashcroft, both in this essay and in his co-authored book
on Said entitled Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity,15 proposes that Said’s
concept of “wordliness,” which is really what his concept of the secular is about, is
Said’s most significant contribution to critical theory. Imbricated in this idea is
Said’s representation of the intellectual as having first and foremost a moral
obligation to stand against untruth and injustice by exposing where power goes
wrong, where the nationalist and imperialist epistemology fails, and to draw out the
significance of the locatedness of texts in the world. Ashcroft draws attention to the
connection of his foregrounding of the importance of the notion of “worldliness”
(again--in Said’s lexicon synonymous with the “secular’) with Said’s “paradoxical
identity as a Palestinian.”16 It is this series of connections that has been
underexamined in Said commentary and which the final chapter of this study shall
take up as the most significant element in this work and as the very quintessence
of what Said means by his term “secular” criticism.
14
Said, The World, The Text and The Critic, 29-30.
15
Bill Ashcroft and Pal Ahluwalia, Edward Said: The Paradox of Identity (New
York: Routledge, 1999.)
See Bill Ashcroft, “Edward Said and the Locatedness of Theory,” in Futures of
Critical Theory: Dreams of Difference, ed. Michael Peters, Mark Olssen, and Colin
Lankshear (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 261-273; quote from 261.
16
184
This is perhaps the time to note with Courville and in agreement with Hussein’s
earlier adumbration17 that the impact of Said’s Orientalism was so monumental that
it has caused the sublation of the rest of Said’s work (that written before and that
written after Orientalism) which has resulted not only in an inordinate amount of
scholarship and debate being expended on Orientalism without adequate attention
to the rest of Said’s oeuvre, and without examining the parts in relation to the
whole and vice versa, but also has resulted in a myopia that prevents the
perception of Said’s oeuvre as a comprehensive, unified critical project with
themes and goals that carry through it from the first to the last publication as
opposed to the more common perception that Said’s work consists of two disparate
elements: the literary/cultural and the political. Moreover, it has caused, even in
some of those very familiar with Said’s work an inability to see precisely how his
ideas are present and concretely embodied in his more overtly worldly political
work, particularly on the joint issues of representation and emancipation-- that is,
his work on the Arab-Islamic world and the joint questions of the past, present and
futures of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. This study contends that Said’s
project is a unity and that his notion of the secular though eccentric (ex-centric—
outside the center, outside the accepted circle of received opinion) is central to
everything he ever wrote. It is particularly central to his work on the Arab-Islamic
world as well as his theses on Palestine-Israel. Until now no one has focused on
these connections, perhaps due to the perceived political risks. Said’s significant
work on the question of Palestine and the Arab-Islamic world and its relationship to
his notion of the religious and secular merits more examination. Furthermore, it
17
Abidirahman Hussein, Edward Said, Criticism and Society (New York and
London: Verso, 2002), 12-13.
185
should be added that making explicit the connections between underexamined
elements of Said’s oeuvre, following Hart, Hussein and Courville, should be
continued.
Another of the important positions that Courville vigorously presses forward is
that (contrary to the several commentators who attack Said for allowing his
personal and political location to occupy an existentially and intellectually
genealogically foundational place in his oeuvre) a scholar’s personal and political
location cannot be bracketed out of his or her work.”18 Now this assertion raises the
question of how the contradiction between phenomenology and critical theory can
be resolved (both in Said, Courville, and the present study). Mufti in “Critical
Secularism” writes of Said: “Every world he lived in, he inhabited fully, and yet with
an uncompromising critical distance. This is the great strength, the beauty, and the
paradox of his life.”19 The idea that one can inhabit fully and yet maintain a critical
distance from a place, whether one’s native home or one’s adopted home relates
to Said’s idea that one can consciously and critically work through attachments
such as the attachment to one’s native place or ethnicity, race, or religion, or
anything that is imbued within one by connections of birth and culture. This is one
more aspect of Said that Courville has noted which coincides with my own
perception that Said’s strength is his focus on being both inside and outside of
things including that which is most natively dear to one, that is working through
18
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular 14. In his note on this point
Courville suggests Ashcrofts’s previously mentioned essay “Edward Said: The
Locatedness of Theory.”
Aamir Mufti, “Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times,”
boundary 2 31/2 (2004) 2.
19
186
filiative and affiliative relationships consciously. Said’s centrally important concept
of the critical consciousness which does this work, rhetorically “working through
one’s religiosities” as ultimate concerns, maintaining a self-reflexiveness which is
the essence of the secular as Said conceives it. And yet as Courville also notes,
Said “…avoided suggestion that religion, like the distinction of peoplehood, should
effectively be evacuated from public debate; conversely, he does suggest that
these are not, however, ultimate ends, even though in themselves they might claim
to be, however religiously or secularly.”20 He notes that with Fanon, Said
advocated that working from and through a national consciousness, especially in
the stage of deprivation of the rights of the self-determination of a people, even the
refusal to acknowledge a people’s sense of nation, the national consciousness
(nationalism) is a decolonizing vehicle to emancipation but that national
consciousness (which by extension is a “religious” consciousness) must ultimately
lead to a broader more inclusive type of consciousness both social and political. As
Courville says, the religious (national) consciousness must move “toward a more
global secular ethos that is not however mud in the eye of religions qua religions”
which are in fact (whether anyone likes it or not) the foundations of “ensuing selffashioned identities; identities that, for Said, must not only be negotiated together
as opposed to erected against one another, but also always remain, in the final
analysis, human creations, subject to change, potentially to be remade
otherwise.”21 Though religious tradition and national identity in Europe and much of
the United States are not completely inseparable, they are almost always
20
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 15.
21
Courville, Edward Said's Rhetoric of the Secular, 15-16.
187
inseparable for most people in the Arab world, including the Israelis. The demise of
Weber’s secularization thesis, or at least, the failure of most of it to be true outside
Western Europe, is evident when one confronts the way in which personal identity
is still ontologically at one in the rich religious-national tapestry for most people
outside the U.S. and Western Europe.22
This study is necessarily then not only a critical examination of Said’s discourse
concerning the religious and the secular and his construction of it, but it is a
consideration of elements of the larger discourse of religion which attempts to
illuminate connections and implications between it and Said’s thought.
Methodologically we employ close textual reading of Said and those commentators
whose work bears on Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the secular as it may help
draw connections between this and his work on the Arab-Islamic world. We also
seek to raise questions and establish connections concerning how this reading
may contribute to furthering thought on the question of the meaning of the word
The debate on Weber’s secularization thesis and related topics on religion in the
modern/postmodern world fills volumes. The following are a sampling that are
useful as background to the present study. See Talal Asad, Formations of the
Secular: Christianity, Islam and Modernity (Stanford CA: Stanford University
Press, 2003) and responses to Formations in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind,
ed. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006); See also Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the
Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) ; Janet R. Jakobsen
and Ann Pellegrini, ed., Secularisms ( Durham SC: Duke University Press, 2008);
Vincent Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 2006) Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular:
Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge Ma: The Bellknap Press of Harvard
University,2007); Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan, Political Theologies:
Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press,
2006); Linda Woodhead and Paul Heelas, Religion in Modern Times: An
Interpretive Anthology (Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
22
188
secular. What this leads to, it seems, is a questioning of whether that which we
typically conceive as the secular does not in fact embody elements of the religious
and vice versa. Is this binary as meaningful as we think it is? Is it useful? Does it
hamstring our conceptual framework? And, of course, in relation to Said’s religioussecular trope, does it further or detract from his critical project? These are
questions we want to keep in mind as we proceed and return to them further on.
Returning to Courville’s commentary, it is notable that he briefly discusses Said’s
“secular mysticism,” which can be picked up in various passages. For example,
there is what Said says about the essay: “Essays are concerned with relations
between things, with values and concepts, in fine, with significance. Whereas
poetry deals in images, the essay is the abandonment of images; this
abandonment the essay ideally shares with Platonism and mysticism.”23 Said, as
an essayist, is drawing the connection with his chief professional activity and the
mystical. In saying that the essay abandons images and connecting this
abandonment of images in drawing the “relations between things,” he seems to be
saying that the abandonment of images enables connections—in a mystical way,
not a rational one. The abandonment of images—that is, idolatries --is central to
making connections within the realm of truth and meaning (“significance”). Making
connections is the opposite of dichotomizing or polarizing: it is therefore the
seeking of the whole, not in seeking identity but in seeking the whole that contains
all of its distinct parts. It is the return to wholeness. In his essay “Reflections on
Exile,” Said quotes Simone Weil for her concise expression of the dilemma of exile
for its spiritual effects: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least
23
Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic, 39.
189
recognized need of the human soul.” Elsewhere in the essay, Said elaborates on
the brokenness that the exile experiences focusing on the spiritual and ontological:
…exile…is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off
from their roots, their land, their past….Exiles feel…an urgent need to
reconstitute their broken lives usually by choosing to see themselves as part
of a triumphalist ideology or a restored people. The crucial thing is that a
state of exile free from this triumphant ideology—designed to reassemble an
exile’s broken history into a new whole—is virtually impossible in today’s
world. Look at the fate of the Jews, the Palestinians, and the Armenians.”24
Said’s focus on the spiritual struggle inaugurated by the experience of physical
exile is also conveyed in his inclusion of a poem on exile by the Palestinian poet
Mahmoud Darwish which also focuses on the existential as well as ontological
brokenness and incompleteness in the lives of the human beings forced to accept
exile as a permanent condition of their lives and those of future generations who
will remain “transcendentally homeless.”25 Said refers to Darwish’s “epic effort to
transform the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.”26
Said’s “secular mysticism” that seeks the return to wholeness is very much present
in Said’s thought—and manifest in his love of and involvement with classical
music.
Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 183, 177.
24
25
An expression of the Marxist theorist Georg Lukács, speaking of the condition of
the conditions of the European novel that is grounded in the experience of a rapidly
changing society in which a people become “itinerants” “seeking to construct a new
world that somewhat resembles an old one left behind forever.” Quoted in Said,
Reflections on Exile, 181.
26
Said, Reflections on Exile, 179.
190
In fact, in many places in his writing about music the mystical sensibility in Said
emerges. For example in “Remembrance of Things Played,” he speaks of the art of
the German pianist Wilhelm Kempff: Kempff’s music has a unique, singing tone,
and his playing like Gould’s, is unusual in not bearing the imprint of his teachers, or
of other pianists. What you do hear is an unfolding interpretation. Kempff is
someone for whom technique has been subordinated to discovery, for whom the
piano as an instrument sharpening perception, rather than delivering perfectly
fashioned sounds….The surface finish of Kempff’s playing never impresses us with
either its assertiveness or its strength. Rather, we are aware of how over a longer
period of time, we learn a piece of music, grow to understand it, and finally know it,
as the beautiful phrase has it, “by heart.”27 Further on in the same essay, Said
writes that “The music’s outward evidence and inner movement are experienced as
two forms articulated together. And we realize that while much of the pianistic
enterprise as we know it—through playing (if we play), and through listening—
takes place in the public sphere, its fullest effects are felt in a private sphere of
memory and association which is the listener’s own.” And in the concluding
paragraph, Said returns to the worldiness, contingency, and mystique of the
musical performance as well as the essay in a comparison in which it is well to
note the italicized terms Said uses to describe both and consider their “secular,”
(i.e., worldly) aspect but also their likenesses, for example, to spiritual activities
such as prayer or the reading of holy scriptures or performance of religious ritual:
The greatest performances provide the invaluable restatements and forceful
interpretations of the essay, a literary form overshadowed by the grander
Said, “Remembrance of Things Played,” in Reflections on Exile (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 228.
27
191
structures of epic and tragedy. The essay, like the recital, is occasional, recreative, and personal. And essayists, like pianists concern themselves with
givens: those works of art always worth another critical and reflective
reading. Above all, neither pianist nor essayist can offer final readings,
however definitive their performances may be. The fundamental sportiness
of both genres is what keeps them honest, as well as vital. But there is an
irreducible romance to the pianist’s art. It is suggested by the underlying
melancholy in Schumann’s Humoresque and Chopin’s Ballade in F. Minor;
by the lingering authority of legendary pianists—Busoni, Eugen d’Albert,
Franz, Liszt, Leopold Godowsky—with magical names….28(my emphasis)
Notable here is the idea of expressions and communications in music and essay
that are always a re-creation leaving the possibility of yet another reading, all of
which ultimately has to do with an endeavor of the soul to express and
communicate with an “other” whether that other is a human audience or a
transcendent one, and of course, with one’s own alienated self that seeks return
and wholeness.
Said’s recovery of a passage in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,29, where the words
of the twelfth century monk of Saxony, Hugh of St. Victor conveys the mystical
value of man’s detachment from “home” and simultaneous embrace of a more
universal belonging is important enough to Said that he utilizes the passage in
several places in his work. Hugh of St. Victor expresses the perspective of the
exilic consciousness, one that allows a critical distance from filiative attachments,
28
29
Said, “Remembrance of Things Played,” Reflections on Exile, 229
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). For an
exploration of the relationship between Said’s notion of humanism and Auerbach’s
and Said’s affinity to Auerbach, see Paul A. Bove’s, chapter 3,” The Last of the
Late Comers: The Critical Syntheses of Erich Auerbach,” in Intellectuals in Power:
A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, 79-129
192
an idea to which Said resonated strongly and which arises frequently in his own
thought:
The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to
whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to
whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his
love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all
places; the perfect man has extinguished his.30
Before closing this assessment on Courville’s interpretation, it is necessary to
note two baffling assertions of Courville. These are of minor consequence in our
estimation of the singular contribution his work has made but they seem to detract
from the coherence of his basic argument. The first point concerns several
statements Courville makes concerning his view that Said “want(s) to defend those
all–too-often derisively branded ‘religious’ (i.e. the Islamic world generally), but on
the other hand fully realizing the negative power of (sic) religious alignments can
have….”31 –a surprising statement coming from Courville. Said’s work is not a
defense of Islam or the Islamic world, or even the “religious,” and yet it has been
construed that way by some Muslims as well as by several interpreters of Said.
Said denies ever having defended Islam or the Muslim world, or Arabs, or
Palestine, or the Palestinians. In fact, the meaning of Said’s notion of “secular”
criticism means that he is quite egalitarian in his criticism of particular behaviors,
trends, and demerits of all of these groupings as will be shown in the sixth chapter.
But what he does is to criticize perceptions, assumptions, presumptions,
ideologically based attitudes and positions that he metaphorically calls “religious”
30
31
Said, “Remembrance of Things Played,” Reflections on Exile, 185.
Courville, Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular, 15.
193
among all these groups. He does this wherever and whenever he finds that lack of
internal self-criticism and self-assessment based in unexamined filiative ties,
unprincipled behaviors originating from blind allegiances based on ethnicity, party,
religion and the like. Said does this consistently applying his criticism to all parties.
In the end Said angered people from every world he inhabited with his criticism—
which is precisely why his criticism is “secular.” Courville seems to say that Said
takes up for the Muslims in a counter-cultural and broadly applied defensive turn.
Yet Said’s treatment of Islam and Muslims is quite varied and certainly neither
apologetic nor defensive as shall be presented in the next chapter.
The second disagreement with Courville concerns his, again, surprising
perception that “It is important to keep in mind that Said could not articulate his
views on religion freely; the world around him being shot through with political
considerations and religious alignments; the two not being so distinct from one
another, as he himself knew experientially, even, existentially. He wrote and spoke
in a double bind:…”32 Courville finishes the sentence with the statement quoted
above. These sentences are separated because they each speak to a different
issue. Even more surprising than Courville’s perception that Said felt himself not
able to express his views directly for fear is the note he attaches to this sentence,
referencing Leo Strauss’ Persecution and the Art of Writing.33 He says nothing
about the basis for this statement other than to see this book “to interpret Said’s
view of religion and secular humanism” and that the title of the book hints at what
32
33
Courville, Edward Said’s Rhetoric of the Secular, 15.
Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe Illinois: Free Press,
1952).
194
he is getting at. The fact is that Said fearlessly bore the verbal and physical
assaults on his office of radical Zionists such as the Jewish Defense League, and
lived with death threats against himself and his family throughout the eighties and
nineties until his death in 2003. He once stated that he knew of at several hit lists
that he was on in the Middle East. After his death, it was discovered that a large
FBI dossier had been kept on him. And yet it is precisely in those years that his
production on the Arab-Islamic world and the question of Palestine was at its
height. For Said, his role as a radical humanist concerned with the pervasive and
pernicious effects of dominant ideologies dictated that criticism of any and all, as
and wherever needed to advance the cause and struggles for human rights,
human freedom, and justice for all was carried out fearlessly in spite of the dangers
of doing so. Said had personally known several Palestinians and other Arab
intellectuals assassinated by the enemies of criticism. If anything, this only
emboldened his critique. Courville’s statement is baffling given the evidence of
Said’s awareness of the dangers of his critical activities.
4.4 Said’s Critical Theory of the Religious and the Secular and the
Critical Theory of Religion
While Courville avers that Said’s rhetoric expresses an implicit critical theory of
the religious and the secular, he does not look at the convergences between
Said’s ideas in comparison with those of Max Horkheimer, whose Dialectic of
Enlightenment (co-authored with Theodore Adorno, with whom Said shared
several intellectual affinities), clearly influences Said’s early embrace of the thought
of poststructuralists like Foucault. What we shall see is that within Said’s thought
195
there exist several intersections with notions emerging from various critical theories
of religion such as that of Horkheimer, and which has been further developed and
elaborated by Rudolf Siebert. We have decided that there is further insight that
might be gained in considering to what extent Said’s implicit critical theory of
religious and the secular might have parallels with the critical theory of religion for
example of the Frankfurt School theorists such as Horkheimer, Adorno and
Habermas. In the next section we shall engage in an examination of this and of
what Courville refers to as Said’s secular mysticism, in an effort to consider Said’s
implicit critical theory and his secular mysticism in relation to other critical theorists
of religion.
To compare Said’s notions of the religious and the secular to the ideas within
the twentieth century critical theory of religion, it is first necessary to trace the basic
history of the theory’s development which simultaneously illuminates the
intellectual backdrop against which Said’s thought develops. Max Horkheimer
expresses the changes in modern society that had emanated from seventeenth
century Cartesian philosophy which developed and legitimated an instrumental
rationality exemplified by the Scientific Revolution, a major cultural change that
began with the purpose of freeing humankind from ignorance, fear, unnecessary
suffering and death that hitherto had been legitimized by myths and superstitions
fostered by religious authorities.34 In many ways the Scientific Revolution did that,
but there were other effects of the scientifically based instrumental rationality that
put Europe on a trajectory of industrialization and the development of capitalism at
Michael R. Ott, Max Horkehimer’s Critical Theory of Religion (New York:
University Press of America, 2001), 3. See also Taylor, 130-36.
34
196
home --and imperialism and colonization around the globe. These developments
followed the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation which had disparaged
human reason as a means of salvation and had denied the medieval Scholastic
efforts to rationalize and reconcile Christianity with the world.35 According to Martin
Luther, neither God nor his will could be known by human reason and faith alone
was the means of attaining heaven.36 By this faith paradigm, the worldly realm of
knowledge and authority was severed conceptually from the heavenly realm
creating a bifurcating tendency that has dominated European thought ever since.
Science and reason would be the concern of the world and of those in power, and
religious, spiritual concerns would become increasingly privatized.37 Furthermore,
with Calvin’s predestinarian theology, the saved were blessed on earth as a sign of
God’s favor and a wretched life on earth became the sign of an accursed
otherworldly future.38 As instrumental rationality and its “progressive”
consequences worked together to create surplus wealth in the bourgeois, largely
Protestant population, proving their favored status and creating self-fulfilling
prophecies in the economic and political spheres-- and as Max Weber theorized,
the work ethic of Protestant Christianity worked in tandem with the establishment
and development of a capitalist system that then supported a type of bourgeois
Christianity that successfully utilized religious doctrine to self-perpetuate the
Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion, 2-3. See Taylor, A Secular
Age, 77.
35
36
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2007), 143.
Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion 3; Taylor, A Secular Age, 146,
541.
37
38
Taylor, A Secular Age, 77-78.
197
economic status and support the interests of the growth of the capitalist classes.39
With the Cartesian concept of reason based on a subject-object dichotomy, the
individual human was thought to be independent of all other objects, including
other humans.40 Subjectivity involved the idea that an instrumental rationality of the
“I” allowed the analysis, categorization, and understanding of all that is “not I,” i.e.
the “object” for the purposes of control and domination. Thus, the monadic
individual person in opposition to other41 objects of nature and society became the
paradigmatic standard in the modern age. From this time on, one’s being was no
longer seen as dependent on an “other”—divine or human as it had been during
the pre-modern period of traditional Roman Catholic Christianity during the
centuries of the Holy Roman Empire. Following the devastating religious wars 42 of
Europe following the sixteenth century Reformation and the eighteenth century
French Revolution the political disestablishment of religion led to the development
of a complex of ideas that are generally called “the secular.”43 These were
supported by the new conception of the world as governed by and governable and
exploitable by the laws of science and the development of technologies that could
improve production. The positive effects of the Cartesian rationalization of the
39
Max Weber (translated by Talcott Parsons), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958).
Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion 4. Taylor, A Secular Age,348349.
40
41
Taylor, A Secular Age, 348-349.
42
For a good recent account see Benjamn J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious
Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 1-12.
43
Taylor, A Secular Age, 264-267.
198
subject resulted in its liberating aspects: for instance, the concept of the value and
rights of the individual44, but only for some human beings with certain advantages
of science, technology, wealth, knowledge and superior culture –i.e. power.45 The
negative side of this development in European thought led to the taking of
territories and accumulation of human beings by others, the history of colonization
and imperialism.46 Of this Horkheimer writes:
The total transformation of each and every realm of being into a field of
means leads to the liquidation of the subject who is supposed to use them.
This gives modern industrialist society its nihilistic aspect. Subjectivization,
which exalts the subject, also dooms him. The human being, in the process
of his emancipation, shares the fate of the rest of his world. Domination of
nature involves domination of man.47
This state of things serves the class interests of those in control of political society
and the economic system of production but it creates, according to Horkheimer, an
“irrationality with reference to human existence.”48 The monadic individual is
alienated from society, from God, and from himself. Thus, western civilization and
all that it controlled eventually becomes “rationalized irrationality.”49 The former
44
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr,Trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1-34. See also Pecora,
Secularization, 68-72.
Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion 7; Taylor, A Secular Age, 199207.
45
46
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1-34.
47
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), 93.
48
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 94.
49
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 94.
199
society in which a belief in a Divine Transcendent that unified and was involved in
both the natural and social worlds no longer experienced the consolations of
religious belief as the Cartesian dualism of subject-object, God-world, mind-body,
human spirit-nature progressively eroded any sense of wholeness or
connectedness of humanity with itself or with the Divine; modern society depended
instead on science and technology as the source and means of knowledge to
secure human preservation and security through social domination and that of
nature.50 In the eighteenth century, the bourgeois enlightenment’s battle cry (from
Voltaire) was “ecrasez l’enfame”— that is, “crush the evil” (that oppresses
humanity)— and it was directed at the Church.51 The desire for freedom from the
religious authorities that became symbolic of all that had caused lack of justice and
freedom of individuals, as the oppressor that had used scripture and the church to
enforce the control over life by the ecclesiastical authorities became entrenched in
the modern mind causing a revolutionary consciousness to develop.52 After the
eighteenth century French Revolution and the rise of the bourgeoisie through the
harnessing of Protestant Christianity to the engine of capitalism, the industrial
revolution created the poor masses of the labor force in Europe’s cities; the
working class experienced little benefit from the “progress” of either the religious or
bourgeois enlightenment. Social philosophers such as Marx, utilizing Fichte’s,
Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s critique of religion, posited that the enemy of suffering
50
Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion, 5.
51
Ott, Max Horkheimer’s Critical Theory of Religion, 5.
52
Taylor discusses the complexity of the French Revolution in terms of the various
goals of different classes and their differing understandings of the goals of the
revolution, 199-207.
200
humanity in Europe was religion as the creation of an alienated and oppressed
human self-consciousness, “a reversed world-consciousness” due to a reversed
and exploitative socio-historical world.”53 Marx saw religion as a “reflex” of a
commodity producing society based on domination and terror, that offers a
fantastic, “other worldly” consolation to the victims of the society’s inherent violence
while it legitimates the same social system of domination and those who benefit
from its violence. As such, Marx deemed religion a “false consciousness” which
would be eliminated through a revolution led by the proletariat that would ideally
bring a truly human history of freedom and justice based on socialized ownership
of the means of production. Marx saw the value of religion to the downtrodden
masses, saying, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a
heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the
people.”54 Marx sees society as producing religion itself as a drug through their
projected hope of a better life beyond the horror of earthly existence produced by
the enlightened bourgeois that owns the means of production and from whose
exploitation the masses could find no escape. In the twentieth century the Freudian
enlightenment also posits religion as an “illusion.” For Freud the human psychically
creates from his experience of need and fear in the face of the overwhelming
power of nature and the injustice of society, a divine revelation by which human
counsel comes from a putative Wholly Other to guide man from his experiences of
fear and vulnerability and enables him to overcome some of the difficulties of life,
though Freud posits all of this as simple wish fulfillment. Freud calls religion “the
53
Karl Marx, On Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 41.
54
Karl Marx, On Religion, 42.
201
universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.”55 Freud advocates that humanity
must work through its religious neurosis and deal with reality without the illusory
consolation of religious myth and ritual, describing reality in terms of the struggle
between the innate drive for love (Eros) or death (Thanatos).
In view of the results of instrumental rationality, privatization, and the
development of the capitalistic system which Max Weber famously connected with
the ethics of Protestant Christianity, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno
posited that the other side of the enlightenment and therefore the modernity that
issued from it –based in its essentially dialectical nature-- had resulted in new
myths of society, a stranglehold on socio-economic and political power no different
in actual effect than the earlier church-state alliance had created, alienation and
even terror which developed in the modern world and resulted in a huge amount of
suffering for millions of people. From Europe and all that it touched through
colonial exploitation, a sense of meaninglessness, apathy, alienation, hatred, fear,
and hopelessness spread, affecting the colonies and subjected territories around
the world. Modernity, having resulted in a crisis of humanity, led to an intellectual
struggle as well to try to resolve the destructive dichotomy that reason and faith
(often lost faith) --and the secular and the religious-- posed. What Horkheimer and
Adorno and later Adorno and Benjamin (and still later Habermas) try to do is to
build on the dialectical traditions within the monotheistic religions as well as on the
thought of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer and Freud and to reformulate the
positive content of religion into a theory and praxis for the transformation of a
55
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1966), 34.
202
technologically oriented and capital-dominated society to facilitate the development
of a more humane, rational, and free future society (without the extremes and
depredations of rationality seen, for example, in the capitalistic, fascist, or
communist societies). Historical materialists, most of whom were Jewish, who had
originally subscribed to Marxism and wanted to retain the emancipatory Marxist
goal of a more just society, but who disassociated themselves from the equally
oppressive aspects of worldly Marxism—or rather its deformations in the
Communism states, and who had also lived through the devastation of the world
wars, and specifically the Holocaust, these critical theorists, sought to dialectically
subsume the human, emancipatory content of religion into the secular form of the
critical theory. To this end Rudolf Siebert has done an immense amount of work on
the critical theory of religion since 1947, when he became involved with the
multidisciplinary critical theorists at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt,
better known as the Frankfurt School. In Siebert’s study of The Critical Theory of
Religion56 he posits three versions—that of Horkheimer and Adorno which
radicalizes the prohibition of idolatry (making names or images of the Divine) of the
Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Decalogue); that of
Walter Benjamin and Adorno—which is an inverse theology of remembrance of the
suffering and death of innocent victims and a longing for a Messianic redemption;
and finally of Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative praxis.
We have provided this very brief sketch of the most basic developments leading
up to the development of the critical theory of religion as part of a critical theory of
56
Rudolph J. Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School (New
York: Mouton Publishers, 1985).
203
society, a multidisciplinary theory that sees the location of the scholar/actor as
central to and in dynamic relation to the theory he develops to lay the groundwork
for considering Horkheimer’s critical theory of religion and Said’s idea of the
religious and the secular in tandem.
Firstly, it is a theory that elaborates itself out of the socio-political situation
Horkheimer found himself in from 1926-1973. Horkheimer attempts to overcome
the separation of reason and religion through the Hegelian dialectical method of
determinate negation. In this method, the critical theory is received, negated,
preserved, and furthered in and for itself from Hegel. Hegel states the conception
of this process in his Phenomenology of Mind57 and in The Encyclopedia of Logic,
Part I.58 This methodology of determinate negation is a process whereby a new
form not only negates the old but also preserves and elevates the old form in itself.
The modern world posits itself then as operating with freedom and the rights of the
individual person as its ideological ideal. However, this idea has been corrupted by
unbridled capitalism which causes the collapse where only a few (the rich-- the
owners of the means of production) are really free and able to have their voices
heard and their interests realized. This problematic thus requires determinate
negation in which a new form of economy would arise from the capitalistic system
in which some elements remain, but others change, and the new form contains an
elevated form of the older system. The voices and interests of all are the goal of
the new system without destroying everything in the old order.
57
G.W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, J.B. Baillie, trans.(New York: Harper &
Row, 1967).
58
G.W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Logic, Part I, R. F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting,
H.S. HarrIs, Trans. (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Publishing, 1991.
204
Hegel’s philosophy contains both a negative and a positive dialectic, understood
as the negation of the negative in both the subjective and objective realms of the
human spirit, which thereby produces a new, more just and free social totality.
However, for Hegel who acknowledged the tremendous suffering and negativity
that takes place in history as a gigantic “Golgotha” and a “slaughter-bench,” both
the beginning and the end of this historical dialectical process is philosophically
known. For this reason Horkheimer and Adorno saw Hegel’s thought as an identity
philosophy, which became mythical and ideological in the sense of expressing and
producing false consciousness through professed knowledge of the beginning and
end of history. Such claimed absolute knowledge of the beginning and end of
human and natural history ultimately devalued and thereby legitimated the horror of
human suffering through which history developed to its idealized realization and
fulfillment. The critical theorists found this result unacceptable for creating an
emancipatory politics.
Unlike Hegelian philosophy and in keeping with the second and third
commandments of the Hebrew Bible which prohibits the name or making of an
image of the Absolute, Horkheimer’s critical theory expresses only a negative
dialectic which does not identify the positive of society but seeks only to formulate
the negative of the present society whose negation might allow for the possibility of
creating a more just and reconciled future society. Horkheimer thus radicalized
Hegel’s methodology of determinate negation by radicalizing the second and third
commandments.59 Horkheimer was more pessimistic than Hegel about the
possibility of realization of the goal of wholeness or the reconciliation of the crisis of
59
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion, 95.
205
modernity in the form of the antagonism between the universal and the particular,
the sacred and the profane, notion and reality, reason and history, individual and
collective. Both Horkehimer and Adorno saw in the idea of the historical whole,
(which as yet still does not exist,) the unknown “totally Other.”60
Because the dialectic inherent in the bourgeois and Marxist enlightenments led
ultimately to their oppressive opposites, Horkheimer simply sought to seek the
determinate negation of negativity without seeking to establish a positive or
positively known result. In this conception, if the future is open, it is in a negative
and not a positive way. The “iron cage” of positivism and capitalism61 would be
negated determinately by the historical, human struggle to overcome their inherent
contradictions. Horkheimer in his refusal to claim to know the future acknowledged
that the praxis of negative dialectics was not a guarantee of the more just and free
future of humanity but operated primarily on hope in its logic and hope in an
unknown and unknowable totally Other.
Horkheimer applies the dialectical methodology of determinate negation to the
form and content of religion, focusing on religion’s emancipatory content, which
opposes both unjust natural and socio-historical conditions and longs practically for
the creation of an unknown yet better future society, thus preserving and yet
changing the content of religion to the new secular form of the critical theory and its
praxis. Horkheimer’s critical theory does not thereby become a new religion itself.62
60
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion, 95.
61
Max Weber (translated by Talcott Parsons), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958)
62
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion 139.
206
Horkheimer derived his critical theory of religion (and of society as well) in part
from Schopenhauer’s pessimistic premise that mankind could never escape
suffering on this earth due to what he called the “will-to-life” that ontologically rules
all life and causes all suffering.63 Horkheimer shared Schopenhauer’s pessimism
in that he believed that human beings can know nothing beyond the life of this
world that can give meaning to or consolation for the life-death antagonism of life.
Utilizing Judaism’s prohibition of idolatry (making any image of or saying the name
of the Absolute), Kant’s critique of pure reason, Hegel’s dialectical method, Marx’s
historical materialism and critique of bourgeois political economy and
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Horkheimer denied that the hope of a future life
beyond this world could or should be a motivation for action in this life.64 Rather,
solidarity with suffering humanity, past, present and future, and remembrance of
those who suffer unjustly, the Jewish concept of salvation—that of remembrance—
is what motivates and should motivate a person to work for a better future on this
earth.65
Horkheimer believed that solidarity and empathy for others in the present as
well as the past is what the love of one’s fellow human being, which is central to
the emancipatory aspect of the world’s major religions, is the basis for a potentially
better future. It is for the human being to choose to make the socio-historical praxis
63
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion 24-28, 113-114.
64
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion 103-105.
65
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion 107.
207
of works of empathy and solidarity to make the religious love of humanity a
historical reality.66 Horkheimer writes
The idea of a justice which is absolutely impartial toward the things of this
world is contained in the belief in the resurrection of the dead and the last
judgment. If those ideas were to be discarded along with the myth, mankind
would be deprived of a propulsive concept which thought certainly not as a
belief might today be applied as a criterion to judge the powers that be, and
the church in particular. The criticism of religion as mere ideology is justified
if it reveals that what were previously impulses in religious disguise, such as
dissatisfaction with the order on earth, may become effective today in a
different form. The life of the revolutionary is such a revelation.67
Horkheimer’s idea is that the dialectical process of determinate negation is working
here in the critique of religion, not to eliminate the positive emancipatory justice
seeking elements of religion, i.e., not as an anti-religious move per se, but rather
to allow the dynamic emancipatory elements of religion to free it from the distorted
ideological form of religion that keeps humanity enslaved and keeps human beings
from seeing religion as a legitimator of the unjust socio-economic and political
status quo. The critique of religion is done in order to preserve and utilize the
positive elements within religion and migrate it into the secular, this-worldly
struggle for human enlightenment and emancipation. However, Horkheimer also
sees that it is “enormously difficult to avoid making a new religion” out of the critical
rejection of the false consciousness, the ideology of, bourgeois religion.68 He
opposes and sees no need for a new atheistic religion. Horkheimer believes that
66
Ott, Max Horkheimer and the Critical Theory of Religion 135-140.
67
Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: 1926-1931 and 1950-1969 (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1978), 58.
68
Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: 1926-1931 and 1950-1969, 65.
208
humanity in its current historical stage can neither forget religion or irreligion
because of the weakness induced in the face of unjust living conditions in
capitalistic society.
4.5 Convergences: Said and Horkheimer
What strikes the reader of Said, particularly in consideration of Said’s rhetoric of
the religious and the secular, is how similar is Said’s opposition to negative
elements of religion per se and to the “naturalized supernatural” that exists in postEnlightenment Western society with those of Horkheimer and Siebert. This view on
religion surfaces throughout his oeuvre: The exploitative deformation and
exclusionary, ideological drift away from the life-enhancing, justice oriented,
humanly compassionate and empathetic message within religion, that had become
bourgeois Christianity, requires critique. Also, his opposition to religion as ideology
or vice-versa is because so much of religion in the contemporary world had
become ideology which had lost any emancipatory thrust. Said’s insistent and
repetitive focus on the historical or “secular” --that is, his concern for that which
occurs in the saeculum, as opposed to that which occurs in or for another world
expresses Said’s highest value –his own ultimate concern-- the justice and
emancipation of all humanity and the environment that supports life in this world.
Finally, and quite outstanding, is the central fact that Said’s project of critique of
ideology is in its essence a critique of idolatry, the making of anything finite into the
“sacred,” which puts him side by side with Horkheimer and other critical theorists
whose main concern emanated from the prohibition of naming or making a
representation of the divine. Similarly, this also puts Said side by side with the Jew
whose religion eschews idolatry and in which the remembrance of the dead is the
209
way in which a life beyond death is conceived and as a way of focusing on the
future. Implied in Said’s refusal to engage in idolatry are many of his actions and
writings which refuses to uphold or extol any impossibly huge generalization. This
Said would has called “theological.” Like Horkheimer, Said was concerned that no
belief, objective, or value be elevated to the status of the transcendent Absolute,
which would thereby create another new religion and another god. He decried all
“systematicity” (his word) as well because once a value or belief system becomes
canonized, it stops being based in the time of the now, in the local, and the
particular. Said’s oeuvre can be seen as an act of determinate negation in that
Said’s criticism negates the negative elements found in every human formation and
theoretical formulation ossified into dogma that is not life-enhancing and in its
negation is “constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny….”69
It is thus that one can say, with Mathieu Courville, that Said has an implicit
critical theory of the religious and the secular and that his ideas about religion are
quite consonant with it. Finally, the objectives of Said’s project of criticism work
toward similar goals to those of Horkheimer. Carrying the implications of this
commonality between Said’s critical theory of the religious and the secular and that
of the critical theorists of religion to its logical conclusion and considering all of that
in conjunction with the thought and praxis of the theologians of liberation, a great
deal of common theoretical and practical ground can also be found among them.
might yield significant insights to those concerned with secular and religious
methodologies of liberation and universal justice. Can humanists of liberation work
69
Edward Said, “Secular Criticism,” The World, The Text, and the Critic, 29-30.
210
with theologians of liberation productively and effectively? Are Said and Marc Ellis,
Naim Atteek compatible? We shall explore this a bit in chapter six.
4.6 Gauri Viswanathan: Did Said see liberatory potential in
Islamism as “secular” criticism?
To detail this comparison is beyond the scope of the present study but Said’s
former student and postcolonial theorist Gauri Viswanathan in an essay published
in 2008, raises the question of whether Said saw in Islamism a positive vehicle of
resistance. She notes that in an interview conducted by Tariq Ali, Said made “a
rare comment in which he links religion with dissent.”70 Certainly it is well known
that various religious movements have historically been just that, i.e., forms of
resistance to worldly power and injustice against society. But Viswanathan, aware
of Said’s suspicion of the negative, totalizing tendencies into which religion often
falls, picks up on the potential that Said may have seen in some of the Islamist
movements to resist the stranglehold that Arab regimes—and the hegemony of
Western cultural and political paradigms-- had on their populations. Said calmly
responded to Ali that the radical Islamist groups that Ali decried, are “creatures of
the moment [for] whom Islam is an opportunity to protest the current stalemate, the
current mediocrity and bankruptcy of the ruling party.” 71 Viswanathan sees in this
statement a recognition by Said that he may have seen “religion—at least in the
Gauri Viswanathan, “Said, Religion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, ed., Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Basak
Ertür, London and New York: Verso Books, 2008, 164.
70
71
Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said, London: Seagull books, 2006, 91,
quoted in Gauri Viswanathan, “Said, Religion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for
the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, ed., Müge Gürsoy Sokmen and Basak
Ertür, London and New York: Verso Books, 2008, 164.
211
current situation of the postcolonial world—as a site from which the failings of the
ruling political order could be exposed.”72 It was clear even in this brief exchange,
how important it was for Said to put pressure on cultural criticism as a means by
which ideologies of power are made transparent and no longer serviceable to
narrow self-serving interests. That religion could be allied with critique opens an
angle of vision on his uses of the term ‘secular criticism’….”73 Viswanathan goes
on to assert that she thought Said was….” tacitly aware of, without ever quite
overtly acknowledging, the densely packed meanings of the word ‘religion’ itself,
covering a history that includes both orthodox and heterodox elements.”74
Viswanathan rejects the criticisms of those such as Hart who argues that “Said’s
subversive understanding of Islam in this context undermines his secularism and
renders his practice of secular criticism unstable and incoherent.”75 Viswanathan,
on the contrary, interprets Said’s refusal to see Islam reductively and to highlight
the heterodox elements in Islam as a clear contradiction to Hart’s reading. In
support of her reading, Viswanathan highlights Said’s estimation of Massignon’s
Viswanathan, “Said, Religion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, 164.
72
Viswanathan, “Said, Religion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, 164
73
Viswanathan, “Said, Relgion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, 164
74
Viswanathan, “Said, Relgion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, 164
75
212
views on Islam which she interprets as showing Said as “particularly responsive to
those charismatic elements in religion that resist consensus and authority:”76
Islam is therefore a religion of resistance (to God the Father, to Christ the
Incarnation), which yet keeps within it the sadness that began in Hagar’s
tears… Within Islam, Massignon believed he was able to discern a type of
countercurrent, which it became his chief intellectual mission to study,
embodied in mysticism, a road towards divine grace. The principal feature of
mysticism was of course its subjective character, whose nonrational and
even inexplicable tendencies were towards the singular, the individual, the
momentary experience of participation in the Divine. All of Massignon’s
extraordinary work on mysticism was thus an attempt to describe the
itinerary of souls out of the limiting consensus imposed on them by the
orthodox Islamic community, or Sunna.77
Here it is perhaps the right moment to suggest that Said, like Jurgen Habermas,
the only living critical theorist of the Frankfurt School, as well as Horkheimer,
Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt School, may have been an atheistic
mystic or a mystical atheist. Siebert suggests that Habermas’s mystical atheistic
universal pragmatic and his atheistic-mystical theory of communicative praxis “both
strengthen the living bond between the generations” 78 and “helps rescue the
humanum under conditions of highly complex modern action systems precisely by
transcending it, but at the same time without reifying this transcending once more
in terms of final structures, telic systems or ultimate reality.”79 Following Siebert, we
Viswanathan, “Said, Relgion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, 165.
76
77
Edward Said, Orientalism, 268.
78
Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. 313.
79
Siebert, The Critical Theory of Religion: The Frankfurt School. 313.
213
suggest that Said’s positive expressions toward the mystical dimension in Islam, as
one form among others that display the breadth and depth of the Islamic tradition,
his positive allusions to the mystical experience and elements of the essay and of
music, indicate a non-religious mysticism, which, as we have seen, Courville
preferred to call “secular mysticism.” This is very much related to Said’s embrace
of the non-systematic, unhomed, de-centered, exilic energies that he sees as the
engine of the secular. This is an important point to underline in any attempt at a
comprehensive and accurate interpretation of Said.
Related to this, Viswanathan points out that “oppositional knowledge systems,”
such as Gnosticism which, “represented a moment of ‘existential experience of
human alienation,’”80 resisted the attempt to turn such experience into theodicy
which eventually put in place doctrinal religion and religious doctrines that offered
systematized explanations of suffering. The systematic doctrines of religion with
the eschatological teleology that explain and deny the worldly as transient and
therefore inconsequential except as a vehicle to the felicitous life of another world
beyond this world are rejected by Said’s favoring of the mystical heterodoxies that
resisted orthodoxy and orthopraxy. We must conclude therefore, that Said,
consistent with the preponderance of his statements in interviews and essays, did
not view Islamism, or political Islam, as a theology of liberation, nor as meeting the
definition of “secular” criticism. The dogmatic nature of the various strains of
Islamism as well as some interpretive traditions within the world of Islam itself (as
80
Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of
Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 48
quoted in Viswanathan, “Said, Religion, and Secular Criticism,” in Waiting for the
Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said, 166.
214
well as in other faith traditions) are precisely what Said would consider to be the
ideologization of religion that he rejected. Islamism for Said fell into the category of
idolatry as much as any other ideology. What he was getting at in his statement to
Tariq ‘Ali is more about the seductiveness of religious ideologies like Islamism in
the face of massive systems of political and social injustice in the Arab-Islamic
world. Thus, Said rightly distinguishes between the mystical tradition in Islam and
contemporary Islamism in his view of Massignon’s treatment of Islamic mysticism
versus the orthodoxy of traditional Sunni Islam.
In another parallel with Horkheimer, Said never rationalizes suffering, nor
accepts that injustices can or should be forgotten. There are obvious parallels with
the Jewish longing for the return to the land from which they were turned out by the
Romans after the uprising of 70 C.E., and with the Jewish focus on the
remembrance of the dead. Referring to Edward Thompson’s inspiring demand in
his 1926 book The Other Side of the Medal, for Britain to acknowledge the
suffering and harm done to its colonized peoples, Said invokes the language of
atonement in Culture and Imperialism.81 Thompson was a religious figure whose
inspiration can be felt in Said’s increasing acknowledgement of him for insisting
that first the admission of wrong is the necessary first step to reconciliation
between oppressor and oppressed. Said applies this call for atonement in his
thoughts about a future between the Israelis and the Palestinians in his statement
that “I don’t believe that there can ever be a reconciliation until there’s a recognition
by Israelis of what they have done and what their society has cost another
81
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1993, 147,
206-07, 209.
215
people… We want recognition that something happened here.” Only from this
starting point of atonement can there be “real dialogue, a real framework of
understanding, a real reconciliation, of two cultures.”82
One question which can only be raised here--its answer is perhaps for another
stud-- is how Said’s idea of contrapuntal analysis, which he also calls, the idea of
polyphony,83 relates to the question of the religious and the secular. Pecora’s
discussion of Said’s “contrapuntal” reading as a “methodological antidote” to the
“dialectic of enlightenment” hails Said’s contrapuntal method in which he
juxtaposes what he calls “discrepant experiences”— i.e., diverse historical,
geographic, cultural, political, and religious experiences in equally diverse contexts
that shape each other in the context of empire as “Said’s signal achievement” in
that it led to his pushing of—and subsequent acknowledgement of-- comparative
scholarship toward and ethical recognition of its role in the domination of colonized
peoples and cultures, and toward an epistemological revaluation of its assumptions
about the status and superiority of the West.” 84
Pecora also notes that Said’s work “also encouraged Western scholarship on
Western culture to acknowledge to what extent imperialism had created the culture
of the West as well.”85 Said’s methodology of contrapuntal analysis then is reading
82
Viswanathan, ed. Power, Politics, and Culture: Interview with Edward W. Said,
(New York: Vintage Books, 2001) 272-73.
84
Vincent P. Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, &
Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 34.
85
Pecora, Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity, 34.
216
“with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated
and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating
discourse acts.”86 It requires us to see that the Western narratives of progress and
cultural life in the metropolis are always developed side by side a hitherto hidden
narrative of the Caribbean plantation or the Indian city or the Arab village in which
stories of the colonized, enslaved, murdered or dispossessed are ignored,
forgotten, buried, and always re-presented by the West in ways that mask reality.
Said demands the retrieval of the colonial narrative and thus begins the prerequisite to the possibility of atonement.
4.7 Conclusion
In this chapter, the major critical insights of Mathieu Courville concerning
Edward Said’s notions of the religious and the secular have been examined,
concluding that Courville’s interpretation of Said’s secular-religious trope points to
Said’s implicit critical theory of the religious and the secular. This chapter notes
the convergences with Max Horkheimer’s critical theory of religion. Gauri
Viswanathan’s examination of whether Said may have seen Islam as a site of
resistance from which Muslims could critique the power of corrupt dictatorial
regimes supported by the West incorporates her recovery of Weber’s and
Gauchet’s ideas of the genealogy of the modern intellectual to show how Said’s
effort to champion secular criticism as the antidote to the problem of human
oppression and suffering is an extension of the religious question of theodicy.
Vincent Pecora adds an important critical insight on the connection between Said’s
86
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 51.
217
secular criticism as the contrapuntal antidote to the burial of the narratives of the
murdered, dispossessed and colonized, noting that the contrapuntal method allows
for the revival of the suppressed as the first step towards atonement, an act at
once religious and secular. Together the arguments of Courville, Viswanathan, and
Pecora support the idea that Said’s religious-secular trope implies a critical theory
of the religious and secular. The idea that this trope is a tool of Said’s nonhumanist humanism and an element of secular criticism, offers a strong alternative
to Hart’s conclusions that link Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the secular to an
anti-religious bias and to a defensive and self-contradictory effort on behalf of
Islam. Having argued an understanding of Said’s rhetoric of the religious and the
secular as a way of defining criticism as the mission of the intellectual whose role it
is to de-idolize and to de-construct the idolatrous nature of ideologies both religious
and non-religious that oppress human beings and lead to human enslavements of
various sorts rather than human emancipation and justice for all people, we shall
next examine how Said’s work on the Arab-Islamic world exemplifies his notion of
“secular” criticism. In the next chapter, we explore through an examination of
some of Said’s writings on Islam and on the Arab-Islamic world, particularly some
of his less well-known writing, how this work is synechdochal of his project of
“secular” criticism.
218
Chapter Five
Said on Islam and the Arab-Islamic World as “Secular” Criticism
…Arabic is Islam and Islam is Arabic at some very profound level…
Edward Said, “Living in Arabic”
5.1 Introduction
In Hart’s and Courville’s studies which treat Said’s rhetoric of the religious and
the secular, Said’s overtly political writing, which fills more than a dozen volumes,1
does not figure prominently and is not examined explicitly for its relationship to the
religious-secular trope. William V. Spanos, however, does understand Said’s
political writing in light of his notion of the secular and his examination focuses on
Said’s place in the debate between humanism and poststructuralism or as some
1
These are Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts
Determine How we see the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981),
The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), Culture and
Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), with Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky:
Palestinian Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), Blaming the Victims:
Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, Edward W. Said and
Christopher Hitchens, eds. (New York and London: Verso, 1988), Peace and its
Discontents: Essays on Palestine and the Middle East Peace Process (New York:
Vintage Books, 1993); The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian
Self-Determination 1969-1994 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), The Pen and the
Sword: Conversations with David Barsamian (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1994
(2010),The End of the Peace Process (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), Power,
Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, Gauri Viswanathan, ed.
(New York: Vintage Books, 2001), Culture and Resistance: Conversations with
Edward W. Said, Interviews with David Barsamian (London: Pluto Press, 2003),
Interviews with Edward W. Said, Amritjit Singh and Bruce G. Johnson, eds.
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), From Oslo to Iraq and the Road
Map (New York: Pantheon Press, 2004), Conversations with Edward Said, Tariq
Ali (New York: Seagull Books, 2006).
219
have labeled it, left anti-humanism. However, in these Said commentators as well
as others, what Said has actually said about Islam, about intellectual currents in
the Arab-Islamic world, and about the Arab Islamic tradition –and specifically how
Said’s centrally important notion of “secular” criticism is related to this body of
work—remains untheorized. This chapter strives to demonstrate how this writing of
Said’s on the Arab Islamic world is seen by most Said commentators as political in
nature and as a separate body of work from his professional production in literary
and cultural criticism—work they see as tinged with personal attachments and
motivations. Few Said commentators have seen Said’s political writing on a
continuum with his work in literary criticism and theory,2 viewing the latter as his
humanistic professional work and the former as outside his work as comparatist
and literary/cultural critic. In this chapter, we shall argue that all of Said’s work, and
particularly his work on Islam and the Arab-Islamic world, coalesces around Said’s
project of re-orienting humanism as a liberatory project in which criticism is
unmoored from unexamined filiations and attachments that he rhetorically labels
“religious.” As has been alluded to earlier, Orientalism has been over-analyzed and
debated3 while other work by Said has not been sufficiently examined in relation to
2
Notable exceptions are Abdirahman Hussein, Mathieu Courville, Aamir Mufti,
Stathis Gourgouris and R. Radhadrishnan.
3
Critiques of Orientalism abound: Commentary on the various types of critiques
(from the poststructuralists, from the Arabs and Muslims, from the Orientalists and
others in the Western social sciences and humanities, from the Marxists, from the
postcolonialists) are found in numerous sources. Among them are Hamid Dabashi,
Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 2009) 17-108; in Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999) 65-76; Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism,
Postmodernism and Globalism (London: Routledge, 1994, 1997) 3-10, 31-31,1012, 12-13, 21-2. Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge (New York: The Overlook
Press, 2006),3-4, 277-9, 254, 256-7, 259, 362-3,281-2, , 282-3,290, 299-304, 309;
William D. Hart summarizes the critiques that were available at the time he was
220
Said’s notion of secular criticism and his effort to re-orient or reconstruct humanism
as a useable praxis of the contemporary intellectual who sees his work as part of
the struggle for universal human emancipation. For this reason, we shall examine
examples of Said’s lesser known, and rarely commented writing on Islam, the
Islamic tradition, and the Arab Islamic world, for how it conveys Said’s ideas about
representation of Islam as religion and as civilization and how we may see this in a
comprehensive view of his oeuvre as an exemplification of secular criticism and
humanism.
5.2 Said’s Humanistic Critique: Not a Defense of Islam but a Call
for Self-Criticism in the Arab-Islamic World
Though Hart, Varisco, and (surprisingly) Courville, express the belief that Said’s
work is given to defending Islam, Said actually states in Power, Culture and
Politics, “I have nothing to say about Islam”4 conveying his conviction of the vast
diversity of Islam and its rich traditions, its divergent interpretations and
writing his book, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000). Daniel Varisco’s Reading Orientalism: Said
and the Unsaid, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007) is a recent
contribution.
4 Said, Power, Culture, and Politics, 437. In this interview where Said is asked
about his “best readers” in the Arab world, intellectuals who belong to the “neoIslamic groups” and who cite Said’s ”ideas and writings in their studies’ footnotes.”
Said clarifies his concern that he is often misinterpreted, “especially where (he)
includes substantial criticism of Islamist movements. First, I am secular; second, I
do not trust religious movements; and third, I disagree with these movements’
methods, means, analysis, values, and visions.” Here he obviously uses “secular”
in its commonly intended meaning of “non-religious.” His statement that he does
not trust religious movements seems a categorical denial that is somewhat
inconsistent with his expressed positive regard for certain religious personages
who either led religious movements or were strongly connected with religiously
based movements such as Malcolm X and Ali Shariati, though these are
exceptions to Said’s general distance from religion mainly as was discussed in
previous chapter because of what Said saw and experienced primarily as the
deformations of religion both in the West and in the Arab world.
221
orientations. Perhaps because Said’s statements about Islam or any of its
traditions are so non-editorial and factual when viewed from a phenomenological
perspective, they are somehow interpreted as defensive of Islam because they
represent Islam the way Muslims understand their own tradition. The goal of this
chapter is to examine important essays in which Said has modeled his concept of
“secular” criticism in writing to and about the Arab-Islamic world. What we shall
see is that Said’s writing to and on the Arab-Islamic world is a call to selfknowledge and self-criticism, even where he simultaneously criticizes western
faults.
We have noted that Said speaks of himself as a person whose life and thought
developed initially in the Arab-Islamic environments of Jerusalem, Cairo and Dhour
El Schweir, making the existential and personal connection between himself and
the Arab-Islamic world clear and providing an existential rather than professional
rationale for his deep interest and concern for the world from which he emerged
but which no longer exists as it was. This connection and its centrality to Said’s
oeuvre and the sentiments, intellectual positions, and interests that develop in
relation to it and which motivate it, has been elaborated in chapter one of this
study. We have seen how the Arab-Islamic world Said was born into, already
changed and challenged by European colonialism, become further changed and
challenged by the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 on the land known to the
Palestinian and other Arab peoples as Palestine. The association of
dispossession, cultural and political imperialism, human suffering and bloody
political conflict with claims arising out of ethno-religious confessional lines in
Said’s world creates a sense of alienation from religion in Said. We find that Said
associates the religious with rigid orthodoxies that lead away from human
222
emancipation, while he comes to associate the secular with the liberatory intent of
humanism, regardless of its paradoxes.
What we find in a survey of all of Said’s writing on and to the Arab-Islamic world
is that the topics Said engages most frequently and that he puts before both Arab
and Western (American, British, Spanish, German, French, Dutch) audiences are
the political and cultural issues of the contemporary Arab world. In essay after
essay written for Arab audiences, Said calls for the Arab and Muslim world to
generate their own answers to their problems, particularly in terms of its
relationship to the non-Arab-Islamic world. We shall also see examples of how
Said understands contributions of diverse Muslim thinkers of the past and the
present to contemporary problems both academic and political. Throughout his
writing over a period of nearly forty years, Said continues to provide support for his
thesis put forth in Orientalism that the representation by the West of the Arab
Islamic world, Islam, the Arab and the Palestinian, in particular, have had and
continue to have numerous negative effects that only the Arabs and Muslims
themselves can overcome-- but only by first taking a self-critical approach that will
move them into new directions and methods of addressing their predicament.
Though in Orientalism and early articles such as “The Arab Portrayed” Said
addresses the way in which Western Europe utilized knowledge of the Islamic East
in representation and the extension of rule and hegemony, a great deal of Said’s
writing, especially after Culture and Imperialism in which Said details the
intellectual resistance to imperialism ( a job that he was criticized from all sides for
failing to do in Orientalism), Said focuses on calling the Arab-Islamic world to take
account of itself, to re-develop a vibrant and authentic culture, to re-vitalize its
tradition of intellectual excellence, of discovery, creativity, and diverse thought, and
223
for its masses to stand against the despotism of the Arab regimes. Recalling
Said’s belief that humanism seeks self-knowledge and understanding through selfcriticism in relationship to and in dialogue with the “Other,” it is a consistent
approach Said takes both toward the Western and the Islamic world. This seems to
be missed by many commentators on Said and it is the work of this chapter to
show how this writing is precisely what Said means by “secular” criticism,
exemplifying what Said was calling on the Arab-Islamic world to do –for itself and
by itself.
As for political or ideological interpretations of Islam, Said’s writing is replete
with negative statements concerning Islamist movements such as the Muslim
Brotherhood, and he is equally negative about fundamentalism in any tradition.
This should put to rest any notion that Said somehow was a secret admirer or a
fellow traveler with radical political Islamism.
5.3 What Said’s Critique Lacks
Before going further, however, it may be the right moment to note that Said’s
“secular” criticism as we see it in his writing on the Arab-Islamic world falls short in
one major sense. In his critique, to the dismay of those who understand the
hegemony of global capital as the central issue in need of sustained and effective
criticism, Said does not treat the predatory nature of capitalism in any systematic
way, though references to its depredations are frequent. Timothy Brennan, Said’s
student more than forty years ago, raises this issue in a piece written after Said’s
death. Anouar Majid also raises the issue not in relation to Said specifically but in
relation to the massive issues the entire contemporary world faces. Brennan
identifies Said’s “reluctance to work through or even directly address theories of
224
capitalism,”5 as a deficiency of his critique because “a viable theory of imperialism
is impossible without studying capitalism, its historical phases, its national-cultural
peculiarities, but also its unwavering constants.”6 Brennan comments on Said’s
weak engagement with Marxism and states that Said’s “awareness of the
American public sphere … determined [Said’s} views (on Marxism) more than any
other.” With regard to the Arab-Islamic world, the only thing Said ever said
concerning its Marxist-inspired movements such as the Baath parties of Syria and
Iraq or its Communist parties was this: “In the whole history of Marxist
organization, theory, discourse and even practice in the Middle East, there seems
to be no convincing evidence of a Marxism that went beyond Russian Marxism of
the twenties and thirties.”7 Brennan’s point about the relevance of global capitalism
to neo-imperialism is taken up as well in Majid’s concerns expressed at the end of
his chapter entitled “Millenium without Arabs?”
Polarized in debates over the future of the Arab and Muslim Worlds, Muslim
and Western culturalists have failed to realize that the very model of
development to which the entire Third World aspires is now bankrupt at
every level, and that ‘progress’ has turned out to be a cruel myth that has
thrown the world in the throes of an impending catastrophe. Capitalism and
tis consumer culture have done more damage to our living environment than
previous systems of social organization; it has engendered more poverty,
created more health problems, endangered the planet, idled tens of millions
of people worldwide, and reduced work to a numbing and meaningless
monotony… Since infinite growth is unsustainable and trying to replicate the
American economic experience is materially impossible, the very idea of
catching up that sparked Arab nationalism and Islamist movements has
Timothy Brennan, “Resolution,” Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 50.
5
6
Brennan, “Resolution,” Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, 52.
Brennan, “Resolution,” Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation 51. Quoted in
Brennan from Said, “Interview,” Diacritics 6 (Autumn 1976): 36.
7
225
become utterly impractical and as dangerous as the Western hegemony it
seeks to resist and overcome.8
Majid sees “Arab nationalism (whose vision is still largely locked in the cultural
origins of the emerging capitalist Europe) and militant Islamism (having reIslamized secular nationalist ideologies and further alienated itself through a
regressive reading of the Islamic past) have been unable to articulate a different
position that takes the collective fate of humanity into account.”9 Majid suggests
that “rebuilding of human-scale economies and a creative form of delinking from
the expanding and intensified process of capitalist exploitation”10 is what a
“postnationalist, Islamically progressive identity can contribute….”
For Said, the development of new modes of co-existence among diverse
peoples in conflict, tied filiatively to race, ethnicity, nationality or religion must be
overcome by thought that drives civil action aimed at the achievement on earth of
universal human rights and justice. Whether Said’s writing to the Arab masses in
the nineties and early years of the twenty-first century --encouraging democracy,
secular criticism, and activism on the part of Arab civil society—indirectly
influenced the recent course of events in the Arab-Islamic world is impossible to
say. Said was certainly suggesting in the nineties in the Arab press that secular
criticism as non-violent resistance and defiance of the regimes of the Middle East
was called for and that Arab civil society had to provide its own response to
corruption, ineptitude, and dictatorship, whether in Palestine, Egypt, Syria, or Saudi
8
Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World
(Durham SC: Duke University Press, 2000), 69-70.
9
Majid, Unveiling Traditions, 72.
10
Majid, Unveiling Traditions, 72.
226
Arabia and the Gulf countries. In 2006 with the election of HAMAS, the
Palestinians expressed their refusal of the authoritarianism and corruption of the
Palestinian Authority. In 2011 Tunisia and Egypt successfully brought about the
downfall of Ben Ali and Mubarak, only to descend into chaos thereafter. Syria,
Yemen, and Bahrain followed suit with disastrous consequences that continue
unabated. Had Said’s exhortations impinged upon the consciousness of the
citizenry of the Arab world and combined with the precise sets of circumstances
combined to produce the active resistance? One can only wonder at the possibility
of Said’s indirect influence, perhaps analogous to a seed planted in the soil tilled by
a variety of economic, religious, and psychological implements operating on the
fertile psyche of the Arab world. Unfortunately, the seeds of justice and democracy
have been struggling to survive among the even stronger seeds of injustice and
dictatorship, of greed, corruption and ignorance.
Brennan and Aijaz Ahmad have addressed Said’s failure to attempt any
systematic criticism of the system of global capitalism and have suggested that this
was a monumental core global problem at least as destructive as the issue of
representation, lack of democracy, and lack of intellectual currency in the ArabIslamic world. To this, one might respond that Said could do battle on the field of
cultural criticism but not on the field of economics. He was excoriated from writing
a critique of Orientalism –as outside his field of expertise, as faulty in his historical
facts, as a dilettante dabbler in global political issues. What would have been said
had he tried to take on the hegemonic capitalistic system without a background in
economics? Also, Said’s belief was that for humanism to survive, there had to be
criticism—“secular” criticism, and that humanism, whether religious or secular,
offered the best antidote to systems of oppression and injustice. Of course, here he
227
was at odds with those that argued that humanism in itself was born of an
intrinsically oppressive Western hubris and ethnocentrism that could never
emancipate human beings, but has been proven to have been part of some of the
most massive genocides and unjust systems in human history. 11
5.4 Edward Said and Islam
As the thinker who is first and foremost associated with a critique of the
Orientalist representation of Islam and the Arab Islamic world, contrary to the
assertions of Hart, Courville, Varisco and others, this study insists that Said, taking
a phenomenological approach, tries to avoid any construction or representation of
Islam. Though his fifth book bears the title Covering Islam: How the Media and the
Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, which may seem to imply
that Said will present some conception of Islam, one finds that Said argues not for
a more adequate construction of Islam or the Islamic world than that of Orientalists
or neo-Orientalist experts, nor even for a construction or representation of Islam by
Muslims. Said simply argues against the very conception of a stable, precisely
defined entity that can be called “Islam.” If “Islam” is to be defined at all, that
definition would, in Said’s view, have to encompass the tremendously huge
panoply of conceptions that have ever been constructed in the last 1400 years, and
perhaps would even have to include conceptions that have not been consciously
constructed at all but that have been lived by Muslims on nearly every continent. In
his introduction to his study of the prevalent Western and specifically American
construction of Islam, he writes:
11
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr,Trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
228
The term “Islam” as it is used today seems to mean one simple thing but in
fact is part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a
religion called Islam. In no really significant way is there a direct
correspondence between the “Islam” in common Western usage and the
enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam ... its dozens of
societies, states, histories, geographies, cultures.12
One notes in the repeated pluralization of the terms of the last sentence that
Said insists on the plurality of every aspect of the “world of Islam.” Said here might
have chosen to pluralize that expression to “worlds of Islams” to be even more
precise and consistent. Islam is indeed pluralized by Aziz Al-‘Azmeh to convey this
sense and to disturb received opinion in all quarters. Further on, Said objects both
to the substitution of “cliché” for a complex reality and to the notion that a complex
historical reality can be positively constructed from “outside” as a known and
properly apprehended entity which is characterized, whether by its Other or its
adherent as an ahistorical, unchanging, and concretely defined entity when he
writes: “... there is an unquestioned assumption that Islam can be characterized
limitlessly by means of a handful of recklessly general and repeatedly deployed
clichés ... as if the ‘Islam’ being talked about is some real and stable object out
there …”13 Two decades later, Al-‘Azmeh in his book Islams and Modernities, first
published in 1993 and updated in 2009, amplifies and elaborates Said’s idea in a
way that is more historical as well as more theoretical than Said’s, in his statement
that
a vast industry of misrecognition is in place… by advocates of Islamism as
by Western opinion (both expert and inexpert) purporting to read over and
above the complex and multiple histories and present conditions of Muslim
12
13
Edward Said, Covering Islam (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), x.
Said, Covering Islam, xi.
229
peoples a homogenous and timeless Islam, construed as a culture beyond
society and history, as a repository of ‘meaning.’14
It is important to note that both Said and Al-‘Azmeh attack the “misrecognition”
purveyed both within the world of Islam and outside it. In other words, they equally
fault the Islamists attempt to represent or claim authority to define Islam according
to their ideologized, local, and contingent constructions of Islam as they do to nonMuslims who think they can characterize, define, or represent Islam from the
exterior.
Said stresses the importance of considering the epistemological basis for
scholarship on Islam, and though he is skeptical about motivations for scholarship
on Islam, or anything presented as knowledge of Islam, he does not deny the
possibility that there are those who honestly or sincerely produce scholarly work on
Islam (both Muslim and non-Muslim) and he does not deny that there exists
something approaching accurate presentation, contrary to what many of Said’s
negative commentators claim on this score.15
However, writing just after the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis in 1979,
Said adduces to much of what has been produced in the academy as well as in the
mainstream media and what issues from American officialdom in particular “a
gross simplification of ‘Islam,’ so that numerous manipulative aims can be realized,
from the stirring up of a new cold war, to the instigation of racial antipathy, to
mobilization for a possible invasion … Little of this is, I believe, in the interest of
14
Aziz Al-‘Azmeh, Islams and Modernities (London and New York: Verso, 2009)
198.
15
Al-‘Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, xviii.
230
truth ...”16 Summarizing his approach to “Islam” and the places where diverse
ideas of Islam are lived, Said expresses the purpose of Covering Islam, which is
essentially an exemplification, a case-study, of the major thesis of Orientalism.
Writing of the aftermath of the Iranian revolution and the way in which the Islamic
world is presented and re-presented by the corporate media and a cadre of
knowledge producers called “experts,” Said clarifies his own stance on “Islam” and
the Islamic world that animates his humanistic criticism of what he considers to be
the illicit uses of knowledge to “dominate for the purposes of control and external
dominion.”17
He contrasts that purpose and methodology with what he thinks is humanistic
knowledge and its proper methodology of experience and contact with the
multiplicity as opposed to the unity of reality:
I do not believe as strongly and as firmly in the notion of ‘Islam’ as many experts,
policy-makers, and general intellectuals do; on the contrary, I often think it has
been more of a hindrance than a help in understanding what moves people and
societies. But what I really believe in is the existence of a critical sense and of
citizens able and willing to use it to get beyond the special interests of experts and
their idées reçues. By using the skills of a good critical reader to disentangle sense
from nonsense, by asking the right questions and expecting pertinent answers,
anyone can learn about either ‘Islam’ or the world of Islam and about the men,
women, and cultures that live within it, speak its languages, breathe its air, produce
its histories and societies. At that point, humanistic knowledge begins and
communal responsibility for that knowledge begins to be shouldered. I wrote this
book to advance that goal.18 (my emphasis)
16
Al-‘Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, xviii.
17
Said, Orientalism, xix.
18
Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See
the Rest of the World, xix.
231
Said’s actual discussion of any of the many aspects, manifestations,
dimensions, experiences, histories, societies, and or systems of ethics, thought,
and law of “Islam,” is rare and is only done when Said, in trying to provide the
barest of agreed upon facts for a readership, let’s say, of a popular magazine such
as Harper’s, contextualizes an argument or situates the general topic for the
purpose of presenting and/or critiquing an idea, a book, or other concrete
representation related to Islam or the Islamic “world.” As an example, one may
examine what Said writes in a 2002 article from which he borrows Al-‘Azmeh’s
pluralization of the word Islam for its title. This is one of a handful of essays that
most clearly exhibit Said’s approach to Islam itself, “Impossible Histories: Why the
Many Islams Cannot Be Simplified.” What is evident in this passage quoted at
length to provide not only what Said says about Islam but the way in which he says
it, is a concern with basic facticity, and even so, Said is careful to acknowledge the
incompleteness and hence, inadequacy, of what is being communicated as against
the diverse aspects and realities of what has come to be conglomerated to what
we simplify into one word: “Islam.”
As a religious idea, Islam goes back to…the Prophet Muhammad, God’s
messenger whose book of divine revelations is collected in the prose-poetic
suras of the Koran. Having said that, however, one is only at the very
beginning, and even primitive, level of what Islam is. On the purely scriptural
level, along with the Koran, there is first of all, a vast collection of ahadith, or
prophetic sayings and deeds of Muhammad, and a massive library of
interpretations of those sayings … As the religion grew enormously in the
century after Muhammad’s preaching and career, the faith spread into
hundreds of different regions and cultures, from China and India in the east
to Morocco in the west, to Europe in the north, and to Africa in the south.
Each region and people who came under its sway developed its own kind of
Islam. Thus, Islam is a world of many histories, many peoples, many
languages, traditions, schools of interpretation, proliferating developments,
disputation, cultures, and countries. A vast world of more than 1.2 billion
people stretch out over every continent, north and south, including now the
232
Americas, it can’t adequately be apprehended or understood simply as
“Islam.’19
Said adds to this thought utilizing Al-Azmeh’s pluralization of Islam which is to
assert through a linguistic creation, that complexity can only be conveyed in
English in the plural, saying much about the nature of what is too often reductively
defined as a monolithic system of belief and practice. Claims about an imagined
orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy20 distort the richness of Islamic history and reduce its
multiple and constantly expanding forms, orientations, textual interpretations, and
its jurisprudential developments to less than a shadow of its reality. For this reason
Said says,
One should … begin by speaking about Islams rather than Islam (as the
scholar Aziz al-‘Azmeh does in his excellent book Islams and Modernities),
and then go on to specify which kind, during which particular time, one is
speaking about. In a series of profoundly compelling essays, the brilliant
Edward Said, “Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot Be
Simplified,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2002, 70. In the same style, in “Living in
Arabic” Said presents the Koran and what is known as the adab al-lughah (proper
behavior in the language)(231) “The Koran is always referred to as al–Koran alkareem, the honorable Koran, and after saying the Prophet Muhammad’s name it
is obligatory to say a phrase meaning, may God pray and deliver him, a slightly
shorter version of the same phrase applies to Jesus, and in regular Arabic
conversations God’s name is invoked dozens of times in an extraordinarily varied
arsenal of phrases that recall the Latin deo volente, or Spanish ojalá, or English in
God’s name. When one is asked how one is feeling or doing, the immediate
response is invariably al-hamdulillah, for example, and what can follow is a whole
series of questions, also invoking god, that concern the members of the family,
none of whom is usually referred to by name, but by position of love and prestige:
a son, for instance, is not referred to by his name but as al-mahrous, the one whom
God preserves.” Here again, Said simply relates facts of language etiquette and its
provenance (the Koran) without comment. (231) The tone is always neutral but in
its neutrality it conveys a respect and a generosity.
19
Malise Ruthven’s Islam: A Short Introduction asserts that more than a religion of
“same” (ortho) belief (doxy), Islam is a religion of orthopraxy (same practice). Said
would say, Islam is neither a religion of orthodoxy nor of orthopraxy.
20
233
Muslim-Indian philosopher Akeel Bilgrami … has sketched out the problems
that have to be faced whenever one tries to define Muslim identity.21
Said expands on this idea about the multiplicity that exists as a valid and very real
part of Islam, raising what may sound paradoxical, that “… on intellectual and
historical grounds, Islam is not properly a subject at all but (at best) a series of
interpretations that are so divergent in nearly every case as to make a mockery of
the enterprise conceived of by the interpreter as one monolithic whole called
‘Islam.’ The most ironic thing of all is that only fundamentalists and antifundamentalists agree that what they are discussing is the single object they both
call ‘Islam.’”22(my emphasis.)
Here Said’s recognition that the Islam constructed by the discourse of
Orientalism, internalized and appropriated by those in the Arab world for whom the
saturating effect of Orientalist constructions have become their own identities, as
well as the Islam of the Islamists, who only imagine themselves as rejecting the
Orientalist construction, but who quite ironically share many common theoretical
and historical formulations of Islam with Orientalism, leads to what Al-‘Azmeh
describes as an “Islam (that) devolves to … the mirror image of the modernist state
which originated with the Jacobins, was routinized and historicized in the
Napoleonic state, and exported worldwide. The modernism of this proposed state
is the fundamental feature of this supposedly pre-modern creature of
Said, “Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot Be Simplified,”
Harper’s Magazine, 2002, 70.
21
22
Said, “Impossible Histories,” 70.
234
postmodernism.”23 The irony is almost too much to bear but is very much worth the
effort Al-Azmeh expends to explicate it.
Another feature in Said’s writing in which he either explicates a particularity of
Islam or of the Islamic world is that he occasionally provides a gloss for the general
reader who may be unfamiliar with key ideas or institutions or personages of the
Islamic world. In the passage that follows, Said attempts to present Al-Azhar, for
example, in a brief but historical way and briefly comments on a particular problem
in the contemporary world that arises when the mainstream Islamic idea collides
with a minoritarian idea from within its own membership:
… the Azhar University in Cairo is not only the oldest institution of higher
learning in the world, but that it is also considered to be the seat of
orthodoxy for Islam, its Rector being for Sunni Egypt the highest religious
authority in the country. More important is that the Azhar essentially, but not
exclusively, teaches Islamic learning of which the core is the Koran, and all
that goes with it in terms of methods and interpretation, jurisprudence,
hadīth, (sayings of the prophet) language, and grammar. Mastery of
classical Arabic is thus clearly the very heart of Islamic learning for Arabs
and other Muslims at al-Azhar since the language of the Koran—which is
considered to be the uncreated Word of God that ‘descended’ (the Arabic
word is munzal) in a series of revelations to Muhammad—is sacred, with
rules and paradigms in it that are considered obligatory and binding on
users although, paradoxically enough, they cannot by doctrinal fiat (ijaz) be
directly imitative of it or, as in the case of the Satanic Verses, in any way
challenge its entirely divine provenance.”24
From these examples, which are representative of Said’s statements on Islam,
the Qur’an, and Al Azhar, it is clear that Said refrains from any construction or
representation of Islam or its principle elements. This is a phenomenological
23
Aziz Al-‘Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, (New York and London: Verso, 1993
[2009]), 83.
24
Edward Said, “Living in Arabic,” Raritan, Summer 2002, 233.
235
approach that employs basic statements about Islam in a straightforward noneditorial way. It represents a social constructivist epistemology that Said generally
and consistently employs to approach texts and contexts.
In another example Said, in making a point about the divergent methods of
textual interpretation in contemporary literary studies, utilizes the concept of the
“text” as the dominant metaphor of Arab-Islamic culture. He emphasizes that texts
exist in a dialogical context with the time and place of the text. Thus, the beginning
or the inaugural moment of a text is very central to Said’s concept of keeping texts
historical and resistant to reification; he is in this way trying to resist the
disembodied, ahistorical readings that emerge from ahistorical textual
interpretations in which the text becomes a thing in itself, above the world from
which it emanates, a transcendent entity. In his own effort to seek comprehension
of the significance of the text, Said is interested in what brings the text about, and
what circumstances around the text allow the text to live on-- not only in its
immediate environment-- but beyond that time and place. Said’s critical attitude
toward the text itself sees the text more as an active entity than as an object of
veneration; that is, the text remains active and acting on its readers in new
circumstances, requiring interpretative methods that both preserve the text as it is
but that also render it useful beyond its inaugural situation. This is what Said would
call the “worldliness” of texts, their pertinence to the human experience of the
person reading them as well as to the inauguration of the text. As Ferial Ghazoul
points out in an exploration of the Arab-Islamic heritage in Said’s work, Said
emphasizes “textuality within a dialogical context” as the ruling metaphor of Arab
236
Islamic culture.25 Said’s concern that texts can be made to serve “dogmatic and
reactionary purposes,” correlates closely to his opposition to “mummifying texts or
rendering them impotent through elevating them or stigmatizing them,” rather than
“questioning the order and trying to revise it …”26 Ghazoul’s most salient point is
that Said’s “text-oriented vision” coincides with the intersection of his connection
both with Arab-Islamic and Western culture and his vocational training as a
commentator of texts. Together, Ghazoul asserts, Said evinces a critical attitude
toward the “text,” which maintains its active worldly element and effect while
refusing to allow it to become a “cult object.”27 This comment by Ghazoul points to
Said’s efforts to keep textual criticism worldly, i.e. “secular,” rather than piously
following some orthodoxy of interpretation.
A problem that has long occupied critics and exegetes is the question of
universality vs. locality and historicity vs. ahistoricity. While it is a matter of general
agreement that great texts transcend their beginnings in time and place in terms of
their ability to inform, inspire, and challenge the ideas of people in other times and
places, these questions continues to elicit responses. Said utilizes Ibn Hazm’s
tenth century Islamic solution over the Qur’an’s ambivalence, that is, its claim to be
of universal intent and value as well as having historicity. Below Said presents the
problem and the solution of Ibn Hazm so that its implications can be extrapolated
Ferial Ghazoul, “The Arab Islamic Heritage in the Work of Edward Said,” in
Edward Said: A Critical Reader, Michael Sprinker, ed. (Cambridge MA: Blackwell,
1992), 165.
25
Ghazoul, “The Arab Islamic Heritage in the Work of Edward Said,” in Edward
Said: A Critical Reader, 165.
26
Ghazoul, “The Arab Islamic Heritage in the Work of Edward Said,” in Edward
Said: A Critical Reader, 166.
27
237
to contemporary literary debate. What is interesting and important about what Said
does here as well as in his discussion of Ibn Khaldun and Foucault28 in which the
latter is illuminated by the work of the former (as another example) is that by
drawing out the work of these thinkers of the Arab-Islamic heritage Said, not only
and very importantly brings in parallel views largely unknown in the West, but he
also shows the affinities that exist between the ideas of Western and Islamic
thinkers and draws insights from them to solve contemporary historical and literary
problems. By modeling a global comparative approach, Said widens the horizons
of scholarship and interpretation in a “secular” critical way.
The Koran speaks of historical events, yet is not itself historical. It
repeats past events, which it condenses and particularizes, yet is not itself
an actually lived experience; t ruptures the human continuity of life, yet God
does not enter temporality by a sustained or concerted act … In short, the
Zahirite position adopts a view of the Koran that is absolutely circumstantial
without at the same time making that worldliness dominate the actual sense
of the text: all this is the ultimate avoidance of vulgar determinism in the
Zahirite position …
What Ibn Hazm does … is to view language as possessing two
seemingly antithetical characteristics: that of a divinely ordained institution
signifying meanings anchored in specific utterances. It is exactly because
the Zahirites see language in this double perspective that they reject reading
techniques that reduce words and their meanings back to radicals from
which (in Arabic at least) they may be seen grammatically to derive. Each
utterance is its own occasion and as such is firmly anchored in the worldly
context in which it is applied. And because the Koran, which is the
paradigmatic case of divine-and-human language, is a text that incorporates
speaking and writing, reading and telling, Zahirite interpretation itself
accepts as inevitable not the separation between speech and writing, not
the disjunction between a text and its circumstantiality, but rather their
necessary interplay.29
Edward Said, “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” in Foucault, A Critical
Reader, David Couzens Hoy, ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 149-155.
28
29
Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 37-39.
238
Here Said’s focus is on the centrality of text within context in Ibn Hazm’s
interpretation of Qur’an. Similarly, in comparison of Ibn Khaldun’s thought and
method with Foucault’s, he demonstrates similarities between Ibn Khaldun’s
concern with structures and functions of power in relation to Foucault’s explication
of the same and describes the underlying metaphors that each uses to illustrate
their thesis. Said offers a medieval Arab and contemporary European model and
in so doing, Said reintroduces what has generally been dismissed by the West –the
insights, the thinking, the intellectual effort of a non-Western source. He does not
seek to dislodge or displace but simply amplifies by addition, allowing seemingly
disparate strands of thought and encouraging dialogue about apparently divergent
sources of thought on common topics. Said may be said to be employing what he
has called contrapuntal analysis, of which he first spoke in Culture and
Imperialism,30 a method which is polyphonic in essence and which never seeks
erasure of one or the other strand in the narrative or the melody. Each strand
maintains its identity, its melody, its “self” without being either extinguished or
amalgamated. This is how Said sees the inclusion of Arab-Islamic and other nonWestern contributions to human culture adding to the rich tradition of the West. In
this way of considering divergent views, positions, narratives, and interpretations,
disharmony is allowed to exist. The use of the concepts of polyphony and
counterpoint as methods of treating the paradoxical, discrepant, or incongruent
enable a non-binaristic approach to counteract the effects of both Orientalist and
Occidentalist representations.31
30
31
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993),
For a detailed and insightful examination of the place of a polyphony,
counterpoint and harmony in Said’s work see Rokus de Groot, “Perspectives of
239
5.5 Said on the Role of Arabic in Islam: “Living in Arabic”
It is quite representative of the seriousness with which Said treats the identity
issue that in a 2002 article entitled “Living in Arabic,” published just a year before
his death, Said presents what may be his most forcefully stated conviction about
Islam and its inseparability from the Arabic language, a position which is wholly
embraced within Islam itself. It is stated as an equation, an identity between Arabic
and Islam which has both profound meaning and implications. This statement, in
and of itself, is an assertion based in linguistic theory which argues the determining
nature of language on thought, on the ability to perceive, on the ability to conceive
reality in particular ways and to therefore live and be, with all that living and being
implies, a human being who thinks, and therefore acts, communicates, and
transacts according to the utilities made possible by the language(s) in which one
perceives, thinks, speaks, etc. This idea may be Said’s most categorical and most
important assertion about Islam---its inherent and essential connection with Arabic.
Said’s radical perception of the relationship of Arabic to Islam implies a set of
connections both in terms of thought and identity that clarify perhaps one of the
only stable or semi-stable elements in Said’s own existence, experience and
identity. This was previously pointed out in the first chapter. But it shall suffice to
note here the solid connections between Arabic, the Arab Islamic world and Said’s
conception of himself—as Arab—that informs Said’s thought. Of course, he is also
a speaker of English and French but those languages are secondary and
Polyphony in Edward Said’s Writings,” 219-240, in Ferial J. Ghazoul, Edward Said
and Critical Decolonization (New York: University of Cairo Press, 2007).
240
essentially languages of utility for him. English comes to be the language in which
he is most proficient at every level. This he makes clear in several places in his
writing, including in “Living in Arabic” that he even feels inadequately developed
beyond a certain level of Arabic proficiency both in writing and in speaking. He
begins the article discussing the importance and centrality of eloquence in Arabic,
and admitting his lack thereof, which, in fact, causes him to do all of his writing
(though much of it was translated for an Arab audience) and almost all his
speaking in English. However, the fact that Said began his life in a household in
which Arabic was spoken, in an environment where Arabic was the language of
life, (though English was the language of schooling and later of intellectual
development), and that Said later sought out intensive study of Arabic in Beirut
from a Professor of Semitic Languages, Anis Frayha, who spent nearly a year of
mornings with Said tutoring him in Arabic in 1973, indicates that Arabic was within
Said’s core as the language of existence and the language of filiative identity. Of
Arabic Said says, “Classical Arabic—its rules, inflections, syntactical modes, and
overpoweringly beautiful richness---seems to exist in a sort of abiding simultaneity
of existence quite unlike any other linguistic state that I know of.”32 In this
statement, Said avers his personal experience of Arabic as the mode of
communication and of his own very experience in which one feels the sense of
luxuriousness of the Arabic experience, one that English did not provide him. In the
next passage it becomes evident that Said read and experienced Arabic in an
engagement with the Qur’an as well as some of the greatest thinkers and scholars
of the Arab Islamic tradition, which, he points out, antedated the European thinkers
32
Said, “Living in Arabic,” 227.
241
with whom he had drawn from in his liberal education. Here we see how Said,
seeking to enter a particular world at a particular level where thought is enabled in
different modes to that which English enables and in which thought development
and communication utilizing another set of structures, vocabulary and concepts is
made possible through a deepening and intensifying of his knowledge of his native
Arabic, discovers through language an intrinsic connection to the “Islams” (in the
diversity of Islamic ideas which he engaged through the diversity of thinkers he
read) of various “worlds.”33
Learning to think in Arabic, reading the classical texts of Arabic, studying
them with a teacher who had the breadth and depth of knowledge of not only
Arabic but of its related Semitic linguistic systems—all of this gave Said a window
to the conceptualizations of the writers of Arabic texts throughout the tradition.
Through his study as an adult of classical Arabic texts, Said becomes more than
just a speaker of demotic and modern standard Arabic; he becomes capable of
approaching Arabic concepts, at least somewhat as Muslim thinkers of the past
did. This becomes evident in his treatment of some of those whose writing he
studied as an Arabic lesson, but in the process, also studied as a human being and
as a particular Muslim thinker in that time, place and circumstances. Hence, Said’s
Said, “Living in Arabic,” 220. “For almost a year between the morning hours of
seven and ten, he took me on daily explorations through the language using not a
text book but hundreds of passages from the Koran (which, at bottom, is the
foundation of Arabic usage), classical authors like Al –Ghazzali, Ibn Khaldun, and
al-Mas’udi, and modern writers from Ahmad Shawki to … I was introduced to …
Arab grammarians and linguistic speculators including al-Khalil ibn Ahmad,
Sebawayh, and Ibn Hazm, whose work antedated my European figures by seven
centuries.” (18th and 19th century authors such as Vico, Rousseau, Herder,
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Humboldt, Renan, Nietzsche, Freud, and de
Saussure.)
33
242
conviction that one cannot know the world of Islam or the products of its civilization
if one does not have a firm grasp of classical Arabic. While he did succeed in
becoming both fluent and literate in Arabic, he never achieved eloquence in Arabic,
something which one suspects he regretted for eloquence (balāgha) has a high
value in Arab Islamic culture. Said’s minimal education in Arabic was experienced
by him as something of a handicap in spite of having achieved a reasonable
standard of Arabic for practical purposes.
This causes Said to raise fascinating implications about one of the most
widely read and debated of Arab Muslim feminist thinkers today, Leila Ahmed. She
has interrogated the patriarchal roots of the Islamic tradition and its derived ideas
that have hardened into orthodoxies and orthopraxies over the centuries. 34 In a
later work, Said does question the relationship between Ahmed’s modernist
scholarship and her lack of expertise in Arabic though he does not do it overtly in
this article. It is in his discussion of Ahmed’s level of and attitude toward Arabic that
his equation of Islam and Arabic is announced with something more than rhetorical
intent.
Even some Arabs, who for various reasons left the Arab world relatively
early in life and now work in the West, repeat the same nonsense, while in
the same breath admitting that they have no serous knowledge of the
classical language. An example is Leila Ahmed, an Egyptian woman….who
went to the same English schools that we attended, came from an educated
Arabic-speaking family, got her Ph.D.in English Literature from Cambridge,
and wrote an interesting book on gender in Islam almost two decades ago.
She has now reemerged as a campaigner against the classical language
and, oddly enough, a Professor of Religion (Islam, in fact) at Harvard. In her
memoir A Border Passage: From Cairo to America---A Woman’s Journey
(1999), she waxes eloquent on the virtues of spoken Egyptian while
34
See Leila Ahmed. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern
Debate. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.)
243
admitting that she really doesn’t know the fusha (classical Arabic) at all. This
doesn’t seem to impede her teaching of Islam even though it scarcely needs
repeating that Arabic is Islam and Islam is Arabic at some very profound
level (my emphasis). … it doesn’t seem to occur to her that educated Arabs
actually use both the demotic and the classical, and that this common
practice neither prohibits naturalness and beauty of expression nor, in and
of itself, automatically encourages a stilted and didactic tone, as she seems
to think it does. The two languages are porous, and the fact that the user
flows in and out of them is an essential aspect of what ‘living in Arabic’
means.35
In this article, Said also renders a brief history of modern standard Arabic
and in so doing challenges some of the claims emanating out of common
Orientalist-based conceptions of Islam among well-known journalists and scholars.
In the iteration of this brief history, Said points out the transformation that occurred
through the work of mainly Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian Christian Arabs of the
Nahda who modernized Arabic bringing with that transformation or re-formation of
the language a cultural and even religious re-formation of ideas and concepts, a
secularizing tendency that could be expressed through a new Arabic vocabulary,
while preserving the classical language.36 This causes Said to question those such
as Thomas Friedman and Bernard Lewis “who keep repeating the formula that
Islam and the Arabs needs a reformation,” pointing out the superficial nature of
their knowledge of the language and the fact that they are not speakers of the
language. This leads Said to affirm the change that has occurred in “actual Arabic
usage, in which the traces of reformation in thought and practice are everywhere to
35
Said, “Living in Arabic,” 227.
36
Said, “Living in Arabic,” 226.
244
be found.”37 The implication here is of a secularizing development based in a new
epistemology brought about through linguistic change.
Said exhibits another blind spot here. His positive view of the Nahda’s
linguistic reforms of the early twentieth century seems to submerge the
connections of these reformers with the former colonialist powers, a point that
Anouar Majid elaborates in his statement that “the idea of nationalism began to
enter Islamic lands through vernacular revolutions; not only was the first vernacular
press in Istanbul published by a man (Ibrahim Sinasi) who had spent five years in
France, but Arab Maronites and Copts, trained in Levantine Christian academic
institutions were to become ‘major contributors to the revival of classical Arabic and
the spread of Arab nationalism.’”38 Continuing his point, Majid quotes the viceroy of
India, Lord Lytton (1876-80) who expressed in 1878 a vision and a goal of creating
a “gradual but gigantic revolution—the greatest and most momentous social,
moral, and religious, as well as political revolution which, perhaps the world has
ever witnessed.”39 Here he is speaking of his idea that inscribing the values of
England40 in the Indian colony should be at the center and the objective of this
gradual revolution. Majid comments that this project required a new social class of
37
Said, “Living in Arabic,” 226.
38
Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World
(Durham SC: Duke University Press, 2000), 54.
39
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 55.
He cites “religious toleration,” “liberty of the press,” and the “personal freedom of
the subject.” These, he says, are “here in India to the vast mass of our native
subjects, the mysterious formulas of a foreign, and more or less uncongenial,
system of administration, which is scarcely…intelligible to the great number of
those whose benefit it is maintained.” Quoted in Majid, Unveiling Traditions:
Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World 55.
40
245
cultural mediators who, though they were “anticolonial nationalists … (they) were
promoted by colonial powers to maintain Eurocentric views and economic
interests. “He sees the secularizing, language- modernizing secular Arab
nationalists as “surrogate colonialists.”41 Said, on the contrary, sees the Arab
nationalists as preservers of Arabic in their modernizing of it. If one connects this
view to Said’s conviction that “Islam is Arabic” previously contextualized in his
discussion of the necessity of the knowledge of modern classical Arabic, there is
an implicit claim that the Nahda as a re-birth of Arabic had a preserving function in
spite of its simultaneous secularizing function, an interesting though paradoxical
claim that Majid does not accept. Majid details the reasons for his belief that the
modern Arab identity is invented, utilizing the work of Mohamed ‘Abed al –Jabri,
the Moroccan philosopher, who “inadvertently (my emphasis) posits Arabness as a
fictional ethnicity …a political ploy to contain dangerous foreigners attracted by the
egalitarian and liberating promise of Islam” in the late Abbasid period.42 Majid
translates the development of Arab nationalism as a secular effort to reconstitute a
fragmented and colonized ummah and an effort to recoup the Islamic tradition
(turāth) after the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate. He evaluates this as follows:
For just as the sacralized Arabic language contained the imagined
ontologies of the pre-islamic Bedouin, the ‘a’rabi invented and recorded in
the early Abbasid period to secure the privilege of an Arab minority, a
secular version of the same language cannot erase the sacrality proffered
on Arabic by Islam. Ghassan Salamé has argued that the overlapping and
tense existence of Arab ethnic and Islamic universalistic epistemologies in
the Arabic language render categorical delineations between the discourses
of Arab nationalism and Islamic resurgence difficult. If Arab Islamism doesn’t
41
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 54.
42
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 53.
246
signal the passing away of pan-Arabism but simply its metamorphosis, a
‘profound mutation,’ the nationalist concept of the umma is, by the same
token, a ‘true usurpation of the referent, an illicit secularization (laïcisation
illicite). One paradox of Arab nationalism is its attempt to dehistoricize Arab
identity by removing it from the religion that made it possible in the first
place.43
Salamé connects the unification of the Arabs under the banner of Islam as a
fact that would vex modern Arab nationalism endlessly in a dilemma “for which
they would never have an answer. They wanted to appropriate an Islamic past
while overcoming it in a secular modernity.”44 Said may be seen, to the extent that
he valorizes the work of the Nahda Arabic project, as partaking in this
irreconcilability, though, as is known, he embraces the nationalism of the formerly
colonized for its power to resist but then rejects it as any sort of solution; in fact,
seeing it as the ultimate cause of repeated injustice and oppressions seen in the
depredations of the Arab and Maghrebian dictatorships that followed
independence. Majid notes that scholars such as Al-Jabri (notably Maghrebian and
not Arab) who worked with thinkers of the nationalist-religious debate of 1989
sponsored by the Lebanon-based Research Center for Arab Unity, “historically the
guardian of the Arab nationalist doctrine,” emanates from the same intellectual
tradition of his Maghrebian and Andalusian predecessors of the tenth to the
fourteenth century on a synthesis that combines tradition and reason-- Ibn Hazm,
Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Khaldun. Majid writes more than a decade ago words that have
perhaps special force or merit consideration in the present occasion of the period
43
44
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 57.
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 58. See
Salamé, n. 34.
247
after the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, and the ongoing struggles
elsewhere in the Arab world, “If the Maghreb, whose population is overwhelmingly
Muslim reappears now as a strategic location from which to theorize the relation
between nationalism and Islam, it may be because the accelerated ‘demographic
de-christianization’ of the Levant has diluted the imaginary separation between
Arabic and Islam. And so if Arab nationalism began as a ‘sort of de-islamized
religion,’ it is now reappearing as an Islamized nationalism or simply Islamism.”45
Majid ends this thread in his discussion of the relationship between the
modernization of Arabic, the Arab nationalist movement and Arab Islamism as
nationalism and the dilemmas posed by these solutions to the crisis in the Arab
world with a statement that “Arabs have not been able to theorize their own identity
within the bifurcations and polarities engendered by the colonial experience”46
asking if the rewriting of a traditional Islamic authenticity is the answer.
Said’s answer to this idea would be that “secular” criticism and a contrapuntal
methodology for addressing overlapping territories and intertwined histories is the
discursive, activist and secularly critical or critically secular answer—though, as
has been said earlier, Said never systematically examines the political economy
that is the current hegemonic reality across the planet: global capitalism. Majid’s
opinion is that
Not only Said’s, but all Muslim scholarship, secular or not, is one of protest,
an attempt to escape the maddening crisis of marginalization and
dependency. Laroui and Al-‘Azmeh opt for a thorough positivism and
45
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World 58. See
Salamé note 38, on 182.
46
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 58.
248
uncompromising secular modernization (if only for the sake of expediency);
others resurrect a primitive version of the Shari’a to counter cultural
imperialism. In the final analysis, both tendencies fail to move away from
‘Westernization’ and ‘medievalization.’47
He finds Laroui’s call for multicultural universalism inadequate in the face of the
realities of the strengthening of global capitalism while the Muslim world would
attempt to bring about a bourgeois liberal revolution as an initial step toward
socialism.48
What is particularly interesting in Majid’s statement about Said’s great effort is
that he sees it as mainly relegated to the discursive realm of literature of protest.
While most of Said’s work is surely that of academic discourse, it actually has had
a number of historical and “secular,” that is, worldly consequences, one of which is
the development and strengthening of the non-violent resistance movements in the
West Bank, and the development of the same in Egypt, the Maghreb and other
places in the Arab world. This is not to say that Said’s writing in and of itself was
catalytic, but it appears that his calls for the rising up of civil society against the
oppression of both the Israeli –Zionist state and the Arab dictatorships, his
insistence on the power of non-violent forms of resistance including media and
information campaigns, for a world-wide movement utilizing the power of
boycotts, divestment and sanctions to respond to Israel’s continued occupation
and the building of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, as well as broad
alliances across religious and other normally divisive lines to take down tyrannical
47
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 68.
48
Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, 68.
249
regimes—all of these have gained in popularity among the Arab masses in recent
years. Said was the lone voice that wrote continuously and published ubiquitously
on these ideas in the nineties and until his death in 2003. Said’s secular criticism
and contrapuntal analysis, as well as his co-creation with Daniel Barenboim of the
East-West Diwan Orchestra as a model of “non-coercive community,” were
intended to promote active modes of resistance and active modes of co-existence.
Very few analysts have connected Said’s view of the role of the public intellectual,
his notion of secular criticism, and his voluminous writing on the Arab-Islamic
world, particularly his work on the Palestinian-Israeli question as being greater than
the sum of its parts, rather dismissively herded under Majid’s weak expression
“scholarship … of protest.” This study finds that this is precisely a point that has to
be made about the value of Said’s notion and practice of “secular” criticism.
What Majid’s work on the development of Arab nationalism and Islamism does,
however, and his linking of the Arabic language right to the center of the question
of what might be a way toward a solution, is that it indirectly implies that Said’s
equation of Arabic with Islam and specifically the Nahda modernization of the
language with a secularization of the Islamic world through language is a sort of
argument for something like the idea of determinate negation, a concept from
critical theory. In determinate negation, new creation, preservation, and
transformation paradoxically arises from their opposites. Is Said’s equation of
Arabic with Islam, something that Islam also claims about itself, not an example of
determinate negation with respect to the secularization thesis?
250
5.6 Edward Said’s “Humanism of Liberation” and the Arab Islamic
World: The Secular Imperative of Democracy in a Religious World
In 1993 Said published an important essay entitled “The Other Arab Muslims”
in the New York Times Magazine and later published in his 1994 book The Politics
of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994. He
begins the piece with a summary of a debate expressed in two articles in the spring
1993 issue of Foreign Affairs by Judith Miller and Leon T. Hadar on the question of
whether “Islam” is a threat the United States. Miller predictably took the affirmative
position. Hadar took the negative and in his advice to President Clinton averred
that the United States should not “lead a crusade against Islam, not even try to run
the Middle East.” Furthermore, he said that Clinton should disengage the United
States from interventions or direct pressures on the Islamic countries and allow
democracy, peace among the warring factions, and a new prosperity to take
over.”49
Miller’s insistence on Islam as a monolithic system that threatens the world
because of a perceived foundational discrepancy between Islam and democracy,
modernity, and secularism was combined with an admonition that the United
States should support regimes such as those in Egypt and Jordan, failing to
mention the ongoing struggles for democracy and secularism (as well as for an
“Islamic state”) throughout the Arab nations. This, of course, followed on the heels
of Samuel Huntington’s article in Foreign Affairs on “The Clash of Civilizations”
(and the subsequent book) which similarly propounded that Islam is irremediably at
Edward Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994 (New York: Vintage Books,
1994) 384.
49
251
odds with the West, a “watertight” entity. Said takes this as the starting ground of
his argument to the contrary, an argument that represents one of the major efforts
of his oeuvre, an argument against any concept of the homogeneity of either the
“West” or of “Islam.”
To illustrate the rich diversity of “the contest between adherents of several ideas
of national identity” in the Arab Islamic countries, Said draws from his own
experience and quest in the summers of 1992 and 1993 in Jordan, Lebanon, the
Occupied Territories, and Egypt to learn about the diversity of positions and efforts
to discover alternatives both to the despotism of the Arab regimes, most of which
had varying levels and kinds of support of United States, and to calls for an
“Islamic state.” Said, as well as many secularist Arab thinkers he highlights, has
seen the Arab Islamist movements generally as a modernist reaction of resistance
that appropriates the narrowest historical interpretations of Islam in an effort to
portray this resistance as an unsullied, pure, return to an “authentic” Islam of the
first Islamic century, rather than as the definition of what “Islam” is.50 He cites the
thought and work of Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, at the time the leading
independent journalist of the Arab world, who remained an Arab nationalist,
uniquely aloof and critical of the Gulf Arabs, formerly a member of Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s cabinet, and strongly opposed to the autocratic methods of both Sadat
and Mubarak, and who also sees the Islamists as an oppositional movement
Youssef Yacoubi, in an article that analyzes Said’s position on Salman Rushdie’s
work (among other things) writes that while he supported Rushdie’s as “ a critique
of all structure of oppression, theological and political,” Said also “never failed to
stress the role of US hegemony and foreign policy in making and unmaking
reactionary and militant movements.” Youssef Yacoubi ,”Edward Said, Eqbal
Ahmed, and Salman Rushdie: Resisting the Ambivalence of Postcolonial Theory,”
in Ferial J. Ghazoul, Edward Said and Critical Decolonization (New York:
University of Cairo Press 2007), 204.
50
252
whose rise is in precise relation to the continuation of dictatorship, government
corruption, denial of basis human rights, and lack of economic security for vast
numbers of Egyptians. As a communal oppositional force, the Islamist parties,
having been able in the eighties at least to provide concrete aid to the common
person in Egypt through clinics, schools, investment companies, and social
charities, they were able to garner more support, though as most secularists Said
interviewed said, they were short on action plans and clear agendas of socioeconomic benefit to the masses when it came to political party platforms. So
though a great deal of the impoverished majority and small middle class were able
to re-discover comfort and a sense of security in religious activity, Islamic dress,
and a newfound sense of social solidarity through the mosques and Islamist
affiliation, as well as a hope for a better future, the Islamists had failed to gain
wider support due to their violent methods of dealing with political or even
intellectual opponents. While initially in the eighties, the jailing and torture of
members of the general population aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood combined
with the corruption, lack of social services, failure to improve the national and
municipal infrastructure, and general meanness of daily life in Egypt unameliorated
by dictatorial regimes earned an even greater following, the more extremist
radicals of Takfīr wa-l-Hijrah and Al-Gamā‘ah al-Islāmiyyah dedicated to violent
and random acts of opposition that often killed common Egyptians and made daily
life even more insecure, earned these groups more opprobrium of the populations
they sought to recruit, particularly in the nineties, all of which spurred a wider and
richer debate within Egyptian and other Arab societies that further proves the claim
of a diverse Islamic society whose intellectuals have been highly engaged in
253
finding new ways forward, recognizing that no ideology that employs force,
secularist or religious, can win the day in such complex and multi-layered societies.
Said draws out the many positions of intellectuals he spoke with such as Shukry
Ayyad, a critic and professor of Arabic literature, who had written an argument
against the Islamist Kamal Abul-Magd, also a professor and Islamic jurist “of
remarkable fluency and learning,” the highlight of which was its opposition to the
“appallingly slapdash methods of the new shaikhs and religious demagogues who
leap to instant denunciations of heresy and apostasy in bloodcurdling language,
with scan background in the infinitely complex and pains-taking legal processes
that the Islamic tradition spells out explicitly.”51 Other intellectuals such as the ultrasecularist novelist Gamal al-Ghitani, the actor Adel Iman, and the film director,
Yusef Shahine, and of course, the novelist Naguib Mafhouz, are cited for their
activism and strong responses to Islamism as a political program for their society.
Said stresses several times in this essay that neither he nor his interlocutors in the
Arab world saw at the time any realistic chance that any of the Islamist parties
could ever prevail in Egypt.52 Needless to say, a tremendous number of world and
Egyptian events occurred in the intervening years between 1993 and the present—
two decades—and the Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, also changed its
strategies as well as developing more diverse perspectives in conversation with
each other, other Islamists, and with the larger Egyptian and Arab Islamic world,
and managed, for good or for ill, to be the elected choice of the Egyptian people in
the wake of the revolution of 2011. With the current chaotic situation that has
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994, 394.
51
52
A failure of Said’s perception of the power of Islamism.
254
followed, the hope of democracy appears beyond reach again following the
military takeover and removal of Morsi in 2013. What Said foresaw as impossible
in 1993 became reality for a brief moment in Egyptian history after the 2011
revolution. Said was wrong, for contrary to his own historicist views, he himself, in
his historical moment, did not sufficiently conceive of the possibilities of change
that would be brought about by the dialectical nature of history and the interactions
of international events with the large number of possible permutations that can
occur as societies change. On the other hand, we may say that though the regime
of Mubarak was made to fall, and the effort at democratic rule attempted, Said was
right in believing that the work of Arab civil society had not begun in the earnest
self-criticism /self-knowledge development required to sustain transition to
democracy. Simultaneously, Said was right in his criticism that the role of the
United States has not been to support democratic movements in the Arab world.
Similarly, in his interviews in 1995 with Abdullah al-Sinnawi of Al-‘Arabī, Cairo,
though Said had openly and strongly opposed Arafat in numerous published
essays in the Arab world, he had not seen any future for Hamas in Palestine and
said this categorically in response to al-Sinnawi’s question about Hamas as “a real
alternative at the level of the Palestinian national movement, arguing that Hamas
‘does not possess a Palestinian vision or a reading of Palestinian history outside of
generalities’” and that “the question of representing the Palestinian people or of
building a democratic current that would organize all of the segments of our people
is beyond Hamas’s capabilities.”53 In 1993 about 33% of the population was
53
Said, Peace and its Discontents, 192-183.
255
thought to be Islamist in terms of popular sentiment. At that time, Said assessed
Hamas as having only the capacity
to mobilize people for demonstrations or strikes (mostly useless) and a
much smaller number for the occasional attack on Israeli soldiers. But, in the
main, their ideas are protests against Israeli occupation, their leaders
neither especially visible nor impressive, their writings rehashes of old
nationalist tracts, now couched in an ‘Islamic’ idiom. Worst of all, their
‘threat’ has been marketed by policymakers in Israel, the PLO, and the
United States, as a way of forcing more concessions on the Palestinians
and trying to sell the deal to Israel.54
Again, Said was wrong in his view of the ultimate capacity of Hamas, which, again
in response to the massively violent and deadly 2002 actions of Israel in the West
Bank, and the continued loss of West Bank territory that the Oslo “peace process”
and the “Roadmap to Peace” had wrought, particularly in the huge growth of Israeli
settlements and influx of Israelis, mainly from Russia and other places, as well as
the building of the massive “security wall,” that effectively imprisoned Palestinians in
their towns, and denied many access to their farmlands or relatives in other towns
or even in the same town, by 2006, had democratically and decisively won the West
Bank election over the repressive and corrupt “secular” Palestinian Authority.
Hamas had predictably already gained power by virtually unanimous acclaim in
Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal. Said’s inability to be sufficiently “secular’ in his
openness to the possibility that democracy among the Palestinians might entail
acceptance of an Islamist government detracts from and deviates from his
dedication to “secular” criticism in this case.
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994, 405.
54
256
Assessing the position of Islamism in Jordan, Said declares the Brotherhood an
ineffective force cleverly co-opted by King Hussein who had allowed them into the
establishment so to speak which defused their revolutionary vigor. Said contrasts
the Brotherhood in Jordan with people like Laith Shubeilat and Asma Khidr, who he
sees as standing out with
resolute independence of spirit,… uncompromising radicalism, utter
fearlessness, ….dedication to clear principles of human equality and real
democracy, but an almost total absence of theoretical, religious, and
sophistic rhetoric. What you get … is the kind of attention to the concrete
world of cases, facts, figures, and conclusions that allows not leap into the
Beyond, or any resort to thought-stopping formulas like ‘al-Islām huwa alḥāl.’ Khidr … a Christian and Palestinian, Shubeilat a Muslim and a
Jordanian… the message … is the same.55
In support of his thesis that a real ongoing and vibrant contest among Arab
Muslim interpretations of Islam that includes a wide variety of thinkers Said names
Mohammed Arkoun, Fatima Mernissi, Muhammad Abid el-Jabiri, Hassan Hanafi
and Fuad Zakariya, Ali Shariati, and Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid as intellectuals
“disput(ing) the literalism and dogmatism of the orthodox.”56 Of Abu Zeid’s critique,
Said, consistent with his concern that Islamism is a brand of Muslim nationalism of
which Said is very suspicious, writes that it
… ferrets out the forced provincial isolationism of the new Muslim
extremists, who, as former Leftists, in some cases, were greatly influenced
by modern ideas of nationalism and socialism. In rejecting their new zealotry
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994, 406-407.
55
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994408. He then cites a host of
novelists, poets, and dramatists who have taken aim against militant political Islam
or through their work have opposed its claims. His list includes Adonis, Shahar
Khalifa, Hanan Al-Shaykh, Abdel Rahman, Munif, Kamal Abu Deeb, Mahmoud
Darwish, Naguib Mahfouz.
56
257
Abu Zeid reestablishes a sense of intellectual principle appropriate for both
secularists and fundamentalists.”57
Said’s overall assessment of Abu Zeid as well as his naming of other intellectuals
of the Arab Muslim world as a representative but by no means exhaustive list of
thinkers, encapsulates the points that from Orientalism on Said had been
addressing in an effort to question the Western representation of Islam and the
Arab Islamic world and the Islamic world generally as lacking in developed critical
intellectual modes of behavior and therefore deficient and in need of Western
“amelioration.” Citing first and foremost Abu Zeid as a representative of “a rising
new critical consciousness” within the Arab and Islamic world, Said admits that
Abu Zeid’s methodology is partially based “on a European model” but is
“nevertheless conducted entirely within the Arab and Islamic domain,” addressing
both local and “universal” problems, demonstrating “an investigative attitude that
is both skeptical and affirmative and that has in fact existed for many centuries in
the Muslim tradition.”58 What Said finds most important about Abu Zeid and others
like him is that they cannot be overcome by the “mediocre demagogues and
tyrants who speak in the name of religion and tradition,” displaying in contrast to
Western representations of Islam “a sign of energy and vivacity,” challenging “the
dogmatists who have wanted to shut things down, capitalize on frustration and
despair, (and) lead people toward violence and negation.”59 Clearly throughout
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994, 410.
57
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994, 410.
58
Said, “The Other Arab Muslims,” in The Politics of Dispossession: The
Palestinian Struggle for Self-Determination 1969-1994, 410.
59
258
this article, Said demonstrates his belief in and support for the diversity within
political and social Arab thought that emanates from various secular and religious
perspectives (in the denoted sense). Said opposes Islamism as religious ideology.
It is evident that his opposition stems from Islamism as ideology rather than as
religion. In this article, Said’ s “secular” criticism aims to portray the diversity
present in the Arab Islamic world among Muslim thinkers and activists, particularly
highlighting those Muslims who refuse to identify with dogmatic Islamism, as
viable and valid actors and agents of change. Said’s attention to these public
figures exemplifies both his “worldly” effort at changing both Muslim and western
perceptions of the Arab Islamic world and inspiring that world to think beyond the
current status of things to other possibilities for creating just and broad-based
leadership.
In another example of “secular” criticism, commenting on a passage from the
Iranian Muslim intellectual Ali Shariati who Said notes as “a prime force in the
early days of the Iranian Revolution, when his attack on the ‘true, straight path,
this smooth and sacred highway”—organized orthodoxy—contrasted with the
deviations of constant migration.”60 Said finds a hope in the potential Shariati
represented for “an emergent non-coercive culture…which in its awareness of
concrete obstacles and concrete steps, exactness without vulgarity, precision but
not pedantry, shares the sense of a beginning” --an inauguration—“which occurs
in all genuinely radical efforts to start again. Said cites the passage from one of
Shariati’s lectures in which he speaks of man in terms of migration, change,
choice—all notions that Said’s notion of human liberation includes:
60
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 334.
259
Man, this dialectical phenomenon, is compelled to be always in motion …
Man, then can never attain a final resting place and take up residence in
God … How disgraceful, then, are all fixed standards. Who can ever fix a
standard? Man is a ‘choice,’ a struggle, a constant becoming. He is an
infinite migration, a migration within himself, from clay to God; he is a
migrant within his own soul.61
While none of what Said says in “The Other Arab Muslims” is novel to anyone
who has actually engaged with Muslims in the study of Islam anywhere in the
world, Said’s statements in 1993 were quite novel and challenged common
perceptions of the Arab Muslim world in the United States. There were no other
thinkers with Said’s media reach contesting the view that had been forming since
the Iranian revolution in particular (though as Said has effectively shown, this
portrayal of the Muslim world is at least several centuries, even a millennium old).
Furthermore, though Said is clearly focused on proving the diversity and vibrant
debate occurring in the Arab Islamic world, and denying the stereotypical views of
Western cant, he is also clearly negative on Islamism tout court, treating it as
monolithic, covering its nuances and differing manifestations and diversity of
thought. A great deal of scholarship has been done on Islamism, traditional Islam
and neo-traditionalism, as well as on progressive Islam, liberal Islam, and
modernist Islam since Said wrote of Islamism in the late eighties and until his
death in 2003. A problem here is that there are not only Islams but Islamisms.
Said tended to treat Islamism monolithically which calls into question whether he
extended the “secularly” critical attitude toward the various types of Islamism that
he espoused. He tended to be too dismissive and not sufficiently
61
Ali Shariati, On the Sociology of Islam: Lectures by Ali Shariati, trans. Hamid
Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1979), 92-93, quoted in Said, Culture and
Imperialism, 334.
260
phenomenological in his approach toward these politico-religious movements,
something which other Saidians, such as Ibrahim Abu Rabi,’ a Muslim but not an
Islamist himself, was able to achieve in his scholarship on contemporary Arab
thought.62
However, in spite of this failure (if it may be called that,) Said was the best
voice, the only voice in his time, and, it seems, since, capable of getting a hearing
in the West at least for a broadened conceptualization of the world of “Islam.”
Coming from a “doctrinaire secularist,” Said’s “opening” rent the hijab, the covering,
the wall, the distinction that Miller, Huntington and like-minded neoconservative
American ideologues were struggling to erect, much as the Israelis erected the
separation wall, that eventually, like the Berlin wall may well be torn down. Said,
ever the humanist of liberation, did not achieve the ability to be the voice of the
Arab Islamic world, nor did he seek to be—consistent with his own ethos on the
question of the representation of the Other. Said was never interested in
representing the Arab Islamic world but was interested in encouraging the Arab
Islamic world to find its own voice(s), define its own problems and search for,
debate, and develop knowledge about its own solutions. Said was certainly not a
voice for “Islam,” but a voice for a widening and more accurate vision of the world
See Ibrahim M. Abu- Rabi’. Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the
Modern Arab World. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. The
Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2006. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam. London: Pluto Press,
2010. Theodicy and Justice in Modern Islamic Thought: The Case of Said Nursi.
Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. Islam and the Search for a Social Order in
Modern Egypt: An Intellectual Biography of ShaykhʻAbd Al-Ḥalīm Maḥmūd. 1987.
. Contemporary Islamic Intellectual History: A Theoretical Perspective / Ibrahim M.
Abu-Rabiʻ. Singapore: Islamic Religious Council of Singapore, 2006. See also
Colleen Keyes, “Wandering Scholar: A Memoir,” Religious Studies and Theology,
V. 32.1, 2013, 95-99 in which convergence between both Palestinian scholars,
Abu-Rabi’ and Said are drawn out
62
261
in it is particularity, its contingency, its worldly and actual locality. Said’s work on
the Arab Islamic world serves as a model of “secular” criticism, calling a world he
was himself part of, but remained able to critically engage with, to self-knowledge
through dialogue with the Other and to self-criticism/self-knowledge by the same
methodology.
5.7 Said, the Secular, and The Question of Nationalism
In an interview with Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker published in 1992,
in elaborating his concept of “the politics of secular interpretation,”63 Said speaks of
nationalism as a reaction to imperialism, “an assertion of identity where the
problematics of identity are supposed to carry the whole wave of the culture and of
political work, which is the case in the early phases of nationalist struggle against
European colonialism,” citing the Algerian and other Arab nationalisms, the
Malaysian, the Caribbean and the Philippine cases. Said recognizes the “virtues”
but brings up the intellectual and political limitations, the greatest of which is the
danger of the “fetishization of the national identity,” which becomes “a kind of idol,
in the Baconian sense—an idol of the cave, and of the tribe,” producing “a kind of
desperate religious sentiment.” Said, always trying to be as complete, balanced
and fair as possible to the various elements in any reality, adds. “This is not
everything about the rise of fundamentalism, for example in the Islamic world, the
Christian world, or the Jewish world, but it’s an important constituent.”64
Michael Sprinker, “Interview with Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker,” Edward
Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 232.
63
64Sprinker,
“Interview with Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker,” Edward Said: A
Critical Reader, 232.
262
Said then contrasts the religious fetishization of national identity with “the
notion of secularism” which concerns “actual living human beings” who produce
their own history, which he argues therefore, can be interpreted “in secular terms,
under which religions are seen… as a token of submerged feelings of identity, of
tribal solidarity, ‘aṣabiyyah, (filiation) in Ibn Khaldun’s phrase.”65 Here Said
provides an extended statement on the problem of identity and race, ethnicity,
culture and religion that illuminates further his notion of the religious and the
secular and relates quite concretely to the problematic of nationalism in the Arab
world, and especially concerning the question of Palestine and Israel, which will be
a useful introduction to recall later when the Arab world and its problems and the
question of Palestine is discussed in more depth.
…religion has its limits in the secular world. Possibilities are extremely
curtailed in the presence of other communities. For example, when you
assert an identity, one identity is always going to infringe on others that also
exist in the same or contiguous spaces. For me the symbol of that, in the
Arab world, is the problem that has been postponed from generation to
generation: the problem of the national minorities. Not only the Palestinians,
whose denied presence of course proved to be one of the major failures of
the Zionist movement, but also the problems with the Jews as a national
community to which the Palestinians are only beginning now to try to
provide answers in this larger Islamic context. But also there are the many
obvious problems with the place of Armenians, Kurds, Christians, Egyptian
Copts. The status of all of these groups is extraordinarily inflamed.
Therefore, to address such issues, it seems to me that you need a secular
and humane vision, one based on the idea of human history not being the
result of divine intervention but a much slower process than the politics of
identity usually allow. To fight around the slogans provided by nationalist,
religious, or cultural identity is a much quicker thing, the formations easier to
coalesce around: embattled identities that create traditions for themselves
Sprinker, “Interview with Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker,” Edward Said: A
Critical Reader, 232. See Ferial Ghazoul’s, “The Arab-Islamic Heritage in the
Work of Said,” in Sprinker, for original discussion by Said of Foucault and Ibn
Khaldoun,161-164.
65
263
going back to the crusades, or to the Phoenician period … or to the
Hellenistic period. I’m actually citing cases of social and religious minorities
in the Arab world, where this rhetoric of impossibly early (usually imagined)
pedigrees is extremely heated as opposed to secular interpretation which
argues for historical discrimination and for a certain kind of deliberate
scholarship…. Above all, it argues and this is the point, for the potential of a
community that is political, cultural, intellectual, and is not geographically
and homogeneously defined.66
Said was highly critical of the relationship between nationalism and
dictatorship in the Arab world. It is ubiquitous in his political writing and interviews
on the Arab world.67 The fact that almost everywhere in the Arab world for most of
their post-colonial history non-democratic governments ruled every country either
in the form of a monarchy such as those of the Arabian Gulf countries and
Morocco) or a dictatorship (such as those of Egypt, Syria, the Palestinian
territories, Tunisia, Libya, and Algeria) which arose out of an anti-colonial, antiimperialist nationalist movement and then devolved into petty local ‘strong man”
rule with a vestigial nationalism led Said to be extremely concerned about
nationalism for its reductive solidarities and its high-handed tendencies toward
absolutism. His critiques of nationalism, particularly those forms based in nativist
exclusivism and his frequent references to Fanon’s ideas on the necessary but
limited and potentially dangerous role of nationalism exude a mistrust of Arab
nationalism as well as nationalism expressed through religious movements such as
Sprinker, “Interview with Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker,” Edward Said: A
Critical Reader,232-3.
66
For example, see Said, The Politics of Dispossession, “The Arab Right Wing,”
“The Death of Sadat,” “Behind Saddam Hussein’s Moves,”; in Peace and Its
Discontents, see “The PLO’s Bargain,” “The Morning After,” “The Symbols and
Realities of Power,” and From Oslo to Iraq, “ A Monument to Hypocrisy,” Arab
Disunity and Factionalism,” “Propaganda and War,” and “The Arab Condition.”
67
264
the various Islamist parties of Egypt.68 He writes most often of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Occupied Territories, the FLN of Algeria,
and of course Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, but his critique covers all Islamist groups in
the Arab Islamic world, and it is always linked back to the religious (in behavior) but
also often religiously based (in religious sources and religious history, i.e. Christian
evangelical, “Crusader mentality) nationalism of the United States. Speaking of
both types of nationalism which are based in a fundamentalist mentality and their
claimed textual sources, Said says in 1999, and eschewing simultaneously Jewish
nationalism (Zionism), Islamist nationalism (Hamas and Islamic Jihad), American
nationalism and its exceptionalism with its grounding in the “errand in the
wilderness” founding narrative of the Pilgrims combined with the revival of the
Crusader mentality evident in American Christian evangelicalism:
“The trouble with religious or moral fundamentalism is that today their
primitive ideas of revolution and resistance, including a willingness to kill
and be killed, seems all too easily attached to technological sophistication
and what appears to be gratifying acts of horrifying symbolic
savagery….Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education,
mass mobilization, and patient organization in the service of a cause, the
poor and the desperate are often conned into the magical thinking and
quick, bloody solutions that such appalling models provide,, wrapped in lying
religious claptrap. This remains true in the Middle East generally, Palestine
in particular, but also in the United States, surely the most religious of all
countries. It is also a major failure of the class of secular intellectuals not to
have redoubled their efforts to provide analysis and models to offset the
undoubted sufferings of the large mass of their people, immiserated and
impoverished by globalism and an unyielding militarism with scarcely
The Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Gamā‘ah al-Islāmiyyah, Takfīr wa-l-Hijrah, the Ahl
al-Sunnah also considered by many to be one and the same as the Ahl al-Ḥadīth
salafist groups.
68
265
anything to turn to except blind violence and vague promises of future
salvation.69
Benita Parry perceives an irresolvable contradiction in “Said’s designating
nationalism as both necessary and the enemy, as positive and problematic…”70
Parry sees this as “equivocation” -- “the necessity of inscribing cultural identity
before it can be transcended, of working through attachments in order to emerge
beyond them.”71 It is difficult to see what Parry finds troubling about an evolutionary
view of human liberation as passing through stages of development. The
colonized, bereft of pre-colonial structures or institutions that might assist a
resistance effort, adopt the nationalism that they see as so effectively subjugating
and dispossessing them. If it could work against them, it could work for them. But it
would have to be a nationalism rooted in a set of attitudes and beliefs that have the
power to unify and garner the highest level of motivation and dedication. Religion,
whether one thinks it positive or not, can and has succeeded in providing that
mobilizing and sustaining energy and power. The danger as Said (and Fanon)72
saw it was that anti-imperialistic nationalism becomes coopted by leaders who
acquire first by popular fiat and later by force of arms and intimidation an absolute
Edward Said, in “Truth and Reconciliation,” in The End Of The Peace Process,
(New York: Penguin, 2000), 373-374.
69
Parry, “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” in Edward Said: A Critical
Reader, 30.
70
Parry, “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” in Edward Said: A Critical
Reader, 30.
71
See an elaboration of Fanon’s idea of the stages of resistance in Peter Childs
and Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (New York: PrenticeHall, 1997),49-54; and a comparison of Fanon and Cabral on the issue of culture
and resistance, 55-59.” Fanon and Cabral are alike in their estimation that
nationalism is both an absolutely necessary and unequivocally insufficient
instrument in the liberation struggle.” Said’s view is quite similar.
72
266
power that becomes as oppressive as the preceding foreign imperialist/colonialist
powers. This has been a reality throughout the post-colonial world.
While Said distrusts nationalism for its politics of identity which, as has been
said, he views as reductive and creating harmful and falsely based senses of
divisions among peoples, he completely eschews nativism, in its “attempt to
disprove imperialism’s assumptions and accusations by recovering an original and
pristine past standing free of worldly time.”73 The false claims of a “pure” or
“original” Islam of the founding era proposed by radical Islamism are equally
incongruous with lived reality as are Huntington’s claims of distinct and opposite
civilizations. In Yeats and Decolonization, Said denies any benefits of “nativism”:
…To accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism too
willingly, to accept the very radical, religious and political divisions imposed
on places like Ireland, India, Lebanon, and Palestine by imperialism itself.
To leave the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude,
Irishness, Islam, and Catholicism, is, in a word, to abandon history. 74
Though clearly skeptical about nationalism as “religious” and certainly about
religiously based nationalism which is essentially how Said sees Islamist
movements, Said seems to have recognized the strength of a religiously centered
resistance for those in a position of material weakness as is the case in the ArabIslamic masses in statements made in his writings and in his interviews. Though
their views converge on a number of points such as the representation by the West
Parry, “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” in Edward Said: A Critical
Reader, 37.
73
Parry, “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories,” in Edward Said: A Critical
Reader, 37.
74
267
of Islam and Muslims and its disabling effects, Talal Asad adds some nuance to
the idea that Islamism is in reality a form of nationalism. Asad agrees that Arab
nationalism and Islamism share a concern with the modernizing state put in place
by Westernizing power—a state directed at the unceasing material and moral
transformation of entire populations only recently organized as ‘societies.’” 75 He
argues that Islamism takes for granted and seeks to work through the nation-state
and hence is a “statist project,” which seems quite debatable in one possible
interpretation of this term, given the extra-statist nature of international movements
that cut across national boundaries such as Al Qaeda. But Asad’s point is more
that the “statist project” rather than an attempt to fuse religious and political ideas
creates a sense of “nationalism” in Islamism. However, Asad denies that Islamism
is a form of nationalism, pointing out that the idea of an Islamic state is not, in his
view, present at the beginning of Islamic history.76 Asad asserts that the ‘real”
motives of Islamists and the question of whether thy use religion for political ends,
is not relevant to the question of nationalism. The important question, he avers, is
“what circumstances oblige ‘Islamism’ to emerge publicly as a political discourse,
and whether, and if so, in what way, it challenges the deep structures of
secularism, including its connection with nationalist discourse.”77
75
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2003), 198.
For an elaboration of this see The Muslim World, vol. 87, no. 2, 1997 in “Europe
Against Islam: On Islam in Europe.”
76
Asad, Formations of the Secular, 199. Asad’s discussion of “Secularism, NationState, Religion” is important and bears both similarities and differences to Said’s
ideas. Unfortunately, time and space prevent me for elaborating more on Asad’s
critical ideas which read in conversation with Said, is a rich and fascinating
conversation.
77
268
Said’s writings reveal repeated concerns about Islamist movements as
more rejectionist than constructive but his primary objections to political Islamism
seeking return to the original Islamic state of the seventh century is its
reductiveness of Islam into a monolithic system that denies the rich and diverse
Islamic tradition and historical nature of Islamic experience.78 He consistently
denounces the dangerous and false reductiveness of Islamist ideas as what he
perceived as their lack of solid, concrete, actionable plans to address social,
economic, educational and political organization and their tendency to interpret
Islam’s rich tradition of thought and law far too simplistically. As discussed in the
previous chapter, Said in his interview with Tariq Ali sees the Islamists as coopting
Islam as “an opportunity to protest the current statement, the current mediocrity
and bankruptcy of the ruling party” which as “client state(s)…with the West, with
the United States…(have) no credibility or support in the mass of the population.”79
He goes on to say that “The Islamic movements are minuscule in number. They
are dramatized by the western press because of a sensationalism…these raving
fundamentalist terrorists sort of thing, but daily life is uninterrupted by them.”
However, Tariq Ali interjects that in Algeria and Egypt writers such as Farukh Foda
were killed by Islamists, which Said acknowledges. In an article he also addresses
the stabbing of Naguib Mahfouz by radical Islamists but emphasizes the
oppressive lack of basic rights of expression also perpetrated by Mubarak’s
government in a statement that indicts both the Islamists and Mubarak and the
mentality that enables both:
78
Said is here talking mainly about radical political Islamist movements. There are
other Islamic movements that do not have overt or immediate political goals.
79
Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said (New York: Seagull, 2006), 91.
269
Mahfouz’s stabbing highlights the total bankruptcy of a movement that
prefers killing to dialogue, intolerance to debate, and paranoia in favor of
real politics. But it is hypocritical now to say of Mahfouz’s assailants only
that they are crude fanatics who have no respect for intellectual or artistic
expression, without at the same time noting that some of Mahfouz’s work
has already been officially banned in Egypt itself. One cannot have it both
ways. Either one is for real freedom of speech or one is against it. There is
little basic distinction in the end between authorities who reserve the right for
themselves to ban, imprison, or otherwise punish writers who speak their
minds, and those fanatics who take to stabbing a famous author just
because he seems to them to be an offense to their supposed idea of
religion. Shockingly, there is not more artistic or journalistic freedom in the
Arab world during this supposed ear of peace than there was during the war
years after 1948.80
Concerning his view of the Islamists, he goes on to say that in his view the
“Islamic movements are still small…splintered,….a protest against the status quo…
but the societies are still largely secular societies.”81 Here “secular” is used in its
denotative sense. Said here is not using the word rhetorically. He downplays not
only the popularity of the Islamists in Egyptian society but also their ability to obtain
state power, and he emphasizes their focus on “rules of conduct, private conduct,
what you wear, whether you drink alcohol or not…”82 denying that Islamists could
obtain “an Islamic state the way Iran is…”83 Speaking of the Algerian Islamist
contest with the military and the population, Said highlights the fact that “a large
mass of Algerians opposed the regime but also opposed…the fundamentalists”
Edward Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents, (New
York: Vintage, 1996), 108.
80
81
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents, 92.
82
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents, 92
83
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents, 93.
270
adding that he sees all of this as “an open contest about the future of the Islamic
world. But to suggest that the contest is over and Islam is a sort of retrograde
return to the Middle Ages, a kind of retreating Islam, is …a misinterpretation of
what’s happening.”84 He makes the point that the Islamic revival expresses that
“there is still an oppositional culture in the Arab Islamic world” which goes beyond
the nation- state, … linking “the oppositional culture of a place like Egypt, with
Palestine, with Lebanon, with Syria, with parts of the Gulf, with parts of north
Africa,” and in which Said perceives “ a sign of vitality.”85 Here one perceives that
Said views Islamist groups and the Islamic resurgence as counter-cultural
responses to the status quo and yet everything else Said has to say about
Islamism and Islamist movements indicates that he does not see them positively
except as one among other voices against the tyranny of the regimes all across the
Arab world.86
Said argues against what he considers to be ahistorical and ideologically
based distortions that posit Islam as the complete other of a putative West,
particularly the ideas of Orientalist such as Bernard Lewis and the political
84
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents, 93.
85
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause? Peace and its Discontents, 93.
See Said’s nuanced views and criticism of the status quo in Arab nations and in
the West Bank are expressed in an interview on the intifada of 2000. He says,
“Islam remains the last cultural bastion to defend against the intrusions and the
aggressions on the Arab Muslim by Israel and the United States and the (Arab)
regimes. So I would say it’s a symbol of resistance rather than something that can
immediately be translated into a political message or a political vision for the future.
It isn’t. That has to come from citizens who think in terms of coexistence, of
cooperation, let’s say in the Arab world, a common Arab market, a common
pooling of Arab resources, a common policy on immigration and integration of a
kind, alas, that hasn’t been the case for at least two generations.” Edward W. Said,
Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (London: Pluto
Press, 2003), 62.
86
271
scientist, Samuel Huntington, who derives his ideas in part from Lewis.87 He views
as Huntington’s “fundamental mistake” his construction of a West whose core is an
“unchanging essence” countervailing Huntington’s view with the suggestion that
“discontinuities and disruptions in it as in all cultures and civilizations, in addition to
all the various mixtures and hybrids that in fact compose cultures and
civilizations”88 are in fact more normative than perennial essences. This leads Said
to point up a second error of Huntington which is his lack of acknowledgement that
all cultures, as well as civilizations, are mixed, hybrid, and full of elements taken
from other cultures” though Said admits that all cultures attempt to imagine and
present themselves as pure, unique, and uncontaminated by others.89 Said’s
argument against Huntington is that
…he writes about the West as if France were still made up of exclusively
Duponts and Bergeracs, England of Smiths and Joneses. This is
fundamentalism, not analysis of culture, which … is made by humankind,
not decreed once and for all by an act of divine genesis. Every identity
therefore is a construction, a composite of different histories, migrations,
conquests, liberations, and so on. We can deal with these either as worlds
at war, or as experiences to be reconciled. It is one of the prerogatives of
power historically to classify lesser peoples by placing them in eternal
categories—the patient Chinese, the servile Black, the devious or violent
Muslim, are well-known examples—that condemn them to solitude and
apartness, the better and more easily to be ruled or held at bay. This is
precisely what the ‘separation of Arabs from Israelis is all about, in the past
and during the peace process. Is that the only way for civilizations to
coexist?90
87
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents,140.
88
Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” Peace and its Discontents,140.
89
Said, “The Uses of Culture,” Peace and its Discontents, 140-141.
90
Said, “The Uses of Culture,” Peace and its Discontents, 142.
272
This critique of Huntington and Lewis expresses, as has been noted previously,
not a counter-construction of Islam or the Islamic world but an example of what
Said means by the term “secular” criticism, an effort (essai) against both nativism
and separatism. Said’s critique is based in an interpretive attitude that seeks to
establish the connections across societies, their histories and their creations of
thought, art, and systems of life. It emanates from his concept of the “secular
attitude” which
warns us to beware of transforming the complexities of … history into one
large figure, or of elevating particular moments or monuments into universals.
… Secular transgression chiefly involves moving from one domain to another,
the testing and challenging of limits, the mixing and intermingling of
heterogeneities…”91
Said sees the possibility of the secular attitude to express itself in literature and the
arts, the locus of humanistic enterprise. Contrasting the essentialisms of Western
conceptions of the Arab Islamic world, Said highlights contemporary Arab poets
and novelists and in so doing implicitly critiques ideas of an unchanging, irrational,
deficient, Arab world lacking in a concept of modernity. By virtue of the litany of
well-known Arab authors who wear their secularity proudly that Said cites, he
challenges the easy charges of the Friedmans92 and the Lewises of the West that
insist that the Arab world is irremediably and fanatically religious. By the admission
of his own recent discovery of these authors, Said implies acknowledgement that
unless one reads Arabic and reads, one would of course be unable to appreciate
91
Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press,
1991), 55.
92
This refers to those like Tom Friedman, New York Times journalist and to
Bernard Lewis, the Orientalist scholar of Princeton University.
273
this reality of the Arab world first hand, or perhaps at all. One notes Said’s
connection between these Arab authors, the large followings they command, the
effects they have on their audiences, and the quality of their critical thought, thus
debunking in a sentence the idea that Arabs and Muslims live in an archaic
medieval world.
It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that I’ve discovered that the finest,
leanest, most steely Arabic prose that I have either read or heard is
produced by novelists…like Elias Khoury or Gamal al-Ghitany. Or by two of
our greatest living poets Adonis and Mahmoud Darwish, each of whom in
his odes soars to such lofty rhapsodic heights as to drive huge audiences
into frenzies of enthusiastic rapture, while at the same time their prose can
become a razor-sharp Aristotelian instrument whose elegance resembles
Empson’s or Newman’s.93
Throughout Said’s political writing, interviews and lectures on the Arab world, he
extends his secular criticism and what Aamir Mufti has called his “critical
secularism” to those aspects of life in the Arab world that, regardless of their
provenance in anti-imperialistic nationalisms, have devolved into dictatorships and
the associated lack of freedom of thought and action. The primary criticism that
Said exposes is the lack of democracy and human rights in Arab countries, and he
repeatedly calls for serious, organized intellectual and institutional efforts to
develop a strong understanding of what democracy is, how it can work in its own
Arab Islamic context and within the particular environments of the twenty-three
Arab countries. For Said, there is no greater challenge for the peoples of the Arab
world.
I remain convinced…that the real problem at the root of these outrages
(including attacks on intellectuals in Algeria mentioned earlier) is the general
93
Said, “Living in Arabic,” 234.
274
political failure—secular as well as religious—to come to proper terms with a
democratic politics. That is what the Arab world needs now.94
Said’s words seem particularly pertinent to the present moment. Speaking of the
particular problem of the Palestinians (and the rising popularity of Hamas) but in a
statement that acknowledges the need for democratic processes and critical
thought in the entire Arab world, Said writes:
The general condition of the Arab World has never been weaker and more
mediocre: we have no institutions, no science, no coordination, no counterstrategy. Most people are now indifferent or despondent. The rise of Islamic
militancy is a symptom of how deplorable things are…. Analysis, dedication,
and a decent, realizable vision: that is what we need --to build ourselves up
to a position where we can truly engage in dialogue, where we can really
show those who speak for the West and Israel that we cannot tolerate our
present status either as angry religious terrorists or as compliant Red
Indians. 95
Said stresses that there is a vital secular, Arab “alternative to the dominant
religious mode,”96 which treats “the major question in the Arab world: What is the
Arab’s relationship to the western world of which an essential component is the
issue of “dependency.”97 Dozens of articles Said published between the early
eighties and the year of his death, 2003, address the lack of basic human
freedoms in the Arab world, the corruption of the Arab regimes, the need for Arab
self-criticism, the necessity freedom of speech and of press, the imperative of the
94
Edward Said, “Violence in a Good Cause?” 108.
Edward Said, “The Campaign Against ‘Islamic Terror,’” The End Of The Peace
Process, (New York: Penguin, 2000), 48-50.
95
Said, “The Campaign Against ‘Islamic Terror,’” The End Of The Peace Process,
50.
96
Said, “The Campaign Against ‘Islamic Terror,’” The End Of The Peace Process,
50.
97
275
Arab people’s taking matters into their own hands, making their own history, and
representing themselves, in fact creating themselves through what he terms
“secular” criticism in the best manner of speech, behavior and thought of the Arab
Islamic tradition. Here it perhaps bears repeating that for Said, though he does use
the word “secular’ in its denoted meanings in many instances, when he speaks of
“secular” criticism, he is referring to a historical, worldly, concrete, local, and
contingent type of critical activity. This means by logical extension that even the
religious, those affiliated to Islam, Christianity, Judaism or any other religious belief
system are capable of exercising a type of criticism that is free of dogmatic,
orthodox affiliations. That is, one can paradoxically identify as a practicing Jew,
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist but can be “secular” in his/her criticism of any
entity, body of thought, practice, system, etc.98 With regard to religious movements,
Said is skeptical of the abilities of members of these movements (Islamic,
Christian, Jewish or otherwise) to maintain that worldly, historical, tendency to
stand outside of system and method, but he does not deny it is possible, and he
even sees at least the possibility that religious believers can produce powerful
critiques of hegemonic systems, may be quite anti-systemic, and therefore, quite
“secular” in that sense.
In spite of Said’s recognition of the possibility that religiously affiliated
intellectuals can carry out secular criticism both within religious institutions and
within their political and social environments, Said expresses more often than not a
Compare Said’s view of the secular with that of Homi Bhaba expressed in
“Unpacking my Library…Again,” 199-211, Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds.,
The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London:
Routledge, 1996). Bhaba, attempts to “’translate’ secularism for the specific
experiential purposes of marginalized or minority communities who are struggling
against various hegemonic oppressions of race, class, gender, generation—what I
have called ‘subaltern secularism…’” 210.
98
276
doubtfulness about the prevalence of this in actuality, and most of his statements
can be interpreted as maintaining a generally skeptical attitude toward the
religiously affiliated. This seems to be the reason that Hart and those who base
their view of Said in Hart’s critique assesses Said to be basically an opponent of
religion. It must be acknowledged that Said’s numerous statements scattered
throughout interviews and articles, acknowledge his own secularity; he often refers
to himself as “secular” (with the meaning of being non-religiously affiliated or nonbelieving in (a) religion)—always as a means of distancing himself from religious
affiliation.99
Said recognizes that the vast complexity that is “Islam” is not the same as
Islamism, seeing Islamism as a political ideology that appropriates religious
principles, religious law, and religious texts to support a narrow interpretation of
Islam which has primarily political goals. As with the Judaism- Zionism distinction
that Said makes, Said does not ascribe the deformative results of Islamism to
“Islam.” Calling out all tendencies to put religion in the service of politics, Said
writes:
Cynical manipulations of religion are appalling: to kill children or bus
passengers in the name of God is a horror to be unconditionally
Said’s highlighting of a number of Jewish intellectuals who stand outside their
tradition—Isaac Deutscher’s concept of the non-Jewish Jew—Spinoza, Marx,
Heine and Freud—in Freud and the Non-European, whose “ideas were powerful
critiques of society,”…who as Deutscher says “believed in the ultimate solidarity of
man” is another example of how Said conceives of the value of criticism which
emanates from the critical consciousness born of exile: “in our age of vast
population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be
identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of
someone who is both inside and outside his or her community…. Freud’s
meditations and insistence on the non-European from a Jewish point of view
provide, I think an admirable sketch of what it entails, by way of refusing to resolve
identity into some of the nationalist or religious herds in which so many people
want so desperately to run.” Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European
(London: Verso, 2003), 52-3.
99
277
condemned, as much as one should also condemn leaders who send young
people on suicide missions. But there has been little more obdurate and
arrogant than the Israeli and American response, with its sanctimonious
choruses against terrorism, Hamas, Islamic fundamentalism, and its equally
odious hymns to peacemaking, the peace process, and the peace of the
brave.100
Here Said takes both Islamic fundamentalism and religious nationalism of the U.S.
and Israel to account. The quintessentially secular criticism expressed here is
clearly an armament of Said’s humanism of liberation.
5.8 Conclusion
Said’s writing on Islam and the Arab-Islamic world is a sustained effort at the
practice of “secular” criticism, which is nothing if not a struggle against national,
religious, cultural or “civilizational” constructs under which all social life is to be
lived and understood. Absolute claims that allow for no deviation, exception, or
alternative construction of ways of being a part of a national (or other type of)
community are seen as in need of contrapuntal not destructive analysis. This shall
be seen more concretely in Said’s ideas about the question of Palestine and the
question of Israel, currently a question related to that of Zionism rather than
Judaism, as Said sees it. Aamir Mufti in his idea that a particular type of
secularism—a “critical secularism”-- is implied in Said’s secular criticism offers a
plausible notion in view of Said’s secular approach to Islam and the Arab-Islamic
(which implies ,of course, the Zionist-Judaic) worlds. In calling for a continuous
100
Said, “The Campaign Against Islamic Terror,” 45.
278
critique and a “critical engagement with secularism,” Said is calling for a mode of
being critically secular, which starts from a dialectical understanding of the
sometimes quite deformed and deforming history of secularism and the
Enlightenment, and an honest acknowledgement that its so-called mission
civilisatrice has been replete with horror and degradation for non- European
peoples, and does not simplistically take on a point of departure that religion has
historically acted oppressively but that secularizing post-Enlightenment
instrumental rationality has done so as well.
Said interprets the social world as secular. Transcendence of any kind, whether
of metaphysics, of religion or of ideology, goes beyond the social lived historical
world. As such it contains a hope for something beyond the historical world. Said’s
intellectual quest, be it, as Weber thinks, a sublimation of theodicy, or as Said sees
it, is essentially aimed at overcoming fear of the Other through knowledge of the
Other, in a self-reflective and reciprocal process and is simultaneously aimed at
fear of human finitude by a focus that remains hopeful but not blithely cheerful, that
remains grounded in work and struggle that must always seek the emancipation of
self and other—together, contrapuntally.
Said’s writing on the Arab-Islamic world in relation to the West, is a body of
secular criticism, employing its qualities of immanence, historicity, local
circumstance, mixture, and geographical specificity. It is eminently generous in
style and in content. It does not construct, represent, or define. It permits realities
of the large geographical-historical entity called Arab-Islamic to be experienced
without mediation. It is secular more than secularist. This distinction is important. It
is always critical asking questions about things taken as given by the discourses
that construct our realities and hegemonically overtake our ability to perceive.
279
Secular criticism simply restores the ability to perceive more fully if the critic and
the reader are willing to work at it for an outcome that results from honest inner
struggle to control tribalism, and the tendency to blind filiation in the encounter with
the Other.
As delineated earlier in the chapter describing a major deficiency of Said’s
criticism, American postcolonial scholar Timothy Brennan, who is generally quite
sympathetic to Said, and the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, who presents a brilliant if
strident critique of Said, both cite Said’s major failure101 as Said’s lack of analytical
and systematic attention to the relationship between economics and politics,
Perhaps as humanist this was a task he felt to be beyond his ken and so his
criticism remains overly general and undeveloped. His position in one of America’s
premier research universities provide the privileged position from which Said can
express the contents and products of an “exilic consciousness.”102 Perhaps critique
of the economic system was to evolve as a subject of criticism but one that Said
did not live long enough to tackle. He died relatively young at age 68.
The present study argues that while such criticisms of Said’s failures seem
valid, the value of both Said’s literary and cultural criticism as well as his political
writing is that he activates his notion and practice of “secular” criticism in his writing
on the Arab Islamic world and the question of Palestine-Israel. As discussed in the
previous examination of the convergences between Said’s critical theory of the
101
See Ahmad Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso,
1992), 159-219. See also Timothy Brennan, “Resolution,” Edward Said:
Continuing the Conversation(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
102
Paul A. Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986) provides a critique of Said’s socioeconomic and political privilege as a member of the elite of Columbia University
and its relationship to the power structure in the U.S.
280
religious and the secular and Max Horkheimer’s critical theory of religion, Said is
clearly devoted to the idea of universal human liberation in the present world. While
he does not deny the liberatory potential within religion, Said can be said to be
skeptical of the claim that religion is a liberatory force in the historical world.
Said’s humanism of liberation of which his secular criticism and contrapuntal
analysis are the signature elements indeed seeks to take the collective fate of
humanity into account but without the necessary critique of political economy.
Brennan has leveled perhaps the most cogent “secular criticism” of Said103 and
Majid’s conclusions support Brennan’s late assessment. Those who want to take
Said’s secular criticism to the next level must further engage in the study of global
capitalism and neo-imperialism if Said’s humanism of liberation is to go beyond a
hopeful utopian universalism. In spite of the fact that Said’s work remained worldly
and humane at the level of ideas and politics, and did not take that essential next
103
Aijaz Ahmed attacks Said harshly primarily for his lack of fidelity the
base/superstructure notion of the Marxist critique, though Said acknowledges early
on in Orientalism that he has been influenced by Marxists but is not a Marxist.
Ahmad takes issue with what he sees as Said’s bourgeois liberalism and clearly
finds it oxymoronic that Said, from a wealthy Palestinian family, lives quite well
and critiques “the West” in the name of universal emancipation from a comfortable
situation in an elite institution which insulates him from his opponents wish to do
him harm. Ahmad would have Said addressing the economic basis of Western
imperialism and particularly the system of global capital that the United States
perpetuates around the world while the world’s people devolve into more helpless
circumstances than ever no matter what they do. In a particularly uncharitable
2010 portrayal of Said, a “critical biography” entitled Edward Said: The Charisma
of Criticism, H. Aram Veeser, a former student of Said also expresses disdain for
Said’s “unmistakeably Ruling Class” persona and demeanor. 58. Veeser
apparently would have liked a penurious Said a great deal more. Robert Irwin also
emphasizes Said’s well-to-do background. (Irwin, 2006, 278-9) One wonders if this
is intended to somehow deny his or his family’s claims to their home taken in
Jerusalem and by extension the idea that anything was really lost by the Saids—is
he implying Said’s socio-economic status is a substitute for a family home, a sense
of place, of home, of belonging to nation? Does one have to be living in a refugee
camp to be an exile from Palestine?
281
step toward a critique of the economic system of global capitalism, his work
addressing one of the most threatening, and long-standing problems of the
twentieth and twenty-first century is a significant effort that occupied Said’s writing
and scholar-activism for over three decades and merits a thoughtful critique for its
value as “secular criticism” and as a genuine effort to re-define and re-cast the
struggle in terms of human rights and liberation for all people, one that seeks
inclusion and connection rather than exclusion, separation and dispossession. This
is Said’s work of “secular criticism” on the question of Palestine and Israel which is
the subject of the next chapter, which shall show with specificity how Said’s work
on this question not only exemplifies his concept of secular criticism, is a metonym
for Said’s oeuvre tout court, but also is the fullest and clearest expression of Said’s
humanism of liberation. Said’s major themes on the question of Palestine and
Israel are explored in relation to these inter-related and overarching motives of his
life’s work.
Said’s approach to Islam is succinctly expressed in the following statement
imbued with Viconian overtones and based in a nominalist, social constructivist
epistemology:
Of course one can learn about and understand Islam, but not in general and
not, as far too many of our expert authors propose, in so unsituated a way.
To understand anything about human history, it is necessary to see it from
the point of view of those who made it, not to treat it as a packaged
commodity or as an instrument of aggression. Why should the world of
Islam be any different? I would therefore suggest that one should begin with
some of the copious first-person accounts of Islam available in English that
describe what it means to be a Muslim, as in Muhammad Asad’s
extraordinary book The Road to Mecca … or in Malcom X’s account in his
memoir, or in Taha Hussein’s great autobiography, The Stream of Days.
The whole idea would be to open up Islam’s worlds as pertaining to the
living, the experienced, the connected-to-us, rather than to shut it down,
282
rigidly codifying it and stuffing it into a box labeled “Dangerous—do not
disturb.104
104
Said, “Impossible Histories,” 74.
283
Chapter Six
Said on the Question of Palestine as “Secular” Criticism
The struggle is not only against Israeli and Arab tyranny and injustice: it is for our
right as a people to move into the modern world, away from fear, the ignorance
and superstition of backward-looking religion, and the basic injustice of
dispossession and disenfranchisement.
Edward Said, “The Campaign Against Islamic Terror”
6.1 Introduction
In 1979 with the publication of The Question of Palestine, Edward Said
inaugurated a body of work that exemplifies the practice of what he has called
“secular” criticism—a practice which provides “the conceptual and political
foundation for his concept of humanism.”1 In his statement that Palestine exists
“as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular
will,”2 Said presses forward an unusual claim—that is, that the idea of Palestine -the idea of what it can be and what it should be—is, quite simply, the land and the
country of all of its citizens, Jews and Palestinians, and that this idea is based in
Saree Makdisi, “Said, Palestine and the Humanism of Liberation,” in Edward
Said: Continuing the Conversation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2005), 80. See also Saree Makdisi, “Edward Said and the Style of the Public
Intellectual,” in Müge Gursoy Sökmen and Basak Ertür, Waiting for the Barbarians
(New York, Verso, 2008), 53-65.
1
2
Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 5.
284
the humanistic value of the equality of all. With this value at its center, Said’s work,
as a Palestinian and a humanist, employing secular criticism as its primary tool, is
an intellectual struggle against systems and ideologies inimical to a society in the
land of Palestine based on the inalienable rights of its entire people. Said, through
his work on the joint question of the rights of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples,
and the liberation of both together, thus enunciates a critical theory of society
which has at its core an inclusive sense of what it means to be human.
To make explicit the connections in Said’s work on the question of Palestine-his concept of the human, his theory of the meaning and goals of humanism, and
the way in which his writing on the question of Palestine exemplifies his concept of
“secular” criticism-- is the objective of the present chapter. This explication
supports the thesis that, far from being a separate body of work unconnected with
his literary-cultural criticism, Said’s work on the question of Palestine, along with
his writing on the Arab-Islamic world, forms a unity with his thesis on Orientalism,
and as secular criticism, it concretely represents Said’s best work. As Saree
Makdisi, has aptly called it, Said’s “humanism of liberation,”3 intrinsically rooted in a
secular (this-worldly) historical realist, social constructivist epistemology, employs
criticism of society, of culture, of systems of thought and politics in the struggle for
universal emancipation.4
See Makdisi, “Said, Palestine and the Humanism of Liberation,” in Edward Said:
Continuing the Conversation.
3
See R. Radakrishnan’s brilliant and comprehensive analysis of Said’s notion and
practice of humanism as a practice in which intentionality and worldliness are key.
He clearly sees the connectedness of Said’s primary project of secular humanism
with his vision of Palestine and his work on Palestine as secular criticism. See
“Edward Said the Possibilities of Humanism,” in Adel Iskandar and Hakem
4
285
As discussed in chapter two, Said’s departure from traditional humanism begins
as early as his first book on Conrad and is exhibited in the type of concerns Said
expresses in his explication of Conrad’s work, particularly in his analysis of
Conrad’s awareness that the emancipatory vision of Europe had not extended to
the world it colonized and ruled. Said is not primarily interested as a humanist in
upholding the literary monuments of Western civilization though he acknowledges
their greatness and appreciates their aesthetic qualities. However, at that early
point in his professional life, he is primarily interested in how Western literary
masters reveal the workings of the consciousness of Europeans (and their Others)
in the age of high imperialism. Said, for example is interested in the way in which
the idea behind empire as “something you can bow down to and offer sacrifice to”,
voiced by Marlowe in the Heart of Darkness conveys the epistemological basis of
empire while simultaneously ignoring the epistemology of the natives conquered.
Said’s literary analyses also stir consciousness of the untold narratives of the silent
characters in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia who form a silent backdrop to the
plots and conflicts of the European novel and its protagonists. In Culture and
Imperialism, Said brings to light the fact of the submerged narratives of the
plantations in Antigua in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. This highlighting of the
Rustom,eds., Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation
(Berekeley: University of California Press, 2010), 431-47. Said elaborates on his
ideas of humanism in “An Interview with Edward W. Said,” in Mustafa Bayoumi
and Andrw Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage Books,
2000), 433-35. He says, “The only life that is possible for humanism is if it’s revived
in the interest of a universal concept. This is especially needed in this country, with
its own views and special history or exceptionalism, ‘manifest destiny,’ and
patriotism. This notion of American goodness is that ‘we Americans’ fight altruistic
wars, the sense that ‘we’ wage campaigns for the good of the other. That has to
be demythologized and replaced with a real critique of power….We need to
discover a new concept of humanism based of a rejuvenated idea of it, drawing
also from the older traditions, including the Islamic tradition.” (434)
286
position of the objects of empire and his interrogation of the European Self as
subject marks the beginning of Said’s departure from traditional humanism and
literary criticism.5
With Orientalism’s major argument that Western scholarship had constructed
an image of the Arab and Islamic world which inevitably (though not necessarily
consciously) served imperialism and colonialism, followed by The Question of
Palestine and Covering Islam -- essentially case studies of the thesis of
Orientalism —Said inaugurated a more explicit, more concrete, more worldly
project of cultural and political criticism. As Michael Sprinker states in the
introduction to his critical reader on Said, Said’s earlier sense (through the midseventies) of “living two lives, each almost hermetically sealed off from the other,”
changed after the publication of Orientalism, “as his intellectual work has
increasingly come to be integrated with—indeed motivated by-- his political
Following Said’s reading of authors such as Austen and Conrad, others have also
examined nineteenth century British literature in relation to imperialism. For
example Suvendrini Perera reads selected canonical works by Edgeworth, Austen,
Gaskell, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Thackery in relation to imperial ideology
and gender issues. See her Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from
Edgeworth to Dickens (1991). See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness:
British Literature and Imperialism 1830-1914 1988) Unlike Said who does not look
at the development of imperialism historically, Brantlinger does. He uses
Foucauldian discourse theory to analyze the colonial situation. Said’s approach is
more geographical, following Gramsci. Said says, “A lot of my work has this very
strong geographical as opposed to Hegelian dimension. The contrast between
Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci is very important to me here. For Gramsci…
there is a territorial, geographical, and material basis… For Gramsci, territoriality is
represented in many forms: the testimony of victims, the refugees who still carry
keys to the houses from which they’ve been driven.” Bayoumi and Ruben, The
Edward Said Reader, 425.
5
287
commitments. In this way, too, he differs markedly from those earlier humanists
whose example he has honored.”6
Said’s belief in the possibility of human agency despite the sometimes
overpowering strength of hegemonic culture keeps Said within humanism.7
However, Said’s quarrel with traditional humanism as the reinforcement of cultural
solidarities aims to turn traditional humanism on its head by re-creating humanism
as the practice of interrogating cultural solidarities and the systems that they serve.
By using “secular” as an intensifier and descriptor of “criticism,” Said emphasizes
the worldly role of criticism and its emancipatory objective.
Said’s work on the Arab Islamic world as discussed in the previous chapter is
one aspect of his oeuvre exemplifying his idea of secular criticism. In short, Said’s
criticism of Western as well as certain Arab nationalist and Islamist representations
of the Arab Islamic world seeks to uncover the oppressive effects of those
representations and to call to account those who engage in or espouse oppressive
systems that foreclose the possibility of equal human rights to any segment of
society for whatever reason. As has been shown, Said’s critical writing on the
Arab-Islamic world deconstructs Western representations of Islam and the Western
6
Michael Sprinker, Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Cambridge MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 1992), 4.
7
Though for this Said is found to be unacceptably self-contradictory by Paul
Clifford. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press,
1988). Said is taken to task for saying in Orientalism that “unlike Michel Foucault, I
do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise
anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like
Orientalism.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Book, 1979), 23.
288
imaginary in favor of the vast and diverse socio-historical Islamic world and calls
upon the Arab world to re-create itself on a new conception of the human. Said
hails the works of George Makdisi-- The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning
in Islam and the West and The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the
Christian West8 pointing out that
the system of knowledge that we call humanism did not originate… in Italy
during the fifteenth and sixteenth century Renaissance, but rather in the
Arab colleges, madrasas, mosques and courts of Iraq, Sicily, Egypt,
Andalusia, from the eighth century on Those places formed the traditions
and the curricula of legal, theological, as well as secular learning—the so
called studia adabiya—from which European humanists derived many of
their ideas not only about learning itself, but also about the environment of
learning where disputation, dissent, and argument were the order of the day.
Humanism is a much less exclusive Western concept than a lot of people
rather proudly think. It exists in India, in the Chinese tradition, in the Islamic
tradition.9
The present chapter extends what was begun in chapter five and examines the
significant work on a particular problematic of the Arab Islamic world—and that is
the question of Palestine (which is, of course, necessarily also the question of
Israel). This work is a sustained body of “secular” criticism which seeks as its
highest value universal human liberation in the saeculum, that is, the historical
world. Said’s worldly notion of universal human liberation seeks the realization of
human community in which difference is not submerged into identity, and in which
difference is also not a category marking superiority or inferiority. The commitment
8
For his seminal work on the origins of the Western system of higher education
and humanism, which of course are linked in medieval Islam, see
9 Bayoumi and Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, 434.
289
to the notion of human equality disallows ideologies of difference in which one
people assumes paramountcy of rights over any other.10
Arguing that “secular” criticism is Said’s idea of secular “beginning” –which is
both intention and method,11 this chapter focuses on how Said employs criticism to
challenge the hegemony of the narrative of the founding of the state of Israel and
the concomitant suppression and denial of the Palestinian narrative of
dispossession. It is further argued that Said’s challenge to the Zionist narrative has
as its goal the uncovering and acknowledgement of truth for the purpose of
rectifying first the record and second the asymmetrical realities created by Israel in
relation to the rights of self-determination and the utilization of the land’s resources.
Said’s ideas on the problematic of the “two communities of suffering”12—the
Palestinians and the Jews-- claiming the same land offers a humanistic perspective
that challenges exclusionary and supremacist ideologies whether rooted in
religious or philosophical ideologies.
A sub-thesis is that this body of work is the most significant contribution of
Said’s production in terms of its visionary futurist objective of human community
and in terms of its seminal role in motivating subsequent work by Israeli and
Palestinian scholars of history such as Ilan Pappé and Rashid Khalidi (among
10
See Edward Said, Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the
Universality of Human Rights,” unpublished lecture delivered at SOAS in January
2003, p. 25. Referenced in Sökmen and, Waiting for the Barbarians, xi.
Recalling the title of Said’s second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method, we
can think about Said’s notion of criticism as the exercise of reason as a human and
humanistic enterprise, one which is based in Vico’s idea that “history is made by
men and women and not by God.”
11
Edward W. Said, “Truth and Reconciliation,” The End of the Peace Process,
(New York: Penguin, 2000 [2002]), 318.
12
290
many others) and of international scholar-activists whose work jointly forms a
vigorous oppositional discourse supported by a Palestinian-led international nonviolent resistance movement that challenges the Israeli state in its current
manifestation and seeks the creation of a just democratic and human community in
Palestine-Israel. Said’s work on the joint question of Palestine and Israel reveals
Said’s notion of what the humanism of liberation must ultimately achieve for both
Palestinians and Jews. This inclusive envisioning of human community while not
arguing against religious ideas that inform and motivate the imaginations of Jews,
Christians and Muslims, does challenge exclusivist religious interpretations that
seek to form the basis for statehood.13 Said proposes a future for the PalestinianIsraeli peoples, a “secular” vision based in a single democratic bi-national state that
preserves difference while affirming identity.
In the first section of this chapter, Said’s 1979 foundational text on the question
of Palestine is examined, followed by a review of the way in which his essays and
articles appearing in the Arab, European, and American press form the basis for an
intellectual humanistic challenge to Zionist constructions.14 The last section
Said writes “There has been a great deal of talk in the Western media and
among policy-makers about political Islam. Very little attention has been paid to
the equally problematic resurgence in political Judaism.” See “Further Reflections
on the Hebron Massacre,” in Edward W. Said, Peace and its Discontents (New
York: Vintage Books, 1993, 1996), 55. Said goes on to talk about fanatical,
intolerant and exclusivist strains within the Abrahamic faiths. On another note, Said
criticizes the PLO for signing the Oslo accord leaving settlers in place in the West
Bank, further exacerbating tensions among native Palestinians in places such as
Hebron and mainly non-native “Israelis” who hail mostly from the U.S.
14 Said devotes five books of articles and essays that had been published as
newspaper articles in the popular Arab press (as well as in many major Western
newspapers) to the problems of Palestine-Israel and the search for a solution to
the problem of what he calls “two communities of suffering,” presenting the
Palestinian issue in the complex context of the history of Western relations with the
Arab-Islamic or Middle Eastern world. He also has dozens of interviews in which all
13
291
discusses the influence of Said’s ideas on the work of several Israeli and
Palestinian scholars and some of the efforts of Palestinian civil society in the West
Bank as well as its international support network in implementing the ideas of nonviolent resistance, secular criticism, and self-representation of the Palestinian, in
support of the concept of one democratic secular state for Jews and Palestinians.
Included is a consideration of the way that non-exclusivist religious interpretations
can work in tandem with the idea of Palestine as conceived by Said.
6.2 The Question of Palestine
Said’s 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, published just a year after
Orientalism details how the discourse of the Western world about the Islamic
Orient had created and furthered misrepresentations that made the easy
dispossession of the Palestinian natives of the land by Zionist immigrants an
accomplished fact. In Orientalism Said de-constructs both the notions of the East
and the West through a focus on the sources of Western knowledge about nonWestern peoples and their societies. Said argues that the function of the discourse
of Orientalism was to “…understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even
incorporate, what is manifestly a different world…”15 Said saw this discourse as
reflecting Western power over representation of the non-European Other, creating
of these issues are commented at length, lending additional thought, explication,
and support to previously published ideas and commentary. Most notably a great
deal of his writing on the Arab-Islamic world documents historical facts and events
which are either part of a Western suppressed and/or Israeli suppressed narrative,
analyzing in the process, the effects of what he argues are distortions, deletions,
and suppressions of truth intended to maintain the power balance that the West
and Israel have been able to achieve through the conjuncture and control of the
knowledge/power equation.
15
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 12.
292
“knowledge” which constructed non-Europeans “ as peoples and societies to be
ruled and dominated, not as objects to be understood passively, objectively, or
academically”16 thereby supporting the aims of empire and colonization.
Said, among other theorists of liberation such as Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral,
Aimé Césaire, and W.E.B DuBois, to name but a few, believes that the
appropriation of the narrations of the histories of the colonized and the negation of
colonial misrepresentations is a necessary intellectual element of resistance.
Suppressed histories that reflect the perspective of the colonized and subjugated
and that challenge the official narrative must be written in addition to a program of
resistance action. Liberation is thus a matter of “critical de-colonization”17 as much
as political de-colonization. The colonized must make it impossible for the world to
plead ignorance of their reality. The discrepancies between claims of the colonizer
and the realities and experiences of the colonized must be revealed.18 This, for
Said, is the work of criticism and the role of the humanist.
Said’s approach to Palestinian self-representation and the countering of the
hegemonic Zionist narrative involves two strategies: First, Zionism must be treated
genealogically, that is, it must be situated and contextualized demonstrating the
origins of ideas in relation to historical events and dominant ideas and institutions.
Second, Zionism must be studied as a “practical system of accumulation (of power,
Edward Said, “Orientalism and Zionism”, in al-Majalla, December 2-8, 1987
(Arabic). The quotation is from the English typescript.
16
17
See Ferial Jabouri Ghazoul, Edward Said and Critical Decolonization (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2007).
18
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. (New York: Orion Press,
1965).
293
land, ideological legitimacy) and displacement (of people, other ideas, prior
legitimacy).”19 Said’s objective then is to elaborate the century-long process of
Zionist representation which is a critical intervention in what Said has called the
denial by the West and Israel of the “permission to narrate”20 this history from the
Palestinian experience and perspective. With the denial and obliteration of even a
“question” of Palestine, the Zionists with Western support created an image for the
state of Israel so effectively constructed and projected globally that to the time of
this writing, the bringing to light of reconstructed Palestinian history and the raising
of the question of Palestine meets walls of fierce ideological resistance. And yet
numerous scholarly and activist efforts have taken up precisely this charge
following Said’s effort of a quarter century.21 It is, in fact, not so difficult anymore to
reconstruct and present the truth of Palestinian history and to argue rationally for a
just solution, for all the evidence is available, but so powerful is the image
constructed by Israel of itself, so successful its self-representation and the
supportive representation given it by the West, particularly the United States, since
the inception of the state of Israel in 1948, that the conflicting truth of the
Palestinian reality is unable to be comprehended, perceived or heard.22 The
19
Said, The Question of Palestine, 57.
20
See Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for
Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, “Permission to Narrate,” 247-268.
21
To this end, the work of the Institute of Palestine Studies which produces the
Journal of Palestine Studies, the Jerusalem Quarterly and publishes numerous
scholarly works on Palestine, past and present, is a notable and effective
endeavor.. The works of Palestinian scholars Walid Khalidi, Joseph Massad,
Naseer Aruri Raja Shehadeh, Nur Masalha, Rashid Khalidi, Saree Makdisi, as well
as Israeli and other international scholars appear in the output of the IPS.
Alain Gresh, “Reflections on the Meaning of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine
Studies, 161, XLI:1 Autumn, 2011, 68. Gresh brings up the problem of the fear of
22
294
cognitive dissonance generated by the presentation of the Palestinian narrative
against or even side-by-side that of the official Israeli narrative effectively
forecloses the ability of many intellectuals, not to mention the Western, especially
American public, to allow for the Palestinian perspective and reality to be
cognitively allowed. Thus, in the effort to go against the grain of a hegemonic
cultural and historical mythical belief, particularly given the exclusivist interpretation
of religious texts supporting the commonly held opinions so constructed,23 Said
enacts his greatest and most sustained effort at “secular” criticism precisely in his
prolific writing on Palestine, of which The Question of Palestine was the inaugural
work. The issue of the way that the Palestinian question has been represented is
addressed by Said in the following passage:
Ever since its founding in 1948, Israel has enjoyed an astonishing
dominance in matters of scholarship, political discourse, international
presence, and valorization. Israel was taken to represent the best in the
Western and Biblical traditions. Its citizens were soldiers, yes, but also
farmers, scientists, and artists; its miraculous transformation of an ‘arid and
empty land’ gained universal admiration….In all this, Palestinians were
either ‘Arabs’ or anonymous creatures of the sort that could only disrupt and
disfigure a wonderfully idyllic narrative. Still more important, Israel
represented (if it did not always play the role of) a nation in search of peace,
while the Arabs were warlike, bloodthirsty, bent on extermination, and prey
to irrational violence, more or less forever.24
Said notes the “complex irony” that the Jews, the “classic victims of years of antiSemitic persecution and the Holocaust, have in their new nation become the
being seen as anti-Semitic if one were to criticize Israel, quoting Jean-Paul Sartre
expressing his discomfort at the idea of standing against Israel in any way.
23 For an overview of exclusivist orientations within religions, see Linda Woodhead
and Paul Heelas, Religion in Modern Times (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
2000), “Religions of Difference,”27-69.
24 Said, The Question of Palestine, xiv.
295
victimizers of the victims.”25 As a national liberation movement initially, and later,
beginning in 1988 an independence movement, the Palestinian national
movement, Said points out, has been unique in historical terms for having so
difficult an opponent: “a people recognized as the classical victims of history.” 26
Combined with the concomitant lack of reliable allies, a volatile political
environment, and a clearly prejudiced “super-power interlocutor” (the United
States), the Palestinian national movement has been severely handicapped.
Lacking any territorial sovereignty at all, “with dispersion and dispossession” the lot
of the entire nation, “subject to punitive laws in Israel and the Arab countries,
discriminating legislation, and unilateral edicts that run the gamut from deportation
and shoot-on-site orders to airport harassment and verbal abuse in the press,”27
the Palestinian national movement after 1948 has faced an uphill climb in every
respect. He ends the 1991 preface of the original book with a conviction that he
also carries throughout all his works on Palestine-Israel:
…neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a military option against the other;
this fact is as striking now as it was when I wrote The Question of
Palestine…The task for the Palestinian people is still to assure its presence
on the land, and by a variety of means, to persuade the Israelis that only a
political settlement can relieve the mutual siege, the anguish and insecurity
of both peoples. There is no other acceptable secular—that is, real (my
emphasis)—alternative.28
25
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxi.
26
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxii.
27
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxii.
28
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxiii.
296
Said’s constant effort is to emphasize mutuality and the necessity of framing the
issues to be solved in “secular—that is, real,” terms displays another instance of
Said’s use of the word secular to indicate a grounding in this-worldly reality based
on common humanity as opposed to a grounding in any other-worldly reality (or
unreality) based in an “ideology of difference.”29 The secular/real is thoroughly a
common human reality. Said’s criticism is leveled against the violation of this
secular/real by the other-worldly/unreal of a religiously based state veiled in the
language of modern nationalism, and furthermore, one that valorizes difference—
that is the superiority of Jewish difference—and the inferiority of non-Jewish
difference—ignoring and denying human commonality of rights and needs as the
basis for the nation. As shall be shown, this commitment to the secular/real is
consistently evident throughout Said’s project of secular criticism on the joint
question of Palestine and Israel. It may have taken Said more than a decade to
work this out in his own head, but from 1979 on, Said through the example of his
work on the problem, models the humanistic criticism he calls “secular” in essay
after essay published throughout the Arab and Western world.
In the Introduction to The Question of Palestine Said begins with the idea that
“the defining characteristic of Palestinian history—its traumatic national encounter
with Zionism—is unique to the region”30 – a statement in which Said highlights the
uniqueness of Palestinian history. Noting the success of Zionism as a European-
Said’s essay entitled “The Ideology of Difference” which will be treated further on
in which the Israeli ideology based in Jewish ideology of chosenness and
difference forms the basis even for the non-religious Israeli ideology underpinning
the concept of the Jewish state.
29
30
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxxv.
297
inspired nationalist ideology that was “so admirably successful in bringing Jews to
Palestine and constructing a nation for them, that the world has not been
concerned with what the enterprise meant in loss, dispersion, and catastrophe for
the Palestinian natives,”31 Said quotes Hannah Arendt’s acknowledgment, rarely
admitted by her compatriots, that the well-known success of the Zionist movement
spelled a far less well-known disaster for the people who had inhabited the land of
historic Palestine for century upon century:
After the [Second World] war it turned out that the Jewish question which
was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by
means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither
the problems of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all
other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely
produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the
number of the stateless by another 700,00-800,000 people.32
The only recently acknowledged Palestinian existence on the land that was
converted into the state of Israel is counterposed to the celebrated and lauded
success of Israel and its history. However, the very continued presence of
Palestinians on their land has created a question—that is, the question of
Palestine. Noting that in 1978 when he was writing the book, there was no
authoritative text on Palestinian history, the time had finally come—thirty years
later-- to question whether the depopulation, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine33
31
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxxix.
32
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1973), 290, quoted in The Question of Palestine, xxxix.
33
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006).
298
could possibly be justified, and if so, how so and if not, then what? Said frames the
question as follows:
By what moral or political standard are we expected to lay aside our claims
to our national existence, our land, our human rights? In what world is there
no argument when an entire people is told that it is juridically absent, even
as armies are led against it, campaigns conducted against even its name,
history changed so as to ‘prove’ its nonexistence?”34
Said goes on to underline the fact that “if there is no country called Palestine it is
not because there are no Palestinians,” both Christian and Muslim, whose
existence on the land is indisputable and which is the first point of the essay, The
Question of Palestine.35 Clearly identifying the question of Palestine as the
“center” of the “infinite complexities, problems, and conflicts” of the “Middle East,” a
region of the Orient that “from being a place ‘out there,’…became a place of
extraordinarily urgent and precise detail, a place of numerous subdivisions,” 36 Said
emphasizes that the fact that there is “a question of” implies a number of things: a
matter apart from others, a long-standing, intractable and insistent problem, and an
issue which is “uncertain, questionable, unstable.” Acknowledging that “today
Palestine does not exist except as a memory or, more importantly, as an idea, a
political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will,” Said’s
secular criticism aims to put before the reader the reality that, contrary to Golda
Meir’s 1969 flat denial of the existence of a Palestinian people, there is, indeed,
34
Said, The Question of Palestine, xxiii.
35
Said, The Question of Palestine, 5.
36
Said, The Question of Palestine, 4.
299
such a people struggling for their narrative to be admitted in the world of nations
and fairly dealt with.37 In the following statement quoted at length, Said plainly puts
forth the resulting crux of the matter which has been fully understood by few-- so
powerful is the commonly held belief in the West concerning Israel -…the plain and irreducible core of the Palestinian experience for the last
hundred years (now almost 140 years-- my addition) (is): that on the land
called Palestine there existed as a huge majority for hundreds of years a
largely pastoral, a nevertheless socially, culturally, and politically,
economically identifiable people whose language and religion were (for a
huge majority) Arabic and Islam, respectively. This people---or if one
wishes to deny them any modern conception of themselves as a people, this
group of people—identified itself with the land it tilled and lived on (poorly or
not is irrelevant), the more so after an almost wholly European decision was
made to resettle, reconstitute, recapture the land for Jews who were to be
brought there from elsewhere. So far as anyone has been able to
determine, there has been no example given of any significant Palestinian
gesture made to accept this modern reconquest or to accept that Zionism
has permanently removed Palestinians from Palestine. Such as it is, the
Palestinian actuality is today, was yesterday, and most likely tomorrow will
be built upon an act of resistance to this new foreign colonialism. But it is
more likely that there will remain the inverse resistance which has
characterized Zionism and Israel since the beginning: the refusal to admit,
and the consequent denial of, the existence of Palestinian Arabs who are
there not simply as an inconvenient nuisance, but as a population with an
indissoluble bond with the land.38
This is the background to The Question of Palestine which Said summarizes
simply as “the struggle between the Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle
between a presence and an interpretation, the former constantly appearing to be
overpowered and eradicated by the latter.”39 Said sets out to demonstrate how “the
37
Said, The Question of Palestine, 5.
38
Said, The Question of Palestine, 8.
39
Said, The Question of Palestine, 8.
300
contest between an affirmation” (of presence)” and a “denial” (through
interpretation) was made possible by certain “instruments of this contest and how
they shaped subsequent history so that this history now appears to confirm the
validity of the Zionist claims to Palestine thereby denigrating the Palestinian
claims.”40 Recalling the eighteenth and nineteenth century travel literature of
Nerval, Disraeli, Chateaubriand, Mark Twain, and Lamartine, Said marshals these
Western sources to support the claims of the Palestinian inhabitants of the land.41
Citing the small number of Jews living in Palestine in 1822 (24,000), prior to the
beginning of Zionist emigrations from Europe in the mid to late nineteenth century,
Said documents as a first step in his re-construction of the denied Palestinian
history the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestine’s inhabitants prior to
dispossession were Arab Palestinians.
However, Said points out that the imperial attitude enabled by European hubris
concerning Palestine is evident in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient in
which, despite numerous encounters with Arab peasants and townspeople in 1833,
Lamartine “announced that the territory was not really a country (presumably its
inhabitants not ‘real’ citizens), and therefore a marvelous place for an imperial or
colonial project to be undertaken by France.”42 This act of cancelation and
transcendence of an actual reality—the Palestinian residents of the land—by
means of a European idea and wish—“that the land be empty for development by a
40
Said, The Question of Palestine, 8.
In Bayoumi and Rubin, The Edward Said Reader, “An Interview with Edward W.
Said, Said raises the question of why “excluded voices” can not “look at oral
history… look at geographical evidence…look at the landscape…reconstruct out of
the silence what was either destroyed or excluded.” 425.
42 Said, The Question of Palestine, 9.
41
301
more deserving power,”43 is then repeated half a century later in the Zionist slogan
adopted as justification of the Zionist project: “a land without people for a people
without land.”44
The key point Said makes in this pivotal section that opens his work of reconstruction is that the West and the Zionist movement, as an outgrowth of
Western nationalism and persecution of European Jewry, joined knowledge and
representation of the Islamic Orient to its political will to power over it. Palestine is
a precise example of this conjoining of representation and knowledge with power in
utter disregard of the human rights of a whole people by both the Zionists and their
willing Western supporters in the seats of power in Great Britain and the United
States. Europe seeking an answer to “the Jewish question,” created a new
question that has had an immense cost for Palestinians, Jews, and others as the
results of the dispossession, submersion of truth, and denial of the most basic of
human rights of the Palestinian people, all done under the mantle of a profession of
the Enlightenment’s “secular” ideals as far as secular political Zionists are
concerned or alternatively, under divine sanction as interpretations of Judaism
allied with political Zionism see it. Either way, a superior idea is the basis for the
denial of the basic human rights of the Palestinian people.
Said forcefully reveals the discrepancy between a purportedly secular West’s
role in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the creation of the Jewish state of
43
44
Said, The Question of Palestine, 9.
Said, The Question of Palestine, 9. Said here attributes this slogan to Israel
Zangwill though there are disputes about who initially created this slogan which
though pithy absolutely denied reality and the rights of the inhabitants of Palestine
in favor of a Zionist future vision that created the current intractable problem of the
Palestinian resistance to Zionism and Israel.
302
Israel as a state for the Jewish people and not a democratic state of its native and
naturalized citizens, and the religious narrative and sensibility informing the West’s
acts of collusion with Zionism. In doing so, Said exhibits the signal quality of
“secular” criticism, that is, the quality of challenging received opinion and accepted
narratives as dogma in the interest of truth and as an intervention aimed at
disturbing the accepted version of truth. The irony and discrepancy between
Western claims of its own secularity and the actual persistence of what Said would
call its redisposed “religious” tendencies, its naturalized supernaturalism, and the
thinly veiled political motivations for its support of a Western born and nurtured
nationalism—Zionism-- based in a clearly religiously based narrative and a
scriptural claim to a land inhabited primarily by non-Jews for millennia, is evident in
the following passage:
For Palestine has always played a special role in the imagination and in the
political will of the West, which is where by common agreement modern
Zionism also originated. Palestine is a place of causes and pilgrimages. It
was the prize of the Crusades, as well as a place whose very name (and
endless historical naming and renaming of the place) has been an issue of
doctrinal importance. ….to call the place Palestine, and not, say Israel or
Zion is already an act of political will… My more important point is that so far
as the Arab Palestinian is concerned, the Zionist project for, and conquest
of, Palestine was simply the most successful and to date the most
protracted of many such European projects since the Middle Ages.45
Said’s counterposing of the European will in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century, which found common cause with the Zionist project, to the will
of the Arab Palestinian community of the land whose background since the
45
Said, The Question of Palestine, 9-10.
303
seventh century was rooted in the Arab Islamic idea and reality of Filastin suggests
that the commonly accepted idea of modern Israel is actually one of recent
provenance motivated by a desire to dispose of the tragic results of centuries old
animosities between Europeans and Jews, one which Europe and the United
States, especially in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust, felt obligated to
support in spite of the obvious derogation of Palestinian human rights to selfdetermination.
In another act of secular criticism, Said goes on to document in detail the
British, Zionist, and American statements and actions that show without any doubt
that the Jewish state was to be built on a forcibly ruined and ethnically cleansed,
land. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, termed it “ …a miraculous cleaning
of the land; the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.”46
Said also documents that the site of Zionist struggle was only partially in
Palestine—that the struggle to create an image and present it to the world in a
particularly compelling way was also waged, fueled, and supplied in Western
capitals. Though Britain had initially created the possibility of Israel being
established in Palestine, in the years following the great war, the years of the
British Mandate in Palestine 1922-1947, the Zionists presented the struggle as
being one between Britain and themselves, though the British in this period
facilitated an average nine percent increase in Jewish population through
immigration though the natural increase in population had been 1.5 percent per
year normally. In certain years it was much more than nine percent: In 1928 the
46
Said, The Question of Palestine, 22.
304
Jewish population increase was 28.7 per cent and in 1934 the Jewish increase was
25.9. Said comments that
The only way in which these brute, politically manipulated disproportions
between natives and nonnatives could be made acceptable was by the
rationale Balfour used. A superior idea to that of sheer number and
presence ought to rule in Palestine, and that idea—Zionism—was the one
given legitimacy right up until 1948, and after. (my emphasis)47
Lord Balfour’s 1917 declaration “take(s) for granted the higher right of a colonial
power to dispose of a territory as it saw fit,… especially when dealing with such a
significant territory as Palestine and with such a momentous idea as the Zionist
idea, (my emphasis) which saw itself as doing no less than reclaiming a territory
promised originally by God to the Jewish people, at the same time as it foresaw an
end to the Jewish problem.”48 Said’s point strikes at the moral epistemology of
imperialism, exposing the religious basis of the claims, not of the age-old religious
Zionism that had not actually sought the establishment of a Jewish state in
Palestine, but of what has been presented as a secular (non religious) political
Zionism. Said’s exposure of the role of imperial power in spite of contradictory
promises made to parties in the Middle East theater demonstrates that what really
mattered was not the fact of violations of promises made by the West, but Lord
Balfour’s sense of the priorities (his sense “as a privileged member of a superior
political, cultural, and even racial caste”).49 Said cites as an example the following
excerpt from a memorandum written in August 1919 by Balfour that shows not only
47
Said, The Question of Palestine, 23.
48
Said, The Question of Palestine, 13.
49
Said, The Question of Palestine, 16.
305
that this was not simply Balfour’s opinion;” it was a statement of policy that radically
altered the course of history, if not for the whole world, then certainly for the
700,000 Arabs and their descendants whose land was being pronounced upon. In
revealing the following statement, Said is highlighting his earlier point that the
contest has been staged as being between a “higher” and a “lower” reality:
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant [the Anglo-French
Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of former Ottoman colonies that as
a reward for supporting the Allies they could have their independence] is
even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in
that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose
even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present
inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been
going through the forms of asking what they are. The four great powers are
committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is
rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far
profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who
now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right. [emphasis added]50
In a section of the first chapter entitled “Palestine and the Liberal West,” Said
comments on the Balfour Declaration (and subsequent policy statements such as
the memorandum above provides adequate example of), and cites the central
importance of the declaration as having formed the juridical basis of Zionist claims
to Palestine first of all. Secondly and clearly related to the present thesis is the fact
that as Said summarizes it
… the declaration was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a nonEuropean territory, (c) in a flat disregard of both the presence and the
wishes of the native majority resident in that territory, an(d) it took the form
of a promise about this same territory to another foreign group, so that this
50
Quoted in Said, The Question of Palestine, 17.
306
foreign group might, quite literally, make this territory a national home for the
Jewish people.51
These facts demonstrate that the epistemological framework of imperialism in
which history is enacted by a European subject (Self) on a non-European object
(Other) was operative both in the way Balfour and the Zionists, whose
ethnically/religiously based nationalism arose in the European context of such
nationalism as well as during the age of European empire. The same
epistemological framework of imperialism, thus, was the framework in which
political Zionism arose and set its terms essentially appropriated from a
racially/ethnically based imperialism with a redisposed religious underpinning, a
“naturalized supernaturalism.” The binary structure inherent in Zionism’s “ideology
of difference” is the same structure inherent in modern imperialism, whose logic
always opposes a fully human Self to a less-than- human Other.
Said, Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire and other antiimperialist thinkers of the twentieth century seek to free their own thought and that
of others from the imperialist logic of the Self-Other binary, the logic out of which
traditional humanism arose, positing an oppositional humanism that does not
repeat the nationalist/imperialist logic of the Self (fully human) and the Other (not
fully human). A Palestinian response that refuses to adopt the
nationalist/imperialist logic of the Self and the Other is what Said sought to model
through secular criticism and hoped to extend through his own example. Said
admired and shared Frantz Fanon’s vision of the human and call for those
51
Said, The Question of Palestine, 15-16.
307
oppressed by imperialism and colonialism to create what he referred to as a “new
history of man.” Fanon had expressed his dissatisfaction with the enslaving,
oppressive concept of man that he had found enacted over 85% of the world’s
surface at the height of the imperialist age:
When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, that same
Europe where they [are] never done talking of Man, and where they never
[stop] proclaiming they [are] only anxious for the welfare of Man [though]
today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their
triumphs of the mind…, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an
avalanche of murders.52
Yet rather than conceive of a new concept of man through destruction or negation
of Europe, Fanon posited a dialectical process that would synthesize the
oppositions of Europe and its others into a wholly new concept of the human and a
“new history of man.” Said, similarly, as shall be shown through his works on the
question of Palestine, does not seek the negation of Israel through destruction, nor
a return to an imagined or sacralized Palestinian past, but seeks the creation of a
new reality, a new bi-national entity that preserves life, that enhances community,
that honors difference, and that allows for the existence and prosperous growth of
52
Quoted in Said, Said, The Question of Palestine, 15-16. See Fanon, Frantz,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Constance Farrington. The Wretched of the Earth (New
York: Grove Press), 1965.
308
the “two communities of suffering,”53 the Palestinians and the Israelis in the same
land.54
Pursuing the idea that self-representation and self-definition must be
conceptually consistent with a people’s collective memory, Said seeks to examine
the hitherto disallowed Palestinian perception of their history with Zionism. Thus,
Said’s genealogy of Zionism, begun in chapter one of The Question of Palestine
leads into the second chapter of The Question of Palestine, “Zionism from the
Standpoint of Its Victims.” Here Said, not oblivious of the what Zionism entailed for
Jews, that is the establishment of “Jewish political and religious selfdetermination—for Jewish national selfhood—to be exercised on the promised
land,”55 an undoubtedly positive outcome for the Jewish people especially after
their travails in Europe, raises the question of what Zionism entailed for non-Jews.
Utilizing literature such as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Moses Hess’s56
writings, Said points up three major ideas that infuse this literature and Zionist
53
Said, “Truth and Reconciliation,” 318.
54
Once considered unthinkable, the idea of one, democratic bi-national state has
gained the support of many thinkers, though the forces of separation and
exclusivism still carry the day. See Richard Falk, “Rethinking the Palestinian
Future,” Journal of Palestine Studies,168, XLII:4, Summer 2013, 73-85. Falk
concludes his article calling for a freeing of the political and moral imagination,
invoking Said’s vision and message, and pointing out that since World War II, in
the anticolonial struggles, “the side that ended up controlling the political
outcome…was not the side with military superiority but the winner of the legitimacy
war.” He goes on to cite the message at the heart of the Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions campaign (BDS), “which is building a global solidarity movement based
on nonviolent coercion. BDS seeks to make Israel and the United States rethink
their sense of ‘the feasible’ in light of the mounting costs and dangers associated
with the continuing denial of fundamental Palestinian rights. (85).
55
56
Said, The Question of Palestine, 56.
Moses Hess was an early Zionist.
309
writings in general from the beginning: “(a) the nonexistent Arab inhabitants, (b) the
complementary Western-Jewish attitude to an ‘empty’ territory, and (c) the
restorative Zionist project, which would repeat by rebuilding a vanished Jewish
state and combine it with modern elements like disciplined, separate colonies, a
special agency for land acquisition, etc.”57 Said’s argument for how Zionism was
able to succeed turns on a nexus between its attitudes to the native Arab
Palestinians and those of its European and American supporters. Extending the
argument of Orientalism in its specifically Palestinian manifestation, Said states
that “Laying claim to an idea and laying claim to a territory—given the
extraordinarily current idea that the non-European world was there to be claimed,
occupied, and ruled by Europe—were considered to be different sides of the same,
essentially constitutive activity, which had the force, the prestige, and the authority
of science.”58 Pointing to the racial theories of such biologists as Linnaeus, Buffon
and Cuvier, de Gobineau, and Spengler, Said demonstrates how science was
“deformed into rationalization for imperial domination,” and how the taxonomy of
linguistics supported the “taxonomy of a natural history deformed into a social
anthropology whose real purpose was social control, citing the theories of Bopp,
Jones, and Friedrich von Schlegel whose discovery of a structural connection
between families of languages led to an “unwarranted extension of an idea about
language families into theories of human types having determined ethno-cultural
and racial characteristics.”59 From this type of theorization, Said argues that
57
Said, The Question of Palestine, 68.
58
Said, The Question of Palestine, 74.
59
Said, The Question of Palestine, 74-75.
310
Schlegel and later Renan, developed their ideas about the differences between a
superior Aryan and an inferior non-Aryan mind, culture and society. However, in
Said’s estimation the most effective deformation of science into the philosophical,
legal and political theorization that undergirded political administration created a
tradition of philosophical empiricism that supported the idea of racial distinctions
among human beings into greater and lesser breeds of human beings. Supporting
these ideas, were the ideas on the social meaning of color (race) by such giants of
modern Western philosophical thought as Lock and Hume, making it axiomatic by
the middle of the nineteenth century that Europeans always ought to rule nonEuropeans. Said links this doctrine to Zionist practice and vision in Palestine.
Citing various late nineteenth century European thinkers in various fields of study
from philosophy to geography such as Robert Knox (The Races of Man), John
Westlake, and Emer de Vattel, and Paul Leroy-Beaulieu as well as the ideas
expressed through Conrad’s characters in the Heart of Darkness, Said
demonstrates the ideas animating the behaviors of imperialism and colonialism,
the intellectual and political milieu in which political Zionism formed. Stating that
“Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly
unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European
metropolitan society,”60 Said draws the parallels between the Zionist project, its
history in Palestine, and the cultural, intellectual, political support it received from
Europe first, followed by that of the United States. This historical review is first to
establish the facts of the history and second “to record the effects of Zionism on its
victims,” reiterating the imperative that “these effects can only be studied
60
Said, The Question of Palestine, 78.
311
genealogically in the framework provided by imperialism, even during the
nineteenth century when Zionism was still an idea and not a state called Israel.” 61
Here Said invokes Antonio Gramsci’s observation that “the consciousness of
what one really is…is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to
date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an
inventory.”62 Gramsci advocated the compilation of an inventory as a priority which
Said adopts because the inventory of what Zionism’s victims…endured had been
largely buried in locked archives. As a first step toward Palestinian selfrepresentation, the making of this inventory is an act of secular criticism aimed at
Fanon’s “new idea of man,” a new idea of human community. The dominating
ideas that emerge from Said’s body of work on Palestine as a new concept that
Israeli Jews and Palestinians have the opportunity to enact, a model of human
community that defies the current models immersed in exclusivist nationalist
mentalities. Said envisions the kind of human community that a bi-national
democratic state of Jews and Palestinian could become
as a collective, absorptive, embracing, heterogeneous, and infinitely openended striving rather than the violent, fractured, binary conception of
humanity underlying European imperialism, with its opposition of the human
to the subhuman and of self to other—the conception, in short, on which
Zionism stands.63
61
Said, The Question of Palestine, 73.
62
Quoted in Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books), 25.
63
Makdisi, “Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation,” 89.
312
Makdisi adds his view that “the idea of Palestine for which Said worked amounted
to both an engagement with and a transcendence of the distorting, violent, and
finally, quite inhuman logic of Zionism.”64 Though judged an idealistic utopian
conception of humanity and the future, especially in light of the Palestinian-Israeli
realities of the moment, Said’s notion of humanism and the human, is seen by him
as fully achievable, still a hope within many Palestinian and Israeli hearts and
minds, this idea of a human community built with rather than against other human
beings. Said’s eloquent appeal in 1988 expresses best the idea of Palestine,
worthy of quoting at length:
We say to the Israelis … live with us, but not on top of us. Your logic, by
which you forecast an endless siege, is doomed, the way all colonial
adventures are doomed. We know that Israelis possess a heritage of
suffering, and that the Holocaust looms large over their present thought.
But we Palestinians cannot be expected merely to submit to military rule and
the denial of our human and political rights…. Therefore, we must together
formulate the modes of existence, of mutuality and sharing, those modes
that can take us beyond fear and suffering into the future, and an
extraordinarily interesting and impressive future at that.65
In the next section, key pieces in Said’s large body of work on the PalestinianIsraeli issue following The Question of Palestine are examined as Said’s enormous
contribution to providing a sustained model of secular criticism that challenges
Zionism and the Zionist state and that also challenges Palestinian positions,
behaviors and attitudes that fail in what Said proposed to the be essential objective
and methodology that leads to universal human liberation in the land of historic
64
Makdisi, “Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation,” 89.
65
Makdisi, “Said, Palestine, and the Humanism of Liberation,” 89.
313
Palestine. This body of work on the Palestinian question constitutes an intellectual
statement that questions every foundational myth that has resulted in the
inexorable dispossession of the Palestinian people as well as the exclusion of the
Palestinian narrative from the Western public. Among the works that comprise this
category are The Politics of Dispossession, Peace and Its Discontents, The End of
the Peace Process, From Oslo to Iraq, and interviews from 1994-2003 compiled in
several volumes including Power, Politics, and Culture, Conversations with Edward
Said, The Pen and the Sword, Interviews with Edward Said, and Culture and
Resistance.
6.3 Said’s Essays 1969-1994: The Politics of Dispossession: The
Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination
Following his 1979 book The Question of Palestine, which has been examined
in the previous section as a model of Said’s signal concept and practice secular
criticism, Said expanded his critical project on Palestine and the Arab-Islamic world
though a series of essays (some which predated The Question of Palestine), often
articulated as immediate responses to recent crises in the life of Palestine and the
Palestinian and the Arab world, and which had appeared in a variety of books,
magazines, journals and newspapers, later published as The Politics of
Dispossession in 1994.66 In the present discussion, two essays in the collection
stand out as pressing forward a critique of the centrality and factual basis of the
66
The book divides the essays into three groupings: (1) Palestine and the
Palestinians,(2) The Arab World, and (3) Politics and Intellectuals. Some of these
essays have been referenced in chapter five which addresses Said’s work of
criticism on the Arab-Islamic world.
314
dispossessing and obliterating aims and actions of political Zionism and the state
of Israel and of the concomitant suppression of historical context and Palestinian
narrative. Said’s critique addresses the ideological-religious basis of Zionism
which he contrasts with the notion of Palestinianism. Said, in pressing forth the
non-exclusivist universal and secular values of Palestinianism, forthrightly
addresses the failures of the PLO and of Yasser Arafat demonstrating Said’s
unwavering commitment to democracy and equal human rights. True to its
principle of opposing tyranny and injustice, Said’s secular criticism addresses
violations of these basic values without regard to outcomes or consequences.
6.4 An Ideology of Difference
In the 1985 essay “An Ideology of Difference” Said details the three elements
that constitute what is undeniably a religiously and ethnically based nationalism,
that is an ideology of difference that forms the foundation of the state of Israel as it
is presently constituted. In an earlier essay, “The Palestinian Experience” (196869), Said examines the relationship between Zionism and its appropriation of the
exclusivist elements within Judaism, interpreting Israel’s consolidations of its
national existence as manifest in what he calls “the place apart of Judaism.” 67
These essays enunciate the essential basis for Said’s elaboration of a counterposition which inheres in all his other works on the question of Palestine-Israel and
serves to demonstrate how Said’s work on Palestine should be understood as
synecdochal of his entire critical project.
67
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 17.
315
Said cites the three bases on which “anomalous norms, exceptional arguments,
eccentric claims” had become the accepted standard for the actions of Israel’s
existence and its behavior. These are that (1) Israel was established in 1948 as a
Jewish state, which is “on national, religious, cultural, juridical, and political
grounds different from any other state.”68 (2) In “public, juridical and international
practice, Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and not a sovereign, independent
state of its citizens, who happen to be non-Jewish as well as Jewish.”69 This was
established in Israel’s earliest days, when the People’s Council debates resulted in
a decision that as a state Israel would and could not be independent of all the
Jewish people, Israeli and non-Israeli. Said points out several consequences of this
fact which have been well documented from daily reports in the Israeli press to
studies by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the
Israeli group B’Tselem, and UN bodies, Western journalists, church and civic
groups, and not least by dissenting Israelis such as Israel Shahak, Jeff Halper and
the Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and numerous other
Israeli individuals and organizations. These consequences include the fact that
non-Jews in Israel have fundamentally fewer and different rights than Jewish
Israelis. In addition, Israel has no internationally declared borders and no
constitution. Add to all of this that Basic Laws such as The Law of Return and the
Nationality Law allow any Jew anywhere in the world to immigrate to Israel and to
acquire Israeli citizenship while no Palestinian Israeli has this right, although he or
she may have owned property in Palestine and whose family had lived there for
68
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 86.
69
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 86.
316
hundreds of years. (3) Non-Jews in Israel are separated in particular ways from
Jews in the Jewish state and are referred to as Palestinians, that is, present or
former native Arab inhabitants of what is now referred to as historical….Palestine.70
Said’s exposure of these three basic facts about the nature of the Zionist state
provides the precise basis for the ideology of difference that is based in a
theological claim of “choseness” of a people who therefore have a different
relationship to God from that of any other group of people. This theologically based
idea translates into what has been claimed to be an inherent right, articulated by
nineteenth century political Zionists as a special relationship between Jews and
“The Land of Israel.” Said’s critical response is to counter-pose Palestinianism to
Zionism as a political philosophy “whose premise is the need for forging
connections and more important, the existential need to find modes of knowledge,
coexistence, and justice that are not based on coercive separation and unequal
privilege.” Said here and in numerous places throughout his writing points out that
separateness and the idea of unmixed pure essences is a shibboleth.71 He argues
that one can be “for difference (as opposed to sameness or homogenization)
without at the same time being for the rigidly enforced and policed separation of
populations into different groups.”72 Thus, while the preservation of a people’s
uniqueness and traditions can be a positive element in the fashioning of a diverse
society, the use of “difference” to relegate the rights of others to inferior status, or
70
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 85-86.
71
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 86-87.
72
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 86-87.
317
to the rights of one’s own group as a priori superior, sets up prisons of mind and
bodies.
Let us say that we can reinterpret ideologies of difference only because we
do so from an awareness of the supervening actuality of ‘mixing,’ or
crossing over, of stepping beyond boundaries, which are more creative
human activities than staying inside rigidly policed borders.73
Said concludes the essay arguing against the natural tendency of reaction to
injustice to perpetrate the same injustice on the Other. Said sees that the striving
for
a more creative sense of ‘difference,’ one that acknowledges, the historical,
cultural, and material distinctions between Jews and Palestinian Arabs,
while refusing to privilege the experience or the contemporary situation of
either, we shall, it is to be hoped, produce a whole new dynamic in this
relationship. …The difficult task is to realize them in the world, a task that
must begin with a new logic in which ‘difference’ does not entail
‘domination.’
In his edited 1988 book Blaming the Victims, Said follows up on his 1983 essay
“Permission to Narrate” that shows how the shift occurred from the image of the
Palestinian as non-existent, absent, or sub-human that had been the main Zionist
position until Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the subsequent primary image of
the Palestinian as “terrorist.” Said exposes the rationale for incorporating the
charge of “terror” into Israel’s master narrative: “The main thing is to isolate your
enemy from time, from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or
her as ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own
73
Edward Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 89-90.
318
sake.”74 Utilizing this fear-inspiring image, the Zionist portrayal of the Palestinian
as “terrorist” has been able to garner great support because a belief that
Palestinians are somehow in their essence irrational, hateful, and murderous,
seeking out innocent Jewish victims added to the easy reversal of fact—that is,
that it is the Palestinian who does not belong to the land who is trying to evict,
harm, eliminate the Jew who is believed to be indigenous and who does belong to
the land (this, relying on scriptural claims of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament)—
makes it much easier to condemn all Palestinian resistance action as an outrage
against life and liberty—the highest of Western values. “Sequence, the logic of
cause and effect as between oppressors and victims, opposing pressures—these
all vanish inside an enveloping cloud called terrorism.”75 The control of the
narrative and the effective images associated with it in ways that cause people in
the west to identify emotionally with the Israelis as a result of the long history of
Orientalist representations of the Arab-Islamic world has been key to Zionist
success in furthering its own goals of creating “a land without people for a people
without land.”76
In a 2004 interview between Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit and Israeli historian
Benny Morris, following his revised edition of his 1987 The Birth of the Palestinian
Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in which using the Israeli government archives, he
shows that the 700,000 Palestinians had either been expelled or forced to flee
74
Edward W. Said and C. Hitchens, eds., Blaming the Victims: Spurious
Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London: Verso, 1988), 154.
75
Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 257.
Israel Zangwill’s expression was later appropriated by other Zionists and is still in
currency among Zionists today.
76
319
during the 1948 war on the population by Zionist forces, Morris tells Shavit that
additional research he had done into the Israel Defense Force archives had
demonstrated that “there were far more Israeli acts of massacre” during the 1948
war “than (he) had previously thought… and many cases of rape,” many of which
ended with [the] murder of the Palestinian victims.” 77 Morris’s work, like that of
several other Israeli historians such as Ilan Pappé, Sammy Smooha, Simha
Flaphan, and Tom Segev, corroborated much of the Palestinian historical narrative
that had been unheard or unheeded in the West that Palestinian scholars such as
Walid Khalidi and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod in the seventies prior to Said’s The
Question of Palestine had begun to document in their books.78 The interview
between Shavit and Morris in 2004 clearly corroborates the Palestinian narrative
that for decades had been denied. Morris is quite sanguine about it all, seeing the
expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from the land as necessary to the establishment
of the state of Israel. Only about 150,000 Palestinians remained on the land, many
of them made refugees from their native areas into areas that are now Israel, with
the rest who remained forced into camps in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.
What emerges from the interview is confirmation of everything that Israel had
always denied. And still, the Israeli (Zionist) ability to control the narrative leaves
the truth of the Palestinian dispossession a fact of history that has not been
77
78
Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest,” 44.
Said was not the first to identify the organic connection between Zionism and
European imperialism and colonialism, but he deconstructed it and enunciated it in
a more critical fashion than his predecessors and was able to attract more attention
after Orientalism had made such an impact for the elaboration of the thesis in The
Question of Palestine. See Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest (Beirut:
Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971) and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, ed., The
Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the ArabIsraeli Conflict (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.)
320
remedied in any way. A portion of the interview is reproduced to convey the official
Israeli stance on the dispossession of the Palestinians and the establishment of the
state of Israel:
Shavit: So when the commanders of Operation Dani [an Israeli military
operation in which thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from
their homes by Zionist forces in 1948] are standing there and observing the
long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod [sic]
walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?
Morris: I definitely understand them. I understand their motive. I don’t think
they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn’t have felt
pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and
the state would not have come into being.
Shavit: You do not condemn them morally?
Morris: No.
Shavit: They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.
Morris: There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I
know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the twenty-first
century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—
the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing.
Shavit: And that was the situation in 1948?
Morris: That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state
would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000
Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no
choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the
hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was
necessary to clean the villages from which our convoys and our settlements
were fired on.
Shavit: The term “to cleanse” is terrible.
Morris: I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the
time. I adopted it from the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.
Shavit: What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You
sound hard-hearted.
321
Morris: I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a
hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire
to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. 79
Said’s analysis of the idea of Zionism, the idea behind the action, the provenance
of the establishment of Israel on a land ethnically cleansed by murder, force, and
expulsion is a strong counter to the official Israeli version of things. However, the
moral and intellectual idea of Zionism that had already been incorporated into the
Western world’s acceptance of the conquest of Palestine, particularly in the United
States, carries tremendous weight.
Beginning in the early nineteen nineties, Said’s criticism attacks the
disingenuous role of the United States which had followed in the footsteps of
France and Britain following the Second World War with a masterful construction in
the American media of image, language and ideas designed to cast the
Palestinians always as terrorist and the Israelis always as innocent victims. Said’s
criticism of America’s role in the exacerbation rather than resolution of the
Palestinian question deconstructs and displays the neo-imperialism of the United
States in its creation after the fall of the Soviet Union of “a new world order, “in
which the United States policy was to employ a set of terms and pieties that would
be swallowed whole by the American public-- so hegemonic had the culture of
religious nationalism become especially in the wake of the Viet Nam war. Said
argues in “U.S. Policy and Conflict of Powers in the Middle East” that
one of the most ominous developments in the Middle East since the era of
avowedly secret agreements by the powers on the disposition of spheres of
79
Shavit, ”Survival of the Fittest,” 44.
322
influence has been the rise of a public policy consisting of the traditional
Realpolitik but incorporating the terminology of a liberal mutual interest,
respect, and assistance platform against extremism and disorder; even as
far as the less evident underside of that platform is a thoroughly ruthless
instrument for quashing or containing the slightest social restiveness or
protest.80
Said’s critical view of the highly effective but wholly false manipulation of opinion
by the official statements by United States policy vis-à-vis Palestine-Israel on
“freedom,” and “democracy,” and most important—“peace”— in essay after essay
incorporates fact and detail about the realities of Palestine-Israel. Said’s effort
becomes more polemical as facts on the ground result in the loss of more land and
the continued denials of basic human rights to the Palestinians, particularly in the
Occupied Territories. Said’s deconstruction of American foreign policy in PalestineIsrael and the Middle East generally become more frequent as the United States
succeeds in convincing its public of its benign intentions and of Israel’s closeness
to the United States while demanding ever more of the Palestinians.
Studying the terms of each successive proposed agreement, it becomes clear
that U.S. –Israeli policy would see to the eventual obliteration of any possibility of a
viable, independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, 22% of historic
Palestine, a concept that, against his philosophical better judgment in favor of one,
secular, democratic state for Jews and Palestinians (i.e. the citizens of the land),
Said had been one of the architects of and voices in Algiers in 1988 that had
announced the recognition of Israel and the agreement for a Palestinian state in
the 22% that Gaza and the West Bank represented. Seeing that the facts on the
80
Said, The Politics of Dispossession, 207.
323
ground following the 1988 PLO capitulation resulted in continued dispossession,
brutality, and virtually no movement on a state, Said reversed course returning to
his original conviction that one secular democratic state for Jews and Palestinians
on the historic land of Palestine was the only valid position. Additionally, with the
Western led war on Iraq in 1991 and the announcement by George H.W. Bush of
“a new world order,” following Iraq’s defeat, the United States continued and
strengthened relationships with the so-called “moderate” Arab regimes of Saudi
Arabia and the other GCC nations, Mubarak’s Egypt and, Ben Ali’s Tunisia, Said
in numerous articles printed in Arabic across the Arab world, attacks not only
American duplicity, double-standards, and hidden but evident motivations, but most
importantly, he begins a critical campaign on the lack of democracy and human
rights in the Arab world. He repeatedly called on the people of the Arab world to
form democratic movements throughout the nineties until his death in 2003.
Though he seemed at the time “ a voice in the wilderness” if the irony of the
religious metaphor can be tolerated, his persistent message to civil societies of the
Arab world may have had some influence leading to the events of 2011 in Egypt,
Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria.
Also notable in the essays of the nineties is Said’s consistently secular criticism
of every form of ideological approach to resistance against injustice. Said is
particularly insistent against the dangers and false promises of religious
nationalisms and nationalistic religions and he is generally negative toward every
Islamist party from Gama’a al Islamiya in Egypt to Hamas in the Palestinian
territories as he toward interpretations of Judaism that support political Zionism in
its exclusivist mode. He also attacks the Christian Lebanese nationalism of the
324
Maronite Christians and their complicity with Israel. Although in the fifth chapter of
the present study, the possibility that Said understood the Islamist movements as
national resistance movements to imperialism, colonialism and the undemocratic
ruling Arab regimes and that he may have seen some value in that religious-based
resistance was examined, as introduced by Gauri Viswanathan in “Said, Religion
and Secular Criticism,” the weight of Said’s negative statements against the
Islamists of the Arab world, must lead to the conclusion that, while he understands
their provenance as oppositional, he questions whether their goals are liberatory.
In his strong distrust of ideological systems whether religiously based or otherwise,
he remains opposed to and skeptical of Islamism, not primarily because of Islam
but because of his belief that religion turned into ideology is the enemy of human
liberation.
Prior to and particularly following the 1993 signing of the Declaration of
Principles on Interim Self-Governing Arrangements (DOP) between Israel and the
PLO on the White House lawn, Said ramps up his public criticism arguing that the
DOP is nothing more than a “Palestinian Versailles” and in numerous essays
derides the failure of integrity and dedication to justice for the Palestinians of
Yasser Arafat, decrying his obsequiousness, dictatorial ways, and incompetence.
Said declares the negotiators of both Israel and the United States dishonest and
revealed back-door deals and a general disingenuousness, exposing the unknown
truths about the agreements that would never allow for Palestinian independence
or self-determination, nor a viable and sovereign state out of the minuscule amount
325
of land that had not been appropriated by Israel.81 Invited by President Clinton to
the signing ceremony and celebration of “peace,” Said’s conspicuous absence is a
dramatic act of criticism in itself. Given his conviction that the DOP would ensure
the impossibility of a Palestinian state, would not address the right of return of
refugees, nor reparations, Said’s refusal to support the DOP and the Oslo “peace
process” in 1993 is only the beginning of a tenyear period of constant but lonely
efforts to continue to publicize the truth of precisely how Israel with massive
United States financial and unwavering moral support used the DOP to ensure that
there would be nothing left for the Palestinians to make a state out of by
appropriating more and more Palestinian owned land for Jewish use only, now that
the PLO had not only declared recognition of the right of Israel to exist in 1988 but
had capitulated to Israel’s refusal to deal at all with the refugee issue, Jerusalem,
borders, settlements, and water—that is, every issue inherent in the question of
justice for the Palestinians.
6.5 “Secular” Criticism and the Arab World
Following September 13, 1993, in Peace and Its Discontents Said for the first
time, produces essays with an Arab audience in mind. They are written originally
for al-Hayat, edited in London but printed across the Arab world on a bi-weekly
In retaliation, Said’s books were banned by Arafat in the occupied territories.
See “The Theory and Practice of Banning Books and Ideas,” in Said, The End of
the Peace Process, 69-73.
81
326
basis; they were also published in Cairo’s Al Ahram- Weekly.82 In the Arab edition
of the book, he added a few articles on the United States intended for an Arab
audience unaccustomed to the type of views Said expressed. Said characterized
the period from September 1993 through summer 1995 as “extraordinarily dramatic
and… tragic.”83 In this period, the massacre and maiming in February 1994 of
dozens of Palestinians at Jumu’ah prayer in Hebron by a New York settler, Baruch
Goldstein, the assassination of Rabin by an extremist Israeli, and suicide bombings
by Palestinians, had led to ever more intolerable and volatile situations. Topics for
Said’s criticism now included not only the details of Israel’s continued policies of
brutality, dispossession and occupation, all illegal under international law, and not
only the exposition of little understood and poorly reported United States foreign
policy in the Middle East, but Said also addressed the failures of the PLO with
Chairman Arafat as its fawning leader seeking only his own survival, who until that
time Said had argued was the sole representative of the Palestinian people. Said
was truly a lone voice in insistently turning out essays revealing what few writers of
international stature or with a national audience in the United States would dare to
say. The first piece in the book entitled “The PLO’s Bargain,” was published in The
Guardian, The Nation, Al Hayat and Al-Ahram Weekly just before the handshake
between Rabin-Arafat and Clinton in Washington, DC. Said concludes his expose
82
Only four appeared in American newspapers of magazines though several were
published in the French, Spanish, British, and Swedish press. For the English
language edition, Said added a few articles and an interview done after the
publication of the Arab book.
83
Edward W. Said, Peace and Its Discontents (New York: Vintage, 1993[1996]),
xxiii.
327
of what had actually been going on with his perennial message reminding the
Palestinians especially
Our struggle is about freedom and democracy; it is secular and, for a long
time—indeed, up until the last couple of years—it was fairly democratic.
Arafat has canceled the intifada unilaterally, with possible results in further
dislocations, disappointments, and conflict that bode poorly for both
Palestinians and Israelis. In recent years Arafat’s PLO (which is our only
national institution) refused to mobilize its various dispersed constituencies
to attract its people’s best talents. Now it may try to regain the loyalty and
compliance it expects before it plunges into a new phase, having seemed to
mortgage its future without serious debate, without adequate preparation,
without telling its people the full and bitter truth. Can it succeed, and still
represent the entire Palestinian nation?84
Said could not have been more correct about the projected outcomes of the DOP.
The reality became evident that the “peace process” was a ploy for Israel to
increase settlement activity in the West Bank that goes on unabated twenty years
hence. The PLO and Israel under the Oslo Accords established interim
agreements over a five-year period (1993-99) that were hailed as constituting the
basis for a final settlement of their conflict based on the “land for peace” formula
outlined in U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). Although
the PLO had recognized “the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and
security,” Israel offered only recognition of the PLO as the representative of the
Palestinian people and no more; there was no firm agreement by Israel to admit
the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own with peace and security, nor was
there an agreement to end the military occupation of the Palestinian territories of
the West Bank and Gaza, nor any agreement about how to rectify the issue of the
84
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, 7.
328
massive destruction of Palestinian lives and property.85 The only outcome of the
Oslo Accords was the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) which would
manage selected local and civil affairs for the Palestinian population in the
Occupied Territories. Areas “A,” “B,” and “C” –non-contiguous administrative areas
that the PA only had jurisdiction over only in “A” and “B” which totaled no more
than 21% of the total area of the Occupied Territories and just 5% of historical
Palestine.86
Said, though clearly demoralized, continues his critical campaign. His
motivation: “the need to tell the truth and not to let the language of hypocrisy,
flattery, and self-delusion rule.”87 His project of secular criticism, of going against
the grain of platitude, party platform and piety, required redoubled efforts as
enemies increased and friends disappeared. His own purpose in continuing the
exposes: “In a very honest way…this book is meant to stir up debate and to open
up discussion. I am neither a political scientist nor a prophet with a new vision.” 88
85
G. Watson, The Oslo Accords: International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian
Peace Agreements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 315-316.
86
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xxxi. When the inevitable occurred, Arafat
expressed dismay. Of Arafat’s expressed frustration and humiliation by Israel, Said
asks: “What did he expect when he signed an agreement with his people’s
oppressor, and when he canceled that people’s past and its future rights, as well
as its present hopes?
Though the Oslo language had stated that “neither side shall initiate or take any
step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the
outcome of final status negotiations,” since 1993, Israel has more than doubled the
number of settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem through the construction of
illegal Jewish settlements, bypass road for Jewish use only, and the “security wall”
in the West Bank (declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004) and
yet continuing.
87
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xxx.
88
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xxx
329
Said would remain what his literary studies had trained him to be: a thinker and a
critic, seeking “Palestine… as an idea that…galvanized the Arab world into thinking
about and fighting for social justice, democracy, an a different kind of future than
the one that has been imposed on it by force and by an absence of Arab will.” 89
True to the notion of the truth-telling vocation of the intellectual and his conviction
that “solidarity before criticism means the end of criticism,”90 Said continues to
raise questions in the Arab and Western press (though not much of his material
was published in the United States.) He attacks Arab and Palestinian subservience
and self-interest as well as a weak-minded adherence to simplistic solutions. He
calls attention, however, to the fact that the only group who seemed to be
addressing these problems were the Islamists:
Why don’t our intellectuals feel it their duty to tell the truth about the pitfalls
of Gaza-Jericho and to say that we have signed an agreement that gives
Israel control over our affairs with our cooperation. Perhaps too many of us
have internalized the norms prevailing in most of the Arab world, that you
must always serve a master, that you must defend your patron and attack
his enemy, and that you must be careful not to harm your chances of a good
career and a handsome reward, Language has been degraded into slogans
and clichés…. What one misses in current Arab and Palestinian culture is a
moral and intellectual standard by which truth and falsehood can be
distinguished and according to which intellectuals act regardless of profit or
patronage. Perhaps the Islamic resurgence with which I am not in sympathy
speaks to that lack.91
89
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xxxiii.
90
Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 28.
91
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xxxi.
330
Here there is a hint that Said understands the growing influence of Hamas in the
Occupied Territories though he is skeptical of all Islamists. He sees that the Hamas
leadership had potential as powerful critics gaining a popular base due to their
reputation at the time for honesty, integrity, and incisive criticism of Israeli lies and
duplicity, but as religiously ideological— they were anathema to Said’s anti-system
critical sense. In envisioning the only outcomes that could possibly come of the
1993 capitulations of the DOP and the “peace process,” Said knows that things
would have to blow apart, anticipating the 2000 intifadah:
Will Palestinians in the Occupied Territories long endure the servility and
incompetence of their leaders as well as the continued unfairness of an
occupation regime and its vast web of colonial settlements? Can Arafat last
in his people’s eyes as simply another Arab despot, albeit one working hand
in glove with the very state that destroyed his people’s society and has
enslaved and persecuted their survivors? Will the Gaza-Jericho enclaves
collapse under the pressures of poverty and hopelessness? Will a new
vision, a new leadership rise from Palestinian ranks to project renewed hope
and determination?92
6.6 A “secular” dilemma for Said? The “New Leadership”
Hamas would come to be that new leadership, not the secular leadership that
Said wanted to see develop, but in the eyes of the Palestinians, in the nineties and
first decade after 2000, Hamas had attained credibility among the Palestinians.
Said, of course, passed away in 2003 and did not live to see the democratic
election in 2006 of the “new leadership” that would be prevented from taking power
in the West Bank in favor of the docile and toothless Palestinian Authority. For
Said, this would have presented a dilemma: Could a democratically elected
92
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xxxv.
331
(strongly) religiously-affiliated representative of the whole Palestinian people have
the power as well as the “secular” vision to provide an effective counter to Israel?
Said expresses in several essays that he thinks that in a political contest against
secular parties, Islamists both in Palestine and across the Arab-Islamic world
would not gain mainstream support. He implies that the Arab world is simply too
diverse in its thinking and that Islamist parties are too simplistic, tending to a false
sense of how Islam’s early days could form a model for twenty-first century
governance, social and political life. Clearly he sees Islamists as one strongly
resistant alternative to Arab dictators, ruling families, and to Israeli injustices. But
he consistently expresses his belief that the secular (non-religious) alternatives, if
they are sufficiently resistant to the intolerable lack of human rights and social
justice, will be the preferred alternative. Given that since his death, both in
Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia, Islamist Parties have turned out to be the people’s
choice, one has to question whether Said was himself being “secular’ enough
and critical enough in his assessments of the appeal of the Islamists, whose
thought he had been dismissive of without a great deal of familiarity with Islamist
thought. His secular (non-religious) bias seems to jeopardize his capacity to
assume that a religiously-affiliated party such as Hamas could not operate
according to his own implicit definition of what it means to be “secular,” that is,
oppositional yet critically so. He is doubtful that being unified by religious principles
and their interpretation that such religiously strengthened “resisters” could also be
capable of tolerance and fairness to those who differ from them. Said does
understand the resistance factor in the popularity and respect won among
Palestinians by Hamas in particular and clearly voices that he is aware that it is not
religion per se but resistance and integrity that underpin the success of the
332
religiously-based opposition. In “The Middle East ‘Peace Process,’” Said says of
Hamas and Islamic Jihad that they
are part of the continuing protest and should be understood as that. Their
suicide missions, bomb throwing, and provocative slogans are acts of
defiance principally, refusals to accept the crippling conditions of Israeli
occupation and Palestinian (PLO) collaboration. No matter how much
secular people like myself lament their methods and their vision(such as it
is), there is no doubting the truth that for many Palestinians these people
express a furious protest against the humiliations, demeanments, and
denials imposed on all Palestinians as a people. It is ironic that Hamas,
having been encouraged by Israel in the 1980s as a tool for breaking the
PLO and the intifada, should be elevated to the rank of superdevil.93
Said implies that the representation of Hamas is false though he takes a distance
from their violent resistance and “their vision” on which he does not elaborate, but
toward which he is clearly negative. Notable in Said’s writing about extremist
Islamists, which is always general and allusive, is that he uses the opportunity to
convey his concern for the commonalities among all fundamentalists and
fundamentalisms, all forms of extremism, not only Islamist forms. Said’s insistent
reminders that extremism, political violence, and religiously based ideologies are a
human problem, not one instigated by or unique to Islam are displayed in an article
published in France, Britain, and the Arab world immediately following the Al
Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001, entitled “Collective Passion.” In pointing
out the main fault he sees with “religious or moral fundamentalists” Said always
includes all extremists of whatever religion, ideology or stripe, emphasizing the
commonality among all who are willing “to kill or be killed” and who “seem all too
easily attached to technological sophistication and what appear to be gratifying
93
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, 156.
333
acts of horrifying symbolic savagery”94 He laments the lack of liberatory vision and
positive planning of the disaffected and angry who turn to violence as a solution—
on all sides—and in the same breath faults the “secular intellectuals” who have not
done enough to improve the lot of the oppressed who easily fall for the seduction of
ideological (“religious”) violence. Said’s secular criticism spares no one and fears
no reprisal. His across- the -board criticism picks out the similarities rather than the
differences between the “religious” of the West and the East and presciently
assesses what now is all too well known to be true: that the “religious” response of
violence would lead to nothing more than more suffering, as the results of the wars
against Afghanistan and Iraq have overwhelmingly proven. Said’s plea for
rationality, patient response, and “secular” approaches to the problems of injustice
went unheeded though as he says in his last line of the article that there are many
people across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East who demonstrated
and spoke out for the rational and patient approach but got mindless war and
violence instead from their “leadership.”95
Instead of getting a wise leadership that stresses education, mass
mobilization, and patient organization in the service of a cause … are often
conned into the magical thinking and quick bloody solutions that such
appalling models provide, wrapped up in lying religious claptrap. This
remains true in the Middle East generally, in Palestine in particular, but also
in the United States, surely the most religious of all countries. It is also a
major failure of the class of secular intellectuals not to have redoubled their
efforts to provide analysis and models to offset the undoubted sufferings of
the large mass of their people, immiserated and impoverished by globalism
and an unyielding militarism with scarcely anything to turn to except blind
violence and vague promises of future salvation….
94
Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process, 2000 (2002), 373-4
95
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, 375.
334
“Islam” and “the West” are simply inadequate banners to follow blindly.
Some will run behind them… but for future generations to condemn
themselves to prolonged war and suffering without so much as a critical
pause, without looking at interdependent histories of injustice and
oppression, and without trying for common emancipation and mutual
enlightenment seems far more willful than necessary. Demonization of the
Other is not a sufficient basis for any kind of decent politics, certainly not
now, when the roots of terror in injustice and misery can be addressed and
the terrorist themselves easily isolated, deterred, or otherwise put out of
business. It takes patience and education, but it is more worth the
investment than still greater levels of large-scale violence and suffering.96
Inexorably the ironies of a “peace process” that produced for the Palestinian more
expropriations of land, more home demolitions, more tortured prisoners, a ratio of
100 to 1 killed (Palestinian to Israeli), maimed and injured between the Palestinian
and Israeli populations, led to despair and revolt among the Palestinian population,
an inevitable result of constant provocations. In The End of the Peace Process,
Said’s essays of 1995-2002 written mostly for the Arab and European press,
enunciate a perspective rarely expressed in the Unites States press. Here Said
continues his struggle “to chronicle the final official chapter of the Oslo peace
process, to lay bare its assumptions, to detail its accomplishments and, much
more, its failures, and above all, to show ho despite the tremendous media and
governmental attention lavished on it, it can neither lead to a real peace nor likely
provide for one in the future. “97
96
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, 374-5.
97
Said, Peace and Its Discontents, xx.
335
Said produces 65 essays in this period that are collected into the book, essays
that had appeared in various European countries, and regularly in the Arab press.
The titles of his critical interventions are illuminating: “How Much and For How
Long?”, “Where Negotiations Have Led,” “Elections, Institutions and Democracy,
“Total Rejection and Total Acceptance are Equivalent,” “The Theory and Practice
of Banning Books and Ideas,” “Uprising against Oslo,” “The Campaign Against
‘Islamic Terror,’” “Bombs and Bulldozers,” “Bases for Coexistence,” “Strategies for
Hope,” “Reparations: Power and Conscience,” “Truth and Reconciliation,” “South
Lebanon and After,” “The End of Oslo,” “Emerging Alternatives in Palestine,”
“What can Separation Mean?” are a few of the titles. Some of these are also
reprinted in the posthumously published From Oslo to Iraq but in the very last year
of his life, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, as the United States went
into Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and seek Usamah Bin Laden and began to
create the pretext for the war on Iraq, Said, now losing his battle with leukemia,
turns out at least another 3 dozen essays presenting little known information about
the background to the war and the motivations of those making the case for it,
raising questions on which there had been silence in the mainstream media,
attempting to disturb the rush to a war that would cost hundreds of thousands of
lives, most of them civilian, destroy a great deal of Iraq’s infrastructure and its
priceless antiquities, and cost taxpayers of the Western nations involved in the
coalition against Iraq more than a trillion dollars. The transformation of the
Orientalist narrative facilitated the easy creation, manipulation and expansion of
the level of threat that Al Qaeda terrorism could be made to represent in the minds
of the publics that would initially sanction these wars. Said’s work, and all the antiwar efforts—all were notably minimized in American mainstream media. Similarly
336
just as in the first Gulf war, the sanitized presentations to the American public,
managed by the embedded media with the military, led Americans to see the war
far differently than it actually was, and with the clever rhetoric of “freedom”
“democracy” and “war on terror,” Americans were, except for the vocal and largely
intellectual protest movement, completely mesmerized by the successful image
creation and rhetorical ruses. Not surprisingly, Said’s criticism was wholly ignored
by the crusading George W. Bush. And yet, From Oslo to Iraq whose essays span
the period of 2000 through July 2003, the last essays written just two months
before Said’s death, replete facts and figures concerning the economic motivations
driving the “war on terror,” in an effort to look behind the jingoisitic rhetoric, and
“secular” exhortations to envision the world beyond binarisms of good and evil,
light and dark. It is singularly dedicated to humane and rational approaches to
conflict, both in the Palestinian land and in the rest of the Islamic world.
6.7 Said’s Influence on Palestinian Resistance
A few examples will suffice to highlight Said’s themes, ever more focused on
resistance but detailing the need for community based non-violent resistance and
other methods that worked in other anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggles
while simultaneously exposing how the major players were manufacturing consent
for their plans. In “Israel, Iraq, and the United States” Said exposes the specific
ways in which the collusive strategic plans of the United States and Israel work
together to re-fashion the image of the enemy, dehumanize him and make him fair
game for inhumane treatment, utilizing a language invented by the security
337
establishments to play well in the world. Hence “anticipatory preemption” and
“preventive self-defense” become the euphemisms for the wanton destruction of
human lives and property of a silent and invisible enemy. These essays
consistently pursue three themes: the urgency of truth-telling about Israel’s policies
and treatment of the Palestinians; the equal urgency of Palestinian and Arab
engagement with Israelis, particularly the Israeli opposition; and the need for the
Arab peoples to admit the failure of Arab leadership, and to speak out against the
lack of democracy and freedom in the Arab world.
One of the main contributions to maintaining a modicum of hope among the
Palestinians of the Occupied Territories as well as the high moral ground that could
ultimately serve to reveal that the Israeli image so carefully crafted especially for
Western consumption was more image than reality-- that throughout the nineties
but especially after the outbreak of the second intifadah in 2000 would become
critical to pleading the Palestinian case in the court of world opinion was Said’s
constant encouragement of the methodologies of non-violent resistance and the
building of a coalition of activism between Palestinians and internationals who
could testify to what they witnessed in the Occupied Territories. Though non-violent
resistance had always been the manner of the majority of Palestinians in response
to Zionist actions and agendas, it was not well known outside the West Bank
because of the success of the Zionist-American image manipulation that early on
portrayed the Palestinian (as all Arab portrayals) as violent, backward, fanatic.
Mazin Qumsiyeh, a geneticist from Beit Sahour (Shepherd’s Field, near
Bethlehem) has documented the history of the non-violent resistance in his 2010
338
book Popular Resistance in Palestine: A Story of Hope and Empowerment.98
Said’s visits to South Africa in 1991 and 2001 as his son Wadie writes
had a profound effect on how he felt the struggle should process. A serious
public information campaign in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa, and
crucially, Israel, coupled with a program of mass civil disobedience in
Palestine itself, were the only real methods to end the Israeli occupation and
bring about a just solution to the conflict. The South African model, daring
and unique as it was in the history of anti-colonialism movements, provided
the way forward for Palestinians.99
Said sees non-violent resistance as based in a philosophy of justice consonant
with humanism’s idea of self-knowledge requiring both self-criticism and a
dialogical approach to the Other. It is not inconsistent with the liberation theologies
of the three Abrahamic faith traditions. Naim Ateek’s Palestinian Christian
Liberation theology enunciated in Justice and Only Justice100 as well as A
Palestinian Cry for Reconciliation and the work of the organization Sabeel based in
Jerusalem presents a religiously based Christian epistemology consonant with the
humanistic goal of universal human liberation.101 And indeed practicing Christians,
98
See Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A Story of Hope and
Empowerment ( New York: Pluto Press, 2010.) See also Mazin Qumsiyeh,
Sharing the Land of Canaan (New York: Pluto Press, 2008.)
99
Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq, “Afterword,” 302.
100
See Naim Ateek, Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation
(New York: Orbis Books, 1989) and A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008).
101
See Marc Ellis, Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation: The Challenge of the
Twenty-first Century (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2004). See also Hamid
Dabashi, Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (New York:
Routledge, 2008). For another Islamic view of liberation theology see Esack Farid,
Ellis provides a positive perspective on Said’s work in his “Edward Said and the
339
Muslims and Jews have joined with non-religious activists in the non-violent
Palestinian resistance movement in constant efforts—of word and act—that are
indistinguishable from Said’s notion of “secular” criticism. Can Said’s notion of
“secular” criticism be maintained within a religiously principled effort toward
universal human liberation? This is a question that merits the attention of both
religious thinkers and practitioners and those who approach human emancipation
from a non-religious epistemology. “Secular” criticism of culture, society and
politics can be and is the practice of numerous thinker/activists whose
epistemology is based in a non-exclusivist conception of their faith tradition. Said
recognized this in his valorization of the work and ideas of Malcolm X, Ali Shariati,
and Fatima Mernissi. His own experience of religious intolerance and exclusivity in
Lebanon and Palestine and his association of the Anglican communion with British
colonialism had almost disabled his capacity to think through the question of the
secularity of religion. These early life experiences combined with a Western
education followed by the experience of the dispossession of the Palestinian
people on the heels of the enormity of the Holocaust overdetermine Said’s
tendency to favor “the secular” over “the religious,” in his particular metaphorical
uses of these words. This does not preclude the possibility for Said that
thinkers/activists operating from a religious epistemology can engage in “secular”
criticism.
In what may be considered one of Said’s bravest and most ground-breaking
efforts to change Palestinian thinking about Israel and Israelis is a 1998 essay
Future of the Jewish People,” in Naseer Aruri and Muhammad A. Shuraydi, eds.
Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2001) 3872.
340
published in Al Hayat and The Marxist, entitled “Breaking the Deadlock: A Third
Way.” It is eloquent and strongly worded calling for Palestinians and Arabs to
“create justice” as Israel Shahak, an Israeli Holocaust survivor and Azmi Bishara, a
West Bank Palestinian survivor of the Occupation had called for.
…the third way avoids both the bankruptcy of Oslo and the retrograde
policies of total boycotts. It must begin in terms of the idea of citizenship,
not nationalism, since the notion of separation (Oslo) and of triumphalist
unilateral theocratic nationalism, whether Jewish or Muslim, simply does not
deal with the realities before us. Therefore a concept of citizenship, whereby
every individual has the same citizen’s rights, based not on race or religion,
but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must
replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of our
enemies. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing whether it is done by
Serbians, Zionists, or Hamas. What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews
like Ilan Pappé are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by
which Jews and those Palestinians already inside the Jewish state have the
same rights, there is no reason why the same principle should not apply on
the occupied territories, where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by
side, together, but with only one people, Israeli Jews, now dominating the
other. So the choice is either apartheid or justice and citizenship. We must
recognize the realities of the Holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to
abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history,
our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged. And we must
also recognize that Israel is a dynamic society containing many currents—
not all of them Likud, Labor, and religious. We must deal with those who
recognize our rights.102
In the same essay, Said reminds Palestinians of the possibilities of lived
coexistence that had been part of the Arab Islamic past. Said’s recourse to the idea
that the” letter” of scripture (text) does violence but that it is the overarching ethical
vision, or “spirit” of scripture (text) that offers life-affirming hope for humanity.
Clearly Said does not oppose religion; he opposes ideological narrowness and
102
Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process, 2000, (2002), 284-5.
341
tribal/religious exclusivism as a basis for human community and state-building.
Here Said expresses his anti-essentialist idea of co-existence and mutual respect
for the idea of one democratic state, highlighting the civilization of Andalusia:
Our battle is for democracy and equal rights, for a secular commonwealth or
state in which all the members are equal citizens, in which the concept
underlying our goal is a secular notion of citizenship and belonging, not
some mythological essence or an idea that derives its authority from the
remote past, whether that past is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. The genius
of Arab civilization at its height in, say, Andalusia was its multicultural,
multireligious, and multiethnic diversity. That is the ideal that should be
moving our efforts now, in the way of a dead and embalmed Oslo and an
equally dead rejectionism. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, as the
Bible says.
Said’s commitment to secular criticism had reached its height, in these last
years of his life-- the stakes higher than ever, as they remain at the present time,
and speaking the unwanted and, to borrow Gore’s phrase, “inconvenient truth”
remained his most important activity in which writing had become wholly focused
on a worldly practice of using the pen against the sword as a model of humanism,
and a model for intellectuals. 103
At the end of his days, before lapsing into unconsciousness, Said’s son Wadie
painfully remembers his father overcome by emotion because he felt that he had
not done enough for the Palestinians. Edward Said, “From Oslo to Iraq and the
Road Map, Afterword” Wadie Said, 302. See also David Barsamian, The Pen and
the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1994
[2010]).
103
342
6.8 Said’s “Secular” Influence on Israeli Scholarship
In spite of its failure to lead to change in the American posture toward Israel,
Said’s early counter-narrative and analysis of how Zionists used their idea to justify
their treatment of the Palestinians and his efforts to reach out to Israelis inspired
the work of several Israeli historians. Ilan Pappé has detailed Said’s influence on
Israeli scholarship in his “Post-Zionist Critique in Israel.” In the nineties the “postZionist” movement began to revisit the 1948 Zionist narrative. The “new history”
resulted in an academic Israeli deconstruction of the entire Zionist project and a
scathing critique of Israeli policies, focusing on the early policies toward the
Palestinians and the Mizrahi Jews from the Arab countries. Pappé suggest that this
phase of Israeli scholarship, both historical and sociological, “may be the precursor
of a more revolutionary future, if we wish to take a more optimistic view of the
chances for peace and reconciliation the torn land of Palestine.”104 Pappé argues
that “Said contributed more than anyone else” to the formulation of an Israeli
version of postcolonialist critique, especially the concrete deconstruction of the
Zionist and Israeli scholarly writings that helped sustain the Zionist project in
Israel—that is, the mainstream Israeli historiography and sociology of the Arab
world at large and the Palestinians in particular. Said’s impact extends to such
trends in Israeli scholarship as “the analysis of Israel as an ‘Orientalist’ state; the
examination of the dialectical relationship between power and academic
knowledge within the local context; the introduction of the postcolonial prism into
the study of the society; and the critique of the present peace process and the
Ilan Pappé, “Post-Zionist Critique in Israel,” in Adel Iskandar and Hakem
Rustom, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 322.
104
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adoption of an alternative way forward.”105 Pappé credits Said with helping Israelis
“translate their emotional response to the historical and contemporary evils in the
Israel/Palestine conflict into an intellectual statement that questioned almost every
foundational myth of the Jewish state.” Israeli academics seeking an intellectual
basis for critique other than the Marxist found one in the Saidian critique of
Orientalism. Said’s idea that “[t]he interchange between the academic and the
more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the
late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined—perhaps
even regulated—traffic between the two.” Pappé explains how this translated into
the Israeli academy’s role in providing
the scholarly scaffolding for the aggressive and coercive policies toward
Palestinians and Jews who came from Arab countries….Not only had the
Israeli academy developed an Orientalist interpretation of reality, the state
as a whole adopted such a self-image. To this day, and more so after the
American occupation of Iraq, the sate of Israel sells itself as a deciphering
agent for the West in general and the United States in particular. The state,
which is in the area but not part of it, claims to understand the secrets of the
‘barbaric’ and ‘enigmatic’ Middle East. This self-presentation is the principal
explanation for, and mechanism for perpetuating, its alienating existence in
the midst of the Arab world.
Perhaps Theodore Herzl’s vision of Israel best represents the Orientalist
dimension of the state: ‘There (in Palestine) we shall be a sector of the wall
of Europe against Asia, we shall serve as the outpost of civilization against
barbarism.’106
Pappé, “Post-Zionist Critique in Israel,” in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom,
Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, 322.
105
Pappé, “Post-Zionist Critique in Israel,” in Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom,
eds.,Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation, 325.
106
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The Saidian critique of the utilization of the symbols and manifestations of
Orientalist discourse and the insights developed as a result on the ways in which
the Israeli media and educational establishment to construct a collective memory
through official texts, museums, ceremonies, school curricula and national
emblems had, led by the dominant Ashkenazi group, excised all other narratives
from national memory other than the one that they created and manipulated from
the seats of power.
Pappé particularly credits Said with his effort to memorialize both the Holocaust
and the Nakba which encouraged scholars “to follow his call for a universalization
of the Holocaust memory, both as a critique on the Zionist manipulation of that
memory and as a rejection of the Holocaust denial tendencies in the Arab and
Palestinian worlds.” Pappé writes that he himself was inspired by Said’s work in
The Politics of Dispossession “to look into the dialectical relationship and to
connect both sides’ memories of the Nakba and the Holocaust.”
In another article entitled “The Saidian Fusion of Horizons” Pappé says that
the spirit of [The Question of Palestine], no less than its factual basis,
accompanied my own research in the early 1980s, when I was mining the
archives and revisiting the history of 1948….Said’s historical perspective on
Palestine highlighted for[other historians] as it did for me, the relevance of
the events of 1948 to the predicaments of the present Israel and Palestine,
and to the need to locate the refugee issue at the heart of the Palestine
problem. But this message, at that time, did not reach a wide audience
either in Israel or in the Western world at large. Also, during the Oslo days,
the leading Palestinian politicians seems also to forget this incisive Saidian
articulation of what the Palestine conflict was all about.107
Ilan Pappé, “The Saidian Fusion of Horizons,”in Müge Gursoy Sökmen and
Basak Ertür, eds. Waiting for the Barbarians, (New York and London: Verso,
2008),85.
107
345
In his summation of where Said’s work has had the greatest effect, Pappé
highlights the way in which Said’s vision for a secular, democratic bi-national state
“has been planted away from academia (“unlike the theoretical and methodological
kits drawn from his general writings”).108 “… [N]ourished by a very small, but
intriguing, group of political activists,” (and based on current realities in the West
Bank and Israel—a growing, constant, and dedicated movement) this vision “offers
the Israelis, in his (humanist and universalist) theoretical work, as well as in his
writings on Palestine, a moral basis for living together with the Palestinians despite
years of colonization, dispossession, and occupation.” Pappé admits that
[h]is search for the sate based on universal values may be no more than an
ideal type for the Middle East as a whole, but it conveys the message of
restitution rather than retribution. It reflects the bewildering gap between the
magnitude of the Israeli evil and the fragility of Palestinian revengefulness. It
offers a political entity that is not Zionist, but also a far cry from those of the
Arab regimes around Palestine. Above all, it was visualized as a utopia by
someone who regarded himself as the only remaining Jewish intellectual
around, in contrast to the nightmare that another Jew from the same milieu,
Theodore Herzl, inspired.
As Mariam Said suggests, Edward Said left it up to us to dot the i’s and
cross the t’s in his vision, but he did ask us to allow all members of society,
and not just its political classes, to partake in the process, including the
refugees and not just the elite in Ramallah, the Palestinians in Israel and not
just those in Gaza, the new Jewish immigrants to Israel and not just those
who settled in the last century. For this we do not need to be giants, it
seem, but just humanist human beings.109
Pappé, “The Saidian Fusion of Horizons,” in Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and
Basak Ertür, eds. Waiting for the Barbarians, 91.
108
Pappé, “The Saidian Fusion of Horizons,”in Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Basak
Ertur, eds. Waiting for the Barbarians, 91-2.
109
346
To Pappé’s Israeli110 and Said’s Palestinian perspective not much can be added.
They stand as the best that has been thought or said from the perspective of a
humanism of liberation.
6.8 Conclusion
We conclude this chapter with a brief statement about a unique book of Said’s
that has not been previously discussed in detail. The reasons for so doing should
become evident by way of concluding this chapter on his work on the problematic
of Palestine-Israel as the exemplification of what it means to engage in “secular”
criticism. In his 1985 book After the Last Sky, Said’s text stands in relationship to a
series of photographs (taken by Jean Mohr)—photographs of faces, household
objects, buildings, notices, family groups, the pages of a diary, landscapes,
cityscapes, old postcards, none of which are captioned. They confront the reader,
silent yet eloquent. The book seems to be Said’s attempt as an exile to come to
terms with exile and the Palestinian experience. After the Last Sky raises questions
for the reader about what the images mean, and about what the reality of
Palestinian life after the exile has been. The photo essay of four Palestinian boys
See Pappé’s work which provides a long-standing and continuing challenge to
Zionist claims and scholarship: Ilan Pappé, and Jamīl Hilāl. Across the Wall:
Towards a Shared View of Israeli-Palestinian History. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010;
Ilan Pappé, and Moshe Maʻoz. Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from
within. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997; Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, and
Frank Barat. Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War against the Palestinians.
Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010. Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine:
One Land, Two Peoples. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004;Ilan
Pappé, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-51. New York: St. Martin's Press,
1988;Ilan Pappé, Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel.
London: Pluto Press, 2010; Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford:
Oneworld, 2006.Ilan Pappé, The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader. London:
Routledge, 2007;Ilan Pappé;The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951.
London: Tauris, 1992.
110
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smiling at the viewer (Said, Mohr) while setting a bird free is the one around which
the rest are built. It is the most powerful photo in the group and defines the topic of
the story. The picture could convey the message of the essay and is the cover of
the book on which W.J. T Mitchell remarks, “The idea of the book, then, is
ultimately to help bring the Palestinians into existence for themselves as much as
for others; it is that most ambiguous of books, a nation-making text.” The book
allows for the reconstruction of vignettes or anecdotes of Palestinian life, as Said
remembers it from childhood, to emerge out of and disappear back into general
reflections on the Palestinian crisis of existence. Said’s effort, a departure from his
academic style of criticism, seems based in the facts of Palestinian existence and
the burial of the Palestinian narrative for in spite of all that has been written, and all
the images produced, very little is known about the actual realities of Palestinian
people and their lives. More eloquent, more “logical,” and more factual than Said’s
Orientalism and with none of its historical errors, overgeneralizations, or
paradoxes, After the Last Sky, in a significantly “secular” way, conveys the issue of
representation, the issue of reality versus image and the necessity of trying to
convey a “secular” reality. The book has six sections: Palestinian lives, States,
Interiors, Emergence, Past and Future, and The Fall of Beirut. Said writes in the
section “Palestinian Lives,”
The multifaceted vision is essential to any representation of us. Stateless,
dispossessed, de-centered, we are frequently unable either to speak the
‘truth’ of our experience or to make it heard. We do not usually control the
images that represent us; we have been confined to spaces designed to
reduce or stunt us; and we have often been distorted by pressures and
powers that have been too much for us. An additional problem is that our
language, Arabic, is unfamiliar in the West and belongs to a tradition and
civilization usually both misunderstood and maligned. Everything we write
348
about ourselves, therefore, is an interpretive translation—of our language,
our experience, our senses of self and others.111 (my emphasis)
In the last sentence, Said speaks, essentially of self-knowledge, the key element in
his notion of humanism. Self-knowledge through self-representation or subjectivity
is the reverse of representation of the other as well as of representation by the
other. The idea that self-representation also involves an “interpretive translation,”
implies Said’s belief that self-knowledge must be self-critical. The stories,
memories, scraps of history and poetry, perceptions, and aphorisms Said
assembles are put together in this way to express a sense of loss, invasion, and
rupture both in Said and in a people from whom he in the United States is
separated by time and distance and yet intimately connected to—in a disjointed
sort of way. This is the reality of the six million Palestinians who were exiled or
born in exile and can not return home. After the Last Sky, whose title is taken from
a line of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry: “Where should we go after the last frontiers,
where should the birds fly after the last sky?” This question reminds us that human
reality, like that of birds whose nature is that they should travel, that they should fly,
and that they can transcend frontiers but ultimately that our reality is circumscribed
by our rootedness to the earth, the world, the saeculum. It is a “secular” question,
the question of Palestine and the question of Israel.
Said, in his emphasis on connection rather than separation, of healing the rifts
caused by human failures in our treatment of the other, speaks of reconciliation as
an essential step in ending violence, hatred, and separation. In his important late
111
Edward W. Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 6-7.
349
essay “Truth and Reconciliation,” Said reminds us of the condition for
reconciliation: “There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two
communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it
has to be dealt with as such.”112 (my emphasis) Said’s humanism is in full
evidence here: An affirmation of the rights of both peoples to share the very land
on which their lives and their identities have been formed is a notion based in the
principle of universal emancipation. Said’s works on the question(s) of Palestine
are quintessentially humanistic works of criticism.113
Another exemplification of Said’s humanism is his co-creation with Daniel
Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, of the East-West Diwan Orchestra consisting of
Palestinian and Israeli musicians; a secular creative act of self and other literally
dialoguing through the production of music, an embodiment of Said’s concept of
“overlapping territories and intertwined history.” Perhaps this late effort in “secular”
criticism was Said’s best, outperforming his rhetorical efforts—wordlessly;
humanistic, worldly affirmation of the humanity of Palestinians and Israelis in a
common creative, productive act. Connecting this endeavor to all that Said had
written, the East-West Diwan Orchestra might be said to be Said’s most eloquent
critical performance.
Said’s work on the question of Palestine and Israel, including the creation of
the East West Diwan Orchestra, arising from the ground of his exilic experience
112
Said, “Truth and Reconciliation,” 318.
See Joseph A. Massad, Beginning with Edward Said,” 123-132, in Sökmen and
Ertür,eds., Waiting for the Barbarians for an assessment of Said’s legacy
particularly as a “critic of discursive and visual representations of the Palestinian
experience.” 132.
113
350
utilizes the tool of a critical consciousness that the distance of exile has enabled
within both spirit and intellect. Simply stated, the bridge rather than the wall as
metaphor of human liberation, connection rather than separation, the street rather
than the cloister or the ivory tower—the secular. In a lecture at SOAS shortly
before his death, Said conveyed this idea and his optimism eloquently:
In our work and planning and discussions our main principle is that
separation between peoples is not a solution for any of the problems that
divide peoples. And certainly ignorance of the other provides to help
whatever. Cooperation and co-existence of the kind that music lived as we
have lived, performed, shared and loved it together might be. I for one am
full of optimism despite the darkening sky and the seemingly hopeless
situation for the time being that encloses us all.114
In March of 2003, just a few months before his death, as the United States attack
on Iraq was about to begin, Said was flying from Cairo to Beirut when his wife,
Mariam, asked him what he planned to lecture on. He “answered with one word—
humanism—and added that this is the only hope.”115
Rashid Khalidi summarizes Said’s devotion to his public role as cultural and
political critic up to the moment of his death while simultaneously working to
support and build an actual example of Palestinian-Israeli cooperation—“a
beacon… along the always humanistic path that he set out upon…” Speaking of
the last trip of his life—to Seville—“a city that symbolized coexistence between
different peoples and religions and cultures, and where the apparently irresolvable
114
Edward Said, Memory, Inequality, and Power: Palestine and the Universality of
Human Rights,” 25, in Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Basak Ertür, eds., Waiting for
the Barbarians (New York: Verso, 2008), xi. This statement was shared by
Mariam Said, Edward’s wife, in the Preface.
115
Sökmen and Ertür, x.
351
political contradictions between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples could be briefly
forgotten as young Arabs and Israelis collaborated in making music” Khalidi notes
Said’s ability to continue to affirm “hopeful possibilities in an exceedingly bleak
time, and assertion that something constructive can be done even in a time of
despair, and a typically Saidian assertion of optimism in the midst of pessimism.”116
Said’s work on Palestine-Israel, including his work with Daniel Barenboim, the
Israeli conductor, to create a model of humanistic endeavor that personifies Said’s
notion of humanism, the human, and the secular, is singularly powerful in its hope
for humanity and human emancipation, even in the darkest of moments and, most
importantly, it explicates his religious-secular rhetoric and his notion of humanism
in a way that leaves no doubt about the unified and comprehensive nature of his
oeuvre.
116
Rashid Khalidi, “Said and Palestine,” in Sökmen and Ertür, 52.
352
Conclusion
The originality of this thesis, and where it differs from other work on Edward
Said, lies in several elements of its argument: Firstly, that Edward Said’s literary
and cultural criticism, his treatment of Islam, the Arab-Islamic world, and the
problematic of Palestine-Israel, constitute a unified and coherent body despite
common perceptions that these superficially divergent endeavors represent
incompatible directions in Said’s work. To support this claim, we have shown that
from Said’s earliest works, Said’s debate with traditional humanism and postEnlightenment rationality begins. The commitment to the emancipatory goal entails
the idea that theory should be unified with praxis, an aspect of Said’s project which
maintains the central goal of Marx’s critique. Though Marx’s concern that theory
and praxis be unified has failed to be realized and later theorists of Western
Marxism eventually acknowledged that the struggle for unified theory and praxis
may well be unachievable, Said, departing from this pessimism, maintains his hope
that what he conceives of as “secular” criticism can assist in the achievement of
the goals of justice and emancipation for all human beings. Said remains
consistently optimistic about the possibility for all people to represent themselves,
to create their own narratives, to govern their own lands, cultures, traditions,
against the hegemonic reach of Western, ideologies, culture, and power.1 Said
Paul Bové in his assessment of Said’s project writes that “Said was nothing if not
committed to the power of resistance and optimism that human struggles for
freedom can be achieved. See Bové, in Bhaba and Mitchell, Edward Said:
Continuing the Conversation, 41. Spanos thinks that Said’s optimism is not
historical enough. See Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 3-4. The current
state of the Arab world would tend to lend support to Spanos’ view. Yet without
optimism, no struggle for the good is possible
1
353
often invoked these lines translated from Aimé Césaire’s poem entitled Cahier d’un
retour au pay natal: “And no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of
strength, and, There is a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.”2
Said’s insistent push for universal emancipation, justice and equality is the
hallmark of his oeuvre. And for Said, like Marx, thought and praxis must and can
work together. Though not a Marxist by his own lights, Said’s belief that critique
must be connected to praxis, is clearly affirmative of Marx’s famous dictum, which
bears reiteration: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various
ways; the point, however, is to change it.”3 Said’s concern about the relationship of
theory to praxis becomes a central feature of his criticism and is evident in his own
involvement as activist and representative of and spokesman for the interests of
the Palestinian people in the U.S. Similarly, his negative appraisal of theories that
result in political apathy or quietism whether for their belief in the ultimate power of
dominant discourses and their apparatuses of control or for their denial of human
agency, are notable.4 Said remained a humanist for whom the project of “secular”
criticism intends to address the failures of both humanism and the oppositional
antihumanist discourses, and hence his self-appellation, the “non-humanist
humanist.”
2
Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pay natal. Poeme. 1956; repr.( Paris:
Presence Africaine and Montreal: Guerin Litterature, 1990).
3
Theses on Feurbach by Karl Marx, XII, accessed December 28, 2011,
http://www.marxist.com/classics-old/marxengels/thesesfeur.html.
See Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, 1-31 and 290-294 on “Secular
Criticism” and “Religious Criticism.”
4
354
The second element of the originality of this thesis is the argument that Said’s
attempt to re-orient or re-construct a “critical humanism,” and within it, his notion of
criticism and the role of the intellectual,5 is one of the most important aspect of
Said’s legacy, though the value of the religious-secular trope that reappears
throughout his writing and his speech is contestable. Said’s ideas of both
humanism and criticism, profoundly influenced by his own experience of political
and metaphorical exile, call the humanist to the role of critical examiner rather than
upholder of a tradition. Criticism entails the activation of critical consciousness
which pre-supposes an optimistic view of human nature, human possibility, and
human agency.
Thirdly, the most original aspect of the argument of this thesis and where it is
hoped to be seen as a contribution to scholarship is that we have attempted to
closely examine what Edward Said means by his insistent use of word “secular” as
an essential element to his professed humanism and as a particular type of
criticism that he believes is the mission of the humanist. We have argued that
Said’s works exemplify what he means by criticism in his keen effort to foster a
questioning attitude toward the way in which the Western world represents the
Arab-Islamic world which he considers to be representation that arises out of the
religious. Throughout these works, Said criticizes ideology for its disabling effect on
critical approaches to authorities and canons. Ideologies including nationalisms
such as Zionism Islamism and of the colonized mentality of the Arab world living
under various Arab dictatorships, as well as the Crusader mentality of the
5
See Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith
Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).
355
American and British led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan –all of them either
elaborations of the implications of Orientalism or a reaction to it—typify what Said
calls “religious.” The danger of the “religious” as has been emphasized, for Said, is
its invocation of a metaphysical or theological transcendental as its a priori which
precludes independence of thought and action, something which Said fears
because it leads to massive hermetic systems which can not be broken through.
This is not a position against religion as much as it is a position against idolatry and
ideology.
In the passage above, referring to manifestations of the religious effects of
culture Said acknowledges the needs that religion and culture provide for: the
need for certainty, solidarity, and belonging. It is important to underline that Said’s
negative estimation of some aspects of traditional religion is balanced by the
acknowledgement of its positive effects and calls further into question Hart’s
conclusions about Said’s anti-religious agenda. Once again, it is important to
reiterate that Said sees identitarian thinking and its politics, nativism, nationalism,
imperialism, colonialism and Orientalism as “religious” in the sense of the
ideological aspects of all of them, that is, the way certain ideas are upheld as the
highest good or ultimate reality which is why he resonates to the anti-nationalism of
Fanon.
Clearly what may be seen as Said’s eccentric usage of the word “secular” which
originates from his Viconian ideas about the centrality of the real world of “men
(and women who) make their own history” emanates from his insistence on the
Latin root saeculum and to his dedication to the foundational and emancipatory
thrust of humanism born of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the failure of those
356
ideals to be realized in the world. Said clings to those emancipatory ideals and the
goal that human thought and action can be rational and critical, uncoerced by
“culture” and “system” (whether by religious culture or religious system or nonreligious culture or system). Thus “secular” in Said’s usage refers to an attitude and
way of thinking and acting that arises from a human consciousness able to
exercise itself skeptically. This is a classically humanist position about man and his
ability to think and to act in history undetermined (or at least not wholly determined)
by nature or nurture.
Said, though he utilized Foucault’s concepts and methods in his own work,
starting with Orientalism, remained a humanist in his unshakeable posture on the
still existent possibility of human agency in spite of his acknowledgement of the
gripping effects of culture, particularly in the “administered society” of the
contemporary world. This, of course, earned him the disapproval of the poststructuralists while traditional humanists also assailed his deviant (but radically
“secular”) humanism. William Spanos refers to Said’s project as “projective”(throwing forward) rather than “de-structive” for its optimistic focus on the
possibility of change.6
Spanos, refusing the inherent self-contradictions of humanism, insists that Said’s
Humanism and Democratic Criticism can not be his Summum, his final statement,
writing: “Said may in practice reject traditional Western humanism, but in
Humanism and Democratic Criticism, by inventorying the traces that have
disfigured modernity, he finally leaves this trade—the accommodational tolerance
of traditional humanism—intact. And tolerant humanism is certainly not “’the whole
consort dancing together ‘ contrapuntally.” As Said’s critical secular practice
suggests, for that contrapuntal vision of global humanity we need a definition of
human being that demotes Man from the status of sovereign subject, the lord and
master over all he surveys, to render humanity—the anthropos logon echon (the
being not endowed with the Word but burdened by words, by the capability of
6
357
Said had come to observe that not only had the transfiguration of religion in
European and Euro-American culture underwritten the depredations of nationalism,
imperialism and colonialism resulting in massive injustices across the globe, death
camps and denial of the rights of other human beings by the proponents of the
Rights of Man, that in a similar failure, another radical critique of class ideology and
religion, Marxism in its Communist manifestations and deformations, had ironically
behaved like a religion of the irreligious, and that Western Marxism had become
quietistic having lost its trust in the emancipatory project of the proletariat, in
addition to the poststructuralist turn away from worldly struggle, while religion as
religion also had become fervently ideologized by radical Zionists, Islamists,
Hindus and Sikhs (not to mention the explosion of fundamentalist Christianity in
“born again” movements in the U.S. and extended across the globe), all of whose
ideologues had harnessed and manipulated the power of traditional religious belief
to the engine of activist resistance and identity in the colonial/postcolonial,
imperialist and anti-imperialistic struggles. Religious revivals globally have
ideologically forced politics and religion back together using mindless slogans,
emotionalism, and irrational behavior. In the end, the commonality is ideological,
identitarian thought, whether secular or religious by their typical denotations and
origins. Said’s increased concern with what he saw as a dangerous and
disappointing abdication of the principles and responsibilities of truly critical
“secular” thought on the part of intellectuals who seemed to be mesmerized by
their own inventions of thought --from jargonistic language which resulted in merely
obfuscating thought to systematic thought that sought to eliminate all previous
undecidable speech)—the responsible caretaker of a mute bing in all its infinite
singularity, variety, and mystery.” Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said, 196.
358
systems whether religious or humanistic and which, due to their difficulty and
opacity, were accessible to very few. Said’s concern for the retreat of the
intellectuals of the humanities is expressed in his charge that “Literary theory” (Left
and Right) “has turned its back on” …”the social world, human life, and of course
the historical moment in which they are located or interpreted.”7
Said, like Adorno, was anti- system because of the hegemonic and closed
nature of systems, their processes and their apparatuses which induce blindness in
the system-makers and the system-followers.8 “Secular” criticism thus is inherently
political in its effort to affect systems of power. Said emphasizes the importance of
the connectedness of the critic to the “saeculum”-- the time of this world—hence
demonstrating Said’s rootedness in historical materialism as opposed to ahistorical idealism. He situates the problem of criticism as the problem residing
within the European (which means as well Euro-American) cultural elite, which
implies a geographical center, but decries its lack of connection with the rest of the
world.
In Said’s view, “criticism with adjectives like Marxist or Liberal are an oxymoron.”
“Solidarity before criticism” means the end of criticism. Furthermore, for Said, there
is no crisis, no threat greater than the one posed by a type of solidarity that takes
precedence over independent thought and action and that becomes so central to
the identities of intellectuals that it ends the ability to freely conduct criticism. Said
writes: “I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle
7
8
Said, The World,The Text and the Critic, 4.
See Theodor Adorno, Minimal Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated
by E.F.N. Jephcott. 1951; repro. (London: Verso, 2005).
359
in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be
criticism, because there must be critical consciousness (my emphasis) if there are
to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for.9 This critical
consciousness of which Said speaks is equated rightly by Spanos as a
consciousness that works (or critiques) from the position of the unhomed, the
exiled, turning the negative experience of exile into an enabling place of strength
that keeps criticism in the concrete world of human realities as described by Said
below. Here it is clear that “secular” has to do with its worldliness, its locatedness
in time and space of human experiences and in which judgments and hence action
is required to occur through the uncovering of truth, an idea which is very close to
the Greek concept of truth, a-lethia, or uncovering, as opposed to covering,
obfuscating, and mystifying. Said writes,
Criticism in short is always situated, secular, reflectively open to its own
failings. …To stand between culture and system is therefore to stand close
to—closeness itself having a particular value for me—a concrete reality
about which political, moral, and social judgments have to be made, and if
not only made, then exposed and demystified. 10
It is clear that his concern is with the proper role of the intellectual and criticism of
society and culture, the critique of ideology, not of religion as such. However, his
use of the language of the religious and secular to characterize his concerns in
spite of what are known as the well-known ambiguities of these words, his linguistic
choices that emphasize the negative characteristics of religion historically, and his
positive though eccentric catachrestical use of the word “secular,” conveys a sense
9
Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic, 4.
10
Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said, 26.
360
that like most humanists Said still clings to the Enlightenment’s self-proclamation
that it had inaugurated an era of freedom of human reason from the unthought and
unresisted authority of religious doctrine and its post-Enlightenment transfigured
cultural and ideological heirs. Knowing that not to be the case as seen in the
persistence of the metaphysical and theological in modernity and post-modernity,
Said conveys through the negative valence of his religious rhetoric his concern with
the imperceptible stealthy residues of unquestioned orthodoxies inhabiting the
literary canon, scholarship and expertise on the Arab-Islamic world, and in fact, all
of the non-Western world.
Examining Said’s religious-secular rhetoric as part of his larger project of
humanism, and considering how Said commentators construe the significance of
this rhetoric, it becomes apparent that Said runs the risk of furthering dualistic
“either/or” understandings of the religious and the secular. Some might argue the
opposite: that it has incited debate and thought about the meanings of the
religious and the secular which inevitably leads away from simplistic dualism. The
idea that this rhetoric plays an important role within and not in contradiction to the
goals of his oeuvre seems clear. And this is perhaps the most significant claim of
the present thesis. Most importantly, its value in highlighting what criticism is
meant to be has lead to an exploration of the value of Said’s critical writing to the
Arab Islamic world and to the Palestinian-Israeli problematic. The fact that the
mission of criticism enabled Said to remain optimistic in the darkest time and
maintained his belief in the value of commitment to universal justice, rights, and the
concerns of humanity. Marc Ellis, Jewish theologian of liberation, concludes his
essay on “Edward Said and the Future of the Jewish people” with these words on
361
Said’s notion of the secular and of criticism: “…such criticism acts to develop space
where alternative acts and intentions can flourish. …this is the path of advancing
human freedom as a fundamental human obligation.”11 Ellis goes further in his
estimation of what Said, “a modern Canaanite,” has accomplished in his secular
criticism: “Edward Said lights that darkness with his own intelligence and
compassion. One wonders if this light will one day become a beacon of recognition
and reconciliation for Jews as it has been… for his own people.”12
The most salient element in his oeuvre is Said’s insistence that humanistic
criticism must see the “Other” as both “source and resource” for self-knowledge.13
Said’s great effort has modeled both a principle and a practice. It has furthermore
set an illuminating standard for criticism in political work as well as in religion.
Said’s example offers a mode of inquiry and analysis too often forgotten on the
slippery slide toward ideological constructions of reality, especially the realities of
others. Said’s work on the Palestinian-Israeli problematic and his efforts to
influence the Arab Muslim world toward a self-critical approach to self-knowledge
and knowledge of the other was both important and urgent. We are indebted to his
courageous effort and inspired by his unassailable optimism.
Marc Ellis, “Edward Said and the Future of the Jewish People,” 67, in Aruri and
Shuraydi, eds., Revising Culture, Reinventing Peace: the influence of Edward W.
Said.
11
12
13
Ellis, “Edward Said and the Future of the Jewish People,” 67.
Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004), xii.
362
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