The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (5 page)

The first time most Americans ever saw him on-screen was when the black-robed Bedouin noble Sherif Ali rides in from the distance (oddly evocative of Omar ibn Abi Rabi‘ah’s entrance) to shoot a rival tribesman for drinking from his water supply. It is a cruel introduction, but without his character
Lawrence of Arabia
would not be a classic. The movie turns on the gravity of his conscience, his ability to think, doubt, learn, and thus change. Lawrence is the hero of the story, and all the other characters are merely symbols of human qualities, like greed, brutality, and naïveté, or of national stereotypes (the American huckster, the French cynic, the generous and proud Arab, and so on). Sherif Ali is the only real human being in a picture over three hours long. It is he who questions Lawrence’s decision to go to Aqaba and then rescue a man lost in the desert, and it is through his eyes that we appreciate the Englishman’s courage. He is appalled by Lawrence’s command to cut down a column of haggard Ottoman troops to take his personal revenge against the Turks, for although Sherif Ali killed a man at his drinking well, thirst for water is one thing, and thirst for blood is something else. And it is through his character that the screen version of Colonel T. E. Lawrence’s colorful and often inaccurate retelling of the Arab revolt subtly makes an
important point about Arab history. Once the Arabs have reached Damascus, and their representative council succumbs to chaos, Lawrence storms from the hall to take his leave of his former colleagues. His friend, however, is going nowhere. “I shall stay here,” says Sherif Ali, “and learn politics.” It’s true that the Western powers, excluding America, carved up the former Ottoman Empire to satisfy their own interests, but it was the Arabs themselves who determined the political culture of the modern Middle East.

 T
hat notion—that the history of modern Arab politics is primarily the story of the actions of Arabs themselves—wouldn’t, at first glance, seem all that controversial. Yet it is, thanks in no small part to the work of a man who was once an elementary-school classmate of Omar Sharif’s: Edward Said. If Sharif represented, for Westerners, the ideal Arab man, Said, in a far more substantive fashion, came to be seen as the ideal Arab intellectual, the man Westerners looked to to make sense of the region. Indeed, no writer has had a bigger impact on the way Westerners see the Middle East than Said did over the course of more than three decades of work. The paradox is that while Said’s work was devoted, in principle, to the idea that for too long Arab culture and Arab life had been misunderstood and misrepresented in the West, his own work often ended up fostering new, if different, misrepresentations. Most important, Said’s work, inadvertently or not, lent itself to a kind of monolithic definition of Arab culture, and a view of the region’s politics that in the end saw Arabs as more acted upon than acting.

I visited Said one afternoon at his office at Columbia University a few months before 9/11. The first time I had met him was in the mid-1980s, when I was in graduate school at Cornell, where he had come to give a lecture. He was one of the major figures in American academia, a reputation he clinched more than a decade before as one of the early Anglophone advocates of French post-structuralism,
until his 1978 masterwork,
Orientalism
, vaulted him out of the rarefied world of literary theory and made him a public intellectual and a media star. In the years that followed, the Palestinian-American’s stature only grew. His real-world activism as a member of the Palestinian National Congress enhanced his academic credentials, and vice versa. And his transition from scholarship to media criticism was seamless, for the methods he had used to categorize the prejudices of nineteenth-century artists, writers, and scholars were just as easily used to document the sins of late-twentieth-century newspapers and television networks, particularly since, in Said’s view, little had changed in the way Westerners thought about and described Arab culture. “Every European,” he wrote, “in what he could say about the Orient was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”
¹

Orientalism
was not a book about the contemporary Middle East. Nor was its thesis just reflexive anticolonialism, that the Great Powers had ravaged other societies through military, political, and economic means. It focused on the way Western authors and scholars had written about the region in the nineteenth century. But Said’s conclusion—that the work of these writers and scholars had served as a handmaiden of the Western imperial endeavor to subjugate the Middle East—resonated with modern Arab concerns. The book was very much of its time, keyed to the self-image of a confident post-Algeria, post-Vietnam intellectual left for whom the Palestinian cause, with the paramilitary élan of Yasser Arafat and the youthfully glamorous violence of his Soviet-backed cadre, represented the revolutionary work that remained to be done. The book’s success in influencing Western opinion of the Middle East was also enhanced by the fact that it gave intellectuals center stage. Even though Said was in effect charging writers, journalists, and scholars with conspiring to oppress Third World peoples, by arguing that they had played a key role in shaping history, he was also, paradoxically, flattering intellectuals.

Said offered me a seat. His office library held a huge collection of literature, philosophy, and history in many languages, including the more than thirty that
Orientalism
had been translated into. He sat across from me, squeezing his large athletic frame awkwardly into a chair to make himself less physically striking, more intellectual. We talked about what he was working on, his book on late style, or how some artists and writers achieve a certain refinement and power right before their deaths, which was certainly on his mind as he was fighting the cancer that eventually killed him in 2003. I gave him a recording of Palestinian folk songs I’d found in my Brooklyn neighborhood, and then, remembering halfway through the visit that he had written in his memoir of how he disliked Oriental music, I apologized for bringing him a less than welcome gift. I told him it was meant to thank him for introducing me to the Middle East and giving me access to a new world, a body of literature I knew nothing of previously, thousands of years of history, dozens of different cultures and languages. After all, the crucial and enduring insight at the heart of Said’s work was that the people of the Middle East deserved to have their lives described as they were, and not as Westerners imagined (or hoped, or feared) them to be. He was touched, flattered, and a little embarrassed. It was the last time I saw him.

After 9/11, the ground literally shifted under his feet, the grounds of a city where he’d become famous for a thesis no longer supported by reality. Contrary to Said’s argument, the West’s fear of Islamic terror was not merely a projection of Orientalist stereotypes. In the introduction to
Covering Islam
, he had ridiculed “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners,” based as they were on “highly exaggerated stereotypes,” but he never emended his own caricatures of U.S. Middle East policy and the American media, a repertory rehearsed over a quarter of a century that, as the Arab response to 9/11 showed, was drawn from the lingua franca of Middle Eastern propaganda. Arab journalists and officials complained that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had
manipulated U.S. public opinion by likening suicide operations in New York and Washington to terror in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But it was Said and other Arab commentators who’d made the linkage between Israel and 9/11 by arguing that the attacks came as a result of legitimate Arab grievances over U.S. support for the Jewish state.

Said was the transitional figure between the academy and the world of mainstream Arab politics. And thus it was no accident that American academics came to sound like Arab nationalist and Islamist ideologues claiming that the 9/11 attacks were justified due to America’s bad policies in the Middle East. As
Orientalism
had become the touchstone of Middle East studies, the academy could not help but see Washington as the dark angel of history. If you were not working to expose the racist lies fabricated for the purpose of destroying Third World peoples, then, willingly or not, you were collaborating with the state. It was this essentialism that allowed Said, the man who had accused scores of intellectuals of holding essentialist views of the Arabs and Islam, to write as though real-world events, like 9/11, never happened. If ideas or policies are not shaped in response to changing realities or interests but determined by immutable qualities, like anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism, then information is irrelevant and debates are a waste of time, for the central issue is always the same—whatever is wrong with the Middle East is the fault of the West.

By attacking other writers with different points of view—his enmity toward the Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis was famous-Said helped set the terms by which Western intellectuals and reporters could write about the Arabs and Islam. Since in Said’s view there was no such thing as disinterested intellectual work—all textual strategies served power—what mattered was taking the right side. If you were in the academic industry, jobs, publishing contracts, committee appointments, and such depended on it, and if you were outside of Said’s direct sphere of influence, you were tarred as a racist, or for Arabic-speaking Middle Easterners like Fouad Ajami and Kanan
Makiya there were equally ugly formulations, like “native informant,” that is to say, traitor. Ajami is “a disgrace,” Said wrote. “Not just because of his viciousness and hatred of his own people, but because what he says is so trivial and so ignorant.”
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Said’s litmus test for intellectual good faith was the Palestinian cause. Ajami and Makiya had at one time been safely within the fold, but then became preoccupied with their own concerns, which had nothing to do with Palestine and Israel or even the West. Ajami, a Lebanese Shia, became concerned with the outrages of Sunni supremacism, while the Iraqi Makiya dedicated himself to fighting Saddam Hussein, but from Said’s point of view all they’d done by exposing rifts in the Arab consensus was to confirm for Americans the bad things that they had wanted to believe about Arabs, and Said’s strategy was to credit Western intellectuals with all the sins they wanted attributed to themselves. His condemnations of the American media for its one-dimensional coverage of the Middle East were famous. “Very little of the detail,” he had written, “the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world.” But his accounts of the region were equally empty of human density and passion; the conflicting opinions of Middle Easterners, for instance, like the quarrels Ajami and Makiya had with Arabism, Said wrote off as apostasy.

Of course, intolerance of dissenting Arab opinion wasn’t the only characteristic Said’s work shared with Arab nationalism. Like many of the doctrine’s major ideologues, he saw the Arab world as defined, largely, by the West and in its opposition to it.

Given
Orientalism’s
canonical status as one of the central works on the modern Middle East, it bears repeating that the book isn’t about the Middle East. Rather, it is a polemical piece of cultural criticism about Western portrayals of it over the course of a brief period in Middle Eastern history. This wasn’t a coincidence: the reason Said wrote about Western views of the Middle East, rather than
about the region itself, was because, as he wrote, “I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are.”
³

The notion that it is impossible to describe things as they “really are” was a postmodernist escape hatch that appealed to the book’s more sophisticated readers, but was lost on much of a literate American audience that just wanted some sort of introduction to a complex part of the world. But consider how strange that line is: the person who, perhaps more than anyone else, has shaped the contemporary Western understanding of Arabism and Islam was uninterested in showing what the Arab world was really like. This had two consequences. First, in holding Western colonialism responsible for the conditions of the region, Said let Americans off the hook insofar as they didn’t have to understand the politics, culture, and societies of the region itself. Second, it sent the message that Arabs were less responsible for what happened in the region than the West was. In effect, in Said’s work the most relevant fact of modern Middle Eastern history is Western interference. He glided over the diversity, conflicts, and tensions among Arabs themselves, and painted a picture of an Arab community unified by Western oppression, a worldview derived from Arab nationalism.

 T
here is a great deal of confusion about the nature of Arab nationalism, most of it arising from the idea that it is a secular doctrine. This misunderstanding results from the mirror imaging of Western scholars, the misplaced hopes of European and American officials, and the misleading descriptions of Arab nationalist ideologues who recognized that the Westerners feared Islam as a political force. Arab nationalism is secular in the sense that it does not derive its political legitimacy from divine revelation, but it is an absolutism nonetheless, enshrining the idea of the eternal and the unchanging not in an omnipotent creator but in the nation. This is profoundly
different from Western secularism, which makes room for different, even opposing worldviews and lays no claims to absolute truth.

One of the major theorists of Arab nationalism was Sati‘ al-Husri (1879–1968), who played a leading role in Syrian and then Iraqi politics and education. Influenced by the Young Turks and their brand of Turkish nationalism, Husri also drew on the example of nineteenth-century German intellectuals and political activists and argued that the nation is a primordial force that impresses itself upon the masses whether they will it or not, and whether or not the state comes into being. The nation is different from the state, so even if the people do not create the legal and political foundations of an actual state, the nation exists nonetheless, a spirit with a destiny independent of the people’s will. The task, then, of the Arab nation’s political and intellectual leaders is to help the masses recognize and fulfill Arabism’s destiny. As Husri explained, “Under no circumstances, should we say: ‘As long as [someone] does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab.’ He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes.”
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