by Edward W. Said
Nine years ago I wrote an epilogue to Orientalism, which, trying to clarify what she believed she had said and not said, stressed not only the many discussions open since my book appeared in 1978, but during the growing misunderstandings of work on representations of "the Orient ".
today I feel more ironic than irritated about this fact is a sign of age so that has seeped into me. The recent deaths of my two main mentors, intellectual, political and personal-Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, "I have brought sadness and loss, but also a certain resignation and fortitude to move forward.
In Out of Place (Out of Place), 1999, described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grew up, providing me and my readers a detailed account of the environments that I think formed me in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But it was a very personal account of all those years of my political involvement, which began after the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 - and came up short.
Orientalism is a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. It opens with a description, which dates from 1975, the civil war in Lebanon, which ended in 1990. We arrived at the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the terrible suffering of the Palestinians reinvade of the West Bank and Gaza strip. The ho-violence and bloodshed rrible continue at this very moment. The phenomenon of suicide bombing has appeared with all the hideous damage caused, not more apocalyptic and sinister than the events of September 11, 2001 with its aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines continues the illegal imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States. His wake is truly horrible to contemplate. It is said that this is part of an alleged clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. I, however, I think not.
I wish I could say that the understanding general Middle East, Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but heck, not really. For all sorts of reasons, the situation in Europe appears to be considerably better. In the U.S. the hardening of attitudes, the tightening the yoke of a cliché disparaging generalizations and triumphant, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt toward those who disagree and against "others", has its exact counterpart in the sa- interlock and the destruction of libraries and museums in Iraq. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys fail to understand is that history can not be erased like a blackboard, leaving it clean so that "we" can there inscribe our own future and impose our way of life for these people "inferior" to follow. It is quite common to hear that senior officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can shake like almonds in a jar. But this has often happened in "East", that semi-mythical constructor is invented and reinvented countless times since the invasion of Napoleon in Egypt in the late eighteenth century. And in the process, sediment reported no history, that include innumerable histories and a surprising variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, are swept away and ignored, relegated to sandbar along with the treasures of-rruidos indecipherable fragments that were taken to Baghdad.
My argument is that history is made by women and men, it is feasible to undo it and rewrite it so that "our" Orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct. I have highly of the potential and gifts of the peoples of the region to fight for his vision of what they are and what they want to be. It has been so overwhelming and calculatedly aggressive an attack on contemporary societies and Muslim Arabs, accusing them of being backward, lack of democracy and abrogate the rights of women, that we forget that the notions of modernity, enlightenment and democracy are not concepts agreed by all and are in no way so simple that can be found or lost as Easter eggs in a living room. The adequacy of advertisers daunting stupid (speaking on behalf of the foreign policy but no knowledge of the language spoken by real people), produces an arid landscape, ripe for American power construct an artificial model of "democracy" free market, which does not need to speak Arabic, Persian or French to pontificate about the domino effect that supposedly needs the Arab world. But there is a difference between knowing other peoples and other times (which is the understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis themselves), and the knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the desire to understand in order to coexist and to broaden horizons and the desire to master in order to control. It is without doubt one of the worst disasters in history that an imperialist war drawn up by a handful of U.S. officials who were not selected are set against a devastated Third World dictatorship, calling for clearly ideological aspects, to attempt world domination, control security and limited resources, and to disguise their real intention, attached and designed by Orientalists who betrayed their duty to co-mo academic.
The main influences of the Pentagon and National Security Council George W. Bush were men like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to come up with ridiculous phenomena such as the Arab mind or decay of centuries of the Islamic world that only American power could reverse. Today the U.S. bookshops are full of badly made screeds with titles like horror screaming and Islamic terror, Islam laid bare, the Arab threat, the risk Muslim, all written by political polemicists who demonstrate knowledge to them imparted to them and other experts alleged to have penetrated the heart of these strange oriental peoples. The companions of this predicament warmongering are CNN and Fox, plus myriad of broadcasters and radio show hosts, right-wing evangelicals, innumerable tabloids and even middle-class magazines, all thrown into recycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations that spur to America against the foreign devil.
Without a well organized scheme that the people over there are not like "us" and do not appreciate "our" values-the very heart of Orientalist dogma, there would be no war. So the same directory of professional academics paid by the conquistadores Dutch in Malaysia and Indonesia, by the British armies in India, Mesopotamia, Egypt and West Africa, by the French army in Indochina and North Africa came the American advisers in the Pentagon and the White House, and use the same clichés, the same stereotypes treacherously, the same justifications for exercising power and violence (the end of the day, says the chorus, power is the only language they understand). All these people joined in the case of Iraq with an army of private contractors and em-pins who are entrusted voracious everything from writing textbooks to the Constitution that remodel the political life of Iraq and its oil industry.
All
empire, in his official statement, said it's not like the others, their circumstances are special, with a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and will use force only as a last resort. The saddest thing is that there is always a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
Twenty-five years after the publication of my book Orientalism, it once again raises the question of whether modern imperialism has terminated or continued in the Orient since Napoleon invaded Egypt two centuries earlier. He said Arabs and Muslims and live victimology the spoils of empire is only one way to evade this responsibility. Have failed, went the wrong way, says the modern Orientalist. Of course, it is Naipaul also the contribution to the literature: the victims of empire whine while his country goes to hell. But what a superficial calculation of imperial intrusion that just craves it address the long succession of years through which empire continues its interference in the vi-tion of Palestinian, Congolese, Algerians or Iraqis. Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of oriental studies and making North Africa, then continued in similar enterprises in Vietnam, Egypt and Palestine and throughout the twentieth century has fought for oil and strategic control of the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anticolonial nationalism, the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and brutality to the most recent irresponsible groups of "native" . Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, its own reductive images, its own controversial peleoneras.
my idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open battlefields and introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the brief incandescence of the anger controversy, contrary to the thought that imprisons us. To which I try to call "humanism", a word that I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful contempt for the term expressing sophisticated postmodern critics. By humanism I mean first of all, the attempt to break the shackles invented by Blake, only then will we be able to use our mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover, the h uman holds a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and pe-riod, therefore, strictly speaking, can not be an isolated humanist.
This means that every area is connected to all others, there is nothing in our world that has been isolated and pure of outside influences. Require talking about issues such as injustice and suffering in the broader context of history, culture and socio-economic reality. Our role is to broaden the scope of the discussion. Much of my past 35 years I have defended the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I've always tried to give all possible attention to the reality of the Jewish people and the shape he suffered persecution and genocide. Point is central to the struggle for equality between Palestine and Israel should be directed toward a human target, ie towards coexistence, and not further suppression and denial.
is no accident that indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. It is therefore vital that intellectuals need to provide alternative models to separate those that simplify and confined to rely on mutual hostility that prevails in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.
As a humanist whose field is literature, I have old enough to have been educated for 40 years in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before I mention the creative contribution, supreme, Giambattista Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate a German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf, and later Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally to the great twentieth-century philologists as Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Ernst Robert Curtius.
To the youth of the current generation the very idea of \u200b\u200bphilology suggests something to them too rusty, antique, but in fact is the most basic and creative performing arts. His ad-mirable example can be found in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular, passion that consumed him and led him to the composition of the West-Östliche Diwan, and influenced subsequent ideas on the Weltliteratur Goethe, the study of all literatures of the world as if it were a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically preserving individuality of each work without losing sight of everything.
There is considerable irony in realizing that although today's globalized world is grouped into some of the ways I've been talking, we may be approaching some kind of standardization and homogeneity that the specific formulation of the ideas of Goethe sought to prevent. In an essay published in 1951, with the title der Philologie Weltliteratur, Erich Auerbach emphasized exactly this point, just as they began the postwar period, which was also the beginning of the Cold War. His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946, but it was written while Auerbach was exiled war that courses taught Romance languages \u200b\u200bin Istanbul, trying to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of reality as represented in Western literature Ho-mer of Virginia Woolf. But in reading the 1951 essay one senses that for Auerbach the great book was an elegy for the period where people could interpret texts philologically-specific, sensitive and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages understanding in support of Goethe proclaimed in his approach to Islamic literature.
positive knowledge of languages \u200b\u200band history was necessary, but it was never enough, nor the mechanics of data collection could in any way constitute a suitable method to understand what was an author like Dante, for example. The fundamental requirement for the kind of philological understanding speaking Auerbach and his predecessors, who tried to implement, was one that sympathetically and subjectivity gets into the life of a text written from the perspective of their time and author ( Einfühlung). Instead of trumpeting the alienation and hostility to other times and different culture, philology as further applied the implied Weltliteratur deep humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter's mind actively created a pa-ra the other abroad. This created a place to work than could be alien and distant is the most important facet of the mission of the interpreter.
All this was obviously undermined and destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbach notes with sadness the standardization of ideas, and increasing specialization of knowledge gradually narrowed the opportunities for the kind of philological work perennial inquiry and investigation that he had represented, and, alas, is even more depressing to know that since Auerbach's death in 1957, the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in spectrum and centrality. Instead of reading in the real sense of the term, students today are distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the Internet and mass media.
What's worse is that education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies that spread mass media, for focusing, so ahistorical and sensationalist, in distant wars electronic giving a sense looking surgical precision, when in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern weapons of war. To demonize an unknown enemy who labeled a "terrorist", it meets the general purpose of keeping people agitated and angry making images require a lot of media attention that can be exploited in times of crisis and insecurity, as aftermath of September 11, 2001.
Speaking as an Arab and American, I must ask my readers not to underestimate this kind of simplified view of the world that a handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated as U.S. policy for the entire Arab worlds and Islamic. A vision in which the terror, preemptive war and regime change unilaterally supported by the inflated military budget in history, are the main ideas discussed endlessly, impoverished in ways that are assigned to themselves the role of producing these so-called "experts" who validate the government's general line. Reflection, debate, rational argument and moral principle based on the secular notion that human beings must create their own history, were replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context and stare contempt for other cultures.
may say that I too abrupt transitions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand, and foreign policy, on the other. A modern technological society, possessing an unprecedented power-electronic networks as well as fighter jets F-16-must ultimately be driven by policy and technical experts as formidable as Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle. What really is missing is a sense of the density and interdependence of human life that can not be reduced to a formula or swept away as irrelevant.
This is one facet of the global debate. In the Arab and Muslim countries the situation is not better. As Roula Khalaf argues, the region has slid-ing anti-Americanism has easy to show little understanding of what actually is the United States as a society. As governments have become relatively unable to affect U.S. policies towards them, turn their energies to repress and subjugate their own people, resulting in resentment, anger and useless imprecations that do not open the possibility that companies have ideas secular about history and human development. Instead, companies are beset by frustration and failure, and Islamism built by a dogmatic learning and the obliteration of other forms of secular knowledge, considered competitive. The gradual disappearance of the extraordinary tradition of ijtihad Islamic, or personal interpretation, is one of the largest cultural-tailors of our time, it causes the loss of critical thinking and individual ways of dealing with the modern world.
This does not mean the cultural world has simply returned to a belligerent or rejection neoorientalismo ta-jante from the outside. With all the limitations you will, the Johannesburg World Summit, United Nations, held last year, revealed in fact a vast area of \u200b\u200bcommon global concern that suggests the emergence, very healthy, a new sector group that confers a new urgency to the often simple notion of "one world." In all this we admit that no one can know the extraordinarily complex unity of our globalized world, despite being reality that the world has such an interdependence of parts that will not allow genuine chance of isolation.
The terrible conflicts that herd people to falsely unifying slogans such as "America", "West" or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who actually are quite diverse, not to stay in power now maintained and we must oppose them. We still have rational interpretive skills that are a legacy of humanistic education, not sentimental piety that calls for us to return to traditional values \u200b\u200bor the classics, but an active practice of rational discourse, secular world. The secular world is to build the story as human beings. Critical thinking is not subject to call-up to march against an enemy or another adopted as such. Instead of a clash of civilizations manufactured, we need to focus on the slow work of collecting cultures that overlap, so that they give each other, living together in ways much more interesting than they can in any way abridged or inauthentic understanding. But this kind of extended perception takes time, patience and skeptical inquiry, and the support given by faith in communities of interpretation, which is difficult to maintain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism focuses on human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than received ideas and approved authority. The text should read as produced and lived in the historical area of \u200b\u200ball possible forms of the world. But this does not mean power. On the contrary, I have tried to show the insinuations, the interpenetration of power even in the depths of the studies.
Finally, and most important, is that humanism is the only and I would say the final form of resistance against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. Today we have the vast and promising field demo-cratic of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamt of by previous generations of tyrants or of or-todoxias. The global protests that occurred before the start of the Iraq war would not have been possible if not for the existence of alternative communities around the world, alerted by alternative information, and are actively aware of environmental and human rights, and ibertarios impulses that bind us together on this small planet.
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