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🪵 The Threshold

Orientalism's totalizing discourse critique erases all sites of resistance and liberation

Properties2
tagsja-picks, xref, addendum, causal_relationships, singleton, category/factual-claims
aliases@ahmad_theory_1992, loc. 815

5 min read

Orientalism’s totalizing discourse critique erases all sites of resistance and liberation

Evidence

But this vision, in the case of Orienta/ism, gains further authority from the way it panders to the most sentimental, the most extreme forms of Third-Worldist nationalism. The book says nothing, of course, about any fault of our own, but anything we ourselves could remember - the bloodbath we conducted at the time of Partition, let us saysimply pales in comparison with this other Power which has victimized us and inferiorized us for two thousand five hundred years or more. So uncompromising is this book in its Third-Worldist passion that Marxism itself, which has historically given such sustenance to so many of the anti-imperialist movements of our time, can be dismissed, breezily, as a child ofOrientalism and an accomplice of British colonialism. How comforting such visions of one’s own pr.imal and permanent innocence are one can well imagine, because given what actually goes on in our countries, we do need a great deal of comforting. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 817 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The Central Islamic lands are defined as excluding North Africa and Andalusia, and their history is an orderly march from the past till modern times. In volume 1, therefore, Islam is a geographical designation applied chronologically and selectively as it suits the experts. But nowhere in the chapters on classical Islam is there an adequate preparation for the disappointments in store for us when we come to “recent times,” as they are called. The chapter on the modern Arab lands is written without the slightest understanding of the revolutionary developments in the area. The author takes a schoolmarmish, openly reactionary attitude towards the Arabs (“it must be said that during this period the educated and uneducated youth of the Arab countries, with their enthusiasm and idealism, became a fertile soil for political exploitation and, at times, perhaps without realizing it, the tools of unscrupulous extremists and agitators”127), tempered by occasional praise of Lebanese nationalism (although we are never told that the appeal of fascism to a small number of Arabs during the thirties also infected the Lebanese Maronites, who in 1936 founded the Falanges libanaises as a copy of Mussolini’s Black Shirts). “Unrest and agitation” are ascribed to 1936 without a mention of Zionism, and the very notions of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism are never allowed to violate the serenity of the narrative. As for the chapters on “the political impact of the West” and “economic and social change”—ideas left no more specific than that—they are tacked on as reluctant concessions to Islam as having something to do with “our” world in general. Change is unilaterally equated with modernization, even though it is nowhere made clear why other kinds of change need be so imperiously dismissed. Since it is assumed that Islam’s only worthwhile relations have been with the West, the importance of Bandung or of Africa or of the Third World generally is ignored; this blithe indifference to a good three-quarters of reality somewhat explains the amazingly cheerful statement that “the historical ground has been cleared [by whom, for what, in what way?] for a new relationship between the West and Islam … based on equality and cooperation.” — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 768 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Orientalist discourse simultaneously homogenizes and divides its subjects — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 286; Orientalist historiography equates all change with Westernization and erases anti-colonial resistance — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 768; Treating orientalism as mere colonial discourse is analytically hindering — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 81 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

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