Readers overstate the comparative scope actually present in Said’s work

Evidence

To say, as Aamir R. Mufti does (“Global Comparativism,” Critical Inquiry 31 : 472–89, at 472), that non-Western literature “animates” Said’s work “even when its explicit preoccupation appears to be elsewhere” is certainly an overreach. One wonders why such a comparative interest needs to “be put into articulation” if it were indeed “present in relatively developed form in his [Said’s] work.” It is telling that Mufti views his own scholarship as an attempt to continue Said’s work, “to pick up where he [Said] seemed to have left off, to pursue directions that were only hinted at in his work, or to explore possibilities that were implicit in them” (473). Here, as in Mufti’s analysis of Said’s understanding of secularism and “secular criticism”/“critical secularism,” Said is made to bear larger claims than he in fact propounded. That Said hinted at the importance of non-Western literature and strove to provide for its integration the method of contrapuntal reading is undoubted, but this remained indeed implicit, and was never carried out, with any methodical thrust, in correction of the discourse he was critiquing. More crucially, such readings, had they been articulated and elaborated by Said, would not have mitigated the problems engulfing his liberalism, anthropocentrism, and secularism. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 814

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates about how to fairly read a canonical theorist versus what they actually propounded — parallels scholarly disputes about misattribution of views. — connects to: Said’s work embodies the contradictions of the literary theory tradition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 68