Said’s own critique essentialized the West by tracing Orientalism back to Homer

Evidence

Al-Azm, one of the first to advance this argument, contended that while Said sought to challenge the ways in which Orientalists ascribe an essential nature to the East and West, which makes them not only ontologically different but that renders one superior to another, Said was himself guilty of essentializing the West. By tracing Orientalist attitudes all the way back to Homer, Said seems to suggest that there is something inherent in knowledge production in the West that renders it Orientalist. … Such a sweep that compares discourses produced in the capitalist and pre-capitalist eras, Ahmed argued, is one that even Foucault would have objected to. It leads Said to a place where the explanation for anti-Muslim/Arab caricatures comes out of the “European mind,” which is for Said, as al-Azm puts it, “inherently bent on distorting all human realities other than its own for the sake of its own aggrandisement.” Such a unilinear, essentialist and idealist understanding of Orientalism does not, al-Azm argues, serve Said well in his attempt to find an approach to how one might study other cultures and peoples in a non-repressive manner. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 872

77.Aijaz Ahmad, and before him Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, have critiqued Said for homogenizing the West, and for presenting all work about the East done in the West as being necessarily influenced by Orientalism. Al-Azm, one of the first to advance this argument, contended that while Said sought to challenge the ways in which Orientalists ascribe an essential nature to the East and West, which makes them not only ontologically different but that renders one superior to another, Said was himself guilty of essentializing the West. By tracing Orientalist attitudes all the way back to Homer, Said seems to suggest that there is something inherent in knowledge production in the West that renders it Orientalist. … Such a sweep that compares discourses produced in the capitalist and pre-capitalist eras, Ahmed argued, is one that even Foucault would have objected to. … It leads Said to a place where the explanation for anti-Muslim/Arab caricatures comes out of the “European mind,” which is for Said, as al-Azm puts it, “inherently bent on distorting all human realities other than its own for the sake of its own aggrandisement.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 886

Categorization

• XREF: This is Kumar marshaling Marxist critics of Said (al-Azm, Ahmad) — directly parallel to the analytical move in Aziz and Rana where they distinguish between discursive critique and material/policy analysis. Clarifies Kumar’s own positioning that Islamophobia must be anchored in empire, not eternal Western essence. — connects to: Said’s critique essentializes the West as much as it claims Orientalists essentialize the East — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 335; Edward Said’s own critique essentialized the West; Said’s critique mirrored Orientalism by fixating on Western metropolitan culture — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 104
• DEFINE: Establishes the stakes of treating Islamophobia as historically specific imperial policy versus as an eternal Western trait — the exact methodological ground on which Kumar’s own argument (contra Said’s universalizing tendency) will stand.
• SHARE: For a colleague working on postcolonial theory — al-Azm’s critique that Said’s anti-essentialism itself essentializes the West, and that he flattens pre-capitalist and capitalist discourse
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 872; Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 886

Broader Connections

• Edward Said’s own critique essentialized the West #expands (1.00)
• Said’s critique mirrored Orientalism by fixating on Western metropolitan culture #corroborates (0.85) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 104