Said’s own tastes and scholarly practice embodied the Western canon he criticized

Evidence

That Said set up Western modernity as the standard is the most plausible conclusion to draw from his writings, because while Said, on the one hand, condemned Orientalism, he ennobled Western modernity and its achievements as the exclusive standard, on the other. His most-valued literature was Conrad and Kipling, not his compatriot Ghassan Kanafani or the other “Oriental” ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif; the music that thoroughly impassioned him, and that he himself performed, was Bach’s and Beethoven’s, not ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s, Riyad al-Sunbati’s, or Sayyid Darwish’s; and as a literary critic and intellectual, his entire academic apparatus and its Weltanschauung were profoundly Western, having never bothered, even in his senior years, to inquire into the dialogical potential of the exquisitely rich and fertile Oriental and Islamic intellectual traditions. It never occurred to him, for instance, to undertake research projects in literary criticism in which the highly refined Islamic contributions to this intellectual domain could be brought to dialogue with its Western counterpart, much less to critique it. These were furthest from his mind, because Said was a secularist liberal, whereas these Oriental “traditions” were products of “religion,” which, needless to say, he was not far from detesting. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 279

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the usual image of Said as the postcolonial critic; connects to debates about critics who denounce a canon while living comfortably inside it. — connects to: Said’s work embodies the contradictions of the literary theory tradition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 68; Said’s later work privileges Western-based writers while raging against non-Western societies — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 848
• SEED: Possible essay angle: ‘the canon-in-spite-of-oneself’ — how critics’ private aesthetic allegiance can contradict their public theoretical commitments, using Said’s Bach-beats-Abd-al-Wahhab taste as the case study.