The Great Debate of the Two Intellectual Giants in Middle Eastern Studies of

Postcolonial Era: A Comparative Study on the Schemata

of Edward Said and Bernard Lewis1

Nassef M. Adiong 2

This paper entails different views perpetuated by Bernard Lewis and Edward Said on the
pedagogy of Islam and of the West. This is about two warring factions in Middle East Studies
academia, battling their ideas for more than 2 decades. It will also explicitly try to compare
their personal profiles to see how at par and well-educated are they congruent to their
similar expertise while compounding dissonance intellectual perceptions and schemata.
Bernard Lewis, a revered expert on Middle East studies who led a faction of Islam
academia based on Western perspective up to 2002 and was recognized all over the world
as a public intellectual. While Edward Said is Lewis' intellectual nemesis: He accuses Lewis
of being deliberately biased to aid Israel's expansion. For more than 25 years they have
been crossing their pens in bloody academic battle. Said has been accused of terrorism by
Lewis supporters. Lewis has been accused of propaganda and collusion with "The Zionists
conspiracy" by Said's supporters.

A term paper presented to Prof. Julkipli M. Wadi of the Institute of Islamic Studies, UP Diliman on 14 October
2008 for the course on Arab Historiography.
2
Master student in International Studies, University of the Philippines, Diliman.

Comparative
Profile

Date of Birth
Date of Death &
Cause of Death
Age
Descent
Place of Birth
Citizenship
Parents
Academic Titular

Specialization

Legacy

Occupation

College degree
Graduate degree
Post-Graduate
degree
Other Private
and Government
Positions held

Other Teaching
Assignments

Edward Wadie Said

November 1, 1935
September 25, 2003, chronic
myelogenous leukemia
67 years old
Palestinian-Protestant
Jerusalem, Palestine
Naturalized American
Middle-class Protestant
Palestinians
Literary theorist, cultural critic,
political activist, and an
outspoken advocate of
Palestinian rights
Middle Eastern studies
particularly on Orientalism and
the history of the Palestinian
struggles
A founding figure in postcolonial
theory - Orientalism
University Professor of English
and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University
A.B., Summa cum Laude,
Princeton University (1957)
M.A. in English, Harvard
University (1960)
Ph.D. in English literature,
Harvard University (1964)
Contributor to The Nation, The
Guardian, the London Review of
Books, Le Monde Diplomatique,
Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and AlHayat; President of Modern
Language Association (MLA)
Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and
Yale universities

Bernard Lewis
May 31, 1916
Still Living
92 years old
British-Jewish
Stoke Newington, London
Naturalized American
Middle-class Jewish British
Historian, orientalist, political
commentator, and a public
intellectual
Middle Eastern studies
particularly on Islam and the
West, and history of the Ottoman
Empire
The most influential postwar
historian of Islam and the Middle
East
Cleveland E. Dodge Professor
Emeritus of Near Eastern
Studies, Princeton University
A.B. in History (with honors),
University of London (1936)
Diplme des tudes Smitiques,
University of Paris (1937)
Ph.D. in History of Islam,
University of London (1939)
Served in Royal Armoured Corps
and Intelligence Corps, 1940-41;
attached to Foreign Office, 194145; Chairman of Association for
the Study of the Middle East and
Africa (ASMEA)
University of London and Cornell
University

Family

First marriage to Maire Jaanus,

ended in divorce. He is survived
by his wife, Mariam Cortas,
whom he has a son and a
daughter.

Married to Ruth Hlne

Oppenhejm in 1947 but later
dissolved on 1974, whom he has
a son and a daughter.

Schematic Overview concomitant with its General Critiques

A Politico-historical View on Edward Said (Rubin 2004)
Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism," which he perceived as a
constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In
Orientalism, Said described the "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against ArabIslamic peoples and their culture." He argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized
images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification
for Europe and America's colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the
practice of Arab elites who internalized the American and British orientalists' ideas of Arabic
culture.
He argued that Western writings on the Orient, and the perceptions of the East purveyed
in them, are suspect, and cannot be taken at face value. According to Said, the history of
European colonial rule and political domination over the East distorts the writings of even
the most knowledgeable, well-meaning and sympathetic Western Orientalists (a term that
he transformed into a pejorative).
Said contended that Europe had dominated Asia politically so completely for so long that
even the most outwardly objective Western texts on the East were permeated with a bias
that even most Western scholars could not recognize. His contention was not only that the
West has conquered the East politically but also that Western scholars have appropriated
the exploration and interpretation of the Orients languages, history and culture for
themselves. They have written Asias past and constructed its modern identities from a
perspective that takes Europe as the norm, from which the "exotic", "inscrutable" Orient
deviates.

He concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak,
while feminized "Other," as contrasted with rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he
suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be
attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up. In a 1997 revised edition of his
book Covering Islam, Said criticized what he viewed as the biased reporting of the
Western press and, in particular, media speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up
buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.
As a pro-Palestinian activist, Said campaigned for a creation of an independent
Palestinian state. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian
National Council (PNC) who tended to stay out of factional struggles. In 1991, he quit the
PNC in protest over the process leading up to the signing of the Oslo Accords, feeling that
the terms of the accord were unacceptable and had been rejected by the Madrid round
negotiators. He felt that Oslo would not lead to a truly independent state and was inferior to
a plan which Arafat had rejected when Said himself presented it to him on behalf of the US
government in the late 1970s.
In particular, he wrote that Arafat had sold short of the right of Palestinian refugees to
return to their homes in pre-1967 Israel and ignored the growing presence of Israeli
settlements. Said's relationship with the Palestinian Authority (PA) was once so bad that PA
leaders banned the sale of his books in August 1995, but improved when he hailed Arafat
for rejecting Barak's offers at the Camp David 2000 Summit. Ultimately, Said came to
prefer and support a state that would afford Palestinians a home with equal human rights in
place of the 'Jewish' state of modern-day Israel.
In June 2002, Said, along with Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa
Barghouti, helped establish the Palestinian National Initiative, or Al-Mubadara, an attempt
to build a third force in Palestinian politics, a democratic, reformist alternative to both of the
established Fatah and Islamist militant groups, such as Hamas. While Said was seen - and
indeed, often appropriated by various Islamic groups - as a global intellectual defender of

Islam, he himself denied this claim several times, most notably in republications of
Orientalism. His primary objectives were humanistic and not Islamic; his vision for Palestine
and Israel's peaceful co-existence necessarily took Islam into consideration, but emphasized
the needs of Palestinians and Israelis as two ethnic groups whose basic needs, such as food,
water, shelter and protection, were to be valued above all else.
He was one of few Palestinian activists who at the same time acknowledged Israel and
Israel's founding intellectual theory, Zionism. Said was one of the first proponents of a twostate solution, and in an important academic article entitled "Zionism from the Standpoint of
its Victims," Said argued that both the Zionist claim to a land - and, more importantly, the
Zionist claim that the Jewish people needed a land - and Palestinian rights of selfdetermination held legitimacy and authenticity.

A Politico-historical View on Bernard Lewis (London 2002)

In the mid-1960s, Lewis emerged as a commentator on the issues of the modern Middle
East, and his analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of militant Islam brought
him publicity and aroused significant controversy. American historian Joel Beinin has called
him "perhaps the most articulate and learned Zionist advocate in the North American Middle
East academic community." U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney remarked: "...in this new
century, his wisdom is sought daily by policymakers, diplomats, fellow academics, and the
news media."
A harsh critic of the Soviet Union, Lewis continues the liberal tradition in Islamic
historical studies. Although his early Marxist views had a bearing on his first book The
Origins of Ismailism, Lewis subsequently discarded Marxism. His later works are a reaction
against the left-wing current of Third-worldism, which came to be a significant current in
Middle Eastern studies. Lewis advocates closer Western ties with Israel and Turkey, which
he saw as especially important in light of the extension of the Soviet influence in the Middle

East. Modern Turkey holds a special place in Lewis's view of the region due to the country's
efforts to become a part of the West.
Lewis views Christendom and Islam as civilizations that have been in perpetual collision
ever since the advent of Islam in the 7th century. In his essay The Roots of Muslim Rage,
(1990) he argued that the struggle between the West and Islam was gathering strength. It
was in that essay that he coined the phrase "clash of civilizations", which received
prominence in the eponymous book of Samuel Huntington. The phrase "clash of
civilizations," was first used by Lewis at a meeting in Washington in 1957 where it is
recorded in the transcript.
In 1998, Lewis read in a London-based newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi a declaration of
war on the United States by Osama bin Laden, a person of whom Lewis had never heard
despite his terrorist attacks in Africa and the Middle East. In his essay "A License to Kill,"
Lewis indicated he considered Bin Laden's language as the "ideology of jihad" and warned
that bin Laden would be a danger to the West. The essay was published after the Clinton
administration and the US intelligence community had begun its hunt for bin Laden in Sudan
and then in Afghanistan.
In August 2006, an article about whether the world can rely on the concept of mutual
assured destruction as a deterrent in its dealings with Iran, Lewis wrote in the Wall Street
Journal about the significance of August 22 in the Islamic calendar. The Iranian president
had indicated he would respond by that date to U.S. demands regarding Iran's development
of nuclear power; Lewis wrote that the date corresponded to the 27th day of the month of
Rajab of the year 1427, the day Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet
Muhammad from Jerusalem to heaven and back. Lewis wrote that it would be "an
appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world."
Most recently Lewis has been called "perhaps the most significant intellectual influence
behind the invasion of Iraq", who urged regime change in Iraq to provide a jolt that he
argued would "modernize the Middle East". Critics of Lewis have suggested that Lewis'

allegedly 'Orientalist' theories about "What Went Wrong" in the Middle East, and other
important works, formed the intellectual basis of the push towards war in Iraq. Lewis does
not advocate imposing freedom and democracy on Islamic nations. He argued that "there
are things you can't impose. For example democracy, which is a very strong medicine which
has to be administered to the patient in small, gradually increasing doses. Otherwise, you
risk killing the patient. In the main, the Muslims have to do it themselves.
Ian Buruma, writing for The New Yorker in an article subtitled The two minds of Bernard
Lewis, finds Lewis's stance on the war difficult to reconcile with Lewis's past statements
cautioning democracy's enforcement in the world at large. Buruma ultimately rejects
suggestions by his peers that Lewis, a Jew, promotes war with Iraq to safeguard Israel, but
instead concludes "perhaps he (Lewis) loves it (the Arab world) too much."

General Critique on Edward W. Said (Warraq 2003)

Strong criticism of Said's critique of Orientalism has come from academic Orientalists.
Bernard Lewis is among scholars whose works were questioned in Orientalism. The two
authors came frequently to exchange disagreement, starting in the pages of the New York
Review of Books following the publication of Orientalism. Lewis's article "The Question of
Orientalism" was followed in the next issue by "Orientalism: An Exchange."
Some of his academic critics argue that Said made no attempt to distinguish between
writers of very different types: such as on the one hand the poet Goethe (who never even
traveled in the East), the novelist Flaubert (who undertook a brief sojourn in Egypt), Ernest
Renan (whose work is widely regarded as tainted by racism), and on the other scholars such
as Edward William Lane who was fluent in Arabic. Such critics accuse Said of creating a
monolithic Occidentalism to oppose to the Orientalism of Western discourse, arguing that
he failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, that
he ignored the widespread and fundamental differences of opinion among western scholars
of the Orient; that he failed to acknowledge that many Orientalists (such as Sir William

Jones) were more concerned with establishing kinship between East and West than with
creating "difference", and had frequently made discoveries that would provide the
foundations for anti-colonial nationalism.
More generally, critics argue that Said and his followers fail to distinguish between
Orientalism in the media and popular culture (for instance the portrayal of the Orient in
such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) and academic studies of Oriental
languages, literature, history and culture by Western scholars (whom, it is argued, they tar
with the same brush).
His critics argue that by making ethnicity and cultural background the test of authority
and objectivity in studying the Orient, Said drew attention to the question of his own
identity as a Palestinian and as a "Subaltern." Ironically, given Said's largely Anglophone
upbringing and education at an elite school in Cairo, the fact that he spent most of his adult
life in the United States, and his prominent position in American academia, his own
arguments that "any and all representations are embedded first in the language and then
in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the presenter interwoven with a great
many other things besides the 'truth', which is itself a representation" (Orientalism 272)
could be said to disenfranchise him from writing about the Orient himself. Hence these
critics claim that the excessive relativism of Said and his followers trap them in a "web of
solipsism", unable to talk of anything but "representations", and denying the existence of
any objective truth.

General Critique on Bernard Lewis (Alam 2002)

There was a time when Bernard Lewis was fined one franc by a French court for denying
the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article. Lewis's position was that
while mass murders did occur, he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to conclude
it was government-sponsored, ordered or controlled and therefore did not constitute
genocide. The court stated that "by concealing elements contrary to his opinion, he failed to

his duties of objectivity and prudence." When Lewis received the prestigious National
Humanities Medal from President Bush in November 2006, the Armenian National
Committee of America took strong objection.
Lewis' views on the issue were widely criticized by historians and scholars and have been
called a "notorious genocide-denier". According to historian Yair Auron, "Lewis stature
provided a lofty cover for the Turkish national agenda of obfuscating academic research on
the Armenian Genocide." Jewish scholar Israel Charny wrote about Lewis' views, that "the
seemingly scholarly concern with putting the historical facts in the context of Armenians
constituting a threat to the Turks as a rebellious force who together with the Russians
threatened the Ottoman Empire, and the insistence that only a policy of deportations was
executed, barely conceal the fact that the organized deportations constituted systematic
mass murder."
In a 2002 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's "Hot Type" program,
Noam

Chomsky

detailed

series

of

comments

from

declassified

Eisenhower

Administration memo: President Eisenhower, in an internal discussion, observed to his

staff, and I'm quoting now, "There's a campaign of hatred against us in the Middle East, not
by governments, but by the people." The National Security Council discussed that question
and said, "Yes, and the reason is, there's a perception in that region that the United States
supports status quo governments, which prevent democracy and development and that we
do it because of our interests in Middle East oil. Furthermore, it's difficult to counter that
perception because it's correct. It ought to be correct. We ought to be supporting brutal and
corrupt governments which prevent democracy and development because we want to
control Middle East oil, and it's true that leads to a campaign of hatred against us."
Chomsky claimed that Bernard Lewis, in his writings on the Middle East, omitted this and
other evidence of Western culpability for failures in the region. Chomsky claimed: Now,
until Bernard Lewis tells us that, and that's only one piece of a long story, we know that
he's just a vulgar propagandist and not a scholar."

The Great Debate

Preliminary Interpolation
Bernard Lewis is known for his literary sparring with Edward Said, the PalestinianAmerican literary theorist and activist who deconstructed Orientalist scholarship. Said
defined Lewis's work as a prime example of Orientalism, in his 1978 book Orientalism. He
asserted that the field of Orientalism was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation
rather than objective study, a form of racism, and a tool of imperialist domination. He
further questioned the scientific neutrality of his Orientalist scholarship on the Arab world.
(Said 2000)
In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, Said suggested that Lewis' knowledge of the
Middle East was so biased it could not be taken seriously, and claimed "Bernard Lewis hasn't
set foot in the Middle East, in the Arab world, for at least 40 years. He knows something
about Turkey, I'm told, but he knows nothing about the Arab world." Edward Said
considered that Lewis treats Islam as a monolithic entity without the nuance of its plurality,
internal dynamics, and historical complexities, and accused him of "demagogy and
downright ignorance." (Said 2000)
Bernard Lewis rejected the view that western scholarship was biased against the Middle
East, he responded that Orientalism developed since then as a facet of European humanism,
independently of the past European imperial expansion. He noted the French and English
pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, yet not in an organized way, but
long before they had any control or hope of control in the Middle East; and that much of
Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of imperialism. "What imperial purpose
was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language and then restoring to the
Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?" (Dalrymple 2004)

10

Main Arguments: Ranting each other on Published Articles

Edward Saids Accusation of Bernard Lewis Ignorance (Said 2001, 2002, 2003;
Richter 2000)
Said to Lewis: Labels like "Islam" and "the West" only serve to confuse us. In this
belligerent kind of thought, relies heavily on a 1990 article by the veteran Orientalist
Bernard Lewis, whose ideological colors are manifest in its title, "The Roots of Muslim Rage."
In the article, the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam" is
recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a
cartoon like world where Popeye and Bruno bash each other mercilessly, with one always
more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. (Said 2001)
Certainly not Lewis has much time to spare for the internal dynamics and plurality of
every civilization, or for the fact that the major contest in most modern cultures concerns
the definition or interpretation of each culture, or for the unattractive possibility that a great
deal of demagogy and downright ignorance is involved in presuming to speak for a whole
religion or civilization. No, the West is the West, and Islam. (Said 2003)

Personal Attack: A Zionist decipher of Orientalism

Bernard Lewis, made his name forty years ago as an expert on modern Turkey, but
came to the United States in the mid-seventies and was quickly drafted into service as a
Cold Warrior, applying his traditional Orientalist training to larger and larger questions,
which had as their immediate aim an ideological portrait of "Islam" and the Arabs that
suited dominant pro-imperial and pro-Zionist strands in U.S. foreign policy. It should be
noted that Orientalist learning itself was premised on the silence of the native, who was to
be represented by an Occidental expert speaking ex-cathedra on the native's behalf,
presenting that unfortunate creature as an undeveloped, deficient, and uncivilized being
that couldn't represent him. But just as it has now become inappropriate for white scholars

11

to speak on behalf of "Negroes," it has, since the end of classical European colonialism,
stopped being fashionable or even acceptable to pontificate about the Oriental's (i.e., the
Muslim's, or the Indian's, or the Japanese's) "mentality." (Said 2001)

Distorted Academic Sources inclined to Polemical Destruction

Except for anachronisms like Lewis. In a stream of repetitious, tartly phrased books and
articles that resolutely ignored any of the recent advances of knowledge in anthropology,
history, social theory, and cultural studies, he persisted in such "philological" tricks as
deriving an aspect of the predilection in contemporary Arab Islam for revolutionary violence
from Bedouin descriptions of a camel rising. For the reader, however, there was no surprise,
no discovery to be made from anything Lewis wrote, since it all added up in his view to
confirmations of the Islamic tendency to violence, anger, anti-modernism, as well as Islam's
(and especially the Arabs') closed-mindedness, its fondness for slavery, Muslims' inability to
be concerned with anything but themselves, and the like. From his perch at Princeton (he is
now retired and in his late eighties but still tirelessly pounds out polemical tracts), he seems
unaffected by new ideas or insights, even though among most Middle East experts his work
has been both bypassed and discredited by the many recent advances in knowledge about
particular forms of Islamic experience. (Richter 2000)

Crude Historical Presentation on Arabs

With his veneer of English sophistication and perfect readiness never to doubt what he is
saying, Lewis has been an appropriate participant in post-September discussion, rehashing
his crude simplifications in The New Yorker and the National Review, as well as on the
Charlie Rose show. His jowly presence seems to delight his interlocutors and editors, and his
trenchant, if wildly improvable; anecdotes of Islamic backwardness and anti-modernism are
eagerly received. His view of history is a crudely Darwinian one in which powers and
cultures vie for dominance, some rising, some sinking. (Said 2001)

12

Fabricated and Revulsion of What Went Wrong?

Lewis's notions (they are scarcely ideas) seem also to have a vague Spenglerian cast to
them, but he hasn't got any of Spengler's philosophic ambition or scope. There isn't much
left to what Lewis says, therefore, than that culture can be measured in their most
appallingly simplified terms (my culture is strongeri.e., has better trains, guns, symphony
orchestrasthan yours). For obvious reasons, then, his last book, What Went Wrong?
which was written before but published after September 11, has been faring well on the
bestseller lists. It fills a need felt by many Americans: to have it confirmed for them why
"Islam" attacked them so violently and so wantonly on September 11, and why what is
"wrong" with Islam deserves unrelieved opprobrium and revulsion. The book's real theme,
however, is what went wrong with Lewis himself: an actual, rather than a fabricated
subject. (Said 2003)
For the book is in fact an intellectual and moral disaster, the terribly faded rasp of a
pretentious academic voice, completely removed from any direct experience of Islam,
rehashing and recycling tired Orientalist half (or less than half) truths. Remember that Lewis
claims to be discussing all of "Islam," not just the mad militants of Afghanistan or Egypt or
Iran. All of Islam. He tries to argue that it all went "wrong," as if the whole thingpeople,
languages, culturescould really be pronounced upon categorically by a godlike creature
who seems never to have experienced a single living human Muslim (except for a small
handful of Turkish authors), as if history were a simple matter of right as defined by power,
or wrong, by not having it. One can almost hear him saying, over a gin and tonic, "You
know, old chap, those wogs never really got it right, did they?" (Said 2003)

Bias Turkish Citations on Islamic World

But it's really worse than that. With few exceptions, all of Lewis's footnotes and concrete
sources (that is, on the rare occasion when he actually refers to something concrete that

13

one could look up and read for oneself) are Turkish. All of them, except for a smattering of
Arabic and European sources. How this allows him to imply that his descriptions have
relevance, for instance, to all twenty-plus Arab countries, or to Indonesia or Pakistan or
Morocco, or to the 30 million Chinese Muslims, all of them integral parts of Islam, is never
discussed; and indeed, Lewis never mentions these groups as he bangs on about Islam's
tendency to do this, that, or the other, backed by a tiny group of Turkish sources. (Said
2002)

Solipsism and Protecting Oneself

Although it is true that he protects himself at first by saying that his polemic "especially
but not exclusively" concerns an area he vaguely calls the Middle East, he throws restraint
to the winds in all of what follows. Announcing portentously that Muslims have "for a long
time" been asking "what went wrong?" he then proceeds to tell us what they say and mean,
rarely citing a single name, episode, or period except in the most general way. One would
never allow an undergraduate to write so casually as he does that, during the nineteenth
century, Muslims were "concerned" about the art of warfare, or that in the twentieth "it
became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that
things had indeed gone badly wrong." (Said 2003)

Feeding Ignorance
How he impresses non-expert Americans with generalities that would never pass in any
other field or for any other religion, country, or people is a sign of how degraded general
knowledge is about the worlds of Islam, and how unscrupulously Lewis trades on that
ignorance feeds it, in fact. That any sensible reader could accept such nonsensical
sentences as these (I choose them at random) defies common sense: For the whole of the
nineteenth and most of the twentieth century the search for the hidden talisman (an
invention of Lewis's, this is the supposed Muslim predilection for trying to find a simple key

14

to "Western" power) concentrated on two aspects of the West - economics and politics, or to
put it differently, wealth and power. (Said 2001)
And what proof is offered of this 200-year "search," which occupied the whole of Islam?
One statement, made at the start of the nineteenth century, by the Ottoman ambassador in
Paris. Or consider this equally precise and elegant generalization: During the 1930s, Italy
and then, far more, Germany offered new ideological and political models, with the added
attraction of being opposed to the Western powers. (Never mind the dangling "being
opposed" - Lewis doesn't bother to tell us to whom the models were offered, in what way,
and with what evidence. He trudges on anyway). These won widespread support, and even
after their military defeat in World War II, they continued to serve as disavowed models in
both ideology and statecraft. (Said 2001)

Sublime Lewis in a Nutshell

Mercifully, since they are "disavowed models," one doesn't need to offer any proof of
their existence as models. Naturally Lewis offers none. Or consider, even more sublime, this
nugget, which is intended to prove that even when they translated books from European
languages, the wretched Muslims didn't do it seriously or well. Note the brilliant preamble:
"A translation requires a translator, and a translator has to know both languages, the
language from which he is translating and the language into which he is translating." (It is
difficult for me to believe that Lewis was awake when he wrote this peculiarly acute
tautology - or is it only a piercingly clever truism?)
Such knowledge, strange as it may seem, was extremely rare in the Middle East until
comparatively late. There were very few Muslims who knew any Christian language; it was
considered unnecessary, even to some extent demeaning. For interpreters, when needed for
commerce, diplomacy, or war, they relied first on refugees and renegades from Europe and
then, when the supply of these dried up, on Levantines. Both groups lacked either the
interest or the capacity to do literary translations into Middle-Eastern languages. And that is

15

it: no evidence, no names, no demonstration or concrete documentation of all these Middle

Eastern and Muslim incapacities. To Lewis, what he writes about "Islam" is all so selfevident that it allows him to bypass normal conventions of intellectual discourse, including
proof. (Said 2002)

Uncritical Appraisals
When Lewis's book was reviewed in the New York Times by no less an intellectual
luminary than Yale's Paul Kennedy, there was only uncritical praise, as if to suggest that the
canons of historical evidence should be suspended where "Islam" is the subject. Kennedy
was particularly impressed with Lewis's assertion, in an almost totally irrelevant chapter on
"Aspects of Cultural Change," that alone of all the cultures of the world Islam has taken no
interest in Western music. Quite without any justification at all, Kennedy then lurched on to
lament the fact that Middle Easterners had deprived themselves even of Mozart! For that
indeed is what Lewis suggests (though he doesn't mention Mozart). Except for Turkey and
Israel, "Western art music," he categorically states, "falls on deaf ears" in the Islamic world.

Predilections and Falsehoods

Now, as it happens, but it would take some direct experience or a moment or two of
actual life in the Muslim world to realize that what Lewis says is a total falsehood, betraying
the fact that he hasn't set foot in or spent any significant time in Arab countries. Several
major Arab capitals have very good conservatories of Western music: Cairo, Beirut,
Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, Amman even Ramallah on the West Bank. These have produced
literally thousands of excellent Western-style musicians who have staffed the numerous
symphony orchestras and opera companies that play to sold-out auditoriums all over the
Arab world. There are numerous festivals of Western music there, too, and in the case of
Cairo, they are excellent places to learn about, listen to, and see Western instrumental and
vocal music performed at quite high levels of skill. (Said 2001)

16

Saids in to-to with Caveat

Avoid the trots and the manuals, give a wide berth to security experts and formulators
of us-versus-them dogma, and, above all, look with the deepest suspicion on anyone who
wants to tell you the real truth about Islam and terrorism, fundamentalism, militancy,
fanaticism, etc. Youd have heard it all before, anyway, and even if you hadnt, you could
predict its claims. Why not look for the expression of different kinds of human experience
instead, and leave those great non-subjects to the experts, their think tanks, government
departments, and policy intellectuals, who get us into one unsuccessful and wasteful war
after the other? (Said 2002)

Bernard Lewis Accusation of Edward Saids Errors and Misrepresentations

(Humphreys 1990; Yoffe 2001; Lewis 1982, 1993, 2002; Faroon 2003)
In his publication Islam and the West, highlights what he considers being many
historical and ethical errors and omissions from Saids book and also highlights the political
undertones, citing examples of imperialist administrators' publications being referenced as
Orientalist academic work to portray Saids hypotheses. Lewis also goes on to summarize
why he feels that Saids work is so popular. There is, as anyone who has browsed a college
bookshop knows, a broad market for simplified versions of complex problems. (Humphreys
1990)
Some of the points that Lewis cited in his criticism: (Lewis 1982)

The isolation of Arabic studies from both their historical and philological contexts.
(Said dates the main development of Arabic studies in Britain and France and dates
them after the British-French expansion)

Said's transmutation of events to fit his thesis (for example he claimed that Britain
and France dominated the eastern Mediterranean from about the end of seventeenth

17

century, knowing that at that time the British and French merchants and travelers
could visit the Arab lands only by permission of the sultan). (p. 109)

Many leading figures of British and French Arabists and Islamists who are the
ostensible subject of his study are not mentioned, such as Claude Cahen, Henri
Corbin, Marius Canard.

Said's neglecting of Arab scholarship and other writings.

From Pretentiousness to Meaninglessness

There are several contradictory theses buried in Saids impenetrable prose, decked with
post-modern jargon a universe of representative discourse, Orientalist discourse and
some kind editor really ought to explain to Said the meaning of literally and the difference
between scatalogical and eschatological, and pretentious language which often conceals
some banal observation, as when Said talks of textual attitude, when all he means is
bookish or bookishness. Tautologies abound, as in the freedom of licentious sex.
(Lewis 2002)
Said tells us that what binds them together is their common background in Oriental
legend and experience but also their learned reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb out of
which they were brought forth. What is the background of Oriental legend that inspired
Burton or Lane? Was Flauberts vivid imagination stimulated by Oriental legend, and was
this the same legendary material that inspired Burton, Lane and Lamartine? Learned
reliance on the Orient as a kind of womb... is yet another example of Saids pretentious
way of saying the obvious, namely that they were writing about the Orient about which they
had some experience and intellectual knowledge. (Lewis 2002)
Why are all these disparate works imitations? Take Lane and Burtons works, they are
both highly accurate accounts based on personal, first-hand experience. They are not
imitations of anything. James Aldridge in his study Cairo (1969) called Lanes account the
most truthful and detailed account in English of how Egyptians lived and behaved. While

18

Burtons accurate observations are still quoted for their scientific value as in F.E.Peters The
Hajj. Said also says of Lane, For Lanes legacy as a scholar mattered not to the Orient, of
course, but to the institutions and agencies of his European society. There is no of course
about it, Lanes Arabic Lexicon (5 vols; 1863-74) is still one of the first lexicons consulted
by any Muslim scholars wishing to translate the Koran into English; scholars like Maulana
Muhammad Ali, who began his English translation in 1909, and who constantly refers to
Lane in his copious footnotes; as does A.Yusuf Ali in his 1934 translation. What is more the
only place where one can still buy a reasonably priced copy of Lanes indispensable work of
reference is Beirut, where it is published by the Librairie du Liban. (Lewis 2002)
What profound mysteries are unraveled by Saids final tortuous sentence? Count
Alessandro Cagliostro (1743-1795) was a Sicilian charlatan who travelled in Greece, Egypt,
Zrabia, Persia, Rhodes, and Malta.During his travels he is said to have acquired considerable
knowledge of the esoteric sciences, alchemy in particular. On his return to Europe,
Cagliostro was involved in many swindles, and seems to have been responsible for many
forgeries of one kind or another, but found time to establish many Masonic lodges and
secret societies. He died in prison in 1795. He did not contribute anything whatsoever to the
scientific study of the Near or Middle East, neither of its languages, nor of its history or
culture. He was not a distinguished Orientalist in the way Lane was. Cagliostro, according to
Said, was the prototype of their the above five authors imaginative conception. Is he
suggesting that they too forged or made up their entire knowledge of the Egypt, Near East
and Arabia? (Lewis 2002)
Orientalism is peppered with meaningless sentences. Take, for example, Truth, in short,
becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which in time seems to
owe its existence to the Orientalist. Said seems to be saying: Truth is created by the
experts or Orientalists, and does not correspond to reality, to what is actually out there. But
then what is out there is also said to owe its existence to the Orientalist. If that is the
case, then the first part of Saids sentence makes no sense, and if the first part is true then

19

the second part makes no sense. Is Said relying on that weasel word seems to get him
out of the mess? That ruse will not work either; for what would it mean to say that an
external reality independent of the Orientalists judgment also seems to be a creation of the
Orientalist? That would be a simple contradiction. (Lewis 2002)
Here is another example: The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite
being true. Throughout his book, Said is at pains to point out that there is no such thing as
the Orient, which, for him, is merely a meaningless abstraction concocted by Orientalists
in the service of imperialists and racists. In which case, what on earth could The Orient
cannot imitate the Orientalist possibly mean? If we replace the Orient by the individual
countries, say between Egypt and India, do we get anything more coherent? No, obviously
not: India, Egypt, and Iran cannot imitate the Orientalists like Renan, Bernard Lewis,
Burton, et al. We get nonsense whichever way we try to gloss Saids sentence. (Lewis
2002)

Saids Anti-Westernism
In a rather disingenuous 1994 Afterword Said denies that he is anti-Western, he denies
that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a synecdoche of the entire West, and claims that he
believes there is no such stable reality as the Orient and the Occident, that there is no
enduring Oriental reality and even less an enduring Western essence, that he has no
interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are.
(Lewis 1993)
Denials to the contrary, an actual reading of Orientalism is enough to show Saids antiWesternism. While he does occasionally use inverted commas around the Orient and the
Occident, the entire force of Saids polemic comes from the polar opposites and contrasts
of the East and the West, the Orient and Europe, Us and the Other, that he himself has
rather crudely set up. (Lewis 1993)

20

Said wrote, I doubt that it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in
India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was
never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite
different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged
and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact (of imperialism) and yet that is
what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. (Yoffe 2001)
Here is Saids characterization of all Europeans: It is therefore correct that every
European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist,
and almost totally ethnocentric. In other words not only is every European a racist, but he
must necessarily be so. Said claims he is explicitly anti-essentialist particularly about the
West. But here is Said again: Consider first the demarcation between Orient and West. It
already seems bold by the time of the Iliad. Two of the most profoundly influential qualities
associated with the East appear in Aeschyluss The Persians, the earliest Athenian play
extant, and in The Bacchae of Euripides, the very last one extant.... The two aspects of the
Orient that set if of from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of
European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is
powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant. (Yoffe 2001)
A part of Saids tactics is to leave out Western writers and scholars who do not conform
to Saids theoretical framework. Since, for Said, all Europeans are a priori racist, he
obviously cannot allow himself to quote writers who are not. Indeed one could write a
parallel work to Orientalism made up of extracts from Western writers, scholars, and
travelers who were attracted by various aspects of non-European cultures, which they
praised and contrasted favorably with their own decadence, bigotry, intolerance, and
bellicosity. (Lewis 1993)

21

Misunderstanding of Western Civilization

One should remind Said that it was thanks to this desire for knowledge on the part of
Europeans that led to the people of the Near East recovering and discovering their own past
and their own identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century archaeological
excavations in Mesopotamia, Ancient Syria, Ancient Palestine and Iran were carried out
entirely by Europeans and later Americans the disciplines of Egyptology, Assyriology, and
Iranology which restored to mankind a large part of its heritage were the exclusive creations
of inquisitive Europeans and Americans. Whereas, for doctrinal reasons, Islam deliberately
refused to look at its pre-Islamic past, which was considered a period of ignorance. (Faroon
2003)

Serious Errors of History, Interpretation, Analysis and Omission

We should points out that even among British and French scholars on whom Said
concentrates, he does not mention at all Claude Cahen, Lvi-Provenal, Henri Corbin, Marius
Canard, Charles Pellat, William and George Marais, William Wright, or only mentioned in
passing, usually in a long list of names, scholars like R.A. Nicholson, Guy Le Strange, Sir
Thomas Arnold, and E.G.Browne. Even for those whom he does cite, Mr. Said makes a
remarkably arbitrary choice of works. His common practice indeed is to omit their major
contributions to scholarship and instead fasten on minor or occasional writings. Said even
fabricates lies about eminent scholars: Thus in speaking of the late nineteenth century
French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, Mr. Said remarks that he ransacked the Oriental
archives....What texts he isolated, he then brought back; he doctored them... If these
words bear any meaning at all it is that Sacy was somehow at fault in his access to these
documents and then committed the crime of tampering with them. This outrageous libel on
a great scholar is without a shred of truth. (Lewis 2002)
Another false accusation that Said flings out is that Orientalists never properly discussed
the Orientals economic activities until Rodinsons Islam and Capitalism (1966). This shows

22

Saids total ignorance of the works of Adam Mez, J.H.Kramers, W.Bjrkman, V.Barthold, and
Thomas Armold, all of whom dealt with the economic activities of Muslims.
Said also talks of Islamic Orientalism being cut off from developments in other fields i.e.
the humanities particularly the economic and social developments. But this again only
reveals Saids ignorance of the works of real Orientalists rather than those of his
imagination. As Rodinson says the sociology of Islam is an ancient subject, citing the work
of R.Lvy. Rodinson then points out that Durkheims celebrated journal LAnne sociologique
listed every year starting from the first decades of the XX century a certain number of
works on Islam. (Lewis 2002)

Concluding Remarks
Throughout their careers they have slashing out a bloody academic battle where one
intern has to side with the other to defend what he think is correct. We might be
disillusioned on how they craft their stands or positions without critically looking on the
sources theyve used, which sometimes distorted or sublime into oblivion of prejudices and
biases. Their disciples are scantily defending their mentors even death have befall upon
them, and this will continue with the next generation who would seemingly interested on
their expertise and majestic disciplines in re their specializations.
In to-to, instead of making it possible for people to educate them in how complex and
intertwined all cultures and religions really are, available public discourse is polluted with
reductive clichs that both Said and Lewis bandies about without a trace of skepticism or
rigor. The worst part of this method is that it systematically dehumanizes peoples and turns
them into a collection of abstract slogans for purposes of aggressive mobilization and
bellicosity. This is not at all a matter of rational understanding.
The study of other cultures is a humanistic, not a strategic or security, pursuit: They
may mutilates the effort itself and pretends to be delivering truths from on high. That this
has to do neither with knowledge nor with understanding is enough to dismiss a work as a

23

debased effort to push unsuspecting readers toward thinking of "Islam" as something to

judge harshly, to dislike, and therefore to be on guard against.
Of course one can learn about and understand Islam, but not in general and not, as far
too many of our expert authors propose, in so unsaturated way. To understand anything
about human history, it is necessary to see it from the point of view of those who made it,
not to treat it as a packaged commodity or as an instrument of aggression. Why should the
world of Islam be any different? The whole idea would be to open up Islams worlds as
pertaining to the living, the experienced, the connected-to-us, rather than to shut it down,
rigidly codifying it and stuffing it into a box labeled "Dangerous - do not disturb."
Above all, "we" cannot go on pretending that "we" live in a world of our own; certainly,
as Americans, their government is deployed literally all over the globe - militarily, politically,
and economically. So why do we suppose that what we say and do is neutral, when in fact it
is full of consequences for the rest of the human race? In our encounters with other cultures
and religions, therefore, it would seem that the best way to proceed is not to think like
governments or armies or corporations but rather to remember and act on the individual
experiences that really shape our lives and those of others.
Consequently, to think humanistically and concretely rather than formulaically and
abstractly, it is always best to read literature capable of dispelling the ideological fogs that
so often obscure people from each other.

Books Published
Edward W. Said
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Bernard Lewis

Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of

Autobiography (1966)
Beginnings: Intention and Method
(1975)
Orientalism (1978)
The Question of Palestine (1979)
Orientalism (1980)
Literature and Society (editor)
(1980)

1. The Origins of Ismailism (1940)

2. A Handbook of Diplomatic and
Political Arabic (1947)
3. The Arabs in History (1950)
4. The Emergence of Modern Turkey
(1961)
5. Istanbul and the Civilizations of the
Ottoman Empire (1963)
6. The Assassins: A Radical Sect in

24

7. The Middle East: What Chances For

Peace? (1980)
8. Covering Islam: How the Media and
the Experts Determine How We See
the Rest of the World (1981)
9. The World, the Text and the Critic
(1983)
10. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives
(1986)
11. Blaming the Victims: Spurious
Scholarship and the Palestinian
Question (1988)
12. Yeats and Decolonization (1988)
13. Musical Elaborations (1991)
14. Culture and Imperialism (1993)
15. The Politics of Dispossession (1994)
16. Representations of the Intellectual:
The Reith Lectures (1994)
17. The Pen and the Sword:
Conversations with Edward W. Said
(1994)
18. Peace and Its Discontents: Essays
on Palestine in the Middle East Peace
Process (1996)
19. Entre guerre at paix (1997)
20. Acts of Aggression: Policing "Rogue
States" (with Noam Chomsky and
Ramsey Clark) (1999)
21. Out of Place (1999) (a memoir)
22. Henry James: Complete Stories,
1884-1891 (Editor) (1999)
23. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo
and After (2000)
24. Reflections on Exile (2000)
25. The Edward Said Reader (2000)
26. Power, Politics and Culture:
Interviews with Edward W. Said
(2001)
27. Freud and the Non-European (2003)
28. From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map
(Collection of Essays) (2003)
29. Parallels and Paradoxes:
Explorations in Music and Society
(2003)
30. Humanism and Democratic Criticism
(2005)
31. On Late Style: Music and Literature
Against the Grain (2006)
32. Music at the Limits (2007)

Islam (1967)
7. The Cambridge History of Islam
(1970)
8. Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad
to the capture of Constantinople
(1974)
9. History Remembered, Recovered,
Invented (1975)
10. Race and Color in Islam (1979)
11. Christians and Jews in the Ottoman
Empire: The Functioning of a Plural
Society (1982)
12. The Muslim Discovery of Europe
(1982)
13. The Jews of Islam (1984)
14. Semites and Anti-Semites (1986)
15. Islam from the Prophet Muhammad
to the Capture of Constantinople
(1987)
16. The Political Language of Islam
(1988)
17. Race and Slavery in the Middle East:
an Historical Enquiry (1990)
18. Islam and the West (1993)
19. Islam in History (1993)
20. The Shaping of the Modern Middle
East (1994)
21. Cultures in Conflict (1994)
22. The Middle East: A Brief History of
the Last 2,000 Years (1995)
23. The Future of the Middle East (1997)
24. The Multiple Identities of the Middle
East (1998)
25. A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of
Life, Letters and History (2000)
26. Music of a Distant Drum: Classical
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew
Poems (2001)
27. The Muslim Discovery of Europe
(2001)
28. What Went Wrong?: The Clash
Between Islam and Modernity in the
Middle East (2002)
29. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and
Unholy Terror (2003)
30. From Babel to Dragomans:
Interpreting the Middle East (2004)

25

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Harper (July 2002).
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Sindbad. Desmond Tutu Vs Bernard Lewis. Blog (1 July 2007).

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