PostOrientalism

Knowledge and Power in

Time of Terror

Hamid Dabashi
0
Transaction Publishers
New Brunswick (U.S.A.) and London (U.K.)

Copyright 2009 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
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This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National
Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008045362
ISBN: 978-1-4128-0872-9
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dabashi, Hamid, 1951Post-orientalism : knowledge and power in time of terror / Hamid
Dabashi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-0872-9 (alk. paper)
1. Orientalism. 2. Authority. 3. Intellectuals. 4. Middle East
Foreign relations-United States. 5. United StatesForeign relations
Middle East. I. Title.
DS61.85.D33 2009
303.4877305dc22

2008045362

Contents
Introduction: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror

ix

1. On Exilic Intellectuals

2. Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

17

3.1 Am Not a Subalternist

123

4. The Creative Crisis of the Subject

155

5. Pilgrims' Progress: On Revolutionary Border-Crossing

185

6. Endosmosis: Knowledge without Agency,

209

Empire without Hegemony

7. Towards a New Organicity

229

Conclusion: Changing the Interlocutor

271

Index

283

Introduction
Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror
"The Mechanism of the exception is different While the example
is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is
included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to
it."Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1995)
At the writing of this introduction, Muslim and Iranian communities around the United States are exceedingly angry with
an editorial cartoon printed in the 4 September 2007 issue of the
Columbus Post-Dispatch in which Iranians are depicted as cockroaches spewing out of a sewer.

lb& Columbus Dispatch

Iran as a sewer and Iranians as cockroaches: the Columbus Post-Dispatch, 4
September 2007

Post-Orientalism

Invoking the classical study of Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy:

Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (1991), people who objected
to this cartoon took the Columbus Post-Dispatch to task for partaking in the prevailing Islamophobia of the time and portraying a
fabricated enemy (in this case an entire nation) as vermin. In one
letter to the editor of the paper, a deeply offended Iranian academic
wrote, "I find it extremely troubling that your paper would behave
like the Rwandan Hutu papers that also published cartoons depicting human beings, in their case Tutsis, as cockroaches, calling
for them to be stamped outleading to genocide. At least there
the hate mongers were indicted for crimes against humanity for
inciting that violence." In another, a learned scholar wrote, "The
editorial cartoon printed on September 4 in the Post-Dispatch
hit a new low. Depicting Iranians as cockroaches spewing out
of a sewer was a vile slur on the Iranian people. Aside from the
insulting nature of the cartoon, it represents an inaccurate view of
Iran's role in the Middle East. Despite the Bush administration's
attempts to blame everything that is going wrong in the Middle
East on Iranian interference, the accusations leveled by the White
House about Iran's role in Iraq, Afghanistan and contemporary
Lebanon remain unproven, or absurdly illogical. Cartoons like
this only cause the neoconservative drums of war sounding for a
disastrous military attack against Iran to beat louder."
Iranians as cockroaches: this is more than an attempt to distort
public perception of an entire nation. This is the foregrounding of a
semiotics of extermination, for that is what is done to cockroaches
and other pests. They are exterminated. The trouble, however, with
such cartoons and the sentiments they represent is that they are
neither sporadic nor accidental in the range and variety of racism
that they represent. They are, in fact, integral to a much wider
normative spectrum that usually remains mute and accumulates
unnoticed. Writing letters of protest to the editor and perhaps
even getting them published is certainly a minimal response and
protest against such behavior. But equally important is a more
fundamental attempt at understanding the normative authority
that enables a cartoonist, a newspaper, and a reading audience to

Introduction

xi

initiate and accept such cartoons, generate and sustain such semiotics of extermination about an entire people. "By what authority,
and who gave thee this authority"one might wonder in a very
simple, albeit Biblical, question. There is, as always, a relation of
reciprocity between the knowledge (public perception) that such
cartoons generate and sustain and the military power that is able
to go and exterminate those cockroaches.
The book you are about to read is a sustained record of my reflections over many years on precisely the question of this presumed
authority and evident power to represent. Who gets to represent
whom and by what authority? When initiated in the most militarily powerful country in the world, the United States of America,
already deeply engaged in military interventions in Afghanistan
and Iraq (and through Israel in Palestine and Lebanon), such acts
of racist representation speak voluminously of a far more deeply
rooted claim to normative and moral agency, a phenomenon that
must be unearthed and examined. In his groundbreaking book,
Orientalism (1978), Edward Said traced the origin of this power
of representation and the normative agency that it entailed to the
colonial hubris that carried a militant band of mercenary merchants,
military officers, Christian missionaries, and European Orientalists around the globe, enabling them to write and represent the
people they thus sought to rule. The insights of Edward Said in
Orientalism went a long way toward explaining the conditions of
domination and representation from the classical colonial period
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries down to the time that
he wrote his landmark study in the mid-1970s. Though many of
his insights still remain valid and operative, Edward Said's observations will have to be updated and mapped out for the iconic
events that have led to the post-9/11 syndrome. I have written this
book in partial response to this need, in order to think through
Edward Said's insights and reflect on our contemporary conditions. I have done so, however, not just by way of a diagnosis of
how and through what mechanisms "the Orient" continues to be
represented and sought to be dominated, but, more to the point,
how (in what particular terms) a resistance to that will to dominate

xii

Post-Orientalism

is possible. This latter phenomenon, the will to resist power, was a

principal point of departure for Edward Said's other major study,
Culture and Imperialism (1991), though mostly in the form of an
archival inventory of rebellious resistances to European domination. My objective in this book is more to articulate the theoretical
foregrounding of the power of self-representation and rebellious
agency for the subaltern, the colonized, the dominated. Can the
subaltern speak, I too wonder along with Gayatri Spivak, and wish
to engage in a response to that (perhaps rhetorical) question.
Towards that end I navigate my way through and around Said's
work in order to articulate the critical question of agency and the
will to resist power in a manner that bestows authorial voice to
the subaltern beyond the presumed crisis of the subject that has
remained a constant in European philosophical thinking from
Michel Foucault forward and has remained principally unresolved
in Edward Said. Here I have an idea I wish to explore beyond that
presumed crisis of the subject by way of guiding it through the
creative and critical moments of the subaltern when s/he teases
agency and authority to speak out of historical traumas that have,
in fact, sought to silence him/her.
With this general project in mind, I will begin this book with a
reading of Edward Said from a rather unusual perspective; not from
either of his two seminal worksOrientalism (1978) or Culture
and Imperialism (1991)but from his book on Representation
of Intellectuals (1994). My argument in this chapter, "On Exilic
Intellectuals," is that this latter book was central to Said's lifelong
project of detecting, arguing, and articulating a mode and manner of moral agency in a post-metaphysical space and beyond the
crisis of the subject paramount in post-Foucauldian philosophical
scene. I choose to start with this argument because my paramount
concern in this book is not a mere critique of colonial representation but in fact the manners and modes of fighting back and resisting it. This is not to question the central significance of Edward
Said's Orientalism and its principal concern with colonial acts of
representation, to which I will turn in the following chapter, but
to provide a different angle on Said's entire oeuvre, an angle that

Introduction

xiii

argues for the primacy of the question of postcolonial agency in

a tireless attempt to reach for a mode of knowledge production at
once beyond the legitimate questions raised about the sovereign
subject and yet politically poignant and powerful. My contention
in this chapter is that the figure of the exilic intellectual (by which
I will understand an intellectual at home in not being at home) is
ultimately the paramount site for the cultivation of normative and
moral agency with a sense of worldly presence. That figure of the
exilic intellectual will remain paramount in this book as I navigate
my way toward a mode of counter-knowledge production in time
of terror and total war, and as the will to resist power must mount
its energy to match the will to dominate, represent, and show human beings as cockroaches waiting to be exterminated.
It is at this point that I will turn to Edward Said's Orientalism,
and through a close reading of the life and career of the distinguished Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher I will reargue
Said's critical position from a much neglected perspective. In
"Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism," I
have navigated my way along three intervening paths: first, the
extraordinary life and career of a preeminent Orientalist and the
challenge that he poses to Said's argument in his Orientalism;
second, the re-positioning of the Saidian argument through a
sociology of knowledge perspective that predates his book by
decades and thus substantiates it from an entirely different angle;
and third, open a way towards the rearticulation of the critical
question of agency in an Orientalized context beyond both Said
and his critique of Orientalism. The significance of Goldziher in
these arguments is manifold. First and foremost, he was a staunch
anticolonial activist who actively opposed British colonialism in
Egypt and refused to have anything to do with the Zionist colonization of Palestine, for which reasons he has earned the everlasting
wrath of his Zionist biographers. He is no ran of the mill Bernard
Lewis look-alike Orientalist, and as such provides an extraordinary
occasion to reexamine Said's argument. While even Goldziher's
scholarship corroborates Said's principal thesis concerning the general contours of the Orientalist episteme, he nevertheless exercises

xiv

Post-Orientalism

extraordinary agential autonomy in his anticolonial politics. My

close and detailed examination of Goldziher's life and scholarship
is to safeguard Said's argument from ad hominem references to
individual Orientalists, while accounting for a space that distinguishes between someone like Goldziher and someone like Bernard Lewis. Central to my argument in this chapter is a revival of
a sociology of knowledge perspective, which at one and the same
time historicizes Edward Said's argument in his Orientalism and
also paves the way for our renewed understanding of the relation
between knowledge and power beyond Said's seminal work. This
chapter is thus crucial in the case I wish to make in this book for
the notion of "post-Orientalism."
My next move, in the same vein, is to work my way towards a
mode of agential autonomy that enables the subaltern to produce
knowledge about the world without being implicated in the socalled crisis of the subject. To do so, I will first have to dismantle
the essentialized notion of "the subaltern" (or "the Oriental") as
being ipso facto conducive to the formation of agency and, in a
Saidian move, seek to place the normative authority of the subaltern in a contrapuntal position that refuses essentialized agency
or else remain the sitting duck for any narrative dismantling of
the knowing subject. In "I am Not a Subalternist" I have sought
to bring Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak to a closer conversation
that their mutual positioning as two postcolonial theorists would
otherwise not warrant, a conversation that was made possible
for me through a critical encounter with Ranajit Guha and his
critique of Hegelian notion of history. Here, my objective is to
insert myself in between two iconic moments of questioning the
(European) sovereign subject, through a critically self-conscious
colonial subject who attains agential autonomy by way of knowing
the language of speaking (fighting) back to the sovereign. Here I
have (perforce) taken the Kantian knowing, sovereign subject at its
face value and then sought to unlearn the colonial language, while
learning the language of speaking back to its knowing sovereignty.
I have attempted in this essay a simultaneous critique of Spivak
and Said, via a critical encounter with Guha, seeking in the space

Introduction

xv

between Said's insistence on retrieving and contrapuntally liberating a critical and democratic humanism and Spivak's institutional
detour around the impossibility of an intellectual representation of
the subaltern a thirdmuch widerpath. On this path, I contend,
we can wed Edward Said's unabashed political engagement to
Gayatri Spivak's paralyzing critique of the European dismantling
of the sovereign subject, without partaking in Said's "residual humanism" or Spivak's prolonging even further the (European) crisis
of the subject. The straight path towards that objective, learning
and then going beyond Said, Spivak, and Guha, is to put an end
to the idea of "Europe," or a fortiori "the West," as the principle
interlocutor of the world. It is not.
In my next chapter, "The Creative Crisis of the Subject," I continue to facilitate the conversation I have initiated between Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak in order to reach for a mode of creative
agency, particularly in aesthetic domains, an area that has remained
relatively neglected in both their cases, perhaps in Spivak more
than in Said. This argument will enable me to follow the central
question of agency in Said and Spivak in creative and artistic domains, places where the subaltern artist is ipso facto outside the
purview of the colonial de-subjection. My argument here begins
with a reading of Said's so-called "residual humanism" and then
expands to find a way out of the cul de sac of the sovereign subject
by dwelling on the aesthetic moment of subaltern creativity. In
between Said's critical humanism and Spivak's strategic essentialism, I wish to demonstrate in this chapter, that there already dwells
a defiant subject that they have left theoretically under-theorized,
and which I wish here to encounter. My contention is that this
defiance is best articulated in revolutionary aesthetics rather than
in an exclusively political opposition.
In the next chapter, "Pilgrims' Progress," I have sought to look
at the presumed crisis of the (European) subject from a different and complementary angle. Here I wish to argue that for the
postcolonial person the crisis of the subject is resolved not only
creatively in the aesthetic domain, but also critically in the domain
of revolutionary praxis of a particular provenance. Here I wish to

xvi

Post-Orientalism

argue that the presumed crisis of the subject is balanced by the

factual crisis of the dominant ideology that categorically fails to
convince, control, or sustain the servitude of its targeted population. The ideological crisis of the Hegemon (standing for the Empire), I will then argue, is matched by an extraordinary evidence
of revolutionary border-crossing by a number of leading world
revolutionaries in the twentieth century. I will thus try to find a
common thread in this chapter among a number of revolutionary
thinkers and activistsChe Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X,
and Ali Shari'atiwho managed to cross a number of confounding
borders in order to reach for a global conception of emancipation.
My objective here is to articulate the question of creative agency
in a specifically revolutionary context and to demonstrate that a
truly authentic revolutionary character is always and paradoxically
predicated on revolutionary inauthenticitybeing fixed on the
revolutionary cause but mobile in one's discursive articulation of
it. Here, upon this premise, is where I consider Edward Said as one
such revolutionary thinker who in the realm of ideas and aspirations
did precisely what Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and
Ali Shari'ati had done in praxis: translating the native and nativist
boundaries of a particular cause, for him Palestine, into the vernacular grammar of a far more global struggle. The resultfrom
praxis to theoryis a manner of revolutionary border-crossing in
order to dodge power and speak a vernacular of revolt.
Predicated on this reconsidered notion of normative and moral
agency, I will then turn to what I believe to be a post-Orientalist
moment in a chapter on "Endosmosis: Knowledge without Agency,
Empire without Hegemony." My objective in this chapter is to go
beyond Edward Said's critique of Orientalism and see through a
manner of confronting the modes of knowledge production (in
the proverbial aftermath of 9/11) and the formation of a kind of
imperialism that is no longer predicated on a sustained hegemony.
My aim here is to posit the postcolonial critic in tune with a postOrientalist mode of knowledge production, a mobile guerrilla
tactician unfettered by fixated discursive analytics. I propose
the notion of epistemic endosmosis as the most recent phase of

Introduction

xvii

knowledge production about the Middle East, a phase when such

useful knowledge is no longer predicated on a particular manner
of subject-formation, for it is predicated on no particular paradigmatic or epistemic formation. This amounts to an implosion of
the European sovereign and knowing subject, at a moment when
globalized capital has effectively metastasized and knows no center
or periphery to sustain its corresponding illusion of the sovereignty
of the owning/knowing subject.
In my final chapter, "Towards a New Organicity," I have sought
to see through a renewed commitment to a moral voice that does not
remain silent in face of global atrocities for fear of authenticating
an inauthentic act of representation. By now I will have hoped to
have constituted a conception of agency that speaks clearly and authoritatively without any fear of false and faltering representation.
The urgency of our time, I fear and hope, now critically demands
that voice, and we will have to speak it clearly and authoritatively,
in one language or another.
In my conclusion, "Changing the Interlocutor," I intend to revisit
all these issues once again through what I have had to say between
this introduction and that conclusion, and map out the contour of
a new mode of defiant knowledge production against the grain of
the power that demands and exacts a subservient knowledge that
corroborates all that sustains its course of global domination. To
subvert that domination, I intend to argue in the conclusion, we will
have to change the interlocutor with whom we, as postcolonial critics, have been conversing all these long and tumultuous years.

1
On Exilic Intellectuals1
"It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home."
Theodore W. Adorno

"[I am] the outlander, not only regionally, but down bone deep and
for good...my Texas grandfather has something to do with that."
C. Wright Mills
Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual must be
considered a landmark in radically reawakening the crucial consciousness of that critical community of counter-interpreters we
have habitually called "The Intellectuals."
It appears that the problem of intellectuals in the United States
is reformulated periodically as a crucial barometer of issues and
concerns centered around, but much beyond, the immediate conception of this social category. It was in Democracy in America
that Tocqueville opened his second, theoretically more significant,
volume with the startling pronouncement that:
I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to
philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into
which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known
to them.2

Post-Orientalism

To be sure, a century and a half after this observation, and in

an age when major European philosophers like Derrida, Foucault,
Gadamer, Habermas, Vattimo, and Eco have had a long-standing
intellectual engagement in this country, Tocqueville's observation
does not appear to be the case anymore. Nevertheless, Tocqueville
seems to have detected something crucial in the American intellectual disposition, both in terms of attention to matters of theory
and to the social and political implications of that attention. Thus,
immediately after this paragraph, he proceeds to detect a sort of
"practical philosophy" among Americans almost despite themselves. But one of the most striking of Tocqueville's observations
in this respect, which I think still carries a strong element of truth
in it, is his assertion that "The Americans do not read the works
of Descartes, because their social condition deters them from
speculative studies..."3 Attention to what Tocqueville calls "social
condition" will necessarily lead us to some principal material
forces that can be either conducive or detrimental to theoretical
and speculative concerns which must be considered as the conditio
sine qua non of the rise and sustained legitimacy of an intellectual
group with its contingent collective consciousness.
Since Tocqueville's observations early in the nineteenth century,
quite a number of other theorists have periodically raised the question of the responsibility of the intellectuals in society. In 1921,
in the wake of a massive migration of American literati to Europe,
for example, Harold Steams raised the rhetorical question, "Where
Are Our Intellectuals?" In 1927, Julien Benda's La trahison des
clercs appeared as a crucial text with an enduring effect on both
the European and American conceptions of the fate of the intellectuals and their social responsibilities. More often than not, it
is in response to some crucial social event, a moderate or radical
change in what Tocqueville called the American "social condition," that the issue of the social responsibility of the intellectuals
seems to reemerge. Partially in response to the horrifying implications of McCarthyism, for example, in 1956, H. Stuart Hughes
heralded a generation of reflection on the nature and function of
the intellectuals. In 1969, again, with obvious attention to the

On Exilic Intellectuals

events in the decade, Philip Rieff put together a number of by

now classic statements on the position of the intellectuals. Rieff's
edited volume, On Intellectuals* included some seminal pieces
by Edward Shils, Ralf Dahrendorf, J. P. Nettle, Isaiah Berlin, and
Rieff himself who wrote on "The Case of Dr. Oppenheimer." In
many respects, these, among many other texts, are indices of those
very "social conditions" that Tocqueville identified as the primary
framework of all (dis)engagements with intellectual issues. At the
height of the Reagan era, for example, we saw the publication of
Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, which was in fact a thinly disguised
anti-intellectual tirade.
The most recent concern with the plight of intellectuals in the
United States commenced with the insightful volume by Russell
Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (1987),5 in which he launched a
scathing attack against the gentrification and suburbanization of
the urban (or what he called "public") intellectuals by virtue of
which academic careerism fatally aborted the formation of any
community of critical counter-interpreters. Jacoby demonstrated
how the generation of Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith had failed to produce their intellectual epigones,
and thus left the public domain vacant of any autonomous critical
judgment. In a collection of essays that Bruce Robbins assembled
in 1990, Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics,6 Jacoby's
book was taken to task and a number of leading critical theorists
began to re-historicize the position of the intellectuals in this country. Among the contributors to this volume was Edward Said who
in an interview with Bruce Robbins outlined the historical roots
of an almost total neglect of the Palestinian cause by American
intellectuals.
The crucial problem that both Jacoby's text and Robbins edited volume underlined was that of the professionalization of the
intellectual. The radical pacification of the urban intellectuals by
the university was the crucial factor that both Jacoby's diagnosis
and Robbins' edited response brought to the fore. The changing
social condition of professionalization (and such ancillary problems as suburbanization which Jacoby equally emphasized) was

Post-Orientalism

thus identified as the leading cause of the decline and fall of the
intellectuals as a community of counter-interpreters.
Edward Said's book on intellectuals came at the end of a long
history of institutional concern with the fate and function of the
intellectuals, particularly at the concluding dead-end of Jacoby's
diagnosis which Robbins' collection had sought to balance. Although Said's lectures were delivered in London as the 1993 Reith
Lectures, the brunt of his argument is in fact directed domestically
to the United States which was not only home to his moral and
intellectual concerns but in fact with the demise of the Soviet
Union and the obvious dangers of a single, domineering, world
superpower the question of American intellectuals' social responsibility has assumed an added momentum. Whereas Robbins' edited
volume had rather successfully re-historicized the position of the
intellectuals, the institutional dilemma of professionalization had
remained paramount. The contributors to Robbins' volume were
in fact more engaged in an advocative and emancipatory act of
inaugurating a new role for the intellectuals rather than providing institutional bases for a way out of Jacoby's highly accurate
diagnosis.
Said's text, however, begins to provide a crucial, and institutionally viable way out of the Jacobian paradox. To be sure, Said's
argument, as I shall note shortly, is equally innovating, advocative,
and emancipatory, rather than clinical and diagnostic in its assessments. Moreover, I believe he had, in effect, detected a crucial
way out of the Jacobian cul-de-sac, which under the changing
conditions of the U.S. imperial polity, to paraphrase Tocqueville's
assessment, may indeed lead to a renaissance in the social function
of the intellectuals.
The first thing that Said does is that he expands the spectrum
of compromising forces that endanger the autonomous judgment
of the intellectual. Here we observe that much more than professionalism is present and active in compromising the role of a
potential intellectual class. As Said sees them, the intellectuals,
as such, are principally compromised by a number of compelling
centers of fatal attractions: nations and nationalism (in parts of

On Exilic Intellectuals

chapter 2), traditions and traditionalism (in other parts of chapter

2), professions and professionalism (chapter 4), powers and their
institutions (chapter 5), and ultimately gods and their latter-day
prophets (chapter 6). Said believes that the single most effective
way out of the traps of these compromising forces are the conditions of exile and marginality, which he theorizes effectively
to a level of almost institutional de-centrality in an otherwise
hegemonic culture. Said's argument here takes to logical conclusions the moral and theoretical implications of what in 1930s was
called "the University in Exile" and was comprised of hundreds
of European intellectuals who fled to this country from the Nazi
atrocities and thanks to the visionary brilliance of Alvin Johnson
were brought to the New School for Social Research.7
Said's theorization of the condition of exile, both literally and
metaphorically, is of crucial significance here. It is critical to note
how Said arranges the progression of his argument and the logistics
of his narrative strategies. When one reads the book one notices
how he has planted the crucial chapter on intellectuals as real and
metaphorical exiles right in the middle of the text, the third of the
six chapter/lectures, like a subversive bomb, or a blooming flower,
planted/embraced in between the preceding two chapters which
unpack the compromising forces of nations and traditions, and
the last three chapters on professions, powers, and gods. While
logically this chapter should have followed all the other chapters,
rhetorically it comes in the middle, where it explodes/blooms
like a grenade/tulip to subvert/outgrow all those compromising
forces and thus give forceful birth to the expatriate intellectual, in
both the real (as in fact exemplified by Edward Said himself) and
the metaphoric (as represented by Noam Chomsky, for example)
senses of the term.
This is the principal proposition of Said, which because of its
significance I am going to quote in some detail:
...while it is an actual condition, exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical condition. By that I mean that my diagnosis of the intellectual
in exile derives from the social and political history of dislocation and
migration...but is not limited to it. Even intellectuals who are lifelong

Post-Orientalism

members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into

insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the
society as it is, whoflourishin it without an overwhelming sense of
dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers, and on the
other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odd with their society and
therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are
concerned. The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider
is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully
adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by
the natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings
of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual
in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being
unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and
perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never
fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation.8
This is much more than a mere self-theorization on part of Said, or
even if it is, it is based on a much larger social reality. What Said
has detected is a constitutional change in precisely that "social
condition" that Tocqueville had identified as the material condition for Americans not being philosophically minded early in the
nineteenth century. Without naming it so, Tocqueville had what
Weber would later identify as the Protestant ethic in mind when he
diagnosed the conditions of an anti-intellectual trait in American
life. As the catholicity of learning, and the caring that follows
from it, became a trademark of the Jesuits, the Calvinist theology
was translated into an ascetic practicality constitutionally at odds
with "wasteful speculation." The predominance of the Protestant
ethic in the U.S. thus became conducive to the rise of the spirit
of capitalism, as Weber first theorized the relationship. Equally, it
led, in both moral and intellectual senses, to that intellectual iron
cage of which Weber wrote with a prophetic clarity: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines
that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."9
Said does not pay any attention to the centrality of this Protestant
ethic in the institutional professionalization of the intellectuals.
Jacoby briefly notices it but does not develop it into the major
grids of his argument. Yet, rather instinctively and without much
theorizing it, Jacoby narrows in on the "Jewish intellectual" as a

On Exilic Intellectuals

prototype. The Jewish intellectuals did not, for obvious reasons,

share the Protestant ethic of asceticism and practicality and thus
the so-called "Bohemian Culture" was instrumental in the production of an autonomous critical judgment, always operating on the
periphery of some hegemonic center.
What principally threatens Said's way out of Jacoby's cul-de-sac
is precisely this pervasive culture of asceticism and practicality
deeply entrenched in the Protestant ethic now propagated deeply
into the American ethos. What is lacking in the United States is
a paradoxically productive culture of idleness, a culture of counter-professional, counter-institutional, and critically questioning
imagination. It is only such an idle imagination that can afford
serious engagement with the vital issues of the time. That bizarre
category we call "the academic intellectual" is constitutionally
compromised by something much more immediate than the debilitating anxieties of a tenure-track predicament, that is, by a set of
regular and routine responsibilities. To be responsible in a much
wider domain of public interest, an intellectual will have to be an
irresponsible person in the most positive sense of the term. For the
gradual formation of a community of counter-interpreters, a culture
of "idleness" is necessary. Constitutionally opposing the formation of such a culture of (only inadvertently productive) idleness
is the Protestant ethics with its doctrinal denial of "leisure"in a
revised reading of Veblen's theory.
In the context of this engulfing anti-intellectual culture, equally
modifying Said's theoretical proposition, is the other end of ascetic practicality, which is the Stardom Syndrome in the U.S.
academic scene. The principal prerequisite for the generation
and legitimate operation of an intellectual is the social formation
of an intellectual class, or more accurately a community of counter-interpreters. Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, as two star
intellectuals, are not the representatives of a freethinking social
enterprise, an active community of counter-interpreters. They are,
among a handful of other urban intellectuals, paid professors at
highly prestigious universities, and then in their public presentations framed as some sort of professorial stars. If Jacoby's highly

Post-Orientalism

accurate criticism of professionalization of the intellectual is to

be overcome, if the pervasive asceticism of the Protestant ethic
of practicality is to be balanced, and if Said's theorization of the
exilic condition is indeed to correspond to a constitutional change
in what Tocqueville identified as the American "social conditions,"
this Stardom Syndrome too must be substituted by a community of
critical thinking from which, of course, certain chief spokespersons
can and do emerge.
The problem with the Stardom Syndrome is that ideas and their
formative social forces become so organically mis-identified with
the characters representing them that they systematically lose
their intellectual anchorage in the public domain. Edward Said's
critique of Orientalism, as a chief example, is so thoroughly identified with him that in the domain of civic discourse it has scarce
any connection to the discipline of the sociology of knowledge
that by about a century predates the publication of Edward Said's
masterwork. The principal proposition of Orientalismthe
structural link between the Orientalist manner of knowledge
production and colonialismcan indeed be linked not only to a
major branch of the sociology of knowledge that through Max
Scheler and Karl Mannheim is rooted in the works of Karl Marx,
Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, but can in fact completely
bypass Michel Foucault and trace its origin to Quentin Skinner's
philosophical hermeneutics on political theory and the link that he
proposes between social meaning and social action.10 A similar
argument can be made linking the argument of Edward Said's
Orientalism to an even more critical school of intellectual history,
now best represented perhaps in the work of Dominick Lacapra.11
The intellectual fragmentation and the political disembodiment of
ideas, coupled with a radical removal of public intellectuals from
their moral and normative imaginary, are chiefly responsible for
their dismemberment from a sustained body of critical judgment
that pre- and postdates their public appearance.
Threatening the active formation of that critical community of
counter-interpreters is not just the Stardom Syndrome but also the
self-perpetuating culture of professionalism that is most detectable

On Exilic Intellectuals

among undergraduate students. This crucial community which

should ideally constitute both the audience and the main pool of
potential intellectuals is increasingly turning into a frightened
mass of prematurely career-conscious teenagers with all their innate and natural sense of justice and fairness, as indeed their very
biological urge to wonder about their world, completely muzzled
by concerns about their professional careers. The result is that
there is barely any intellectual joy, wonder, and free exercise of
the critical faculties left among undergraduates. Either an intellectually crippling obsession with getting "trained" for their career
in engineering, business, law, or medical professions, or acutely
joyless symptoms of a life without moral and intellectual vision,
now characterizes undergraduate education in the U.S. academy.
Seriously curtailed on our university campuses is a free-floating
atmosphere of creative and critical imagination that can grasp
and direct the moral and political imperatives of a whole generation. Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind12 was the
last anti-intellectual manifesto that still sought to save the canons
of the "Western Civilization" for the hegemonic arsenal of what
he wished to be the American imperialist imagination. These
so-called "canons" can be as much the icons of dead certainties
and nostalgic imperialism a la Bloom as they can be the crucial
catalysts of a regeneration of a moral and political imagination
at the very heart of a renewed definition of the intellectual. It
really does not matter whether one reads Plato or Ibn Khaldun in
the curriculum of a core of required courses. It does matter for
what purpose one reads them: For the canonical celebration of
a fiction called "Western Civilization" or for the rejuvenation of
a moral and political imagination that can take a full account of
life as it is.
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Edward Said's
theorizing of the exilic intellectual is the decontextualization
of critical judgment whereby no sociology of knowledge can
actually explain the intellectual away. "[By] virtue of living a
life," Said constructs the image of an exilic intellectual from the
fragments of the character of Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and

10

Post-Orientalism

Sons and the Adorno of Minima Moralia, "according to different

norms, the intellectual does not have a story, but only a sort of
debilitating effect; he sets off seismic shocks, he jolts people,
but he can neither be explained away by his background nor
his friends."13 The figure of Adorno as an intellectual in exile,
however, remains a problematic one. Because while Said celebrates Adorno alongside Sartre for the direct and catalytically
radical effects they have had, he equally notes his deliberate
obscurantism as an strategy: "It [Adorno's writing style] represents the intellectual's consciousness as unable to be at rest
anywhere, constantly on guard against the blandishments of
success, which for the perversely inclined Adorno, means trying consciously not to be understood easily and immediately."14
Said is here caught between his deep appreciation for Adorno,
whom he celebrates as an exemplary exilic intellectual, and
his own committed concern with the public accessibility of the
intellectual, which first and foremost means the command of
a direct and simplified prose. Said is, of course, conscious of
this paradox and spares not a moment to side with the positive
reading of exile and a denouncement of any gloomy predisposition that can lead to narrative obscurantism as a mode of
residual existence in exile. After a close reading of Adorno's
assertion that "In the end, the writer is not allowed to live in
his writing," Said observes that "This is typically gloomy and
unyielding.... What Adorno doesn't speak about are indeed the
pleasures of exile, those different arrangements of living and
eccentric angles of vision that it can sometimes afford, which
enliven the intellectual's vocation, without perhaps alleviating
every last anxiety or feeling of bitter solitude."15
This positive and enabling reading of exile is precisely what
distinguishes Said from Adorno, and if indeed it corresponds to
some constitutionally enduring changes in the American social
conditions, namely to the active and engaged presence of intellectual exiles on the close periphery of the hegemonic center, then
it can lead to historical changes in the role of the intellectuals. In
taking issue with Jacoby's assessment of the decline of the social

On Exilic Intellectuals

11

significance of the public intellectual, Said's principal argument

for the continued political centrality of the intellectual as exile
becomes evident:
.. .what Jacoby does not talk about is that intellectual work in the twentieth century has been centrally concerned not just with public debate and
elevated polemic of the sort advocated by Mien Benda and exemplified
perhaps by Bertrand Russell and a few Bohemian New York intellectuals,
but also with criticism and disenchantment, with the exposure of false
prophets and debunking of ancient traditions and hallowed names.16
But the problem with the social function of the intellectuals is not
that it must be predicated on a vocational "office" called "The Intellectuals." A critical community of counter-interpreters always
emerges out of the collective concerns of a number of individuals
who can and do transcend their class and professional interests.
Jacoby's diagnosis about the declining critical apparatus of the
intellectuals is thus perfectly accurate not because there is something constitutionally defective about the status of intellectuals
in the United States. The reason, rather, is that historically these
very people (Jacoby himself, as Gore Vidal so aptly commented
upon the publication of The Last Intellectuals, Edward Said, Noam
Chomsky, Gore Vidal, etc.) have actually managed to speak and
be heard beyond their professional concerns and interests and on
issues of vitalmoral and politicalsignificance.
With the exception of Gore Vidal, practically all other names in
that list are highly successful academics, way beyond being scared
of their upcoming ad hoc committees deciding their academic,
professional, and, of course, personal future. But this is not the
case with the overwhelming majority of academics, particularly
those who in one way or another consider themselves in exile. The
junior members of the faculty in particular are by and large scared
witless to get themselves through the tenure process which can
take anything from six to ten years before they reach the infamous
and treacherous "up-or-out" cliff-hanger. By the time the tenure
process is over, bending over backwards to accommodate power,
being compromising and appeasing, become almost second nature
to the junior faculty. The problem is particularly acute for expatri-

12

Post-Orientalism

ate members of the university, the very center of Said's theorization

of their potential status as urban intellectuals. There are not many
Alvin Johnsons around anymore, a visionary intellectual who as the
director of the New School for Social Research in 1930s provided
a safe and enabling haven for hundreds of European intellectuals escaping the atrocities of the Third Reich. Today, expatriate
intellectuals, cut off from their native support networks, are at the
double mercy of both the university and the society at large, the
first target of all the barely concealed anxieties of demonization
of "The Other" which the likes of Samuel Huntington and Francis
Fukuyama have sustained in the U.S.
This is not to suggest that the expatriate (potential) intellectuals themselves are not chiefly responsible for the generation of a
culture of self-pity and misery, a jeremiad of pathological nostalgia for a homeland that never was nor will be. That prevalent
predicament, constitutional to that branch of cultural studies that
caters to the so-called diasporic cultures, is so deeply pathetic and
jaundiced that nothing more than a sub-culture of ghetto mentality and self-deprivation can emerge from it. Perhaps the most
exhilarating aspect of Said's very cast of mind and narrative is
his humane and humanizing urbanity, his liberating, inaugurating, and emancipatory rhetoric, the deeply moving catholicity of
his critical imagination. It is precisely in the cast and character
of that critical imagination that we ought to detect the exemplary
model of a new generation of expatriate intellectuals who are more
amphibian than exilic, more central than peripheral, more actively
critical than passively self-negating. "The intellectual in exile,"
in Said's precise perception, "is necessarily ironic, skeptical, even
playfulbut not cynical."17 It is to that emancipatory wisdom that
we owe our moment of liberation:
For the intellectual an exilic displacement means being liberated from
the usual career, in which "doing well" and following in time-honored
footsteps are the main milestones. Exile means that you are always going
to be marginal, and that what you do as an intellectual has to be made up
because you cannot follow a prescribed path. If you can experience that
fate not as deprivation and as something to be bewailed, but as a sort of
freedom, a process of discovery in which you do things according to your

On Exilic Intellectuals

13

own pattern, as various interests seize your attention, and as the particular
goal you set yourself dictates: that is a unique pleasure.18
There is, however, a profound element of sectarian ghettoization
that seriously challenges the possibilities of Said's cosmopolitan
liberation of the so-called third-world intellectual. As early as
Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (his Quaderni del Carcere which
he wrote between 1929 and 1935), we have been warned of this
danger. Here is what Gramsci observed:
One can note, in the case of the United States, the absence to a considerable degree of traditional intellectuals, and consequently a different
equilibrium among the intellectuals in general.... The necessity of an
equilibrium is determined, not by the need to fuse together the organic
intellectuals with the traditional, but the need to fuse together in a single
national crucible with a unitary culture the different forms of culture
imported by immigrants of differing national origins. The lack of a vast
sedimentation of traditional intellectuals such as onefindsin countries
of ancient civilisations explains, at least in part, both the existence of
only two major political parties, which could in fact easily be reduced
to one only.... and at the opposite extreme the enormous proliferation
of religious sects.19
That condition is still present. Against it, Said's resuscitation of
an active exilic intellectual, precisely in his moving last chapter,
provides what E. M. Cioran once observed as the best condition for
an intellectual: anationality. The exilic condition, as Said defines it,
supersedes ethnic and religious sectarianism only through a flexing
of historical memories through an essentially ironic mode of being. Resistance to theory, which is at the root of resistance to the
intellectuals as the counter-interpreters of a culture, is, as Paul De
Man once observed, resistance to the rhetorical and tropological, to
which one might add "ironic," dimensions of language, and through
language, of being. That ironic mode of being is constitutional to
the working act of the intellectual, irony in the senses stretched
from the counter-metaphysics of Soren Kierkegaard to the engage
pragmatism of Richard Rorty. It is in that ironic mode that the
intellectual can take to task much more than the relations of power
in a political culture and reach down for what Rorty, paraphrasing

14

Post-Orientalism

Heidegger, has called the "Plato-Kant canon." In fact, the intellectual is nothing but the social manifestation of what Rorty has
typified, if that is the right word to use in this case, as "the ironist
theorist."20 "The ironist theorist," Rorty has suggested, "distrusts
the metaphysician's metaphor of a vertical view downward. He
substitutes the historicist metaphor of looking back on the past
along a horizontal axis."21 The horizontality of that historicist
irony is precisely what spells out the counter-theorizing urge of
the intellectual. "The last thing the ironist theorist wants or needs
is a theory of ironism": It is precisely in that apparent paradox
that the social function of the intellectual may be assayed. The
intellectual, too, can only be real if not idealized, who can only be
historically relevant if under-theorized, institutionally consequential only if not institutionalized. "This means," for intellectuals
as self-creating ironists in Rorty's terms, "that their criterion for
resolving doubts, their criterion of private perfection, is autonomy
rather than affiliation to a power other than themselves."22 In that
autonomyfree from nationalism, traditionalism, professionalism, and neo-prophetic millenarianismEdward Said stipulates
the criteria and conditions of the intellectual.
It is to that ironic mode of being, the exile as the corrective force
in a country to which he or she only marginally belongs, that Said
repeatedly leads our attention. In that attention rests the possibility
of a community of counter-interpreters, permanently in an ironic
mode, that belong only to the degree that they depart, morally
strengthen only to the degree that they politically challenge. As
counter-interpreters, intellectuals are, in the very elegant and true
words of Gianni Vattimo, chiefly responsible for weakening the
terror of metaphysical categories. The politics of "Truth" is only
one such category.
Notes
1.

An earlier version of this essay was published as a review of Edward Said's

Representations of the Intellectual (New York: 1994) in the journal Critique,
Fall 1994, pp. 85-96.

On Exilic Intellectuals
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

8.
9.
10.

11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

21.
22.

15

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969: 3.

Tocqueville 1969: 4.
Phillip Rieff, On Intellectuals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of
Academe. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Bruce Robbins ed., Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1990.
For a study of this group of intellectuals and the impact they had on
American social and political ideas see Claus-Dieter Krohn's Intellectuals
in Exile. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectuals: the Reith Lectures. New
York: Pantheon Press, 1994: 52-53.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958: 182.
For further details see James Tully (Ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988.
See Dominick Lacapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts,
Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987.
Said 1994: 56.
Said 1994: 57.
Said 1994: 59.
Said 1994: 72.
Said 1994: 61.
Said 1994: 62.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare
and G.N. Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971: 20.
Richard Rorty, "Self Creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietchze, and
Heidegger," in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989: 96.
Rorty 1989: 96.
Rorty 1989: 97.

2
Ignaz Goldziher and the Question
Concerning Orientalism1
"Ich lebte mich denjn auch wdhrend dieser Wochen so sehr in den
mohammedanischen Geist ein, dass ich zuletzt innerlich uberzeugt
wurde, ich sei selbst Mohammedaner und klug herausfand, dass dies
die einzige Religion seit welche selbst in ihrer doktrinar-offiziellen Gestaltung und Formulirung philosophische Kopfe befriedigen
konne, Mein Ideal war es, das Judenthum zu dhnlicher rationeller
Stufe zu erheben, Der Islam, so lehrte mich meine Erfahrung, sei die
einzige Religion, in welcher Aberglaube und heidnische Rudimente
nicht durch den Rationalismust sondern durch die orthodoxe Lehre
verpont werden,"
[I truly entered in those weeks into the spirit of Islam to such an
extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was
a Muslim and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion
which, even in it doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational
level Islam, my experience taught me, was the only religion in which
superstition and pagan elements were proscribed, not by rationalism
but by the Orthodox doctrine,]
Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch2

17

18

Post-Orientalism

Publication of a new edition of Ignaz Goldziher's Muslim Studies,

long out of print, some one hundred and sixteen years after its
original appearance in German in 1889, close to forty years after
its English translation was released in 1966, and above all more
than a quarter of a century after the publication of Edward W.
Said's Orientalism (1978) has the necessary signs of an extended
reflection written all over it. Neither Goldziher nor Said can be
neglected, and yet the implicit celebration of one seems to contradict the other. That apparent contradiction, and an attempt to
address (if not to resolve) it, will inform much of this chapter.
How is one to read an Orientalistin fact, one of the most
learned Orientalists of alltoday? Isn't Orientalism over? Did
Edward Said not deliver a coup de grace to the crumbling temple
of Orientalism? Is Orientalist scholarship today of only antiquarian interest? Does a scholar like Ignaz Goldziher still have anything to teach students of Islamic Studies? Is there, in fact, any
disciplinary validity left to the practice of "Islamic Studies?" Has
Goldziher's scholarship not been superseded even by scholars who
continue to study Islam in the context of a variety of disciplines
(from anthropology to political science), let alone in the aftermath
of a fundamental challenge to the epistemic foregrounding of
his scholarship? Much of what I have to say in this introduction
surrounds not just the particular scholarship that Goldziher best
represents but also the more fundamental problem of reading any
Orientalist at all, in the aftermath of Edward Said's work and the
mighty intellectual tradition that it best exemplifies.
In 1984,1 received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and in
Islamic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The seeming
paradox, stretched between Ignaz Goldziher and Edward Said, to
both of whom I was first introduced as a graduate student, has been
central to my own work on the borderlines of those two disciplines.
Between Philip Rieff and the late George Makdisi, with whom I
studied Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies, respectively,
Edward Said and Ignaz Goldziher are not mere bibliographical
references in the itinerary of an intellectual paradox. They are the
presiding figures of an intellectual pedigree that locates and defines

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

19

me. It is from a confident corner of that space that I wish to share

this reflection on two monumental scholars and intellectuals in the
making of my own mind.
*

Goldziher represents Orientalism at its highest and most productive stage, a moment in its emerging history, when Orientalists
thought themselves sitting on top of a heap of untapped knowledge
about a universe of which they and the European world they represented knew nothingand yet they must. Before anything else,
it is imperative to have an understanding of Goldziher's range and
depth of knowledge about Islam, for at the heart of that sweeping
knowledge also dwelled its fatal weakness.
In May 1906, Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) received an invitation to deliver a series of six lectures in various universities in the
United States"Honorarium," he noted in his Tagebuch, "$2,500."3
It is something more than an indication of the rate of inflation to
take that figure today as an index of the esteem in which he was
held at the high point of his scholarly reputation. His declining
health, however, combined with his frustration with the inadequacy
of the English translation of his lectures prevented him from coining to the United States and delivering those lectures. Goldziher
subsequently published the original German of his lectures, Vorlesungen iiber den Islam, in 1910. Translations of these lectures
soon appeared in many languagesincluding the notorious English
translation (1917) that had discouraged Goldziher's U. S. visit.4
Despite that inauspicious beginning, the prominent Hungarian
Orientalist finally made it into the English-speaking world when
his most ambitious scholarly work, Muhammedanische Studien
(1889-1890) was competently translated into English as Muslim
Studies and published in 1966 (volume I) and 1971 (volume II).
If in 1906, a group of American scholars went through the
trouble of raising a rather handsome honorarium to invite and
listen to one of the most distinguished Islamists alive, a century
later, the world at large, now perhaps globally far more in jeopardy

20

Post-Orientalism

than it was a century ago, remains even more in need of accurate

knowledge about the subject of Goldziher's scholarship. If the
honorarium offered Goldziher can be seen as an index of his significance as a scholar at the time, the essays themselves are solid
indices of a sweep of scholarship rarely matched in the field of
Islamic Studies either in Europe or the United States.
It is not only Orientalists who (discredited and dispirited) seem
to have forever lost their legendary competence in doing what they
were doing best. Ironically, while the world at large is more than
ever in need of accurate and reliable knowledge about Islam, a
field of studies that Goldziher and a handful of other prominent
Orientalists like him effectively created, Orientalism itself, as a
mode of knowledge production has lost its ability to produce scholars of Goldziher's stature and competencewith the catholicity
of his learning, the consistency of his critical mind, and above all
his feeling intellect.5 Reading Goldziher today is like a walk in a
museum of antiquitiesfull of fine and delicate objects, but now
mostly of antiquarian interest. One reads Goldziher more like
watching a master craftsman perform his art with competence
and delicacy. But the objects themselves, the essays so finely
sculpted, are mere museum piecesfull of outdated antiquities.
Ever since Goldziher wrote these essays in the late nineteenth
century, the field of Islamic studies has developed far and beyond
the specifics of the scholarship his essays contain. Every one
of the essays is now the subject of practically an entire field of
inquiry, covered by an army of scholars. But no one seems to be
capable of producing an essay, as Goldziher did one after another,
with such a vast topography of learning, ease and grace of diction,
historical vision, or with a gestalt view of an entire civilization
so competently fine-tuned to the minutiae of discussing its sacred
doctrines and enduring institutions, political histories, and intellectual movements. Ignaz Goldziher was a master craftsman, the
very elegance of his scholarly prose and the sinuous grace of his
probing intellect now among the rarest and most forgotten virtues
of an entirely different world. "Specialists without spirit," one
cannot help remembering the prophetic words of Max Weber at

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

21

the end of The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism, when
comparing what is written today on Islam with Goldziher's essays,
"sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained
a level of civilization never before achieved."6
More than anything else, it is the range of these essaysfor
Ignaz Goldziher's Muslim Studies and most of his other writings
are essentially a collection of interrelated essaysthat today strikes
us as quite rare and extraordinary. Ours is an age of professedly
competent but publicly irrelevant specialists, on one side, and
dangerously incompetent public experts, on the other. As the
systematic and perhaps inevitable fragmentation of various disciplinesranging from social sciences to the humanitieshave
fragmented the academic world into the domains and fiefdoms of
publicly irrelevant specialists, the public at large is at the mercy of
overnight experts opining on matters of vital global significance
without so much as an elementary knowledge of a language necessary to venture an opinion about a matter. "Islam" in particular,
as a floating signifier, has today (more than ever) emerged as a
perilous field of terrifying frivolity, with the U.S. and European
airwaves, print media, and the Internet inundated with dangerous
disinformation. Between academic specialists knowing more
and more about less and less relevant issues and public experts
shooting from the hip, stands a bewildered public that today could
have, but alas is not, much benefited from a gifted and erudite essayist like Ignaz Goldziher. What is most remarkable about these
essays is the ease of their diction, the fluidity of their scholarly
competence communicated with an almost deceptive simplicity.
Goldziher's essays could very well be published in a newspaper
or a magazine todaya world religion much politically maligned
(by its adherents and detractors alike) and rarely explained to the
world at large.
Like most other gifted essayists, Goldziher is well informed in
his scholarship, highly competent in his delivery, and unabashedly
opinionated. In the six essays collected in the first volume of Muslims Studies (1889/1966), Goldziher begins with a general treatment of Islam and its rise from pre-Islamic Arab context through

22

Post-Orientalism

two critical concepts of Muruwwa and Din, trying to articulate what

is at the heart of a religion with so many manifestations of which
he was closely familiar. In this initial essay, Goldziher wishes to
introduce the moral and normative revolution that Muhammad
and his teachings had introduced in Arabia. The essay is written
at the most abstract level of ethical speculation about the nature
of Islam as a world religion, facing stiff resistances from pre-Islamic Arab paganism. The result is an attempt to get at the ethical
and normative roots of a world religion that later expanded into
so many moral and intellectual directions. In the second essay,
"The Arab Tribes and Islam," Goldziher tries to do the same but
this time with the social revolution that Islam had launched from
within pagan Arab tribalism. Here, too, Goldziher's objective is to
see how a world religion in effect changed not just the worldview
but also the enduring social institutions of a global community.
In the third chapter, "'Arab and 'Ajam," Goldziher picks up this
issue and this time runs it through the major historical challenges
of Islam, namely its open and democratic spirit welcoming people
of all races and ethnicities to a global brotherhood/sisterhood of
humanity, while the tribal elitism of the early Arab patrimonialism institutionally resisted that Islamic promise. The last two
chapters of the volume are Goldziher's groundbreaking studies of
Shu'ubiyya, at times characterized as a literary-humanist movement launched to assert the moral foregrounding of a universal
equality among all people (Muslim or otherwise), irrespective of
their faith, race, or ethnicity.7 The cumulative result of these collected essays is effectively an attempt to get at the heart of Islam as
a world religion, the specific resistances it had historically faced,
the inner dialectics of its enduring struggles, and what ultimately
constitutes its Weltanschauungall through a close and detailed
attention to Arabic primary resources.
The second volume of Muslim Studies (1890/1971) consists
mainly of Ignaz Goldziher's seminal study of Hadith (Prophetic
traditions), again in eight consecutive and interrelated essays.
These essays progress methodically, from the most basic to the
most advanced, from introducing the elementary terminology of

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

23

Hadith scholarship to a highly controversial attempt at historicizing

the origin and political function of Hadith literature throughout
Islamic history. At the heart of Goldziher's Hadith scholarship is
his contention that opposing schools of jurisprudence, changing
social formations, and vacillating political expediencies more
often than not necessitated the fabrication of Hadith, of sayings
and doings attributed to the Prophet of Islam, in order to justify
a politically necessitated course of action. The practice was not
something unknown to Muslim scholars themselves long before
Ignaz Goldziher. The production of the sixth canonical collection of Hadiththe Sihah Sittais itself an indication of Muslim
scholars' attempt to separate the authentic from the fabricated
words and deeds of their Prophet. The two famous SahihsSahih Muslim, compiled by Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj al-Nisaburi (circa
817-875) and Sahih Bukhari, compiled by Abdullah Muhammad
al-Bukhari (810-870)are the two most trustworthy canonical
texts of the Hadith, painstakingly put together by pious and meticulous Muslims scholars whose scrupulous attention to details
of authenticity was for them a mater of religious observance and
pious anxiety. To be sure, the intervening ten centuries between
the time of Muslim and Bukhari and that of Goldziher allows the
Hungarian scholar the space of reflecting critically on the pros
and cons of his Muslim peers' achievementsbut he does so fully
conscious of their rigorous scholarship.8 Goldziher's scholarship
on Hadith literature is marked by an ease and fluency with which
he engages with his Muslim peers, as if they were his contemporaries, or he was theirs. With very few and sporadic references
to European Orientalists, Goldziher's essays are filled with references to Muslim primary sources (most of which were in fact not
even critically edited and published in his time but were still in
scattered manuscripts), not just corroborating his argument but
also engaging in a trans-historical debate with themas if he was
sitting in a college in Baghdad at the time of Muslim and Bukhari
and debating with them.9 This particular aspect of Goldziher's
essays is now almost entirely lost in contemporary scholarship. It
seems that more than Islam being Goldziher's object of scholarly

24

Post-Orientalism

investigations, it is Muslim scholars who were his actual (at alAzhar, where he studied) and imaginative (transhistorical) peers,
with whom he most immediately identified, and into their debates
he brought along a comparatist perspective (particularly with his
insights into the Talmudicboth Halakha and Haggadainfluences on both Islamic law and Qur'anic exegesis). Goldziher, in
a very peculiar way, saw himself as a "Muslim scholar," though
to his dying day (and against extraordinary odds in the horrid
days of European anti-Semitism) he remained a proud, pious, and
observant Jew.10
The second volume of Muslim Studies, otherwise exclusively
devoted to the study of the legalistic and formal aspects of the faith,
includes a pioneering study of "Veneration of Saints in Islam."
Here, Goldziher demonstrates the process by which the Prophet
of Islam was gradually endowed with miraculous attributes despite doctrinal and his own personal testimonies to the contrary.
Goldziher characterizes this as the necessity of filling "the gap
between the divine and the human."11 The dialectical disposition
of Goldziher's scholarship had always necessitated a multifaceted
conception of Islam, never allowing his particular attention to one
crucial dimension of the faith (particularly its jurisprudence, with
which Goldziher was primarily concerned) totally color his general
conception of it. Here, Goldziher's attention to the development
of the figure of wali is a pioneering reflection on the doctrinal development of the more mystical dimension of Islam, with specific
attention to the role of women saints in Sufism. The detail with
which Goldziher examined the more popular dimensions of Islam
would not be repeated until much later with the rise of interest on
the part of anthropologists in Islamic fields.
The six essays that Goldziher wrote when he was invited to
travel to the United States demonstrate a similar range of interest
and complexity. What he had intended to teach his American audience shows Goldziher's particular penchant for the multifaceted
realities of a civilization to which he had devoted his scholarly life.
First, he wanted to speak about "Muhammad and Islam." In this
essay, Goldziher gives a rather detailed account of the prophetic

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

25

career of Muhammad, the composition of the Qur'an, and the rise

of Islam against the background of pre-Islamic Arabia. After this
introductory essay, Goldziher turns his attention to Islamic law
(both a primary point of his own scholarship and the most enduring social institution of Islam). Here one can see his preferred
methodology of juxtaposing historical developments with doctrinal articulations in Islamic jurisprudence in full operation. His
objective is to demonstrate how "Hadith formed the framework
for the earliest development of religious and ethical thought in
Islam."12 Goldziher's third essay, 'The Growth and Development
of Dogmatic Theology" is a testimony to the natural outgrowth
of Muslim scholars' initial preoccupation with law. Goldziher's
historical awareness leads him to demonstrate how the formation of
a new class of speculative theologians was chiefly responsible for
carrying the theological implications of the Qur'anic revelation to
a new level of abstraction. Goldziher is quite particular in linking
the nascent political developments that gradually led to the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty (661-750) to the rise of major
theological issues that subsequently became sui generis questions
and followed their own abstract course of articulation.13
After his two lectures on Islamic law and Islamic theology,
Goldziher, in his fourth lecture, turns his attention to 'Asceticism
and Sufism." Although thefieldof Islamic mysticism has advanced
by leaps and bounds since the Goldziher's time and extraordinary
works of scholarship have been producedparticularly in Arabic
and Persiancovering the most detailed minutiae of the subject,
Goldziher's essay remains exemplary in his persistent attempt to
link the rise of Islamic mysticism to the initial material expansionism of Muslim conquests. Locating Islamic mysticism historically,
he then offers a sweeping panorama of both Arabic and Persian
sources, linking Ibn Arabi and Rumi, while remaining equally attentive to prose narratives and polemical sources. His account of
Sufism is at once comprehensive and sympathetic, comparative
and investigativefrom a solid intellectual history perspective that
never loses sight of Sufism as one among a number of contending
discursive and institutional forces in the general contour of Islam
as a cultural universe.

26

Post-Orientalism

Goldziher's next move is to make sure that he communicates no

monolithic conception of Islam to his audience. His sixth lecture
on "The Sects" is a comprehensive account of the social conditions
and political circumstances dictating the rise of various Muslim
sects, after a critical evaluation of what does in fact constitute a
"sect" as distinct from mainline orthodoxy (sunna). The guiding
principle of Goldziher's discussion of sectarian movements in
early Islam is, again, a careful attention to the historical developments, beginning with the question of succession to the Prophet,
which had politically occasioned them. Goldziher's observations,
characterizing the formation of Islamic sects as "the infusion of
religious ideas into political strife,"14 is typical of the way he sought
to understand a plethora of sectarian movements otherwise lost
in a sea of doctrinal and revolutionary convictions. Goldziher's
study of Islamic sects is a good example of his habitual attention
to historical circumstances, while taking their varied and multifaceted doctrinal and dogmatic positions seriously, examining
them closely for their diverse political consequences. Goldziher
is not an altogether disinterested or impartial observer of sectarian
movements in Islam, and does not hesitate to make such polemical observations as Shi'ism being "a particularly fecund soil for
absurdities suited to undermine and wholly disintegrate the Islamic
doctrine of God."15 Obviously a Shi'i reader of Goldziher does not
agree with such harsh pronouncements. But evident in Goldziher's
diction is the supposition that his command of primary sources,
critical intimacy with issues and doctrines and movements, and
detailed hermeneutic conversation with what animated Islamic
moral and intellectual history in general seem to have effectively
entitled him to such observations. He had, as it is quite obvious
in his writings, an intimate knowledge of Islamic intellectual history, and that knowledge entitled him, perhaps in his own view, to
make creative and critical observations about a matter to which he
had devoted his entire scholarly life. Disagreement in this respect
with Goldziher, as a result, cannot be on the ground of his having
offended certain Muslim (Shi'i in this case) sensibilities. Muslims themselves, of varied theological convictions and sectarian

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

27

persuasions, have always taken serious issues with each other on

a variety of doctrinal matters, and thus gravely offended (and in
fact waged war against) each other. Goldziher seems to have been
convinced that he had in fact earned the privilege of entering into
the domain of such theological and sectarian disputationsfor in
many significant ways he considered himself a "Muslim scholar."
There is a relentlessness about Goldziher's manner of mobilizing
an army of evidence to make a point that is entirely medieval,
scholastic, and classical in its resemblance to Islamic (or Jewish or
Christian for that matter) scholarly method of jadal (disputation).
When reading Goldziher one has the uncanny sense of reading a
medieval Arabic text on law or theologyexcept it is written in
German (or English). If aspects of his scholarship on Muslim sects
have now been superseded, it is not because of the substance or
range of his knowledge, which remains exemplary, but because of
his epistemic limitations, such as not being able to break through
the unexamined assumption that there was an "Orthodoxy" from
which then certain "heterodoxies" secededrather than seeing
the formation of various theological and juridical movements on
historically equal terms.16
Among the six lectures that Goldziher intended to deliver in the
United States his last one is on "later Developments," in which he
gives an account of the most recent events in Islamic historytheological issues and political movements contemporary to his own
time. It is in this particular essay that one can learn much from
Goldziher for our own timewhat he would have said and how
he would have written were he around in the anxiety-provoking
environment of the post-9/11 world. There are two major social
movements in the Islamic world to which Goldziher turns in this
last lecturethe Wahhabi movement in Arabia and the Babi movement in Iran.17 What is remarkable about Goldziher's account of
these two movements is (1) his detailed knowledge of their doctrines and beliefs; (2) his analytical facility with conversing with a
range of political and doctrinal issues; and (3) his simultaneously
critical and intimate exchanges with their pros and consneither
condoning the puritanical proclivities of the Wahhabis and the revo-

28

Post-Orientalism

lutionary zeal of the Babis, nor indeed dismissing them altogether.

If he takes issue with Wahhabism, which he does, he does so on
the basis of a doctrinal disagreement with them, that "to abandon
ijma', to cast aside what the consensus of the community of believersas it has historically evolvedacknowledges as sound
and true, is to forsake orthodox belief."18 If he shows a healthy
dose of skepticism about the mutation of the Babi movement into
Baha'ism (particularly of their propaganda missions in Europe
and the United States),19 which he does, he does so without once
casting doubt on the sincerity of the Baha'is. His discussion of
both Wahabism and Babism leaves no doubt that Goldziher most
immediately identified with what he considered mainline Sunni
Orthodoxy.
Throughout his work as a scholar, Goldziher's most important
contribution was, perhaps his sweeping knowledge of various (and
conflicting) Islamic discourses. Because he had no institutional or
dogmatic connection to any particular Islamic discourse (neither
as a jurist, nor as a philosopher, mystic, nor even as a Muslim),
he could see them all at the same time. There is no question that
Goldziher identified most with Muslim (Sunni) jurists. But unlike Muslim jurists, he had a deeply sympathetic understanding
of Islamic mysticism, and then unlike Muslim mystics he had an
equally broad understanding of Islamic philosophyand, unlike all of them, he had no aversion to the most recent social and
intellectual developments in the Islamic world, the revolutionary
movements that Muslim jurists, mystics, and philosophers alike
would have dismissed as whimsical and unworthy of their critical and scholarly attention. That catholicity of learning, granted
Goldziher by virtue of being an outsider/insider, was perhaps the
most significant dimension of his scholarship. To be sure, such
Muslim scholars as al-Baghdadi (d. 1037) in his al-Farq bayn
al-Firaq or al-Shahrastani (d. 1153) in his al-Milal wa al-Nihal
were Goldziher's predecessors in comparative analysis of various
Muslim sects and their doctrines. But none of them had the historical and spatial distance from varied Islamic intellectual discourses
that Goldziher enjoyed. At once universal in his command of

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

29

Islamic material, dialectical in his analytical reading of them, and

fully aware of the multifaceted expressions of Islam throughout its
intellectual history, Goldziher had an unfailingly historical conception of Islam, a comparative vision of its various discursive and
institutional formations, and attended to all of these with a critical
intimacy otherwise exclusive to Muslim scholars themselvesa
self-understanding that Goldziher consciously cultivated in himself
throughout a long and productive scholarly career.
#

Today, we mostly remember Goldziher for his Muslim Studies.

But Goldziher produced far more than these two volumes of essays, or the six lectures that he intended to deliver in the United
States. He wrote extensively and authoritatively on a variety of
subjects, including on Arabic grammar, Arabic literature, Qur'anic
hermeneutics, even a book on Hebrew mythology.20 The scholarly
legacy of Goldziher speaks of the range and depth of his intellectual
preoccupation with Islam. Because of his historical and spatial
distance from the Islamic intellectual history, he was able to bring
a unique perspective to his scholarship, at once intimate and yet
critical, comparative and globalthough at a deep emotive level
(and directly under the influence of his own religious convictions
and practices) he identified with the Sunni Orthodoxy. The power
of Goldziher's scholarship, the fact of his universal command of a
variety of discourses that collectively and dialectically constitute
the Islamic intellectual history, is firmly situated at a pioneering
point in the history of Orientalism when Orientalists thought
themselves at an intellectually commanding center, producing a
global knowledge about a world religion scarcely known to nonMuslimsparticularly to Europeans at the zenith of their coloniall
interests in Muslim lands. The result is an all but inevitable and
evident paradox, that the knowledge that was thus produced about
Islam became Islammeaning, the pioneering generation of European Orientalists, which included Goldziher, manufactured a kind
of global perspective that was radically different from an entire
history of Muslim scholarship about their own religion, culture,
and civilization. The principle insights of Orientalists (and as

30

Post-Orientalism

such covering their invisible blind spots) into Islam was fundamentally rooted in the fact that at their best they were not invested
in it, while the worst of them were heavily invested in producing
a particular knowledge of Islam and Muslims compatible with
European colonial interests. At their best, such European Orientalists as Goldziher had nothing at stake in the historical outcome of
Islamic history, nor did they, in any shape or form, share the fate
of Muslims. The reason that Goldziher could place a discussion of
Islamic law next to one of Islamic mysticism and then compare the
result to Islamic philosophy, followed by a discussion of Islamic
sects, and thus come up with significantly crucial insights about
all of them, is that he was neither a Muslim jurist, nor a mystic,
nor a philosopher, nor did he (except for an emotive affinity with
the Sunni Orthodoxy) have anything but a scholarly interest in
varied sectarian divisions within Islam. The knowledge that he
thus produced was in its very epistemic foundations different
from the one produced by Muslims themselvesjurists, mystics,
theologians, philosophers, historians of ideas, etc., scholars who
would put their neck on the line for what they wrote. Goldziher
had no such stake in the matter, and as such his ability to take a
surgeon's point of view over what amounts to the unconscious body
of a patient demonstrates the characteristic insights and blindness
of Orientalism that Goldziher best represented.
Many of these basic issues at the epistemic roots of Orientalism
as a system of knowledge production have today become overshadowed by a succession of entirely adhominem assumptions and
accusations about Orientalists and Orientalismone specifically
targeted at Goldziher, and the other extended to Orientalism in general. It is imperative to depersonalize any discussion of Goldziher
and Orientalism and take the argument back to its discursive and
institutional points of origin. What we face today in any attempt
to have an historically balanced conception of Goldziher and the
body of scholarship that he has produced is (1) an entirely inappropriate and ad hominem attack on Ignaz Goldziher, and (2) an
equally twisted view of Edward Said's principled critique of Orientalism into a personal dispute between him and his nemeses. If
Raphael Patai, a recent biographer of Ignaz Goldziher, is chiefly

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

31

responsible for the former, Bernard Lewis, for years the principle
academic nemesis of Edward Said, is equally responsible for the
latter. The matter, however, is far more institutionally grounded,
and theoretically robust, for these ad hominem distortions of principled issues to cloud our historical assessment of Orientalism as
a mode of knowledge production in general, and of Goldziher in
particular.
*

Today a clear assessment of Goldziher and his significance as

a scholar must be navigated through two sets of flawed and fallacious assumptions about his person and his achievements as an
Orientalist. The first task facing such a fair and balanced assessment is to restore the dignity of his name as a person and a scholar
against the background of an entirely tendentious criticism of him
that in the guise of a "psychological portrait" has cast an entirely
false shadow of doubt on the dignity of his character. Once he
is cleared, the next task is equally to de-personalize the question
of Orientalism and reach for a principled critique of its mode of
knowledge production, as articulated by Edward Said but before
it was distorted into the assumption of an ad hominem attack on
individual Orientalists.
On 22 June 1890, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, Goldziher began writing his memoirs. He summarized the early part
of his life in general strokes, devoting, for example, only eight
pages to the first sixteen years of his life (1850-1866), including
a moving account of his bar mitzvah.21 Other memorable years
of his life include 1873-1874, the year that he traveled to Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt and studied at al-Azhar, the year he calls
"mein orientalisches, mein muhammedanisches Jahr."22 One of the
longest passages in this part of the Tagebuch concerns Goldziher's
studies at al-Azhar in Cairo,23 which for the rest of his days he
considered the happiest and most fulfilling time of his life. This
section is in sharp contrast to the years he summarizes after his
return from Cairo, from the death of his father on 4 May 1874 and

32

Post-Orientalism

including his failure to secure a proper teaching position and being forced, against his will and in order to provide for his family,
acceptance of a secretarial position at the Israelite Congregation
of Pest, a job he bitterly resented until his dying day. Beginning
in 1890, when he began writing his memoir, Goldziher's notes
become contemporaneous with his life and rather consistent until
1919 (1 September 1919 is his last entry), namely just two years
before his death on 13 November 1921.
When in 1955, Ignaz Goldziher's son, Karoly Goldziher, died in
Budapest, the Goldziher family handed over to Alexander Scheiber,
the director of the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, the manuscript
of Goldziher's Tagebuch, which he in turn edited, annotated, and
published in its original German in Leiden in 1978. On this occasion, Goldziher's family also delivered to Alexander Scheiber
another manuscriptthis one a detailed travelogue that Goldziher
had kept during 1873-1874 (between 15 September 1873 and 14
January 1874), while on his memorable journey to Syria, Palestine,
and Egypt. Alexander Scheiber subsequently gave this manuscript
to Raphael Patai, an anthropologist and biblical scholar, the founder
and director of the Palestine Institute of Folklore and Ethnology,
and the editor of Herzl Press, who at the time was living in New
York and teaching at various universities. Raphael Patai subsequently translated Goldziher's travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and
Egypt, called it Goldziher's "Oriental Diary," wrote an extensive
introduction to it, in effect summarizing Goldziher's other, more
extensive, memoir in German, the Tagebuch, and then used the occasion to produce what Patai calls a "psychological portrait." This
English translation of Goldziher's original German by Raphael
Patai is the only published version of this travelogue.24
Goldziher's travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt ends
abruptly on 14 January 1874. But he remained in Cairo until
mid-April of that year, returning to Budapest a few days before
the death of his father on 4 May 1874. Between mid-January and
mid-April, Goldziher continued to write in his travelogue, including a detailed description of his attending a Friday prayer in Cairo.
But according to Raphael Patai that part of the Travelogue has been
lost. Patai's theory about this loss, which seems plausible, is that

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

33

in 1924, three years after Goldziher's death, a Hungarian Zionist

named Ludwig Bato approached Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952),
then already the president of World Zionist Organization, to purchase Goldziher's library for the soon to be inaugurated Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Weizmann raised the necessary funds and
purchased the library, which apparently included only the printed
books and not Goldziher's own manuscripts, which remained in
possession of Goldziher's son Karoly until the German invasion
and occupation of Hungary in 1944, in the course of which Patai
believes this portion of the library (and thus the last part of Goldziher travelogue) was lost.25
Whereas Alexander Scheiber's preface to Goldziher's Tagebuch
is very short and modest (just about two and a half pages of the
published book), while his endnotes are very useful but equally
factual and straightforward, Raphael Patai's introduction has a far
more ambitious project of producing what he calls a "psychological portrait." While both these scholars have done the scholarly
community a service by making Goldziher's Tagebuch and Travelogue available, Patai's "psychological portrait" is a singular act of
systematic defamation of a prominent scholar with whose politics
Patai is in obvious, and rather drastic, opposition. It is imperative
to try to rescue Goldziher from this unconscionable falsification of
his character and dignity, for it casts an entirely unfair aspersions
over his character as one of the most distinguished scholars of his
generationloved and admired by his friends, family, students,
and colleagues alike. This corrective measure is equally necessary
if we are to stay clear of personal attacks on scholars and make a
fair and balanced assessment of their scholarship.
*

"The great Goldziher" was the exclusive honorific term with

which the prominent German Orientalist Carl Brockelmann is
reported to have referred to Ignaz Goldziher.26 Born and raised in
a learned Jewish family in Szekesfehervar (Stuhlweissenburg) in
west-central Hungary, Ignaz Goldziher had mastered the original

34

Post-Orientalism

text of the Hebrew Bible by the time he was five years old: "At
seven he and his friends organized religious services every Sunday, at which Naci preached the sermons. At eight he was started
on the Talmud."27 At eight, his mother told him later, he would
go to bed embracing and kissing, "like beloved beings," his own
voluminous copies of the Talmud. At twelve, he had started reading such major Jewish philosophers as Bahya ibn Paquda, Yehuda
Halevi, and Maimonides. He was still twelve when he wrote and
published a treatise on the origin and development of the Jewish
prayers. Later he recalled, "this opus was the first cornerstone of
my bad reputation as a 'freethinker.'"28 The following year, he
persuaded his father to arrange for him to deliver his bar mitzvah
speech from the pulpit of the synagogue. The speech had a lasting
influence on the young Goldziher, who considered it "the beacon
of my life."29 By the time he was fifteen, and before he even had
his high school diploma he entered University of Budapest, where
he began a course of studies in "classical languages, philosophy,
German literature and Turcology."30 He was barely sixteen when
he published his first translations from Turkish literature, and by
time he was nineteen he earned his Ph.D. in Leipzig, followed by
yet another year of studies in Leiden. By then, "he had no less than
thirty published items to his credit."31 After all these achievements,
the prevalent European anti-Semitism still prevented him from securing a paid teaching position at a university, unless he converted
(like his own teacher Armenius Vambery had) to Christianity,
something he refused to do. Failing to secure a solid teaching
position, Goldziher was engaged to teach as a Privatdozent (an
unpaid lecturer) at the University of Budapest, while subsisting
on a meager stipend from the Ministry of Culture.
Rescuing Goldziher from this disconcerting conditionbeing
one of the most prominent Islamist of his generation, and yet prevented from assuming his rightful place at a universitya timely
governmental grant enabled him to travel to the Islamic world.
Between September 1873 and April 1874, Goldziher spent what
he later considered the happiest months of his life in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, enrolling at al-Azhar as a student, a feat rarely

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

35

(if ever) attained by a non-Muslim. Goldziher kept a meticulous

travelogue of this journey, now one of the most fascinating firsthand accounts of his life and career as a scholar. Whatever the
bureaucratic purposes of that governmental grant may have been,
Goldziher's intentions were entirely directed towards the rare opportunity given him to study Arabic and Islamic sources at a major
center of scholastic learning.
A considerable part of the travelogue demonstrates the love
and affection Goldziher had for Islamic intellectual history, a fact
that, combined with some severe criticism of the formal aspects
of Judaism he expresses in the same source, has provided occasions for Raphael Patai in his "psychological portrait" to criticize
Goldziher and project the complicated character of a man who was
"infatuated with Islam"32 and "suffered from an acute anti-Jewish complex."33 Neither of these two attributes is fair, correct, or
corroborated by evidence.
During this sojourn, Goldziher was exceedingly happy and
proud to be in the company of Muslim scholars, thought of himself
as "a member of the Mohammedan scholars' republic," had an
unsurpassed affinity for the subject of his scholarship, considering Islam in fact to have "developed out of the Judaized Meccan
cult the mighty world religion of Islam," and then went so far as
stating categorically:
I truly entered in those weeks into the spirit of Islam to such an extent
that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself was a Muslim
and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion which, even
in it doctrinal and official formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds.
My ideal was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level.34

In order to understand the meaning and significance of this statement, it is crucial to remember that Goldziher never converted to
Islam and to his dying day (and against all odds) remained committed to his own ancestral faith. The statement, instead, must
be understood as a simple confession of affinity with a person's
subject of lifetime scholarly devotion. The other aspect of this
statement is its comparative disposition. Goldziher detested Christianity with a vengeance, traced the horrid roots of European anti-

36

Post-Orientalism

Semitism to its doctrinal formations, and given his own personal

and communal experiences in Europe his views of Christianity can
hardly be surprising. When members of Damascene Jewry, for
example, mistrusted him thinking he was a Christian missionary,
he did not hesitate in calling Christianity "the most abominable of
all religions."35 One can easily see that much of Goldziher's love
and admiration for Islam is in fact an intellectual extension of his
devotion to his own faith, to Judaism. Goldziher's fellow Jewish
Hungarians report that there are reasons to believe that towards the
end of his life he had religious concerns about having committed
his life to Islamic studies rather than Judaic studies. Raphael Patai
reports that one of Goldziher's students, Bernard Heller, who later
became a professor at the rabbinical seminary of Budapest, once
visited Goldziher a few days before his death,
and found him seated at the festive Sabbath table with the Bible and an
Arabic book before him: "I don't know," Goldziher addressed Heller,
"whether it is right that I should still delve into Arabic literature when
tomorrow I shall stand there where they will ask me, Nasata w'natata
be'emiina? (Did you conduct yourself faithfully?)36
It is perhaps only natural for Hungarian Jewish scholars like Heller
and Patai to have wished that a man of Goldziher's status would
have devoted his scholarly life to Judaic rather than Islamic studiesand thus remembered and recorded this story. But if a few
days before his death Goldziher is reported to have had "compunctions," as Patai puts it, "whether from the Jewish religious point
of view it was permissible for him to have devoted his life to the
study of Islam instead of Judaism,"37 on the very first page of his
own memoir, from his own pen, written at the mature age of forty,
he tells a rather different story (a point recorded on the very first
page of Goldziher's Tagebuch but completely missed by Patai in
his "psychological portrait"). "Mein Leben," writes Goldziher,
war von friiher Jugend an durch zwei Wahlspriiche geleitet: Der einer ist
der Prophetenspruch, den ich mir an meinem Confirmationstage in die
Seele gepgragt: "Er hat Dir verkiindet o Mensch, was gut sei, und was
Jahve von Dir fordert: Nur dies: Gerechtigkeit iiben, Barmherzigkeit

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

37

bieten und in Bescheidenheit wandeln vor Deinem Gott." Der andere

ist der Koran-Spruch: "fa-sabrun gamilun wa-Ilahu-1-musta'anu," d. h.
"Ausdauer ist gut: und Gott ist der, zu dem man um Hilfe aufblicken
muss."38
"My lifs," says Goldziher,
from the early youth, has been guided by two principal mottos. One is the
prophetic saying that on the day of my conformation I imprinted upon
my soul [Micah VI: 8: from the Hebrew Bible]:
He hath shewed thee, O man,
what is good;
and what doeth the LORD require of thee,
but to do justly,
and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God?39
The other is the Qur'anic saying [Surah XII (Joseph) in the Qur'an]:
... comely patience. And Allah it is whose help is to be sought... .40
If we take these words simply for what they say (and abstain from
abusing them in order to psychoanalyze their author), Goldziher
did not have to (and thus he did not) choose between his ancestral
faith and the subject of his scholarship. Those two books on the
Sabbath table had been there for quite some time, "von friiher
Jugend" (from early youth) in fact. If at the mature age of forty,
Goldziher says that since his early youth two mottos from the Hebrew Bible and from the Qur'an have been the guiding principles
of his life, then his lifetime scholarly devotion to Islam and his
unflinching commitment to Judaism were integral to each other
and part and parcel of the same character. In this respect, Goldziher was no oddity, for he was in a direct intellectual tradition
that linked him to Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who had no
problem being the supreme codifier of the Jewish Law (Mishneh
Torah) while writing his philosophical masterpiece, The Guide
to the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Hayiriri) in Arabic and in conversation with Muslim philosophers in general, while being under the

38

Post-Orientalism

direct influence of al-Ghazali's (1058-1111) Deliverance from

Darkness (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal). Neither Maimonides nor
Goldziher saw any contradiction in what they were doing. The
problem is not with them. The problem is with taking the fictive
construction of a "Judeo-Christian tradition" far more seriously
than allowing for the far more historically balanced assumption
of a Judeo-Islamic heritage.
To be sure, the sorts of doctrinal questions that Raphael Patai
raises are perfectly legitimate issues. Speaking of Goldziher's
spiritual elation at participating in a Muslim Friday prayer, Patai
asks, "how a religious Jew (Goldziher was and remained throughout his life an observant Jew) could have,"
done what he did: substitute, even if only for a brief moment, Muslim
belief and worship for the Jewishness that was his patrimony. For a person
of such persuasion even to enter the place of worship of another faith, let
alone participate in a non-Jewish service, is anathema.41

To answer this question, Patai resorts to such observations as

Goldziher having fallen "under the spell of Muslim public worship
that, with its uniform and rhythmically repeated mass prostrations
and unison mass proclamation of the oneness of God, isto this
I can attest from my own experiencemore impressive, not to
say mesmerizing, than the rites of the other two monotheistic
religions."42 But what Patai disregards is that at no point did
Goldziher "substitute," let alone abandon, his own religious beliefs
and practices, and his intellectual affinity with Islam, momentarily
extended into a single act of religious ritual, remained perfectly
compatible with his Jewish identity, faith, and practice. It in fact
accentuated and corroborated it.
Patai compares Goldziher's enthusiasm for Islamic rituals he
witnessed and in which he participated while in Cairo with his
severe criticism of the Jewish services that he saw in Istanbul to
conclude that he "suffered from an acute anti-Jewish complex."
There is no evidence for that claim. As a confident Jew, there is
nothing wrong with Goldziher criticizing aspects of certain 'forms
of Jewish observance."43 This criticism ofform never went into the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

39

substance of Goldziher's faith. He runs away from a service in a

German-Jewish synagogue in Istanbul and goes to his room, and
what does he do? He "buries himself in the Book of Isaiah," and
writes in his Travelogue, "here is the Temple I seek."44 There is no
question that Goldziher was full of "boundless admiration for the
ideas of prophetic Judaism," but there is no reason to believe that
Judaism for him was, even in these young and ambitious years,
just a set of admirable ideas. It is impossible to read Goldziher's
memoir, both his Tagebuch and his Travelogue, without having a
sense of his profound faith (not just admiration for prophetic ideas)
as a confident and proud Jew. So, in fact, confident and proud of his
faith he was that he felt himself entitled to criticize its occasional
formal failures. The assumption that Goldziher "suffered from an
acute anti-Jewish complex" is entirely false and not corroborated
by the facts, nor indeed by Goldziher's lived experiences.
How could one read the following passage of the Tagebuch
and not see the overriding love and devotion of a man of faith for
his own religion, his own ancestral covenant, and yet severely
critical of its institutional shortcomings, assured (with the pride
of an accomplished young scholar) of his superior knowledge of
his own faith?
I cried bitterly, I lamented; as I recited mechanically the sins as prescribed
for me, I howled as I bothered "Our Father and King" with the likewise
prescribed requests; I felt elevated as I kissed the Tora, whose legends
and myths I mercilessly analyze, whose roster of authors I dare construe
with certainty, whose formation as to year and day I make bold to fix
with proud assurance. Am I weak or mad? A hypocrite I am not, for
my tearsflowedtoo endlessly salty against my will, this much I can say.
Explain it, friends; I cannot. But then again I was driven against my will
when a I heard the reader snorting away at the story of the two burned
sons of Aaronaway, away, far away from these vulgar rooms, again
over mountain and hill, to Pera. For the synagogue made merry over
my tears, laughed at my emotions, jeered at my convulsionthis idols'
synagogue, this fasting, godless one, does not deserve my sympathy. They
laughed at the stranger who brought his better heart to their infamous
horde because he honors the most holy of all days, which symbolizes the
idealization of the dust, the contempt for theflesh,the spiritualization
of the matter. Hefindsthis idea in their inane songs, in their senseless

40

Post-Orientalism

customs; he grasps the little kernel of spirit which hides in this mud; he
identifies his own self with the day of renunciation and disembodiment;
he cries honestly, bitterly; he loves with the noble ones of the time; he
feels unhappy in the flesh; he cries about it; he trembles as he speaks,
"Father-King, we have sinned before you;" he shakes as he grasps the
power of the word "Sins"and this synagogue of the Sephardim, which
he had held higher than it deserved, laughs at him! Away, away from the
impure! Here you can no longer stand it.45
These cannot be the words of a person who is suffering "from an
acute anti-Jewish complex"? Avicenna has a quatrain in Persian
(among the few things that he wrote in his own mother tongue),
in which he says:
Kofr-e cho mani gazaf-o asan nabovad,
Mohkam tar az iman-e man iman nabovad;
Dar dahr cho man yeki-o ou ham kafer,
Pas dar hameh dahr yek Mosalman nabovad.
[The infidelity of someone like me is no simple matter,
For there is no faith stronger than my faith;
All around the universe there is no one like me, and I am an infidel,
Then throughout the universe there is not a single Muslim.]46

People like Goldziher and Avicenna are the measure of their faith,
not an abstract notion of faith the measure of their experiences.
They were, in their persons, mobile synagogues and itinerant
mosques, living and breathing temples to the truth of their respective religions.
There is a universal ecumenicalism about Goldziher's religiosity that seems to have escaped the author of his "psychological
portrait." A Muslim public prayer was not the only non-Jewish
service that Goldziher attended while on this journey. During his
short visit to Jerusalem, on 2 December 1873, he also attended
a mass in the Church of Holy Sepulcher, of which Patai is fully
aware and yet on which remains curiously silent, seeming to
have no moral "compunctions" such as those he expresses about
Goldziher's attending a Friday prayer in a mosque in Cairo.47 This
attendance at the Church of Holy Sepulcher was despite the fact
that Goldziher was severely critical of Christianity.

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

41

As further evidence that Goldziher "suffered from an acute

anti-Jewish complex," Patai refers to his criticism of the rampant
commercialism at religious sites he visited while in Palestine. But
if Goldziher was critical of the Jewish and Christian "religious industry," as he calls it, and considered its practitioners "swindlers,"
so did he consider Muslims capable of the selfsame commercialism
and had no hesitation to speak of "the great Mohammedan Ramadan swindle."48 In these passages, Goldziher's religious (Jewish)
sensibilities are offended by the crass commercialism of the "religious industry," the term he uses in anticipation of what decades
later Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer would call "culture
industry," to which they too had a justifiably angry reaction.49
In understanding Goldziher's expressed joy in traveling to
Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, we must also consider the rarity of
the occasion, and the opportunity it afforded the young scholar to
see first hand the lands where Islam had historically flourished.
Given the infrequency of such adventures into the Islamic world
for a European of Goldziher's generation, it is all but natural
that he would take advantage of every second of his journey to
learn more about Muslims and their lived culture. One must
also remember that Goldziher's principal objection to Wilhelm
Bacher, a gifted Biblical scholar whom he deeply admired, was
that he was too bookish. This was a rare chance for Goldziher's
own knowledge of Islam to go beyond what he had learned in
books and in Europe.
What Patai does understand, and articulates quite well, are the
sources of Goldziher's anger against certain formal aspects of
practiced Judaism. "Religion," Patai observes,
and especially Jewish religion, was for him a great and sacred thing,
embodied in the teachings of the Hebrew prophets with their lofty moral
ideals. He himself shared this idealism, and when he saw the humdrum
observance of ossified rituals, he felt that it was empty, insincere, false,
indeed, a "swindle."50
Patai's next observation, however, that Goldziher "almost entirely"
saved Muslims from "his censorious wrath," and that this is "the
most eloquent proof of the extent of the young Goldziher's ad-

42

Post-Orientalism

miration for the world of Islam, which he extended to its ritual

manifestation,"51 is not entirely accurate for the following reasons:
(1) neither in his Tagebuch nor Travelogue nor indeed in the vast
body of his scholarship did Goldziher hesitate from severest criticism of aspects of Islam he disliked (especially of Shi'ism, which
he considered "a particularly fecund soil for absurdities suited to
undermine and wholly disintegrate the Islamic doctrine of God,"52
and of certain classes of Turks, whom he showers with utmost
contempt"barbarian, vulgar, and corrupt"in the early part of
his Travelogue53); (2) his admiration for Islam was not from his
religious convictions but due to his scholarly interests, and as all
other scholars he was not immune from developing perhaps an
inevitable affection for the subject of his scholarship; and above
all; (3) his criticism of practiced (not ideal) Judaism has to do with
the fact of his pious, observant, total, and unconditional devotion
to his faith.
Patai dismisses Goldziher's expression of love and admiration
for Islam as "youthful infatuation."54 That "youthful infatuation"
was the subject of Goldziher's lifetime scholarship. Throughout
the scholarly world, Goldziher is known for his unsurpassed
critical acumen in dissecting the most sacrosanct principles, doctrines, beliefs, and sacred texts of Islam. Not for a moment in the
course of his scholarship did Goldziher lose his necessary critical
distance from his. He remained consistent, throughout his life, in
his critical intimacy with Islamin fact the very substance of his
scholarship was predicated on his distance from it. Goldziher's
love and admiration for Islam emerged out of his own profound
piety within his own religion, and not despite or against it. Patai
completely misreads a superior scholar's natural affection for his
subject and consistently seeks to psychologize everything that
Goldziher said. Goldziher's affection for Islamic intellectual
history never prevented him from being exceedingly and appropriately critical of aspects of Islam of which he did not approve,
If one were to detect a non-scholarly reason for Goldziher's love
for Islam, it is imperative to see how his affection for the range
and depth of Islamic scholastic learning grew through his own

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

43

superior knowledge of his own faith, for Judaism, and not at its
expense. Goldziher saw Islam as an intellectual outgrowth of Judaism (he called Islam "the Judaized Meccan cult" and he meant
it in an exceedingly positive and affirmative sense towards both
Judaism and Islam). The result is an emotive affinity with Islam
on both a confessional and a scholarly plane, and thus far from a
"youthful infatuation."
That Goldziher later became exceedingly angry and bitter that
he had to work as a secretary for the Israelite Congregation of Pest
upon his return from Egypt, or that on occasions he made some
rather harsh remarks about this job, is no indication that he had
any troubled relationship with his own faith. He refused to betray
his faith and convert to Christianity at the heavy cost of endangering and damaging his academic career. He had no problem with
being a perfectly proud and confident Jew. Speaking of his friend
Wilhelm Bacher (1850-1913), whom he greatly loved and admired
as a Talmudic scholar (and with whom, incidentally, he studied
Persian and read Sa'di), Goldziher said, "for him Judaism was a
literary fact; for me, in 1867, it was already the pulse of my life."55
Defending his dignity while at the service of a secretarial job that
took him away from his scholarship, he insisted, "my house was
now Jewish in a higher sense, and I brought up my two children
religiously, with prophets and Psalms; all lies were banished and
left out of their education. And while I in this manner erected a
temple in my home for truly God-believing and Messianic Judaism, the pious men from Bohemia never ceased slandering me and
charging me with heresy on ever-broader grounds."56 Goldziher
never forgave his own teacher, the prominent Turcologist Armenius Vambery (1832-1913), for having converted to Christianity
(after having already converted to Islam), while deriding Goldziher for remaining true to Judaism against all odds.57 Goldziher's
frustration with his secretarial job was the just and perfectly
understandable anger of a superior intellect being forced to do a
mind-numbing administrative task (while being constantly humiliated by his employers), and had nothing to do with this job being
at a Jewish organization. Goldziher was equally contemptuous of

44

Post-Orientalism

his administrative duties when he was made dean of the faculty in

1917. "I am on the verge of collapse from this slave labor,"58 he
said, using the identical phraseology he used while working for
the Israelite Congregation of Pest. Like many other great scholars, Goldziher detested administrative duties. This simple and
perfectly understandable fact escapes Patai, busy as he is chasing
after some dark psychological trait in Goldziher. Patai, without
the slightest hesitation, concurs with and seeks to provide a psychological account for, the slanderous remark of an acquaintance
of Goldziher who had called him a "roshe" (Yiddish for an "evil
man"). Goldziher was hardly evil for resenting the time wasted
on some administrative job (any administrative job) that took
him away from his scholarly work. One would have to have an
understanding of a man's passion for scholarship before resorting to dark and hidden psychological traits in him, especially for
a man who from the age five was possessed (not by Islam) by an
insatiable intellectual curiosity.
Towards the end of his introduction, Patai does show a bit of
understanding in this regard. "No doubt other people too would
have reacted with a sense of injury, indignation, and outrage to
the experiences that circumstances visited on Goldziher," Patai
consents. But he still insists, "the intense hatred with which he
reacted must have been due at least as much to the emotional bent
of his personality as to the occurrences themselves."59 It is this
persistent attempt at transhistorical psychoanalyzing, by an anthropologist with no psychoanalytical trainings or credentials, that is
deeply flawed and utterly irresponsible. Goldziher's devotion to
his scholarly pursuits, his occasional criticism of the formal (not
doctrinal) aspects of his own faith, and his intense dislike for a
secretarial position he had to perform in order to earn his living and
provide for his family do not earn him the title of an "evil man,"
nor do they qualify his relation with Islam as "infatuation," and
certainly there are no indications that he "suffered from an acute
anti-Jewish complex."
*

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

45

Neither "infatuated with Islam" nor having "suffered from an

acute anti-Jewish complex," nor indeed an "evil man," and thoroughly in command of his own emotions, thoughts, and above all
sense of purpose, Goldziher embarked on his journey to Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt, having just received his doctoral degree,
published extensively on both Islamic and Judaic subjects, and was
excited at the prospect of meeting and studying with the people he
admired most: his Muslim colleagues at al-Azhar. What animated
Goldziher more than anything else on this trip was the once-ina-lifetime opportunity to study with Muslim scholars (in Egypt
in particular) with whom he most immediately identified. When
soon after his arrival in Egypt, Goldziher met with the Egyptian
minister of education, Riyad Pasha, he so impressed him with his
knowledge of Arabic that the minister offered Goldziher a position in his ministry. Goldziher declined that rather lucrative offer
and instead requested permission to attend al-Azhar as a student.
The minister was taken aback by this request for until then no
non-Muslim had benefited from that privilege. "I cannot order the
mufti to accept you,"60 the Minister told Goldziher, who in turn
asked only for a letter of recommendation and an appointment
with the mufti. He would take care of the rest.
Goldziher did go and meet with al-Shaykh Abbasi al-Mufti, and
presented Minister Pasha's letters to him. Goldziher reminisced
later that once he arrived to meet with the Shaykh of al-Azhar,
he was in the middle of a legal discussion concerning the laws of
inheritance with other al-Azhar Shaykhs. He continued his juridical discussions while Goldziher was waiting. Finally he turned to
Goldziher and asked who was he, what was his religion, and how
did he know the minister. "My name is Ignaz al-Majari," Goldziher
responded, "I was born among the Ahl al-Kitab, and I believe that
I shall be resurrected with the confessors of Oneness."61 Raphael
Patai has already noted the intelligence of this response, but he
does not know quite why and resorts to some generic explanations
based on a very artificial knowledge of Islamic centers of higher
learning and thus the circumstances that the young Goldziher faced

46

Post-Orientalism

at al-Azhar. Goldziher's introducing himself as "Ignaz al-Majari,"

is not just to impress the Shaykh how far he has traveled to be at
al-Azhar, as Patai notes. Goldziher has, while simply introducing
himself, approximated his true and correct name and identity on
the Arabic and Islamic manner of naming. He is Ignaz and he is
from Hungary. He tells the Shaykh his name but in a manner that
the Dean of al-Azhar would immediately embrace and recognize.
He is both true to his identity and yet conversant with the people
he most admires in the linguistic idiomaticity of their culture.
Goldziher identifies himself as a person "born among the People
of the Book," not just to be truthful to his own Jewish faith, which
Muslims call "People of the Book," but also with a proper pun
(which Patai completely misses) on the literal, not the technical, sense of the expression. He is a man of the book, meaning
a scholar, someone like them, very much the same way that long
before he set foot on al-Azhar and once he embarked on his trip to
Egypt he thought of himself as "a member of the Mohammedan
scholars' republic."62 As for the expression, "and I believe that I
shall be resurrected with the confessors of Oneness," the phrase
points not only to his belief in bodily resurrection on the Day of
Judgment, but also on a more immediate sense of being resurrected
in his scholarship into a truthful recognition of the Oneness of all
religions. Patai is correct that the term Muwahhidun (those who
believe in One God) that Goldziher uses is juxtaposed against
Mushrikun, but Mushrikun are not just the idolaters. It also has
a subtle (but perfectly recognizable) reference to Christians as
well who believe in Trinitya doctrine that has always rubbed
the absolute monotheism of Muslims the wrong way. It is the
unconditional monotheism of Islam and Judaism, of Muslims
and Jews, that Goldziher has invoked here, making doubly sure
that the Shaykh knows that he is a Jew and not a Christian. The
trilateral root of Muwahhidun, WHD, is also at the root of Tawhid,
namely Oneness of God, which was integral to the definition of the
Mu'tazilah, known as Ahl al-Tawhid wa al-Adl ("The People who
Believe in the Oneness of God and His Justice")an elaborate
and longstanding theological issue is at the root of that expression.

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

47

What is most remarkable about this manner of introducing himself

is what is most remarkable about Goldziher in generalthe subtle
and graceful way he had found to remain (without a shadow of a
doubt) a pious and believing Jew while deeply respectful of his
Muslim colleagues and their scholastic culture. That he managed
to strike that balance and yet "mercilessly analyze," to use his
own favorite phrase, Islam, as he did Judaism, dissect them both
to their most detailed historical particulars is of course the sign of
his superior character as a man and a scholar.
In no uncertain terms, Goldziher has told the Shaykh at al-Azhar
that his name is Ignaz, he comes from Hungary, he is a Jew, and
he is scholar. The range of meanings and inferences hidden in that
short expression in which he said all of these could not but have
impressed the Shaykh tremendously, and thus he proceeded readily
to grant Goldziher written permission for him to attend lectures and
seminars at al-Azhar. That the Shaykh of al-Azhar himself was
reportedly the son of a rabbi who had converted to Islam63 is an
additional sign of a scholarly camaraderie across religions, nations,
and cultures. Without sacrificing an iota of his integrity, identity,
or ancestral faith, Ignaz al-Majari was finally at home. There are
many moments in his Tagebuch when Goldziher says things such as
"I termed my monotheism Islam, and I did not lie when I said that
I believed the prophecies of Mohammad. My copy of the Koran
can testify how I was inwardly turned toward Islam. My teachers
seriously expected the moment of my open declaration."64 But
these all remained at the level of a scholar's complete immersion
in the subject of his lifelong learning. Based on the evidence of
his own Tagebuch and Travelogue, and given his profoundly pious character as a practicing Jew, Goldziher never even thought
of converting to Islam. At al-Azhar he was like a fish in the clear
waters of an ocean. But not even the majesty of al-Azhar, where
his mind was most at home, made him compromise his integrity
as a Jew. It in fact accentuated it. Al-Azhar, and by extension
Goldziher's knowledge of Islamic scholastic learning, made him
more of a pious, believing, practicing and noble Jewqualities
he in turn squarely invested in his understanding of Islam. It is

48

Post-Orientalism

the nature of that dialectic that has completely escaped the author
of his "psychological portrait," busy as he is portraying him as
"an evil man."
There were other obstacles Goldziher had to overcome before
he was finally admitted to study al-Azhar. With every witty, intelligent, and appropriate answer he provided he further endeared
himself to his colleagues and teachers and was welcomed with
open arms, especially by a certain Shaykh Mahfuz al-Maghribi
who as soon as laid eyes on Goldziher told him he had had a
dream that he was coming to study with him, referring to him as
"a descendent of the old prophets"65yet another indication that
neither Goldziher nor his friends and colleagues hid his identity and
ancestral faith. Al-Azhar professors and students alike welcomed,
loved, and admired Goldziher like one of their own. He visited
them at their residences and they came to pay Goldziher visits in
turn. He spent his mornings studying at the library and attending
lectures and seminars, and his evenings socializing with his friends
and colleagues. He was "led from paradise to paradise,"66 as he
later recalled fondly what to the end of his life he considered the
most blissful time of his life. Riyad Pasha, totally vindicated in
his recommendation of Goldziher continued to meet with him and
repeat his offer for him to stay in Egypt and pursue a career far
more lucrative than what was offered or was expected of him in
Hungary. Goldziher politely refused Riyad Pasha's offers.
Neither his preoccupation with his studies nor his acquaintance
with high-ranking officials like the minister of education prevented
Goldziher from becoming deeply involved with the anti-colonial
sentiments current in Egypt at the time. "During the celebrations
of the marriage of the daughter of the Viceroy," as Patai characterizes Goldziher's politics, "Goldziher agitated in the bazaars against
the advantages enjoyed by the Europeans in Egypt."67 What Patai
calls "agitation" others may call something else, like anti-colonial
protest. Goldziher frequented the circles of Egyptian nationalists,
prepared historical accounts of a reconstruction of Egyptian culture
in opposition to European colonialism.68 He joined anti-colonial
demonstrations in the streets of Cairo, spoke and wrote on behalf

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

49

of Egyptian nationalism in circles he frequented, refused to attend

exclusively European gatherings unless his teachers and colleagues
at al-Azhar were also invitedand Patai characterizes all these
noble and moral acts as Goldziher's identifying "with traditional
Muslim anti-Western Egypt,"69 representing his principled anticolonial and pro-Egyptian sentiments, actions, and writings either
as "agitation" or else as "anti-Western."70
Within weeks after he left Budapest, the twenty-three year old
Goldziher was demonstrating in the streets and alleys of Cairo
against European colonialism alongside his Egyptian friends and
colleagues. He was what we would today call an academic activist,
a staunch anti-colonial critic of European arrogance in the region
of his scholarly interestand his sojourn to Muslim lands was his
rare chance to put his lifelong learning and moral convictions to
the test of the lived and material realities of a people and a faith he
had devoted himself to understanding. This aspect of Goldziher's
character, his anti-colonial activism, Patai has a particularly difficult time fathoming. Goldziher's anti-colonial politics and his
excitement at visiting the seats of Islamic learning go a long way
toward explaining his enthusiasm in this journey than Patai's presumed "infatuation with Islam," or "acute anti-Jewish complex,"
or "anti-Westernism."
Goldziher remained in Cairo until mid-April 1874, returning to
Budapest a few days before the death of his father on 4 May 1874.
His last and most memorable act while in Cairo was to participate
in a public prayer. With the help of a Syrian colleague, Abdallah
al-Shami, Goldziher could fulfill this last wish he had and attended
a Friday prayer next to Imam al-Shafi'i's mausoleum. "In the
midst of the thousands of the pious," he later recorded, "I rubbed
my forehead against the floor of the mosque. Never in my life was
I more devout, more truly devout, than on that exalted Friday."71
The summation of Goldziher's time in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt
to him was a "year full of honors, full of luster, full of light."72
*

50

Post-Orientalism

To understand the predicament of Goldziher as a superior scholar

denied a proper teaching position, as well as his anti-colonial activism in Egypt, it would be very constructive to compare him to
his own teacher Armenius Vambery, a charlatan Orientalist to the
highest degree, a self-confessed spy for the British, a man who
betrayed his ancestral faith and out of career opportunism, converting first to Islam and then to Christianity, in order to advance his
espionage services to colonialism, and whom Goldziher detested
and whom Patai greatly admires.
Goldziher's return to Budapest was not a happy occasion.
His father soon died and he had to assume immediate financial
responsibilities for his mother and sister. No teaching position
worthy of his status was forthcoming and thus reluctantly he began
working as an administrator. Patai is very sarcastic and critical
of Goldziher for resenting this secretarial job. But Goldziher's
anger has nothing to do with whatever important function this
congregation may have (and must have) served. Goldziher was a
scholar. He had just completed his formal education in Europe,
received his highest degrees, published extensively, and studied at
al-Azhar University, a feat never before attained by any European
Orientalist. A mind-numbing administrative position (any such
position, no matter how otherwise important) was far beneath the
dignity of his learning and achievements. Failing to understand
this, Patai characterizes Goldziher as being "slightly paranoid,"73
and wonders why he could not have at least "some measure of satisfaction in occupying the influential position of de facto manager
of the largest Jewish congregation in the world."74
Goldziher was nowhere near the "de facto manager" of anything.
People infinitely inferior to his intellect, such as Moritz Wahrmann
(1832-1892), who was elected the president of the congregation
in 1883 and for nine consecutive years terrorized Goldziher, were
in position of power and authority over him and the very livelihood of his family, repeatedly and sadistically subjecting him to
deliberate humiliation. The pages of Tagebuch are filled with the
agonies that Goldziher experienced under Wahrmann and other
leaders of the congregationat some point even driving him to
contemplate suicide: "With all my self-control," wrote Goldziher

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

51

in his Tagebuch, "a catastrophe for my inner life was to be feared.

In the winter of 1883-84 [that is when Wahrmann became the
president of the congregation] I had no more serious wish than to
be liberated from this nonlife by death. My nightly prayers had
one content: that the merciful God let me not waken again. And
when I did wake up in the morning, it was accompanied by feeling
of terror and fear that I had again been delivered to the evil life
in which I found but shame and torture."75 Why was he driven
to such desperation? "At the meetings of the executivewhere
I sat as the scribe," Goldziher reports of his having been the "de
facto manager of the largest Jewish congregation in the world,"
as Patai characterizes him, "my incompetence and stupidity were
proclaimed hundreds of times by the mouth of this autocrat [Wahrmann]."76 "You want to be a philosopher," on another occasion
Wahrmann ridiculed Goldziher, "If a four-year-old child had
given me such an answer I would scold it severely."77 Goldziher
was no "de facto manager" of anything at the congregation. He
was a eminent scholar trapped in a pathetic administrative post,
systematically humiliated and abused by his superiors in power
and inferiors in intellect.
Occasionally teaching positions would open, such as the one
at the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest. But because Goldziher,
in his book DerMythos bei den Hebraern {Mythology among the
Hebrews) had ventured to examine the Hebrew Bible in terms of
current theories of myth advanced by Max Muller (1823-1900)
he had managed to offend the religious sensibilities of people
in charge of that academic position.78 Goldziher held Armenius
Vambery, an exceedingly powerful and influential man, directly
responsible for having failed to secure a teaching position for him.
"That I have been totally ignored here," Goldziher believed of his
predicament in Budapest, " is the work of vengeance of this evil
monster." Calling him the "most cunning of all liars," Goldziher
believed that Vambery "cannot maintain his grandeur without
slighting me." When in March 1905, and upon the retirement of
a senior colleague, Peter Hatala, Goldziher was finally appointed
as a full-time and salaried professor, he was absolutely convinced
that it was against Vambery's machinations. "Had he been present

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Post-Orientalism

on the sixteenth [of March 1905, when the faculty unanimously

voted in favor of Goldziher], it would certainly not have been
unanimous. I would not have got the vote of this malicious ignoramus."79 This appointment came thirty-five years, from 1870
to 1905, after Goldziher had received his doctoral degree from
Leipzig, and thirty-one years after he had completed his round of
studies at al-Azharand long after decades of enduring a humiliating and demeaning secretarial job to earn a living and provide for
his family. Goldziher adamantly believed that Vambery not only
had absolutely nothing to do with his appointment but that in fact
if he could have he would have prevented it from happening.80
Patai unequivocally takes Vambery's side (without providing a
shred of evidence except his own deep affection for and political
identification with Vambery) and, disregarding all fundamental
moral and intellectuals issues separating Goldziher from Vambery,
accuses Goldziher of yet another malevolent character trait, of
being ungrateful to his friends and colleagues.81
The choice seems to be between Patai's projection of Goldziher
as "an evil man" who was "infatuated with Islam," "suffered from
an acute anti-Jewish complex," was "slightly paranoid," and utterly
ungrateful, or else look a little closer at this Armenius Vambery and
notice the difference between him and Goldziher. Ignaz Goldziher
and Armenius Vambery were two radically different people and
in fundamental political disagreementsa fact that Patai barely
notes but for the most part disregards. As a central Asian expert,
Armenius Vambery was deeply involved in British colonialism in
India, knew Prince of Wales (Edward VII) personally and boasted
of having visited him at Windsor Castle. "Vambery," as Patai himself reports, "became an advisor to the British government on India
and Asiatic policies."82 Vambery was an exceedingly rich man who
had made his money by being a "secret agent" for both the British
and the Ottomans, as he put it himself proudly, putting his Oriental
expertise squarely at the service of British colonialismby his
own repeated admission, to more than one person.83 "In Hungary
one needs no science," Vambery told Goldziher condescendingly,
"do you think I earned my fortune with Science? Ha, ha, ha! I
received an annual salary from the English Queen and from the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

53

Sultan, for political matters. England has now increased my salary

by 500 pounds sterling a year. This is science."84 After quoting
this passage from Goldziher's Tagebuch, Patai corroborates both
the extraordinary wealth of Vambery and the fact that he was a
secret agent in the service of the British Empire and the Ottomans
at the same time, from Theodor Herzl's diary (which Patai has
also edited). Herzl also reports, entirely independently of any
malevolence that Goldziher may have had towards Vambery, that
Vambery had told Herzl that he was a spy for the British and for
the Ottoman Sultan at the same time.85
In addition to the testimonies of Goldziher, Herzl, and Patai, we
have another piece of document from Vambery's own pen, corroborating the reasons why a principled person like Goldziher with
a record of anti-colonial activism, would detest him and repeatedly
call him a "swindler-rich Dervish."86 Vambery's service to the
British Empire had a long and quite adventurous history. In the
early 1860s, Vambery disguised himself as a wandering dervish
and traveled throughout Central Asia and Iran to collect detailed
and vital intelligence for his British employers. Vambery's own
account of these travels, Voyage d'unfaux derviche en Asie centrale, 1862-1864,S1 provides detailed accounts of his adventures.
Disguised and calling himself "Rashid Efendi," Vambery traveled
extensively in the region of vital strategic significance to the British and gathered detailed intelligence, concluding his journey and
returning to London to give his reports on 9 June 1864.88 "I have
no doubt," Vambery concludes after his long journeys in Iran and
Central Asia, "that without any question the Christian civilization
is nobler than any other that has ever regulated human societies.
It will be a great gift for Central Asia as well." This is so far as
his comparative conception of Judaism (his own original faith),
Christianity, and Islam is concerned. As for his politics, "I have
no clue," he says, catering to the political agenda of his employers,
"how England, while possessing India, can tolerate so indifferently
the Russian incursions into East. In my opinion the political aspect
of the question is more important than it social aspect."89 With
an obvious eye towards his own career in Orientalist espionage,
Vambery was determined to persuade the British of the danger of

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Post-Orientalism

Russian incursion into Central Asia, a vital region for protecting

the British control of the Indian subcontinent. The British were
of course not sitting idly by and were far more engaged in Iran,
Afghanistan, and Central Asia than Vambery knew or divulged
at the time. From the early nineteenth century the British were
deeply involved in the region, including in Iranand their having
dispatched their Orientalist spy Vambery to the region was part
of their gathering intelligence about the region. As early as the
Perso-Russian wars of 1804-1813 and then again 1825-1827, the
British were actively involved in Iran and Central Asiatrying
to win the Qajars over against the advances that Napoleon had
already made as early as 1805 by allying himself (in the famous
Finckenstein Treaty of 3 May 1807) with the Qajars in order to
create headaches for the British in South Asia. Pretending to help
the Qajars in their fight against the Russians (in compensation
for dismissing the French) the British, in effect, turned Iran into
a buffer zone between Russia and India. By the 1830s, when the
Qajars had repeatedly invaded Herat, the British had become increasingly concerned that the Qajars were not behaving properly,
and saw India, the jewel of their crown, as they called their colonial
adventurism, exposed to Russian adventures. On 24 October 1856,
the Qajars finally conquered Herat. By 4 December of the same
year, the British navy in the Persian Gulf had captured the Kharg
Island and were pushing northward all the way up to Ahvaz. By 4
March 1857, a treaty was signed in Paris between Iran and Great
Britain. The Qajars left Herat, the British left southern Iran, and
soon after created Afghanistan as a buffer state between Russia
and India. Vambery's travels through Central Asia and gathering
of intelligence in the early 1860s all occurred after these crucial
events and obviously furthered British interests in the region.
Unlike Vambery with his illustrious career as a spy, Goldziher
was, as a matter of moral and intellectual principle, opposed to
European colonialism in general. He had just returned from Cairo
where, alongside his Egyptian friends and colleagues, he had been
"agitating," as Patai puts it, against precisely the same sort of colonial interests that Vambery so lucratively served. Vambery and

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

55

Goldziher were two entirely different people, at the opposite ends

of a moral divideone a rich spy for the European colonialism
and an entirely mediocre Orientalist who did not mind converting
from Judaism to Islam first and Christianity next when it served his
career opportunism, the other a staunchly anti-colonial activist, a
poor but justifiably proud scholar, and a man of moral rectitude who
as a mater of ethical principle had remained honorably true to his
own ancestral faith against all odds. As he states in his Tagebuch,
Goldziher was propagating the same sorts of anti-colonial ideas
when he was in Egypt in the early 1870s that a decade later became
the rallying cry of the anti-colonial revolt of Arabi Pasha in June
1882.90 This marks off Goldziher as an entirely different person
than Vambery, who on one occasion told Goldziher, "Every man
who does not acquire much money is a reprehensible character. I
have earned a quarter of a million, half a million kronen, but not
with science. Science is shit."91
As he fails to understand Goldziher's intellectual affinity with
Islamic scholastic learning, Patai equally misconstrues the nature
of Goldziher's anger with Vambery and thus uses the occasion to
heap even more abuse on the subject of his "psychological portrait." Goldziher's critical disposition extended from his scholarship to his political views, which were not only anti-colonial but
also altogether anti-establishment. For all his love and admiration for his friend Wilhelm Bacher, he thought that Bacher was
too bookish and conformist, that "without being dishonorable,
he could adapt his spirit to the dominant trends, of which in the
course of time he became a factor."92 If Goldziher was so gently
critical of a man he deeply admired, for the supposition of being
a conformist, what could he think of a wealthy spy who put his
Orientalist knowledge at the service of British colonialism, against
which Goldziher took to the streets of Cairo, which fact Patai, in
his profound affinity with and admiration for Vambery, considers
as indication of Goldziher's "anti-Western" and pro "traditional
Muslim" sentiments and thus "agitations."
There is another principled difference between Vambery and
Goldziher that again goes a long way explaining Goldziher's dis-

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Post-Orientalism

like for Vambery without resorting to convoluted psychological

witch hunting. Vambery's career opportunism led him to act as
an intermediary of introducing Theodore Herzl (1860-1904) to
the Ottoman Sultan to secure permission for Jewish settlements
in Palestine. According to Patai, Vambery was so close and intimate with Herzl that Herzl called him, "Vambery bacsi" ("Uncle
Vambery"). After Herzl's death, Vambery was regularly consulted
by David Wolffsohn, then the president of the World Zionist Organization. To his dying day, on the contrary, Goldziher refused
to have anything to do with Zionism. In Patai's own words, "although Vambery had converted to both Islam and Christianity, he
remained a Jew at heart and proudly proclaimed himself a Zionist.
In contrast, Goldziher, with his lifelong religious fervor, was opposed to Zionism."93 These facts speak of fundamental moral and
political differences between Vambery and Goldziher, and they go
a long way explaining Goldziher's anger with Vambery, before we
need to resort to some deep-rooted, and dark psychological malice
on Goldziher's part. When it comes to a career opportunist who
abandoned his own ancestral faith, converting first to Islam and
then to Christianity when it served his purposes (and there is no
proof that even his presumed Zionism was anything other than the
same self-serving opportunism) and who in his own words believed
"that without any question the Christian civilization is nobler than
any other that has ever regulated human societies," Patai calls
him "a Jew at heart." But when it comes to a profoundly pious
and practicing Jew who against all anti-Semitic odds in Europe
and despite his deep intellectual affinity with Islamic scholastic
learning remained true to his faith, Patai considers him as having
"suffered from an acute anti-Jewish complex."
Goldziher's difficult time during these trying circumstances
notwithstanding, he remained exceedingly productive, published
extensively, attended international conferences, delivered learned
papers, and received accolades of praise and admiration from his
peers. His scholarship at this point was by no means limited to
Islamic Studies. During 1887-1888, he gave a series of public
lectures on the "Essence and Development of Judaism."94 But the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

57

highest achievement of this decade, as we saw, was the publication of his two-volume masterpiece, Muhammedanische Studien
(1889-1890). While his public lectures on Judaism were not very
well received"his presentation was far above the heads of the
audience"95his two-volume opus on Islam established him as
the undisputed master of the discipline. In his oscillation between
two exaggerated extremes, either accusing Goldziher of malevolent
character traits or showering him with exaggerated superlatives,
and thus projecting the image of a tormented genius,96 Patai considers the publication of the two volumes of Muhammedanische
Studien as an indication that "until Goldziher all of this was terra
incognita, not only for European scholars but also for the Muslim
'ulama and intelligentsia. With the publication of this work the
scholarly world agreed that Goldziher had created the intellectual
history of Islam "97 This absurdity, later repeated by other latterday Orientalists, simply defies reason. How could Muslims create
their own intellectual history, the material that Goldziher studiously
examined as the body of his scholarship, and yet not be aware of
what it is they had produced? It was Goldziher's supreme joy to
have (however briefly) lived and studied among those who had
created this intellectual history. He felt himself honored to have
been accepted by them as a student and as an equal. How could
he have "created the intellectual history of Islam"? Goldziher did
no such thing. He was a scholar of uncommon erudition. But he
did not "create" the intellectual history of an entire civilization.
He was no tormented geniusnor was he an evil man.
*

Patai's ad hominem attacks on Goldziher, completely distorting

the historical record and confusing the nature and quality of his
scholarship, assumes utterly slanderous proportions when he turns
to Goldziher's personal and private life.
Throughout these troubling years as an independent scholar,
Goldziher received numerous offers to teach in Germany, England, and Egypt. He rejected them all and opted to remain in

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Post-Orientalism

Budapesthis hometown and where his family and close friends

lived. Patai takes these refusals as signs of Goldziher's perturbed
soul that somehow needed to be tormented, and heaps even more
abuse upon him. "If Goldziher had not had opportunities to break
the shackles that tied him to the Israelite Congregation of Pest for
thirty years," Patai says in his "psychological portrait" of Goldziher, "his life would have been a most pathetic story of a genius
chained. But the fact that he had ample opportunities to liberate
himself and never took the decisive step makes that life more
nearly pathological than pathetic."98 Goldziher himself had more
immediate and healthy reasons to remain in Budapest, such as his
family obligations, particularly towards the orphaned children of
his deceased sister, and also his pride of place as a Hungarian. All
indications are that he did not wish to pack up his family and go
to England, Germany, or Egypt. Why should he? Budapest was
his city, Hungary his country, of which he spoke with singular affection and possessive pronoun. "He feels that he has a particular
mission in my country,"99 he once wrote of a Baha'i missionary
trying to convert people in Budapest to his religion.
Goldziher had two sons, Max and Karoly, from his marriage
in May 1878 to Laura Mittler. His older son Max committed
suicide on 31 May 1900, at the age twenty. The death of his son
was a particularly devastating experience for Goldziher, "the
darkest day of my life," he wrote in his diary of the day his son
died"my house has been destroyed."100 When his younger and
sole surviving son Karoly married Maria Freudenberg in 1913,
Goldziher developed a deep affection for his daughter-in-law
and thought it a matter of divine intervention that he should have
declined all those positions outside Hungary and stay put to have
the grace of this daughter in his life. Patai casts an astoundingly
irresponsible shadow of impropriety on Goldziher's affection for
his daughter-in-law and accuses him of having fallen in love with
her. Characterizing Goldziher's postdated explanation as to why
he had turned academic offers coming his ways as "ravings of
an enthusiast," Patai believes that "Goldziher, sixty-three at the
time, promptly fell in love with her [with his daughter-in-law, the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

59

twenty-three year old Maria Freudenberg],"101 suggesting that he

had remained in Budapest in order "to be able to experience the
elation of falling in love with his divine daughter-in-law"while
emphasizing their obvious age difference in order to add spice to
his slanderous suggestions.102
Nothing, not a shred of evidence in any passage from Goldziher's
Tagebuch that Patai's scandal-ridden language attempts to dig
out, suggests anything other than a perfectly innocent paternal
love that Goldziher had for her daughter-in-law. Goldziher never
expresses anything about Maria Freudenberg except adding, "who
is now my daughter," or "the good wife of my Karl," or "she is
from now on everything for us" (meaning he and his wife and
his son). Maria Freudenberg does not live long and dies tragically, on 4 December 1918 at the age of twenty-eight (of Spanish influenza). Goldziher's first thoughts on this sad occasion
are with his son, "Oh, my dear Karl."103 Towards the end of his
"psychological portrait," and after he has besmirched his dignity,
Patai casually admits that Goldziher's love for his daughter-inlaw was "undoubtedly platonic."104 But why suggest in such a
slanderous language anything otherwise, first (under a section
subtitled tabloid-like, "The Divine Mariska,")105 and then some
twenty-three pages after he has accused a man of "falling in love
with his divine daughter-in-law" simply adds that it was "undoubtedly platonic"? Why not take those expressions of paternal love
for what they were? Why not consider the fact that Goldziher did
not have a daughter of his own and it was only natural for him to
be excited at having a daughter-in-law in his family? Why not
remember that thirteen years before Maria Freudenberg entered
the Goldziher family, they had lost Goldziher's eldest son, Max,
a tragic suicide? All members of the Goldziher family must have
been elated to have a daughter join them to fill that tragic gap.
Why Patai does not not tell his English-speaking readers what
German-speaking readers were told by Scheiber, the editor of the
original text of the Tagebuch, that Maria Freudenberg was a learned
young scholar, a gifted Egyptologist?106 Why could Goldziher not
have a scholarly engagement with his daughter-in-law, fascinated

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Post-Orientalism

by her achievements, interests, potentials? Why plant a thought

(page 32) that Goldziher was not "emotionally involved" with his
own wife, suggesting there and then that Goldziher was capable
of "passionate love," in order to reap the slanderous fruit (pages
52-54) that Goldziher had anything but an entirely innocent and
noble sentiments towards his own daughter-in-law? Patai loses
not a single occasion to slander Goldziher with this accusation.
Long after the "The Divine Mariska" section, when discussing
Goldziher's relations with his students, he still interpolates sardonic
remarks: "in 1919, when Goldziher was heartbroken over the death
of his beloved Mariska "107 This section of Patai's "psychological
portrait" of Goldziher tops off a systematically slanderous picture,
casting his entire scholarly achievements under a thick shadow of
defamation, simply because Goldziher had committed the unforgivable sin of not being a Zionist.
*

The perfidious remarks about Goldziher's feelings and relations

to his daughter-in-law is not the last shadow that Patai wishes to
cast on his integrity and thus upset a balanced assessment of his
lifetime achievement as a scholar. His next move is to accuse Goldziher of "superpatriotism," "chauvinism," and even "xenophobia."
"Chauvinistic patriotism," Patai writes, "often goes hand in hand
with xenophobia, or at least a disdain for foreigners. This was
the case with Goldziher."108 This is quite strange indeed. On one
hand Patai accuses Goldziher of having an abiding love for Arabs
and Muslims"infatuated with Islam," "anti-Western"and then
accuses him of xenophobia, "or at least a disdain for foreigners."
So which one is it? Is Goldziher a superpatriotic, chauvinistic,
xenophobe, or an incurable Arabophile who exempted Arabs and
Muslims from his "censorial wrath,"109 had an "admiration for the
world of Islam,"110 and who was indeed "infatuated with Islam?"111
Patai did not make up his mind, and in that confusion dwells the
persistent demonization of a scholar whose lifetime achievements
need a far more serious assessment more than a century after they
were produced.

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

61

To be sure, Patai raises a perfectly legitimate set of questions

about Hungarian Jewry and their Hungarian nationalism, which
he traces back to "post-Emancipation Hungarian Jewry," emancipated in 1867. Patai gives an outline of the odds against which
the Hungarian Jewry remained nationalist, a nationalism that
"survived," as he argues,
All the vicissitudes that they experienced in subsequent decades: the
wave of anti-Semitism that swept Hungry in the 1880's and culminated
in the blood libel of Tiszaeszlar; the attacks and murders that followed
the downfall of the short-lived 1919 Communist regime headed by the
renegade Jew Bela Kun; the introduction in 1921 of the numerus clasusus law, which stamped the Jews a national minority despite all their
protestations that they were but one of the several religious denominations in the Magyar nation and reduced the number of Jews admissible
to universities to the proportion of Jews in the total population; and the
constant undercurrents of anti-Semitism that characterized Hungarian
life in the intervals between these and other such hurtful events. In fact,
every anti-Semitic manifestation was countered by the Jews with louder
and more emphatic proclamations of their Hungarianism and Hungarian
patriotism. This remained the dominant tone of Hungarian Jewish life
until the tragic years of World War II and the extermination of 565,000
of the 825,000 Hungarian Jews.112
These are all perfectly legitimate questions that one can raise in
the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust. At the time (as indeed at
any time), the Hungarian Jewry, as the rest of European Jewry, had
perfectly legitimate claims to their national identities as Hungarians, Germans, Poles, etc. If there is an intensity about nationalism
and patriotism it is neither exclusive to Hungarians nor indeed is
there any legitimate reason why Hungarian Jewry be exempt from
that patriotism. It is only in hindsight and after the horrors of
European anti-Semitism culminated in the Jewish Holocaust that
one can raise these sorts of historical and sociological questions.
But one cannot anachronistically single out the Hungarian Jewry,
let alone Goldziher, accuse them of chauvinism and xenophobia
simply because like all other Hungarians and Europeans they felt
attached to a country that for generations and millennia had been
their homeland.

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Post-Orientalism

As a Zionist, Patai does not hide the fact that his anger against
Goldziher is rooted in why he refused to endorse the Zionist project.
"After the issuance of the Balfour Declaration," Patai notes,
in which the British government undertook to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, Zionist leaders approached
Goldziher to ask him to help them establish contacts with Arab notables
and scholars with whom he had excellent connections and who had great
respect for him, but he refused.113
Even this frustration of a committed Zionist as to why a man
of Goldziher's status refused to have endorsed his ideology is
perfectly understandable. But to turn around and accuse him
of "superpatriotism, chauvinism, and xenophobia" is not only
anachronistic, but blatantly politically motivated, vindictive, and
as such predicated on an entirely flawed line of argument. One
could not possibly accuse Goldziher, and hundreds of thousands
of other Hungarian Jews, of not caring about their own collective
fate, their own well-being. From a Zionist perspective, and from
the hindsight of post-Holocaust history, one can even accuse them
of poor judgment and lack of farsightedness. But imputing superpatriotism and xenophobia not just to Goldziher and hundreds of
thousands of other Hungarian but to millions of European Jewry
for their perfectly legitimate claims to their homeland is not just
affectedly conceited but also logically flawed.
There are, in fact, no indications that Goldziher opposed the
peaceful coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine. Patai reports an eyewitness account in which Goldziher
purportedly told the Syrian reverend 'Abdul-Ahad Dominique
Bashar Mishkuni, a former student:
I havefirmlyhoped in my whole life that the time will come when Arabs
and Jews making peace with each other, will cooperate in the resurrection of Israel and the Arab people. If you return to your native country,
tell your brethren that I have worked all my life for your people and for
my people.114

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

63

From his own pen in his Travelogue we also read how upon his
visit to Jerusalem he thought
of the calumniated, persecuted prophetism of the Hebrew Past, of the
prophetism of the future, of the new Jerusalem that, "liberated" and
rebuilt by spirit and thought, will become the place of pilgrimage of all
those who, with free mind, erect a new Zion for the Jehovah of freedom
that embraces the whole mankind.115
This is in November 1873, from the pen of the twenty-three-yearold Goldziher, decades before the Dreyfus Affair (1894) gave
momentum to the rise of political Zionism, twenty-three years,
to be exact, before Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) published his Der
Judenstaat {The Jewish State, 1896), and almost thirty-years before Herzl published his novel, Altneuland {Old-New Land, 1902),
giving his vision of a socialist Utopia in Palestine. Long before
Herzl, Goldziher too had his own Utopian vision. "He wanted the
persecuted Jews," recalls Bernard Heller, "to find a home in the
Holy Land, that Jews, Christians, and Muslims might live there in
brotherhood together."116 He too called that Utopia "Israel," and
invoked the name of Zion to mark it, but Goldziher's was a "Zion
for the Jehovah of freedom that embraces the whole mankind."
There is a serious difference between Goldziher's "Zionism" and
Herzl's.
Patai, much to his credit, seriously discounts the later efforts of
people like Louis Massignon who tried posthumously to turn Goldziher into a "spiritual" or a "cultural" Zionist, and characterizes
them as "to say the least, tenuous."117 But more than tenuous are
his own issues with millions of European Jews who simply refused
to take Herzl's colonial adventurism (if they were not Zionists)
or prophetic visions (if they were) too seriously. That they paid
for their decisions dearly and with their own lives and the lives of
their loved one's cannot be subjected to Monday-morning quarterbacking nor can their natural and perfectly legitimate love for their
homelands branded as superpatriotic, chauvinist, and xenophobic.
Bernard Heller believes, in exact contradiction to Raphael Patai,
that Goldziher's "profound religion was not mixed with any kind
of nationalist element. On this point he made a fundamental state-

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Post-Orientalism

ment in his letter to Joseph Banoczi in 1889: 'Jewry is a religion,

and not an ethnographical concept. As for as my nationality is
concerned, I am a Trans-Danubian Hungarian, and for my religion
I am a Jew.... On leaving Jerusalem for Hungary I said that I was
returning home."118 Might that be the reason why Patai turns Goldziher into a xenophobic, superpatriotic, zealotthat he believed
Judaism is a religion, not "an ethnographic concept," that he was
a nationalist but not the right kind of nationalist that suited Patai's
"psychological portrait"?
*

Towards the end of his "psychological portrait" of Goldziher,

Patai concludes with what he believes are the "two contrasting
aspects of Goldziher's personality: his clear, analytical, scholarly
mind, which, of course, is well known from his great works, and
his uncontrollable, powerful emotionalism, which ever and again
breaks forth from depth of his psyche and, as it were, sweeps him
off his feet."119 Patai's assessment of this apparent paradox posits
yet another psychological malady in Goldziher suggesting that he
suffered from something close to a "split personality." The psychological diagnosis of the anthropologist: "As a matter of fact the
explanation is not far to seek. It is found in a lack of adjustment,
an absence of harmony, between the cerebral Goldziher and the
emotional Goldziher that was to remain a basic characteristic of his
life. I would not go so far as to say that he had a split personality,
but he certainly came near enough to it."120
The alternative reading, instead of Patai's systematically abusive
interpretation of Goldziher's Tagebuch and the Travelogue, would
be that these two documents are in fact entirely private spaces that
have perfectly innocent functions for their author. Neither Tagebuch
nor the Travelogue was meant for publication. The Tagebuch was
written exclusively for Goldziher's wife, children, and very close
friends.121 As for the Travelogue, when on the occasion of his
fortieth birthday, on 22 June, 1890, Goldziher began writing his
Tagebuch and came to his recollections of his trip to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt he had apparently misplaced (or else did not care

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

65

to consult) his Travelogue and thus did not care even to consult
it for exact dates, locations, or the chronology of events, and as a
result he makes a few minor mistakes about dates and locations
(which Patai is of course quick to catch). These facts indicate that
the function of Tagebuch and Travelogue was entirely momentary,
private, and a simple way of unloading the burden of the day that
had passed. "I have nobody to whom I could confide the mortifications and humiliations that are my daily bread," Goldziher
writes in his Tagebuch on the day that his son Max dies, "except
to these pages."122 Neither the Tagebuch nor the Travelogue was
certainly meant to be abusively read by a politically antagonistic
anthropologist with a penchant for pop-psychology and scandalous sexual innuendos.
There are other aspects of the Tagebuch and the Travelogue
that come together to define their mutual function in providing
Goldziher with an emotional outlet and underscore the sense of
purpose in his life. Patai notes how on one day Goldziher goes on
a rampage against people who have irritated him, and only a few
days later he forgets what he had said earlier and writes: "I have
become apathetic to all marks of honor just as I have, with a will,
become apathetic to all humiliation."123 Patai takes such occasions
as an indication of Goldziher's lack of stability. But these remarks
point to something entirely different, that the Tagebuch (and by
extension the Travelogue) is really an instantaneous occasion for
Goldziher to let off steam, building up inside him during the day,
an immediate function even beyond his original purpose of telling
his family and close friends his life story. The Tagebuch certainly
began as a life story to be shared with Goldziher's immediate family and friends, but as soon as he summarizes the early part of his
life (with an obvious and perhaps inevitable sense of nostalgia),
and continues to write about his current life from 1890 forward
the function of the diary almost completely changes and becomes
a manner of talking to a friend, a close confidentand even that
not in a regular, systematic way. There are days, weeks, and even
months that go by in which Goldziher does not write anything
in his Tagebuch. The entire year of 1905, for example, has only

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forty-two entries, some of them as short as a single sentenceand

that year is a relatively crowded year in the Tagebuch. Between
28 August and 5 September 1905 he does not write a single entry,
and after an entry in September for three months he writes nothing
until a couple of entries in December. The same is true of 1906
(twenty-six entries), 1907 (ten), 1908 (ten), 1918 (eighteen), and
1919 (two)meaning that in an entire year he writes as little as
twice in his diary. The earlier years of the Tagebuch, to be sure,
contain more elaborate entries and more frequently1892 (fortyfive entries), 1893 (twenty-one), 1894 (forty-nine), whereas the
later years have fewer entries. Throughout most of the Tagebuch,
the summer entries (from May to August) are far more frequent
than those in the spring (January-April) and fall (September to Decemberan obvious indication that during his summer holidays
he had more time to write his private thoughts. The overwhelming majority of Goldziher's time was spent writing his scholarly
essays, with prodigious, voluminous, and astounding rapidity and
frequency. These few, infrequent, and entirely innocent reflections
of a man in the privacy of his diary cannot be abused to construct
a whole scenario about the tormented soul of a "pathetic genius"
full of horrid and amoral character traits, coming together to produce "an evil man."
Rather than misrepresent him, there are other, more fascinating, ways to read the Tagebuch. Consider the fact that the lengthy
and elaborate entries of the Tagebuch in its earlier parts and the
shorter staccatos of the later years in a rather peculiar (and most
probably unconscious) way resembles the narrative composition of
the Qur'an, with short and exclamatory Meccan verses (revealed
between 610-622) standing in sharp contrast to the long and elaborate Medinan verses (revealed between 622 and 632). Although
this order is chronologically reversed in the case of Goldziher's
Tagebuch, and the longer and more elaborate entries occur earlier
in his life and the terser ones later, the narrative structure of the
Tagebuch follows exactly that of the canonical composition of the
Qur'an, in which the longer chapters come first and the shorter
ones later. There is a saying that what Muslims do is not just

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

67

memorize the Qur'an but Qur'anify their memory. Goldziher,

too, knew much of the Qur'an (and the Bible of course) by heart.
On the very first page of Tagebuch he quotes a passage of the
Qur'an as one of the two guiding principles of his life (the other
being from the Hebrew Bible).124 He refers to his personal copy
of the Qur'an being an indication of his piety"my copy of the
Koran can testify how I was inwardly turned toward Islam."125
Goldziher's intimate familiarity with the Qur'an could not have
been entirely irrelevant in the way his mind and memory worked,
especially in the unguarded and private spaces of his diary. One
must not overemphasize or exaggerate this point, or the fact that
Goldziher began writing his Tagebuch on his birthday when he
turned fortyprecisely the age of Prophet Muhammad (570-632)
when he began receiving his revelations. The point is that there
are far more insightful and crucial ways of reading the Tagebuch
(all domestic to the life of Goldziher as a scholar) that are possible
without resorting to systematically abusing it for a slanderous
characterization of its author.
Patai, as evidenced in his repeated questions as to why in the
Tagebuch Goldziher did not write about his trip to the United States
in 1904, or about his students more than he did (such as in the case
of Bernat Heller who had translated into Hungarian the six lectures
Goldziher was supposed to deliver in a subsequently cancelled
trip to the United States, his Vorlesungen iiber den Islam, later
translated also into English as Introduction to Islamic Theology
and Law) seems to have his own fixed conception of what a diary
ought to be. That of course is perfectly fine, but he cannot impose,
exact, and demand that conception from Goldziher, and if he has
failed to deliver read even what he has not written as the sign of a
psychological malady. Patai reports how Bernat Heller (with whom
Patai studied in the academic year 1929-1930) told him "several
times about his great master [Goldziher], whose memory he cherished as that of the kindest person he had ever known,"126 but, alas,
nothing of that kindness seems to have rubbed off on Patai's own
pen when writing Goldziher's "psychological portrait." Instead,
he uses even this reportthe eyewitness account of a close and

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Post-Orientalism

trusted student speaking fondly of his teacherto cast a shadow

of doubt on Goldziher's integrity, that he failed to mention and
praise his students properly in the pages of his Tagebuch. Not only
in this but also in every other case, Patai uses every opportunity,
every occasion that Goldziher's students have testified to his kindness and greatness, to turn the point around and cast a shadow of
doubt on Goldziher's character. Joseph de Somogyi writes in his
reminisces of Goldziher how in 1919, when Goldziher and his
family were mourning the tragic death of his daughter-in-law, he
still managed to give Somogyi private tutorials in Arabic in his
home "twice a week, from 4:00 PM to late in the evening." Patai
cannot report this without a subordinate clause, adding, "when
Goldziher was heartbroken over the death of his beloved Mariska,"
deliberately using the endearing diminutive "Mariska" for Maria
Freudenberg.127 Frau Maria Freudenberg Goldziher was "Mariska"
to members of her close family, not to Raphael Patai.
It does not make much sense to preface a translation of a scholar's travelogue on a journey he considered the most joyous occasion
of his scholarly career by persistently casting him as "an evil man,"
"infatuated with Islam," who "suffered from an acute anti-Jewish
complex," and who "agitated" in the streets of Cairo because of his
"anti-Western" and "pro-traditional Muslim" cultural sentiments,
and who to top it off was not only ungrateful to his own teachers
and benefactors but had fallen in love with his own daughter-inlaw, was a chauvinist and xenophobe who suffered from a split
personalityand then to compensate for all of this keep repeating
a nonsensical cliche that he was a "tormented genius."
It does not quite make sense, except for the fact that Patai has
given ample evidence that he is far more sympathetic to someone
like Armenius Vambery, a self-proclaimed spy for the British, an
Orientalist squarely at the service of European colonialism, a man
who had betrayed his ancestral faith, first converting to Islam and
then to Christianity, both to further his career as a spy, and who
derided-Goldziher for having remained true to and faithful to Judaismsimply because Armenius Vambery was sympathetic to
Zionism, a friend of Herzl, and an intermediary between him and

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

69

the Ottoman Sultan in securing permission for Jewish settlements

in Palestine. For this Patai bestows upon Armenius Vambery the
honorary position of having remained "a Jew at heart." Meanwhile,
Patai turns Goldziheran exceptionally gifted scholar, a noble,
observant, and pious Jewinto a psychological freak, a tormented
soul, full of venom against the Jewish community, and guilty of
inappropriately amorous feelings towards his daughter-in-law,
simply because he was opposed to European colonialism of all
sorts, and was sympathetic to Islam and Muslims. Patai was of
course perfectly entitled to whatever politics he wished, but to
using politics in order to slander a great scholar of unsurpassed
moral integrity he was not.
Goldziher was neither a tormented genius, nor an emotional
pervert, nor an evil man, nor indeed did he harbor anything but
proudest and most noble attachment to his ancestral faith. He was
a superior scholar of uncommon learning, one of the most gifted
scholars of his time, and a man of enormous moral and intellectual
authority, who rightly detested any single second that he spent
away from his scholarly pursuits. He was a man of principle,
a devout and proud Jew, an opponent of European colonialism,
who produced a massive body of scholarship over a lifetime of
meticulous and inquisitive learning.128
*

Beyond clearing the name of Goldziher as a scholar from such

flawed and fallacious assumptions about his person, it is equally
important to de-personalize the critique of Orientalism, as best
articulated by Edward Said, and thus reach for a principled assessment of its mode of knowledge production, not allowing this
critique to be derailed into personal attacks on individual Orientalists. Goldziher's achievements as an Islamist must be read not
only as having come from the pen of a gifted scholar but also as the
particular examples, in fact examples par excellence, of a mode of
knowledge production called "Orientalism"and no appreciation
of the work of an Orientalist like Goldziher at the height of his

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remarkable career can of course disregard the magisterial work

of Edward Said (1935-2003), Orientalism (1978), and its cogent
critique of the discipline at the colonial origin of its epistemic
formation.
More than a quarter of a century after its publication, Edward
Said's Orientalism has assumed an iconic status quite independent
of the actual idea at the heart of the book. In his own 1995 afterword to Orientalism, Said addressed what he called "Borgesian"
mutation of his book into various languages, texts, interpretations,
intentions, readings. "In so far as I have been able to follow and
understand these subsequent versions," Said wrote, he sought to
correct and address them, navigating them through what he saw as
a "strange, often disquieting and certainly unthought-of polymorphousness."129 On this and on many other occasions, Said sought
to clarify what he meant, dismiss certain misreadings, expound
on his principle contentions, and altogether restate his case. But
all of these protests were read against the background of the idea
of "the death of the author," which much to Edward Said's own
chagrin had been one of the dominating ideas of his own academic
discipline, literary criticism.130 No matter how much and how many
times he protested that his book was not a case of "anti-Westernism""as it has been misleadingly and rather too sonorously called
by commentators both hostile and sympathetic"or that he did
not believe in the existence of a "true Orient" that Orientalists had
then misrepresented it, or a score of other such takes on the book,
including the accusation that "to criticize Orientalism...is in effect to be a supporter of Islamism or Muslim fundamentalism,"131
it did not matter. The multifaceted social construction of the text
had almost completely taken over the text itself, making "the text
itself," in fact, a matter of opinion.
Perhaps one of the most unfortunate misreadings of Edward
Said's Orientalism, not only beyond his control, though he inadvertently contributed to it, is its having been read as an ad hominem
attack on Orientalists as such. This misreading is due, at least in
part, to a series of public confrontations between Edward Said
and Bernard Lewis, who took upon himself the task of defending

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

71

the Orientalists, prompting Edward Said in turn to engage with

Bernard Lewis personallybeyond his cogent references to his
work in the pages of Orientalism}32 This was perhaps an inevitable
political fallout of the publication of Orientalism in the United
States (recently home to the most mediocre Orientalists compared
to their nineteenth-century counterparts), but most unfortunate
also in derailing (certainly in public domain) the more serious
discussions of the text, which remained by and large limited to
literary-critical and anthropological circles.
Thus while such critics as James Clifford, Aijaz Ahmad, and
Sadiq Jalal al-Azm133 took serious issue with Edward Said, taking
both his theoretical and political assumptions and consequences
meticulously to task, Bernard Lewis became the spokesman of a
whole generation of mediocre Orientalists who were personally
offended by Orientalism and sought to discredit it with the clumsiest and most theoretically illiterate arsenal, in effect exposing
the historical exhaustion of Orientalism as a discipline of engaged
scholarship and intellectual vigorthus providing the widest possible public testimony of the point that Edward Said was trying
to make. Said in turn and justifiably responded to Bernard Lewis
and thus inevitably helped in detracting from the more serious
discussion of his own work. Said did not particularly mind this
active politicization of Orientalism, though of course he disagreed
with the theoretical criticisms of his points as well. "Orientalism,"
he declared in the 1995 afterword to his book and in response to
still more serious critics of his work, "is a partisan book, not a
theoretical machinery."134 In other words, the very same political
energy that made Edward Said take Michel Foucault's insights
on the relations between knowledge and power, rescue it from its
discursive and institutional limitation to theoretical domains, apply it to European colonialism in an unprecedented and politically
potent waythus turning his Orientalism into a global phenomenonwas equally instrumental in detracting from its more serious,
theoretically consequential, discussions. Edward Said was one of
those rare public intellectuals who walked a tightrope between his
serious theoretical concerns, groundbreaking in many related fields,

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and his equally serious political concerns, redefining in effect the

role and function of a public academic intellectual. The two sides
of this critical imbalance inevitably both reinvigorate and compromise each other. It was an awareness of this critical imbalance,
perhaps, that led Max Weber to warn against the involvement of
academic intellectuals in public affairsto which, in his life and
scholarship, Edward Said offered an alternative model.135
The ad hominem misreading of Orientalism is particularly
troublesome because it has turned the disciplinary critique of an
epistemic mode of knowledge production into a street battle between opposing political parties, while categorically dismissing a
whole constellation of different Orientalists and their sometimes
radically opposed politics into a singular categorythus, for example, equating Ignaz Goldziher (a gifted and dignified scholar
opposing European colonialism of all sorts as a matter of moral
and intellectual principle) with Bernard Lewis and his Orientalist
ancestor Armenius Vambery (a mediocre Orientalist and a selfconfessed spy working on behalf of British colonialism in general
and European Zionism in particular).
In any understanding of the scholarly output of Goldziher as
an Orientalist, it is of course imperative to read him in the context
of Edward Said's critique of Orientalism. But one cannot do that
before the issues are completely de-personalized and brought back
to the principal points of Edward Said's critique of a powerful discipline of knowledge production. One way of defusing the issue
in order to work towards a de-personalization of Edward Said's
critique of Orientalism is to turn the calendar back to decades
and dozens of years before the appearance of Orientalism (1978)
in order to steer clear of the quagmire of Pavlovian reactions to
that text and take the issues back to their principal positions and
critical points. The detection and outline of this theoretical and
substantive genealogy of Edward Said's argument is not to detract
by any means from his extraordinary achievement in Orientalism.
It is in fact to buttress it with at times identical critical perspectives that either in their embryonic states or else in their expansive
theoretical domains anticipate, corroborate, and substantiate Said's

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

73

thesis. This genealogy also provides a wider spectrum of critical

perspective on the practice of Orientalism so that political disagreement with Edward Said on other grounds cannot disguise itself as
a shallow and flawed criticism of his Orientalism. But above all,
it is to clear the field for a principled assessment of Goldziher's
scholarship against the powerful critique that Edward Said has
leveled against the discipline in which Goldziher conducted his
scholarship.
On 19 June 1904, more than half a century before Michel
Foucault (1926-1984) had formulated his ideas on the relation
between knowledge and power and then Edward Said (1935-2003)
extended that argument to Orientalism, a twenty-seven year old
Iranian scholar named Mohammad Qazvini (1877-1949) left Tehran and, traveling through Russia, Germany, and Holland came
to London. Before his death at the age seventy-two, Mohammad
Qazvini was universally recognized as the most distinguished
Iranian scholar of all time, earning the honorific title of Allamah
("Most Learned"), rarely given to any other Iranian scholar of that
generation.136 To this day, Allamah Qazvini is globally revered
as the model of scholarly acumen, the very definition of a vastly
learned, exquisitely cultivated, and meticulously precise scholar.
His critical edition of medieval texts and his path-breaking essays
and articles are exemplary models that succeeding generations
of scholars have followed in their own work. Even the scraps of
notes Qazvini took on various occasions have been meticulously
collected, edited, annotated, and published by his students and
admirersso precious, so rare, and so revered is every trace of
his significance as a scholar. So when we mention the name of
Allamah Qazvini, generation after generation of Iranian scholar
stand up in reverence for the mighty memory of his unsurpassed
excellence as a learned man. All this by way of a brief introduction,
so that we know whose authority we are about to witness.137
Qazvini spent two years in London and then in June 1906 left
London for Paris. He spent nine years in Paris and soon after the
onset of World War I, on 23 October 1915, he left Paris for Berlin, following an invitation by a close friend, Hossein Qoli Khan

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Nawwab, who had just been appointed as the Iranian ambassador

to Germany, and wishing to visit German libraries and meet with
German scholars. Because of the war, however, his journey to Germany ended up becoming a four-and-a-half-year sojourn. Qazvini
lived in Berlin until the end of the war, and then in January 1920,
he returned to Paris again, where he remained until 1939 and the
commencement of World War II, at which time he finally decided
he had seen enough of European wars and went back to Iran.
Between 1906 and 1939, Qazvini spent more than thirty years in
Europe.138 Throughout his years in Europe, the singular abiding
preoccupation of Qazvini was to visit libraries, read manuscripts,
produce critical editions, and meet with prominent European Orientalists. In the short autobiographical account that he wrote and
published, Qazvini proudly mentions the names of all the major
European Orientalists he met in London, Paris, and Berlin. He
mentions such Orientalists as E. G. Browne (1862-1926), whom
he dearly loved and admired, and A. A. Bevan, whom he describes
as a "specialist in Arabic literature.. .in this field very few people
are his match.. .exquisitely learned, and in his work he exercises an
astounding degree of precision, caution, even finicky-ness." The
same story is repeated in Paris, where he meets with the leading
French Orientalists, including Barbier de Meynard (d. 1908), Clement Huart (d. 1926),andG. J. E.Blochet(1870-1937). Whenhe
goes to Berlin, he does the same, and meets with Joseph Marquart
(1864-1930) and Karl Eduard Sachau (1845-1930), among other
prominent German Orientalists. In Berlin his only regret is that
he did not have a chance to meet Theodore Noldeke (1836-1930),
"despite my sincere hope to meet him. But at this time he was living in Strasbourg and I was in Berlin, and during the war traveling
between cities was quite difficult."139
It is important to take note of Qazvini's own scholarly achievements and his explicit admiration for prominent Orientalists of his
generation so that some seventy years before Edward Said he too is
not dismissed as a dilettante in Orientalist scholarship, or engaged
in obscure French theories (there was not a single theoretical bone
in Qazvini's scholarship, and he was in fact quite antipathetic to-

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

75

wards theory. He was a straight-arrow textual critic of unsurpassed

precision and diligence). It is this very Allamah Qazvini, who has
the following assessment of Orientalism in general:
Now that I have mentioned these Orientalists, I would not consider it
entirely inappropriate if at the end of this [autobiographical] essay I were
to mention this final point, which I have learned from my own experiences. The point is this: My dear fellow countrymen should know that
in Europe and among the Orientalists the number of fake and would be
scholars, and indeed charlatans, is infinitely more than the number of
genuine Orientalists and real scholars. Although this is perhaps generic
to all humanity, and in every field of knowledge and science, and as
such is not exclusive to European Orientalists alone, but nevertheless,
in the case of European Orientalists the domain of this problem has an
unbelievable expansion. The reason for this, perhaps, is that, as the
French proverb has it, "in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is
the king." Because of the European public ignorance at large, concerning
the issues of the Orient, and the languages and sciences of the Orient,
then naturally the field of Orientalism has become a vast and ready domain for imposters and charlatanpeople who as soon as they acquire
a preliminary knowledge of a couple of Oriental languages, and pass an
exam in them, which in most cases those who examine are more illiterate
than those are being examined, then by hook or by crook they become
a teacher of Oriental languages. At this point the instruction of these
languages, and in fact the teaching of a few other languages as well, and
all at the same timesuch as Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and all the arts
and sciences that have been produced in those languages, as well as all
the various and innumerable dialects of those languagesall and all are
entrusted to these Orientalists.140
This is so far as Qazvini's general assessment of Orientalists is
concerned. Now, what does he think of their scholarship? Here
is what he says:
These Orientalists then proceed, without the slightest sense of shame or
fear of being scandalized, for there is no one to tell, to claim knowledge
and authority in all these languages and the arts and sciences written
in them, teaching them, publishing books and articles about them, and
even coming out with their own new and specific ideas about them. Occasionally these people take a few innocent books in Persian, Arabic, or
Turkish, thoroughly distort them, and proceed to publish them, full of
blatant mistakes. This is not the case about Latin and Greek languages

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at all, for the European public at large more or less knows about these
languages. So because they might be exposed in public, those who know
these languages never dare to make such claims, not-even one tenth of
such claims. They only speak of their ownfieldof specialization in a
very small branch of those two languages, and would not dare to utter a
word beyond their area of competence.141
As to Qazvini's recommendation:
My point is that my dear fellow countrymen should not be fooled by
such authoritative-sounding titles as "Professor of Oriental Languages,"
or "Member of Such-and Such Society or Academy," and should not
accept blindly any nonsense that comes from Europe, signed by such
non-entities, without first subjecting it to critical judgment. Their assessments should not be considered as divine revelation, and you must
use your divinely endowed reason, which is the sole measure of distinguishing between truth from falsehood, along with the knowledge you
have acquired, in everything. Gauge everything with that measure, so
that you can distinguish between the right and the wrong path, between
the learned guide and the misguided fool.142
Qazvini wrote these words on Friday 14 November 1924, based
on his experiences accumulated over the preceding two decades in
Europe and with European Orientalists. These are the words of a
scholar who admires, and considers it his honor to have even met,
prominent European Orientalists. He has no political axe to grind.
He is not Palestinian. The state of Israel is not yet established. He
is neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction are terms yet to be invented decades
after Qazvini made these observations. None of the crowded
and crowding issues that subsequently coagulated to confuse the
principled questions raised by Edward Said in Orientalism are
anywhere in sight, nor does Qazvini present his case against these
"charlatans," as he calls them, in any theoretically sophisticated
language near the points and ambitions of Edward Said. He simply
provides an eyewitness account as a legendary scholar about what
he thought of Orientalism as practiced by all its representatives except a handful he mentions specifically by name and do not all add
up even to two dozens in entire Europe (exactly sixteen scholars

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

77

altogether). Major European Orientalists whom Qazvini thought

were "charlatans" include such luminaries as Louis Massignon and
Henri Masse. He accused these and other Orientalists like them of
having "phantasmagoric conjectures, illusory theses, drug-induced
illusions, and opium-assisted gibberish," as he put it in a letter
he wrote to a prominent Iranian literati and close friend (Seyyed
Hassan Taqizadeh), on Sunday 30 December 1923Orientalists
who Qazvini thought "after one or two years of studies claim to
know all the languages and sciences of the Eastclaiming not
only to understand them but in fact venturing to come up with their
own autonomous opinions and ideas and laughable conjectures,
all against the common consensus of all Muslims, and the origin
of which is nothing but the ignorance of Muslim habits, customs,
sciences, and traditionsfacts that in Muslim countries not just
every simple student of religious seminaries but in fact even pious
old women know."143
Qazvini's view of Orientalism, uttered at the height of its epistemic power and contemporaneous with the absolute best European
scholars that the discipline had generated, is not exclusive to him,
and is in fact representative of the most learned in his generation
of Iranian scholars and literati and those who came later. Hossein
Kazemzadeh Iranshahr (1884-1962), yet another major literary
intellectual who was a contemporary of Qazvini and shared much
of his experience in Europe, particularly in Berlin where they were
together during World War I, published an exceedingly important
journal in Berlin (in Persian), called Iranshahr. In the very first
issue of this influential journal, dated 26 June 1922, Iranshahr published a short essay that he called "Orientalism and Occidentalism."
In this essay (again published half a century before Edward Said's
Orientalismeffectively corroborating his theoretical observations
with eyewitness accounts), Iranshahr begins by telling his readers how over the last "two or three centuries" a discipline called
"Orientalism" has been generated in Europe.144 Iranshahr traces
the origin of this discipline to European travelers and adventurers
who used to write their travelogues and inform their countrymen
of what they had seen and witnessed. Originally, Iranshahr suggests, these accounts were in fact read as works of fantasies, and

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indeed, "many of these works did not have much else to offer."
Then Iranshahr writes:
But later, when European countries expanded the domain of their colonial possessions and conquered much of Oriental lands, the significance
and influence of these sorts of [Orientalist] writings became far more
powerful. European governments who needed to know about the habits,
ethics, as well as the political, economic, and social conditions and organizations of the Orientals began to pay closer attention to these travelers
and their works. For this reason, they began also to establish in their
capitals Orientalist schools and societies, encouraging the Orientalists
and promoting Orientalist journals and periodicals.145
Thus about half a century before Edward Said, Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr clearly and concisely sees and articulates the link between
colonialism and Orientalism. To be sure, he does not have Edward
Said's theoretical sophistication to argue the organic link between
the epistemic foregrounding of Orientalist knowledge production
and the colonial power that engendered it, for in fact Michel Foucault was not even born yet (the first issue of Iranshahr in which
this article appears is dated 26 June 1926; Michel Foucault was
born a few months later on 15 October 1926) to spend a lifetime
of his scholarship discovering and articulating that link, from
which then Edward Said borrowed and proceeded with his own
version of the idea. But the essence of the idea, the connection
between colonialism and Orientalism, following on the footsteps
of European travelers and adventurers and their Oriental fantasies
they created, foretells Edward Said's very table of contents in
Orientalism almost chapter by chapterfifty years before Edward
Said put pen to paper and wrote Orientalism,
Upon this premise, Iranshahr then proceeds to tell his readers
how by his time the domain of Orientalism had vastly expanded
and there were now Orientalists specializing in various fields as
Egyptologists, Arabists, Iranists, Sinologists, Armenialogists, etc.
Despite his acute political alertness, Iranshahr is not an anti-Orientalist and like Qazvini acknowledges the service that European
Orientalists have in fact provided the world of scholarship. So in
order to be fair, he reminds his readers that the beneficiaries of the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

79

work of these Orientalists have not been just the "political interests," as he puts it, of the Orientalists' respective countries. The
Orientalists have indeed, Iranshahr believes, done a wonderful job
of discovering the most detailed aspects of these countries, so much
so that "for centuries the Orientals themselves need to benefit and
follow the Orientalists and learn their methodology as the exemplary model of scholarship."146 It is imperative to place Iranshahr's
insight into the link between colonialism and Orientalism, outlined
half a century before this became the common staple of Edward
Said theories and scholarship, in the context of his appreciation of
Orientalism so he too cannot be dismissed as an "anti-Western,"
"pro-Islamic fundamentalist," "Palestinian activist," "Professor of
terror," who just did not appreciate the finer points of Orientalist
scholarship. If anything, Iranshahr and his colleagues in Berlin,
particularly their patron Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh (1878-1969),
were the staunchest supporters of the so-called "Westernization"
in Iran. Taqizadeh, the principal benefactor of Kazemzadeh and
scores of other expatriate Iranian intellectuals whom he gathered
in Berlin during World War I to publish Kaveh, another extraordinary journal advocating the cause of "modernization" in Iran,
is famous in modern Iranian history for having said, "From the
top of the head to the tip of the toe, Iranians must become European."147 So none of these people can be accused of any ill will
towards "the West," or even of having a strong political position
on colonialism. They have simply recorded what they thought of
Orientalists and Orientalism.
Iranshahr's concluding remark in this short essay is to suggest
(echoing in this respect too Edward Said's repeated insistence)
that people in the East should also start creating a discipline of
"Occidentalism," in which they will study "the social, political,
literary, economic, industrial, and technical aspects of Western
nations."148
The combined effect of Qazvini and Iranshahr's critique of Orientalism, both in scholarly and political terms (representative of
a wider constituency of Iranian scholars and coming from people

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who were pronouncedly appreciative of the best that the discipline

had produced) anticipates Edward Said's much later, and much
more theoretically cogent critique and should once and for all eradicate the false assumption that before Edward Said's Orientalism
there was no problem with this mode of knowledge production or
that scholars were unaware of its systematic services to colonialismand above all it should emancipate the domain of criticism
from personal politics and ad hominem battles between Edward
Said and his political adversaries. One can of course expand on
these precursors of Said and point to the works of scholars like
Anwar Abdel Malek ("Orientalism in Crisis," 1963) and Jacques
Waardenburg (L'Islam dans le miroir de UOccident, 1963),149
which, of course, Said knew and citedor even to Raymond
Schwab's Oriental Renaissance (1950), for the English translation
of which Said wrote a highly appreciative introduction.150 The
point is neither to diminish the rightful significance of Orientalism as a monumental text of universal significance, nor indeed to
detract from its far superior theoretical apparatusbut in fact to
accentuate it, bring it to the fore and rescue it from entirely tangential political and personal issues and so clear the air before we
read the work of any prominent Orientalist like Goldziher against
the background of Said's cogent and powerful argument. It must
be noted that observers whom neither Said knew nor they could
have known Said or read his Orientalism, were, quite independently
critical of the Orientalist project, to the point of one calling the
overwhelming majority of them illiterate "charlatans." This is not
what Said says. He is in fact exceedingly appreciative of the scholarly output of the Orientalists. Said's argument centers around the
question of "representation"who represents whom and by what
authority and power, and on what tacit epistemic assumptions the
knowledge thus produced is predicated. Thus, observations that
scholars like Qazvini and Iranshahr make expand the domain of
a critical perspective towards Orientalism beyond the exchanges
between Edward Said and his political opponents.
*

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

81

Beyond this expansion and clarification of Edward Said's argument in Orientalism of any issues that cloud its principal thesis,
we need also to know what Said specifically has to say about Ignaz
Goldziher. In Orientalism, Edward Said makes three specific references to Goldziher, and they are as follows: The first reference is
when Said effectively admits his own shortcomings in not having
covered German Orientalism. "Any work that seeks to provide
an understanding of academic Orientalism," he writes, "and pays
little attention to scholars like Steinthal, Miiller, Becker, Goldziher,
Brockelmann, Noldeketo mention only a handfulneeds to be
reproached, and I freely reproach myself. I particularly regret not
taking more account of the great scientific prestige that accrued to
German scholarship by the middle of the nineteenth century, whose
neglect was made into a denunciation of insular British scholars by
George Eliot."151 Said then proceeded to provide a perfectly persuasive explanation for this neglectfirst because Germany never
had a national interest in the Orient, and second because despite
this absence of colonial concerns (like French and British Orientalism), the German Orientalism did project "a kind of intellectual
authority over the Orient within Western cultures,"152 namely the
exclusion of German Orientalism was theoretically explainable
without exempting it from Said's more general critic of European
Orientalism, which is to say he implicated German Orientalism,
and quite rightly so, in his general critique of the discipline, while
providing something of an explanation as to why he had excluded
it, and yet still confessing that there is lacunae in his coverage. Be
that as it may, what Said is saying specifically about Goldziher is a
confession of the limitation of his coverage, but phrased in a way
that does not altogether discredit his observationsand he is (as
I will soon explain) perfectly correct in that suggestion.
The second time Said refers to Goldziher in Orientalism is in
the context of his discussion of the objectification of "the Orient,"
the "Orientals," and thus the systematic ignorance, for example,
of national liberation movements in the former colonies, a theme
that Said picks up from Anwar Abdel Malek and expands upon.
Here Said says,

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The Orientalistsfrom Renan to Goldziher to Macdonald to von Grunebaum, Gibb, and Bernard Lewissaw Islam, for example, as "cultural
synthesis" ... that could be studied apart from the economics, sociology,
and politics of the Islamic peoples. For Orientalism, Islam had a meaning which, if one were to look for its most succinct formulation, could
be found in Renan'sfirsttreatise: in order best to be understood Islam
had to be reduced to "tents and tribe."153
Whatever the accuracy of this assertion might be about the other
Orientalists (and it certainly is accurate about Bernard Lewis), it is
not entirely applicable to Goldziher. The distinguishing factor of
Goldziher as an Islamist was in fact his particular attention to social
and political factors in the course of the historical developments of
Islam, not only as evident in the pages of his Muslim Studies, but
throughout the rest of his work, particularly his Qur'anic, Tafsir
(Qur'anic exegesis), and legal scholarship. Ironically, Goldziher is
in fact severely criticized by Muslim scholars, especially by Muslim Hadith scholars, for having too much historicizedsubjected
to social and political factorsthe development of their sacred
lore.154 In addition, Goldziher was acutely aware of the most recent
developments in the Islamic world, had traveled there, and wrote
about such revolutionary movements as Wahabism and Babism
with a combination of critical appreciation and extensive analytical detail. As evidenced in the pages of his travelogue to Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt, he in fact participated in street demonstrations
against European colonialism and refused to have anything to do
(and in fact opposed) Zionismso he certainly cannot be accused
of either ignoring social and political issues or reducing Islam
to "tents and tribes." But to be fair to Said, neither Goldziher's
Tagebuch (1978) nor his Travelogue (1987) was available to him
when he was writing Orientalism (1978)though the two volumes
of Goldziher's Muslim Studies (1966 and 1970) and other works,
evidence of Goldziher's detailed attention to social and political
factors in the development of Islam, were indeed available, as was
his Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (1920), another
major indication of Goldziher's attention to social and political
factors in the historical developments of Qur'anic hermeneutics
(the tafasir).

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

83

Be that as it may, there is an element of truth to what Said observes even about Goldziher, namely the disciplinary and epistemic
self-sufficiency of Orientalism as a mode of knowledge production,
in which Orientalists rarely paid any attention to adjacent disciplines or learned from their methodologies and discoveries. The
one work in which Goldziher did pay attention to the theories of
myth advanced by Max Miiller is his study of the Hebrew Bible,
Der Mythos bei den Hebrdern (Mythology among the Hebrews),
cost him dearly in the course of his academic career. As we noted
earlier, his contemporaries were utterly scandalized by it, in effect
costing him a prominent position that had opened in the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest, for it had offended the religious
sensibility of powerful men in positions to deny him that job.155
Even earlier in his life, when as a precocious adolescent (merely
twelve years old) Goldziher published his Sihat Yitzhaq ("Isaac's
Discourse")Yitzhaq being his Hebrew nameon the historical
origin and gradual development of Jewish prayers, people began to
call him, by way of an insult and accusation, that he was a "freethinker" and a "Spinozist."156 So both in epistemic terms domestic
to the discipline of Orientalism and in terms of the social conditions
that prevented an Islamist or a scholar of Judaism to venture into
uncharted theoretical and methodological domains, Goldziher was
very much a creature of his own timethough being a European
and writing about Islam gave him a freer hand in applying a vigorous historical analysis to Islamic intellectual history, a freedom
denied him when it came to Judaic studies because of severe and
immediate professional consequences.
One has to also consider that much of the disciplinary formations
of sociology, anthropology, political science, or economics were
in their nascent stages as Goldziher was writing. Said's expectation that Goldziher should have paid attention to "the economics,
sociology, and politics of the Islamic peoples" must be balanced by
what was available to him from an intellectual history perspective,
for by the time that Goldziher was writing, say between his first
publication, the very same Sihat Yitzhaq, in 1862 and his death in
1921, the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, and

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political science were very much in their nascent, formative, and

mostly positivistic phases. Karl Marx (1818-1883), Max Weber
(1864-1920), and Emile Durkheim (1857-1917), as the three
major founding figures of social sciences were of courses very
much present or even the contemporaries of Goldziher, but he
could not have known their works and been creatively conversant
with them while engaged in his own scholarship, when even Weber did not know of Durkheim's Les Formes elementaires de la
vie religieuse: le systeme totemique enAustralie (1912) when he
was writing his own Religionssoziologie " Typen der religiosen
Vergemeinschaftung as part of his monumental Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft (1921-1922)and in fact Weber's and Durkheim's
respective sociology in general developed quite independent of
each other.157 Although Said's criticism is of course perfectly appropriate when it comes to the later Orientalists and their systematic ignorance of these disciplines, which could have complicated
their conception of Islamic history but of course did not, one must
still keep the contemporaneous formations of these disciplines in
mind. As it pertains to the Goldziher's generation of Orientalists,
it is not only the question of awareness of the discoveries and
discussions among social scientist, but (and here Edward Said is
of course absolutely correct) the disciplinary self-sufficiency of
Orientalism that prevented the Orientalists from looking outside
their own discipline.
In short, Goldziher is aware of and attentive to social and political factors while writing on various aspects of Islam, but not to
the degree of being conversant with the disciplinary methodologies in the fields of economics, sociology, or political science, in
part because these disciplines were very much in process of being
systematically articulated at his time, and also in part because Orientalism was a by and large self-sustained mode of scholarly operationwhich is of course the whole point of Said's criticism.
The third and final time that Said refers to Goldziher in Orientalism is in the context of his discussion of how "widely diffused
notions of the Orient depended on...the almost total absence in
contemporary Western culture of the Orient as a genuinely felt

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

85

and experienced force." "For a number of evident reasons," Said

adds, "the Orient was always in the position both of outsider and
of incorporated weak partner for the West." Here the point of
Said's argument is to show how in manufacturing the Orient, the
Orientalist is the "superior judge, learned man, powerful cultural
will," while the Orient itself "is all absence," and that in fact "the
Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence."
These are all instrumental and exceedingly pointed arguments for
Said in order to show how the Orientalist is in fact dialectically
cornered into reducing the Orient
in his work, even after he has devoted a good deal of time to elucidating
and exposing it. How else can we explain major scholarly production,
of the type we associate with Julius Wellhausen and Theodore Noldeke
and, overriding it, those bare, sweeping statements that almost totally
denigrate their chosen subject matter? Thus Noldeke could declare in
1887 that the sum total of his work as an Orientalist was to confirm his
'low opinion' of the Eastern people.' And like Carl Becker, Noldeke was
a philhellenist, who showed his love of Greece curiously by displaying
a positive dislike of the Orient, which after all was what he studied as
a scholar.158
It is at this point that Said refers to Jacques Waardenburg's UIslam
dans le miroir de VOccident (1963), and relies on this report in
order to assert that "Ignaz Goldziher's appreciation of Islam's
tolerance towards other religions was undercut by his dislike of
Mohammad's anthropomorphisms and Islam's too-exterior theology and jurisprudence"and after similar observations about the
paradoxical views of a few other Orientalists, Said concludes that
"the manifest differences in their methods emerge as less important
than their Orientalist consensus on Islam: latent inferiority."159
As in the previous cases, whatever the accuracy of these particular observations about other Orientalists, initially articulated by
Waardenburg and followed by Said, might be (and they certainly
are about Theodore Noldeke and Carl Becker), their application to
Goldziher is incorrect and unfair. To be sure, Said's initial observations about the epistemic disposition of Orientalism in general
remain meticulously correct. Here, Said is at his absolute theoretical best, dissecting, as he does, the normative constitution of the

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Orientalist as historical agent, and the simultaneous withdrawal of

that agency from "the Orientals," thus epistemically constituted.
But the veracity of that theoretical observation is entirely independent of what Waardenburg and by extension Said have to say
about Goldziher, which remains categorically false.
To begin with, the assumption that no scholar should have a
critical perspective towards the subject of his or her scholarship
is patently wrong. Goldziher, like any other scholar, not only can
but should have a legitimately critical angle on any aspect of the
subject to which he has devoted his life. Second, the assumption,
implicit in Said's point here to be sure, that the problem with Orientalism was that Orientalists had an unsympathetic perspective
on Islam is equally flawed. Some of the worst Orientalists, completely and specifically at the service of colonialism, absolutely
adored Islam and had an entirely uncritical and romantic take on
Arabs and Muslims. Third, if anything, Goldziher had too much
of a sympathetic perspective on Islam, much to the chagrin of
people like Raphael Patai, who raised even religious issues as
to the propriety of his having devoted his life to a sympathetic
understanding of Islam.
Then we come to the specific question of Goldziher's "dislike
of Mohammad's anthropomorphisms and Islam's too-exterior
theology and jurisprudence." Here, Waardenburg (and by extension Said) are entirely wrong in their reading of Goldziher, for the
following reasons: (1) as a contested issue, the question of anthropomorphism is endemic to Islamic theology in general and from
its very inception, dividing the Mu'tazilites and the Ash'arites and
wreaking havoc in both theological and juridical terms on Muslim
intellectual history. Goldziher vicariously participates in this long
(and rather exquisite) theological debate, and is perfectly entitled to
take one side or the other; (2) the entire body of Goldziher's work
on Islamic theology and jurisprudence is in fact argued in terms
drawn from within Islamic theological and jurisprudential schools
themselves. If Goldziher has prejudices, he has in effect "Islamic"
prejudices, namely Sunni prejudices, for example, against Shi'ism.
But these are all indices of his having completely identified with

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

87

Islamic intellectual history and with Muslim scholars in particular.

It is a fact of Goldziher's intellectual legacy that as a pious, believing, and practicing Jew he very much saw himself as a "Muslim
scholar," but not in a flimsy and romantic way, and in fact directly
from the heart of his Judaism. He believed (and repeatedly asserted
that) the Islamic intellectual history was simply superior to any
other religious intellectual history known to him, and the only one
that could "satisfy philosophical minds."160 One can even go so
far as to argue that Goldziher saw something "Jewish" in Islamic
intellectual history, as an intellectual potential of Judaism that was
more realized in Islam than in Judaism. His decision to work on
Islamic intellectual history, rather than his own (of which he was
perfectly capable), was in fact an intellectual choice, not a career
decision. For Goldziher, "the East" was no career, as Benjamin
Disraeli (1804-1881) had put it in his Tancred and Said quotes him
appropriately at the very outset of his Orientalism. For Goldziher,
"the East" was positively detrimental to his career, an anti-career, a
very bad career choice. He would have had a far more comfortable
professional career if, like his friend Wilhelm Bacher whom he
deeply admired, he had devoted his life to a judicious and perfectly
neutral study of Judaism, or like Armenius Vambery, whom he distinctly despised, and put his infinitely superior knowledge of Islam
at the service of British Empire. To this day, and as evidenced by
Patai's "psychological portrait," studying Islam was a hazardous
decision for an intellectually honest and morally principled man,
now at the mercy of men infinitely inferior to his monumental
stature to turn him into a psychological freakprecisely because
he thought of himself as a historical partner of Muslim scholars
engaging with exquisite moral and philosophical issues. Goldziher
did not create the question of anthropomorphism in Islamic theology. It existed long before he studied itand he had absolutely
every right to agree or disagree with it, and Goldziher's position
on anthropomorphism, one way or another, is not the issue that
was with Orientalism.
That brings us to the most unfair and entirely inaccurate assessment of Said himself, that Goldziher shared the other Oriental-

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ists' belief in the "latent inferiority" of Islam. By now it must be

quite evident that this is exactly the opposite of what Goldziher
actually believed. So far as Christianity is concerned, Goldziher
detested it with a vengeance, calling it an "abominable religion,
which invented the Christian blood libel, which puts its own best
sons to the rack."161 He thought only Christianity was capable
of missionary activities, for "this is an insolence of which only
Christianity, the most abominable of all religions, is capable."162
So far as a comparison between Islam and Christianity is concerned, Goldziher believed, "Islam signifies a mighty advance in
relation to Christianity."163 As for the intellectual disposition of
Christianity, Goldziher thought Christianity "has no forehead to
become aware of the insolence that forms its historical character.
The forehead of a whore, that is the forehead of Christianity."164
So much for Christianity! As for Judaism, we just saw how
Raphael Patai skewered Goldziher (endorsing the assessment of
him as a "roshe," or "evil man") for being too critical not only
of his contemporary co-religionists and detesting the fact that he
had to do a secretarial job at the Israelite Congregation of Pest,
but for being entirely dismissive (to the point of revulsion) of the
formal (certainly not doctrinal, prophetic, or devotional) aspects
of his contemporary Judaism, for running away from synagogues
in order to save his own faith. To be sure, Goldziher remained a
pious and practicing Jew to his dying day (the supreme sign of
the dignity and nobility of his character). But in no shape or form
did he believe that Judaism was "superior" to Islam. Quite to the
contrary"I truly entered in those weeks," as he reminisced about
his sojourn to Muslim lands, "into the spirit of Islam to such an
extent that ultimately I became inwardly convinced that I myself
was a Muslim and judiciously discovered that this was the only
religion which, even in its doctrinal and official formulation, can
satisfy philosophical minds. My ideal was to elevate Judaism to
a similar rational level. Islam, my experience taught me, was the
only religion in which superstition and pagan elements were proscribed, not by rationalism but by the Orthodox doctrine."165
How can we accuse the man who wrote these sentences of

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

89

having an affinity with those who believed in the "latent inferiority" of Islam? Goldziher was so profoundly pro-Islamic (without
losing his scholarly perspective on it, of course), that his own coreligionists consider him of having been "infatuated with Islam"
and "suffered from an acute anti-Jewish complex." The facts of
Goldziher's thoughts, ideas, and scholarship do not corroborate
Waardenburg/Said's specific assertions on him. Goldziher is first
accused of being "infatuated by Islam" and then of believing in
Islam's "latent inferiority." He could not have been both, for
he was neither. He was neither infatuated with Islam nor did he
believe it to be an inferior religion. He thought it one of the greatest religions and civilizations the world had experienced, without
either converting to it or else losing his scholarly distance from
itand yet none of these false attributions to Goldziher clear
him from the principle criticism of Edward Said in Orientalism,
which survive these minor mistakes and remains solidly valid.
The question is how.
*

Once the principle argument of Edward Said in Orientalism is

cast back to its substantive thesis, and his specific references to
Goldziher' scholarship are justly evaluated and balanced, what
still remains solidly valid and perfectly legitimate is the principal
point of his suggestion, that there is a structural correspondence
between Orientalism as a disciplinary mode of knowledge production and European colonialism. That central argument, after
whatever modifications one may make about specific examples
Said has provided, still remains legitimate, for there are plenty of
other examples that abound in his book and that along with the
consistency, logic, and reasoned premise of his theory still demand
attention, and against which one has to measure the specific work
of Ignaz Goldziher. Goldziher was an Orientalist, the European
founding figure, in fact, of the Orientalist study of Islam. So What
Said's says in Orientalism must still be tallied against Goldziher's
lifetime achievements. In fact, towards the end of his references to
Goldziher through Waardenburg, Said implicates Goldziher (with-

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out naming him but including him among the five Orientalists that
Waardenburg had studied) in having "shaped a coherent vision of
Islam that had a wide influence on government circles throughout
the Western world," and that as such they were bringing to completion the earlier Orientalist practices beyond a "literary problem"
and towards "un ferme propos d'assimiler adequatement la valeur
des langues pour penetrer les moeurs et les pensees, pour forcer
meme des secrets de l'histoire "166 To the degree that Goldziher
was an Orientalist he did in fact contribute to the production of a
system of knowledge that was subject to political abuse. But would
that earn Goldziher the same criticism that he applied to his friend
Wilhelm Bacher, that "without being dishonorable, he could adapt
his spirit to the dominant trends, of which in the course of time he
became a factor?"167 The answer is certainly not, for Goldziher
adapted his spirit to no dominant trendfor he was breathing in it,
too close to it to see it, and that is where the more principled criticisms of Edward Said in Orientalism, beyond specific examples
and ad hominem errata, remains thoroughly valid.
The principle reason that Orientalism's main thesis is not compromised by any specific examples that he may have provided is
not merely the ample alternative examples that do support it, nor
is it merely due to the internal cohesion and consistency of the
argument that he persuasively formulates, but above all because it
is deeply rooted in a mighty intellectual tradition from which it has
emergednamely the extended body of literature in sociology of
knowledge. Here, Orientalism has suffered much not only from its
opponents but also from some of its strongest supporters, both of
which have left this powerful intellectual tradition by and large out
of their responses to Said. Here it is important to keep in mind that
the theoretical pedigree from which Edward Said himself worked
out his argument in Orientalism is rather eclecticborrowing
from a diverse group of theorists, ranging from Michel Foucault
(the relation between knowledge and power in the formation of a
discourse), to Antonio Gramsci (the relation between power and
ideology in the formation of hegemony), and then to Fredrich Nietzsche (the relation between metaphor and representation in the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

91

formation of truth). Said's extraordinary task was to bring these

three theorists together and have them coagulate around the central problem of representation.16* The problem with Orientalism
for Said was thus a problem of representation (and by extension
the thorny issue of the sovereign subject), a much larger literarytheoretical issue, which Said then brought to bear on the specific
case of Orientalism. In his own words: "The Orient that appears
in Orientalism, then, is a system of representation framed by a
whole set offerees that brought the Orient into Western learning,
Western consciousness, and later, Western empire;"169 or as he
put it years later, towards the end of his life, "I recall quite emphatically making a similar set of points in my book Orientalism,
when I criticized the representations of the Orient and Orientals
by Western experts. My critique was premised on the flawed nature of all representations...."170 Though much less pronounced
in the pages of Orientalism than elsewhere, Said's preoccupation
with the question of representation is also rooted in his lifelong
fascination and identification with Erich Auerbach's notion of estrangement in his highly influential book Mimesis,111 which both
Auerbach and Said thought were instrumental in gaining a greater
insight (thus overcoming the problem of representation) not just
into one's scholarly subject matter but also into the scholar's own
culturewith the only critical stipulation being that
one of the striking differences between Orientalism in the Islamic version
and all the other humanistic disciplines where Auerbach's notions on the
necessity of estrangement have some validity is that Islamic Orientalists never saw their estrangement from Islam either as salutary or as an
attitude with implications for better understanding of their own culture.
Rather, their estrangement from Islam simply intensified their feelings
of superiority about European culture, even as their antipathy spread to
include the entire Orient, of which Islam was considered a degraded (and
usually, a virulently dangerous) representative.172

Said placed this problem of representation in the context of the

larger issue of what he called worldliness. The significance and
centrality of this idea in Said's work is not limited to Orientalism,
and in fact finds its most succinct expressions in his other, mostly

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literary-critical, works, particularly the essay, "The World, the

Text, the Critic" in his book of the same title.173 This is how Said
understood the notion of worldliness:
The key word here is "worldly," a notion I have always used to denote
the real historical world from whose circumstances none of us can in
fact ever be separated, not even in theory. I recall quite emphatically
making a similar set of points in my book Orientalism, when I criticized
the representations of the Orient and Orientals by Western experts. My
critique was premised on the flawed nature of all representations and
how they are intimately tied up with worldliness, that is, with power,
position, and interests. This required saying explicitly that my work
was not intended as defense of the real Orient or that it even made the
case that a real Orient existed. I certainly held no brief for the purity of
some representations against others, and I was quite specific in suggesting that no process of converting experience into expression could be
free of contamination.174
And indeed in Orientalism Said specifically indicates that he is not
arguing that there is a "real Orient" that Orientalists have failed to
represent, but the problem he is articulating is in the very nature
of representation. "The methodological failures of Orientalism,"
Said insists, "cannot be accounted for either by saying that the
real Orient is different from Orientalist portraits of it, or by saying that since Orientalists are Westerners for the most part, they
cannot be expected to have an inner sense of what the Orient is
all about.... I certainly do not believe the limited proposition that
only a black can write about blacks, a Muslim about Muslims,
and so forth."175
Through the intellectual pedigree of Nietzsche, Gramsci,
Auerbach, and above all Foucault, all synthesized and placed
in Said's own articulation of the notion of worldliness, and then
laser-beamed on the universal problem of representation, the
central thesis of Orientalism was ultimately fused with Said's
political punch to give it its global appeal: "If this definition of
Orientalism [as representation of the Orient by the Orientalists],"
he said, "seems more political than not, that is simply because I
think Orientalism was itself a product of certain political forces
and activities. Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

93

material happens to be the Orient, its civilizations, peoples, and

localities."176
That particular intellectual pedigree informing Said's own insights into the direct epistemic and emotive links between Orientalism and colonialism gave Orientalism its unprecedented insights,
theoretical power, global appeal, and political energyand yet at
the very same time delimited its serious readership, interpretations,
and reception very much within a literary-critical body of idiomaticitynamely the enduring problem of representation and the
barbed barrier of the sovereign subjectboth of which preoccupied
Edward Said to the very end and including his posthumously published book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). Putting
the latter-day Orientalists' belligerent and theoretically illiterate
response (best represented by Bernard Lewis') aside, Said's own
intellectual heritage and subsequent readership are the principle
reasons why James Clifford's critique of Orientalismthat its
author himself while criticizing a particularly powerful mode of
representation partook uncritically in the humanistic tradition of
presuming an all-knowing and sovereign subject that can represent with authorityto this day remains the most cogent that it
has received.177 What Clifford was in effect saying was that Said
takes from Foucault what he wants (dismantling representation)
and then abandons him when Foucault becomes a theoretical
troublemaker (disallows the critic to assume the authorial position
of an omniscient narrator). Later in his life, Edward Said himself
in fact agreed with Clifford's main point. "In many ways," Said
concurred, "Clifford was right." 178 In other, more exasperated,
moments, Said would lash out against such criticisms and say:
"Among American and British academics of a decidedly rigorous
and unyielding stripe," he says in his 1995 Afterword to Orientalism, "Orientalism, and indeed all of my other work, has come
in for disapproving attacks because of its "residual" humanism,
its theoretical inconsistencies, its insufficient, perhaps even sentimental, treatment of agency. I am glad that it has! Orientalism
is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine."179 In other words,
instead of Said not being Foucauldian enough in mistrusting

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agency, perhaps Foucault was not Saidian enough in allowing for

political activism! But on a more consistent level with his enduring
theoretical struggles against the question of representation, Said
sought to overcome the problem of the sovereign subject not by
yielding to its poststructuralist dismantling but in fact by going
into the opposite direction and radically redefining and expanding
humanism by what he called a "democratic criticism," namely the
opening up the limited domain of European humanism to a wider
range of humanisms, in plural, manifested globally in various
literary cultures and humanistic traditions.180
An entirely different intellectual tradition from which Edward
Said's Orientalism derives, and which in fact gives it far more
cogency and authority is that of sociology of knowledge, an aspect
almost entirely absent from the critical reception of Orientalism.
To be sure, the origin of this neglect is in Orientalism itself. Edward Said was not a sociologist. He was a literary critic, and it
was basically, but not exclusively, as a literary critic that he sought
to dismantle the central epistemic hold of Orientalism. To be
sure, in Orientalism, Said makes a cursory reference to Robert
K. Merton's Sociology of Science and his notion of "insider and
outsider."181 He also makes another brief reference to "Weber,
Durkheim, Lukacs, Mannheim, and other sociologists of knowledge," but here in the context of in fact taking Weber's notion of
"ideal-type" to task.182 Altogether it is quite clear from Orientalism
that Said was only tangentially attentive to the long and illustrious
tradition of sociology of knowledge and took the principal source
of his theoretical insights from an entirely different traditionfrom
Foucault in particular.
The entirely implicit roots of Edward Said's Orientalism in the
rich and powerful tradition of sociology of knowledge not only
gives it added validity and momentum but posits the very discipline of Orientalism in an entirely different conundrum. Implicit
in Said's Orientalism is the weight of an intellectual tradition that
from Karl Marx to Karl Mannheim has sought to historicize the
modes and manners of knowledge production in terms specific to
social forces that have occasioned it. Given the major political

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

95

and ideological diversity among the principle figures in the gradual

articulation of sociology of knowledge it is impossible to dismiss
the entire discipline as radical or conservative, Marxist or antiMarxistand in its entirety it was articulated by European social
scientists themselves. But what is common to all of them is that
their theoretical proposition concerning the social conditioning of
knowledge production are far more radical in their implications
than what Said had articulated in Orientalism. The advantage
(and brilliance) of Orientalism is that it added a pronouncedly
political impetus to those insights implicit in his book and then
laser beamed it on a specific historical case with profound consequences for global geopoliticssomething that remained entirely
dormant (and rather provincial in their reach, however universal
in their theoretical implications) in the body of insights produced
by sociologist of knowledge.
It is now imperative to remember that long before Michel Foucault began examining the relation between knowledge and power
as embedded in various forms of discursive and institutional formations, Max Scheler (1874-1928) and Karl Mannheim (1893-1947)
had articulated a major line of sociological inquiry into the modes
and manners of the social production of knowledgeincluding
(obviously) the question of power. If we come to Orientalism from
this long and illustrious tradition of investigating the sociological
roots of knowledge formation, it is impossible either to ignore
its insights (because of its literary-critical origins) or else readily
dismiss them as if it stood only on its own limited ground. A far
more variegated and powerful intellectual tradition is at the roots
of (the rather modest) suggestions of Edward Said in Orientalismsuggestions that became radical and revolutionary in part
because of the inordinate institutional power of those who were
offended by Orientalism, and their vested interest was in a rather
violent opposition to its suggestions.183
More than half a century before Edward Said wrote Orientalism
, Max Scheler's Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (Munich, 1924) had made far more radical proposition concerning the
relationship between knowledge production and its sociological

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conditioning. The expanded argument of Max Scheler appeared

two years later in his Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft
(Leipzig, 1926).184 A couple of years later, and quite independently of Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim's masterpiece, Ideologie
und Utopie (Bonn, 1929), proposes that social life and economic
conditions have a catalytic effect on the nature and function of
bodies of knowledge produced within their parameters. Two
years later, Mannheim published his groundbreaking essay, "Wissenssoziologie" (Stuttgart, 1931).185 Both Max Scheler and Karl
Mannheim were far more radical in their daring propositions,
linking not just the substance but also the forms of knowledge
to social forces, than Edward Said ever was in his Orientalism.
"All human knowledge," declared Max Scheler as the very first
axiom (his term) of the sociology of knowledge, "in so far as
man is a 'member' of a society in general, is not empirical but 'a
priori' knowledge. The genesis of such knowledge shows that it
precedes levels of self-consciousness and consciousness of one's
self-value. There is no T without a 'we.' The 'we' is filled with
contents prior to the T.'"186 This is decades before Foucault postulated the notion of episteme, which here in Scheler is simply
called "a priori knowledge" that precedes empirical data. Another
axiom of Scheler in his sociology of knowledge states that "there
is SLfixedlaw that orders the origin of our knowledge of reality,
i.e., our knowledge of what generally 'brings about effects,' and
orders the fulfillment of the individual spheres of knowledge,
constant in human consciousness, and the correlative spheres of
objects"1*1 This is many decades before Edward Said posited his
notion of worldliness as the condition that affects the Orientalists'
production of knowledge. What Scheler calls "our knowledge of
what generally brings about effects" is what in Said becomes the
colonial condition of knowledge production. Similarly provocative proposals are evident in Karl Mannheim, who categorically
theorized the principal function of the sociology of knowledge as
"a theory of the social or existential determination of actual thinking," and thus sought to investigate the "social processes influencing the process of knowledge" and "the essential penetration of

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

97

social process into the 'perspective' of thought."188 All Edward

Said's Orientalism does is an extension of these very principles
into the global operation of colonialism and its Orientalist mode
of knowledge production, focusing on one particularly powerful
and integral relation between the social (colonial) conditions in
which a mode of knowledge (Orientalism) is presumed valid and
set in motion.
The origin of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim's own thoughts
on sociology of knowledge can easily be traced back, as it has been,
to Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Fredrich Engels (1820-1895) and
The German Ideology (1846)and their elaborate argument concerning the structural link between specific class interests and the
modes of knowledge (ideology) best compatible and conducive to
them. "The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,"
Marx and Engels proposed more than a century before Edward
Said wrote Orientalism, "is at first directly interwoven with the
material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language
of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men,
appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour."189 This is infinitely more radical than a simple proposition
that the knowledge that European colonialists were instrumental
in producing, or conditioning to be produced, was at their immediate political and financial service. Marx, Engels, Scheler, and
Manheim demonstrated the foundational production of the very a
priori structure of thinking, at a deep epistemic level, before even a
producer of knowledge has put pen to paper. Said's Orientalism is
a particular example of these insights, generated by major thinkers
generations in creative conversation with each other. The specific
insights of Orientalism, as a result, cannot be readily dismissed as
if he wrote it whimsically just to settle his accounts with Bernard
Lewis and other contemporary Orientalists with whom he was in
political disagreement. Bernard Lewis and generations of Orientalist like him are not in the same league as these thinkers. One must
by all means resist the temptation of taking issue with Said as to
why instead of elaborating these profoundly important theoretical
sources of his insights (that sustain and support his argument) he

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wasted so many precious pages on Bernard Lewis and his ilk, for
it is precisely the immediate contemporaneity of the third chapter
of Orientalism, "Orientalism Now," that made it so universally
appealing, however it may have made it also theoretically wanting
in more support.
There is another line of argument that canquite independent
of Marx, Engels, Scheler, and Mannheimlink the rise of the
sociology of knowledge as a critical discipline of thought to the
American social pragmatist George Herbert Mead (1863-1931).190
There is yet another persuasive argument, linking Scheler's notion
of "the powerlessness of the mind," to Mannheim's "homelessness of the mind," and connecting both to Georg Lukacs' central
concept of "reification of consciousness," and thus demonstrating
the rise of the sociology of knowledge in Weimar Germany, between 1918 and 1933, and connecting it to the cultural and political crisis of Germany at the time.191 Even longer traditions have
been put forward articulating the relationship between modes of
human existence and manners of thought and knowledge production, tracing it back to Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and the French
Enlightenment philosophers, or in Saint-Simonian (1760-1825)
philosophy of history.192 Once we come to Edward Said's Orientalism from this extraordinary body of critical literature, we see
that there is really nothing particularly new or even radical about
his theoretical proposition that there is a structural link between
the Orientalist manner of knowledge production and colonialism.
This rather theoretically innocuous propositionfar less radical in its implications than, say, Mannheim's suggestion that all
forms of knowledge and institutionalized beliefs are politically
modulatedcan indeed be linked not only to a major branch of
the sociology of knowledge that through Max Scheler and Karl
Mannheim is rooted in the works of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim,
and Max Weber,193 but may in fact completely bypass Michel
Foucault and trace its origin to Quentin Skinner's philosophical
hermeneutics on political theory and the link that he proposes
between social meaning and social action.194 A similar argument
can be made linking the argument of Edward Said's Orientalism

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

99

to an even more critical school of intellectual history, now best

represented in the work of Dominick Lacapf a.195
If we come to Edward Said's Orientalism from the angle of the
sociology of knowledge, a number of critically corrective lenses
will mitigate our reading of it: (1) it will be cleared of all its tangential ad hominem implications as a polemic between him and
his Orientalist adversaries and thus give more room, weight, and
significance to the substance of his argument; (2) it will be rescued
from its abusive readings by a populist brand of Arab and Muslim
intellectuals who have taken it as a declaration of open season on
"the West" (an empty abstraction that they in fact thus authenticate and corroborate), a misreading that Edward Said repeatedly
sought to correct196; (3) it will provide Orientalism with breathing
space against its more serious critics like James Clifford who now
need to tackle a much mightier intellectual tradition at the roots
of its argument than its "residual humanism"197; and (4) it will
also make it possible to distinguish between a remarkable man
and prominent scholar like Ignaz Goldziher and a self-confessed
spy like Armenius Vambery, while reading them in the epistemic
limitations of a mode of scholarship they shared.
From this perspective, that as a manner of knowledge production
Orientalism was deeply rooted in European project of colonialism
(as best exemplified by Armenius Vambery) does not mean that all
Orientalists were willing partners with colonialists, or that all their
scholarship was (or is) suspect, or that some devilish European
design was at the roots of their scholarly project. None of these
are contingent on Edward Said's thesis, and all of them are unintended and unexamined misreading of his book. As a scholarly
project, Orientalism has produced some of the most magnificent
works of scholarship, unsurpassed, at their best, to this day. Edward Said's criticism was directed against the epistemic origin of
a disciplinary formation, irrespective of its individual results. No
knowledge is possible, as entirely independent of Edward Said and
long before him Thomas Kuhn had discovered and persuasively
argued, except as articulated within a specific epistemic (or what
Kuhn called paradigmatic) frame of reference.198 What Kuhn
considered "the priority of paradigms" in scientific discoveries, <

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straight out of a long tradition of the sociology of knowledge, not

only determine the sorts of questions raised, answers provided, and
directions of even newer discoveries charted, but upon the exhaustion of the paradigm, Kuhn spoke of a "crisis" that occurs in the
scientific discoveries that in turn result in a "paradigm change,"
which for him constituted the very mechanism of new scientific
discoveries.199
The Orientalist paradigm of knowledge production was productive not only in terms of such paramount features of its epistemic
operation as a primarily positivist mode of investigation, textual
criticism, philological lineages, literary traditions, received and
elaborated notions of canonicity (many of which were equally applied to Greek, Latin, and Biblical scholarship), but also in terms
of the colonial relation of power between the discipline itself and
its subjects of scholarshipand thus the necessary consolidation of "the Orient" as a knowable object for the Orientalist as a
knowing subject. This epistemic aspect of Orientalism is quite
independent of the fact that an Orientalist adventurer like Armenius
Vambery was a bought and paid for spy for British colonialism
while Goldziher was adamantly opposed to any kind of European
colonialism. Both Vambery and Goldziher were operating within
the same set of epistemic assumptions about "the Orient"that it
was a "thing," and that it was knowable, and that they were there
to know it. So far as Orientalism as a mode of knowledge production is concerned, the individual differences between Vambery and
Goldziher (morally and intellectually extremely important) is far
less important than the fact that they shared the same set of not
just identical research and analytical tools but also the same blind
spots. But these blind spots (and there is the rub) are as much
conducive to the production of that knowledge as the analytical
parameter definitive to its creativityto the degree that a scholar
like Goldziher can be anti-colonial in his own personal politics,
and still the language of his critical inquiry partakes in a colonially
conditioned discourse. All his insights into Islamic intellectual
history were contingent on the blind spot of not knowing what set
of epistemic assumptions and within what discursive formation

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101

he was producing them.

Even more concisely than Thomas Kuhn, it was Hans-Georg
Gadamer who in his magnum opus Warheit und Methode {Truth
and Method, 1960/1975) argued that understanding is made possible not despite but because of prejudices. Based on his reading of
Heidegger's notion of the "fore-structure of understanding" (both
similar to and articulated prior to Kuhn's paradigm and Foucault's
episteme), Gadamer devoted an entire section of Truth and Method
to "the problem of prejudice," and after a critical evaluation of the
discrediting of "prejudice" by the Enlightenment, he proceeded
to articulate it in fact as the very condition of understanding.200
The fact that Orientalists were prejudicially predisposed (in an
imaginative not necessarily political term) towards the Orient that
they had epistemically manufactured, as Edward Said persuasively
argues and demonstrates, was also instrumental in making their
understanding of the Orient possible and as such at the very root
of the monumental body of scholarship they produced. One may,
to give an entirely different example to make the point clear,
take fundamental and epistemic issue with, say, a mechanical
conception of human body in certain periods of medical science, and argue for the organicity of the human body. But that
very mechanical conception of human bodily organs has been
instrumental in major discoveries and progress in medical science. Rejecting and discrediting a mechanical conception of the
human body and proposing its organicity certainly requires a
radically new mode of medical knowledge production but it does
not, ipso facto, dismiss or discredit the discoveries and services
done within medical science while it operated under a mechanical
assumption about human body. While the science of physics, as
another example, operated under a Ptolemaic (geocentric) conception of the universe it created magnificent works of scientific
discoveries. The Copernican revolution and the positing of a
Heliocentric universe was a critical moment of what Kuhn calls
a paradigmatic shift in physics, requiring a whole new mode and
manner of mathematics and astrophysics, but the knowledge the
physics as a science produced while operating under a geocen-

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trie assumption are simply superceded by a superior episteme,

without any derogatory assumption about physicist who were
still operating under a geocentric assumption,201
These examples from fields entirely different from Orientalism
help to distinguish between the epistemic and the political dimensions of Orientalism. Long before Edward Said delivered his
magnificent coup de grace, Orientalism had collapsed under the
weight of its own narrative contradictions, or epistemic exhaustion,
to be more accurate, of all its productive possibilities, to use the
language common among Kuhn, Foucault, Claude Levi-Straus,
and all other post-structuralists. Said, more than anything else,
was a post-structuralist in this sense, detecting an epistemic mode
of knowledge production (particularly conducive to the European
colonial project) and seeking to expose its blind spots, and given the
political dimension of his project, its navigation through imperial
and colonial modus operandi, his Orientalism assumed a global
significance far beyond anything achieved by the (theoretically
ambitious but thematically provincial) sociology of knowledge.
In every epistemic mode of knowledge production, blindness and
insight are integral to each other and mutually productive of the
minutest particulars of its very hermeneutic underpinningwhich
never remains constant or static. One of the most significant contributions of Edward*Said's diagnosis of Orientalism is that he
posited and diagnosed it as a living organism of knowledge production. After Said, it is now possible to make distinction among a
variety of phases and mutations of Orientalisms, in plural, that are
otherwise treated identically in his Orientalism. The Orientalism
of the Greeks towards the Persians, for example, was an Orientalism of enmity and rivalry \ that of Western Europeans towards the
Ottomans was an Orientalism of rivalry and fearboth of which
were categorically different from the Orientalism of domination
that was coterminous with the rise of European colonialism and
that Said first and foremost identified and diagnosed.202 By the
same token, by the time Edward Said published his Orientalism
(1978), the discipline had pretty much exhausted its inner creative
power, done its active or implicit services to European colonialism,

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103

produced some magnificent works of scholarship, completely run

out of creative and critical energy, and had already begun its mutation (in correspondence with the global relations of power that
had necessitated it) into what in the language of post-World War
II Cold War was called "Area Studies"for this reason, there is a
noticeable difference between the first two and the last chapter of
Orientalism, where Said traces the mutation of Orientalism into
Area Studies.
One has to make, however, crucial distinctions among the various phases of Orientalism, before and after its by now classical
case of the Orientalism of domination, the principal point of Said's
investigation. There are significant differences between that Orientalism and Area Studies, for example. They are not identical
in their nature and function. As Said's Orientalism has made it
possible to see the variety of Orientalisms that preceded the Orientalism of colonial domination, it has also made it possible to
see its subsequent mutations in the aftermath of the World War II.
The Orientalism that Edward Said diagnosed and analyzed was an
Orientalism of domination that best corresponded with the European age of industrial revolution and the colonial expansionism that
was entirely contingent on it. This was an Orientalism that corresponded best with the invention of "the West" as the categorical
imperative of the bourgeois revolutions in Europe. As a category,
"the West" came to constitute the civilizational canopy that brought
under its protection the European national economies, polities,
and cultures. As the European national culturesthe British, the
French, the German, etc.supplanted dynastic configurations
and histories (and thus the very notion of "Europe" as a cultural
category was invented), "the West" supplanted "Christendom" as
the civilizational category that symbolically united these nations
all together. The difference between "Christendom" and "the
West" was that dynastic and ecclesiastical Christianity was taken
out of the category and replaced with the European Enlightenment
in order to manufacture "the Western Civilization." It was at this
point that the army of mercenary Orientalists were dispatched
to invent alternative civilizational categoriesIslamic, Chinese,
Indian, etc, and altogether "Oriental"all in order to corroborate

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the anxiogeneric fabrication of an empty abstraction called "the

West."203 It was not just the European asylum houses that emerged
to house the unreason, as Foucault argued and demonstrated in his
Folie et deraison {Madness and Civilization) (1961/1965), but a
much larger and exotic domain was needed to harbor that unreason
for the European Enlightenment to be assured of its primacy of
reason. "The Orient" was that larger asylum house of exoticism
and unreason for "the Occident" to feel safe and secure in its illusions of sanity and reason (until the horrors of the Holocaust
and the systematic genocide of the European Jewry shattered that
dangerous delusion).
In the immediate aftermath of the World War II, the global
geopolitics of power that had conditioned that kind of Orientalism
radically changed, Europe became relatively tangential, and the
U.S. and the USSR emerged as the polar opposites of two imperial claims to metanarratives of reason and progress. As a similar
relations of power persisted, changed its shape from European
colonialism into U.S. and USSR imperialisms, the Soviets went
about creating their own version of Orientalism (quite competent
and equally colonial in its blindness and insights), while in the U.S.,
Area Studies emerged as the site of security knowledge production
about nations and cultures on the periphery of the Soviet Empire.
If Orientalism of the European colonialism was in the business of
manufacturing an Orient compatible with its colonial domination
of the globe, Area Studies specialists were employed as the intelligence arm of the U.S. imperial rivalries with the USSR. By the
publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, old-fashioned European
Orientalism had either mutated into disciplinary modes of knowledge productionsociology, anthropology, and political science
in particularor else delegated its erstwhile tasks to the realm of
Area Studies. As a mode of knowledge production, Area Studies,
now squarely at the service of U.S. imperial competition with the
Soviet Union between the end of World War II in 1944 and the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was producing knowledge
about "the Orient" on a rather different mode of operationand
principally charged with preventing Soviet expansionism. If Ori-

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

105

entalism was strategically oriented, Area Studies was far more

policy-driven. Again, the specific case of Bernard Lewis, to
whom Edward Said paid an inordinate and altogether distorting
attention, was among the few old-fashioned European Orientalists who had lived long enough to link his services to the British
colonialism to that of U.S. imperialism. Perhaps if Edward Said
had not allowed Bernard Lewis' specific and rather bizarre case
to distort his vision, he would have theorized in more details the
radically changing epistemic operation of old-fashioned Orientalism and Area Studies, for by the time Said wrote Orientalism,
classical Orientalism that Goldziher best represented had long
since combined its blindness and insights, produced some magnificent works of scholarship, served (willingly or unwittingly)
its colonial purposes, and its duties done, self-destructedas all
other paradigms and epistemes do: they never go with a bang;
they go with a whimper.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the dissolution of
the Eastern bloc, and the emergence of a mono-polar U.S. empire
also ended the particular services provided by the Area Studies
mutation of Orientalism. "The West" now no longer exists. It
ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the end of "the West"
also ended all its binary oppositions, particularly "the Orient" all
having dissolved into an amorphously globalized universe. "The
West versus the Rest" is no longer the term of global operation
of either the capital or the cultures it keeps producing to sustain
its legitimacythough the binary still persists in the perturbed
imagination of ideologues like Samuel Huntington and Bernard
Lewis, whom we now witness undergo a third level of mutation:
from Orientalist to Area Studies specialist to active propagandist.204
The instrumental function of Area Studies specialists effectively
ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the need for an
entirely different mode of intelligence gathering, while whatever of old-fashioned Orientalism had entered such disciplines
as anthropology or sociology were subject to self-regulatory,
intra-disciplinary debates, discussions, ideas, and combatant and
conversant theories.

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The world marked by the iconic dates of 9/11 is now sought

to be dominated by a U.S. empire with no ideological claim to
legitimacyto which neither old-fashioned Orientalism nor Area
Studies specialist of yore are of any use anymore. This is an
empire with no hegemony. While European colonialism worked
through multifaceted hegemonies (and thus the colonial function
of Orientalism), not limited or exclusive to scholarship, but, and
as Said noted, also in art, literature, and popular fantasies as well,
the flailing American imperialism works without an overriding
hegemony and by sheer brute force (and thus the intellectual
mendacity of the clique called "the neocons," which in its global
strategies of domination seeks to link old-fashioned European
Orientalism and erstwhile American Area Studies to the most
pestiferous attempts at the ideological justification of the U.S.
empire. If upon the exhaustion of Orientalism as a robust mode of
knowledge production at the height of European colonialism the
gradual emergence of the United States as a global superpower
necessitated and generated a whole new modus operandi of intelligence gathering, global strategies, and ideological justification
during the Cold War era and termed it "Area Studies," with the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a decade later the rise of
the U.S. global "war on terror," even the phase of Area Studies is
no longer valid or useful. The gradual mutation of old-fashioned
Orientalists into Area Studies specialists is now further transmuting into a class of barefaced propagandists in close collaboration
with think tank strategistsperhaps best represented by Bernard
Lewis' What Went Wrong? (2003). To witness this astounding
historical metamorphosis in person, the career of one Bernard
Lewis remains exceptionally instructivefor in his person and his
long and productive services to British colonialism and American
imperialism he has systematically mutated from an Orientalist into
an Area Studies specialist and now into a master propagandist, the
author of one empty, vacuous, and dangerously delusional set of
ideas after another. These dangerous delusions no longer have
any connection with the classical case of Orientalism and are
identical in their hazardous consequences for the world with the

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

107

gibberish nonsense of people they seek to fight but in fact necessitate-Osama bin Laden and Company. What we are witnessing
today is an imperil aspiration with no idea, ideal, or imagination
to match or mastermind itthe result is a fake empire running
on empty and operating on sheer brute force that as evident from
New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to Baghdad
and Kandahar in the aftermath of Hurricane ("Shock and Awe")
Rumsfeld is as administratively incompetent as it is ideologically
vacuousimperially self-delusional.
*

It is for that set of reasons that reading the magnificent essays of

Ignaz Goldziher today is like a walk through a museum of exquisite
antiquities, of dead and outdated elegance, the solid thoughts and
graceful reflections of a noble man full of graceful sensibilities
in his scholarship, beset by brightest blindness and shining with
the darkest insights. A combination of his personal brilliance as
a scholar and his institutional membership in the discursive particularities of Orientalism come together to demand an entirely
different readership for him. The question is how to read Goldziher today, generations after his exquisitely crafted essays were
the groundbreaking events of an entire discipline called Islamic
Studies. The significance of these essays should not be measured
against the historically outdated and theoretically discredited discipline called Orientalism anymore. As that of all other Orientalists, Goldziher's scholarship was integral to a mode of knowledge
production at once exceedingly productive and insightful and yet
at its very epistemic root predicated on the European colonial interests in what they called "the Orient," a fact entirely independent
of two vastly different people like Goldziher and Vambery sharing
the same designation, "the Orientalist." Today, Goldziher must be
read as an exemplary scholar of unsurpassed brilliance, a cultural
comparatist of uncommon insights, a humanist with a vast catholicity of learning rarely seen among his peers, a politically alert
and intellectually diligent activist who opposed colonialism of all

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sorts as a matter of moral principle, a gifted essayist who put his

extraordinary learning at the service of understanding a religion,
a culture, a civilization, and above all a people entirely different
than his, helping him to gain insight into his own; and ultimately
a pious and ethically principled man with a passion for a morally
meaningful and purposeful life, which he drew not against but
from the very heart of his proud Judaism.
Notes
1.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as an introduction to a new edition of Ignaz Goldziher's Muslim Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2006). I am grateful to Irving Horowitz for having asked me
to write that introduction and his kind permission to reprint it here.
2. Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch. Herausgegeben von Alexander Scheiber.
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978, 59. The English translation is Raphael Patai's
in Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation
and Psychological Portrait (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987),
20.
3. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 251. The invitation had come from an organization
he calls, "Gesellschaft der Religionsgeschichte" ("Society for the Study
of History of Religion").
4. Decades later a competent and scholarly translation of Goldziher's Vorlesungen uber den Islam (Heidelberg, 1910) appeared in English. See
Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. Translated
by Andras and Ruth Hamori. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1981).
5. "The feeling intellect" is Philip Rieff's phrase, which he selected as the
apt title of a selection of his essays, collected and edited by Jonathan B.
Imber. See Philip Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated
by Talcott Parsons. Introduction by Anthony Giddens. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1958): 182.
7. Ignaz Goldziher's study of the Shu'ubiyya movement in Muslim Studies,
edited by S. M. Stern, translated by C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (Chicago:
Aldine Publishing Company, 1966: 137-198) needs to be augmented by
the equally important essay of Sir Hamilton Gibb, "The Social Significance
of the Shu'ubiyya," in his Studies on the Civilization of Islam. Edited by
Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1962: 62-73; as well as by Roy Mottahedeh's "The Shu'ubiyya

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.
13.

14.
15.
16.

109

Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran," International

Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume VII (1976). The most recent essay on the subject is by H. T. Norris, "Shu'ubiyya in Arabic Literature"
in Julia Ashtiyani, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: 'Abbasid Belles-Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990: 31-47. Equally important is the extensive study of Shu'ubiyya by
the Iranian scholar Jalal Homa'i, Shu'ubiyya (Tehran: Sa'eb Publication,
1984).
For the homage that Goldziher pays his Muslim peers in the discipline of
Hadith criticism see his essay, "The Development of Law," in Introduction
to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 39-40.
Needless to say, later Muslim scholars have continued these heated debates
and particularly when it comes to matters of their doctrinal beliefs (concerning the divine origin of the Qur'an, for example), they have taken strong
objections to some of Goldziher's scholarly positions. As a non-Muslim
scholar, Goldziher was free of such doctrinal convictions and as a result
had a freer sense of inquiry. Neither his freedom nor Muslim scholars'
convictions means either one of them were necessarily compromised in
their scholarship. They simply operated within two different epistemic
apparatus. For a critical debate with Goldziher, concerning his Qur'anic
scholarship, from a pious Muslim perspective, see Seyyed Muhammad
Reza Jalali Na'ini, Tarikh-e Jam'-e Qur'an-e Karim (Tehran: Noqreh
Publications, 1365/1986): XIII, XVI, XVV, et passim.
Much of Goldziher's observations on Islamic law have of courses been
extensively amended by the later scholarship, among them Subhi Mahmassani's Falsafat aUTashri: The Philosophy of Jurisprudence in Islam.
Translated by Farhat Ziadeh (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961); Joseph Schacht's
An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); and Noel
J. Coulson's A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1964).
Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies. Edited by S. M. Stern. Translated by C.
R. Barber and S.M. Stern. (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1971:
262.
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 41.
On further scholarship on Islamic theology after Goldziher see L. Gardet
and M. M. Anawati's Introduction a la theologie musulman (Paris: Vrin,
1948).
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 174.
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit: 186.
For alternative readings of the rise of Shi'ism in the context of early
Islamic history see my Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad
to the Establishment of the Umayyads (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction

110

17.

18.
19.

20.

21.
22.
23.

Post-Orientalism
Publishers, 1992). It is noteworthy that after a critical examination of some
of the exceedingly illiberal aspects of Shi'i law, Goldziher feels obligated
to make the following observation: "The Shi'i community has suffered the
hardship of an ecclesia oppressa, having from the outset struggled against
persecution and repression. It has on the whole lacked the freedom to
make open profession of its beliefs, and could disclose and practice them
only in the conspiratorial secrecy of its members. Its mood therefore tends
towards rage against the adversaries who prevailed" etc. (ibid: 217). While
his scholarly criticism leads him to pinpoint certain xenophobic aspects of
Shi'i law, his historical imagination leads him to place them in their proper
social context.
See Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 241254. Goldziher also pays close attention to the Constitutional Revolution
in Iran (ibid: 196-202), as well as reformist movements in India (ibid:
254-267).
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 244.
"During the writing of these pages," writes Goldziher towards the end of his
observations about the Baha'ism, "I have had occasion to hear such Biblical
proofs [that Abbas Efendi, the leader of the Baha'is, has been promised
in the Bible, and that Isaiah 9:6, "unto us a child is born, unto us a son is
given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder," foretells him] from
the mouth of a Baha'i zealot. This man, originally a doctor from Tehran,
has been staying for the last two years or so in the city where I live, in
an effort to gain converts to his religion. He feels that he has a particular
mission in my country: one more proof that it is not only American soil
that the extra-Islamic propaganda of the new Baha'is has in view" (Ibid:
254).
See Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical
development. Translated from the German, with additions by the author, by
Russell Martineau. London: Longmans, Green, 1877. See also Goldziher's
On the History of Grammar among the Arabs: An Essay in Literary History.
Translated and edited by Kinga Devenyi, Tamas Ivanyi. Amsterdam: J.
Benjamins, 1994; A Short History ofClassical Arabic Literature. Translated
by Joseph de Somogyi. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966. Goldziher's classical
study of Qur'anic hermeneutics, Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: Brill, 1920) was a pioneer study in the comparative discourse
analysis of varied forms of Qur'anic interpretationsranging from juridical
to mystical.
Goldziher, Tagebuch, 22-23.
Goldziher, Tagebuch, 55.
Goldziher, Tagebuch, 65-74.

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

111

24. Patai, Psychological Portrait: 9-11. Patai reports that the original German
of Goldziher's travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt is at the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America in New York.
25. Patai, Psychological Portrait: 26.
26. This according to Raphael Patai, who studied with Carl Brockelmann during academic year 1930-1931. See Patai, Psychological Portrait, 13.
27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 15.
28. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 15.
29. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 16.
30. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 16.
31. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 18.
32. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21, and again "infatuated with Islam" (Ibid,
27).
33. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 63.
34. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 59, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 20.
35. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60-61, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 21.
36. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 60.
37. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 60.
38. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 15.
39. Holy Bible, King James Text, Modern Phrased Version (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), 1249.
40. The full text of the verse is: "And they came with false blood on his shirt.
He said, Nay, but your minds have beguiled you into something. (My
course is) comely patience. And Allah it is whose help is to be sought in
that (predicament) which ye describe" {The Meaning of the Glorious Koran:
An Explanatory Translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall. New
York: A Mentor Book, no date). Arberry's "sweet patience" {The Koran
Interpreted. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1955, 255) and
T B. Irving's "patience is beautiful" {The Qur'an. Translation and Commentary by T. B. Irving/al-Hajj Ta'lim 'AH. Brattleboro, Vermont, 1985,
120) are perhaps better translations of the original "fa-sabrun jamilun."
41. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 61 -62.
42. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 62.
43. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 62.
44. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 62.
45. Goldziher's Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 99-100 (entry of
1 October 1873). Goldziher has similarly moving passages when he visits
Jerusalem for the first (and last time). See Goldziher's Travelogue in Patai,
Psychological Portrait, 132-133 (entry of 29 November 1873).
46. As quoted by Zabihollah Safa in his magisterial history of Persian literature,
Tarikh-e Adabiyat dar Iran. Six Volumes (Tehran: Ibn Sina Publications,

112

47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.

Post-Orientalism
1959-1990), Volume One, 308. Such self-deprecating poems abound in
Persian literature. Perhaps the most famous is the Eighteenth century
poet Hatif al-Isfahani's celebrated Tarji'-band, in which he describes his
metaphoric journeys through all religious beliefs and practices finds them
all identical. The most famous passage is when he goes to a Zoroastrian
temple and becomes ashamed of being a Muslim: "Man-e Sharmandeh
az Mosalmani/Shodam anja beh gusheh'i penhan ("I, ashamed of being
a Muslim/Hid myself there in a corer"). See the original Persian and an
English translation in E. G. Browne's A Literary History of Persia. Four
Volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Volume IV,
184-297.
See Goldziher, Tagebuch, 65; and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 66.
Goldziher's Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 119 (entry of 29
October 1873).
On "culture industry" See Theodore Adorno, Culture Industry (London:
Brunner-Routledge, 2001).
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67.
Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit, 186.
Goldziher's Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 93-97, et passim
(entries of 26 and 29 September 1873 and an undated entry as well).
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21, and again "infatuated with Islam" (Ibid,
27).
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 46.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 36.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 39.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 55.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 73.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 22.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 23.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 24. Footnote 12.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 25.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 28.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 29.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 29.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 30.

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

75.
76.
77.
78.

79.

80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.

86.
87.
88.

89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.

97.
98.
99.

113

Goldziher, Tagebuch, 107, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 34.

Goldziher, Tagebuch, 98, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 33.
Goldziher, Tagebuch, 98, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 33.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 31. Patai dismisses Goldziher's Mythology
among the Hebrews even on scholarly grounds and believes it "to be the
only work of Goldziher's scholarly output that did not stand the test of time"
(Ibid, 31). The moral courage and intellectual imagination to engage with
current theoretical propositions from the heart of one's own religion bear
the marks of an entirely different "test of time" and of course character.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44. As evidence of his belief, Goldziher offers an incident in which two days after he was appointed as full professor
he run into Vambery and he had no idea of Goldziher's appointment and
asked him, in yet another condescending remark, when will he finally be
appointed as full professor.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 40.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44-45.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 40.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44, quoting from Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl Edited by Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl
Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), Volume III, 961.
Goldziher, Tagebuch, 129, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 41.
See Armenius Vambery, Voyage d 'unfaux derviche en Asie centrale, 18621864 (Paris, 1993).
Because this book contains extensive and detailed passages on Iran and
Central Asia in the nineteenth century, it was later translated into Persian
by Fath Ali Khawja Nurian as Siyahat-e Darvishi Dorughin dar Khanat-e
Asiya-ye Mianeh (Tehran: Elmi va Farhangi Publications, 1986).
Vambery, Siyahat-e Darnshi Dorughin, 534.
Goldziher, Tagebuch, 71-72, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27-28.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 43-44.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 46.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 40.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 37.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 37.
"The portrait of the man Goldziher that emerges from the pages of my
introduction," Patai writes at the very outset, "is not a totally attractive one.
Like many a geniusand he undoubtedly was oneGoldziher had his
share of unpleasant character traits" (Patai, Psychological Portrait; 10).
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 36. Emphasis added.
Patai, Psychological Portrait, 50-51.
Goldziher Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 254.

114

Post-Orientalism

lOO.Goldziher, Tagebuch, 228-229, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological

Portrait, 50.
101.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 52.
102.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 54.
103.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 55, based on Goldziher, Tagebuch, 311.
Goldziher is so distraught at this point that his entry for 4 December 1918
begins in Hungarian, which Scheiber translated into German in his footnote
529 and Patai into English: "The Crown of my head is fallen! My Mariska
fell victim to the Spanish epidemic. My soul is broken into a thousand
pieces. Oh, my dear Karl!"
104.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 73; while his accusations are all concentrated
in Patai 1987, 50-56, under the suggestive subheading of "The Divine
Mariska."
105.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 50-56.
106. Scheiber in Goldziher, Tagebuch, 10"einer begabte Agyotologin" is the
way Scheiber describes Maria Freudenberg.
107.Raphael Patai's penchant for making scandalous assumptions about people's
sexuality in particular is not limited to Goldziher. In 1973 he wrote a book
called The Arab Mind (New York: Hatherleigh Press, Revised Edition,
2002), in which he devoted an entire chapter, Chapter VIII, "The Realm
of Sex," pp, 126-151) to the way he thought "the Arab sexuality" works.
In his "Gray Zone" (New Yorker, 24 May 2004), Seymour Hirsh implicitly
connected the sexual torture of Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib to this chapter
of Raphael Patai and its central significance to teaching the U.S. military
how to deal with Muslims. Other journalists, such as Brian Whitaker
(Guardian, 24 May 2004) picked up from Hirsh and wrote a scathing attack against Patai's book. Raphael Patai's supporters came to his defense.
The problem, however, with Patai's observations in The Arab Mind is not
the reported uses or abuses to which the U.S. (or any other) military may
have put it. Four years after he published The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai
also published a book on The Jewish Mind (New Jersey: Wayne State
University Press, 1977). Long before Patai, Charles A. Moore had edited
a volume on The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and
Culture (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1967), announcing in
his introduction similar volumes on the Chinese and the Indian "minds."
The problem with these sorts of assumptions as "the Arab mind" or the
"Jewish mind" (replicated by the fabrication of equally empty and absurd
abstractions about "the Western mind") is their outdated analytical language
and superseded scholarship, not their (potential) political bad faith. After
more than a hundred years of sociological and anthropological advances
(Patai was an anthropologist), no one thinks and writes in such a generic
and essentialist language anymore. There are so many class, gender,
communal, regional, national, and moral and psychological variants that

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

115

come dialectically together to constitute a people that one cannot even

think in terms of an "Arab" or "Jewish" or "Japanese" mind that works
in any particular wayone way or another. These are simply flawed
categories, long before suggesting and articulating them can be debated
as the indices of a retrograde politics. In addition to "the Arab Mind" and
"the Jewish Mind," Patai has made equally untenable and entirely vacuous observations about "the Middle Eastern culture" in his Golden River
to Golden Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).
In Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 308-309), Edward Said
has critically examined a passage of this book as an example of how "the
Orient" is constituted as thefixedobject of investigation for the Orientalist.
But as Said demonstrates the problem with such essentialist attributes is
that they categorically disregard a whole variety of factors that have been
categorically essentialized (in this particular case metaphorically sexualized) in order to facilitate a particular mode of analytic. Instead of grand
conspiratorial assumptions about people, one has to take to task these flawed
analytics on specific scholarly grounds.
108.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 70.
109.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67.
110.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67.
111. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
112.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 68.
113. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 69.
114. Joseph de Somogyi, "My Reminiscences of Igance Goldziher." The Muslim
World, LI (1961), 15; also quoted in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 69.
115.Goldziher's Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 132 (entry of 29
November 1873).
116.Bernard Heller, "Goldziher Ignac emlekezete," IMIT 1932, Evkonyve, Budapest 1932,24-25, as quoted by Joseph de Somogyi, "My Reminiscences
of Igance Goldziher," 15.
117.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 70.
118.Bernard Heller, "Goldziher Ignac emlekezete," as quoted by Joseph de
Somogyi, "My Reminiscences of Igance Goldziher", 15.
119.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 71.
120. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 71.
121.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 73. See also Goldziher's Tagebuch, which
he begins by saying that he is writing it "fur meine Frau, meine Kinder und
die allernachsten Glieder meines engern Freudeskreises" ("for my wife,
my children, and the close circle of my intimate friends," 15).
122. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 228, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 50.
123.Goldziher Tagebuch, 235-239, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 75.

116

Post-Orientalism

124.Goldziher, Tagebuch, 15.

125.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27.
126.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 11.
127.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 11.
128.Given the highly speculative, tendentious, and outright slanderous nature of
Patai's account of Goldziher's life on the basis of his reading of the German
original of Goldziher's Tagebuch, it is imperative that a competent English
translation of this seminal text be made available to the larger scholarly
community. For the very same reasons, Patai's English translation of the
German original of Goldziher's travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt
should also be published in its original German. The scholarly community
should not be at the mercy of the English translation of a German (the
original of which is not published), done by someone so systematically
hostile to Goldziher. In fact it is a rather dubious scholarly practice to
have kept the original German in manuscript form and published only an
English translation of it. A more serious scholar would have first published
the German original, or else published a bilingual version. When the
English translation of Tagebuch and the German original of Goldziher's
travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt are published a larger community
of interpreters can read these two extraordinary documents and make its
own judgment.
129. Said, Orientalism, 330.
130. On the origin and later development of the idea of "the death of the author"
in contemporary French thought see Sean Burke, The Death and Return of
the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). See also Roland Barthes'
"The Death of the Author" in his collection of essays, Image, Music, Text
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 142-148.
131. Said, Orientalism, 330-331.
132.The most memorable such exchanges were in the pages of the New York
Review of Books. See Bernard Lewis' "The Question of Orientalism"
(New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 11, 24 June, 1982), and
the subsequent exchange among Edward Said, Bernard Lewis and Oleg
Grabar (an Islamic Art Historian) in "Orientalism: An Exchange" (New
York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 13: 12 August, 1982). In a
subsequent MESA (Middle East Studies Association of North America)
meeting in Boston, MA, Edward Said and Bernard Lewis faced each other
in a debate.
133.See James Clifford, "On Orientalism," in The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255-276; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes,
Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1994); and Sadiq Jalal
al-Azm, "Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse," Khamsin (1981).

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

117

134.Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978/2003), 340.

135.See Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology. Translated and Edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-156. For Edward Said's
articulation of the role of public intellectual see his Representations of
the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996). For an excellent study of
Max Weber's conception of intellectuals see Ahmad Sadri's Max Weber's
Sociology of Intellectuals. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For
reflections on Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual see my
review essay in the journal Critique, Fall 1994, 85-96.
136.This has of course now changed and there is a whole "Allamah" bestowing
industry in the Islamic Republic.
137.For more on Mohammad Qazvini see his own short autobiography in
Doreh-ye Kamel-e Bist Maqalah-ye Qazvini ("The Complete Collection
of Twenty Essays by Qazvini"). Edited by Abbas Iqbal and Ibrahim Pour
Davoud (Tehran: Donya-ye Ketab, 1363/1984), 7-30.
138.For additional biographical data on Mohammad Qazvini see Houshang
Ettehad, Pazhuhishgaran Mo'asser ("Contemporary Scholars"). Two
Volumes (Tehran: Farhang-e Mo'asser, 1378/1999), Volume I, 1-52.
139.Qazvini, Bist Maqalah-ye Qazvini, 23-24.
140.Qazvini 1984, 24-25.
141.Qazvini 1984, 24-25.
142.Qazvini 1984, 24-25.
143.See Iraj Afshar (Edited), The Letters of Qazvini to Taqizadeh. Tehran:
Javidan Publications, 1974, 102-103). For more details on Qazvini's
derogatory views on Orientalists and Orientalism see Hossein Kamaly's
"Allamah Qazvini va Mustashriqin," Golestan, vol. Ill (nos. 3 & 4), Fall
and Winter 1378 (1999-2000), 125-138.
144. See Hossein Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, "Orientalism and Occidentalism," in
Iranshahr (Number 1, 26 June 1922), 12-14.
145.1ranshahr 1926, 12-13.
146.1ranshahr 1926, 13. For more on Hossein Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr see
Kazem Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr (Ed), Athar va Ahval-e Kazem Zadeh
Iranshahr (Tehran: Iqbal Publications, 1971).
147.For more on Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh see his autobiography, Zendegiye Tufani: Khaterat-e Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh. Edited by Iraj Afshar
(Tehran: Bahar Publications, 1989).
148.1ranshahr 1926, 13-14.
149. See Anwar Abdel Malek's "Orientalism in Crisis" {Diogenes AA, winter
1963) and Jacques Waardenburg's "L'Islam dans le miroir de VOccident
(The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963).
\\
150.See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery
of India and the East, 1680-1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black

118

Post-Orientalism

and Victor Reinking. Foreword by Edward W. Said (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1984).
151.Said, Orientalism, 18.
152. Said, Orientalism, 19.
153.Said, Orientalism, 105.
154.See for example Seyyed Muhammad Reza Jalali Na'ini, Tarikh-e Jam'-e
Qur'an-e Karim op. cit, XIII, XVI, XVV, et passim.
155.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 31.
156.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 15.
157. See Talcott Parsons' Introduction to Max Weber's The Sociology ofReligion,
translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), xxvii, for
Parsons' note to this effect.
158.Said, Orientalism, 208-209. Said's apt observations about Theodore
Noldeke can of course be extended to Bernard Lewis tenfold. Lewis exemplifies the later generation of Orientalists who positively loathed and
politically plotted against the very dignity of the subject of their lifetime
scholarship. A bona fide psychologist (no anthropologist) needs to do a
"psychological portrait" of people who spend their lives studying peoples
and cultures they loathe. There must be a psychopathological explanation
for this.
159.Said, Orientalism, 209.
160.Goldziher, Tagebuch, 59, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 20.
161.Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 21.
162.Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 21.
163. As quoted in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20.
164.Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60-61, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 61. Again to be fair to Said, neither the Tagebuch nor the Travelogue was available to him at the writing of Orientalism (1978).
165.Goldziher Tagebuch, 59, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological
Portrait, 20. Quoting Goldziher's comparative and categorical statements
on Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is obviously not to endorse them. But
simply to show that Said's assumption that Goldziher thought of Islam
as inferior to other religions is false. But, again, we must remember that
neither the Tagebuch nor the Travelogue were available to Said when he
wrote Orientalism.
166. Said, Orientalism, 210. The passage Said quotes in French is from P. Masson-Oursel, "La connaissance scientifique de 1'Asie en France depuis 1900
et les varietes de 1'Orientalism," Revue Philosophique 143, Numbers 7-9
(July-September 1953), 345.
167.Patai, Psychological Portrait, 46.

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

119

168.By far the most significant of these three for Said is Foucault. "I have
found it useful here," Said says early in his Orientalism, "to employ Michel
Foucault's notion of a discourse, as described by him in Archeology of
Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism" (Said,
Orientalism, 3, et passim).
169.Said, Orientalism, 202-203.
170.Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2003), 48-49.
171.Said, Orientalism, 258-259.
172. Said, Orientalism, 260.
173.See Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1983/2004), 31-53.
174. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 48-49.
175.Said, Orientalism, 322.
176.Said, Orientalism, 203.
177. See James Clifford, "On Orientalism," op. cit.
178. See Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 8-10.
179. Said, Orientalism, 340.
180. This is the principal project of his first posthumously published book,
Humanism and Democratic Criticism, op. cit.
181. Said, Orientalism, 322.
182. Said, Orientalism, 259.
183. It was in the best interest of not just Bernard Lewis (the Armenius Vambery
of his time) and his ilk but of an entire lucrative industry of knowledge
production about "Islam" (and soon "Islamic terrorism") to pretend that
they had no idea what this problem of representation was, that it was some
sort of French mumbo-jumbo, and that they were "experts" on Islam and
could tell the U.S. and European governments what to do in their dealing
with Muslims. While the academic world went on the wild goose chase of
solving the essentially insoluble problem of the soverign subject, "Islamic
experts" made a very lucrative living telling the world (powerful people in
particular) what to think of Islam and what do to Muslims. "Persian and
Turkish poetry are entirely Muslim," Bernard Lewis tells his readers in The
Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Simon and
Shuster, 1995, 258), as an example of his exquisite command of primary
sources and what they represent. Ayatollah Khomeini could not have
thought and said it better, nor could Moustapha Kamal disagreed more. The
astounding illiteracy at the very root of a sentence like that is prototypical
of every single sentence that Bernard Lewis utters in his writingsmaking
the Persian and Turkish poets of the last one thousand year (particularly
of the last two hundred years) turn in their graves. Bernard Lewis and the
industry he represents need not have worried about the problem of representation. They knew everything there was to know about Arabic, Persian,

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and Turkish languages and literatures and cultures. Allamah Qazvini knew
these "charlatans," as he called them quite well: "The instruction of these
languages, and in fact the teaching of a few other languages as well, and
all at the same timesuch as Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and all the arts and
sciences that have been written in those languages, as well as all the various
and innumerable dialects of those languagesall and all are entrusted to
these Orientalists. These people then proceed, without the slightest sense
of shame or fear of being scandalized, for there is no one to tell, to claim
knowledge and authority in all these languages and the arts and sciences
written in them, teaching them, publishing books and articles about them,
and even coming out with their own new and specific ideas about them."
(Qazvini, Bist Maqalah-ye Qazvini, 23). His prophetic soul!
184.For an English translation, see Max Scheler, Problems of Sociology of
Knowledge. Translated by Manfred S.Frings. Edited and with an Introduction by Kenneth W. Stikkers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
185.For an English translation of both these sources see Karl Manheim, Ideology
and Utopia. Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936). See also Karl Mannheim,
Structures of Thinking. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber
Nicholson. Edited and Introduced by David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico
Stehr (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
186. Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Manfred S. Frings. Edited and with an Introduction by Kenneth W. Stikkers.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, 67. Emphasis in the original.
187. Scheler 1980, 70. Emphasis in the original.
188. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936, 267-271.
189. See Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The German Ideology. Edited and
with an Introduction by C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers,
1947), 47.
190. See for example Tom W. Goff, Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980).
191. See David Frisby, The Alienated Mind: The Sociology of Knowledge in
Germany, 1918-1933 (London and New York: Routledge, 1983). A similar
attempt at providing a sociology of knowledge for the rise of the sociology
of knowledge, as it were, that corroborates Frisby's observations is provided
by Pierre Bourdieu for the emergence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy in
Pierre Bourdieu's The Political Ontology ofMartin Heidegger. Translated
by Peter Collier. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 7-39.
192. See Gunter W. Remmling (Ed), Towards the Sociology of Knowledge:
Origin and development of a sociological Thought Style (New York: Humanities Press, 1973).

Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

121

193.For cogent observations about similar thoughts in the sociology of Talcott

Parsons see Harold J. Bershady, Ideology and Social Knowledge (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973).
194.For further details see James Tully (Ed), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1988.
195.See Dominick Lacapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts,
Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983).
196. "Let me begin with the one aspect of the book's reception," Said wrote
in his 1995 afterword to Orientalism, "that I most regret and find myself
trying hardest how (in 1994) to overcome. That is the book's alleged antiWesternism, as it has been misleadingly and rather too sonorously called by
commentators both hostile and sympathetic... One scarcely knows what
to make of these caricatural permutations of a book that to its author and
in its argument is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically skeptical about all
categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly
careful about not 'defending' or even discussing the Orient and Islam'"
(Said, Orientalism, 330-331).
197.To be sure, the central and thorny issue of the sovereign subject remains
valid in Clifford's critic even when we move into the domain of the sociology of knowledge. However, the long tradition of Verstehendesoziologie,
namely a sociology that is predicated on the verstehendemethode (subjective
understanding), central, for example, to Max Weber's sociology, will go
a long way addressing that problem. The tradition extends from Wilhelm
Dilthey and Max Weber to more recent statements by Theodore Abel and
others. For more on this see Marcello Truzzi (Ed.), Verstehen: Subjective
Understanding in the Social Sciences (London: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1974).
198. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1962/1996). In Orientalism, Edward Said makes
a very brief and tangential reference to Thomas Kuhn. The context is Said's
discussion of the distinguished Orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb's "mind operating with great ease inside established institutions" (Said, Orientalism,
275). Later on, however, Said made direct connections between Foucault
and Kuhn. "Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn," he believed, "have done
a considerable service by reminding us in their work that, whether we are
aware of it or not, paradigms and epistemes have a thoroughgoing hold on
fields of thought and expression, a hold that inflects if it does not shape
the nature of the individual utterance" (Said, Humanism and Democratic
Criticism, 42).
199.Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, op. cit, 66-67.

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200.Hans-GeorgGadamer, Truth and Method. Second, Revised Edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshal (New York: Crossroad,
1989), 277-285.
201. For a discussion of the epistemic impact of Copernican revolution on
a range of moral and intellectual developments see Hans Blumenberg's
The Genesis of the Copernican World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1989).
202. In Said's Orientalism all these varied forms of Orientalism are coagulated,
while they need to be separated and periodized. For Said's observations on
Greek Orientalism on the basis of Aeschylus' The Persians see Orientalism, 55-56; and on that of Europe towards the Ottomans on the basis of
Mozart's Magic Flute and Abduction from the Seraglio see Orientalism,
118.
203.For a more elaborate argument for this point see my "For the Last Time:
Civilizations," International Sociology. September 2001. Volume 16(3),
361-368.
204.No other propagandist alive is more responsible for sustaining this delusional opposition between "Islam and the West" than Bernard Lewis. He
even forgets the books he himself has already written on the subject and
writes new ones. In 1993, Lewis forgot that he had already written a book
called The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper, 1964) in 1964 and
wrote yet another one on Islam and the West (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994)essentially the same ideas, almost verbatim similarities, not
just in these two books but in practically everything that he writes"the
West" got it right; "Islam" and Muslims did not; there were some accidentally intelligent Muslim reformists who did, but the ignoramus masses and
fanatics did not, and thus we are in the mess that we are. This is Bernard
Lewis in a nutshell.

3
I Am Not a Subalternist1
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule"
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1955)
It will certainly amuse future historians of postcolonial theories that by far the most celebrated essay in its current canon has
received its extraordinary title by serendipitythat the original
title of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" by her
own account in the very first sentence of the essay, was in fact
"Power, Desire, Interest." It is hard to believe that this hallmark
event in our counter-canonical community would have fared so
spectacularly well had Spivak kept its original, nondescript title.
"Names are a great mystery " says Samuel Hamilton to Adam
Trask in John Steinbeck's East of Eden, as they get together with
Lee, Mr. Trask's Chinese servant-savant, to decide what to call
the twin sons of Adam and his estranged wife Cathy Ames. "I
have never known whether the name is molded by the child or the
child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of thiswhenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him
was wrong."2
It is hard to imagine "Can the Subaltern Speak?" with any other
(given or nick-) name than the one it now proudly bears. There
seems to have been a divinity "shaping the ends" of this essay,
rough hew them how its very author may have willed. The ques123

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tion though still remains: why would an author begin her essay
by noting a title that it no longer bears? "The original title of this
paper was 'Power, Desire, Interest.'"3 It is like my saying in this
very paragraph that the original title of this chapter was "I am a
Subaltern." Why then did I not give it that titleor having changed
it, why register its abandoned name? There is more power and
desire in a nickname than old Samuel Hamilton and his friend
Lee could have imagined in their respective Irish and Chinese
immigrant minds and peripatetic philosophy.
Much of the enduring power of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
is in fact contingent on this very opening gambit wherein Spivak
playfully posits her speaking voice somewhere within her own
"Power, Desire, [and] Interest." This is as much the intended title
of that essay as its circular conclusion, its alpha and its omega at
one and the same timethe title anticipating the entitlement, the
promise and delivery, with the triumvirate of "power, desire, and
interest" retorting the triple disenfranchisement of the "poor, black,
and female" that comes at the very end of the essay: "if you are
poor, black, and female you get it in three ways."4 In three ways,
Spivak anticipates and responds, announces and plays back, in the
inaugural paragraph of the grenade she is throwing into the midst
of "the few white boys" who had convinced themselves of having
dismantled what they liked to call "the sovereign subject." "Indeed, whatever power these meditations command may have been
earned by a politically interested refusal to push to the limit the
founding presuppositions of my desire, as far as they are within my
grasp."5 Spivak is here turning the self-conscious postmodernity
of the author shooting herself in the foot against itselffiring the
gun, dodging the bullet, and then dashing, prancing to get away
with murder. Her first cry of freedom will now echo (for pages
to come) throughout the essay: "I have invoked my positionality
in this awkward way so as to accentuate the fact that calling the
place of the investigator into question remains a meaningless piety
in many recent critiques of the sovereign subject." Coming from
left field, and fielding his own "positionality," Spivak is about to
teach that self-serving presumption of "a critique of the sovereign
subject" a lasting lesson.

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125

My contention here is that this opening paragraph is in fact the

crowning condition of Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"and
that by the end of the essay, she has in fact forfeited the power
inherent in this inaugural moment by not carrying through what
she had already delivered at the beginning. My hope in this chapteran homage to her essayis to dwell on what in her opening
sentences Spivak coyly calls "the precariousness of my position,"
and to give it a far more seriously hopeful disposition than her
playful reservation ("although I will attempt to foreground the
precariousness of my position throughout, I know such gestures
can never suffice") allows or admits. In this chapter, I wish to take
that state of "precariousness" and run with it, place the Spivak
citation next to our other significant citation, Edward Said, and
then place myself between these two iconic figures of our defiant
disposition. More specifically: I believe that in Spivak's "precarious position" dwells a permanent revolutionary disposition that her
preoccupation with inserting the voice of the (suicidal and sacrificial) subaltern into the chorus of First World Theory (and they all
requiredemand and exactthose three capital letters) did not
allow to rise to the occasion. In the same vein, I also believe that
Edward Said's defiant humanism sprouted from a center-periphery
dichotomy that disallowed, ipso facto, the globality he wished
politically to attain. This, if successful, will amount to crafting a
camera that will have Spivak and Said as its dual, complementary,
lenseseach correcting the other. What it will then put into view,
as I intend to show, is the autonomy of a subject that in speaking
back to the sovereign will also know the transitional {contingent
not necessary) parameters of its own agency.
Were it not for that strategic self-exposure in the opening
paragraph of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"very similar in fact
to Antonio Gramsci's encouragement of making an inventory
of the defiant subject, which Edward Said later put to effective
useSpivak would not have been able to perform the bravura task
of liberating the subaltern voice from the imposed impossibility
of its colonial asphyxiation, not just by the brutal act of putting a
gun to his/her head and robbing him/her of integrity and subterranean resources at one and the same time but in fact by (far more

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Post-Orientalism

perniciously) writing him/her out of the presumably liberating

critique of the sovereign subject. Spivak's speaking in the opening paragraph of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in terms of her own
power, desire, and* interest is in fact the answer to that question
and the conclusion of the essay placed right at its beginninga
kind of a proverbial Hegelian preface she once performed when
translating Derrida's Of Grammatology into English. "Can the
Subaltern Speak?" Spivak is speakingof her power, desire, and
interest, beyond the patriarchal subject-constitution and defying
the imperialist object-formation. She is no subalternindeed,
nor is she the author of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"who can
shoot herself in the foot. The dialectics confirms the question
and comprises the answerright at the very first paragraph, immediately after the question is posed: "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
The question is not philosophical at all. It is merely a manner of
being politeraising a finger and asking with proper etiquette if
she could please talk. She has been silent for quite some time.
Butand here is the rubby the time she has asked permission
to speak, she has already spoken: Can the subaltern speak?
*

Permission (inevitably) granted, Spivak has (already) trespassed

into a Homeric space, mutated into a Trojan Horse, reversed the
metaphor, and once inside the city walls, she would wreak havoc
on Trojans. A trophy that Trojan theorists could not resist taking
home to the center of their Metropolitan Capital to claim, Spivak
lets loose her swords and soldiers (hiding in her belly) raiding at
midnight the poststructuralist critique of the subject with a dexterity
and precision they had never anticipated. Thereshe exposes the
silenced subaltern not as a reality sui generis but as a fabricated
asphyxiation constitutional to a postmodernity that still carries
within it the selfsame colonial blind-spots integral to the modernity
it thought it had dismantled. Not quite so, objects Spivak (calmly
and politely) with her accusatory finger raised. Without Spivak,
we were all in danger of shooting ourselves in the foot and collapsing into a debilitating nativism. She has taken the critique of

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127

the sovereign subject not back to our colonial site where we are
on home territory, our own turf, and thus know how to fight our
colonizers. Inside her bellyful of ideas, we have learned how to
ambush the enemy on his own terms and turf.
As a Trojan Horse, Spivak extended the battle-line into the
enemy's backyard and showed, chapter and verse, how in fact a far
more radical critique of the European sovereign subject was both
possible and evident in Marx and Derridathe two iconic referents
at the two opposing ends of the Cartesian cogito, pulling it apart,
giving it epistemic tonality and texture. A quarter of a century after
the publication of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" we can now tell how
Spivak was in fact far more accommodating in her reading of both
Marx and Derrida in projecting that liberation as evident in them.
Without Spivak, the fact remains, not just the subaltern but Marx
and Derrida could not speak a more planetary emancipation of the
de-subjected postcolonial personas a person. It was Spivak who
caught what she generously calls "the Western intellectual production" with both hands in the cookie jar of "Western international
economic interests." That radical positioning of the postcolonial
critic was the conditio sine qua rton for Spivak to be able to turn
the most debilitating ritual practice of widow sacrifice and sublate
it into a liberating moment for the thrice-silenced conjugation of
being poor, black, and female.
"Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West
today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of
the West, or the West as Subject."6 With that one sentence, Spivak
let a flood loose on poststructuralist ants all too happily thinking
they had turned the hill of the Cartesian cogito upside down. "The
much-publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually
inaugurates a Subject." This, as I read it, is reading Foucault and
Deleuze from the perspective of their mutual blind spotwhere
neither of them could see Spivakas power, desire, and interestcoming their way. From that angle, Spivak can see how both
Foucault and Deleuze are suspending not just the thematic operation of ideology in their critique but in fact the instrumentality of
two white European male intellectuals in the effective operation
of that ideology. Thereshe can also catch the transcontinental

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Post-Orientalism

difference between Maoism as an ideological force in history and

a manner of French intellectual Maoism in which "Asia" cannot be
but a translucent claim. Spivak, on that spot, is the primal repression of "the West" as Subject, coming back to reveal, release, and
thus to dismantle it. She is the voice of the subaltern as "the state
of exception," the blind spot of "Western politics," as Agamben
sees itthe colonial as the state of exception that made the rule of
"the Western Subject" ("The West" as the Subject) possible.7
Spivak is particularly perceptive in her critique of Deleuze's
conception of the workers' struggle, which remains provincially
Eurocentric and oblivious of the far more global division of labor.
For Deleuze "the workers' struggle" is itself an imperially generalized conception of the European working classand Spivak
catches Deleuze red-handed:
The invocation of the [emphasis is Spivak's] workers' struggle is baleful
in its very innocence; it is incapable of dealing with global capitalism:
the subject-production of worker and unemployed within nation-state
ideologies in its Center; the increasing subtraction of the working class
in the Periphery from the realization of surplus value and thus from
"humanistic" training in consumerism; and the large scale presence
of paracapitalist labor as well as the heterogeneous structural status
of agriculture in the Periphery. Ignoring the international division of
labor; rendering "Asia" (and on occasion "Africa") transparent (unless
the subject is ostensibly the "Third World); reestablishing the legal
subject of socialized capitalthese are problem as common to much
poststructuralist as to structuralist theory. Why should such occlusions
be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets
of heterogeneity and the Other?8

The question is (needless to say but necessary to repeat) rhetorical,

liberating.
*

Although Spivak proceeds to up the ante and demonstrate in

analytical detail how "the failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders
them incapable of articulating a theory of interest,"9 and thus make
a shambles of the entire poststructuralist project, precisely at this

I Am Not a Subalternist

129

very moment of her critical pause, Spivak exposes her own blind
spots: places and paradoxes that her hidden soldiershaving just
come out of her bellycan see but she cannot.
The problem ultimately resides in a para-geographical metaphor.
The location of Spivak's postcolonial intellectual is so metaphorically fixated in a peripheral "East" that she cannot but authenticate
the white European intellectuals and the sovereign subject they
think they have dismantled to its "West." This binary is no longer
merely geographical. It is thematic, epistemic, theoretical. It binds
the postcolonial critic to an imaginary location that whether we
call it "East" or "the Periphery," ipso facto, corroborates a "West"
and/or a "Center" that cannot ever be seen as a mere figment of an
ideological imagination, created and crafted to (dull the wit and
thus) divide in order to rule the world.
The paramount problem with this binary ruling supreme over
Spivak's critical geography becomes evident when she reaches
the most compelling and the most problematic part of "Can the
Subaltern Speak?"her discussion of sati. Once as a postcolonial
critic Spivak finds herself trapped in the East-West binary tunnel,
she cannot but jar the banality of a nativist reading of sati ("the
women actually wanted to die") with the sarcastic jab of "white
men are saving brown women from brown men."10 No appeal
to a "productive catachresis" can save this jab from being read as
"the brown woman critic is scoring with white intellectual men."
Spivak's dangerous identification of the "nativist argument" with
nothing (no alternative) other than "a parody of the nostalgia for
lost origins"and thus with a single stroke of "the women actually wanted to die"ipso facto mutates her into a spokesman (or
yes-man) for the gratitude (absolution) of brown women thanking white men for having saved them from brown men. This is
obviously not a position that Spivak would voluntarily choose to
occupyand yet her dichotomous construction continues to keep
her trapped in it.
Why should Spivak remain limited to Foucault's critique of the
"scientific episteme," where she has no choice but to place sati in
between the untenable dichotomy of "ritual as opposed to crime,
the one fixed by superstition, the other by legal science?"11 What

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Post-Orientalism

Spivak's tunnel vision between the colony and the empire conceals
is the fact that the colonial criminalization of sati by the British
imperial power ipso facto also ritualizes it. Sati was not a ritual
until the British made it a crime. Once criminalized by the British
colonial officers, sati loses whatever range of pre-colonial markers
it may or may not have signified and is immediately mutated into
a fixed signifier, a ritual, but not of widow-burning as Spivak is
forced to speculate, but of resistance to colonial demarcation of a
colonized culture. But why should Spivak get this obvious dialectic
wrong, or to turn the rhetorical question she puts to Foucault back
to her: "Why this conflation of language and discourse from the
master of discourse analysis?"12
The epistemic predicate of missing this evident dialectic is a
false hermeneutics. By virtue of trekking along a wrong route
to a right destination, Spivak is drawn into a trap and forced into
the corner of engaging in a hermeneutic encounter with Manava
Dharrn-sasastra, or "The Laws of Manu," for which she is neither
juridically qualified nor theoretically prepared. She is, in effect,
forced to become a native informer, re-reading the sacred text of her
cultural ancestrythe metrical Sanskrit compendium of ancient
sacred laws and customsin order to revise a colonial reading of
dtmaghata and atmadana. Making native informers out of radical
critics is the oldest trick in the outdated Orientalist arsenal. We
always lose on that scoreand thus we should by all means refuse
to engage with it. This of course does not mean that in the course
of a false hermeneutics Spivak does not pull off a quite critical
class analysis of sati, helped out by P. V. Kane's crucial discovery
that widow sacrifice had an economic condition anchored to the
fact that the widow could have inherited her diseased husband's
property.13 But the dichotomous bifurcation of "tradition and modernity" remains solidly constant in Spivak (how strange indeed
for a postcolonial theorist who comes to her poststructuralism
through her overriding feminism!) and yields even more limiting insights: "The gravity of sati was that it was ideologically
cathected as 'reward,' just as the gravity of imperialism was that
it was ideologically cathected as 'social mission.'"14

I Am Not a Subalternist

131

Only once in the course of her analysis does Spivak come close
to reading sati in the contextual immediacy of its own cultural
and political neighborhood but she quickly abandons it for (the
misplaced) fear of incongruity:
There is no itinerary we can retrace here. Since the other sanctioned
suicides did not involve the scene of this constitution, they entered neither
the ideological battleground at the archaic originthe tradition of the
Dharmasastranor the scene of the inscription of ritual as crimethe
British abolition. The only related transformation was Mahatma Gandhi's
reinscription of the notion of satyagraha, or hunger strike, as resistance.
But this is not the place to discuss the details of that sea-change. I would
merely invite the reader to compare the auras of widow sacrifice and
Gandhian resistance. The root in thefirstpart of satyagraha and sati
are the same.15
Here, Spivak comes close to positing hunger-strike and widowburning together, but she quickly abandons the idea because in
the mind of her white male intellectual interlocutor either of the
two acts invoke two different auraswhereas precisely because
their roots are the same, though their auras differ, they should
have been read together, in their political reconfiguration of
power, as would their mutual reading against the current spate of
suicidal violence in the course of the Afghan, Iraqi, or Palestinian resistance (muqawamah). The colonial context ought to be
made integral to a reading of adjacent texts together, rather than
separately, forcing them into a binary opposition against their
colonial mis/readings.
Spivak's falseabstract, ahistorical, extra-juridicalhermeneutics is simply astonishing coming from a postcolonial critic
who is chiefly responsible for having applied post-structuralism
and deconstruction to a whole continent of ideas and practices.
"I have written.. .a constructed counternarrative of women's consciousness, thus women's being, thus women's being good, thus the
good women's desire, thus woman's desire."16 Fine. This is quite
self-evident. But by what authority? And for what constituency of
purposes? Hindu law, as any other, has a history, a hermeneutics,
a jurisprudence, a constellation of divergent localities of readings

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and interpretations, canonical arguments, and seditious rebuttals.

Spivak is not, nor can she, speak from the vast (power-basing)
topography of that variegated jurisprudence. And why should
she bother? Why should a postcolonial critic, deeply engaged in
a pointed and genuine challenge to the European critique of the
sovereign subject engage in a pointless and false hermeneutics
and become an amateur commentator on a legal text uprooted
from its historical contextand in the act transform herself into
a native mis/informer for a jurisprudence of the grammatology of
which she is totally clueless, except by the dubious claim of the
accident of her birth? Spivak is aware of the untenable grounds
of her hermeneutics and tries to address it:
I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary
training, that accident of birth and education has provided me with a sense
of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that
are useful tools for a bricoleur, especially when armed with the Marxist
skepticism of concrete experience as the final arbiter and a critique of
disciplinary formations.17

But why should Spivak accept the function of a bricoleurl She

is taking the entirety of the post/structuralist enterprise to task,
and now she succumbs to the idea of bricolage (tinkering), first
introduced by Claude Levi-Strauss in his Savage Mind (1966)a
metaphor for an instructional handyman who can help out with
varieties of tasks, aiding the anthropologist in reading texts he
cannot, thus facilitating his interpretation of a culture in which he
is and will always remain an alien. Why? Why should Spivak succumb to becoming a bricoleura native informer? The problem is
not only an "absence of advanced disciplinary training," which in
and of itself is a disqualifying factor. The real problem is for the
postcolonial critic suddenly to collapse into an ahistorical speaker
of a language whose jurisprudential syntax and morphology, and
whose hermeneutic logic and rhetoric, are alien to herand with
that alienation comes the flat-footed feminism that checks the
armament of its "Marxist skepticism" at the door.
Spivak is ultimately saved not by her false and misplaced hermeneutics but by her progressive politics: "white men, seeking to

I Am Not a Subalternist

133

save brown women from brown men, impose upon those women
a greater ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within
discursive practice, good-wifehood with self-immolation on the
husband's pyre."18 This, however, is but a momentary Saidian
move on the part of Spivak because she has not (could not) work
out her (progressive) politics from her (retrograde) hermeneutics.
That hermeneutics, in effect, cannot but lead Spivak to abandon
completely the crucial opening part of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
and by the end of the essay collapse into a "poli-sci" lingo that
informs her readers that "between patriarchy and imperialism,
subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman
disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the 'third-world woman'
caught between tradition and modernization."19 By the end of the
text, her argument has dissipated into the most banal oscillation
between "tradition and modernization." It is ultimately not the
force of Spivak's argument but the jarring power of her example,
Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri's suicide, that saves the essay.
*

At one critical moment in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri

Spivak and Edward Said, rarely on the same page, come together
when she catches the tiger of the European progressive politics by
the toe and notes Michel Foucault's hurried conflation of language
and discourse as he hastens to salvage his theory of power. The
occasion of this concurrence between Spivak and Said is when
she wants to insert the function of the public intellectual between
"the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition," on one hand, and "the self-proximate, if not
self-identical, subject of the oppressed," on the other.20 Spivak's
position is that "the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects, becomes transparent in the relay race, for they merely report
on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing)
the working of (the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by)
power and desire."21 Here, Spivak resorts to a strategic alliance
with Said and quotes him affirmatively for having wondered why

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Foucault's critique of power disregards "the role of economics,

the role of insurgency and rebellion."22 This is where Spivak's
alliance with Said becomes pronounced:
I add to Said's analysis the notion of the surreptitious subject of power
and desire marked by the transparency of the intellectual. Curiously
enough, Paul Bove faults Said for emphasizing the importance of the
intellectual, whereas "Foucault's project essentially is a challenge to the
leading role of both hegemonic and oppositional intellectuals." I have
suggested that this "challenge" is deceptive precisely because it ignores
what Said emphasizesthe critic's institutional responsibility23
Spivak is much gentler here with Said's characteristic humanism
than was James Clifford in his famous critique of Orientalism,
where he exposed what he considered to be the central paradox of
the text, namely its being "ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing
habits of Western humanism."24 Spivak's gentle defense of Said,
taking on Bove for having ignored "what Said emphasizesthe
critic's institutional responsibility," is as close as she can get to
Said's persistent and embattled humanism without compromising her own relentless critique of the European encounter with
the sovereign subject. This is a particularly endearing moment in
the mutual (but divergent) history of these two towering figures
of our critical disposition: Said's defiant humanism and Spivak's
rebellious uprising against the European critique of the sovereign
subject. This is the crucial occasion where the sovereignty in which
Edward Said effectively partakes, and (here is the rub) which in
effect "inaugurates a [European] Subject," at the expense of silencing the (poor, colored, and female) subaltern, come together to
aufgehoben into a third-level critique that embraces them both.
Here we are put in a very privileged position to see Spivak's
postcolonial critique of post-structuralism to the left of the European critique of the sovereign subject and Said's defiant insistence
on (what he would later call "democratic) humanism" to its right.
Spivak wants to up the ante and put forward a far more radical
critique of the European dismantling of the sovereign subject (by
way of giving voice to a silenced subaltern), whereas Said wants
to resuscitate the humanism that this very critique of the sover-

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eign subject had surpassed and dismantled in order to sustain a

mighty measure of political agency (though entirely oblivious to
the fact this critique might also give space to the silenced subaltern). Thus paradoxically, Spivak's radical discursive critique
becomes politically circumscribed and ends up in a defiant,
counter-ritual, suicidewhile Said's conservative insistence
on humanism becomes politically far more potent, albeit theoretically halting. Spivak has to abandon her radical critique of
the European destruction of the sovereign subject in order to
become politically viable, while Said has to fall behind that
critique in order to remain politically potent. We are thus put in
a very odd position by having to choose between Spivak's far
more discursively radical critique of the European dismantling
of the sovereign subject and be politically suicidal, and Said's
defiant political activism and yet keep quiet about its structural
foundations in a troubled and outmaneuvered humanismand
thus commit ideological suicide.
I believe and purpose that in the space between Edward Said's
insistence on retrieving and contrapuntally liberating a critical and
democratic humanism25 and Spivak's institutional detour around
the impossibility of an intellectual representation of the subaltern
resides a thirdmuch widerpath.
Spivak's critique of the European critic of the sovereign subject
navigates (inevitably) the space between an us and a them whose
axis of binary opposition still oscillates vigorously in the span of
a distance corroborated by the colonizer and the colonizednot
despite but because of the postcolonial disposition of her criticism.
This, for example, is how she corrects Derrida:
Derrida calls the ethnocentricism of the European science of writing
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a symptom of the
general crisis of European consciousness. It is, of course, part of a greater
symptom, or perhaps the crisis itself, the slow turn from feudalism to
capitalism via thefirstwave of capitalist imperialism. The itinerary of
recognition through assimilation of the Other can be more interestingly
traced, it seems to me, in the imperialist constitution of the colonial
subject than in repeated incursions into psychoanalysis or the "figure"
of woman, though the importance of these two interventions within

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deconstruction should not be minimized. Derrida has not moved (or

perhaps cannot move) into that arena.26
Even this dialectical description of the Other partakes of the metaphysical violence it seeks to expose, criticize, and overcome. There
is no Other. Insecure Selves have created them allby way of
crafting (and believing in) themselves in a position of power.27 The
postcolonial critic of the European critic of the sovereign subject
that still operates on that dichotomy has not yet liberated itself
enough: "This S/subject...belongs to the exploiters' side of the
international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary
French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that
would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe." Precisely. But this head-on collision between the European Subject
and the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe will not erupt
into a voice with which the subaltern can speak. It will only add
more a colorful tonality to the ventriloquist voices of Europe. Its
bellyful of hidden guerilla fighters emptied, the Trojan Horse can
indeed become a trophy and be confiscated by the Trojans.
The same bifurcated consciousness (pulled and pushed between
an East and a West that never were, let alone allowed to meet) is
evident and present in Edward Said's ecumenical humanismstill
committed to an us-and-a-them axis that ipso facto has to accommodate the slanted relation of power between the European Subject
and the unnamed subjects of the Other of Europe. Here, as always,
Said will have to resort to the most powerful argument of active
political agency in and up against the horrors of the world to make
a persuasive case for his defiant humanism:
Although I was one of the first critics to engage and discuss French
theory in the American university, [James] Clifford correctly saw that I
somehow remained unaffected by that theory's ideological antihumanism,
mainly, I think, because I did not (and still do not) see in humanism only
the kind of totalizing and essentializing trends that Clifford identified.
Nor have I been convinced of the arguments put forward in the wake of
structuralist antihumanism by postmodernism or by its dismissive attitude
to what Jean-Francois Lyotard famously called the grand narratives of
enlightenment and emancipation. On the contrary, as a fair degree of

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my own political and social activism has assured me, people all over the
world can be and are moved by ideals of justice and equalitythe South
African victory in the liberation struggle is a perfect case in pointand
the affiliated notion that humanistic of ideals of liberty and learning still
supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war
and military occupation, for instance, and to try to overturn despotism
and tyranny, both strike me as ideas that are alive and well. And despite
the (in my opinion) shallow but influential ideas of a certain facile type
of radical antifoundationalism, with its insistence that real events are at
most linguistic effects, and its close relative, the end-of-history thesis,
these are so contradicted by the historical impact of human agency and
labor as to make a detailed refutation of them here unnecessary. Change
in human history, and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities.28
Predicated on that solid political commitment (but divergent
theoretical encounter with the persistent problem of European
humanism, which was instrumental in the making of European
Romanticism and Orientalism alike), Said proceeds to argue that
"it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism
and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentricism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism
that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language bound in ways that
absorbed the great lessons of the past...and still remain attuned
to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them
exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American."29 To be sure, Said's attempt at salvaging (European) humanism via a democratic criticism, in effect trying to de-Europeanize
its power-basing provenance, is a far superior proposition than
Jurgen Habermas' attempt to posit what he calls a "communicative" versus a "subject-centered" reason30an entirely useless
stand from where we stand on the (post) colonial site, because
it is simply blind, deaf, and dumb to the structural violence that
has silenced us at the very outset, so that "communication" (as in
"speaking," as Spivak would say) is simply impossible for us. But
still there is a structural similarity between what Habermas calls
"the unfinished project of modernity" and what Said proposes to
do with humanism, namely to liberate it from its European provenancethey both bracket and disregard the persistent relation of

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power that (as Spivak has convincingly demonstrated) precisely

when it is trying to criticize the sovereign European subject it
"actually inaugurates a Subject"31a "European Subject," to be
more precise. No degree of insistence on the veracity and nobility
of the politics of the emancipated anticolonial activism can in fact
constitute a postcolonial subject merely by wishing it. The actual
relation of power, not just on the battlefield, but in fact in the very
act of de-Europeanization of the postcolonial subject (further and
even more insidiously) Europeanizes the Subject. This insight
we ultimately owe to Spivakbut she is under the false impression that her postcolonial critique of the European critic of the
subject is not site-specific and has occurred on the no-man's-land
of the postcolonial intellectual (as indeed does Said by invoking
the extra-territorial site of his critical encounter with European
humanism). But neither Spivak nor Said has kept a safe distance
from the sovereignty of that European Subject. They in fact inhabit
itSpivak by virtue of her head-on collision with the European
Sovereign Subject from its theoretical left, Said by virtue of his
defiant humanism that makes him politically progressive but epistemically seriously compromised.
Thus it makes no difference if we seek to negotiate a position
for the historical agency of the postcolonial subject via Spivak's
criticism of the European critic of the sovereign subject or through
Said's democratic criticism engaging and uplifting European
humanism. In both cases, we are positing the figure of the postcolonial critic in a liminal space that is neither here nor there,
thus authenticating the metaphysical authenticity of both here
and a therean altogether untenable proposition for the critical
intelligence necessary to wed Edward Said's progressive politics
with Gayatri Spivak's radical critique of the European (critic of
the) sovereign subject. Under the nuptial auspices of that wedding should come forth the twin projects of a critical theory and
a progressive politics that are neither compromised by a belated
humanism (Edward Said), nor debilitated by a speculative abortion
of political agency (Spivak).
The site of that auspicious wedding, I propose, is on a location
that is neither in the East nor in the West, but on a critical geog-

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139

raphy that de-centers the planet without reversing its dominant

order in cross-essentializing termsa political geography that
will always remain strategic, transitional, spontaneous. To detect
the topography of that geography, I will now tell a story in which
Gayatri Spivak's superlative criticism and Edward Said's progressive politics came together in celebration of Ranajit Guhaon an
occasion when we had all gathered to honor the founding father
of Subaltern Studies.
*

In late October through early November 2000, Ranajit Guha,

the eminent historian whose groundbreaking work has given a new
lease on life to Gramsci's conception of "the Subaltern," delivered
a series of three lectures at the Italian Academy in Columbia University. I was among the happy few who attended these series of
lectures and read Guha's draft in preparation for a workshop that
Gayatri Spivak and I had organized around these lectures. "Subaltern Studies at Large" became a critical moment in the nascent
history of our Center (now Institute) for Comparative Literature
and Society, the institutional host of the workshop. On Friday
and Saturday, 10 and 11 November, 2000, at three consecutive
panels we explored the perils and promises of the very notion of
"Subaltern Studies" in Asian, African, Latin American, and African-American contexts. Edward Said chaired our plenary session,
and Gayatri Spivak convened our conference.
As I read the manuscript of Ranajit Guha's series of lectures,
and subsequently heard him deliver them in our Casa Italiana, it
seemed to me that in his most recent reflections we were witness
to a further mapping out of the navigational exclusion of people
without history in order to narrate and thus make (what Guha aptly
called) historicality a possible site of contestation and resistance.
Guha's singling out of Hegel as the particular focal point of his
critique and departure (I subsequently learned particularly from
our Europeanist colleagues) appeared as beating a dead horse.
Nevertheless I shared Guha's primary concern with Hegel precisely because it was he, next to Kant, who at the crack of the

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Enlightenment's dawn had opted to narrate us Oriental folks out

of history in order to make his own story not just possible but in
fact plausible. China, India, and Persia were the three pre-historic
moments that Hegel thought necessary to bracket and exclude
from history before the Region of Spirit was to be located in the
Greco-Roman world and then beyond into Hegel's own Europe,
particularly Germany.
In Hegel, wethe Chinese, the Indians, the Persians, as he called
uswere all brought together as the pre-moments of history so
that the moment of his story, now called History, would be made
possible. In Guha's liberating prose, I thought before and I was
convinced even more now, we were in effect being set free from
the prose of Hegel's world history in order to craft the prose of our
own place in the historicality of the world at largeif indeed we
were to talk a plausible language (having Spivak now in mind).
How Hegel brought us together by negating us and how Guha
sought to bring us together to set us free is precisely the point
that I thought we had to converge or disperse as historical agents
before and after our condition of Subalternity.
How did exactly Hegel bring us together? And how exactly is
Guha seeking to set us free? To add my own spice to the Hegelian
soup we were cooking in that Workshop, I asked the audience on
that Saturday morning, the of November 11, 2000 in the teatro of
our Italian Academy, to allow me to indulge in reminding them of
the specific place that Hegel had assigned to this thing he called
"Persia," and this by way of trying to find a way out of the cul de
sac of always negotiating a place for ourselves via and through
Hegel, seeking, albeit indirectly, his approval of our experience
or wonder, history or itihasa, speaking or listening, against our
states or in our civil societies.
Generations of modern Iranian historians, charged and commissioned by the Pahlavi dynastic state-building project, were
positively enamored by the inordinately positive attention that the
German Geist-Meister had given to the place of this "Persia" in
world history. They were particularly delighted to translate into
translucent Persian prose Hegel's opening paragraph to the section
III of The Philosophy of History. In the first read, it appears that

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141

Hegel in fact considers Persians as people that Guha would put

within his Aristotelian limit as a people with a history and thus not
of a "people with no history." Here is the passage:
Asia separates itself into two partsHither and Farther Asia; which
are essentially different from each other. While the Chinese and Hindoosthe two great nations of Farther Asia, already consideredbelong
to the strictly Asiatic, namely the Mongolian Race, and consequently
possess a quite peculiar character, discrepant from ours; the nations of
Hither Asia belong to the Caucasian; i.e., the European Stock. They are
related to the West, while the Farther-Asiatic peoples are perfectly isolated. The European, who goes from Persia to India, observes, therefore,
a prodigious contrast. Whereas in the former country he finds himself
still somewhat at home, and meets with European dispositions, human
virtues and human passionsas soon as he crosses the Indus (i.e. in the
latter region), he encounters the most repellent characteristics, pervading
every single feature of society. With the Persian Empire wefirstenter on
continuous History. The Persians are the first Historical People; Persia
was thefirstEmpire that passed away. While China and India remain stationary, and perpetuate a natural vegetative existence even to the present
time, this land has been subject to those developments and revolutions,
which alone manifest a historical condition. The Chinese and the Indian
Empire assert a place in the historical series only on their own account
and for us [not for neighbors and successors]. But here in Persia first
arises that light which shines itself, and illuminates what is around; for
Zoroaster's "light" belongs to the World of Consciousnessto Spirit as
a relation to something distinct from itself. We see in the Persian World
a pure exalted Unity, as the essence which leaves the special existences
that inhere in it, freeas the Light, which only manifests what bodies
are in themselves;a Unity which governs individuals only to excite
them to become powerful for themselvesto develop and assert their
individuality.32
What the Pahlavi court historians did not care to note (beyond this
evidently laudatory place Hegel had assigned to Persians in history)
was the concluding paragraph of Hegel on Persians where he announces in no uncertain terms that the Persians are over, finished,
done with, no longer in history. Celebrating the anniversary of the
2500 years of Persian monarchy, His Imperial Majesty Shahanshah Aryamehr ("The Sun of the Aryan Race," no less) linking his
physically short self-confidence with the metaphorical longevity of

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Cyrus the Great, the Shah did not want to know that, generations
of European and American archeologists notwithstanding, nobody
slept in that decrepit tomb except his own perturbed imagination,
and he certainly did not want translated into any lucid Persian
prose the following Hegelian pronouncement:
. . . the historical transition takes place when the Persian world comes
in contact with the Greek. Here, for the first time, an historical transition meets us, viz. in the fall of an empire. China and India, as already
mentioned, have remainedPersia has not. The transition to Greece is,
indeed, internal; but here it shows itself also externally, as a transmission of sovereigntyan occurrence which from this time forward is ever
and anon repeated. For the Greeks surrender the scepter of dominion
and of civilization to the Romans, and the Romans are subdued by the
Germans.33
Conscious of his compatriot Goethe's love and admiration for the
Persian Rose, Hegel then adds this little minuet:
If we examine this fact of transition more closely, the question suggests
itselffor example, in thisfirstcase of the kind, viz. Persiawhy it sank,
while China and India remain. In thefirstplace we must here banish from
our minds the prejudice in favor of duration, as if it had any advantage as
compared with transience: the imperishable mountains are not superior
to the quickly dismantled rose exhaling its life in fragrance. In Persia
begins the Principle of Free Spirit as contrasted with imprisonment in
nature; mere natural existence, therefore, loses its bloom, and fades away.
The principle of separation from Nature is found in the Persian Empire,
which therefore, occupies a higher grade than those worlds immersed
in the Natural.34
In other words, Hegel nurtures this plump Persian lamb until it
is really fat and voluptuous only in order to offer it as a worthy
sacrifice upon the altar of his historical teleology. Persia serves
its historical task and disappears, thus also serving Hegel with his
McDonald arches, rise-and-shine theory of history whereby the
sun rises in the East only to shine on the West. We begin with the
sun rising in China and then India in the Farther and then move
Hither to Persia only, and here is the rub, to come home to shine
on the Parthenon. Persia is "somewhat at home" only for Ancient

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Greece to be "immediately at home," because for Hegel "among

the Greeks we feel ourselves immediately at home, for we are
in the region of Spirit."35 This rise-and-shine theory of history
is also pre-Copernican and geocentric in its cosmology. It does
not recognize that the world is not really flat, and that the Sun
also sets on China, India, and Persia, the three way-stations on
Hegel's choo-choo train theory of history (to change, not to mix,
the metaphor) that begins to click-and-clack in the Orient only to
come to full throttle in Greece and Rome and then move to roar
to full blast towards Berlin, there waiting to resume its transcontinental journey further West to the steps of Low Library to deliver
Columbia University's Core Curriculum.
This is how Hegel had drawn usdead and dying civilizationstogether as the pre-moments of History only to make the
moment of his story, and thus History, possible. Against Hegel, it
is Guha's project to set us free from the prose of that kind of world
history and enable us to roam in the historicality of the world itself,
in its everydayness, aware of being-with-others, conscious of the
relation of power that it entails. The project I thought is noble and
presided over by a sagacious figure, now attracting disciples from
other continents, Latin America in particular.
A good part of our discussion at the conclusion of the first day
of the Workshop, when John Beverly, Jon Kraniaskous, Alberto
Moreiras, and Ileana Rodriguez had reflected on Guha, converged
on the issue of the translatability of Subaltern Studies from its
originary South Asian context into other contexts, and it is to that
point that I thought I should address my principal position vis-avis Subaltern Studies.
If I were to start from the three provocative lectures that Guha
delivered at Columbia, I would have to acknowledge that I had
learned much from him, rejoiced in his virtuoso dismantling of
the Hegelian prose of history, the debunking of the invention
of world history, positing historicality, outlining the prose of
the world in its every dayness, in its being-with-others, and ultimately his judicious positing of wonder against experience, civil
society against the state, or in short the poetics of our resistance

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against theprosaics of power we face. Guha's dismantling of the

Hegelian prose of history, I thought, was very much reminiscent
of Spivak's discrediting of the poststructuralist critic European
sovereign subject and of Said's democratic criticism of European
humanism.
My trouble with Guha starts when I see that Mahabharata is
taken out of its own locality (reminiscent of Spivak taking Manava
Dharmsasdstra in a similar way, or of Said bringing A dab literary
humanism to bear on European humanism), adjacent to which my
own neighborhood is located, and made to have a conversation
with Hegel. I wonder about this conversation, question its validity,
and ask at what price we are forcing this conversation, and what
exactly are we to learn from it? I believe that this is a forced conversation, extracting a wonder and an itihasa from Mahabharata
and its neighborhood only to put it against Hegel's experience and
World History and thus once again thumb our nose at Hegel. This
sort of exercise I believe is no longer satisfying. It takes Hegel too
seriously, sells Mahabharata out of its neighborhood too cheaply,
betrays its historical location, and ultimately and most damagingly
trades in the locality of our historicality for the dubious engagement
in a Hegelian conversation. I do not believe that conversation is
possible. For one thing we do not speak the same language, for
another the idiomaticity (Spivak's word) of our literary imagining
is lost in such translations.
The answer to the Hegelian teleology (or the European presumption of having dismantled the sovereign subject, or indeed to
European exclusionary humanism) is neither a reverse teleology
(or a postcolonial critique of the European critic of the sovereign
subject or a democratic critique of European humanism) nor an
abstracted dialogue between East and West. The best tactic is not
a direct confrontation, a head-on collision. Ours is, and should
always remain, a guerilla warfare, by a band of lightweight insurgents, a gang of highway bandits, practicing apensiero debole, as
Gianni Vattimo calls our sort of insurrectionary operation, not a
direct metaphysical eye for a metaphysical eye confrontation. We
cannot afford it. It is tactically outdated, strategically misplaced,
and politically moot.

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Our task, I believe, is a recasting of the world map in which

primacy ought to be given to local geographies, to the polylocality
of our historical exigencies, the polyvocality of our voices, and
the polyfocality of our visions. Mahabharata dwells in a neighborhood and Hegel is not in that neighborhood. Shahnameh is in
that neighborhood, so is the Sirat Bani Hilal, as are al-Tabari's
Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, Mas'udi's Muruj al-Zahab, and
Ibn Qutaybah's 'Uyun al-Akhbar. To posit the sense of wonder
in Mahabharata, we need to break away from Hegel and connect
with Qazvini's Aja'ib al-Makhluqat. Tagore was in conversation
with Hafez, Hafez with Abu Nuwas, Allamah Iqbal with Rumi,
Rumi with Ibn 'Arabi. To break the rise-and-shine theory of history the last thing we need to do is to posit Hafez against Goethe,
except when we diagnose the colonial pathology of 'Allamah Iqbal
receiving his own neighbor Hafez from Goethe.
Theorizing Mahabharata in terms of its wonder, repetition,
and performance is the critical step towards any meaningful
comparative conception of literature and the society it constitutes
by mis/representing it. But that theorization needs to be in active
conversation with its neighboring, historically conversant texts
and contexts, and not the ahistorical, colonially mitigated, nonconversation with Hegel. The polylocality of our local cultures,
the poly vocality of our voices, and the polyfocality of our vision
render South Asia no longer an exclusive domain of the Hindu
culture. The real challenge to Hegel is not the sense of wonder
that we extract from Mahabharata to posit against his conception
of experience. The real threat to the whole gamut of power-basing historiography, Hegel's or Bernard Lewis' (to go from the
sublime to the ridiculous) is the border-crossing of Persian and
Parsees into India, of Arabic and Islam into Iran, so that in the
fifteenth century we end up with a peculiar situation where we
readily import Shi'i jurists from Jabal Amil and export poets to
Delhia terrible balance of trade in retrospective, I might add.
The fact is that if we want to write the history of Arabic poetry
we have to go to my hometown of Ahvaz to look for the great
Abu Nuwas, and the fact is that if we want to write the history
of Persian literature we have to go to Guha's home in Bengal is

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the real threat to Hegel and all his progenies in Alan Bloom and
Francis Fukuyama.
Both strategically and as a matter of once and for all decolonizing our analytical apparatus, the conversation can no longer be
conducted between a living Bengali and a dead German. A far
more critical conversation needs to be retrieved between our literal
and our oral, our visual, and our performative, our historical and
our contemporary registers. Whether we call them India, Iran, and
the Arab world, or South Asia, West Asia, and North Africa, we are
neighbors, kin to a common history, a collective living memory
that cannot be colonially divided or paradigmatically paralleled
because it is historically common.
The critique of the binary banality between "the East and the
West" is not to go for the non-committal, apolitical gray. Quite
the contrary. The critique of a singular binary is to retrieve and
underline the multiplicity of many binaries, their thematic topography and historical choreography, the vicissitudes of their
alterations, the performance of their alterity. It is in going from a
bifocal lens to a polyfocal vision, thereby retrieving the multiple
sites of resistance to power in the local immediacy of that power.
In the political culture I call home, the nomocentricity of its law
is challenged by the logocentricity of its philosophy, [and] both
by the homocentricity of its mysticism, and by the time the medieval institutions of Caliphate and Vizierate want to corner that
poly vocality in the mosque, madrasa, Khaneqah, or the palace, you
suddenly see arisen the magnificent replacement, the epistemic
shift, of the verbal by the visual, of the literary by the oral, of the
prosaic by the poetic. We seek refuge from the sacred Arabic in
the profane Persian, as we do from Persian Monarchy in Islamic
insurrectionary movements. We always dodge power, subvert
authorities. But not by a massive head-on collision. Ours is a
guerilla tactic. Hit and run. The Palestinian Intifada is no spontaneous combustion. There is a method to it. Escaping from one
language into another, moving from the prosaic into the poetic,
from the verbal to visual, from the literary to the oral, from the
truthful to the performative, from the real to the Active. Throwing
an analytical stone here, kidnapping a conceptual general there,

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blasting a theoretical bomb somewhere else, and then planting an

eloquent spokesman calling him Edward Saidand letting him
loose in the very heart of darkness, the bloated belly of the beast.
That's how we operate. Our resources do not allow for a head-on
narrative collision. We will lose. Should we, God forbid, win, we
only replace a categorical theocracy for a conceptual monarchy.
Thus ours is a permanent revolution.
Ours is no longer the task of correcting Hegel with the assumption that in Ramram Basu we have "the first work on Indian history,
written by an Indian in his own language, but in conformity with
the Western model of historical writing...." In this remark I noted
our most difficult task when I saw that Ranajit Guha so adamantly,
even, might I say, for all his extraordinarily gracious disposition
so angrily, dismissed Partha Chatterjee's suggestion on Friday
morning that Ramram Basu could have had an extraordinarily rich
historiographical literature under his own belt. Guha responded to
Chatterjee that he could only identify four potential sources that
Ramram Basu could have used, and that he found these sources of
an unworthy genre of annals and chronicles, "florid" in their languages, lacking in the elegance of closure or theoretical sophistication (hallmarks of "Western historiography," evidently). Guha even
insisted that he believed in what he calls "parallel paradigmatics,"
simultaneously running across the subcontinent, Perso-Islamic on
one side of the street, Sanskrit-Hindu on the other. Then and there
I found myself totally mystified, baffled and confused as to why
Guha so adamantly believed all these assumptions.
I could not, of course, allow myself the audacity of challenging
Guha on his knowledge of Persian sources of South Asian history
and historiography. There must be, I thought, a flaw in my understanding of his adamant refusal to pay heed to Partha Chatterjee's
reminder. But I could not erase my own memory of not four
books but forty libraries full of books in Persian constitutional
to the South Asian literary and social history, including works
of history, and even more specifically including books of world
history, written by Indian historians in one of their languages that
they call Persian, the same way that Americans call their language
English.

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What concerned me deeply is something frightfully more serious

than "the Persian in the air" of which Gayatri Spivak assured us on
that Friday. The Muslim conquest of the subcontinent began by
Mahmud of Ghazna in the year 977 of the Christian calendar and
until the collapse of the Mughal Empire in 1707 there has been a
consistent presence of the Islamic culture in India, with Persian
language and literature, historiography and philosophy, mysticism
and poetry constitutional to that culture. The Ghaznavids and the
Ghurids ruled over India from the tenth to the thirteenth century, the
Delhi Sultanates from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, the independent states of Bengal and Kashmir, Gujarat and Jawnpur, Malwa,
and Deccan from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, and ultimately
the Mughal Empire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
Extracting Persian from India is far more inane than trying to extract Arabic from Iran. No amount of linguistic nationalism can
change the magnificent face of a gloriously multicultural tapestry
that is the very prose of our historicality in that neck of the woods.
We are yet even completely to document and catalogue the collection of manuscripts from the subcontinent in Persian. The existing
collections in the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Museum, the
India Office, the Vienna Library, the Bodleian, the Lahore Library,
the Mar'ashi Library in Qom, the Astaneh Library in Mashhad, the
Majlis Library in Tehran, literally hundreds of private collections
in India, Iran, and Turkey, are the tip of the iceberg.
I had an equally difficult time subscribing to the notion of "parallel paradigmatics" when there is a whole genre in the Persian
translation of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. How could one
believe in parallel paradigmatics in our part of the world when
one of our most reliable sources to in preparing the critical edition of Shahnameh, the pride and joy of Persian poetic glory, is
in fact al-Bundari's Arabic translation of it, when the best commentary on Hafez's lyric poetry is in Turkish by Sudi, when the
great Persian scientist al-Biruni's Arabic Tahqiq ma li-l-Hindi
puts every anthropological ethnography of the last two hundred
years to shame, when Panchatantra was translated into a glorious
Arabic not just by any old Katib from Baghdad but by the great
Ibn al-Muqaffa' himself (the Edward Said and Michel Foucault of

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149

his time put together), translated into a glorious Arabic, and then
from the Arabic of Ibn al-Muqaffa' into the Persian of Iskandar
Beik Monshi as Kalilah wa Dimnah to become the master model
of generation of prose stylists from the Deccan to Baghdad. When
the most beautiful architectural monuments of the subcontinent,
its manuscripts and paintings, prose and poetry, philosophy and
mysticism, are as familiar to any Iranian as their own face, how
could we believe in "parallel paradigms" that presumes an element
of untouchability among the Hindu and Muslim components of
the South Asian experience?
Forget about art and architecture. If I were to take a Gramscian
inventory of myself, I am the walking defiance of all "parallel
paradigmatics." It is impossible for someone to believe in parallel
paradigmatics when his first name is Arabic, his second name of
Sanskrit origin, was born to a light-skinned Iranian mother and a
dark-skinned tropical father, raised on the beautiful voice of Umm
Kulthum, Abd al-Halim Hafiz, and Fairuz in the neighborhood of
the late Saddam Hussein and the Shahanshah of Iran, at the bank
of a river that carries the memory of all the ancient Mesopotamian
civilizations into a Persian Gulf, an Arabian Sea, and an Indian
Ocean. So I must really excuse myself, my living memory, and
the very manner and mood of assigning meanings to the world,
cannot possibly accommodate for a "parallel paradigmatics "
#

The common problem, I believe, with Said, Spivak, and Guha

is that their principal interlocutor remains a Active white male
Euro-American philosopher or literary theoristAuerbach, Derrida, or Hegel. The fact that they all write principally in English
may be the false premise of this troublesome denominator. The
white male interlocutor at the center of their respective takes on
our histories colors the entirety of their otherwise varied discourses
and corners them to enter a two-way tunnel in which "the East
and the West," or "the Center an the Periphery," is the presiding
metaphor. None of them, their defiant intellectual disposition
notwithstanding, has been able to escape the expectant gaze of

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Post-Orientalism

that white male interlocutor in order to free their vision and look
around and away to alternative sites of conversation, conversion,
rebellion. For Said (theflawsof) the European literary humanism,
for Spivak (the blind spots of) the European critique of the sovereign subject, and for Guha (the shortcomings of) the European
prose of historyand thus for all of them a Active white European
male intellectualremains central to their persuasive arguments,
trapping them ever so deeper into the hole they sought to climb and
cover. This critical demarcation of a white male interlocutor can no
longer be dismissed by Spivak's proverbial "indigenous theorists
[consider me] too committed to Western Theory." There are no
"indigenous theorists" left anymore, nor are there any "Western
theorists" left to rest in peace.
I believe the site of our contestations ought to move away from
any head on collision with the idea of Europe because the more we
oppose it the more we strengthen and breathe life into its ghostly
illusion. Guha, Spivak, and Said strike back at Europe with a
vengeanceand that makes them all quintessential^ Europeanists. No matter how strongly they oppose it, they in fact re-invent
it with that very opposition. They tend to protest too much. They
have, collectively, facilitated an inroad into the working of the
European ideological hegemony otherwise closed to the rest of the
world. The only way to resist and overcome the normative power
of that hegemony is to cultivate regional sites of cross-cultural
conversation removed from presumed centers of cosmopolitan
power. The geopolitics of that power, as the globalized capital
it seeks to serve and the international relation of labor it seeks to
dominate, has no center or periphery, knows neither an East nor a
West. It has devised an electronic capitalism with a twenty-fourhour working clock on whose handles the sun never sets. "The
West" is thus long since dead. It will have to cease to function as
an interlocutor for the world, for only in that Active but powerful
capacity it has secured a vicarious life for itself.
As we seek polyfocal sites of resistance to the amorphous
power thus formed, I also believe we should not put all our combative eggs in one ideological or theoretical basket and join any

I Am Not a Subalternist

151

bandwagon of Subaltern or any other systematized Studies. It is

dangerous for all of us to congregate at one time at one place. At
the conclusion of that conference formed around Guha's lectures
I remember I could not doubt Guha and I could not forget those
Low Library loads of Persian sources. Then I was led to believe
that there must be something constitutional about the practice,
program, or the critical claim of Subaltern Studies that dis-invites
me as both a scholar and as an activist. But I didn't mourn that
dis-invitation. On the contrary. IjoinedAlbertoMoreirasineven
more emphatically than him celebrating it.
I believe that in the spirit of subaltemity we should not all jump
on its bandwagon. It is great that our South Asian colleagues could
theorize themselves so magnificentlyeven though not so persuasively. They still have much to teach us. But I believe I'd rather
stick to my own guns. Ours is a guerilla warfare. All metanarratives are debunked. Subaltern Studies included. On this particular
occasion, I joined John Beverly in denouncing Subaltern Studies
as an academic exercise in the name of Subaltemity. Ours must
remain a hit-and-run operation. If we all band together for one
massive epistemic assault at the foundation of the Euro-American
sovereign subject, I am afraid we might be narratively ambushed. I
think that we need to disband, and target Hegel, Derrida, and Auerbach, or Modernity, Eurocentricism, and Globalization, separately,
from the convergent and conversant sides of Sierra Nevada.
I too hope that we never come to a consensus as to what hegemony means. What a great lesson has Ranajit Guha taught us in
that conference through his wise laughter with the Latin Americanists! The project of the subaltern is to bring to an end the prose of
world history, Guha taught us that day, by a restitution of the prose
of the world historicality. What a great line, what a lasting lesson!
But can, as Alberto Moreiras rightly warned us, a restitution of the
prose of world historicality put an end to subaltemity. I echoed
Moreiras' critical judgment that that split is not a bad thing. And
I added that it was a strategic necessity.
In short, I believe that ours is a simultaneous task of solidarity
and difference. Our solidarity is through correcting our collective
vision by pointing to our blind spots and covering each other's

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backs. We are a band of sisters and brothers at war with local

manners of power and global maters of abused labor. In heeding
Moreiras' warning on hegemony and subalternity, I would insist
on banking on our differences but investing in our solidarity (and
these must remain the limits of our stealing capitalist metaphors).
We are not all South Asians, but the South Asian is in all of us. That
we are not all South Asians makes for the strength of our differences, that the South Asian is in all of us makes for our solidarity.
In order to cultivate our solidarity politically, we need to document
our differences epistemically. Our differences will prevent us from
marching to our own death trap in yet another metanarrative. Our
solidarity will prevent us from being degenerated into irrelevant
specialists, making academic careers out of people's miseries.
Subalternity in short is the polyvocality of our dissent. In this
idea we are not doing anything but heeding the dialectical wisdom
of the master dialectician himself when he confessed that "Je ne
suis pas Marxister In that spirit, "I am not a Subalternist."
Notes
1.

2.
3.

4.
5.
6.
7.

An earlier and much shorter version of this essay was delivered in a conference called "Subaltern Studies at Large," which Gayatri Spivak and I
organized at Columbia University on November 10-11th, 2000. A Spanish
translation of that shorter version has appeared as "No Soy Subalternista"
in Convergencia de Tiempos: Estudios Subalternos/Contextos LatinoAmericanos Estado Cultura Subalternidad, edited by Ileana Rodriguez,
Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001: 49-59. Ranajit Guha's presentation at that conference was subsequently published as History at the Limit
of World-History, Italian Academy Lecture Series, New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden. New York: Viking, 1952: 261.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Cary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271.
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 294.
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 271.
Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 271.
"'The ordering of space' that is ... constitutive of the sovereign nomos
is therefore not only a 'taking of land' (Landesnahme) ... but above all
a 'taking of the outside' (Ausnahme)." (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:
Soverign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen

I Am Not a Subalternist

153

[Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]: 19). This is as close as

Agamben ever gets to realizing that "the state of exception" he is after
is the condition of the colonial. There has never been a Landesnahme in
what he calls "Western Politics" without a simultaneous Ausnahmeand
Ausnahme isipso factoboth the colonial and the state of exception at
one and the same time.
8. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 272.
9. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 273.
10. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 296-297.
11. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 298.
12. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 280.
13. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 300.
14. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 301.
15. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 302.
16. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 304-305.
17. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 281.
18. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 305.
19. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 306
20. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 277-278.
21. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 277.
22. Edward Said, The World, The Text, The Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, 243.
23. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 280. Her reference is to Paul Bove's
"Intellectuals at War: Michel Foucault and the Analysis of Power," SubStance, 36/37 (1983).
24. See James Clifford's "On Orientalism," in The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988, 271. The essay was originally published
as a review of Edward Said's Orientalism in History and Theory, 19:2
(February 1980): 204-203.
25. For the details of Said's extraordinary efforts in this vein see his first posthumous book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2004.
26. Spivak, Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 294.
27. Take "the Orient" ("the East") out of "Europe" ("the West") and there will
remain no "Europe" ("The West"), and thus the absolute necessity of "the
Orient" ("the East") in the making of "Europe" ("the West.") "The East"
was the "state of exception" that made "Europe" into a rule, that made it
possible for "Europe" to assume itself the role of the rule. Agamben never
came to that recognition; he, to paraphrase Spivak, "has not moved (or
perhaps cannot move) into that arena."
28. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (op. cit.), 10.
29. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 10-11.

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Post-Orientalism

30. See Jiirgen Habermas, "An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the
Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason," in his The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1990, 294-326.
31. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 272.
32. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History. New York:
Dover Publications, 1956, 173
33. Hegel 1956, 221.
34. Hegel 1956,221.
35. Hegel 1956, 223.

4
The Creative Crisis of the Subject
"The Poet gave them faces, gestures, and garments, actualizing them
completely, because for him they belonged to reality and not to schemata of thought"Benedetto Croce, "Note sulla poesia italiana e
straniera del secolo decimonono: Ibsen" (1921)
For about a decade in the 1990s I was fascinated by the cinema
of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian revolutionary activist who finally opted to drop his gun and pick a camera, quite the opposite of
Che Guevara who decided to drop his medicine bag and pick up a
gunthough nevertheless in the same spirit. Throughout the course
of my intimate engagements with Mohsen Makhmalbaf's cinema,
and ultimately in the book I wrote on him,1 my primary concern
was to come to grips with his varied attempts at an aesthetic articulation of moral and normative agency beyond the inherited
limitation of a colonial subject. In my reading of Makhmalbaf's
cinema, I tried to see how his creative imagination defies the critical condition of the post/colonial subject by breaking through its
epistemic and narrative limitations. The source and purpose of
my entering the site of Makhmalbaf's cinema from this particular
angle were of course entirely connected to the question of subject
and the presumed crisis that it faced.
#

155

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Post-Orientalism

Here is one way of looking at the (creative) crisis of the colonial subject. Some two hundred years into the active history of
the field of Orientalism performing its discursive services as the
principal intelligence arm of colonialism, Edward Said dismantled
the nefarious edifice with one stroke of creative genius. With his
magisterial achievement in Orientalism (1978), Said ushered in
a generation of critical inquiry into the discursive constitution
of the colonial subject, and the manners in which that project
remained integral to the imperial imagining of the globe.2 About
two decades after the publication of Orientalism, Said published
his magnum opus, Culture and Imperialism (1994), as a sequel
to the principal arguments he had put forward in his most famous
book.3 While expanding massively on implicating the European
literary imagination in imperial designs upon the globe, in Culture
and Imperialism Said also navigated the manners and modes of
ideological and literary resistances to that will to planetary domination. The combined effect of these two books has been global
in dimension and cross-disciplinary in consequencenamely,
the universal implication of the moral imaginary of "the West"
(as it called itself and was thus designated by all its Others) in a
predatory will to rule and dominate the world by systematically
manufacturing and denying other (and Othered) cultures at one and
the same time. When in April 2003, Edward Said's colleagues at
Columbia University celebrated the Silver Jubilee of the publication of Orientalism, major scholars and public intellectuals from
around the world came to New York to mark their debt to his
path-breaking achievements. At the time of his untimely death on
25 September 2003, Edward Said had single-handedly redefined
the field of literary criticism and established the field of cultural
studieswith his Orientalism and its persuasive argument on the
colonial fabrication of a subservient non-European subject at the
heart of that movement.
As had all other great and timely texts, Orientalism created all
sorts of intended and unintended ripples, positive and negative
reactions, to which Edward Said himself responded either at the

The Creative Crisis of the Subject

157

time or else in subsequent editions of his book. There were obvious hostile reactions from professional Orientalists like Bernard
Lewis that were entirely predictable (theoretically mute) and uselessdespite the fact that Said himself spent an inordinate amount
of time responding to them. Among the more cogent (theoretically
consequential) criticism of Orientalism soon after its publication,
however, was one by the distinguished American historian James
Clifford who in his 1980 review of the book took Said's principal
manner (if not the matter) of argument to task. In his review,4
James Clifford pointed out a central paradox in Said's criticism of
"Orientalism"namely its "relapse into the essentializing modes
it attacks," and for its being "ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism."5 Here Clifford faults Said
for using Michel Foucault to dismantle the edifice of Orientalism,
and yet neglecting him when it came to his own adamant (though
implicit in Orientalism) insistence on the centrality of a knowing
and sovereign subjectthe proverbial Cartesian cogito. Said, in
other words, was being representational precisely at a time that he
was criticizing representation. The problem was not, as it was later
misunderstood, just limited to the assumption that Said had crossessentialized both the Orient and the Occident by totalizing them
into two eternal camps. The more serious challenge was that he, the
critic, had assumed the position of a sovereign, knowing subject,
which was at the epistemic root of the Enlightenment predicates
of the colonial manufacturing of an Orient. His vision, in other
words, was blinded by his own insight.6 To be sure, Clifford himself in his review occasionally lapsed into expecting Said to say
what exactly "Orient" was if it were not what the Orientalists had
said it waswhich effectively contradicted his own point. But the
more serious challenge he had put to Said, namely his humanistic
assumption of a sovereign, knowing subject, remained valid and
survived any misreadings of Orientalism,
James Clifford's cogent point notwithstanding, and the misplaced criticism of latter-day Orientalists equally noted, Edward
Said's Orientalism proceeded to have a lasting influence on a wide
range of academic disciplines and critical movementsperhaps

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the most significant of which was the rise of what is now called
Postcolonial Studies, particularly in the domain of Subaltern
Studies. Partially under the influence of Edward Said but equally
attentive to a resurgent interest in one of Said's major sources of
inspiration Antonio Gramsci, beginning in the early 1980s, a collective of distinguished historians of South Asia, led by Ranajit
Guha and including such eminent scholars of the field as Partha
Chatterjee, Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Gyanendra Pandey, Ajit
K. Chaudhury, and Gyan Prakash (among others) revolutionized
the field of historiography by taking on the task of systematically
narrating the repressed history of the masses seriously.7 The theoretical and historiographical implications of the Subaltern Studies
soon spread far beyond its originary geography of South Asia. As
I noted in the previous chapter, in a conference called "Subaltern
Studies at Large" held at Columbia University on November 10,
2000, Ranajit Guha's colleagues took advantage of his residency at
Casa Italiana and brought together historians from Latin America,
Asia, and Africa discussing the manners in which the idea had
spread far beyond its South Asian domain.8 The principal task of
this collective was to generate a South Asian history from bellow,
speaking the unspoken truth of the denied and denigrated. Having
been silenced for a long time by and through imperial domination
and colonial de-subjection, the subalterns had started, as it were,
talking.
Beyond Orientalism proper, Edward Said himself pushed forward with his eloquent defense of the right of Palestinian people
not just for self-determination but more immediately for self-representationthat they need not be represented (to paraphrase his
ironic citation of Karl Marx's famous phrase at the beginning of
Orientalism), that they can represent themselves. Beginning with
the war of 1967 until his untimely death in 2003, Edward Said
was the most powerful voice speaking on behalf of the plight of
Palestinians. His critic of the colonial fabrication of the Orientalmapping a subject in order to conquer and subjugate it-did
not remain limited to a mere academic exercise in analytic dismantling of a discursive constitution of overpowered subject. His next

The Creative Crisis of the Subject

159

step was to speak, to narrate, to navigate a vision and a perspective

on the predicament of a much maligned and systematically brutalized people. In the title words of one of his major essays in this
endeavor, "Permission to Narrate" (1984),9 Said articulated the
terms of a defiant narrative in which a dispossessed people are to
tell their own stories. "Facts do not at all speak for themselves,
but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and
articulate them. Such a narrative has to have a beginning and
an end: in the Palestinian case, homeland for the resolution of
its exiles since 1948."10 From the heart of Palestinian national
liberation movement, Said spoke as a defiant subject, refusing
the fate of history. The eloquence and the force of Said's defiant
voice soon became contagious and people from around the world
echoed his voice and talked back to Empire. The subaltern was
speaking loud and clear"for indeed," he insisted, "the subaltern
can speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth
century eloquently attests."11
More than a decade after the publication of Orientalism (1978)
and well into its dominant presence in the fields of Postcolonial
and Subaltern Studies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published her
by now legendary essay "Can the Subaltern Speak" (1988) where
she took the relatively gentle reminder of James Clifford's point
about Orientalism, made almost a decade earlier in 1980, to a far
more radical critic of the nature and function of the manners of
critical representations that inadvertently collapse into essentializing and totalizing pitfalls.12
In this essay, as I began to demonstrate in some detail in the previous chapter, Spivak sought to expose the paradox at the heart of
any postcolonial attempt at dismantling the discursive constitution
of the colonial subject. She argued that the very epistemic assumptions of postcoloniality in fact perpetuate the selfsame epistemic
foregrounding of colonialityfrom its economic principles to its
political power and ultimately down to its cultural hegemonies. The
principle target of Spivak's essay, as the title suggests, is the manner of knowledge production about the subaltern, taking to task the
fundamental presumptions of the postcolonial critic in representing

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anything at all. A certain presumptuous sovereignty of the knowing subject is detected in the figure of the postcolonial critic that
Spivak wishes to take to task and show that he (and the masculinist assumptions of that sovereign subject is itself a principal issue
for Spivak) is in fact complicit in de-subjecting the subalterns by
virtue of a constitutional denial of their heterogeneityin effect
perpetrating against them a severe epistemic violence. The subaltern is not a collective individualthe subaltern is heterogeneous,
gendered, classed, cultured. The subaltern cannot be represented
without being ipso facto violated. Representing them perpetrates
an epistemic violence perpetrated on the fact of their heterogeneity, unrepresentability. There is a constitutional problem in such
a logocentric representation of the subaltern, Spivak contends,
because in effect it ossifies the relation of power operative in the
very formation of the denied and denigrated colonial subject. So
as much as Spivak supports and applauds the project of Subaltern
Studies collective, of which she is in fact a member, she believes
that it is wrong of them to assume that they have given voice to
"the Subaltern" because by assuming so they have in fact extended
the cultural domain of the European sovereign subjectuncriticallyall around the globe. Spivak goes to the source of that
presumed sovereignty and takes to task even the so-called "critic
of the sovereign subject" in the heart of Europe by showing how
from Derrida to Foucault (less the former than the latter), they
have in fact fallen much short of any critical dismantling of the
sovereign subject that is globalinclusive of the colonial fact of
de-subjection. She is just as critical of what she calls the "internationalist" Marxism for equally essentializing the subaltern. She
concludes that Subaltern Studies, Internationalist Marxism, and
European criticism of the sovereign subject are united in the assumption that there is a pure form of consciousness. On the French
scene, there is a shuffling of signifiers: "the unconscious" or "the
subject-in-oppression" clandestinely fills the space of "the pure
form of consciousness." In orthodox "internationalist" intellectual
Marxism, whether in the First World or the Third, the pure form of
consciousness remains an idealistic bedrock which, dismissed as a
second-order problem, often earns it the reputation of racism and

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161

sexism. In the Subaltern Studies group it needs development according to the unacknowledged terms of its own articulation."13
By raising the disquieting question "can the subaltern speak,"
Spivak throws a monkey wrench at the whole question of representation, targeting both the Orientalists and the Orientals, as it
were, disallowing them both to speak on behalf of what George
Herbert Mead a couple of generations before these issues were
raised would have called a generalized Other14because by virtue of this essentializing of that generalized Other as "Subaltern,"
the postcolonial critics are in fact confirming it in its subordinate
relation of power to neo/colonialism. Although in her essay,
Spivak is far gentler with the postcolonial Subalternists than she
is with the European poststructuralists, she has nevertheless told
them very firmly that they are both in effect doing the contrary of
what they say they wish to dothat their vision is indeed blinded
by their own insight, their purposeful deed defeated by the force
of their own argument. So the Subalternists are damned if they
do (represent the subaltern) and damned if they don'tbecause
in one case they are essentializing them and in the other they are
remaining silent in sight of unconscionable atrocities.
If Spivak were to be read on face value, even she could be (and
she has been)15 accused of essentialism of her own, of recasting
the world precisely in its colonial bifurcation between the First
and the Restfailing to see the structural similarities between the
two sides of the colonial divide that in fact under the code-name
globalization now shows the clear signs of its collapse. The power
of Spivak's question, however, is not in its presumed binary that it
perpetuates, but in the transcendental nature of the issue she raises,
namely can the subaltern speak a subaltern language constitutional
to a liberation lexicon domestic to the condition of subalternity
that does not further trap him/her in that condition? The question is not as much a matter of if and when the subaltern speaks
as whether she can be heard. Quite to the contrary. The question
is that when she does speak she is heard and understood all too
easily because she speaks a familiar languagethe language of
her oppressors. The question is the dialectic of interlocution in

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which the subaltern is caught, that her oppressor has always already
established the language of the conversationthat even when the
subaltern activists, scholars, and critics come to speak on her behalf
they speak the language of the oppressor, share the metaphors of
his imagination, invoke the sovereignty of his subjectby virtue
of the hegemony he has already consolidated in the universe of
meaning within which a speecheven the colonial's anti-colonial
speechis understood.16
The danger that threatens Spivak's position is to turn the question
of the subaltern (as the signifier for the economically disenfranchised, politically oppressed, discursively silenced, and culturally
denied) into a purely discursive proposition. In the real world, the
subalternas all of thoserevolts, commits acts of transgressive
violence, kills its oppressors and occupiers and is killed in return
(Palestine is the principal and Afghanistan and Iraq the most recent
sites of such actions). The question of representation (both speech
and phenomenon) is very much limited to the matter of the intellectualsacademic or otherwisereflecting on such matters very
much as bystanders (not as militant participants). Despite the fact
that this tendency remains a serious limitation of Spivak's essay, it
does not mean that the question that she raises is inconsequential
on the ground, where the subaltern revolts.
The implications of Spivak's argument were not limited to
discursive representations. There were obvious political consequences to her theoretical speculations. If she were to be taken at
face value, how would any activist raise her voice and say anything
on behalf of anything? The rampant charges of political impotence
systematically brought against the deconstructivists was here in
full view. Because she is a committed activist herself, Spivak
soon realized the impossibility of the situation in which she had
theoretically cornered her own colleagues and comrades. In the
subsequent concept of "strategic essentialism," Spivak sought to
redress this limitation and posit specific positions where essentialism can be effectively (politically) used as a strategy against itself:
"A strategic use of positivist essentialism," she now declared, is
perfectly viable "in a scrupulously visible political interest."17

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The fate of Subaltern Studies meandered after Spivak's critical

intervention and continued either in the politically progressive and
discursively groundbreaking scholarship of such members of the
collective as Partha Chatterjee and Gyan Prakash, or were else rerouted into the bourgeois banality of Homi Bhabha's naval-gazing
into the abyss of "liminality," or else towards the retrograde attempt
at rescuing the project of European Enlightenment in the disguise
of "Provincializing Europe" by Dipesh Chakrabarty.18 Ranajit
Guha himself, in his lectures at Casa Italiana, later published as
History at the Limit of World-Historyy and as I noted in the previous chapter, proceeded to resuscitate the ghost of Hegel and have
it encounter Indian epic narratives as alternative historiography.
So the question of the sovereign subject and its imperial extension
into colonial domains and postcolonial studies gradually turned
mute and moot within the domain of Subaltern Studies proper.
In subsequent editions of Orientalism, Edward Said himself
responded extensively and persuasively to all sorts of charges
of essentialism and "residual humanism" in his groundbreaking
book. In one particularly significant point in his 1995 afterword to
Orientalism, he says, "Among American and British academics
of a decidedly rigorous and unyielding stripe, Orientalism, and
indeed all of my other work, has come in for disapproving attacks
because of its 'residual' humanism, its theoretical inconsistencies,
its insufficient, perhaps even sentimental, treatment of agency. I
am glad that it has! Orientalism is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine."19 Later in his 2003 preface to Orientalism, Said
continued to insist on his humanistic predilection: "My idea in
Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of
struggle.... I have called what I try to do "humanism," a word I
continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the
term by sophisticated post-modern critics."20 The combination
of these two assertionsthat "Orientalism is a partisan book, not
a theoretical machine" and Said's defiant humanismis what
ultimately rescues his entanglement with the thorny issue of the
sovereign subject and any sort of essentialism that might remain
contingent on it.
Said's "stubborn humanism," as he put it, finally came to a

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succinct theoretical articulation in his first posthumous book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), in which he provides a
detailed re-articulation of his unflinching conviction in humanism
by way of resuming a dialogue with James Clifford's detection of
the central paradox of the sovereign subject and essentialism in
Orientalism. Early in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said
begins by agreeing with Clifford's criticism and conceding that
in many ways Clifford was right, since during the 1960's and 1970's the
advent of the French theory in the humanistic departments of American
and English universities had brought about a severe if not crippling
defeat of what was considered traditional humanism by the forces of
structuralism and post-structuralism, both of which professed the death
of man-the-author and asserted the preeminence of antihumanist systems
such as those found in the work of Levi-Strauss, Foucault himself, and
Roland Barthes. The sovereignty of the subjectto use the technical
phrase for what Enlightenment thought did with Descartes' notion of
the cogito, which was to make it the center of all human knowledge
and hence capable of essentializing thought in itselfwas challenged
by what Foucault and Levi-Strauss carried forward from the work of
thinkers such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and the linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure. This group of pioneers showed, in effect, that the existence of
systems of thinking and perceiving transcended the power of individual
subjects, individual humans who were inside those systems (systems
such as Freud's "unconscious" or Marx's "capital") and therefore had no
power over them, only the choice either to use or be used by them. This
of course flatly contradicts the core of humanistic thought, and hence
the individual cogito was displaced, or demoted, to the status of illusory
autonomy or fiction.21
Upon this admission, Said then proceeds to articulate his vision
of humanism, which is vastly different from "the kind of totalizing
and essentializing trends that Clifford identified," adding further
that he did not agree with "the argument put forward in the wake
of structuralist antihumanism by postmodernism or by its dismissive attitudes to what Jean-Francois Lyotard famously called the
grand narratives of enlightenment and emancipation." 22 Instead,
Said insists that there is a kind of non-totalizing, non-essentializing
humanism that he advocates and describes as being

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165

Critical of humanism in the name of humanism, and that schooled in

its abuses by the experiences of Eurocentricism and empire, one could
fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text
and language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past
from, say, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from
Richard Poirier.23
Guided by this principle, Said spends the rest of his book articulating the particular terms of his democratic criticism, paving the
way towards a more inclusive humanism. Whether or not Said's
attempt to save (European) humanism by liberating it from its
Eurocentricity is a successful enterprise or in fact joins Habermas'
attempt at saving the Enlightenment modernity by opening it to
his theory of communicative action (both of which are articulated
in a political vacuum)24 what remains important in Said's project
is his reference to his own political activism as the measure of his
theoretical position about the necessity of a knowing (in his case
defiant) subject. As he puts it himself:
As a fair degree of my own political and social activism has assured
me, people all over the world can be and are moved by ideals of justice
and equalitythe South African victory in the liberation struggle is a
perfect case in pointand the afflicted notion that humanistic ideals
of liberty and learning still supply most disadvantaged people with the
energy to resist unjust war and military occupation, for instance, and to
try to overturn despotism and tyranny, both strike me as ideas that are
alive and well.25
*

Said's conclusion here points to the constitution of a defiant

subject that has remained by and large moot in his work. Much
of the confusion about Said's presumed essentialism stems from
a mis/reading of Orientalism as a book that dismantles the Orient
of the Orientalists without suggesting what and where the real orient is. Even as astute a critic as James Clifford says, "frequently
he [Said] suggests that a text or tradition distorts, dominates, or
ignores some real or authentic feature of the Orient. Elsewhere,
however, he denies the existence of any "real Orient," and in this

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he is more rigorously faithful to Foucault and the other radical

critics of representation whom he cites.... Orientalist inauthenticity is not answered by any authenticity."26 That last sentence in
Clifford's criticism stems from a very deep confusion in reading
Orientalism as a book about locations, while it is in fact an argument about relations. Edward Said's Orientalism is not a better
tourist guide to Lebanon or India than the one that the Orientalists
from Bernard Lewis to Thomas Friedman have producedreplacing a more accurate "Orient" for a false, vicious, or outdated
one. Orientalism is the unpacking of a relation of power, and the
discursive constitution of a space to be dominated and within it a
subject to be servile.
In defiance of that constituted servility, the only language that
the subaltern can speak with precision and clarity, and with the
hope of being understood, is the language of violence. Consider
the fact that towards the end of her essay, "Can the Subaltern
Speak?" Spivak has no recourse to restore agency except through
a supremely paradoxical act of violencethe suicidal violence of
Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri. That in Bhaduri's case her suicidal violence was in defiance of a revolutionary command to assassinate a
political opponent, and in the cases of the Vietnamese or Palestinian
suicidal violence the domain of violence is embracive, makes no
difference so far as the violent restitution of agency is corned.
Long before Frantz Fanon actively theorized the defiant violence
constitutional to anticolonial movements, perhaps the greatest
theorist of violence in the twentieth century, George Sorel (18471922), had in his Reflections on Violence (1908) specifically
articulated the nature and function of violence as integral to the
social operation of capital. Sorel's was far more a description of
the violence structural to the operation of capital than & proscription of it. There is a globality of application to Sorel's description
when he says,
proletarian violence not only makes the future revolution certain, but
it seems also to be the only means by which the European nationsat
present stupefied by humanitarianismcan recover their former energy.
This kind of violence compels capitalism to restrict its attention solely
to its material role and tends to restore to it the warlike qualities which

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167

it formerly possessed. A growing and solidly organized working class

can compel the capitalist class to remainfirmin the industrial war. If a
united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich middle class, eager
for conquest, capitalist society will have reached its historical perfection.27
It is in recognition and response to this fact, discovered long before
Fanon put pen to paper, that Fanon declared:
The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become
its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear
to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called
in question by absolute violence.28
That ultimately both Edward Said's democratic criticism and
Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism fail either to salvage the
European Enlightenment humanism for the rest of the world or
else safeguard the colonial subject from an inevitable position of
servitude to the European sovereign subject that has ipso facto
essentialized and totalized the world into subservience is deeply
rooted in the historical and philosophical fact that at its very inception the European project was articulated in specifically exclusionary terms. The European project of capitalist modernityboth in
its sovereign constitution of the subject and in its Enlightenment
humanismcannot be salvaged for any use on its extended colonial
outposts because it is at its very metaphoric lexicon it was articulated in terms beneficial to a few and detrimental to the rest.
As Hegel was chiefly responsible for having written the colonial out of world history in the course of European modernity,
Immanuel Kant was the principal articulator of a European sovereign subject at the cost of all other peoplesthus gathered and
othered by being denied historical agency. Read in this light, the
three famous critiques of Immanuel Kant are not three innocent
philosophical treatises constituting a sovereign subject. Read in
this vein, the first critique, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and
1787) constitutes the European (and the European alone) as the
solitary knowing subjectsovereign and presiding over the world.
In its metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology, psychology, and

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ultimately theology, the first critique is exclusionary, territorial,

Christian, European.29 In articulating the Transcendental Doctrine
of Elements, Kant in effect posits a European subject presiding
over both a Transcendental Aesthetics (Space and Time) and a
Transcendental Logic (both an Analytic and a Dialectic). Whether
we move in the Analytic direction of Concepts and Principles or in
the Dialectic direction of Illusion and Pure Reason, the European
knowing Subject has placed itself in the advantageous position
of the omniscient narrator of his categorical destiny. The moral
imaginary of that destiny ends at the banks of Danubeas its
colonial claims hover around the globe. In the form of his moral
philosophy, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788) offers
freedom of will as the normative force of a knowable world that
he puts at the disposal of the knowing subject he had earlier articulated in the Critique of Pure Reason.
In addition to the centrality of the Christian God in Kant's
conception of both "pure" and "practical" reasons (and thus by
extension his articulation of the European sovereign subject), the
reason that for him and the European Enlightenment in general
the knowing subject is a sovereign European and the knowable
world the rest of the (non-European) world is perfectly evident in
black and white, as it were, in his much earlier, pre-critical, text,
Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763).
Here, Kant leaves no room for speculation as to who precisely the
sovereign (knowing) subject is. In a catalogue of racist dismissal
of every people on face of the earth except Europeans, his project is
far more serious than telling his European audience that they have a
superior sense of the sublime and the beautiful. By characterizing
the non-Europeans as constitutionally "degenerate," "unnatural,"
"pleasure-prone," "monstrous," "hideous," "despotic," "miserable,"
"ignorant," and above all "grotesque," he leaves no room for interpretation as to how we are to read his following assertion, upon the
speculation that something that a "Negro carpenter" said "might
be.. .something [that] deserved to be considered: But in short, this
fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what
he said was stupid."30 The racist nature of this statement should

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169

not prevent the far more serious point that Kant here is not merely
dismissing one human being or even a succession of cultures as
being constitutionally incapable of the superior (European) conceptions of the beautiful and the sublime. As is evident in his third
critique, The Critique of Judgment, the realm of the aesthetics for
Kant is where he puts his first two critiquesthe knowing subject
and the knowable worldto test, that his constituted European
subject is capable of navigating the indecisive subjectivity of the
beautiful. Far more than being racially inferior to the European
subject in matters of aesthetic, the non-European (the Oriental) is
part and parcel of the objectified (knowable) world, at the mercy
of the European knowable subject.31
While both Said and Spivak are trapped in the thorny predicament of European subject, in two fundamentally different but ultimately related ways, the subject of their concern, the post/colonial
subjectwhether in post-Independence India or in yet to be liberated Palestineneeds to be free and liberated. And that liberation is impossible except in the militant disposition of a defiant
subject whose agency is in opposing its historical fate. In between
Said's critical humanism and Spivak's strategic essentialism there
already dwells a defiant subject that they have left theoretically
under-theorized, at the very same time that they themselves have
politically personified it.
*

How is that defiant subject to be metexcept in revolutionary

praxis? In his Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault discovered how Europeans in their "Age of Reason," had to incarcerate
the "Unreason" in their asylum houses in order to believe in and
unleash the global claims of an instrumental reason. "The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth
century" he proposed,
affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect
words withoutfixedsyntax in which the exchange between madness and

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reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of

reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a
silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather
the archeology of that silence.32
What Foucault had discovered in the islands of a few scattered
European asylum houses had a far vaster continental abode that
he had categorically failed to see. Too much in a rush of excitement at having discovered the subterranean dungeons of European
Reason, Foucault did not look farther to see "the Orient," the
mainland of the European Unreason. In the course of their Age
of Reason Europeans crafted and constituted all their nightmarish
fears in the distant exoticism of an Orient they invented to loathe
and demonized to rule.
Unnoticed by Michel Foucault, it was left for Edward Said to
discover that continent and expose the diabolic roots of European
Orientalism, not only navigating a vast continent to rule, but a
madhouse to incarcerate their own frightened imagination. It is
the singular achievement of Edward Said to see and show how
European colonialism predicated its vast domination of the globe
on a systematic production of knowledge about an Orient they
wanted to rule. Extending yet another major discovery of Michel
Foucault, the organic link between knowledge and power, Edward
Said assayed the manner and mode of the colonial de-subjection
of the globe in order to rule the earth and deny its inhabitants
historical agency to say "No!"
Serious critics of Edward Said's Orientalism like James Clifford
soon noticed that in order to speak Said had had to partake in the
epistemic parameters of the same sovereign subject that he was set
to dismantle. Gayatri Spivak soon after that expanded that criticism to show how the entire discipline of Subaltern Studies was in
fact cross-essentializing both the European sovereign subject and
its colonial object of observation, as it indeed counter-totalized
the hidden epistemic assumptions of both. Her question, "Can
the Subaltern Speak?" was entirely rhetorical. For the subaltern
cannot speak except in the language of her oppressorsespecially
when extended by the ostensibly liberating mission of the postcolonial critic.

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171

As Edward Said's "stubborn humanism," as he put it, sought to

navigate the terrain of a democratic criticism where the knowing
subject is multifaceted and auto-critical, Spivak's own cul de sac
oscillated between the suicidal violence of revolutionary woman
activist, or else the dubious domains of a "strategic essentialism."
Whether they spoke from the relative peace of a postcolonial
India or the permanent war of the savagely colonized Palestine,
Spivak and Said remained trapped in their heroic efforts to rescue the (European) knowing subject and liberate it for historical
agency in a global act of emancipation. Where they failed in their
theoretical liberation, they succeeded in praxis in their own active
personification of two versions of a defiant subject that refuses to
accommodate power.
Integral to Said and Spivak's active personification of a defiant
subject in praxis is Fanon's revolutionary theorization of violence
as the modus operandi of a militant stand against the colonial logic
of the insanity of the capital. It was George Sorel, not Frantz Fanon,
who in his Reflections on Violence (1908) theorized violence as
the principle engine in the operation of capital, violence not even
for immediate political ends, violence as a substitution for reason,
violence extended into the realm of myth, that is to say violence
cast upon "a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before
any considered analysis are made, is capable of evoking as an
undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the
different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism against
modern society."33 What Fanon did was to mark the liberating
force of this violence specifically on the colonial site:
If we wish to describe it precisely, we mightfindit in the well-known
words: "The last shall befirstand thefirstlast." Decolonization is the
putting into practice of this sentence.... For if the last shall befirst,this
will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between
the two protagonists.... The native who decides to put the program into
practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all
times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with
prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.34

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*

My interest in Makhmalbaf and his cinema commenced from

the moment that I learned that when he was seventeen years old
he had picked up a knife to attack a police officer to steal his gun
to rob a bank to launch a revolution. When I met him for the first
time in August 1996 during the Locarno International Film Festival
he was a world-renowned filmmaker. The distancethe creative
crafting of a defiant subjectwas going to be the subject of the
book that I later wrote on him.
The defining moment of the colonial subjects is the violent defiance of their fate. In the dialectics of that defiance is the colonial a
knowing subject without being an agent of the colonial extension
of an essentializing, totalizing, and sovereign subject. The idea
of the "defiant subject" becomes theoretically feasible only in the
course of revolutionary praxis. My interest in Makhmalbaf's cinema was entirely rooted in his revolutionary character as a rebel.
His particular cinema is important precisely because he was once
a revolutionary activist, an Islamist militant who emerged from the
heat of a massive revolutionary mobilization to become one of its
most important visionaries. The aesthetic transmutation of his defiant disposition from a militant activist into a visionary filmmaker
is what is most significant about Makhmalbaf's cinemaand what
makes him a particularly poignant case in a radical reconsideration
of the crisis of the subject in post/colonial conditions.
My turn to Iranian cinema in general and Makhmalbaf's cinema
in particular followed the facing of a theoretical dead end in all
manners of (anti) colonial politics that effectively ossifies, even as
it tries to dismantle, the debilitating heritage of colonial modernity.
All nationalist anticolonial movements have written their ideological lexicon in terms domestic to colonial modernitycorroborating
the grand narrative of the "nation" and all its trappings, oppressing
sub-national solidarities, pre-empting cross-national liberation
movements. The reason that Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
is not a mere discursive critique of the sovereign subject and has
far-reaching implications in the domain of revolutionary praxis is

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173

that even when revolutions are launched on the ground they still
speak their defiance in the ideological language of the sovereign
subject they politically opposeat the very moment they epistemically adopt it. The experience of anticolonial movements over the
last two hundred years demonstrates very well the futility of any
political or ideological resistances to colonial modernity. In my
Theology of Discontent I sought to document how the presumed
political and ideological resistances to colonial modernity (the
Shah of Iran aggressively "modernizing" at the behest of and with
full military support of the Americans) have in fact acted as a trap
in which colonial subjects mimic its particular parameters, that
they are indeed dialectically predetermined in their revolutionary
resistance to colonial modernity to replicate its internal logic,
ossify its underlying metaphysical supposition of singular inevitability.35 People on the colonial edges of European modernity
are trapped, I had argued and demonstrated in that book, whether
they are enamored of its promises or if they oppose it through
a whole constellation of revolutionary uprisings. Revolutionary
resistances to colonialism may assume nativist (Islamist), nationalist, or socialist modes of resistancebut the result in all cases is
the same. All these modes of resistance to colonialism (through
which colonials have received European modernity) could not but
replicate the absence of historical agency assigned to the colonial
subject by way of writing it out of Hegelian history.
The emerging conception of "multiple modernities,"36 or anticolonial re/modulations of nationalism,37 do not make a particularly
persuasive case either, nor indeed does the native naturalization of
Soviet Socialism has historically done the colonized any good in
its aspirations towards an emancipatory conception of economic
growth, social justice, or political democracy (Soviet Socialism
in fact inaugurated a manner of colonialism of its ownboth
in economic and in cultural and ideological terms). The idea of
"alternative modernities" categorically disregards the aggressive
globalization of the operative forces of the capital long before the
term "globalization" assumed its current currency. By virtue of
the organizing forces of the capital, there was only one politically
dominant modernityand that was the European-based capitalist

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modernity, and the rest of the worldOrientalized, colored, coded,

colonized, Othered, ossified, eroticized, infantilized, eroticized,
anthropologized, museumized, catalogued, archived, studied,
distanced, dispatched, deniedreceived it from its wrong side,
its hidden shadow, its colonial end. Thus alienated, the colonized
world was not the passive recipient of all such atrocities. The
colonial world actively corroborated themweather it self-Orientalized itself and sought, or else resisted them in terms domestic
to the colonial modernity they thought they were fighting but in
effect consolidating, corroborating.
Islamism, nationalism, and socialism, as a triumvirate of ideological desperation, offered much in revolutionary mobilization
against colonialism but very little in discursive possibilities of
critically confronting colonial modernity because they have been,
ipso facto, partaking in the very same Enlightenment project that
has abnegated the colonial subject. If the colonized have distanced
themselves from it they have painted themselves into the corner
of nativist "traditions" beyond their control, and if they have been
attracted to its promises they did so in terms domestic to a colonial
modernity that had denied them agencyand thus spoken its language. By the end of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1977-1979),
in both its initial success and in its ultimate failure, it was quite
obvious that any form of ideological resistance to colonialism was
utterly delusionalbecause the colonized could not but speak
the language of the colonizer and thus negationally implicate the
validity of colonial modernity, imitate its parameters, whether they
celebrated or opposed it, and thus ossify its underlying metaphysics, perpetuate their own historical negation, contradict their own
necessary (autonomous, defiant) agency.
When in the course of the 1979 Iranian revolution the revolutionaries spoke they spoke Nationalism (of Mosaddiq and the
National Front variety), Socialism (of the Tudeh and Fada'ian-e
Khalq Guerrilla Organization range), and Islamism (of Ayatollah
Khomeini and Ali Shari'ati mixture). There were, of course, all
sorts of variations and interpenetrations in and among these revolutionary movements. But by and large they spoke in the tongue

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175

of the sovereign subject. They did, however, revolt, dismantle

the monarchy, disrupt the U.S. military and economic presence,
and establish a republic. In the process of doing so the militant
Islamists outmaneuvered both the nationalists and the socialists,
incorporated some of their projects and dismantled their political presence, and thus committed all sorts of criminal atrocities
against civil rights of its citizens. But the failure of the revolution
is ultimately in something far worse than all these put together.
The failure of the revolution is in its claim to ideological purity
having at its epistemic and emotive center a colonial conception
of "the West" as its principal interlocutor, and thus falling squarely
into the trap of replicating the European sovereign subjectnot
only in its reigning mullacracy but even in its oppositional forces
across the board: From the monarchists to the Mojahedin Khalq
Organization to the liberal nationalists and ultimately the secular
left. The experience of the Islamic revolution shows that when the
subaltern speaks s/he speaks the language of its oppressors, even
when s/he says "I want freedom"s/he says it in the language
of the European sovereign subjecteffectively corroborating
and cross-essentializing the colonially fabricated binary between
"Islam and the West."
Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open:
a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency
from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion
of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime
forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude,
subjection combatively out of humiliation. This possibility has
persistently materialized from the dawn of Iranian encounter with
colonial modernity and came to a crescendo in the course of the
Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911the very birth channel of revolutionary artists like Makhmalbaf. The most defiant
disposition of Iranian revolutionary character first and foremost
found its expressions in Persian prose and poetry. In the course
of the nineteenth century, revolutionary uprisings had a dialectical relationship with a robust rejuvenation of Persian prose riding
on the recent introduction of the printing machine, appearance of

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the first newspapers, translation of world literature into Persian,

and a phenomenal rise in revolutionary pamphleteeringall of
which culminated in the collapse of an absolutist monarchy and
the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Soon after the
success of the Constitutional Revolution, and during the course
of the twentieth century, first a radically revolutionized Persian
poetry (1900s-1930s), then a rich literary output (1930s-1970s),
and ultimately a multifaceted cinematic tradition (1960s-2000s)
emerged to map out the contours of this defiant subject. Much that
has happened in Iranian cinema of the last few decades is deeply
rooted in the fertile memory of this creative history.
Rooted in Iranian poetic and literary imagination, and in faceto-face conversation with the best in world cinema, a variety of
realismsplural, as in factual, actual, and virtualsoon became
evident in Iranian cinema and thus conducive to the creative
constitution of a historical agency beyond the pale of colonial
modernity.38 One can, as a result, dwell on Iranian cinema as an
analytical trope, taking full advantage of its global appeal, in order
to get the point across to a wider range of readership. The principal
objective in this challenge is to see how revolutionary re/subjection is creatively possible when people have been critically denied
agency in a colonially militated modernity. Having witnessed the
failure of ideological resistances to colonial modernity and realized them to be ipso facto incriminated at the very moment of their
articulation, we can reach for an understanding of the creative defiance of neo/colonial domination and its simultaneous constitution
of historical agency. What has been particularly promising in the
volcanic outburst of creative defiance of these realities in Iranian
cinema is not so much its anticolonial textures as its non-colonial
disposition. At its best, this art was not launched to resist colonial
modernity but to generate and sustain an entire topography of
contemporaneous presence in a history that was neither traditionally reactionary nor colonially modern, but inherently collapsing
those two debilitating binary oppositions by rendering them both
irrelevant. In this respect we may gradually move away from the
disease towards its cure. From an entirely neglected angle, we

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177

may come away from a critical encounter with colonial modernitysince the more its political consequences were opposed,
the stronger its metaphysical underpinnings became, dragging the
colonized people and all the radical revolutions they launched into
its epistemic and emotive quagmireand on towards a creative
reconstitution of reality in a way that wrested the arrested light of
emancipation from the heart of blinding darkness.
Thus reflecting and writing a book on Makhmalbaf, I had hoped
to have given a glimpse of what has happened in post-revolutionary Iran once its Islamic Revolution failed to liberate it from the
colonial disposition of its ideological imagination. I had also tried
to link this structural failure at the presumed periphery of global
capitalism to its privileged center. There is a structural similarity
between the crisis of the subject (and with that the material conditions that occasion and sustain that crisis) endemic to the colonial
edges of capitalist modernity and a similar crisis specific to the
moments of anxiety at its presumed centers. Such European theorists of this crisis as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jean
Baudrillard are of central significance in what I had to say in this
respectnot because I have a blind trust in their insights, or else
wish to provide an inconsequential gloss on their work. No. To
the degree that they have spoken from the heart of a European (or
what they call "Western") crisis (of the subject), then their reflections are crucial in any attempt in understanding what is happening
at the colonial and imperial edges of that proposition.
My single ambition in that book on Makhmalbaf was to detect
and articulate the evident aesthetics at the heart of his cinema.
My objective was to navigate through Makhmalbaf s cinema
and get closer to its revolutionary aesthetics, articulated by the
artist himself almost unconsciously. The aesthetic mutation of
violence into an assertive reconstitution of a defiant subject, as
I tried to show in this book, is evident throughout Makhmalbaf
cinema, but perhaps most visibly in "A Moment of Innocence"
(1996). In the final scene, where Makhmalbaf brings the police
officer and the would-be assassin together, one with a gun and the
other with a knife, imaginatively re-narrating a critical moment in

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Makhmalbaf's own history into a creative reconstitution of agency,

instead of the assassin's knife and the officer's gun we see their
extended hands bringing forth a piece of bread and a flowerpot
into the graceful embrace of a beautiful woman's gazethe would
be accomplice in an assassination attempt. This is the re-enactment of a moment in Makhmalbaf's own militant history when he
took a knife to attack a police officer to steal his gun, and when
he failed the police officer almost killed him on the spot, except
that the trigger in his gun was stuck. The visual mutation of the
knife and the gun into a flowerpot and a piece of bread does not
erase the fact of their memorial historythat in fact that piece of
bread is a knife (for the knife was raised to secure bread for the
hungry), and that flowerpot is a gun (meant to be stolen in no less
sign of love for a brutalized nation). Throughout his cinematic
career, Makhmalbaf has remained that seventeen-year-old rebel,
reaching for his knife (now metamorphosed into the slicer on his
editing machine) to take a stab at history and slice a diagonal cut
into the side of its brutal verdictshealing the wounds of humanity
on the very edge of that cut. The gun that he would have stolen
if he were successful in his initial attempt is now his camera, successfully shooting one vision of his nation's emancipation after
another. He has hidden that violent reach for justice in the graceful
choreography of a cinema that still resonates with an emancipatory
violence, no matter how beautifully you slice it.
Notes
1.

See my Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Revel Filmmaker (London:

I. B. Tauris, 2007).
2. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
3. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books,
1994).
4. See James Clifford's review of Orientalism in History and Theory 19:2 (February 1980): 204-223; reprinted as "On Orientalism" in James Clifford's
Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and
Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 255-276.
5. Ibid., 271.
6. Blindness and insight is the running theme of Paul de Man's influential
collection of essays, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of

The Creative Crisis of the Subject

7.

8.

9.

10.
11.
12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

179

Contemporary Criticism (Theory & History of Literature) (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
The first series of essays by the subaltern collective appeared in Ranajit
Guha's edited volume Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History
& Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1982); and the most
recent is Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty's edited volume Subaltern
Studies IX (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1996).
For more details on this conference see the previous chapter. A collection
of the essays presented at this conference plus others was later translated
into Spanish and edited into a volume by Ileana Rodriguez, Convergencia
de Tiempos: Estudios Subalternos/Contextos Latinoamericanos Estado,
Cultura, Subalternidad (Atlanta and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). For
Ranajit Guha's own lectures in this conference see his History at the
Limit of World-history (Italian Academy Lectures) (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002).
See Edward Said, "Permission to Narrate," in London Review of Books
(February 16-29, 1984), 6(3): 13-17; re-printed in Edward Said's Politics
of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 19691994 (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 247-268.
Ibid., 254.
See Edward Said's 1994 Afterword to Orientalism (London: Penguin,
1994), 335.
See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Eds), Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 271-313.
Ibid., 286. The crisis of the European subject has of course a life of its
own. For a series of reflections on this see Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the
Subject (New York: Other Press, 2000).
See Charles W. Morris (Ed.), Works of George Herbert Mead: Volume 1:
Mind, Self& Societyfrom the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1934), 154-156.
See, for example, the exchange between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," and Dipesh Chakrabarty's
"Invitation to a Dialogue," in Ranajit Guha (Ed), Subaltern Studies IV (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1985); as well as A. Chakrabarty and
A. Chaudhury's "Can the Sa(va)ge Speak?" in Rethinking Marxism 9 (2):
113-130, where the authors provide a far more nuanced re-articulation of
Spivak's conception of the Subaltern.
In an essay on the so-called "Chancellor incident," Richard Poirier noted
precisely this absence of a universe of meaning to understand a specific
phenomenon. John Chancellor was a prominent American television
commentator who once while reporting from Beirut (under bombardment
by the Israelis in 1982) referred to Israeli "savagery" and "imperialism."

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Post-Orientalism

Once in Israel he effectively reversed himself and said that Israel did not
mean to do what it did! In his essay, "Watching the Evening News: The
Chancellor Incident" (Raritan 2:2; Fall 1982), Pokier noted how "Chancellor unwittingly exposed the degree to which the structure of the evening
news depends on ideas of reality determined by the political and social
discourse already empowered outside the newsroom" (8). For an elaboration of Poirier's point see Edward Said's "Permission to Narrate," op. cit.,
255-256.
17. See Gayatri Spivak, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works ofGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 214. For further references
to Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism" see her interview with Ellen
Rooney in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993),
1-23. In addition to Gayatri Spivak's theorization of it, the term "strategic
essentialism" has been in circulation among such other feminist theorists as
Diana Fusssee her Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Elizabeth Groszsee her Volatile
Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation & Difference) (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1994); see also Elizabeth
Grosz's "Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism," in Traveling
Theories, Traveling Theorists, Inscriptions 5, Edited by James Clifford and
Vivek Dhareshwar (Santa Cruz, CA: Center for Cultural Studies, 1989).
http://humwww.ucsc.edu/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/v5_top.
html. For an examination of the nuances of Spivak's use of "strategic essentialism" see Caryl Flinn, "The Body in the (Virgin) Machine." Arachne
(1996), 3(2): 50 and 66. In her most recent book, A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason, Spivak suggests that "the stringent binary opposition between positivism/essentialism .. .and "theory".. .may in fact be spurious. Apart from
repressing the ambiguous complicity between essentialism and criticism
of positivism.. .it also errs by implying that positivism is not a theory.. .yet
I remain generally sympathetic to aligning feminism with the critique of
positivism and the defatishization of the concrete." (See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the
Vanishing Present [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999],
282-283).
18. For Homi Bhabha's diatribe against Edward Said after his untimely death,
disguised as a tribute, in which he effectively accuses Said of allowing
his Oriental passion to overcome his rational faculties and thus condone
suicidal violence, see "Untimely Ends: Homi K. Bhabha on Edward Said."
Art Forum, February 2004. For a cogent critique of Homi Bhabha's attack
on Edward Said see Joseph Massad's "Intellectual Life of Edward Said," in
Journal of Palestine Studies (Special Issue in Honor of Edward Said) 131:
Volume XXXIE: Number 3, Spring 2004: 7-22. To see how Homi Bhabha's
characterization of Edward Said matches and reflects that of Said's Zionist

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181

opponents, see Ella Shohat, "Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of

National Narration," in Michael Sprinkler (Ed), Edward Said: A Critical
Reader(Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 125-128. As for Dipesh Chakrabarty,
see his Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000), where branding as "nativist" he dismisses all manners of resistance
to the imperial imaginary of the European Enlightenment, because in
his judgment "the universals propounded by European Enlightenment
remain indispensable to any social critique that seeks to address issues of
social justice and equity." There are even more disturbing implications to
Chakrabarty's licentious introduction of religious symbolics and institutions into cosmopolitan politics that in his preferred context of South Asian
politicshis "archive," as he puts itand its paralyzing communal warfare
under BJP Hindu fundamentalism, is quite frighteningnot to speak of
its implications for the Christian Empire, the Jewish State, and the Islamic
Republic alike.
19. See Edward Said, Orientalism (London and New York: Penguin Books,
1995), 340.
20. Ibid., xvii.
21. See Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 9-10.
22. Ibid., 10.
23. Ibid., 10-11.
24. On Habermas' attempt at resolving the issue of the sovereign subject see his
"An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative
versus Subject-Centered Reason," in Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical
Discourse ofModernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 294-326. On
debates surrounding Habermas' famous notion of "the unfinished project of
Modernity," see Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (Eds.),
Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997). An earlier collection of essays reflecting on the same issue is Richard J. Bernstein (Ed.), Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1985).
25. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, op. cit: 10.
26. Clifford, "On Orientalism," op. cit., 260.
27. See George Sorel, Reflections on Violence, translated by T. E. Hulme and
J. Roth (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1961), 92.
28. See Frantz Fanon, "Concerning Violence," in The Wretched of the Earth,
op. cit, 37.
29. The centrality of a Christian God in Kant's conception of "pure reason"
is evident throughout his Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner
S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996). See in
particular his discussion concerning the existence of God (pp. 800-803).

182

30.
31.

32.

33.
34.
35.
36.

Post-Orientalism
The same centrality of the Christian God is evident in Kant's Critique
of Practical Reason translated and edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge:
Cambridge.University Press, 1997). See for example his discussion of God
as "supreme perfection in substance" (p. 37), or his "postulate of existence
of God" (pp. 104-105). These are not mere signs of Kant's evident Christianity. They are central to his conception of "pure Reason," and thus by
extension the Christian disposition of his sovereign subject. For more on
the centrality of Christianity in Kant's philosophical project see Theodore
M. Greene's excellent essay, "The Historical Context and Religious Significance of Kant's Religion" as the Introduction to his and Hoyt H. Hudson's
translation of Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), ix-cxxxiv.
See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1960), 113.
In view of the Christian and European disposition of the Enlightenment sovereign subject, it is particularly troubling to see the astonishingly retrograde
turn that Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies has assumed in the work of
Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, one "coding passing as resistance"
(as some have put it) in mimicry and hybridity, as it were; while the other
unabashedly pronouncing that "this heritage [namely Enlightenment humanism] is now global." See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe,
op. cit.: 4. Evidence of this globality has recently been demonstrated in
the U.S. and Israeli torture chambers and killing fields spread evenly from
Asadabad in the Northeastern Kunar Province of Afghanistan, to the Rafah
Refugee Camps in Palestine, to Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, to Guantanamo
Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in
the Age of Reason, translated from the French by Richard Howard (New
York: Vintage Books, 1965), x-xi.
See Sorel, Reflections on Violence, op. cit., 122-123.
See Frantz Fanon, "Concerning Violence," op. cit., 37.
See my Theology of Discontent, op. cit.
For the emerging positions on the issue of "multiple modernities" see
S. N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities
(Leiden: Brill, 2003); Sachsenmaier Dominic (Ed.), Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations (Leiden:
Brill, 2002); Luis Roniger and Carlos H. Waisman, Globality and Multiple
Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American Perspectives (International Specialized Book Service, 2002); and on cinema and
the idea of multiple modernities see Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (Ed.), Multiple
Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in Transcultural East Asia
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003).

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183

37. The most cogent case for the categorical difference of anti-colonial nationalism is made by Partha Chatterjee in The Nation and Its Fragments
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). The emergence of
anticolonial nationalism and the postcolonial state, Chatterjee argues, is
markedly different from the European primogeniture of such categories as
nation-state and modernity. I disagree. I believe anticolonial nationalism
throughout the world have in fact aggravated and ossified the epistemic
and political predicates of European nationalism. For the case I make for
an "anticolonial modernity" see the postscript to my Iran: A People Interrupted (op. cit.).
38. I have developed these ideas in some details in my Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema (Washington, DC: Mage Publications, 2007).

5
Pilgrims' Progress:
On Revolutionary Border-Crossing
"Now what effect does [the struggle over Africa] have on us? Why
should the black man in America concern himself since he's been
away from African continent for three or four hundred years? Why
should we concern ourselves? What impact does what happens to
them have upon us? Number one, you have to realize that up until
1959 Africa was dominated by the colonial powers. Having complete
control over Africa, the colonial powers of Europe projected the image
ofAfrica negatively. They always project Africa in a negative light:
jungle savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. What then naturally it
was so negative that it was negative to you and me, and you and I
began to hate it We didn yt want anybody telling us anything about
Africa, much less calling us Africans. In hating Africa and in hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can't hate the roots of a tree, and not hate the
tree."Malcolm X (1965)

In the previous chapter I argued that in the aesthetic domain the

presumed crisis of the colonial subject could in fact be creatively
effervescent in a liberating and expansive way. In this chapter,
I intend to look at this crisis from a different angle. Here I wish
to argue that for the postcolonial person the crisis of the subject
(which for us is effectively a matter of normative and moral agency)
is resolved not only creatively in the aesthetic domain, but also
critically in the domain of revolutionary politics of a particular
provenance, which I will explore in this chapter. My argument
185

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Post-Orientalism

here is that the presumed crisis of the subject is checked and balanced by the factual crisis of the dominant ideology, which (in
my estimation) categorically fails to convince, control, or sustain
the credulity and servitude of its targeted population. The ideological crisis of U.S. imperialism, I will thus argue, is matched by
an extraordinary evidence of revolutionary border-crossing by a
number of leading world revolutionaries in the twentieth century. I
will try to find a common thread among a number of revolutionary
thinkers and activistsChe Guevara, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon,
and Ali Shari'atiwho managed to cross their respective borders
in order to reach for a global conception of liberation. My objective here is to articulate the question of normative and moral (ipso
facto political) agency in a specifically revolutionary context and to
demonstrate that a truly authentic revolutionary character is always
and paradoxically predicated on revolutionary inauthenticitybeing fixed on the revolutionary cause but mobile in one's discursive
articulation of it. Here, upon this premise, is where I will look at
Edward Said as one such revolutionary thinker who in the realm
of ideas and aspirations did precisely what Che Guevara, Frantz
Fanon, Malcolm X, and Ali Shari'ati had done in the battlefields
of history: translated the native and nativist boundaries of a particular cause, for Said Palestine, into the vernacular grammar of
a far more global struggle.
My principal point of departure in making this argument is
that the Hegemon is in trouble, for in its call to spread freedom
and democracy it protests too much. To understand the subjective limits of hegemony, we need to have a realistic assessment of
its power and legitimacy and never take its claims on face value.
The fact that the propaganda machinery seeks to generate and
sustain consent does not mean that it is successful in securing its
domination or persuasive in articulating its ideology. There is a
real world outside CNN and Fox News that neither Wolf Blitzer
nor Brit Hume know or represent. The phantasmagoric size of
the U.S. military and propaganda machineries are in fact the best
testimonies to their hollow promises, empty messages, and above
all unconvincing protestations. Opposing both the U.S. military

Pilgrims' Progress

187

and the nexus of infomercial and news-entertainment that seeks

to justify itmapping out the contours of Hollywood, CNN, and
their mutual corporate sponsorsis the real world where insurrectionary movements across the globe and their diverse cultures
of creative resistance continue to give nations and continents their
own measures of defiant truth and rebellious agency.
Beyond the power game of either an empire with no hegemony
(the way George W. Bush has managed to do it) or hegemony
with no empire (the way John Kerry had intended to do), however, there are the rampant ravages of the globalized (predatory)
capital. Some 850 million people around the world go to sleep
hungry every night (according to a recent UN report),1 while the
projected military budget of the U.S. between 2000-2008 is the
number 32 and eleven following it.2 The CNN and Fox terrorism
experts notwithstanding, the frightful distance between those two
figures is the only definition of "terrorism" that we need handy for
a very long time: With all the facts, figures, fears, and finances
necessary to realize the depth of the terror we live and experience
today. Opposing the fear of that fact is the subjective limit of any
vacuous claim to imperial hegemony. Opposing it also requires
a critical manner of revolutionary border-crossing that defies the
fundamental law of colonialism that has always sought to divide the
world in order to rule it better. As evident in the defiant character
of the leading revolutionaries of the twentieth century, revolutionary authenticity means cultural inauthenticity, thinking with soft
(what Gianni Vattimo has called "weak'5) thoughts, striking hard
blows, traveling light, and reaching far and beyond. My contention
in this chapter is that authentic revolutionary character is always
predicated on revolutionary inauthenticity. In other words, being fixed on a steady course of revolutionary activism requires a
consistent mobility in one's discursive articulation of it. To me
in the evident paradox of looking for revolutionary inauthenticity
in the interest of an authentic revolutionary dwells the premise of
a mode and manner of moral and historical agency that can never
be captured and incarcerated in the dungeons of any self-defeating
ideology of liberation.

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Post-Orientalism

"If one were to reduce U.S. foreign policy under John Kerryshould he defeat President George W. Bush in the November
electionsto a four-word motto," so speculates an observer of the
U.S. Presidential election of 2004 in an article, "it would probably
be, 'Hegemony Yes, Empire No.'"3 So if the presidency of George
W. Bush has been geared toward the military manufacturing of an
Empire with no Hegemony, then was the world looking forward to
Senator Kerry's possible victory with the prospect of a Hegemony
with no Empire? The answer lies in the nature and disposition
of the current U.S. imperial self-projection, and the underlying
propaganda machinery that seeks to define and justify it.
In an article published at the wake of the Republican National
Convention in August 2004 in New York, Lewis Lapham gave a
synoptic history of the phantasmagoric propaganda machinery that
has been at the service of the current turn to U.S. Empire-building project.4 Trying to give an answer to Richard Hofstadter's
riddle"When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre,
so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American
consensus, ever got so far?"Lapham mobilizes a troubling army
of facts and figures documenting the systematic appropriation of
the public space by a small band of billionaires who, beginning
with the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, were frightened
out of their wits, saw the proverbial writing on the wall, and then
went on a rampage of establishing multi-million dollar conservative foundations (like The Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson
Foundation, and Scaife Family Foundation), founding reactionary
think-tanks (like the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise
Institute, and the Hoover Institution), spending some 300 million
dollars on television programs (like Pat Robertson's 700 Club
and Fox News Channel), radio shows (like the Rush Limbaugh
show, the Cal Thomas Commentary), publishing houses (like
Eagle Publishing, Inc), newspapers (like the Washington Times
and the Wall Street Journal), and websites (like Townhall.com
and AnnCoulter.com); funding students and scholars at major
U.S. universities (ranging from Harvard and Yale to Stanford and
Chicago), and paying lucrative subventions for the publication
of such books as Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education (funded

Pilgrims' Progress

189

by the Olin Foundation), Samuel Huntington's Class of Civilization (funded by both Bradley Foundation and Smith Richardson
Foundation), and Milton Friedman's Free to Choose (funded by
both the Scaife Foundation and the Olin Foundation).
To what degree Richard Hofstadter's assumption, and Lewis
Lapham's tacit concurrence, that what has happened in the U.S.
from the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1980-1988) to that of
George W. Bush (2000-2008) is "remote from the basic American
consensus," or in fact (as I believe) constitutional to it, is a matter
of speculative and rather useless conjecture here. What remains
solid is Marx's simple formula that the ruling ideas are always
the ideas of the ruling class. If the military budget of the United
States, a self-proclaimed democracy with every single eligible voter
entitled to vote, between the years 2000 and 2008 is estimated to
be the number 3,200,000,000,000, and there is no congressional
call for presidential impeachment for having cheated and lied, or
no criminal charges brought against the neoconservatives calling
to increase that number, then to what degree is the U.S. imperial
nightmare accidental to the historical experience of the United
States from its very inception is a serious matter of debate.
To understand the nature and function of this propaganda
machinery and the hegemony that its imperial imaginary wishes
to generate and sustain, we can look at one of its most recent
products. Consider, for example, the recent publication of the
runaway New York Times bestseller, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita
in Tehran. At a stroke, the new inductee in the neocon's hall of
shame (an employee of Paul Wolfowitz and a protege of Bernard
Lewis) manages to do all the following in one grand tour of service: (1) excite the Oriental fantasies of the Empire by posing
as a Scheherazade storyteller who collects seven Oriental virgins
in a corner of her harem to tell them stories; (2) posit an overtly
Orientalized pedophilia (Professor Humbert Humbert and Lolita
metaphorically modulated into an Islamic Republic) catering to
the post-9/11 fear of imperial castration associated with the collapse of the two totemic phallic symbols of the U.S. empire (the
twin towers of the World Trade Center); (3) convey a not so subtle

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Post-Orientalism

message that Iranian women at large are waiting for Azar Nafisi's
boss, the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and
his boss George W. Bush, to come and liberate them the way they
have liberated their Iraqi sisters and brothers in the U.S. torture
chambers of Abu Ghraib prison; (4) dismiss and denigrate all local cultures of resistance to imperial hubris and then divest them
of their innate moral imagination and political agency poised to
liberate themselves from both domestic tyranny and globalized
empires, by suggesting that if Iranians were left to their own
devices and not rescued by the masterpieces of Western literature
they would have been clueless as to how to articulate their hopes
and speculate on their aspirations; and finally (5) reassert the globalized significance of the "masterpieces of Western literature" a
half a century into a historic battle to rescue the curricula of the
U.S. colleges and universities from endemic domination by a white
supremacist project. With the appearance of a single volume, facilitated by Paul Wolfowitz and Bernard Lewis, all it takes is one
Oriental storyteller to do all these services in one shot.5
The massive propaganda machinery that Lewis Lapham clinically identifies and Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran best
represents is constitutional to the imperial imaginary at the root
of the "The Project for the New American Century" (expanding
the imperial hubris of the U.S. empire far beyond space and topography and well into time and eternity), which in the words of
William C. Kristol, its chairman, is predicated on the principle that
"American leadership is good both for America and for the world;
that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy
and commitment to moral principle." Based on this premise, "The
Project for the New American Century" asserts that:
(1) We need to increase defense spending significantly if we are to carry
out our global responsibilities today and modernize our armed forces
for the future; (2) we need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies
and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values; (3) we need
to promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; (4) we
need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and
extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity,
and our principles.6

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191

Signatories to these imperial design are the leading men of power

ruling the United States today: Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge
Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis
Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay
Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter
W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld,
Vin Weber, George Weigel, and Paul Wolfowitz, the dean of Paul
Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns
Hopkins University, where Fouad Ajami and Azar Nafisi have their
intellectual home, "Our nation," believes their leader, George W.
Bush, "is the greatest force for good in history."7
Against this enormous (multi-dimensional) machinery of power
and hubris, which has sought to sustain the shallow hegemonic
claims of this fraught Empire, the subjective limits of its claims
to imperial domination and global resistance to it are navigated
on two interrelated planes: (1) revolutionary uprisings by poor
people around the globe (850 million of whom going to sleep
hungry every night according to a report by the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]while adding that the
number of undernourished people is climbing by 5 million people
a year); and (2) rich and varied cultural resistances to the shallow
and superficial (principally the U.S. mass media manufactured)
hegemonic claims of the U.S. Empire. On both accounts the U.S.
Empire is losing ground.
Militarily, consider Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon.
The so-called greatest military power on earth is now caught in
a quagmire, fighting Taliban bandits in Afghanistan and facing a
national liberation movement in Iraq, which the U.S. army has
failed to control or even contain. Consider the following facts
about Iraq alone: The Iraqi army was devastated over a protracted
war with Iran between 1980 and 1988. It was almost completely
dismantled by the U.S. in the course of the First Gulf War (19901991). Between 1992 and 2000, under President Clinton's administrations, the Iraqi army suffered the severe U.S. and U.K. control
of its movements and reconstruction, as well as systematic and

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prolonged air raids. Right before the March 2003 invasion, the
chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, was dispatched effectively
to dismantle all the Iraqi defense mechanism. And half a decade
into its illegal colonial occupation of Iraq, the US army has still
not been able to control or contain massive popular and armed
uprisings against its colonial occupation. Similarly in Israel, one
of the deadliest military extensions of the U.S. imperial power in
the region, has failed to pacify the Palestinian national liberation
uprising, sustained by pebbles, homemade bombs, and the iron
will of an indomitable people. The resounding defeat of the Israeli
army by the Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 is the
further indication of the factual ineptitude of a military machinery
otherwise sustained on self-delusional propaganda.
Culturally, the combined forces of Hollywood and CNN/Fox are
the singular source of joke and ridicule (and thus entertainment)
in the world. Manners and modes of resistance to Hollywood
globalization is narrated and navigated by a panoply of national
cinemas; as it would be wrong to assume that the success of Azar
Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran in the U.S. means anything in
Iran, where the masterpieces of modern Persian literature are the
staple of a moral imaginary that has resisted domestic tyranny and
imperial hubris alike.
Ideologically, the two most widely read imperial tracts of the
last two decades, Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilization
and Francis Fukuyama The End of History and the Last Man
are the evidence of their authors' historical and philosophical
illiteracyconfounded by an imperial hubris that can actually
print and publish them. The ideas of the dominant class are the
dominant ideas not by virtue of their innate logic, consistency, or
correspondence to truthbut by virtue of the powerful gun that
fires them across the globe and into the people's faces, minds, and
against their analytic faculties.
Either an Empire without hegemony or else a hegemony without
an empire, paramount in our historic fate today is the globalized
operation of a predatory capital that makes and breaks cultures and
civilizations at the command of the inner logic of its own madness.

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193

Resisting the logic of that madness requires a wherewithal far

more serious than the fraudulent whims of a would-be Empire or a
fraught hegemony. If we bypass the smokescreen of the militarism
at the roots of empires and hegemonies, and come to grips with
the inner logic of the madness that drives capital to its criminal
conclusions, then we need manners of facing up to its destructive
violence with a creative force that dodges the systematic traps of
the fragmented world divided to be ruled for the beneficiaries of
the inner logic of the madness of capital.
*

The so-called crisis of the subject can and has been resolved
creatively in various artistic adventures (such as in Iranian, Cuban,
or now Palestinian cinemas). It can and has also been resolved
critically and in political terms via revolutionary border-crossing,
where bourgeois nationalism means absolutely nothing and all
manners of national identities, characters, and commitments have
in theory and practice been transmuted into a global conception of
a far more universal struggle. The significance of such revolutionary border-crossing is even more acute under the circumstances
when American attempts at hegemonic consensus building is in
fact in deep trouble and can achieve nothing but its own undoing.
The platitudinous fatuity of American attempts at hegemony effectively invites multiple sites of resistance via a succession of
revolutionary border-crossing. This, in effect, amounts to a mode
of revolutionary inauthenticity in specifically national bourgeois
terms and in the interest of a far superior objective of global resistance to imperialism of one sort or another. Such revolutionary
inauthenticity and border-crossing, in turn, results in altogether
bypassing the so-called crisis of the subject, for the revolutionary
activist at the moment of that activism represents absolutely nothing and nobody and as such the entire question of representation
is effectively overcome.
Who might be some of the best examples of such revolutionary border-crossing? In the central two decades of the twentieth
century four exemplary visionaries put their emancipatory ideas

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into revolutionary action beyond the geographical boundaries of

their birth and breeding. As liberation theorists far beyond the
limits of their time and space, these revolutionaries dismantled
the jargon of authenticity, the claim of any particular culture and
country, and radically resolved the predicament of representation that has now plagued and paralyzed the U.S. and European
academic left. The revolutionary vanguards of our current dissent,
these past visionaries of our future revolts, were instrumental in
the detection and cultivation of local cultures of resistance in terms
of a global solidarity.
Manufacturing of colonial divides and civilizational boundaries
(in turn corroborated and accented by a pervasive and paralyzing
identitarian politics) are all predicated on assumptions of cultural
authenticity and insurmountable differences, such as those suggested and sustained between "Islam and the West," "The West
and The East," or even "The North and the South " or "The First
ad the Third Worlds." Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and
Francis Fukuyama are the principal ideologues of such binary
oppositions.
Revolutionaries like Ernesto Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Ali Shari'ati are exemplary models not only in the
courage of their convictions, but also in the transgressive texture
of their imaginations. Each in his own way, these revolutionaries defied the character and culture of their birth and breeding in
order to globalize their innate revolutionary disposition and speak
truth to power and lead rebellious uprisings against domestic tyranny and globalized Empire at one and the same time. In these
exemplary models we see evident in flesh and blood that we need
not choose between the pathologies of a localized tyranny and a
predatory empire.
In their defiant hybridity and cultural inauthenticity, such
revolutionary vanguards of the twentieth century as Che Guevara,
Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Ali Shari'ati expose the colonial
manufacturing of civilizational divides and cultural authenticity
(and thus discredit the ideological force of Bernard Lewis, Samuel

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195

Huntington, and Francis Fukuyama), while at the very same time

they dismantle the compradorial function of the Oriental regiment
of the neocons (the house Muslims) by suspending their claim
to cultural representation. The result is a dialectical collapse of
any ideological claim to hegemonic consistency in and about the
troubled Empire. Against the grain of that belligerent Empire,
the revolutionary hybridity I intend to define here categorically
challenges the very assumption of moral and material imperialism. The fact of this revolutionary hybridity corresponds with the
phenomenon of massive demographic changes that have redefined
the world revolutionary disposition. What Homi Bhabha, in his
Location of Culture (1994), calls liminality of hybridity and considers as the hallmark of colonial anxiety can in fact work in an
entirely counterintuitive manner and reset the revolutionary agenda
beyond the particulars of national and regional politics. What the
cultural politics of migrancy might narratively suggest has in fact
a far more political relevance in its revolutionary claim to moral
and normative inauthenticity.
It is impossible to locate a revolutionary icon like Che Guevara
(1928-1967) in any specific domain other than his visionary conception of a global uprising against imperialism. Born in Rosario,
Argentina in 1928, Che Guevara became a key figure in the Cuban
Revolution of 1956-1959, before he led a guerilla operation in the
Kinshasa rebellion in the Congo in 1965 and then another guerilla
movement in southeastern Bolivia in 1966. He was in person and
remained as an icon a revolutionary escaping the shades and shapes
of his own shadow. In the span of a short life (he was thirty-nine
when he was killed), Che Guevara crossed one localized boundary after another. He defied his upper middle-class origin to become the very icon of poor-peasant and working-class uprising;
he defied a congenital asthmatic condition to lead expeditionary
guerillas in the jungles of Africa and Latin America; he defied an
Argentinean bourgeois origin to become a Cuban revolutionary; he
defied functionary Cuban apparatchiks to become a revolutionary
emissary around the world; he defied the auguries of Soviet imperialism to lead guerrilla movements in Africa and Latin America
autonomous of any party affiliation. He was the defiance of his

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own revolutionary modelnot a romantic revolutionary as he is

usually made out to be but a persistent pilgrim navigating the borders and boundaries of one revolutionary territory after anothera
theoretician and tactician of asymmetric warfare with an enduring
impact on the history that followed him. His authenticity was in
being inauthentic to any tradition that claimed him.
Every phase of Che Guevara's short but fulfilling life was marked
by a major border-crossing. By far the most restless revolutionary
of the twentieth century, he first crossed the class barrier of his
birth (on 14 June 1928) and breeding into an upper middle-class
family in Rosario, Argentina. Diagnosed with a severe asthmatic
condition when he was two years old, he soon had to trespass yet
another, this one physical, limitation that nature had imposed on
him. Educated in his father's library principally by his mother,
Che entered Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, a secondary school in
Cordoba in 1941 and the University of Buenes Aires in 1948, and
was disqualified from military service because of his asthmatic
condition. Che Guevara's 4,000-mile-long journey in 1949 around
Argentina and conversations with indigenous tribes is thefirstgeographical border-crossing that expanded his revolutionary horizons.
Soon in 1951, Che Guevara began his second geographical journey
out, this one his famous motorcycle ride (with his friend Alberto
Granado). They traveled from Argentina to Chile, and from there
to Peru, Columbia and then to Venezuela. Che Guevara's diary
in this trip is the first record of a revolutionary navigating the regional and global topography of the human misery against which
he revolted. In 1953, soon after he passed his qualifying exams
and became a physician, he began yet another journey, this time
on foot and by hitchhiking, to Guatemala, where backed by the
CIA, Castillo Armas had overthrown the socialist government of
Jacobo Arbenz. It is at this point that he became directly involved
with such Latin American movements as the Apristas in Peru.
Che Guevara's move to Mexico in 1954 and his friendship with
Fidel Castro, inaugurated the most serious revolutionary commitment of his life beyond his national borders and well into the wider
domain of Latin American liberation struggles. His encounter with
the writings of Mao Tse-tung, instrumental in the formulation of

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197

his own ideas of guerrilla warfare, further expanded the horizons of

his revolutionary imagination and gave it a far more global dimension. His final revolutionary mutation from a medical officer in
the guerilla band of Fidel Castro that landed in Cuba in 1956 into
a Commandante of the revolutionary army that defeated Fulgencio
Batista in 1959 is the most significant alteration in his creative character as a guerilla. Che Guevara's ambassadorial travels around
the world between 1961 and 1965 put him in direct contact with a
vast array of liberation movements in Asia and Africa. His breaking rank with Soviet imperialism in 1965 and Castro's subsequent
dissociation of himself from Che Guevara cast him into a much
wider global context of revolutionary movements with no organic
link to any formal support, of which the failed guerilla movement
he led in Congo in 1965 and in Bolivia in 1966 (hoping to inspire
a global uprising in Latin America) became prime examples. His
arrest and execution by the CIA-trained Bolivian army finally put
an end to his thirty-nine years of relentless border-crossings to
mobilize a global revolution.8
In a similar vein, though born in the French colony of Martinique
in 1925, FrantzFanon (1925-1961) joined the Algerian revolutionary uprising against the French in 1954 and until his death in 1961
remained a key participant in its theoretical articulation of a far
more global anti-colonial uprising. Navigating the colonially manufactured borders between the Caribbean and the North African
liberation movements, Fanon combined his psychoanalytic insights
with his Marxist perspectives on class struggle to come up with
a theory of revolution that saw the measured wisdom of violence
in all liberating acts of defiance and rebellion. He was neither a
French, nor a Caribbean, nor an Algerianand precisely in that
non-committal location in the middle of nowhere/everywhere he
sustained a commitment to revolutionary causes in France, Algeria,
and the Caribbeanand by extension beyond.
Carrying his early experiences from the French colony of Martinique in the Caribbean context to his student years in France and
then to his revolutionary activism in North Africa, Fanon wove
three interrelated themes of racism, colonialism, and violence

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together to write one of the most cogent narratives of anti-colonial

revolt. His move from Martinique to France to study medicine
between 1945 and 1950 is a typical journey into the heart of the
Imperium where he links the experiences at the colonial edges of
the capital with its imperial imaginary at the center. His move
in 1953 from France to Algeria brought his lived experiences in
Martinique and his psychiatric training in France to revolutionary
combustion via detailed attention to the psychopathology of colonial dominationand the necessity of a violent outburst against
it. His Black Skin, White Masks (1952), in which he examined
the psychopathology of a colonial domination that turns a black
person into a wanting image of his white master, was very much
an autobiographical account of his having crossed the boundaries
of his own inner anxieties between the white and black domains
of his consciousness.
Starting from 1954, Fanon began his collaboration with the FLN
(Front de Liberation Nationale), and by 1956 he had resigned his
post in the hospital to work openly with the Tunisian branch of
the FLN. From the very first of his writings for the organ of the
.FLN, Fanon had a pan-African, third-worldist, and transcontinental
conception of liberation movements, deeply present and endemic
to the cast of his theoretical disposition and revolutionary agenda.
Fanon's border-crossing was as much geographical as discursive.
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) he combined a psychoanalytic
of the colonial condition with his Marxist reading of class struggle
to argue for the necessity of a violent peasant uprising cleansing
at once the social and the psychological disposition of servitude
and domination. His conception of a "collective catharsis" was
a key psychosocial category that would liberate the mobilized
colonials from two sets of interrelated oppressions. The result
was a radical collapse of both Marxism and psychoanalysis into
a singular analytic of liberation, emancipating not only the world
at large, but Europe itself from its own trap. He was diagnosed
with leukemia in 1960, while on ambassadorial mission to Ghana
on behalf of the Algerian provisional government. His subsequent
trips to the Soviet Union and the U.S. for treatment (he died in

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199

1961) also signaled his incessant attempts to expand the dormant

polity of a cross-regional uprising.9
A similar pattern of global transformation almost identical to
those of Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon is evident in the life and
career of Malcolm X (1925-1965). Born in Omaha, Nebraska
in 1925, Malcolm X (Little) went through a succession of radical changes from petty criminal activities that landed him in jail
in 1946 to activism devoted to the cause of African-American
Muslims in the 1950s, and finally to a global revolutionary activism before his assassination in 1965. Malcolm's conversion to
Islam while in jail in the late 1940s foreshadowed his far more
consequential conversion into a global revolutionary after his Hajj
pilgrimage in 1964. But in the span of his short life between 1925
and 1965, pilgrimage was the running motif of his life. Ultimately,
Malcolm X put together his experiences as an African-American
and a Muslim revolutionary to reach for a global emancipation
beyond any domain of domesticated identity.
Malcolm X initially grew up in a religious and political environment determined by his father, Earl Little, an outspoken Baptist
minister who was a follower of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Before Malcolm was four years old, his family was
forced to move two times for fear of their lives, threatened by
white supremacists angry with Earl Little's activism. Nevertheless,
Malcolm's family home was burned down in Lansing, Michigan in
1929, when he was four years oldand two years later, in 1931,
when Malcolm was only six years old, his father was murdered,
his mutilated body found across trolley tracks. Malcolm's mother,
Louise Brown, had a mental breakdown after the death of her husband and was committed to a mental asylum. Malcolm and his
seven siblings were separated and given to various foster families
and orphanages. He soon dropped out of school, went to Boston,
Massachusetts for a while, and then to Harlem, New York, where
by 1942, when he was still a teenager, he ran a narcotics, prostitution, and gambling ring. By 1946, when Malcolm was twenty-one
years old, he was arrested on criminal charges and sentenced to a
seven-year prison term.

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In prison, Malcolm X began a systematic program of educating

himself. Before he was paroled in 1952, he had converted to Islam,
become a follower of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, dropped
his family name (what he considered slave name), assumed "X" as
his last name, signaling the name of the tribe from which he had
descended in Africa, and left prison a convinced Muslim activist,
Between 1952 and 1963, Malcolm X served Elijah Muhammad
and the Nation of Islam with fury and conviction, captivating charisma, and a deeply cultivated revolutionary character, increasing
the membership of the Nation from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 in 1963.
The weeklong television special that featured Malcolm X with
Mike Wallace in 1959, "The Hate That Hate Produced," nationalized Malcolm's cause, catapulted him to national prominence, and
cast his long and illustrious shadow over Elijah Muhammad's. The
Civil Rights Movement in the United States now had a towering
Black Muslim revolutionary at its vanguard, with an increasingly
global vision guiding his way.
In 1963, Malcolm's faith in Elijah Muhammad was shaken when
he discovered that the leader of the Nation of Islam had illicit sexual
relationships and unacknowledged children with as many as six
women among his followers. Malcolm X's reaction to President
John F. Kennedy's assassination on 21 November 1963"[Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost
so soon,"led to Elijah Muhammad ordering him to be silent for
ninety days. By March 1964, Malcolm resigned from the Nation
of Islam and established his own Muslim Mosque, Inc.
Malcolm's pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 radically changed his
revolutionary disposition, abandoning a racial conception of his
faith and returning home to New York convinced that there are
plenty of "blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers."
That experience spread the domain of his revolutionary message
far beyond a racially regimented boundary. From this moment
forward, until his untimely death, Malcolm X was the harbinger of
a revolutionary message that stemmed from the heart of his Islam
but spread all over the globe. After an initial assassination attempt
against him on 14 February 1965, when his home was burned down,

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201

Malcolm X was finally murdered at the Audubon Ballroom on

February 21, 1965.10 At the time of his death, Malcolm X ranked
among the leading world-renowned revolutionaries, deeply rooted
in his Muslim convictions and yet spreading his liberating wings
far beyond any racial, ethnic, or religious denomination.
Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and Malcolm X would find Ali
Shari'ati (1933-1977) sharing their common denominatora universalized parlance sublating the particulars of their revolutionary
message. Born in the provincial town of Mazinan in Iran in 1933,
Ali Shari'ati's life followed a similar path. Educated in his native
province, Shari'ati eventually went to Paris in 1960, where as a
student he became deeply engaged with the Algerian and Cuban
revolutions. He was attracted to the ideas of Frantz Fanon and
Che Guevara in particular, and on his return to Iran in 1964, he
became a key and critical force in the revolutionary mobilization
that shortly after his premature death in 1977 led to the Iranian
revolution of 1979. While in Paris, Shari'ati combined his strong
Shi'i zeal, his unflinching socialism, and his attraction to Sartrian
existentialism to navigate the topography of a liberation theology
beyond any particular domain or denomination.
Arguably the most widely influential revolutionary ideologue
of the twentieth-century Iran, Ali Shari'ati was born to a religious
family in Mazinan, in the Northeastern province of Khurasan in
Iran. Attending elementary and high school in the city of his birth
and breeding, as well as in Sabzevar and Mashhad, Shari'ati was
the product of a staunchly Shi'i environment marked by its vicinity to the shrine of the Eighth Shi'i Imam, Ali ibn Musa al-Rida
(765-818). His father, Mohammad Taqi Shari'ati, was a religious
scholar, without having become an official cleric, a bifurcation that
deeply influenced Shari'ati's own future disposition. Mohammad
Taqi Shari'ati was a staunch socialist, a nationalist supporter of
Mohammad Mosaddiq who combined his socialist and nationalist
convictions with a deeply learned awareness of Shi'i scholastic
learning, seasoned by a wide-range of familiarity with contemporary pan-Arab movements in the region. The younger Shari'ati
deeply identified with all these traits in the political and intellectual
disposition of his father.

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During his college student years in the Teachers Training College

in Mashhad, Shari'ati became deeply affected by the provincial
poverty separating the fragmented forces of classes in his country.
He, like his father, became a staunch supporter of Prime Minister
Musaddiq and participated in student activists' support for the
national hero. In 1953, Shari'ati graduated from high school and
started teaching at a high school in the outskirts of Mashhad. A
transformative experience for Shari'ati occurred in 1956 when he
translated an adaptation of a biography of Abu Dhar, a companion of the Prophet, written by the Egyptian writer Abd al-Hamid
Jawdat. Abu Dhar: Khodaparast-e Socialist ("Abu Dhar: The
Monotheist Socialist," 1953) was not only the first published book
of Ali Shari'ati but the one that influenced him mostcombing
his lifelong transit between revolutionary socialism and religious
sentiments, Persian language and Arabic sources, the early history
of Islam and its contemporary predicament. In 1956, Shari'ati
also entered the faculty of literature at Mashhad Universityconcentrating on Arabic and French. While working on his M. A., he
was sent to jail along with his father for about eight months, was
released, and married the sister of a prominent Tudeh Party activist who had been murdered in 1953. Soon after that, he translated
a book by the 1912 Nobel laureate in medicine and physiology,
Alexis Carrel, called Khish ("Self," 1956), on "Christian humanism," a subject that deeply interested and affected Shari'ati for
its obvious implications for the sort of Islam with which he was
deeply concerned.
On a scholarship from the government, Ali Shari'ati went to Paris
in 1960 and started working on a doctorate degree at the Sorbonne.
His years in Paris had a lasting influence on his revolutionary
disposition. He was deeply affected by Sartre's Existentialism(he
translated his What is Poetry?), the French student movement, and
the Algerian and Cuban Revolutions, and corresponded with Frantz
Fanon on matters of revolutionary mobilization. His revolutionary
eclecticism was shaped during these formative yearsinfluenced
by an array of systematic ideas and local revolutions, and yet
entirely syncretic in his own revolutionary aspirations. While in

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203

Paris, Shari'ati was active in publishing anti-Shah newspapers

and pamphlets. He organized numerous demonstrations in support of revolutionary movements throughout Asia, Africa, and
Latin Americaincluding one protesting the assassination of
Patrice Lumumba in January 1961. He contributed articles to El
Moujahed, the official organ of the Algerian FLN. He became
fascinated by Che Guevara and translated his Guerilla Warfare.
Fanon he read vociferously, translating both his Wretched of the
Earth and A Dying Colonialism. Also in Paris, he became deeply
interested in the work of Louis Massignon, a Catholic Orientalist
who had spent his life studying medieval Islamic mysticism, the
life and teaching of the Muslim mystic Mansur al-Hallaj in particular. Under the influence of Massignon, Shari'ati also became
interested in Salman the Persian or Salman the Purean early
companion of the Prophet, a Muslim, an Iranian, a follower of Ali,
a proto-socialist Shari'ati saw himself in Salman the Pure. Also
under Massignon's influence, Shari'ati became aware of Esprit, the
organ of radical Catholic liberation theology. Leading French, European, and Francophone public intellectualsincluding Michel
Foucault, George Lukacs, Jacques Berque, Henri Lefebvre, Franz
Fanon, Henri Corbin, and Louis Massignon himselfcontributed
to this journal. Esprit actively supported the national liberation
movements across the globe. The radical Catholicism of Esprit
deeply influenced Shari'ati's own later reading of Shi'ism when
he returned to Iran. Among the towering figures in French sociology, Shari'ati attended the lectures of Raymond Aron and Georges
Politzer, but was particularly attracted to the ideas of Georges
Gurvitch, the founding father of dialectical sociology. By the time
he finished his doctoral degree at the Sorbonne and returned to
Iran, Ali Shari'ati was a revolutionary of unsurpassed global vision
and of unflinching moral rectitude. He had successfully surpassed
the endemic nativism of his compatriot intellectuals, and though
he wrote mostly in Persian, his language and diction had already
assumed a global consciousness.
Upon his return to Iran, Ali Shari'ati was arrested at the border and jailed for his anti-governmental activities as a student in

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Paris. Released from jail, he went to Mashhad, where he taught

first at a high school and subsequently at Mashhad University.
Over the next four years, he translated the works of Massignon
and published his own massive monument, Islamshenasi. The
latter publication in particular began to attract the attention of the
Shah's notorious S AVAK and the Muslim activists to him. Barred
from teaching in Mashhad, Shari'ati moved to Tehran, where he
began giving public lectures at Housseiniyyeh Ershad Religious
Institute, where he attracted a wide and populous range of followers. Between 1969 and 1972, he was exceedingly successful in
attracting an ever-increasing circle of followers, tape-recording
his lectures, and distributing them widely throughout the nation.
In these lectures, Shari'ati lent his charismatic voice and presence
to a vision of Islam that was ipso facto worldly, cosmopolitan,
emancipatory, with an abiding love for humanity at its core. He
no longer belonged only to Iran or even to Shi'ism. His Islam
spoke a global language of love and liberation.
By 1972 not only the Shah's secret police but even the Hosseiniyeh Ershad establishment was wary of Shari'ati's radical
ideas, linking European and Islamic thoughts irrespective of the
institutional figures and powers that represented them both. SAVAK soon arrested Shari'ati and jailed him for about a year and a
half. Released from prison on 20 March 1975, but kept effectively
under house arrest until 1977, Shari'ati spent his time taping his
lectures and giving an outline of some of his most radical ideas on
class struggle within the Islamic context. In May 1977, Shari'ati
was allowed to travel to London, where he died of a massive heart
attack on 19 June 1977. His body was taken to Syria and buried
next to the shrine of one of his iconic heroes, Zeinab, the valiant
sister of Hussein, the third Shi'i Imam. Soon after his death a
massive revolutionary outburst swept through his homeland, and
the best aspirations of this otherwise failed revolution bore the
unmistakable mark of Shari'ati's worldly conception of life and
liberty for humanity at large.
*

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205

Common to these four revolutionaries (to which one might add

others like Jose Martiand then consider Edward Said as their
public intellectual counterpart) is a systematic, deliberate, and
articulate crossing of their colonial boundariesweaving the fate
of the wretched of the earth from Asia and Africa to Latin and
North America. All these revolutionaries crossed the colonially
fabricated but materially meaningless boundaries of the nationstate into which they had been born. They all recognized their received national boundaries as colonial inventions, and nationalism
(devoid of a socialist project) as camouflaged colonialism. They
revolted against the global domination of capital and the colonial
and imperial designs set to sustain it by recognizing the aggressive
mutation of their native comprador bourgeoisie into an emerging
national bourgeoisie, further facilitating the same global operation
of capital, benefiting a handful, disenfranchising the rest.
As expeditionary revolutionaries, these figures remained native
to the immediate particulars of their homeland and yet expanded
those particulars into the universal terms of a global struggle for
emancipation. These revolutionary theorists and practitioners were
like pilgrimsalways destined to move on and visit the next site,
while speaking from the distant echo of somewhere else they had
just visitedor the accumulative wisdom of all the places they
had seen. They always spoke with the ring of somewhere else in
their voice; and acted with the glow of a certainty about the place
to come. They could see and suggest so persuasively because
they spoke with a voice that echoed the assurances of somewhere
other than where they were. They came from yesterday but spoke
the language of tomorrow. Everywhere they stood, they spoke
with the confidence of having been somewhere else, having seen
something else. They were prophetic visionariesthough not by
virtue of any divine intervention, but by the whirlwind of dust on
the hooves of their horses, the heels of their traveling boots.
In their revolutionary character and defiant disposition, these
exemplary models of rebel warriors have challenged the jargon of
cultural authenticity and complicated the question of representation. They are puritan pilgrims, visionaries of the otherwise, ar-

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ticulating in soft (what Gianni Vattimo has called "weak") thoughts

their enduring convictions. In the company of these revolutionaries,
Edward Said was a theorist of uncompromising worldliness, the
cosmopolitan vision of his liberating humanism setting the globalized subject on a transformative and emancipatory goal. Palestine
for Said was both a palpable reality and a metaphor, both a gaping
wound and an allegory of worldly struggle against injustice. He
defied the normative narrative and disciplinary boundaries of his
received languages to speak a free and liberated diction to millions
who attentively listened, to million more who were yet to learn
how to listen.
Notes
1.

See "The State of Food Insecurity in the World," FAO Corporate Document
Repository, Economic and Social Department, available at http://www.
fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/006/j0083e/j0083e02.
htm.
2. Center for Defense Information reports that in the fiscal year 2004 the US
military budget is 399.1 billion dollars, more than the combined military
budgets of Russia, China, Japan, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Saudi
Arabia, Italy, India, South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, Israel, Spain, Australia,
Canada, Netherlands, Turkey, Mexico, Kuwait, Ukraine, Iran, and Singapore. The military budget of Israel, meanwhile, is bigger than all the
countries that come after it in that list. For more details see the Website
of the Center for Defense Information at http://www.cdi.org/budget/2004/
world-military-spending.cfm, where you will see the following statement:
"For 45 years of the Cold War we were in an arms race with the Soviet
Union. Now it appears we're in an arms race with ourselves"is attributed
to Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr., U.S. Navy (Ret.), Vice President Emeritus,
Center for Defense Information.
3. See Jim Lobe, "Hegemony Yes, Empire No in a Kerry Foreign Policy."
Inter Press Service, 29 July 2004; published in Common Dreams News
Center at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0729-04.htm.
4. See Lewis Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill,
A Brief History." Harper's Magazine, September 2004: 31-41.
5. For more on my take on Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran see my
"Native informers and the making of the American empire" (al-Ahram,
1-7 June 2006).
6. As stated on the Website of "The Project for the New American Century"
at http://www.newamericancentury.org.

Pilgrims' Progress
7.

207

From a speech given by George W. Bush at Crawford, Texas on 31 August

2002, quoted by Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism,
Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2004): 1.
8. For an introduction to the revolutionary career of Ernesto Che Guevara see
Jon Lee Anderson's Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove
Press, 1998).
9. For a biography of Fanon see David Macey's Frantz Fanon: A Biography
(New York: Picador, 2002).
10. The best source on Malcolm X remains his own Autobiography of Malcolm
X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: One World, 1964).

6
End osmosis: Knowledge without Agency,
Empire without Hegemony1
"The subjection of women in Muslim societiesespecially in Arab
nations and in Iranis today very much in the public eye. Accounts
of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news,
and searing memoirs byAyaan HirsiAli andAzarNafisi have become
major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist
groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices,
joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to
change their societies. This is not happening"Christina HojfSommers, "The Subjection of Islamic Women: And the Fecklessness of
American Feminism" {Weekly Standard, May 21, 2007)
"To speak is to fight.... It is now dissension that must be emphasized.
Consensus is a horizon that is never reached. Research that takes
place under the aegis of a paradigm tends to stabilize; it is like the exploitation ofa technological, economic, or artistic 'idea/ It cannot be
discounted. But what is striking is that someone always comes along
to disturb the order of 'reason.' It is necessary to posit the existence
of a power that destabilizes the capacity for explanation...."JeanFrangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979/1984)2

After one of his early visits to Iraq soon after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003, Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, at the time the U.S.
Deputy Secretary of Defense, told Charlie Rose in an interview
209

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Post-Orientalism

how positively grateful and appreciative Iraqis were that Americans had gone there to liberate them. 'As we would drive by," he
said, "little kids would run up to the road and give us a thumbs up
sign." Commenting on Mr. Wolfowitz's observation, the New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd jabbed at the deputy secretary
and quipped, "at least he thought it was the thumb"suggesting
that it may have been some other finger, the middle finger to be
precise.3
The trouble with both Mr. Wolfowitz and Ms. Dowd is that Mr.
Wolfowitz may have had absolutely no problem with his eyesight
and he must indeed have seen Iraqi youngster giving him the
thumbs up; but, and here is the rubrubbing both Mr. Wolfowitz
and Ms. Dowd the wrong wayin the streets of Baghdad the
thumbs up means what the middle finger means in Washington,
DC.
It is fair to say that as things go in the United States, Paul
Wolfowitz and Maureen Dowd are on the opposite sides of the
political divideand yet what unites them both is a sort of semiotic imperialism in which they cannot see a thumb or a raised
middle finger in any other way but the American wayno local
knowledge, as the late Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) would say, no
thick description of any other kind than the kind operating on both
sides of the Dowd-Wolfowitz divide, informs the analytics of this
particular empirefor or against it.
It is one of the most enduring paradoxes of all imperial projects that precisely at the moment that they feign universality of
purpose they sport the most provincial, parochial, tribal, and even
outright dyslexic utterances in the idiomatic prosody of their
claim to rule the world. We cannot begin to address the current
state of so-called "Middle East studies," and its adjacent supplement, "Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire," without first
keeping this paradox in mind. The more the United States spreads
its imperial wings, just like the emblem of the bald eagle it so
celebrates, the more myopic, self-delusional, mendacious, and
even banal becomes its predatory claims to a worldly knowledge
befitting that imperialism. Paramount in the state of knowledge
that friends and foes of this empire share is a narrow lexicogra-

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211

phy of brute force and illegitimate dominationall marked by

a parochialism that sees the world in ever more limited moral
and normative terms.
The task ahead of us in both a critique of the current state of
"Middle East Studies" and of "Knowledge Production in an Age
of Empire" is thus summoned not in provincializing Europe (thus
presuming its universality), as Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested
about the moral imaginary at the heart of this thing called "the
West," but in fact in underlining its ipso facto provincial disposition as it goes about simulating a universality of purpose to conceal its ever more limited imaginative geography of the human
condition.
Towards that end, any assessment of the "State of Middle East
Studies" will have to start with the subject of the area that this
particular mode of knowledge production entails, namely the
imaginative geography that was colonially manufactured and called
"the Middle East." The colonial origin of the area now called "the
Middle East" already anticipates the question of "Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire." In other words, the two parts of the
subject matter are in fact redundant, for designating a part of the
globe as "the Middle East" already announces, loudly and clearly,
the manner of "knowledge production in an age of empire"albeit
a different empire than the current one. The distance between the
height of British imperial power in the nineteenth century, when
the term "Middle East" may indeed have originated in the 1850s
in the British India Office, and our own era of "war on terrorism"
marks the space where modes and manners of knowledge production vary and oscillate on the borderline where imperial projects
need a vision of the world compatible with their domination.
In this respect the fact that it was the American naval strategist
Alfred Thayer Mahan who was most probably the first person to
coin the term "the Middle East" is a quite crucial historical curiosity. In the heydays of the British and Russian imperial rivalries in
Central Asia, Mahan identified the Persian Gulf as the epicenter of
what he termed "the Middle East" and advised the British to rush
to control it if they wished to keep their hegemony in the region.4
Despite the centrality of the U.S. ideological machinery in sus-

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taining the colonially manufactured notion of "the Middle East,"

both the term and the politically expedient knowledge generated
around it are of a more global usage. Not only do European and
even Latin American academic and journalist parlances uses it,
but even in the Arab and Muslim countries, thus carved into "the
Middle East," they too call themselves "the Middle East"perhaps
by way of a permanently returning repression that reminds them
of who and what they are. Thus to the extent that the term "the
Middle East" still remains in usage, the term "postcolonial" has
an uneasy connection to reality.
Any understanding of the "State of Middle East Studies: Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire" will have to begin with a
genealogy of the varied layers of knowledge production about the
area now under U.S./Israeli imperial domination and code-named
"the Middle East." In my reading of the late Edward Said's classic
study Orientalism (1978), I have sought to augment it in three different but complementary ways: (1) dissect it into the classical Greek
(Aeschylus Persians, All B.C.E, which we might call an Orientalism of
rivalry), the medieval Christian (Dante's Divine Comedy, 1308-1321,
which we might consider an Orientalism of loathing), die early modem
Ottoman (Mozart's Die Entfuhrung ausdem Serail, 1782, which we
might call an Orientalism of fear), and finally the colonial mode of
knowledge production about "the Orient;" (Orientalist scholarship,
or the Orientalism of domination); (2) shift the critical apparatus of
reading the manufacturing of "the Orient" away from the Saidian
literary modus operandi, at the center of whose Orientalism remains
the thorny question of representation, and redirect it to a much wider
domain of sociology of knowledge that in fact has far more radical
and enduring implicationsand thus save Said from his so-called
"residual humanism;" andfinally(3) posit the Orientalist knowledge
production as the locus classicus of manufacturing the sovereign
European subject and the construction of his (and he was always
thus gendered) civilizational domain as "the West," delegating the
world at large to the chaotic abyss of "the rest."
This historical genealogy and epistemic analytic are both absolutely crucial if we are not to fetishize the question concerning
colonialism, formulate a historically more nuanced conception

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213

of it, so that today we might have a better grasp of the varied and
amorphous modes of knowledge production about Islam and "the
middle East," and in fact see it, as I propose, as a case of epistemic endosmosis, in which the aggressive formation of a field of
public knowledge about Islam and "the Middle East" is no longer
conducive to the reversed formation of a sovereign (European
or American) and all-knowing (Kantian) subject. My ultimate
proposal here is that today in fact we are witnessing a mode of
knowledge that is devoid of agential subjectness, which is the
modus operandi of an empire without hegemony. This epistemic
endosmosisinterested knowledge manufactured in think tanks
and percolating into the public domainI propose is conducive
to various manners of disposable knowledge productionpredicated on no enduring or legitimate episteme, but in fact modeled
on non-refundable commodities that provide instant gratification
and are then disposed of after one use only. This is fast-knowledge produced on the model of fast food, with plastic cups, plastic
knives, plastic forks, and hopefully biodegradable paper that can
be recycled for environmental purposes.
The origin and function of this mode of knowledge are compatible with the imperial imaginary they serve, for the problem of
knowledge production in an age of empire will have to begin with
the political provenance of that empire, the U.S. empire, and the
postmodern predicament of its illusion of sovereignty, legitimacy,
and authority. The power at the military roots of the conception of
empire that enables any mode of knowledge production will have
to be broken down, in the idiomaticity of its American English,
into the distance between potenza and potere, when Agamben
begins to speak Italian to it, between puissance andpouvoir, when
Foucault begins to speak French, or Macht and Vermogen when
Heidegger begins to speak German to it. The Latin root of the distance between potentia mdpotestas, between power in a diffused
and amorphous state, and power as centralized, authenticated, and
legitimized, is what is perhaps deliberately lost to "power" when
George W. Bush claims it in his American English.
My contention here is that as much as power as potere, pouvoir, Vermogen, andpotestas was conducive to the formation of a

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Post-Orientalism

knowing and sovereign European subject, power as potenza, puissance, Macht, and potentia entirely lacks and perhaps has forever
lost the ability to constitute agential autonomy for the knowing
and sovereign subject (European or otherwise) who thus seeks to
claim it. Immanuel Kant, in other words, was the very last metaphysician of the (European) sovereign subjectthe omnipotent,
omnipresent, and omniscient narrator of history. The classical
period of Orientalism, namely Orientalism as the intelligence arm
of colonialism, corresponded to that absolute sovereignty of the
European knowing subject, as mercenary armies of Orientalists
went around the world and defined it in the form of a knowledge
that can be known, owned, and governed at one and the same time.
That mode of knowledge production along with the sovereign
subject that produced it have long since ceased to exist, and upon
us is the age of homo sacer, nuda vita (naked life), state of exception, dispersion of refugees between mere humans and would-be
citizens, language as hypertrophy, and gestures as pure means with
no end. The knowledge that corresponds to this state of exception
as imperial rule is the knowledge by endosmosis, the knowledge
of nothing, knowledge without agency, at the service of an empire
with no hegemony.
To work my way towards this final argument, I will first have to
demonstrate the mutation of these varied modes of Orientalisms
(in plural) into Area Studies specializations in the course of the
Cold War. Here I propose a fundamental difference between the
dominant mode of Orientalist knowledge production, commensurate with the heights of European colonialism, and the rise of
Area Studies programs in various U.S. and European universities,
with direct or indirect connections to the U.S. State Department or
the U.S. intelligence communities, at a time that such knowledge
was useful in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the
beginning of the Cold War.
That mode of knowledge, compatible with American strategic
interests in areas on the periphery of the Soviet Unionall the way
from Eastern Europe down to the Middle and Far Eastwas active
and operative for almost half a century until it came to an abrupt end
with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union,

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215

and the rise of a U.S. mono-polar imperial project. The publication

of my late Columbia colleague Sigmund Diamond's (1920-1999)
groundbreaking study, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration
of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (1992)
gives the most compelling account of the period and the way in
which American universities, Henry Kissinger's Harvard and
William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Yale were actively collaborating with the
CIA and FBI in spying against students and faculty who held what
they believed to be subversive ideas. American college campuses
were not thus compromised merely in active collaboration between
university officials and the intelligence communities, but in fact
extended well into curricular and scholarly practices.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of a monopolar imperial imaginary, the American and European university
departments, hitherto designated for doing "Middle East," or "Near
East" studies, have thus lost their raison d'etre. These departments
have so far either categorically degenerated into irrelevance, or else
mutated into teaching security languages (aptly called the "target
languages," namely Arabic, Persian, and Urdu in particular) to
intelligence communitiesor else have gone through a lemonadeout-of-lemons aufgehoben and become effective departments of
postcolonial (or in my case anticolonial) studies. The publication
of Martin S. Kramer's Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure ofMiddle
Eastern Studies in America (2001), in which the author faults the
faculty teaching at Middle Eastern Studies departments for having
failed to anticipate or explain events such as those of 9/11 in fact
marks a very accurate expectation of the American and Israeli intelligence communities that these sorts of departments must perform
their services properly or else be dismantled. The criticism that
Stanly Kurtz has leveled against scholars who study the Middle
East for abusing Title VI (H. R. 3077) of the Higher Education Act
is precisely of the same sort, as is the criticism raised by Daniel
Pipes on his Campus Watch website, and later by David Horowitz
in his recent publication The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous
Academics in America (2006). The sort of services that Martin
Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz expect, and Stanly
Kurtz, Dinesh D'Souza, and their other illustrious colleagues at the

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Post-Orientalism

Hoover Institution provide, to the U.S. national security objectives

(as they understand and define them) goes a long way compensating for the failures of Middle East studies department they aptly
criticize for having failed to follow their lead and help George W.
Bush (aided and abetted by his Israelis allies) in his crusading wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, and perhaps even beyond.
The concerted attack against Middle East studies departments is
multi-pronged and quite effective. It consists of (1) an intelligence
network best represented by Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Stanly
Kurtz, and David Horowitz; (2) a millionaires club that, based on
the reports of their intelligence arm, writes letters and emails and
makes phone calls to university officials threatening to withdraw
their financial support; (3) a network of tabloids like the New York
Sun and the New York Post that scandalizes the targeted faculty and
makes their daily lives in their communities impossible; (4) propaganda machineries like David Project that infiltrates campuses
and uses student organizations as conduits of their character assassination against the targeted faculty; and (5) a lunatic fringe that
makes racist, obscene, and life threatening phone calls targeting
faculty and students (and their families) unless they stop doing and
writing what the callers find objectionable. Although, as the case
of Ward Churchill in Colorado University clearly demonstrates,
having tenure is no indication of professional protection against
these sorts of pressure, it is the junior facultyas the case of my
Columbia colleagues Nicholas De Genova, Joseph Massad, and
Gil Anidjar and that of Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University
demonstratethat is most vulnerable to such pressures. The
case of Alan Dershowitz's campaign to stop the publication of
Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of
Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (2005) by the University
of California Press, including writing a threatening letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, points to the professional hazards
now facing younger faculties in writing against the grain of the
accepted norm in Middle Eastern matters. The publication of
Columbia University's former provost Jonathan Cole's "Academic
Freedom under Fire" marks a crucial rejoinder to these dangerous
developments.5 On the opposite side of Provost Cole stand the

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217

complicitous collaboration of Columbia President Lee Bollinger

and Barnard College President Judith Shapiro with the assailants,
as well as the helping hand that presumably liberal and radical
venues like the New York Times and the Nation provide, as well
as the deafening silence of such organizations as PEN American
Center, which are quick to act in protecting dissidents activist like
Akbar Ganji in the distant land of the Islamic Republic, but are
deaf, dumb, and blind when something happens under their own
nose in New York City.
The current crisis and imminent end of the departments and
disciplines of Middle Eastern Studies, for having exhausted their
epistemic usefulness to the era of the Cold War and now categorically failed to prove themselves useful to the U.S. imperialism,
does not mean that the term "the Middle East" itself or its various
derivatives have lost their usefulness. The term "the Middle East,"
or its divisions such as Arab or Iranian or Turkish studies is still
militarily, logistically, and strategically of extraordinary relevance
and significance, though perforce conjugated in a new parlance.
The active incorporation of Area Studies into various human rights
and democracy projects (on the model of promoting human rights
and democracy in Iraq, one Abu Ghraib torture chamber and Haditha massacre at a time), and above all into matters of American
foreign policy (Johns Hopkins), and national security concerns
(Stanford, National War College, National Defense University,
and Naval Postgraduate School) has given a new lease on life for
matters of Middle Eastern studies. Publication of Seyyed Vali
Reza Nasr's The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will
Shape the Future (2006) while in the employment of the U.S.
Naval Postgraduate School, Ray Takeyh's Hidden Iran: Paradox
and Power in the Islamic Republic (2006) while employed by
National War College and National Defense University, and Abbas
Milani's "Can Iran Become a Democracy?" (2003) while at the
Hoover Institution fall into this category.
The mutation of departments of Area Studies in such directions
coincides with the rise of lucratively funded think thankssuch
as the Heritage Foundation ($33 million/2001), American Enterprise Institute ($25 million), Hoover Institution ($25 million). In

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conjunction with such U.S. military establishments as National

War College, National Defense University, and Naval Postgraduate School, there are also think tanks like the Hoover Institution at
Stanford or S AIS at Johns Hopkins University, that have altogether
managed to bypass the paraphernalia of an academic life for the
facultypeer review employment and promotion, peer review
publications and a sustained record of peer reviewed scholarship,
or above all the training of the next generation of scholarsand
go straight for the articulation of American national security
concerns.
Under these circumstances, the legitimate concern about the
current condition of knowledge production about Islam and "the
Middle East" is not limited to this generation of young scholars
about to enter their professional careers. In recent history, beginning with Edward Said's Covering Islam (1981), down to Robert
W. McChesney's The Problem of the Media: U. S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2004) and Thomas De
Zengotita's Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the
Way You Live in It (2006), a range of scholars have investigated
the varied aspects of producing public knowledge compatible with
the dominant ideological proclivities of our time.
Most recently, and as it pertains to the complacency of the
New York Times in the run-up to the war in Iraq, Howard Friel
and Richard Falk's The Record of the Paper: How the New York
Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (2004), Nicholas Mirzoeff's
Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture
(2005), Chalmers Johnson's extraordinary work in his Blowback
Trilogy (2000-2006) are excellent examples of the rising concern
about the modes and manners of representation of precisely these
issues and areas.
Among the most recent work on this issue, I believe Lewis H.
Lapham's September 2004 essay in Harper's, "Tentacles of Rage:
The Republican Propaganda MillA Brief History" (2004) goes
a long way in giving a preliminary outline of the contours of the
neoconservative propaganda now plaguing American politics and
deeply rooted in American universities. The significance of this
pioneering essay is that it is only tangentially related to matters

Endosmosis

219

of Islam and "the Middle East" and only to the degree that they
pertain to the larger ideological project of American neo-conservatism. Lewis Lapham begins his essay with a quotation from
Richard Hofstadter, asking rhetorically, "When, in all our history,
has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding,
so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far."6
Lewis Lapham's response to this question is to go back to the Civil
Rights Movement in the 1960s and map out carefully the process
by which multi-billion-dollar conservative foundationssuch as
the Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Scaife
Family Foundation, or John M. Olin Foundationwere established precisely to counter progressive and radical thinking in the
American counter-culture.
Lewis Lapham is equally attentive to the formation of major
think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution, in which scholars
are exempted from the time-honored practice of peer review and
a responsible teaching and credible scholarly career and instead
given lucrative salaries to sit down and do nothing but write up
strategies of domination for American economic interests and thus
seek to safeguard presumed American national security concerns.
Lapham also carefully documents what he calls a "300 Million
dollar Conservative Message Machine," in which a wide spectrum
of television and radio stations, publishing houses, newspapers,
and websites have been incorporated into a massive propaganda
machinery. His argument extends well into a widespread body of
students and scholars in major American universitiesincluding
Harvard, Chicago, and Stanfordwho have been the recipients of
scholarships from these institutions. Most significantly, Lapham
creates a chart in which the most influential books in the neoconservative genre and cross-references them with the foundations
that have sponsored thembooks that include Francis Fukuyama's
The End of History (1992) and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of
Civilizations (1993/1996)funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and Smith Richardson Foundation,
respectively. The Olin Foundation, co-founded by Alan Bloom
and co-directed by John Cropsey and Leon Kass, includes among

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Post-Orientalism

its illustrious roster none other than Ms. Azar Nafisi. As to what
exactly holds all these distinguished people together, all one needs
to read is Anne Norton's extraordinary book, Leo Strauss and
the Politics of American Empire (2004), or at the very least Earl
Shorris' equally revealing "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George
Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception" (Harper's Magazine, June 2004).
I believe that despite the elegance and thoroughness of his argument, Lewis Lapham's essay falls far too short of answering Richard Hofstadter's question"When, in all our history, has anyone
with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote
from the basic American consensus, ever got so far." I believe that
we need to link the sorts of historicization that Lewis Lapham does
in his fine essay to the larger frame of pre- and post-Orientalist
knowledge production in order to reach for a clearer understanding of our present condition. Two sorts of mutually contradictory
approaches in this respect are in my judgment counter-productive
and will have to be surpassed: One is Douglas Little's fine study
American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East
since 1945 (2004), and the other is Robert Irwin's retrograde,
missing-the-point Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents [aka For Lust of Knowing] (2006). While Douglas Little's
fine historical overview is weakened by a noticeable absence of
theoretical precision on the nature of knowledge and power and
thus lumps together and confuses the European Orientalist and the
American post-Orientalist phases of Area Studies, Robert Irwin's
retrograde piece of memorabilia completely misses the boat and
thinks exhuming the graves of some perfectly decent Orientalists
who were not spies or were in fact pacifists is going to solve and
absolve his predicament.7
Predicated on these studies, my argument is that in the most
recent development in the evolving modes of knowledge production about Islam and "the Middle East" we have in fact entered a
new epistemic, or counter-epistemic to be more exact, juncture.
To ascertain the particulars of that counter-epistemic, we need to
begin in the domain of the social construction of reality, and the
coterminous creation of security studies departments as fifth col-

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221

umns within the universities. In conjunction with a wide spectrum

of commentators that include columnists such as Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer, writers like Azar Nafisi, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie, and Fouad Ajami, Zionist
publicists such as Alan Dershowitz, Stanly Kurtz, Daniel Pipes,
David Horowitz, and Martin Kramer, human rights polemicist
like Michael Ignatieff, and journalists like Christopher Hitchens,
these think tanks and security studies departments have all come
together to manufacture a public language that in turn becomes the
political parlance of people in position of power, giving currency
and legitimacy to the political proverbials of President Bush, Prime
Minister Tony Blair, Pope Benedict VI, the current Australian
Prime Minister John Howard, the former Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi, and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
In the United States and Europe, this clamorous racket of voices
is principally responsible for manufacturing a communal consensus
very much on the model of the social construction of reality as
proposed by sociologists like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann
in the mid-1960s.8 The active dialectic among the three moments
of externalization, objectivation, and internalization that Berger
and Luckmann have identified can be here specifically noted in
the social construction of knowledge about Islam and "the Middle
East" all under the political duress of the post-9/11 world and the
collective trauma associated with it. Here is the condition where
pundits, experts, national security observers, native informers,
and even Muslim Martin Luther candidates (e.g., Tariq Ramadan
and Reza Asian) all come together to generate and externalize a
particular mode of knowledge about these traumatized subjects
and areas, a knowledge that is then objectified via its circulation
in the mass media and legitimized by the power that announces
and enunciates it and subsequently internalized as truth, and thus
not just generates collective consensus about Islam or "the Middle
East" but in fact define the terms of occasional or accidental dissent
and contestation against them (we can identify Harper's Magazine,
the Nation, and Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911 [2004] as
prime examples of dissent in terms domestic to this internalized
language). In this context, the slightest disagreement with the

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externalized, objectified, and internalized knowledge in social

construction of reality is ipso facto identified with social and/or
psychological deviance, a wonderful example of which is when
a social psychologist from Florida contacted the 101 professors
identified by David Horowitz as dangerous to the well-being of
Americans to invite them to a study he was conducting on social
deviancetrying to establish deviant psychological traits among
those who dissented from the dominant knowledge about American
foreign policies.
As far as the authorial voice of its subject-formation is concerned, this later phase of knowledge production about Islam and
"the Middle East" is in fact an indication of a mode of knowledge
that one might call epistemic endosmosis, namely a phase in the
post-Orientalist period when such knowledge is no longer centered
in any university or research institute and is in fact widely disseminated in varied forms of private and public forums, and as such
resisting categorization and operating on a cacophonous modulation. Endosmosis here refers to the inward flow of dis/information
through the permeable membrane of the mass mediaa cellular
labyrinth of dissemination or cavities of transmutationtoward
the public domain at large and there mutated into a greater concentration: Externalization, objectivation, and internalization as
Berger and Luckmann would say.
This latter mode is in fact tantamount to the aggressive privatization of knowledge production, very much on the model of the
privatization of various intelligence (and in fact even torture) activities and services contracted out by the U.S. military. Although
the principal domain of the privatization of knowledge production
is in the U.S. think tanks, it is equally evident in the systematic
corporatization of American universities, with university presidents increasingly seeing themselves and behaving as the CEOs
of corporations and thus consider the faculty as their employees.
This fact is evident from the exorbitant salaries that university
presidents make to the imperceptible appropriation of tenure
decisions away from the provost's office to that of the president.
In the crucial matter of the freedom of speech, for example, this
privatization/corporatization of American universities amounts to

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the declaration that because we teach in private institutions our

First Amendments rights do not extend to our campusesa point
made repeatedly by Bollinger.
Primitivization of knowledge in U.S. think tanks and the corporatization of American universities are both coterminous with
this development that I identify as epistemic endosmosis, in the
sense that when we see a book written by someone like Seyyed
Vali Reza Nasr, while employed at the Department of National
Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, or another
by Ray Takeyh, while a professor of national security studies at
the National War College, or a professor and director of studies at
the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the
National Defense University, or else a fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, then the knowledge that these gentlemen and their respective books and articles (they have recently
started in fact writing joint articles) produce about Shi'ism or
Iran, while both employed by the U.S. military, through a process
of endosmosis flows through the membrane of their PR firms and
mass media access into the currents of public at large and helps
in the social construction of reality about Islam, Iran, "the Middle
East," and if need be about Somalia, North Korea, Venezuelaanywhere that the U.S. military may need to engage in psychological
operations at both the home front and on the battle zones. What
we have witnessed in the famous case when the U.S. military
commissioned a series of articles favorable to the U.S. military
occupation of Iraq written by a PR firm in Washington DC, then
translated into Arabic and placed in newspapers in Iraq9 is only a
slightly exaggerated case of what Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray
Takeyh are doing in the United States.
The epistemic endosmosis that I suggest as the most recent phase
of knowledge production about the Middle East is not limited to
the bizarre condition in which the U.S. military (through Seyyed
Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh) produces knowledge and disseminates it as psych-op for general public consumptioneffectively
changing the critical discourse away from the U.S. responsibility
for the mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq and blaming it on medieval sectarian hostilities among the natives. In this phase we

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have entered a mode of knowledge production that is no longer

predicated on a particular manner of subject-formation (the study
of "the Orient" cross-generated "the West" as the sovereign and
knowing subject of history). Here such diverse figures as Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Irshad Manji, Salman Rushdie,
Pope Benedict VI, Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W.
Bush, Michael Ignatieff and the entire discourse of human rights,
Allan Dershowitz and the Zionist propaganda machinery, Azar
Nafisi and her brand of women's rights, the Danish cartoonist of
Jyllands-Posten, the comic books of Frank Miller and the cinema
of Zach Snyder, the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and the
expansive Islamophobia she represented are all integral to an
amorphous manner of public knowledge production about Islam
and "the Middle East" through a miasmatic spectrum that is not
integral to any paradigmatic or epistemic formation.
These modes of knowledge production about Islam or "the
Middle East" are infinitely more popular, politically more potent,
and socially far more formative of opinions, judgments, and even
votes in democratic contexts than libraries full of detailed research
conducted by qualified and responsible scholars. The thing that
holds these people together is neither an epistemic cohesion, nor
a paradigmatic modality, and certainly not a conspiracy to deceive
and misinform. There is indeed a grain of truth in much of what
people like Hirsi Ali or Irshad Manji or Ibn Warraq or Azar Nafisi
saya grain of truth wrapped inside insidious falsities at the service of mass deceptionor a "noble lie" as Leo Strauss's version
of Plato would say. These creatures of media and PR firms are
competing with each other to grab a larger share of the public attention via a mode of knowledge production that is categorically
miasmatic in its sentiments, spontaneous in its marketability, and
above all disposable in the emotive universe it engenders. As such
they address themselves neither to a specific audience, nor are they
conducive to an integrated mode of subject formation. In manufacturing public consent, they are spontaneous and disposableconvincing in their self-fulfilling prophecies today, discarded for the
next round of the U.S. military adventurism tomorrow.

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225

My suggestion here is that what we are witnessing today in the

course of the U.S. war on so-called "terrorism," predicated on a
mono-polar imperial imaginary that produces disposable knowledge at the rate of one military adventurism after another, is the sign
of a complete paradigmatic meltdown of disciplinary formalism in
knowledge production, which amounts to the normative dissolution
of disciplines, and above all an epistemic endosmosis in which the
public is mobilized as a weapon of mass deception for one military project or another. From Alexis de Tocqueville's assessment
of the fate of knowledge in American democratic populism early
in the nineteenth century, down to Theodore Adorno and Max
Horkheimer's conception of the "culture industry," to our own
time and Jean Baudrillard's notion of "the automatic writing of the
world" ("the resolution of the world ahead of time by the cloning
of reality and the extermination of the real by its double"),10 to
Lyotard's notion of "legitimation by paralogy,"1l all might be cited
as the visionary prophecies of what has now come to pass.
And yet: From the ashes of disciplinary death of the scholar as
author, one might take one's lead from Lyotard's playful paralogy
and suggest the birth of the critical thinker as auteur. In cinematic
lingo, we refer to a filmmaker with a sustained record of a rich visual and performative idiomaticity as being an auteur. In that vein,
we might here point to a constellation of contemporary thinkers
ranging from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Luce Irigaray, Avital
Ronell, or Assia Djebar in whose work matters of Islam and "the
Middle East" is beginning to sip through a similar act of endosmosis, and yet paramount in whose writings is a certain theoretical
performativity, at once political and meta-political. Precisely in
their formal destruction of disciplinary formalities, these auteurs
point to the way in which from the epistemic dissolution of our
disciplinary scholarship new modes of inquiry beyond Orientalism
or Occidentosis, beyond the fake and falsifying binary of the East
and the West, might in fact be emerging. The formal destructions
and paralogical performativity in the theoretical idiomaticity of
auteurs such as Gayatri Spivak or Avital Ronell are predicated on
the epistemic breakthrough of scholars like Judith Butler, Zillah

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Eisenstein, Susan Willis, and Susan Buck-Morss who have successfully crossed the psychological barrier and begun valiantly to
write about matters Islamic and "Middle Eastern" without being
Islamist in their disciplinary training. The fact that all these thinkers
as authors or auteurs in one way or another address the questions
of women's rights within the shifting epistemics of critical thinking
in pre- and post- 9/11 wars of terror and terrorism at once roots
them in the immediate materiality of their time and yet points to
manners of emancipatory thinking yet beyond our horizons.
Notes
1. The first draft of this chapter was delivered at a symposium, "The State
of Middle East Studies: Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire,"
organized by a group of graduate students at the Department of Cultural
and Social Anthropology at Stanford University on 17 May 2007. I am
grateful to the organizers of the symposiumElif Babul, Chiara De Cesari,
Aisha Ghani, Sima Shakhsari, and Rania Sweisfor having included me
in this gathering.
2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(Minneapolis, Minnesota: University Of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979]),
10 and 61.
3. For Maureen Dowd's column on this point see her "Neocon Coup at the
Department d'Etat" {New York Times, 6 August 2003).
4. Alfred Thayer Mahan used the term "the Middle East" first in an article,
"The Persian Gulf and International Relations," which he published in
September 1902 in National Review in London. See C.R. Koppes, "Captain
Mahan, General Gordon and the origin of the term "Middle East."" Middle
East Studies 1976: 12: p. 95-98. See also Roger Adelson, London and the
Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
5. Jonathan Cole, "Academic Freedom under Fire" {Daedalus, Vol. 134, Issue
2On Imperialism, Spring 2005): 5-17.
6. See Lewis H. Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda
MillA Brief History," in Harper's Magazine (September 2004): 31.
7. For my argument that they do not, see the details of my case study of Ignaz
Goldziher in chapter 2.
8. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of
Reality. (London: The Penguin Press, 1967).
9. For more details see Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane, "U.S. Is Said to Pay to
Plant Articles in Iraq Papers," {New York Times, 1 December 2005) "But far
from being the heartfelt opinion of an Iraqi writer, as its language implied,"

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227

this report indicates about one such article, "the article was prepared by
the United States military as part of a multimillion-dollar covert campaign
to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi
journalists monthly stipends, military contractors and officials said. The
article was one of several in a storyboard, the military's term for a list of
articles, that was delivered Tuesday to the Lincoln Group, a Washingtonbased public relations firm paid by the Pentagon, documents from the Pentagon show. The contractor's job is to translate the articles into Arabic and
submit them to Iraqi newspapers or advertising agencies without revealing
the Pentagon's role. Documents show that the intended target of the article
on a democratic Iraq was Azzaman, a leading independent newspaper, but
it is not known whether it was published there or anywhere else."
10. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner (London
and New York: verso, 1996): 25.
11. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (op. cit.): 60-67.

7
Towards a New Organicity
"Exile is also...a metaphorical condition."Edward Said
Halfway through his 1993 Reith Lectures on "Representations
of the Intellectuals," Edward Said proposes his principal argument
in revising the Gramscian idea of the organic intellectual:
While it is an actual condition, exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical condition.... Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society
can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders:
those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those
who can be called yea-sayers; and on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the
individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles
so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned.1
In this piece of self-theorization, Said proposes a certain necessary
distance between the intellectual and the society at large, a distance
that should enable the intellectual to keep an angular perspective
on power and thus be able to speak the truth to it. On many other
occasions and conversations, I have heard Edward Said talk about
the revolutionary potential of an amphibian intellectual, someone
who fluently traverses two or more interlacing environments. I
have always thought that the idea of an "amphibian intellectual,"
as Edward Said understood it, is a far more effective and liberating
ideal-type than the notion of "dual marginality" with which social
scientists tend to categorize the so-called "exilic" conditiona
condition I find entirely useless for it is self-disenfranchising,
229

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disabling, and paralyzing. The amphibian is at home in two or

more places, and thus at home in the world. The dually marginal
is nowhere at home. The postnational (postcolonial) amphibian
is active, agile, engaged, living. The dually marginal is passive,
irrelevant, nostalgic, neither here nor there, resenting one, not
claiming the other, and thus indifferent to the fate of two significant communities from which s/he is derived and to which s/he is
driven. A post-nativist, amphibian intellectual has his or her roots
in the material reality that embraces both "home" and "exile,"
a division that has in effect caused the initial intellectual labor
migration. The dually marginal have left their home but are not
at home where they are. Amphibian intellectuals are rooted both
here and there and even more importantly in the fact of a global
reality that embraces both here and there. The dually marginal
are neither here nor there. They are nowhere.
The implications of Said's conception of the amphibian intellectual are both obvious and radical. What he is suggesting in effect
is the constitution of a radically re-modulated moral responsibility,
corresponding to a new set of material forces, for the postcolonial
intellectual who by the sheer force of global (and now electronic)
capitalism can no longer be limited either in his vision or in her
responsibilities to superseded (colonially manufactured) national
boundaries. There is a massive migratory gyration of labor and
capital around the world capitalist machinery. Whether on the site
of the radically compromised and assimilated "national economies," which is simply no longer a viable proposition, or on
the site of the massively repopulated metropolitan capitals, the
postcolonial intellectual faces an entirely different phase in the
coagulation of power to which truth must be spoken. From the
postnational (postcolonial) angle, there is a position of critical
judgment that is safely distanced from the compromising site of
"home" and the debilitating neutralization of being in "exile," as
in "marginal," at the "center." From the site of Said's argument
a whole new definition of the postcolonial intellectual emerges
which by the sheer force of late global capitalism cannot remain
confined within a specific "national" boundary because there is
no longer a national boundary. If "globalization" means "the

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231

twofold process of the particularization of the universal and the

universalization of the particular,"2 the crucial task of the postcolonial intellectual is a locally articulated agenda of particular
action that is universally informed. The task is extraordinarily
critical. It does not mean abandoning the local ("national")
program of action as it is has been domestically articulated. It
means that program of action should be articulated by a constitutionally postcolonial, postnational, intelligence that is globally
locatedat home in no longer being at home.
The United States, as a "nation of immigrants," and at the
forefront of global and electronic capitalism, is perhaps the most
natural birthplace of the postnational intellectual. Here is where
global capitalism has the core of its nervous system and where
the postnational condition is constitutional to the function of the
intellectual. Precisely because of this extraordinary possibility,
resistance to Edward Said's idea of the amphibian intellectual are
particularly acute in the United States. The single most important source of resistance to a new organic intellectual that Said
has articulated and theorized in the wake of global capitalism is
"nativism" of the most rampant sort. Nativism is now evident
in two diametrically opposed, but ideologically complementary,
sites. First is the dominant Eurocentric Americanism and second,
reversing and complementing it, is the rampant tribalism of the
so-called "ethnic minorities."
*

First let us consider American nativism: Eurocentric Americanism has become the most ferocious force of conservative energy
in the United States over the last few decades. At the very heart
of global capitalism, Samuel Huntington's thesis of the "Clash of
Civilizations" is only the most widely noted example of a much
wider range of conservative reaction that has now reached as far left
as Richard Rorty. Under the entirely bogus and outdated concept
of "Civilization," and totally innocent of the most radical modifications of such grandiloquent claims on our credulity that kept
nineteenth century sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Marcel

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Mauss busy with such positivist preoccupations as "Note on the

Notion of Civilization," Samuel Huntington takes the dead horse
of "Western Civilization" for yet another ride and articulates yet
another pathological "defense" of "the West" against its presumed
enemies. As usual, first a phenomenally phantasmagoric fiction
is created and called "Western Civilization," and then it is put on
the defensive against its presumed enemies "Asian Civilization"
or "Islamic Civilization." These are entirely empty, irrelevant,
and outdated rhetorics that have nothing to do with realities in
which we live. The world is not made of "Civilizations." The
world is made of one mad and maddening global dis/order that
does not have the slightest patience or room for which direction
people face when they pray so long as the pair of Nike shoes they
are wearing is manufactured cheaply, sold widely, and renewed
at very short intervals. If there has ever been a "balance" in the
world, it has never been among "Civilizations," but among the
moral and material forces they have mustered. The paranoia that
animates Huntington is fed precisely on the assumption that the
economic and political hegemony of the presumed centers of
global capital, or what he calls "The West," are being eroded by
"the resurgence of non-Western cultures."3 The language of the
paranoia is frightful:
Indigenization and the revival of religion are global phenomena. They
have been most evident, however, in the cultural assertiveness and challenges to the West that have come from Asia and from Islam. These
have been the dynamic civilizations of the last quarter of the twentieth
century. The Islamic challenge is manifest in the pervasive cultural,
social, and political resurgence of Islam in the Muslim world and the
accompanying rejection of Western values and institutions. The Asian
challenge is manifest in all the East Asian civilizationsSinic, Japanese,
Buddhist, and Muslimand emphasizes their cultural differences from
the West and, at times, the commonalties they share, often identified with
Confucianism. Both Asians and Muslims stress the superiority of their
cultures to Western culture. In contrast, people in other non-Western
civilizationsHindu, Orthodox, Latin American, Africanmay affirm
the distinctive character of their cultures, but as of the mid-1990's had
been hesitant about proclaiming their superiority to Western culture.
Asia and Islam stand alone, and at times together, in their increasingly
confidant assertiveness with respect to the West.4

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233

That this is the language of tribal chieftain advisers is self-evident.

But the question remains what delusional hubris could inform this
misreading of reality? The single most significant source of the
so-called "Islamic" or "Asian" resurgence is a devastating history
of colonialism and the monumental injustice that European (followed by American) imperialism has perpetrated on the world.
If anti-colonial movements have assumed religious overtone, if
ravaged people have had to resort to their priests, mullahs, and
monks to help themfightback against their colonial tormentors, the
reason is nothing but the colonial ravages of capitalist modernity
having robbed these people of a modicum of civil-societal institutions independent of their religious sentiments. The result of two
centuries of robbing the so-called "Islamic World" of its natural
resources and the military imposition of corrupt governments in
order to facilitate lucrative markets for the goods that those natural
resources produced have been nothing but mass poverty, a de-nationalized bourgeoisie, constitutionally corrupt puppet regimes,
and a total absence of the most fundamental of civil rights. What
sheer stupidity can make one neglect two centuries of the most
violent rape of nations and their resources and then brand their
cries of freedom as an "Islamic" resurgence against "the West" or
"Confucian" revolt against the same monstrous abstraction?
Huntington's essay on "The Clash of Civilizations" in 1993
had come to complement yet another major piece of Washington tribalism by Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History,"
published in 1989. A self-congratulatory, bureaucratic take
on Hegel, Fukuyama's thesis is straight out of the U. S. State
Department (where he used to work) and Pentagon habit of
defining a non-existent game and then having the home team
come out on top. As innocent as Huntington of generations of
critical thought dismantling the Hegelian teleological fantasies
in Continental Philosophy, Fukuyama picks up from Hegel's
conception of Geist and leaves the triumphant torch of "Western Civilization" at the opening gates of the White House. A
train of thought started running from Plato's neighborhood in
Athens, sped through a time capsule, and came to a full stop on
Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. Hegel saw himself

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as the anticipated consequence of Plato as he saw Napoleon as

the anticipated consequence of Alexander the Great. Fukuyama
and President George W. Bush were to update the fantasy.
Fukuyama's nativism assumes the disguise of a global universalism in which "the West" has won the historical game. With the
end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Union, "Western
Liberalism" has universally proclaimed its victory over all its rival
ideologies. Not only Marxist Socialism but all other potential
claims to rival ideologies have equally lost to "the West," according
to Fukuyama's vision of our present situation. Consider Islam,
for example, as a potential rival to liberalism. This is Fukuyama's
assessment:
It is true that Islam constitutes a systematic and coherent ideology, just
like liberalism and communism, with its own code of morality and doctrine of political and social justice. The appeal of Islam is potentially
universal, reaching out to all men as men, and not just to members of a
particular ethnic or national group. And Islam has indeed defeated liberal
democracy in many parts of the Islamic world.... The end of the Cold
War in Europe was followed immediately by a challenge to the West
from Iraq, in which Islam was arguably a factor.5
What today we call "Islam" is the historical outcome of a colonially
ravaged people in search of an ideology of resistance. From the
scattered memories of their ancestral faith Muslims have sought
to narrate an ideology of resistance and then called it "Islam."
We cannot, as does Mr. Fukuyama, neglect the last two hundred
years of imperialism and the havoc it has wrought on Muslims
and then make a transcontinental leap that "Islam" is this, that, or
the other thing.
"Islam" is nothing except that which Muslims have actively
imagined and institutionalized it to be. And Muslims have actively
imagined and institutionalized their faith over the last two centuries
under very specific historical circumstances, of which Fukuyama
is either frightfully ignorant or deliberately dismissive. Islam has
been an ideology of resistance as has socialism and nationalism,
or any number of its amalgamated ventures. Constitutional to
that resistance has been the material basis of opposing tyranny

Towards a New Organicity

235

at home and imperialism from abroad. It was simply a joke,

had it not been so pathologically dangerous, to consider Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait as an "Islamic" movement. The
Shi'i population of southern Iraq, the Kurdish population of the
northern Iraq, and the entire Muslim population of Iran have a
lot to say to Fukuyama about the "Islamic" incentives of Saddam
Hussein. Saddam Hussein's megalomaniac proclivities, for long
generated and sustained by Fukuyama's colleagues at the U.S. State
Department, became a pain in the neck for American imperialism
by daring to lay claim to an oil-rich region, and he was properly
punished for it, and then this "former deputy director of the US
Department's Policy Planning Staff' believes that he was moved
by his "Islamic" spirit.
The description of "Islam" as such is of course a prelude for
Fukuyama to dismiss it as a rival to "the West." "Despite the
power demonstrated by Islam in its current revival," Fukuyama
stipulates, "it remains the case that this religion has virtually no
appeal outside those areas that were culturally Islamic to begin
with.... Part of the reason for the current, fundamentalist revival
is the strength of the perceived threat from liberal, Western values
to traditional Islamic societies."6 What Fukuyama is doing here
is to claim such an absolutist ideological victory for "the West"
that will make the existing economic configuration of the world
all but a fait acompli, a configuration in which the capitalist cosmopolis continues to produce in such a way that Muslims, like any
other disenfranchised people, will have no choice but to resort to
"Islam" as their ideology of resistance. The Hegelian certainty
in Fukuyama points to the inevitable unfolding of what he calls
"the Universal History,"7 in which cultures can either contribute
to or impede its progress. Totally innocent of the fact that the
so-called "traditional cultures" are the very products of colonial
encounters with capitalist modernity, Fukuyama believes that the
end of history, as he sees it, is destroying those precious relics.
"Democratization," however, results in "homogenization," in
Fukuyama's dire assessment.8
Anticipating Samuel Huntington by about half-a-decade, Fukuyama also believes that the two potential threats to "Western

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Democracy" come from the resentful Muslims building "Empires of Resentment," and the paternalistic Japanese (Asians in
general) who are combining "Western Capitalism" with "Eastern
patrimonialism" in their construction of "Empires of Deference."9
Muslims have lost the game, so they are resentful. Asians have
joined the game, and they may steal the show. The pathology of
Fukuyama's diagnosis does not rest in his shameless identification of "the failure of Muslim societies generally to maintain their
dignity vis-a-vis the non-Muslim West,"10 but in the extension of
his diagnosis to include the disenfranchised communities inside
the capitalist metropolis:
Even in the United States, it is possible to see the beginning of new
illiberal ideologies emerging as the distant result of different cultural
attitudes towards economic activity. In the heyday of the civilrightsmovement, most American blacks aspired to complete integration into white
society, implying a full acceptance of the dominant cultural values of
American society.... Despite the abolition of legally sanctioned barriers
to equality in the 1960's, however, and the rise of a variety of affirmative action programs giving preference to blacks, a certain sector of the
American black population not only failed to advance economically, but
actually lost ground. One political result of persistent economic failure,
however, is the now more frequently heard assertion that the traditional
measures of economic success, such as work, education, and employment, represent not universal but "white" values. Rather than seeking
integration in a color-blind society, some black leaders stress instead the
need to take pride in distant Afro-American culture with its own history,
traditions, heroes, and values, equal to but separate from the culture of
white society.11
Here, Fukuyama is caught red-handed, with his blatant racism
in full view, and here is where we can see the paralyzing anxiety
of American conservative "nativism." What Fukuyama tries to
conceal under the inside-the-Beltway bureaucratic euphemism
of "different cultural attitudes towards economic activity" is his
conviction that African-Americans are constitutionally lazy, and
that their problem is not historical disenfranchisement in the rise
of American capitalist modernity but their "culture." If African
Americans are jobless, or lack education and training, it is not
because of a constitutional racism at the very core of the American

Towards a New Organicity

237

society, but because they themselves belong to a "culture" that does

not value "work, education, and employment." Fukuyama took his
course in modern American history in the same mosque or college
that he took his course in "Islam," where he was taught that "in
the heyday of the civil rights movement, most American blacks
aspired to complete integration into white society, implying a full
acceptance of the dominant cultural values of American society."
Did Malcolm X as the voice of the most downtrodden segments of
the African-American community "aspired to complete integration
into white society"? Did the Black Panthers? Or can even Martin
Luther King's legacy be summarized as "a full acceptance of the
dominant cultural values of American society"?
The Asians have learned the game and may steal the show, the
Muslims have lost the game and may spoil the show: that is the
message of Francis Fukuyama when translated from the lingo of
the U.S. State Department to the simple language that the rest of
the world speaks. But in both languages, Fukuyama's message is
symptomatic of a nervous breakdown in American conservative
nativism, alarmed by the massive demographic changes that have
radically transformed American society and are poised to redefine
it in terms inconvenient to the custodians of the "New World Order" The same nativist anxiety is equally present in yet another
comrade-in-arms of Fukuyama and Huntington, Allan Bloom,
whose The Closing of the American Mind was an equally nervous
reaction to the major demographic changes in the United States
and its inevitable cultural and intellectual consequences, including
the emerging centrality of a new organic intellectual.
While both Huntington and Fukuyama have targeted foreigners,
Muslims and Asians in particular, as the locus of their attack, it
is blatantly obvious that it is the emerging demographic changes
inside the United States that concerns them most. Huntington has
been particularly successful in appearing to be globally concerned,
to the degree that the Persian translation of his essay, "The Clash
of Civilizations," has prompted the then Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to propose to the United Nations a "Dialogue of
Civilizations." Huntington of course is far less concerned about
the Islamic or the Asian world, about which he knows absolutely

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nothing, than in the frightful, for him, demographic changes inside

the United States.12
The advantage of Allan Bloom is that he goes for the jugular
and does not conceal his fear of the cataclysmic changes inside the
Untied States under the disguise of "the Clash of Civilizations."
Bloom rightly detects an intellectual and moral confusion in our
midst. He puts the blame squarely at our, his professoriate colleagues', doorstep. We in the university are to blame for lacking
purpose, moral conviction, and a sense of direction. Our students
are equally to blame for being illiterate. Their literacy being
in our charge, we have failed them twice, by not teaching them
properly and by failing to have a moral purpose in our curriculum. He thinks that "reason" has been superseded by "creativity,"
"culture" by "cultural relativism." He thinks that we foreigners,
especially when we are attracted to "Continental Philosophy," have
abused the hospitality of American democracy by infiltrating our
nihilism and relativism into the welcoming bosom of our newly
gained Constitutional rights. The life of our students is poorer
today, both morally and intellectually. The "Great Traditions" of
Western learning are no longer communicated and taught to them
properly. There is a "spiritual" sickness that Professor Bloom
diagnoses in our body ethic. He is set to cure it by admonition,
exhortation, and guidance.
The problem with the kinds of highfalutin sentiments in defense
of such empty abstractions as "Public Good" and "Moral Values"
that Bloom champions in his book is that they are so constitutionally divorced from the material world in which we live and
the moral forces it engenders that they amount to nothing but a
Sunday morning sermon that leaves no patience even to reach for
one's pillow. As a distinguished translator of Plato, Bloom lives
too much in his Archetypal Ideals and has no Aristotelian foot on
the ground. What he perceives as the "illiteracy" of his students
about "the Great Western Traditions" or about "American Founding
Fathers" has a source entirely different from what he imagines.
Bloom has been so busy trying to figure out why his students
are so "illiterate" he has missed a far more immediate reality,
namely the very color of the skin and the physiognomy of their

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facial features. This, Bloom would probably be sad to know, is

an entirely different student body than the one he grew up with in
the 1940s and 1950s. Massive labor migrations into the presumed
centers of the capitalist cosmopolis, including those in the United
States, have radically changed the student body that we face in our
classroom today. This change in the configuration of the student
body that has resulted in racial profiling and imposition of a quota
in a number of leading universities has not been accidental. It is
not because of the good weather conditions in Western Europe and
North America that people from Asia, Africa, Latin America, or
Eastern Europe migrate to Western Europe or the United States.
The circular chasing of capital and cheap labor is the most elementary force in such migrations and yet Professor Bloom is entirely
innocent of these cataclysmic changes in the moral and material
configuration of reality.
Bloom anointed himself as the great custodian of the "The Great
Western Tradition," not knowing that the emerging demographic
shifts in the United States could not give a hoot about such monstrous Hegelian abstractions. The fate of "Humanity," and of "The
Public Good," and any other such empty abstraction is going to
be determined by moral and material forces far beyond the control of universities that are starved for money. Some 85 percent
of the salary of the professoriate faculty at my own university as
well as the expenses for graduate studies (which is to say for us
to get together with our students and have the luxury of reading
Professor Bloom's translation of The Republic) is paid for by the
undergraduate tuition. The parents of our students pay an arm and
a leg for their education not to learn about Plato but to be trained
to become a "productive member of the society," as the saying
goes. To be "productive" means to be marketable according to
the whims and vicissitudes of Wall Street as the barometer of a
notoriously self-regulating market. Some of my colleagues here
at Columbia are under the assumption that we are in charge of our
core curriculum. We are not. Wall Street is.
"The upshot of all this for the education of young American
is," Bloom concludes, "that they know much less about American
history and those who were held to be its heroes. This was one

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of the few things that they used to come to college with that had
something to do with their lives. Nothing has taken its place except a smattering of facts learned about other nations or cultures
and a few social science formulas."13 The students we face in
our classes today have either fortunately lost the innocence of
considering Christopher Columbus and his murderous treatment
of native Americans a hero, or else have a far more busy schedule even to care about who "discovered" America. What neither
Allan Bloom nor, alas, Saul Bellow who has written a laudatory
foreword to Bloom's volume, recognize is that the children of new
immigrants face the fact of witnessing both their parents working
sometimes eighteen hour a day to make it possible for them to go
to college. They have to become productive in the shortest amount
of time possible. They lack the luxury of caring for Bloom's
list of "American heroes." Their parents are far more heroic to
them, and rightly so, than any dead figment of white Americans'
imagination. This culture is rightly suspicious of all those heroes
that Mr. Bloom celebrates. As for the "smattering of facts" they
do know about other cultures and nations, this should have given
Professor Bloom a hint as to the changing composition of his
students but it alas did not. Whatever "smattering of facts" these
students might know is infinitely superior to the Orientalist bag of
treachery that Bloom's own generation of American students were
taught by the likes of Bernard Lewis and Co. about these "other
cultures." What we witness here is a fundamental inability to see
what is glaringly standing in front of us as the radically changing
configuration of a national reality by the sheer force of economic
necessity. The inability is rooted both in a constitutional lack of
historicity in one's intellectual disposition and an equally flawed
conception of intellectual history.
The case of the Civil Rights Movement is a crucial test. Like Fukuyama, Mr. Bloom finds fault with the Civil Rights movement:
The civil rights movement provides a good example of this change in
thought. In its early days almost all the significant leaders, in spite of
tactical and temperamental differences, relied on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.... This stance implied afirmconviction

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of the truth of the principles of natural rights and of their fundamental

efficacy within the Constitutional tradition, which although tarnished,
tends in the long run toward fulfilling those principles.14
He then admonishes the Black Power movement for having "at
its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery."15 What Bloom
considers historical illiteracy in this particular case is in fact quite
to the contrary. Today, it is not only the grass-roots movement
identified with the Black Power that knows the earlier drafts of
the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson's complacency in upholding the institution of slavery. The little that these
students actually care to know goes a long way in dismantling
the illusion of power that these "cultural heroes" of Allan Bloom
held over his generation. Bloom is very found of proclaiming that
the ideals of the Founding Fathers (he has a penchant for Capital
Letters, of which all our students are rightly afraid) are "Universal
Western Values." Alas, they are no such things. They are the specific products of the joint projects of capitalist modernity and the
racist European Enlightenment. There is no trace of these ideals
anywhere in Europe of the Renaissance or Middle Ages, let alone
of so-called "Ancient Greece."
In the total absence of an historical origin of the rise of global
capitalism and the project of European Enlightenment in whose
truncated trajectory the very birth of the United States as a nation
took place, Allan Bloom speaks like a latter-day prophet of doom
admonishing a band of high school kids for having failed to notice and perform their civic duty. None of the ideals that Bloom
capitalizes in frightful letters are in any meaningful or binding
way "Universal," nor do they belong to the bugbear of European
Modernity, "the West." They are historically identifiable ideals
of a rising middle class massively documented by Peter Gay in
his two magisterial achievements, The Bourgeois Experience and
The Enlightenment Through a universal orchestration of a new
moral and political apparatus, the project of Enlightenment, chief
among it the very Jean-Jacques Rousseau whom Mr. Bloom has
translated, sought to provide the rising bourgeoisie with a new

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ideological definition distinct from the debunked institution of

feudal aristocracy and medieval Christianity. That these "Ideals"
are "Universal" or "Western" is a bogus Hegelian cream puff
long debunked by precisely the same Continental Philosophy that
Professor Bloom, along with a number of other outmoded and
superseded philosophical positivists, has demonized in Part Two
of his Closing of the American Mind.
The sentiments that Huntington, Fukuyama, and Bloom represent are so central to the anxieties of the American intellectual right
that one can detect their reverberations right into the journalistic
attention to curricular issues on our campuses. Consider the fact
that equally under the illusion of the universality of "The Western
Canon" is David Denby, a journalist who before turning his attention to what he describes as the "Indestructible Writers of the
Western World" was known for writing film reviews for the New
Yorker. Mr. Denby decided to take the two famous Lit Hum (Literature Humanities) and CC (Contemporary Civilization) courses
at my own home institution, Columbia. After sitting in for the two
courses, he went out and wrote a book about his experience in
which he concluded that there was nothing wrong with the Core
Curriculum, caricatured the nature of critical debate among my
colleagues, and probably made himself a fortune by selling his
Great Books to a public baffled, or perhaps moderately amused,
by the hoopla about "Multiculturalism." Lacking Huntington's
historicist flair, Fukuyama's bureaucratic inventiveness, and certainly Bloom's scholarship, Denby's conclusions are simply too
prosaic to examine: "The great thing about Western culture is that
any American can stand on it, or on some small part of it. In this
country, we take what we want and mix it with our own composition."16 There is very little one needs to do with such pieces of
self-destructive journalism. Denby thinks that both "Academic
Left" and the "Academic Right" (his phrases) got it wrong, whereas
he got it right. The "Great Western Canons" are really Great and if
the African-American students object to them they are still using
them in their arguments and that verifies their Really Great Greatness of these Booksthis is David Denby in a nutshell.17

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243

The significance of Denby's contribution to the chorus of conservative nativism is in something entirely different. What we
read here is wonderful bedtime reading for the Columbia Alumnae
who have now succeeded in the business world and have a nostalgic recollection of their experiences with the Core and now by
reading Denby's memorabilia are reminded of their own youthful
days. Great psychological salesmanship on the part of Simon and
Schuster, but alas very little substance otherwise. What Adorno
scornfully called "the Culture Industry" is taken here to its logical
conclusion. A little bit of a cultural booster shot will ensure that
the dose our Alumnae received in their youthful days is still fully
operative. But the booster shot that Denby administers here to the
top executives of the industry is not totally innocent. It reinforces
the fear of the foreigners, it consolidates the presumed reality and
continued validity of "Western Civilization," and it ultimately
helps to sustain the shopping cart theory of world history in which
through a Hegelian isle we walk and pick and choose the best that
the world has produced and call it "Western." Plato is plucked
out of his Greek context, Augustine out of his North African
milieu, Machiavelli from his Mediterranean, and Rousseau from
his Enlightenment, and then all are strung together by a fictitious
thread that Oswald Spengler wove and Francis Fukuyama took it
ad absurdum.
David Denby's escapade and its lucrative consequences points
to a constitutional fallacy in the assumption of the university
as a reality sui generis that was already embedded in Cardinal
Newman's The Idea of a University. A critical awareness of the
sociology of contemporary academic intellectuals requires a realistic assessment of their institutional limitations. The critical
intelligence that today is required to cultivate historical agency
can no longer harbor such illusions. Newman, as a committed
Christian, was after carefully defining what he considered to be
the "Universal," that is to say, non-denominational, purpose of the
institution. He, as a result, considered the university to be primarily an "intellectual" proposition and not a "moral" one.18 From
a devoutly Christian perspective he considered the Church to be

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constitutional to the "integrity" of university, and yet fully commanded by the catholicity of his learning and the liberality of his
mind, Newman was one of the greatest defenders of the autonomy
of the university as an institution of higher learning. The same
liberality that Newman articulated in 1852. when he delivered in
Dublin, as rector-elect of the new Catholic University, the series
of lectures that gradually emerged as The Idea of a University,
translates today into the constitution of a site for the cultivation of
critical judgmentas we the teachers are morally responsible to
help cultivate that critical intelligence for responsible citizenship
among our students.
Such critical judgment today radically questions the very assumption that a university can be considered autonomous of the
social forces that embrace it. The active corporatization of the very
idea of the university over the last century and a half, since Newman
articulated his position, has left no room for the illusion that we
teach in an autonomous institution. Governmental agencies, corporations, and private sectors with specific and clearly articulated
agendas now besiege the institution of higher learning. Lucrative
grants come into universities and high-ranking administrations
accept them without the slightest concern or even a momentary
pause for critical conversation with faculty and students. Domestic
and foreign governmental agencies, corporations, "philanthropists," and foundation directors fully recognize that universities
are starved for money. The result is the full incorporation of the
university into the globalizing spirit of capitalism. Today into the
belly of the "Distant Learning" Trojan Horse, electronic capitalism is spreading like a cancer into the very vertebrae of academic
integrity. The enduring wisdom of Newman beyond his specific
Catholic and elitist overtones is the very supposition of the university as an autonomous site of liberal education which today is
a goal to be fought for and not an idea to be taken for granted.
The same wisdom that carries its own flaw is equally evident
in the judicious reflections of Jaroslav Pelikan in his Idea of
the University: A Reexamination, in which he updates Cardinal
Newman's call for the idea of the autonomy of the site of liberal
education, but carries over the same sociological flaw of isolating

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245

the university from its constitutionally compromising societal location. Whereas in Cardinal Newman's case more than a century
and a half ago the active corporatization of the university had not
yet reached full throttle, in Pelikan's case we are reading a piece
of antiquarian nostalgia for the autonomy of the university. When
Pelikan quotes the proverbial encounter in which a patriotic Englishwoman asks a don at Oxford "And what are you doing to save
Western civilization, young man?" to which the don responds,
"Madam, I am Western civilization!"19 we get a glimpse of the
self-delusional hubris at the core of the academic presumptions
to autonomy and integrity.
The conservative attack on the university and the naive liberal
assumption of its autonomy are both the indices of the national
seismography getting the correct signal of constitutional changes
in the American demography. The emerging organicity of the
public intellectual is the critical cause of this anxiety. As sites
of professional training for global capitalism, universities are the
critical barometers of the labor (both intellectual and physical)
migration. The nativist tribalism that informs all such nervous
reactions ultimately derive from statistically demonstrable demographic changes in the United Sates. By the mid-1990s the racist
anxiety of nativist tribalism had reached such proportions that the
publication of Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation could only testify to
much deeper resentments. Based on an earlier essay that he wrote
for National Review, this book puts between two covers the most
frightful evidence of the genocidal tendencies lurking under the
thin veneer of British imperialist proclivities that Peter Brimelow
has brought with him to the United States when he himself immigrated to "the former colony." "There is a sense in which
current immigration policy is Adolf Hitler's posthumous revenge
on America."20 This is the first sentence of this by far the lowest
depth of tribalism that today afflicts American neo-conservatism.
The rest of the book follows suit.
It is not just people like Brimelow whose anxiety at the rise of the
new intellectual organicity in the United States is underlined by a
remarkable historical ignorance of the circumstances that instigate
global migration of capital and labor. Academic intellectuals of

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a far superior and fairer nature have equally failed to understand

the constitutional forces at work in massive demographic changes
from the colonial ends of the capitalist cosmopolis to its presumed
centers, as the capital has tried to escape the cosmopolis and go
to the site of cheap labor and raw material (German factories in
Turkey to stop the influx of cheap labor migration from Turkey to
Germany). Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country is one such
regrettable instance of a lifetime record of admirable academic and
political engagement to come to such a tribalist cul-de-sac.
With admirable tenacity and liberal-minded fairness, Rorty asks
for a return to the tradition of democratic intellectual labor of the
Walt Whitman and John Dewey generations. Rorty, who has been
one of the most successful American pragmatists in assimilating
continental philosophy into his revised reading of that American
tradition, now cannot resist siding with Harold Bloom in taking a
swipe at the "school of resentment" as they call the critical reading of the so-called "Classics." He says that he has "no doubt that
cultural studies will be as old hat thirty years from now as was
logical positivism thirty years after its triumph."21 He also joins
Bloom in prophesying that the "odd blend of Foucault and Marx
[is]... a very minor episode in the endless history of Platonism "22
This may indeed be the case. But what Rorty and Bloom have
both missed, in Rorty's case more regrettably, is the constitutional
difference between the changing location of the United States in
late global capitalism from the time of Whitman and later Dewey.
The spiraling chase of labor and capital has resulted in massive
migratory patterns in the world. It is not to vacation in a pleasant
climate that the flood of legal and illegal immigrants pours from
Africa, Asia, and Latin America into Europe and North America.
The ever-versatile capital evades them as it can and then builds
factories where they used to live for even cheaper labor; the motion is set in gear. Electronic capitalism has now constitutionally
transgressed the very assumption of national boundaries in such
radical terms that we can no longer really "achieve" any, let alone,
"our" country.

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*

247

The potential rise of a new organicity among postcolonial/postnational intellectuals is equally resisted by ethnic tribalism of the
opposite sort. Matching the tribal Americanism exemplified at
worst by Brimelow and at its most philosophically anchored by
Rorty is the equally retrograde ethnic tribalism of the identity
politics of the so-called "ethnic minorities." Evident among African-American, Latino, and Asian "minorities," this reactionary
ethnic isolationism has now reached the new wave of immigrants
including Iranians. The rampant tribalism of the "ethnic minorities" is equally nativist in its pathological resistance to Eurocentric
Americanism, which in effect results in the active consolidation
of both. Collapsing in response to the tribal Americanism of this
presumed "center" are the equally tribal ethnicities at the presumed
"periphery." The scattered reality of our location, however, is not
and cannot be divided into this presumed "center" and "periphery."
What we are witnessing at the cosmopolitan centers of capitalist
power is a quilt-like patchwork of false and falsifying consciousness successfully disguising the fact that the whole world, regardless of gender and ethnicity, is reduced to raw material and cheap
labor actively engaged in an economic production of reality. It
is precisely this reality that necessitates the constitution of a new
organicity for the public intellectual.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 produced two unrelated but,
as fate would have it, convergent by-products: A significant body
of Iranian nativist intellectuals moving abroad and then a global
cinema that came out to meet them on the festival haymarkets of
global capitalism. Where these two meet is the site of a crucial
reconsideration of the very place and function of the intellectual
in late globalizing capitalism.
The "Iranian-Americans," as the phrase has emerged now, are
the latest addition to the roster of tribes in the United States. The
best study of this particular pathology is Hamid Naficy's The
Making of an Exile Culture, a study so rich and representative of
this pathology that itself is one of its most significant symptoms.
In this book, Naficy gives a full, panoramic, and detailed picture
of "the exilic condition" of Iranians in Los Angeles, as seen

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through their television programs, radio shows, and periodicals.

More than sixty regularly scheduled television programs, close
to ninety Persian-language periodicals, twenty radio programs,
four organizations sponsoring "newscast" by phone, twentyseven feature films, ten different types of voluntary associations,
twenty-three active organizations, and close to $6,000,000.00
estimated annual revenue from advertisement are among the
startling statistics collected and analyzed by Naficy.
The Iranian experience in Los Angeles, as a microcosm of their
"exilic" experiences everywhere, is a sad testimony to the violent
power of words, when a rhetoric of isolationism robs reality of
relevance: "Iran," "Home," "Exile." The sorry self-flagellation of
a whole generation of people moaning in front of television shows,
mourning their being "in exile" and away from their "home" is
the symptom of a disease that refuses life. To detect the specific
symptoms of that disease, Naficy's is by far the most articulate
voice to have come out of the Iranian "exilic experience." Naficy's
own voice is integral to that experience and thus in it dwells a
frightfully claustrophobic echo of its subject matter. The Making
of an Exile Culture begins with a nightmare of Naficy himself,
over a narration of which he then presides as a self-analyst. The
nightmare moves around the image of an elevator, the supremely
claustrophobic space, suspended between two nowheres, moving
between two vertiginously nauseating emptinesses. Here is the
nightmare of an analytical interpreter interpreting his claustrophobic nightmare:
As a metaphor, this image of ambivalence (elevator) provokes several
questions: Is a person in exile entitled to a piece of land as small as an elevator? Is he condemned to travel up and down in it between two cultural
poles, two memories, and two lives? Is there a third in-between zone or
territory that is safe from both? Is exile merely a claustrophobic space
that provides shelter and acts as a prison, or is it a liberatory slipzone of
possibilities and potentialities?23

The double-nightmare, in the no-time-zone of "exilic" self-pity,

then leads into indulgence in a daytime at once translucent and
vacuous:

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249

Separation from you [Naficy 's introduction is cast in the rhetorical device
of a letter addressed to his parents in Iran. The device is effective, though
at times breaching the limits of credulity] is in fact a series of separation, like links in a chain: separation from the earththat dry, cruel, and
yet nurturing earth of the homeland; separation from the fragrances of
spices in bazaars and from the smell of urine on the mud walls outside
mosques; separation from the native language and the control one has
in using ita control that is gradually diminishing; separation from
childhood and from the places of childhood, separation from father,
brothers, and sistersstrands that become thinner and more fragile from
this position of exile, causing the tapestry of your faces to grow stark,
faint, and threadbare.24
What jeremiad denials of life are these "narratives of exile"? No
vision, no courage, no imagination of a life-affirming encounter
with one's material life (wherever it might be) is evident in these
sad, sorrowful pages of misery. Collapsing into the abyss of such
sorry sentiments degenerates into a metaphysics of identity crisis
that is simply pre-modern in its underlying assumptions. For all
the presumptuous postmodernity of their rhetorical devices, these
so-called "narratives of exile" are positively medieval in their
sentimental celebrations of an outdated crisis of identity, of such
gross, historically untenable, binary oppositions presumed between
"home" and "exile."
What exactly could be the purpose of such sentimental selfindulgence? Are we supposed to generate or expect sympathy in
the world for missing some pissing ground of our hometown when
in the years of civil war in the former Yugoslavia millions of Bosnians and now Kosovars have fled their homeland, many of them
the brutalized victims of rape, mayhem, carnage, torture, and of
barbaric Serbian concentration camps? What could be the relative
significance of an "exilic narrative" whose most memorable trope
is being homesick for the smell of turmeric and saffron in a bazaar
in Isfahan or Tehran when on a daily basis we witness the plight
of thousands of Haitian refugees robbed of their most elementary
human rights, on our television screens, escaping the brutal social
and economic consequences of one military coup after another?
More than a million Rwandans, in an unimaginable state of des-

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titution and despair escape immanent massacre in their homeland

and stampede their way into Goma, Zaire, there to be rooted out
by cholera and dysentery. Texan vigilantes are mobilized against
Mexican illegal immigrants. Dead bodies of Chinese illegal immigrants are discovered in a crate in Dover, England. Algerians
in France, Turks in Germany, South Asians in Britain, Afghans
in Iran, Nepalese in India, Filipinos in Kuwait, Sri Lankans in
Lebanon, are the subjects of the most brutal, racist, treatments.
Against the backdrop of this "exilic" reality, are we supposed to
feel sympathy for someone dozing off in Los Angeles while feigning a recoiled return to his mother's womb? Does the massacre of
a million Iraqis, the maiming of even more, and the rise of some
four millions of brutalized Iraqi refugees in the aftermath of the
U.S.-led invasion and occupation of their country since March
2003 perhaps give rise to a little bit of consideration as to who is in
diaspora and who not. Can the fact and phenomenon of Palestinians in and out of their homeland, subject of a vicious European
colonial settlement called Zionism, perhaps alter our conception
of being in "exile"?
How dare a people lump themselves together with Palestinians,
Haitians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Kosovars, Afghans, or Iraqis as part
of a universal refugee camp of people in exile? The overwhelming majority of Iranians living in Los Angeles or anywhere else in
the United States, Europe, or Australia lead a rather comfortable,
some even obscenely opulent, life with absolutely no intention
whatsoever to go back "home." Those migrant Iranian laborers
in the Persian Gulf, Turkey, or as far as Japan, have little time to
waste on their "narratives of exile." For those who do, "Home" is
a luxurious toy with which affluent Iranians waste much of their
children's time and overfed Iranian pop artists in Los Angeles sing
their silly songs and lead a pathetically corrupt life. We live in
circumstances when these very successful Iranians have already
joined ranks with the most fascist elements in the Republican
Party in the United States, from mayoral to gubernatorial Jo national politics. It is not accidental that before we have produced
a single voice joining the cause of monumental social concerns
in the United States, where our children live now and where our

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251

grandchildren will be born and raised, we have Iranians joining the

Republican Party, or adding their voices to those of the neocons.
Problems ranging from unconscionable poverty to dehumanizing
racism to homelessness, debate over national health or immigration laws now deeply concern everyone who lives in the United
States. As the most recent flock of immigrants, where do we stand
on all these vital issues, what do we want, whom do we support,
when do we speak, and what exactly is the configuration of our
collective presence? Is joining the Republican Party or staying
home and watching those wretched television programs of which
Naficy writes or else writing about the streets and alleys and walls
on which we used to urinate when we were kids going to be the
extent of our public awareness in the face of monumental events
that face all of us as mere objects of economic production and
consumption irrespective of a massive trail of poverty and injustice that it leaves behind? The fact is that with few exceptions
the overwhelming majority of Iranians living outside Iran can get
on an airplane and return to their homeland and there lead a halfdecent life not particularly worse or better than what they lead in
Los Angeles, Washington, DC, London, or Paris. This is not the
case with millions of Palestinians, Bosnians, Kosovars, Haitians,
Rwandans, Afghans, or Iraqis.
*

This exilic condition extends well into the making of nativist

ethnic intellectuals. So far the Iranian intellectuals abroad have
failed miserably to liberate themselves either from the inane
sentimentality of missing one spot or another of their hometown
or else repeating ad nauseum their intellectually retarded manner
of political opposition to the Islamic Republic. Judged by the
deeply corrupt, frightfully outmoded, and irremediably dictatorial
disposition of the so-called "Opposition" to the Islamic Republic
outside Iranfrom the retinue idly gathered around the late Shah's
son to a cacophony of constitutionally fascist political cells and
all-boys-clubs day-dreaming about taking power in Iranthere
is no indication that living outside the dictatorial and totalitarian

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reach of the Islamic Republic has done Iranians any good in learning and assimilating into their operative political culture the very
elementary principles of democratic institution-building, or the
very alphabetical conceptions of civil society. Constitutionally
and as a matter of a stubbornly enduring political culture, there is
no difference between the state absolutism of the Islamic Republic
and the political culture operatives among the communities abroad,
and if Naficy's study is to be taken as a reliable barometer of the
evolving disposition of these communities, there is a long, useless,
and utterly aimless road stretching ahead of them. Instead of being a jubilant feast of freedom and possibilities otherwise denied
at "home," the Los Angeles carnival, representing all others, is a
miserable mourning procession of an emigre sub-culture impotent
to deliver itself from the mortifying memories of a past that never
was, unable to face a present which could potentially be theirs,
and incapable of imagining a future, visualizing a horizon, that
just might be their children's.
In the case of the Iranian intellectuals abroad in particular, the
pathology represents a constitutionally nativist disposition that at
some earlier point in its composition was the site of creative resistance to colonialism but now in its outdated endurance remains
constant even in "exile." If the nativist disposition continues to be
operative inside Iran for perhaps obvious but not legitimate reasons,
its endurance among the exilic communities outside Iran is scandalous. After two hundred years, that nativist disposition has totally
exhausted all its revolutionary potential and now its debilitating
disposition has come totally to dominate it. The world, deeply
entrenched in planetary capitalism and extraterrestrial colonization,
no longer has a room for intellectual nativism.
Nowhere is this state of moral self-mortification of nativist intellectuals in exile more evident than in the sorry case of the Iranian
filmmakers living abroad. After the revolution of 1979, a number
of leading Iranian filmmakers left their country. It is ludicrous to
assume that those who remained supported the Islamization of the
revolution, or those who left were in any shape or form more in
danger, or waged a more effective critical campaign against the
Islamic Republic, than those who remained. Some of those who

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253

left were forced to return under sever financial circumstances.

Many of those who opted to tolerate the indignity of exile could
never pursue their professional careers. Many decided to remain
abroad not out of any political conviction but by choice. Gradually a rift developed between those who remained inside and those
who left. Those who remained managed to tolerate the brutalities
of the Islamic censorship and gave birth to a glorious cinema.
Those who left, with few notable exceptions, gradually dwindled
into irrelevance. Perfectly understandable professional rivalries
began to be confused with vengeful jealousy, hatred, apathy, and
anomie. Those who remained resented the freedom the outsiders
had enjoyed and the waste to which they had put that freedom.
Meanwhile, those who remained produced vastly, magnificently,
and conquered the major film festivals around the globe, while
those who left could not come near those who had remained in
their achievements. During the two tumultuous decades after the
successful Islamization of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iranian
filmmakers in exile managed to overcome intolerable circumstances, however, and by mid-1990s even arrange for a film festival
in Sweden in which some twenty-four filmmakers and sixty-two
films were brought together.25 Mostly produced in Europe and
the United States, these films, regardless of their quality, are an
emphatic testimonial to the indomitable spirit of their producers,
directors, and actors. Who financed these films, what sacrifices
have been made to produce them, who will screen and who will
go to see them? Most of the major and minor film festivals still
operate on the basis of "national cinema." A filmmaker in exile
has very limited acccess into a major film festival.
The nature of cinematic production as an art form is such that it
requires extraordinary preparation, institutional support, financial
resources, familiarity with specific cultures of production and
distribution, knowledge of the local industries related to cinema, a
wide range of familiarity with the technical support, and ultimately
access to the major film festivals and distribution companies. It is
a daunting task to raise the necessary financial resources, mobilize
the technical support, have access to locations and actors, etc.
even to begin to engage in producing a film. The task is acutely

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difficult if it is to be done in a foreign land, in a different language

and culture, and on uncharted territory. The success or failure of
the Iranian filmmakers abroad, as a result, has to be measured in
this extraordinarily difficult context. If there are talented Iranian
filmmakers driving cabs in New York or Los Angeles, and there
are, their predicament ought to be understood in this context.
There were quite a number of Iranian filmmakers who left their
country after the revolution in order to settle in a foreign land and
yet try to pursue their professional interests. Under these sever
circumstance, they did not succeed and either resorted to work
unrelated to their preferred profession or else, finding the indignity
of exile unendurable, returned to their homeland. Among those
who remained abroad, one of the most prolific has been Parviz
Sayyad. Under intolerable conditions for an expatriate artist, and
with heroic effort, Parviz Sayyad continued his artistic activities,
wrote and staged plays, and directed two films, Mission (1984)
and Checkpoint (1987), to no commercial success but some critical
acclaim. From a pioneering figure in Iranian cinema, television,
and theatre, Sayyad subsequently collapsed into a bitter and angry
exile, dually marginalized both in his homeland and in the United
States. The tragic figure of Sayyad epitomizes of how artistic and
intellectual nativism soon degenerates into bitterness, despair, and
irrelevance. In 1996, Sayyad published a collection of his essays,
Cinema-ye dar Tab'id ("Cinema in Exile") in which is evident
the deep ressentiment of an artist totally out of his environmental
elements. Sayyad's anger is targeted at international film festivals
for having facilitated the access of the post-revolutionary Iranian
cinema and thus legitimized the Islamic Republic. He opposes the
term "Islamic Cinema," and he tries to make a delicate distinction
between his love and appreciation for Iranian filmmakers and the
fact that the inevitable consequence of their art is a whitewashing
of the atrocities committed by the Islamic Republic.26
Reza Allamehzadeh is another major filmmaker who migrated
to Europe. Because of his political activities, Allamehzadeh was
imprisoned during the Pahlavi regime. While in Sweden, Allamehzadeh made A Few Simple Sentences (1987), addressing
the problem of the marginality of Iranian immigrants in Europe.

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255

Allamehzadeh's Guests of Hotel Astoria (1989) also dealt with

the plight of Iranian immigrants abroad. Because of the lack of
resources, Allamehzadeh could no longer persue his filmmaking
activities and soon had to resort to writing scripts about issues
more domestic to his environment in Europe.27 His Lalla and My
Stepfather (1998) is a script that was written after making a television-series documentaries about gypsies. He could never raise
enough funds to turn this script into a film. His attention to the
gypsies leaves very little room for conjecture as to the state of his
mind while in exile. Another Iranian filmmaker, Qasem Ebrahimian, is another example whose Suitors (1989), premiered during
the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, equally dealing with matters
of immigrant displacement in the United States.
What Sayyad, Allamehzadeh, and Ebrahimian share is a cinema
of migratory misery: Desolate, claustrophobic, angry, resentful,
unable to leave the old culture behind, incapable of adapting to the
new. Imprisoned in one language, one culture, and one imaginary
place that they claim and yet cannot claim as theirs, theirs is a ghettoized cinema, a closed-circuit nightmare that repeats itself to no
viable audience. Shot in no land, narrated in no time, no proportion
to the flat repetition of its visions, this cirlema is empty, flawed,
pointless, hopeless, jaundiced. We are Iranians, this cinema says,
we have a country, we have been robbed, we are in exile, come
and look at us. This cinema generates no sympathy, solicits no
noble sentiment, attracts no audience, and self-flagellates to no immediate purpose. This cinema has lost even the magic of cinema
itself. No sense of wonder, no occasion of awe, no reason to pause
and withdraw from the numbing banality of the routinized gaze,
sustains this flat and light-less repetition of frames.
A more versatile group of Iranian filmmakers began to make
films in their new environment with a larger scope of reality in
their vision. Sohrab Shahid-Sales (1944-1998), Parviz Kimiavi,
Marva Nabili, and the most gloriously rebellious of them all Amir
Naderi are in this group. Marva Nibili's Nightsongs (1984), about
a Vietnamese woman's identity crisis in the United States is one
of the best examples of a visual mutation of an Iranian's particular

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into a compelling universal. But among this group, by far the most
prolific Iranian filmmaker since his departure from Iran has been
Amir Naderi, one of the most remarkable artists who has arisen
from his own ashes like a phoenix. After a long and illustrious
career in his homeland, Naderi left Iran permanently and has resided in the United States. His last two masterpieces made inside
Iran, The Runner (1985) and Water, Wind, Dust (1991) established
his status as one of the most brilliant Iranian filmmakers. While
in the United States, Naderi shifted gear and began to make films
native to his adopted land. Manhattan by Numbers (1993), ABC
Manhattan (1997), Marathon (2001), and Sound Barrier (2005)
are the four feature films that Naderi has made in the United States,
all of which are testimonials to his attempts at breaking loose from
the limitations of being an Iranian filmmaker living abroad. In
his recent cinema palpitates the raw and effervescent energy of a
New Yorker, the fresh look, the empowering bewilderment, of a
newcomer who has come to claim, to appropriate, to own. Amir
Naderi is exactly on the opposite pole of Parviz Sayyad. Sayyad's
vision is claustrophobic and bitter, Naderi's rambunctious, openhearted, devouring life, madly magnificent.
Amir Naderi also stands in sharp contrast to another tragic figure in Iranian cinema, Sohrab Shahid-Sales. A pioneering figure
in the contemporary renaissance in Iranian realism, Shahid-Sales
life came to a miserable end, virtually drinking himself to death
in Chicago in 1998. Shahid-Sales tried to lead a productive life
in Germany. But compared to his glorious achievements like One
Simple Incident (1973), Still Life (1974), and In Exile (1975) he
never recovered from the trauma of exile and his serious impact on
German New Cinema is yet to be fully assayed and recognized.28
Equally an idle life in exile has been led by another pioneering
figure in Iranian film and fiction, Ebrahim Golestan. While in the
case of the majority of Iranian filmmakers abroad lack of resources
and cultural dislocation may very well account for their abysmal
productivity, this cannot at all explain Golestan's predicament.
Independently wealthy, multilingual, and very well connected to
all major European festivals, Ebrahim Golestan could not take
advantage of any of these resources to make any major or minor

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257

contribution to Iranian cinema or letters after he left Iran. He

has not produced either a work of fiction or film while living in
the UK. What is even worse is that over the last few years he
has been reduced to writing useless, gossip-ridden articles for
Iranian magazines, seriously jeopardizing the reputation he had
rightly established for himself as one of the pioneering figures in
Persian fiction with a modest contribution to Iranian cinema as
well. Golestan leads a secluded, idle, lucrative but uncreative life
in Sussex, England.
The failure of Iranian filmmakers abroad, Amir Naderi being
the most glorious exception that has only proved the rule, is symptomatic of the nativist tribalism and ethnic identitarianism robbing
a whole generation of artists and intellectuals of any possibility
of giving a new life to themselves and a vision to the predicament
of their moral and material concerns. They are strangers to their
adopted land, as they have become strangers to what they think
is their own land but is not, and as a result strangers to the very
timbre of reality. The organicity of the intellectual in the emerging
configuration of globalizing power requires an entirely different
disposition than the so-called "opposition" intellectuals who are
waging a long-distance battle against their home regime. More
often than not, these "oppositional" intellectuals degenerate into
irrelevant parasites with no organic link either to their presumed
"homeland" or to their immediate physical surroundings. They end
up living in a cocoon, a hermetic seal of suffocating limitations.
They increasingly grow irrelevant to the changing configuration
of realitybitter, reclusive, morally and intellectually isolated
from their environment.
For the first time in the long and arduous genealogy of our
encounter with capitalist modernity, we now have the historic opportunity to examine the mysterious, but decodable, relationship
between the promising rhetorics of our revolutions and the miser-r
able politics of our self-inflicting violence. From that demystified
site we can begin to retrace our location in the globalizing logic of
capitalism, its extended colonial arm, and ultimately the emerging
patterns of organicity for a whole new conception of the moral
responsibility of an intellectual. That objective will not happen

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except as the by-product of a full integration into the historical

agency of a new material organicity of the intellectual. That hybridity is the very site of the emerging intellectual is self-evident, but
"hybridity" not in the moribund and self-pitying introspection to
which Homi Bhabha is often prone, instead in a stripping naked
of all illusions of "homeland," and "authenticity." There no longer
is any "homeland."29 "Achieving his country," Rorty cannot, nor
can any other homesick native intellectual who misses the pissing-ground of his childhood while far more significantly missing
the vast openness of possibilities stretched ahead of us.
The roots of the Iranian intellectual nativism abroad can be
traced back to Iran and to two diametrically opposed and yet thematically complementary maladies: one initiated by Jalal Al-e
Ahmad's nativist conception of "Westoxication," and the other
exemplified in the deeply colonized spirit of Daryush Shayegan's
"Westernism." One resenting "the West," the other aspiring to
"the West," and thus both authenticating "the West." In his attempt to de-colonize the mind of the Iranians, Jalal Al-e Ahmad
diagnosed a disease that he called "Westoxication" and thereby
contributed massively to the domestication of the Spenglerian
abstraction, "The West." No other term than "Westoxication" has
been the singular source of so much calamitous consequences in
contemporary Iranian history. Al-e Ahmad began on the correct
premise of his attempt to de-colonize the colonially constituted
Iranian subject in order to restore historical agency to it. This was
a necessary, admirable, and historically crucial move. But in the
absence of a historically informed and a critical awareness of the
joint projects of capitalist modernity and the Enlightenment, Al-e
Ahmad fell squarely into the Hegelian trap of a ghostly attribution
of authenticity to the phenomenal abstraction "the West." "The
West" was thus uncritically borrowed and categorically accepted
as a reality sui generis. In response to that originating gesture, a
native "authenticity" was sought from history, which is at once
ahistorical and constitutionally fabricated. "Nativism" of this sort,
as Edward Said has argued, "reinforces the distinction [between
the colonizer and the colonized] by revaluating the weaker or
subservient partner. And it has often led to compelling but often

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259

demagogic assertions about a native past, history, or actuality that

seems to stand free not only of the colonizer but of worldly time
itself."30
Divorced from the historical context of colonialism in the
immediate vicinity of the rise of capitalist modernity, the term
"Westoxication,"31 assumed a reality sui generis. From its initial
formulation in the early 1960s,32 through the Islamic Revolution
of the late 1970s, and well into its successful institutionalization in
the 1980s and 1990s, the term "Westoxication" has been the singular ideological touchstone of the Iranian political culture. From
individuals and institutions to social movements and conceptual
categories, from normative behavior and intellectual dispositions
to artistic tastes and moral judgments were branded and thus condemned as "Westoxicated."' Khomeini and Khomeinism have had
many field days with this term and its brutal execution. The most
fascist and totalitarian purges of the political and cultural institutions, as well as the most medieval exacting of codes of conduct and
normative behavior have taken place precisely under the auspices
of this term. The most catastrophic consequence of this term,
however, has been the "Truly Islamic" or "Genuinely Iranian" or
else "Traditional," all xenophobic maladies that have divided the
world into two opposing Manichean forces. Al-e Ahmad began
on the promising note of trying to locate Iran and the rest of the
colonized world in relation of production to the centers of capitalist
cosmopolis. "Occidentosis," he diagnosed, "characterizes an era
in which we have not yet acquired the machine, in which we are
not yet versed in the mysteries of its structure."33 But he ended
up coining the most distorting term in modern Iranian political
culture. The critical fallacy was squarely rooted in Al-e Ahmad's
historical and theoretical limitations:
We have always looked westward. We even coined the term "Western"
before the Europeans called us "Eastern." Consider Ibn Battuta, "the
Westerner [Maghribi]," or, from an earlier date, Gibraltar, the extremity
of the Islamic "West."34
This is inaccurate. The naming of North Africa as "Maghrib" (the
West), meaning to the west of the Islamic Civilization, with first

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Damascus and then Baghdad as the epicenters of that civilization,

has nothing to do with the post-Hegelian constitution of "the West"
as a metaphysical entity at the very heart of the Enlightenment.
From such false premises, Al-e Ahmad could only plunge into
even deeper ahistorical fallacies like, "perhaps it was in flight
from mother Indiaour first turn West. Flight from origins? I
don't know. This is something for ethnology and Indo-European
studies to clarify. I only conjecture,"35 or even worse: "then too
we may have always looked to the West because the nomads to
our northwest have driven us in that direction, just as the arriving
Aryans drove the peoples called in the Shahnama the divs from
Mazandaran to the Gulf coast."36
This descending spiral of ahistorical nonsense leads to an abyss
of confusion because Al-e Ahmad lacked the critical apparatus
to see the specific historical circumstances in which the project
of capitalist modernity emerged and with it also emerged the
project of the Enlightenment and the Hegelian conception of the
historical Geist in which Hegel had to see himself as the anticipated consequence of Plato with the same instrumental logic that
he saw Napoleon as the anticipated consequence of Alexander the
Great. Al-e Ahmad, in all sincerity, with the best of intentions to
de-colonize the Iranian mind, paved our way to hell and branded
the unfortunate term of "Westoxication" onto our political culture.
The coinage of the term "Westoxication" became the pinnacle of
ideological nativism in the contemporary Iranian political culture.
"To accept nativism," again Edward Said warns,
is to accept the consequences of imperialism too willingly, to accept the
very radical, religious, and political divisions imposed on places like
Ireland, India, Lebanon, and Palestine by imperialism itself. To leave
the historical world for the metaphysics of essences like negritude, Irishness, Islam, and Catholicism is in a word, to abandon history. Most often
this abandonment in the postimperial setting has often led to some sort
of millenarianism, if the movement has any sort of mass base, or it has
degenerated into small-scale private craziness, or into an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes, myths, animosities, and traditions encouraged
by imperialism.37

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261

There is, as Said implies here, a direct and catastrophic link between Al-e Ahmad's formulation of the concept of "Westoxication"
and the pathology that Huntington represents under the rubric of
"the Clash of Civilization" and Fukuyama articulates as "the End
of History." "Islam" and "The West" were in effect constituted
as two a/historical enemies. Bernard Lewis, the chief patron of
the Orientalist concoction of the binary opposition between "Islam and the West," has provided much historical fantasy to these
terms,38 and thus a dangerous liaison was daydreamed between
two diametrically active illusions. Much of the isolationism of
Iranian intellectuals abroad, their historical affliction with being
unable to formulate a place of dignity and a position of agency
for themselves outside their self-ghettoized limitations is directly
traceable to this nativist conception of "Westoxication."
Matching and complementing the nativism of Al-e Ahmad's
conception of "Westoxication" is the equally distorted Westernism
of Daryush Shayegan, chief among a number of other Iranians particularly enamored of the achievements of "The West" and critical
of "the East" for having been lazy and stupid enough to lose the
historical game. Al-e Ahmad's principal project in publishing his
Westoxication in the early 1960s was to de-colonize the Iranian
mind, and yet, having failed in that objective while adding a further
entrapment to the Iranian political culture, by the late 1980s we had
the most frightful expression of precisely such a deeply colonized
imagination manifested in the publication of Daryush Shayegan's
Le Regard Mutile.39 In the esteemed judgment of Shayegan, we,
in what he calls "pays traditionelles," suffer from the catastrophic
consequences of having been "on Holiday from History."40
Let us try to be rational for once! [Shayegan admonishes us, the unruly,
irrational Orientals on leave from "History," and publishes his admonition precisely in 1989, the year that his kindred soul, Francis Fukuyama,
published "The End of History" in Washington!] What exactly has
been happening over the last four centuries? What has happened since
the discovery of the great laws of astronomy? The last phases of the
construction of our cathedrals of thought coincide oddly with the rise
of Cartesian subjectivity. One is tempted to agree with Hegel that the

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World-Spirit was deserting the areas where culture had been perfected
and was seeking asylum in the West. Why? I have no idea.41

Exactly. On the premise of reprimanding us for having been on

holiday from "History," Shayegan then proceeds to bombard us
with a litany of condemnations that not only we were stupid enough
to take a vacation when "the West" was busy working but that we
are even dumber than being able to learn it from them and do it
the way they did it. Why are we like that? Well, according to
Shayegan we suffer from some sort of mental multiple sclerosis
and we are "unable to begin" our own history (chapter 1). Thus
afflicted and not knowing what to do with ourselves, we took a
vacation from "History" (chapter 2). China and the Islamic World
are the prime examples of such irresponsible Oriental vacationing
(chapter 3, and detect the identical diagnosis of Huntington and
Fukuyama with Shayegan's). In addition to all of this, we have a
pathological fixation with "Identity" (chapter 4). This combination of mental and physical malaise is so far as the occasion of
the "split" between "the West" and "the East" is concerned. Then
Shayegan plans to teach us the "ontological displacement" that has
characterized our untimely vacation-taking. First of all we have an
ophthalmologic deficiency. "Reality" for us is always somewhere
else (chapter 1 of the second book). Then we have severe cardiac
malignancies and our "Scholastic Arteries" are hardened (chapter
2 of book two). Next comes a paradigmatic shift in "the West,"
which we could not read because of our severe dyslexia (chapter
3 of book two). Finally comes schizophrenia to complete the list
of our Oriental diseases: We live in two paradigmatic modes, our
own and that of "the West" (chapter 4 of book two). This completes
our "ontological displacement."
What next? Shayegan now tells us about our "field of distortions." What are these fields? First is the juxtapositional distortion
of "Tradition and Modernity." We are cross-eyed (chapter 1 of book
three). Then comes the dual entrapment of "Westernization" and
"Islamization" (chapter 2 of book three). The result is a lesson in
our geographical illiteracy, that is to say our location in "A World
which is Nowhere" (chapter 3 of book three). To complete his

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263

diagnosis of our "regard mutile," Shayegan gives us a checklist of

perpetrators for us to hold responsible for "the social foundation
of the distortions." Who are they? First the "Intellectuals" who
not only cannot read French like Shayegan does but cannot even
have translated for them a half-decent text (chapter 1 of book four).
Second are the "Ideologues" who having been on the sideline of
"History" now are plagiarizing "the Western" ideas by procurement (chapter 2 of book four). Third come the "Technocrats"
who lack the coherence of both intellectuals and ideologues and
thus attend to our attempted re-entry into "History" as "splintered
fragments of desire, scattered packages of awareness, crumbs of
contradictory wishes pulling this way and that, right and left, each
in its own direction" (chapter 3 of book four).42 And finally come
the ayatollahs, the "Strategists of God" who defy "the planetary
triumph of laicism"43 and stubbornly wish a return back to "A
World in which Nothing Moves,"44 that is to say to get back to yet
another "Holiday from History."
*

What we are witnessing here is no simple historical amnesia

in which, as Said has pointed out,45 self-loathing Orientals are so
deeply colonized in their mind and imagination that in effect they
side with their conquerors. Here, we have a historical updating
of the "native informer" who this time around not only "informs"
the colonial officer of the predicament of the colonial subject but
actually presides over an interpretation of his malignancy. As
a sign of the catastrophic consequences of theoretical nativism,
compare the language and disposition of Daryush Shayegan with
the insurrectionary spirit of Gayatri Spivak and her appropriation of an entirely different conception of the "native informant."
Despite its constitutionally flawed mis-appellation, the subject
"native informant" is nevertheless revolutionized in the pages
of Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: "I think of the
'native informant' as a name for that mark of expulsion from the
name of Mana mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical
relation."46 Here, Spivak alters the subservient positioning of the

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"native informant" into one of a rebel with a legitimate cause and

a subversive angle. Here, the "native" informs but of an entirely
different reality, speaking as she does from the shadow-lines of
Modernity, where the extended shadow of capitalism became so
vast and the absurdity of the logic of its Enlightenment so untenable that only a "native" could tell its Emperor of the frightful
fire. The entire text of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is the
"autobiography" that has been for long denied the native, an "autobiography" replete not with accounts of atrocities but enlightened
with the corrective lenses of an embracing wisdom that seeks to
set the course of history right as it seeks to right a wrong so long
left under-theorized.
"Increasingly," Spivak informs us from the depth of her liberating language, "there is the self-marginalizing or self-consolidating
migrant or postcolonial masquerading as a 'native informant.' I am
discovering the native informant clear out of this cluster."47 That
is a discovery worth registering, because this is the voice of that
confidant marginality that has a claim over the center beyond the
control, wit, or judgment of the center. Through what amounts
to an act of guerrilla maneuvering, Spivak appropriates the term
from ethnography, reminds ethnographers of their complacency,
and turns the table around by repositing the "informant" as "native"
to an entirely new locality. In that new locality, the "European" is
no longer the "norm," and thus no longer in position of inscribing
the "native informant." The "native," now speaking from the pages
of Spivak, informs of an entirely different reality, drawn from the
shadow of the "European" norm.
In Spivak's light, the three reflections on the flat mirrors of
Kant-Hegel-Marx now see themselves in the speculum of this
Other woman. In Spivak's speculum is reflected Kant's claim
of an autonomy of the reflexive subject as the heteronomy of its
necessary exclusions, Hegel's claim on the movement from the
unconscious to consciousness as the needed evidence of the Active
Geist, Marx's claim on the logic of the productive history as the
"Asiatic mode of production." In the language of this "native,"
as a result, the North can be reminded of its "aiding" the South
by its selective forgetting of the plundering of its resources. If

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the "native" is "the site of unlisted traces,"48 Spivak's is thus the

historical task of listing the unlisted, and that not by branding
the triumvirate domination of our state of beingKant-HegelMarxas "motivated imperialists," but by reading the history
of our presence in the shadow of their absences, their lapses of
memory, their presumptions to represent. Spivak has a far more
ambitious project to succumb to empty anti-imperialist bickering.
Hers is the manifesto of a whole new dimension given to freedom:
"A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial
texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs
itself in the name of the Other."49
There is a direct link between Spivak's reclaiming of the global
locality and the rise of a new organicity in the making of the postcolonial intellectual. Edward Said's conception and practice of an
exilic intellectual, Bhabha's hesitant but nevertheless useful unpacking of the split personae of hybridity, but far more effectively
Spivak's re-appropriation of the rebellious "native informant"
are all the insignia of an emancipatory will to resist power and
to effect global change. The experience of Iranian intellectuals
outside their homeland is an apt example of utter misery, debilitating ressentiment, and distasteful bitterness. In his character and
work, Edward Said theorized and exemplified an intellectual of
amphibious presence in multiple cultural settings, while the Iranians discussed above are the best example of dual marginality,
irrelevant at home, doubly useless in exile, squandering their energy and talents in pitiful rivalries and banal backbiting. Historically trapped, universally speechless, culturally self-ghettoizing,
morally mute, and intellectually parochial, Iranian intellectuals in
exile exemplify an amoebic life, incapable of zooming out of their
claustrophobic close-ups, and casting a fresh and life affirming
look at the long shot of the open air.
The task is not to create yet another intellectual ghetto. The
task is to occupy and redefine the center, and thus eliminate the
fabricated peripheries. The more we crawl back into the suffocating air of yet another peripheral dungeon, the more the center
is left vacant to be defined by the Huntingtons, Fukuyamas, and

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Brimelows: All of them petrified seismographers of the coming

changes. Redefining the center is not going to be an easy task.
There are institutionally based and powerfully placed custodians
of "Western Civilization," the self-appointed guardians of a nightmare that Hegel dreamt and Spengler interpreted. It is not just
the so-called "third world" cultures that disturb this nightmare.
The entire post-metaphysical turn in un-thinking "the West" jolts
them in their slumber. The radical subversiveness of this deeply
troubling turn in post-Platonic reaching for the real frightens them
out of their wits.
It is a splendid moment in history to see these beneficiaries of
capitalist modernity fear the crumbling consequences of the tall
walls they have so long celebrated and under whose tall shadows
rested for long. It is an equally glorious moment to see exposed and
brought to rest in peace the metaphysical underpinning of Oswald
Spengler's assumption that "The decline of the west.. .we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all
its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being."50
To confront their fear and trembling, to turn the unraveling tide
of de-narrating "the West," the custodians of "Western Civilization" reach for their dead certainties in their deadening reading
of what they call "their Classics." It is the principal task of the
post-nativist (postcolonial) intellectual not to give these cultural
warlords of a non-existant "West" the satisfaction of thinking that
these texts actually belong to them. They do not. We are at home
in their exile.
Notes
1.
2.

3.

See Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectuals (New York:

Pantheon Books, 1994), 52-53.
As suggested by Roland Robertson in his Globalization: Social Theory
and Global Culture. (London, 1992) and elaborated by Fredric Jameson
and Masao Mioshi in their edited volume, The Cultures of Globalization
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), xi.
See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 91-95. For an
extremely hesitant and bashful but nevertheless pointed critique of Hun-

Towards a New Organicity

4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.

14.
15.
16.

17.
18.

19.

20.
21.
22.

267

tington by an Islamic historian see Roy P. Mottahedeh, "The Clash of

Civilizations: An Islamicist's Critique," in Harvard Middle Eastern and
Islamic Review 2 (1995), 2: 1-26.
Huntington 1996: 102.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The
Free Press, 1992), 45-46.
Fukuyama 1992, 46.
Fukuyama 1992, 55-70.
Fukuyama 1992, 235.
Fukuyama 1992, 235-244.
Fukuyama 1992, 236.
Fukuyama 1992, 237.
I have made this case, that the discourse of the clash of civilization is
targeted more domestically in the United States than globally, in my "For
the Last Time: Civilizations," International Sociology. September 2001.
Volume 16 (3), 361-368.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education
has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students,
foreword by Saul Bellow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 34.
Bloom 1987, 33.
Bloom 1987, 33.
David Denby, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf
and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1996).
For your amusement read Denby 1996, 459-463.
See John Henry Newman, The Idea ofa University. Introduction and Notes
by Martin J. Svalgic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1960), xxxvii.
See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Re examination (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 137. Pelikan would much benefit from a reading of Sigmund Diamond's Compromised Campus: The
Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), particularly chapter 7, "William F Buckley, Jr.: The FBI Informer as Yale Intellectual." Insightful
information about the history of Pelikan's own university is available in
this chapter. He might, after reading this chapter, think twice before arguing for the autonomy of the institution in matters of moral and intellectual
integrity.
See Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster. New York: Random House, 1995: xv.
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 132.
Rorty 1998, 138.

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Post-Orientalism

23. Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian television in Los
Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiii.
24. Naficy 1993, xiii.
25. See Parviz Sayyad, Cinema-ye dar Tab'id (Los Angeles, CA: Persian,
1996), 91-101.
26. Sayyad 1996, 57-66.
27. See Reza Allamehzadeh's Lalla and My Stepfather (Los Angeles, CA:
Nashr-e Ketab Publishers, 1998). Allamehzadeh's Sarab-e Cinema-ye
Islami-ye Iran (Utrecht: Nawid Verlag, 1991) is a bitter condemnation of
the political abuses of cinema by the officials of the Islamic Republic.
28. The list of Shahid-Sales' film while in Germany include Tagebuch eines
Liebenden (1976), Reifezeit (1976), Die Langen Ferien der Lotte H Eisner (1979), Ordnung (1980), Anton P Cechov: Ein Leben (for TV, 1981),
Empfanger unbekannt (1983), Utopia (1983), Der Weidenbaum (1984),
Hans: Ein Junge in Deutschland (for TV, 1985), Wechselbalg (for TV,
1987), and Rosen fur Afrika (for TV, 1991)
29. The illusion of "homeland" can lead to theoretical miscalculations. Matching Said's conception of the "exilic intellectual" and Bhabha's "hybridity,"
is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "native informant," as theorized in her
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999): et passim.
Though Spivak is particular in her constitution of the "native informant"
as "revolutionary vanguard" (71), the term is still too colonially bound
to be post/colonially emancipatory. Her actual theorization of the term,
I believe, is far more engaging and liberating than this unfortunate term
suggests. I understand the rhetorical logic of re/claiming these colonial
terms. But I believe we are too late in the game for such old gestures.
Spivak has a monumentally ambitious project to turn this term on its head.
In the following pages I will have reasons to converse with and celebrate
that project. But still I insist, while celebrating in that emancipation, that
the term smells too much of its origin. For my take on the notion of the
"native informer" see my "Native informers and the making of the American
empire" (Al-Ahram Weekly, 1-7 June 2006).
30. Edward Said, "Yeats and Decolonization," in Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, and Edward Said, Natidnalism, Colonialism, and Literature,
introduction by Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1990), 82.
31. Which Said, incidentally, rightly singles out as a case in ressentiment. See
Said 1990, 82.
32. See Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi ("Westoxication"). Tehran: Ravaq
Publishers, 1962. For an English translation see Jalal Al-i Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague From the West, translated by R. Campbell. Hamid
Algar, Editor (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1984).

Towards a New Organicity

33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.

40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.

46.
47.
48.
49.
50.

269

Al-e Ahmad 1984, 34.

Al-e Ahmad 1984, 36.
Al-e Ahmad 1984, 36.
Al-e Ahmad 1984, 37.
Said 1990, 82.
For the latest version see Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993).
SeeDaryush Shayegan, Le Regard Mutile: Schizophrenic culturelle: Pays
traditionelles face a la modernite (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1989).
For an English translation see Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia:
Islamic Societies Confronting the West (London: Saqi Books, 1992).
Shayegan is not alone in his deeply colonized subjectivity. Daryush Ashuri
is equally critical of our failures to catch up with "Western" modernity.
These sorts of assessments are not limited to Iranians. For their Arab counterpart see Fatima Mernissi's Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern
World (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1992). Quite
independently of each other, but being birds of the same feather, Shayegan
and Mernissi both choose the image of the "Mutilated Modernity" as their
preferred self-Orientalizing trope.
Shayegan 1992, 12-15.
Shayegan 1992, 12.
Shayegan 1992, 150-151.
Shayegan 1992, 157.
Shayegan 1992, 159.
See Said 1984, 119, footnote 4 in which Said singles out Shayegan's text
as a typical example of the self-loathing disease of blaming the victims:
"The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more
like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point.
Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's
destructive results. We Arabs and Muslims are the sick ones, our problems
are our own, totally self-inflicted" (119).
Spivak 1999, 6.
Spivak 1999, 6.
Spivak 1999, 6.
Spivak 1999, 7.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, two volumes (New York: Alfred
A.Knopf, 1926-1928), Volume One, 3.

Conclusion
Changing the Interlocutor

"You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me ? You talkin' to me ? The who the
hell else are you talking to? "Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in
Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (1976)
The central narrative device in Atom Egoyan's Ararat (2002) is
a conversation between a young Armenian, Raffi (David Alpay),
who is entering Canada with the rushes of a film on the Armenian
genocide, and a Canadian customs officer, David (Christopher
Plummer), who is trying to ascertain that Raffi is not smuggling
drugs into Canada, hidden in the film cans. The conversation
ultimately turns into a futile attempt by the young Armenian to
convince the aging Canadian customs officer that the Armenian
Genocide indeed took place. The prolonged conversation amounts
to a traumatic recognition that unless and until this white male
Canadian official is convinced that the Armenian genocide actually
took place, then it is as if it did not happen at all.
Suppose Atom Egoyan, or his alter ego Raffi, or any other
Armenian for that matter, did not have to convince any Canadian
customs officer, or any other fictive White Male Interlocutor, that
the Armenian Genocide actually happened. Suppose they were so
sure and convinced that it did indeed happen that it did not matter
at all if their fictive interlocutor, at the center of all their futile and
pointless attempts to convince, believe it or not. Suppose instead
of trying to convince a Canadian customs officer, Raffi and other
Armenians were to wed the horrors and historical fact of the Armenian Genocide to other more contemporary atrocities happening
271

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Post-Orientalism

around the globeand thus making the memory of those innocent

Armenians perished in Anatolia meaningful by way of a testimony
to other genocides and holocausts. What then?
While navigating the contours of the modes and manners of
knowledge production in a Time of Terror, my principal concern in
this book has been to suggest the absolute necessity of this altered
interlocutor, by way of finding a way to wed Edward Said's defiant
political engagement (against any charge of theoretical inconsistency) to Gayatri Spivak's critique of the European dismantling
of the sovereign subject (at the evident cost of political inaction),
and thus argue for a new organicity in the voice and vision of the
postcolonial critic. Of necessity, I have had to do so without partaking in Said's "residual humanism" or Spivak's prolonging even
further the (European) crisis of the subject. My way towards that
objective, heeding and then bypassing Said and Spivak, has been
to put an end to the idea of "Europe," or a fortiori "the West," as
the principle interlocutor of the worldfor it is not. It is a terrible
and terrifying abstraction. It means absolutely nothing. It is now
a completely vacuous and vacated signifier, signifying nothing
but the imperial arrogance of those who invoke it. Why should
we, the rest of the world corroborate that terrorizing abstraction
even by revoking it? The principle problem I see in both Said and
Spivak is that they take (against their own better judgment) the
idea of "the West" altogether too seriously and write and react to
it as the principle interlocutor of their own critical judgmentthe
Canadian customs officer to whom they respond. My contention
is that the condition of postcoloniality knows nothing of the crisis of the subject, and that this crisis is of an entirely Eurocentric
provenance.
The question then is how do we write and act in a manner that
"the West" is no longer the principle interlocutor of our critical
intelligence? Suppose Raffi no longer needs to convince any white,
male, Canadian customs officer that the Armenian genocide actually happened. Suppose he could link the Armenian and Bosnian
genocides together, place them next to the Jewish Holocaust and
the Japanese atomic horror, the Native American and Rwandan
massacres, and scores of other atrocities and then wed them all to

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273

just causes like Palestinian national liberation movement. What

then? By then we will have entirely changed the interlocutor to
whom these are addressed and thus altered the manner we speak
to the world.
Throughout his long and prolific career, Edward Said (and even
more so Gayatri Spivak) had a white Euro-American interlocutor at
the center of his narrative attention, moral outrage, and argumentative persistenceas if trying hard to convince him (and it is always
a "him") of the atrocities of colonialism around the globeas if
unless and until this Active white male interlocutor is not convinced
that the horrors of colonialism actually took place, then they did not
in fact happen at all. There is much less of an attempt to convince
this fictitious white customs officer at the center of their narratives
when it comes to revolutionary activists like Malcolm X (in sharp
contrast to Martin Luther King), Frantz Fanon, or Aime Cesaire.
In their thoughts and deeds, these revolutionary rebels gradually
lose any pretension that they are indeed trying to convince the
white colonialists of one sort or another of what colonialism and
racism have done to the world. When it comes to Jose Marti and
Che Guevara, there is absolutely not a trace of any attempt to
explain their revolutionary deeds to any such Active interlocutor,
as we see them plunge deeply into the thicket of actual guerrilla
warfare against imperialism everywherefrom Latin America to
Africa. They just do what they think is necessary and do not try
to convince anyone (let alone a presumed white interlocutor) of
the veracity of their sayings and deeds. To them, and to us, these
are all self-evident.
Changing the interlocutor and speaking and acting in solidarity
with a global resistance to imperial warmongering does not mean
that people in positions of power will stop thinking that you are
actually talking to them, or talking to them, as Edward Said did
for a lifetime very eloquently, amounts to any serious change in
their reading of the world. Consider a journalist charlatan like
Christopher Hitchens. In a review of yet another cliche-ridden
attack on Edward Said's Orientalism, Robert Irwin's Dangerous
Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (2006), Hitchens
began his article with a direct assault against me. "I cannot imag-

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Post-Orientalism

ine my late friend Edward Said," wrote Christopher Hitchens in

this review, "either saying or believing anything so vulgar." The
vulgarity is attributed to me for having identified a kindred soul of
Christopher Hitchens, Azar Nafisi, and her scandalous book Reading Lolita in Tehran for what it isan obscenity at the service of
the U.S. empire.1 Hitchens' attack against me is no surprise. Ever
since the publication of my critical essay in al-Ahram Weekly in
June 2006 scores of neocons came to the defense of their poster
girl and let go their most racist diatribes against me and my criticism. Christopher Hitchens' attack on me deserves closer attention
only because after giving a helping hand to his neocon comrade,
and under the protection of that silly, if not treacherous, phrase,
"my late friend Edward Said,"2 he proceeds to launch yet another
useless attack against his Orientalism. Christopher Hitchens'
repeated defense of Reading Lolita in Tehrana book that has
been rightly described as "political pornography" and in which
the author blames Edward Said ("my late friend Edward Said" to
Christopher Hitchens) for what she considers to be the backward
fundamentalism of the entire Muslim worldis the premise of his
attack on me and endorsement of Robert Irwin's book.
Irwin's attack on Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens' endorsement of it ultimately rest on anecdotal references to certain
Orientalists, the prominent Hungarian Orientalist Ignaz Goldziher
chief among them, who did not quite fit the description that Irwin
and Hitchens believe Said had attributed to them. This presumed
challenge to Said's argument of course rests on a fallacythat
his criticism was a charged ad hominem attack on individual Orientalists. Edward Said's long running-feud with Bernard Lewis
(charged by their respective politics towards contemporary issues,
the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular) was perhaps chiefly responsible for this fallacy. Said's criticism, as I have extensively argued
and demonstrated in chapter 2 of this book, was of an entirely
epistemic nature, taking to task the political foregrounding of a
mode of knowledge production coterminous with European colonialism. No amount of individual anecdotes about one Orientalist
or another will have the slightest effect on the principle veracity
of Said's argument.3

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275

The principle problem with people like Christopher Hitchens is

that they are under the delusion that we are talking to them. We
are not. I for one, following the path of people I trust and admire,
have long since changed my interlocutor. I do not read, write, and
talk to convince any Christopher Hitchens/Lawrence of Arabia
look alike as to what the matter with the world is. Living in the
United States and writing in English has a whole range of wondrous
advantagesfor one thing, what we write is immediately read by
millions of people across the language barrier of a non-imperial
language. But it also has the drawback of being written in the
language and vicinity of people like Christopher Hitchens, who
then, in turn, presume we are talking to them. We are not.
Changing the interlocutor, though, is no mere political project.
It is equally important to keep in mind that it is also a literary
proposition. In the realm of literature, I cannot think of a better
example in altering the meaning and purpose of a text by changing
its interlocutor than the extraordinary case of James Morier's Adventures ofHajji Baba ofIspahan (1824) and its Persian translation
by Mirza Habib Isfahani in 1892. Whereas the original English
text of this picaresque novel, penned by a charlatan British colonial
officer of unsurpassed treachery (an apt predecessor of Christopher
Hitchens), reads like a racist piece of Orientalist nightmare, written and published to denigrate and ridicule an entire nation, its
Persian translation by a leading intellectual of the Constitutional
period, changes the diction, demeanor, tone, tonality, and above
all who it is that the book addresses in order to make the narrative
read like a groundbreaking work of collective auto-criticism that
in turn becomes a central revolutionary text during the course of
the Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906-1911. More than
a century later, a reverse case corroborates precisely the same
phenomenon. Whereas in its original Persian (as it was initially
serialized in Ferdowsi Magazine in early 1970s), Iraj Pezeshkzad's
wondrous novel, Uncle Napoleon, is a delightful piece of social
satire, in its English translation by Dick Davis, My Uncle Napoleon
(1996), particularly when introduced by none other than Paul Wolfowitz-Bernard Lewis-Fouad Ajami protege Azar Nafisi, becomes
exactly the opposite of that, and as the author of Reading Lolita in

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Post-Orientalism

Tehran puts it, the best guide for "experts and analysts on Iran,"
(namely, her friends and colleagues in the intelligence, military,
and think tank communities in Washington, DC) to understand
her homeland. This is how Azar Nafisi transforms a masterpiece
of modern Persian social satire into a pamphlet for "experts and
analysts" at the service of U.S. imperialism:
Let us imagine we are in the processes of crating a much-needed mandatory reading list for experts and analysts on Iran. I would put My Uncle
Napoleon in a cherished place very near the top. One seemingly irrelevant
reason for this choice is that it is a great read. More pragmatically, I believe
this novel provides its readersin a delightful and deliciously politically
incorrect mannerwith many important insights into Iran, its culture and
traditions, its present conflicts and past history, as well as its paradoxical
relation to the West.4

Signaled with that very subordinate clause, "in a delightful and

deliciously politically incorrect manner," and then in the rest of
her introduction, Azar Nafisi transforms a beautiful social satire
into a vicious tract, the account of a native informer, documenting
the presumed malfeasance of an entire people, so that their culture
and traditions, particularly their "paradoxical relation to the West,"
can be properly understood by the Washington, DC intelligence
community.
What embedded intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens or native
informers like Azar Nafisi do ultimately do will make absolutely
no difference in the global configuration of the power they serve.
If anything, they make the empire they promote even more reprehensible. For the necessity of changing the interlocutor is not
just for us once and for all to know and remember to whom we
are talking. But also to recognize that the center of knowledge
production in the Imperium, where both Christopher Hitchens and
Azar Nafisi live, has once and for all degenerated, transmuted,
and is way passed its meltdown point. We have reached a point
where authors like Reza Asian and Noah Feldman, authorities on
absolutely nothing, produce widely disseminated knowledge about
things entirely outside the purview of their limited education and
knowledge, and yet in the hay market of post 9/11 anxieties they

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277

have plenty of customers for their nonsense. In the same flea

market, employees of the U.S. military like Seyyed Vali Reza
Nasr and Ray Takeyh produce psy-op pamphlets and sell it as
objective public knowledge. A more direct link between usable
knowledge and military power is simply impossible to fathom. At
the very same garage sale, people like Abbas Milani and Mohsen
Sazegara have confused the advancement of democracy in the
world and the promotion of their own career as one and the same
thing. In the very same bazaar, Azar Nafisi, Hirsi Ali, and Irshad
Manji are in fact stifling conversation about vital issues of our
time by pretending to promote dialogue. In the very same market,
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr's father) continues
to produce a rosewater-and-musk image of Islam as jaundiced and
vertiginous as its exact opposite, this one produced by the Zionist
contingency of the neocons. In the very same market, people like
Stanly Kurtz, Dinesh D'Souza, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz,
and Martin Kramer unabashedly and quite openly promote the
production of a mode of knowledge that is in direct service of
the U.S. Empire. In the very same market, Alan Dershowitz and
Michael Ignatieff are on record for advocating torture not despite
the human rights discburse but in fact through it. In the very same
market, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami produce one book after
another persuading their readers that Muslims are backward and
diabolic, "the West" is the principal source of good in the world,
and the whole humanity must abide by it.
Changing the interlocutor and facing a wide world of possibilities addresses the fundamental issues of our time to those who are
the subject of imperial warmongeringand the very act of deciding
who is in fact one is talking to is the principle site of generating and
sustaining historical agency in and about the postcolonial critic. A
mere critic of colonial representation is no longer sufficient or even
necessary. It is impossible to have been more eloquent, patient,
and persistent than Edward Said was in addressing these issues
to a "Western" interlocutor. What was the result? Robert Irwin
is the result, and Christopher Hitchens, and before them Bernard
Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Fighting (writing) back and resisting
imperial knowledge production is entirely predicated on the ne-

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Post-Orientalism

cessity of altering who is it exactly to whom we are talking. The

primacy of postcolonial agency, operating beyond the legitimate
questions about the sovereign subject, can only be measured in
terms of a politically pointed and powerful language that is not
trapped in a circuitous discourse of merely talking back to the
self-appointed interlocutors of the world. We need to change
the very alphabet of reading the world. The language of power
is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, to allow or admit any
inroads into the fallacies of its origin and interests. The reason
I believe that the figure of an exilic intellectual is the paramount
site for the cultivation of critical agency is precisely because it
is this very figure who can afford the possibilities of changing
the interlocutor, for expatriate intellectuals are not trapped inside
any particular hermeneutic community of conversation. They
recreate their own anew.
If, as I have argued, the principle point of Edward Said's criticism of Orientalism as a colonially modulated mode of knowledge
production is ultimately a critique of its epistemic foregrounding, then changing the interlocutor is the principle way in which
that very episteme can be turned upside down and an entirely
different mode of knowledge predicated on it. The repositioning of Edward Said's argument from a sociology of knowledge
perspective substantiates its principle argument while at the very
same time rearticulates the critical question of agency in a wide
and emancipatory direction. If we are indeed to reach the point
of post-Orientalist knowledge production, it is not enough to be
a witness to the aggressive implosion of Orientalism and Area
Studies because of their own inner contradictions. It is equally
important to initiate and advance a counter-intelligence of a different sort, a liberating knowledge via a deliberate altering of the
audiences we address. Trying to convince people to change their
take on the world against their perceived self-interest is ultimately
a futile and self-defeating task.
Altering the interlocutor means an almost instantaneous resolution of the so-called crisis of the subject for the postcolonial critic.
The mode of agency contingent on this altered interlocution is
categorically distanced from any essentialized agency (autonomy,

Conclusion

279

or presumed representation) that ipso facto remains a sitting duck

for the narrative dismantling of the knowing subject. Changing the
direction of address away from people in positions of power will
rest the case of the speech in the communal solidarity of people
who are the subject of this power, and thus the voice will no longer
assume the authorial assumption of individual agency, and instead
will speak with the moral foregrounding of the community it addresses. The political act of questioning the ("Western") sovereign
subject thus assumes the voice of a critically self-conscious colonial subject who attains agential authorship by way of learning
the language of speaking back to the sovereign subject with the
authority vested in that voice by virtue of that changed interlocution. The Kantian knowing and sovereign subject will here, in the
thicket of undoing the colonized mind, be unlearned, while the
speaker is learning the language of speaking back to its knowing
sovereignty through the community his or her voice addresses.
In the realm of the aesthetics, this agential subversiveness of
the postcolonial artist is even more actively defiant of any crisis of
the subject the "Western" philosopher might face. The subaltern
artist, ipso facto, addressing his and her immediate audience, is,
ipso facto, outside the purview of the colonial de-subjection, for
in their defiance they have never been the subjects of colonial will.
The aesthetic moment of subaltern creativity knows nothing of any
"residual humanism" for the subject that creates in that aesthetics
defies sovereignty, not claiming it. Between Edward Said's critical humanism and Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism, dwells
a creative subject that escapes from their respective "residual
humanism" and "crisis of the subject" into vast and effervescent
domains.
For the postcolonial critic the presumed crisis of the subject,
preventing him and her from speaking, is resolved not only creatively in the aesthetic domain, but also critically in the domain of
revolutionary praxis if we keep in mind the manner in which world
revolutionary figures have systematically defined and redefined the
terms of their interlocution, and the direction in which they speak.
The extraordinary evidence of revolutionary border-crossing by
such revolutionary thinkers and activists as Che Guevara, Frantz

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Post-Orientalism

Fanon, Malcolm X, and Ali Shari'ati shows how they have succeeded in crossing a number of confounding borders in order to
reach for a global conception of emancipation. Creative agency
in a specifically revolutionary context marks the making of a truly
authentic revolutionary character as paradoxically predicated on
revolutionary inauthenticity, constantly making and remaking
the globality of the community they address. Translating the native and nativist boundaries of a particular cause, as Palestine for
Edward Said for example, into the vernacular grammar of a far
more global struggle. The resultfrom praxis to theoryis a
manner of revolutionary border-crossing in order to dodge power
and speak a language of revolt.
The active reconstruction of normative and moral agency for
the postcolonial critic will have to be predicated on what is now
evidently a post-Orientalist moment. The varied and failed manners of knowledge production in the aftermath of 9/11 point to
a degenerative meltdown where the Hegemon cannot produce a
single legitimizing idea that in fact sustains its claim to any authority beyond what brute and vile power can generate and sustain. A
postcolonial critic who is in tune with this chaotic post-Orientalist
mode of knowledge production and knows how it desperately and
categorically fails to convince in turn becomes like a mobile guerrilla tactician unfettered by fixated discursive analytics, systematically dodging power and altering the direction in which he and she
speakaway from addressing the powers that be and towards the
brutalized subjects of such powers. We are currently in a phase
of capital and its failing cultures when useful knowledge is no
longer predicated on a particular manner of subject formation for
disposable knowledge is predicated on no particular paradigmatic
or epistemic foregrounding, and as such amounts to an implosion of
the "Western" sovereign and knowing subject, at a moment when
the globalized capital has effectively metastasized and knows no
center or periphery to its illusions of sovereignty.
Changing the interlocutor is ultimately geared towards a renewed
commitment to a moral voice that does not remain silent in face of
globalized atrocities for fear of authenticating an inauthentic act of
representation. This strategically altered voice speaks clearly and

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281

authoritatively without any fear of false and faltering representation. The rapidly endangered globe, from its environment to its
inhabitants cannot afford such outdated philosophical doubts, and
is in dire need of clear, concise, confident, and defiant voices.
Notes
1.

2.

3.

4.

For my take on Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran see my essay, "Native
informers and the making of the American empire" (Al-Ahram Weekly, 1-7 June
2006). For the full frontal attack of Christopher Hitchens against me on account
of my essay see his "East Is East" (Atlantic, March 2007), 109-111.
One of course cannot abuse one's close proximity to a great man for over a decade
towards the end of his life and attribute to him thoughts and sentiments that he
is no longer around to corroborate. Nor am I the only one among Edward Said's
close friends, colleagues, and comrades who knows perfectly well what he thought
of Christopher Hitchens and his politics, certainly since the events of 9/11 and his
criminal endorsement of the Bush and Wolfowitz doctrine, responsible for the death
of hundreds of thousands of a people that Edward Said always referred to as "my
people."
For the fuller account of this argument see chapter 2 in this volume. It should be
kept in mind that I initially published this chapter as an introductory essay to a new
edition of Ignaz Goldziher's Muslim Studies (See Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies
[New Brunswick, NJ: Transactions Publishers, 2006]) shortly before Irwin's book
was published.
See Azar Nafisi's Introduction to Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon, translated
by Dick Davis, (New York: The Modern Library, 2006).

Index
Adorno, Theodore W., 10-11, 243
Allamah, see Qazvini, Mohammad
Allamehzadeh, Reza, 254-255
Auerbach, Erich, 91
Bacher, Wilhelm, 41,43, 55, 90
Bato, Ludwig, 33
Bhabha, Homi, 195
Bloom, Allan, 9, 237-242
Bloom, Harold, 246
Bove,Paul, 134
Brimelow, Peter, 245-247
"Can the Subaltern Speak?", see Spivak,
Gayatri
characteristic humanism, 134-136
Civil Rights movement, 188, 200, 219,
236-238, 240-241
Clifford, James, 93-94, 134, 136, 138,
157-158, 164-165, 170
Deleuze, Gilles, 128
Denby, David, 242-243
Derrida, Jacques, 135-136
Disraeli, Benjamin, 87
Dowd, Maureen, 210

Gay, Peter, 241-242

Geertz, Clifford, 210
Goldziher, Ignaz,
admiration for Islam, 42-43,49, 55
as Orientalist, 89-91
al-Azhar University, 45-49
books,
Muslim Studies, 21-24
TagebucK 31-32, 36-37, 64-67
childhood, 33-34
criticism, 82-83
death, 36
essays, 24-28
family life, 58-60
in the United States, 68-69
psychological portrait, see Patai, Raphael
religiosity, 36-43
teaching life, 50-52
travelogue, 32-33, 34-35, 41, 64-65
views on Christianity, 35-36, 43-44
views on Judaism, 43, 47, 56-57
views on Zionism, 56, 63-64, 68, 82
Gramsci, Antonio, 13-14, 158, 229
Guevara, Che, 195-197
Guha, Ranajit, 139-141, 143-144, 147,
150-151, 158, 163

epistemic endosmosis, 213-215, 222-224

Fanon, Frantz, 167, 197-199, 202
Foucault, Michel,
"age of reason," 169-170
and Orientalism, 157
knowledge and power, 73
Madness and Civilization, 169-170
theory of power, 133-134
Freudenberg, Maria, 58-60, 68
Fukuyama, Francis, 233-237, 240-241,
261
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 101
283

Habermas, Jiirgen, 137-138, 165

Hadith scholarship, 22-25, 82
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm F, 139-143, 258,
167,233,260
hegemony, 90, 106, 150-152, 162, 186188,211-214,232
Heller, Bernard, 36, 63-64, 67
Herzl, Theodore, 53, 56-57, 63
historiography, 145, 147-148, 158-159,
163
Hofstadter, Richard, 188
Hungarian Jewry, 61-64
Huntington, Samuel, 231-233, 237, 261

284

Post-Orientalism

intellectuals,
amphibian, 230
"culture of idleness," 7
exilic condition, 5-6, 9-14, 251-263
in the United States, 1-3, 4, 6
Jewish, 6-7
organic, 13,229-231
professionalization, 3-4, 7-8
social function, 11-12
Iranian-Americans, 247-249
Iranshahr, Hossein Kazemzadeh, 77-80
Iraq War, 191-193,210-211
Islamic mysticism, see Sufism
Islamic Revolution, 174-178
Islamic Studies,
anthropomorphism, 87-89
Goldziher's influence, 20-31
historical view, 234-235
intellectual history, 28-29, 35-36,
57, 83, 86-95, 99, 100

Orientalist studies, 18, 20

origins, 77-79
problems, 91-94
Qazvini's view, 75-77
view of Islam, 86-88
worldliness, 92-93, 96-97
Orientalism (book), see Said, Edward
Palestinians, 158-159
Pasha, Riyad, 48
Patai, Raphael,
comments on Vambery, 52-55
psychological portrait of Goldziher,
32-33,35,38,41-44,52,58-69
Pelikan, Jaroslav, 244-245
Persia, 140-142, 148-149
post-colonialism, 127-133, 158-161
Project for the New American Century,
190-191
propaganda, 186-190
Protestant ethics, 6-7

Jacoby, Russell, 3, 6-7

Qazvini, Mohammad, 73-80
Kant, Immanuel, 167-169
Khatami, Mohammad, 237-238
Kuhn, Thomas, 99-102
Lapham, Lewis, 188-189, 219
Lewis, Bernard, 71-72, 97-98
Mahabharata, 144-145
Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 211-212
Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 155, 172-173,
176-178
Malcolm X, 199-201
Mannheim, Karl, 95-97
"Mariska," see Freudenberg, Maria
McCarthyism, 2-3
Middle East Studies,
academic state, 210-211
literature, 220-221
teaching, 215-218
Naderi, Amir, 256-259
Nafisi, Azar,
Reading Lolita in Tehran, 189-190
narratives of exile, 250-255
nativism, 231-238, 243-244
Newman, John Henry, 243-245
Orientalism, 24
criticism, 30-31

revolutionaries, 185-206
Robbins, Bruce, 3-4
Rorty, Richard, 13-14, 246
Said, Edward,
death, 156
Orientalism,
book's influence, 102-104
goal, 163-165
on Ignaz Goldziher, 81-89
reactions, 70-73, 92-96, 156-160
Representations of the Intellectuals,
1,4-7,229-231
subaltern voice, 125, 133-134
theories of exilic intellectuals, 9-14
sati, 129-133
Sayyad, Parviz, 254
Scheiber, Alexander, 32-33
Scheler, Max, 95-98
Shari'ati,Ali, 201-204
sociology of knowledge, 96-102
Somogyi, Joseph de, 68
Sorel, George, 166-167
"sovereign subject," 124-127, 134-135,
138-139
Soviet Union,
collapse, 215

Index
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty,
"Can the Subaltern Speak?", 124128, 159
criticism on Said, 134-135, 170-172
"worker's struggle" 128
Stardom Syndrome, 7-9
subaltern voice (studies), 124-133, 135,
139, 143-144, 149-152, 159-165
Sufism, 25
Taqizadeh, Seyyed Hassan, 77
terrorism, 187-188, 224-226
think tanks, 188-189, 219, 222-223
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1-3

285

tribalism, 247
universities, 243-246
Vambery, Armenius, 43, 51-57, 68-79
violence, 165-166
Waardenburg, Jacques, 85-87
Wahrmann, Moritz, 50-51
Weber, Max, 6-7
Weizmann, Chaim, 33
Western subject, 127-128, 235-237
Wolffsohn, David, 56
Wolfowitz, Paul, 209-210