| Beirut
Hosts a Conference on Edward Said
By Nezar
Andary
Along
with inflation, a growing gap between the rich and poor, and
never-ending bickering between self-serving politicians, Beirut,
this summer, hosted a conference entitled: “A Salute to Edward
Said.” With the growing censorship found in Beirut, this
auspicious event was held during the first week of July and
sponsored by the well-known publishing house, Dar al-Adab,
which provided a positive impetus for diverse Arab intellectuals
to communicate. The conference created much debate in Beirut,
as well as in the Arab press. As Said has burgeoned into an
internationally well-known cultural critic, his reception
in the Arab world has had only slight coverage in the United
States.
Since
the translation of “Orientalism” in 1981 (also by K. Abu-Deeb),
Said’s work has generated a diverse range of scholarship and
interpretation in the Arab world. Works ran the gamut, from
total misunderstanding of Said’s work by advocating him as
a champion of the East against the West, to Leftist critiques
of Said’s methodologies, to certain intellectuals associating
Said with Western hegemony. Said has recently written how
he never meant “Orientalism” as a diatribe against the West;
yet to my knowledge, Said has infrequently responded to some
of the more serious criticisms from the Arab world. The
Leftist critiques have not been sufficiently covered in the
growing discourse on Said’s work. Two works, for instance,
are Sadiq Jalal al-Azm’s critique of “Orientalism” in his
article “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” published
in English in the journal Khamsin (1981), and Mahdi
Amil’s book in Arabic, “Marxism in Edward Said’s Orientalism”
(1985).
Sadiq
Jalal al-Azm, who is currently the Chair of the Philosophy
Department at Damascus University, has been a prolific intellectual
over the last 25 years. His book “The Critique of Religious
Thought” (1969) provoked much controversy in the Arab Word
during the 1970s. His article on Orientalism can also be
found in his Arabic book, "Dhihniyat at-Tahrim"
[The Mentality of Taboo], which also includes a chapter
defending Salman Rushdie. Al-Azm wrongly interprets Orientalism
as a philosophical treatise and does not mention such influences
on Said as Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams or Antonio Gramsci.
His harshest criticism, however, concerns Said’s treatment
of Marx. Al-Azm calls Said’s short section on Marx a “travesty.”
The work further criticizes Adonis, the well-known Arab poet,
and other Arab writers for essentializing the Islamic world
in the same way as Bernard Lewis and other Orientalists.
Al-Azm also critiques Said for corroborating with the powerful
elite in America. Far from the truth! Interestingly, in
many of the interviews Said gave during the conference to
the Arab press, his closeness to power in the United States
is always brought into the discourse. Azm’s article, however,
cannot be discounted and could be read along with other social
science critiques, such as James Clifford’s chapter “On Orientalism”
in “The Predicament of Culture”.
It
is most unfortunate, however, that Mahdi Amil’s book on Said’s
understanding of Marx has yet to be translated. I am not aware
of anyone mentioning this study in recent academic works on
Said in English. Mahdi Amil was a committed Marxist and
differed from many other Arab intellectuals because he did
more work as a public intellectual; for example, he was known
to go to villages and speak to different communities. He wrote
extensively about sectarianism in Lebanon, Ibn Khaldoun, and
Arab political economy. Along with a long list of intrepid
Arab thinkers, he was assassinated at the height of the Lebanese
Civil War.
Unlike
Azm’s article, Amil wrote a book focusing solely on the problems
of Said’s interpretation of Marx. The one hundred page book
mainly discusses four pages of “Orientalism”; however, Amil
does critique Said for defining the “West” without many class
distinctions. Many scholars assert that Said’s “Orientalism”
essentializes the West, which Said has responded to in his
new Afterword and his article “Orientalism Reconsidered.”
Amil, however, takes this critique a step further by stressing
the importance of understanding knowledge through class conflict.
This notion, if taken further, can provide an urgent addition
to Said’s text. How was the East seen by the impoverished
of Europe or by the illiterate? How was the East seen in
public spaces as opposed to the elite spheres of literature
and philology?
Amil’s
two main dilemmas with Said’s methodology in “Orientalism”
are first, that the study decontextualizes Marx’s work by
underestimating Marxist insistence on the necessity of revolution
in the Third World. Amil does a precise textual analysis
of how he believes Said misinterprets two pages of Marx.
Second, Amil blames the “meeting” of Foucaldian structuralism
and Nietzsche’s nihilism for creating Said’s “absolute inability”
to believe in anything beyond representation. On this second
point, Amil asserts that Said’s methodology denies revolutionary
thought. While Said’s “Orientalism” does produce a pessimism
about the relationship between knowledge and power, it also
encourages new ways to get beyond entrenched discourses like
“Orientalism”. While Amil and others have not recognized
this, I find that Said’s “optimism of the will” becomes more
forcefully expressed in his recent works.
While
many in the Arab world have written about Said, Mahdi Amil’s
work deserves consideration, not only because of the impressive
scholarship of his work, but also because, unlike other critiques
of Said, he does not diminish his effort by personalizing
the debate. By reading Amil and many other Arab intellectuals
unheard of in the United States, we can also gauge how knowledge
travels and how certain sensitivities change across geography.
Also, I want to emphasize how Said’s presence in Arab cultural
circles is not, by any means, a new phenomenon.
In
the last two years, the Arab press has carried myriad articles
on Said. The translation of “Representation of the Intellectual”
was heavily debated in more than one newspaper. Many Arabic
journals like al-Fikr al-Arabi, al-Karmil, and al-Adab
have translated his articles. Said’s courageous position
against the cronies in the Palestinian Authority and the futile
Oslo Accords are always brought into question during many
interviews with figures like Mahmoud Darwish or Hisham Sharabi.
The recent conference in Beirut not only underlined Said’s
significance as an Arab thinker, but also gave many new scholars
a chance to share their work. I will try to highlight some
of the intellectuals and their work at the conference.
Burhan
Ghalioun, an Arab thinker, who has written extensively on
Arab thought and religion, gave a paper entitled “Towards
a Critical Culture.” In an interview with the Beirut daily
As Safir , he claimed that the conference was positive
because it was not just an effort to laud Edward Said. Like
many others, he believes that Arab thought is “undergoing
a profound internal crisis” which resembles a civil war between
its much divided intellectuals and cultural activists. Ghalioun
sees a solution by creating a culture that is more able to
be active and secular within different communities.
George
Tarabishi, a noted Arab writer, presented a paper about “The
Notions of Otherness in Arab Turath.” Tarabishi, recently
wrote a harsh critique of the Moroccan thinker Mohammad Abd
al-Jabbiri (See Al Jadid issue no. 17 for an interview
with him), and is also known for writing a Freudian critique
of Nawal Saadawi. His paper stressed that
the notion of otherness has been imported by Arab-Islamic
culture. Tarabishi sees an irony in the contrasting notions
of otherness in Arab society during the last century. While,
at the turn of the century, there existed a general willingness
to understand the ‘other’, now there is, not only a demand
to become independent of the other, but also a general war
on all notions of otherness. Tarabishi used three Arab
historical writers, al-Jahiz, Sa’ad al-Andulsi, and Ibn Khaldun,
to illustrate how Arabic culture was open to many other cultures
in ways not present today. This essay agrees with Said’s
notion that culture and civilization is inherently hybrid.
An
engaging paper by the Lebanese intellectual, Fawaz Traboulsi,
entitled “Arab Travelers to the West,” focused on two Arab
19th century writers, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq of Lebanon and
Rifa’ah Rafi’ al-Tahtawi of Egypt. Traboulsi wanted to portray
the complicated net of relationships between East and West.
This paper reiterated Said’s assertion in “Culture and Imperialism”
that the East and West are not two fundamentally opposed entities.
The paper revealed how these two travelers had different
perceptions about the West, as they were both in Paris during
the years of the Industrial Revolution. Traboulsi reads
these writers ‘contrapuntally’ with travel writers like Gustave
Flaubert. His paper interestingly showed how Flaubert and
Shidyaq both identify foreign cultures by sexuality.
Ferial
Ghazoul, a professor at the American University of Cairo,
gave a talk that compared the works of the well-respected
Syrian playwright who recently passed away, Sa’adallah Wannous,
and Edward Said. She asserted that both intellectuals believe
in the importance of the written word as a way of confronting
hegemony. Wannous and Said both believe in making words
turn into action. She stated that Wannous’ work shows written
expression can produce direct results in confronting power,
while Said ‘s work illustrates how the written word diversifies
and grows within its audience in a more indirect manner.
Jad
Thabit, a prominent Lebanese engineer and intellectual, gave
a unique paper on the relationship between architecture and
culture in the Arab world. He stressed how architecture
cannot be separated from cultural activity. He compared the
work of Iraqi architect, Rifa’ al-Jadrji and one of the leaders
of avant-garde poetry, Yusif al-Khal. Both of these figures
found failure in the modernizing projects in their respective
fields. Thabit perceived this failure stemmed from the relationship
between architecture and power, and an inability of Arab society
to diversify its architecture.
The
conference included other participants: Mohammad Malass, a
Syrian director, discussed his film about the Palestinian
camps; Palestinian literary critic, Faisal Darraj, gave a
talk about Palestinian literature; Ibrahim Abu-Lughoud, a
Palestinian-American academic, presented a paper entitled
The “Meaning of Return;” Moroccan critic Mohammad Barada
contributed a paper on new Arab literary criticism. Michel
Khalifi, a Palestinian director, discussed exile and, according
to press reports, is currently making a film on Said. Said
himself participated by sharing parts of his yet to be completed
memoirs.
In
addition to the extensive coverage the Lebanese press gave
to the conference, Said himself gave two interviews, one to
the Lebanese leading daily An Nahar , and the other
to the Saudi London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat. In
each interview, Said is asked about his identity. Both interviewers
perceived the notion of hybrid identity as problematic and
asked naive questions like, “Are you American or are you Arab?”
As in so many interviews in the United States, Said’s identity
is always under scrutiny. His usual responses were that
he has stopped focusing on identity or that he is bored with
the search for one identity. In the interview in al-Sharq
al-Awsat by Sawsan al-Abtah, Said states: “I refuse
to be cornered inside any ghetto, religion, place, or nation.
I want to challenge borders and deny the opinions of others
who want to imprison me inside of one model.” Said’s notion
of identity has been unsettling for even some of his strongest
supporters among Arab intellectuals.
In
Kamal Abu Deeb’s article in the Lebanese monthly Al-Adab
about “Culture and Imperialism”, he states that one
of his disagreements with Said concerns the notion of hybrid
identity. He writes: “Year after year, Said’s inclination
to minimize the significance of identity increases....
In a world emblazoned by identity conflicts, I remain unable
in stripping off the close ties that bind me to a deeply rooted
notion of identity. On one occasion, I told him... In a
world where my fate is threatened by Israel and the West’s
desire to stamp out my identity, I cannot forsake my identity
and fight in the name of a hybrid identity...” Abu Deeb
then goes on to define Said as an Arab-Palestinian who has
fought to defend his specific identity many times. While
Abu Deeb writes most of the article defending Said’s views
that culture is fundamentally mixed, he obviously is not comfortable
with Said’s vision of identity.
| When an-Nahar interviewer,
Ali Barada, asked Said about the most important event
in his life, Said poignantly responded: “I am discovering
right now, after deciding to write my autobiography in
a personal style and not political or formal, that many
things have influenced me. For example, coexistence and
tolerance—I live in an environment that was accustomed
to diverse languages and identities. What deeply saddens
me is that I cannot travel or cross borders like I used
too. |
This
anxiety over Said’s identity exists for many here in the United
States as well. How many articles attack Said because of
his flexible identity? The rhetoric has gone from “terrorist
disguised as English professor” to Judith Mil |
