In an Exclusive Interview with Al Jadid, Edward Said Speaks on Democracy, Identity, Western Intellectuals and Zionism, and the Lack of Arab Liberationist Thought

By Stephen Sheehi

SHEEHI: I am always amazed at the level to which your works, foremost of which is “Orientalism,” are misunderstood by Western conservative readers who accuse you of “West bashing.” On the other hand, sometimes you are taken up as a champion by Islamists. How do you explain this? What must one do to misrecognize you to that degree?

SAID: I think books are always misread. There is nothing particularly new about the phenomenon. But these are very embattled issues where a lot of people are involved, angry, and excited, so they are bound to read it to suit their own purposes, ideological, political, or otherwise. Of course, it comes from not being able to see the complexities of an argument, which, in fact, completely refutes both of those positions. So, you try to correct it or you try to say “this is completely not what I said.” But people are not that interested in what you said. They’re interested in what they think you said for their purposes.

SHEEHI: Using you as a platform.

SAID: Yeah. It has nothing to do with me or very little to do with what I wrote. It has to do with what they suppose I should be saying or have said.

SHEEHI: What I find amazing is that you are accused of bashing the Western canon when, as I see it, you fall clearly in the tradition of someone like [Walter] Benjamin who too was criticized, in fact by the left, for focusing or subverting “great books.”  So using the issue of “great books” as a cheap sequitur, I want to ask you about opera, since you spoke about it last night-- particularly about the discursive differences between operas. ( Prof. Said presented “Opera Against Opera: Cosi fan tutte and Fidelio,” at the Modern Language Association Conference (MLA) in Toranto, Dec. 27, 1997).  Nietzsche said that in Mozart he heard the “swan song of the good old times” and “Europeanism,” the last breath of  “the faith in the South.” He compares that to Schumann and, obviously, Wagner, when German music descends into “fatherlandishness.” Since you mark the difference between pedigrees in Orientalism, can you mark the differences between deploying Orientalist tropes in classical music?. You know, could one read, say, Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio” and “Magic Flute against” Verdi’s “Aida?”

SAID: Yeah. I talk about Mozart’s view of the Orient which is very benign because he is a Mason and this whole idea of the Egyptian mysteries is central to Masonic lore.

SHEEHI: That is the “Magic Flute.”

SAID: “The Magic Flute” and to a certain degree the “Abduction from the Seraglio.” In that respect, it is not really
Orientalist in quite the same sense in which “Aida” is because “Aida” is a case where Verdi is using the work of an
expert Egyptologist, Mariette, who was working in Egypt at the time. He was the head of antiquities and a great
entrepreneur. He stole a lot of stuff from Egypt. Verdi liked the professional expertise of the man, something of which Mozart had very little to do with since Orientalism as a science, I am not talking about as an ideology, simply just hadn’t existed at the time of Mozart. There was no direct contact, just a supposed, you might say, “Orient” of the imagination. Whereas in the case of the latter work, almost a hundred years later, Verdi was really in touch with the whole apparatus of authenticity, which is very different.

Hybridity and Arab Identity

SHEEHI: In many of your more recent works and talks, which I have heard, you seem to be stressing the notion
of “hybridity” which is really important in responding to claims of authenticity by essentialist nationalists.

SAID: Well, it is not necessarily authenticity only. It’s some notion of purity.

SHEEHI: Right, essentialism.

SAID: Right. I mean you can be hybrid and authentic at the same time.

SHEEHI: I guess that is where I am going. I like the notion of hybridity but a facile reading of it offers a sort of
Kantian utopianism that erases, say, the violent process of becoming that hybrid. So how does one talk about hybridity without emptying it out of that very process?

SAID: I don’t think you can. There are people who do, like Homi Bhabha in a completely theoretical way. I don’t. The various historical processes which include imperialism, that would include crossing boundaries, migration, genocide, all of these collective experiences of involuntary or forced uprooting and dislocation, contribute to this, not some utopian idyllic state. I just don’t believe that. I am very profoundly historical in that respect. So I try to talk about it very rarely and I use it to refute those that say “let us return to original whatever,” original Islam, original Swedishness. Now, I just came back from India where there’s this big debate because of the parliamentary crisis. The Congress Party, which has been historically the leading party since independence, the party of Ghandi and Nehru, has been in decline. Parliament has been dissolved and it now looks like the strongest single party is the BJP, which is the Hindu fundamentalist party, which says that India is a Hindu state, denying that which, for example, the early secular nationalists like Ghandi and Nehru asserted that India is a diverse state and can’t call it Hindu because there are Muslims, Christians, Parses, and Sikhs. So in that political context, therefore, one has to call attention to the historical realities, rather than to some theoretical standpoint, either primitive or utopian and complex like hybridity itself.

Western Intellectuals and Zionism

SHEEHI: I want to shift gears a little and ask you about some criticisms you have raised in “Culture and Imperialism” regarding Camus and his stance on Algeria, which, to me, resonated with Abd al-Kebir al-Khatibi’s searing critique of Sartre, which has never been translated into English, in “Vomito Blanco,” let alone the silences of eminent thinkers like Derrida on the issue of Palestine and Zionism. How do you account for the neglect of progressive, even radical, Western intellectuals, like Foucault, regarding Zionism?

SAID: Well, you know Foucault was very pro-Zionist. He was very anti-Arab, because of his experiences, according to Didier Eribon, in Tunis during the 1967 war, when he was teaching at the University of Tunis. He thought he had witnessed a great deal of Arab anti-Semitism at the time because of the Israeli victory. That is the reason given. There could have been others. I knew him somewhat and I did not understand and really was not interested in his reticence because there was no way you could prod him into saying anything. Others like Genet, who were contemporaries of Sartre and Foucault, were scandalized by them and attacked by them.  Sartre, for example, was very Zionist. I attended in 1979 a seminar that he and Simone de Beauvoir had organized on the possibilities of peace in the Middle East. All he was interested in, although he did not say very much during the course of the seminar which took place in Foucault’s house, was how brave Anwar Sadat was, and the effort he made for peace. He had nothing to say about the Palestinians. He was surrounded by pro-Israeli people, like Pierre Victor whose original name is Benny Levi, who was an Egyptian Jew. He just prevented Sartre, who was very weak and doddering, from saying anything. I think this is the milieu in which these people lived, and is still the dominant milieu. France is still very pro-Zionist because of all kinds of obvious connections between it and Israel, and a sense of, let’s say, collective guilt on the part of France for what happened during World War II. Second, there has never been any important Arab presence culturally in France.

SHEEHI: Until recently.

SAID: Even recently. Like whom? Someone who can counteract this? Who is the Arab equivalent of Foucault?

SHEEHI: Khatibi’s pretty strong.

SAID: Khatibi is a nice guy but peripheral. He is perceived as a kind of Moroccan equivalent of Derrida. But he doesn’t have the force or the presence or the place or the location inside French culture that Sartre or Foucault do or had.

SHEEHI: Genet did, and even Deleuze.

SAID: Genet did. But Deleuze did not say very much. I mean the difference is between a kind of vociferous, organized expression of Zionist or pro-Zionist sentiment, versus reticence on the part of Deleuze here and there, and in the case of Genet, at best a kind of ambiguous relationship with the Palestinians. Genet was just not a political animal in the same sort of way.  It is not only in France, it’s everywhere else. Look at Isaiah Berlin. Isaiah Berlin, who just died, is universally celebrated as a great liberal intellectual and his support for…Zionism is just scandalous. It has nothing to do with liberalism but he was never called on it because it is an accepted contradiction.

SHEEHI: I asked the question because for many young Arab intellectuals, people like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, have had a very positive effect on their academic and political work. I think your work has opened up that possibility, in fact. How can an Arab or Arab American utilize these theoreticians while also recognizing where they have come from? It is the same dilemma of using Hegel after you know his views on the “Third World.”

SAID: Well, you can’t adopt their methods and take their views uncritically. You have to situate them with all the
drawbacks and failings and political ambiguities that need to be spelled out. So we are back to square one. That is,
should anyone be adopted wholly without those critical discriminations? Everyone has these blind spots and I think the role of the Third World intellectual is to point them out and not to idealize them.

Towards an Arab
Liberationist Thought

SHEEHI: Do you think there is an Arab equivalent to, say, an Aime Cesaire who has done this sort of critical work,
used the very tools of the critical apparatus to…

SAID: It is too hard to translate one situation to another. Writing in the Caribbean is very different from writing in the Arab world today.

SHEEHI: But someone like Fanon does a pretty good job in crossing those borders.

SAID: Right, but it is an entirely different situation. I thought you were asking me about something that was happening within the Arab world. I myself don’t see it. Maybe that’s my imperfect knowledge. In other words, I don’t think we have had a sustained–not that the Caribbean has had either–liberationist current of thought throughout the Arab world.

SHEEHI: You make a distinction between the thought of liberation and thought of independence. Now that the one- state solution has been dismissed, how one might maintain this thought of liberation?

SAID: A one-state solution has been dismissed? I think Oslo is the graveyard of a two-state solution! What does it mean to let there be a Palestinian state which even right-wing Israelis, like Sharon, are saying? What does it mean to have a Palestinian state? It might be a nothing. It is a worse trap than anything we had before, just this little hub…like apartheid townships surrounded by Israeli roads, settlements, military posts, etc.

The notion of separation, which is what the Labor Party had in mind when they did Oslo, was in effect to quarantine the Palestinians into townships or Bantustans or whatever you want to call them, which falsifies the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis, which is really a very close one. Israelis can’t be understood without Palestinians, and visa versa.  So the one-state solution is really the only alternative now. In other words, the Palestinians and Israelis are so mixed, especially in the West Bank and Gaza but also inside Palestine, that the only solution is a multi-confessional, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural state. This idea which the Zionists have tried since 1897 to now, a hundred years, has simply not worked! They are fighting with each other now over what is a Jew, who is a Jew. They can’t even decide that! How are they going to isolate all the Jews away from you? In the meantime, there are all kinds of social inequities. That is why I think the idea of accepting mixture, which is an explosive statement, is the only way to move forward. Otherwise, we will be stuck in smaller and smaller ghettos. Both of us!

SHEEHI: That is my question. To have this one-state solution as a viable possibility, one has to have that thought of liberation.

SAID: Of course. I understand your question. To move beyond the prisons of the present into a liberating space where people can live together, coexist, without regard for these absurd ethnic and religious differences which imprison people and confine them in way that I find unacceptable. That is where the whole question of liberation becomes central for me. Not just in the Palestinian-Israeli context, but even in the Arab context. I have been thinking about, and will do it in a week or so, writing an article about borders. Not the theoretical ones that we talk about at the MLA, but how every border in, let’s say, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, is so problematic. They have made life miserable. Palestinians can’t travel. Arabs can’t travel, even between one country and another. In India and Pakistan, if you are a Pakistani and want to come to India, it can take you sometimes six months to get a visa. And when you get the visa, you are only allowed to go to three places, and when you get to that place you have to register with the police! What is going on here? What is this virulent fear of the excluded other? I think we have to work this out. I mean that is what liberation thinking is.

SHEEHI: Do you think that this sort of thinking is possible in the Arab world especially in light of, for example, the
debate that has arisen out of a symposium convened in your honor at Columbia, where Joseph Massad launched a very intelligent critique of what he termed, following your lead in “Peace and its Discontents,” “pragmatist” and “realist” intellectuals. Do you think that, as his argument may be extended, Arab intellectuals, previously progressive and critical intellectuals, are being co-opted by the state?

SAID: Not only by the state, but by other things as well.

SHEEHI: By professionalism?

SAID: Yes. I was particularly thinking of, in the Arab world, one of the hopes of budding or emerging intellectuals is to be co-opted by the Ford Foundation, or by the Rockerfeller Foundation, or the Foundation for Democracy. That has become a real window of opportunity. And these are people who, barely three years ago, were attacking U.S. imperialism and now they are anxious to be a part of it. So there is some fundamental lack of balance, lack of principle.

SHEEHI: Do you think it is just opportunism?

SAID: I don’t know. I can’t judge the motives, but certainly opportunism is quite evident. You take a guy like this
fellow Hazem Saghiyeh who writes in this paper [al-Hayat]. He used to be a member of Fawaz Trabulsi’s Munazzamat al-‘amal al-shuyu‘I (Organization of Communist Action). He used to be a left-wing Marxist, a member of a Trotskyite organization; then he became affiliated with the Palestinians; then he became a kind of Khomeiniite. There may have been a Maoist phase in there too. Then he became associated with the Lebanese right. Now he is pro-Israeli, pro-Saudi, pro-American.

Position of Exile

SHEEHI: I wanted to ask you about your idea of “secular interpretation.” To me, it seems a method rooted in the state of an exile where one is constantly translating in several directions, making meaning out of comparisons between disparate examples. Do you think your state of exile has facilitated this?

SAID: Not always. A lot of the time, it is very difficult to work through the state of unstable, dislocated sensibilities because of exile, because of the inability to feel at home, something most people take for granted. After a while, if you work at it long enough, it becomes possible to provide one with numerous perspectives. You stop thinking in terms of nations and homes, and think in terms of other principles. You think more about justice and transcend the apologies like “Oh human rights, those are Western ideas,” or “we have human rights in Syria. We have human rights in Saudi Arabia.” You can see through that more easily.

SHEEHI: I asked you because it seems that this is the increasing condition of more Arabs than not. I think, for
example, that it is telling that you are a household name in the Arab-American community.

SAID: Well, I have no answer to this, but increasingly, the diaspora community is becoming important in ways that they never were. Partly because there is not even the sentimental attachment, as with the first generation of immigrants from Syria and Lebanon in this country, and to Latin America and so on, where there was a mythologized Lebanon or Palestine. Those countries have disappeared! What does it mean to have a sentimental attachment to Lebanon after 16 or 15 years of civil war? It is sort of insane; you can’t. The diaspora now is a new construction and we are just on the threshold of discovering what that means.  I find it interesting because I have lived in it for so long, and I really know no other abode. But your generation and my children’s generation are very much that one too. There is very little illusion. There is very little sentimentality. There’s commitment, but it’s critical, a critical commitment, rather than an uncritical commitment having to do with al-bilad or al-watan. You don’t hear that very much anymore and I think that it is good because historically, our theory has been we are not concerned about what is going on over there. We go there in the summers or for visits. We enjoy our cooking and etc. and what the governments are doing is their business. But, now, we don’t feel that way anymore. It is our part of the world, too, and what is going on over there is deeply important to us. We ask, and I felt this while I was in India, why is it that the Arab world lags behind India? It does. Intellectually… we are not in the same world. There is a democracy in India. You can speak freely. People are not put in jail. The army has never been an important instrument of policy as it has been in, say, Pakistan, or virtually every single Arab country. Why are rates of production going down in the Arab world? Why is illiteracy increasing? Did you know that? Illiteracy is increasing! There is no scientific or humanistic major contribution being made collectively, although there are some brilliant individuals. It is cause for concern. And the total lack of democracy! They keep telling us “we are in a state of emergency. We are waiting for…” What are they waiting for? Certainly, they keep buying arms! Sixty percent of the world’s arms are sold to Arab countries but not a single army is prepared to fight the quote-unquote “enemy.” They’ll fight their own people. They’ll fight the enemy declared by the Americans, they all went to war in the Gulf but they won’t fight to liberate their own territories.

SHEEHI: In the meantime, as the Arab American exile, diaspora community is critical of Arab regimes, they are also
critical of the West. They grow up here called “niggers” by Americans.

SAID: Right. So they have a two-front battle.

This interview appeared in Al Jadid magazine, Vol. 4, no. 22 (Winter 1998)

Copyright (c) 1998 by Al Jadid