Middle East 201

The Feud: Bernard Lewis v. Edward Said

If ever you’ve wondered how students at our elite universities came to sound the way they do when they talk about Israel, Gaza, and US foreign policy in the Middle East, the coming week’s reading and discussion will help.

In our last class, I spoke briefly about the bitter feud between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said. Given the significance of this debate not only to academic Middle East studies but to our culture more widely, we should dwell on this at greater length. You can trace a direct line from this controversy to the campus tentifada. (It’s absolutely no surprise that Columbia has been the epicenter.)

It occurred to me that there’s no special reason not to invite all of our subscribers to join this discussion. I suspect this topic will have broad appeal, and talking about it fruitfully doesn’t require that you’ve done all the earlier ME101 reading (although certainly it would help). If you’d like to participate, why not join us next Sunday, September 1? The reading list is below.

You do need to read it, or a large part of it, beforehand. (We’re meeting to discuss what Lewis and Said wrote and said, not what they’re rumored to have said and written.) If you’re unable to finish the reading despite making a good-faith effort, come anyway and we’ll see if everyone wants to spend another week with it. If so, that’s fine with me. But don’t be daunted by the length of the list. It’s all short articles or single chapters.

It would also help if you familiarized yourself, at least, with the book we’ve been discussing and will continue to discuss today and next week, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. This is Bernard Lewis’s splendid introduction to the story of the Arab-Islamic world from the birth of Christ to the present. (The whole book is available online at the link.) You don’t need to read it cover-to-cover to join us, but have a look at it and try to get a sense of his style as a historian and writer.

All of our subscribers are welcome, so long as they’ve done the reading. The Zoom link is below. (Note, too, that under the ME101 tab there are forums to discuss chapters 1-10 of Lewis’s history of the Middle East. If you’re reading it with us, feel free to join that discussion.)

For our regular ME201 students,¹ obviously you should finish Lewis’s Brief History, too.

I began writing a brief introduction to the reading a few days ago, then realized I had a lot to say about it. It turned into an essay. I’ll publish it separately, but I’ll wait a bit, though, so that you have a chance to form your own impression of the reading before I tell you what I think of it.

“It was a case of the historian-expert armed with the corpus of source material versus the English professor who grasped the literary implications of it all, and thus the effect on people’s political imaginations.” —Robert Kaplan

Reading

For September 1

1. What Went Wrong, by Bernard Lewis. This famous 2002 article is a summary of the arguments he makes in his short book, published in 2003, by the same title. The book was already in galleys on September 11, so it doesn’t treat the attacks. But given the timing, the book transformed Lewis from a respected figure among historians to a public figure, the ex-officio dragoman of the Islamic world.² There’s no need to read the whole book through, but have a look at it. Skim the parts that interest you. It’s available online here. (Do read the full article, however.) Then read these critical reviews:

• What is wrong with What Went Wrong? by Adam Sabra

• What Went Wrong: Scholarship or Sophistry? by M. Shahid Alam

• Review of Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong, by Juan Cole. The review begins, “Bernard Lewis’s What Went Wrong? is a very bad book from a usually very good author.” This, in turn, is a very good review by a usually very bad author.

• Alas, poor Bernard Lewis, a fellow of infinite jest, by Said’s acolyte Hamid Dabashi, now the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Published (with exquisitely poor taste) on Lewis’s death, this article could be mistaken for a Said satire. Read it to see where Said’s ideas led, particularly when vulgarized.

2. Orientalism, by Edward Said. Please read the introduction and skim the first chapter. (There are a number of copies available online, this one may be easier to read.) Feel free to continue reading if you like, but also feel free to stop if you’ve got the point. This book, published in 1978, has been so influential that you should make the time, one of these days, to read it in full. You can’t otherwise fully understand contemporary scholarship on the Middle East (or contemporary journalism about the Middle East, for that matter). But the reading list would be too long if I assigned the whole thing, and his key points are all in the introduction.³

• Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, by Ibn Warraq. Please read the preface and Part I, “Edward Said and the Saidists.” Feel very free to continue, if you’re into it.

• “My Beautiful Old House” and other fabrications by Edward Said, by Justus Reid Weiner

• Enough Said, by Martin Kramer

• The exotic East, by Megan McArdle

• Edward Said’s anti-Oslo writings, by Anthony B. Tirado Chase

3. The 1982 Lewis-Said debate in The New York Review of Books:

• The question of Orientalism, by Bernard Lewis

• Orientalism: An exchange, by Edward W. Said and Oleg Grabar, with reply by Bernard Lewis

The men debated viva voce only once, in 1986, at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association. (They called it “the shoot-out at the MESA corral.”) We watched the first part in class. Please watch the whole debate:

Then read these articles about the debate:

• The ironic death of Orientalism, by Robert Kaplan. (This is particularly good.)

• Lewis-Said controversy, by Naazir Mahmood.

• The revered and reviled Bernard Lewis, by Daphna Berman

Optional, but recommended:

• Why the Arabic world turned away from science: On the lost Golden Age and the rejection of reason, by Hillel Ofek.⁴

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Videos

There are so many interviews, lectures by, and lectures about Bernard Lewis on YouTube that you could profitably watch one every day for several months. Every one I’ve watched so far has been worth watching. There are just as many, if not more, of (or about) Said. I haven’t watched all the videos on YouTube, so I don’t know which to prioritize.

• Bernard Lewis archive.

• Edward Said archive.

The ones below looked the most relevant to me, but I haven’t watched them yet. Give them a try. (If they’re no good, say so in the comments so no one else wastes time.) First, here’s a lovely interview with Lewis about his life and approach to scholarship. I met him several months before this video was shot, and this is just how I remember him:

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Study questions:

(These questions have a very Oxford-history-finals aspect, but give them your best shot. Be prepared to defend your answers when I call on you.)

1. Write a brief (one paragraph or two) biography of Lewis, using these sources and others on the Internet. Do the same for Said.

2. In what ways, if any, is Said’s concept of Orientalism useful?

3. Has his concept been applied properly or abused in our wider culture, and if so, how? Is this his fault?

4. Find examples of rhetoric that displays Said’s influence in a news article, or a comment on social media, about the Middle East. (Bring it to class.)

5. Find examples of the kind of rhetoric or imagery Said deplores as Orientalist in a (contemporary) news article, comment on social media, or visual depiction of the Middle East. (Bring that to class, too.)

6. What is the proper way for one culture and civilization to regard another? How should we report upon and analyze very different cultures? Who should do the analyzing and reporting? Does Said offer useful answers to these questions? If not, why was he instantly lionized among postcolonial people who believe he described with precision a phenomenon with which they were familiar?

7. Is the debate between Said and Lewis something more than an ancient debate between the Left and the Right? If so, in what way?

8. Is Said guilty of Occidentalism? (If so, document your claim.)

9. Both Lewis and Said claimed the other was a political propagandist. Were either or both correct? (Document the claim.)

10. To what extent is this debate (and Said’s victory) responsible for growing Western hostility toward Israel?

11. What responsibility does the West bear for the current conditions of the Middle East?

12. Is the Arab-Muslim world weak because it was colonized, or was it colonized because it was weak?

13. Prior to the 19th century, was it better to be born a woman in Europe or the Islamic world?

14. Are insularity and xenophobia sources of civilizational decline, or are they responses to it?

15. Does Lewis succeed in producing objective scholarship, or is it, in reality, “aggressively ideological?”

16. “Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability.” Discuss.

17. “For Lewis, the essential characteristic of Islamic religious and political thinking is that it is totalitarian in character.” Discuss.

18. Was the failure of the Islamic world to catch up with Western Europe a problem specific to this region, or was it a global one? If the latter, does Lewis’s thesis in What Went Wrong make sense?

19. Have you noticed other contradictions in Lewis’s work?

20. “Lewis shows little interest in the entire period that falls between the early Abbasid caliphate of the eighth and ninth centuries and the late Ottoman period of the eighteenth century, which directly precedes the European colonization of the Middle East.” Identify the source and discuss.

21. “The past 50 years have witnessed an important rapprochement between history and the social sciences, which has transformed history as a discipline. Yet Lewis continues to write literary, anecdotal history as if such developments had never taken place.” Identify the source. Is this true? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

22. “Regardless of the book’s errors, [Orientalism and books like it] are the sort of things the Pentagon should be reading.” Identify the source. Do you agree?

23. Is Lewis correct that the Islamic world was doomed by its incuriosity about the wider world?

24. If he is, does this fate await the United States?

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