Edward Said's stupidity

In 'Criticism & Exile', Edward Said wrote- 

The greatest single fact of the past three decades has been,

i.e. the period between 1970 and 2000. The greatest single fact during that period was the collapse of Communist command economies.  

I believe, the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonialism and decolonization, economic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing, and great power machinations.

Said's people had begun emigrating to the US in the 1870s with numbers peaking between 1880 and 1924. Migration is more about 'pull' than 'push' factors. 

In a place like New York, but surely also in other Western metropoles like London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin, all these things are reflected immediately in the changes that transform neighborhoods, professions, cultural production, and topography on an almost hour-by-hour basis.

Immigration occurred because standards of living were higher in places still ruled by market-friendly White Christians.  

Exiles, émigrés, refugees, and expatriates uprooted from their lands must make do in new surroundings,

Said is pretending he was an exile. He wasn't. He was a voluntary immigrant.  

and the creativity as well as the sadness that can be seen in what they do is one of the experiences that has still to find its chroniclers,

It has too many.  

even though a splendid cohort of writers that includes such different figures as Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul

immigrants not exiles 

has already opened further the door first tried by Conrad.

An exile. The Russians had suppressed the Polish national movement.  

Said taught English & Comp Lit because that is what he had studied in America. However, he did not understand English English literature because he knew little about England and its history. Consider the following. 

There is a moment in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh that has always had for me the startling and completely pleasurable force of a benign epiphany, despite the fact that the novel itself is as much an artifact of late Victorianism as the characters and attitudes it mocks.

Said was extraordinarily ignorant of English history & Literature. Butler began writing the book in 1873.  The mid-Victorian period is generally defined as the period from 1851–1873. The protagonist has an Early Victorian childhood and comes of age in the mid-Victorian period. Edmund Gosse's 'Father & Son' is late Victorian. Butler isn't. 

Butler asks rhetorically about the appalling life of a clergyman’s children: “How was it possible that a child only a little past five years old, trained in such an atmosphere of

hypocritical 

prayers and hymns and sums and happy Sunday evenings—to say nothing of daily repeated beatings over the said prayers and hymns, etc., …—how was it possible that a lad so trained should grow up in any healthy or vigorous development?”

His aunty helps him. That's why he doesn't turn into a sneak & a snob.  

As the plot goes on to show, young Ernest Pontifex would have a dreadful time because of this strenuously virtuous upbringing,

Butler's point is that no virtue was involved. The boy was being brought up to be a sneak, a snob & a hypocrite.  

but the problem goes back to the way Rev. Theobald, Ernest’s father, was himself brought up to behave.

His father published religious texts. His elder son would inherit the business. The younger son- a dim bulb- was forced to become a clergyman because this promoted the family reputation for piety & orthodoxy in Religion. There was no genuine piety here. There was crass commercialism on the one hand, and hypocrisy & snobbishness on the other.   

“The clergyman,” Butler says, “is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.”

Butler's readers knew this wasn't the case. England always had fox-hunting clergymen. Had Theobald had any talent or intelligence he could have risen as a scholar or missionary or popular preacher.  

This brilliant reversal,

metonymy

by which a person suddenly becomes a day, scarcely needs the preachy explanation given a moment later by Butler. Priests, he goes on, are supposed to live stricter lives than anyone else;

Not in Early Victorian England. Butler's readers understood that this was a family which had risen from the working class through commerce. They needed to 'keep up appearances'. The younger son of a Baronet, who gets the advowson to the Rectory in lieu of anything more substantial by way of inheritance, might have very little piety. Indeed, if he inherits a bit of cash from an aunt, he might hire a curate and spend his time at Bath or Boulogne.  

as vicars their “vicarious goodness” is meant to substitute for the goodness of others;

No. It is meant to inspire an equal piety. 

the children of such professionally righteous individuals end up as the ones most damaged by the pretense.

Only if the righteousness is feigned and no actual enthusiasm replaces it. Having a dad who pretends piety to get his salary is fine if he is teaching you about Darwin.  

Yet for anyone who (perhaps more frequently in an earlier age) was required to dress up, go to religious services, attend a solemn family dinner, and otherwise face the rigors of a day from which many of the sins and pleasures of life had been forcibly swept, to be a human Sunday is an immediately horrible thing.

Nonsense! Ernest's plight is horrible because his dad is horrible. Thankfully he has a nice Aunty.  

And although the phrase “human Sunday” is compressed in the extreme, it has the effect of releasing a whole storehouse of experiences refracted in as well as pointed to directly by the two words.

Said forgets that there is a novel called 'The man who was Thursday'. The human Sunday turns out to be... a nightmare version of God.  

Butler’s novel is not very much in fashion these days.

It came into fashion with the publication of Gosse's 'Father & Son'. Gosse was a well known man of letters. It must be said, 

He stands at the threshold of modernism, but really belongs to an age in which questions of religion, upbringing and family pressures still represented the important questions, as they did for Newman, Arnold, and Dickens.

He was mid Victorian. Erewhon was well received. However, his opposition to both the Church & the school of Darwin relegated him to obscurity.  

Moreover, The Way of All Flesh is hardly a novel at all but rather a semi-fictionalized autobiographical account of Butler’s own unhappy youth, full of scarcely veiled attacks on his own father, his own early religious inclinations, and the pre-Darwinian age in which he grew up, when how to deal with faith, and not science or ideas, was the preeminent concern. It would not, I think, be doing The Way of All Flesh an injustice to say that it provides readers with principally a historical, rather than an aesthetic, experience.

It was an effective complement to Gosse's book. One might say Butler's work is crude but what it caricatures was real enough. Kipling's Ba Baa Black sheep came out in 1888. Butler shows the Oxbridge educated father & even the mother could be just as bad as the lower middle class landlady/ foster-mother.  

Literary art, rhetoric, figurative language, and structure are there to be looked for,

Butler was a fine Classicist.  

to be occasionally encountered and admired, but only minimally and momentarily, as a way of leading readers directly back to particular experiences of life at a particular time and place.

No. Butler is Lamarkian. The servile son is likely to become a bullying father. Change the environment and you change the phenotype regardless of genotype. Incidentally, Gosse's father had proposed the "Omphalos" theory, which suggested God created the world with artificial signs of age (e.g., fossils, tree rings) to represent a pre-existent history.

One neither could nor would want to compare Butler with Henry James or Thomas Hardy,

Nonsense! James is a psychologist of a similar type to Butler. Hardy has a theory of history which one might call Schopenhauerian or a pessimistic Darwinism. Butler too could be pessimistic. What if machines are evolving? Might they not supplant human beings?  

two of his immediate contemporaries: they represent a far more complete encoding of historical experience by aesthetic or literary form.

No. They failed. Of James, H.G Wells said, there was James the First (wisest fool in Christendom & probably gay as fuck) James the Second (who lost his throne because of his mulish obstinacy) and the Old Pretender. As for Hardy, nobody could stand his 'Dynasts'. The feeling was that he should have stuck with tales of the rustic proletariat. Still there's nothing funnier than the ending of Jude the Obscure. 'Old Father Time' kills the kids & himself  because 'we are too menny'. Don't forget, it was Malthus who laid the foundation for Darwin.  

It would be more appropriate somehow to read The Way of All Flesh along with Newman’s Apologia,

Fuck off! Anyway, nobody actually reads that shite.  

Mill’s Autobiography,

see above.  

and even so eccentric and rousing a work as Swift’s Tale of a Tub,

ditto. We get that Professors of Literature have to pretend that unreadable shite aint shite, but Said is overegging the cake.  

than it would to compare Butler’s novel with The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors, works that have been far more influential in setting the standard for interpretation and critical theory in our time

that theory was utter garbage. Anyway, E.M Forster did that sort of thing much better.  

than the story of Ernest Pontifex.

Which has a lot of verisimilitude & is well written.  

The point I am trying to make in all this, however, is related to the recent trends in the criticism and study of literature that have shied away from the unsettling contentiousness of experiences like this one,

which one? Creaming your pants over the phrase 'human Sunday'?  

or from exiled or silenced voices.

why shy away from shite you can't hear?  

Most of what has been exciting and contentious about the vogue of formalist and deconstructive theory has been

the fact that when it isn't coprophagy, it is finger painting using your own shit? 

its focus on purely linguistic and textual matters. A phrase like “the clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday” is too transparent on one level, too inchoate in its recollection and summonings on another, for the theorists of simile, metaphor, topology, or phallologocentrism.

Nonsense! It is merely a metaphor. Clergymen are associated with Sunday because it the day on which they work while others rest. It is a day of calm spirituality and pious devotion- qualities a man of the cloth is expected to embody. It was Chesterton's nightmarish 'Sunday' who defies analysis.  

Said did not claim to have studied the Orient. However he was an emigrant from that region. Might this not give him some locus standi in critiquing 'Orientalists' in the manner that I- who emigrated to London around the time Samuel Butler's first book came out in the Seventies- have critiqued Said? 

Consider the following-

At bottom, what I said in Orientalism had been said before me by A. L. Tibawi,

His 1963 essay 'English-Speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism' could be said to have been the seed of Said's own chef de oeuvre. Tibawi was the professor of Islamic Education at the London Institute of Education till about 1977 when he retired. 

by Abdullah Laroui,

who argues that the Arab Intellectual has no use for historicism. In other words, Orientals really see the Orient as outside time. In other words, they are saying opposite things- probably because Laroui remained in Morocco while Tibawi settled in London.  

by Anwar Abdel Malek,

a Copt who settled in France. He was a Marxist & Pan-Arabist. As such, he understood that what some stupid Professors said didn't matter in the slightest. Money matters & so do guns.  

by Talal Asad,

who settled in the UK after studying in Pakistan. His father was a Jewish convert to Islam. He is an anthropologist who, quite rightly, points out that a lot of anthropological field work was short on theory. Sadly, what succeeded it was short on field-work. Indeed, it was utterly worthless & paranoid.  

by S. H. Alatas,

Malaysian. He bridled at the European depiction of Malays as lazy though, truth be told, it was the Chinese who proved this must be the case. To his credit he opposed nativist 'bhumiputra' policies- which is why he had no political future.  

by Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire,

Martinique had the sense to remain with France 

by Sardar K. M. Pannikar

a brilliant writer & diplomat though a little too pro-China.  

and Romila Thapar,

a cretin, but well connected & close to the dynasty 

all of whom had suffered the ravages of imperialism and colonialism,

None had. They benefited from it. Martinique was lucky because it remained with France.  

and who, in challenging the authority, provenance, and institutions of the science that represented them to Europe,

None did. Tibawi criticised some books by Christian missionaries which did the Prophet less than justice. But the Brits already viewed Prophet Muhammad favourably because of Carlyle. Tibawi was preaching to the converted which is why the Brits appointed him a Professor. 

were also understanding themselves as something more than what this science said they were. 

No Science was involved unless Hope Risley & anthropometrics is meant. But this was eroded by the Boas critique (i.e. adaptation to the environment) & the rise of genetics. 

As an patriotic, albeit immigrant, American, not a Palestinian exile, Said should be praised for pushing forward the American 'Rodgers Plan' to return Israel to its pre '67 borders. Other Americans- including WASPs like Clinton- harboured the same illusions as Said.

Still it was possible to believe

even after Arafat sided with the butcher Saddam 

that the Palestinian cause continued to represent an idea of justice and equality around which many others could rally.

It made some Palestinians very rich.  

By being for Palestinian rights we stood for nondiscrimination, for social justice and equality, for enlightened nationalism.

In other words, an independent Palestine would be like Israel, not Saddam's Iraq.  

Our aim was an independent sovereign state, of course. Even though we had lived through our loss, we were able to accept a compromise whereby what we lost in 1948 to Israel (contained within the prewar 1967 lines) would be lost forever, if in return we could have a state in the Occupied Territories. We had assumed (and I do not recall much discussion of this particular option for the future) that our state would have sovereignty, our refugees would have the right of some sort of repatriation or compensation, and our politics would be a distinct advance over those of the Arab states, with their oligarchies, military dictatorships, brutal police regimes.

So, Said thought the Palestinians would have elections & courts of law in the same manner as the Jews.  

During the period that was effectively terminated by the Oslo agreement of 1993 I recall quite distinctly that most of the intellectuals, professionals, political activists (leadership and nonleadership), and ordinary individuals I knew well lived at least two parallel lives.

Most people have two parallel lives- viz. a professional one, during office hours, and a personal one the rest of the time.  

The first was in varying degrees a difficult one: as Palestinians living under different jurisdictions, none of them Palestinian of course, with a general sense of powerlessness and drift. Second was a life that was sustained by the various promises of the Palestinian struggle, utopian and unrealistic perhaps, but based on solid principles of justice and, at least since the late 1980s, negotiated peace with Israel.

So, this cretin wasn't aware that Hamas- which was founded in 1987.  

The distorted view of us as a people single-mindedly bent on Israel’s destruction that existed in the West bore no relationship at all to any reality I lived or knew of.

Because Said was an ignorant American.  Between 1990-1992 Hamas candidates won an average of 30 percent of the seats in elections for professional organizations (engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.) in the West Bank and Gaza, according to observers.

Most of us, the overwhelming majority, in fact, were most interested in the recognition and acknowledgment of our existence as a nation, and not in retribution; everyone I knew was flabbergasted and outraged that the Israelis, who had destroyed our society in 1948, took our land, occupied what remained of it since 1967, and who bombed, killed, and otherwise oppressed an enormous number of us, could appeal to the world as constantly afraid for their security, despite their immense power relative to ours.

Israel was able to convince the US that unilateral reversion to pre-'67 borders meant the country could not be effectively defended. To counter the argument, you need a military expert not a fucker who teaches literature to morons.  

Few Westerners took seriously our insecurity and real deprivation: somehow Israel’s obsession with its insecurity and need for assurance—with its soldiers beating up Palestinians every day after twenty-eight years of occupation—took precedence over our misery. I vividly recall the anger I felt when I learned that starting in the fall of 1992 under the auspices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an organization of which I was a member, a group of privileged Palestinian intellectuals met with Israeli security officials in secret to begin a discussion of security for settlers and army personnel who would remain in the Occupied Territories should there be some form of Palestinian self-rule arrangement.

What's wrong with 'confidence building talks'? It is part & parcel of peace-keeping initiatives in different parts of the world. Why did the thing make Said so angry? The answer, I suppose, is that as an immigrant, not an exile, he didn't really care what happened in a far away country.  

This was a prelude to Oslo, but the fact that there was an acceptance of the Israeli agenda and a scanting of real Palestinian losses struck me as ominous, a sign that capitulation had already set in.

Peace, for Hamas, means capitulation unless all the Jews & other kaffirs are killed.  

Another sign of capitulation was the efflorescence of Islamic movements whose reactionary message (the aim of which was to establish an Islamic state in Palestine) testified to the secular desperation of the nationalist cause.

In other words, if Arafat & the 'secular' forces made peace, then it would be 'capitulation' unless all the Jews were killed or enslaved.  

Let me skip directly to Oslo and after. The mystery there—indeed, from my viewpoint, the only interesting thing—is how a people that had struggled against the British and the Zionists for over a century (unevenly and without much success it is true) were persuaded—perhaps by the international and regional balance of power, the blandishments of their leaders, the fatigue of long and apparently fruitless struggle—to declare in effect that their hope of real national reconstruction and real self-determination was in effect a lost cause.

because 'real national reconstruction' meant killing all the Jews. This was a lost cause because the Jews were better at fighting and not as corrupt as fuck.  

One of the advantages of so extraordinary a volte face

like Germany surrendering to the Allies?  

is that one can see what is happening against the immediate and also the more distant background.

Said couldn't see shit. 

History of course is full of peoples who simply gave up and were persuaded to accept a life of servitude;

America was once full of such people. They are called the First Nations.  

they are all but forgotten, their voices barely heard, the traces of their life scarcely decipherable. History is not kind to them since even in the present they are seen as losers, even though it is sometimes possible, as Walter Benjamin says, to realize that “whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (Illuminations, 256).

Those of Benjamin's people who moved to Israel did become victorious.  

How does the cause of a people, a culture, or an individual become hopeless?

In the case of Palestinians, they couldn't form a fiscally viable state in 1948 or at any later date.  

We had once believed as a people that there was room for us at the rendezvous of destiny. In the instance I have been discussing, it was certainly true that a collective sentiment developed that the time was no longer right, that now is the period of ascendancy of America and its allies, and that everyone else is required to go along with Washington’s dictates.

Sadly, Arafat refused to take the very good deal Clinton offered. Clinton Parameters presented in December 2000, or the subsequent Taba negotiations in January 2001. These proposals suggested a Palestinian state in 94-96% of the West Bank, full control of Gaza, and East Jerusalem as the capital. Arafat's procrastination would cost the Palestinians dear. After 9/11, the whole of NATO was killing Muslim terrorists with a vim and vigour even the Israelis had never displayed. It now appears, that the Palestinians will never regain the whole of Gaza while losing more and more land in the West Bank & East Jerusalem. America has already recognised the annexation of the Golan Heights and accepted Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. 

A gradual shift in perspective revealed to the collective consciousness that the cause of Palestinian nationalism, with its earlier yet long-standing and uncompromising position on

killing all the Jews 

sovereignty, justice, and self-determination, could no longer be fought for:

because the Jews were better at killing 

there had to be a change of strategy whereby the nation now thought of its cause less as something won than as something conceded to it as a defeated people by its opponents and by the international authority.

A self-defeating people. But Lebanon too has turned to shit. The Saids have a holiday home there.  

Certainly for Palestinians the sense of isolation among the other Arabs had been growing inexorably. What used to be the great Arab cause of Palestine was so diminished that it became a bargaining card in the hands of countries like Egypt and Jordan, who

hated Palestinians with good reason. The Palestinians had tried to take over Jordan with the result that Pakistani pilots flying Saudi Arabian planes bombed Palestinian refugee camps- a great example of pan-Islamic cooperation. Egypt's Anwar Sadat was angered by Abu Nidal's killing of his friend & Minister of Culture, Yusuf Sibai in 1978. The feeling was that Palestinians are mad dogs. Some years earlier, when the Palestinians killed a senior Jordanian politician in Cairo, one of them took the trouble to lick his blood. These aren't Muslims because these aren't men. They are rabid beasts. 

were desperately hard up for American patronage and largesse

they were fed up with Palestinian craziness. 

and therefore tried to position themselves as talking realistic sense to the Palestinians.

Fuck that. Expel the cunts & make peace with Israel. They aren't the enemy.  

Whereas in the past Palestinians gathered hope and optimism from the struggles of other peoples (e.g., the South African battle against apartheid), the opposite became true:

They became pessimistic because Mandela & his crew didn't kill every White person and then lick their blood. 

they were successful because their circumstances were more favorable, and since we did not have the same conditions, we needed instead to become more accommodating.

Fuck that. Just immigrate to some place where Jews are safe.  

What had once been true for liberation movements was no longer applicable in our case.

Because liberation isn't about killing people and licking their blood. This may be a difficult concept for Palestinian intellectuals to comprehend.  

Soviet help was nonexistent, and besides the times had changed. Liberation was no longer a timely cause—democracy and the free market were,

Said, as a Palestinian, thinks democracy is very evil. Nobody should be allowed to choose what to buy or sell or whom to vote for. Liberation means killing lots of people & licking their blood. Somebody should explain this to Mandela.  

does the consciousness and even the actuality of a lost cause entail

anything other than than being smart enough to see you have lost? No.  

that sense of defeat and resignation that we associate with the abjections of capitulation

There can be capitulation without defeat & defeat without capitulation or resignation 

and the dishonor of grinning or bowing survivors who opportunistically fawn on their conquerors and seek to ingratiate themselves with the new dispensation?

Who says that is dishonourable? Guys who aren't happy unless they are killing people and licking their blood?  

Must it always result in the broken will and demoralized pessimism of the defeated?

No. The Brits lost the American War of Independence. You didn't see them repining. The South lost the American Civil War. They didn't start obsequiously fawning over African American lieutenant-Governors.  

I think not, although the alternative is a difficult and extremely precarious one, at least on the level of the individual.

Not for WASPs. Palestinians may be differently constituted.  

In the best analysis of alternatives to the helpless resignation of a lost cause that I know, Adorno

a shithead 

diagnoses the predicament as follows.

'At a moment of defeat: For the individual, life is made easier through capitulation to the collective with which he identifies.

No. It is made easier by capitulating to the guys who have defeated that collective. Thus, when Germany was defeated, smart Germans ingratiated themselves with the occupying powers. They didn't capitulate to equally abject Germans.  

He is spared the cognition of his impotence; within the circle of their own company, the few become many.

I suppose there were underground cells of Hitler worshippers who, during the day, worked in menial occupations for the occupying power.  

It is this act—not unconfused thinking—which is resignation.

No. What is being described as 'magical thinking'. Resignation represents clear thinking if there is no way to reverse the outcome. Thus if I am diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, I resign myself to dying. I don't join a group of people with brain tumours who say 'our tumours make us immortal. It is the guys who don't have tumours who will die in a month or two.'  

No transparent relation prevails between the interests of the ego and the collective to which it assigns itself.

Nonsense! My relation to my family is transparent. That's the 'collective' to which I belong by natural  'oikeiosis'.  On the other hand my relationship to the collective represented by winners of the Fields medal isn't transparent. It is wishful thinking because I am as stupid as shit. 

The ego must abrogate itself, if it is to share in the predestination of the collective.

This is not necessary at all. I may join the Iyer Liberation Army which is predestined to be defeated in its attempt to reclaim Ireland from Marathi leprechauns like Leo Varadkar, but my ego swells in doing so. It isn't abrogated at all.  

Explicitly a remnant of the Kantian categorical imperative manifests itself:

Everybody should kill everybody and lick their blood? Is that the Palestinian categorical imperative?  

your signature is required.

No it isn't unless you are acknowledging receipt of something beneficial to you.  

The feeling of new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking.

Stupidity or being as crazy as shit has that effect. 

The consolation that thought within the context of collective actions is an improvement proves deceptive: thinking, employed only as the instrument of action, is blunted in the same manner as all instrumental reason. (167–168)

Adorno was stupid. What he studied & taught was nonsense. Instrumental reason is what scientists and businessmen & Mums display.  

As opposed to this abrogation of consciousness, Adorno posits as an alternative to resigned capitulation of the lost cause the intransigence of the individual thinker whose power of expression is a power—however modest and circumscribed in its capacity for action or victory—that enacts a movement of vitality, a gesture of defiance, a statement of hope whose “unhappiness” and meager survival are better than silence or joining in the chorus of defeated activists:

Very true. Did you know that Sartre achieved the Liberation of France by writing some shite? Eisenhower played no role in that happy outcome.  

In contrast, the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither superscribes his conscience nor permits himself to be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give up.

Adorno, in truth, was one of those who was so terrorized that the action he took involved fucking off to the US in 1938.  

Furthermore, thinking is not the spiritual reproduction of that which exists.

Thinking about a dog doesn't turn you into a spiritual reproduction of a dog. What an amazing discovery! 

As long as thinking is not interrupted, it has a firm grasp upon possibility.

Not if the thinking is done by shitheads who study or teach stupid shit. 

Its insatiable quality, the resistance against petty satiety,

why be content with licking the blood of one person you murdered? Why not kill everybody and lick all their blood?  

rejects the foolish wisdom of resignation. (168)

because fantasizing about licking blood isn't foolish at all.  

I offer this in tentative conclusion as a means of affirming the individual intellectual vocation,

These guys are idiots. They have no fucking intellect.  

which is neither disabled by a paralyzed sense of political defeat nor impelled by groundless optimism and illusory hope.

The Frankfurt School couldn't understand why the proletariat didn't want Communism. What was the reason for their own defeat in Democratic countries? The answer is they had shit for brains & this was fucking obvious. But this was an answer they couldn't accept more particularly if they had tenure as 'drunken helots' whose intoxication with Marxism made their cretinous antics an example & a warning to the jeunesse doree.  This was also the reason Rawls & Sen & other such shitheads were taught to undergrads. 

Consciousness of the possibility of resistance can reside

in guys who are smart and who see how, when & were resistance can be successfully mounted.  

only in the individual will that is fortified by intellectual rigor

so not these shitheads then 

and an unabated conviction in the need to begin again, with no guarantees except, as Adorno says, the confidence of even the loneliest and most impotent thought that “what has been cogently thought must be thought in some other place and by other people.”

Sadly, stupid magical thinking of the same type appears in every age and every milieu. How can we resist the ravages of cancer? My solution is masturbation. It is stupid but I bet lots of people have wanked in the hope of ridding themselves of illness. But smart sciencey guys have found ways to shrink or remove many different types of tumours. In this case, it is better not to reinvent the wheel. Just go to where these smart people are and learn the technique from them.  

In this way thinking might perhaps acquire and express the momentum of the general, thereby blunting the anguish and despondency of the lost cause, which its enemies have tried to induce.

Why not just take a lot of drugs & get someone to tell you that the Palestinians have killed all the Jews and are busy licking up all their blood?  

We might well ask from this perspective if any lost cause can ever really be lost.

We might, if we are as stupid as shit. The South won't rise again. Charles III won't reconquer what George III lost. Palestinians, however, will keep killing but even they seem to have given up licking blood. That's like so not halal.  

Clive James on Edward Said

The late Clive James wrote-

Edward Said (1935–2003) was the most spectacular intellectual asset of the Palestinians in exile.

James 'read' English. Thus, he considered Said an 'intellectual'. But Palestinians considered Mahmoud Abbas, who had a PhD from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, to be their greatest intellectual asset. Indeed, he is still, at 90, the President of the Palestinian State as recognized by UK, France, etc. 

Because he had been exiled all the way to Columbia University,

He was an American citizen who went to American Prep School & Colleges.  

where he was professor of english and comparative literature, it was possible to say, as the perennial crisis in the Middle East continued to shape his scholarly and critical work, that he was caught between New York and a hard place.

No it wasn't.  Said family’s holiday home is in the Lebanese village of Dhour el Shweir. His sister taught at the American University of Beirut. Still, it is true that the family lost property in Israel. Boo fucking hoo. 

But there is no call to doubt his integrity just because he had been raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards that Western civilization can bestow.

More importantly, his family was Anglican (or Episcopalian, in America). Thus, even fellow Palestinian Christians felt his people were opportunistic turn-coats.  

What can be doubted is his accuracy. His influential book Orientalism (1978) painted a picture in which Western students of African, Arab and Eastern cultures had practised racist imperialism under the guise of a search for knowledge.

Whereas Arabs had practised racist imperialism by killing people and taking over their territory. 

The book was hugely influential: its “narratives of oppression” became the tunnels through which non-Western academics came to preferment in the West.

They got to teach worthless shite. What is the point of 'reading' Literature at Collidge unless you are congenitally illiterate? 

Said’s ideas found such favour on the international left that he became a whipping boy for the right, but it is important to say that there were some Arab thinkers who equally found Orientalism a wrong-headed book.

It isn't important at all unless you studied stupid shite at Uni.  

According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling failed states to blame the West for their current plight:

James did not live to see diversity-hire, Kamala, blaming everybody but herself for her defeat.  

a patronizing idea, common to the Western left, which the emerging non-Western intelligentsia would find that much harder to rebut when endorsed by someone with Said’s credentials and prestige.

The intelligentsia didn't read Said. People studying worthless shite at Uni did. Why? Grievance Studies went hand in hand with Affirmative Action. You have to admit shitheads because you need the tuition fee income. Find some shit for them to 'study'. Then appoint them Professors of utter shit.  

Though most of Said’s Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said’s written work thoughout his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence

He never made any such claim. He wasn't the Arab Ali Shariarti. He wasn't even the Palestinian Michel Aflaq.  

that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also characterized Said’s role as a practical diplomat.

James is ignorant. He doesn't get that Republican administrations always tried to get Israel to revert  to something close to its '67 borders. Reagan was bound to continue the 'Rodgers Plan' approach after he and Gorby reached a modus vivendi. Reagan also set the ball rolling on ending Apartheid after the Cubans agreed to pull out of Angola. Said could have been useful if he had Arafat's ear. But what really mattered was the Soviet Union. Once it started to unravel, all bets were off.  

In 1988 he helped secure the breakthrough by which the Palestinian National Council finally recognized the State of Israel’s right to exist,

He could play no role because the US would not then, and still will not, recognize Palestine. What mattered was that Egypt's recognition of Israel had held up. The other factor was the Syrian intervention in Lebanon. Assad didn't like Arafat. He had sent his soldiers to help the Christian Maronites against the PLO in 1976. The Taif agreement in 1989 confirmed the marginalization of the Palestinians. Syrian forces only left the country in 2005. Arafat had to accept that everybody else in the region had their own modus vivendi with Israel. 

but in 1991 he resigned in protest at the Oslo peace process, before Arafat had even had a chance to scupper it.

Because he was useless.  

If a solution had been secured it could well have meant that the lives of everyone involved on the Palestinian side of the negotiating table would have been forfeit, but Said was unlikely to be put off by Arab extremists, who for a long time had been threatening him with death in one ear just as loudly as extreme Zionists had been threatening him in the other.

Why kill a useless Professor of a worthless subject?  

Yet Said was exemplary in his insistence that Israel had an historic claim in Palestine and that anti-Semitism, with the Holocaust as its centrepiece, had better be understood by the Arab nations or there would be no end to the conflict.

This is hilarious. There is money in conflict. There isn't in teaching Literature.  

When he simplified history, it wasn’t because he was a simpleton:

It was because he was had spent his life studying and teaching shit. This is a guy who noted that you need to tell your Graduate students that Dr. Jonathan Swift was not a medical Doctor. If, in one of his texts, he mentions the project of turning shit into food, this does not mean you should stir your own turds into your coco-pops. Don't eat your own shit. It is bad for you.  

though many a buffoon hoped to acquire points for intelligence by sitting beside him,

Arafat was a buffoon- albeit a homicidal one.  

his dignity was unimpaired, and he still looked wise even when accompanied by Tariq Ali looking serious.

Tariq Ali's celebrity predated Said's. Also, he was a Pakistani Aristocrat. The Pakistanis had clever diplomats and might use Ali to send a message or seal a deal. What was hilarious was General Zia and the Pak Air Force, slaughtering Palestinians during Black September, with the tab being picked up by Saudi Arabia. The PLO supplied anti-aircraft missiles to the Bhutto brothers so they could try to avenge the death of their father by bringing down the Presidential plane. They muffed it. Later, the younger was poisoned by his Afghan wife (or so the Bhutto family believe) while the older was killed on orders of his brother-in-law. 

Said’s writing on the arts, at its best, has the exuberance that his writing on one art, music, always has.

Do Musicians find it valuable? Or, is his writing on art itself of great artistic merit? If not, it matters as little as whether Said farted exuberantly or scratched his arse in a lugubrious manner.  

He played the piano to professional standard: a piquant demonstration that the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical.

Fuck does that mean? Prof. Leavis was shite at playing the Didgeridoo?

But his answer to that was convincing: if both sides had not created the music, they could both perform it.

Which is why F.R Leavis was greatly remiss in not playing the Didgeridoo to an acceptable standard.  

After his death, his orchestra plays on: the West-Eastern Divan, founded by him and Daniel Barenboim, has performed in the Occupied Territories.

And weren't taken hostage. Sadly, they refused to play the Didgeridoo. At the very least, they could have hired a token wallaby in the strings section.  

Said was an accomplished and charming man who presented his admirers on the left with the dangerous illusion that by appreciating his writings they were being fast-tracked to an understanding of the history of the Middle East in a refined form,

Nonsense! He'd have had to bang on about the vested interests of big corporations to achieve that. Said was too lazy to go down that particular rabbit-hole.  

without having to study it in further detail. There were non-Western scholars who thought that he had the same illusion about his nominal subject, and that no Orientalist has ever been more damagingly superficial than he.

No. The notion that 'colonial epistemic systems' must be dismantled chimes with the old anti-colonial ideology which became the basis for State sponsored postcolonial ideology in the Global South. Thus, if the Indians decide to call their Penal Code the 'Bharatiya Nyaya Samhita', some hack will mention Said's Orientalism.  

There can be no doubt, alas, that some of his themes were cartoons. His argument that every Orientalist racist imperialist scholar since the Enlightenment was furthering the territorial ambitions of his home country broke down on the obvious point that the best of them came from Germany, which before the twentieth century had no colonies to speak of.

So what? The fact is Hanover- which was in personal union with England- got in on the act first and did earn some money from John Company. Germany had a lot of Universities. Its pedants were poor. They could get paid a little money for doing donkey work which actual colonial administrators from other countries might nevertheless find it worthwhile to subsidize.  

Simply because they believed in the objective nature of knowledge, the great European students of foreign cultures were all humanists before they were imperialists,

Fuck off! Most were Missionaries or believed in Proselytization save where that would be fatal to the commercial and geopolitical interests of their country.  

and often defended the first thing against the second, out of love and respect.

The fact is, if you study recondite shite, you have to pretend it is really Humanistic recondite shite.  

Today’s Indian scholars of Indian languages

are poorly paid pedants 

further the work of English scholars whose names they revere,

Like whom? G.U Pope? Caldwell? This may have been true a hundred years ago. Today, there is the awareness that crazy linguistic chauvinism and sub-nationalism gave rise to corrupt, gangsterish, local politics. 

The plain fact is, there is no part of the world where scholars of Literature or Philology are respected.  

one fact among the many that Said found it convenient either not to mention or never to know.

He was an Arab Anglican. His Bishops were happy to gas on about such things till the cows came home.  

Also his idea that Napoleon had wrecked Egypt’s advance into the modern age was not one shared by Naguib Mahfouz, who said that Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything modern it possessed.

The French had to leave quite soon. Mehmet Ali- an Albanian by birth- took over after the French withdrawal. He was the founder of modern Egypt. Mahfouz's charm, as a writer, is his resistance to the siren song of Pan-Arabism. Like Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, he saw Egypt as possessing a distinct culture and nationality. 

Said was right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world.

Intellectuals tend to be ignorant and stupid. If they aren't we would call them rich dudes or dudes with a lot of power.  

Very few of Said’s admirers in the West could begin to contemplate

anything at all. They were too stupid.  

the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse.

Still, if your son or daughter is a complete moron, they might as well do a PhD in Saidian shite and get tenure on the basis of affirmative action.  

I finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force, brave in a cause that was very short of his kind of soldier.

Because the Palestinians need terrorists not tenured Professors.  

'I pressed harder. What about the admiring caresses lavished by the camera on Mathieu marching into Algiers?'

—EDWARD SAID, REFLECTIONS ON EXILE, P. 286

The natural answer to the question would be to ask how lavishly Said had caressed his dick till it jizzed into his popcorn as he gazed longingly at the French dude in question. 

ANNOYINGLY UNDATED except for its opening phrase, “A few months ago,” Said’s essay on Gillo Pontecorvo

the runt of the litter of a high IQ Jewish family.  

is the account of a personal meeting that probably took place in the late 1990s, by which time Pontecorvo had not made a film in many years.

By then, Islamists in Algeria were discovering what the Army already knew- viz. the French had won the war. It was just that the game was not worth the candle- financially speaking.  That changed when oil prices soared. France and Italy soon became best buds of the dictators in their former North African colonies. 

But he had once, in 1966, made a film that Said continues to admire as a masterwork of political analysis: The Battle of Algiers.

I saw it in Baghdad. The message was simple. Bull doze the fucking Souk. Get rid of the old narrow streets. Anti-Baathist elements- Islamists, Bazaari Capitalists, Feudalists- are likely to entrench themselves there.  

I feel the same, but for different reasons,

 Pontecorvo married a wallaby who played the Didgeridoo?

and by focusing on the second of these two quoted sentences it is easy to make the difference plain. Said wants the film to be an outright condemnation of imperialism,

So did I. It would have been much shorter. Just get a wallaby to play the Didgeridoo while other wallabies stand about shouting 'Fuck you Imperialism! Fuck you very much!'  

with no concessions made to the forces of oppression. Said thinks that the French claims to have extended civilization to Algiers had nothing to be said for them, and that the rebellious native Algerians, whatever atrocities they might have committed, were well within their rights, considering the magnitude of the atrocity that had been committed against them.

Wallabies, too, have much to complain about.  

I want the film to be what it is. It certainly does condemn imperialism, but it shows that the French imperialism in Algeria was the work of human beings, not automatons.

nor wallabies. Similarly, I want every film- even those I don't like- to be what it is rather than a wallaby up my bum. The odd thing is, I didn't 'read' English at Pembroke College. I guess I was just born stupid. Some people are lucky that way.  

It need hardly be added that Said is right about how their apparently successful colonial efforts in Algeria corrupted the French into illusions of manifest destiny.

Do I need to point out that there was a dude named Napoleon who conquered a large portion of Europe? It was he who gave the French delusions of gloire. The French conquest of Algeria began 15 years after Waterloo. 

Elsewhere in the same book, Said gives an exemplary caning to Tocqueville, who was respectful enough about the repressed minorities in America, but who chose to despise Islam when he became gung-ho for a French Algeria.

James should give an exemplary caning to both Tocqueville and Said for ignoring the plight of wallabies.  

Said’s only mistake,

was to have studied and taught and written stupid useless shite. He may have done well as an importer of dates and other dry goods.  

but a crucial one, is to question Pontecorvo’s directorial emphasis at the exact moment when Pontecorvo is being most sensitive. At his most sensitive, he is at his most comprehensive, and comprehending. In letting the camera, and thus the audience, be impressed by the French general’s heroic stature as he marches into Algiers at the head of his paratroopers, Pontecorvo shows

he knows which side his bread is buttered on. The Algerian government financed the film.  Colonel Houari Boumédiène had seized power. He was the counterpart to the French General who, in consequence, must be depicted as heroic. 

why he ranks with Costa-Gavras as a true auteur of the political film.

In my part of South India, films were genuinely political- i.e. changed politics. 'Reel Society' took over 'Real Society'. Film stars or Scriptwriters dominated politics. 

In Costa-Gavras’s film The Confession, there is a similarly penetrating moment when Yves Montand, released from gaol, meets his torturer in the street, and can show nothing except embarrassment, while the torturer (Gabriele Ferzetti) assumes that the victim will join him in blaming the whole episode on unfortunate circumstances.

Nonsense! The torturer knows that both their fates depend on the Kremlin. The Czechs simply weren't free agents. They were a conquered people.  

These are human reactions, in all their ambiguity.

In Soviet controlled Czechoslovakia- maybe. Otherwise, if you meet your torturer in the street, you very unambiguously kick his head in- if it is safe to do so.  

In The Battle of Algiers, the paratroopers’ commander, Mathieu (in real life he was General Jacques Massu), is greeted with rapture by the pieds noirs as he leads his soldiers down the main street. They cheer, weep, do everything but lay palm fronds before his polished boots. He is greeted with hosannas because he looks like a saviour. Here is the man who will take the necessary measures to ensure that our innocent children are no longer blown to pieces in the nightclubs and restaurants. When the camera is on him, it has the eyes of his worshippers. If the camera bestows admiring caresses, it is because the crowd is doing the same.

I suppose the gerontocrats ruling the country in the 1990s hoped they too would be seen as Messiahs for the ruthless manner they crushed the Islamists.  

Since 1834, generations of the French in Algiers had grown up believing they inhabited part of France. In 1963 they believed de Gaulle when he said that Algeria would stay French.

Nonsense! De Gaulle recognized Algerian Independence in July 3, 1962. But it was the January 1961 referendum which was decisive. 

To them, the paratroopers looked like the guarantee that it would do so. The paratroopers believed it too, and the film, in its tragically logical unfolding, shows that belief being undermined by horror at the tenacity of the other belief that they encountered, and at what they must do to fight it.

Militarily, the French gained the upper hand. But the game was not worth the candle.  

“Non siamo sadici,” the general tells the press: “We are not sadists,”

i.e. did not derive pleasure from inflicting pain. Sadly, a reputation for sadism can be salutary for an occupying army.

and one of the measures of the film’s unique subtlety is that we believe they are not, even as they set about doing sadistic things.

The experience of the World War showed what humanity was capable of. Forget genocide, the Great Powers were developing weapons which could blow up the entire planet.  

There is a key moment when a couple of the paratroopers say a respectful “Courage!” to the man who is about to be tortured.

Perhaps they had family members who had been in the Resistance.  

Said might legitimately have objected to that. In any military group conducting interrogation by violence, no matter how reluctantly the policy is pursued, there are always a few genuine enthusiasts who relish the opportunity to make their sinister dreams come true.

Sadly, torture is a specialised profession. One needs empathy and imagination to get under the skin of your victim. I suppose the French soldiers thought they were dealing with 'terrorists'. 

But Said’s objection is directed elsewhere, at the very idea that the French in Algeria might have had a point in thinking that they had something to protect.

Both the Dutch in Indonesia and the French in Indo-China and Algeria seem to have believed that National Glory was connected to keeping Colonies. It seemed obvious that such possessions were the source of wealth. Yet, this was not actually the case. France grew rapidly after giving up its colonies. Refugees from Algeria filled the factories and enabled France to become an affluent Welfare State.  

Wedded to his conviction that imperialism is always and exclusively a force bent on destruction, Said writes as if the French could have had no reason to believe in their mission civilisatrice.

In some cases- e.g. Martinique- the colonial possession chose to remain part of France. Recently, some people in Lebanon were wishing France was still the mandatory power.  

He writes as if they would only have had to take thought to see the truth.

Said himself was an admirer of French literary culture. People like him were conscious of a divided loyalty.  

But they had been bred to believe that there was something to it.

It did appear that the might of the French Army would prevail. Surely, the US would back its ally against Left wing Arabs? 

In the opening sequence of the movie, Pontecorvo showed that their belief was an illusion. As the future insurgents look on silently from the gaol window, an anonymous colleague, with frightening efficiency and speed, is executed in the courtyard. Civilization means the guillotine. But the pieds noirs thought the repression of the natives was incidental, not fundamental.

There is an element of truth to this. The Colonists believed that the indigenous people were tribal and lacked a sense of nationalism. They were being misled by Communist agitators who would turn the territory over to their Soviet masters. This was also a popular view in Apartheid South Africa.  

They had developed a culture, had some reason to believe in its superiority, and were concerned to protect it.

Sadly, once Egypt became Nasserite, it was obvious that more and more Algerian & Libyan & Tunisian Arabs would receive military training & plenty of weaponry. The French could either fuck off or lose a war of attrition.  

(There is a constant assumption behind Said’s writings that multiculturalism, in imperial times, was an a priori view that had to be suppressed by propaganda,

The French weren't into multi-culturalism. The Brits were.  

rather than a view which grew out of the imperial experience as a result of the contact.)

The French believed they had a civilizing mission. The Brits believed they should conserve existing institutions- more particularly if there were kingdoms. That's the reason Uganda was a Protectorate while Kenya was a Crown Colony.  

For the French in Algeria, their mission to rule by right

might, not right.  

was an understandable belief. Even Camus shared it to a certain extent: he could be single-minded in despising Nazism and communism, but he was in two minds about Algeria until his last day.

French Algerians had been there for generations. Few thought they would have to leave en masse. But most became much better off as a result.  

How would Said have had Pontecorvo film the scene in question, the one about the paratroopers arriving in Algiers like redeeming heroes at the striding heels of their suave commander?

He would have wanted him to enter humbly like Allenby entering Jerusalem. Don't forget, it was Allenby who insisted on u.d.i for Egypt in 1922. Back in the Thirties, it seemed possible that the Brits would favour the Arabs over the Jews. Sadly, Arab fanaticism- contained by Tegart- and the fiscal infeasibility of a Palestinian state meant that the Brits had to do a deal with the East European Jews whom they despised. 

Should the actor playing him have been uglier, even though Massu looked like a film star in real life? Should his dialogue have been less subtle, even though Massu was well aware that a holding action was the best that could be hoped for, and said so? Should he have been wearing a swastika armband?

No. He should have been humble, like Allenby, and flanked by Imams and local potentates wearing robes and carrying scimitars.  

Said has similar objections to the glamour of the Marlon Brando character in Pontecorvo’s other big political statement, Quemada!

A stupid film. Portugal is England's oldest ally. The Brits wouldn't try to take over a Portuguese colony. It would be cheaper to deal with the existing administration.  

The imperialist looks too good.

Film stars tend to look good. That's why my own Hollywood career never took off even though I was willing to put out to Jane Fonda.  

This bothers Said even though Quemada! like The Battle of Algiers, is scrupulous in attributing all the impetus and justification of history to the insurgents: scrupulous, relentless and disturbingly convincing for those of us who doubt the efficacy of the outcome.

It was stupid shit. That's why Turd Worlders wouldn't watch that shite.  The plain fact is, it looked like the Kremlin's neo-colonialism- not that of the Brits who, after all, had peacefully transferred power to Socialist politicians like Nehru, Nyerere etc. 

Said doesn’t doubt it, yet he detects in Pontecorvo a lingering tendency to admire the envoys of established power.

Said rejected 'established power'. He refused to remain in the US. He went to Bangladesh to help feed the starving during the 1974 famine. He also married a Trotskyite wallaby.  

The same tendency can’t be imputed to Said. One detects in him a puritanical determination to remain unsullied by the blandishments of his own cultural sympathies.

One would detect this only if one also believed that Said was working on famine relief in Bangladesh while married to a Trotskyite wallaby.  

As a critic and man of letters he has an enviable scope,

But he was a shite critic. If Said said 'x is a good film or novel' everybody understood that it was tedious shite.  

but it is continually invaded by his political strictness. It would be foolish to blame him for this.

What was foolish was to think he had any genuine political standing.  

If he had a secular Islamic intelligentsia

Secular Islamic is a fucking oxymoron. 

behind him, he could leave a share of his self-imposed task to others.

There were plenty of Ivy League cretins happy to plough his sterile farrow.  

But he is pretty much on his own, and needs his absolutism if he is to fight his battle.

i.e. his business is to say Whitey be debil.  

Though his aesthetic judgements are often finely nuanced, there can be few nuances in his basic political position, so he is easily put out when the same turns out not to be true for an established Western radical he would like to admire without reserve.

Why can't Whites just slit their own fucking throats already?  

At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo, he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo

hadn't slit his own fucking throat 

has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent,

like Gaddaffi?  

and proud of it. But Pontecorvo, until 1956, was a Communist, and Said has underestimated—or, rather, overestimated—the grandees of the Italian Communist intelligentsia.

Like other Arabs, he felt they had done a good enough job supporting Libyan independence, denouncing the monarchy, condemning Suez etc. The fly in the ointment was support by intellectuals like Toni Negri for the Zionist kibbutz which they considered a challenge to the Arab absentee landlord urban bourgeoisie  

Few of them ever embraced the privations of the proletariat.

The Italian proletariat was doing okay. It was the peasants in the South who faced privation.  

The Italian intellectuals of the post-war sinistra might have paid lip service to Gramsci but their true models were among the perennial left-leaning artists of Europe: the Picasso who disguised his limousine as a taxi, and the Brecht whose rough-looking blue work-shirts were tailored for him out of matted silk.

Every country had plenty of Champagne Socialists.  

The luminaries of the Italian left were concerned with taking their place in a current society, not a future one.

Some thought there would be a revolution in the Seventies and that they themselves would move into the offices and mansions of the Cabinet Ministers.  

Fundamentalism was corrupted by the temptations of civilization, and Said might eventually reach the conclusion that it would be better if the same thing could happen in the Islamic world.

Said's generation of Arab intellectuals assumed that 'Secular Socialist' Generals would rule the roost. If the bazaari Middle Class allied with the Mullahs and sought to take power, they would be slaughtered. Iran was a different case. It wasn't Arab.  

In his fine long essay “Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation” (appearing as chapter 36 of Reflections on Exile) there is an encouraging sign that he has already reached it.

It suddenly occurs to him that 'Secular Socialist' kleptocrats were shite. The bazaari middle class might prevail.  

He notes that the Lebanese writer Adonis,

greatly hated now because he failed to support the Syrian uprising 

like Salman Rushdie, was reviled for suggesting that a strict literalism in the reading of sacred texts kills the spirit.

Hilarious! This is like saying- 'Aleister Crowley suggested that the Archbishop of Canterbury really ought to try sodomy with a goat'.  

Said is only a step away from saying that no text is sacred.

The Quran isn't sacred for Christians. Nobody gives a toss about a Christian saying the Biblical God is a bit of a shit.  

He is brave enough to take that step: he is used to having his life threatened.

By whom?  

His other fear is the disabling one: the fear of giving aid and comfort to the automatic enemies of Islam. But one is not necessarily an enemy of Islam for saying that although all good books are holy, no book is the word of God.

Good books aren't holy.  

Even the greatest books are the work of human beings, in all their frailty. Without the frailty, there would be no art, or even any thought.

If humans weren't frail, they wouldn't be humans. They would be rocks.  

When Said saw the general up there on the screen looking so seductive, he

jizzed in his pants?  

thought that he had caught Pontecorvo in a weak moment.

what makes for good cinema is strong from the cinematic point of view 

But the weak moment was a moment of strength.

 We'd rather Count Dracula be played by a handsome actor rather than a guy who looks like me. 

Pontecorvo had asked himself: “How would I have reacted, if I had been a French Algerian, and had been there in the street for the arrival of the strongman who had come to reassure me that my life had not been wasted?”

Strong men don't have to be good looking.  

By looking into himself, he was able to see everything else: the sign of the artist.

Because he was an artist- not an actuary.  

As for Pontecorvo the ex-artist, he made those commercials

which were artistic 

in order to maintain his way of life as a figure of prestige, a man who counts.

A guy who provides for his family.  

And after all, the prestige was impressively brought into play when Pontecorvo strode forward as a headline act in the demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan.

Nobody gave a fuck.  

There he was, up there on the screen: the great director, being lavished with the camera’s admiring caresses. One imagines that Said was pleased enough to see that.

It would have been a reminder of the utter futility of his own shitty career.  

Brennan's Said

Jews have been vilified by various soi disant savants since the time of Josephus. By contrast, there was a Roman Emperor named Phillip the Arab whom the Church fathers later claimed as one of their own and thus on the side of the Angels. After Israel's 1967 victory, vilification of Jews, in the West, stopped because there is no point saying mean things about people who are very good at fighting. The problem with attacking vilification is that nobody is willing to listen to you till you show you can militarily attack and defeat at least some of those vilifiers. Sadly, though the Palestinians showed they could export crazy terrorists, they never showed they could militarily defeat anybody or, at the least, rise up collectively by making and selling useful stuff. 

Esmat Elhalaby has a well-written, well-researched, article in the Boston Review on Brennan's biography of Edward Said.

His argument is that Said was an Arab intellectual living in the West rather than a Western intellectual who became involved in the Palestinian cause at a time when it was fashionable for Professors to appear 'engaged'. Is Elhalaby's view credible? Let us see.

On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein

who wrote in Arabic, not English. 

died in his New York apartment.

He was the PLO's correspondent at the UN. 

Hussein had been born forty-one years earlier in Musmus, a town not far from Nazareth. Politics for Hussein, Edward Said remembered, “lost its impersonality and its cruel demagogic spirit.”

Arafat wasn't a demagogue- right?  

Hussein, Said wrote of his dear friend, “simply asked that you remember the search for real answers, and never give it up, never be seduced by mere arrangements.”

What 'real answer' was the PLO searching for? I think it had to do with killing Jews or chasing them away from Palestine.  Said seems to have come to the conclusion that the two state solution was unviable. But a one state solution is also unviable if one community pays pensions to the families of those who kill innocent people of the other community. Also Palestinian leaders prefer killing each other to fighting elections. That's not good for the community. All you end up with is gangsterism.

Sharply critical of his own society and its rulers—he had a map of the Middle East on his wall with “thought forbidden here” scrawled across it in Arabic—Hussein was also a partisan of the Third World. “I am from Asia,” he pronounced in an early poem, “The land of fire / Forging furnace of freedom-fighters.”

This is silly. The fact is the Brits had kept the Arabs safe from the Jews. They had restricted Jewish immigration and were trying to figure out a way to get the Jews to subsidize the Arab portions of Palestine. The alternative was for Egypt and Jordan to take control over the Arab areas which is what in fact did happen till 1967. Still, the poet Hussein was better off remaining in Israel precisely because he was free to think for himself. 

At a later point in this essay, the author mentions a Pakistani intellectual who had to run away from India after Hindus killed his father. He also mentions Franz Fanon whose native country decided to remain part of France. The plain fact is that post-colonialism was worse for intellectuals than colonialism- at least, in many parts of Asia.  

Said’s influence was profound, but he was not alone. Any intellectual history must account for the multitude of emigres, exiles, and migrants from Africa and Asia who carried the pillars of anti-colonialism across the world.

This is crazy shit. People who emigrated after their countries became independent can't be pillars of opposition to colonialism for the simple reason that it no longer exists. 

Another of Hussein’s friends, Pakistani political scientist Eqbal Ahmad,

who had to run away from Bihar after the Brits left 

wrote that he lived in “New York City as though it were a Palestinian town.” Born in 1936, Hussein was nearly the same age as Said. Had the dislocations of his life not burdened his soul so heavily—he died alone in his apartment, a lit cigarette setting fire to the mattress as he slept—Hussein may very well have lived alongside Said in Manhattan for a few decades more.

The PLO was flush with funds back then. Hussein would have lived well.  

Though born in different milieux, Hussein and Said were drawn into close contact by the exigencies of the anti-colonial struggle in Palestine.

There was no anti-colonial struggle there. The battle was against immigrants of another faith who, sadly, tended to do sensible things whereas Palestinian leaders tended to do crazy shit- though they did get  richer than any Israeli politician.  

Indeed, it was precisely Said’s participation in a global political movement—his regular, public refusal to abide by the dictates of the United States’ imperial way of life—that drew the ire of so many during his lifetime.

What 'global political movement' are we talking about? Some Leftists pretended there was something called neo-colonialism. Not till you are ruled by a guy who takes his orders from the Kremlin can you call yourself a free country. The US was secretly ruled by Jewish homosexuals. Not till the Red Flag replaces the Stars and Stripes will the starving proletarians of America gain any real freedom.  

Before their recent reinvention, liberal journals such as the New Republic and Dissent regularly found column inches to attack Said’s thought and personage.

Because they thought the PLO was a terrorist organization which wanted to exterminate Jews. For some reason, Jewish readers disliked Arafat and his merry crew of cut-throats. 

But the bromides of Irving Howe and Leon Wesieltier

who were of Chinese Muslim origin- right?  

were never a match to Said, who embodied Frantz Fanon’s “final prayer” in Black Skins, White Masks (1952): “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

Fanon was a Doctor. He fell ill and died. His body could not be cured by the kind of drivel he had devoted himself to.  

And yet, many reviewers of Timothy Brennan’s new biography of Said, Places of Mind, have taken the opportunity to domesticate the late Palestinian writer.

This is because the guy refused to leave America and settle somewhere Arabic was spoken.  

Said is characterized as a representative of precisely those New York intellectuals who regularly derided him. In the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz goes to great lengths to argue that Said doesn’t “resemble Gramsci or Fanon so much as Susan Sontag.” The same Sontag who rebuffed Said’s (and many others) urgent appeals not to accept Israel’s Jerusalem Prize in 2001.

Which was odd. Normally Jews don't like visiting Jerusalem or getting an award from a country which produces much more than its fair share of intellectuals.  

Rather than an honest reckoning with how Said’s commitment to the Palestinian cause and conscious affiliations with anti-imperialism world-wide

America pulled the plug on the British Raj. It intervened against Britain, France and Israel who had attacked Egypt in 1956. Still, Leftists thought its intervention in Lebanon was very evil- as was the Baghdad pact. Good Muslims should turn towards the Kremlin, not the Ka'ba, to pray. But Stalin had supported the creation of Israel and had forced Arab Communists to toe the party line. 

distinguished him from such thoroughly American figures, reviews have exhibited a resilient orientalism.

Very true. Said is depicted as incessantly riding a camel.  

Shatz, long familiar with Said’s vision and politics as one of his editors at the Nation, nevertheless lazily falls back on such tropes when he describes Said as someone who donned “Burberry suits, not keffiyehs.”

Only because Said's favourite camel was partial to such suits. Indeed, it may have been a Jewish camel.  

In the New Statesman, Thomas Meaney breathlessly ends his review by mentioning that “along with his well-stocked shelves and formidable collection of classical music records, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities kept a map with the current positions of the Israeli Defense Forces.”

It was put there by his camel.  

It was precisely these kinds of efforts to juxtapose culture or refinement from the symbols and practices of political action that Said perennially opposed.

He would often harangue Arafat and his chums to stop living large and flying around the world in private jets. I'm kidding. He kept his mouth shut about the corruption in the ranks of the PLO.  

To account for Said’s life, one must acknowledge his involvement in a community of intellectuals, activists, and indeed martyrs, who found their commitment to Palestine and their commitment to ideas not only unironic, but essential.

One must acknowledge that he didn't write in Arabic, didn't move to an Arab university, and didn't participate in the armed struggle. Lots of people would hang out with free-spending Palestinians back then. The PLO was almost as cool as the Black Panthers. 

Throughout Places of Mind, Brennan is at his best when he deals directly with the themes, arguments, and circumstances of Said’s substantial oeuvre. He is sensitive to how political judgments long shaped Said’s work even before Palestine and the Third World became the causes for which he devoted most of his voice.

But, unlike his sister, Said never studied anything to do with the Arab world nor did he return there to teach or do anything else.  

Said’s 1975 book, Beginnings: Intention and Method, was widely feted in literary critical circles.

But, it was Eurocentric. The fact is the Western novel- in so far as it wasn't a revival of an ancient Greek and Latin form- owes much to contact with China and the Islamic world. But China and Japan were influenced by early Indian novels. However, the traveller's account of adventures in remote regions themselves were part and parcel of the beginning of the genre. 

The other problem with the book was that Said's premise- viz that 'beginnings' are secular while 'origins' are theological- was simply silly. There was a guy called Darwin who wrote a book called 'On the Origin of the Species'.  

 Said’s 1983 collection of essays, The World, the Text, and the Critic, which Brennan draws particular attention to, “was a teacher’s book in just this sense, but more sober and a good deal angrier.”

The trouble was that everybody had decided that peeps wot teech Litterchur are as stupid as shit. Said himself had given the game away when he complained that most Literature Professors didn't know a single foreign language. Students didn't read novels. They watched a video instead. The only way to confer academic credentials on these cretins was to get them to write utter gobbledegook of the sort Foucault and Said were writing. The good thing about this is you can say exactly the same thing about a Jane Austen novel or a Sanskrit play by Kalidasa or an advertisement for breakfast cereal.

In its essays, especially its central three on contemporary practices of literary and cultural criticism, Said mounts a lucid critique of the kinds of literary theory, like that of Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller, which had overtaken humanities departments by the 1980s. For Said, embroiled as he was in the culture of the university and the struggle for Palestinian freedom, it was clear that “left” theory was “very far from playing a genuinely political role.”

Whereas whining about being an A-rab, or a Paki or a homo or not having a penis was stuff which was genuinely political because the University administration can be bullied into creating a Chair for Grievance Studies of the sort you specialize in. Also you get to call all your colleagues Fascist. 

“A visitor from another world,” Said wrote, “would surely be perplexed were he to overhear a so-called old critic calling the new critics dangerous. What, this visitor would ask, are they dangers to? The State? The mind? Authority?”

The danger was that non-STEM subjects would become adversely selective of drug addled cretins. You'd end up with Professors of English at Ivy League unable to write a grammatically correct sentence.  

How does a Palestinian end up in New York teaching literature in the first place?

Said was from Egypt and knew French. That gave him a leg up. I suppose he had a private income and thus was under no great pressure to make a ton of money in Business. The one perk of teaching is that you get to deflower co-eds. Well they claim to be virgins though they tend to steal your Rolex.  

The nakba—inaugurated in 1948 by the establishment of the State of Israel—continues to scatter Palestinians.

Other countries in the region also 'scatter' Palestinians. If your leaders do stupid shit, you pay the price. 

But inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean had been regularly migrating to the Americas since the nineteenth century,

because White Christian immigrants had massacred the indigenous people and grabbed their land. 

when capital’s forced entry into the Ottoman Empire

The Khedive borrowed money willingly enough. Then the Brits and France turned up to get their money back. The Ottomans were more powerful. 

precipitated a series of profound social and political transformations in the Middle East.

Contact with a more advanced culture can have that effect, unless- of course- it just wipes out the indigenous population and grabs its land. 

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were host to a period of intense intellectual ferment, often referred to as the nahda, or Arab renaissance.

Missionaries played a role in this. Arab Christians tended to be in the forefront in the Nahda though still subject to the occasional pogrom.  

Characterized by the explosion of the periodical press, the rapid translation and interpretation of European texts, and the emergence of new genres of writing, new modes of political assembly, and new visions of social order, the nahda bequeathed today’s Arab world with its primary institutional and intellectual foundations. Those Arabs who migrated remained indelibly linked to the nahdawi efforts of their compatriots in the Levant, publishing their own Arabic journals, like New York’s al-Funun (The Arts), host to writers such as Khalil Gibran and Amin al-Rihani.

It must be said that Egypt under the 'veiled protectorate' was an astonishingly cosmopolitan and economically vibrant place.  

During World War I, some of the migrants heading toward the United States were doing so to dodge the Ottoman draft. Among them was Edward’s father, Wadie,

a Christian. The Turks killed plenty of Armenian Christians.  

who would end up in the U.S. Army, fighting the Germans in France. His wartime service earned him and his family U.S. citizenship and inculcated Wadie with a profound Americophilia. “On the Fourth of July,” Wadie’s daughter Jean Said Makdisi recounted in her 1990 memoir Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, “we went to the picnics at the American Embassy, where we ate hot dogs and Crackerjacks and watched the square dancing.”

Christians eat pork. Still, if you have an Embassy in a predominantly Muslim country, maybe you should substitute burgers for hot dogs. 

Born in Jerusalem in 1935, Edward Said grew up between British Egypt and British Palestine. Brennan, drawing on Said’s private papers and more than a hundred interviews with his friends and family, paints a detailed picture of the rich literary and musical life Said encountered as a young man in Cairo, a world Said describes in his 1999 memoir Out of Place. Had he been born a generation earlier, Said may very well have been an important member of the nahda’s last generation, caught up in the furies of empire and the modernity of Arabic.

Only if he actually remained in an Arab country. Erasmus couldn't have been part of the European Renaissance if he'd fucked off to Tibet.  

Also at the American University of Beirut was Syrian-born and Princeton-trained historian Constantine Zurayk. Best known for his 1948 book Ma’na al-Nakba (The Meaning of Catastrophe), which sought to account for the loss of Palestine with regard to its Arab past and future, Zurayk was also a key advocate for the development of modern methods of teaching and research in his administrative roles at AUB, as historian Hana Sleiman has recently documented. Zurayk was a close family friend of Said’s wife, Mariam. In his regular visits to Beirut after their marriage, and especially during the 1972–73 academic year which he spent there, Said regularly consulted with Zurayk. Brennan argues that Zurayk became Said’s “chief influence” at this time.

The problem with this view is that, by then, Zurayk was considered a nutter. If you think Islam is essential for Arab flourishing, why not convert to it? 

The wider problem with the Arab or sub-continental intellectual was the complete failure to understand that Imperialism was about the forcible export of 'public goods'- Defence, Law and Order, protection of minorities etc. The way for a nation to become strong was by making money and spending it wisely. In practice this means buy stuff which will make you richer so that you'll have more money to buy that sort of stuff. Protesting against 'materialism' or the money power of the Jews and the Europeans won't do any good. Both the Jews and the Europeans may fuck off leaving your country to turn into a shit-hole. 

Armies cost money. They may prefer to take over the country and get rich rather than fight the enemy. But Universities too cost money. If you pay people to teach worthless shit, you will have more and more unemployable cretins demanding jobs as Professors of worthless shit. 

But soon Said was drawn to a new generation of Arab intellectuals who largely disavowed the reformist politics and patrician style of Zurayk and his ilk.

 What fucking 'reformist politics' could you find in Assad's Syria?  

These Arab writers—in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s taxonomy, “the rebels, the committed, and the others”—were by no means monolithic in their attitudes and politics.

They were useless shitheads. It was obvious that what the Arabs needed to do was make money and get rich. True, if your son is a cretin you can send him to a fancy skool so he can end up as pedagogue of useless shit. 

In journals such as Al-Adab, Al-Tariq, Shi’r, Hiwar, and Mawaqif, Arab intellectuals revolted against the scripts of liberal political action

there was no such thing in the Arab world. To be fair, the Brits in Egypt had no interest in fostering any such thing. Still, Jordan turned out all right.  

that had been nourished by the nahda and against the formal conventions of Arabic literature, especially in poetry. Said would begin reading and corresponding with many of these thinkers, including the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Syrian philosopher Sadiq Al-Azm.

Who was admired by secular Leftists in Iran and India because they couldn't actually read his books. Still 'prominent Syrian philosopher' is like 'renowned cellist who is also a cat'. Obviously, I exclude theological or hermeneutic works in which Syrians have always excelled.  

It was in the 1970s, in midst of his deepening involvement with the political and literary revolutions of the Arab world, that Said’s intellectual and political energies were poured into the critique of imperial knowledge, culminating with the 1978 publication of Orientalism, his best known work. In that book, essentially a work of intellectual history, Said described and critiqued what he referred to as “the system of ideological fictions” that had until that point been uncontroversially known as Orientalism.

Said didn't understand that Colonialism was about making money. It wasn't about telling stories. Still, it is true that one particular tribe of Patagonians conquered Spain by saying mean things about that country.  

Drawing on the field’s major scholarly and literary works produced from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth in imperial France, Britain, and the United States, Said argued that Orientalism became an armature of those empires’ political and economic conquests.

No. There was a market for books about far off places where lots of money was being made. True, in one or two places- e.g. Hanover when it was ruled by an English King- academics could make a little money by learning Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic. Then the thing became a fashion. Herman Grassman, remembered today as a mathematician, was better known in his own lifetime as a translator of the Rg Veda.  

Orientalism’s publication generated furious debate. Among its harshest critics was Al-Azm, with whom Said engaged in an acrimonious exchange.

Al-Azm was an expert on German philosophy. He knew that the Germans were big on Orientalism though they never had an Empire. The English were perfectly content to outsource their Oriental scholarship to penniless Prussian pedagogues.  

To Arab Studies Quarterly, a journal Said coedited, Al-Azm submitted a sharply critical—and rather lengthy—review of Orientalism. In response, Said wrote to its author, “I am a skeptic and in many ways an anarchist who doesn’t believe as you do, in laws, or systems, or any of the other claptrap that inhibits your thought and constricts your writing.” “For you Marx is what Khomeini is to his followers,” he continued, “you are in fact a Khomeini of the Left which is one thing my heroes, Gramsci and Lukacs, could never have been.”

This is illiterate nonsense. Gramsci would loved to have been the Lenin of Italy. Lukacs was a Commissar under Bela Kun and had some of his own people shot. Perhaps that's why Stalin didn't kill him.  

Al-Azm responded in kind, requesting that his review be published as is or not at all. Perturbed, Said nevertheless agreed to publish the forty-page review on the condition that his response be printed as well.

In the end, Al-Azm published his review in the 1981 issue of Khamsin, the London journal of a collective of radical Israeli intellectuals.

I recall them. I was asked by an elderly Jewish lady if I could lay my hands on some of my fellow darkies to attend some function associated with those nutters. Apparently, they were fighting for our liberation.  I should explain, at that time, I thought it funny to wear a dhoti and carry a placard up and down Aldwych demanding Dominion Status for India. 

In the review, Al-Azm accused Said of unfairly maligning Marx, as would other Marxist critics including Aijaz Ahmad and Mahdi Amel. More significantly, Al-Azm argued that Said was practicing what he called “Orientalism in reverse,” essentializing the West in the same way the orientalists who were his targets essentialized the East.

 But Said was making money from his book. That's what counted- essentially speaking. 

In the wake of 1979’s Iranian Revolution, Al-Azm feared Said’s critique of Orientalism made room for the further entrenchment of the idea that Islam was inherently opposed to Western ideas, images, and institutions

Meanwhile Saddam had invaded Iran. That didn't end well. Damascus is now a client of Teheran. It turned out that sectarian divisions alone matter. Ideology- even 'Nationalism'- doesn't at all.  

Orientalism was only the latest example in a tradition of the oppressed defending themselves from the slanders which accompanied land robbery, labor exploitation, and political domination. Indeed, the critique of orientalism is as old as orientalism itself.

Very true. People who are being robbed and raped have traditionally written pseudo-intellectual shite about their assailants.  

Said was not the only target of Al-Azm’s critique, however. He also took aim at other Arab intellectuals, including Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) and Elias Khoury, whom he accused of being too open in their embrace of revolutionary “islamanics,” as he called those partisans of Islamic revival in the Middle East.

After Al-Azm published his review, he and Said never spoke again, according to Brennan. At the end of the decade, Al-Azm would attack the entire Palestinian intellectual and political class, including Said again, in an essay provocatively titled “Palestinian Zionism,” for the German journal of Islamic studies Die Welt des Islams. He would compare Said to early Zionist ideologues like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and Leon Pinsker. Said’s “Palestinian idea,” Al-Azm argues in that later essay, bore clear Hegelian affinities with the “Zionist idea.” To that end, Al-Azm concludes, Yasser Arafat was Chaim Weizmann, George Habash was the mirror image of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and Naif Hawatmeh, the Palestinian Ben-Gurion.

But the Jews mentioned achieved much. The Palestinians made things worse for their own people.  

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Arab intellectuals who traveled and studied in Europe, including Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq

an impressive novelist. If only it had been translated into Urdu! I suppose the thing was written before his conversion to Islam.  

and Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, criticized, corrected, and even satirized the writings of prominent orientalists like Silvestre de Sacy.

 Who had made genuine discoveries. 

In the 1880s, Jamal al-din al-Afghani, an influential and peripatetic West Asian intellectual, offered a powerful riposte to French philologist Ernest Renan’s scurrilous if typical pronouncement that Islam was inimical to scientific progress.

 There is only way to counter this argument- viz. point to the superior scientific discoveries being made by one's own people.

Intellectuals across the Ottoman Empire—indeed across Africa and Asia—would regularly denounce imperial knowledge and its political implications throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century’s anti-colonial revolutions, rebellions, and intifadas.

But those 'intellectuals' were considered crack-pots by their own people unless they were making a lot of money or gaining a lot of power and influence by doing so.  The fact is Imperialism was about making money and was prepared to spend a little money to gain factual knowledge of a type which might enable profits to increase. 

For the colonized, the critique of colonial knowledge was fundamental. “For me,” Indian social theorist Partha Chatterjee recounted, “child of a successful anti-colonial struggle,

which succeeded in turning Calcutta from 'a city of Palaces' and 'the second City' of the biggest Empire the world has ever seen into the veritable anus of the Turd World.  

Orientalism was a book which talked of things I felt I had known all along but had never found the language to formulate with clarity. . . . [I]t seemed to say for the first time what one had always wanted to say.”

Partha was being silly. The Mahacrackpot had shat very thoroughly on the West some 40 years before he was born. There was little point in Indians denouncing 'Orientalism' when they had contributed to, and pretty much taken over, the entire project. Anyway, it was Indian origin people- like Niradh Chaudhuri and VS Naipaul who had taken over a job previously done by the likes of the American Katherine Mayo. 

Edward Said was in a class apart because he could argue that his people were the victims of European colonists. Moreover, there was plenty of petro-dollars available for their cause. Nixon and 'the Rodgers plan' (which permitted Egypt to gain militarily over Israel) had sent the signal that the US could tilt away from Israel. But for Habash provoking 'Black September' which then lead to 'Black September' attacking Israeli athletes in Munich, and the crazy antics of the Japanese and German terrorist outfits, the Palestinians could have gained something substantial after the OPEC oil shock. The plain fact is their leaders did stupid shit. It is remarkable that an intelligent, hard working, decent people have had such terrible leaders.  

As Said himself acknowledged, in the decades leading up to 1978, Arab intellectuals publishing in the West had attacked orientalism’s edifice with increasing ferocity and clarity, as imperial structures and attitudes proved resilient even in the wake of political decolonization.

In other words, countries- like Israel and India- which were fortunate enough to inherit British institutions- e.g. an independent Judiciary and regular Parliamentary elections- weren't foolish enough to scrap them.

Socialism, it is true, failed. This was because Socialists didn't get that only making  money can make things make better, not passing stupid laws or protesting against injustice.  

For example, the prolific Palestinian historian Abdu Latif Tibawi, who received his PhD from the University of London in 1948 and who would work and teach in England for the rest of his life, published a short but perceptive study in 1964, English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism.

He was a colonial civil servant whom the Brits kept on because they still had a big presence in parts of the Arab world. It was noticeable that British professors wrote in a sympathetic manner even of countries which had turned against Britain- e.g. Iraq. One reason Niradh Chaudhuri was important in England was because he highlighted the importance of racist comments made in the European press in fuelling the Independence movement. The Brits had encouraged Katherine Mayo to write her scurrilous book but this had united the Indians against them. The approach of the 'Orientalists' in Lahore, however, had paid dividends. Britain needed to present itself as a God fearing Monarchy which was keen to sell munitions and train the Armies of newly independent Arab countries. Also, Suez had been a fucking disaster.  

A year earlier, Egyptian Marxist Anour Abdel-Malek published a long essay, “Orientalism in Crisis,” from his exile in Paris.

He had been co-opted by the French who were pretending they weren't Capitalist Imperialists in order to continue to squeeze their former colonies.  

Abdel-Malek primarily took to task the “neo-orientalism” of Europe and the United States, as well as the “europeocentrism” of the social sciences and humanities in general.

France wanted them to Franco-centric.  It still rankled that England had gotten the nicer colonies. 

Indeed, Said’s specific critique of orientalism cannot be separated from the general assault on the established institutions and protocols of knowledge production that accompanied the mass movements of the 1960s and ’70s globally.

Those assaults failed. They simply proved that non-STEM subjects are useless though, no doubt, an MBA or a law degree from Ivy League have a 'signalling' function.  

Campuses erupted into the streets as the practical implications of imperial science became ever-apparent in the midst of endless war and underdevelopment.

 Then De Gaulle got re-elected while America voted for Nixon. There was no such thing as 'imperialist science' or 'anti-imperialist science'. On the other hand there was a Feminist version of Queer Bio-Political Subaltern Students focusing narrowly on Patagonian penguins illegally occupying Gazza's football strip. 

The editors of the short-lived but influential Review of Middle East Studies would acknowledge this fact in 1978: “it is our opinion that much of what is wrong with Middle Eastern studies is also wrong both with other social science writing and also with work on other regions of the world.”

But this opinion was wrong because the people holding it were cretins. The only thing wrong with Middle Eastern studies was that it wasn't making those who did it as rich as fuck. Indeed, that was also what was wrong with other sorts of studies of the sort which attracted paranoid nutters or virtue signalling cretins.  

They acknowledged their debt to groups such as the Committee of Concerned Asian scholars, which would lead its own revolt against Cold War Asian studies in the United States in the midst of the Vietnam War.

Americans didn't want to pay for that shit. That's why they surrendered.  

Said would mention these efforts of “decolonializing” knowledge with appreciation in the final chapter of Orientalism.

Nobody read that far. The one question which puzzled us was why the guy had beef with Massignon- an admirer of the Mahatma. I suppose, Said as a Christian didn't understand the appeal of al-Hallaj. Imam Khomeini wrote poems in his praise and the Sufis have spread his fame far and wide. 

Although vestiges of its imperial designs remain today, the study of the Orient, as it were, shifted dramatically after Said’s dissection.

Nobody bothered with it. The Left realized that Tudeh in Iran, or the Khalqis in Afghanistan would merely pave the way for Islamists. True a regime could become stable by creating a 'Welfare State'- however rudimentary- but oil prices are intrinsically unpredictable. Make sure the secret police are recruited from your own clan. Ideology can go fuck itself. 

Middle East studies, as a field constituted principally in the crucible of the Cold War, would become increasingly critical of its own institutions and origins.

But, by 1968, it was obvious that a 'Manhattan Project' for the Social Sciences was simply a waste of money. So what if some far off shithole became 'Socialist'? They'd still need to sell us stuff and as Stalin showed in the early Thirties, Dictators can pay cash on the nail because they don't care if millions of their people starve to death.  

The impact of Said’s book on the academy also went far beyond the field he specifically targeted. “We feminists read Orientalism by Braille,” Sondra Hale would write in her 2005 essay “Edward Said—Accidental Feminist.”

Sondra Hale is a hugely important figure in....nothing at all. Apparently she thinks women are using Islam to advance their own agenda in North Sudan.  

An anthropologist of the Sudan and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Hale would register the profound impact of Said’s book on gender studies of the Middle East.

But such studies have had no impact whatsoever. There is no point impacting stuff which is utterly useless.  

Like Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Orientalism was largely absent of women, yet it raised a critique that would become foundational in future writing about the use of Middle Eastern women in imperial justifications for war as scholars like Lila Abu-Lughod, Laura Nader, and Suad Joseph have since elaborated.

That's a point which might have been made about America's war in Afghanistan. Then, it turned out, Americans don't give a fuck about sand-niggers with or without dicks.  

“It is now time for us together to expose and destroy the whole system of confinement, dispossession, exploitation, and oppression that still holds us down and denies us inalienable rights as human beings. It is our job to create a genuine world culture of brotherhood and common cause.”

Very true. We are sick and tired of a fake world culture of brotherhood and common cause.  Still, it is good to know that academics want to destroy the whole system of exploitation which employs them.

Said never saw his book simply in academic terms, however. In a letter to British historian Roger Owen, the editor alongside Talal Asad of the Review of Middle East Studies, Said made clear what he saw as his project’s political stakes: “I find the work on Orientalism to be a contribution to the struggle against imperialism.”

There was no imperialism any where. Said had beef with Israel- a post colonial country just like Pakistan.  

In addition to his participation in Beirut’s intellectual scene, Said was increasingly involved in the political struggles being organized by Arabs who, like himself, resided in the United States. Indeed, the first draft of the argument Said would put forward in Orientalism was commissioned by his close friend, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, in 1968 for a volume responding to the disastrous Arab–Israeli War of 1967. The book was published by the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG), which was founded in 1967 by a formidable group of Arab intellectuals including philologist Muhsin Mahdi, radical lawyer Abdeen Jabra, and Abu-Lughod himself. A political scientist, Abu-Lughod and Said first met when they were both at Princeton, Said in his final year of college and Abu-Lughod doing his PhD.

Abu-Lughod had Jewish students who learnt a lot from him. This helped Israel.  

After Princeton, both Palestinians spent time in Cairo, where their relationship would deepen. “The older Abu-Lughod,” Brennan writes, “tutored the French-identified Said in third-world political insurgency, especially the events then unfolding in Algeria.” Said became deeply involved in the AAUG, and would cofound with Abu-Lughod the Arab Studies Quarterly in 1979, which was published under the group’s auspices. While the 1967 war had emboldened American supporters of Israel, it was also the occasion of the increased political mobilization of Palestinians internationally, often in defiance of Arab governments as well as Israel’s supporters in the West.

Political mobilization is fine. Crazy terrorist atrocities are counter-productive. People weren't saying 'wow! Palestinians are brave!' They were saying 'Palestinians are cowards. They prefer killing unarmed civilians.' 

There were and are plenty of very smart Palestinians. Yet, when considering whether the Academy should boycott Israel we have to admit that that tiny country is producing better research than the entire Muslim world- Turkey included- is producing. If you set  aside the Nobel prizes for Peace and Literature, we find there are 3 Muslim laureates, all of whom were located in the West and one of whom was declared a non-Muslim by his own country. Israel has 9 (though 3 are in Econ) and they work, at least some of the time, in their own country. 

It is shameful for me, as a Tamil and an Indian, to admit that the best scholars in two or three Indological fields in which I am interested are based, at least partially, in Israel. I'm not saying they aren't ignorant of India, but our Indian scholars have worked harder at becoming more ignorant. 

Said, his colleagues in the AAUG, and Arab Americans in general were increasingly subject to surveillance, harassment, and intimidation by the U.S. government and Zionist groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Defense League.

Whereas Arafat would simply have had their throats slit.  

By the mid-1970s, Said, whilst being recruited by Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Harvard, was considering a departure from the United States altogether. In 1974 he would write to Zurayk inquiring about a permanent position for himself in Beirut: “Whatever knowledge of the Middle East I now possess is being pressured into the service of the American Empire, and why not put it to our service?”

Because, thanks to the Palestinians, Beirut was going to turn to shit. To be fair, Maronite Christians were even crazier. Still they weren't roaming around the world killing athletes or elderly guys in wheelchairs.  

Although Said did not in the end take the job as research director of the Institute for Palestine Studies

Say what you like the guy knew when he was well off. Being Arafat's pal meant Assad might have him killed. 

which he was offered, his involvement with the Third World continued apace. In addition to Abu-Lughod, whom he called his “guru,” Said became close with prominent anti-war intellectuals in the United States, like Noam Chomsky and Eqbal Ahmad.

a former Pakistani army officer wounded in their first war against India. 

And increasingly, the great theorists of anti-colonialism, especially Frantz Fanon

whose country wisely chose to remain French territory 

and Aimé Césaire,

a prominent politician in French Martinique  

would become touchstones of his thought, alongside the Arab humanists and European Marxists he had long drawn from. Said’s writing would leave little room for confusion as to where his thought was aimed.

The guy liked France. They make great cheese. Sadly, their wine is greatly inferior to Coca Cola.  Anyway, America pays its celebrity Professors a lot more money.

For the memorial service following Said’s death in 2003, Brennan wrote that Said’s “words so often expressed my thoughts that I found it hard over time to remember what I knew before I met him—what I had said and believed before knowing him, and what (by contrast) I had taken entirely from him.” A catalog of Brennan’s principal interests over the last four decades—from humanism, philology, and empire to Giambattista Vico, Erich Auerbach, and C. L. R. James—betray Said’s mark.

They betray great stupidity.  

Like Said, Brennan’s efforts have often been extra-literary and meta-critical in character, the grammar of global politics and the life of ideas the subjects of much of his work.

Fuck would Brennan know about either? Global politics is about who is producing how much of what. That's economics with a bit of military geography thrown in. 

And Brennan, too, has not shied from political activity. As a graduate student at Columbia during the Reagan years, Brennan was among those who protested U.S. intervention in Nicaragua.

Is he protesting Ortega's authoritarianism now?  

Imperialism is Brennan’s primary object of critique. A close second, however, is the increasingly marginalized field of postcolonial studies, which he characterizes—and sometimes caricatures—as a post-structuralist effort to obfuscate the social and political effects of imperialism and to deny the anti-imperialist criticism that preceded it. In a long chapter on Said in his 2006 book Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, Brennan argued that those who take Said to be the progenitor of the academic field known as “postcolonial studies” are gravely mistaken. Postcolonialism’s methods and motives departed significantly from Said’s own efforts to understand and critique imperialism in Orientalism and elsewhere, according to Brennan. “A good deal of postcolonial studies drew on Orientalism without being true to it,” Brennan writes. “The book’s theory traveled, and it did not travel well.”

The point about 'post-colonial' studies was that if you were really really stupid, you might be able to use it to travel and settle on a nice Western campus where you could pretend to be battling the ghosts of Dead White Peeps who remain busy buggering the brains out of one's own sub-species of benighted darkies.  

Under Said’s tutelage, Brennan would produce a study of Salman Rushdie’s life and work, publishing his first book Salman Rushdie and the Third World in 1989 just as Rushdie was catapulted into public consciousness with the controversy over his novel The Satanic Verses. The Rushdie Affair, as it became known, occasioned a flurry of writing. A decade of rigorous thinking about secularism, liberalism, imperialism, and literature was put to the test as an Indian Muslim writer in London

Rushdie was British Pakistani. His parents had left India permanently when he was a child.  

was attacked for blasphemy by coreligionists. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Agha Shahid Ali, Talal Asad, and many other formidable thinkers all jumped into the fray to clarify their positions on the uses and abuses of Rushdie’s writing.

But they had no following anywhere. Rushdie should have played the Kashmir card. He was too stupid or deracinated to do so.  

Said had a nuanced view of postcolonial studies, appreciating that a leading motif of it “has been the consistent critique of Eurocentrism and patriarchy.”

Boo to Whitey! Boo to Penises! Double Boo to White Penises!  

In the pages of the academic Marxist journal Social Text, Brennan would spar with another of Said’s students, Aamir Mufti, over the interpretation and reception of Rushdie’s novel.

This was hilarious. Mufti insisted that Brennan was very very wonderful but that Brennan hadn't understood that Mufti was brown and thus as stupid as shit. The joke here was that Mufti, like Rushdie, didn't know shit about India because he knew nothing about Hinduism and India is a Hindu country.  

For the uninitiated, the language of the debate may appear obscure. Both Mufti and Brennan opposed the cooption of Rushdie’s plight in the name of purportedly Western values against the Muslim horde in Europe and the United States.

They were wrong to do so. Rushdie renounced Islam and settled in America where the Jews liked him.  

For Brennan, however, Rushdie—as a metropolitan subject writing in English and publishing in London—was himself participating principally in a Western conversation.

He was participating in the British publishing industry. Indeed, he raised the prestige of the English novel because people thought he actually knew about India.  

Against that reading, Mufti argued that Rushdie was part of “the struggle over Islamic culture in the late twentieth century.”

This was foolish. You actually have to be Muslim or living in an Islamic culture to participate in such a struggle.  

Brennan, Mufti argued, was obscuring the nature of this global fight under the guise of anti-imperialism.

This was true. In Karachi many rickshaw drivers felt that Brennan was obscuring the nature of the global fight against the establishment of universal Khilafat. 

Brennan in turn, accused Mufti (and others, like Sara Suleri), of summoning “high theory” and the language of the Western academy to make arguments about “ethnic collectivities” and contemporary imperialism that simply did not hold. “London literary celebrities,” Brennan concluded, “do not speak for Bradford factory workers.”

Nor did Bradford factory workers. This is because they didn't want to be factory workers. Also there were too many darkies in Bradford. They wanted to move somewhere which didn't stink of curry. At least this is what I was told on my brief visit there. Mirpuris can be terribly colour conscious you know.  

Despite Brennan’s disdain for postcolonial studies in general, there is no doubt that the brief enthusiasm for work that fits below postcolonialism’s very large umbrella was crucial to making Brennan’s career. His exasperated response to Mufti, detailing the breadth of his expertise in the Islamic elements of Rushdie’s work, and his own role in first delineating them, speaks precisely to the ironies of postcolonial studies’ rapid rise and fall in literature departments. Postcolonialism, after all, never in reality congealed into any kind of doctrine, but more often simply denoted an interest on the part of its practitioners in colonialism’s myriad effects, which is more than can be said about prevailing approaches to the humanities or social sciences in general. However deficient postcolonialism may be for tackling the material realities of our colonial present,

Material realities involve getting money and spending it wisely. Postcolonialism may get you an ill-paid job as a glorified child minder. We want our kids to study stuff which makes them money.  

the field’s gradual disappearance and replacement in U.S. universities with geographical idioms totally untethered from the language of power and domination—whether world literature, global history, or “the global Anglophone”—can only be seen as a loss.

But US universities are axing entire Departments because they attract only imbeciles and can't generate profitable intellectual property.  

In contrast to Brennan’s judgment, Said himself had a much more nuanced appreciation of postcolonial studies, tempered always by his suspicion of purely academic endeavors in general.

Said died before the internet really took off. Still, he could see that non-STEM subjects had turned to shit. The day was long gone when somebody at the Pentagon or the CIA would want to talk to a Professor of Arabric or Hindu or whatever.  

In a university that was at the time—even more than it is today—overwhelming white and male (like Brennan himself), Said

whose daddy was allowed to become American because he looked white enough 

identified with appreciation that a “leading motif” of postcolonial studies “has been the consistent critique of Eurocentrism and patriarchy.” At the same time, however, Said was increasingly frustrated with the literary criticism and theory that was being practiced and celebrated in U.S. literature departments and humanities journals like Critical Inquiry and Diacritics.

Said could actually read French. His complaint was that many of his colleagues hadn't even read Shakespeare, forget about Racine.  

In a 1992 interview, he admitted to not reading “lit. crit.” anymore: “It seems to me that whereas, say, ten years ago I might eagerly look forward to a new book by somebody at Cornell on literary theory and semiotics, now I’m much more likely to be interested in work emerging out of concern with African history.”

Like what? Martin Bernal's 'Black Athena'? But Bernal and those who influenced him were White and his own interest in Africa arose out of his interest in his Jewish 'roots'.  

Said nevertheless found work to praise. In the afterword to a new edition of Orientalism in 1994, he singled out Ammiel Alcalay’s After Arabs and Jews: Remaking Levantine Culture (1992), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Moira Ferguson’s Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (1992) for “rethinking and re-formulating historical experiences which had once been based on the geographical separation of peoples.”

But, by then darkies the world over were trying to get rich. Nothing less would do.  

Said’s own work was characterized by a patent refusal of separation. He refused to separate the literary from the historical, the material from the cultural, and, indeed, the personal from the political.

But he was making money as a person from his politics. That made him a success. True, he wasn't a billionaire like Arafat but then he hadn't actually killed anybody. Lukacs would have looked down on him.  

Said dedicated his eloquent 1979 book The Question of Palestine

the answer to which was 'Palestinians be kray kray'.  

to his late friends Rashid Hussein and Farid Haddad, a Palestinian communist and physician tortured to death in an Egyptian jail in 1959.

No question, Nasser was a great man- though he sucked at killing Jews.  

To those two, one could add Kamal Nassir, a brilliant Palestinian lawyer and writer killed by Israeli agents in Lebanon in April 1973.

Revenge for Munich. Palestinians decided it was safer to kill Arabs so as to extort money though, no doubt, killing school-children might be a great proof of valour.  

Said had dinner with him the night before his assassination.

Why did the Israelis not think it worthwhile to kill Said? Is it because he was useless or because he annoyed the fuck out of the small number of area specialists whom Governments listened to?

That list could be expanded still, by adding Hanna Mikhail, an accomplished Arabist with a PhD from Harvard who abandoned a comfortable career at the University of Washington to join the Palestine Liberation Organization in Jordan and Lebanon,

both of which had to kill and expel a lot of Palestinians

where he would come to be known as Abu Omar. He would die at sea in 1976, on an ill-fated mission from Beirut to Tripoli with eleven others. “Abu Omar,” Said would write of his friend in 1994, “embodied the prevailingly generous and unconventional principles of the Palestinian revolution.”

Sadly, those principles made it impossible for anyone to live with any sizable group of them. Only Gaddafi wanted them but he'd get angry because they weren't killing enough innocent people. Arafat was actually quite cautious but he was the face of a movement almost as rabid as Libya's ruler.

This was Said’s world.

He often rode his camel from Manhattan to Mecca stopping off to slaughter innocent school children from time to time. 

In New York but not of it, Said’s life cannot be contained by the cliches of campus novels and parochialism of the U.S. literary establishment.

Because he and his camel were actually terrorists- right? 

Endlessly caricatured, ridiculed, and disdained, Said never wavered in his commitment to the Palestinian people, even—and especially—when they were abandoned by their own leadership.

Said and his camel were constantly darting into refugee camps in Lebanon to give leadership to the abandoned Palestinians. 

Endlessly caricatured, ridiculed, and disdained, his arguments regularly misconstrued and disfigured by his critics and opponents, Said never wavered in his commitment to the Palestinian people (to whom, it should perhaps be noted, Brennan dedicates Places of Mind). Even—and especially—when Palestinians were abandoned by their own leadership, Said refused to acquiesce to the status quo, or celebrate half-measures.

Sadly, nobody had asked him to acquiesce to anything. 

He surrounded himself with people who respected his cause and he admired them in turn.

A bunch of losers teaching stupid shit had a mutual admiration society. How sweet! 

On the occasion of Eqbal Ahmad’s retirement from Hampshire College,

which is in Pakistan- right? 

Said—while holding back tears—offered this tribute:


I want . . . to take this opportunity, to say on their behalf—I have no right to speak on their behalf, but I’ll try—to say on behalf of the many refugees, camp dwellers, wretched of the earth, who have been forgotten by their own leaders, and by their fellow Arabs and Muslims,

like the Biharis in Bangladesh? Eqbal Ahmed was born in Bihar. 

that Eqbal has been one of their guiding lights, and for that no Palestinian can ever thank him enough.

Eqbal, unlike General Zia, had not helped the Jordanians bomb Palestinians during 'Black September'. Palestinians should be grateful for this. On the other hand, the fool suggested kidnapping Kissinger at a time when Nixon was tilting away from Israel. 

Said’s world is certainly different from ours. Palestinian institutions have been turned inside out. Unlike the PLO of Said’s 1970s, today’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank serves not as a place where Palestinians from around the world can work for their liberation, but rather serves to administer Israel’s occupation itself.

Why not simply call the Authority a bunch of corrupt, senile, thugs? 

The U.S. university, too, has been transformed. Most who teach at universities today, even at Columbia, are insecure in their jobs, housing, and health care. While genuinely left-wing positions remain rare in the university, more and more intellectuals on the margins—many of them young and in the streets—are articulating their opposition to the U.S. policy of endless warfare at home and abroad, to use the imperial locution.

Biden ended that. The next President is likely to be even more isolationist. The plain fact is Imperialism is only cool if it makes a profit. 

Some things, however, continue unchanged. Israel remains belligerent in its zeal to dispossess Palestinians from Haifa to Jerusalem to Gaza.

But the Saudis want the Palestinians to shut the fuck up. The true enemy of the Arab is the Iranian and maybe the Turk.  Jews are fellow Semites.

“Seventy years, but actually longer,” Palestinian anthropologist Khaled Furani observed in 2018, “of not only wanting more land but also less and less Palestinians.”

Nobody in the region wants more Palestinians.  

On a daily basis, home by home, sometimes neighborhood by neighborhood, Palestinians continue to be killed outright or killed slowly, expelled from their lands, stripped of their livelihoods and communities. What also remains is the Palestinian will to rebel.

Provided pensions are paid to the families of those who kill a couple of innocent civilians. 

“The greater the Palestinian insistence, the deeper the Zionist denial,” Said wrote in The Question of Palestine.

Aamir Mufti liked comparing Pakistan with Israel. Both were created at around the same time. Suppose a United Arab Republic had been created, would Palestinians have become citizens of it? No. They were welcome to die trying to kill Jews but nobody wanted them as equal citizens- though, it must be said, Jordan was initially quiet hospitable. Then the Palestinians tried to take over. Their politics was always that of the gangster or blood thirsty clan chieftain. The Arabs made a mistake by boycotting the 1923 elections held by the Brits. Israel took the trouble to hold regular elections. The Palestinians tried it once or twice then stopped bothering with the thing. Mafias don't have elections. Their job is killing and extorting money. 

While defenders of Israel appear increasingly desperate to everyone watching, public support of the Palestinian people still draws the ire of university administrators and the professional political class in the United States.

The thing is a nuisance. Israel is a knowledge economy. Palestine can't even export terrorism because ISIS is better at the rough stuff.  

Said’s work and example, then—attuned as he was to the shape of Palestinian freedom to come—remains as instructive as ever.

To be fair, Said gave up on a two state solution because he could see the Palestinian political class was too thuggish while its 'intellectuals' were too stupid and paranoid to enable the community to rise up. Still, by opposing the Oslo agreement he had made himself irrelevant. No doubt, he was right that the PLO would fuck up but the alternative to the PLO was some other bunch of nutters fucking up. But there was no point saying that the solution was for Israel to stop being Israeli and for Pakistan to stop being Muslim and for Americans to stop being so fucking American and just become Chinese already.

Currently, it looks as though, if the Palestine problem really matters, China will broker a deal. But Palestinians- especially those who are Israeli citizens- don't matter and ought not matter in a part of the globe where many Syrians and Lebanese people are far worse off. The truth is, if Palestinians have a chance to work hard and get rich, then it will become worth their while to elect people to spend their tax money in sensible ways. If they don't have that opportunity, some bunch of thugs can always pay them to go around slaughtering innocents. But that is counter-productive. They take lives, but lose land.