Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror 2015000026, 9781412855808, 9781412808729, 9781315127088

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Post-Orientalism Knowledge & Power

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Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy

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Post-Orientalism Knowledge & Power in a Time of Terror

Hamid Dabashi With a new introduction by the author

Originally published in 2009 by Transaction Publishers. Published 2015 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business New material this edition copyright © 2015 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015000026 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dabashi, Hamid, 1951Post-orientalism : knowledge and power in a time of terror / Hamid Dabashi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-5580-8 1. Orientalism. 2. Authority. 3. Intellectuals. 4. Middle East— Foreign relations—United States. 5. United States—Foreign relations— Middle East. I. Title. DS61.85.D33 2015 303.48’256073—dc23 ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5580-8 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-0872-9 (hbk)

2015000026

Contents

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Contents Introduction to the Paperback Edition

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Introduction: Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror

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1. On Exilic Intellectuals 2. Ignaz Goldziher and the Question Concerning Orientalism

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3. I Am Not a Subalternist

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4. The Creative Crisis of the Subject

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5. Pilgrims’ Progress: On Revolutionary Border-Crossing

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6. Endosmosis: Knowledge without Agency, Empire without Hegemony

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7. Towards a New Organicity

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Conclusion: Changing the Interlocutor

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Index

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To the Memory of Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Cherished Colleague, Fallen Friend, Enduring Comrade

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Introduction to the Paperback Edition Hamid Dabashi A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.—Walter Benjamin

In my book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror (2009), which I am delighted to see out in paperback only a few years after its original hardcover, I began by questioning the power of representation (who has it and why) and concluded by suggesting the necessity of changing the interlocutor (habitually imagined as a fictive white man) with whom we seemed to have been conversing and whom we seemed to have been determined to convince of our lot as colonially conditioned. In my conclusion I had suggested we should stop talking to this fake white man—that he does not exist, that he is a figment of our own imagination. Since the publication of Post-Orientalism, my own thinking has moved forward considerably, and now I think within an unfolding succession of framings in which I have explored a variety of interlocutors—historical, worldly, palpable, real. This unfolding is temporally anchored, rooted as it is in some groundbreaking, world-historic events that have happened since the original publication of this book. Here in this new introduction I wish to dwell on the moment, which is really a nonmoment, for it is the instance when we declare a mode of knowledge production as dead and done with, as passé, point to a state beyond and yet unnamed, or the moment of the “post” in my phrasing of “post-Orientalism.” When exactly is that moment? What time is it when we declare that moment of “post?” When we have overcome and yet we are not quite destined. It is a ix

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purgatorial state—when a state is phasing out and the next has not quite phased in, or even announced itself. The central argument of my book is the proposition that knowledge is produced within an episteme that is subject to historical formation and thus eventual exhaustion, and the mode of thinking and knowledge production we call “Orientalism” is now passed, exhausted, has done its historic function and yielded to the forces of history. Upon this proposition I then try to understand the manner in which the relation of knowledge and power sorts itself out in different modes and manners, one of which for example I called “disposable knowledge,” coterminous with the rise of think-tanks replacing universities as the most useful location for knowledge production at the service of the avaricious power. The Arab revolutions of 2010 forward finally crystalized the moment for me when I declared the mode of knowledge production considered “postcolonial” as having ended, namely delivered its promises, conjugated its paradigm and yielded, willy-nilly, to the unfolding of history.1 Here the key question that informs any such claim is the temporal monad (as Walter Benjamin called it) evident in the prefix “post” in “post-Orientalism” or “postcolonialism,” as it is in the proposition of “the end” of either one of them. It is those moments of temporal arrest that have led me back to a reading of a critical passage in Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (1940) when he discusses his own conception of historical materialism and dwells on the moment he considers the time when “time stands still.” A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.2

In the proposition of a stage when we have overcome Orientalism, or reached the end of postcolonialism, we are in fact revisiting Benjamin’s temporal thesis regarding historical materialism. Following Benjamin’s argument, when a moment is transitional, it

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cannot see itself as transitional, nor can a critical theorist do without that moment when the time has narratively (theoretically) stood still. I can point to the traumatic events of the by now proverbial 9/11, or the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, or the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, or the rise of the Green Movement in Iran in 2008, or the commencement of the Arab Revolutions in 2010 as such unique and transformative moments when an epistemic shift allows for newer narrative, thematic, and theoretical possibilities. The time of the thinking about these world-historic events is the time that has come to a stop—teleologically speaking. The present of the thinker is therefore “ahistorical” precisely in order for the argument to be historically rooted. The moment is contemplative not chronological. The past is made past—and the present present—precisely at that critical moment of thinking when the thinker has placed the thinking outside the fluidity of history in order to capture a snapshot of it and see it better. If we are not to be seduced into the “historicism’s bordello,” as Benjamin fancies it, then the critical instance we have dubbed “post” is a necessary narrative way-station, a refuge, a haven where we can afford to be in and out of history at one and the same time. Benjamin’s criticism of historicism is precisely where the terms of historical emancipation find their moment: Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.3

The whole catastrophe of European historicism sums up in the fact that it has resulted in the cul-de-sac of universalizing its provincialism and selling it as “Modernity,” thus dismissing all its repressed others as “traditional”—namely outdated. Those ruptures Benjamin saw as definitive to materialistic historiography dismantle that provincial claim on universality. The reason that “universal history has no theoretical armature” is precisely this colonially anchored

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self-universalization of European provincialism. What does it exactly mean when Benjamin says, and quite rightly so, “thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well?” For thinking to crystalize into a monad those configurations pregnant with tensions are to be seen and considered as global, planetary, scattered around the world precisely where those tensions are made palpable. What Benjamin called “Messianic cessation” in 1940 has been prophetic to our history after Benjamin: A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework.4

The revolutionary moment identified as “Messianic cession” happens as much on the streets and alleys of cities across the Arab and Muslim world, Europe, Africa, North and Latin America as in the pages and paragraphs of our reading them. The “post” in my “PostOrientalism” marks one such “messianic cession,” a revolutionary monad in and of itself as a dot on a changing global topography that I have termed “liberation geography.” It is the nature and function of the “knowledge” that this moment occasions, and the configuration of the power it disengages—“in Time of Terror”—that marks the moment we need to read in and out of history. The unfolding succession of framings that has been made possible by a number of groundbreaking events in which a variety of interlocutors—historical, worldly, palpable, parabolic, real—are made possible is now definitive to our world-historic moment. Multiple “oppressed pasts” have now been liberated and let loose for recognition and theorization, dwelling in them the world hitherto denied, repressed, denigrated. We are precisely at the moment when Benjamin proposed we need to blast our own era from the homogenous course of history. That a mere half a decade ago I saw that moment and sought to theorize it, and that now I get to recapture and push it forward, is itself a testimony to the veracity of Walter Benjamin’s prophetic soul that for us even to have a history we need “to blast

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open the continuum of history.” You may read the entire spectrum of my arguments in this book as a gloss on that dictum. Hamid Dabashi New York October 2014 Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

See Hamid Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012). See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940). Available online here: http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html. Accessed 2 October 2014. Ibid. Ibid.

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Introduction Knowledge and Power in a Time of Terror “The Mechanism of the exception is different. While the example is excluded from the set insofar as it belongs to it, the exception is included in the normal case precisely because it does not belong to it.”—Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (1995)

At the writing of this introduction, Muslim and Iranian communities around the United States are exceedingly angry with an editorial cartoon printed in the 4 September 2007 issue of the Columbus Post-Dispatch in which Iranians are depicted as cockroaches spewing out of a sewer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1 On Exilic Intellectuals1 “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” —Theodore W. Adorno

“[I am] the outlander, not only regionally, but down bone deep and for good…my Texas grandfather has something to do with that.” —C. Wright Mills

Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual must be considered a landmark in radically reawakening the crucial consciousness of that critical community of counter-interpreters we have habitually called “The Intellectuals.” It appears that the problem of intellectuals in the United States is reformulated periodically as a crucial barometer of issues and concerns centered around, but much beyond, the immediate conception of this social category. It was in Democracy in America that Tocqueville opened his second, theoretically more significant, volume with the startling pronouncement that: I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.2

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

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events in the decade, Philip Rieff put together a number of by now classic statements on the position of the intellectuals. Rieff’s edited volume, On Intellectuals,4 included some seminal pieces by Edward Shils, Ralf Dahrendorf, J. P. Nettle, Isaiah Berlin, and Rieff himself who wrote on “The Case of Dr. Oppenheimer.” In many respects, these, among many other texts, are indices of those very “social conditions” that Tocqueville identified as the primary framework of all (dis)engagements with intellectual issues. At the height of the Reagan era, for example, we saw the publication of Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, which was in fact a thinly disguised anti-intellectual tirade. The most recent concern with the plight of intellectuals in the United States commenced with the insightful volume by Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (1987),5 in which he launched a scathing attack against the gentrification and suburbanization of the urban (or what he called “public”) intellectuals by virtue of which academic careerism fatally aborted the formation of any community of critical counter-interpreters. Jacoby demonstrated how the generation of Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and John Kenneth Galbraith had failed to produce their intellectual epigones, and thus left the public domain vacant of any autonomous critical judgment. In a collection of essays that Bruce Robbins assembled in 1990, Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics,6 Jacoby’s book was taken to task and a number of leading critical theorists began to re-historicize the position of the intellectuals in this country. Among the contributors to this volume was Edward Said who in an interview with Bruce Robbins outlined the historical roots of an almost total neglect of the Palestinian cause by American intellectuals. The crucial problem that both Jacoby’s text and Robbins edited volume underlined was that of the professionalization of the intellectual. The radical pacification of the urban intellectuals by the university was the crucial factor that both Jacoby’s diagnosis and Robbins’ edited response brought to the fore. The changing social condition of professionalization (and such ancillary problems as suburbanization which Jacoby equally emphasized) was

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

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

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members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers, and on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odd with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned. The pattern that sets the course for the intellectual as outsider is best exemplified by the condition of exile, the state of never being fully adjusted, always feeling outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by the natives, so to speak, tending to avoid and even dislike the trappings of accommodation and national well-being. Exile for the intellectual in this metaphysical sense is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation.8

This is much more than a mere self-theorization on part of Said, or even if it is, it is based on a much larger social reality. What Said has detected is a constitutional change in precisely that “social condition” that Tocqueville had identified as the material condition for Americans not being philosophically minded early in the nineteenth century. Without naming it so, Tocqueville had what Weber would later identify as the Protestant ethic in mind when he diagnosed the conditions of an anti-intellectual trait in American life. As the catholicity of learning, and the caring that follows from it, became a trademark of the Jesuits, the Calvinist theology was translated into an ascetic practicality constitutionally at odds with “wasteful speculation.” The predominance of the Protestant ethic in the U.S. thus became conducive to the rise of the spirit of capitalism, as Weber first theorized the relationship. Equally, it led, in both moral and intellectual senses, to that intellectual iron cage of which Weber wrote with a prophetic clarity: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”9 Said does not pay any attention to the centrality of this Protestant ethic in the institutional professionalization of the intellectuals. Jacoby briefly notices it but does not develop it into the major grids of his argument. Yet, rather instinctively and without much theorizing it, Jacoby narrows in on the “Jewish intellectual” as a

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

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

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

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

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significance of the public intellectual, Said’s principal argument for the continued political centrality of the intellectual as exile becomes evident: …what Jacoby does not talk about is that intellectual work in the twentieth century has been centrally concerned not just with public debate and elevated polemic of the sort advocated by Julien Benda and exemplified perhaps by Bertrand Russell and a few Bohemian New York intellectuals, but also with criticism and disenchantment, with the exposure of false prophets and debunking of ancient traditions and hallowed names.16

But the problem with the social function of the intellectuals is not that it must be predicated on a vocational “office” called “The Intellectuals.” A critical community of counter-interpreters always emerges out of the collective concerns of a number of individuals who can and do transcend their class and professional interests. Jacoby’s diagnosis about the declining critical apparatus of the intellectuals is thus perfectly accurate not because there is something constitutionally defective about the status of intellectuals in the United States. The reason, rather, is that historically these very people (Jacoby himself, as Gore Vidal so aptly commented upon the publication of The Last Intellectuals, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, etc.) have actually managed to speak and be heard beyond their professional concerns and interests and on issues of vital—moral and political—significance. With the exception of Gore Vidal, practically all other names in that list are highly successful academics, way beyond being scared of their upcoming ad hoc committees deciding their academic, professional, and, of course, personal future. But this is not the case with the overwhelming majority of academics, particularly those who in one way or another consider themselves in exile. The junior members of the faculty in particular are by and large scared witless to get themselves through the tenure process which can take anything from six to ten years before they reach the infamous and treacherous “up-or-out” cliff-hanger. By the time the tenure process is over, bending over backwards to accommodate power, being compromising and appeasing, become almost second nature to the junior faculty. The problem is particularly acute for expatriate

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

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own pattern, as various interests seize your attention, and as the particular goal you set yourself dictates: that is a unique pleasure.18

There is, however, a profound element of sectarian ghettoization that seriously challenges the possibilities of Said’s cosmopolitan liberation of the so-called third-world intellectual. As early as Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (his Quaderni del Carcere which he wrote between 1929 and 1935), we have been warned of this danger. Here is what Gramsci observed: One can note, in the case of the United States, the absence to a considerable degree of traditional intellectuals, and consequently a different equilibrium among the intellectuals in general…. The necessity of an equilibrium is determined, not by the need to fuse together the organic intellectuals with the traditional, but the need to fuse together in a single national crucible with a unitary culture the different forms of culture imported by immigrants of differing national origins. The lack of a vast sedimentation of traditional intellectuals such as one finds in countries of ancient civilisations explains, at least in part, both the existence of only two major political parties, which could in fact easily be reduced to one only…. and at the opposite extreme the enormous proliferation of religious sects.19

That condition is still present. Against it, Said’s resuscitation of an active exilic intellectual, precisely in his moving last chapter, provides what E. M. Cioran once observed as the best condition for an intellectual: anationality. The exilic condition, as Said defines it, supersedes ethnic and religious sectarianism only through a flexing of historical memories through an essentially ironic mode of being. Resistance to theory, which is at the root of resistance to the intellectuals as the counter-interpreters of a culture, is, as Paul De Man once observed, resistance to the rhetorical and tropological, to which one might add “ironic,” dimensions of language, and through language, of being. That ironic mode of being is constitutional to the working act of the intellectual, irony in the senses stretched from the counter-metaphysics of Søren Kierkegaard to the engagé pragmatism of Richard Rorty. It is in that ironic mode that the intellectual can take to task much more than the relations of power in a political culture and reach down for what Rorty, paraphrasing

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

An earlier version of this essay was published as a review of Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (New York: 1994) in the journal Critique, Fall 1994, pp. 85-96.

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

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

21. 22.

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Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969: 3. Tocqueville 1969: 4. Phillip Rieff, On Intellectuals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Bruce Robbins ed., Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1990. For a study of this group of intellectuals and the impact they had on American social and political ideas see Claus-Dieter Krohn’s Intellectuals in Exile. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectuals: the Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Press, 1994: 52-53. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958: 182. For further details see James Tully (Ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. See Dominick Lacapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Said 1994: 56. Said 1994: 57. Said 1994: 59. Said 1994: 72. Said 1994: 61. Said 1994: 62. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. ed. Quintin Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971: 20. Richard Rorty, “Self Creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietchze, and Heidegger,” in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 96. Rorty 1989: 96. Rorty 1989: 97.

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

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

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me. It is from a confident corner of that space that I wish to share this reflection on two monumental scholars and intellectuals in the making of my own mind. * * * Goldziher represents Orientalism at its highest and most productive stage, a moment in its emerging history, when Orientalists thought themselves sitting on top of a heap of untapped knowledge about a universe of which they and the European world they represented knew nothing—and yet they must. Before anything else, it is imperative to have an understanding of Goldziher’s range and depth of knowledge about Islam, for at the heart of that sweeping knowledge also dwelled its fatal weakness. In May 1906, Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) received an invitation to deliver a series of six lectures in various universities in the United States—“Honorarium,” he noted in his Tagebuch, “$2,500.”3 It is something more than an indication of the rate of inflation to take that figure today as an index of the esteem in which he was held at the high point of his scholarly reputation. His declining health, however, combined with his frustration with the inadequacy of the English translation of his lectures prevented him from coming to the United States and delivering those lectures. Goldziher subsequently published the original German of his lectures, Vorlesungen über den Islam, in 1910. Translations of these lectures soon appeared in many languages—including the notorious English translation (1917) that had discouraged Goldziher’s U. S. visit.4 Despite that inauspicious beginning, the prominent Hungarian Orientalist finally made it into the English-speaking world when his most ambitious scholarly work, Muhammedanische Studien (1889-1890) was competently translated into English as Muslim Studies and published in 1966 (volume I) and 1971 (volume II). If in 1906, a group of American scholars went through the trouble of raising a rather handsome honorarium to invite and listen to one of the most distinguished Islamists alive, a century later, the world at large, now perhaps globally far more in jeopardy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Goldziher’s next move is to make sure that he communicates no monolithic conception of Islam to his audience. His sixth lecture on “The Sects” is a comprehensive account of the social conditions and political circumstances dictating the rise of various Muslim sects, after a critical evaluation of what does in fact constitute a “sect” as distinct from mainline orthodoxy (sunna). The guiding principle of Goldziher’s discussion of sectarian movements in early Islam is, again, a careful attention to the historical developments, beginning with the question of succession to the Prophet, which had politically occasioned them. Goldziher’s observations, characterizing the formation of Islamic sects as “the infusion of religious ideas into political strife,”14 is typical of the way he sought to understand a plethora of sectarian movements otherwise lost in a sea of doctrinal and revolutionary convictions. Goldziher’s study of Islamic sects is a good example of his habitual attention to historical circumstances, while taking their varied and multifaceted doctrinal and dogmatic positions seriously, examining them closely for their diverse political consequences. Goldziher is not an altogether disinterested or impartial observer of sectarian movements in Islam, and does not hesitate to make such polemical observations as Shi’ism being “a particularly fecund soil for absurdities suited to undermine and wholly disintegrate the Islamic doctrine of God.”15 Obviously a Shi’i reader of Goldziher does not agree with such harsh pronouncements. But evident in Goldziher’s diction is the supposition that his command of primary sources, critical intimacy with issues and doctrines and movements, and detailed hermeneutic conversation with what animated Islamic moral and intellectual history in general seem to have effectively entitled him to such observations. He had, as it is quite obvious in his writings, an intimate knowledge of Islamic intellectual history, and that knowledge entitled him, perhaps in his own view, to make creative and critical observations about a matter to which he had devoted his entire scholarly life. Disagreement in this respect with Goldziher, as a result, cannot be on the ground of his having offended certain Muslim (Shi’i in this case) sensibilities. Muslims themselves, of varied theological convictions and sectarian

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persuasions, have always taken serious issues with each other on a variety of doctrinal matters, and thus gravely offended (and in fact waged war against) each other. Goldziher seems to have been convinced that he had in fact earned the privilege of entering into the domain of such theological and sectarian disputations—for in many significant ways he considered himself a “Muslim scholar.” There is a relentlessness about Goldziher’s manner of mobilizing an army of evidence to make a point that is entirely medieval, scholastic, and classical in its resemblance to Islamic (or Jewish or Christian for that matter) scholarly method of jadal (disputation). When reading Goldziher one has the uncanny sense of reading a medieval Arabic text on law or theology—except it is written in German (or English). If aspects of his scholarship on Muslim sects have now been superseded, it is not because of the substance or range of his knowledge, which remains exemplary, but because of his epistemic limitations, such as not being able to break through the unexamined assumption that there was an “Orthodoxy” from which then certain “heterodoxies” seceded—rather than seeing the formation of various theological and juridical movements on historically equal terms.16 Among the six lectures that Goldziher intended to deliver in the United States his last one is on “later Developments,” in which he gives an account of the most recent events in Islamic history—theological issues and political movements contemporary to his own time. It is in this particular essay that one can learn much from Goldziher for our own time—what he would have said and how he would have written were he around in the anxiety-provoking environment of the post-9/11 world. There are two major social movements in the Islamic world to which Goldziher turns in this last lecture—the Wahhabi movement in Arabia and the Babi movement in Iran.17 What is remarkable about Goldziher’s account of these two movements is (1) his detailed knowledge of their doctrines and beliefs; (2) his analytical facility with conversing with a range of political and doctrinal issues; and (3) his simultaneously critical and intimate exchanges with their pros and cons—neither condoning the puritanical proclivities of

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

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Islamic material, dialectical in his analytical reading of them, and fully aware of the multifaceted expressions of Islam throughout its intellectual history, Goldziher had an unfailingly historical conception of Islam, a comparative vision of its various discursive and institutional formations, and attended to all of these with a critical intimacy otherwise exclusive to Muslim scholars themselves—a self-understanding that Goldziher consciously cultivated in himself throughout a long and productive scholarly career. * * * Today, we mostly remember Goldziher for his Muslim Studies. But Goldziher produced far more than these two volumes of essays, or the six lectures that he intended to deliver in the United States. He wrote extensively and authoritatively on a variety of subjects, including on Arabic grammar, Arabic literature, Qur’anic hermeneutics, even a book on Hebrew mythology.20 The scholarly legacy of Goldziher speaks of the range and depth of his intellectual preoccupation with Islam. Because of his historical and spatial distance from the Islamic intellectual history, he was able to bring a unique perspective to his scholarship, at once intimate and yet critical, comparative and global—though at a deep emotive level (and directly under the influence of his own religious convictions and practices) he identified with the Sunni Orthodoxy. The power of Goldziher’s scholarship, the fact of his universal command of a variety of discourses that collectively and dialectically constitute the Islamic intellectual history, is firmly situated at a pioneering point in the history of Orientalism when Orientalists thought themselves at an intellectually commanding center, producing a global knowledge about a world religion scarcely known to nonMuslims—particularly to Europeans at the zenith of their colonial interests in Muslim lands. The result is an all but inevitable and evident paradox, that the knowledge that was thus produced about Islam became Islam—meaning, the pioneering generation of European Orientalists, which included Goldziher, manufactured a kind of global perspective that was radically different from an entire history of Muslim scholarship about their own religion, culture, and civilization. The principle insights of Orientalists (and as

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

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

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

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in 1924, three years after Goldziher’s death, a Hungarian Zionist named Ludwig Bató approached Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), then already the president of World Zionist Organization, to purchase Goldziher’s library for the soon to be inaugurated Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Weizmann raised the necessary funds and purchased the library, which apparently included only the printed books and not Goldziher’s own manuscripts, which remained in possession of Goldziher’s son Károly until the German invasion and occupation of Hungary in 1944, in the course of which Patai believes this portion of the library (and thus the last part of Goldziher travelogue) was lost.25 Whereas Alexander Scheiber’s preface to Goldziher’s Tagebuch is very short and modest (just about two and a half pages of the published book), while his endnotes are very useful but equally factual and straightforward, Raphael Patai’s introduction has a far more ambitious project of producing what he calls a “psychological portrait.” While both these scholars have done the scholarly community a service by making Goldziher’s Tagebuch and Travelogue available, Patai’s “psychological portrait” is a singular act of systematic defamation of a prominent scholar with whose politics Patai is in obvious, and rather drastic, opposition. It is imperative to try to rescue Goldziher from this unconscionable falsification of his character and dignity, for it casts an entirely unfair aspersions over his character as one of the most distinguished scholars of his generation—loved and admired by his friends, family, students, and colleagues alike. This corrective measure is equally necessary if we are to stay clear of personal attacks on scholars and make a fair and balanced assessment of their scholarship. * * * “The great Goldziher” was the exclusive honorific term with which the prominent German Orientalist Carl Brockelmann is reported to have referred to Ignaz Goldziher.26 Born and raised in a learned Jewish family in Székesfehérvár (Stuhlweissenburg) in west-central Hungary, Ignaz Goldziher had mastered the original

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

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

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

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to its doctrinal formations, and given his own personal and communal experiences in Europe his views of Christianity can hardly be surprising. When members of Damascene Jewry, for example, mistrusted him thinking he was a Christian missionary, he did not hesitate in calling Christianity “the most abominable of all religions.”35 One can easily see that much of Goldziher’s love and admiration for Islam is in fact an intellectual extension of his devotion to his own faith, to Judaism. Goldziher’s fellow Jewish Hungarians report that there are reasons to believe that towards the end of his life he had religious concerns about having committed his life to Islamic studies rather than Judaic studies. Raphael Patai reports that one of Goldziher’s students, Bernard Heller, who later became a professor at the rabbinical seminary of Budapest, once visited Goldziher a few days before his death, and found him seated at the festive Sabbath table with the Bible and an Arabic book before him: “I don’t know,” Goldziher addressed Heller, “whether it is right that I should still delve into Arabic literature when tomorrow I shall stand there where they will ask me, Nasata w’natata be’emuna? (Did you conduct yourself faithfully?)36

It is perhaps only natural for Hungarian Jewish scholars like Heller and Patai to have wished that a man of Goldziher’s status would have devoted his scholarly life to Judaic rather than Islamic studies—and thus remembered and recorded this story. But if a few days before his death Goldziher is reported to have had “compunctions,” as Patai puts it, “whether from the Jewish religious point of view it was permissible for him to have devoted his life to the study of Islam instead of Judaism,” 37 on the very first page of his own memoir, from his own pen, written at the mature age of forty, he tells a rather different story (a point recorded on the very first page of Goldziher’s Tagebuch but completely missed by Patai in his “psychological portrait”). “Mein Leben,” writes Goldziher, war von früher Jugend an durch zwei Wahlsprüche geleitet: Der einer ist der Prophetenspruch, den ich mir an meinem Confirmationstage in die Seele gepgrägt: “Er hat Dir verkündet o Mensch, was gut sei, und was Jahve von Dir fordert: Nur dies: Gerechtigkeit üben, Barmherzigkeit

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bieten und in Bescheidenheit wandeln vor Deinem Gott.” Der andere ist der Koran-Spruch: “fa-sabrun gamilun wa-Ilahu-l-musta’anu,” d. h. “Ausdauer ist gut: und Gott ist der, zu dem man um Hilfe aufblicken muss.”38

“My life,” says Goldziher, from the early youth, has been guided by two principal mottos. One is the prophetic saying that on the day of my conformation I imprinted upon my soul [Micah VI: 8: from the Hebrew Bible]: He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doeth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?39 The other is the Qur’anic saying [Surah XII (Joseph) in the Qur’an]: . . . comely patience. And Allah it is whose help is to be sought . . . .40

If we take these words simply for what they say (and abstain from abusing them in order to psychoanalyze their author), Goldziher did not have to (and thus he did not) choose between his ancestral faith and the subject of his scholarship. Those two books on the Sabbath table had been there for quite some time, “von früher Jugend” (from early youth) in fact. If at the mature age of forty, Goldziher says that since his early youth two mottos from the Hebrew Bible and from the Qur’an have been the guiding principles of his life, then his lifetime scholarly devotion to Islam and his unflinching commitment to Judaism were integral to each other and part and parcel of the same character. In this respect, Goldziher was no oddity, for he was in a direct intellectual tradition that linked him to Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), who had no problem being the supreme codifier of the Jewish Law (Mishneh Torah) while writing his philosophical masterpiece, The Guide to the Perplexed (Dalalat al-Ha’irin) in Arabic and in conversation with Muslim philosophers in general, while being under the

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direct influence of al-Ghazali’s (1058-1111) Deliverance from Darkness (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal). Neither Maimonides nor Goldziher saw any contradiction in what they were doing. The problem is not with them. The problem is with taking the fictive construction of a “Judeo-Christian tradition” far more seriously than allowing for the far more historically balanced assumption of a Judeo-Islamic heritage. To be sure, the sorts of doctrinal questions that Raphael Patai raises are perfectly legitimate issues. Speaking of Goldziher’s spiritual elation at participating in a Muslim Friday prayer, Patai asks, “how a religious Jew (Goldziher was and remained throughout his life an observant Jew) could have,” done what he did: substitute, even if only for a brief moment, Muslim belief and worship for the Jewishness that was his patrimony. For a person of such persuasion even to enter the place of worship of another faith, let alone participate in a non-Jewish service, is anathema.41

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

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

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customs; he grasps the little kernel of spirit which hides in this mud; he identifies his own self with the day of renunciation and disembodiment; he cries honestly, bitterly; he loves with the noble ones of the time; he feels unhappy in the flesh; he cries about it; he trembles as he speaks, “Father-King, we have sinned before you;” he shakes as he grasps the power of the word “Sins”—and this synagogue of the Sephardim, which he had held higher than it deserved, laughs at him! Away, away from the impure! Here you can no longer stand it.45

These cannot be the words of a person who is suffering “from an acute anti-Jewish complex”? Avicenna has a quatrain in Persian (among the few things that he wrote in his own mother tongue), in which he says: Kofr-e cho mani gazaf-o asan nabovad, Mohkam tar az iman-e man iman nabovad; Dar dahr cho man yeki-o ou ham kafer, Pas dar hameh dahr yek Mosalman nabovad. [The infidelity of someone like me is no simple matter, For there is no faith stronger than my faith; All around the universe there is no one like me, and I am an infidel, Then throughout the universe there is not a single Muslim.]46

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

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

Patai’s next observation, however, that Goldziher “almost entirely” saved Muslims from “his censorious wrath,” and that this is “the most eloquent proof of the extent of the young Goldziher’s

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

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

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

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Neither “infatuated with Islam” nor having “suffered from an acute anti-Jewish complex,” nor indeed an “evil man,” and thoroughly in command of his own emotions, thoughts, and above all sense of purpose, Goldziher embarked on his journey to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, having just received his doctoral degree, published extensively on both Islamic and Judaic subjects, and was excited at the prospect of meeting and studying with the people he admired most: his Muslim colleagues at al-Azhar. What animated Goldziher more than anything else on this trip was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study with Muslim scholars (in Egypt in particular) with whom he most immediately identified. When soon after his arrival in Egypt, Goldziher met with the Egyptian minister of education, Riyad Pasha, he so impressed him with his knowledge of Arabic that the minister offered Goldziher a position in his ministry. Goldziher declined that rather lucrative offer and instead requested permission to attend al-Azhar as a student. The minister was taken aback by this request for until then no non-Muslim had benefited from that privilege. “I cannot order the mufti to accept you,” 60 the Minister told Goldziher, who in turn asked only for a letter of recommendation and an appointment with the mufti. He would take care of the rest. Goldziher did go and meet with al-Shaykh Abbasi al-Mufti, and presented Minister Pasha’s letters to him. Goldziher reminisced later that once he arrived to meet with the Shaykh of al-Azhar, he was in the middle of a legal discussion concerning the laws of inheritance with other al-Azhar Shaykhs. He continued his juridical discussions while Goldziher was waiting. Finally he turned to Goldziher and asked who was he, what was his religion, and how did he know the minister. “My name is Ignaz al-Majari,” Goldziher responded, “I was born among the Ahl al-Kitab, and I believe that I shall be resurrected with the confessors of Oneness.”61 Raphael Patai has already noted the intelligence of this response, but he does not know quite why and resorts to some generic explanations based on a very artificial knowledge of Islamic centers of higher learning and thus the circumstances that the young Goldziher faced

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sultan, for political matters. England has now increased my salary by 500 pounds sterling a year. This is science.”84 After quoting this passage from Goldziher’s Tagebuch, Patai corroborates both the extraordinary wealth of Vámbéry and the fact that he was a secret agent in the service of the British Empire and the Ottomans at the same time, from Theodor Herzl’s diary (which Patai has also edited). Herzl also reports, entirely independently of any malevolence that Goldziher may have had towards Vámbéry, that Vámbéry had told Herzl that he was a spy for the British and for the Ottoman Sultan at the same time.85 In addition to the testimonies of Goldziher, Herzl, and Patai, we have another piece of document from Vámbéry’s own pen, corroborating the reasons why a principled person like Goldziher with a record of anti-colonial activism, would detest him and repeatedly call him a “swindler-rich Dervish.”86 Vámbéry’s service to the British Empire had a long and quite adventurous history. In the early 1860s, Vámbéry disguised himself as a wandering dervish and traveled throughout Central Asia and Iran to collect detailed and vital intelligence for his British employers. Vámbéry’s own account of these travels, Voyage d’un faux derviche en Asie centrale, 1862-1864,87 provides detailed accounts of his adventures. Disguised and calling himself “Rashid Efendi,” Vámbéry traveled extensively in the region of vital strategic significance to the British and gathered detailed intelligence, concluding his journey and returning to London to give his reports on 9 June 1864.88 “I have no doubt,” Vámbéry concludes after his long journeys in Iran and Central Asia, “that without any question the Christian civilization is nobler than any other that has ever regulated human societies. It will be a great gift for Central Asia as well.” This is so far as his comparative conception of Judaism (his own original faith), Christianity, and Islam is concerned. As for his politics, “I have no clue,” he says, catering to the political agenda of his employers, “how England, while possessing India, can tolerate so indifferently the Russian incursions into East. In my opinion the political aspect of the question is more important than it social aspect.”89 With an obvious eye towards his own career in Orientalist espionage, Vámbéry was determined to persuade the British of the danger of

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

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

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

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highest achievement of this decade, as we saw, was the publication of his two-volume masterpiece, Muhammedanische Studien (1889-1890). While his public lectures on Judaism were not very well received—“his presentation was far above the heads of the audience”95—his two-volume opus on Islam established him as the undisputed master of the discipline. In his oscillation between two exaggerated extremes, either accusing Goldziher of malevolent character traits or showering him with exaggerated superlatives, and thus projecting the image of a tormented genius,96 Patai considers the publication of the two volumes of Muhammedanische Studien as an indication that “until Goldziher all of this was terra incognita, not only for European scholars but also for the Muslim ‘ulama and intelligentsia. With the publication of this work the scholarly world agreed that Goldziher had created the intellectual history of Islam.”97 This absurdity, later repeated by other latterday Orientalists, simply defies reason. How could Muslims create their own intellectual history, the material that Goldziher studiously examined as the body of his scholarship, and yet not be aware of what it is they had produced? It was Goldziher’s supreme joy to have (however briefly) lived and studied among those who had created this intellectual history. He felt himself honored to have been accepted by them as a student and as an equal. How could he have “created the intellectual history of Islam”? Goldziher did no such thing. He was a scholar of uncommon erudition. But he did not “create” the intellectual history of an entire civilization. He was no tormented genius—nor was he an evil man. * * * Patai’s ad hominem attacks on Goldziher, completely distorting the historical record and confusing the nature and quality of his scholarship, assumes utterly slanderous proportions when he turns to Goldziher’s personal and private life. Throughout these troubling years as an independent scholar, Goldziher received numerous offers to teach in Germany, England, and Egypt. He rejected them all and opted to remain in

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

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twenty-three year old Mária Freudenberg],”101 suggesting that he had remained in Budapest in order “to be able to experience the elation of falling in love with his divine daughter-in-law”—while emphasizing their obvious age difference in order to add spice to his slanderous suggestions.102 Nothing, not a shred of evidence in any passage from Goldziher’s Tagebuch that Patai’s scandal-ridden language attempts to dig out, suggests anything other than a perfectly innocent paternal love that Goldziher had for her daughter-in-law. Goldziher never expresses anything about Mária Freudenberg except adding, “who is now my daughter,” or “the good wife of my Karl,” or “she is from now on everything for us” (meaning he and his wife and his son). Mária Freudenberg does not live long and dies tragically, on 4 December 1918 at the age of twenty-eight (of Spanish influenza). Goldziher’s first thoughts on this sad occasion are with his son, “Oh, my dear Karl.”103 Towards the end of his “psychological portrait,” and after he has besmirched his dignity, Patai casually admits that Goldziher’s love for his daughter-inlaw was “undoubtedly platonic.”104 But why suggest in such a slanderous language anything otherwise, first (under a section subtitled tabloid-like, “The Divine Mariska,”)105 and then some twenty-three pages after he has accused a man of “falling in love with his divine daughter-in-law” simply adds that it was “undoubtedly platonic”? Why not take those expressions of paternal love for what they were? Why not consider the fact that Goldziher did not have a daughter of his own and it was only natural for him to be excited at having a daughter-in-law in his family? Why not remember that thirteen years before Mária Freudenberg entered the Goldziher family, they had lost Goldziher’s eldest son, Max, a tragic suicide? All members of the Goldziher family must have been elated to have a daughter join them to fill that tragic gap. Why Patai does not not tell his English-speaking readers what German-speaking readers were told by Scheiber, the editor of the original text of the Tagebuch, that Mária Freudenberg was a learned young scholar, a gifted Egyptologist?106 Why could Goldziher not have a scholarly engagement with his daughter-in-law, fascinated

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by her achievements, interests, potentials? Why plant a thought (page 32) that Goldziher was not “emotionally involved” with his own wife, suggesting there and then that Goldziher was capable of “passionate love,” in order to reap the slanderous fruit (pages 52-54) that Goldziher had anything but an entirely innocent and noble sentiments towards his own daughter-in-law? Patai loses not a single occasion to slander Goldziher with this accusation. Long after the “The Divine Mariska” section, when discussing Goldziher’s relations with his students, he still interpolates sardonic remarks: “in 1919, when Goldziher was heartbroken over the death of his beloved Mariska.”107 This section of Patai’s “psychological portrait” of Goldziher tops off a systematically slanderous picture, casting his entire scholarly achievements under a thick shadow of defamation, simply because Goldziher had committed the unforgivable sin of not being a Zionist. * * * The perfidious remarks about Goldziher’s feelings and relations to his daughter-in-law is not the last shadow that Patai wishes to cast on his integrity and thus upset a balanced assessment of his lifetime achievement as a scholar. His next move is to accuse Goldziher of “superpatriotism,” “chauvinism,” and even “xenophobia.” “Chauvinistic patriotism,” Patai writes, “often goes hand in hand with xenophobia, or at least a disdain for foreigners. This was the case with Goldziher.”108 This is quite strange indeed. On one hand Patai accuses Goldziher of having an abiding love for Arabs and Muslims—“infatuated with Islam,” “anti-Western”—and then accuses him of xenophobia, “or at least a disdain for foreigners.” So which one is it? Is Goldziher a superpatriotic, chauvinistic, xenophobe, or an incurable Arabophile who exempted Arabs and Muslims from his “censorial wrath,”109 had an “admiration for the world of Islam,”110 and who was indeed “infatuated with Islam?”111 Patai did not make up his mind, and in that confusion dwells the persistent demonization of a scholar whose lifetime achievements need a far more serious assessment more than a century after they were produced.

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To be sure, Patai raises a perfectly legitimate set of questions about Hungarian Jewry and their Hungarian nationalism, which he traces back to “post-Emancipation Hungarian Jewry,” emancipated in 1867. Patai gives an outline of the odds against which the Hungarian Jewry remained nationalist, a nationalism that “survived,” as he argues, All the vicissitudes that they experienced in subsequent decades: the wave of anti-Semitism that swept Hungry in the 1880’s and culminated in the blood libel of Tiszaeszlár; the attacks and murders that followed the downfall of the short-lived 1919 Communist regime headed by the renegade Jew Béla Kun; the introduction in 1921 of the numerus clasusus law, which stamped the Jews a national minority despite all their protestations that they were but one of the several religious denominations in the Magyar nation and reduced the number of Jews admissible to universities to the proportion of Jews in the total population; and the constant undercurrents of anti-Semitism that characterized Hungarian life in the intervals between these and other such hurtful events. In fact, every anti-Semitic manifestation was countered by the Jews with louder and more emphatic proclamations of their Hungarianism and Hungarian patriotism. This remained the dominant tone of Hungarian Jewish life until the tragic years of World War II and the extermination of 565,000 of the 825,000 Hungarian Jews.112

These are all perfectly legitimate questions that one can raise in the aftermath of the Jewish Holocaust. At the time (as indeed at any time), the Hungarian Jewry, as the rest of European Jewry, had perfectly legitimate claims to their national identities as Hungarians, Germans, Poles, etc. If there is an intensity about nationalism and patriotism it is neither exclusive to Hungarians nor indeed is there any legitimate reason why Hungarian Jewry be exempt from that patriotism. It is only in hindsight and after the horrors of European anti-Semitism culminated in the Jewish Holocaust that one can raise these sorts of historical and sociological questions. But one cannot anachronistically single out the Hungarian Jewry, let alone Goldziher, accuse them of chauvinism and xenophobia simply because like all other Hungarians and Europeans they felt attached to a country that for generations and millennia had been their homeland.

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As a Zionist, Patai does not hide the fact that his anger against Goldziher is rooted in why he refused to endorse the Zionist project. “After the issuance of the Balfour Declaration,” Patai notes, in which the British government undertook to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, Zionist leaders approached Goldziher to ask him to help them establish contacts with Arab notables and scholars with whom he had excellent connections and who had great respect for him, but he refused.113

Even this frustration of a committed Zionist as to why a man of Goldziher’s status refused to have endorsed his ideology is perfectly understandable. But to turn around and accuse him of “superpatriotism, chauvinism, and xenophobia” is not only anachronistic, but blatantly politically motivated, vindictive, and as such predicated on an entirely flawed line of argument. One could not possibly accuse Goldziher, and hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews, of not caring about their own collective fate, their own well-being. From a Zionist perspective, and from the hindsight of post-Holocaust history, one can even accuse them of poor judgment and lack of farsightedness. But imputing superpatriotism and xenophobia not just to Goldziher and hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian but to millions of European Jewry for their perfectly legitimate claims to their homeland is not just affectedly conceited but also logically flawed. There are, in fact, no indications that Goldziher opposed the peaceful coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine. Patai reports an eyewitness account in which Goldziher purportedly told the Syrian reverend ‘Abdul-Ahad Dominique Bashar Mishkuni, a former student: I have firmly hoped in my whole life that the time will come when Arabs and Jews making peace with each other, will cooperate in the resurrection of Israel and the Arab people. If you return to your native country, tell your brethren that I have worked all my life for your people and for my people.114

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From his own pen in his Travelogue we also read how upon his visit to Jerusalem he thought of the calumniated, persecuted prophetism of the Hebrew Past, of the prophetism of the future, of the new Jerusalem that, “liberated” and rebuilt by spirit and thought, will become the place of pilgrimage of all those who, with free mind, erect a new Zion for the Jehovah of freedom that embraces the whole mankind.115

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

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in his letter to Joseph Bánóczi in 1889: ‘Jewry is a religion, and not an ethnographical concept. As for as my nationality is concerned, I am a Trans-Danubian Hungarian, and for my religion I am a Jew…. On leaving Jerusalem for Hungary I said that I was returning home.”118 Might that be the reason why Patai turns Goldziher into a xenophobic, superpatriotic, zealot—that he believed Judaism is a religion, not “an ethnographic concept,” that he was a nationalist but not the right kind of nationalist that suited Patai’s “psychological portrait”? * * * Towards the end of his “psychological portrait” of Goldziher, Patai concludes with what he believes are the “two contrasting aspects of Goldziher’s personality: his clear, analytical, scholarly mind, which, of course, is well known from his great works, and his uncontrollable, powerful emotionalism, which ever and again breaks forth from depth of his psyche and, as it were, sweeps him off his feet.”119 Patai’s assessment of this apparent paradox posits yet another psychological malady in Goldziher suggesting that he suffered from something close to a “split personality.” The psychological diagnosis of the anthropologist: “As a matter of fact the explanation is not far to seek. It is found in a lack of adjustment, an absence of harmony, between the cerebral Goldziher and the emotional Goldziher that was to remain a basic characteristic of his life. I would not go so far as to say that he had a split personality, but he certainly came near enough to it.”120 The alternative reading, instead of Patai’s systematically abusive interpretation of Goldziher’s Tagebuch and the Travelogue, would be that these two documents are in fact entirely private spaces that have perfectly innocent functions for their author. Neither Tagebuch nor the Travelogue was meant for publication. The Tagebuch was written exclusively for Goldziher’s wife, children, and very close friends.121 As for the Travelogue, when on the occasion of his fortieth birthday, on 22 June, 1890, Goldziher began writing his Tagebuch and came to his recollections of his trip to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt he had apparently misplaced (or else did not care

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

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forty-two entries, some of them as short as a single sentence—and that year is a relatively crowded year in the Tagebuch. Between 28 August and 5 September 1905 he does not write a single entry, and after an entry in September for three months he writes nothing until a couple of entries in December. The same is true of 1906 (twenty-six entries), 1907 (ten), 1908 (ten), 1918 (eighteen), and 1919 (two)—meaning that in an entire year he writes as little as twice in his diary. The earlier years of the Tagebuch, to be sure, contain more elaborate entries and more frequently—1892 (fortyfive entries), 1893 (twenty-one), 1894 (forty-nine), whereas the later years have fewer entries. Throughout most of the Tagebuch, the summer entries (from May to August) are far more frequent than those in the spring (January-April) and fall (September to December)—an obvious indication that during his summer holidays he had more time to write his private thoughts. The overwhelming majority of Goldziher’s time was spent writing his scholarly essays, with prodigious, voluminous, and astounding rapidity and frequency. These few, infrequent, and entirely innocent reflections of a man in the privacy of his diary cannot be abused to construct a whole scenario about the tormented soul of a “pathetic genius” full of horrid and amoral character traits, coming together to produce “an evil man.” Rather than misrepresent him, there are other, more fascinating, ways to read the Tagebuch. Consider the fact that the lengthy and elaborate entries of the Tagebuch in its earlier parts and the shorter staccatos of the later years in a rather peculiar (and most probably unconscious) way resembles the narrative composition of the Qur’an, with short and exclamatory Meccan verses (revealed between 610-622) standing in sharp contrast to the long and elaborate Medinan verses (revealed between 622 and 632). Although this order is chronologically reversed in the case of Goldziher’s Tagebuch, and the longer and more elaborate entries occur earlier in his life and the terser ones later, the narrative structure of the Tagebuch follows exactly that of the canonical composition of the Qur’an, in which the longer chapters come first and the shorter ones later. There is a saying that what Muslims do is not just

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

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

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the Ottoman Sultan in securing permission for Jewish settlements in Palestine. For this Patai bestows upon Armenius Vámbéry the honorary position of having remained “a Jew at heart.” Meanwhile, Patai turns Goldziher—an exceptionally gifted scholar, a noble, observant, and pious Jew—into a psychological freak, a tormented soul, full of venom against the Jewish community, and guilty of inappropriately amorous feelings towards his daughter-in-law, simply because he was opposed to European colonialism of all sorts, and was sympathetic to Islam and Muslims. Patai was of course perfectly entitled to whatever politics he wished, but to using politics in order to slander a great scholar of unsurpassed moral integrity he was not. Goldziher was neither a tormented genius, nor an emotional pervert, nor an evil man, nor indeed did he harbor anything but proudest and most noble attachment to his ancestral faith. He was a superior scholar of uncommon learning, one of the most gifted scholars of his time, and a man of enormous moral and intellectual authority, who rightly detested any single second that he spent away from his scholarly pursuits. He was a man of principle, a devout and proud Jew, an opponent of European colonialism, who produced a massive body of scholarship over a lifetime of meticulous and inquisitive learning.128 * * * Beyond clearing the name of Goldziher as a scholar from such flawed and fallacious assumptions about his person, it is equally important to de-personalize the critique of Orientalism, as best articulated by Edward Said, and thus reach for a principled assessment of its mode of knowledge production, not allowing this critique to be derailed into personal attacks on individual Orientalists. Goldziher’s achievements as an Islamist must be read not only as having come from the pen of a gifted scholar but also as the particular examples, in fact examples par excellence, of a mode of knowledge production called “Orientalism”—and no appreciation of the work of an Orientalist like Goldziher at the height of his

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

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the Orientalists, prompting Edward Said in turn to engage with Bernard Lewis personally—beyond his cogent references to his work in the pages of Orientalism.132 This was perhaps an inevitable political fallout of the publication of Orientalism in the United States (recently home to the most mediocre Orientalists compared to their nineteenth-century counterparts), but most unfortunate also in derailing (certainly in public domain) the more serious discussions of the text, which remained by and large limited to literary-critical and anthropological circles. Thus while such critics as James Clifford, Aijaz Ahmad, and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm133 took serious issue with Edward Said, taking both his theoretical and political assumptions and consequences meticulously to task, Bernard Lewis became the spokesman of a whole generation of mediocre Orientalists who were personally offended by Orientalism and sought to discredit it with the clumsiest and most theoretically illiterate arsenal, in effect exposing the historical exhaustion of Orientalism as a discipline of engaged scholarship and intellectual vigor—thus providing the widest possible public testimony of the point that Edward Said was trying to make. Said in turn and justifiably responded to Bernard Lewis and thus inevitably helped in detracting from the more serious discussion of his own work. Said did not particularly mind this active politicization of Orientalism, though of course he disagreed with the theoretical criticisms of his points as well. “Orientalism,” he declared in the 1995 afterword to his book and in response to still more serious critics of his work, “is a partisan book, not a theoretical machinery.”134 In other words, the very same political energy that made Edward Said take Michel Foucault’s insights on the relations between knowledge and power, rescue it from its discursive and institutional limitation to theoretical domains, apply it to European colonialism in an unprecedented and politically potent way—thus turning his Orientalism into a global phenomenon—was equally instrumental in detracting from its more serious, theoretically consequential, discussions. Edward Said was one of those rare public intellectuals who walked a tightrope between his serious theoretical concerns, groundbreaking in many related fields,

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

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

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

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towards theory. He was a straight-arrow textual critic of unsurpassed precision and diligence). It is this very Allamah Qazvini, who has the following assessment of Orientalism in general: Now that I have mentioned these Orientalists, I would not consider it entirely inappropriate if at the end of this [autobiographical] essay I were to mention this final point, which I have learned from my own experiences. The point is this: My dear fellow countrymen should know that in Europe and among the Orientalists the number of fake and would be scholars, and indeed charlatans, is infinitely more than the number of genuine Orientalists and real scholars. Although this is perhaps generic to all humanity, and in every field of knowledge and science, and as such is not exclusive to European Orientalists alone, but nevertheless, in the case of European Orientalists the domain of this problem has an unbelievable expansion. The reason for this, perhaps, is that, as the French proverb has it, “in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is the king.” Because of the European public ignorance at large, concerning the issues of the Orient, and the languages and sciences of the Orient, then naturally the field of Orientalism has become a vast and ready domain for imposters and charlatan—people who as soon as they acquire a preliminary knowledge of a couple of Oriental languages, and pass an exam in them, which in most cases those who examine are more illiterate than those are being examined, then by hook or by crook they become a teacher of Oriental languages. At this point the instruction of these languages, and in fact the teaching of a few other languages as well, and all at the same time—such as Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and all the arts and sciences that have been produced in those languages, as well as all the various and innumerable dialects of those languages—all and all are entrusted to these Orientalists.140

This is so far as Qazvini’s general assessment of Orientalists is concerned. Now, what does he think of their scholarship? Here is what he says: These Orientalists then proceed, without the slightest sense of shame or fear of being scandalized, for there is no one to tell, to claim knowledge and authority in all these languages and the arts and sciences written in them, teaching them, publishing books and articles about them, and even coming out with their own new and specific ideas about them. Occasionally these people take a few innocent books in Persian, Arabic, or Turkish, thoroughly distort them, and proceed to publish them, full of blatant mistakes. This is not the case about Latin and Greek languages

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at all, for the European public at large more or less knows about these languages. So because they might be exposed in public, those who know these languages never dare to make such claims, not even one tenth of such claims. They only speak of their own field of specialization in a very small branch of those two languages, and would not dare to utter a word beyond their area of competence.141

As to Qazvini’s recommendation: My point is that my dear fellow countrymen should not be fooled by such authoritative-sounding titles as “Professor of Oriental Languages,” or “Member of Such-and Such Society or Academy,” and should not accept blindly any nonsense that comes from Europe, signed by such non-entities, without first subjecting it to critical judgment. Their assessments should not be considered as divine revelation, and you must use your divinely endowed reason, which is the sole measure of distinguishing between truth from falsehood, along with the knowledge you have acquired, in everything. Gauge everything with that measure, so that you can distinguish between the right and the wrong path, between the learned guide and the misguided fool.142

Qazvini wrote these words on Friday 14 November 1924, based on his experiences accumulated over the preceding two decades in Europe and with European Orientalists. These are the words of a scholar who admires, and considers it his honor to have even met, prominent European Orientalists. He has no political axe to grind. He is not Palestinian. The state of Israel is not yet established. He is neither a Zionist nor an anti-Zionist. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction are terms yet to be invented decades after Qazvini made these observations. None of the crowded and crowding issues that subsequently coagulated to confuse the principled questions raised by Edward Said in Orientalism are anywhere in sight, nor does Qazvini present his case against these “charlatans,” as he calls them, in any theoretically sophisticated language near the points and ambitions of Edward Said. He simply provides an eyewitness account as a legendary scholar about what he thought of Orientalism as practiced by all its representatives except a handful he mentions specifically by name and do not all add up even to two dozens in entire Europe (exactly sixteen scholars

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

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indeed, “many of these works did not have much else to offer.” Then Iranshahr writes: But later, when European countries expanded the domain of their colonial possessions and conquered much of Oriental lands, the significance and influence of these sorts of [Orientalist] writings became far more powerful. European governments who needed to know about the habits, ethics, as well as the political, economic, and social conditions and organizations of the Orientals began to pay closer attention to these travelers and their works. For this reason, they began also to establish in their capitals Orientalist schools and societies, encouraging the Orientalists and promoting Orientalist journals and periodicals.145

Thus about half a century before Edward Said, Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr clearly and concisely sees and articulates the link between colonialism and Orientalism. To be sure, he does not have Edward Said’s theoretical sophistication to argue the organic link between the epistemic foregrounding of Orientalist knowledge production and the colonial power that engendered it, for in fact Michel Foucault was not even born yet (the first issue of Iranshahr in which this article appears is dated 26 June 1926; Michel Foucault was born a few months later on 15 October 1926) to spend a lifetime of his scholarship discovering and articulating that link, from which then Edward Said borrowed and proceeded with his own version of the idea. But the essence of the idea, the connection between colonialism and Orientalism, following on the footsteps of European travelers and adventurers and their Oriental fantasies they created, foretells Edward Said’s very table of contents in Orientalism almost chapter by chapter—fifty years before Edward Said put pen to paper and wrote Orientalism. Upon this premise, Iranshahr then proceeds to tell his readers how by his time the domain of Orientalism had vastly expanded and there were now Orientalists specializing in various fields as Egyptologists, Arabists, Iranists, Sinologists, Armenialogists, etc. Despite his acute political alertness, Iranshahr is not an anti-Orientalist and like Qazvini acknowledges the service that European Orientalists have in fact provided the world of scholarship. So in order to be fair, he reminds his readers that the beneficiaries of the

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

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

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

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synthesis” . . . that could be studied apart from the economics, sociology, and politics of the Islamic peoples. For Orientalism, Islam had a meaning which, if one were to look for its most succinct formulation, could be found in Renan’s first treatise: in order best to be understood Islam had to be reduced to “tents and tribe.”153

Whatever the accuracy of this assertion might be about the other Orientalists (and it certainly is accurate about Bernard Lewis), it is not entirely applicable to Goldziher. The distinguishing factor of Goldziher as an Islamist was in fact his particular attention to social and political factors in the course of the historical developments of Islam, not only as evident in the pages of his Muslim Studies, but throughout the rest of his work, particularly his Qur’anic, Tafsir (Qur’anic exegesis), and legal scholarship. Ironically, Goldziher is in fact severely criticized by Muslim scholars, especially by Muslim Hadith scholars, for having too much historicized—subjected to social and political factors—the development of their sacred lore.154 In addition, Goldziher was acutely aware of the most recent developments in the Islamic world, had traveled there, and wrote about such revolutionary movements as Wahabism and Babism with a combination of critical appreciation and extensive analytical detail. As evidenced in the pages of his travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, he in fact participated in street demonstrations against European colonialism and refused to have anything to do (and in fact opposed) Zionism—so he certainly cannot be accused of either ignoring social and political issues or reducing Islam to “tents and tribes.” But to be fair to Said, neither Goldziher’s Tagebuch (1978) nor his Travelogue (1987) was available to him when he was writing Orientalism (1978)—though the two volumes of Goldziher’s Muslim Studies (1966 and 1970) and other works, evidence of Goldziher’s detailed attention to social and political factors in the development of Islam, were indeed available, as was his Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (1920), another major indication of Goldziher’s attention to social and political factors in the historical developments of Qur’anic hermeneutics (the tafasir).

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

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

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and experienced force.” “For a number of evident reasons,” Said adds, “the Orient was always in the position both of outsider and of incorporated weak partner for the West.” Here the point of Said’s argument is to show how in manufacturing the Orient, the Orientalist is the “superior judge, learned man, powerful cultural will,” while the Orient itself “is all absence,” and that in fact “the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence.” These are all instrumental and exceedingly pointed arguments for Said in order to show how the Orientalist is in fact dialectically cornered into reducing the Orient in his work, even after he has devoted a good deal of time to elucidating and exposing it. How else can we explain major scholarly production, of the type we associate with Julius Wellhausen and Theodore Nöldeke and, overriding it, those bare, sweeping statements that almost totally denigrate their chosen subject matter? Thus Nöldeke could declare in 1887 that the sum total of his work as an Orientalist was to confirm his ‘low opinion’ of the Eastern people.’ And like Carl Becker, Nöldeke was a philhellenist, who showed his love of Greece curiously by displaying a positive dislike of the Orient, which after all was what he studied as a scholar.158

It is at this point that Said refers to Jacques Waardenburg’s L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident (1963), and relies on this report in order to assert that “Ignaz Goldziher’s appreciation of Islam’s tolerance towards other religions was undercut by his dislike of Mohammad’s anthropomorphisms and Islam’s too-exterior theology and jurisprudence”—and after similar observations about the paradoxical views of a few other Orientalists, Said concludes that “the manifest differences in their methods emerge as less important than their Orientalist consensus on Islam: latent inferiority.”159 As in the previous cases, whatever the accuracy of these particular observations about other Orientalists, initially articulated by Waardenburg and followed by Said, might be (and they certainly are about Theodore Nöldeke and Carl Becker), their application to Goldziher is incorrect and unfair. To be sure, Said’s initial observations about the epistemic disposition of Orientalism in general remain meticulously correct. Here, Said is at his absolute theoretical best, dissecting, as he does, the normative constitution of the

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

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

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

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How can we accuse the man who wrote these sentences of having an affinity with those who believed in the “latent inferiority” of Islam? Goldziher was so profoundly pro-Islamic (without losing his scholarly perspective on it, of course), that his own co-religionists consider him of having been “infatuated with Islam” and “suffered from an acute anti-Jewish complex.” The facts of Goldziher’s thoughts, ideas, and scholarship do not corroborate Waardenburg/ Said’s specific assertions on him. Goldziher is first accused of being “infatuated by Islam” and then of believing in Islam’s “latent inferiority.” He could not have been both, for he was neither. He was neither infatuated with Islam nor did he believe it to be an inferior religion. He thought it one of the greatest religions and civilizations the world had experienced, without either converting to it or else losing his scholarly distance from it—and yet none of these false attributions to Goldziher clear him from the principle criticism of Edward Said in Orientalism, which survive these minor mistakes and remains solidly valid. The question is how. * * * Once the principle argument of Edward Said in Orientalism is cast back to its substantive thesis, and his specific references to Goldziher’ scholarship are justly evaluated and balanced, what still remains solidly valid and perfectly legitimate is the principal point of his suggestion, that there is a structural correspondence between Orientalism as a disciplinary mode of knowledge production and European colonialism. That central argument, after whatever modifications one may make about specific examples Said has provided, still remains legitimate, for there are plenty of other examples that abound in his book and that along with the consistency, logic, and reasoned premise of his theory still demand attention, and against which one has to measure the specific work of Ignaz Goldziher. Goldziher was an Orientalist, the European founding figure, in fact, of the Orientalist study of Islam. So what Said’s says in Orientalism must still be tallied against Goldziher’s lifetime achievements. In fact, towards the end of his references to Goldziher through Waardenburg, Said implicates Goldziher

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

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formation of truth). Said’s extraordinary task was to bring these three theorists together and have them coagulate around the central problem of representation.168 The problem with Orientalism for Said was thus a problem of representation (and by extension the thorny issue of the sovereign subject), a much larger literarytheoretical issue, which Said then brought to bear on the specific case of Orientalism. In his own words: “The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representation framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire;”169 or as he put it years later, towards the end of his life, “I recall quite emphatically making a similar set of points in my book Orientalism, when I criticized the representations of the Orient and Orientals by Western experts. My critique was premised on the flawed nature of all representations….”170 Though much less pronounced in the pages of Orientalism than elsewhere, Said’s preoccupation with the question of representation is also rooted in his lifelong fascination and identification with Erich Auerbach’s notion of estrangement in his highly influential book Mimesis,171 which both Auerbach and Said thought were instrumental in gaining a greater insight (thus overcoming the problem of representation) not just into one’s scholarly subject matter but also into the scholar’s own culture—with the only critical stipulation being that one of the striking differences between Orientalism in the Islamic version and all the other humanistic disciplines where Auerbach’s notions on the necessity of estrangement have some validity is that Islamic Orientalists never saw their estrangement from Islam either as salutary or as an attitude with implications for better understanding of their own culture. Rather, their estrangement from Islam simply intensified their feelings of superiority about European culture, even as their antipathy spread to include the entire Orient, of which Islam was considered a degraded (and usually, a virulently dangerous) representative.172

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

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literary-critical, works, particularly the essay, “The World, the Text, the Critic” in his book of the same title.173 This is how Said understood the notion of worldliness: The key word here is “worldly,” a notion I have always used to denote the real historical world from whose circumstances none of us can in fact ever be separated, not even in theory. I recall quite emphatically making a similar set of points in my book Orientalism, when I criticized the representations of the Orient and Orientals by Western experts. My critique was premised on the flawed nature of all representations and how they are intimately tied up with worldliness, that is, with power, position, and interests. This required saying explicitly that my work was not intended as defense of the real Orient or that it even made the case that a real Orient existed. I certainly held no brief for the purity of some representations against others, and I was quite specific in suggesting that no process of converting experience into expression could be free of contamination.174

And indeed in Orientalism Said specifically indicates that he is not arguing that there is a “real Orient” that Orientalists have failed to represent, but the problem he is articulating is in the very nature of representation. “The methodological failures of Orientalism,” Said insists, “cannot be accounted for either by saying that the real Orient is different from Orientalist portraits of it, or by saying that since Orientalists are Westerners for the most part, they cannot be expected to have an inner sense of what the Orient is all about…. I certainly do not believe the limited proposition that only a black can write about blacks, a Muslim about Muslims, and so forth.”175 Through the intellectual pedigree of Nietzsche, Gramsci, Auerbach, and above all Foucault, all synthesized and placed in Said’s own articulation of the notion of worldliness, and then laser-beamed on the universal problem of representation, the central thesis of Orientalism was ultimately fused with Said’s political punch to give it its global appeal: “If this definition of Orientalism [as representation of the Orient by the Orientalists],” he said, “seems more political than not, that is simply because I think Orientalism was itself a product of certain political forces and activities. Orientalism is a school of interpretation whose

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

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

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

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conditioning. The expanded argument of Max Scheler appeared two years later in his Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (Leipzig, 1926).184 A couple of years later, and quite independently of Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim’s masterpiece, Ideologie und Utopie (Bonn, 1929), proposes that social life and economic conditions have a catalytic effect on the nature and function of bodies of knowledge produced within their parameters. Two years later, Mannheim published his groundbreaking essay, “Wissenssoziologie” (Stuttgart, 1931).185 Both Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim were far more radical in their daring propositions, linking not just the substance but also the forms of knowledge to social forces, than Edward Said ever was in his Orientalism. “All human knowledge,” declared Max Scheler as the very first axiom (his term) of the sociology of knowledge, “in so far as man is a ‘member’ of a society in general, is not empirical but ‘a priori’ knowledge. The genesis of such knowledge shows that it precedes levels of self-consciousness and consciousness of one’s self-value. There is no ‘I’ without a ‘we.’ The ‘we’ is filled with contents prior to the ‘I.’”186 This is decades before Foucault postulated the notion of episteme, which here in Scheler is simply called “a priori knowledge” that precedes empirical data. Another axiom of Scheler in his sociology of knowledge states that “there is a fixed law that orders the origin of our knowledge of reality, i.e., our knowledge of what generally ‘brings about effects,’ and orders the fulfillment of the individual spheres of knowledge, constant in human consciousness, and the correlative spheres of objects.”187 This is many decades before Edward Said posited his notion of worldliness as the condition that affects the Orientalists’ production of knowledge. What Scheler calls “our knowledge of what generally brings about effects” is what in Said becomes the colonial condition of knowledge production. Similarly provocative proposals are evident in Karl Mannheim, who categorically theorized the principal function of the sociology of knowledge as “a theory of the social or existential determination of actual thinking,” and thus sought to investigate the “social processes influencing the process of knowledge” and “the essential penetration of

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social process into the ‘perspective’ of thought.”188 All Edward Said’s Orientalism does is an extension of these very principles into the global operation of colonialism and its Orientalist mode of knowledge production, focusing on one particularly powerful and integral relation between the social (colonial) conditions in which a mode of knowledge (Orientalism) is presumed valid and set in motion. The origin of Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim’s own thoughts on sociology of knowledge can easily be traced back, as it has been, to Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Fredrich Engels (1820–1895) and The German Ideology (1846)—and their elaborate argument concerning the structural link between specific class interests and the modes of knowledge (ideology) best compatible and conducive to them. “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,” Marx and Engels proposed more than a century before Edward Said wrote Orientalism, “is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour.”189 This is infinitely more radical than a simple proposition that the knowledge that European colonialists were instrumental in producing, or conditioning to be produced, was at their immediate political and financial service. Marx, Engels, Scheler, and Manheim demonstrated the foundational production of the very a priori structure of thinking, at a deep epistemic level, before even a producer of knowledge has put pen to paper. Said’s Orientalism is a particular example of these insights, generated by major thinkers generations in creative conversation with each other. The specific insights of Orientalism, as a result, cannot be readily dismissed as if he wrote it whimsically just to settle his accounts with Bernard Lewis and other contemporary Orientalists with whom he was in political disagreement. Bernard Lewis and generations of Orientalist like him are not in the same league as these thinkers. One must by all means resist the temptation of taking issue with Said as to why instead of elaborating these profoundly important theoretical sources of his insights (that sustain and support his argument) he

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The world marked by the iconic dates of 9/11 is now sought to be dominated by a U.S. empire with no ideological claim to legitimacy—to which neither old-fashioned Orientalism nor Area Studies specialist of yore are of any use anymore. This is an empire with no hegemony. While European colonialism worked through multifaceted hegemonies (and thus the colonial function of Orientalism), not limited or exclusive to scholarship, but, and as Said noted, also in art, literature, and popular fantasies as well, the flailing American imperialism works without an overriding hegemony and by sheer brute force (and thus the intellectual mendacity of the clique called “the neocons,” which in its global strategies of domination seeks to link old-fashioned European Orientalism and erstwhile American Area Studies to the most pestiferous attempts at the ideological justification of the U.S. empire. If upon the exhaustion of Orientalism as a robust mode of knowledge production at the height of European colonialism the gradual emergence of the United States as a global superpower necessitated and generated a whole new modus operandi of intelligence gathering, global strategies, and ideological justification during the Cold War era and termed it “Area Studies,” with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and a decade later the rise of the U.S. global “war on terror,” even the phase of Area Studies is no longer valid or useful. The gradual mutation of old-fashioned Orientalists into Area Studies specialists is now further transmuting into a class of barefaced propagandists in close collaboration with think tank strategists—perhaps best represented by Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong? (2003). To witness this astounding historical metamorphosis in person, the career of one Bernard Lewis remains exceptionally instructive—for in his person and his long and productive services to British colonialism and American imperialism he has systematically mutated from an Orientalist into an Area Studies specialist and now into a master propagandist, the author of one empty, vacuous, and dangerously delusional set of ideas after another. These dangerous delusions no longer have any connection with the classical case of Orientalism and are identical in their hazardous consequences for the world with the gibberish nonsense of people they seek to fight but

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in fact necessitate—Osama bin Laden and Company. What we are witnessing today is an imperil aspiration with no idea, ideal, or imagination to match or mastermind it—the result is a fake empire running on empty and operating on sheer brute force that as evident from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to Baghdad and Kandahar in the aftermath of Hurricane (“Shock and Awe”) Rumsfeld is as administratively incompetent as it is ideologically vacuous—imperially self-delusional. * * * It is for that set of reasons that reading the magnificent essays of Ignaz Goldziher today is like a walk through a museum of exquisite antiquities, of dead and outdated elegance, the solid thoughts and graceful reflections of a noble man full of graceful sensibilities in his scholarship, beset by brightest blindness and shining with the darkest insights. A combination of his personal brilliance as a scholar and his institutional membership in the discursive particularities of Orientalism come together to demand an entirely different readership for him. The question is how to read Goldziher today, generations after his exquisitely crafted essays were the groundbreaking events of an entire discipline called Islamic Studies. The significance of these essays should not be measured against the historically outdated and theoretically discredited discipline called Orientalism anymore. As that of all other Orientalists, Goldziher’s scholarship was integral to a mode of knowledge production at once exceedingly productive and insightful and yet at its very epistemic root predicated on the European colonial interests in what they called “the Orient,” a fact entirely independent of two vastly different people like Goldziher and Vámbéry sharing the same designation, “the Orientalist.” Today, Goldziher must be read as an exemplary scholar of unsurpassed brilliance, a cultural comparatist of uncommon insights, a humanist with a vast catholicity of learning rarely seen among his peers, a politically alert and intellectually diligent activist who opposed colonialism of all sorts as a matter of moral principle, a gifted essayist who put his

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

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as an introduction to a new edition of Ignaz Goldziher’s Muslim Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006). I am grateful to Irving Horowitz for having asked me to write that introduction and his kind permission to reprint it here. Ignaz Goldziher, Tagebuch. Herausgegeben von Alexander Scheiber. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978, 59. The English translation is Raphael Patai’s in Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary: A Translation and Psychological Portrait (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 20. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 251. The invitation had come from an organization he calls, “Gesellschaft der Religionsgeschichte” (“Society for the Study of History of Religion”). Decades later a competent and scholarly translation of Goldziher’s Vorlesungen über den Islam (Heidelberg, 1910) appeared in English. See Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. Translated by Andras and Ruth Hamori. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). “The feeling intellect” is Philip Rieff’s phrase, which he selected as the apt title of a selection of his essays, collected and edited by Jonathan B. Imber. See Philip Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Max Weber, The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Introduction by Anthony Giddens. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958): 182. Ignaz Goldziher’s study of the Shu’ubiyya movement in Muslim Studies, edited by S. M. Stern, translated by C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1966: 137-198) needs to be augmented by the equally important essay of Sir Hamilton Gibb, “The Social Significance of the Shu’ubiyya,” in his Studies on the Civilization of Islam. Edited by Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962: 62-73; as well as by Roy Mottahedeh’s “The Shu’ubiyya Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume VII (1976). The most recent

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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essay on the subject is by H. T. Norris, “Shu’ubiyya in Arabic Literature” in Julia Ashtiyani, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990: 31-47. Equally important is the extensive study of Shu’ubiyya by the Iranian scholar Jalal Homa’i, Shu’ubiyya (Tehran: Sa’eb Publication, 1984). For the homage that Goldziher pays his Muslim peers in the discipline of Hadith criticism see his essay, “The Development of Law,” in Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 39-40. Needless to say, later Muslim scholars have continued these heated debates and particularly when it comes to matters of their doctrinal beliefs (concerning the divine origin of the Qur’an, for example), they have taken strong objections to some of Goldziher’s scholarly positions. As a non-Muslim scholar, Goldziher was free of such doctrinal convictions and as a result had a freer sense of inquiry. Neither his freedom nor Muslim scholars’ convictions means either one of them were necessarily compromised in their scholarship. They simply operated within two different epistemic apparatus. For a critical debate with Goldziher, concerning his Qur’anic scholarship, from a pious Muslim perspective, see Seyyed Muhammad Reza Jalali Na’ini, Tarikh-e Jam’-e Qur’an-e Karim (Tehran: Noqreh Publications, 1365/1986): XIII, XVI, XVV, et passim. Much of Goldziher’s observations on Islamic law have of courses been extensively amended by the later scholarship, among them Subhi Mahmassani’s Falsafat al-Tashri: The Philosophy of Jurisprudence in Islam. Translated by Farhat Ziadeh (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961); Joseph Schacht’s An Introduction to Islamic Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); and Noel J. Coulson’s A History of Islamic Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964). Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies. Edited by S. M. Stern. Translated by C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern. (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1971: 262. Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 41. On further scholarship on Islamic theology after Goldziher see L. Gardet and M. M. Anawati’s Introduction a la theologie musulman (Paris: Vrin, 1948). Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 174. Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 186. For alternative readings of the rise of Shi’ism in the context of early Islamic history see my Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992). It is noteworthy that after a critical examination of some of the exceedingly illiberal aspects of Shi’i law, Goldziher feels obligated

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18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

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to make the following observation: “The Shi’i community has suffered the hardship of an ecclesia oppressa, having from the outset struggled against persecution and repression. It has on the whole lacked the freedom to make open profession of its beliefs, and could disclose and practice them only in the conspiratorial secrecy of its members. Its mood therefore tends towards rage against the adversaries who prevailed” etc. (ibid: 217). While his scholarly criticism leads him to pinpoint certain xenophobic aspects of Shi’i law, his historical imagination leads him to place them in their proper social context. See Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 241254. Goldziher also pays close attention to the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (ibid: 196-202), as well as reformist movements in India (ibid: 254-267). Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit.: 244. “During the writing of these pages,” writes Goldziher towards the end of his observations about the Baha’ism, “I have had occasion to hear such Biblical proofs [that Abbas Efendi, the leader of the Baha’is, has been promised in the Bible, and that Isaiah 9:6, “unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder,” foretells him] from the mouth of a Baha’i zealot. This man, originally a doctor from Tehran, has been staying for the last two years or so in the city where I live, in an effort to gain converts to his religion. He feels that he has a particular mission in my country: one more proof that it is not only American soil that the extra-Islamic propaganda of the new Baha’is has in view” (Ibid: 254). See Ignaz Goldziher, Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development. Translated from the German, with additions by the author, by Russell Martineau. London: Longmans, Green, 1877. See also Goldziher’s On the History of Grammar among the Arabs: An Essay in Literary History. Translated and edited by Kinga Dévényi, Tamás Iványi. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1994; A Short History of Classical Arabic Literature. Translated by Joseph de Somogyi. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1966. Goldziher’s classical study of Qur’anic hermeneutics, Richtungen der islamischen Koranauslegung (Leiden: Brill, 1920) was a pioneer study in the comparative discourse analysis of varied forms of Qur’anic interpretations—ranging from juridical to mystical. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 22-23. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 55. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 65-74. Patai, Psychological Portrait: 9-11. Patai reports that the original German of Goldziher’s travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt is at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York.

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25. Patai, Psychological Portrait: 26. 26. This according to Raphael Patai, who studied with Carl Brockelmann during academic year 1930-1931. See Patai, Psychological Portrait, 13. 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 15. 28. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 15. 29. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 16. 30. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 16. 31. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 18. 32. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21, and again “infatuated with Islam” (Ibid, 27). 33. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 63. 34. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 59, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20. 35. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60-61, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21. 36. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 60. 37. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 60. 38. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 15. 39. Holy Bible, King James Text, Modern Phrased Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1249. 40. The full text of the verse is: “And they came with false blood on his shirt. He said, Nay, but your minds have beguiled you into something. (My course is) comely patience. And Allah it is whose help is to be sought in that (predicament) which ye describe” (The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall. New York: A Mentor Book, no date). Arberry’s “sweet patience” (The Koran Interpreted. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1955, 255) and T. B. Irving’s “patience is beautiful” (The Qur’an. Translation and Commentary by T. B. Irving/al-Hajj Ta’lim ‘Ali. Brattleboro, Vermont, 1985, 120) are perhaps better translations of the original “fa-sabrun jamilun.” 41. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 61-62. 42. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 62. 43. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 62. 44. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 62. 45. Goldziher’s Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 99-100 (entry of 1 October 1873). Goldziher has similarly moving passages when he visits Jerusalem for the first (and last time). See Goldziher’s Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 132-133 (entry of 29 November 1873). 46. As quoted by Zabihollah Safa in his magisterial history of Persian literature, Tarikh-e Adabiyat dar Iran. Six Volumes (Tehran: Ibn Sina Publications, 1959-1990), Volume One, 308. Such self-deprecating poems abound in Persian literature. Perhaps the most famous is the Eighteenth century poet Hatif al-Isfahani’s celebrated Tarji’-band, in which he describes his

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

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metaphoric journeys through all religious beliefs and practices finds them all identical. The most famous passage is when he goes to a Zoroastrian temple and becomes ashamed of being a Muslim: “Man-e Sharmandeh az Mosalmani/Shodam anja beh gusheh’i penhan (“I, ashamed of being a Muslim/Hid myself there in a corer”). See the original Persian and an English translation in E. G. Browne’s A Literary History of Persia. Four Volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Volume IV, 184-297. See Goldziher, Tagebuch, 65; and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 66. Goldziher’s Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 119 (entry of 29 October 1873). On “culture industry” See Theodore Adorno, Culture Industry (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2001). Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67. Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, op. cit., 186. Goldziher’s Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 93-97, et passim (entries of 26 and 29 September 1873 and an undated entry as well). Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21, and again “infatuated with Islam” (Ibid, 27). Patai, Psychological Portrait, 46. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 36. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 39. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 55. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 73. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 22. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 23. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 24. Footnote 12. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 25. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 28. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 29. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 29. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 30. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 107, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 34. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 98, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 33.

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77. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 98, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 33. 78. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 31. Patai dismisses Goldziher’s Mythology among the Hebrews even on scholarly grounds and believes it “to be the only work of Goldziher’s scholarly output that did not stand the test of time” (Ibid, 31). The moral courage and intellectual imagination to engage with current theoretical propositions from the heart of one’s own religion bear the marks of an entirely different “test of time” and of course character. 79. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44. As evidence of his belief, Goldziher offers an incident in which two days after he was appointed as full professor he run into Vámbéry and he had no idea of Goldziher’s appointment and asked him, in yet another condescending remark, when will he finally be appointed as full professor. 80. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 40. 81. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44-45. 82. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 40. 83. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44. 84. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44. 85. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 44, quoting from Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Edited by Raphael Patai (New York: Herzl Press and Thomas Yoseloff, 1960), Volume III, 961. 86. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 129, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 41. 87. See Armenius Vámbéry, Voyage d’un faux derviche en Asie centrale, 18621864 (Paris, 1993). 88. Because this book contains extensive and detailed passages on Iran and Central Asia in the nineteenth century, it was later translated into Persian by Fath Ali Khawja Nurian as Siyahat-e Darvishi Dorughin dar Khanat-e Asiya-ye Mianeh (Tehran: Elmi va Farhangi Publications, 1986). 89. Vámbéry, Siyahat-e Darvishi Dorughin, 534. 90. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 71-72, and Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27-28. 91. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 43-44. 92. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 46. 93. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 40. 94. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 37. 95. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 37. 96. “The portrait of the man Goldziher that emerges from the pages of my introduction,” Patai writes at the very outset, “is not a totally attractive one. Like many a genius—and he undoubtedly was one—Goldziher had his share of unpleasant character traits” (Patai, Psychological Portrait; 10). 97. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 36. Emphasis added. 98. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 50-51. 99. Goldziher Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law, 254.

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100. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 228-229, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 50. 101. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 52. 102. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 54. 103. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 55, based on Goldziher, Tagebuch, 311. Goldziher is so distraught at this point that his entry for 4 December 1918 begins in Hungarian, which Scheiber translated into German in his footnote 529 and Patai into English: “The Crown of my head is fallen! My Mariska fell victim to the Spanish epidemic. My soul is broken into a thousand pieces. Oh, my dear Karl!” 104. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 73; while his accusations are all concentrated in Patai 1987, 50-56, under the suggestive subheading of “The Divine Mariska.” 105. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 50-56. 106. Scheiber in Goldziher, Tagebuch, 10—“einer begabte Ägyotologin” is the way Scheiber describes Maria Freudenberg. 107. Raphael Patai’s penchant for making scandalous assumptions about people’s sexuality in particular is not limited to Goldziher. In 1973 he wrote a book called The Arab Mind (New York: Hatherleigh Press, Revised Edition, 2002), in which he devoted an entire chapter, Chapter VIII, “The Realm of Sex,” pp, 126-151) to the way he thought “the Arab sexuality” works. In his “Gray Zone” (New Yorker, 24 May 2004), Seymour Hirsh implicitly connected the sexual torture of Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib to this chapter of Raphael Patai and its central significance to teaching the U.S. military how to deal with Muslims. Other journalists, such as Brian Whitaker (Guardian, 24 May 2004) picked up from Hirsh and wrote a scathing attack against Patai’s book. Raphael Patai’s supporters came to his defense. The problem, however, with Patai’s observations in The Arab Mind is not the reported uses or abuses to which the U.S. (or any other) military may have put it. Four years after he published The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai also published a book on The Jewish Mind (New Jersey: Wayne State University Press, 1977). Long before Patai, Charles A. Moore had edited a volume on The Japanese Mind: Essentials of Japanese Philosophy and Culture (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1967), announcing in his introduction similar volumes on the Chinese and the Indian “minds.” The problem with these sorts of assumptions as “the Arab mind” or the “Jewish mind” (replicated by the fabrication of equally empty and absurd abstractions about “the Western mind”) is their outdated analytical language and superseded scholarship, not their (potential) political bad faith. After more than a hundred years of sociological and anthropological advances (Patai was an anthropologist), no one thinks and writes in such a generic and essentialist language anymore. There are so many class, gender, communal, regional, national,

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108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

117. 118. 119. 120. 121.

122.

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and moral and psychological variants that come dialectically together to constitute a people that one cannot even think in terms of an “Arab” or “Jewish” or “Japanese” mind that works in any particular way—one way or another. These are simply flawed categories, long before suggesting and articulating them can be debated as the indices of a retrograde politics. In addition to “the Arab Mind” and “the Jewish Mind,” Patai has made equally untenable and entirely vacuous observations about “the Middle Eastern culture” in his Golden River to Golden Road (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969). In Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 308-309), Edward Said has critically examined a passage of this book as an example of how “the Orient” is constituted as the fixed object of investigation for the Orientalist. But as Said demonstrates the problem with such essentialist attributes is that they categorically disregard a whole variety of factors that have been categorically essentialized (in this particular case metaphorically sexualized) in order to facilitate a particular mode of analytic. Instead of grand conspiratorial assumptions about people, one has to take to task these flawed analytics on specific scholarly grounds. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 70. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 67. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 68. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 69. Joseph de Somogyi, “My Reminiscences of Igance Goldziher.” The Muslim World, LI (1961), 15; also quoted in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 69. Goldziher’s Travelogue in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 132 (entry of 29 November 1873). Bernard Heller, “Goldziher Ignác emlékezete,” IMIT 1932, Évkönyve, Budapest 1932, 24-25, as quoted by Joseph de Somogyi, “My Reminiscences of Igance Goldziher,” 15. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 70. Bernard Heller, “Goldziher Ignác emlékezete,” as quoted by Joseph de Somogyi, “My Reminiscences of Igance Goldziher”, 15. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 71. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 71. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 73. See also Goldziher’s Tagebuch, which he begins by saying that he is writing it “für meine Frau, meine Kinder und die allernächsten Glieder meines engern Freudeskreises” (“for my wife, my children, and the close circle of my intimate friends,” 15). Goldziher, Tagebuch, 228, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 50.

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123. Goldziher Tagebuch, 235-239, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 75. 124. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 15. 125. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 27. 126. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 77. 127. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 77. 128. Given the highly speculative, tendentious, and outright slanderous nature of Patai’s account of Goldziher’s life on the basis of his reading of the German original of Goldziher’s Tagebuch, it is imperative that a competent English translation of this seminal text be made available to the larger scholarly community. For the very same reasons, Patai’s English translation of the German original of Goldziher’s travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt should also be published in its original German. The scholarly community should not be at the mercy of the English translation of a German (the original of which is not published), done by someone so systematically hostile to Goldziher. In fact it is a rather dubious scholarly practice to have kept the original German in manuscript form and published only an English translation of it. A more serious scholar would have first published the German original, or else published a bilingual version. When the English translation of Tagebuch and the German original of Goldziher’s travelogue to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt are published a larger community of interpreters can read these two extraordinary documents and make its own judgment. 129. Said, Orientalism, 330. 130. On the origin and later development of the idea of “the death of the author” in contemporary French thought see Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). See also Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” in his collection of essays, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 142-148. 131. Said, Orientalism, 330-331. 132. The most memorable such exchanges were in the pages of the New York Review of Books. See Bernard Lewis’ “The Question of Orientalism” (New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 11, 24 June, 1982), and the subsequent exchange among Edward Said, Bernard Lewis and Oleg Grabar (an Islamic Art Historian) in “Orientalism: An Exchange” (New York Review of Books, Volume 29, Number 13: 12 August, 1982). In a subsequent MESA (Middle East Studies Association of North America) meeting in Boston, MA, Edward Said and Bernard Lewis faced each other in a debate. 133. See James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 255-276; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes,

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134. 135.

136. 137.

138.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146.

147.

148. 149.

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Nations, Literatures (London and New York: Verso, 1994); and Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin (1981). Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978/2003), 340. See Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and Edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129-156. For Edward Said’s articulation of the role of public intellectual see his Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996). For an excellent study of Max Weber’s conception of intellectuals see Ahmad Sadri’s Max Weber’s Sociology of Intellectuals. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For reflections on Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual see my review essay in the journal Critique, Fall 1994, 85-96. This has of course now changed and there is a whole “Allamah” bestowing industry in the Islamic Republic. For more on Mohammad Qazvini see his own short autobiography in Doreh-ye Kamel-e Bist Maqalah-ye Qazvini (“The Complete Collection of Twenty Essays by Qazvini”). Edited by Abbas Iqbal and Ibrahim Pour Davoud (Tehran: Donya-ye Ketab, 1363/1984), 7-30. For additional biographical data on Mohammad Qazvini see Houshang Ettehad, Pazhuhishgaran Mo’asser (“Contemporary Scholars”). Two Volumes (Tehran: Farhang-e Mo’asser, 1378/1999), Volume I, 1-52. Qazvini, Bist Maqalah-ye Qazvini, 23-24. Qazvini 1984, 24-25. Qazvini 1984, 24-25. Qazvini 1984, 24-25. See Iraj Afshar (Edited), The Letters of Qazvini to Taqizadeh. Tehran: Javidan Publications, 1974, 102-103). For more details on Qazvini’s derogatory views on Orientalists and Orientalism see Hossein Kamaly’s “Allamah Qazvini va Mustashriqin,” Golestan, vol. III (nos. 3 & 4), Fall and Winter 1378 (1999-2000), 125-138. See Hossein Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, “Orientalism and Occidentalism,” in Iranshahr (Number 1, 26 June 1922), 12-14. Iranshahr 1926, 12-13. Iranshahr 1926, 13. For more on Hossein Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr see Kazem Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr (Ed), Athar va Ahval-e Kazem Zadeh Iranshahr (Tehran: Iqbal Publications, 1971). For more on Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh see his autobiography, Zendegiye Tufani: Khaterat-e Seyyed Hassan Taqizadeh. Edited by Iraj Afshar (Tehran: Bahar Publications, 1989). Iranshahr 1926, 13-14. See Anwar Abdel Malek’s “Orientalism in Crisis” (Diogenes 44, winter 1963) and Jacques Waardenburg’s “L’Islam dans le miroir de l‘Occident (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963).

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150. See Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. Foreword by Edward W. Said (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 151. Said, Orientalism, 18. 152. Said, Orientalism, 19. 153. Said, Orientalism, 105. 154. See for example Seyyed Muhammad Reza Jalali Na’ini, Tarikh-e Jam’-e Qur’an-e Karim op. cit, XIII, XVI, XVV, et passim. 155. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 31. 156. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 15. 157. See Talcott Parsons’ Introduction to Max Weber’s The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), xxvii, for Parsons’ note to this effect. 158. Said, Orientalism, 208-209. Said’s apt observations about Theodore Nöldeke can of course be extended to Bernard Lewis tenfold. Lewis exemplifies the later generation of Orientalists who positively loathed and politically plotted against the very dignity of the subject of their lifetime scholarship. A bona fide psychologist (no anthropologist) needs to do a “psychological portrait” of people who spend their lives studying peoples and cultures they loathe. There must be a psychopathological explanation for this. 159. Said, Orientalism, 209. 160. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 59, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20. 161. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21. 162. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 21. 163. As quoted in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20. 164. Goldziher, Tagebuch, 60-61, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 61. Again to be fair to Said, neither the Tagebuch nor the Travelogue was available to him at the writing of Orientalism (1978). 165. Goldziher Tagebuch, 59, as translated by Patai in Patai, Psychological Portrait, 20. Quoting Goldziher’s comparative and categorical statements on Judaism, Christianity, or Islam is obviously not to endorse them. But simply to show that Said’s assumption that Goldziher thought of Islam as inferior to other religions is false. But, again, we must remember that neither the Tagebuch nor the Travelogue were available to Said when he wrote Orientalism. 166. Said, Orientalism, 210. The passage Said quotes in French is from P. Masson-Oursel, “La connaissance scientifique de l’Asie en France depuis 1900 et les variétés de l’Orientalism,” Revue Philosophique 143, Numbers 7-9 (July-September 1953), 345.

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167. Patai, Psychological Portrait, 46. 168. By far the most significant of these three for Said is Foucault. “I have found it useful here,” Said says early in his Orientalism, “to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in Archeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism” (Said, Orientalism, 3, et passim). 169. Said, Orientalism, 202-203. 170. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 48-49. 171. Said, Orientalism, 258-259. 172. Said, Orientalism, 260. 173. See Edward Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983/2004), 31-53. 174. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 48-49. 175. Said, Orientalism, 322. 176. Said, Orientalism, 203. 177. See James Clifford, “On Orientalism,” op. cit. 178. See Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 8-10. 179. Said, Orientalism, 340. 180. This is the principal project of his first posthumously published book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, op. cit. 181. Said, Orientalism, 322. 182. Said, Orientalism, 259. 183. It was in the best interest of not just Bernard Lewis (the Armenius Vámbéry of his time) and his ilk but of an entire lucrative industry of knowledge production about “Islam” (and soon “Islamic terrorism”) to pretend that they had no idea what this problem of representation was, that it was some sort of French mumbo-jumbo, and that they were “experts” on Islam and could tell the U.S. and European governments what to do in their dealing with Muslims. While the academic world went on the wild goose chase of solving the essentially insoluble problem of the soverign subject, “Islamic experts” made a very lucrative living telling the world (powerful people in particular) what to think of Islam and what do to Muslims. “Persian and Turkish poetry are entirely Muslim,” Bernard Lewis tells his readers in The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995, 258), as an example of his exquisite command of primary sources and what they represent. Ayatollah Khomeini could not have thought and said it better, nor could Moustapha Kamal disagreed more. The astounding illiteracy at the very root of a sentence like that is prototypical of every single sentence that Bernard Lewis utters in his writings—making the Persian and Turkish poets of the last one thousand year (particularly of the last two hundred years) turn in their graves. Bernard Lewis and the industry he represents

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185.

186.

187. 188. 189.

190. 191.

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need not have worried about the problem of representation. They knew everything there was to know about Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages and literatures and cultures. Allamah Qazvini knew these “charlatans,” as he called them quite well: “The instruction of these languages, and in fact the teaching of a few other languages as well, and all at the same time—such as Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and all the arts and sciences that have been written in those languages, as well as all the various and innumerable dialects of those languages—all and all are entrusted to these Orientalists. These people then proceed, without the slightest sense of shame or fear of being scandalized, for there is no one to tell, to claim knowledge and authority in all these languages and the arts and sciences written in them, teaching them, publishing books and articles about them, and even coming out with their own new and specific ideas about them.” (Qazvini, Bist Maqalah-ye Qazvini, 23). His prophetic soul! For an English translation, see Max Scheler, Problems of Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Manfred S. Frings. Edited and with an Introduction by Kenneth W. Stikkers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). For an English translation of both these sources see Karl Manheim, Ideology and Utopia. Translated from the German by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936). See also Karl Mannheim, Structures of Thinking. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry Weber Nicholson. Edited and Introduced by David Kettler, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Translated by Manfred S. Frings. Edited and with an Introduction by Kenneth W. Stikkers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, 67. Emphasis in the original. Scheler 1980, 70. Emphasis in the original. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936, 267-271. See Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The German Ideology. Edited and with an Introduction by C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 47. See for example Tom W. Goff, Marx and Mead: Contributions to a Sociology of Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). See David Frisby, The Alienated Mind: The Sociology of Knowledge in Germany, 1918-1933 (London and New York: Routledge, 1983). A similar attempt at providing a sociology of knowledge for the rise of the sociology of knowledge, as it were, that corroborates Frisby’s observations is provided by Pierre Bourdieu for the emergence of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy in Pierre Bourdieu’s The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Translated by Peter Collier. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 7-39.

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192. See Gunter W. Remmling (Ed), Towards the Sociology of Knowledge: Origin and development of a sociological Thought Style (New York: Humanities Press, 1973). 193. For cogent observations about similar thoughts in the sociology of Talcott Parsons see Harold J. Bershady, Ideology and Social Knowledge (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1973). 194. For further details see James Tully (Ed), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. 195. See Dominick Lacapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 196. “Let me begin with the one aspect of the book’s reception,” Said wrote in his 1995 afterword to Orientalism, “that I most regret and find myself trying hardest how (in 1994) to overcome. That is the book’s alleged anti-Westernism, as it has been misleadingly and rather too sonorously called by commentators both hostile and sympathetic…. One scarcely knows what to make of these caricatural permutations of a book that to its author and in its argument is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically skeptical about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly careful about not ‘defending’ or even discussing the Orient and Islam’” (Said, Orientalism, 330-331). 197. To be sure, the central and thorny issue of the sovereign subject remains valid in Clifford’s critic even when we move into the domain of the sociology of knowledge. However, the long tradition of Verstehendesoziologie, namely a sociology that is predicated on the verstehendemethode (subjective understanding), central, for example, to Max Weber’s sociology, will go a long way addressing that problem. The tradition extends from Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber to more recent statements by Theodore Abel and others. For more on this see Marcello Truzzi (Ed.), Verstehen: Subjective Understanding in the Social Sciences (London: AddisonWesley Publishing Company, 1974). 198. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1962/1996). In Orientalism, Edward Said makes a very brief and tangential reference to Thomas Kuhn. The context is Said’s discussion of the distinguished Orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb’s “mind operating with great ease inside established institutions” (Said, Orientalism, 275). Later on, however, Said made direct connections between Foucault and Kuhn. “Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn,” he believed, “have done a considerable service by reminding us in their work that, whether we are aware of it or not, paradigms and epistemes have a thoroughgoing hold on fields of thought and expression, a hold that inflects if it does not shape the nature of the individual utterance” (Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 42). 199. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, op. cit, 66-67.

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

3 I Am Not a Subalternist1 “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1955)

It will certainly amuse future historians of postcolonial theories that by far the most celebrated essay in its current canon has received its extraordinary title by serendipity—that the original title of Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by her own account in the very first sentence of the essay, was in fact “Power, Desire, Interest.” It is hard to believe that this hallmark event in our counter-canonical community would have fared so spectacularly well had Spivak kept its original, nondescript title. “Names are a great mystery,” says Samuel Hamilton to Adam Trask in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, as they get together with Lee, Mr. Trask’s Chinese servant-savant, to decide what to call the twin sons of Adam and his estranged wife Cathy Ames. “I have never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of this—whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong.”2 It is hard to imagine “Can the Subaltern Speak?” with any other (given or nick-) name than the one it now proudly bears. There seems to have been a divinity “shaping the ends” of this essay, rough hew them how its very author may have willed. The 123

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

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

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perniciously) writing him/her out of the presumably liberating critique of the sovereign subject. Spivak’s speaking in the opening paragraph of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in terms of her own power, desire, and interest is in fact the answer to that question and the conclusion of the essay placed right at its beginning—a kind of a proverbial Hegelian preface she once performed when translating Derrida’s Of Grammatology into English. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak is speaking—of her power, desire, and interest, beyond the patriarchal subject-constitution and defying the imperialist object-formation. She is no subaltern—indeed, nor is she the author of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—who can shoot herself in the foot. The dialectics confirms the question and comprises the answer—right at the very first paragraph, immediately after the question is posed: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The question is not philosophical at all. It is merely a manner of being polite—raising a finger and asking with proper etiquette if she could please talk. She has been silent for quite some time. But—and here is the rub—by the time she has asked permission to speak, she has already spoken: Can the subaltern speak? * * * Permission (inevitably) granted, Spivak has (already) trespassed into a Homeric space, mutated into a Trojan Horse, reversed the metaphor, and once inside the city walls, she would wreak havoc on Trojans. A trophy that Trojan theorists could not resist taking home to the center of their Metropolitan Capital to claim, Spivak lets loose her swords and soldiers (hiding in her belly) raiding at midnight the poststructuralist critique of the subject with a dexterity and precision they had never anticipated. There—she exposes the silenced subaltern not as a reality sui generis but as a fabricated asphyxiation constitutional to a postmodernity that still carries within it the selfsame colonial blind-spots integral to the modernity it thought it had dismantled. Not quite so, objects Spivak (calmly and politely) with her accusatory finger raised. Without Spivak, we were all in danger of shooting ourselves in the foot and collapsing into a debilitating nativism. She has taken the critique of

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

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

The question is (needless to say but necessary to repeat) rhetorical, liberating. * * * Although Spivak proceeds to up the ante and demonstrate in analytical detail how “the failure of Deleuze and Guattari to consider the relations between desire, power, and subjectivity renders them incapable of articulating a theory of interest,”9 and thus make a shambles of the entire poststructuralist project, precisely at this

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

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

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Only once in the course of her analysis does Spivak come close to reading sati in the contextual immediacy of its own cultural and political neighborhood but she quickly abandons it for (the misplaced) fear of incongruity: There is no itinerary we can retrace here. Since the other sanctioned suicides did not involve the scene of this constitution, they entered neither the ideological battleground at the archaic origin—the tradition of the Dharmasâstra—nor the scene of the inscription of ritual as crime—the British abolition. The only related transformation was Mahatma Gandhi’s reinscription of the notion of satyâgraha, or hunger strike, as resistance. But this is not the place to discuss the details of that sea-change. I would merely invite the reader to compare the auras of widow sacrifice and Gandhian resistance. The root in the first part of satyâgraha and sati are the same.15

Here, Spivak comes close to positing hunger-strike and widowburning together, but she quickly abandons the idea because in the mind of her white male intellectual interlocutor either of the two acts invoke two different auras—whereas precisely because their roots are the same, though their auras differ, they should have been read together, in their political reconfiguration of power, as would their mutual reading against the current spate of suicidal violence in the course of the Afghan, Iraqi, or Palestinian resistance (muqawamah). The colonial context ought to be made integral to a reading of adjacent texts together, rather than separately, forcing them into a binary opposition against their colonial mis/readings. Spivak’s false—abstract, ahistorical, extra-juridical—hermeneutics is simply astonishing coming from a postcolonial critic who is chiefly responsible for having applied post-structuralism and deconstruction to a whole continent of ideas and practices. “I have written…a constructed counternarrative of women’s consciousness, thus women’s being, thus women’s being good, thus the good women’s desire, thus woman’s desire.”16 Fine. This is quite self-evident. But by what authority? And for what constituency of purposes? Hindu law, as any other, has a history, a hermeneutics, a jurisprudence, a constellation of divergent localities of readings

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

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

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save brown women from brown men, impose upon those women a greater ideological constriction by absolutely identifying, within discursive practice, good-wifehood with self-immolation on the husband’s pyre.”18 This, however, is but a momentary Saidian move on the part of Spivak because she has not (could not) work out her (progressive) politics from her (retrograde) hermeneutics. That hermeneutics, in effect, cannot but lead Spivak to abandon completely the crucial opening part of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and by the end of the essay collapse into a “poli-sci” lingo that informs her readers that “between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.”19 By the end of the text, her argument has dissipated into the most banal oscillation between “tradition and modernization.” It is ultimately not the force of Spivak’s argument but the jarring power of her example, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide, that saves the essay. * * * At one critical moment in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said, rarely on the same page, come together when she catches the tiger of the European progressive politics by the toe and notes Michel Foucault’s hurried conflation of language and discourse as he hastens to salvage his theory of power. The occasion of this concurrence between Spivak and Said is when she wants to insert the function of the public intellectual between “the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition,” on one hand, and “the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed,” on the other. 20 Spivak’s position is that “the intellectuals, who are neither of these S/subjects, becomes transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing) the working of (the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire.”21 Here, Spivak resorts to a strategic alliance with Said and quotes him affirmatively for having wondered why

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Foucault’s critique of power disregards “the role of economics, the role of insurgency and rebellion.”22 This is where Spivak’s alliance with Said becomes pronounced: I add to Said’s analysis the notion of the surreptitious subject of power and desire marked by the transparency of the intellectual. Curiously enough, Paul Bové faults Said for emphasizing the importance of the intellectual, whereas “Foucault’s project essentially is a challenge to the leading role of both hegemonic and oppositional intellectuals.” I have suggested that this “challenge” is deceptive precisely because it ignores what Said emphasizes—the critic’s institutional responsibility.23

Spivak is much gentler here with Said’s characteristic humanism than was James Clifford in his famous critique of Orientalism, where he exposed what he considered to be the central paradox of the text, namely its being “ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism.”24 Spivak’s gentle defense of Said, taking on Bové for having ignored “what Said emphasizes—the critic’s institutional responsibility,” is as close as she can get to Said’s persistent and embattled humanism without compromising her own relentless critique of the European encounter with the sovereign subject. This is a particularly endearing moment in the mutual (but divergent) history of these two towering figures of our critical disposition: Said’s defiant humanism and Spivak’s rebellious uprising against the European critique of the sovereign subject. This is the crucial occasion where the sovereignty in which Edward Said effectively partakes, and (here is the rub) which in effect “inaugurates a [European] Subject,” at the expense of silencing the (poor, colored, and female) subaltern, come together to aufgehoben into a third-level critique that embraces them both. Here we are put in a very privileged position to see Spivak’s postcolonial critique of post-structuralism to the left of the European critique of the sovereign subject and Said’s defiant insistence on (what he would later call “democratic) humanism” to its right. Spivak wants to up the ante and put forward a far more radical critique of the European dismantling of the sovereign subject (by way of giving voice to a silenced subaltern), whereas Said wants to resuscitate the humanism that this very critique of the

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sovereign subject had surpassed and dismantled in order to sustain a mighty measure of political agency (though entirely oblivious to the fact this critique might also give space to the silenced subaltern). Thus paradoxically, Spivak’s radical discursive critique becomes politically circumscribed and ends up in a defiant, counter-ritual, suicide—while Said’s conservative insistence on humanism becomes politically far more potent, albeit theoretically halting. Spivak has to abandon her radical critique of the European destruction of the sovereign subject in order to become politically viable, while Said has to fall behind that critique in order to remain politically potent. We are thus put in a very odd position by having to choose between Spivak’s far more discursively radical critique of the European dismantling of the sovereign subject and be politically suicidal, and Said’s defiant political activism and yet keep quiet about its structural foundations in a troubled and outmaneuvered humanism—and thus commit ideological suicide. I believe and purpose that in the space between Edward Said’s insistence on retrieving and contrapuntally liberating a critical and democratic humanism25 and Spivak’s institutional detour around the impossibility of an intellectual representation of the subaltern resides a third—much wider—path. Spivak’s critique of the European critic of the sovereign subject navigates (inevitably) the space between an us and a them whose axis of binary opposition still oscillates vigorously in the span of a distance corroborated by the colonizer and the colonized—not despite but because of the postcolonial disposition of her criticism. This, for example, is how she corrects Derrida: Derrida calls the ethnocentricism of the European science of writing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a symptom of the general crisis of European consciousness. It is, of course, part of a greater symptom, or perhaps the crisis itself, the slow turn from feudalism to capitalism via the first wave of capitalist imperialism. The itinerary of recognition through assimilation of the Other can be more interestingly traced, it seems to me, in the imperialist constitution of the colonial subject than in repeated incursions into psychoanalysis or the “figure” of woman, though the importance of these two interventions within

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deconstruction should not be minimized. Derrida has not moved (or perhaps cannot move) into that arena.26

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

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my own political and social activism has assured me, people all over the world can be and are moved by ideals of justice and equality—the South African victory in the liberation struggle is a perfect case in point—and the affiliated notion that humanistic of ideals of liberty and learning still supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war and military occupation, for instance, and to try to overturn despotism and tyranny, both strike me as ideas that are alive and well. And despite the (in my opinion) shallow but influential ideas of a certain facile type of radical antifoundationalism, with its insistence that real events are at most linguistic effects, and its close relative, the end-of-history thesis, these are so contradicted by the historical impact of human agency and labor as to make a detailed refutation of them here unnecessary. Change in human history, and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities.28

Predicated on that solid political commitment (but divergent theoretical encounter with the persistent problem of European humanism, which was instrumental in the making of European Romanticism and Orientalism alike), Said proceeds to argue that “it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentricism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past…and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American.”29 To be sure, Said’s attempt at salvaging (European) humanism via a democratic criticism, in effect trying to de-Europeanize its power-basing provenance, is a far superior proposition than Jürgen Habermas’ attempt to posit what he calls a “communicative” versus a “subject-centered” reason30—an entirely useless stand from where we stand on the (post) colonial site, because it is simply blind, deaf, and dumb to the structural violence that has silenced us at the very outset, so that “communication” (as in “speaking,” as Spivak would say) is simply impossible for us. But still there is a structural similarity between what Habermas calls “the unfinished project of modernity” and what Said proposes to do with humanism, namely to liberate it from its European provenance—they both bracket and disregard the persistent relation of

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

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geography that de-centers the planet without reversing its dominant order in cross-essentializing terms—a political geography that will always remain strategic, transitional, spontaneous. To detect the topography of that geography, I will now tell a story in which Gayatri Spivak’s superlative criticism and Edward Said’s progressive politics came together in celebration of Ranajit Guha—on an occasion when we had all gathered to honor the founding father of Subaltern Studies. * * * In late October through early November 2000, Ranajit Guha, the eminent historian whose groundbreaking work has given a new lease on life to Gramsci’s conception of “the Subaltern,” delivered a series of three lectures at the Italian Academy in Columbia University. I was among the happy few who attended these series of lectures and read Guha’s draft in preparation for a workshop that Gayatri Spivak and I had organized around these lectures. “Subaltern Studies at Large” became a critical moment in the nascent history of our Center (now Institute) for Comparative Literature and Society, the institutional host of the workshop. On Friday and Saturday, 10 and 11 November, 2000, at three consecutive panels we explored the perils and promises of the very notion of “Subaltern Studies” in Asian, African, Latin American, and African-American contexts. Edward Said chaired our plenary session, and Gayatri Spivak convened our conference. As I read the manuscript of Ranajit Guha’s series of lectures, and subsequently heard him deliver them in our Casa Italiana, it seemed to me that in his most recent reflections we were witness to a further mapping out of the navigational exclusion of people without history in order to narrate and thus make (what Guha aptly called) historicality a possible site of contestation and resistance. Guha’s singling out of Hegel as the particular focal point of his critique and departure (I subsequently learned particularly from our Europeanist colleagues) appeared as beating a dead horse. Nevertheless I shared Guha’s primary concern with Hegel precisely because it was he, next to Kant, who at the crack of the

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

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Hegel in fact considers Persians as people that Guha would put within his Aristotelian limit as a people with a history and thus not of a “people with no history.” Here is the passage: Asia separates itself into two parts—Hither and Farther Asia; which are essentially different from each other. While the Chinese and Hindoos—the two great nations of Farther Asia, already considered—belong to the strictly Asiatic, namely the Mongolian Race, and consequently possess a quite peculiar character, discrepant from ours; the nations of Hither Asia belong to the Caucasian, i.e., the European Stock. They are related to the West, while the Farther-Asiatic peoples are perfectly isolated. The European, who goes from Persia to India, observes, therefore, a prodigious contrast. Whereas in the former country he finds himself still somewhat at home, and meets with European dispositions, human virtues and human passions—as soon as he crosses the Indus (i.e. in the latter region), he encounters the most repellent characteristics, pervading every single feature of society. With the Persian Empire we first enter on continuous History. The Persians are the first Historical People; Persia was the first Empire that passed away. While China and India remain stationary, and perpetuate a natural vegetative existence even to the present time, this land has been subject to those developments and revolutions, which alone manifest a historical condition. The Chinese and the Indian Empire assert a place in the historical series only on their own account and for us [not for neighbors and successors]. But here in Persia first arises that light which shines itself, and illuminates what is around; for Zoroaster’s “light” belongs to the World of Consciousness—to Spirit as a relation to something distinct from itself. We see in the Persian World a pure exalted Unity, as the essence which leaves the special existences that inhere in it, free—as the Light, which only manifests what bodies are in themselves;—a Unity which governs individuals only to excite them to become powerful for themselves—to develop and assert their individuality.32

What the Pahlavi court historians did not care to note (beyond this evidently laudatory place Hegel had assigned to Persians in history) was the concluding paragraph of Hegel on Persians where he announces in no uncertain terms that the Persians are over, finished, done with, no longer in history. Celebrating the anniversary of the 2500 years of Persian monarchy, His Imperial Majesty Shahanshah Aryamehr (“The Sun of the Aryan Race,” no less) linking his physically short self-confidence with the metaphorical longevity of

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Cyrus the Great, the Shah did not want to know that, generations of European and American archeologists notwithstanding, nobody slept in that decrepit tomb except his own perturbed imagination, and he certainly did not want translated into any lucid Persian prose the following Hegelian pronouncement: . . . the historical transition takes place when the Persian world comes in contact with the Greek. Here, for the first time, an historical transition meets us, viz. in the fall of an empire. China and India, as already mentioned, have remained—Persia has not. The transition to Greece is, indeed, internal; but here it shows itself also externally, as a transmission of sovereignty—an occurrence which from this time forward is ever and anon repeated. For the Greeks surrender the scepter of dominion and of civilization to the Romans, and the Romans are subdued by the Germans.33

Conscious of his compatriot Goethe’s love and admiration for the Persian Rose, Hegel then adds this little minuet: If we examine this fact of transition more closely, the question suggests itself—for example, in this first case of the kind, viz. Persia—why it sank, while China and India remain. In the first place we must here banish from our minds the prejudice in favor of duration, as if it had any advantage as compared with transience: the imperishable mountains are not superior to the quickly dismantled rose exhaling its life in fragrance. In Persia begins the Principle of Free Spirit as contrasted with imprisonment in nature; mere natural existence, therefore, loses its bloom, and fades away. The principle of separation from Nature is found in the Persian Empire, which therefore, occupies a higher grade than those worlds immersed in the Natural.34

In other words, Hegel nurtures this plump Persian lamb until it is really fat and voluptuous only in order to offer it as a worthy sacrifice upon the altar of his historical teleology. Persia serves its historical task and disappears, thus also serving Hegel with his McDonald arches, rise-and-shine theory of history whereby the sun rises in the East only to shine on the West. We begin with the sun rising in China and then India in the Farther and then move Hither to Persia only, and here is the rub, to come home to shine on the Parthenon. Persia is “somewhat at home” only for Ancient

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

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

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

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

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

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

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his time put together), translated into a glorious Arabic, and then from the Arabic of Ibn al-Muqaffa’ into the Persian of Iskandar Beik Monshi as Kalilah wa Dimnah to become the master model of generation of prose stylists from the Deccan to Baghdad. When the most beautiful architectural monuments of the subcontinent, its manuscripts and paintings, prose and poetry, philosophy and mysticism, are as familiar to any Iranian as their own face, how could we believe in “parallel paradigms” that presumes an element of untouchability among the Hindu and Muslim components of the South Asian experience? Forget about art and architecture. If I were to take a Gramscian inventory of myself, I am the walking defiance of all “parallel paradigmatics.” It is impossible for someone to believe in parallel paradigmatics when his first name is Arabic, his second name of Sanskrit origin, was born to a light-skinned Iranian mother and a dark-skinned tropical father, raised on the beautiful voice of Umm Kulthum, Abd al-Halim Hafiz, and Fairuz in the neighborhood of the late Saddam Hussein and the Shahanshah of Iran, at the bank of a river that carries the memory of all the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations into a Persian Gulf, an Arabian Sea, and an Indian Ocean. So I must really excuse myself, my living memory, and the very manner and mood of assigning meanings to the world, cannot possibly accommodate for a “parallel paradigmatics.” * * * The common problem, I believe, with Said, Spivak, and Guha is that their principal interlocutor remains a fictive white male Euro-American philosopher or literary theorist—Auerbach, Derrida, or Hegel. The fact that they all write principally in English may be the false premise of this troublesome denominator. The white male interlocutor at the center of their respective takes on our histories colors the entirety of their otherwise varied discourses and corners them to enter a two-way tunnel in which “the East and the West,” or “the Center an the Periphery,” is the presiding metaphor. None of them, their defiant intellectual disposition notwithstanding, has been able to escape the expectant gaze of

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

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

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

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

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

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

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[Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998]: 19). This is as close as Agamben ever gets to realizing that “the state of exception” he is after is the condition of the colonial. There has never been a Landesnahme in what he calls “Western Politics” without a simultaneous Ausnahme—and Ausnahme is—ipso facto—both the colonial and the state of exception at one and the same time. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 272. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 273. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 296-297. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 298. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 280. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 300. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 301. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 302. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 304-305. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 281. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 305. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 306 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 277-278. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 277. Edward Said, The World, The Text, The Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, 243. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 280. Her reference is to Paul Bové’s “Intellectuals at War: Michel Foucault and the Analysis of Power,” SubStance, 36/37 (1983). See James Clifford’s “On Orientalism,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 271. The essay was originally published as a review of Edward Said’s Orientalism in History and Theory, 19:2 (February 1980): 204-203. For the details of Said’s extraordinary efforts in this vein see his first posthumous book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Spivak, Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 294. Take “the Orient” (“the East”) out of “Europe” (“the West”) and there will remain no “Europe” (“The West”), and thus the absolute necessity of “the Orient” (“the East”) in the making of “Europe” (“the West.”) “The East” was the “state of exception” that made “Europe” into a rule, that made it possible for “Europe” to assume itself the role of the rule. Agamben never came to that recognition; he, to paraphrase Spivak, “has not moved (or perhaps cannot move) into that arena.” Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (op. cit.), 10. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 10-11.

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

4 The Creative Crisis of the Subject “The Poet gave them faces, gestures, and garments, actualizing them completely, because for him they belonged to reality and not to schemata of thought.”—Benedetto Croce, “Note sulla poesia italiana e straniera del secolo decimonono: Ibsen” (1921)

For about a decade in the 1990s I was fascinated by the cinema of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, an Iranian revolutionary activist who finally opted to drop his gun and pick a camera, quite the opposite of Che Guevara who decided to drop his medicine bag and pick up a gun—though nevertheless in the same spirit. Throughout the course of my intimate engagements with Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s cinema, and ultimately in the book I wrote on him,1 my primary concern was to come to grips with his varied attempts at an aesthetic articulation of moral and normative agency beyond the inherited limitation of a colonial subject. In my reading of Makhmalbaf’s cinema, I tried to see how his creative imagination defies the critical condition of the post/colonial subject by breaking through its epistemic and narrative limitations. The source and purpose of my entering the site of Makhmalbaf’s cinema from this particular angle were of course entirely connected to the question of subject and the presumed crisis that it faced. * * * 155

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

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

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

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

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

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sexism. In the Subaltern Studies group it needs development according to the unacknowledged terms of its own articulation.”13 By raising the disquieting question “can the subaltern speak,” Spivak throws a monkey wrench at the whole question of representation, targeting both the Orientalists and the Orientals, as it were, disallowing them both to speak on behalf of what George Herbert Mead a couple of generations before these issues were raised would have called a generalized Other14—because by virtue of this essentializing of that generalized Other as “Subaltern,” the postcolonial critics are in fact confirming it in its subordinate relation of power to neo/colonialism. Although in her essay, Spivak is far gentler with the postcolonial Subalternists than she is with the European poststructuralists, she has nevertheless told them very firmly that they are both in effect doing the contrary of what they say they wish to do—that their vision is indeed blinded by their own insight, their purposeful deed defeated by the force of their own argument. So the Subalternists are damned if they do (represent the subaltern) and damned if they don’t—because in one case they are essentializing them and in the other they are remaining silent in sight of unconscionable atrocities. If Spivak were to be read on face value, even she could be (and she has been)15 accused of essentialism of her own, of recasting the world precisely in its colonial bifurcation between the First and the Rest—failing to see the structural similarities between the two sides of the colonial divide that in fact under the code-name globalization now shows the clear signs of its collapse. The power of Spivak’s question, however, is not in its presumed binary that it perpetuates, but in the transcendental nature of the issue she raises, namely can the subaltern speak a subaltern language constitutional to a liberation lexicon domestic to the condition of subalternity that does not further trap him/her in that condition? The question is not as much a matter of if and when the subaltern speaks as whether she can be heard. Quite to the contrary. The question is that when she does speak she is heard and understood all too easily because she speaks a familiar language—the language of her oppressors. The question is the dialectic of interlocution in

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

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

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Said’s “stubborn humanism,” as he put it, finally came to a succinct theoretical articulation in his first posthumous book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), in which he provides a detailed re-articulation of his unflinching conviction in humanism by way of resuming a dialogue with James Clifford’s detection of the central paradox of the sovereign subject and essentialism in Orientalism. Early in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Said begins by agreeing with Clifford’s criticism and conceding that in many ways Clifford was right, since during the 1960’s and 1970’s the advent of the French theory in the humanistic departments of American and English universities had brought about a severe if not crippling defeat of what was considered traditional humanism by the forces of structuralism and post-structuralism, both of which professed the death of man-the-author and asserted the preeminence of antihumanist systems such as those found in the work of Lévi-Strauss, Foucault himself, and Roland Barthes. The sovereignty of the subject—to use the technical phrase for what Enlightenment thought did with Descartes’ notion of the cogito, which was to make it the center of all human knowledge and hence capable of essentializing thought in itself—was challenged by what Foucault and Lévi-Strauss carried forward from the work of thinkers such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. This group of pioneers showed, in effect, that the existence of systems of thinking and perceiving transcended the power of individual subjects, individual humans who were inside those systems (systems such as Freud’s “unconscious” or Marx’s “capital”) and therefore had no power over them, only the choice either to use or be used by them. This of course flatly contradicts the core of humanistic thought, and hence the individual cogito was displaced, or demoted, to the status of illusory autonomy or fiction.21

Upon this admission, Said then proceeds to articulate his vision of humanism, which is vastly different from “the kind of totalizing and essentializing trends that Clifford identified,” adding further that he did not agree with “the argument put forward in the wake of structuralist antihumanism by postmodernism or by its dismissive attitudes to what Jean-Francois Lyotard famously called the grand narratives of enlightenment and emancipation.”22 Instead,

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Said insists that there is a kind of non-totalizing, non-essentializing humanism that he advocates and describes as being Critical of humanism in the name of humanism, and that schooled in its abuses by the experiences of Eurocentricism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text and languagebound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from, say, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from Richard Poirier.23

Guided by this principle, Said spends the rest of his book articulating the particular terms of his democratic criticism, paving the way towards a more inclusive humanism. Whether or not Said’s attempt to save (European) humanism by liberating it from its Eurocentricity is a successful enterprise or in fact joins Habermas’ attempt at saving the Enlightenment modernity by opening it to his theory of communicative action (both of which are articulated in a political vacuum)24 what remains important in Said’s project is his reference to his own political activism as the measure of his theoretical position about the necessity of a knowing (in his case defiant) subject. As he puts it himself: As a fair degree of my own political and social activism has assured me, people all over the world can be and are moved by ideals of justice and equality—the South African victory in the liberation struggle is a perfect case in point—and the afflicted notion that humanistic ideals of liberty and learning still supply most disadvantaged people with the energy to resist unjust war and military occupation, for instance, and to try to overturn despotism and tyranny, both strike me as ideas that are alive and well.25

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

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

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it formerly possessed. A growing and solidly organized working class can compel the capitalist class to remain firm in the industrial war. If a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich middle class, eager for conquest, capitalist society will have reached its historical perfection.27

It is in recognition and response to this fact, discovered long before Fanon put pen to paper, that Fanon declared: The native who decides to put the program into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all times. From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.28

That ultimately both Edward Said’s democratic criticism and Gayatri Spivak’s strategic essentialism fail either to salvage the European Enlightenment humanism for the rest of the world or else safeguard the colonial subject from an inevitable position of servitude to the European sovereign subject that has ipso facto essentialized and totalized the world into subservience is deeply rooted in the historical and philosophical fact that at its very inception the European project was articulated in specifically exclusionary terms. The European project of capitalist modernity—both in its sovereign constitution of the subject and in its Enlightenment humanism—cannot be salvaged for any use on its extended colonial outposts because it is at its very metaphoric lexicon it was articulated in terms beneficial to a few and detrimental to the rest. As Hegel was chiefly responsible for having written the colonial out of world history in the course of European modernity, Immanuel Kant was the principal articulator of a European sovereign subject at the cost of all other peoples—thus gathered and othered by being denied historical agency. Read in this light, the three famous critiques of Immanuel Kant are not three innocent philosophical treatises constituting a sovereign subject. Read in this vein, the first critique, Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) constitutes the European (and the European alone) as the solitary knowing subject—sovereign and presiding over the world. In its metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology, psychology, and

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

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not prevent the far more serious point that Kant here is not merely dismissing one human being or even a succession of cultures as being constitutionally incapable of the superior (European) conceptions of the beautiful and the sublime. As is evident in his third critique, The Critique of Judgment, the realm of the aesthetics for Kant is where he puts his first two critiques—the knowing subject and the knowable world—to test, that his constituted European subject is capable of navigating the indecisive subjectivity of the beautiful. Far more than being racially inferior to the European subject in matters of aesthetic, the non-European (the Oriental) is part and parcel of the objectified (knowable) world, at the mercy of the European knowable subject.31 While both Said and Spivak are trapped in the thorny predicament of European subject, in two fundamentally different but ultimately related ways, the subject of their concern, the post/colonial subject—whether in post-Independence India or in yet to be liberated Palestine—needs to be free and liberated. And that liberation is impossible except in the militant disposition of a defiant subject whose agency is in opposing its historical fate. In between Said’s critical humanism and Spivak’s strategic essentialism there already dwells a defiant subject that they have left theoretically under-theorized, at the very same time that they themselves have politically personified it. * * * How is that defiant subject to be met—except in revolutionary praxis? In his Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault discovered how Europeans in their “Age of Reason,” had to incarcerate the “Unreason” in their asylum houses in order to believe in and unleash the global claims of an instrumental reason. “The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century” he proposed, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and

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reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archeology of that silence.32

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

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

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

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

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

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of the sovereign subject. They did, however, revolt, dismantle the monarchy, disrupt the U.S. military and economic presence, and establish a republic. In the process of doing so the militant Islamists outmaneuvered both the nationalists and the socialists, incorporated some of their projects and dismantled their political presence, and thus committed all sorts of criminal atrocities against civil rights of its citizens. But the failure of the revolution is ultimately in something far worse than all these put together. The failure of the revolution is in its claim to ideological purity having at its epistemic and emotive center a colonial conception of “the West” as its principal interlocutor, and thus falling squarely into the trap of replicating the European sovereign subject—not only in its reigning mullacracy but even in its oppositional forces across the board: From the monarchists to the Mojahedin Khalq Organization to the liberal nationalists and ultimately the secular left. The experience of the Islamic revolution shows that when the subaltern speaks s/he speaks the language of its oppressors, even when s/he says “I want freedom”—s/he says it in the language of the European sovereign subject—effectively corroborating and cross-essentializing the colonially fabricated binary between “Islam and the West.” Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open: a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude, subjection combatively out of humiliation. This possibility has persistently materialized from the dawn of Iranian encounter with colonial modernity and came to a crescendo in the course of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911—the very birth channel of revolutionary artists like Makhmalbaf. The most defiant disposition of Iranian revolutionary character first and foremost found its expressions in Persian prose and poetry. In the course of the nineteenth century, revolutionary uprisings had a dialectical relationship with a robust rejuvenation of Persian prose riding on the recent introduction of the printing machine, appearance of

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

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may come away from a critical encounter with colonial modernity—since the more its political consequences were opposed, the stronger its metaphysical underpinnings became, dragging the colonized people and all the radical revolutions they launched into its epistemic and emotive quagmire—and on towards a creative reconstitution of reality in a way that wrested the arrested light of emancipation from the heart of blinding darkness. Thus reflecting and writing a book on Makhmalbaf, I had hoped to have given a glimpse of what has happened in post-revolutionary Iran once its Islamic Revolution failed to liberate it from the colonial disposition of its ideological imagination. I had also tried to link this structural failure at the presumed periphery of global capitalism to its privileged center. There is a structural similarity between the crisis of the subject (and with that the material conditions that occasion and sustain that crisis) endemic to the colonial edges of capitalist modernity and a similar crisis specific to the moments of anxiety at its presumed centers. Such European theorists of this crisis as Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard are of central significance in what I had to say in this respect—not because I have a blind trust in their insights, or else wish to provide an inconsequential gloss on their work. No. To the degree that they have spoken from the heart of a European (or what they call “Western”) crisis (of the subject), then their reflections are crucial in any attempt in understanding what is happening at the colonial and imperial edges of that proposition. My single ambition in that book on Makhmalbaf was to detect and articulate the evident aesthetics at the heart of his cinema. My objective was to navigate through Makhmalbaf’s cinema and get closer to its revolutionary aesthetics, articulated by the artist himself almost unconsciously. The aesthetic mutation of violence into an assertive reconstitution of a defiant subject, as I tried to show in this book, is evident throughout Makhmalbaf cinema, but perhaps most visibly in “A Moment of Innocence” (1996). In the final scene, where Makhmalbaf brings the police officer and the would-be assassin together, one with a gun and the other with a knife, imaginatively re-narrating a critical moment in

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Makhmalbaf’s own history into a creative reconstitution of agency, instead of the assassin’s knife and the officer’s gun we see their extended hands bringing forth a piece of bread and a flowerpot into the graceful embrace of a beautiful woman’s gaze—the would be accomplice in an assassination attempt. This is the re-enactment of a moment in Makhmalbaf’s own militant history when he took a knife to attack a police officer to steal his gun, and when he failed the police officer almost killed him on the spot, except that the trigger in his gun was stuck. The visual mutation of the knife and the gun into a flowerpot and a piece of bread does not erase the fact of their memorial history—that in fact that piece of bread is a knife (for the knife was raised to secure bread for the hungry), and that flowerpot is a gun (meant to be stolen in no less sign of love for a brutalized nation). Throughout his cinematic career, Makhmalbaf has remained that seventeen-year-old rebel, reaching for his knife (now metamorphosed into the slicer on his editing machine) to take a stab at history and slice a diagonal cut into the side of its brutal verdicts—healing the wounds of humanity on the very edge of that cut. The gun that he would have stolen if he were successful in his initial attempt is now his camera, successfully shooting one vision of his nation’s emancipation after another. He has hidden that violent reach for justice in the graceful choreography of a cinema that still resonates with an emancipatory violence, no matter how beautifully you slice it. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

See my Makhmalbaf at Large: The Making of a Revel Filmmaker (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). See James Clifford’s review of Orientalism in History and Theory 19:2 (February 1980): 204-223; reprinted as “On Orientalism” in James Clifford’s Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 255-276. Ibid., 271. Blindness and insight is the running theme of Paul de Man’s influential collection of essays, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of

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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

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

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Once in Israel he effectively reversed himself and said that Israel did not mean to do what it did! In his essay, “Watching the Evening News: The Chancellor Incident” (Raritan 2:2; Fall 1982), Poirier noted how “Chancellor unwittingly exposed the degree to which the structure of the evening news depends on ideas of reality determined by the political and social discourse already empowered outside the newsroom” (8). For an elaboration of Poirier’s point see Edward Said’s “Permission to Narrate,” op. cit., 255-256. 17. See Gayatri Spivak, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 214. For further references to Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism” see her interview with Ellen Rooney in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1-23. In addition to Gayatri Spivak’s theorization of it, the term “strategic essentialism” has been in circulation among such other feminist theorists as Diana Fuss—see her Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Elizabeth Grosz—see her Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation & Difference) (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press1994); see also Elizabeth Grosz’s “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism,” in Traveling Theories, Traveling Theorists, Inscriptions 5, Edited by James Clifford and Vivek Dhareshwar (Santa Cruz, CA: Center for Cultural Studies, 1989). http://humwww.ucsc.edu/CultStudies/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_5/v5_top. html. For an examination of the nuances of Spivak’s use of “strategic essentialism” see Caryl Flinn, “The Body in the (Virgin) Machine.” Arachne (1996), 3(2): 50 and 66. In her most recent book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak suggests that “the stringent binary opposition between positivism/essentialism …and “theory”…may in fact be spurious. Apart from repressing the ambiguous complicity between essentialism and criticism of positivism…it also errs by implying that positivism is not a theory…yet I remain generally sympathetic to aligning feminism with the critique of positivism and the defatishization of the concrete.” (See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 282-283). 18. For Homi Bhabha’s diatribe against Edward Said after his untimely death, disguised as a tribute, in which he effectively accuses Said of allowing his Oriental passion to overcome his rational faculties and thus condone suicidal violence, see “Untimely Ends: Homi K. Bhabha on Edward Said.” Art Forum, February 2004. For a cogent critique of Homi Bhabha’s attack on Edward Said see Joseph Massad’s “Intellectual Life of Edward Said,” in Journal of Palestine Studies (Special Issue in Honor of Edward Said) 131: Volume XXXIII: Number 3, Spring 2004: 7-22. To see how Homi Bhabha’s characterization of Edward Said matches and reflects that of Said’s Zionist

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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

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32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

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

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

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Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Resisting the logic of that madness requires a wherewithal far more serious than the fraudulent whims of a would-be Empire or a fraught hegemony. If we bypass the smokescreen of the militarism at the roots of empires and hegemonies, and come to grips with the inner logic of the madness that drives capital to its criminal conclusions, then we need manners of facing up to its destructive violence with a creative force that dodges the systematic traps of the fragmented world divided to be ruled for the beneficiaries of the inner logic of the madness of capital. * * * The so-called crisis of the subject can and has been resolved creatively in various artistic adventures (such as in Iranian, Cuban, or now Palestinian cinemas). It can and has also been resolved critically and in political terms via revolutionary border-crossing, where bourgeois nationalism means absolutely nothing and all manners of national identities, characters, and commitments have in theory and practice been transmuted into a global conception of a far more universal struggle. The significance of such revolutionary border-crossing is even more acute under the circumstances when American attempts at hegemonic consensus building is in fact in deep trouble and can achieve nothing but its own undoing. The platitudinous fatuity of American attempts at hegemony effectively invites multiple sites of resistance via a succession of revolutionary border-crossing. This, in effect, amounts to a mode of revolutionary inauthenticity in specifically national bourgeois terms and in the interest of a far superior objective of global resistance to imperialism of one sort or another. Such revolutionary inauthenticity and border-crossing, in turn, results in altogether bypassing the so-called crisis of the subject, for the revolutionary activist at the moment of that activism represents absolutely nothing and nobody and as such the entire question of representation is effectively overcome. Who might be some of the best examples of such revolutionary border-crossing? In the central two decades of the twentieth century four exemplary visionaries put their emancipatory ideas

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

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

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own revolutionary model—not a romantic revolutionary as he is usually made out to be but a persistent pilgrim navigating the borders and boundaries of one revolutionary territory after another—a theoretician and tactician of asymmetric warfare with an enduring impact on the history that followed him. His authenticity was in being inauthentic to any tradition that claimed him. Every phase of Che Guevara’s short but fulfilling life was marked by a major border-crossing. By far the most restless revolutionary of the twentieth century, he first crossed the class barrier of his birth (on 14 June 1928) and breeding into an upper middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina. Diagnosed with a severe asthmatic condition when he was two years old, he soon had to trespass yet another, this one physical, limitation that nature had imposed on him. Educated in his father’s library principally by his mother, Che entered Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, a secondary school in Cordoba in 1941 and the University of Buenes Aires in 1948, and was disqualified from military service because of his asthmatic condition. Che Guevara’s 4,000-mile-long journey in 1949 around Argentina and conversations with indigenous tribes is the first geographical border-crossing that expanded his revolutionary horizons. Soon in 1951, Che Guevara began his second geographical journey out, this one his famous motorcycle ride (with his friend Alberto Granado). They traveled from Argentina to Chile, and from there to Peru, Columbia and then to Venezuela. Che Guevara’s diary in this trip is the first record of a revolutionary navigating the regional and global topography of the human misery against which he revolted. In 1953, soon after he passed his qualifying exams and became a physician, he began yet another journey, this time on foot and by hitchhiking, to Guatemala, where backed by the CIA, Castillo Armas had overthrown the socialist government of Jacobo Arbenz. It is at this point that he became directly involved with such Latin American movements as the Apristas in Peru. Che Guevara’s move to Mexico in 1954 and his friendship with Fidel Castro, inaugurated the most serious revolutionary commitment of his life beyond his national borders and well into the wider domain of Latin American liberation struggles. His encounter with the writings of Mao Tse-tung, instrumental in the formulation of

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

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

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1961) also signaled his incessant attempts to expand the dormant polity of a cross-regional uprising.9 A similar pattern of global transformation almost identical to those of Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon is evident in the life and career of Malcolm X (1925-1965). Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1925, Malcolm X (Little) went through a succession of radical changes from petty criminal activities that landed him in jail in 1946 to activism devoted to the cause of African-American Muslims in the 1950s, and finally to a global revolutionary activism before his assassination in 1965. Malcolm’s conversion to Islam while in jail in the late 1940s foreshadowed his far more consequential conversion into a global revolutionary after his Hajj pilgrimage in 1964. But in the span of his short life between 1925 and 1965, pilgrimage was the running motif of his life. Ultimately, Malcolm X put together his experiences as an African-American and a Muslim revolutionary to reach for a global emancipation beyond any domain of domesticated identity. Malcolm X initially grew up in a religious and political environment determined by his father, Earl Little, an outspoken Baptist minister who was a follower of the black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Before Malcolm was four years old, his family was forced to move two times for fear of their lives, threatened by white supremacists angry with Earl Little’s activism. Nevertheless, Malcolm’s family home was burned down in Lansing, Michigan in 1929, when he was four years old—and two years later, in 1931, when Malcolm was only six years old, his father was murdered, his mutilated body found across trolley tracks. Malcolm’s mother, Louise Brown, had a mental breakdown after the death of her husband and was committed to a mental asylum. Malcolm and his seven siblings were separated and given to various foster families and orphanages. He soon dropped out of school, went to Boston, Massachusetts for a while, and then to Harlem, New York, where by 1942, when he was still a teenager, he ran a narcotics, prostitution, and gambling ring. By 1946, when Malcolm was twenty-one years old, he was arrested on criminal charges and sentenced to a seven-year prison term.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

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

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From a speech given by George W. Bush at Crawford, Texas on 31 August 2002, quoted by Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004): 1. 8. For an introduction to the revolutionary career of Ernesto Che Guevara see Jon Lee Anderson’s Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1998). 9. For a biography of Fanon see David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2002). 10. The best source on Malcolm X remains his own Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: One World, 1964).

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

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

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

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

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both the term and the politically expedient knowledge generated around it are of a more global usage. Not only do European and even Latin American academic and journalist parlances uses it, but even in the Arab and Muslim countries, thus carved into “the Middle East,” they too call themselves “the Middle East”—perhaps by way of a permanently returning repression that reminds them of who and what they are. Thus to the extent that the term “the Middle East” still remains in usage, the term “postcolonial” has an uneasy connection to reality. Any understanding of the “State of Middle East Studies: Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire” will have to begin with a genealogy of the varied layers of knowledge production about the area now under U.S./Israeli imperial domination and code-named “the Middle East.” In my reading of the late Edward Said’s classic study Orientalism (1978), I have sought to augment it in three different but complementary ways: (1) dissect it into the classical Greek (Aeschylus Persians, 472 B.C.E, which we might call an Orientalism of rivalry), the medieval Christian (Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1308-1321, which we might consider an Orientalism of loathing), the early modern Ottoman (Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, 1782, which we might call an Orientalism of fear), and finally the colonial mode of knowledge production about “the Orient;” (Orientalist scholarship, or the Orientalism of domination); (2) shift the critical apparatus of reading the manufacturing of “the Orient” away from the Saidian literary modus operandi, at the center of whose Orientalism remains the thorny question of representation, and redirect it to a much wider domain of sociology of knowledge that in fact has far more radical and enduring implications—and thus save Said from his so-called “residual humanism;” and finally (3) posit the Orientalist knowledge production as the locus classicus of manufacturing the sovereign European subject and the construction of his (and he was always thus gendered) civilizational domain as “the West,” delegating the world at large to the chaotic abyss of “the rest.” This historical genealogy and epistemic analytic are both absolutely crucial if we are not to fetishize the question concerning colonialism, formulate a historically more nuanced conception of it, so that today we might have a better grasp of the varied and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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pertain to the larger ideological project of American neo-conservatism. Lewis Lapham begins his essay with a quotation from Richard Hofstadter, asking rhetorically, “When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far.”6 Lewis Lapham’s response to this question is to go back to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and map out carefully the process by which multi-billion-dollar conservative foundations—such as the Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Scaife Family Foundation, or John M. Olin Foundation—were established precisely to counter progressive and radical thinking in the American counter-culture. Lewis Lapham is equally attentive to the formation of major think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution, in which scholars are exempted from the time-honored practice of peer review and a responsible teaching and credible scholarly career and instead given lucrative salaries to sit down and do nothing but write up strategies of domination for American economic interests and thus seek to safeguard presumed American national security concerns. Lapham also carefully documents what he calls a “300 Million dollar Conservative Message Machine,” in which a wide spectrum of television and radio stations, publishing houses, newspapers, and websites have been incorporated into a massive propaganda machinery. His argument extends well into a widespread body of students and scholars in major American universities—including Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford—who have been the recipients of scholarships from these institutions. Most significantly, Lapham creates a chart in which the most influential books in the neoconservative genre and cross-references them with the foundations that have sponsored them—books that include Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992) and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1993/1996)—funded by the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and Smith Richardson Foundation, respectively. The Olin Foundation, co-founded by Alan Bloom and co-directed by John Cropsey and Leon Kass, includes among its illustrious roster none other than Ms. Azar Nafisi. As to what

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exactly holds all these distinguished people together, all one needs to read is Anne Norton’s extraordinary book, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (2004), or at the very least Earl Shorris’ equally revealing “Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception” (Harper’s Magazine, June 2004). I believe that despite the elegance and thoroughness of his argument, Lewis Lapham’s essay falls far too short of answering Richard Hofstadter’s question—“When, in all our history, has anyone with ideas so bizarre, so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far.” I believe that we need to link the sorts of historicization that Lewis Lapham does in his fine essay to the larger frame of pre- and post-Orientalist knowledge production in order to reach for a clearer understanding of our present condition. Two sorts of mutually contradictory approaches in this respect are in my judgment counter-productive and will have to be surpassed: One is Douglas Little’s fine study American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (2004), and the other is Robert Irwin’s retrograde, missing-the-point Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents [aka For Lust of Knowing] (2006). While Douglas Little’s fine historical overview is weakened by a noticeable absence of theoretical precision on the nature of knowledge and power and thus lumps together and confuses the European Orientalist and the American post-Orientalist phases of Area Studies, Robert Irwin’s retrograde piece of memorabilia completely misses the boat and thinks exhuming the graves of some perfectly decent Orientalists who were not spies or were in fact pacifists is going to solve and absolve his predicament.7 Predicated on these studies, my argument is that in the most recent development in the evolving modes of knowledge production about Islam and “the Middle East” we have in fact entered a new epistemic, or counter-epistemic to be more exact, juncture. To ascertain the particulars of that counter-epistemic, we need to begin in the domain of the social construction of reality, and the coterminous creation of security studies departments as fifth columns within the universities. In conjunction with a wide spectrum of

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

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

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First Amendments rights do not extend to our campuses—a point made repeatedly by Bollinger. Primitivization of knowledge in U.S. think tanks and the corporatization of American universities are both coterminous with this development that I identify as epistemic endosmosis, in the sense that when we see a book written by someone like Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, while employed at the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, or another by Ray Takeyh, while a professor of national security studies at the National War College, or a professor and director of studies at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, or else a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, then the knowledge that these gentlemen and their respective books and articles (they have recently started in fact writing joint articles) produce about Shi’ism or Iran, while both employed by the U.S. military, through a process of endosmosis flows through the membrane of their PR firms and mass media access into the currents of public at large and helps in the social construction of reality about Islam, Iran, “the Middle East,” and if need be about Somalia, North Korea, Venezuela—anywhere that the U.S. military may need to engage in psychological operations at both the home front and on the battle zones. What we have witnessed in the famous case when the U.S. military commissioned a series of articles favorable to the U.S. military occupation of Iraq written by a PR firm in Washington DC, then translated into Arabic and placed in newspapers in Iraq9 is only a slightly exaggerated case of what Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh are doing in the United States. The epistemic endosmosis that I suggest as the most recent phase of knowledge production about the Middle East is not limited to the bizarre condition in which the U.S. military (through Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr and Ray Takeyh) produces knowledge and disseminates it as psych-op for general public consumption—effectively changing the critical discourse away from the U.S. responsibility for the mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq and blaming it on medieval sectarian hostilities among the natives. In this phase we have entered a mode of knowledge production that is no longer

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

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on a mono-polar imperial imaginary that produces disposable knowledge at the rate of one military adventurism after another, is the sign of a complete paradigmatic meltdown of disciplinary formalism in knowledge production, which amounts to the normative dissolution of disciplines, and above all an epistemic endosmosis in which the public is mobilized as a weapon of mass deception for one military project or another. From Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment of the fate of knowledge in American democratic populism early in the nineteenth century, down to Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s conception of the “culture industry,” to our own time and Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “the automatic writing of the world” (“the resolution of the world ahead of time by the cloning of reality and the extermination of the real by its double”),10 to Lyotard’s notion of “legitimation by paralogy,”11 all might be cited as the visionary prophecies of what has now come to pass. And yet: From the ashes of disciplinary death of the scholar as author, one might take one’s lead from Lyotard’s playful paralogy and suggest the birth of the critical thinker as auteur. In cinematic lingo, we refer to a filmmaker with a sustained record of a rich visual and performative idiomaticity as being an auteur. In that vein, we might here point to a constellation of contemporary thinkers ranging from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to Luce Irigaray, Avital Ronell, or Assia Djebar in whose work matters of Islam and “the Middle East” is beginning to sip through a similar act of endosmosis, and yet paramount in whose writings is a certain theoretical performativity, at once political and meta-political. Precisely in their formal destruction of disciplinary formalities, these auteurs point to the way in which from the epistemic dissolution of our disciplinary scholarship new modes of inquiry beyond Orientalism or Occidentosis, beyond the fake and falsifying binary of the East and the West, might in fact be emerging. The formal destructions and paralogical performativity in the theoretical idiomaticity of auteurs such as Gayatri Spivak or Avital Ronell are predicated on the epistemic breakthrough of scholars like Judith Butler, Zillah Eisenstein, Susan Willis, and Susan Buck-Morss who have

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successfully crossed the psychological barrier and begun valiantly to write about matters Islamic and “Middle Eastern” without being Islamist in their disciplinary training. The fact that all these thinkers as authors or auteurs in one way or another address the questions of women’s rights within the shifting epistemics of critical thinking in pre- and post- 9/11 wars of terror and terrorism at once roots them in the immediate materiality of their time and yet points to manners of emancipatory thinking yet beyond our horizons. Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The first draft of this chapter was delivered at a symposium, “The State of Middle East Studies: Knowledge Production in an Age of Empire,” organized by a group of graduate students at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University on 17 May 2007. I am grateful to the organizers of the symposium—Elif Babul, Chiara De Cesari, Aisha Ghani, Sima Shakhsari, and Rania Sweis—for having included me in this gathering. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University Of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1979]), 10 and 61. For Maureen Dowd’s column on this point see her “Neocon Coup at the Department d’État” (New York Times, 6 August 2003). Alfred Thayer Mahan used the term “the Middle East” first in an article, “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” which he published in September 1902 in National Review in London. See C.R. Koppes, “Captain Mahan, General Gordon and the origin of the term “Middle East.”“ Middle East Studies 1976: 12: p. 95-98. See also Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Jonathan Cole, “Academic Freedom under Fire” (Daedalus, Vol. 134, Issue 2—On Imperialism, Spring 2005): 5-17. See Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill—A Brief History,” in Harper’s Magazine (September 2004): 31. For my argument that they do not, see the details of my case study of Ignaz Goldziher in chapter 2. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. (London: The Penguin Press, 1967). For more details see Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane, “U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers,” (New York Times, 1 December 2005) “But far from being the heartfelt opinion of an Iraqi writer, as its language implied,” this report indicates about one such article, “the article was prepared by

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

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Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy

7 Towards a New Organicity “Exile is also…a metaphorical condition.”—Edward Said

Half way through his 1993 Reith Lectures on “Representations of the Intellectuals,” Edward Said proposes his principal argument in revising the Gramscian idea of the organic intellectual: While it is an actual condition, exile is also for my purposes a metaphorical condition…. Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those on the one hand who belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yea-sayers; and on the other hand, the nay-sayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honors are concerned.1

In this piece of self-theorization, Said proposes a certain necessary distance between the intellectual and the society at large, a distance that should enable the intellectual to keep an angular perspective on power and thus be able to speak the truth to it. On many other occasions and conversations, I have heard Edward Said talk about the revolutionary potential of an amphibian intellectual, someone who fluently traverses two or more interlacing environments. I have always thought that the idea of an “amphibian intellectual,” as Edward Said understood it, is a far more effective and liberating ideal-type than the notion of “dual marginality” with which social scientists tend to categorize the so-called “exilic” condition—a condition I find entirely useless for it is self-disenfranchising, 229

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

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twofold process of the particularization of the universal and the universalization of the particular,”2 the crucial task of the postcolonial intellectual is a locally articulated agenda of particular action that is universally informed. The task is extraordinarily critical. It does not mean abandoning the local (“national”) program of action as it is has been domestically articulated. It means that program of action should be articulated by a constitutionally postcolonial, postnational, intelligence that is globally located—at home in no longer being at home. The United States, as a “nation of immigrants,” and at the forefront of global and electronic capitalism, is perhaps the most natural birthplace of the postnational intellectual. Here is where global capitalism has the core of its nervous system and where the postnational condition is constitutional to the function of the intellectual. Precisely because of this extraordinary possibility, resistance to Edward Said’s idea of the amphibian intellectual are particularly acute in the United States. The single most important source of resistance to a new organic intellectual that Said has articulated and theorized in the wake of global capitalism is “nativism” of the most rampant sort. Nativism is now evident in two diametrically opposed, but ideologically complementary, sites. First is the dominant Eurocentric Americanism and second, reversing and complementing it, is the rampant tribalism of the so-called “ethnic minorities.” * * * First let us consider American nativism: Eurocentric Americanism has become the most ferocious force of conservative energy in the United States over the last few decades. At the very heart of global capitalism, Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the “Clash of Civilizations” is only the most widely noted example of a much wider range of conservative reaction that has now reached as far left as Richard Rorty. Under the entirely bogus and outdated concept of “Civilization,” and totally innocent of the most radical modifications of such grandiloquent claims on our credulity that kept nineteenth century sociologists like Émile Durkheim and Marcel

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

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

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as the anticipated consequence of Plato as he saw Napoleon as the anticipated consequence of Alexander the Great. Fukuyama and President George W. Bush were to update the fantasy. Fukuyama’s nativism assumes the disguise of a global universalism in which “the West” has won the historical game. With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet Union, “Western Liberalism” has universally proclaimed its victory over all its rival ideologies. Not only Marxist Socialism but all other potential claims to rival ideologies have equally lost to “the West,” according to Fukuyama’s vision of our present situation. Consider Islam, for example, as a potential rival to liberalism. This is Fukuyama’s assessment: It is true that Islam constitutes a systematic and coherent ideology, just like liberalism and communism, with its own code of morality and doctrine of political and social justice. The appeal of Islam is potentially universal, reaching out to all men as men, and not just to members of a particular ethnic or national group. And Islam has indeed defeated liberal democracy in many parts of the Islamic world.... The end of the Cold War in Europe was followed immediately by a challenge to the West from Iraq, in which Islam was arguably a factor.5

What today we call “Islam” is the historical outcome of a colonially ravaged people in search of an ideology of resistance. From the scattered memories of their ancestral faith Muslims have sought to narrate an ideology of resistance and then called it “Islam.” We cannot, as does Mr. Fukuyama, neglect the last two hundred years of imperialism and the havoc it has wrought on Muslims and then make a transcontinental leap that “Islam” is this, that, or the other thing. “Islam” is nothing except that which Muslims have actively imagined and institutionalized it to be. And Muslims have actively imagined and institutionalized their faith over the last two centuries under very specific historical circumstances, of which Fukuyama is either frightfully ignorant or deliberately dismissive. Islam has been an ideology of resistance as has socialism and nationalism, or any number of its amalgamated ventures. Constitutional to that resistance has been the material basis of opposing tyranny

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

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Democracy” come from the resentful Muslims building “Empires of Resentment,” and the paternalistic Japanese (Asians in general) who are combining “Western Capitalism” with “Eastern patrimonialism” in their construction of “Empires of Deference.”9 Muslims have lost the game, so they are resentful. Asians have joined the game, and they may steal the show. The pathology of Fukuyama’s diagnosis does not rest in his shameless identification of “the failure of Muslim societies generally to maintain their dignity vis-à-vis the non-Muslim West,”10 but in the extension of his diagnosis to include the disenfranchised communities inside the capitalist metropolis: Even in the United States, it is possible to see the beginning of new illiberal ideologies emerging as the distant result of different cultural attitudes towards economic activity. In the heyday of the civil rights movement, most American blacks aspired to complete integration into white society, implying a full acceptance of the dominant cultural values of American society…. Despite the abolition of legally sanctioned barriers to equality in the 1960’s, however, and the rise of a variety of affirmative action programs giving preference to blacks, a certain sector of the American black population not only failed to advance economically, but actually lost ground. One political result of persistent economic failure, however, is the now more frequently heard assertion that the traditional measures of economic success, such as work, education, and employment, represent not universal but “white” values. Rather than seeking integration in a color-blind society, some black leaders stress instead the need to take pride in distant Afro-American culture with its own history, traditions, heroes, and values, equal to but separate from the culture of white society.11

Here, Fukuyama is caught red-handed, with his blatant racism in full view, and here is where we can see the paralyzing anxiety of American conservative “nativism.” What Fukuyama tries to conceal under the inside-the-Beltway bureaucratic euphemism of “different cultural attitudes towards economic activity” is his conviction that African-Americans are constitutionally lazy, and that their problem is not historical disenfranchisement in the rise of American capitalist modernity but their “culture.” If African Americans are jobless, or lack education and training, it is not because of a constitutional racism at the very core of the American

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

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

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

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

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of the truth of the principles of natural rights and of their fundamental efficacy within the Constitutional tradition, which although tarnished, tends in the long run toward fulfilling those principles.14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The double-nightmare, in the no-time-zone of “exilic” self-pity, then leads into indulgence in a daytime at once translucent and vacuous: Separation from you [Naficy’s introduction is cast in the rhetorical device of a letter addressed to his parents in Iran. The device is effective, though

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at times breaching the limits of credulity] is in fact a series of separation, like links in a chain: separation from the earth—that dry, cruel, and yet nurturing earth of the homeland; separation from the fragrances of spices in bazaars and from the smell of urine on the mud walls outside mosques; separation from the native language and the control one has in using it—a control that is gradually diminishing; separation from childhood and from the places of childhood, separation from father, brothers, and sisters—strands that become thinner and more fragile from this position of exile, causing the tapestry of your faces to grow stark, faint, and threadbare.24

What jeremiad denials of life are these “narratives of exile”? No vision, no courage, no imagination of a life-affirming encounter with one’s material life (wherever it might be) is evident in these sad, sorrowful pages of misery. Collapsing into the abyss of such sorry sentiments degenerates into a metaphysics of identity crisis that is simply pre-modern in its underlying assumptions. For all the presumptuous postmodernity of their rhetorical devices, these so-called “narratives of exile” are positively medieval in their sentimental celebrations of an outdated crisis of identity, of such gross, historically untenable, binary oppositions presumed between “home” and “exile.” What exactly could be the purpose of such sentimental selfindulgence? Are we supposed to generate or expect sympathy in the world for missing some pissing ground of our hometown when in the years of civil war in the former Yugoslavia millions of Bosnians and now Kosovars have fled their homeland, many of them the brutalized victims of rape, mayhem, carnage, torture, and of barbaric Serbian concentration camps? What could be the relative significance of an “exilic narrative” whose most memorable trope is being homesick for the smell of turmeric and saffron in a bazaar in Isfahan or Tehran when on a daily basis we witness the plight of thousands of Haitian refugees robbed of their most elementary human rights, on our television screens, escaping the brutal social and economic consequences of one military coup after another? More than a million Rwandans, in an unimaginable state of destitution and despair escape immanent massacre in their homeland and stampede their way into Goma,

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

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and raised, we have Iranians joining the Republican Party, or adding their voices to those of the neocons. Problems ranging from unconscionable poverty to dehumanizing racism to homelessness, debate over national health or immigration laws now deeply concern everyone who lives in the United States. As the most recent flock of immigrants, where do we stand on all these vital issues, what do we want, whom do we support, when do we speak, and what exactly is the configuration of our collective presence? Is joining the Republican Party or staying home and watching those wretched television programs of which Naficy writes or else writing about the streets and alleys and walls on which we used to urinate when we were kids going to be the extent of our public awareness in the face of monumental events that face all of us as mere objects of economic production and consumption irrespective of a massive trail of poverty and injustice that it leaves behind? The fact is that with few exceptions the overwhelming majority of Iranians living outside Iran can get on an airplane and return to their homeland and there lead a half-decent life not particularly worse or better than what they lead in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, London, or Paris. This is not the case with millions of Palestinians, Bosnians, Kosovars, Haitians, Rwandans, Afghans, or Iraqis. * * * This exilic condition extends well into the making of nativist ethnic intellectuals. So far the Iranian intellectuals abroad have failed miserably to liberate themselves either from the inane sentimentality of missing one spot or another of their hometown or else repeating ad nauseum their intellectually retarded manner of political opposition to the Islamic Republic. Judged by the deeply corrupt, frightfully outmoded, and irremediably dictatorial disposition of the so-called “Opposition” to the Islamic Republic outside Iran—from the retinue idly gathered around the late Shah’s son to a cacophony of constitutionally fascist political cells and all-boys-clubs day-dreaming about taking power in Iran—there is no indication that living outside the dictatorial and totalitarian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is inaccurate. The naming of North Africa as “Maghrib” (the West), meaning to the west of the Islamic Civilization, with first

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

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

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

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

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diagnosis of our “regard mutilé,” Shayegan gives us a checklist of perpetrators for us to hold responsible for “the social foundation of the distortions.” Who are they? First the “Intellectuals” who not only cannot read French like Shayegan does but cannot even have translated for them a half-decent text (chapter 1 of book four). Second are the “Ideologues” who having been on the sideline of “History” now are plagiarizing “the Western” ideas by procurement (chapter 2 of book four). Third come the “Technocrats” who lack the coherence of both intellectuals and ideologues and thus attend to our attempted re-entry into “History” as “splintered fragments of desire, scattered packages of awareness, crumbs of contradictory wishes pulling this way and that, right and left, each in its own direction” (chapter 3 of book four).42 And finally come the ayatollahs, the “Strategists of God” who defy “the planetary triumph of laicism”43 and stubbornly wish a return back to “A World in which Nothing Moves,”44 that is to say to get back to yet another “Holiday from History.” * * * What we are witnessing here is no simple historical amnesia in which, as Said has pointed out,45 self-loathing Orientals are so deeply colonized in their mind and imagination that in effect they side with their conquerors. Here, we have a historical updating of the “native informer” who this time around not only “informs” the colonial officer of the predicament of the colonial subject but actually presides over an interpretation of his malignancy. As a sign of the catastrophic consequences of theoretical nativism, compare the language and disposition of Daryush Shayegan with the insurrectionary spirit of Gayatri Spivak and her appropriation of an entirely different conception of the “native informant.” Despite its constitutionally flawed mis-appellation, the subject “native informant” is nevertheless revolutionized in the pages of Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: “I think of the ‘native informant’ as a name for that mark of expulsion from the name of Man—a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation.”46 Here, Spivak alters the subservient positioning of the

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

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the “native” is “the site of unlisted traces,”48 Spivak’s is thus the historical task of listing the unlisted, and that not by branding the triumvirate domination of our state of being—Kant-HegelMarx—as “motivated imperialists,” but by reading the history of our presence in the shadow of their absences, their lapses of memory, their presumptions to represent. Spivak has a far more ambitious project to succumb to empty anti-imperialist bickering. Hers is the manifesto of a whole new dimension given to freedom: “A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other.”49 There is a direct link between Spivak’s reclaiming of the global locality and the rise of a new organicity in the making of the postcolonial intellectual. Edward Said’s conception and practice of an exilic intellectual, Bhabha’s hesitant but nevertheless useful unpacking of the split personae of hybridity, but far more effectively Spivak’s re-appropriation of the rebellious “native informant” are all the insignia of an emancipatory will to resist power and to effect global change. The experience of Iranian intellectuals outside their homeland is an apt example of utter misery, debilitating ressentiment, and distasteful bitterness. In his character and work, Edward Said theorized and exemplified an intellectual of amphibious presence in multiple cultural settings, while the Iranians discussed above are the best example of dual marginality, irrelevant at home, doubly useless in exile, squandering their energy and talents in pitiful rivalries and banal backbiting. Historically trapped, universally speechless, culturally self-ghettoizing, morally mute, and intellectually parochial, Iranian intellectuals in exile exemplify an amoebic life, incapable of zooming out of their claustrophobic close-ups, and casting a fresh and life affirming look at the long shot of the open air. The task is not to create yet another intellectual ghetto. The task is to occupy and redefine the center, and thus eliminate the fabricated peripheries. The more we crawl back into the suffocating air of yet another peripheral dungeon, the more the center is left vacant to be defined by the Huntingtons, Fukuyamas, and

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

3.

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

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

13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

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

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

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

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

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

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Al-e Ahmad 1984, 34. Al-e Ahmad 1984, 36. Al-e Ahmad 1984, 36. Al-e Ahmad 1984, 37. Said 1990, 82. For the latest version see Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See Daryush Shayegan, Le Regard Mutilé: Schizophrénie culturelle: Pays traditionelles face á la modernité (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1989). For an English translation see Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West (London: Saqi Books, 1992). Shayegan is not alone in his deeply colonized subjectivity. Daryush Ashuri is equally critical of our failures to catch up with “Western” modernity. These sorts of assessments are not limited to Iranians. For their Arab counterpart see Fatima Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1992). Quite independently of each other, but being birds of the same feather, Shayegan and Mernissi both choose the image of the “Mutilated Modernity” as their preferred self-Orientalizing trope. Shayegan 1992, 12-15. Shayegan 1992, 12. Shayegan 1992, 150-151. Shayegan 1992, 157. Shayegan 1992, 159. See Said 1984, 119, footnote 4 in which Said singles out Shayegan’s text as a typical example of the self-loathing disease of blaming the victims: “The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War’s destructive results. We Arabs and Muslims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted” (119). Spivak 1999, 6. Spivak 1999, 6. Spivak 1999, 6. Spivak 1999, 7. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, two volumes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926-1928), Volume One, 3.

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Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy

Conclusion Changing the Interlocutor “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? The who the hell else are you talking to?. . . .”—Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

3.

4.

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

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Philosophical Dimensions of Public Policy

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

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

epistemic endosmosis, 213-215, 222-224 Fanon, Frantz, 167, 197-199, 202 Foucault, Michel, “age of reason,” 169-170 and Orientalism, 157 knowledge and power, 73 Madness and Civilization, 169-170 theory of power, 133-134 Freudenberg, Mária, 58-60, 68 Fukuyama, Francis, 233-237, 240-241, 261 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 101 Gay, Peter, 241-242

Habermas, Jürgen, 137-138, 165 Hadith scholarship, 22-25, 82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm F, 139-143, 258, 167, 233, 260 hegemony, 90, 106, 150-152, 162, 186188, 211-214, 232 Heller, Bernard, 36, 63-64, 67 Herzl, Theodore, 53, 56-57, 63 historiography, 145, 147-148, 158-159, 163 Hofstadter, Richard, 188 Hungarian Jewry, 61-64 Huntington, Samuel, 231-233, 237, 261

283

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intellectuals, amphibian, 230 “culture of idleness,” 7 exilic condition, 5-6, 9-14, 251-263 in the United States, 1-3, 4, 6 Jewish, 6-7 organic, 13, 229-231 professionalization, 3-4, 7-8 social function, 11-12 Iranian-Americans, 247-249 Iranshahr, Hossein Kazemzadeh, 77-80 Iraq War, 191-193, 210-211 Islamic mysticism, see Sufism Islamic Revolution, 174-178 Islamic Studies, anthropomorphism, 87-89 Goldziher’s influence, 20-31 historical view, 234-235 intellectual history, 28-29, 35-36, 57, 83, 86-95, 99, 100 Jacoby, Russell, 3, 6-7 Kant, Immanuel, 167-169 Khatami, Mohammad, 237-238 Kuhn, Thomas, 99-102 Lapham, Lewis, 188-189, 219 Lewis, Bernard, 71-72, 97-98 Mahabharata, 144-145 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 211-212 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 155, 172-173, 176-178 Malcolm X, 199-201 Mannheim, Karl, 95-97 “Mariska,” see Freudenberg, Mária McCarthyism, 2-3 Middle East Studies, academic state, 210-211 literature, 220-221 teaching, 215-218 Naderi, Amir, 256-259 Nafisi, Azar, Reading Lolita in Tehran, 189-190 narratives of exile, 250-255 nativism, 231-238, 243-244 Newman, John Henry, 243-245

Orientalism, 24 criticism, 30-31 Orientalist studies, 18, 20 origins, 77-79 problems, 91-94 Qazvini’s view, 75-77 view of Islam, 86-88 worldliness, 92-93, 96-97 Orientalism (book), see Said, Edward Palestinians, 158-159 Pasha, Riyad, 48 Patai, Raphael, comments on Vámbéry, 52-55 psychological portrait of Goldziher, 32-33, 35, 38, 41-44, 52, 58-69 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 244-245 Persia, 140-142, 148-149 post-colonialism, 127-133, 158-161 Project for the New American Century, 190-191 propaganda, 186-190 Protestant ethics, 6-7 Qazvini, Mohammad, 73-80 revolutionaries, 185-206 Robbins, Bruce, 3-4 Rorty, Richard, 13-14, 246 Said, Edward, death, 156 Orientalism, book’s influence, 102-104 goal, 163-165 on Ignaz Goldziher, 81-89 reactions, 70-73, 92-96, 156-160 Representations of the Intellectuals, 1, 4-7, 229-231 subaltern voice, 125, 133-134 theories of exilic intellectuals, 9-14 sati, 129-133 Sayyad, Parviz, 254 Scheiber, Alexander, 32-33 Scheler, Max, 95-98 Shari’ati, Ali, 201-204 sociology of knowledge, 96-102 Somogyi, Joseph de, 68 Sorel, George, 166-167

Index “sovereign subject,” 124-127, 134-135, 138-139 Soviet Union, collapse, 215 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 124128, 159 criticism on Said, 134-135, 170-172 “worker’s struggle,” 128 Stardom Syndrome, 7-9 subaltern voice (studies), 124-133, 135, 139, 143-144, 149-152, 159-165 Sufism, 25 Taqizadeh, Seyyed Hassan, 77 terrorism, 187-188, 224-226

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think tanks, 188-189, 219, 222-223 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1-3 tribalism, 247 universities, 243-246 Vámbéry, Armenius, 43, 51-57, 68-79 violence, 165-166 Waardenburg, Jacques, 85-87 Wahrmann, Moritz, 50-51 Weber, Max, 6-7 Weizmann, Chaim, 33 Western subject, 127-128, 235-237 Wolffsohn, David, 56 Wolfowitz, Paul, 209-210