HISTORY GONE WRONG? 415These thugs see themselves as entitled, first as men, then as soldiers in
the cause.
The most striking aspect of the Algerian fundamentalist campaign is
its rapidity—how litde time it took to turn the clock back centuries."My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains... boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.Orientalists and Essentialists
Scholarly emotions run high on Middle Eastern matters. Readers and
audiences know the answers in advance. Debates, often angry or
sullen, are anything but debates. No one is ready to check his gun at
the door; it may be needed. Among the casus belli: the Arab-Israeli
conflict; European economic imperialism, formal and informal; and
Western criticisms (hence slanders) of Arab or Islamic culture,
especially the treatment of women.
In these circumstances, much of the debate has taken the form of
name-calling. The purpose (or effect) of these labels is to marginalize
or exclude the adversary. He is a ... (fill in the classifier). Nothing
more need be said.
The most influential of these dismissive strikes has been the
invention of "orientalism." This is the sin of writing about Asia, but
especially the Middle East, from the outside, that is, from the
standpoint of the condescending, hostile, exploitative West. Attacks
on the once respectable fascination with things Eastern go back at
least to the 1960s; but it was the publication in 1978 of Edward
Said's book of this name (Orientalism) that gave the charges
currency and called into question most Western writing on the
Middle East.^35 The bill of indictment ran as follows:
- Studies by outsiders distort the subject of inquiry by turning
persons into objects. These objects are by definition ripe for
manipulation and domination. For Said, such systems as orientalism
are "discourses of power, ideological fictions—mind-forg'd
manacles."