(^416) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
- Such pseudo-scholarship tends to stereotype in time and space.
"Orientals"—the very designation is a Eurocentric imposition—are
the same through the ages, and this essential sameness results from a
perdurable Islam that "never changes." Hence the intellectual
fellow-disease of "essentialism." Orientalists have no room for
details, nuances, or texture. - Stereotyping lends itself to racism and prejudice. It separates
one group from another, promotes arrogance on one side,
resentment on the other. If we could get rid of "the Orient," we
would have "scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom
the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions [are] less important than
the common enterprise of promoting human community."^36
One can hardly quarrel with lofty sentiments, but sentiments are
not enough. The effort to purge the field of these factitious diseases
has become an assault on knowledge. In the first place, the anti-
"orientalist" method would exclude indispensable tools of inquiry.
As any good comparativist knows, distinctions are the stuff of
understanding. The anti-"orientalist" cannot have it both ways—
denounce, that is, the pursuit of distinctive characteristics as
"essentialist," while calling for an understanding of intergroup
differences. It is this understanding that turns diversity into a sense
of common humanity.
Ironically, those very "orientalists" so roundly condemned here—
those philologists, archeologists, and travelers, sand-smitten
Westerners in Middle Eastern garb—were desperately in love with
the Arab Muslim world. Some of them were searching for paradise
lost. To quote from an epigraph to a recent book: "The attraction,
the spell of Arabia, as it is so frequently called, is a sickness of the
imagination."^37 Today these orientalists are reproved as pretentious,
racist imperialists. So much for their romance: no kindly sentiment
goes unpunished. They were sincere? So what? Sincerity is the
cheapest of virtues.
Secondly, the reality of nuance does not rule out the light that
comes from generalization. Everything, to be sure, is more complex
than appears. Every person, every event is unique. Even so, some
effort must be made to simplify, to find patterns. Otherwise we have
nothing but a grab bag of unrelated data.
Thirdly, bad news is not necessarily wrong. Substantive
observations may cast an unfavorable light, but such evidence must
be judged on its merits, not dismissed as a priori falsehood. That way
lies self-censorship and dereliction of duty. Much of the anti-