Allah and Man at Columbia

...Shall we then stop reading Nietzsche, or at least stop taking him seriously...

...When reading a philosopher seriously we are honor-bound to suspect that he is right...

...We must content ourselves with the realization that we already know that a good case can be made for Communism...

...The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West," he has written, "particularly in America, is disheartening...

...These comprise as formidable an expression of the Palestinian Arab point of view as exists in the English language...

...All those things that might make Professor Said happy--inquisitive Columbia sophomores...

...Bowing this time to one Raymond Williams, Said says that this will advance the " 'unlearning' of the 'inherent dominative mode'"-presumably, a good thing...

...He received his early schooling there and, after life for an Arab in Jerusalem became uncomfortable in the forties, in Egypt...

...In the years to come, Said would join the Palestine National Council...

...So honored, and still so young . . . was Said bored...

...Was his consciousness raised by the Arab oil embargo of the winter of 1973-74...

...On the other hand we have an assortment of Arab leaders, each uncertain of the range and depth of his own dominion, each worried about being one-upped by his neighbor...

...He rolls out the jargon, referring to such things as "intertextuality," "enormous technical advances in detailed textual analysis," the failure of literary scholars and American Marxist theorists to bridge "the gap between the superstructural and the base levels on textual, historical scholarship," "mere unconditioned ratiocination," and, most marvelous of all, "the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture...

...to al-Madinah and Mecca, and Gerard de Nerval's Voyage en Orient--and although he offers qualified admiration of all three, he feels ultimately compelled to disapprove of them as suffering from the Orientalist taint...

...While in its treatment of the native Arab population it is true that Israel is a colonial settler-state and resembles South Africa, it is also manifestly the case, as I said earlier, that any total similarity between Jews and Afrikaaners is simply not a true one...

...Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, rest.ructuring, and having authority over the Orient...

...This is a remarkably obtuse observation...

...He fails because he does not himself seem to be much interested in his material except as it happens to support his thesis that nearly everything written by Westerners about the Near East is tainted by colonialist, imperialist, Orientalist bias...

...This is obviously true of the literary pilgrims, beginning with Chateaubriand, who found in the Orient a locale sympathetic to their private myths, obsessions, and requirements...

...Nietzsche has much to teach us, including, and especially, things about intellectual probity...

...His first book was Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography...

...And what of Professor Said's analytical powers...

...And it is hardly as if the Orient were alone in being blessed, or cursed, with literary travelers bearing prejudicial baggage--think of Voltaire in England, Goethe in Italy, Byron in Greece, Dickens in America, Dr...

...In the first place most writers worth reading customarily make it a practice to explore and then use (exploit...

...That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood...

...That travel books should not be written...

...Said could afford to devote more time to their children, who doubtless suffer from the nationalistic schizophrenia Professor Said has described...

...Sinai is back in Egypt, the Golan Heights now officially Israeli...

...The Heights of Morningside, on the island of Manhattan, are quite unlike the Hills of Judea, in the land of Israel...

...In the case of both of them we have nothing to gain and much to lose by refusing to think their thoughts through as deeply as we can...

...Upper West Side Chinese restaurants, the protection of the Constitution of the United States-have failed to pinch a smile out of him...

...they should not have been made to suffer for the crimes of Hitler...

...the writings of Theodor Herzl, the Balfour Declaration, the machinations of the Jewish Agency, and the Western powers that helped to create Israel must be viewed in this context...

...there must be--in the absence of a binational state--a Palestinian state including Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza...

...For another, they are far more heavily populated by the youthful denizens of academia--to be precise, the huddled scholars of Columbia and Barnard Colleges, so many of them hot in pursuit of knowledge and yet trying to keep cool by wearing T-shirts in search of a laundromat...

...We find balderdash about "Zionist apartheid...

...They do not yield what is precious without forcing us'to consider what is pernicious...

...If the person one commands is stupid and unable to take care of himself, if he is one of Aristotle's natural slaves, no "pathos of distance" can come into play...

...for I will certainly deliver the Philistines into thy hand...

...He began to publish...

...BegM, obviously intent on fudging his way toward permanent Israeli dominion over the West Bank and unafraid to bang hig Bible on the table if challenged...

...Without doubt he is himself a true philistine, endlessly sniffing his way through works of literature in hopes of exposing the cultural imperialism that has inspired Westerners to look lustfully upon belly dancers...

...III The late Golda Meir was surelybeing a bit crotchety when in 1969 she declared that the Palestinians did not exist...

...To study both Nietzsche and Marx is to realize that it is impossible for both to be right, though it is indeed possible that both are wrong...

...And, ff so, why...

...they still identify themselves as being 'from' Shafa'Amr or Jerusalem or Tiberias...

...To study these men today is to encounter the pain that is part of the way to the pleasure of being liberally educated...

...that sort of equation has been reserved for 'Islam.'" Unfortunately, these spasms of lucidity come too seldom...

...The two of them could plot the overthrow of the Begin dictatorship and plan the future of Palestinian literature...

...Life is tough, even with tenure...

...Never mind that one of Pro...

...Of course no one has equated the Jonestown massacre or the destructive frenzy produced at the Who concer~ in Cincinnati or the devastation of Indochina with Christianity, or with Western or American culture at large [he's wrong on the last count, and he need look no further than the works of his pal Chomsky for proof...

...I, for one, must insist on my right-to maintain a more complex view of things than the professor from Morningside Heights would permit me--to be charmed, for example, by the singing of Fayrouz but not by the speeches of President Hafez Assad, whose troops now trot across milady's Lebanon...

...ity is partial, or that the false similarity is total...

...Beneath the brusque manners are often to be found shrewd minds and large hearts...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982...

...David did as instructed and the results were impressive: The Israelites "smote the Philistines from Geba until thou come to Gezer...

...indeed, it is exposed as such by many of the writings quoted by Professor Said, in which "irreducible opposition" is quite clearly not the position assumed...

...In practice today it means +the Gulag Archipela'go, the spread of barbarism, and darkness at noon...

...That old Orientalist, God, seems to have had typically ambivalent feelings about the Philistines...

...What is one to do with someone who would call R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...We find gnarled comparisons on the same theme...

...Orientalism and Covering Islam have in common the theme that Westerners tend to view the people of the Near East with a racist attitude...

...Before Professor Said came along to label this process "justification of existential vocation" it was more simply designated "insph-ation" and "research...

...IV How keeps the peace...

...There is of course the danger that Begin's narrow coalition might fall, that his policy might clarify, or that some other democratic inconvenience might reveal the conspicuous futility of Professor Said's indignation...

...In the three hundred pages that follow, it becomes evident that Professor Said is a genuinely learned man...

...For Nietzsche, the master has to realize the uncanny arbitrariness which places him in command and forces the slaves to obey...

...Finally, Professor Said fails to make crucial distinctions...

...The most terrifying thing about the pasgage is Nietzsche's unflinching call for conventional slavery...

...The argument is familiar: The Palestinians were dealt a raw hand...

...racist" and "slanderous" for gently advancing the thesis that Arabs are not like Philadelphians...

...Those territories precious to the Palestinian Arabs-the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem--remain in doubt...

...Professor Said's enthusiasm for the good works of Ramsey ("genuinely interested in exchange") Clark is also disconcerting...

...is it Professor Said's point that writers should stay home...

...He cooks up three categories of books about the Orient...

...The answer is plain enough though discomforting...

...According to Mayor Elias Freij of Bethlehem, one of the more intelligent Pales...

...Having acknowledged as much, l cannot excuse Professor Said's flailing away ~ la Andy Young...

...for, in having to take up a position of irreducible hostility to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience...

...The nineteenth-century French pilgrims," he notes at one point, "did not seek a scientific so much as an exotic yet especially attractive reality...

...The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny...

...There are those who admire him and thus refuse to admit he had anything to do with Fascism, and there are those who denounce him as a Fascist and thus refuse to concede that he has anything worthwhile to teach...

...A social climber he obviously is n o t . II Orientalism opens with a benighted, boring introduction wherein the theme of "cultural imperialism" is belabored for 28 pages...

...Nietzsche tends to divide his critics into two camps...

...We find this politicized analysis applied to the behavior of children...

...J u s t think: Professor Said could 1oll around the cafes of Haifa with Emile Habibi...

...The students on Morningside Heights are apt to fall under the tutelage of Professor Edward W. Said, who would rather be in the Hills of Judea, in the land he calls Palestine...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 15 History has advanced to the point where Israel's honest friends ought to admit there is some truth in this line of thought, even as Israel's adversaries ought to admit that the Jewish State is a special case among the nations of the modern w o r l d . . , but I am dreaming of a more reasonable planet...

...After all, Armenian children do not behave in this way...

...Here we notice how all the pilgrims, but especially the French ones, exploit the Orient in their work so as in some urgent way to justify their existential vocation...

...In pursuit of the Orientalist mentality he read through the works of countless scholars and writers-everyone from Gerard de Nerval to Syivestre de Sacy, from Flaubert to Marx...

...Orientalism is highly highbrow, a critical examination of literary and scholarly texts from recent centuries...

...For many years Professor Said seemed to be content with his lot...

...We find American peacemaking efforts between 1974 and 1977 denounced as "astonishingly destructive and irresponsible...

...I concur in the professor's complaint that Arabs have too often been given the fisheye by Westerners in need of scapegoats...

...By some standards we are perhaps an unexceptional people," Professor Said has confessed...

...Though born and raised a Jew, I have nevertheless derived much pleasure from association with Arabs, both in my travels and in my home town of Detroit, which features the largest concentration of Arabs in America...

...from Princeton, his M.A...

...And indeed there.is...

...That only sociologists should write about foreign countries...

...But is it not fair to call anybody who so forthrightly and with such abandon offers the many as cannon fodder for a few a Fascist...

...And there is a third distinctive difference...

...Let him fly...

...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 The final section of Orientalism and the whole of Covering Islam are more forthrightly polemical in intent than the earlier sections of Orientalism...

...The United States, after all, isn't to everybody's taste, what with all the racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, and dehumanizing ideology...

...Then he came to America, finding his way almost immediately to the right places and hooking up with the right people...

...Professor Said explains that "Palestinians have a sense of detail and reality through using the patterns of an acutely concrete spacetime conflation...

...He misunderstands the ambivalence of Westerners gazing Eastward, and sees hostility where there is often only confusion...

...After all, Aristotle took care to distinguish between natural and conventional slavery, primarily defending the former variety...

...And--who knows?--with his gift for unique phrasemaking, Professor Said might orate his way right into the Knesset...

...What is so racist about that...

...It really isn't a good idea to let your children run around the streets of New York telling people they're from Jerusalem...

...At his best he reminds me of Edmund Wilson at his worst: too damned dialectical for his own good...

...We find, Nasser's warmaking seemingly preferred to Sadat's peacemaking, and Egypt's historic identity ignored: Nasser"made Egypt the focus of the Arab world, whereas in having lost its Arab aura, Sadat's Egypt has become a large, nondescript country rather like Nigeria or Brazil...

...Mitchell S. Ross ALLAH AND MAN AT COLUMBIA Edward Said is a rare bird, a free man yearning to be tyrannized...

...the Palestinians will also remain...

...We are approaching a state of irresolution that can be formulated as a clichg...

...Why not...

...In the closing paragraph of Orientalism he writes, "I consider Orientalism's failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one...

...Johnson in Scotland...

...Similarly, the reality of Hitler should not deprive us of the wisdom of Nietzsche...

...At one point He dispatched them to wage "sore war" against the errant Israelites, but He later allowed Samson to thrash them with His blessing...

...and Ph.D...

...He is certain of only two things: "The Jews of Israel will remain...

...some redress is required...

...We are unable to live with Nietzsche and we are unable to live without him...

...As of now, one word must'once more stand for a decisive answer: Auschwitz...

...He is a strange bird, now free but yearning for a cage he can call home...

...In The Question of Palestine Said comes to the point, confesses the deep yearning he and his fellow exiles feel for their lost land, and asks what can be done about it...

...If Professor Said has failed in the pursuit of happiness here, would it not be better for him to go home...

...He resolves, finally, to work for the elimination of "Orient" and "Occident...

...Professor Said's critical method is severely restricted by his relentless and deeply humorless search for racists--in the closet, under the bed, and in the open air...

...tinian Arabs, the stalemate favors Israel...

...most recent book...

...Are we being overly optimistic to hofae they will disappear...

...He earned his B.A...

...But where Wilson would usually redeem himself by focusing finally on the author and text athand, Professor Said ties his analysis to his theme...

...They are rather meaningless and I won't bother to recite them...

...The defining character, istic of Palestinian history," according to Professor Said, is "its traumatic national encounter with Zionism...

...Did the news of Egyptian troops crossing the Bar-Lev line inspire him...

...Let us then think of why we "can't live without him...

...The ideology behind the argument is also familiar: Zionism was an offshoot of European imperialism...

...There he and Begin could go at it, man to man, with Begin quoting the Bible and Professor Said quoting Orienta/isra...

...What holds him back...

...When the New York Times explains a surprisingly strong Iranian resistance to Iraq's incursion," he writes, "it resorts to formula about the ' S h i ' a penchant for martyrdom.'" In the same spirit he soundly dismisses the tendency to blame Islam for the assorted perversions of Ruhollah Khomeini's gang...

...So that's it...

...This is nonsense...

...Does Professor Said have a point...

...For one thing, they are shorter...

...We look to Columbia's Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature for moral illumination, and what do we find...

...Every day that passes sees new settlements," he notes, "and in ten years there will be nothing left for the Palestinians to talk a b o u t . " But how are the lsraelis permanently to absorb the Arab population of these territories and retain the Jewish character so essential to Israel's spiritual survival ? Back in these States, Professor Said broods on...

...And yet, sadly, all his erudition does not seem to have made him very wise...

...Perhaps the professor can redirect his energies...

...Does Professor Said mean that the true similar...

...His second, Beginnings: Intention and Method, caused a crisis in Said's academic trophy case: In 1976, it won the first annual Lionel Trilling Award...

...Some day, if Professor Said and his brethren work hard enough, they may well get themselves a state o f their own, and I'm sure it will be a very nice little state indeed--probably quite similar to Syria, with all the fabulous features (minus Krak des Chevaliers) of that great nation, and with a President Arafat providing Palestine with the same inspirational leadership that President Assad now provides Syria...

...All in all there are more than seven hundred pages of prose packed into these three volumes, enough for Professor Said to deserve recognition as a hero of his people, regardless of whether or not they manage to get back any of their land...

...Indeed, Professor Said's own assessment of the Iranian revolution borders on the bizarre, as when he comments that the doings in Tehran and environs up until mid-1980 should be seen as an "extremely fluid, actually quite open political struggle' '--yes, there was plenty of bloodshed for all to see...

...Said is silent...

...lessor Said's favorite Palestinian writers, Emile Habibi, strolls as a free man through the city of Haifa after serving twenty years as a member of the Knesset, during which time his vote was weighted equally with that of the hated Begin...

...All signs pointed to a distinguished career in the bureaucracy of English t e a c h e r s , and, indeed, Said was soon at Columbia, learning the art of rigorous and tedious criticism from the g r e a t master, Lionel Trilling...

...intriguing people and places in their work...

...Palestine in Arabic is Filastin, and, even with full allowance made for the cross-breeding of camels and the infusions of Koranic wisdom over the years, it is hardly radical to contend that the modern Palestinians derive from the ancient Philistines, who figure prominently in the Biblical Books of .Judges and First and Second Samuel...

...Intellectual probity precludes that choice...

...On the one hand we have a character such as Dr...

...sive s t a t e s - in brief simply the enhancement of the type "'man," the continual "self-overcoming of man," to use a moral formula in a supramoral sense "The matchless eloquence and unquestionable yearning for excellence should not blind anybody to the fact that here Nietzsche opts for slavery, in a more ruthless way than could ever be attributed to the ancients by their most mean-spirited critics...

...In theory, though, it means the study of Marx and, before him, of Hegel...

...These categories are epitomized by three books-Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modem Egyptians, Richard Burton's Pilgrimage...

...He has, after all, cashiered the cachet that accompanied his early fame as a brave young knight in Lord Lionel's critical circle in favor of becoming a scholarly servitor of Arafatism...

...Israel itself displays imperialistic appetites when it annexes conquered territory and treats Palestinian Arabs as second-class citizens...

...What can be done...

...What are we to do when engaging a thinker with a Fascist hue about him...

...from Harvard, and even managed, at Harvard, to cop the fabled Bowdoin Prize...

...Said wrings his hands for several pages, worrying about whether to set himself up as ideologue or critic...

...There is merely a difference in tastes--not an intrinsic difference--between Chateaubriand's use of the Orient and his stay-athome contemporary Balzac's use of Paris in their respective writings...

...the land was theirs (the Old Testament be damned...

...He tries to reassure the Jews that he is really on their side...

...What is certain, however, is that in the mid-t970s the Parr Professor of English and Comparative L i t e r a t u r e , his THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 13 tenure at Columbia secure, began to devote less time to the critical illumination of George Eliot and more time to the struggle against Zionism...

...Palestinian children today are born in such places as New York or Amman...

...We do not and should not let the reality of Stalinism deprive us from learning what those titans have to teach us...

...Covering Islam is a contemporary polemic, focusing on the fatuities of the press in its coverage of the recent Iranian unpleasantness...

...Uneasily, but it keeps...

...Lovers of English literature would forgive him his departure, I am sure...

...He was born in .jerusalem (,Jerusalem, Palestine, as it says in the "about the author" section of his Mitchell S. Ross is author o f The Literary Politicians andAn Invitation to Our Times...

...He would also compose a trilogy of indignant books: Orienta/ism (Pantheon, 1978), The Question of Palestine (Times Books, 1979), ;and Covering Islam (Pantheon, 1981...

...One would have thought it a worthwhile effort to report in detail what it means for a country's national existence, after decades of severe oppression, to have a dozen political parties vying for influence and power, relatively free of torture and imprisonment"--relative to the Third Reich and the Gulag Archipelago, perhaps...

...The days of yore don't figure in his calculations, however obvious the parallels...

...Do they really...

...He bows to Michel Foucault and to Noam Chomsky...

...To take Nietzsche seriously is to admit that there is a case to be made for Fascism...

...By contrast Nietzsche avoids any recourse to justification by nature, which his whole philosophy renders dubious anyhow...

...Current Palestinian patriots seem reluctant to affiliate themselves with those ancient losers...

...If the critic's task is to evoke interest--positive, negative, ambivalent--in what he is analyzing (and I think it is), Said fails consistently...

...When in The Question of Palestine he turns his attention to one of the central political issues of our time, he leaves us wondering whether we had best regard him as a prophet working with a weak voice or a critic working with a weak text...

...I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism...

...Surely the struggle for liberation could better be carried out in Palestine proper, even if it means enduring the Israeli yoke in the short term...

...Yet we are unable to embrace Fascism...

...I am sure that he and Mrs...

...Soon after his anointment as king, David asked the Lord to advise in the matter of the Philistines and was told, "Go up...

...Whose side is time on...

...Professor Said has some blessed moments here, particularly when he notes the self-enchantment and ignorance of the American press...