The ‘war on terror’ and the backlash against Orientalism

Abstract

The last few years have witnessed a vigorous backlash against Orientalism. Edward Said’s most influential work has been accused of sweeping denunciations of Western scholarship about the Orient as well as knee-jerk anti-Americanism and even covert support for terrorism and radical Islam. His critical stance on Western colonialism and especially Zionism meant that Said was no stranger to abuse and misrepresentation, from Edward Alexander’s coinage of the epithet ‘professor of Terror’1 to Justus Weiner’s baseless claim that he had invented his status as a Palestinian and a refugee. Said’s argument in Orientalism is, of course, that the purportedly disinterested study of the Orient frequently perpetuates age-old prejudices about the East that make it easier to denigrate the region and justify its domination. However over-determined its reception was by specifically academic and institutional trends, Orientalism’s confrontational tone and its appearance in the late 1970s along with its author’s forthright advocacy of the Palestinians’ national aspirations meant the book was soon caught up in the passionate ideological disagreements surrounding the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, Israel’s accelerating expansionism after the 1967 war and the election of the first Likud government in 1977, and the general audibility of the Arab and Islamic worlds. In short, this was a book pitched into the tented field of political controversy.