How do we know what we think we know about Islam and the Arabs? Movies and novels have long been a rich source of misinformation and eloquent prejudice. Novels like Eric Ambler's The Levanter, Frederick Forsyth's The Key to Rebecca and Daniel Easterman's The Last Assassin, as well as films like Cast a Giant Shadow, Jewel of the Nile and Operation Condor have fed on and refuelled such prejudice. Arabs and Muslims commonly feature as terrorists, religious fanatics, drug dealers, pimps and so on. In the course of the last 50 years or so they have replaced the Nazis as hand-me-down villains. Films in which Arab points of view are realistically and sympathetically presented, such as David O Russell's political action film Three Kings (1999), set in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf war, are hard to find.
The presentation of Islam by Muslim apologists, on the other hand, has little appeal for non-believers. In the 19th century, a significant sector of the British public read sermons for pleasure. Today's readers have lost this taste. In any case, Muslim apologists tend to present current Islamic practice and past history as more perfect than would seem plausible to an outsider. Besides there are too many competing accounts of Islam in print—Wahhabi, Deobandi, Barelwi, Ahmadi, Sufi, liberal. As for journalism, its coverage of the middle east is crisis-driven, providing only a restricted context to the latest terrorist atrocity or rigged election. The longue durée of the middle east has been elided.
Orientalist writings, in the sense of books and articles written by academics specialising in Arab and Islamic studies, currently play a negligible part in informing and shaping public opinion. Orientalism is now a pejorative word and its practitioners have become losers in the politics of knowledge. Arabic studies has lost prestige and the resources devoted to it keep diminishing. In a debate in the House of Lords on 24th March 2004, several peers expressed disquiet at the way oriental studies and the teaching of difficult languages had declined in Britain. The closure of the east Asian studies department at Durham University was condemned, but the decline of Arabic teaching was also a matter of grave concern. James Craig, Arabist and former ambassador, tells me that in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Soas, the professors of Arabic are Syrian, Palestinian, Dutch or German; and that of the entire membership of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies barely one-third are home-grown British scholars.
In the 20th century, the Thomas Adams professorship in Cambridge (endowed in the 17th century) was held by some of the most brilliant and famous Arabists in Europe, including Edward Granville Browne, Reynold Alleyne Nicholson and AJ Arberry. It is a scandal that there is no Thomas Adams professor and that there seems to be no plan to appoint one. In his memoir, Among Arabs and Jews: A Personal Experience 1936-90 (1991), PJ Vatikiotis, a former professor of middle eastern politics at Soas, registered his dismay at the decline of traditional oriental studies: "As new funding schemes for higher education were being brought in, we suddenly lost most of our star quality colleagues either through early or premature retirement, resignation or relocation across the Atlantic." The latest bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies notes that the government has belatedly announced that it is going to allocate more funds for posts concerned with the Arabic-speaking world. Obviously this is crisis-driven funding, aimed at alleviating the disastrous situation in Iraq, but it takes years to grow specialist experts. In the meantime the occupying forces have found that shouting loudly in English to the Iraqis is not always effective as a means of communication. It would have been useful to have had a larger pool of translators and even more useful to have had a corps of experts on the history of Iraq's tribal politics.
As far as large sections of the British intelligentsia are concerned, orientalism is thought of as an historical evil, something to be ashamed of and linked, however vaguely, to such wickednesses as crusading, racism, the slave trade, colonialism and Zionism. Orientalism, by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, published in 1978, pioneered this paranoid approach to an essentially benign academic discipline. In his immensely influential book, Said presented a somewhat confusing survey of the way Europeans and Americans have written and thought about the orient and, more precisely, about the Arab world. Said argued that orientalism was a sinister discourse that constrained the ways westerners could think and write about the orient. He suggested that there was a malign tradition of disparaging and stereotyping orientals in various ways that went back to Homer, a tradition that was continued by such grand writers as Aeschylus, Dante, Flaubert and Camus. However, Said argued, in recent centuries academics in Islamic and middle eastern studies had been instrumental in framing a mindset that facilitated and justified imperial dominance over the Arab lands. According to Said (who died in 2003), the west possesses a monopoly over how the orient may be represented. His thesis has subsequently found incongruous allies among Islamist polemicists. They too see western scholarship as a conspiracy. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, a multi-volume work of mostly western scholarship whose second edition was recently published, has attracted particular criticism from some Muslims, who argue that this sort of reference work should have been written mostly, if not entirely, by Muslims, and should have been subject to Muslim censorship.
Orientalism was a work of misdirected spleen, written in anger and in haste. Had Said restricted himself to attacking the way Islam and Arabs have been portrayed in novels, films and popular journalism, this would have been a worthwhile enterprise. Better yet, he might have attacked Israeli generals, Washington lobbyists, British arms dealers and right-wing newspaper columnists. Instead, he chose to concentrate his wrath on academics, serious novelists and a miscellaneous assortment of other writers. Most of the people he chose to vilify were actual enthusiasts for Arab culture and admirers of Islam. And although Said sought to present orientalism as something that was inherently bound up with imperialism and the colonisation of the middle east by Britain and France, the chronology does not bear him out. The first great heyday of orientalism, especially in Britain, was in the 17th century. Edward Pococke was perhaps the leading Arabist in Europe. (His peers were mostly Dutch.) But Pococke's century was one in which the Turks were occupying a large part of the Balkans and still threatened Vienna. It was a time when thousands of Europeans were taken captive every year by the Barbary corsairs and shipped off to slavery in north Africa. It was also an age when most serious scholars wrote in Latin. (Edward Said may have been unaware of this, as he omits discussion of the Latin works of such grand Arabists as Marracci or Golius.) The second great age of British orientalism extended from the 1940s to perhaps the 1970s, and therefore roughly coincided with the ending of what the political historian, Elizabeth Monroe has called "Britain's moment in the middle east." At a time when Britain was withdrawing its political advisers, troops and administrators from Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf and Aden, scholars with huge international reputations held senior teaching posts in Britain, among them Bernard Lewis, Ann Lambton, Vatikiotis, Robert Serjeant, Arberry, Albert Hourani and AFL Beeston.
The attack by Said and his allies on academics can be seen as a soothing displacement activity. In mounting such an onslaught, specialists in literary criticism and cultural studies could imagine themselves to be on the frontline of a global conflict and as "speaking truth to power." But their guns were pointing in the wrong direction. In general, stereotypes and patronising misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims do not originate in university departments.
It would be absurd to pin all the blame for the decline of oriental studies on Said's polemic. Broader intellectual trends have had a role—a flight from difficulty, a suspicion of old-fashioned, fact-bound scholarship and a taste for deconstructive readings of classic works. And when funds are occasionally found for middle eastern topics, the designation of the new posts is dim-wittedly directed by yesterday's newspaper headlines and thus earmarked for such areas as terrorism studies or conflict resolution. In both the universities and the media there is a cult of immediacy and contemporary relevance. This cult would have seemed strange, profane and even frivolous to past intellectual generations.
