One of the basic themes of all Orientalist discourse since the mid-19th century is that the Arabic language and the Arabs are afflicted with both a mentality and a language that has no use for reality. Many Arabs have come to believe this racist drivel, as if whole national languages like Arabic, Chinese, or English directly represent the minds of their users. This notion is part of the same ideological arsenal used in the 19th century to justify colonial oppression: “Negroes” cannot speak properly therefore, according to Thomas Carlyle, they must remain enslaved; “the Chinese” language is complicated and therefore, according to Ernest Renan, the Chinese man or woman is devious and should be kept down; and so on and so forth. No one takes such ideas seriously today except when Arabs, Arabic and Arabists are concerned.
In a paper he wrote a few years ago Francis Fukuyama, the right-wing pontificator and philosopher who was briefly celebrated for his preposterous “end of history” idea, said that the State Department was well rid of its Arabists and Arabic speakers because by learning that language they also learned the “delusions” of the Arabs. Today every village philosopher in the media, including pundits like Thomas Friedman, chatters on in the same vein, adding in their scientific descriptions of the Arabs that one of the many delusions of Arabic is the commonly held “myth” that the Arabs have of themselves as a people. According to such authorities as Friedman and Fouad Ajami, the Arabs are simply a loose collection of vagrants, tribes with flags, masquerading as a culture and a people. One might point out that this is a hallucinatory Orientalist delusion, which has the same status as the Zionist belief that Palestine was empty, and that the Palestinians were not there and certainly do not count as a people. One scarcely needs to argue against the validity of such assumptions so obviously do they derive from fear and ignorance.
But that is not all. Arabs are always being berated for their inability to deal with reality, to prefer rhetoric to facts, to wallow in self-pity and self-aggrandising rather than in sober recitals of the truth. The new fashion is to refer to the UNDP Report of last year as an “objective” account of Arab self-indictment. Never mind that the report, as I have pointed out, is a shallow and insufficiently reflective social science graduate student paper designed to prove that Arabs can tell the truth about themselves, and it is pretty far below the level of centuries of Arab critical writing from the time of Ibn Khaldun to the present. All that is pushed aside, as is the imperial context, which the UNDP authors blithely ignore, the better perhaps to prove that their thinking is in line with American pragmatism.
Other experts often say that, as a language, Arabic is imprecise and incapable of expressing anything with real accuracy. In my opinion such observations are so ideologically mischievous as not to require argument. But I think we can get an idea of what drives such opinions forward by looking for an instructive contrast at one of the great successes of American pragmatism and how it shows how our present leaders and authorities deal with reality in sober and realistic terms. I hope the irony of what I am discussing will quickly be evident. The example I have in mind is American planning for post-war Iraq. There is a chilling account of this in 4 August issue of the Financial Times in which we are informed that Douglas Leith and Paul Wolfowitz, unelected officials who are among the most powerful of the hawkish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration with exceptionally close ties to Israel’s Likud Party, ran a group of experts in the Pentagon “who all along felt that this [the war and its aftermath] was not just going to be a cakewalk [a slang term for something so easy to do that little effort would be needed], it [the whole thing] was going to be 60-90 days, a flip-over and hand-off…to Chalabi and the Iraqi National Council. The Department of Defence could then wash its hands of the whole affair and depart quickly, smoothly, and swiftly. And there would be a democratic Iraq that was amenable to our wishes and desires left in its wake. And that’s all there was to it.”
We now know, of course, that the war was indeed fought on these premises and Iraq militarily occupied on just those totally far-fetched imperialist assumptions. Chalabi’s record as informant and banker is, after all, not of the best. And now no one needs to be reminded of what has happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The terrible shambles, from the looting and pillaging of libraries and museums (which is absolutely the responsibility of the US military as occupying power), the total breakdown of the infrastructure, the hostility of Iraqis — who are not after all a homogenous single group — to Anglo-American forces, the insecurity and shortages and, above all, the extraordinary human — I emphasise the word “human” — incompetence of Garner, Bremer and all their minions and soldiers in adequately addressing the problems of post-war Iraq, all this testifies to the kind of ruinous sham pragmatism and realism of American thinking which is supposed to be in sharp contrast to that of lesser pseudo-peoples like the Arabs who are full of delusions and have a faulty language to boot. The truth of the matter is that reality is neither at the individual’s command (no matter how powerful) nor does it necessarily adhere more closely to some peoples and mentalities than to others. The human condition is made up of experience and interpretation, and these can never be completely dominated by power: they are also the common domain of human beings in history. The terrible mistakes made by Wolfowitz and Leith came down to their arrogant substitution of abstract and finally ignorant language for a far more complex and recalcitrant reality. The appalling results are still before us.
So let us not accept any longer the ideological demagoguery that leaves language and reality as the sole property of American power, or of so-called Western perspectives. The core of the matter is of course imperialism, that (in the end banal) self-assumed mission to rid the world of evil figures like Saddam in the name of justice and progress.
(This extract is taken from Said’s article ‘Dreams and delusions’, published in Al-Ahram Weekly, 21-27 August 2003)
Edward Said was a literary theorist, cultural critic and political activist for Palestine. A founding figure in post-colonialism, he wrote dozens of books, lectures, and essays