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has added a new journalIn January 2006, author David Price obtained 147 pages of Edward Said's 238-page FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records reveal that Said was under surveillance starting in 1971. Most of his records are marked as related to "IS Middle East" ("IS" = Israel) and significant portions remain "Classified Secrets".
www.counterpunch.org
A CounterPunch Exclusive Investigation
How the FBI Spied on Edward Said
By DAVID PRICE
The FBI has a long, ignoble tradition of monitoring and harassing America's top intellectuals. While people ranging from Albert Einstein, William Carlos Williams to Martin Luther King have been subjected to FBI surveillance, there remains an under-accounting of the ways in which this monitoring at times hampered the reception of their work.
In response to my request under the Freedom of Information Act, filed on behalf of CounterPunch, the FBI recently released 147 of Said's 238-page FBI file. There are some unusual gaps in the released records, and it is possible that the FBI still holds far more files on Professor Said than they acknowledge. Some of these gaps may exist because new Patriot Act and National Security exemptions allow the FBI to deny the existence of records; however, the released file provides enough information to examine the FBI's interest in Edward Said who mixed artistic appreciations, social theory, and political activism in powerful and unique ways.
Most of Said's file documents FBI surveillance campaigns of his legal, public work with American-based Palestinian political or pro-Arab organizations, while other portions of the file document the FBI's ongoing investigations of Said as it monitored his contacts with other Palestinian-Americans. That the FBI should monitor the legal political activities and intellectual forays of such a man elucidates not only the FBI's role in suppressing democratic solutions to the Israeli and Palestinian problems, it also demonstrates a continuity with the FBI's historical efforts to monitor and harass American peace activists.
Edward Said's wife, Mariam, says she is not surprised to learn of the FBI's surveillance of her husband, saying, "We always knew that any political activity concerning the Palestinian issue is monitored and when talking on the phone we would say 'let the tappers hear this'. We believed that our phones were tapped for a long time, but it never bothered us because we knew we were hiding nothing."
The FBI's first record of Edward Said appears in a February 1971 domestic security investigation of another unidentified individual. The FBI collected photographs of Said from the State Department's passport division and various news agencies. Said's "International Security" FBI file was established when an informant gave the FBI a program from the October 1971 Boston Convention of the Arab-American University Graduates, where Said chaired a panel on "Culture and the Critical Spirit". Most of Said's FBI records were classified under the administrative heading of "Foreign Counterintelligence," category 105, and most records are designated as relating to "IS ? Middle East," the Bureau's designation for Israel.
Post-Patriot Act alterations of the Freedom of Information Act facilitate the FBI's efforts to keep significant portions of Said's FBI file classified ? as if concerns with resolving Palestinian sovereignty from twenty or thirty years ago are indelibly linked to Bush's "war on terror". Large sections of Said's file remain redacted, with stamps indicating they remain Classified Secret until 2030, 25 years after their initial FOIA processing. One 1973 "Secret" report is now "exempt from General Declassification Schedule of Executive Order 11652, Exemption Category 2," and is "automatically declassified on indefinite". Such administrative stonewalling diminishes our ability to understand the past and further complicates our ability to document the FBI's role in undermining domestic democratic movements.
In February 1972, New York FBI agents produced a report listing Said's employment at Columbia University, his home address and phone number, including a notation that his home telephone service was provided by New York Telephone Company ? information that was later used to request listings of all toll calls charged to Said's home phone number. A July 1972 FBI report indicates Said received a phone call from someone who was the subject of intensive FBI surveillance. The NYC agent wrote that "reasons for phone call, activities of the professor, and his sympathies in relation to matters have not been ascertained".
In the months after the attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics there was a flurry of FBI interest in Said and other Palestinian Americans. In early October 1972, the NY FBI office investigated Said's background and citizenship information as well as voting, banking and credit records. Employees at Princeton and Columbia Universities gave FBI agents biographical and education information on Said, and the Harvard University Alumni Office provided the FBI with detailed information. As Middle East scholar Steve Niva observes, "looking back, this post-Munich period may have marked an historic turning point when statements in support of the Palestinian cause became routinely equated with sympathies for terrorism."
The FBI spoke with their "Middle East informants" in Boston, Newark and New York to gather information on Said. One report indicated that "several confidential sources who are familiar with Middle East in the United States were contacted during 1972 and 1973, but were unable to furnish any information pertaining to Edward William Said." During this investigation, FBI agents located and read a 1970 Boston Globe article headlined "Columbia Professor Blames Racist Attitude for Arab-Israeli Conflict".
One FBI report detailed events at the fifth annual convention of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates (AAAUG) held in November 1972 in Berkeley. Said was living in Lebanon at the time and did not attend the conference, but because he was a member of the AAAUG Board of Directors, the FBI included their convention report in his FBI file. There was a significant FBI presence at the conference, and the FBI's released records include the conference program indicating presentations from a selection of Arab-American scholars such as anthropologists Laura Nader and Barbara Aswad.
The extent of the FBI's surveillance of the conference is seen in the FBI's list (provided by a "reliable" FBI informer) of all AAAUG convention's attendees staying at the Claremont Hotel. Why the FBI collected information on conference attendees' accommodations is not clear. Was it to break into participants' rooms to plant listening devices, search for documents, or to monitor attendees? The redacted report does not say, but the FBI's well-documented reliance on such "black bag jobs" during this period raises this as a likely possibility. The Bureau's policy for these illegal operations was to maintain separate filing systems for them. The FBI's report contains summaries of several talks, including a detailed account of Andreas Papandreou's keynote address criticizing "the imperialistic forces of the United Stats against the peoples of the Middle East, Greek and Arab peoples alike."In January 1973, the FBI undertook further criminal and biographical background checks on Said, and the New York Special Agent in Charge recommended in February that the case be closed. But an FBI investigation the next month of a "subject traveled in the United States in 1971" began a new investigation of Said as one of several individuals whose phone numbers had come to the attention of the FBI and were believed to have possible "connections with Arab terrorist activities." Such alleged connections remain unspecified as do Said's connections to such activities, but such vague associations are frequently used to keep investigations active.
FBI memos from this period discuss the creation of a LHM (Letterhead Memorandum, meaning a memo identified as coming from the FBI) that "should be suitable for dissemination to foreign intelligence agencies". The agency or country to receive this LHM report is not identified, but Israel's Mossad was a likely candidate.
During the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War the FBI collected several of Said's newspaper columns and interviews, and his file includes a New York Times column arguing that Arabs and Jews in the Middle East had historically been pitted against each other rather than against "imperialist powers". In 1974, the FBI received word that Said would speak at the Canadian Arab Federation Conference in Windsor, Ontario, and the Bureau again tracked Said's movements, though an FBI informer indicated that "he did not consider Said to be the type of individual who would be involved in any terrorist activity".
The FBI made no entry in Edward Said's file in 1978, the year of the publication of his groundbreaking book, Orientalism.
A July 1979 FBI report summarized information on thirty-six individuals (names blacked out in the released documents) preparing to attend the August 1979 Palestine American Congress (PAC) at the Shoreham-Americana Hotel in Washington, D.C. The FBI noted that Said was an ex-officio member of the council. Snippets of paragraphs on other unidentified attendees mention past academic and political conferences attended, and one FBI informant is identified as being linked to the "pro-Iraqi Ba'ath Party". FBI offices receiving this report were advised to check their files for pertinent information on any of the mentioned individuals.
The extent of the FBI's conference surveillance is shown in a partially declassified Secret Report Index indicating that attendee records had been consulted from FBI field offices in twenty-five listed cities alphabetically listed from Albany to Washington. This report contains sentence summaries on participants. Said's summary, for example, says, "EDWARD SAID ? Previously identified as being from Columbia University, New York City, New York, and as being deeply affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Other released passages find the FBI preoccupied with tracing various attendees' PFLP sympathies.
The PAC was perhaps the most open and democratic deliberative effort by displaced American Palestinians to address the goals of the Palestinian struggle. With great concern the FBI documented how the PAC "created a Preparatory Committee that empowered it to prepare a working paper on a proposed constitution for some mechanism for collaborative action".
The FBI noted some internal arguments about the legitimacy of some delegates coming from Arab communities with low Palestinian populations. The FBI reported that one delegate at the Congress "reminded all in attendance that the FBI has no legitimate interest in the activities taking place during the three day convention. There was no reason to be afraid of one's presence at all functions of the PAC." Without irony the FBI then noted with concern that some present used false names to register their hotel rooms.
Following opening remarks by Jawad George, another speaker described in the FBI report as a revolutionary black male named Smith, "ensured the PAC that the black Americans would render assistance to Arab revolution." Other speakers discussed in the FBI report included a member of the Organization of Arab Students and Ramallah Mayor Krim Khlif speaking on efforts to establish a Palestinian State on the West Bank.
The FBI report discussed problems arising at the conference's conclusion when there was "much discussion on just the preamble to the constitution. Strong disagreement on the wording of a sentence concerning return to its national homeland, to national self-determination, and to its national independence and sovereignty in all of Palestine, by the Arab peoples." Fights over the wording of the constitution's preamble continued, and several disputes "almost broke out into fist fights" between rival factions. Said's FBI file contains a copy of the "Proposed Constitution of the Palestine American Congress" that had been distributed to PAC attendees, which the FBI marked as classified "SECRET." This information provided by an FBI informant from this period has now been reclassified under thePatriot Act measures making the document classified "Secret" until the year 2029.
In May 1982, the New York FBI Special Agent in Charge sent a Secret report to FBI Director William Webster saying that Said's name had "come to the attention of the N.Y. in the context of a terrorist matter." FBI headquarters was then requested "to contact liaison with State Department's Middle East section with regard to their knowledge of Said". A week later, Said's file gained a photograph of him addressing the December 1980 Palestine Human Rights Campaign National Conference. One 1982 newspaper clipping added to the file attempted to connect his wife Mariam Said and the PLO to the funding of a full-page anti-Israel advertisement in the New York Times.
During the summer of 1982 an unidentified individual was arrested and deported from the United States, and the "INS obtained photocopies of all documents in his possession". Among this deported individual's papers was Edward Said's name and home phone number. Documents relating to Said and this deportation are still being withheld and are being vetted under National Security Classification review processes.
On September 3, 1982, FBI Director Webster instructed FBI librarians at Quantico to use their computerized New York Times index to locate all past references to Said. This generated a thirteen-page report containing abstracts of forty-nine NYT articles featuring Edward Said. These articles range from political columns by Said, features about him, to literary book reviews by Said. The New York Times Information Service was long used by the pre-Google FBI to compile dossiers on persons or organizations of interest. Thus did the FBI collected a filtered analysis of Said's writings and public statements formed by the reports and prejudices of Times reporters and editors.
Said's FBI file, in the form in which it reached me, concludes with a few redacted reports (now reclassified until the year 2030) from 1983 and a highly censored Classified Secret memo from August 1991 that ends with the suggestions that the FBI "may desire to contact your Middle East Section for additional information concerning Said".
Curiously, Said's FBI file, as released to me, contains no information on the remaining dozen years of his life. Either the FBI stopped monitoring him, or they couldn'tlocate these files, or they won't release this information or even the fact that the information exists in the files. The latter two possibilities seem far more likely than the first .
It did not matter how frequently or clearly Edward Said declared that he "totally repudiated terrorism in all its forms". The FBI continued to focus its national security surveillance campaign on him. Had the FBI read the Palestine American Congress's proposed constitution placed in Said's file in 1979, they would have seen the group's commitment to upholding the "basic fundamental human and national rights of all people and affirms its opposition to racism in all of its manifestations including Zionism and anti-Semitism". Instead, they kept searching for connections to terrorism.
The FBI's surveillance of Edward Said was similar to their surveillance of other Palestinian-American intellectuals. For example, Ibrahim Abu Lughod's FBI file records similar monitoring ? though Abu Lughod's file finds the FBI attempting to capitalize on JDL death threats as a means of interviewing Lughod to collect information for his file.
Having read hundreds of FBI reports summarizing "subversive" threads in the work of other academics, I am surprised to find that Said's FBI file contains no FBI analysis of his book Orientalism. This is especially surprising given the claims by scholars, like Hoover Institute anthropologist Stanley Kurtz in his 2003 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Select Education, that Said's post-colonial critique had left American Middle East Studies scholars impotent to contribute to Bush's "war on terror". Given what is known of the FBI's monitoring of radical academic developments it seems unlikely that such a work escaped their scrutiny, and it is reasonable to speculate that an FBI analysis of Orientalism remains in unreleased FBI documents.
But some known things are obviously missing from the released file. Chief among these are records of death threats against Said and records of the undercover police protection he received at some public events. But there are no reasons to withhold such records, and their absence gives further cause to not believe the FBI's claim this is his entire releasable file.
The reasons for the temporal and thematic gaps in Said's file remain unknown. One explanation for such gaps is suggested in Kafka's The Trial, where reference is made to cases of suspects never cleared of vague accusations but who are instead given an "ostensible acquittal" under which the accused's dossier circulates for years, "backwards and forwards with greater or smaller oscillations" on "peregrinations that are incalculable". Perhaps such Kafkaesque forces move within the FBI, empowered by post-9/11 legislation and desires to shield the public's eye from acknowledgments of past persecutions of Edward Said.
David Price is author of Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke, 2004). He can be reached at: [email protected]
KingFahad
counterpunch may have any issue with u posting their paid content online...as for the issue..yeah, scary and with the recent NSA fiasco...i wonder who the dictator really is?
talk about the bath party in irqa, awfully sounds like the republican here at home..
psychedelic
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has added a new journalEdward Said Speaks Out Before and After 9-11:
Muffling the Arab Voice
By Judith Gabriel
With the one-year anniversary of September 11 approaching, and as recurring ?terrorism alerts? continue to fuel waves of panic and paranoia, the American public remains overwhelmingly mute about violations of civil rights perpetrated against Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. It is an old silence, one which has allowed the demonizing of Arabs to become woven into all aspects of the political and cultural fabric.
In these cautious times, Edward Said is one of the few speaking out about the situation, elegantly tracing the long, tawdry history of anti-Arab animosity. Said?s vantage point is tandem: first, as a cultural historian, and secondly, as someone who belongs to both sides of the discussion ? he?s a Palestinian-Arab as well as an American. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, he moved to Cairo with his family in 1947 and then came to the United States in 1951, experiencing the discomforts of being a member of an often marginalized and demonized ethnic minority. It got worse after 9-11.
?I?ve been living here for 50 years, and I?ve never felt quite as alienated,? he told a crowd gathered at Chapman University in Orange, California. ?American prejudice against Muslims and Arabs was one of the few culturally sanctioned forms of bigotry before September 11, and that has made the situation after the towers fell that much more dangerous.? This alienation is the common lot of those who share Said?s hyphenated identity. ?I don?t know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted, hostility. For despite the occasional official statements saying that Islam and Muslims and Arabs are not enemies of the United States, everything else about the current situation argues the exact opposite. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning, and in far too many cases detained by the police or the FBI because of their ethnic profile. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behavior against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic, or even reading an Arabic document in public, is likely to draw unwanted attention.?
Appearing at Chapman University to deliver the Delp-Wilkinson Peace Lecture in late February, Said noted that in the wake of 9-11 the media, long blamed as culprits in the demonization of Arabs in the United States, has continued to feed the xenophobic frenzy, presenting ?far too many experts and commentators on terrorism, Islam and the Arabs, whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society, and culture, that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere.? These more recent media images only compound the long-existing practice that Said calls part of ?an unremitting cultural war against the Arabs who are principally, if not exclusively, known as camel jockeys, desert warriors, or murderous terrorists.?
Moreover, there is virtually nothing to counter the negative images. ?The build-up against Iraq continues, and Israel prolongs its collective punishment of the Palestinian people, all with what seems like great public approval in the United States. In such a setting, therefore, it?s not surprising that there exists no available cultural narrative of the Arabs as a people, whereas this blocked human presence is in fact represented by a whole arsenal of negative anti-human and anti-narrative stereotypes, which associates the Arabs with unpleasant and unpalatable things.?
Although Arab Americans have been able to achieve some success in educating the public, such as ?sensitizing people to the coarseness of equating the word ?Arab? with vagrancy, as Webster?s dictionary did, or of openly blaming Arabs and Muslims for global violence and human degradation decades before 9-11,? there still exists a vast lacuna in American cultural resources when it comes to any nuanced discourse on Arabs. Said finds it regrettable ?that there is no massive literature, no fund of popular knowledge, no mobilizable discursive means to bring in as an antidote to writings about the Arab.? Thus, there are no ?ready examples at hand for circulation that specify positive contributions of the Arabs to science, to world literature, to even so modest a thing as popular wisdom. These may exist in libraries, but the images, the values, and the knowledge they represent don?t circulate. There?s a prohibition against narrating the Arab story, as it were, which in the U.S. has been equated ? not with a complex history of an entire people, but only with being opposed to Israel. That?s what the Arabs, in the end, are
mostly known for.?
Besides the negative stereotypes, Americans have little source material to help them develop any understanding of the Arab past and present. ?For we Arabs who live in the West, it?s the source of acute frustration that none of the achievements of our tradition and our culture are known or recognized or admitted; that there are no cultural institutions of consequence that are dedicated to advancing appreciation and knowledge of the Arabs in the United States.? Pointing to Albert Hourani?s ?History of the Arab Peoples? as the sole exception, Said protested that ?The Arabs are not known as the authors of their own cultural works, and indeed, it?s considered a dangerous thing to get an Arab man or woman to write in his or her own voice. When the occasional novel or poem is translated, it is either immediately relegated to marginality as minor ethnic literature, or much more likely, it?s simply ignored. ? In a relationship as peculiarly skewed and unequal as that between the Arabs and the U.S., no one can long entertain the illusion that there is free and open criticism, or that the right to say anything is available for Arabs in the U.S. It is much more, much more difficult to say anything positive about the Arabs than it is to attack them or say something that dovetails with the prevailing views.?
As an example, Said pointed to an interview with novelist Norman Mailer that appeared in May 1991 in Esquire Magazine, in which Mailer described Arabs as having had ?2,000 years of living in the desert fighting over nothing very tangible until oil wells came along very recently. They have learned to negotiate and trick and play and maneuver and distort realities in such a way that we are encountering a mind, geopolitically speaking, that is
more evil than any mind we have encountered before.? Where, Said asked, did Mailer get this description? Nothing in Mailer?s writing ?suggests any familiarity with, much less any real knowledge of the Arabs, their history, or civilization. As a semi-crazed construction left over from the propaganda of the Gulf War, it has some plausibility. But where did he get it? It comes, I believe, from a demonized geography in which the sand people ? the Arabs ? roam as the permanent opposite of and threat to everything that we hold important.?
Arab writers have been treated shabbily in the U.S., according to Said, who recounted that when The New York Times announced that Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz had won the Nobel Prize for literature, the article carried a quotation from the Israeli Consul in New York, ?as if to say the readers of the New York Times want to know if Israel finds this award in any way objectionable or threatening.? During the Gulf War, the same newspaper ran a full page bibliography for its readers who might want to read further about Iraq. ?Not a single book on the very extensive list was written by an Arab, or in fact dealt with anything about modern Iraq after Sumer and the Chaldeans.? In another example, Said told how a major U.S. publisher who wanted to publish third world novels
rejected Said?s recommendation of Naguib Mahfouz (before he won the Nobel Prize) saying that they couldn?t touch the Egyptian novelist ?because ?he writes in Arabic and Arabic ... is a controversial language.? ?
POWER DISPARITY
Turning to the Arab world, which has its own informational shortcomings, such as the lack of any academic institution devoted solely to the critical study of the West or the United States, Said reported that, nonetheless, the level of popular awareness is high; the U.S. is the most widely portrayed of all foreign societies in the media. American films, television programs, consumer goods, and magazines exist in profusion throughout the Arab world. ?In contrast, hardly any Arab fiction or cultural analysis is devoted to the United States. And if it is, virtually none of it is read in the United States, or has any effect at all, say in New York or Los Angeles, except among expatriate groups. There is, thus, even in culture, an almost absolute disparity in power, and it is this disparity that characterizes the relationship between the Arabs and the U.S., which results on the one hand in a bitterness and dependency leading to Islamism or fundamentalism in some cases, and on the other, on the American side, in triumphalism and ignorance that are extremely depressing, especially after September 11.?
?I?m not saying that Arabs are innocent,? Said said. ?Nor am I saying that the fault is entirely the United States. ... There is no monolithic U.S., just as there is no monolithic Arab world or Islam ? which has now been compressed into one rather narrow and unforgiving all-purpose formula signifying terrorism, fundamentalism, and fanaticism.?
Said lamented the ?unfortunate triumph of all these idiotic, super-real, and atrophied labels, in which in the Arab world, the U.S. has become shorthand for all our ills, and in the United States the Arabs have become a universal symbol of violence and intransigence and anti-Americanism. The result promises to be unending conflict.?
This report appeared in Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 39 ( Spring 2002)
Copyright 2002 ? by Al Jadid
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has added a new journalOrientalism 25 Years Later
Worldly Humanism v. the Empire-builders
By EDWARD SAID
Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of "the Orient" lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on.
In my memoir Out of Place (1999) I described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grew up, providing for myself and my readers a detailed account of the settings that I think formed me in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But that was a very personal account that stopped short of all the years of my own political engagement that started after the 1967 Arab-
Israeli war.
Orientalism is very much a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. Its first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 2001 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds. Its aftermath is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not.
I wish I could say that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist clich?, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and "others" has found a fitting correlative in the looting and destruction of Iraq's libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that "we" might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the "Orient," that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times. In the process the uncountable sediments of history, that include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad.
My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, so that "our" East, "our" Orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct. And I have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be. There's been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple, and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no knowledge at all of the language real people actually speak, has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market "democracy". You don't need Arabic or Persian or even French to pontificate about how the democracy domino effect is just what the Arab world needs.
But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.
The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline which only American power could reverse. Today bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples. Accompanying such war-mongering expertise have been CNN and Fox, plus myriad evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, innumerable tabloids and even middle-brow journals, all of them re-cycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up "America" against the foreign devil.
Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like "us" and didn't appreciate "our" values--the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma--there would have been no war. So from the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House, using the same clich?s, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided every thing from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry.
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
Twenty-five years after my book's publication Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it has continued in the Orient since Napoleon's entry into Egypt two centuries ago. Arabs and Muslims have been told that victimology and dwelling on the depredations of empire is only a way of evading responsibility in the present. You have failed, you have gone wrong, says the modern Orientalist. This of course is also V.S. Naipaul's contribution to literature, that the victims of empire wail on while their country goes to the dogs. But what a shallow calculation of the imperial intrusion that is, how little it wishes to face the long succession of years through which empire continues to work its way in the lives say of Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or Iraqis. Think of the line that starts with Napoleon, continues with the rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa, and goes on in similar undertakings in Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and, during the entire twentieth century in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Then think of the rise of anti-colonial nationalism, through the short period of liberal independence, the era of military coups, of insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, irrational struggle and uncompromising brutality against the latest bunch of "natives." Each of these phases and eras produces its own distorted knowledge of the other, each its own reductive images, its own disputatious polemics.
My idea in Orientalism is to use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle, to introduce a longer sequence of thought and analysis to replace the short bursts of polemical, thought-stopping fury that so imprison us. I have called what I try to do "humanism," a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. By humanism I mean first of all attempting to dissolve Blake's mind-forg'd manacles so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
This it is to say that every domain is linked to every other one, and that nothing that goes on in our world has ever been isolated and pure of any outside influence. We need to speak about issues of injustice and suffering within a context that is amply situated in history, culture, and socio-economic reality. Our role is to widen the field of discussion. I have spent a great deal of my life during the past 35 years advocating the rights of the Palestinian people to national self-determination, but I have always tried to do that with full attention paid to the reality of the Jewish people and what they suffered by way of persecution and genocide. The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, co-existence, and not further suppression and denial. Not accidentally, I indicate that Orientalism and modern anti-Semitism have common roots. Therefore it would seem to be a vital necessity for independent intellectuals always to provide alternative models to the simplifying and confining ones based on mutual hostility that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long.
As a humanist whose field is literature, I am old enough to have been trained forty years ago in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before that I must mention the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neopolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate those of German thinkers such as Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great 20th Century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius.
To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion which led to the composition of the West-?stlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole.
There is a considerable irony to the realization then that as today's globalized world draws together in some of the ways I have been talking about here, we may be approaching the kind of standardization and homogeneity that Goethe's ideas were specifically formulated to prevent. In an essay he published in 1951 entitled "Philologie der Weltliteratur" Erich Auerbach made exactly that point at the outset of the postwar period which was also the beginning of the Cold War. His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that for Auerbach the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
Positive knowledge of languages and history was necessary, but it was never enough, any more than the mechanical gathering of facts would constitute an adequate method for grasping what an author like Dante, for example, was all about. The main requirement for the kind of philological understanding Auerbach and his predecessors were talking about and tried to practice was one that sympathetically and subjectively entered into the life of a written text as seen from the perspective of its time and its author (einf?hlung). Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and a different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place for works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter's mission.
All this was obviously undermined and destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbach notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and greater specialization of knowledge gradually narrowed the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly inquiring kind of philological work that he had represented, and, alas, it's an even more depressing fact that since Auerbach's death in 1957 both the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. Instead of reading in the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the internet and in the mass media.
Worse yet, education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the mass media as they focus ahistorically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars that give viewers the sense of surgical precision, but in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern warfare. In the demonization of an unknown enemy for whom the label "terrorist" serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced.
Speaking both as an American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind of simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change--backed up by the most bloated military budget in history--are the main ideas debated endlessly and impoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called "experts" who validate the government's general line. Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with contempt.
Perhaps you will say that I am making too many abrupt transitions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand and foreign policy on the other, and that a modern technological society which along with unprecedented power possesses the internet and F-16 fighter-jets must in the end be commanded by formidable technical-policy experts like Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle. But what has really been lost is a sense of the density and interdependence of human life, which can neither be reduced to a formula nor brushed aside as irrelevant.
That is one side of the global debate. In the Arab and Muslim countries the situation is scarcely better. As Roula Khalaf has argued, the region has slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the US is really like as a society. Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turn their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, with results in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies where secular ideas about human history and development have been overtaken by failure and frustration, as well as by an Islamism built out of rote learning and the obliteration of what are perceived to be other, competitive forms of secular knowledge. The gradual disappearance of the extraordinary tradition of Islamic ijtihad or personal interpretation has been one of the major cultural disasters of our time, with the result that critical thinking and individual wrestling with the problems of the modern world have all but disappeared.
This is not to say that the cultural world has simply regressed on one side to a belligerent neo-Orientalism and on the other to blanket rejectionism. Last year's United Nations World Summit in Johannesburg, for all its limitations, did in fact reveal a vast area of common global concern that suggests the welcome emergence of a new collective constituency that gives the often facile notion of "one world" a new urgency. In all this, however, we must admit that no one can possibly know the extraordinarily complex unity of our globalized world, despite the reality that the world does have a real interdependence of parts that leaves no genuine opportunity for isolation.
The terrible conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like "America," "The West" or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and must be opposed. We still have at our disposal the rational interpretive skills that are the legacy of humanistic education, not as a sentimental piety enjoining us to return to traditional values or the classics but as the active practice of worldly secular rational discourse. The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings. Critical thought does not submit to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time, patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.
Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. But this by no means excludes power, since on the contrary I have tried to show the insinuations, the imbrications of power into even the most recondite of studies.
And lastly, most important, humanism is the only and I would go so far as saying the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history. We are today abetted by the enormously encouraging democratic field of cyberspace, open to all users in ways undreamt of by earlier generations either of tyrants or of orthodoxies. The world-wide protests before the war began in Iraq would not have been possible were it not for the existence of alternative communities all across the world, informed by alternative information, and keenly aware of the environmental, human rights, and libertarian impulses that bind us together in this tiny planet.
Edward Said is a professor at Columbia University. He is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press).
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has added a new journalEdward Said, Dead at 67
A Mighty and Passionate Heart
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to beat.
Edward Said died in hospital in New York City Wednesday night at 6.30 pm, felled at last by complications arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever since the early 1990s.
We march through life buoyed by those comrades-in-arms we know to be marching with us, under the same banners, flying the same colors, sustained by the same hopes and convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we may not have spoken to them in months; but their companionship is burned into our souls and we are sustained by the knowledge that they are with us in the world.
Few more than Edward Said, for me and so many others beside. How many times, after a week, a month or more, I have reached him on the phone and within a second been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our updates: his trips, his triumphs, the insults sustained; the enemies rebuked and put to flight. Even in his pettiness he was magnificent, and as I would laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled at him by an eighth-rate scrivener, he would clamber from the pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at himself.
He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia pressed, was routed, pressed again. He lived at a rate that would have felled a man half his age and ten times as healthy: a plane to London, an honorary degree, on to Lebanon, on to the West Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid, back to New York. And all the while he was pouring out the Said prose that I most enjoyed, the fiery diatribes he distributed to CounterPunch and to a vast world audience. At the top of his form his prose has the pitiless, relentless clarity of Swift.
The Palestinians will never know a greater polemical champion. A few weeks ago I was, with his genial permission, putting together from three of his essays the concluding piece in our forthcoming CounterPunch collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I was seized, as so often before, by the power of the prose: how could anyone read those searing sentences and not boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward's generosity of soul: that with the imperative of justice and nationhood for his people came the humanity that called for reconciliation between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir, criticism, homily, fiction poured from his pen, a fountain pen that reminded one that Edward was very much an intellectual in the nineteenth- century tradition of a Zola or of a Victor Hugo, who once remarked that genius is a promontory in the infinite. I read that line as a schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook and though I laugh now a little at the pretension of the line, I do think of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the intellectual and political landscape that forced people, however disinclined they may have been, to confront the Palestinian experience.
Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if I would make available my apartment in New York, where I lived at that time, as the site for a surprise 40th birthday for Edward. I dislike surprise parties but of course agreed. The evening arrived; guests assembled in my sitting room on the eleventh floor of 333 Central Park West. The dining room table groaned under Middle Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the front door. Edward and Mariam had arrived! They were ascending in the elevator. Then we could all hear Edward's furious bellow: "But I don't want to go to dinner with *******, Alex!" They entered at last and the shout went up from seventy throats, Happy Birthday! He reeled back in surprise and then recovered, and then saw about the room all those friends happy to have traveled thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could see him slowly expand with joy at each new unexpected face and salutation.
He never became blase in the face of friendship and admiration, or indeed honorary degrees, just as he never grew a thick skin. Each insult was as fresh and as wounding as the first he ever received. A quarter of century ago he would call, with mock heroic English intonation, "Alex-and-er, have you seen the latest New Republic? Have you read this filthy, this utterly disgusting diatribe? You haven't? Oh, I know, you don't care about the feelings of a mere black man such as myself." I'd start laughing, and say I had better things to do than read Martin Peretz, or Edward Alexander or whoever the assailant was, but for half an hour he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals and listen moodily as I told him to pay no attention.
He never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he marched onward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street eager to pour sewage on his head.
Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to you across the abyss. I don't even have to close my eyes to savor your presence, your caustic or merry laughter, your elegance, your spirit as vivid as that of d'Artagnan, the fiery Gascon. You will burn like the brightest of flames in my memory, as you will in the memories of all who knew and admired and loved you
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has added a new journalTHE BUSINESS OF TERROR
US: a disputed history of identity
By Edward W Said
ANYONE with the slightest understanding of how cultures work knows that
defining a culture, saying what it is for members of that culture, is always
a major and, even in undemocratic societies, a democratic contest. There are
canonical authorities to be selected and regularly revised, debated,
reselected, or dismissed. There are ideas of good and evil, belonging or not
belonging (the same and the different), hierarchies of value to be
specified, discussed, rediscussed and settled or not.
Moreover each culture defines its enemies, who stands beyond it and
threatens it. For the Greeks, beginning with Herodotus, anyone who did not
speak Greek was automatically a barbarian, an Other to be despised and
fought against. An excellent recent book by the French classicist Frangois
Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus (1), painstakingly shows how deliberately
Herodotus set about constructing an image of a barbarian Other from the
Scythians, more even than from the Persians.
The official culture is that of priests, academies and the state. It
provides definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries and what I have
called "belonging". It is this official culture that speaks in the name of
the whole, that tries to express the general will, the general ethos and
idea, that inclusively holds the official past (the founding fathers and
texts, the pantheon of heroes and villains) and excludes what is foreign or
different or undesirable in the past. From it come the definitions of what
may or may not be said, those prohibitions and proscriptions that are
necessary to any culture if it is to have authority.
It is also true that besides the mainstream or official or canonical culture
there are dissenting or alternative, unorthodox, heterodox cultures that
contain many anti- authoritarian strains in competition with the official
culture. These can be called the counterculture, an ensemble of practices
associated with outsiders - the poor, immigrants, artistic bohemians,
rebels, artists. From the counterculture comes the critique of authority and
attacks on what is official and orthodox. The great contemporary Arab poet
Adonis has written a massive account of the relationship between orthodoxy
and heterodoxy in Arabic culture and shown the constant dialectic and
tension between them. No culture is understandable without some sense of
this ever-present source of creative provocation from the unofficial to the
official; to disregard this sense of restlessness within each culture, and
to assume that there is complete homogeneity between culture and identity is
to miss what is vital and fecund.
In the United States the debate about what is American has gone through many
transformations and sometimes dramatic shifts. When I was growing up,
Westerns depicted native Americans as evil devils to be destroyed or tamed.
They were called Red Indians and insofar as they had any function in the
culture - and this was as true of films as of the writing of academic
history - it was as a foil to the advancing course of white civilisation.
Today that has changed completely. Native Americans are seen as victims, not
villains, of the advance of the US into the Wild West.
There has been a change in the status of Columbus and even more dramatic
reversals in the depictions of African-Americans and women. Toni Morrison
noted how in classic American literature there is an obsession with
whiteness, as Melville's Moby-Dick and Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym eloquently
testify. Yet she says major male, white writers of the 19th and 20th
centuries, men who shaped the canon of American literature, created their
works by using whiteness as a way of avoiding, curtaining and rendering
invisible the African presence in the midst of society. That Toni Morrison
writes her novels and criticism with such success and brilliance now
underscores the extent of the change from the world of Melville and
Hemingway to that of Dubois, Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Morrison herself.
Which vision is the real America, and who can lay claim to represent and
define it? The question is complex and deeply interesting but cannot be
settled by reducing the matter to a few clichis.
A recent view of the difficulties in cultural contests whose object is the
definition of a civilisation can be found in Arthur Schlesinger's little
book, The Disuniting of America (2). As a mainstream historian, Schlesinger
is understandably troubled by the fact that emergent and immigrant groups in
the US have disputed the official, unitary national fable as it used to be
represented by great classical historians such as Bancroft, Henry Adams and,
more recently, Richard Hofstader. The disputants want the writing of history
to reflect not only a nation conceived of and ruled by patricians and
landowners but one in which slaves, servants, labourers and poor immigrants
played an important but as yet unacknowledged role.
The narratives of such people, silenced by the great discourses whose source
was Washington, the investment banks of New York, the universities of New
England and the industrial fortunes of the Middle West, have come to disrupt
the slow progress and unruffled serenity of the official story. They ask
questions, tell the experiences of social unfortunates and make the claims
of "lesser" peoples - women, Asians and African-Americans and other
minorities, sexual as well as ethnic. Whether one agrees or not with
Schlesinger's cri de coeur, there is no disagreeing with his underlying
thesis that the writing of history is the royal road to the definition of a
country and that the identity of a society is in large part a function of
historical interpretation, which is fraught with contested claims and
counterclaims. The US is in such a fraught situation today.