as Ella Shohat puts it in a seminal article on the post-colonial, "continuities and discontinuities; but its emphasis is on the new modes and forms of the old colonialist practices, not on a ‘beyond’.” 2/2

or the Orient and tyranny. And there has also been a return in various parts of the Middle and Far East to nativist religion and primitive nationalism, one particularly disgraceful aspect of which is the continuing Iranian 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘸𝘢 against Salman Rushdie. 3/3

by some scholars and journalists in the United States to find in an Orientalized Islam a new empire of evil. Consequently, both the electronic and print media have been awash with demeaning stereotypes that lump together Islam and terrorism, or Arabs and violence, 2/3

a chronic tendency to deny, suppress or distort the cultural context of such systems of thought in order to maintain the fiction of its scholarly disinterest. 4/4

Most of all they see in the discourse of modern Orientalism, and its counterparts in similar know-ledges constructed for native Americans and Africans, 3/4

neither Muslims nor Arabs nor any of the other dehumanized lesser peoples recognize themselves as human beings or their observers as simple scholars. 2/4

Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of each and every Orientalist. But I do say that the 𝘨𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥 of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant. 4/4

This does not, however, conflict with what I say in 𝘖𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮, with the difference that I do insist on the prevalence in the discourse itself of a structure of attitudes that cannot simply be waved away or discounted. 3/4

Names that he brought up included Marshall Hodgson, Claude Cohen, André Raymond, all of whom (along with the German authors who come up 𝘥𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘶𝘦𝘶𝘳) should be acknowledged as real contributors to human knowledge. 2/4

Me playing the clip, fully expecting one about to be eaten

As with defenses of Islam, recourse to Marxism or "the West" as a coherent total system seems to me to have been a case of using one orthodoxy to shoot down another. 3/3

whose system of thought was claimed to have risen above his obvious prejudices, or I was criticized for not appreciating the great achievements of Orientalism, the West, etc. 2/3

There's going to be a "right wing backlash" no matter what we do, why not just come correct from the outset?

I believe 𝘖𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘮 as a book shows it, especially when I speak of humanistic study as seeking ideally to go beyond coercive limitations on thought towards a non-dominative and non-essentialist type of learning. 3/3

because I traversed the imperial East—West divide, entered into the life of the West, and yet retained some organic connection with the place I originally came from. I would repeat that this was very much a procedure of crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers; 2/3

I am happy to record that many readers in Britain and America, as well as in English-speaking Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean, saw the book as stressing the actualities of what was later to be called multiculturalism, rather than xenophobia and aggressive, race-oriented nationalism. 3/3

the Orient-versus-Occident opposition was both misleading and highly undesirable; the less it was given credit for actually describing anything more than a fascinating history of interpretations and contesting interests, the better. 2/3

Napoleon’s is an "objective" account from the standpoint of someone powerful trying to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit; Jabarti's is an account by someone who paid the price, was figuratively captured and vanquished. 4/4