A New "Copernican" Revolution: Said's Critique of Metaphysics and Theology

Abstract

T he view that Edward Said is primarily a Third World critic of orientalism, imperialism, and Zionism has gained wide currency in the academic community and beyond. This appropriation of his writings, which has helped launch the increasingly important Weld of postcolonial studies, is perhaps not particularly surprising. After all, Said over the years wrote a great deal about these related areas of knowledge and socio-political combat. Some of the most compelling insights in his oeuvre concern modern Euro-American imperialism— its genesis, evolution, consolidation, reversal, and recrudescence; its doctrinal audacity and epic scope; its trails of scent and lines of de- scent; its enormous capacity for self-fortiWcation, self-idealization, and (in the case of contemporary America) self-occultation. Orientalism, his most famous book (it has been translated into thirty-six languages worldwide), is an encyclopedic, meticulously diagnostic dissection and indictment of orientalist discourse; 1 presumptively disinterested but— in Said's view—profoundly motivated, this hybrid Weld of knowledge about the Orient (especially the Arab-Islamic Near East), though hav- ing medieval wellsprings, has over the last two and a half centuries matured into a formidable, theoretically armored discipline closely entwined with imperial dogma and practice. Said also magisterially documented the scandals of Zionism, from the moment it piggybacked itself on European imperialism in the nine- teenth century, to its political and ideological triumph in the mid- twentieth century, to its desperate twilight in the early twenty-Wrst. All but stripped of its multilayered ideological disguise, this colonial venture is nowadays sustained by means of almost unlimited Ameri- can aid (both moral and material) and the use of the most defamatory anti-Muslim, anti-Arab representations to come out of the orientalist