Edward Said Meets Ameen Rihani: Lebanon's Forgotten Orientalism

Abstract

Edward Said's famous statement, in Orientalism (1995), that scholars still want to come and sit at the feet of American Orientalists is belied by the writings of the Lebanese-American author Ameen Rihani (1876–1940). Following Said's death, and except for a few critically informed but scattered voices, the vs. the West arena has been left to figures like Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and Bernard Lewis, who have taken upon themselves the task of deciding—whether in overtly simplifying strategies or in covertly anti-Arab misreadings— the fate of the Orient and, thus, of settling the issue of how to deal with what has recently become the growing problem of the Oriental and, specifically, of the Arab, in the wake of the events of September 11. Indeed, some of Said's most frustrating struggles have been with deconstructing a demonized, unitary representation of a religion not his own: Islam. Yet Ameen Rihani, another Arab Christian, presents one of the earliest attempts at narrat...