Orientalism Now: Lebanese History, Identity and Alterity

Abstract

Against the backdrop of turbulent change in contemporary Middle East societies, it is apt to reconsider Edward Said’s conceptualization of Eastern other. Within the theoretical parameters of Orientalism and the more fluid borders of postmodernism our present concern is with the formation of history and culture in Lebanon. Bearing in mind the inherent differences between Lebanese Christians, Muslims and Jews, we contend that Said’s notion of the other can explain only in part what is a far more complex religious encounter. Such a nuanced argument locates alterity in various frameworks of cultural correlation, appropriation and displacement. Our modus operandi is to adopt the epistemology of otherness in a comparative and comprehensive analysis of identity. We consider, in particular, how the Lebanese Maronites, a Christian sect, have employed history to assert ethnic difference and antecedence in terms of religion, language and territory. Furthermore, what we find in the discourse of contemporary Muslim leaders and academics ‐ specifically Sunni, Shiite and Druze ‐ are increasing questions concerning the meaning of Arab identity, common heritage and Islamic nationhood. The central premise of Said’s Orientalism is the belief that in the nineteenth century imperialism facilitated a growing interest among European academics in ethnography and taxonomy. The Oriens, the Orient, became alter by virtue of its Islamic identity, and a “pseudo-incarnation” by virtue of the fact that it came after Christianity (Said 1978: 62). This unrepresentative, flawed and tendentious classification of the Orient by a Western “corporate institution” predisposed to reinterpret historical data ad infinitum, was essentially racist as it “accumulated experiences, territories, peoples, histories; it studied them, classified them, verified them; but above all, it subordinated them to the culture and indeed the very idea of white Christian Europe” (Said 1990: 72). Moreover, the recursive formation of knowledge pertaining to the East was dependent upon a discriminatory language to