Power, Knowledge, and Orientalism

Abstract

These two books by Bernard Lewis and Edward Said both appeared in 1993, and both have to do with the encounter of Europe and the Middle East. But in most other respects they are very different books. Lewis was trained at and long associated with the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies at a time when the British Empire was still in full flourish. A genius at languages and a man of remarkable erudition who crossed the Atlantic to teach at Princeton during the latter part of his career, he has made his mark on the entire range of Middle Eastern history from the advent of Islam to the rise of modern Turkey, and from the history of slavery to the history of his coreligionists, the “Jews of Islam” (his term). Said is a much younger man, an Anglican Palestinian whose family emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s, in the wake of the loss of Palestine. Alongside a distinguished career as a professor of English literature at Columbia, specializing in Conrad, Said became an active supporter of the Palestinian cause, a member of the Palestine National Council, and occasionally an adviser to the PLO on issues such as the wording of diplomatic documents in English. In 1978, Said published Orientalism, a wide-ranging attack on the entire tradition of writing about the Middle East produced by scholars, travelers, and diplomats in Britain and France from the late eighteenth into the twentieth centuries. The book's framework derived from the work of critical theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault, and, with its argument that power and knowledge are intimately connected, it became an academic best-seller. Its thesis, that a mainstream metropolitan culture could powerfully control the representation of what it saw as marginal areas and groups, appealed widely to academics of the baby boom generation concerned with discrimination against women and minorities.