Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. By ZACHARY LOCKMAN (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. xxi + 307. £40; pb. £16.99).
Many, if not most, academics engaged in Middle East Studies in the United States have come to believe that their field was subject to a dangerous assault on its freedom and integrity as a result of developments triggered off by the 9/11 attack: assault from outside by those who either ignored or belittled its claim to area expertise; assault from inside by a group of fellow academics who argued that it had been largely hi-jacked by post-modernist followers of Edward Said to the detriment of its scholarship, its relevance, its patriotism and its political impartiality.
As a European who has taught at Middle East Centres in both Oxford and Harvard for some forty years, I see matters from a somewhat different perspective. For one thing, accusations of political, methodological, not to speak of ideological, bias have been part and parcel of the field throughout most of the post-war period, and more especially since the deep divisions promoted by the 1967 Middle East war. For another, the influence of Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism (1978), has never been anything like as strong in our field as it has more generally in post-colonial, feminist and cultural studies. I would also argue, again from personal experience, that the present situation is not anything like as dire as many of my colleagues seem to think, and that the twin impact of 9/11 and the bungled occupation of Iraq have, in fact, alerted many powerful groups in both Washington and academe as to the need for more area and Middle Eastern language expertise not less—a situation which has already brought us a large rise in government funds, as well as, at Harvard at least, pressure for several useful appointments in both Islamic and Middle Eastern political studies.
Zackary Lockman's book comes at a good time to provide a clear, if not impartial, account of the history and politics of orientalism from a scholar who, as a student, then teacher at Harvard and now New York University, has clearly been identified with the anti-orientalist, ‘politics of knowledge’, camp for over three decades. After a quick gallop through some of the early history of different formulations of the east/west divide from the Greeks onwards, the bulk of the book is devoted to the modern development of the field as a child, first of empire and then of the Cold War, guided initially in both America and Europe by scholars trained in the all-pervading orientalist tradition, such as Sir Hamilton Gibb and Bernard Lewis, and then subject to a process of criticism and revision by small groups of historians, anthropologists and social scientists—myself included.
There is much to be said for Lockman's approach. Calm, clearly-argued, and reasonably comprehensive, it is an ideal introduction for students and others who know little of the history of the ‘contending visions’ he so ably presents. Nevertheless, I would beg to differ with its approach on two main grounds. First, something important is lost as a result of the decision to structure the analysis of the recent period largely in terms of orientalism versus its critics. Not only has this the effect of personalising much of the argument in terms of the polemics launched against each other by rival authorities like Lewis and Said, but it also largely ignores many of the difficulties faced by the critics themselves.
Hence, while Lockman says very nice things about me, he misses something of the corporate nature of the early anti-orientalist critique generally carried out under the influence of scholars like Albert Hourani and Anwar Abdel-Malek, who had had no orientalist-training themselves. Moreover, while pointing out the flaws in the orientalists' ahistorical and usually reductionist approach to the history of Middle Eastern societies is one thing, constructing a coherent alternative which does full justice to the political, economic, and social development of this particular corner of the former colonial world quite another. Even if we leave aside the notorious problems faced by secular persons attempting to account for the continuing importance of religion in Middle Eastern life, I cannot say that the task of explaining the region's historical trajectory has been especially well done.
Second, I do not share Lockman's pessimism about the present state of affairs. In his final chapter entitled ‘After Orientalism’ he sets out what he takes to be the threats posed to Middle Eastern studies by a revived and much more politically motivated orientalism which began to manifest itself as the cold war was coming to an end. There was the heightened, sometimes near hysterical, concern with terrorism and the associated ‘clash of civilisations’. There was the threat to traditional area studies posed by attempts to provide a globally-organised alternative which could be pursued without any knowledge of languages or of local socio-economic and cultural conditions. And, particularly after 9/11, there was a serious effort to censor opinions deemed too liberal, too supportive of Arab, and therefore assumedly anti-American, anti-Zionist or even anti-Semitic, forces.
And yet, and yet, and yet ... While not wanting to minimise the threat to certain targeted individuals and institutions, nor the consternation that this has created inside our ivy-covered walls, it needs to be noted that much of this offensive, while sometimes supported by working academics, came largely from forces external to the universities, that it resonated more outside than inside, and that it was soon offset by equally important counter-trends set in train by such persons as congressmen, Defense Department advisers and members of the 9/11 Commission who soon came to realise the huge dangers posed to American security and to its attempts at Middle Eastern national building by the country's lack of regional linguistic and cultural expertise. Meanwhile, those of us who teach continue to do so in much the same old way. More controversially, it seems to me quite likely that, once this particular dust is finally settled, we will discover that Usama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and company look more like the servants of the academic study of the Middle East than the agents either of its demise or its take-over by orientalist fundamentalists.
E. Roger Owen is the A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle Eastern History. He was director of CMES from 1996 to 1999 and since 1995 he has directed the Center's Contemporary Arab Studies Program. The leading authority on Middle Eastern economic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for the last ten years he has been Harvard's principal figure in the teaching of the region's modern economic history.
This review first appeared in The English Historical Review, cxx. 489 (Dec. 2005). It is quoted in full with permission from Oxford University Press.