The Loom of Time, page 5
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I would return to Greece to live for seven years from 1982 to 1989, working there as a freelance foreign correspondent. Based in Athens, and living close to the sea, I traveled throughout the Balkans and the Middle East as far as Central Asia. One month I was in Yugoslavia, another month on the Iran-Iraq border: in my mind they both were linked as the western and eastern frontiers of the Ottoman Empire. There were only a handful of other journalists in Athens who used the city as a base to cover what was, in fact, the old Near East. But my own travel pattern in particular had a venerable tradition, that of Herodotus and Alexander the Great. For Herodotus, the father of history and, in truth, the world’s first reporter in the fifth century B.C., the Aegean Sea was his base. From here he organized his far-flung expeditions throughout the Near East[15]—Macedonia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and so on—in order to investigate the causes of that first great struggle between West and East: the Greco-Persian Wars. Little more than a hundred years later, between 334 and 323 B.C., Alexander the Great, a veritable geographical force in human form,[16] traveled from his base in Macedonia near the Aegean Sea to conquer the whole Near East: what in antiquity constituted the Persian Empire, just as it would constitute the Ottoman Empire in early modern and modern times.
Thus, without realizing it, I was covering an historically coherent geography, even if it did not fit into the conventional journalistic boundaries of the Cold War, which demanded sharp divisions between the Balkans, Turkey, the Arab world, and beyond. But it is that older geography that forms the contours of this book, not just as a basis for my travels and memories, but for my reading as well.
Yes, I am very much out of date. But there is no understanding of the present without a vivid notion of the past. The travel writer Paul Theroux, defending his old age, rebukes the young with this: “I have been to a place where none of you have ever been, where none of you can ever go. It is the past. I spent decades there and I can say, you don’t have the slightest idea.”[17]
That is my defense for writing a book of history, travel, reporting, memoir, and geography about parts of the Greater Middle East in my seventies. I have vivid, living memories of being at the front in the Iran-Iraq War in 1984, of experiencing the relative peace and beauty of Hafez al-Assad’s Syria in 1976, and of traveling all over the shah’s Iran in 1973. I knew Egypt in the relatively hopeful Sadat and early Mubarak years. I knew Tunisia under the enlightened dictatorship of Habib Bourguiba, one of the great minor men of the twentieth century, who gave Tunisia a secular nation-state identity rare in the Arab world, and who was therefore crucial to its peaceful experiment with democracy more than a third of a century after I had first visited there.
I could go on.
The past merging into the present is all we ever have to go on. Age renders me a bit withered and invisible in the crowd, and more inhibited as to where I can venture, but it can have its uses. Like Yeats’s protagonist in “Sailing to Byzantium,” I will also begin my journey in earnest in Istanbul, not to defeat mortality as in the poem, but to understand what has happened to our world in the course of my own lifetime.[18]
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And what has happened to our world includes the intellectual world as well. For the intellectual and journalistic climate in the 2020s is radically different than it was when I began work in the 1980s as an Athens-based foreign correspondent. How do I explain just how different the intellectual climate was back then? Oddly enough, I can do this most effectively by describing a public duel over the Middle East that took place in 1982 between two brilliant men. Describing that duel, blow by blow, illustrates how my own relationship with the region—and how to think about it—has spanned starkly different eras.
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It was truly a battle royal fought out in the pages of The New York Review of Books between Princeton University historian of the Near East Bernard Lewis and Columbia University professor of literature Edward W. Said. The subject of the duel was Said’s book Orientalism, published in 1978, which had become an academic sensation. By assaulting what he considered the surreptitious imperialist motivations of Western writers and experts on the Near East, Said with just one book arguably did more than anyone else to invent the field of postcolonial studies. Lewis eviscerated Said’s book at great length, criticizing its accuracy and deconstructing its entire postcolonial theme, demonstrating, in the process, his own formidable knowledge in several Near Eastern languages and traditions. This prompted Said to respond with equal venom, again at great length, playing the role of the suave rebel who had invaded the house of the almighty savants. It was a case of the historian-expert armed with the corpus of source material versus the English professor who grasped the literary implications of it all, and thus the effect on people’s political imaginations. Both men are now dead. Lewis, a British-born Jew, chose burial in the historic Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv. Said, who identified as an exiled Palestinian, elected to have his ashes interred at a Protestant cemetery near Beirut. Clearly, here were two Americans whose deepest sympathies lay elsewhere. Because the Israeli-Palestinian dispute lay deep in their psyches as the bedrock of their disagreement, it allowed for the presentation of two incalculably different scholarly approaches and worldviews. In fact, their duel of four decades ago wears very well. This battle royal radiates a timeless, classical quality.
The drama begins with Said’s book itself.
Employing nineteenth-century French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme’s glittering orientalist fantasy of a nude snake charmer in the East as the book’s cover, Said’s work immediately electrifies with both condemnation and exotica even before the reader encounters the first word. Said defines orientalism as nothing less than “the Western approach to the Orient” in its entirety, and because orientalism constituted the systematic study of the Orient, it also involved a province of “dreams, images, and vocabulary” that the West practically inhaled in order to come to terms with this seemingly hostile, “Other” world. Because this “Other” world was so different and outwardly opposite to that of European civilization, Europeans, Said claimed, used the Orient as a vehicle to define themselves by what they were against: a geography close by and yet fantastically threatening. Said circumscribes the branch of orientalism with which he is especially concerned to mean the British and French imperialist encounter with the Near East: that part of the East that is geographically nearest to Europe, and thus the part that exercised the most elaborate effect on Europe’s political and intellectual imagination. Because the Near East (more or less interchangeable with the Middle East) is mainly Arab and Islamic, Orientalism is a book focused primarily on how Western imperialism succeeded in distorting the study and interpretation of Arab culture and politics.[19]
Europe, Said alleges, is the “genuine creator” of the Near East as it has been imagined by scholars, journalists, and policymakers for centuries. For it was the blunt and violent fact of empire that facilitated the study and travels of generations of British and French scholars, who, whether they admitted it or not—whether they were aware of it or not—were directly or indirectly imperial agents. Said’s indictment includes Richard Francis Burton, T. E. Lawrence, D. G. Hogarth, Harry St. John Philby, Gertrude Bell, Hamilton A. R. Gibb, and many others stretching deep into the modern era, as well as novelists and travel writers, to say nothing of the Arabists and national-security experts who have regularly delivered expertise on the Near East from their perches in London, Paris, and Washington. And this expertise, as Said explains, was based on the Middle East of their imaginations, not on what it was in fact.
Because such expertise was based on their imaginations, which in turn were supported by the superior position that imperialism and later American dominance afforded them, these men and women “bandied about” clichés and generalizations concerning Arab Muslims that “no one would risk in talking about blacks or Jews.” This is how, for example, the myth of the so-called Arab mind took root. From imperialism to determinism and essentialism there was a straight line that poisoned everything from travel writing to scholarship to area studies and finally to foreign policy. In short, military and economic dominance had offered up cultural stereotypes.[20]
Keep in mind that the literary vehicle for this whole argument is an elegant and sumptuous tour de force of well over three hundred pages that takes no prisoners, and takes one’s breath away. Bernard Lewis is singled out by Said for especially harsh treatment, as someone respected by the Anglo-American establishment as the “learned Orientalist,” and whose writings are “steeped in the ‘authority’ of the field,” yet who, Said charges, became “aggressively ideological” later in life, writing “propaganda against his subject material” (against the Arabs, that is).[21]
Lewis’s counterattack appeared in the June 24, 1982, edition of The New York Review of Books, four years after the publication of Orientalism. The fact that he did not reply much sooner was possibly due to the fact that the relentless success of the book at some point simply made it impossible for him to ignore. Lewis’s response certainly reads with the tight organization that betrays maturation and slow, meticulous writing.
Lewis begins with an analogy: a rich description of the European classicists who translated and interpreted the work of the ancient Greek tragedians and historians, preserving the origins of the Western tradition in Greece in all its glory and brilliance. Lewis then pivots:
“The time has come to save Greece from the classicists and bring the whole pernicious tradition of classical scholarship to an end. Only Greeks are truly able to teach and write on Greek history and culture from remote antiquity to the present day.” The only non-Greeks who should be permitted to join this great endeavor, Lewis continues in jest, would be those who demonstrated pro-Greek sentiments, such as support for the Greek cause in Cyprus or ill will toward the Turks. Lewis thus undermines the whole edifice of Said’s Orientalism as absurd, since what it amounts to is that only Arabs and other oppressed people are qualified to write about their own cultures. “The implication would seem to be,” Lewis argues, “that by learning Arabic, Englishmen and Frenchmen were committing some kind of offense.” Said, in Lewis’s words, misrepresents “what scholars do and what scholarship is about.” In fact, “orientalist,” as a professional term, Lewis goes on, was long ago discarded by the very people Edward Said attacks, as modern historians and academically trained specialists have long since taken over the field. Orientalism survives only in Said’s mind as a term of “polemical abuse,” Lewis writes. As for the crimes of orientalism, Lewis quotes Said on how Western scholars “appropriate” and “ransack” the intellectual and aesthetic riches of the Middle East, as if those things were, Lewis writes, “commodities which exist in finite quantities.” In fact, nothing has been stolen or “appropriated” since such intellectual and other riches exist for endless interpretation by whoever wants to undertake it.[22]
Said fired back in the August 12, 1982, issue of The New York Review of Books. He rejected Lewis’s comparison between orientalism and classical Greek studies, because the latter constitutes true “philology” and thus is much more rigorous as a scholarly field. In any case, Greek classical studies are further removed from the tradition of empire than is orientalism. Said also draws a link between orientalist scholarship and the foggy, romantic writings of European novelists, poets, journalists, and politicians about Islam, noting the migration of prejudice from one field of knowledge to the next. Said’s ultimate point is that contemporary orientalism of the kind represented by Lewis “is a discourse of power”—of one civilization dominating another—that thoughtful Arabs and Muslims now reject.[23]
In fact, the core issue of how one culture and civilization should regard another, and how all of us, as individuals, should report on and analyze cultures and civilizations different from our own, is more urgent than ever. Globalization and the defeat of distance through technology have brought us all into thrilling and yet uncomfortable proximity. This renders the disagreement between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said of signal importance. Just consider that the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s 1993 thesis on The Clash of Civilizations actually borrowed the term from Lewis’s “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” which first appeared in The Atlantic in September 1990. Though Lewis used the phrase in a somewhat different context, the connection with Huntington’s famous thesis is not incidental, since what Lewis and Said were really arguing about was, to repeat, the ability or inability of one civilization to comprehend another nearby. And that, as Huntington explained, constituted a malady of the last phase of the modern world, before postmodernism with all of its cultural mixings and juxtapositions took over.
The fact that it was a very different world in 1982 only further demonstrates the clairvoyance manifested unintentionally by both Lewis and Said in the course of intellectually assaulting one another. Let me explain. As a young reporter in Greece in the 1980s, the world of journalism that I experienced was one of Americans and Europeans holding forth in print about the Arab world and Israel. The idea that Jews could not be expected to report objectively about Israel still held currency among journalists back then. Arabs could work as stringers in the Middle Eastern bureaus of major publications but, though it was never openly stated, with few exceptions they were thought to lack the emotional distance of staff correspondents. Interpreting the Middle East was the province of Westerners who were neither Jewish nor Muslim. Indeed, the ideal situation was to write, report, and provide analysis about countries and peoples with which one had no emotional or personal links whatsoever. For to have any kind of a stake in any particular place could be professionally disqualifying. Foreign correspondents often had a familiarity with other languages, such as French or German, but rarely with Arabic. Rather than true area expertise, an Olympian degree of distance and objectivity was sought. Of course, the idea that merely being from the West burdened one with a viewpoint and cultural baggage all its own was rarely realized, or even considered.
In this world of Western observers of the Middle East during the Cold War, groups such as the State Department Arabists (about whom I later wrote a book) were truly caught in the middle. Mainly Protestants who spoke Arabic, they were thought of by those like Said as diplomats-cum-imperialists, and by many others, especially the pro-Israel community, as having gone native with the culture that they were supposed to be analyzing and reporting on. Neither the Arabs nor the Washington policy community wholly trusted them.
This entire world was rendered sepia-toned by the globalization that followed the end of the Cold War, which, by dramatically enlarging middle classes nearly everywhere and the air links between them, to say nothing of connecting everyone with digital platforms, has plunged the West and the Arab worlds both into the cross currents of multiple civilizations. Of course, the Arab encounter with the West, following the conquests of Roman lands and the Crusades, began in earnest in the late eighteenth century with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. But, as I’ve said before, attrition of the same adds up to big change. Thus, it is the very intensity and magnitude of this intermingling at the higher levels of society that has been so critical, fostered as it has been by technology. The consequence is a whole new generation of Arabs and Africans who are middle class, extremely well educated, and filtering steadily into the ranks of the global elite, and thus into the ranks of journalism and policy studies.
This new generation of experts is more analytically demanding than the old one. In such a professional environment, subjective observations about national cultures, even positive observations, rarely make it through editorial filters without substantial backup. The exception is the work of anthropologists, who build cultural models out of particulars from the ground up.
Truly, we inhabit Edward Said’s world now. Though one has to wonder whether postcolonial thinking, with its denunciatory references to imperialism and racism, is but a phase that will dissipate somewhat as the distance between the present and the end of European empires lengthens in the coming decades. Keep in mind that, as I’ve already explained, empires have been the political rule for humanity for thousands of years, so we are still immediately in the shadow of them. This makes natural the current obsession.
If Edward Said rules the roost, then Bernard Lewis is considered by some a relic, like the old and gracious foreign correspondents of major newspapers I used to know in the 1980s. I say this more as a lament than with pleasure. It is tragic that Lewis had his reputation tarnished by the Iraq War. While his influential support for the war fits nicely with Said’s profile of him as the very personification of imperialism, it is also true that Lewis’s long and intimate association with the Arab world and its language—rather than make him cynical—gave him hope for liberal change. Saddam Hussein was not merely a dictator. He was a Stalinist tyrant and Lewis may have felt the opportunity to topple him just too good to pass up. And all this transpired in Lewis’s ninth decade of life.
To fairly judge Lewis we need to realize that, like postcolonialism itself perhaps, he represents a chapter in the accumulation and interpretation of knowledge that was already ending by the time Said set his sights on him. But that does not make his vast and learned experience of the Arab world—in addition to the Turkish and Persian ones whose languages he also knew—any less valuable. To judge Lewis we need to recognize not only what has come after him but what came before him. For the younger Lewis helped shake up the world of scholarship just as Said would do much later.
