Orientalism, the book

There are two sides to Edward Said's Orientalism. It's seminal: many prints, many translations, many articles about it, generator of Post­colonial Studies. But weak on facts, selective focus (in spite of general claims), a complete failure.
Its thesis: the West dominates the East because Western scholars master Eastern subjects. The premises: from Homer to Kissinger the world is divided between a rational Occident and an irrational Orient — at the same time, Said writes: The Orient is a creation of Western scholars = the Orient is not real, hence there can be no fact chequing, because there can be no adequatio rei et intellectus, between the orient of things and the Orient in books, because there is no real orient. When several writers agree on a subject, according to Said, they copied from each other; that they agree with observable facts is out of the question.
Orientalism is not about "truth" (p 21), it's about internal con­sistency (p 22).
So Said dispensed himself from studying the East before writing about it (before writing about French intellectuals he studied their writings; but the orien­talist Orient he wrote about he studied second hand, the orient not at all). But — to his ever­lasting shame — sometimes he could not resist. Edward, the son of a Presbyterian American, thinks he knows enough of things Middle Eastern, because of Arab blood running through his veins — his family is neither Muslim nor Oriental Christan (Copts, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian), nor half Oriental (like Maronites or Greek Orthodox) but Anglo-Protestant, he has never been to an Arab school, he does not read Arabic.

Said: „Bethlehem, whose etymological meaning Chateaubriand got completely wrong“ (p. 172) » Bethléhem signifie la Maison de Pain. « (Œuvres complètes de M. le vicomte de Chateaubriand, Paris: Garnier, 1861 V 281) — correct! And "etymological" is out of place. Köln and Augsburg go back to Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium resp. Aelia Augusta, but Neapoli (Greek: New City), Bethlehem (Hebrew: House of Bread) have a meaning, no need for "etymology"; Said has to show off — like by "an etymological, dynastic notion of linguistic filiation" (p. 135).

When you read Orientalism carefully you will often cry or laugh — or just wonder:
How can Said transform "[to an ordinary Muslim] religion meant everything." (H A R Gibb) to "Islam is or means everything" (and its opposite)?
I propone that Said knows near to nothing on Islam. "it is time to mention Gibb's ... assertion that the Islamic master science is law ... not theology. The curious thing about [this] is that the assertion [is] made ... not on the basis of evidence internal to islam, but rather on the basis of a logic delibe­rately outside Islam." (p. 280) Rubbish. Take any sample of 1000 ʿUlema at any place and time, you will find 100 jurists for each theo­logian, take any 1000 Arabic Muslim books, you will find many more on law, than of the nature of God. Compared to Gibb Said knows nothing about Islam.
And I go further. I will argue with him on a point, where he is not the only ignoramus, but has many on his side: "Now it is time to mention Gibb's preference for the word Mohammedanism over Islam (since he says that Islam is really based upon an idea of apostolic succession culminating in Mohammed)" (p. 280) When Khomeini declared Salman Rushdi an outlaw, many Islamologist wrote that he was condemned for blasphemy. Annemarie Schimmel was the only one, who knew at once, that his crime was sabb an-nabī; she knew that in India there are millions of Muslim declaring their love for Muhammad, that in Arabia hundred thousands chant of al-nûr al-Muḥammadī, that in Turkey pious Muslims have a Hilye, a description of the beauty of Muhammad on their reception room wall. In Islam there is no blasphemy, just the crime "denigration of the Messenger"! God is so exhalted, he is in no need, he does not care what humans do to his honour.
Wahhabis and Ed Said get angry, they claim that calling islam "Muhammadism" makes Muhammad into a God. Does Ed think "Jainismus" makes Jina to God, "Zoroastrianism" Zoroaster to God, "Manichaeism" Mani to God, "Buddhism" Buddha to God? Jews call their religion "Mosaic" promoting Moses to God? One can study the religious practice of Muslims and find "Muhammedanism" a proper name, it does not show that you had a "preconception". You can call someone "Mormon" instead of "Member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", and you can call Edward "an arse­hole" although he himself doesn't find that appropriate. Islam is "submission (to God's will)", so Adam is muslim, Jesus is Muslim, and Abraham is the most muslim of all, ready to sacrifice his only legitimate son. If Islam is the religion of all prophets, the religion reinvigorated by Muhammad needs a name of its own! Take that, you idiot Anglican Protes­tant American Professor! Playing Wagner on the piano doesn't teach you enough to pontificate to Gibb on Muhammedanism!

"First Persia, Syria, and Egypt, then Turkey, then North Africa fell to the Muslim armies" (p 59) Turkey was conquered more than 400 years after North Africa (even if we do not count Egypt which certainly is part of North Africa). "By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Islam ruled as far east ... Indonesia, and China." (p 59) Tiny parts of (modern) Indonesia had to wait till the 16th century, the rest much longer, and China is still waiting to be ruled by Islam.

The next quote shows, that his Greek is not as good as he thinks it is:
"Mohammed's punishment is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart. Dante's verse at this point spares the reader none of the eschatological (sic) detail that so vivid a punishment entails: Mohammed's entrails and his excrement are described with unflinching accuracy." (p. 68) Lyer! Dante speaks neither of cask and staves, not does he describe Muhammad's solid metabolic waste in "detail ... with unflinching accuracy."
canto XXVIII
Un diavolo è qua dietro che n’accisma
sì crudelmente, al taglio de la spada
rimettendo ciascun di questa risma,

quand’avem volta la dolente strada;
però che le ferite son richiuse
prima ch’altri dinanzi li rivada.

    Look at how mangled is Mohammed here!
    In front of me, Ali treks onward, weeping,
    His face cleft from his chin to his forelock.

    And all the others whom you see down here
    Were sowers of scandal and schism while
    They lived, and for this they are rent in two.

    A devil goes in back here who dresses us
    So cruelly by trimming each one of the pack
    With the fine cutting edge of his sharp sword

    Whenever we come round this forlorn road:
    Because by then our old wounds have closed up
    Before we pass once more for the next blow.
Or does he have an other Italian text?

Let's have a look at Said specimen of Orientalists. He focuses on French and English, which is fine, but his "reasons" are dishonest: When the connection between scholarship, belle-lettre and empire are the main interest, where is Portugal, where are the Netherlands? Maybe because Said does not read Portuguese, nor Dutch? Maybe because they had no colonies near Palestine? He discards Germans, Russian. Fine, but why does he count the Hungarian Jew Ignaz Goldziher as German? ((This is the only point not taken from my 35 years old notes; this article gives my fresh impression after reading Orientalism soon after it was published, with just al-ʿAẓm's and Parker's reviews taken in. At the time I did not know that Goldziher had written a lot in Hungarian.)) When he counts Burkhardt as Swiss although he does not write in Swiss, Goldziher can not be among the Germans.
His pioneers, d'Herbelot and de Sacy, are well taken, but both unfairly criticized, not because Said is an unfair polemicist (which he is), but because he does not know a thing about oriental literatures. He castigates d'Herbelot for „a triumphant technique for taking the immense fecundity of the Orient and making it systematically, even alphabetically, knowable by Western laymen “ (p. 65), „the dangers of free-wheeling heresy are removed when it is transformed into ideologically explicit matter for an alphabetical item.“ (p. 66). Said does not know that the Bibliothèque oriental is based on Ottoman Kaššaf al-Zunûn by Ḥāǧǧī Ḫalīfa, which is alphabetical (!), nor that it was 1835 published in an Arabic&Latin edition in London.
Silvestre de Sacy is accused of working with fragments, of atomizing Arab poems; again Said ignores that Arabs (a) decreed that poems should be like a necklace of pearls (= each line should stand on its own, a perfect pearl); this is called by Th. Kowalski 'molecular structure' (Cf. Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung , pp. 20-31; van Gelder, Beyond the Line 14-22. (b) that Arabs published anthologies of parts of poems, (c) that Arab poets liked to make poems that started (or ended) with a line from a known poem by someone else — the device is called taḍmīm, (4) that Arab prose books were interspersed with poetic "fragments".

Nerval, Chateaubriand, Flaubert are prominent in his book because Said knows them well. I doubt that Renan is an Orientalist scholar, rather a public intellectual, a stylist, a narcissistic player with words (less than content), a Said if his time.
What Said writes about Goethe and Marx is non-sense. "Goethe's West-Östlicher Diwan ... was based on a Rhine journey" (p. 19) It's based on translations by Hammer-Purgstall and William Jones, he never made a Rhine journey, but a journey to his home town, Frankfurt on the Main, from where he made a short trip to the Rhine. Both al-ʿAẓm and Parker were appaled by what Said wrote on Marx, so am I.
His liking for Massignon, tormented by homosexual desire, uncontrollable by crazy mysticism, looks odd to me. That he treats Bernard Lewis endlessly without paying much attention to Lewis's main subject (Turkey) strikes me as strange: but Said mentions the Ottoman Empire only in passing — for him Empires must be European to deserve attention.

I did not need to read the books by Ibn Warraq and Daniel M Varisco to know that Ed Said's book is just hot air — I had read Maxime Rodinson's book on Oriental studies; so I saw the deficiencies and mistakes for myself. I read the reviews by Sadik Jalal al-Azm and by J S F Parker. I think Irfan Khawaja is giving to much weight to the book by exposing its poor logic. Ed has had no interest in reasoning. He wanted to convince Washington that their investment in Israel as unsinkable aircraft carrier was stupid, that Palestine was a much better bridgehead in the oil-rich Arab world, that the friend of the Soviets, Yassir Arafat, was not the only Palestinian to negotiate with. He hoped to become the Palestinian Chaim Weitzman: Like the Zionist socialists had needed someone in London, who knew the manners and customs of Westminster, he offered to be the PLO's interpreter in Washington — to be rewarded by becoming the figurehead president of the future state. That was the agenda behind the triptych of Orientalism, The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam. Today most observers are to young to remember what Saids aim was, and to see that it was a complete failure.