What should not be known

This elegantly argued, amusing and acute book has been put together, in the end, for a single overdue purpose: to piss all over Edward W. Said’s ludicrous 1978 polemical work, Orientalism. It may look, for most of the journey, like a scrupulous history of the academic study of Arabic cultures, and the steady growth in understanding, as well as some deft character sketches of the necessarily rather eccentric figures in the field. Don’t be misled: Robert Irwin has Said perpetually in his sights.

It is quite incredible to conceive the influence Said’s Orientalism has had, within and outside academia. Said’s point was not just that the ‘orientalist’ styles of European art and literature traduced the reality of what they purported to represent. He went further and claimed that almost all Western students of Middle Eastern culture were tools of imperialism and Zionism, plotting to subjugate the vast culture under jackboots cunningly disguised as slow-selling histories of the Mameluke sultanates.

The book is spectacularly full of mistakes, many of which were pointed out as soon as it was published. Said thought Muslim armies conquered Turkey before North Africa; he refers to a whole school of ‘Cluniac orientalists’ (there was only one, Peter the Venerable); invents research by Burckhardt into Egyptian proverbs; said the eastern Mediterranean was under British and French control from the 17th century, and so on.

Omissions, sometimes very large ones, are everywhere. If you think academic orientalism is exclusively a tool of empire, you are going to have to explain away the existence of a large and original German academy, which Said, amazingly, treats as of secondary importance. On the other hand, if you wanted to explore the thesis, might you not want to look at the work of Russian orientalists, working in an empire with large Muslim territories? Said omits the whole, important school.