Imperial
Arrogance And
The Vile Stereotyping Of Arabs
By
Edward Said
Counterpunch
23 July, 2003
The
great modern empires have never been held together only by military
power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand
colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian.
France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia,
the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial
perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating
it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view,
seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant
administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives
ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and
necessary thing.
For a while this
worked, as many local leaders believed--mistakenly--that cooperating
with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic
between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and
impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes
uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria
and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule
over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification
through unpopular local rulers has so far worked.
At least since World
War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first,
to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost
the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors.
Every empire, however,
tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that
its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.
These ideas are by no means shared by the people who inhabit that empire,
but that hasn't prevented the U.S. propaganda and policy apparatus from
imposing its imperial perspective on Americans, whose sources of information
about Arabs and Islam are woefully inadequate.
Several generations
of Americans have come to see the Arab world mainly as a dangerous place,
where terrorism and religious fanaticism are spawned and where a gratuitous
anti-Americanism is inculcated in the young by evil clerics who are
anti-democratic and virulently anti-Semitic.
In the U.S., "Arabists"
are under attack. Simply to speak Arabic or to have some sympathetic
acquaintance with the vast Arab cultural tradition has been made to
seem a threat to Israel. The media runs the vilest racist stereotypes
about Arabs--see, for example, a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the Wall
Street Journal in which she speaks of Palestinians as having "reared
children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and
behaviors" and of Palestinian culture as "the life force traduced,
cultism raised to a sinister spiritualism."
Americans are sufficiently
blind that when a Middle Eastern leader emerges whom our leaders like--the
shah of Iran or Anwar Sadat--it is assumed that he is a visionary who
does things our way not because he understands the game of imperial
power (which is to survive by humoring the regnant authority) but because
he is moved by principles that we share.
Almost a quarter
of a century after his assassination, Sadat is a forgotten and unpopular
man in his own country because most Egyptians regard him as having served
the U.S. first, not Egypt. The same is true of the shah in Iran. That
Sadat and the shah were followed in power by rulers who are less palatable
to the U.S. indicates not that Arabs are fanatics, but that the distortions
of imperialism produce further distortions, inducing extreme forms of
resistance and political self-assertion.
The Palestinians
are considered to have reformed themselves by allowing Mahmoud Abbas,
rather than the terrible Yasser Arafat, to be their leader. But "reform"
is a matter of imperial interpretation. Israel and the U.S. regard Arafat
as an obstacle to the settlement they wish to impose on the Palestinians,
a settlement that would obliterate Palestinian demands and allow Israel
to claim, falsely, that it has atoned for its "original sin."
Never mind that
Arafat--whom I have criticized for years in the Arabic and Western media--is
still universally regarded as the legitimate Palestinian leader. He
was legally elected and has a level of popular support that no other
Palestinian approaches, least of all Abbas, a bureaucrat and longtime
Arafat subordinate. And never mind that there is now a coherent Palestinian
opposition, the Independent National Initiative; it gets no attention
because the U.S. and the Israeli establishment wish for a compliant
interlocutor who is in no position to make trouble. As to whether the
Abbas arrangement can work, that is put off to another day. This is
shortsightedness indeed--the blind arrogance of the imperial gaze. The
same pattern is repeated in the official U.S. view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and the other Arab states.
Underlying this
perspective is a long-standing view--the Orientalist view--that denies
Arabs their right to national self-determination because they are considered
incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth and fundamentally murderous.
Since Napoleon's
invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial
presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing
untold misery--and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have
Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S.
advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their
venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think
that what we do is correct because "that's the way the Arabs are."
That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by
the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration
simply adds fuel to the fire.
We are in for many
more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the
main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What
the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.
Edward Said is a
professor at Columbia University.