Summary
The Cambridge History of Islam, the two-volume work first published in England in 1970 which Said takes in Orientalism’s Chapter Three, IV as the regular summa of Orientalist orthodoxy in its highest and most intellectually prestigious form — and, by any standards other than those of Orientalism, an intellectual failure (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.311 / printed p.302).
Details
- Said’s general judgment: too many ideas were uncritically accepted by its editors, there was too much reliance on vague concepts, little emphasis was placed on methodological issues, and no effort was put forth to make even the idea of Islam seem interesting; the work misconceives and misrepresents Islam as a religion and has no corporate idea of itself as a history (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.311 / printed p.302).
- Islam is defined by P. M. Holt’s introduction, in Said’s words rather airily, as a “cultural synthesis”, yet volume 1 proceeds from pre-Islamic Arabia to Mohammed and the caliphates while entirely bypassing any account of Islam as a system of belief, faith or doctrine, and for hundreds of pages Islam means an unrelieved chronology of battles, reigns and deaths (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.311-312 / printed p.302-303).
- The chapter on the modern Arab lands is written, in Said’s account, without the slightest understanding of the revolutionary developments in the area, takes a schoolmarmish, openly reactionary attitude towards the Arabs, ascribes “unrest and agitation” to 1936 without a mention of Zionism, and never allows the notions of anticolonialism and anti-imperialism to violate the serenity of the narrative (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.312-313 / printed p.303-304).
- After approximately twelve hundred pages, “Islam” appears to be no more a cultural synthesis than any other roll call of kings, battles and dynasties; hanging over the whole disjointed enterprise is the old Orientalist truism that Islam is about texts, not about people (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.313-314 / printed p.304-305).
- The fundamental question Said raises from it is whether ethnic origins and religion are the best definitions of human experience: Orientalism clearly posits the Islamic category as the dominant one (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.314 / printed p.305).