Summary
An Orientalist and ideologue whose book In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power Said reads in “Orientalism Reconsidered” as a case of Orientalism’s resilience — its arguments at the service not of knowledge but of an aggressive and interventionary state, the United States, whose interests Pipes helps to define (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.208).
Details
- Pipes speaks of Islam’s anomie, its sense of inferiority and its defensiveness, as if Islam were one simple thing, and as if the quality of his either absent or impressionistic evidence were of the most secondary importance (PDF p.208).
- Writing about material for which, in his own words, “rumor, hearsay, and other wisps of evidence” are the only proof, Pipes in the very same paragraph transmutes rumor and hearsay into “facts”, on whose “multitude” he relies in order “to reduce the importance of each” (quoted PDF p.208).
- The core of the book is its thesis that Muslims themselves are the worst source for their own history, its pages dotted with references to Islam’s incapacity for self-representation, self-understanding and self-consciousness, and with praise for witnesses like V. S. Naipaul — the familiar Orientalist theme that they cannot represent themselves and must therefore be represented by others who know more about Islam than Islam knows about itself (PDF p.208-209).
- Said calls this neither science, nor knowledge, nor understanding, but a statement of power and a claim for absolute authority, constituted out of racism; Pipes stands for programmatic ignorance and aligns himself explicitly with colonial Orientalists like Snouck Hurgronje and pro-colonial renegades like Naipaul (PDF p.209).
- His book’s political relevance is to Reagan’s America, where terrorism and communism merge into the media’s image of Muslim gunners, fanatics and rebels, and he speaks to and for a large clientele for whom Islam is not a culture but a nuisance (PDF p.209).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Orientalism, Bernard Lewis, V. S. Naipaul