Summary
P. J. Vatikiotis, editor of the 1972 School of Oriental and African Studies volume Revolution in the Middle East and Other Case Studies, whose quasi-medical definition of revolution Said reads in Orientalism’s Chapter Three, IV as saying, in purple writing and counterrevolutionary zealotry, that revolution is a bad kind of sexuality and also a cancerous disease (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.321-323 / printed p.312-314).
Details
- Vatikiotis’s theoretical support is Camus, whose phrase that revolution destroys both men and principles he accepts as having “fundamental sense”; his quoted definition presents revolutionary ideology as a methodical metastasis demanding fanaticism, abhorring adaptiveness, and wishing to create a new world by a terrifying act of Olympian pseudo-divine creation (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.321-322 / printed p.312-313).
- Said’s reading: whatever is done by the “human,” according to Vatikiotis, is rational, right, subtle, discrete, concrete; whatever the revolutionary proclaims is brutal, irrational, mesmeric, cancerous — and since it is Arab revolution that is in question, the passage is to be read as a comment on the kind of inferior race the Arabs are (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.322 / printed p.313).
- The irony Said notes: a few pages later the Arabs are so inept they cannot even aspire to, let alone consummate, the ambitions of revolution — revolution in the Middle East is a threat precisely because revolution cannot be attained (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.323 / printed p.314).
- The scholarly centerpiece of his collection is Bernard Lewis’s essay “Islamic Concepts of Revolution” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.323 / printed p.314).