Summary
Sania Hamady, author of Temperament and Character of the Arabs, whose generalizations Said quotes in Orientalism’s Chapter Three, IV and reads as prose in which the Arabs are totally transformed from people into no more than the putative subject of the author’s style (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.318-320 / printed p.309-311).
Details
- Hamady, as quoted: “The Arabs so far have demonstrated an incapacity for disciplined and abiding unity”, and “Any collective action for common benefit or mutual profit is alien to them” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.318-319 / printed p.309-310).
- Said’s reading of her style: verbs like “demonstrate,” “reveal,” “show” are used without an indirect object — truths self-evident only to a privileged or initiated observer, since nowhere does Hamady cite generally available evidence; as her prose moves along her tone increases in confidence, the categories harden, and the Arabs exist only as an occasion for the tyrannical observer (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.319 / printed p.310).
- Hamady again, as quoted: “the Arab lives in a hard and frustrating environment” — he has, in her passage, little chance to develop his potentialities and define his position in society, holds little belief in progress and change, and finds salvation only in the hereafter (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.319 / printed p.310).
- Her work is one of the arguments — with Berger’s and Lerner’s — whose main object is criticism of “traditional” Arab society and which, in Said’s reading, never say what their discourse implies: that what is really left to the Arab is an undifferentiated sexual drive (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.320 / printed p.311).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Orientalism, Raphael Patai, Morroe Berger