Mohammed Sharafuddin’s Islam and Romantic Orientalism, first published in 1994, sets out to “demonstrate the implications of .realistic orientalism...an oxymoron...that links together . . .the idea of imaginative escape and libidinous investment contained in the notion of orientalism, and the idea of a body of knowledge outside the self and independent of the subjective desire contained in the notion of realism” (p. vii). Unlike modern critics who, according to the author, represent “society as a closed system of interrelated values,” Sharafuddin seeks to show how “a society...renews itself, not in how it remains static and enslaved by its perceptions and dogmatic conventions” (p. viii).
As a point of departure, Sharafuddin takes on Edward Sa`id’s work on Orientalism, the arguments of which he seeks to challenge. Said is depicted as having “a limited view of literature as a creative progress towards the discovery of truth and not merely a reflection of the age’s social and political tendencies” (p. ix). Sharafuddin attributes to Sa`id the position that “the thought of all Western writers was wholly conditioned by an all-enveloping cultural grid” (p. xvii). Sa`id, however, never made such claims. In Orientalism, Sa`id was clear that Western “scholars and critics who are trained in the traditional Orientalist disciplines are perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old straitjacket.”’ He cites Jacques Berque and Maxime Rodinson as examples. Also, Sa`id did not study Orientalism as a static system of ideas, rather as “a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced."2 For Sa`id, Orientalism was always transforming. His task was to identify “changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions [that] take place within Orientalism."3
While modern critics, Sa`id included, are accused of emphasizing the cultural and social milieux of authors at the expense of their “personal side,” Sharafuddin emphasizes their “individual singularity and particular personality that was the prime instigator of their interest in other cultures” (p. x). But Sa`id did not ignore the personal biographies of Orientalists-be they Christian missionaries, colonial military officers, colonial politicians, travelers, academicians, politicians, colonial-settlers, etc.-rather, such biographies were always important in explaining an Orientalist’s representation of the Orient. Sa`id is also faulted for his alleged reliance on Michel Foucault’s episteme, which Sharafuddin erroneously identifies as an “ideology in a hard sense” (p. xvii). Actually, according to Foucault, episteme is not any kind of ideology, it is “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems."4 But Sa`id sets himself apart from Foucault by stating-among his many critiques of the latter-his belief “in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism."5 Sa`id did not seek to prove that Orientalists are against the Orient or that they do not tell the “truth” of the Orient; rather, he showed how “the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West."6 When Sa`id is speaking about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture, he does not positivistically oppose truth to falsity, rather that “what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations.”’
Sharafuddin states that "[t]he first step in the direction of `realistic orientalism'-the recognition by English culture of the reality and value of a radically foreign form of life-must be the loosening of one’s literal-minded attachment to one’s particular corner of the world” (p. xxxiv). What Sharafuddin seems to miss in Sa`id’s account is Sa`id’s awareness that what Orientalists think of or say about the Orient “is considered to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality."8 Sa`id calls this a philosophical “form of radical realism."9 Not only does Sa`id not question that within Orientalist epistemological confines, the Orient is real, but he goes further by identifying this process as “Orientalizing” the Orient. Furthermore, contra Sharaffudin, Orientalism, for Sa`id, is not an “ideology” but a discourse, albeit one that is connected to “ideology, politics, and the logic of power."lo Sharafuddin rules Sa`id’s Orientalism to be “empirically suspect and methodologically contradictory” (p. xvii).
Sharafuddin also wants to analyze culture “at the crossroads of poetry, politics, religion and sexuality...[with an] approach...intended to highlight, rather than overlook, those elements which promote genuine interchange between cultures” (p. x). To achieve his goals and support his contentions, Sharafuddin gives an excessively detailed analysis of only three poems-Walter S. Landor’s Gebir, Robert Southey’s Thalaba and Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh-and examines as well Byron’s “Turkish Tales”. This is quite a small empirical sample for such grandiose conclusions. In his exhaustive analysis of the poems and the “Tales”, Sharafuddin opposes Sa`id’s alleged argument that Orientalism “served as a political ideology to make the orient unreal,” by focusing on a “contrary strand” wherein Orientalism, “because it proved receptive to the radical energies liberated by the French Revolution, offered an effective vantage point from which to condemn the reactionary forces at home” (p. ix). He succeeds in showing how the Orient was chosen, by mostly minor Romantic English poets and Byron, as a safe site from which to criticize British tyranny, Napoleon’s hunger for power, and unpleasant Romantic features of British life, and that they do not necessarily (although on many occasions they do) malign the Orient. For example, he writes of Landor’s republicanism and repudiation of monarchy, which “in the reactionary Britain in which he was writing, [he] had to conceal...under narrative allegories” (p. 39), such as the ones used in Gebir. Sharaffudin asserts that Southey’s description, in Thalaba, of an “oriental despot sitting in a luxurious tent, receiving `homage and worship’ from his people” (p. 70) could with "[v]ery little adjustment...fit a European court of the ancien regime” (p. 71). Such examples, which are more often than not unconvincing, lead Sharafuddin to conclude that, in Thalaba, “Islam is used as a model for the regeneration of European civilization” (p. 105)! Sharafuddin provides examples from Moore’s Lalla Rookh to show how Moore’s Irishness influences his description of Oriental tyranny, which is intended as an allegory of its British counterpart (p. 204). But in doing so, Sharafuddin has proven nothing new. If anything, his findings bolster Sa`id’s finding that the Orientalist “is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says."11
Based on the presence of Islamic “costume” or local color in Byron’s writing, Sharafuddin asserts that the authentic scenery and “costumes” of the “Turkish Tales” “confer an altogether new reality to Islam as a form of life [and that] it assumes an independence from western [sic] values and perceptions which conventional orientalism could never attain” (p. 243). This statement is quite indulgent, as is his claim that “In Byron...Islam...plays its full part as itself’ (p. 243). The fact that Islamic props are on the stage does not mean that it is Islam which is acting. In fact, Byron’s representations of Islam, even the more positive ones, never veer outside the confines of Orientalist conventions.
Many of Sharafuddin’s main arguments in the introduction are unrelated to and appear imposed on the rest of the book. If all Sharafuddin wants to say is that these poets used the Orient as the site from which they could level critiques at home, his argument can be convincing, assuming that this is not all these poets were doing. As for the argument that these poets are engaging in a “realistic” kind of Orientalism, where the Orient and Islam can represent themselves outside conventional Orientalist representations, the book fails to deliver completely. Perhaps, Sharafuddin’s judgment of Sa`id’s Orientalism is a more apt description of his own book, which is indeed “empirically suspect and methodologically contradictory” (p. xvii).
[Footnote]
1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) p. 326.
2. Ibid., p. 15.
3. Ibid., p. 15.
4. For Foucault’s definition, see Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972) p. 191.
5. Said, p. 23.
6. Ibid., pp. 20-21.
7. Ibid., p. 21. 8. Ibid., p. 72. 9. Ibid., p. 72. 10. Ibid., p. 24.
II. Ibid., p. 21.
[Author note]
Joseph Massad is a Columbia University Ph.D. candidate in political science. He has published articles in a number of journals including The Middle East Journal, Journal of Palestine Studies, and Social Text
http://osiyou.cc.columbia.edu:2086/pqdweb?Did=000000022654133&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=3&Sid=4&RQT=309