“Covering Islam” by Edward Said is an Important Book About Knowledge, Power and Influence

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  • Edward Said states quite bluntly that “Islam” is painted with a broad brush by western media and that is at the heart of the false narrative that gets created time and again. X-XI
    1. Even though the pun in "covering Islam" will be obvious to any reader proceeding through this book, a simple explana- tion is worth having at the outset. One of the points I make here and in Orientalism is that the term "Islam" as it is used today seems to mean one simple thing but in fact is part fic- tion, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a reli- gion called Islam. In no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the "Islam" in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory principally in Africa and Asia, ib dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, cul- tures. On the other hand, "Islam" is peculiarly traumatic news today in the West, for reasons that I discuss in the course of this book. During the past few years, especially since events in Iran caught European and American attention so strongly, the media have therefore covered Islam: they have portrayed it,
  • With the over reliance on easily accessible cliches to help paint a blurry picture for western readers, Said takes the stance that reporters in the West take an easier path when it comes to reporting Islam—they don’t read the language, nor live in the region so they have a difficult time showing any empathy. He gives an example of how the Iran hostage crisis was covered. Xii
    1. INTRODUCTION xii readers at home are unlikely to challenge. With approximately three hundred reporters in Teheran during the first days of the hostage crisis, and without a Persian-speaker among them, it was no wonder that all the media reports coming out of Iran repeated essentially the same threadbare accounts of what was taking place; in the meantime, of course, other events and political processes in Iran that could not easily be character- ized as instances of "the Islamic mentality" or of "anti-Ameri- canism" went unnoticed.
  • Said interprets Iranian Hostage Crisis
    1. analyze and explain. The back-and-forth between the West and Islam, the challenging and the answering, the opening of certain rhetorical spaces and the closing of others: all this makes up the "word politics" by which each side sets up situa- tions, justifies actions, forecloses options, and presses alterna- tives on the other. Thus when Iranians seized the United States Embassy in Teheran they were responding, not just to the former shah's entry into the United States, but to what they perceived as a long history of humiliation inflicted on them by superior American power: past American actions "spoke" to them of constant intervention in their lives, and therefore as Muslims who, they felt, had been held prisoner in their own country, they took American prisoners and held them as hostages on United States territory, the Teheran em- bassy. Although the actions themselves made the point, it was the words, and the movements of power they adumbrated, that
  • Said gives tips to those who desire to truly learn about Islam. It takes a different, more inquisitive approach, one that questions and is open to paradigm shift from the western status quo.
    1. now prevailing. Nevertheless I do not believe as strongly and as firmly in the notion of "Islam" as many experts, policy- makers, and general intellectuals do; on the contrary, I often think it has been more of a hindrance than a help in under- standing what moves people and societies. But what I really believe in is the existence of a critical sense and of citizens able and willing to use it to get beyond the special interests of experts and their idées reques. By using the skills of a good critical reader to disentangle sense from nonsense, by asking the right questions and expecting pertinent answers, anyone can learn about either "Islam" or the world of Islam and about the men, women, and cultures that live within it, speak its languages, breathe its air, produce its histories and societies. At that point, humanistic knowledge begins and communal responsibility for that knowledge begins to be shouldered. I wrote this book to advance that goal.
  • Said restates general details about the Iran Hostage Crisis, even quoting curious American publications, “But was Iran—is Iran—rational.” Moreover, after the hostages were released, the west labeled the hostages as heroes and hostage takers as subhuman beasts. Xxii
    1. Ideas about retribution and loud assertions of American force were accompanied by a symphonic elaboration of the hostages' ordeal and triumphant return. The victims were directly transmuted into heroes (understandably upsetting various veterans' and former-POW groups) and symbols of freedom, their captors into subhuman beasts. To this end the New York Times said editorially on January 22, "let there be rage and revulsion in those first hours of release," and then, having reflected for a while, came up with the following ques- tions on January 28: "What should have been done? Mining harbors, or landing marines, or dropping a few bombs might frighten rational foes. But was Iran—is Iran—rational?" Cer- tainly, as Fred Halliday wrote in the Los Angeles Times on January 25, there was much to be critical of in Iran, religion and unceasing revolutionary turmoil having proved incapable of providing a modern state with the kind of day-to-day de- cisions likely to benefit the population at large. Internationally Iran was isolated and vulnerable. And certainly it was just as clear that the students at the embassy had not been gentle with their prisoners. Yet not even the fifty-two themselves went so far as to say that they had been tortured or systematically brutalized: this emerges in the transcript of their news con- ference at West Point (see the New York Times, January 28) , where Elizabeth Swift says quite explicitly that Newsweek lied about what she said, inventing a story about torture (much amplified by the media) that had nothing to do with the facts.
  • A form passive aggressive pressure on journalists is exerted. A lot of them build up a career and then arrive at some sort loss-aversion inflection point where they will either plateau in their credibility or reach a higher, far less lucrative, stage in their careers that will truly set them apart from the rest. It might be a story or a global crisis of sorts. The unmasking occurs whether they like it or not. 48
    1. COVERING ISLAM 48 the company of other journalists abroad, but he also keeps in touch with his embassy, other American residents, and people known to have good relations with Americans. Something not to be underestimated is the journalist's sense while abroad of relying not only on what he knows and learns but also on what as an American media representative abroad he ought to know, learn, and say. A New York Times correspondent knows exactly what the Times is and what in a corporate way it thinks of itself as being: surely there is a crucial, perhaps even a determining, difference between what the Times's Teheran correspondent files as a story and what a free-lance journalist who hopes to get an article in The Nation or In These Times writes while in Teheran. The medium itself exer- cises great pressure. Doing a spot on the NBC Nightly News will cause a Cairo correspondent to put things differently than might Time magazine's Cairo bureau chief in an article pre- pared over a longer period of time. Then too, there is the way a correspondent's foreign report is recast by the editors at home: another set of unconscious political and ideological constraints comes into play here.
  • American culture and the limits of what it can handle dictates what it wants from its media. It’s a bit confusing to understand so I will let Said put it in his own words. 48-9
    1. cystallizing, forming. This is the point. The media can do all sorb of things, represent all sorts of points of view, provide many things that are eccentric, unexpectedly original, even aberrant. But in the end, because they are corporations serv- ing and promoting a corporate identity—"America" and even "the West"—they all have the same central consensus in mind. This, as we shall see a little later in the case of Iran, shapes the news, decides what is news and how it is news. It does not, however, dictate or determine the news involuntarily: it is neither the result of deterministic laws, nor of conspiracy, nor
  • Islam as News 49 of dictatorship. It is the röult of the culture; better, it is the culture; and it is, in the case of the United States media, an appreciable component of contemporary history. %ere would be no point in analyzing and criticizing the phenomenon if it were not true that the media are responsive to what we are and want.49
  • Said writes that American media attempts to silently build a sort of consensus that represents America, or maybe serves America. He says that ever since the founding of America “there has existed in this country an institutionalized ideological rhetoric expressing a peculiarly American consciousness, identity, destiny and role whose fiction has always been to incorporate as much of America’s (and the world’s) diversity as possible, and to re-form it in. Uniquely American way. This rhetoric and its institutional presence in American life have been convincingly analyzed by numerous scholars, and among them Perry Miller and most recently Sacvan Bercovitch.” 49
    1. Most importantly of all, he concludes with an important sentence: “one result of this is the illusion, if not always the actuality, of consensus, and it is as part of this essentially nationalist consensus that the media, acting on Belal of the society they serve, believe themselves to be functioning.” 49
  • Said gives a second point on this topic of establishing a media consciousness consensus in America. He details it’s inner mechanics as to how invisible lines that serve as limits.
  • The reading of this book is absurdly slow only because every sentence is packed with an ah-ha moments of sorts—something I didn’t know, hadn’t connected before or had an inkling about but Said simply put it into words. The man was a genius and I am not surprised he has a school named after him.
  • of this ' 'Islam" tout court. And I also think we will begin to sense that various Islamic attempts to respond to Islamic as well as Westem circumstances, in all their variety and contra- diction, are no less political, no less to be analyzed in terms of processes, struggles, and strategies of interpretation" Let me try now rather sketchily to show what a staggeringly complex set of things is involved, although I should say at the outset that the greatest problem is that much of what one has to assßs essentially escapes documentation.
    1. Above  P56. Said has repeatedly put western scholars on their heels and maybe this is why they are somewhat cruel to him—in that contemporary scholars didn’t look to him direction or as one source into the Islamic world. This will change with new generations of writers bc much of what Said wrote is fairly accurate. Here is another example of Said taking a scholarly shot. P56 bottom.
    2. nomadic patterns. As for the periods of Islamic history, these too are so complex as to defy a simple "Islamic" characteriza- tion. What are the points of similarity between the Alawi, Ottoman, Safavid, Uzbek, and Mogul states (which represent the great state organizations in Islamic history, until the twen- tieth century, in India, Turkey, and the Near and Middle East) and the modern Islamic nation-states? How do we ex- plain the difference between (and even the origin of) the so-called Turco-lranian and Turco-Arabian segments of the Is- lamic regions? In fine, as Albert Hourani clearly shows, the problems of definition, interpretation, and characterization within Islam itself are so great as to give Western scholars pause (to say nothing of Western nonscholars) :
  • Said fires off a litany of questions to show how complicated the Islamic societies can be if viewers through an analytical lens.
    1. persistence. We cannot with real certainty say, for example, whether some or all or any Islamic societies changed the bases of their authority from concepts of the sacred to concepts of legalistic doctrine. Language, aesthetic structures, sociologies of taste, problems of ritual, urban space, population shifts, revolutions of feelings: these are things in relation to context that have barely begun to be studied, either by Muslim or non- Muslim scholars. Is there such a thing as Muslim political behavior? How do class formations occur in Muslim societies, and how do these differ from those in Europe? What are the concepts, the tools of research, the organizational frame- works, the documents by means of which we can locate the best indications of everyday Muslim life in general? Is "Islam" in the end useful as a notion, or does it hide, distort, deflect, and ideologize more than it actually says? Above all, what bearing does the position of the person asking any or all of these questions have on the answers? In what ways is it differ- ent for a Muslim theologian to ask them in Iran, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, today as opposed to ten years ago? How do those statements compare with questions asked by a Soviet Orientalist, a French Arabist at the Quai d'Orsay, or an American anthropologist at the University of Chicago?
  • He gives an example of the diversity of thought in the Islamic world by using Saudi Arabia. The excerpt starts oh P58 with the following sentence and continues in the image below. “Saudi Arabia, for example, is (as its name indicates, the state of the royal house of Saud,…
    1. whose victory over the other leading tribes in the region pro- duced the state. What this family says and does in the name of the state and of Islam expresses the family's power, in addition to what has accrued to it as a member of the inter- national community and what it has gathered to itself by way of considerable authority and legitimacy with regard to its people. Similar things can be said of Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, prerevolutionary Iran, and Pakistan, except that it is not bue in all instances that the ruling oligarchy is a family. But it is true that in numerous cases a relative minority—whether a religious sect, a single party, a family, or a regional grouping— dominates all others in the name of the state and of Islam. Lebanon and Israel are exceptions: both bélong in the Islamic world, but in one a Christian minority rules in the other a Jewish. But they too express some considerable part of their hegemony in religious terms.
  • This answers the question, “Why didn’t other Arab countries come to Palestine’s aid as the people were being slaughtered in 2023?” 59
    1. To a very large degree all of these states, each in its own way, have felt themselves to be responding to outside threats and have had recourse to religion, tradition, or nationalism reactively. Yet no one of them—and this is the main point—is free from an extraordinarily diffcult dilemma. On the one hand, the state structure is not completely sensitive to the plurality of nationalities, religions, and sects contained within it. Thus in Saudi Arabia various tribes or clans feel themselves perhaps constrained by a state calling itself the Arabia of the Saud clan; and in Iran to this day, the state structure effectively stifles Azerbaijanis, Baluchis, Kurds, Arabs, and others, who feel their individual ethnic existence compromised as a result. The same tension on a wider front is repeated in Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. On the other hand, the dominant power in each of these states has used a national or religious ideology to give an appearance of unity against what are perceived as outside threats. This is clearly the case in Saudi Arabia, where Islam is the only ideological current wide and legitimate enough to rally people to it. In Saudi Arabia and in postrevolutionary Iran "Islam" has consequently come to be
  • If western version of Islam were a restaurant, it would be like In N Out with around 2 or three items on the menu. The real islam when you peek under the veil is as diverse as any society or geographical location as Allah gives us in this world. 60
    1. Thus, far from being a uniform or even a Coherent movement, "the return to Islam" embodies a number of politi- cal actualities. For the United States it represents an image of disruption to be resisted at some times, encouraged at others. We speak of the anticommunist Saudi Muslims, of the valiant Muslim rebels of Afghanistan, of "reasonable" Muslims like Sadat, the Saudi royal family, and Zia al-Haqq. Yet we also rail at Khomeini's Islamic militants and Qaddafi's Islamic "Third Way," and in our morbid fascination with "Islamic punishment" (as administered by Khalkali) We paradoxically strengthen its power as an authority-maintaining device. In Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood, in Saudi Arabia the Muslim militants who took the Medina mosque, in Syria the Islamic Brotherhoods and Vanguards who oppose the Baath party regime, in Iran the Islamic Mujahideen, as well as the Feda- yeen and the liberals: these make up a small part of what is an adversarial current running through the nation, although we know very little about it. In addition, the various Muslim na- tionalities whose identities have been blocked in various post- colonial states clamor for their Islam. And beneath all this— in madrasas, mosques, clubs, brotherhoods, guilds, parties, universities, movements, villages, and urban centers all through the Islamic world—surge still more varieties of Islam, many of them claiming to guide their members back to "the true Islam.
  • According to Said, the west only gets a tiny fraction of this “Islam,” but is that because the west only takes its machines to the east and not his mind and heart? 60
    1. Only the tiniest fraction of this diverse Muslim energy is available to the Westerner now being asked by the media and by government spokesmen to consider "Islam." The most seri- ous misrepresentations occur when Islamic "resurgence" is solicited.63 In the minds and hearts of its adherents, surely Islam has always been resurgent, alive, rich in thought, feel- ing, and human production. And always in the thoughts of the faithful the "Islamic vision" (in W. Montgomery Watt's use-
  • Islam as News 61 ful phrase64) has involved them in creative dilemmas. What is justice? what is evil? When are orthodoxy and tradition to be relied on? when is iitihad (individual interpretation) in order? The questions multiply, and the work gets done—yet we in the West see or hear little of it. So much of Islamic life is neither bound by texts nor confined to personalities or neat structures as to make the overused word "Islam" an unreliable index of what we try to apprehend.
  • This was very interesting. Said quotes Ali Shariati at the end and it’s a very deep statement. 63
    1. l Ideas like Shariati’s informed the Iranian revolution in its early phases, which once and for all dismissed the dogmati- “>
    2. The opening sentence is very prescient on Said’s part considering he wrote this in the early 1980s
    3. In this respect, the Chinese have done well to keep western influences at an arm’s reach.
  • Said uses the controversy created by the film “Death of a Princess” to show how Islam and generally the East, gets represented in popular media, in this case film. It also lights how the the Saudi government responds to controversy—they don’t care about Islam or greater Arab conflicts but what they care about is how they are viewed by the outside world. 70
    1. After the Princess controversy died down, the Saudis fortunately forgot to take offense when the American Spec. tator published an article by Eric Hoffer called 'Muhammad's Sloth," subtitled "Muhammad, Messenger of Plod."78 Nor did they include in their list of misperceptions of Islam some re. minder that the only three countries in the world whose terri. tory was under occupation by a United States ally '„vere Is- lamic states. Only when the royal family's reputation was directly tarnished did the Saudi regime threaten punishment. How was it that Islam was injured only in the one instance and not in the others? Why until the present have the Saudis done relatively little to help promote an understanding of Islam? Hitherto their major educational contribution has been to the University of Southern California's Middle East Studies Program, which is run by a former ARAMCO employee.74
    2. The final detail about the ARAMCO employee is hilarious.
  • Must be read-and reread to fully grasp. You must understand contextuAl nature of information being created. Sometimes it is the party that is disseminating  the information that might want a certain take-away interpretation. Incentive caused bias—whether it is political or financial.
    1. Another, this time unforeseen, nonmilitary result is that some people here and in the Islamic world may discover the deplorable limits of coercive labels like "the West" and "Islam." Perhaps it is too much to expect that these labels and the frameworks supporting them will thereby lose their im- prisoning force, but it is probable that "Islam" will seem less monolithic and frightening and more the result of interpreta- tions that serve our immediate political purposes and char- acterize our anxieties, whether "we" happen to be Muslims or non-Muslims. Once we finally grasp the sheer power and the
  • non-Muslims. Once we finally grasp the sheer power and the subjective components of interpretation, and once we recog- nize that many of the things we know are ours in more ways than we normally admit, we are well on our way to disposing of some naiveté, a great deal of bad faith, and many myths about ourselves and the world we live in. Thus to understand even "the news" is in a certain sense to understand what we are and how a certain sector of the society in which we live works. Only after we have understood those things can we go on to grasp the "Islam" that is ours and the different kinds Of Islam that exist for Muslims.
  • Made me think of how Sunni Indians also have something against shi’ites. Bias must have been planted and needs to be removed. 82
    1. ynibdirc In a sma way, ps, was Walter Cronkite's nability to pronounce names correctly. Ghotbzadeh's name vas changed nearly every time it was pronounced, usually into ;omething like "Caboozaday." (On November 28 CBS called Beheshti "Bashati," and not to be left out, ABC on December 7 changed Montazeri's name to "Montessori." ) Almost every capsule history of Islam was either so confusing as to be non. sensical or so inaccurate as to frightening. Take, as an example, a CBS Nightly News segment on Islam November 21. Moharram was described by reporter Randy Daniels as a period when Shi'ite Muslims "celebrated Mohammed's chal- lenge to world leaders" a statement so wrong as to be silly. Moharram is an Islamic month; Shi'ite Muslims commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein during the first ten days of Mohar- ram. Later we were informed that the Shi'ites have a persecu- tion complex, so "no wonder they produced a Khomeini"; it was reassuring, though no los to be told that he does not represent Islam as a whole. In the same program I was interviewed for my wisdom, and mistakenly identified as a professor of Islamic studies. On November 27 a CBS reporter informed us that all of Iran was suffering from "revolutionary hangover," as if Iran were the corner drunk.
  • Decent summary of what goes in a western article covering Islam. I think the heart of the issue is perspective—it is clouded by personal  or national interests. 87
    1. An illuminating comparison can be made between the Times's feature coverage of "Islam" and Le Monde's. ne Times had it quickly put together by Flora Lewis; she dis- cusses neither the theological and moral issues debated all across the Islamic world (how can one talk about Islam today and never once mention the conflict raging between partisans of iitihad interpretation) and partisans of taqlid (reliance on the interpretation of authorities) as modes of Koranic intcrprctation?) nor the history and struc- ture of the various Islamic schools fueling the "upheaval" she tries to document. InstGid she relics on random quotations from even more random Ix•ople, she uses anecdotes to do the work of analvsis, and she does not so much as report the actual terms of Islamic life, whether they are doctrinal, meta- physical, or political. . newsoaoer in
  • What if current situation in Islam is the product of Islam’s inability to mix with imperialist powers—one power corrupts the other the people who suffer are the general public who practice one religion but must withstand the pressures of a fear based power structure at the top that is trying to maintain their rule. It’s an interesting dynamic that is fueled by power and greed. It is a corrupting force that forces the civilians to resort to extremist tactics to get their voices heard. What is the recourse? The proverbial reset button isn’t an option, so maybe, struggle?
    1. On this Said constrains a NY Times article with one in French paper Le Monde about the topic of Islam and writes: P88
    2. COVEMSC ISLAM and ganff He s.t in aid hstmy mth Fæt As a reuit, it a Ønflict, Ähty---ent hs work, not merely a the benefit of suspicimg
  • Referring to guests on PBS news show the Report, Said writes: “… the carefully dressed, whose uniform qualification is expertise, not necessarily, insight or understanding. There’s nothing wrong with trying to grasp the situation, rationally, as the show sets out to do, but the questions asked of guests make it evident that McNeil and Lehrer tend to look for support of the prevailing national mood: outage at Iranians, ahistorical analyses of what makes Iranians tick, attempts at making discussion fit for either Cold War or crisis management molds.”
    1. I look forward to comparing modern day reporting with this analysis that Said makes above.
  • There is something here with regards to how we analyze the news and what the Trump years forced upon the public—it made the American public look inside to figure out what needs to change. It appears a similar thing happened during the Iran hostage period. 124
    1. From time to time, for example in John Rifner's gent four-part series on the Iranian revolution (New York Times, May 29, 30, June 1, 1980) and in Shaul Bhakhash's essay on the Iranian revolution for the New York Review of Books (June 26, 1980), one would encounter ous, reflective efforts at coming to grips With what was both a continuing revolution and one whose energies were still not graspable in simple conceptual or strictly empirical terms, Yet I believe there is little doubt that such articles would not have been written if in fact the hostages had been released, embassy seizure—immoral, illegal, outrageous, politically use- ful in the short run but wasteful for Iran in the long run—had quite literally forced a crisis of awareness in the United States. From being an almost forgotten, taken-for-granted colony in Asia, Iran had intermittentlv become an occasion for self- examination on the part of the United States. The Iran story's very persistence, its anxious, unseemly duration, gradually had modified the media's early single-mindedness and narrow focus into something more critical and useful. In short, the embassy seizure instituted Process where there had only been
  • The Iran Story 125 static anger; in time this process acquired a history of its own, through which the media—and Americans generally—saw more of themselves than they had hitherto, Whether this was what the militants had intended, or whether this has delayed rather than encouraged the return Of normal conditions in Iran, it is too early to tell, Certainly more Americans now understand what a struggle for power means (Who has not felt the conflict between BaniSadr and Beheshti, with Khomeini lurking mysteriously behind them?) , and certainly too, more Americans than before appreciate the futility Of trying to im- pose € 'our*' order on that upheaval, or for that matter, on the battle between Iraq and Iran. Many questions remain un- answered—the circumstances of Beheshti's ascendancy, the modes of struggle between the left and the right, the state of the Iranian economy—and many possible outcomes remain imminent. 16
  • Edward Said asks the important questions he wishes to explore as he wraps up his book—mainly, “why does Islam matter, and what sort of knowledge or coverage of both (Islam + Iran) do we require?
  • Just like African Americans were dehumanized with negative imagery in popular mediums of information exchange, Islam has gone through a similar treatment. Availability changes behavior. 136
    1. did. What I am saying is that negative images of Islam are very much more prevalent than any others, and that such images correspond, not to what Islam "is" (given that "Islam" is not a natural fact but a composite structure created to a certain extent by Muslims and the West in the ways I have tried to describe) , but to what prominent sectors of a particu- lar society take it to be. Those sectors have the power and the will to propagate that particular image of Islam, and this image therefore becomes more prevalent, more present, than all others. As I said in Chapter One, this is done through the work- ings of a consensus, which sets limits and applies pressures.
  • I feel like the following assessment applies even 40 years after the first publication. 149
    1. Knowledge and Power 149 All in all, present coverage of Islam and of non-Wotem societiö in effect certain notions, texts, and authori- ties. idea that Islam is medieval and dangerous, for exam- ple, has acquired a place both in the culture and in the polity that is very well defined: authorities can be cited for it readily, references can be made to it, arguments about particular in- stances of Islam can be adduced from it—by anyone, not just by experts or by joumalists. And in tum such an idea fur- nishes a kind of a priori touchstone to be taken account of by anyone wishing to discuss or say something about Islam. From being something out there, Islam—or rather, the material in- variably associated with it—is turned into an orthodoxy of this society. It enters the cultural canon, and this makes the task of changing it very diffcult indeed.
  • Edward Said ends his chapter titled “knowledge and power” with a prescient few sentences that pretty much predicts the shrinking world due mainly to communication technologies like the Internet. He states that knowledge acquisition rooted in challenging preconceived views, inherent biases is key to a better and more inclusive world in which people try to gain empathy and learn about each other as opposed to superficial knowledge that only scratches the surface. 153
    1. traitor. As our world grows more tightly knit töther, the control of scarce rsources, strat%ic and large popula- tions will seem more dßirable and more Carefully fostered fars of anarchy and disorder Will very likely produce conformity of views and, with reference to the "outside" world, greater distrust: this is as true of the Islamic world as it is of the West. At such a åme—which has already begun—the production and diffusion of knowledge will play an absolutely crucial role. Yet until knowledge is understood in human and political terms as something to won to the service of coexis- tence and community, not of particular races, nations, classes, or religions, the future augurs badly.
  • Said questions true originality in writing. He writes, “No writing is (or can be) so new as to be complete original, for in writing about human society one is not doing mathematics, and therefore one cannot aspire to the radical originality possible in that activity.” 155
  • Said posits one reason for the negative sentiments toward Islam in the west. 155
    1. antipathy. Today Islam is dcfincd negatively as that with which the West is radically at odds, and this tension establishes a framework radically limiting knowledge of Islam. So long as this framework stands, Islam, as a lived experience for Muslims, cannot be known. 'Illis, unfortunately, is particularly true in the United States, and only slightly less true in Europe.
  • How to read a totally new text from a culture you don’t fully understand or may have preconceived biases toward. 158
    1. COVÉRiNG ISLAM 158 Therefore, the first thing to be aware Of in reading a text produced in an alien culture is its distance, the main condition Of its distance (in both time and space) being quite literally, although not exclusively, the presence Of the interpreter in his or her time and place. As we saw, the orthodox Orientalist or "area studies" approach is to equate distance with authority, to incorporate the foreignness of a distant culture into the authoritative rhetoric of a scholarly discourse, which has the social status of knowledge, with no acknowledgment of what that foreignness exacted from the interpreter and no acknowl- edgment of what structure of power made the interpretel's job possible. I mean quite simply that, almost without exception, no writer on Islam in the West today reckons explicitly with the fact that "Islam" is considered a hostile culture, or that anything said about Islam by a professional scholar is within the sphere of influence of corporations and the government, both of which in turn play a very large role in making inter- pretations and, subsequently, knowledge of Islam desirable and "in the national interest." In the argument that I analyzed above, Leonard Binder is typical: he mentions these matters, then he makes them disappear in a sentence paying homage to vofessionalism and "the disciplines," whose collective func- tion is an effcient way of dismissing whatever disturbs their mask of rational objectivity. This is an instance of socially acceptable knowledge erasing the steps by which it was Droduced.
  • Interpretation is given a ton of weight by Said. He states they interpretation can be riddled with errors when produced or commissioned for a specific  purpose or particular entity—especially government. He discusses more on 158-160
    1. As an aspcct of interpretation, ' 'inter—t" can be a good dcal further and much more conctetelys No One simply happcns upon Islam, Islamic cuitüte, ot Islamic society. Fot thc citizcn of a Wcstcrn industtui state today, Islam is ena countcrcd by virtue cttbct of tbc phtxcal Oil cnsls. ot of in. tense media attcntion, Ot Of bootan«hng tradition of expert—that is, Oricntaitst--«omnxntagy on Islam in the West. Takc the case oi a who wtshcs to spe cialize in modern Middie tie ot shc comes to study that subject ali truce tn play. ail of them
  • Knowledge and Power 159 molding and shaping the situation in which "the facts"—the supposedly raw data—are apprehended. In addition, there are the individual's own history, sensibility, and intellectual gifts to be figured in. Taken together these constitute a significant measure of his or her interest in the subject: sheer curiosity is tempered by such things as the promise of consulting work for the State Department or oil companies, a wish to become a famous scholar, a desire to "prove" that Islam is a wonderful (or for that matter, a terrible) cultural system, an ambition to serve as a bridge of understanding between this culture and that, a desire to know, The texts, the profess+rs;. tfie scholarly tradition, the specific moment, add !heir i"print to what this young historian is going to study. In the end there are other things to be considered too. one hås studied the history of nineteenth-cen!tuy 'ynan !and tenure, for instance, it is ex- tremejy likel Ybac even the driest and most "objective" treat- ment of 'Subject will have some contemporary policy patticularly for a government offcial who is anxious to the dynamics of traditional authority (which is connected to land ownership) in contemporary Syria.
  • But if, in the first place, some effort is made to have uncoercive contact with a distant culture, and secondly, if the interpreter is consciously aware of the interpretative situation in which he or she is to found (that is, if the interpreter undcrstands that knowledge of another culture is not absolute but is relative to the interpretative situation in which that knowledgc gets produced), then it is more than likely that the interpreter will feel the orthodox view of Islam and of other "alien" cultures to an acutely limited one. By comparison, antithetical knowledge of Islam seems to go a reasonable dis- tance towards overcoming the limitations of orthodox views. Precisely because the antithetical scholars reject the notion that knowledge of Islam ought to be subservient to the gov- emment's immediate policy interests, they highlight the com- plicity between knowledge and power. And in doing so they seek to other relationships with Islam than those
  • Said goes on to make very important conclusions below linked to how interpretations of a particular scholar can become a tool for misinterpretation depending on who is doing the interpretating of the “scholarly”interpretation. In other words, reader beware. 160
    1. In the end, though, there is never any simple escape from what some critics have called the interpretative circle. Knowl- edge of the social world, in short, is always no better than the interpretations on which it is based. All our knowledge of so complex and elusive a phenomenon as Islam comes about through texts, images, experiences that are not direct embod- iments of Islam (which is after all apprehended only through instances of it) but representations or interpretations of it, In other words, all knowledge of other cultures, societies, or reli- gions comes about through an admixture of indirect evidence with the individual scholar's personal situation, which includes time, place, personal gifts, historical situation, as well as the over-all political circumstances. What makes such knowledge accurate or inaccurate, bad, better, or worse, has to do mainly with the needs of the society in which that knowledge is pro- duced. There is, of course, a level of simple factuality without which no knowledge can occur: after all, how can one "know" Islam in Morocco without knowing Arabic, Berber, and some- thing about the country and its society? But beyond that, knowledge of Moroccan Islam is not a mere matter of correspondence between there and here, an inert object and its beholder, but an interaction of the two (usually) for a purpose here: for example, a learned article, a lecture, advice to the policy-maker. Insofar as the purpose is fulfilled, knowl- edge is considered to have been produced. There are other uses for knowledge (including even the use of uselessness), but the main ones tend to be very functional or instrumental.
  • Said states his conclusions that are worthwhile to read if reviewing. 161
    1. My thesis in this has been that the ortho- dox coverage of Islam that we find in the academy, in the govemment, and in the media is all interrelated and has been more diffused, has seemed more and influential, in the West than any other "coverage" or interpretation. fie succos of this coverage can be attributed to the political influence of those people and institutions producing it rather than necessarily to truth or accuracy. I have also argued that this coverage has served purposs only tangentially related to actual knowledge of Islam itself. ne result has been the tri- umph not just of a particular knowledge of Islam but rather of a particulat intetptctatton which. however, has neither been unchallcngcd not impcmous to the kinds of questions asked by unorthodox. inqutnng nunds. It js thetcfotc as that "Islam" has not been par- ticularly useful expiauung the Iran-Iraq war, any more than "the Nego mentality" were useful in explaining ideas about the ex}xnences of black Americans. For aside front gn ang narcisxsnc to the expert who emplow them and whoe livelibd often depends on them, thee totalitarian concepb have kept up neither with the sheer force of exents nor with the forces that produced the 'l he result has an ever-widening rift between the asertions of concepb and the far more power-
  • Universities need to train students in language and help them along their path to interpret cultures, not at the service of power or political ends, but of capturing human experience—that human experience is different in different environments and circumstances, not a monolith that can be painted with one color and one broad brush. 162
    1. No one know everything about the world we live in, and so the division of intellectual will have to continue forseeably. fie academy requires that division, ibelf demands it, society in the WBt is organized around it. But most knowledge about human society is, I think, finally accessible to common sense—that is, the sense that grows out of the common human experience—and is, indeed must subject to some sort of critical assessment. %ese two thin5, common sense and critiæl assosment, are in the final analysis social and generally intellectual attributes available to and cultivatable by everyone, not the privilege of a special class nor the possession of a handful of certified "experts." Yet special training is necessary if one is to leam Arabic or Chinese, or if one is to understand the meaning of economic, historical, and demographic trends. And the is the place for making that training available: of this I have no doubt at all. The trouble comes when training produces guilds who, losing touch with the realities of community, good sense, and intel- lectual r5ponsibility, either promote the guild at all costs or put it too willingly and uncritically at the service of power. In both instances, foreign societiß or culturo Islam end up being covered more than elucidated or understood. There is even the danger that new fictions will be invented and un- heard-of varieties of disinformation circulated.
  • Using “the decline of the west” as a trope to get into a more defensive posture doesn’t serve humanity—this is another comment Said attempts to stress. Knowledge acquisition doesn’t have to be zero-sum in nature, a winner and loser, but humanity can win through the diversity of people. Once we begin to want to win at the expense of others, biases set in, harden and clashes occur. This can happen in the East and the west. Knowledge acquisition must be done through some level of humility. 163
    1. Knowledge and Power 163 been saying that this has meant the emergence of new and irregular realities in the Islamic world; it is no less true that similar irrcgularities, disturbing the calm theoretical descrip- tions of earlier years, have emerged in other parts of the post- colonial world. Merely to reassert the old formulas about "underdevelopment" and "the Afro-Asian mentality" is fool- ish enough; but to connect these causally with notions about the sad decline of the West, the unfortunate end of colonial- ism, and the regrettable diminishment of American power is, I must say as strongly as possible, rank folly. nere is simply no way in which societies thousands of miles away from the At- lantic world in both space and identity can be made to con- form to what we want of them, One can consider this a neutral fact without also regarding it (as I happen to) as a good thing. In any event, the danger in talking about the loss of Iran and the decline of the West in the same breath is that we immedi- ately foreclose the possibility of most courses of action— except the ascendancy of the West and the regaining of places like Iran and the Gulf. recent success of "experts" who in their work bewail the end of British or American or French dominion in the Islamic world is, in my opinion, frightening testimony to what might be lurking in the minds of policy- makers, and to what deep needs for aggression and reconquest these "experts," consciously or unconsciously, really serve.32 there are compliant natives who play in the same orches- tra belongs to the shabby history of collaboration and is not (as some would have it) a sign of new maturity in the %ird World,
  • The final states are important to re-read. 164
    1. COVE'IXC ISLAM 164 abo Mid that all of erem Wiff the ide an is interpretation, and that interpr&tion must in ib methods and ib aims if it is to be vigilant and humane, if it is abo to arrive at knowldge. But undaly- ing every interpreuüon of other cultures---ßFally of Islam ——is the facing the individual scholar or whether to put intellæt at the service of power or at the vice of criticism, community, and moral choice must be the first act of interpretation and it must rsult in a decision, not simply a postponenait. If the history of knowledge about Islam in the West has too closely Med to conquest and domination, the Hme has come for thse to be severed completely. About this one ænnot be too emphatic. For otherwise we Will not only face protracted ten- sion and perhaps even war, but we offer the Muslim world, various societie and sbtß, ffe prospect of many wars, unimaginable suffering, and disasbous upheavals, not the least of which would be the birth of an "Islam" fully ready to play the role prepared for it by reaction, orthodoxy, and desperation. By even the sanguine of this is not a pleasant possibility.

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