The Influence of Orientalism on American Perceptions and Policies in the Middle-East

AU/ACSC/7348/2008-04

AIR COMMAND AND STAFF COLLEGE

AIR UNIVERSITY

THE INFLUENCE OF ORIENTALISM ON AMERICAN

PERCEPTIONS AND POLICIES IN THE MIDDLE-EAST

by

Hamid Kbiri, Major, Royal Moroccan Air Force

A Research Report Submitted to the Faculty

In Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements

Advisor: Edward Ouellette, Ph.D.

Maj USAF

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

April 2008

Distribution A: Approved for Public Release; distribution unlimited

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this academic research paper are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense. In accordance with Air Force Instruction 51-303, it is not copyrighted, but it is the property of the United States government.

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Contents

Page DISCLAIMER………………………………………………….….……......ii

PREFACE………………………………………………………….........…..iv

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...vi

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………..1

GENEALOGY OF ORIENTALISM..…………………...……….........…....3

Proto-Orientalism: the Medieval legacy.…………………….…….....3

The impact of the Crusades.……………..………………….……......4

The Middle-East in the Eye of Enlightenment ….……...…………....6

The Emergence of Scholarly Orientalism ………….…………...…...8

AMERICAN ORIENTALISM..……………….………………………........11

Orientalism in Mass Culture: From Mark Twain to Hollywood .........11

From Orientalism to Area Studies: A change of denomination….......16

How Orientalism failed America…………….………….……...….....17

Area Studies as a locus of political struggle……………………...…..24

A Brief Critique of Orientalist Approaches……………………...…...25

CONCLUSIONS………………………………………….…………....…....27

RECOMMENDATIONS…………………………………………….….......28

ENDNOTES………………………………………………………….….......30

BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………….…..36

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Preface

As a Moroccan officer attending the Air Command and Staff College, I have often had to deal with situations, texts and views where deep-seated and sometimes horrendous stereotypes about the Arabs and Muslims were consistently recurrent. While some of these stereotypes are still enshrouded in a semblance of political correctness, many other biased ideas are taken for granted as they are openly circulated in respectable media and authoritative academic works. What struck me is that even at an age where scientific tools and means are available on an unprecedented scale, gross and sweeping generalizations about the Middle-East--that could be effectively verified through empirically supported data like surveys, interviews or statistics-continue to populate serious works by renowned academics and journalists. This paper purports to show that the cultural assumptions that underlie such lax intellectual treatment of the Middle-East are the result of a whole discourse which is currently known in academic circles as “Orientalism.” This pervasive discourse, also known as the Orientalist tradition, has formed over the historical period extending from medieval ages to modern times. It consists of popular attitudes supported by well established scholarship, which command most aspects of perception and interaction with the Middle-East. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the much publicized “Clash of Civilizations” have certainly contributed to the crystallization of some of the most enduring misrepresentations of Middle-Eastern societies. The criminal but overly spectacular actions committed by a small and marginal band of crazed fanatics in what is called “the capture of big ideas by a tiny minority”1 played a major role in accentuating the stigma about the “evil Arab” or the “evil Muslim.” These perceptions lie in contrast to the fact that the vast majority of Arab and Muslim countries count among the staunchest and most committed allies of the United States. The Clash of Civilization, as it will be

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argued in this work, is an offshoot of Orientalism, which presents the world in Manichean terms where Middle-Easterners are just overexcited and dehumanized hordes bent on jumping at the West’s throat at the very first occasion. I truly believe that military officers should have a fair idea about the debates raging nowadays in American academic circles regarding the issue of perception and reality in so far as Middle–East Studies are concerned. The publication of Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism2 in 1978 has spurred a heated debate in area studies that never abated. With its critique of Western studies of Oriental cultures, this book has indeed reshaped scholarship in the humanities3 and regional studies as a whole. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the assistance of my thesis advisor, Dr. Edward Ouelette who gave me the liberty to explore this significant topic and then helped me focus my thoughts into a cohesive product. He spared no efforts in providing me with his kind and generous advice, his critical review and valuable suggestions which have been of great help in accomplishing this work. I want also to express my deepest love and appreciation for my wife and little daughter, Souad and Marwa, for their unwavering support and patience during my studies at ACSC and throughout the preparation of this research paper. N.B.: Given the scope of this paper, it is certainly not the place to survey all the vast literature produced on the Middle-East and Islam since medieval times. It was therefore necessary to rely on authoritative works by renowned academics who compiled substantial materials to evidence the ways in which MiddleEasterners and Muslims had been and continue to be portrayed and understood. In this regard, I would like to name three books in particular: Orientalim,4 American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle-East since 1945,5 and Contending visions of the Middle-East: The History and Politics of Orientalism.6

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AU/ACSC/7348/2008-04

Abstract Orientalism as a scholarly tradition and a mode of thought looms large in the perceptions of the Middle-East both at the public and official spheres in America. This paper traces the formation of the Orientalist outlook back to the Middle-Ages. It argues that the Orientalist vision of the Middle-East has largely informed the interactions between the United-States and the Middle-East during much of the twentieth century up to the present day. In particular, the Orientalist expertise provided to civilian and military decision makers, under the guise of Area Studies, has time and again proven inaccurate or confusing with often disastrous long-term consequences. The on-going war in Iraq is the ultimate illustration of how Orientalist conventional wisdom had it wrong. The stark discrepancies between expert predictions and actual developments and the growing insistence on cultural awareness among the US military seem to underscore the limits of the prevailing Orientalist paradigm of perception. While Orientalist knowledge should not be rejected wholesale, there is a need to empanel other MiddleEast experts, who are shorn of Orientalist bias, to achieve a balanced assessment of the developments in this critical region of the world. Likewise, military curricula and recommended reading lists should include other authoritative materials which present other perspectives on the Middle-East, relying more on empirical data than on philological conjectures.

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INTRODUCTION

“Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” Edward Said7 Counterinsurgency experts have somewhat belatedly rediscovered that central to the best practices in the war against insurgents and terrorists is to win the war of perceptions. The Population has thus been recognized as an overriding center of gravity of any counterinsurgency strife. It has become essential to bring it to the point where it perceives the coalition’s forces as part of the solution and not as part of the problem. This insight has given way to enormous efforts to heighten military officers’ cultural understanding and cultural awareness.8 However, few experts, have so far emphasized the fact that achieving full awareness of the adversary’s culture (and not the adversary culture)9 entails not only a kind of cultural empathy but also by way of consequence changing one’s own perception of that culture. Thus assuming adequate or at least accurate cultural awareness means casting aside pre-conceived ideas (or pre-existing cultural assumptions) before engaging with the culture at hand. In the on-going war in Iraq, perceptions have proven particularly relevant to the conduct of military operations. However, because Western perceptions of the Middle-East did not develop in a vacuum, the ideas so-far dominating Western outlook of this critical region, and forming the personal repertoire of most Westerners, are predetermined by each individual’s experience within his/her culture. This experience is mostly shaped by the images, ideas and impressions retained from exposure to popular culture, media and more or less elaborate curricula or readings, and depending on one’s educational attainments, personal or professional interests. The common denominator between all these individual experiences, as far as the Middle-East is concerned, is that they are all immersed in a predominant consensus or discourse about the representation of this critical region of the world. Academia has identified this

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prevalent mode of Western representation of the Orient in general and the Middle-East in particular as Orientalism. Orientalism is a vision of the Middle-East as a monolithic and unitary region. It is a vision that owes a great deal to tumultuous interactions and established intellectual and scholarly traditions going back as far as the Middle Ages. The reductionism of this vision is particularly patent when this region is referred to in terms of its prevalent religion: Islam. In the media and academia, Islam is almost invariably contrasted sharply with the West or Modernity as though it was “unchanging in essence and totally controlling the mental life and social behavior of all Muslims everywhere and at all times.”10 Such an essentialist view overlooks the complexities and diversities of Muslim beliefs and practices, the existence of Muslim secularists and Muslim agnostics and denies the Muslims any kind of individuality or human experience.11 In short, it is a dehumanizing and often vilifying vision of the Middle-East. This paper explores the process of the making of the Middle-East’s image in the West’s consciousness. It traces the formation of Orientalism from medieval times to the contemporary era. It demonstrates how antagonistic attitudes evolved from the first crusade through the enlightenment period leading to the birth of the scholarly discipline “Orientalism” in the eighteenth century. Scholarly Orientalism would later lend its name to the whole discourse whereby the Middle-East as part of the Orient is construed, represented and understood in Western Media and popular culture. A substantial part of the paper focuses on the influence of Orientalism on American policies and perceptions of the Middle-East. This influence, as demonstrated through historical evidence, has often been pernicious or misleading. American interactions with the Middle-East have indeed been plagued by deep-seated Orientalist misgivings resulting in often flawed policies and counterproductive attitudes. Therefore there is a

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need to identify Orientalist assumptions at work, to neutralize them or at least counterbalance them with other academic inputs based more on empirical data than on overarching generalizations.

THE GENEALOGY OF ORIENTALISM Proto-Orientalism or the Medieval legacy: “From the time it first appeared, the religion of Islam was a problem for Christian Europe. Those 12 who believed in it were the enemy on the frontier.” Albert Hourani

Thanks to the Orientalist tradition, the Western outlook of the Middle-East continues to be dominated by enduring legacies from the past.13 Human societies are naturally inclined to define themselves in relation to the “other”. In ancient times, the Greeks, whose heritage is claimed by the West, often contrasted themselves with Asians in rather stark and essentialized terms.14 The purpose was to celebrate and assert their self-perceived uniqueness and superiority.15 Roman political philosophers would later adopt the East/West polarity developed by the Greeks, drawing on some of the images of the ancient Greek city-state, to define themselves as civilized while the whole world around them was invariably barbaric.16 The same kinds of ideas later permeated influential works of prominent historians like Gibbon (1737-94). They went as far as to attribute the downfall of the Western Roman Empire to the “infection” by the vices of the East.17 They also excluded Byzantium from Europe’s “Roman heritage” which they depicted as corrupted by oriental influences. 18 The views of the Middle-East as decadent and corrupt are therefore age old. They precede even the advent of Islam which constituted a watershed in the relationship between the East and the West. Even before the first encounter between Europeans and Muslims, the Europeans, who did not really conceive of themselves as European or Western at the time, used to nurture an idea of mistrust and fear of the new power rising in the Arabian Peninsula. The

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sweeping new faith represented a real challenge to the dominant Christendom. “All sort of bizarre and derogatory myths about the ‘Saracens’ circulated in Europe, among the educated as well as the masses, reflecting the fear and hostility which Christians felt for the Muslims who were the new competitors on the world stage.”19 For instance, in AD 786, in a letter recording synodal decrees, sent by Bishop Georgius of Ostia, England’s papal legate, to Pope Hadrian, the ninth item reads: “That no ecclesiastic shall dare to consume foodstuffs in secret, unless on account of very great illness, since it is hypocrisy and a Saracen practice.”20 Thus, three centuries before the Crusades, at a time when Arabic was not yet studied in Christian Europe, the Qur’an was not yet translated into Latin and no contact was yet established with the Arabs, Saracen was already understood as a pejorative term.21

The impact of the Crusades: “From about the year 1120 everyone in the West had some picture of what Islam meant, and who Mahomet was. The picture was brilliantly clear, but it was not knowledge, and its details were only accidentally true. Its authors luxuriated in the ignorance of triumphant imagination” – Sir Richard W. Southern 22

The relation between the Middle-East and the West continues to be largely screened through inherited images and stereotypes.23 The era of the crusades has indeed deeply marked Western perceptions of Islam and the Middle-East. In the eleventh century, new developments in Anatolia and Mesopotamia accentuated the fear of the rising power of Muslim polities in the East. However, the threat posed to the Byzantine emperor, who appealed to the pope Urban II for help was not posed by an homogenous Islam. It was rather emanating from Seljuk Turks who were carving their own empire in Western Asia, wresting territories from both Muslim and Christian states alike. The first crusade was sparked only after the Seljuks seized Palestine from the Egypt-based Fatimids and disrupted Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the Holy land, which had long been tolerated by successive Muslim rulers.24 Following the launching of the

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crusades, Christian figures no less prominent than Peter the Venerable, abbot of the monastery of Cluny, saw Islam as a Christian Heresy –just like the Arians who rejected the dogma of the Holy Trinity-25 and argued that it could not be destroyed unless its errors were understood.26 He thus oversaw the first translation ever of the Qur’an into Latin in 1143.27 Later, Roger Bacon (1214­ 1320) along with other Church scholars urged the Church to foster the study of Islam and Arabic in order to arm Christians with the tools they would need to convince Muslims that their faith was false and Christianity true.28 However, Medieval Christendom studied Islam not only for the purpose of converting Muslims to Christianity but also “to protect Christians from Muslim blandishments.”29. To this aim, Christian scholars “created a body of literature concerning the faith, its prophet and his book, polemic in purpose and often scurrilous in tone, designed to protect and discourage rather than to inform.”30 Roger Bacon, for instance, endorsed the assumption of the secret conversion of Avicenna and Averroes, two remarkable Muslim philosophers, to Christianity and/or their profession of the Muslim faith for fear of persecution.31 For many medieval Europeans, this was “the most plausible way of explaining the genius of Muslim thinkers and scientists against the backdrop of a religion that the medieval West ignored abhorred and rejected.”32 The mood was the same whether in Church scholarship, in medieval lore or in monumental literary work. Thus Saladin, who had exercised a sort of fascination in medieval Europe and came to be depicted in many popular stories and epic poems as chivalrous, humane, just and wise, was ultimately included into the “Christian experience”.33 Fantastic stories circulated that “his mother had actually been a Christian princess and that he had converted to Christianity on his deathbed.”34 While the Italian poet Dante (1265-1321), in his Inferno, modeled after a medieval Muslim work,35 placed the prophet Mohammed in one of the worst circles of hell, subject to endless torment, Saladin was depicted as enjoying a relatively

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pleasant afterlife along with Avicenna and Averroes among near-contemporaries and various non-Christians of antiquity like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.36 The stereotype of Middle-Eastern irrationality also dates back to medieval times. It was the brain child of the Spanish Ramon Llull (1232-1316). Following “St Isidore’s schema” which declared the Jews who resisted conversion irrational, Llull blamed his failures to convert Spain’s Muslims, at the outset of the Inquisition, on the irrationality of the Saracens.37 This image of the irrational Saracen “would be afterwards echoed by many other writers, such as the Dominican monk Riccoldo Montecroce and the Franciscan monk Robert Bacon, and it would indeed become the predominant stereotype in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, only to be transferred onto ‘the Turk’.”38 All these developments, that brought the Western image of the Middle-East into sharper focus,39 were only the early beginning of a prolific production which would lead to a sharp dichotomization of Christianity and Islam and much more later into the twentieth and twenty-first century of the West and “Islam”.

The Middle-East in the eye of the Enlightenment “From the earliest attempts at defining Europe during the enlightenment period, the Orient came to be seen as immature and childlike and inherently incapable of progress; it was stagnant, lacking innovation and rationality. Such ideas served only as a distorted mirror image of Europe’s own identity, a foil for the articulation of a discourse of civilization.” Gerard Delanty 40

Enlightenment had been synonymous with the intellectual, philosophical and artistic awakening of Europe. Great ideas and ideals were shaped during this momentous period of Western history. However, the humanism and universalism of the Renaissance stopped short of encompassing the other parts of the world including the Orient in general and the Middle-East in particular. Many prominent Enlightenment thinkers actually held racist views, some very openly and overtly.41 The racial comments of thinkers like Kant, Hume and Voltaire are well known.42 For instance, David Hume in his Essays: Moral, Political and Literary states: “There never was

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any civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences...”43 As for Voltaire, he was an outright anti-Semite: "They are [the Jews], all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair."44 Likewise, the French philosopher showed no lesser restraint in debasing the Muslims and their faith. His tragedy Mahomet ou le Fanatisme even gained enough prestige to become part of the repertoire of La Comédie-Française.45 Despite Voltaire being a dedicated enemy of the Church as the author of the Anti-Trinitarians Tract, Pope Benedict XIV, the greatest pontiff of the eighteenth century, unhesitatingly sent him his blessing for the dedication to him of Mahomet ou le Fanatisme.46 Before him Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), one of the most devout defenders of the Christian faith in the 17th century, was as harsh and uncompromising as his successors in condemning Islam and its Prophet in the ‘fifteenth movement’ of his Les Pensées, called Contre Mahomet.47 The buoying realm of literature and arts became also largely fascinated with the oriental “Other” and rife with Oriental images. Thus in the words of the late Edward Said, professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Columbia: Between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, such major authors as Ariosto, Milton, Marlowe, Tasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the authors of the Chanson de Roland and the Poema del Cid drew on the Orient’s 48 riches for their productions, in ways that sharpened that outlines of imagery, ideas, and figures populating it.

The translation of the Thousand and One Nights in 1704 would further stimulate a fascination with the exotic lands of the Orient and grip Western popular imagination.49 It would also have a lasting effect on the perceptions of almost every Westerner visiting the Muslim world from that date until this.50 The letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) wife of Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1717-18 provide an illustration of the disconnect between Oriental fantasies and historical realities. After befriending members of the Ottoman

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elite and the female members of their households (upper Middle-class women) she wrote: “I think I never saw a country where women may enjoy so much liberty, and free from all reproach as in Turkey.”51 She did not miss the opportunity to deride European accounts of the Ottoman society: “they never fail giving you an account of the women, which’tis certain they never saw, and talking very wisely of the men, into whose company they were never admitted.”52 It was the beginning of the process of ‘Orientalizing the Orient’.53 The same notion of Orientalization is nowadays used by some Western intellectuals, such as German social scientist Volker Heins, to describe the process whereby the European Union is trying to forge its identity in contrast with the United States.54

The Emergence of Scholarly Orientalism “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.” Edward Said. 55

Orientalism as a scholarly discipline started in the eighteenth century, concurrently with European colonial enterprise. With the flourishing of academic disciplines addressing the Orient, the term Orientalism actually entered French, English and other European languages as the special name for the scholarly field which focused on the Orient.56 As a scholarly discipline, it tended to produce knowledge that was often used to justify and further the exertion of European power over the Orient.57 The Middle-East was therefore studied under the postulate that it was a stagnant, exhausted, and defective region in need of European influence and civilization.58 It was all in keeping with the “White Man’s Burden” and “mission civilisatrice”. The increasing institutionalization of scholarship in the field over the course of the nineteenth century led to an incestuous relationship between intellectual circles and power. Thus, French scholar Sylvester de Sacy, known as the father of modern Orientalism, advised the French government on Islam and

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the Orient and translated into Arabic the proclamation which that government issued when it invaded Algeria in 1830.59 Later in the century, the prominent Dutch Orientalist scholar Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936) who studied mystical tendencies in Islam, helped the Dutch government formulate and implement policy toward the Muslim population of its colonies in Indonesia. Russian Orientalists for their parts, helped the Tsarist government formulate policies designed to “pacify, control and assimilate the empire’s Muslim subjects.”60 As for the British officials, they embraced Orientalism as “a self-serving view of Asians, Africans and Arabs as decadent, alien, and inferior” to rationalize their imperial ambitions.61 The same rationale would later be used to deny British Oriental subjects the right to self-determination enshrined in the Atlantic Charter. British leaders then went as far as to brand such claims as “a typical example of loose thinking.”62 Several nineteenth century Orientalist scholars were Christian missionaries. Sir William Muir (1819-1905), for instance, was an active missionary who wrote several generally considered biased books on Islam, which continue to be used as references to this very day.63 As a result of these interested studies of Muslim lands, the Muslim in the Middle-East was made into what Maxime Rodinson calls the “homo islamicus” that is a distinct type of human being, ontologically different from Western man.64 The essential characteristics of the “homo islamicus” could be identified by “the use of philological methods to study key texts” (like the Quran) which were regarded as embodying the core principles of Islamic civilization.65 One of the most prominent Orientalists of the 19th Century was Ignaz (Yitzhaq Yehuda) Goldziher (1850 –1921). His writings which sought to “debunk” both the Qur’an and the Islamic Tradition, have created “a kind of scholarly orthodoxy which has retained its power until our own times.”66 However, the same Goldziher wonders: “What would be left of the Gospels if the Qur’anic methods were applied to them?”67 Another prominent figure of nineteenth-century Orientalism is

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Ernest Renan who in an 1883 Sorbonne lecture declared: “The Muslim has the most profound disdain for instruction, for science, for everything that constitutes the European spirit.” Even when science, culture and philosophy flourished under Islam, Renan argued that the “caliphs who were patronizing this cultural and intellectual efflorescence could hardly be called Muslims, and though the civilization used the Arabic language, it was not really Arab, it was essentially Greek and Persian.”68 Such ideas would be still be found in the twentieth-Century, as renowned scholars like Albert Howe Lybyer and Sir Hamilton Gibb explained the decline of the Ottoman Empire as the result of the replacement of the Ottoman civil and military elite almost entirely composed of born Christians with born Muslims i.e. because “the Empire became Muslim and Semitic in character.”69 All these ideas fit into a long tradition of belittling and minimizing the role and contribution of Islam to World Civilization. German philosopher Friedrich Hegel (1770­ 1831), and after him Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), used the paradigm of the rise and fall of civilizations, initially developed by the North African Ibn Khaldoun (1332 – 1406),70 to reduce the role of Islam to the minor role of preserving and handing on to Europe the heritage of Greek and Roman civilization.71 The nineteenth century also witnessed a dramatic fascination with the Orient in literary and artistic circles to such extents that the famous French writer Victor Hugo wrote in 1820: “In the century of Louis XIV one was Hellenist; today one is an Orientalist…the Orient has become for the intellect as well as for the imagination a sort of general preoccupation…”72 Again, like their enlightenment forbears, European writers, poets, and painters produced works drawing heavily on the prevailing imagery and themes depicting Middle-Easterners as violent, lusty and sexually perverse. The works of painters like Delacroix, Jean-Leon Gerome and many others73 created a new tableau genre called the “Oriental”, rife with phantasmagoric harems,74 which

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“carried representation into visual expression and a life of its own.”75 Such high culture works which form part of the West’s cultural heritage continue to haunt Western collective imagination in both Europe and America to this day.

AMERICAN ORIENTALISM “American Orientalism is a tendency to underestimate the peoples of the region [the MiddleEast]and to overestimate America’s ability to make a bad situation better.” Douglas Little (2002)76

Orientalism in Mass Culture: From Mark Twain to Hollywood “Most Americans now know better than to use nasty generalizations about ethnic or religious groups. Disparaging stereotypes—the avaricious Jew, the sneaky Chinese, the dumb Irishman, the lazy black person—are now so unacceptable that it’s a shock to hear them mentioned. Thanks to current international politics, however, one form of ethnic bigotry retains an aura of respectability in the United States: prejudice against Arabs.” —New York Times editorial, 14 July 1993.77

Middle-Easterners have consistently been portrayed in derogatory ways in popular culture designed for mass consumption. Since the eighteenth century, American collective imagination was already permeated with representations of Middle-Eastern peoples that were conveyed either through European literary works or the accounts of American missionaries, merchants, and archeologists.78 Three decades of sporadic maritime warfare with the Barbary pirates helped spread Orientalist images to the public at large79 about the Arabs as “exotic, fanatical, and congenitally predisposed towards autocracy.”80 This was done through captivity narratives such as Caleb Bingham’s Slave in Barbary and plays like Susanna’s Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers.81 Mark Twain, one of the most popular American writers, did not derogate to the rule. The author’s rendition of his journey to the Middle-East, The Innocent Abroad, was replete with exotism and Orientalist fantasies: To see a camel train laden with the spices of Arabia and the rare fabrics of Persia come marching through the narrow alleys of the bazaar …is a genuine revelation of the Orient. The picture lacks nothing. It casts you back at once into your forgotten boyhood, and again you dream over the wonders of the Arabian Nights; again your

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companions are princes, your lord is the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid, and your servants are terrific giants and genii that come with smoke and lightning and thunder, and go as a storm goes when they depart!82

Twain’s account of his passage to the Middle-East seethed with his biases towards the Arabs and Muslims and translated his difficulty to transcend deep-ingrained ideas. He viewed Middle-Easterners through the lenses of stereotypes that portrayed them as backward, servile, and untrustworthy. When faced with realities that cannot be contorted to fit his basic premises, he solves the paradox in a quite dismissive way: “The Arabs are too high-priced in Egypt, they put on airs unbecoming such savages.”83 Mark Twain’s remarks are strikingly in line with the views of another Western intellectual of a completely different ideological color. Frederick Engels wrote in 1848: The conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact of the progress of civilization …All these nations of free Barbarians look very proud, noble, and glorious at a distance, but only come near them and you will find that they, as well as the more civilized nations are ruled by the lust of gain, and only employ ruder and more cruel means.84

The influential popular magazine, the National Geographic, established in 1888, used to represent a window on the world for millions of middle-class Americans at a time when television and movies were either not yet invented or in their infancy. The “bland picturesque coverage” of the Middle-East, by this magazine, showed the Arabs as exotic Orientals.85 For instance, its November issue included an article entitled “Sailing with Sinbad’s Sons” whose description of the sailors of the Bayan, a “Winged Galeon of Araby”, reproduced ‘the classic Orientalist myth of the primitive but happy native’: “Like monkeys in treetops, Arabs climb a 130-Foot Yard…their pay is a pittance and their food poor, yet they are cheerful.”86 Mass media and movie industry developed throughout the twentieth century to become the main purveyor of information, images and attitudes about the region to the public at large.87 The “Arab Muslim” progressively became a “figure in American popular culture.”88 In the films and television, the Arabs have become “the most maligned people on the silver screen” 89 and are

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associated “either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty.”90 The Arab appears as “an oversexed degenerate, capable of cleverly devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous, low.” 91 As early as the twenties, blockbusters such as The Sheikh (1921), The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and Beau Geste (1939) were pandering to the most common stereotypes about the Arabs. For instance Valentino’s Sheikh is a depraved Arab chief who is “snarling at the captured Western hero and the blond girl, both of them steeped in wholesomeness.”92 Later, the Arab oil boycott, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis –many Americans think the Iranians are Arabs-93 all conspired to cast the Arab as film villain.94 From the 1970s on, the Arab took the role of a leering mustachioed oil sheik with stereotypical Semitic features.95 Some intellectuals saw in this development the smooth “transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target, since the figure was essentially the same.”96 The themes of denigration and caricaturization97 of the Arabs in recent Hollywood works are recurrent. The entertainment industry has indeed tended to provide the public with stereotyped versions of the Islamic, and specifically Arab, connection with terrorism.98 In 1977’s Black Sunday, the Arabs are depicted as dumb homicidal fanatics. In True Lies, the Arabs are not only evil but also stupid and ridiculous. In The Father of the Bride II, the Arab is the wife abuser who wants to buy Steve Martin’s house. In Executive Decision the Arab murders innocent airline passengers just because it makes him feel good.99 In Cannonball Run II, the Arab is again a lusty sheikh who rejoices at the sight of the blond girl asking her “Here, my desert blossom. Keep the change. Have you ever considered joining a harem?”100 Sometimes, willful distortion is at work to portray Arabs and Muslims in the worst light. A case in point is the award-winning 1996 film The English Patient, (nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture). One particularly racist and manipulative sequence will certainly mark the collective imagination for generations. The

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movie’s hero, the spy David Caravaggio has his thumbs cut off by fascist troops. Against all odds, a veiled Muslim appears, like a deus ex machina, with a knife to perform the gruesome task in a repugnant, bloody scene, as Caravaggio's tormentor explains that “Muslims understand this sort of thing.”101 Given the fact that the movie’s cultural background is largely that of Renaissance Italy, it becomes obvious that the screenplay wishes to associate Muslims with brutality.102 This becomes all the more evident as the racist scene in the movie had no foundation whatsoever in Michael Ondaatje's novel upon which the film is based. Instead, in the novel, the words of Caravaggio read literally: “They found a woman to do it. They thought it was more trenchant. They brought in one of their nurses. She was an innocent, knew nothing about me, my name or nationality.”103 Another example of the systematic misrepresentation of Muslims in Hollywood movies is The Wind and The Lion (several international nominations including two for Academy Awards.) While the movie claims to be based upon real historical facts, the Pedecaris incident (1904), the whole screenplay is rife with Orientalist fallacies. The rather fictional adventure is about an American woman, Eden Perdicaris, and her two children who are kidnapped by a Muslim Sheikh Moulay Ahmed Raisuli in the North of Morocco. The kidnapping would, according to the movie, prompt American President Teddy Roosevelt to launch an armed invasion and rescue mission, which never actually took place.104 The whole movie is replete with insidious messages as to the cruelty, worthlessness and servility of the North Africans. At one point, the movie shows an American Marines platoon slaughtering the guards of Tangier’s Pasha (governor) with no demand that they surrender or any words or bullets from the guards.105 Another instance is when Mrs. Perdicaris, in an exchange with Raisuli, wonders how he can pray five times a day and still find the time to kidnap women and children and to cut peoples’ heads

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off all the time.106 However, the real Raisuli in the real Pedecaris incident seized a man, Ilio Pedecaris, who turned out not even to be an American citizen.107 The most subtle way of spreading enduringly harmful stereotypes remains movies and cartoons designed for children. Besides textbooks and comic strips, these entertainments constitute children’s first live encounter with “bad Middle-Easterners.” In 1992 Disney Studios released Aladdin, “an animated love story about two rather westernized Arabs, Aladdin and princess Jasmin, whose English is flawless. The other inhabitants of the imaginary oriental sheikhdom which constitutes the story’s settings are frightful thugs sporting turbans, daggers, and thick accents.”108 More into the bargain, the first song, “Arabian Nights” contains an opening lyric: “Oh I come from a land, from a far away place, where the caravan camels roam…where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” Although the most offensive lyrics were removed by Disney Studios from the home video distributed later, Aladdin revised still reflected the Orientalism deeply embedded in U.S. popular culture.109 In The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the costumes of the Haradrims, a human race who allies itself with the enemy, are Middle-Eastern in style. When children are fed this kind of negative bias against the Middle-East, the subliminal cultural consciousness of whole generations is enduringly and profoundly impacted. The “normalcy” of such egregious depictions cogently illustrates what several Western intellectuals qualify at best as acceptable “political incorrectness” directed against Middle-Easterners: You can hit an Arab free; they are free enemies, free villains where you couldn’t do it to a Jew or you can’t do 110 it to a black anymore.

In the media as in the movies, the Arab is “always shown in large numbers, no individuality, no personal characteristics or experience. Most pictures represent mass rage and misery or irrational gestures” by blood-thirsty mobs.111 The burning and ransacking of the

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American Embassy by the Serbs, Orthodox Christians, in Belgrade on February 21, 2008, to protest against U.S. support for Kosovo's declaration of independence112 is not fundamentally different from any other politically motivated manifestation of mass anger elsewhere. Moreover, controversial figures disparaging Arabs or Muslims are given ready access to Media outlets and university amphitheaters without close scrutiny as to their background or real motivations. To disown or denigrate one’s own culture or religion has become in many instances a shortcut to instant fame and media bestowed glory. A case in point is the self-proclaimed “former terrorists”113 who instead of being brought to answer for the crimes they claim to have committed while being terrorists, are regularly invited to denigrate Arabs and Muslims.114

From Orientalism to Area Studies: A change of denomination As soon as the colonial venture started to wane in Europe in the aftermaths of World War II, there was a large exodus of renowned Orientalists to America. This was the case of senior scholars like Sir Hamilton Gibb who, in the forties, worked closely with the foreign Office in the United Kingdom. He came to the US to head Harvard’s new Center for Middle-Eastern Studies. Other prominent Orientalists included the Viennese Gustave von Grunebaum and Historian Philip Hitti who immigrated to the US to respectively run UCLA’s new center for Near Eastern Studies and Princeton’s Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures.115 Several other no less prominent Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis (who also served as an intelligence officer under colonial Britain)116 would later follow suit leaving their chairs in prestigious European universities to join American universities and institutes where generous government and private funding was available on an unprecedented lavish scale. 117 While private funding was provided by the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and similar Foundations, government funding was made available under Title VI of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.118 This measure

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stemmed from the concerns of post-war American elite circles about the dearth of expertise necessary to maintain US global power and the need to develop a much larger pool of expertise on the rest of the world.119 Orientalists, of course, were not alone in area studies. They had, in fact, to interact with scholars in other humanities and social science disciplines to provide interdisciplinary expertise and theoretical framework to “explain the character and historical trajectory of Middle-Eastern societies.”120 Thanks to this interdisciplinary environment, the European tradition of Orientalist scholarship was, “if not taken over, then accommodated, normalized, domesticated and popularized and fed into the postwar efflorescence of Near Eastern Studies in the United States.”121

How Orientalism failed America “According to Middle-East expert Bernard Lewis, a post Saddam Iraq is one that would be more likely to make peace with Israel, defang Arab radicalism, and perhaps even catalyze revolutionary forces in present day Iran.” The Jerusalem Post (Editorial of September 9, 2002) 122

Already in 1889, Mark Twain construed the US relationship with the Middle-East as “the by-product of two contradictory ingredients: an irresistible impulse to remake the world in America’s image and a profound ambivalence about the peoples to be remade.”123 There are indeed several instances where decision makers’ judgment was influenced by their prejudices and the prevalent Orientalist outlook of their society as endorsed by popular culture and academic circles. Before even the growth of Middle-Eastern Studies from the fifties on, politicians and officials used to view Middle-Eastern people and their region as exotic. They also used to rely on the tainted knowledge available to them to reproduce the same kind of bias about the region in their decisions and statements. For instance, President Theodor Roosevelt who has never been to the Middle-East124 could state straightaway that: “It is impossible to expect moral, 125

intellectual and material well-being where Mohammedanism is supreme.”

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President Truman,

after a meeting with Abdullah Suleiman, King Ibn Saud’s Minister of Finance, in August 1946, described his guest as a “real old Biblical Arab.” To the latter’s request for US help on a Saudi irrigation project, Truman replied: “he should send for a Moses to strike rocks in various places with his staff and he’d have plenty of water.”126 At a white house dinner in April 1964, President Lyndon Johnson toasted King Hussein of Jordan for “having brought that ancient land of the camel, the date, and the palm to the threshold of a bright future.”127 In addition, many historical examples illustrate the debilitating effect that cultural assumptions have had on diplomatic relations with the Middle-East128 and how Orientalist bias have loomed large with regard to crisis management and foreign policy issues in this region. Such shortcomings were not due only to the cultural baggage of decision makers but also, in a large part, to the Orientalist academic tradition. That tradition was progressively pressed into service in America under the form of policyrelevant knowledge,129 thanks to prominent scholars like Sir Hamilton Gibb, Bernard Lewis and others. As such, Orientalist expertise was supposed to provide the intellectual framework which policymakers could use to make sense of what was happening in the Middle-East and “formulate policy accordingly.”130 Orientalist scholars, in fact, consistently promoted a vision of the Middle-East as a monolithic place inhabited by monolithic people thinking in a monolithic and unchanging way since the early days of Islam.131 Their analysis is predicated on a number of basic assumptions grounded mainly in philology, “which frame their understanding of Islam, and inform much of their works.”132 They believe in a sort of overarching and monolithic great culture. They pretend to deduce from a selection of classical Islamic texts the key principles which are presumed to govern the minds of all Muslims everywhere at all time.133 Gibb, for instance, claims that he can fathom what he calls the “Arab mind” or the “Semitic mind.” Overdoing the psychologists

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themselves, he states: “upon the Arab mind the impact of artistic speech is immediate; the words, passing through no filter of logic or reflection which might weaken or deaden their effect, go straight to the head.”134 Such dispensations made in the ivory towers of universities without any empirical bearing except medieval texts have had enduringly confounding effects on policymaking. Whenever Middle-Eastern leaders did not yield to US pressure or concur with its policies in the region, which is normal since different societies may construe their interests in different ways, it was always because of fundamental defects in the Middle-Eastern mind or the Middle-Eastern mode of thought.135 For instance, as a nationalist leader, the Iranian Mohammed Mossadegh, under pressure from the Iranian street, called for legislation forcing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) to split its profits with Iran fifty-fifty. His claims, put into historical perspective, were in line with what was happening in other oil producing countries such as Venezuela.136 The reaction of British and American officials was to simply dismiss him as a “wily Oriental” who “put Scheharazade in the petroleum business.” His approach to the oil question was dubbed as “almost purely mystical.”137 Influenced by long-standing Orientalist stereotypes, American and British policymakers often referred to Mossaddegh with “gendered language that revealed their conviction that he was neither manly enough for international politics nor fit to hold the office of prime minister.”138 They also derided his “fragile” and “emotional” temper which made him an “irrational and fickle adversary who could not be trusted.”139 Instead of accepting Mossadegh on his own terms, Western leaders resorted to snap judgments and simplistic stereotypes.140 Turning a deaf ear on Mossadegh’s initial plea of profit sharing, prompted him as a Prime Minister to resort to full nationalization of the AIOC. The subsequent overthrow of Iran’s parliamentary government headed by Mossadegh in 1953 and the West’s unconditional support of the despotic

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regime of the Shah Pahlavi141 generated widespread anti-Western sentiment among the Iranians. This helped set the stage for the Shah’s downfall and the coming to power of a stridently antiAmerican revolutionary regime a quarter-century later.142 The contrast between Mohammed Mossadegh, who merely wanted Iran to have a fair share of its own oil and Ayatollah Khomeini, who wanted to destroy the ‘Great Satan’ 143 speaks volumes as to how Orientalist prejudices in the decision making process can have long term disastrous effects. Likewise, the national aspirations in the Middle-East were usually dismissed in Truman’s and Eisenhower’s Washington as “manifestations of oil-inspired economic arrogance, antiSemitic rabble-rousing, or oriental affinity for revolutionary despotism.”144 Hostility to Arab secular nationalism in the 50s and 60s enhanced the stature of leaders like Nasser and helped destabilize pro-US regimes. Nasser’s nationalism was seen according to a CIA report to “provide an excuse for a host of deficiencies and inadequacies in Arab society.”145 Subsequently, the withdrawal of the US promised economic and technical assistance for the construction of the High Dam at Aswan on the Upper Nile in 1956 and the US refusal to sell weapons and food to Egypt alienated the Nasser regime who eventually sought assistance and weapons from the Soviet Union.146 It also prompted Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal for the financing of the Aswan dam.147 Such an unforeseen move enabled him to gain more leverage later as he managed to turn military defeat into political victory in the Suez crisis. The whole episode boosted the activism of Nasserite radicalism that destabilized the then pro-US governments of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.148 It appears from the examples of Mossadegh and Nasser that Western leaders tended to judge their Middle-Eastern counterparts according to their “own Orientalist standards of acceptable oriental behaviors” and to “dismiss them when they failed to measure up to their expectations.”149 Conversely, Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s revolutionary

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companion and successor, was hailed in Washington after the conclusion of the Camp David Accords as the “quintessential good Arab.”150 He was even praised, despite his modest peasant origins,151 for his “great subtlety and sophistication.”152 Later, upon his assassination, President Carter referred to him as a “latter day Pharaoh” along with the press which downplayed his Arab side by highlighting the “exceptional beauty about his dark, complex face, noble as a pharaoh’s.”153 Given the intersection between policymaking and academic circles, it is not surprising that these political attitudes were supported by prolific Orientalist academic productions. Despite the secular character of Middle-Eastern nationalism, Area Studies scholars have always found ways to discredit it on either religious or racial basis. In Bernard Lewis’ essay The Return Of Islam (1976), Arab nationalism is “at most a thin and easily shed veneer beneath which there always remain the bedrock identity of Islam,” since “all those who belong to the Islamic civilization have religion and the Muslim community as their primary loyalty.”154 Nevertheless, the loyalty to the mythologized “Ummah” or Muslim Community can hardly account for the tough crackdown on Islamist activists like the Muslim Brotherhood155 by those who championed Arab Nationalism among secular Baathists and Nasserites. It can neither accommodate all the wars and struggles for power that have characterized this region since the advent of Islam, in which many Muslims had to kill their co-religionists in the name of various earthly pursuits. Raphael Patai, an Israeli educated anthropologist, who taught Middle-Eastern Studies at Princeton, Columbia and other universities advocated in his book “the Arab Mind” a rather unconventional theory. He linked the troubled relationship of the Arabs with the West to everything from “prolonged breast-feeding to faulty toilet training, all of which produced a disturbing inferiority complex in the Arab mind which in itself made it more difficult to shake

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off the shackles of stagnation.”156 Patai’s approach is again predicated on the premise that “sweeping generalizations about the personality of an entire people could be extrapolated from dubious anecdotal and literary references.”157 The whole methodology of the book is “based on a fatally flawed set of assumptions -most importantly, that there is one entirely homogenous Arab culture, derived from nomadic Bedouin culture.”158 Such artificial unity ignores both “the diversity and history of a people and a civilization that extends across dozens of countries, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, and the deeply rooted Arab culture of cities and agricultural communities.”159 To all that, The Arab Mind which has been described as “probably the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military” is also blamed for inspiring the Abu Gharib scandal160 and remains a much recommended reading for Military Officers.161 In contrast, in several American universities such as Darmouth College and UCLA, this book is either used as an anti-text or simply not taken seriously any longer.162 The works of influential Orientalist scholars like Hamilton Gibb, Bernard Lewis, (both served as editors of the Encyclopaedia of Islam) Raphael Patai, Gustave von Grunebaum and many others produced and reproduced the same broad generalizations about Islam, the MiddleEast and its inhabitants. Their theories were instrumental in shaping the interpretative framework through which decision makers, be they civilian or military, have understood Islam and the Middle-East. A case in point is the famous paradigm of “the Clash of Civilizations.” This rather self-fulfilling prophecy illustrates once again how Orientalist ideas have been recycled and integrated into social and political science in the USA. In fact Huntington’s milestone article draws a great deal on Bernard Lewis’ pessimistic163 Orientalist “Master Narrative” 164 manifest in the latter’s 1990 article entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” The expression “Clash of Civilizations” itself was used for the first time in the Lewis’ article.

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More recently, Orientalist expertise has loomed large in the initiation and conduct of OIF. As Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, paid a glowing tribute to the veteran Orientalist Bernard Lewis, via video phone at a special ceremony held in Tel Aviv to honor Lewis in March 2002: “Bernard has taught [us] how to understand the complex and important history of the Middle-East and use it to 165 guide us where we will go next to build a better world for generations”

Even before the 9/11 tragedy occurred, Lewis actively lobbied for war in Iraq in a collective open letter addressed to President Clinton in 1998.166 Lewis is actually the father of what the Wall Street journal calls the “Lewis Doctrine”167 which consists of “making Iraq a Westernized polity, reconstituted and imposed from above like Kemal’s Turkey, which is to become a bulwark of security for America and a model for the region.”168 He also wrote an article for Newsweek International in early 2003, in which he made a case for American intervention in Iraq and argued that “worries about Iraqi civilians --fighting in the streets, popular resistance-- were overblown.”169 Other Orientalists whose expertise has turned out misplaced, if not misleading, are Fouad Ajami and Kanan Makiya, who along with Bernard Lewis advised the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war.170 Downplaying the risks of insurgency in post-Saddam era, they argued that the Iraqis were going to meet American troops “with flowers and sweets.”171 The remarks of Vice President Dick Cheney to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention are very telling in this regard: As for the reaction of the Arab ‘street,’ the Middle-East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.’ Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates 172 throughout the region would take heart.

But most disturbing of all are the words of Bernard Lewis, hailed as the Dean of the Orientalists, as he counseled the Vice President and Secretary of Defense on the coming war in Iraq: “I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with

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a big stick. They respect power.”173 Apart from the racist tones of these remarks, they reflect a long-standing Orientalist bias which consists of “underestimating the locals.”174 Such remarks seem to highlight, at best, a lack of scientific neutrality and distance between the intellectual and his subject. They also somehow give credence to the reproaches made by Lewis’ detractors that although his work “purports to be liberal objective scholarship, it is in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material”175 Last but not least, during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel War, Bernard Lewis went so far as to warn, in the Wall Street Journal, that Teheran might drop a nuclear bomb—a bomb that Iran by all accounts did not have—on Israel on August 22, 2006, coinciding with the day that the prophet Muhammad went to Jerusalem and then to heaven.176 In his own words: “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinajad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for August 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.”177 Orientalists definitely seem to think that their stature as renowned scholars would lend unlimited authority to their pronouncements on contemporary conflicts in the Middle-East and the Muslim world, even when they clearly go against common sense.

Area Studies as a locus of political struggle Already in 1976, the University of Chicago political scientist Leonard Binder in his assessment of the state of the Middle-East Studies lamented that the field was “beset by subjective projections, displacements of affect, ideological distortion, romantic mystifications, and religious bias, as well as by a great deal of incompetent scholarship.”178 Ironically and in quite similar words thirty years later, the founders of the new Association for the Study of Middle-East and Africa, among which are Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, criticized MiddleEast Studies on the basis that “the increased politicization of these fields and the certainty that a

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corrupt understanding of them is a danger to the academy as well as the future of the young people it purports to educate.” They also declared their intention to “dispassionate” the debate: "Given the importance of these regions, there is an acute need for objective and accurate scholarship and debate, unhampered by entrenched interests and allegiances.”179 Such criticisms, no matter how controversial they might be, have at least the merit of signaling a kind of uneasiness in the field of Middle-East Studies.180 They also relativize academic Orientalism as just another paradigm which has, like any other approach, its own flaws and imperfections.

A Brief Critique of Orientalist Approaches: The main shortcoming of the Orientalist tradition remains its overarching generalizations based on “philological methods, unexamined premises and meager empirical data.”181 Orientalists usually represent the Middle-East as a monolithic and benighted region whose inhabitants are somewhat uniformly mesmerized by the teachings of an enraged Islam.182 Therefore Middle-Easterners stances’ are not to be taken seriously, because “they are at bottom merely irrational expressions of a Muslim collective psyche which had been gravely damaged by its encounter with Western modernity.”183 Orientalists hold that the universality and centrality of Islam in the lives of Muslims are beyond question.184 Such depictions overlook the diversity of a region comprised of a multitude of ethnies, tribes and nationalities with different historical trajectories and cultural backgrounds. They lump together all and sunder: Muslim terrorists (a very marginal minority), extremists, moderates, seculars, agnostics, Sunnis and Shiites. Such generalizations can prove misleading, complicating rather than facilitating the task of even the lowest ranking soldiers. For example, “Marines who were instructed that Muslims were highly pious and prayed five times a day, lost respect for Iraqis when they found a brewery in Baghdad and men with mistresses.”185 Likewise, despite widespread Western images of Islamists as uniformly violent and radical, Islamism represents a large spectrum extending from die hard 25

terrorists to co-opted activists willingly engaging in non-violent politics. Islamism is indeed a “modern phenomenon, the product of complex social, economic and cultural forces operating in specific historical contexts and conjunctures.”186 In Turkey and Morocco, for instance, Islamist parties have been incorporated into the political process and they are evolving in a rather democratic and moderate direction. At the same time, die-hard extremists like Osama Bin Laden have no religious or scholarly legitimacy. Their fatwas (opinions) are not binding on anyone187 and they do not represent any form of orthodoxy. If Bin Laden has any forerunners, they would be, among many others, the Russian anarchists of 1881, the Oklahoma City bombers, the Zionist terrorist groups Irgun and Stern Gang,188 or Guy Fawkes the “Catholic jihadist” who plotted to blow up (by gunpowder) British Houses of Parliament as early as 1605.189 The condition of women is another example where broad generalizations fail to take into account the diversity of Middle-Eastern societies. For instance, Tunisian women have had the right to vote and to run for election since 1957,190 just one year after Tunisia’s independence. Moroccan women, as well, gained the right to vote as early as 1963. In contrast, Switzerland, situated at the heart of Europe, did not grant this right to its women until 1971. Moreover, there are and there were many prominent Muslim women leaders in the course of history,191 such as Queen Shagrat al-Durr of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt (AD 1250-57), Tansu Çiller (Turkey), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan), Khaleda Zia (Bangladesh)…

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CONCLUSION “Politically sensitive ecumenism is needed, not only to overcome anti-Western sentiments within many Muslim countries but also to overcome the public stereotypes in America that limit US flexibility in the pursuit of its national security.” Zbignew Brezezinski.192 In sum, Western perceptions of the Middle-East are largely informed by Orientalism both as a cultural mode of thought and an academic discipline. Depictions of Islam, the dominant religion, as a unitary and aggressive civilization have reinforced such frightening ideas as the clash of civilizations between a civilized West and an enraged Middle-East. Orientalism as a long standing tradition has played an important role in shaping how the public, the Media and leaders, be they military or civilians, have made sense of the Middle-East in America. Views that Middle-Easterners are monolithic people thinking and responding in monolithic ways conditioned by the teachings of a monolithic Islam have influenced the policies and measures pursued by America in this critical region. After all, leaders like scholars may “attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from … brute, everyday reality, but they can never quite escape or ignore their involvement as human subjects in their own circumstances.”193 While historians are just beginning to explore the debilitating effect that cultural assumptions have had on diplomatic relations with the Middle-East,194 growing emphasis on cultural awareness in the US military seems to translate a consciousness that the traditional Orientalist perception paradigm has reached its limits. However, pinning the hope of achieving an accurate understanding of MiddleEastern peoples and their culture exclusively on books that are in large part responsible of the existing confusion –and that continue to feature on top of Military recommended readings- might not be very helpful in achieving an accurate assessment of the situation and therefore devising appropriate military strategies or measures. Now, Orientalist driven behaviors or attitudes may just as well contribute to a sort of perception dilemma (by analogy with security dilemma.) In

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such a dilemma, Orientalism and Occidentalism195 (Orientalism in reverse) would nurture one another to culminate in the self-prophesized “Clash of Civilizations” – that would be better named the “Clash of Perceptions.”

Recommendations: Of course, not all the knowledge produced by academic Orientalism is unreliable. There are certainly elements of truth in this knowledge, but one has to be at least aware of the bias and the imperfections of its approaches. Many of its methodologies are marred by epistemological flaws and inconsistencies. The shortcomings of the Orientalist framework of interpretation include foregrounding aspects and ignoring others and blaming socio-economic realities on religious or racial defects.196 While the Orientalist expertise should not be taken nor rejected wholesale, there is a need to enlist the expertise of other social science disciplines which have kept up with scientific and technological development. Many Middle-East Studies researchers have indeed adopted modern empirical tools such as surveys, statistics and case studies to provide scientifically evidenced explanations of what is going on in the Middle-East.197 Orientalists’ authority should not be a free pass to issue overarching statements about the Middle-East based only on their mastery of some of its language and their ability to decipher a collection of dusty medieval texts. The raging academic debate in Middle-East Studies is indicative of the existence of contending visions of the Middle-East. To feed officials or military leaders just one version of “the Middle-East” is to limit their ability to effectively come to terms with the realities they might encounter on the ground. Curricula aimed at heightening cultural awareness of this region should therefore include the works of equally authoritative if not more serious and rigorous academics198 presenting different approaches to this region. Based on OIF, decision makers should not ‘slavishly’ embrace Orientalists’ pronouncements but rather take a

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critical distance from their expertise. Awareness, at least, of the existence of the Orientalist prism is a key step to successfully engaging this increasingly important region in the world’s great political and economic affairs. It is time to challenge the conventional wisdom infused by Orientalism. It is time to think outside the Orientalist box.

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ENDNOTES

1

Edward Said, “The Clash of Ignorance”. The Nation. October 22, 2001 issue.

Edward Said, Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.

3 Britannica OnLine, http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9397174 (accessed November 2, 2008)

4 Edward Said, Orientalism.

5 Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill, NC:

University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

6 Zachary Lockman , Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. New York,

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

7 Edward Said Orientalism. 2

8 David H. Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq.” Military Review,

January-February 2006. Published by the US Army Command and General Staff College. In this article the ninth

observation reads : “Cultural Awareness is a Force Multiplier…knowledge of the cultural ‘terrain’ can be as

important as, and sometimes even more important than, knowledge of the geographic terrain.

9 Montgomery McFate, "The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture." Joint Forces Quarterly, Issue

thirty-eight, 3rd Quarter, July 2005. Published by the National Defense University. I take issue with the expression

Adversary Culture because it implies that all those belonging to that culture are adversaries which is not true.

10 Zachary Lockman , Contending Visions of the Middle East, 79.

11 Ibid., 79.

12 Albert Hourani, Islam in European Thought. Published 1991. Cambridge University Press 1996, 7.

13 Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East, 149.

14 Ibid., 13.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 13-14.

17 Ibid., 15.

18 Ibid., 15.

19 Ibid., 26.

20 Katharine Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon

England. Publication: Cambridge, New York Cambridge University Press, 2003. P1

21 Ibid., 1

22 Sir Richard W. Southern Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages. Harvard University Press 1978, 28.Quoted

in Zachary Lockman , Contending Visions of the Middle East, 34.

23 Ibrahim Kalin, “The Roots of Misconceptions: Euro-American Perceptions of Islam Before and After 9/11” in

Islam, Fundamentalism and the Betrayal of Tradition. Edited by. Lumbard Joseph E.B. World Wisdom, Inc 2004,

164

24 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 27.

25 Hassan Hanafi, Religious Dialogue & Revolution: Essays on Judaism, Christianity, & Islam, Anglo-Egyptian

Bookshop (1977), 103.

26 Robert Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics. Ignatius Press 2005, 106.

27 Ibid.

28 Zachary Lockman , Contending Visions of the Middle East, 39.

29 Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, Oxford University Press, USA 1994, 85-86.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibrahim Kalin. “The Roots of Misconceptions”, 153.

32 Ibid.

33 Norman Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe.London Longman, 1975. P22-23 quoted in Lockman, Zachary.

Contending Visions of the Middle East, 32

34 Ibid.

35 Miguel Asin Palacios, Islam and the Divine Comedy. Tr. Harold Southerland. Routledge 1968, 55.

36 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 32.

37 Paul T. Levin, “Narrating Oneself through the Other: Medieval Christians and Their Images of ‘The Saracen’”

University of Southern California. Prepared for presentation at the Center for International Studies,USC, November

17, 2004, 26. Available at http://usccis.org/tools/software/original/public/fileforward.php?Id=3060 (accessed 3

March 2008)

2

30

38

John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, NY: Columbia University Press 2002.

P251. Quoted in Paul T. Levin. “Narrating Oneself through the Other”, 26.

39 Maxime Rodinson, Europe and the Mystique of Islam. Trans. Roger Veinus Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 1987. P 6. Quoted in Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle-east, 27.

40 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe : idea, Identity, reality, Macmillan 1995, 90.

41 Kenan Malik, “The Meaning of Race” Lecture delivered on a dayschool on 'The Reinvention of Race', Oxford

University Department of Continuing Education, 22 September 2001. Available at

http://www.kenanmalik.com/lectures/race_oxford1.html (accessed 14 March 2008)

42 Ibid.

43 Eric Morton, “Race and Racism In The Works Of David Hume”. Journal on African Philosophy (2002): 1, 1.

Available at http://www.africanphilosophy.com/vol1.1/morton.html (accessed 10 March 2008)

44 Arthur Hertzberg, “The Chosen People” The New York Review of Books Volume 11, Number 7 October 24,

1968. Available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11525. (accessed 10 March 2008)

45 Maurice Bucaille, The Bible, the Qur’an and Science: The Holy Scriptures Examined in the Light of Modern

Knowledge. Dar Al Ma'arif; 6 Revised edition, 1977, 118.

46 Maurice Bucaille, The Bible, the Qur’an and Science, 118. The texts of the exchanged letters between Pope

Benedict XIV and Voltaire can be found on page 16 and 17 of the digitized version of “The Works of Voltaire”

available at http://books.google.com.

47 Ibrahim Kalin. “The Roots of Misconceptions”, 153.

48 Edward Said, Orientalism, P63.

49 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 64. 50 Ibid., 64. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Edward Said, Orientalism, 49. 54 Andrei S. Markovits, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. Princeton University Press (2007), 219. 55 Edward Said, Orientalism, 3. 56 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East,66. 57 Ibid., 88. 58 Ibid., 89. 59 Ibid., 66. 60 Ibid., 89. 61 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 10. 62 Charles Lutton, “The ‘Atlantic Charter’ Smokescreen: History As A Press Release” Journal of Historical Review issued by Institute for Historical Review. www.ihr.org/jhr/v05/v05p203_Lutton.html (accessed 27 February 2008) 63 Edward Said, Orientalism, 151. 64 Lockman, Zachary. Contending Visions of the Middle East, 74. 65 Ibid., 77. 66 Albert Hourani, Islam In European Thought, P2. 67 Ignaz Goldziher, Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law. tr. By Andras and Ruth Hamori. Princeton University Press. 1981. p 13. N 12. quoted in Hitchens, Christopher “East Is East.” Atlantic Monthly, Mar2007, Vol. 299 Issue 2. 109-111. also quoted in Manzoor Pervez. Method Against Truth: Orientalism and Qur’anic Studies at

http://pmanzoor.info/Method-Truth.htm (accessed 4 March 2008)

68 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 79-80.

69 Ibid., 104, 108.

70 Franz Rosenthal, trans. The Muqaddimah, An Introduction to History. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1958. P623-627. See also Stone Caroline. “Ibn Khaldun and the Rise And Fall of Nations”. Saudi Aramco World.

September/October 2006. Available at

http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200605/ibn.khaldun.and.the.rise.and.fall.of.empires.htm (accessed 15

March 2008)

71 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 75-76.

72 Ibid., 69.

73 For further information on Orientalist painters and paintings visit: http://www.orientalist-art.org.uk/

74 Inge E. Boer, et al. Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis, Rodopi Publishers (2006), 84.

31

75

Edward Said, Orientalism, 118.

Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 314.

77 “It's Racist, But Hey, It's Disney” New York Times editorial, 14 July 1993.

78 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 41.

79 Ibid., 12.

80 Ibid., 41.

81 Ibid., 12

82 Mark Twain, The Innocents abroad: Roughing It. 1869. Reprint , New York: Viking, 1984. Quoted in Little,

Douglas. American Orientalism. 9

83 Ibid.P13

84 Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx Versus Friedrich List. Oxford University Press US

(1988). P45.

85 “Arabs and Americans” in The Economist 1/18/2003, Vol.366 Issue 8307. 80-81

86 Little Douglas, American Orientalism, 25.

87 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 241.

88 Edward Said, Orientalism, 284.

89 William Booth, “Cast of Villains 'Reel Bad Arabs' Takes on Hollywood Stereotyping.” Washington Post,

Saturday, June 23, 2007. Page C01.

90 Edward Said, Orientalism, 286.

91 Ibid.

92 Ibid., 285-286

93 Fawaz Gerges, America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests, Cambridge University

Press (1999), 7.

94 William Booth, “Cast of Villains,” P C01.

95 Edward Said, Orientalism, 285-286

96 Ibid.

97 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions, 194.

98 Zbigniew Brezezinski, The Choice: Global Domination Or Global Leadership. Basic Books, 2004. P48

99 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 38-39.

100 Jack Shaheen, Arab Image Ltd. NPR Interview. October 12, 2007. Transcription at

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/10/12/07

101 Robert Fisk, “Film-makers must atone for their sins”. The Independent. 19 January 2008.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid.

104 Douglas Porch, The Conquest of Morocco, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2nd Edition, Edition (May 26, 2005), 114.

105 http://www99.epinions.com/content_120662101636 (accessed 28 March 2008)

106 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073906/quotes (accessed 28 March 2008)

107 Jon Blackwell,“1904: ‘Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead’” TheTrentonian.

http://www.capitalcentury.com/1904.html (accessed 15 February 2008)

108 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 40-41.

109 Ibid.

110 Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. Cambridge: Harper and Row, 1986. P29­

30. quoted in Jack Shaheen, Arab and Muslim Stereotyping in American Popular Culture . Georgetown University

Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (January 1, 1997), 12.

111 Edward Said, Orientalism, 285-286.

112 http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2087155420080221

113 Wilhelm Trevor, “Doubt cast on Anani's terrorist claims. Jihad adviser says story of holy war in Lebanon rings

false,” Windsor Star. Saturday, January 20, 2007. available at

http://www.canada.com/windsorstar/news/story.html?id=4a479502-4490-408e-bdb5-f2638619a62c (accessed 4

March 2008)

114 Neil Macfarquhar, “Speakers at Academy Said to Make False Claims.” The New York Times. February 7, 2008.

115 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 126.

116 http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2006-07/eastandwest.html (accessed 11 April 1008)

117 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 110.

76

32

118

Pinar Bilgin, “Is the ‘Orientalist’ past the future of Middle East studies?” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2,

pp. 423–433, 2004, 423.

119 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 121-126.

120 Ibid., 110.

121 Edward Said, Orientalism, 295.

122 Quoted in John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M.Walt “The Israel Lobby And U.S. Foreign Policy”. Columbia

University Press March 2006. P76, N186. Available at

http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011 (accessed 10 March 2008)

123 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 3 124 http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/tr26.html (accessed 10 March 2008) 125 Ibid., 15 126 Ibid., 26 127 Ibid., 31 128 Mary Ann Heiss, “Culture and U.S. Relations with the Middle East.” OAH Magazine of History • May 2006, P19-22. P21 129 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East,140. 130 Ibid. 131 Oleg Grabar, Edward Said, Bernard Lewis “Orientalism: An Exchange”. The New York Review of Books. Volume 29, Number 13. August 12, 1982. Available at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/6517 (accessed 20 March 2008) 132 Zachary Lockman , Contending Visions of the Middle East, 132. 133 Ibid., 130. 134 Ibid., 108. 135 Jamil E. Jreisat, Politics Without Process: Administering Development in the Arab World, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Published 1997. 39 136 Douglas Little, American Orientalism,54-56 137 Mary Ann Heiss, “Culture and U.S. Relations with the Middle East.” P21 138 Ibid., P20 139 Ibid., 21. 140 Ibid., 20. 141 David W. Lesch, “The Middle-East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment”. Westview Press – 2003. P51. 142 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 269. 143 Douglas Little, American Orientalism,317 144 Ibid., 309. 145 CIA, NIE 36-61, “Nasser and the Future of Arab Nationalism” 27 June 1961, “36 Arab World”, Box 6, NIE, NSF, LBJL. Quoted in Little, Douglas. American Orientalism. 30. 146 David W. Lesch. “The Middle-East and the United States”, 143. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 144. 149 Mary Ann Heiss, “Culture and U.S. Relations with the Middle East,” 20-21. 150 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 34 151 http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kbank/profiles/sadat/ 152 Douglas Little, American Orientalism,34 153 Ibid. 154 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East,174-175. 155 Military Review. July-August 2003. P29. Also available at www.au.af.mil/au/awcgate/milreview/abo.pdf. (accessed 16 March 2008) 156 Douglas Little, American Orientalism, 35. 157 Emram Qureshi, “Misreading 'The Arab Mind'”. The Boston Globe. Issue May 20, 2004. Available at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/05/30/misreading_the_arab_mind/ (accessed 13 March 2008) 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Seymour M. Hersh, “The Gray Zone”. The New Yorker Magazine. May 24 2004. See also

33

Brian Whitaker, “'Its best use is as a doorstop'”. guardian.co.uk Monday May 24 2004. Available at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/24/worlddispatch.usa (accessed 13 March 2008)

161 Capt James W. Lively, “Cultural Education: A Key to Winning the Global War on Terrorism.” Published by the

Marine Corps Gazette, vol.91 No.4, April 2007.

162 Emram Qureshi. “Misreading 'The Arab Mind'”. See also Ann Marlowe, "Sex, Violence, and ‘The Arab Mind,'"

at http://www.salonmag.com/books/feature/2004/06/08/arab_mind/index_np.html. (accessed 20 March 2008)

163 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraq. Penguin Books. 2007. P31.

164 Michael Hirsh, “Bernard Lewis revisited”. Washington Monthly. November 2004 edition.

165 Alain Gresh, “Malevolent fantasy of Islam”. Le Monde Diplomatique. August 2005. English version available at

http://mondediplo.com/2005/08/16lewis (accessed 20 March 2008)

166 http://www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/rumsfeld-openletter.htm ( accessed 20 February 2008) and

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9802/20/iraq.war.presser/ (accessed 20 February 2008)

167 Frederick Kempe, “Lewis ‘Liberation Doctrine for Mideast Faces New Tests”, The Wall Street Journal. Dec 13

2005. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113440875450020298.html (accessed 9 March 2008)

168 Michael Hirsh, “Bernard Lewis revisited”.

169 Michiko Kakutani, “How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy” New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New

York, N.Y.: Apr 5, 2003. pg. D.7.

170 Michael R. Gordon, Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story Of The Invasion And Occupation Of Iraq.

Pantheon Books, New York 2006, 18.

171 http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/congress/winning_hearts_shehata_jun04.pdf (accessed 20 March 2008)

172 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html (accessed 8 March 2008)

173 Jeffrey Goldberg, “Breaking Ranks.” The New Yorker Magazine. Oct.31, 2005 issue. See also Ali Tahir.

“Bernard Lewis: Historian or Lobbyist for war?” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Washington Mar

2006. Vol25, Issue 2; P74. According to this article in a letter to the New Yorker Magazine Bernard Lewis

confirmed his remarks adding: “He who treats friend and foe alike will arouse only distaste for his friendship and

contempt for his enmity.”

174 D. T. Jervis, “Review Essay Orientalism, Occidentalism, And American Policy In The Middle East” Association

of Third World Studies, Inc. Journal of Third World Studies, Vol. XXI, No. 2, 2004 P293-298. P296.

175 Ali Tahir, “Bernard Lewis: Historian or Lobbyist for war?” The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Washington Mar 2006. Vol25, Issue 2; P74.

176 Akhavi Khody , “Neoconservative Scholars Establish Mideast Studies Group”, Global Information Network.

New York: Nov 13, 2007. pg. 1

177 Bernard Lewis, “August 22 Does Iran have something in store”. The Wall Street Journal. Aug. 8, 2006. available

at http://opinion journal.com/extra/?id=11008768 (accessed 20 February 2008)

178 “Area Studies: A critical Assessment” in the Study of The Middle East : Research and Scholarship in the

Humanities and the Social Sciences, ed. Leonard Binder (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1976). Quoted in

Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East,177-178.

179 Akhavi Khody , “Neoconservative Scholars”.

180 For further information on the turmoil in Middle-East Studies read: Sethi Chanakya. “Near East Studies

Department Faces Warring Factions”. The Daily Princetonian. December 8th, 2004. Available at

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2004/12/08/news/11695.shtml (accessed 13 March 2008)

181 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 88.

182 Bernard Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim rage.” The Atlantic Monthly. September 1990.

183 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 176.

184 Ibid., 174-175.

185 Montgomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture”

186 Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East,220

187 David Waines, An Introduction to Islam. Cambridge University Press 2003, 86

188 Walter Laqueur, “World of Terror”. National Geographic Magazine. November 2004. Available at

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0411/feature4/fulltext.html

189 The Economist.:“The new wars of religion.”. Leader, Issue Nov 1st 2007. Available at

http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10063829 (accessed 16 February 2008)

190 Laurie A. Brand. Women, the State, and Political Liberalization: Middle Eastern and North African Experiences.

Columbia University Press. Published 1998. P211.

191 http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/Muslim_Leaders.htm

34

192

Zbigniew Brezezinski, The Choice: Global Domination Or Global Leadership. Basic Books, 2004, 58.

Albert Hourani, "The Road to Morocco". The New York Review of Books, Vol. 26, March 8, 1979, pp. 27-30.

194 Mary Ann Heiss, “Culture and U.S. Relations with the Middle East,” 21.

195 D. T. Jervis “Review Essay Orientalism, Occidentalism, And American Policy In The Middle East” Association

of Third World Studies, Inc. Journal of Third World Studies, Vol. XXI, No. 2, 2004

196 For ample details about the shortcomings of the Orientalist tradititon see The chapter on the Critique of the

Discipline in Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 162-177.

197 Works such as Fawaz Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy are representative of this

tendency which relies on interviews and case studies. See also works which rely on surveys such as John Esposito,

Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. Gallup Press. March 8, 2008.

193

http://www.gallup.com/consulting/worldpoll/26410/gallup-center-muslim-studies.aspx

198

Idem

35

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