Edward Said’s Double Standards?
January 25, 2006
I was thinking about a talk I had yesterday with a friend concerning what he noticed in the introduction of Covering Islam: the apparent double standard employed by Said in his treatment of Rodman and Karabell. The question: Shouldn’t Karabell be criticised on pg. xxvi as Rodman is on pg. xviii? Both make seemingly gross generalizations regarding groups; Rodman concerning the Muslims and Islam, Karabell concerning American college students. Said jumps all over one, but seemingly passes the other by without even a peep. But did he really ignore the “generalization” made by Karabell? Was Karabell’s statement really a generalisation, as it initially seems?
Nothing Short of Astounding …
January 16, 2006
On pg. 101 of the book I’m currently reading, Orientalism, Edward Said (pronounced Sa’îd) states:
In Scott’s novel The Talisman (1825), Sir Kenneth (of the Crouching Leopard) battles a single Saracen to a standoff somewhere in the Palestinian desert; as the Crusader and his opponent, who is Saladin in disguise, later engage in conversation, the Christian discovers his Muslim antagonist to be not so bad a fellow after all. Yet he remarks:
I well thought … that your blinded race had their descent from the foul fiend, without whose aid you would never have been able to maintain this blessed land of Palestine against so may valiant soldiers of God. I speak not thus of thee in particular, Saracen, but generally of thy people and religion. Strange is it to me, however, not that you should have the descent from the Evil One, but that you should boast of it.
For indeed the Saracen does boast of tracing his race’s line back to Eblis, the Muslim Lucifer. But what is truly curious is not the feeble historicism by which Scott makes the scene “medieval,” letting Christian attack Muslim theologically in a way nineteenth-century Europeans would not (they would, though); rather, it is the airy condescension of damning a whole people “generally” while mitigating the offense with a cool “I don’t mean you in particular.”
