Saree Makdisi: Secrets of intellectual warfare

Al-Ahram Weekly
May 2007 Issue No. 844

In its 59th anniversary, the memory and repercussions of the Palestinian Nakba continue to haunt this troubled region. But so does neo-Orientalism, which dictates much of American foreign policy.

Interview by Amira Howeidy

Few if any of the tens of thousands of Egyptians flocking to theatres in the last month to see the epic movie 300 are aware of what the scriptwriter, Frank Miller, told American national radio about Arab-Muslim culture in January. Had they known, his movie would have likely had a different reception.

In what was supposed to be a critique of President George W Bush's State of the Union Speech which included references to the "global war on terror", Miller warned Americans of what they're "up against" -- "the sixth-century barbarism that these people actually represent". In fact, he said, "the contention that all cultures are equal and that every belief system is as good as the next, is utterly reprehensible. We have to understand that some cultures are superior and some cultures are inferior. Our culture in the West is superior than their culture".

While American media and foreign policy alike are rife with such ridiculously misinformed racism, back in this part of the world little attention is paid to the neo-con world view; even the energetic critique of the US media in the wake of 9/11 has all but completely died down. Arab-Muslims are in fact required not only to pay attention to such discourse and the damage in which it results, but equally to wage intellectual war in self-defence.

Such, at least, was the view of Saree Makdisi, University of California, Los Angeles professor of English and comparative literature, during a series of lectures he delivered in Cairo this week.

Asked if the three subjects are connected, Makdisi immediately answered, "no"; then he paused, evidently registering the fact that, in many ways, they are. Zionism, the direct cause of the 1948 Nakba and the subsequent establishment of the state of Israel in the same year, "always had a degree of Orientalism written into it", not only with regard to Arabs but also with Israel's own Arab Jewish population: "Both Orientalism and Zionism are founded on an opposition between the self and other. And it is this that is underlying the very structure that defines both," he told Al-Ahram Weekly following the last lecture on Monday.