Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-20T21:41:19.140Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Double Extradition: What Edward Said Has to Tell Us Thirty Years on from Orientalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

François Burgat
François Burgat*
Affiliation:
CNRS/Institut Français du Proche Orient
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

If my assessment of Said’s contribution via Orientalism were to be proportioned solely to the immense admiration I have always had for him as a reader, whiter shades of gray and critical remarks would have to be relegated to a footnote in small print. Such an assessment would be devoted to spontaneous expressions of debt and admiration and to enumerating all the reasons Said became the pioneer he remains thirty years on, for the vast majority of us.

Type
Special Section: On Orientalism at Thirty
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Summer 2009 , pp. 11 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

End Notes

1 Cf. especially Bayoumi, Moustapha and Rubin, Andrew, eds., The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 472.Google Scholar

2 Cf. for instance Azm, Sadek Jalal al, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin (Journal of the Revolutionary Socialists in the Middle East) number 8,1981, pp. 5–26Google Scholar. Reprinted in Macfie, Alexander L., ed., Orientalism : A Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 217–238Google Scholar, and (in French) in Al-Azm, Sadik Jalal, Ces interdits qui nous hantent, Islam, Censure, Orientalisme, Editions Parenthèses/ MMSH/ Ifpo (coll Parcours Mediterranéen), 2008.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Islamism in the Shadow of al Qaeda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008)Google Scholar, translated by Hutchinson, Patrick, who I warmly thank also for translating these pages; Face to Face with Political Islam (London: IB Tauris, 2002)Google Scholar.

4 Mémoires d’un témoin du siècle. L’enfant. L’étudiant. L’écrivain. Carnets. Présentation et notes de Nour-Eddine Boukrouh, Samar, Alger 2006.Google Scholar

5 And, highly significantly, of one of its keenest auxiliaries, the great French orientalist Louis Massignon, soon identified by Bennabi, because of his role as a collaborator of the Psy-Ops services of the army, as his worst personal enemy.

6 The French title of his autobiography is A contre courant (Against the grain).

7 “The Algerian Civil War may at any time move inside France, with its murders, with its bombings whose authors will not always be those considered as such by the journalists. That is why we must support by all means the Rome agreements between democratic parties and the representatives (whom I consider are truly representative) of the Islamic Salvation Front” (emphasis added). Telerama 2353, February 15,1995.

8 “La question de l’Islam comme force politique est une question essentielle pour notre époque et pour plusieurs années à venir. La première condition pour en traiter avec un minimum d’intelligence, c’est de ne pas commencer par y mettre de la haine” [“The issue of Islam as a political force is an essential question for our time and for many a year to come. The fundamental condition in addressing it with a minimum of intelligence is not to begin by fuelling the debate with hate language,”]Dits et écrits, III Gallimard, 1996, p. 708.Google Scholar