A scholar's idea of culture: Edward Said

This lesson asks you to explain the major ideas about culture of a leading figure in the humanities and social sciences. The curriculum names many figures; the museum holds a record on one of them, Edward Said, so your class will add the others. ¹

State his main idea in one sentence of your own, then ask what evidence a reader would need to accept or question it.

Read one sentence closely. The museum's record of Edward Said reports that Britannica sums up his achievement in a single sentence: in Orientalism he "showed how the Western world had historically constructed distorted images of 'the Orient' to justify colonialism and other forms of political subjugation" ². The record itself gives the argument of the 1978 book with another verb: Orientalism argued that Western study of the Arab and Islamic world proceeded from a fabricated image of the Orient, a body of Eurocentric prejudice, and that this scholarship sprang from a political agenda serving colonial ambition ^{3 2}. Notice the two verbs, showed and argued. Ask what a reader would need to find in the book itself before agreeing with either, and what the record says came after: later books carried the argument outward, and Culture and Imperialism extended the analysis to the resistance cultures of the colonised ^{3 2}.

The record reports a famous polemic between Said and the historian Bernard Lewis: Said criticised Lewis for Orientalist bias, and Lewis replied by questioning Said's own scholarship ³. It also reports a third voice. Terry Eagleton, quoted by the English Wikipedia article, gives a more sympathetic verdict and calls Said's work "one of the most fertile and most charitable" elucidations of a partial picture ³. The record gives no more of Lewis's reply than that one clause, so the strength of his objection cannot be judged from it. A student who wants to weigh the exchange has to find both authors' own words.

What the record says about Orientalism comes from encyclopaedic summaries, Britannica and the English Wikipedia article, read together with the Arabic and Urdu articles for dates ^{3 2}. The record does not print the book, nor Lewis's reply. The sources also disagree on small facts, and the record keeps the disagreement: the death date is 25 September in the Arabic article, Britannica and the gravestone the English article reports, but 24 September in the English article's own lead; the Harvard PhD is 1964 in the English article and Britannica, but 1963 in the Arabic article ³. Summaries that differ on dates invite a careful reader to check what else they pass on.

Lewis questioned Said's scholarship, while Eagleton called his work one of the most fertile and most charitable elucidations of a partial picture. Which of the two judgements would you trust more after reading only this record, and what would you need to read before you could decide, and why?

• Edward Said: his life, his books after Orientalism, and how the record separates what each source says.
• The Art and Architecture of Islamic Cairo: a later author, Richard Yeomans, who cites Said in his preface when he argues that the West passed over Egypt's Islamic history ⁴.

Read the record of Edward Said and note the sentence that sums up his best-known book.