Put paid to said.(Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism)(Book review)

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Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus, 556 pp., $29.95)

A YEAR or two ago I went to an extremely interesting exhibition in Birmingham (England) of 19th-century paintings of blacks. To my great surprise and pleasure, it was curated very straightforwardly, without the intrusion of any political correctness.

Having viewed the exhibition, I looked at the books of visitors' comments, as is my practice wherever such a book is provided (I have been to more than one exhibition where the book of comments was by far the most interesting exhibit). On one page, two black women had inscribed their thoughts about the exhibition. The first thanked God that she had lived to see the day when black people were displayed so truthfully and sympathetically; the second deplored the unutterably racist nature of the pictures.

The first response was, in my opinion, much nearer the mark, and much less self-consciously ideological and therefore sincere. Apart from a certain condescending sentimentality of the noble-savage variety (by no means absent from the attitudes of the politically correct) discernible in some of the pictures, the artists portrayed their subjects as full and equal members of the human race. The second woman who wrote her opinion was under the influence, whether she knew it or not, of the late Edward Said.

Unfortunately, intellectual influence is not necessarily proportional to intellectual worth, especially in an age of celebrity and liberal guilt. Edward Said knew, consciously or unconsciously, how to achieve the first while playing on the second. His tragedy was that, in order to do so, he had to turn himself into a charlatan, the literary equivalent of a salesman of patent medicine.

His charlatanry is evident in his execrable prose, by means of which he disguises bad arguments and dishonesty by tortuous syntax and redundant polysyllables. His only writing known to me in which he approaches clarity is that which relates to music, a genuine passion of his that was free from ideological deformation. Said was a talented man for whom fame was more important than truth, and this will ensure that his work falls into well-merited oblivion, except as an example of egregious intellectual fashion. Sociologists of knowledge will long be interested in the rise to preeminent intellectual influence and power of so inconsiderable a figure.