Jan. 29, 1979: Misreading Islam

posted on: Sep 27, 2010

In times of trouble, certain characteristics of predominantly Muslim countries are emphasized in the media, while others disappear. Consider Iran.

Until the shah’s “stable” regime collapsed, phrases like “non-Arab” and “Indo-European” were routinely used to express approval of Iran; now of course the adjective “Islamic” recurs numbingly, and with it hints of a sinister “Islamic resurgence,” trailing anti-Semitism, fundamentalism, totalitarianism. For “Islam” is a concept that can readily be used to compel vast reaches of Africa and Asia into the stereotype of a scimitar-waving mass of people (even if the adjective “Christian” is studiously not used to describe unsavory Latin American regimes).

Islam’s supposed militancy (collectively reinforced by generations of European experts on Islam) thus emerges to blot out the complicating record of such “Islamic” achievements as Andalusian culture, Arabic science and mathematics, the intricate discipline of Koranic interpretation.

For decades, Europeans and Americans have imposed reassuring intellectual order on a too-diverse, little-known Orient and Africa by means of large labels: the “yellow peril,” the “black hordes,” etc. You defend against the teeming non-European world by trying to make it work in a distant framework provided by you, and never mind the details.

Edward W. Said
The New York Times
(The Opinion Pages)

EDWARD W. SAID was a professor of English at Columbia and a member of the Palestine National Council. He died in 2003.

The preceding was excerpted and adapted from a previously published Op-Ed article, for inclusion in a 40th-anniversary issue.