The Imperialism of Western Guilt

Mention the word “Orientalist” almost anywhere, and you’re likely to hear the name of Bernard Lewis, who has just marked his one-hundredth birthday, as the quintessential embodiment of that distinction. In one sense, the designation is only apt: from the 18th century onward, the greater Middle East, Lewis’s major area of scholarship, has been equated with the concept of “the Orient.” But ever since that scholarly pursuit, and Lewis himself, began to come under attack, most vituperatively by Edward Said in his 1978 screed “exposing” Orientalism as a supposed cat’s paw of Western imperialism, the distinction has become invidious—as Martin Kramer explains in “The Return of Bernard Lewis,” his fine survey and tribute to Lewis in Mosaic.

I myself still regard the title “Orientalist” as a badge of honor for the hundreds of men and women who, over more than two centuries, helped the people of the Middle East, including my own in Iran, learn aspects of their history and culture they had forgotten or ignored. As for Lewis himself, however, his multifarious output eludes any one of the many individual shades of the Orientalist persuasion.

Some traditional Orientalists, for example, were in search of ancient alphabets to decipher or dead literatures to resuscitate. Others regarded the Orient as the scene of atrophied civilizations that had reached the limits of their development and were now, so to speak, on autopilot. Still others went looking for the exotic, hoping to inject some color, or some hidden layers of spirituality, into what they regarded as the frozen reality of Western existence; a number went so far as to insist that only mass conversion to Islam could save Christendom from certain decline and doom. And then there were the archaeologists for whom the Orient meant digging in the Levant or Persia with the promise of furnishing relics for display in Western museums. And that is not to exclude, at the lower end of the Orientalist hierarchy, “les turcs de profession” (professional Turks), whose business was to ingratiate themselves with Orientals for purposes of either profit or politics. Nor does this exhaust the list.