Said leaves it to the reader to conjecture where his critics might have gone astray. Perhaps he had in mind those who charge that Orientalism exploits the ignorance, panders to the passions, and plays to the prejudices of credulous American intellectuals only too ready to believe the worst about their intellectual forbears and their nation. Such critics contend that the book seduced a generation of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political theorists into believing falsely that for two centuries Western scholarship devoted to understanding the languages, history, art, and ideas of the Arab and Muslim Middle East distorted and degraded the peoples under examination and provided inspiration and justification for their intellectual and political conquest.
Our Left has embraced Said's views of the Moslem world. Yet it is our Left that is most vocal in its claims that mere Moslem Arabs are incapable of democracy and must be ground down under the heels of a despot to keep their excitable and dangerous impulses under control.
The pre-Orientalists, I'm sure Said would agree if he was around to think about it, did their job all too well.
