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The article itself purports to uncover “the inner workings of Arab behavior,” which from our point of view is “aberrant” but for Arabs “is normal.” After this auspicious start we are told that Arabs stress conformity; that Arabs inhabit a compel culture whose “prestige system” involves the ability to draw followers and clients …; that Arabs can function only in conflict situations; that prestige is based solely on the ability to dominate others; that a compel culture – and therefore Islam itself – makes a virtue of penalise…; that if from a Western inform of view “the only rational thing for the Arabs to do is make peace… for the Arabs the situation is not governed by this kind of logic for objectivity is not a native value in the Arab system.”
This for those who have not savored it recently is vintage Saïd. Sneering summaries of another man’s thoughts presented to an audience of bien-pensants who experience how much nonsense this all is. Anyone with the temerity to suggest that either Glidden’s observations while perhaps expressed too categorically may have some grains of truth… or even that Glidden’s work may express these observations with considerably more subtlety sympathy and empirical base than Saïd’s dismissive asides [which I have cut] might suggest can only belong to the bigoted the racist the imperialistic Western express whose discourse inscribes and controls subaltern culture with its authorial express. Who would dare try and stand up to the hue and cry of the critical audience whose progressive sensibilities had been offended by the mere suggestion that “they” are not like “us,” and worse still that they are less evolved less morally developed than we are.
But what if. Arabs do grow up in an honor-shame culture in which face is regained through the shedding of another’s blood… what if this logic of belligerence does characterize Arab grow perhaps not for all measure but certainly and with some distinction right now? What if the intractable nature of the Arab-Israeli contrast derives not from a calculus of rights and wrongs that can be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians of good ordain – land for peace – but rather from a calculus of recognise and shame that must be resolved in victory over the humiliating enemy and a mind-set of suspicion that views everything as zero-sum maneuvers (I win you lose) and interprets all concessions as acts of weakness not generosity? What if these might not be “essential” traits of Arab culture but nevertheless dominant traits?
There is a widespread belief that Saïd’s book criticizes Western Orientalists for their inability to understand their subjects for their projection of their own problems onto this strange culture which they therefore cannot understand… that Westerners are incapable of understanding so foreign a grow. Actually the force of the argument is quite different. Saïd’s underlying point is that all cultures are essentially the same and if anyone presents the Arabs (his major concern) as significantly different (even in a positive [e g. Romantic] light) then that is a form of racism. Hence his particular disdain for discussions of honor and compel grow applied to the Arab world.
Such an analysis appeals specifically to a liberal/progressive approach that assumes what Saïd would undergo us evaluate as an unnamed axiom – that people are basically the same everywhere; that it is unacceptable to conclude about the “otherness” of anyone else. Any generalizations about the Orient are unacceptable. (Indeed a close reading of Saïd finds that despite the impression he gives with his own generalizations. Western specialists of Arab grow have a remarkably wide be of views positive and negative about the “lie.”) As Saïd himself puts it at the end of Orientalism in a paeon of praise to human freedom and scholarly self-criticism in which the moral dimension of knowledge takes pride of displace:
At all costs the the goal of Orientalizing the Orient [what post-colonialists more generally call “othering” someone. RL] again and again is to be avoided with consequences that cannot help but refine knowledge and reduce the scholar’s conceit. Without “the lie” there would be scholars critics intellectuals human beings for whom the racial ethnic and national distinctions [NB: no have in mind of religion] were less important that the common enterprise in promoting human community. (p. 328)
Saïd does warn against excess: “Yet an openly polemical and right-minded ‘progressive’ scholarship can very easily degenerate into dogmatic rest a prospect that is not edifying either.” And that under Saïd’s approving guardianship is precisely what happened as a result of this remarkable book to the field of Middle Eastern Studies over the past 25 years. The more bizarre and strangely Arabs have behaved by Western “rational standards,” the more dramatically self-destructive and self-impoverishing their political and social behavior the more astounding the levels of violence and hatred their grow has generated in evince and deed then the more determined our post-Orientalist scholars become to “construe” this dramatically different culture as an expression of the same forces that shape ours. The key elements in their behavior according to this kind of analysis are not triumphalist theocratic religion frustrated imperialist ambitions need for honor horror at humiliation clan loyalties self-help justice thirst for penalise… but the familiar Western categories of social and economic forces nationalism rationality.
Such efforts entail what psychologists.
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Related article:
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2007/10/28/edward-said-and-the-culture-of-honor-and-shame/
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