Reprodutive Critiques - Reader comments at The New York Sun

Reader comment on:
The Bertrand Russell of Islam
in response to reader comment: Said's Successful Sabotage

Submitted by Suzanne Oliver, Dec 18, 2007 10:57

In my own work I both critique and make use of Said and his thoughts about colonialism.

I cheer at the idea that his work has lead to a rethinking of easy critiques of Islam and that his work is widely read throughout the world.

I am happy to read a thorough critique of Said - it brought me to this website. This is not one of them.

Using Western celebrations/appropriations of the Other do nothing at all, however, to answer to the engine of Orientalist thought: essentialism.

There is no fixable, knowable East but the work of Orientalism was the work of making a fixed and definable other against which to define the self. This process is of course enduring. It is of course significant: It is evident in the critique Warraq himself constructs. Five hundred years of "thought" and deployment of that thought as rationale for genocide and destruction of peoples and cultures continue to re-entrench it.

The real critique of Said lies elsewhere in far more fraught waters than are touched on by arguments which merely reproduce centuries old relations of power. To be brave is not to stand up for the logic of the West as against the East but to begin to rethink any such simplistic division at all. The contexts of these critiques cannot be reduced to a process of "victimization" and conquerer - yet another binary. The East Warraq constructs is once again bounded by the West and not contextualized and read through the historical processes that still shape, as Fanon wrote about the veil in Algeria, the Islam that the West and Mr. Warraq are so eager to criticize.

Postcolonialism is a failure insofar that anything was "post"-ed at all. The process itself is evident here in this critique and not behind anything at all. At no point has my work in these studies been a movement away from critique of Islam or any of the West's Others. Understanding power means moving with it from specific context to specific context and not placing essentialist, colonial limits upon analysis.

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Reader comment on:
The Bertrand Russell of Islam
in response to reader comment: Said's Successful Sabotage

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Reader comment on:
The Bertrand Russell of Islam
in response to reader comment: Said's Successful Sabotage