Orientalism - autonomous learning

334 ORIENT ALISM
sion from the point of view of the invaded. One might say that the
Description is just a scientific, and therefore objective, account of
Egypt in the early nineteenth century, but the presence of Jabarti
(who is both unknown and ignored by Napoleon) suggests otherwise.
Napoleon's is an "objective" account from the standpoint of someone
powerful trying to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit;
Jabarti's is an account by someone who paid the price, was figuratively
captured and vanquished.
In other words, rather than remaining as inert documents that
testify to an eternally opposed Occident and Orient, the Description
and Jabarti's chronicles together constitute a historical experience,
out of which others evolved, and before which others existed. Studying
the historical dynamics of this set ofexperiences is more demanding
than sliding back into stereotypes like "the conflict of East and
West." That is one reason why Orientalism is mistakenly read as a
surreptitiously anti-Western work and, by an act of unwarranted and
even willful retrospective endowment, this reading (like all readings
based on a supposedly stable binary opposition) elevates the image
of an innocent and aggrieved Islam.
The second reason why the anti-essentialism of my arguments has
proved hard to accept is political and urgently ideological. I had
absolutely no way of knowing that, a year after the book was published,
Iran would be the site of an extraordinarily far-reaching Islamic
revolution, nor that the battle between Israel and the
Palestinians would take such savage and protracted forms, from the
1982 invasion of Lebanon to the onset of the intifada in late 1987.
The end of the Cold War did not mute, much less terminate, the
apparently unending conflict between East and West as represented
by the Arabs and Islam on one side and the Christian West on the
other. More recent, but no less acute, contests developed as a result
of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan; the challenge to the
status quo during the 1980s and '90s made by Islamic groups in
countries as diverse as Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the
Occupied Territories, and the various American and European responses:
the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from
bases in Pakistan; the Gulf War; the continued support ofIsrael; and
the emergence of "Islam" as a topic of alarmed, if not always precise
and informed, journalism and scholarship. All this inflamed the sense
of persecution felt by people forced, on an almost daily basis, to
declare themselves to be either Westerners or Easterners. No one
seemed to be free from the opposition between "us" and