Mazen El Naggar - Cairo

Four decades have passed since the publication of Edward Said's articular book Orientalism, during which it became a major tool in dismantling the knowledge structure of Orientalist production and its relationship to the Western imperial project.

As a thinker and pioneer in postcolonial studies, Said viewed Orientalism (like his counterparts, Michel Foucault and others) as an authoritative use of knowledge of the East, after its "Orientalization" and its stereotyping in preparation for its colonization and domination.

In his next book, Covering Islam, Sa'id observed the reductionist nature of Orientalism studies and production, how they turned into "regional" studies, and exhausted the efforts of serious or promising scholars to eventually become "regional experts" recruited into Western intelligence, diplomacy, and militarization circles.

In turn, scholars and intellectuals with a critical tendency to the idea of ​​"power" and "modern" Western state, considered "Orientalism" as essential travel raised by confronting other narratives about the state and modernity.

This idea became central to researchers in post-colonial studies, but Wael Hallak felt that Orientalist production was given because of the infrastructure of Western thought, the most important modernity and ideas of the era of "lights" or "enlightenment."

But Said did not pay attention to this issue, but is the son of modernity and enlightenment, and therefore perhaps considered by Wael Hallak another orientalist, as noted by the Syrian researcher Turki al-Rabiou.

The beginning of sparring
Talking to Al Jazeera Net, historian and academic Bashir Nafi tells the beginning of the controversy of Wael Hallak with the thesis "Orientalism": a barber book developed from a long article published years ago in the magazine "Islamic Law and Society", in which he responded to a short previous article by the magazine's editor David Bauer, accused Barber said that he began his career as a follower of the German-British Orientalist School Joseph Schacht (1902-1969), known for his criticism of the Holy Quran and Hadith, and that he was fickle in his views.

But Barak's long response was staggering, and the article was based on a large and profound research effort, both in Western thought and in the studies of early Islam and the emergence and development of jurisprudence.

Barber tried to argue that the Orientalist approach in Western writings on early Islam is rooted in a Western vision of the world that developed from the end of the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment, to the imperial era.

In this vision, the West envisioned itself as a guardian of the world, dominant, responsible for leading the world - or even dragging it - into the future.

Enlightenment vision of the world
Nafie believes that Barak began his career influenced by the Schacht school, but he gradually developed a critical approach to Schacht's followers. And imperialism.

Thus, it can be said that Barak did what Edward Said did not try to explore his roots and origins, and perhaps was not prepared for it.

On the other hand, Nafie asserts that it is difficult to say that Said Ibn Enlightenment and Barber is not. Indeed, everyone who received a modern Western education belongs to the Enlightenment methodology, in one way or another. Both adopted a critical approach to seeing the Western Enlightenment for itself and for the world, and Barber in particular, able to follow this vision from the moments of its first birth to our time.

The Legacy of Orientalism
Now, is it possible to say that all Western scholars who were interested in the study of the East belonged to one Oriental school of thought?

Nafie replied no. Said did not hesitate to exclude British orientalist Hamilton Gib and British historian Albert Hourani. It is believed that it is necessary to note the distinction between two major trends in the studies of Islam and the East.

The French orientalist André Raymond and Albert Hourani cannot be placed alongside Bernard Lewis and Elie Kadouri. In the studies of early Islam, jurisprudence and hadith, Harald Motsky (a German Orientalist who strongly criticizes Shakht's ideas about the hadith) and Wael Barber himself could not be put together with Patricia Krone who questioned the character of the Prophet Muhammad, John Wansboro and Norman Calder.

Useful enemies
On the other hand, British journalist and historian Noel Malcolm (author of "Kosovo: A Brief History" in 1998, which provoked a storm of protests and a charge of bias for Albanian Muslims) offered a serious debate with Said's arguments in the context of his book: "Nefty Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Political Thought" Al-Gharbi, 1450-1750 "On the Ottoman-Western conflict, he considered that the Orientalism of this period was a serious production that responded cognitively to the Ottoman tide and its challenges.

The Syrian writer Sobhi Hadidi says that the book records the theses of "Orientalism", although its contents do not mean directly. Malcolm's work follows famous writings such as Machiavelli, Campanella, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, who at that time carried mixed feelings toward the Ottomans, and took Islam and his political ideology as paradoxical positions of hostility, stereotyping, and fabrication;

Malcolm acknowledges that Said's book covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Britain and France colonized the East and the knowledge of Orientalism was at the service of the imperial project, but in the period studied by Malcolm, the empires of the West had not started its colonial projects, but Western scientists showed openness to the Ottomans and the Islamic world end of the day.

Two parallel traditions
There are therefore two parallel traditions of Orientalism, one of which is the production of epistemology dealing with the history of the East, its meeting, its heritage, its literature and its culture, and has provided an important productions ranging from the collection of manuscripts, the realization of texts, the classification of dictionaries of the language, the Hadith and in-depth studies in various fields. The other acted as vanguards of European colonialism and used his knowledge to penetrate and colonize the peoples of the colonies before and after their invasion .

If we look at the horizons of Orientalism associated with the imperial project, we will find a continuous decline to cope with the needs of this project, where the studies of the Middle East dominate the security issue, and the East has become just a source of terrorism and irregular migration and deserves corrupt and authoritarian rulers governed by iron and fire.

Settlement Orientalism
This type of orientalism reaches the point of its degeneration in the Israeli orientalism that is completely used in the service of the Zionist imperialist settlement settlement project, so that it became a pure settlement orientalism.

In his book Israel and the Settler Society, Australian scholar Lorenzo Veracini traces early Israeli writings in the 1950s, talking about Israeli studies depicting the Palestinian population as irrational beings with which they understand only the language of power, and found the same characterization of indigenous people in the literature of other settlement projects.

Saleh al-Naami, an Israeli scholar, points to the thinness of the Israeli intelligence community, who are considered Orientalists in Israel and the West and who call for the support of bloody Arab powers, arguing that the history of the East shows that rulers who adopt brutal repression against their people guarantee stability that ultimately secures interests. the West.

These orientalists not only provide general insights on supporting and enabling counter-revolutions in the Arab world, but offer detailed proposals to support them.

If some of these Israeli Orientalists' knowledge and psychology crystallized around Arabs in interrogation bases and prisons, and their professional backgrounds were to work in an intelligence service such as the Mossad, Aman, and the Shin Bet, it would seem understandable to them how the orientation path from colonialism to settlement to occupation would be conceived.