Abdul Rahman Mazhar Al-Halloosh-Al-Qamishli

Since the Palestinian-American thinker Edward Said issued the book "Orientalism" in 1978, the discussion on the subject has not stopped, and Saeed Al-Rayed revealed from the heart of the Western cultural establishment itself what he considered a collusion of knowledge that has lasted centuries, and participated in formulating the most famous minds of the West with or without intent.

Wanderings in the East and its civilization were not exclusive to a specific group, so the engineer, the researcher, the traveler, the artist, the writer, the spy, the adventurers and the archaeologists, participated in it; everyone was searching for his misfortune.

Edward Said (1935-2003) possessed a broad culture in English and French, which gave him the ability to see the original Orientalist literature on the East, which broke apart its interwoven strings as a result of its abundance and abundance, and Saeed revealed the mechanisms employed by the West to crystallize a clear identity, mainly dependent on the invention or profiling of what It is called "East".

Colonial text
Edward Said opened the door to dismantling the colonial literary body wide open, to become within a few years the pioneer of a critical intellectual school bearing the name "postcolonial", which deals with the cultural and social effects of colonialism in the peoples that were subject to it, and these studies focus on the power relations in Societies.

Saeed stressed that Orientalism is not just a European imagination, but an entity that has its theoretical and practical existence, and that great potential has been invested in it throughout the generations, which made Orientalism a cognitive doctrine of "the East", through which imperialism controlled a whole field of studies, creations and research institutions with the intent or who Without him.

Saeed built his dialectics on the works of French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and Orientalism knew that it was not just an academic field, but "an intellectual pattern based on anthropological and epistemological distinction between the East and most of the West, establishing a dualism rooted between East and West."

Ideological controversies
But the sharp criticism of Edward Said came from oriental academics, some of whom are of eastern origin, and was the first to elicit responses from senior French orientalists Maxime Rodinson (1915-2014) who was the author of theses understanding about Arabs and Islam and not hostile to them.

Rodinson has authored several books dealing in all Arab and Islamic issues, including "Islam and Capitalism" 1966, Marxism and the Islamic World 1972, Muhammad p. 1979, and Arabs 1979, and the attractiveness of Islam 1980-1989.

"The concept of Orientalism itself is the result of transient scientific imperatives, at which European Orientalist scholars experienced in the study of other cultures met, and this case strongly discredited their view of things," Rodinson asserts.

Rodinson also responded to Edward Said's theses in his book "Orientalism", by saying that not all European orientalists had the apparent intention to conspire and occupy the East. He set an example of the Germans, who did not occupy any of the countries of the East, but were sympathetic to its inhabitants.

Although the Germans were the most skilled Westerner to utter the Arabic tongue and the most eloquent in it, they had voracious and fierce colonial desires, as they did not show their colonial intentions, until after German unity in 1870 CE.

What is worth noting is that Rodinson did not like the term orientalist, only imagining that colonialism had distorted him, and therefore he considered himself an Arabist, his concern being familiar with the Arab and Islamic culture.

The attractiveness of Islam
In the introduction to his book “The Attractiveness of Islam,” Rodinson examines what Saeed wrote, and admits that much of his criticism remains true within the scope of what is called traditional Orientalism, but takes on some of Edward Said’s ideas that they lead to a theoretical circle built on two opposing science: one is bourgeois, the other proletarian . But that does not mean that he agrees with all of his judgments and perceptions, as he justifies some of the criticism of the Orientalists, such as the complete relative tendency that he considers non-institutional to Edward Said.

He goes on to say, "And Said's exploit lies in that he contributed to a broader definition of the ideology of European Orientalism, and in fact Anglo-French in particular in the 15th and 20th centuries, and its roots in European political and economic goals at the time."

Rodinson also responds to a question about his opinion of Said and his specialization in criticism of Orientalism: "I did not love him from the beginning, and for me he is bourgeois, then he is very exemplary, and he also has superficial ideas about Islam that I call the bourgeoisie, on the other hand he exploits this in his literary works And he belongs to a cultural field that I do not like at all, which is the field that I call the literary philosophical field. He continues, "In my opinion, those belonging to this field are familiar with many and separate matters, but they do not know a certain field."

As for Edward Said, he praised in his book "Orientalism" the positions of Rodinson, and considered him one of the few who deviated from Orientalism, and praised the French orientalist Jacques Burke.

Rodinson goes back to saying that the book's great merit is that it has shaken the self-satisfaction of many orientalists about themselves, made them think about the sources and connections of their ideas, and stop viewing them as a natural and neutral conclusion of facts studied without any assumptions.

Renewed controversy
In his book, "The Palaces of Orientalism" (2018), Palestinian thinker Wael Hallaq presented a late criticism to Saeed, saying that he misunderstood Orientalism, and he could not read these texts outside the colonial world, which was produced during it, while he had - as Hallak sees - to be alert to the necessity Placing this production in deeper infrastructure, by looking at the discourse of Orientalism, not as a reflection or justification of a colonial project, but as a reflection of the modernist project.

Hallak reached through his book a paradox that Said was orientalist according to his expression, because orientalism - according to Hallaq - is not only concerned with dismantling the image of the different oriental Orientalists who produced their prejudices, but also a critique of the infrastructure that produced the Western Enlightenment, considering that Saeed remained true to the ideas The era of secular human enlightenment.

Saeed's shedding light on the issue of Orientalism, and his endeavor to highlight the primacy of Orientalist thought - which was produced within specific political, social and ideological contexts - is so influential that the controversy over his ideas has not stopped until this day, which are the ideas in which Saeed revealed the centrality of the West around himself; The East as a counter world in a way that tends to position itself within the marginalized and detracted borders, and rewriting European cultural history in a way that achieves unity and continuity on the one hand, and makes it the general history of all human thought on the other hand.