Edward Said and the Palestinian Question

The exceptional resistance and struggle that the people of Gaza are displaying these days against the occupying, genocidal Zionist-Crusader alliance is without doubt a groundbreaking event in many respects. Al-Aqsa Flood, the name the resistance chose for this new phase it has entered on its own initiative, is demolishing all our habits to date, upsetting our rote assumptions, shaking our intellectual or moral comforts, and tearing apart the structured form of discourses and philosophies.

Having mentioned this last point, we must not fail to recall what the Palestinian thinker-intellectual Edward Said, whom we are commemorating these days on the 20th anniversary of his death, did in the entire West-centered world of thought. Said is a name that the belated admirers of the West should remember again and whose writings they should read before making their final decisions these days.

He was known by world public opinion or intellectual circles, in fact, through his book Orientalism, published in 1978, which broke new ground in its field, indeed in many fields. Before the work was translated into Turkish in 1982 and published by Pınar Yayınları, a long article by Cemil Meriç on orientalism, if I do not remember wrongly, was published in the Yeni Devir newspaper and later included in the book Kültürden İrfana. The title he chose for this article was added as a subtitle in the Pınar Yayınları edition: Sömürgeciliğin Keşif Kolu (The Reconnaissance Arm of Colonialism).

I first heard of Edward Said from this article in the Yeni Devir newspaper, which I followed regularly in the years when I was an İmam-Hatip High School student. Very shortly afterwards the Turkish edition of the book came out. As Cemil Meriç quoted him, Said said: "The East is an integral part of Europe's material culture and civilization. Orientalism is a culturally and ideologically different mode of expression of this civilization; it is a different vocabulary, an education and teaching, an association of institutions, a sum of fantasies and ideas, doctrines, and even the bureaucratic cadres and local administration personnel necessary for colonial rule. Everyone who teaches, writes and does research about the East is an orientalist. Moreover, in the general or specific sense, it is possible to include ethnologists, sociologists, historians and philosophers too, together with their scientific disciplines, within orientalism. Taking the end of the 18th century, orientalism is the totality of the institutions that take the East as their subject, the statements made, the attitudes adopted, the analogies drawn, a kind of doctrine, a form of administration or form of government. This kind of orientalism is the West's tactic of maintaining superiority, its effort to establish authority over the East... In short, orientalism is a special partnership of England and France against the East. This word, at least until the early 18th century, covered only the Indian subcontinent and the countries mentioned in the Bible. From the beginning of the 19th century until the end of the Second World War, France and England were the sole dominant powers of the East's Orientalism. Since the war the United States has come to the fore in the East and has approached the subject exactly with the traditional viewpoints of the English and the French.... Orientalism is not a geographical distinction, but a collection of interests."

Said's treatment of Orientalism as a discourse beginning with the knowledge produced about the East was in a way an application, going beyond even Foucault, of the necessary relationship the French philosopher Michel Foucault established between knowledge and power. Knowledge could not be produced without producing power, and the Western knowledge produced about the East is inevitably the most important source of a West-centered power structure. As the knowledge produced about the East depicted the Oriental as a mysterious, mystical realm of treasures waiting to be discovered, it objectified him, and it constructed the Westerner interested in him as a curious, exploring, active subject who knows what he is seeking and wanting.

When Said spoke of "the Orient being Orientalized" by way of this image of the East constructed through discourse, he was at the same time exposing that it had been constructed as a resource open to and deserving of exploitation. The exposure he made deconstructed all the scientistic, objectivist claims attributed so far to the knowledge produced about the East.

From the moment it was published, this work of Said provided groundbreakingly important support not only to research on orientalism but also to critical approaches to every kind of discursive power relation. It became a work that no study on the subject could ignore.

It is of course of separate importance to note that Said took the real motivation of this work from the Israel question: all the claims of Western Enlightenment modernity had to undergo, spontaneously, a complete deconstruction in the Israeli-Palestinian encounter.

In Said's personal and intellectual biography, the great factor that drove him to write a work like Orientalism was the Zionist occupation that reminded him, in the U.S., of his being Palestinian. Until 1967 he was a quiet U.S. citizen of Palestinian origin, in the early stages of his academic career as well. Like all Palestinians of that time he was exiled from his homeland, but through this exile he was perhaps trying to adapt to his new land by virtue of the U.S. citizenship his father had acquired in the times before the occupation. But the way the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict was received among U.S. citizens would give Said a complete experience of enlightenment.

Among his U.S. colleagues, whether Jewish or not, most people in news about the war referred to Israel's actions as "ours." This perception or position of "identity" must have formally awakened Said to the Palestinian cause, and from that day on he would enter a process in which he grasped his place in this world anew. He was now a Palestinian thinker-intellectual.

His book Orientalism, which broke new ground in its field, is in fact the first book of a trilogy, together with the two books he would publish right afterwards, "Covering Islam" (Haberlerin Ağında İslam) and "The Question of Palestine" (Filistin Sorunu) (all three books were translated and published by Pınar Yayınları within a short time).

This intellectual trajectory is a very striking example of what kind of extensions thinking about Palestine, thinking by way of Palestine, has in today's world.

Just like the role Palestine and Jerusalem have played in history for all humanity, a role that seems to repeat itself.

Let us continue from this point.