There are people whose names are sacrosanct in the halls of academia and the hallowed halls of DC insiders. One of them is the cultural jihadist Edward Said. I have attacked his fallacious Islamist narrative repeatedly at Atlas.
Why? Because the evil of Said's propaganda infects all levels of learning and "global perspectives". Check out the profile of Shampa Biswas, Associate Professor of Politics at Whitman College. "In this regard, Biswas is as much instigator as educator in her academic life.
'A lot of what I do in my classes is to confuse frames to see elements in a new
light,' she said. 'It’s a stretch for many students, but education should be a
stretch. I’m not telling students to accept or excuse anything. I’m asking them
to think through something — broadly, deeply and, for me, globally.'" Remember: these Islamic propagandists are teaching your children.
Shampa Biswas: Global Perspectives Whitman College (hat tip the lid)
There was a moment, an episode, in Shampa Biswas’ life as a graduate
student when the center no longer held and the way she considered the world
changed, fundamentally and inexorably. It occurred in the space of 432 pages of
a book by Edward Said called “Orientalism.”
In the book, Said observes that the panoramic view of the East by scholars
in the West has essentially painted half of the world into a corner. He urges
that “narrative” replace “vision” in any interpretation of a geography and its
people. “Vision” classifies and labels. “Narrative” records and critically
assesses the variety and dynamic nature of human experience.
“Said’s book was truly transformative, one of those ‘aha!’ moments,” said
Biswas, associate professor of politics at Whitman. “It was eye-opening to see
how literature, which I dearly love, has been complicit in perpetuating
inequality in the world.”
More important in the context of her teaching was Said’s insight that all
knowledge is political. “It opens up the pedagogic possibility of also thinking
of knowledge as politically liberating,” she said.
Biswas uses “Orientalism” in her “Alternative Voices” class. With each fresh
reading of the book, “new windows” open in her teaching. Said’s call for
critical analysis — part and parcel of the learning experience at Whitman — is
precisely the petition Biswas delivers to her students.
“Not every moment in the classroom is transformative, of course, but as a
teacher, you always hope to bring knowledge that will generate that spark of
enlightenment,” she said. “I really savor those moments.” Biswas recognizes both
the influence and responsibility that come with her job. Honesty as an educator
demands that the educator be forever a learner, she maintains.
“I never felt a calling to teach, but I knew why it appealed to me soon after
I started,” she said. “Teaching keeps me intellectually curious and productive
in useful ways. My students are exceptional in many respects, and I learn a
great deal from them. They challenge me to think in new ways about texts that I
have read and thought about many times over.”
Scary, right?
And how does Biswas view the "empire" America? Check out her convocation address back in 2007 - evil in prose.
The bipartisan report was titled “Defending
Civilization: How our Universities are Failing America and What can be done
about it?” The report, whose ostensible goal was the restoration of “the legacy
of freedom and democracy” in U.S. higher education institutions, lists 115
specific instances of dissent to the war on terror from around 50 campuses
across the country, and condemns U.S. academics for both their own lack of
patriotism and the failure to cultivate the same in young students.
A couple more events from recent years. In the name of restoring “an academic
bill of rights”, former Marxist turned right wing commentator, David Horowitz
has launched a campaign against what has been described as “the stranglehold of
progressive politics on university campuses” (Larkin, 2004), a campaign that has
involved identifying “the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” (an
appellation I regret to inform no member of this distinguished faculty has
earned, but not for lack of trying). A founder and director of the Middle East
Forum and a former member of the board of the very influential U.S. Institute of
Peace, Daniel Pipes has founded the organization Campus Watch, whose explicit
purpose is to compile dossiers and publicly malign on their website
“unpatriotic” academics who oppose U.S. or Israeli foreign policy, especially
with regard to the Middle East. More recently, a conservative alum at the
University of California at Los Angeles started a nonprofit group to combat
“U.C.L.A.’s continued slide into political partisanship and indoctrination” by
enumerating a “Dirty Thirty” list of professors whose leftist leanings he found
particularly troubling. This alum offered to pay students for taping and
documenting what those professors said in their classrooms – an event which
generated national news media attention and put many academics around the
country on guard.
Here we are, you – eager, bright, highly accomplished students ready to
embark on your college careers with passion and energy and us, educators –
scholars, thinkers, dedicated teachers ready to engage you in a life of the
mind. What could be at stake in this intellectual enterprise that is deemed so
risky, so threatening to engage the energies of all these highly connected,
well-funded, groups and people with substantial political influence in today’s
world?What are the stakes of reading, writing, thinking and reflecting in a
place such as this which might some day perhaps earn you too the disfavor of
some powerful group, some set of vested interests? As we convoke today this
journey into knowledge, it may be worth asking, what are the stakes of becoming
an intellectual?
Like Obama? I think not.
I ask this question no doubt with a certain utopian vision of the academy in
mind, a vision that celebrated Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri describes as
“a place for self-perfection…for the highest education in life”, a place that
“engages endless generations in profound and perpetual discovery…The purpose…to
deepen the spirit, to make more profound the sensitivities of the individual to
the universe, and to become more creative” (Okri, 1995). And I speak with some
concern as I see this utopian vision under onslaught not just from the political
witch-hunting I mentioned above or the intrusions into academic freedom by a
heavy-handed Patriot Act, but also the increasing corporatization of academia,
as universities and colleges become what Stanley Aronowitz (2000) has called
“knowledge factories” and David Noble (2001) “diploma mills”, places where
educators are simply service providers, students consumers and education a
commodity whose content and value is to determined by the imperatives of the
market. As students at elite institutions such as this, students at whose
service enormous resources are being deployed by parents, the college, donors,
the government and always, always (remember this because this is the easiest to
forget) the invisible subsidy provided by the undervalued labor
Evil in prose. There's more, but you get the gist.
Watch my quick interview with the world's leading scholar on Islam, Ibn Warraq, who ought to be the go-to guy on Islam - not the likes of poisonous apologists and Islamists on college campuses.
Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Reading and Book Signing
Celebrated Muslim apostate and Koranic scholar Ibn Warraq discussed his new book, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism at the Columbia University Bookstore.
As Martin Kramer has pointed out, Said admitted in the afterword of the 1994 edition of Orientalism
that "I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the
true Orient and Islam really are." In other words, Said was not
interested in advancing scholarship, but only anti-Western polemical
screeds, being mostly content with hurling vitriolic and malicious
invective against past and present Orientalists.......
Andrew Bostom writes: Ibn Warraq reminds us, unapologetically, of what cultural jihadists like Tariq (Taqiyya) Ramadan
(Above) would destroy, and “establish” in its place.
A culture [i.e., Western] that gave the world the novel; the music of
Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert; and the paintings of Michelangelo, da
Vinci, and Rembrandt does not need lessons from societies whose idea of
heaven, peopled with female virgins, resembles a cosmic brothel. Nor
does the West need lectures on the superior virtue of societies in
which women are kept in subjection under sharia, endure genital
mutilation, are stoned to death for alleged adultery, and are married
off against their will at the age of nine; societies that deny the
rights of supposedly lower castes; societies that execute homosexuals
and apostates. The West has no use for sanctimonious homilies from
societies that cannot provide clean drinking water or sewage systems,
that make no provisions for the handicapped, and that leave 40 to 50
percent of their citizens illiterate.
Read the rest of Ibn Warraq’s essential new book, Defending the
West—A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Caroline Fourest’s book (“Brother Tariq”) exposing Taqiyya Ramadan’s Doublespeak, and the rest of Ibn Warraq’s evisceration of Taqiyyya Ramadan, in City Journal, below:
Ibn Warraq
Fjordman wrote of Warraq's deconstruction of Said's argument:
Ibn Warraq's book was written as a response to Edward
Said's deeply flawed, but highly influential Orientalism from 1979. Said chastised Western
countries for their supposed racist and stereotypical view of "the Other." Ibn
Warraq dubs Said's methods "intellectual terrorism" and demonstrates the logical
inconsistencies of his positions:
"To argue his case, Said very
conveniently leaves out the important contributions of German Orientalists, for
their inclusion would destroy – and their exclusion does indeed totally destroy
- the central thesis of Orientalism,
that all Orientalists produced knowledge that generated power, and that they
colluded and helped imperialists found empires. As we shall see, German
Orientalists were the greatest of all scholars of the Orient, but, of course,
Germany was never an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of North
Africa or the Middle East. [Bernard] Lewis wrote, '[A]t no time before or after
the imperial age did [the British and French] contribution, in range, depth, or
standard, match the achievement of the great centers of Oriental studies in
Germany and neighbouring countries. Indeed, any history or theory of Arabic
studies in Europe without the Germans makes as much sense as would a history or
theory of European music or philosophy with the same omission.' Would it have
made sense for German Orientalists to produce work that could help only England
and France in their empire building?"
Despite its many serious historical
and logical shortcomings, Said's thesis was eagerly embraced by many
intellectuals:
"Post-World War II Western intellectuals and leftists were
consumed by guilt for the West's colonial past and continuing colonialist
present, and they wholeheartedly embraced any theory or ideology that voiced or
at least seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of
the third world. Orientalism came at the
precise time when anti-Western rhetoric was at its most shrill and was already
being taught at Western universities, and when third-worldism was at its most
popular. Jean-Paul Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the
exploitation of the third world, and that violence against Westerners was a
legitimate means for colonized men to re-acquire their manhood. Said went
further: 'It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say
about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally
ethnocentric.' Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so."
Moreover, "Where
the French presence lasted fewer than four years before they were ignominiously
expelled by the British and Turks, the Ottomans had been the masters of Egypt
since 1517, a total of 280 years. Even if we count the later British and French
protectorates, Egypt was under Western
control for sixty-seven years, Syria for
twenty-one years, and Iraq for only fifteen – and, of course, Saudi Arabia was
never under Western control. Contrast this with southern Spain, which was under
the Muslim yoke for 781 years, Greece for
381 years, and the splendid new Christian capital that eclipsed Rome – Byzantium
– which is still in Muslim hands. But no Spanish or Greek politics of victimhood
apparently exist."
Paul Fregosi confirms this in Jihad
in the West: "Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130
years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands
lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the
Muslims…who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which
they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the
guilt. It should be the other way around."
Some observers now think
Europeans should feel grateful for Muslim colonization of their lands. Joan Acocella wrote a review
of David Levering Lewis' book God's Crucible:
Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. Lewis is a two-time winner of
the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. According to Acocella, he thinks Muslims "did
Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further:
he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe."
This was "one of the most significant losses in world history."
Warraq
explains how Charles Wilkins became perhaps first Englishman to master Sanskrit,
and in 1783 translated the important work Bhagavat Gita. Scholar Sushil Kumar De
"praised Wilkins for bringing Bengali literature into the era of printing.
Wilkins being a 'metallurgist, engraver, founder, and printer' of such elaborate
and different alphabets as Persian and Bengali has already been noted. Wilkins's
achievements were summed up in 1922 by the Indian scholar Shumbhoo Chander Dey,
who highlighted Wilkins's contributions to Indian epigraphy. It must be
emphasized that Wilkins was the first European to study Sanskrit inscriptions
that had baffled even the Hindu scholars. His introduction of the art of
printing to Bengal was also of specific importance, endearing him to thousands
of Indians."
A digression: I am under the impression that printing was
introduced surprisingly late in India. Islamic religious resistance slowed down
the adoption of printing everywhere. However, even prior to the Islamic
conquests the spread of printing was slow. Moreover, one of the few good things
Muslims did in India was to increase the use of paper. Why were non-Muslims
Indians so slow to appreciate the value of paper and book printing, surely two
of the greatest inventions China has ever made? This becomes even more puzzling
if we remember that the development of printing in China was intimately
connected with Buddhism, a religion exported from India. Indeed, printing was so
closely associated with Buddhism in Japan that for nearly eight hundred years,
until contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Japanese printed only
Buddhist scriptures. Was the Indian reluctance caused by caste? Were the
Brahmins afraid that their privileged hereditary position would be undermined by
the spread of printing? I don't know, but it's an interesting
subject.
Sir William Jones was a brilliant linguist who is said to have
known thirteen languages well, and twenty-eight fairly well, at the time of his
death. According to Ibn Warraq, "With his work on Indian chronology, and having
created a solid framework for the understanding of India's past, Jones, in
effect, can be considered the father of Indian history. Jones's translation of
Sacontala (Shakuntala) had an enormous
influence in Europe, inspiring Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel, and Goethe, who used
its introductory scene as a model for the 'Vorspiel auf dem Theater' of Faust (1797). But even more remarkably, the
collection, printing, and translations of Sanskrit texts by Jones and other
Orientalists made available for the first time to Indians themselves aspects of
their own civilization, changing forever their own self-image. Until now, these
texts had only been accessible to a narrow coterie of
Brahmins."
Professor A. L. Basham had praised the small band of Western
scholars who labored to reveal India's past. Most of them met the expenses of
their research out of their own pockets: "The main motive in most of their minds
seems to have been the study of India for its own sake. When Jones translated
Sakuntala and thus introduced the Sanskrit drama to the western world, are we to
believe that he consciously thought: 'I am doing this in order that my country
may dominate a subject people'? Could any such motive have been in the mind of
James Prinsep, when he deciphered the inscriptions of Asoka? Was Colebrooke
inspired in his pioneering work on the Veda chiefly by motives of patriotism? If
these scholars had worked to serve their country or the [East India] Company in
their spare time they could surely have found more effective ways of doing
so."
Ibn Warraq writes that "As [Professor] Kejariwal laments, Indians,
unaware of the importance of historical remains, had left them to crumble and
decay, a fact attested to by the British Orientalists. Similarly, many
manuscripts would have been lost but for the efforts of scholars such as Charles
Wilkins and the German Johann Georg Bühler, who salvaged severely damaged
manuscripts of the rare Sanskrit historical work Rajatarangini. Similarly, Prinsep's tenure in
the Asiatic Society 'was full of achievements in retrieving, restoring and
trying to preserve the ancient historical monuments of the country. Among these
were the Sarnath remains and the Allahabad pillar which yielded such significant
information about Asoka and Samudragupta – two of the greatest monarchs of
India, and in fact, of the world.'"
An emblem associated with Asoka (or
Ashoka) the Great is now the national emblem of India, yet he was virtually
forgotten until the British got there. (more here)
OT but related:

From
left to right, Michelle Obama, then Illinois state senator Barack
Obama, Columbia University Professor Edward Said and Mariam Said at a
May 1998 Arab community event in Chicago at which Edward Said gave the
keynote speech. (Image from archives of Ali Abunimah) Posted at Atlas March 07