314 ORIENTALISM erm, modern) reason. The irony of which I spoke earlier now comes into play, for a few pages later we find that the Arabs are so inept that they cannot even aspire to, let alone consummate, the ambitions of revolution. By implication, Arab sexuality need not be feared for itself but for its failure. In short, Vatikiotis asks his reader to believe that revolution in the Middle East is a threat precisely because revolution cannot be attained. The major source of political conflict and potential revolution in many countries of the Middle East, as well as Africa and Asia today, is the inability of so-called radical nationalist regimes and movements to manage, let alone resolve, the social, economic and political problems of independence. . . . Until the states in the Middle East can control their economic activity and create or produce their own technology, their access to revolutionary experience will remain limited. The very political categories essential to a revolution will be lacking.#8 Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. In this series of dissolving definitions revolutions emerge as figments of sexually crazed minds which on closer analysis turn out not to be capable even of the craziness Vatikiotis truly respects—-which is human, not Arab, concrete, not abstract, asexual, not sexual. The scholarly centerpiece of Vatikiotis’s collection is Bernard Lewis’s essay “Islamic Concepts of Revolution.” The strategy here appears refined. Many readers will know that for Arabic speakers today the word ‘hawra and its immediate cognates mean revolution; they will know this also from Vatikiotis’s introduction. Yet Lewis does not describe the meaning of thawra until the very end of his article, after-he has discussed concepts such as dawla, fitna, and bughat in their historical and mostly religious context, The point there is mainly that “the Western doctrine of the right to resist bad government is alien to Islamic thought,” which leads to “defeatism” and “quietism” as politica) attitudes. At no point in the essay is one sure where all these terms are supposed to be taking place except somewhere in the history of words. Then near the end of the essay we have this: In the Arabic-speaking countries a different word was used for [revolution} shawra. The root th-w-r in classical) Arabic meant to rise up (e.g. of a camel), to be stirred or excited, and hence, especially in Maghribi usage, to rebel. It is often used in the context of establishing a petty, independent sovereignty; thus, for

Orientalism Now 315 example, the so-called party kings who ruled in eleventh century Spain after the break-up of the Caliphate of Cordova are called thuwwar (sing. tha’ir). The noun thawra at first means excitement, as in the phrase, cited in the Sihah, a standard medieval Arabic dictionary, intazir hatta taskun hadhihi ‘ithawra, wait till this excitement dies down-—a very apt recommendation. The verb is used by al-Iji, in the form of thawaran or itharat fitna, stirring up sedition, as one of the dangers which should discourage a man from practising the duty of resistance to bad government. Thawra is the term used by Arabic writers in the nineteenth century for the French Revolution, and by their successors for the approved revolutions, domestic and foreign, of our own time.!#4 The entire passage is full of condescension and bad faith. Why introduce the idea of a camel rising as an etymological root for modern Arab revolution except as a clever way of discrediting the modern? Lewis's reason is patently to bring down revolution from its contemporary valuation to nothing more noble (or beautiful) than a camel about to raise itself from the ground. Revolution is excitement, sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty—nothing more; the best counsel (which presumably only a Western scholar and gentleman can give) is “wait till the excitement dies down.” One wouldn’t know from this slighting account of ‘hawra that innumerable people have an active commitment to it, in ways too complex for even Lewis's sarcastic scholarship to comprehend. But it is this kind of essentialized description that is natural for students and policymakers concerned with the Middle East: that revolutionary stirrings among “the Arabs” are about as consequential as a camel’s getting up, as worthy of attention as the babblings of yokels. All the canonical Orientalist literature will for the same ideological reason be unable to explain or prepare one for the confirming revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world in the twentieth century. Lewis’s association of ‘hawra with a camel rising and generally with excitement (and not with a struggle on behalf of values) hints much more broadly than is usual for him that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being. Each of the words or phrases he uses to describe revolution is tinged with sexuality: stirred, excited, rising up. But for the most part it is a “bad” sexuality he ascribes to the Arab, In the end, since Arabs are really not equipped for serious action, their sexual excitement is no more noble than a camel's Tising up. Instead of revolution there is sedition, setting up a petty sovereignty, and more excitement, which is as much as saying that