318 ORIENTALISM whole mission is now to inform conservative segments of the Jewish reading public, and anyone else who cares to listen, that any political, historical, and scholarly account of Muslims must begin and end with the fact that Muslims are Muslims. For to admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty is too much. Even to suggest such a thing is regarded as oftensive by liberal opinion, always ready to take protective umbrage on behalf of those whom it regards as its wards, This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and rightwing, progressive and conservative, aod the rest of the Western terminology, the use of which in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as accurate and as enlightening as an account of a cricket match by a baseball correspondent. [Lewis is so fond of this last simile that he quotes it verbatim from his 1964 polemic.}}*7 In a later work Lewis tells us what terininology is more accurate and useful, although the terminology seems no less “Western” (whatever “Western“ means): Muslims, like most other fortner colonial peoples, are incapable of telling the truth or even of seeing it. According to Lewis, they are addicted to mythology, along with “the so-called revisionist school in the United States, which look back to a golden age of American virtue and ascribe virtually all the sins and crimes of the world to the present establishment in their country.”"** Aside from being a mischievous and totally inaccurate account of revisionist history, this kind of remark is designed to put Lewis as a great historian above the petty underdevelopment of mere Muslims and revisionists. Yet so far as being accurate is concerned, and so far as living up to his own rule that “the scholar, however, will not give way to his prejudices,”'*? Lewis is cavalier with himself and with his cause. He will, for example, recite the Arab case against Zionism (using the “in” language of the Arab nationalist) without at the same time mentioning—anywhere, in any of his writings—that there was such a thing as a Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine despite and in conflict with the native Arab inhabitants. No Israeli would deny this, but Lewis the Orientalist historian simply leaves it out. He will speak of the absence of democracy in the Middle East,

Orientalism Now 319 except for Israel, without ever mentioning the Emergency Defense Regulations used in Israel to rule the Arabs; nor has he anything to say about “preventive detention” of Arabs in Israel, nor about the dozens of illegal settlements on the militarily occupied West Bank of Gaza, nor about the absence of human rights for Arabs, principal among them the right of immigration, in foriner Palestine. Instead, Lewis allows himself the scholarly liberty to say that “imrialism and Zionism [so far as the Arabs are concerned were] long familiar under their older names as the Christians and Jews." He quotes T. E. Lawrence on “the Semites” to bolster his case against Islam, he never discusses Zionism in parallel with Islam (as if Zionism were a French, not a religious, movement), and he tries everywhere to demonstrate that any revolution anywhere is at best a forin of “secular millenarianism.” One would find this kind of procedure Iess objectionable as political propaganda—which is what it is, of course—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists like Lewis writing about Muslims and Arabs are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners. But let us listen finally to Lewis telling us how the historian ought to conduct himself. We may well ask whether it is only the Orientals who are subject to the prejudices he chastises. (The historian’s] loyaities may well influence his choice of subject of research; they should not influence his treatment of it. If, in the course of his researches, he finds that the group with which he identifies himself is always right, and those other groups with which it is in conflict are always wrong, then he would be well advised to question his conclusions, and to reexamine the hypothesis on the basis of which he selected and interpreted his evidence; for it is not in the nature of human communities (presumably, also, the community of Orientalists] always to be right. Finally the historian must be fair and honest in the way he presents his story. That is not to say that he must confine himself to a bare recital of definitely established facts. At many stages in his work the historian must formulate hypotheses and make judgments. The important thing is that he should do so consciously