320 ORIENT ALISM and explicitly, reviewing the evidence for and against his conclusions, examining the various possible interpretations, and stating explicitiy what his decision is, and how and why he reached it.?5! To look for a conscious, fair, and explicit judgment by Lewis of the Islam he has treated as he has treated it is to look in vain. He prefers to work, as we have seen, by suggestion and insinuation. One suspects, however, that he is unaware of doing this (except perhaps with regard to “political” matters like pro-Zionism, anti-Arab nationalism, and strident Cold Warriorism), since he would be certain to say that the whole history of Orientalism, of whom he is the beneficiary, has made these insinuations and hypotheses into indisputable truths. Perhaps the most indisputable of these rock-bottom “truths,” and the most peculiar (since it is hard to believe it could be maintained for any other language), is that Arabic as a language is a dangerous ideology. The contemporary /ocus classicus for this view of Arabic is E. Shouby’s essay “The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Psychology of the Arabs.”’*? The author is described s “a psychologist with training in both Clinical and Social Psysholony” and one presumes that a main reason his views have such wide currency is that he is an Arab h himself (a_self-incriminating one, at that). The argument he proposes is ‘amentably simpleminded, perhaps because he has no notion of what language is and how it operates. Nevertheless the subheadings of his essay tell a good deal of his story; Arabic is characterized by “Genera} vagueness of Thought,” “Overemphasis on Linguistic Signs,” “Overassertion and Exaggeration.” Shouby is frequently quoted as an authority because he speaks like one and because what he hypostasizes is a sort of mute Arab who at the same time is a great word-master playing games without much seriousness or purpose. Muteness is an important part of what Shouby is talking about, since in his entire paper he never once quotes from the literature of which the Arab is so inordinately proud. Where, then, does Arabic influence the Arab mind? Exclusively within the mythological world created for the Arab by Orientalism. The Arab is a sign for dumbness combined with hopeless overarticulateness, poverty combined with excess. That such a result can be attained by philojogical means testifies to the sad end of a formerly complex philotogical tradition, exemplified today only in very rare individuals. The reliance of today’s Orientalist on “philology” is the last eaey Mena mage.

Orientalism Now 321 infirmity of a scholarly discipline completely transformed into social-science ideological expertise. In everything I have been discussing, the language of Orientalism plays the dominant role. ft brings opposites together as “natural,” it presents human types in scholarly idioms and methodologies, it ascribes reality and reference to objects (other words) of its own making. Mythic language is discourse, that is, it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will, or statements in it, without first belonging—in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily—to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence. These latter are always the institutions of an advanced society dealing with a less advanced society, a strong culture encountering a weak one. The principal feature of mythic discourse is that it conceals its own origins as well as those of what it describes. “Arabs” are presented in the imagery of static, almost ideal types, and neither as creatures with a potential in the process of being realized nor as history being made. The exaggerated value heaped upon Arabic as a language permits the Orientalist to make 4. Orientals Orientals Orientals. The system of ideological fictions I have been calling Orientalism has serious implications not only because it is intellectually discreditable. For the United States today is heavily invested in the Middle East, more heavily than anywhere else on earth: the Middle East experts who advise policymakers are imbued with Orientalism almost to a person. Most of this investment, appropriately enough, is built on foundations of sand, since the experts instruct policy on the basis of such marketable_abstractions as political elites, modernization, and_ stability, most of which are simply the old Orientalist stereotypes dressed up. in policy jargon, and most of which have been completely inadequate to describe what took place recently in Lebanon or earlier in Palestinian popular resistance to Israel. The Orientalist now tries to see the Orient as an imitation West which, according to Bernard Lewis, can only improve itself when its nationalism “is prepared to come to terms with the West.”'*® If in the meantime the Arabs, the Muslims, or the Third and Fourth Worlds go unexpected ways after all, we will not be surprised to have an Orientalist teli us that this testiftes to the incorrigibility of Orientals and therefore proves that they are not to be trusted.