322 ORIENTALISM The methodological failures of Orientalism cannot be accounted for either by saying that the real Orient is different from Orientalist portraits of it, or by saying that since Orientalists are Westerners for the most part, they cannot be expected to have an inner sense of what the Orient is all about, Both of these propositions are false. It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true Orient (Islam, Arab, or whatever); nor is it to make an assertion about the necessary privilege of an “insider” perspecttve over an “outsider” one, to use Robert K. Merton’s useful distinction."** On the contrary, I have been arguing that “the Orient” is itself a constituted entity, and that the notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically “different” inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea. I certainly do not believe the limited proposition that only a black can write about blacks, a Muslim about Muslims, and so forth. And yet despite its failures, its lamentable jargon, its scarcely concealed racism, its paper-thin intellectual apparatus, Orientalism flourishes today in the forms J have tried to describe. Ind € is some reason for alarm in the fact that its influence h ‘has spread to “the Orient” itself: the pages of books and joumals.in_Arabic. (and doubtless in Japanese, various Indian dialects, and other Oriental languages) are-filled_with secon d-order apalyses by Arabs of “the Arab mind,” “Islam,” and other myths. Orientalism has also spread in the United States now that Arab money and resources have added considerable glamour to the traditional “concern” felt for the strategically important Orient. The fact is that Orientalism has been successfully accommodated to the new imperialism, where its ruling paradigms do not contest, and even confirm, the continuing imperial design to dominate Asia. In the one part of the Orient that I can speak about with some direct knowledge, the accommodation between the intellectual class and the new imperialism might very well be accounted one ‘of the special triumphs of Orientalism. The Arab world today is an_intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of t nited States. This is not in itself something to be lamented; the specific form of the satellite relationship, however, is, Consider first of all that universities in the Arab world are generally run according to some pattern inherited from, or once directly imposed by, a former colonial power. New circumstances make the curricular actualities

Orientalism Now 323 almost grotesque: classes populated with hundreds of students, badly trained, overworked, and underpaid faculty, political appointments, the almost total absence of advanced research and of research facilities, and most important, the lack of a single decent library in the entire region. Whereas Britain and France once dominated intellectual horizons in the East by virtue of their prominence and wealth, it is now the United States that occupies that place, with the result that the few promising students who manage to make it through the system are encouraged to come to the United States to continue their advanced work. And while it is certainly true that some students from the Arab world continue to go to Europe to study, the sheer numerical preponderance comes to the United States; this is as true of students from so-called radical states as it is of students from conservative states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Besides, the patronage system in scholarship, business, and research makes the United States a virtual hegemonic commander of affairs; the source, however much it may not be a real source, is considered to be the United States. Two factors make the situation even more obviously a triumph of Orientalism. Insofar as one can make a sweeping generalization, the. felt tendencies of contemporary culture in the Near East are guided by European and American models. When Taha Hussein said of modern Arab culture in 1936 that it was European, not Eastern, he was registering the » identity o of the Egyptian cultural elite, of which he was so distinguished a member..The same is true of the Arab cultural elite today, although the powerful current of anti-imperialist. Third World ideas that has gripped the region since the early 1950s early 1950s has tempered the Western edge. of the dominant culture. In addition, _the_Arab_and Islamic--werld_remains a second-order power in terms of the production of culture, knowledge, and sche and ‘scholarship. ‘Here one must be completely realistic about using the terminology of power politics to describe the situafion that obtains. No Arab or Islamic scholar can afford to ignor ignore what goes on in scholarly journals, institutes, and_universities_in the United States a and Europe; the converse is not true. For example there is “Ho_major. journal_of.. Arab studies "published-in-the-Arab world today, just as there is no Arab educational institution capable of challenging places like Oxford, Harvard, or UCLA in the study of the Arab world, much less in any non- -Oriental subject_matter. The