EDWARD SAID
http://www.edwardsaid.org
Interviewed by David Barsamian
Born in Jerusalem and educated at schools there and in Cairo,
Edward Said came to the U.S. in the early 1950s and attended
Princeton and Harvard. His creative intellectual talents
and abilities are infused with passion and a sense of outrage
at the hypocrisies, contradictions, and indignities of what
passes for political commentary, particularly when it comes
to the Middle East. He is no doubt the most prominent spokesperson
for the Palestinian cause in the United States.
Q: The events of September 11 have bewildered and confused
many Americans. What was your reaction?
Edward W. Said: Speaking as a New Yorker, I found it
a shocking and terrifying event, particularly the scale of
it. At bottom, it was an implacable desire to do harm to innocent
people. It was aimed at symbols: the World Trade Center, the
heart of American capitalism, and the Pentagon, the headquarters
of the American military establishment. But it was not meant
to be argued with. It wasn't part of any negotiation. No message
was intended with it. It spoke for itself, which is unusual.
It transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical.
There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work
here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political
organization and persuasion. This was bloody-minded destruction
for no other reason than to do it. Note that there was no
claim for these attacks. There were no demands. There were
no statements. It was a silent piece of terror. This was part
of nothing. It was a leap into another realm--the realm of
crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving
people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's
important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond
with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.
Q: What should the U.S. do?
Said: The just response to this terrible event should
be to go immediately to the world community, the United Nations.
The rule of international law should be marshaled, but it's
probably too late because the United States has never done
that; it's always gone it alone. To say that we're going to
end countries or eradicate terrorism, and that it's a long
war over many years, with many different instruments, suggests
a much more complex and drawn-out conflict for which, I think,
most Americans aren't prepared.There isn't a clear goal in
sight. Osama bin Laden's organization has spun out from him
and is now probably independent of him. There will be others
who will appear and reappear. This is why we need a much more
precise, a much more defined, a much more patiently constructed
campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the terrorists'
presence but the root causes of terrorism, which are ascertainable.
Q: What are those root causes?
Said: They come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement
in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world,
the Arab world, the Middle East--those areas that are considered
to be essential to U.S. interests and security. And in this
relentlessly unfolding series of interactions, the U.S. has
played a very distinctive role, which most Americans have
been either shielded from or simply unaware of.
In the Islamic world, the U.S. is seen in two quite different
ways. One view recognizes what an extraordinary country the
U.S. is. Every Arab or Muslim that I know is tremendously
interested in the United States. Many of them send their children
here for education. Many of them come here for vacations.
They do business here or get their training here.The other
view is of the official United States, the United States of
armies and interventions. The United States that in 1953 overthrew
the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran and brought
back the shah. The United States that has been involved first
in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions
against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter
of Israel against the Palestinians.
If you live in the area, you see these things as part of a
continuing drive for dominance, and with it a kind of obduracy,
a stubborn opposition to the wishes and desires and aspirations
of the people there. Most Arabs and Muslims feel that the
United States hasn't really been paying much attention to
their desires. They think it has been pursuing its policies
for its own sake and not according to many of the principles
that it claims are its own--democracy, self-determination,
freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, international law.
It's very hard, for example, to justify the thirty-four-year
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It's very hard to justify
140 Israeli settlements and roughly 400,000 settlers. These
actions were taken with the support and financing of the United
States. How can you say this is part of U.S. adherence to
international law and U.N. resolutions? The result is a kind
of schizophrenic picture of the United States.
Now we come to the really sad part. The Arab rulers are basically
unpopular. They are supported by the United States against
the wishes of their people. In all of this rather heady mixture
of violence and policies that are remarkably unpopular right
down to the last iota, it's not hard for demagogues, especially
people who claim to speak in the name of religion, in this
case Islam, to raise a crusade against the United States and
say that we must somehow bring America down.
Ironically, many of these people, including Osama bin Laden
and the mujahedeen, were, in fact, nourished by the United
States in the early eighties in its efforts to drive the Soviets
out of Afghanistan. It was thought that to rally Islam against
godless communism would be doing the Soviet Union a very bad
turn indeed, and that, in fact, transpired. In 1985, a group
of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President
Reagan, who called them "freedom fighters."These
people, by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense.
They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors
for Islam. Osama bin Laden, who is a Saudi, feels himself
to be a patriot because the U.S. has forces in Saudi Arabia,
which is sacred because it is the land of the prophet Mohammed.
There is also this great sense of triumphalism, that just
as we defeated the Soviet Union, we can do this. And out of
this sense of desperation and pathological religion, there
develops an all-encompassing drive to harm and hurt, without
regard for the innocent and the uninvolved, which was the
case in New York. Now to understand this is, of course, not
at all to condone it. And what terrifies me is that we're
entering a phase where if you start to speak about this as
something that can be understood historically--without any
sympathy--you are going to be thought of as unpatriotic, and
you are going to be forbidden. It's very dangerous. It is
precisely incumbent on every citizen to quite understand the
world we're living in and the history we are a part of and
we are forming as a superpower.
Q: Some pundits and politicians seem to be echoing Kurtz
in Heart of Darkness when he said, "Exterminate all the
brutes."
Said: In the first few days, I found it depressingly
monochromatic. There's been essentially the same analysis
over and over again and very little allowance made for different
views and interpretations and reflections. What is quite worrisome
is the absence of analysis and reflection. Take the word "terrorism."
It has become synonymous now with anti-Americanism, which,
in turn, has become synonymous with being critical of the
United States, which, in turn, has become synonymous with
being unpatriotic. That's an unacceptable series of equations.
The definition of terrorism has to be more precise, so that
we are able to discriminate between, for example, what it
is that the Palestinians are doing to fight the Israeli military
occupation and terrorism of the sort that resulted in the
World Trade Center bombing.
Q: What's the distinction you're drawing?
Said: Take a young man from Gaza living in the most
horrendous conditions--most of it imposed by Israel--who straps
dynamite around himself and then throws himself into a crowd
of Israelis. I've never condoned or agreed with it, but at
least it is understandable as the desperate wish of a human
being who feels himself being crowded out of life and all
of his surroundings, who sees his fellow citizens, other Palestinians,
his parents, sisters, and brothers, suffering, being injured,
or being killed. He wants to do something, to strike back.
That can be understood as the act of a truly desperate person
trying to free himself from unjustly imposed conditions. It's
not something I agree with, but at least you could understand
it. The people who perpetrated the terror of the World Trade
Center and Pentagon bombings are something different because
these people were obviously not desperate and poor refugee
dwellers. They were middle class, educated enough to speak
English, to be able to go to flight school, to come to America,
to live in Florida.
Q: In your introduction to the updated version of Covering
Islam: How The Media and The Experts Determine How We See
The Rest of The World, you say: "Malicious generalizations
about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration
of foreign culture in the West." Why is that?
Said: The sense of Islam as a threatening Other--with
Muslims depicted as fanatical, violent, lustful, irrational--develops
during the colonial period in what I called Orientalism. The
study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance
of Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world. And
it has persisted because it's based very, very deeply in religious
roots, where Islam is seen as a kind of competitor of Christianity.If
you look at the curricula of most universities and schools
in this country, considering our long encounter with the Islamic
world, there is very little there that you can get hold of
that is really informative about Islam. If you look at the
popular media, you'll see that the stereotype that begins
with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik has really remained
and developed into the transnational villain of television
and film and culture in general. It is very easy to make wild
generalizations about Islam. All you have to do is read almost
any issue of The New Republic and you'll see there
the radical evil that's associated with Islam, the Arabs as
having a depraved culture, and so forth. These are impossible
generalizations to make in the United States about any other
religious or ethnic group.
Q: In a recent article in the London Observer, you say
the U.S. drive for war uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in
pursuit of Moby Dick. Tell me what you have in mind there.
Said: Captain Ahab was a man possessed with an obsessional
drive to pursue the white whale which had harmed him--which
had torn his leg out--to the ends of the Earth, no matter
what happened. In the final scene of the novel, Captain Ahab
is being borne out to sea, wrapped around the white whale
with the rope of his own harpoon and going obviously to his
death. It was a scene of almost suicidal finality. Now, all
the words that George Bush used in public during the early
stages of the crisis--"wanted, dead or alive," "a
crusade," etc.--suggest not so much an orderly and considered
progress towards bringing the man to justice according to
international norms, but rather something apocalyptic, something
of the order of the criminal atrocity itself. That will make
matters a lot, lot worse, because there are always consequences.
And it would seem to me that to give Osama bin Laden--who
has been turned into Moby Dick, he's been made a symbol of
all that's evil in the world--a kind of mythological proportion
is really playing his game. I think we need to secularize
the man. We need to bring him down to the realm of reality.
Treat him as a criminal, as a man who is a demagogue, who
has unlawfully unleashed violence against innocent people.
Punish him accordingly, and don't bring down the world around
him and ourselves.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in
Boulder, Colorado.
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