Ibn Warraq - Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Saids Orientalism

"This is a dazzling masterwork, a tour de force of beauty, scholarship, and passionate clarity. This book documents that nearly every idea-nay almost every sentence-that Edward Said has written is deliberately false. Said is the master of the Big Lie. Ibn Warraq's landmark book successfully challenges the hijacking of the Western academy and intellectual imagination that Said and his followers have perpetrated. Ibn Warraq creates a portrait of the West that is, in turn, a vigorous reminder of who we are and what our values have meant to the entire world. It should be mandatory reading in every university and should find its way onto every citizen's bookshelf, for it provides the best and most bracing self-defense we can muster against the anti-Western diatribes that pass for received wisdom."

-Phyllis Chesler Emerita professor of psychology and women's studies City University of New York Author of thirteen books including the international best seller Women and Madness, The New Anti-Semitism, and Death of Feminism

"This is a far braver book than Edward Said's famous Orientalism-and intellectually a more honest one. It deserves at least as much attention and should be required reading for every student of history."

-Charles Allen Author of The Buddha and the Sahibs and God's Terrorists

"Ibn Warraq's magisterial critique of Edward Said's malicious and prodigiously mischievous book shows that the late `professor of terror' was prone to violence in his intellectual as much as in his political pronouncements. But Defending the West teaches by example as much as by direct criticism, for its vast erudition and sweet reasonableness represent the condition to which all scholarship should aspire."

-Edward Alexander Emeritus professor of English, University of Washington

"Edward Said died in 2003. This book buries him. With extraordinary learning and insight, Ibn Warraq utterly destroys Said and the Saidists, taking apart one of the most prevalent and destructive `intellectual' movements of recent years. This book is primarily not an attack but a defense, a defense of the West against its opponents and haters. As the war for ideas rages, there have been few books as brilliant as this one, and none more important."

-Douglas Murray Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion in London Best-selling author of Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas

"An impressive, urgently necessary, and delightfully learned guide to rediscovering the West-and saving it, too."

-Diana West Author of The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

"For decades Edward Said enjoyed the best that Western academic life had to offer-international celebrity, plaudits, honors, and fame beyond the wildest dreams of most professors-while constantly bashing the history, values, and policies that have made this privileged existence possible. In Defending the West, the eminent intellectual Ibn Warraq exposes with razor-sharp precision the hypocrisy of Said's writings as well as the perverted academic culture that has made his great success possible. With this important new book Ibn Warraq has once and for all dispatched Orientalism to the dustbin of history."

-Efraim Karsh Head of Mediterranean Studies at the University of London Author of Empires of the Sand (with Inari Karsh) and Islamic Imperialism: A History

IBN WARRAO

FOR E

I'M A HOSTAGE. I'M MAROONDED. BUT I'M IN PARIS WITH YOU.

-FROM IN PARIS WITH YOU, JAMES FENTON

Propter studium sapientiae absolutum.'

-Roger Bacon (c.1214-94)

It is futile to condemn several centuries of European expansion, absurd to include under the same malediction Christopher Columbus and [Hubert] Lyautey.2 The era of colonialisms is over, one must just acknowledge it and shoulder the consequences....

It is fitting for a nation long in tradition and with a strong sense of honour to find the courage to denounce its own errors. But it should not forget all the reasons it could still have for self-esteem. In any case it is dangerous to ask it to confess that it alone was guilty, and to doom it to perpetual penitence.

-Albert Camus, Chroniques Algeriennes 1939-19583

The predicament of Western civilization is that it has ceased to be aware of the values which it is in peril of losing.

-Arthur Koestler

originally planned the present work to serve as an anthology of both primary sources and articles by scholars who have replied to, taken issue with parts of, and possibly even refuted in their totality the arguments of Edward Said as presented principally in Orientalism, but also in Culture and Imperialism. The primary sources were to be prefaced with introductions that would have provided the necessary background to the controversies and the arguments engendered by Said's two most influential works.

In the end, I felt that Said's arguments could only be adequately addressed and refuted against the background of a more general presentation of salient aspects of Western civilization. I abandoned the idea of an annotated anthology. Instead I have identified three of the main themes that run through the history of the West. Since I still wished the work to serve as a source book for a general audience, I have retained many of the quotations from primary sources in the main body of my text: Homer and Aeschylus, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, Pico della Mirandola and Guillaume Postel, Sir William Jones and Lord Curzon; from the Greeks to the early Christians, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and up to the twentieth century. In the chapters on Orientalists in India, I have treated the writings of Indian scholars as primary sources, because they are essential to any argument that shows that Orientalists were motivated primarily by disinterested intellectual curiosity and they made genuine contributions to our knowledge of India that were recognized and appreciated by Indians themselves.