Between Two Cultures

The resulting images – the caricatures of the inscrutable Orients , the mysterious east , the evil and terror of the Arab world- why they were necessarily created?

I think ignorance played a big role. There was an hostility that prevented what I would call the normal exchange between cultures. One of the things that is quite amazing is that there is a rather stubborn continuity between European views of Islam in the twelfth century and European views of Islam in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries: they simply don’t change. First of all, I argue there's no such thing as Islam, pure and simple; there are many Muslims and different kinds of interpretations of Islam-that was the subject of another book, called COVERING ISLAM. There's tendency always to homogenize and to turn the other into something monolithic, partly out of not only ignorance but also fear because the Arab armies came into Europe and were defeated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So there is that long standing sense. Then of course they are part of the monotheistic trilogy. Islam is the latest of the two other great monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, and there is a sense in which the closeness of Europe of the Arab and Islamic world is a source of great unease. Nothing is easiest for people to deal with something that is different than the portray it as dangerous and threatening and to reduce it ultimately to a few clichés.
That’s what's really appalling, that the whole history of this creation of the orient involves a continuous diminishment, so that now, for example, in the western press, the things you read about Islam and the Arab world are really horrendously simplified and completely belie the two or three hundred years of close contact between Europeans and to some degree Americans on the one hand and the Arab and Muslims on the other. It's as if they have always been standing on opposite side of some immense ditch and all they do is throw rotten food at each other.

And that's not changing?

No, I think it's actually getting worse*. At times of crisis, such as during the Gulf War and also on a continual daily basis in the media in America, the clichés are getting less interesting and less forgiving and less "true". The correspond les to any conceivable human reality. Islam in the west is the last acceptable racial and cultural stereotype that you can fling about without any sense of bad manners or trepidation.

Why do you think that is?

There are many reasons for it but I think the main one is that there's no deterrent. No western, or let's say North American person, knows very much about Islamic world*. It's out there, it's mainly desert, a lot of sheep, camels, people with knives between their teeth, terrorists, etcetera. The cultural heritage, the novels and other books that appear in English, are never paid attention to. There's nothing to prevent people here –in the united states- from saying what they wish. On the other hand the Arab and Muslims have not really understood the politics of cultural representations in the West. Most of the regimes in the Arab world are basically dictatorial, very unpopular, minority regimes of one sort or another; there are not interested in saying anything about themselves because it would expose them to justified criticism. The myths about America and the west in the Arab world are equally clichéd: All Americans are oversexed and they eat too much. The result where there should be humans presence there is vacuum, and where there should be exchange and dialogue and communication, there is a debased kind of non-exchange.

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(from:
POWER, POLITICS AND CULTURE: Interviews with EDWARD W.SAID)