Shocking! Outrageous! Libelous!
A report by Arab intellectuals commissioned by the United Nations warns that Arab societies are being crippled by a lack of political freedom, the repression of women and an isolation from the world of ideas that stifles creativity.
Balderdash! Speciousness! Prevarication! Such conclusions are obviously fraudulent!
The report notes that although oil income has transformed the landscapes of some Arab countries, the region remains ‘richer than it is developed.’ Per capita income growth has shrunk in the last 20 years to a level just above that of sub-Saharan Africa. Productivity is declining. Research and development are weak or non-existent. Science and technology are dormant.
Ha! Grotesque distortions! Zionist propoganda! Infidel fairytales! I mean, gaze upon my finery — do I look poor to you?
Intellectuals flee a stultifying — if not repressive — political and social environment, it says.
Arab women, the report found, are almost universally denied advancement. Half of them still cannot read or write. The maternal mortality rate is double that of Latin America and four times that of East Asia.
‘Sadly, the Arab world is largely depriving itself of the creativity and productivity of half its citizens,’ the report concluded.
Rubbish! Progress viewed solely through Western cultural paradigms! Hegemony! Cultural imperialism!
Otherness! Otherness! Otherness…!
It seems you are not well acquainted with Mr. Said’s work. He would likely welcome this report, as it gives more, rather than less, credibility criticisms to his many critiques of the Arab world.
Edward Said is first and foremost a humanist and an intellectual. While he decries the baseless charges against Arabs and their culture, he is one of the leading critics of Arab regimes, decisions, governments, and cultural backwardness. Just because he is also a critic of the West does not mean he is a devil, an enemy, or a liar. You would be well served to read his essays from 1990-present on Arab regimes, rulers, and societal decay.
Edward Said—who I am quite familiar with—has worked to delegitimize any but “authentic” investigations of Arab culture by insisting that one need occupy a privileged status to qualify as a viable voice participating in the discourse on mideast studies. His work over the last 10 years consistently called the threat to the west from radical Islamism a fantasy cooked up by those (mostly western scholars) who misread the Arab world.
Methodologically, he relies on essentialistic and self-serving theoretics. His ideas have polluted the academy and done much to weaken scholarship in the humanities.
Here’s Charles Paul Freund’s rather sober analysis, <a href=”http://reason.com/0112/cr.cf.2001.shtml”>”2001 Nights”</a>
Having argued this, I’ve changed the title of the post to better reflect what I was parodying—which is the rote invocation of Orientalist critiques inspired by Said and his followers.
If the UN is made up of apologists for Islamic and other Third World repression, as many have often complained, what exactly is going on here? Is anything put out by the UN credible (AIDS, global warming), or does it depend on one’s politics? Personally, I thought the latest UN AIDS projections sounded inflated, a way to squeeze more money out of the U.S. My guess is that the UN, in the small print, holds the U.S. accountable for supporting the Arab regimes that are presumably culpable for Arab despair. But for you to hold up a UN report as worthy evidence, and pretend to attack it from the Said-ist point of view (when in fact he’d probably applaud it, and blame the U.S.), seems a little off-base.
You’re probably right, Jensen. I hold the Orientalist paradigm in complete contempt, but I probably should have chosen a better story to overlay with this particular conceit.
Oh well. You win some, you lose some.
Fair enough response… my problem has always been with the Said-wannabes rather than with the man himself, who in my experience is a fine writer who made some valid points in Orientalism. It’s the carrying out as dogma of those points which gets me goat.