Great Throughts Treasury

"In short, Israel is the measure of our failings and our incompetence. We have waited for a great leader for years, but none came; we have waited for a mighty military victory, but we were defeated roundly; we have waited for outside powers (the US or,in its time, the Soviet Union), but none came to our aid. The one thing we have not tried in all seriousness is to rely on OURSELVES: until we do that with a full commitment to success there is no chance that we can advance towards self-determination and freedom from aggression.-1998"

"Indeed, while it is no longer possible to write scholarly essays (or extension) on the spirit of Negro or on the Jewish character , it is perfectly possible to undertake research on topics such as the spirit of Islam or the Arab character (...)."

"indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addition the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usually overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand."

"Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devote to rational investigation and moral judgement; and this puts the individual on record and on the line. How to use Knowing language well and knowing when to intervene in language are On two essential features of intellectual action."

"In newsreels or news-photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world."

"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."

"Intellectuals are the sons of their time they shop public policy, and cannot afford to resist , but a dispute images of authority and official novels, and justifications propagated by the media increasingly mighty cross provide them revealed masks or alternative accounts of operations, in which the thinker is trying as much as possible to tell the truth."

"Intended to describe someone was not what he east, as repeatedly by Orientalists, is limited to point out that the language of this person and the geography of his country and its history of scientific study subjects, but often it's the expression is intended to discredit the person means it belongs to strain minimum of humans, albeit not discharge that the word East was associated in the minds of some of creators such as Narval and Sajalan closely wonderful and fascinating strange, and grace, and mystery, and promise, but the floor was a historic circulating hyperbolic in its comprehensiveness."

"Intellectuals those characters that cannot predict the performance of public; or subjecting its disposal for the logo, or line - partisan traditional or faith firmly fixed. What I sought to his proposal is and should remain the intellectual faithful to the criteria for humanitarian misery and persecution the right, despite the affiliation partisan, and his background nationalism and Olaouath innate. nothing distorts the public performance of cultured more than a change of views Taatava conditions, and to remain silent caution, national and bravado, late apostasy portraying themselves as a theatrical manner , p . 14 - Photos cultured"

"Invent all the families fathers and sons , and give each one of them the story of the character and fate, but it grants to its own language."

"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 [9/11 event] 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."

"It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar."

"It [9/11 event] 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 is sensible to begin by asking the beginning questions, why imagine power in the first place, and what is the relationship between one's motive for imagining power and the image one ends up with."

"It [destroying Twin Towers] 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."

"It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home."

"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."

"It isn?t at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation."

"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."

"It remains the professional Orientalist's job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental; fragments, such as those unearthed by Sacy, supply the material, but the narrative shape, continuity, and figures are constructed by the scholar, for whom scholarship consists of circumventing the unruly (un-Occidental) nonhistory of the Orient with orderly chronicle, portraits, and plots."

"It will not take a modern Victorian specialist long to admit that liberal cultural heroes like John Stuart Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George Eliot, and even Dickens had definite views on race and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at work in their writing."

"It's racism at the bottom."

"It was Tjlibdeh red Moroccan leather slave streaky and paper , which was printed by the book for me to embody all that is sumptuous and sexy in any book ."

"It would be wrong to pretend, however, that both feminist and what has been called ethnic criticism did not in fact since lend themselves either to formalism or to an esoteric and jargon-ridden exclusivism."

"Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings."

"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."

"Kent Nagano, the most skilful and sensitive conductor, the music kept wonderfully together."

"Liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose conciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see 'the complete consort dancing together' contrapuntally."

"Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible."

"Marx does not exception. It is easier for him to use the collective East to illustrate a theory than existential human identities. For, between the East and the West, as if by magic, all that matters, or are, the vast anonymous collectivity."

"Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. Far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made ??Orientalism tend fatally towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; Also That meant it reconstructive precision, science, EVEN imagination Could the prepare the way for what armies, administrators, and Bureaucracies would later do on the ground."

"Massignon fought tirelessly for the Muslim civilization and, as evidenced by numerous essays and letters after 1948, to support Palestinian refugees to defend the rights of Muslim and Christian Arabs of Palestine against Zionism, against that he called caustically, bourgeois colonialism Israelis (...) Yet Massignon implicitly places the Islamic East in a former period in essence, and the West in modernity. As Robertson Smith, it considers that the Oriental is not a modern man but a Semite (...)"

"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."

"most important, humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history."

"Most professional humanists as a result are unable to make the connection between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of practices such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poetry, fiction, philosophy of the society that engages in these practices on the other."

"Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone's feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences and feelings."

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. The force of these comments is directed equally, I think, at poets who think critically and at critics whose work aims at a close appreciation of the poetic process. The main idea is that even as we must fully comprehend the pastness of the past, there is no just way in which the past can be quarantined from the present. Past and present inform each other, each implies the other and, in the totally ideal sense intended by Eliot, each co-exists with the other."

"No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot?s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the other echoes [that] inhabit the garden. It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about us. But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how our culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter)."

"Music requires a particular type of education which is simply not given to most people. And, as a result, it?s set further apart. It has a special place. People who are familiar with painting and photography and drama and dance, and so on, cannot talk so easily about music. And yet, as Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, music is potentially the most accessible art form because, with the Apollonian and the Dionysian coming together, it makes a"

"My whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting. It is this idea that Gramsci, certainly, and Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very different ways have been trying to illustrate."

"My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated."

"My basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history."

"No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents."

"None of the major periodicals in Arabic studies is now published in the Arab world, none of Arab educational institutions is not able to compete with centers such as Oxford, Harvard, UCLA in the study the Arab world, much less in any non-oriental area. Result Expected: Oriental students (and Oriental professors) still want to sit at the feet of American Orientalists, before repeating before the local public clich‚s that I described as dogmas of Orientalism. With a reproduction system like this, it is inevitable that the Oriental scholar will use her American training to feel superior to his countrymen, because he is able to master the Orientalist system; in his relations with his superiors, the European or American Orientalists, it will be that native informant. And it is in this that his role in the West, if he has the chance to stay there once completed studies superiors."

"Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual."

"Not one of our political spokespeople?the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser?s time?ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go. In the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force."

"Of itself, in itself, as a set of beliefs, as a method of analysis, Orientalism cannot develop. In fact, it is the doctrine the antithesis of development, its central argument is the myth of the arrested development of the Semites. Out of this matrix other myths, each showing the Semite as the opposite of the Westerner and the victim, permanently, of his own weaknesses. By a whole chain of circumstances the Semitic myth bifurcated in the Zionist movement; one Semites went the way of Orientalism, the other, the Arab, was forced to follow that of the Oriental."

"Now everyone knows that to try to say something in the mainstream Western media that is critical of U.S. policy or Israel is extremely difficult; conversely, to say things that are hostile to the Arabs as a people and culture, or Islam as a religion, is laughably easy. For in effect there is a cultural war between spokespersons for the West and those of the Muslim and Arab world. In so inflamed a situation, the hardest thing to do as an intellectual is to be critical, to refuse to adopt a rhetorical style that is the verbal equivalent of carpet-bombing, and to focus instead on those issues like U.S. support for unpopular client re?gimes, which for a person writing in the U.S. are somewhat more likely to be affected by critical discussion. Of course, on the other hand, there is a virtual cer?tainty of getting an audience if as an Arab intellectual you passionately, even slavishly support U.S. policy, you attack its critics, and if they happen to be Arabs, you invent evi?dence to show their villainy; if they are American you confect stories and situations that prove their duplicity; you spin out stories concerning Arabs and Muslims that have the effect of defaming their tradition, defacing their history, accentuating their weaknesses, of which of course there are plenty. Above all, you attack the officially ap? proved enemies-Saddam Hussein, Baathism, Arab na?tionalism, the Palestinian movement, Arab views of Israel. And of course this earns you the expected accolades: you are characterized as courageous, you are outspoken and passionate, and on and on. The new god of course is the West. Arabs, you say, should try to be more like the West, should regard the West as a source and a reference point. ú Gone is the history of what the West actually did. Gone are the Gulf War's destructive results. We Arabs and Mus?lims are the sick ones, our problems are our own, totally self-inflicted. A number of things stand out about these kinds of performance. In the first place, there is no universalism here at all. Because you serve a god uncritically, all the devils are always on the other side: this was as true when you were a Trotskyist as it i's now when you are a recanting former Trotskyist. You do not think of politics in terms of interrelationships or of common histories such as, for instance, the long and complicated dynamic that has bound the Arabs and Muslims to the West and vice versa. Real intellectual analysis forbids calling one side innocent, the other evil. Indeed the notion of a side is, where cultures are at issue, highly problematic, since most cultures aren't watertight little packages, all homogenous, and all either good or evil. But if your eye is on your patron, you cannot think as an intellectual, but only as a disciple or acolyte. In the back of your mind there is the thought that you must please and not displease."

"One of the tasks is the intellectual effort to smash stereotypes and statements Altsgarah, which severely limits human thought and intellectual contact."