Mightily Flawed Frauds—Edward Said and Tariq Ramadan

Substack

I just re-watched an important and lively Intelligence² debate that took place in 2007 in London. The proposition was "We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of the West"—yea or nay. The panelists included my dear friend Ibn Warraq, Douglas Murray (with whom we have both worked), and David Aronovich. They were all in favor of defending the West. Those opposed were Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple and Charles Glass. It was chaired by the jovial but controlling Edward Lucas.

Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He believes in a moratorium on stoning women, to give the Ummah enough time to consider the matter amongst themselves. Ramadan, formerly an Oxford-based and much glamorized "Islamic scholar," was subsequently convicted of three rapes in both France and Switzerland, and an international warrant for his arrest remains in existence. Ramadan insists that only illness kept him away from the trials. Perhaps that is true; perhaps it is merely a ruse. Ramadan apparently lives in Geneva and conveniently became a Swiss citizen. Switzerland does not extradite its citizens.

Everyone on the panel was exceedingly well-spoken, serious, even brilliant, but Ibn Warraq drew the greatest laughter that evening when he said: "I'd rather not live in a society where one gets stoned for adultery and much prefer a place where one gets stoned—and then commits adultery." (I am paraphrasing).

What caught my ear was this: Tariq Ramadan damned the West for its gravest excesses, its worst colonial cruelties, World Wars, etc. (as did Dalrymple and Glass). But Ramadan also pointed out that many so-called Judeo-Christian Western values were not really Western. For example, he actually admitted that "the Jewish tradition is not Western."

What ho??? And so, Ramadan himself confirmed that the Jewish people are indigenous to the Levant and were there for more than three millennia, that we are not "settler colonizers" in an imaginary country called "Palestine," whose only purpose is to genocidally cleanse the Arab Middle East of its remaining Jews. Ramadan also confirmed that "Christianity is also an Eastern religion"—and, I might add, one originally founded by a Jewish rabbi in Jerusalem and one that once flourished in Central Asia, Africa, and the Levant until Muslims conquered these areas and took over Christianity’s holy sites. They have continued to persecute the remaining Christian remnant to this very day.

The panel's issues concerned the ideals of freedom, liberty, self-criticism, scientific thinking, and the separation of religion and state—all issues that Ibn Warraq dealt with in his many books, especially Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism. Said's work has occupied the Western imagination completely and has led to an endless amount of self-flagellation. Said was seen as the Great Defender of Islamic Palestine. I have much to say about this terrible and misguided influence in my forthcoming book The Complete Palestinianization of American Feminism, but for now, I have a few psychological and biographical points to make about Said. Few have ever made them before.

Please note: Edward Said and his family were never expelled from Jerusalem. Although Said became heavily invested in a "Palestinian" identity, and viewed himself as a spokesman for "Palestine," Edward was a Christian, not a Muslim. His family left with both their wealth and American contacts intact. In other words, Edward was a "nepo baby" who opportunistically, and as a matter of academic opportunism, chose to identify himself as a stateless victim of Western imperialism or of "Orientalism"—and he did so while enjoying all the rights and privileges of living in the West. Edward went on to champion the rights of other Arabs who also chose to leave their ancestral homes but not those Arabs who chose to remain—all of whom have since become Israeli citizens. However, his life was far different from the Arabs who fled to other Arab Muslim countries, where, to this day, they have been denied both employment and citizenship and have been forced to live under the rule of fundamentalist terrorist tyrants.

For this, Edward blamed only Israel, not the Arab Muslim states.

Edward Said's father, Wadi (William) Ibrahim Said, was a wealthy Christian Protestant who grew up under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Ibrahim was also an American citizen who fought for America in World War I. Edward Said's mother, Hilda, was also a Christian Protestant who grew up under the Ottoman Empire. Wadi Ibrahim Said left the Jerusalem area in 1947, even before Israel became a sovereign state. At the time, Edward was a pre-teenager. They lived in Cairo, where Edward attended English-language schools; thereafter, in 1951, when Edward was 17 years old, he attended an elite high school in Massachusetts.

After Edward completed Princeton and Harvard, he obtained a professorship at Columbia and soon occupied well-funded Endowed Chairs. Interestingly, Edward never specialized in Middle Eastern Studies; his expertise was in Literature. Nevertheless, at some point, he was elected to the Palestine National Council. How does that happen? One can only wonder.

Edward allowed others to view him as a dispossessed Muslim Palestinian who was forced to flee his homeland. Ironically, Edward's support for a one-state solution over and above a Palestinian state lost him his position on the Palestine National Council.

Edward's 1999 Memoir, Out of Place, concerns his sense of existential displacement from his roots (an entirely legitimate literary venture). However, it might best be compared with the even more anguished works written by Jews who were thrown out of Arab Muslim countries with at most ten dollars in their hands. For example, why not read Andre Aciman's 1994 work Out of Egypt; Lucette Lagnado's 2007 work The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World; Jean Naggar's 2008 work Sipping From the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt; Ariel Sabar's 2008 book My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for this Family's Past (in Iraq). We might also consider Algerian-born Jew Pierre Rehov's films about the forced flight of Jews from Arab lands, like The Silent Exodus (2004). Pierre himself had to flee Algeria as an endangered Jew and infidel. Gisele Littman, better known as Bat Ye'or (Daughter of the Nile), was also forced to flee Egypt in an impoverished state. She went on to document the history of infidels, "dhimmis," under Muslim rule in the Arab Middle East.

Edward Said was a dhimmi. He dealt with this reality by defending his potential persecutors, by allying himself with them, and defending their tyranny. (Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? This is precisely the posture that Western leftists, including feminists, have adopted, and it's pretty weird as well as dangerous.)

Edward's work has been "magnified and glorified," so to speak, and his influence has been monumental. In addition to the influence of the French post-modernists and de-constructionists (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan, etc.), Edward's accusation of Western "Orientalism" has had an oversize influence on the Western academy. His point? That the West has interpreted the East in grossly stereotypical and racist ways in order to dominate and colonize it. To him, the "Orient" primarily consisted of Arab Muslim men of color, especially Palestinian men. He did not focus overly much on Arab Christians or Arab Jews, and he certainly did not concern himself with the fate of Arab women—not even of so-called Palestinian Arab women.

If anyone wants to read a major and detailed critique of Said's work, I strongly suggest that they read Ibn Warraq's previously mentioned masterful book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007).

As a psychologist who was also trained in psychoanalytic theory, please allow me to venture a comment about Said's 2003 work, Freud and the Non-European. In this work, Said refers to Palestine as a "colony," and treats "the" West in a totally stereotypical way. He treats "the" West just as he claims that Westerners have treated or mistreated the Orient. Amazingly, Edward chooses to present Moses as a non-Jewish Egyptian who "adopts" the Hebrews as his people. Said approves of Freud's "provocative reminders that Judaism's founder was a non-Jew, and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian, non-Jewish monotheism."

This is simply not true. Even the former Hebrew slave Joseph, who preceded Moses and who had been elevated to Pharoah's second-in-command, spoke Hebrew/Aramaic and still yearned for his people. Joseph asked his sons to take his bones back with them to the Holy Land.

Those who are even minimally Torah-literate know that God spoke to Moses in Midian and that Moses had married a Midianite woman; however, this does not make Moses a Midianite. We also know the names of Moses's Jewish parents (Yocheved and Amran) and those of his siblings (Miriam and Aharon). We know that Moses was raised in the household of Pharoah's daughter, who adopted him in a most daring act of civil disobedience. This does not mean that Moses worshipped any of the Egyptian gods. Edward's view that Moses was an Egyptian and that he "adopted" the Jews allows him to present Judaism as having been founded by a pagan Arab Egyptian. If so, the official Jewish state, Israel, has simply "eliminated" its true origins entirely.

This, too, is entirely false. However, Said would do anything to delegitimize Judaism and the Jewish state—just as he'd do anything to support an imaginary country called Palestine.

Great minds...and our wavelengths....just today, my friend and colleague Jonathan Leaf, who also attended our book launch for Ibn Warraq's new book on Churchill, has reviewed a new biography of Edward Said. Leaf describes this book, authored by Timothy Brennan, as "atrociously written." Brennan is a devoted acolyte of Said's, and he believes that "Said's windy, tedious, out-of-print examinations of the currents of modern literature are weighty and profound."

Au contraire.

Leaf continues that Said lacked "anything that could be construed as aesthetic taste or sensibility." Apparently, Leaf accidentally found an old syllabus to a class taught in the 1920s; Said had "barely altered the list of readings." Said disliked Mozart and did not understand that "art had value in and of itself" as opposed to being a vehicle for his political agenda.

How many feet of clay do these two poseurs have? And both have been lionized by Westerners, especially the academic world and to our detriment.