That Old Orientalism...

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The only true characterization of Kanan Makiya in Turi Munthe's review of The Rock: A Tale of Seventh-Century Jerusalem ["Muslim Jerusalem: A Story," April 1] is Munthe's claim that Makiya is the "Arab world's most ardent and vocal supporter of America's projected intervention in Iraq." Munthe could have added that Makiya was also the most ardent Arab voice calling on the Americans to continue to bomb Iraq all the way to Baghdad after they had decided to stop their bombing campaigns and end the Gulf War. As for Makiya being, in Munthe's words, "the hammer of liberal Arab intelligentsia, [and] the arch anti-Orientalist," there is no basis of truth to these astonishing claims. Not only is Makiya not known anywhere in the Arab world, whether in liberal or illiberal intellectual, academic or journalistic circles (except perhaps among the Iraqi expatriate community in London and among some of the Arab journalists working in that city), indeed, he is not known among the Arab reading public at large, as only selections of his book Republic of Fear were translated into Arabic and published in 1990 by an obscure Egyptian publisher during the heyday of the gulf crisis. Makiya, however, seems to be better known in the West, celebrated by the mainstream American media as a native informant who reproduces views about the Arab world that accord with official US policy. Now, it seems, The Nation is also celebrating him through Munthe's ill-informed review. The main irony, however, is in portraying Makiya as a major Arab intellectual, which he neither was nor is, whether in the Arab world or in the West.

Contrary to the claim that he is an "arch anti-Orientalist," Makiya's own words reveal him to be a deeply Orientalist thinker. Not only did he never take on Orientalists and their anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racist claims, in his own writings he reproduces Orientalist opinion: In his Republic of Fear, a slapdash account of Iraqi politics in which an amateurish pseudopsychological analysis substitutes for social, economic or political analysis and in which facts are selectively chosen to suit the argument (see my review in Against the Current (March/April 1991), he writes, for example, that "conspiratorial thinking has broad roots in the extreme fatalism and hostility to individualism that may be characteristic of Islamic culture generally." Makiya's views in his other book, Cruelty and Silence, are reminiscent of the Israeli Orientalist Raphael Patai's racist book The Arab Mind. Makiya tells us in Cruelty and Silence that unlike in English culture, which considers it rude, "belching" is allegedly an "Arab custom of hospitality" to be practiced at the dinner table in appreciation of one's hosts. In fact, this "arch anti-Orientalist" goes to some pains to excuse anti-Arab racism in the West by affirming that "racism exists everywhere else in the world" (see As ad Abukhalil's excellent review of this book in the Middle East Journal, Autumn 1993).

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