AP Photo/Shakil Adil

Another week of the new semester gone. We finished reading and discussing in class today Edward Said’s Covering Islam. It struck me repeatedly that this book, written more than two decades ago in the wake of the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis, resonated even more powerfully in the present context of the tragedy in Iraq. Against a “post-industrial cult of expertise” in the West, Said calls for the production of “antithetical knowledge” about the concrete political situations and the many kinds of Islam. He appeals for attention to the “human density” of lived experience and argues against the use of “limiting labels like ‘the Islamic mind’ and ‘the Islamic personality.’” The closing lines of the book now appear depressingly prophetic: “If the history of knowledge about Islam in the West has been too closely tied to conquest and domination, the time has come for these ties to be severed completely. About this one cannot be too emphatic. For otherwise we will not only face protracted tension and perhaps even war, but we will offer the Muslim world, its various societies and states, the prospect of many wars, unimaginable suffering, and disastrous upheavals, not the least of which would be the birth of an ‘Islam’ fully ready to play the role prepared for it by reaction, orthodoxy, and desperation. By even the most sanguine of standards, this is not a pleasant possibility.”

P.S. I just read a piece on the cartoon controversy by Manorama Saraswati who uses Said to talk about visuality and cultural power. The blog was linked by the sturdy Sikh, the indefatigable warrior of the blogosphere, Sardar Amardeep Singh. Here is a link to Salon which presents new pictures of abuse of Iraqis.