Contending Visions of the Middle East

Zachary Lockman, professor of Middle Eastern history at New York University, has produced a definitive guide to Orientalism: that systematic, fascinating, and hotly contended study of the East, which for a long time has formed the very ‘stuff’ of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies in Europe and America, and informed so much of the two continents’ political and communal perceptions of the Eastern ‘other’. His goal in this is to serve both students and the lay public to better understand the relationship of the United States with the Islamic world: a relationship that has lasted more than six decades and not been as benign as one might have supposed – as illustrated by the tragic events of September 11, 2001. He warns us that we can no longer trust those in power to provide us with the knowledge of why our (Western) governments are involved in peoples and problems so far afield, as their expertise – or what they have chosen to share – is severely lacking. Thus we learn that the knowledge we are passed is not always reliable, and being the result of a mode of knowledge collection and production (literally, when considering media!), is framed, coloured, delineated, and even limited by those very processes. As such, if we seek to know the contending visions of the Middle East and also why they exist, we require some background on the history of this epistemological enterprise, as well as its ‘contexts, arguments, conflicts and processes which affect [its] production, dissemination and reception’, that is, its ‘politics’.

Lockman begins by tracing his investigations as far back as Hellenic conceptions of the world, demonstrating convincingly that there has been an innate human tendency to study and typify the other, often from a self- aggrandizing perspective, and usually with the goal of gaining some sort of strategic advantage over it. Moreover, this study usually concerned empires of equal stature (to be considered of worth), and so for the Greeks interest lay in Persia; while for Medieval Latin Christianity, in the Islamic world of Turkey, Jerusalem and North Africa. The situation today is not so different. Whilst we may debate whether modern ‘Western’ civilization is any heir to Western Christianity, it remains bordering Muslim nations in nearly every direction, and so the need for ‘valuable’ knowledge about them has never ceased to exist.