Chapter 1 - Loss of Memory, Loss of Focus: Geiger, Said, and the Search for Missing Origins

Summary

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins

(Nietzsche 1954 [1873], 46–47).

In a series of acrimonious exchanges occurring in a number of venues in the 1980s, including The New York Review of Books, Edward Said and Bernard Lewis debated the merits of the scholarly enterprise of Islamic studies. Lewis charged that Said's thesis in Orientalism was “tendentious,” “arbitrary,” “reckless,” and “not merely false but absurd” (1982a, 51–52). Even “the one Arabic phrase which he quotes,” argues Lewis, “is misspelled and mistranslated” (1982a, 53). To these charges, Said responds that Lewis's attacks are “superficial,” based on his own “insecurity,” and that while his Arabic may be okay, Lewis possesses “carelessness in reading English” (1982, 44–45). Said subsequently equates Lewis with anti-Arab radicals such as Meir Kahane, the Israeli political party Gush Emunim, and accuses Lewis of reproducing “the Zionist vision of the world divided into racial and ethnic ghettos” (1982, 46).