Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Orientalism and Analysis: Ideas of the ‘Arab’
- 2 Formation of the United Arab Republic
- 3 Revolution in Iraq
- 4 Syrian Secession
- 5 Civil War in Yemen
- 6 Six-Day War
- 7 War of Attrition
- 8 Early Years of Sadat's Presidency
- 9 Yom Kippur War
- 10 Aftermath of Victory
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Orientalism and Analysis: Ideas of the ‘Arab’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Orientalism and Analysis: Ideas of the ‘Arab’
- 2 Formation of the United Arab Republic
- 3 Revolution in Iraq
- 4 Syrian Secession
- 5 Civil War in Yemen
- 6 Six-Day War
- 7 War of Attrition
- 8 Early Years of Sadat's Presidency
- 9 Yom Kippur War
- 10 Aftermath of Victory
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Want of accuracy, which easily generated into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind … Endeavour to elicit a plain statement of facts from any ordinary Egyptian. His explanation will generally be lengthy, and wanting in lucidity. He will probably contradict himself half-a-dozen times before he has finished his story. He will often break down under the mildest process of selfexamination.
Edward Baring, 1911Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held. What bound the archive together was a family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be effective.
Edward Said, 1978From the Iranian revolution to the ‘Arab Spring’, the West has consistently been accused of misunderstanding the culture and politics of the Middle East. In 1995, Samuel Huntington's controversial ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis revived the argument of controversial Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis that there was a fundamental ‘cultural divide’ between East and West.3 Western intelligence communities have borne the brunt of such criticism, yet little historical scholarship has explored how Arab culture has been conceived by the world's most important and powerful producers of ‘knowledge’ in recent history.
The theoretical underpinning for this chapter is an important and ongoing debate about Western cultural representations and their validity, evoked by Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism. Said's 1978 study raised groundbreaking questions about Western depictions of the Arab ‘Other’, the purpose and utility of these depictions in justifying European imperial rule and their relation (or lack thereof) to the ‘real’ Arab world.
This chapter brings to scholarly attention for the first time several recently declassified documents of a different nature to assessments usually produced by the British and US diplomatic and intelligence analytic bodies: those focused primarily on the issue of ‘national character’. Unsurprisingly, the declassified documents that deal in length with this issue are few. We can be certain that their authors never imagined that these reflections on Arab culture would ever be available for public consumption. Nonetheless, there are sufficient links between them and repeated reference to their underlying assumptions in more routine diplomatic and intelligence analysis to warrant a critical examination of the intellectual archive or ‘library’ that the Western political elite compiled about the Arab world.
- Type
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- Information
- The Arab World and Western IntelligenceAnalysing the Middle East, 1956–1981, pp. 25 - 56Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017