“The Flood of Al-Aqsa” Resurrects Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish

Critic and translator Fakhri Saleh observed a strong return to Edward Said after “The Flood of Al-Aqsa,” which he explained as being due to the fact that he was and still is “an inspiration, not just a theorist, for his students and readers, at Columbia University in the United States and around the world, and because of the nature of his inspiration we recall him today at these critical moments in the history of the Palestinian cause and the world.” One aspect of this is the sit-ins that took place in support of Palestine in American, European, and Australian universities.

This came in the latest episode of the program “In Orientalism,” presented by Moroccan media figure Yassin Adnan on the “Community” platform, where Saleh mentioned that the sit-ins in Western universities “are evidence of the deep-rooted presence of Edward Said in the memory of students and professors,” noting that he is one of the founders of post-colonial studies, and even though he did not use this expression in his book “Orientalism,” it is one of its signs, and he is recalled as a theoretical founder and media presence as a contemporary person, and his writings are contemporary, and his personality is a defender of the oppressed on earth, including the Palestinians.

“Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish are two researchers who are being forcefully revived at this moment,” he continued, and with Said is revived “the personality of the theorist and thinker who seeks to identify the foundations of Western discourse that is in some ways close to the Zionist discourse, from which the colonial Zionist discourse emerged. He wrote the book “Orientalism” because he wanted to understand how the West thinks about Palestine, and the attack on him aimed to attack the Palestinian narrative. He was not satisfied with his role as a professor of English literature and comparative literature, but after 1967 he tried to discover himself as a Palestinian and an Arab because of the joy he faced from the Zionists and supporters of Israel in academia.”

Edward Said also spoke in favor of Palestine in the media, exposing the Zionist crime against this people. He wrote a book about the “Palestinian issue” that was not translated into Arabic, and then he wrote “Covering Islam” about the Western coverage of the Iranian revolution. There were major attempts to harm him due to his great ability to shake the Zionist narrative.

But Edward Said did not only work to study the other, but he also studied the self with a double-layered reading that criticizes colonialism and the colonized self. Therefore, he criticized the “rhetoric of blame,” thinking that there might be reconciliation in the future, and that we should not only blame the West, but rather talk to each other. The West can admit its crimes, and the colonized can, one day, search for a solution for reconciliation, which is framed by his project for “the coexistence of peoples regardless of religions, ethnic origins, and way of thinking.” He used to say that peoples must learn how to coexist with each other.

Within the framework of this same human vision, Edward Said wrote a book published after his death entitled “Humanism and Democratic Criticism,” in which he established a different critique and a non-central and non-European humanism, as he wanted to revive “humanism” from another perspective, one that would include both colonizers and colonized.

“No mind can imagine this ongoing massacre in Gaza in the 21st century, and that the exile continues and the Palestinian Nakba continues,” Saleh said, but despite that, Edward Said’s vision of the future remains current in order to “establish a common civilization.”

Regarding Bernard Lewis, the speaker stressed that he is “a great author on the Islamic world, and not just an orientalist, but the roots of his hatred for Islam began with his book “The Arabs in History,” which he published when he was 34 years old.” As for Samuel Huntington, he is “not an orientalist because he knows Arabic.”

“They presented a kind of blueprint for policymakers, especially in America, to wage future wars of American imperialism at the end of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century,” he continued. “In his book ‘The Clash of Civilizations,’ Huntington presented a shaky theory, using the concept of the clash of civilizations that his teacher Bernard Lewis had preceded him in; he said that there were bloody borders between civilizations, and that the Western war would be with the Slavic-Russian civilization and the Islamic civilization,” knowing that the reality of the matter is that the wars that were within these cultures themselves were fiercer, and therefore “this is a fallen theory.”

After detailing the work of the two with the colonial and ruling decision-making circles, Saleh said that “Orientalists throughout history had a relationship with the colonial establishment, and the problem with Bernard Lewis is that he is a great historian, whose academic, research and methodological preparation is solid, unlike the new Orientalists who have secondary sources from journalists who write reports and do not know Arabic (…) but he is founded on Zionist thought, and he did not hide his sympathy as a Jew for Israel, and he betrayed his mission as a historian in favor of his whims and ideology,” noting that the generations that came after him, even if their thought was weak, “the Zionist component in the thought of Western new Orientalism and its discourse is dominant in formulating their discourse.”