On oriental wisdom

Edward Said's Orientalism, and Culture and Imperialism have had a far better press than they deserve. While both suffer from serious methodological and conceptual shortcomings, in Orientalism Said is guilty of that which he accuses the West to have perpetrated.

In an altogether sycophantic review of Orientalism, Gordon Johnson (THES, February 24) selectively summarises the main points of Orientalism as though this will suffice to show the strength and relevance of Said's arguments. But Orientalism, though a good read, does not make an intellectual, nor even a historical, case. The issue is not that the "European" deliberately created the "Orient", etc, and that this was an intellectual betrayal of some kind, a more general epistemological problem is involved. It so happens that in terms of "science" and the publication of studies and accounts West Europeans, since at least Napoleon, have been ahead of the others.

Said also ignores the fact that individuals as historical/cultural beings normally do not adjust and talk, think or write in terms of a future understanding, nor with a view to what someone else, some time, may or may not, say, think, or write about them.

F. Nash

Department of politics

University of Southampton