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Angry Robot launches open submission period with AI... and quickly reverses course due to community blowback
(astrolabe.aidanmoher.com)
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When I asked my friend how she found the book to be, she described it as “a jumble of thoughts that felt familiar.”
As Orientals, they indeed feel familiar to us. Although I never picked up the book before now, I couldn't say I have not read it. I read it on the faces of Western "political experts". I read it in laws of counterterrorism and anti-immigration. I read it in the newspapers, listen to it on the radio, and watch it on the TV. But most crucially, I read it when I look into the mirror, this self perception of being an “Oriental”, an inferiority complex transfused throughout the years from teachers and professors, intellectuals and celebrities, family and friends, and especially strangers.
“Oriental students (and Oriental professors) still want to come and sit at the feet of American Orientalists, and later to repeat to their local audiences the clichés I have been characterizing as Orientalist dogmas.” (Ch.3, IV).
Orientalism, according to Said, is not merely a scientific, objective field as it has always been characterised by the Orientalist himself. Rather, it is a subjectivity: that is, the Orientalist does not study the Orient, but he “comes to terms” with an Orient “that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience.” Though the same may be said about the Occident which does not just exist as an inert fact of nature, for such divide is a social construct first and foremost, and does not translate smoothly into a physical or geographical classification.
Orientalism reflects a history of colonial exploitation. By scrutinising, interpreting and classifying the Orient, the Orientalist justified (in advance and after the fact) the West's right to dominate, restructure and have authority over the Orient.
Although the otherisation of the Oriental has already existed for millenia, Said traces back the changing point of Orientalism to the onset of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. It is at this point in time that Orientalism was institutionalised and 'scientisized'. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the majority of Orientalists were philologists and anthropologists. Yet, the core values of the scientific method—objectivity, disinterest, mutability—notwithstanding, Orientalism preserved, see “secularized,” the mythic discourses of premodernity.
“the scientific categories informing late-nineteenth-century Orientalism are static: there is no recourse beyond “the Semites” or “the Oriental mind”; these are final terminals holding every variety of Oriental behavior within a general view of the whole field. As a discipline, as a profession, as specialized language or discourse, Orientalism is staked upon the permanence of the whole Orient, for without “the Orient” there can be no consistent, intelligible, and articulated knowledge called “Orientalism.”” (Ch.3, II).
Although Science, as an ideal of truth should theoretically be prone to change, admits proof and counterproof; the scientist still holds on his shoulders the overwhelming weight of his predecessors and their values. He is impelled to follow their path, avoid uncertainty and existentiality, to reproduce mythic discourses. And this is especially relevant to Orientalism.
From an existential standpoint, the gaze of the White Man makes of the Oriental man “first an Oriental [essence] and only second a man [existence].” Dehumanised, otherised and silenced; the Oriental is a piece of mold that can be shaped by the Orientalist according to the zeitgeist of his epoch on the one hand, and to the eccentric tendencies of his personality.
In the second half of the twentieth century, which coincides with the decolonisation movement and the zenith of American hegemony, Orientalism went through major transformations. European focus on philology was superseded by a jejune, American obsession in “Social Sciences”. The Orient became then the experimental laboratory of the American social scientist.
“No longer does an Orientalist try first to master the esoteric languages of the Orient; he begins instead as a trained social scientist and “applies” his science to the Orient, or anywhere else.” (Ch.3, IV).
Late (read: American) Orientalism was shaped by government and corporate interests in the non-Western world, and fueled by the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union. This is why very perverse and polemical "studies" of Islam were mass-published (especially by Zionists). Islam, according to the modern Orientalist, is a volatile and purely political religion, a force “contending with the American idea for acceptance by the Near East” along with communism. All this whilst maintaining the early myths of “Oriental despotism.”
“The legendary Arabists in the State Department warn of Arab plans to take over the world. ... the passive Muslims are described as vultures for “our” largesse and are damned when “we lose them” to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.” (Ch.3, IV).
Edward Said's magnum opus is a seminal and well-acclaimed work. Yet it had its fair share of critics. Apart from the Zionists and Orientalists themselves (which we shall dusregard), some scholars criticised Said's dealing with the Middle East as a monolithic category consisting of pure Muslim Arabs. It is not entirely incorrect to say that Said did not leave much space to the other constituents of the region; however, Said is very well aware of the cultural and ethnic diversity characterising West Asia and North Africa. Rather, their virtual absence from the big picture is a better reflection of the Orientalist's vision of what the Near East is, in which non-Arabs and non-Muslims hold a peripheral, if not silent, role. Britain and France, Said contends, viewed themselves as the protectors of Christian minorities from the evils of Islamic "barbarism."
Moreover, Islam is equally simplified by Orientalists and reduced to Islamic Orthodoxy. In the Islamic Orient, everything cannot but be perceived as Islamic, even modernisation and the adoption of European technologies and institutions is itself Islamic. To reiterate a previous thought, the essence precedes existence.
It is important to note that this book was released decades before the 9/11 attacks which spurred another Orientalist wave. Although today the formal, academic field is almost nonexistent, its essentialist doctrines are still being disseminated into the masses, both in the West and the East. The face of Western progressivism has shown a grim, and not entirely unfamiliar face, especially amid the genocide in Gaza. The struggle against dehumanisation and exploitation is not over yet.
P.S. Take a shot every time you read the word Orient.
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Disclaimer: there is no English translation of this book
The setting is 14th century Syria witnessing a stand-off between the usurping Mameluke Sultanate, and the Mongol Ilkhan whose forefathers invaded from the East, and who, having converted to Islam, is seeking to govern the holy sites of Mecca and Medina.
However, amid the grusomeness of the scenes delicately described and narrated, there is an overarching theme which the author fixated on: that is History.
The author does not accept history at face value. There are political ramifications at play that go largely unnoticed by positivist scholarship in the field. For the production of history is neither an objective nor symmetrical process: not everyone has the privilege of writing history, not even one's own history for that matter. The historian's discretionary power in selectively choosing what to convey and what to silence from the past precludes him from being a disinterested observer. History does not merely transmit events and happenings, but rather imposes lessons, ideologies, philosophies and entire worldviews. More precisely, the production of history translates, depending on the context, into the reproduction of the status quo.
The Mongol invasion is exemplary of this particularity of History. This event went down in history as the most horrific massacre in the premodern age; indeed, some historians go as far as to equate it with the Holocaust. This evaluation has been widely accepted and deemed uncontroversial by the scholarship of the last few decades, both in the East and the West.
However, since the twenty-first century, there have been efforts by some scholars to dissect those ramifications of history mentioned earlier within the widely-accepted narrative of “Mongol genocide.” Anja Pistor-Hatam for instance argues that the collective memory of the societies which experienced the invasion has to a certain extent exaggerated the degree of violence commited by the Mongols. What the premodern historians have transmitted secondhand in their books do not conform to archaeological evidence. Though if the extent of the destruction brought by the Mongols is not as significant as it was thought to be, “the trauma was very real” (Lane, 2008). The idea of foreign invasion was more fatal than the act itself, sending the affacted civilisations into existential crisis. The paranoia of the Foreign, the Other, is very well evinced by Al-Zahabi when the novel's characters who pondered on many occasions about the nature of the Monhol soldiers, concluding every time that they were not humans but mythical animals.
While endless literature is dedicated to the Mongol invasion itself, its aftermath and the cultural legacy of the Mongols in Iran and Iraq is rarely acknowledged. The Ilkhanids in fact contributed a lot to the enrichment of art and architecture, one of the perks of the cosmopolitan and diverse constituencies of the Mongol courts. Among the rulers' servants and elite were not only Muslims, but also Christians, Zoroastrians and Buddhists; for the Mongol rulers were more concerned about one's loyalty to the empire rather than religious or ethnic affiliation. Yet, especially in the Muslim world, this perspective remains ignored.
Reviving the bygone past, Al-Zahaby vividly shows the Ilkhan's fear of history, or more accurately his concern over the image that will be left of him by the chroniclers to the later generations:
History is an invincible enemy, for when life creeps into it one would be buried in the ground, stripped of awe and undesired.
The Mameluke Sultan knew of the Ilkhan's weakness and thus surrounded himself with historians and chroniclers, his strongest soldiers against the imminent invasion. He gasps and declares:
O God, may History be my friend and not my enemy.
Bibliography / Further Reading
Al-Zahaby, Khairy. “The Trap of Names” (2009).
Lane, George. “The Mongols in Iran” (2008).
Pistor-Hatam, Anja. “History and its meaning in the Islamic Republic of Iran: The case of the Mongol invasion(s) and rule” (2012).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Silencing the Past:Power nd the Production of History” (1995).
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The attached image is the number of books I have read this year with their page and audio length stats.
If you read audiobooks, ebooks, or library books, the satisfaction of owning tall stack of books that you have read will not be possible for you.
To help you with that, I wanted you know that I pulled a random foot of book shelf and added up the pages. There are 4336 pages in my random foot of paperbacks with one hard cover.
Now you could put together a spreadsheet that tells you how many audio weeks and shelf feet of books you have read without owning the physical books.
If there is interest in this, I could release a template.
