Not quite as hypocritical [as Bernard Lewis], but no less uncritical, are younger ideologues and Orientalists like Daniel Pipes whose expertise as demonstrated in his book In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power is wholly at the service not of knowledge but of an aggressive and interventionary State - the U.S. - whose interests Pipes helps to define. Even if we leave aside the intellectually scandalous generalizing that allows Pipes to speak of Islam's anomie, its sense of inferiority, its defensiveness, as if Islam were one simple thing, and as if the quality of his either absent or impressionistic evidence were of the most secondary importance, Pipes's book testifies, I think, to Orientalism's unique resilience, its insulation from intellectual developments everywhere else in the culture, and its antediluvian imperiousness as it makes its assertions and affirmations with little regard for logic or argument. I doubt that any expert anywhere in the world would speak today of Judaism or Christianity with quite that combination of force and freedom that Pipes allows himself about Islam, although one would have thought that a book about Islamic revival would allude to parallel and related developments in styles of religious resurgence in, for example, Lebanon, Israel, and the U.S. Nor is it likely that anyone anywhere, writing about material for which, in his own words, "rumor, hearsay, and other wisps of evidence" are the only proof, will in the very same paragraph alchemically transmute rumor and hearsay into "facts" on whose "multitude" he relies in order "to reduce the importance of each." This is magic quite unworthy even of high Orientalism, and although Pipes pays his obeisance to imperialist Orientalism he masters neither its genuine learning nor its pretense at disinterestedness. For Pipes, Islam is a volatile and dangerous business, a political movement intervening in and disrupting the West, stirring up insurrection and fanaticism everywhere else.
The core of Pipes's book is not simply its highly expedient sense of its own political relevance to Reagan's America where terrorism and communism fade imperceptibly into the media's images of Muslim gunners, fanatics, and rebels, but its thesis that Muslims themselves are the worst source for their own history. The pages of In the Path of God are dotted with references to Islam's incapacity for self-representation, self-understanding, self-consciousness, and with praise for witnesses like V.S. Naipaul who are so much more useful and clever in understanding Islam. Here, of course, is perhaps the most familiar of Orientalist themes - since the Orientals cannot represent themselves, they must therefore be represented by others who know more about than Islam knows about itself. Now it is often the case that you can be known by others in different ways than you know yourself, and that insights might be generated accordingly. But that is quite a different thing than pronouncing it as immutable law that outsiders ipso facto have a better sense of you as an insider than you do of yourself. Note that there is no question of an exchange between Islam's views and an outsider's: no dialogue, no discussion, no mutual recognition. There is a flat assertion of quality, which the Western policy-maker, or his faithful servant, possesses by virtue of his being Western, white, non-Muslim.
Now this, I submit, is neither science, nor knowledge, nor understanding: it is a statement of power and a claim for relatively absolute authority. It is constituted out of racism, and it is made comparatively acceptable to an audience prepared in advance to listen to its muscular truths. Pipes speaks to and for a large clientele for whom Islam is not a culture, but a nuisance; most of Pipes's readers will, in their minds, associate what he says about Islam with the other nuisances of the 60's and 70's - blacks, women, post-colonial Third World nations that have tipped the balance against the U.S. in such places as UNESCO and the U.N., and for their pains have drawn forth the rebuke of Senator Moynihan and Mrs. Kirkpatrick. In addition, Pipes - and the rows of like-minded Orientalists and experts he represents as their common denominator - stands for programmatic ignorance. Far from trying to understand Islam in the context of imperialism and the revenge of an abused, but internally very diverse, segment of humanity, far from availing himself of the impressive recent work on Islam in different histories and societies, far from paying some attention to the immense advances in critical theory, in social science and humanistic research, in the philosophy of interpretation, far from making some slight effort to acquaint himself with the vast imaginative literature produced in the Islamic world, Pipes obdurately and explicitly aligns himself with colonial Orientalists like Snouck Hurgronje and shamelessly pro-colonial renegades like V.S. Naipaul, so that from the eyrie of the State Department and the National Security Council he might survey and judge Islam at will.
I have spent this much time talking about Pipes only because he usefully serves to make some points about Orientalism's large political setting, which is routinely denied and suppressed in the sort of claim proposed by its main spokesman, Bernard Lewis, who has the effrontery to disassociate Orientalism from its 200 year old partnership with European imperialism and associate it instead with modern classical philology and the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture.
