Edward Said's 1975 attack on Orientalists in general and Bernard Lewis in specific provoked a debate that still continues. In As Others See Us, Lewis musters some strong support to help him argue (1) the weakness of Said's case and (2) the value of the Orientalist enterprise. Most of the book looks at the ways in which Westerners and Muslims, Chinese, Japanese, and Indians have seen each other. A brief section at the end considers mutual perceptions between Muslims on one side and Chinese and Indians on the other.
Some of the chapters are brilliant. Fedwa Malti-Douglas shows why Said's attempt to tie Orientalists to imperialism fails ("one man's scholar is another man's Orientalist"); G.M. Wickens absolves Orientalists of responsibility for the life-in-the-harem type of soft pornography; William E. Naff demonstrates the utter irrelevancy of Said's paradigm in the case of Japan; and Carl Steenstrup muses on the whole enterprise of cross-cultural studies (coming up with such offbeat-but important insights as, "what is trivial in one language is trivial also in translation").
Perhaps because it was published as a double issue of the Comparative Civilizations Review, this excellent book has led an utterly obscure existence. Even at this late date, however, the publishers should begin to advertise and distribute As Others See Us; failing that, they should pass it on to another company that will do so.
