Orientalist abuse is not static. It is made of the Aff’s ontological investment in it, and only by rejecting it in every instance can one take an ethical stance.

Yet, Orientalism isvery much tied to the tumultuous dynamics of con- temporary history. I emphasize in it accordingly that neither the term Orient nor theconcept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort,partly affirmation,partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulationand the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time,whenthe mobilization of fear, hatred, disgust andresurgent self-pride and arrogance— much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, ‘we’ Westerners on the other— arevery large-scale enterprises.Orientalism’s first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza, with Israeli F-16s and Apache helicopters used routinely on defenceless civilians as part of their collective punishment. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I write these lines, the illegal and unsanctioned imperial occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds, with resulting physical ravagement and political unrest that is truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not. I wish I could say, however, that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn’t.For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tighten- ing of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliche ́ , the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and ‘others’ has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging and destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that ‘we’ might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and else- where speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the ‘Orient’, that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process the uncountable sediments of his- tory, that include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad’s libraries and museums. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and direct. I should say again that I have no ‘real’ Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be.There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of demo- cracy, and abrogation of women’s rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy areby nomeans simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find like Easter eggs in the living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no live notion (or any knowledge at all of the language of what real people actually speak) has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market ‘democracy’, without even a trace of doubt that such projects don’t exist outside of Swift’s Academy of Lagado.