Orientalism’s reductionism fails – no empirical data or foundation, and Said is a hack with no concrete objective argumentative foundations. Means the alternative can’t solve.

Edward Said's Orientalism gave those unable to think for themselves a formula. His work had the attraction of an all-purpose tool his acolytes eager, intellectually unprepared, aesthetically unsophisticated-could apply to every cultural phenomenon without having to think critically or having to conduct any real archival research requiring mastery of languages, or research in the field requiring the mastery of technique and a rigorous methodology. Said's Orientalism displays all the laziness and arrogance of the man of letters who does not havemuch time for empirical research, or, above all, for making sense ofits results. His method derives from the work of fashionable French intellectuals and theorists. Existentialists, structuralists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists all postulate grandiose theories, but, unfortunately, these are based on flimsy historical or empirical foundations. Claude Levi-Strauss, with just a few years of field work in Brazil, constructed a grand theory about the structures of the human mind. As Edmund Leach put it in his short monograph on Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist never bothered to learn the native languages, never spent more than a few weeks in one place; the subsequent model, peppered with Marxist jargon, that he concocted on such meager empirical foundations is "little more than an amalgam" of his "own prejudiced presuppositions." Leach continues, "Levi-Strauss ... is insufficiently critical of his source material. He always seems to be able to find just what he is looking for. Any evidence, however dubious, is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data run counter to the theory Levi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.... [H]e consistently behaves like an advocate defending a cause rather than a scientist searching for ultimate truth."' This tradition was carried on by Michel Foucault, surely one of the great charlatans of modern times. Said, influenced by Foucault, Marx, and the French intellectual tradition, refuses to acknowledge evidence that does not fit into hisalready prepared Procrustean bed; evidence such as the work of German Orientalistsor the evidence of Indian Orientalists who praise the scholarly contribution of their European colleagues. Generally speaking, Said's thinking can be characterized as "ideological."An ideologue is immune to argument; he believes his ideas about man, history, and society to be self-evident, and anyone opposing them to be either stupid or malevolent. He cannot lose since his interpretation has already been determined in advance of observations. His attitude is immune to facts or reality, and no argument will ever disprove him.' The ideology is a way of interpreting the world: I can shut out recalcitrant data, I can shut my eyes if necessary.' Ideology is a method of substituting sweeping structural explanations for empirical investigation; for the ideologues, all the failings of his target group are the systematic products of its core identity. In cultures already immune to self-criticism, Said helped Muslims, and particularly Arabs, perfect their already well-developed sense of self-pity. There is a kind of comfort and absolution in being told that none of your problems are of your making, that you do not have to accept any responsibility for the ills besetting your society. It is all the fault of the West,of infidels. There is no need even to take responsibility for selfdetermination, it is easier to accept money from the Western donors and to treat it as one's rightful due from them, that is, a kind of jizyah. The attraction of Said's thesis for third-world intellectuals is thus easily understandable. But why was it so successful among Western intellectuals? Post-World War II Western intellectuals and leftists were consumed by guilt for the West's colonial past and continuing colonialist present, and they wholeheartedly embraced any theory or ideology that voiced or at least seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of the third world. Orientalism came at the precise time when anti-Western rhetoric was at its most shrill and was already being taught at Western universities, and when third-worldism was at its most popular. Jean-Paul Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the exploitation of the third world, and that violence against Westerners was a legitimate means for colonized men to re-acquire their manhood., Said went further: "It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric"(p. 204). Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so. As I have argued, Western civilization has been more willing to criticize itself than any other major culture. These self-administered admonishments are a far cry from Said's savage strictures, and yet they found a new generation ready to take them to heart. Berating and blaming the West, a fashionable game in the 1960s and 1970s that impressionable youth took seriously, had the results we now see when the same generation appears unwilling to defend the West against the greatest threat that it has faced since the Nazis.When shown that Said is indeed a fraud, his friends and supporters in academia sidestep the criticisms and evidence, and pretend, as did several reviewers of Robert Irwin's book on Said, that Said may indeed have got the "footling details" wrong but he was, nonetheless, onto a higher truth. Said's influence, thus, was a result of a conjunction of several intellectual and political trends: post-French Algeria and post-Vietnam tiers mondisme (third-worldism); the politicization of increasingly postmodernist English departments that had argued away the very idea of truth, objective truth; and the influence of Foucault. In effect Said played on each of these confidence tricks to create a master fraud that bound American academicsand Middle East tyrants in unstated bonds of anti American complicity'In Said's works there is no room for historical comparisons. The West alone stands, tried on the basis of a few examples taken out of historical context, judged and condemned as the source of all evil. There was slavery in the West, but, as pointed out above, the West itself took the first steps to actually abolish it. Indeed, abolitionism, as Olivier Petre-Grenouilleau reminds us in his pathbreaking comparative study,' was an Occidental concept that did not resonate in either black Africa or the Islamic world. In his study of the slave trade in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, Ehud R. Toledano wrote, "Accepted by custom, perpetuated by tradition and sanctioned by religion, slavery was an integral part of Ottoman society." He further adds that no abolitionist movement ever emerged in the Ottoman Empire. On the contrary, Ottoman politics can be characterized as a continual resistance of varying intensity to British abolitionist pressure. Slavery was taken for granted and abolitionism was considered a foreign, English idea-barely understood, let alone accepted.' Turkish historian Y H. Erdem confirms Toledano's findings; there was no organized abolitionist movement in the Ottoman Empire, no abolitionist tracts popularizing the subject and bringing home the suffering of the slaves. Moreover, in modern Turkey, continues Erdem, the abolition of slavery is not a part of the educational curriculum, and there is no specific date for abolition that could have been used as a point of departure for such a study.9