A CRITIQUE OF EDWARD SAID, reviewed by Oliver Miles, "a former British ambassador to Libya, Luxembourg and Greece":

The fossils bite back

Oliver Miles admires Robert Irwin's defence of orientalism against the denunciation of Edward Said, For Lust of Knowing

Saturday February 4, 2006
The Guardian

For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies
Robert Irwin
409pp, Allen Lane, £25

Readable, learned, enthusiastic, this is three books in one: a polemic, a catalogue and a narrative. The polemic is a counterattack against the late Edward Said's denunciation of orientalism. Said, the doyen of Arab-American intellectuals, argued that orientalism - referring to the Middle East and India and largely ignoring China and Japan - was "a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West". For Said, orientalism was the lackey of imperialism and racism. Irwin stands for the orthodox view that it is what it claims to be - the study, as objective as possible, of eastern languages, history, culture and so on.

I must declare an interest. I am, like Irwin, a "living fossil", having been taught Latin and Greek the old way, a way "certainly much closer to that practised in the 17th and 18th centuries than to the system which prevails in the 21st century". From these disciplines I followed a well-trodden path to oriental studies, and I was the pupil of some of the orientalists sketched in his book. I owe them everything both as teachers and as friends, "mentors" to use one classical word that has been reborn in management-speak. Like Irwin I would be flattered if anyone wanted to call me an orientalist.

[...]

I'm not familiar enough with Said's work to have a strong opinion about it, but as far as the language training goes, I guess I count as a "living fossil" too.