From a response by Edward Said and Oleg Grabar to Bernard Lewis:
Then there is the meaning of thawra, the common modern Arabic term for revolution, and Lewis’s description of it. His discussion of thawra incidentally is one of two occasions in an enormous article in which Lewis reveals that he is writing not just as a defender of Orientalism, but as someone I had criticized in two of my books. His declaration of interest, as so often, is extremely discreet. With bogus learning, Lewis parades meanings of thawra acquired from a superifical survey of sources. His Orientalist account of the word has very little to do with what it means in contemporary usage; thus his method of proceeding is peculiar to a field that studiously places a greater value on what European scholars thought and said than on what users of a language thought and said. One of his examples is that thawra is associated with the act of rising up, after which Lewis affixes to “rising up” a parenthetical instance, “e.g., a camel.” This he says in his defense follows “the standard classical Arabic dictionaries, and would have been immediately recognized by anyone familiar with Arabic lexicography.” Arabic lexicography isn’t the issue here: the real issue is whether Lewis is right to associate rising camels with the contemporary meaning of the term thawra, and whether anyone using the term in Arabic, i.e., a native speaker, would find the rising camel of any relevance. In fact the standard Arabic dictionaries do not all use the camel example, and when they do (e.g., Lisan al Arab of Ibn Manzur, Tahdhib al lugha by al-Azhari, which are among the very earliest dictionaries) the camel is an insignificant illustration, usually given one or two inconspicuous lines out of a total of several pages. More correct than rising up is the association between thawra and anger as a cause for the movement of armies, people, etc. A very important dictionary, Zamakhshiri’s eleventh-century Assas al Balagha, doesn’t even mention the rising camel. So we see that Lewis deliberately chooses an unimportant example first in order to indulge the well-known Orientalist prejudice that all Semitic languages ought to be understood with reference to concrete or desert usages, and second, to score a point against the modern Arabs whose use of thawra is undercut by the word’s undignified origins. In so doing of course he scants actual usage, the elucidation of which is presumably why he wrote the article. Lewis’s master in this procedure is Renan whose hatred of Arabs and Jews was customarily laced with instances revealing the primitive arrested mentality of desert dwellers lurking beneath a superficially modern exterior.
Comments