The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

Like other postcolonial writers, Said’s central claim is singularly anti-Western. He is uninterested in crimes committed by non-Western powers. And that disinterest helps lead him to believe that every aspect of the West—even or especially its intellectual and cultural curiosity—is to be not just condemned but derided. His central work explaining this trend—Orientalism, published in 1978—has become one of the most widely cited books across disciplines in academia. Said’s central critique is an attempt to prove that when Westerners encountered other societies, they did so through the lens of the societies they came from. Despite the intelligence and style that Said could bring to his writing and his public debates, this central point is wholly unremarkable. After all, through what other lens might Western travelers and scholars have been expected to look at the Orient? Could they have been expected to look at the Middle East through Chinese eyes? Or Middle Eastern eyes? And why should Western explorers, linguists, and others be held to such a strange standard? It would be curious indeed to expect Arabs to have looked at Europe through European eyes. Or for the Chinese to look at the Middle East through Aboriginal eyes. Everybody approaches a different culture through references they have picked up in the culture they are from. There is nothing sinister about this. It is inevitable.