"Imagining The Middle East" by Thierry Hentsch; translated by Fred Reed

Book review by Julian Samuel

Montréal, Black Rose Rose Books, 1992

218 pages

originally published as "L'orient imaginaire," Les Editions du minuit, Paris, 1988.

published: The Gazette, 16 January 1993

Thierry Hentsch's "Imagining the Middle East" is monumental in its desire to deal with Europe's contemplation of The Orient. In many ways it is like Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" whose intention is

"to lessen European arrogance" by situating the origins of Greek civilization in Africa. Understandably, Bernal's claim has been dismissed by many historians. However, many African-American intellectuals and others consider his work valuable in offering an alternative view. With similar scholastic intensity, Hentsch presents an   understanding of Europe and of the European self.

"...no civilization was ever so systematically curious about other cultures as Western civilization. But its vast storehouse of anthropological knowledge should have given it a sense of relativity, should have sharpened its self-lucidity." p. 214

The book begins with an account of how the Orient was and is perceived in Western thought. The list of intellectuals raked over the coals by Hentsch is long and thorough.

Cultural Orientalists such as Racine, Leibniz, Voltaire are considered in Hentsch's critical scheme. In one way or another these intellectuals used Islam and the Arab world not simply as raw material for their own creations but, however inadvertently, as a means to project a vision of the European entity back onto itself. The Orient, Hentsch theorizes, is the Empire's reversed looking glass, always ready to reflect whatever response Europe wanted: Europe has democracy; the Orient has oligarchy and despotism; the Occident is feminist, women in the Orient practice "circumcision" of girls, etcetra.

The "contours" of Hentsch's darkly eloquent critique bring us towards a philosophy of cultural and identity politics. The work is not history, but an analysis of history-making as it transpires within the moment-to-moment preoccupations of Empire. Hentsch explains how, before electronic mass media, "The Orient" was made palatable for popular culture.

Like Aldous Huxley in "The Devils of Loudun", Hentsch penetrates the rationality of the most influential of western thinkers: Here are Hentsch's words on Hegel, European par excellence:

"The European character of the Hegelian idea was seen as the objective fruit of the march of history...

a Eurocentrist beatification of Western world domination. Beatification is by no means too strong a word: history merely revealed the eternal immanence of Reason in the universe...Europe regulated the world, and in the mouth of Hegel, revealed the meaning of history..." p.141

Hentsch frames his Europeans as "eurocentric" and then generates a hall of mirrors view of history around them, exposing racist Europe. He is justly and soundly abrasive with Bernard Lewis and less impolite with Karl Marx. In his methods Hentsch is superior to the man who made the anti-Orientalist machine hum in the Occidental mind; Edward Saïd, who is respectfully made to look like a somewhat mechanical critic of Orientalism listing off incorrect things Europe said or did.

For readers fixated by the desire to come to understand the world of plural identities and the tactics of "appropriation" this is a very rich and necessary book. It is also useful for those who study "The Other" and "race" (growth industries these days) and who don't want to bother with the inane prattle of careerist post-modernist "texts" which toy with the same issues.

"Imagining the Middle East" takes us from Antiquity (the initial few chapters need more than school-boy's/girl's knowledge of the Byzantine, Greek, and Roman Empires) to the utter destruction of Iraq which is forced to convalesce strike after surgical strike - "treatment consisting of a strangle-hold." (p. 212)

The final chapter, "The Deadly Frontier" is about more than the Gulf war. Again and again Hentsch probes sinuously into the Western mind, though by now the European mirror has become so drenched in Arab blood that it becomes almost impossible to see a reflection.

At times, I found Hentsch's erudition difficult; ideas get cluttered in historical referencing obscuring his analytical system from view (in spite of his clear prose): the "problematic" is before you in a way that you can recognize it.

"Imagining the Middle East" is an ugly translation of "L'Orient imaginiare". The book's cover projects Arabs as farmers and people walking outside Mosques and so on. Also, it is not easy to read the author's name on the dotty red on yellow on blue cover. Something more in line with the book's trajectories ought to have been visualized.