SOURCE: A review of Orientalism, in The New Republic, Vol. 180, No. 14, April 7, 1979, pp. 27-33.

In the harsh review below, Wieseltier demonstrates how politics inform many of Said's arguments in Orientalism, suggesting that "the methodological gadgetry and 'iconoclastic' analysis of his book issue in little more than the abject canards of Arab propaganda."

Edward Said's angry book [Orientalism] is about a collusion of knowledge with power. The knowledge is Orientalism and the power is imperialism. Said contends that images of the Orient in the West's traditions of learning and literature are of a piece with the institutions of conquest and administration that it loosed upon the East. Fictions about Islam and the Arabs were manufactured to justify, and even exalt, Europe's rapacious political and cultural designs. In Said's account the self-serving misperceptions appear already in Aeschylus (Peter Brown once called this sort of thing "the Plato-to-NATO" school of intellectual...