Edward Said's Orientalism has received both
praise and criticism. Among the criticisms leveled is the charge that
Said's neglect of German scholarship misses an important part of
Orientalism in the West. Robert Irwin, for example, notes that German
Biblical scholarship was critically influential as a “motivating
force for the study of Islam” and that the “German
form-critical techniques” developed to study the Old Testament
influence on the way “Western scholars interpret[ed] the Koran
and the early Islamic community.” Bernard Lewis claims that
Said's neglect of German scholarship calls into question his
entire project and likens it to writing a history of European music
without a discussion of the German contribution.
See Robert Erwin, “Writing about
Islam and the Arabs,” Ideology and Consciousness, 9
(1981–82), 108–9; Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108. More generally,
critics have noted that the presence of an influential Orientalist
scholarship in Germany, as well as the absence of any significant
Germany colonies in the Orient, calls into question Said's claim
that there is a confluence between scholarship and political power in
Orientalist discourse. Neither critics nor supporters, on the other
hand, have given much attention to Said's claim that there is a
similarity between Orientalism and anti-Semitism. Said states this in
his introduction, where he notes that in “addition and by an
almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a
strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism,
and as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch Orientalism resemble
each other is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs
only be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly
understood” (1978:27–28). Elsewhere, Said has faulted
critics of his work on Orientalism for seeing “in the critique
of Orientalism an opportunity for them to defend Zionism . . . and
launch attacks on Palestinian nationalism,” instead of giving
attention to the similarity “between Islamophobia and
anti-Semitism” (1985:9).