LETTER TO RADWA ASHOUR,

ORPHANS OF EDWARD W. SAID

By Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla

© Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla

Dear Radwa,

We have received your “Letter to Europe”. I would

like to thank you on behalf of everyone for having

written it. One reading confirms that you were

one of the most appropriate people to write it,

that you were going to take an abstract and

somewhat extravagant proposal seriously. I don’t

know if you are aware that we also tried to get

Abdurrahman Mounif to write another letter but,

unfortunately, his health is delicate and he

declined our offer.

While your “Letter to Europe” was not written

expecting a response, reading it brought to mind

so many things that I could not leave it

unanswered. I share your ideas to such a degree

that I can’t help but be surprised that there are

still people who believe those apocalyptical

prophecies regarding the unbreachable

differences between human beings due to

cultural or religious factors. Your letter appealed

to me for many reasons, because you endorse

knowledge and understanding between peers

and, most of all, because your words do not

contain laments or nostalgia, but rather the

genuine aspiration to live in a better planet. And I

love that you have chosen the word “planet” to

allude to this unjust world, because it is earthy,

ecological and ecumenical and at the same time

cosmic: the human species and the planet Earth.

I am writing you from Toledo, two months after

you finished your provocative letter to Europe in

Cairo. Only two months, and it seems as if the

world - the planet Earth, I mean - has continued

to worsen. The extreme right, racist and

xenophobic, is also on the rise in Switzerland.

Every day more rafts set out into the Strait of

Gibraltar to reach the shores of Andalusia, now

Europe’s southern border. The other day a seven year

old Moroccan boy arrived on board one of

those boats. People risk their lives to cross the

Mediterranean sea, that real and imaginary

chasm that joins us as well as separating us. And

there are those who freeze to death on boats

adrift that reach too late their destination. At

night the waters of the Mediterranean turn deadly

and the waves deposit lifeless, half-dressed

bodies on the beaches. Some of those who

survive are repatriated - cruel euphemism,

exposed by José María Ridao, when referring to

deportations. The war in Iraq, which they wanted

to be short, and the conclusion of which they

announced with great fanfare, appears to be

endless. The UN continues to be attacked on all

fronts. The assaults come one after another with

monotonous regularity throughout the region.

The wall of separation advances impassibly

between Palestine and Israel.

I am writing you this from the “old Europe”, in

defence of which you stand in your letter, a

Europe that, as you very well state, drags the

weight of its history - we know this well in a city

like Toledo - and whose values one can identify

with, but whose horrors cannot be forgotten.

And perhaps we should pay more attention to

values and ideas, because, as Juan Goytisolo set

forth in an interview: “Do you truly believe that

Spain or Europe will exist in a thousand years?”1. I

also know the Europe of demonstrations against

the war in which you place hope, but I would

warn you that it could be a mirage that led many

to believe what was not.

In connection with this seminar Enlargement of

minds and with this publication, the name of

Edward W. Said was mentioned on various

occasions. We all thought that Said fit in with the

philosophy of this reunion, which we would have

liked for him to attend, but we knew about his

illness and his multiple commitments. We then

tried to interview him, but that was also not

possible, as is the case for so many of the

initiatives taken within the lengthy process

required to organise an event of this nature, the

final version of which differs from that initially

conceived.

Dear Radwa: I don’t think I need to tell you that

we would have liked to have had you here with us,

you and others who for various reasons were not

able to attend, because at times the stars vary

their orbit unexpectedly. What can I tell you, who

knows so much of these matters?

Although, naturally, the presence or words of Said

would have enhanced any event or publication, it

is nonetheless paradoxical that, being a

Palestinian settled in New York, he seemed to fit

perfectly in a “Euro-Mediterranean” encounter.

Maybe this is because Said has become a moral

and intellectual reference, and because many of

his viewpoints and analyses continue to hold

force. As a result, we cannot help but feel vaguely

disorientated and orphaned by his death.

1 El País, 15-II-03.

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Because we would have liked to ask him what is

happening, ask him about the occupation of Iraq,

ask him if the barbarians have arrived or if it is

another mirage, ask him what will become of us...

We would have liked to ask Edward Said what is

happening in the world that we have this

sensation of moving backwards, of witnessing a

reverse as vertiginous as it is sad, and which

brings back attitudes and language that we

believed obsolete. Not only in Spain and the

Mediterranean, but on a planetary scale, this

sensation is becoming more and more

unnerving. In an analysis of the concept of

“international terrorism”, a term turned into a

catchall apparently applicable to anything at the

convenience of a fierce political propaganda, one

of our most open-minded intellectuals, the

comparatist Claudio Guillén warned in

“Language and the War”2 against the subversion

of language and the regression in the advance of

humanity: “What is at risk is the capacity of

History to overcome itself, the old colonialism

and the disproportionate pride that permitted

one part of the world to impose its will on the

others, razing nations, committing murder in the

name of Christ, unsettling and transforming

whole societies.”

For months and years we have been hearing talk

about crusades and holy wars, although,

naturally, it is not to those times - we hope - that

we are returning, but another that, as Guillén

points out, shows itself to be clearly rooted in

colonialism. The complex mesh of economic,

political and military interests that characterised

the colonial enterprises of the 19th century has

resurged in the opening of the 21st century,

painting as a crusade which has all the signs of

being nothing more than colonial machinery in

full sail, with its characteristic authoritarian

attitude camouflaged as a civilising mission.

How can we explain, otherwise, that in 2003 we

find it normal that the Bush Administration has

invaded Iraq, forced a change in regime for the

good of the Iraqi people and established a

protectorate led by a proconsul? Or that the

United States and its allies have serious plans to

undertake the pacification and democratisation of

the entire region? Aren’t we also taken back to the

colonial era by the emergence, once again, of the

Kurdish problem, a people without a State,

bloody upshot of colonial division? And the

looting of the National Library and the National

Museum in Baghdad, and the disappearance of

so many treasures from 7,000 years of

civilisation? The mere evocation of these

2 El País, 14-2II-03.

episodes continues to cause astonishment. Not

because of the devastation of Iraqi national

heritage - that dream, no less true for its

delusions, of possessing a nation anchored in

History, that of Saddam Hussein and of all the

nationalists in this world - but because of the

disregard for those 7,000 years of history of

human civilisation and barbarity, because of the

contrast drawn between such devastation and the

care with which the pipelines are protected. And

the UN? Turned into a nuisance for the

champions of these initiatives, as if it had no

purpose. A UN on the verge of legitimising the

occupation of Iraq and backing colonialism. Does

this not also take us back to principles more in

line with the League of Nations, which

contemplated the well-being and development of

certain peoples as a “sacred mission of

civilisation”?

There is regression on many fronts, but also

validity, as time does not appear to have passed

for Orientalism, the essay that Edward Said

published in 1978, a quarter of a century ago. Rereading

that work, against the backdrop of events

that we are fated to live, clarifies the tangle of

confused reality, that “terrifying reality” to which

the novelist Sonallah Ibrahim referred to not long

ago in Cairo on rejecting an important official

award. The doctrines of Orientalism - ideology,

style and academic tradition that established an

ontological distinction between “East” and

“West” and was characterised by its drive for

“dominating, reconstructing and having authority

over Orient” - appear to have recovered an

unexpected relevance. Or perhaps it is just that

they never lost their relevance.

Said dissected the behaviour of colonial powers

and, with clairvoyance, envisaged the appearance

of the new – and now only – imperial power. He

observed that the political elite of the imperial

powers, provided that some matter relating to

their interests abroad were at risk, transmitted to

their civilian societies “a sense of urgency”. He

was also right in exposing that the “Orient” in

which Iraq is placed is not merely a geographical

notion; it is, most of all, an idea that has “a

history, a tradition of thought, imagery and

vocabulary”. The supposed dangers of “Orient”

and its fatidic tendency towards satrapy have

always been essential elements of the Orientalist

representation, whose essential dogma is the

unquestionable belief in “Western superiority”.

Without a doubt the Bush government ignores

the genealogy of knowledge to which its

Manichean and simplistic vision of the world

belongs, but in the core it does not differ greatly

from that of Balfour, who, at the beginning of the

118

20th century, to politically justify the British

colonial presence in Egypt, invoked the good of

the Egyptians and the good of all Europe. In a

recent article by Neil Clark “The return of

Arabophobia”3, this reporter reminded us of

Richard Perle’s reaction to fears expressed by

Egyptian politicians regarding the consequences

of the occupation of Iraq in the region: “Egyptians

can barely govern their own country, we don’t

need advice on how to govern ours”.

Among the codes of Orientalist orthodoxy is that

of representing the others and speaking in their

name using abstract and immutable sentences.

Might not the proliferation of texts by alleged

specialists trying to explain the intrinsic evilness

of Islam, a religion that for some would hold the

seeds of violence since its origins, be, as Said

suggested, part of the erudite support for colonial

undertakings of this kind? The massive

stigmatisation of the coreligionists of Islam,

converted into a Platonic essence, ontologically

stable throughout the centuries, seems to

emanate directly from the constellation of ideas

and intellectual positions that characterised the

Orientalist disciplines. Today, once again, this

enthusiasm for the exotic is showing its face, that

other side of the coin described by Juan

Goytisolo, that of fascination and attraction for a

salon-Orient, preterit and aseptic, what Said

called the Orientalia epidemic.

The progression of the institutions and ideas that

fed Orientalism coincided with the period of

greatest European colonial expansion. But, for

Said, to argue that this discipline was a

rationalisation of the colonial principle is “to

ignore the extent to which colonial rule was

justified in advance by Orientalism”. If in other

times the name of God was bandied about, and

later the name of progress, to justify colonial

injustices, now in the name of democracy - of

their democracy, and of our safety – we are

helplessly witnessing a full fledged colonial war.

When dehumanising ideologies once more start

to forge their way, perhaps we should not forget,

as the Palestinian essayist set forth in 1978, that

“anti-Semitism and Orientalism in its Islamic

branch resemble each other very closely” and that

in this “Orient”, apart from the tyrant, there also

live human beings “whose lives, histories and

customs possess a reality that is obviously much

richer than anything that can be said about

them”. As Mourid Barghouti said: "People are not

simply individuals, every one is a whole planet.

And so when someone I love dies, it's as if the

day of resurrection has come. The enemy of

3 The Independent, 20-X-2003.

anything refined in a human being is reduction.

And this is what we suffer from as Palestinians;

we are defined, we are labelled. No one sees the

planet in each one of us, we are either terrorists

or victims, killers or killed, always reduced and

labelled. And we do this to ourselves too. In 1948

we called the people who came from the

Palestinian coasts to Ramallah refugees”4.

Dear Radwa, like you, I believe that we are

witnessing the birth of a new empire and that the

part of the planet from which you are writing is

being re-conquered by the new and sole colonial

power. In the name of democracy, but also

invoking God and noble ideals such as liberty and

the truth, we are witnessing the rise of a new

emperor of East and West, in whose galactic

dominions the suns will not set. All we can hope

for is a reincarnation, in which I cannot believe,

although I can believe in that conjunction of the

stars and, especially, in the earthly circumstances

that turned a perpetually “out of place” boy into a

thinker who illuminated the recesses of History.

Hope for that, and hope that the suns and moons

of the Sufi tradition of Ibn Arabi will rise in the

heaven of their hearts.

Toledo, 1 November 2003

4 Al-Ahram Weekly, 23-I-03.

‘BEYOND

ENLARGEMENT:

OPENING EASTWARDS,

CLOSING SOUTHWARDS?’

An ECF ‘Enlargement of Minds’ Seminar

in cooperation with

Escuela de Traductores de Toledo,

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Toledo, 13-16 November 2003