Covering Islam Edward Said Quotes

عندما جعل علي شريعتي هجرة النبي محمد صلى الله عليه وسلم من مكه إلى المدينة ،فجعلها تنطبق على وضع الإنسان ذاته باعتباره اختياراً وكفاحا وصيروره متواصله ،إنه هجره لانهائية ،هجرة داخل نفسه من الصلصال إلى الإله ،إنه مهاجر داخل روحه نفسها

As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?

يجب أن ننتبه فوراً إلى أنّ الغرب، لا المسيحية، هو دائماً في موضع التنافس والعداء ضد الإسلام. لماذا؟ يكمن السبب في افتراض أنّ "الغرب" أكبر من المسيحية، دينه الرئيسي، وقد تجاوز مرحلتها. أمّا عالم الإسلام -على ما فيه من غنى وتعدد وتنوع في تاريخه ومجتمعاته ولغاته - فيقول الافتراض إنه ما يزال غارقاً في الدين والبدائية والتخلف.

Much as one may be inclined to agree with such theses—since, as this book has tried to demonstrate, Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West—the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the "truth," which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representations (or misrepresentations—the distinction is at best a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse. Within this field, which no single scholar can create but which each scholar receives and in which he then finds a place for himself, the individual researcher makes his contribution. Such contributions, even for the exceptional genius, are strategies of redisposing material within the field; even the scholar who unearths a once-lost manuscript produces the "found" text in a context already prepared for it, for that is the real meaning of finding a new text. Thus each individual contribution first causes changes within the field and then promotes a new stability, in the way that on a surface covered with twenty compasses the introduction of a twenty-first will cause all the others to quiver, then to settle into a new accomodating configuration.