JUNE 06 Newsletter

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Orientalists and Bloggers

Jonathan B. Alterman, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Great Britain did not create Orientalists but, in many ways, it was there that they perfected their art. For more than a century, ancient universities in Oxford, Cambridge and London have turned out polished experts in the language and cultures of the Middle East. French, American, and German universities long ago joined in the enterprise, creating a cadre of educated professionals who could explain the Middle East to laymen, be they in government or business.

It has been little noticed that the Middle East also created its own class of “Westernists,” glib and skillful scholars who in many cases have been educated at those same universities. Often fluent in several European languages as well as their own mother tongues, disproportionately Christian, and emanating in many cases from cosmopolitan Mediterranean port cities, these elites have played a prominent role both explaining their own societies to Western audiences, and explaining the West to societies back home.

For most of the last century, the old school ties have run strong, and the common experiences and common interests of this congenial and co-mingled elite has come to shape relations between these societies. The Orientalists seemed to rule the roost until the 1980s, with seasoned experts such as Bernard Lewis and Sir Hamilton Gibb framing intellectual inquiry. In the last two decades, Arabs themselves seemed to assert the upper hand, with scholars such as Albert Hourani, Sami Zubeida and Ghassan Salamé rising to prominence on the academic side, and scholarly policy makers such as Hanan Ashrawi and Faisal Husseini coming to the fore on the political side.

In this changing world, however, these elites are swiftly losing ground. Outside of the gothic halls and faculty clubs they have long called home, a universe of bloggers, bootleg translators, and self-appointed experts are ascendant.

The key change has been the sudden ubiquity of translation. Only a decade ago, translation was a centralized affair, and few people outside of governments and academia ever did it. Wide scale translation was too expensive and had too small an audience to generate much wider interest.

The rapid spread of education in the Arab world, combined with unprecedented means for distributing translated information to whomever is interested, means that both the traditional demand side of this equation as well as its supply side have been utterly transformed.

Only a decade or so ago, an outrageous quotation in an obscure newspaper would lie dormant and unread. Now, it can circulate on the Internet and within hours emerge in countless wire stories, ripped out of context but cited as an example of “typical” speech. Columnists and television talk show guests in the Arab world and the West drop quotations from translated books and articles to prove their point—and their point is often the venality of their imagined foes. These quotations are often used to paint a stark image of the challenges their societies face, and dramatic steps that must be taken now.

In truth, there is something positive about the democratization of this discourse. There was always a bit of dishonesty in the way that Orientalists and Westernists papered over problems in the relationship, and the way in which they often embraced a sort of benign authoritarianism in the Middle East that was rarely benign to the objects of its oppression. Second-guessing and testing the premises of these relationships is healthy.

The democratization of discourse that has followed, however, gives rise to a whole different beast,

and its impact is likely to be enormous. The first thing to note is how many people who are doing the translating now have clear agendas. They do not seek to discover truth so much as they hope to confirm what they believe, incite, grab attention, and discredit their enemies. Freelance translators often play into a lust for sensationalism that creates its own market for further translations.

Second, it is remarkable just how much authority accrues to those who use the translated information, making even the casual observer into an educated insider. This creates a further demand for translated information that conforms to a certain line of argument.

The third element to note is just how decentralized this process is, relying on loosely coordinated networks of like-minded individuals rather than the large translation organizations of old. There is no client any more, except for the cause the translator seeks to serve.

In all of this lies the peril that the newly distributed information will incite far more than it will inform. Search engines—which work as well in Arabic as they do in English—exacerbate this problem further, since they are so good at taking things out of context and justifying pre-existing views.

The experts have not been rendered irrelevant. To the contrary, they are even more relevant and more necessary. Still, there is no going back to the entitlements they enjoyed in an earlier age as reward for their academic effort. Democracy, after all, is not about entitlements, but about competition, and those who do not compete, lose.