Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and the Middle East are still living, in different ways, with the questions that moment raised. Wars have erupted, regimes have fallen and others have emerged, and alliances have shifted.
It’s an anniversary that takes us back, consciously or otherwise, to one of the most important intellectual battles in American academia during the final decades of the twentieth century: the dispute between Edward Said and Bernard Lewis. Their disagreement was not simply about the Middle East. It was about who has the right to interpret it, what tools should be used to do so, and at what point interpretation itself becomes part of the conflict. When Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978, he was not merely offering another book about the East. He was posing a far more unsettling question to the Western cultural establishment: How is knowledge about peoples subjected to Western power constructed, and who has the authority to define them and present them to the world?
Bernard Lewis became one of the most prominent critics of Said’s thesis, and their dispute soon moved beyond university lecture halls into journals, newspapers, and politics. In the United States in particular, where both men lived, taught, and wrote for broad audiences, their disagreement was never purely academic. The country producing knowledge about the Middle East was also a country possessing enormous military and political power and the capacity to intervene in the region. That is precisely what made their confrontation so consequential.
Do not judge scholarship by the identity of the scholar or the politics surrounding it – judge it by its sources, its accuracy, and its ability to substantiate its claims.
The two men came from very different academic traditions. Said, a Palestinian American and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, brought with him the tools of literary criticism, discourse analysis, and the study of cultural representation. Lewis, a British-born historian specializing in Islamic and Ottoman history who moved to Princeton University in 1974, came from the traditions of history, languages, and manuscript scholarship. Lewis’s underlying premise was that scholars could approach the truth by mastering languages, examining documents, comparing sources, and correcting errors. Said, however, was asking a different set of questions: Who chose these questions in the first place? Who created the categories through which we think? And what is the relationship between the institutions that produce knowledge and the political power that makes use of it?
In Orientalism, Said connected European knowledge of the East to imperial expansion. He argued that recurring images of the East as static, irrational, or incapable of self-rule were not merely isolated stereotypes but part of a framework that could help justify domination. His argument did not require treating all Orientalist scholarship as false. Rather, it required taking into account the circumstances in which information was selected, interpreted and elevated into representations of entire societies.
Lewis strongly rejected this generalization. In his famous 1982 essay “The Question of Orientalism,” he accused Said of grouping very different scholarly traditions under a single political interpretation and of focusing more on the presumed motives of scholars than on the value of the knowledge they produced. He also pointed out that the study of the East had flourished in European countries that had no Arab colonies, and that many scholars had made genuine contributions to the study of Islamic languages and history.
Lewis’s defense was, at its core, both simple and powerful: Do not judge scholarship by the identity of the scholar or the politics surrounding it – judge it by its sources, its accuracy, and its ability to substantiate its claims. But Said believed that this still failed to answer the original question. The issue was not simply whether a historical document was authentic or accurate, but how documents were selected, what questions were asked of them, and how they were ultimately transformed into sweeping narratives about millions of people. At one of its most fundamental levels, then, their disagreement was about the very meaning of objectivity.
Palestine made the argument still more intense. For Said, the question of cultural representation could not be separated from the way Palestinians and Arabs appeared in Western political and media discourse. Cultural images, he believed, did not remain confined to books; they could shape people’s ability to recognize the rights and experiences of others. Lewis, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a different question: Why had Muslim societies, after centuries in which they constituted some of the world’s most advanced and powerful civilizations, fallen behind in the face of the rise of the West? Their exchanges in The New York Review of Books revealed a disagreement whose intensity went beyond scholarly debate. From this point onward, the distance between the two men began to expand from a dispute over “Orientalism” into a much larger disagreement about the relationship between Islam and the West.
In his 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Lewis turned to religious and civilizational history in search of the roots of hostility toward the West, using a phrase that would later become enormously famous: “clash of civilizations.” At the same time, he warned against turning this interpretation into reciprocal hostility toward Islam and Muslims, and he did not argue that all Muslims – or even most Muslims – were participants in such a clash. Three years later, Samuel Huntington transformed the “clash of civilizations” into a comprehensive thesis about the post-Cold War world.
Then came September 11, and suddenly the debate was no longer merely an intellectual exercise. Airliners struck New York and Washington, al-Qaeda spoke in explicitly religious terms, and the United States prepared for wars that would continue for years. For a moment, history appeared to be offering bloody evidence for the theory of a civilizational clash.
Edward Said, however, saw almost precisely the opposite. Just weeks after the attacks, he wrote his famous essay “The Clash of Ignorance,” attacking the way terms such as “Islam” and “the West” were transformed into two enormous entities supposedly battling one another across history. His objection was that there is no single “Islam” that behaves like a state, just as there is no single “West.” Within every civilization are states, classes, movements, interests, conflicts, and contradictory ideas. Said condemned the crime of September 11 without hesitation, but he rejected the intellectual leap from an atrocity committed by a particular group to an explanation of an entire civilization.
Twenty-five years later, that debate appears far from over. The Middle East is once again passing through a period that can easily be portrayed as a grand civilizational confrontation. Religion is powerfully present. Iran uses religious and revolutionary language; armed groups raise ideological and religious slogans; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict carries profound religious and historical dimensions; and American political discourse sometimes invokes moral and civilizational language when discussing terrorism and conflict in the region. On social media, meanwhile, the leap from a war among states and armed groups to a “war between Islam and the West,” or between religions and civilizations, can be made with remarkable ease.
And so the question raised by Said and Lewis decades ago becomes relevant once again: Are religion and civilization what explain these conflicts, or are they also the language through which struggles over power, security, territory, and influence are narrated?
This is precisely where the debate between Said and Lewis becomes especially compelling a quarter-century after September 11. Lewis was asking, in one form or another: What happened to the Islamic world in its long encounter with modernity and Western ascendancy? Said was asking: Who has the authority to define “the Islamic world” in the first place, and how do those definitions become knowledge and then policy? Neither question has disappeared.
Lewis’s book What Went Wrong?, published in 2002, was largely written before the September 11 attacks. It was not conceived as a direct explanation of the attacks so much as an attempt to understand a much longer historical trajectory. A quarter-century later, the question contained in its title still sounds familiar: What happened? Where did things go wrong? But Said’s legacy may lie in warning us that the question itself can become problematic if it assumes that an entire civilization somehow “went wrong,” rather than examining multiple societies with very different political, economic, and historical experiences.
Not every criticism of Arab or Muslim societies is an act of intellectual colonialism, and the fact that a scholar does not share the identity of the people being studied is not, by itself, a reason to invalidate that scholar’s knowledge.
That is why the conflict between the two men was more than a rivalry between two eminent professors. Said transformed entire fields in the humanities, making scholars more attentive to their own position, the language they use, and the voices absent from the sources on which they rely. After Orientalism, it became difficult to study another society without asking about the relationship between knowledge and power.
Yet Said himself is not beyond criticism. If the concept of “Orientalism” is expanded without limit, it can turn from a tool for exposing bias into a ready-made accusation against any unwelcome interpretation. Not every criticism of Arab or Muslim societies is an act of intellectual colonialism, and the fact that a scholar does not share the identity of the people being studied is not, by itself, a reason to invalidate that scholar’s knowledge.
We do not have to choose between Said and Lewis as though choosing between rival teams. Instead, we can preserve the unease that each cultivated from a different direction: Lewis’s concern about interpretation that is not protected by precise knowledge, and Said’s concern about knowledge that never asks how it acquired its authority. Twenty-five years after September 11, the temptation remains to describe the Middle East through grand categories: Islam and the West, East and West, Sunni and Shia, Jews and Muslims, modernity and tradition. These categories contain elements of reality, but they become dangerous when they claim to explain all of it.
Perhaps that is why the debate between Edward Said and Bernard Lewis remains alive. Ultimately, it was not simply about “the East” but about the lens through which we look at it. In the aftermath of September 11, two almost opposing interpretations came to symbolize the argument: the “clash of civilizations” on one side and the “clash of ignorance” on the other. A quarter-century later, as some once again try to portray the wars of the Middle East as a confrontation between East and West, or between Islam and other religions, perhaps the most important question is not about the “clash of civilizations.” It is this: Who convinced us in the first place that this is the right way to describe the war?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
