1960s

The 1960s matter in Edward Said’s account as a moment when revisionist challenges reshaped some area studies but left the study of Arabs and Islam largely unrevised. The decade therefore marks not a general academic transformation but an uneven one: inherited assumptions persisted where political and scholarly institutions continued to treat the Orient as uniform, timeless, and dependent on Western interpretation.

A Uneven Revision of Area Studies

Said contrasts the experience of Arab and Islamic studies with changes elsewhere. During the 1960s, the Committee of Concerned Asia Scholars led a revolution among East Asia specialists, while revisionists similarly challenged specialists in African studies and other fields concerned with the Third World. These developments show that Orientalist assumptions could be contested within area studies rather than accepted as the necessary terms of scholarship.

The contrast is pointed: Said argues that Arabists and Islamologists alone continued to function without comparable revision. In their work, the notions of a unified Islamic society, an Arab mind, or an Oriental psyche remained available as explanatory categories. The decade’s significance thus lies as much in the exception as in the change: the reform of neighboring fields throws the persistence of old premises in Arab and Islamic studies into sharper relief.

Inherited Assumptions and Their Effects

Said identifies a set of durable dogmas underlying modern study of Arabs and Islam. They oppose a rational, developed, humane, superior West to an aberrant, undeveloped, inferior Orient; prefer abstractions drawn from classical texts to evidence from contemporary life; and depict the Orient as eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself. These assumptions make generalized descriptions appear objective and leave open the prospect that the Orient must be feared or controlled.

In Said’s account, this framework did not simply survive as a collection of outdated academic opinions. It shaped what researchers and policymakers could recognize as political action. When contemporary Arab realities were read through a fixed image of Islam derived from the seventh century, colonialism, imperialism, and ordinary politics could be obscured by an imagined historical unity. The result was a vocabulary that explained living societies through inherited categories rather than attending to their changing circumstances.

Political Language and Revolution

Said’s discussion of Bernard Lewis’s treatment of the Arabic word thawra illustrates how such categories could diminish modern political meaning. Lewis delays discussion of the word’s contemporary use until the end of his essay, first treating related terms in historical and religious contexts. His account associates the root with rising, excitement, rebellion, and the establishment of petty sovereignty; Said argues that this sequence frames revolution as something lesser than a struggle around political values.

The camel example makes the interpretive stakes especially clear. By connecting the root’s meaning to a camel rising, Lewis’s etymological account, as Said reads it, risks making modern Arab revolution seem trivial or merely agitated. Said stresses that innumerable people have an active commitment to revolution in ways too complex for that reduction. He further argues that Orientalist literature of this kind could not explain or prepare its readers for revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world during the twentieth century.

Language as a Scholarly Object

Said extends the critique from historical vocabulary to claims about Arabic itself. He singles out E. Shouby’s essay on the influence of Arabic on Arab psychology, whose headings characterize Arabic through alleged vagueness of thought, overemphasis on linguistic signs, and exaggeration. Although Shouby is presented as a psychologist with clinical and social psychology training, Said argues that the essay’s authority rests partly on the fact that its author is Arab, lending an Orientalist claim the appearance of insider confirmation.

For Said, the problem is not merely that the essay makes a crude generalization. It does not substantiate its claims by quoting the Arabic literature it purports to describe. Instead, it creates an imagined Arab who is both mute and excessively verbal, turning a language into a supposed diagnosis of its speakers. Said treats this as evidence of a disciplinary shift: philological tools, once part of a complex scholarly tradition, have been transformed into ideological expertise about society and psychology.

The Decade’s Place in Said’s Argument

The 1960s function as a measure of selective academic change. Revisionism in East Asian, African, and other Third World studies demonstrates that scholarly frameworks can be challenged; the continued lack of comparable revision in Arab and Islamic studies exposes the durability of Orientalist categories. The difference is institutional as well as intellectual: a research consensus maintained through agencies, institutions, and traditions can persist even when its assumptions have been contested elsewhere.

Said’s examples also clarify what is at stake in describing the decade. Terms such as thawra and claims about Arabic are not neutral labels when historical meaning is narrowed to fit a prior image of Arab political incapacity or psychological defect. The 1960s therefore appear in the book not as a self-contained period narrative, but as a hinge in an argument about the unequal reception of critique and the continuing power of inherited knowledge to shape accounts of contemporary life.