E. Shouby

E. Shouby is presented as a psychologist whose influential essay turns Arabic into an explanation for an imagined Arab psychology. In Edward Said’s critique, Shouby’s account does not establish how Arabic works through engagement with its literature; instead, it converts the language into a set of stereotypes about Arab thought and expression, showing how scholarly authority can reproduce Orientalist assumptions.

Identity and Scholarly Position

Said describes Shouby as a psychologist trained in both clinical and social psychology and identifies his essay, “The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Psychology of the Arabs,” as a contemporary locus classicus for the view that Arabic itself is a dangerous ideology. Shouby’s position as an Arab, Said suggests, helps explain why his claims circulate widely: he is treated as an insider whose authority appears to confirm the argument from within.

That authority is especially consequential because Shouby is frequently cited as an expert. Said argues that he speaks in the manner of an authority while presenting a construction of the Arab that is at once mute and excessively verbal. The force of the essay, in this reading, rests not only on its claims but on the credibility attached to its author and professional standing.

The Essay’s Account of Arabic

The essay’s subheadings condense its argument. Arabic is associated with “General vagueness of Thought,” “Overemphasis on Linguistic Signs,” and “Over-assertion and Exaggeration.” Said characterizes this as a simple-minded account, rooted in what he considers a failure to understand what language is and how it operates.

The essay’s central contradiction is that it attributes extraordinary psychological power to Arabic while rendering Arab speakers intellectually deficient. Shouby’s Arab is imagined as a master of words who nevertheless uses them without seriousness or purpose: mute, yet overarticulate; impoverished, yet excessive. In Said’s account, the language becomes a vehicle for attributing incompatible qualities to the same figure.

Silence, Evidence, and Orientalist Discourse

For Said, the decisive omission is that Shouby never quotes from the Arabic literature of which, in the essay’s framing, the Arab is supposedly so proud. The argument therefore does not demonstrate its claims by examining literary language. Instead, Said contends, it locates Arabic’s influence within a mythological world made for the Arab by Orientalism, where the Arab serves as a sign of dumbness combined with hopeless overarticulateness.

Said treats this example as evidence of a broader transformation in scholarship. The use of philological means to produce such a result marks, in his view, the decline of a once-complex philological tradition, now represented only by rare individuals. In its place, reliance on philology becomes the final weakness of a discipline transformed into ideological expertise in the social sciences.

Significance in Said’s Critique

Shouby’s case illustrates how Orientalist discourse can make oppositions appear natural, assign human types through scholarly methods, and give reality to objects that its own language has constructed. Such discourse conceals its origins: the categories it presents as descriptions are products of an intellectual and institutional order formed by a strong society dealing with one it regards as less advanced.

Within that order, Arabs appear as static, nearly ideal types rather than as people whose capacities are developing or as participants in the making of history. By equating Arabic with mind, society, history, and nature, the Orientalist framework reverses the relation between speaker and language: the language is made to speak the Arab, rather than the Arab speaking through language. Shouby’s essay thus figures in Said’s argument not simply as a claim about Arabic, but as an instance of scholarly discourse turning a language into an instrument for defining and immobilizing its speakers.