Mo Luo Bo Jie

Morroe Berger was a professor of sociology and Near Eastern studies at Princeton and president of the Middle East Studies Association when he wrote a 1967 report on Middle Eastern and North African studies. Edward Said treats the report as more than a mistaken forecast: its dismissal of the region’s cultural achievement and political prospects exemplifies how Orientalist assumptions could persist in modern social science, obscuring contemporary realities while reinforcing the scholar’s authority to interpret the region.

Academic Position and Commission

Berger wrote “Middle Eastern and North African Studies: Developments and Needs” at the request of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The report appeared in the second issue of the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin. Berger occupied several positions that gave his assessment institutional weight: he taught sociology and Near Eastern studies at Princeton, and he was president of the professional association, founded in 1967, whose members studied the Near East across social-scientific and humanistic disciplines.

The report surveyed the region’s strategic, economic, and political importance to the United States before discussing federal and philanthropic support for university programs. Berger endorsed initiatives including the National Defense Education Act of 1958, an initiative prompted by Sputnik, and links between the Social Science Research Council and Middle Eastern studies. His assessment therefore emerged from a policy environment actively building academic programs, not from a detached consideration of a region with no American institutional interest.

Claims About the Region

Berger wrote that the modern Middle East and North Africa was not a center of great cultural achievement and was unlikely to become one in the near future. He concluded that studying the region or its languages consequently did not offer its own reward in terms of modern culture. The judgment treated cultural significance as a reason for scholarly attention, then discounted the region by denying that significance.

He also argued that the region was not a center of great political power and lacked the potential to become one. In his account, the Middle East—North Africa to a lesser degree—was declining in immediate importance to the United States relative to Africa, Latin America, and the Far East. From this assessment he inferred that contemporary conditions offered few of the traits likely to attract scholarly attention. Although he said this did not diminish the intellectual value of research already being done, he predicted limits on the field’s growth in the number of people studying and teaching it.

Said’s Critique of Berger’s Forecast

Said calls Berger’s prediction lamentable and argues that its failure was not a chance error. Berger had been commissioned not only as an expert on the modern Near East but also as someone expected to assess the region’s future and the future of policy. Yet his characterization of its cultural weakness and limited political prospects reproduced an established Orientalist judgment: that the Semitic world had never produced great culture and was too impoverished to command universal attention.

The report’s forecast also conflicted with circumstances Said says were already visible in 1967. The United States was importing about ten percent of its oil from the Middle East, and its strategic and economic investments in the region were already immense. Berger’s emphasis on declining importance thus overlooked the scale of American involvement. Said argues that this mismatch helped preserve the Orientalist’s central position: if the region was intrinsically difficult to understand and lacked much that merited attention, the specialist could still present himself as necessary to interpret it.

Said’s criticism is not simply that Berger made inaccurate predictions. He argues that inherited ideas shaped what Berger could recognize, causing the report to discount evidence before it. The claim that the region had little cultural importance sat uneasily beside Berger’s own recommendation that scholars devote their careers to its cultures. For Said, this tension exposes an exaggerated sense of cultural duty cultivated by Orientalism: the scholar is cast as a defender who confronts the region’s supposed disorder on behalf of the West, even while the region’s value is being disparaged.

Disciplinary Change and Significance

Said emphasizes that Berger was not a classical Orientalist but a professional sociologist. That distinction does not, in his analysis, free Berger’s report from Orientalism’s inherited attitudes. Rather, the case demonstrates how those attitudes could migrate into a new academic specialty, where a social scientist’s methods and institutional standing gave them a contemporary form.

Berger’s report also illustrates a broader transformation in the field. In Said’s account, the older Orientalist first mastered the languages and textual traditions of the region; the newer American expert began as a trained social scientist and applied disciplinary methods to the Orient, without the same philological preparation. Said dates this American development roughly to the period after the Second World War, when the United States assumed a position previously held by Britain and France. In that shift, the region became less a broad cultural and scholarly concern than an administrative matter tied to policy. Berger’s assessment stands as an example of the new expertise inheriting cultural hostility even as its professional form changed.