November 2, 1945

November 2, 1945, is the date of demonstrations in Egypt called by political leaders to mark the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. In Orientalism, Edward Said returns to the event through two versions of Bernard Lewis’s account, showing how changes in wording and emphasis turn a political demonstration into purported evidence of an irrational, essentially anti-Jewish Islam. The episode matters less as a self-contained account of the day than as a case study in how scholarly narration can reshape historical evidence to sustain a political argument.

The Demonstration and Its Reframing

In the version Lewis published in 1964, political leaders in Egypt called for demonstrations on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. Lewis wrote that they rapidly developed into anti-Jewish riots, during which a Catholic, an Armenian, and a Greek Orthodox church were attacked and damaged. Said questions the evidentiary force of this description: Lewis identifies the damaged churches as evidence of anti-Jewishness but does not explain how attacks on these churches establish that characterization. The reported targets, as described, do not make the allegation self-explanatory.

Lewis returned to much of the same material twelve years later, in an essay retitled “The Return of Islam” and published in Commentary. The revised passage begins by claiming that popular nationalism had become less national and more religious, and that during crises instinctive communal loyalty outweighed other affiliations. Its description of November 2, 1945, shifts from political leaders calling the demonstration to demonstrations simply being held in Egypt. Said draws attention to the change: removing the named organizers helps present the event as the spontaneous expression of communal instinct rather than an action called by political leaders.

The later account also describes a more general outbreak in which several Catholic, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox churches were attacked and damaged. Said contrasts this with the 1964 wording, which names one church of each denomination. The alteration changes the scale and texture of the report: the earlier version specifies three churches, while the later phrasing can suggest that many churches of three kinds were attacked. In both versions, the church detail is made to carry an argument about anti-Jewishness that Said finds unsupported by the account itself.

Said’s Critique of the Evidence

Said treats the two texts as examples of polemical narration, not neutral retellings of a settled event. Their differences are meaningful: political sponsorship recedes, communal instinct becomes the explanatory frame, and the description of the damaged churches grows less specific. By placing the versions side by side, Said makes the revisions themselves part of the evidence and invites readers to notice how an account’s framing can direct interpretation before its claims are tested.

He argues that Lewis’s purpose is to portray Islam not merely as a religion but as an anti-Semitic ideology. The account of the demonstration is fitted into a broader image of Muslims as governed by passion, instinct, and unreflecting hatred. Said identifies a tension in this argument: Lewis presents Islam as a powerful mass phenomenon while also calling it “not genuinely popular.” The contradiction does not, in Said’s reading, interrupt the polemic; the anecdote instead helps produce alarm and counsel against making concessions to Islam.

Significance Within Orientalism

For Said, the episode exemplifies how a seemingly small choice of wording can turn a historical occurrence into support for an essentialized portrait of a people and religion. Treating the demonstration as an expression of instinctive religious loyalty obscures the political agency present in the 1964 account, where leaders call the protest. Broadening the description of the churches likewise gives the later version a different evidentiary force. Said’s comparison shows that the political meaning of an event is shaped not only by what an account says happened, but by what it selects, omits, and revises.

The case also belongs to Said’s wider argument that historical experience is repeatedly compressed into reductive images and polemics. He insists that analysis attend to concrete circumstances rather than make an episode stand for an immutable essence. November 2, 1945, thus appears in Orientalism as both a demonstration remembered through competing descriptions and a test of scholarly responsibility: readers must examine who is said to have acted, what the evidence actually establishes, and how the narrative turns those details into a claim about Islam.