RAND Corporation

RAND Corporation is mentioned as the publisher of a study whose conclusion exemplifies the reduction of Arab intellectual life to an alleged absence of practical reasoning. In Edward Said’s account, the reference belongs to a wider critique of scholarship and policy expertise that turns historically varied societies into objects of sweeping generalization.

The RAND Study and Its Claim

Said identifies Adel Daher’s RAND study, Current Trends in Arab Intellectual Thought, published in December 1969, and singles out its conclusion that “the concrete problem-solving approach is conspicuously absent from Arab thought.” He presents that statement as an instance of a larger consensus: that if Arabs think, they think differently, supposedly not always rationally. The RAND study thus serves as a concrete example of an intellectual claim that assigns a collective mental deficiency to Arab people rather than examining the particular historical conditions and arguments under discussion.

Place in Said’s Critique

The reference appears in a note surveying works that, in Said’s view, sustain similar implications. He places the RAND conclusion beside arguments in Morroe Berger’s work and other studies of Arab society, and contrasts this tendency with Roger Owen’s criticism of treating Islam as a fixed explanatory category in historical writing. The comparison situates the RAND study within a contested scholarly field: broad claims about Arab or Islamic thought are not neutral descriptions simply because they appear in social-scientific or academic publications.

The example connects to Said’s wider argument that knowledge about the Orient must be considered alongside the power relations and institutions through which it is produced and circulated. His objection is not to the study of languages, societies, or peoples as such, but to an essentialist approach that treats complex and changing realities as expressions of enduring collective traits. The RAND conclusion matters in this context because it converts a judgment about intellectual practice into a categorical statement about Arab thought.

Significance in the Book

Said’s brief use of RAND Corporation makes the study a small but pointed instance of a larger pattern: a claim presented as expertise can narrow the range of historical explanation and reproduce a hierarchical contrast between Western rationality and an allegedly deficient Arab mind. The passage does not provide an institutional history of RAND or discuss the study’s methods beyond identifying its title, date, and quoted conclusion. Its significance is instead evidentiary and critical: Said uses the report’s wording to show how the language of social science can participate in the essentializing representations he calls Orientalism.