Edward Said On Orientalism

Edward Said's book ORIENTALISM has been profoundly influential in a diverse range of disciplines since its publication in 1978. In this engaging (and lavishly illustrated) interview he talks about the context within which the book was conceived, its main themes and how its original thesis relates to the contemporary understanding of "the Orient."

Said argues that the Western (especially American) understanding of the Middle East as a place full of villains and terrorists ruled by Islamic fundamentalism produces a deeply distorted image of the diversity and complexity of millions of Arab peoples.

Director: Sut Jhally, 1998.

Edward Said on Orientalism

When future scholars take a look back at the

intellectual history of the last quarter of the 20th century,

the work of Professor Edward Said of Columbia University

will be identified as very important and intellectual.

In particular, Said's 1978 book, Orientalism,

will be regarded as profoundly significant.

Orientalism revolutionized the study of the

Middle East and helped to create and shape entire

new fields of study, such as post-colonial theory,

as well as influencing disciplines as diverse as English, history,

anthropology, political science, and cultural studies.

The book has now been translated into 26 languages

and is required reading at many universities and colleges.

It is also one of the most controversial

scholarly books of the last 30 years,

sparking intense debate and disagreement.

Orientalism tries to answer the question of why,

when we think of the Middle East, for example,

we have a preconceived notion of what kind of people live there,

what they believe, how they act,

even though we may never have been there or indeed even met anyone from there.

More generally, orientalism asks, how do we come to understand people,

strangers, who look different to us by virtue of the color of their skin?

The central argument of orientalism is that the

way we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective,

but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests.

That is, it is highly motivated.

Specifically, Said argues that the way the west --

Europe and the US -- looks at the countries and peoples of the Middle East -

is through a lens that distorts the actual reality

of those places and those people.

He calls this lens through which we view that part of the world,

orientalism: a framework that we use to understand the

unfamiliar and the strange,

to make the peoples of the Middle East appear different and threatening.

Professor Said's contribution to how we understand

this general process of what we could call stereotyping,

has been immense.

The aim of this program is to explore these issues

through an interview with him.

He starts by discussing the context within which he conceived orientalism.

Edward Said: Well, my interest in orientalism began for two reasons.

One was an immediate thing.

That is to say, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973,

which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions

in the media and the popular press.

You know, about how the Arabs are cowardly,

and they don't know how to fight,

and they're always gonna be beaten because they're not modern.

And then everybody was very surprised when the Egyptian army

crossed the canal in early October 1973 and demonstrated that,

you know, like anybody else, they could fight.

So that was one immediate impulse.

And the second one, which has a much longer history in my own life,

was the constant sort of disparity I felt between what my experience

of being an Arab was and the representation of that,

that one saw in art -- I mean, I'm talking about very great art --

like de la Croix, and Angh Jerome, and people like that.

Novelists who wrote about the Orient, like Disraeli or Flaubert.

And, you know, the fact that those representations of the

Orient had very little to do with what I knew about my own background in life.

So I decided to write the history of that.

[Music]

If somebody, let's say, in the 1850s or 60s,

in Paris or London, wished to talk about or read about India,

or Egypt or Syria, there would be very little chance

for that person to simply address the subject as we like to

think in a kind of free and creative way.

A great deal of writing had gone before.

And this writing was an organized form of writing,

like an organized science,

of what I have called orientalism and it seemed to me that there was

a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up,

you know, the sensual woman, who's there to be sort of used by the man.

The East as a kind of mysterious place,

full of secrets and monsters, you know;

the marvels of the East was a phrase that was used.

And the more I looked,

the more I saw that this was really quite consistent with itself --

you know, it had very little to do with people that had actually been there.

And even if they had been there,

there wasn't much modification; in other words,

you didn't get what you could call realistic representations of

the Orient either in literature or in painting or

in music or any of the arts.

And this extended even further into descriptions of the Arabs by experts.

You know, people who had studied them.

And I noticed that even in the 20th century,

some of the same images that you found in the 19th century,

amongst scholars like Edward William Lane,

who wrote his book on the modern Egyptians in the early 1830s.

And then you read somebody in the 1920s.

And they're more or less saying the same thing.

One great example that I always give is of the wonderful French poet,

Gerard de Nerval, who went on a voyage to the Orient, as he called it.

And I was reading this book of his travels in Syria and

there was something very familiar about it.

You know, it sounded like something else that I had read.

And then I realized that what he was doing almost unconsciously was

quoting Lane on the Egyptians,

on the theory that the orientals are all the same no matter

where you find 'em, whether it's in India or Syria or in Egypt;

it's basically the same essence.

So there developed a kind of image of the timeless Orient,

as if the orient, unlike the west, doesn't develop; it stays the same.

And that's one of the problems with orientalism,

is it creates an image outside of history,

of something that is placid and still and eternal.

Which is simply contradicted by the fact of history.

So that's it in one sense.

It's a creation of, you might say, an ideal other for Europe.

[Music]

Professor Said's analysis of orientalism isn't just

a description of its content,

but a sustained argument for why it looks the way it does.

It's an examination of a quite concrete,

historical and institutional context that creates it.

Specifically, Said locates the construction of orientalism within

the history of imperial conquest.

As empires spread across the globe,

historically the British and the French have been the

most important in terms of the East.

They conquer not only militarily,

but also what we could call ideologically.

The question for these empires is,

how do we understand the natives that we are encountering

so we can conquer and subdue them easier.

This process of using large,

abstract categories to explain people who are different,

whose skin is a different color, has been going on for a long time,

as far back as there has been contact between different cultures and peoples.

But orientalism makes this general process more formal,

in that it presents itself as objective knowledge.

Said identifies Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798

as marking a new kind of imperial and colonial conquest that

inaugurates the project of orientalism.

Said: There was a kind of break that occurred after Napoleon

came to Egypt in 1798.

I think it's the first really important imperial,

modern imperial expedition.

So he invades the place.

But he doesn't invade it the way the Spaniards invaded the New World.

Looking for loot.

He comes instead with an enormous army of soldiers but also scientists.

Botanists, architects, philologists, biologists, historians,

whose job it was to record Egypt in every conceivable way and

produce a kind of scientific survey of Egypt

which was designed not for the Egyptian, but for the European.

And of course what strikes you first of all,

about the volumes they produced is their enormous size;

they're a meter square.

And all across them is written the power and

prestige of a modern European country that can do to the

Egyptians what the Egyptians cannot do to the French.

There is no comparable Egyptian survey of France.

To produce knowledge you have to have the power to be

there and to see in expert ways things that the natives themselves can't see.

[Music.]

The differences between different kinds of orientalisms are,

in effect, the differences between experiences of what is called the Orient.

I mean, the difference between Britain and France on the one hand,

and the United States on the other,

is that Britain and France had colonies in the Orient;

I mean they had a longstanding relationship.

And imperial row in a place like India.

So there's a kind of a --

there's a kind of archive of actual experiences of being in India,

of ruling a country for several hundred years, right?

And the same with the French in North Africa,

let's say Algeria, or Indo China.

Direct colonial experience.

In the case of the Americans, the experience is much less direct.

There has never been an American occupation of the Near East.

So I would say the difference between the British and

French orientalism on the one hand,

and the American experience in the orient on the other,

is that the American one is much more, uh, indirect.

It's much more based on abstractions.

The second big thing, I think,

the difference in the American experience from the

British and the French, of orientalism,

is that American orientalism is very politicized by the presence of Israel,

for which America is the main ally.

President Clinton and I are proud, as are all Americans,

that the United States was the first nation to recognize the state of Israel.

Eleven minutes after you proclaimed your independence.

Said: And what you have in effect is the creation of a Jewish state

in the middle of the Islamic oriental world in the sense that

because it's a Jewish state and a western state,

self-declared, there is a greater coincidence between

American interests there, than there is between American interests,

let's say, in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia,

which are important because of oil.

I think the presence of this other factor, which is very anti-Islamic,

where Israel regards the whole Arab world as its enemy is imported into --

into American orientalism.

I mean the idea for example that Hamas terrorists on the West Bank

are just interested in killing Jewish children,

is what you derive from looking at this stuff.

And very little attention is paid to the fact that the

Israeli occupation of the West Bank in Gaza has been going on for --

30 - years - it's the longest military occupation in this century.

And so you get the impression that the only problem is that,

you know, Israeli security is threatened by Hamas and suicide bombers and

all the rest of it.

Nothing is said about the hundreds of thousands,

millions of palestianians who are dispossessed and

living miserable lives as a direct result of what Israel

has done and is doing.

So there's a sense in which the Arab struggle for

national independence in the history of the Palestinians for national

self-determination is looked at with great hostility as upsetting the

stabilities of the status quo.

And that makes it virtually impossible.

It's a tragedy.

Virtually impossible for an American to see on television,

to read books, to see films about the Middle East,

that are not colored politically by this conflict in

which the Arabs almost always play the role of terrorists and

violent people and irrational and so on and so forth.

[Music.]

Beastie Boy: That's another thing that America really needs to think about,

is our racism.

Racism that comes from the United States towards Muslim people and

towards Arabic people and that's something that has to stop and

the United States has to start respecting people from the Middle East

in order to find a solution to the problem that's been

building up over many years.

So I thank everyone for your patience in letting me speak my mind on that.

Speaker: Many people believe the way that Americans understand

the Muslim world is very problematic.

Indeed, anti-Arab racism seems to be almost officially sanctioned.

You can make generalized and racist statements about

Arab peoples that would not be tolerated for any other group.

At the heart of how this new American orientalism operates is a

threatening and demonized figure of the Islamic terrorist.

That is emphasized by journalists and Hollywood.

Now Said recognizes that terrorism exists as a result of the

violent political situation in the Middle East.

But he argues that there's a lot more going on there that is

misunderstood or not seen by the peoples of the west.

The result of the media's focus on one negative aspect alone means

that all the peoples of the Islamic world come to be understood in the

same negative and paranoid way.

That is, as a threat.

So that when we think of people who look like that and

have come from that part of the world,

we think, fanatic, extreme, violent.

Said argues that understanding a vast and

complex region like the Middle East in this narrow way

takes away from the humanity and diversity of millions of

ordinary people living decent and humane lives there.

Reporter: We asked, would he plant a bomb to blow up the Americans if the

Islamic underground asked him to, the answer was yes.

After I wrote Orientalism and a book called the Question of Palestine

in the early 80s. In the late 70s, rather.

And in the beginning of the 80s,

I wrote a third book which is called Covering Islam and I thought

of them as a kind of trilogy.

And Covering Islam was an account of the coverage of Islam

in the popular media immediately occasioned by the

Iranian Revolution which described itself

as you recall as an Islamic revolution.

And you know, what I discovered was a huge arsenal of images

employed by the media.

Large masses of people waving their fists, black banners,

you know, the stern-faced Khomeini,

all of them giving an impression of the utmost negative,

sort of evil emanation.

So the impression you got of Islam was that it was a frightening,

uh, mysterious -- above all, threatening,

as if the main business of Muslims was to threaten and

try to kill Americans.

As recently as last year, in 1996, that is to say,

almost 16 or 17 years after I wrote Covering Islam,

I did an update of the book and I wrote a new introduction.

And I found that quite to my horror and surprise,

that during those 16 and 17 years with the large number of

events in the Islamic world taking place,

which you would think would allow for more familiarity,

with a more refined sense of what was taking place on, let's say,

as reflected in television and print journalism, in fact, was the opposite.

I think the situation got worse.

And that what you had instead now,

was a much more threatening picture of Islam,

represented for example by television and film --

called Jihad in America, based on the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Reporter: I reported on international terrorism for the past ten years and

since the World Trade Center bombing,

I've been investigating the networks of Islamic extremists

committed to Jihad in America.

For these militants, Jihad is a holy war,

an armed struggle to defeat nonbelievers or

infidels and their ultimate goal is to establish an Islamic empire.

But this gathering did not take place in the Middle East.

It happened in the heartland of America: Kansas City, Missouri.

Combatting these groups within the boundaries of the

Constitution will be the greatest challenge to law enforcement

since the war on organized crime.

Said: But never the same generalizations were made,

let's say, about the Oklahoma City bombing,

that this was a Christian fundamentalist, etc., etc.,

but the Islamic Jihad had come to America,

and you had these scenes of the most irresponsible journalism,

where you would see people talking in Arabic and a voiceover saying,

"and they are discussing the destruction of America.

Whereas if you picked up a little of what was being said,

if you knew the language, it had nothing to do with that.

And that Islam and the teachings of Islam,

became synonymous with terror and the demonization of Islam,

allowed for very little distinction between piety,

let's say, and violence.

The so-called independent media in a liberal society like this --

in effect are so lazy and are controlled by interests that are

commercial and political at the same time,

that there is no investigative reporting.

It's just basically repeating the line of the government.

Ted Koppel: Only eight days ago I concluded a broadcast on the

World Trade Center bombing by telling you what

senior US law enforcement officials were telling us,

that the threat of Muslim extremists operating within

the United States is an ongoing danger,

something we'll have to live with from now on.

Said: And repeating the lies of the people who have

the most influence for whom Islam is a useful,

foreign, demon, to turn attention away from the inequities and

problems in our own society.

So as a result, the human side of the Islamic and especially Arabic world,

are rarely to be found, and the net result is this vacancy,

on the one hand, and these easy,

almost automatic images of terror and violence.

There is a handy set of images and cliches.

You know, not just from the newspapers and television, but from movies.

[Music]

Oh I come from a land, from a far away place,

where the caravan camels roam

Where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense

It's barbaric, but hey, it's home

When the wind's from the east,

and the sun's from the west and the sand in the glass is right;

come on down, stop on by, hop a carpet and fly to another Arabian night.

Said: I mean, I myself, growing up in the Middle East in Palestine and Cairo,

used to delight in films on the Arabian Nights, you know,

done by Hollywood producers, with John Hall and Maria Montez and Sabu.

I mean they were talking about a part of the world that I lived in but

it had this kind of exotic magical quality which was what

we call today Hollywood.

So there was that whole reportory of the Sheiks and the desert and

the galloping around and the cimitars and the dancing girls and all that.

That's really the material.

That's the situation in the popular media is basically that

Muslims are really two things.

One -- they are villains. They are villains and fanatics.

I will dispatch the American people to the hell they deserve.

(Gunfire)

In the name of Allah!

And B, many films end up with huge numbers of bodies, Muslim bodies,

strewn all over the place, the result of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Demi Moore,

Chuck Norris; lots of films about guerrillas going in to

kill Muslim terrorists.

So the idea of Muslim is something to be stamped out.

(Fighting and swordfighting sounds with music)

Said: The whole history of these whole orientalist representations

which portray the Muslim and the oriental as in effect a lesser breed;

in other words, the only thing they understand is the language of force.

This is the principle here, that unless you give them a bloody nose,

they won't understand. We can't talk reason with them.

(Gunshots and screaming)

Said: Is the Arab world full of tough terrorists?

Well, I mean, all you have to do is sort of break down the question into -

into common sense and say, uh, there are terrorists, as there are everywhere.

But you know, there's a lot more going on there.

We're talking about 250, 300 million people.

And one of the great problems of orientalism to begin with,

is these vast generalizations about Islam and the nature of Islam.

There's very little in common that you can talk about as Islam,

let's say, between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

I mean they're both Muslim countries but you know,

the difference is in history and language and traditions and so on --

it's so vast, that the word Islam has, at best, a tenuous meaning.

The same is true within the Arab world.

I mean, Morocco is very different from Saudi Arabia.

Algeria is very different from Egypt.

And I would argue and in fact,

have argued that the predominant mood of the Arab world is very secular.

You know, it's easy to attract attention and

certainly the media's attention for some of the

political reasons that are obvious.

I mean to discredit the Arabs to make them seem like a threat to the west.

To keep the idea around at the end of the

Cold War that there are foreign devils.

In other words, what are we doing with this gigantic military?

This huge military budget that is twice as much as the

entire world's military budget combined?

So you have to have threat.

And the result is, it's very hard to find works

that are sympathetic to the Arabs and Islam.

Islam is seen as the enemy of Christianity and

the United States sees itself as a Christian or

Judeo-Christian country in affiliation with Israel,

and that Islam is the great enemy.

The competitor.

There is a history of that.

And I give the example of Dodi Fayed,

the erstwhile suitor of Princess Diana.

Well, a few days before he died,

I read through the English press, and it was full of racist cliches,

all of orientalist discourse.

I mean that this is -- the Sunday Times,

one of the leading newspapers in England,

had a headline to a 15,000 word story, entitled,

"A Match Made in Mecca."

And the idea of Muslim conspiracy is trying to infect,

you know, taking over this white woman by these dark people with Mohammed,

the prophet Mohammed, who is a historical person in the 7th century,

somehow stage-managing the whole thing.

That's the power of the discourse. You see.

If you are thinking about people and Islam and about that part of the world,

those are the words you constantly have to use.

Speaker: And you won't get hurt! I give you my word!

Woman: No way you wacko.

Said: The discourse is a regulated system of

producing knowledge within certain constraints whereby

certain rules have to be observed.

Now gay Libya. Exports.

Yes sir you American pig.

[Laughs.] Nice touch.

Said: To think past it, to go beyond it, not to use it,

is virtually impossible because there's no knowledge

that isn't codified in this way about that part of the world.

May I help you?

(Unintelligible)

Listen to --

Jesus.

(Unintelligible)

(Loud noises and explosions)

Said: And there's a certain sense in which in not really

mounting a serious critique of it,

the Arabs have participated and continued to allow themselves

to be represented as orientals in this orientalist way.

There is no, for example, information policy of the 20 Arab countries,

22 Arab countries, to try to give a different picture

of what their worlds are like.

Because most of them are dictatorships.

All of them are dictatorships, without democracy,

who are in desperate need of US patronage,

government patronage, to support them.

So they are not about to criticize the United States.

Not about to engage in a real dialogue.

And in that respect, I think the Arabs keep themselves

collectively in a way that is subordinate and inferior to the west.

And in fact, fulfills the kinds of representations that

most westerners have on their minds about the Arabs.

[Music]

The attacks came without warning.

Connie Chung: And according to a US government source,

told CBS News, that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.

Reporter: The attack in Oklahoma City appears to have a familiar mark.

Speaker: this was done with the attempt to inflict

as many casualties as possible.

That is a Middle Eastern trait.

Reporter: The fact that it was such a powerful bomb in

Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider

deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East.

ABC News has learned that the FBI has asked

the US military to provide up to ten Arabic speakers to

help in the investigation.

Said: Well, one of the interesting things about --

about the persistence of orientalism-- I mean,

when you think about it, almost astonishing persistence of it,

was the Oklahoma City bombing in April of 1995.

I can give you a personal example.

I was in Canada giving some lectures at the

actual time of the bombing and maybe half an hour after

the event had occurred in the afternoon,

my office was inundated with phone calls from the media.

And I rang my office from Canada,

as I frequently do to find out, you know,

if there was any message for me that needed attention and so on,

and she said, every --

25 calls had come in from the major networks,

from the cable channels,

from the major newspapers and news magazines and so forth,

all of them wanting to talk to you.

And I said what about?

About this event in Oklahoma City.

And I said, but what does that have to do with anything.

Well, apparently somebody had volunteered,

one of these instant commentators, that --

the notion that this seemed like a

Middle East-style bombing and that there were a couple of

swarthy people around right after the bombing or seen after the bombing.

Reporter: Within hours of the explosion,

local police and the FBI had issued the all points bulletin

looking for three men believed to be of Middle Eastern origin

Reporter: And sources tell CBS News that unofficially the FBI

is treating this as a Middle Eastern related incident.

Steve Emerson: Oklahoma City, I can tell you,

is probably considered one of the largest centers of

Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East.

Said: And so this got them to think that they should talk to me,

not because I had anything to do with it,

but because by virtue of being from the Middle East,

I would have an inside -- insight into this.

You know, and of course the proposition is so preposterous and so racist.

Just if you're from the area,

you would understand who and why this is being done.

Never thinking for a moment that it was a

local homegrown boy called McVeigh who was

totally American in his outlook and was doing it

out of the best principles of American extermination

and Ahab-like anger, you know, at the world.

[Music.]

Speaker: Professor Said is not only a true theorist.

He is also a very prominent and active

representative of the Palestinian people.

Said grew up in what was then called Palestine

and is now called Israel and the occupied territories.

When the state of Israel was founded in 1948,

like millions of other Palestinians,

Said and his family were made homeless as well as stateless.

These exiled Palestinians now mostly lived either

in the territories under control of Israel or

in refugee camps in the surrounding countries.

One of the things that drives Said is the quest for

justice and a homeland for the Palestinian people.

And there's a close connection between Said's intellectual

work and his political activism.

As he himself remarks,

he wrote three books that he thinks of as a

trilogy and that in his mind are closely connected together --

Orientalism, Covering Islam, and the Question of Palestine.

He believes that finding a peaceful,

humane and just solution to the conflict in the Middle East,

that is, finding an answer to the question of Palestine,

will require overcoming the racist legacy of

orientalism that stresses the separation of people from each other.

That regards difference as a threat that must be contained or destroyed.

Because of the complex and bloody history of the Middle East,

Said regards the situation in Palestine and

Israel as the ultimate test case facing the 21st century of

whether we live together in peace and reconciliation

with our differences or whether we

live apart in fear and loathing of each other,

constantly under threat, constantly at war.

In seeking a way out of this legacy of mistrust and conflict,

Said draws upon the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci,

who gives us the tools to think about these

difficult issues in more productive and humane ways.

Said: Well, Gramsci in the prison notebooks,

says something that has always tremendously appealed to me,

that history deposits in us, our own history,

our family's history, our nation's history,

our tradition's history, which has left in us an affinity of traces,

all kinds of marks, through heredity,

through collective experience, through individual experience,

through family experience,

through relationships between one individual and another,

a whole book, if you like, a series, an infinity of traces.

But there's no inventory.

There is no orderly guide to it.

So Gramsci says, therefore the task at the

outset is to try to compile an inventory.

In other words, to try and make sense of it.

And this seems to me at any rate to be

the most interesting sort of human task:

it's the task of interpretation.

It's the task of giving history some shape and sense.

For a particular reason,

not just to show that my history is better

than yours or my history is worse than yours,

I'm a victim and you're somebody who has oppressed people.

But rather, to understand my history

in terms of other people's history.

In other words to try to -

to move beyond to generalize one's own

individual experience to the experience of others.

And I think -- I think the great --

goal is in fact to become someone else,

to transform itself from a unitary identity

to an identity that includes the other without suppressing it.

That he says is the great goal,

and for me I think that would be the case.

You know.

And that would be the notion of writing an inventory.

An historical inventory,

to not only understand oneself but to

understand oneself in relation to others and

to understand others as if you would understand yourself.

Palestine is so important in this respect

because of its local complexities,

as say Arabs, Jews, Arab Muslims and Arab Christians and

Israeli Jews of themselves, a very mixed background.

We're talking about Polish Jews, Russian Jews,

American Jews, Yemeni Jews, Iraqi jaws, Indian Jews;

it's a fairly complex mosaic.

Somehow finding a way to live together.

On land that is drenched,

saturated with significance on a world scale

unlike any other country in the world.

I mean it's holy to three of the major religions.

And every inch of it has been combed over and

fought over for the last several thousand years and

the pattern so far has been the Zionist pattern,

which is to say that it was promised to us,

we are the chosen people.

Everybody else is sort of second rate.

Throw 'em out or treat 'em as a second class citizen.

And in contrast to that, some of us,

not everybody but many Palestinians have said, well,

we realize that we are being asked to pay the price

for what happened to the Jews in Europe after the holocaust.

It's an entire Christian and European catastrophe

in which the Arabs played no part.

And we are being dispossessed, displaced by our --

we've become the victims of the victim but as I say,

not all of us say, well,

they should be thrown out because we have been

thrown out and so we have another vision,

which is a vision of co-existence in which Jew and Arab,

Muslim, Christian, and Jew can live together in some

polity in which I think it requires a kind of creativity and invention.

That is possible.

Vision.

That would replace the authoritarian hierarchical model.

But this idea that somehow we should protect ourselves against the

infiltrations, the infections of the other,

is I think the most dangerous idea.

At the end of the 20th century and unless we find ways

to do it and there are no shortcuts to it,

unless we find ways to do this,

there's going to be wholesale violence of a sort

represented by the Gulf War, by the killings in Bosnia,

the Rwandan massacres and so on.

I mean those are the pattern of emerging conflict

that is extremely dangerous and needs to be

counteracted and I think therefore it's correct

to say that the challenge is --

I wouldn't call it anything other than coexistence.

How does one co-exist with peoples whose religions are different.

Whose traditions and languages are different.

But who form part of the same community.

A polity. In a national sense.

How do we accept difference without violence and hostility.

I've been interested in a field called comparative literature most --

all of my adult life.

The ideal of comparative literature is not to show how

English literature is really a secondary phenomenon of

French literature or Arabic literature is --

you know, a kind of poor cousin to

Persian literature or any of those silly things,

but to show them existing, you might say, as contrapuntal lines.

In a great composition by which difference

is respectively understood without coercion.

And it's that attitude that I think we need.

[Music]