Word: arabized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Salman Rushdie against the Iranian mullahs and their fatwa: "Those of us from the Moslem part of this world cannot accept the notion that democratic freedoms should be abrogated to protect Islam." He has inveighed against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Hafez Assad in Syria. The "traditional discourse" of Arab nationalism, he wrote on the eve of the Gulf War, is "unresponsive, anomalous, even comic." The Arab media are "a disgrace," incapable of dealing with "life in the Arab world today with its terrible inequities, its self-inflicted wounds, its crushing mediocrity in science and many cultural fields...
Politics -- and the haunting, obsessive questions of Arab identity -- entered Said's life long after music and literature. His effort to put them together started after the 1967 war with the seizure of the West Bank. "Many of my friends who had studied in America began to be drawn back, and I began to be involved in the re-emergence of Palestinian nationalism." He set out to relearn classical Arabic. He got extra encouragement from his wife Mariam Cortas, the daughter of a Lebanese educator. "Mariam also grew up in the Middle East, but in an entirely Arab system...
...canard that Said supports Arab terrorism goes back to the '70s, and it is supported, his critics say, by the fact that from 1977 until 1991 he was a member of the Palestine National Council, a Palestinian parliament-in-exile consisting of some 400 members worldwide, which serves as an umbrella for the P.L.O. as well as for nonmilitary and nonterrorist organizations. Never mind that Said has always urged the P.L.O. to seek the conference table, not the car bomb; or that, to the U.S. government, the P.N.C. and the P.L.O. were wholly distinct. For the Israeli right...
...have been able to cite a single utterance by him that could be construed as anti-Semitic or as condoning either tyranny or terrorism. Hence they fall back on innuendo, smear tactics or -- in the case of Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi whose recent book Cruelty and Silence, directed against Arab acquiescence in the horrors of Saddam's regime, also fiercely attacks Said -- on distortions of his views. The feud between Makiya and Said has been seized on, to the pleasure of neither, by American anti-Arabists. Said, declaimed A.M. Rosenthal in the New York Times last April, is the kind...
...optimistic about the future, on either side. He sees Americans clinging to their Arab stereotypes -- the fat grasping sheik, the crazy fundamentalist bomber. Meanwhile, "most Arabs today, including cultivated ones, have no hope of any kind of cultural exchange between them and the West. The mood is so desperate. The fundamentalist movement is in a sense an act of desperation: 'The West won't listen to us, so we turn away from them.' That's the most discouraging thing, to me -- the wholesale condemnation of America and the West, without trying to discover that America is a very contradictory, various...