DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE in THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

After terrific notice in THE NEW YORK TIMES and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL for Robert Irwin's beatdown of Edward Said's screed ORIENTALISM, this weekend came a brilliant review in the WASHINGTON POST written by BOOK WORLD editor Michael Dirda:

Dangerous Knowledge is, obviously, a history of that apostolic succession. It ends, though, with Muslim critiques of Western Orientalism and a chapter about Edward Said titled "An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic." This is an allusion to John Carter and Graham Pollard's quietly devastating 1934 Enquiry into Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets , which exposed Thomas J. Wise, England's foremost book collector, as a forger, cheat and liar. Irwin forthrightly maintains that "Said libelled generations of scholars who were for the most part good and honourable men and he was not prepared to acknowledge that some of them at least might have written in good faith."

Is Irwin right about Said? He certainly makes a cogent case. And yet. Said too was admired, even revered, by many good and honorable men and women, many of them first-rate thinkers and theorists. Haven't we, after all, persistently tended to view the Middle East through prejudices and distorting lenses of one sort or another? There's no doubt, then, that Dangerous Knowledge will be hotly argued about in departments of literature and Middle Eastern studies for some time to come. Still, like Irwin, I strongly believe that most scholars work hard to discover and tell us the truth. Dangerous Knowledge is a paean to that noble purpose. ?