The BOSTON REVIEW on DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE

A long piece in the latest BOSTON REVIEW on Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge:

Robert Irwin, defending his discipline in his new book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, pulls no punches: “That book seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations.” Irwin, building on our misgivings from the last chapter of Orientalism, writes that if Said was wrong about the present, his account of earlier Orientalists might be equally suspect. Then, like Said, Irwin takes us through the history of Western writings on the East, appraising the work of some famous scholars and some so obscure they may be unfamiliar even to specialists. Irwin probes for these writers’ foibles and eccentricities. Thus Guillaume Postel (born 1510), “the first true Orientalist,” was “a complete lunatic” who thought everyone needed to return to speaking Hebrew; Abraham Wheelocke (c. 1593–1653), holder of the first chair in Arabic at Cambridge, was interested in sea monsters and mermaids; and Athanasius Kircher (1601–80), to whom “the torch of mad linguistics passed,” “devised a vomiting machine and eavesdropping statues, as well as a kind of piano powered by screeching cats.”