Humanism as resistance

Abstract

Nine years ago wrote an epilogue to Orientalism in which, in trying to clarify what I had said and not said, I highlighted not only the many debates that had arisen since the appearance of my book in 1978, but the way in which a work on the representations of "the East" lent itself to increasing distortion. That this causes me more irony today than irritation shows how much I have aged. The recent deaths of my two great intellectual, political and personal mentors, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, have produced in me, in addition to sadness and feelings of loss, resignation and a kind of stubborn determination to move on. In my memoirs, "Out of Place" (Grijalbo, 2001), I spoke of strange and contradictory worlds in which I was educated and offered readers a detailed account of the circumstances that shaped me in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. But it was a very personal text, which stopped just before my years of political engagement, which began after the 1967 war between the Arabs and Israelis.