Robert Graham Irwin

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Robert Graham Irwin (born 1946) is a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature.

He read modern history at the University of Oxford, and did graduate research at SOAS. From 1972 he was a lecturer in Medieval History at the University of St. Andrews. He gave up the academic life in 1977, to write. Irwin is currently a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and the Middle East editor of the The Times Literary Supplement.

Contents

[edit] Dangerous Knowledge

In 2006 his critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and its Discontents, was published. Among his various critiques, he points to how Said focused his attention on the British and the French in his critique of Orientalism. He also addressed how Said linked the academic Orientalism in those countries with imperialist designs on the Middle East. Yet, by the 19th and the early 20th centuries, it was more proper to assign Russia as an empire having imperialist designs on the Caucasus region and Central Asia. Irwin pointed to how Russia evaded Said's attention. [1] Another of Irwin's key points is that oriental scholarship or 'Orientalism' "owes more to Muslim scholarship than most Muslims realize."[2]

Maya Jasanoff criticized the book in a review in the London Review of Books: "...Irwin's factual corrections, however salutary, do not so much knock down the theoretical claims of Orientalism as chip away at single bricks. They also do nothing to discount the fertility of Orientalism for other academics. The most thought-provoking works it has inspired have not blindly accepted Said's propositions, but have expanded and modified them."[3]

[edit] Works

  • The Arabian Nightmare (Dedalus Books, 1983, novel)
  • The Middle East in the Middle Ages:The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250-1382 (1984)
  • The Limits of Vision (Dedalus Books, 1986, novel)
  • The Mysteries of Algiers (Dedalus Books, 1988, novel)
  • The Arabian Nights: A Companion (1994)
  • Exquisite Corpse (Dedalus Books, 1995, novel)
  • Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (Dedalus Books, 1997, novel)
  • Islamic Art (1997)
  • Satan Wants Me (Dedalus Books, 1999, novel)
  • Night and Horses and the Desert: the Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (1999)
  • The Alhambra (Harvard University Press, 2005)
  • For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (2006)
  • Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Overlook Press, 2006)

[edit] External links

  • East is East Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2007

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/books/01grim.html?ex=1163394000&en=b2e925d36504c43c&ei=5070 The West Studies the East, and Trouble Follows, William Grimes, New York Times, November 1, 2006
  2. ^ http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3237245.ece Islamic science and the long siesta Robert Irwin, TLS, 23 January, 2008.
  3. ^ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n11/jasa01_.html Before and After Said, Maya Jasanoff, LRB, 8 June, 2006.
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