Orientalism Revisited A Conversation across Disciplines

Exemplaria Medieval, Early Modern, Theory ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yexm20 “Orientalism Revisited: A Conversation across Disciplines” Kaya Şahin, Julia Schleck & Justin Stearns To cite this article: Kaya Şahin, Julia Schleck & Justin Stearns (2021) “Orientalism Revisited: A Conversation across Disciplines”, Exemplaria, 33:2, 196-207, DOI: 10.1080/10412573.2021.1915009 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2021.1915009 Published online: 16 Aug 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yexm20 EXEMPLARIA 2021, VOL. 33, NO. 2, 197–208 https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2021.1915009 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY “Orientalism Revisited: A Conversation across Disciplines” Kaya Şahina, Julia Schleckb and Justin Stearnsc a Indiana University Bloomington; bUniversity of Nebraska Lincoln; cNew York University Abu Dhabi Orientalism. By Edward W. Said. Pantheon Books. 1978. Recent calls to decolonize the curriculum have both built on work done over the past two decades in premodern studies and challenged it to go further. Particularly in light of the United States’ continuing military interventions in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and East Africa, its domestic surveillance apparatus, and its associated Islamophobic rhetoric, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) remains a central text with which to approach such a decolonizing mission. Or does it? This conversation considers how Orientalism, and Orientalism, have influenced the current structures of knowledge production about the “East” in both European and Near Eastern premodern studies, asking whether Said’s critique is still relevant to contemporary discussions. Kaya Şahin (an early modern Ottoman historian), Julia Schleck (an early modern English literary critic), and Justin Stearns (a historian of the medieval and early modern Islamic Middle East) met at a 2010 NEH Summer Seminar designed to bring together in conversation European and Middle Eastern historians, art historians, and literary critics. They continue that conversation here by reflecting on how premodern scholars might continue to build on Said’s work in ways that recognize the limitations of the original work and productively adapt its insights to earlier texts and histories. Julia Schleck It would seem helpful simply to begin by summarizing the role Said played and continues to play in each of our respective fields. Edward Said was, as I am, a literary critic by training. He was central to the founding of postcolonial studies and its methods of resistant reading, in which colonial texts are read against their own ideological grain and used to make anti-imperial arguments. This practice of uncovering the colonial assumptions and discourses embedded in literary texts dovetailed with the rise of new historicism and the opening of the literary canon in the 1980s and 1990s, all of which worked synergistically to situate works like Said’s in the dominant mode of criticism during this time. Orientalism turned its critical lens on the writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western scholars specializing in the languages, cultures, and histories of what was termed “the East” — known as Orientalists — in order to show how the knowledge they produced for Western scholars, politicians, and others was not separate from but rather an integral part of European imperial dominance over the Middle East. CONTACT Kaya Şahin [email protected] © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 198 K. ŞAHIN ET AL. Orientalism was enshrined as a foundational work in literary studies during the 1980s and continues to be assigned as such in introductory postcolonial courses, but by the turn of the century, I think it is fair to say that it had been thoroughly digested by the field and was more often referenced than engaged by scholars in any depth. However, after leaving premodern English literary studies relatively untouched in those early years, in the first decade of the twenty-first century Orientalism reemerged in the work of scholars like Nabil Matar (1998, 1999, 2005a) and Daniel Vitkus (2003). They brought into critical view non-canonical dramatic works written by contemporaries of Shakespeare, ones set in the early modern Mediterranean highlighting North African and Ottoman characters. Invoking postcolonial aims and reading practices, these scholars and others opened a wide-ranging debate on the usefulness of postcolonial methodologies like Said’s for reading literature written prior to European imperial dominance. Increasing interest in travel and ethnographic texts printed in the period also contributed significantly to this discussion. Given the prevalence of material in both prose and verse which featured “Turks” and “Moors,” this debate frequently centered on the wisdom of reading Orientalisms out of (or into) early modern texts. As you might expect from fields whose boundaries are nationally and linguistically restrictive (English, or French literature, etc.), literary critics wrestling with the applicability of Said’s ideas to the early modern period have generally confined their critiques to points that can be read out from European sources, such as the inverted colonial power dynamic when it came to Europeans and Ottomans (who were very definitely not in decline), the tendency of such an approach to essentialize “Europe” into a homogenous block that simply didn’t exist at the time, or the way that popular works like captivity narratives (written by Europeans held as slaves in Ottoman or North African domains) undermined a theoretical framework built upon European hegemony over the “East” (these critiques are helpfully summarized in Roddan [2016]). Following that debate, it seemed for a time that engagement with Said had waned, but the last few years have found him once more back in the titles of conference panels and seminars at literary and interdisciplinary forums like the Renaissance Society of America and the Shakespeare Association of America. Early modern scholars whose early postcolonial work engaged with Orientalism, such as Jyostna Singh, have recently returned to Said’s ideas. Singh, for instance, gives him a substantial role in her latest monograph (2019). Personally, I believe that Said’s postcolonial methodology in Orientalism can at this point do little more for early modern studies than provide a general political impetus or perhaps point to a set of questions that anti-imperial or anti-racist scholarship should ask of early modern materials. However, I do think that if applied self-reflectively to the field’s institutions, resource allocations, and interactions with the archives and scholars of the Middle East (those practicing in Euro-American institutions and those in the Middle East), Said’s critique of knowledge production remains an extremely provocative one. It forces us to examine how the unequal distribution of resources in the imperial past (and present) interacts in complex ways, not only with dominant discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference, but also with their counter-discourses within the EuroAmerican academy. It pushes us to recognize and to challenge the limitations of our current knowledge production practices. EXEMPLARIA 199 Kaya Şahin My own encounter with Edward Said’s Orientalism has a long history: an undergraduate student reading excerpts of this seminal text with awe; a junior editor helping prepare a corrected Turkish edition of Orientalism (the first, unauthorized, uncopyrighted Turkish edition having been somehow manipulated by its Islamist publishers); a graduate student re-reading the book with a critical eye towards its selective ignorance of Ottoman history, or German and Russian Orientalisms; and a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire trying to respect the intellectual and political legacy of the work while being frustrated by its inapplicability to the early modern period. At the end of my long engagement with the text, I now see it, like Julia, as a book about knowledge-production, almost like a more historicist and topical version of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). When looked at in this particular way, Orientalism becomes a work that teaches us about the historical production of any form of knowledge (or discourse). It invites us to identify and hopefully reverse the effect of hegemonic approaches that establish hierarchies between geographical regions, religious and linguistic traditions, genders, ethnicities, etc. Thus, even though, like Julia and Justin, I have several reservations about the applicability of Orientalism to East–West encounters in the premodern period, and especially in the early modern era (from 1400 to 1750), I would like to salvage some of the initial political and intellectual mission. Of course, that mission, in Said’s oeuvre, goes far beyond Orientalism. For instance, I find his Representations of the Intellectual (1994) an important component of his corpus that deserves revisiting. When we look at Said’s legacies in Ottoman studies, we see a stark divide between scholars who work on the premodern period, and those who work on the modern era. Most scholars start the modern period in Ottoman history some time between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. (There are also those who start it in the sixteenth century, or claim that the division pre-/early modern/ modern is meaningless.) For those scholars who study the modern period, the work of Said and his followers is seen as indispensable. Indeed, their work lends itself very well to critiques of Western imperialism, and also to critiques of Ottoman imperialism itself as a hybrid political and cultural establishment that created its own Orient vis-à-vis the empire’s Arab subjects or the Muslim societies and cultures further East (for a good example of the redirection of the Orientalist critique towards a non-European empire, see Makdisi 2002). Ottomanists, inspired by postcolonial and subaltern studies, two fields strongly influenced by Said, similarly apply anti-hegemonic and anti-racist approaches to a multiplicity of subjects, such as the Ottoman Empire’s relationship with Western/ European imperialism and, more importantly, the relationship between the empire’s male, Sunni, Turkish-speaking, propertied classes and the subjugated genders, religions and ethnicities, and classes. The result is a modern Ottoman/Turkish history that is much more layered than it ever was, when it comes to the questions it asks of the established structures of power and the topics it adopts, which include serious inquiries into genocidal violence, non-orthodox religiosities, gendered identities, non-Muslim and non-Turkish agencies, etc. (For a recent survey of the field, one that does cover the entire span of the empire, see Aksan [2014].) Do we need Said to discuss all this? Not necessarily. There is a wide variety of works, from Antonio Gramsci to James C. Scott, 200 K. ŞAHIN ET AL. from the Frankfurt School to Patricia Hill Collins, that one can use as inspiration. Said’s importance is to have introduced a repertoire of critical approaches and insights into the study of the Middle East in the early 1970s, at a time when several similar critical fields and subfields were taking off in the world of the Western academe. Thanks to Said, the study of the modern Middle East, and the late/modern Ottoman Empire, have been attuned to the latest critical trends in the profession since then. When we move from the modern period to the premodern, however, my political sympathy, indeed admiration, for Said and his followers is replaced by a mild yet sufficiently irritating dissatisfaction. As Julia already stressed, and I assume Justin will further elucidate, Said’s critique of Orientalism creates serious problems for premodernists. While his book attempts to draw upon the longer history of Orientalism, its critical core consists of his readings of Orientalist scholarship produced between roughly the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. As an Ottomanist working on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the European texts I encounter — mostly in the form of travel narratives, but also diplomatic reports, Orientalist scholarship and antiquarianism in the form of histories and anthropologies, etc. — do not necessarily reflect the notions and values of the European/Western subject who essentializes a historical relationship of political and economic domination into a “civilizational” difference and superiority. There may be elements of those ideas in those earlier texts, since the Renaissance may be seen as formative of a new European identity defined against any and all forms of alterity within and without Europe. However, the European political and economic domination is not there, especially in the sixteenth century. The Ottoman Empire reigned supreme on political, military and diplomatic fronts, while the Habsburgs were barely maintaining their presence in Central Europe and the Mediterranean, and it was widely expected that the Ottoman sultan would establish a new universal rule and unite all religions and nations under a single mantle. Of course, I am talking about a specific period, but this is a specific historical period Said misses almost entirely. My advocacy for this period is not about promoting my own topic of study. Rather, this period was a unique era of transition in world history, in which a sort of early globalization brought all societies in touch with one another, without initially creating a significant imbalance of power in most of the globe. (Here, I say “most of the globe” because what I propose does not apply to the genocidal encounter between the Spanish and the Natives of the Caribbean and Mesoamerica. Also, I am limiting my comments to the sixteenth century, and thus am not addressing the Atlantic Slave Trade and later modes of domination and exploitation by European societies. Finally, I am not addressing the recent scholarship on the global Middle Ages.) This period is crucial for arguing that there were several competing, alternative early modernities from Tudor England through the Ottoman Empire to Mughal India and beyond. Rather than yielding to the domination of a superior Europe, communities, societies, and empires were able to create and sustain their own patterns of economic and cultural production and reproduction. Even in the case of the Spanish-Native encounter, despite the destructive violence, hybrid cultural identities that exist to this day resisted European-imported notions of Christianity and Whiteness. This is an important legacy that should not be missed, for both political and academic reasons. Said is not to be blamed solely for these kinds of omissions when they occur in scholarship influenced by EXEMPLARIA 201 his ideas; indeed, his critical apparatus is elastic enough to be mobilized against the imperial identities and discourses of the early modern world, both East and West. However, the at times sharp dichotomies that emerge from his work, and his sometimes facile anti-imperialism that tends to hide the imperialist nature of some non-European polities, should be identified by scholars and left aside. Anti-imperialism and antiWesternism are often utilized today as an excuse for nativist, anti-secularist, autocratic policies and positions in Muslim-majority countries, and these have to be criticized together with Eurocentric, White-centric notions of history, culture, and alterity. I return here to what I said at the beginning: Said’s Orientalism is a work on knowledgeproduction, one with a strong theoretical stance but occasionally hastily drawn case studies. Justin Stearns My own relationship to the text has followed a similar evolution to that of Kaya’s in that it has accompanied me from my undergraduate days until now, when I teach a class on Orientalism as an investigation into academic politics, canonicity, and the current state of scholarship on the Muslim and Arab worlds. I continue to be deeply impressed by Said the engaged public intellectual, but as a historian of the premodern Middle East my relationship with Orientalism is more ambivalent. I worry that if the substance of the book — not just its nature as an anti-imperial and anti-racist touchstone that Kaya already alluded to — is taken seriously, it can only distract us from nuanced understandings of the premodern period. Said’s critique of Orientalists’ privileging of texts over the realities of the Middle East of their own day was especially difficult to accept for historians who didn’t see themselves having many options for their scholarship other than texts and who also were dealing with what has been called “ulamology”: the fact that historians’ chief source for the intellectual and social history of the premodern Muslim world are the writings of the “ulama” (religious scholars). (I take the term, which was Roy Mottahedeh’s, from a book that was assigned to me during my graduate studies, where it was in the epigraph of Chapter Eight in Humphreys 1991, 187.) Not to take that body of work seriously made little sense to them, and to some extent they adopted the views of the figures they studied. This was a body of writing with which Said had little familiarity and in which he rarely showed interest, being far more concerned with negative stereotypes that recurred citationally within Western scholarship. Considering the rather overheated nature of the debate around Orientalism, and the fallacious debate regarding whether philological or theoretical skills should be privileged in researching the Middle East and Islam, I should stress that I’m hardly arguing that representation and power don’t matter — far from it — but that Said’s analysis in Orientalism was not productive for much of medieval and early modern studies regarding the Middle East as it confused rather than clarified the genealogies of many of the master narratives we grapple with today. The most interesting work in the past two decades has demonstrated the important ways in which European and Middle Eastern scholarship was co-constitutive. This work has shown that the essentialized understanding of Islam and the Middle East so criticized by Said as well as the decline narrative had both achieved a powerful hold in the West and 202 K. ŞAHIN ET AL. the Middle East precisely because it was a product of both Middle Eastern and European actors, often in conversation with each other. (See Gesink [2009], Mayeur-Jaouen [2018], and El Shamsy [2020]. I disagree with El Shamsy’s characterization of post-classical intellectual production, but there is much to learn from his detailed discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals.) The decline narrative argues that after an intellectual and political Golden Age under the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258), the Arab and Muslim worlds slipped into a broad decline until European colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prompted much-needed reforms. The power of the narrative is such that the acknowledged political and military strength of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals in the sixteenth century can be easily elided into their secondary decline period in the seventeenth and subsequent centuries, not to mention an overall period of intellectual stasis that stretched from the Abbasids up until modernity. This narrative is pervasive among Europeanist scholarship as well, of course, and here it is worth noting that it is adopted even by scholars such as Nabil Matar (2005b), whom Julia referred to above and who has been so important in charting the presence of Muslims in early modern England. The effective and award-winning interventions against the essentialization of Islam by Thomas Bauer (2011) and Shahab Ahmed (2016) — distinct but related to the decline thesis in that the latter leans heavily on Islam being static — have for their part engaged not so much with Said or his legacy, as with Orientalist and Islamic modernist preoccupations with Islamic law and their equation of the Islamic legal tradition with Islam itself. Julia Schleck So, Justin, you are saying that one of the weaknesses of Said’s work was his failure to realize that the master narratives that did so much work for European imperialists were successful in part because they were similarly useful for actors within the Middle East, something that might have been more evident if he had engaged in more depth with Middle Eastern sources? I was unfamiliar with this critique and find it fascinating. However, I must also say that as a scholar in Said’s field and one sympathetic to his aims, the challenges of escaping the European silo and working in a competent way with non-European sources were and remain formidable. Studies like those you just noted, Justin, which treat equally European and non-European actors, are something that I believe early modernists with Europeanist training would like to investigate in their own period, mutatis mutandis, but the institutional and linguistic barriers have largely prevented it. That there is considerable interest in integrating non-European writings, histories, and ideas into the discussion is manifested in the upsurge in “Global Renaissance” and “Global Medieval” studies, but the difficulty of achieving the languages necessary to do this, and a lack of translations of relevant materials has made this a relatively rare event. With language training even less available (and increasingly less required by doctoral programs), the likelihood of someone training in Global Renaissance studies within a traditional Europeanist literature or history program being able to access and successfully integrate early modern Ottoman or Arabic into their degrees is slim unless it was already a familiar language (whether from personal background or undergraduate training). Those who succeed will struggle to navigate the appropriate archives since this knowledge is not well integrated into our fields. EXEMPLARIA 203 Kaya Şahin Yet I think one of the most enticing aspects of medieval and early modern studies is the emergence and expansion of a rich written culture that is less elite-produced and more popular than ever before, coupled with the rise and expansion of local, regional, and state/ imperial archives. These developments, observed in several societies and polities across the globe, not only allow us to do more in-depth work, but also enable comparative scholarly approaches. While it is indeed very challenging to use a variety of languages in one’s research, not to mention a variety of different narrative and archival sources, I want to make a case for it here. More specifically, I want to quickly suggest two ways to think about building upon Said’s work while revising some of its features, such as the overly strong East–West dichotomy, or the strict critique of philological study that sometimes throws out the good scholarship with the bad. First of all, as an Ottomanist working on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I find it of capital importance to temper the dominance of sources produced by the Ottoman elite by using sources produced outside the Ottoman territories, or within the Ottoman realm but by members of non-elite groups. Of course, these kinds of inquiries are always limited by the nature and number of relevant sources we can locate at any given time, but this is a worthwhile inquiry. Rather than suspecting early modern European sources as representatives of Orientalism a priori, I believe my task is to use them together with contemporary Ottoman sources, while subjecting both sides to the same level of critique. Secondly: I agree with Said about the dangers of classical/traditional (indeed logocentric) philology and its Orientalist variant. One of those dangers is to come up with essentialist and monolithic categories of Islamic civilization or Islamic culture; another is to claim that this invented culture or civilization is represented by, and can be almost exclusively studied by, a series of texts; yet another is to study non-European texts through the lens of social and cultural hierarchies that place Europe and Whiteness at the center. I am not advocating for substituting philology, especially that kind of philology, for critical scholarship, or turning philological/linguistic inquiry into an end in itself. However, without the necessary philological skills, we can only produce an inadequate view of premodern Islamic societies, which creates yet another methodological and political problem. This is the second point I want to make here. I am made hopeful by recent debates on a new kind of philology that is more self-aware of its own intellectual pedigree and ideological origins, as well as of the material and historical conditions within which its texts were produced. This “new philology” strives to be more transnational in its reading of texts, as well as in the concepts it develops and the methodologies it uses. This is where Said-inspired critical perspectives and the strengths of classical philological training may come together to produce a non-nationalist, nonessentialist study of the premodern past. (As a good starting point for discussions of this new philology/philologies, I strongly recommend Dayeh [2016].) Justin Stearns I’m happy to see the reference to a renewed interest in philology, Kaya! It reminds me of that great volume by Pollock, Elman, and Chang, World Philology (2015), and also of 204 K. ŞAHIN ET AL. Julie Orlemanski’s fantastic essay (2015) historicizing philology’s place in medieval studies and its relation to the linguistic turn. Those two works pull in different directions: the first offers a comparative window onto past philological practices across the globe, while the second argues for the study and practice of philology going hand in hand with its theorization. Orlemanski cites Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette’s edited volume (2013) as an example of the kind of work she is advocating for. These two works help explain the continued focus on philology in our fields, even though when I look at our Europeanist colleagues, I am struck with something you could call “theory envy,” as I see there a much deeper explicit engagement with a wide variety of contemporary theoretical approaches, some inspired by Said himself. This is in part a reflection of our fields not yet having fully digested the ocean of unedited manuscript sources with which we are faced, but we are also struggling to find the right master narratives with which to contextualize these materials and to articulate them to others outside our fields. One example: the starkly different interpretations that Khaled El-Rouayheb (2015) and Ahmed El Shamsy (2020) have recently given for the character of the intellectual production in the early modern Middle East. El-Rouayheb argues — convincingly, I believe — that the Muslim world was intellectually vibrant and diverse in the long seventeenth century, with the central Arab Ottoman lands being revivified by works by Moroccan, Kurdish, and Indian scholars. Deeply influenced by the reformers that are at the heart of his study of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, El Shamsy argues that the same period was characterized by stultifying scholasticism and esotericism. I think ElRouayheb is right and El Shamsy wrong, but they are both great scholars, and I doubt that anyone outside the field, looking at these works, could think that we have arrived at any kind of consensus on this significant issue. And so, the default narrative of intellectual decline will likely remain the status quo in survey texts and courses, despite the amazing work that has gone into complicating the picture (see here also the very useful volume by von Hees 2017, especially the contribution of Sing [2017]). Julia Schleck The point about the decline narrative brings us back to Said once again. You mentioned earlier, Justin, that recent studies have convincingly argued that Said’s work failed to recognize that the essentializing and the decline narrative about the Middle East were so effective in part because they were developed by and served the interests of both European and Middle Eastern actors. Arguably, it did so in part because Said himself, as someone whose disciplinary training was in European literature and history, did not engage substantively with non-European sources. But if that’s the case, it seems that we have not done much to rectify the field configurations which permitted or even encouraged this weakness in his work. I’m wondering if there is not a political, but rather an epistemological parallel to be made between the Orientalist grand narratives that Said critiques that were created by an earlier generation of scholars, and the master narratives of scholars today, particularly one which Kaya mentioned earlier. Said used the new theoretical reading tools that were being developed in literary theory at the time (indeed, helped to forward those techniques) in order to critique the narratives being generated about the “East” by Western scholars. He asserted that these narratives served a political function — to give EXEMPLARIA 205 intellectual legitimacy to “Western” political, economic, and cultural hegemony. He did not consider what function these narratives played for Middle Eastern political actors and/or scholars, and whether they were simultaneously being promoted in “the East” as well. Said was effective in showing how the knowledge generated in Orientalist scholarship was partial, and self-referential, and did not value or incorporate knowledge traditions that originated outside Western scholarship. In short, he showed how that knowledge had politically motivated blind spots — forms of ignorance — that it promoted as knowledge. But he missed that others outside the West were also invested in promoting these forms of ignorance. Today, we in the Europeanist tradition are accustomed to seeking out and condemning these politically motivated blind spots in our own writings. But we tend to do so on a purely theoretical level, failing to take into account the way institutional and disciplinary practices also condition what can be known and said. In other words, much like Said’s condemned Orientalists, Europeanists are still largely having a conversation about the “Orient” amongst ourselves. This points to the need to subject our disciplinary and institutional practices to the same kind of rigorous critique as our methodology. For the most part, we have not successfully incorporated the sources, narratives (even if they are conflicting), or knowledge traditions of North African or Ottoman studies into the discussion. Nor are we particularly successful about interacting with scholars originating from and/or working within Middle Eastern colleges and universities. I realize this has its own separate set of complex challenges, which we’ve not discussed in depth here, but I think it’s fair to see the continuing impact of imperialism in the exclusive nature of the Euro-American academy. What strains of ignorance are we unintentionally cultivating and promoting as knowledge through the isolation of “Western” scholarly discussions taking place about the “East”? Kaya mentioned that as an Ottomanist, he sees integrating European sources into his study of the Ottomans as an important part of his work, and one that undermines unhelpful essentialisms which can result from relying too heavily on Ottoman state sources. Speaking with him about the theoretical dangers and implications of this move profoundly changed my own attitude towards the European travel narratives I had been working with for years. At an NEH Summer Institute hosted by Hal Parker and Ahmet Karamustafa in 2013, Kaya and I began collaborating on an article that examined the writings of an English traveler to Safavid Persia in the early seventeenth century (Şahin and Schleck 2016). As I had fully digested Said’s arguments and methods, I had assumed that most of the history of Persia this traveler included was severely warped by his ignorance of the region and his cultural and religious arrogance and that the most ethical way to read it was surely against the grain. I myself lacked sufficiently detailed knowledge of Safavid history to be able to assess it well. I was therefore deeply surprised when, after Kaya read the travel narrative for the first time, he viewed it as an interesting and important primary source. I realized I had written it off as a kind of Orientalized quasi-fiction without even considering its usefulness as a historical source, what it might have to add to a serious discussion of early modern Persian history and culture. Ironically, it was working with an Ottomanist that made me rethink what had become a deeply embedded assumption about the inherent Orientalism of my sources and the concomitant method for approaching their analysis. 206 K. ŞAHIN ET AL. Kaya Şahin I do think that collaboration is one good way to surmount philological and disciplinary challenges, and produce work that will appeal to a variety of scholars and readers. There are some institutional foundations for collaboration in the United States. The three of us first met at an NEH Summer Seminar in 2010, called “Remapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Islam and Europe.” It was directed by Judith Tucker, an Ottomanist/Islamicist, and Adele Seeff, a Europeanist. (Here, it should also be noted that the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland, our host, was shut down a few years later as a result of decanal fiat and technocratic reorganization.) Julia and I organized a similar gathering at Indiana University in the summer of 2017. Several other scholars put together seminars and institutes focusing on East–West relations, Mediterranean history, the global Middle Ages, and similar interdisciplinary and cross-cultural configurations. That is one way to foster collaborations, but it is not enough in itself, since it leaves the choice to the participants, almost all of whom prefer to focus on their individual projects, albeit in an environment that brings together different fields and disciplines. There are a few collaborative grants, ranging from small ones, like those at the Newberry Library, to large ones, like those sponsored by the ACLS, but these are quite competitive. The incentives for collaboration are there, in other words, but they may not be well-structured and readily available. Collaboration almost always comes as an addition to our own work. The biggest institutional obstacle is the tenure and promotion process in the social sciences and the humanities in American academia, which privileges single-authored articles and books. One glimmer of hope is coming from Europe, where both larger entities like the European Research Council and Erasmus+, and smaller ones like the German Research Foundation (DFG), have been supportive of humanities research and scholarly collaboration. Likewise, academic institutions have been more encouraging about collaborative collectives, even though many of these are time- and grant-bound, and do not result in the creation of tenured/permanent positions that could sustain similar collaborations over a longer period of time. Justin Stearns I can only agree. And ideally we would also be involved in multiple conversations and collaborations with varied academic partners, both within the Euro-American academy, but much more importantly in the broader Middle East and North African region as well. None of this will be easy (and we are hardly the first to call for such collaboration), both because of how collaborative research is not readily built into United States academic evaluations and funding structures when it comes to the Humanities, as you have noted, and because our fields are often focused on distinct questions. Yet such collaboration is not just intellectually desirable in its own right but is also a necessary part of addressing what Julia has in this conversation called the imperial legacies of our own disciplines, legacies which resulted in our inhabiting much better funded academies in the United States and Europe than those that exist in the Middle East. Here we can take inspiration from Said’s writings on the politics of knowledge production and turn to ways of reaching out across national academies not only to collaborate with colleagues in the EXEMPLARIA 207 countries we study, but also, as much as possible for us individually, to make grant money, conference participation, and employment opportunities accessible to them. Julia Schleck I agree that the renewed interest in Said’s work and the model he provided as a politically engaged public intellectual not afraid to examine the academy’s own practices gives us an opportunity. Said’s legacy challenges us to examine more rigorously the ways in which not just the curriculum but the shape of our disciplinary configurations, institutions, and practices have been and continue to be shaped by the European imperialisms launched in the early modern period and still in force today. Knowledge is not created in an intellectual vacuum but through particular practices enacted within the inherited structures of academia and our societies. We can continue to carry forward Said’s trenchant stance towards the imbrication of scholarship with imperial injustices by advocating for a truly internationalist vision of scholarly knowledge production, one which deliberately confronts and creatively addresses the continuing legacies of imperialism in our practice as premodern scholars. Critiquing those legacies from a privileged distance is not enough. We must examine both our methods and practices in order to stand in true solidarity with those directly affected by the continuing legacies of Orientalist knowledge production. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Jyotsna Singh and Cornell H. Fleischer for their advice and encouragement. Notes on contributors Kaya Şahin is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington. He is currently working on a biography of the Ottoman sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66) and on Ottoman public ceremonies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Julia Schleck is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She is the author of Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands: Forms of Mediation in English Travel Writing, 1575– 1630 (2011). Justin Stearns is an Associate Professor in Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. His new book, Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco, will appear with Cambridge University Press in 2021. References Ahmed, Shahab. 2016. What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, and Karla Mallette, eds. 2013. A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 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