Gellner/Said debate
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The Gellner/Said debate started with Ernest Gellner's review of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993).
This text, which bore the title In the text "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism " stated that Said's contention of Western domination of the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, because, until the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) was a realistic military, cultural, and religious threat to (Western) Europe.
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Quotations from "An academic row turns personal" by Brian Cathcart, Sunday 6 June 1993, The Independent
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Said on Gellner
- 'code of politesse and ritual calmness'
- 'reams of unsupported, unconcrete generalisations'
- 'piffling trivia of the Common Room'.
- 'He didn't even read my book, but I have been reading his. They are woolly abstractions of the worst sort.'
- 'obsessive revulsion for Islam'
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Gellner on Said
- 'citizen of Woody Allen-land', guilty of 'unsustained, facile inverse colonialism'
- 'entertaining but intellectually insignificant'
- 'He is coasting on the predicament of his Palestinian compatriots - which incidentally he does not share: he is a dandy and a Manhattan bon viveur.'
- 'the prevalent mood of expiation for empire'
- 'anodyne expression of shared pieties'
- 'The problem of power and culture . . . is too important to be left to lit crit.'
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