When dealing with the subject of Orientalism, Islamism and postmodernism, I will be casually criss-crossing all kinds of existing borders between these three discourses, practices and orientations. My approach, then, will have to be quite global and very interdisciplinary. I shall start by putting before you a prime example of Orientalism in the really bad sense of the term as exposed and explained by the late Edward Said:

“To live in Arabic is to live in a labyrinth of false turns and double meanings. No sentence means quite what it says. Every word is potentially a talisman, conjuring the ghosts of the entire family of words from which it comes. The devious complexity of Arabic grammar is legendary. It is a language, which is perfectly constructed for saying nothing with enormaus eloquence; a language of pure manners in which there are hardly any literal meanings at all and in which the symbolic gesture is everything. Arabic makes English look simple-minded, and French a mere jargon of cost-accountants. Even to peer through a chink in the wall of the language is enough to glimpse the depth and darkness of that forest of ambiguity. No wonder the Koran is so notoriously untranslatable.”

Obviously Arabic is judged here (and found very wanting) by the principles of a Cartesian conception of language – a conception implicitly based on the doctrine of «clear and distinct ideas», the primacy of quasisyllogistic reasoning of the «I think therefore I am» type, the propositional nature of all genuine saying and comprehending and the full specifiability and discreteness of communicable meaning.

Now, if we shift to a postmodernist-deconstructionist approach to language based on such principles as the disjunction of sign, signifier and signified; the unending shiftiness of sense; the undecidability of meaning; the paradoxes of incommensurability; William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity; the absurdities of self-reflexivity and so on, then would not the Arabic described by Jonathan Raban seem like the ideal language for the angst-ridden Daseins of the postmodern condition?

A similar and widespread view as expressed by a most famous French Arabist when referring to the spirit of the Arabic language, Jacques Berque observed «the Arabic tongue, whose every word leads to God, has been designed to conceal reality, not to grasp it.»