Sunday, October 29, 2017

Edward Said on Noah Feldman

Some people go to their own pages on Wikipedia and add or change materials for their own benefit and glory.  The epitome of narcissism.  Noah Feldman (who is now mentioned as a Supreme Court candidate) whose knowledge and writings about the Arab world and Islam amount to no more than vapidness and stereotypical generalizations and who once questioned whether Arabs act "rationally", has a page on Wikipedia and it says that Edward Said only wrote against Feldman because he did not think that he was experienced enough.  This is what Edward Said had written about Feldman: "The late Edward Said, writing last year in Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly, observed that the U.S. media described Feldman as “an extraordinarily brilliant expert in Islamic law, [who] had studied Arabic since he was 15, and grew up as an Orthodox Jew. But he has never practiced law in the Arab world, never been to Iraq, and seems to have no real practical background in the problems of post-war Iraq. What an open-faced snub not only to Iraq itself, but also to the legions of Arab and Muslim legal minds who could have done a perfectly acceptable job in the service of Iraq’s future. . . . [T]he contempt is thick enough to cut with a knife.”"