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undeveloped [and] inferior.” Another dogma is that “the Orient” lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes “that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective.’ “And the final dogma is “that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).”
    There is reason to be hugely skeptical of claims that describecivilizations discretely and identify civilizational histories with particular geographies and polities. One has to distinguish between civilization and power. The very notion of an uninterrupted “Western civilization” across linear time is an idea that only arises from the vantage point of the power we know as the West. This power has both a geography and a history: that history stretches from 1492 through the centuries of the slave trade and colonization to the Cold War and after.
    Like the history of Western civilization, the history of Arabs is linked to particular political agendas. At times, such a history doubles as a history of “Islam,” just as the history of “the West” often doubles as the history of “Christianity.” Here, too, the tendency is for cultural identities to get politicized and to take on identities defined by the law.
    In its North African colonies, France drew a legal distinction between “Berber” and “Arab.” By governing “Berbers” with a “customary law” (dahir) and “Arabs” with a religious law, they turned “Berber” and “Arab” into mutually exclusive identities, first legal, then political. The nationalist response was in reality a backlash that reified the identity “Arab,” so much so that simply “to acknowledge any distinction between Arabs and Berbers was to risk associating oneself with the French colonial attempt to divide the nation into ethnic enclaves.” This response turned the politically charged world of Orientalist culture upside down but failed to change it.
    Not surprisingly, who is a Berber and who is not—and what percent of Morocco’s population is Berber today—is now a profoundly political question. How else are we to understand wildly differing estimates of Berbers in the Moroccan population, from the BBC’s claim of “more than 60%” to estimates of “less than 45%” by Berber scholar Fatima Sadiqi and “about 40%” byactivist-scholar Salem Chaker? One problem with equating political identities and cultural ones is that everything becomes too one-dimensional. Cultural developments that are amalgams are given one identity, Arab, as if springing from a single fountainhead. Arabic-speaking North African Berbers thus become “Arabs” and so the conquest of Spain by mainly Berber dynasties from Senegambia, becomes an “Arab” conquest.
    Conventional Arab civilizational history has been most effectively questioned by Africans themselves. In 1972, the Sudanese civil war—already the longest civil war in the history of postcolonial Africa—was the subject of a negotiated settlement in Addis Ababa. All those involved in the civil war—the power in the north, the rebels in the south, and the range of foreign states and interests that lined up behind either side—agreed that the civil war had pitted “Arabs” in the north against “Africans” in the south. The presumption that the political adversaries represented two distinct cultural identitites, “Arab” and “African,” was challenged by a group of northern and southern Sudanese intellectuals who came to control the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when a coalition government came to power. In a book written in