By Ali Halane - Journalist and Political analyst
“Dr Hussein’s book led me back to Edward Said, revealing a deeper question beneath his critique of Orientalism: knowledge, power and the colonised person’s freedom.”
Domination can begin with a simple assertion: a people cannot govern themselves, or a society is not yet advanced enough to decide its own future. Repeat that claim in books, academic studies and political speeches, and prejudice begins to look like common sense. It can even become a justification for taking control of other people’s lives.
This is the question that animates Abdirahman Hussein’s Edward Said: Euro-American Supremacism & Critique of Imperial Reason: how have ideas claiming to be rational and universal coexisted with colonialism and racism, and sometimes helped justify them?
According to the publisher, Hussein sets out to uncover often hidden connections between modern philosophy, from the Enlightenment onward, and imperialism, racism and genocide.
Drawing on intellectual and social history, political theory and cultural criticism, he examines thinkers ranging from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Foucault, Derrida, Adorno and Habermas, with varying degrees of attention.
They did not share a single set of beliefs. What brings them into this study is a larger question: how have ideas about humanity, reason and progress intersected with the exercise of power?
Hussein takes the inquiry beyond Said’s best-known book, Orientalism, while keeping its central question in view: who gets to describe other peoples and speak for them? Said showed that domination depends on knowledge, literature and public language as well as political and military force.
Portray a society as stagnant or unable to manage its affairs, and its subjugation can be presented as civilisation or rescue. Hussein goes further back, asking which philosophical assumptions allow such portrayals to pass for truth.
The title deserves a closer look. “Euro-American supremacism” describes the tendency to treat Western experience as the measure of everyone else’s, then judge other societies by their distance from it. “Imperial reason” names ways of thinking that give existing hierarchies a moral or scientific defence.
The point is not to discard reason or philosophy. It is to ask what happens when an idea claims to speak for all humanity while excluding whole peoples in practice.
Hussein has been pursuing these questions for years. In his earlier book, Edward Said: Criticism and Society, he argued that a coherent method runs through Said’s seemingly varied work.
Verso, its publisher, notes the importance Hussein gives to Said’s Beginnings and to the Palestinian experience, which he sees as informing even those writings that do not directly address Palestine.
The publisher describes Hussein’s 2023 book as an expansion of an argument made in that first study. To me, the shift is from “How does Said think?” to “What can Said’s way of thinking tell us about the history of empire?”
A review of that first book helps explain the appeal of Hussein’s approach. Writing in Logos, Matthew Abraham observed that Hussein did not treat Said as a literary critic who eventually turned to politics.
He found a question running through Said’s work from the beginning: how can a person think freely within a culture that both shapes and constrains them? How can they draw on that same culture to challenge its forms of domination? Criticism, in this reading, exposes stereotypes but also makes room for dissent and new beginnings.
I have a history with this book that began before I opened it. I met Dr Abdirahman Hussein at the University of Hargeisa in August 2020. He had much on his mind, yet was generous with his time. We spoke about his life in the United States, his years teaching there and in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and his first book on Said.
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He told me he had sent the manuscript of this new book to a respected publisher but doubted it would be accepted. It was, he said, more daring than his previous work. When the book finally appeared, I remembered that conversation. I wanted to know where those more daring questions had taken him.
Hiil Press, a young Somali publishing house, took on the book. Its resources could not match those behind Verso’s handsome edition of Hussein’s first study of Said. The result is modest but readable, and it put the work into readers’ hands.
That, too, left me with a question beyond the book’s subject: what does it take for serious scholarship to find publishers with both the courage to back it and the means to bring it to its readers?
At 530 pages, the book asked for time and patience, but I found the reading absorbing. Said’s arguments had impressed me before: their boldness, and the depth of his thinking about knowledge and power. I had also found him difficult to follow at times as he moved between literature, philosophy, history and politics.
I often understood the force of Said’s question before I could follow the path to his answer. I would go back, read again and try to trace it. Hussein helped me see the connections between works I had approached separately.
Behind Said’s many subjects, I began to recognise a lasting concern for people denied the chance to tell their own histories. In that sense, the book allowed me to discover Said anew.
Hussein asks us to read grand ideas alongside the histories in which they were put to use. It matters what philosophers wrote about reason, freedom and humanity. It matters just as much whom those words included, and whom they excluded, as empires expanded.
Read this way, Said’s work is more than an account of Western stereotypes about the East. It becomes a way to examine how knowledge and power shape each other, and how universal principles have faltered when confronted with the lives of colonised peoples.
These questions matter beyond the university. The way a powerful state depicts another people can affect whether the world listens to their demands and which responses it considers acceptable.
Reduce a society to a security threat or a chronic inability to govern itself, and its history and the voices of its people fade from view. Ideas do not wage wars or build empires by themselves. They can, however, give power a language in which to explain its actions, justify them and soften their impact on the public conscience.
Earlier readings of Hussein have likewise noted his interest in the distance between academic accounts of Palestinians and their lived experience, and in the relationship between scholarship and state policy.
The book’s sweep is a source of strength and a demanding test of its argument. Following claims of Western superiority across centuries of philosophy means distinguishing between thinkers, between open defences of domination and assumptions left unstated, and between texts that served colonialism and texts that helped people resist it.
The fact that knowledge has a relationship to power does not invalidate everything it produces. As I read, I kept returning to a question: how precisely does Hussein connect each idea to its historical setting while preserving the differences within European and American thought? That is the kind of question an ambitious book deserves.
Dr Abdirahman Hussein, known among Somalis as Abdirahman Hawd, is a scholar whose work has reached an international audience. When we met, I found him modest, generous in conversation and uninterested in the limelight. I do not think his work has received the attention it deserves.
I hope an Arabic publisher will translate his work. Arabic readers would gain a searching account of Said’s thought and a Somali contribution to the debate on colonialism that deserves a far wider audience.
I finished the book with greater admiration for Said and deeper appreciation for Hussein, along with more questions than I had when I began. That is my measure of a book worth reading.
It stays with me after the final page, sending me back to works I thought I knew. And when an idea is offered in the name of reason or progress, it prompts me to ask: who chose the standard, who stands to benefit from its promise, and who has been left out?
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Ali Halane is a Somali journalist and researcher specialising in African and Middle Eastern affairs, and a founding member of the Somali Cultural Parliament.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Dawan Africa.