Can an AT89S52 be programmed using an Arduino as ISP?
You should be able to use the Arduino as an ISP since an ISP is basically just a serial to SPI interface. If you are trying to use the arduino software to upload your program, you will need to edit your boards.txt file to be able to talk to the chip. If you are just using avrdude you will need to update your avrdude.conf.  AVR Freaks has a post on someone trying something similar and may be of some help. Without knowing your environment it's difficult to give more specific advice