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An Introduction to Edward Said’s Orientalism
 Haroon Khalid

Author: Edward W. Said

Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1994

Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text of cultural studies in which he has

challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it.
He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the
lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic,
and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the Orientals or the people
from these exotic civilization.
Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the
west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an
artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and
ours. The Europeans used orientalism to define themselves. Some particular attributes were
associated with the Orientals, and whatever the Orientals weren’t the occidents were. The
Europeans defined themselves as the superior race compared to the orientals; and they
justified their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty towards the world
to civilize the uncivilized world. The main problem, however, arose when the Europeans
started generalizing the attributes they associated with orientals, and started portraying these
artificial characteristics associated with orientals in their western world through their
scientific reports, literary work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a
certain image about the orientals in the European mind and in doing that infused a bias in the
European attitude towards the orientals. This prejudice was also found in the orientalists
(scientist studying the orientals); and all their scientific research and reports were under the
influence of this. The generalized attributes associated with the orientals can be seen even
today, for example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion
of the terrorist.
Here is a brief summary of the book, followed by a critique by Malcolm Kerr.

Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism

In this chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how
the orientals started considering the orientals as non-human beings. The orientals divided the
world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs. An imaginary geographical line
was drawn between what was ours and what was theirs. The orients were regarded as
uncivilized people; and the westerns said that since they were the refined race it was their
duty to civilize these people and in order to achieve their goal, they had to colonize and rule
the orients. They said that the orients themselves were incapable of running their own
government. The Europeans also thought that they had the right to represent the orientals in
the west all by themselves. In doing so, they shaped the orientals the way they perceived them
or in other words they were orientalizing the orients. Various teams have been sent to the east
where the orientalits silently observed the orientals by living with them; and every thing the
orientals said and did was recorded irrespective of its context, and projected to
the civilized world of the west. This resulted in the generalization. Whatever was seen by the
orientals was associated with the oriental culture, no matter if it is the irrational action of an
individual.
The most important use of orientalism to the Europeans was that they defined themselves
by defining the orientals. For example, qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized,
crudeness were related to the orientals, and automatically the Europeans became active,
rational, civilized, sophisticated. Thus, in order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for
the orientalists to generalize the culture of the orients.
Another feature of orientalism was that the culture of the orientals was explained to the
European audience by linking them to the western culture, for example, Islam was made
into Mohammadism because Mohammad was the founder of this religion and since religion of
Christ was called Christianity; thus Islam should be calledMohammadism. The point to be
noted here is that no Muslim was aware of this terminology and this was a completely
western created term, and to which the Muslims had no say at all.

Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures

In this chapter, Edward Said points the slight change in the attitude of the Europeans
towards the orientals. The orientals were really publicized in the European world especially
through their literary work. Oriental land and behaviour was highly romanticized by the
European poets and writers and then presented to the western world. The orientalists had
made a stage strictly for the European viewers, and the orients were presented to them with
the colour of the orientalist or other writers perception. In fact, the orient lands were so
highly romanticized that western literary writers found it necessary to offer pilgrimage to
these exotic lands of pure sun light and clean oceans in order to experience peace of mind,
and inspiration for their writing. The east was now perceived by the orientalist as a place of
pure human culture with no necessary evil in the society. Actually it was this purity of the
orientals that made them inferior to the clever, witty, diplomatic, far-sighted European; thus it
was their right to rule and study such an innocent race. The Europeans said that these people
were too naive to deal with the cruel world, and that they needed the European fatherly role to
assist them.
Another justification the Europeans gave to their colonization was that they were meant to
rule the orientals since they have developed sooner than the orientals as a nation, which
shows that they were biologically superior, and secondly it were the Europeans who
discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans. Darwin’s theories were
put forward to justify their superiority, biologically by the Europeans.
In this chapter, Edward Said also explains how the two most renowned orientalists of the
th
19 century, namely Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan worked and gave orienatlism a new
dimension. In fact, Edward Said compliments the contribution made by Sacy in the field. He
says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the information in such a way that it
was also useful for the future orientalist. And secondly, the prejudice that was inherited by
every orientalist was considerably low in him. On the other hand, Renan who took advantage
of Sacy’s work was as biased as any previous orientalist. He believed that the science of
orientalism and the science of philology have a very important relation; and after Renan this
idea was given a lot attention and many future orientalists worked in its line.

Chapter 3 : Orientalism Now

 This chapter starts off by telling us that how the geography of the world was shaped by the
colonization of the Europeans. There was a quest for geographical knowledge which formed
the bases of orientalism.
The author then talks about the changing circumstances of the world politics and changing
approach to orientalism in the 20th century. The main difference was that where the earlier
orientalists were more of silent observers the new orientalists took a part in the every day life
of the orients. The earlier orientalists did not interact a lot with the orients, whereas the new
orients lived with them as if they were one of them. This wasn’t out of appreciation of their
lifestyle but was to know more about the orients in order to rule them properly. Lawrence of
Arabia was one of such orienatlists.
Then Edward Said goes on to talk about two other scholars Massignon and Gibb. Though
Massignon was a bit liberal with orientalists and often tried to protect their rights, there was
still inherited biased found in him for the orientals, which can be seen in his work. With the
changing world situation especially after World War 1, orientalism took a more liberal stance
towards most of its subjects; but Islamic orientalism did not enjoy this status. There were
constant attacks to show Islam as a weak religion, and a mixture of many religions and
thoughts. Gibb was the most famous Islamic orientalist of this time.
After World War 1 the centre of orientalism moved from Europe to USA. One important
transformation that took place during this time was instances of relating it to philology and it
was related to social science now. All the orientalists studied the orientals to assist their
government to come up with policies for dealing with the orient countries. With the end of
World War 2, all the Europeans colonies were lost; and it was believed that there were no
more orientals and occidents, but this was surely not the case. Western prejudice towards
eastern countries was still very explicit, and often they managed to generalize most of the
eastern countries because of it. For example Arabs were often represented as cruel and violent
people. Japanese were always associated with karate whereas the Muslims were always
considered to be terrorists. Thus, this goes on to show that even with increasing globalization
and awareness, such bias was found in the people of the developed countries.
Edward Said concludes his book by saying that he is not saying that the orientalists should
not make generalization, or they should include the orient perspective too, but creating a
boundary at the first place is something which should not be done.

Malcolm Kerr’s review on Orientalism

Malcolm Kerr did his specialization in International Relations and specialized in the Middle
East from Princeton University. He worked on his PhD thesis with Gibb, and spent two years
with him in Cambridge University.1 Malcolm’s review on Orientalism can be concluded by
his following remarks, “This book reminds me of the television program “Athletes in Action,”
in which professional football players compete in swimming, and so forth. Edward Said, a
literary critic loaded with talent, has certainly made a splash, but with this sort of effort he is
not going to win any major race. This is a great pity, for it is a book that in principle needed to
be written, and for which the author possessed rich material. In the end, however, the effort
misfired. The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is
spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to
spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink
into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and
American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely
the same error”2. He further goes on to say “The list of victims of Said’s passion is a long one,
too long to examine in detail. Some of them deserve it: he has justly taken the measure of
Ernest Renan. Some others are probably not worth it. One wonders why he is so ready to
lump nineteenth-century travellers with professional philologists; why he found it necessary
to twist the empathy of Sylvain Levi for colonized peoples into an alleged racism (pp. 248-
250), or to dismiss the brilliance of Richard Burton as being overshadowed by a mentality of
Western domination of the east (p. 197); why he condemns Massignon for his heterodoxy,
and Gibb for his orthodoxy; or why he did not distinguish between Bernard Lewis’s recent
polemics on modern politics and his much more important corpus of scholarship on the
history of Islamic society and culture. For those who knew Gustave von Grunebaum and were
aware of his scholarly genius and his deep attraction to Islamic culture in all its ramifications,
Said’s exercise in character assassination (pp. 296-298) can only cause deep dismay. Suffice
it to say that von Grunebaum’s view of Islamic culture as “antihumanist” was a serious
proposition, and in fact not an unsympathetic one, denounced but not rebutted by Said, who
seems not to recognize the difference between an antihumanist culture and an inhumane one.
He might have done well to note that Abdallah Laroui, whose penetrating criticism of von
Grunebaum’s work he invokes, earned thereby an invitation from von Grunebaum to teach at
UCLA”3.

1
. Ann Z Kerr, A Biography of Malcolm Hopper Kerr, Middle East Study Association of North
America, June 2000, Journal on-line. Available
from http://fp.arizona.edu/mesassoc/Kerr/kerrbio.htm Accessed October 3rd 2004.
2
. Malcolm Kerr, vol. 12, Edward Said, Orientalism reviewed by Malcolm Kerr, “International
study of middle eastern studies. (December 1980), 544-547. Journal on-line. Available from
http://www.geocities.com/orientalismorg/Kerr.htm. Accessed October 3rd 2004.
3
. Ibid

http://somereading.blogspot.com/2011/11/edward-said-orientalism.html

Thursday, 24 November 2011

Edward Said, Orientalism

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)

Introduction
Said starts by asserting the fact that the Orient played an instrumental role in
the construction of the European culture as the powerful Other: “the Orient has
helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea,
personality, experience.” (1-2) He then states that the research subject of his
book is Orientalism, by which he understands a combined representation of the
Orient in the Western culture, science, politics, etc. and, transcending the
borders of all these field of knowledge, it becomes “a style of thought based
upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient"
and (most of the time) "the Occident,"” (2) and finally it transforms into a
powerful political instrument of domination: “Orientalism as a Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” (3) As Said is
a Marxist, there is no wonder that it is this third incarnation of Orientalism,
domination, that he cares most of all for.

In the Foucaultian tradition, Said suggests to look at Orientalism as a

discourse:

without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the

enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-
and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically,
scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (3)

He then states that the Western image of the Orient—i.e. Orientalism—had

little to do with the “real” Orient. What is more important, Orientalism is not
simply the work of European imagination—it is all about power, domination,
hegemony and authority. As such, Orientalism was not “simply” a collection of
misrepresentations about the Orient in Europe, it “created body of theory and
practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable
material investment,” (6) material investment here meaning academic
scholarship, art, literature, political writing, common sense, etc. In this way,
Orientalism in the European culture became an instrument for maintaining
“content” (in Gramscian terms), i.e. voluntary reproduction by the subjects of
the social reality desired by the power. In this way, Orientalism is a
phenomenon of the same rank as the idea of Europe.

Said then ask how relevant it is on his side to consider as one phenomenon
what was supposed to be, actually, two: individual writing (particularly in case
of literary fiction) and hegemonic strategies. He then goes into a lengthy
explanation of why he considers this to be relevant. First, he asserts that there
is no “pure” knowledge, but rather all knowledge is shaped by ideological
positions:

No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the
circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious)
with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a
member of a society. (10)
The same, he argues, is the case with literature. The link between ideology and
writing is not simplistic at all, but still it is unavoidable. He describes this link
in the following way:

Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively
by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of
texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious
"Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a
distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic,
sociological, historical, and philological texts, <…> it is, rather than expresses, a
certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even
to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is,
above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship
political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven
exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with
power political, <…> intellectual, <…> cultural <…> moral… (12)

Hence Said’s research agenda: to study Orientalism “as a dynamic exchange

between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the
three great empires-British, French, American-in whose intellectual and
imaginative territory the writing was produced.” (15) His research question is,
logically, “How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and
economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of
Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world?” (15) as well as some other
related to its evolution in time and the relationship between the individual
effort and this collective project.

Said then discusses his methodology. He, first, claims that there was a need to
specify the corpus of his sources, therefore, he focused on French and British,
later American sources on Islamic countries, and provides a rationale for this
choice, Britain and France as the most important imperial powers, the US as
occupying their place after the WWII, Islam as the “Near Orient,” which has
been in contact with Europe for over a century.

As for his methodological focus, Said’s project is about fighting the dominant
power:

There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated,

disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it established canon
of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as
true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits,
reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. (20)

His technics of analysis involve

strategic location, which is a way of describing the author's position in a text with
regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a
way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of
texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential
power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. (20)
He explains that every author writing about the Orient must take a position vis-
à-vis the Orient, which means that he or she should translate into his or her
text the symbolic constructions created by Orientalism in its previous or
contemporary incarnations:

Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental
precedent. some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on
which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other
works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of
relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient
therefore constitutes an analyzable formation… (20)

Any text about the Orient is always exterior to the object it describes (i.e.,
Orient). Therefore, there are no “natural depictions” of the Orient, there are
only representations of it. What is important in this observation is that “these
representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon
codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous
Orient,” (22) which means that Orientalist texts are always more about the
West than about the Orient.

Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism

1. Knowing the Oriental

Said starts by analyzing public speeches and writings of two British

imperialists of the early 20th century about the Egypt, making an emphasis on
how the stress that since the British imperial authorities “know better” their
country, they have a natural right to rule it:

British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge
make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour
nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for
granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. (32)

Any doubt in this right is dangerous, as it destroys the faith of both “Arabs” and
colonial officers in what they are doing.

This mode of seeing the Orient turned into the dominant political vision:

The most important thing about the theory during the first decade of the twentieth
century was that it worked, and worked staggeringly well. The argument, when
reduced to its simplest form, was dear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There
are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter must be
dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs
rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another
Western power. (36)

Political domination had to be justified, therefore, in the course of the

nineteenth century, a bunch of theories turn up which persisted into the
twentieth century and which constructed the colonial subject as inferior to
Europeans—in logic, culture, moral, etc. Many resources were invented in this
vision of Oriental people, as it justified and legitimized domination:

The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the
prison, the illustrated manual. (41)

The reason why this domination emerged was that at that time Britain and
France, two leading colonial powers, divide between them (and other powers)
the whole world, but only between them—Middle East. In a way, they
cooperated to secure cultural domination over these lands:

And share they <Britain and France> did, in ways that we shall investigate
presently. What they shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was
the kind of intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism. In a sense
Orientalism was a library or archive of information, commonly and, in some of its
aspects, unanimously held. (41)

This cultural and academic project of Orientalizing the Orient was

institutionalized in learned societies, academic journals, conceptual views (like
Darwinism or Marxism), etc. The link between them and the Orientalism as the
phenomenon for which they all worked was double-folded: they drew on
Orientalism and they gradually transformed it. That it was not a transformation
of liberation, but the one of intensification and improvement, is proven,
according to Said, by contemporary (1970s) speeches of American politicians
who reproduce in their writing the same Oriental myth of the nineteenth
century. These myths are represented to us as truth, and Said asks how this
situation could emerge. The answer goes in the following sections.

2. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the

Oriental

Orientalism emerges, first, as an academic discipline within the European

mediaeval scholarship and is eventually fully formed by the nineteenth century:

A nineteenth-century Orientalist was therefore either a scholar (a Sinoiogist, an

IsIamicist, an Indo-Europeanist) or a gifted enthusiast (Hugo in Les Orientales,
Goethe in the Westostlicher Diwan), or both (Richard Burton, Edward Lane,
Friedrich Schlegel). (51)

This Orientalism of the nineteenth century was, however, built not upon a
“real” encounter with the West, but rather on the basis of the European writing
about the East since Ancient Greece. As the result, Orientalism formed as a
system of signs which functioned relatively independently from its alleged
references in the real world:

In the nineteenth century, Orientalism is very fashionable, but in a very eclectic

way, with a focus on the classical period, rather than on modernity, and “the
Orient studied was a textual universe by and large; the impact of the Orient was
made through books and manuscripts.” (52) The result was “Europe's collective
day-dream of the Orient.” (quoted V. G. Kiernan, 52)
Said then discusses that all geographies are imaginative and moves on to
inspect the imaginative geography of the Orient: “Almost from earliest times in
Europe the Orient was something more than what was empirically known about
it.” (55) Already in ancient Greece, “a line <was> drawn between two
continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.”
(57) “It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the
prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving
power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous
space beyond familiar boundaries.” (57)

Different travel accounts, literary fiction, histories, which themselves are

nearly literature, “are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and
they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East
and West.” (58)

The European vision of Islam became particularly important for the emergence
of Orientalism. Islam, due to its attack on European borders during the Middle
Ages, was regarded as a threat:

Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic
hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe Islam was a lasting trauma. (59)

Since European Christian scholars believed that Islam was a heresy and
Mohammed—an impostor, a “false” Christ, “he became as well the epitome of
lechery, debauchery, sodomy, and a whole battery of assorted treacheries,”
(62) which were later imposed on all Orientals in general.

In general, “Islam became an image… whose function was not so much to

represent Islam in itself as to represent it for the medieval Christian.” (60)
“This rigorous Christian picture of Islam was intensified in innumerable ways,
including—during the Middle Ages and ear1y Renaissance—a large variety of
poetry, learned controversy, and popular superstition.” (61)

Said then goes through the European mediaeval writing examining how the
image of the Orient was shaped gradually by different authors in the course of
time. The aim of these works was to “tame” the Orient, at least in the European
imagination, to give its phenomena genealogies, explanations and
developments.

3. Projects

In this section, Said considers projects which emerged within Orientalism and
shaped it as a threat to the European civilization, as something totally opposed
to it. He starts with Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s and William
Jones's expeditions to the Orient and scholarly studies of Sanskrit. His main
emphasis in this section is, however, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt:

For Napoleon Egypt was a project that acquired reality in his mind, and later in his
preparations for its conquest, through experiences that belong to the realm of
ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality… <Napoleon> saw the
Orient only as it had been encoded first by classical texts and then by Orientalist
experts, whose vision, based on classical texts, seemed a useful substitute for any
actual encounter with the real Orient. (80)

I wonder why Said finds so surprising the fact that Napoleon used literary
canon to prepare for his military expedition. There is actually no other way,
therefore, there is nothing special in it. Any military campaign is prepared on
the basis of literary evidence, and the enemy is always constructed, rather than
real. That’s why wars are lost in 50% of cases.

Said emphasizes that Napoleon saw Egypt as his trophy, rather than a country
and culture of its own: “Egypt's own destiny was to be annexed, to Europe
preferably.” (85)

Description de l'Egypte, a discursive attempt to make Egypt French, 23 large

volumes published between 1809 and 1823. This is how Said describes it:

To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness; to
instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modem West; to
subordinate or underplay military power in order to aggrandize the project of
glorious knowledge acquired in the process of political domination of the Orient; to
formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its
place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its "natura1" role as an
appendage to Europe; to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial
occupation with the title "contribution to modern learning" when the natives had
neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pretexts for a text whose
usefulness was not to the natives; to feel oneself as a European in command,
almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography; to institute new areas of
specialization; to establish new disciplines; to divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate,
index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight); to make out of every
observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable
law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type; and,
above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one
possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one's
powers: these are the features of Orientalist projection entirely realized in the
Description de I'Egypte, itself enabled and reinforced by Napoleon's wholly
Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and
power. (86)

Despite Napoleon’s military failure, his “occupation gave birth to the entire
modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of
discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt, whose agencies of domination and
dissemination included the Institut and the Description… After Napoleon, then,
the very language of Orientalism changed radically. Its descriptive realism was
upgraded and became not merely a style of representation but a language,
indeed a means of creation.” (87) It gave birth to multiple literary works about
the Orient that Said discusses later in the section.
Even the building of the Suez Canal was an Orientalist project, as Ferdinand de
Lesseps, the leader of the project, appealed not only to commercial, but also
civilizing benefits of this project:

Despite its immemorial pedigree of failures, its outrageous cost, its astounding
ambitions for altering the way Europe would handle the Orient, the canal was
worth the effort. It was a project uniquely able to override the objections of those
who were consulted and, in improving the Orient as a whole, to do what scheming
Egyptians, perfidious Chinese, and half-naked Indians could never have done for
themselves. (90)

IV. Crisis

Said once again argues that the West understood the Orient on the basis of
text. He explores different ways of how “expertise” and “competence”
represented in texts might, in fact, be far from “reality,” but the cultural inertia
will keep on reproducing “wrong” views:

A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of
circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed.
Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and
governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its
practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only
knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such
knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a
discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author,
is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. (94)

The results of this process were quite obvious: soon in the European cultural
world, the Orient as such was completely replaced by the constructed
knowledge of Orientalism:

Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always
rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an
observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards
(and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from
the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim
sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the
reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. (96)

Said then examines “scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political

conquests aided by Orientalism” (100) in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, including scholarly societies, authors and politicians, conquests, etc.

With the coming of the nineteenth century, the Orient also turns into a
spectacle:

The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues
out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the
Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached… (103)
And here are result of all these developments by the early twentieth century:

As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even
says, stand apart from it objectively. His human detachment, whose sign is the
absence of sympathy covered by professional knowledge, is weighted heavily with
all the orthodox attitudes, perspectives, and moods of Orienlalism that I have been
describing. His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been
Orientalized. An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or
Western statesman and the Western Orientalists; it forms the rim of the stage
containing the Orient. (104)

This situation dominated more or less academia, cultural and political spheres
until the end of the Second World War. After it, the political situation changed
radically, as Eastern nations acquired independence, while the Cold War
divided the world between two new superpowers. Unable to recognize "its"
Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and
politically armed Orient. (104) Two alternatives arose: to pretend as if nothing
had changed, or to adapt old ways to the new. Yet, in general, Orientalism was
now in crisis. “National liberation movements in the ex-colonial Orient worked
havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic subject races,” (105) in
addition, there came an understanding that the entire conceptual apparatus of
Orientalism was out-dated.

Despite that, Orientalism still has a firm footing in the Western academia. “The
perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians, and passive Muslims are described as
vultures for "our" largesse and are damned when "we lose them" to
communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is
scarcely significant.” (108)

The West is still “the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the
spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.” (109)

Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures

1. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion

Romantic Orientalist project

Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example. urged upon their countrymen, and
upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was
Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism
(and republicanism) of Occidental culture. (115)

Four preconditions for the modern Orientalism:

First, in the 18th century, “Orient was being opened out considerably beyond
the Islamic lands.” (116) Consequently, attempts at wide comparative studies
Second, attempts at scholarly studies of the lands outside Europe, including
usage of original, i.e. non-European, sources: translation of the Koran, etc.
(117)

Third, attempts to “exceed comparative study, and its judicious surveys of

mankind from "China to Peru," by sympathetic identification.” (118)

Fourth, new classificatory schemas which arouse in the European scholarship,

including physiological-moral classification of human beings: “the American is
"red, choleric, erect," the Asiatic is "yellow, melancholy, rigid," the African is
"black, phlegmatic, lax.” (119)

“The four elements I have described—expansion, historical confrontation,

sympathy, classification—are the currents in eighteenth century thought on
whose presence the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern
Orientalism depend. Without them Orientalism, as we shall see presently, could
not have occurred.” (120)

These are secularizing elements in the European culture. Said claims, that the
Orient, in its Orientalized form, served as an instrument which pushed
secularization of the European culture, as the contact with the Orient brought
into being new cultural elements which destroyed classical religious cultural
framework:

For anyone who studied the Orient a secular vocabulary in keeping with these
frameworks was required. Yet if Orientalism provided the vocabulary, the
conceptual repertoire, the techniques-for this is what, from the end of the
eighteenth century on, Orientalism did and what Orientalism was-it also retained,
as an undislodged current in its discourse, a reconstructed religious impulse, a
naturalized supernaturalism. (121)

It led to a huge cultural shift in Europe:

The modern Orientatist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the
obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly
distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient's lost languages, mores, even
mentalities… In the process, the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed
dialectically, for they could not survive in their original form… Yet both bore the
traces of power—power to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power
that dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and of
anthropological generalization. (121)

The figure of Orientalist also gradually changed in the course of the

19th century:

The more Europe encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth century, the
more Orientalism gained in public confidence. Yet if this gain coincided with a loss
in originality, we should not be entirely surprised, since its mode, from the
beginning, was reconstruction and repetition. (122)
In the final passage of the section, Said openly announces his stakes in this
project:

Modern Orientalism… embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. And far

from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made
Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and
territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to
reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision,
science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations,
and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the
vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its
later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority. (123)

2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and

Philological Laboratory

In this section, Said examines in detail professional work of two scholars whom
he regards as instrumental in shaping Orientalism. The first, Silvestre de Sacy,
is the founder of this discipline:

Sacy's name is associated with the beginning of modem Orientalism; it is because

his work virtually put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a
pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental
scholarship and public policy. (124)

As Sacy had to create this discipline from a blank sheet of paper, he invented
several important principles, including the principle of the chrestomathy, which
shaped the research object:

And since also the vastly rich (in space, time, and cultures) Orient cannot be totally
exposed, only its most representative parts need be. Thus Sacy's focus is the
anthology, the chrestomathy, the tableau, the survey of general principles, in
which a relatively small set of powerful examples delivers the Orient to the
student. (125)

The reason why chrestomathy:

Not only are Oriental literary productions essentially alien to the European; they
also do not contain a sustained enough interest, nor are they written with enough
"taste and critical spirit," to merit publication except as extracts… Therefore the
Orientalist is required to present the Orient by a series of representative
fragments. fragments republished, explicated, annotated, and surrounded with still
more fragments. (128)

The second scholar under scrutiny, Ernest Renan, is remarkable for having
“associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which
philology was one of the most eminent.” (130) His initial project was to
recreated the Semitic protolanguage, which made him a distinguished
authority in this field. In doing so, he actually constructed his object, because
the Semitic protolanguage cannot, unlike living or even dead written
languages, be observed. In doing so, he was quite reactionary:

Everywhere Renan treats of normal human facts—language, history, culture, mind,

imagination—as transformed into something else, as something peculiarly deviant,
because they are Semitic and Oriental, and because they end up for analysis in the
laboratory. Thus the Semites are rabid monotheists who produced no mythology,
no art, no commerce, no civilization; their consciousness is a Darrow and rigid
one… (141-142)

This is the state of the art with which Orientalism met the twentieth century.

3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of

Lexicography and Imagination

Said continues his critique of Renan’s version of orientalism by stressing that

due to linguistic approach employed by the latter, Orientalism was from the
very beginning based on strategies of comparison:

Thus a knowing vocabulary developed, and its functions, as much as its style,
located the Orient in a comparative framework, of the sort employed and
manipulated by Renan. Such comparatism is rarely descriptive; most often, it is
both evaluative and expository. (149) Thus did comparatism in the study of the
Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological
inequality of Occident and Orient. (150)

Said then attracts attention to the fact that emotional attitude to the Orient
was very uneven among European intellectuals of the nineteenth century:
extremities (enthusiasm and disdain) dominated. As the result,

Most often an individual entered the profession as a way of reckoning with the
Orient's claim on him; yet most often too his Orientalist training opened his eyes,
so to speak, and what he was left with was a sort of debunking project, by which
the Orient was reduced to considerably less than the eminence once seen in it.
(150-151)

Narrative structures were employed to make coherent a huge mass of random

facts about the Orient into texts which “tamed” the Orient and imposed upon it
the European vision. Said discusses books about Mohammad published in the
19thcentury as examples. He then moves on to analyze Karl Marx’s writing
about the Orient. Said notes that Marx is undoubtedly sympathetic about the
Orient, but when it comes to conceptualizing his insights into contemporary
political language, the Orientalist vocabulary starts to shape his writing about
India (that particular example):

That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with
poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before
he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient. It is as if the
individual mind (Marx's, in this -case) could find a precollective, preofficial
individuality in Asia—find and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings,
senses—only to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very
vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. (155)

Said then analyzes another important factor in the formation of Orientalism,

the writing about the Orient while being there in residence. Said claims that
the cultural structures of Orientalism were so strong that Europeans who came
to the Orient to get a “first-hand experience” actually imposed already existing
meanings on what they encountered there. He makes a thorough analysis of
Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836).
He notes, first, that Lane pretended to be Muslim in order to gain a better
access to the Egyptian culture—a fact of domination itself, as

Thus while one portion of Lane's identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim
sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire,
possess everything around it. (160)

This “subversive” activity is obviously Eurocentric:

What he says about the Orient is therefore to be understood as description

obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and
wrote down. His power was to have existed amongst them as a native speaker, as it
were, and also as a secret writer. And what he wrote was intended as useful
knowledge, not for them, but for Europe and its various disseminative institutions.
(160)

Said then discusses how different behavioral and narrative strategies help Lane
to pursue his observation without getting emotionally and physically mixed
with Egyptians, such as the use of details in narration, monumental and
detailed description, interruptions of narratives.

Said finishes the section by stressing that by the mid-19 th century, Orientalism
was able to institutionalize itself and organize itself into a specialized body of
knowledge. He concludes with this summarizing statement:

On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as
possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it
through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews,
dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together
formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for
the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes
garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by
a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive
experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls,
where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental
culture became categorically Oriental. It would be reconverted, restructured from
the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions,
commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical,
departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense. (166)
4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French

Said discusses the last large type of writing about the Orient, travel pilgrimage
accounts. From the very beginning, he asserts that

their <pilgrims’> writing was to be a fresh new repository of Oriental experience

but, as we shall see, even this project usually (but not always) resolved itself into
the reductionism of the Orientalistic. The reasons are complex, and they have very
much to do with the nature of the pilgrim, his mode of writing, and the intentional
form of his work. (169)

He differentiates between French and English writing, in the way that for
British pilgrims, “to write about Egypt, Syria, or Turkey, as much as traveling
in them, was a matter of touring the realm of political will, political
management, political definition… In contrast, the French pilgrim was imbued
with a sense of acute loss in the Orient.” (169) And then:

Consequently French pilgrims from Volney on planned and projected for, imagined,
ruminated about places that were principally in their minds; they constructed
schemes for a typically French, perhaps even a European, concert in the Orient,
which of course they supposed would be orchestrated by them. Theirs was the
Orient of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences,
and an almost virtuosic style of being an Orient whose highest literary forms would
be found in Nerval and Flaubert, both of whose work was solidly fixed in an
imaginative. Unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension. (169-170)

He claims that French (and later he would reiterate that about Englishmen)
would be coming to the Orient as in case of Chateaubriand “a constructed
figure, not as a true self.” (171) Therefore, a number of prejudices were a priori
brought into their accounts:

This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost
unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing: the theme of Europe
teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand
and everyone after him believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew
nothing about. (172)

As the Oriental experience was regarded through the European vision,

consequently, “as a form of growing knowledge Orientalism resorted mainly to
citations of predecessor scholars in the field for its nutriment.” (176-177)

This is why even fictional writing and memoir accounts are secondary to the
Orientalist picture:

In system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a
set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a
quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient,
or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation
or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on
the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another
sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of
canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing
interest in the reader. Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is
asserted, even though, as I said earlier, the narrative consciousness is given a very
large role to play. What we shall see is that for all its eccentric individuality, this
narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, like Bouvard and Pecuchet,
that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying. (177)

Then Said analyzes European travelogues noting that they involve operations of
“recognizing,” rather than “learning.” Even the best of them, like Nerval, who
refused to impose blindly the established Orientalist networks of meaning on
their Oriental experience, presented it, consequently, as chaotic, to the realm
of “failed narratives,” because they rejected European narratives about it, but
could not see the local narratives:

It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable Oriental reality and in his
intent to give systematic order to his re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was
employing the borrowed authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage
the earth remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented
embodiments in the Voyage, his self was no less drugged and worn out than
before. Therefore the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm,
in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly
texts, were its only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project by
wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the Orienl, although he did
resort to Orientalism to make some of his points. (184)

Personal and sensual experiences were, after all, also subordinate to

Orientalist structures of meaning, as in case of Flaubert’s Oriental women:

After his voyage, he had written Louise Colet reassuringly that "the oriental
woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and
another man." (187)

Flaubert’s writing became the basis of Said’s discussion of how the new modes
of knowledge in Europe “structure” the reality (in his case, Orient) “like a
theatrical, fantastic library, parading before the anchorite's gaze.” (188) From
here, he moves on to discuss the emergence of the scholarly apparatus for
disseminating Orientalism and disciplining and governing the European
society, in Foucaultian terms:

The apparatus serving Oriental studies was part of the scene, and this was one
thing that Flaubert surely had in mind when he proclaimed that "everyone will be
in uniform." An Orientalist was no longer a gifted amateur enthusiast, or if he was,
he would have trouble being taken seriously as a scholar. (191)

Even the most innocuous travel book—and there were literally hundreds written
after mid-century—contributed to the density of public awareness of the Orient; a
heavily marked dividing line separated the delights, miscellaneous exploits, and
testimonial portentousness of individual pilgrims in the East (which included some
American voyagers, among them Mark Twain and Herman Melville) from the
authoritative reports of scholarly travelers, missionaries, governmental
functionaries, and other expert witnesses. (192)

He concludes by addressing Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a

Pilgrimage to AI-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856), which he regards as a
transitional form of between “between Orientalist genres represented on the
one hand by Lane and on the other by the French writers.” (194) Burton, who
was highly sympathetic with the Arabs, still promotes, according to Said, the
Orientalist project, as he invests his knowledge in the European understanding
—and, consequently, structuring—of the Oriental societies:

Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs;
but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against
authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from
Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the
manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of
interest. (195) “The problem finally reduces itself to the problem of knowledge of
the Orient, which is why a consideration of Burton's Orientalism ought to conclude
our account of Orientalist structures and restructures in most of the nineteenth
century.” (195)

And finally:

what we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way
through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of
information and behavior. Burton's freedom was in having shaken himself loose of
his European origins enough to be able to live as an Oriental. Every scene in the
Pilgrimage reveals him as winning out over the obstacles confronting him, a
foreigner, in a strange place. He was able to do this because he had sufficient
knowledge of an alien society for this purpose. (196)

He then concludes that by the second half of the 19th century, institutionalized
structures of knowledge and power replace earlier individual efforts to
Orientalize the Orient. This is the legacy of the 19 th century which would be
fully exploited in the twentieth, as his conclusion to the entire Chapter 2
promises:

This is the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalism to which the twentieth

century has become inheritor. We must now investigate as exactly as possible
the way twenlieth century Orientalism-inaugurated by the long process of the
West's occupation of the Orient from the 1880s on-successfully controlled
freedom and knowledge; in short, the way Orientalism was fully fonnalized into
a repeatedly produced copy of itself.

Chapter 3. Orientalism Now

1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism

Said starts by summarizing his observations and conclusions in the two
previous chapters:

The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, the collective
nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and social
circumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar's production. A
field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is
particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning (the classics, the
Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies,
geographical societies, universities), and generically determined writing (travel
books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description). The result for Orientalism
has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain
types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has built his work and
research upon them, and they in tum have pressed hard upon new writers and
scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or
Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives,
and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught,
researched, administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways. (202)

Artistic forms, language idioms, conventional wisdoms about the Orient—all

these illusions which pretended to be truth and which were reproduced as
truths. “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about
the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally
ethnocentric.” (204)

He then differentiates between two different modes of knowing and

representing the Orient:

The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly

an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various
stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and
so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in
knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the
unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant.
(206)

Said discusses the colonial effort of European powers in the second half of the
19thcentury as it drew on symbolic resources provided by the Orientalism to
claim the national support for the British and French imperial presence in
“undeveloped” lands. Regarding how the Orient was supposed to be divided
between the European Powers, he writes:

What matters more immediately is the peculiar epistemological framework through

which the Orient was seen, and out of which the Powers acted. For despite their
differences, the British and the French saw the Orient as a geographical-and
cultural, political, demographical, sociological, and historical-entity over whose
destiny they believed themselves to have traditional entitlement. The Orient to
them was no sudden discovery, no mere historical accident, but an area to the east
of Europe whose principal worth was uniformly defined in terms of Europe, more
particularly in tenos specifically claiming for Europe-European science,
scholarship, understanding, and administration-the credit for having made the
Orient what it was now. And this had been the achievement-inadvertent or not is
beside the point-of modern Orientalism. (221)

Apart from institutionalized knowledge (“disseminative capacities of modem

learning, its diffusive apparatus in the learned professions, the universities, the
professional societies, the explorational and geographical organizations, the
publishing industry” – p. 221), there was another method of knowing and
managing the Orient in the West which was widely employed in the colonial
struggle for the Oriental lands:

The second method by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West was the
result of an important convergence. For decades the Orientalists had spoken about
the Orient, they had translated texts, they had explained civilizations, religions,
dynasties, cultures, mentalities-as academic objects, screened off from Europe by
virtue of their inimitable foreignness… The Orienlalist remained outside the
Orient, which, however much it was made to appear intelligible, remained beyond
the Occident. This cultural, temporal, and geographical distance was expressed in
metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise… Yet the distance between
Orient and Occident was, almost paradoxically, in the process of being reduced
throughout the nineteenth century. As the commercial, political, and other
existential encounters between East and West increased, a tension developed
between the dogmas of latent Orientalism, with its support in studies of the
"classical" Orient, and the descriptions of a present, modern, manifest Orient
Orientalism now articulated by travelers, pilgrims, statesmen, and the like. At
some moment impossible to determine precisely, the tension caused a convergence
of the two types of Orientalism. (221-222)

The convergence was the figure of an imperial spy, who possessed “intimate
and expert knowledge of the Orient and of Orientals,” and yet served the
interests of the European Powers in their quest for the Orient. (224)

2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Worldliness

Said starts by discussing Kipling’s White Man as a cultural phenomenon aimed

to mobilize the British society for the imperial effort.

Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned
position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant-in the colonies-
speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even
feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations,
gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites
themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial
governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the
expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within
this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal
communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a
very concrete manner of being-in-theworld, a way of taking hold of reality,
language, and thought. It made a specific style possible. (227)
This image was based on the opposition “we” and “they”: “This opposition was
reinforced not only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course,
by the Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection, and-no less decisive-
by the rhetoric of high cultural humanism.” (227)

In literary narratives, this opposition revealed by regular moralizations and

judgements on the nature of the superiority of Europeans over Orientals.
Consequently, Orientals in these narratives were downgraded to literary
characters constructed according to the laws of the genre, not on the basis of
“reality.” To exercise of this opposition, a special vocabulary and
epistemological instruments were elaborated, which were facilitated by
“method, tradition and politics all working together.” (230)

The scholarly investigator took a type marked "Oriental" for the same thing as any
individual Oriental he might encounter. Years of tradition had encrusted discourse
about such matters as the Semitic or Oriental spirit with some legitimacy. And
political good sense taught, in Bell's marvelous phrase, that in the East "it all
hangs together." Primitiveness therefore inhered in the Orient, was the Orient, an
idea to which anyone dealing with or writing about the Orient had to return, as if
to a touchstone outlasting time or experience. (230-231)

Ancient cultural bias was strengthened in the 19th century by the influential
racial theory:

in late-nineteenth-century culture, as Lionel Trilling has said, "racial theory,

stimulated by a rising nationalism and a spreading imperialism, supported by an
incomplete and mal-assimilated science, was almost undisputed." (232)

He then analyzes in more detail the writing about the Orient at the turn of the
20thcentury, seeing how features described in the previous chapters reveal
themselves there.

A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert
is no longer simply "understanding"; now the Orient must be made to perform, its
power must be enlisted on the side of "our" values, civilization, interests, goals.
Knowledge of the Orient is (directly translated into activity, and the results give
rise to new currents of thought and action in the Orient. (238)

This led to a split within Orientalism between its older and new versions:
between a passive knowledge and knowledge as action, between vision and
narrative:

Against this static system of "synchronic essentialism" I have caned vision because
it presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant
pressure. The source of pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be
shown to move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What
seemed stable-and the Orient is synonymous with stability and unchanging
eternality-now appears unstable. Instability suggests that history, with its
disruptive detail, its currents of change, its tendency towards growth, decline, or
dramatic movement, is possible in the Orient and for the Orient. History and the
narrative by which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that "the
Orient" as an unconditional ontological category does an injustice to the potential
of reality for change. Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written
history to counter the pennanence of vision. Lane <an early Orientalist> sensed
the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his
information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or
lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and
die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that
modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake "classical" civilizations; above
all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to
power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history.
Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective,
consciousness to the unitary web of vision… When as a result of World War 1 the
Orient was made to enter history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work.
(240)

Yet after the World War I, the domination of Europe over the Orient becomes
less firm, which causes changes in the symbolic structures of Orientalism:

In the period between the wars, as we can easily judge from, say, Malraux's novels,
the relations between East and West assumed a currency that was both
widespread and anxious. The signs of Oriental claims for political independence
were everywhere; certainly in the dismembered Ottoman Empire they were
encouraged by the Allies and, as is perfectly evident in the whole Arab Revolt and
its aftermath, quickly became problematic. The Orient now appeared to constitute
a challenge, not just to the West in general, but to the West's spirit, knowledge,
and imperium. (248)

This led to some fears that the Orient might at some point get an upper hand
over Europe, unless the latter mobilizes herself:

Europe's effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valery called "une machine
puissante," absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to
its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or
disorganized). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis.
Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power-military, material, spiritual-
would sooner or later overwhelm Europe. The great colonial empires, great
systems of systematic repression, existed to fend off the feared eventuality.
Colonial subjects, as George Orwell saw them in Marrakech in 1939, must not be
seen except as a kind of continental emanation, African, Asian, Oriental… (251)

This led to increased racist propaganda, such as “that the Orientals' bodies are
lazy, that the Orient has no conception of history, of the nation, or of patrie,
that the Orient is essentially mystical-and so on.” (253)

3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower

In the interwar period, the firm standing of Orientalism in the Western society
is gradually undermined, mostly by externally (economic and political) factors:
No longer did it go without much controversy that Europe's domination over the
Orient was almost a fact of nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need
of Western enlightenment. What mattered during the interwar years was a cultural
self-definition that transcended the provincial and the xenophobic. For Gibb, the
West has need of the Orient as something to be studied because it releases the
spirit from sterile specialization, it eases the affliction of excessive parochial and
nationalistic self-centeredness, it increases one's grasp of the really central issues
in the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this new rising
dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is, first, because the Orient is more of a
challenge now than it was before, and second, because the West is entering a
relatively new phase of cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of
Western suzerainty over the rest of the world. (257)

There is also a growth of non-Orientalist philosophies in Europe (Weber, e.g.)

which challenge the ontological and genealogical foundations of Orientalism.
Yet, Said concentrates on another phenomenon, the growth of Islamic
Orientalism, i.e. an Orientalist development which claimed that it was Islam
that was the root of all evils about the Orient. Said then studies the careers and
evolution of views of two prominent Islamic Orientalists, H. A. R. Gibb's and
Louis Massignon.

As for the latter,

At its best, Massignon's vision of the East-West encounter assigned great

responsibility to the West for its invasion of the East, its colonialism, its relentless
attacks on Islam. Massignon was a tireless fighter on behalf of Muslim civilization
and, as his numerous essays and letters after 1948 testify, in support of Palestinian
refugees, in the defense of Arab Muslim and Christian rights in Palestine against
Zionism, against what, with reference to something said by Abba Eban, he
scathingly called Israeli "bourgeois colonialism." Yet the framework in which
Massignon's vision was held also assigned the Islamic Orient to an essentially
ancient time and the West to modernity. Like Robertson Smith, Massignon
considered the Oriental to be not a modern man but a Semite; this reductive
category had a powerful grip on his thought. (270)

Therefore, according to Massignon,

the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or understanding himself. Partly

because of what Europe had done to him, he had lost his religion and his
philosophie; Muslims had "un vide immense" within them; they were close to
anarchy and suicide. It became France's obligation, then, to associate itself with
the Muslims' desire to defend their traditional culture, the rule of their dynastic
life, and the patrimony of believers. (271)

Said then looks at Gibb “as the culmination of a specific academic tradition,
what-to use an expression that does not occur in Polk's prose-we can call an
academic-research consensus or paradigm.” (274-275) Gibb was an “insider” of
the Western academia, therefore, “The Orient for Gibb was not a place one
encountered directly; it was something one read about, studied, wrote about
within the confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly
conference.” (275) For Gibbs, Islam is, too, the dominant structure organizing
the entire life of Near Eastern communities.

In general, although “the old Orientalism was broken into many parts; yet all of
them still served the traditional Orientalist dogmas.” (284)

4. The Latest Phase

In this section, Said focuses on the Orientalist influences in the American

culture, academia and politics. He starts by considering cultural stereotypes
about Arabs, which were strengthened by the confrontation of Arab states with
Israel and with the use of oil as a lever of pressure. “In the films and television
the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty.” (286)
Another example: “A survey entitled The Arabs in American Tex/books reveals
the most astonishing misinformation, or rather the most callous
representations of an ethnic-religious group.” (287)

As for academia, “These crude ideas are supported, not contradicted, by the
academic whose business is the study of the Arab Near East.” (288) Moreover,
Oriental studies became even more about propaganda since the West was not
involved into the confrontation with the Soviet Union.

In general, Said claims that the United States intentionally occupied space
freed by the retreating British and French Empires in the Near East, and in the
course of doing that they Orientalized this field

(a) the extent to which the European tradition of Orientalist scholarship was, if not
taken over, then accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized and
fed into the postwar efflorescence of Near Eastern studies in the United States;
and (b) the extent to which the European tradition has given rise in the United
States to a coherent attitude among most scholars, institutions, styles of discourse,
and orientations, despite the contemporary appearance of refinement, as well as
the use of (again) highly sophisticated-appearing social-science techniques. (295-
296)

Consequently, even now, at the time of Said’s writing, academic writing about
Islam was quite dogmatic:

But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies
of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and
systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane,
superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant. undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma
is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts
representing a "classical" Oriental civilization, are always preferable to direct
evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is 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 even scientifically "objective." A fourth dogma
is that the Orient is at 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) . (300-301)

As an example of contemporary Orientalism, Said discusses the “intellectual

failure” of The Cambridge History of Islam. He then looks at the racial politics
of Israel, which to a considerable degree break the rights of Palestinians on the
basis that they are “less developed” than Jews.

Said then analyzes the contemporary right wing discourse, which is a priori
anti-Oriental due to its inherent Orientalism: “And so it is throughout the work
of the contemporary Orientalist; assertions of the most bizarre sort dot his or
her pages, whether it is a Manfred Halpern arguing that even though all human
thought processes can be reduced to eight, the Islamic mind is capable of only
four, or a Morroe Berger presuming that since the Arabic language is much
given to rhetoric Arabs are consequently incapable of true thought. (310)
However, here in this chapter, as well as in the previous one, his analysis
becomes somewhat weaker than before, as he generalizes less and the details
overwhelm the picture. Perhaps, this is because the contemporary criticism is
too personal.

Said finishes this section, this chapter and the whole book by considering the
role that Orientalism and its expert play in the foreign policy of the United
States. As the latter became heavily invested in the Middle East,

Most of this investment, appropriately enough, is built on foundations of sand,

since the experts instruct policy on the basis of such marketable abstractions as
political elites, modernization and stability, most of which are simply the old
Orientalist stereotypes dressed up in policy jargon, and most of which have been
completely inadequate to describe what took place recently in Lebanon or earlier
in Palestinian popular resistance to Israel. (321)

Said concludes that the current situation is the triumph of Orientalism, to the
degree that even Orientals themselves start to speak the languages of
Orientalism. Yet there is hope: in the critical thinking in modern universities.
Sort of.

Positively. I do believe-and in my other work have tried to show -that enough is

being done today in the human sciences to provide the contemporary scholar with
insights, methods, and ideas that could dispense with racial, ideological, and
imperialist stereotypes of the sort provided during its historical ascendancy by
Orientalism. (328)
Posted by Alex at 23:41