Orientalism is Edward Said’s controversial contribution to post-colonial critical studies. Written during the tumultuous times of the mid-Seventies, it is a work of immense scholarship and profound insights. In essence, this is a diatribe against the West’s attempts to comprehend the Orient on its own, imperialist terms with total disregard to what the eastern half of the world was really about. Said criticizes Western scholars, diplomats and travelers who have, over several centuries, constructed a stereotypical image of the Orient for Western consumption. “Oriental Studies” was consolidated in Europe, chiefly in the urban centers of colonial powers such as England and France, as an area of academic scholarship, in the same vein as Hellenist studies or Latin studies. According to Said, the cultural (mis)representation in this scholarship creates and reinforces prejudice, racism and imperialism and constantly imagines the Orient as an arcane, exotic, inferior and subordinate universe of experiences, legitimized only in contradistinction from the West.
Said’s central contention is that “[T]he Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” He argues that Orientalism has become such an established canon in western epistemology that the Orient is no longer a free subject of thought and action and no scholar can study it creatively and independently. Said, who is steeped in the discipline of comparative literature, seeks to expose the tenuousness of this canon by debunking its reputation of authenticity and in order to do this he relies on textual exegesis of a variety of Anglo-French texts. Said is predominantly concerned with the Anglo-French and, later, the American practice of Orientalism because he contends that these are the principal colonial/imperial powers that have affected the region in any enduring way. Orientalism, says Said, is the result of British and French ascendancy in the Orient and, later, of American hegemony (in the post-1945 world). Most of the studies of the Orient in this tradition characterizes the Orient as a monolithic bloc, as a land of despotism, splendor, cruelty, sensuality, exoticism, and, eccentricity - all in all, the entire discourse is a gratuitous orgy of lies and fantasy.
It is important to note that Said does not intend to deal with the entire Orient and indeed in order to do that he would have to compile an encyclopedia. That is not his purpose in this book. He is more interested in the inappropriate generalizations about the Orient that the West invariably makes. He cites Vico and says that if men make their own history, what they can know is what they themselves make. This idea extends to geographical and cultural entities as well. The West and the Orient are ultimately man-made ideas, both immersed in a complex historical tradition of imagery and vocabulary.
Orientalism, which passes for (a travesty of?) a system of knowledge, is thus a kind of mental mapping of the Other. It is a distribution of geo-political awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, social, historical and philological texts. It is a willful construction of these geographical regions in the minds of Westerners in a way in which the West can apprehend the aberrance of a world that is outside their sphere of influence, yet close enough to their territory to be a source of threat. And the region closest to Europe, of course, is the Islamic Near East. Thus the brutal demonization of Islam and everything it is associated with. Orientalism, therefore, is how “we” [Europeans] are different from, and indeed superior to, “them” [the Orientals].
Indeed the whole project is political. For instance, when the West gazes upon the Orient, there is no such thing as disinterestedness or indifference; indeed one is looking at the Orient from the vantage point of the powerful West with definite interests in the Orient. This is as true of the Orientalists of the colonial empire as it is true of the modern Orientalists in America, who study the region in various avatars: as academicians, policy-planners, strategic studies specialists, analysts and so on.
Equally, Said has no pretensions about his own disinterestedness. He does not claim to be ideologically unbiased. Said was born in Palestine. He was educated in, lives and teaches in America. Thus, he finds himself in the interstices of two cultures. It is not a surprise that he is unambiguous in his reservations about this meaningless cultural stereotyping of the Orient. He borrows Gramsci’s insistence on the Socratic phrase “knowing thyself,” and says that like Gramsci he believes that history leaves on the individual an infinity of traces and he wishes to assimilate an inventory of these traces.
Said takes up individual texts to “reveal the dialectic between individual texts or writer and the complex collective formation to which his work is a contribution.” In each text, he shows us how authors cite established works within the canon to demonstrate the inviolable veracity of their claims as if the ideas that have gained currency within the discourse of Orientalism are somehow sacrosanct. Thus Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard Burton. This is equally true of Renan, Sacy, Lamartine, Schlegel and others
Through this incestuous network of affiliations with other authors in the same tradition, Orientalists, and Orientalism gained strength. But Said states clearly that his purpose here is not to compile a complete history or an encyclopedia of Orientalism. His work is a treatise seeking to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination that Orientalism precipitates on an unsuspecting and powerless East.
Said says that the scope of Orientalism is immense. He traces the origins of this discourse to the depiction of grieving Oriental women in Aeschylus’s play The Persians. He talks about Dante’s Inferno in which Maometto [the Islamic prophet, Mohammed], is banished to the eighth circle of hell closest to Satan, where he is together with other traitors such as Brutus, Judas and Cassius. Ostensibly, there is in hell, a full-fledged hierarchy of sins and the sin of false revelation that Mohammed is accused of entails that this should be his destiny.
From colonial times, Said cites Benjamin Disraeli, William Jones and many others as Orientalists. Arthur James Balfour, in an address to the House of Commons at the turn of the 20th century, says that he does not take up any airs of superiority and that Oriental civilizations are great too. But, Balfour concludes, “Is it a good thing for these great nations - I admit their greatness - that this absolute government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing. I think that experience shows that they have got under it far better government than in the whole history of the world they had before…” Among others, Said talks about the hectoring chief of Egypt, Evelyn Baring, who was credited to
have made Egypt.
The terms invoked in this discourse, Said points out, are openly racist and patently false. Thus the Oriental is looked upon as devoid of energy and initiative, given to fulsome flattery, intrigue, cunning and unkindness to animals, they are inveterate liars, lethargic and suspicious. In everything, these Orientals are opposed to the clarity, directness and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Said talks about the British Raj in India and how colonial administrators were retired from India at the age of 55 and sent back to England. Thus the Oriental would never witness a white man ageing and degenerating, or, even worse, dying. The White man was thus systematically portrayed in the East as the epitome of energy, vitality and above all alertness, casting their panopticon, their imperialist gaze upon an effeminate, subservient, pliant mass.
Said gives us a 20th century example of this hegemony in which Henry Kissinger makes a clear-cut dichotomy in his discussion of styles of foreign policy - the prophetic and the political foreign policy traditions. Kissinger also says about the Western cultures that the West is “deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data - the more accurately the better.” About non-Western cultures, “Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer.” Said says that the pedigree of Kissinger’s
knowledge and glibness is the history of Orientalism itself. Each time such words like prophetic or empirical reality is used, one creates an image of the Orient in opposition to the West.
In contemporary times, Orientalism has been taken over by the modern day imperial power, the United States, where the tradition is continued with renewed enthusiasm. Said says that the Arab-Israeli wars and threat of an oil crisis (such as in the mid-Seventies) have made the Near East a new source of horror. Thus policy planners, academics, corporate conglomerates want to analyze and control this region. Arabs are consistently demonized, ridiculed, reduced to being the object of contempt in the popular media in America. In film and television, the Arab is regularly shown as the slave trader, the camel driver, the money lender, although when one actually visits the Middle East one is more likely to see Coca Cola, blue jeans and transistors.
What is objectionable about Orientalism is not so much that it was attempted in the first place, but the fact that it claimed to be a specialization with a colossal, immodest scope. Unlike Americanists, or Romance specialists, or classicists, the Orientalist was pretending to be an expert on one-half of the world. This project becomes further problematized when Said invokes Claude Levi-Strauss’s science of the concrete and says that things and spaces acquire meanings in the human mind because of the meanings that are assigned to them. This task can be totally arbitrary. Thus, when we define spaces and communities as binaries, as in our land-barbarian land, us and them, we are ultimately
being arbitrary. Moreover, in this scenario it is enough for “us” to make this distinction for the distinction itself to gain legitimacy among “us.” It is not dependent on whether or not the “they” embedded in “them” acknowledge this distinction.
Politics thus, as Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams have pointed out, pervades culture. To elaborate this point, Said uses established literature as a problematic and embarks upon critical textual analysis. Quite plainly, Said’s chief preoccupation is with the Arab world and with Islam, mainly because of the Middle East’s proximity (and sometimes military threat) to Europe. It is not that India, China, Japan and other Oriental countries are eliminated from his analysis but including these regions would make this a gargantuan, perhaps humanly impossible, exercise. Said acknowledges that in his inquiry into Orientalism, there is no ready-made problematic that he can analyze as Louis Althusser could with Marxist texts. Thus he limits himself to the Near East which constituted the direct European experience of the Orient for over a thousand years. He also acknowledges that there has been considerable scholarship in this tradition emanating from Italy, Germany and so on, but he limits himself primarily to Anglo-French texts simply because England and France were, ultimately, the biggest colonial forces in the Orient.
Orientalism, according to Said depends on the positional superiority of Europe because although the Near East was a formidable military force between the 8th and the 16th centuries, it lost its glory with the rise of European colonial expansion - a fact that fed into Europe’s increasing condescension for and dominance over the Orient. Soon Europeans began to study the Orient in the academy, Oriental artifacts were displayed in museums, there were theoretical illustrations of the Orient in biological, historical, linguistic and racial theses, such as second order Darwinism. But, the Orient is far from a homogeneous category that can be subjected to sweeping generalizations as the Orientalists were purporting to make. This simple fact seems to have escaped the Orientalists’ attention.
The authority of the Orientalist flows from his exteriority - he can make the Orient speak because it cannot speak for itself, he describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. Alexander, Herodotus, even Napolean, are for the Orientalists emblems of curiosity, bravado and ultimately western rationality and power, because they went on conquests and subjugated the Orient, thus emasculating the East and subjecting it to Western, almost surgical, scrutiny. Napolean, when he entered Egypt in 1798, actually took with himself, scientists, historians and so on. Thus he came to know Egypt strategically, tactically, historically and above all, textually (He had read about it!).
Islam’s earlier triumph in Syria, North Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Spain, Sicily and parts of France was terrifying for Europe which reacted with hatred and contempt for these aberrant, un-Christian people. Mohammed was thus equated with all that was evil - lechery, debauchery, sodomy and assorted treacheries. According to Said, public mythologies get perpetuated through texts. This is what Voltaire was criticizing in Candide and Cervantes in Don Quixote. When one is confronted at close quarters with something unknown and threatening and previously distant, one takes recourse in what one has read about the adversary, what one knows about the adversary. Equally, as long as what one has read is not demonstrably falsified, the author is held as an expert. This is what was going on with the Orientalists. It is important to know now what kind of things the Europeans were reading, where they got their information about the Orient from. In one instance, Said cites a flagrant, indeed outrageous, excerpt by Flaubert in which he narrates the story of an eccentric Oriental in a Cairo market-place who gets masturbated by numerous women until he dies of exhaustion.
In this way what is expressly untrue is said often enough until it becomes widely believed. On this note, Said reminds us of Nietzsche, "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms…after long use seem firm, canonical and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are."According to Said, this is how a racist, imperialist and ethnocentric discourse developed and gained momentum in Europe.
The Orient thus becomes feminine, penetrable, silently indifferent, backward. It requires Western attention, reconstruction and redemption - a fall-out of a male power fantasy. In this way, European textual and contemplative awareness of the Orient got transformed into administrative, military and economic awareness. Western humanism, supported by a tradition of belles-lettres, informed scholarship, rational inquiry was thus essentialized in the whole project. The Arabs, on the other hand, were said to have centuries of experience but no wisdom. A westerner could therefore make summational statements about one part of the Orient and it would become representative of the whole. Western hypocrisy beneath a liberal face is thus both morally and intellectually reprehensible. As Said sums it up: “[T]he metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s difficult civilizing - all this is something at work within a purportedly liberal culture, one full of concern for its vaunted norms of catholicity, plurality, and open-mindedness. In fact what took place was the very opposite of liberal…”