Orientalism is the generic term that I have been employing to describe the Western approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice.
(Orientalism, page 73)
Said’s fundamental premise is that knowledge is power – and so the entire discipline of Orientalism, along with all related types of scholarship such as the sociology and anthropology of the East, the study of Oriental languages, culture, religions, history, customs, economies, geography, ethnic groups and so on, all of them contribute to a vast interlocking system of self-reinforcing ideas about the ineradicable difference between the West and the East, and the ineradicable inferiority of the latter:
The essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority (p.42)
Ideas which, obviously enough, were designed to bolster, justify and explain the inevitability of imperial rule. It all circles back to the fundamental premise that Knowledge is power:
To have knowledge of a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. (p.32)
Knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control. (p.36)
Straightaway you can see how Said’s thesis is premised on a basically Marxist interpretation of the compromised, parti pris nature of bourgeois culture. The naive bourgeois thinks that their culture and their scholarship is objective and truthful, beacons of rationality and self-evident truths. Whereas Marxists from the 1850s onwards developed the idea that bourgeois culture was no such thing, but in every aspect a justification for the political control of their class.
Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s extended the idea that the bourgeoisie held power by extending their values through every aspect of capitalist culture to achieve what he termed hegemony.
Michel Foucault, in a series of studies in the 1960s and 70s, gave really practical examples of how this power or hegemony extended into the furthest recesses of hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons and other state institutions.
And Said took these ideas, very current and fashionable in the mid-1970s when he was writing, and applied them to the subject closest to his heart, to imperial rule in the Middle East or Arab world.
But the idea that so-called scholarship and academic knowledge is never pure but always tainted by the power structures of the society it is generated by, is a straight Marxist idea.
Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism
[Chapter 1] draws a large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes.
1. Knowing the Oriental
In western discourse the Oriental is an object to be studied, recorded, measured and ruled. He is always in a subordinate position vis-avis the Westerner. All this scholarship doesn’t depict the Oriental as they actually are: it creates an avatar of the Oriental as inferior in every way to the Westerner, and places this image within numerous ‘frameworks of power’. So study of the Orient produces a kind of ‘intellectual power’ (p.41).
Given its enormous impact and reputation it’s a surprise to discover that Orientalism is poorly conceived and poorly written. Said really struggles to develop an argument or present evidence. Instead he asserts the same core idea over and over again. In this section he opens with a speech by Arthur Balfour to the House of Commons in 1910, then goes onto some passages from the writings of Lord Cromer, consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907.
Despite his repeated lists of big categories and ideas Said is decidedly poor at placing either speech in its historical context or at performing even basic practical criticism on them. He says both demonstrate the assumption of Western superiority over the East, but I thought that was the thing he was going to analyse, and whose history and development he was going to explain. Instead he just redescribes it in much the same terms he used in the Introduction. Repetition is going to be a central tactic of the book.
It’s surprising and disappointing that, having not got very far with what ought on the face of it to be two exemplars of the heyday of Orientalising imperialism he then, abruptly, jumps to an essay by Henry Kissinger (!?), ‘Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy’, published in 1966. Said says that when Kissinger, in this essay, discusses foreign policy he divides the nations of the world into the developed world and the developing world and then claims this is the same kind of binary opposition which he, Said, sees as the basis of Orientalism (West superior, East inferior). Kissinger adds the idea that the West is superior because it went through the Newtonian scientific revolution whereas the rest of the world is inferior (less developed politically and economically) because it didn’t. I see what he’s doing but it feels like a thin and predictable interpretation.
Moreover, at this early stage, it confirms the suspicion you have from the Introduction that, in one sense, Said’s deep aim in researching and writing the book is simply to attack American foreign policy, in particular US policy regarding Israel and Palestine. He doesn’t artfully combine his personal situation and history in a subtle way with objective history and scholarship, rather the reverse; his supposed scholarship keeps collapsing to reveal the pretty straightforward political agenda lurking underneath.
Lastly he comes to another contemporary essay, ‘The Arab World’ by one Harold W. Glidden published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1972. By now we recognise that the title alone would be enough to get Said’s goat and, sure enough, he extracts from the article a whole load of clichés about ‘the Arab world’ (based on its patriarchy, its ‘shame culture’, the way it’s structured through patron-client relationships, the importance given to personal honour and revenge) which, predictably enough, set Said’s teeth on edge.
We’re only at part one of the first chapter and the book is in danger of turning into little more than ‘grumpy middle aged Palestinian reads the news and is outraged by anti-Arab stereotypes’.
2. Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalising the Oriental [in fact this section is about historic Western attitudes to Islam]
The academic discipline of Orientalism dates its origin to the decision of the Church Council of Vienne in 1312 to establish a series of university chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac (p.50). Until the 18th century Orientalism meant chiefly study of the Biblical languages. Then in the later 18th century the field exploded and by the mid-19th century was vast.
Modern Orientalism can be said to have started with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, 1798 to 1801. He took scores of scholars who explored, excavated, measured, sketched and recorded every scrap of ancient Egyptian relics they could find. The result was the vast Description de l’Égypte (‘that great collective appropriation of one country by another’, p.84), the work of 160 scholars and scientists, requiring some 2,000 artists and technicians including 400 engravers. Published in 37 volumes from 1809 to 1829, at the time of its publication it was the largest known published work in the world.
In a way the sudden fashion for all things Oriental was a transposition further East of the great awakening of interest in ancient Greece and Rome which we call the Renaissance (p.51). In 1820 Victor Huge wrote: ‘In the time of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist; now one is an Orientalist.’ There was an explosion of Asiatic and Oriental and Eastern Societies devoted to studying ‘the Orient’.
But whereas the Renaissance was based on plastic relics i.e. buildings and statues, Orientalism, indicating its origins in Bible scholarship, was overwhelmingly textual. It concerned languages and belief systems. Orientalists went to the area looking to bolster and confirm what they had in ancient texts from the region.
Said’s structuring of the material is poor. In one paragraph he says there was an Oriental school of writers i.e. Western writers who were captured by its mystique, from Goethe to Flaubert. This is an interesting idea to explore, but in the very next paragraph he is discussing whether it’s valuable for university departments which study this region to retain the name ‘Oriental’. These feel like completely different topics, each would merit a page or two of thorough investigation. Instead he plonks them haphazardly side by side and doesn’t explore either of them properly. Frustrating.
He cites the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on the fundamental human tendency to give ‘poetic’ or emotional meaning to our immediate surroundings and the people who inhabit them, and define them by contrast with the land beyond our ‘borders’ and the strange people who live there. Good. But in my opinion this has always seemed a weak point in Said’s argument, because he admits that ‘othering’ ‘the Other’, far from being some wicked Western vice, is in fact a universal trait and all peoples and cultures do it.
He says he wants to investigate the geographical basis of Orientalism but, characteristically, kicks this off by summarising two classic Greek plays, The Persians by Aeschylus and The Bacchae by Euripides. It’s sort of relevant as the first one is one of the earliest Greek dramas to survive and depicts ‘the East’ as a military threat in the form of the Persian Empire. The second is one of the final ancient Greek plays which has come down to us and is also about ‘the East’ which it associates with frenzied religious cults – but discussing history via literature (and therefore ignoring the evidence of archaeology and history) is always a shaky procedure.
Next thing we know Said is talking about the rise of Islam. His account is inferior to every other account I’ve ever read, lacking detail, interest or insight. Compare it, for example, with the final illuminating chapter of Peter Brown’s wonderful book, ‘The World of Late Antiquity’ (1971).
Said is blinkered by his need to twist every aspect of history to suit his thesis, to make out the West to always be blinkered, limiting, constraining, ignorant, creating the East in its own negative image. Hence he underplays the completely real threat which militant Islam actually posed to Christendom for nearly a thousand years. He refers to the West’s ‘anxiety’ as if it is an over-nervous neurotic, whereas Islamic armies captured and colonised half of Christendom, seizing all of North Africa, Spain and the entire Middle East from what had been Christian rule, then capturing the great Christian city of Constantinople and then pressing on through the Balkans into central Europe until Ottoman conquest was only finally halted just outside Vienna. See the quote from Edward Gibbon, below. Of course the West was terrified of these unstoppably conquering armies. Of course we were scared shitless of these plundering hordes. He himself admits this in a sentence thrown away while he’s discussing something else:
During its political and military heyday from the eighth to the sixteenth century, Islam dominated both East and West. (p.205)
Only someone with a poor grasp of deep history can dismiss eight centuries of Islam’s military, cultural and economic domination as if it’s nothing, a speck, a detail which we can quickly hurry past in order to get to the juicy part, the West’s wicked wicked domination of the Muslim world for, what, all of 300 years.
Having broached the topic of Islam, Said goes on to describe the way medieval authors vilified Mohammed as a kind of failed impersonator of Christ. He emphasises the West’s ‘ignorance’ and ‘narcissism’. On the next page he is claiming that this kind of ignorance created the Orient as a kind of theatre attached to Europe on whose stage were presented a whole series of Oriental types and stereotypes, from Cleopatra onwards. His text moves fast and deals with a confusing variety of topics, all of them very superficially. The only constant is his relentless criticism of every aspect of ‘the West’.
He introduces us to the Bibliothegue oriental of Barthelemy d’Herbelot (1697), which was to remain the standard reference work on the subject for over a hundred years, before going on to explain how this kind of encyclopedic work narrows and constrains its subject matter until readers could only approach this knowledge of the Orient via ‘the learned grids and codes’ provided by the Orientalist.
Said makes this sound like some awful conspiracy, as if the worst thing anybody could ever do would be to write a book on a factual subject, because that would involve imposing ‘grids and codes’ on it and so preventing any reader ever struggling through to a ‘true’ understanding of it.
In fact Said frequently uses these scare tactics, as if he’s letting you in on the shocking truth! The text as a whole has the obsessively repetitive feel of a conspiracy theorist letting you in on a secret which is even worse than the fake moon landings, who killed JFK and what really happened at Roswell, yes, this previously covered-up, hush-hush secret is that…a lot of Western literature and culture stereotypes the so-called ‘Orient’ and ‘the Arab world’ and ‘Islam’.
Next Said has a couple of pages revealing that Dante, in his great masterpiece The Divine Comedy, put Mohamed right in the lowermost pit of hell, next to Satan, for the sin of being a sensualist and religious impostor. He takes this as an epitome of the West’s fundamental Islamophobia.
Said broadens his critique out to describe how conquering Islam came to be seen in Christendom as the vital ‘Other’ against which European Christendom defined itself. Far from being some kind of revelation, this just strikes me as being obvious, really bleeding obvious, particularly to anyone who’s ever read any medieval history. Of course European Christendom defined the Islamic Arab world as ‘the Other’ because it was the Other. India let alone China were just rumours. Nobody had ever been to sub-Saharan Africa. Nobody knew North or South America or Australia existed. To anyone living in medieval Europe, in a society drenched at every single level at every single moment in Christian belief and practice, all there was was Christendom and facing it the enemy at the gates who threatened to overthrow and destroy everything they knew and cared for. Of course the Orient was depicted as alien, because it was alien. Of course it was depicted as threatening, because it had overrun and conquered half of Christendom. Even Said at one point admits this:
From the end of the seventh century until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam in either its Arab, Ottoman or North African and Spanish form dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity. (p.74)
Said goes on to quote Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire without, apparently, realising the full implications of what he’s citing:
In the ten years of the administration of Omar, the Saracens reduced to his obedience thirty-six thousand cities or castles, destroyed four thousand churches or temples of the unbelievers, and edified fourteen hundred mosques for the exercise of the religion of Mahomet. One hundred years after his flight from Mecca, the arms and the reign of his successors extended from India to the Atlantic Ocean.
‘Destroyed four thousand churches.’ How do you think that struck a society completely dominated by Christian belief? With horror and terror.
3. Projects [turns into a list of French Orientalists]
Starts with more stuff about the rivalry between Christianity and Islam. Yawn. By page 75 I was remembering my impression on first reading this book 40 years ago, that Said just doesn’t have the intellectual chops to manage such a huge subject, with all its vast conceptual ramifications, that he is trying to address. He’s bitten off far more than he can chew and the symptoms of this are his repetitiveness, his superficial analyses, his raising complex issue only to move swiftly on. And his superficial and often wrong versions of history.
The Ottoman Empire had long since settled into a (for Europe) comfortable senescence, to be inscribed in the nineteenth century as the ‘Eastern Question’. (p.76)
1) The Ottoman Empire did not settle into a ‘comfortable senescence’ in the later 18th and 19th centuries. There was a good deal of upheaval and violence in the palace of the Sultan, not to mention endless uprisings and rebellions by national groups around the empire.
2) Said’s tone is unpleasantly patronising, condescending to the both the contemporary politicians who had to deal with and the modern historians who write about the Eastern Question. The use of the modish, pretentious, would-be Parisian intellectual verb ‘inscribed’ tries to hide the fact that Said doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The ‘Eastern Question’ is the term given to the series of geopolitical tensions and international crises brought about by the obvious decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, crises which included, for example, the Crimean War and a stream of military and diplomatic crises in the Balkans in the 1870s and 1880s which threatened to drag all Europe into war. See my review of Andrew Roberts’s life of Lord Salisbury. That book was extremely well researched, intelligently analytical and beautifully written. Next to Roberts, Said looks like a blustering frog puffing up his throat to try and persuade everyone how important he is.
The next orientalist book of note after Barthelemy d’Herbelot‘s Bibliothegue oriental, was Simon Ockley‘s History of the Saracens (1708). Ockley shocked contemporaries by recording how much of the ancient world only survived because the Muslims saved it.
Next major Orientalist was Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731 to 1805), the first professional French Indologist, whose work on Avestan texts prompted him, unlike previous scholars, to actually go to India. (The Avesta is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.) Anquetil’s publications (including a translation of the Upanishads), opened up huge new vistas of Indian literature to European readers.
Next major Orientalist was Sir William Jones (1746 to 1794), British philologist, orientalist and scholar of ancient India. It was Jones who first suggested the relationship between European and Indo-Aryan languages which is now widely accepted. Said doesn’t like him. Jones was a polymath who embarked on a deep immersion in the languages and texts of India. He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. According to some he was ‘the undisputed founder of Orientalism’ (p.78).
As Said went on about Jones, and the other Brits who gathered round him, studying and translating Sanskrit texts (e.g. Charles Wilkins, first translator of the Bhagavad-Gita, in 1785), I suddenly realised we had made a huge leap away from Islam, Mohammed and the Arab world to India, a completely different civilisation.
That is the primary problem with Said’s use of the word and concept ‘Oriental’, that it can refer to the Near East, Middle East, Far East, India, China, Japan you name it – and Said doesn’t help. He offers no conceptual or lexical clarification, no way of making the term more geographically or conceptually precise. In fact you realise that it suits his political agenda to keep it as open and slippery as possible. This allows him to jump from one criticism to another of ‘the West’ and its awful Oriental scholars all the more easily, to shift his ground, to continually move the goalposts.
His narrative moves on to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt which, you will remember, was described just 40 pages ago. He repeats some of the key facts from the earlier passage, but adds new details. This, you feel, is how Said’s mind works, going round in circles, covering the same ground albeit with new wrinkles, making the same points again and again – Western Orientalism was (and is) an artificial construct, a self-referential system, built on self-serving stereotypes of Oriental backwardness, laziness, corruption and sensuality, which paved the way for and justified Western (French and British) imperialism.
The most interesting new bit is a (typically brief) account of Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney (1757 to 1820) who wrote an extremely practical record, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787), which detailed the obstacles an invader would face in conquering Egypt, and was consulted and used by Napoleon. Many of Napoleon’s Orientalist scholars had trained under de Sacy and Said tells us his pupils dominated the field of Orientalism for the next 75 years.
de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone (discovered by some of Napoleon’s soldiers in 1799) and he was a teacher of Jean-François Champollion who went on to play a key role in deciphering it and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The introduction to the vast Description of Egypt was written by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 to 1830) known to history as a mathematician but who accompanied Napoleon’s expedition as scientific adviser. Fourier was appointed secretary of the Institut d’Égypte and contributed papers to the Egyptian Institute (also called the Cairo Institute) which Napoleon founded with the aim of weakening British influence in the East.
Said, characteristically, sees these institutes devoted to study of the Orient (and the others founded around Europe at the same time) as ‘agencies of domination and dissemination’ (alliteration is an important element of critical theory; sounds impressive) (p.87).
Said gives a handy half-page list (God, he loves lists) of the aims of Napoleon’s project, as summarised by Fourier himself, which amounts to a shopping list of Orientalism, namely:
- to restore Egypt from its present fallen state to its former glory
- to instruct the Orient in the ways of the modern West
- to promote ‘knowledge’ of the East
- to define ‘the East’ in such a way as to make it seem a natural appendage or annex of the West
- to situate European scholars as on control of Oriental history, texts, geography
- to establish new disciplines with which to control even more ‘knowledge’ about the Orient
- to convert every observation into a ‘law’ about the eternal unchanging essence of ‘the Orient’
- to bring ‘the obscurity’ of the Orient into the light and clarity of Western science
Above all, to convert the 3D ‘reality’ of the multivariant Orient into texts, the fundamental sources of power and control in Western ideology, sources written by Westerners, edited by Westerners, updated by Westerners, for the minds and imaginations of Western politicians and public. Fourier goes on to confirm all Said’s ideas when he writes that Egypt will provide ‘a theatre’ for Napoleon’s ‘gloire’ (p.86).
The Orient as stage for Western glory. Out of this matrix of dominating discourses come classics of Orientalising literature such as:
- François-René de Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811)
- Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1835)
- E.W. Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836)
- Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1856)
- Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862)
In the world of scholarship the next milestone was Ernest Renan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1855).
Said’s text progresses not logically and chronologically, but crabwise, digressively, one thing leading to another. It’s fairly well known that the Suez Canal was conceived, designed and supervised by Ferdinand de Lesseps. Less well known that his father Mathieu de Lesseps went to Egypt as part of Napoleon’s huge expedition and stayed on after the Napoleonic forces withdrew in 1801.
It’s a mental tic of Said’s that he often writes a sentence or paragraph or topic about a subject, then shoehorns in a sentence in parentheses because it’s in his notes and it’s relevant but he can’t think of a way of including it in a logical exposition. An example is the way he ends his discussion of the Suez Canal’s symbolic significance (uniting East and West, ‘opening’ Egypt to the modern world etc) with a really throwaway reference to the Suez Crisis of 1956. He should either have given the Suez Crisis a paragraph of its own, where its significance could have been properly developed, or not mentioned it all. A brief throwaway reference is the worst of all worlds, but very typical of his scatter-gun, repetitive and badly structured approach.
For Said the Suez Canal finally dispelled the notion of the Orient as somehow remote and barely reachable. The Suez Canal dragged ‘the Orient’ into the fast-growing global imagination, made it imaginatively reachable (he doesn’t mention the establishment of the first Cook’s tours to Egypt at around the time of the canal’s opening, the 1860s). At the same time made it more of an annex and dependency.
4. Crisis
He repeats one his basic ideas which is that Orientalism amounted to the transformation of messy reality into tidied-up texts.
It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human. (p.93)
He calls this the textual attitude. Travel books are an epitome of this attitude, assuring readers of a kind of Platonic ideal of a place which all-too-often fails to live up to the book’s idealised portrait.
Suddenly he’s giving a page-long quote from Egyptian social scientist Anwar Abdel Malek (1924 to 2012), from his 1963 essay ‘Orientalism in crisis’.
This is a not particularly relevant preliminary to ‘a history of Orientalism’. Said says all the pioneering Orientalists were philologists. Almost all the great discoveries in philology of the nineteenth century were based on study of texts brought back from the Orient. The central idea was that European languages were descended from two great families of Oriental languages, Indo-European and Semitic. Said gives a political interpretation of this, saying it proves 1) the linguistic importance of the Orient (its languages and scripts) to the achievements of Western research/knowledge, and 2) the Western tendency to divide and categorise Oriental materials to suit its own interests.
Orientalism is inextricably bound up with the study of language and texts; and therefore had a huge tendency to look far back into the past, to a golden age when Orientals lived the idealised lives depicted in the Upanishads or the Koran. In other words, a field of study entirely based on romantic images of an ideal past was always going to regard the messy realities of modern life in India or the Middle East as ‘degraded’ and fallen. Orientalists travelled to the East with their heads full of Romantic ideals and were horrified by the poverty and backwardness of what they saw, leading to a universal agreement that inhabitants of the modern Orient were degraded, debased and vulgarised – ‘an upsetting demystification of images culled from texts’ (p.101).
He’s barely told us he’s going to do a history of Orientalism before he tells us he’s not, and instead going to rattle off lists of eminent Orientalists ‘to mention a few famous names almost at random’ (p.99). Scholars, philosophers, imaginative writers, novelists, poets, travel writers, and explorers and archaeologists, they all contributed to the vast hegemony of Orientalism.
Suddenly it’s 1955, the year of the Bandung Conference, by which date all the nations of the former Orient were independent, presenting Orientalists with conceptual problems. This undermined (destroyed) one whole trope about Oriental peoples, of them being passive and fatalistic.
(This itself is obviously a gross simplification since movements for independence began to stir as early as the 1880s [the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885)], were loud and powerful enough to worry Kipling in the 1890s, and gained new momentum after the Great War. I.e. it’s plain wrong to say the trope of passive Orientals was overthrown by 1955, the contrary evidence was highly visible 50 years earlier.)
Suddenly Said is quoting from the first of a series of lectures given by the ‘great’ Oriental scholar H.A.R. Gibb in 1945, ‘Modern Trends in Islam’, a passage which beautifully illustrates the kind of tropes Said is on about, in that Gibb pontificates about ‘the Arab mind’ being utterly different from the Western mind, specifically in its inability to generalise from individual instances out to general laws and so their inability to have the rationalist thought and utilitarian practices which characterise the West.
This slips somehow into critiquing modern-day Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis (1916 to 2018) who set themselves up as experts on ‘Islam’, ‘the Arab mind’ and so on but just repeat the same old slanders about the Orient’s ineradicable backwardness but also – and suddenly the political Said steps forward into the limelight – uses all these tropes and prejudices to defend Israeli policy in Palestine.
And this turns quickly into polemic as he accuses Orientalists of ignoring ‘the revolutionary turmoil’ gripping the Islamic Orient, the ‘anticolonialism’ sweeping the Orient, as the world faces various disasters (nuclear, environmental) Said accuses politicians of ‘exploiting popular caricatures’ of the Orient.
These contemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. (p.108)
And his anger at white people:
A white middle-class Westerner believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it. (p,108)
Who’s making sweeping generalisations now? Who’s invoking racial stereotypes now?
You can’t help thinking that the tiger of passionate political polemic is constantly straining at the leash just below the surface of Said’s text, ready at any moment to break free and unleash a torrent of righteous indignation, genuine anger not only at Western Orientalists but the greedy white societies which host them. Pages 105 to 110 display his real anger at the way academic, cultural and political Orientalists deploy a whole armoury of demeaning tropes and stereotypes to maintain the lie of the Oriental as a passive, backward degenerate, even up to the time of writing (1976 to 1977).
It might also explain why the book is so poor as scholarly exposition, why he promises some kind of history of Orientalism on page 96 but a few pages later apologises for giving us only a very superficial sketch, skipping over names and dates, citing essays and speeches almost at random. It’s because what is really motivating him is to get to the Polemical Outburst.
(I got to the end of this section without really understanding why it was titled ‘crisis’.)
Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures
[Chapter 2] attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism by a broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the work of important poets, artists and scholars.
In this chapter my concern is to show how in the nineteenth century a modern professional terminology and practice were created whose existence dominated discourse about the Orient, whether by Orientalists or non-Orientalists. (p.156)
1. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularised Religion
Like the literary critic he started out as, Said opens with a 2-page summary of the plot of Flaubert’s last novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet, two clerks who come into an inheritance, resign, buy a house in the country and proceed to systematically study every subject then known to modern man, with a view to mastering all the arts and crafts. Inevitably, the turn out to bodge every single one. Said’s quoting the novel because in Flaubert’s notes for the ending (he died before completing it) the pair talk about the future and hope for a great regeneration of the West by the East.
Said takes this as his theme and shows how it derived from the Enlightenment achievement of rejecting Christianity but incorporating many of its mental structures, such as a millennial transformation of society, and how, in a central thread of the Romantic tradition, this transformation and redemption was expected to come from the East, or from the reintegration of Eastern and Western thought.
Modern Orientalism derives from secularising elements in eighteenth century European culture (p.120)
This triggers a rash of name-dropping – Schlegel, Novalis, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, Comte, Schopenhauer.
Said is, of course, sharply critical of this whole way of thinking, saying it’s yet another example of Western intellectuals thinking they own the world and that ‘Asia’ or ‘the Orient’ will be happy to play this redemptive role for the benefit of the West.
During the eighteenth century the way for modern Orientalist structures was laid down in four major developments:
- Expansion The East was opened up far beyond the Islamic lands, by a range of explorers he lists
- Historical confrontation History benefited from an anthropology which conceived of cultures as self-contained systems and began to think more sympathetically about them e.g. George Sales’s translation of the Koran which also translated Muslim commentators
- Sympathy Leading to ‘sympathetic identification’ by which some writers, artists, and Mozart (his opera, ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’) imaginatively identified with the East, he briefly sketches the rise of the Gothic and exotic in writers like Beckford, Byron, Thomas Moore et al
- Classification The Western impulse to categorise everything into types, Linnaeus, Buffon, Kant, Diderot, Johnson, Montesqieu, Blumenbach, Soemmerring, Vico, Rousseau, it’s difficult to make out the scanty ideas through the blizzard of impressive names
In this chapter:
My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis (from which present-day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularised, redisposed, and reformed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalised, modernised and laicised substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism. (p.122)
2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory
An extended discussion of the lives and works of these two founding Orientalists or, as he puts it, Orientalism’s:
inaugural heroes, builders of the field, creators of a tradition, progenitors of the orientalist brotherhood (p.122)
In Said’s usual manner this starts out reasonably clearly but soon gets bogged down in his characteristically elliptical, digressive, list-heavy and oddly expressed style. It is a struggle to read. Sacy was interested in fragments of texts and knowledge (a mindset very typical of the Romantic generation).
Renan is tougher-minded. Said’s passage on Renan brings out the importance of philology, considered as a leading discipline. He brings in Nietzsche, who was also a philologist, to describe how the discipline means bringing to light the meanings latent in words and language. Renan wrote in 1848: ‘the founders of the modern mind are philologists.’ The ‘new’ philology of the start of the nineteenth century was to score major successes:
- the creation of comparative grammar
- the reclassification of languages into families
- the final rejection of the divine origins of language
Prior to this scholars thought that God gave Adam the first language in the Garden of Eden. The systematic discoveries of philologists in Semitic then Sanskrit languages, along with the texts newly discovered and translated from India, was to make the story of one divine origin for language untenable, and also to call into question the previously accepted timelines of the Book of Genesis.
Thus it was his philological studies which led Renan to lose his Christian faith and then to go on to write the secular Life of Jesus, published in 1863, the first account to portray Jesus as a purely human figure, which had a dramatic impact on intellectual life all across Europe.
In my opinion, Said misses a big point here, a massive point, which is that European Christendom (and latterly American Christian churches) have a weird, strange, distorted interest in the Middle East because that is where their religion comes from.
Islam has a kind of geographical integrity, because the key locations of the religion are in the ongoing heartlands of Islamic territory i.e. Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Jerusalem. By contrast the faith and ideology on which ‘the West’ based itself until very recently, along with all its holy texts, derive from a geographical location outside itself, completely detached from itself by the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries.
This accident of history and geography explains why ‘the West’ has had such an intrusive, interfering interest in the Middle East, from the Crusades to Russia claiming control of the Holy Places which triggered the Crimean War, the mandates over Palestine and Syria between the wars – and always will have, for the region is the ground zero of its religious and ideological underpinnings.
The Orientalists Said describes were so obsessed with the Middle East because they sought, through their philological enquiries, to get closer to the heart of and seek out deeper secrets, of their faith and religion. Hence the recovery of all the texts they could get their hands on, the immense effort put into the archaeology of the region, setting up umpteen Institutes and learned societies.
Said mentions the minuscule number of ‘Orientals’ who came to Europe during the nineteenth century compared to the tidal wave of Europeans who went to the Orient and this is a major reason. Not many Arabs or Indians are interested in visiting, for example, Stonehenge, which has a purely tourist interest for them. But potentially every Christian had a profound vested interest in the stream of archaeological and philological discoveries which poured out the Middle East and Egypt throughout the nineteenth and on into the early twentieth century (for example, the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen) because each new discovery shed light on their faith, and the sum total of the discoveries tended to undermine Christian faith altogether, as it did in the high profile case of Renan.
Said brings out how Renan came to prefer the Sanskrit family of languages origin of the idea of an Indo-European language i.e. ancestors of European languages, over the Semitic family, which is the parent of Hebrew and Arabic. His dislike of the latter hardened into an antisemitic attitude which he expressed with growing virulence and became part of the anti-Arab, anti-Islamic discourse of Orientalism.
Said very briefly refers to the post-Prussian haste among the imperial powers to draw up maps, to mark boundaries of power and control over the colonial possessions. Hence (he doesn’t say this) the notorious Berlin Conference of 1885, called to allow all the European powers to peacefully agree who controlled which parts of Africa, through to the post-Great War division of the Middle East between Britain and France and the equally notorious maps of new states drawn up by Mark Sykes and Georges Picot.
The aim of all this map making activity was never the interest of the native inhabitants, but solely the need to avert conflict arising between the powers, above all between France and Britain.
3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination
The profession of Orientalist is based on multiple inequalities, of wealth and power and intellectual control (of the West over the East).
This section carries on from the previous section, dwelling on Renan’s contempt for Semitic languages and peoples and asserting that philology, by reducing a language to its roots, has a similar reductive effect on views about its speakers and peoples. He comments on the tendency of Orientalists of the Romantic generation to project grand romantic feelings onto the Orient, then experience an adverse reaction when they learned more about the reality of the actual contemporary Orient, accusing it of being ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’.
So many Orientalists ended up hating their subject, not just Renan but William Muir, Reinhart Dozy, Alfred Lyall, Caussin de Perceval. Each of these pieced together and constructed versions of ‘the Orient’ from fragments, creating imaginary models for other Orientalists to debate.
Popular stereotypes about the Orient were perpetrated by mainstream authors such as Thomas Carlyle and Lord Macaulay. Orientalist tropes were used by eminent men in unrelated fields as diverse as Cardinal Newman or French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier.
Marx and abstraction
Even Karl Marx, usually friend of the poor and downtrodden, gives in to Orientalist tropes in his 1850s writings about India, where he says that although British rule is harsh and stupid, it may be historically necessary to waken India from its backward, barbaric stupor.
Said quotes a bit of Marx on India where the latter himself quotes Goethe, and this, for Said, shows the origins of Marx’s Orientalism in classic Romantic worldview, wherein peoples and races need redemption from suffering through pain.
The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism. (p.154)
Said says these are all examples of Western knowledge’s tendency to group everything into high-level categories and groups and ignore the multiplicity, diversity and specificity of individual lives on the ground. He makes the fairly crude accusation that:
Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals. (p.154)
I have a big problem with this whole angle of Said’s attack, because the tendency to categorise and group entities under abstract terms is, of course, fundamental to the management of all knowledge and of all modern societies. The field of medicine I work in is only possible by virtue of general categories, starting with the notion of ‘patients’ or ‘cases’. Take epidemiology, ‘the study of the determinants, occurrence, and distribution of health and disease in a defined population’, which played a central role in the management of COVID-19 around the world – this is only possible by converting individual cases into numbers and groups and categories.
Accusing just the one academic discipline of Orientalism of doing this – turning the specificity of individual people into abstract categories and numbers – seems to me 1) factually incorrect; almost all academic or professional specialisms do just this; and 2) this approach is the basis of our entire civilisation, the entirety of Western science, medicine, public health provision and so on rests on this approach.
I take the point that, in his opinion, the conversion of teeming cities full of all kinds of races, religious groups, ethnicities, sexualities and so on into one big dumb category, the Orient, is a kind of abuse of the procedure, and was designed to justify imperial conquest and rule. Yes yes. But to attack the intellectual approach of gathering large numbers of people together under particular headings or categories as somehow inherently wicked and abusive seems to me plain wrong.
Anyway Said spends a page guessing that what happened is Marx’s initial sympathy for suffering individuals in the East met, in his mind, the censorship and ‘the lexicographical police action of Orientalist science’, of the accumulated playbook of orientalist metaphors prevalent in his Romantic sources, and shut down his human sympathies in favour of Orientalist stereotypes.
What Said’s devoting a couple of pages to Marx really indicates is how important Marx still was to his audience in the academy back in 1978, that he has to perform such mental gymnastics to reconcile what he wrote about India with what he takes for granted was ‘Marx’s humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people’ (p.154).
As so often Said is blinkered or partial because the whole point of Marx is that he was a kind of acme of converting individual people into vast historical abstractions; his whole deal was about mentally converting the teeming masses of capitalist countries into vast abstracts named the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In doing so he notoriously dismissed vast numbers of people who would be trodden on and be victims of the historical process, namely the industrial bourgeoisie which would have to be eliminated in a violent revolution. And all of this needed to be carried out in the cause of the biggest Romantic redemptive project every conceived i.e. the creation of the utopian classless society.
But Said ignores the fact that Marx’s central procedure was to apply huge dehumanising categories to all Western societies, and instead somehow wants imply that he only did it to India; that this was somehow unique to his thought, a uniquely dehumanising and uniquely Orientalising manoeuvre to make, whereas, as I’ve just shown, the very same procedure was of course fundamental to Marx’s entire approach.
Travelling to the Orient
Moving on, Said says you can draw a distinction between Orientalists who stayed in Europe and worked from texts, and those who actually went to the Orient, some of them settling and living there. Here they had the exciting experience of living like kings, the life of the privileged imperial conqueror, waited on hand and foot, free to travel anywhere.
Goes on to say that an interesting process can be observed, which is they start off writing about specific experiences but sooner or later come up against Orientalist tropes, rather like the buffers in a railway station. Some Western writing became official while other texts remained personal, such as tourist and travel writing (Flaubert, Kinglake, Mark Twain). He attempts a little categorisation of motives for travelling to the Orient at this period (mid-nineteenth century):
- The writer aiming to gather information for scientific purposes
- The writer intending to gain evidence but happy to mix this with personal observation and style – e.g. Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1857)
- The writer who travels to fulfil a personal (often literary) project – e.g. Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (1851)
He calls the intentions of the different writers, their ‘author-function’ (p.159). I looked this up and a) it’s a term coined by Foucault who, as we’ve seen, Said is very indebted to throughout; and b) Foucault uses the term author-function as: ‘a concept that replaces the idea of the author as a person, and instead refers to the ‘discourse’ that surrounds an author or body of work’ (Open University)
He cashes this out with an extended discussion of the career of Orientalist Edward Lane (1801 to 1876), showing how the quirky personal asides he included in his monumental 1836 work, ‘Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians’, were expunged in his subsequent works – an entirely functional Arabic-English Lexicon and an ‘uninspired’ translation of the Arabian Nights (p.164).
4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French
Pursuing the same line, Said categorises the many writers who went on journeys to the Orient as ‘pilgrims’.
(In my opinion the chapter title and concept just highlight the huge holes in his account, which include a proper discussion of actual Christian pilgrimage, a proper consideration of medieval literature, which would include a proper account of the Crusades and, indeed the vast and generally unread libraries of devotional Christian literature. Seen in this wider perspective, Said’s account pretty much solely focuses on the nineteenth century, taking its start from writers he would have taught in his comparative literature course, such as Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Flaubert and going a bit beyond them into the actual literature of Orientalists such as Sacy, Renan, Burton, Lane and so on. But of the vast hinterland of medieval and Christian accounts of the Orient, almost nothing [excepting the passage about Dante]. Not his specialism, not his area.)
He compares and contrasts British and French visitors to the region and makes the simple point that the British had strong or defining presence on the ground and the French didn’t: the British beat the French to seize India during the eighteenth century and slowly ramped up their presence in the Middle East till they established an unofficial protectorate over Egypt in 1882.
The Mediterranean echoed with the sounds of French defeats, from the Crusades to Napoleon. What was to become known as ‘la mission civilisatrice’ began in the nineteenth century as a political second-best to Britain’s presence. (p.169)
The (partly) explains why (some) British writing feels practical and administrative while some much French writing is more imaginative, projective, wistful, dwelling in ruins and lost hopes etc.
He spends some time summarising François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand’s ‘Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem of 1811’. Said shows how, besides Chateaubriand’s obsessive narcissism the book reeks of Orientalist tropes, despising Islam, regarding the Arab as degraded, saying the whole region needs to be redeemed by the West. Said talks about his ‘Christian vindictiveness’ (p.174).
He moves on to discuss Alphonse de Lamartine’s ‘Voyage en Orient’ of a generation later, 1835. He, too, ends up disliking the reality of the terrain and people (thinking it was painted better by Poussin, p.178) and saying it is ripe for conquest and development by the West.
Then on to Nerval (visited 1842-3) and Flaubert (1849-50). Nerval writes of an eerily empty Orient, disappointing the Romantic fantasies he had learned from (earlier Orientalist) books. He copies large blocs from Edward Lane’s account and passes them off as his own.
Flaubert, much the greater writer, vividly describes what he sees before him in notes and his wonderful letters. The Orient was to bulk large in two of his six novels, Salammbô (1862) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Said takes an excerpt from Flaubert’s notes on visiting a hospital to highlight the way morality and revulsion are completely excise; all that matters is the correct rendering of exact detail (p.186).
The most famous episode in Flaubert’s journey to the Orient was the time he spent with Kuchuk Hanem, an Egyptian sex worker. This is a peg for Said to talk a little about the sexual stereotypes of the East and to make the fairly obvious point that not only for nineteenth century writers but for many readers ‘the Orient’ became associated with sensuality, guilt free and available sex, much more available than back in Victorian strictly regimented Europe.
But the main impact this had on me was to realise how little he talks about sex, desire, gender, feminism, themes which massively saturate modern academic studies. In fact he raises the issue, why the Orient then (and now) suggests ‘not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies’, before going on to say (in his typically not quite correct English) ‘it is not the province of my analysis here.’ A little later (p.208) he refers to the use of Orientalist stereotypes of ‘exotic’ sex in semi-pornographic novels but, by and large, it’s not his thing, his aim, his subject.
Then he returns to his main theme, ‘the sense of layer upon layer of interests, official learning, institutional pressure, that covered the Orient as a subject matter and as a territory during the second half of the nineteenth century’ (p.192).
British visitors and writers had a harder more realistic sense of what pilgrimages to the Orient entailed. The French didn’t own any territory and so were, in a sense, more imaginatively free. The British were always anchored in the reality by the vast responsibility of India, later on of Egypt, both of which meant that tough questions about administration and Realpolitik lurked behind even the most carefree travelogue. In a word, they are less imaginative. He has harsh words for Alexander Kinglake (1809 to 1891, Eton and Cambridge), English travel writer and historian, whose ‘Eothen’ or Traces of travel brought home from the East’ (1844) was wildly popular. Kinglake didn’t let his ignorance of any Oriental language and poor grasp of its culture stop him from making sweeping xenophobic, antisemitic and racist generalisations about the culture, mentality and society of ‘the Orient’.
This contrasts with the splendid achievements of Richard Burton, always an imperialist at heart, but a rebel against the establishment who took great delight in pointing out to the Orientalists that he knew more languages, had travelled more, seen more and understood more of the Arab mind than they ever would. Of all the writers of the classic Orientalist period Burton is the one who knew most about the actual specificities of Arab and Muslim life which Said values. He is maybe the last compromised of all these writers. And yet throughout his work is the assumption that the Orient is there to be taken, to be ruled by the West, by Britain, leading Said to another restatement of his core theme, that in Burton’s writings:
Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient… (p.199)
Chapter 3. Orientalism Now
Begins where its predecessor left off at around 1870. This is the period of greatest colonial expansion into the Orient…the very last section characterises the shift from British and French to American hegemony. I attempt to sketch the present intellectual and social realities of Orientalism in the United States.
1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism
The phrase is obviously derived from Freud’s notion, first expressed in The Interpretation of Dreams, that dreams have both a manifest or obvious content, and then a latent or secret meaning (also latent in the sense that it required work by patient and therapist to bring it out). Said applies Freud’s metaphor to his topic of study.
The idea is simple: the details or surface or manifest Orientalism have changed and varied over the past 250 years but the latent or bedrock attitudes behind it remain as fixed as ever, namely that the Orient is backward, poor, lazy, undisciplined and passive, in need of endless help (p.206).
Actually his argument is not helped by the way that he continually shuffles the attributes he claims that Orientalism attributes to the Orient. In the space of a few pages he says there are the Orient’s:
- sensuality, tendency to despotism, aberrant mentality, habits of inaccuracy, backwardness (p.205)
- eccentricity, backwardness, silent indifference, female penetrability, supine malleability (p.206)
- backward, degenerate, uncivilised, retarded (p.207)
I take the point that each list shuffles from a pack of negative stereotypes, but, like his repeated attempts to give a precise definition of Orientalism, none of which really nail it, there’s a constant sense of blurriness and slippage.
Helplessness
I read his criticism of this idea of Oriental ‘helplessness’ on a day (23 September 2023) when, on the radio, I heard that Morocco needs Western help because of the massive earthquake which just struck it, that Libya needs Western help because of the unprecedented floods which have devastated it, that Lebanon still needs help rebuilding itself three years on from the devastating explosion of 4 August 2020, and saw a charity appeal to help the victims of the civil war in Yemen.
It’s all very well to read Said’s repeated claim that seeing the Orient as helplessly needing Western intervention is an Orientalist trope, a demeaning stereotype entirely created by the institutions he describes, and yet…it also appears to be a real-world fact.
SOAS
Anyway, Said continues to describe (yet again) the process whereby a set of intellectual interests and disciplines based in study of the Biblical languages slowly transformed into a series of postulates which justified and enabled the colonial occupation of ‘the Orient’. He quotes Lord Cromer’s paternalistic speeches, specifically the one calling for the establishment of an institute to study the region, which was a trigger point for the establishment of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
The importance of geography
If the section about Renan dwelled on the importance of the discipline of philology, this section dwells on the academic discipline of geography for the colonial enterprise. As Said puts it in his foggy, unclear prose:
Geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient. All the latent and unchanging characteristics of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography. (p.216)
France bounced back from its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870 to 71) with a renewed determination to expand its empire and this led, among other things, to ‘a tremendous efflorescence of geographical societies’ (p.217). There was even a thing called the geographical movement.
Scientific geography gave rise to commercial geography and an explosion of utopian schemes to interfere and alter geography. The opening of the Suez Canal had changed the world of commerce and profoundly affected geopolitics. Dreamers dreamed of similar huge projects, including flooding the Sahara to make the desert bloom, and tying together France’s scattered African colonies by ambitious railway networks.
Some French commentators blamed their defeat by Prussia on lack of imperial ambition; falling behind British imperial aggrandisement was blamed for France’s economic woes. The solution to every problem was to more aggressively conquer and control. This lay behind France’s drive to conquer the territories of what became French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), clinched in a series of battles in 1885.
But the French throughout the period continually lamented coming second best to the British who had secured all the plum territories (India, Egypt). French envy and resentment knew no bounds. Said ties this to the way the British produced remarkable characters who flourished in the Oriental purview, such as Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence.
2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Wordliness
Starts with a discussion of the concept of The White Man, the controller at the centre of Orientalism who defined unwhites, blacks, coloureds and Orientals as ‘others’, lacking the attributes of whiteness, who therefore had to be schooled and trained up to ‘our’ standard. To demonstrate he gives (more) quotes from Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence.
In the late nineteenth century bastardised theories of evolution, the survival of the fittest and race theories lent malevolent force to pre-existing Orientalist discourse.
Said introduces us to William Robertson Smith (1846 to 1894) a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar and minister of the Free Church of Scotland, best known for his book ‘Religion of the Semites’ which became a foundational text in the comparative study of religion.
Said moves on to his most extended consideration of T.E. Lawrence who he sees following a recognisable career arc, from Romantic adventurer, to imperial agent (in the Arab Uprising), to disillusioned failure. He quotes passages from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom to show how Lawrence not only identified himself totally with the Arab Uprising but, more typically, identified the Arab Uprising with himself, another white man assuming the natives couldn’t have done it on their own.
I like his idea (maybe pretty obvious) that the mid and late nineteenth century figure of the adventurer-eccentric was replaced around the time of the Great War by the Orientalist-imperial agent, citing Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, St John Philby (a small checklist which he refers to countless times). This marked a shift from an academic to an instrumentalist mode.
Between the wars
Between the wars imperial rule throughout the Orient became problematic for the simple reason that the natives formed more and more strident nationalist movements, flanked by increasing acts of violence, while a growing minority in Western countries began to question or turn against colonialism and in favour of home independence.
Said quotes French Orientalists (Sylvain Lévi) who (like all academics) insist the answer is more study, more research, better understanding etc. He quotes the poet Paul Valéry whose contribution amounts (with comic French intellectualism) to analysing the problem away (p.250). And goes on to cite Valentine Chirol, Elie Faure, Fernand Baldensperger, all of whom reiterated the now crystallised Orientalist lines: ‘they’ are unlike us, lack the ability for rational knowledge, are economically and culturally backward, Islam is an imprisoning limiting religion, all the usual slurs.
At the end of this section he gives yet another summary of what he’s trying to do, to investigate:
the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspeciality into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, and making apocalyptic statements about the White Man’s difficult civilising mission (p.254)
3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower
During the 1930s and 40s Orientalism had hardened into an extensive field of knowledge in which, like a spider’s web, reference to the most trivial fact tended to jangle the entire system and immediately invoke a whole gang of presuppositions, biases and bigotries.
There’s a long passage on the development, between the wars, of ‘types’ in the social sciences, which I think he contrasts with the cosmopolitan pluralism of the philological (in the wide sense) approach taken by one of his heroes, Auerbach. Narrowing versus widening.
So this section invokes the profound collapse of European economy and political consensus and in an obscure, round the back kind of way, describes how this impacted on national Orientalisms. For example, Snouck Hutgonje, Dutch scholar of Oriental cultures and languages and advisor on native affairs to the colonial government of the Dutch East Indies.
Then 20 pages contrasting the work of the most eminent Orientalists of their generations in France and Britain, Louis Massignon (1883 to 1962), French Catholic scholar of Islam and a pioneer of Catholic-Muslim mutual understanding, and Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895 to 1971), Scottish historian and Orientalist.
Massignon is depicted as an outsider of great genius and insight who devoted a lot of time to the biography of a Muslim Sufi saint, al-Hallaj. Gibb was the opposite, an insider, an institution man.
Inevitably Said depicts both of them, in subtle and sometimes impenetrable style, while citing Foucault and Barthes, as nonetheless continuers and purveyors of fundamental Orientalist stereotypes. His detailed look at the careers, professional subjects and styles of these two giants takes us from after the Great War up to the early 1960s.
4. The Latest Phase
To date the book has amounted to a brief consideration of the origin of Orientalist tropes and prejudices among the ancient Greeks, a brief sketch of the Middle Ages in the form of Dante, skipping past the Renaissance altogether and then settling down to a detailed examination of Orientalism from the late eighteenth and through the long nineteenth century.
In this last section he finally brings all his findings on home to the colossus which dominated the post-war settlement, culturally, economically and militarily, the US of A. It is completely unlike the rest of the book in that it is clear, accessible, magazine style rage against the unchecked proliferation of anti-Arab and Islamophobic caricatures across American culture.
The traditional Orientalism he has chronicled was broken up in 1960s America into a proliferation of academic subspecies. The European focus on philology, itself deriving from study of the Biblical languages, disappeared and was replaced by an American focus on the social sciences. American academics didn’t study the languages of the Middle East, they studied their ‘societies’ and on this basis set themselves up as experts and advisers.
Part of this was the abandonment of the study of literature. The long philological and literary approach he’s been praising and enjoying came to a grinding halt. In American hands it was all about preparing oil executives for their stints in the Arab world and advising the State Department.
He categorises ways in which ‘the Arab’ or ‘the Arab Muslim’ appear in ‘modern’ (i.e. 1960s and 70s) culture:
- Popular images and social science representations
- Cultural relations policy
- Merely Islam
- Orientals Orientals Orientals
Said becomes more and more angry, outraged at the barrage of anti-Arab and Islamophobic imagery to be found all across American culture. Images of humiliatingly defeated Arabs after the 1967 war. Images of hook-nosed Arab sheikhs at petrol pumps after the 1973 war and the oil price hike. These latter have all the Nazi antisemitic stereotypes born again.
He is appalled at the new tone of American Orientalism. He mounts a sustained attack on the 1970 Cambridge History of Islam, spotting stereotypes everywhere and accusing it of being bereft of ‘ideas and methodological intelligence’ (p.302).
He quotes from magazine articles, from Commentary magazine, from scholarly papers, interviews in which academics, politicians, commentators, repeat ad nauseam the same anti-Arab tropes he has enumerated throughout the book, the backwardness of Arabs, the stupidity of Arabs, the bombastic nature of Arabic which prevents Arabs from having rational thought, and so on.
He attacks 3 or 4 essays before alighting on a 1972 volume called ‘Revolution in the Middle East and other case studies’. He attacks the introductory essay by the volume’s editor P.J. Vatikiotis, before making a sustained attack on the essay by notable modern Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, giving numerous quotations in a vitriolic attack on what he takes to be Lewis at the same time setting himself up as an oracle on all things Arab while at the same time comprehensively despising and belittling his subject matter. Sounds weird, sounds counter-intuitive, unless you’ve read Said’s book in which he identifies it as a recurring characteristic of all Orientalists.
It’s in the Lewis passage that Said finally opens up about the Zionist movement and the foundation of the state of Israel, pointing out that Lewis nowhere (apparently) mentions Zionism or the Jewish appropriation of Palestinian land and, at last you feel, the cat is out of the bag. it feels as if the previous 300 pages have been a long, slow, laboursome foreplay leading up to this, the money shot.
What particularly gets his is Lewis’s pride in being an objective historian when Said claims to have shown he is in fact a ludicrously biased, anti-Arab, anti-Islamic bigot.
This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners. (p.319)
The final pages describe the way Orientalism has infected the Orient in the sense that students and lecturers from the region come to the United States to train, are inculcated with Orientalism biases against their own people and culture and return to propagate these biases. There were, at the time of writing, hardly any institutes of higher education devoted to studying the Orient in the Orient. Academically, it is backward.
Worse, America has made the entire Middle East, economically, into a client region. America consumes a select number of products from it (mostly oil) but in return exports a huge number of goods, from blue jeans to Coca Cola. And TV and Hollywood movies, which often feature Arabs as the bad guys.
The modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalising. (p.325)
Finally he hopes that his work has made a small contribution to encouraging scholars to critically scrutinise the premises of their disciplines, to be attentive to the realities on the ground and try to avoid the artificial and cramping conventions which constrict so many fields of study in the humanities. And, writing at a time of increasing nationalism in the developing world, he hopes it will help those peoples and movements get free of the mind-forg’d manacles (a quote from William Blake) which their oppressors created to judge, demean and control them.
Critique
Mind opening
Books like this are mostly for students because, if you hadn’t yet come across the notion that academic disciplines are not the clean objective collections of facts you were led to believe at school, then Said’s full frontal demolition of an entire area of academic study, and his association of it with one of modern woke ideology’s great bogeymen, Western imperialism, is liable to have a dynamite impact, opening your mind to whole new ways of thinking about scholarship, the academy, the humanities, history, geography, languages, religion, all of it.
And, given the extent to which Said ties his history of nineteenth century Orientalism directly to the perennial hot button issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the impressionable student is likely to have not only their intellectual interests, but their sense of justice fired up. When I used to visit my son at Bristol University I was struck by the number of posters around the town burning with indignation for the cause of oppressed Palestine.
But, unfortunately, it’s nearly 40 years since I read Orientalism, so none of this is new to me although rereading it made me realise I’d forgotten almost all the detail.
Repetitive
And forgotten how bad it is. It really doesn’t read very well. Reread in the cold light of day it feels extremely repetitive and confused. Too often Said asserts his case rather than proving it, in particular repeating the fundamental ideas like the created nature of Orientalist discourse, the premise of an unchangingly inferior Orient and so on, scores and scores of times till I felt like screaming.
Weak definitions
A surprisingly central problem is his failure to really define what his central term i.e. the Orient, actually means. When I began to explain the book to a friend she expected it to be about the Far East, China and Japan, which are the places she associates with the word ‘Orient’. She was very surprised when I told her it focuses almost entirely on the Middle East and Egypt, with some digressions about India. China and Japan are mentioned once or twice in passing, but not part of his hard core message. Here’s one of his not particularly useful definitions of the great subject, Orientalism:
What I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. (p.1)
Or:
Orientalism is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed Oriental. (p.72)
You can see the air of tautology hanging over a sentence like this, as there are so many of his other formulations.
The Orient that appears in Orientalism is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness and, later, Western empire. (p.203)
Or this one, that Orientalism:
is an attempt to describe a whole region of the world as an accompaniment to that region’s colonial conquest. (p.343)
It’s peculiar that every time he mentions the concept, he feels the need to redefine it, and every time it comes out slightly different. This adds to the general difficulty of reading the book.
Relation to the contemporary world
The second point is one I made in part 1, which is that so much has happened in the world since it was published – chiefly the collapse of communism, the end of the Cold War, the rise of Islamic terrorism, the Western invasions of Middle Eastern countries, the Arab Spring and its failures – that, to anyone keeping up with events, the book doesn’t feel like a guide to the modern world but a dated dead end.
No doubt Western academics, commentators, ‘experts’ and journalists continue to use Orientalising stereotypes, and for much the same motives Said describes, to define, control and contain the complex realities of this troubled part of the world, to assert Western superiority over ‘barbaric’ Arabs. But this is, in the end, a very easy concept to understand and what would be useful would be a guide to the contemporary forms of Orientalising stereotyping which we in the West, no doubt, still labour under.
Ending the binary
Quite a few times Said says he laments the simplistic binary opposition between East and West which he says is at the heart of Orientalism. Does he? No. In my opinion he reinforces the binary on every page of the book, in fact he deepens and entrenches it by repeating its binary terms – the Orient and the West – on every page.
By not including a single Oriental, Arab or Muslim voice, while featuring scores and scores of European writers, I thought the book has the effect of making ‘the Orient’ even more invisible, disappearing it, while filling the mind to overflowing with Western European ideas. He angrily rejects those ideas. but those are the ideas I’ve just spent a week reading a 350-page book about, and so those are the ideas I remember.
Epistemology
Said’s thesis is based on the idea that knowledge is power, and that the way ‘knowledge’ about ‘the Orient’ was created and curated was always biased, bigoted, negative, critical and disempowering. Fine. But what this boils down to is an argument about epistemology, which is defined as ‘the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.’ This is the heart of his book and his thesis. It is an argument about the production of knowledge. And yet Said nowhere explains his own theory of epistemology. Just as he is slippery about what ‘the orient’ actually means, and gives ten or so differing definitions of ‘Orientalism’, in the same way he never gives an adequate definition of the central concept he’s arguing about.
In my opinion it’s this lack of really deep, thought-through clarity and consistency about his key concepts which explains why, instead, he lumps lots of disparate topics together, rarely explores them in any depth, and continually resorts to asserting his thesis instead of proving it.
Fake urgency
Said writes that, when Orientalists codified their knowledge into encyclopedias under alphabetical entries, they modelled and shaped knowledge, created constraints so that readers could only approach this knowledge of the Orient via ‘the learned grids and codes’ provided by the Orientalist, and this is made to sound like some wicked conspiracy. And yet the same is true of any other subject whatsoever. Take woodwork. You want to learn a bit about woodwork so you Google or buy a book on the subject, written by experts.
But in Said’s eyes, this knowledge about woodwork has been modelled and shaped knowledge by so-called ‘woodwork experts’ who have created constraints so that readers can only approach this knowledge of woodwork via ‘the learned grids and codes’ provided by the woodwork expert! Scary, eh? Or utterly banal.
Reading these kinds of scare tactics on every single page gets boring. Again and again and again he makes the same simple point which is a critique of the way knowledge is produced and curated by academics with, he claims, an anti-Eastern, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice – all so that he can lead the reader, in the Introduction and then in the third section, right back to the modern world and to the iniquity of US policy in the Middle East.
It’s this, Said’s obsession with the Arab-Israeli policy, which really gives the book its energy. The rise of ‘Orientalism’ as an academic discipline would be of solely academic interest, a very niche concern, if it weren’t for the fact that the same kind of anti-Eastern, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes are at work, in the world, today, guiding American’s slavishly pro-Israeli and ruinously anti-Arab policy.
Last word
When we were students a friend of mine, who went on to become a professor of poetry, described it as ‘a bad book in a good cause’.
Practical criticism
See if you can identify the kind of essentialising Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs and Islam which Said describes, in Western (British) coverage of the recent Hamas attack on Israel (I’m just giving the BBC as a starting point):
Credit
Orientalism by Edward Said was first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978. References are to the 2003 Penguin paperback edition (with new Afterword and Preface).
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