Crisis in Orientalism

Crisis in Orientalism

INTRODUCTION:

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a well known and most debated work. It belongs to trilogy of which the other two The Question of Palestine (1980) and Covering Islam (1982), from a series of writing dealing principally with the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. Orientalism is one of the most influential text of the twentieth century. Spivak calls it a source book through which marginality itself has acquired the status of a discipline in the Anglo- American academy. Orientalism occupies three overlapping domains. It designates first the 4000 – year history of and cultural relations between Europe and Asia; second the scientific discipline producing specialists in Oriental languages and culture from the early nineteenth century; and third the long- term images, stereotypes and general ideology about ‘the orient’ as ‘the other’, constructed by generations of Western scholars. ‘Orientalism’ depends on a culturally constructed distinctions between ‘the Occident’ and ‘the Orient’ (a fact less than of nature than of ‘imaginative geography’, as said terms it) and is inescapably political, as is its study.

            In Edward Said’s view ‘representations’ is a key factor in Orientalism that the West has created. It makes imagination as a powerful force that transforms the Orient into an image that suits the Western imperialist agenda. The best definition of orientalism comes from Said himself:

            A way of coming to terms with the orient’s special places in European Western experience, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as contrasting image, idea, personality, experience Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the orient” and “ the Occident”(Said, 32)

            Said sees representation in Orientalism at three different levels (a) linkage with the objective knowledge; (b) its relationship with the political will of the jest to dominate over others (c) representations as tool of power.

            In“ Crisis in Orientalism” Edward W. Said exposes the limitations of Orientalism. He continues to focus our attention to the enterprise of falsification of the East by the Western Orientalists. Almost the entire West came to believe in the strange portrayals of Arab land and its people, filling the text that came to be written in large numbers. In this enterprise joined people from such diverse areas as creative writing, economics, liberal, philosophy, political thought, administration, history, humanities of different hues. In this particular essay the author deals at lengths with the treatment of the Arabs and Islam by the West which we find no different from their treatment in other works of India and the Hindu as backward, superstitious and blockheads. One has to read such works as Jutes Verne’s, Round the World in Eighty Days(1873) and Kipling’s Kim (1901) and other Raj novels, diaries and personal accounts written during the heyday of colonialism.

            Said, here borrows from Foucault’s views that all texts are politically informed, more so colonial texts. Obviously, Orientalism owes a great debt to Foucault’s dual notion of ‘discourse’. Said regards Foucault’s presentations of order, stability, authority and regularity power of knowledge as the underpinning notion of all institutions of governance. Any speech, writing or belief through which the world can be known and understood. In the Foucauldian sense, ‘discourse’ contains statements which are governed by unspoken rules yielding a language of power co- ordinate through knowledge. We can say that there is no truth, and that all knowledge is a ‘will to power’. All societies, following Foucault, have procedures whereby the production of discourse is controlled selected, organized and redistributed and the purposes of these processes of discourse control is to ward off ‘danger’.

            In Orientalism, he shows how Western knowledge far from being academic, is tainted by power by power and political motivation. These conclusion are carried forward into Culture and Imperialism where the creative writers consciousness is seen to be shaped by the imperialist tendencies prevailing in the nineteenth century England.

            The so called Orientalists presented the East from their Western perspective. “ Orientalism is the discourse of the West about the East, a huge body of text- literary, topographical, anthropological, historical, sociological that has been accumulating since the renaissance” (David Lodge, 289). Said explains that certain texts are accorded:

            The authority of academics, institutions, and governments most important such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michael Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, pot the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the text produced out of it. (Said, 94). In this way, the orients ‘vacillates’ between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and it shivers with delight or fear of novelty.

            The West constructs the East in the terms of binary opposition. Said shows that this opposition is crucial to European self conception. As Loomba puts it:

If colonized people are irrational, Europeans are rational; if the former are barbaric, sensual and lazy, Europe is civilization itself, with its sexual appetites under control and its dominant ethic that of hard work; if the Orient is static, Europe can be seen as developing and marching ahead; the orient has to be feminine so that Europe can be masculine.(Loomba, 132)

            This dialectic between self and other, derived in part from deconstruction, has been hugely influential in subsequent studies of colonial discourses in other places. Since Orientalism, colonial discourse studies have analysed a wide range of cultural texts and practices such as art, works, scientific systems, museums, educational institutions, advertisements, pattern of clothing and ideas on beauty. “colonial discourse analysis forms the categories and assumptions”.( Young, 11)

           So the impressive knowledge Orientists filtered through their cultural bias, for the study of the Orient was not objective but A political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference Between the familiar (Europe, The West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’) when one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the end points of analysis, research Public policy, the result is usually to polarize the distinction the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western and limit the human encounter between different cultures, traditions and societies. (Said, 45-46)

Said argued that knowledge of the East could never be innocent or objective because it was produced by human beings who are necessarily embedded in colonial history and relationship.

          Said suggests that we need a contrapuntal perspective in opposite order to think through and interpret together experienced that are discrepant, each with its own agenda, pace of development, internal formation and coherence- and a system of external relationships that coexist and interact with one another. Said is, thus, suggesting that we abandon a unified approach that goes by the master narrative, and adopt a technique where marginal and apparently contradictory narrative battle.

          In short, Orientalism is this production of ideas, knowledge, and opinions about the orient – ideas which were preliminary to governance, military conquest and political control over the geographical territory of the orient. Thus, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating restructuring and having authority over the orients.

REFERNCE:

1.        Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: OUP, 1998.2.        Lodge, David. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Singapore: Pearson Education Pvt. Ltd., 2004.3.        Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Post Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 2005.4.        Nayar, Parmod K. Postcolonial literature: An Introduction. New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008.5.        Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New  York : Vintage Books, 1978.6.        Young, R. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

Content: Ritu Rani

           Research Scholar, English Department, Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra

Orientalism

What is Orientalism?

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous. Edward W. Said, in his groundbreaking book, Orientalism, defined it as the acceptance in the West of “the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny and so on.”
According to Said, Orientalism dates from the period of European Enlightenment and colonization of the Arab World. Orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonialism based on a self-serving history in which “the West” constructed “the East” as extremely different and inferior, and therefore in need of Western intervention or “rescue”.
Examples of early Orientalism can be seen in European paintings and photographs and also in images from the World’s Fair in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The paintings, created by European artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, depict the Arab World as an exotic and mysterious place of sand, harems and belly dancers, reflecting a long history of Orientalist fantasies which have continued to permeate our contemporary popular culture.
France colonized Algeria from 1830 to 1962. From roughly 1900 to 1930, French entrepreneurs produced postcards of Algerian women that were circulated in France. While Algerian women are portrayed in these photographs as if the camera is capturing a real moment in their everyday lives, the women are actually set up in the photographer’s studio. As demonstrated in Malek Alloula’s book, The Colonial Harem, these photographs were circulated as evidence of the exotic, backwards and strange customs of Algerians, when, in fact, they reveal more about the French colonial perspective than about Algerian life in the early 1900s. This is an example of how Arab women have been exoticized and eroticized for the pleasure of the European male voyeur, as these photographs make visible French colonial fantasies of penetrating the harem and gaining access to Arab women’s private spaces.
The World’s Fairs in Chicago (1893) and St. Louis (1904) helped to reinforce Orientalist imagery in the United States. The crossover from European to U.S. Orientalism can be seen in the images from James Buel’s photographic book that catalogued the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. This publication includes photographs of recreated Arab streets, accompanied by captions that capture the Orientalist thinking of the time. For example, the caption that accompanies the image “Egyptian Girl in Street of Cairo” refers to the “peculiar manners of the Egyptians,” and her “unsightly disguise.” In addition to being written about as an object on display, her characteristics are described as belonging to a backwards culture.

Orientalism said

Chapter-Wise Summary of ORIENTALISM By Edward Said

Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the orientals or the people from these exotic civilization.

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

Here is a brief summary of the book:  

Chapter 1:  The Scope of Orientalism

In this chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how the orientals started considering the orientals as non-human beings. The orientals divided the world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs. An imaginary geographical line was drawn between what was ours and what was theirs. The orients were regarded as uncivilized people; and the westerns said that since they were the refined race it was their duty to civilize these people and in order to achieve their goal, they had to colonize and rule the orients. They said that the orients themselves were incapable of running their own government. The Europeans also thought that they had the right to represent the orientals in the west all by themselves. In doing so, they shaped the orientals the way they perceived them or in other words they were orientalizing the orients. Various teams have been sent to the east where the orientalits silently observed the orientals by living with them; and every thing the orientals said and did was recorded irrespective of its context, and projected to the civilized world of the west. This resulted in the generalization. Whatever was seen by the orientals was associated with the oriental culture, no matter if it is the irrational action of an individual.

The most important use of orientalism to the Europeans was that they defined themselves by defining the orientals. For example, qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized, crudeness were related to the orientals, and automatically the Europeans became active, rational, civilized, sophisticated. Thus, in order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for the orientalists to generalize the culture of the orients.

Another feature of orientalism was that the culture of the orientals was explained to the European audience by linking them to the western culture, for example, Islam was made into Mohammadism because Mohammad was the founder of this religion and since religion of Christ was called Christianity; thus Islam should be called Mohammadism. The point to be noted here is that no Muslim was aware of this terminology and this was a completely western created term, and to which the Muslims had no say at all.

Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures

In this chapter, Edward Said points the slight change in the attitude of the Europeans towards the orientals. The orientals were really publicized in the European world especially through their literary work. Oriental land and behaviour was highly romanticized by the European poets and writers and then presented to the western world. The orientalists had made a stage strictly for the European viewers, and the orients were presented to them with the colour of the orientalist or other writers perception. In fact, the orient lands were so highly romanticized that western literary writers found it necessary to offer pilgrimage to these exotic lands of pure sun light and clean oceans in order to experience peace of mind, and inspiration for their writing. The east was now perceived by the orientalist as a place of pure human culture with no necessary evil in the society. Actually it was this purity of the orientals that made them inferior to the clever, witty, diplomatic, far-sighted European; thus it was their right to rule and study such an innocent race. The Europeans said that these people were too naive to deal with the cruel world, and that they needed the European fatherly role to assist them.

Another justification the Europeans gave to their colonization was that they were meant to rule the orientals since they have developed sooner than the orientals as a nation, which shows that they were biologically superior, and secondly it were the Europeans who discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans. Darwin’s theories were put forward to justify their superiority, biologically by the Europeans.

In this chapter, Edward Said also explains how the two most renowned orientalists of the 19^th century, namely Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan worked and gave orienatlism a new dimension. In fact, Edward Said compliments the contribution made by Sacy in the field. He says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the information in such a way that it was also useful for the future orientalist. And secondly, the prejudice that was inherited by every orientalist was considerably low in him. On the other hand, Renan who took advantage of Sacy’s work was as biased as any previous orientalist. He believed that the science of orientalism and the science of philology have a very important relation; and after Renan this idea was given a lot attention and many future orientalists worked of in its line.

Chapter 3 : Orientalism Now

This chapter starts off by telling us that how the geography of the world was shaped by the colonization of the Europeans. There was a quest for geographical knowledge which formed the bases of orientalism.

The author then talks about the changing circumstances of the world politics and changing approach to orientalism in the 20^th century. The main difference was that where the earlier orientalists were more of silent observers the new orientalists took a part in the every day life of the orients. The earlier orientalists did not interact a lot with the orients, whereas the new orients lived with them as if they were one of them. This wasn’t out of appreciation of their lifestyle but was to know more about the orients in order to rule them properly. Lawrence of Arabia was one of such orienatlists.

Then Edward Said goes on to talk about two other scholars Massignon and Gibb. Though Massignon was a bit liberal with orientalists and often tried to protect their rights, there was still inherited biased found in him for the orientals, which can be seen in his work. With the changing world situation especially after World War 1, orientalism took a more liberal stance towards most of its subjects; but Islamic orientalism did not enjoy this status. There were constant attacks to show Islam as a weak religion, and a mixture of many religions and thoughts. Gibb was the most famous Islamic orientalist of this time.

After World War 1 the centre of orientalism moved from Europe to USA. One important transformation that took place during this time was instances of relating it to philology and it was related to social science now. All the orientalists studied the orientals to assist their government to come up with policies for dealing with the orient countries. With the end of World War 2, all the Europeans colonies were lost; and it was believed that there were no more orientals and occidents, but this was surely not the case. Western prejudice towards eastern countries was still very explicit, and often they managed to generalize most of the eastern countries because of it. For example Arabs were often represented as cruel and violent people. Japanese were always associated with karate where as the Muslims were always considered to be terrorists. Thus, this goes on to show that even with increasing globalization and awareness, such bias was found in the people of the developed countries.

Edward Said concludes his book by saying that he is not saying that the orientalists should not make generalization, or they should include the orient perspective too, but creating a boundary at the first place is something which should not be done.

Edward Said : Orientalism

                                                     Orientalism

Edward Said—A Biographical Note

Edward Said was a Palestinian born professor and scholar. A literary theorist and academician, he wrote many books on literary criticism, musical criticism, and issues of post-colonialism. He served as a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University (former American President Barak Obama was his student at Columbia University) in a teaching career that spanned four decades. He served as Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard College in 1974.He had a deep interest in politics and represented the Palestinian National Council (PNC) as an independent member from 1977 to 1991.

Said is best known for his book ‘Orientalism’, published in 1978. In the book he discussed how certain assumptions of the Western world lead to the misinterpretations of the cultural symbols of the Orient, particularly the Middle East. The book, considered to be a very significant writing on the post-colonial theory has been translated into many languages, and is a part of the prescribed reading for many political science courses.

He published ‘Covering Islam’ in 1981 in which he analyzed how the countries like France, Britain, and the U.S. view the Islamic nations and Arabs. Over the next few years he wrote ‘The World, the text and the Critic’ (1983), ‘After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives’ (1986), and ‘Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature’ (1990).

He died of leukemia on 25 September 2003 after battling the disease for 12 years.

Orientalism

David Lodge comments about the book: ‘Orientalism is the discourse of the West about the East, a huge body of texts—literary, topographical, anthropological, historical, sociological——that has been accumulating since the Renaissance. Said, concentrating his attention on writing about the Near East, is concerned to show how this discourse is at once self-validating, constructing certain stereotypes which become accepted as self-evident facts, and also in conscious or unconscious collusion with political and economic imperialism’.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said says that Orientalism, especially the academic study of, and discourse, political and literary, about the Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East (that primarily originated in England, France, and then in the United States) actually creates a divide between the East and the West.

‘My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge’ (Orientalism  204).

The book is divided into three chapters:

ü  The Scope of Orientalism

ü  Orientalist Structures and Restructures

ü  Orientalism Now

Orientalism is considered to be Edward Said's most influential work and has been translated into at least 36 languages. It has been the focus of any number of controversies and polemics, notably with Bernard Lewis, whose work is critiqued in the book's final section, entitled "Orientalism Now: The Latest Phase." In October 2003, one month after Said died, a commentator wrote in a Lebanese newspaper that through Orientalism ‘Said's critics agree with his admirers that he has single-handedly effected a revolution in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S.’

The present extract constitutes the concluding part of the First Chapter of Orientalism  entitled, ‘The Scope of Orientalism’

Said begins this extract by pointing out that it is a fallacy to assume that the world can be understood through texts. It is foolish to apply what one learns from books to real life. Voltaire and Cervantes had shown the foolishness of this in Candide and Don Quixote [see notes—1] respectively. But people have tried and still try to use texts to understand ‘the unpredictable, problematic mess in which human beings live’ or else books like Candide and Don Quixote will not appeal to us even today. “It seems a common failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientation of direct encounters with the human”.

There are some situations that favor textual attitude to reality.

1. When a human being confronts ‘something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant’, he has to depend on what he has read about it. For example, when a person travels in strange lands he may fall back on travel books for support.  Many travelers say that their experience in a particular country is not what they expected. This simply means that the experience is not what a book said it would be. Many writers of travel books ‘compose them in order to say that a country is like this or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and  so forth’. The idea here is that experience can be described by books “so much so that the book acquires a greater authority and use even than the actuality it describes”.

   

2. A second situation favoring textual attitude is the appearance of success. Said gives an example.  If one reads a book claiming that lions are fierce and then encounters a fierce lion, the chances are that one will be encouraged to read more books by that author and believe them.  But in addition, if the book advises how to deal with fierce lions and if the instructions work perfectly, then the author will be greatly believed and will be prompted to write more books of the same kind. Thus a series of books on various aspects of the fierce lion will be written.

Expertise will be attributed to such books. Academics, institutions, and governments will surround the book with greater prestige. Such books can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In course of time such books will create a tradition or what Foucault calls a discourse. The ‘material presence or the weight’, not the originality of the writer, is responsible for the texts produced out of it.

Everything Napoleon or de Lesseps [see notes—2] knew about the Orient came from books or from pre-existing information like the one deposited by Flaubert in the catalogue of received ideas. For Napoleon and de Lesseps the Orient was silent, available for the realization of projects. These projects never directly involved the native inhabitants who were unable to resist them. The discourse of Orientalism gave meaning to the activities of people like Napoleon and de Lesseps. 

When we think of Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto the Orient and the will to govern over it, we will have few surprises. During the 19^th and 20^th centuries the Oriental European relationship was determined by an unstoppable European expansion in search of markets, resources, and colonies. Thus Orientalism accomplished a self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution.  Evidence of this metamorphosis exists in Napoleon and de Lesseps. Their projects for the Orient are understandable at the rudimentary level as the projects of men of vision and genius, heroes in Carlyle’s sense.

Thus there was a transition from a merely textual apprehension, formulation, or definition of the Orient to actual practice of the textual ideas in the Orient. Said says that Orientalism “had much to do with that preposterous [outrageous, unbelievable] transition”.

As a strictly scholarly theory, Orientalism did many things:-

·        During the 19^th century, it produced scholars,

·        Increased the number of languages taught in the West and the quantity of manuscripts edited, translated, and commented on, and

·        Provided the Orient with sympathetic European students genuinely interested in such matters as Sanskrit grammar and Arabic poetry.

Yet “Orientalism overrode the Orient”. As a system of thought about the Orient it rose from “the specifically human detail to the generally trans-human one”. For example:

Observation about a 10^th century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq or Arabia.

A verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality.

“Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different from the West. Orientalism could never revise itself”.    

Closeness between Politics and Orientalism

Ideas about the Orient drawn from Orientalism are put to political use. These ideas raise questions about cultural, racial, or historical generalizations, their uses, value, degree of objectivity, and fundamental intent. Western Orientalism drew attention to the debased position of the Orient or Oriental as an object of study.

Characteristics of the Orientalized Orient

Anwar Abdel Malek gives the qualities of the Orientalized Orient:-

a. The Orient/Oriental is considered as an ‘object’ of study, stamped with an ‘otherness’; as all that is different. This object of study is passive, non-participating, non-autonomous, and non-sovereign.

b. On the level of the thematic, Orientalism adopt an essentialist (a belief that things have a set of characteristics which make them what they are) conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study. The essence is both ‘historical, since it goes back to the dawn of history and fundamentally a-historical, since it transfixes the being, the ‘object’ of study, within its inalienable and non-evolutive specificity, instead of defining it as all other beings.

c. Thus one ends with a typology detached from history and therefore conceived as intangible, essential. We will have a homo Sinicus,(the Chinese) a homo Arabicus, a homo Aegypticus, a homo Africanus. The normal man is the European man of the historical period, that is, since Greek antiquity.

“One sees how much, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud are accompanied by europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples”.

Said outlines a brief history of Orientalism.

From the last decades of the 18^th century and for at least a century and a half, Britain and France dominated Orientalism as a discipline. The great philological discoveries in comparative grammar made by Jones, Bopp, Grimm and others were originally based on manuscripts from the East. The revolution in philology was based on the premise that languages belong to families, of which the Indo-European and the Semitic are two great instances.

Fredrich Schlegel, held the view that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than the Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages. He believed that the Indo-European family was artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic was not. But nowhere has he spoken about the living, contemporary Orient. “When he said in 1800 that “it is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism, he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala the Zend Avesta, and the Upanishads”. [Zend Avesta is the holy book of the Parsis].

Schlegel considered the Semites (whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic and mechanical) different, inferior, and backward. Schlegel’s lectures on language and on life, history, and literature are full of these discriminations, which he made without the slightest qualification. Hebrew, he said, was made for prophetic utterance and divination, the Muslims, however, espoused a ‘dead empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith.

                      

Much of the racism in Schlegel upon the Semites and other ‘low’ Orientals was widely diffused in European culture. By the later 19^th century it made the basis of a scientific subject matter. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and the ‘good’ Orient was inevitably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the ‘bad’ Orient lingered in present day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere. ‘Aryans’ were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient and the Aryan myth dominated historical and cultural anthropology at the expense of the ‘lesser’ peoples.

The Official Intellectual Genealogy of Orientalism

Include Gobineau, Steinthal, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir etc.

It also includes some learned societies

—The Society Asiatique (1822)

-The Royal Asiatic Society (1823)

-American Oriental Society (1842)

The great contribution of imaginative and travel literature which made significant input to the development of building an Orientalist discourse. This includes work by Goethe, Hugo, Flaubert, Burton, Scott, Byron, Disraeli, George Eliot. Later in the 19^th century we could add T. E. Lawrence, Forster etc.

In this enterprise of building an Oriental discourse, there was considerable support not only from the unearthing of dead Oriental civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey but also from major geographical surveys done all through the Orient.

By the end of the 19^th century the above achievements were materially abetted by the European occupation of the entire Near Orient. The principal colonial powers were once again Britain and France. To colonize meant at fist the identification / creation of interests; which could be commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural. With regard to Islam and Islamic territories Britain, as a Christian power, had legitimate interests to safeguard. A complex apparatus for tending these interests developed.

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,

Baptist Missionary Society

Church Missionary Society

British and Foreign Bible Society

Propagation of Christian religion was the main aim of these societies. The trading societies, geographical exploration funds, translation funds, the establishment of Oriental Schools, missions, consular offices, factories, and sometimes large European communities, were established consequently.  

What are the typical experiences and emotions that accompany both the scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political conquests aided by Orientalism?

1. There is disappointment that the modern Orient is not at all like the texts. Experience of the mundane Orient sends one back to the imagination as a place preferable to the real Orient. It so happened in the case of Goethe, Hugo and Nervel. Nervel once told Gautier, “For a person who has never seen the Orient a lotus is still a lotus, for me it is only a kind of onion”.

2. To write about the modern Orient is either to reveal an upsetting demystification or to confine oneself to the Orient as ‘image’.

3. There are other familiar habits of thought, feeling and perception. The mind learns to separate a general apprehension of Orient from a specific experience of it. Said gives an example from Scott’s The Talisman and comments that for writers like Scott, the Orient is like a bin ‘into which all the authoritative, anonymous, and traditional Western attitudes to the East are dumped unthinkingly” and concludes that “how much a single Oriental can escape the fences placed around him, he is first an Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental’.

4. With disenchantment and a generalized (or schizophrenic), there is yet another peculiarity.  The Orient is made to serve as an illustration of a particular form of eccentricity. The Orient is watched. The European whose sensibility tours the Orient is a watcher, never involved, always detached. “The orient becomes a living tableau of queerness”.

5. This tableau becomes a special topic for texts. Thus the circle is completed. From being exposed as what texts do not prepare one for, the Orient can return as something one writes about in a disciplines way. Its foreignness can be translated, its meaning decoded.

CRISIS IN ORIENTALISM

As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, stand apart from it objectively (though he may claim so). ‘His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized.’

By the end of World War I both Africa and the Orient formed not so much an intellectual spectacle for the West but a privileged terrain for it. The scope of Orientalism exactly matched the scope of empire, and it was this absolute unanimity between the two that provoked the only crisis in the history of Western thought about and dealings with the Orient. This crisis continues now.

Beginning in the twenties, the response of the Third World to empire and imperialism has been dialectical. By the time of the Bandung Conference of 1955, the entire Orient had gained its political independence from the Western empires and confronted a new set of imperial powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. Two alternatives opened for Orientalism.

1. Carry on as if nothing had happened.

2. Adapt the old ways to the new. This was a difficult task because the Orientalist always believed that the Orient never changes. The new for him is simply the old betrayed by new, misunderstanding dis-orientals.

The third alternative, to dispense with Orientalism altogether, was considered by only a tiny minority.

Abdel Malek says that national liberation movements in the ex-colonial Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic ‘subject races’. Moreover specialists and the public became aware of the time-lag between Orientalist science and the material under study, and also between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of Orientalism.

H.A.R Gibb

Through the career of Gibb, Said illustrates two alternative approaches by which Orientalism has respond to the modern Orient.

In 1945, delivering a lecture in the University of Chicago, Gibb displayed his biases against Oriental Islam. The Orientalist has a fixed view of Islam, and he would not tolerate any attempts to reform Islam, as such an attempt would be seen as a betrayal of the religion.

Eighteen years later, speaking at Harvard, Gibb said that ‘the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists’. He suggested that interdisciplinary approaches must be introduced in the study of Orientalism. His lecture was titled ‘Area Studies Reconsidered’ and it was meant to prepare students for careers in ‘public life and business’. At the same time Gibb warned the Orientalists that ‘to apply the psychology and mechanics of Western political institutions to Asian or Arab situations is pure Walt Disney’.

Castigating this notion Said points out that ‘in practice this notion meant:

History, politics and economics do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and right wing, revolutions, and change back to Disneyland.

Modern Orientalists have benefitted from Gibb’s advice. Most of them today are indistinguishable from other ‘experts’ and ‘advisers’ in policy matters. They have been instrumental to the creation of military alliances such as SEATO, institutions for character analysis etc.

“As anticolonialism sweeps and unifies the entire Oriental world, the Orientalist damns the whole business not only as a nuisance but an insult to the Western democracies”. Popular caricatures of the Orient are exploited by politicians. Similar attitudes flood the media as well.

Arabs are thought of as camel riding, terroristic, hook nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.

Anwar Abdel Malek calls this ‘the hegemonism of possessing minorities’. Anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism make the white middle-class Westerner believe it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition the non-white is not as human as ‘we’ are.

The limitations of Orientalism

1. The limitation that follows upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical region

2. The view that Orient is something whose existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West.

3. Entire periods of the Orient’s cultural, political, and social history are considered mere response to the West. The West is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior.

4. If historic changes have taken place in the Orient, the Orientalist is stunned: he cannot realize that to some extent.

5. The Orientalist assumes that what his texts have not prepared him for is the result of either outside agitation in the Orient or of the Orient’s misguided inanity.

Conclusion

The present crisis in Orientalism dramatizes the disparity between texts and reality. The contemporary intellectual feels that to ignore a part of the world is to avoid reality. He can learn from Orientalism how to limit or enlarge the scope of his discipline’s claims. “To investigate Orientalism is also to propose intellectual ways for handling the methodological problems that history has brought forward in its subject matter, the Orient. But before that we must virtually see the humanistic values that Orientalism, by its scope, experiences, and structures, has all but eliminated”.