Orientalism

It will be clear to the reader […] that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted definition for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist and what he or she does is Orientalism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism […But] Orientalism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental.

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways, my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the Islamic Orient has got to be the center of attention.

The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant. Aeschylus represents Asia, makes her speak in the person of the aged Persian queen, Xerxes’ mother. It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries. There is an analogy between Aeschylus’s orchestra, which contains the Asiatic world as the playwright conceives it, and the learned envelope of Orientalist scholarship, which also will hold in the vast, amorphous Asiatic sprawl for sometimes sympathetic but always dominating scrutiny. Secondly, there is the motif of the Orient as insinuating danger.

Our initial descriptions of Orientalism as a learned field now acquires a new concreteness. A field is often an enclosed space. The idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. An Orientalist is but the particular specialist in knowledge for which Europea at large is responsible, in the way that an audience is historically and culturally responsible for (and responsive to) the dramas technically put together by the dramatist.

As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient, Orientalism thus comes to exert a three-way force, on the Orient, on the Orientalist, and on the Western “consumer” of Orientalism. It would be wrong, I think, to underestimate the strength of the three-way relationship thus established. For the Orient (“out there” towards the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, “our” world; the Orient is thus Orientalized, a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codifications […] as the true Orient. Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgement, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe even its existence to the Orientalist.

In the Suez Canal idea we see the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and, more interesting, Orientalist effort. To the West, Asia had once represented silent distance and alienation; Islam was militant hostility to European Christianity. To overcome such redoubtable constants the Orient needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed, then re-created by scholars, soldiers, and judges who disinterred forgotten languages, histories, races, and cultures in order to posit them—beyond the modern Orientalist’s ken—as the true classical Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient. The obscurity faded to be replaced by hothouse entities; the Orient was a scholar’s word, signifying what modern Europe had recently made of the still peculiar East. De Lesseps and his canal finally destroyed the Orient’s distance, its cloistered intimacy away from the West, its perdurable exoticism.

As anticolonialism sweeps and indeed unifies the entire Oriental world, the Orientalist damns the whole business not only as a nuisance but as an insult to the Western democracies. As momentous, generally important issues face the world—issues involving nuclear destruction, catastrophically scarce resources, unprecedented human demands for equality, justice, and economic parity—popular caricatures of the Orient are exploited by politicians whose source of ideological supply is not only the half-literate technocrat but the superliterate Orientalist. The legendary Arabists in the State Department warn of Arab plans to take over the world. The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians, and passive Muslims are described as vulture for “our” largesse and are damned when “we lose them” to communism or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant.

The importance of Tableau historique for an understanding of Orientalism’s inaugural phase is that it exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge and its features, as it also describes the Orientalist’s relationship to his subject matter. In Sacy’s pages on Orientalism—as elsewhere in his writing—he speaks of his own work as having uncovered, brought to light, rescued a vast among of obscure matter. Why? In order to place it before the student. For like all his learned contemporaries, Sacy considered a learned work a positive addition to an edifice that all scholars erected together. Knowledge as essentially the making visible of material, and the aim of a tableau was the construction of a sort of Benthamite Panopticon. Scholarly discipline was therefore a specific technology of power: it gained for its user (and his students) tools of knowledge which (if he was a historian) had hitherto been lost.

What is given on the page and in the museum case is a truncated exaggeration, like many of Sacy’s Oriental extracts, whose purpose is to exhibit a relationship between the science (or scientist) and the object, not one between the object and nature. Read almost any page of Renan on Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, or proto-Semitic and you read a fact of power, by which the Orientalist philologist’s authority summons out of the library at will examples of man’s speech, and ranges them there surrounded by a suave European prose that points out defects, virtues, barbarisms, and shortcomings in the language, the people, and the civilization. The tone and the tense of the exhibition are cast almost uniformly in the contemporary present, so that one is given an impression of a pedagogical demonstration during which the scholar-scientist stands before us on a lecture-laboratory platform, creating, confining, and judging the material he discusses.

Unlike [others], Lane was able to submerge himself amongst the natives, to live as they did, to conform to their habits […]. Lest that imply Lane’s having lost his objectivity, he goes on to say that he conformed only to the words […] of the Koran, and that he was always aware of his difference from an essentially alien culture. Thus while one portion of Lane’s identity floats easily in an unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it.

The Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true. What he says about the Orient is therefore to be understood as a description obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down. […] And what he wrote was intended as useful knowledge, not for them, but for Europe and its various disseminative institutions.

It was assumed that if languages were as distinct from each other as the linguists said they were, then too the language users—their minds, cultures, potentials, and even their bodies—were different in similar ways. And these distinctions had the force of ontological, empirical truth behind them […]

The point to be emphasized is that this truth about the distinctive differences between races, civilizations, and languages was (or pretended to be) radical and ineradicable. It went to the bottom of things […] it set the real boundaries between human beings, on which races, nations, and civilizations were constructed; it forced vision away from the common, as well as plural, human realities like joy, suffering, political organization, forcing attention instead in the downward and backward direction of immutable origins.

Our of such a coercive framework, by which a modern “colored” man is chained irrevocably to the general truths formulated about his prototypical linguistic, anthropological, and doctrinal forbears by a white European scholar, the work of the great twentieth-century Oriental experts in England and France derived. To this framework these experts also brought their private mythology and obsessions. […] Each […] believed his vision of things Oriental was individual, self-created out of some intensely personal encounter with the Orient, Islam, or the Arabs; each expressed general contempt for official knowledge held about the East. […] Yet in the final analysis they all […] expressed the traditional Western hostility to and fear of the Orient.

Because we have become accustomed to think of a contemporary expert on some branch of the Orient […] as a specialist in “area studies,” we have lost a vivid sense of how, until around World War II, the Orientalist was considered to be a generalist […] who had highly developed skills for making summational statements. By summational statements I mean that in formulating a relatively uncomplicated idea, say, about Arabic grammar or Indian religion, the Orientalist would be understood […] to be making a statement about the Orient as a whole, thereby summing it up. Thus every discrete study of one bit of Oriental material would also confirm in a summary way the profound Orientality of the material. And since it was commonly believed that the Orient hung together in some profoundly organic way, it made good hermeneutical sense for the Orientalist scholar to regard the material evidence he dealt with as ultimately leading to a better understanding of such things and the Oriental character, mind, ethos, or world-spirit.

[The] real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambiance of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso [thereby] implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth,” which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representation (or misrepresentations—the distinction is at best a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse.

Von Grunebaum’s Islam, after all, is the Islam of the earlier European Orientalists—monolithic, scornful of ordinary human experience, gross, reductive, unchanging.

At bottom such a view of Islam is political, not even euphemistically impartial. The strength of its hold on the new Orientalist (younger, that is, than Von Grunebaum) is due in part to its traditional authority and in part to its use-value as a handle for grasping a vast region of the world and proclaiming it an entirely coherent phenomenon. Since Islam has never easily been encompassed by the West politically—and certainly since World War II Arab nationalism has been a movement openly declaring its hostility to Western imperialism—the desire to assert intellectually satisfying things about Islam in retaliation increases.

[Bernard Lewis] will, for example, recite the Arab case against Zionism […] without mentioning—anywhere, in any of his writings—that there was such a thing as a Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine despite and in conflict with the native Arab inhabitants. No Israeli would deny this, but Lewis the Orientalist historian simply leaves it out. […]

One would find this kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda—which is what, of course, it is—were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists like Lewis writing about Muslims and Arabs are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness.