PDF Summary:Orientalism, by Edward Said

Orientalism is a study of the scholarly, intellectual, political, and ideological phenomenon known as Orientalism: the framework through which Western writers, policymakers, and the general public have interpreted and defined the Islamic societies of the Middle East as “the Orient.” Orientalism does not reflect objective truth about these societies or the people who live in them. Instead, it is an invention of the Western mind that posits a fundamentally different, exotic, dangerous, unchanging, and “other” East—an idea that was a major intellectual cornerstone of European imperialism and that continues to have profound implications on today’s geopolitical landscape.

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This is because Orientalism functioned as a method of interpretation—the only means by which the mysteries of the East could be understood by the Western reader. Thus, anyone engaged in any work even remotely connected to the area we now know as the Middle East could not help but be influenced by Orientalism’s major works.

The Triumph of Philology

One way that Orientalism positioned itself as the guardian of knowledge about the East was through its dominance of highly esoteric fields like philology. Philology is the study of language, primarily using written, ancient textual sources. By studying ancient literary texts and historical documents, philologists hope to gain greater understanding of the historical development of languages over time.

For the philologists, language was the key to understanding Eastern culture, history, and the “Oriental mind.” By studying the origin and evolution of ancient languages, philologists believed that they could glean great insights into the temperament and essential “racial” characteristics of contemporary Asians.

For instance, Orientalist philologists like the Frenchman Ernest Renan (1823-1892) saw the supposedly ossified and static Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic) as responsible for the languid and desultory development of the Orient.

The philologists’ passion for decoding and organizing the ancient languages of the East speaks to another pillar of Orientalism. Orientalists of this era saw it as their mission to order and make sense of the chaotic and unruly fragments of Oriental history, language, and culture. They believed that the mysteries of the Orient could only be understood through their mediation. They saw themselves bringing to light and unearthing lost knowledge (and thus, the power to define and proscribe the Orient in the mind of the West).

Orientalism and Power

Orientalism was more than just scholarship. Ideas influence actions, and Europe was highly active in the Orient throughout the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century. In this section we’ll examine:

• How Orientalism both reflected and reinforced a fundamental power relationship between the West and the East
• How imperialist nations like Great Britain and France marshaled the academic knowledge of the Orientalists in the service of empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
• How the notion of the “white man’s burden” followed from these attitudes

The Power Imbalance

Orientalism both reflected and reinforced a fundamental power relationship between Europe and the Orient. Indeed, the very existence of a field like Orientalism, in which one could claim to be an expert in the history, languages, culture, social system, and religion of a vast and diverse region on the basis of having studied ancient texts and artifacts, demonstrated the inequality of the relationship between the Orient and the West. All things about “the Orient” could be reduced and ultimately mastered as a field of study.

The Necessity of Empire

Orientalism revealed itself to be a potent force in world politics by the late 19th century. By this time, the British and French governments had come to view the cultivation of experts in Oriental studies as necessary for the survival and expansion of their Middle Eastern empires. This was because, as we’ve seen, Western policymakers viewed the Orient as essential and unchanging. Thus, experts in ancient languages, monuments, and religions could provide valuable insight into the eternal “Oriental mind” that would be of great use in dominating the contemporary peoples of the Orient.

The mobilization of academic knowledge in service of imperialism became a hallmark of Orientalism during this period. Orientalist tropes about Western superiority and Eastern passivity played a major role in justifying and legitimating the imperialist project. Orientalist scholarship was not merely confined to the ivory tower of academia. As we’ve seen, it influenced the actions of key historical figures like Napoleon, who very much saw themselves as modern-day exemplars of an ancient tradition of Western dominance.

The political results of these Orientalism-inspired actions were profound, with Europe coming to fulfill its imagined role as the rightful ruler of the Eastern world. Indeed, by the end of World War One (1914-1918), European powers had conquered a staggering 85 percent of the world’s landmass, including large swathes of the Orientalist heartland of the Middle East.

This was a great triumph of Orientalism. Orientalists were no longer just analyzing history; now, they were actively making it.

The White Man’s Burden

The work of Western writers and commentators of this era, like the French Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), is suffused with a fear and apprehension regarding the Orient, its strangeness (to Europeans), and its potential for violent action if not held in check.

If they were not subjugated, the unwashed, teeming masses of the Orient could one day overwhelm the West. Accordingly, to preserve and defend their own culture, Western powers had a positive duty to extract what they could from the Orient, while keeping its people in a perpetual state of political disorganization.

One of the most famous promoters of the view that it was Europe’s destiny and duty to dominate Asia and Africa was the British journalist and author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). In his 1899 poem, “The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands," Kipling celebrated the imperial project and exhorted white Europeans to fulfill their mission to civilize and subjugate the non-white peoples of Asia and Africa.

The “white man’s burden” was adopted in broader European and American culture, with governments, private enterprises, and individuals accepting the notion that white people had a moral obligation to dominate the world.

As bringers of capitalism, technology, and civilization, imperialist whites expected to be shown a high degree of deference and obedience by the Asian and African peoples they came to dominate. Of course, categorical identities like “white men” and “Orientals” were only possible through Orientalism’s successful division of complex reality into simple generalities of race, language, and culture.

Orientalism in the Modern Age

Orientalism had to react to historical developments in the 20th and 21st centuries, when the peoples and nations of the Orient began resisting European imperialism, forging their own political identity, and competing with the West on more equal terms. To understand these developments, it’s crucial to examine:

• How Orientalist scholars opposed political developments like Arab nationalism
• How the United States emerged as the preeminent Western power after World War Two and made its own contributions to Orientalism
• How Western popular images of the Orient in the 20th century built upon centuries-old Orientalist tropes

Maintaining the East-West Divide

The Orientalists strove to maintain the barrier between East and West in the postwar years. For scholars like H.A.R. Gibb (1895-1971), keeping this wall of separation intact was paramount. The West had defined itself since ancient times in opposition to the East. If these lines were to become blurred, the West might find itself without an identity of its own.

The growth of national independence movements and organizations like the League of Nationalist Action in Lebanon and the Arab Independence Party in Mandatory Palestine (which was administered by the British) threatened to knock down the barriers between East and West and possibly even put the East on equal footing with the West. These developments raised the alarming prospect of the Arab world throwing off the shackles of Western political and economic domination and asserting its own right to self-determination. This represented a grave affront to the West’s self-conception, as it envisaged itself as the natural ruler and guardian of the Orient. If the Orient could successfully push back against the West, what else might they be able to do?

Thus, despite the changes taking place within other academic disciplines during this era, Orientalism remained insular and backward-looking in its outlook and core assumptions. It continued to root the region’s complex contemporary conflicts and political problems in ancient, Biblical sources—such as explaining the emerging Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of the Old Testament story of Isaac and Ishmael. 20th-century Orientalists saw these conflicts as manifestations of an “eternal” struggle between East and West.

Thus, as late as 1963, a figure like Gibb could still be found asserting that the politics of the Arab world could not possibly be motivated by modern political ideologies like communism, nationalism, or anti-colonialism. Those were products of the Western tradition; the “Oriental” was forever constrained by his status as an “Oriental.” Any deviation from this preordained role was a betrayal or perversion of his essential character.

Figures like Gibb saw these complex movements toward self-determination as unorganized outbursts of enthusiasm. The Arabs may have been capable of political agitation, but it would typically be short-lived and, ultimately, self-destructive. The Arab temperament was incapable of conceiving, let alone acting upon, a collective political program for the benefit of their nation or society as a whole. Their innate parochialism and loyalty to tribe or clan would inevitably trump the formation of larger political identities or coherent ideologies. These were Western political achievements of which “the Arab” was incapable.

The United States: New Colonial Power

In the postwar world, the United States would emerge as the preeminent Western power, particularly as the Cold War (1945-1991) began to take shape. This was the beginning of America’s active role in Middle Eastern politics, which it maintains to this day.

The United States also took a leading role in driving Orientalism, which would be inextricably linked to Cold War geopolitics. Think tanks and university cultural relations programs in Islamic or Middle Eastern studies were routinely funded by the United States Department of Defense, the Ford Foundation, and the RAND Corporation, as well as major banks, oil companies, and other pillars of the US national security and business establishment. Under American influence, the Orient remained an object to be shaped, manipulated, dominated, and defined by Western interests.

Neo-Orientalism

In the latter decades of the 20th century, Orientalism was recast as “area studies,” but the same assumptions and power dynamics remained.

Well into the 1960s and 1970s, area studies specialists were publishing papers analyzing the failure of the “Semitic” people to produce great cultural achievements on par with those of the West. This was little more than neo-Orientalism, with crude and reductive analyses of Arabs and Muslims still finding a welcome audience in prestigious academic journals.

The “Clash of Civilizations”

Another manifestation of modern, post-World War Two Orientalism is the “clash of civilizations” theory, supported by scholars like the American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008). This theory posits that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable division between the progressive, liberal, secular West and the traditionalist, reactionary, and orthodox Islamic world. Huntington argued in 1993 that these two religious and cultural traditions formed distinct blocs organized around irreconcilable values and worldviews.

The “clash of civilizations” theory held that cultural conflict between the West and Islam would form the main theatre of geopolitical conflict in the years following the Cold War. This view gained many adherents in the West, as it seemed especially prescient following the attacks of September 11 and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the notion of the “clash of civilizations” is rooted in old, false Orientalist assumptions. Cultures, in fact, influence and shape one another and do not have neat distinctions like “the Muslim world” or “Western civilization.” These are ideological constructions and invented identities.

Arabs in Pop Culture

We also see the lingering effects of Orientalism in the way Arabs are portrayed in Western popular culture.

Arab and/or Muslim film characters have frequently been shown wearing stereotypical robes and headgear. In political cartoons in American and European newspapers, Arabs have been represented using racist caricatures featuring hooked noses, mustaches, and leering expressions. Disturbingly, these portrayals echo the depictions of Jews in the antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich—perhaps unsurprising, given the Orientalist tradition of lumping Jews and Arabs together as “Semites.”

Conclusion

Our discussion of the ideological pitfalls—and real-world consequences—of Orientalism shows that the role of the scholar should be to question and scrutinize politically motivated myths like the notion of a separate, eternal, and unchanging Orient—not to manufacture and perpetuate them.

Likewise, we must always remember that knowledge is not inherently neutral or objective: As our study of Orientalism teaches, knowledge can always be manipulated to serve the interests of the powerful against the powerless.