Orientalism

Orientalism

Form and Content
The best-known and most controversial study of its sort, Edward Said’s Orientalism is a scholarly and
polemic examination of how scholars and other writers in the West have long viewed the East. By
“Orientalism,” Said means three things. First, he uses the term as an academic designation for the activities of
anyone who teaches, writes about, or conducts research on the Orient or the East in whatever discipline. A

second meaning Said finds in the term is the related but more general notion of Orientalism “as a way of
thinking based upon a binary distinction between ‘the (allegedly inferior) Orient’ and ‘the (allegedly
superior) Occident,’” which has served writers of all sorts as a starting point for theories, social descriptions,
political accounts, and fictions about the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” and destiny. Said views
Orientalism, third, as a corporate institution since the eighteenth century for dealing with and dominating the
Orient. Despite the broad range of his definitions, however, Said’s own focus in Orientalism is specifically
and almost exclusively on the Arab Muslim Middle East, which he presumably (and gratuitously) considers a
representative case study illustrative of the situation throughout Asia.
Said develops his argument and analysis in three chapters, which examine chronological stages in the
phenomenon of Orientalism, defined chiefly through the works and views of representative Orientalist
scholars. Chapter 1, “The Scope of Orientalism,” reviews writing on the Muslim Near East before the
eighteenth century and the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Said argues that
in this period the East was a textual universe for the West, with Orientalists interested in classical periods and
not at all in contemporary, living Orientals. Chapter 2, “Oriental Structures and Restructures,” treats the
French and English traditions of the study of the Muslim Near East during the nineteenth century and up to
World War I. Said examines the career of the leading French Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy and such works as
Edward Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) in endeavoring to
demonstrate, among other things, how Orientalism has influenced and affected Western perceptions of the
Arab Middle East and eventually Arab Middle Eastern perceptions of themselves. Chapter 3, “Orientalism
Now,” characterizes Orientalism in the 1920’s and 1930’s, through a review of the careers of the leading
Islamicists of the day, the French scholar Louis Massignon and the English scholar Hamilton Gibb. Said notes
that the latter, who served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, lectured
on “the Arab mind” and the “aversion of the Muslim from the thought processes of rationalism” and referred
to Islam as “Mohammedanism.”
The concluding section of the final chapter of Orientalism is titled “The Latest Phase,” by which Said means
the period after World War II, when the center of activity for the phenomenon became the United States and
the American “area specialist,” trained in the social sciences, assumed the lead role from the earlier
philologists. Said examines how such Middle East area specialists participate in and perpetuate the dynamics
of Orientalism in their representation of Islam and Arabs in four categories. The first is “popular images and
social science representations”; here Said argues that treatments of Arabs and Islam are predictably and
routinely negative and derive from the transference of the popular anti-Semite animus from Jews to Arabs.
Said asserts the existence of academic support for popular negative caricatures of Arab and Islamic culture.
For example, the first president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America observed in 1967:
Orientalism 1
“The modern Middle East and North Africa is not a center of great cultural achievement . . . [and] . . . has
only in small degree the kinds of traits that seem to be important in attracting scholarly attention.” Said’s
second category is “public relations policy,” by which, in Said’s view, contemporary scholars perpetuate
such aspects of European traditions of Orientalist scholarship as the racist discourse and dogmas of Ernest
Renan in the 1840’s. His example is the work of Gustave von Grunebaum, a prominent German Orientalist
for whom the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles is named and
whom Said characterizes as exhibiting an “almost virulent dislike of Islam.” Four dogmas implicit in the
work of such scholars are the absolute difference between the (rational and superior) Occident and the
(aberrant and inferior) Orient, the preferability of abstractions about the Orient to direct evidence from the
contemporary Orient itself, the incapacity of the Orient to define itself, and the recognition that the Orient is to
be feared and controlled. A third category of contemporary Orientalist representation Said calls “Merely
Islam.” Here his focus is on the alleged inherent inability of the Muslim Near Orient to be as richly human as
the West. As evidence, Said cites the view of a prominent political scientist, whose argument that all human
thought processes can be reduced to eight includes the ancillary assertion that the Islamic mind is capable of
only four. Another piece of evidence is the presumption on the part of the already cited president of the
Middle East Studies Association that “since the Arabic language is much given to rhetoric Arabs are
consequently incapable of true thought.” The fourth characteristic of Orientalist representation of the Muslim
Near East is the attempt “to see the Orient as an imitation West” and encouragement to Easterners both to
judge themselves by Western criteria and to strive to achieve Western goals. Said laments the consequent fact
that “the modern Orient . . . participates in its own Orientalizing.”
Said’s concluding remarks briefly address the positive side to the problematic of reliable scholarship in the
field. He argues that the best work on the Arabs and the Near Orient is (likely to be) done by scholars “whose
allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a ‘field’ like Orientalism defined either
canonically, imperially, or geographically.” Said cites the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz as an
example. As for scholars with Orientalist training, he sees Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Anouar Abdel
Malek, and Roger Owen as freed from “the old ideological straitjacket.” Ultimately, however, Said views
Orientalism past and present as an almost unmitigated intellectual failure, as an enterprise which has “failed
to identify with human experience” and has “failed also to see it as human experience.”
Analysis
As a Palestinian educated at Princeton and Harvard universities, Edward Said was bound to confront
representations by Western scholars of his culture of birth. He read numerous patronizing characterizations of
“the Arab mind” and of Islam as a monolithic phenomenon. He read a leading European scholar’s reference
to Arabs as people who could not think straight. Von Grunebaum saw in Islamic civilization
“anti-humanism” and in Arab nationalism a lack of “a formative ethic.” Said read a report by an American
State Department expert, in a 1972 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, asserting that “objectivity is
not a value in the Arab system” and that “the art of subterfuge is highly developed in Arab life, as well as in
Islam itself.” What troubled Said was not that stereotypes were part of contemporary American popular
culture but that there seemed to be a tradition and institutionalization of them in scholarship. The special
history of the Palestinian people vis-a-vis the Zionist movement, the establishment of the state of Israel, and
the aftermaths of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 made Said’s concerns both intellectual and political
issues. That Said’s profession became university teaching at Columbia University and literary criticism
impelled him to respond to the issues through an investigation of scholarly writing on the subject and combine
the fruits of his own research with polemic purpose.
Said’s agenda in Orientalism is essentially political: He is asking that academics, policymakers, and other
American intellectuals recognize and redress long-standing and arguably systematic bias against the Arabs.
Orientalism derives largely from Said’s sense of injustices perpetrated on the Palestinian people, an
Form and Content 2
awareness so intense that the author has little time to find or discern positive dimensions or sides to
Orientalism or even individual Orientalists who do not fit his definition of the biased scholar. Consequently,
Orientalism has left few readers unmoved. Reactions have been predictable and varied according to the
predispositions of reviewers. For example, the Anglo-Arab Middle East historian Albert Hourani has found in
Orientalism a basically sound historical treatment, with its major flaw forgivable exaggeration for the sake of
argument. At the other extreme is a Jewish-American view expressed by Leon Wieseltier, who is outraged at
Said’s pro-Palestinian perspective and takes the latter to task for advocating a cause whose adherents use oil
and murder as weapons. The comparative literature specialist Victor Brombert has a more detached view and
consequently assesses the book’s strengths, weaknesses, and relevance beyond issues of Middle Eastern
studies and politics. He finds Said occasionally guilty of setting up discredited models to make and prove
points and of other polemical excesses. Brombert’s most serious concern with Orientalism is his sense that
Said exhibits in it a loss of faith in humanism—in other words, that Said seems not to believe that scholars and
other intellectuals can prize disinterested scholarship and love their disciplines more than their own success,
power, material comforts, and the society and institutions that support their work.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine even the most negative assessment of Orientalism gainsaying two
arguments that constitute almost the warp and weft of Said’s book. First is the groundlessness and
perniciousness of the idea of European identity as superior to non-European peoples and cultures. Second is
the constant need to question dominative modes of contemplating, discussing, and evaluating cultures other
than one’s own.
Critical Context
Although far and away Edward Said’s best-known book, Orientalism is only one in a lengthy list of literary
critical studies, studies of culture, historical analyses, and meditations and proposals on the subject of the
Arabs and of Western views of Arabs and Islam.
In Said’s stylistic analyses in Orientalism and his allusions throughout to a broad spectrum of literary works,
he displays the literary perspectives and erudition of such literary critical writings of his as Joseph Conrad
and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), an edited volume titled
Literature and Society (1980), and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983).
As for Said’s equally long-standing intellectual concerns with the political place and image of the Arabs of
the Near Orient in the late twentieth century, before Orientalism came a series of pamphlets with such titles as
The Arabs Today: Alternatives for Tomorrow (1973), Arabs and Jews: A Possibility of Concord (1974),
Lebanon: Two Perspectives (1975), and The Palestinians and American Policy (1976). Substantial studies
published after Orientalism include The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam: How the Media and
the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981), and Blaming the Victims: Spurious
Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988; edited with Christopher Hitchens).
In the context of scholarly and intellectual currents in general, Orientalism is a prominent example of
revisionist stances in various academic fields in which ethnocentric approaches, national character studies, the
definition of other through self, the presumption of the possibility of scholarly objectivity, and other
traditional assumptions and approaches to the investigation of foreign subject matter have been questioned
and forcefully challenged. Said’s historical survey is as strong as it could be in arguing that a near conspiracy
can be part of scholarship. His argument encouraging scholars to avoid accepting results of such research
unquestioningly is salutary. In addition, his concluding examination of post-World War II American study of
the Middle East constitutes both a provocative call for better teaching, research, and scholarship methods in
the academic establishment and a warning to scholars concerning the inappropriateness and moral impropriety
of their working in a field which does not engage their sympathies or evoke their admiration. Little serious
Analysis 3
scholarship in the field has taken place since Orientalism without a consideration of Said’s theses, criticisms,
and proposals. In short, Orientalism was a watershed event in academic circles. It was remarkable that a
scholarly study treating such an esoteric subject from such an unpopular perspective would become one of the
most widely reviewed books of its day.
For the general American reader, Said provided a dramatic and provocative plea for fairmindedness in dealing
with Arab culture. More generally, he clarified the need to transcend ethnocentric predispositions and biases
in judging non-Americans and their cultures in an ever-shrinking and increasingly interdependent world and
to give primary and serious attention to the self-views of others, however troubling and challenging to one’s
own cultural values.Orientalism
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Orientalism
Form and Content
The best-known and most controversial study of its sort, Edward Said’s Orientalism is a scholarly and
polemic examination of how scholars and other writers in the West have long viewed the East. By
“Orientalism,” Said means three things. First, he uses the term as an academic designation for the activities of
anyone who teaches, writes about, or conducts research on the Orient or the East in whatever discipline. A
second meaning Said finds in the term is the related but more general notion of Orientalism “as a way of
thinking based upon a binary distinction between ‘the (allegedly inferior) Orient’ and ‘the (allegedly
superior) Occident,’” which has served writers of all sorts as a starting point for theories, social descriptions,
political accounts, and fictions about the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” and destiny. Said views
Orientalism, third, as a corporate institution since the eighteenth century for dealing with and dominating the
Orient. Despite the broad range of his definitions, however, Said’s own focus in Orientalism is specifically
and almost exclusively on the Arab Muslim Middle East, which he presumably (and gratuitously) considers a
representative case study illustrative of the situation throughout Asia.
Said develops his argument and analysis in three chapters, which examine chronological stages in the
phenomenon of Orientalism, defined chiefly through the works and views of representative Orientalist
scholars. Chapter 1, “The Scope of Orientalism,” reviews writing on the Muslim Near East before the
eighteenth century and the significance of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Said argues that
in this period the East was a textual universe for the West, with Orientalists interested in classical periods and
not at all in contemporary, living Orientals. Chapter 2, “Oriental Structures and Restructures,” treats the
French and English traditions of the study of the Muslim Near East during the nineteenth century and up to
World War I. Said examines the career of the leading French Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy and such works as
Edward Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) in endeavoring to
demonstrate, among other things, how Orientalism has influenced and affected Western perceptions of the
Arab Middle East and eventually Arab Middle Eastern perceptions of themselves. Chapter 3, “Orientalism
Now,” characterizes Orientalism in the 1920’s and 1930’s, through a review of the careers of the leading
Islamicists of the day, the French scholar Louis Massignon and the English scholar Hamilton Gibb. Said notes
that the latter, who served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, lectured
on “the Arab mind” and the “aversion of the Muslim from the thought processes of rationalism” and referred
to Islam as “Mohammedanism.”
The concluding section of the final chapter of Orientalism is titled “The Latest Phase,” by which Said means
the period after World War II, when the center of activity for the phenomenon became the United States and
the American “area specialist,” trained in the social sciences, assumed the lead role from the earlier
philologists. Said examines how such Middle East area specialists participate in and perpetuate the dynamics
of Orientalism in their representation of Islam and Arabs in four categories. The first is “popular images and
social science representations”; here Said argues that treatments of Arabs and Islam are predictably and
routinely negative and derive from the transference of the popular anti-Semite animus from Jews to Arabs.
Said asserts the existence of academic support for popular negative caricatures of Arab and Islamic culture.
For example, the first president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America observed in 1967:
Orientalism 1
“The modern Middle East and North Africa is not a center of great cultural achievement . . . [and] . . . has
only in small degree the kinds of traits that seem to be important in attracting scholarly attention.” Said’s
second category is “public relations policy,” by which, in Said’s view, contemporary scholars perpetuate
such aspects of European traditions of Orientalist scholarship as the racist discourse and dogmas of Ernest
Renan in the 1840’s. His example is the work of Gustave von Grunebaum, a prominent German Orientalist
for whom the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles is named and
whom Said characterizes as exhibiting an “almost virulent dislike of Islam.” Four dogmas implicit in the
work of such scholars are the absolute difference between the (rational and superior) Occident and the
(aberrant and inferior) Orient, the preferability of abstractions about the Orient to direct evidence from the
contemporary Orient itself, the incapacity of the Orient to define itself, and the recognition that the Orient is to
be feared and controlled. A third category of contemporary Orientalist representation Said calls “Merely
Islam.” Here his focus is on the alleged inherent inability of the Muslim Near Orient to be as richly human as
the West. As evidence, Said cites the view of a prominent political scientist, whose argument that all human
thought processes can be reduced to eight includes the ancillary assertion that the Islamic mind is capable of
only four. Another piece of evidence is the presumption on the part of the already cited president of the
Middle East Studies Association that “since the Arabic language is much given to rhetoric Arabs are
consequently incapable of true thought.” The fourth characteristic of Orientalist representation of the Muslim
Near East is the attempt “to see the Orient as an imitation West” and encouragement to Easterners both to
judge themselves by Western criteria and to strive to achieve Western goals. Said laments the consequent fact
that “the modern Orient . . . participates in its own Orientalizing.”
Said’s concluding remarks briefly address the positive side to the problematic of reliable scholarship in the
field. He argues that the best work on the Arabs and the Near Orient is (likely to be) done by scholars “whose
allegiance is to a discipline defined intellectually and not to a ‘field’ like Orientalism defined either
canonically, imperially, or geographically.” Said cites the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz as an
example. As for scholars with Orientalist training, he sees Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Anouar Abdel
Malek, and Roger Owen as freed from “the old ideological straitjacket.” Ultimately, however, Said views
Orientalism past and present as an almost unmitigated intellectual failure, as an enterprise which has “failed
to identify with human experience” and has “failed also to see it as human experience.”
Analysis
As a Palestinian educated at Princeton and Harvard universities, Edward Said was bound to confront
representations by Western scholars of his culture of birth. He read numerous patronizing characterizations of
“the Arab mind” and of Islam as a monolithic phenomenon. He read a leading European scholar’s reference
to Arabs as people who could not think straight. Von Grunebaum saw in Islamic civilization
“anti-humanism” and in Arab nationalism a lack of “a formative ethic.” Said read a report by an American
State Department expert, in a 1972 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, asserting that “objectivity is
not a value in the Arab system” and that “the art of subterfuge is highly developed in Arab life, as well as in
Islam itself.” What troubled Said was not that stereotypes were part of contemporary American popular
culture but that there seemed to be a tradition and institutionalization of them in scholarship. The special
history of the Palestinian people vis-a-vis the Zionist movement, the establishment of the state of Israel, and
the aftermaths of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 made Said’s concerns both intellectual and political
issues. That Said’s profession became university teaching at Columbia University and literary criticism
impelled him to respond to the issues through an investigation of scholarly writing on the subject and combine
the fruits of his own research with polemic purpose.
Said’s agenda in Orientalism is essentially political: He is asking that academics, policymakers, and other
American intellectuals recognize and redress long-standing and arguably systematic bias against the Arabs.
Orientalism derives largely from Said’s sense of injustices perpetrated on the Palestinian people, an
Form and Content 2
awareness so intense that the author has little time to find or discern positive dimensions or sides to
Orientalism or even individual Orientalists who do not fit his definition of the biased scholar. Consequently,
Orientalism has left few readers unmoved. Reactions have been predictable and varied according to the
predispositions of reviewers. For example, the Anglo-Arab Middle East historian Albert Hourani has found in
Orientalism a basically sound historical treatment, with its major flaw forgivable exaggeration for the sake of
argument. At the other extreme is a Jewish-American view expressed by Leon Wieseltier, who is outraged at
Said’s pro-Palestinian perspective and takes the latter to task for advocating a cause whose adherents use oil
and murder as weapons. The comparative literature specialist Victor Brombert has a more detached view and
consequently assesses the book’s strengths, weaknesses, and relevance beyond issues of Middle Eastern
studies and politics. He finds Said occasionally guilty of setting up discredited models to make and prove
points and of other polemical excesses. Brombert’s most serious concern with Orientalism is his sense that
Said exhibits in it a loss of faith in humanism—in other words, that Said seems not to believe that scholars and
other intellectuals can prize disinterested scholarship and love their disciplines more than their own success,
power, material comforts, and the society and institutions that support their work.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine even the most negative assessment of Orientalism gainsaying two
arguments that constitute almost the warp and weft of Said’s book. First is the groundlessness and
perniciousness of the idea of European identity as superior to non-European peoples and cultures. Second is
the constant need to question dominative modes of contemplating, discussing, and evaluating cultures other
than one’s own.
Critical Context
Although far and away Edward Said’s best-known book, Orientalism is only one in a lengthy list of literary
critical studies, studies of culture, historical analyses, and meditations and proposals on the subject of the
Arabs and of Western views of Arabs and Islam.
In Said’s stylistic analyses in Orientalism and his allusions throughout to a broad spectrum of literary works,
he displays the literary perspectives and erudition of such literary critical writings of his as Joseph Conrad
and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), an edited volume titled
Literature and Society (1980), and The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983).
As for Said’s equally long-standing intellectual concerns with the political place and image of the Arabs of
the Near Orient in the late twentieth century, before Orientalism came a series of pamphlets with such titles as
The Arabs Today: Alternatives for Tomorrow (1973), Arabs and Jews: A Possibility of Concord (1974),
Lebanon: Two Perspectives (1975), and The Palestinians and American Policy (1976). Substantial studies
published after Orientalism include The Question of Palestine (1979), Covering Islam: How the Media and
the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981), and Blaming the Victims: Spurious
Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1988; edited with Christopher Hitchens).
In the context of scholarly and intellectual currents in general, Orientalism is a prominent example of
revisionist stances in various academic fields in which ethnocentric approaches, national character studies, the
definition of other through self, the presumption of the possibility of scholarly objectivity, and other
traditional assumptions and approaches to the investigation of foreign subject matter have been questioned
and forcefully challenged. Said’s historical survey is as strong as it could be in arguing that a near conspiracy
can be part of scholarship. His argument encouraging scholars to avoid accepting results of such research
unquestioningly is salutary. In addition, his concluding examination of post-World War II American study of
the Middle East constitutes both a provocative call for better teaching, research, and scholarship methods in
the academic establishment and a warning to scholars concerning the inappropriateness and moral impropriety
of their working in a field which does not engage their sympathies or evoke their admiration. Little serious
Analysis 3
scholarship in the field has taken place since Orientalism without a consideration of Said’s theses, criticisms,
and proposals. In short, Orientalism was a watershed event in academic circles. It was remarkable that a
scholarly study treating such an esoteric subject from such an unpopular perspective would become one of the
most widely reviewed books of its day.
For the general American reader, Said provided a dramatic and provocative plea for fairmindedness in dealing
with Arab culture. More generally, he clarified the need to transcend ethnocentric predispositions and biases
in judging non-Americans and their cultures in an ever-shrinking and increasingly interdependent world and
to give primary and serious attention to the self-views of others, however troubling and challenging to one’s
own cultural values.