Orientalism by
Edward W Said; Routledge and Kegan Paul (London),
1978, xi+ 368pp, index, £8.95 and £3.95
In classifying and castigating Western attitudes towards ‘the Orient’ over many centuries, this book takes aim at a large number of targets, as a glance through the excellent index will show. Its main thrust, however, is delivered by the analysis of Orientalists' preconceptions, methods, and conclusions in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, the period during which, as the author sees it, their work was both deeply coloured by the increasing Anglo-French mastery over the Middle-East (and by extensions of European imperial control further afield in Asia) and, more significantly, went a long way towards ‘enabling’ – inspiring, rationalizing, justifying – that mastery. Scholarly Orientalism, as well as the romantic-literary varieties which the book considers, was admirably adapted to this political role because behind it there stretched out a very long, and quite unquestioned, tradition asserting that Oriental societies were in essence both different and inferior - barbarous and at times vaguely menacing, irrational, cruel, licentious, and thus in urgent need of European rationality, discipline, and government. Orientalism in its widest sense is thus to be soon as an aspect of cultural hegemony, and this book is about intellectual power: to borrow two more of the author’s formulas, it deals with the ‘technology of power’ and how this became ‘actual scholarly rule’. The central theme is made explicit in many re-statements; here is one of the starkest, and (save for the odd use of ‘elided’ which may serve to characterize the occasional opacities besetting the writer's style) one of the clearest:
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. (p 204)
The final section examines the significance of this background to the Middle East situation today, when the USA has taken over the Angle-French role of embodying Western power in and for the Orient. So far as the shaping assumptions and derived attitudes of scholarly and sub-scholarly discourse are concerned, the author finds that the old received text, gaudily re-illustrated but essentially unemended, still enjoys the widest currency, though its soundness has recently begun to be questioned by a few critics.
Orientalism is a scathing book, sometimes a bitter one. Professor Said, who occupies a chair of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia and has published two formidably methodical books in those fields, is a Palestinian, and plainly feels very deeply about the arrogant injustice perpetrated in his country by British imperial interests, British power, and British illiberal remissness, backed up and prolonged by European and American ignorance and prejudice. He sees in this an extreme but not untypical instance of how Orientalism, in both its scholarly and wider guises, has worked to dehumanize the objects of its scrutiny. ‘To look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an Oriental’s human or even social reality … is to look in vain’ (p. 176) – the specific reference is to Lane and Chateaubriand, but the sweep of the arraignment extends from Aeschylus to Kissinger. His charges are backed up by an anthology of examples highlighting what he sees as Orientalism’s governing preoccupations, extracted from an extremely heterogeneous assortment of European and American witnesses.
Said has elsewhere discussed the literary problem of where and how to begin:[1] he starts here with a Commons speech by Balfour in June 1910, made in the course of an Egyptian debate inflamed by argument about the assassination of Butros Ghali, the prime minister, in Cairo six months before, and by Theodore Roosevelt’s more recent ‘govern or get out’ speech in London. Some might consider it was loading the dice to base one’s exordium on such a classic statement of what used to be called ‘Egyptophobia’: seeing that Balfour was enunciating, from a considerable intellectual altitude, the accepted platitudes of scholarship – filtered-through-expertise,[2] it seems to me wholly justified. We are at once confronted with that strange penumbra of secondary meanings and insinuations that clustered around the word 1 oriental' (especially when used as a noun) during the nineteenth century and perhaps earlier.[3]
Anyone who has done much reading in the older literature about British India or the Near East could compile a private thesaurus to illustrate the point.[4] What makes Balfour’s remarks such an admirable introduction is his explicit claim that ‘we’ (presumably educated Britons) know the history of Oriental nations very thoroughly and that in the classified facts of that history lies the justification for ‘our’ rule over them. Here at once is the paradigm of intellectual power. ‘An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists’ (p 104).
If the argument of the whole book is to cohere, however, the author needs to convince the reader that Balfour’s words, admirably expressing the received wisdom behind a British imperial confidence that was by now being edged onto the defensive,[5] are in their ruling arrogance also an epitome of Orientalist convictions and aspirations over a much longer period; and that information about the Orient had always been filtered through a grid of prejudice and misconception that directed it towards the Orient’s need of control and domination by the West. Do the examples in the book, or a sufficient number of them, really establish this satisfactorily? The question can only be answered, I think, by closely scrutinizing a sample of them, and the uses to which they are put by the author. Before that, however, I should like to say something about the historical framework of Orientalism; and this involves looking at two or three of Said’s favourite techniques: all of which, taken together, leaves me with considerable reservations about his book’s ability to convince.
Orientalism allows or induces the reader to form in his mind the picture of an age-old relationship between ‘East and West’ wherein the latter has nearly always, and certainly characteristically, been the aggressive, self-confident party, and usually the stronger, controlling one. In fact, of course, this Western control was only exercised for a comparatively short period; as regards the Middle East, with its long succession of empires, a very short period indeed. Said several times admits that the East, in the shape of Islam, menaced the frontiers of Christendom (and, one might add, permanently or temporarily occupied and culturally transformed extensive regions that were of deep concern to many Christians) over a far longer period.[6] But somehow this admission is not allowed to affect the proportions of the overall picture, and this technique of quietly making a large qualification and then leaving it to lie on the table is the first to which I would call attention. (Instances of its use may be found on p 67, where severe strictures about Orientalism’s ‘moral and epistemological rigour’ in imposing ‘learned grids and codes’ on the Orient are followed by the concession that ‘all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge’; on p 224, where we are told that ‘human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultures’; and in several other places.) The Ottoman Empire is kept well out of the limelight. The reader is nowhere encouraged to consider how its proximity and aggressive power, and the later problems of its degeneration, may have affected European attitudes (by no means always in a derogatory sense) towards the ‘Orient’ over a span of five centuries. This is surprising, since for most of that long period the Empire really was Islam for Europe, and this easy identification greatly influenced thought and emotion at every level from scholarship to popular mythology.[7]
Said’s historical frame, then, seems oddly designed, and the picture within it contains some curious details. The statement (p 17) that ‘Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on’ may be a slip for ‘eighteenth’: but can he suppose there was in the 1880s ‘an unbroken patch (sic) of British-held territory from the Mediterranean to India’ (p 169)? In what sense did Austria-Hungary move into the Orient (p 191)? What is the justification for saying, of a time when France held Tunis, Al geria, and Morocco, that ‘so far as the actual space of the Orient was concerned, however, England was really there, France was not’ (p 211: and the same tendency to equate ‘the Orient’ with Egypt on the following page)? Oddest of all, perhaps, is the obiter dictum, referring to the present, that ‘anticolonialism sweeps and indeed unifies the entire Oriental world’ (p 108, italics mine).[8]
The second device calling for comment is one which, on the analogy of Tolstoy’s artifice of ‘making itstrange’, I am tempted to call ‘making it sinister’. By this, scholarly procedures which one might have supposed to be innocuous or ethically neutral, and certainly not restricted to Orientalists, are made to seem somehow maleficent, actually or potentially manipulative and repressive. Perhaps the best example of this is the treatment given to Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque orientale published in 1697, which is said to demonstrate ‘a triumphant technique for taking the immense fecundity of the Orient and making it systematically, even alphabetically, knowable by Western laymen’ (p 65).
The placing (italics his) of Muhammad within this ‘rational Oriental panorama’ becomes a characteristic manifestation of that intellectual power which the book is all about; ‘the dangers of free-wheeling heresy[9] are removed when it is transformed into ideologically explicit matter for an alphabetical item.’ D’Herbelot ‘imposes a disciplinary order upon the material he has worked on; in addition, he wants it made clear to the reader that what the printed page delivers is an ordered, disciplined judgement of the material’ (p 66). Surely these are essential procedures in any scholarly enterprise? The reader may reflect that the genre of encyclopaedic compilation was not exactly unknown in Islamic societies, and wonder why d’Herbelot should be a more portentous figure than his Ottoman near-contemporary Haci Halife.
There are many other instances of the employment of this device; and critical terms of art, such as text, discourse, archive, above all represent, seem to be endowed with a potency that will puzzle many readers. An explanation is partly to be found in the author’s conviction that European thinking about the Orient early became stylized and codified into a sort of Newspeak, in which it was impossible to express any notions that went against the sanctified and repressive dogmas of the Orientalists. Is this true, to anything like the degree alleged? Can we really accept Said’s picture of a discipline wherein all the usual impulses of young scholars to show their independence, to make a name for themselves by bold originality, have been successfully drugged? (To be fair, it should be stressed again that he does allow that a handful of contemporary scholars, by largely abandoning the old categories of ‘Oriental’, ‘Islamic’, etc have shown the way out of the closed system he depicts, and in paying tribute to them he fully acknowledges his debt to their work.)[10]
The third device is perhaps so closely related to the second that they merge into one. This is the implicit identification of a scholar’s control
over the components of his discourse with control over the real ‘existential’ entities that the discourse is about. Weighted phraseology, such as ‘imperial power over recalcitrant phenomena’ (p 145), may help condition the reader’s mind for the semantic slide. I can best illustrate by reproducing in their entirety four consecutive sentences about Burton, a traveller-scholar whose writing, by ‘radiating a sense of assertion and domination over all the complexities of Oriental life’, feeds into the voice of European ambition for rule over the Orient.’
The double-pronged intention of Burton’ s work is at the same time to use his Oriental residence for scientific observation and not easily to sacrifice his individuality to that end. The second of these two intentions leads him inevitably to submit to the first because, as will appear increasingly obvious, he is a European for whom such knowledge of Oriental society as he has is possible only for a European, with a European’s self-awareness of society as a collection of rules and practices. In other words, to be a European in the Orient, and to be one knowledgeably, one must see and know the Orient as a domain ruled over by Europe. Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient, and this domination effectively overrules even the eccentricities of Burton’s personal style. (p 197)
As Mrs Wilcox said to Margaret Schlegel, ‘these are indeed “other words”. I must confess myself completely unable to follow the sequence of thought here. The same equation, which is tacitly or explicitly made many times, is updated, to suit the contemporary American-dominated phase of Orientalism, and with particular reference to Israel, on p 307:
For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality[11] of the myths that Orientalism propagates. This system now culminates in the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force.
This is perhaps the point at which to emphasize, what my quotations have probably made clear, that Orientalism draws quite heavily on the language and concepts of linguistics and the arcaner reaches of contemporary literary criticism.[12] A lay reviewer can only run the risk of offering his excuses if certain methodological subtleties that are plain sailing for the initiated have eluded his protracted attempts at comprehension.
Since so much of the indictment is sustained by textual reference and citation, any adequate evaluation of Said’s book must look at the use he has made of his writers. In the cases I have followed up it seems to me that a few, notably Chateaubriand and Renan, illustrate very adequately his thesis of a ‘specially legitimated antipathy’ felt by Orientalists towards the Orient.[13] But some of the evidence for the millennial Europe-Orient polarity seems to me so bizarre as to demand brief discussion.
‘The demarcation between Orient and West’, we are told on p 56, ‘already seems bold by the time of the Iliad’, and Homer is elsewhere associated with ‘writers on the Orient.’ But surely not even the most casual reader of the Iliad can fail to be struck by the virtual identity, certainly in any morally evaluative terms, of the two warring societies? To quote M I Finley: (the Trojans) ‘are quite without distinguishing characteristics. They are as Greek and as heroic as their opponents in every respect’ (The World of Odysseus, Penguin ed, p 50). The point would hardly be worth making were the author not a Professor of Comparative Literature; but it does seem a pity to have missed the chance of showing that the earliest monument of European literature is strikingly untainted by that millennial manipulative ideology he is writing about.
Next, Dante – and, inevitably, the figures of Muhammad and Ali in Bolgia IX of the Inferno, as well as Avicenna, Averroes, and Saladin in Limbo. Said is convinced that in both instances Dante is making statements about Islam, reiterating, all Orientalist-like, the already consecrated libels and idées reçues. Like d’Herbelot some three and a half centuries later, the poet is trying 1 to characterize the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage’ (p 71). Now apart from the fact that in canto 28 there is nothing whatever to locate Muhammad and Ali in any sort of Oriental frame of reference, and everything to put them (together with an enormous company, five named representatives of whom are all Western, and include Dante’s own cousin) in the category of schismatics and sowers of dissension in the body politic,[14] how can this episode, and the poet’s very different handling of the three eminent Muslims located in the honoured company of Limbo (not ‘for not having had the benefit of Christian revelation’ but, as Dante expressly states, for not having received baptism, a very different matter) both be evidence for one and the same ‘poetic grasp of Islam’? Were Dante in any sense writing about Islam one instance would surely contradict the other.[15]
After Dante, Goethe. Here the point at issue is Marx’ s quotation of
the ending of the little song to Zuleika, from the West-östlicher Diwan, to clinch his argument about the ultimately beneficial effect, in terms of Marxist theory, of clumsy and heartless British policies that were breaking up the village communities of India, Said’s analysis of Marx’ sinner juggling with alternative emotions seems to me acute and sensitive, and might be taken as one of the book’ s most detailed and convincing dissections of the way Orientalist-Newspeak functioned, could one accept his view that Marx was here ‘scurrying back to Goethe’ as a source of Orientalist wisdom (p 155); or, even subconsciously, expressing any sort of received views about the Orient, But reference to the full text of the poem will, I think, convince anyone who reads German that all Marx is saying, albeit in a rather elephantine fashion, is that you can’t have an omelette without breaking eggs – or rather, attar without killing rosebuds.[16]
It would be easy to cite some other cases where texts have been used in an arbitrary, sometimes inexplicable, fashion.[17] Perhaps the most astonishing is the author’s elucidation of remarks by Bernard Lewis on the meanings of the word thawra (pp 314-6). This must be read in full to be appreciated; all I would suggest is that if Lewis really intended anything like the extraordinary sub-text, full of crude sexual innuendo, that Said has brought to light, it seems strange that when his original article on Islamic Concepts of Revolution was reprinted a year later (in Islam and History, pp 253-63) he should, by inserting just at the crucial point a fairly long passage tracing the respectable medieval political usage of thawra, have gone far towards neutralizing the alleged satirical force of his 1962 text. An old German academic joke used to run: ‘Other scholars can hear the grass grow, but X can hear the hay grow’, and I really think that in the last twenty-five pages or so of Orientalism, and more especially when he is dealing with Lewis, Said’s exegetical elan soars into realms of fantasy. His vigour in bending texts to his purposes can best be studied on p 236, where he prints an extract from Robertson Smith’s Lectures and Essays with his own elucidations below. Robertson Smith states, inter alia:
It would be a mistake to suppose that genuine religious feeling is at the bottom of everything that justifies itself by taking a religious shape.
In context, this generalization is very probably - though not self-evidently – being given a specifically Islamic reference, since Islamic society is the topic under discussion. But it would seem to be a harmless semi-platitude, capable of wide application, without giving offence, in many societies. One can imagine it being used of British legal formalities, church parades, or some popular superstitions. Said glosses it thus:
religion is only a cover used by Muslims (in other words, all Muslims are hypocrites essentially).
It is time to sum up, and that is not easy. After dwelling so much on what seem to me the eccentricities and shortcomings of the book it may seem strange to say that I found it immensely stimulating, repaying much close study and following-up; but that is certainly the truth. It seems to me to be often unfair, tendentiously selective,[18] and very over-simplified in its conclusions – I am tempted to add, often rather over-complicated in its procedures. Said’s representation of Orientalism is quite as ‘essentialist’ and immutable as the Orient he accuses it of having imagined, constructed, and dominated.[19] The best things seem to me the treatment of Renan (a reviewer whose previous acquaintance was limited to the Life of Jesus feels gratitude for having been directed into some fascinating country), of Seven Pillars, and the attack on the preconceptions and methodologies of modern Islamic scholarship; the respectful but reproachful discussion of Gibb’s and Massignon’s work makes some very subtle points, which probably only a professional Islamic scholar can adequately assess.[20] It is likewise for academic Orientalists to answer the charge that their system of ideas has remained unchanged since Renan’s time (p 6), and for students of Islam and the Arabs to accept or reject the four principal dogmas of modern Orientalism attributed to them on pp 300-301.
It seems to me that the book quite often seeks out unnecessarily subtle explanations for what is essentially unmysterious. The hostile and unsatisfactory attitudes complained of can nearly all be adequately accounted for by the survival, into modern times, of the older religious prejudices (a point that the author does not overlook), together with Europe’s long experience, not necessarily at first hand, of the apparent non-reformability of the Ottoman Empire in its decline. This last consideration did not only shape thinking about the Turks: in the Great War period British ‘experts’ attributed the political ‘ backwardness’ of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, etc to ‘centuries of Ottoman misrule’ quite as often as to some innate Oriental or Islamic incapacity. More prominence given to the Ottoman Empire might also have allowed Said to do justice to the occasions when the conquering Turk and his institutions were held up for European emulation. It would not greatly have weakened the force of his indictment to have looked briefly at the handful of Orientalists who seem to be obvious exceptions to his rules - Browne, Leone Caetani and, on a different level, Blunt and Philby. Since British theory and practice loom so large it would have been appropriate to make some reference to James Mill’s detailed analysis of the differences between Hindu and Muslim civilization in The History of British India – a very influential text which surely goes some way towards controverting a number of Orientalism’s assertions. On a more trivial level, Said ignores the fact that 1 the Changing East’ has been almost as popular a cliché, during the last seventy years or more, as its dialectical progenitor - perhaps its popularity is really only testimony to the continuing strength of the original platitude, but the point would have been worth brief discussion. All of which is to suggest that the lasting utility of his book, as distinct from its immediate impact, would not have been lessened by a much more frequent use of qualified statement.
At the end, the reader is left with something of a puzzle. How was it that such a shallow, narrow-minded, deliberately imperceptive ideology, and one, furthermore, that was so untrue to reality (for Said makes it plain that in his opinion Orientalism 1 s arrogant categorizations were not merely dehumanizing and insulting, but objectively inaccurate) could be so effective in helping to establish and administer vast empires, even if those empires, with the arguable exception of British India, lasted for such a short time? But it is a virtue of this book, I think, to suggest many more questions than it answers. That they are not always the questions formulated by the author does not diminish its power to provoke and stimulate. I hope it will be widely read and discussed; it would provide an excellent focus for a seminar series. (Those who have struggled with Beginnings may be assured that the subject-matter, manner of proceeding, and style are all much easier going in Orientalism.)
There are a number of places where the text has gone awry, which should be attended to. A sentence has slipped out of Cromer’s paragraph on p 37; ‘minimized’ on p 276 seems a mistake for ‘overstated’; ‘really’ on p 317 for ‘rarely’; ‘natural’ near the bottom of p 19 for ‘unnatural’; and on p 68 ‘scatological’ rather than ‘eschatological’ seems to be meant. A final doubt: can Quinet’s ‘docteurs’ on p 79 really mean medical men, as the argument seems to require?
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