How valid is Edward Said's criticism of the West, and of Western scholarship, in Orientalism?
Firstly, many critics of Edward Said refer to his upbringing according to sources if one researches any biography on him that he comes from a wealthy family and obtained a privileged education from private schools in both Jerusalem and Cairo. Orientalism single handedly created the idea that the concept of the Orient (of the East) became the mechanism by which the West sought to dominate and gain authority over the Arab world. To Said, it was only a concept which never existed, but which was created by Westerners as a tool to categorise the region. Said’s work has been subject to other criticism that he has oversimplified the terminology between East and West, as well as having exaggerated the nature of colonial reality to an extreme description or manner.
Said points out that most scholars would not deny that “texts exist in contexts” and acknowledge the fact of “intertextuality, . . . the pressures of conventions, predecessors and rhetorical styles”. However, Said contends that most are unwilling to admit that “political, institutional and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author”. Many are reluctant to give up their belief in the “principle of ‘creativity,’ in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure mind to have brought forth his work”. In the same way that there is an “explicit connection ” in classic philosophers.
Said essentially became the person viewed most responsible for creating the idea that a paradigm of development in the Middle East was an evil construct of Western capitalism, and hence had to be resisted. Another example of Said’s misreading of Orientalism is in his treatment of the German historian Johann Gottfried von Herder. As Varisco shows, Said wrongly dismisses Herder as interested solely in understanding the Orient through ‘artificial entities’ and not through individuals. This approach, Said contends, was typical of all Orientalists. Said fails to mention crucial components of Herder’s writings on the Orient. For one, Herder ‘was a relentless critic of the kind of imperialist propaganda that divided the world into “civilized” and “barbarian”’ – an approach that, according to Said, would have been inconsistent with that of a ‘typical’ Orientalist. The list goes on of Western writers and scholars who have been criticised by Said and whose work has been misread to fit his particular theory. In the case of Orientalism, however, “political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination and scholarly institutions – in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility”.
Edward Said’s criticism is not that we in the West are faced with a major and dangerous terrorist foe, a foe inspired by radical Islam but rather the problem is “how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States.” whose rulers a “small circle of men, ”have decided to unleash an unjust war against the entire Muslim world. We have, in clear words, his main point: The enemy of the world is the United States and our democratically elected leaders. Among other crimes, it has carried out what he calls the “Israelisation of US Policy,".
It leads to an understanding that Said has little patience with the “Third World intellectuals” who draw inspiration from the rhetorical power of Orientalism?’ There is no mention about Europe’s persecution of the Jews and this omission should be due to Said’s opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies. Said’s ignoring of the Oriental in Orientalism is manifested as well in his political positions. In his analysis of the Iranian Revolution, Said systematically failed to consider the ideas and political programme of the Ayatollah Khomeini. During the Gulf War, he made little mention of the plight of the Kuwaitis who were suffering under a brutal occupation as a result of Ba’athist imperialism. He also failed to speak out for the human rights of the Iraqi Kurds who were victims of the most brutal Iraqi state aggression. Instead, Said felt compelled to only speak of human rights abuses committed by America and Israel. This political position is the product of a view which Varisco acknowledges to be central in Orientalism: ‘The default theory in Orientalism, is that somehow Europe is uniquely imperialist and colonialist; Said is willing to take the theory of the West dominating the East as a given, strongly affirming that the denial of the state of Palestine is ‘deeply Orientalist.’ Yet in opposing Said’s essentialism on Orientalism, there can be critics that can take and adopt an essentialist understanding of Zionism. Said’s political positions on the real Orient stem directly from his arguments made in the book itself.
How else can Said’s perception be explained of the Iranian Revolution as everything but heavily influenced by a political ideology rooted in an particular interpretation of Islam, or his reluctance to accept the validity of Western claims of genocide committed by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds without referring back to Orientalism? Orientalism is the soil in which Said’s political positions are rooted. Said’s work has been criticised in following academic works as having ignored Oriental voices in Orientalism. In this book Orientalism there are other intellectual critics on the other end of the scale that label it as a 'work that is not even a passing nod to Muslim intellectuals who learned from Western education yet saw through to the core of prejudice and intolerance.’
Orientalism assumes that Western imperialism, Western psychological projection, "and its harmful political consequences are something that only the West does to the East rather than something all societies do to one another." There are numerous harsh critics that underline Orientalism's political angle harmful to university students say, for instance, of literature since it has led to the political study of literature at the expense of philological, literary, and rhetorical issues wjere Said completely ignores China, Japan, and South East Asia, in talking of "the East," but then goes on to criticise the West’s homogenisation of the East. In addition, fails to capture the essence of the Middle East by overlooking important works by Egyptian and Arabic scholard with limited knowledge about the history of European and non-European imperialism. It sees only the influence of the West on the East in colonialism as these influences were not simply one-way, but cross-cultural, and that Said fails to take into account other societies or factors within the East. Said himself praises Orientalism as a book that ‘had to be written’ and that Orientalism is not merely some “European fantasy about the Orient” but rather, a “system of knowledge about the Orient”.
To what extent can it be argued that medieval attitudes have shaped the modern world?
First, he shows that slavery was a Western practice. There are fascinating facts presented such as the large degree of African complicity in the slave trade and instances when African chiefs petitioned Western leaders to resist pressure to abolish their slave trade industries of Black Africans. He also points out that it was Arab merchants from the seventh-century to the 1920s who forced over 17 million black African slaves across the Saharan desert. The slavery movement in Britain was a movement rooted in the Enlightenment – the very same era that Said understands as critically important in shaping and forging Orientalist racist attitudes of the Other.
In 1742, French poet Voltaire published a scathing attack against Muhammad in his play Mahomet but more than a decade later he retracted his hostile views and adopted more favourable views of Islam at the expense of Christianity. Warraq draws attention to a quote by Voltaire who admitted that ‘assuredly, I have made [Muhammad] out to be more evil than he was.’ One of Said’s more glaring misreadings of Orientalist scholarship comes with his analysis of the French Orientalist Ernest Renan. On Renan, Said makes three basic points about his work: that it was racist, that this racism conformed it to the Orientalist discourse, and that his writings were hugely influential on the discourse of Orientalism. Like Voltaire, Renan also changed his views and later in his life even wrote that ‘it would be ungracious of [Europe] to wish to settle the faith of others. All the while actively pursuing the propagation of her dogma which is civilisation, she ought to leave to the peoples themselves the infinitely delicate task of adjusting their own religious traditions to their new needs.’
Said stresses out that discourse on the Orient must be understood in relation to the “period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present”. The ‘Oriental world,’ is in short, , a “body of ideas, beliefs, clichés or learning about the East ”Significantly, these 'truths' were developed "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections".
In short, Said argues, nearly every nineteenth century (if not before) literary writer, he contends, “was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire”. It is in this light that Said views Orientalism as a “dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American”. From this point of view, Said believes that the following “political questions” are the crucial ones: what other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novelwriting and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality in this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work – not of mere unconditioned ratiocination – in all its historical complexity, detail and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political tendencies, the state and the specific realities of domination?
Said’s treatment of Greek intellectual themes rests only on a reading of the play The Persians. Its author, Aeschylus, is more commonly recognised as the founder of the tragedy, but in Orientalism he is depicted as one of the founding fathers of modern Orientalism. The Persians is of central importance in Orientalism because Said depicts it as one of the first attempts to demarcate a sharp distinction between the West and the Orient. This play supposedly sets the tone for more than a millennium of Western perceptions of the Orient. ‘There is an analogy,’ Said wrote, ‘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.’ The main point Said wants to advance is that from antiquity Westerners were depicting the Orient as their ‘great complementary opposite’ and that these Western attitudes of the Orient form an ‘internally structured archive’ that is built on a ‘restricted number of encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation.’ If only understanding Western intellectual history was so simple…
Said wonders whether Orientalism should be equated with the “general group of ideas overriding the mass of material . . . shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism and the like” or the “much more varied work of almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient”. These are “two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material”, Said contends, which he intends to apply conjointly the mass of material under investigation, avoiding the possibility of “distortion” by steering his way between the extremes of “too dogmatic a generality” and “too positivistic a localised focus” . He believes, he avoids the dangers of both “coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description” and“so detailled and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general lines of force informing the field”. His goal is accordingly to “recognise individuality and to reconcile it with its . . . general and hegemonic context”.
Orientalism is, not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition . . ., as well as an area of concern defined by travellers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples, and civilisations. The “idioms” of Orientalism “took firm hold in European discourse. Beneath the idioms there was a layer of doctrine about the Orient” which was “fashioned out of the experiences of many Europeans, all of them converging upon such essential aspects fo the Orient as the Oriental character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, and the like”.
It is, as such, a "system of truths . . . in Nietzsche’s sense of the word". As a result, “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was concsequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric”, a constellation of attitudes that is perhaps true, Said adds, of possibly all “human societies” in their dealings “with ‘other’ cultures”. The ‘very presence of a ‘field’ such as Orientalism, with no corresponding equivalent in the Orient itself, suggests the relative strength of Orient and Occident”, Said avers, because 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 is, in short, a “body of ideas, beliefs, clichés or learning about the East”. It is the deliberate "distillation of essential ideas about the Orient – its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness – into a separate and unchallenged coherence". It seemed to be “morally neutral and objectively valid” and to have an epistemological status equal to that of historical chronology or geographical location”.
Due to colonial influences from the British, the French and the Italians in Libya for example throught the Arab/Middle Eastern diaspora or Northern Saharan Africa, literature from the Medieval period contained writings with teachings of Islam distorted and caricatured its believers and potential converts in a variety of ways. How can the attitudes be argued? Muslims viewed Christianity from these times with feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority that can be told viewed, heard, read evidently by fundamentalist extremists in our modern day society. This hostility existed on both sides though with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Starting from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, the literature of Western origins in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries can explain how the denigration from one to the other can be used to defend one's own beliefs, values, traditions, customs and the intellectual, cultural and economic construction of the world.
Firstly, many critics of Edward Said refer to his upbringing according to sources if one researches any biography on him that he comes from a wealthy family and obtained a privileged education from private schools in both Jerusalem and Cairo. Orientalism single handedly created the idea that the concept of the Orient (of the East) became the mechanism by which the West sought to dominate and gain authority over the Arab world. To Said, it was only a concept which never existed, but which was created by Westerners as a tool to categorise the region. Said’s work has been subject to other criticism that he has oversimplified the terminology between East and West, as well as having exaggerated the nature of colonial reality to an extreme description or manner.
Said points out that most scholars would not deny that “texts exist in contexts” and acknowledge the fact of “intertextuality, . . . the pressures of conventions, predecessors and rhetorical styles”. However, Said contends that most are unwilling to admit that “political, institutional and ideological constraints act in the same manner on the individual author”. Many are reluctant to give up their belief in the “principle of ‘creativity,’ in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure mind to have brought forth his work”. In the same way that there is an “explicit connection ” in classic philosophers.
Said essentially became the person viewed most responsible for creating the idea that a paradigm of development in the Middle East was an evil construct of Western capitalism, and hence had to be resisted. Another example of Said’s misreading of Orientalism is in his treatment of the German historian Johann Gottfried von Herder. As Varisco shows, Said wrongly dismisses Herder as interested solely in understanding the Orient through ‘artificial entities’ and not through individuals. This approach, Said contends, was typical of all Orientalists. Said fails to mention crucial components of Herder’s writings on the Orient. For one, Herder ‘was a relentless critic of the kind of imperialist propaganda that divided the world into “civilized” and “barbarian”’ – an approach that, according to Said, would have been inconsistent with that of a ‘typical’ Orientalist. The list goes on of Western writers and scholars who have been criticised by Said and whose work has been misread to fit his particular theory. In the case of Orientalism, however, “political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagination and scholarly institutions – in such a way as to make its avoidance an intellectual and historical impossibility”.
Edward Said’s criticism is not that we in the West are faced with a major and dangerous terrorist foe, a foe inspired by radical Islam but rather the problem is “how to deal with the unparalleled and unprecedented power of the United States.” whose rulers a “small circle of men, ”have decided to unleash an unjust war against the entire Muslim world. We have, in clear words, his main point: The enemy of the world is the United States and our democratically elected leaders. Among other crimes, it has carried out what he calls the “Israelisation of US Policy,".
It leads to an understanding that Said has little patience with the “Third World intellectuals” who draw inspiration from the rhetorical power of Orientalism?’ There is no mention about Europe’s persecution of the Jews and this omission should be due to Said’s opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies. Said’s ignoring of the Oriental in Orientalism is manifested as well in his political positions. In his analysis of the Iranian Revolution, Said systematically failed to consider the ideas and political programme of the Ayatollah Khomeini. During the Gulf War, he made little mention of the plight of the Kuwaitis who were suffering under a brutal occupation as a result of Ba’athist imperialism. He also failed to speak out for the human rights of the Iraqi Kurds who were victims of the most brutal Iraqi state aggression. Instead, Said felt compelled to only speak of human rights abuses committed by America and Israel. This political position is the product of a view which Varisco acknowledges to be central in Orientalism: ‘The default theory in Orientalism, is that somehow Europe is uniquely imperialist and colonialist; Said is willing to take the theory of the West dominating the East as a given, strongly affirming that the denial of the state of Palestine is ‘deeply Orientalist.’ Yet in opposing Said’s essentialism on Orientalism, there can be critics that can take and adopt an essentialist understanding of Zionism. Said’s political positions on the real Orient stem directly from his arguments made in the book itself.
How else can Said’s perception be explained of the Iranian Revolution as everything but heavily influenced by a political ideology rooted in an particular interpretation of Islam, or his reluctance to accept the validity of Western claims of genocide committed by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds without referring back to Orientalism? Orientalism is the soil in which Said’s political positions are rooted. Said’s work has been criticised in following academic works as having ignored Oriental voices in Orientalism. In this book Orientalism there are other intellectual critics on the other end of the scale that label it as a 'work that is not even a passing nod to Muslim intellectuals who learned from Western education yet saw through to the core of prejudice and intolerance.’
Orientalism assumes that Western imperialism, Western psychological projection, "and its harmful political consequences are something that only the West does to the East rather than something all societies do to one another." There are numerous harsh critics that underline Orientalism's political angle harmful to university students say, for instance, of literature since it has led to the political study of literature at the expense of philological, literary, and rhetorical issues wjere Said completely ignores China, Japan, and South East Asia, in talking of "the East," but then goes on to criticise the West’s homogenisation of the East. In addition, fails to capture the essence of the Middle East by overlooking important works by Egyptian and Arabic scholard with limited knowledge about the history of European and non-European imperialism. It sees only the influence of the West on the East in colonialism as these influences were not simply one-way, but cross-cultural, and that Said fails to take into account other societies or factors within the East. Said himself praises Orientalism as a book that ‘had to be written’ and that Orientalism is not merely some “European fantasy about the Orient” but rather, a “system of knowledge about the Orient”.
To what extent can it be argued that medieval attitudes have shaped the modern world?
First, he shows that slavery was a Western practice. There are fascinating facts presented such as the large degree of African complicity in the slave trade and instances when African chiefs petitioned Western leaders to resist pressure to abolish their slave trade industries of Black Africans. He also points out that it was Arab merchants from the seventh-century to the 1920s who forced over 17 million black African slaves across the Saharan desert. The slavery movement in Britain was a movement rooted in the Enlightenment – the very same era that Said understands as critically important in shaping and forging Orientalist racist attitudes of the Other.
In 1742, French poet Voltaire published a scathing attack against Muhammad in his play Mahomet but more than a decade later he retracted his hostile views and adopted more favourable views of Islam at the expense of Christianity. Warraq draws attention to a quote by Voltaire who admitted that ‘assuredly, I have made [Muhammad] out to be more evil than he was.’ One of Said’s more glaring misreadings of Orientalist scholarship comes with his analysis of the French Orientalist Ernest Renan. On Renan, Said makes three basic points about his work: that it was racist, that this racism conformed it to the Orientalist discourse, and that his writings were hugely influential on the discourse of Orientalism. Like Voltaire, Renan also changed his views and later in his life even wrote that ‘it would be ungracious of [Europe] to wish to settle the faith of others. All the while actively pursuing the propagation of her dogma which is civilisation, she ought to leave to the peoples themselves the infinitely delicate task of adjusting their own religious traditions to their new needs.’
Said stresses out that discourse on the Orient must be understood in relation to the “period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present”. The ‘Oriental world,’ is in short, , a “body of ideas, beliefs, clichés or learning about the East ”Significantly, these 'truths' were developed "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections".
In short, Said argues, nearly every nineteenth century (if not before) literary writer, he contends, “was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire”. It is in this light that Said views Orientalism as a “dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American”. From this point of view, Said believes that the following “political questions” are the crucial ones: what other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novelwriting and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality in this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work – not of mere unconditioned ratiocination – in all its historical complexity, detail and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political tendencies, the state and the specific realities of domination?
Said’s treatment of Greek intellectual themes rests only on a reading of the play The Persians. Its author, Aeschylus, is more commonly recognised as the founder of the tragedy, but in Orientalism he is depicted as one of the founding fathers of modern Orientalism. The Persians is of central importance in Orientalism because Said depicts it as one of the first attempts to demarcate a sharp distinction between the West and the Orient. This play supposedly sets the tone for more than a millennium of Western perceptions of the Orient. ‘There is an analogy,’ Said wrote, ‘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.’ The main point Said wants to advance is that from antiquity Westerners were depicting the Orient as their ‘great complementary opposite’ and that these Western attitudes of the Orient form an ‘internally structured archive’ that is built on a ‘restricted number of encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation.’ If only understanding Western intellectual history was so simple…
Said wonders whether Orientalism should be equated with the “general group of ideas overriding the mass of material . . . shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism and the like” or the “much more varied work of almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient”. These are “two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material”, Said contends, which he intends to apply conjointly the mass of material under investigation, avoiding the possibility of “distortion” by steering his way between the extremes of “too dogmatic a generality” and “too positivistic a localised focus” . He believes, he avoids the dangers of both “coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description” and“so detailled and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general lines of force informing the field”. His goal is accordingly to “recognise individuality and to reconcile it with its . . . general and hegemonic context”.
Orientalism is, not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition . . ., as well as an area of concern defined by travellers, commercial enterprises, governments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples, and civilisations. The “idioms” of Orientalism “took firm hold in European discourse. Beneath the idioms there was a layer of doctrine about the Orient” which was “fashioned out of the experiences of many Europeans, all of them converging upon such essential aspects fo the Orient as the Oriental character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, and the like”.
It is, as such, a "system of truths . . . in Nietzsche’s sense of the word". As a result, “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was concsequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric”, a constellation of attitudes that is perhaps true, Said adds, of possibly all “human societies” in their dealings “with ‘other’ cultures”. The ‘very presence of a ‘field’ such as Orientalism, with no corresponding equivalent in the Orient itself, suggests the relative strength of Orient and Occident”, Said avers, because 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 is, in short, a “body of ideas, beliefs, clichés or learning about the East”. It is the deliberate "distillation of essential ideas about the Orient – its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness – into a separate and unchallenged coherence". It seemed to be “morally neutral and objectively valid” and to have an epistemological status equal to that of historical chronology or geographical location”.
- The West and its customs are viewed and titled as Babylon.
- For Jews, the call to their homeland is Aliyah.According to Edward Said, Orientalism is a series of false assumptions toward the Middle East.
- It serves an implicit justification with colonial and imperial influences for European and American images, culture and ambitions.
Due to colonial influences from the British, the French and the Italians in Libya for example throught the Arab/Middle Eastern diaspora or Northern Saharan Africa, literature from the Medieval period contained writings with teachings of Islam distorted and caricatured its believers and potential converts in a variety of ways. How can the attitudes be argued? Muslims viewed Christianity from these times with feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority that can be told viewed, heard, read evidently by fundamentalist extremists in our modern day society. This hostility existed on both sides though with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Starting from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, the literature of Western origins in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries can explain how the denigration from one to the other can be used to defend one's own beliefs, values, traditions, customs and the intellectual, cultural and economic construction of the world.
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