Orientalism

1.1 Knowing the Oriental

Said begins this chapter with the assertion that knowledge is a form of power. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries of colonial travel, the growing Western interest in texts from the Orient led to a desire to translate them. According to Said, this interest was never benign, as these translation projects quickly became a form of wielding power through knowledge. Whoever produces and disseminates knowledge of the Orient also possesses the ability to dominate it. In the case of the British colonial presence in Egypt, British knowledge and perception of Egypt came to define the colonized country’s total identity, whereas Egyptians’ sense of their country was omitted. This prevalence of British knowledge is evident in Arthur James Balfour’s attitude toward Egyptians. Balfour, who was a British House of Commons official, believed that Egyptian self-government was not possible due to their people’s reliance on the British administration for moral guidance. He also believed that Egyptians tacitly approved of British colonial occupation. These beliefs presumed the national affiliations and desires of Egyptians without actually consulting their views. The goal was self-serving; Balfour wanted to continue occupying Egypt, and so he decided that Egyptians both wanted and needed British occupation.

Said continues to argue that the West deploys Orientalism in several ways. For one, the West simultaneously positions itself as a “technician of empire” as well as a “beneficiary of Orientalism” (44). For Said, imperialism is a vehicle for Orientalism as European powers strove not only to acquire resources and land from the Orient but also knowledge about it. Through imperialist expansion, the West gains power over the East by presenting the West as an expert on its colonized territories. In the case of Balfour’s attitude toward the Egyptians, this expertise often omits the perspective of the colonized territories’ native populations. After establishing oneself as an expert on these territories, the Western power compartmentalizes its relations with them. The relationship is demarcated as “us” (the West) and “them” (the East), with the former presiding over the latter. It is a hierarchal relationship in which the West dominates.

This hierarchy is once again determined by power over knowledge. For former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, the Orient’s presumed lack of pre-Newtonian knowledge justified Western stereotypes about American and European advancement over the East. In the Western perspective, knowledge generated by Western scholars, administrators, and writers is the only valid form thereof. The East possesses different origins and bases for knowledge production that predate Western colonial occupation, and these forms are considered less legitimate in Western eyes. The dominance of Western knowledge produces values that distinguish the West and the East and that maintain the established hierarchy. For instance, in the 1972 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, an article describes the differences between Westerners and Arabs, depicting Westerners as “rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, [and] capable of holding real values” (49), while the Arab individual possesses the opposite traits. Ideas like these support advancing rational Western power over the irrational and unstable East. The West used these distinctions to justify administrative rule and dominance over the East.

1.2 Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental

In this section, Said argues that Western attempts to consolidate the expansive Eastern “geographical ‘field’” resulted in the formalized study of the Orient within Western academic institutions (50). Despite the variance between countries and regions of the Orient, the academic formalization of this space reduced the East to a monolithic concept. This created a “free-floating mythology of The Orient” (53), where Western scholars entered their study of the East with pre-formed ideas about the space and its history. Said asserts that Western academic scholarship about the East was always based upon a pre-existing “European imaginative geography” in which the Orient was always known in the Western imagination (57). Orientalist philosophy only works to confirm Western ideas about the East.

Since Western scholarship and literature about the Orient were always based upon prefigured ideas, Said believes Orientalism to be a “closed system” in which the Orient is always staged as inferior to the West (70). This attitude was prevalent in representations of Islam across early Western literature. In French writer Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville’s play, Bibliothèque orientale, the character of Mahomet (named after the Islamic prophet Mohammed) represents Islam for the Western audience. In this play, de Molainville used Mahomet to express that Islam was simply an incorrect version of Christianity. The message of the play was filtered through a Christian lens. Similarly, in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the figure of Maometto (also named after Mohammed) is in one of the circles of Hell alongside sinners. While Maometto does not perform any of the other sins himself, his Islamic faith is seen as punishable according to the poem’s Christian morals. Through the portrayal of Western Christianity’s moral superiority in these works, Islam appears as the inferior Oriental faith.

1.3 Projects

Said describes several influential texts and policies that lent themselves to the expansion of Orientalism. In the pre-Napoleonic era, the theoretician Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron traveled to Asia to research biblical genealogies. From his travels, he produced a translation of Avesta, a sacred book of Zoroastrianism from Persia, revealing aspects of early Eastern civilization to a Western audience. Years later, William Jones, a British philologist of the East India Company, drew from such translated works to advance British colonial activity in India. In a letter to Lord Althorp in 1787, he proclaimed that “it is [his] ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it” and that he aimed “to rule and to learn” the Orient (78).

Similar strategies for wielding knowledge to influence public policy were utilized by Napoleon Bonaparte during the French occupation of Egypt. He encouraged the development of The Description de l’Égypte, a collection of essays by French scholars about the colonized territory. By assembling knowledge about Egypt, Napoleon aligned himself with native Egyptians during times of political upheaval in the country. He positioned the French army as “fighting for Islam” (82), using knowledge collected about Egypt throughout history to establish that the French had the Egyptians’ best interests at heart.

In this section, Said also notes the importance of analyzing the textual attitude of works by Orientalists to determine where the writer or thinker stood. The textual attitude of a work is made up of its writing style as well as its content and context. The analysis of textual attitude allows one to see the work beyond its presumptions of depicting reality. This is especially crucial for critiquing Orientalism, as all Orientalist works presume that their versions of the Orient represent the East in its most authentic form.

1.4 Crisis

Said expresses how the ideas mentioned in earlier sections present a certain intellectual and political crisis for Orientalist activity. As the study of the Orient became more formalized and Western relations with the East responded to this progression, certain Orientalist ideas were also codified. Orientalism developed a “scientific self-consciousness” (98), which meant that Western involvement in the Orient inevitably compelled the former to define and distinguish itself from the latter. The West drew constantly from its own values and projected its ideals upon the East. Thus, the continued bond between West and East eventually necessitated the former to define its own identity on the same terms applied to the East.

For German philologist and writer Friedrich Schlegel, this scientific self-consciousness meant designating the Aryan superiority of Western people through his study of the Orient. His work argued that there were differences between the “good Orient” of the past in contrast to the “bad Orient” of his present to show the lack of social progression of Oriental people. The West, in contrast, achieved social innovation due to racial superiority. This thinking relied upon the notion of an inferior and monolithic Orient to form the beginnings of scientific racism.

By codifying the relationship between the West and the East in such a way, Said argues that another core trait of Orientalism is that it never alters its values over time. The idea of the Orient as irrational and perpetually foreign to the West will continue to constitute Orientalist thinking over time. Even if new political circumstances emerge, such as the rise of Arab nationalism, Orientalist views of the East will rely on preconceived notions of the space to define it, interpreting this resistance as proof of Oriental inability to self-govern.