Orientalism

by Edward W. Said

  The second reason why the anti-essentialism of my arguments has proved hard to accept is political and urgently ideological. I had absolutely no way of knowing that, a year after the book was published, Iran would be the site of an extraordinarily far-reaching Islamic revolution, nor that the battle between Israel and the Palestinians would take such savage and protracted forms, from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the onset of the intifada in late 1987. The end of the Cold War did not mute, much less terminate, the apparently unending conflict between East and West as represented by the Arabs and Islam on one side and the Christian West on the other. More recent, but no less acute, contests developed as a result of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan; the challenge to the status quo during the 1980s and ’90s made by Islamic groups in countries as diverse as Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Occupied Territories, and the various American and European responses: the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan; the Gulf War; the continued support of Israel; and the emergence of “Islam” as a topic of alarmed, if not always precise and informed, journalism and scholarship. All this inflamed the sense of persecution felt by people forced, on an almost daily basis, to declare themselves to be either Westerners or Easterners. No one seemed to be free from the opposition between “us” and “them,” which resulted in a sense of reinforced, deepened, hardened identity that has not been particularly edifying.

  In such a turbulent context Orientalism’s fate was both fortunate and unfortunate. To those in the Arab and Islamic world who felt Western encroachment with anxiety and stress, it appeared to be the first book that gave a serious answer back to a West that had never actually listened to or forgiven the Oriental for being an Oriental at all. I recall one early Arabic review of the book that described its author as a champion of Arabism, a defender of the downtrodden and abused, whose mission was to engage Western authorities in a kind of epic and romantic mano-a-mano. Despite the exaggeration, it did convey some real sense of the West’s enduring hostility, as felt by Arabs, and it also conveyed a response that many educated Arabs felt was appropriate.

  I will not deny that I was aware, when writing the book, of the subjective truth insinuated by Marx in the little sentence I quoted as one of the book’s epigraphs (“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.”), which is that if you feel you have been denied the chance to speak your piece, you will try extremely hard to get that chance. For indeed, the subaltern can speak, as the history of liberation movements in the twentieth century eloquently attests. But I never felt that I was perpetuating the hostility between two rival political and cultural monolithic blocks, whose construction I was describing and whose terrible effects I was trying to reduce. On the contrary, as I said earlier, the Orient versus Occident opposition was both misleading and highly undesirable; the less it was given credit for actually describing anything more than a fascinating history of interpretations and of contesting interests, the better. I am happy to record that many readers in Britain and America, as well as in English-speaking Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean, saw the book as stressing the actualities of what was later to be called multiculturalism, rather than xenophobia and aggressive, race-oriented nationalism.

  Nevertheless Orientalism has been thought of rather more as a kind of testimonial to subaltern status—the wretched of the earth talking back—than a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself. Thus, as its author I have been seen as playing an assigned role: that of a self-representing consciousness of what had formerly been suppressed and distorted in the learned texts of a discourse specifically designed to be read not by Orientals but by other Westerners. This is an important point, and it adds to the sense of fixed identities battling across a permanent divide that my book quite specifically abjures, but which it paradoxically presupposes and depends on. None of the Orientalists I write about seems ever to have intended an Oriental as a reader. The discourse of Orientalism, its internal consistency, and its rigorous procedures were all designed for readers and consumers in the metropolitan West. This goes as much for people I genuinely admire, like Edward Lane and Gustave Flaubert, who were fascinated by Egypt, as it does for haughty colonial administrators, like Lord Cromer, brilliant scholars, like Ernest Renan, and baronial aristocrats, like Arthur Balfour, all of whom condescended to and disliked the Orientals they either ruled or studied. I must confess to a certain pleasure in listening in, uninvited, to their various pronouncements and inter-Orientalist discussions, and an equal pleasure in making known my findings both to Europeans and non-Europeans. I have no doubt that this was made possible because I traversed the imperial East-West divide, entered into the life of the West, and yet retained some organic connection with the place from which I originally came. I would repeat that this is very much a procedure of crossing, rather than maintaining, barriers; I believe Orientalism as a book shows it, especially at moments when I speak of humanistic study as seeking ideally to go beyond coercive limitations on thought toward a non-dominative, and non-essentialist, type of learning.

  These considerations did in fact add to the pressures on my book to represent a sort of testament of wounds and a record of sufferings, the recital of which was felt as a long overdue striking back at the West. I deplore so simple a characterization of a work that is—here I am not going to be falsely modest—quite nuanced and discriminating in what it says about different people, different periods, and different styles of Orientalism. Each of my analyses varies the picture, increases the difference and discriminations, separates authors and periods from each other, even though all pertain to Orientalism. To read my analyses of Chateaubriand and Flaubert, or of Burton and Lane, with exactly the same emphasis, deriving the same reductive message from the banal formula “an attack on Western civilization” is, I believe, to be both simplistic and wrong. But I also believe that it is entirely correct to read recent Orientalist authorities, such as the almost comically persistent Bernard Lewis, as the politically motivated and hostile witnesses that their suave accents and unconvincing displays of learning attempt to hide.

  Once again, then, we are back to the political and historical context of the book, which I do not pretend is irrelevant to its contents. One of the most generously perspicacious and intelligently discriminating statements of that conjuncture was laid out in a review by Basim Musallam (MERIP, 1979). He begins by comparing my book with an earlier demystification of Orientalism by the Lebanese scholar Michael Rustum in 1895 (Kitab al-Gharib fi al-Gharb), but then says that the main difference between us is that my book is about loss, whereas Rustum’s is not:

  Rustum writes as a free man and a member of a free society: a Syrian, Arab by speech, citizen of a still-independent Ottoman state unlike Michael Rustum, Edward Said has no generally accepted identity, his very people are in dispute. It is possible that Edward’ Said and his generation sometimes feel that they stand on nothing more solid than the remnants of the destroyed society of Michael Rustum’s Syria, and on memory. Others in Asia and Africa have had their successes in this age of national liberation; here, in painful contrast, there has been desperate resistance against overwhelming odds and, until now, defeat. It is not just any “Arab” who wrote this book, but one with a particular background and experience. (22)

  Musallam correctly notes that an Algerian would not have written the same kind of generally pessimistic book, especially one like mine that does very little with the history of French relations with North Africa, Algeria most particularly. So while I would accept the overall impression that Orientalism is written out of an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration—only a few years before I wrote Orientalism Golda Meir made her notorious and deeply Orientalist comment about there being no Palestinian people—I would also like to add that neither in this book, nor in the two that immediately followed it, The Question of Palestine (1980) and Covering Islam (1981), did I want only to suggest a political program of re
stored identity and resurgent nationalism. There was, of course, an attempt in both of the later books to supply what was missing in Orientalism, namely a sense of what an alternative picture of parts of the Orient—Palestine and Islam respectively—might be from a personal point of view.

  But in all my works I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism. The picture of Islam that I represented was not one of assertive discourse and dogmatic orthodoxy, but was based instead on the idea that communities of interpretation exist within and outside the Islamic world, communicating with each other in a dialogue of equals. My view of Palestine, formulated originally in The Question of Palestine, remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested instead a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war. (I should mention in passing that although my book on Palestine was given a fine Hebrew translation in the early 1980s by Mifras, a small Israeli publishing house, it remains untranslated into Arabic to this day. Every Arabic publisher who was interested in the book wanted me to change or delete those sections that were openly critical of one or another Arab regime (including the PLO), a request that I have always refused to comply with.)

  I regret to say that the Arabic reception of Orientalism, despite Kamal Abu Deeb’s remarkable translation, still managed to ignore that aspect of my book which diminished the nationalist fervor that some implied from my critique of Orientalism, which I associated with those drives to domination and control also to be found in imperialism. Abu Deeb’s painstaking translation was an almost total avoidance of Arabized Western expressions; technical words like discourse, simulacrum, paradigm, or code were rendered from within the classical rhetoric of the Arab tradition. His idea was to place my work inside one fully formed tradition, as if it were addressing another from a perspective of cultural adequacy and equality. In this way, he reasoned, it was possible to show that just as one could advance an epistemological critique from within the Western tradition, so too could one do it from within the Arabic.

  Yet the sense of fraught confrontation between an often emotionally defined Arab world and an even more emotionally experienced Western world drowned out the fact that Orientalism was meant to be a study in critique, not an affirmation of warring and hopelessly antithetical identities. Moreover, the actuality I described in the book’s last pages, of one powerful discursive system maintaining hegemony over another, was intended as the opening salvo in a debate that might stir Arab readers and critics to engage more determinedly with the system of Orientalism. I was either upbraided for not having paid closer attention to Marx—the passages on Marx’s own Orientalism in my book were the most singled out by dogmatic critics in the Arab world and India, for instance—whose system of thought was claimed to have risen above his obvious prejudices, or I was criticized for not appreciating the great achievements of Orientalism, the West, etc. As with defenses of Islam, recourse to Marxism or “the West” as a coherent total system seems to me to have been a case of using one orthodoxy to shoot down another.

  The difference between Arab and other responses to Orientalism is, I think, an accurate indication of how decades of loss, frustration, and the absence of democracy have affected intellectual and cultural life in the Arab region. I intended my book as part of a pre-existing current of thought whose purpose was to liberate intellectuals from the shackles of systems such as Orientalism: I wanted readers to make use of my work so they might then produce new studies of their own that would illuminate the historical experience of Arabs and others in a generous, enabling mode. That certainly happened in Europe, the United States, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean, Ireland, Latin America, and parts of Africa. The invigorated study of Africanist and Indological discourses; the analyses of subaltern history; the reconfiguration of post-colonial anthropology, political science, art history, literary criticism, musicology, in addition to the vast new developments in feminist and minority discourses—to all these, I am pleased and flattered that Orientalism often made a difference. That does not seem to have been the case (insofar as I can judge it) in the Arab world, where, partly because my work is correctly perceived as Eurocentric in its texts, and partly because, as Musallam says, the battle for cultural survival is too engrossing, books like mine are interpreted less usefully, productively speaking, and more as defensive gestures either for or against the “West.”

  Yet among American and British academics of a decidedly rigorous and unyielding stripe, Orientalism, and indeed all of my other work, has come in for disapproving attacks because of its “residual” humanism, its theoretical inconsistencies, its insufficient, perhaps even sentimental, treatment of agency. I am glad that it has! Orientalism is a partisan book, not a theoretical machine. No one has convincingly shown that individual effort is not at some profoundly unteachable level both eccentric and, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sense, original; this despite the existence of systems of thought, discourses, and hegemonies, (although none of them are in fact seamless, perfect, or inevitable). The interest I took in Orientalism as a cultural phenomenon (like the culture of imperialism I talk about in Culture and Imperialism, its 1993 sequel) derives from its variability and unpredictability, both qualities that give writers like Massignon and Burton their surprising force, and even attractiveness. What I tried to preserve in what I analyzed of Orientalism was its combination of consistency and inconsistency, its play, so to speak, which can only be rendered by preserving for oneself as writer and critic the right to some emotional force, the right to be moved, angered, surprised, and even delighted. This is why, in the debate between Gayan Prakash, on the one hand, and Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, on the other, I think Prakash’s more mobile post-structuralism has to be given its due.2 By the same token the work of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Ashis Nandy, predicated on the sometimes dizzying subjective relationships engendered by colonialism, cannot be gainsaid for its contribution to our understanding of the humanistic traps laid by systems such as Orientalism.

  Let me conclude this survey of Orientalism’s critical transmutations with a mention of the one group of people who were, not unexpectedly, the most exercised and vociferous in responding to my book, the Orientalists themselves. They were not my principal intended audience at all; I had in mind casting some light on their practices so as to make other humanists aware of one field’s particular procedures and genealogy. The word “Orientalism” itself has been for too long confined to a professional specialty; I tried to show was its application and existence in the general culture, in literature, ideology, and social as well as political attitudes. To speak of someone as an Oriental, as the Orientalists did, was not just to designate that person as someone whose language, geography, and history were the stuff of learned treatises: it also was often meant as a derogatory expression signifying a lesser breed of human being. This is not to deny that for artists like Nerval and Segalen the word “Orient” was wonderfully, ingeniously connected to exoticism, glamour, mystery, and promise. But it was also a sweeping historical generalization. In addition to these uses of the words Orient, Oriental, and Orientalism, the term Orientalist also came to represent the erudite, scholarly, mainly academic specialist in the languages and histories of the East. Yet, as the late Albert Hourani wrote me in March 1992, a few months before his untimely and much regretted death, due to the force of my argument (for which he said he could not reproach me), my book had the unfortunate effect of making it almost impossible to use the term “Orientalism” in a neutral sense, so much had it become a term of abuse. He concluded that he would have still liked to retain the word for use in describing “a limited, rather dull but valid discipline of scholarship.”

  In his generally balanced 1979 review o
f Orientalism, Hourani formulated one of his objections by suggesting that while I singled out the exaggerations, racism, and hostility of much Orientalist writing, I neglected to mention its numerous scholarly and humanistic achievements. Names that he brought up included Marshall Hodgson, Claude Cohen, and André Raymond, all of whose accomplishments (along with the German authors who come up de rigueur) should be acknowledged as real contributors to human knowledge. This does not, however, conflict with what I say in Orientalism, with the difference that I do insist on the prevalence in the discourse itself of a structure of attitudes that cannot simply be waved away of discounted. Nowhere do I argue that Orientalism is evil, or sloppy, or uniformly the same in the work of each Orientalist. But I do say that the guild of Orientalists has a specific history of complicity with imperial power, which it would be Panglossian to call irrelevant.

  So while I sympathize with Hourani’s plea, I have serious doubts whether the notion of Orientalism properly understood can ever, in fact, be completely detached from its rather more complicated and not always flattering circumstances. I suppose that one can imagine at the limit that a specialist in Ottoman or Fatimid archives is an Orientalist in Hourani’s sense, but we are still required to ask where, how, and with what supporting institutions and agencies such studies take place today? Many who wrote after my book appeared asked exactly those questions of even the most recondite and otherworldly scholars, with sometimes devastating results.