Orientalism

by Edward W. Said

  37. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 180, note 55.

  38. W. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, ed. Stanley Cook (1907; reprint ed., Oesterhout, N.B.: Anthropological Publications, 1966), pp. xiii, 241.

  39. W. Robertson Smith, Lectures and Essays, ed. John Sutherland Black and George Chrystal (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1912), pp. 492–3.

  40. Ibid., pp. 492, 493, 511, 500, 498–9.

  41. Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (New York: Random House, n.d.), 1: 95. See also the excellent article by Richard Bevis, “Spiritual Geology: C. M. Doughty and the Land of the Arabs,” Victorian Studies 16 (December 1972), 163–81.

  42. T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1926; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1935), p. 28.

  43. For a discussion of this see Talal Asad, “Two European Images of Non-European Rule,” in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (London: Ithaca Press, 1975), pp. 103–18.

  44. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 218.

  45. T. E. Lawrence, Oriental Assembly, ed. A. W. Lawrence (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1940), p. 95.

  46. Cited in Stephen Ely Tabachnick, “The Two Veils of T. E. Lawrence,” Studies in the Twentieth Century 16 (Fall 1975): 96–7.

  47. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, pp. 42–3, 661.

  48. Ibid., pp. 549, 550–2.

  49. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924; reprint ed., New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952), p. 322.

  50. Maurice Barrès, Une Enquête aux pays du Levant (Paris: Plon, 1923), 1: 20; 2: 181, 192, 193, 197.

  51. D. G. Hogarth, The Wandering Scholar (London: Oxford University Press, 1924). Hogarth describes his style as that of “the explorer first and the scholar second” (p. 4).

  52. Cited by H. A. R. Gibb, “Structure of Religious Thought in Islam,” in his Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed. Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), p. 180.

  53. Frédéric Lefèvre, “Une Heure avec Sylvain Lévi,” in Mémorial Sylvain Lévi, ed. Jacques Bacot (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1937), pp. 123–4.

  54. Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 2: 1556–7.

  55. Cited in Christopher Sykes, Crossroads to Israel (1965; reprint ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 5.

  56. Cited in Alan Sandison, The Wheel of Empire: A Study of the Imperial Idea in Some Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 158. An excellent study of the French equivalent is Martine Astier Loutfi, Littérature et colonialisme: L’Expansion coloniale vue dans la littérature romanesque française, 1871–1914 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1971).

  57. Paul Valéry, Variété (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), p. 43.

  58. George Orwell, “Marrakech,” in A Collection of Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), p. 187.

  59. Valentine Chirol, The Occident and the Orient (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), p. 6.

  60. Élie Faure, “Orient et Occident,” Mercure de France 229 (July 1–August 1, 1931): 263, 264, 269, 270, 272.

  61. Fernand Baldensperger, “Où s’affrontent l’Orient et l’Occident intellectuels,” in Études d’histoire littéraire, 3rd ser. (Paris: Droz, 1939), p. 230.

  62. I. A. Richards, Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definitions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1932), p. xiv.

  63. Selected Works of C. Snouck Hurgronje, ed. G. H. Bousquet and J. Schacht (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1957), p. 267.

  64. H. A. R. Gibb, “Literature,” in The Legacy of Islam, ed. Thomas Arnold and Alfred Guillaume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 209.

  65. The best general account of this period in political, social, economic, and cultural terms is to be found in Jacques Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972).

  66. There is a useful account of the intellectual project informing their work in Arthur R. Evans, Jr., ed., On Four Modern Humanists: Hofmannsthal, Gundolf, Curtius, Kantorowicz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).

  67. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (1946; reprint ed., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), and his Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Bollingen Books, 1965).

  68. Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. M. and E. W. Said, Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 11.

  69. Ibid., p. 17.

  70. For example, in H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reconstruction of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (1958; reprint ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1961).

  71. See Anwar Abdel Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes 44 (Winter 1963): 103–40.

  72. R. N. Cust, “The International Congresses of Orientalists,” Hellas 6, no. 4 (1897): 349.

  73. See W. F. Wertheim, “Counter-insurgency Research at the Turn of the Century—Snouck Hurgronje and the Acheh War,” Sociologische Gids 19 (September-December 1972).

  74. Sylvain Lévi, “Les Parts respectives des nations occidentales dans les progrès de l’indianisme,” in Mémorial Sylvain Lévi, p. 116.

  75. H. A. R. Gibb, “Louis Massignon (1882–1962),” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1962), pp. 120, 121.

  76. Louis Massignon, Opera Minora, ed. Y. Moubarac (Beirut: Dar-el-Maaref, 1963), 3: 114. I have used the complete bibliography of Massignon’s work by Moubarac: L’Oeuvre de Louis Massignon (Beirut: Éditions du Cénacle libanais, 1972–73).

  77. Massignon, “L’Occident devant l’Orient: Primauté d’une solution culturelle,” in Opera Minora, 1: 208–23.

  78. Ibid., p. 169.

  79. See Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident, pp. 147, 183, 186, 192, 211, 213.

  80. Massignon, Opera Minora, 1: 227.

  81. Ibid., p. 355.

  82. Quoted from Massignon’s essay on Biruni in Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident, p. 225.

  83. Massignon, Opera Minora, 3: 526.

  84. Ibid., pp. 610–11.

  85. Ibid., p. 212. Also p. 211 for another attack on the British, and pp. 423–7 for his assessment of Lawrence.

  86. Quoted in Waardenburg, L’Islam dans le miroir de l’Occident, p. 219.

  87. Ibid., pp. 218–19.

  88. See A. L. Tibawi, “English-Speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism, Part I,” Islamic Quarterly 8, nos. 1, 2 (January-June 1964): 25–44; “Part II,” Islamic Quarterly 8, nos. 3, 4 (July–December 1964): 73–88.

  89. “Une figure domine tous les genres [of Orientalist work], celle de Louis Massignon”: Claude Cahen and Charles Pellat, “Les Études arabes et islamiques,” Journal asiatique 261, nos. 1, 4 (1973): 104. There is a very detailed survey of the Islamic-Orientalist field to be found in Jean Sauvaget, Introduction à l’histoire de l’Orient musulman: Éléments de bibliographie, ed. Claude Cahen (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1961).

  90. William Polk, “Sir Hamilton Gibb Between Orientalism and History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1975): 131–9. I have used the bibliography of Gibb’s work in Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A. R. Gibb, ed. George Makdisi (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 1–20.

  91. H. A. R. Gibb, “Oriental Studies in the United Kingdom,” in The Near East and the Great Powers, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 86–7.

  92. Albert Hourani, “Sir Hamilton Gibb, 1895–1971,” Proceedings of the British Academy 58 (1972): p. 504.

  93. Duncan Black Macdonald, The Religious Attitude and Life in Islam (1909; reprint ed., Beirut: Khayats Publishers, 1965), pp. 2–11.

  94. H. A. R. Gibb, “Whither
Islam?” in Whither Islam? A Survey of Modern Movements in the Moslem World, ed. H. A. R. Gibb (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932), pp. 328, 387.

  95. Ibid., p. 335.

  96. Ibid., p. 377.

  97. H. A. R. Gibb, “The Influence of Islamic Culture on Medieval Europe,” John Rylands Library Bulletin 38, no. 1 (September 1955): 98.

  98. H. A. R. Gibb, Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 2, 9, 84.

  99. Ibid., pp. 111, 88, 189.

  100. H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 108, 113, 123.

  101. Both essays are to be found in Gibb’s Studies on the Civilization of Islam, pp. 176–208 and 3–33.

  102. R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr., “Chimera in the Middle East,” Harper’s, November 1976, pp. 35–8.

  103. Cited in Ayad al-Qazzaz, Ruth Afiyo, et al., The Arabs in American Textbooks, California State Board of Education, June 1975, pp. 10, 15.

  104. “Statement of Purpose,” MESA Bulletin 1, no. 1 (May 1967): 33.

  105. Morroe Berger, “Middle Eastern and North African Studies: Developments and Needs,” MESA Bulletin 1, no. 2 (November 1967): 16.

  106. Menachem Mansoor, “Present State of Arabic Studies in the United States,” in Report on Current Research 1958, ed. Kathleen H. Brown (Washington: Middle East Institute, 1958), pp. 55–6.

  107. Harold Lasswell, “Propaganda,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1934), 12: 527. I owe this reference to Professor Noam Chomsky.

  108. Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1925; reprint ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 135.

  109. Nathaniel Schmidt, “Early Oriental Studies in Europe and the Work of the American Oriental Society, 1842–1922,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 43 (1923): 11. See also E. A. Speiser, “Near Eastern Studies in America, 1939–45,” Archiv Orientalni 16 (1948): 76–88.

  110. As an instance there is Henry Jessup, Fifty-Three Years in Syria, 2 vols. (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910).

  111. For the connection between the issuing of the Balfour Declaration and United States war policy, see Doreen Ingrams, Palestine Papers 19171922: Seeds of Conflict (London: Cox & Syman, 1972), pp. 10 ff.

  112. Mortimer Graves, “A Cultural Relations Policy in the Near East,” in The Near East and the Great Powers, ed. Frye, pp. 76, 78.

  113. George Camp Keiser, “The Middle East Institute: Its Inception and Its Place in American International Studies,” in The Near East and the Great Powers, ed. Frye, pp. 80, 84.

  114. For an account of this migration, see The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).

  115. Gustave von Grunebaum, Modern Islam: The Search for Cultural Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 55, 261.

  116. Abdullah Laroui, “Pour une méthodologie des études islamiques: L’Islam au miroir de Gustave von Grunebaum,” Diogène 38 (July–September 1973): 30. This essay has been collected in Laroui’s The Crisis of the Arab Intellectuals: Traditionalism or Historicism? trans. Diarmid Cammell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

  117. David Gordon, Self-Determination and History in the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971).

  118. Laroui, “Pour une méthodologie des études islamiques,” p. 41.

  119. Manfred Halpern, “Middle East Studies: A Review of the State of the Field with a Few Examples,” World Politics 15 (October 1962): 121–2.

  120. Ibid., p. 117.

  121. Leonard Binder, “1974 Presidential Address,” MESA Bulletin 9, no. 1 (February 1975): 2.

  122. Ibid., p. 5.

  123. “Middle East Studies Network in the United States,” MERIP Reports 38 (June 1975): 5.

  124. The two best critical reviews of the Cambridge History are by Albert Hourani, The English Historical Review 87, no. 343 (April 1972): 348–57, and Roger Owen, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1973): 287–98.

  125. P. M. Holt, Introduction, The Cambridge History of Islam, ed. P. M. Holt, Anne K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1: xi.

  126. D. Sourdel, “The Abbasid Caliphate,” Cambridge History of Islam, ed. Holt et al., 1: 121.

  127. Z. N. Zeine, “The Arab Lands,” Cambridge History of Islam, ed. Holt et al., 1: 575.

  128. Dankwart A. Rustow, “The Political Impact of the West,” Cambridge History of Islam, ed. Holt et al., 1: 697.

  129. Cited in Ingrams, Palestine Papers, 1917–1922, pp. 31–2.

  130. Robert Alter, “Rhetoric and the Arab Mind,” Commentary, October 1968, pp. 61–85. Alter’s article was an adulatory review of General Yehoshafat Harkabi’s Arab Attitudes to Israel (Jerusalem: Keter Press, 1972).

  131. Gil Carl Alroy, “Do The Arabs Want Peace?” Commentary, February 1974, pp. 56–61.

  132. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), pp. 109–59.

  133. Raphael Patai, Golden River to Golden Road: Society, Culture, and Change in the Middle East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962; 3rd rev. ed., 1969), p. 406.

  134. Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973). For an even more racist work see John Laffin, The Arab Mind Considered: A Need for Understanding (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1976).

  135. Sania Hamady, Temperament and Character of the Arabs (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), p. 100. Hamady’s book is a favorite amongst Israelis and Israeli apologists; Alroy cites her approvingly, and so does Amos Elon in The Israelis: Founders and Sons (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971). Morroe Berger (see note 137 below) also cites her frequently. Her model is Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, but she has none of Lane’s literacy or general learning.

  136. Manfred Halpern’s thesis is presented in “Four Contrasting Repertories of Human Relations in Islam: Two Pre-Modern and Two Modern Ways of Dealing with Continuity and Change, Collaboration and Conflict and the Achieving of Justice,” a paper presented to the 22nd Near East Conference at Princeton University on Psychology and Near Eastern Studies, May 8, 1973. This treatise was prepared for by Halpern’s “A Redefinition of the Revolutionary Situation,” Journal of International Affairs 23, no. 1 (1969): 54–75.

  137. Morroe Berger, The Arab World Today (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964), p. 140. Much the same sort of implication underlies the clumsy work of quasi-Arabists like Joel Carmichael and Daniel Lerner; it is there more subtly in political and historical scholars such as Theodore Draper, Walter Laqueur, and Élie Kedourie. It is strongly in evidence in such highly regarded works as Gabriel Baer’s Population and Society in the Arab East, trans. Hanna Szoke (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), and Alfred Bonné’s State and Economics in the Middle East: A Society in Transition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). The consensus seems to be that if they think at all, Arabs think differently—i.e., not necessarily with reason, and often without it. See also Adel Daher’s RAND study, Current Trends in Arab Intellectual Thought (RM-5979-FF, December 1969) and its typical conclusion that “the concrete problem-solving approach is conspicuously absent from Arab thought” (p. 29). In a review-essay for the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (see note 124 above), Roger Owen attacks the very notion of “Islam” as a concept for the study of history. His focus is The Cambridge History of Islam, which, he finds, in certain ways perpetuates an idea of Islam (to be found in such writers as Carl Becker and Max Weber) “defined essentially as a religious, feudal, and antirational system, [that] lacked the necessary characteristics which had made European progress possible.” For a sustained proof of Weber’s total inaccuracy, see Maxime Rodinson’s Islam and Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 76–117.

  138. Hamady, Character and Temperament, p. 197.

  139. Berger, Arab World, p. 1
02.

  140. Quoted by Irene Gendzier in Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), p. 94.

  141. Berger, Arab World, p. 151.

  142. P. J. Vatikiotis, ed., Revolution in the Middle East, and Other Case Studies; proceedings of a seminar (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), pp. 8–9.

  143. Ibid., pp. 12, 13.

  144. Bernard Lewis, “Islamic Concepts of Revolution,” in ibid., pp. 33, 38–9. Lewis’s study Race and Color in Islam (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) expresses similar disaffection with an air of great learning; more explicitly political—but no less acid—is his Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (London: Alcove Press, 1973).

  145. Bernard Lewis, “The Revolt of Islam,” in The Middle East and The West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p. 95.

  146. Bernard Lewis, “The Return of Islam,” Commentary, January 1976, p. 44.

  147. Ibid., p. 40.

  148. Bernard Lewis, History—Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 68.

  149. Lewis, Islam in History, p. 65.

  150. Lewis, The Middle East and the West, pp. 60, 87.

  151. Lewis, Islam in History, pp. 65–6.

  152. Originally published in Middle East Journal 5 (1951). Collected in Readings in Arab Middle Eastern Societies and Cultures, ed. Abdulla Lutfiyye and Charles W. Churchill (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1970), pp. 688–703.

  153. Lewis, The Middle East and the West, p. 140.

  154. Robert K. Merton, “The Perspectives of Insiders and Outsiders,” in his The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, ed. Norman W. Storer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 99–136.

  155. See, for example, the recent work of Anwar Abdel Malek, Yves Lacoste, and the authors of essays published in Review of Middle East Studies 1 and 2 (London: Ithaca Press, 1975, 1976), the various analyses of Middle Eastern politics by Noam Chomsky, and the work done by the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). A good prospectus is provided in Gabriel Ardant, Kostas Axelos, Jacques Berque, et al., De I’impérialisme à la décolonisation (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1965).