Orientalism

by Edward W. Said

  On the other hand, scholars and critics who are trained in the traditional Orientalist disciplines are perfectly capable of freeing themselves from the old ideological straitjacket. Jacques Berque’s and Maxime Rodinson’s training ranks with the most rigorous available, but what invigorates their investigations even of traditional problems is their methodological self-consciousness. For if Orientalism has historically been too smug, too insulated, too positivistically confident in its ways and its premises, then one way of opening oneself to what one studies in or about the Orient is reflexively to submit one’s method to critical scrutiny. This is what characterizes Berque and Rodinson, each in his own way. What one finds in their work is always, first of all, a direct sensitivity to the material before them, and then a continual self-examination of their methodology and practice, a constant attempt to keep their work responsive to the material and not to a doctrinal preconception. Certainly Berque and Rodinson, as well as Abdel Malek and Roger Owen, are aware too that the study of man and society—whether Oriental or not—is best conducted in the broad field of all the human sciences; therefore these scholars are critical readers, and students of what goes on in other fields. Berque’s attention to recent discoveries in structural anthropology, Rodinson’s to sociology and political theory, Owen’s to economic history: all these are instructive correctives brought from the contemporary human sciences to the study of so-called Oriental problems.

  But there is no avoiding the fact that even if we disregard the Orientalist distinctions between “them” and “us,” a powerful series of political and ultimately ideological realities inform scholarship today. No one can escape dealing with, if not the East/West division, then the North/South one, the have/have-not one, the imperialist/anti-imperialist one, the white/colored one. We cannot get around them all by pretending they do not exist; on the contrary, contemporary Orientalism teaches us a great deal about the intellectual dishonesty of dissembling on that score, the result of which is to intensify the divisions and make them both vicious and permanent. Yet an openly polemical and right-minded “progressive” scholarship can very easily degenerate into dogmatic slumber, a prospect that is not edifying either.

  My own sense of the problem is fairly shown by the kinds of questions I formulated above. Modern thought and experience have taught us to be sensitive to what is involved in representation, in studying the Other, in racial thinking, in unthinking and uncritical acceptance of authority and authoritative ideas, in the sociopolitical role of intellectuals, in the great value of a skeptical critical consciousness. Perhaps if we remember that the study of human experience usually has an ethical, to say nothing of a political, consequence in either the best or worst sense, we will not be indifferent to what we do as scholars. And what better norm for the scholar than human freedom and knowledge? Perhaps too we should remember that the study of man in society is based on concrete human history and experience, not on donnish abstractions, or on obscure laws or arbitrary systems. The problem then is to make the study fit and in some way be shaped by the experience, which would be illuminated and perhaps changed by the study. At all costs, the goal of Orientalizing the Orient again and again is to be avoided, with consequences that cannot help but refine knowledge and reduce the scholar’s conceit. Without “the Orient” there would be scholars, critics, intellectuals, human beings, for whom the racial, ethnic, and national distinctions were less important than the common enterprise of promoting human community.

  Positively, I do believe—and in my other work have tried to show—that enough is being done today in the human sciences to provide the contemporary scholar with insights, methods, and ideas that could dispense with racial, ideological, and imperialist stereotypes of the sort provided during its historical ascendancy by Orientalism. I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience. The worldwide hegemony of Orientalism and all it stands for can now be challenged, if we can benefit properly from the general twentieth-century rise to political and historical awareness of so many of the earth’s peoples. If this book has any future use, it will be as a modest contribution to that challenge, and as a warning: that systems of thought like Orientalism, discourses of power, ideological fictions—mind-forg’d manacles—are all too easily made, applied, and guarded. Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism. No former “Oriental” will be comforted by the thought that having been an Oriental himself he is likely—too likely—to study new “Orientals”—or “Occidentals”—of his own making. If the knowledge of Orientalism has any meaning, it is in being a reminder of the seductive degradation of knowledge, of any knowledge, anywhere, at any time. Now perhaps more than before.

  Afterword

  I

  Orientalism was completed in the last part of 1977, and was published a year later. It was (and still is) the only book that I wrote as one continuous gesture, from research, to several drafts, to final version, each following the other without interruption or serious distraction. With the exception of a wonderfully civilized and relatively burdenless year spent as a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1975–6), I had very little in the way of support or interest from the outside world. I received encouragement from one or two friends and my immediate family, but it was far from clear whether such a study of the ways in which the power, scholarship, and imagination of a two-hundred-year-old tradition in Europe and America viewed the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam, might interest a general audience. I recall, for instance, that it was very difficult at first to interest a serious publisher in the project. One academic press in particular very tentatively suggested a modest contract for a small monograph, so unpromising and slender did the whole enterprise seem at the outset. But luckily (as I describe my good fortune with my first publisher in Orientalism’s original page of Acknowledgments) things changed for the better very quickly after I finished writing the book.

  In both America and England (where a separate U.K. edition appeared in 1979) the book attracted a great deal of attention, some of it (as was to be expected) very hostile, some of it uncomprehending, but most of it positive and enthusiastic. Beginning in 1980 with the French edition, a whole series of translations started to appear, increasing in number to this day, many of which have generated controversies and discussions in languages that I am incompetent to understand. There was a remarkable and still controversial Arabic translation by the gifted Syrian poet and critic Kamal Abu Deeb; I shall say more about that in a moment. Thereafter Orientalism appeared in Japanese, German, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Catalan, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and Swedish (in 1993 it became a bestseller in Sweden, which mystified the local publisher as much as it did me). There are several editions (Greek, Russian, Norwegian, and Chinese) either under way or about to appear. Other European translations are rumored, as is an Israeli version, according to one or two reports. There have been partial translations pirated in Iran and Pakistan. Many of the translations that I have known about directly (in particular, the Japanese) have gone through more than one edition; all are still in print and appear on occasion to give rise to local discussions that go very far beyond anything I was thinking about when I wrote the book.

  The result of all this is that Orientalism, almost in a Borgesian way, has become several different books. And, insofar as I have been able to follow and understand these subsequent versions, that strange, often disquieting, and certainly unthought-of polymorphousness is what I should like to discuss here, reading back into the book that I wrote what others have said, in addition to what I myself wrote after Orientalism (eight or nine books plus many articles). Obviously I shall try to correct misreadings and, in a few instances, willful misinterpretations.

  Yet I sh
all also be rehearsing arguments and intellectual developments that acknowledge Orientalism to be a helpful book in ways that I foresaw only very partially at the time. The point of all this is neither to settle scores nor to heap congratulations on myself, but to chart and record a much-expanded sense of authorship that goes well beyond the egoism of the solitary beings we feel ourselves to be as we undertake a piece of work. For in all sorts of ways Orientalism now seems to me a collective book that I think supersedes me as its author more than I could have expected when I wrote it.

  Let me begin with the one aspect of the book’s reception that I most regret and find myself trying hardest now (in 1994) to overcome. That is the book’s alleged anti-Westernism, as it has been misleadingly and rather too sonorously called by commentators both hostile and sympathetic. This notion has two parts to it, sometimes argued together, sometimes separately. The first is the claim imputed to me that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a synecdoche, or a miniature symbol, of the entire West, and indeed ought to be taken to represent the West as a whole. Since this is so, the argument continues, therefore the entire West is an enemy of the Arab and Islamic or for that matter the Iranian, Chinese, Indian, and many other non-European peoples who suffered Western colonialism and prejudice.

  The second part of the argument ascribed to me is no less far-reaching. It is that a predatory West and Orientalism have violated Islam and the Arabs. (Note that the terms “Orientalism” and “West” have been collapsed into each other.) Since that is so, the very existence of Orientalism and Orientalists is seized upon as a pretext for arguing the exact opposite, namely, that Islam is perfect, that it is the only way (al-hal al-wahid), and so on and so on. To criticize Orientalism, as I did in my book, is in effect to be a supporter of Islamism or Muslim fundamentalism.

  One scarcely knows what to make of these caricatured permutations of a book that to its author and in its arguments is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically skeptical about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly careful about not “defending” or even discussing the Orient and Islam. Yet Orientalism has in fact been read and written about in the Arab world as a systematic defense of Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly in the book that I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient and Islam really are. Actually I go a great deal further when, very early in the book, I say that words such as “Orient” and “Occident” correspond to no stable reality that exists as a natural fact. Moreover, all such geographical designations are an odd combination of the empirical and imaginative. In the case of the Orient as a notion in currency in Britain, France, and America, the idea derives to a great extent from the impulse not simply to describe, but also to dominate and somehow to defend against it. As I try to show, this is powerfully true with reference to Islam as a particularly dangerous embodiment of the Orient.

  The central point in all this is, however, as Vico taught us, that human history is made by human beings. Since the struggle for control over territory is part of that history, so too is the struggle over historical and social meaning. The task for the critical scholar is not to separate one struggle from another, but to connect them, despite the contrast between the overpowering materiality of the former and the apparent otherworldly refinements of the latter. My way of doing this has been to show that the development and maintenance of every culture require the existence of another, different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity—for identity, whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction in my opinion—involves the construction of opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from “us.” Each age and society re-creates its “Others.” Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of “other” is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies. Debates today about Frenchness and Englishness in France and Britain respectively, or about Islam in countries like Egypt and Pakistan, are part of the same interpretive process, which involves the identities of different “others,” whether they be outsiders and refugees, or apostates and infidels. It should be obvious in all cases that these processes are not mental exercises but urgent social contests involving such concrete political issues as immigration laws, the legislation of personal conduct, the constitution of orthodoxy, the legitimization of violence and/or insurrection, the character and content of education, and the direction of foreign policy, which very often has to do with the designation of official enemies. In short, the construction of identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything but mere academic woolgathering.

  What makes all these fluid and extraordinarily rich actualities difficult to accept is that most people resist the underlying notion: that human identity is not only not natural and stable, but constructed, and occasionally even invented outright. Part of the resistance and hostility generated by books like Orientalism, or after it, The Invention of Tradition, and Black Athena,1 is that they seem to undermine the naive belief in the certain positivity and unchanging historicity of a culture, a self, a national identity. Orientalism can only be read as a defense of Islam by suppressing half of my argument, in which I say (as I do in a subsequent book, Covering Islam) that even the primitive community we belong to natally is not immune from the interpretive contest, and that what appears in the West to be the emergence, return to, or resurgence of Islam is in fact a struggle in Islamic societies over the definition of Islam. No one person, authority, or institution has total control over that definition; hence, of course, the contest. Fundamentalism’s epistemological mistake is to think that “fundamentals” are ahistorical categories, not subject to and therefore outside the critical scrutiny of true believers, who are supposed to accept them on faith. To the adherents of a restored or revived version of early Islam, Orientalists are considered (like Salman Rushdie) to be dangerous because they tamper with that version, cast doubt on it, show it to be fraudulent and non-divine. To them, therefore, the virtues of my book were that it pointed out the malicious dangers of the Orientalists and somehow pried Islam from their clutches.

  Now this is hardly what I saw myself doing, but the view persists anyway. There are two reasons for this. In the first place no one finds it easy to live uncomplainingly and fearlessly with the thesis that human reality is constantly being made and unmade, and that anything like a stable essence is constantly under threat. Patriotism, extreme xenophobic nationalism, and downright unpleasant chauvinism are common responses to this fear. We all need some foundation on which to stand; the question is how extreme and unchangeable is our formulation of what this foundation is. My position is that in the case of an essential Islam or Orient, these images are no more than images, and are upheld as such both by the community of the Muslim faithful and (the correspondence is significant) by the community of Orientalists. My objection to what I have called Orientalism is not that it, is just the antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies, and peoples, but that as a system of thought Orientalism approaches a heterogenous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above. This false position hides historical change. Even more important, from my standpoint, it hides the interests of the Orientalist. Those, despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire, can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.

  I have in mind the striking contrast between the weaker and stronger party that is evident from the
beginning of Europe’s modern encounters with what it called the Orient. The studied solemnity and grandiose accents of Napoleon’s Déscription de l’Egypte—its massive, serried volumes testifying to the systematic labors of an entire corps of savants backed by a modern army of colonial conquest—dwarfs the individual testimony of people like Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti, who in three separate volumes describes the French invasion from the point of view of the invaded. One might say that the Déscription is just a scientific, and therefore objective, account of Egypt in the early nineteenth century, but the presence of Jabarti (who is both unknown and ignored by Napoleon) suggests otherwise. Napoleon’s is an “objective” account from the standpoint of someone powerful trying to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit; Jabarti’s is an account by someone who paid the price, was figuratively captured and vanquished.

  In other words, rather than remaining as inert documents that testify to an eternally opposed Occident and Orient, the Déscription and Jabarti’s chronicles together constitute a historical experience, out of which others evolved, and before which others existed. Studying the historical dynamics of this set of experiences is more demanding than sliding back into stereotypes like “the conflict of East and West.” That is one reason why Orientalism is mistakenly read as a surreptitiously anti-Western work and, by an act of unwarranted and even willful retrospective endowment, this reading (like all readings based on a supposedly stable binary opposition) elevates the image of an innocent and aggrieved Islam.