Orientalism

by Edward W. Said

  Still, there has been one sustained attempt to mount an argument whose purport is that a critique of Orientalism (mine in particular) is both meaningless and somehow a violation of the very idea of disinterested scholarship. That attempt is made by Bernard Lewis, about whom I had devoted a few critical pages in my book. Fifteen years after Orientalism appeared, Lewis produced a series of essays, some of them collected in a book entitled Islam and the West, one of whose main sections is an attack on me, which he surrounds with chapters and other essays that mobilize a set of lax and characteristically Orientalist formulas—Muslims are enraged at modernity, Islam never made the separation between church and state, and so on and on—all of them pronounced with an extreme level of generalization and with scarcely a mention of the differences between individual Muslims, between Muslim societies, or between Muslim traditions and eras. Since Lewis has in a sense appointed himself a spokesman for the guild of Orientalists on which my critique was originally based, it may be worth spending a little more time on his procedures. His ideas are, alas, fairly current among his acolytes and imitators, whose job seems to be to alert Western consumers to the threat of an enraged, congenitally undemocratic and violent Islamic world.

  Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting nearly everything wrong. Of course, these are familiar attributes of the Orientalists’ breed, some of whom have at least had the courage to be honest in their active denigration of Islamic, as well as other non-European, peoples. Not Lewis. He proceeds by distorting the truth, by making false analogies, and by innuendo, methods to which he adds that veneer of omniscient tranquil authority which he supposes is the way scholars talk. Take as a typical example the analogy he draws between my critique of Orientalism and a hypothetical attack on studies of classical antiquity, an attack which, he says, would be a foolish activity. It would be, of course, but then Orientalism and Hellenism are radically incomparable. The former is an attempt to describe a whole region of the world as an accompaniment to that region’s colonial conquest, the latter is not at all about the direct colonial conquest of Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; in addition, Orientalism expresses antipathy to Islam, Hellenism sympathy for classical Greece.

  Additionally, the present political moment, with its reams of racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim stereotypes (and no attacks on classical Greece), allows Lewis to deliver ahistorical and willful political assertions in the form of scholarly argument, a practice thoroughly in keeping with the least creditable aspects of old-fashioned colonialist Orientalism.3 Lewis’s work therefore is part of the present political, rather than purely intellectual, environment.

  To imply, as he does, that the branch of Orientalism dealing with Islam and the Arabs is a learned discipline that can therefore be compared with classical philology is as appropriate as comparing one of the many Israeli Arabists and Orientalists who have worked for the occupation authorities of the West Bank and Gaza with scholars like Wilamowitz or Mommsen. On the one hand Lewis wishes to reduce Islamic Orientalism to the status of an innocent and enthusiastic department of scholarship; on the other he wishes to pretend that Orientalism is too complex, various, and technical to exist in a form for any non-Orientalist (like myself and many others) to criticize. Lewis’s tactic here is to suppress a significant amount of history. As I suggest, European interest in Islam derived not from curiosity but from fear of a monotheistic, culturally and militarily formidable competitor to Christianity. The earliest European scholars of Islam, as numerous historians have shown, were medieval polemicists writing to ward off the threat of Muslim hordes and apostasy. In one way or another that combination of fear and hostility has persisted to the present day, both in scholarly and non-scholarly attention to an Islam which is viewed as belonging to a part of the world—the Orient—counterposed imaginatively, geographically, and historically against Europe and the West.

  The most interesting problems about Islamic or Arabic Orientalism are, first, the forms taken by the medieval vestiges that persist so tenaciously, and, second, the history and sociology of connections between Orientalism and the societies that produced it. There are strong affiliations between Orientalism and the literary imagination, for example, as well as the imperial consciousness. What is striking about many periods of European history is the traffic between what scholars and specialists wrote and what poets, novelists, politicians, and journalists then said about Islam. In addition—and this is the crucial point that Lewis refuses to deal with—there is a remarkable (but nonetheless intelligible) parallel between the rise of modern Orientalist scholarship and the acquisition of vast Eastern empires by Britain and France.

  Although the connection between a routine British classical education and the extension of the British empire is more complex than Lewis might suppose, no more glaring parallel exists between power and knowledge in the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism. Much of the information and knowledge about Islam and the Orient that was used by the colonial powers to justify their colonialism derived from Orientalist scholarship: a recent study by many contributors, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament,4 edited by Carl A. Breckenridge and Peter Van der Veer, demonstrates with copious documentation how Orientalist knowledge was used in the colonial administration of South Asia. A fairly consistent interchange still continues between area scholars, such as Orientalists, and government departments of foreign affairs. In addition, many of the stereotypes of Islamic and Arabic sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation, and splendor to be found in writers from John Buchan to V.S. Naipaul have also been presuppositions underlying the adjoining field of academic Orientalism. In contrast, the trade in clichés between Indology and Sinology, on the one hand, and general culture, on the other, is not quite as flourishing, although there are relationships and borrowings to be noted. Nor is there much similarity between what obtains among Western experts in Sinology and Indology and the fact that many professional scholars of Islam in Europe and the United States spend their lives studying the subject, yet still find it an impossible religion and culture to like, much less admire.

  To say, as Lewis and his imitators do, that all such observations are only a matter of espousing “fashionable causes” is not quite to address the question of why, for example, so many Islamic specialists were and still are routinely consulted by, and actively work for, governments whose designs in the Islamic world are economic exploitation, domination, or outright aggression, or why so many scholars of Islam—like Lewis himself—voluntarily feel that it is part of their duty to mount attacks on modern Arab or Islamic peoples with the pretense that “classical” Islamic culture can nevertheless be the object of disinterested scholarly concern. The spectacle of specialists in the history of medieval Islamic guilds being sent on State Department missions to brief area embassies on United States security interests in the Persian Gulf does not spontaneously suggest anything resembling the love of Hellas ascribed by Lewis to the supposedly cognate field of classical philology.

  It is therefore not surprising that the field of Islamic and Arabic Orientalism, always ready to deny its complicity with state power, had never until very recently produced an internal critique of the affiliations I have just been describing, and that Lewis can utter the amazing statement that a criticism of Orientalism would be “meaningless.” It is also not surprising that, with a few exceptions, most of the negative criticism my work has elicited from “specialists” has been, like Lewis’s, no more than banal description of a barony violated by a crude trespasser. The only specialists (again with a few exceptions) who attempted to deal with what I discuss—which is not only the content of Orientalism, but its relationships, affiliations, political tendencies, and worldview—were Sinologists, Indologists, and the younger generation of Middle East scholars, susceptible to newer influences and also to the political arguments that the critique of Orientalism entailed. One example is Benjam
in Schwartz of Harvard, who used the occasion of his 1982 presidential address to the Asian Studies Association not only to disagree with some of my criticism, but also to welcome my arguments intellectually.

  Many of the senior Arabists and Islamicists have responded with the aggrieved outrage that is for them a substitute for self-reflection; most use words such as “malign,” “dishonor,” “libel,” as if criticism itself were an impermissible violation of their sacrosanct academic preserve. In Lewis’s case the defense offered is an act of conspicuous bad faith, since more than most Orientalists he has been a passionate political partisan against Arab (and other) causes in such places as the U.S. Congress, Commentary, and elsewhere. The proper response to him must therefore include an account of what politically and sociologically he is all about when he pretends to be defending the “honor” of his field, a defense which, it will be evident enough, is an elaborate confection of ideological half-truths designed to mislead non-specialist readers.

  In short, the relationship between Islamic or Arab Orientalism and modern European culture can be studied without at the same time cataloguing every Orientalist who ever lived, every Orientalist tradition, or everything written by Orientalists, then lumping them together as rotten and worthless imperialism. I never did that anyway. It is beknighted to say that Orientalism is a conspiracy or to suggest that “the West” is evil: both are among the egregious fatuities that Lewis and one of his epigones, the Iraqi publicist K. Makiya, have had the temerity to ascribe to me. On the other hand it is hypocritical to suppress the cultural, political, ideological, and institutional contexts in which people write, think, and talk about the Orient, whether they are scholars or not. And as I said earlier, it is extremely important to understand that the reason Orientalism is opposed by so many thoughtful non-Westerners is that its modern discourse is correctly perceived as a discourse of power originating in an era of colonialism, the subject of an excellent recent symposium Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks.5 In this kind of discourse, based mainly upon the assumption that Islam is monolithic and unchanging and therefore marketable by “experts” for powerful domestic political interests, neither Muslims nor Arabs nor any of the other dehumanized lesser peoples recognize themselves as human beings or their observers as simple scholars. Most of all they see in the discourse of modern Orientalism and its counterparts in similar knowledges constructed for Native Americans and Africans a chronic tendency to deny, suppress, or distort the cultural context of such systems of thought in order to maintain the fiction of its scholarly disinterest.

  II

  Yet I would not want to suggest that, current though such views as Lewis’s may be, they are the only ones that have either emerged or been reinforced during the past decade and a half. Yes, it is true that ever since the demise of the Soviet Union there has been a rush by some scholars and journalists in the United States to find in an Orientalized Islam a new empire of evil. Consequently, both the electronic and print media have been awash with demeaning stereotypes that lump together Islam and terrorism, or Arabs and violence, or the Orient and tyranny. And there has also been a return in various parts of the Middle and Far East to nativist religion and primitive nationalism, one particularly disgraceful aspect of which is the continuing Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie. But this isn’t the whole picture, and what I want to do in the remaining part of this essay is to talk about new trends in scholarship, criticism, and interpretation that, although they accept the basic premises of my book, go well beyond it in ways, I think, that enrich our sense of the complexity of historical experience.

  None of those trends has emerged out of the blue, of course; nor have they gained the status of fully established knowledges and practices. The worldly context remains both perplexingly stirred-up and ideologically fraught, volatile, tense, changeable, and even murderous. Even though the Soviet Union has been dismembered and the Eastern European countries have attained political independence, patterns of power and dominance remain unsettlingly in evidence. The global south—once referred to romantically and even emotionally as the Third World—is enmeshed in a debt trap, broken into dozens of fractured or incoherent entities, beset with problems of poverty, disease, and underdevelopment that have increased in the past ten or fifteen years. Gone are the non-Aligned movement and the charismatic leaders who undertook decolonization and independence. An alarming pattern of ethnic conflict and local wars, not confined to the global south, as the tragic case of the Bosnians attests, has sprung up all over again. And in places like Central America, the Middle East, and Asia, the United States still remains the dominant power, with an anxious and still un-unified Europe straggling behind.

  Explanations for the current world scene and attempts to comprehend it culturally and politically have emerged in some strikingly dramatic ways. I have already mentioned fundamentalism. The secular equivalents are a return to nationalism and theories that stress the radical distinction—a falsely all-inclusive one, I believe—between different cultures and civilizations. Recently, for example, Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard University advanced the far from convincing proposition that Cold War bipolarism has been superseded by what he called the clash of civilizations, a thesis based on the premise that Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations, among several others, were rather like watertight compartments whose adherents were at bottom mainly interested in fending off all the others.6

  This is preposterous, since one of the great advances in modern cultural theory is the realization, almost universally acknowledged, that cultures are hybrid and heterogenous and, as I argued in Culture and Imperialism, that cultures and civilizations are so interrelated and interdependent as to beggar any unitary or simply delineated description of their individuality. How can one today speak of “Western civilization” except as in large measure an ideological fiction, implying a sort of detached superiority for a handful of values and ideas, none of which has much meaning outside the history of conquest, immigration, travel, and the mingling of peoples that gave the Western nations their present mixed identities? This is especially true of the United States, which today cannot seriously be described except as an enormous palimpsest of different races and cultures sharing a problematic history of conquests, exterminations, and of course major cultural and political achievements. And this was one of the implied messages of Orientalism, that any attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences exposes not only the misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but also the way in which understanding is complicit with the power to produce such things as the “Orient” or the “West.”

  Not that Huntington, and behind him all the theorists and apologists of an exultant Western tradition, like Francis Fukuyama, haven’t retained a good deal of their hold on the public consciousness. They have, as is evident in the symptomatic case of Paul Johnson, once a Left intellectual, now a retrograde social and political polemicist. In the April 18, 1993, issue of The New York Times Magazine, by no means a marginal publication, Johnson published an essay entitled “Colonialism’s Back—And Not a Moment Too Soon,” whose main idea was that “the civilized nations” ought to take it upon themselves to re-colonize Third World countries “where the most basic conditions of civilized life had broken down,” and to do this by means of a system of imposed trusteeships. His model is explicitly a nineteenth century colonial one where, he says, in order for the Europeans to trade profitably they had to impose political order.

  Johnson’s argument has numerous subterranean echoes in the works of U.S. policy-makers, the media, and of course U.S. foreign policy itself, which remains interventionist in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, and frankly missionary everywhere else, especially with regard to its policies toward Russia and; the former Soviet republics. The important point, however, is that a largely unexamined but serious rift has opened in the public consciousness between the old ideas of Western hegemony (of which the system of Oriental
ism was a part) on the one hand, and newer ideas that have taken hold among subaltern and disadvantaged communities and among a wide sector of intellectuals, academics, and artists, on the other. It is now very strikingly no longer the case that the lesser peoples—formerly colonized, enslaved, suppressed—are silent or unaccounted for except by senior European or American males. There has been a revolution in the consciousness of women, minorities, and marginals so powerful as to affect mainstream thinking worldwide. Although I had some sense of it when I was working on Orientalism in the 1970s, it is now so dramatically apparent as to demand the attention of everyone seriously concerned with the scholarly and theoretical study of culture.

  Two broad currents can be distinguished: post-colonialism and post-modernism, both in their use of the word “post” suggesting not so much the sense of going beyond but rather, as Ella Shohat puts it in a seminal article on the post-colonial, suggesting “continuities and discontinuities, but its emphasis is on the new modes and forms of the old colonialist practices, not on a ‘beyond’.”7 Both post-colonialism and post-modernism emerged as related topics of engagement and investigation during the 1980s and, in many instances, seemed to take account of such works as Orientalism as antecedents. It would be impossible here to get into the immense terminological debates that surround both words, some of them dwelling at length on whether the phrases should or should not be hyphenated. The point here is therefore not to talk about isolated instances of excess or risible jargon, but to locate those currents and efforts which, from the perspective of a book published in 1978, seem to some extent now to involve it in 1994.