Orientalism is a work of intellectual history, based on readings of an enormous range of literary and scholarly texts. If they were, they would be much easier to deconstruct and dislodge.
Quite the reverse, classical Orientalism drew upon elements of positive knowledge and scholarship, work that was often admiring of—at times, even besotted with—its object. And the aim of Orientalism as a system of representations, sometimes explicit, more often implicit, was to produce an Other, the better to secure the stability and supremacy of the Western self.
The syndrome is very much in evidence today. Orientalism is a foreign ambassador in an Arab city belittling popular concern about Palestine and depicting Arabs as a docile mass who only woke up in , during the Arab revolts, and then reverted to being a disappointment to a benevolent West that merely seeks to be a good tutor. It can be expressed in a variety of ways: sometimes as an explicit bias, sometimes as a subtle inflection, like the tone color in a piece of music; sometimes erupting in the heat of argument, like the revenge of the repressed.
But the Orientalism of today, both in its sensibility and in its manner of production, is not quite the same as the Orientalism Said discussed forty years ago. Orientalism is, at its core, a critique of the expert , the producer of knowledge about the Arab-Islamic world, from Flaubert and Montesquieu to Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes. The cast—and quality—of characters changes; their aim, however, remains pretty consistent.
Said was obviously more interested in explaining continuity than change, because he was trying to establish the existence of an ideological tradition.
Still, he understood that Orientalism was a dynamic and supple system of representations, that as a style it had a wide array of expressions, and that it held up a mirror to its time. This ability to shift register depending on political context has been a key to its resilience and vitality.
After September 11, , the Bush administration reacted with a kind of Orientalist frenzy, heralding the liberation of Muslim women among its reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, and applying the insights of Raphael Patai, that expert on the so-called Arab mind, to the torture tactics employed at Abu Ghraib. Under President Obama, the grip of Orientalism appeared to relax.
But even the message of his famous Cairo address in was filtered through an Orientalist prism, albeit a more liberal, multicultural one. Not a few listeners in the region wished that he had addressed them as citizens of their respective countries rather than as Muslims—not only because some of them were Christians or atheists, but because religion is but one marker of identity, and not always the most pertinent one. An extraordinary demonstration of this came less than two years later in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt.
The Arab uprisings raised a great number of demands—democracy, rule of law, equal citizenship, bread and freedom—but religious demands were not among them.
Then came the so-called Arab winter. Since then, the rise of the Islamic State, or Daesh, and the resurgence of Salafism have helped restore the old prism, the Orientalism of rigid and immutable difference, just as surely as they helped restore the old regimes. Arab and Muslim leaders also contributed to the reconsolidation of this distorting lens. Orientalism has long been a co-production, even though not all its producers have equal power. This trend has continued under Trump, but there has also been rupture.
The expeditionary force that Napoleon Bonaparte sent to Egypt in included scientists and intellectuals, among them a handful of professional Orientalists. The history of Orientalism is rich in tales of Westerners assuming Oriental masquerade, as if they wanted to become, and not simply to master, the Other.
These were vain hopes. In the nearly 40 years since Orientalism first appeared, the Middle East, the Arabs and Islam have continued to fuel enormous change, struggle, controversy and, most recently, warfare. Said always longed for elegance and sophistication in argument. But he was unrepentant. Moreover, humanism is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters and other societies and periods: strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an isolated humanist.
As the US and the western powers continue to grapple with the crisis of Islam in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, while desperately appeasing the oil-rich princes of Arabia, Orientalism will remain the text to which the Foreign Office and the State Department will have to return to replenish their search for mutual understanding in the conflict between east and west. With great elegance and clarity, he argued for intellectual progress. The Latest Phase.
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