Edward Said's Orientalism
The word Oriental is associated with the Eastern part of the world and specifically the East Asian nations. For Said however, the Orient consists only of the Arabic World. Orientalism discusses how Arab is portrayed by America and Europe and how it results in a misunderstanding about an Arabic or middle-eastern identity. In the 21st century, when issues like the Israel - Palestine conflict are at their peak, Orientalism has some interesting arguments to think about. For my purpose, I've referred to Said's interview on Orientalism with Sut Jhally, University of Massachusetts- Amherst.
Said's Orientalism was published in 1978, and it tries to answer, in Sut Jhally's words,' when we think of the Middle East for example, we have a preconceived notion of what kind of people live there, what they believe, how they act'. The basic argument of Orientalism, therefore, is that 'the way we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests.' In Sut Jhally's words, Orientalism asks 'how do we come to understand people, strangers, who look different to us by virtue of the color of their skin?'
'Said argues that the way the West, Europe and the U.S. looks at the countries and peoples of the Middle East is through a lens that distorts the actual reality of those places and those people. He calls this lens through which we view that part of the world Orientalism, a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and the strange; to make the peoples of the Middle East appear different and threatening.' So, the basic idea is to understand how the Occident views the Orient and how its perceptions about these identities result in becoming stereotypes about the people of Middle-East.
In the introductory section of the interview Said talks about how the idea of Orientalism was conceived when he felt a disparity between his experience of being an Arab and the representations of that he saw in art.
The Repertory of Orientalism:
Said traces the stereotyping of the orient to the 1850s and 1860s, when, if somebody in Paris or London wished to read or talk about India, Egypt or Syria, ' there would be very little chance for that person to simply address the subject, as we like to think in a kind of free and creative way'. To put it in his words:
" A great deal of writing had gone before and this writing was an organized form of writing, like an organized science. What I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up: The sensual woman who is there to be sort of used by the man, the East as a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters, you know, “the marvels of the East,” was a phrase that was used. And the more I looked the more I saw that this was really quite consistent with itself. It have very little to do with people who had actually been there. And even if they had been there, there wasn't much modification. In other words you didn't get what you could call realistic representations of the Orient, either in literature or in painting or in music or any of the arts."
Now, we already know how stories or literature at large, has the power to affect people's opinions and perspectives. And if this was the case, Middle-East, in Said's opinion has suffered the most as can be understood by the above statement. Further, this stereotyping has continued in newer and newer forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What exactly then, these representations mean? Said answers it by arguing that this would lead to a theory that:
"Orientals are all the same no matter where you find them, whether it's in India, or Syria, or in Egypt, it's basically the same assets. So there develops a kind of image of the timeless Orient, as if the Orient, unlike the West, doesn't develop, it stays the same. And that's one of the problems with Orientalism is it creates an image outside of history, of something that is placid and still and eternal. Which is simply contradicted by the fact of history. In one sense it's a creation of you might say, an ideal Other for Europe."
Thus once these representations are circulated through art and media they result into the creation of more and more generalizations regarding the Oriental identity, as they are not based on an objective understanding of history or any actual encounter with those identities.
Orientalism and Empire:
Said's Orientalism was published in 1978, and it tries to answer, in Sut Jhally's words,' when we think of the Middle East for example, we have a preconceived notion of what kind of people live there, what they believe, how they act'. The basic argument of Orientalism, therefore, is that 'the way we acquire this knowledge is not innocent or objective but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests.' In Sut Jhally's words, Orientalism asks 'how do we come to understand people, strangers, who look different to us by virtue of the color of their skin?'
'Said argues that the way the West, Europe and the U.S. looks at the countries and peoples of the Middle East is through a lens that distorts the actual reality of those places and those people. He calls this lens through which we view that part of the world Orientalism, a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and the strange; to make the peoples of the Middle East appear different and threatening.' So, the basic idea is to understand how the Occident views the Orient and how its perceptions about these identities result in becoming stereotypes about the people of Middle-East.
In the introductory section of the interview Said talks about how the idea of Orientalism was conceived when he felt a disparity between his experience of being an Arab and the representations of that he saw in art.
The Repertory of Orientalism:
Said traces the stereotyping of the orient to the 1850s and 1860s, when, if somebody in Paris or London wished to read or talk about India, Egypt or Syria, ' there would be very little chance for that person to simply address the subject, as we like to think in a kind of free and creative way'. To put it in his words:
" A great deal of writing had gone before and this writing was an organized form of writing, like an organized science. What I've called Orientalism. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up: The sensual woman who is there to be sort of used by the man, the East as a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and monsters, you know, “the marvels of the East,” was a phrase that was used. And the more I looked the more I saw that this was really quite consistent with itself. It have very little to do with people who had actually been there. And even if they had been there, there wasn't much modification. In other words you didn't get what you could call realistic representations of the Orient, either in literature or in painting or in music or any of the arts."
Now, we already know how stories or literature at large, has the power to affect people's opinions and perspectives. And if this was the case, Middle-East, in Said's opinion has suffered the most as can be understood by the above statement. Further, this stereotyping has continued in newer and newer forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What exactly then, these representations mean? Said answers it by arguing that this would lead to a theory that:
"Orientals are all the same no matter where you find them, whether it's in India, or Syria, or in Egypt, it's basically the same assets. So there develops a kind of image of the timeless Orient, as if the Orient, unlike the West, doesn't develop, it stays the same. And that's one of the problems with Orientalism is it creates an image outside of history, of something that is placid and still and eternal. Which is simply contradicted by the fact of history. In one sense it's a creation of you might say, an ideal Other for Europe."
Thus once these representations are circulated through art and media they result into the creation of more and more generalizations regarding the Oriental identity, as they are not based on an objective understanding of history or any actual encounter with those identities.
Orientalism and Empire:
Power creates knowledge. This Foucaultian idea helps Said to prove how Orientalism began and is still functioning. Orientalism as mentioned earlier, finds the roots of its stereotyping in the times of colonialism. And when it comes to empire building, or colonialist rule in the East, two major names come up, i.e British and French. Sut Jhally mentions how these two empires ruled not just politically or culturally, but also ideologically. To explain this with Jhally's words:
"They conquer not only militarily but also what we could call ideologically. The question for these empires is: How do we understand the natives we are encountering so we can conquer and subdue them easier? This process of using large abstract categories to explain people who look different, whose skin is a different color, has been going on for a long time, as far back as there has been contact between different cultures and peoples. But Orientalism makes this general process more formal in that it presents itself as objective knowledge."
Said explains his arguments through the example of Napoleon's annexation of Egypt. To put it in Sut Jhally's words,' Said identifies Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798 as marking a new kind of imperial and colonial conquest, that inaugurates the project of Orientalism'.
Now what was this new kind of imperial conquest? To explain it briefly, Said points out that Napoleon, did not come to Egypt with just the amount of soldiers needed to conquer the nation, but rather with large numbers of scientists, botanists, architects, philologists, historians, etc. The aim was to record and do a kind of survey of Egypt, which was designed not for the Egyptian but for the European. Thus, since Napoleon was in power, he could produce, popularize and circulate, the knowledge about the nation as well as the people living there. Said concludes this idea with the statement: ' To produce knowledge you have to have the power to be there, and to see in expert ways things that the natives themselves can't see'.
American Orientalism:
There are different kinds of Orientalisms. Yes. The differences, among them, in Said's words,'are in effect the differences between different experiences of what is called the Orient'. He explains how, the British and French Orientalisms are based on their long imperial rule over places like India and therefore on an actual encounter with the natives of those places. Whereas, for the Americans, it is indirect and in Said's words, 'much more based on abstractions'.
Another important matter for American Orientalism is that it is 'very politicized by the presence of Israel for which America is the main ally'. Now, here is where Said focuses on the Israel-Palestine issue which continues to exist even today. Watch the following video to know what the actual conflict is about:
So, it's not a religious conflict as we're accustomed to think. It is rather a matter of national sentiments of two communities and their wish to have their own distinct nation. Since this is understood, Said's following arguments would become easy to understand:
"And what you have in effect the creation of Jewish state in the middle of the Islamic Oriental world. And the sense that because it's a Jewish state and a Western state, self-declared, there is a greater coincidence between American interests there than there is between American interests in lets say in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are important because of oil."
What these interests would lead to is the projection of the Arab world as cruel and threatening. So, it's not an objective understanding of the conflict which an American is subjected to but a generalized and naturalized projection which works in the favour of a certain identity and against the other. Consequently, to put it in Said's words, 'it is virtually impossible for an American to see on television, to read books, to see films about the Middle East, that are not colored politically by this conflict, in which the Arabs almost always play the role of terrorists and violent people and irrational and so on and so forth'.
Orientalism Today- Demonization of Islam in the news and popular culture:
Now, how does this work? Of course through media and popular culture. Although during the publication of the book, media wasn't as developed as it is today, the matters which Said talks about are quite the same and in fact have doubled since then.Today, because of the popular social media, these issues have heightened more than they already were. Just think about the kind of messages you receive on Whatsapp regarding the status quo of Syria for example. Or for fundamental level how would you respond if someone's going to business to the Middle East (in this case places like Dubai)? Or think about your reaction to someone from the Middle-East who wants to befriend you on Facebook? Or think about the projection of a Middle-Eastern identity in a movie? These might seem like trivial issues but they reflect how you think about these identities. And Orientalism answers the why question.
The picture of Islamic Terrorism is so clear in the mind of the people all across the world that it becomes difficult for an Islamic identity to leave a place, without being looked at with suspicion. Sut Jhally mentions how, ' At the heart of how this new American Orientalism operates is a threatening and demonized figure of the Islamic terrorist that is emphasized by journalists and Hollywood'.
Said isn't all together denying that terrorism doesn't exist. His aim is rather to point out, in Sut Jhally's words, 'there is a lot more going on there that is misunderstood or not seen by the peoples of the West. The result of the media's focus on one negative aspect alone means that all the peoples of the Islamic world come to be understood in the same negative and paranoid way, that is, as a threat. So that when we think of people who look like that and come from that part of the world we think fanatic, extreme, violent. Said argues that understanding a vast and complex region like the Middle East in this narrow way takes away from the humanity and diversity of millions of ordinary people living decent and humane lives there'.
Said explains this through the example of broadcasting of the Iranian Revolution on television and popular media, when he was working on his book Covering Islam:
"What I discovered was a huge arsenal of images employed by the media, large masses of people waving their fists, black banners, the stern-faced Khomeini, all of them giving the impression of the utmost negative, sort of evil emanation. So the impression you got of Islam was that it was a frightening mysterious, above all threatening, as if the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans".
The situation at hand worsened by the time of the attack on the World Trade Center. Said argues that the same generalizations were never made for instance, after the Oklahoma City bombing. Now what consequently happened because of these generalized broadcasting was that the Islamic religion and its teachings, started getting associated with terrorism and ' the demonization of Islam allowed for very little distinction between piety, lets say, and violence'.
This proves that what we call independent media is not actually independent. And is rather controlled by the ruling government or those in power. Said further argues how the repetition of such demonic images of Islam affects people's perspectives and how in the process, the human side of the same religion as well as that of the Arabic world is forgotten. And this repetition is not restricted to journalism but rather it is also found in the entertainment industry. Think about, for example, animated shows like Arabian Nights or Disney movies like Aladdin.
Then of course there is the issue of whether the Arabic world full of terrorists? Said correctly argues that 'there are terrorists as there are everywhere, but you know, there's a lot more going on there'.
Said further explains how such generalized presentations are necessary, politically:
'There is very little in common that you can talk about as Islam, let's say, between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, I mean they are both Muslim countries but, you know, the difference is in history and language and traditions and so on. It's so vast that the word Islam has, at best, a tenuous meaning. The same is true within the Arab world. I mean Morocco is very different from Saudi Arabia. Algeria is very different from Egypt. And I would argue and in fact have argued, that the predominant mood of the Arab world is very secular. It's easy to attract attention and certainly the media's attention for some of the political reasons that are obvious. I mean, to discredit the Arabs to make them seem like a threat to the West, to keep the idea around at the end of the Cold War, that, you know, there are foreign devils. Otherwise what are we doing this gigantic military? You know, this huge military budget that is twice as much as an entire world's military budget combined'.
'So you have to have threat. And the result is it's very hard to find words that are sympathetic to the Arabs and Islam. Islam is seen as the enemy of Christianity and the United States sees itself as a Christian or a Judeo-Christian country, in affiliation with Israel and that Islam is the great enemy. The competitor'.
Said also mentions how the Arabs have, in his words,'allowed themselves to be represented as Orientals in this Orientalist way'. All 22 Arabic countries are dictatorships without democracy, as Said mentions, and are in desperate need of US patronage; and therefore have no information policy to tell the world that their world is not what they are seeing or thinking. So, of course, they would allow themselves to be portrayed the way they are, because they aren't in a position to critique or question the authority or power, which in this case is with the United States.
Conclusion with the Palestinian question:
Since, we've already discussed about the basics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, let's see what is Said's approach to the issue and also find out how, in his opinion this Orientalism issue can be solved or at least managed.
Sut Jhally mentions that Said is not just a literary theorist he is also an active representative of the Palestinian people. So, we know how to analyze his arguments further. As Jhally says, "One of the things that drives Said is the quest for justice and a homeland for the Palestinian people. And there is a close connection between Said's intellectual work and his political activism. As he himself remarks, he wrote three books that he thinks of as a trilogy and that in his mind are closely connected together, Orientalism, Covering Islam, and The Question of Palestine. He believes that finding a peaceful, humane and just solution to the conflicts in the Middle East, that is finding an answer to the Question of Palestine, will require overcoming the racist legacy of Orientalism that stresses the separation of people from each other, that regards difference as a threat that must be contained or destroyed".
Jhally also mentions how 'In seeking a way out of this legacy of mistrust and conflict, Said draws upon the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who gives us the tools to think about these difficult issues in more productive and humane ways'.
Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks presents certain ideas which influenced Said to a great extent. One of them being the idea of history. History in Gramsci's opinion 'deposits in us our own history'. That when we learn history, we also learn about our own history, i.e family history, nation's history, tradition's history, so on and so forth. However, there is no inventory or guide to such histories. And therefore, we should try to 'compile an inventory'. Meaning we should make sense out of our own history. To put this into Said's words: 'It's a task of giving history some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that my history is better than yours, or my history is worse than yours. I'm a victim and you're somebody who's oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in terms of other people's history, in other words to try to understand, to move beyond, to generalize one's own individual experience to the experience of others'.
Thus, for Said the answer to the Palestinian question is the idea of co-existence. Co-existing with people who are different from us in every aspect, i.e religion, language, tradition, etc. And a proper and objective interpretation of history can help us in doing this.
As for me, now that I've looked at and understood the various aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict and also how generalizations regarding a certain identity affects people's perspectives, I agree with Said to a great extent. However, this is not going to be the end of the discussion. Said's book came in 1978, and although it is relevant in our times, many things have changed after that.
Now what was this new kind of imperial conquest? To explain it briefly, Said points out that Napoleon, did not come to Egypt with just the amount of soldiers needed to conquer the nation, but rather with large numbers of scientists, botanists, architects, philologists, historians, etc. The aim was to record and do a kind of survey of Egypt, which was designed not for the Egyptian but for the European. Thus, since Napoleon was in power, he could produce, popularize and circulate, the knowledge about the nation as well as the people living there. Said concludes this idea with the statement: ' To produce knowledge you have to have the power to be there, and to see in expert ways things that the natives themselves can't see'.
American Orientalism:
There are different kinds of Orientalisms. Yes. The differences, among them, in Said's words,'are in effect the differences between different experiences of what is called the Orient'. He explains how, the British and French Orientalisms are based on their long imperial rule over places like India and therefore on an actual encounter with the natives of those places. Whereas, for the Americans, it is indirect and in Said's words, 'much more based on abstractions'.
Another important matter for American Orientalism is that it is 'very politicized by the presence of Israel for which America is the main ally'. Now, here is where Said focuses on the Israel-Palestine issue which continues to exist even today. Watch the following video to know what the actual conflict is about:
So, it's not a religious conflict as we're accustomed to think. It is rather a matter of national sentiments of two communities and their wish to have their own distinct nation. Since this is understood, Said's following arguments would become easy to understand:
"And what you have in effect the creation of Jewish state in the middle of the Islamic Oriental world. And the sense that because it's a Jewish state and a Western state, self-declared, there is a greater coincidence between American interests there than there is between American interests in lets say in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which are important because of oil."
What these interests would lead to is the projection of the Arab world as cruel and threatening. So, it's not an objective understanding of the conflict which an American is subjected to but a generalized and naturalized projection which works in the favour of a certain identity and against the other. Consequently, to put it in Said's words, 'it is virtually impossible for an American to see on television, to read books, to see films about the Middle East, that are not colored politically by this conflict, in which the Arabs almost always play the role of terrorists and violent people and irrational and so on and so forth'.
Orientalism Today- Demonization of Islam in the news and popular culture:
Now, how does this work? Of course through media and popular culture. Although during the publication of the book, media wasn't as developed as it is today, the matters which Said talks about are quite the same and in fact have doubled since then.Today, because of the popular social media, these issues have heightened more than they already were. Just think about the kind of messages you receive on Whatsapp regarding the status quo of Syria for example. Or for fundamental level how would you respond if someone's going to business to the Middle East (in this case places like Dubai)? Or think about your reaction to someone from the Middle-East who wants to befriend you on Facebook? Or think about the projection of a Middle-Eastern identity in a movie? These might seem like trivial issues but they reflect how you think about these identities. And Orientalism answers the why question.
The picture of Islamic Terrorism is so clear in the mind of the people all across the world that it becomes difficult for an Islamic identity to leave a place, without being looked at with suspicion. Sut Jhally mentions how, ' At the heart of how this new American Orientalism operates is a threatening and demonized figure of the Islamic terrorist that is emphasized by journalists and Hollywood'.
Said isn't all together denying that terrorism doesn't exist. His aim is rather to point out, in Sut Jhally's words, 'there is a lot more going on there that is misunderstood or not seen by the peoples of the West. The result of the media's focus on one negative aspect alone means that all the peoples of the Islamic world come to be understood in the same negative and paranoid way, that is, as a threat. So that when we think of people who look like that and come from that part of the world we think fanatic, extreme, violent. Said argues that understanding a vast and complex region like the Middle East in this narrow way takes away from the humanity and diversity of millions of ordinary people living decent and humane lives there'.
Said explains this through the example of broadcasting of the Iranian Revolution on television and popular media, when he was working on his book Covering Islam:
"What I discovered was a huge arsenal of images employed by the media, large masses of people waving their fists, black banners, the stern-faced Khomeini, all of them giving the impression of the utmost negative, sort of evil emanation. So the impression you got of Islam was that it was a frightening mysterious, above all threatening, as if the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans".
The situation at hand worsened by the time of the attack on the World Trade Center. Said argues that the same generalizations were never made for instance, after the Oklahoma City bombing. Now what consequently happened because of these generalized broadcasting was that the Islamic religion and its teachings, started getting associated with terrorism and ' the demonization of Islam allowed for very little distinction between piety, lets say, and violence'.
This proves that what we call independent media is not actually independent. And is rather controlled by the ruling government or those in power. Said further argues how the repetition of such demonic images of Islam affects people's perspectives and how in the process, the human side of the same religion as well as that of the Arabic world is forgotten. And this repetition is not restricted to journalism but rather it is also found in the entertainment industry. Think about, for example, animated shows like Arabian Nights or Disney movies like Aladdin.
Then of course there is the issue of whether the Arabic world full of terrorists? Said correctly argues that 'there are terrorists as there are everywhere, but you know, there's a lot more going on there'.
Said further explains how such generalized presentations are necessary, politically:
'There is very little in common that you can talk about as Islam, let's say, between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, I mean they are both Muslim countries but, you know, the difference is in history and language and traditions and so on. It's so vast that the word Islam has, at best, a tenuous meaning. The same is true within the Arab world. I mean Morocco is very different from Saudi Arabia. Algeria is very different from Egypt. And I would argue and in fact have argued, that the predominant mood of the Arab world is very secular. It's easy to attract attention and certainly the media's attention for some of the political reasons that are obvious. I mean, to discredit the Arabs to make them seem like a threat to the West, to keep the idea around at the end of the Cold War, that, you know, there are foreign devils. Otherwise what are we doing this gigantic military? You know, this huge military budget that is twice as much as an entire world's military budget combined'.
'So you have to have threat. And the result is it's very hard to find words that are sympathetic to the Arabs and Islam. Islam is seen as the enemy of Christianity and the United States sees itself as a Christian or a Judeo-Christian country, in affiliation with Israel and that Islam is the great enemy. The competitor'.
Said also mentions how the Arabs have, in his words,'allowed themselves to be represented as Orientals in this Orientalist way'. All 22 Arabic countries are dictatorships without democracy, as Said mentions, and are in desperate need of US patronage; and therefore have no information policy to tell the world that their world is not what they are seeing or thinking. So, of course, they would allow themselves to be portrayed the way they are, because they aren't in a position to critique or question the authority or power, which in this case is with the United States.
Conclusion with the Palestinian question:
Since, we've already discussed about the basics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, let's see what is Said's approach to the issue and also find out how, in his opinion this Orientalism issue can be solved or at least managed.
Sut Jhally mentions that Said is not just a literary theorist he is also an active representative of the Palestinian people. So, we know how to analyze his arguments further. As Jhally says, "One of the things that drives Said is the quest for justice and a homeland for the Palestinian people. And there is a close connection between Said's intellectual work and his political activism. As he himself remarks, he wrote three books that he thinks of as a trilogy and that in his mind are closely connected together, Orientalism, Covering Islam, and The Question of Palestine. He believes that finding a peaceful, humane and just solution to the conflicts in the Middle East, that is finding an answer to the Question of Palestine, will require overcoming the racist legacy of Orientalism that stresses the separation of people from each other, that regards difference as a threat that must be contained or destroyed".
Jhally also mentions how 'In seeking a way out of this legacy of mistrust and conflict, Said draws upon the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who gives us the tools to think about these difficult issues in more productive and humane ways'.
Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks presents certain ideas which influenced Said to a great extent. One of them being the idea of history. History in Gramsci's opinion 'deposits in us our own history'. That when we learn history, we also learn about our own history, i.e family history, nation's history, tradition's history, so on and so forth. However, there is no inventory or guide to such histories. And therefore, we should try to 'compile an inventory'. Meaning we should make sense out of our own history. To put this into Said's words: 'It's a task of giving history some shape and sense, for a particular reason, not just to show that my history is better than yours, or my history is worse than yours. I'm a victim and you're somebody who's oppressed people or so on, but rather, to understand my history in terms of other people's history, in other words to try to understand, to move beyond, to generalize one's own individual experience to the experience of others'.
Thus, for Said the answer to the Palestinian question is the idea of co-existence. Co-existing with people who are different from us in every aspect, i.e religion, language, tradition, etc. And a proper and objective interpretation of history can help us in doing this.
As for me, now that I've looked at and understood the various aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict and also how generalizations regarding a certain identity affects people's perspectives, I agree with Said to a great extent. However, this is not going to be the end of the discussion. Said's book came in 1978, and although it is relevant in our times, many things have changed after that.
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