Domhnall

As we watch America and its allies reproducing cycles of violence, despotism and mayhem across the Middle East, it is blindingly obvious that there is something profoundly wrong with the way Western governments think and act in that region. Edward Said sets out in this book an account of two centuries of work by so called 'Orientalists' and demonstrates that the advice they have been offering is blindly racist and unreliable in the extreme. While the West continues to rely on this appalling band of self appointed experts for guidance, the Four Horses of the Apocalypse will remain in secure employment.

The book was first published in 1978. There is no suggestion of the US taking Edward Said's advice and sacking the Orientalists he has debunked. There is plenty of evidence of the US getting almost everything wrong since then. At some point one would imagine that such a powerful nation would do a reality check. Since that has not happened, it is at least helpful to understand what is wrong.

From the Eighth Century to the Sixteenth, various Islamic powers governed a vast area between (at the most expansive) Spain and the borders of China and there was continuous pressure between Christians and Muslims along the land borders with eastern Europe and throughout the Mediterranean Sea. The people of Europe had good reason to fear the East. Yet there was always interaction through trade as well as warfare, so it is hard to understand why ignorance of the East need have been as great as it was. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy makes the assumption that the great Muslim philosophers had never heard of Jesus and so could be forgiven their lack of Christian faith, whereas of course Islam is based on shared old testament sources and the Koran explicitly discusses its association with Jews and Christians. It seems that there is always something wilful in the failure to understand or to give recognition to the culture and belief systems of others.

In the Nineteenth Century, Europeans developed an academic discipline known as “Orientalism,” devoted to the language, history and culture of a geographical area extending through North Africa and the Middle East, India, Indochina, Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia, much of the former Russian Empire and more besides. This new interest was motivated for Britain through its involvement with India and for France it took off with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, because the need to understand went hand in hand with an intention to administer and to rule. What all those diverse regions and peoples had in common was primarily their potential availability as colonial subjects. In order to reduce them to the status of subjects, it was desirable to reduce them first to the status of being “Oriental.” To this end, Europeans brought wilful ignorance and misrepresentation to new depths.

Napoleon in Egypt is remembered as much as anything for the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and an early, great achievement of Orientalism was to master the ancient languages of Egypt, India, Persia, and to unravel enough of the early history of civilisation to invite radical new thinking about the status of different peoples in relation to each other. Indeed, making comparisons was a major feature of the way Orientalism would proceed. The notion arose that, from its early roots in the East, civilisation passed to the Europeans, while the people of the East failed to build on their early achievements and the Semitic people, Jews and Arabs, remained rooted in their early, religious and seemingly quite childish phase of development, unable to go further. Orientalists were disappointed in the failure of Orientals to achieve or even to be aware of their potential but were able instead to demonstrate how right it was that the white Europeans should take up the burden of governing and in time educating their Oriental counterparts, albeit “The Arab” was almost certainly incapable of benefiting from such an education.

This curious line of reasoning illustrates a paradox by which great learning could go hand in hand with severe misrepresentation and distortion of evidence in favour of an ideological purpose. In an extensive review of writing by many different authors taking as their subject “The Orient,” Edward Said exposes the production and recycling of myths and lies: “In a sense, the limitations of Orientalism .. follow upon disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region.” [p108] What the Western, self-styled science of Orientalism offered was nothing less (and little more) than a systematic smear. Writer after writer issued generalizations about the essence of “The Arab” or “The Oriental” or “The East” which could not possibly match any real person or place because the geographical area included under this concept was vast and comprised a plethora of profoundly different physical and social environments, with an immense weight of history and cultural achievements that, taken together, defy simplification and cannot reasonably be reduced to any single category or description that is valid for all that is embraced within the concept. The best to be said for the notion of an Orient is that it is not European, but the Orientalist does not comment either on the complexity of what Europe contains. ”...The notion that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically “different” inhabitants who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence is equally a highly debatable idea…. And yet despite its failures, its lamentable jargon, its scarcely concealed racism, its paper-thin intellectual apparatus, Orientalism flourishes today.”[p322]

In its origins, Orientalism was a largely literary and academic discipline but it nevertheless held very direct political objectives in mind and was intended to inform and justify the project of imperial expansion, by which Europeans came to control some 85% of the globe. Balfour’s speech to Parliament on June 13, 1910, captures sufficiently well the way Orientalism tied into empire:

The point I am trying to press on the House is this. We have got, as I think, to deal with nations who, as far as our knowledge goes, have always been governed in the manner we call absolute, and have never had what we are accustomed to call free institutions or self-government. They have never had it; they have never, apparently, desired it. There is no evidence that until we indoctrinated them with the political philosophy, not always very profound, which has been in fashion in this country, they ever had the desire or the ambition which the hon. Member opposite very naturally and properly wishes that they should have. The time may come when they will adopt, not merely our superficial philosophy, but our genuine practice. But after 3,000, 4,000, or 5,000 years of known history, and unlimited centuries of unknown history have been passed by these nations under a different system, it is not thirty years of British rule which is going to alter the character bred into them by this immemorial tradition.
If that be true, is it or is it not a good thing for these great nations—I admit their greatness—that this absolute Government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing. I think experience shows that they have got under it a far better government than in the whole history of the world they ever had before, and which not only is a benefit to them, but is undoubtedly a benefit to the whole of the civilised West. ……..
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1910/jun/13/consolidated-fund-no-2-bill#S5CV0017P0_19100613_HOC_381

The Orientalist myth was not only propagated by European supporters of imperialism but also by its European enemies. Karl Marx shared a comparable Orientalist perspective, when - writing in 1853 - he analysed Britain’s role in India. ”Now, sickening as it must be to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units,.. and their individual members losing their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities … had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies… The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

Orientalism, in order to function academically, evolved a web of authorities and references, such that it was self-reinforcing rather than empirically tested. A common set of labels and loaded assumptions has been passed down and remains alive because it meets the needs of its intended audience. Of course, over time there have been major changes in the external realities confronting the Orientalist, as the British and French empires have shrivelled while the interest of America in controlling much of the globe has taken their place. In line with the changing realities, Said comments that it is no longer accepted to make racist generalisations about Africans, Indians, the Chinese or the Japanese, but Orientalism has remained alive and entirely respectable in Western treatment of the Islamic world and the near East. Under the revised label of Area Studies, American policy towards the Middle East is shaped by the very same racist generalizations. While there is clearly far less excuse for such shabby academic productions in the modern environment compared with that of the Nineteenth Century, America’s interest in oil and support for the state of Israel provides the same incentive to dismiss complexity and to treat the region as an imperial property, incapable of mature self government, more suited to despotism.

The point about Orientalism is not that it is wrong (of course it is wrong) but that it is absurd. Edward Said does not set about correcting its errors by offering a better interpretation of what “The Arab” really thinks or what “The Orient” is really like or what “Islam” really demands. The subject matter of Orientalism is a fantasy and it does not require a correct interpretation, it requires dismissal. Patiently reviewing a long line of writers and theorists, the task Said sets himself is precisely that - to debunk their theories and expose their absurdity.

To be honest, the resulting book is very long, detailed and frequently very dry. My early reaction was that it ought to be far more brief and should set out its arguments more concisely. I persisted to the end, however, and came to appreciate that the point of this book is not the argument - which is simple enough in all fairness - but the sheer scale of the evidence, the industrial level production by Orientalist academics and advisers to the governments of the west of racist nonsense that flatters and feeds the imperial monster while insulting, demoralising and dehumanising its subjects. It is an exhausting book to read but an important one.