Orientalism is a book published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been highly influential and controversial

in postcolonial studies and other fields. In the book, Said effectively redefined the term Orientalism to mean a
constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of
scholarship is marked by a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their
culture. He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western
culture had served as an implicit justification for European and the American colonial and imperial ambitions.
Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists ideas
of Arabic culture.
So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and
Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human
density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is
to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic
world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.
Edward Said
A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but
from preconceived archetypes that envision all Eastern societies as fundamentally similar to one another, and
fundamentally dissimilar to Western societies. This a priori knowledge establishes the East as antithetical
to the West. Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of
limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East.
Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in
scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued
that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the Orient was constructed as a negative
inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was also important in shaping
Edward Saids analysis in this area. In particular, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramscis notion
of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western
scholarship and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the Orient.
Although Edward Said limited his discussion to academic study of Middle Eastern, African and Asian history
and culture, he asserted that Orientalism is, and does not merely represent, a significant dimension of modern
political and intellectual culture. (53) Saids discussion of academic Orientalism is almost entirely limited to
late 19th and early 20th century scholarship. Most academic Area Studies departments had already abandoned
an imperialist or colonialist paradigm of scholarship. He names the work of Bernard Lewis as an example of the
continued existence of this paradigm, but acknowledges that it was already somewhat of an exception by the
time of his writing (1977). The idea of an Orient is a crucial aspect of attempts to define the West. Thus,
histories of the GrecoPersian Wars may contrast the monarchical government of the Persian Empire with the
democratic tradition of Athens, as a way to make a more general comparison between the Greeks and the
Persians, and between the West and the East, or Europe and Asia, but make no mention of the other
Greek city states, most of which were not ruled democratically.

Taking a comparative and historical literary review of European, mainly British and French, scholars and
writers looking at, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the peoples of the Middle East, Said sought
to lay bare the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized in those texts. Saids writings have
had far-reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to studies of imperialist Western attitudes
to India, China and elsewhere. It was one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said later developed
and modified his ideas in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993, another must read).
Edward Said, was a Palestinian American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was a
University professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in
Post-Colonial Studies. He died in September 2003 after a long battle with cancer.
Many scholars now use Saids work to attempt to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western
ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say
that the Wests idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If Europe evolved out of
Christendom as the not-Byzantium, early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto,
1571) defined itself as the not-Turkey.
Said puts forward several definitions of Orientalism in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have
been more widely quoted and influential than others:

A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orients special place in European

Western experience. (1)

a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient

and (most of the time) the Occident. (2)

A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (3)
particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic

discourse about the Orient. (6)

A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and

philological texts. (12)

In his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the falsely unifying rubrics that
invent collective identities, citing such terms as America, The West, and Islam, which were leading to
what he felt was a manufactured clash of civilisations.
Heres a little critical Q&A to guide you through the central arguments (the first 100 or so pages) of the text.
Question One:
Said starts his first chapter with a quote from Fourier in the Description de lEgypte, le genie inquiet et
ambitieux de (sic) Europeens impatient demployer les nouveaux instruments de leur puissance, which
roughly translates as, the ambitious and anxious spirit of the Europeans.. eager to use the new tools of their
power. Explain the sentence and comment on why it is the opening quote for this chapter.
Answer:
Though, Said notes, feelings of Orientalism and demarcation of an European us and an Oriental them were
long in the making, the middle of the eighteenth century brought about two principal elements in the

relationship between the West and the East: growing systematic knowledge in Europe of the Orient, and
Europes position of strength [read: domination]. (39-40)
This emerging body of literature is what, according to Said, constituted European knowledge of the Orient and
is what gave them control of the region knowledge is power, Said writes, taking from Foucault. (34, 36, and
40) Said structures this paradigm of knowledge in the following manner: England knows Egypt, Egypt is what
England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying
Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore
becomes the very basis of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed insists upon, British
occupation. (34)
As such, Englands age of discovery, which preceded this period of domination and government, produced a
body of knowledge that allowed them to witness Egypts inabilities to self-govern and thus fed into Englands
occupation. This timeline presented by Said is the thrust of the first chapter that is to say that the emergent
feelings of colonialism stem from systematic knowledge flooding Europe which place European culture and
knowledge above that of the Orient and create a hierarchy of power between the West and the East. The tools of
Europes power, the tools mentioned in the quote at the beginning of the chapter are these aforementioned tools
of knowledge. The knowledge gathered during the Age of Discovery was harnessed in the mid-eighteenth
century to serve racial and geographic paradigms of power. This construct of knowledge feeds into Said pivotal
phrase Orientalism orientalizes the Orient meaning that the Orient (and the Occident for that matter) is
man made constructs built out of the systematic knowledge gathered in Europe at this time. The Orient is only
the Orient when placed in opposition to the Occident.
Question Two:
Comment on Saids question which is central to his entire book: Can one divide human reality, as indeed
human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even
races, and survive the consequences humanly? (45) Is this simply a rhetorical question or a statement about a
much more difficult and unresolved issue.
Answer:
Ideally, Saids book aims to answer this question though in this context (placed in the first chapter) the question
is asked rhetorically. Does this statement have to be either a rhetorical question or an unresolved issue? Can it
not be both? In the first chapter it is meant to be rhetorical it is meant to make that reader believe that the
author will attempt to answer the question or that the reader will be able to answer the question come the end of
the book. In the context of the whole book however, it is a statement of deeply unresolved issues of race and
superiority and how each and every individual defines themselves and those around them. Is Said not saying
with this statement that while we [the collective human race] wish not to admit such things, we all define
ourselves in opposition to others? (I am I because I am not youso on and so forth) Can discussing such
practices and their roots ever make the practice cease? I dont think Said had an answer, try as he might to find
one in the process of this book.

Question Three:
Explain what Said means by: As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient,
Orientalism comes to exert a three-way force, on the Orient, on the Orientalist, and on the Western consumer
of Orientalism (67) What do you think about Saids implied position about the constitution and growth of
knowledge?
Answer:
This statement, on page 67, harkens to the phase mentioned in the response to the first question Orientalism
orientalizes the Orient. Orientalism, as a practice, penalizes the Orient for not being Europe. In the process of
penalizing the Orient, the Occident is orientalizing the Orient by implementing a set of constraints, limitations
upon the Orient (these constraints are apart of Saids description of the practice of Orientalism on page 41). In
this process that Occident receives that it believes to be truths of the Orient, but in reality the truths they are
ingesting are learned judgments of the Orient built upon the power dynamic established. Thus the process of
Orientalism is as destructive to the West as it is to the East, for as mentioned above (response to question 1)
both operate under false senses of themselves and the other.
Question Four:
Said argues that there are two major reasons which favor a textual attitude [accepting the authority of texts]
over direct human encounters: one has to do with the human need for the comfort of textual authority when
confronted with something relatively unknown, threatening and previously distant, the second has to do with
the appearance of success (93) Explain his point in relation to Orientalism.
Answer:
Said writes that all things, all experiences and places, cane be described as a book. Therefore, all reality can be
described and thus descriptions garner authority as sources of reality. His over simplified example of the man
who reads of a fierce lion, encounters a fierce lion, believes in the authority of the author about lions and thus
subsequently about all other realities that he or she might write on is apropos.
The written word garners power because of its relationship (even if only perceived relationship) to reality. This
relationship that Said constructs of how an individual will take a written account as authentic over or in place of
a personal account is a large piece of both Saids and Foucaults arguments on the power of both language and
knowledge. This is essential to the Orientalist dialectic because the power relationship between East and West,
Orient and Occident, is built upon power (read: language and knowledge). If the West has more knowledge they
have more power, then get more knowledge through language (written word), thus power is imbued into written
accounts of travels in the Orient and encounters with the Orient. Thus the written account will trump the
personal account.
This book and its main arguments serves as the basis for a paper I wrote on Orientalist painting and Napoleons
explorations in Egypt and Greater Syria,here.