I think the problem with reading Orientalism today is that much of what he says (that was so revolutionary at the time) is so accepted now (at least among most academics). He's a brilliant writer, although he did irritate me at times (he constantly vilified anyone trying to represent anything, claiming, rightfully, that it is only possible to have a misrepresentation of anything built on one's own experiences and culture, and I did truly want to remind him that was what he was doing with Orientalism, too). Some of his scholarship is also a bit off (mistaking certain writers for other people with the same name, that sort of thing), but still, a seminal work. (One last aside--I would have also liked to have seen more women writers acknowledged by him, although at least in the case of Lucie Duff Gordon, he would have been more hardpressed to criticize her as he could some of the major Orientalists.)

n  God Bless Edward Said n

For those who may ask why one should pick up and read Edward Said's Orientalism, my response would be a difficult one to articulate. This was a book I knew I had to tackle; Orientalism started a whole intellectual counter-movement in the 1970's after all. However, the work I just finished reading was one I wrestled with intellectually throughout. The subject raised by Said is one that I agree with whole-heartedly; that wasn't the point of contention when reading this. In reality, I found this to be an incredibly difficult book to read. I agree with another reviewer here that this is a book primarily aimed at academics. This becomes clear in its long passages, intensely obsessive and detailed scrutiny of scholars previous work in the field (dating as far back to the 1700's, with names you will simply not remember unless you work in this field), as well as long expositions (philological laboratory are two words I will never forget for as long as I live), in which the author attempts to penetrate the mind of those, who in turn, had made it their job to penetrate the minds of those in the so called Orient.

Saids aim in these pages can easily be found anywhere on the internet. It does not seem worthy of repeating here again. However, having come out of this particular experience very exhausted - 70 pages in one day utterly annihilated me, to the point where I couldn't muster the same enthusiasm for the text again, and proceeded at a mediocre 10 pages a day - yet extremely grateful, and stimulated. I feel quite strongly about encouraging others to pick this up and finish it's 328 pages (354 if we include the afterword).

It wasn't until mid-way in this book, that I realised why I was so knackered with reading it. It wasn't solely the style of writing; I've read tough books before. It was the fact that I found myself mildly depressed at the topic. It was my first encounter with truly institutionalised, academised, racism in written form. I am not referring to Said, I refer to the work he exposes. For what another reader like myself will discover - one who would identify as a casual reader - is there is no limit to the absolute absurdities certain so called "intellectuals" will go to to try and justify a certain world view. It truly is the epitome of 'wilful ignorance' when contradictions are found in amply supply upon analysing western views of billions of people throughout different countries and cultures. I was exposed to utterly astonishing - farcical even - explanations of Islam, the Middle East, central Asian, and East Asian cultures and beliefs. No less shocking than the fact it was by individuals considered "well-to-do" in their day. It was truly ridiculous. Yet, it was at this moment that I realised what Said was doing, and grew a true appreciation for his work that went beyond simply reading out of respect for the fact that his work was the first to tackle this topic.

It can be boiled down to this well known phrase: "They were people of their time". This emerged in my head after reading a particularly subtle racist passage Said illuminates to the reader (something I must also thank him for, as he pointed out latent racism quotes that I missed, despite him preparing me before the passage was quoted, as well as me knowing what book I was reading and being of sharp mind), and it suddenly dawned on me. Why did people think that way, and within their own time more specifically? Where did their information come from? In this case, what informed them of their world view of the East? Said deconstructs the institutions that actually form the ideas that are then assimilated into the general knowledge of a particular time, culture and place. That unto itself makes for essential reading for anyone who wants to challenge or understand structures of power.

It is, finally, the new found knowledge I gained from his book, that gave me the nudge to rate it as 'must-read' in my own experience of reading non-fiction. We are sold the idea that social progress is always moving forward, linear, and unbreakable. Said exposes this as fraud. I learned - and hope you do to, if you choose to pick this up - that if ideas are institutionalised, guarded as borderline law, and sustained by succeeding generations of those attached to the institutions in question; then said ideas can be perpetuated, in theory, forever. Not only this, but they can lie dormant for years. They change, morph, and grow new faces to suit some urgent need by those using the institutions housing the ideas. Usually as justification for their own purpose, and ultimately making it nigh impossible to pin down in definition, the ideas first made popular, especially when they are written and re-written by many important names. For this I would draw attention to the shift from the mysterious and mystical Orient in the 1700's, to it becoming something described as backward, dangerous and barbaric in the 1800's, only to then morph into something useful for Orientalists to use as physical guiders of policy in the colonial era (overwhelmingly to justify oppression), only to then shift from European to American Orientalism mid 20th Century.

This is still so important for so many current day issues of our time. It doesn't bare thinking about where we would be if it weren't for writers like Said challenging the status quo.

السنة التي تقرأ فيها الاستشراق يجب أن تكون في أهميّة السنة التي تخرجت فيها، أو حصلت على أول عملٍ لك، أو تزوجتْ. سنة فارقة؛ لأن الكتاب يشكّل بالفعل علامة فارقة في قائمة القراءات.

يتناول الكتاب تحليل "خطاب" الاستشراق، وينقسم إلى ثلاثة محاور: نطاق الاستشراق، أبنية الاستشراق وإعادة بنائها، الاستشراق الآن. ثيمة الكتاب أو الفرضية التي يقوم عليها تتلخص في أن (الاستشراق مذهب فُرِض فرضاً على الشرق) وهو (جهاز ثقافي ينحصر في العداء والنشاط وإصدار الأحكام وفرض "الحقائق" والمعرفة).

بأسلوبٍ عميق، ونثرٍ آسر، ودقة لافتة يعرض سعيد تاريخ "التحيّزات" التي تكتسي طابعاً علميا زائفا، والرسائل المضمرة في الاستشراق، وتواطؤه المريب مع السلطة. وهو يكرر في صفحاتٍ كثيرة رفضه لتصوّر وجود جوهرٍ ثابت للشرق (أو حتى الغرب). (الاستشراق يقدم الشرق في صورة أنماطٍ ثابتة مجردة)، وبذكاء يلاحظ (الاختلاف المضمر والأقوى القائم بين المستشرق والشرقي، هو أن الأول يقوم بالكتابة، والثاني هو المكتوب عنه، والسلبية هي الدور المفترض للثاني، وأما الأول فيفترض فيه القوة التي تمكنه من الملاحظة والدرس وهلم جرا).

سيجعلك المؤلف في النهاية تنفر من لغة التعميمات الفضفاضة، والحشو والتطويل، والأحكام الساذجة، والصور الموغلة في السلبية، والقوالب الفكرية المغلقة، والمواقف العدائية المُغرِضة، وضيق الأفق.

إنه كتاب في (تهافت) الاستشراق، يمتاز بقدرة رهيبة على تفحص عيوبه ومساوئه، وسعيد يخلص إلى أن (الاستشراق رغم أوجه فشله، ورطانته المؤسفة، ونزعته العنصرية التي لا تكاد تخفى، وجهازه الفكري الهزيل، يزدهر اليوم. بل أني أرى ما يدعو إلى الانزعاج في انتشار تأثيره إلى "الشرق" نفسه، إذ تحفل صفحات الكتب والمجلات المنشورة بالعربية (وبلا شك باليابانية وشتى اللهجات الهندية وغيرها من اللغات الشرقية) بتحليلاتٍ من الدرجة الثانية يكتبها العرب عن "العقل العربي" وعن "الإسلام" وغير ذلك من أقوال في عداد الأساطير).

أخيراُ قرأت هذا الكتاب الشائك..

4.5 stars
This is a classic. If you're at all interested in international studies or anticolonialism, you should definitely read some Said. I've recently been compiling a list of international studies essentials that I've gotten into (or at least heard great things about) as an undergraduate in the major, and this was the first book I thought of.

With that said, this is a dense book. Said really only gets to the point by Part 3, "Orientalism Now." I definitely understand how the background of parts 1 and 2 is important for building his argument, particularly in the academic landscape of 1979, when it was published. But it is really hard to get through, and if you're not used to reading heavily academic texts, it might not be worth it. I consider myself fairly good at working through dense academic writing, and it still took me about nine months to get through it.

I think you could probably get the idea if you started around part 3, or just picked a few select chapters to read. So if you just want a general idea of Orientalism theory, that might be a better option. Still, I'm glad I personally read the whole book because I was able to learn about the whole background of the field that used to be called "Orientalism" (and that changed largely because of this book!), and having put in the effort to read all of it, I do think my understanding of Edward Said's brilliant ideas is much better.

In his conclusion and his 1994 Afterword, Said says part of the purpose of this book is to teach people to recognize orientalist trends and tropes in the scholarship and media they consume. I absolutely feel much more equipped to do that now, so for that, this book is quintessential.

Particularly in an era where we're seeing many orientalist tropes rising to the surface (for example, in the language of apologists for the genocide in Gaza), I absolutely encourage people to become aware of these ideas and how they influence our language and perceptions. A definitely must-read for anybody in/interested in academia, especially the humanities or social sciences.

The following is a true story:

Me, in a San Franscisco bar reading Orientalism.

The blonde girl next to me reading over my shoulder: "So what's Orientalism?"

I explain as best I can in a couple sentences.

Her: "There are so many isms in Asia - like Buddhism and Taoism. You know what book you should read? The Tao of Poo. It's sooo good. It's, like, the perfect way to teach Americans about Eastern Religion."

Horrified, I look back to my book and take a sip of beer.

هو تطوير تفصيلي ليس فقط للتمييز الجغرافي الأساسي الذي يقسم العالم لقسمين غير متكافئين شرق و غرب بل أيضا لسلسلة من المصالح التي يستعين في تحقيقها و الحفاظ عليها بشتى الوسائل مثل نتائج البحوث العلمية و إعادة البناء اللغوي القديم و التحليل النفسي و وصف الظواهر الطبيعية و المجتمعات و هو في حد ذاته إرادة معينة أو نية معينة أي إنه ليس مجرد تعبير عن الإرادة و النية لتفهم ما يبدو بوضوح أنه عالما مختلفا أو عالما بديلا و جديدا و للسيطرة عليه و التلاعب به في بعض الأحيان و ضمه إليه.

و هو و قبل كل شيء خطاب لا يرتبط مطلقا بعلاقة مباشرة بالسلطة السياسية السافرة و موازية لها

من الأخر و بدون فلسفات و تنظير طويل تمتليء به صفحات هذا الكتاب القيم فإن الاستشراق هو دراسة الشرق دراسة منحازة بوجهات نظر مسبقة و مدفوعة بأغراض استعمارية و نظرة فوقية لشعوب الشرق مهما تبين لنا غير ذلك و يدلل هنا إدوارد سعيد بوعيه كمثقف شرقغربي إن جاز التعبير على ذلك بدلالات عديدة يخلص منها بنتيجة أن على الشرق تمثيل نفسه بنفسه بدلا من ترك الساحة للمستشرقين للتأثير في الشعوب و صناع القرار.

من أصعب الكتب التي قرأتها أيضا كان هذا الكتاب

A Pioneering Study in Intellectual History
Make no mistake: this book is not about the East at all - no matter how you fill in that geographical-political-cultural term - but about the West, Western culture in the broad sense of the word (including its political, social and economic dimension). The essence of Said’s thesis is that in Western culture an image of the East was created very early on as the fundamentally different: mysterious, strange, exotic, somewhat attractive, but above all different and therefore threatening. He delves deeply into history, and devotes most of his book to how 'Orientalism' has evolved from a rather vague mythical-social concept to a concrete literary movement (after all Said was a literary scientist) and in the course of the 19th century also into a branch of scientific practice. In addition, he discusses concrete writers such as Dante, Chateaubriand and E.M. Forster, but also scientists such as Ernest Renan, Edward William Lane and Louis Massignon.

strengths
Said certainly has an eye for nuances: with each of these authors there are different accents, and throughout history the concept of the 'Orient' is constantly evolving, if only geographical: ranging from ancient Persia and Egypt, to Arabia and Islam, to India and even South East Asia, to shrink back to the Middle East and especially Islam in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Three things keep coming back: the orientalist discourse always has Western superiority as a starting point, and in the 19th century that even led to the overt mission to drag the 'passive and backward' Orient along in the advance of (Western) civilisation. Said was clearly inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and his thesis that any discourse is an expression of a power relationship, in this case colonialism and imperialism; Said adds that Orientalism also precedes that colonialism, made it possible, supported it and also was strengthened and influenced by it. A second characteristic of 'Orientalism' that is stressed is that it mainly says something about the West itself, because it is simply constitutive of Western identity: as there is a ‘different, retarded and strange’ East, it is also immediately clear that the West must stand for civilization and enlightenment. And a third important characteristic is that the concept of ‘Orient’ among the Orientalists is unchanging, does not allow nuance; it is a frozen concept (“the typical Arab always is lazy”).

So I certainly support the extensive praise that this work has received, which has led to a much more critical view of Western culture, both in the West itself and beyond. Of course, it also has something to offer for the view of the West on other cultures: the African, the native American, Chinese, Polynesian (and why not: the Russian, those of the Balkans), and so on. Edward Said only focussed on the ‘Orient’, because he is right that no other approach was as deep, elaborate, persistent and as fundamental to Western civilization in general as 'Orientalism'.

Since its publication, in 1978, this book also has received a lot of criticism. Said is said to have written a purely anti-Western book and has feeded the hateful movements against the West in their (sometimes violent) struggle. Anyone who has read this book thoroughly will have to admit that this reproach is unjustified. Said really does his best to elaborate his thesis from a nuanced theoretical framework (the relationship between culture and society), with a subtle eye for constant shifting, the fluidness of concepts and opinions, and at the same time placing ‘Orientalism’ in a context that immediately exposes how generally human that tendency is to reduce the other to a reductionist essence ("otherness").

weaknesses
But the book also contains elements that in a certain sense justify criticism. Said does not always write coherently, has been rather sloppy in the construction of this book, and occasionally is fiercely polemic (especially his criticism of the Arabist Bernard Lewis is extremely harsh). Ultimately, this book is an engaged piece of writing: it is an explicit position against ‘Orientalism’, that is to say, against reducing the East to an essence that is constructed and self-nourishing. Also in his personal life, Said did not shy away from polemics, and in the United States in particular, that - as an advocate of the Palestinian cause – has done his reputation much harm.

Detail criticism is certainly also possible on the selectiveness in this work: Said only focuses on authors who support his thesis. This can be scientifically justified at the level of hypothesis formation, but not in a final assessment of reality. I notice that very influential works such as Marco Polo’s report of his (alleged?) trip to Mongolian China and Montesquieu's Persian homage in “Lettres Persanes” are completely missing. And that is strange.

But for me, the weaknesses of this work do not entirely outweigh the strengths of it. Perhaps it’s best to view this book as a pioneering work: Said has shown us how the dominant position of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries found its inspiration and justification in a much longer existing way of looking at that 'other' East, and how that ‘Orientalism’ in turn was strengthened and inspired by concrete colonial and imperialist action. More nuances and more context may be appropriate, but you cannot ignore this fact. And a relevant evolution is that after Said, a whole scientific branch of post-colonial, "subaltern" studies has started that continue to feed the debate. That debate is also very varied: sometimes nuanced, sometimes very extreme, but at least it is an intellectual debate, and only through this a multifaceted, enriching view of history and reality can only be won.

“My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?”
-tGalileo in his Letter to Johannes Kepler

The above quote had a huge impact on me when I first read it. I always thought that even if those learned men so faithful to the Christian ideas they were married to, would have looked through the telescope and saw how the Earth moves around the Sun, they still would have dismissed it as sorcery or witchcraft. But comes in Said and corrects me, “One of them did look through the telescope,” he tells me, “and he still saw that it was the Sun going around the Earth” And I am like, “But how is it possible. “That is just what happened” Said answers nodding wisely, “and the guy wasn’t lying.”

Some of the racist stuff like ‘White man’s burden’ – looks likes a justification of imperialism but in reality the racism predated imperialism. It began first as a European effort to understand the rise of Islam. It begin with earliest travel accounts –people trying to be honest but also trying to be interesting about their visits. It is a tendency among the travelers to generalize their experience as the truth of the whole region.

In fact, whenever we don't share some sort of identity with people by whom we feel wounded, we always run to worst ever generalised judgements about those 'others' - so 9/11 was followed by Islamophobia which generalised the fear of terrorists to all muslims. It didn't generalise to all men because there were men in white Americans (who were ones making judgements) - it didn't generalise to all gun carrying people because white Americans carried guns too. So it was religion that became the identity prejudiced. Sheriyar and Hamlet jump to similar conclusions. So a prejudice based on regional identity is equally possible - and for centuries, Europeans thoughts were sure that those living to the East of Caspian sea were somehow not human in same sense as they were. May be there is something in soil.

... Then some intellectuals followed in same vein as travelers. There was now a systematic education available in this increasingly organised pseudo-knowledge. This image of Arab World in particular (and what is called ‘Eastern civilization’ in general) is what author means by Orient. But believe me, it gets worse. While those first travelers were lazy in their generalizations the later were worse, they simply depended upon accounts of those old travelers for their purposes. The first intellectuals even with their preconceived ideas at least studied the language and read the original texts, their successors need do neither but only read commentaries. And so – a terrible game of Chinese Whispers got started, and you know wonderfully good such a game is at preserving information. No one ever thought of checking the truthiness of the taught information (or they saw what they hoped to saw, rather than what was.)

That is always the thing with prejudice – it always goes hand-in-hand with laziness. In fact, it is born of lack of willingness to think critically of one’s own views.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Stephen Hawking

But there were subsequent travelers and colonists, didn’t they correct those accounts? No they were very well taught in this ignorance before they reached in colonies and like that guy who only confirmed Sun’s orbit around Earth after glancing through telescope, these new travelers only saw what their education taught them to see even after having a more intimate contact with real people of East. A general image of what Orientals are supposed to look like remained in their mind and overruled what they saw. If sometimes truth made itself too obvious to refuse, it was called a case of rare exception. If some great mind really did overcome the illusion of knowledge and found and spoke the truth, he would only be ignored by others for not knowing what he is talking about.

Moreover this image didn’t change. It has remained more or less the same throughout the centuries since the Orient is supposed to be simply incapable of change. This is convenient because 'we' (Orientalists) need only read a book or two written by them a couple of centuries ago to know them.

The image, if we can call it that, is created through use of overloaded words to describe everything. So there is an ‘Islamic warfare’ 'Hindu way of life' etc.(but not Christian warfare) – the generalizations were so fantastic that for a time Jews and Muslims were grouped in same category.

Orientals supposed to be largely homogeneous mass of people; who show high similarity in behavior – they mostly look alike, are just clever enough to make good slaves and have most sensual women. Another things about Orientals is that they can’t speak for themselves. They must be spoken for – they need their Conrads and Naipauls.

But then what is true Orient? There is no real Orient, just as there is no real Occident, and no real Western or Eastern world, ‘White’ or ‘Black’ people. If you want to travel from U.S.A. to China, you will travel westwards not eastwards, Africa is in South of Europe not East They are only social constructs. And the only reason that good people go on using these words is to fight back the discrimination done on their basis.

What the author has done in the book is look at how orient is represented by a score of big authors – which might not seem so big a thing but we must remember that those were the books that formed the world view of Europeans. And that is worrying – as it shows how even the best of the minds can fall prey to racism.

You may also think, like I used to, that it is about a subject of past. But it isn’t. People in west still prefer reading account of their own people travelling to East or immigrants coming from East; rather than people who have lived and continue to live in these regions. They also seem to promote a particular world view. People of a country might still be thought of as carrying a certain common characteristic or other. Often people of East are shown in Hollywood movies as caricatures of Western idea of them (Indiana Jones movies). A score of adjectives come to mind - spiritual, introvert etc.

And people in the East and everywhere shows similar tendentcies of prejudice.

Also the author is not saying anything about the countries orient is supposed to represent. Because such a representation might not be possible - particularly in terms of generalisations. Where we must, I guess, we should notice the diversity of people. Unfortunately most of us are too lazy to make an effort to understand such diversity, so we are happy with generalisations and ignoring what doesnt suit us. So human rights activists working in Middle-East never find a mention in western media unless they get killed or exiled, in which case their fate is often given rightful importance, but nothing is done to avoid further such tragedies.

P.S. See the first comment below if you haven't yet seen the stupidity of review.

Did not finish. A tone more for scholars than general readers like myself. May try again.

The Orient in this book is everything from what we call Egypt and the Middle East to the Pacific ocean. Orient is from the root - where the sun rises. The villain in this story is the Occident (from the root - where the sun sets) mainly England, France, to a lesser extent the rest of Europe and of course the United States. The book concentrates on Egypt, the Middle East and the religion of Islam. The book does not contain any information about or history of these lands or the Islamic religion. It is a critic of the interaction between the Occident and the facts of the Orient.

"Knowledge of the Orient . . . in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. . . the Oriental is something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something on disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks."

Edward Said represents himself as a profoundly angry man in this book. He begins by saying the interaction over the last hundreds of years is normal and then condemns it. "This whole didactic process is neither difficult to understand nor difficult to explain. One ought again to remember that all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures receiving these other cultures not as they are but as for the benefit of the receiver they ought to be."

"The relationship between the Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony...". I looked up hegemony and the dictionary says it is domination but by culture rather than power. Said appears to believe that all scholars and travelers since the time of the Romans have defined something called the Orient with hostile intent. "The Orientalist makes it his work to always be converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture...". "We need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate."

"The political importance of Orientalism comes from the possibility of its direct "translation into economic terms" and "the closeness of a field to ascertainable sources of power in political society." "All academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact" - the imperial interests of America, Britain, and France. "For readers in the so-called Third World, this study [the book] proposes itself as a step toward an understanding, not so much of Western politics and of the non-Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western cultural discourse, a strength too often mistaken as merely decorative or 'superstructural' . . . [it is] a formidable structure of cultural domination". This is why he states conservative Islamists must crack down hard.

These ideas are rehashed and repeated for countless pages. I started skipping big sections after one hundred pages. Said gets angrier and angrier. He pulls out the most repulsive things ever said and uses them to paint all efforts to understand as hostile. "For no other ethnic or religious [Islamic] group is it true that virtually anything can be written or said about it, without challenge or demurral." Orientalists are "slanderous and racist". "Orientalism is a form of paranoia." "Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."

I don't recommend this book to anyone. Said does not find any material ever written on the subject to be neutral let alone praiseworthy so you will not get any ideas for future reading from him.

Feb 1, in Harper's Magazine February edition, "Madame and the Masters: Blavatsky's cosmic soap opera" by John Crowley he writes, "British theosophists ... introduced a non-religious young barrister named Mohandas Gandhi to the Bhagavad Gita - which he read first in English translation." A society can, if history is not important to it, lose knowledge, discount its own history. Having swarms of academics from outside the society attempt to excavate and understand is not a totally negative, colonial, strong-arm tactic. It is important that someone cares and preserves even if they are not the politically correct members of that ethnic group.

- - - -
Said had a valuable message but his book did not work for me. I did get the offensiveness of uninformed handling of material better from this YouTube video on music. Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music - Farya Faraji
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR511...

Edward Said is a respected scholar and with Orientalism he established the need for a reexamination of how The West, and much of The Middle East needed to begin again the process of understanding what in much of European and American scholarship is called Orientalism. His cultural/ethnic background is as a mixed westerner and Palestinian form a certain amount of privilege and a top quality American Education. All of this apparent in this book.

In reviewing this book I have the advantage of the thoughts of several of us who read it as a ‘buddy’ read. In general we were all frustrated or unhappy about the same problems. We tended to agree with most of his major points while feeling that his arguments when not merely tedious and repetitive failed to suggest better alternatives or point to non-Western systems of learning that had done a better job. Said may be forgiven on this last point, because he never intended to make any such suggestions. The implication is that no one did any better and that there is no multi-century process that can be expected to do better.

Said would have been writing Orientalism in the mid 1970’s. During this time many scholars were re-examining how the problem of the author’s biases should be addressed in their scholarship. At this same time revisionism was asking scholars to pay attention to the “other voices” in history. Women, slaves, average working people and the native populations of colonial powers were to be given fuller inclusion in scholarly studies.

This period gave rise to a number of ‘ism and as some less sympathetic folks would have it , “victim’s” history.

Edward Said make a very good case that the long established field of Oriental Studies, or as he prefers Orientalism, had been from the beginning or by accretion poisoned such that it was structurally compromised. Particular toxins include the historic fact that interest in the Orient is shot through with military conquest and geo-politics (Colonialism), deliberate or incidental ignorance about Islam and the almost insurmountable problem of making general, if learned statements about any population. At some point generalizations about a people no longer describe that group, and they can devolve into little more than racism.

Given his evidence it is hard to disagree with Said. The problem is that there is little he says in the case of Middle Eastern Islamic Arabs (For reason never explained he hates the term Muslim) or Arabs in general or sometimes anyone from the Orient, Japanese, Afghans and etc.; that cannot be said for any number of groups. Catholics may not always speak kindly of Protestants, Mid-Western Americans of East Coast Americans and so forth. More than this he offers nothing by way of contrast. Oriental studies are tainted? What studies are not, or which have risen entirely above their mistakes? Who has done a better job of cross cultural studies? And the questions continue.

Orientalism is a frustrating read for a number of reasons. The language can be highly academic. And the continual restatement of his case can get old. For all of this I tend to agree with his larger points. The case he makes for many of them can make a reader tired.