A Seminal Work for Cultural Understanding

Relations between people of different cultures is a vital part of today’s world, not only for culture’s sake, but in terms of diplomacy, business, travel, military action, and even just general knowledge for daily life. Unlike in previous eras, we are extremely likely to find ourselves living and working with those “others” who used to inhabit unknown spaces “out there”. Governments have to deal intimately with foreigners in a variety of ways. So, intercultural relations can impact on our daily life in new ways that our grandparents never dreamt of. The quality and success of those relationships are going to depend on what we know as individuals about those “others” or on what we know as a society. That is why the process by which we get that knowledge and the actual contents of that knowledge are so important. ORIENTALISM is the work that over the last 40 years has most influenced the way people think and write about that process.

Edward Said concentrated on what is commonly known as “the Middle East”, but would be better known as the largely-Muslim countries east of Europe and west of India, or maybe “western Asia”. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, this part of the world was often called “the Orient”. (Though people often applied that term to the rest of Asia too.) The method in which he looks at this so-called Orient can be extended to any other area. He examines the process by which Euro-Americans sought information about the Orient. They gleaned it from the writings of diplomats, soldiers, colonial administrators, travelers, and businessmen who had stayed for varying lengths of time in the Orient. They got it from the paintings of artists who wished to sell paintings of exotic scenes or from poets and novelists who wished to write of exotic locales. In almost all cases, the presenters of knowledge treated the Orient as homogenous, simple, dangerous, crude, full of exoticism or fanaticism and above all, unchanging. People there were not separate individuals like “us”; they were the undifferentiated “others” with whom we could make contrasts favorable to ourselves. Some Westerners might dream of escape to the exotic world of the Orient, where society would be the reverse of their own. Some presenters of the Orient knew a lot about what they wrote or painted, others had an extremely superficial knowledge. In all cases, Said writes, the information collected and presented was used by governments in the West to control the Orient. Information was power. The people in the so-called Orient had, and needed, no independent existence. They were only shadows brought to life by the Light of Knowledge emanating from the West. They might be guided to proper ways by Western powers, Westerners with power. Orientalism underlay colonialism.

Said examines the vast body of written work—that “Orientalism”—very extensively. He notes that it has had its own paradigms of research, its own learned societies, its own establishment, not to mention university departments labelled “Oriental Studies” in many countries. Through such bodies, the Orient has been labelled, packaged, and presented to the world for two hundred years. We can see this process alive and well today. All you have to do is watch Hollywood movies, turn on your TV for the news, or read travel/geographic magazines. All you have to do is listen to current American pronouncements about the same area, regard their lack of trust in its people, their lack of respect. Think about the labels that are put on Palestinians or Iranians. It is not a question of whether you support this particular cause or that. It is a question of how you get your information. Think about it. The world may depend on a radical change in Western thinking, equal to a stop to suicide bombings, teaching of hatred in schools, and terrorist plots. When is a man a terrorist and when is he a freedom fighter? When an international news magazine tells us so? An information establishment shapes the presentation of that old “Orient” and many other parts of the world. Said took the first mighty step in forcing the West to see its own constructions. For that, and for a detailed, well-argued book, five stars are obligatory.

P.S. I wrote this review 15 years ago. Do you think a lot has changed?

Ever since its publication in 1978, this has been an iconic work, a book that is constantly referred to, be it in very divergent ways: it is praised in heaven by some and banned to hell by others. So, the least you can say is that this work gives a very own, original view of the way the West has looked and still looks to the East.

I immediately stress two fraught terms here: "West" and "East", because that is where it all starts, with that distinction. It is to the great credit of Said that he demonstrates that precisely that distinction - philosophically formulated as a reductionist essentialism - has played a very important role in Western history: “Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them"). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived.” For Said that interaction between image and action is crucial. Specifically: the conception of the Orient (a very broad and constantly fluctuating concept) as mysterious but also passive, backward and at the same time threatening became the source of inspiration and the justification of a colonialism and imperialism that in turn reinforced the Orientalist view. This book is therefore primarily a topic intellectual history.

Much of what Said put forward in 1978 has now become more or less commonplace, although it is also regularly taken under fire from a conservative angle, but rather because of its political implications. In this sense "Orientalism" is a pioneering work that has rightly received praise. But it also has some flaws, because Said sometimes used a rather sloppy and polemic approach in this book, and in turn he is to a certain extent selective and reductionist. See more about this in my Senseofhistory-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Wenn das Wissen zur Erniedrigung verführt?

Pseudo-intellectual porn for goateed college-goers and soft-headed not-fully-Maoist professors.

There is not much to say about this book, apart from the fact that Said's view of the west holds up still today. I feel like I would have gotten more out of this book if I had studied it with a guide, or at least chececked every Orientalist he mentioned to get a full grasp of his point of view, but even just by reading it (in the span of three years, and for some reason always in hazy July afternoons while I was about to fall asleep) I still feel I understood his main points.

One fault I found in it, though, is that the chapters are way too long for a book of over four hundred pages, I felt like I could never take a break lest I miss the point he was trying to make in each sub-chapter.

Other than that it's a classic for a reason, definitely worth the time it took to finish it.

كيف ينظر الغرب إلى الشرق ، وماهي الأفكار التي تدور في ذهن الغربي تجاه نظيره الشرقي ؟
حقيقة الإستشراق ، معناه ودوافعه ، أبعاده !
كل هذة الأسئلة وأكثر ستجد إجابتها هنا ،
الكتاب " كامل الدسم جدا " أستطيع القول بأنه مرجع لما يحتويه من معلومات نادرة وهذا إن دل على شيء إنما يدل على ثراء فكر كاتبه .

الك��اب مقسم الى ثلاث أقسام رئيسه
تبدأ بتعريف الإستشراق ومراحل تطور اهتمام الغربي بالشرق ، وتوسع العالم الغربي .ثم يأتي الإستشراق الحديث المتمثل بهيمنة الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية
على العالم .

لقد كان واضحاً لي أن هذه المراحل إتخذت شكل حلقات متراصله في سلسة إبتدأت حينما قال : كارل ماركس
"لا يستطيعون أن يمثلوا نفسهم ولابد أن يمثلهم أحد "

فمن يتأمل الواقع المعاصر الذي نحياه سيجد إستمراية
هذا الفكر لديهم .

الكتاب مهم جدا و ليس بالشيء الهين
ولا يقرأ مرة واحده
ولا يقرأ ايضا دون بحث ومطالعه خارجية ...





#أبجدية_فرح

يناقش أدوارد سعيد في هذا الكتاب " الاستشراق " كظاهرة ثقافية يشوبها الكثير من التحامل الغربي على الشرق ،، يظهر ذلك في سطحية النظرة الغربية للثقافة العربية و الاسلامية بل و الشرقية بصفة عامة فيلعب المستشرق دور الراصد لما يعتقد أنه همجية في مقابل الحضارة و التقدم الغربي فينجرف وراء " نحن " مقابل " هم " أو المسيحية و الحضارة مقابل البدائية و هنا تظهر كثير من الدراسات الاستشراقية كدعامة للعنصرية و التعالي الأوربي على الشعوب الأخرى الأقل درجة في رأيهم ،، ناقش إدوارد سعيد بشكل كبير الاستشراق من عدة جوانب مستشهداً بالعديد من الكتابات الاستشراقية على مدى فترات طويلة ،، كذلك ناقش دورها في التنظير للاستعمار و بناء صورة مشوهة عن الشعوب التي تقع في جنوب و شرق أوربا و الصورة النمطية التي رسمها هؤلاء المستشرقون وأصبحت كحقيقة لا يمكن مناقشتها بل و تم البناء عليها بشكل مستمر من الأجيال الأوربية التالية ،، في نهاية هذه الطبعة - التي ترجمها الدكتور محمد عناني بشكل متميز - سجل المؤلف ردود الفعل المعادية لكتابه و آرائه من بعض المهتمين بالشأن الاستشراقي و ناقش حججهم و انتقاداتهم بشكل جميل ،، الكتاب متميز و غني بالمعلومات و الحقائق و الأفكار المتميزة للمؤلف

love you, said, but it could have been an essay

الاستشراق ليس تخصصا أكاديميا بحتا وهو ليس مجموعة من الباحثين المتحيزين أو بضعة من الرحالة المتنقلين بين بلاد المشرق

بل هو جهاز ثقافي يتكون من معدات ونشاطات ومؤسسات لإصدار أحكام وفرض مجموعة من الأقوال كانها حقائق ومحاولة إعادة خلق وعي جديد بالمشرق على أساس أن المشرقي لا يستطيع تمثيل نفسه وشرح ذاته لأنه قاصر عن ذلك

مجموعة من عمليات الإزاحة والتبديل للوعي الحقيقي السابق إلى وعي غربي بالمشرق ليستطيع المشرقي تمثيل نفسه
إذا بالملخص هي عملية إعادة تكوين وتمثيل

الاستشراق تحول من مرحلة الدراسة الأكاديمية إلى مرحلة الاستعانة به كأداة استعمارية في الواقع العملي

وتتمثل دراسة الراحل إدوارد بتحليل أسلوب الخطاب الغربي الاستشراقي الأدبي والمعرفي وعلاقتها بالمؤسسات العسكرية والسياسية الغربية من خلال كتابتهم وابحاثهم الاكاديمية

الخطاب الاستشراقي تميز بالتكرار والاعادة لاطروحة ان الشرق قاصر عن تمثيل نفسه وفهم ذاته وعلى الغربي ان يقود المشرقي الى الوعي بذاته وتمدينه بطريقة تصلح للعييش في عالمنا المعاصر

ماركس اكذ ذلك في قوله
انهم لا يستطيعون تمثيل انفسهك علينا تمثيلهم

هذه الجهود كله كانت مقدمة لنسق استعماري مستمر

بشكل عام الكتاب صعب ومرهق لكنه بالنهاية مفيد

ويحتاج إلى إعادة ترجمة لتوصيل النص بطريقة الطف
على امل قراءة الكتاب بنسخته الانجليزية

It’s become a total cliché to say this, but I’m gonna anyway: This work is more relevant than ever. If you want an inexpensive, at-home university course on the history of Islam phobia and ways in which the West has appropriated, marginalized, and re/presented (and consequently colonized) the East, this is your book. This is also a scintillating example of literary analysis and how important and germane deconstruction can be in illuminating power dynamics and seemingly benign discourse which is actually damaging and demeaning. Said impressively deconstructs western hegemony and the countless manifestations of an us vs. them (occidental vs. Oriental) mentality.

And not to sound sanctimonious or whatever, but I would take some excerpts from this work and teach them to high school and college kids if I were in the classroom right now. I’d quote it to anyone who actually thought Sex and the City 2: Arabian Nights in Abu Dhabi was a quality film. And it would be my pleasure to force this on backward hicks in both Europe and the United States who are scaring the bejeebus out of people about THE MUSLIM THREAT! Ohmygodthemuslims! I mean, I still know some people who use the word “oriental” to describe Asians. And don’t even get me started on the everyday treatment of Turkish immigrants here in Germany.

I know there’s a whole slew of academics and others who seem to have some pretty legitimate critiques of this work, but regardless of some errors (and boredom), this is powerful and enlightening reading. Said primarily examines writing and scholarship from the big 3 Eastern imperialist superpowers: Britain, France, and the United States. His major analyses begin in late 18th century Britain and France and span the years through the early 20th century with a focus on the USA, though he goes further back in a few places and further ahead as he discusses orientalism up through the 1970s (and post 9/11 with his 2003 preface). He disassembles hundreds of Orientalist motifs in writings from Disraeli, Flaubert, Kipling, a bit of Homer and Dante and a whole bunch of other DWMs* I’ve never heard of, but Said also gives us ways of thinking about scholarship in general.

He posits in there somewhere that this work can be applied to women’s studies, black studies, and various area studies. If anything, this work constantly calls into question any supposed objectivity we may have, as we’re all products of our histories and cultures (and race, gender, class etc etc). And this is pretty standard thinking , but it really began to bother me that Said makes it seem impossible to escape the smothering effect of all this Orientalism. I realize that a solution isn’t really within the purview of this work, but I need some alternatives. I also wondered as I was reading how anyone could possibly write about or study anyone else without some sort of cultural positioning or superiority taking over. Said actually does briefly addresses this issue at the very end, and gives some examples of acceptable scholarship and ways of avoiding being trapped in an “ideological straightjacket.” But sometimes Said is soooo heavy handed. I’m almost afraid to be critical of aspects of the middle east and Islam for fear of being labeled an Orientalist or essentialist.

This work isn’t purely comparative literature or pure academia, though. Said chronicles the political impact of Orientalist thinking and looks at everything from Henry Kissinger’s polarizing foreign policy analyses to Napoleon’s swindling and pilfering in Egypt to Britain’s liberal -utilitarian colonial administration in India. Scholars often work hand in hand with governments to form imperialist policies, Said points out, and even the most neutral sounding essays serve to further reinforce differences between east and west and create literal or ideological battle lines.

Michel Foucault's ideas about power and discursive formations (though he rejects the idea that individual authorship is irrelevant)form a framework for Said's study and he depends on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of cultural leadership and consent(hegemony). So you’re also getting all sorts of refreshers and perhaps some new lessons from sociology and philosophy here. Honestly, though, I think to fully grasp the entire work, like every last little citation and reference, one would need some formal academic training in oriental studies, postcolonialism, or transnationalist studies, because Said is quite a challenge at times. I still have no idea who some of the more obscure authors or great 18th century philologists he mentions are and I‘m not sure I’m motivated enough to look them up on wikipedia. (This might be a good argument for an e-reader: instant explanations for unknown allusions.) Chapter 2 Part II (“Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan”) gets especially stuffy and slow and recondite and I had to force myself to keep reading.

Things begin to sound the same after a while; there are only so many metaphors one can use for how the West subjugates and oppresses the East. And I found the writing challenging not because Said uses lots of big, sophisticated words, but because he jam packs every paragraph full of ideas and analyses and philosophy. I wanted to underline too much.

I do think this should be read, all or in excerpts, by most everyone with the intellect and willpower because it forces westerners to confront what have become ingrained collective notions about the East. I've grown up with Orientalism crammed into the unlikeliest of places. Indiana Jones, children’s books and movies, Jane Austen, the Louvre and Bristish museums, all of these things have furthered Orientalism’s aims of “otherizing“, creating, and marginalizing a rather large group of people. Said ends up coercing us into examining ourselves and our own culture and pushes us to call into question all essentialist views. That may just be the most dangerous/radical aspect of all.


*dead white males, acronym borrowed from DFW, David Foster Wallace

“From 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35% of the earth’s surface to about 85% of it. Every continent was affected, none more so than Africa and Asia. The two greatest empires were the British and the French; allies and partners in some things, in others they were hostile rivals.”

Without doubt this is a dated and dry account which has the stilted style you would more commonly associate with scholars and historians of a bygone era, which I suppose in some ways is now where Said could be placed. I have to say I agree with almost everything Said says, but the major problem with this, and it is a critical one, is that the writing is terrible. I mean this is the kind of prose which put youngsters off history when they get subjected to it at a young age.

Another huge failing is with the unbearably, long winded quotes in untranslated French, 14 lines long and longer, with no English translation. Crazy me (hits head with hand) I never saw this was a French edition…no wait a minute…it’s English?...

So this is yet another example of an elite, snobby academic writing for other elite, snobby academics and falling into that cliché pitfall of assuming that anything in French is somehow automatically culturally superior. Why do these people never do the same with the German language?...

I simply cannot fathom the logic a Palestinian who writes a book complaining about elitist, ignorant and superior attitudes of the West, and then repeatedly resorts to elitist, ignorant and superior tactics himself?... Of course he makes a number of incredibly valid points, but unfortunately his delivery is just so dull and flat that it is hard to care and this is a good example of how not write a historical/political account.

This is a fascinatingly interesting book. It is also a book that is virtually required reading if you are going to say anything at all about post-colonialism. Whether you agree or disagree with the central theme of the book is almost beside the point. This work is seminal and landmark – so it can be avoided only at your own cost.

I’ll get to the central idea of the book in a second, but first some advice for people thinking of reading it. I think, if I only wanted to get an idea of what the book was about, but didn’t have time to read 305 pages or so, that I would read the preface to the 2003 edition and then read the afterword (actually, you could probably read those the other way around if you wanted, that would probably make even more sense). The point being that he is so clear and so ‘summary’ in these two parts of the book that as an overview and a way to get at the meat of his argument you would struggle to get a better grounding than those parts of his book. The rest of the book is a bit more for the kind of person who likes ‘completeness’. Look, it is all beautifully written and utterly fascinating too – but like I said, life is short and this is the sort of book that covers more ground that you might feel you really need covered.

So, what’s it all about? Well, Orientalism probably doesn’t mean what you might first think. You might assume that it has something to do with China – which isn’t quite where he is coming from. Said is tracing the history of an idea and in that idea the exotic East was the Middle East long before it was the Far East. That is what makes this book essential reading. If there is one thing that is increasingly being used to define our understanding of the world today – in the way that the Cold War defined our world for large parts of the 20th Century – it is the relationship between the West and Islam. We are constantly told that Islam is monolithic, that Islamofascists are wanting to impose Sharia Law on a hapless and ‘too democratic for our own good’ West. That we are pluralistic, they are clones. The main lesson of this book is to beware as soon as anyone starts using the word WE. It can be the most dangerous word in the language. But the similarities between the pluralist US and the monolithic THEM so reminded me of the East / West cold war that it was terrifying.

The Orient has long been a place where Westerners have projected their lusts, their dreams and their nightmares. Much of what is said about the East in this book by ‘Orientalists’ confirms masturbatory desires on behalf of the Orientalists themselves more than it says about life in the Middle East.

In fact, Orientalism says infinitely more about the West than it does about whatever we choose define as the Orient. The problem is one of essentialism. East is East and West is West and neither the twain shall meet – but not only is this geographically stupid, for it to be true in any sense it relies on a definition of the two ‘diametrically opposed’ opposites that must be taken as being real and total explanations before you start.

It requires us to have a single notion of what a Muslim is – as if this religion covering so many millions of people and having lasted for centuries and centuries could really, somehow remain self-identical across all of that time and all of that space. Such an idea ought to be utterly ludicrous after a moment’s reflection (not that such ideas ever really get even a moment’s reflection) – but our desire for a simple and clear and easily defined enemy is such that we lump together Seventh Century Arabs with Twenty-First Century Indonesians as if they were all identical.

And it gets worse. Not only are they all the same, but they are also too stupid to even understand the first thing about themselves. It is only because of we remarkably generous Westerners being able to explain their history to them, their language, society and character, that they have any ideas about themselves at all. This is the role of the Orientalist, a role he (and from what I can gather from this book it does seem to virtually always be a he) has played rather consistently over the centuries.

What is particularly interesting here is that Said says Orientalists don’t really treat the Orient as if it was a place, in space or time, but rather as a text – written once and then indelible. The Orient really reached its glory days a long time ago – you have to remember that much of our mathematics and virtually all of our Classical Philosophy came from Islamic scholars. So, to explain this we need to see Islam and the Orient as a culture in decay, a culture that is degenerating. But still a text nonetheless. And a text that can only be read by a properly schooled Western scholar. And what is the appropriate schooling for such a scholar? Well, not necessarily Oriental texts, as you might think – but rather texts about the Orient by previous Oriental scholars. This is like an entire school of Shakespeare scholarship that never actually refers to any of the poems or plays, but rather discusses previous works of scholarship on Shakespeare. And like such scholarship the assumption is that the plays never change – just as it is assumed the Orient and those who live there never changes either. You can understand the Muslim mind by reading the Koran – in a way that you can’t understand the Western mind by reading the Bible.

Of course, our television makes this unity of the Orient something that is self-evident. Other than Israel, the rest of the region is self-identical. This was made particularly clear during the so called Arab Spring when an image of an Arab in headgear shaking his fist could have been someone revolting in Libya, or Tunisia, or Egypt, or Syria – and fortunately from our perspective in the West all of these countries were identical and had identical problems and were resolving those identical problems in exactly the same way. Through unreason and violence – that is, a particularly Oriental and non-Western way.

If this book is anything, it is a plea for us to recognise the humanity of the other – of the Arab other in this case. One of the things I’ve become increasingly concerned about is what I call aggregated facts. For example, when I hear that the USA spends more on healthcare than any other nation or how much an average Australian spends on education, I become worried. People who talk in averages are not to be trusted – there, a generalisation you can rely on in a review telling you not to rely on generalisations. What people who talk in averages are about to say next is generally a lie. ‘How can there be a problem when America already spends more on healthcare than any other nation on earth?’ ‘How can Australia need the Gonski Report, we already spend a fortune on education?’ But averages mask how much is going to some people and how little is going to others. Averages are lies told in numbers. Aggregating humans as if all you need to say about them is that they are Arabs or Americans or Australians and then thinking that is somehow all you needed to say, that a single label can explain entire human cultures, is the stuff of racist fantasy. That so many otherwise rational and intelligent people have fallen into this trap (yes, I’m looking at you Hitchens – but not only you) and have done so repeatedly is to all of our shame.

Unfortunately, the work of learning about other cultures cannot be done by pouring them into a single bucket and giving them a single name. People are insanely complex and the societies they make are even more so. To imagine for a second that by calling a society Arabic or Islamic suddenly makes it any easier to understand says far more about the person pointing their finger and calling names than it does about those on the receiving end.

Of course this doesn’t only go for Arabs – or even just those living in Asia – but this is a common theme for all people who we think of as being different from ourselves and so group into a single mass. This book is a mirror held up before us (whoever that US is) – we should have the courage to look squarely into that mirror and learn the lesson it is trying to teach us.

Highly recommended, essential reading.