A devastating internal critique that demonstrates the absurdity of implicitly seeing the world through self-absorbed rose-colored glasses.

The narrative about the narrative becomes the truth and the experts create our reality such that we trust their story as if it correlates to reality. Today RFK becomes an expert on health and half the country believes vaccines are dangerous, fluoride in water is unsafe, Trump won the 2020 election, and so on. Just as Edward Said showed the madness within ‘Oriental studies’, the madmen today are creating reality by ignoring reality.

The real strength in this book is when the reader realizes that the book is about all mythmakers who pretend to know the Truth, but are masters at perpetuating the great myths of their day creating a background of lies with no foundation while coloring our foreground into believing the absurd.

Wow, this was an enlightening read. If you’re like me, when you hear the word ‘oriental’ be used you might wince; this was the book that caused that in the popular consciousness. When I first started my degree in Japanese Studies at uni, Said’s Orientalism was the first book that was assigned to us for read. While it opened my eyes a great deal, I only read a handful of chapters at that time. ‘One day I’ll get around to reading it fully’ I’d tell myself, well that day has came.

It’s an incredibly well written deconstruction of how the Occident, Britain, France, and later the United States, fetishised and controlled views of the ‘East’ or Orient, or it can even be said that the entire concept of the Orient is an occidental invention. But it goes further, chronicling around 500 years of oriental study, its defects and shortcomings, but also its progress.

While of course an anti-imperialist book, I wouldn’t go into this expecting any long winded diatribes or hyper emotional language. Said is a measured author, guiding us through history and philosophy with an even hand. Now while the book itself almost entirely focuses on the Near-East to India, its lessons are relevant for the entirety of the non-white world, and how the predominantly white nations treated not only them, but their history and culture.

Being British, it can become slightly fatiguing to read about just how out of date we were, and all the terrible things we did(!), but that is just how history went and it shouldn’t be shied away from. Again, Said is not trying to make any reader feel bad, or turn them against their own history, he is simply showing us what happened.

I must say though, it wasn’t the easiest of reads. Said has a very expansive vocabulary, and is pretty comfortable writing in French and not always translating, the expectation being any reader would of course know this. Written in a different time! Also, some of the chapters do become more of a literary review. But there’s some gold in here, I loved learning about the start of Egyptology and Napoleons heavy influence on it.

All in all, 4 stars, absolutely recommend if you wish to learn something about how the West viewed, and still views, the East.

I’ve been ashamed I hadn’t read Orientalism, and now I know I had reason to be ashamed. It’s rightly a classic. Though its ideas have seeped out so that much was familiar, there was a lot of clarity in going back to source.

I expected a more ‘pugnacious’ book, to use a word from the back cover. But it’s not pugnacious in style or content. Perhaps in the first shock of publication it seemed so. It’s a fair-minded book, ‘humanist’ in a word he refuses to relinquish (that wins my heart). His point is not to condemn or consign to oblivion the entirety of the West’s scholarship and art on the Orient. He just makes us aware of the structures of thought in place. When it came to figures I have an attachment to (T.E. Lawrence; his hero Charles Doughty; other travelers), I never felt Said was telling me I have to cease to read them. And I wasn’t disenchanted, because I knew these guys were riddled with Orientalism even if I didn’t have the terms (in fact, I’m stalled in Doughty from years back where he has an egregious instance; I’ll get over it and pick him up again, for his wonderful observation and the prose style Lawrence so admired). You cannot say fairer than what he says of Richard Burton, along with the useful analysis that only Said has said.

This book is a feat of thought that probably has its little inexactitudes as his detractors like to point out. It re-visioned things and has a larger scope than the still-contentious area of 'Islam' and 'the West' (still? I’m glad he’s not alive). He explains how scholarship isn't innocent of politics – not just in the case of the West on Islam, and not even to fault that case, because scholarship cannot exist in a safe bubble, away from the hustle and bustle of the politicised world around us. I think it is this which gets backs up, more than the charge that he is anti-West (he isn’t). I’ve seen scholars respond that they are indeed innocent of politics; but if I ever cherished that thought, too much reading history has ruined me. If I can tell a not-irrelevant tale: in my own research area, in Asia, in his Orient, as an innocent researcher who didn’t know much about historiography, I grew increasingly flummoxed and exasperated by the attitudinal problems in mainstream, prestigious histories. It turns out, the best thing I could have done in order to understand what I saw was wrong with Mongol history-writing, was read Said. Its applicability goes wider than Islam-and-the-West.

The only time I think he’s irascible in tone is in the 1995 Afterword, when he’s obviously been in a feud with Bernard Lewis. I’m sorry his book met hostility in certain quarters, because, as I say, it’s not damnatory of the tradition, and if Orientalists or their heirs don’t see there’s room for this sort of criticism, that’s sad. With his 2003 Preface – the year he died – he has returned to the serene tones of the main work, although, with the downturn in world events, he sounds a sadder and a wiser man.

The book was written as a classic ought to be, without the jargon of the day and a pleasure to read. It may become too detailed in its case studies for most people’s purposes; I used the skip button, but this is not my last encounter with Said’s great work.

A seminal work which really revolutionised the humanities, particularly when looking at non-western cultures, Said's Orientalism is something which really needed saying and that now, at least for those of us who have been through graduate studies in the humanities and social sciences after the publication of this book, does seem kind of obvious. However, things only look obvious after someone pointed them out, and Said does a great job of systematically pointing out the way in which Western scholarship constructed the idea of the "orient" on a bedrock of prejudice, colonialism and racism. 

Said systematically charts the construction of the "orient" as a handmaid of colonialist projects of England and France with in depth analysis of authors and works from the 18th century onwards. If there is a problem with Said it is the way in which he limits his analysis to these countries, but then he was just opening a conversation, others did follow in his footsteps for the realities of other European countries which had their own specific ways of relating to the fabled orient. 

A book that is as interesting for the collection of works, authors and citations which help prove Said's point as it is for the kind of conversation that Said is attempting to start, one which faced considerable resistance on the part of western academia but which was eventually vindicated as new generations of scholars started taking in Said's points. This doesn't mean, however that the problem he raises is in any way solved, and if there have been improvements in the Social Sciences and Humanities in the way Asia and North Africa is spoken about there, the problem is, as countless middle eastern military adventures have shown, that those people actually have very little power of decision when it really comes down to it. Essential.