I'm sure you've heard people say, "I've got to get a handle on it" when they are telling you they need to better understand something.

Edward Said has written this comprehensive account of how people in the West have gotten a handle on the area of the world called the Orient - the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Far East and Southern Asia, much of it Islamic. It isn't about the Orient at all but about the representation of the Orient in the West. To say the result was a better understanding would be wrong...with a couple of notable exceptions, all they really got was a variety of stereotypical impressions having common themes.

Said acquaints the reader with the difficulty of dealing with the "other" in a way that gives even an approximation to the reality of lives and cultures in other places. He makes a solid case that more is to be discovered about the West and its experts on the Orient themselves than anything solid on the subject they claim to be illuminating.

What IS the "Orient"? What are the themes that run through writing about it? Said is convinced that the imbalance of power between West and East during the period from the 1700's through the 1900's is a driving factor and the bus really gets rolling with the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon and the voluminous study he commissioned on it. One object of Orientalist writing was to defuse the fear of the ominous East for Westerners by putting it in its place.

The superiority of the West is assumed, as one would expect of material written for Europeans.

Another theme is the nature of Islam. Being considered a challenger to Christianity, Orientalists held up Islam as a bizarre, inferior, perverse, anti-modern and anti-intellectual entity that kept its subjects benighted and unable to think in the clear and rational way of Western man. Said stresses the fact that the Orientalists didn't really like their subject and were ever ready to belittle it.

Keenly appreciating their assumed authority, these writers often held forth with flights of speculation intended to show their own brilliance rather than revealing anything about distant lands and peoples. Racism was never out of the picture. No interviews of those who lived in the Orient were required. In fact, even a visit by the author wasn't necessary, though of course many did tour the area and a few even learned the languages.

Philology (the study of languages) was the "handle" upon which Orientalism started. Great gobs of "wisdom" and summary judgments about the Orient were made on the basis of language analysis alone, showing the clear inferiority of the Semitic languages to the Indo-European languages. Then came the political/colonial experience which put another set of almost opaque spectacles on Western writers. The arrogance of colonialism was quite compatible with orientalist writing. In other words, the orientalists wrote in service to their time and culture, not to their subject in itself.

Instead of individuals, Orientalists wrote of "The Arab" or "The Semite" or "The Musselman". Like those who might inspect insects under a magnifying glass, entire peoples are given immutable characteristics preserved from ancient times which bound their mental outlook allowing no escape; instinctual just as one could speak of how insects behave. The people of the Orient were not fully human like the European.

Islam takes on the character of an invariant blanket of rules that determines life from birth to death, ignoring all the variety that we know to be characteristic of Christianity in the Western world. Not surprisingly, none of the Orientalists were born or raised in the cultures they claimed to know with great accuracy. And the Orientalist outlook has continued to current times, think of the advisors to the president of the United States on foreign policy.

But Said is clear that he doesn't mean only those who live in the Orient are capable of writing about it, nor that one must be a member of any group in order to understand the group. He describes how Orientalism infected the Orient and became a comfortable home for Arab writers as well. Perhaps that is the primary lesson for me in this book - that one can become so at home within the in-group that conforming to the norms of that group and behaving so as to gain the approval of that group becomes more important than any reality outside of it.

The Afterward of the book is a must read. Said relaxes and explains his thinking in reaction to criticism of the book received from all over the world. In describing how his work was misinterpreted, by Islamists holding it out as a repudiation of the West and a vindication of Islam, for example, he explains how easily we label and categorize others, unable to see the rich variety in culture and daily life that we conclude is exclusively ours. He did not write Orientalism as a rejection of the West or to claim that Europeans are uniquely prone to what the book describes.

He ends with optimism, citing the work of such as Clifford Geertz (whose work is fascinating and well worth investigating) and a new generation of writers that have conducted their investigations on guard against the dangers Said exposed.

Orientalism is now a classic text, but Said had great difficulty in finding any publisher for it when he completed it in the late 1970's. As another reader said to me, "it's a scholarly work, but he nailed it." I'd bet most readers will learn a new word or two. I did. His writing expects an educated audience.

There aren't lots of books that mark a sharp dividing line, but this is one of them. I found the high praise I'd heard about it well deserved. It's an education we can all use.

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.

Just from my own experience, if you spend enough time in another culture you realize that human nature is remarkably consistent wherever you go. It’s that consistency that allows us to see the humanity in another but it’s only the lived experience that allows us to truly understand. We all have similar daily anxieties, starting with basic needs, similar needs for family, purpose and spirituality and ultimately similar expressions of joy and sorrow. At least on the level of symbols we can always find counterparts in other cultures, traditions and languages. But to have the opportunity to see things in this way involves a level of knowledge, power and privilege that is not available equally to all. More to the point it involves a particular WAY of seeing things that is one of the main ideas in Said’s writing.

This book is one to regularly re-visit and I have in light of recent events. We fear what we don’t understand - understanding (knowledge) brings a form of control whether conscious or not and even that sense of control compels many of us to study a particular topic in the first place. Understanding a topic brings a sense of order - this is a psychological trait common to all of us. Also common is the tendency to place broad generalizations and to project our own fear of the unknown onto others which dehumanizes them in many ways, starting with our need to explain their reality in terms we understand. As Said famously says, “The Orient must be represented, it can’t represent itself.” This is both an observation and perhaps a statement of human nature. We can only understand things in the context of our own subjectivity. Knowing a foreign language or spending time in a foreign country will help as will a genuine positive desire to learn from other cultures for the sake of learning alone but we will still interpret all this through the context of our own experiences. We retreat to those subjective experiences (or we simply retreat to fear) when we can’t properly describe our observations of the “foreign” or “the orient” in this case.

One of Said’s main concerns is to show how knowledge, power and privilege (in this case coming from the West) has defined “the East” or “the Orient” in terms of “the Occident” - we’ve described what we don’t know in terms of what we do know - as outsiders - without taking into account these fundamental subjective biases. These biases are both conscious and subconscious and are a result of our speaking for others.

Said goes on to point out the dangers of Orientalism in the sense that it has become a structural way for the “West” to define the “East” in terms and through labels that allow our control and dominance of the areas in question - which leads to actual invasions, occupation and general warfare. Orientalism is a colonial phenomenon in Said’s thinking and developed almost parallel and naturally as a part of the drive for world domination. In the time of writing and currently, the greatest face of the Orient is Islam or brown people generally. It is in the Middle East that the greatest geopolitical concerns for the United States and proxies still remain. It was as true 50 years ago as it is today - maybe more so. How we have viewed the people of this region has a dramatic effect on our tolerance for evil - it is still sobering to imagine 2.3 million Americans being shot and starved like fish in a barrel in Gaza (instead of 2.3 million Arabic speaking brown Palestinians) or 1 million Americans killed in Iraq to understand the twinge of subconscious Orientalism many (sometimes all of us) still harbor. How would it affect your view of the current conflict to know that your neighbors or friends or people who spoke exactly like you on the instagram videos were being sliced in half by bombs or burned alive in their homes? Even if you’re against the war I would guess it would still hit a bit harder. Hopefully not, but likely we all carry some of it. It hurts more and we fear it more when the victims look like us. It comes down to human life being valued differently. Said mentions in this book that more than any other group, we will accept labels, slurs and bigotry towards Muslims and Arabs. The things that are said publicly about Palestinians would get you canceled if you said it about any other group. Imagine a panel of university presidents being called before Congress for accusations of “anti-Palestiniansim”.

Orientalism goes hand in hand with Colonialism - it’s a system of rationalizing our actions, justifying our violence and expansion of cultural or physical territory through dehumanization of those we don’t understand towards the end of power and control. It allows us to re-write history according to our narrative and gives power the ability to create labels according to our needs. At times it’s purposeful but it always results from the human fear of what we don’t understand, making it a tool of manipulation for those in positions of power. It’s a critically important read as is The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam by Said which are considered part of a trilogy of related works that are as relevant now as when they were written.

الكتاب مجهدٌ جدًا، وهو مرجعٌ تاريخي أكثر من كونه كتابًا للقراءة.