Said's Orientalism, its Critiques and His Responses

Presenter: Md. Shohel Rana

Roll No. Zia-2300, Tutorial Group No. 1

M.A. English Literature, Session: 2009-10

Department of English, University of Dhaka

Introduction: Good morning everybody, thanks for coming and welcome to my

presentation. I have got a topic as you know and that is Edward Said's Orientalism, its
Critiques, and His Responses. I hope my findings will help us better understand the text. I also
hope that you will find my presentation interesting. I request you not to ask questions while I
am presenting as you know, interruptions may distract me. But don't worry about that; if you
get a question during the presentation, please write it down and ask me at the end of the
session and I would be happy to answer your questions. Now let’s go to the main point.

Highlights of the book Orientalism

First of all, I am going to remind you of the highlights of the book Orientalism by Said. I hope it
will help us relate Said's views to the critiques. The book Orientalism is a bright moon in the
world of post-colonial theories. Many a scholar has regarded it as the canonical text of cultural
studies. It has brought a revolution in this field. Many scholars acknowledge that without Said’s
Orientalism post-colonial studies would remain incomplete. The term orientalism means
scholarly knowledge of Asian cultures, languages, and peoples. Said has popularized the term in
which he examines the processes by which the Orient was constructed in European thinking by
professional orientalists included scholars in various disciplines such as languages, history, and
philology.

As a form of academic discourse, it was “a style of thought based upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction made between the Orient and the Occident” (p.2). Said defines
Orientalism as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the
Orient"(p.3). He further defines Orientalism as "A distribution of geopolitical awareness into
aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts"(p.12).
In Orientalism, Said has used two epitaphs. The first one is from Benjamin Disraeli's novel
'Tancred' which reads "The East is a career". The other is taken from Karl Marx's description of
the ordinary farmer in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and that reads "They
cannot represent themselves; they must be represented". So the Orient is seen as a source of
material gain. The orientalist scholars came to the Orient motivated by their greed for wealth.
They represented the Oriental people as weak, feminine, and inactive. They also depicted them
as the Other or Alien who are inferior while the Occident is superior. The representation of
Eastern man and woman by the orientalist scholars is very much objectionable. The man is
depicted as feminine, weak yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white women.
And the woman is described as both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic.

In the book, Said has 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 Arobo-Islamic peoples and
their culture". He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle
East has served as an implicit justification for European and American colonial and imperial
ambitions.

Principally a study of 19th-century literary discourse and strongly influenced by the work of
thinkers like Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Gramsci, Said's work also engages
contemporary reality and has clear political implications. 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.

Following the idea 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. According to the Foucauldian Model of Power/ Knowledge, knowledge gives
rise to power, and in turn, power produces knowledge and more power requires more
knowledge. The orientalists established their authority over the Orient by acquiring knowledge
about them. 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 Said's analysis in
this area. In particular, Said has been greatly influenced by Gramsci's notion of hegemony in
understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western
scholarship and reparting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the Orient.

Edward Said has summarized his work in the following lines: "My contention is that Orientalism
is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than
the West, which elided difference with its weakness...As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all
aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth and knowledge."(p.204).

Critics on Orientalism

Since the publication in 1978, Orientalism has stimulated and continues to generate responses
from several quarters and with varying degrees of hostility. The vigor and range of these
criticisms reveal how profound the influence of the book has been. I am going to focus on those
critics who have pointed out certain demerits/problems of Orientalism.

 Shelley Walia

Criticizing Said's Orientalism, Shelley Walia in his book entitled 'Edward Said and the Writing of
History' has said, "There are some methodological problems within Said's hypothesis of
Orientalism. It is felt that the study of a systematic and unitary attitude to the East is too
monolithic and dismisses with a single sweep the inconsistencies and varieties of Western
Orientalisms as practised by the English, the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese.
Moreover, the totalising force of Western discourse is rejected as inauthentic, with the implicit
assumption that there is a representation which is real."(p.46-7).
 Aijaz Ahmad

Another prominent critic of Said's Orientalism is Aijaz Ahmad. He is a well-known Indian Marxist
literary theorist and political commentator. One of the most vigorous attacks on Said's alleged
Foucauldian position in recent time has been mounted by Aijaz Ahmad in his book "In Theory:
Classes, Nations, Literature".

Ahmad contextualizes Orientalism with what he terms the general retreat of the Left in
response to the global offensive of the Right. He is at pains to demonstrate that Said is
inconsistent about whether Orientalism is a system of representations or misrepresentations.
Further, Ahmad argues that Said's position is simply to suggest that "the line between
representation and misrepresentation is always very thin."

Robert Irwin

Another critic whose name is Robert Irwin, a British historian criticizes a problem with Said's
Orientalism. In his book 'For Lust of Knowing' he criticizes what he claims to be Said's thesis that
throughout Europe's history "every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a
racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric." Irwin points out that long before notions
like Third-Worldism and post-colonialism entered academia, many Orientalists were committed
advocates for Arab and Islamic political causes.

George P. Landow

Now, let’s have a look at what George Landow says about Said's Orientalism. Landow is a
professor of English and Art History at Brown University in the United States. Though he has
acknowledged the great influence of Orientalism on post-colonial theory, he has found a lack in
Said's scholarship. Landow criticizes Said for ignoring the non-Arab Asian countries, non-
Western imperialism, the occidentalist ideas that abound in the East towards the Western, and
gender issues. Orientalism assumes that Western imperialism, Western psychological
projection, "and its harmful political consequences are something that only the West does to
the East rather than something all societies do to one another."

Bernard Lewis

Now comes Bernard Lewis, the strongest critic of Said's Orientalism. Lewis is a British-American
historian, scholar in Oriental Studies, and political commentator. Orientalism included much
criticism of Bernard Lewis, which he in turn answered. Rejecting the view that Western
scholarship was biased against the Middle East, Lewis responded that Orientalism developed as
a facet of European humanism, independently of the past European imperial expansion. He
noted that the French and the English pursued the study of Islam in the 16th and 17th
centuries, yet not in an organized way, but long before they had any control or hope of control
in the Middle East; and that much of Orientalist study did nothing to advance the cause of
imperialism.

"What imperial purpose was served by deciphering the ancient Egyptian language, for example,
and then restoring to the Egyptians knowledge of and pride in their forgotten, ancient past?"
(Islam and the West:1993, p. 126). Lewis further says that the importance of the German and
Hungarian scholars was tremendous in terms of their contribution to the Middle East
scholarship, even though they were not residents of countries with any imperialist interest in
the region, and therefore the connection between power and knowledge did not exist in this
case. He also says that Said ignored the fact that many scholars opposed imperialism, and
therefore the connection he creates between their academic works and imperialism is forced.

In his Orientalism Said has accused the scholars of the Middle East of serving imperialism or
gaining from it. In response to this accusation, Lewis says that he agrees that some Middle East
scholars served imperialism. But he argues that as an explanation of academic research of the
Islamic world as a whole, this argument is flawed.
 Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and
director of the Middle East Forum. His writing focuses on American foreign policy, the Middle
East, Islam, and Islamism. He is the writer of the controversial book entitled 'In the Path of God:
Islam and Political Power' (2002).

In a review, Pipes argues that "Said's arguments violate history and common sense, while his
manipulation of evidence creates the book's dramatic effect as well as its deep flaws. More
specifically, the argument in Orientalism is overstated and its explanations false."

In the conclusion of his review, Pipes further says, "Orientalism screams with pains; Said reveals
unvarnished grievance and his book settles petty scores. Writing more in anger than in sorrow,
Said lashes out against an outworn view of the world as a catharsis for his personal nemesis. His
flawed, shoddy, and deceptive project is a disgrace and deserves to be ignored.”

Said's Responses to the Critiques

Said's publication of Orientalism made such an impact on thinking about colonial discourses
that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy and criticism. Much of the
criticisms against Orientalism come from the Orientalists. Some criticisms are only for the sake
of criticism. But some points are well-grounded. Now let us have a look at what Said has said to
the Critiques of his Orientalism. He says, "Orientalism elicited a great deal of comment, much of
it positive and instructive; a fair amount of it was hostile and in some cases abusive"(OR-p.1).

As some critics argue that Said has ignored the contribution of German Orientalism which was
not motivated by greed, he responses to this by saying "my exclusion of German Orientalism,
which no one has given any reason for me to have included, have frankly struck me as
superficial, and there seems no point in responding to them"(OR-p.2).
Besides this, some critics have argued that Said's scholarship is ahistorical and inconsistent. To
this point, Said says "the claim made by some, that I am ahistorical and inconsistent, would
have more interest if the virtues of consistency, whatever may be intended by the term, were
subjected to rigorous analysis; as for my ahistoricity, that too is a charge weightier in assertion
than in proof"(OR-p.1).

In response to Bernard Lewis's argument that the Western quest for knowledge about the
Orient was not motivated by greed for power over them rather than by curiosity, Said refutes
this in the following sentences: "In a series of articles and one particularly weak book-'The
Muslim Discovery of Europe'-Lewis has been busy responding to my argument, insisting that
the Western quest for knowledge about other societies is unique, that it is motivated by pure
curiosity, and that in contrast, Muslims were neither able nor interested in getting knowledge
about Europe, as if knowledge about Europe was the only acceptable criterion for true
knowledge. Lewis's arguments are presented as emanating exclusively from the scholar's
apolitical impartiality, whereas he has become a widely rated authority for anti--Islamic, anti-
Arab, Zionist, and Cold War crusades, all of them underwritten by a zealotry covered with a
veneer of urbanity that has very little in common with the "science" and learning Lewis
purports to be upholding"(OR-p.7-8).

A good portion of Said's Orientalism Reconsidered involves his responding to Daniel Pipes's
arguments against Islam. At one point in the preface of his book, Pipes says, "Militant Islam is
best understood not as a religion but as a political ideology." Said's responses to Pipes' critique
are very severe. He says, "His arguments, as demonstrated in his book 'In the Path of God: Islam
and Political Power' would appear to be at the service not of knowledge but of an aggressive
and interventionary state- the United States-whose interests Pipes helps to define"(OR-p.8).

At another point, Said says, "Far from trying to understand Muslims in the context of
imperialism and the revolt of an abused, but internally very diverse, segment of humanity, far
from availing himself of the impressive recent works on Islam in different histories and
societies, far from paying some attention to the immense advances in critical theory, in social
science, in humanistic research, and in the philosophy of interpretation, far from making some
slight effort to acquaint himself with the vast imaginative literature in the Islamic world, Pipes
obdurately and explicitly aligns himself with colonial Orientalists like Snouck Hurgronje and
shamelessly pro-colonial renegades like V. S. Naipaul"(OR-p.10).
The concluding paragraph of Orientalism Reconsidered is very much sharp. Here Said dismisses
the critics of Orientalism by calling them baseless and ephemeral pastime. In his own words:
"We are at now at the threshold of fragmentation and specialization, which impose their own
parochial dominations and fussy defensiveness, or on the verge of some grand synthesis which
I, for one, believe could very easily wipe out both the gains and oppositional consciousness
provided by these counter-knowledges hitherto."

In the very last line Said attacks his critics severely by saying: "Lastly, a much sharpened sense
of the intellectual's role both in the defining of a context and in charging it, for without that, I
believe, the critique of Orientalism is simply an ephemeral pastime.”

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to say that some of the arguments that have been raised by the
critics against Said’s Orientalism are logical to some extent. A noticeable problem of Orientalism
is that Said has over-generalized the representations of the Orient by the orientalist scholars.
We cannot say that all the Western scholars of the Orient were biased. Bernard Lewis is very
much logical in his argument that some scholars came to the Orient motivated by their pure
curiosity and some orientalists did not support imperialism. Now if we can ignore Said’s
problem of over-generalization, we will have to acknowledge that Orientalism is a great
creation that has brought a revolution in the field of post-colonial theories. We can also regard
the book as a canonical text of cultural studies. Actually Said’s Orientalism has opened a new
window through which we can see things better than they had been before. I hope, Edward
Said will be living in his extra-ordinary creation Orientalism through centuries. That’s all from
me for now. Thank you very much for listening. Have a nice day.