NYRB, Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979 The Road to ...

NYRB, Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979
The Road to Morocco
By Albert Hourani
Orientalism
by Edward Said

The theme of this powerful and disturbing book is the way in which intellectual traditions
are created and transmitted. They do not simply arise, Edward Said argues, in the solitude
of a thinker's or a scholar's mind. The scholar may "attempt to reach a level of relative
freedom from…brute, everyday reality," but he can never quite escape or ignore his
"involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances."
…the possibilities for work present in the culture to a great and original mind are never
unlimited…. The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, the
collective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and social
circumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar's production. A field
like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporative identity…the result has been a certain
consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemed
for the Orientalist correct.

"Orientalism" is the example Mr. Said uses to illustrate his theme, and by it he means
something precise. The scholar who studies the Orient (and specifically the Muslim
Orient), the imaginative writer who takes it as his subject, and the institutions which have
been concerned with "teaching it, settling it, ruling it," all have something in common: a
certain representation or idea of "the Orient," defined as being other than the "Occident,"
mysterious, unchanging, and ultimately inferior.

This representation has been created by the Western mind in more or less complete
freedom, for "the Orient as a genuinely felt and experienced force" has been almost
totally absent from Western culture. It has been developed and maintained by a kind of
implicit partnership between scholars, writers, and those who have won and governed
empires. Scholars and writers have been conscious of the sheer fact of Western strength
in a passive and powerless Orient waiting to be ruled or manipulated, and the men who
ruled have drawn a moral justification, and therefore a kind of strength, from the Western
idea of the Orient. The partnership has been mediated through institutions—certain
formalized ways of teaching and writing—which have limited what can be thought and
said about the Orient.

It is this cumulative way of thinking about the Orient and acting toward it that Edward
Said calls "Orientalism." Of course, any kind of thought involves making distinctions,
and distinctions establish limits, but it is his contention that this kind of definition has
been particularly harmful. It may have acted as a spur to the European imagination and
helped to shape the Western sense of identity, but since it is a distinction based ultimately
on religious and cultural difference it has led to a misunderstanding of historical
processes. It has made it impossible to see "orientals" as individual human beings, since
their identity has been absorbed into the idea of "the Muslim," "the Arab," or "the
Oriental"; and, like all very simple binary oppositions of "us" and "them," it has given

rise to judgments of moral worth. The Orient is seen as strange and distant, malignant and
dead unless we bring it to life, the haunt of "monsters, evils, heroes; terrors, pleasures,
desires."

The germ of this vision of the Orient Mr. Said finds in the first encounters of Western
Europe with the world of Islam: the struggle for control of the Mediterranean basin
caused a recurrent trauma in the Western mind, and it could only be controlled by trying
to explain Islam in familiar terms, as a false revelation or a Christian heresy. Then, in the
second half of the eighteenth century, structures of thought inherited from the past were
"secularized, redisposed and reformed": under the influence of a new kind of intellectual
curiosity and the expansion of European power, the image of the Muslim enemy turned
into the modern image of the "Oriental." There appeared the first modern "Orientalists,"
the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron, who discovered and translated Avestan texts, and the
Englishman Sir William Jones, who translated Sanskrit poetry and studied Hindu laws,
and who "before he left England for India in 1783…was already a master of Arabic,
Hebrew, and Persian." Jones was particularly important because his career was bound up
with the first effective and permanent rule of Europeans over an Oriental society, that of
the East India Company in Bengal; in his life and work, the link between political
domination and the urge to understand becomes explicit.

A generation later there came a European incursion into the heart of the Muslim Orient.
The French occupation of Egypt in 1798 was not only an incident in the revolutionary
wars, it was a movement of the imagination. Bonaparte had read the Comte de Volney's
Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie and other writings about Egypt, and they helped to shape
his actions there: he was conscious of forty centuries looking down on him and his
soldiers: he thought of himself as coming to bring back life to a lifeless world, and the
scholars and scientists who went with him carried out the first systematic appropriation of
an Oriental society and culture.

The French expedition perhaps did more for the "imaginative geography" of the Orient
than for the real Egypt. To represent the Orient intellectually and imaginatively, to
dominate it and bring it back to life: these endeavors were to create the Orientalist "field"
during the next seventy years or so. Scholars discovered, edited, extracted, translated, and
interpreted texts: at first an individual effort, their work was later codified and embodied
in institutions and traditions…

Parallel to the process of scholarly investigation went that of exploration. Some travelers
to the Orient, like Lane, went as scholars to gather materials; some, like Chateaubriand,
to discover or assert their identities; others, like Burton, from a mixture of motives. In a
subtle analysis not only of what they said but of the ways in which they said it—
arrangement, style, and "tone"—Mr. Said uncovers the "latent Orientalism" beneath their
differences of approach. For all of them, the fact of empire, the assertion and domination
of Europe, was a present reality; the Orient appeared as a fallen being, attractive but full
of danger, in particular sexual danger.

The modern Orient that they found was not the real Orient but a dead shell into which
only Europe could breathe life again; travel in the Orient was a kind of pilgrimage, which
bore fruit only when the traveler had encountered dangers and overcome them, seen
strange places and turned his back on them, and returned to his own self enriched. In spite
of the similarities, Mr. Said is aware of differences between British and French attitudes,
and perhaps he overstates them. For the British, securely established in India, he says, the
Muslim Orient is a region of potential domination; for the French it is haunted by a
"sense of acute loss." But in this period the French had not irretrievably lost the Middle
East, and they had won for themselves a new province of the imagination in Algeria.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a new phase begins. The imperial
governments take on new responsibilities, the British in Egypt and the French in Tunisia;
then the division of the Ottoman Empire, foreshadowed before the First World War, is
accomplished at its end, and the Arabic-speaking provinces fall under British and French
control. The relationship between scholarly work and political action becomes closer and
more complex. The institutions through which the Orientalist tradition is transmitted are
larger, more formally organized, and more closely linked with governments. Within this
tradition, new human types of the "Orientalist" emerge. In the generation before 1914, the
age of light-hearted, combative, and self-assured expansion, there appears the "imperial
agent," the man who puts his knowledge and ideas, his feelings and impulses, at the
service of empire.

In the years after 1918 the Orientalist vision changes. Europe is in control of the Orient;
its ultimate power cannot be shaken, its right to rule is scarcely questioned, but the
resurgence of the peoples of Asia is now seen as a challenge, and the typical Orientalist
of the age is the adviser who, while accepting the ultimate reality of Western domination,
tries to show the way to a peaceful resolution of differences, a kind of mutual acceptance.
The English and French traditions culminate in two figures who seem to sum them up:
the first is the Frenchman Louis Massignon, whose evocation of the mystical writer and
martyr Mansur al-Hallaj has been formed not only by the European tradition of Islamic
studies but by an aesthetic sensibility and a Catholic consciousness typically French and
of that time; the second is the Scotsman Hamilton Gibb, whose lineage goes back through
Thomas Arnold and Robertson Smith to the same origins, and whose vision of the
continuity and development of the Muslim community through history would come most
easily to a mind conscious of imperial responsibilities and holding a certain Protestant
view of the Church.

Mr. Said writes of both of them with respect for their culture, the quality of their thought,
and their courage, but regards them both as being caught within the "Orientalist" cast of
mind: "Oriental studies" had not turned critically upon their own tradition, as other
human sciences were doing at the time, and for both Massignon and Gibb the ultimate
reality was something called "Islam," eternally present, always different from the West,
in which the individuality of human beings, the differences of times and places, were
dissolved.

Massignon died in 1962, and Gibb in 1971; for those of us who knew them and can
compare our memories with what Mr. Said writes of them, doubts and questions may

arise. His writing is forceful and brilliant (sometimes too forceful for comfort, sometimes
too brilliant to be clear); and he has the skill to penetrate human wills and to delineate the
structure of human visions. But can it be that he himself has fallen into the trap which he
has exposed, and has sunk human differences in an abstract concept called "Orientalism"?
What is the status of this concept? What kind of validity can he claim for the general
statements he makes—such statements as these: "Orientalists are neither interested in nor
capable of discussing individuals"; the Orientalist is marked by "absence of sympathy
covered by professional knowledge"?

In a sense, the answer is simple. What Mr. Said has done is to construct an ideal type of
"the Orientalist," made up of a number of elements logically connected with each other,
and free from extraneous and accidental elements. But as every social scientist knows,
such ideal types must be used with care and caution in order to explain particular events
or human beings. No person fully exemplifies one type: each must be seen in the light of
several types. One of them may explain him more than others, but in the end some
irreducible individual flavor will remain. Having admired the elegance of Mr. Said's
construction, we must still ask how far it will serve as a principle of explanation of the
human beings about whom he writes. The politicians and colonial servants? On the
whole, yes… It may be, however, that he is not treading on such sure ground when he
writes about scholars. Here too he has found some telling quotations: Theodor Noldeke
saying that his life's work had only confirmed his "low opinion" of the Eastern peoples,
or Gibb claiming that "the Arab mind" is incapable of rational thought. Some element of
"latent Orientalism" was indeed present in the minds of most of the Oriental scholars of
the period he deals with; if it was not a certain contempt for those about whom they
wrote, it was at least a conviction that they understood these people, knew their languages
and beliefs, better than they did themselves. We must still ask, however, to what extent
this conviction entered into their work and determined its direction and limits.

Said's thesis is that the tradition of European "Orientalism" has now been transplanted to
the United States, expressed in the language of the social sciences, embodied in
institutions closely linked with American interests and policies in the Middle East, and
used as a weapon in the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians. Once more, he is probably
right in so far as he is dealing with popular images: for the movies, the politicians, and
much of the press, the Arab is the creeping, mysterious, fearsome Oriental shadow. But
once more doubts arise when he writes about scholars…

Today's work still expresses, to a great extent, a European and American conception of
the Muslim East: "the Arab and Islamic world remains a second-order power in terms of
the production of culture, knowledge and scholarship." There are some exceptions: no
Ottoman historian would neglect the work of Halil Inalcik and other great Turkish
historians, and no student of North Africa in future will be able to ignore the profound
and original ideas of Abdullah Laroui. But in general it is true that the Western student of
the Arabs and Persians still works within a structure of ideas created by other Western
students. Arabs and Persians, "as a genuinely felt and experienced force," are still not
present in Western culture; but it would need another book to explain why this is so.