Orientalism is the framework through which Western writers, policymakers, and the general public have interpreted and defined the Islamic societies of the Middle East as “the Orient.” The central premise of Orientalism is that the Orient is a fundamentally different, exotic, dangerous, unchanging, and “other” place. This concept of a foreign and strange East forms a set of cultural, political, religious, and linguistic contrasts which, in turn, has enabled the “West” to think of itself as a distinct—and superior—entity.
Orientalism served as a key ideological lynchpin of European colonialism; fundamentally, it is a discourse of dominance, superiority, and control that continues to have profound implications on today’s geopolitical landscape.
We first need to define and flesh out Orientalism as a concept by exploring:
Beginning in the early 18th century, Orientalism began to emerge and diversify as an academic discipline. Its experts and practitioners positioned themselves as the authoritative “interpreters” of the Orient, both for Western audiences and, as the Age of Imperialism dawned, for the people of the region themselves.
Rather than seeing the Orient as a complex and evolving society of people with their own political and economic agency, Orientalists viewed it as a fascinating object to be studied, described, represented, and, ultimately, mastered by Western powers.
Thus, the knowledge produced and disseminated by the Orientalist tradition was a source of tremendous power for the West in its efforts to subjugate and subordinate the East.
A hallmark of Orientalist thought was the idea that the Orient was a monolithic mass whose people, culture, and society had remained unchanged since the days of the ancient civilizations.
The idea that the Orient was static and unmoved by the forces of modernity directly fed the myth of the supposed “Oriental mind.” Because “Orientals” had remained stuck in a stage of intellectual, cultural, religious, and political development essentially unchanged since the days of the pharaohs, Orientalists felt confident in making sweeping pronouncements about how modern-day peoples of the region thought and acted. There was no need to speak to contemporary people living in Egypt, Iran, or Arabia, because all one ever needed to know about them could be found in the treasure of ancient artifacts and manuscripts that Orientalist anthropologists, historians, and philologists eagerly devoured.
Thus, there was an eternal and fixed “Oriental mind.” And, in the Orientalist interpretation, this “Oriental mind” was incapable of the kind of objectivity and rationality that would enable the people of the region to develop enlightened European institutions like science, representative democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law. Instead, it was and would forever be rooted in the subjective and transactional mental structures of the ancient world. Therefore, as a people, “Orientals” were vengeful, emotional, dishonest, and violently obsessed with shame and honor.
In Orientalist writings, the Orient is forever in the passive position. It can never act of its own accord; it can only be acted upon. This could be seen in its (perceived) failure to keep up with European political, economic, and technological advances. Even when Orientalists did encounter unmistakable evidence of political agency and will among people of the region (as with, for example, the Egyptian nationalist movement, which gained momentum in the late 19th century) they could comfortably write it off as an anomaly.
In its methodology, Orientalism was highly textual, relying heavily upon ancient writings and inscriptions as the source of all knowledge about the Orient. This approach contributed to the dehumanizing tone and attitudes that pervaded so much of Orientalist discourse, treating human beings—indeed, even enormously complex human societies—as reducible to what texts had to say about them. For the Orientalist, the story of the East was fundamentally one of texts—not people.
This methodology had real-world consequences, as Orientalists sought to apply ancient texts to address the problems of the modern Orient, fully consistent with their belief in an unchanging East—and in their unique role as its interpreters.
This European idea of a strange, distant, and static Orient had existed in Western literature and historical writing long before the development of Orientalism as a formal academic discipline. We'll explore these deep roots of Orientalist thought by looking at:
Ancient Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta explicitly defined themselves by their contrasts with and opposition to the despotic “Asiatic” Persian Empire.
This tradition of “othering” the Orient goes all the way back to the very earliest works of Western literature. In The Iliad, the foundational text of Western literature, Homer presents the antagonistic and ultimately doomed kingdom of Troy as a stand-in for the Orient—a decadent and dangerous foe to be vanquished by the daring and heroic Greeks. For the intended Greek audience, the message is clear—Asian challenges to the West will result only in Asia’s own ruin and lamentation.
The rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century brought a new dimension to Western apprehensions regarding the Orient.
For the Christian West, Islam became the great existential menace, threatening the frontiers of Europe while occupying the Christian sites of the Levant. For the next millennium, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One, Islam would occupy a singular role in the European mind, standing as the only plausible threat to European Christian hegemony.
Europeans saw Islam as a bastardization or perversion of the true religion of Christianity, with the prophet Mohammed as the fraudulent Muslim analogue to Christ. The Orientalists later picked up on this theme. Even with their great monotheistic religion, the “Oriental” mind was only capable of producing an inferior facsimile of the Western original.
This power of Orientalism to shape and control the Western image of the East—and the influence of that vision on Western actions toward the East—came on vivid display in 1798, with the French invasion of Egypt.
Although the (ultimately unsuccessful) military expedition was partly driven by France’s strategic imperatives in the region, Napoleon was also heavily influenced by an Orientalist-inspired vision of the West’s historical relationship with the East. He wanted to unlock Egypt for the West, not just militarily and economically, but also to mine the country for its ancient artifacts and texts. Accordingly, he brought a team of hundreds of scholars and surveyors along with his army.
One of the most significant works to come out of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt was the Description de l’Egypte, a 23-volume publication the purpose of which was to serve as the definitive and comprehensive catalog of ancient Egypt. It is one of the foundational texts of Orientalism, exerting a powerful influence over a generation of European writers.
The Description portrayed Egypt in Eurocentric terms, celebrating it for being the origin point of Western civilization. In this telling, Egypt and the Orient could not exist on their own terms. They were significant because of their relationship to the West.
These historical experiences deeply influenced how Orientalists wrote about, acted upon, and interpreted the Orient during the 19th century Age of Imperialism. To delve deeper into this dynamic, it is important to understand:
Orientalism was and remains a powerful framework, one that shaped (and constrained) the ways in which Western scholars and observers wrote about and experienced the Orient.
This is because Orientalism functioned as a method of interpretation—the only means by which the mysteries of the East could be understood by the Western reader. Thus, anyone engaged in any work even remotely connected to the area we now know as the Middle East could not help but be influenced by Orientalism’s major works.
One way that Orientalism positioned itself as the guardian of knowledge about the East was through its dominance of highly esoteric fields like philology. Philology is the study of language, primarily using written, ancient textual sources. By studying ancient literary texts and historical documents, philologists hope to gain greater understanding of the historical development of languages over time.
For the philologists, language was the key to understanding Eastern culture, history, and the “Oriental mind.” By studying the origin and evolution of ancient languages, philologists believed that they could glean great insights into the temperament and essential “racial” characteristics of contemporary Asians.
For instance, Orientalist philologists like the Frenchman Ernest Renan (1823-1892) saw the supposedly ossified and static Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic) as responsible for the languid and desultory development of the Orient.
The philologists’ passion for decoding and organizing the ancient languages of the East speaks to another pillar of Orientalism. Orientalists of this era saw it as their mission to order and make sense of the chaotic and unruly fragments of Oriental history, language, and culture. They believed that the mysteries of the Orient could only be understood through their mediation. They saw themselves bringing to light and unearthing lost knowledge (and thus, the power to define and proscribe the Orient in the mind of the West).
Orientalism was more than just scholarship. Ideas influence actions, and Europe was highly active in the Orient throughout the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century. In this section we’ll examine:
Orientalism both reflected and reinforced a fundamental power relationship between Europe and the Orient. Indeed, the very existence of a field like Orientalism, in which one could claim to be an expert in the history, languages, culture, social system, and religion of a vast and diverse region on the basis of having studied ancient texts and artifacts, demonstrated the inequality of the relationship between the Orient and the West. All things about “the Orient” could be reduced and ultimately mastered as a field of study.
Orientalism revealed itself to be a potent force in world politics by the late 19th century. By this time, the British and French governments had come to view the cultivation of experts in Oriental studies as necessary for the survival and expansion of their Middle Eastern empires. This was because, as we’ve seen, Western policymakers viewed the Orient as essential and unchanging. Thus, experts in ancient languages, monuments, and religions could provide valuable insight into the eternal “Oriental mind” that would be of great use in dominating the contemporary peoples of the Orient.
The mobilization of academic knowledge in service of imperialism became a hallmark of Orientalism during this period. Orientalist tropes about Western superiority and Eastern passivity played a major role in justifying and legitimating the imperialist project. Orientalist scholarship was not merely confined to the ivory tower of academia. As we’ve seen, it influenced the actions of key historical figures like Napoleon, who very much saw themselves as modern-day exemplars of an ancient tradition of Western dominance.
The political results of these Orientalism-inspired actions were profound, with Europe coming to fulfill its imagined role as the rightful ruler of the Eastern world. Indeed, by the end of World War One (1914-1918), European powers had conquered a staggering 85 percent of the world’s landmass, including large swathes of the Orientalist heartland of the Middle East.
This was a great triumph of Orientalism. Orientalists were no longer just analyzing history; now, they were actively making it.
The work of Western writers and commentators of this era, like the French Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), is suffused with a fear and apprehension regarding the Orient, its strangeness (to Europeans), and its potential for violent action if not held in check.
If they were not subjugated, the unwashed, teeming masses of the Orient could one day overwhelm the West. Accordingly, to preserve and defend their own culture, Western powers had a positive duty to extract what they could from the Orient, while keeping its people in a perpetual state of political disorganization.
One of the most famous promoters of the view that it was Europe’s destiny and duty to dominate Asia and Africa was the British journalist and author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). In his 1899 poem, “The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands," Kipling celebrated the imperial project and exhorted white Europeans to fulfill their mission to civilize and subjugate the non-white peoples of Asia and Africa.
The “white man’s burden” was adopted in broader European and American culture, with governments, private enterprises, and individuals accepting the notion that white people had a moral obligation to dominate the world.
As bringers of capitalism, technology, and civilization, imperialist whites expected to be shown a high degree of deference and obedience by the Asian and African peoples they came to dominate. Of course, categorical identities like “white men” and “Orientals” were only possible through Orientalism’s successful division of complex reality into simple generalities of race, language, and culture.
Orientalism had to react to historical developments in the 20th and 21st centuries, when the peoples and nations of the Orient began resisting European imperialism, forging their own political identity, and competing with the West on more equal terms. To understand these developments, it’s crucial to examine:
The Orientalists strove to maintain the barrier between East and West in the postwar years. For scholars like H.A.R. Gibb (1895-1971), keeping this wall of separation intact was paramount. The West had defined itself since ancient times in opposition to the East. If these lines were to become blurred, the West might find itself without an identity of its own.
The growth of national independence movements and organizations like the League of Nationalist Action in Lebanon and the Arab Independence Party in Mandatory Palestine (which was administered by the British) threatened to knock down the barriers between East and West and possibly even put the East on equal footing with the West. These developments raised the alarming prospect of the Arab world throwing off the shackles of Western political and economic domination and asserting its own right to self-determination. This represented a grave affront to the West’s self-conception, as it envisaged itself as the natural ruler and guardian of the Orient. If the Orient could successfully push back against the West, what else might they be able to do?
Thus, despite the changes taking place within other academic disciplines during this era, Orientalism remained insular and backward-looking in its outlook and core assumptions. It continued to root the region’s complex contemporary conflicts and political problems in ancient, Biblical sources—such as explaining the emerging Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of the Old Testament story of Isaac and Ishmael. 20th-century Orientalists saw these conflicts as manifestations of an “eternal” struggle between East and West.
Thus, as late as 1963, a figure like Gibb could still be found asserting that the politics of the Arab world could not possibly be motivated by modern political ideologies like communism, nationalism, or anti-colonialism. Those were products of the Western tradition; the “Oriental” was forever constrained by his status as an “Oriental.” Any deviation from this preordained role was a betrayal or perversion of his essential character.
Figures like Gibb saw these complex movements toward self-determination as unorganized outbursts of enthusiasm. The Arabs may have been capable of political agitation, but it would typically be short-lived and, ultimately, self-destructive. The Arab temperament was incapable of conceiving, let alone acting upon, a collective political program for the benefit of their nation or society as a whole. Their innate parochialism and loyalty to tribe or clan would inevitably trump the formation of larger political identities or coherent ideologies. These were Western political achievements of which “the Arab” was incapable.
In the postwar world, the United States would emerge as the preeminent Western power, particularly as the Cold War (1945-1991) began to take shape. This was the beginning of America’s active role in Middle Eastern politics, which it maintains to this day.
The United States also took a leading role in driving Orientalism, which would be inextricably linked to Cold War geopolitics. Think tanks and university cultural relations programs in Islamic or Middle Eastern studies were routinely funded by the United States Department of Defense, the Ford Foundation, and the RAND Corporation, as well as major banks, oil companies, and other pillars of the US national security and business establishment. Under American influence, the Orient remained an object to be shaped, manipulated, dominated, and defined by Western interests.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, Orientalism was recast as “area studies,” but the same assumptions and power dynamics remained.
Well into the 1960s and 1970s, area studies specialists were publishing papers analyzing the failure of the “Semitic” people to produce great cultural achievements on par with those of the West. This was little more than neo-Orientalism, with crude and reductive analyses of Arabs and Muslims still finding a welcome audience in prestigious academic journals.
Another manifestation of modern, post-World War Two Orientalism is the “clash of civilizations” theory, supported by scholars like the American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008). This theory posits that there is a fundamental and unbridgeable division between the progressive, liberal, secular West and the traditionalist, reactionary, and orthodox Islamic world. Huntington argued in 1993 that these two religious and cultural traditions formed distinct blocs organized around irreconcilable values and worldviews.
The “clash of civilizations” theory held that cultural conflict between the West and Islam would form the main theatre of geopolitical conflict in the years following the Cold War. This view gained many adherents in the West, as it seemed especially prescient following the attacks of September 11 and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the notion of the “clash of civilizations” is rooted in old, false Orientalist assumptions. Cultures, in fact, influence and shape one another and do not have neat distinctions like “the Muslim world” or “Western civilization.” These are ideological constructions and invented identities.
We also see the lingering effects of Orientalism in the way Arabs are portrayed in Western popular culture.
Arab and/or Muslim film characters have frequently been shown wearing stereotypical robes and headgear. In political cartoons in American and European newspapers, Arabs have been represented using racist caricatures featuring hooked noses, mustaches, and leering expressions. Disturbingly, these portrayals echo the depictions of Jews in the antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich—perhaps unsurprising, given the Orientalist tradition of lumping Jews and Arabs together as “Semites.”
Our discussion of the ideological pitfalls—and real-world consequences—of Orientalism shows that the role of the scholar should be to question and scrutinize politically motivated myths like the notion of a separate, eternal, and unchanging Orient—not to manufacture and perpetuate them.
Likewise, we must always remember that knowledge is not inherently neutral or objective: As our study of Orientalism teaches, knowledge can always be manipulated to serve the interests of the powerful against the powerless.
Edward Said’s Orientalism is a study of the scholarly, intellectual, political, and ideological phenomenon known as Orientalism. Orientalism is the framework through which Western writers, policymakers, and the general public have interpreted and defined “the Orient” (which, in this summary, will primarily refer to the Islamic societies of the Middle East, though these terms also encompass East Asia in some writings).
Said’s key insight is that Orientalism does not reflect objective truth. Instead, it is an invention of the Western mind. The central premise of Orientalism is that the Orient is a fundamentally different, exotic, dangerous, unchanging, and “other” place. This concept of a foreign and strange East forms a set of cultural, political, religious, and linguistic contrasts which, in turn, has enabled the “West” to think of itself as a distinct—and superior—entity.
Said (1935-2003) had the intellectual framework of Orientalism impressed upon him from birth. As an Arab Palestinian educated in Palestine and Egypt (both of which were British colonies at the time), who then went on to an academic career in literature and postcolonial studies in the United States, Said always felt himself to be straddling the Eastern and Western parts of his identity. Despite his success, Said always had a keen awareness of his identity as an “Oriental.” Orientalism is his exploration of the origins, development, and implications of this manufactured “otherness” that he experienced so deeply.
“The West” (by which we refer primarily to Europe and North America) in turn forged its historical identity against the foil of the East or Orient. This identity was typically expressed as one of superiority and dominance over the Orient, which Western writers, travelers, and, later, imperialists reduced to a series of crude and reductive stereotypes and generalizations. The West was Christian where the Orient was Islamic; its people were Nordic where those of the Orient were Semitic; it was liberal, democratic, and rational where the Orient was backward, despotic, and emotional.
Even generalized terms like “West,” “East,” “Orient,” and “Occident” are products of Orientalism, artificially separating complex cultures into monolithic, separate, and opposed moral spheres. (“Occident” is the Latin-derived term for the Western world, the counterpart to the Eastern “Orient.”) These terms reduce the complexity of diverse human societies, languages, cultures, and histories into near-meaningless generalities that ultimately serve to obscure the humanity of the people to whom they refer.
In the end, Orientalism represents the interpretation and creation of the Orient—by Westerners, for Westerners. The people of the Orient themselves have had little agency in the creation of Western narratives about them.
Although this picture of the Orient in the Western mind can be found as far back as the Middle Ages, we will primarily concern ourselves with the growth and development of Orientalism beginning in the 18th century. It is no coincidence that this era coincided with the beginning of the age of European imperialism, in which European nations (chiefly Great Britain and France) conquered, subjugated, and exploited the peoples of the Middle East.
Orientalism served as a key ideological lynchpin of European colonialism; fundamentally, it is a discourse of dominance, superiority, and control over the people of the Orient. As the centuries wore on, Orientalism became a self-sustaining intellectual force, profoundly impressing itself upon the Western mind and influencing European (and, later, American) art, literature, poetry, economics, science, philosophy, political science, and public policy.
Although Orientalism was originally published in 1978, its lessons are still highly relevant for today’s audience. Recent events such as:
All demonstrate the intertwined and often-fraught relationship between Orient and Occident.
How the West views the East continues to have profound implications on today’s geopolitical landscape. The continued involvement of the West in the affairs of the Middle East through political interference, economic sanctions, and even military force shows that the legacy of Orientalism and the imperialism it sustained is still very much alive and with us today.
In this summary, we will attempt to break through the simplistic narrative of an eternal and inevitable “clash of civilizations” between East and West by:
(Shortform note: In referring to the region primarily covered in this summary, we have chosen to use the more familiar (although admittedly Eurocentric) “Middle East” over the more neutral “Western Asia.” When we are discussing Orientalism and how Orientalists viewed the region, we have used the term “Orient,” for purposes of clarity and to make their outdated terminology and intellectual framework more clear. With some occasional exceptions when referring to how Orientalists viewed the people of the region, however, we have avoided using the adjectival “Oriental” to refer to the peoples of the Middle East, as this term is widely regarded today as pejorative and offensive. Where we have used the term, we have placed it in quotes to signify its racist character.
We have also reorganized some of Said’s ideas for purposes of clarity.)
As we mentioned in the Introduction, Orientalism is the intellectual framework by which European (and later, American) scholars, diplomats, imperial administrators, and policymakers created the idea of an alien, oppositional, and unchanging “East.” In this chapter, we’ll define and flesh out Orientalism as a concept by exploring:
The knowledge produced and disseminated by the Orientalist tradition was a source of tremendous power for the West in its efforts to subjugate and subordinate the East.
Beginning in the early 18th century, Orientalism began to emerge and diversify as an academic discipline, with its experts and practitioners positioning themselves as the authoritative “interpreters” of the Orient, both for Western audiences and, as the Age of Imperialism dawned, for the people of the region themselves.
Later, in public speeches and written works, figures like Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), First Lord of the Admiralty of the British Empire and, later, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; and Evelyn Baring (1841-1917), 1st Lord of Cromer and first British Consul-General of Egypt, asserted the Orientalist position that the Orient was a fantastic, wild, but ultimately static and unchanging place.
Balfour was a figure thoroughly rooted in Orientalist assumptions about the Middle East. A stately and high-ranking figure in the administration of the British Empire, he had held key posts in countries from Ireland to Afghanistan to South Africa. In a memorable speech before the House of Commons in 1910, he justified the British occupation of Egypt on the grounds of the wealth of knowledge that British scholars had accumulated about the country. Because they knew so much already, the country would be easy to administer and expropriate for British strategic and commercial purposes. And what had this knowledge “taught” them? That Egypt—and the Orient writ large—was unchanging, incapable of self-government, and capable of flourishing only under conditions of despotism.
This last point was crucial to Balfour’s argument. If the benighted Egyptians could not govern themselves and had always submitted to the will of iron-fisted rulers, why shouldn’t those rulers be the enlightened, humane British? Only Europeans, Balfour argued, had the right combination of strength, ingenuity, but also humanity to serve as Egypt’s rightful masters.
The Orient, rather than being a complex and evolving society of people with its own political and economic agency, was, in the view of Orientalists like Balfour and Cromer, an object to be studied, described, represented, and, ultimately, mastered by Western powers.
This was why the production of knowledge about the Orient was so vitally important—the extensive knowledge that British and French Orientalists had about the ancient cultures, languages, and history of the Orient was precisely what made them fit to rule it and bring it out of its decrepit state into the light of the modern world.
The Orientalists’ admiration for the ancient world of the Orient was important in this production of knowledge. They viewed with awe the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria. For them, the Orient was the cradle of civilization itself, the great well from which Greek, later Roman, and, finally, their own Western European civilization had sprung.
But crucially, they saw the modern Orient as having remained essentially unchanged in the millennia that had passed since ancient times. European civilization, in their telling, had thoroughly eclipsed its Eastern forebears. The Orient, it’s true, may have been home to the world’s first civilizations, but they had already passed their peak before Western civilization had truly begun. The West had birthed political ideals like democracy, the rule of law, representative institutions, and free enterprise; the Orient languished in decadent and backward despotism. The West had developed advanced technologies and sophisticated, rational state structures that enabled it to navigate the world and export its ideals; the Orient, meanwhile, was parochial and conservative, caring little about the world beyond.
After their launch of human civilization in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia and the valley of the Nile, the “Orientals” had fallen into a state of perpetual arrested development, having neglected to maintain their own glorious tradition.
Therefore, the Orientalists, with their unparalleled knowledge of the achievements of the Orient (which, to them, was eternal and unchanging) were the true guardians and inheritors of that tradition—more so than the people who actually lived in the Middle East.
For the Orientalist, the views of the people of the Orient themselves were irrelevant, as they were clearly incapable of self-government or judging their own self-interest. To supposedly enlightened British imperialists like Balfour and Cromer, empire-making was not mere conquest or subjugation. Instead, they genuinely believed it to be an inherently humanitarian enterprise, one in which colonial officials, scholars, and entrepreneurs were engaged in a great civilizing mission. Their role would be to protect the heritage and allure of the Orient from the depredations of the “Orientals.”
As previously noted, a hallmark of Orientalist thought was the idea that the Orient was a monolithic mass whose people, culture, and society had remained unchanged since the days of the ancient civilizations. Moreover, Orientalists believed there to be little if any distinction between cultures within the Orient—it was all one undifferentiated mass, so what was true for Egypt was also true for Iran, Transjordan, Palestine, and Arabia.
This belief in an essential, static, and unchanging Orient enabled Orientalists to make sweeping generalizations about the mental framework of the millions of people living in the Middle East—despite the enormous cultural, social, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of the region.
The idea that the Orient was static and unmoved by the forces of modernity directly fed the myth of the supposed “Oriental mind.” In the Orientalist telling, the “Oriental mind” was incapable of the kind of objectivity and rationality that would enable the people of the region to develop enlightened European institutions like science, representative democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law. Instead, the people of the Orient saw everything as subjective and transactional. As a people, they were vengeful, emotional, dishonest, and violently obsessed with shame and honor.
This speaks to another aspect of Orientalist thought: its essentialism regarding the peoples of the region. Orientalists believed that non-Westerners shared a set of essential characteristics that made them who they are. According to this mode of thinking, a person’s identity as an “Oriental” was the most important fact one needed to know about them. Every other aspect of their humanity was secondary to it and could be explained by reference to it.
We see these attitudes in works from the period like Tancred, an 1847 novel by British parliamentary backbencher (and future Prime Minister) Benjamin Disraeli. The novel details the adventures of the titular protagonist, a member of the British landed gentry, who travels to the Holy Land in the footsteps of the Crusaders, in an attempt to connect more deeply with his Christianity. Tancred’s interactions with the people he encounters there come down to the essential and unalterable racial characteristics. Whether they are Jews, Muslims, or Druzes matters little, they are all fundamentally “Orientals.” An “Oriental” worships, lives, eats, fights, and dies as an “Oriental.” No matter what he does or thinks, he can never shake loose this fundamental component of his identity.
These ideas of essential or innate characteristics shared by groups of people are closely tied to scientific racism, which was broadly accepted within the Western academic community from the 18th century through the first half of the 20th century. These ideas were only finally discredited when they were carried to their logical (and catastrophic) conclusion by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Scientific racism argued that humanity was divided up into different races (like the “Asiatic,” the “Aryan,” the “Negroid,” the “Semitic,” and so on), each with their own set of immutable characteristics. Thus, a race scientist could speak of the behaviors of “the Asiatic” or “the Oriental” just as a naturalist might describe the behavior of “the gazelle” or “the antelope” in the wild. The individual was largely irrelevant to this system of classification. What mattered most was the racial group to which she belonged.
Because of its perceived failure to keep up with European political, economic, and technological advances, the Orient was seen by the Orientalists as incapable of acting upon its own agency or initiative.
In Orientalist writings, the Orient is forever in the passive position. It can never act of its own accord; it can only be acted upon. Even when Orientalists did encounter unmistakable evidence of political agency and will among people of the region (as with, for example, the Egyptian nationalist movement, which gained momentum in the late 19th century) they could comfortably write it off as an anomaly.
This was because the people of the Middle East lacked the initiative and innate racial characteristics (as the Orientalists saw it) to break free from their ancient superstitions and irrationality. They would forever be at the mercy of events, never in control of their own destiny—and certainly incapable of gaining the requisite knowledge and enlightenment to bridge their gap with the West on their own.
Think about how your ideas about other cultures may be rooted in false assumptions.
What false or overly simplistic preconceived ideas have you had about cultures, religions, and/or ethnicities other than your own?
How do you think you came to believe these things? Did someone teach them to you, or did you simply absorb them without actively learning them? Briefly explain your answer.
What caused you to rethink these preconceived ideas about other cultures and adopt a more nuanced approach? How can you avoid accepting stereotypes and simplified understandings of other cultures in the future?
In the previous chapter, we defined Orientalism and outlined its core ideological assumptions about the East—and how those ideas influenced the exercise of power and control in the Orient by Europeans.
But the European idea of a strange, distant, and static Orient wasn’t simply invented by 18th- and 19th-century colonial powers to justify their imperial project. In fact, these concepts have long existed in Western literature and historical writing. In this chapter, we’ll explore these deep roots of Orientalist thought by looking at:
Ancient Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta explicitly defined themselves by their contrasts with and opposition to the despotic “Asiatic” Persian Empire. The Greek city-states may have been bitter rivals, but they were united in their shared identity of not being of the “barbarian” Orient.
This tradition of Greek “othering” of the Orient goes all the way back to the very earliest works of Western literature. In The Iliad, the foundational text of Western literature, Homer presents the antagonistic kingdom of Troy as a stand-in for the Orient—a decadent and dangerous foe to be vanquished by the daring and heroic Greeks.
Later, the ancient Greek tragedies of Aeschylus (c. 525-c. 455 BCE), Sophocles (c. 497-c. 406 BCE), and Euripides (c. 480-c. 406 BCE) presented the Orient in a similar way. In Aeschylus’s The Persians, the Persian emperor Xerxes is presented as the ultimate figure of mourning, loss, and defeat, lamenting the crushing of his forces by the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE). This is the earliest known representation of the supine, submissive East kneeling before the dominant and superior West. For the intended Greek audience, the message is clear—Asian challenges to the Greeks will result only in Asia’s own ruin and lamentation.
In a tradition that would later be picked up by the European Orientalists, these works never present the perspective of the Orient on its own terms. Always, the words and feelings of the Orient are filtered —by Greek writers, for the benefit of Greek audiences. The Orient does not, and cannot, speak for itself.
Later Western encounters with the Orient—from the journeys of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BCE), to the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), to the Crusades during the Middle Ages, to the journeys of Marco Polo (1254-1324 CE)—only reinforced these themes of strangeness and otherness.
The very separateness of the Orient was a key element in forging the emerging “Western” or “European” identity.
The rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century and its stunning conquest of vast swathes of Asia, Africa, and Europe brought a new dimension to Western apprehensions regarding the Orient.
For the Christian West, Islam became the great existential menace, threatening the frontiers of Europe while occupying the Christian sites of the Levant. For the next millennium, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One, Islam would occupy a singular role in the European mind, standing as the only plausible threat to European Christian hegemony.
This was reflected in how Europeans wrote about the East. In representing and describing the alien entity of Islam, Western writers imposed their own archetypes on it. Even the name they ascribed to Islam, “Mohammedism,” betrays this attitude. They saw Islam as a bastardization or perversion of the true religion of Christianity, with the prophet Mohammed as the fraudulent Muslim analogue to Christ. As Christ was to Christianity, so was Mohammed to Mohammedanism—a gross misunderstanding of Islam, which celebrates Mohammed as a prophet but does not worship him as God.
The Orientalists inherited this dismissal of Islam. Even with their great monotheistic religion, the “Oriental” mind was only capable of producing an inferior facsimile of the Western original.
As we’ve seen, there was a long historical tradition of Western antipathy toward the Orient, with Western writers forming a distorted and reductive picture of what was in fact a highly diverse—and quite culturally advanced—region.
(Shortform note: During the Middle Ages, the cultural and scientific achievements of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, which ruled vast stretches of the Middle East and Northern Africa from 750-1258, vastly outpaced those of Christian Europe. It was Muslim scholars, for example, in the great centers of learning at Baghdad and Damascus, who translated the classic works of ancient Greece and Rome into Arabic and Persian—preserving this great legacy of knowledge that would have otherwise been lost to the European Dark Ages.)
Although it drew on this history, Orientalism truly began its meteoric ascent during the age of European imperialism, which began in earnest at the tail end of the 18th century and became a dominant feature of world politics in the 19th century.
Advances in technology, administration, and war-making capabilities made the once-mysterious and inscrutable Orient visible and real to the European world in a way that it never had been before. A French consortium’s 1869 completion of Egypt’s Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, was a visible, physical manifestation of Europe’s emerging dominance. The canal stood as a marvel of modern engineering, and, for the West, a powerful demonstration of its superiority. It also held great symbolic significance as a physical link connecting West and East, at last subordinating the once-mysterious and inaccessible Orient—and decisively shifting the power balance in the West’s favor.
Likewise, the early 19th century witnessed an explosion of interest in the study and acquisition of ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Assyrian texts within learned European circles, comparable to the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman works that marked the Renaissance in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries.
Leading Orientalist figures like the German Julius von Moh (1800-1876), president of the Société Asiatique, produced lengthy encyclopedic compendia of all things Oriental, encompassing art, literature, religious texts, and architecture.
But for all of their admiration for the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and their unquestionably brilliant scholarship, this first generation of Orientalists could not help but perpetuate and codify the same ancient myths about the Orient that we’ve seen had existed in the European consciousness since antiquity.
The purpose of Orientalist writing and scholarship was never to inform readers or challenge their preexisting “knowledge” of the Orient—it was to confirm and reinforce it.
The Orientalists’ singular focus on ancient texts made this all but inevitable—because of their commitment to the idea of an essential, unchanging Orient, they came to believe that rigorous study of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Pyramid Texts could provide a scholar with penetrating insight into the society, culture, and politics of modern Middle Eastern societies. As we’ll see later, this mode of thinking enabled a small guild of Orientalist philologists, archeologists, anthropologists, and historians to exert great influence over the public policy of the British and French Empires in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Orientalism’s textual approach contributed to the dehumanizing tone and attitudes that pervaded much of Orientalist discourse, treating human beings—indeed, even enormously complex human societies—as reducible to what texts had to say about them. For the Orientalist, the story of the East was fundamentally one of texts, not people.
The modern Orient, meanwhile, held little value for the Orientalist scholar, because of their belief that the essential character of the people and their societies had remained the same since ancient times. As such, there was no need to engage with the actual people of the Orient or to even attempt to understand their daily lived experiences.
Thus, their methodology had real-world consequences, as Orientalists sought to apply ancient texts to address the problems of the modern Orient, fully consistent with their belief in an unchanging East—and in their unique role as its interpreters.
This textual approach tended to create a feedback loop in how Westerners described and ultimately acted upon the East:
Thus, Orientalism was not some musty, ivory-tower academic discipline. It shaped real-world interactions and remade the region and culture it purported to describe through the vehicle of European imperialism. European imperialists and travelers acted upon and wrote about the actual Orient through an explicitly Orientalist lens. In doing so, they defined and categorized their experiences into well-worn Orientalist tropes, forcing reality to bend to their preconceived ideas and even changing how the people of the Orient viewed themselves—in effect, Orientalizing the Orient.
This power of Orientalism to shape and control the peoples of the East came on vivid display in 1798, with the French invasion of Egypt.
This military expedition, led by Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), was a watershed moment in the history of East-West relations and in the development of Orientalism, both as an academic discipline and as imperialist ideology.
In many ways, the campaign was an Orientalist venture. Although the (ultimately unsuccessful) military expedition was partly driven by strategic imperatives, Napoleon was also heavily influenced by an Orientalist-inspired vision of the West’s historical relationship with the East—and of his own destiny as heir to that glorious tradition.
Napoleon envisaged himself as following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Greek warrior-king who conquered much of the known world from Greece to India, creating one of the largest (albeit most short-lived) land empires in world history.
Napoleon wanted to unlock Egypt for the West, not just militarily and economically, but also to mine the country for its ancient artifacts and texts. Because he saw his role as both conqueror and as re-discoverer of the lost secrets of the ancient Egyptian civilization, Napoleon brought a team of hundreds of scholars along with his army.
Their mission was to document and codify as many of the texts and artifacts of Egypt as they could find. In true Orientalist fashion, Napoleon also hoped that their mastery of ancient Egypt would help him understand “the Oriental” and aid in his conquest and administration of modern Egypt. Orientalist textualism was a tool to crack the code of the mysterious Orient and Orientals—not to understand them as humans on equal terms with Europeans.
Sure enough, the campaign brought a wealth of Egyptian texts, artifacts, and knowledge back to Europe, resulting in a flowering of endowed university chairs in Oriental studies as well as the foundation of numerous learned societies like the Royal Asiatic Society and the aforementioned Société Asiatique.
As we’ve seen, knowledge is power. The wealth of knowledge that France extracted from Egypt excited a frenzy of interest in the ancient cultures, languages, and history of the Orient, further demonstrating to Europeans that their possession of this knowledge was precisely what made them fit to dominate the Orient.
One of the most significant works to come out of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt was the Description de l’Egypte, a 23-volume publication intended to serve as the definitive and comprehensive catalog of ancient Egypt.
It is one of the foundational texts of Orientalism, exerting a powerful influence over a generation of European writers. The Description portrayed Egypt in Eurocentric terms, celebrating it for being the origin point of Western civilization. In the preface to the mammoth work, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) frames Egypt explicitly as the starting point of civilization, its pyramids and sphinxes already ancient by the time of the ancient Greeks. But he also notes that every great power has seen Egypt as a prize to be taken, and the French were following in that tradition. Egypt, descended as it was into barbaric despotism, was in need of a hero like Napoleon to bring true civilization back to the nation from which it had originally sprung.
In this telling, Egypt and the Orient could not exist on their own terms. They were significant because of their relationship to the West. Conquering it (as Napoleon attempted to do) was merely the fulfillment of the West’s historic destiny as master of the Orient, a tradition that stretched all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
In the last chapter, we explored how Orientalist attitudes and assumptions had deep roots in European history and the experiences of Westerners with the peoples of the East.
In this chapter, we’re going to carry our analysis forward into the 19th century Age of Imperialism, to see how Orientalists wrote about, acted upon, and interpreted the Orient.
Specifically, we’ll explore:
The work of scholars reflects the economic, social, and historical circumstances in which it was produced.
Orientalism was and remains a powerful framework, which shaped (and constrained) the way in which Western scholars and observers wrote about and experienced the Orient. As an ideology and as an academic discipline, its core assumptions about what constituted and separated “Orient” from “Occident” influenced scholarly and popular works in history, anthropology, sociology, archeology, and journalism.
This is because Orientalism functioned as a method of interpretation—the only means by which the mysteries of the East could be understood by the Western reader. Thus, anyone engaged in any work even remotely connected to the area we now call the Middle East could not help but be influenced by Orientalism’s major works, because it positioned itself as the gatekeeper to such knowledge.
We can see this gatekeeping and interpretive function more clearly if we look at Orientalism in the context of the Romantic movement of the first half of the 19th century.
Romanticism emphasized emotion, intuition, subjectivity, and individual experience. It was a reaction against the scientific rationalism of the Industrial Revolution, as European culture-makers looked backed toward what they imagined to be a nobler, more courtly, and picturesque past.
The Orient, in its wildness, antiquity, and timelessness, served as a powerful source of inspiration for Romantic writers and artists. By revealing the ancient mysteries of the East, the Romantics sought to shake the West out of what they saw as its rationalist stupor and reacquaint it with the divine and mysterious. The Orient could revitalize and save Europe.
Figures like the German poet and literary critic Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and his countryman Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (1772-1801), better known by the pseudonym Novalis, saw the study of the culture and religion of the Orient (India, in their case) to be a means by which Europeans could move past what they saw as Europe’s excessive materialism. Importantly, they also approvingly looked upon the traditional, patriarchal societies of the Orient as an example of a society untouched by (in their view) the decadent and vulgar republicanism that had swept Europe in the wake of the French Revolution.
Of course, this was another manifestation of the Orientalist mindset—treating the Orient as an object to be interpreted and drawn upon for Western benefit and enlightenment.
The Romantic movement accordingly fixated upon the ancient languages, cultures, and history of Egypt, Assyria, and Sumer. Little thought was given to the lived experiences of contemporary people of the Middle East, or what they might think about the European appropriation of their cultural heritage.
This focus on antiquity brings us to the field of philology, which was to play a crucial role in the development of Orientalism in the 19th century. Philology is the study of language, primarily using written, ancient textual sources. By studying ancient literary texts and historical documents, philologists hope to gain greater understanding of the historical development of languages over time.
Philology studies the evolution of languages from a scientific perspective, rejecting the idea that God had given language to humanity—an idea that European writers had embraced since the Middle Ages. The discovery of Sanskrit, an ancient written language that greatly predated the Biblical Hebrew, was a major victory for philology as a field and a significant blow to Judeo-Christian ideas about the divine origins of language, because it showed that Hebrew was just one language among many.
We’ve already seen how Orientalism built upon the edifice of a constructed division between East and West that had existed for much of recorded history—from the Greek and Roman antipathy toward the Persians to the medieval Christian hatred and fear of Islam. We’ve also seen how Orientalists derived their knowledge of—and thus, power over—the East from their ability to produce, translate, and disseminate knowledge about it.
For the philologists, language was the key to understanding Eastern culture, history, and the “Oriental mind.” Thus, philology became a powerful tool that enabled Orientalists to add a new rationalist and scientific cast to the ancient East/West division. Nineteenth-century philologists were deeply concerned with dividing ancient languages into families (such as Semitic or Indo-European), comparing grammar and morphology between them, and reducing languages to their roots to find connections to others.
Philologist scholarship contributed heavily to the racial determinism that was a hallmark of the social sciences during the 19th century. By studying the origin and evolution of ancient languages, philologists believed that they could glean great insights into the temperament and essential “racial” characteristics of contemporary Asians.
Orientalist philologists like the Frenchman Ernest Renan (1823-1892) believed they could discover the reasons for what they saw as “shortcomings” in contemporary Eastern civilization and culture in the structure of their ancient languages.
Renan and his colleagues saw the supposedly ossified and static Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic) as responsible for the languid and desultory development of the Middle East. He contrasted it with the dynamic and organic Indo-European languages to which could be attributed the success of white European civilization—and its inevitable conquest of the East.
Indo-European languages were fluid and adaptable according to this mode of thinking, enabling the cultures that spoke them to adopt new ideas, adapt to changing historical circumstances, and flourish in the modern world. Semitic languages, by contrast, were overly stilted, formulaic, and unable to develop a vocabulary for new technologies and ideas. As a result, the Semitic-speaking peoples (like Arabs and Jews) were doomed to fall into a state of cultural stagnation relative to Europeans. Language was destiny.
Renan made the analogy that the Semitic languages (and, in his essentialist thinking, the Semitic race) were to the Indo-European languages (and thus, the white race) as a pencil sketch was to a painting.
The Semitic races may have had glory days in their “youth,” but they had never blossomed into maturity. Their ability to advance and reach the level of cultural and technological sophistication achieved by Europeans would be forever constrained by their innate ethnic and linguistic limitations. The philologists of this era helped to give these sorts of crude racial and cultural generalizations the cloak of scientific rigor and academic respectability.
These philological ideas are closely related to the Orientalist trope of the “Semites” being in a perpetual state of arrested development. Their cultural achievements in ancient times could still be acknowledged with reverence and awe, their role as the originators of human civilization fully acknowledged—but they were seen as having fallen behind the times and having failed to develop the technology and political and economic institutions that were the keys to power in the modern world.
This frozen-in-amber quality was what made these peoples fit objects for study and analysis by Europeans. In Orientalist discourse, an Arab acted the way she acted solely because she was an Arab. Thus, every observable feature of Middle Eastern society could be slotted into a preconceived and essentialized category regarding “the Muslim” or “the Arab.” Everything they did or thought was a result of being of the Orient.
These racist, nationalist, and imperialist attitudes would have near-universal acceptance among both European elites and the general public well into the early 20th century. The prominence of such ideas cuts against the image of a “liberal” or “enlightened” 20th-century Europe. Instead, colonialism was an ideology inherently rooted in violence, authoritarianism, and repression.
The philologists’ passion for decoding and organizing the ancient languages of the East speaks to another key pillar of Orientalism. Orientalists of this era saw it as their mission to order and make sense of the chaotic and unruly fragments of Oriental history, language, and culture.
Out of the inchoate mass of ancient texts, symbols, artifacts, and architectural ruins, it was the task of the Orientalist to form a coherent and complete narrative—one fit for European understanding.
This role as sole interpreter put Orientalists in the power position, both over the Eastern peoples for whom they claimed to speak and the Western audiences they endeavored to enlighten. The mystery of the Orient could only be understood through their mediation.
One key figure within Orientalism during the early 19th century was the French nobleman Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838).
De Sacy was one of the intellectual patriarchs of Orientalism, widely regarded within European academic circles for his work in translating Arabic as well as his success as a leading Persian scholar. His expertise as an Orientalist made him an important figure within the French imperial state. He served in key posts for the French Empire, advising on France’s interests in the Middle East. De Sacy was an important figure in straddling the gap between academia and public policy—a symbiotic relationship that would become a hallmark of Orientalism as the 19th century wore on.
De Sacy’s students went on to become some of Europe’s leading Orientalists, including figures like Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), discoverer of Egypt’s famous Rosetta Stone. Through them, de Sacy’s approach to scholarship influenced the study of the Orient across Europe for the next generation and well into the 20th century.
A figure fully within the Orientalist tradition, de Sacy saw his role as an interpreter, compiler, editor, and commentator on the Orient. He, like most Orientalists, saw himself bringing to light and unearthing lost knowledge. He believed that experts like himself existed to transmit knowledge of the Orient to Europeans. As we’ve seen, this knowledge was a symbol and instrument of power. Knowledge gave European Orientalists the ability to define and proscribe the Orient in the collective mind of the West, and justify imperial incursions on the grounds that well-educated, enlightened Europeans were best positioned to save the culture and legacy of the Orient from the barbarism of the modern “Orientals.”
This was why his work focused on compiling vast stores of knowledge into multi-volume compendia for European consumption. Inherent to this compilation process was the scholar’s subjective judgments about which parts of the Orient were important and which weren’t, and what was and wasn’t worthy of inclusion. This Eurocentric approach to scholarship resulted in the erasure of those elements of Eastern culture and religion that the Orientalists deemed unworthy or unimportant.
We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that Orientalism was just confined to the ivory tower of academia. It profoundly shaped how all Europeans wrote about and experienced the Orient when they traveled there. We can see this when we explore the work of European travel writers during the 19th century.
In addition to creators of explicitly scholarly work like Renan (whose influence we explored earlier in the summary), who journeyed to the East for explicitly academic and research-focused purposes, many European writers entered the Orient under less formal pretenses.
These travel writers—novelists, poets, playwrights, diarists—entered the Orient with a set of assumptions and expectations shaped by Orientalist scholarship. Although they wished to learn about the area and record their discoveries, they often traveled to the East to fulfill some deeply felt personal mission, be it emotional or spiritual in nature. They shared a core assumption: that the Orient existed for the European to experience and interpret.
One important European visitor to the Orient was the Englishman Edward William Lane (1801-1876). Lane wrote Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians in 1836, based on his years of extensive travel and observation in Egypt.
The book is an exhaustive account of contemporary Egyptian social, cultural, and family life. But Lane’s narrative is also filled with lurid details about supposed Arab cruelty and barbarism, sexual lasciviousness, harems, and polygamy.
Lane frames his observations and reflections of Egypt as a series of one-way interactions between himself and the locals. For him, Egypt exists as a source of knowledge, study, and fascination that his European readers experience vicariously. The Egyptians themselves are passive in his narrative; they do not comment on Lane or influence him in any way. They are not there to observe; instead, they exist to be observed and studied.
The French writer and diplomat François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), detailed his journey to the East in Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary, During the Years 1806 and 1807.
Chateaubriand saw his travels as a pilgrimage. He was traveling to the Orient as a devout Catholic on his personal journey of self-completion and religious confirmation. He envisioned himself as following in the footsteps of the French Crusaders.
Just as the Crusaders of the Middle Ages had journeyed East to reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the barbarous Muslim infidels, Chateaubriand envisioned the Orient as his canvass, onto which he and his fellow Europeans could paint civilization and liberty—concepts that he believed the Arabs knew nothing about. He expressed this quite literally when he had his own name inscribed upon the pyramids.
For Chateaubriand, the mission of the European writer-traveler was to bring the Holy Land back to life from its dead, decrepit state.
A recurring theme in Western travel writing about the East is dangerous sex. In the minds of European writers and observers, the East is a world of sensuality, filled with lascivious women, harems, courtesans, and street prostitutes.
There, a European could escape the bonds of Christian sexual morality and indulge his carnal desires. Writers like the French realist novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) gave voice and expression to this Western image of the Orient.
In his account of his 1849 journey to Egypt (published as Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour), Flaubert described his experiences with an Egyptian courtesan and prostitute named Kuchuk Hanem. Flaubert’s recorded experiences with Kuchuk Hanem (and likely sexual liaisons with her) embody the Orientalist style and outlook.
He never delves into what her emotions and experiences might be. For Flaubert, she exists solely as an object of sex and desire, or else as a vehicle for his own creativity. With him, she is emotionally unattached, unreservedly sexual, undemanding, and submissive. In many ways, he sees these as the ideal female attributes, lamenting that the French prostitutes he knew in Paris lacked this unbridled femininity.
Flaubert projects these attributes onto Eastern women as a whole, essentializing them as sensual objects.
Even the leading literary figures of the time, men like Chateaubriand and Flaubert, could not stop themselves from automatically reducing the Orient to a series of essentialized archetypes.
Extraordinarily gifted writers with unique voices found themselves, wittingly or not, creating quasi-propaganda (or at least moral justification) for European imperialism in their writing about the Orient during the 19th century. This shows the power and reach of Orientalist modes of thought.
Some Westerners, however, did enter the Orient with extraordinary knowledge, and genuinely sought to describe Oriental life from the perspective of people actually living there. One such figure was the Englishman Richard Burton (1821-1890). Burton had genuine sympathy for the Arab perspective, spoke Arabic fluently, and was deeply disdainful of the ivory tower Orientalists in Europe who claimed to be experts about a place to which they had never traveled. Burton prided himself on the fact that his knowledge of the Orient was, atypically, not derived from the intensive study of ancient texts. Instead, his knowledge came from actual observations of the Orient and personal relationships with the people who lived there.
Yet even Burton’s writing is clearly suffused with the idea that his position as a European in the Orient by definition puts him in a position of supremacy and power vis-à-vis the people he encounters there. He was deeply conscious of his identity as an Englishman in Egypt and of the privileges that brought, thanks to the growing power of the British Empire in Egyptian affairs. For him, it was a matter of destiny that Great Britain would become master of the Orient, and that an ambitious Briton like himself could fulfill his destiny on the blank canvas of the Orient.
He could see the East in no other terms—it simply existed for the West. As he put it, “Egypt is a treasure to be won.”
Explore how what you accept as fact may actually be heavily influenced by your own cultural biases.
In a few sentences, give an example of a contemporary issue (perhaps the Israel-Palestine conflict or the 2003 US invasion of Iraq) where your ideas of what’s “objective” or “true” might be influenced by your culture and values—and why someone with a different set of cultural values might see things differently.
Given that people might be able to arrive at such radically different ideas about the same issue, do you think that there is truly such a thing as objectivity? Is everything in the modern world a question of subjective experience? Explain your answer.
So far, we’ve explored the main intellectual framework of Orientalism and how that framework influenced the ways in which Europeans experienced the East—and, crucially, how they interpreted the East and defined its essential “otherness” with regard to the West.
But Orientalism was more than just scholarship. Ideas influence actions, and Europe was highly active in the Orient throughout the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century. In this chapter, we will explore the relationship between Orientalism as an intellectual discipline and the exercise of European imperial power in the Middle East. Specifically, we’ll examine:
Orientalism both reflected and reinforced a fundamental power relationship between Europe and the Orient. Indeed, the very existence of a field like Orientalism, in which one could lay claim to be an expert in the history, languages, culture, social system, and religion of a vast and diverse region on the basis of having studied ancient texts and artifacts, demonstrated the inequality of the relationship between the Orient and the West.
All things about “the Orient” could be reduced and ultimately mastered as a field of study. Certainly, the reverse wasn’t true. There has never been an equivalent field of “Occidentalism,” in which a non-Westerner could become an expert on everything related to Europe and North America on the basis of having studied and mastered topics like classical Latin and the works of the ancient Roman poet Virgil.
The Orientalist framework assumes without question that the West is a complex entity, dynamic and constantly reinventing itself. It can never be essentialized or reduced. A field like Orientalism can only exist if one implicitly accepts the idea that the Orient, however one defines it, is characterized by certain essential, unchanging characteristics, which make it possible to master and ultimately control.
We see this power imbalance on display when we look closer at the two main forms of Orientalism that took shape—Latent and Manifest Orientalism.
Latent Orientalism is the set of unconscious ideas about what defines the Orient that permeated Western writing on the subject. As we explored earlier in the summary, it is the idea of the Orient as static, unchanging, barbaric, superstitious, and in need of interpretation by Westerners.
You can think of Latent Orientalism as the constant background noise that can be heard in nearly all Western writing about topics such as Islam, the Middle East, and imperialism. Latent Orientalism succeeded in firmly establishing a fixed idea of what the “Orient” and so-called “Orientals” are (and what they are not) such that a certain set of images and tropes are brought to the minds of European and American readers immediately when these terms are used.
Manifest Orientalism, on the other hand, refers to how Europeans and Americans acted upon the Orient when they had direct contact with it. If Latent Orientalism is mainly found within the world of academia and discourse, then Manifest Orientalism is found in the realms of public policy, commerce, and empire.
The two strands are related, however; Latent Orientalism formed the set of ideological assumptions about the Orient that informed the actions of Manifest Orientalist adventurers, imperial administrators, businesspeople, and missionaries who exerted their will upon the peoples of the East.
Manifest Orientalism revealed itself to be a potent force in world politics by the late 19th century. By this time, the British and French governments had come to view the cultivation of experts in Oriental studies as necessary for the survival and expansion of their Middle Eastern empires. This was because, as we’ve seen, Western policymakers viewed the Orient as essential and unchanging. Thus, experts in ancient languages, monuments, and religions could provide valuable insight into the eternal “Oriental mind” that would be of great use in dominating the contemporary peoples of the Orient.
The mobilization of academic knowledge in service of imperialism became a hallmark of Orientalism during this period. Orientalist tropes about Western superiority and Eastern passivity played a major role in justifying and legitimating the imperialist project. As we’ve seen, Orientalist scholarship influenced the actions of key historical figures like Napoleon, who very much saw themselves as modern-day exemplars of an ancient tradition of Western dominance.
The political results of these Orientalism-inspired actions were profound, with Europe coming to fulfill its imagined role as the rightful ruler of the Eastern world. The military, economic, and social upheavals of World War One (1914-18) resulted in the collapse of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires—leaving the victorious French and British (and, to a lesser extent in this era, the Americans), as the only remaining imperial powers.
The destruction of the Ottoman Empire in particular left a great power vacuum in the Middle East, into which the French and British believed they could step without competition. Government leaders and commercial interests on both sides of the English Channel saw the Orient as a distinct political and cultural entity over which they had the right—and duty—to rule. Indeed, by the end of World War One, European powers had conquered a staggering 85 percent of the world’s landmass, including large swathes of the Orientalist heartland of the Middle East. This was a great triumph of Orientalism. Orientalists were no longer just analyzing history; now, they were actively making it.
Why did imperial powers like France and Britain feel the need to dominate the East? Certainly, economic and geopolitical opportunities played a significant role, particularly concerning access to the region’s valuable oil reserves. But the logic of imperialism ran deeper than the achievement of concrete, strategic objectives. Ancient Western attitudes and anxieties about the East made empire-building not just an opportunity, but a necessity.
The work of Western writers and commentators of this era like the French Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935) is suffused with a fear and apprehension regarding the Orient, its strangeness (to Europeans), and its potential for violent action if not held in check. Even the famed left-wing British writer George Orwell (1903-1950), anti-fascist and advocate for democratic socialism, wrote of the people of Marrakesh with horror and disgust—in fact, questioning whether people who lived in what he saw as abject material and intellectual poverty could even be considered people at all.
If they were not subjugated, the unwashed, teeming masses of the Orient could one day overwhelm the West. Accordingly, to preserve and defend their own culture, Western powers had a positive duty to extract what they could from the Orient, while keeping its people in a perpetual state of political disorganization.
We can see these attitudes in the writings of key Western actors in the Middle East during this time. One such figure was the British diplomat, spy, and intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935), better known to history as Lawrence of Arabia.
In many ways, Lawrence was a typical Orientalist of his time. Before embarking upon a military career, this son of a British nobleman studied history at Oxford. Later, he went on to study Arabic and work in the field of archeology in Syria on behalf of the British Museum.
Lawrence was recruited by the military in 1914 at the outbreak of war, as his background made him a valuable asset for British Army planners who were concerned about a potential Ottoman attack on British-controlled Egypt. They saw men like Lawrence as experts whose knowledge about the Orient could help them win the loyalty and support of the local Arab population. Lawrence secured an assignment in the Arabian peninsula during World War One, where he was tasked with fomenting and aiding the Arab Revolt against the enemy Ottoman Empire.
Of course, Lawrence’s placement in such a role is a clear example of how Orientalist thought shaped the course of world politics. Orientalism’s notion of an essential, unchanging Arab “mind” was what made it possible for an imperial power like Great Britain to treat a man whose background was in language and archeology as an “expert” in contemporary Arabian politics.
For his part, Lawrence saw his role in Asia exclusively on his own terms. In typical Orientalist fashion, he conceived of himself as midwifing a new Orient, one imbued with “enlightened” European ideas like republicanism and capitalism. But, of course, this expression of Arab self-determination could only be brought about through European intrigue and encouragement. The Oriental mind was incapable of imagining and implementing such a project on its own.
Even when it wore the guise of freedom and liberation, Orientalism still fundamentally saw the Orient as an object to be manipulated and controlled by white Europeans.
Twentieth-century European imperialism was couched in explicitly racial terms. One of the most famous promoters of the view that it was Europe’s destiny and duty to dominate Asia and Africa was the British journalist and author Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).
In his 1899 poem, “The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands," Kipling celebrated the imperial project and exhorted white Europeans to fulfill their mission to civilize and subjugate the non-white peoples of Asia and Africa. He saw the imperial project as an act of “cleaning a land,” making it a civilized, prosperous (in other words, Western) society—including by removing and suppressing native cultures and peoples.
The “white man’s burden” was adopted in broader European and American culture, with governments, private enterprises, and individuals accepting the notion that white people had a moral obligation to dominate the world.
As bringers of capitalism, technology, and civilization, imperialist whites expected to be shown a high degree of deference and obedience by the Asian and African peoples they came to dominate. This was closely tied to Orientalism, with its long historical tradition of promoting the notion of a super and enlightened West’s right and responsibility to bring order to the chaotic and backward East.
As we’ve seen, categorical identities like “white men” and “Orientals” were only possible through Orientalism’s successful division of complex reality into simple generalities of race, language, and culture. It speaks to Orientalism’s defining characteristic—the scholarly division of the world into a civilized and dynamic West and a barbarous and unchanging East.
In the last chapter, we saw how Orientalist scholarship and writing animated, motivated, and rationalized European imperialism by reinforcing the fundamental power imbalance between East and West. In this chapter, we will see how Orientalism reacted to historical developments in the 20th and 21st centuries, when the peoples and nations of the Orient began resisting European imperialism, forging their own political identity, and competing with the West on more equal terms. Specifically, we’ll look at:
After World War One, European scholars working in academic disciplines dealing with studies of Asian history and culture began to approach their subject in a different way.
They studied the East in the hopes of learning from it, thereby rejuvenating the West and easing the cultural crisis and alienation brought on by the experience of war, violent ethno-nationalism, and economic depression. They emerged with a recognition that the West needed the East as much as vice versa. As Europe descended into the horrors of fascism, the Orient seemed to be bursting with new potential and developments that pointed toward the region playing a major role in the global future: Arab nationalism, self-determination, the Zionist movement, and the economic power of oil. The East was flowering; the West seemed to be entering a new dark age.
With the postwar rise of independence movements across the Middle East, it became clear that the Orient was indeed a dynamic and changing place, whose peoples yearned for self-determination. The Orient could now be seen as an entity that acted on its own, rather than one that was merely acted upon. Accordingly, a new generation of scholars began to study cross-cultural synthesis, writing about how Europe and the Orient had influenced one another at crucial junctures throughout history, instead of presenting it as a one-sided exchange.
Despite these readjustments in scholarly focus in other fields, however, Orientalism remained rooted in its fundamental “us and them” outlook. As we’ve emphasized, a central tenet of Orientalism was that the people of the Orient were unchanging through time. This belief, which the Orientalists accepted as an unquestionable fact, made Orientalism as a whole resistant to change or revision. To accept the dynamism of Arab or Islamic society and its power to act would be to undermine the very edifice of Orientalism.
Indeed, comparative cultural analysis only made the Orientalist world (particularly those scholars dealing with the Islamic Orient) more aware of the fundamental and irreconcilable differences between East and West. This was largely due to these Orientalists' fixed ideas about Islam. They saw Islam as fundamentally incompatible with modernity. Increased study of Islamic texts and sources could only confirm them in this belief.
The Orientalists strove to maintain the barrier between East and West. For scholars like H.A.R. Gibb (1895-1971), keeping this wall of separation intact was paramount. As we’ve seen, the West had defined itself since ancient times in opposition to the East. If these lines were to become blurred, the West might find itself without an identity of its own.
This was a major reason why figures like Gibb remained steadfastly opposed to modern political developments like Arab nationalism. The success of the national independence movements threatened to knock down the barriers between East and West and possibly even put the East on equal footing with the West.
Thus, despite the changes taking place within other academic disciplines during this era, Semitic or Islamic Orientalism remained insular and backward-looking in its outlook and core assumptions. It continued to root the region’s complex contemporary conflicts and political problems in ancient, Biblical sources—such as explaining the emerging Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of the Old Testament story of Isaac and Ishmael (In the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, Isaac is the true heir of the Abrahamic covenant with God; in the Quran, the holy book of Islam, this figure is Abraham’s other son, Ishmael). Twentieth-century Orientalists saw these conflicts as manifestations of an “eternal” struggle between East and West, a clash of civilizations brought on by the ancient hostility of the East toward the West.
Yet, in spite of its increasingly clear failures to describe reality, Orientalism remained a discipline in good standing well into the modern age, with works on topics such as “the Islamic mind” or the “Arab character” continuing to find publication in elite academic journals throughout the 20th century.
After the end of the Second World War, financially and militarily exhausted colonial powers like Great Britain and France began to lose their grip on their Middle Eastern colonial possessions. In the postwar decades, most of the former colonies threw off the shackles of European imperialism and gained independence.
This turn of events should have forced a reckoning within Orientalist circles, if not an outright rejection of Orientalist modes of thought. After all, the supposedly lethargic, unoriginal, and unchanging Orient was suddenly asserting itself and forging a new political identity. But old-guard Orientalists like Gibb refused to adapt their ideas even in face of a politically armed and dynamic Orient.
In a 1963 lecture, Gibb was still asserting that the politics of the Arab world could not possibly be motivated by modern political ideologies like communism, nationalism, or anti-colonialism. Those were products of the Western tradition; the “Oriental” was forever constrained by his status as an “Oriental.” Any deviation from this preordained role was a betrayal or perversion of his essential character.
Figures like Gibb saw these complex movements toward self-determination as unorganized outbursts of enthusiasm. The Arabs may have been capable of political agitation, but it would typically be short-lived and, ultimately, self-destructive. The Arab temperament was incapable of conceiving, let alone acting upon, a collective political program for the benefit of their nation or society as a whole. Their innate parochialism and loyalty to tribe or clan would inevitably trump the formation of larger political identities or coherent ideologies. These were Western political achievements of which “the Arab” was incapable.
Financially and militarily exhausted by the war and no longer able to maintain their far-flung Asian and African colonial outposts, the British and French empires entered a period of sharp and permanent decline. In the postwar world, the United States would emerge as the preeminent Western power.
As the Cold War (1945-1991) began to take shape, Western strategists and policymakers feared that the Soviet Union would step into the power vacuum left by Britain and France and turn the Middle East into a launchpad for the export of communism. This was the beginning of America’s active role in Middle Eastern politics, which it maintains to this day.
The United States also took a leading role in driving Orientalism. American Orientalism would be inextricably linked to Cold War geopolitics, with think tanks and university cultural relations programs in Islamic or Middle Eastern studies being funded by the United States Department of Defense, the Ford Foundation, the RAND Corporation, as well as major banks, oil companies, and other pillars of the US national security establishment. Orientalism served a valuable role in the Cold War as the Middle East became a theater of war throughout the conflict, with flashpoints like the Suez Crisis (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-1989) creating fresh demand for the service and expertise of Orientalists.
Although it assumed a new cast and justification (containing and rolling back Soviet influence), American policy in the Middle East remained guided by the same Orientalist stereotypes and assumptions that had shaped the West’s actions in the region since Napoleon’s Egypt expedition in 1798. The Orient remained an object to be shaped, manipulated, dominated, and defined by Western interests.
This idea of an unchanging and essential Orient continued to have currency throughout the 20th century, creating a space for old-guard Orientalists to influence American foreign policy—such as when the US Department of State sent specialists in the history of medieval Islamic guilds to advise American embassy officials in the Persian Gulf during the 1991 Gulf War.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, Orientalism became recast as “area studies,” but the same assumptions and power dynamics remained. Rather than being based around the scholarly study of ancient languages and artifacts, studies of the Orient were becoming more geographically based and strategic in their purpose. Building on its legacy as a partner to European imperialism, Orientalism after World War Two refocused itself to become a tool of American policymaking, helping the United States formulate its response to the rapidly changing and strategically vital Middle East.
Well into the 1960s and 1970s, area studies specialists were publishing papers analyzing the failure of the “Semitic” people to produce great cultural achievements on par with those of the West. This was little more than neo-Orientalism, with crude and reductive analyses of Arabs and Muslims still finding a welcome audience in prestigious academic journals.
Figures like the Austrian historian Gustave von Grunebaum (1909-1972) argued that Islam was rooted in its classical past, unaltered by the changing world. There was no such thing as classical, medieval, or modern Islam—there was only Islam as it always had been and always would be.
For figures like von Grunebaum, the entire history and culture of the Middle East could be understood through the lens of Islam. It was the sole, all-encompassing feature of Arab life. Unfortunately, these reductive and simplistic explanations of Islam, Arabs, and their relation to Europe and America continued to have great intellectual and popular currency well into the late 20th century.
An example of the lingering effects of Orientalism can be found in the Cambridge History of Islam (1970). The two-volume history—written and edited almost entirely by European and American scholars—failed to examine Muslim theology on its own terms, instead focusing only on Islam’s history of conquest (and thus, its threats to the West) and the rise and fall of Islamic dynasties.
Among other glaring oversights, the Cambridge History of Islam also ignored the stunning cultural achievements of the Abbasid Caliphate (750-1258) and dismissed the seriousness of postwar anticolonialist politics.
Modern scholars like the American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) have posited that there is a fundamental “clash of civilizations” between the liberal, secular West and the Islamic world.
Huntington argued in 1993 that these two religious and cultural traditions formed distinct blocs organized around irreconcilable values and worldviews. He traced the evolution of this conflict from the initial Islamic conquests and clashes with Christian Europe in the 7th century to the Crusades of the 11th-13th centuries, to the threat of the Muslim Ottoman Empire from the 15th to the 20th century, to the Israeli-Palestine conflict of our time.
The “clash of civilizations” theory held that cultural conflict between the West and Islam would form the main theatre of geopolitical conflict in the years following the Cold War. This view gained many adherents in the West, as it seemed especially prescient following the attacks of September 11 and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the notion of the “clash of civilizations” is rooted in old, false Orientalist assumptions. Cultures are, in fact, syncretic and related. They influence and shape one another and do not have neat distinctions like “the Muslim world” or “Western civilization.” These are ideological constructions and invented identities. As we’ve seen, the very ability to create neat distinctions like “West” and “Orient” is itself a function of power.
We also see the lingering effects of Orientalism in the way Arabs are portrayed in Western popular culture.
These portrayals became more prevalent in Western popular culture following the 1973 oil shock, in which several Middle Eastern oil-producing states withheld American access to petroleum products to protest US support for Israel.
For consumers in the West, the resulting gas shortages and price shocks (which often benefitted American oil companies) represented a dangerous and shocking inversion of the “natural” order. Here, for the first time, was the Orient exercising its autonomy and exerting economic power over the West.
The cultural impact of the oil shock in the West was significant, as Arabs became stock villains, seen as greedy dictators or violent, maniacal terrorists. Around this time, in political cartoons in American and European newspapers, Arabs began to be represented using racist caricatures featuring hooked noses, mustaches, and leering expressions. Disturbingly, these portrayals echo the depictions of Jews in the antisemitic propaganda of the Third Reich—perhaps unsurprising, given the Orientalist tradition of lumping Jews and Arabs together as “Semites.”
Beyond their physical portrayal, successful Hollywood films like Network (1976), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and The Mummy (1999) depict Arabs as manipulative, cunning, lecherous, deceitful, and greedy.
The 1948 creation of the State of Israel was a watershed moment in 20th-century relations between the West and the Muslim world.
The creation of the Jewish state and the subsequent Israeli victory in the 1947-1949 Palestine War resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Arab Muslim Palestinians and the annexation of Palestinian land—a political crisis that continues to this day.
Western journalistic accounts reduced this complex humanitarian, political, sectarian, and economic conflict to familiar colonial and Orientalist tropes. In this narrative, brave and heroic Jewish Israeli settlers were forging a new homeland on the lands where their ancient forebears had once ruled.
Like their British and French colonial forebears who wished to bring civilization and modernity to the benighted Arabs, these modern-day Israeli pioneers were planting the seeds of civilization in the face of barbaric, murderous opposition from the Palestinian Arab hordes. This narrative harkened back to the colonial myths promoted by figures like Kipling and Lawrence, with Israelis fulfilling the postwar version of the “white man’s burden” to civilize and tame the Orient.
Western media commentators and public officials (especially in the United States) refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Palestinian objections to the Israeli military occupation and subsequent construction of Jewish settlements on lands seized from Palestinians.
Palestinian resistance to Israel was dismissed as being based in ignorance, religious mania, and violent anti-Semitism. Palestinians were simply “terrorists,” irreducibly barbaric and hellbent on Israel’s destruction. This was a modern replay of the old Orientalist trope of Arabs being driven entirely by passion and emotion—it was not possible for them to be motivated by rational political concerns. They could only be the essentially violent and irrational people they had always been.
This modern spin on Orientalism was expressed by writers like the American political scientist Gil Carl Alroy (1924-1985), who argued that the Arabs were inflexibly opposed to peace and could not be trusted to abide by any political settlement in his 1974 article “Do the Arabs Want Peace?” published in Commentary magazine.
Yet again, here was a Western commentator purporting to speak with authority on the essential character and mind of an entire culture. It was the role of the Orientalist to write; it was the role of the Orient to be written about.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict provided fodder for the Western academic press, with books featuring titles like Temperament and Character of the Arabs continuing to be published.
Such works pathologized and delegitimized anti-colonialism and pan-Arabism as perversions of the natural order and deviations from the essential, unchanging Arab mindset—which was to be politically impotent and submissive.
Perhaps the most famous and influential of modern-day Orientalist writers was the British-American historian and public intellectual Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), who was among the editors of the Cambridge History of Islam, the shortcomings of which we discussed earlier in this chapter.
Lewis was a ubiquitous presence in academic journals and a frequent television commentator in the United States in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. With his sonorous voice and erudite style, Lewis presented himself as a serious, sober scholar imparting “objective” wisdom about the Arab world.
Yet Lewis was steeped in the same Orientalist tradition that had hampered the perspectives of Western commentators on the East since the 18th century. He believed that Islam was fundamentally unchanging and that this fact could explain most of contemporary Middle Eastern politics. Lewis infantilized the Orient, arguing that political upheavals like the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the Arab Spring of 2011 were temporary excitements, bursts of passions that would eventually die down when the Arabs reverted to their essential political submissiveness.
An ardent supporter of the Israeli position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lewis argued that Islam was an inherently anti-Semitic faith, motivated by irrational hatred for the Jewish people. In reducing Arab Muslim grievances to pathological, murderous anti-Semitism, Lewis ignored substantive objections to specific Israeli policies, including:
For Lewis, these nuances were simply irrelevant to his preferred narrative of civilized (i.e., white European) Israelis against barbarous (i.e., Arab Muslim) “Orientals.”
(Shortform note: Edward Said and Bernard Lewis had an intense academic rivalry for most of the latter decades of the 20th century, ending only when Said passed away in 2003. The two frequently sparred with one another in the academic press, in mainstream print media, and on television, with Lewis even going so far as to question Said’s basic competence as a historian. To learn more about the Said-Lewis debate, read “Orientalism: An Exchange” published in the New York Review of Books in 1982.)
Our analysis of Western representations (and, under the influence of Orientalism, misrepresentations) of the East raises a key question: How do you represent a culture?
Perhaps more fundamentally, is there even such a thing as a “separate” culture or culture zone, or are divisions of the world into neat categories like “West” and “Orient” simply fictions left over from the age of European imperialism?
It is not the case that the West can only be written about by Westerners or the Muslim world written about only by Muslims. But scholars, policymakers, cultural commentators, and even members of the general public must resist the temptation to fall into either ethnocentrism when analyzing their own culture, or dismissal and chauvinism when analyzing other cultures.
Our discussion of the ideological pitfalls—and real-world consequences—of Orientalism show that the role of the scholar should be to question and scrutinize politically motivated myths, not to help manufacture them.
Thankfully, there are alternatives to Orientalism for those who wish to engage in thoughtful area studies about the Middle East. Today’s scholars are increasingly discarding the concept of a monolithic “Orient” in which one can become an expert. Instead, they are narrowing their focus to study specific problems and societies, without reference to a larger “Oriental” superstructure.
Scholars and researchers on Middle Eastern society and culture are employing a more multidisciplinary approach, incorporating insights from disciplines such as economics, sociology, postcolonial studies, and feminist theory. This helps to ensure that scholarship is submitted to more rigorous and holistic peer review, while serving to break the old Orientalist stranglehold of fields like philology, textualism, and archeology on Middle East area studies.
The emerging field of postcolonialism (which studies the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism) holds great promise for deconstructing Orientalist myths, as does the diversification of graduate programs in Europe and the United States since the 1960s, which has seen more women and students of color enter these fields that were once the sole provenance of white men.
The most important takeaway from Orientalism is that that knowledge is not inherently neutral or objective. If our study of Orientalism teaches us anything, it is that knowledge can always be manipulated to serve the interests of the powerful against the powerless.
Explore the main takeaways from Orientalism.
Explain how the idea of a separate and distinct “Orient” helped to define how Europeans thought of themselves as a separate religious, ethnic, and cultural sphere.
How did the field of Orientalism encourage and contribute to the exercise of European imperial power beginning in the 18th century?
What do you think were the main harmful effects of Orientalist discourse?
How do you think Orientalism continues to influence how people in the West think about Arabs and Muslims?