Orientalism

The first reason of the popularity of Edward Said is the seminal work in the field of the so -called postcolonial and cultural studies. In his works the intellectual roots are the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School and the genealogies of Nietzsche/Foucault, a very fashionlable way to make an "original academic research" in the late XX century in US and Europe. The second reason is the wrong mental image in Western minds that Palestinian = Arab = Muslim = good knowledge of Middle East and Muslim World and an "authorithy" in the political and cultural problems of this very complex World region. The third reason is the political support of the palestinian side in US and the Western World.

The book of Said raises, at least, three important questions: the firs one is how can Said be qualified like an humanist thinker, if his intelectual roots are clearly anti-humanist (v.g. Der Antichrist of Nietzsche and the distortion/manipulation of Nietzsche thought made by Foucault )?

Furthermore, if Said is right when he says that are negative stereotypes deeply inside the Western "imperial literature" of the orientalists, who made misrepresentations of the Arabs and the Muslim World, why Said don't analyse too the imperial literature inside of the Muslim World and the representations of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire? After all, the Ottoman imperial rule existed in Middle East and in Palestine for several centuries, until the end of World War I, in 1918, and the Palestinians and other Arab peoples where dominated by the Turks for a long time; the Western British imperial rule in Palestine existed only for 30 years; the French in Lebanon and Syria between the two World Wars ...

And what happen to the deeply rooted negative stereotipes that exists in the Arab/Muslim World about the Jewish and the Oriental Christians, the oher so-called people of the book ( the "dhimmi" in the name coinned by the egyptian born Bat Ye'Or)? The question is: the "dhimmi" status under Muslim rule, with the humiliations of different clothing, the prohibition to ride noble animals like horses or camels, the prohibition on carrying or possesing weapons, the discriminatory taxation where all trade and transport taxes where generally doubled for "dhimmis", etc, was better and lesser opressive than colonial rule of the European Powers?

Finally, another question. Edward Said is a Christian born bourgeois, who studied only in Western Schools, first in Lebanon and Egipt (the countries with the large Christian Communities in Middle East), later in US. Does he really knows the complexities of the Arab/Muslim World ? And, if the answer is affirmative, why the Arab sources and the Ottoman sources, are totally inexistent in his book? If the answer is that the inquire is about Western perceptions, why the works of German and Russian Orientalist are not used? Said says that the most influential works were written in English and French. Is this true or, as Bernard Lewis suggests, this is an usefull argument, when we have any knowlege of this languages?


A Very Important and Influential Book (Unfortunately)   March 28, 2004
Corn Soup
3 out of 8 found this review helpful

It isn't until you get to p. 242 of Edward Said's "Orientalism" that he informs the reader of what he is REALLY getting at. Although he hints at it in his introduction, it isn't until p. 242 that Said lets us know that "truth" doesn't exist, that it is simply a term applied to a given concept in a given milieu at a given time. This admission later gives Said the opportunity, this time in the final few pages of the book, to explain to the reader, that while he has just written 300 some odd pages on what the Orient ISN'T, he is not going to make any attempt to tell us what it IS. Of course, truth doesn't exist, as Said would say, so what does one really want from him?
To be fair, Said explains in his introduction that it is not really his goal to give a comprehensive assessment of Orientalism, nor necessarily to offer a coherent alternative to Orientalism, but neither does he say outright what he later says on p. 242 and in the conclusion of the book. That is, he has essentially nothing new to offer the reader aside from dressing up certain aspects of post-modern European cultural theory in the clothing of (primarily) Middle Eastern cultural resentment. Although Said has little to say, one must give him credit for exploiting his implied "otherness" as a Palestinian to open up a can of trendy 60s style resentment worms on the field of Middle Eastern studies. Interestingly, and I think it is relevant here, as I am sure Said would agree, Middle Eastern studies, and even more broadly, the Middle East, were not really his milieu, neither academically nor personally. He was a Western-educated Christian that emigrated to the US early, stayed here his entire life, and worked at Columbia University where he taught literature (reading Orientalism, you will quickly see that it wasn't "Oriental" literature that he was interested in.) With this in mind, if Said was so disturbed by Westerners with Western education using Western methods to research an issue, then what exactly is it that he is doing? If the truth doesn't really exist, then what is the difference really, between producing a "truth" about the Orient or the Occident? I know every other reviewer in the world that has looked at this book objectively has already pointed this out, but it is worth repeating over and over again because it is such a powerful and fundamental flaw in this work.
Also, despite his pretentions of objectivity (and liberal use of "big" words like ontological, dialectical, and Foucaultian), Said veers into polemical screed towards the end of the book with an extremely childish attack on the prominent "Orientalist" Bernard Lewis, quoting him in a very narrow context, and then declaring him to obviously be a racist. Christopher Hitchens wrote a sympathetic piece about Said on the event of Said's death in which he mentions Said's thin skin and the personal way in which he often took professional or ideological disagreements. It seems in the case of Lewis, this got in the way of his better judgement.
Although I think in many ways it is a shame, this book must be dealt with for what it is, and that is essentially as a provoker of thought. For that reason alone, it is an important book. Though I don't feel that Said ultimately added anything to the substance of how to think about the East, as I stated before, he was the first to apply a certain type of thought to the Western way of viewing the Middle East, and in doing so, he more or less defined the agenda for looking at the history of Western thought on the Middle East.


Eye Opening   March 17, 2004
Simply put an amazing book. Said's point is not to accuse the "West", for which he is derided by one of Amazon's "spotlighted reviewers" here, but instead Said seeks to explain how the history that has been written about the "Middle East" is biased.

All history is written filtered through the perspective of a writer, so all stories from the past have a slant. Not only the distant past, but current events as they are reported are colored too by perspectives of the reporter too. This book explores how an identity of the "Middle East" were created by colonial powers; an identity which was not real for the people from the region.

This book was a ground breaking phenomena because it was the first of its kind to explore how images of the "Middle East" have been misinterpreted by the "Western scholars;" a grievance that is still echoed by people in the Middle East today.