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Chapter 1, Part 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Orientalism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The West’s View of the Eastern World
Knowledge and Power
Belief, Consensus, and Reality
The Persistence of Racism
The Personal as Political
Summary
Analysis
In the West, the academic discipline of Orientalism is established in 1312, when European universities began to endow chairs of Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac) languages. Over the next 650 years, the discipline expands to encompass not only half of the world (the Orient begins in the Near East but eventually includes lands as distant from Europe as Japan) but also social, linguistic, historical, political, and artistic subjects. Until the mid-18th century, most Orientalists were Biblical scholars or philologists (scholars of languages) but by the mid-19th century, a “virtual epidemic of Orientalia” in literature, philosophy, and the arts piques public interest. In this era, an Orientalist can be a scholar, a “gifted enthusiast,” or both.
One of the reasons Said claims that Orientalism is a discourse more than anything else (especially an academic discipline) is the way that it metastasized so completely that it became an entire worldview. Moreover, its roots lie in inherently political territory: the study of Hebrew by medieval academics served theological ends, including asserting the primacy of Christianity over Islam and Judaism. By the 19th century, however, it hardly matters where Orientalism started, since it has become so common that it has force outside of the academy.
Themes
Despite the long history of their field, 18th- and 19th-century Orientalists tend to focus on the classical periods of the civilizations they study. They have little interest in (and sometimes outright disdain for) modern cultures. And despite extensive travel and commerce between Europe and the Near East in the period, most Orientalists, like the European public that avidly consumed their work, primarily encounter their subject in the mediated realm of texts rather than first-hand experience.
One of the ways that Orientalist discourse constrains Oriental subjects is by a resolute focus on the past, because the past can’t argue with the expert. And expertise is important for creating and maintaining a discourse like Orientalism, in both a past and a present where most European (or American) people have little to no personal experience of anything subsumed under the umbrella of the Orient.
Themes
Even the term “Orientalist” says something interesting about the relationship between knowledge and geography, because the Orient is ultimately a creation of the discourse, too. Anthropologists have long understood that it is normal for people to impose order on the world by labeling and classifying things. Nor is it hard to understand how this leads to geographic distinctions between “us” and “them.” But people tend to forget that when it comes to social organization (as opposed to, say, fashion trends), these distinctions are always at least a little bit arbitrary, informed more often by emotional associations than rational decision making. People hold poetic, emotional, and imaginative knowledge as well as empirical knowledge, and the two often go hand in hand.
Orientalists study the Orient, but the Orient is also a place that they create by their scholarship—that’s part of why Said classifies Orientalism as a discourse first and foremost and only tangentially as an academic discipline. It’s important to pay attention to the care with which he constructs his argument here. Said isn’t trying to argue that people shouldn’t try to make sense of the world around them by categorizing things—he does that himself by identifying and studying Orientalist discourse as a category. The problem is when the human-imposed classifications and distinctions are taken as hard and fast reality.
Themes
Because of these emotional and imaginative associations, Said explains, the Orient has always signified more than what the West empirically knows about a certain geographic region. And some of this imaginative knowledge is very old indeed, dating back to the ancient Greeks, who were already depicting the Orient (for them, Asia Minor and Persia) as a distant, exotic, irrational, hostile, defeated but nevertheless dangerous entity—images which persist in 18th and 19th century Orientalism. Then, when people like Herodotus and Alexander the Great begin to explore Asia Minor, the discourse shifts into domesticating a region formerly full of exotic and alarming things.
When Said talks about the Orient here, he’s talking about an idea that’s bigger than Asia Minor or the clash of cultures that took place during the Greco-Persian wars (499-449 BCE). The unknown that the Orient initially represented is initially threatening precisely because it is unknown. What marks Orientalist discourse as uniquely political is that even as the region became more known, the sense of danger and threat was preserved in ways that licensed political domination.
Themes
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But a sense of the Orient as dangerous persisted, bolstered by the successful expansion of Muslim control across the Near East and Turkey and into India, Indonesia, China (in the east), North Africa and Sicily (to the west) and even into Europe itself on the borders of French and Spanish terrain in the 9th-17th centuries. Orientalist discourse becomes attractive in this context because imposing a narrative on the Orient allows the European Orientalist to feel a sense of control over it. But domesticating perceived threats in this way generates increasingly limited and limiting ideas. For example, medieval theologians tended to dismiss Islam as a misguided form of Christianity until it had become nothing more than that in their eyes, then they used that perception to stoke fear of the other and to stage their own intermural doctrinal debates.
Another factor contributing to Orientalism’s longevity is the way it flexibly accommodated shifting political circumstances. Within a century of Mohammed’s death in 632, the Umayyad Caliphate had brought Islam into close contact with Europe through (among other things) its conquest of Spain. This political might—as well as the theological competition between Christianity and Islam, both of which claimed to be the final revelation of God—conspire to give Islam and Arab people a tremendous importance in European conceptions of the world. And at times when Arab political power was in ascendance (for instance, the 8th century), Orientalist discourse put them in their place, at least intellectually, by assuring European Christians of their superiority.
Themes
Said sees the discourse of academic Orientalism turning the Orient into a theater that endlessly reproduces European ideas about the Orient. This can be seen in the way that allegedly encyclopedic accounts about the Orient, such as Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s late 17th-century Bibliothèque oreintale, convey European superiority and flatten the complexity of the Orient and its cultures with racist caricatures and behind the seemingly neutral and rational veneer of alphabetically arranged entries. Books like this allow the expert Orientalist to impose order and discipline on their subject while at the same time ensuring that no one will have unmediated access to primary sources that might give them a different idea. Again, Said stresses that he isn’t taking issue with encyclopedias or trying to understand other cultures. Rather, his concern is to interrogate the political ends the discourse of Orientalism has always served—bringing the Orient under the colonial control of Europe.
Said jumps through history offering a few examples from each century along the way. The continuities between these help to build his argument that Orientalism functions more on received ideas than on actual observation of the world. This becomes especially problematic in the 17th and 18th centuries, after Europe undergoes its Enlightenment. Although there’s been a revolution in the way that people look at the world in other realms, namely science, that values empirical knowledge (that which can be supported through direct observation), Orientalist scholars tend to look only for the facts that fit the discourse that has already been established. The more they close ranks and keep outsiders from having unmediated access to the Orient and its primary sources, the easier it is for them to control the narrative—and the narrative is increasingly focused on conquering the Orient.
Themes
In the realm of literature, a work like Dante’s Inferno shows how entrenched and hegemonic Orientalist discourse has always been. Dante places Mohammed in the eighth circle of Hell, where he is punished as a schismatic (a person who causes the division of a religious group) because earlier medieval Christian theologians (and Orientalists) had misinterpreted Mohammed as a failed Christian. The fact that Dante places other Muslim figures (philosophers Avicenna and Averroes and the chivalrous warrior king Saladin) in the afterlife realm reserved for virtuous non-Christians shows that he didn’t just hate Muslims, but that his depiction of Muslim characters has more to do with how European culture understands Islam rather than with how Islam understands itself.
After introducing d’Herbelot’s encyclopedia, Said turns back in time yet again to the Middle Ages and the Divine Comedy, written by Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the 14th century. Dante isn’t an academic Orientalist, so his views about Islam and Mohammed aren’t establishing the discourse, they’re just participating in the discourse that’s already in existence in Dante’s time. Since Said has already covered some of the history, it’s easy to see how Dante’s work draws from earlier theological debates about the relationship between Christianity and Islam. Moreover, the way Dante decides, on his own authority, which historical Muslims are allowed a pleasant afterlife (or a terrible one) implies the sense of Western superiority Orientalist discourse provides. Muslims, in this view, are too shortsighted to understand that their religion is wrong. But an enlightened Christian like Dante can explain for them what kind of behavior is and isn’t acceptable.
Themes
Islam is a particular target of Orientalist discourse because it is the “outsider” against which medieval Christian Europe defined itself, especially as the Eastern Mediterranean increasingly came under Muslim control in the 6th century and the center of Christian culture migrated north from Rome toward modern-day Germany. Islamophobic Orientalism as sketched by Said shows how the discourse doesn’t represent the actual Orient (indeed, such a thing doesn’t really exist) but simply replicates the figures, tropes, and ideas that Europe uses to signify (and devalue) the Orient. Instead, Orientalist discourse is a self-reinforcing machine. The Orientalist uses “declarative and self-evident” phrases to describe the Orient. Each time they say, for example, “Mohammed is an imposter,” they give that declaration the weight of proven fact.
At the end of this section, Said returns consciously to a theme that runs throughout the whole book—from the Middle Ages on, Orientalist discourse doesn’t just take aim at some general Orient. Rather, it always has Muslims, Arabs, and Islam at the center of its sights. This focus on Islam and Arab people might wax and wane, but it persists, nevertheless. And, as he hinted in the introduction, an anti-Muslim, anti-Arab bias is the primary feature of contemporary (that is, late 20th century) Orientalist discourse. And the way this discourse gains so much traction is by cherry-picking evidence and only presenting that which proves its foregone conclusions, no matter how biased or racist those might be.
Themes
