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Chapter 3, Part 2
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
Orientalism undergoes sizeable political, economic, and academic shifts in the 20th century. Globally, the economic recession of the 1920s, colonized subjects’ increasingly loud demands for freedom, and the rise of fascism in Europe undermine a sense of Western stability. While the latter half of the 20th century has seen the humanities generally move toward a humbler acknowledgement that the relationships between scholars, their societies, and the topics they study has an impact on the scholarship they produce, in Orientalism, the sense of distance between the Western scholars and their (now almost exclusively) Islamic material primarily reinforces a sense of Western superiority.
Said will spend most of this section analyzing the work of two early to mid-20th-century Orientalists whose work he considers typical of the period. To set the stage for that analysis, he begins with a discussion of what sets Orientalism of the postwar period apart from prewar Orientalism (meaning before and after the World Wars). Mostly, this has to do with modernity and increased globalism. It’s harder to depict the Orient as perfectly preserved in some mythical primal state when it suffers the same misfortunes as the rest of the world (e.g., the Great Depression) and when Oriental subjects demand the autonomy and political self-determination Western discourse has long claimed they were incapable of even wanting.
Themes
Said shows this by tracing the way that Islamic Orientalists emphasize Islam’s resistance to change and to mutual understanding or cooperation with the West. These ideas preserve the subject of study—if Islam won’t cooperate with the West, then the West will still need Orientalists to explain it—and assert Western dominance. This dynamic can be seen clearly in the work of two important 20th-century Orientalists, Louis Massignon and Hamilton Gibb, even though their cultures of origin (Massignon was French, Gibb was British) impact their findings somewhat.
Said’s argument implies that as the Orient continued to prove their general assertions wrong, Orientalists reacted by focusing on increasingly narrow subjects. “The Orient” shrinks from everything east of Europe down to just the Eastern Mediterranean and Arabinan Peninsula. The Oriental subject increasingly refers specifically to Arab people. In addition, Islam reemerges as the traditional threat to Europe it has been in the Western imagination since the Middle Ages. A smaller arena of expertise makes it easier for Orientalists to control the narrative about the Orient with scholarly discourse.
Themes
Massignon’s early ideas are deeply informed by his own devout Catholic religiosity. He describes Islam generally as a religion of “resistance,” then seeks to reclaim what he feels is its real truth, which he find this in the mystical practice of a Sufi called al-Hallaj. Massignon thus creates a vision of Islam that conforms with Christian theology, in which mysticism allows Muslim believers to transcend the limitations of Islamic orthodoxy and experience God’s grace. Otherwise, he claims, they remain stuck in a state of soul thirst for God that leads them into a sterile and excessively legalistic practice of their faith. Despite Massignon’s great and evident sympathy for his Muslim subjects and the intellectual richness of his analyses, his work still fails to transcend an essentializing distinction between East and West, between ancient and modern cultures, and between Christianity and Islam.
Another way Orientalism does violence to the things it studies is by refusing to acknowledge or consider them on their own terms. For Said, Massignon’s analyses of Islam may be somewhat more sophisticated than his medieval counterparts (if for no other reason than, thanks to generations of Orientalist scholarship, he has access to a greater range of primary sources), yet his assertions are hardly more sensitive than Dante’s. As an Orientalist, Massignon implies the superiority of his own knowledge and experience when he insists on interpreting Islam in ways that measure it against (and ultimately make it conform to) his own understanding of Christian theology. And his position as an expert gives his mistaken and incomplete interpretations authority.
Themes
And although his work assigns some responsibility for current trends to the destabilizing force of European colonialism, Massignon cannot transcend the essentializing idea that modern Oriental subjects are first and foremost Semites—that is, a vestige of an ancient past perfectly preserved and somewhat incongruously set down amid a modern world. Because Oriental subjects don’t belong in the modern world, Westerners (particularly the French, in Massignon’s opinion), must defend, protect, and explain Muslim subjects to themselves. Thus, despite the important ways in which his scholarship diverges from tradition, he nevertheless repeats and maintains many of the foundational assumptions about the Islamic Orient, namely that it is “spiritual […] tribalistic, radically monotheistic, un-Aryan” and must be forcibly brought into alignment with the modern world.
For Said, Massignon makes a series of typically Orientalist moves in his scholarship. He starts with his (frankly racist) assumptions about the East and West and then looks for things to explain the essential difference between the two. When evidence presents itself that the Orient is more complicated than the discourse has previously allowed, Massignon reverts to assertions that fly in the face of critical thinking—and that work to preserve the status quo in which Europe overpowers and exploits the Orient. Thus, rather than looking at the way colonialism had perhaps slowed the economic development of modern Arab societies, Massignon claims that they are fundamentally incapable of adapting to historical shifts. And this, in turn, justifies ongoing Western exploitation under the guise of guidance.
Themes
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Yet, Said points out, it isn’t right to criticize Massignon personally. The blame lies with the Orientalist discourse of which Massignon’s scholarship is just one small part. All representations, Said says, are necessarily mis-representations because they cannot be divorced from the “language, culture, institutions, and political ambiance” of the presenter. This might sound dehumanizing, but it’s the way that scholarship happens. Accepting this truth means that it’s more helpful to interrogate the structure of a shared discourse than to attack its representatives. The point isn’t that Massignon and so many others misunderstand and therefore misrepresent Islam (or any other aspect of the Orient). The point is to ask what purpose this misrepresentation serves.
The ideas in this section are key to the whole of Said’s argument. He wants to take Orientalism, Orientalist discourse, and Orientalists to task for the harm their ideas have caused in the real world, and he wants to hold them responsible for the racist stereotyping they perpetuated. But Said takes less issue with the individual contributions to discourse than discourse itself. He asks his readers—the academic community that fostered Orientalism as a discipline for so long, but also the lay consumers of Orientalist discourse, which is practically everyone living in a Western society, given how deeply is Orientalism imbued into Western consciousness—to open their eyes and pay critical attention to the things they’re told to believe. That way, they won’t be bamboozled by discourse but will instead be able to create a more reasonable understanding of the world based on facts.
Themes
This is the context in which Said examines the contributions of Hamilton Gibb, whose work represents the culmination of the “academic-research consensus,” of contemporary Orientalism both because of his status in the field and because, unlike his 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, he was always a scholar and never a colonial administrator or rapt visitor. Therefore, his Orient was completely mediated by the previous scholarship of Orientalism.
In earlier sections of the book, Said built a case for his ideas that Orientalist discourse is a technology of power. Gibb doesn’t represent the most direct geopolitical application of this power, which took place during the height of European colonization. But he does represent for Said the height of academic Orientalist hubris, the idea that he, a Western expert, knows and has the right to explain the Orient to itself and to the world.
Themes
As a mature scholar, Gibb advocates for the expansion of Anglo-American Oriental studies so that the West can maintain cultural dominance in a post-colonial world. These ideas develop from his earlier work, which explores Islam. Taking Islam as the sole lens through which Oriental subjects can or should be viewed draws on essentializing ideology articulated by earlier Orientalists. And orthodox Orientalist discourse also provides his image of the Muslim as a person wholly incapable (without Western help, that is) of an empirical grasp of reality or understanding of natural laws, who can therefore be easily blinded and manipulated by powerful figures and ideas. This truism even has such force that it allows Gibb to blithely ignore the centuries of Islamic contributions to Western science.
Said hints that Gibb’s interest in the professional reputation of Orientalism and his tendency to diminish Arab and Muslim subjects both serve to elevate his sense of himself. In Gibb, Said presents a figure of the individual Orientalist living out the dynamic of Orientalism, in which the West uses the Orient as an idea to shape and define itself against. Moreover, Gibb represents for Said the epitome of Orientalism’s refusal to accept evidence that contradicts its narratives. Gibb not only ignores the contributions of Muslim and Arab subjects to human civilization but cannot see that he is as blinded by a powerful ideas he accuses Muslim subjects of being.
Themes
Although Gibb displays more generosity and sympathy toward Islam than many of his predecessors, Said argues that he’s nevertheless guilty of essentializing Islam. Rather than investigating the ways its various sects and doctrinal debates affect each other, Gibb turns everything into evidence of Islam’s unity and paints a picture of an essential reactionary and conservative ideology that perceives the changing nature of time itself as an attack on its essence. And he fails to consider the impact of colonialism on Muslim cultures.
Gibb, like Orientalism generally, does extra work to make reality conform to his expectations, rather than updating his ideas to reflect the evidence he finds.
Themes
Moreover, Gibb asserts his own authority over the religion he studies (and its adherents) by insisting on calling it “Mahommedanism” and by claiming without evidence that its “master science” is law. Gibb’s idea of Islam doesn’t explain the existence of sectarian disagreement in actual Islam. And it refuses to allow that the religion might perceive itself as engaged with the real world. Gibb’s Islam is a lifeless dogma that runs the risk of extinction because its failure to keep up with the innovations of the West. Yet, Gibb never bothers to ask what modern Muslim subjects think about their faith, nor does he listen to what modern clerics say about it. He defines Islam as an Orientalist because the entire edifice of Orientalism privileges the general and the universal over the specific and the complex, and it trusts the Western expert far more than the Eastern subject.
Gibb renames Islam in accordance with his (incorrect) assumptions about the faith (namely that if Christians worship Christ, Muslims must worship Mohammed). But renaming it is also a means by which he claims authority over it, because this suggests he understands the essence of Islam better than its own practitioners. But the renaming seems appropriate, too, since Gibb isn’t describing Islam as it is, but Islam as he imagines it—a categorically different thing. And by this series of displacements, Gibb (and other Orientalist thinkers) perpetuate Western misunderstanding and fear of whatever they label Oriental.
Themes
The Orient, then, is intensely and carefully created by Orientalism. It is not a reflection of reality. Rather, it is a fiction, a creation of the scholar’s worldview and choices more than anything else. It exists nowhere but in the pages of Orientalist discourse, which collect, arrange, interpret and pass the material down to subsequent generations of experts.
As Said prepares to turn to the latest phase of Orientalism—the Orientalist frameworks and assumptions in which his contemporary readers were steeped, he reminds them once again that Orientalism presents a vision of the world that is fundamentally biased (at least—and often outright racist) and which grows ever more distant from reality over time.
Themes
