Orientalism: Chapter 3, Part 4 Summary & Analysis

Three major shifts have changed the course or Orientalism in the in the post WWII era: France and Britain are no longer dominant, but America is; the Arab-Israeli conflicts have brought the figure of Arab Muslims to the fore; and Orientalism now offers its services directly to government and business interests. With the increasing Western attention on the region, the Arab person has become an empty vessel into which Westerners can put their “traditional, latent mistrust” of Oriental subjects, specifically Semitic—and even more specifically, Arab—people. This has something to do with the West’s involvement in the creation of Israel in 1948, and something to do with the fact that the menacing figure of “the Arab” controls perhaps the single most important commodity in the contemporary world: oil.

Films and other popular cultural representations perpetuate menacing, Orientalist stereotypes about Arab Muslim people, building on both traditional tropes and the fear that Muslim people (or Arab people) will take over the world through jihad. Likewise, contemporary academic Orientalism (now rebranded as “area studies”) undervalues the contributions of the Near East to either modern geopolitics or to the historical development of the arts and sciences. What makes latent and manifest blindness to the complexity and strategic importance of the Near East so astonishing is that it’s being articulated even as the United States and the West are increasingly dependent on (and involved in) the area.

Said draws examples of this from the mid-century work of Morroe Berger, a sociologist and professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in the 1960s. Berger not only exemplifies the newest iteration of Orientalism’s disdain for its subject of study but also the post-WWII shift from philology and the humanities toward the social sciences, which Said sees as a result of the fact that America’s interest in the Orient (mostly after WWII) is always in the realm of policy first, culture second. Accordingly, American Orientalists have little awareness of Arab or Islamic literature and the arts. American Orientalism’s focus on statistics and sociological trends dehumanize, while literature speaks to experience and is inherently humanizing. By neglecting Islamic culture’s arts and literature, American scholars continue to dehumanize Arab and Muslim subjects.

In this American social sciences version of Orientalism, the study of language and literature is only important to serve military, political, or business ends. This control of language gives cover to other illiberal and silencing attitudes toward the Orient. For example, during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the New York Times newspaper commissioned two point-of-view articles, one representing the Israeli side and one the Arab side of the conflict, which not only offered two individual opinions as indicative of each side’s beliefs but also perpetuated an asymmetry between the two. The Israeli article was written by an Israeli lawyer, while the Arab point of view was explained by a White American public servant who had previously been an ambassador in an Arab country.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Even though the United States doesn’t become a world empire until after WWII, it had imperial ambitions (albeit limited ones) in the Orient in the 19th century, too. When the American Oriental Society was founded in 1843, its explicit goal was to follow the imperial example of Europe—to understand the East in order to dominate and control it. It is an inherently political organization with political goals. Then, American involvement in the World Wars betrayed its interest in the Near East. It entered WWI only after the Balfour Declaration and was heavily involved in the oil-rich Middle East—Iran, North Africa, and the Levant—during WWII.

Thus, when the Middle East Institute is founded in Washington, D. C. in 1946, its aims are almost entirely political, with no veneer of pure scholarly interest. In this context, American Orientalism should be understood as a logical extension and appropriation of the academic Orientalist tradition in Europe. For example, Harvard appoints the British Gibb as director of is Cetner for Middle East Studies in the 1950s, and the University of Chicago and UCLA hire German Orientalist Gustave von Grunebaum in the 1940s and 1950s.

Said has already cataloged Gibb’s anti-Muslim stereotypes. Grunebaum shares many of them, including belief in the myopia and “antihumanism” of “Muslim civilization.” Said points to critiques demonstrating how Grunebaum presents an image of Islam as a timeless monolith “incapable of innovation.” And Grunebaum doesn’t notice the irony that if his assertions are true—if Muslim subjects are wholly incapable of growth or change—then there is no need for his work, because there can never be productive cultural exchange between the West and the Orient. The more that Islam—in the form of Arab nationalist movements—demonstrates its opposition to the West, the more satisfying it seems to be for Western scholars to take control by making assertions that justify Western aggressions.

If Gibb and Grunebaum represent a “hard,” overtly geopolitical form of Orientalism, there’s a softer version operating in contemporary area studies departments, which are trying to modernize their scholarship without reckoning with the circumstances that brought the field of Orientalism into existence in the first place. Nor have area studies been able to transcend the fundamental sense of difference between East and West; the belief in Western rationality and Eastern irrationality and inferiority; the preference for “classical” civilizations rather than the lived reality of modern societies; the sense of the Orient as a timeless and unchanging place; the alleged objectivity of the Western observer; or a sense of the Orient’s threatening nature.

The Islamic East is the primary victim of this contemporary Orientalist discourse. Scholars and geopolitical analysts of other parts of the world (Asia, Africa) have already begun the reappraisal and evolution of their work. Only Islam—or the narrow, 7th-century version of it recreated by Orientalists—is treated as if it stands apart from the otherwise widely acknowledged influences of imperialism, colonialism, and racism. People feel free to discuss the modern Muslim person—reduced primarily to the “despised heretic” and “anti-Zionist”—in terms that are no longer publicly acceptable when it comes to other marginalized groups like Black or Jewish people.

Said offers the three volume Cambridge History of Islam, published in 1970, as an example of how Modern Orientalism treats—or, more accurately, mistreats—the subject of Islam. First, it downplays any consideration of Islam as faith in favor of geopolitical history. Second, in focusing on politics, it ignores the flourishing of arts and sciences during the early centuries of Muslim expansion. Third, it focuses on a geographical area corresponding only to the Near East, excluding North Africa and Andalusian Spain. It ignores or dismisses nationalist and anticolonial movements without acknowledging Zionism or Western colonial interventions. The result of giving unquestioned power to Orientalist discourse is that the History presents Islam as a Platonic ideal rather than a living thing. And thus it raises questions about whether “ethnic origins and religion” are the best lens through which to explore human history and experience. Or even if they’re a legitimate one.

One of the deepest and most entrenched truisms of Orientalism is the “simplicity” of mind possessed by the Oriental subject. This belief underwrites both antisemitic and Islamophobic sentiments in popular and political cultures throughout Orientalism’s history. But one quirk of contemporary Orientalism is the way that the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel split the “Semitic myth” in two, aligning the Jewish people (or at least democratic Israel) with Western Orientalism while leaving Arab people stuck in the role of “the Oriental.” Rather than seeing Palestinians as resisting foreign colonists, contemporary Orientalist discourse undermines the dignity of their struggle by casting them as typical Arab subjects: timelessly, inherently, and irrationally vengeful; “incapable of peace”; untrustworthy. Orientalist discourse thus seeks to control the Orient and Oriental subjects by defining them, emphasizing their essential and unchanging foreignness, and imposing a more salutary (Western) viewpoint on them.

From a vast sea of modern examples of the way Orientalist discourse dehumanizes and defines Oriental subjects, Said selects a few—Raphael Patai’s attempts to elucidate the Middle Eastern mind, Sania Hamady’s assertions that Arab people are fundamentally incapable of cooperation, Manfred Halpern’s claims that Arab people are only half as mentally flexible as their Western peers—that demonstrate the ongoing essentializing of the Arab and Muslim subject through blatant racism.

This raises the question of why, if the Arab person is so profoundly limited and negative, anyone bothers to write about them at all. Said argues that the sheer size of Islam as a cultural influence threatens Western dominance. The Orientalist can deny or hide evidence for the existence of “intellectual and social power” in Muslim societies but cannot explain away their large numbers. So Orientalist discourse tries to control the narrative by reducing the activity of Islamic or Arab subjects to an endless, politically pointless, and potentially dangerous reproductive sexuality. Of course, casting the (Muslim) Oriental subject as procreative undermines ideas about their essential passivity, but Orientalist discourse isn’t a reflection of reality as much as a myth, in which such illogic can pass by unremarked.

The paternalistic bent of modern Orientalism is particularly apparent in the work of another contemporary scholar, Bernard Lewis. In an essay titled “Islamic Concepts of Revolution,” Lewis first asserts (without evidence) that Islamic thought doesn’t include the idea of a right to resist and then defines the word thawra (“revolution”) by its basic root (to rise up) with the inelegant visual image of a camel struggling to get up from the ground. Then he paternalistically counsels Arab people toying with ideas of revolt to “wait till the excitement dies down.” In Lewis’s work, Said sees an Orientalism so propagandistic and polemical that it collapses in on itself and loses all connection with any sort of reality—past or present.

Contemporary Orientalism is, then, a particularly dangerous form of political propaganda because it presents itself as an objective and fair history. Moreover, the field resolutely refuses to recognize its failures of objectivity and fairness. Yet, despite being a series of “intellectual discreditable” fictions, the discourse of Orientalism remains powerful and dangerous as long as the Western remains interested and involved in the Near East. Understanding and dismantling it is an important project because Orientalism is, if anything, more powerful than ever. In the 1970s, it’s beginning to take hold in the Near East among the ruling classes and cultural elites, thanks to the vacuum that exists in the Orient’s ability to represent itself. There are no major Arabic studies journals or internationally prestigious universities in the region, so students and professors in the East are mostly taught in the West and continue in large part to replicate Orientalist models.

Said is aware that he has described the discourse of Orientalism and raised questions about how cultures can be represented accurately without offering alternatives or answers. The broad outlines of what he sees as a way forward include challenging the alignment between the scholar and the state, a suspicious attitude toward received ideas and dogmas, “methodological self-consciousness,” and interdisciplinary cooperation, rather than the cross- or super-disciplinary authority of the old-school Orientalist. Above all, Said wants scholarship to stop pretending to exist separate from the divisions and tensions in society. Scholars must never forget that “the study of human experience” has political and ethical implications.

The failure of Orientalism isn’t just academic arrogance: it is the absence of human empathy, the inability to see humanity in a people and a region of the earth declared to be (for suspect reasons) irredeemably alien. The contemporary recognition of the political and historical experiences of so many of the world’s diverse people opens the door to challenging Orientalism’s hegemony. And, as Orientalism offers a warning about how easy it is to fall prey to the “mind forg’d manacles” of ideology, Said hopes that his work warns against just replacing Orientalism with another equally limited discourse.