Orientalism by Edward Said is a canonical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference

between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the orientals or the people from these exotic civilization. Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and ours. The Europeans used orientalism to define themselves. Some particular attributes were associated with the orientals, and whatever the orientals werent the occidents were. The Europeans defined themselves as the superior race compared to the orientals; and they justified their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty towards the world to civilize the uncivilized world. The main problem, however, arose when the Europeans started generalizing the attributes they associated with orientals, and started portraying these artificial characteristics associated with orientals in their western world through their scientific reports, literary work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a certain image about the orientals in the European mind and in doing that infused a bias in the European attitude towards the orientals. This prejudice was also found in the orientalists (scientist studying the orientals); and all their scientific research and reports were under the influence of this. The generalized attributes associated with the orientals can be seen even today, for example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion of the terrorist. Here is a brief summary of the book, followed by a critique by Malcolm Kerr. Chapter 1: The Scope of Orientalism In this chapter, Edward Said explains how the science of orientalism developed and how the orientals started considering the orientals as non-human beings. The orientals divided the world in to two parts by using the concept of ours and theirs. An imaginary geographical line was drawn between what was ours and what was theirs. The orients were regarded as uncivilized people; and the westerns said that since they were the refined race it was their duty to civilize these people and in order to achieve their goal, they had to colonize and rule the orients. They said that the orients themselves were incapable of running their own government. The Europeans also thought that they had the right to represent the orientals in the west all by themselves. In doing so, they shaped the orientals the way they perceived them or in other words they were orientalizing the orients. Various teams have been sent to the east where the orientalits silently observed the orientals by living with them; and every thing the orientals said and did was recorded irrespective of its context, and projected to the civilized world of the west. This resulted in the generalization. Whatever was seen by the orientals was associated with the oriental culture, no matter if it is the irrational action of an individual. The most important use of orientalism to the Europeans was that they defined themselves by defining the orientals. For example, qualities such as lazy, irrational, uncivilized, crudeness were related to the orientals, and automatically the Europeans became active, rational, civilized, sophisticated. Thus, in order to achieve this goal, it was very necessary for the orientalists to generalize the culture of the orients. Another feature of orientalism was that the culture of the orientals was explained to the European audience by linking them to the western culture, for example, Islam was made into Mohammadism because Mohammad was the founder of this religion and since religion of Christ was called Christianity; thus Islam should be called Mohammadism.The point to be noted here is that no Muslim was aware of this terminology and this was a completely western created term, and to which the Muslims had no say at all. Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures In this chapter, Edward Said points the slight change in the attitude of the Europeans towards the orientals. The orientals were really publicized in the European world especially through their literary work. Oriental land and behaviour was highly romanticized by the European poets and writers and then presented to the western world. The orientalists had made a stage strictly for the European viewers, and the orients were presented to them with the colour of the orientalist or other writers perception. In fact, the orient lands were so highly romanticized that western literary writers found it necessary to offer pilgrimage to these exotic lands of pure sun light and clean oceans in order to experience peace of mind, and inspiration for their writing. The east was now perceived by the orientalist as a place of pure human culture with no necessary evil in the society. Actually it was this purity of the orientals that made them inferior to the clever, witty, diplomatic, far-sighted European; thus it was their right to rule and study such an innocent race. The

Europeans said that these people were too naive to deal with the cruel world, and that they needed the European fatherly role to assist them. Another justification the Europeans gave to their colonization was that they were meant to rule the orientals since they have developed sooner than the orientals as a nation, which shows that they were biologically superior, and secondly it were the Europeans who discovered the orients not the orients who discovered the Europeans. Darwins theories were put forward to justify their superiority, biologically by the Europeans. In this chapter, Edward Said also explains how the two most renowned orientalists of the 19 th century, namely Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan worked and gave orienatlism a new dimension. In fact, Edward Said compliments the contribution made by Sacy in the field. He says that Sacy organized the whole thing by arranging the information in such a way that it was also useful for the future orientalist. And secondly, the prejudice that was inherited by every orientalist was considerably low in him. On the other hand, Renan who took advantage of Sacys work was as biased as any previous orientalist. He believed that the science of orientalism and the science of philology have a very important relation; and after Renan this idea was given a lot attention and many future orientalists worked of in its line. Chapter 3 : Orientalism Now This chapter starts off by telling us that how the geography of the world was shaped by the colonization of the Europeans. There was a quest for geographical knowledge which formed the bases of orientalism. The author then talks about the changing circumstances of the world politics and changing approach to orientalism in the 20th century. The main difference was that where the earlier orientalists were more of silent observers the new orientalists took a part in the every day life of the orients. The earlier orientalists did not interact a lot with the orients, whereas the new orients lived with them as if they were one of them. This wasnt out of appreciation of their lifestyle but was to know more about the orients in order to rule them properly. Lawrence of Arabia was one of such orienatlists. Then Edward Said goes on to talk about two other scholars Massignon and Gibb. Though Massignon was a bit liberal with orientalists and often tried to protect their rights, there was still inherited biased found in him for the orientals, which can be seen in his work. With the changing world situation especially after World War 1, orientalism took a more liberal stance towards most of its subjects; but Islamic orientalism did not enjoy this status. There were constant attacks to show Islam as a weak religion, and a mixture of many religions and thoughts. Gibb was the most famous Islamic orientalist of this time. After World War 1 the centre of orientalism moved from Europe to USA. One important transformation that took place during this time was instances of relating it to philology and it was related to social science now. All the orientalists studied the orientals to assist their government to come up with policies for dealing with the orient countries. With the end of World War 2, all the Europeans colonies were lost; and it was believed that there were no more orientals and occidents, but this was surely not the case. Western prejudice towards eastern countries was still very explicit, and often they managed to generalize most of the eastern countries because of it. For example Arabs were often represented as cruel and violent people. Japanese were always associated with karate where as the Muslims were always considered to be terrorists. Thus, this goes on to show that even with increasing globalization and awareness, such bias was found in the people of the developed countries. Edward Said concludes his book by saying that he is not saying that the orientalists should not make generalization, or they should include the orient perspective too, but creating a boundary at the first place is something which should not be done. Malcolm Kerrs review on Orientalism Malcolm Kerr did his specialization in International Relations and specialized in the Middle East from Princeton University. He worked on his PhD thesis with Gibb, and spent two years with him in Cambridge University.1 Malcolms review on Orientalism can be concluded by his following remarks, This book reminds me of the television program Athletes in Action, in which professional football players compete in swimming, and so forth. Edward Said, a literary critic loaded with talent, has certainly made a splash, but with this sort of effort he is not going to win any major race. This is a great pity, for it is a book that in principle needed to be written, and for which the author possessed rich material. In the end, however, the effort misfired. The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web,

leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error2. He further goes on to say The list of victims of Saids passion is a long one, too long to examine in detail. Some of them deserve it: he has justly taken the measure of Ernest Renan. Some others are probably not worth it. One wonders why he is so ready to lump nineteenth-century travellers with professional philologists; why he found it necessary to twist the empathy of Sylvain Levi for colonized peoples into an alleged racism (pp. 248-250), or to dismiss the brilliance of Richard Burton as being overshadowed by a mentality of Western domination of the east (p. 197); why he condemns Massignon for his heterodoxy, and Gibb for his orthodoxy; or why he did not distinguish between Bernard Lewiss recent polemics on modern politics and his much more important corpus of scholarship on the history of Islamic society and culture. For those who knew Gustave von Grunebaum and were aware of his scholarly genius and his deep attraction to Islamic culture in all its ramifications, Saids exercise in character assassination (pp. 296-298) can only cause deep dismay. Suffice it to say that von Grunebaums view of Islamic culture as antihumanist was a serious proposition, and in fact not an unsympathetic one, denounced but not rebutted by Said, who seems not to recognize the difference between an antihumanist culture and an inhumane one. He might have done well to note that Abdallah Laroui, whose penetrating criticism of von Grunebaums work he invokes, earned thereby an invitation from von Grunebaum to teach at UCLA3.

Critical Examination of Edward Saids Orientalism

Heres a little Q & A on Saids now seminal and foundational text Orientalism. Orientalism is a book published in 1978 by Edward Said that has been highly influential and controversial in postcolonial studies and other fields. In the book, Said effectively redefined the term Orientalism to mean a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the Middle East. This body of scholarship is marked by a subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture. He argued that a long tradition of romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for European and the American colonial and imperial ambitions. Just as fiercely, he denounced the practice of Arab elites who internalized the US and British orientalists ideas of Arabic culture. So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression. Edward Said A central idea of Orientalism is that Western knowledge about the East is not generated from facts or reality, but from preconceived archetypes that envision all Eastern societies as fundamentally similar to one another , and fundamentally dissimilar to Western societies. This a priori knowledge establishes the East as antithetical to the West. Such Eastern knowledge is constructed with literary texts and historical records that often are of limited understanding of the facts of life in the Middle East. Following the ideas of Michel Foucault, Said emphasized the relationship between power and knowledge in scholarly and popular thinking, in particular regarding European views of the Islamic Arab world. Said argued that Orient and Occident worked as oppositional terms, so that the Orient was constructed as a negative inversion of Western culture. The work of another thinker, Antonio Gramsci, was also important in shaping Edward Saids analysis in this area. In particular, Said can be seen to have been influenced by Gramscis notion of hegemony in understanding the pervasiveness of Orientalist constructs and representations in Western scholarship and reporting, and their relation to the exercise of power over the Orient. Although Edward Said limited his discussion to academic study of Middle Eastern, African and Asian history and culture, he asserted that Orientalism is, and does not merely represent, a significant dimension of modern political and intellectual culture. (53) Saids discussion of academic Orientalism is almost entirely limited to late 19th and early 20th century scholarship. Most academic Area Studies departments had already abandoned an imperialist or colonialist paradigm of scholarship. He names the work of Bernard Lewis as an example of the continued existence of this paradigm, but acknowledges that it was already somewhat of an exception by the time of his writing (1977). The idea of an Orient is a crucial aspect of attempts to define the West. Thus, histories of the GrecoPersian Wars may contrast the monarchical government of the Persian Empire with the democratic tradition of Athens, as a way to make a more general comparison between the Greeks and the Persians, and between the West and the East, or Europe and Asia, but make no mention of the other Greek city states, most of which were not ruled democratically.

Taking a comparative and historical literary review of European, mainly British and French, scholars and writers looking at, thinking about, talking about, and writing about the peoples of the Middle East, Said sought to lay bare the relations of power between the colonizer and the colonized in those texts. Saids writings have had far reaching implications beyond area studies in Middle East, to studies of imperialist Western attitudes to India, China and elsewhere. It was one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies. Said later developed and modified his ideas in his book Culture and Imperialism (1993, another must read).

Many scholars now use Saids work to attempt to overturn long-held, often taken-for-granted Western ideological biases regarding non-Westerners in scholarly thought. Some post-colonial scholars would even say that the Wests idea of itself was constructed largely by saying what others were not. If Europe evolved out of Christendom as the not-Byzantium, early modern Europe in the late 16th century (see Battle of Lepanto, 1571) defined itself as the not-Turkey. Said puts forward several definitions of Orientalism in the introduction to Orientalism. Some of these have been more widely quoted and influential than others:

A way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orients special place in European Western experience. (1) a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and (most of the time) the Occident. (2) A Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (3) particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient. (6) A distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts. (12)

In his Preface to the 2003 edition of Orientalism, Said also warned against the falsely unifying rubrics that invent collective identities, citing such terms as America, The West, and Islam, which were leading to what he felt was a manufactured clash of civilisations. Heres a little critical Q&A to guide you through the central arguments (the first 100 or so pages) of the text. Question One: Said starts his first chapter with a quote from Fourier in the Description de lEgypte, le genie inquiet et ambitieux de (sic) Europeens impatient demployer les nouveaux instruments de leur puissance, which roughly translates as, the ambitious and anxious spirit of the Europeans.. eager to use the new tools of their power. Explain the sentence and comment on why it is the opening quote for this chapter. Answer: Though, Said notes, feelings of Orientalism and demarcation of an European us and an Oriental them were long in the making, the middle of the eighteenth century brought about two principal elements in the relationship between the West and the East: growing systematic knowledge in Europe of the Orient, and Europes position of strength [read: domination]. (39-40) This emerging body of literature is what, according to Said, constituted European knowledge of the Orient and is what gave them control of the region knowledge is power, Said writes, taking from Foucault. (34, 36, and 40) Said structures this paradigm of knowledge in the following manner: England knows Egypt, Egypt is what

England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes the very basis of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed insists upon, British occupation. (34) As such, Englands age of discovery, which preceded this period of domination and government, produced a body of knowledge that allowed them to witness Egypts inabilities to self-govern and thus fed into Englands occupation. This timeline presented by Said is the thrust of the first chapter that is to say that the emergent feelings of colonialism stem from systematic knowledge flooding Europe which place European culture and knowledge above that of the Orient and create a hierarchy of power between the West and the East. The tools of Europes power, the tools mentioned in the quote at the beginning of the chapter are these aforementioned tools of knowledge. The knowledge gathered during the Age of Discovery was harnessed in the mid-eighteenth century to serve racial and geographic paradigms of power. This construct of knowledge feeds into Said pivotal phrase Orientalism orientalizes the Orient meaning that the Orient (and the Occident for that matter) is man made constructs built out of the systematic knowledge gathered in Europe at this time. The Orient is only the Orient when placed in opposition to the Occident. Question Two: Comment on Saids question which is central to his entire book: Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanly? (45) Is this simply a rhetorical question or a statement about a much more difficult and unresolved issue. Answer: Ideally, Saids book aims to answer this question though in this context (placed in the first chapter) the question is asked rhetorically. Does this statement have to be either a rhetorical question or an unresolved issue? Can it not be both? In the first chapter it is meant to be rhetorical it is meant to make that reader believe that the author will attempt to answer the question or that the reader will be able to answer the question come the end of the book. In the context of the whole book however, it is a statement of deeply unresolved issues of race and superiority and how each and every individual defines themselves and those around them. Is Said not saying with this statement that while we [the collective human race] wish not to admit such things, we all define ourselves in opposition to others? (I am I because I am not youso on and so forth) Can discussing such practices and their roots ever make the practice cease? I dont think Said had an answer, try as he might to find one in the process of this book. Question Three: Explain what Said means by: As a discipline representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient, Orientalism comes to exert a three-way force, on the Orient, on the Orientalist, and on the Western consumer of Orientalism (67) What do you think about Saids implied position about the constitution and growth of knowledge? Answer: This statement, on page 67, harkens to the phase mentioned in the response to the first question Orientalism orientalizes the Orient. Orientalism, as a practice, penalizes the Orient for not being Europe. In the process of penalizing the Orient, the Occident is orientalizing the Orient by implementing a set of constraints, limitations upon the Orient (these constraints are apart of Saids description of the practice of Orientalism on page 41). In

this process that Occident receives that it believes to be truths of the Orient, but in reality the truths they are ingesting are learned judgments of the Orient built upon the power dynamic established. Thus the process of Orientalism is as destructive to the West as it is to the East, for as mentioned above (response to question 1) both operate under false senses of themselves and the other. Question Four: Said argues that there are two major reasons which favor a textual attitude [accepting the authority of texts] over direct human encounters: one has to do with the human need for the comfort of textual authority when confronted with something relatively unknown, threatening and previously distant, the second has to do with the appearance of success (93) Explain his point in relation to Orientalism. Answer: Said writes that all things, all experiences and places, cane be described as a book. Therefore, all reality can be described and thus descriptions garner authority as sources of reality. His over simplified example of the man who reads of a fierce lion, encounters a fierce lion, believes in the authority of the author about lions and thus subsequently about all other realities that he or she might write on is apropos. The written word garners power because of its relationship (even if only perceived relationship) to reality. This relationship that Said constructs of how an individual will take a written account as authentic over or in place of a personal account is a large piece of both Saids and Foucaults arguments on the power of both language and knowledge. This is essential to the Orientalist dialectic because the power relationship between East and West, Orient and Occident, is built upon power (read: language and knowledge). If the West has more knowledge they have more power, then get more knowledge through language (written word), thus power is imbued into written accounts of travels in the Orient and encounters with the Orient. Thus the written account will trump the personal account. This book and its main arguments serves as the basis for a paper I wrote on Orientalist painting and Napoleons explorations in Egypt and Greater Syria,here.

Edward Saids Orientalism

MAI 18, 2012

A conventional assessment of Edward SaidsOrientalism reduces his entire thesis to the subtitle of the French edition : LOrient cr par loccident (The Orient created by the Occident).To summarize this point of view, Said ties Orientalism, that is the academic field, to colonization, registering them both in the same historical paradigm and, in one fell swoop, reproves an entire scholarly field. If this was really what he said, it would seem like a bit of an exaggeration. Lets say this right away, so there is no possible ambiguity. Said never claimed that the Occident created the Orient, that is, that the geographic and cultural area understood as the Occident invented the geographical and cultural area understood as the Orient. For Said, the Orient created by the West, is Orientalism. That is his thesis. Orientalism, born of the West, superimposed its own representations of the Orient, on the Orient. In his summary of Orientalism, Edward Said, makes no attempt to be exhaustive; rather, he highlights the essential traits of Orientalism, in all its diversity. Because the first difficulty encountered when considering Orientalism, is the multiplicity and diversity of its output and quality. How do you develop under the same heading, an authors travelogue from 1809, a soldiers journal from 1840, a Jesuits report from 1870, and university conferences from 1883 and 1950, etc.? Saids analysis is based upon Foucaults conception of the analysis of discourse. The postulate defended by Foucault is that a concept does not necessarily refine itself progressively. Used over time, it is activated and reactivated, its use changing according to the person exploiting it, the conditions that make this exploitation possible, and a larger historical context. The course taken by an idea through history, and the mass of texts associated with it, constitute a discourse. The idea in question here is that of the Orient. Its use throughout history, and the texts attached to it, constitutes Orientalism. Modern Orientalism The use of Orientalism as a discourse, throughout history, to justify action in and on the Orient, political and religious, has remained a constant. The acquisition of positive knowledge remained subordinate to this justification, and was therefore determined by an imperative of utility. As this body of knowledge conditioned the available attitudes towards the Orient, artists and authors referencing Orientalists reproduce this same logic of domination. And they also give credence to, and dialectically reinforce, Orientalist discourse, by citing its authors and confirming their statements. This outline suggests a division of Orientalism into three parts, each one complementing and supplementing the other two. Their successive emergence suggests a historical progression, each step renewing and reinforcing both the tenants of Orientalism and the Orientalists role. In the beginning there was the Text, and the Text was with the Orient The first step to be taken in the construction of Orientalist discourse is the creation of a corpus, a body of texts, a set of references that touch on the idea, the Orient. The birth of Orientalism as an academic field dates to 1312 when church fathers decided to set up chairs for the study of Oriental languages in European capitals. This first period belongs to biblical scholars, approaching the

Orient through the Holy Land. With the Renaissance, and a new tradition of erudition, the field was transformed. In 1697, the first comprehensive presentation of the Orient, using Arab and Persian texts as a principal source, was given by Barthlemy dHerbelot and his Bibliothque Orientale, in which the area studied expands. The geographical confines of Orientalism extend from the Atlas Mountains to the Mongolian steppe, the period described starts with creation and ends in the 17th century; the topics covered are as diverse as geography and theology, dynastic genealogies and tribal customs. Yet Herbelot is quite happy compiling information on the Orient. He makes no attempt at analysis, even if criticism is implicit in his selection of texts, and explicit in his hostility towards Islam. But more than anything else, the style he adopts is didactic. However, in order to be able to teach the Orient, Herbelot must first create a finite and knowable Orient, he must tame dangerous heresy, domesticate the insane and transform entire continents and cultures into neat, sensible and essentialized encyclopedia entries. Doing so successfully demonstrates the Orientalists power over the Orient, bolsters his position and adds weight to what he has said and will say. Napoleon Bonapartes campaign in Egypt in 1798, with its division of scholars and scientists incorporated into the army, is the next gigantic act in the formulation of an academic Orientalism. They applied new social theories to Egypt and reported on their discoveries in the twenty three volume Description de lEgypte. The approach was textual, meaning that the Orient was understood through the exclusive use of texts. Napoleon prepared for the expedition by reading and studying, paying particular attention to Constantin de Volneys Considration de la guerre actuelle des Turcs, which deals with complications and strategy tied to invading and colonizing an Ottoman province. The expedition is a turning point because it allows scholars to work within the framework of occupation, associating military and cultural domination. This determines a certain relationship to the Orient, and, above all, demonstrates that the Orient is attainable. As the Orientalist is credible, his writings influence those who read them and then determine in part actual experiences. When amateur Orientalists start to travel to the Orient in the first half of the 19th century, their writings adopt, renew and e xpand Orientalist essentialism. From writers like Lord Byron, and artists like Delacroix, to soldiers like Richard Burton, the Orient was again approached textually. As such, these men continue to reference such stereotypes as Oriental despotism, luxury, cruelty and sloth. Reality proved surprisingly easy to ignore and discrepancies between the Oriental, as he had been described, and actual Orientals met, were relegated to the realm of the exceptional and anecdotal. and the Text was the Orient. This does not mean that for Orientalists, and those that read and used them, that there was no such thing as a good Orient. But the good was lost, a golden age, nearly mythical time and place peopled with Pharaohs and Muslim philosophers. And there was of course a bad Orient too, the one they had in front of them. As a result, there is nearly always talk of disappointment with the Orient and a preference for the collective European daydream, for the idea of a lotus and not a real lotus, which was, according to Nerval, a type of onion. In their writings and paintings, they transmit once more these experiences, determined by Orientalist references. They

substantiate what had been said by their predecessors and add a new layer, a new level of complexity to the Orientalist discourse. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, these encyclopedic sources of reference were used by writers and artists, furnishing their works with picturesque decors and a typology of possible characters. In the second half of the century, empire and positivism do not so much as transform the field as they do update it, applying the foundations of Oriental discourse to a new world order, justifying domination and colonization. The era of amateurs was over almost before it had begun. The French expedition in Egypt had been a failure, but the tone was set and the administrative needs of European Empire dictated a change in the field. Said says that, staring at this time, an Orientalist was no longer a gifted amateur enthusiast, or if he was, he would have trouble being taken seriously as a scholar. Administrators needed info rmation on the present, and the Oriental past was no longer studied seriously, even if it was still used to dress a typology of Orientals (past and present). Knowing the Oriental, for scholars and officers alike, was a means to an end; effective and profitable administration. Once again, the belief in the fundamental difference of Orientals had been inherited from bygone days. The question Said asks is what does different means exactly when stripped of the particle from? Unless the West is taken as the benchmark. Cumulative Identity and Coherence within Orientalism
A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning, public institutions, and generically determined writing.

Said repeatedly redefines Orientalism throughout his work but the multiplication of definitions does not correspond to a refinement of one all-encompassing description. Rather, all his definitions are equally valid, revealing the cumulative and corporate quality of Orientalism and reflecting its progression and renewal across the ages. All of Saids efforts tend to demonstrate that Orientalism, as a field of erudition, scholarship and European culture, has not perfected itself over time; rather, it has repeatedly restructured itself, following the evolution of the Humanities, and changing historical context, especially colonization in which Orientalism had an important role to play. But, as a field, it has managed to conserve a set of references and representations, continuously reactivated and updated, but nonetheless a constant throughout the history of Orientalism. This set of references is the keystone of Saids work, and the key to his understanding of Orientalism. His project is to describe the economy that makes Orientalism a coherent subject matter. His response is that it is this bank of available prejudices and beliefs, relayed from the end the end of the 18th century on, and reactivated throughout the history of Orientalism, taking on each time a new form. This set of references represents a second-order knowledge, that permeates any positive knowledge on the Orient. Its source is in imagination and ideology, not in observation. These references and representations, made available to all, are what make up what Said calls latent Orientalism, described as a layer of doctrine about the Orient; this doctrine was fashioned out of the experiences of many Europeans, all of them converging upon such essential aspects of the Orient as the Oriental character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality, and the like. These representations of the Orient, on which all writings converge, are the source of Orientalisms coherence. Produced and then confirmed by academics, popularized by

novelists, politicians and artists, these representations seem permanent and intangible, like the set of a play that never changes though the acts and scenes continue to unfold. In the academic world these representations had many uses. They offered an epistemological framework for research and a connoted vocabulary. They also served as a premise, allowing the use of notions with no corresponding reality. Additionally, they presented the opportunity to reaffirm ideas about the Orient, outside of disciplinary rigor, in metaphysical demonstrations made possible by the connoted vocabulary and the repetition of empty, abstract phrases. Orientalism is of course subject to History, but it is the status of Orientalists in Europe and the methods used that evolve. Not how the Orient is presented, distilled into a set of ontological characteristics. Orientalisms Orient
As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even says, stand apart from it objectively; () his Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized.

Artists and travelers, colonial administrators and academics, all position themselves in relation to these representations, which they then confirm and feed. But never do they question them. Nineteenth century Orientalism was the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient. Starting in the second half of the 19th century, the Orient existed as a place isolated from the mainstream of European progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce ; () The very possibility of development, transformation, human movement in the deepest sense of the word is denied the Orient and the Oriental.
Such a consistency was a form of cultural praxis, a system of opportunities for making statements about the Orient.

Orientalisms Orient is an intangible idea. The Modern Orient is the disappointing heir of the Ancient, the essential subject matter of scholarly research in the first half of the 19thcentury. After the 1850s, with the urgency of formal colonial domination, it became necessary to write more about the contemporary Orient, but always in a utilitarian perspective of domination. As such, the object of study is scorned. In the context of colonization, the Orient is the irreducible Other. But Orientalism rid the Orient of this difference by [eliding] the Orients difference with its weakness. p. 201 Once again, such essentialist affirmations as Islam is really no more than a second-order Aryan heresy see the light of day, presenting the Orient and the Oriental as fundamentally weak and static. Starting with such a generic idea of the Orient, the crisis within Orientalism makes sense. This crisis, beginning at the end of the Second World War, is the focus of the last part of Saids book. Unable to recognize its Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. () To the Orientalist who believes the Orient never changes, the new is simply the old betrayed by new, misunderstanding dis-Orientals.(p. 104) The crisis, still operative in 1977 when Said finished Orientalism, was rooted in a new awareness of the disparity between texts and reality as the East emancipated itself. The Orient created by the West is Orientalism. By that, Said does not say there is a real and self-determined Orient, which we have yet to access. Rather, he insists Orientalism has become, because of the representations it associates with the Orient, its principal agent, and in doing so has said less about the Orient than it has about the West. Said ends with Orientalisms triumph,

showing the continued relationship between area experts and power, and the permanence of Orientalisms representations of the Orient in the political, popular and academic spheres. An implicit conclusion in Saids work concerns the epistemological position to take when studying the Orient. He ends up invalidating all of them. Considering the Orient as the Other essentializes his characteristics, which are more decided than observed anyway. Considering the Orient as the same means eliding its difference with its weakness, and making the Orient a backwards partner of the West, behind on some race towards civilization, also defined ideologically. Letting the Orient go, forgetting the representations we have been fed, recognizing it as a notion whose appearance and evolution are tied to precise historical conditions, ultimately means discarding the Orientalist as the sole interpreter of the cultural phenomenon called the Orient.

Edward Said, Orientalism

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)

Introduction Said starts by asserting the fact that the Orient played an instrumental role in the construction of the European culture as the powerful Other: the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. (1-2) He then states that the research subject of his book is Orientalism, by which he understands a combined representation of the Orient in the Western culture, science, politics, etc. and, transcending the borders of all these field of knowledge, it becomes a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident," (2) and finally it transforms into a powerful political instrument of domination: Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (3) As Said is a Marxist, there is no wonder that it is this third incarnation of Orientalism, domination, that he cares most of all for. In the Foucaultian tradition, Said suggests to look at Orientalism as a discourse:
without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (3)

He then states that the Western image of the Orienti.e. Orientalismhad little to do with the real Orient. What is more important, Orientalism is not simply the work of European imaginationit is all about power, domination, hegemony and authority. As such, Orientalism was not simply a collection of misrepresentations about the Orient in Europe, it created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment, (6) material investment here meaning academic scholarship, art, literature, political writing, common sense, etc. In this way, Orientalism in the European culture became an instrument for maintaining content (in Gramscian terms), i.e. voluntary reproduction by the subjects of the social reality desired by the power. In this way, Orientalism is a phenomenon of the same rank as the idea of Europe. Said then ask how relevant it is on his side to consider as one phenomenon what was supposed to be, actually, two: individual writing (particularly in case of literary fiction) and hegemonic strategies. He then goes into a lengthy explanation of why he considers this to be relevant. First, he asserts that there is no pure knowledge, but rather all knowledge is shaped by ideological positions:
No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. (10)

The same, he argues, is the case with literature. The link between ideology and writing is not simplistic at all, but still it is unavoidable. He describes this link in the following way:
Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts, <> it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political, <> intellectual, <> cultural <> moral (12)

Hence Saids research agenda: to study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-

in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced. (15) His research question is, logically, How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novelwriting, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world? (15) as well as some other related to its evolution in time and the relationship between the individual effort and this collective project. Said then discusses his methodology. He, first, claims that there was a need to specify the corpus of his sources, therefore, he focused on French and British, later American sources on Islamic countries, and provides a rationale for this choice, Britain and France as the most important imperial powers, the US as occupying their place after the WWII, Islam as the Near Orient, which has been in contact with Europe for over a century. As for his methodological focus, Saids project is about fighting the dominant power:
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it established canon of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgements it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. (20)

His technics of analysis involve

strategic location, which is a way of describing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. (20)

He explains that every author writing about the Orient must take a position vis--vis the Orient, which means that he or she should translate into his or her text the symbolic constructions created by Orientalism in its previous or contemporary incarnations:
Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent. some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable formation (20)

Any text about the Orient is always exterior to the object it describes (i.e., Orient). Therefore, there are no natural depictions of the Orient, there are only representations of it. What is important in this observation is that these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient, (22) which means that Orientalist texts are always more about the West than about the Orient. Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism 1. Knowing the Oriental Said starts by analyzing public speeches and writings of two British imperialists of the early 20th century about the Egypt, making an emphasis on how the stress that since the British imperial authorities know better their country, they have a natural right to rule it:
British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. (32)

Any doubt in this right is dangerous, as it destroys the faith of both Arabs and colonial officers in what they are doing. This mode of seeing the Orient turned into the dominant political vision:
The most important thing about the theory during the first decade of the twentieth century was that it worked, and worked staggeringly well. The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was dear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate; the latter

must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power. (36)

Political domination had to be justified, therefore, in the course of the nineteenth century, a bunch of theories turn up which persisted into the twentieth century and which constructed the colonial subject as inferior to Europeansin logic, culture, moral, etc. Many resources were invented in this vision of Oriental people, as it justified and legitimized domination:
The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual. (41)

The reason why this domination emerged was that at that time Britain and France, two leading colonial powers, divide between them (and other powers) the whole world, but only between themMiddle East. In a way, they cooperated to secure cultural domination over these lands:
And share they <Britain and France> did, in ways that we shall investigate presently. What they shared, however, was not only land or profit or rule; it was the kind of intellectual power I have been calling Orientalism. In a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information, commonly and, in some of its aspects, unanimously held. (41)

This cultural and academic project of Orientalizing the Orient was institutionalized in learned societies, academic journals, conceptual views (like Darwinism or Marxism), etc. The link between them and the Orientalism as the phenomenon for which they all worked was double-folded: they drew on Orientalism and they gradually transformed it. That it was not a transformation of liberation, but the one of intensification and improvement, is proven, according to Said, by contemporary (1970s) speeches of American politicians who reproduce in their writing the same Oriental myth of the nineteenth century. These myths are represented to us as truth, and Said asks how this situation could emerge. The answer goes in the following sections. 2. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental Orientalism emerges, first, as an academic discipline within the European mediaeval scholarship and is eventually fully formed by the nineteenth century:
A nineteenth-century Orientalist was therefore either a scholar (a Sinoiogist, an IsIamicist, an IndoEuropeanist) or a gifted enthusiast (Hugo in Les Orientales, Goethe in the Westostlicher Diwan), or both (Richard Burton, Edward Lane, Friedrich Schlegel). (51)

This Orientalism of the nineteenth century was, however, built not upon a real encounter with the West, but rather on the basis of the European writing about the East since Ancient Greece. As the result, Orientalism formed as a system of signs which functioned relatively independently from its alleged references in the real world:
In the nineteenth century, Orientalism is very fashionable, but in a very eclectic way, with a focus on the classical period, rather than on modernity, and the Orient studied was a textual universe by and large; the impact of the Orient was made through books and manuscripts. (52) The result was Europe's collective day-dream of the Orient. (quoted V. G. Kiernan, 52)

Said then discusses that all geographies are imaginative and moves on to inspect the imaginative geography of the Orient: Almost from earliest times in Europe the Orient was something more than what was empirically known about it. (55) Already in ancient Greece, a line <was> drawn between two continents. Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant. (57) It is Europe that articulates the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative, not of a puppet master, but of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous space beyond familiar boundaries. (57) Different travel accounts, literary fiction, histories, which themselves are nearly literature, are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West. (58) The European vision of Islam became particularly important for the emergence of Orientalism. Islam, due to its attack on European borders during the Middle Ages, was regarded as a threat:

Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe Islam was a lasting trauma. (59)

Since European Christian scholars believed that Islam was a heresy and Mohammedan impostor, a false Christ, he became as well the epitome of lechery, debauchery, sodomy, and a whole battery of assorted treacheries, (62) which were later imposed on all Orientals in general. In general, Islam became an image whose function was not so much to represent Islam in itself as to represent it for the medieval Christian. (60) This rigorous Christian picture of Islam was intensified in innumerable ways, includingduring the Middle Ages and ear1y Renaissancea large variety of poetry, learned controversy, and popular superstition. (61) Said then goes through the European mediaeval writing examining how the image of the Orient was shaped gradually by different authors in the course of time. The aim of these works was to tame the Orient, at least in the European imagination, to give its phenomena genealogies, explanations and developments. 3. Projects In this section, Said considers projects which emerged within Orientalism and shaped it as a threat to the European civilization, as something totally opposed to it. He starts with Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperrons and William Jones's expeditions to the Orient and scholarly studies of Sanskrit. His main emphasis in this section is, however, Napoleons invasion of Egypt:
For Napoleon Egypt was a project that acquired reality in his mind, and later in his preparations for its conquest, through experiences that belong to the realm of ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality <Napoleon> saw the Orient only as it had been encoded first by classical texts and then by Orientalist experts, whose vision, based on classical texts, seemed a useful substitute for any actual encounter with the real Orient. (80)

I wonder why Said finds so surprising the fact that Napoleon used literary canon to prepare for his military expedition. There is actually no other way, therefore, there is nothing special in it. Any military campaign is prepared on the basis of literary evidence, and the enemy is always constructed, rather than real. Thats why wars are lost in 50% of cases. Said emphasizes that Napoleon saw Egypt as his trophy, rather than a country and culture of its own: Egypt's own destiny was to be annexed, to Europe preferably. (85) Description de l'Egypte, a discursive attempt to make Egypt French, 23 large volumes published between 1809 and 1823. This is how Said describes it:
To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness; to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modem West; to subordinate or underplay military power in order to aggrandize the project of glorious knowledge acquired in the process of political domination of the Orient; to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its "natura1" role as an appendage to Europe; to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial occupation with the title "contribution to modern learning" when the natives had neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pretexts for a text whose usefulness was not to the natives; to feel oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography; to institute new areas of specialization; to establish new disciplines; to divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and out of sight); to make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type; and, above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one's powers: these are the features of Orientalist projection entirely realized in the Description de I'Egypte, itself enabled and reinforced by Napoleon's wholly Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and power. (86)

Despite Napoleons military failure, his occupation gave birth to the entire modern experience of the Orient as interpreted from within the universe of discourse founded by Napoleon in Egypt, whose agencies of domination and dissemination included the Institut and the Description After Napoleon, then, the very language of Orientalism changed radically. Its descriptive realism was upgraded and

became not merely a style of representation but a language, indeed a means of creation. (87) It gave birth to multiple literary works about the Orient that Said discusses later in the section. Even the building of the Suez Canal was an Orientalist project, as Ferdinand de Lesseps, the leader of the project, appealed not only to commercial, but also civilizing benefits of this project:
Despite its immemorial pedigree of failures, its outrageous cost, its astounding ambitions for altering the way Europe would handle the Orient, the canal was worth the effort. It was a project uniquely able to override the objections of those who were consulted and, in improving the Orient as a whole, to do what scheming Egyptians, perfidious Chinese, and half-naked Indians could never have done for themselves. (90)

IV. Crisis Said once again argues that the West understood the Orient on the basis of text. He explores different ways of how expertise and competence represented in texts might, in fact, be far from reality, but the cultural inertia will keep on reproducing wrong views:
A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it. (94)

The results of this process were quite obvious: soon in the European cultural world, the Orient as such was completely replaced by the constructed knowledge of Orientalism:
Orientalism overrode the Orient. As a system of thought about the Orient, it always rose from the specifically human detail to the general transhuman one; an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards (and about) the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq, or Arabia. Similarly a verse from the Koran would be considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality. Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, absolutely different (the reasons change from epoch to epoch) from the West. (96)

Said then examines scholarly advances of Orientalism and the political conquests aided by Orientalism (100) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including scholarly societies, authors and politicians, conquests, etc. With the coming of the nineteenth century, the Orient also turns into a spectacle:
The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behavior issues out of a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached (103)

And here are result of all these developments by the early twentieth century:
As a judge of the Orient, the modern Orientalist does not, as he believes and even says, stand apart from it objectively. His human detachment, whose sign is the absence of sympathy covered by professional knowledge, is weighted heavily with all the orthodox attitudes, perspectives, and moods of Orienlalism that I have been describing. His Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized. An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the European or Western statesman and the Western Orientalists; it forms the rim of the stage containing the Orient. (104)

This situation dominated more or less academia, cultural and political spheres until the end of the Second World War. After it, the political situation changed radically, as Eastern nations acquired independence, while the Cold War divided the world between two new superpowers. Unable to recognize "its" Orient in the new Third World, Orientalism now faced a challenging and politically armed Orient. (104) Two alternatives arose: to pretend as if nothing had changed, or to adapt old ways to the new. Yet, in general, Orientalism was now in crisis. National liberation movements in the excolonial Orient worked havoc with Orientalist conceptions of passive, fatalistic subject races, (105) in

addition, there came an understanding that the entire conceptual apparatus of Orientalism was outdated. Despite that, Orientalism still has a firm footing in the Western academia. The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians, and passive Muslims are described as vultures for "our" largesse and are damned when "we lose them" to communism, or to their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant. (108) The West is still the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behavior. (109)

Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures 1. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion Romantic Orientalist project Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, for example. urged upon their countrymen, and upon Europeans in general, a detailed study of India because, they said, it was Indian culture and religion that could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture. (115) Four preconditions for the modern Orientalism: First, in the 18th century, Orient was being opened out considerably beyond the Islamic lands. (116) Consequently, attempts at wide comparative studies Second, attempts at scholarly studies of the lands outside Europe, including usage of original, i.e. nonEuropean, sources: translation of the Koran, etc. (117) Third, attempts to exceed comparative study, and its judicious surveys of mankind from "China to Peru," by sympathetic identification. (118) Fourth, new classificatory schemas which arouse in the European scholarship, including physiologicalmoral classification of human beings: the American is "red, choleric, erect," the Asiatic is "yellow, melancholy, rigid," the African is "black, phlegmatic, lax. (119) The four elements I have describedexpansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classificationare the currents in eighteenth century thought on whose presence the specific intellectual and institutional structures of modern Orientalism depend. Without them Orientalism, as we shall see presently, could not have occurred. (120) These are secularizing elements in the European culture. Said claims, that the Orient, in its Orientalized form, served as an instrument which pushed secularization of the European culture, as the contact with the Orient brought into being new cultural elements which destroyed classical religious cultural framework:
For anyone who studied the Orient a secular vocabulary in keeping with these frameworks was required. Yet if Orientalism provided the vocabulary, the conceptual repertoire, the techniques-for this is what, from the end of the eighteenth century on, Orientalism did and what Orientalism was-it also retained, as an undislodged current in its discourse, a reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism. (121)

It led to a huge cultural shift in Europe:

The modern Orientatist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished. His research reconstructed the Orient's lost languages, mores, even mentalities In the process, the Orient and Orientalist disciplines changed dialectically, for they could not survive in their original form Yet both bore the traces of powerpower to have resurrected, indeed created, the Orient, power that dwelt in the new, scientifically advanced techniques of philology and of anthropological generalization. (121)

The figure of Orientalist also gradually changed in the course of the 19th century:

The more Europe encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth century, the more Orientalism gained in public confidence. Yet if this gain coincided with a loss in originality, we should not be entirely surprised, since its mode, from the beginning, was reconstruction and repetition. (122)

In the final passage of the section, Said openly announces his stakes in this project:
Modern Orientalism embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation. And far from this being exclusively an intellectual or theoretical feature, it made Orientalism fatally tend towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories. To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or neglected Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority. (123)

2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory In this section, Said examines in detail professional work of two scholars whom he regards as instrumental in shaping Orientalism. The first, Silvestre de Sacy, is the founder of this discipline:
Sacy's name is associated with the beginning of modem Orientalism; it is because his work virtually put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition, and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy. (124)

As Sacy had to create this discipline from a blank sheet of paper, he invented several important principles, including the principle of the chrestomathy, which shaped the research object:
And since also the vastly rich (in space, time, and cultures) Orient cannot be totally exposed, only its most representative parts need be. Thus Sacy's focus is the anthology, the chrestomathy, the tableau, the survey of general principles, in which a relatively small set of powerful examples delivers the Orient to the student. (125)

The reason why chrestomathy:

Not only are Oriental literary productions essentially alien to the European; they also do not contain a sustained enough interest, nor are they written with enough "taste and critical spirit," to merit publication except as extracts Therefore the Orientalist is required to present the Orient by a series of representative fragments. fragments republished, explicated, annotated, and surrounded with still more fragments. (128)

The second scholar under scrutiny, Ernest Renan, is remarkable for having associated the Orient with the most recent comparative disciplines, of which philology was one of the most eminent. (130) His initial project was to recreated the Semitic protolanguage, which made him a distinguished authority in this field. In doing so, he actually constructed his object, because the Semitic protolanguage cannot, unlike living or even dead written languages, be observed. In doing so, he was quite reactionary:
Everywhere Renan treats of normal human factslanguage, history, culture, mind, imaginationas transformed into something else, as something peculiarly deviant, because they are Semitic and Oriental, and because they end up for analysis in the laboratory. Thus the Semites are rabid monotheists who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce, no civilization; their consciousness is a Darrow and rigid one (141-142)

This is the state of the art with which Orientalism met the twentieth century. 3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination Said continues his critique of Renans version of orientalism by stressing that due to linguistic approach employed by the latter, Orientalism was from the very beginning based on strategies of comparison:
Thus a knowing vocabulary developed, and its functions, as much as its style, located the Orient in a comparative framework, of the sort employed and manipulated by Renan. Such comparatism is rarely descriptive; most often, it is both evaluative and expository. (149) Thus did comparatism in the study of the

Orient and Orientals come to be synonymous with the apparent ontological inequality of Occident and Orient. (150)

Said then attracts attention to the fact that emotional attitude to the Orient was very uneven among European intellectuals of the nineteenth century: extremities (enthusiasm and disdain) dominated. As the result,
Most often an individual entered the profession as a way of reckoning with the Orient's claim on him; yet most often too his Orientalist training opened his eyes, so to speak, and what he was left with was a sort of debunking project, by which the Orient was reduced to considerably less than the eminence once seen in it. (150-151)

Narrative structures were employed to make coherent a huge mass of random facts about the Orient into texts which tamed the Orient and imposed upon it the European vision. Said discusses books about Mohammad published in the 19thcentury as examples. He then moves on to analyze Karl Marxs writing about the Orient. Said notes that Marx is undoubtedly sympathetic about the Orient, but when it comes to conceptualizing his insights into contemporary political language, the Orientalist vocabulary starts to shape his writing about India (that particular example):
That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient. It is as if the individual mind (Marx's, in this -case) could find a precollective, preofficial individuality in Asiafind and give in to its pressures upon his emotions, feelings, sensesonly to give it up when he confronted a more formidable censor in the very vocabulary he found himself forced to employ. (155)

Said then analyzes another important factor in the formation of Orientalism, the writing about the Orient while being there in residence. Said claims that the cultural structures of Orientalism were so strong that Europeans who came to the Orient to get a first-hand experience actually imposed already existing meanings on what they encountered there. He makes a thorough analysis of Edward William Lane'sManners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He notes, first, that Lane pretended to be Muslim in order to gain a better access to the Egyptian culturea fact of domination itself, as
Thus while one portion of Lane's identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it. (160)

This subversive activity is obviously Eurocentric:

What he says about the Orient is therefore to be understood as description obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down. His power was to have existed amongst them as a native speaker, as it were, and also as a secret writer. And what he wrote was intended as useful knowledge, not for them, but for Europe and its various disseminative institutions. (160)

Said then discusses how different behavioral and narrative strategies help Lane to pursue his observation without getting emotionally and physically mixed with Egyptians, such as the use of details in narration, monumental and detailed description, interruptions of narratives. Said finishes the section by stressing that by the mid-19th century, Orientalism was able to institutionalize itself and organize itself into a specialized body of knowledge. He concludes with this summarizing statement:
On the one hand, Orientalism acquired the Orient as literally and as widely as possible; on the other, it domesticated this knowledge to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars, commentaries, editions, translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West. The Orient, in short, would be converted from the personal, sometimes garbled testimony of intrepid voyagers and residents into impersonal definition by a whole array of scientific workers. It would be converted from the consecutive experience of individual research into a sort of imaginary museum without walls, where everything gathered from the huge distances and varieties of Oriental culture became categorically Oriental.

It would be reconverted, restructured from the bundle of fragments brought back piecemeal by explorers, expeditions, commissions, armies, and merchants into lexicographical, bibliographical, departmentalized, and textualized Orientalist sense. (166)

4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French Said discusses the last large type of writing about the Orient, travel pilgrimage accounts. From the very beginning, he asserts that
their <pilgrims> writing was to be a fresh new repository of Oriental experience but, as we shall see, even this project usually (but not always) resolved itself into the reductionism of the Orientalistic. The reasons are complex, and they have very much to do with the nature of the pilgrim, his mode of writing, and the intentional form of his work. (169)

He differentiates between French and English writing, in the way that for British pilgrims, to write about Egypt, Syria, or Turkey, as much as traveling in them, was a matter of touring the realm of political will, political management, political definition In contrast, the French pilgrim was imbued with a sense of acute loss in the Orient. (169) And then:
Consequently French pilgrims from Volney on planned and projected for, imagined, ruminated about places that were principally in their minds; they constructed schemes for a typically French, perhaps even a European, concert in the Orient, which of course they supposed would be orchestrated by them. Theirs was the Orient of memories, suggestive ruins, forgotten secrets, hidden correspondences, and an almost virtuosic style of being an Orient whose highest literary forms would be found in Nerval and Flaubert, both of whose work was solidly fixed in an imaginative. Unrealizable (except aesthetically) dimension. (169-170)

He claims that French (and later he would reiterate that about Englishmen) would be coming to the Orient as in case of Chateaubriand a constructed figure, not as a true self. (171) Therefore, a number of prejudices were a priori brought into their accounts:
This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing: the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him believed that Orientals, and especially Muslims, knew nothing about. (172)

As the Oriental experience was regarded through the European vision, consequently, as a form of growing knowledge Orientalism resorted mainly to citations of predecessor scholars in the field for its nutriment. (176-177) This is why even fictional writing and memoir accounts are secondary to the Orientalist picture:
In system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these. Direct observation or circumstantial description of the Orient are the fictions presented by writing on the Orient, yet invariably these are totally secondary to systematic tasks of another sort. In Lamartine, Nerval, and Flaubert, the Orient is a re-presentation of canonical material guided by an aesthetic and executive will capable of producing interest in the reader. Yet in all three writers, Orientalism or some aspect of it is asserted, even though, as I said earlier, the narrative consciousness is given a very large role to play. What we shall see is that for all its eccentric individuality, this narrative consciousness will end up by being aware, like Bouvard and Pecuchet, that pilgrimage is after all a form of copying. (177)

Then Said analyzes European travelogues noting that they involve operations of recognizing, rather than learning. Even the best of them, like Nerval, who refused to impose blindly the established Orientalist networks of meaning on their Oriental experience, presented it, consequently, as chaotic, to the realm of failed narratives, because they rejected European narratives about it, but could not see the local narratives:
It is as if having failed both in his search for a stable Oriental reality and in his intent to give systematic order to his re-presentation of the Orient, Nerval was employing the borrowed authority of a canonized Orientalist text. After his voyage the earth remained dead, and aside from its brilliantly crafted but fragmented embodiments in the Voyage, his self was no less drugged and worn out than before. Therefore

the Orient seemed retrospectively to belong to a negative realm, in which failed narratives, disordered chronicles, mere transcription of scholarly texts, were its only possible vessel. At least Nerval did not try to save his project by wholeheartedly giving himself up to French designs on the Orienl, although he did resort to Orientalism to make some of his points. (184)

Personal and sensual experiences were, after all, also subordinate to Orientalist structures of meaning, as in case of Flauberts Oriental women:
After his voyage, he had written Louise Colet reassuringly that "the oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man." (187)

Flauberts writing became the basis of Saids discussion of how the new modes of knowledge in Europe structure the reality (in his case, Orient) like a theatrical, fantastic library, parading before the anchorite's gaze. (188) From here, he moves on to discuss the emergence of the scholarly apparatus for disseminating Orientalism and disciplining and governing the European society, in Foucaultian terms:
The apparatus serving Oriental studies was part of the scene, and this was one thing that Flaubert surely had in mind when he proclaimed that "everyone will be in uniform." An Orientalist was no longer a gifted amateur enthusiast, or if he was, he would have trouble being taken seriously as a scholar. (191) Even the most innocuous travel bookand there were literally hundreds written after mid-century contributed to the density of public awareness of the Orient; a heavily marked dividing line separated the delights, miscellaneous exploits, and testimonial portentousness of individual pilgrims in the East (which included some American voyagers, among them Mark Twain and Herman Melville) from the authoritative reports of scholarly travelers, missionaries, governmental functionaries, and other expert witnesses. (192)

He concludes by addressing Richard Burton's Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to AI-Madinah and Meccah (1855-1856), which he regards as a transitional form of between between Orientalist genres represented on the one hand by Lane and on the other by the French writers. (194) Burton, who was highly sympathetic with the Arabs, still promotes, according to Said, the Orientalist project, as he invests his knowledge in the European understandingand, consequently, structuringof the Oriental societies:
Burton was an imperialist, for all his sympathetic self-association with the Arabs; but what is more relevant is that Burton thought of himself both as a rebel against authority (hence his identification with the East as a place of freedom from Victorian moral authority) and as a potential agent of authority in the East. It is the manner of that coexistence, between two antagonistic roles for himself, that is of interest. (195) The problem finally reduces itself to the problem of knowledge of the Orient, which is why a consideration of Burton's Orientalism ought to conclude our account of Orientalist structures and restructures in most of the nineteenth century. (195)

And finally:
what we read in his prose is the history of a consciousness negotiating its way through an alien culture by virtue of having successfully absorbed its systems of information and behavior. Burton's freedom was in having shaken himself loose of his European origins enough to be able to live as an Oriental. Every scene in the Pilgrimage reveals him as winning out over the obstacles confronting him, a foreigner, in a strange place. He was able to do this because he had sufficient knowledge of an alien society for this purpose. (196)

He then concludes that by the second half of the 19th century, institutionalized structures of knowledge and power replace earlier individual efforts to Orientalize the Orient. This is the legacy of the 19th century which would be fully exploited in the twentieth, as his conclusion to the entire Chapter 2 promises: This is the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalism to which the twentieth century has become inheritor. We must now investigate as exactly as possible the way twenlieth century Orientalisminaugurated by the long process of the West's occupation of the Orient from the 1880s on-successfully controlled freedom and knowledge; in short, the way Orientalism was fully fonnalized into a repeatedly produced copy of itself.

Chapter 3. Orientalism Now 1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism Said starts by summarizing his observations and conclusions in the two previous chapters:
The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, the collective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and social circumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar's production. A field like Orientalism has a cumulative and corporate identity, one that is particularly strong given its associations with traditional learning (the classics, the Bible, philology), public institutions (governments, trading companies, geographical societies, universities), and generically determined writing (travel books, books of exploration, fantasy, exotic description). The result for Orientalism has been a sort of consensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemed for the Orientalist correct. He has built his work and research upon them, and they in tum have pressed hard upon new writers and scholars. Orientalism can thus be regarded as a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient. The Orient is taught, researched, administered, and pronounced upon in certain discrete ways. (202)

Artistic forms, language idioms, conventional wisdoms about the Orientall these illusions which pretended to be truth and which were reproduced as truths. It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. (204) He then differentiates between two different modes of knowing and representing the Orient:
The distinction I am making is really between an almost unconscious (and certainly an untouchable) positivity, which I shall call latent Orientalism, and the various stated views about Oriental society, languages, literatures, history, sociology, and so forth, which I shall call manifest Orientalism. Whatever change occurs in knowledge of the Orient is found almost exclusively in manifest Orientalism; the unanimity, stability, and durability of latent Orientalism are more or less constant. (206)

Said discusses the colonial effort of European powers in the second half of the 19thcentury as it drew on symbolic resources provided by the Orientalism to claim the national support for the British and French imperial presence in undeveloped lands. Regarding how the Orient was supposed to be divided between the European Powers, he writes:
What matters more immediately is the peculiar epistemological framework through which the Orient was seen, and out of which the Powers acted. For despite their differences, the British and the French saw the Orient as a geographical-and cultural, political, demographical, sociological, and historical-entity over whose destiny they believed themselves to have traditional entitlement. The Orient to them was no sudden discovery, no mere historical accident, but an area to the east of Europe whose principal worth was uniformly defined in terms of Europe, more particularly in tenos specifically claiming for Europe-European science, scholarship, understanding, and administration-the credit for having made the Orient what it was now. And this had been the achievement-inadvertent or not is beside the point-of modern Orientalism. (221)

Apart from institutionalized knowledge (disseminative capacities of modem learning, its diffusive apparatus in the learned professions, the universities, the professional societies, the explorational and geographical organizations, the publishing industry p. 221), there was another method of knowing and managing the Orient in the West which was widely employed in the colonial struggle for the Oriental lands:
The second method by which Orientalism delivered the Orient to the West was the result of an important convergence. For decades the Orientalists had spoken about the Orient, they had translated texts, they had explained civilizations, religions, dynasties, cultures, mentalities-as academic objects, screened off from Europe by virtue of their inimitable foreignness The Orienlalist remained outside the Orient, wh ich, however much it was made to appear intelligible, remained beyond the Occident. This cultural, temporal, and geographical distance was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise Yet the distance between Orient and Occident was, almost paradoxically, in the process of being reduced throughout the nineteenth century. As the commercial, political, and other existential encounters between East and West increased, a tension developed between the dogmas of latent Orientalism, with its support in

studies of the "classical" Orient, and the descriptions of a present, modern, manifest Orient Orientalism now articulated by travelers, pilgrims, statesmen, and the like. At some moment impossible to determine precisely, the tension caused a convergence of the two types of Orientalism. (221-222)

The convergence was the figure of an imperial spy, who possessed intimate and expert knowledge of the Orient and of Orientals, and yet served the interests of the European Powers in their quest for the Orient. (224) 2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalisms Worldliness Said starts by discussing Kiplings White Man as a cultural phenomenon aimed to mobilize the British society for the imperial effort.
Being a White Man was therefore an idea and a reality. It involved a reasoned position towards both the white and the non-white worlds. It meant-in the colonies-speaking in a certain way, behaving according to a code of regulations, and even feeling certain things and not others. It meant specific judgments, evaluations, gestures. It was a form of authority before which nonwhites, and even whites themselves, were expected to bend. In the institutional forms it took (colonial governments, consular corps, commercial establishments) it was an agency for the expression, diffusion, and implementation of policy towards the world, and within this agency, although a certain personal latitude was allowed, the impersonal communal idea of being a White Man ruled. Being a White Man, in short, was a very concrete manner of being-intheworld, a way of taking hold of reality, language, and thought. It made a specific style possible. (227)

This image was based on the opposition we and they: This opposition was reinforced not only by anthropology, linguistics, and history but also, of course, by the Darwinian theses on survival and natural selection, and-no less decisive-by the rhetoric of high cultural humanism. (227) In literary narratives, this opposition revealed by regular moralizations and judgements on the nature of the superiority of Europeans over Orientals. Consequently, Orientals in these narratives were downgraded to literary characters constructed according to the laws of the genre, not on the basis of reality. To exercise of this opposition, a special vocabulary and epistemological instruments were elaborated, which were facilitated by method, tradition and politics all working together. (230)
The scholarly investigator took a type marked "Oriental" for the same thing as any individual Oriental he might encounter. Years of tradition had encrusted discourse about such matters as the Semitic or Oriental spirit with some legitimacy. And political good sense taught, in Bell's marvelous phrase, that in the East "it all hangs together." Primitiveness therefore inhered in the Orient, was the Orient, an idea to which anyone dealing with or writing about the Orient had to return, as if to a touchstone outlasting time or experience. (230-231)

Ancient cultural bias was strengthened in the 19th century by the influential racial theory:
in late-nineteenth-century culture, as Lionel Trilling has said, "racial theory, stimulated by a rising nationalism and a spreading imperialism, supported by an incomplete and mal-assimilated science, was almost undisputed." (232)

He then analyzes in more detail the writing about the Orient at the turn of the 20thcentury, seeing how features described in the previous chapters reveal themselves there.
A new dialectic emerges out of this project. What is required of the Oriental expert is no longer simply "understanding"; now the Orient must be made to perform, its power must be enlisted on the side of "our" values, civilization, interests, goals. Knowledge of the Orient is (directly translated into activity, and the results give rise to new currents of thought and action in the Orient. (238)

This led to a split within Orientalism between its older and new versions: between a passive knowledge and knowledge as action, between vision and narrative:
Against this static system of "synchronic essentialism" I have caned vision because it presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is a constant pressure. The source of pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be shown to move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What seemed stable-and the Orient is synonymous with stability and unchanging eternality-now appears unstable. Instability suggests that history, with its disruptive detail, its currents of change, its tendency

towards growth, decline, or dramatic movement, is possible in the Orient and for the Orient. History and the narrative by which history is represented argue that vision is insufficient, that "the Orient" as an unconditional ontological category does an injustice to the potential of reality for change. Moreover, narrative is the specific form taken by written history to counter the pennanence of vision. Lane <an early Orientalist> sensed the dangers of narrative when he refused to give linear shape to himself and to his information, preferring instead the monumental form of encyclopedic or lexicographical vision. Narrative asserts the power of men to be born, develop, and die, the tendency of institutions and actualities to change, the likelihood that modernity and contemporaneity will finally overtake "classical" civilizations; above all, it asserts that the domination of reality by vision is no more than a will to power, a will to truth and interpretation, and not an objective condition of history. Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision When as a result of World War 1 the Orient was made to enter history, it was the Orientalist-as-agent who did the work. (240)

Yet after the World War I, the domination of Europe over the Orient becomes less firm, which causes changes in the symbolic structures of Orientalism:
In the period between the wars, as we can easily judge from, say, Malraux's novels, the relations between East and West assumed a currency that was both widespread and anxious. The signs of Oriental claims for political independence were everywhere; certainly in the dismembered Ottoman Empire they were encouraged by the Allies and, as is perfectly evident in the whole Arab Revolt and its aftermath, quickly became problematic. The Orient now appeared to constitute a challenge, not just to the West in general, but to the West's spirit, knowledge, and imperium. (248)

This led to some fears that the Orient might at some point get an upper hand over Europe, unless the latter mobilizes herself:
Europe's effort therefore was to maintain itself as what Valery called "une machine puissante," absorbing what it could from outside Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and materially, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or disorganized). Yet this could be done only through clarity of vision and analysis. Unless the Orient was seen for what it was, its power-military, material, spiritual-would sooner or later overwhelm Europe. The great colonial empires, great systems of systematic repression, existed to fend off the feared eventuality. Colonial subjects, as George Orwell saw them in Marrakech in 1939, must not be seen except as a kind of continental emanation, African, Asian, Oriental (251)

This led to increased racist propaganda, such as that the Orientals' bodies are lazy, that the Orient has no conception of history, of the nation, or of patrie, that the Orient is essentially mystical-and so on. (253) 3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower In the interwar period, the firm standing of Orientalism in the Westerrn society is gradually undermined, mostly by externally (economic and political) factors:
No longer did it go without much controversy that Europe's domination over the Orient was almost a fact of nature; nor was it assumed that the Orient was in need of Western enlightenment. What mattered during the interwar years was a cultural self-definition that transcended the provincial and the xenophobic. For Gibb, the West has need of the Orient as something to be studied because it releases the spirit from sterile specialization, it eases the affliction of excessive parochial and nationalistic self-centeredness, it increases one's grasp of the really central issues in the study of culture. If the Orient appears more a partner in this new rising dialectic of cultural self-consciousness, it is, first, because the Orient is more of a challenge now than it was before, and second, because the West is entering a relatively new phase of cultural crisis, caused in part by the diminishment of Western suzerainty over the rest of the world. (257)

There is also a growth of non-Orientalist philosophies in Europe (Weber, e.g.) which challenge the ontological and gnoseological foundations of Orientalism. Yet, Said concentrates on another phenomenon, the growth of Islamic Orientalism, i.e. an Orientalist development which claimed that it was Islam that was the root of all evils about the Orient. Said then studies the careers and evolution of views of two prominent Islamic Orientalists, H. A. R. Gibb's and Louis Massignon. As for the latter,

At its best, Massignon's vision of the East-West encounter assigned great responsibility to the West for its invasion of the East, its colonialism, its relentless attacks on Islam. Massignon was a tireless fighter on behalf of Muslim civilization and, as his numerous essays and letters after 1948 testify, in support of Palestinian refugees, in the defense of Arab Muslim and Christian rights in Palestine against Zionism, against what, with reference to something said by Abba Eban, he scathingly called Israeli "bourgeois colonialism." Yet the framework in which Massignon's vision was held also assigned the Islamic Orient to an essentially ancient time and the West to modernity. Like Robertson Smith, Massignon considered the Oriental to be not a modern man but a Semite; this reductive category had a powerful grip on his thought. (270)

Therefore, according to Massignon,

the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or understanding himself. Partly because of what Europe had done to him, he had lost his religion and his philosophie; Muslims had "un vide immense" within them; they were close to anarchy and suicide. It became France's obligation, then, to associate itself with the Muslims' desire to defend their traditional culture, the rule of their dynastic life, and the patrimony of believers. (271)

Said then looks at Gibb as the culmination of a specific academic tradition, what-to use an expression that does not occur in Polk's prose-we can call an academic-research consensus or paradigm. (274275) Gibb was an insider of the Western academia, therefore, The Orient for Gibb was not a place one encountered directly; it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference. (275) For Gibbs, Islam is, too, the dominant structure organizing the entire life of Near Eastern communities. In general, although the old Orientalism was broken into many parts; yet all of them still served the traditional Orientalist dogmas. (284) 4. The Latest Phase In this section, Said focuses on the Orientalist influences in the American culture, academia and politics. He starts by considering cultural stereotypes about Arabs, which were strengthened by the confrontation of Arab states with Israel and with the use of oil as a lever of pressure. In the films and television the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty dishonesty. (286) Another example: A survey entitled The Arabs in American Tex/books reveals the most astonishing misinformation, or rather the most callous representations of an ethnic-religious group. (287) As for academia, These crude ideas are supported, not contradicted, by the academic whose business is the study of the Arab Near East. (288) Moreover, Oriental studies became even more about propaganda since the West was not involved into the confrontation with the Soviet Union. In general, Said claims that the United States intentionally occupied space freed by the retreating British and French Empires in the Near East, and in the course of doing that they Orientalized this field
(a) the extent to which the European tradition of Orientalist scholarship was, if not taken over, then accommodated, normalized, domesticated, and popularized and fed into the postwar efflorescence of Near Eastern studies in the United States; and (b) the extent to which the European tradition has given rise in the United States to a coherent attitude among most scholars, institutions, styles of discourse, and orientations, despite the contemporary appearance of refinement, as well as the use of (again) highly sophisticatedappearing social-science techniques. (295-296)

Consequently, even now, at the time of Saids writing, academic writing about Islam was quite dogmatic:
But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here: one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant. undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient, particularly those based on texts representing a "classical" Oriental civilization, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically "objective." A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something

either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible) . (300-301)

As an example of contemporary Orientalism, Said discusses the intellectual failure of The Cambridge History of Islam. He then looks at the racial politics of Israel, which to a considerable degree break the rights of Palestinians on the basis that they are less developed than Jews. Said then analyzes the contemporary right wing discourse, which is a priori anti-Oriental due to its inherent Orientalism: And so it is throughout the work of the contemporary Orientalist; assertions of the most bizarre sort dot his or her pages, whether it is a Manfred Halpern arguing that even though all human thought processes can be reduced to eight, the Islamic mind is capable of only four, or a Morroe Berger presuming that since the Arabic language is much given to rhetoric Arabs are consequently incapable of true thought. (310) However, here in this chapter, as well as in the previous one, his analysis becomes somewhat weaker than before, as he generalizes less and the details overwhelm the picture. Perhaps, this is because the contemporary criticism is too personal. Said finishes this section, this chapter and the whole book by considering the role that Orientalism and its expert play in the foreign policy of the United States. As the latter became heavily invested in the Middle East,
Most of this investment, appropriately enough, is built on foundations of sand, since the experts instruct policy on the basis of such marketable abstractions as political elites, modernization and stability, most of which are simply the old Orientalist stereotypes dressed up in policy jargon, and most of which have been completely inadequate to describe what took place recently in Lebanon or earlier in Palestinian popular resistance to Israel. (321)

Said concludes that the current situation is the triumph of Orientalism, to the degree that even Orientals themselves start to speak the languages of Orientalism. Yet there is hope: in the critical thinking in modern universities. Sort of.
Positively. I do believe-and in my other work have tried to show -that enough is being done today in the human sciences to provide the contemporary scholar with insights, methods, and ideas that could dispense with racial, ideological, and imperialist stereotypes of the sort provided during its historical ascendancy by Orientalism. (328)