Orientalism by Edward Said is a cononical 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 weren’t 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.

The first 'Orientalists' were 19th century scholars who translated the writings
of 'the Orient' into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective
colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of
knowledge as power is present throughout Said's critique. By knowing the
Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the
observed, the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the
observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.

One of the most significant constructions of Orientalist scholars is that of the

Orient itself. What is considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads
across a myriad of cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as
the Middle East. The depiction of this single 'Orient' which can be studied as a
cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist
scholars. It essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental--a biological
inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging--to be depicted in
dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism
is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate
a colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide
variety of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the construction.
The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of the West; it is a
defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its Western
counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single
subject matter where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken
notions of the Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist,
it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the scholar who gives it
life.

Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of

"Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing,
untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--
prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These
notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by
the Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is
increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite
literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the
ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now
culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab
Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with
the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of
absolute truth backed by absolute force." He continues, "One would find this
kind of procedure less objectionable as political propaganda--which is what it
is, of course--were it not accompanied by sermons on the objectivity, the
fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that
Muslims and Arabs cannot be objective but that Orientalists. . .writing about
Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact of their Westernness.
This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its
subject matter but also blinds its practitioners."
Said calls into question the underlying assumptions that form the foundation of
Orientalist thinking. A rejection of Orientalism entails a rejection of biological
generalizations, cultural constructions, and racial and religious prejudices. It is
a rejection of greed as a primary motivating factor in intellectual pursuit. It is
an erasure of the line between 'the West' and 'the Other.' Said argues for the use
of "narrative" rather than "vision" in interpreting the geographical landscape
known as the Orient, meaning that a historian and a scholar would turn not to a
panoramic view of half of the globe, but rather to a focused and complex type
of history that allows space for the dynamic variety of human experience.
Rejection of Orientalist thinking does not entail a denial of the differences
between 'the West' and 'the Orient,' but rather an evaluation of such differences
in a more critical and objective fashion. 'The Orient' cannot be studied in a non-
Orientalist manner; rather, the scholar is obliged to study more focused and
smaller culturally consistent regions. The person who has until now been
known as 'the Oriental' must be given a voice. Scholarship from afar and
second-hand representation must take a back seat to narrative and self-
representation on the part of the 'Oriental.'

Orientalism questioned a pattern of misrepresentation of the non-western world.

In some sense his book Orientalism aims to dismantle this myth, but more than
that Said's goal is to identify Orientalism as a discourse.

From Myth to Discourse. The oriental is a myth or a stereotype, but Said shows
that the myth had, over the course of two centuries of European thought, come to
be thought of as a kind of systematic knowledge about the East. Because the
myth masqueraded as fact, the results of studies into eastern cultures and
literature were often self-fulfilling. It was accepted as a common fact that Asians,
Arabs, and Indians were mystical religious devotees incapable of rigorous
rationality. It is unsurprising, therefore that so many early European studies into,
for instance, Persian poetry, discovered nothing more or less than the terms of
their inquiry were able to allow: mystical religious devotion and an absence of
rationality.

Political Dominance. Said showed that the myth of the Oriental was possible
because of European political dominance of the Middle East and Asia. In this
aspect of his thought he was strongly influenced by the French philosopher
Michel Foucault. The influence from Foucault is wide-ranging and thorough, but it
is perhaps most pronounced when Said argues that Orientalism is a full-fledged
discourse, not just a simple idea, and when he suggests that all knowledge is
produced in situations of unequal relations of power. In short, a person who
dominates another is the only one in a position to write a book about it, to
establish it, to define it. It’s not a particular moral failing that the stereotypical
failing defined as Orientalism emerged in western thinking, and not somewhere
else.

His book makes three major claims. The first is that Orientalism, although
purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact
functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means
through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands. Said is quite clear
about the causal sequence: “Colonial rule was justified in advance by
Orientalism, rather than after the fact.” Imperial administrators like Lord
Curzon, a Viceroy of India, agreed that the products of this scholarship—“our
familiarity, not merely with the languages of the people of the East but with
their customs, their feelings, their traditions, their history, and religion”—had
provided “the sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain in the
future the position we have won.” In the late twentieth century, the field helps
preserve American power in the Middle East and defends what Said calls “the
Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine.” Today, however, there is much
less interest in the traditional fields of philology and literature. American
academic centers for Middle Eastern studies are more concerned with providing
direct advice to the government on public policy. Overall, Said submits, his
work demonstrates “the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological
subspecialty into a capacity for managing political movements, administering
colonies, making nearly apocalyptic statements representing the White Man’s
difficult civilizing mission.”

His second claim is that Orientalism helped define Europe’s self-image. “It has
less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” The construction of
identity in every age and every society, Said maintains, involves establishing
opposites and “Others.” This happens because “the development and
maintenance of every culture require the existence of another different and
competing alter ego.” Orientalism led the West to see Islamic culture as static
in both time and place, as “eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself.”
This gave Europe a sense of its own cultural and intellectual superiority. The
West consequently saw itself as a dynamic, innovative, expanding culture, as
well as “the spectator, the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior.”
This became part of its imperial conceit. In 1810, the French author
Chateaubriand called upon Europe to teach the Orient the meaning of liberty
which he, and everyone after him, believed the Orientals knew nothing about.
Said says he thereby provided the rationale for Western imperialism, which
could be described by its perpetrators not as a form of conquest, but as the
redemption of a degenerate world.

Thirdly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs
and Islamic culture. This happened primarily because of the essentialist nature
of the enterprise—that is, the belief that it was possible to define the essential
qualities of Arab peoples and Islamic culture. These qualities were seen in
uniformly negative terms, he says. The Orient was defined as a place isolated
from the mainstream of human progress in the sciences, arts, and commerce.
Hence: “its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its
habit of inaccuracy, its backwardness.” Where this approach first goes wrong,
Said says, is in its belief that there could be such a thing as an Islamic
society, an Arab mind,an Oriental psyche. No one today, he points out, would
dare talk about blacks or Jews using such essentialist clichés. Where
Orientalism goes even further astray, he claims, is its anachronistic assumption
that Islam has possessed a unity since the seventh century, which can be read,
via the Koran, into every facet of, say, modern Egyptian or Algerian society.
The notion that Muslims suffer such a form of arrested development not only is
false, he maintains, but also ignores more recent and important influences such
as the experience of colonialism, imperialism, and, even, ordinary politics.

The faults of Orientalism, moreover, have not been confined to analyses of the
Orient. Said claims there have been counterparts in “similar knowledges”
constructed about Native Americans and Africans where there is a chronic
tendency to deny, suppress, or distort their systems of thought in order to
maintain the fiction of scholarly disinterest. In other words, Said presents his
work not only as an examination of European attitudes to Islam and the Arabs
but also as a model for analysis of all Western “discourses on the Other.”

The other source of Said’s inspiration also derived from Paris in the Sixties.
This is the writing of Michel Foucault, especially his notion that academic
disciplines do not simply produce knowledge but also generate power. Said
uses Foucault to argue that Orientalism helped produce European imperialism.
“No more glaring parallel exists,” Said says, “between power and knowledge in
the modern history of philology than in the case of Orientalism.” He also
borrowed from Foucault the notion of a “discourse,” the ideological framework
within which scholarship takes place. Within a discourse, all representations are
tainted by the language, culture, institutions, and political ambience of the
representer. Hence there can be no “truths,” Said argues, only formations or
deformations.

In Orientalism, Edward Said discusses the many aspects of the term “Orientalism,” including its origins, the
primary ideas and arguments behind Orientalism, and the impact that Orientalism has had on the
relationship between the West and the East. He quotes Joseph Conrad for the proposition that conquering
people who are different from us is “not a pretty thing.” It needs an “idea” to “redeem” it. Said’s concept of
Orientalism helps define the “idea” that provides a political, economic, moral, and socio-cultural
justifications for imperialist actions by more dominant countries such as the United States. In Iraq, this
“idea” is that the United States is a more advanced, civilized, and productive nation that is trying to assist a
less civilized country with inferior citizens that is being torn apart by civil war. We are seeking to bring
Iraqis the “gift” of democracy.
Said’s concept of Orientalism asks us to consider whether

the United States is motivated by more selfish and imperialistic notions that motivate foreign intervention
and our self-affirming “idea.” Orientalism in his view is primarily about power and a feeling of superiority.
Because the Occident has superior people with a superior culture, we deserve to be in control. We justify
our forceful intervention in other countries and protection of our own interests on the ground that it is
“good” for the inferior Oriental people. Said asks us to consider whether intervention by force is the most
effective way to positively change a nation, or whether there might be more peaceful and effective ways to
help countries in the Orient achieve their own self-determination in their own ways.
Many reasons explain the need for conquest of the Orient. These reasons essentially fall under four
categories: political, economic, moral, and socio-cultural.