Orientalism is an oppressing tool

Looking at Ingres oil painting La Grande Odalisque, I cant help but thinking that this work, though very beautiful and touching, has little to do with my experience of an Orient inhabitant. Where are all the harems full of lustful and lascivious women in Morocco today? I do not think that my grandfather, nor any of my ancestors had the privilege to bask in such facilities. Nevertheless, let us play the devils advocate and imagine that one of our august forbearer attended joyfully one of them; is it a proof that all Moroccos citizens lived that way? Have we ever heard of oriental representations of the Occident based on Parisian brothels? Isnt it a bit reducing? Having all these thoughts on my mind, I decided to definitely ban all orientalist works from my small personal library, beginning from Victor Hugos Les Orientales. I was to focus on authors praised for their objectivity and iconoclastic views: Mark Twain for instance. Embezzled was I when I read chapter 6 of his well-known travelogue Innocents Abroad (1867), about his two-day trip to Tangier, northern city of the Moroccan Empire. Mark Twains approach of the East is extremely biased and his longing of Tangier is dictated by its foreignness, that he repeatedly compare to the Arabian nights stories! What a pity for such a bright mind to fall into such despairing clich: we wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign, -foreign from top to bottom foreign from center to circumference- foreign inside and outside and all around nothing anywhere around it to dilute its foreignness nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun (Innocents abroad, p 62, 1867). My point here is that Orientalism wasnt just an airy idea of Orient, a great pack of lies: it was a constructed politically system that no western mind could escape from, even the utmost opponents of colonialism (such as Twain, who spoke and wrote with passion against European imperialism, e.g. in King Leopolds soliloquy, 1905).

First, we have to assume that neither Orient nor Occident is a fact of nature. You can ask any inhabitant of Shanghai about Orient, hed describe it to you as an area between San Francisco and Washington DC: The earth is not flat, thank God. So how can such ideas bear in the mind of historians (e.g. Ernest Renan and Bernard Lewis to mention only a few of them), that perfectly master earths roundness? Giambattista Vico, an Italian politician philosopher of the XVIII century gave the answer: verum esse ipsum factum (the true itself is made). A fierce opponent of all sorts of early positivism, Vico is considered as the first scholar who introduced constructivist epistemology, as further developed by Emmanuel Kant and Gaston Bachelard. According to him, scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world. Thus, concepts of science (including history and geography) are mental constructs proposed in order to explain sensory experience. Indeed, it is true that men themselves made this world of nations but this world without doubt has issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men had proposed to themselves (The New Science, 1725). The idea behind is that toponyms such as Occident and Orient are a created body of theory and practice. For many generations, there have been considerable investments to forge them, and Orientalism is the system of thinking that lies beneath them.

Strictly speaking, Orientalism is a study area, considered to have been launched by a formal decision of the church of Council in Vienne in 1312 to create a series of chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon and Salamanca. A medievalist, a classicist or even an Americanist focuses on a very limited area of the world, not the full half of it. That is not the case of the orientalist, who boasts of his considerable geographical field of study. This confusing amalgam held together such different studies as Islamic law and Chinese dialects together. Nevertheless, this area of study was quiet modest comparing to what it became in the mid-19th century: a treasure-house of learning with huge eclecticism. Indeed, Orientalism was here developed as a subservient for colonization. The paradigm was simple: Westerners divided the world by using the concept of ours and theirs. An imaginary geographically line was drawn: Orients were regarded as uncivilized, and by contrast, Occident was born as home of the refined race. For instance, former British governor of Egypt Lord Cromer described what he called the core of the Oriental, in his two-volume work Modern Egypt (1910). : Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind (note here that despite his book was only aimed at Egypt, he managed to generalize it to all Orientals, from Zulus to Chinese nationals) *+ The European is a close reasoner, a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic. The oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. In addition to that, Orientals are inveterate liars, lethargic and suspicious, far from the nobility of the Anglos-Saxon race. Lord Cromers review is not only based on observations: it is also (and mostly, according to his own testimony) the product of orientalist imagery. Men like him could say what they said in the way they did because Orientalism (lead by historians such as Ernest Renan) provided them with a vocabulary, rhetoric and figures with which to say it. No wonder why the period of unparalleled European expansion coincided with an incredible surge in orientalist studies. One could question how such racist views rapidly grew to be indisputable norms. Why wasnt there any dissonant theory to Orientalism? Let us analyze one of the key colonization speeches, given by Sir Arthur James Balfour, on behalf of the British foreign office, in front of the House of Commons on June 13th 1910. The house was challenging the necessity for England to be in Egypt as some nationalistic demonstrations burst in Cairo calling for emancipation. Here is Balfours response: First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government You may look through the whole history of the Orientals, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries have been under despotism, under absolute government. Science, history and knowledge are pulled here. Balfour claims that he knows Egypt better than anyone, even Egyptians themselves. Thus, he can crush upon anyone who dares to question colonial rule: Is it a good thing for these great nations I admit their greatness- that this absolute government should be exercised by us? I think its a good thing. No matter what Al Wafd nationalists, who spoke out against this rule, would say: England knows Egypt better than them through oriental studies and the English idea of Egypt is Egypt. Scientia potentia est (Knowledge is power), Francis Bacon once said: to have knowledge of a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. Edward Said, an American philologist of Palestinian origins, conceived a very interesting theory which includes these Baconian themes in the core of the relationship between Orient and Occident. According to him, Orient which is the most significant construction of

Orientalist scholars is a feminine figure. It awaits and wishes for the dominance of the masculine West. In fact, it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of its Western counterpart (Orientalism, Edward Said, 1976). The importance of such a construction is that it forges an Occidental identity (from scratch, since European nations arent that similar), by defining the Other and scrutinizing Him. Nevertheless, one could easily oppose that aside from these colonial rough speeches, there were also testimonies of full sympathy embodied by all the artistic works that hailed the Easts call. Indeed, a virtual epidemic of Orientalia affected every major poet and essayist of the 19th century, and it is relevant to speak of an orientalist genre as exemplified in the works of Flaubert and Goethe or the paintings of Ingres and Gerome. However, these works inevitably went with a kind of freefloating mythology of the Orient, and Orient that derives not only from contemporary attitudes but also the conceit of scholars that preceded them (Orientalism , Edward Said, 1976). What Edward Said points out here is that it isnt just Art for Arts sake, no matter what the true motivations were: it conveys loads of taken-for-granted misconceptions about Orient almost in an unconscious way. In fact, it can be seen as soft imperialism. Lets have a look once again at Mark Twains text The Innocents abroad or the New Pilgrims Progress (1867). His first encounter with the Orient happens in Gibraltar, where a lot of Moors came to do business. Describing the people of this area, he starts with the English garrison, the soft-eyed Spanish girls and then the turbaned, sashed and trousered Moorish merchants from Fez and long robed, bare legged, ragged Mohammedan vagabonds from Tetouan and Tangier. Then he describes the Jews in gabardine, skullcap and slippers, just as they are in pictures and theatres, and just as they were three thousand years ago, no doubt. Note here the reference to Time (which will be recurring in Twains text): Orientals are out of Time. This might please poets, but it certainly denotes Orients inferiority. Moreover, Moors are Mohammedan, rather than Muslims: it is an inferior name, mainly used by orientalist studies (no Muslim would call himself Mohammedan) in times of Islamophobia. Twain stressed in his description of the city of Tangier what Edward Said called exotic spatial configurations as one of the eccentricities of the Oriental life. In his criticizing paper Mark Twains image of the moor: how Innocent were the Innocents?, Mohamed Raji Zughoul of Yarmouk University (Jordan), notes that in Twains eyes Tangier is jammed, crowded, enclosed in massive stone wall and has very narrow streets. Another feature pointed out as odd, is what Edward Said calls unimaginable antiquity. Tangier is a funny old town. How old can it be? Almost older than time itself! Even legendary Hercules found it old when he came here. Orient is eternal. Eternal in its backwardness! Then we move to another favorite orientalist clich, described by Edward Said as a tendency to despotism. The image of Orient dismissed in orientalist works reflects a land which is no way concerned by liberty. And this is exactly the theme Twain treats when he describes the Emperor of Morocco: The emperor of Morocco is a soulless despot, and the great officers under him are despots under smaller scale. There is no regular system of taxation, but when the Emperor or the Bashaw wants money, they levy on some rich man, and he has to furnish the cash or go to prison. Therefore, few men dare to be rich in Morocco. It is a dangerous luxury. Fortunately, Occident is

here to grant some liberty. Indeed, he says that rich Moors seek sometimes the protection of foreign consuls to flout their riches in the emperors face with impunity.

As a conclusion, we might consider that Orientalism as a field of study lead to the creation of a fantasized land called Orient that exists solely for him. It mainly served two goals: rationalizing colonization and depicting a glorified Occident, land of reason and modernism by contrast with the Other (Orient). One side effect of orientalism was the creation of works of art, which were mainly soft illustrations of its racist views and reproductions of its countless taken-for-granted statements. This was very harmful to all the oriental people as it delayed their emancipation and entrenched in westerners mind xenophobic views that lasted until these days. How can we leave it behind? In his interesting essay Le drglement du monde: Quand nos civilisations spuisent (2009), Amin Maalouf pledges that there is no salvation for the humankind outside culture. With this powerful tool, we can learn about orientalism and erase it in our minds: to your books!