Orientalism Edward Said

Despite the book's wide-ranging influence, some have taken issue with the arguments and assumptions of Orientalism. Critics include Albert Hourani (A History of the Arab Peoples, 1991), Robert Graham Irwin (For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies, 2006), Nikki Keddie (An Islamic Response to Imperialism, 1968), and Bernard Lewis ("The Question of Orientalism", Islam and the West, 1993).[40][41][42]

In a review of a book by Ibn Warraq, American classicist Bruce Thornton dismissed Orientalism as an "incoherent amalgam of dubious postmodern theory, sentimental Third Worldism, glaring historical errors, and Western guilt".[43] Likewise, in the preface paragraphs of a book-review article "Enough Said" (2007), about Dangerous Knowledge (2007), which is the American title for British-published For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies by Robert Irwin, Martin Kramer criticized what he said was the way Said turned the term "Orientalism" into a pejorative, saying "In a semantic sleight of hand, Said appropriated the term "Orientalism", as a label for the ideological prejudice he described, thereby, neatly implicating the scholars who called themselves Orientalists."[44]

Nonetheless, the literary critic Paul De Man said that, as a literary critic, "Said took a step further than any other modern scholar of his time, something I dare not do. I remain in the safety of rhetorical analysis, where criticism is the second-best thing I do."[45]

History

Ernest Gellner, in his book review titled "The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism: a review of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said" (1993), says that Said's contention of Western domination of the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, because, until the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire (1299–1923) was a realistic military, cultural, and religious threat to (Western) Europe.[46]

In "Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Said" (2005), Mark Proudman noted incorrect 19th-century history in Orientalism, that the geographic extent of the British Empire was not from Egypt to India in the 1880s, because the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in that time intervened between those poles of empire.[47] Moreover, at the zenith of the imperial era, European colonial power in the Eastern world never was absolute, it was relative and much dependent upon local collaborators—princes, rajahs, and warlords—who nonetheless often subverted the imperial and hegemonic aims of the colonialist power.[48]

In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Robert Irwin says that Said's concentrating the scope of Orientalism to the Middle East, especially Palestine and Egypt, was a mistake, because the Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948) and British Egypt (1882–1956) were only under direct European control for a short time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thus they are poor examples for Said's theory of Western cultural imperialism. That Orientalism should have concentrated upon noteworthy examples of imperialism and cultural hegemony, such as the British colony of India (1858–1947) and Russian colonies in Asia (1721–1917), but he did not, because, as a public intellectual, Edward Said was more interested in making political points about the politics of the Middle East, in general, and of Palestine, in particular.[49] Moreover, that by unduly concentrating on British and French Orientalism, Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by German and Hungarian academics and intellectuals, whose countries did not possess colonies in the East.[50] He frankly states that the "book seems to me to be a work of malignant charlatanry in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations."[51]

Irwin's book was later reviewed by Amir Taheri, writing in Asharq Al-Awsat. He listed certain factual and editing errors, and noted a number of prominent Orientalists were left unmentioned, but says that he believes it to be "the most complete account of Orientalism from the emergence of its modern version in the 19th century to the present day." He also describes it as "a highly enjoyable read both for the specialist and the broadly interested reader."[52]

American scholar of religion Jason Ānanda Josephson has argued that data from Japan complicates Said's thesis about Orientalism as a field linked to imperial power. Not only did Europeans study Japan without any hope of colonizing it, but Japanese academics played a prominent role as informants and interlocutors in this academic discipline, providing information both on their own practices and history and on the history of China.[53] Moreover, Josephson has documented that European conferences on East Asia predate European conferences on the Middle East described by Said, necessitating an alternative chronology of Western academic interest in the Orient.[54]

French orientalists Maxime Rodinson was surprised by the popularity of the book in the United States, calling it a "polemic" and a "bit Stalinist".[55]

Professional

In the article "Said's Splash" (2001), Martin Kramer says that, fifteen years after the publication of Orientalism (1978), UCLA historian Nikki Keddie (whom Said praised in Covering Islam, 1981) who originally had praised Orientalism as an "important, and, in many ways, positive" book, had changed her mind. In Approaches to the History of the Middle East (1994), Keddie criticises Said's work on Orientalism, for the unfortunate consequences upon her profession as an historian:

I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word "orientalism" as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the "wrong" position on the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged too "conservative". It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So, "orientalism", for many people, is a word that substitutes for thought and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.[56]

Literature

In the article, "Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy" (2008), Robert Irwin says that Said ineffectively distinguished among writers of different centuries and genres of Orientalist literature. That the disparate examples, such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) who never travelled to the Orient; the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) who briefly toured Egypt; the French Orientalist Ernest Renan (1823–1892), whose anti-Semitism voided his work; and the British Arabist Edward William Lane (1801–1876), who compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93)—did not constitute a comprehensive scope of investigation or critical comparison.[57] In that vein, in Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007), Ibn Warraq earlier had said that in Orientalism (1978) Said had constructed a binary-opposite representation, a fictional European stereotype that would counter-weigh the Oriental stereotype. Being European is the only common trait among such a temporally and stylistically disparate group of literary Orientalists.[58]

Philosophy

In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past (1988), O. P. Kejariwal says that with the creation of a monolithic Occidentalism to oppose the Orientalism of Western discourse with the Eastern world, Said had failed to distinguish between the paradigms of Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and ignored the differences among Orientalists; and that he failed to acknowledge the positive contributions of Orientalists who sought kinship, between the worlds of the East and the West, rather than to create an artificial "difference" of cultural inferiority and superiority; such a man was William Jones (1746–1794), the British philologist–lexicographer who proposed that Indo–European languages are interrelated.[59]

In the essay "The Debate About 'Orientalism'", Harry Oldmeadow says that "Said’s treatment of Orientalism, particularly the assertion of the necessary nexus with imperialism, is over-stated and unbalanced." He objected to Said's view that Western Orientalists were projecting upon the "artificial screen" called 'the East' or 'the Orient', but that such projection was only a small part of the relationship. That Said failed to adequately distinguish between the genuine experiences of the Orient and the cultural projections of Westerners. He further criticized Said for using reductionist models of religion and spirituality, that are based on "Marxist/Foucauldian/psychoanalytic thought."[60]

George Landlow argued that Said assumed that such projection and its harmful consequences are a purely Western phenomenon, when in reality all societies do this to each other. This was a particular issue given Said treated Western colonialism as unique, which Landlow regarded as unsatisfactory for a work of serious scholarship.[61]

Cultural turn

Several scholars have critiqued Orientalism and Said's embrace of the cultural turn as a means of explaining colonialism. Vivek Chibber has highlighted how Orientalism argues that orientalist discourse was both a cause and an effect of colonialism - that on the one hand, orientalist scholarship (described by Said as "manifest orientalism") developed from the eighteenth century as a means of justifying the process of imperialist expansion, whilst on the other, a deeply ingrained tradition of broader orientalist depictions of the East stretching back to the classical era (which Said labelled "latent orientalism") played a role in creating the conditions for the launching of colonial projects. Whilst the first claim had previously been made by anti-colonial thinkers, the latter was novel.[62]

In the years after Orientalism was published, Said's arguments were critiqued by Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Aijaz Ahmad. In 1981 Al-Azm suggested that conceiving of orientalism as "the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent the realities of other cultures, peoples, and their languages, in favour of Occidental self-affirmation" served to reinforce the essentialism that was at the heart of orientalism, rather than challenging it, i.e. that the West is inherently incapable of understanding the East. Just over ten years later Ahmad raised two criticisms of Said's assertions: firstly, that according to Said orientalist views were so pervasive that he did not differentiate critics of colonialism such as Karl Marx from supporters of imperialism, despite the role of Marxists in anti-colonial struggles across the world, and secondly that Said's suggestion of cultural causes for imperialism displaced older Marxist, nationalist and liberal analyses based on the interests of economic classes, nations and individuals in favour of a "Clash of Civilizations" thesis.[62]

More recently, Chibber has pointed out that essentialist and ethnocentric portrayals of foreign cultures can be found in pre-colonial Eastern civilisations as well: whilst Said acknowledged that "all cultures impose corrections upon raw reality", Chibber has argued that this fact weakens the contention that such essentialism was itself a cause of colonialism, since the latter was practiced by a relatively small number of mostly Western European countries. Regarding a weaker interpretation of Said's thesis - that latent orientalism was a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for colonialism - Chibber contends that economic and political factors are universally accepted as contributory causes of colonialism, that these in themselves would generate pressure for arguments to legitimise imperial projects, and therefore a case cannot be made that pre-existing latent orientalism was indispensable for the rise of colonialism.[62]

Personality

In the sociological article, "Review: Who is Afraid of Edward Said?" (1999) Biswamoy Pati said that in making ethnicity and cultural background the tests of moral authority and intellectual objectivity in studying the Oriental world, Said drew attention to his personal identity as a Palestinian and as a subaltern of the British Empire, in the Near East.[63] Therefore, from the perspective of the Orientalist academic, Said's personal background might, arguably, exclude him from writing about the Oriental world, hindered by an upper-class birth, an Anglophone upbringing, a British-school education in Cairo, residency in the U.S., a university-professor job; and categorical statements, such as: "any and all representations...are embedded, first, in the language, and then, in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer...[the cultural representations are] interwoven with a great many other things, besides 'the Truth', which is, itself, a representation."[6]: 272 

Hence, in the article "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", D.A. Washbrook said that Said and his academic cohort indulge in excessive cultural relativism, which intellectual excess traps them in a "web of solipsism," which limits conversation exclusively to "cultural representations" and to denying the existence of any objective truth.[64] That Said and his followers fail to distinguish between the types and degrees of Orientalism represented by the news media and popular culture (e.g., the Orientalism of the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, 1984), and heavy academic Orientalism about the language and literature, history and culture of the peoples of the Eastern world.[6]: 347 [65]

In the article "Orientalism Now" (1995), historian Gyan Prakash says that Edward Said had explored fields of Orientalism already surveyed by his predecessors and contemporaries, such as V. G. Kiernan, Bernard S. Cohn, and Anwar Abdel Malek, who also had studied, reported, and interpreted the social relationship that makes the practice of imperialism intellectually, psychologically, and ethically feasible; that is, the relationship between European imperial rule and European representations of the non-European Other self, the colonised people.[66] That, as an academic investigator, Said already had been preceded in the critical analysis of the production of Orientalist knowledge and about Western methods of Orientalist scholarship, because, in the 18th century, "Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti [1753–1825], the Egyptian chronicler, and a witness to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, for example, had no doubt that the expedition was as much an epistemological as military conquest". Nonetheless, George Landow, of Brown University, who criticized Said's scholarship and contested his conclusions, acknowledged that Orientalism is a major work of cultural criticism.[67]

Posthumous

In October 2003, one month after the death of Edward Said, the Lebanese newspaper Daily Star disparaged the intellectual import of the book, saying "Everyone agrees that Said's work was a work of fiction designed to derail Western civilisation" and that "U.S. Middle Eastern Studies were taken over, by Edward Said's postcolonial studies paradigm."[68]