Orientalism

Part of why the book provoked such confusion is that Said used "Orientalism" to mean three things at once, and readers often seized on one while ignoring the others. Untangling them is the key to the whole argument. First, and most narrowly, Orientalism is an academic discipline — the actual departments, chairs, journals, and learned societies devoted to studying the East. This is the sense the professors themselves would have recognized.

Second, and more broadly, Orientalism is a style of thinking founded on the basic distinction between East and West. In this sense it runs far beyond the universities. It shows up in Dante and in Marx, in Verdi's operas and in Delacroix's paintings, in the offhand assumptions of politicians who never read a word of Arabic. It is a habit of imagination, a way the Western mind organizes the world that persists whether or not anyone is doing formal scholarship.

The heart of the book is the claim that this knowledge was never innocent, because it never operated in a vacuum. When a European scholar sat down to describe Egyptian society, he did so from a position of overwhelming power — his country's gunboats were in the harbor, its administrators in the ministries, its language in the schools. The East he described was an East already conquered, or about to be. Description and domination arrived together.

Said's sharpest example is a speech Arthur Balfour gave to the British Parliament in 1910, defending Britain's rule in Egypt. Balfour did not argue that occupation was good for the Egyptians in the ordinary way of politics. He argued that England knew Egypt better than the Egyptians knew themselves — that Western knowledge conferred a natural right to govern. The logic is perfectly circular and perfectly Orientalist: we understand you, you cannot understand yourselves, therefore we must rule you. The scholarship licensed the empire, and the empire funded the scholarship.

What Orientalism did, beyond its specific case, was open a question that has refused to go away: who has the right to describe whom, and what happens when the describer holds the power? The book effectively founded a field — postcolonial studies — and its influence spread far past its original subject, into anthropology, history, art criticism, and the study of how any dominant group represents any subordinate one. The template proved almost endlessly portable, which is both its strength and, its critics say, its weakness.

Because the objections came fast and they were serious. The historian Bernard Lewis, one of the scholars Said had targeted, accused him of caricaturing the entire Western tradition, ignoring the many Orientalists who admired the cultures they studied, and getting basic facts wrong. Others pointed out that Said drew almost entirely on British and French sources while barely mentioning German scholarship, which had been enormous and had no colonies attached to it — an awkward gap for a theory about knowledge and empire. Still others noted a strange silence: Said criticized the West for essentializing the East, yet the East itself, and its own thinkers and resistances, remained oddly absent from his pages.

Edward Said died in 2003, and the old, innocent sense of Orientalism died with him. The word can no longer be used the way the nineteenth-century professors used it — as a neutral badge of learning. It now names a suspicion that any confident account of a distant people, delivered from a position of strength, may be describing the observer's needs as much as the observed reality. Whether one accepts his full argument or picks it apart line by line, the suspicion has proven impossible to unlearn.