No More Learning

The nexus of knowledge and power creating “the Oriental” and in a sense obliterating him as
a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter. Yet it is an intellectual
matter of some very obvious importance. I have been able to put to use my humanistic and
political concerns for the analysis and description of a very worldly matter, the rise, development,
and consolidation of Orientalism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically,
even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of
Orientalism has convinced me (and I hope will convince my literary colleagues) that society and
literary culture can only be understood and studied together. In addition, and by an almost
inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western
anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed
36
it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and
political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly
understood. But what I should like also to have contributed here is a better understanding of the
way cultural domination has operated. If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient,
indeed if it eliminates the “Orient” and “Occident” altogether, then we shall have advanced a little
in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative
mode. ”16
37
1
The Scope of
Orientalism
… le génie inquiet et ambitieux de Europeens … impatient d’employer les nouveaux instruments
de leur puissance…
- Jean -Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, Preface historique (1809),
Description de l’Égypte
38
39
I
Knowing the Oriental
On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on “the problems with
which we have to deal in Egypt. ” These, he said, “belong to a wholly different category” than
those “affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire. ” He spoke with the authority
of a long-time member of Parliament, former private secretary to Lord Salisbury, former chief
secretary for Ireland, former secretary for Scotland, former prime minister, veteran of numerous
overseas crises, achievements, and changes. During his involvement in imperial affairs Balfour
served a monarch who in 1876 had been declared Empress of India; he had been especially well
placed in positions of uncommon influence to follow the Afghan and Zulu wars, the British
occupation of Egypt in 1882, the death of General Gordon in the Sudan, the Fashoda Incident, the
battle of Omdurman, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War. In addition his remarkable social
eminence, the breadth of his learning and wit-he could write on such varied subjects as Bergson,
Handel, theism, and golf-his education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and his apparent
command over imperial affairs all gave considerable authority to what he told the Commons in
June 1910. But there was still more to Balfour’s tech, or at least to his need for giving it so
didactically and moralistically. Some members were questioning the necessity for “England in
Egypt,” the subject of Alfred Milner’s enthusiastic book of 1892, but here designating a
once-profitable occupation that had become a source of trouble now that Egyptian nationalism
was on the rise and the continuing British presence in Egypt no longer so easy to defend. Balfour,
then, to inform and explain.
Recalling the challenge of J. M. Robertson, the member of Tyneside, Balfour himself put
Robertson’s question again: “What tight have you to take up these airs of superiority with regard
to people whom you choose to call Oriental? ” The choice of “Oriental” was canonical; it had
been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It
designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally. One could speak in Europe of an
Oriental personality, an Oriental
atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be
understood. Marx had used the word, and now Balfour was using it; his choice was
understandable and called for no comment whatever.
I take up no attitude of superiority. But I ask [Robertson and anyone else] . . . who has
even the most superficial knowledge of history, if they will look in the face the facts with
40
which a British statesman has to deal when he is put in a position of supremacy over great
races like the inhabitants of Egypt and countries in the East. We know the civilization of
Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back; we
know it more intimately; we know more about it. It goes far beyond the petty span of the
history of our race, which is lost in the prehistoric period at a time when the Egyptian
civilisation had already passed its prime. Look at all the Oriental countries. Do not talk about
superiority or inferiority.
Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: knowledge and power, the
Baconian themes. As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in
his mind is associated with “our” knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or
economic power. Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its
prime to its decline-and of course, it means being able to do that. Knowledge means rising above
immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently
vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a “fact” which, if it develops, changes; or otherwise
transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even
ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority
over it. And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it”-the Oriental country-since we
know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know 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.
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 selfgovernment having merits of their
own. . . . You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly
speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-
41
government. All their great centuries-and they have been very great-have been passed under
despotisms, under absolute government. All their great contributions to civilisation-and they
have been great-have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded
conqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and
fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a
Western point of view, call self-government. That is the fact. It is not a question of
superiority and inferiority. I suppose a true Eastern sage would say that the working
government which we have taken upon ourselves in Egypt and elsewhere is not a work
worthy of a philosopher-that it is the dirty work, the inferior work, of carrying on the
necessary labour.
Since these facts are facts, Balfour must then go on to the next part of his argument.
Is it a good thing for these great nations- I admit their greatness --that this absolute
government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing. I think that experience
shows that they have got under it far better government than in the whole history of the world
they ever had before, and which not only is a benefit to them, but is undoubtedly a benefit to
the whole of the civilised West. . . . We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians,
though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.
Balfour produces no evidence that Egyptians and “the races with whom we deal” appreciate
or even understand the good that is being done them by colonial occupation. It does not occur to
Balfour, however, to let the Egyptian speak for himself, since presumably any Egyptian who
would speak out is more likely to be “the agitator [who] wishes to raise difficulties” than the good
native who overlooks the “difficulties” of foreign domination. And so, having settled the ethical
problems, Balfour turns at last to the practical ones. “If it is our business to govern, with or
without gratitude, with or without the real and genuine memory of all the loss of which we have
relieved the population [Balfour by no means implies, as part of that loss, the loss or at least the
indefinite postponement of Egyptian independence] and no vivid imagination of All the benefits
which we have given to them; if that is our duty, bow is it to be performed? ” England exports
“our very best to these dies. ” These selfless administrators do their work “amidst tens of
thousands of persons belonging to a different creed, a different
42
race, a different discipline, different conditions of life. ” What makes their work of governing
possible is their sense of being supported at home by a government that endorses what they do.
Yet
directly the native populations have that instinctive feeling that those with whom they have
got to deal have not behind them the might, the authority, the sympathy, the full and
ungrudging support of the country which sent them there, those populations lose all that sense
of order which is the very basis of their civilisation, just as our officers lose all that sense of
power and authority, which is the very basis of everything they can do for the benefit of those
among whom they have been sent.
Balfour’s logic here is interesting, not least for being completely consistent with the premises
of his entire speech. 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. But if the special intimacy between governor and governed in Egypt is
disturbed by Parliament’s doubts at home, then “the authority of what . . . is the dominant race
and as I think ought to remain the dominant race-has been undermined. ” Not only does English
prestige suffer; “it is vain for a handful of British officials-endow them how you like, give them
all the qualities of character and genius you can imagine--it is impossible for them to carry out the
great task which in Egypt, not we only, but the civilised world have imposed upon them. ”1
As a rhetorical performance Balfour’s speech is significant for the way in which he plays the
part of and represents a variety of characters. There are of course “the English,” for whom the
pronoun “we” is used with the full weight of a distinguished, powerful man who feels himself to
be representative of all that is best in his nation’s history. Balfour can also speak for the civilized
world, the West, and the relatively small corps of colonial officials in Egypt. If he does not speak
directly for the Orientals, it is because they after all speak another language; yet he knows how
they feel since he knows their history, their reliance upon such as he, and their expectations. Still,
he does speak for them in the sense that what they might have to say, were they to be asked and
might they be able to answer, would somewhat uselessly confirm what is already
evident: that they are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for
them better than they could possibly know themselves. Their great moments were in the past;
they are useful in the modern world only because the powerful and up-to-date empires have
effectively brought them out of the wretchedness of their decline and turned them into
rehabilitated residents of productive colonies.
43
Egypt in particular was an excellent case in point, and Balfour was perfectly aware of how
much right he had to speak as a member of his country’s parliament on behalf of England, the
West, Western civilization, about modern Egypt. For Egypt was not just another colony: it was
the vindication of Western imperialism; it was, until its annexation by England, an almost
academic example of Oriental backwardness; it was to become the triumph of English knowledge
and power. Between 1882, the year in which England occupied Egypt and put an end to the
nationalist rebellion of Colonel Arabi, and 1907, England’s representative in Egypt, Egypt’s
master, was Evelyn Baring (also known as “Over-baring”), Lord Cromer. On July 30, 1907, it
was Balfour in the Commons who had supported the project to give Cromer a retirement prize of
fifty thousand pounds as a reward for what he had done in Egypt. Cromer made Egypt, said
Balfour:
Everything he has touched he has succeeded in . . . . Lord Cromer’s services during the past
quarter of a century have raised Egypt from the lowest pitch of social and economic
degradation until it now stands among Oriental nations, I believe, absolutely alone in its
prosperity, financial and moral. 2
How Egypt’s moral prosperity was measured, Balfour did not venture to say. British exports to
Egypt equaled those to the whole of Africa; that certainly indicated a sort of financial prosperity,
for Egypt and England (somewhat unevenly) together. But what tally mattered was the unbroken,
all-embracing Western tutelage of an Oriental country, from the scholars, missionaries,
business-men, soldiers, and teachers who prepared and then implemented the occupation to the
high functionaries like Cromer and Balfour who saw themselves as providing for, directing, and
sometimes even forcing Egypt’s rise from Oriental neglect to its present lonely eminence.
If British success in Egypt was as exceptional as Balfour said, it was by no means an
inexplicable or irrational success. Egyptian
44
affairs had been controlled according to a general theory expressed both by Balfour in his notions
about Oriental civilization and by Cromer in his management of everyday business in Egypt. 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
clear, 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. That Balfour and Cromer, as we shall soon see, could strip humanity
down to such ruthless cultural and racial essences was not at all an indication of their particular
viciousness. Rather it was an indication of how streamlined a general doctrine had become by the
time they put it to use-how streamlined and effective.
Unlike Balfour, whose theses on Orientals pretended to objective universality, Cromer spoke
about Orientals specifically as what he had ruled or had to deal with, first in India, then for the
twenty-five years in Egypt during which he emerged as the paramount consulgeneral in
England’s empire. Balfour’s “Orientals” are Cromer’s “subject races,” which he made the topic
of a long essay published in the Edinburgh Review in January 1908. Once again, knowledge of
subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives
power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of
information and control. Cromer’s notion is that England’s empire will not dissolve if such things
as militarism and commercial egotism at home and “free institutions” in the colony (as opposed
to British government “according to the Code of Christian morality”) are kept in check. For if,
according to Cromer, logic is something “the existence of which the Oriental is disposed
altogether to ignore,” the proper method of ruling is not to impose ultrascientific measures upon
him or to force him bodily to accept logic. It is rather to understand his limitations and “endeavor
to find, in the contentment of the subject race, a more worthy and, it may be hoped, a stronger
bond of union between the rulers and the ruled. ” Lurking everywhere behind the pacification of
the subject race is imperial might, more effective for its refined understanding and infrequent use
than for its soldiers, brutal tax gatherers, and incontinent force. In a word,
45
the Empire must be wise; it must temper its cupidity with selflessness, and its impatience with
flexible discipline.
To be more explicit, what is meant when it is said that the commercial spirit should be
under some control is this-that in dealing with Indians or Egyptians, or Shilluks, or Zulus, the
first question is to consider what these people, who are all, nationally speaking, more or less
in statu pupillari, themselves think is best in their own interests, although this is a point which
deserves serious consideration. But it is essential that each special issue should be decided
mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience tempered
by local considerations, we conscientiously think is best for the subject race, without
reference to any real or supposed advantage which may accrue to England as a nation, or-as
is more frequently the case-to the special interests represented by some one or more
influential classes of Englishmen. If the British nation as a whole persistently bears this
principle in mind, and insists sternly on its application, though we can never create a
patriotism akin to that based on affinity of race or community of language, we may perhaps
foster some sort of cosmopolitan allegiance grounded on the respect always accorded to
superior talents and unselfish conduct, and on the gratitude derived both from favours
conferred and from those to come. There may then at all events be some hope that the
Egyptian will hesitate before he throws in his lot with any future Arabi . . . . Even the Central
African savage may eventually learn to chant a hymn in honour of Astraea Redux, as
represented by the British official who denies him gin but gives him justice. More than this,
commerce will gain. 3
How much “serious consideration” the ruler ought to give proposals from the subject race
was illustrated in Cromer’s total opposition to Egyptian nationalism. Free native institutions, the
absence of foreign occupation, a selfsustaining national sovereignty: these unsurprising demands
were consistently rejected by Cromer, who asserted unambiguously that “the real future of Egypt
. . . lies not in the direction of a narrow nationalism, which will only embrace native Egyptians . .
. but rather in that of an enlarged cosmopolitanism. ”4
Subject races did not have it in them to
know what was good for them. Most of them were Orientals, of whose characteristics Cromer
was very knowledgeable since he had had experience with them both in India and Egypt. One of
the convenient things about Orientals for Cromer was that managing
46
them, although circumstances might differ slightly here and there, was almost everywhere nearly
the same. 5
This was, of course, because Orientals were almost everywhere nearly the same.
Now at last we approach the long-developing core of essential knowledge, knowledge both
academic and practical, which Cromer and Balfour inherited from a century of modern Western
Orientalism: knowledge about and knowledge of Orientals, their race, character, culture, history,
traditions, society, and possibilities. This knowledge was effective: Cromer believed he had put it
to use in governing Egypt. Moreover, it was tested and unchanging knowledge, since “Orientals”
for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence, which any Orientalist (or ruler of Orientals)
might examine, understand, and expose. Thus in the thirty-fourth chapter of his two-volume work
Modern Egypt, the magisterial record of his experience and achievement, Cromer puts down a
sort of personal canon of Orientalist wisdom:
Sir Alfred Lyall once said to me: “Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind. Every
Anglo-Indian should always remember that maxim. ” Want of accuracy, which easily
degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind.
The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he
is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and
requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works
like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque
streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.
Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics,
their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of
drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit
the truth. Endeavor to elicit a plain statement of facts from any ordinary Egyptian. His
explanation will generally be lengthy, and wanting in lucidity. He will probably contradict
himself half-a-dozen times before he has finished his story. He will often break down under
the mildest process of crossexamination.
Orientals or Arabs are thereafter shown to be gullible, “devoid of energy and initiative,” much
given to “fulsome flattery,” intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals; Orientals cannot walk
on either a road or a pavement (their disordered minds fail to understand what the clever
European grasps immediately, that roads and pavements are made for walking); Orientals are
inveterate liars, they are “lethargic and suspicious,” and in everything oppose the clarity,
directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race. 6
Cromer makes no effort to conceal that Orientals for him were always and only the human
material he governed in British colonies. “As I am only a diplomatist and an administrator, whose
proper study is also man, but from the point of view of governing him,” Cromer says, “. . . I
content myself with noting the fact that somehow or other the Oriental generally acts, speaks, and
47
thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European. ”7 Cromer’s descriptions are of course based
partly on direct observation, yet here and there he refers to orthodox Orientalist authorities (in
particular Ernest Renan and Constantin de Volney) to support his views. To these authorities he
also defers when it comes to explaining why Orientals are the way they are. He has no doubt that
any knowledge of the Oriental will confirm his views, which, to judge from his description of the
Egyptian breaking under crossexamination, find the Oriental to be guilty. The crime was that the
Oriental was an Oriental, and it is an accurate sign of how commonly acceptable such a tautology
was that it could be written without even an appeal to European logic or symmetry of mind. Thus
any deviation from what were considered the norms of Oriental behavior was believed to be
unnatural; Cromer’s last annual report from Egypt consequently proclaimed Egyptian nationalism
to be an “entirely novel idea” and “a plant of exotic rather than of indigenous growth. ”8
We would be wrong, I think, to underestimate the reservoir of accredited knowledge, the
codes of Orientalist orthodoxy, to which Cromer and Balfour refer everywhere in their writing
and in their public policy. To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is
to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than
after the fact. Men have always divided the world up into regions having either real or imagined
distinction from each other. The absolute demarcation between East and West, which Balfour and
Cromer accept with such complacency, had been years, even centuries, in the making. There were
of course innumerable voyages of discovery; there were contacts through trade and war. But more
than this, since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been two principal elements in the
relation between East and West. One was a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the
Orient, knowledge reinforced by the colonial encounter as well as by the widespread interest
48
in the alien and unusual, exploited by the developing sciences of ethnology, comparative
anatomy, philology, and history; furthermore, to this systematic knowledge was added a sizable
body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers. The other feature
of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say
domination. There is no way of putting this euphemistically. True, the relationship of strong to
weak could be disguised or mitigated, as when Balfour acknowledged the “greatness” of Oriental
civilizations. But the essential relationship, on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was
seen-in the West, which is what concerns us hereto be one between a strong and a weak partner.
Many terms were used to express the relation: Balfour and Cromer, typically, used several.
The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”; thus the European is rational,
virtuous, mature, “normal. ” But the way of enlivening the relationship was everywhere to stress
the fact that the Oriental lived in a different but thoroughly organized world of his own, a world
with its own national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries and principles of internal
coherence. Yet what gave the Oriental’s world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of
his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the
Orient was identified by the West. Thus the two features of cultural relationship I have been
discussing come together. Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense
creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. In Cromer’s and Balfour’s language the Oriental is
depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in
a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as
in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and
represented by dominating frameworks. Where do these come from?
Cultural strength is not something we can discuss very easilyand one of the purposes of the
present work is to illustrate, analyze, and reflect upon Orientalism as an exercise of cultural
strength. In other words, it is better not to risk generalizations about so vague and yet so
important a notion as cultural strength until a good deal of material has been analyzed first. But at
the outset one can say that so far as the West was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, an assumption had been made that the
49
Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by
the West. The Orient was viewed as if framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the
illustrated manual. Orientalism, then, is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in
class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing.
During the early years of the twentieth century, men like Balfour and Cromer could say what
they said, in the way they did, because a still earlier tradition of Orientalism than the
nineteenth-century one provided them with a vocabulary, imagery, rhetoric, and figures with
which to say it. Yet Orientalism reinforced, and was reinforced by, the certain knowledge that
Europe or the West literally commanded the vastly greater part of the earth’s surface. The period
of immense advance in the institutions and content of Orientalism coincides exactly with the
period of unparalleled European expansion; from 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial
dominion expanded from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent of it. 9 Every
continent was affected, none more so than Africa and Asia. The two greatest empires were the
British and the French; allies and partners in some things, in others they were hostile rivals. In the
Orient, from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to Indochina and Malaya, their colonial
possessions and imperial spheres of influence were adjacent, frequently overlapped, often were
fought over. But it was in the Near Orient, the lands of the Arab Near East, where Islam was
supposed to define teal and racial characteristics, that the British and the French countered each
other and “the Orient” with the greatest intensity, familiarity, and complexity. For much of the
nineteenth century, as Lord Salisbury put it in 1881, their common view of the Orient was
intricately problematic: “When you have got a . . . faithful ally who id’ bent on meddling in a
country in which you are deeply interested ---you have three courses open to you. You may
renounce--or monopolize-or share. Renouncing would have been to place the French across our
road to India. Monopolizing would have been very near the risk of war. So we resolved to
share. ”10
And share they did, in ways that we shall investigate presently. What they shared, however,
was not only land or profit or rule; it the kind of intellectual power I have been calling
Orientalism.
Is a sense Orientalism was a library or archive of information commonly and, in
some of its aspects, unanimously held. What bound the archive together was a family of ideas11
and a unifying
50
set of values proven in various ways to be effective. These ideas explained the behavior of
Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important,
they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing
regular characteristics. But like any set of durable ideas, Orientalist notions influenced the people
who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidental, European, or Western; in short,
Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is
simply as a positive doctrine. If the essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between
Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, then we must be prepared to note how in its
development and subsequent history Orientalism deepened and even hardened the distinction.
When it became common practice during the nineteenth century for Britain to retire its
administrators from India and elsewhere once they had reached the age of fifty-five, then a further
refinement in Orientalism had been achieved; no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as
he aged’ and degenerated, just as no Westerner needed ever to see himself, mirrored in the eyes
of the subject race, as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj. 12
Orientalist ideas took a number of different forms during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. First of all, in Europe there was a vast literature about the Orient inherited from the
European past. What is distinctive about the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which
is where this study’ assumes modern Orientalism to have begun, is that an Oriental renaissance
took place, as Edgar Ouinet phrased it. 13 Suddenly it seemed to a wide variety of thinkers,
politicians, and artists that a new awareness of the Orient, which extended from China to the
Mediterranean, had arisen. This awareness was partly the result of newly discovered and
translated Oriental texts in languages like Sanskrit, Zend, and Arabic; it was also the result of a
newly perceived relationship between the Orient and the West. For my purposes here, the keynote
of the relationship was set for the Near East and Europe by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in
1798; an invasion which was in many ways the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of
one culture by another, apparently stronger one. For with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt
processes were set in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural
and political perspectives. And the Napoleonic expedition, with its great collective monument of
erudition, the Description de l’Egypte, provided a scene or setting
51
for Orientalism, since Egypt and subsequently the other Islamic lands were viewed as the live
province, the laboratory, the theater of effective Western knowledge about the Orient. I shall
return to the Napoleonic adventure a little later.
With such experiences as Napoleon’s the Orient as a body of knowledge in the West was
modernized, and this is a second form in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism
existed. From the outset of the period I shall be examining there was everywhere amongst
Orientalists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights suitably in
modern terms, to put ideas about the Orient in very close touch with modern realities. Renan’s
linguistic investigations of Semitic in 1848, for example, were couched in a style that drew
heavily for its authority upon contemporary comparative grammar, comparative anatomy, and
racial theory; these lent his Orientalism prestige and-the other side of the coinmade Orientalism
vulnerable, as it has been ever since, to modish as well as seriously influential currents of thought
in the West. Orientalism has been subjected to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism,
Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism, Spenglerism. But Orientalism, like many of the
natural and social sciences, has had “paradigms” of research, its own learned societies, its own
Establishment. During the nineteenth century the field increased enormously in prestige, as did
also the reputation and influence of such institutions as the Société asiatique, the Royal Asiatic
Society, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, and the American Oriental Society. With
the growth of these societies went also an increase, all across Europe, in the number of
professorships in Oriental studies; consequently there was an expansion in the available means
for disseminating Orientalism. Orientalist periodicals, beginning with the Fundgraben des
Orients (1809), multiplied the quantity of knowledge as well as the number of specialties.
Yet little of this activity and very few of these institutions existed and flourished freely, for in
a third form in which it existed, Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient. Even
the most imaginative writers of an age, men like Flaubert, Nerval, or Scott, were constrained in
what they could either experience of or say about the Orient. For Orientalism was ultimately a
political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe,
the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”). This vision in a sense created and
then served
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the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world,“we” lived in ours. The vision and
material reality propped each other up, kept each other going. A certain freedom of intercourse
was always the Westerner’s privilege; because his was the stronger culture, he could penetrate, he
could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery, as Disraeli
once called it. Yet what has, I think, been previously overlooked is the constricted vocabulary of
such a privilege, and the comparative limitations of such a vision. My argument takes it that the
Orientalist reality is both antihuman and persistent. Its scope, as much as its institutions and
all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present.
But how did and does Orientalism work? How can one describe it all together as a historical
phenomenon, a way of thought, a contemporary problem, and a material reality? Consider
Cromer again, an accomplished technician of empire but also a beneficiary of Orientalism. He
can furnish us with a rudimentary answer. In “The Government of Subject Races” he wrestles
with the problem of how Britain, a nation of individuals, is to administer a wide-flung empire
according to a number of central principles. He contrasts the “local agent,” who has both a
specialist’s knowledge of the native and an Anglo-Saxon individuality, with the central authority
at home in London. The former may “treat subjects of local interest in a manner calculated to
damage, or even to jeopardize, Imperial interests. The central authority is in a position to obviate
any danger arising from this cause. ” Why? Because this authority can “ensure the harmonious
working of the different parts of the machine” and “should endeavour, so far as is possible, to
realise the circumstances attendant on the government of the dependency. ”14 The language is
vague and unattractive, but the point is not hard to grasp. Cromer envisions a seat of power in the
West, and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central
authority yet commanded by it. What the machine’s branches feed into it in the East-human
material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you-is processed by the machine, then converted
into more power. The specialist does the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter into
useful substance: the Oriental becomes, for example, a subject race, an example of an “Oriental”
mentality, all for the enhancement of the “authority” at home. “Local interests” are Orientalist
special interests, the “central authority” is the general interest of the imperial society as a whole.
What Cromer quite accurately sees is the management
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of knowledge by society, the fact that knowledge-no matter how special-is regulated first by the
local concerns of a specialist, later by the general concerns of a social system of authority. The
interplay between local and central interests is intricate, but by no means indiscriminate.
In Cromer’s own case as an imperial administrator the “proper study is also man,” he says.
When Pope proclaimed the proper study of mankind to be man, he meant all men, including “the
poor Indian”; whereas Cromer’s “also” reminds us that certain men, such as Orientals, can be
singled out as the subject for proper study. The proper study-in this sense-of Orientals is
Orientalism, properly separate from other forms of knowledge, but finally useful (because finite)
for the material and social reality enclosing all knowledge at any time, supporting knowledge,
providing it with uses. An order of sovereignty is set up from East to West, a mock chain of being
whose clearest form was given once by Kipling:
Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the
sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the
major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the
brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. 15
As deeply forged as is this monstrous chain of command, as strongly managed as is Cromer’s
“harmonious working,” Orientalism can also express the strength of the West and the Orient’s
weakness-as seen by the West. Such strength and such weakness are as intrinsic to Orientalism as
they are to any view that divides the world into large general divisions, entities that coexist in a
state of tension produced by what is believed to be radical difference.
For that is the main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism. 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? By surviving the
consequences humanly, I mean to ask whether Oere is any way of avoiding the hostility
expressed by the division, say, of men into “us” (Westerners) and “they” (Orientals). For such
divisions are generalities whose use historically and actually has been to press the importance of
the distinction between some men and some other men, usually towards not especially admirable
ands. When one uses categories like Oriental and Western as both the starting and the and points
of analysis, research, public policy
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(as the categories were used by Balfour and Cromer), the result is usually to polarize the
distinction-the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western-and limit the human
encounter between different cultures, traditions, and societies. In short, from its earliest modern
history to the present, Orientalism as a form of thought for dealing with the foreign has typically
shown the altogether regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on such hard-and-fast
distinctions as “East” and “West”: to channel thought into a West or an East compartment.
Because this tendency is right at the center of Orientalist theory, practice, and values found in the
West, the sense of Western power over the Orient is taken for granted as having the status of
scientific truth.
A contemporary illustration or two should clarify this observation perfectly. It is natural for
men in power to survey from time to time the world with which they must deal. Balfour did it
frequently. Our contemporary Henry Kissinger does it also, rarely with more express frankness
than in his essay “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy. ” The drama he depicts is a real one, in
which the United States must manage its behavior in the world under the pressures of domestic
forces on the one hand and of foreign realities on the other. Kissinger’s discourse must for that
reason alone establish a polarity between the United States and the world; in addition, of course,
he speaks consciously as an authoritative . voice for the major Western power, whose recent
history and present reality have placed it before a world that does not easily accept its power and
dominance. Kissinger feels that the United States can deal less problematically with the
industrial, developed West than it can with the developing world. Again, the contemporary
actuality of relations between the United States and the so-called Third World (which includes
China, Indochina, the Near East, Africa, and Latin America) is manifestly a thorny set of
problems, which even Kissinger cannot hide.
Kissinger’s method in the essay proceeds according to what linguists call binary opposition:
that is, he shows that there are two styles in foreign policy (the prophetic and the political), two
types of technique, two periods, and so forth. When at the end of the historical part of his
argument he is brought face to face with the contemporary world, he divides it accordingly into
two halves, the developed and the developing countries. The first half, which is the West, “is
deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge
consists of recording and
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classifying data-the more accurately the better. ” Kissinger’s proof for this is the Newtonian
revolution, which has not taken place in the developing world: “Cultures which escaped the early
impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real
world is almost completely internal to the observer. ” Consequently, he adds, “empirical reality
has a much different significance for many of the new countries than for the West because in a
certain sense they never went through the process of discovering it. ”16
Unlike Cromer, Kissinger does not need to quote Sir Alfred Lyall on the Oriental’s inability
to be accurate; the point he makes is sufficiently unarguable to require no special validation. We
had our Newtonian revolution; they didn’t. As thinkers we are better off than they are. Good: the
lines are drawn in much the same way, finally, as Balfour and Cromer drew them. Yet sixty or
more years have intervened between Kissinger and the British imperialists. Numerous wars and
revolutions have proved conclusively that the pre-Newtonian prophetic style, which Kissinger
associates both with “inaccurate” developing countries and with Europe before the Congress of
Vienna, is not entirely without its successes. Again unlike Balfour and Cromer, Kissinger
therefore feels obliged to aspect this pre-Newtonian perspective, since “it offers great flexibility
with respect to the contemporary revolutionary turmoil. ” Thus the duty of men in the
post-Newtonian (real) world is to “construct an international order before a crisis imposes it as a
necessity”: in other words, we must still find a way by which the developing world can be
contained. Is this not similar to Cromer’s vision of a harmoniously working machine designed
ultimately to benefit some central authority, which opposes the developing world?
Kissinger may not have known on what fund of pedigreed knowledge he was drawing when
he cut the world up into pre-Newtonian and post-Newtonian conceptions of reality. But his
distinction is identical with the orthodox one made by Orientalists, who separate Orientals from
Westerners. And like Orientalism’s distinction Xissinger’s is not value-free, despite the apparent
neutrality of his tone. Thus such words as “prophetic,” “accuracy,” “internal,” “empirical reality,”
and “order” are scattered throughout his description, and they characterize either attractive,
familiar, desirable virtues or menacing, peculiar, disorderly defects. Both the traditional
Orientalist, as we shall see, and Kissinger conceive of the difference between cultures, first, as
creating a battlefront that
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separates them, and second, as inviting the West to control, contain, and otherwise govern
(through superior knowledge and accommodating power) the Other. With what effect and at what
considerable expense such militant divisions have been maintained, no one at present needs to be
reminded.
Another illustration dovetails neatly-perhaps too neatly-with Kissinger’s analysis. In its
February 1972 issue, the American Journal of Psychiatry printed an essay by Harold W. Glidden,
who is identified as a retired member of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, United States
Department of State; the essay’s title (“The Arab World”), its tone, and its content argue a highly
characteristic Orientalist bent of mind. Thus for his four-page, double-columned psychological
portrait of over 100 million people, considered for a period of 1,300 years, Glidden cites exactly
four sources for his views: a recent book on Tripoli, one issue of the Egyptian newspaper
A1-Ahram, the periodical Oriente Moderno, and a book by Majid Khadduri, a well-known
Orientalist. The article itself purports to uncover “the inner workings of Arab behavior,” which
from our point of view is “aberrant” but for Arabs is “normal. ” After this auspicious start, we are
told that Arabs stress conformity; that Arabs inhabit a shame culture whose “prestige system’. ”
involves the ability to attract followers and clients (as an aside we are told that “Arab society is
and always has been based on a system of client-patron relationships”); that Arabs can function
only in conflict situations; that prestige is based solely on the ability to dominate others; that a
shame culture-and therefore Islam itself -makes a virtue of revenge (here Glidden triumphantly
cites the June 29, 1970 Ahram to show that “in 1969 [in Egypt] in 1070 cases of murder where
the perpetrators were apprehended, it was found that 20 percent of the murders were based on a
desire to wipe out shame, 30 percent on a desire to satisfy real or imaginary wrongs, and 31
percent on a desire for blood revenge”); that if from a Western point of view “the only rational
thing for the Arabs to do is to make peace . . . for the Arabs the situation is not governed by this
kind of logic, for objectivity is not a value in the Arab system. ”
Glidden continues, now more enthusiastically: “it is a notable fact that while the Arab value
system demands absolute solidarity within the group, it at the same time encourages among its
members a kind of rivalry that is destructive of that very solidarity”; in Arab society only
“success counts” and “the end justifies the means”;
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Arabs live “naturally” in a world “characterized by anxiety expressed in generalized suspicion
and distrust, which has been labelled free-floating hostility”; “the art of subterfuge is highly
developed in Arab life, as well as in Islam itself”; the Arab need for vengeance overrides
everything, otherwise the Arab would feel “ego-destroying” shame. Therefore, if “Westerners
consider peace to be high on the scale of values” and if “we have a highly developed
consciousness of the value of time,” this is not true of Arabs. “In fact,” we are told, “in Arab
tribal society (where Arab values originated), strife, not peace, was the normal state of affairs
because raiding was one of the two main supports of the economy. ” The purpose of this learned
disquisition is merely to show how on the Western and Oriental scale of values”“the relative
position of the elements is quite different. ” QED. 17
This is the apogee of Orientalist confidence. No merely asserted generality is denied the
dignity of truth; no theoretical list of Oriental attributes is without application to the behavior of
Orientals in the real world. On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are
Arab-Orientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable
of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things. Out of what
collective and yet particularized view of the Orient do these statements emerge? What specialized
skills, what imaginative pressures, whht institutions and traditions, what cultural forces produce
such similarity in the descriptions of the Orient to be found in Cromer, Balfour, and our
,contemporary statesmen?