No More Learning

One need only remember
that Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and
anthropological observation because of its style, its enormously intelligent and brilliant details,
not because of its simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am saying here.
The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are as follows: What other sorts of
intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist
tradition like the Orientalist one? How did philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and
economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism’s broadly
imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take
place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality, in
this context? How does Orientalism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In
fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenomenon of Orientalism as a kind of willed
human work-not of mere ,unconditioned ratiocination-in all its historical complexity, detail, and
worth without at the same time losing sight of the alliance between cultural work, political
tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination? Governed by such concerns a
humanistic study can responsibly address itself to politics and culture. But this is not to say that
such a study establishes a hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between knowledge and
politics. My argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that
connection in the specific context of the study, the subject utter, and its historical circumstances.
2. The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a deal of thought and analysis to
the methodological importance for work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first
a point of departure, a beginning principle. 11 A major lesson
24
I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a merely given,or simply available,
starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what
follows from them. Nowhere in my experience has the difficulty of this lesson been more
consciously lived (with what success-or failure -I cannot really say) than in this study of
Orientalism. The idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of
delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass,
and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning; for the student of texts one such
notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis Althusser’s idea of the problematic, a specific
determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis. 12 Yet
in the case of Orientalism (as opposed to the case of Marx’s texts, which is what Althusser
studies) there is not simply the problem of finding a point of departure, or problematic, but also
the question of designating which texts, authors, and periods are the ones best suited for study.
It has seemed to me foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative history of Orientalism, first
of all because if my guiding principle was to be “the’ European idea of the Orient” there would be
virtually no limit to the material I would have had to deal with; second, because the narrative
model itself did not suit my descriptive and political interests; third, because in such books as
Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale, Johann Fűck’s Die Arabischen Studien in Europa
bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, and more recently, Dorothee Metlitzki’s The Matter of
Araby in Medieval England13 there already exist encyclopedic works on certain aspects of the
European-Oriental encounter such as make the critic’s job, in the general political and intellectual
context . I sketched above, a different one.
There still remained the problem of cutting down a very fat archive to manageable
dimensions, and more important, outlining something in the nature of an intellectual order within
that group of texts without at the same time following a mindlessly chronological order. My
starting point therefore has been the British, French, and American experience of the Orient taken
as a unit, what made that experience possible by way of historical and intellectual background,
what the quality and character of the experience has been. For reasons I shall discuss presently I
limited that already limited (but still inordinately large) set of questions to
25
the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost a thousand
years together stood for the Orient. Immediately upon doing that, a large part of the Orient seemed
to have been eliminated-India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East-not because these
regions were not important (they obviously have been) but because one could discuss Europe’s
experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its experience of the Far Orient. Yet at
certain moments of that general European history of interest in the East, particular parts of the
Orient like Egypt, Syria, and Arabia cannot be discussed without also studying Europe’s
involvement in the more distant parts, of which Persia and India are the most important; a notable
case in point is the connection between Egypt and India so far as eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury
Britain was concerned. Similarly the French role in deciphering the Zend-Avesta, the preeminence
of Paris as a center of Sanskrit studies during the first decade of the nineteenth century,
the fact that Napoleon’s interest in the went was contingent upon his sense of the British role in
India: these Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest it the Near East, Islam, and
the Arabs.
Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from out the end of the seventeenth
century on. Yet my discussion of that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to (a)
important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal and (b) the fact that
one of the important impulses toward the study of the Orient in the eighteenth was the revolution
in Biblical studies stimulated by such variously interesting pioneers as Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn,
Herder, and Michaelis. In the first place, I had to focus rigorously upon the British-French and
later the American material because it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France
were their nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these and positions were held by
virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American
Orientaltion since World War II has fit-I think, quite self-consciously_in the places excavated by
the two earlier European powers. Alen too, I believe that the sheer quality, consistency, and mass
of British, French, and American writing on the Orient lifts it the doubtless crucial work done in
Germany, Italy, Russia, elsewhere. But I think it is also true that the major steps in Oriental
scholarship were first taken in either Britain and France,
26
then elaborated upon by Germans. Silvestre de Sacy, for example, was not only the first modern
and institutional European Orientalist, who worked on Islam, Arabic literature, the Druze
religion, and Sassanid Persia; he was also the teacher of Champollion and of Franz Bopp, the
founder of German comparative linguistics. A similar claim of priority and subsequent
preeminence can be made for William Jones and Edward William Lane.
In the second place-and here the failings of my study of Orientalism are amply made up forthere
has been some important recent work on the background in Biblical scholarship to the rise
of what I have called modern Orientalism. The best and the most illuminatingly relevant is E. S.
Shaffer’s impressive “Kubla Khan” and The Fall of Jerusalem,” an indispensable study of the
origins of Romanticism, and of the intellectual activity underpinning a great deal of what goes on
in Coleridge, Browning, and George Eliot. To some degree Shaffer’s work refines upon the
outlines provided in Schwab, by articulating the material of relevance to be found in the German
Biblical scholars and using that material to read, in an intelligent and always interesting way, the
work of three major British writers. Yet what is missing in the book is some sense of the political
as well as ideological edge given the Oriental material by the British and French writers I am
principally concerned with; in addition, unlike Shaffer I attempt to elucidate subsequent
developments in academic as well as literary Orientalism that bear on the connection between
British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the rise of an explicitly colonial-minded
imperialism on the other. Then too, I wish to show how all these earlier matters are reproduced
more or less in American Orientalism after the Second World War.
Nevertheless there is a possibly misleading aspect to my study, where, aside from an
occasional reference, I do not exhaustively discuss the German developments after the inaugural
period dominated by Sacy. Any work that seeks to provide an understanding of academic
Orientalism and pays little attention to scholars like Steinthal, Mdller, Becker, Goldziher,
Brockelmann, Noldeke-to mention only a handful-needs to be reproached, and I freely reproach
myself. I particularly regret not taking more account of the great scientific prestige that accrued to
German scholarship by the middle of the nineteenth century, whose neglect was made into a
denunciation of insular British scholars by George Eliot. I have in mind Eliot’s unforgettable
portrait of Mr. Casaubon in Middle-march.
27
One reason Casaubon cannot finish his Key to All Mythologies is, according to his young cousin
Will Ladislaw, that he is unacquainted with German scholarship. For not only has Casaubon
chosen a subject “as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of
view”: he is undertaking a job similar to a refutation of Paracelsus because “he is not an
Orientalist, you know. ”15
Eliot was not wrong in implying that by about 1830, which is when Middlemarch is set,
German scholarship had fully attained its European preeminence. Yet at no time in German
scholarship during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century could a close partnership have
developed between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient. There
was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North
Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical,
Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual, the
way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or
Nerval. There is some significance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the
Orient, Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan and Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache and Weisheit
der Indier, were based respectively on a Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. What
German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate techniques whose application was to
texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain
and France.
Yet what German Orientalism had in common with Anglo French and later American
Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. This
authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orientalism, and it is so in this
study. Even the name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when
I apply it to modern American social scientists (since they do not call themselves Orientalists, my
use of the word is anomalous), it is to draw attention to the way Middle East experts can still
draw on the vestiges of Orientalism’s intellectual position in nineteenth-century Europe.
There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated;
it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is
virtually
28
indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and
judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. All
these attributes of authority apply to Orientalism, and much of what I do in this study is to
describe both the historical authority in and the personal authorities of Orientalism.
My principal methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called
strategic location, which is a way of describing the author’s position in a text with regard to the
Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the
relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual
genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the
culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the
Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or
overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about the
Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the
kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes,
motifs that circulate in his text all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader,
containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. None of this takes
place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer)
assumes some Oriental precedent, some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and
on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliates itself with other works, with
audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of relationships between works,
audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable
formation-for example, that of philological studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental
literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies-whose presence in time, in discourse, in
institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives it strength and authority.
It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden
in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes. I
do not think that this idea can be overemphasized. Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that
is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes
29
the Orient renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He is never concerned with the Orient
except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that
it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an
existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course,
representation: as early as Aeschylus’s play The Persians the Orient is transformed from a very
far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus’s
case, grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of representation in The Persians
obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment of what a nonOriental
has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text
therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such
representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient. This evidence is
found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political
treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i. e. , openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style,
figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the
correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriorly of the
representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent
itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux,
for the poor Orient. “Sie können sich nicht vertreten,sie műssen vertre en werden,” as Marx wrote
in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about
cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not
“truth” but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a
highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate,
exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written
language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation.
The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore
relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the
written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced made
supererogatory any such real thing as “the Orient. ” Thus all
30
of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends
more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western
techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, “there” in discourse about it. And
these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of
understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient.
The difference between representations of the Orient before the last third of the eighteenth
century and those after it (that is, those belonging to what I call modern Orientalism) is that the
range of representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true that after William Jones
and Anquetil-Duperron, and after Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, Europe came to know the
Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before. But
what mattered to Europe was the expanded scope and the much greater refinement given its
techniques for receiving the Orient. When around the turn of the eighteenth century the Orient
definitively revealed the age of its languages-thus outdating Hebrew’s divine pedigree-it was a
group of Europeans who made the discovery, passed it on to other scholars, and preserved the
discovery in the new science of Indo-European philology. A new powerful science for viewing
the linguistic Orient was born, and with it, as Foucault has shown in The Order of Things, a
whole web of related scientific interests. Similarly William Beckford, Byron, Goethe, and Hugo
restructured the Orient by their art and made its colors, lights, and people visible through their
images, rhythms, and motifs. At most, the “real” Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very
rarely guided it.
Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which
was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency
and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it. My analyses
consequently try to show the field’s shape and internal organization, its pioneers, patriarchal
authorities, canonical texts, doxological ideas, exemplary figures, its followers, elaborators, and
new authorities; I try also to explain how Orientalism borrowed and was frequently informed by
“strong” ideas, doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was (and is) a linguistic Orient,
a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient-and so on. Yet never
has there
31
been such a thing as a pure, or unconditional, Orient; similarly, never has there been a
nonmaterial form of Orientalism, much less something so innocent as an “idea” of the Orient. In
this underlying conviction and in its ensuing methodological consequences do I differ from
scholars who study the history of ideas. For the emphases and the executive form, above all the
material effectiveness, of statements made by Orientalist discourse are possible in ways that any
hermetic history of ideas tends completely to scant. Without those emphases and that material
effectiveness Orientalism would be just another idea, whereas it is and was much more than that.
Therefore I set out to examine not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political
tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies. In other words, my hybrid
perspective is broadly historical and “anthropological,” given that I believe all texts to be worldly
and circumstantial in (of course) ways that vary from genre to genre, and from historical period to
historical period.
Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the
determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts
constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism. The unity of the large ensemble of texts I
analyze is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each other: Orientalism is after all a
system for citing works and authors. Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the
Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard
Burton. He was an authority whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or thinking about
the Orient, not just about Egypt: when Nerval borrows passages verbatim from Modern Egyptians
it is to use Lane’s authority to assist him in describing village scenes in Syria, not Egypt. Lane’s
authority and the opportunities provided for citing him discriminately as well as indiscriminately
were there because Orientalism could give his text the kind of distributive currency that he
acquired. There is no way, however, of understanding Lane’s currency without also
understanding the peculiar features of his text; this is equally true of Renan, Sacy, Lamartine,
Schlegel, and a group of other influential writers. Foucault believes that in general the individual
text or author counts for very little; empirically, in the case of Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere
else) I find this not to be so. Accordingly my analyses employ close textual
32
readings whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex
collective formation to which his work is a contribution.
Yet even though it includes an ample selection of writers, this book is still far from a
complete history or general account of Orientalism. Of this failing I am very conscious. The
fabric of as thick a discourse as Orientalism has survived and functioned in Western society
because of its richness: all I have done is to describe parts of that fabric at certain moments, and
merely to suggest the existence of a larger whole, detailed, interesting, dotted with fascinating
figures, texts, and events. I have consoled myself with believing that this book is one installment
of several, and hope there are scholars and critics who might want to write others. There is still a
general essay to be written on imperialism and culture; other studies would go more deeply into
the connection between Orientalism and pedagogy, or into Italian, Dutch, German, and Swiss
Orientalism, or into the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing, or into the
relationship between administrative ideas and intellectual discipline. Perhaps the most important
task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how
one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and
nonmanipulative, perspective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of
knowledge and power. These are all tasks left embarrassingly incomplete in this study.
The last, perhaps self-flattering, observation on method that I want to make here is that I have
written this study with several audiences in mind. For students of literature and criticism,
Orientalism offers a marvelous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and
textuality; moreover, the cultural role played by the Orient in the West connects Orientalism with
ideology, politics, and the logic of power, matters of relevance, I think, to the literary community.
For contemporary students of the Orient, from university scholars to policymakers, I have written
with two ends in mind: one, to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that has not
been done; two, to criticize-with the hope of stirring discussion-the often unquestioned
assumptions on which their work for the most part depends. For the general reader, this study
deals with matters that always compel attention, all of them connected not only with Western
conceptions and treatments of the other but also with the singularly important role played by
Western culture
33
in what Vico called the world of nations. Lastly, for readers in the so-called Third World, this
study proposes itself as a step towards an understanding not so much of Western politics and of
the non-Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western cultural discourse, a
strength too often mistaken as merely decorative or “superstructural. ” My hope is to illustrate the
formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the
dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others.
The three long chapters and twelve shorter units into which this book is divided are intended
to facilitate exposition as much as possible. Chapter One, “The Scope of Orientalism,” draws a
large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and
experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes. Chapter Two, “Orientalist
Structures and Restructures,” attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism by a
broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the
work of important poets, artists, and scholars. Chapter Three, “Orientalism Now,” begins where
its predecessor left off, at around 1870. This is the period of great colonial expansion into the
Orient, and it culminates in World War II. The very last section of Chapter Three characterizes
the shift from British and French to American hegemony; I attempt there finally to sketch the
present intellectual and social realities of Orientalism in the United States.
3. The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: “The starting-point of
critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is `knowing thyself’ as a
product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without
leaving an inventory. ” The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci’s
comment at that, whereas is fact Gramsci’s Italian text concludes by adding, “therefore it is
imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory. ”16
Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an
“Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies
(Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early
awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of 0rientalism has been an attempt to inventory
the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a
factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the
34
Islamic Orient has had to be the center of attention. Whether what I have achieved is the
inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not for me to judge, although I have felt it important to be
conscious of trying to produce one. Along the way, as severely and as rationally as I have been
able, I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness, as well as employing those instruments of
historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate
beneficiary. In none of that, however, have I ever lost hold of the cultural reality of, the personal
involvement in having been constituted as, “an Oriental. ”
The historical circumstances making such a study possible are fairly complex, and I can only
list them schematically here. Anyone resident in the West since the 1950s, particularly in the
United States, will have lived through an era of extraordinary turbulence in the relations of East
and West. No one will have failed to note how “East” has always signified danger and threat
during this period, even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia. In the universities
a growing establishment of area-studies programs and institutes has made the scholarly study of
the Orient a branch of national policy. Public affairs in this country include a healthy interest in
the Orient, as much for its strategic and economic importance as for its traditional exoticism. If
the world has become immediately accessible to a Western citizen living in the electronic age, the
Orient too has drawn nearer to him, and is now less a myth perhaps than a place crisscrossed by
Western, especially American, interests.
One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that there has been a reinforcement of the
stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed. Television, the films, and all the media’s resources
have forced information into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient is
concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenthcentury
academic and imaginative demonology of “the mysterious Orient. ” This is nowhere more
true than in the ways by which the Near East is grasped. Three things have contributed to making
even the simplest perception of the Arabs and Islam into a highly politicized, almost raucous
matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which is
immediately reflected in the history of Orientalism; two, the struggle between the Arabs and
Israeli Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as upon both the liberal culture and
the population at large; three, the almost
35
total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately
to discuss the Arabs or Islam. Furthermore, it hardly needs saying that because the Middle East is
now so identified with Great Power politics, oil economics, and the simple-minded dichotomy of
freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs, the chances of
anything like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the Near East are depressingly
small.
My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an
Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an
almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he
does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political
imperialism, dehumanizing ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and
it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. It has
made matters worse for him to remark that no person academically involved with the Near Eastno
Orientalist, that is-has ever in the United States culturally and politically identified himself
wholeheartedly with the Arabs; certainly there have been identifications on some level, but they
have never taken an “acceptable” form as has liberal American identification with Zionism, and
all too frequently they have been radically flawed by their association either with discredited
political and economic interests (oilcompany and State Department Arabists, for example) or with
religion.
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
52
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.