— 'Islam Through Western Eyes' (1980) The Nation magazine. Thesis of Representation [ ] Orientalism (1978) proposes that much of the Western study of Islamic civilization was an exercise in political; a psychological exercise in the self-affirmation of '; not an objective exercise of intellectual enquiry and the academic study of Eastern cultures. Therefore, Orientalism was a method of practical and cultural discrimination that was applied to non-European societies and peoples in order to establish European imperial.

In justification of empire, the Orientalist claims to know more—essential and definitive knowledge—about the Orient than do the Orientals. That Western writings about the Orient, the perceptions of the East presented in Orientalism, cannot be taken at face value, because they are cultural representations based upon fictional, Western images of the Orient. That the history of European colonial rule and political domination of Eastern civilizations, distorts the intellectual of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalist; thus did the term 'Orientalism' become a pejorative word regarding non–Western peoples and cultures: I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries, which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies.

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To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact—and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism. — Orientalism (1978) p. The notion of cultural representations as a means for domination and control would remain a central feature of Said’s critical approach proposed in Orientalism (1978). Towards the end of his life for instance, Said argued that while representations are essential for the function of human life and societies – as essential as language itself – what must cease are representations that are authoritatively repressive, because they do not provide any real possibilities for those being represented to intervene in this process. The alternative to an exclusionary representational system for Said would be one that is “participatory and collaborative, non-coercive, rather than imposed”, yet he recognised the extreme difficulty involved in bringing about such an alternative. Difficult because advances in the “electronic transfer of images” is increasing media concentration in the hands of powerful, transnational conglomerates.

This concentration is of such great magnitude that ‘dependent societies’ situated outside of the “central metropolitan zones” are greatly reliant upon these systems of representation for information about themselves - otherwise known as self-knowledge. For Said, this process of gaining self-knowledge by peripheral societies is insidious, because the system upon which they rely is presented as natural and real, such that it becomes practically unassailable. Occidental and Oriental origins [ ]. The romanticized Orient: The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511) depicts the ' of 16th-century Syria. Said said that the Western world sought to dominate the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years, since (8th c. BC – AD 6th c.), the time of the play (472 BC), by, which celebrates a (Battle of Salamis, 480 BC) against the Persians in the course of the (499–449 BC)—imperial conflict between the Greek West and the Persian East. Europe's long, military domination of Asia ( and ) made unreliable most Western texts about the Eastern world, because of the implicit that permeates most Orientalism, which was not recognized by most Western scholars.

In the course of empire, after the physical-and-political conquest, there followed the intellectual conquest of a people, whereby Western scholars appropriated for themselves (as European intellectual property) the and of Oriental languages, and the critical study of the cultures and histories of the Oriental world. In that way, by using Orientalism as the intellectual norm for cultural judgement, Europeans wrote the history of Asia, and invented the 'exotic East' and the 'inscrutable Orient', which are cultural representations of peoples and things considered inferior to the peoples and things of the West. The Other [ ] Orientalism concluded that 'Western knowledge of the Eastern world', i.e. Fictionally depicts the Orient as an irrational, psychologically weak, and feminized, non-European, which is negatively contrasted with the rational, psychologically strong, and masculine West.

Such a binary relation, in a hierarchy of weakness and strength, derives from the European psychological need to create a of cultural inequality, between West and East, which inequality is attributable to 'immutable cultural ' inherent to Oriental peoples and things. The notion of an Orient has played a central role in constructing European culture, and “helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience”. The binary relationship of strong-West-and-weak-East reinforces the cultural stereotypes invented with, cultural, and historical texts that are more fictitious than factual; yet, which give the reader of Orientalist texts (history, travelogue, anthropology, etc.) a limited understanding of life in the Middle East, because Orientalism conflates the different societies of the Eastern world, into the homogeneous world of 'the Orient'. Geopolitics and cultural hierarchy [ ] The contemporary, historical impact of Orientalism (1978) was in explaining the How? Of imperial impotence; in the 1970s, to journalists, academics, and Orientalists, the (6–25 October 1973) and the (October 1973 – March 1974) were recent.

The Western world had been surprised, by the pro-active and decisive actions of non-Western peoples, whom the ideology of Orientalism had defined as weak societies and impotent countries. The reality of their actions, of military and economic warfare, voided the fictional nature of, attitudes, and opinions about the non-Western.

The academy [ ] Moving from the assertion that ‘pure knowledge’ is simply not possible (as all forms of knowledge are inevitably influenced by ideological standpoints), Said sought to explain the connection between ideology and literature. He argued that “Orientalism is not a mere political subject or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions”, but rather “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts”. European literature for Said carried, actualised, and propelled Orientalist notions forward and constantly reinforced them. Put differently, literature produced by Europeans made possible the domination of the people of the ‘East’ because of the Orientalist discourse embedded within these texts. Literature here is understood as a kind of carrier and distributor of ideology. Influence [ ].

The Good Orientalist: Edward William Lane, the translator and lexicographer who compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93). The British historian Robert Irwin is the sort of scholar who, in times past, would have been proud to call himself an Orientalist. Someone who mastered difficult languages, like and, and then spent years bent over manuscripts, in heroic efforts of and.

In Dangerous Knowledge, Irwin relates that the 19th-century English Arabist, compiler of the great [1840], 'used to complain that he had become so used to the cursive calligraphy of his Arabic manuscripts that he found Western print a great strain on his eyes.' Orientalism, in its heyday, was a branch of knowledge as demanding and rigorous as its near cousin,. The first International Congress of Orientalists met in 1873; its name was not changed until a full century later. But there are no self-declared Orientalists today. The reason is that the late Edward Said turned the word into a pejorative.

In his 1978 book Orientalism, the Palestinian-born Said, a professor of at Columbia University, claimed that an endemic Western prejudice against the East had congealed into a modern ideology of racist supremacy—a kind of directed against Arabs and Muslims. Throughout Europe's history, announced Said, 'every European, in that he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.'

In a sleight of hand, Said appropriated the term 'Orientalism', as a label for the ideological prejudice he described, thereby, neatly implicating the scholars who called themselves Orientalists. At best, charged Said, the work of these scholars was biased, so as to confirm the inferiority of Islam. At worst, Orientalists had directly served European empires, showing how best to conquer and control Muslims. To substantiate his indictment, Said cherry-picked evidence, ignored whatever contradicted his thesis, and filled the gaps with conspiracy theories. The Oriental threat in the 17th century: the Ottoman Empire at its greatest extent, in 1683.

In the book review, 'The Mightier Pen? Edward Said and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism: a review of Culture and Imperialism, by Edward Said' (1993), said that Said's contention of Western domination of the Eastern world for more than 2,000 years was unsupportable, because, until the late 17th century, the (1299–1923) was a realistic military, cultural, and religious threat to (Western) Europe. In 'Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Said' (2005), Mark Proudman noted incorrect 19th-century history in Orientalism, that the geographic extent of the was not from Egypt to India in the 1880s, because the Ottoman Empire and the in that time intervened between those poles of empire.

Moreover, at the zenith of the, European colonial power in the Eastern world never was absolute, it was relative and much dependent upon — princes, rajahs, and warlords—who nonetheless often subverted the imperial and hegemonic aims of the colonialist power. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Robert Irwin said that Said's concentrating the scope of Orientalism to the Middle East, especially Palestine and Egypt, was a mistake, because the (1920–1948) and (1882–1956) only were under direct European control for a short time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; thus are poor examples for Said's theory of Western. That Orientalism should have concentrated upon good examples of imperialism and, such as the (1858–1947) and (1721–1917), but he did not, because, as a, Edward Said was more interested in making political points about the politics of the Middle East, in general, and of Palestine, in particular. Moreover, that by unduly concentrating on British and French Orientalism, Said ignored the domination of 19th century Oriental studies by German and Hungarian academics and intellectuals, whose countries did not possess an Eastern empire. Team Sleep Formant Rapidshare Movies. Irwin's book was later criticized by Amir Taheri, writing in Asharq Al-Awsat, when he listed a number of factual and editing errors that Irwin makes in the book, also noting a number of prominent Orientalists left unmentioned. Professional [ ]. The geographic extent of the Arab–Israeli Conflict.

(1948 – to date) In the article 'Said's Splash' (2001), Martin Kramer said that, fifteen years after publication of Orientalism (1978), the UCLA historian (whom Said praised in Covering Islam, 1981) who originally had praised Orientalism as an 'important, and, in many ways, positive' book, had changed her mind. In Approaches to the History of the Middle East (1994), Keddie criticised Said's work on Orientalism, for the unfortunate consequences upon her profession as an historian: I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word 'orientalism' as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the 'wrong' position on the, or to people who are judged too 'conservative'. Teaching Middle Years Pendergast Ebook Download. It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So, 'orientalism', for many people, is a word that substitutes for and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Said meant at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.

— 'Said's Splash', Ivory Towers on Sand (2001) Literature [ ] In the article, 'Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy' (2008), Robert Irwin said that Said ineffectively distinguished among writers of different centuries and genres of Orientalist literature. That the disparate examples, such as the German poet (1749–1832) who never travelled to the Orient; the French novelist (1821–1880) who briefly toured Egypt; the French Orientalist (1823–1892), whose anti-Semitism voided his work; and the British Arabist (1801–1876), who compiled the Arabic–English Lexicon (1863–93)—did not constitute a comprehensive scope of investigation or critical comparison. In that vein, in Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism (2007), Ibn Warraq earlier had said that in Orientalism (1978) Said had constructed a binary-opposite representation, a fictional European stereotype that would counter-weigh the Oriental stereotype. Being European is the only common trait among such a temporally and stylistically disparate group of literary Orientalists.

Philosophy [ ]. The British Mandate of Palestine (1922). In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past (1988) O.P.

Kejariwal said that with the creation of a monolithic to oppose the Orientalism of Western discourse with the Eastern world, Said had failed to distinguish, between the paradigms of and the, and ignored the differences among Orientalists; and that he failed to acknowledge the positive contributions of Orientalists who sought kinship, between the worlds of the East and the West, rather than to create an artificial 'difference' of cultural inferiority and superiority; such a man was (1746–1794), the British philologist–lexicographer who proposed that Indo–European languages are interrelated. In the essay The Debate About 'Orientalism', said 'that Said’s treatment of Orientalism, particularly the assertion of the necessary nexus with imperialism, is over-stated and unbalanced.' He objected to Said's view that Western Orientalists were projecting upon the 'artificial screen called “the East” or “the Orient”, but that such projection was only a small part of the relationship. That Said failed to adequately distinguish between the genuine experiences of the Orient and the cultural projections of Westerners.

He further criticized Said for using reductionist models of religion and spirituality, that are based on 'Marxist/Foucauldian/psychoanalytic thought'. Personality [ ] In the sociological article, 'Review: Who is Afraid of Edward Said?' (1999) Biswamoy Pati said that in making and cultural background the tests of and in studying the Oriental world, Said drew attention to his personal identity as a and as a of the British Empire, in the Near East.

Therefore, from the perspective of the Orientalist academic, Said's personal background might, arguably, exclude him from writing about the Oriental world, hindered by an upper-class birth, an Anglophone upbringing, a British-school education in Cairo, residency in the U.S., a university-professor job; and categorical statements, such as: 'any and all representations. Are embedded, first, in the language, and then, in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. [the cultural representations are] interwoven with a great many other things, besides 'the Truth', which is, itself, a representation.' Hence, in the article 'Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire', D.A. Washbrook said that Said and his academic cohort indulge in excessive, which intellectual excess traps them in a ', which limits conversation exclusively to 'cultural representations' and to denying the existence of any. That Said and his followers fail to distinguish between the types and degrees of Orientalism represented by the news media and popular culture (e.g., the light Orientalism of the children's movie, 1984), and heavy academic Orientalism about the language and literature, history and culture of the peoples of the Eastern world. In the article 'Orientalism Now' (1995), the historian Gyan Prakash said that Edward Said had explored fields of Orientalism already surveyed by his predecessors and contemporaries, such as,, and, who also had studied, reported, and interpreted the social relationship that makes the practice of imperialism intellectually, psychologically, and ethically feasible; that is, the relationship between European imperial rule and European representations of the non-European Other self, the colonised people.

That, as an academic investigator, Said already had been preceded in the critical analysis of the production of Orientalist knowledge and about Western methods of Orientalist scholarship, because, in the 18th century, ' [1753–1825], the Egyptian chronicler, and a witness to, for example, had no doubt that the expedition was as much an as military conquest'. Nonetheless,, of Brown University, who criticized Said's scholarship and contested his conclusions, acknowledged that Orientalism is a major work of cultural criticism.

Death [ ] In October 2003, one month after the death of Edward W. Said (1935–2003), the Lebanese newspaper recognized the import of the book, saying 'Said's critics agree with his admirers that he has single-handedly effected a revolution in Middle Eastern studies in the U.S.' And that 'U.S. Middle Eastern Studies were taken over, by Edward Said's postcolonial studies ', Orientalism. See also [ ] • • • • • • References [ ].