Orientalism [Hardcover]

Edward W Said (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1978

"Orientalism" is one of the greatest and most influential of books of ideas to be published since the end of the European empires. For generations now it has defined our understanding of colonialism and empire and with each passing year its influence becomes if anything even greater. To mark its 25th anniversary, "Orientalism" rightfully takes its place as a Pengun Modern Classic.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The theme is the way in which intellectual traditions are created and trans-mitted... Orientalism is the example Mr. Said uses, and by it he means something precise. The scholar who studies the Orient (and specifically the Muslim Orient), the imaginitive writer who takes it as his subject, and the institutions which have been concerned with teaching it, settling it, ruling it, all have a certain representation or idea of the Orient defined as being other than the Occident, mysterious, unchanging and ultimately inferior." --Albert Hourani, New York Review of Books --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

The noted critic and a Palestinian now teaching at Columbia University,examines the way in which the West observes the Arabs. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon Books; 1st edition (1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394428145
• ISBN-13: 978-0710000408
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (88 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #390,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

272 of 320 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Anti Essentialism & Controversial, October 26, 2001

By 

AA "ashour001" (Newton, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Orientalism (Paperback)

This book and Edward Said in general seem capable of generating such intense controversy. Many reviewers of this book seem to forget actually to review the work and focus on attacking Edward Said as a person, many others still forget to review the book and proceed to speak for Palestinian rights and the negative western attitudes of Islam. I will attempt to present an actual review of this book based on MY own reading of it.

In Orientalism, Said sets about dismantling the study of the "orient" in general with primary focus on the Islamic Near East. Said argues that concepts such as the Orient, Islam, the Arabs, etc. are too vast to be grouped together and presented as one coherent whole, encompassing all there is to know about the subject. Said bases his view on the shear width and breadth of the subject, the inherent bias of conflicting cultures and more recently the role of the Orientalism in colonialism. It is indeed difficult to attempt to represent a book that is so focused on anti essentialism.

Said's research of western / occidental discourse was very thorough indeed and he does illustrate through repeated examples how misinformation sufficiently repeated can become accepted academic work. Said also presents an analysis of the causes and motives and theorizes about his findings. A lengthy and a times tedious discussion of the origins of Orientalism is rather repetitive and hard to follow for a non specialist like me.

Edward Said however seem to have fallen in the same trap he attributes to Orientalism, he has not attempted to explore Arab writings of the periods he discussed nor has he attempted to present (possibly even read) work by Egyptian and Arab historians of the periods he was addressing save for work carried out in the west and within western universities. In doing so, Said fails to see how the modern and contemporary "orient" sees itself through primarily "oriental" eyes such as Ibn Khaldoun, Al Maqrizi and also through the writings of orientalists like Lane. Said also fails to address the work carried out by orientalists based on many manuscripts of Orientals.

I particularly enjoyed Said's analysis of the strong ties that Orientalism has with power and colonialism. Said analysis of the diverging development of the British and French practice based on the latter's limited success as a colonial power was very enjoyable and very well thought out. The Orientalism Today and indeed the Afterwards section are also very informative and as these were more familiar areas for Said his presentation of ideas and thoughts came across more clearly and the writing was far less tedious than the earlier parts of the book.

Orientalism is not an easy read, it will challenge many established views, indeed it has already with a fair degree of success led to changes in the way the Near East is studied. To me, most of all I see this as a book that offers in part a largely coherent explanation for the on-going misunderstanding between the West and the Near East and in Islam. And while Occidentalism does not exist as a field of study in a place like Egypt per se, Said fails to see that the west is viewed largely in terms of its wealth, promiscuous habits, hypocrisy and anti Islam and thus fails to see it as 2 way street, albeit with unequal power.

This is by no means a the definitive correction of the history of the Middle East or Near Orient, it is however a very legitimate and serious study of a field of study that no doubt has a lot to answer for!

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Seminal but Flawed Work on Colonialism, June 16, 2000

By 

Stephen Graham (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Orientalism (Paperback)

When it was written, Orientalism administered a much-needed correction to the study of the Arab and Asian worlds. Any historian, social scientist or humanist working in related fields should own a copy.

The strength of Edward Said's Orientalism is its highlighting of the underlying assumptions of dominance and subjection in Orientalist scholarship. Said correctly points out that the British, French and United States have relied on the reduction of the Orient to an academic study backed by a mythical image of its inhabitants and cultures as more primitive, passionate, mystical and illogical. Complementing this has been a presumption of Western superiority that allows diagnosis of social ills and prescription of Western remedies for these ills.

Said also pointed out a secondary weakness in the Orientalist approach to its studies. If Westerners presume the Orient to be more passionate and mystical, they may assume that it provides absolute alternatives to the ills of Western culture and modernism. Thus the span of Western history scrutinized by Said has seen individuals and groups embracing ill-understood religions and cultural precepts. The anti-majoritan/left-leaning subcultures arising during the upheavals of the 1960's are particularly susceptible to this.

This leads naturally to Aijid Ahmad's primary criticism of Said. Orientalism doesn't consider the varied responses of the Orient/Third-World to its theories. In particular, Ahmad correctly points out that Orientalism over-focuses blames on the West and doesn't address the self-inflicted problems of "Oriental" societies. Based on this criticism, the proper approach is to balance the effects of Western Orientalism and the indigenous difficulties. Essentially, Ahmad advocates abandoning the simple depiction of the Orient for a complex and layered reality.

Orientalism's uncriticized weakness lies in its treatment of Europe. Said willingly admits his limited focus on Britain, France and United States may miss some important scholarship found elsewhere. This concentration has some logic to it. His trio of nations has been among the strongest if not dominant powers in the colonial and post-colonial world. A complete survey of European Orientalism could run for several volumes. Yet in this focus, Said misses those European nations who had had longer and more intricate relations with the "Orient".

Said mentions his lack of attention to German scholarship on the Orient. Beyond the loss in additional scholarship, he cannot take account of the direct influence of the German academic tradition on the rest of Europe and particularly the United States. Beyond this immediate effect, Said loses the transmitted experience of the German Reich's participation in the direct struggle against the Ottoman Empire. While he mentions the Medieval and Renaissance hostility to Islam based on direct threat and conflict, he ignores the extension of this conflict into the 18th and 19th centuries. Yet this conflict remained a dominant factor in the existence of the Austrian and Russian Empires. As long as the struggle continued, the Orient in the form of Islam would have a direct influence on the course of European history. The simple illustration of this is the European approach to independence for the Balkan states and occasional support for the Ottomans versus an opponent. While this support was partially based on the perceived weakness of the Ottomans and resultant manipulability, it also concedes the existence of some real and beneficial power.

Said's exclusion of other European states weakens his structure in a different manner. It's useful to consider the British and French perceptions of Austria and Russia. A simple interpretation of Orientalism presumes a unified Europe as opposed to the Orient. Yet this ignores the equally institutionalized denigration of Austria and Russia. We can refer to the image of the mythical Slavic province of Ruritania (cf. Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda), a den of intrigue and iniquity. Add to this Said's notes on the relative knowledge of the Near Orient versus the Far Orient. This suggests more of a subtle gradation in the construction of the Other than is represented by Orientalism's sharp division between Occident and Orient.

Other historical patterns also stress the need for the representation of a more complex Occident. For instance Said argues that European exploration and extension of trade routes to India and the Far East shows hostility to Islam. A simpler explanation may be mercantile concerns for lowering expenses and increasing profits. Direct trade was more profitable than relying on Arab middlemen. The Arab reaction to Portuguese penetration of the Indian Ocean reflected a concern with being excluded from the profits of trade with India rather than with the intrusion of a new power in the region. This concern with trade leads to different motivations for learning languages and examining cultures. A variety of motivations for scholarship argue for a more complex Occident. The need for more complexity does not necessarily invalidate Said's central points on the institutionalized domination common to Western European Orientalism. Rather it demands refinement of a useful critique of the study of colonialism.

100 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars One of the most disappointing books I've ever read, May 15, 2008

By 

A. Z. F. (Chicago, Il) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Orientalism (Paperback)

The ways in which Orientalism falls short of sanity are numerous enough to fill a book twice its length. The main issues, however, are:

1) The book claims to be a correction to flawed scholarship, but is immensely, damningly flawed itself.

2) In attempting to deconstruct Orientalism, Said's book is, in and of itself, a horrifyingly orientalist text. The book completely neglects China, Japan and all of the far east, and makes only minimal and superficial observations about the Indian subcontinent. It focuses almost wholly on the Middle East. In attempting to describe the west's relationship with the "Orient," therefore, Said grossly overgeneralizes his observations about a particular region to apply to all of the East. In doing so, Sa'îd is guilty of the same foolishness he perceives in the west, which, oddly enough he also misconstrues as a similarly monolithic entity.

3) Edward Said, through what can only be wilful ignorance, sees colonialism as a phenomenon unique to Europe, and western Europe in particular. Not only is the falsity of such a presumption obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of Asian history, but it actually reinforces the dichotomy between Occident and Orient which Said is supposedly trying to deconstruct. Furthermore, one of the greatest colonial movements in recent European history was Russian expansion through Siberia and central Asia. But, amusingly enough, Said seems never to have heard of Russian Orientalism.

4) Said makes numerous factual errors that suggest that he hasn't actually read much of the work he claims to be criticizing or using. He refers, for example, to "Peter the Venerable and other Cluniac Orientalists." Not true. Peter the Venerable was very much on his own. Among the many orientalists Said denigrates as out of touch and unconsciously racist is E. G. Browne, who was in fact a tireless campaigner for Persian independence and democracy. There are larger errors too, such as claiming that Muslim armies conquered Turkey before they conquered North Africa. On the other hand, claiming that Dante's slander of Muhammad in the Inferno is no different from modern American foreign policy may not be a factual error, but it does suggest a gross allergy to detail and nuance.

5) Said's analysis, heavy on Freud, essentializes the west, with such gems as "all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact [of Orientalism]" and the absurd implication that "Every [nineteenth century] European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric." As Said would have it, a westerner cannot know Arabic, Hebrew or Bengali without being instrumental to an imperialist enterprise.

It is this 5th point that makes me particularly sad (I was actually shaking.) In Said's zeal to construe European imperialism as racist, he has also rather foolishly betrayed his ignorance. For example, his outright slander of European linguists in the 19th century would be LAUGHABLE if I weren't so creeped out by the fact that people still take it seriously.

It is impossible to study historical linguistics without learning how it began with Sir William Jones' discovery in the 19th century of Sanskrit's similarity to Greek and Latin. The following statement of his will be encountered in any introduction to the discipline:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source.

This statement, according to Said "indicates the extent to which modern Orientalism, even in its philosophical beginnings, was a comparative discipline having for its principal goal the grounding of the European languages in a distant, and harmless, Oriental source."

Quite the opposite. Seeing a connection between Eastern and Western languages was in no way, shape or form the "goal" of Orientalist scholars. Nor was it in the interest of their empires to see European languages as having an "Oriental source." To say that European scholars actually wanted to ground European languages in such sources is a manifest stupidity. They discovered a pre-existing relationship. They did not further a pre-existing goal. As Jones eventually discovered, Latin and Greek do not have their sources in Sanskrit. Rather, they do indeed descend from a common linguistic ancestor.

If Jones was nothing more than a racist who brought his preconceived notions of superiority to the Indian subcontinent's linguistic history, then why do I constantly see Indian scholars of Indian languages praising him, quoting the very eulogy on Sanskrit that I just cited.

Said also skewers the German linguist Friedrich Schlegel, saying "[Although] Schlegel had practically renounced his Orientalism, he still held that Sanskrit and Persian on the one hand and Greek and German on the other had more affinities with each other than with Semitic, Chinese, American, or African languages." The only conclusion that can be drawn is that Said simply doesn't know that the view Schlegel held has been universally acknowledged as TRUE for well over a century.

Said is, in effect, impeaching well-established facts (which are currently only questioned by Quacks and non-specialists) as having their basis in Orientalism.

In addition, Said himself acknowledges that German orientalism in particular was not motivated by any particular desire for cultural hegemony, since Germany had no colonies to maintain. However, he justifies almost completely ignoring German scholarly contributions by saying that"Britain and France were the pioneer nations...in Oriental studies." This is patently false. German scholarship on the Orient was in no way subordinate to, or derivative of, British and French work. The first worthwhile Arabic grammar, for example, was published not by a Frenchman or an Englishman, but by a German theologian named Karl Caspari. The first remotely useful dictionary of Contemporary Literary Arabic (Hans Wehr's Arabisches Wörterbuch) was also published by a German. German oriental scholarship achieved such primacy that today in many Western universities (including the one I'm enrolled in) demonstrating a mastery of written German is a prerequisite for doing graduate work in near eastern studies.

I would venture to guess that Said ignores German orientalism not because it is of secondary importance, but because a) it challenges his notion of Orientalist scholarship as ipso facto imperialist and b) because his command of German is poor, as he demonstrates when translating Goethe's famous "Gottes ist der Orient" as "God is the Orient" instead of "The orient is God's," mistaking a German genitive ending for a nominative one.

On another note, in refusing to allow for selflessness or dedication to unbiased inquiry on the part of orientalists, Said denies them the responsibility of moral agency. If they can do no good, how can they, in Said's world of utter relativism, be said to do evil? Relegating the west to the position of something like a geological force, rather than a complex bundle of motives and narratives, Said renders his own conclusions irrelevant, since it is impossible to pass moral judgment on an entity for something over which it has no control.

Furthermore, I can't shake the feeling that there's something of a problem in the fact that Edward Said is more a product of the west than of the "Orient" he claims to defend. In Orientalism he says "any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions and political ambience of the representer...We must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things beside the "truth" which is itself a representation."

This book demonstrates Said to be a true postmodernist, implying that all (or nearly all) narratives have their value. How, then, can Said claim access to the Eastern narrative as someone who has been a product of exclusively European languages and education since the age of 12 and who didn't speak Arabic particularly well until adulthood? The passage I just quoted would seem to disqualify him from speaking for the "Orient."

Furthermore, in the same vein, Said seems to forget that all of the most influential criticisms of the west (including the ones he has written) draw upon tools developed by the *west.* Fanon, Pappé, Esack, Sa'adawi and Said himself all drew upon Freud, Marx, Foucault, Marcuse, Benjamin and De Beauvoire for their analytical tools. If the West developed tools of thought that hegemonically preclude their exponents from giving an honest account of the east, then how is it that every single work which makes this assertion derives its power from the very analytical tools it denigrates?

I am severely disappointed.