Customer Reviews

Orientalism (Modern Classics (Penguin))

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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!

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.

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.

The phenomenon Edward Said describes in his book is the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim traditions in society and literature. "Orientalism" is a term that describes a "discourse", a school of thought. And like anti-Semtism, which was one part of Orientalist prejudice in the 19th century, the discourse of anti-Muslim anti-Arab prejudice has a long and powerful history. Regrettably it infects leading scholars of the Middle East like Bernard Lewis. Said deserves credit for putting it all together. Although he is a harsh critic of Western imperialism and Israeli and American power in the Middle East, he hardly manifests racism towards any group.

Given the amount that has already been said here about Said's `Orientalism', it is worth just summarising, as I understand it, what the book is about and the kind of readership it will be of interest to.

What is the book about? `Orientalism' deals with Western (mainly British, French and American) colonial representation of `the Orient' (mainly the Middle East). In other words, it is about how the West saw the East.

What are the book's arguments? Said demonstrates how Western representations of the Orient were not grounded in reality but were in fact constructed in opposition to whatever the West saw itself as - rational, liberal, progressive, dynamic. In the process, the Orient came to be represented as the irrational and decadent `Other' to the West. More controversially, Said contends that this was a means of imposing cultural domination on the Orient. Said uses Foucault's notion of discourse (an institutionalised way of thinking) to show how Western `knowledge' of the East gave it power over the East.

Why is the book significant? `Orientalism' has created shockwaves throughout academia and beyond since its publication in 1978. For one, it revolutionises the way we think about European empire - that imperial power was enforced not just politically or economically, but also culturally. The work has since spawned a whole sub-field of cultural studies on European imperialism, or more broadly, Western cultural influence. Said's textual deconstruction of colonial literature also paved the way various schools of postcolonial theorists concerned with colonial literary criticism. These ideas still reverberate with contemporary concerns, especially America's role in shaping in Middle East.

What are the books defects? Many of the shortcomings of the book have already been addressed here, but I shall highlight some of them briefly. Firstly, Said presents a monolithic picture of `the West' in the very same way he accuses them of representing `the East'; in reality, `the West' was and is of course far less homogenous that Said suggests and the discourse of the Oriental `Other' is but one of many other discourses. Secondly, he neglects to demonstrate how the Orient influenced the West as well; cultural influence was bidirectional. Thirdly, Said's personal engagement with the subject as a Palestinian living in America undoubtedly distorts or at least biases his judgements. These are amongst the reasons why I give the book only 4 out of 5 stars.

Despite these shortcomings, this seminal work is impossible to ignore and I would highly recommend it. I found the writing clear and forceful, and the arguments cogent. The extent to which the work has been cited, dissected and qualified is itself tribute to its immense influence, even twenty years on. A must-read.

Whatever one may chose to believe about Said's methodology, one cannot question his vast erudition concerning Western literature about the Middle East. Said presents a rigorous and thoroughgoing exegesis of Western texts about the "Orient" and covers virtually the entire gamut in European letters, from Nietzsche to Karl Marx, from British colonialsim to American social science. His penetrating criticism of this material constitutes a significant contribution to the canon of literature.

One may argue against the merit of Said's more radical interpretation of these texts, namely, that the concept of the "Orient" is a sweeping generalization that lacks "ontological stability," and must be understood as a discourse of power in Western literature. This is a fascinating and intellectually pregnant thesis, although many may find it recondite and polemical.

Edwards Said's book, Orientalism, is both a study on the origins, repercussions, and general history of the concept of "Orientalism" as well as an example of cultural history in action, and in many ways it is also evidence of how cultural history can go drastically wrong. The text itself investigates how Orientalism, or what Said also describes as "the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority," (42) expanded and proliferated in the years of Western expansion; namely, the 19th Century. Although it had existed before, Said argues that "Orientalism" was made concrete by scientists, explorers, and scholars and is mostly the result of these people quantifying and qualifying and making "rational" a concept they could not understand. Edward Said says that the original notion of the dividing line between East and West "is more than anything else imaginative." (55) Once Orientalism was conceptualized from this imagined line, Said argues, it offered a set of rules, descriptions and modes of behavior that generalized a wildly diverse population and made it easily attainable and exploitable by the West. Orientalism was also invented as a way for Europeans to reconcile their fear of the Near East and Islam, which is the topic most covered by Said and was a great influence on Orientalism because of its sheer magnitude and power. While Orientalism was originally conceived out of imagined misconceptions and a largely created body of evidence as realized in Barthelemy d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale (originally published in 1697), it was perpetuated in later "projects" best exemplified in Napoleon's accounts of travel through Egypt in Description de l'Egypte. From this point on, Orientalism had a "scope" and was available for future Orientalists to further generalize the Orient for scientific, literary, and imperialist purposes. Edward Said also argues that Orientalism benefited "professional scholars" and academic institutions because now an entire business based on the idea of Western superiority was created to help serve the above-mentioned scientists, anthropologists, and political thinkers. The modern Orientalist, Said argues, was "in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished." (121) Orientalism not only flourished, but new assumptions made on the old ones only served to perpetuate further the untrue notions on which Orientalism was founded. After Said describes the endeavors of various Orientalists including Chateaubriand, Larmartine, and finally, Richard Burton, the reader is given exhaustive evidence of how Orientalism grew into what it is today; more Orientalism. Orientalism now, Said says, is only the same idea of generalizing and, in a sense, primitivizing the "other" through modern-day "area-studies." Because these area studies are from a long and established tradition of Orientalism, they are only an extension of, not reaction to, all the misconceptions encapsulated in Orientalism. Although Edward Said's Orientalism is an illuminating history of an idea (Orientalism) and how it was created, propagated, and continues to exist, his volume is nonetheless redundant and hostile in tone that made me immediately dislike it and put me on the defensive. In no instance did I find Said to be self--critical; his arguments were set forth like dogma. His extensive endeavors to list the faults generated by "Orientalism" are in some cases based on false assumptions. That is, there have been nations of Islamic people (i.e., the Ottoman Empire) who for over 500 years systematically enslaved and ruled over parts of Eastern Europe. These kinds of reverse atrocities are virtually ignored, probably because Said is only really documenting the past two centuries. In addition, I found very little in the area of proposals or alternatives to the way of conceptualizing the "Orient" other than what Said criticizes in his 300-plus-page book. I understand that Said's mission was "to describe a particular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system with a new one" (325) but in my opinion a history of a subject should allow the reader to conceive of and interpret ideas for a new system and because Said fervently rejected to do so, so did I. In my opinion, Orientalism is also an example of where cultural history can become so subjective that unless the reader accepts the book without question, it serves little purpose other than as an outlet for anger on the part of the author and as testament to how tenuous a historian's job is when he or she lets a particular view so obviously overpowering the content of the text.

Edward Said would say that both demonizing and deifying are problematic because both are distortions and Said wanted to decrease distortion. And so it is that his work has been criticized and praised in a manner that mirrors this distortion through demonizing and deifying. Edward Said's ground-breaking work has been critized on many levels. Some say his writing does not allow adequate agency for Arab and Asian people. In some cases, his examples of historic authors who are allegedly discrediting the "Orient," actually seem to be worshipping.
Regardless of the critics, I found the work wholely enlightening. There are so many details of EuroAmerican travel literature which was so profoundly and disturbingly racist. This book gives me a new insight into the history of the way people in EuroAmerica used to think about "The Rest" meaning everything that was not "The West." Edward's work provide s a new way to examine racism -- not from a purely emotional or coldly statistical perspective, but from literary and academic perspectives. This book is a close examination of how racism in many forms, Arab, Asian or "Other," permeates the institutions of the world. Dangerously, these "authoritative" views of Other people become acceptable ways of talking about each other. In this way, racism becomes embedded in the educational systems, in the universities, in the libraries of the world. Elimating it becomes all the more difficult, because it creates the illusion that it is natural, authentic, scientific and rational.
Said's Orientalism is an excellent work that I strongly recommend to anyone trying to understand the world, especially the Middle East. Breaking out of the International media paradigms is difficult without some assistance. Said provides the necessary assistance.

In this post 9.11 world where ever-increasing importance
is being attached to keywords such as `Islamic
fundamentalism,' `Jihad,' and `Clash of civilizations,'
Edward Said's monumental publication serves as a reminder to
both agitated policymakers and the alarmed public that such
perceptions of the `Islam threat' are, in fact, nothing new.

Said's exposé persistently delineates how the West has created
an erroneous, heavily biased systematic knowledge of the Orient
for political, economical and social purposes. The Orient
- which, in the book, is mainly represented through the Arab
world - has been defined as the antithesis of everything
European (or Western). Thus, the Orient loses its intrinsic,
self-determined value and becomes a counterfeit identity that
only accentuates the genuineness of the Occidental.
Overly exaggerated and false perceptions of the Orient are
promulgated, to be embedded in the works of philologists,
poets, government officials, anthropologists, and so on,
all who compose - be it voluntarily or involuntarily,
consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or
unintentionally - the vast body of `Orientalists'.

Although Said may not have expected the controversy bred and
spread through his book to have such far-reaching implications
as they have now, his claims are pertinent to why and how
current international, US-led foreign policy objectives have
become centered on the two-fold strategy of a) countering
terrorism (i.e. countering the `Islam threat') and
b) proliferating Western ideals of freedom and democracy.
The striking similarities between European point of view
toward the Orient during 17c-early 20c and American attitudes
in the post Cold War world validate the subsisting tradition
of Orientalism.

While the author has devoted much time and attention to
deconstruct the Western creation of the Orient, not much
work has been done on the contrary - the author himself
acknowledges this in the latter parts of the text.
Yet after patiently going through the details, the reader
may ask, and justifiably so, "What, then, is the correct or
recommendable approach to understanding the Orient?"
In other words, after deconstructing the `false' Orient,
how are we to reconstruct the `true' Orient? Should such
reconstruction be the responsibility of penitent Western
scholars, or self-determined Oriental scholars?

This also leads to other important questions that have been
neglected in Said's work (perhaps because it was not within
the mandate of this particular volume), which is - what are
Oriental perceptions of the Occidental, and Oriental
perceptions of the Oriental? If, as the author claims,
perceptions on different cultural realms are defined through
a relationship of power, domination and hegemony, does the
Orientals' conception of the West conform to such an assertion?
How do Orientals define themselves, and how do other
cultures `less powerful' than the Oriental perceive the Orient?
Are all such perceptions necessarily under the dominating
influence of "Orientalism"? To ask and answer such questions
would be the critical next step to enhancing the persuasive
power of Said's argument.

As a young academic, the now established and successful Edward Said, was young, academic, and angry, as is ever obvious in his best known work "Orientalism." Ostensibly, his target is the reductive Western perception of the "Orient" (it's always unclear where the Orient is physically located, and that's exactly the point of the author) into a scary and sensual, depraved and weak force that permits the West to dominate over it.

In Professor Said's words, here's the cause and consequence of Orientalism:

"[E]very European , in what he could say about the Orient, was subsequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures...My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient's difference with its weakness."

The prototypical example of Orientalism in both thought and action is Napoleon's march on Egypt, where he brought a lot of academics to map out and research Egypt, but more importantly to intellectually and academically justify his invasion. Here was the first modern example of the concrete twinning of the military and academia in imperial endeavors.

It's obvious that Professor Said is angry, and his book is a searing indictment. But of what exactly?

Is it of human nature? What exactly is the difference in Professor Said's calculus between "Orientalism" and "otherness"? Reading the book, we discover there is none, and so it's not that the West has a tendency to discriminate against the East but that humans have a tendency to discriminate against everything and everyone that different. Londoners may discriminate against Indians and Chinese, but they're just as sure to discriminate against the Scots, the Welsh, and anyone who lives outside London, and I'm sure that London neighborhoods discriminate against each other as well.

Is it of imperialism? Orientalism is part and parcel of imperialism, because power must be justified. But isn't that a bit too obvious? And power relationships can work horizontally (across geography) and vertically (up and down economic strata). In Victorian Engliand, is the Indian lawyer discriminated more, or is the English textile worker?

Or is it of academia? Universities as think-tanks for imperialism? This actually would be a much more stimulating and concrete subject of discussion. The book is often too nebulous and too repetitive, and while it hints how academics have always served the interests of the powerful, a fuller, more intimate discussion would be extremely compelling to read.