Vintage Books Edition, October 1979
Copyright © 1978 by Edward W. Said
Afterword copyright © 1994 by Edward W. Said
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Pantheon Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., in November 1978.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Said, Edward W
Orientalism.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Asia—Foreign opinion, Occidental. 2. Near East—Foreign opinion, Occidental. 3. Asia—Study and teaching. 4. Near East—Study and teaching. 5. Imperialism. 6. East and West. I. Title.
DS12.S24 1979 950′.07′2 79-10497
ISBN 0-394-74067-X
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5386-7
Since this copyright page cannot accommodate all the permissions acknowledgments, they are to be found on the following two pages.
v3.1
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: Excerpts from Subjects of the Day: Being a Selection of Speeches and Writings by George Nathaniel Curzon.
George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: Excerpts from Revolution in the Middle East and Other Case Studies, proceedings of a seminar, edited by P. J. Vatikiotis.
American Jewish Committee: Excerpts from “The Return of Islam” by Bernard Lewis, in Commentary, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1976). Reprinted from Commentary by permission. Copyright © 1976 by the American Jewish Committee.
Basic Books, Inc.: Excerpts from “Renan’s Philological Laboratory” by Edward W. Said, in Art, Politics, and Will: Essays in Honor of Lionel Trilling, edited by Quentin Anderson et al. Copyright © 1977 by Basic Books, Inc.
The Bodley Head and McIntosh & Otis, Inc.: Excerpts from Flaubert in Egypt, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller. Reprinted by permission of Francis Steegmuller and The Bodley Head.
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., and The Letters of T. E. Lawrence Trust: Excerpt from The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett.
Jonathan Cape, Ltd., The Seven Pillars Trust, and Doubleday & Co., Inc.: Excerpt from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence. Copyright 1926, 1935 by Doubleday & Co., Inc.
Doubleday & Co., Inc., and A. P. Watt & Sons, Ltd.: Excerpt from Verse by Rudyard Kipling.
The Georgia Review: Excerpts from “Orientalism,” which originally appeared in The Georgia Review (Spring 1977). Copyright © 1977 by the University of Georgia.
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: Excerpt from a poem by Bornier (1862), quoted in De Lesseps of Suez by Charles Beatty.
Macmillan & Co., London and Basingstoke: Excerpts from Modern Egypt, vol. 2, by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer.
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from “Propaganda” by Harold Lasswell, in The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman, vol. 12 (1934).
Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and A. P. Watt & Sons, Ltd.: Excerpt from “Byzantium” by William Butler Yeats, in The Collected Poems. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
The New York Times Company: Excerpts from “Arabs, Islam, and the Dogmas of the West” by Edward W. Said, in The New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Northwestern University Press: Excerpt from “The Arab Portrayed” by Edward W. Said, in The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective, edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Copyright © 1970 by Northwestern University Press.
Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Excerpt from The Persians by Aeschylus, translated by Anthony J. Podleck. Copyright © 1970 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.
The Royal Asiatic Society, Great Britain and Ireland: Excerpt from “Louis Massignon (1882–1962),” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1962).
University of California Press: Excerpts from Modern Islam: The Search for Cultural Identity by Gustave von Grunebaum. Copyright © 1962 by the Regents of the University of California.
University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Modern Trends in Islam by H. A. R. Gibb.
FOR JANET AND IBRAHIM
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Scope of Orientalism
I. Knowing the Oriental
II. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental
III. Projects
IV. Crisis
Chapter 2 Orientalist Structures and Restructures
I. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion
II. Silverstre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory
III. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination
IV. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French
Chapter 3 Orientalism Now
I. Latent and Manifest Orientalism
II. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Worldliness
III. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower
IV. The Latest Phase
Afterword
Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
I have been reading about Orientalism for a number of years, but most of this book was written during 1975–1976, which I spent as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. In this unique and generous institution, it was my good fortune not only to have benefitted agreeably from several colleagues, but also from the help of Joan Warmbrunn, Chris Hoth, Jane Kielsmeier, Preston Cutler, and the center’s director, Gardner Lindzey. The list of friends, colleagues, and students who read, or listened to, parts or the whole of this manuscript is so long as to embarrass me, and now that it has finally appeared as a book, perhaps even them. Nevertheless I should mention with gratitude the always helpful encouragement of Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky, and Roger Owen, who followed this project from its beginning to its conclusion. Likewise I must gratefully acknowledge the helpful and critical interest of the colleagues, friends, and students in various places whose questions and discussion sharpened the text considerably. André Schiffrin and Jeanne Morton of Pantheon Books were ideal publisher and copy editor, respectively, and made the ordeal (for the author, at least) of preparing the manuscript an instructive and genuinely intelligent process. Mariam Said helped me a great deal with her research on the early modern history of Orientalist institutions. Apart from that, though, her loving support really made much of the work on this book not only enjoyable but possible.
E. W. S.
New York
September–October 1977
They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
The East is a career.
—Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred
Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
Nine years ago, in the spring of 1994, I wrote an afterword for Orientalism, which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, I stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but also the ways in which a work about representations of “the Orient” lends itself to increasing misrepresentation and misinterpretation. That I find the very same thing today more ironic than irritating is a sign of how much my age h
as crept up on me, along with the necessary diminutions in expectations and pedagogic zeal that usually frame the road to seniority. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political, and personal mentors, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (who is one of the work’s dedicatees) have brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on. It isn’t at all a matter of being optimistic, but rather of continuing to have faith in the ongoing and literally unending process of emancipation and enlightenment that, in my opinion, frames and gives direction to the intellectual vocation.
Nevertheless, it is still a source of amazement to me that Orientalism continues to be discussed and translated all over the world, in thirty-six languages. Thanks to the efforts of my dear friend and colleague Professor Gaby Peterberg, now of UCLA, formerly of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, there is a Hebrew version of the book available, which has stimulated considerable discussion and debate among Israeli readers and students. In addition, a Vietnamese translation has appeared under Australian auspices; I hope it’s not immodest to say that an Indochinese intellectual space seems to have opened up for the propositions of this book. In any case, it gives me great pleasure to note as an author who had never dreamed of any such happy fate for his work that interest in what I tried to do in my book hasn’t completely died down, particularly in the many different lands of the “Orient” itself.
In part, of course, that is because the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam have continued to fuel enormous change, struggle, controversy and, as I write these lines, war. As I said many years ago, Orientalism is the product of circumstances that are fundamentally, indeed radically, fractious. In my memoir, Out of Place (1999), I described the strange and contradictory worlds in which I grew up, providing for myself and my readers a detailed account of the settings that I think formed me in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon. But that was only a very personal account that stopped short of all the years of my own political engagement that started after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, a war in whose continuing aftermath (Israel is still in military occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights) the terms of struggle and the ideas at stake that were crucial for my generation of Arabs and Americans seem to go on. Nevertheless, I do want to affirm yet again that this book and, for that matter, my intellectual work generally have really been enabled by my life as a university academic. For all its often noted defects and problems, the American university—and mine, Columbia, in particular—is still one of the few remaining places in the United States where reflection and study can take place in an almost-utopian fashion. I have never taught anything about the Middle East, being by training and practice a teacher of the mainly European and American humanities, a specialist in modern comparative literature. The university and my pedagogic work with two generations of first-class students and excellent colleagues has made possible the kind of deliberately meditated and analyzed study that this book contains, which for all its urgent worldly references is still a book about culture, ideas, history, and power, rather than Middle Eastern politics tout court. That was my notion from the beginning, and it is very evident and a good deal clearer to me today.
Yet Orientalism is very much a book tied to the tumultuous dynamics of contemporary history. I emphasize in it accordingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulation and the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time, when the mobilizations of fear, hatred, disgust, and resurgent self-pride and arrogance—much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, “we” Westerners on the other—are very large-scale enterprises. Orientalism’s first page opens with a 1975 description of the Lebanese Civil War that ended in 1990, but the violence and the ugly shedding of human blood continues up to this minute. We have had the failure of the Oslo peace process, the outbreak of the second intifada, and the awful suffering of the Palestinians on the reinvaded West Bank and Gaza, with Israeli F-16’s and Apache helicopters used routinely on defenseless civilians as part of their collective punishment. The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. As I wrote these lines, the illegal and unsanctioned imperial invasion and occupation of Iraq by Britain and the United States proceeds, with a prospect of physical ravagement, political unrest, and more invasions that are truly awful to contemplate. This is all part of what is supposed to be a clash of civilizations, unending, implacable, irremediable. Nevertheless, I think not.
I wish I could say, however, that general understanding of the Middle East, the Arabs, and Islam in the United States has improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn’t. For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the United States, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliché, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and “others” has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging, and destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the “Orient,” that semi-mythical construct, which, since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century, has been made and remade countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient’s nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process the uncountable sediments of history, which include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad’s libraries and museums. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that “our” East, “our” Orient becomes “ours” to possess and direct.
I should say again that I have no “real” Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be. There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women’s rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment, and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find, like Easter eggs in the living room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no live notion (or any knowledge at all) of the language of what real people actually speak has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market “democracy,” without even a trace of doubt that such projects don’t exist outside of Swift’s Academy of Lagado.
What I do argue also is that there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge—if that is what it is—that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency, and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control
and external enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected U.S. officials (they’ve been called chicken hawks, since none of them ever served in the military) was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened, and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W. Bush’s Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline that only American power could reverse. Today, bookstores in the United States are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat, and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in “our” flesh. Accompanying such warmongering expertise have been the omnipresent CNNs and Fox News Channels of this world, plus myriad numbers of evangelical and right-wing radio hosts, plus innumerable tabloids and even middlebrow journals, all of them recycling the same unverifiable fictions and vast generalizations so as to stir up “America” against the foreign devil.
Even with all its terrible failings and its appalling dictator (who was partly created by U.S. policy two decades ago), were Iraq to have been the world’s largest exporter of bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction, no transporting of an enormous army, navy, and air force 7000 miles away to destroy a country scarcely known even to the educated American, all in the name of “freedom.” Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like “us” and didn’t appreciate “our” values—the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma as I describe its creation and circulation in this book—there would have been no war.