Orientalism (1978)

Summary

Edward W. Said defines Orientalism in three interdependent senses — the academic discipline of Oriental studies, a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident, and, from the late eighteenth century, the corporate institution by which the West dominated, restructured and had authority over the Orient — and argues that Orientalism is a discourse, in Foucault’s sense, whose internal consistency, material investment and Hegemony matter more than its correspondence to a real Orient (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.11-15 / printed p.2-6). The Introduction sets out his method (Strategic location and strategic formation, Exteriority, the distinction between pure and political knowledge, and the personal dimension of a Palestinian educated in British colonies), and Chapter One, I reads Arthur James Balfour’s 1910 Commons speech and Lord Cromer’s writings on Egypt as the streamlined doctrine of that discourse: knowledge of the Oriental as the ground of power over him, renewed in Henry Kissinger’s developed/developing binary and in Harold W. Glidden’s 1972 portrait of the Arabs (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.40-58 / printed p.31-49). Chapter One, II then traces the Imaginative geography behind the doctrine — the field’s scope from the Council of Vienne, its textual Orient, Dante, and d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale — and Chapter One, III follows its projects from Anquetil-Duperron and William Jones through Napoleon’s Egypt and the Description de l’Égypte to de Lesseps and the Suez Canal; Chapter One, IV completes the Textual attitude analysis and turns to the crisis provoked when a politically independent, armed Orient confronted the discourse — the alternatives of carrying on and of adapting into area studies — quoting Anwar Abdel Malek at length and taking H. A. R. Gibb’s career as the illustration of both responses (PDF p.101-119 / printed p.92-110). Chapter Two, I then re-reads the nineteenth century through Gustave Flaubert’s copyists, tracing the four secularizing currents of the eighteenth century — expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, classification — whose religious patterns were reconstituted rather than removed, and Chapter Two, II opens the paired study of Silvestre de Sacy, the inaugurator whose chrestomathies canonized a restored Orient, and Ernest Renan, whose new philology created “Semitic” in the laboratory as an inorganic, degraded object (PDF p.120-153 / printed p.111-144).

What the file is

• The file is the First Vintage Books Edition (October 1979) of Edward W. Said, Orientalism, copyright 1978 by Said, originally published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in November 1978, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.3). ISBN 0-394-74067-X; Library of Congress classification DS12.S24. Cover: Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Snake Charmer (detail), courtesy of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (PDF p.3).
• Length and parts: 378 PDF pages. Contents (PDF p.7): Acknowledgments at printed p.xi; Introduction printed p.1; Chapter 1, The Scope of Orientalism (I. Knowing the Oriental 31; II. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental 49; III. Projects 73; IV. Crisis 92); Chapter 2, Orientalist Structures and Restructures (sections at printed p.113, 123, 149, 166); Chapter 3, Orientalism Now (sections at printed p.201, 226, 255, 284); Notes printed p.329; Index printed p.351. Printed pagination in this part: printed p. = PDF p. − 9.
• Most of the book was written during 1975-1976, spent as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; the Acknowledgments are signed New York, September-October 1977, E. W. S. (PDF p.8 / printed p.xi). The work is dedicated to Janet and Ibrahim (PDF p.6) — Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod are thanked in the Acknowledgments (PDF p.8).
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/1978-said-orientalism.txt) has a page marker for every page, 1-378, and about 156,700 words. It is OCR and is garbled throughout in small ways — letter substitutions, split words, and passages on PDF p.20, 21, 23, 28, 35-36, 46, 51 and 56 garbled beyond reading in the copy. Those passages were checked against the original and the correct wording is recorded in the reading notes (reading/said-1978-orientalism.md). In part 2, passages on PDF p.85 (Whiston) and PDF p.93 (the Description’s publication details) are likewise garbled in the copy and were checked against the original, as were PDF p.57-58, 78, 92, 94 and 95. PDF p.1 and PDF p.39 are blank in the original (checked). In part 3, the lines at the foot of PDF p.124 are scrambled in the copy and were reassembled from the original (annotation ink partly obscures two line-end words there), PDF p.104, 108, 133 and 146 were checked against the original, and PDF p.121 is blank in the original (checked). The book is heavily underlined and annotated in the scanned copy, in places obscuring characters in the OCR.
• Attribution inside the work: the Introduction and Chapter One are Said’s own, apart from the two epigraphs at PDF p.9 (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred) and the Chapter 1 epigraph at PDF p.38 (Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, Preface historique, 1809, Description de l’Égypte), and the long quotations credited in the Section by section entries to Arthur James Balfour, Lord Cromer (including Cromer quoting Sir Alfred Lyall), Rudyard Kipling and Henry Kissinger. The permissions pages (PDF p.4-5) are the publisher’s matter, not Said’s text.

Section by section

Front matter — PDF p.1-9

Title page, copyright page, permissions acknowledgments, dedication and Contents as recorded in What the file is. Acknowledgments (PDF p.8 / printed p.xi): thanks to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and its director Gardner Lindzey; to Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky and Roger Owen, who followed the project from its beginning to its conclusion; to André Schiffrin and Jeanne Morton of Pantheon Books, publisher and copy editor; and to Mariam Said, who helped with research on the early modern history of Orientalist institutions. Epigraphs (PDF p.9): Marx — they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented — and Disraeli — the East is a career (see Key passages).

Introduction, I — PDF p.10-13 / printed p.1-4

A French journalist visiting Beirut during the civil war of 1975-1976 wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area as having once seemed to belong to the Orient of Chateaubriand and Nerval; the Orient was almost a European invention, and for the European visitor the main thing was a European Representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, not the Orientals who lived there and were suffering (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.10 / printed p.1). Americans associate the Orient differently, mainly with the Far East; the French and British have had the long tradition Said calls Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient based on its special place in European Western experience: the Orient is adjacent to Europe, the place of Europe’s greatest, richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other; it has also helped to define Europe as its contrasting image, idea, personality and experience, and it is an integral part of European material civilization and culture, which Orientalism expresses as a mode of Discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles (PDF p.10-11 / printed p.1-2).

The three meanings (PDF p.11-12 / printed p.2-3): (1) academic — anyone who teaches, writes about or researches the Orient is an Orientalist and what he or she does is Orientalism; the label survives academically through its doctrines and theses even where specialists now prefer Oriental studies or area studies. (2) A style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between the Orient and (most of the time) the Occident, accepted as a starting point by poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists and imperial administrators, and capacious enough to accommodate Aeschylus and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. (3) From the late eighteenth century as a roughly defined starting point, the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient — making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling over it — a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. Said uses Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, from The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish: without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture managed — and even produced — the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively in the post-Enlightenment period, nor how no one writing, thinking or acting on the Orient could do so without the limitations Orientalism imposed (PDF p.12 / printed p.3). European culture gained strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self (PDF p.12-13 / printed p.3-4). To speak of Orientalism is mainly, not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise — India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, Oriental experts and hands, ideas such as Oriental despotism, splendor, cruelty and sensuality — arising from the closeness of Britain and France to an Orient that until the early nineteenth century meant only India and the Bible lands; France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of World War II, and since then America has dominated it as they once did (PDF p.13 / printed p.4). His argument depends not on an exhaustive catalogue or a delimited canon but on the historical generalizations he now discusses (PDF p.13 / printed p.4).

Introduction, II — PDF p.13-17 / printed p.4-8

The Orient is not an inert fact of nature, and neither is the Occident; following Vico — men make their own history, and what they can know is what they have made — Orient and Occident as geographical, cultural and historical entities are man-made, and the Orient is an idea with a history, a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West (PDF p.13-14 / printed p.4-5). Three qualifications follow. First, the Orient was not essentially an idea with no corresponding reality: Disraeli’s statement in Tancred that the East was a career meant an all-consuming passion for bright young Westerners, and the cultures and nations in the East have a brute reality greater than anything said about them in the West; Said’s study deals not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient despite or beyond any correspondence with a real Orient (PDF p.14 / printed p.5). Second, ideas, cultures and histories cannot be studied without their configurations of power: the relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony, as K. M. Panikkar’s Asia and Western Dominance indicates; the Orient could be — was submitted to being — made Oriental, as in Flaubert’s encounter with the Egyptian courtesan Kuchuk Hanem, who never spoke of herself or represented her emotions, presence or history while he, foreign, comparatively wealthy and male, spoke for and represented her — a pattern that fairly stands for the relative strength between East and West and the discourse it enabled (PDF p.14-15 / printed p.5-6). Third, Orientalism is not a structure of lies or myths that the truth would simply blow away; it is more valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than as a veridic discourse about it, and what must be grasped is the knitted-together strength of Orientalist discourse, its ties to socio-economic and political institutions, and its durability as teachable wisdom from Ernest Renan in the late 1840s to the present in the United States — a created body of theory and practice with a considerable material investment, which became an accepted grid for filtering the Orient into Western consciousness (PDF p.15 / printed p.6).

Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between civil society (schools, families, unions — influence by consent) and political society (army, police, central bureaucracy — direct domination) supplies Hegemony as the indispensable concept: hegemony at work gives Orientalism its durability; Orientalism is never far from Denys Hay’s idea of Europe, the idea of European identity as superior to all non-European peoples and cultures, and it depends for its strategy on a flexible positional superiority that puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing the relative upper hand (PDF p.15-16 / printed p.6-7). Under Western hegemony from the end of the eighteenth century a complex Orient emerged, suitable for the academy, the museum, the colonial office, and for anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses and theories of development, revolution and cultural personality; the imaginative examination of things Oriental proceeded from a sovereign Western consciousness and a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by desires, repressions, investments and projections — works of genuine scholarship such as Silvestre de Sacy’s Chrestomathie arabe and Edward William Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians came from the same impulse as Renan’s and Gobineau’s racial ideas (PDF p.16-17 / printed p.7-8). Said poses the choice between the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material and the varied work of individual writers — pioneers such as William Jones, artists such as Nerval and Flaubert — as two perspectives on the same material, names his two fears as distortion and inaccuracy, and announces the three aspects of his contemporary reality that point a way out (PDF p.17 / printed p.8).

Introduction, III.1 — PDF p.18-24 / printed p.9-15

The first aspect is the distinction between pure and political knowledge. The liberal consensus that true knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical (and overtly political knowledge not true) obscures the organized political circumstances in which knowledge is produced: no one has devised a method for detaching the scholar from his involvement, conscious or unconscious, with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position or a society; a field’s political importance comes in greater part from its closeness to sources of power in political society — an economic study of Soviet energy potential commissioned by the Defense Department acquires a political status impossible for a study of Tolstoy’s early fiction, yet both belong to Russian studies (PDF p.18-20 / printed p.9-11). Following Chomsky’s study of objective scholarship and the Vietnam War, Said argues that because Britain, France and recently the United States are imperial powers, their political societies impart urgency to their civil societies wherever imperial interests abroad are concerned; an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest never far from their status in his mind as British colonies, and all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact — for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming that he comes up against the Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second, belonging to a power with definite interests in the Orient and a history of involvement in it almost since Homer (PDF p.20 / printed p.11, checked against the original; the text copy is garbled here). Big facts such as imperial domination cannot be applied mechanically and deterministically; culture created the interest in the Orient and acted dynamically along with brute political, economic and military rationales (PDF p.21 / printed p.12). Orientalism is therefore not a mere political subject matter reflected passively by culture, nor a diffuse collection of texts, nor the expression of a nefarious Western imperialist plot: it is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts, an elaboration of a basic geographical distinction and of a whole series of interests it not only creates but maintains, and a discourse produced and existing in uneven exchange with power political, power intellectual, power cultural and power moral — a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture that has less to do with the Orient than with our world (PDF p.21 / printed p.12, checked against the original).

Texts exist in contexts, yet humanists resist allowing political, institutional and ideological constraints to act on the individual author as conventions and predecessors do — Balzac’s monarchism, or the connection Harry Bracken shows in Locke, Hume and empiricism between philosophic doctrines and racial theory, justifications of slavery and arguments for colonial exploitation (PDF p.22 / printed p.13). Literary studies and American Marxist theorists have avoided bridging superstructure and base, and the literary-cultural establishment has declared the serious study of imperialism and culture off limits; Orientalism makes the avoidance of political imperialism’s governance of a whole field of study, imagination and scholarly institutions an intellectual and historical impossibility, and the specialist argument — training in literature or philosophy, not politics — can block the larger perspective (PDF p.22-23 / printed p.13-14). Two answers: first, nearly every nineteenth-century writer was extraordinarily well aware of the fact of empire — Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George Eliot and even Dickens had definite views on race and imperialism at work in their writing, and Mill made it clear in On Liberty and Representative Government that his views there could not be applied to India because the Indians were civilizationally, if not racially, inferior, a paradox also found in Marx (PDF p.23 / printed p.14, checked against the original). Second, that imperialism bears on the production of literature, scholarship, social theory and history writing does not demean culture: the internal constraints of saturating hegemonic systems were productive, not unilaterally inhibiting, as Gramsci, Foucault and Raymond Williams in different ways illustrate, and Williams’s pages on the uses of the Empire in The Long Revolution show it (PDF p.23 / printed p.14). Said studies Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires — British, French, American; what interests him is the detail, Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians as a classic of observation because of its style and brilliant details, not its simple reflection of racial superiority (PDF p.24 / printed p.15). He lists the questions the study pursues — the energies that went into an imperialist tradition, the service of philology, lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel-writing and lyric poetry to its view of the world, originality and continuity within it, its transmission across epochs — and holds that each humanistic investigation must formulate the connection between knowledge and politics in its specific context (PDF p.24 / printed p.15).

Introduction, III.2 — PDF p.24-33 / printed p.15-24

The second aspect is the methodological question. Beginnings have to be made, not found; the act of beginning is an act of delimitation, and for texts one such notion is Louis Althusser’s problematic (PDF p.24-25 / printed p.15-16). An encyclopedic narrative history of Orientalism was rejected — the European idea of the Orient would admit virtually no limit to the material, the narrative model did not suit his descriptive and political interests, and encyclopedic works by Raymond Schwab, Johann Fück and Dorothee Metlitzki already exist — so his starting point is the British, French and American experience of the Orient taken as a unit, limited to the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost a thousand years together stood for the Orient (PDF p.25-26 / printed p.16-17). India, Japan, China and the Far East are thereby eliminated from the main treatment, apart from moments — the Egypt-India connection for Britain, the French deciphering of the Zend-Avesta, Paris as a center of Sanskrit studies, Napoleon’s interest in the Orient contingent on the British role in India — where Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest in the Near East, Islam and the Arabs (PDF p.26 / printed p.17). The discussion does not do justice to German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese contributions, nor to the revolution in Biblical studies (Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn, Herder, Michaelis), because Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history, and the American position since World War II has fit in the places excavated by them; the major steps in Oriental scholarship were first taken in Britain or France and then elaborated by Germans — Silvestre de Sacy, the first modern and institutional European Orientalist, was teacher of Champollion and of Franz Bopp, and a similar priority holds for William Jones and Edward William Lane (PDF p.26-27 / printed p.17-18). E. S. Shaffer’s Kubla Khan and The Fall of Jerusalem is the best work on the Biblical-scholarship background, but it lacks the political and ideological edge the British and French writers give the material and does not trace the later reproduction in American Orientalism (PDF p.27 / printed p.18). German scholarship is reproached by omission — Steinthal, Müller, Becker, Goldziher, Brockelmann, Nöldeke — and George Eliot’s Casaubon in Middlemarch, who cannot finish his Key to All Mythologies because he is unacquainted with German scholarship and is not an Orientalist, marks its pre-eminence by about 1830; yet no close partnership developed in Germany between Orientalists and a protracted national interest in the Orient, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly or classical one (Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan from a Rhine journey, Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier from Paris libraries), and German scholarship refined techniques applied to texts gathered from the Orient by imperial Britain and France (PDF p.27-28 / printed p.18-19).

What German Orientalism shared with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism was intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority: it is formed, irradiated, disseminated, instrumental and persuasive, establishes canons of taste and value, and is virtually indistinguishable from the ideas it dignifies as true (PDF p.28-29 / printed p.19-20, checked against the original). His devices for studying authority are strategic location and strategic formation: the author’s position in a text toward the Oriental material he writes about, and the way groups and genres of texts acquire mass, density and referential power among themselves and in the culture at large (PDF p.29 / printed p.20). His concern is not what lies hidden in the Orientalist text but its surface, its Exteriority: the Orientalist makes the Orient speak, describes it, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West, from outside it as an existential and moral fact, and the principal product of this exteriority is representation — as early as Aeschylus’s The Persians, where a threatening Otherness becomes grieving Asiatic women in a highly artificial enactment by a non-Oriental (PDF p.29-30 / printed p.20-21). What is circulated in a culture is not truth but representations; in written language there is no delivered presence but a re-presence, and a written statement about the Orient is a presence to the reader by virtue of having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as the Orient (PDF p.30 / printed p.21). Orientalism thus stands forth and away from the Orient and makes sense more by the West than by the Orient (PDF p.31 / printed p.22). After William Jones and Anquetil-Duperron and Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, Europe knew the Orient more scientifically and lived in it with greater authority and discipline, and the range of representation expanded enormously — the age of Oriental languages antedating Hebrew’s divine pedigree, preserved in the new science of Indo-European philology, and Beckford, Byron, Goethe and Hugo restructuring the Orient by their art; at most the real Orient provoked a writer to his vision and very rarely guided it (PDF p.31 / printed p.22). Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object; there was and is a linguistic Orient, a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient, but never a pure or unconditional Orient and never a nonmaterial Orientalism — in this he differs from historians of ideas (PDF p.31-32 / printed p.22-23). Against Foucault, he insists on the determining imprint of individual writers on the discursive formation: Orientalism is a system for citing works and authors, and Lane’s Manners and Customs was read and cited by Nerval, Flaubert and Richard Burton, its authority used even for village scenes in Syria; his analyses therefore employ close textual readings revealing the dialectic between the individual text or writer and the collective formation (PDF p.32-33 / printed p.23-24). The book is one installment of several, not a complete history; unwritten tasks include a general essay on imperialism and culture and, most important, studies in contemporary alternatives to Orientalism from a libertarian, nonrepressive and nonmanipulative perspective (PDF p.33 / printed p.24). His audiences are students of literature and criticism, contemporary students of the Orient from scholars to policymakers, the general reader, and readers in the so-called Third World, for whom the study illustrates the formidable structure of cultural domination and the dangers of employing it upon themselves or others (PDF p.33-34 / printed p.24-25). The three chapters and twelve shorter units are then summarized: Chapter One draws a large circle around the subject, Chapter Two traces modern Orientalism’s development to about 1870, and Chapter Three begins there, culminating in World War II and the shift from British and French to American hegemony (PDF p.34 / printed p.25).

Introduction, III.3 — PDF p.34-37 / printed p.25-28

The third aspect is the personal dimension. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks prescribe compiling an inventory of the infinity of traces the historical process has deposited in one (the English translation omits this conclusion, which Said restores from the Italian). Much of the personal investment in the study derives from his awareness of being an Oriental as a child growing up in two British colonies; all his education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, yet that deep early awareness persisted, and the study is an attempt to inventory the traces upon him, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been a powerful factor in the life of all Orientals — which is why the Islamic Orient is the center of attention (PDF p.34-35 / printed p.25-26). The circumstances making such a study possible include: extraordinary turbulence in East-West relations since the 1950s, in which East has always signified danger and threat; area-studies programs making scholarly study of the Orient a branch of national policy; the electronic age drawing the Orient nearer while television, films and the media forced information into standardized molds, intensifying the nineteenth-century demonology of the mysterious Orient (PDF p.35 / printed p.26). Three things made even the simplest perception of the Arabs and Islam a highly politicized, almost raucous matter: the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, reflected in Orientalism’s history; the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism and its effects on American Jews and the liberal culture and population at large; and the almost total absence of any cultural position making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately to discuss the Arabs or Islam — compounded by the Middle East’s identification with Great Power politics, oil economics and the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian and terroristic Arabs (PDF p.35-36 / printed p.26-27). The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening: an almost unanimous consensus that politically he does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental; no Orientalist in the United States has culturally and politically identified himself wholeheartedly with the Arabs in an acceptable form as liberal American identification with Zionism has (PDF p.36 / printed p.27). The nexus of knowledge and power creating the Oriental, and in a sense obliterating him as a human being, is therefore not an exclusively academic matter; literature and culture are not politically or historically innocent, and society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together (PDF p.36 / printed p.27, checked against the original). By an almost inescapable logic the book is also the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism, which closely resembles Orientalism in its Islamic branch; Said hopes to have advanced a little in what Raymond Williams called the unlearning of the inherent dominative mode (PDF p.36-37 / printed p.27-28). The Introduction ends here; Chapter 1’s title page and Fourier epigraph are at PDF p.38 / printed p.29, and PDF p.39 is blank.

Chapter 1, I. Knowing the Oriental — PDF p.40-58 / printed p.31-49

On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt, which he said belong to a wholly different category than those affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire. Said first builds Balfour’s authority: long-time member of Parliament, former private secretary to Lord Salisbury, former chief secretary for Ireland, former secretary for Scotland, former prime minister, serving a monarch declared Empress of India in 1876, placed to follow the Afghan and Zulu wars, the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the death of General Gordon in the Sudan, the Fashoda Incident, the battle of Omdurman, the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War, educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge — while some members were questioning the necessity for England in Egypt, the subject of Alfred Milner’s enthusiastic book of 1892, now that Egyptian nationalism was on the rise (PDF p.40 / printed p.31). Balfour himself restated J. M. Robertson’s question — what right have you to take up these airs of superiority with regard to people whom you choose to call Oriental — the choice of Oriental being canonical, employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope and Byron, and usable for an Oriental personality, atmosphere, tale, despotism or mode of production, as Marx had used it (PDF p.40-41 / printed p.31-32).

Balfour’s answer, quoted at length (PDF p.41-43 / printed p.32-34): he takes up no attitude of superiority, but asks anyone with even superficial knowledge of history to look in the face the facts a British statesman deals with in supremacy over great races like the inhabitants of Egypt; we know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country, further back and more intimately, a civilization already past its prime when our race’s history is lost in the prehistoric period — and do not talk about superiority or inferiority. Through the whole history of the Orientals in the East one never finds traces of self-government; all their great centuries were passed under despotisms and absolute government, and no Oriental nation of its own motion established what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government; a true Eastern sage would call the working government Britain has taken on in Egypt the dirty work, the inferior work, of carrying on the necessary labour. It is a good thing that this absolute government is exercised by us: they have got under it far better government than they ever had before, a benefit to them and to the whole of the civilised West, and we are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians but also for the sake of Europe at large. If it is our business to govern, with or without gratitude and without the loss — which by no means implies the indefinite postponement of Egyptian independence, as Said notes — of which we have relieved the population, it is performed by exporting our very best to these countries, administrators working amidst tens of thousands of persons of a different creed, race, discipline and conditions of life, whose sense of order depends on feeling that behind them stand the might, authority and sympathy of the country that sent them.

Said’s analysis (PDF p.41-44 / printed p.32-35): two great themes dominate Balfour’s remarks, knowledge and power, the Baconian themes. Knowledge for Balfour means surveying a civilization from origins to prime to decline; its object is a fact that is fundamentally, even ontologically stable, and to have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it and deny autonomy to it — British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and he nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority but takes them for granted. Balfour produces no evidence that Egyptians appreciate the good being done them and does not let the Egyptian speak for himself, since the speaking Egyptian would be the agitator who wishes to raise difficulties rather than the good native. Balfour’s logic is circular: England knows Egypt, Egypt cannot have self-government, England confirms it by occupying Egypt, and foreign occupation becomes the very basis of contemporary Egyptian civilization, so that parliamentary doubt undermining the authority of the dominant race makes the great task of the handful of British officials impossible. As a rhetorical performance Balfour plays and represents a variety of characters — the English, the civilized world, the West, the colonial officials — and speaks for the Orientals too, in that what they might say would uselessly confirm that they are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could know themselves, their great moments past, useful in the modern world only as rehabilitated residents of productive colonies.

Egypt was the vindication of Western imperialism, an almost academic example of Oriental backwardness become the triumph of English knowledge and power. Between 1882 — the occupation that ended the nationalist rebellion of Colonel Arabi — and 1907 England’s representative in Egypt was Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer; on July 30, 1907, Balfour supported a retirement prize of fifty thousand pounds for Cromer, saying Cromer’s services had raised Egypt from the lowest pitch of social and economic degradation to stand among Oriental nations absolutely alone in its prosperity, financial and moral — while British exports to Egypt equaled those to the whole of Africa (PDF p.44 / printed p.35). The general theory behind both Balfour and Cromer, reduced to its simplest form, is that there are Westerners and there are Orientals, the former dominate and the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of a Western power; that they could strip humanity down to such ruthless cultural and racial essences shows how streamlined the doctrine had become (PDF p.45 / printed p.36).

Cromer, who ruled first in India and then for twenty-five years in Egypt, wrote of subject races in the Edinburgh Review in January 1908: knowledge of subject races makes their management easy and profitable, in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control, and the empire will not dissolve if militarism, commercial egotism and free institutions in the colony are kept in check; since logic is something the existence of which the Oriental is disposed altogether to ignore, ruling means understanding his limitations and finding in the contentment of the subject race a stronger bond of union between rulers and ruled, imperial might lurking behind pacification — the Empire must be wise, tempering cupidity with selflessness and impatience with flexible discipline (PDF p.45-46 / printed p.36-37). In Cromer’s long quoted statement, each issue should be decided mainly by what Western knowledge and experience tempered by local considerations conscientiously think best for the subject race, without reference to advantage to England, fostering at most a cosmopolitan allegiance grounded on respect for superior talents and unselfish conduct and on gratitude for favours conferred and to come, so that the Egyptian will hesitate before throwing in his lot with any future Arabi and even the Central African savage may learn to chant a hymn in honour of Astraea Redux as represented by the British official who denies him gin but gives him justice — and commerce will gain (PDF p.46 / printed p.37). Cromer’s total opposition to Egyptian nationalism shows how much serious consideration the subject race’s proposals received: he asserted that the real future of Egypt lies not in the direction of a narrow nationalism, which will only embrace native Egyptians, but rather in that of an enlarged cosmopolitanism (PDF p.46 / printed p.37, checked against the original). Managing Orientals was almost everywhere nearly the same because Orientals were almost everywhere nearly the same (PDF p.46-47 / printed p.37-38).

This is the core of essential knowledge, academic and practical, inherited from a century of modern Western Orientalism: Orientals for all practical purposes were a Platonic essence any Orientalist or ruler might examine, understand and expose. Cromer’s canon in the thirty-fourth chapter of his two-volume Modern Egypt quotes Sir Alfred Lyall — accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind — and sets the European, a close reasoner, a natural logician, by nature sceptical, his trained intelligence working like a piece of mechanism, against the Oriental mind, like his picturesque streets eminently wanting in symmetry, its reasoning of the most slipshod description, the descendants of the ancient Arabs singularly deficient in the logical faculty, an ordinary Egyptian’s statement of facts lengthy and wanting in lucidity, contradicting himself half-a-dozen times and breaking down under the mildest cross-examination (PDF p.47 / printed p.38). Orientals or Arabs are then shown to be gullible, devoid of energy and initiative, much given to fulsome flattery, intrigue, cunning and unkindness to animals, inveterate liars, lethargic and suspicious, unable to walk on a road or pavement (PDF p.47-48 / printed p.38-39). Cromer, in his own words a diplomatist and administrator whose proper study is man from the point of view of governing him, notes that the Oriental generally acts, speaks and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European, deferring to orthodox Orientalist authorities such as Ernest Renan and Constantin de Volney; the Oriental is found guilty because the crime was that the Oriental was an Oriental, and Egyptian nationalism could therefore be proclaimed in Cromer’s last annual report an entirely novel idea, a plant of exotic rather than of indigenous growth (PDF p.48 / printed p.39).

Colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact. Since the middle of the eighteenth century two principal elements structured East-West relations: a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient, reinforced by the colonial encounter and the interest in the alien and unusual exploited by ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology and history, plus a sizable body of literature by novelists, poets, translators and gifted travelers; and Europe’s constant position of strength, not to say domination, the essential strong-weak relationship expressed as the Oriental irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, different, against the European rational, virtuous, mature, normal (PDF p.48-49 / printed p.39-40). Knowledge of the Orient, generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental and his world; in Balfour’s and Cromer’s language the Oriental is something one judges as in a court of law, studies and depicts as in a curriculum, disciplines as in a school or prison, and illustrates as in a zoological manual — contained and represented by dominating frameworks (PDF p.49 / printed p.40). During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Orient and everything in it was assumed, if not patently inferior, then in need of corrective study by the West; Orientalism is knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline or governing (PDF p.49-50 / printed p.40-41). The immense advance in Orientalism’s institutions and content coincides exactly with unparalleled European expansion: from 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent, the British and French empires greatest, adjacent and often fought over from the eastern Mediterranean to Indochina and Malaya, and encountering the Orient with greatest intensity in the Arab Near East, where Islam was supposed to define cultural and racial characteristics; Lord Salisbury in 1881 set out the choice as renounce, monopolize or share, and they resolved to share (PDF p.50 / printed p.41). What they shared was not only land, profit or rule but Orientalism itself, a library or archive of information commonly held, bound by a family of ideas and a unifying set of values: ideas that explained Orientals’ behavior, supplied them a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere, and allowed Europeans to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics, and that constrained the Orientals’ thought as well as the Occidentals’ — Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than as a positive doctrine, and its history deepened and hardened the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority, a refinement marked by retiring British administrators from India at fifty-five so that no Oriental was ever allowed to see a Westerner as he aged and degenerated, and no Westerner needed to see himself in the subject race’s eyes as anything but a vigorous, rational, ever-alert young Raj (PDF p.50-51 / printed p.41-42, the last passage checked against the original).

Orientalist ideas then took forms Said enumerates. First, the inherited vast literature and the Oriental renaissance (Edgar Quinet’s phrase) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from newly discovered and translated texts in Sanskrit, Zend and Arabic and a newly perceived East-West relationship whose keynote for the Near East and Europe was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, the very model of a truly scientific appropriation of one culture by another, apparently stronger one, setting in motion processes that still dominate contemporary cultural and political perspectives; the expedition’s Description de l’Égypte made Egypt, and subsequently the other Islamic lands, the live province, laboratory and theater of effective Western knowledge about the Orient (PDF p.51-52 / printed p.42-43). Second, modernization: Orientalists from the outset aimed to formulate their discoveries in modern terms — Renan’s 1848 linguistic investigations of Semitic drew authority from comparative grammar, comparative anatomy and racial theory — making Orientalism vulnerable to imperialism, positivism, utopianism, historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism and Spenglerism, while it built its paradigms, learned societies (Société asiatique, Royal Asiatic Society, Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, American Oriental Society), professorships and periodicals from the Fundgruben des Orients (1809) on (PDF p.52 / printed p.43). Third, Orientalism imposed limits on thought about the Orient: even Flaubert, Nerval and Scott were constrained in what they could experience or say, because Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality promoting the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, us) and the strange (the Orient, the East, them), a vision that in a sense created and then served the two worlds, in which a freedom of intercourse was the stronger culture’s privilege — an antihuman and persistent reality lasting to the present (PDF p.52-53 / printed p.43-44).

How Orientalism works is illustrated by Cromer’s “The Government of Subject Races”: the local agent, with a specialist’s knowledge of the native and Anglo-Saxon individuality, may treat subjects of local interest in a manner calculated to damage or jeopardize Imperial interests, while the central authority in London can ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine and realize the circumstances attendant on the government of the dependency — a seat of power in the West radiating a great embracing machine eastward, whose branches feed in human material, material wealth and knowledge to be processed into more power, the specialist translating mere Oriental matter into a subject race or an Oriental mentality for the enhancement of authority at home; knowledge, however special, is regulated first by the specialist’s local concerns, later by the general concerns of a social system of authority (PDF p.53-54 / printed p.44-45). Cromer’s proper study is also man, where Pope’s proper study of mankind meant all men including the poor Indian; the proper study of Orientals in this sense is Orientalism, and the order of sovereignty from East to West was given its clearest form by Kipling’s chain — mule, horse, elephant or bullock obeying his driver, up through sergeant, lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, brigadier and general to the Viceroy, servant of the Empress (PDF p.54 / printed p.45). The main intellectual issue is whether human reality can be divided into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies and races and the consequences survived humanly — avoiding the hostility of us (Westerners) and they (Orientals) — since using Oriental and Western as starting and end points of analysis, research and public policy polarizes the distinction, limits the human encounter, and channels thought into a West or an East compartment, the sense of Western power over the Orient taken for granted as scientific truth (PDF p.54-55 / printed p.45-46).

The contemporary illustration is Henry Kissinger’s essay “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy”, proceeding by binary opposition — prophetic and political styles, developed and developing halves — in which the West is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer and knowledge consists of recording and classifying data, while cultures that escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking retain the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely internal to the observer, and empirical reality has a much different significance for many of the new countries than for the West (PDF p.55-56 / printed p.46-47). Kissinger does not need to quote Lyall on the Oriental’s inability to be accurate; we had our Newtonian revolution and they did not, and the lines are drawn as Balfour and Cromer drew them, sixty or more years on, except that Kissinger must respect the pre-Newtonian perspective’s flexibility for contemporary revolutionary turmoil and charges the post-Newtonian world with constructing an international order before a crisis imposes it — still a way for the developing world to be contained, like Cromer’s harmonious machine; his distinction, drawn, as Said puts it, on a fund of pedigreed knowledge, is identical with the orthodox Orientalist one and is not value-free, its words — prophetic, accuracy, internal, empirical reality, order — characterizing attractive virtues or menacing defects (PDF p.56 / printed p.47, the pedigreed-knowledge passage checked against the original). Section I continues beyond PDF p.56.

The section closes with a second contemporary illustration dovetailing with Kissinger’s analysis: Harold W. Glidden, a retired member of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, United States Department of State, in “The Arab World”, American Journal of Psychiatry, February 1972 — a four-page, double-columned psychological portrait of over 100 million people, considered for a period of 1,300 years, citing exactly four sources (a recent book on Tripoli, one issue of Al-Ahram, Oriente Moderno, and a book by Majid Khadduri) (PDF p.57 / printed p.48). Glidden’s Arabs stress conformity, inhabit a shame culture, can function only in conflict situations, base prestige solely on domination, and make a virtue of revenge — citing the June 29, 1970 Ahram for 1,070 cases of murder in Egypt in 1969, 20 percent to wipe out shame, 30 percent to satisfy real or imaginary wrongs, 31 percent for blood revenge — and for them “objectivity is not a value in the Arab system” (PDF p.57 / printed p.48). Only “success counts” and “the end justifies the means”; “the art of subterfuge is highly developed in Arab life, as well as in Islam itself”; and in Arab tribal society “strife, not peace, was the normal state of affairs because raiding was one of the two main supports of the economy” (PDF p.57-58 / printed p.48-49). Said calls this the apogee of Orientalist confidence: no merely asserted generality is denied the dignity of truth, and “no theoretical list of Oriental attributes is without application to the behavior of Orientals in the real world”. On one side Westerners — rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion — and on the other Arab-Orientals, none of these things; Said asks what specialized skills, imaginative pressures, institutions, traditions and cultural forces produce such similarity in the descriptions of the Orient in Cromer, Balfour and contemporary statesmen (PDF p.58 / printed p.49).

Chapter 1, II. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental — PDF p.58-82 / printed p.49-73

Strictly speaking Orientalism is a field of learned study, considered in the Christian West to have commenced its formal existence with the decision of the Church Council of Vienne in 1312 to establish chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon and Salamanca (PDF p.58-59 / printed p.49-50). Fields are made; speaking of specialization as a geographical “field” is revealing, since no symmetrical field called Occidentalism is imaginable, and no other discipline takes a fixed geographical position towards a full half of the world: Orientalism’s chief characteristic is enormous, indiscriminate size plus an almost infinite capacity for subdivision, a confusing amalgam of imperial vagueness and precise detail (PDF p.59 / printed p.50). Its rule of development was increasing scope, not greater selectivity: Renaissance Orientalists such as Erpenius and Guillaume Postel were specialists in the languages of the Biblical provinces; until the mid-eighteenth century Orientalists were Biblical scholars, Semitic-language students, Islamic specialists or Sinologists; the middle expanse of Asia was opened in the later eighteenth century by Anquetil-Duperron and Sir William Jones’s revelation of Avestan and Sanskrit (PDF p.60 / printed p.51). Raymond Schwab’s La Renaissance orientale and Jules Mohl’s Vingt-sept Ans d’histoire des études orientales (1840-1867) index its mid-nineteenth-century vastness; Hugo in 1829 put the change as Au siècle de Louis XIV on était helléniste, maintenant on est orientaliste (PDF p.60-61 / printed p.51-52). Its blind spots: academic Orientalists studied the classical period, not the modern Orient (Napoleon’s Institut d’Égypte the single major exception), and the Orient studied was a textual universe, its rapport with Orientalists textual — producing, beside exact positive knowledge, a second-order knowledge Kiernan called “Europe’s collective day-dream of the Orient”, and a genre of Orientalist writing in Hugo, Goethe, Nerval, Flaubert and Fitzgerald shadowed by a free-floating mythology of the Orient (PDF p.61-62 / printed p.52-53). The designation survives — the Oxford Oriental faculty, Princeton’s department, the 1959 commission behind the Hayter Report (1961), H. A. R. Gibb preferring “Orientalist” to “Arabist” — and Said turns to knowledge and geography (PDF p.62 / printed p.53).

Imaginative geography: following Lévi-Strauss’s science of the concrete and Bachelard’s poetics of space, Said argues that designating a familiar space “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “theirs” is a universal practice of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary, requiring no acknowledgment by the barbarians designated; societies derive identity negatively, as the fifth-century Athenian felt himself nonbarbarian as much as Athenian (PDF p.62-64 / printed p.53-55). Imaginative geography and history intensify the mind’s sense of itself by dramatizing distance and difference, and positive history and geography have not dispelled them; at least until the early eighteenth century, as R. W. Southern showed, European understanding of Islamic culture was ignorant but complex (PDF p.64-65 / printed p.55-56). Two motifs from Aeschylus’s The Persians and Euripides’s The Bacchae persist: Europe powerful and articulate, Asia defeated and distant, Europe articulating the otherwise silent and dangerous Orient as Aeschylus makes Asia speak in the aged Persian queen; and the Orient as insinuating danger, its mysteries to be sized up with the judgment Cadmus and Tiresias counsel (PDF p.65-66 / printed p.56-57). Classical taxonomic lore, Herodotus and Alexander as predecessors subdividing the Orient into realms known and unknown, Christianity’s Near and Far Orient — Grousset’s “l’empire du Levant” — and the Orient’s vacillation between Old World returned to and New World discovered, yield an internally structured archive whose typical encapsulations are the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype and the polemical confrontation, and a median category that sees new things as versions of a previously known thing, controlling novelty as a threat (PDF p.66-68 / printed p.57-59).

Islam is the test case. Judged a fraudulent new version of Christianity, its novelty “handled”, the Orient vacillates between contempt for the familiar and fear of novelty; after Mohammed’s death in 632 Islam’s hegemony grew — Persia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, North Africa, Spain, Sicily and parts of France in the eighth and ninth centuries, as far east as India, Indonesia and China by the thirteenth and fourteenth — and Europe responded with fear and awe, Islam becoming a lasting trauma symbolizing terror, devastation and the demonic, the “Ottoman peril” current until the end of the seventeenth century (PDF p.68-69 / printed p.59-60). Norman Daniel’s study of its reception: because Christ is the basis of Christian faith it was assumed, quite incorrectly, that Mohammed was to Islam as Christ was to Christianity — hence “Mohammedanism” and the epithet “imposter”; Islam became an image whose function was to represent it not in itself but for the medieval Christian, and what Muslims said they believed was accepted only with very great reluctance (PDF p.69-70 / printed p.60-61). Southern’s account of the 1450-1460 contraferentia episode — John of Segovia, Nicholas of Cusa, Jean Germain and Aeneas Silvius (Pius II) attempting a staged conference to convert Muslims — shows, in Said’s reading, Western ignorance becoming more refined and complex rather than positive knowledge increasing; Mohammed heaped with attributes of lechery, debauchery, sodomy and treachery deriving “logically” from his doctrinal impostures, the Orient and the Oriental becoming repetitious pseudo-incarnations of some great original (Christ, Europe, the West) (PDF p.70-72 / printed p.61-63).

Representation is theatrical: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined, a closed field affixed to Europe, stocked with a prodigious cultural repertoire — the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sodom and Gomorrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the Genii, the Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet — drawn on by Ariosto, Milton, Marlowe, Tasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes and the authors of the Chanson de Roland and the Poema del Cid (PDF p.72 / printed p.63). The celebrated instance is Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697, preface by Antoine Galland), the standard reference work in Europe until the early nineteenth century: alphabetically arranged, dividing history into sacred and profane and pre- and postdiluvian, satisfying readers’ expectations rather than revising received ideas, and placing Mohammed — “the famous imposter Mahomet, Author and Founder of a heresy” in Said’s translation of its entry — quietly on his portion of the Orientalist stage, given a genealogy, an explanation and a development subsumed under statements that prevent him from straying elsewhere (PDF p.72-75 / printed p.63-66). The Bibliothèque conveys Orientalism’s three-way force on the Orient, the Orientalist and the Western consumer: the Orient is Orientalized, the uninitiated reader is forced to accept Orientalist codifications as the true Orient, and truth becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself (PDF p.76 / printed p.67). All cultures impose corrections on raw reality, but the Orientalist makes it his disciplined work always to be converting the Orient from something into something else, in a process supplied by the prevailing cultural and political norms of the West and tending to become more total — the insensitive schematization of the entire Orient (PDF p.76-77 / printed p.67-68).

Dante’s Inferno illustrates the schematization: Mohammed in canto 28, in the eighth circle’s ninth Bolgia among the seminator di scandalo e di scisma, endlessly cleft in two, pointing to Ali and warning Fra Dolcino; Avicenna, Averroes and Saladin in the first circle among the virtuous heathens; empirical data counting for very little beside the Orientalist vision common to all who have thought about the Orient in the West (PDF p.77-78 / printed p.68-69). Isaiah Berlin’s account of a single all-inclusive hierarchy, in which to know a thing’s cosmic place is to say what it is and why, is “profoundly anti-empirical” — and so is the Orientalist attitude, a closed system in which objects are what they are for ontological reasons no empirical material can dislodge (PDF p.79 / printed p.70). Henri Pirenne: the Islamic invasions from the seventh century moved European culture’s center from the Mediterranean, then an Arab province, towards the North, and Islam became the epitome of an outsider against which European civilization was founded; in Dante, the Cluniac Orientalists, the polemicists from Guibert of Nogent and Bede to Luther, the Poema del Cid, the Chanson de Roland and Othello, the Orient and Islam are always represented as outsiders having a special role inside Europe (PDF p.79-80 / printed p.70-71). Underlying the discourse is a set of representative figures or tropes, declarative and self-evident in the timeless eternal tense, symmetrical to and diametrically inferior to a European equivalent: “Mohammed is an imposter”, the evidence contained in the “is”, Humphrey Prideaux’s biography of Mohammed subtitled The True Nature of Imposture — philosophically a form of radical realism, rhetorically anatomical and enumerative, psychologically a form of paranoia (PDF p.80-82 / printed p.71-73).

Chapter 1, III. Projects — PDF p.82-101 / printed p.73-92

Against Michelet’s menacing idea that “the Orient advances, invincible, fatal to the gods of light by the charm of its dreams, by the magic of its chiaroscuro”, Said considers the material evidence of Europe’s advance: in general it was the West that moved upon the East, not vice versa (PDF p.82 / printed p.73). Islam excepted, the Orient for Europe was until the nineteenth century a domain of unchallenged Western dominance (the Japanese Christians who threw the Portuguese out in 1638-1639 the occasional disturbance); only the Arab and Islamic Orient presented an unresolved challenge. Islam lay uneasily close to Christianity, drew on Judeo-Hellenic traditions, and from the end of the seventh century until Lepanto in 1571 dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity; Gibbon’s Omar figures — in ten years thirty-six thousand cities or castles reduced, four thousand churches or temples destroyed, fourteen hundred mosques edified — stand for its outstripping of Rome (PDF p.82-84 / printed p.73-75). The “militant” Orient, Henri Baudet’s “Asiatic tidal wave”, is what “Orient” most rigorously meant through the mid-eighteenth century; India, by contrast, never provided an indigenous threat, native authority crumbling to inter-European rivalry and outright control — Britain and France fighting there in 1744-1748 and 1756-1763 until Britain emerged in practical control in 1769 — and until the early nineteenth century “Oriental languages” was a synonym for “Semitic languages” (PDF p.84-85 / printed p.75-76). Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens (first volume 1708) gave Europe its first authentic and substantial taste of the Arab viewpoint, yet Ockley dissociated himself from Islam as an outrageous heresy — unlike William Whiston, expelled from Cambridge in 1709 for his Islamic enthusiasm (PDF p.84-85 / printed p.75-76, checked against the original).

Before Napoleon only two scholarly projects invaded the Orient beyond the shelter of the Biblical Orient. Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) traveled to Surat, found a cache of Avestan texts and translated the Avesta (1759) and the Upanishads (1786); Schwab’s verdict, quoted, is that he “had dug a channel between the hemispheres of human genius”, and for the first time the Orient was revealed to Europe in the materiality of its texts, languages and civilizations (PDF p.85-86 / printed p.76-77). William Jones closed the vistas Anquetil opened, codifying, tabulating, comparing: master of Arabic, Hebrew and Persian before leaving for India in 1783, author of the “Objects of Enquiry During My Residence in Asia”, founder-convener of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in January 1784, assistant to Wilkins on the Institutes of Manu under Warren Hastings’s decision that Indians be ruled by their own laws, and author of the pronouncement grounding Sanskrit, Greek and Latin in a common source (PDF p.86-88 / printed p.77-79). The early Orientalists were judges or doctors — Quinet: L’Asie a les prophètes; L’Europe a les docteurs — rescuing a lost classical grandeur to facilitate ameliorations in a decrepit modern Orient; and characteristically they learned the Orient only after arriving, improvising it down to a province (PDF p.88-89 / printed p.79-80).

Napoleon, readied in Italy in 1797 after Campo Formio, attracted to the Orient since adolescence and knowing Egypt textually, wanted the whole of Egypt and prepared with unparalleled, fanatically schematic thoroughness — the first encounter in which the Orientalist’s expertise was put directly to functional colonial use, the Orientalist always choosing the conquering West at the crucial instant (PDF p.89 / printed p.80-81). His living archive was the Institut d’Égypte and his prior reliance Volney’s Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787) and Considérations (1788), with its three wars — against England, the Ottoman Porte and, most difficult, the Muslims (PDF p.90 / printed p.81-82). The proclamation of July 2, 1798 (“nous sommes les vrais musulmans”), the team of Orientalists, the sixty Azhar ulemas flattered at his quarters, and the instruction to Kléber to administer Egypt through Orientalists and won-over religious leaders made the conquest a uniquely benign and selective war, which Hugo celebrated with Napoleon as “un Mahomet d’occident” (PDF p.91-92 / printed p.82-83). The textual attitude was bolstered by Revolutionary decrees, notably that of 10 Germinal An III — March 30, 1793, as printed — establishing an école publique in the Bibliothèque nationale, and by Silvestre de Sacy, from June 1796 the first and only teacher of Arabic at the École publique des langues orientales, teacher of nearly every major Orientalist in Europe (PDF p.92 / printed p.83). The other part of the project was to render Egypt completely open: the Institut as the army’s learned division recording everything in the Description de l’Égypte, published in twenty-three enormous volumes between 1809 and 1828 (PDF p.92-93 / printed p.83-84, checked against the original). Fourier’s préface historique presents Egypt as the center of the ancient continent and the homeland of the arts, annexation as its destiny, and Napoleon as offering the Orient “all the advantages of a perfected civilization”; Said’s long enumeration of the Orientalist projection realized in the Description ends with transmuting living reality into the stuff of texts, and the Description supplants Egyptian history by identifying its record with world history, a euphemism for European history (PDF p.93-96 / printed p.84-87).

Out of the expedition issued textual children — Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire, Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient, Flaubert’s Salammbô, Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Madinah and Meccah — and two further projects: the scientific, Renan’s Système comparé et histoire générale des langues sémitiques (1848, for the Prix Volney), and the geopolitical, Ferdinand de Lesseps’s Suez Canal and England’s occupation of Egypt in 1882 (PDF p.97 / printed p.88). De Lesseps, whose father Mathieu had come to Egypt with Napoleon, returned in 1854 and completed the canal fifteen years later without an engineering background, planting contributors in the world-historical theater with his “pensée morale” and the Compagnie universelle (1858); Thomas Cook’s Excursionist and Tourist Advertiser of July 1, 1869, hailed the November 17 inauguration as the greatest engineering feat of the century (PDF p.97-99 / printed p.88-90). The opening ceremonies, with the papal envoy’s November 16 speech on the Cross respected before the Crescent and the globe’s two extremities recognizing their fraternity, embodied de Lesseps’s theatrical vocabulary; the West had come to the Orient never to leave it, until in July 1956 Nasser would activate Egypt’s takeover of the canal by pronouncing de Lesseps’s name (PDF p.99-100 / printed p.90-91). In the Suez Canal idea Said sees the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and effort: the Orient, first known, then invaded and possessed, then re-created as the true classical Orient beyond the modern Oriental’s ken, was transubstantiated from resistant hostility into obliging partnership; thereafter “Oriental” is an administrative or executive notion, and the Oriental, like the African, a member of a subject race for imperialists like Balfour and anti-imperialists like J. A. Hobson alike (PDF p.100-101 / printed p.91-92).

Chapter 1, IV. Crisis — PDF p.101-119 / printed p.92-110

The section opens the Textual attitude: it is a fallacy, as Voltaire’s Candide and Cervantes’s Don Quixote attack it, to assume the swarming, unpredictable mess of human life can be understood on the basis of what books say, yet it is a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters (PDF p.101-102 / printed p.92-93). Two situations favor it: confronting something relatively unknown, threatening and previously distant — travel books and guidebooks are its natural texts, and travelers say an experience was not what they expected, meaning not what a book said — and the appearance of success, as when a book claiming lions are fierce, whose instructions for dealing with a fierce lion work, impels its author to further written performance (PDF p.102-103 / printed p.93-94). The dialectic of reinforcement narrows from lions to their fierceness, which the recommended handling actually increases; such texts are not easily dismissed, acquire the authority of academics, institutions and governments, and can create not only knowledge but the very reality they appear to describe, producing a tradition, or what Foucault calls a discourse. Napoleon and de Lesseps knew the Orient from books in Orientalism’s library of idées reçues; their Orient was silent, available to Europe for projects never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist them — the sign of the West’s will to power over the Orient, with another side to the strength depending on the pressures of the Orientalist tradition (PDF p.103 / printed p.94).

The other side is the textual attitude itself, which lives its own life, as books about fierce lions will do until lions can talk back: the discourse suffused Napoleon and de Lesseps’s activity with meaning, intelligibility and reality above and beyond the Orient’s powerlessness, and their success had all the actual human interchange of the Judge’s monologue in Trial by Jury. Orientalists plotted Oriental history, character and destiny as historians like Michelet, Ranke, Toqueville (as printed) and Burckhardt emplotted their narratives “as a story of a particular kind” (PDF p.104 / printed p.95, note 87 checked against the original). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Orientalism accomplished its self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution; Napoleon, de Lesseps, Cromer and Balfour are far more regular, far less unusual, once the schemata of d’Herbelot and Dante are recalled with a modernized engine (the nineteenth-century European empire) and a positive twist — since the Orient cannot be ontologically obliterated, it can be captured, treated, described, improved, radically altered (PDF p.104 / printed p.95). The transition from merely textual apprehension to putting it into practice in the Orient did take place, and Orientalism’s strictly scholarly work — scholars, languages taught, manuscripts edited, translated and commented on, sympathetic students of Sanskrit grammar, Phoenician numismatics and Arabic poetry — nonetheless overrode the Orient: an observation about a tenth-century Arab poet multiplied itself into a policy towards the Oriental mentality in Egypt, Iraq or Arabia, and a verse from the Koran was considered the best evidence of an ineradicable Muslim sensuality; Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient absolutely different from the West and in its post-eighteenth-century form could never revise itself, which makes Cromer and Balfour inevitable (PDF p.105 / printed p.96). The closeness between politics and Orientalism is an important yet extremely sensitive truth, raising questions of innocence or guilt and scholarly disinterest or pressure-group complicity in fields such as black or women’s studies and drawing attention to the debased position of the Orient as an object of study — whether any other than a political master-slave relation could produce the Orientalized Orient as Anwar Abdel Malek characterized it (PDF p.105-106 / printed p.96-97).

Said quotes Abdel Malek at length: the Orient and Orientals as an object of study stamped with a constitutive, essentialist otherness, passive, non-participating, non-autonomous and non-sovereign, the only admitted Oriental subject the alienated being defined and acted by others; and an essentialist thematic, an ethnist typology proceeding towards racism, in which an inalienable essence transfixes the studied being outside historical evolution — a homo Sinicus, a homo Arabicus, a homo Africanus, the normal man being the European since Greek antiquity — europocentrism accompanying the hegemonism of possessing minorities and anthropocentrism in the human and social sciences from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (PDF p.106 / printed p.97). Said then outlines the nineteenth-century accumulation of weight and power: Britain and France dominated the discipline for at least a century and a half from the last decades of the eighteenth century; the philological discoveries of Jones, Franz Bopp and Jakob Grimm were indebted to manuscripts brought from the East to Paris and London, almost every Orientalist began as a philologist, and comparative philology carried forward a new scientific self-consciousness and a proclivity to divide and subdivide its subject without changing its mind about the Orient (PDF p.107 / printed p.98). Friedrich Schlegel illustrates both traits: his Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808) set Sanskrit and Persian with Greek and German against the Semitic, Chinese, American and African languages, found the Semites different, inferior and backward, their language agglutinative, unaesthetic and mechanical, and their religion, as he is quoted, a “dead empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith” (PDF p.107-108 / printed p.98-99). Language and race seemed inextricably tied, the good Orient a classical period in a long-gone India, the bad Orient present-day Asia, parts of North Africa and Islam everywhere; the Aryan myth, as Leon Poliakov showed, dominated at the expense of the lesser peoples, Poliakov never remarking that Semites were not only the Jews but the Muslims as well (PDF p.108 / printed p.99). The official genealogy — Gobineau, Renan, Humboldt, Steinthal, Burnouf, Remusat, Palmer, Weil, Dozy, Muir — and the learned societies (Société asiatique 1822, Royal Asiatic Society 1823, American Oriental Society 1842) are set beside the imaginative and travel literature that strengthened the field’s divisions — Goethe to Gautier, and later Doughty, Barrès, Loti, T. E. Lawrence and Forster (the surname Barrès checked against the original, PDF p.108) — supported by excavations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria and Turkey and by major geographical surveys, and materially abetted by the European occupation of the entire Near Orient except parts of the Ottoman Empire, swallowed up after 1918 (PDF p.108-109 / printed p.99-100).

To colonize meant at first the identification, indeed the creation, of interests — commercial, communicational, religious, military, cultural — tended for Islam by a complex apparatus: the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1698), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701), the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) and the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (1808), missions that, in the phrase Said quotes, openly joined the expansion of Europe, together with trading and learned societies, exploration and translation funds, and schools, missions, consular offices, factories and European communities implanted in the Orient (PDF p.109 / printed p.100). The typical experiences and emotions come next, first disappointment that the modern Orient is not at all like the texts: Nerval to Gautier at the end of August 1843, regretting Egypt driven out of his imagination now that he had sadly placed it in his memory — the betrayed dream of Romanticism and of travelers in the Biblical Orient from Chateaubriand to Mark Twain (PDF p.109-110 / printed p.100-101). Memory disputes imagination and sends one back to it; to write the modern Orient is either demystification or confinement to Hugo’s Orient as image or pensée, and the mind learns to separate a general apprehension of the Orient from a specific experience of it. In Scott’s The Talisman (1825), Sir Kenneth, having found Saladin in disguise not so bad a fellow, nonetheless damns his race and religion generally while exempting him in particular; Scott, no expert on Islam though H. A. R. Gibb praised the novel’s insight into Islam and Saladin, took enormous liberties with Eblis (PDF p.110 / printed p.101). The general category offers the specific instance a limited terrain: a single Oriental is first an Oriental, second a human being, and last again an Oriental. Disraeli’s 1831 Cairo letter and Tancred’s racial platitudes — Arabs as simply Jews on horseback — show unisons made between general categories, an Orient of ease, despotism, sensuality and fatalism usable unquestioningly by writers as different as Marx, Disraeli, Burton and Nerval (PDF p.111 / printed p.102). The whole Orient made a general object can illustrate a particular form of eccentricity, enjoyed for its own sake in Flaubert’s Cairo spectacle passages, quoted: the European watcher is never involved, always detached, and the Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness, which then becomes a topic for texts, its foreignness translated, its meanings decoded, its hostility tamed, its generality, disenchantment and eccentricity redistributed in what is written about it (PDF p.111-112 / printed p.102-103). Carl Becker’s Islam, a failed Oriental attempt to employ Greek philosophy without Renaissance Europe’s creative inspiration, and Louis Massignon’s Islam, a systematic rejection of the Christian incarnation whose greatest hero is the crucified al-Hallaj rather than Mohammed or Averroes, both leave out the eccentricity they backhandedly acknowledge by regularizing it in Western terms; the modern Orientalist as judge does not stand apart objectively, his detachment weighted with orthodox Orientalist attitudes, his Orient not the Orient as it is but the Orient as it has been Orientalized (PDF p.112-113 / printed p.103-104).

An unbroken arc of knowledge and power connects the Western statesman and the Western Orientalists, the rim of the stage containing the Orient; by the end of World War I Africa and the Orient formed a privileged terrain for the West, and the absolute unanimity between the scope of Orientalism and the scope of empire provoked the only crisis in the history of Western thought about and dealings with the Orient, which continues now (PDF p.113 / printed p.104). From the twenties the response to empire across the Third World was dialectical; by the Bandung Conference in 1955 the entire Orient had gained political independence and confronted the United States and the Soviet Union, and Orientalism faced a challenging and politically armed Orient it could not recognize as its own. Two alternatives opened — to carry on as if nothing had happened, or to adapt the old ways to the new — a third, revisionist alternative, to dispense with Orientalism altogether, being considered by only a tiny minority, since to the Orientalist the new is simply the old betrayed by new, misunderstanding dis-Orientals (PDF p.113-114 / printed p.104-105). Abdel Malek’s index of the crisis is the awareness of the time-lag between the conceptions, methods and instruments of the human and social sciences and those of Orientalism; the Orientalists from Renan to Goldziher, Macdonald, von Grunebaum, Gibb and Bernard Lewis saw Islam as a cultural synthesis studyable apart from the economics, sociology and politics of the Islamic peoples, its meaning reducible in Renan’s first treatise to “tent and tribe”, the impact of colonialism and historical development disregarded (PDF p.114 / printed p.105).

Gibb’s career illustrates both alternatives within itself. His 1945 Haskell Lectures at the University of Chicago, Modern Trends in Islam, opened, in a world made cataclysmically new, with the Arab mind’s intense feeling for the separateness and individuality of concrete events, Macdonald’s “lack of a sense of law” as the characteristic difference in the Oriental, and the Muslims’ aversion from rationalism rooted in the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination — pure Orientalism whose inaugural biases obstruct any understanding of modern Islam: Said asks, as for modern Islam itself, despite the complexities of Gibb’s otherwise magisterial understanding of it, why it must be regarded with so implacable a hostility as Gibb’s, and that logic opposes Islamic reform as a betrayal of Islam (PDF p.114-115 / printed p.105-106). Eighteen years later Gibb, as director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, announced the second alternative in “Area Studies Reconsidered”: “the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists”, and the formula is the traditional Orientalist plus a good social scientist, the Orientalist’s expertise reminding his colleagues that applying Western political psychology and mechanics to Asian or Arab situations “is pure Walt Disney” (PDF p.115-116 / printed p.106-107). In practice, Said argues, that means colonial resistance is read as Orientals never understanding self-government as we do, contradictory Oriental behavior is flattened into the formula that they’re all Orientals at bottom, and with Bernard Lewis Arab Palestinian opposition to Israeli settlement and occupation of their lands is merely “the return of Islam” — history, politics and economics do not matter (PDF p.116 / printed p.107). Modern Orientalists, as area experts, profited: indistinguishable from other experts and advisers in Harold Lasswell’s policy sciences, they supplied the military-national-security alliance of national character analysis and Islamic expertise against a totalitarian enemy collecting gullible Oriental allies — the stick-and-carrot technique, the Alliance for Progress, SEATO — traditional knowledge retooled for manipulation, sociologists reminding us Arabs are addicted to “oral functions” and recycled-Orientalist economists that for modern Islam neither capitalism nor socialism is an adequate rubric (PDF p.116-117 / printed p.107-108). Contemporary attitudes flood the press and the popular mind — Arabs as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth affronts real civilization — on the assumption that the Western consumer, a numerical minority, is entitled to own or expend the majority of the world’s resources because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being: no purer example of dehumanized thought, and of Abdel Malek’s hegemonism of possessing minorities allied with anthropocentrism and europocentrism (PDF p.117 / printed p.108). Orientalism views the Orient as fixed in time and place for the West, entire periods of its history considered mere responses to the West, the West the actor, spectator, judge and jury; the Orientalist is stunned by intrinsic change, cannot credit the new Oriental leaders, intellectuals and policy-makers quoted as having learned from their predecessors’ travail, no longer seeking a favorable verdict from the invisible jury of the West, their dialogue not with the West but with their fellow-citizens, and assumes whatever his texts have not prepared him for is outside agitation or the Orient’s misguided inanity — none of the Orientalist texts on Islam, including their summa, The Cambridge History of Islam, can prepare a reader for what has taken place since 1948 in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or the Yemens (PDF p.117-118 / printed p.108-109). When the dogmas cannot serve, recourse is to Orientalized social-science jargon — elites, political stability, modernization, institutional development — while the rift between Orient and Occident grows more dangerous. Said closes the chapter by stating the study’s double aim, to expose the sources of Orientalism’s views and to reflect on its importance: humanists can learn from Orientalism how to limit or enlarge realistically the scope of a discipline’s claims and to see the human ground, Yeats’s foul-rag-and-bone shop of the heart, in which texts, visions, methods and disciplines begin, grow, thrive and degenerate, and must first virtually see the humanistic values Orientalism has all but eliminated (PDF p.118-119 / printed p.109-110).

Chapter 2 — title page and epigraphs — PDF p.120-121

Chapter Two, “Orientalist Structures and Restructures”, opens with two epigraphs: Edward William Lane’s Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, on the young man who carried his drawn-out intestines on a silver tray before the wedding procession of a daughter of the seyyid ‘Omar, the Nakeeb el-Ashraf — “this foolish and disgusting act” — and Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient, in French without translation, projecting that on the Ottoman empire’s fall the European powers will each take a protectorate, a suzerainty defined as European law consisting principally in the right to occupy territory or coasts for free cities, European colonies and trading stations, an armed and civilizing tutelage exercised under the flag of a stronger nationality (PDF p.120). PDF p.121 is blank in the original (checked).

Chapter 2, I. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion — PDF p.122-132 / printed p.113-123

Gustave Flaubert died in 1880 without finishing Bouvard et Pécuchet, his comic encyclopedic novel on the degeneration of knowledge and the inanity of human effort: two bourgeois clerks, one unexpectedly inheriting, retire to do what they please and pass through agriculture, history, chemistry, education, archaeology and literature with less than successful results, travelers through the whole disillusioning experience of the nineteenth century in which, in Charles Morazé’s phrase, “les bourgeois conquérants” are the bumbling victims of their own leveling incompetence (PDF p.122 / printed p.113). Two items in Flaubert’s sketches for the conclusion frame the chapter. Bouvard sees the future of Humanity brightly against Pécuchet’s glass darkly: modern man is progressing, “Europe will be regenerated by Asia”, the historical law is that civilization moves from Orient to Occident, and the two forms of humanity will at last be soldered together — an obvious echo of Quinet, interrupted rudely by gendarmes accusing Bouvard of debauchery. And the two men confess their secret desire to become copyists again, have a double desk made, and turn to it: from living and applying knowledge they are reduced to transcribing it uncritically from one text to another (PDF p.122-123 / printed p.113-114). Bouvard’s vision is global and reconstructive, the nineteenth-century predilection for rebuilding the world according to an imaginative vision, sometimes with a special scientific technique — the utopias of Saint-Simon and Fourier, Comte’s scientific regenerations, and the technical or secular religions of ideologues, positivists, eclectics, occultists, traditionalists and idealists from Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis to Michelet, Cousin, Proudhon, Cournot, Cabet, Janet and Lamennais, each espoused by the clerks, ruined, and replaced (PDF p.123 / printed p.114). The roots of such revisionist ambitions are Romantic in a specific way: a major part of the late-eighteenth-century spiritual and intellectual project was a reconstituted theology, natural supernaturalism in M. H. Abrams’s term, whose notion of regeneration reverts to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and its violent reversals — destruction and creation, hell and heaven, exile, death and rebirth — reconstituted after the Enlightenment so as to save the overview of human history and destiny and the cardinal values of the religious heritage in intellectually acceptable form (PDF p.123-124 / printed p.114-115).

The regeneration of Europe by Asia was a very influential Romantic idea: Schlegel and Novalis urged a detailed study of India because Indian culture and religion could defeat the materialism and mechanism (and republicanism) of Occidental culture, and what mattered was not Asia so much as Asia’s use to modern Europe; whoever mastered an Oriental language was a spiritual hero, a knight-errant restoring Europe’s lost sense of holy mission, a sense the later secular religions carry on, Auguste Comte, like Bouvard, adhering to a secular post-Enlightenment myth whose outlines are unmistakably Christian (PDF p.124 / printed p.115). Underneath the idée reçue lurked an insidious hubris: neither Europe nor Asia was anything without the visionaries’ technique for turning vast geographical domains into treatable, manageable entities, historical laws were in reality historians’ laws, and Flaubert mocked the blithe indifference to actuality of an enthusiastic, even messianic European science that never reckoned with its own unself-conscious bad innocence, the resistance of reality, or the egoistic will to power feeding the scientist who cannot see that the Orient may not wish to regenerate Europe (the passage at the foot of PDF p.124 is scrambled in the text copy and was reassembled from the original) (PDF p.124-125 / printed p.115-116). The novel’s conclusion — the two men content to copy their favorite ideas faithfully from book onto paper, knowledge passed on silently without comment from one text to another, ideas propagated anonymously and re-echoed uncritically as idées reçues — frames in highly compressed form the specifically modern structures of Orientalism, one discipline among the secular and quasi-religious faiths of nineteenth-century European thought (PDF p.125 / printed p.116).

Four interlocking eighteenth-century elements hinted at the coming evangelical phase. First, expansion: the Orient was opened out considerably beyond the Islamic lands through European exploration of the rest of the world, travel literature, imaginary utopias, moral voyages and scientific reporting, the discoveries of Anquetil and Jones set in the wider context of Cook and Bougainville, Tournefort and Adanson, de Brosses, French traders in the Pacific, Jesuit missionaries in China and the Americas, Dampier, and speculations on giants, Patagonians, savages, natives and monsters — all with Europe firmly in the privileged center, its cultural strength fortified as colonies were created and ethnocentric perspectives secured from travelers’ tales as much as from the India companies (PDF p.125-126 / printed p.116-117). Second, historical confrontation: historians compared European experience profitably with other and older civilizations — the confrontation of the gods, Gibbon reading Rome’s decline in the rise of Islam, Vico understanding modern civilization through barbaric, poetic beginnings — and eighteenth-century historians, unlike the Renaissance’s, confronted the Orient’s peculiarities with some detachment and some attempt at dealing directly with Oriental source material; George Sale’s translation of the Koran, dealing with Arab history in terms of Arab sources and letting Muslim commentators speak for themselves, illustrates the change, and simple comparatism was the early phase of the comparative disciplines (philology, anatomy, jurisprudence, religion) that became the boast of nineteenth-century method (PDF p.126 / printed p.117). Third, sympathy: historicism, an eighteenth-century idea in Vico, Herder and Hamann, held all cultures organically and internally coherent, bound by a spirit, genius, Klima or national idea penetrable only by historical sympathy — Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791) displaying cultures each accessible only to an observer who sacrificed his prejudices to Einfühlung — and an eighteenth-century mind so imbued could breach the doctrinal walls between West and Islam and see hidden kinship with the Orient, Napoleon a famous instance of selective identification by sympathy and Mozart another, The Magic Flute and The Abduction from the Seraglio locating a magnanimous humanity in the Orient; this sits within the intense popular Orientalist vogue of Beckford, Byron, Thomas Moore and Goethe, Gothic tales and barbaric splendor, Piranesi’s prisons, Tiepolo’s ambiences and the exotic sublimity of late-eighteenth-century painting, then Delacroix and dozens of painters, the Orient of the pre-Romantic, pretechnical imagination being a chameleonlike quality called, adjectivally, “Oriental” — a free-floating Orient severely curtailed with the advent of academic Orientalism (PDF p.127-128 / printed p.118-119). Fourth, classification: the impulse to classify nature and man into types, from Linnaeus and Buffon, transforming bodily (and soon moral, intellectual and spiritual) extension into precise measurement of characteristic elements — Linnaeus’s note as a product of number, form, proportion and situation, the same penchant in Kant, Diderot and Johnson — a type providing its observer a designation and, in Foucault’s quoted phrase, “a controlled derivation” within a system of related generalizations, and character-as-designation appearing as physiological-moral classification in Linnaeus, Montesquieu, Johnson, Blumenbach, Soemmerring and Kant: the American “red, choleric, erect”, the Asiatic “yellow, melancholy, rigid”, the African “black, phlegmatic, lax”, designations that gather power when allied later with character as genetic derivation, the Oriental then referred to in terms of genetic universals such as his primitive state and particular spiritual background (PDF p.128-129 / printed p.119-120).

Without these four elements, on whose presence modern Orientalism’s specific intellectual and institutional structures depend, Orientalism could not have occurred; their effect was to release the Orient generally, and Islam in particular, from the narrowly religious scrutiny of the Christian West, modern Orientalism deriving from secularizing elements in eighteenth-century culture in four corresponding ways: the Biblical framework loosened and dissolved as the Orient expanded further east and further back, its reference-points no longer Christianity and Judaism but India, China, Japan and Sumer, Buddhism, Sanskrit, Zoroastrianism and Manu; non-European and non-Judeo-Christian cultures could be dealt with historically rather than reductively, John of Segovia’s contraferentia realized in a wholly secular way, Gibbon treating Mohammed as a historical figure; selective identification with other regions and cultures wore down the polarized obduracy of self and identity, Christian Europe’s borders no longer serving as a customs house; and the classifications of mankind were systematically multiplied beyond Vico’s gentile and sacred nations, race, color, origin, temperament, character and types overwhelming the distinction between Christians and everyone else (PDF p.129 / printed p.120). But the old religious patterns of human history and destiny and the existential paradigms were not simply removed: they were reconstituted, redeployed and redistributed in the secular frameworks, Orientalism retaining a reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism, in the Orientalist’s conception of himself, of the Orient and of his discipline (PDF p.129-130 / printed p.120-121). The modern Orientalist was in his view a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation and strangeness he himself had properly distinguished, his research reconstructing its lost languages, mores, even mentalities as Champollion reconstructed Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone; the techniques of lexicography, grammar, translation and cultural decoding restored the values of an ancient, classical Orient and of philology, history, rhetoric and doctrinal polemic, while the Orient was modernized, restored to the present, and both bore the traces of power — the Orientalist celebrating his method and position as a secular creator, a man who made new worlds as God had once made the old — and continuity beyond any individual was secured by a secular tradition, a lay order of disciplined methodologists whose brotherhood rested on a common discourse, a praxis, a library and a set of received ideas, a doxology; Flaubert foresaw the modern Orientalist become a copyist, but in the early days of Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan no such danger was apparent (PDF p.130-131 / printed p.121-122).

Said states the thesis: the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis can be understood not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed and re-formed by disciplines such as philology, in turn naturalized, modernized and laicized substitutes for Christian supernaturalism. Jones and Anquetil contributed, but what distinguishes modern Orientalism as a field is a later generation’s work: taking the Napoleonic expedition (1798-1801) as its first enabling experience, its inaugural heroes in Islamic studies, Sacy and Renan and Lane, placed Orientalism on a scientific and rational basis, created a vocabulary and ideas usable impersonally by anyone, established the Orientalist as central authority for the Orient and put a discursive currency into circulation by whose presence the Orient henceforth would be spoken for; the more Europe encroached on the Orient in the nineteenth century, the more Orientalism gained in public confidence, its mode from the beginning being reconstruction and repetition (PDF p.131 / printed p.122). The chapter’s ideas, institutions and figures belong to the first phase of the greatest age of territorial acquisition ever known — by the end of World War I Europe had colonized 85 percent of the earth — and modern Orientalism, unlike the precolonial awareness of Dante and d’Herbelot, embodies a systematic discipline of accumulation, fatally tending towards the systematic accumulation of human beings and territories: reconstructive precision, science and imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, and Orientalism’s vindication was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, usefulness and authority (PDF p.132 / printed p.123).

Chapter 2, II. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory — PDF p.132-153 / printed p.123-144 (section continues beyond this part)

The section opens with Sacy. The two great themes of his life are heroic effort and a dedicated sense of pedagogic and rational utility: born in 1757 into a Jansenist family of notaires, Antoine-Isaac-Silvestre was privately tutored at a Benedictine abbey, first in Arabic, Syriac and Chaldean, then in Hebrew, Arabic being the language that opened the Orient to him since in Arabic, according to Joseph Reinaud, Oriental material sacred and profane was then to be found in its oldest and most instructive form (PDF p.132-133 / printed p.123-124). As printed, in 1769 he was appointed the first teacher of Arabic at the newly created school of langues orientales vivantes, becoming its director in 1824; in 1806 he was named professor at the Collège de France, from 1805 he was the resident Orientalist at the French Foreign Ministry, translating the Grande Armée bulletins and Napoleon’s Manifesto of 1806, created interpreters for the French Oriental dragomanate, and when the French occupied Algiers in 1830 translated the proclamation to the Algerians; at seventy-five he replaced Dacier as secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions and became curator of Oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque royale, and with Cuvier in 1832 was made a new peer of France (PDF p.133 / printed p.124; the 1769 appointment date is as printed, checked against the original, and conflicts with the 1757 birth year given on the preceding page — see Open questions). Sacy’s name is associated with the beginning of modern Orientalism not only as first president of the Société asiatique (1822): his work put before the profession an entire systematic body of texts, a pedagogic practice, a scholarly tradition and an important link between Oriental scholarship and public policy, with a self-conscious methodological principle at work for the first time in Europe since the Council of Vienne, and Sacy acted in his writing like a secularized ecclesiastic for whom his Orient and his students were doctrine and parishioners respectively, the Duc de Broglie saying his work reconciled the manner of a scientist with that of a Biblical teacher, “the goals of Leibniz with the efforts of Bossuet” (PDF p.133 / printed p.124).

Everything Sacy wrote was addressed specifically to students — the Principes de grammaire générale of 1799 to his own son, its dedication opening, in French as printed in the original (PDF p.134, checked), C’est à toi, mon cher Fils, que ce petit ouvrage a été entrepris — and presented not as a novelty but as a revised extract of the best already done, said or written. His voice-speaking prose forms a circle sealing teacher and pupils off from the world, a classroom in which the didactic speaker displays carefully selected and arranged material to disciples: since the Orient cannot be totally exposed, only representative parts need be — the anthology, the chrestomathy, the tableau, the survey of general principles, a small set of powerful examples that deliver the Orient to the student and signify it (PDF p.134-135 / printed p.125-126). His work is essentially compilatory: the three-volume Chrestomathie arabe (1806 and 1827), an anthology of Arab grammatical writing (1825), an Arabic grammar of 1810, treatises on Arabic prosody and the Druze religion, short works on numismatics, onomastics, epigraphy, geography, history and weights and measures, translations, and commentaries on Calila and Dumna and al-Hariri’s Maqamat; and he was one of the team for the Tableau historique de l’érudition française (Dacier’s report, commissioned in 1802), whose preface claims a survey that could take in, with one coup d’oeil, the whole of human knowledge and preserve it against loss, a task Dacier intimated was simplified by Napoleon’s Oriental expedition (PDF p.135 / printed p.126). The Tableau exteriorizes the form of Orientalist knowledge: Sacy speaks of his work as having uncovered, brought to light and rescued obscure matter in order to place it before the student, knowledge as the making visible of material and the tableau as a sort of Benthamite Panopticon, scholarly discipline a specific technology of power: He made the books, the precepts, the examples, said the Duc de Broglie of Sacy (reported speech in the text, with no quotation marks; Said’s paraphrase of de Broglie), and the result was material about the Orient, methods for studying it and exempla even Orientals did not have (PDF p.136 / printed p.127). Unlike a Hellenist or Latinist, Sacy had to make the texts, conventions and schools himself; the dynamic of primary loss and subsequent gain in his writing is obsessive — identifying, deciphering, interpreting and making available knowledge he believed is seeing, pan-optically — and as a European he ransacked the Oriental archives without leaving France, isolating texts, bringing them back, doctoring, annotating, codifying, arranging and commenting on them, until the Orient as such became less important than what the Orientalist made of it and the Orientalist’s Orient, drawn into the sealed discursive place of a pedagogical tableau, was reluctant to emerge into reality (PDF p.136-137 / printed p.127-128).

Sacy argued for his practice: the Orient on its own could not survive a European’s taste, intelligence or patience, and Arabic poetry had to be properly transformed by the Orientalist before it could be appreciated — produced by a completely strange people under hugely different conditions, nourished by opinions, prejudices, beliefs and superstitions acquirable only after long and painful study, much of it inaccessible even then to Europeans who have attained a higher degree of civilization, its value lying in an unusual range of experience and in helping Europeans understand the truly divine poetry of the Hebrews (PDF p.137 / printed p.128). Oriental writing ought not to be taken in whole: his theory of fragments holds Oriental literary productions essentially alien, without sustained interest or enough taste and critical spirit to merit publication except as extracts, so the Orientalist presents the Orient by representative fragments republished, explicated, annotated and surrounded with more fragments, in the chrestomathy (PDF p.137 / printed p.128). The Chrestomathie arabe opens with an internally rhyming Arabic couplet, quoted with translation as a book pleasant and profitable for the studious pupil collecting fragments of poetry and prose; the anthologies were used widely in Europe for generations, their choice and arrangement of fragments never revealing their secret while submerging the Orientalist’s censorship of the Orient, and in time the reader forgets the Orientalist’s effort and takes the restructuring signified by a chrestomathy as the Orient tout court — objective structure and subjective restructure become interchangeable, the Orient overlaid with the Orientalist’s rationality, from distant to available, from lost to found with its missing parts made to drop away; Sacy’s anthologies not only supplement the Orient, they supply it as Oriental presence to the West, canonizing it and begetting a canon of textual objects passed between generations of students, every major Arabist in Europe tracing his intellectual authority back to Sacy (PDF p.138 / printed p.129). Enrichments and restrictions were passed on together: Sacy placed the Arabs in the Orient and the Orient in the general tableau of modern learning, its material to be re-created by the Orientalist before entering alongside Latinism and Hellenism, each Orientalist re-creating his own Orient by Sacy’s epistemological rules of loss and gain; Sacy, the father of Orientalism, was also its first sacrifice, displaced by successors supplying their own restored Orients, while philology developed systematic and institutional powers he had never exploited (PDF p.138-139 / printed p.129-130).

Renan’s accomplishment was to associate the Orient with the recent comparative disciplines, philology the most eminent: inauguration against continuity, Sacy’s personal efforts against Renan’s adaptation of Orientalism to philology and both to his time’s intellectual culture, which perpetuated the structures and gave them visibility (PDF p.139 / printed p.130). Renan is to be grasped neither as total originality nor absolute derivativeness but as a dynamic force and a type of cultural and intellectual praxis, a style for making Orientalist statements within what Foucault would call the archive of his time, read as a writer doing something describable in a place defined temporally, spatially and culturally, for an audience and for the furtherance of his own position (PDF p.139-140 / printed p.130-131). Renan came to Orientalism from philology, whose rich cultural position endowed Orientalism with its most important technical characteristics: Nietzsche’s proclamation that he is a philologist, Balzac’s Louis Lambert on the life and adventures of a word in its triple aspect of soul, body and movement, F. A. Wolf inventing the name stud. philol. in 1777, and the herd of philologists who never adduce philology as a problem because as knowledge of the ancient world its material is exhaustible — the exceptional spirits being distinguished by their profound relation to modernity, philology problematizing itself, its practitioner and the present, a Viconian sign of human discovery and self-discovery (PDF p.140-141 / printed p.131-132). Between Wolf and Nietzsche stands Renan: in L’Avenir de la science (written 1848, published 1890) he wrote that “the founders of modern mind are philologists”, modern mind being rationalism, criticism and liberalism founded the same day as philology, philology a comparative discipline possessed only by moderns and a symbol of modern, European superiority, its job to see reality and nature clearly, drive out supernaturalism, keep pace with the physical sciences and enable a general view of human life — “Philology is the exact science of mental objects”, to the sciences of humanity what physics and chemistry are to the sciences of bodies (PDF p.141-142 / printed p.132-133). Said notes the middle section’s admiring accounts of philology, Renan’s self-association with Vico, Herder, Wolf, Montesquieu, Humboldt, Bopp and Eugène Burnouf (to whom the volume is dedicated), the book as a manifesto of humanistic meliorism subtitled “Pensées de 1848”, and the deliberateness of fashioning his relation to 1848’s social issues through the least immediate, most conservative discipline — not speaking as one man to all men but as a specialized voice that took, in the 1890 preface, the inequality of races and the necessary domination of the many by the few for granted as an antidemocratic law of nature and society, the paradox being that philology is premised on the unity of the human species while Renan proved a harsh divider of men into superior and inferior races, with notorious race prejudice against the very Oriental Semites whose study made his professional name (PDF p.142 / printed p.133). Part of the answer is his guild sense as a professional Orientalist, shown in early letters to Cousin, Michelet and Humboldt; more important is his conception of his dynastic position within philology: he speaks not about philology but philologically, as an initiate using the encoded language of a prestigious new science (PDF p.142-143 / printed p.133-134). The discipline imposed doxological rules from the revaluative discoveries of roughly the 1780s to the mid-1830s; Renan’s memoirs record how the crisis and loss of religious faith led him in 1845 into scholarship — his initiation into philology — determined to be as Christian as he once was, now without Christianity and with what he called lay science; his 1878 Sorbonne lecture “On the Services Rendered by Philology to the Historical Sciences” shows philology, which like religion teaches the origins of humanity, civilization and language, delivering a far less knitted-together and positive message than religion, Renan retaining in the new lay science the historical world-view he had gained from religion in order to pursue critical research into Christianity with far ampler means (PDF p.143-144 / printed p.134-135).

The difference between the history Christianity offers internally and the history philology offers made modern philology possible: the new philology’s successes include comparative grammar, the reclassification of languages into families and the final rejection of the divine origins of language, accomplishments following from language as an entirely human phenomenon once the sacred languages, Hebrew primarily, were discovered to be neither of primordial antiquity nor of divine provenance — Foucault’s discovery of language as a secular event displacing God’s delivery of language to man in Eden, pushing aside the dynastic notion of linguistic filiation for language as a domain of jagged internal structures, and interest in the origins of language subsiding from Herder’s prize essay of 1772 to near-banishment by the new century’s first decade (PDF p.144 / printed p.135). Jones’s Anniversary Discourses (1785-1792) and Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik (1832) ruptured the divine dynasty of language; Chateaubriand’s faith survived Sanskrit outdating Hebrew, in the French passage quoted with translation, while for Bopp and the philologists language study entailed its own history and philosophy without a primal Edenic language, language becoming an internal field created by its users — no first language, and no simple language except by a method to come (PDF p.145 / printed p.136). Renan repeated these antidynastic, anticontinuous lessons all his career, higher in his regard even than Sacy’s work; with Coleridge’s language as the armory of the human mind, the Edenic first language gives way to heuristic protolanguages, Indo-European and Semitic, that cannot be recaptured, only reconstituted in the philological process, Sanskrit in its earliest Indo-European form serving as touchstone, the terminology shifting to families of languages, perfect linguistic form corresponding to no real language, and original languages as functions of philological discourse rather than nature (PDF p.145-146 / printed p.136-137). Benjamin Constant had already noted in his Journal intime in 1804 that Sanskrit and India had simply taken the place of Hebrew and the Edenic fallacy, the English owning India, the Germans studying it indefatigably, the French after Napoleon and Champollion deciding everything originated in Egypt and the new Orient; Renan’s generation, educated from the mid-1830s to the late 1840s, retained the intellectual necessity of the Orient for the Occidental scholar, its key text Edgar Quinet’s Le Génie des religions (1832, as printed, checked against the original) announcing the Oriental Renaissance and placing Orient and West in a functional relationship (PDF p.146 / printed p.137). Quinet’s formulation — the Orient proposes and the West disposes, Asia has its prophets, Europe its doctors — and his association with Michelet and their interests in Herder and Vico impressed the scholar-historian’s confrontation with the different, strange and distant as revelation; the picture of the learned Westerner surveying the passive, seminal, feminine, silent and supine East and articulating it under the philologist’s authority persisted in Renan, while the dramatic attitude of Quinet and Michelet, for whom history was a drama and the world a temple, was replaced in Renan’s 1840s apprenticeship by the scientific attitude — for Renan, unlike Quinet, being a philologist meant severing all connections with the old Christian god so a new doctrine, probably science, would stand free in a new place (PDF p.146-147 / printed p.137-138).

Renan put it plainly at the end of his undistinguished essay on the origins of language: man is no longer an inventor and the age of creation is definitely over; the scientist examines how language is, not how it came about — yet Renan instates a new, deliberate, artificial creation performed by scientific analysis, proclaiming in his leçon inaugurale at the Collège de France (February 21, 1862), on succeeding Étienne Quatremère in the chair of Hebrew with a lecture on the Semitic peoples’ contribution to the history of civilization, that the public might see at first hand the very laboratory of philological science, substituting a philological laboratory for divine intervention in history and declaring the Orient’s contemporary relevance to be simply as material for European investigation, where Sacy’s lifeless fragments in tableaux were replaced with something new (PDF p.147-148 / printed p.138-139). Renan’s ambition was to carve out a new Oriental province, the Semitic Orient (against the casual confusion of Arabic with Sanskrit, as in Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin), doing for the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-European, as he said in the 1855 preface to the comparative Semitic treatise, and elevating these neglected inferior languages to a passionate new science of mind (PDF p.148 / printed p.139). Renan was explicit that Semites and Semitic were creations of Orientalist philological study, his own role central; creation in his usage is specified in three senses — the articulation by which an object like Semitic is seen as a creature, the setting (Oriental history, culture, race, mind) illuminated and brought forward from its reticence by the scientist, and the formulation of a classificatory system seeing the object comparatively, in the paradigmatic relations between Semitic and Indo-European — science giving speech to things, linguistics treating words as natural, silent objects made to give up their secrets, as Champollion found the Rosetta Stone’s symbols had a phonetic as well as a semantic component (PDF p.149 / printed p.140). Said insists on the Semitic study because it was the study Renan turned to right after losing his Christian faith, replacing it; because it was his first full-length Orientalist and scientific study, finished in 1847 and published first in 1855, propaedeutic to his late works on the origins of Christianity and the history of the Jews, proposed as a philological breakthrough from which he drew retrospective authority for positions, almost always bad ones, on religion, race and nationalism, his harsh and unfounded strictures on the Semites standing behind every later statement about Jews or Muslims; because to Indo-European linguistics Semitic was a degraded form in the moral and biological senses and to the differentiation of Orientalisms a stable form of cultural decadence; and because Semitic was Renan’s first creation, a fiction invented in the philological laboratory and a symbol of European, and his, dominion over the Orient and his era (PDF p.149-150 / printed p.140-141). Semitic thus occupies a median position, neither a fully natural nor a divine object, its oddities legitimated by inverse relation to normal languages and comprehended as an eccentric, quasi-monstrous phenomenon with libraries, laboratories and museums as its places of exhibition and analysis; Renan’s treatise draws on book-learning and on natural observation as practiced by Cuvier and the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires, the library and the museum supplying his framework (PDF p.150 / printed p.141). Treated in the laboratory, normal human facts become peculiarly deviant because Semitic and Oriental: the Semites as rabid monotheists who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce, no civilization, their consciousness narrow and rigid, representing an inferior combination of human nature — Said noting Renan claims to speak of a prototype, not a real type, a claim he violated in discussing present-day Jews and Muslims (PDF p.150-151 / printed p.141-142).

A typical page of the Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques was constructed, Said argues, with a page of comparative philosophical anatomy in Cuvier’s or Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s style in mind: skeletons, muscle drawings and hypothetical proto-Semitic or proto-Indo-European paradigms alike are laboratory and library products, the text bearing to actuality the relation of a museum case exhibiting a specimen, a truncated exaggeration whose purpose is to exhibit the relationship between the science and the object, not between the object and nature; Renan’s pages summon examples of man’s speech from the library and range them in suave European prose pointing out the defects, virtues, barbarisms and shortcomings of the language, the people and the civilization, in an almost uniformly contemporary present tense giving the impression of a pedagogical demonstration on a lecture-laboratory platform (PDF p.151-152 / printed p.142-143). Because linguistics lacks anatomy’s stable and visible signs, the philologist makes a linguistic fact correspond to a historical period, in a nonlinear, discontinuous temporality full of lacunae that the linguist controls comparatively: Indo-European is taken as the living, organic norm, Semitic Oriental languages as inorganic, time transformed into the space of comparative classification on a rigid organic/inorganic binary, the judgment made imperiously by the Oriental philologist in his laboratory and available to no one else — in the French passage quoted with translation, the Semitic languages are refused the faculty of regenerating themselves while being acknowledged subject to change and successive modifications (PDF p.152 / printed p.143). Behind this opposition works another, exposed candidly in the first chapter of book 5 of the treatise, where Renan introduces Saint-Hilaire’s views on the degradation of types: Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, biological speculators of extraordinary fame and influence among early-nineteenth-century French literary intellectuals (Étienne a member of Napoleon’s expedition, honored in Balzac’s preface to La Comédie humaine; both read and used by Flaubert), legatees of Romantic biology and specialists in teratology, the philosophy and anatomy of monstrosity, in which physiological aberrations result from internal degradation within the species-life, both exploiting the linguistic paradigm to explain deviations within a biological system — a monster as an anomaly as words stand in analogical and anomalous relations, an idea in linguistics as old as Varro’s De Lingua Latina, anomalies confirming the regular structure of the class (PDF p.152-153 / printed p.143-144). Étienne’s “Préliminaire” to his Philosophie anatomique is quoted: it is impossible today to enclose oneself within the framework of a simple monograph, an object studied in isolation can never be perfectly known, but seen in the midst of beings connected with it in many different ways it gains a wider scope of relationships, its specificity, its behavior in its exterior world and the constitution of its features in reaction to its milieu all becoming knowable — where the section continues beyond PDF p.153 (PDF p.153 / printed p.144).

Key passages

• “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.10 / printed p.1)
• “The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.14 / printed p.5)
• “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.29-30 / printed p.20-21)
• Balfour: “We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.41 / printed p.32)
• Cromer, quoting Sir Alfred Lyall: “Accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.47 / printed p.38)
• “The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.36 / printed p.27)
• “no theoretical list of Oriental attributes is without application to the behavior of Orientals in the real world” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.58 / printed p.49)
• “Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe even its existence to the Orientalist.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.76 / printed p.67)
• D’Herbelot’s entry for Mohammed, in Said’s translation: “This is the famous imposter Mahomet, Author and Founder of a heresy” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.75 / printed p.66)
• “Orientalism overrode the Orient.” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.105 / printed p.96; the sentence as printed in the original, checked at PDF p.105, runs Yet — and here we must be very clear — Orientalism overrode the Orient, a fuller form the text copy garbles)
• Abdel Malek, as quoted: the studied object will be “passive, non-participating, endowed with a “historical” subjectivity, above all, non-active … non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.106 / printed p.97)
• Gibb, as quoted: “the Orient is much too important to be left to the Orientalists” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.115 / printed p.106)
• Thesis sentence for Chapter Two: “the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis (from which present-day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.131 / printed p.122)
• Renan, as quoted: “the founders of modern mind are philologists” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.141 / printed p.132)
• Renan on the Semitic languages, in Said’s translation of the passage quoted in French: “Therefore we refuse to allow that the Semitic languages have the capacity to regenerate themselves” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.152 / printed p.143)

Evidence the work relies on

• Arthur James Balfour’s House of Commons speech of June 13, 1910, on Egypt, quoted at length and analyzed as Said’s opening exhibit (PDF p.40-44 / printed p.31-35).
• Lord Cromer’s essay “The Government of Subject Races”, Edinburgh Review, January 1908, as Said dates and presents it, and the thirty-fourth chapter of Cromer’s Modern Egypt (two volumes), quoted for the canon of Orientalist wisdom including Sir Alfred Lyall’s maxim (PDF p.45-48 / printed p.36-39).
• Henry Kissinger’s essay “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy”, quoted for the Newtonian / pre-Newtonian binary (PDF p.55-56 / printed p.46-47).
• Rudyard Kipling’s chain-of-command passage, quoted without a title in the text (PDF p.54 / printed p.45).
• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (epigraph, PDF p.9; quoted in German at PDF p.30 / printed p.21), and Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (epigraph, PDF p.9; the East as a career discussed at PDF p.14 / printed p.5).
• Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish and The Order of Things, for the notion of a discourse and the web of scientific interests around Indo-European philology (PDF p.12, 31 / printed p.3, 22); Antonio Gramsci for hegemony, civil and political society, and the Prison Notebooks inventory (PDF p.15-16, 34 / printed p.6, 25).
• K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, cited for the power relation in its title (PDF p.14 / printed p.5); Denys Hay on the idea of Europe (PDF p.16 / printed p.7); Gustave Flaubert’s encounter with Kuchuk Hanem, presented as the pattern of speaking for the Oriental woman (PDF p.15 / printed p.6).
• Works cited for method and background: Vico (men make their own history); Louis Althusser’s problematic; Raymond Schwab, La Renaissance orientale; Johann Fück, Die Arabischen Studien in Europa bis in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (title as read; the copy prints the author’s name in a garbled form); Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England; E. S. Shaffer, Kubla Khan and The Fall of Jerusalem; Noam Chomsky on objective scholarship and the Vietnam War; Harry Bracken on Locke, Hume and empiricism; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution; George Eliot, Middlemarch (PDF p.22-28 / printed p.13-19).
• Aeschylus, The Persians, as the early case of representation of the Orient (PDF p.30 / printed p.21).
• Figures given in the text: European direct colonial dominion expanding from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface in 1815 to about 85 percent in 1914 (PDF p.50 / printed p.41); British exports to Egypt equaling those to the whole of Africa (PDF p.44 / printed p.35); the fifty thousand pounds retirement prize proposed for Cromer in 1907 (PDF p.44 / printed p.35). No sources for these figures are named in the chapters read in this part; the Notes are outside this part.
• Harold W. Glidden’s essay “The Arab World”, American Journal of Psychiatry, February 1972, analyzed as the apogee of Orientalist confidence, with its four cited sources and its June 29, 1970 Ahram murder figures (PDF p.57-58 / printed p.48-49).
• Norman Daniel on the Christian reception of Islam and R. W. Southern on medieval Western views of Islam, both quoted at length, including Southern’s contraferentia episode of 1450-1460 and his conclusion on progress in stating the problem (PDF p.69-71 / printed p.60-62); Henri Pirenne on Islam and the shift of Europe’s center northwards (PDF p.79-80 / printed p.70-71); Isaiah Berlin on the all-inclusive hierarchy, quoted as “profoundly anti-empirical” (PDF p.79 / printed p.70).
• Dante’s Inferno (canto 28 and the first circle) as the schematic placing of Mohammed, Ali, Avicenna, Averroes and Saladin (PDF p.77-78 / printed p.68-69).
• Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (1697) with Antoine Galland’s preface, quoted in French with Said’s translation for the Mohammed entry (PDF p.72-76 / printed p.63-67).
• For the projects: Raymond Schwab on Anquetil-Duperron, quoted at length (PDF p.86 / printed p.77); William Jones’s “Objects of Enquiry”, his August 17, 1787 letter to Lord Althorp and his Sanskrit pronouncement (PDF p.87-88 / printed p.78-79); Volney’s Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie (1787) as Napoleon’s handbook and the Campagnes d’Égypte et de Syrie for the three wars (PDF p.90 / printed p.81-82); Napoleon’s July 2, 1798 proclamation and Hugo’s poem “Lui”, quoted in French with translation (PDF p.91-92 / printed p.82-83).
• The Description de l’Égypte and Fourier’s préface historique, quoted for Egypt as the center of the ancient continent and for the expedition’s justification (PDF p.93-95 / printed p.84-86); Thomas Cook’s Excursionist and Tourist Advertiser, July 1, 1869, Bornier’s prize epic of 1862 and the papal envoy’s speech of November 16, 1869, for de Lesseps and the Suez Canal (PDF p.97-100 / printed p.88-91).
• Figures given in the text in this part: Glidden’s 1,070 murder cases (Egypt, 1969) with 20, 30 and 31 percent motives, as Glidden presents them through Said (PDF p.57 / printed p.48); Gibbon’s figures for Omar’s ten years — thirty-six thousand cities or castles, four thousand churches or temples destroyed, fourteen hundred mosques edified (PDF p.83-84 / printed p.74-75). No sources for these figures are named beyond the works Said is quoting; the Notes are outside this part.
• Anwar Abdel Malek on Orientalism, quoted at length for the object stamped with constitutive otherness, the ethnist typology and europocentrism, and for the crisis’s time-lag index (PDF p.106, 114 / printed p.97, 105); Said presents the quotations without naming Abdel Malek’s work in the pages read in this part.
• H. A. R. Gibb, Modern Trends in Islam (Haskell Lectures, University of Chicago, 1945), quoted for the Arab mind and the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination, and “Area Studies Reconsidered”, quoted for the area-studies formula (PDF p.114-116 / printed p.105-107).
• Scott’s The Talisman (1825), quoted for Sir Kenneth’s general damnation of the Saracen’s race and religion; Nerval’s letter to Gautier of the end of August 1843 and Flaubert’s Egyptian spectacle passages, both quoted (PDF p.109-112 / printed p.100-103).
• Gustave Flaubert’s notes and sketches for the conclusion of Bouvard et Pécuchet, quoted for Bouvard’s vision of Europe regenerated by Asia and the two men’s return to copying (PDF p.122-123 / printed p.113-114); M. H. Abrams on natural supernaturalism, quoted (PDF p.123-124 / printed p.114-115); and an unattributed quotation on the Romantic undertaking — “either in epic or some other major genre” — whose source is not named on the page (its note marker is garbled in the copy), to be confirmed against the Notes in a later part (PDF p.147 / printed p.138).
• Foucault on classification, quoted for designation and controlled derivation (PDF p.128 / printed p.119); the Linnaean physiological-moral types as Said gives them (PDF p.128 / printed p.119).
• For Silvestre de Sacy: his Principes de grammaire générale (1799) and its dedication, the Chrestomathie arabe and its opening couplet, and Dacier’s Tableau historique de l’érudition française with its preface, all quoted or summarized as Sacy’s exhibits (PDF p.134-138 / printed p.125-129).
• For Ernest Renan: L’Avenir de la science (written 1848, published 1890), quoted for philology as the exact science of mental objects and for the founders of modern mind; his memoirs for the 1845 loss of faith; the 1878 Sorbonne lecture on philology and the historical sciences; his leçon inaugurale of February 21, 1862; and the Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (finished 1847, published first in 1855), quoted in French with translation for the refusal of regeneration to the Semitic languages (PDF p.141-152 / printed p.132-143). Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s Philosophie anatomique, “Préliminaire” (1822, as Said dates the writing), quoted for the impossibility of the simple monograph (PDF p.153 / printed p.144).
• Figures given in the text in this part: Europe had colonized 85 percent of the earth by the end of World War I (PDF p.132 / printed p.123 — the same endpoint as the 1815-1914 expansion figure of part 1, restated); the mission and learned society foundation dates of PDF p.108-109 / printed p.99-100. No sources for these figures are named in the chapters read in this part; the Notes are outside this part.

Analysis

Said’s method in the part read is to define Orientalism at three levels at once — discipline, style of thought, and corporate institution — and to bind them with Foucault’s discourse and Gramsci’s hegemony, while explicitly departing from Foucault on the determining imprint of individual writers, which licenses close textual readings of single speeches and essays (Balfour, Cromer, Kissinger) as evidence for the collective formation. The argument is built by accumulation and by the texts’ own words: Balfour’s and Cromer’s statements are quoted at length and then shown to share one circular logic (knowledge of the Oriental as both premise and product of domination), and Kissinger’s essay is used to show the same binary surviving, in neutral policy language, sixty years later. The study’s stated limits are part of the method: it is not an exhaustive history, it treats the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam rather than the whole Orient, it does not do justice to German Orientalism or to the Biblical-studies background, and it studies the internal consistency of Orientalism rather than its correspondence to a real Orient, whose brute reality it acknowledges only tacitly. The personal dimension is presented as a motive and a check, not as evidence: the inventory of traces on an Oriental subject educated in Palestine, Egypt and the United States. Claims about the Orient itself are not advanced in the parts read so far; every factual claim made is about Western texts, institutions and stated doctrine, and the figures given (notably the 35-to-85-percent expansion) carry no citation in the chapters read. In part 2 the method widens from single speeches to the field’s deep history: Imaginative geography is built from Lévi-Strauss and Bachelard, the medieval Christian picture of Islam is taken largely through two secondary authorities, Daniel and Southern, quoted at length and then read against their conclusions (Southern’s progress is, for Said, refined ignorance), and the projects of Chapter One, III are shown rather than merely stated — Anquetil, Jones, Napoleon and de Lesseps each presented through their own programmatic texts, so that the Description de l’Égypte and the Suez Canal can be read as Orientalism enacted. The exhibits are chosen for their representativeness within the discourse, not sampled from it, and the argument’s force is cumulative and typological. In part 3 the method turns biographical and institutional: Gibb’s single career is made to carry both of Orientalism’s responses to its crisis, Sacy is read through the genres he invented (the chrestomathy, the tableau) rather than through propositions, and Renan is read as a praxis — speaking philologically, within the archive of his time — so that the Histoire générale’s typographic and classificatory form is itself the evidence for the laboratory’s power over its object. The contemporary stakes are carried by examples rather than by survey: popular caricatures, policy-science ploys named without detail (the Alliance for Progress, SEATO), and a single Palestine example (Lewis’s “return of Islam”) stand for the adapted Orientalism of the area-studies era. Figures and dates in this part are again the quoted authors’ or Said’s own without citation in the chapters read (the 85 percent colonization figure restates part 1’s expansion endpoint with a different period, 1914 against the end of World War I), and two dates as printed conflict with the text’s own data (Sacy’s appointment, Quinet’s Génie) and are held under Open questions rather than resolved.

People, organizations, places and events

Edward Said, Arthur James Balfour, Lord Cromer, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Henry Kissinger, Harold W. Glidden, Barthélemy d’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, Napoleon Bonaparte, Description de l’Égypte, William Jones, Ferdinand de Lesseps, Suez Canal, Anwar Abdel Malek, H. A. R. Gibb, Bernard Lewis, Silvestre de Sacy, Ernest Renan, Edward William Lane, Gustave Flaubert, Friedrich Schlegel, Edgar Quinet

Concepts

Orientalism, Representation, Hegemony, Discourse, Exteriority, Strategic location and strategic formation, Imperialism, Imaginative geography, Textual attitude, Philology

How it relates to other sources

• With The Question of Palestine: Said there refers the reader to his study of what he called Orientalism for the long Western tradition of enmity toward Islam and the Orient on which Zionism drew for its view of the Palestinians (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.47 / printed p.26). This book is that study: its account of the Orientalist who speaks for the native is the account the later book’s chapter on Representation takes up for Zionism speaking for the Palestinians, and its Introduction’s Palestinian personal dimension — the Arab Palestinian in America existing politically only as a nuisance or as an Oriental (PDF p.36 / printed p.27) — is stated here a year earlier, in 1978.
• With Perceptions of Palestine: Christison builds on this book’s definitions, quoting its account of authoritative texts creating the reality they appear to describe and Orientalism as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient; this part supplies the definitions themselves (PDF p.12 / printed p.3) and the Balfour-Cromer-Kissinger sequence her frame-of-reference argument presupposes.
• With A Shadow over Palestine: Feldman reads Orientalism (1978) symptomatically, locating its kernel in the 1968 essay “The Arab Portrayed” and tracking a paragraph through three versions into this book at printed p.286. The dedication here is to Janet and Ibrahim (PDF p.6; the text copy garbles both names, the dedication is as read in the original), and the Acknowledgments name Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod first among those who followed the project from beginning to conclusion (PDF p.8), which matches Feldman’s account of the book’s dedication.

Open questions

• The Chapter 1, section I note-number sequence in the text copy is confused around PDF p.47-48 (markers for Cromer’s Oriental-traits passages print in a 5/6/8 sequence, and the marker for his self-description as diplomatist and administrator is garbled). The Notes themselves are at printed p.329 onward, outside this part; the sequence is to be settled when the Notes are read in a later part.
• Johann Fück’s name in the Die Arabischen Studien in Europa citation (PDF p.25 / printed p.16) is garbled in the text copy; the form used here is the form as read and is to be confirmed against the Notes.
• One name in the Acknowledgments (PDF p.8) — Chris Hath, as the copy prints it — is reading-uncertain in the OCR.
• Whether the 35-to-85-percent expansion figure (1815-1914) and the other figures in this part are sourced in the Notes cannot be settled until the Notes are read in a later part.
• The Revolutionary decree establishing the école publique is dated in the text 10 Germinal An III — March 30, 1793 (PDF p.92 / printed p.83, checked against the original): the Revolutionary-calendar year and the Gregorian date as printed do not correspond, and the text gives no other dating for the decree. Recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• Glidden’s murder figures, as Said quotes them (PDF p.57 / printed p.48), give motives for 20, 30 and 31 percent of the 1,070 cases — 81 percent in total (computed from the figures as quoted) — with no motive stated in the passage for the remaining cases.
• The note-number sequence for Chapter One, II-III in the text copy runs 18-86 and was accounted for marker by marker in the reading notes, with several markers garbled in the copy; the sequence for the Description passages was settled against the original (publication note 73, Fourier quotations notes 74-75, preface conclusion note 76). The Notes themselves remain outside the parts read so far.
• Sacy’s appointment as first teacher of Arabic at the school of langues orientales vivantes is dated in the text to 1769 (PDF p.133 / printed p.124, as printed, checked against the original). The same passage sequence gives Sacy’s birth in 1757 (PDF p.132 / printed p.123), which would make him twelve at the appointment, and calls the school newly created; the text gives no other date for the appointment. Recorded as printed, not reconciled; the Notes are outside this part.
• Quinet’s Le Génie des religions is dated in the text to 1832 (PDF p.146 / printed p.137, as printed, checked against the original). No other date for the work is given in the parts read so far. Recorded as printed.
• The colonization figure of 85 percent is dated in Chapter One, I to 1914, the end of the 1815-1914 expansion (PDF p.50 / printed p.41), and in Chapter Two, I to the end of World War I, where the text dates Europe’s colonization of 85 percent of the earth to the end of World War I (PDF p.132 / printed p.123). Both datings are recorded as printed, not reconciled.
• The note-number sequence for Chapter One, IV in the text copy runs 87-104 and for Chapter Two (numbering restarting) 1-55 through PDF p.153, accounted for in the reading notes with several markers garbled in the copy (among them the “oral functions” and new-leaders passages at PDF p.117-118 and the unattributed quotation at PDF p.147, whose source is not named on the page and is to be confirmed against the Notes in a later part). The Notes themselves remain outside the parts read so far.
• Said presents the long Abdel Malek quotations of Chapter One, IV (PDF p.106, 114, 117 / printed p.97, 105, 108) without naming Abdel Malek’s work in the pages read in this part; which work is quoted is to be settled when the Notes are read in a later part.

Coverage

PDF p.1-153 of 378, read in full for parts 1-3 of 8; PDF p.154-378 not yet read. Parts 4-8 remain: part 4 PDF p.154-200; part 5 PDF p.201-251; part 6 PDF p.252-298; part 7 PDF p.299-344; part 8 PDF p.345-378.