Orientalism Chapter 1 Part 1-4

Said quotes Arthur James Balfour’s address to the House of Commons to explain how the British wielded knowledge about oriental cultures and used it to justify their colonial rule. The address in question is directed at the conditions in Egypt, which at the time was seen as a gigantic success by the imperial powers in Britain. They had claimed to bring the country on par with other nations in the orient and argued that the British had a better understanding of the Egyptian civilization than the Egyptians themselves. Balfour highlighted the lack of any forms of self-government in Oriental culture, for although these parts of the world had known prosperity, it had always been under the rule of one despot or another. In this way, Balfour defends the colonial rule of Egypt and claims that it is for the benefit of the Egyptians for the British to understand Egypt better than the inhabitants. Said also quotes from an Essay written by Lord Cromer who had worked at important positions in both India and Egypt. Cromer chose to refer to the people of the orient as ‘subject races’, and claimed that knowledge was the true means of governing the people of the orient. In his essay, he claimed that the people of the orient were completely unable to apply logic and that the British had to adopt a selfless attitude in restraining the orientals so that one day even “the Central African savage may eventually learn to chant a hymn in honor of Astraea Redux, as represented by the British official who denies him gin but gives him justice.”

He goes on to discuss the mindset of the orientals claiming that since he had worked in India he could govern the Egyptians given the similarities of the oriental mind. He wrote in detail how the orientals were untruthful, suspicious, and lethargic while claiming that the Oriental mind seemed to work opposite to the European mind which was naturally more inclined towards reason, and virtue.

Said tells us that Orientalists like Balfour and Cromer did not invent these facts to justify their colonial practices but rather learned a great deal of it from the orientalists that came before them. He argues that this was mostly because the European powers had always dealt with the Orient from a position of power that allowed the Europeans to dominate the Orientals in a way. Additionally, the general population was presented with a distorted image of the orientals as novelists and other artists drew on the exotic Orient for their creative endeavors. According to Said, this domination of the Oriental Culture occurred because of the dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’ that arose, a kind of dichotomy that naturally leads to hostility. Said then lays out the historical timeline of the development of Orientalism through the 18th-20th century, to create a thorough understanding of the historical context within which the framework of Orientalism was developed.

In the second section of the first chapter, Said begins by describing Orientalism as a field of learned study. However, Said points out certain distinguishing features about the field that indicate its unique place. Firstly, Orientalism does not have an equal field that deals with the study of the Occident. Additionally, Orientalism is far too broad a subject to be included under one category, for instance, the title of an orientalist can be applied both to an expert of Indian languages as well as an anthropologist studying Asian cultures. He goes on to explain that the early Orientalists were biblical scholars and cites scholars like Erpenius and Guillaume Postel. In later times, the academic orientalists focussed on discovering the classical period for the oriental languages they were studying. Another shift occurred when academics began to study the modern Orient, and the world was divided along arbitrary and imaginative geographic zones of ‘East’ and ‘West’. Said cites Claude-Levi Strauss, a well-known anthropologist who focussed on highlighting cultural similarities by way of art, religion, linguistics, and other subjects. He explains that arbitrary categorization allows the mind to create order, but that this kind of categorization leads to the development of ‘Imaginative Knowledge’. The creation of categories such as these leads people to believe that the people of such groups possess certain qualities, and this idea is falsely described as knowledge of the said group.

Said believes that there is no imaginative boundary between the east and the west, and he cites the examples of two plays, Aeschylus's The Persians and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Through these examples, Said explains how these artificial boundaries between the east and west serve only to create a further rift between two groups, and that these early descriptions of the Orient were born from a fear of the exotic and the need to control it. He goes on to explain how this false categorization of the orient lead to the perpetuation of misinformation since it led the west to wrongly believe that it understood the Orient. The west remained insulated against the real information about the other side of the world, this is a common phenomenon when dealing with dichotomies like ‘us’ and ‘them’. However, in the case of Orientalism, this phenomenon proved harmful as the Europeans had power over the Orient. Said cites literature works that led to the creation of imaginative boundaries between the east and west, such as Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy.

In the third section, Said discusses the means by which the Occident progressed beyond the Orient, and that the perceived threat of Islam colored the attitude of early Orientalism. Early Orientalists took on several projects in order to gain access to a piece of the older Oriental culture, he mentions works of Simon Ockley, William Jones’ codification of Indian laws, and the translation of the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism, by A.-H. Anquetil-Duperron. These scholarly pursuits paved the foundation for a landmark event in Orientalism, which was Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt. Unlike the leaders of such expeditions from the past, Napoleon spent a great amount of time studying Egypt and relied on works like Voyage en Égypte et en Syrie by Comte de Volney. Napoleon arrived in Egypt with a coterie of intellectuals that were well versed in Orientalism, and they were driven by Napoleon’s singular aim of restoring a formerly great civilization, that had fallen low, to its old glory. All the events of the expedition were dutifully written out in Description de l’Égypte. Said criticizes the tone of the book and the false connection that it sought to build between Europe and the select goodness of the Orient. The book projects Napoleon in a heroic light and depicts him as a leader striving to lift and empower a fallen people.

Said believes that Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt signaled a shift in Orientalism wherein the language stopped being merely descriptive and transformed to become a means of creation. To elucidate his point, he talks about the formulation of the plans for the construction of the Suez Canal, a mammoth project that required an abundance of resources. Ferdinand de Lesseps justified the creation of the canal with the claim that it would allow the Oriental people to reap benefits from an exercise that they could never have conceived.

The final part of the first chapter focuses on elucidating the concept of a ‘textual attitude’. Said explains that such an attitude comes from having access to literature about unknown subjects. The reading of such texts leads one to believe that the knowledge gained from a text is greater and perhaps more accurate than one gleaned from experience or from listening and observing. He goes on to explain how textual knowledge leads to the creation of discourse as described by Michel Foucault in his work. Said raises the example of Napoleon and Ferdinand de Lesseps both of whom interacted with the Orient in a manner that had been greatly shaped from the knowledge that they had gained from texts. On the other hand, travelogues have been typically excluded from the fundamental understanding of Orientalism, and have yet played a crucial role in constructing the image of the Orient. He argues that the dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’ or rather east and west has led to the unfair and inaccurate categorization of disparate cultures and people that fails to recognize the difference between such groups.

These unfair categorizations remain relevant for great periods due to the continued commitment towards the textual attitude. To illustrate, Said provides portions of lectures given by H.A.R. Gibb in 1945 at the University of Chicago, and another in 1963 at Harvard University, both of these lectures contain equally discriminating language aimed at the Orient, indicating no change in attitude despite the passage of time, and access to greater amounts of information.

Analysis

Said is masterful in his representation of the use of words like Orientalism, and the Orient. He takes excerpts from known Orientalists like Balfour and Cromer to outline the meaning of these terms as they were applied then. He goes through these excerpts and provides a detailed analysis of their views to support his understanding and observations about the Occident’s attitude towards the Orient. It is also interesting to note that he chooses to include the views of officials that engaged with the Orient in disparate ways. Although Cromer was involved in the daily management of oriental affairs, he had the same attitude towards the people of the orient, like Balfour, who was involved in the creation of policy that dictated the management of Oriental affairs. In this way, Said demonstrates that Orientalism was not an attitude that was limited to a specific group of people but rather a view that was widely subscribed.

In the second part, Said highlights how the study of the Orient in the early days was focused on studying the language, history, and cultural practices prevalent in the orient. The western scholars were not quite concerned with the people but rather their cultural attributes. Said argues that this led to the west manufacturing the voice of the Orient, one which had nothing to do with the actual people of the orient. He cites literature works in which the Orient was used to indicate something ominous or dangerous, and makes particular mention of the Divine Comedy by Dante. In the third part, Said explains how Napoleon linked the Orient to Old Europe and converted the Orient to a real physical place under the control of the West by the means of the Suez Canal. From this part onwards, Said begins to discuss the ways in which Orientalism began to shift with the progression of time. Napoleon’s expedition also served to reduce the perceived threat of Islam, since, before contact with the Orient, scholars only had the Oriental literature as a means of understanding that other part of the world. Simon Ockley, the author of The History of the Saracens, famously described the religion of Islam as a heresy.