Orientalism Chapter 2 Part 1-4

Said begins the second chapter by detailing the stages of changes that Orientalism underwent through the centuries especially in the 18th century. He explains that although Orientalism in the 18th century was quite different from what had preceded it in earlier centuries, yet the attitude remained. The great change that occurred in Orientalism in the 18th century was that its religious character changed and became secular. Orientalism grew beyond the lands of Islam and came to recognize other aspects of the east such as its history, its similarities to the history of the west, and a need to categorize nature as well as men. This created a secular version of Orientalism, that eventually led to the development of ideas like imperialism and colonialism. The author explains that the only means to understand how the ideas about the Orient were formed is by studying the development of Orientalism through a historical perspective. In Said’s estimation, the modern orientalist was still imbued with the idea of restoring the orient to the glories of its old civilizations, a notion that had existed in the past centuries as well. The only difference was that the modern Orientalist was aided by the secularism of their ideas, in addition, the reflections of the modern orientalist were considered to be accurate not because they corroborated facts but rather because they mirrored the ideas that had been presented before.

Said discusses two eminent Orientalists whose contributions towards the secularisation of Orientalism were profound. He first mentions Silvestre de Sacy who was a pioneer in establishing a systematic body of texts for the study of the Orient. Sacy worked diligently to translate, and present Oriental literature, so much so that several other Orientalists traced their authority on the subject to him. Said holds Sacy responsible for canonizing the core concepts of Orientalism and establishing that it was not an unknowable or elusive concept but one that could be conquered through the might of European Scholarship. Said then cites the work of Ernest Renan, who was a noted scholar of Semitic languages. Renan’s views were not only discriminatory but rather blatantly racist, he argued that Semitic was unnatural in comparison to the Indo-European languages. Said argues that Renan’s approach was biased and his own European ethnocentrism limited him from gaining a complete understanding of the subject he was studying. However, Renan’s limited and racist approach was widely subscribed, and he was quickly recognized as an authority on the Orient that continued to be cited for several generations. Said believes that this self-perpetuation of the flawed Orientalist worldview was the primary reason for its propagation.

Said then moves the discussion towards the changes that took place in Orientalism in the 19th century, which was when the Orientalists developed a knowing vocabulary of the perceived Orient. The works of scholars like Renan and Sacy had already reduced the orient in an attempt to create an easier understanding, the orientalists that came afterward used new language to conjure up visions of the Orient. This could only come about due to a concerted effort by the west to dehumanize the individuals of the east and instead refer to them merely as the Orientals. European scholar-travelers were responsible for a major aspect of this new terminology that began to apply to Orientalism. Said illustrates by example how the different kinds of travelers all had the same effect on Orientalism due to the nature and structure of the language they used to describe the Orient. He explains that there are travelers who voyage in pursuit of their scholarly work, others that do the same for disciplines besides Orientalism, and finally, those that travel for the sake of personal reasons, and yet the texts of their travel have the same effect despite the differences in their purpose. Said cites Edward Lane’s Modern Egyptians to illustrate how the author’s limitations led to the dehumanized the orient, and once again firmed up the claim that the Orientalists possessed specialized knowledge about the Orient.

In the last section of chapter 2, Said chooses to focus on pilgrims, and how they affected the concept of Orientalism. He explains how the image of a weak and inferior Orient was created by the manner in which the west learned about the East. These pilgrims that traveled through oriental lands, saw themselves as guardians that sought to shield the populace from information about practices they perceived to be against European sensibilities. Said also talks about the pilgrimages that were made into Oriental lands, and while locations for such voyages differed between the French and English, both kinds of travelers voyaged through biblical lands. Said then focusses on the foray of the English and the French in other parts of the world, and states that the administrative realities of India served to limit the imaginative play of their Orientalists, while the French traveled freely. Consequently, French texts tended to rely more heavily on imagination than a sense of familiarity from shared experiences. In times before the 19th century, the Orient had not been a real place but rather a set of references, however, the Orient began to become real when information about it began to be sourced from personal experiences. The ideas gleaned from these experiences were propagated through the aid of scholarship as travelogues were widely distributed and researched.

Analysis

In the first section of the second chapter, Said draws attention to the contribution of philological and anthropological frameworks in understanding the Orient and the zeal for classification as a means of gaining scientific validity. Said argues that these categorizations were inherently flawed and cites examples to prove that the process was influenced by the textual generalizations that had been wrongly formed about the Orient. This shift of viewing the Orient from an almost scientific viewpoint in contrast to the religious one that had prevailed before is one of the reasons why that period of time is referred to as the Age of reason. This viewpoint transition failed to change the core concept of Orientalism but instead changed the reasoning for the conclusions drawn in Orientalism. In the second part of the chapter, Said discusses influential scholars that changed the historical context of Orientalism as they perceived the orient in the same manner while their point of view changed from religious to scientific. In the earlier times, this religious view of orientalism was what led to the development of colonialism and Imperialism, while the later scientific view led to the formation of public policies in the Orient.

The last part of the second chapter has been purposefully titled after Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, as Said hopes to demonstrate that the relationship between the east and west has been religious since its inception. In earlier sections, Said highlights the role of the east as a place imbued with religious significance by citing the works of Chaucer and Dante. In this very section, Said first differentiates between the English and French, as he discusses the different routes of pilgrimage that their respective citizens followed. Said argues that in these later times, the goals of the Orientalist had evolved beyond a mere discovery or possession of knowledge, and that modern orientalists viewed their work as a means of saving the heretical Orient through a Christian pilgrim.