Orientalism by Edward W. Said PDF

ORIENTALI§M -- Edward W. Said -- Vintage Books A Division of Random House New York  First Vin tage Books Edition, October 1979 Copyright ® 1 ')7$ by Edward W. Said All fights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright...

ORIENTALI§M -- Edward W. Said -- Vintage Books A Division of Random House New York  First Vin tage Books Edition, October 1979 Copyright ® 1 ')7$ by Edward W. Said All fights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United Slates by Random House, Inc New York, and in Canada.. by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Pantheon Books, A Division of Random House, Inc., in November 1978. Library of Congress Cola/oging in Publico/ion Da/a Said, Edward W Orientahsm. Includes bibliographical references and index. I. As ia Foreign opinion, Occidental. 2. Near - East-Foreign opinion, Occidental. 3. Asia-Study and teachi ng. 4. Near East-Study and teaching. 5. Imperialism. 6. East and West. l. TiUe. DS12.S24 1979 950'.07'2 79-10497 ISBN 0-394-74067-X Manufactured in the United States of America Cover: Jean-Uon Gerome, The Snake Charmer (detail), courtesy of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Williamstown, Massachusetts. , Since this copy right page cannot accommodate aJl tbe permissions acknowledgments, they are to be found on the following two pages. Grateful acknowledgment is made 10 the following for permission to reprint previously published m ate rial: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: Excerpts from Subjects 0/ the Day: Being a Se"'clion 0/ Sptechts and Writings by Ge orge Nathaniel Curron. George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.: Excerpts from Revolution in Ihe Middle East and Olher Ca.'e Studies, proceedings 0/ a seminar, edited by P. J. Vatikiotis. American Je wish Committee: Excerpts from "The Return of Islam " by Bernard Lewis, in Commentary, vol. 61, no. 1 (January 1976). Reprinted from Commcmary by permission. Copyright @ 1976 by the American Jewish Committee. Basic Books, Inc.: Excerpts from "Renan's Philological Laboratory" by Edward W. Said, in Art, Politics, and Will; EJ'sa),s ill HOllar of Lionel Trilling, edited by Quentin Anderson et a!. Copyright © 1971 by Basic Books, Inc. The Bodley Head and McIntosh & Otis, Inc.: Excerpts from Flauherr in Egyp r, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller. Reprinted by permis­ sion of Francis Steegmuller and The Bodley Head. Jonathan C ap e, Ltd., and The Letters of T. E. Lawrence Trust: Excerpt from The Lerrers of T. E. Lo.wrence, edited by David Garnett. Jonathan Cape, l.td., The Seven Pillars Trust, and Doubleday & Co., inc.; Excerpt from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; A Triumph by T. E. l.awrence. Copyright 1926, 1935 by Doubleday & Co., Inc. Doubleday & Co., Inc., and A. P. Wntt & Sons, Ltd : Excerpt from Verse by Rudyard Kipling. The Georgia Review; Excerpts from "Qrientalism," which originally appeared in The Georgia Review (Spring 1977). Copyright © 1977 by the University of Georgia. Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.: Excerpt from II poem by Bornier (}862), quoted in De Lesseps 0/ Sliez by Charles Beatty. Maemillan-& Co , London and Basingstoke: Excerpts from Modern EgYpt,. vol. 2, by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer. Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpt from "Propaganda" by Harold Lasswell, in Tile Encydopedia of the Socia! Sciences, edited by Edwin R. A. Seligman, vol. 12 (}934). Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., and A. P. Watt & Sons, Ltd.: E. cerpt from '"Byzanlium" by William Butler Yeats, in The Collecred Poems. Copyright J933 by l'Iacmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. The New York Times Company; Excerpts from "Arabs, islam, and the Dogmas of the West" by Edward W. Said, in The New Yo rk Times Book Review, October 31, 1976. Copyright © 1976 by The New York Times Company. Reprinled by permission. Northwestern University Press: Excerpt from "The Arab Portrayed" by Edward W. Said, in The Arah-Israeli Confrontation 0/ June 1967: An Arab Perspective, edited by Ibrahim Abu-Lughod. Copy right @ 1970 by North_ western Univers ity Press. Exce rpt from The Persians by Aeschylus, translated by Prentice-Hall, Inc.: Anthony J. Podleck. Copyright © 1970 by Prentice-Hall, Inc. v  The Royal Asiatic Society, Great Britain and Ireland; Excerpt from "Louis Massignoll (1882-1962)." in lournal 0/ the Royal Asiatic Society (1962). University of California Press: Excerpts from Modern Islam: The Search Jor Cui/ural Identity by Gustave von Grunebaum. Copyright © 1962 by the Regents of the University of California. University of Chicago Press: Excerpts from Modern Trends in Islam by H. A. R. Gibb. · - FOR lANET AND IBRAIDM  Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Scope of Orientalism I. Knowing the Oriental 31 II. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalking the Oriental 49 Ul. Projects 73 IV. Crisis 92 Chapter 2 Orientalist Structures and Restructures I. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion 113 n. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest ReDan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory 123 Ill. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination "" 149 IV. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French 166 Chapter 3 OrientaIism Now I. Latent and Manifest Orientalism 201 IT. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism's Worldliness 226 III. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower 255 IV. The Latest Phase 284 Notes 329 Index 351  Acknowledgments I have been reading about Orientalism for a number of years, but most of this book was written during 1975-1976, which I spent as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford. California. In this unique and generous insti· tution, it was my good fortune not only to have benefitted agreeably from several colleagues, but also from the help of Joan Warm­ brunn, Chris Hath, Jane Kielsmeier, Preston Cutler, and the cen­ ter's director, Gardner Lindzey. The Jist of friends, colleagues, and students who read, or listened to, parts or the whole of this manu­ script is so long as to embarrass me, and now that it has finally appeared as a book, perhaps even them. Nevertheless I should mention with gratitude the always helpful encouragement of Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky, and Roger Owen, who followed this project from its beginning to its conclusion. Likewise I must gratefully acknowledge the helpful and critical interest of the colleagues, friends, and students in various places whose questions and discussion sharpened the text considerably. Andre Schiffrin and Jeanne Morton of Pantheon Books were ideal pub­ lisher and copy editor, respectively, and made the ordeal (for the author, at least) of preparing the manuscript an instructive and genuinely intelligent process. Mariam Said helped me a great deal with her research on the early modem history of Orientalist insti­ tutions. Apart from that, though, her loving support really made much of the work on this book not only enjoyable but possible. New York E. W.S. September-October 1977 xi They cannot represent themselves; they must be repee· sented. -Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte The East is a career. -Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred... Introduction I On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975 1976 a French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown acea that "it had once seemed to belong to... the Orient of Chateau­ briand and Nerval."l He was right about the place, of course, especially so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, re­ markable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a European representation of the Orient and its contemporary fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for the journalist and his French readers. Americans will not feel quite the same about the Orient, which for them is much more likely to be associated very differently with the Far East (China and Ja2an. mainly). Unlike the Americans, the French and the British-less so the Germans. Russians, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, and Swiss-have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orienta/ism. a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and 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. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) 1  2 ORIENTALISM I as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, : , imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem 'Ii considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and :: Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic "Oriental" awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of that Orient. It will be clear to the reader (and will become clearer still throughout the many pages that follow) that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, i n my opinion, interdependent. The most readily accepted designation for Orientalism is an academic one, and indeed the label still serves in a number of academic institutions. Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient-and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, J sociologist, historian, or philologist--either in its specific or its gen­ eral aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orien- talism. Compared with Oriental studies or area studies, it is true that the term Orientalism is less preferred by specialists today, both because it is too vague and general and because it connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early­ twentieth-century European colonialism. Nevertheless books are written and congresses held with "the Orienf' as their main focus, with the Orientalist in his new or old guise as their main authority. The point is that even if it does not survive as it once did, Orien­ talism lives on academically through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the Oriental. Related to this academic tradition, whose fortunes, transmigra­ tions, specializations, and transmissions are in part the subject of this study, is a more general meaning for Orientalism. Orientalism I i a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological.t-' distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time) "the Occident." Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers. political theorists, economists, and im­ perial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social, descriptions, and political accounts concerning the po ! Introduction 3 1 , Orient, its people, customs, "mind," destiny, and so on. This Orien­ talism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx. A liule later in this introduction I shaH deal with the methodological problems one encounters in so broadly COR­ strued a "field" as this. The interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism is a constant one, and since the late eighteenth century there has been a considerable, quite disciplined perhaps even regulated-traffic between the two. Here I come to the third meaning of Orientalism, which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two. Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient-dealing with it by making statements about it. authorizing views of it. describing./ it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short. Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having au­ thority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault's notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Oriental ism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enonnously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, socio­ logically, militarily, ideologically. scientifically. and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. Moreover, so authoritative a position did Orientalism have that I believe no one writing, think- ing. or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism. In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a ' free subject of thought or action. This is not to say that Orientalism v' unilaterally detennines what can be said about the Orient, but that it is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on (and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that peculiar entity "the Orient" is in question. How this happens is what this book tries to demonstrate. It also tries to show that Euro jln c un::_f ined trength and identity by setting itself off against 0;(/ the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self. Historically and culturally there is a quantitative as well as a qualitative difference between the Franco-British involvement in the Orient and-until the period of American aScendancy after 4 ORIENTALISM World War II-the involvement of every other European and At­ lantic power. To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enter­ , a project whose dimensions take in such disparate rearms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levanl, the Biblical texis and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial annies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a fonnidable schol­ arly corpus, innumerable Oriental "experts" and "hands," an Orien- tal professorate, a complex array of "Oriental" ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use-the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. My point is that Orientalism derives from a particular closeness experienced between Britain and France and the Orient, which until the early nineteenth century had really meant only India and the Bible lands. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of World War II France and Britain dominated the Orient and Orientalism; since World War II America has dominated the Orient, and approaches it as France and Britain once did. Out of that closeness, whose dynamic is enormously productive even if it always demonstrates the comparatively greater strength of the Occi dent (British, French, or American), comes the large body of texts I call Orientalist. It should be said at once that even with the generous number of books and authors that I examine. there is a much larger number that I simply have had to leave out. My argument, however. de­ pends neither upon an exhaustive catalogue of texts dealing with the Orient nor upon a clearly delimited set of texts, authors, and ideas that together make up the Orientalist canon. I have depended instead upon a different methodological alternative-whose back­ bone in a sense is the set of historical generalizations I have so far been making in this Introduction-and it is these I want now to discuss in more analytical detail. II I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is Dot an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico's great obser- -- Introduction 5 vation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geo­ graphical and cultural entities-to say nothing of historical entities -such locales, regions, geographical sectors as "Orient" and "Occi­ dent" are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery. and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other. Having said that, one must go on to state a number of reasonable qualifications. In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no cor­ responding reality. When Disraeli said in his novel Tancred that the East was a career, he meant that to be interested in the East was something bright young Westerners would find to be an all­ consuming passion; he should not be interpreted as saying that the East was only a career for Westerners. There were-and are­ cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than... anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as ,l I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orien­ talism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. My point is that Disraeli's statement about the East refers mainly to that created consistency, that regular constellation of ideas as the pre-eminent thing about the Orient, and not to its mere being, as Wallace Stevens's phrase has it. A second qualification is that ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied. To be­ lieve that the Orient was created-or, as I call it, "Orientalized" -and to believe that such things happen simply as a necessity of the imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony. and is quite accurately indicated in the title of K. M. Panikkar's classic Asia and Western Dominance,2 The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be "Oriental" in _all those ways 'considered common- 6 ORIENTALISM 1 place by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because " ! I it cou d be-that is, submitted to being-made Oriental. There is very llttle consent to be found, for example, in the fact that Flau- bert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely in- fluential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was "Iypically Oriental." My argument is that Flaubert's situation of strength in relation to Kuchuk Hanem was not an isolated instance. It fairly stands for the pattern of relative strength between East and West, and the discourse about the Orient thai it enabled. This bri.ngs us to a third qualification. One ought never to assume that the structure of Orientalism is nothing more than a structure of lies or of myths which, were the truth about them to be told, would simply blow away. I myself believe that Orienlalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient (which is what, in its academic or scholarly form, it claims to be). Never­ theless, what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted­ together strength of Orientalist discourse, its very close ties to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and ils redoubt­ able durability. After all, any system of ideas that can remain unchanged as teachable wisdom (in academies, books, congresses, universities, foreign-service institutes) from the period of Ernest Renan in the late 1840s until the present in the United States must be something more formidable than a mere collection of lies. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material invest­ ment. Continued investment made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient, an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied-indeed, made truly productive-the statements prolif­ erating out from Orientalism into the general culture. Gramsci has made the useful analytic distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary (or at least rational and noncoercive) affiliations like schools, r Introduction 7 families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role i n the polity is direct domination. Culture, of course, is to be found operating within civil society, where the influence of ideas, of institutions, and of other persons works not through domination but by what Gramsci calls consent. In any society not totalitarian, then. certain cultural forms predominate over Olhers, just as certain ideas are more in­ fluential than others; the form of t is cultural leadership is what Gramsci has identified as hegemony, an indispensable concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West. It is hegemony, or rather the result of cultural hegemony at work, that gives Orientalism the durability and the strength I have been speak­ ing about so far. Orientalism is never far from what Denys Hay has called the idea of Europe,3 a collective notion identifying "us" Europeans as against all "those" non-Europeans, and indeed it can be argued that the major component in European culture is pre­ cisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Eu­ rope: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison.) with all the non-European peoples and cultures. There is in addi­ tion the hegemony of European ideas about the Orient, themselves reiterating European superiority over Oriental backwardness, usu­ ally overriding the possibility that a more independent, or more skeptical, thinker might have had different views on the matter. In a quite constant way, Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible posilionai superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand. And why should it have been otherwise, especially during the period of extraordinary European ascendancy from the late Renaissance to the present? The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part. Under the general heading of knowledge of the Orient, and within the um­ brella of Western hegemony over the Orient during the period from the end of the eighteenth century, there emerged a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial, and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural person-  , 8 QRIENTALISM ality. national or religious character. Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments. and projections. If we can point to great Orientalist works of genuine scholarship like Silvestre de Sacy's Chrestomathie arabe or Edward William Lane's Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, we need also to note that Renan's and Gobineau's racial ideas came out of the same impulse, as did a great many Victorian pornographic novels (see the analysis by Steven Marcus of "The Lustful Turk" ). And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientali m is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material-about which who could deny that they were shot through with doctrines of European superiority, various kinds of racism, imperialism, and the like, dogmatic views of "the Oriental" as a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction?--or the much more varied work produced by almost uncountable individual writers, whom one would take up as individual instances of authors dealing with the Orient. In a sense the two alternatives, general and particular, are really two perspectives on the same material: in both instances one would have to deal with pioneers in the field like William Jones, with great artists like Nerval or Flaubert. And why would it not be possible to employ both perspectives together, or one after the other? Isn't there an obvious danger of distortion (of precisely the kind that academic Orientalism has always been prone to) if either too general or too specific a level of description is maintained systematically? My two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too posi tivistic a localized focus. In trying to deal with these problems I have tried to deal with three main aspects of my own contemporary reality that seem to me to point the way out of the methodological or perspectival difficulties I have been discussing, difficulties that might force one, in the first instance, into writing a coarse polemic on so unacceptably general a level of description as not to be worth the effort, or in the second instance, into writing so detailed and atomistic a series of analyses as to lose all track of the general II - Introduction 9 lines of force informing the field, giving it its special cogency. How then to recognize individuality and to reconcile it with its in­ telligent, and by no means passive or merely dictatorial, general and hegemonic context? III I mentioned three aspects of my contemporary rea1ity: I must explain and briefly discuss them now, so that it can be seen how I was led to a particular course of research and writing. 1. The distinction between pure and political koowledge. It is very easy to argue that knowledge about Shakespeare or Words­ worth is not political whereas knowledge about contemporary China or the Soviet Union is. My own formal and professional designation is that of "humanist," a title which indicates the humanities as my field and therefore the unlikely eventuality that there might be anything political about what I do in that field. Of course, all these labels and terms are quite unnuanced as I use them here, but the general truth of what I am pointing to is, I think. widely held. One reason for saying that a humanist who writes about Wordsworth, or an editor whose specialty is Keats, is not involved in anything political is that what he does seems to have no direct political effect upon reality in the everyday sense. A scholar whose field is Soviet economics works in a highly charged area where there is much government interest, and what he might produce in the way of studies or proposals will be taken up by policymakers, government officials, institutional economists, in­ telligence experts, The distinction between "humanists" and persons whose work has policy implications, or political significance, can be broadened further by saying that the former's ideological color is a matter of incidental importance to politics (although possibly of great moment to his colleagues in the field, who may object to his Stalinism or fascism or too easy liberalism), whereas the ideology of the latter i s woven directly into his material-indeed, economics, politics, and sociology in the modern academy are ideological sciences-and therefore taken for granted as being "pclitical." Nevertheless the determining impingement on most knowledge 10 ORIENTALISM produced in the contemporary West (and here 1 speak mainly about the United States) is that it be nonpolitical. that is, scholarly, academic. impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, pemaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society. These continue to bear on what he does professionally, even though naturally enough his research and its fruits do attempt to reach a level of relative freedom from the inhibitions and the restrictions of brute, everyday reality. For there is such a thing as knowledge that is less, rather than more, partial than the individual (with his entangling. and distracting life circumstances) who produces it. Yet this knowledge is not therefore automatically nonpolitical. Vo'hether discussions of literature or of classical philology are fraught with---or have unmediated-political significance is a very large question that I have tried to treat in some detail elsewhere.5 What I am interested in doing now is suggesting how the general liberal consensus that "true" knowledge is fundamentally non­ political (and conversely, that overtly political knowledge is not "true" knowledge) obscures the highly if obscurely organized political circumstances obtaining when knowledge is produced. No one is helped in understanding this today when the adjective "political" is used as a label to discredit any work for daring to violate the protocol of pretended suprapolitical objectivity. We may say, first, that civil society recognizes a gradation of political im­ portance in -the various fields of knowledge. To some extent the political importance given a field comes from the possibility of its direct translation into economic terms; but to a greater extent political importance comes from the closeness of a field to ascertain­ able sources of power in political society. Thus an economic study of long-term Soviet energy potential and its effect on military capability is likely to be commissioned by the Defense Department, and thereafter to acquire a kind of political status impossible for a study of Toistoi's early fiction financed in part by a foundation. Yet both works belong in what civil society acknowledges to be a similar field, Russian studies, even though one work may be done by a very conservative economist, the other by a radical literary po Introduction 11 historian. My point here is that "Russia" as a general subject matter ' c: has political priority over nicer distinctions such as "economics" and "literary history," because political society in Gramsci's sense reaches into such realms of civil society as the academy and saturates them with significance of direct concern to it. I do not want to press all this any further on general theoretical grounds: it seems to me that the value and credibility of my case can be demonstrated by being much more specific, in the way, for example, Noam Chomsky has studied the instrumental connection between the Vietnam War and the notion of objective scholarship as it was applied to cover state-sponsored military research.6 Now because Britain, France, and recently the United States are imperial powers, their political societies impart to their civil scx;ieties a sense of urgency, a direct political infusion as it were, where and when· ever matters pertaining to their imperial interests abroad are concerned. I doubt that it is controversial. for example, to say that. ngljsbman jn India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries that was never far from their.stat!.....si...in ,,-._iiii-mind-a;-Sritish...__.---.....-.. colonies. To say...this "'"..- _may......seem._-ql,lJte.iff r Jl.t l. Ql!!.. ay!E.[, !. 1 I a d i":. kno led..g...@p ut Il.ldi j gypt is someho n ged i l)).p.r: _ " , ,: o.!a.ted _ , the.#.a£.t and yet Ihal is what I am saying in this study I ro.s politi.cJ!iJ.- of Orientalism. For if it is true that no production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author's involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances, then it must also be true that for a European or American studying the Orient there can be no disclaiming the main" circumstances of his actuality: that he comes up against the Orient as a European or I American first, as an individual second. And to be a European or an American in such a situation is by no means an inert fact. It meant and means being aware, however dimly, that one belongs to a power with definite interests in the Orient, and more important, that one belongs to a part of the earth with a definite history of in­ volvement in the Orient almost since the time of Homer. I Put in this way, these political actualities are still too undefined and general to be really interesting. Anyone would agree to them without necessarily agreeing also that they mattered very. much, for instance, to Flaubert as he wrote SalammbO, or to H. A. R. Gibb as he wrote Modern Trends in Islam. The trouble is that there is too greao: a distance between the big dominating fact, as I have de- 12 ORIENTALISM scribed it, and the details of everyday life that govern the minute discipline of a novel or a scholarly text as each is being written. Yet if we eliminate from the start any notion that "big" facts like imperial domination can be applied mechanically and deterministic­ ally to such complex matters as culture and ideas, then we will begin to approach an interesting kind of study. My idea is that European and then American interest in the Orient was political , according to some of the obvious historical accounts of it that I have given here, but that it was the culture that __cr ated t!t1!.t in£e: !t, that acted dynamically along with brute political. eco­ nomic. and military rationales to make the Orient the varied and , complicated place that it obviously was in the field I call Orientaiism. Therefore. Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field iliat is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institu­ < tions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the... Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. It is rather a §J!i£Y1i2n of caL.awa! ess int{L esJhetic. 1'£ho.. !!.OQlj.f J! s:191(lgi(: :_'l storical, an....E.hi101()gLqll texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain wiJI or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is bY2.l ,jn 4!rect corresgonding relationship with political power in thu , ut rather is produced and exists in an uneven exch",,!l with various k aped tCl_a-.E_ ree by the 0change with p litical (as with a colonial or imE!rial establishm t),. power inte l l!!a l (as with reigning sciences like comparatjve linguistics or anatomy, or any of the mooem lic sciences), ower !!Jura as wlth art oxles an canons of taste texts. valuesl, power moral (as with Ideas about what "we" dQ and what "they" 'cannot do or understand as "we" doL Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is-and does not simply represent-a con­ siderable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with "our" world. po Introduction 13 Because Orientalism is a cultural and a political fact, then, it does not exist in some archival vacuum; quite the contrary, I think i t can be shown that what is thought, said, or even done about the Orient follows (perhaps occurs within) certain distinct and in­ tellectually knowable lines. Here too a considerable degree of nuance and elaboration can be seen working as between the broad superstructural pressures and the details of composition, the {acts of textuality. Most humanistic scholars are, I think, perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such a thing as intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors. and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called the "overtaxing of the productive person in the name of.. the principle of 'creativity,' " in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work.7 Yet there is a reluctance to allow that political, institutional, and ideo­ logical constraints act in the same manner on the individual author. A humanist will believe it to be an interesting fact to any interpreter of Balzac that he was influenced in the ComMie humaine by the conflict between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, but the same sort of pressure on Balzac of deeply reactionary monarchism is felt in some vague way to demean his literary "genius" and therefore to be less worth serious study. Similarly-as Harry Bracken has been tirelessly showing-philosophers will conduct their discussions of Locke, Hume, and empiricism without ever taking into account that there is an explicit connection in these classic writers between their "philosophic" doctrines and racial theory, justifications of slavery, or arguments for colonial exploita­ lion.8 l;'hese. a_reo c()mJP.-on e!1s".ugh wa by which !;Ontemp9J'!...CY SC 9!'!ll!!jQ keeps!! !LP.w:e. Perhaps it is true that most attempts to rub culture's nose in the mud of politics have been crudely iconoclastic; perhaps also the social interpretation of literature in my own field has simply not kept up with the enormous technical advances in detailed textual analysis. But there is no getting away from the fact that literary studies in general, and American Marxist theorists in particular, have avoided the effort of seriously bridging the gap between the superstructural and the base levels in textual, historical SCholarship; on another occasion I have gone so far as to say that the literary-cultural establishment as a whole has declared the seriOl!S study of imperialism and culture off Iimits,g For Orientalism brings one up directly against that question-that is, to realizing  14 ORIENTALISM that political imperialism governs an entire field of study, imagina­ tion, and scholarly institutions in such a way as to make its avoidance an inte1!ectual and historical impossibility. Yet there will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that a literary scholar and a philosopher. for example, are trained in literature and phitosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological analysis. In other words, the specialist argument can work quite effectively to block the larger and, in my opinion, the more intel­ lectually serious perspective. Here it seems to me there is a simple two-part answer to be given, at least so far as the study of imperialism and culture (or Orientalism) is concerned. [n the first place, nearly every nineteenth-century writer (and the same is true enough of writers in earlier periods) was extraordinarily welt aware of the fact of empire:.this is a subject not very well studied, but it will not take a modern Victorian specialist long to admit that liberal cultural heroes like John Stuart Mill, Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, Macaulay, Ruskin, George Eliot, and even Dickens had definite views on race and imperialism, which are quite easily to be found at work in their writing. So even a specialist must deal with the knowledge that Mill, for exam ple, J!!ade it lear if!" e::IY and Represenln­ live Governm el1l that his __ i ,: could not be applied to J2!!ll! _ ,. = w ai Offi !J tiona2'-!o _ _ eal oTllls " life, after all) because the Indians were civilizationally, if not 'raciallr, inferior. The same kind of paradox is to be found in Marx, as I try to show in this book. In the second place, to believe that politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the production of literature, scholarship, social theory, and hiMory writing is by no means equivalent to saying that culture is therefore a demeaned Or denigrated thing. Quite the contrary: my whole point is to say that we can better understand the persistence and the durability of saturating hegemonic systems like culture when we realize that their internal constraints upon writers and thinkers were productive, not J unilaterally inhibiting. It is this idea that Gramsci, certainly, and Foucault and Raymond Williams in their very different ways have been trying to il!ustrate. Even One or two pages by Williams on "the uses of the Empire" in The Long Rellolurion tell us more about nineteenth-century cultural richness than many volumes of hermetic textual analy es.!(l Therefore I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between - po Introduction 15 individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires-British, French, American-in whose in­ tellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced. What interests me most as a scholar is not the gross political verity but the detail, as indeed what interests us in someone like Lane or Flaubert or Renan is not the (to him) indisputable truth that Occi­ dentals are superior to Orientals, but the profoundly worked over and modulated evidence of his detailed work within the very wide space opened up by that truth. One need only remember that Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians is a classic of historical and anthropological observation because of its style, ils enormously intelligent and brilliant details, not because of its simple reflection of racial superiority, to understand what I am saying here. The kind of political questions raised by Orientalism, then, are as follows : What other sorts of intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly, and cultural energies went into the making of an imperialist tradi­ tion like the Oriental ist one? How did philology , lexicography, history, biology, political and economic theory, novel writing, and - lyric poetry come to the service of Orientalism's broadly imperialist view of the world? What changes, modulations, refinements, even revolutions take place within Orientalism? What is the meaning of originality, of continuity, of individuality , in this context? How does Oriental ism transmit or reproduce itself from one epoch to another? In fine, how can we treat the cultural, historical phenom­ enon of Orientalism as a kind of willed human work -not of mere unconditioned ratiocination-in all its historical c omplexi ty, de tail, and worth without at the same time losing sight of the alJiance be­ tween cultural work, political tendencies, the state, and the specific realities of domination? Governed by such concerns a humanistic study can responsibly address itself to politics and culture. But this is not to say that such a study establishes a hard-and-fast rule about the relationship between knowledge and politics. My argument is that each humanistic investigation must formulate the nature of that connection in the specific context of the study, the subject matter, and its historical circumstances, 2. The methodological question. In a previous book I gave a good deal of thought and analysis to the methodological importance for work in the human sciences of finding and formulating a first step, a point of departure, a beginning principleY A major lesson  16 ORIENTALISM I learned and tried to present was that there is no such thing as a merely given, or simply available, starting point: beginnings have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them. Nowhere in my experience has the difficulty of this lesson been more consciously lived (with what success--or failure -I cannot really say) than in this study of Orientalism. The I idea of beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning; for the student of texts one such notion of inaugural delimitation is Louis Althusser's idea I of the problematic, a specific determinate unity of a text, or group of texts, which is something given rise to by analysis.a Yet in the case of Orientalism (as opposed to the case of Marx's texts, which is what Allhusser studies) there is not simply the problem of finding I a point of departure, or problematic, but also the question of designating which texts, authors, and periods are the ones best suited for study. It has seemed to me foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative I history of Orientalism, first of all because if my guiding principle was to be "the European idea of the Orient" there would be virtually no limit to the material I would have had to deal with; second, because the narrative model itself did not suit my descrip­ tive and political interests; third, because in such books as Raymond Schwab's La Renaissance orientale, lohann Flick's Die Arabischen Studien in Europa his in den Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderls, and more recently, Dorothee Metlitzki's The Maller of Araby in Medieval Englandl' there already exist encyclopedic works on cer­ tain aspects of the European-Oriental encounter such as make the critic's job, in the general political and intellectual context I sketched above, a different one. There still remained the problem of cutting down a very fat archive to manageable dimensions, and more important, outlining something in the nature of an intellectual order within that group of texts without at the same time following a mindlessly chrono­ logical order. My starting point therefore has been the British, French, and American experience of the Orient taken as a unit, what made that experience possible by way of historical and intel lectual background, what the quality and character of the ex perience has been. For reasons I shall discuss presently I limited that already limited (but still inordinately large) set of questions to p Introduction 17 the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for almost a thousand years together stood for the Orient. Immediately upon doing thai, a large part of the Orient seemed to have been eliminated-India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East not because these regions were not important (they obviously have been) hut because one could discuss Europe's experience of the Near Orient, or of Islam, apart from its ex­ periellCe of the Far Orient. Yet at certain moments of that general European history of interest in the East, particular parts of the Orient like Egypt. Syria, and Arabia cannot be discussed without also studying Europe's involvement in the more distant parts, of which Persia and India are the most important; a notable case in point is the connection between Egypt and India so far as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was concerned. Similarly the French role in deciphering the Zend-Avesta, the pre-eminence of Paris as a center of Sanskrit studies during the first decade of the nineteenth century, the fact that Napoleon's interest in the Orient was contingent upon his sense of the British role in India: all these Far Eastern interests directly influenced French interest in the Near East, Islam, and the Arabs. Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on. Yet my discussion of that domination and systematic interest does not do justice to (a) the important contributions to Orientalism of Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal and (b ) the fact that one of the im­ portant impulses toward the study of the Orient in the eighteenth century was the revolution in Biblical studies stimulated by such variously interesting pioneers as Bishop Lowth, Eichhorn, Herder, and Michaelis. In the first place, I had to focus rigorously upon the British-French and later the American material because it seemed inescapably true not only that Britain and France were the pioneer nations in the Orient and in Oriental studies, but that these vanguard positions were held by virtue of the two greatest colonial networks in pre-twentieth-century history; the American Oriental position since World War II has fit-I think, quite self-consciously -in the places excavated by the two earlier European powers. Then too, I believe that the sheer quality, consistency, and mass of British, French, and American writing on the Orient lifts it above the doubtless crucial work done in Germany, Italy, Russia, and elsewhere. But I think i t is also true that the major steps in Oriental scholarship were first taken in either Britain and France, 18 ORIENTALlSM then elaborated upon by Germans. Silvestre de Sacy. for example. was not only the first modem and institutional European Orientaiist, who worked on Islam. Arabic literature, the Druze religion, and Sassanid Persia; he was also the teacher of Champollion and of Franz Bopp, the founder of German comparative linguistics. A similar claim of priority and subsequent pre-eminence can be made for William Jones and Edward William Lane. In the second place-and here the failings of my study of Orientalism are amply made up for-there has been some important recent work on the background in Biblical scholarship to the rise of what I have called modern Orientalism. The best and the most illuminatingly relevant is E. S. Shaffer's impressive "KuMa Khan" and The Fall oj Jerusalem,l4 an indispensable study of the origins of Romanticism, and of the intellectual activity underpinning a great deal of what goes on in Coleridge, Browning, and George Eliot. To some degree Shaffer's work refines upon the outlines pro­ vided in Schwab, by articulating the material of relevance to be found in the German Biblical scholars and using that material to read, in an intelJigent and always interesting way, the work of three major British writers. Yet what is missing in the book is some sense of the political as well as ideological edge given the Oriental material by the British and French writers I am principally con­ cerned with; in addition, unlike Shaffer I attempt to elucidate subsequent developments in academic as well as literary Orientalism that bear on the connection between British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the rise of an explicitly colonial-minded im­ perialism on the other. Then too, I wish to show how all these earlier matters are reproduced more or less in American Orientalism after the Second World War. Nevertheless there is a possibly misleading aspect to my study, where, aside from an occasional reference, I do not exhaustively discuss the German developments after the inaugural period domi­ nated by Sacy. Any work that seeks to provide an understanding of academic Orientalism and pays little attention to scholars like Steinlhal, Muller, Becker, Goldziher, Brockeimann, Noldeke-to mention only a handful-needs to be reproached, and I freely re­ proach myself. I particularly regret not laking more account of the great scientific prestige that accrued to German scholarship by the middle of the nineteenth century, whose neglect was made into a denunciation of insular British scholars by George Eliot. I have in mind Eliot's unforgettable portrait of Mr. Casaubon in Middle- p Introduction 19 march. One reason Casaubon cannot finish his Key to All Mythol­ ogies is, according to his young cousin Will Ladislaw, that be is unacquainted with German scholarship. For not only has Casaubon chosen a subject "as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view": he is undertaking a job similar to a refutation of Paracelsus because "he is not an Orientalist, you know."15 Eliot was not wrong in implying that by about 1830. which is when Middlemarch is sel, German scholarship had fully attained its European pre-eminence. Yet at DO time in German scholarship during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century CQuid a close partnership have developed between Orientalists and a protracted, sustained national interest in the Orient. There was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or at least a classical, Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but i t was never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval. There is some signifi­ cance in the fact that the two most renowned German works on the Orient, Goethe's WestOstlicher DilVan and Friedrich Schlegel'S Vber die Sprache und Weisheit der lndier, were based respectively on a Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. What German Oriental scholarship did was to refine and elaborate tech­ niques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas, and languages almost literally gathered from the Orient by. imperial Britain and France. Yet what German Orientatism had in common with Anglo­ French and later American Orientalism was a kind of intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture. This authority must in large part be the subject of any description of Orienlalisrn, and it is so in this study. Even the name Orientalism suggests a serious, perhaps ponderous style of expertise; when I apply it to modern American social scientists (since they do not call them­ selves Orientalists, my use of the word is anomalous), it is to draw attention to the way Middle East experts can still draw on the vestiges of Orientalism's intellectual position in nineteenth-century Europe. is nothing mysterious or natural about autholitJ..It is formed, Irradiated, dlssemmated; it is InStrumentiif,itis ersuasive; if iLhas status, It esta IS es canons of taste and value; it is vlrtua Iy -  - 20 QRIENTALISM indistin uis hie from certain ideas it di nifi as tru and from raditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, repro* duces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed. All these attributes of authority apply to Orientalism. and much of what I do in this study is to describe both the historical authority in and the2rsonal authorities of Orientalism. - My principal methodological devices for studying authority here are what can be called strategic location, which is a way of describ­ ing the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large. I use the notion of strategy simply to identify the problem every writer on the Orient has faced: how to get hold of it, how to approach it, how not to be defeated or overwhelmed by its sublimity, its scope, its awful dimensions. Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-a-vis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts. the type of structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text-all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader. containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. None of this takes place in the abstract, however. Every writer on the Orient (and this is true even of Homer) assumes some Oriental precedent. some previous knowledge of the Orient, to which he refers and on which he relies. Additionally, each work on the Orient affiliateJ itself with other works, with audiences, with institutions, with the Orient itself. The ensemble of reJationships between works, audiences, and some particular aspects of the Orient therefore constitutes an analyzable fonnation-for example, that of philo­ logical studies, of anthologies of extracts from Oriental literature, of travel books, of Oriental fantasies-whose presence in time, in discourse, in institutions (schools, libraries, foreign services) gives it strength and authority. It is clear, I hope, that my concern with authority does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientillist text, but analysis rather of the text's surface, its exteriority to what it de­ scribes. I do not think that this idea can be overemphasized. Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes pi Introduction 21 the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. H e is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation : as early as Aeschylus's play The Persians the Orient is transfonned from a very far distant and often threatening Otherness into figures that are relatively familiar (in Aeschylus's case, grieving Asiatic women). The dramatic immediacy of representation in The Persians obscures the fact that the audience is watching a highly artificial enactment of what a non-Oriental has made into a symbol for the whole Orient. My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representa­ tions as representations, not as "natural" depictions of the Orient. This evidence is found just as prominently in the so-called truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original. The exteriority of the repre­ sentation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient. "Sie konnen sich nicht vertreten, sie mUssen vertreten werden," as Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Another reason for insisting upon exteriority is that I believe it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not "truth" but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such rear thing as "the Orient." Thus all 22 ORIENTALISM of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, "there" in discourse about it. And these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of under­ standing for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient. The difference between representations or the Orient before the last third of the eighteenth century and those after it (that is, those belonging to what I call modern Orientalism) is that the range of representation expanded enormously in the later period. It is true that after William Jones and Anquetil-Duperron, and after Napoleon's Egyptian expedition, Europe came 10 know the Orient more scientifically, to live in it with greater authority and discipline than ever before, But what mattered to Europe was the expanded srope and the much greater refinement given its techniques for receiving the Orient, When around the turn of the eighteenth century the Orient definitively revealed the age of its languages-­ Ihus aUldating Hebrew's divine pedigree-it was a group of Euro­ peans who made the discovery, passed it on to other scholars, and preserved the discovery in the new science of Indo-European philology. A new powerful science for viewing the linguistic Orient was born, and with it, as Foucault has shown in The Order of Things. a whole web of related scientific interests. Similarly William Beckford, Byron, Goethe, and Hugo restructured the Orient by their art and made its colors, lights, and people visible through their images, rhythms, and motifs. At most, the "real" Orient provoked a writer to his vision; it very rarely guided it, Orientalism responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West. Thus the history of Orienlalism has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture sur­ rounding it. My analyses consequently try to show the field's shape and internal organization. its pioneers, patriarchal authorities, canonical texts, doxological ideas, exemplary figures. its followers, elaborators, and new authorities; I try also to explain how Oriental ism borrowed and was frequently informed by "strong" ideas, doctrines, and trends ruling the culture. Thus there was (and is) a Jinguistic Orient, a Freudian Orient, a Spenglerian Orient, a Darwinian Orient, a racist Orient-and so on. Yet never has there p Introduction 23 been such a thing as a pure, or unconditional, Orient; similarly. never has there been a nonmaterial form of Orientalism, much less something so innocent as an "idea" of the Orient. In this underlying conviction and in its ensuing methodological consequences do I differ from scholars who study the history of ideas. For the emphases and the executive form, above all the material effectiveness, of statements made by Orientalist discourse are possible in ways that any hermetic history of ideas tends completely to scant. Without those emphases and that material effectiveness Orientalism would be just another idea, whereas it is and was much more than that. Therefore J set out to examine not only scholarly works but also works of literature, political tracts, journalistic texts, travel books, religious and philological studies. In other words, my hybrid per­ spective is broadly historical and "anthropological," given that I believe all texts to be worldly and circumstantial in (of course) ways that vary from genre to genre, and from historical period to historical period. Yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly in­ debted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism. The unity of the large ensemble of texts I analyze is due in part to the fact that they frequently refer to each other: Orientalism is after all a system for.l citing works and authors. Edward William Lane's Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was read and cited by such diverse figures as Nerval, Flaubert, and Richard Burlon. He was an authority whose use was an imperative for anyone writing or think­ ing about the Orient, not just about Egypt: when Nerval borrows passages verbatim from Modern Egyptians it is to use Lane's authority to assist him in describing village scenes in Syria, not Egypt. Lane's authority and the opportunities provided for citing him discriminately as well as indiscriminately were there because Orientalism could give his text the kind of distributive currency that he acquired. There is no way, however, of understanding Lane's currency without also understanding the peculiar features of his text; this is equally true of Renan, Saey, Lamartine, Schlegel. and a group of other influential writers. Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author eQunts for very little; empirically, in the case of Orientalism (and perhaps nowhere else) I find this not to be so. Accordingly my analyses employ dose textual readings  24 ORIENTALISM whose goal is to reveal the dialectic between individual text or writer and the complex collective fannation to which his work is a contribution. Yet even though it includes an ample selection of writers, this book is still far from a complete history or general account of OrientaJism. Of this failing I am very conscious. The fabric of as thick a discourse as Orientalism has survived and functioned in Western society because of its richness: all I have done is to describe parts of that fabric at certain moments, and merely to suggest the existence of a larger whole, detailed, interesting. dotted with fascinating figures, texts, and events. I have consoled myself with believing that this book is one installment of several, and hope there are scholars and critics who might want to write others. There.;.// is still a general essay to be written on imperialism and culture; other skldies would go more deeply into the connection between Orientalism and pedagogy, or into Italian, Dutch, German, and Swiss Orientalism, or into the dynamic between scholarship and imaginative writing, or into the relationship between administrative ideas and intellectual discipline. Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary :alternatives to OrientaHsm, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a nonrepressive and nonmanipulative, per spective. But then one would have to rethink the whole complex problem of knowledge and power. These are all lasks lefl em­ barrassingly incomplete in this study. The last, perhaps self-flattering, observation on method that I want to make here is that I have written this study with several audiences in mind. For students of literature and criticism, Oriental­ ism offers a marvelous instance of the interrelations between society, history, and textuality; moreover, the cultural role played by the Orient in the West connects Orientalism with ideology, politics, and the logic of power, matters of relevance, I think, to the literary com­ munity. For contemporary students of the Orient, from university scholars to policymakers, 1 have written with two ends in mind: one, to present their intellectual genealogy to them in a way that has not been done; two, to criticize-with the hope of stirring dis­ cussion the often unquestioned assumptions on which their work for the most part depends. For the general reader, this study deals with matters that always compel attention, all of them connected not only with Western conceptions and treatments of the Other but also with the singularly important role played by Western culture p Introduction 25 in what Vico called the world of nations. Lastly, for readers in the so-called Third World, this study proposes itself as a step towards an understanding not so much of Western politics and of the non· Western world in those politics as of the strength of Western cultural discourse, a strength too often mistaken as merely decora live or "superstructural." My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or llpon others. The three long chapters and twelve shorter units into which this book is divided are intended to facilitate exposition as much as possible. Chapter One, "The Scope of Orientalism," draws a large circle around alJ the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes. Chapter Two, "Orientalist Structures and Re­ structures," attempts to trace the development of modern Oriental­ ism by a broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the work of important poets, artists, and scholars. Chapter Three, "Orientalism Now," begins where its predecessor left off, at around 1870. This is the period of great colonial expansion into tbe Orient, and it cul­ minates in World War II. The very last section of Chapter Three characterizes the shift from British and French to American hegemony; I attempt there finally to sketch the present intellectual and social realities of Orienlalism in the United States. 3. The personal dimension. In the Prison Notebooks Gramsci says: "The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory." The only available English translation inexplicably leaves Gramsci's comment at that, whereas in fact Gramsci's Italian text concludes by adding, "therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."16 Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an "Oriental" as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies ( Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals. This is why for me the  26 ORIENTALISM hlamic Orient has had to be the center of attention. Whether what I have achieved is the inventory prescribed by Gramsci is not (or me to judge, although I have felt it important to be conscious of trying to produce one. Along the way, as severely and as rationally as I have been able. I have tried to maintain a critical consciousness, as wen as employing those instruments of historical, humanistic, and cultural research of which my education has made me the fortunate beneficiary. In none of that, however, have I ever lost hold of the cultural reality of, the personal involvement in having been constituted as, "an Oriental." The historical circumstances making such a study possible are fairly complex, and I can only list them schematically here. Anyone resident in the West since the 1950s, particularly in the United States, will have lived through an era of extraordinary turbulence in the reqttions of East and West. No one will have failed to note how "East" has always signified danger and threat during this period, even as it has meant the traditional Orient as well as Russia. In the universities a growing establishment of area-studies programs and institutes has made the scholarly study of the Orient a branch of national policy. Public affairs in this country include a healthy interest in the Orient, as much for its strategic and economic importance as for its traditional exoticism. If the world has become immediately accessible to a Western citizen living in the electronic age, the Orient too has drawn nearer to him, and is now less a myth perhaps than a place crisscrossed by Western, especially American, interests. One aspect of the electronic, postmodern world is that t e has been a rejnforcement of the stereotypes by which the Ori nt is. Television, the films, and all the media's resources have forced infonnation into more and more standardized molds. So far as the Orient is concerned, standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of "the mysterious Orient." This is nowhere more true than in the ways by which the Near East is grasped. Three thin s have contributed to makiAge"ell tiN sjmplest percep­ ( tion of the Arabs and Islam int highly· politicized. almost ntUCOus matter: one, the history of popular anti-Arab and anti-Islamic prejudice in the West, which ii immediately reflected in the history - '?,f Orjentalism; two, the struggle between the Arabs and Isra"li Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as "PQA b h the liberal culture and the population at la[ e; three the almO t. p lntroduction 27 total absence of an cultural osition makin it ossible either to identif WIth or dis assionatel to discuss the Arabs or s am. Furthermore, it hardly n s saying that because the Middle East is now so identified with Great Power politics, oil economics. and the simple-minded dichotomy of freedom-loving, democratic Israel and evil, totalitarian, and terroristic Arabs. the chances of anything like a clear view of what one talks about in talking about the Near East are depressingly small. My own experiences of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West, particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here 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. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes. political im­ perialism, dehumanizjng ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel as his uniquely punishing destiny. It has made matters worse for him to remark that no person academic- ally involved with the Near East-no Orientalist, that is-has ever.' in the United States culturally and politically identified himself / wholeheartedly with the Arabs; certainly there have been identi­ fications on some level, but they have never taken an "acceptable" fonn as has liberal American identification with Zionism, and all too frequently they have been radically flawed by their association either with discredited political and economic interests (oil­ company and State Department Arabists, for example) or with religion. The nexus of knowledge and1'9lV atin the _Qri al" and / in a sense obliterating him as a man_ i _is therefore not for ' me an exclusively academic ma! ",!..! it is an intellectual matter Of some very obvious importance. I have b. en able t J !Y? use !!!y ,!J.!!.'!.!l!.d politi: ! concerns for the analysis and descriQQgn of a very worldly matter tbe rise, development. and consolidat Qf OrientaJism. Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically. even historically innocent; it has regularly seemed otherwise to me, and certainly my study of Orientalism has con­ vinced me (and 1 hope will convince my literary colleagues) that SOciety and literary culture can only be understood and studied together. In addition, and by an almost inescapable logic, I have found myself writing the history of a strange. secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed 28 QRIENTALISM i t in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical. cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood. But what I should like also to have contributed here is a better understanding of the way cultural domination has operated. If this stimulates a new kind of dealing with the Orient, indeed if it eliminates the "Orient" and "Occident" altogether, then we shall have advanced a little in the process of what Raymond Williams has called the "unlearning" of "the inherent dominative mode."1'T ,  1 The Scope of Orientalism... le genie inquiet et ambitieux de Europeens... impatient d'em- ployer leli nouveaux instruments de leur puissan(:e... -Jean-8aptiste-Joseph Fourier, Preface his(Qrique ( 1809), Description de I'Egypte  Ii ,I "I [.,1 11" ,1 " ' , I  I Knowing the Oriental On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on "the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt." These, he said, "belong to a wholly different category" than those "affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire." He spoke with the authority of a long-lime member of Parliament, former private secretary to Lord Salisbury, former chief secretary for Ireland, former secretary for Scotland. former prime minister, veteran of numerous overseas crises, achievements, and changes. During his involvement in imperial affairs Balfour served a monarch who in 1876 had been declared Empress of India; he had been especially well placed in positions of uncommon influence 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 Omdunnan, the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War. In addition his remarkable social eminence, the breadth of his learning and wit-he could write on such varied subjects as Bergson, Handel, theism, and golf-his education at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and his apparent command over im­ perial affairs all gave considerable authority to what he told the Commons in June 1910. But there was still more to Balfour's speech, or at least to his need for giving it so didactically and moral­ istically. Some members were questioning the necessity for "Eng­ land in Egypt," the subject of Alfred Milner's enthusiastic book of 1892, but here designating a once-profitable occupation that had become a source of trouble now that Egyptian nationalism was on the rise and the continuing British presence in Egypt no longer so easy to defend. Balfour, then, to inform and explain. Recalling the challenge of J. M. Robertson, the member of Tyneside, Balfour himself put Robertson's question again: "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" was canonical; it had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It desig­ nated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, culturally. One could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental 31 32 ORIENTALISM atmosphere, 1m Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be understood. Marx had used the word. and now Balfour was using it; his choice was understandable and called for no comment whatever. I take up no attitude of superiority. But I ask [Robertson and anyone else). ,. who has even the most superficial knowledge of history, if they will look in the face the facts with which a British statesman has to deal when he is put in a position of supremacy over great races like the inhabitants of Egypt and countries in the East. We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it. It goes far beyond the petty span of the history of our race, which is lost in the prehistoric period at a time when the Egyptian civilisation had already passed its prime. Look at all the Oriental countries. Do not talR: about superiority or inferiority. Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: knowledge and power. the Baconian themes. As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with "our" knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power. Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its prime 10 its decline-and of course, it means being able to do that. Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a "fact" which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transfonns itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for "us" to deny autonomy to "it"-the Oriental country-since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it. British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge make such ques­ tions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour no­ where denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government... having merits of their own.... You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the EIl'>t, and you never find traces of self_  The Scope of Orientalism 33 government. All their great centuries-and they have been very great-have been passed under despotisms, under absolute govern­ ment. All their great contributions to civilisation-and they have been great-have been made under that form of government. Conqueror has succeeded cDnqueror; one domination has followed another; but never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western poin! of view, call self-government. That is the fact. It is not a question of superiority and inferiority. I suppose a true Eastern sage would say that the working government which we have taken upon ourselves in Egypt and elsewhere is not a work worthy of a philosopher-that it is the dirty work, the inferior work, of carrying on the necessary labour. Since these facts are facts, Balfour must then go on to the next part of his argument. Is it a good thing for these great nations-I admit their greatness. -that this absolute government should be exercised by us? I think it is a good thing. I think that experience shows that they have got under it far better government than in the whole history of the world they ever had before, and which not only is a benefit to them, but is undoubtedly a benefit to the whole of the civilised West.... We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyp­ tians, though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large. Balfour produces no evidence that Egyptians and "the races with whom we deal" appreciate or even understand the good that is being done them by colonial occupation. It does not occur to Balfour, however, to let the Egyptian speak for himself, since presumably any Egyptian who would speak out is more likely to be "the agitator {who) wishes to raise difficulties" than the good native who overlooks the "difficulties" of foreign domination. And so, having settled the ethical problems, Balfour turns at last to the practical ones. "If it is our business to govern, with or without gratitude, with or without the real and genuine memory of all the loss of which we have relieved the population (Balfour by no means implies, as part of that loss, the loss or at least the indefinite post­ ponement of Egyptian independence] and no vivid imagination of all the benefits which we have given to them; if that is our duty , how is it to be perfonned? England exports "our very best to t ese " c ountries. These selfless administrators do t heir work "am1dst " tens of thousands of persons belonging to a different creed, a differ- 34 ORIENTALISM ent race, a different discipline, different conditions of life." What makes their work of governing possible is their sense of being sup­ ported at home by a government that endorses what they do. Yet directly the native populations have that instinctive feeling that those with whom they have got to deal have not behind them the might, the authority, the sympathy, the full and ungrudging sup­ port of the country which sent them there, those populations lose all that sense of order which is the very basis of their civilisation, just as our officers lose all that sense of power and authority, which is the very basis of everything they can do for the benefit of those among whom they have been sent. Balfour's logic here is interesting, not least for being completely consistent with the premises of his entire speech. England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows; England knows that Egypt cannot have self-government; England confirms that by occupying Egypt; for the Egyptians, Egypt is what England has occupied and now governs; foreign occupation therefore becomes "the very basis" of contemporary Egyptian civilization; Egypt requires, indeed insists upon, British occupation. But if the special intimacy between governor and governed in Egypt is disturbed by Parliament's doubts at home, then "the authority of what... is the dominant race­ and as I think ought to remain the dominant race-has been under­ mined." Not only does English prestige suffer; "it is vain for a handful of British officials-endow them how you like, give them all the qualities of character and genius you can imagine-it is impossible for them to carry out the great task which in Egypt, not we only, but the civilised world have imposed upon them."l As a rhetorical perfonnance Balfour's speech is significant for the way in which he plays the part of, and represents, a variety of characters. There are of course "the English," for whom the pro­ noun "we" is used with the full weight of a distinguished, powerful man who feels himself to be representative of all that is best in his nation's history. Balfour can also speak for the civilized world, the West, and the relatively small corps of colonial officials in Egypt. If he does not speak directly for the Orientals, it is because they after all speak another language; yet he knows how they feel since he knows their history, their reliance upon such as he, and their expectations. Still, he does speak for them in the sense that what they might have to say, were they to be asked and might they be able to answer, would somewhat uselessly confirm what is already ,. The Scope of Orientalism 35 evident: that they are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves. Their great moments were in the past; they are useful in the modern world only because the powerful and up-ta-date empires have effectively brought them out of the wretchedness of their decline and turned them into rehabilitated residents of productive colonies. Egypt in particular was an excellent case in point, and Balfour was perfectly aware of how much right he had to speak as a member of his country's parliament on behalf of England, the West, Western civilization, about modem Egypt. For Egypt was not just another colony: it was the vindication of Western imperialism; it was, until its annexation by England, an almost academic example of Oriental backwardness; it was to become the triumph of English knowledge and power. Between J 882, the year in which England occupied Egypt and put an end to the nationalist rebellion of Colonel Arabi, and 1907, England's representative in Egypt, Egypt's master, was Evelyn Baring (also known as "Over*baring"), Lord Cromer. On July 30, 1907, it was Balfour in the Commons who had supported the project to give Cromer a retirement prize of fifty thousand pounds as a reward for what he had done in Egypt. Cromer made Egypt, said Balfour: Everything he has touched he has succeeded in. ,.. Lord Cromer's selVices during the past quarter of a century have raised Egypt from the lowest pitch of social and economic degradation until it now stands among Oriental nations, I believe absolutely alone , in its prosperity, financial and morai.Z How Egypt's moral prosperity was measured, Balfour did not venture to say. British exports to Egypt equaled those to the whole of Africa; that certainly indicated a sort of financial prosperity, for Egypt and England (somewhat unevenly) together. But what reatly mattered was the unbroken, all-embracing Western tutelage of an Oriental country, from the scholars, missionaries, business­ men, soldiers, and teachers who prepared and then implemented the occupation to the high functionaries like Cromer and Balfour who saw themselves as providing for, directing, and sometimes eve