Edward Said On Orientalism

you when future scholars take a look back at the intellectual history of the last quarter of the 20th century the work of Professor Edward Sayid of Columbia University will be identified as very important and influential in particular Sayid 1978 book Orientalism will be regarded as profoundly significant Orientalism revolutionized the study of the Middle East and helped to create and shape entire new fields of study such as post-colonial theory as well as influencing disciplines as diverse as English history anthropology political science and cultural studies the book has now been translated into 26 languages and is required

reading at many universities and colleges it is also one of the most controversial scholarly books of the last 30 years sparking intense debate and disagreement Orientalism tries to answer the question of why when we think of the Middle East for example we have a preconceived notion of what kind of people live there what they believe how they act even though we may never have been there or indeed even met anyone from there more generally Orientalism asks how do we come to understand people strangers who look different to us by virtue of the color of their

skin the central argument of Orientalism is that the way we acquire this knowledge is not innocent their objective but the end result of a process that reflects certain interests that is it is highly motivated specifically Sayid argues that the way the West Europe in the u.s. looks at the countries and peoples of the Middle East is through a lens that distorts the actual reality of those places and those people he calls this lens through which we viewed that part of the world Orientalism a framework that we use to understand the unfamiliar and strange to make

the peoples of the Middle East appear different and threatening professor Syed's contribution to how we understand this general process of what we could call stereotyping has been immense the aim of this program is to explore these issues through an interview with him by discussing the context within which he conceived Orientalism well my interest in Orientalism began trip for two reasons one was an immediate thing that is to say the arab-israeli war of 1973 which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions and the media and the popular press you know about how the

Arabs are cowardly and they don't know how to fight in there you know always going to be beaten because they're not modern and then everybody was very surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated that you know like anybody else they could fight so that was one immediate impulse and the second one which has a much longer history in my own life was was the constant sort of disparity I felt between what my experience of being an Arab was and the representations of that that one saw in art

I mean I'm not talking about very great artists you know like did a claw and anger and [ __ ] home and people like that novelists who wrote about the Orient you know like code Israeli or flow Barre and you know the fact that those representations of the Orient had very little to do with what I knew what my own background in life so I decided to write the history of that if somebody let's say in the 1850s or 60s in Paris or London wished to talk about or read about India or Egypt or Syria

there would be very little chance for that person to simply address the subject as we like to think in a kind of free and creative way a great deal of writing had gone before and this writing was an organized form of writing like an organized science you know what what I've called Orientalism and it seemed to me that there was a kind of repertory of images that kept coming up you know the sensual woman who's there to be sort of used by the man the East is a kind of mysterious place full of secrets and

monsters you know the marvels of the East was a phrase that was used and the more I looked the more I saw that this was really quite consistent with itself you know it had very little to do with people who actually been there and even if they had been there there wasn't much modification other words you didn't get what you could call realistic representations of the Orient either in literature and painting or music or any of the arts and this extended even further into descriptions of the Arabs by experts you know people who had studied

them and I noticed that even in the 20th century some of the same images that you found in me not on 19th century amongst scholars like Edward William Lane wrote his book on the modern Egyptians in 18th in the early 1830s and then you read somebody in in the 1920s and they're more or less saying the same thing what one great example that I always give is that the wonderful French poet gardener Val who went on a voyage to the Orient as he called it and I was reading this book of his travels in Syria

and it was something very familiar about it you know it sounded like something else that I'd read and then I realized that what he was doing almost unconsciously was quoting lane on the Egyptians on the theory that the Orientals are all the same no matter whether where you find them I mean it's in India or in Syria or in Egypt it's basically the same essence so there develops a kind of image of the timeless orient as if the Orient unlike the West doesn't develop it stays the same and that's one of the problems with Orientalism

is it is it creates an image outside of history of something that is placid and still and you know eternal which is simply contradicted by the fact of history see so that's in that one sense it's a it's a creation of of you might say an ideal other for Europe professor Syed's analysis of Orientalism isn't just a description of its content but a sustained argument for why it looks the way it does it's an examination of the quite concrete historical and institutional context that creates it specifically Sayid locates the construction of Orientalism within the history

of Imperial conquest as Empire spread across the globe historically the British and the French have been the most important in terms of the East they conquer not only militarily but also what we could call ideologically the question for these empires is how do we understand the natives that we are encountering so we can conquer and subdue them easier this process of using large abstract categories to explain people who look different whose skin is a different color has been going on for a long time as far back as there has been contact between different cultures and

peoples but Orientalism makes this general process more formal in that it presents itself as objective knowledge Sayid identifies Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798 as marking a new kind of Imperial and colonial conquest that inaugurates the projects of Orientalism it was a kind of break that occurred after Napoleon came to Egypt at 1798 I think it's the first really important Imperial modern Imperial expedition so he invades the place but he doesn't invade it the way the Spaniards invaded the new world looking for loot he comes instead with an enormous army of soldiers but also scientists

botanist architects philologists biologists historians whose job it was to record Egypt in every conceivable way and produce a kind of scientific survey of Egypt which was designed not for the Egyptian but for the European and of course what strikes you first of all about the volumes that they produced or is their enormous size they're a metre square and all across them is written the power and prestige of a modern European country that can do to the Egyptians what the Egyptians cannot do to the franchising there's no comparable Egyptian survey of France to produce knowledge you

have to have a power to be there and to see in expert ways things that the natives themselves can't see the differences between different kinds of Orientalism z' are in fact the differences between different experiences of what is called the Orient I mean the difference between Britain and France on the one hand and the United States on the other is that Britain and France had colonies in the Orient I mean they had a long-standing relationship and imperial role in a place like India you know so that there's a kind of a there's a kind of

a archive of actual experiences of being in India of ruling the country for several hundred years right and the same with the French in North Africa let's say Algeria or Indochina direct colonial experience in the case of the Americans the experience is much less direct it has never been an American occupation of the Near East so I would say the difference we British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the American experience of the Orient on the other is that the American one is much more indirect it's much more based on abstractions the second

big thing I think the difference in the American experience from the British and the French of Orientalism is that American Orientalism is very politicized by the presence of Israel for which America is the main ally President Clinton and I are proud as are all Americans that the United States was the first nation to recognize the State of Israel eleven minutes after you broke your independence and what you have in effect is the creation of Jewish state in the middle of the Islamic oriental world and the sense that positon it's a Jewish state and a Western

State self-declared there is a greater coincidence between American interests there than there is between American interests let's say in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia which are important because of oil I think the presence of of this other factor which is very anti Islamic where Israel regards the whole Arab world as its enemy is imported into into American Orientalism I mean the idea for example that Hamas terrorists on the West Bank are just interested in killing Jewish children is what you derive from looking at this stuff and very little attention is paid to the fact

that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has been going on for thirty it's a lot thirty years it's the longest military occupation in this century and so you get the impression that the only problem is that you know Israeli security threatened by Hamas and suicide bombs and all the rest of it and nothing said about the hundreds of thousands millions of Palestinians who are dispossessed and living miserable life is the direct result of what Israel has done and is doing so there's a sense in which the Arab struggle for national independence and

in the case of the Palestinians for national self-determination is looked at with great hostility as upsetting the stabilities of the status quo and that makes it virtually impossible it's a tragedy virtually impossible for an American to see on television to read books to see films about the Middle East that are not colored politically by this by this conflict in which the arms are almost always play the role of terrorists and violent people and irrational and so forth because that's another thing that America really needs to think about is our racism racism that counts in the

United States towards Muslim people and towards Arabic people and that's something that has to stop and the United States has to start respecting people from the Middle East in order to find a solution to the problem that's been building up over many years so I thank everyone for for your patience and letting me speak my mana many people believe the way that Americans understand the Muslim world is very problematic indeed anti-arab racism seems to be almost officially sanctioned you can make generalized and racist statements about arab peoples that would not be tolerated for any other

group at the heart of how this new american Orientalism operates is a threatening and demonized figure of the Islamic terrorists that is emphasized by journalists and Hollywood now Syed recognizes that terrorism exists as a result of the violent political situation Middle East but he argues that there was a lot more going on there that is misunderstood or not seen by the peoples of the West the result of the media's focus on one negative aspect alone means that all the peoples of Islamic world come to be understood in the same negative and paranoid way that is

as a threat so the one we think of people who look like that and come from that part of the world we think fanatic extreme violent Syed argues that understanding a vast and complex region like the Middle East in this narrow way takes away from the humanity and diversity of millions of ordinary people living decent and humane lives there we asked when he plant a bomb to blow up the Americans if the Islamic Underground asked him to the answer was yes after I've written or Orientalism and a book called a question of Palestine in the

early 80s in the late 70s rather and beginning of the eighties I wrote a third book which is called covering Islam and I thought of them as a kind of trilogy and covering Islam was an account of the coverage of Islam in the popular media immediately occasioned by by the Iranian which described yourself as you recall as an Islamic Revolution and you know what I discovered was a huge arsenal of images employed by the media large masses of people waving their fists black banners you know the stern faced on a knee all of them giving

an impression of the utmost negative sort of evil emanation so the impression you got of Islam was that it was a frightening mysterious above all threatening is if the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans as recently as last year in 1996 let us say almost 16 or 17 years after I wrote covering Islam I did a update of the book and I wrote a new introduction and I found quite to my horror on surprise the during of 16 to 17 years with the large number of events in the Islamic

world taking place which you would think would allow for more familiarity with a more refined sense of what was taking place on let's say as reflected in television and print journalism in fact was the opposite I think the situation got worse and that what you had instead now is a much more threatening picture of Islam represented for example by television film called jihad in America based on the bombing of the World Trade Center I reported an international terrorism for the past ten years and since the World Trade Center bombing I've been investigating the networks of

Islamic extremists committed to jihad in America for these militants jihad is a holy war an armed struggle to defeat non-believers or infidels and their ultimate goal is to establish an Islamic empire but this gathering did not take place in the Middle East it happened in the heartland of America Kansas City Missouri combating these groups within the boundaries of the Constitution we'll be the greatest challenge to law enforcement since the war on organized crime but never the same generalizations were made let's say about the Oklahoma City bombing that this was a Christian fundamentalist etcetera etc but

the Islamic she had had come to America and you had these scenes of the most irresponsible journalism where you'd see people talking in Arabic and then a voice over saying and they are discussing the destruction of America whereas if you picked up a little of what was being said if you knew the language had nothing to do with that and that Islam and the teachers of teachings of Islam became synonymous with terror and the demonization of Islam allowed for very little distinction between piety let's say and violence the so called independent media in a liberal

society like this in a factor so lazy in a controlled by interests that are commercial and political at the same time that there there is no investigative reporting it's just basically repeating the line of the government only days ago I concluded a broadcast on the World Trade Center bombing by telling you what senior US law enforcement officials were telling us that the threat of Muslim extremists operating within the United States is an ongoing danger something we'll have to live with from now on and repeating the lines of the people who have the most influence for

whom Islam as a useful foreign demon to turn attention away from the inequities and problems in our own society so as a result the human side of the Islamic and expecially Arabic world are rarely to be found and and the net result is this vacancy on the one hand and these easy almost automatic images of terror violence there is a handy set of images and cliches you know not just from the newspapers and the television but for movies I come from a land from a faraway place with a caravan camels roam where it's flat and

immense and they need it in tents it's barbaric but hey it's home when the wind and the sun's from the west and the sand and that less is right Armon down stop on by of a carpet and fly to another baby and you know I mean I myself growing up in the Middle East in Palestine and Carrie used to delight in films on the Arabian Nights you know done by Hollywood producers you know with John Hall and Maria Montez and Sabu I mean they were talking about a part of the world that I lived in

but it had this kind of exotic magical quality which was what we call today Hollywood so there was that whole repertory of the sheiks and the desert and galloping around and the scimitars and the dancing girls and all that that was that's really the material the situation and the popular media is is basically that Muslims are really two things one they're villains of one sort villains and fanatics I wouldn't dispatch the American people to the hell they deserve and be many films end up with huge numbers of bodies Muslim bodies strewn all of the place

the result of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Demi Moore Chuck Norris lots of films about gorillas going in to kill Muslim terrorists serve so the idea of Islam is something that to be stamped out the whole history of these Orientalist representations which which portrayed the Muslim and the oriental is in effect a lesser breed in other words they've been the only thing they understand is the language of force this is it this is the principle here that unless you give them a bloody nose they won't understand we can't talk reason with them is the art world full

of terrorists well I mean all you have to do is we'll break down the question into into common sense and say there are terrorists is there everywhere but you know there's a lot more going on there I mean we're talking about 250 300 million people and one of the great problems with Orientalism to begin with is these vast generalizations about Islam and the nature of Islamic is very little in common that you can talk about as Islam let's say between Indonesia and Saudi Arabia they're quite me they're both Muslim countries but you know the difference

is in history and language and traditions and so on are so vast that the word Islam has at best a tenuous meaning um the same is true with in the Arab world I mean Morocco is very different from Saudi Arabia Algeria is very different from Egypt and I would argue in fact have argued that the predominant mood of the Arab world is very secular ah you know it's easy to attract attention and certainly the media's attention for some of the political reasons that are obvious I mean to discredit the Arabs to make them seem like

a threat to the West to keep the idea around at the end of the Cold War that you know there are foreign Devils in otherwise what are we doing with this gigantic military you know this huge military budget that is twice as much as an entire world's military budget combined so you have to have threat and the result is it's very hard to find works that are sympathetic to the Arabs in Islam Islam as seen as the enemy of Christianity and United States sees itself as a Christian or judeo-christian country in affiliation with Israel and

that Islam is the great enemy the the competitor there's a history of that and I give the example of Dodi Fayed you know the erstwhile suitor of Princess Diana well a few days before he died I read through the the English press and it was full of the racist cliches of Orientalist discourse I mean that this is what the Sunday Times but one of the leading newspapers in England had a headline to a 15,000 word story entitled a match made in Mecca and the idea of Muslim conspiracies trying to infect you know taking over this

white woman by these dark people with Muhammad the Prophet Muhammad whose historical personage of the 7th century somehow stage-managing the whole thing that's the power of the discourse you see if you're thinking about people and Islam and about that part of oh those are the words you constantly have to use and you won't get what I give you my word no where you go so this course is a regulated system of producing knowledge within certain constraints whereby certain rules have to be observed ok Libya exports yes sir you American Pig nice Dutch to think past

it to go beyond it not to use it it's virtually impossible because there's no knowledge that isn't codified in this way about that part of the world may I help you oh hi advantage team mabushii Nia listen to her sound cheese's Oh Todd and there's a certain sense in which in not really mounting a serious critique of it the ABS have participated and have and continued to allow themselves to be represented as Orientals in this orientalist way there is no for example information policy of the twenty Arab countries 22 Arab countries to try to give

a different picture of what their worlds are like because most of them are dictatorships all of them are dictatorships without democracy who are in desperate need of us patronage government patronage to support them and so they're not about to criticize the United States not about to engage in a real dialogue and and in that respect I think the Arabs keep themselves collectively in a way that is that is subordinate to and inferior to the West and in fact fulfills the kinds of representations that most Westerners have in their minds about the arms the attack came

without warning and according to a US government source told CBS news that it has middle-east terrorism written all over it the attack in Oklahoma City appears to have a familiar mark this was done with the attempt to inflict as many casualties as possible that is a Middle Eastern trait the fact that it was such a powerful bomb in Oklahoma City immediately drew investigators to consider deadly parallels that all have roots in the Middle East ABC News has learned that the FBI has asked the u.s. military to provide up to 10 Arabic speakers to help in

the investigation well one of the interesting things about about the persistence of Orientalism um I mean almost when you think about it almost astonishing persistence of it is was the Oklahoma City bombing 90 in April of 1995 I can give you a personal example I was in Canada giving some lectures at the actual time of the bombing and maybe half an hour after the event had occurred in the afternoon my office was inundated with phone calls from the media and I rang my office from Canada as I frequently do to find out you know if

there was any message for me that needed attention and so on and she said every 25 calls had come in from the major networks from the cable channels from the major newspapers news magazines and so forth all of them wanting to talk to you and I said what about about this event in Oklahoma City I said well what does that have to do with anything well apparently somebody had volunteered one of these instant commentators that the notion that this seemed like a Middle East style bombing and that there were a couple of swarthy people around

right after the bombing or seen after the bombing within hours of the explosion local police and the FBI had issued the all-points bulletin looking for three men believed to be of middle-eastern origin and sources tell CBS News that unofficially the FBI is treating this as a middle-eastern related incident Oklahoma City can tell you is probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East and so this got them to think that they should talk to me not because I had anything to do with it but because by virtue of being

from the Middle East I would have an inside insight into this you know and of course the proposition is so preposterous and so racist just if you're from the area you would understand who and why this is being done never thinking for a moment that it was a local homegrown boy called McVeigh who was you know totally American in his Outlook that was doing it out of the best principles of American extermination and a hub like anger you know at the world professor Saeed is not only a literary theorist he is also a very prominent

and active representative of the Palestinian people Saeed grew up in what was then called Palestine and is now called Israel and the occupied territories when the State of Israel was founded in 1948 like millions of other Palestinians Saeed and his family were made homeless as well as stateless these exiled Palestinians now mostly live either in the territories under the control of Israel or in refugee camps in the surrounding countries one of the things that drives Saeed is the quest for justice and a homeland for the Palestinian people and there's a close connection between Syed's intellectual

work and his political activism as he himself remarks he wrote three books that he thinks of as a trilogy and that in his mind are closely connected together Orientalism covering Islam and the question of Palestine he believes that finding a peaceful humane and just solution to the conflicts in the Middle East that is finding an answer to the question of Palestine will require overcoming the racist legacy of Orientalism that stresses the separation of people from each other that regards difference as a threat that must be contained or destroyed because of the complex and bloody history

of the Middle East Sayid regards the situation in Palestine and Israel as the ultimate test case facing the 21st century of whether we live together in peace and reconciliation with our differences or whether we live apart in fear and loathing of each other constantly under threat constantly at war in seeking a way out of this legacy of mistrust and conflict Sayid draws upon the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci who gives us the tools to think about these difficult issues in more productive and humane ways well Graham sheet in the prison notebooks says something that

is always tremendously appealed to me that history deposits in in us our own history our family's history our nation's history our traditions history which has left in us infinity of traces all kinds of marks you know through heredity through collective experience of individual experience of family experience the relations between one individual and another a whole book if you like series of an infinity of traces but there's no inventory there's no there's no orderly guide to it you know so Graham she says therefore the task at the outset is to try to compile an inventory in

other words to try and make sense of it and this seems to me to me at any rate to be the most interesting sort of human task it's the task of interpretation it's a task of giving history some shape and sense for a particular reason not just that you know to show that my history is better than yours or my history's worse than yours I'm the victim and you're somebody who's oppressed people at song but rather to understand my history in terms of other people's history in other words to try to understand to general to

move beyond to generalize one's own individual experience of the experience of others and I think I think the great goal is in fact to become someone else to transform itself from a unitary identity to an identity that includes the other without suppressing the difference that he says is the great go and and and and for me I think I think that that would be the case you know and that would be the notion of writing an inventory historical inventory which not only understand oneself would understand oneself in relation to others and to understand others as

if you would understand yourself Palestine is so important in this respect because of its local complexities that say Arabs and Jews are Muslims and our of Christians and Israeli Jews of themselves very mixed background I mean we're talking about Polish Jews Russian Jews American Jews Yemeni Jews Iraqi Jews Indian Jews it's a it's a fairly complex mosaic somehow finding a way to live together on land that is drenched saturated with significance on a world scale unlike any other country in the world I mean it's wholly 2/3 of the major religions and every inch of it

has been combed over and fought over for the last several thousand years and the pattern so far has been the zionist pattern which is to say that you know is promised to us we're the chosen people everybody else is sort of second-rate throw them out or treat him as second-class citizens and in contrast to that some of us not everybody but many Palestinians have said well we realized that we are being asked to pay the price for what happened to the Jews in Europe under the Holocaust it was an entirely Christian and European catastrophe in

which the Arabs played no part and we are being dispossessed displaced by our by the victims we've become the victims of the victims but as I say not all of us say well they should be thrown out because we have been thrown out and so we have another vision which is a vision of coexistence in which Jew and Arab Muslim Christian and and you can live together in some polity which I think it requires a kind of creativity and invention that is possible vision that would replace the authoritarian hierarchical model but this idea that somewhere

we should protect ourselves against the infiltrations the infections of the other is I think the most dangerous idea at the end of the 2028 century and unless we find ways to do it and there are no there aren't our shortcuts to it unless we find ways to do this I you know there's going to be wholesale violence of the sort represented by the Gulf War by the killings in Bosnia the ruined and massacres and so on I mean those are the pattern of emerging conflict that is extremely dangerous and needs to be counteracted and I

think therefore it's correct to say that the challenge now is is the challenge I call it anything other than coexistent how does one coexist with people whose religions are different whose traditions and languages are different but who are who form part of the same community or polity in the national sense how do we accept difference without violence and hostility I've been interested in a field called comparative literature most all of my adult life and commit the ideal of comparative literature is not to show how English literature is really a secondary phenomenon and French literature or

Arabic literature is you know kind of poor cousin to Persian literature or any of those silly things but to show them existing you might say as contrapuntal lines in a great composition by which difference is respected understood without without coercion and it's that attitude I think that we need you