Revisiting Orientalism:

Inventing the Orient

In this week’s column, we examine, briefly, the formation of the idea about the Orient and how Orientalists contributed to make Orientalism a full-fledged discourse.

One of the important facts that Edward Said pints out in Orientalism is that the relationship between the West and the East, has gone through many faces although the distinction between the East and the West, remains, somewhat, static. Said uses the term Orientalism in a broader sense to describe the Western approach to the Orient.

He states, “Orientalism is the generic term I have been employing to describe the Western approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice. But in addition, I have been using the word to designate that collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line. These two aspects of Orientalism are not incongruent, since by use of them both Europe could advance securely and unmetaphorically upon the Orient. ”

Islamic Orient

Said emphasises in no uncertain terms that the Arab and Islamic Orient presented Europe with ‘unresolved challenge’ which is an ‘acutely sensitive aspect of Orientalism’ that he is interested in.

Said observes, “Arab and the Islamic Orient presented Europe with an unresolved challenge on political, intellectual, and for a time, economic levels. For much of its history, then, Orientalism carries within it the stamp of a problematic European attitude towards Islam.”

Challenges that Islamic Orient is manifold on historical grounds and most of the historical groundings for this European attitude towards Islamic Orient Said points out are very much relevant even today.

Said observes, “Doubtless Islam was a real provocation in many ways. It lay uneasily close to Christianity, geographically and culturally. It drew on the Judeo-Hellenic traditions, it borrowed creatively from Christianity, it could boast unrivalled military and political successes. Nor was this all.

The Islamic land sits adjacent to and on top of the Biblical lands; more over the heart of Islamic domain has always been the region closest to Europe, what has been called the Near Orient or Near East. Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages, and together they dispose and predispose of material that is urgently important to Christianity.

From the end of the seventeenth century until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam in its Arab, Ottoman, or North African and Spanish form dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity. That Islam outstripped and outshone Rome cannot have been absent from the mind of any European past or Present.”

Citing a passage from Gibbon, Said points out that idea of Islamic Orient was present in the mind of Gibbon.

He cites, “In the victorious days of the Roman republic it has been the aim of the Senate to confine their councils and legions to a single war, and completely suppressed the first enemy before they provoked the hostilities of a second.

These timid maxims of policy were disdained by the magnanimity or enthusiasm of the Arabian caliphs. With the same vigour and success they invaded the successors of Augustus and Artaxerxes; and the rival monarchies at the same instance became pray of an enemy whom they had so long been accustomed to despise.

In the ten years of the administration of Omar, the Saracens reduced to his obedience thirty-six-thousand cities or castles , destroyed four thousand churches or temples of the unbelievers, and edified fourteen- hundred mosches for the exercise of the religion of Mohanned. One- hundred years after his flight from Mecca the arms and reigns of his successors extended from India to the Atlantic ocean, over the various and distant provinces…”

Exotic

It has been pointed out that Orient not stands merely for Asiatic or East as a whole or taken to denote distant and exotic, it was predominantly referred to the Islamic Orient.

Said observes, “This ‘militant’ Orient came to stand for what Henri Baudet has called ‘the Asiatic tidal wave’. Certainly this was the case in Europe through the middle of the eighteenth century, the point at which repositories of ‘Oriental’ knowledge like d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque Orientale stop meaning primarily Islam, the Arabs or Ottomans.

Until that time, cultural memory gave understandable prominence to such relatively distant events as the fall of Constantinople, the Crusades, and the conquest of Sicily and Spain, but if these signified Orient they did not at the same time efface what remained of Asia.”

In a way, the influence of Islam and danger and fear entertained by early Orientalists was pervasive. Said points out that ‘D.Herbelot’s entries for Indo-Persian subjects in the Bibliotheque were all based on Islamic sources, and it is true to say that until the early nineteenth century ‘Oriental languages’ were considered synonyms for ‘Semitic languages’. The Oriental renaissance of which Quinet spoke served the function of expanding some fairly narrow limits, in which Islam was the catchall Oriental example. ” In fact, Islam prominently figured in the early Oriental texts. One of the important happenings in the history of Orientalism was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and Syria. What is interesting is the tactic that Napoleon adapted in Egypt to win over the Muslims. Napoleon tried to prove that he was fighting for Islam.

Said observes, “Napoleon tried everywhere to prove that he was fighting for Islam; everything he said was translated into Koranic Arabic. What seemed obvious to Napoleon was that his forces were too small to impose itself on the Egyptians, he then tried to make local imams, cadis, muftis, and ulemas.” The tactic worked well. What is significant is that same kind of tactics and approaches are made even today in the arena of international power politics.

Said sums up this political aspect of Orientalism, which is a vital aspect of Orientalism, as “In the Suez canal we see the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and more interesting, of Orientalist effort. To the West Asia had once represented silent distant alienation; Islam was militant hostility to Christianity. To overcome such redoubtable constants, the Orient needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed, then recreated by scholars, soldiers, and judges who disinterred forgotten languages, histories, races, and cultures to posit them-beyond the modern Oriental’s ken –as the true classical Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient.”