Revisiting Orientalism:

Personal encounters with the Orient

In this week’s column, we explore how personal encounters shaped the knowledge of Orient and how it leads to establish Orientalism as a discipline and a major school of thinking which profoundly influenced many important areas of governance including diplomacy. One of the important aspects in the formation of ideas that constitute Orientalism is the travels made by British and French and their experiences in the Orient.Said points out after the Napoleon’s encounter with the Orient, Orient has become ‘a place of pilgrimage’.

He observes that it is the idea of pilgrimage from which derived form, style, and intention of academic Orientalism.He observes, “The Orient was a place of pilgrimage, and every major work belonging to a genuine if not always to an academic Orientalismtook its form, style, and intention from the idea of pilgrimage there. Every pilgrim sees things, in his own way, but there are limits to what a pilgrimage can be for, to what shape and form it can take, to what truths it reveals. All pilgrimages to the Orient passed through, or had to pass through, the Biblical lands; most of them in fact, were attempts either to relieve or to liberate from the large, incredible focund Orient some portion of Judeo-Christian - Greco-Roman actuality.

For these pilgrims the Orientalised Orient, the Orient of

the Orientalist scholars, was a gauntlet to be run, just as the Bible, the Crusades, Islam, Napoleon, and Alexander were redoubtable predecessors to be reckoned with. Not only learned Orient inhibit the pilgrim’s musings and private fantasies; its very antecedent places barriers between the contemporary traveller and his writing, unless, as was the case with Nerval and Flaubert in their use of Lane, Orientalist work is severed from library and caught in the aesthetic project.

Inhibition

Another inhibition is that Orientalist writing is too circumscribed by the official requirements of Orientalist learning.

It is interest to note that preconceived idea about the Orient in the minds of 19th century individual traveller was vague and in most cases incorrect. Said observes that for English speaker Orient was India and for French speaker, it is ‘an acute loss’. The travelers objectives though not manifested directly were to justify the European dominance over the Orient.

Said observes, “To be precisely constituted a figure as Chateaubriand, the Orient was a decrepit canvas awaiting his restorative efforts. The Oriental Arab was ‘civilised man fallen again into a savage state’; no wonder, then, that as he watched Arabs trying to speak French ,Chateaubriand felt like Robinson Crusoe thrilled by hearing his parrot speak for the first time.

True, there were places such as Bethlehem (whose etymological meaning Chateaubriand got completely wrong) in which one found again some semblance of real –that is-European –civilisation, but those were few and far between. Everywhere one encounters Orientals, Arabs whose civilisation, religion and manners were so low, barbaric, and antithetical as to merit reconquest. The Crusades, he argues, were not aggression: they were a just Christian counterpart of Omar’s arrival in Europe. Besides, he added, even if Crusades in their modern or original form were aggression, the issue they raised transcended such questions of ordinary morality;

Deliverance

‘The Crusades were not only about the deliverance of the Holy Sepulture, but more about knowing which would win on earth, a cult that was civilisation’s enemy, systematically favourable to ignorance[this was Islam of course], to despotism, to slavery, or a cult that had caused to reawaken in modern people the genius of a sage antiquity, and had abolished the base servitude’ This is the first significant mention of an idea that will acquire an almost unbearable, next to mindless authority in European writing; the theme of Europe teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty, which is an idea that Chateaubriand and everyone after him believed that Orientals and especially Muslims know nothing about.

‘Of liberty, they known nothing; of propriety, they have none: force is their God. When they go for long periods without seeing conquerors who do heavenly justice, they have the air of soldiers without a leader, citizens without legislators, and a family without a father” What is obvious is that the most of the travellers had reinforced their preconceived ideas of the Orient and prejudices of the Orientals.

These personal encounters with the Orient, ultimately, resulted in consolidating Orientalism’s position as a discipline. Said observes, “ In the history of nineteenth century attempts to restore, restructure, and redeem all the various provinces of knowledge and life, Orientalims-like all other Romantically inspired learned disciplines- contributed an important share. For not only did the field evolve from a system of inspired observation into what Flaubert called a regulated college of learning, it also reduced the personalities of even its most redoubtable individuals like Burton to the role of imperial scribe. From being a place, the Orient became a domain of actual scholarly rule and potential imperial sway.

The role of early Orientalists such as Renan, Sacy, and Lame was to provide theirwork and the Orient together with a mise en scene; later Orientalists, scholarly or imaginative, took firm hold of the scene. Still later, as the scene needed management, it became clear that the institutions and governments were better at the game of management than individuals. This is the legacy of nineteenth-century Orientalism to which the twentieth century has become inheritor. ”