Revisiting Orientalism:

Aftermath of Orientalism

In this concluding column on the series on Edward Said’s path breaking classic Orientalism, we examine how profoundly Orientalism influenced the emergence of critical thinking on culture and civilisations.

Referring to the numerous criticisms and rather misinterpretations of the Orientalism, Said states, “Let me begin with the one aspect of the book’s reception that I most regret and find mu myself trying hardest now (in1994) to overcome. That is the book’s alleged anti-Westernism, at it has been misleadingly and rather too sonorously called by commentators both hostile and sympathetic.

This notion has two parts to it, sometimes argued together, sometimes separately. The first is the claim imputed to me that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a synecdoche, or a miniature symbol, of the entire West, and indeed ought to be taken to represent the West as a whole. Since this is so, the argument continues, therefore the entire West is an enemy of the Arab and Islamic or for that matter the Iranian, Chinese, Indian, and many other non-European peoples who suffered Western Colonialism and prejudice.

The second part of the argument ascribed to me is no less far reaching. It is that predatory West and Orientalism have violated Islam and Arabs. (Note that the terms ‘Orientalism’ and ‘West’ have been collapsed into each other.) Since that is so, the very existence of Orientalism and Orientalists is seized upon as a pretext for arguing the exact opposite, namely, that Islam is perfect, that it is the only way (al-hal al-wahid), and so on and so on. To criticise Orientalism, as I did in my book, is in effect to be a supporter of Islamism or Muslim fundamentalism. ”

Reactions

What is obvious from the initial reactions to the Orientalism is that book is largely misinterpreted and misunderstood by a section of the intelligencia.

Said observes, “ One scarcely knows what to make of these caricatured permutations of a book that to its author and in its arguments is explicitly anti-essentialist, radically skeptical about all categorical designations such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly careful about not ‘defending’ or even discussing the Orient and Islam. Actually I go great deal further when, very early in the book, I say that words such as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ correspond to no stable reality that exists as a natural fact. In the case of notion in currency in Britain, France, and America, the idea derives to a great extent from the impulse not simply to describe, but also to dominate and somehow to defend against it. As I try to show, this is powerfully true with reference to Islam as a particularly dangerous embodiment of the Orient. ”

Said says that culture is a dynamic and essentially identified with other cultures; “My way of doing this has been to show that the development and maintenance of every culture requires the existence of another, different and competing alter ego.

The construction of identity-identity , whether of Orient or Occident, France or Britain , while obviously repository of distinct collective experience, is finally a construction in my opinion- involves the construction of opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from ‘us’. Each age and society re-creates its ‘other’ is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies. Debate today about Frenchness, Englishness in France and Britain respectively, or about Islam in counties like Egypt and Pakistan, are part of the same interpretive process, which involves identities of different ‘other’ whether they be outsiders or refugees, or apostates or infidels. ”

‘Clash of civilisations’ and ‘End of History and the Last Man’

One of the important developments in the aftermath of Orientalism was the ‘demise of the Soviet Union’ and the emergence of the new world order.

Describing the changing socio-cultural scenario, Said observes, “It is true that ever since the demise of Soviet Union, there has been a rush by some scholars and journalists in the United States to find in an Orientalised Islam a new empire of evil.

Consequently, both the electronic and print media have been awash with demanding stereotypes that lump together Islam and Terrorism or Arabs and violence, or the Orient and the tyranny. And there has been a return in various parts of the Middle East and Far East to nativist religion and primitive nationalism.

The world context remains perplexingly stirred-up and ideologically fraught, volatile, tense, changeable, and even murderous. Even though the Soviet Union has been dismembered and the Eastern European countries have attained political independence, pattern of power and dominance remain unsettlingly in evidence.

The global South-once referred to romantically and even emotionally as the Third World- is enmeshed in a debt-trap, broken into dozens of fractured or incoherent entities, beset with problems of poverty, disease, and underdevelopment that have increased in the past ten or fifteen years. Gone are the Non-Aligned Movement and the charismatic leaders who undertook decolonisation and independence. An alarming pattern of ethnic conflict and local wars, not confined to the global South, as the tragic case of Bosnians attests, has sprung up all over again. In Central America, the Middle East, and Asia, the United States still remains the dominant power, with an anxious and still un-unified Europe struggling behind. ”

Cultural theories

Said observes that striking cultural theories have emerged to describe the current world scenario and that they cannot really grasp the complex emerging realities.

Said observes; “Explanations for the current world scene and attempts to comprehend it culturally and politically have emerged in some strikingly dramatic ways. I have already mentioned fundamentalism. The secular equivalents are a return to nationalism and theories that stress the radical distinction –a falsely all-inclusive one, I believe- between different cultures and civilisations.

Prof. Samuel Huntington of Harvard University advanced the far from convincing proposition that Cold War bipolarism has been superseded by what he called the clash of civilisations, a thesis based on the premise that Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilisations, among several others, were rather like watertight compartments whose adherents were at bottom mainly interested in fending off all the others.

This is preposterous, since one of the great advances in modern cultural theory is the realisation, almost universally acknowledged, that cultures are hybrid and heterogeneous. ”