Revisiting Orientalism:

Myth and prejudices continue

In this continuing series on Edward Said’s path breaking classic Orientalism, we would examine how the myths and prejudices continued to reinforce in the form of academic writing in the latest phase of Orientalism.

As we stated earlier, the Orientalism is a continuing process of gathering knowledge of the Orient by the West to use that knowledge to dominate the East economically, socially and politically. An important part of Orientalism, is its myriad applications in the realm of international power politics. In other words, Orientalism is apolitical.

In describing the latest phase of Orientalism, Said stated, “ Since world War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab-Israeli wars, the Arab Muslims has become a figure in American popular culture, even in the academic world, in the policy planners’ world and in the world of business very serious attention is being paid to the Arab. This symbolises a major change in the international configuration of forces. France and the Britain no longer occupy a centre stage in world politics; the American imperium has displaced them.

A vast web of interest now links all parts of the former colonial world to the United States, just as a proliferation of academic subspecialties divides ( and yet connects) all the former philological and European-based disciplines like Orientalism. The area specialist, as he is now called, lays claims to regional expertise, which is put at the service of governments or business or both.

Knowledge

The massive, quasi-material knowledge stored in the annals of modern European Orientalism –as recorded, for example, in Jules Mohl’s nineteenth-century log book of the field-has been dissolved and released into new forms. A wide variety of hybrid representations of the Orient now roam the culture. Japan, Indonesia, China, India, Pakistan: their representatives have had, and continue to have, wide repercussions, and they have been discussed in many places for obvious reasons. Islam and Arabs have their own representations, too, and ...yet powerful and ideologically coherent-persistence, a far less frequently discussed one, in which, in the United States, traditional European Orientalism disbursed itself.”

Throughout the chapter on ‘The Latest Phase’ of Orientalism, Said cites examples from numerous academic writings to show the prejudices and biases against Arabs in general and Islam and Islamic culture in particular. What is obvious is that those writings form the core of public opinion and image created by and continued by the international media on Arabs, Islam and Islamic culture giving an impression that they needed to be dominated and governed and justifies the continuing onslaught on Arabs, Islam and Islamic culture.

Said discusses in great detail how these prejudices and biases have been mainstreamed in vital areas such as popular culture and social sciences.

Said observed, “Here are a few examples of how the Arab is often represented today. Note how readily ‘the Arab’ seems to accommodate the transformation and reductions- all of a simple tendentious kind-into which he is continually being forced.

Arab motif

The costume for Princeton’s tenth-reunion class in 1967 had been planned before the June war. The motif- for it would be wrong to describe the costume as more than crudely suggestive- was to have been Arab: robes, headgear, sandals. Immediately after the war, when it became clear that the Arab motif was an embracement, a change in the reunion plan was decreed. Wearing the costume as had been originally planned, the class was now to walk in procession, hands above heads in a gesture of abject defeat. This was what the Arab had become.

From a faintly outlined stereotype as a camel-riding Nomad to an acceptable caricature as the embodiment of incompetence and easy defeat: that was the all the scope given the Arab.

Yet after 1973 war the Arab appeared everywhere as something more menacing. Cartoons depicting an Arab sheik standing behind a gasoline pump turned up constantly. These Arabs, however, were clearly ‘Semitic’: their sharply hooked noses, the evil mustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to be largely non-Semitic population) that Semitics were at the bottom of all ‘our’ troubles, which in this case was primarily a gasoline shortage. The transference of the popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same”.

It is interesting to note how the perception of the Arab had been made and continues to maintain through academic discourses as well as through the international media.

Suggestion

Said said, “ Without the usual euphemism, the question most often being asked is why such people as the Arabs are entitled to keep the developed (free, democratic, moral) world threatened. From such questions comes the frequent suggestion that the Arab oil fields be invaded by the marines.

In the films and television the Arab is associated either with lechery or bloodthirsty. He appears as an oversexed degenerate, capable, it is true, of cleverly devious intrigues, but essentially sadistic, treacherous, low, slave trader, camel driver, money changer, colourful scoundrel: these are some traditional Arab roles in the cinema.

The Arab leader (of marauders, pirates, “native” insurgents) can often be seen snarling at the captured Western hero and the blond girl (both of the steeped in wholesomeness) ‘My men are going to kill you, but they like to amuse themselves before’ He leers suggestively as he speaks: this is a current debasement of Valentino’s Sheik.

In newsreels or news photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs) will take over the world.

Books and articles are regularly published on Islam and the Arabs that represent absolutely no change over the virulent anti-Islamic polemics of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For no other ethnic or religious group is it true that virtually anything can be written or said about it, without challenge or demurral. ”

In conclusion, Said said that failure of Orientalism to get rid it of racial, ideological and imperialistic stereotypes is essentially a human and intellectual failure. He said, “I consider Orientalism’s failure to have been a human as much as intellectual one.”