Edward Said's Orientalism at Thirty

This year makes the thirtieth anniversary of Edawrd Said's Orientalism. What better occasion than to express some criticism I have about this book?

Orientalism was an attempt to explain how the European powers ‘created’ the Orient, by which Said means the Middle East. Said has focused solely on the writings of Europeans and has developed an insightful, but flawed, analysis of the European image of the East.

“The Orient was,” argued Said, “almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.”[1] To Said, the Orient was an actual, physical place, but, more importantly, it was a construction of the European mind. The Orient was of great importance to Europeans because it provided a vivid image of the “other,” which helped to solidify the Occidental self image. “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of the deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”[2] European ideas about the Orient led to the development of a diverse field of study with a plethora of scholars creating a body of knowledge by studying everything from Sanskrit to the mannerisms of nineteenth century Egyptians. Orientalism also had a colonizing arm because these images of the Orient offered rationalization for European conquest of the Orient.

Said, betraying a prominent Foucaultian influence, made the argument that the idea of the Orient was a result of European power and domination. “The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental.”[3] He claimed that since Europeans, primarily Great Britain and France, could exert such physical power over the Orient, then they also could dominate it mentally. He also argued that since the Orient was a consequence of the power relations between East and West, then the Orient could not be separated from Europe. The European idea of ‘us’ is one predicated on their own superiority. It was this superiority, argued Said, which led to Europeans to exerting hegemonic power over non-Europeans, namely Orientals. Not only did Europeans exercise hegemony over Oriental people, but they also dominated ‘knowledge’ of the Orient. Orientals were not able to be the keepers of the knowledge of their own societies due to their backwardness. “Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing the relative upper hand.”[4] Said continued, “The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part.”[5]

According to Said, Orientalism was not a simple rationalization of colonial rule, but colonialism was justified by Orientalism.[6] He wrote that since the middle of the eighteenth century the relationship between East and West was guided by two distinct elements. One was the increasing body of knowledge, propped up by imperialism, devoted to the exotic, which was exploited by new social sciences. This growth in knowledge led to a proliferation of literature about the Orient.[7] The other element was that Europe always held a position of strength in the East-West relationship. Said wrote that “the essential relationship [between East and West], on political, cultural, and even religious grounds, was seen—in the West… to be one between a strong and a weak partner.”[8] Said concluded that since the West’s knowledge of the Orient comes from a dominate position, then the West has merely invented the Oriental and his world.

Said also put forth the concept of imaginative geography and its relationship to the development of Orientalism. Imaginative geography was a way in which Europeans dramatize, exaggerate, and at times fabricate facts about the ‘other.’ Europeans created an Orient that was mysterious, sensual, sexual, devious and exotic. Said wrote:

"The Orient seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. An Orientalist is but the particular specialist in knowledge for which Europe at large is responsible, in the way that an audience is historically and culturally responsible for (and responsive to) dramas technically by the dramatists. In the depths of this Oriental stage stands a prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual items evoke a fabulously rich world… of monsters, devils, heroes; terrors, pleasures, desires."[9]

The most illustrative example of this is the topic of Islam. Orientalists have misrepresented and misunderstood Islam and especially the position of Mohammed. Orientalists presented Mohammed as an impostor of and rival to Jesus. They placed him at the center of Islam, or as Islam’s version of Jesus, but in actuality Mohammed, according Islam, was the last in a long line of prophets, which included Jesus.

Said drew his conclusions from the false notion that European images of the Orient have remained static and were based on broad Enlightenment ideals. Europeans, Said argued, believed these ideals to be universal. This line of thought is quite flawed. “Much recent research has shown,” argued D.A. Washbrook, a critic of postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies, “substantially greater ‘difference’ in European perception than colonial discourse theory would allow—including many views favourable to non-Europe and hostile to colonialism.”[10] Washbrook correctly argued that Said and other scholars ignored European intellectual movements that followed the Enlightenment such as Romanticism. The proponents of Romanticism rejected many of the ‘truths’ that Enlightenment thinkers held to be universal. Many of the Romantics were rather sympathetic to non-Europeans including Orientals. By portraying European about the Orient as one-sided and unchanging, Said has done nothing more than to expose his willful ignorance. Historians of the Middle East has written that “Said has read widely (if selectively) and writes imaginatively and perceptively, and he might have brought off a real tour de force if only he had satisfied himself with more limited conclusions.”[11] In his review of Orientalism Kerr has leveled an important and valid criticism of Said’s ‘scholarship’:

"This book reminds me of the television program "Athletes in Action," in which professional football players compete in swimming, and so forth. Edward Said, literary critic loaded with talent, has certainly made a splash, but with this sort of effort he is not going to win any major races. This is a great pity, for it is a book that in principle needed to be written, and for which the author possessed rich material. In the end, however, the effort misfired. The book contains many excellent sections and scores many telling points, but it is spoiled by overzealous prosecutorial argument in which Professor Said, in his eagerness to spin too large a web, leaps at conclusions and tries to throw everything but the kitchen sink into a preconceived frame of analysis. In charging the entire tradition of European and American Oriental studies with the sins of reductionism and caricature, he commits precisely the same error."[12]

Said’s scope was also fairly limited. Besides focusing solely on European sources, he only examined sources that were written about a small section of the Orient; the Middle East. Not only did Said focus Middle East, but he wrote solely about Arabs and mostly those in Egypt. He ignored Turkey and modern day Iran. He also ignored China, Japan, and India and so on, which he admitted. Bernard Lewis, who Said unjustly portrayed as one of the villain Orientalists, has written that “The limitations of time, space, and content which Mr. Said forcibly imposes on his subject, though they constitute a serious distortion, are no doubt convenient and indeed necessary to his purpose. They are not, however, sufficient to accomplish it.”[13] Said was also fairly selective about the authors and works which he dissected. Lewis continued, “Among the British and French Arabists and Islamicists who are the ostensible subject of his study, many leading figures are either not mentioned at all or mentioned briefly in passing. Even for those whom he does cite, Mr. Said makes a remarkably arbitrary choice of works. His common practice indeed is to omit their major contributions to scholarship and instead fasten on minor or occasional writings.”[14] Lewis has offered the example of Edward Lane to illustrate his point. Lane emerges as one of the chief culprits among Orientalists in general. According to Lewis, Said chose to dissect a fairly minor work written by Lane after a visit to Egypt and completely ignored all of Lane’s major works.[15] Lewis went on to state:

"All of this—the arbitrary rearrangement of the historical background, and the capricious choice of countries, persons, and writings—still does not suffice for Mr. Said to prove his case, and he is obliged to resort to additional devices. One is the reinterpretation of the passages he cites to an extent out of all reasonable accord with their authors' manifest intentions. Another is to bring into the category of "Orientalist" a whole series of writers—litterateurs like Chateaubriand and Nerval, imperial administrators like Lord Cromer, and others—whose works were no doubt relevant to the formation of Western cultural attitudes, but who had nothing to do with the academic tradition of Orientalism which is Mr. Said's main target."[16]

Said’s selectiveness has done damage to the overall validity of his arguments.


Yet, despite these major flaws, Orientalism is still widely read throughout the West. It is a classic among left-leaning college and university professors who generally suffer from white guilt. I'm not saying that this book should not be read, but, the opposite, it should be thoroughly read and dissected so that its fallacies will be completely revealed.


[1]Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid., 5-6.

[4] Ibid., 7.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 39.

[7] Ibid., 39-40.

[8] Ibid., 40.

[9] Ibid., 63.

[10] D.A. Washbrook, “Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire,” in Robin W. Winks, The Oxford History of the British Empire; Volume V: Historiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.596-510, 603.

[11] Malcolm Kerr, “Edward Said, Orientalism,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 12 (December 1980), pp. 544-547, 544.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Bernard Lewis, “The Question of Orientalism,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 11 (June 24, 1982), para. 34.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., para. 35.

[16] Ibid., para. 36.