In Orientalism, Said sets about dismantling the study of the "orient" in general with primary focus on the Islamic Near East. Said argues that concepts such as the Orient, Islam, the Arabs, etc. are too vast to be grouped together and presented as one coherent whole, encompassing all there is to know about the subject. Said bases his view on the shear width and breadth of the subject, the inherent bias of conflicting cultures and more recently the role of the Orientalism in colonialism. It is indeed difficult to attempt to represent a book that is so focused on anti essentialism.

Said's research of western / occidental discourse was very thorough indeed and he does illustrate through repeated examples how misinformation sufficiently repeated can become accepted academic work. Said also presents an analysis of the causes and motives and theorizes about his findings. A lengthy and a times tedious discussion of the origins of Orientalism is rather repetitive and hard to follow for a non specialist like me.

Edward Said however seem to have fallen in the same trap he attributes to Orientalism, he has not attempted to explore Arab writings of the periods he discussed nor has he attempted to present (possibly even read) work by Egyptian and Arab historians of the periods he was addressing save for work carried out in the west and within western universities. In doing so, Said fails to see how the modern and contemporary "orient" sees itself through primarily "oriental" eyes such as Ibn Khaldoun, Al Maqrizi and also through the writings of orientalists like Lane. Said also fails to address the work carried out by orientalists based on many manuscripts of Orientals.

I particularly enjoyed Said's analysis of the strong ties that Orientalism has with power and colonialism. Said analysis of the diverging development of the British and French practice based on the latter's limited success as a colonial power was very enjoyable and very well thought out. The Orientalism Today and indeed the Afterwards section are also very informative and as these were more familiar areas for Said his presentation of ideas and thoughts came across more clearly and the writing was far less tedious than the earlier parts of the book.

Orientalism is not an easy read, it will challenge many established views, indeed it has already with a fair degree of success led to changes in the way the Near East is studied. To me, most of all I see this as a book that offers in part a largely coherent explanation for the on-going misunderstanding between the West and the Near East and in Islam. And while Occidentalism does not exist as a field of study in a place like Egypt per se, Said fails to see that the west is viewed largely in terms of its wealth, promiscuous habits, hypocrisy and anti Islam and thus fails to see it as 2 way street, albeit with unequal power.

This is by no means a the definitive correction of the history of the Middle East or Near Orient, it is however a very legitimate and serious study of a field of study that no doubt has a lot to answer for!


What about the Ottoman Empire?   August 23, 2001
 118 out of 163 found this review helpful

Edwards Said's book, Orientalism, is both a study on the origins, repercussions, and general history of the concept of "Orientalism" as well as an example of cultural history in action, and in many ways it is also evidence of how cultural history can go drastically wrong. The text itself investigates how Orientalism, or what Said also describes as "the distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority," (42) expanded and proliferated in the years of Western expansion; namely, the 19th Century. Although it had existed before, Said argues that "Orientalism" was made concrete by scientists, explorers, and scholars and is mostly the result of these people quantifying and qualifying and making "rational" a concept they could not understand. Edward Said says that the original notion of the dividing line between East and West "is more than anything else imaginative." (55) Once Orientalism was conceptualized from this imagined line, Said argues, it offered a set of rules, descriptions and modes of behavior that generalized a wildly diverse population and made it easily attainable and exploitable by the West. Orientalism was also invented as a way for Europeans to reconcile their fear of the Near East and Islam, which is the topic most covered by Said and was a great influence on Orientalism because of its sheer magnitude and power. While Orientalism was originally conceived out of imagined misconceptions and a largely created body of evidence as realized in Barthelemy d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale (originally published in 1697), it was perpetuated in later "projects" best exemplified in Napoleon's accounts of travel through Egypt in Description de l'Egypte. From this point on, Orientalism had a "scope" and was available for future Orientalists to further generalize the Orient for scientific, literary, and imperialist purposes. Edward Said also argues that Orientalism benefited "professional scholars" and academic institutions because now an entire business based on the idea of Western superiority was created to help serve the above-mentioned scientists, anthropologists, and political thinkers. The modern Orientalist, Said argues, was "in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished." (121) Orientalism not only flourished, but new assumptions made on the old ones only served to perpetuate further the untrue notions on which Orientalism was founded. After Said describes the endeavors of various Orientalists including Chateaubriand, Larmartine, and finally, Richard Burton, the reader is given exhaustive evidence of how Orientalism grew into what it is today; more Orientalism. Orientalism now, Said says, is only the same idea of generalizing and, in a sense, primitivizing the "other" through modern-day "area-studies." Because these area studies are from a long and established tradition of Orientalism, they are only an extension of, not reaction to, all the misconceptions encapsulated in Orientalism. Although Edward Said's Orientalism is an illuminating history of an idea (Orientalism) and how it was created, propagated, and continues to exist, his volume is nonetheless redundant and hostile in tone that made me immediately dislike it and put me on the defensive. In no instance did I find Said to be self--critical; his arguments were set forth like dogma. His extensive endeavors to list the faults generated by "Orientalism" are in some cases based on false assumptions. That is, there have been nations of Islamic people (i.e., the Ottoman Empire) who for over 500 years systematically enslaved and ruled over parts of Eastern Europe. These kinds of reverse atrocities are virtually ignored, probably because Said is only really documenting the past two centuries. In addition, I found very little in the area of proposals or alternatives to the way of conceptualizing the "Orient" other than what Said criticizes in his 300-plus-page book. I understand that Said's mission was "to describe a particular system of ideas, not by any means to displace the system with a new one" (325) but in my opinion a history of a subject should allow the reader to conceive of and interpret ideas for a new system and because Said fervently rejected to do so, so did I. In my opinion, Orientalism is also an example of where cultural history can become so subjective that unless the reader accepts the book without question, it serves little purpose other than as an outlet for anger on the part of the author and as testament to how tenuous a historian's job is when he or she lets a particular view so obviously overpowering the content of the text.


Intellectual dishonesty   August 8, 2001
 82 out of 155 found this review helpful

Edward Said here unjustly attacks all scholars who criticize the Moslem and Arab worlds, taking special pain to berate award-winning historian Bernard Lewis, as he did in the October, 1976 New York Times Book Review piece that became this book. He argues--incorrectly, and without academic credentials in Middle Eastern studies--that Western Middle Eastern scholars represent "an unbroken tradition in European thought of profound hostility, even hatred, toward Islam." But according to Daniel Pipes, Said's term stuck. "Neo-orientalist" is now the worst possible insult one can hurl at any Middle Eastern scholar.

As Martin Kramer and Jacob Lassner show in The Jewish Discovery of Islam, however, it was a German-Jewish school that raised the study of Islam to an art and introduced it to the West. Far from promoting enmity for Islam, Western scholars including Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), and Muhammad Asad, ne Leopold Weiss of Lvov and Vienna (1900-92) created considerable tolerance for it. Hate? Asad even converted, advised the Saudi king, served as Pakistan's United Nations ambassador and translated the Qur'an into English.

The German-Jewish school's empathy for Islam prevails even today, as evidenced both by its importance to Arab scholars and by Arab and Turkish honors given to its most prominent apostle, Bernard Lewis. But Said writes only of what Pipes calls the defunct "Christian" approach, which saw in Islam a rival and inferior--and which scholars long ago repudiated.

Worse, Said fails to criticize historical or current Arab or Muslim tyranny that wiped out entire cultures, languages and faiths within the Christian nations of North Africa, from Syria to Egypt, all but eliminated Turkish Armenians in 1917, and even now plagues Egypt's Coptic Christians, Algeria and Morocco's Berbers, Lebanese Christians and Iraqi Kurds, women and Hindus in Taliban Afghanistan, Christians in Indonesia--much less Southern Sudan's Black Christians, the ongoing targets of an Arab government program of enslavement and genocide. Said decries the "evil" West, while remaining strangely silent about Arab and Muslim atrocities.

This book constitutes the ultimate in intellectual dishonesty. Alyssa A. Lappen


Arguably flawed but exceptionally potent and important   January 31, 2002
 75 out of 103 found this review helpful

Public opinion has gone in and out like the tides on Said's book since I first read it some six odd years ago. It has been said that the primal characteristic of a truly enlightened mind is its ability to entertain two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time; in that context I find it odd that people can be so proud of their total discrediting of Said's work in favor of the preeminent and (seemingly) diametrically opposed Bernard Lewis. It is obvious to me that both men have something provocative to teach us about Europe and America's relationship with the Middle East (as it has been over the centuries and is reflected in culture and scholarship), and both need to be heard in that context.

It is not often that a brilliantly, exhaustively researched book on an alternatingly controversial and trivialized subject can engender an emotional response of the magnitude with which this work does--which usually means that it is worth reading. In documenting the psychological architecture of the western mind and its perspective on the East--or the "Orient"--he deconstructs it. The idea that it exists deconstructs it by nature; before reading this book you will swear that most of what we know of the Arabian East is the absolute truth, without even being aware that it's been either romanticized into impotence or isn't much of anything complimentary, let alone influential.

I rate ORIENTALISM, for its effect on our psyche as Americans alone (regardless of race or assumed political leanings), as one of the most important books written in the last decades of the 20th century. The world looks the way it does not because of natural law, like the reasons why the Sahara has become a desert--or at least not by the natural laws we have imagined. Edward Said, regardless of the possibility of biases coming through his scholarship, regardless of the political realities he left out of his thesis, shows this in remarkable fashion to people--like myself--who never considered this fact's existence (let alone its influence on my perceptions of the Middle East in all their forms).

Be mature enough to accept that it is not the only educated opinion or set of facts about our complex world, and this book will be a great read and teach a great deal. I would suggest triangulating ORIENTALISM with Karen Armstrong's HOLY WAR and Moseddeq Ahmed's WAR ON FREEDOM, for a truly eye-opening experience of the Western psyche regarding the East.


Nothing but resentment of the West to be found here...   December 6, 2003
 52 out of 137 found this review helpful

What I wonder about Said's career is this: does the West have an equivalent of Edward Said who is working at the most prestigious Arab universities and making a very comfortable living by preaching to them what a horde of ethnocentric, misogynistic, racist, and generally horrible, bigoted people they are? Has this alter-Said written a book called "Occidentalism," detailing how Arabs--in their stereotypical depictions of Westerners as depraved, materialistic, and corrupt infidels--are guilty of ethnocentrism and above all racism? Does this book "Occidentalism" demonstrate how these stereotypes, as found throughout Arab literary art and culture, contributed to the Islamic occupation of the Balkans and Iberia and the colonization of previously non-Arab lands? (Do you begin to see the absurdity of Said's entire career?)

If there is no alter-Said then that is tragic, because Arab culture is in far more need of a healthy dose of cultural relativism than the very self-analyzing, self-critical West is.

Nietzsche would say that Said is nothing but a RESENTER par excellence. Arab culture is in decline, and has been since the fading away of the Ottoman Empire. Islam, formerly the colonizer, has now itself been colonized. This fact is expressed as a generally bitter resentment of the West and an equally resentful characterization of Western culture as simply ethnocentric and racist...

Said, who himself lived in the United States and earned a six-figure income by preaching this gospel of resentment to those who afforded him this luxury, was nothing but a first-class HYPOCRITE.