To write about Orientalism, it is necessary to start with Edward Said. This is because Said is one of the founders of the postcolonial movement in criticism which started with his seminal book, Orientalism, published in 1978. Said's hypothesis of Orientalism is too complex a one to be treated here. However, two aspects of his argument can be singled out. First, building on Foucault's idea that academic disciplines produce power as well as knowledge, Said attributes European imperialism to Orientalism. Since Europe had knowledge of the East (given by the Orientalists), this power (knowledge) is used to justify its invasion of the Orient. Here, Said cited Balfour's justification of the British occupation of Egypt as an example. For Balfour, since the British knew more than any one else about Egypt, they could control it for the benefit of both the natives and the Europeans at large. Such “authority of knowledge” claimed by the West, Said went on, is the reason which has led the West to undertake to speak for the rest of the world, not least the East through what Said called “Orientalism discourse.” Out of this discourse, the “western East” has been created to meet the needs of the West for identity, authority, and so on. So generalized an argument by Said and many other scholars who were inspired by him affects the image of the Orientalists. The latter, to put it frankly, have come to be seen as the agents of imperialism. However correct though this argument to some extent may be, a distinction should be maintained between politicians, such as Balfour, and those scholars who were interested in the East for a purely scientific reason. In other words, not all Orientalists who wrote and still write about the Orient are agents of imperial projects. We know that there were and are some Oreintalists who contributed positively to the study of the ancient and Muslim Near East and were it not for them many things about the great civilizations of the East would have remained unknown. However, if some of their works were used by some others for political axis, it is unreasonable to accuse these scholars of being imperialists. The second of Said's arguments, since the Orient has been created to provide the West with identity and power, is that the Orientalists have looked at the Orient as an opposite which has helped them in defining their identity (here Europeaness) and asserting their superiority. Hence, to defend their self-image, unlike the West, which is seen as innovative and dynamic, the Europeans looked at the Orient as a static, eternal, and uniform entity. Hence, Said went on, all the European literature written about the Orient does not inform us about the real Orient, if there is one, but about the Occident, or about the negative side of the Occident. Such a result of contact between different peoples seems to be a universal cultural phenomenon, as shall be seen further below. Said's influence upon the Western academic environments can be seen in the fact that many branches of knowledge such as history, art, music, and anthropology, to give but some examples, now ritually genuflect to his ideas and arguments, not the least of these being “postcolonial” discourse. However, it should be noted that Said almost used the term Orient to mean the modern Middle East. He could not go beyond the Islamic period. The fact that Said seemed not to have knowledge of non-European imperialism throughout history led him to look at Western colonialism as unique. However, as it shall be seen in a moment, these ideas of Orientalism mentioned by Said can be found in ancient times. As early as the 5th century B.C.E, perhaps earlier, the Greeks, thanks to their contact with eastern peoples, not least the Persians, developed a strong sense of identity which resulted in regarding non-Greeks as “barbarian other”. This “other” was looked at, generally speaking, as static and timeless and lacking the criteria of “civilized” life; a life which is nowhere better exemplified than by a Greek polis. It was an axiom which was accepted by almost all Greeks that the good and “civilized” life cannot be found outside a poli. Hence, anyone who was not Greek was labelled “barbarian” with the entire negative package which this word may denote. This without doubt helped the Greeks to foster their sense of identity to the extent that it was during this period that Herodotus introduced what can be regarded as the first notion of ethnicity when he emphasized that the Greeks had a common blood, religion, language, and way of life. The Romans perceived all other societies through generalized and stereotypical categories inherited from centuries of Greek and Roman ethnographic writings. Accordingly, the Romans adopted the Greek perception of the East and its inhabitants, which was seen as a land of exotica, wealth, and adventure. Hence, as early as the 3rd century B.C.E., to give only one example, we find the figures in Plautus' play going to the East only for business and returning from there opulent. However, it is worth noticing that the East was divided into two parts as far as the Roman familiarity with it is concerned. First, there was Egypt which was very familiar to the Romans, not least owing to its commercial power. Second, came Arabia and Persia which were seen as exotic and strange. – SG Email: [email protected] Blog: alabri3.blogspot.com __
