Orientalism

Rating:
Summary: How to open a closed future.....
Review: Orientalism is a masterpiece of comparative literature studies and deconstruction, published in 1978 it is arguably Said's most rigorous piece but undoubtedly his most influential. This is a examination of the academic discipline of Oriental Studies, which has a long history most of the European universities. Oriental Studies is a pastiche areas of study which include philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts. Said makes it clear that he is not breaking new ground. Said limits Orientalism on how English, French, and American scholars have approached the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East. Although at times he refers to other periods - ranging as far back as the Greeks, the time period he covers is more limited than the scholarly field really extend. Said stays within the confines of the late eighteenth century to the present, whereas European scholarship on the Orient dates back to the High Middle Ages. Within his time frame, however, Said extends his examination beyond the works of recognized Orientalist academics to take in literature, journalism, travel books, and religious and philosophical studies to produce a broadly historical and anthropological perspective incorporating Foucaultian notions of "Discourse" and Gramscian notions of "Inventories".

His book makes three major claims. Firstly, that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Next, his second claim is that Orientalism helped define a European (mainly English and French) self-image. Lastly, Said argues that Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture. Whether you agree with him or not, feel that he may have misappropriated Foucault or feel like I do that what he is putting out is not comprehensive enough therefore is suspect, the point is moot. What is important is that Said has opened up a whole new area of discussion. The book has brought the author a sense of academic place and the author has placed a sense of notoriety on the subject. Trapped in what Foucault has described as an "Authorial Function" of book and author, author and book, the book is a reawakening and sin to overlook.

Miguel Llora

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece about the origins of "knowledge"!
Review: Few books in the modern world have acquired the stature of Edward Said's "Orientalism". It has become the de facto authority on the Western perspective of the Middle Eastern and Oriental worlds. Using impeccable scholarship and irrefutable evidence from two centuries' worth of European writing about the East, Edward Said lays down an indisputable case about how Western so-called "objective" and "scientific" study of the East has been corrupted and is far from describing reality. "Orientalism"'s main achievement, however, spreads far beyond the arena of "Oriental Studies" or "Near Eastern Studies" as they are now called. This book demonstrates using an in-depth case study how an entire field of study can be constructed out of self-reinforcing fiction that tends to gather its own inertia and develop its own seemingly self-consistent world. "Orientalism" therefore is a strong warning not only to Orientalists but to all unsuspecting researchers in any subject (even science) who might, deliberately or not, end up constructing their own mythical world. "Orientalism" also analyses the intricate relationships between knowledge and power, demonstrating the fallacy of taking knowledge for granted without analyzing and understanding the power structure that brought this "knowledge" into being.

This is a highly recommended book. It's only weakness is that it can somewhat difficult reading, thanks to its author's genius and total mastery of the English language. I often had to underline difficult words and look them up in a dictionary, and read over some paragraphs again and again in order to grasp the complex ideas, so once I was done with the book my GRE score improved 100 points. Seriously, though, "Orientalism" is a very perceptive and methodical study of an important topic today: the relationship between East and West.

Rating:
Summary: Some good ideas in a sea of redundancies
Review: In spite of how interesting all references and quotes of Orientalists could be, discovering that it takes more than 300 pages to Edward Said to define Orientalism as a system of ideological fictions is a bit disappointing, after he repeated the same concept hundreds of times with different words. Well, that statement is true for almost all sciences, both social and technical, and surely for their development during XIX century. Once I have been warned by the author that Orientalism has been built above prejudices, and I have been given some significant examples of that, I would prefer not to go through a myriad of further instances to support the initial thesis. Besides, Orientalism's functional facet to Colonialism are widely mentioned, but poorly deepened. That would have required an interdisciplinary approach - cultural, political, historical, ethnological and, why not, scientific - whilst this book is mainly an academic report about textual analysis. Another interesting side, i.e. why Oriental studies are carried on mainly by Western people?, is explained in a few final pages, and in my opinion it would have deserved much more space. So, when Said admits in his 1994 Afterword (probably the worthiest chapter in the whole book) that he has no interest, or capacity, in showing true Orient or Islam, I think he achieves an excessive restriction of the subject "Middle East" (because in this essay "Orient" means that), limiting its suitability to a general audience (which I belong to). There are of course many appreciable hints, but the general style, with its obsessive repetitions, reminds me too much of the political prose common in the 70's, even if Said makes a visible effort to maintain a scholar objectivity. In summary, I did not dislike the book, but I probably lack the specific knowledge necessary to fully appreciate it.

Rating:
Summary: Anti Essentialism & Controversial
Review: This book and Edward Said in general seem capable of generating such intense controversy. Many reviewers of this book seem to forget actually to review the work and focus on attacking Edward Said as a person, many others still forget to review the book and proceed to speak for Palestinian rights and the negative western attitudes of Islam. I will attempt to present an actual review of this book based on MY own reading of it.

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!

Rating:
Summary: Orientalism: the East created by a postmodern thinker
Review: The book of Edward Said is without any doubt on the most influential books produced in the late XX century, in the Western societies.There are several reasons that explain the popularity of the author and his book, some are good reasons, others not.

The first reason of the popularity of Edward Said is the seminal work in the field of the so -called postcolonial and cultural studies. In his works the intellectual roots are the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School and the genealogies of Nietzsche/Foucault, a very fashionlable way to make an "original academic research" in the late XX century in US and Europe. The second reason is the wrong mental image in Western minds that Palestinian = Arab = Muslim = good knowledge of Middle East and Muslim World and an "authorithy" in the political and cultural problems of this very complex World region. The third reason is the political support of the palestinian side in US and the Western World.

The book of Said raises, at least, three important questions: the firs one is how can Said be qualified like an humanist thinker, if his intelectual roots are clearly anti-humanist (v.g. Der Antichrist of Nietzsche and the distortion/manipulation of Nietzsche thought made by Foucault )?

Furthermore, if Said is right when he says that are negative stereotypes deeply inside the Western "imperial literature" of the orientalists, who made misrepresentations of the Arabs and the Muslim World, why Said don't analyse too the imperial literature inside of the Muslim World and the representations of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire? After all, the Ottoman imperial rule existed in Middle East and in Palestine for several centuries, until the end of World War I, in 1918, and the Palestinians and other Arab peoples where dominated by the Turks for a long time; the Western British imperial rule in Palestine existed only for 30 years; the French in Lebanon and Syria between the two World Wars ...

And what happen to the deeply rooted negative stereotipes that exists in the Arab/Muslim World about the Jewish and the Oriental Christians, the oher so-called people of the book ( the "dhimmi" in the name coinned by the egyptian born Bat Ye'Or)? The question is: the "dhimmi" status under Muslim rule, with the humiliations of different clothing, the prohibition to ride noble animals like horses or camels, the prohibition on carrying or possesing weapons, the discriminatory taxation where all trade and transport taxes where generally doubled for "dhimmis", etc, was better and lesser opressive than colonial rule of the European Powers?

Finally, another question. Edward Said is a Christian born bourgeois, who studied only in Western Schools, first in Lebanon and Egipt (the countries with the large Christian Communities in Middle East), later in US. Does he really knows the complexities of the Arab/Muslim World ? And, if the answer is affirmative, why the Arab sources and the Ottoman sources, are totally inexistent in his book? If the answer is that the inquire is about Western perceptions, why the works of German and Russian Orientalist are not used? Said says that the most influential works were written in English and French. Is this true or, as Bernard Lewis suggests, this is an usefull argument, when we have any knowlege of this languages?

Rating:
Summary: A Very Important and Influential Book (Unfortunately)
Review: It isn't until you get to p. 242 of Edward Said's "Orientalism" that he informs the reader of what he is REALLY getting at. Although he hints at it in his introduction, it isn't until p. 242 that Said lets us know that "truth" doesn't exist, that it is simply a term applied to a given concept in a given milieu at a given time. This admission later gives Said the opportunity, this time in the final few pages of the book, to explain to the reader, that while he has just written 300 some odd pages on what the Orient ISN'T, he is not going to make any attempt to tell us what it IS. Of course, truth doesn't exist, as Said would say, so what does one really want from him?
To be fair, Said explains in his introduction that it is not really his goal to give a comprehensive assessment of Orientalism, nor necessarily to offer a coherent alternative to Orientalism, but neither does he say outright what he later says on p. 242 and in the conclusion of the book. That is, he has essentially nothing new to offer the reader aside from dressing up certain aspects of post-modern European cultural theory in the clothing of (primarily) Middle Eastern cultural resentment. Although Said has little to say, one must give him credit for exploiting his implied "otherness" as a Palestinian to open up a can of trendy 60s style resentment worms on the field of Middle Eastern studies. Interestingly, and I think it is relevant here, as I am sure Said would agree, Middle Eastern studies, and even more broadly, the Middle East, were not really his milieu, neither academically nor personally. He was a Western-educated Christian that emigrated to the US early, stayed here his entire life, and worked at Columbia University where he taught literature (reading Orientalism, you will quickly see that it wasn't "Oriental" literature that he was interested in.) With this in mind, if Said was so disturbed by Westerners with Western education using Western methods to research an issue, then what exactly is it that he is doing? If the truth doesn't really exist, then what is the difference really, between producing a "truth" about the Orient or the Occident? I know every other reviewer in the world that has looked at this book objectively has already pointed this out, but it is worth repeating over and over again because it is such a powerful and fundamental flaw in this work.
Also, despite his pretentions of objectivity (and liberal use of "big" words like ontological, dialectical, and Foucaultian), Said veers into polemical screed towards the end of the book with an extremely childish attack on the prominent "Orientalist" Bernard Lewis, quoting him in a very narrow context, and then declaring him to obviously be a racist. Christopher Hitchens wrote a sympathetic piece about Said on the event of Said's death in which he mentions Said's thin skin and the personal way in which he often took professional or ideological disagreements. It seems in the case of Lewis, this got in the way of his better judgement.
Although I think in many ways it is a shame, this book must be dealt with for what it is, and that is essentially as a provoker of thought. For that reason alone, it is an important book. Though I don't feel that Said ultimately added anything to the substance of how to think about the East, as I stated before, he was the first to apply a certain type of thought to the Western way of viewing the Middle East, and in doing so, he more or less defined the agenda for looking at the history of Western thought on the Middle East.

Rating:
Summary: Eye Opening
Review: Simply put an amazing book. Said's point is not to accuse the "West", for which he is derided by one of Amazon's "spotlighted reviewers" here, but instead Said seeks to explain how the history that has been written about the "Middle East" is biased.

All history is written filtered through the perspective of a writer, so all stories from the past have a slant. Not only the distant past, but current events as they are reported are colored too by perspectives of the reporter too. This book explores how an identity of the "Middle East" were created by colonial powers; an identity which was not real for the people from the region.

This book was a ground breaking phenomena because it was the first of its kind to explore how images of the "Middle East" have been misinterpreted by the "Western scholars;" a grievance that is still echoed by people in the Middle East today.

Rating:
Summary: False assesment
Review: Lets get the argument strait here: the Western scholars tried to understand Islam through tradition techniques like fact finding and cultural analysis and for Mr. Said this is not good enough and in fact racist. So basically this book claims that to understand and even critique is racist. The main theme is 'how dare the west critique'. Well isn't Mr. Said critiquing, maybe this book should realize its utter hypocrisy to say 'how dare you critique us' on the one hand while then critiquing the west on the other. according to this volume the great flaw in the west is that it dared to try to understand the east, well maybe it would be better if we just remained ignorant of it.

Rating:
Summary: worth the effort
Review: This extremely important book is not easy to read. As Said tackles sensitive issues, he makes sure that every word of his is backed up by ample research, and the result is at times overwhelmingly tedious. Someone I know remarked that the same book could have been written much shorter. I do not agree.
Although Said is not the first to challenge Western views, his work in this book is certainly ground breaking. Such an effort must be elaborate and concise in order to present a finished thesis, one that would be the basis for future developments
I believe Said succeeded in creating a new subject matter - Orientalism as the study of those who study the Orient. He has been misunderstood and rebuked - I heard one professor claiming that Said stood against thourough research of the Orient, for example, but his immense influence cannot be denied.
For those who do not want to stay behind, who wish to learn Said's "new language" which has become widespread - I recommend the sometimes ardous task of reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing but resentment of the West to be found here...
Review: 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.