Edward Said is one of the most prominent literary critics of the 20th century. He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 to a Christian family. His family never took a certain place as a permanent resident. They were moving from place to place (between Jerusalem, Lebanon, Cairo and United states), therefore, he was a multicultural person. As a teenager, he was expelled from Victoria College, thus, his family sent him to America to study in Mount Hermon and eventually, he studied in Harvard as a graduate student. He worked as professor at Columbia University in New York City for the rest of his professional life.
Said was born in a critical period; when the British mandate to Palestine and to most of area of the Middle East as well as the period that witnesses extensive Jewish immigration to Palestine to constitute Israel country. He grew up watching his home land being taken away and powerful countries colonizing other countries. This experience and historical background added to Said’s work, as it is reflected in his critical and political writings, specifically, on Palestine’s situation and on the Middle East in general.
In Said’s book Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), he referred to Joseph Conrad’s fear of personal disintegration in has continuous re-writing of the past. Said was influenced by the author’s work who create setting for his fiction in areas like East Asia and Africa which reflects the political situation that echoes the colonialism by superior people to civilize the native inhabitant of those places. Said wrote his second book Beginnings: Intention and Method; (1975) discussing the distinction between the ‘origin’ which is divine and the ‘beginning’ which is human creation. Shortly thereafter, he published Orientalism (1978); a book that made him internationally famous. While Said was about to publish Orientalism; he was working on The Question of Palestine (1979) in which Said pointed out the fatal violence in the Middle East and its effects on the lives of both the occupier and the occupied.
Said wrote many books, essays and articles; in most of them he criticizes how the superpower countries exploit the third world countries. Further, he wrote many works defending the Palestinian situation and how his people over night became homeless. In his book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. With photographs by Jean Mohr (1986) Said portrayed the life and identity of Palestinians and how they ended up in exile and diaspora. Said also wrote Culture and Imperialism (1993) where he again criticized the Western imperialism and its endeavor to colonize the other less powerful countries. Further, Said wrote Out of Place: A Memoir (1999) is another book in which he recalled the lost and forgotten world of his and whoever experience this situation.
Said is well known, academically, to involve most of his writings in historical criticism that aims to locate the works of Western literature in the context of its empire. His works exceed the disciplinary boundaries in fields that is outside of his professional expertise. On the other hand, which is outside the academic field, Said was active in many of his writings ( e.g The Question of Palestine (1979), After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. With photographs by Jean Mohr (1986) and Peace and Its Discontents (1995), etc.) for the sake of his home country (Palestine) who was defending his oppressed people by the colonial powers.
Orientalism (1978)
Orientalism is a term that is employed by European and American scholars in reference to the study of Asia and its people. Particularly, in the fields of postcolonial and Asian American studies, the term primarily refers to constructions of the East by the West during colonialist expansion, emphasizing their influence on and participation in the imperialist project as well as on similar later constructions.
According to Said, Orientalism has several interdependent meanings, including an academic one, “Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient—and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist—either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism” and a more general one, “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (Said, 2-3). To Said Orientalism is a ‘style of thought’, by which he indicates that this “ontological and epistemological distinction” between Orient and Occident, specifically the East and West, can be studied more widely than just in an academic specialty. Lastly, an institutional one, “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). Said explores the implications and consequences of each aspect of Orientalism in his text.
Said believes that Orientalism is both a discourse and a corporate institution for the production and domination of the Orient and has long complicated roots in history, though he concentrated on the modern part of power-knowledge that occurs in the end of the 18th century(3). Said’s understanding and analysis of Orientalism was influenced by Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1942) “An eloquent scholarly and personal testimonial to this response can be found in Erich Auerbach's magisterial Mimesis, …He tells us that Mimesis was written during his exile in Turkey and was meant to be in large measure an attempt virtually to see the development of Western culture …therefore, he set himself the task of writing a general work based on specific textual analyses in such a way as to lay out the principles of Western literary performance in all their variety, richness, and fertility”(258). It was any study of the literary practices by which reality was represented through definite stylistic conventions. Auerbach in his Mimesis reflects the Western culture endeavor to have hegemony over the other culture of the developing countries. Further, like Joseph Conrad who had significant influence on Said, Auerbach also influenced Said who the latter sees himself in two those prominent exiled writers. Said also relied heavily on Raymond Schwab’s The Oriental Renaissance (1950) and Edgar Quinet’s Le Genie des religions (1832) that first produced the concept of Orientalism in a study of Western attitudes towards India. Also, they both show the relationship between the Orient and the West; and how the West looked down to the Orient. “Here the key text was Edgar Quinet's Le Genie des religions (1832), a work that announced The Oriental Renaissance and placed the Orient and the West in a functional relationship with each other. I have already referred to the vast meaning of this relationship as analyzed comprehensively by Raymond Schwab in La Renaissance orientale; my concern with it here is only to note specific aspects of it that bear upon Renan's vocation as a philologist and as an Orientalist” (138).
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Said’s Orientalism was, also, crucially influenced by Michel Foucault. Said had found it useful here to “employ Michel Foucault's notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism” (3). Said was very interested in Foucault’s thoughts and ideas, especially the relationship between knowledge and power, and this theme is worked out at length in Orientalism. Said considered Orientalism as a discourse. According to Foucault, a discourse is a body of statements spoken and written in language, though discourse can also encompass other forms of representation that can be, and are, made about a specific matter. And thus, Said argued that it can be explained and understood the enormously systematic discipline by which “European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically. scientifically. and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period” (3) Further, Said believes that the West studied the Orient’s culture and the way of their living through translating their books, especially literature, to have more dominance over the Orient.
Said says “to speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enter-prize,… the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade,… innumerable Oriental 'experts' and 'hands,' an Oriental professorate, a complex array of 'Oriental' ideas,…many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use—the list can be extended more or less indefinitely” (4). Said focuses basically on British and French, and lastly with American, Orientalism. He believes that the British and French knowledge of the Orient is particular, and thus, Orientalism comes from a specific closeness knowledge between Britain and France and the Orient. Further, Orientalism is a cultural enterprise which includes areas and subjects as diverse as the spice trade, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, Oriental experts and old hands. Hence, the West are, principally, interested in learning the cultural construction of the Orient in order to understand the Orient which not merely physical region easily to conquer. To Said, the Orient has a history and tradition of ideas, metaphors, terminology, by which the Orient has been reparented, therefore, the West must consider all those to have hegemony over the Orient.
Said believes there are two angles with which authority can be studied. These are strategic location and strategic formation. The strategic location, which is a way of describing the “author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material he writes about, and strategic formation, which is a way of analyzing the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large” (20). For Said an author’s strategic location is that the position of the author in his own text regarding the Oriental materials (culture, ideology, politics, religion, and, etc.) that he writes about. Said indicated to the method or the way by which the texts can gain its worldly value, effect, and force; and how these come alone or together to create hegemony over the Other. Thus, the action of authority that is reflected by the writer who includes the matter of narrative voice and tone the structure “structure he builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text-all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader” as well as the textual strategies and rhetorical modes that the author applies to refer to the reader, to grasp the Orient , and to authorize himself to him speak about the Orient and to represent them (20). Further, the author’s texts identify themselves in a tradition and posit relationships with other texts, and from there they put together into the kinds of analyzable formation to which Said refers.
However, Said was interested with exteriority of the text. Hence, he was not interested in the ideas that are hidden in the Orientalist text but “rather of the text's surface, its exteriority to what it describes” (20). Exteriority would allow the Orientalist to use his way of writings to represent the Orient to his reader, to speak for the Orient, to bring the Orient to life in the eyes of the reader, as well as to give more explanation about the Orient to the Western reader. In other word, Orientalist’s texts are basically, intended by the author to represent the Orient as if they are uncapable of representing themselves due to lack of high culture and knowledge. Furthermore, Said quotation from Marx’s phrase with which Lasswell is in agreement-for Louis Napoleon: 'They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented' which means the Orient do not have the willing to represent themselves, they do not have enough knowledge and power to take care of themselves; therefore, they must be represented by the West(293).
In “ The Scope of Orientalism” Said opened with a speech of Arthur James Balfour’s lecture that is held on June 13, 1910, in the House of Commons on 'the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt” these, he said, “belong to a wholly different category” than those affecting the Isle of Wight or the West Riding of Yorkshire” (31) Balfour was indicating on how the problems would be different than dealing with problems closer to Britain. In order to justify the British colonialization over Egypt, he used the word Orient to refer to Egyptian people as they are not free people and they are always have been dominated by tyrant who oppress them and prevent from freedom of speech and freedom to act like human, therefore, they have to be represented by the West who are a better human with knowledge and power.
Balfour declared that he takes up no attitude of “superiority… if they will look in the face the facts with which a British statesman has to deal when he is put in a position of supremacy over great races like the inhabitants of Egypt and countries in the East...” (32). He believed that British have the priority to have the superiority over Egypt and the Egyptians, just because they know the civilization of Egypt better than any other country. He was justifying the British occupation in Egypt on the scale of knowledge; by which he meant British are more aware in Egyptians civilization than the Egyptians themselves as well as this give themselves a credit to surpass the Orient by their knowledge. Hence, this knowledge represents the form of authority. “British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, Said states, “and the burdens of knowledge make such question as inferiority and superiority seem pretty ones” (32) obviously, Balfour insisted on British superiority and Egyptian inferiority. Knowledge and power are the two terms by which Balfour and the British justify their occupation over the Egyptians. Balfour believed that the British do the Egyptians a favor by colonizing their country; and thus, they know better to rule Egypt than the Egyptians themselves.
Like Balfour, Said mentioned in his book “Orientalism” Lord Cromer who is British governor of Egypt, during the British occupation in Egypt. Cromer argues in his essay on “subject race” that the England's empire will not “dissolve if such things as militarism and commercial egotism at home and 'free institutions' in the colony” (36) He argues that it would be best for the empire to govern the Orient; if such things as militarism at home, and free institutions in the colonized areas, are kept to a minimum. Furthermore, he believes that Oriental mind is unchanging over history or geography and it is fundamentally irrational; unlike the “ European is a close reasoner” and “ a natural logician” (38) But, “ the mind of the Oriental …like this picturesque street, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description” Orients are singularly “ deficient in the logical faculty”(38). He goes on to say that Oriental are inveterate lairs as well as they are 'lethargic and suspicious,' as well as they are 'lethargic and suspicious,' and they are thereafter shown to be gullible, 'devoid of energy and initiative,' much given to ''fulsome Hattery,' intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals; “Orientals cannot walk on either a road or a pavement” (39). Like Balfour, Cromer believes the West have the knowledge which gives the justification to dominate the Orient who are devoid from. He thinks the Orients are devoid from ethics and morals and they need the European civilized culture to reform their situation.
According to Said, Caussin de Perceval who is an Orientalist wrote his thesis Essaisur l'histoire des Arabes avant l'Islamisme, pendant l'ipoqlle de Mahomet in which he indicates that Arabs were made a people by Mohammed and “Islam being essentially a political instrument, not by any means a spiritual one” (151) Caussin believes that Muslims are irrational people who are barbarians. And thus, he thinks that Mohammad is the reason for Arabs to be united as today who used Islam as a political instrument, not a spiritual one. Caussin portrays Islam is as more Political than spiritual and Mohammed is the right Prophet to lead Arabs. He goes on to say that Mohammad is the Prophet is thereby “seen in a cold light, stripped both of his immense religious force and of any residual powers to frighten Europeans” (152)
A contradictory view to Caussin’s Mohammed, Said mentions Carlyle who criticized Mohammad and Arabs in general. He believes that Mohammed is no legend, no shameful sensualist, no laughable petty sorcerer who trained 'pigeons to pick peas out of his ear” (152). To Carlyle, Mohammad is trickster who delusions his people to gain power over them. Also he thinks that even if Mohammad is the real author of Koran that is a wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, inconditei, nsupportable stupidity, in short” which is also not clear enough to mislead the understanding of Muslims and shape it for the sake of “stylistic grace” of Mohammed (152).
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