Orientalism

2.1 Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularized Religion

In Chapter 2, Said illustrates the various ways that the West interprets the Orient for its own purposes. Historically, Western investment in the Orient was as much about cultivating knowledge about the East as it was about developing a sense of Western advancement. Using Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet as an example, Said argues that Orientalist imagination was particularly interested in the East as a vehicle for Western progress. Flaubert’s novel offers a conversation between two main characters about the possibility of Europe’s regeneration through Asia, justifying further Western colonial intervention in the East.

This section also introduces Said’s four elements of 18th-century Orientalist tendencies: “expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, [and] classification” (120). These moves represent a secularizing tendency in which the religious and cultural specificity of Eastern countries were homogenized to accommodate a generalized Western view of the Orient.

2.2 Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory

In this section, Said discusses two influential figures of modern Orientalism: philologists Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan. The two figures are notable for bridging philology and public policy through the vehicle of Orientalism.

Silvestre de Sacy’s knowledge of the Arabic language made him a crucial figure in the French occupation of Algiers in 1830, as he translated on behalf of the Algerian population and facilitated French presence in the country. He once said, “The Orient on its own could not survive a European’s taste, intelligence, or patience” (128). Said argues that such sentiments express the fundamental Orientalist biases of modern philologists, who believed that their study of the Orient was crucial to maintaining Western dominance and political control over the East.

For Ernest Renan, the Orient possessed secrets that justified Western efforts “to articulate the East” through scholarship and administrative control (138). Renan’s contribution to modern Orientalism was his differentiation between Judaism and Islam in Oriental-Semitic philology, a move that had ramifications on conflicts between the two populations. He also utilized such comparative classifications to distinguish Europeans from Orientals, declaring the former as an organic population of people and the latter “inorganic.” According to him, Europeans could construct new ideas and pursue social innovation, whereas Orientals could not.

Both Sacy and Renan imposed limits on the cultural imagination and political autonomy of Oriental countries. According to Said, they represent the works of modern Orientalist thinkers who “den[ied] Oriental culture the right to be generated, except artificially in the philological laboratory” (148).

2.3 Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination

In modern Orientalism, Western thinkers and writers moved from a style of study that once pursued a descriptive reality to a comparative science. Despite the growing scholarship about the Orient, the position of Orientals never grew under Western purview. Using the metaphor of the pendulum, Said describes how the West could overvalue the Orient on one upswing and completely devalue it on the other end; ultimately, it was never equal to the West in value. Each move always justified Western dominance. Said points to how even a socialist thinker such as Karl Marx was complicit in this thinking. Writing about the British rule of India in 1853, Marx argued that British colonial intervention in India enabled the colonized country to pursue social revolution. In this analysis, Marx attributed the social transformation to the British presence, ignoring the political agency of India in the process. Said uses this example to illustrate how embedded Orientalist thought was in even the most left-leaning examples of Western thought.

Said argues that modern Orientalists often justify traveling to and studying the Orient as a part of a liberal agenda. He names three types of Orientalist writers who travel and document the Orient as part of their study. The first type goes and scientifically observes the Orient with an air of objectivity. The second one pursues a similar objective as the first but retains their style and consciousness in their writing. The third justifies their aesthetic through a sense of urgency to pursue their Orientalist project. They claim that the form of their work is determined by the emergency of the project itself. In each category, the Orientalists pursue knowledge of the Orient with the goal of social betterment.

Said advocates for a deeper critique of Orientalist writing beyond liberal intentions. Looking at works of cultural translation, such as Edward William Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, Said criticizes the author’s use of an Arab and Muslim informant, Sheikh Ahmed, to gain access to aspects of Islamic life that Lane alone would not be privy to. The text is composed of scientific observations and novelistic prose. Its public impact was possible through the authority that Lane gained by using a native informant and the sympathetic narration he wrote to relay his observations. This book was, in turn, used by the Royal Asiatic Society to pursue further study of the Orient, fostering increased interest in translations of Oriental works like Lane’s.

2.4 Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French

In this section, Said illustrates how British and French Orientalist thinkers had cultural and political investments in different territories in the Orient but still produced work that spoke to similar Orientalist values. For French Orientalist thinkers of the 19th century, the pilgrimage to the Orient fulfilled a Romantic ideal for “restorative reconstruction” of the French nation (168). For French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, the Orient was an important biblical site that enabled reparative fantasies following the French defeats from the Crusades to the Napoleonic era. In Chateaubriand’s writing, he portrayed Napoleon as a Crusader and celebrated Christian victory over other religions. While he acknowledged Jerusalem to be an important site for multiple religions, he depicted Christians as the chosen people. Chateaubriand relied upon the Orient for his imaginative interpretation of French and Christian glory at the expense of Muslims, whom he believed did not possess knowledge of liberation as Western Christians did. Alphonse de Lamartine also supported this notion of the Orient, claiming that its people were “nations without territory, patrie, rights, laws or security […] waiting anxiously for the shelter of European occupation” (179).

Even as French writers differed in their approaches to the Orient, they contributed to the larger body of Orientalist thinking. Such were the cases of both Gustave Flaubert and Gérard de Nerval. While the former believed that the Orient was a place consisting of many sense experiences, Nerval had a different outlook, calling the Orient an “absence” that was “in need of Western revitalization” (184). Flaubert, however, felt that the Orient was more “corporeal” (184) and was “a place often returned to after the actual voyage had been completed” (180). Flaubert considered the Orient as a place that offered new sensory experiences that would lend greater clarity to Western living. Despite Flaubert and Nerval’s different perspectives of the Orient, one as embodied and the other as absence, their views still perpetuated the necessity of European access to and control of the Orient.

For British Orientalists, their geographic interests differed from the French, but they still relied upon cultural and political conquest of the Orient as part of British national ambition. Regardless of hostile or more sympathetic views, British Orientalists still advanced the notion of European superiority over the Orient. Said compares the views of Alexander William Kinglake, who claims that One Thousand and One Nights was too well-written of a collection to have been created by Arabs, to Richard Francis Burton, who idealized the figure of the Oriental. Burton saw the Orient as an alternative to the West, providing freedom from the strict Victorian sense of morality in Britain at the time. He expressed a desire to “live as an Oriental” (196), a sympathetic view that Said argues still places the Oriental in a subordinate position.