Orientalism: A Reader 9781474470476

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Orientalism

O RIEN TA LISM A R EA D ER

Edited by A. L. Macfie

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

Selection and editorial material © A. L. Macfie, 2000. The texts are reprinted by permission of other publishers. Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Sabon and Gill Sans by Bibliocraft Ltd, Dundee, and printed and bound in Great Britain by The University Press, Cambridge A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1442 7 (hardback) ISBN 0 7486 1441 9 (paperback) The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

C O N T EN T S

Preface Introduction

ix 1

FOUNDATIONS OF A MYTH 1 James Mill: The Indian Form of Government 2 3

11

G. W. F. Hegel: Gorgeous Edifices

13

Karl Marx: The British Rule in India

16

THE RISE OF ORIENTAL STUDIES 4 5

Pierre Martino: Les Commencements de I’orientalisme

21

Raymond Schwab: The Asiatic Society of Calcutta

31

FOUNDATIONS OF A CRITIQUE 6 7 8

Friedrich Nietzsche: Appearance and the Thing-in-Itself

37

Antonio Gramsci: On Hegemony and Direct Rule

39

Michel Foucault: Truth and Power

41

ORIENTALISM IN CRISIS 9

Anouar Abdel-Malek: Orientalism in Crisis

10 A. L. Tibawi: English-Speaking Orientalists

47 57

C ontents

PART V:

AN APOLOGY FOR ORIENTALISM 11

PART VI:

13 14 15 16

20

104

Edward Said: My Thesis

106

Edward Said: On Flaubert

108

Edward Said: Latent and Manifest Orientalism

111

Bryan S. Turner: Marx and the End of Orientalism

117

Donald P. Little: Three Arab Critiques of Orientalism

123

A. L. Tibawi: A Second Critique of English-Speaking Orientalists

145

A. L. Tibawi: On the Orientalists Again

172

EDWARD SAID’S ORIENTALISM: REVIEWS AND REVIEW ARTICLES 21 22 23

VI

Edward Said: Arabs, Islam and the Dogmas of the West

FURTHER CRITIQUES 19

PART X:

89

AN AMERICAN RESPONSE 18

PART IX:

Edward Said: Shattered Myths

A MARXIST INTERPRETATION 17

PART VIII:

79

AN ELABORATE ACCOUNT 12

PART VII:

Francesco Gabrieli: Apology for Orientalism

Stuart Schaar: Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism

181

David Kopf: Hermeneutics versus History

194

Michael Richardson: Enough Said

208

C ontents

24 25 26

PART XI:

28 29 30 31 32 33

239

Bernard Lewis: The Question of Orientalism

249

B. J. Moore-Gilbert: ‘Gorgeous East’ versus ‘Land of Regrets’

273

Ronald Inden: Orientalist Constructions of India

277

Aijaz Ahmad: Between Orientalism and Historicism

285

Billie Melman: Humanising the Arabs

298

Sheldon Pollock: Indology, Power, and the Case of Germany

302

Lisa Lowe: Turkish Embassy Letters

324

John MacKenzie: History, Theory and the Arts

326

Richard King: Orientalism, Hinduism and Feminism

335

ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED 35

PART XIV:

Ernest J. Wilson III: Orientalism: A Black Perspective

ORIENTALISM AND FEMINISM 34

PART XIII:

217

QUALIFICATIONS AND ELABORATION 27

PART XII:

Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm: Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse

Edward Said: Orientalism Reconsidered

345

BEYOND ORIENTALISM 36

Fred Dallmayr: Exit from Orientalism

365

37

Bryan S. Turner: From Orientalism to Global Sociology

369

Bibliography

375

Acknowledgements

380

vii

PREFACE

In the early 1960s, as an amateur historian interested in the modern history of the Middle East, I was aware of the powerful critiques of orientalism mounted by Anouar Abdel-Malek and A. L. Tibawi. But it was only in the early 1980s, at a conference on a related subject I attended at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, that I became aware of the furore provoked, in orientalist circles, by the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). The comments made on Said’s book by the orientalists present at the conference, when the subject was raised during a question and answer session, appeared both sceptical and uneasy. It was evident that in his critique of orientalism Said had struck a raw nerve, and that the orientalists present did not know quite how to respond. Some suggested that Said’s book did not warrant the attention it was receiving; others that the furore it had provoked would soon pass. Yet more than twenty years later Said’s critique of orientalism continues to provoke great interest, not only in the world of orientalism but also in other related areas, including anthropology, sociology, history, media studies, feminism and the arts. It has been suggested that the continued interest that Said’s book provokes is a consequence of its multi-disciplinary appeal. No doubt there is some truth in this suggestion. But I would suggest that the true explanation lies elsewhere, in the fact that the subject, as interpreted by Said, raises the age-old question, never convincingly answered by philosophers, of the nature of perception that is to say, the relationship between subject and object, ‘self’ and ‘other’ and appearance and thing-in-itself. May I take this opportunity of thanking Professor John MacKenzie, of Lancaster University, and Professor J. J. Clarke, of Kingston University, for their

Preface

help and encouragement in the preparation of this anthology. I would also like to thank the librarians of the University of London and the School of Oriental and African Studies libraries for their help in assembling the various extracts. A. L. Macfie

x

IN T R O D U C T IO N

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word orientalism was, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), generally used to refer to the work of the orientalist, a scholar versed in the languages and liter­ atures of the orient (Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia, later also India, China and Japan, and even the whole of Asia); and in the world of the arts to identify a character, style or quality, commonly associated with the Eastern nations. Moreover, according to John MacKenzie, the author of Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester University Press, 1995), in the final quarter of the eighteenth century the word came, in the context of British rule in India, to acquire a third meaning. There it was used to refer to or identify a ‘conservative and romantic’ approach to the problems of government, faced by the officials of the East India Company. According to this approach the languages and laws of Muslim and Hindu India should not be ignored or supplanted, but utilised and preserved, as foundations of the traditional social order. For a time this approach was adopted, but at the turn of the eighteenth century it was challenged by the combined forces of evangelicalism and utilitarianism; and in the 1830s it was supplanted by the new, so-called ‘Anglicist’ approach. Henceforth, as a minute on education presented by Thomas Macaulay, President of the Committee of Public Instruction, to the Supreme Council in Calcutta on 2 February 1835 made clear (see G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Oxford University Press, 1932, pp. 370-3), indigenous learning in India would be completely supplanted by British scholarship imparted through the English language.

Introduction

The meaning of the word orientalism, as given in the Oxford English Dictionary, remained more or less unchanged until the period of decolonisation that followed the end of the Second World War (1939-45). Then, in a little more than twenty years, it came to mean not only the work of the orientalist and a character, style or quality associated with the Eastern nations, but also a corporate institution, designed for dealing with the orient, a partial view of Islam, an instrument of Western imperialism, a style of thought, based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between orient and occident, and even an ideology, justifying and accounting for the subjugation of blacks, Palestinian Arabs, women and many other supposedly deprived groups and peoples. This transformation, which as MacKenzie has remarked turned orientalism into one of the most highly charged words in modern scholarship, was accomplished by a series of scholars and intellectuals, many of whom lived in or came from the orient. Principal among these were Anouar Abdel-Malek, an Egyptian (Coptic) sociologist, attached to the CNRA (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) (Sociology), Paris; A. L. Tibawi, a Syrian student of Arabic history, employed at the Institute of Education, London University, and later at Harvard; Edward Said, a Palestinian (Christian-Protestant) student of English and Comparative Literature, employed at Columbia University, New York; and Bryan S. Turner, a leading sociologist and student of Marxism. The result was that orientalists - members of what had, in recent years, become an abstruse, dry-as-dust profession - were now accused of practising, not orient­ alism, but ‘orientalism’, that is to say a type of imperialism, racialism, and even, according to some accounts, anti-Semitism. The conditions necessary for the launching of an effective assault on orient­ alism, as traditionally practised, were, as the eminent French orientalist Maxime Rodinson has pointed out - in an article entitled ‘The Western Image and Western Studies of Islam’, in S. Schacht and C. Bosworth, The Legacy of Islam (Oxford University Press, 1979) - already created well before the outbreak of the Second World War. The Iranian revolution of 1906, the Young Turk revolution of 1908, the defeat and destruction of the German, Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires in the period of the First World War, the rise of the Kemalist movement in Turkey (1919-22), the rise of a national movement in Egypt (1919), the spread of Bolshevism - all these events and developments showed that the military and political hegemony imposed by the European powers, throughout large parts of Asia and Africa, could now be successfully challenged, and even on occasion undermined. There followed a period of rapid decolonisation, culminating in the independence of India (1947), the Algerian uprising (1952), the British withdrawal from Egypt (1954) and the collapse of the British-backed Hashemite regime in Iraq (1958). As a result of these and other developments, there arose in Asia and Africa, in the 1950s and 1960s, a climate of opinion that made possible an effective challenge to European hegemony, not only in the military and political but also in the intellectual sphere. 2

Introduction

The assault on orientalism, when it finally came, was launched on four fronts: on orientalism as an instrument of imperialism, designed to secure the colonisa­ tion and enslavement of parts of the so-called Third World (Abdel-Malek; Chap. 9); on orientalism as a mode of understanding and interpreting Islam and Arab nationalism (Tibawi; Chaps 10 and 19); on orientalism as a ‘cumulative and corporate identity’ and a ‘saturating hegemonic system’ (Said; Chaps 12-16); and on orientalism as a justification for a syndrome of beliefs, attitudes and theories, affecting the geography, economics and sociology of the orient (Turner; Chap. 17). The intellectual origins of the four principal assaults on orientalism, launched in the post-Second World War period, were somewhat narrower in scope than might have been expected. Abdel-Malek based his critique of orientalism on the work of Karl Marx, the nineteenth-century German philosopher and econo­ mist. Tibawi based his analysis on the traditional principles of mutual respect, scientific detachment and fairmindedness, much promoted in Europe in the nineteenth century. Said based his approach on the work of a number of European scholars and intellectuals, including Jacques Derrida (deconstruc­ tion), Antonio Gramsci (cultural hegemony) (Chap. 7) and Michel Foucault (discourse, power/knowledge, and epistemic field) (Chap. 8). Turner based his critique on a critical reading of Marx and the literature of anti-colonialism associated with his name (Chap. 17). All four critiques, that is to say, were either based on, or assumed the existence of, a European philosophy or thought system, derived for the most part from the work of two of the greatest German philosophers of the nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel, the transcendental idealist and precursor of Marx, and F. Nietzsche, the critic of idealism in all its manifestations (Chap. 6). The motivation of the four principal assaults on orientalism, on the other hand, may be sought elsewhere, in a hatred of colonialism and imperialism (Abdel-Malek); a dislike of what was perceived by some to be the lack of respect, shown by many English orientalists, for Islam (Tibawi); a personal sense of loss and national disintegration (Said); and an aversion to the workings of the capitalist system (Turner). In the face of such resentment, exacerbated, it is said, in Tibawi’s case by a sense of personal and professional marginalisation, it is not surprising that apologies for orientalism and defences of it - made by such eminent European orientalists as Claude Cahen, professor of Muslim history, Sorbonne University (Diogenes, 49, 2, 1965, not cited here) and Francesco Gabrieli, professor of Arabic languages and literature at the Uni­ versity of Rome (Chap. 11) - should have made so little impression. What the four principal critics of orientalism hoped to achieve, according to their own account, was a critical re-evaluation of the methods employed by the orientalists (Abdel-Malek); a ‘better understanding of an old problem’ (Tibawi); an exposure of the ‘subtle degradation of knowledge’, accomplished by the orientalists (Said); and a reconsideration of the dispute between the orientalists, the sociologists and the Marxist, regarding the characterisation of 3

Introduction

the history and social structure of North Africa and the Middle East (Turner). What they actually succeeded, to a considerable extent, in achieving, in conjunction with other anti-European, anti-imperialist and anti-elitist groups (liberals, socialists, blacks, feminists and many others) active at the time, is what Nietzsche was wont to refer to as a ‘transvaluation of all values’. What had previously been seen as being good (orientalism, text-based scholarship, knowledge of classical languages, concepts of absolute truth, ethnocentricity, racial pride, service to the state, and national pride) was now seen as being bad, or at least suspect. And what had previously been seen as being bad (anti­ colonialism, racial equality, uncertainty regarding the nature of truth, resis­ tance to imperialism, mixed race, and internationalism) was now seen as being good, worthy of promotion. Not that the victory achieved by the critics of orientalism was uncontested, as the debate which ensued, following the pub­ lication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978, shows. Of the four principal assaults launched on orientalism, as traditionally prac­ tised, that launched by Edward Said, in Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), proved to be by far the most effective. According to Said the orientalist, the heir to a ‘narcissistic’ tradition of European writing founded by, amongst others, Homer and Aeschylus, through his writing ‘creates’ the orient. In the process, he assists in the creation of a series of stereotypical images, according to which Europe (the West, the ‘self’) is seen as being essentially rational, developed, humane, superior, authentic, active, creative and masculine, while the orient (the East, the ‘other’) (a sort of surrogate, underground version of the West or the ‘self’) is seen as being irrational, aberrant, backward, crude, despotic, inferior, inauthentic, passive, feminine and sexually corrupt. Other ‘orientalist’ fantasies invented by the orientalist include the concept of an ‘Arab mind’, an ‘oriental psyche’ and an ‘Islamic Society’. Together they contribute to the construction of a ‘saturating hegemonic system’, designed, consciously or un­ consciously, to dominate, restructure and have authority over the orient designed, that is to say, to promote European imperialism and colonialism. In Orientalism, Said cites scores of examples of orientalism, as it appears in the works of European scholars, poets, philosophers, imperial administrators, political theorists, historians, politicians, travel writers and others. These in­ clude the Italian poet Dante, the French orientalists Barthelemy d’Herbelot and Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Sir William Jones, the East India Company official and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the English scholar and adventurer Sir Richard Burton, and the British Arabists Sir Hamilton Gibb and Bernard Lewis. Not that Said believes that the orientalism he discovers in Western thought and text is merely an imaginative phenomenon, a ‘structure of lies and of myth’, which might, if the truth were ever told, be quickly blown away. On the contrary, as we have seen, he believes that it is part of an integrated discourse, an accepted grid for filtering the orient into the Western consciousness and an ‘integral part of European material civilisation and culture’ - that is to say, an instrument of British, French and later American imperialism. 4

Introduction

Other examples of orientalism, as defined by Said, may be found in James Mill, The History of British India (1817), which contains an early mention of an ‘Asian model’ (Chap.1); G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1837), an archetypal ‘orientalist’ text (Chap.2); and Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’ (Chap.3), a significant text for Marxist sociologists. Opinion regarding the validity of Said’s thesis proved as diverse as it was contentious. A list of critics generally convinced by his thesis might include Stuart Schaar, ‘Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism’ (Chap. 21); Ernest J. Wilson III, ‘Orientalism: A Black Perspective’ (Chap. 25); and Ronald Inden, ‘Orientalist Constructions of India’ (Chap. 28). A list of critics opposed might include Bernard Lewis, ‘The Question of Orientalism’ (Chap. 26); C. F. Beckingham, ‘Review of Orientalism’ (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 42, 3, 1979, not cited here); David Kopf, ‘Hermeneutics versus History’ (Chap. 22); M. Richardson, ‘Enough Said’ (Chap. 23); John MacKenzie, ‘Edward Said and the Historians’ (Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 18, 1994, pp. 9-25, not cited here); and Keith Windshuttle, The Killing of History (New York: Free Press, 1996, not cited here). A list of critics generally sympathetic to the approach adopted by Said, but critical of some aspects of his work, might include Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’ (Chap. 24); AijazAhmad, ‘Between Orientalism and Historicism’ (Chap. 29) and ‘Orientalism and After’, in In Theory (London: Verso, 1992, not cited here); James Clifford, ‘On Orientalism’, in The Predicament of Culture (Harvard University Press, 1988, not cited here); and Fred Halliday, ‘Orientalism and Its Critics’ (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 20, 2, 1993, pp. 145-63, not cited here). Donald P. Little, ‘Three Arab Critiques of Orientalism’ (Chap. 18), whilst in general critical of Said, effectively accepts his conclusions, as does Albert Hourani, ‘The Road to Morocco’ (New York Review of Books, 8 March 1979, not cited here). What divides Said from many of his critics is the fact that while Said, in Orientalism, tends to view his subject through the prism of modern and postmodern philosophy (in particular the philosophies of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and, surprisingly, the Marxist Gramsci), his critics remain, for the most part, firmly wedded to a traditional (realist) approach to the writing of history. Thus Bernard Lewis, in his article ‘The Question of Orientalism’ (Chap. 26), accuses Said of an ‘arbitrary rearrangement of the historical background’, a ‘capricious choice of countries, persons and writings’, and an ‘unpolemical ignorance’ of historical fact. Into the category of orientalist he, Said, introduces a number of writers and litterateurs, such as Chateaubriand and Nerval, whose work may have been relevant to the formation of Western cultural attitudes, but who had nothing to do with the academic tradition of orientalism. David Kopf, in his article ‘Hermeneutics versus History’ (Chap. 22), notes Said’s failure to take account of the bitter Orientalist - Anglicist controversy, concerning cul­ tural attitudes and policies, that took place in India in the 1830s. Said’s notion of orientalism, Kopf remarks, is lacking in historical precision, comprehensiveness 5

Introduction

and subtlety. John MacKenzie, in his article ‘Said and the Historians’ (not cited here) points out that, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain’s principal ‘other’ was France; and in the century and a half that followed, France, Russia, Germany and the Soviet Union. Said’s account of orientalism fails to take account of the instability, the heterogeneity and the ‘sheer porousness’ of imperial culture. His work is ‘supremely a-historical’. Critics of Said’s Orientalism are, from their own point of view, no doubt, fully justified in drawing attention to Said’s occasional lack of respect for historical fact. But in so emphasising the issue of historical fact, it can be argued that a number, including in particular Lewis, Kopf and MacKenzie, fail to make due allowance for the nature of the task undertaken by Said: the identification of orientalism as a Foucauldian discourse, a ‘systemic discipline’, without which it would be difficult, if not impossible, for European culture to ‘manage - and even produce - the orient, politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scien­ tifically, and imaginatively’. Said, in other words, was not attempting to write a history of orientalism, similar to Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la litte'rature frangaise (see Chap. 4) and Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance (Chap. 5). Nor, as he makes clear in ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’ (Chap. 35), and the afterword of the 1995 edition of Orientalism (not cited here), was he attempting to write an anti-Western tract, a defence of Islam and the Arabs, a history of East-West relations, a history of British and French colonialism, or a history of European and Asian cultural relations and exchange. His concern was merely to identify the nature of the ‘orientalist’ discourse, as a ‘created body of theory and practice’, designed, consciously or unconsciously, to serve the interests of the European imperial powers. Not that, in exploiting the concepts of discourse and epistemic field, Said was necessarily following a model which Foucault would have recognised. According to Aijaz Ahmad, one of Said’s most perceptive critics (Chap. 29), Foucault would not have accepted Said’s view that a discourse - that is to say an epistemic construction - could span both the pre­ capitalist and the capitalist periods of history. Moreover, Said’s view, that an ‘ideology of modern imperialist Eurocentrism’ might be found, already in­ scribed, in the ritual theatre of ancient Greece, was radically anti-Foucauldian. For Foucault, it may be noted, a discourse was a complexly dispersed histori­ cal phenomenon, a recalcitrant means of expression, burdened with historical sedimentation; while an epistemic field was a field of knowledge, created by a culture, which exercised control over what might, and might not, be said and written. The debate about orientalism in the academic journals was not confined to merely intellectual issues. In Lewis’s view (Chap. 26), Said’s critique of orientalism was intended, not as a contribution to understanding, but as an attack on Zionism, Jewish scholarship and the West, particularly America. It was a polemic inspired by hostile motives. In Said’s view, on the other hand (Chap. 35), Lewis, seen as a spokesman for the guild of orientalists, was a politically motivated zealot, masquerading as an impartial scholar. His defence 6

Introduction

of orientalism was an ‘act of bad faith’, covered with a ‘veneer of urbanity’. In other words, it was pro-Zionist, anti-Islamic and anti-Arab. Criticism of Said’s Orientalism was not confined to reviews and review articles. In the twenty years or so following its publication, a number of scholars sought to test out Said’s conclusions in what became in effect a series of case studies. The outcome proved once again remarkably inconsistent. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers (Cork University Press, 1994, not cited here), Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory and the ‘Mystic East’ (London: Routlege, 1999) (Chap. 34), and most of the authors published in C. A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), in par­ ticular Sheldon Pollock, ‘Indology, Power, and the Case of Germany’ (Chap. 31), generally found in Said’s favour. Nevertheless, Ali Behdad con­ cluded that in formalising orientalism’s discursive regularities, Said failed to take full account of its micropractices, irregularities, historical discontinuities and discursive heterogeneity. European power over the orient should be seen as a productive and dynamic exchange between the two, an exchange that made colonial authority tolerable to those on whom it was being imposed. Richard King drew attention to inconsistencies in Said’s argument, in particular his unwillingness to accept the full implications of the Foucauldian critique of representation. Breckenridge and van der Veer pointed out, in an introduction to their collection, that the essays contained therein suggest that significant discontinuities exist in the disciplinary project of the colonial and post-colonial periods; that colonised subjects were not passively produced by hegemonic projects; and that orientalism was constitutive not only of the orient but also of the occident. Others proved more critical. B. J. Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and Orientalism (London: Croom-Helm, 1986), (Chap. 27), showed that Said’s conclusion could not reasonably be applied to the Anglo-Indians, whose knowl­ edge of India was both personal and direct. Anglo-Indians, as their writings show, were as shocked at the ignorance, indifference and prejudice of their fellow countrymen regarding life in India as were many later oriental critics of Anglo-Saxon attitudes. Billie Melman, Women’s Orients (London: Macmillan, 1992), showed that, while Said’s conclusions may well have applied to most English travellers in the orient in the period with which he was concerned, they hardly ever applied to female travellers, such as Lady Blunt, the wife of Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who travelled widely in the Middle East in the second half of the nineteenth century (Chap. 30). Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains (Cornell University Press, 1991), similarly showed that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her ‘Turkish Embassy Letters’ (Chap. 32), challenged many of the preconceptions, concerning the lives of Turkish women, held by English male travellers in Turkey at the time. John MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester University Press, 1995) (Chap. 33), found that, with regard to the arts, at least, Said’s thesis was unsustainable. The artistic record of imperial culture had in fact been one of ‘constant change, instability, heterogeneity and 7

Introduction

sheer porousness’. It was impossible to recognise either the ‘essentialised, basically unchanging self’ or the freezing of ‘the Other in a kind of basic objecthood’. Finally Emily M. Weeks, ‘About Face: Sir David Wilkie’s Portrait of Mehmet Ali, Pasha of Egypt’, in J. F. Codwell and D. S. Macleod, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, not cited here), found that an analysis of Wilkie’s painting not only complicates a popular Saidian reading of a work of orientalist art, it demands a complete revision of it. That is to say, it demands a complete reversal of the expected coloniser - colonised, East - West relationship. The writings of the three other principal critics of orientalism, Abdel-Malek, Tibawi and Turner, provoked no such storm of debate as that which followed the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1978; though, as we have seen, AbdelMalek’s critique of orientalism (Chap. 9) did provoke responses from Claude Cahen and Francesco Gabrieli (Chap. 11); and Tibawi’s critique of English­ speaking orientalists, together with the critiques of orientalism mounted by Abdel-Malek and Said, provoked a response from D.P. Little, an American historian (Chap. 18), which in turn elicited a somewhat ill-tempered riposte from Tibawi (Chap. 20). That is not to suggest that the attacks on orientalism, mounted by Abdel-Malek, Tibawi and Turner, are in any sense less interesting than those of Said; though it has to be conceded that they cannot compete with Said for sheer intellectual bravura. Abdel-Malek’s ‘Orientalism in Crisis’ (Chap. 9), probably the most influential of the founding documents of the orientalist debate, deserves consideration for its careful identification of the principal features of orientalism and its long-standing relationship with the European, colonialist state. Tibawi’s two critiques of ‘English-Speaking Or­ ientalists’ (Chaps 10 and 19) deserve consideration again for their identification of the principal features of orientalism, and for their analysis of what Tibawi sees as the prejudices displayed by a number of English-speaking orientalists. Finally, Turner’s ‘Marx and the End of Orientalism’ (Chap. 17) should be read for its careful analysis of the relationship which Turner believes exists between orientalism, capitalism and underdevelopment in parts of the Third World. The debate about orientalism, sparked off in the 1980s and 1990s by the works of Abdel-Malek, Tibawi, Said and Turner, has proved both instructive and enlightening, inspiring new approaches to the study of many subjects, including the history of art, media studies, musicology, architectural history, the history of ideas, feminism (Chap. 34), translation studies and post-coloni­ alism. Yet many questions remain unanswered. Is there a real orient or only an imaginary one? Is it possible to move briskly from Eurocentricism to antiEurocentricism? Is it sensible to equate traditional learning, however flawed, with colonial oppression? Do we want an alternative description of the orient, or only a better one? These are some of the questions Fred Dallmayr, ‘Exit from Orientalism’ (Chap. 36) and Bryan S. Turner, ‘From Orientalism to Global Sociology’ (Chap. 37) attempt to answer.

8

PART I F O U N D A T IO N S O F A MYTH

Some scholars, in particular Edward Said, a Palestinian (Christian-Protestant) student of English and comparative literature, have traced the myth of the orient, Europe’s exotic ‘other’, back as far as Homer and Aeschylus. In its more recent manifestation, it may be detected in the works of James Mill, G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

THE IN D IAN FORM OF G O VERN M EN T Jam es Mill

In his History of British India (1817), James Mill, who never actually visited India, wrote an extremely critical account of Hindu civilisation, which in his view was much in need of redemption by ‘European honour and European intelligence’. In the following extract, which includes an early reference to an ‘Asiatic model’, Mill betrays many of the preconceptions and prejudices later associated by its critics with orientalism. These include an exaggerated respect for classical text and an over-emphasis on the significance of oriental despotism.

After the division of the people into ranks and occupations, the great circum­ stance by which their condition, character, and operations are determined, is the political establishment; the system of actions by which the social order is preserved. Among the Hindus, according to the Asiatic model, the government was monarchical, and, with the usual exception of religion and its ministers, absolute. No idea of any system of rule, different from the will of a single person, appears to have entered the minds of them, or their legislators. ‘If the world had no king,’ says the Hindu law, ‘it would quake on all sides through fear; the ruler of this universe, therefore, created a king, for the maintenance of this system.’ Of the high and uncontrollable authority of the monarch a judgment may be formed, from the lofty terms in which the sacred books describe his dignity and attributes. ‘A king,’ says the law of Manu, ‘is formed of

James Mill, The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1820), p. 66.

J ames Mill

particles from the chief guardian deities, and consequently surpasses all mortals in glory. Like the sun, he burns eyes and hearts; nor can any human creature on earth even gaze on him. He, fire and air; He, the god of criminal justice; He, the genius of wealth; He, the regent of waters; He, the lord of the firmament. A king, even though a child, must not be treated lightly, from an idea that he is a mere mortal: No; he is a powerful divinity, who appears in human shape. In his anger, death. He who shows hatred of the king, through delusion of mind, will certainly perish; for speedily will the king apply his heart to that man’s destruction.’ The pride of imperial greatness could not devise, hardly could it even desire, more extraordinary distinctions, or the sanction of a more un­ limited authority.

12

2

G O R G EO U S EDIFICES G . W . F. Hegel

G. W. F. Hegel, in his Philosophy of History (1837), concluded that reason (the world spirit, God) found its highest manifestation in the Germanic world, where ‘All are free’. Previous empires (cultures, civilisations, nations), including the Chinese, Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, were therefore by definition inferior, imperfect manifestations of the world spirit. In particular, the two great oriental empires, the Chinese and the Indian, were assumed to display all the characteristics later associated in the European mind with the orient: irrationality, immutability, despotism, childishness, sensuality, feminin­ ity, capriciousness, backwardness, cruelty and barbarism. In China, Hegel believed, the patriarchal principle ruled a people ‘in a condition of nonage’, while in India there prevailed a ‘universal pantheism’, inspired not by thought but by the imagination. The Indian world displayed the beauty of a ‘flower-life’, but should we approach it more closely, and examine it in the light o f ‘Human Dignity’ and ‘Freedom’, we would ultimately find it unworthy in every respect.

In the geographical survey, the course of the World’s History has been marked out in its general features. The Sun - the Light - rises in the East. Light is a simply self-involved existence; but though possessing thus in itself universality, it exists at the same time as an individuality in the Sun. Imagination has often pictured to itself the

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1902), pp. 163-6.

G. W . F. H egel

emotions of a blind man suddenly becoming possessed of sight, beholding the bright glimmering of the dawn, the growing light, and the flaming glory of the ascending Sun. The boundless forgetfulness of his individuality in this pure splendor is his first feeling - utter astonishment. But when the Sun is risen, this astonishment is diminished; objects around are perceived, and from them the individual proceeds to the contemplation of his own inner being, and thereby the advance is made to the perception of the relation between the two. Then inactive contemplation is quitted for activity; by the close of day man has erected a building constructed from his own inner Sun; and when in the evening he contemplates this, he esteems it more highly than the original external Sun. For now he stands in a conscious relation to his Spirit, and therefore a free relation. If we hold this image fast in mind, we shall find it symbolizing the course of History, the great Day’s work of Spirit. The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. The History of the World has an East xa.%' '£^oxflv (the term East in itself is entirely relative); for although the Earth forms a sphere, History performs no circle round it, but has on the contrary a determinate East, viz. Asia. Here rises the outward physical Sun, and in the West it sinks down: here consentaneously rises the Sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a nobler brilliance. The History of the World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third Monarchy. To understand this division we must remark that as the State is the universal spiritual life, to which individuals by birth sustain a relation of confidence and habit, and in which they have their existence and reality - the first question is, whether their actual life is an unreflecting use and habit combining them in this unity, or whether its constituent individuals are reflective and personal beings having a properly subjective and independent existence. In view of this, substantial [objective] freedom must be distinguished from subjective freedom. Substantial freedom is the abstract undeveloped Reason implicit in volition, proceeding to develop itself in the State. But in this phase of Reason there is still wanting personal insight and will, that is, subjective freedom; which is realized only in the Individual, and which constitutes the reflection of the Individual in his own conscience.1 Where there is merely substantial freedom, commands and laws are regarded as something fixed and abstract, to which the subject holds himself in absolute servitude. These laws need not concur with the desire of the individual, and the subjects are consequently like children, who obey their parents without will or insight of their own. But as subjective freedom arises, and man descends from the contemplation of external reality into his own soul, the contrast suggested by reflection arises, involving the Negation of Reality. 14

G orgeous Edifices

The drawing back from the actual world forms ipso facto an antithesis, of which one side is the absolute Being - the Divine - the other the human subject as an individual. In that immediate, unreflected consciousness which characterizes the East, these two are not yet distinguished. The substantial world is distinct from the individual, but the antithesis has not yet created a schism between [absolute and subjective] Spirit. The first phase - that with which we have to begin - is the East. Unreflected consciousness - substantial, objective, spiritual existence - forms the basis; to which the subjective will first sustains a relation in the form of faith, confidence, obedience. In the political life of the East we find a realized rational freedom, developing itself without advancing to subjective freedom. It is the childhood of History. Substantial forms constitute the gorgeous edifices of Oriental Empires, in which we find all rational ordinances and arrangements, but in such a way that individuals remain as mere accidents. These revolve round a centre, round the sovereign, who, as patriarch - not as despot in the sense of the Roman Imperial Constitution - stands at the head. For he has to enforce the moral and substantial: he has to uphold those essential ordinances which are already established; so that what among us belongs entirely to subjective freedom here proceeds from the entire and general body of the State. The glory of Oriental conception is the One Individual as that substantial being to which all belongs, so that no other individual has a separate existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom. All the riches of imagination and Nature are appropriated to that dominant existence in which subjective freedom is essentially merged; the latter looks for its dignity, not in itself, but in that absolute object. All the elements of a complete State - even subjectivity - may be found there, but not yet harmonized with the grand substantial being. For outside the One Power before which nothing can maintain an independent existence - there is only revolting caprice, which, beyond the limits of the central power, roves at will without purpose or result. Accordingly we find the wild hordes breaking out from the Upland - falling upon the countries in question, and laying them waste, or settling down in them, and giving up their wild life; but in all cases resultlessly lost in the central substance. N o te 1. The essence of Spirit is self-determination or ‘Freedom.’ Where Spirit has attained mature growth, as in the man who acknowledges the absolute validity of the dictates of Conscience, the Individual is ‘a law to himself,’ and his Freedom is ‘realized.’ But in lower stages of morality and civilization, he unconsciously projects this legislative principle into some ‘governing power’ (one or several), and obeys it as if it were an alien, extraneous force, not the voice of that Spirit of which he himself (though at this stage imperfectly) is an embodiment. The Philosophy of History exhibits the suc­ cessive stages by which he reaches the consciousness, that it is his own inmost being that thus governs him - i.e. a consciousness of self-determination or ‘Freedom.’ - Tr.

15

3

THE BRITISH RULE IN IN D IA Karl M arx

In an article entitled ‘The British Rule in India’, published in the New York Daily Tribune, on 25 June 1853, Karl Marx, a keen student of Hegel and occasional observer of the Indian scene, continued to propagate the view, put forward by his great predecessor, that India had no history, and that Hindu society was ‘undignified, stagnatory and vegetative’. Unlike Hegel, however, he argued that the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, combined with the working of ‘English steam and English free-trade’, would in due course undermine the economic base of Indian society, and produce ‘the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard in India’.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical

Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’, New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853.

T he B ritish Rule

in India

energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction, and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindustan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow. England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

17

PART II T H E RISE O F O R IE N T A L STUD IES

The history of oriental studies in Europe may be traced back to the year 1312, when the Church Council of Vienna decided to establish a series of chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac, in Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon and Salamanca. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, following the great voyages of discovery undertaken by the European maritime powers, and the dispatch, by the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus, of Christian missions to the East, a series of institutes and academies were set up for the study of the languages and cultures of India, China and Japan. But it was only in the final quarter of the eighteenth century that orientalism, as a profession, became firmly established. Among the historians who have written substantial accounts of orientalism as a profession, Pierre Martino and Raymond Schwab must be considered two of the most significant.

4

LES COMMENCEMENTS DE L’ORIENTAUSME Pierre M artino

In L’Orient dans la litterature fran^aise au XVIIe et au XVIIIe Siecle, first published in Paris in 1906, Pierre Martino identifies many of the characteristics later associated by its critics with orientalism. These include the important part played in the development of the discipline by state subsidy, the emphasis placed by its practitioners on text-based scholarship (‘le rapprochement, le commentaire, la glose, la compilation’), the lack of interest displayed in living languages, cultures and civilisations (‘ils ne se sentaient certes point de scrupules a parler de la Turquie sans meme connaitre Constantinople’), and the close relationship established between French colonialism and ‘l’exotisme litteraire’ (‘il y a la une relation immediate de cause a effet’). In the following extract, taken from his chapter on the beginnings of orientalism, which he believes did not become fully constituted until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Martino describes the way in which oriental studies developed in the seventeenth century.

III Le XVIIe siecle est «l’epoque oil se place la decouverte, pour ainsi dire, du monde litteraire des contrees exotiques1*. Les langues d’Orient, l’arabe du moins, n’etaient pas tout a fait inconnues aux hommes du moyen age; on y etait naturellement amene par l’etude de l’hebreu et du syriaque, indispensables a une Pierre Martino, L’Orient dans la litterature frangaise (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1906), part I, ch. 5. section 3.

Pierre Martino

bonne connaissance de la Bible2; quelques grecs renegats, des musulmans convertis, avaient pu en instruire de rares savants; mais ceux-ci etaient deja assez affaires devant cette dure besogne, et ils ne songeaient pas a publier leurs difficultueuses trouvailles : point de traductions veritables, point de grammaires, point de dictionnaires. La prise de Constantinople, l’exode vers l’Occident des Grecs instruits, l’elan donne par la Reforme aux recherches d’exegese biblique, le prodigieux effort de travail auquel se livrerent les erudits de la Renaissance, tels ont site les vrais prodromes de la future science orientaliste3. Des le XVIe siecle il y eut des chaires d’arabe dans les principales universites d’Europe : le College de France ne manqua point a en creer une, lui aussi; et il se verifia une fois de plus qu’il est, pour s’instruire, peu de moyens aussi profitables que d’enseigner la science qu’on veut acquerir! On pourra, si l’on veut, aller chercher dans Gallia orientalis du vieux bibliographe Colomies4, les noms, obscurs et rebarbatifs, sous leur forme latine, des savants franjais qui jeterent sur les langues d’Orient toutes leurs ardeurs de travail; pour la plupart ils se bornerent a l’etude de l’hebreu, mais quelques-uns deja, comme Scaliger, Postel surtout, «lecteur des lettres grecques, hebraiques et arabiques» au College de France5, parvinrent a une connaissance veritable de l’arabe. Il y avait des professeurs; il y eut des eleves, et avec les premieres generations du XVIIe siecle, on put commencer le defrichement d’un domaine, jusque-la si broussailleux qu’on n’en devinait pas meme l’etendue. A vrai dire le travail orientaliste se fit a cette epoque surtout hors de France, en Angleterre et en Hollande6; mais il existait deja une sorte d’internationalisme de la science, et peu importait que les livres fussent edites a Leyde, a Cologne, a Rome ou a Paris, puisqu’ils etaient tous ecrits en latin. Toutefois, meme au XVIIe siecle, il y eut en France une serie continue de savants qui furent d’assidus orientalistes : Du Ryer, le premier traducteur du Koran7; Thevenot, garde de la bibliotheque du roi8, Vattier, professeur d’arabe au College de France; d’Herbelot, enfin, l’auteur de la Bibliotheque orientale, sont les moins inconnus parmi eux; mais il serait facile d’en citer d’autres qui collaborerent obscurement a cette tache, grammairiens, lexicographes et traducteurs. Pendant cette premiere periode, ce qu’on chercha surtout a produire, ce furent «des instruments de travail . . . pour pouvoir plus tard sonder ces immenses mines litteraires de l’Orient9»: et l’on pourrait ecrire a la suite, en une meme liste, plus de vingt grammaires ou lexiques qui parurent entre les Rudimenta grammatices lingua turcica de Du Ryer (1630) et la Bibliotheque orientale de d’Herbelot (1697)10. C’etait la le plus presse; aux troupes qui demandent la bataille il faut d’abord des armes et une theorie claire qui puisse en enseigner le maniement. Mais a quoi bon tous ces exercices d’assouplissement si l’on n’a pas occasion de les appliquer? Il n’etait pas a la portee de tous d’acheter cherement en Orient quelque manuscrit, pour le dechiffrer ensuite avec passion; on dut donc se preoccuper d’editer les textes orientaux eux-memes, on grava les poinijons et les matrices necessaires, on donna aux imprimeries les sinueux caracteres arabes. Des Louis XIII, on put publier quelques textes, et a la fin du 22

Les Commencements

de l’orientalisme

xvile siecle l’Imprimerie royale vint, avec ses belles editions, soutenir cet effort de l’initiative privee11. Le travail des fouilles n’etait pas acheve, que deej^i s’eleverent au-dessus des fondations, mal deblayees encore, quelques pieces de la batisse future; des traductions latines ou francaises vinrent apprendre au public a la fois l’existence des savants orientalistes et celle d’une litterature asiatique; on put, de bonne heure, connaitre Sadi, Pilpay et Confucius, le Koran et quelques livres de philosophie chinoise12; alors les ecrivains s’empresserent de refuter Mahomet ou d’exalter Confucius, apres avoir lu cent verset de l’un ou dix sentences de l’autre. Si superficielle que fdt celle erudition, trop prestement acquise, il n’y en avait pas moins la de quoi modifier beaucoup la notion de l’Orient. A ces premiers orientalistes les encouragements royaux ne manquerent pas. Sur ce point encore, Colbert s’interessa beaucoup a la revelation de l’Orient. De meme qu’il encourageait les voyageurs et surtout les commer