‘Orientalism,’ Then and Now
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It would be 30 years after this attempt to 'master' the Other, that the Greek war for independence from the Ottoman empire was won.
It boggles the mind how one can write such a long article on history, without even the briefest mention of Arab invasions and colonialism in Europe (or slavery - "between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured between the 16th and 19th centuries by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves." [1]).
As much as this article tries to paint the Orient as being viewed by Europe as some sort of curiosity, it was in fact an existential threat for the better part of a millennium.
You seem to be aggrieved with it, can I ask why? Or is it specifically because the Ottoman colonization of Greece was not mentioned? Because I can think of many other significant historical events that are not mentioned, but I fail to see how that's relevant.
I think I was very clear as to why: the article heavily implies Arab-European relations were that of one-sided colonization by Europeans, when in fact, until very recently, the opposite was the case. This would be understandable if it had limited itself to more recent history, but as it stands, I consider it lying by omission.
"Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic. hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe. Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century the "Ottoman peril" lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger"
The article reflects on the impact the book had since publication, it's not even close to be mistaken for an introduction or recollection of the whole topic.
https://books.google.de/books?id=npF5BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA59&dq=Not...
Piracy certainly wasn't existential. But also wasn't the whole threat -- 1683 must have felt pretty existential in Vienna. As did 1453 in Constantinople. Of course that's not a European state... but that's pretty much the definition.
Well, it [Constantinople and Byzantium] certainly was a European state, the Eastern Roman Empire, which kept the lights on when as the Western one was dissolving and finding itself again after Rome declined.
My point is that claiming something like "no European state faced an existential threat from Arabs" is a bit circular -- the definition of Europe is very close to being those parts of the Roman world which were not (permanently) conquered. (Or if you think it's a geographic term, then the reason this particular geographic lumping is important, as opposed to say Mediterranean.)
That shit happened. Regularly. To the point that a whole cultural heritage around fortified churches developed. The peasants would retreat into their church behind battlements, and hunker down until the Ottomans left. The village would get burned down and the crops were gone, but at least almost everyone survived.
It didn't help that the Habsburg monarchy saw this as a successful strategy. Oh okay they're just burning the peasants, at least they're not getting as far as Vienna. This is working.
Of course once or twice they did get as far as Vienna and it was bad ...
This period of history left a deep seated distrust of islamic nations so strong that the whole "islam vs. catholic/orthodox" thing still featured as a driving force in the mid 90's Balkan wars. As an interesting curiosity, if you go to Bosnia around the Mostar region you can see a very interesting divide. Left side of the river littered with church spires, right side full of minarets. Barely any mixing.
Everything you say is true and unrelated.
That strikes me as a West European-centric view, "the big West European nations weren't threatened and nobody else matters". From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empir...
> Sixteenth- and 17th-century customs statistics suggest that Istanbul's additional slave import from the Black Sea may have totaled around 2.5 million from 1453 to 1700.[4]
Also
> In the devşirme, which connotes "draft", "blood tax" or "child collection", young Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia were taken from their homes and families, converted to Islam, and enlisted ...
The idea that only "Sweden and the US" did anything is misguided (in fact those were some of the least affected by piracy).
Side note: Napoleon is weirdly unreferenced entity in North America, I think due to the fact he was French and not part of the Anglosphere directly. So much fodder for pop culture there, It'd be great to see a decent film about his foray into Egypt, or rather, a film in which that was the setting. Or even a cheesy netflix 'game of thrones' type thing that went through the revolution, his rise and demise. So many actual crazy stories there, they don't even need to wait for the author to write it ...
Like, wait right there.
One of the most valuable insights from scholarship like this is that we are all trapped in power structures. The "othering" that happens isn't the result of some demonic intention, it's just what people do. While Said takes great pains to make this point, most readers of the book that I've interacted with do not seem to grasp it. When I finished Orientalism I kind of chuckled because in many ways he engaged in the process that he was describing, "Occidentalizing" western area studies, as it were. I know it's not, but at some level I kind of hoped the book was a big meta-joke to illustrate the inescapability of the dynamic.
Then you got further than I did! Someone should have dragged that guy to math class -- before you can prove two things are the same, you have to first define both of them, then make your case.
But if it wishes to use an existing word like "art" in a new sense, for instance to claim that all portrayal of humans is inherently pornographic, then IMHO it needs to be very careful to distinguish this from pre-existing meanings. The fact that some building on campus has "art" chiseled into the marble cannot be assumed to already imply agreement with some new meaning you invented 5 pages ago, a meaning which would have been very surprising to the guys who sponsored the building.
Even if you ultimately make a convincing case that the sense you describe is somehow more correct/useful/interesting than other ones, or encompasses them, you've got to act as if you haven't yet shown that. That's what I meant he should have learned in math class. And really the more honest course is to introduce new words for new concepts, not to try to muddle older ones, as Said successfully did.
But, to be fair, I didn't finish the book.
Power structures are bidirectional graphs. Examples, of this are college departments like Chinese Studies, South Asian Studies, European Studies, etc. These are methods of creating the history of the other and creating power over the other. I'm sure the Chinese, Europeans, Africans, etc. also have such histories.
Well that's the basic problem right there. Did Said assume there was no need to do a serious study of the Middle East's problems and what causes them, because he assumed that if the West would just leave the Middle East alone, it would all on its own solve its problems? Certainly that is what a lot of his followers seem to think, that the world was an egalitarian paradise until evil White people can along and started oppressing everybody.
>As Said argued, Orientalism’s failure was “a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience.”
Alright, but considering the rest of continental philosophy and post-modern thought it is a literal impossibility to do this ever, even with one's own culture and even with one's previous and future selves.
How can it be an indictment on anyone to not have done something that one is actually unable to do?
If, in the 19th century, before Amazon and YouTube, and Instagram, and Facebook, you lived in England, in a village where most people barely even ever travelled farther than the next village over, and you came into contact with radical alterity how else could you be expected to respond. And as, again according to post-modern philosophy (say Baudrillard in this case) you get closer to this difference you actually start changing it so it becomes more and more like you. So you are either in this state of being orientalist, or in a state of intense globalization, and someone making a critique from this moral high road of globalization about this bucolic, parochial state of the orientalist is probably someone similar to a policy wonk referring to a basket of deplorables, which is just another kind of power-knowledge relation, which is what the critique is meant to make clear in the first place.
To think about Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, the problem is we can never really escape from this stuff. And the problem with ever even making a statement such as this is that it is incoherent in the sense that one never comes away clean, basically because always and already the claim of tu quoque can be leveled. I mean sure it doesn't strictly speaking invalidate the claim there is this power relation, but when we're so stuck in the middle of them all the time in every way, as Foucault said, the strategic adversary becomes fascism itself, not the historical fascism, but our love of power and how it causes us to act everyday, and how it makes us love it even as it dominates us. And that is very difficult to uncover if you're leveling a claim of inappropriate relation to any one group, because the problem is our humanity, not the content of our relations or historically contingent facts. Putting names to faces makes it opaque, because the reality is any human occupying a similar role would act inappropriately, so what you do is you attack the role not the name.
It may be that Said does that. I have never gotten around to reading the book, but just going off of the confused article posted, I just felt there was a sort of mishmash without a really clear and distinct thesis, and that what the facade was hiding in a metaphorical sense was paving stones to be thrown in the next revolution, rather than an attempt to end violence or power relations altogether.
It’s been at least 15 years since I read Orientalism, but I recall that being exactly my impression of the book.
I came away thinking that it was an interesting collection of perspectives on historical Oriental relations with the West, but that its thesis was simply “You don’t understand us”. I didn’t feel I learned anything to counteract this apparent misconception that we Westerners all hold.
Is a good book, I'd recommend it. It nails a particular argument to a wall in a way that lets you perhaps take on a wider perspective. And I don't think you have to completely agree with Said for the effort to be worthwhile. Is fine to critique it. But not without reading it through.
The author completely ignores the long history of conflict and colonialism in the opposite direction, namely from the Islamic world and into Europe. The idea of "the Other" is actually codified in Islamic law with religious minorities forced to wear distinctive clothing (the yellow mark for Jews predates its use in Germany by centuries) and pay special taxes, as well as numerous other restrictions.
Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon) instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
My last point is that this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. His examples of 'experts' who misunderstand the Arab world for a nefarious purpose can just as easily apply to political 'experts' in the US who couldn't have fathomed that someone like Donald Trump could ever win the presidency.
Perhaps he is just not a fan of aphorisms pulled from Murphy's law themed joke books.
Though the trouble with Hanlon's law is not in its origins, rather it is that malice and stupidity are not in any regard mutually exclusive and also that people are quite adept at disguising malice as stupidity.
edit - it also makes me very suspicious about Hanlon. Maybe not the first person I would trust if they tried to play dumb.
> Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon) instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
This turns out to be much more of an interesting comment than you intend, insofar you do understand how his work is perfectly coherent with Steve Bannon's project, except with a "respectability" coat on.