colonialism - orientalist summary

Question 1

intro - what is the orient

Answer 1

• ‘the orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (1)
• contrast of the Orient has allowed for a better definition of the west – definition in terms of contrasts
• orientalism = formed of many interdependent aspects
• focus of much academic study
• ‘orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the occident’ (2)

Question 2

intro - Orient and power struggles

Answer 2

• orientalism is linked to Western domination
  o produced by imperial societies
  o becomes political and rooted in power-dynamics
• linked with british and French history
  o beginning of 19th cent – end of WW2, FR and GB dominated Orient
• the orient is not essentially an idea
• ideas, cultures etc. need to be studied alongside their origins/power configurations
  occident and orient = relationship of power

Question 3

intro – 3 aspects of contemporary reality

Answer 3

• distinction between pure and political knowledge
• the methodological question
• the personal dimension

Question 4

intro – 3 aspects of contemporary reality: distinction between pure and political knowledge

Answer 4

• contemporary west emphasises academic, non-political knowledge
• however, cannot separate writing/scholar from their context – this will inevitably reflect personal concerns
• in viewing political knowledge as less valuable, we lose the ability to recognise how knowledge produces political circumstance
• ‘political importance comes from the closeness of a field to ascertainable sources of power in political society’ (10)
  ♣ can look at orientalism as an ‘exchange between authors and greater political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American – in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced’ (15)
  ♣ how did other schools of thought impact the development of orientalism?? Must look at politics and culture – context is key to study

Question 5

intro – 3 aspects of contemporary reality: methodological question

Answer 5

• not only need to identify the beginning of orientalism but also look at context that shaped its development
• starting point = british, French and American involvement with orient
• biblical scholarship = important part of Orientalism
• sense of Western = intellectual dominance over Orient
• main methodological devices
  o strategic location – describing the author’s position in a text
  o strategic formation = analysis of relationship between texts
  emphasis on exteriority of texts – look at them from outside

Question 6

intro – 3 aspects of contemporary reality: personal dimension

Answer 6

• writer = oriental, grew up in Palestine and Egypt. Yet had western education
• Islamic orient = focus
• 1950s, east = dangerous
• things that have contributed to politicisation of Islam
  o anti-Islamic prejudice of west as seen in history of orientalism
  o struggle between arabs and Israeli Zionism. Effect on American jews and liberal culture
  o absence of cultural position that identifies with arabs/islam
• the fact that the Middle East is now an oil-power etc. means that it is less likely for us to achieve this conversation
• cannot fully identify yourself with arabs if you are in US. Deemed flawed in some way

Question 7

P1, CH1 – balfour

Answer 7

• Arthur james balfour, june 13 1910
  o Attempted to justify british occupation of Egypt based on ‘our’ knowledge of the country rather than military power
  o Authority suggests a denial of other countries’ autonomy. British superiority is taken for granted
  o Says the west shows a superior capacity for self-governing
  o Suggests Egypt requires British occupation

Question 8

P1, CH1 – we vs. other

Answer 8

• ‘we’ used when describing West carries sense of royalty and power
• cannot speak for orientals as they are ‘other’ – yet still prevent them from having a voice. Assume their feelings and that they are not capable of making rational decisions
• Europe has always been in a position of power – in knowledge and military etc.
• Relationship between east and west figured in terms of child/parent, clear hierarchy of power

Question 9

P1, CH1 – history of domination

Answer 9

• 1815-1914, EU direct colonial dominion expanded from 35 to 85% of world’s surface
• ‘it was in the Near Orient, the lands of the Arab Near-East, where Islam was supposed to define cultural and racial characteristics, that the British and the French encountered eachother and ‘the Orient’ with the greatest intensity’ (41)
• development of Orientalism made the distinction between occident and orient more intense

Question 10

P1, CH1 – literature about orient

Answer 10

• orient renaissance
• Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 = turning point
• ‘for with Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt processes were set in motion between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives’ (42)

Question 11

P1, CH1 – orientalism as a body of knowledge in the west

Answer 11

• scholars were limited re. what they could say
• ‘orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar and the strange’ (43)
• ‘for that is the main intellectual issue raised by Orientalism. Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races and survive the consequences humanly?’ (45)
• view of West as rational etc. vs. violent East

Question 12

P1, CH2 – academic aspect of orientalism

Answer 12

• orientalism is often viewed as an academic discipline, increases in scope over time
• until mid-18th century, orientalists = biblical scholars
• late 18th century, Anquetil Duperron and Sir William Jones discovered value of Sanskrit and Avestan
• the orient became known in the West ‘as its great complementary opposite since antiquity’ (58)
  o bible and rise of Xianity
  o islam as a redoubtable conquering Eastern movement

Question 13

P1, CH2 – islam in the middle ages as radially new

Answer 13

• was deemed fraudulent version of Xianity
• West favours the familiar
• 632 Mohammed dies
• islam militarily grows – Persia, Syria, Egypt, turkey then North Africa fell to Muslim armies
• 8th and 19th cent = Spain, Sicily and parts of France
• 13th = India, Indonesia and China
• ‘and to this extraordinary assault Europe could respond with very little except fear and a kind of awe’ (59)
• 17th cent – Ottoman Empire = constant threat to Xian civilisation
  o ‘Like Walter Scott’s Saracens, the European representation of the Muslim, Ottoman or Arab was always a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient’ (60)
  ♣ in controlling presentation of orientalists, westerners can mute their danger

Question 14

P1, CH2 – reception of Islam in West

Answer 14

• Westerners misunderstand Islam – they assume that M is to Muslims what JC is to Xians
• Presentation of Islam was orientated towards Xians – Islam is painted in reference to Xianity. Cannot have independent worth
• Daniel, Islam and the West, 259
  o ‘the invariable tendency to neglect what the Qu’ran meant, or what Muslims thought it meant…. Necessarily implies that Qu’ranic and other Islamic doctrine was presented in a form that would convince Christians’
• 1450-60
  o John of Segovia, Nicholas of Cusa, Jean Germain and Aeneas Silvius (Pius II) had a ‘conference’ to discuss what to do with Islam
• Southern highlights how Western views of Islam evolved towards greater ignorance rather than knowledge (Western views of Islam, 99-101)
• M was viewed as ‘the disseminator of false Revelation, he became as well the epitome of lechery…’ (62)
• Narcissistic Western ideas have not gone, but their sources have simply changed

Question 15

P1, CH2 – 3-way relationship between different aspects of orientalism

Answer 15

• Orient, orientalist, western consumer of ‘orientalism’
• Orient = punished for being outside Western boundaries
• ‘The orient is thus orientalised, a process that not only marks the orient as the province of the orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codifications as the true orient’ (67)
  o orientalist no longer has possession over truth
• the west receive oriental territories as they should be – the east always shared a likeness with the west

Question 16

P1, CH2 – dante inferno

Answer 16

• Maometto – Mohammed is only above the falsifiers and treacherous in the circles of hell. Fate = brutal
• Deems Muslims ignorant of Xianity
• Empirical fact does not matter for Dante – it is his poetic grasp of Islam. Muhammed and co. become characters on a stage

Question 17

P1, CH2 – orient as outside civilisation

Answer 17

• 17th cent Islamic invasions – center of EU culture moved away from Mediterranean
• ‘the orient, when it was not merely a place in which one traded, was culturally, intellectually, spiritually outside Europe and European civilisation’ (71)
• ‘we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the orient and the orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do, as Dante tried to do in the Inferno, is at one and the same time to characterise the Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe’
• Muhammed is and always will be an imposter

Question 18

P1, CH3 – what is orientalism

Answer 18

• ‘orientalism is the discipline by which the orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice’ (73)

Question 19

P1, CH3 – islam as threatening

Answer 19

• geographically and culturally close to Islam
• military success
• ‘from the end of 7th cent until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam in either its Arab, Ottoman or North African and Spanish form dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity’ (74)

Question 20

P1, CH3 – Napoleon 3 intentions with Egypt

Answer 20

• 1798, Napoleon invasion of Egypt = crucial for history of orientalism
  o N’s 3 intentions
  ♣ Turned to east after victory at Treaty of Campo Formio
  ♣ Viewed Alexander’s Orient and Egypt particularly glorious
  ♣ N knew Egypt well
  ♣ ‘for Napoleon, Egypt was a project that acquired reality in his mind, and later in his preparations for its conquest, through experiences that belong to the realm of ideas and myths culled from texts, not empirical reality’ (80)
  o ‘napoleon used Egyptian enmity towards the Mamelukes and appeals to the revolutionary idea of equal opportunity for all to wage a uniquely benign and selective war against Islam’ (82)
  o ‘when it seemed obvious to Napoleon that his force was too small to impose itself on the Egyptians, he then tried to make the local imams, cadis, muftis and ulemas interpret the Koran in favour of the Grande Armée’
• after Napoleon, orientalism became a language of creation

Question 21

P1, CH4 – orientalism and writing

Answer 21

• for Napoleon and de Lesseps, ‘everything they knew… about the orient came from books written in the tradition of Orientalism’ (94)
• western reading vs. Oriental silence
• can begin to think of orientalism as a ‘kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient’ (95)
• during 19th/20th century ‘orientalism had accomplished its self-metamorphosis from a scholarly discourse to an imperial institution’ (95)

Question 22

P1, CH4 – accomplishments of orientalism

Answer 22

• produced scholars
• increased number of taught languages
• provided the Orient with interested EU students who wanted to study Sanskrit etc.
• ‘yet…. Orientalism overrode the Orient’ (96)
• orient = object of study. No voice in this study

Question 23

P1, CH4 – GB and Xian interests (Church missionary society)

Answer 23

• ‘with regard to Islam and the Islamic territories, Britain felt that it had legitimate interests, as a Christian power, to safeguard’ (100)
  o societies such as the Church Missionary Society (1799) joined the quest to expand EU
  ♣ worked to ‘abolish the slave trade’
  ♣ wanted to tell people about Jesus
  ♣ social reform

Question 24

P1, CH4 – louis massignon

Answer 24

• Islam = ‘systematic rejection of the Christian incarnation, and its greatest hero was not Mohammed or Averroes but all-Hallaj, a Muslim saint who was crucified by the orthodox Muslims for having dared to personalise Islam’ (104) see 1922 la passion de…
• Aka Islam’s only value is the Christ-like figure of all-Hallaj

Question 25

P2, CH1 – shift away from renaissance

Answer 25

• shift from renaissance historians to 18th cent historians
  o had a sense of detachment in studies
  o dealt directly with Oriental source material e.g. George Sale translated the Koran and ‘let Muslim commentators on the sacred text speak for themselves’ (117)

Question 26

P2, CH1 – 4 elements of emergence of orientalist structures

Answer 26

• expansion
• historical confrontation
• sympathy
• classification

Question 27

P2, CH1 – view of modern Orientalism

Answer 27

• ‘the modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient form the obscurity, alienation and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished’ (121)
  o studied languages of the Orient etc.
• ‘the more Europe encroached upon the Orient during the nineteenth century, the more Orientalism gained in public confidence’ (122)
• orientalism = systematic process of accumulation of humans and territories

Question 28

P2, CH3 – caussin de Perceval

Answer 28

• Caussin de Perceval, Essai sur l’histoire des arabes avant l’islamisme
  o Arabs were made a people by Mohammed
  o Islam = political not spiritual
  o Muhammed is purely political, no religious force

Question 29

P2, CH3 – oriental as nonthreatening

Answer 29

• Depiction of Islam = demeaning
  o Suggests that ‘the Orient need not cause us undue anxiety, so unequal are Oriental to European achievements’ (152)
  o ‘as material for study or reflection the Orient acquired all the marks of an inherent weakness’
  o the West exploited Oriental ideas

Question 30

P2, CH3 – William lane

Answer 30

• William Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians 1836
  o lived in Egypt
  o conformed only to the words of the Koran
  o was aware of alien culture
  o ‘while one portion of Lane’s identity floats easily in the unsuspecting Muslim sea, a submerged part retains its secret European power, to comment on, acquire, possess everything around it’ (160)
  o ‘the Orientalist can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true’
  o lane is ‘both exhibit and exhibitor’
  o lane pretends to be Muslim
  o ‘lane ironically enters the Muslim pattern only far enough to be able to describe it in a sedate English prose’ (161)

Question 31

P3, CH 1 – 2 types of orientalism

Answer 31

• latent orientalism
  o unconscious positivity
  o stereotypes about the East – link to language
• manifest orientalism
  o stated views about Oriental society etc.
  o changing ideals within orientalism used to justify stereotypes of the East and maintain imperial rule e.g. using religion as a tool

Question 32

P3, CH 2 – language

Answer 32

• inherent in race, language etc. is a ‘ours’ vs. ‘theirs’ mentality
• our values = correct, informed.
• ‘as Europeans (and white men) ‘we’ shared in them every time their virtues were extolled’ (228)
• irreducible distance separating white from colored

Question 33

P3, CH 3 – Islamic orientalism

Answer 33

• ‘one of the striking differences between Orientalism in its Islamic version and all the other humanistic disciplines… is that Islamic Orientalists never saw their estrangement from Islam as salutary…. Rather, their estrangement from Islam simply intensified their feelings of superiority about European Culture, even as their antipathy spread to include the entire Orient’ (260)
• ‘Islamic Orientalism synthesis led to a sharpened sense of difference between Orient and Occident as reflected in Islam’ (261)
  ‘in order properly to understand the intellectual genealogy of interwar Islamic Orientalism… we must be able to understand the differences between the Orientalist’s summational attitude towards his material and the kind of attitude to which it bears a strong cultural resemblance’ (262

Question 34

P3, CH 3 – massignon

Answer 34

• Focus = ‘quasi-Christlike, theosophical Sufi figure, Mansur all-Hallaj’ (246)
• Looked at relationship between muslim and catholic spiritual life
• Interest in Semitic languages
• No austerity in work
• Draws on Islamic literature
• Emphasis on context
• Viewed islam as religious of resistance
• Exemplary figure = al-Hallaj
  o Got crucifixion refused by Islam
  o Managed to achieve a ‘mystical union with God against the grain of Islam’ (268)
• Differentiated ‘nos methodes de recherches’ and ‘les traditions vecues d’antiques civilisations’
  o ‘Massignon saw what he did as the synthesis of two roughly opposed quantities, yet it is the peculiar asymmetry between them that troubles one, and not merely the fact of the opposition between Europe and Orient’. Massignon’s implication is that the essence of the difference between East and West is between modernity and ancient tradition’ (269)
• placed responsibility of West on colonialism of East and Islam
• wrote in favour of Palestinian rights
• viewed the Arab-Israeli conflict as a Semitic problem
• ‘he reconstructed and defended Islam against Europe on the one hand and against its own orthodoxy on the other’ (272)
• importance placed on all-Hallaj shows his decision to ‘promote one figure above his sustaining culture, and second, the fact that all-Hallaj had come to represent a constant challenge, even an irritant, to the Western Christian for whom belief was not… the extreme self-sacrifice it was for the Sufi’ (272)

Question 35

P3, CH 3 – orientalists provide a representation of the orient that:

Answer 35

• is personal
• depicts what they view the orient can/ought to be
• consciously contests someone else’s view
• provides orientalist discourse with what it needs
• responds to cultural, economic etc. requirements of epoch

Question 36

P3, CH 3 – Gibb

Answer 36

• islam dominate life in the Islamic orient
  o ‘for Gibb, Islam is Islamic orthodoxy, is also the community of believers, is life, unity, intelligibility, values’ (278)
• doesn’t talk about European colonialism
• ‘that the history of modern Islam might be more intelligible for its resistance, political and non-political, to colonialism, never occurs to Gibb’ (279)
• ‘“Islam” for Gibb is a sort of superstructure imperilled both my politics and by dangerous Muslim attempts to tamper with its intellectual sovereignty’
• Islam used to dominate people’s lives, but now its social impact has diminished since countries have become more ‘advanced’ and people have political interests etc.
• Views this as a result of the reintegration of western civilisation
• 1955, ‘the West took from islam only those non-scientific elements that it had originally derived from the West, whereas in borrowing much from Islamic science, the West was merely following the law making ‘natural science and technology… indefinitely transmissible’ (280) and The Influence of Islamic Culture p.98
• refuses to look beyond Islam orthodoxy
• gibb assumes a certain privilege in talking about Islam
• does not distinguish between the essence and potential of Islam

Question 37

P3, CH 4 – Cultural relations policy

Answer 37

• defined by Mortimer Graves in 1950
• wanted to have significant publications in every important Near Eastern language
• von Grunebaum – influential EU scholar in US
  o ‘it is essential to realise that Muslim civilisation is a cultural entity that does not share our primary aspirations.’
  o (Modern Islam, 1964, p.90)
  o work is accepted in the field
• islam can only become modern through Western self-interpretation
• us vs. them
• orientalists are depicted as doing orientals a favour by providing accurate representations of their past – as if Orientals were not capable of constructing this themselves
• not much resistance to Orientalist ideas, especially by Islamic scholars

Question 38

P3, CH4 – Lewis

Answer 38

• ‘until the states in the Middle East can control their economic activity and create or produce their own technology, their access to revolutionary experience will remain limited’ (314) Bernard lewis, Islamic concepts of revolution p.33
• ‘the Orientalist now tries to see the Orient as an imitation West which, according to Bernard Lewis, can only improve itself when its nationalism ‘is prepared to come to terms with the West’’. (321, the middle east and the west, p.140)

Question 39

P3, CH4 – internalisation of Orientalism

Answer 39

• Orientalism has been engrained in education – people feel accomplished by American education. Orientals themselves internalise this feeling of superiority
  o Can study Orient in US but not US in Orient
• Orient has also internalised US economy and Western market system
  o US controls all major oil companies in Orient
  Result = loss of Oriental culture

Question 40

P3, CH4 – successful study of the orient

Answer 40

• Successful work looks at intellectual rather than geographical/imperial discipline e.g. Clifford Geertz
• ‘the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism’ (328)