Page 242 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes Thus as revolutionary turmoil grips the Islamic Orient, sociologists remind us that Arabs are
addicted to 'oral functions', while economists -- recycled Orientalists -- observe that for modern
Islam neither capitalism nor socialism is an adequate rubric. As anticolonialism sweeps and indeed
unifies the entire Oriental world, the Orientalist damns the whole business not only as a nuisance
but as an insult to the Western democracies. As momentous, generally important issues face the
world -- issues involving nuclear destruction, catastrophically scarce resources, unprecedented
human demands for equality, justice, and economic parity -- popular caricatures of the Orient are
exploited by politicians whose source of ideological supply is not only the half-literate technocrat
but the superliterate Orientalist. The legendary Arabists in the State Department warn of Arab
plans to take over the world. The perfidious Chinese, half-naked Indians, and passive Muslims are
described as vultures for 'our' largesse and are damned when 'we lose them' to communism, or to
their unregenerate Oriental instincts: the difference is scarcely significant. These contemporary
Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. Arabs, for example, are thought of as
camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real
civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a
numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world
resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists
today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls 'the hegemonism of possessing minorities' and
anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human
prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition
'it' is not quite as human as 'we' are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought.
In a sense the limitations of Orientalism are, as I said earlier, the limitations that follow upon
disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people, or geographical
region. But Orientalism has taken a further step than that: it views the Orient as something whose
existence is not only displayed but has remained fixed in time and place for the West. So impressive
have the descriptive and textual successes of Orientalism been that entire periods of the Orient's
cultural, political, and social history are considered mere responses to the West. The West is the
actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of
Oriental behaviour. Yet if history during the twentieth century has provoked intrinsic change in
and for the Orient, the Orientalist is stunned: he cannot realize that to some extent the new
[Oriental] leaders, intellectuals or policy-makers, have learned many lessons from the travail of
their predecessors. They have also been aided by the structural and institutional transformations
accomplished in the intervening period and by the fact that they are to a great extent more at
liberty to fashion the future of their countries. They are also much more confident and perhaps
slightly aggressive. No longer do they have to function hoping to obtain a favorable verdict from
the invisible jury of the West. Their dialogue is not with the West, it is with their fellow-citizens.
Moreover, the Orientalist assumes that what his texts have not prepared him for is the result either
of outside agitation in the Orient or of the Orient's misguided inanity. None of the innumerable
Orientalist texts on Islam, including their summa, The Cambridge History of Islam, can prepare
their reader for what has taken place since 1948 in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, or the
Yemens. When the dogmas about Islam cannot serve, not even for the most Panglossian Orientalist,
there is recourse to an Orientalized social-science jargon, to such marketable abstractions as élites,
political stability, modernization, and institutional development, all stamped with the cachet of
Orientalist wisdom. In the meantime a growing, more and more dangerous rift separates Orient
and Occident. The present crisis dramatizes the disparity between texts and reality. Yet in this
study of Orientalism I wish not only to expose the sources of Orientalism's views but also to reflect
on its importance, for the contemporary intellectual rightly feels that to ignore a part of the world
now demonstrably encroaching upon him is to avoid reality. Humanists have too often confined
their attention to departmentalized topics of research. They have neither watched nor learned
from disciplines like Orientalism whose unremitting ambition was to master all of a world, not

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