Review Of the Book “Orientalism” By Edward W. Said

Abstract

This study took into account very systematic but prejudiced study of the Orient, particularly the Near East and Islam, by the Occidental academic, intellectual and political scholarship as has been superbly enunciated in  Edward Said’s “Orientalism”--- one of the most influential texts written in the last quarter of the 20^th century. To the West, the Orient is a static and lifeless entity so it cannot speak or represent itself; thus it must be represented. So, for this purpose, the West developed a system of “representations”, “cultural hegemony”, and “particular powerful vocabulary” that continued from Barthelemy d’ Herbelot to Silvestre de Sacy and from Carl Marx to Bernard Lewis. The Orient was then defined “by a set of recurring images and clichés and this knowledge of the Orient was put into practice by colonialism and imperialism”[1]. In this way, the Orientalists comprising of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, administrators, politicians and economists made strenuous efforts to prove Western “authority and suzerainty” viz-a-viz  the “lowly, inferior, and illogical” Orient. This study tries to highlight that how superbly and indefatigably Edward Said has examined this whole politico-intellectual project of the West in order to prove the Orient a “worthless Other” and “an Outsider and weak partner”. Moreover, this study endeavours to explain that this devious stratagem on the part of the Western “nexus of power and knowledge”[2] is still going on for “Orientalizing the Orientals”.

[1] S. R. Moosavinia, et al, “Edward Said’s Orientalism and the Study of the Self and the Other in Orwell’s Burmese Days,” Studies In Literature And Language 2, No. 1, (Jan.-July, 2011): pp. 103-113, ISSN 1923-1563.

[2] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978), p.27.