{"id":28081,"date":"2021-03-05T09:04:07","date_gmt":"2021-03-05T13:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=28081"},"modified":"2021-03-14T16:20:23","modified_gmt":"2021-03-14T20:20:23","slug":"orientalist-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/orientalist-discourse\/","title":{"rendered":"Orientalist Discourse Reinforces False Stereotypes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is the problem with the Orientalist discourse? How did the Orientalist scholars<\/a> influence the common perceptions of East Asian societies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Edward Said, Orientalist discourse <\/strong>never attempted to inform people or challenge their preexisting \u201cknowledge\u201d of the Orient. Rather, its purpose was to confirm and reinforce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep reading to learn about Orientalist discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Forging the Orientalist Discourse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ancient Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta explicitly defined themselves by their contrasts with and opposition to the despotic \u201cAsiatic\u201d Persian Empire. <\/strong>The Greek city-states may have been bitter rivals, but they were united in their shared identity of not <\/em>being of the \u201cbarbarian\u201d Orient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This tradition of Greek \u201cothering\u201d of the Orient goes all the way back to the very earliest works of Western literature. In The Iliad<\/em>, the foundational text of Western literature, Homer presents the antagonistic kingdom of Troy as a stand-in for the Orient\u2014a decadent and dangerous foe to be vanquished by the daring and heroic Greeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, the ancient Greek tragedies of Aeschylus (c. 525-c. 455 BCE), Sophocles (c. 497-c. 406 BCE), and Euripides (c. 480-c. 406 BCE) presented the Orient in a similar way. In Aeschylus\u2019s The Persians<\/em>, the Persian emperor Xerxes is presented as the ultimate figure of mourning, loss, and defeat, lamenting the crushing of his forces by the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis (480 BCE). This is the earliest known representation of the supine, submissive East kneeling before the dominant and superior West. For the intended Greek audience, the message is clear\u2014Asian challenges to the Greeks will result only in Asia\u2019s own ruin and lamentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a tradition that would later be picked up by the European Orientalists, these works never present the perspective of the Orient on its own terms. Always, the words and feelings of the Orient are filtered\u2006\u2014by Greek writers, for the benefit of Greek audiences. The Orient does not, and cannot, speak for itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later Western encounters with the Orient\u2014from the journeys of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BCE), to the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE), to the Crusades during the Middle Ages, to the journeys of Marco Polo (1254-1324 CE)\u2014only reinforced these themes of strangeness and otherness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The very separateness of the Orient was a key element in forging the Orientalist discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Islam and Orientalism<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century and its stunning conquest of vast swathes of Asia, Africa, and Europe brought a new dimension to the Orientalist discourse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the Christian West, Islam became the great existential menace, threatening the frontiers of Europe while occupying the Christian sites of the Levant. For the next millennium, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War One, Islam would occupy a singular role in the European mind, standing as the only plausible threat to European Christian hegemony. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was reflected in the European Orientalist discourse. In representing and describing the alien entity of Islam, Western writers imposed their own <\/em>archetypes on it. <\/strong>Even the name they ascribed to Islam, \u201cMohammedism,\u201d betrays this attitude. They saw Islam as a bastardization or perversion of the true religion of Christianity, with the prophet Mohammed as the fraudulent Muslim analogue to Christ. As Christ was to Christianity, so was Mohammed to Mohammedanism\u2014a gross misunderstanding of Islam, which celebrates Mohammed as a prophet but does not worship him as God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Orientalists inherited this dismissal of Islam. Even with their great monotheistic religion, the \u201cOriental\u201d mind was only capable of producing an inferior facsimile of the Western original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dawn of Orientalism<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the early 19th century witnessed an explosion of interest in the study and acquisition of ancient Egyptian, Persian, and Assyrian texts within learned European circles, comparable to the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman works that marked the Renaissance in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leading Orientalist figures like the German Julius von Moh (1800-1876), president of the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Asiatique, produced lengthy encyclopedic compendia of all things Oriental, encompassing art, literature, religious texts, and architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But for all of their admiration for the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and their unquestionably brilliant scholarship, this first generation of Orientalists could not help but perpetuate and codify the same ancient myths about the Orient that we\u2019ve seen had existed in the European consciousness since antiquity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purpose of Orientalist discouse and scholarship was never to inform readers or challenge their preexisting \u201cknowledge\u201d of the Orient\u2014it was to confirm and reinforce it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Problem <\/strong>With the Orientalist Discourse<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The Orientalists\u2019 singular focus<\/a> on ancient <\/em>texts made this all but inevitable\u2014because of their commitment to the idea of an essential, unchanging Orient, they came to believe that rigorous study of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead<\/em> and the Pyramid Texts could provide a scholar with penetrating insight into the society, culture, and politics of modern Middle Eastern societies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orientalism\u2019s textual approach contributed to the dehumanizing tone and attitudes that pervaded much of Orientalist discourse<\/strong>, treating human beings\u2014indeed, even enormously complex human societies\u2014as reducible to what texts had to say about them. For the Orientalist, the story of the East was fundamentally one of texts, not people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The modern <\/em>Orient, meanwhile, held little value for the Orientalist scholar, because of their belief that the essential character of the people and their societies had remained the same since ancient times. As such, there was no need to engage with the actual people of the Orient or to even attempt to understand their daily lived experiences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, their methodology had real-world consequences, as Orientalists sought to apply <\/strong>ancient <\/em><\/strong>texts to address the problems of the <\/strong>modern <\/em><\/strong>Orient, fully consistent with their belief in an unchanging East\u2014and in their unique role as its interpreters.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This textual approach tended to create a feedback loop in how Westerners described and ultimately acted upon the East:<\/p>\n\n\n\n