Orientalism and Arab-Islamic history: an inquiry into the orientalists' motives and compulsions.

• Author: Al-Da'mi, Muhammed A.

"They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented" Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

"Soldiers, from the top of the pyramids, forty centuries look down on you!" Napoleon Bonaparte

As the intellectual outcome of the European affiliation of power with knowledge, Orientalism is a Western cultural phenomenon which is particularly related to the colonial and post-colonial reception of the Orient, its people and history. Orientalism, states Edward W. Said, is "a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the orient, the East, 'them')."(1) As the "strong" and the "familiar" entity, the West finds it automatic and, at times, imperative that "the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks."(2) The frameworks of containment and representation take various forms and apply different techniques. Among the major frameworks are historical presentations and re-presentations. Eric Meyer has very recently reduced Said's argument into the compact structure of a sentence. "Considered as a single metagrammatical sentence," states Meyer, "the ideological syntax of the narrative of Romantic Orientalism might be reduced to the structure of Hegel's Philosophy of History, in which the west as subject defeats the East as object in the battle for world-historical ascendancy."(3) According to this logic, the Orientalist historiography of Eastern civilizations expresses an imperial desire: to subject the "other" and the "other's" past to the imperial will, and to come out with a new "world history" in which the Western power becomes the historical necessity in a "new world order."

Orientalist historiography, in general terms, demonstrates this essential imperial motive, although it also envelops a variety of personal and social compulsions related to the Orientalist himself. But Orientalist historians, together with the majority of the romantic imaginative writers who tackled the East, can rarely escape the imperial will which aims at a:

form of a world historical narrative in which European modernity supersedes a spurious Oriental despotism as the dominant cultural system. The genuinely liberating impulse of Romantic Hellenism thus subsists within and serves to legitimate an imperial narrative that portrays the extension of European dominance over the East as historically inevitable.4

I have considered this "imperial will" as inescapable for both the professional Orientalists(5) and the romantic writers who dealt with Eastern historical materials at large, because the psychological impact of the imperial - with its cultural and economical benefits - has been so imposing that the Western mind as a whole found itself within a general "spirit" (viz. Something of a zeitgeist) which looks down on the East. Moreover, Orientalist writings have often demonstrated a residual fear of Islam, and an archetypal pattern of aggressiveness towards it as an important historical phenomenon which endangered the West for centuries. "Most of the great philosophers of history from Hegel to Spengler," affirms Said, "have regarded Islam without much enthusiasm,"(6) a situation which externalizes the buried, though effective, European memories. The fear of Islam, and of its irresistible Arab host during the Middle Ages,(7) persisted to the colonial and post-colonial periods when Europe became stronger than Asia and Africa. And, I believe that the Western animosity to Islam is, whether conscious or subconscious, a form of a collective and psychological revenge. This is an apt conclusion based on the phenomenon which Said specifies in the following, seemingly sweeping, generalization:

I have not been able to discover any period in European or American history since the Middle Ages in which Islam was generally discussed or thought about outside a framework created by passion, prejudice, and political interests. This may not seem a surprising discovery, but included in it is the entire gamut of scholarly and scientific disciplines which, since the early nineteenth century, have either called themselves collectively the discipline of Orientalism, or have tried systematically to deal with the Orient.(8)

Said's "essentialist" framework which traces an omnipresent imperial awareness in every piece of Western writing on the Orient is largely not baseless. But his final accusation is also unfortunate for Oriental cultures at large, and for Oriental histories in particular. The ultimate meaning of Said's and, of course, Meyer's polemic is: every Orientalist is a participant in an Occidental imperial and cultural campaign to control and exploit the East. I believe, however, that as an intellectual movement, and as a cultural phenomenon, Orientalism - especially literary Orientalism - has been of a considerable merit for the Orientals. It is useful not because it serves imperial interests, but because it envelops a complex of cultural, personal and hereditary compulsions which are productive and significant for the intelligentsia of the Eastern countries. In spite of their conscious/unconscious prejudice, Orientalists have offered us foreign perspectives and coercive challenges which have enriched our approaches to our culture and history. Many examples of clever Eastern writings on Oriental history can be traced to the prejudiced and "suggestive" Orientalist writings. Said's generalization, no matter how true it is, could lead to depriving Eastern cultures of this useful (aggressive, impulsive, suggestive) Orientalist challenge. My point is: Said's accusation, that Orientalism supplies agents and expertise to empire,(9) endangers the uses which the Orientals can make of Orientalist literature. The accusation could lead to a termination of Orientalism through specifying the imperial motive, and through overlooking the other motives and compulsions which contributed to the making of the Orientalist effort. His...