Edward Said 's Critique Of Orientalism Essay

It is no longer unusual to suggeste that the construction of the colonial order is related to the eloboration of modern forms of representation and knowledge

Disney’s Aladdin is a fit example of misrepresentation of diverse cultures from a Westernized perspective. Disney is famous for lending representations of world from a Western viewpoint. According to Edward Said, orientalism is a way of expressing Arab peoples and Islamic cultures as compared to Western or European society (Palestine Diary). Said’s explains orientalism is the framework that we use to

Although Said didn’t directly look into gender orientalism he had made a great point in his article when discussing how the West view woman in an Oriental society. “[…] she never spoke of herself, and she never represented her emotions, presence or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male […]” (Said, Page 6). In this part Said is discussing how Western men would

I must confess that I am guilty of harboring unconscious stereotypes of Asian women. Kathleen Uno’s article “Unlearning Orientalism: Locating Asian and Asian American Women in Family History” brought this to light. She makes a very strong argument that Orientalism has exaggerated Asian patriarchy and the subordination of women; therefore, influencing research to highlight only the oppressive aspects of the Asian family. Uno states that once we can free ourselves from the “Orientalist blinders”, it will allow us to shed the stereotypes by revaluating the role of Asian and Asian American women and acknowledging their contributions. (Uno, 2003)

Alternatively, while the teaching of the Quran promoted equality among men and women, Orthodox Islamic ideas and negative interpretations became the dominant view in Western society and colonists. “It was the practice of veiling and the Islamic degradation of women that stood in the way, according to the imperialist thesis, of the “progress” and “civilization” of Muslim societies and of their populaces being “persuaded or forced” into imbibing “the true spirit of Western Civilization” (Ahmed, 1992, p. 243). Many colonist men created a negative image of Islamic culture,

This direct linkage between modernization and westernization is, in fact, historically inaccurate. The history of technology development has actually indicated that the ideology or culture doesn’t really influence the modernization. When adopting modernisation, countries, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, doesn’t necessarily need to change its own culture. While most Muslim-majority countries are still undeveloped countries, the driving force is not their culture, but instead the clash of civilization itself. The fault line wars characterised by Huntington in fact have majorly taken place in the Middle East, including the war on terror and the Arab–Israeli War. This clash of civilisation characterised by fault line wars, in fact, leads to the chaos and poverty there. The appearance of this pre-modern image of those Muslim Countries is not the justification for the westernisation but the result of the clash of civilizations. Therefore, the inverted causality is inaccurate, and shall be corrected, as the clash of civilization can, in fact, hardly help those

Orientalism, as termed by Edward Said, is meant to create awareness of a constellation of assumptions that underlie Western attitudes towards the Eastern societies. While some of these opinions show the cultures in a positive light, the majority of them are biased and emphasise on depicting negative aspects as perceived by strangers to the Eastern culture.

The European’s mindset by the latter of the third of the 18th century saw that inside each Asian burned the effervescent ember of savagery. Without controlling governance over the people, Europeans believed anarchy would chaotically erupt in Asia. It was believed Asians truly did not have self-control without a supreme leader. Oriental despotism is the idea that the societies in Asia have a single totalitarian-formed government and without this leadership there would be no order to their society. According to Montesquieu, Asian power is absolutist and held in the hands of one. Everything that could possibly happen is in the merciless hands of the despotism. In Montesquieu’s epistolary novel The Persian Letters, he argues for oriental despotism through his two main characters in the story Usbec and Rico. He talks about the economic, political, social and cultural aspects of Persian society that he parallels with oriental despotism. Montesquieu also shows makes his story of the characters into a metaphor of the destruction of oriental despotism. Marx believed in the superiority of the west and the lack of growth in political and economic realms of Asiatic society contributing to the concept of Asian despotism. Finally, Hegel touches on the white man’s burden where he uses oriental despotism to explain the child like relationship Europeans had with the savage orients.

This type of primary source is a written document by Jonathan Lyons in which he describes Islam through western eyes. In Islam Through Western Eyes, Jonathan Lyons unloads Western propensities for contemplating Islam, directing a watchful examination of the West's great totalizing story crosswise over one thousand years of history. He watches the talk's destructive consequences for the sociologies, including human science, legislative issues, theory, religious philosophy, worldwide relations, security studies, and human rights grant. He takes after its influence on research, speeches, political system, and government approach, keeping the West from reacting viably to its most noteworthy twenty-first-century challenges: the ascent of Islamic power, the rise of religious savagery, and the growing pressure between built up social qualities and multicultural rights among Muslim foreigner populaces.

Stuart Hall’s The West and the Rest and Edward Said’s Orientalism both explore notions of power and discourse with regard to the dynamics of the Western world and the non-Western world. The works engage with the concept of a worldwide binary of two unequal sides, and how certain discourses, namely that of “the West and the Rest”, and Orientalism, have both stemmed from this idea and worked to maintain it. While Hall engages with the idea of “the West and the Rest” – the Western world and how it has been defined in opposition to the non-Western – Said analyses the relationship between “the Orient and the Occident” (2). Said’s work reflects in a more concrete way what Hall proposes in his, using the example of “the Orient” as part of “the Rest” against which the Western world positions itself. Both pieces convey significant ideas about how power informs perceptions of difference between societies, and in turn how discourse forms and maintains global hegemonic power.

The region of the Middle East and its inhabitants have always been a wonder to the Europeans, dating back to the years before the advent of Islam and the years following the Arab conquest. Today, the Islamic world spreads from the corners of the Philippines to the far edges of Spain and Central Africa. Various cultures have adopted the Islamic faith, and this blending of many different cultures has strengthened the universal Islamic culture. The religion of Islam has provided a new meaning to the lives of many people around the world. In the Islamic world, the religion defines and enriches culture and as a result the culture gives meaning to the individual. Islam is not only a religion, it is in its own way a culture. It may be this very

Although the Islamic world has faced many challenges throughout history, Islam’s encounter with Western imperialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has had the greatest impact on contemporary Islam. These encounters with Western powers influenced and shaped the Muslim world by introducing Islam to modernity. The Islamic world’s varied reaction to these challenges of modernity affects a wide range of issues in Islam today.

To a large extent Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror followed by the establishment of Guantanamo Bay is by far the largest reflection of Orientalism since it defines the ‘terrorist’. Bush’s speech on the War on Terror, not only defined the ‘terrorist’ but directly associated it with the East, creating the ‘other’ as the enemy. Orientalism can be seen by the Bush’s administration to define, and arguably create the ‘terrorist’ since he characterizes them through an orientalist perspective. It can be argued that the War on Terror was an orientalist instrument used to create the image for ‘knowing’ the Terrorist. This is crucial as knowing the terrorist, legitimizes any policy of action to eradicate the perceived terrorist. This can be seen most prominently in Bush’s speech on the War of Terror where he tactically separates the West from the East. Said’s book would support this argument as it can be perceived that the created an ‘imaginative geography in which the Occident and Orient are separated’. Therefore, Bush divides the US and the ‘others’ by labelling them as ‘evil’ and uncivilized beings that hate western values of freedom

Throughout this paper I will be using Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism. Said defines Orientalism as the following:

He saw this through many ways and because of what was mentioned in the above quote and “the Middle East crisis of 1973 that provoked Said to research and write Orientalism, which was published in 1978” (Irwin 2006, 281). His book however, is not a book about the “history[s] of the Oriental studies, but rather a highly selective polemic on certain aspects of the relations of knowledge and power. Its style and content strongly suggest that it is addressed exclusively to a Western readership” (Irwin 2006, 281). In his book he starts with two points or problems that he saw happen with what others said when studying the Orient. The first one was from Karl Marx who stated that “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” and the second was from Benjamin Disraeli who said “The East is a career” (Krishna 2009, 73). Both these points did not sit well with Said as they showed that knowledge or