//features//
Fall 2018
Restating Orientalism:
Forty Years after Edward Said
Danielle Harris
In 1978, 40 years from the present time, Edward Said, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, published his landmark work Orientalism. This famous publication of one of Columbia’s most reputed scholars deserves special attention on this auspicious anniversary. The recent treatment of Said’s opus by Professor Wael Hallaq—now Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities in Columbia’s MESAAS department—serves as an excellent opportunity for The Current to step back and reflect on the book which has left an indelible mark on the Western Academy.
~
“Said was aware of something, but he could not understand the true nature of Orientalism. He was close, but he did not go far enough.”
Months before the publication of his latest book, Restating Orientalism, Wael Hallaq pronounced these words at Columbia University as he lectured on the violence committed by Europe in redefining the history and politics of Islamic society. His words reverberated through the room, their weight and radicality seemed in some ways heretical and in some ways like pure Truth. Hallaq, in writing and especially in person, has a way of gaining the trust of his audience; he makes them believe each claim he makes as so blatantly obvious that it’s almost a miracle no one ever saw it before. He writes with the boldness and tenacity of a man on a mission. His message is dire and inciting, historical but also alarmingly contemporary.
Orientalism is most basically the study of the Orient, the East. For decades most of Asia was called the Orient, universities had departments of Orientalist Studies, and scholars referred to themselves as Orientalists. The terms were used in a deceivingly innocuous manner, as if the fact and history of defining the non-West under a single umbrella term merited no critique.
Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism changed all this. Said coined a new meaning for the term Orientalism, relating specifically to the power structure that the West constructs over the East. For Said, Orientalism is not merely a word to describe an academic department, but rather a broader phenomena which denotes the discourse by which imperialist cultures created a mode of knowledge in order to dominate non-westerners. Drawing on an array of literary and artistic examples, Said shows that the touchstones of Western culture tend to depict the Orient in an exoticizing manner, its people as unreflective, decadent, and underdeveloped. While not always critical of the Orient, Western discourse about the non-West placed it as essentially other, always already in an inferior relation to a Western cultural standard.
A Columbia professor of Comparative Literature, Said critiqued and synthesized particular texts which he saw as supporting his thesis of a colonialist Western discourse, his newfound definition of Orientalism. Lending his training as a close critic of texts to a detailed analysis of worldwide dynamics, his methodological insight was that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”
Said’s work incited reaction from all sides. It transformed the way people considered the history of colonialism, cultural perceptions of the East and Islam, and the instrumentalization of knowledge towards political ends. His critique is sweeping and biting, attacking a way of viewing how knowledge of other cultures is constructed, something previously unchallenged, or possibly not even noticed.
One of the scholars who has been both influenced by and reflective upon Said’s legacy in recent years is Columbia’s own Wael Hallaq. Hallaq believes in Said’s mission, but takes it farther than, in his view, Said could ever have. Hallaq claims Said did not have the tools to understand the full nature of the phenomena he so deeply critiqued. Hallaq goes through Said’s methodology, examples, and conclusions with a fine tooth comb and comes out on the other side with an understanding of Orientalism as being part of a much larger epistemological problem of which Said’s famous work is just one part.
It is with these critiques of Orientalism that Hallaq begins his work. He spends most of his first chapter, “Putting Orientalism in Its Place,” criticizing the methodological sloppiness and narrowness of scope within Said’s analysis of Orientalism. But Hallaq distinguishes himself from other critics of Said in that he critiques Said in order to expand his thesis, not to discredit it. He thinks with Said, against Said. Hallaq, as a member of the field of postcolonial studies which Said helped shape, understands the effects of Oriental- ism within a particular context yet he is also able to conceptualize how it is in fact one piece within a larger and altogether more problematic phenomenon of modern knowledge as a whole.
Hallaq’s main objection to Said is his Eurocentric understanding of Orientalism. Despite Said’s thesis criticizing the violence of the the West setting itself over the East, Hallaq sees Said as oriented within his own Western background and training, and therefore, unable to fully upset, or even fully comprehend how the West uses knowledge to subjugate the Other. Said is himself too Western to fully examine the relationship of Western knowledge to the Other. He writes on Said:
And so like Orientalist works....his preoccupation is, at the end of of the day, the West’s metropolitan cultural and scholarly production, the world that Said in reality knew and the world that in effect formed him in almost every important way (53-54).
To Hallaq, Said is a man stuck writing from a Western perspective about the perils of Orientalism. He himself is stuck in the West, only able to criticize how the West misuses its position as the standard for culture and knowledge, rather than fully disassembling the notion of a standard at all.
This is fundamental flaw of Said’s understanding of his own biases leads to many flaws within his argument. In trying to critique how Orientalists frame the Orient, Said paradoxically preserves the Western paradigm. Said cannot understand that the “difference” ascribed by Orientalists to the West is not in itself a violent act. Islamic society was different from the spiritless modern Europe. The secular, European- trained Said refuses to accept that that could be good, that difference from the West could be unproblematic.
As an alternative to Said, Hallaq offers a repositioning of Orientalism within the systematic problem that is Western knowledge itself. Using the work of Rene Guenon, a 20th century Orientalist, Hallaq is able to convincingly conceive of Orientalism as a violent product of a more fundamentally violent Modernity and not the origin of the violence itself. He first claims that the instrumentalization of Western knowledge is distinct from other forms of knowledge, as it exists “under the pretense of acting in the interest of ‘civilization’” (159). This theory of Western knowledge production is consistent with Said’s the- sis, however, Hallaq following Guenon says that “Orientalism occupies a position secondary to material- ism, science, philosophy, and the doctrine of progress” (160). Orientalism arose out of these much larger broader fields, and it must be understood as such. Materialism, science, philosophy, and the doctrine of progress must be diagnosed before the treatment of the symptoms of Orientalism can even begin to be treated. Said was not totally wrong, he just got his intellectual history muddled.
This recasting of the corpus of European weaponized knowledge to include all these fields which are so much more fundamental to society writ large is a very intense claim. But Hallaq does not shy away from the full effects of his conclusion. Where Said was criticized for his sweeping claim against all Orientalists, Hallaq makes a claim against most fields of modern European academia. Said was a Western scholar working within the West, a fish who did not realize the water in which he was swimming. He tried to correct a particular perspective, but due to his embeddedness within it, he could not capture the true scope of the problem at hand. This claim is not one of guilt, but of fact; modernity (originating in the European Renaissance) entered all fields to promote domination. The violence that this produced cannot be ignored because its pervasiveness. Hallaq is not shy in taking on this challenge. But can he prove himself right?
Hallaq tries to spell out the features of modernity and finds within it two formative ideologies. These two fundamental ways by which modernity establishes norms are (1) the theory of progress, and (2) the Is/Ought Distinction. The theory of progress demands a single telos that the world is working towards. Hallaq writes that, “historians [...] begin to see the world as moving on a linear trajectory, one that progresses from an earlier and less developed stage to civilization, always dictated by Western terms” (107). This “theology of progress” is inherent to modernity for Hallaq, seeking to fit the world into its own Western terms, terms which will always cast Western phenomena in a superior light. Thus, all historical phenomena are all on the same modern trajectory towards objective, universal perfection. This theory is the justification for the work of the modern Orientalist, colonialist, scientist, and politician. Orientalism is symptomatic of this feature of modernity, as the framework it forces the Orient into is a part of its project to move the world towards the goal of modern progress.
The second feature of modernity examined by Hallaq is the distinction created by the Is/Ought prob- lem, a problem articulated Enlightenment philosopher by David Hume. Hume states that there is no fact that something ought to be a certain way just because it exists in a certain way. Charles Taylor articulates this as “the fact/value split” (92) which has totally reshaped how we consider intrinsic value, both in regards to people and environment. The Distinction between Is/Ought is no longer prescriptive, and instead has extracted inherent value from anything found within modernity. This distinction (which Hal- laq discusses throughout the book) is crucial in understanding the ontology of modernity and therefore the roots of Orientalism. When people, cultures, and nature are not recognized as potentially valuable in themselves, Western knowledge has free reign to dominate and reorganize everything in line with its perspective, not just the discourse of Orientalism which Said comments on.
Thus, Hallaq sees Orientalism as a small part of the problem, but really diagnoses modernity itself as the structure within which such violent and extreme measures are taken. Orientalism has been understood from the time of the eponymous book’s publication largely until today as a field which tried to dominate the Other. This is too short-sighted. Hallaq writes, and this is truly the argument of the entire work, that “there is little difference between the two types of expertise, economic and Orientalist, and both culminate, on the structural level in the absolute right to domination, one through the venue of economy, the other through cultural and, more important, juridical domination (190).” I am not sure whether Hallaq would assign different value judgments to each type of expertise or whether they are identical both in origin and in moral weight. He clearly sees both as products and evidence of modernity. It is unclear whether two things can emerge from the same source and have different impacts. I think what Hallaq is trying to convey is that we should not worry about what is a worse offender, and instead reevaluate whether we can subscribe so automatically to a system which allows itself to go unchecked by morality.
Hallaq sees Orientalism as a notable manifestation of the philosophy of dominion, but also sees it as distinctly helpful in dismantling that philosophy. Unlike business, science, or philosophy, Orientalism both dominates the Other and focuses on creating that Other. Because of its conscious tools to reach the Other, Hallaq also sees a unique opportunity, through the mechanisms of Orientalism, to reapproach the Self. He writes, “If Orientalism is the most obvious bridge through which the Other was so badly constructed, then it is this bridge that can begin refashioning the self through a heuristic accessing of an instructive Other” (258). Orientalism has honed tools to observe, manipulate, and refashion the Other, and it is with these methodologies that the Self can be reformed as well. The Orient—a real, pre-modern, and ethically superior field of inquiry—can be used as a foil to understand the ethical alternative to the sovereign modern man.
I see Hallaq’s critique of modernity and reworking of Orientalism as both impossibly large and manageably personal. In this book he attempts to take on all of modernity. Said’s book necessitated a complete rethinking of the goals and assumptions of Orientalism, and Hallaq seems to want a similar reaction after his book to all fields emerging from modernity. This is a very tall order, both in its breadth and its depth. A businessman or scientist being convinced of their subconscious goals of domination as part of a large historical structure seems quite unlikely. Instead, Hallaq’s vision could only be realized by each person realizing her own position and ethical relationship to her surroundings. This book is a call to the individual reader and not to the world at once.
Hallaq is not asking you to create an ethical Other because that is paradoxical. Each person must in- stead realize and actualize the ethical Self. This is a plausible, effective, and morally sound goal. He is not asking us to shut down structures of modernity, but rather to examine how we actualize them in our own lives, and try to hold back. The broader efficacy of Restating Orientalism can only be observed through time. But its call to constant ethical self construction, in every aspect of life, will definitely remain in the heart and mind of its individual reader.
~
“Said was aware of something, but he could not understand the true nature of Orientalism. He was close, but he did not go far enough.”
Months before the publication of his latest book, Restating Orientalism, Wael Hallaq pronounced these words at Columbia University as he lectured on the violence committed by Europe in redefining the history and politics of Islamic society. His words reverberated through the room, their weight and radicality seemed in some ways heretical and in some ways like pure Truth. Hallaq, in writing and especially in person, has a way of gaining the trust of his audience; he makes them believe each claim he makes as so blatantly obvious that it’s almost a miracle no one ever saw it before. He writes with the boldness and tenacity of a man on a mission. His message is dire and inciting, historical but also alarmingly contemporary.
Orientalism is most basically the study of the Orient, the East. For decades most of Asia was called the Orient, universities had departments of Orientalist Studies, and scholars referred to themselves as Orientalists. The terms were used in a deceivingly innocuous manner, as if the fact and history of defining the non-West under a single umbrella term merited no critique.
Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism changed all this. Said coined a new meaning for the term Orientalism, relating specifically to the power structure that the West constructs over the East. For Said, Orientalism is not merely a word to describe an academic department, but rather a broader phenomena which denotes the discourse by which imperialist cultures created a mode of knowledge in order to dominate non-westerners. Drawing on an array of literary and artistic examples, Said shows that the touchstones of Western culture tend to depict the Orient in an exoticizing manner, its people as unreflective, decadent, and underdeveloped. While not always critical of the Orient, Western discourse about the non-West placed it as essentially other, always already in an inferior relation to a Western cultural standard.
A Columbia professor of Comparative Literature, Said critiqued and synthesized particular texts which he saw as supporting his thesis of a colonialist Western discourse, his newfound definition of Orientalism. Lending his training as a close critic of texts to a detailed analysis of worldwide dynamics, his methodological insight was that “without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period.”
Said’s work incited reaction from all sides. It transformed the way people considered the history of colonialism, cultural perceptions of the East and Islam, and the instrumentalization of knowledge towards political ends. His critique is sweeping and biting, attacking a way of viewing how knowledge of other cultures is constructed, something previously unchallenged, or possibly not even noticed.
One of the scholars who has been both influenced by and reflective upon Said’s legacy in recent years is Columbia’s own Wael Hallaq. Hallaq believes in Said’s mission, but takes it farther than, in his view, Said could ever have. Hallaq claims Said did not have the tools to understand the full nature of the phenomena he so deeply critiqued. Hallaq goes through Said’s methodology, examples, and conclusions with a fine tooth comb and comes out on the other side with an understanding of Orientalism as being part of a much larger epistemological problem of which Said’s famous work is just one part.
It is with these critiques of Orientalism that Hallaq begins his work. He spends most of his first chapter, “Putting Orientalism in Its Place,” criticizing the methodological sloppiness and narrowness of scope within Said’s analysis of Orientalism. But Hallaq distinguishes himself from other critics of Said in that he critiques Said in order to expand his thesis, not to discredit it. He thinks with Said, against Said. Hallaq, as a member of the field of postcolonial studies which Said helped shape, understands the effects of Oriental- ism within a particular context yet he is also able to conceptualize how it is in fact one piece within a larger and altogether more problematic phenomenon of modern knowledge as a whole.
Hallaq’s main objection to Said is his Eurocentric understanding of Orientalism. Despite Said’s thesis criticizing the violence of the the West setting itself over the East, Hallaq sees Said as oriented within his own Western background and training, and therefore, unable to fully upset, or even fully comprehend how the West uses knowledge to subjugate the Other. Said is himself too Western to fully examine the relationship of Western knowledge to the Other. He writes on Said:
And so like Orientalist works....his preoccupation is, at the end of of the day, the West’s metropolitan cultural and scholarly production, the world that Said in reality knew and the world that in effect formed him in almost every important way (53-54).
To Hallaq, Said is a man stuck writing from a Western perspective about the perils of Orientalism. He himself is stuck in the West, only able to criticize how the West misuses its position as the standard for culture and knowledge, rather than fully disassembling the notion of a standard at all.
This is fundamental flaw of Said’s understanding of his own biases leads to many flaws within his argument. In trying to critique how Orientalists frame the Orient, Said paradoxically preserves the Western paradigm. Said cannot understand that the “difference” ascribed by Orientalists to the West is not in itself a violent act. Islamic society was different from the spiritless modern Europe. The secular, European- trained Said refuses to accept that that could be good, that difference from the West could be unproblematic.
As an alternative to Said, Hallaq offers a repositioning of Orientalism within the systematic problem that is Western knowledge itself. Using the work of Rene Guenon, a 20th century Orientalist, Hallaq is able to convincingly conceive of Orientalism as a violent product of a more fundamentally violent Modernity and not the origin of the violence itself. He first claims that the instrumentalization of Western knowledge is distinct from other forms of knowledge, as it exists “under the pretense of acting in the interest of ‘civilization’” (159). This theory of Western knowledge production is consistent with Said’s the- sis, however, Hallaq following Guenon says that “Orientalism occupies a position secondary to material- ism, science, philosophy, and the doctrine of progress” (160). Orientalism arose out of these much larger broader fields, and it must be understood as such. Materialism, science, philosophy, and the doctrine of progress must be diagnosed before the treatment of the symptoms of Orientalism can even begin to be treated. Said was not totally wrong, he just got his intellectual history muddled.
This recasting of the corpus of European weaponized knowledge to include all these fields which are so much more fundamental to society writ large is a very intense claim. But Hallaq does not shy away from the full effects of his conclusion. Where Said was criticized for his sweeping claim against all Orientalists, Hallaq makes a claim against most fields of modern European academia. Said was a Western scholar working within the West, a fish who did not realize the water in which he was swimming. He tried to correct a particular perspective, but due to his embeddedness within it, he could not capture the true scope of the problem at hand. This claim is not one of guilt, but of fact; modernity (originating in the European Renaissance) entered all fields to promote domination. The violence that this produced cannot be ignored because its pervasiveness. Hallaq is not shy in taking on this challenge. But can he prove himself right?
Hallaq tries to spell out the features of modernity and finds within it two formative ideologies. These two fundamental ways by which modernity establishes norms are (1) the theory of progress, and (2) the Is/Ought Distinction. The theory of progress demands a single telos that the world is working towards. Hallaq writes that, “historians [...] begin to see the world as moving on a linear trajectory, one that progresses from an earlier and less developed stage to civilization, always dictated by Western terms” (107). This “theology of progress” is inherent to modernity for Hallaq, seeking to fit the world into its own Western terms, terms which will always cast Western phenomena in a superior light. Thus, all historical phenomena are all on the same modern trajectory towards objective, universal perfection. This theory is the justification for the work of the modern Orientalist, colonialist, scientist, and politician. Orientalism is symptomatic of this feature of modernity, as the framework it forces the Orient into is a part of its project to move the world towards the goal of modern progress.
The second feature of modernity examined by Hallaq is the distinction created by the Is/Ought prob- lem, a problem articulated Enlightenment philosopher by David Hume. Hume states that there is no fact that something ought to be a certain way just because it exists in a certain way. Charles Taylor articulates this as “the fact/value split” (92) which has totally reshaped how we consider intrinsic value, both in regards to people and environment. The Distinction between Is/Ought is no longer prescriptive, and instead has extracted inherent value from anything found within modernity. This distinction (which Hal- laq discusses throughout the book) is crucial in understanding the ontology of modernity and therefore the roots of Orientalism. When people, cultures, and nature are not recognized as potentially valuable in themselves, Western knowledge has free reign to dominate and reorganize everything in line with its perspective, not just the discourse of Orientalism which Said comments on.
Thus, Hallaq sees Orientalism as a small part of the problem, but really diagnoses modernity itself as the structure within which such violent and extreme measures are taken. Orientalism has been understood from the time of the eponymous book’s publication largely until today as a field which tried to dominate the Other. This is too short-sighted. Hallaq writes, and this is truly the argument of the entire work, that “there is little difference between the two types of expertise, economic and Orientalist, and both culminate, on the structural level in the absolute right to domination, one through the venue of economy, the other through cultural and, more important, juridical domination (190).” I am not sure whether Hallaq would assign different value judgments to each type of expertise or whether they are identical both in origin and in moral weight. He clearly sees both as products and evidence of modernity. It is unclear whether two things can emerge from the same source and have different impacts. I think what Hallaq is trying to convey is that we should not worry about what is a worse offender, and instead reevaluate whether we can subscribe so automatically to a system which allows itself to go unchecked by morality.
Hallaq sees Orientalism as a notable manifestation of the philosophy of dominion, but also sees it as distinctly helpful in dismantling that philosophy. Unlike business, science, or philosophy, Orientalism both dominates the Other and focuses on creating that Other. Because of its conscious tools to reach the Other, Hallaq also sees a unique opportunity, through the mechanisms of Orientalism, to reapproach the Self. He writes, “If Orientalism is the most obvious bridge through which the Other was so badly constructed, then it is this bridge that can begin refashioning the self through a heuristic accessing of an instructive Other” (258). Orientalism has honed tools to observe, manipulate, and refashion the Other, and it is with these methodologies that the Self can be reformed as well. The Orient—a real, pre-modern, and ethically superior field of inquiry—can be used as a foil to understand the ethical alternative to the sovereign modern man.
I see Hallaq’s critique of modernity and reworking of Orientalism as both impossibly large and manageably personal. In this book he attempts to take on all of modernity. Said’s book necessitated a complete rethinking of the goals and assumptions of Orientalism, and Hallaq seems to want a similar reaction after his book to all fields emerging from modernity. This is a very tall order, both in its breadth and its depth. A businessman or scientist being convinced of their subconscious goals of domination as part of a large historical structure seems quite unlikely. Instead, Hallaq’s vision could only be realized by each person realizing her own position and ethical relationship to her surroundings. This book is a call to the individual reader and not to the world at once.
Hallaq is not asking you to create an ethical Other because that is paradoxical. Each person must in- stead realize and actualize the ethical Self. This is a plausible, effective, and morally sound goal. He is not asking us to shut down structures of modernity, but rather to examine how we actualize them in our own lives, and try to hold back. The broader efficacy of Restating Orientalism can only be observed through time. But its call to constant ethical self construction, in every aspect of life, will definitely remain in the heart and mind of its individual reader.
//DANIELLE HARRIS is a junior in Columbia College. She can be reached at dfh2116@columbia.edu.
Photo courtesy of: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/isbn/9780231187626.
Photo courtesy of: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/isbn/9780231187626.