This is not the way to learn about other peoples and cultures

In the context of the protests at universities in Switzerland and abroad against Israel’s war in Gaza, the term ‘post-colonial studies’ and the name Edward Said have been repeatedly mentioned. Said, an American professor of literature of Palestinian origin, might be known to many for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he founded together with the conductor Daniel Barenboim in 1999.¹ However, less well known to us is his fundamental critique of Western imperialism in relation to the Arab world and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Founding text of post-colonial studies

Said’s book “Orientalism”, published in 1978, is considered the founding text of post-colonial studies.² In it, he illustrates, through the example of Anglo-Saxon and French representatives of Oriental studies, that their research and publications may not be seen as separate from the respective politics of their ruling elites, but that they rather prepared the way for the imperialist subordination of the Middle East. Said thus places the first major scientific exploration of a non-European country, the four-volume “Déscription de l’Egypte”, in the context of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798:
  “To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness; to instruct […] the Orient in the ways of modern West; […] to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its ‚natural‘ role as an appendage to Europe; to dignify all the knowledge, collected during colonial occupation with the title ‚contribution to modern learning‘ when the natives had neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pretext for a text whose usefulness was not to the natives; to feel oneself as a European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time and geography; […] and, above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actually mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one’s power: these are the features of Orientalist projection entirely realised in the Description de l’Egypte, itself enabled and reinforced by Napoleon’s wholly Orientalist engulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and power. “³

An Oriental man was first 
an Oriental and only second a man

Said shows how these researchers portray a supposedly objective image of the Orient, which however makes use of age-old prejudices. The constructed image of the Orient is shot through and through with racist assumptions, barely camouflaged mercenary interests, reductionistic explanations and anti-human prejudices.⁴ It is not based on an equal dialogue with the inhabitants of the Orient, but on monologues about the Orient without knowing the situation on the ground; in some cases, the researchers had never travelled to the Orient themselves.
  Finally, an ontological contrast between the people of East and West is postulated with the inhabitants of the Orient being portrayed as fundamentally different from those of the Occident: backward, degenerate, static, controlled by a powerful sexual drive, lacking “the sense of law”.⁵ According to the French orientalist Ernest Renan, for example, the inhabitants of the Orient – since they are Semites – appear as an “inferior mixture of human nature (une combinaison inférieure de la nature humaine)”, as “rabid monotheists who produced no mythology, no art, no commerce, no civilisation; their consciousness is a narrow and rigid one […].”⁶ Said gets to the point: “An Oriental man was first an Oriental and only second a man.”⁷ Human bonds between Orient and Occident have thus been impeded, and the destructive imperialist policy has faced only little resistance in the West – until today:
  “As momentous, generally important issues face the world […], popular caricatures of the Orient are exploited by politicians whose source of ideological supply is not only the half-literate technocrat but the superliterate Orientalist. […]. These contemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilisation. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world ressources.”⁸ According to Said, this still had an impact on Oriental studies in the 1970s and 1980s: “But the principal dogmas of Orientalism exist in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam. Let us recapitulate them here; one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is, that abstractions about the Orient […] are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalised and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and even scientifically ‘objective’. A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared […], or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).”⁹

“Co-existence and humanistic 
enlargement” or “control 
and external dominion”?

In the second half of his book, Said deals with American Orientalism after 1945 and its influence on American foreign policy.
  According to Said, the Middle East experts who advise policymakers are imbued with Orientalism almost to a person. “The Orientalists now tries to see the Orient as an imitation West which, according to Bernard Lewis, can only improve itself when its nationalism ‘is prepared to come to terms with the West’.”¹⁰ In the preface to the new edition of the book in 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, Said critically states: “It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials […] was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds […] but disguised for its true intent, hastened and reasoned by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W. Bush’s Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajimi, […] who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline that only American power could reverse.”¹¹ Said complains that the graduates of ‘Middle Eastern Studies’, as Oriental Studies is called today, “have no live notion of the language of what real people actually speak”.¹² What is lost in the end is what really characterises getting to know other peoples and cultures, that is, “understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes.” Said argues in favour of understanding in the sense of “co-existence and humanistic enlargement” as opposed to the “will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion”.¹³ Said’s analysis gave rise to many debates, including critical ones. For example, he ignored the contribution of German-speaking Oriental studies in the 19^th century, although those were of great importance for the discipline and, as in the example of Ignaz Goldziher, bear witness to a genuine understanding of the region and its inhabitants. He also denied many researchers a genuine interest in their field. Another point of criticism is that although debunking the ahistorical orientalist bias of Western intellectuals, Said failed to address similar tendencies on the Arab side, which mystify the Orient as better and thus also construct a fundamental opposition between Orient and Occident. This process is referred to by the Syrian philosopher Sadiq al Azm as “Orientalism in reverse”. This criticism of Said’s ‘Orientalism’ might be understandable if one puts the book in the context of its time considering it a polemic against a prevailing trend in Oriental studies in 1970s USA, which showed little sympathy for the Palestinian-Arab side in the Middle East conflict.

Reception in the Arab world

Said’s fundamental analysis of how a biased image of another culture is constructed in order to legitimise one’s own quest for dominance has been widely approved of. In the Arab world, the impact of these mechanisms of domination on their own culture has been realised. The aforementioned Syrian philosopher Sadiq al-Azm agrees with Said on this point. The Saudi writer Abd ar-Raḥmān Munīf, who is renowned in the Arab world, follows Said in denouncing the arrogance of the West and its constant attempts to keep the prevailing intellectual, social and political patterns backward by claiming that more progressive systems are not suitable for these countries, referring to history, traditions, climate and faith.¹⁴ He states that this orientalist view, with its arrogance, exaggeration and false standards, contributes a great deal to this and still dominates the Western attitude towards the Orient, making intellectual and cultural exchange unequal, focusing only on what one would like to see in the other. ¹⁵ Said himself speaks very clearly: “(T)he accommodation between the intellectual class and the new imperialism might very well be accounted one of the special triumphs of Orientalism. The Arab world today is an intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of the United States”.¹⁶
Cultural hegemony as an 

instrument of imperialist power

Here, Said refers to an important instrument of domination of contemporary Western imperialism, cultural hegemony. This cultural hegemony manifests itself in “the fact of consumerism in the Orient. The Arab and Islamic world as a whole is hooked into the Western market system.” As a consequence, “there is a vast standardisation of taste in the region, symbolised not only by  transistors, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola, but also by cultural images of the Orient supplied by American mass media and consumed unthinkingly by the mass television audience”. Said mentions as a further effect that an Arab today is regarding himself as an ‘Arab’ of the sort put out by Hollywood. He states that the intelligentsia itself is auxiliary to what it considers to be the main trends stamped out in the West giving legitimacy and authority to ideas about modernisation, progress, a culture that it receives from the United States for the most part.¹⁷ He conludes: “The modern Orient in short, participates in its own Orientalizing.”¹⁸
  Said’s understanding of what undermining one’s own cultural identity can mean for personal development is a result of his own biography. Edward Said grew up in the conflict between the Arab world and a family that wanted to align itself with the values of the Western world. In his autobiography “Out of Place”, Said impressively describes what it means to grow up in a world in which one’s own culture and language are denied and the culture of the empire is admired. His family had to settle in Egypt after 1948. He attended a British school there, where he learned to despise his own culture: “We learned about English life and activities, about monarchy and parliament, about India and Africa, about customs and idioms that we could not use in Egypt or anywhere else. Being and speaking Arabic was […] considered despicable, and accordingly we never received adequate instruction in our own language, history, culture and geography.”¹⁹ Cultural hegemony aims at undermining and destroying the cultural identity of the subjugated countries. Said illuminates this by taking the Arab world as an example. Given the profound transformation processes that we have undergone in our own countries in recent decades, his analysis should make us reflect.

Working together of cultures 
on the basis of equality

Throughout his life, Edward Said was committed to cooperation between cultures, mutual exchange and enrichment on the basis of equality. In the preface 2003 he suggests that “rather than the manufactured clash of cultures, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.”²⁰ In this sense, he considers his work to be part of a human, and humanistic desire for enlightenment and emancipation that is not easily deferred.²¹ In his book “Culture and Imperialism”, published in 1993, he called for cooperation between cultures on an equal basis in awareness of their differences. He believes this is a future-orientated approach. “Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life being about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things. […] It is more rewarding – and more difficult – to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about ‘us’. But this also means not to trying to rule others, […] not continually reiterating how ‘our’ culture our country is number one”. ²²

Post-colonialism and enlightenment

All his life, Said was a politically engaged person who in the postcolonial debate, never refrained from pointing out the consequences of the Western quest for power and dominance Said kept an critical distance to Western post-modernism, whose deconstructivist theories influenced the further development of postcolonial studies. He stated that first of all, there was much greater Eurocentric bias in post-modernism. On the other hand, the earliest studies of the post-colonial almost all were based on studies of domination and control made from the standpoint of either a completed political independence or an incomplete liberationist project. “Yet whereas post-modernism in one of its most famous programmatic statements (by Jean-François Lyotard) stresses the disappearance of the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment, the emphasis behind much of the work done by the first generation of post-colonial artists and scholars is exactly the opposite”. Said concludes that this crucial difference between the urgent historical and political imperatives of post-colonialism and post-modernism’s relative detachment makes for altogether different approaches and results.²³
Post-colonialist thinking, as Said understands it, is rooted in the ideas of the Enlightenment and the notion of the equality of all people and their cultures. On this basis, a reflection on the impact of criminal colonialism may open up the potential for cultures to work together as equals.  •

¹ It is a symphony orchestra of Israeli, Arab, Turkish and Spanish musicians aiming to help Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian people get to know each other, work together, break down prejudices and thus contribute to peace.
² Schäbler, Brigitte. “Rising the Turns. Edward Saids Buch Orientalism als Erfolgsgeschichte. In: Schnepel, Burkhardt et al. Orient – Orientalistik – Orientalismus, p. 289: The term post-colonial first appeared in 1977 as the title of an English-language literary journal. The term was used to describe young literature from Third World countries in which the authors dealt with the colonialist legacy and their everyday lives. Under the influence of deconstructivist literary theories, the meaning of the term was expanded and changed. Post-colonial studies emerged. They are based on the conviction that Western dominance claims over the rest of the world can best be analysed and debunked in the form of texts from the colonial era. The techniques of post-structuralism and deconstructivism were applied.
³ Said, Edward. Orientalism, reissued in Penguin Classics, 2019, p. 86
⁴ The Syrian philosopher Sadiq Al Azm characterises this in his 1980 essay “Orientalism and orientalism in reverse”
⁵ Said Edward W., Orientalism, p. 277
⁶ ibid., p. 142
⁷ ibid., p. 231
⁸ ibid., p. 108
⁹ ibid., p. 300ff
¹⁰ ibid., p. 321
¹¹ ibid., p. xii
¹² ibid., p. xii
¹³ ibid., p. xii
¹⁴ Abd ar-Raḥmān Munīf. Some effects of the oil discovery on the societies of the Arabian Peninsula (Baʿḍu ʾāṯāri ṣidmati-n-nafṭi fī-l-ǧazīrati al-ʿarabīya), own translation from Arabic
¹⁵ ibid.
¹⁶ Said, Edward. Orientalism, p. 322
¹⁷ ibid., p. 324ff
¹⁸ ibid., p. 325
¹⁹ Said, Edward. Am falschen Ort, 2000, p. 285, own translation
²⁰ Said repeatedly criticised the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’, which was developed by Samuel Huntington in the USA in the 1990s and served as the intellectual foundation for the American quest for dominance.
²¹ Said, Edward. Orientalism, p. xx
²² Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism, 1994, p. 433
²³ Said, Edward. Orientalism, p. 35