Orientalism Quotes

“The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“كلما ازداد تعدي أوروبا على الشرق في القرن التاسع عشر ازدادت ثقة الجمهور [الغربي] بالإستشراق. لكنه إذا كانت هذه الزيادة في الثقة قد تزامنت مع نقصان الإصالة، فلا ينبغي لنا أن ندهش كثيراً، لأن أسلوب الإستشراق منذ البداية كان يقوم على إعادة البناء والتكرار”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“فلم يكن القصد من وصف شخص ما بأنه شرقي، على نحو ما دأب عليه المستشرقون، ينحصر في الإشارة إلى أن لغة هذا الشخص وجغرافية بلاده وتاريخه من موضوعات الدراسة العلمية، بل كثيراً ما كان ذلك التعبير يرمي إلى الحط من شأن الشخص ويعني أنه ينتمي إلى سلالة دنيا من البشر، وإن كان ذلك لاينفي أن كلمة "الشرق" كانت ترتبط في أذهان بعض المبدعين مثل نيرفال وسيجالين ارتباطاً رائعاً وخلاباً بالغرابة، والبهاء، والغموض، والوعد، ولكن الكلمة كانت بمثابة تعميم تاريخي مغرق في شموله.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“يتحجج بأنه رجل و أني إمرأة ويتذكر فقط وقتها أننا شرقيون ! أمر عجيب أنحن شرقيون نساءً وغربيون رجالا؟!”
― ياسمين ثابت, وثالثهما الموت

“After two years' absence she finally returned to chilly Europe, a trifle weary, a trifle sad, disgusted by our banal entertainments, our shrunken landscapes, our impoverished lovemaking. Her soul had remained over there, among the gigantic, poisonous flowers. She missed the mystery of old temples and the ardor of a sky blazing with fever, sensuality and death. The better to relive all these magnificent, raging memories, she became a recluse, spending entire days lying about on tiger skins, playing with those pretty Nepalese knives 'which dissipate one's dreams'.”
― Octave Mirbeau

“Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes.”
― Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation

“Yet, if we insist on dividing the world into multiple worlds, and if we consider all the wars, crimes, plundering, and exploitation the so-called ‘first world’ has committed against the worlds ranked lower, then does that really make it ‘first’ in anything? Is a world that commits all these atrocities worthy of being called ‘first’? If we, for the sake of argument, assume that the ‘first’ world is called so because it is more technologically and scientifically advanced, then we must raise another critical question, should humans be measured by their advances in technology, nuclear power, and other destructive weapons, or should they be measured by their level of humanity, mercy, and kindness?”
― Louis Yako

“In the wake of the Reformation, as the correct reading of scripture became a matter of increasingly high stakes, Hebrew, as well as Aramaic, Samaritan, Ethiopian, Armenian, and other languages that preserved versions of scripture and documents of the early church, became essential weapons of theological warfare.”
― Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity

“We have dangerously warmed our world already, and our governments still refuse to take the actions necessary to halt the trend. There was a time when many had the right to claim ignorance. But for the past three decades, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created and climate negotiations began, this refusal to lower emissions has been accompanied with full awareness of the dangers. And this kind of recklessness would have been functionally impossible without institutional racism, even if only latent. It would have been impossible without Orientalism, without all the potent tools on offer that allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful. These tools - of ranking the relative value of humans - are what allow the writing off of entire nations and ancient cultures. And they are what allowed for the digging up of all that carbon to begin with.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

“Kung Fu's process of individualization similarly takes part in this backlash as the representation of the social ills experienced by racial minorities is routinely disciplined and rechanneled to make the show palatable for mass consumption. Under this rubric, it is assumed that changing the hearts of individuals will automatically lead to changing society. To a post-1960s liberal audience who obviously felt sympathy toward the plight of racial minorities but who nevertheless were wary of certain measures taken by these groups toward self-determination and weary from extended conflict, this simple adage proved seductive. Indeed, for a great many Americans, post-Civil Rights race relations has transformed the United States into an unruly site with different groups vying for cultural, economic, and political resources. In this way, Kung Fu's Wild West setting—the uneven hand of justice, the social free-for-all, the generally inhospitable natural landscape—seemed to reflect the audience's view of their contemporary social environment. It also mirrored the overall impotence that Americans felt toward ameliorating the situation. Given such a scenario, individualizing racial oppression and other social inequities may have seemed like a final alternative.

While this process of individualization is key in deciphering the show's political stance, the types of identifications the series forged between character and audience more substantively reveal its ideological commitments. Although Kung Fu's psychospiritualized vision was available to all of its audience members, one could argue that it was primarily framed as a commentary toward racial minorities and women who sought social change through means other than or in addition to inner transformation. It achieved this through a formulaic pattern of identifications.”
― Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture

“That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth that needs only to be mentioned to an Arab Palestinian for its irony to be perfectly understood.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

“According to the orator Dio Chrysostom, India had rivers of flowing milk and olive oil, its people lived to be over four hundred years old but stayed young and beautiful and had no disease.”
― Jerry Toner, Homer's Turk: How Classics Shaped Ideas of the East

“There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons.”
― Edward Said إدوارد سعيد

“Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonize populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“An optimism. First you make the sherbet and then the baklava.”
― Ljupka Cvetanova, Yet Another New Land

“Orientalism is but one historical variety of larger epistemological issues, that of the West's encounter with other cultures and of its tendency to disparage and/or idealize them.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Despite his nativist tendency, Suzuki relied heavily on the categories of nineteenth-century Orientalism. He simply inverted the old schemas to serve his own purposes to present Zen as the source and goal of all mystical experiences.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“It also tries to show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate an even underground self.”
― Edward Said, Bloomsbury Revelations

“For there is no doubt that imaginative geography and history hello the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatising the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.”
― Edward Said W

“Cunninghame Graham, having sold his Highland demense and moved to London in 1900, was a regular visitor to Cromwell Place, and together they plotted their Fez adventure, for which they would enlist the help of Walter Harris, and enable Lavery to revive his Orientalist ambitions. The Sultan's harem, a fantasy that had fired the Wetern male imagination, required exorcism. When the voyeur finally got within plain sight of this forbidden world in the Sultan's palace at Fez, with a large canvas concealed in an adjacent room, he was overwhelmed by its ennui. Fantasy, he was compelled to conclude, was more powerful than fact.”
― Kenneth McConkey, Lavery on Location

“I consider Orientalism's failure to have been a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience.”
― Edward Said

“The barren father declares us 'children of darkness'
in the mortal hours—what could I be in the camp of privations
but bones on display, dealer in my own destruction, ripe fodder
for the insatiable canon of Western dreams of the orient?”
― Saif Sidari

“The barren father declares us 'children of darkness'
in the mortal hours—what could I be in the camp of privations
but bones on display, dealer in my own destruction, ripe fodder
for the insatiable canon of Western dreams of the orient?”
― Saif Sidari”
― Saif Sidari, Visiting Hours

“Time and again, I'd hear throwaway stories of Afghan dead, often peppered into conversations as a means of conveying the seriousness of the situation without upending the narrative. It reminds me, in a way, of the ubiquitous scene in countless post-9/11 American war movies. In this scene, the protagonist, a morally upright sniper or checkpoint guard in a difficult situation, must choose whether to shoot dead a small Brown child or a woman in a niqab (who's to say it's a woman at all, underneath that thing?), who might be carrying some kind of suicide bomb. Surely any rational narrative assessment of the situation would conclude that the center of the story is not the sniper, but the person on the other side of the scope, whose life hangs in the balance. But the dead, unnamed, serve their purpose. It is the purpose of Westerners to contend with stakes, it is the purpose of everyone else to establish them.”
― El Akkad Omar

“the Orientalist ego is very much in evidence, however much his style tries for impartial impersonality.”
― Edward W. Said

“Semua orang yang sudah tak punya gairah hidup atau jemu setelah kenyang kesenangan, semestinya juga pergi ke Jawa. Mereka akan menemukan sebuah hidup penuh warna bak lukisan kisah kematian raja Sardanapalus!”
― Honoré de Balzac, Voyage de Paris à Java / Un drame au bord de la mer

“Kelak, sendainya ketika pulau Jawa tak lagi punya hiasan berupa musim semi yang berlangsung sepanjang masa, tak lagi punya panorama alam yang memesona, juga tak lagi punya rimbanya yang perawan, pula tak lagi ada kota-kota yang ramai oleh beragam suku bangsa, di mana bisa kau jumpai perpaduan keanggunan ala India dan kemewahan khas Eropa; atau pada akhirnya ketika pulau itu bisa bersih dari para bidadarinya yang menggairahkan, dan menyisakan hanya kawanan burung gelatik, maka sudah seharusnya kunjungan ziarah ke tanah Jawa tetap dilakukan demi mempelajari samai pada tingkat mana alam liar ini bisa menandingi kemampuan manusia dalam mencipta irama.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Voyage de Paris à Java / Un drame au bord de la mer

“Malangnya, aku adalah seorang yang teramat buruk dalam hal ilmu alam, karenanya aku kerap mengabaikan banyak peristiwa ajaib melalui pengamatan yang hanya sepintas. Aku tak bisa menceritakan padamu berapa jumlah bulu sayap makhluk nan puitis ini, tak pula bisa menjelaskan di mana persisnya letak lubang hidung dalam paruhnya, atau apakah kedua rahangnya terhubung baik maupun bagaimanakah wujud tulang kakinya. Tapi bagaimanapun juga, gelatik ini adalah milikku...! Dia punyaku. Hanya aku yang mampu mendengar dan mengerti. Betul, burung ini, paling tidak pada kicauannya, adalah sebentuk rahasia antara jiwaku dan langit, seperti syair sendu terlukis dalam catatan Webber yang tetap menyimpan misteri antara dua orang yang saling mencintai.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Voyage de Paris à Java / Un drame au bord de la mer

“Eropa serasa tak punya daya, sebab hanya bangsa Asia dan Tuhan-lah yang mampu mencipta kenikmatan sebegitu rupa, yang tak bisa diucap melalui kata, ibarat dekap hangat dua hati yang melantunkan nyanyi mistis.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Voyage de Paris à Java / Un drame au bord de la mer

“Itulah mengapa negeri Timur punya teramat sedikit penulis. Orang di sana terlalu bahagia dengan kehidupan sendiri hingga tak perlu memikirkan hidup orang lain. jadi apa gunanya lagi ada kecerdasan kalau semua adalah melulu soal perasaan!”
― Honoré de Balzac