Alex’s Reviews > Orientalism > Status Update

“Orientals were rarely seen or looked at; they were seen through, analyzed not as citizens, or even people, but as problems to be solved or confined or—as the colonial powers openly coveted their territory—taken over.”

(The sky and the sea are still there; the Oriental sky and the Ionian sky give each other the sacred kiss of love each morning; but the earth is dead, dead because man has killed it, and the gods have fled.)

“Quinet suggestively describes the whole world as a temple and human history as a sort of religious rite.”

“Knowledge no longer requires application to reality; knowledge is what gets passed on silently, without comment, from one text to another.”

“The European encounter with the Orient, and specifically with Islam, strengthened this system of representing the Orient and turned Islam into the very epitome of an outsider against which the whole of European civilization from the Middle Ages on was founded.”

“For Orientalism was ultimately 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”). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, “we” lived in ours.”

“European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.”

Even the language of the war is dehumanizing in the extreme: “We’ll go in there take out Saddam, destroy his army with clean surgical strikes, and everyone will think it’s great,” said a congresswoman on national television.