Topic;

Summary of orientalism by Edward said(1st &2nd chapter)

Submitted to;

Maryum majeed

Submitted by;

Naheed nazar

Uzma rani

Dated

9/05/2011
Knowing the oriental:

It was Belfour how delivered a lecture to house of commons (a terminology used to define the
resources that are collectively own) “the problem with which we have to deal in Egypt” it was
a time of 13 june, 1910 the time of the downfall of Egypt and Belfour was a member of
Parliament at that time and he called Egypt as a “wholly different category” its shows here he
want to say that they are different form us. They are not like us and Balfour served as a monarch
and soon he considered as a person of knowledge and this knowledge makes them superior to
rule over other as he take the challenge of J.M.Robertson that are those special things which
make them to call the others “oriental” the choice of oriental was like a forming canon which
had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron.

And he replied “who has even the most superficial knowledge of history” its could be
interpreted like this it was a reason in the eyes of Belfour to rule over the Egypt because we
knows better about them and their history so he justify that their “power and knowledge” is the
main reason to occupy Egypt.

Balfour no where denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as
he describes the consequences of knowledge. The people of Egypt are not able to govern
themselves “Self Government” there should be absolute Western government in which whole
authority given to its ruler. The people of nation can not interfere in affaires of state as according
to Balfour that we are in Egypt not for the sake of their we are there for our own sake.

Belfour gives the facts that how they emerge in history to show that they are able to rule over the
others, as they have ability to rule over the world and Egypt is not able to rule them. They have
the glorious past but now Egyptians are not able to rule because their knowledge is not as better
for them as they have in past. Belfour speak a lot because he was well aware of his duty as a
member of parliament on the behalf of England that Egypt is vindicated by West. This
vindication is their authority over them. Belfour rewarded Cromer fifty thousand pounds for
what he had done in Egypt. According to Belfour Egypt is made by Cromer “every thing he has
touched he had succeeded in…”
The ruler are going to take all the action of Government in their own hand as according to
Cromer they are the “subject races” and we need to control them and “Logic” is something
which is always ignore by Oriental.

Oreientalism is a term invented by European and west, refers to the discourse by the west about
the east, which comprises a vast corpus of text- literary, sociological, scientific, historical,
linguistic philological, political, anthropological and topographical which has been accumulating
since the Renaissance and particularly since the 18th century and to which there is no counter
part in the East about west.

It also refers to the attitude of West towards the East, (the outsiders) looking on/out/at the orient
in fact watching the East and endeavoring to explain and interpret it.

The scope of orientalism the write consider tell about that all oriental is same even they lived any
place and they belong to any nation for example Indian, Egyptain, or Shilluks etc. He said that if
you want to control the oriental you control own way and they don't understand and they don't
know what they are and if check the standard of judge by western standard.

When subject nations asked for free soiergirty and national instituted Cromer rejected this offer
because he think that they does not know what is best for them.

"Subject race did not have it in them to know what was good for them."

Comer explained the characteristics of orientations he explained because he has experience with
India and Egypt. Orientals can be managed easily trough certain formulas because everywhere
they are same. They treated like inhuman beings because human beings have their individuality.

"Orientals were almost everywhere nearly the same"

Cromer and Balfour explain about Orientals knowledge they said that

"Knowledge of Orientals their race, character, culture, history, traditions, society, and
possibilities. This knowledge was effective"

Balfour who was a member of parliament in 1940 spoke for his nation's behalf.
According to his there is no point of superiority and inferiority. Basic thing is knowledge.
Knowledge about there notices they have knowledge power these subjected races not military or
economic power. This knowledge basically helps them to dominate on these nations to home
authority over them. Balfour gives his own knowledge logic for his views that:

England knows Egypt; Egypt is what England knows"

West think that they are self governing people and orients are people who never can have self
governed so they should be governed. These nations are not useful when they are governed by
west. West must dominate and east must be dominated.

Balfour didn’t let Egyptian speak for them. He thinks that anu Egyptians who would speak is
likely to be an agitator.

Cromer, who was also the member of parliament, also give his remark about orientals. he called
them subject race. according to him their knowledge about Egypt gives them a sense of power
over Egypt. he gives his views abouthow to governs? he says orientals should know about the
contentments of subjected race. rules should be wise enough to make them satisfied. He should
be disciplined too. He should know about what these people are who are they? what they think is
best for them? subjected race does notknow what's good for them so they must be guided. but to
dominate on Orientals, they should have knowledge about them, about their race, culture,
traditions, society, and possibilities tested and unwanted knowledge. Though this any oriental
might be examine, understand and expose(his personal cannon of Orientalist wisdom).

Sir Alfred Lyell tell us European and Orientals. European are close reasoned, no ambiguity about
their statement. He is hater dally skeptical and requires proof of any think by he accept it. he is
intelligent.

On the other hand, Orientals are not a least intelligent people, they are irrational, they cannot
give explain for simple things. They are ill-mannered.

Orientals generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European.

Two principals elements in the relation between East and West. One was a growing systemic
knowledge in Europe about the orient, knowledge forced by colonial encounter as well as by the
widespread interest.

European was always in a position of strength, not to say domination.

And With such experiences as Napoleon's the Orient as a body of knowledge in the West was
modernized, and this is a second form in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century Orientalism
existed. From the outset of the period I shall be examining there was everywhere amongst Orient
lists the ambition to formulate their discoveries, experiences, and insights suitably in modem
terms, to put ideas about the Orient in a very close touch with modern realties.

Kennan’s linguistic investigations of Semitic in 1848, for example, were couched in a style that
drew heavily for its authority upon contemporary comparative grammar, comparative anatomy,
and racial theory; these lent his Orientals prestige and—the other side of the coin—made
Orientals vulnerable, as it has been ever since, to modish as well as seriously influential currents
of thought in the West. Orientals has been subjected to imperial positivism, utopianism,
historicism, Darwinism, racism, Freudianism, Marxism,Spenglerism. But Orientalism, like many
of the natural and social sciences, has had "paradigms" of research, its own learned societies.

Orientalism imposed limits upon thought about the Orient. Even the most imaginative writers of
an age, men like Flaubert, Nerval, or Scott, were constrained in what they could either
experience of say about the Orient. For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality
whose structure, promoted the difference between the familiar and the strange. Orientals lived in
their world, "we “lived in ours. The vision and material reality propped each other up, kept each
other going. e Orientals reality is both antihuman and persistent. Its scope, as much as its
institutions and all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present.

Cromer again an accomplished technician of empire and also a beneficiary of Orientals. He can
furnish us with a rudimentary answer. In T h e Government of Subject Races" he wrestles with
the problem of how Britain, a nation of individuals, is to administer a wide-flung empire
according to a number of central principles. He contrasts the one to all agent," who has both a
specialist's knowledge of the native and an Anglo-Saxon individuality, with the central authority
at home in London. The language is vague and unattractive, but the point is not hard to grasp.
Cromer envisions a scat of power in the West, and radiating out from it towards the East a great
embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it.
The Oriental becomes, for example, a subject race, an example of an "Oriental" mentality; ail for
the enhancement of the “authority" at home. "Local interests” are Orientals special interests; the
"central authority" is the general interest of the imperial society as a whole. Cromer's "also"
reminds us that certain men, such as Orientals, can be singled out as the subject for proper study.
The proper studying this sense of Orientals is Orientals, properly separate from other forms of
knowledge, but finally useful for the material and social reality enclosing all knowledge at any
time, supporting knowledge, providing it with us. The result is usually to polarize the distinction
the Oriental becomes more Oriental, the Westerner more Western and limit the human encounter
between different cultures, traditions, and societies. Orient is taken for granted as having the
status of scientific truth.

Our contemporary Henry Kissinger does it also, rarely with more express frankness than in his
essay "Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy. The drama he depicts is a real one, in which the
United States must manage its behavior in the world under the pressures of domestic forces on
the one hand and of foreign realities on the other. Kissinger's method in the essay proceeds
according to what linguists call binary opposition: that is, he shows that there are two styles in
foreign policy (the prophetic and the political), two types of technique, two periods, and so forth.
When at the end of the historical part of his argument he is brought face to face with the
contemporary world, he divides it accordingly into two halves, the developed and the developing
countries. The first half, which is the West, "is deeply committed to the notion that the real world
is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data the more
accurately the better." Kissinger's proof for this is the Newtonian revolution, which has not taken
place in the developing world. "Cultures which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking
have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the real world is almost completely
internal to the observer." Consequently, he adds, "empirical reality has a much different
significance for many of the new countries than for the West because in a certain sense they
never went through the process of discovering it."

Kissinger may not have known on what fund of pedigreed knowledge he was drawing when he
cut the world up into pre-Newtonian and post-Newtonian conceptions of reality. But his
distinction is identical with the orthodox one made by Orientalists, who separate Orientals from
Westerners.
Another illustration dovetails neatly perhaps too neatly with Kissinger's analysis. In its February
1972 issue, the American Journal of Psychiatry printed an essay by Harold W. Glidden, who is
identified as a retired member of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, United States
Department of State; the essay's title ('The Arab World"), its tone, and its content argue a highly
characteristic Orientalist bent of mind. The article itself purports to uncover "the inner workings
of Arab behavior," which from our point of view is "aberrant" but for Arabs is "normal."After
this auspicious start, we are told that Arabs stress conformity; that Arabs inhabit a shame culture
whose "prestige system" involves the ability to attract followers and clients.

Glidden continues, now more enthusiastically: "it is a notable fact that while the Arab value
system demands absolute solidarity within the group, it at the same time encourages among its
members a kind of rivalry that is destructive of that very solidarity"; in Arab society only
"success counts" and "the end justifies the means “Arabs live "naturally" in a world
"characterized by anxiety expressed in generalized suspicion and distrust, which has been labeled
free-floating hostility"; "the art of subterfuge is highly developed in Arab life, as well as in Islam
itself'; the Arab need for vengeance overrides everything, otherwise the Arab would feel “ego-
destroying" shame. Therefore, if "Westerners consider peace to be high on the scale of values"
and if "we have a highly developed consciousness of the value of time," this is not true of
Arabs."In fact," we are told, "in Arab tribal society (where Arab values originated), strife, not
peace, was the normal state of affairs because raiding was one of the two main supports of the
economy." The purpose of this learned disquisition is merely to show how on the Western and
Oriental scale of values "the relative position of the elements is quite different."

This is the apogee of Orientlist confidence. No merely asserted generality is denied the dignity of
truth; no theoretical list of Oriental attributes is without application to the behavior of Orientals
in the real world. On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are Arab-
Orientals; the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of
holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things. Out of what
collective and yet particularized view of the Orient do these statements emerge? What
specialized skills, what imaginative pressures, what institutions and traditions, what cultural
forces produce such similarity in the descriptions of the Orient to be found in Cramer, Balfour,

Chapter#2
Imaginative Geography and its Representations:

Orientalizing the oriental:

Edward Said’s book Orientalism is regarded as perhaps the most influential 20th Century writing
on political and social movements in the Middle East. Said’s historical argument about the
dominance of Western culture and politics continues to ‘ring true’ to many marginalized people
throughout the region, and yet his text is also a highly debatable argument.

The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the
Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for
the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior
and alien ("Other") to the West.
Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated
by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases apparently suited to the Orient." It is the
image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak,
yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both
eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping
generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.

Strictly speaking, Orientalism is a field of learned study. In the Christian West, Orientalism is
considered to have commenced its formal existence with the decision of the Church Council of
Vienne in 1312 to establish a series of chairs in “Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac at Paris,
Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca.” Yet any account of Orientalism would have to
consider not only the professional Orientalist and his work but also the very notion of a field of
study based on a geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic unit called the Orient. A field can
change so entirely, in even the most traditional disciplines like philology, history, or theology, as
to make an all-purpose definition of subject matter almost impossible.

To speak of scholarly specialization as a geographical “field” is, in the case of Orientalism, fairly
revealing since no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it called Occidentalism. A
classicist, a Romance specialist, even an Americat focuses on a relatively modest portion of the
world, not on a full half of it. But Orientalism is a field with considerable geographical ambition.
And since Orientalists have traditionally occupied themselves with things Oriental (a specialist in
Islamic law, no less than an expert in Chinese dialects or in Indian religions, is considered an
Orientalist by people who call themselves Orientalists), we must learn to accept enormous,
indiscriminate size plus an almost infinite capacity for subdivision as one of the chief
characteristics of Orientalism one that is evidenced in its confusing amalgam of imperial
vagueness and precise detail.
 

The very power and scope of Orientalism produced not only a fair amount of exact positive
knowledge about the Orient but also a kind of second-order knowledge. Today an Orientalist is
less likely to call himself an Orientalist than he was almost any time up to World War II. Yet the
designation is still useful, as when universities maintain programs or departments in Oriental
languages or Oriental civilizations. There is an Oriental “faculty” at Oxford, and a department of
Oriental studies at Princeton.

Said is looking at the relationship between knowledge and geography. “if we agree that all things
in history, like history itself, are made by men, then we will appreciate how possible it is for
many objects or places or times to be assigned and given meanings”. “Asia speaks through and
by virtue of the European imagination”. In the past, Mohammed was portrayed as dangerous and
heretical.

A textual attitude is what developed regarding Orientalism and there are two factors that
contributed to it. First of all, people are confronting a subject that is unknown and threatening.
People then fall back on what they have read about the subject. A second reason has to do with
the fact that it appears to be successful. In this situation, reality is determined by what the reader
has read. It is basically the books that made the Orient possible. The textual approach was put
into practice with Orientalism.

The views of Orientalism, which had begun to change in the late1800s, continued to change
during the1900s. Orientalism came to have two traits known: first, the linguistic importance of
the Orient to Europe and the West led to a scientific self-consciousness, and second, that there
would always be a tendency for people to try to divide, subdivide, and re divide the subject.

 “The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less
important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an
imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel; thus a house may be haunted or
homelike, or prisonlike or magical. So space acquires emotional and even rational sense by
a kind of poetic process whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are
converted into meaning for us here”.

The second part of Chapter One of Orientalism is entitled: “Imaginative Geography and its
Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental.” In this section, Said argues that Orientalism relies
heavily on the production of geographical knowledge in the imperial centre, since for him any
representation of the Orient is necessarily spatial. Yet, beyond the techniques of mapping that
underplayed the imperial project, he is interested in teasing out the cultural and symbolic
domains of this geographical understanding, since it is the cultural politics of space and place
that he is primarily concerned with uncovering. Thus, his is not a typical geographical
undertaking, one that seeks to direct us to the cartographic techniques of what he calls the
Orientalizing process. On the contrary, Said’s aim is to trouble common-sense understandings of
space, in this case of the Orient, in order to destabilize the spatial, and might I add, racial order
upon which Oriental knowledge is produced.

To further develop the tension between the materials and symbolic that Said is looking to
trouble, I will turn to the citation I gave at the beginning of the paper. Relying on Gaston
Bachelard, Said uses the metaphor of the inside of a house to direct us to how objective spaces
acquire a sense of intimacy, secrecy and security due to experiences that seem appropriate to it.
He makes the rather provocative statement that the objective space of a house is far less
important than what he calls the poetics of space. Through such poetics, the space of a house, its
material dimensions if you will, are endowed with imaginative values through which a range of
cultural meanings are attributed to a particular space. In this way, through this imaginative
process, space gains a whole series of meanings that are otherwise not naturally embodied in any
given material space. A house can be haunted, a city can be cosmopolitan, a nation can be evil,
yet none of these meanings come to the space.
Orientalism is an academic discipline that began, according to Said in Vienna in 1312 and
manifested in chairs of various departments. The Orientalist studies the Orient: a geographic
location to the East of Europe, with cultural qualities that distinguish it as such. Orientalism is a
huge and all encompassing field with many sub-specialties. Said objects to the ending saying that
all other academic fields that study something are ologies, as in Orientology.

The Orient was recorded for the enjoyment of western culture. The west, through writing and
discourse on Oriental cultures, has in fact created Oriental culture. So different is eastern culture
from our own, that we have the tendency to exoticize it. With western centers of academia
focusing on Oriental culture, a wave of experts has been created, each building on the work of
the others, to make a definition of Oriental culture that is believed by Orientals.

Said was definitely a scholar. A literary critic by training, he had command of the discourse of
literary criticism as well as ability to talk the talk.  For the Orient (“out there” towards the East)
is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, “our” world;
the Orient is thus Orientalized … One ought again to remember that all cultures impose
corrections upon raw reality, changing it from free-floating objects into units of knowledge. The
problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the
assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose
complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as,
for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be.

 “Maometto”—Mohammed-----turns up in canto 28 of the Inferno. He is located in the eighth of

the nine circles of Hell, a circle of gloomy ditches surrounding Satan’s stronghold in Hell. Thus
before Dante reaches Mohammed, he passes through circles containing people whose sins are of
a lesser order: the lustful, the avaricious, the gluttonous, the heretics, the wrathful, the suicidal,
the blasphemous. … Mohammed thus belongs to a rigid hierarchy of evils, Mohammed’s
punishment, which is also his eternal fate, is a peculiarly disgusting one: he is endlessly being
cleft in two from his chin to his anus like, Dante says, a cask whose staves are ripped apart.
 
Underlying all the different units of Orientalist discourse—by which I mean simply the
vocabulary employed whenever the Orient is spoken or written about—is a set of representative
figures, or tropes. These figures are to the actual Orient—or Islam, which is my main concern
here—as stylized costumes are to characters in a play … In other words, we need not look for
correspondence between the language used to depict the Orient and the Orient itself, not so much
because the language is inaccurate but because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is
trying to do, as Dante tried to do in the Inferno, is at one and the same time to characterize the
Orient as alien and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager,
and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe. Hence the vacillation between the familiar and
the alien; Mohammed is always the imposter (familiar, because he pretends to be like the Jesus
we know) and always the Oriental (alien, because although he is in some ways “like” Jesus, he is
after all not like him).

Rather than listing all the figures of speech associated with the Orient—its strangeness, its
difference, its exotic sensuousness, and so forth—we can generalize about them as they were
handed down through the Renaissance. They are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they
employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are
always symmetrical to, and yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent, which is
sometimes specified, sometimes not. … No background need be given; the evidence necessary to
convict Mohammed is contained in the “is.” One does not qualify the phrase, neither does it
seem necessary to say that Mohammed was an imposter, nor need one consider for a moment
that it may not be necessary to repeat the statement.

Philosophically, then, the kind of language, thought, and vision that I have been calling
Orientalism very generally is a form of radical realism; anyone employing Orientalism, which is
the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed Oriental, will
designate, name, point to, fix what he is talking or thinking about with a word or phrase, which
then is considered either to have acquired, or more simply to be, reality. Rhetorically speaking,
Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative. … Psychologically, Orientalism is a form
of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge.
To further develop the tension between the materials and symbolic that Said is looking to
trouble, I will turn to the citation I gave at the beginning of the paper. Relying on Gaston
Bachelard, Said uses the metaphor of the inside of a house to direct us to how objective spaces
acquire a sense of intimacy, secrecy and security due to experiences that seem appropriate to it.
He makes the rather provocative statement that the objective space of a house is far less
important than what he calls, the poetics of space. Through such poetics, the space of a house, its
material dimensions if you will, are endowed with imaginative value(s) through which a range of
cultural meanings are attributed to a particular space. In this way, through this imaginative
process, space gains a whole series of meanings that are otherwise not naturally embodied in any
given material space. A house can be haunted, a city can be cosmopolitan, a nation can be evil,
yet none of these meanings come to the space naturally. It seems Said wants to direct us to the
processes through which material spaces come to be understood in relation to the symbolic.

To develop this idea further, Said also demonstrates how this same process operates in relation to
time. He argues, in this section of Orientalism, that seemingly settled temporal markers such as
“long ago,” “the beginning,” and “at the end of time” are useless unless they’re endowed with
some additional meanings. For example, for a scholar of Medieval Europe, “long ago” has a
much different meaning than for an evolutionary biologist, in much the same way that my sense
of the material space of my childhood home is qualitatively different than my father’s.
Consequently, Said would have us think through how space and time converge together to form a
particular understanding of the Orient. In his words: “For there is no doubt that imaginative
geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the
distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away. This is no less true
of the feelings we often have that we would have been more “at home” in the sixteenth
century or in Tahiti”.

But what does this have to do with Orientalism, and Said’s determined attempts to underline the
power relations at the heart of the imperial order? To answer this, I’d like to highlight two key
features of Said’s imaginative geographies. The first feature comes through in the last citation I
provided. In it, he refers to the dramatization of distance and difference involved in the
imaginative geographical process. Key to Said’s theorization, is the folding of difference through
a series of what geographer Nicholas Blomley calls spatializations, or a set of geographical
markers such as grids, surveys, and territories, among others.

Said argues that these partitions and enclosures work to more clearly demarcate a familiar space
that is “ours” from one that is “theirs.” To illustrate this, he gives the example of a group of
people living on a few acres of land who set up boundaries and call the territory beyond these
boundaries the ‘land of the barbarians.’ Clearly this distinction is arbitrary, in that it does not
depend on the so-called barbarians to acknowledge the our land-barbarian land distinction. Said
goes on the explain that it is thus enough to set up the distinction in our minds: they become they
and us becomes us in relation to territory, and perhaps other factors such as social, ethnic and
cultural markers.

Considering this, I would argue that the heart of Said’s geographical project lies in his
explication of how distance itself is not fixed, in the same sense as the corridor or closet in the
inside of our homes, since the idea of distance is created and made intelligible through cultural
practices, such as the poetics of space, where, as in the first citation I provided above, “the
vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here.” Consequently,
Said lays out the cultural practices that produce Western knowledge about the Orient throughout
Orientalism.

Fragments of the second key feature of the concept of imaginative geographies that I’d like to
highlight can also be found in the last citation, when Said gestures to how imaginative geography
can “help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself…” As we all know, Said argues throughout
Orientalism that far from being an innocent project of imperial meaning-making, Orientalism has
helped to produce European imperial subjects. Thus, the role imaginative geographies play in
forming a sense of place through understandings of belonging and non-belonging in space, also
forcefully produce a sense of self, an imperial identity. For Said, there is an intimate connection
between the spatialities of various imaginative geographies and the production of identity. One
could say, in a gesture to Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, that space and subjectivity are
mutually constitutive, in that subjects define a particular space in the ways Said discusses, and a
given space produces particular subjects.
So, living in Paris, for example, I may have a particular, historically-specific way of imagining
and practicing my city (how I see the city in relation to others, what I believe can happen in
different parts of the city, who I see as belonging, etc) which helps to constitute the space, but
the space of the city also helps to define what type of subject I can be (what kind of
neighborhood I can live in, who I see everyday, where I go to shop, to play, etc). It is this
interplay between space and subjectivity that I want to highlight here in relation to Said’s notion
of ‘imaginative geography,’ before continuing with two uses of this concept in geography and
post-colonial theory.

Europeans could perceive that Orient was being out stripped and outdated by western science.
But what becomes evident is not only the advantage of a western perspective: there is also the
triumphant technique for taking the immense fecundity of the oriented making systematically,
even alphabetically, knowable by western lay men.
All the bibliotheque Orientale did was represent the orient more fully and more clearly; what
may have been a loose collections of randomly acquired facts concerning vaguely Levantine
history , Biblical imagery, Islamic culture, place names and so on were transformed in to a
rational Oriental panorama, from A to Z. Under the entry for Mohammad, d’Herbelot first
supplied all of the prophet’s given names, and then proceeded to confirm Mohammad’s
ideological and doctrinal values.

“Mohammedan” is the relevant European designation; “Islam”, which happens to be the correct
Muslim name, is relegated to another entry. The “heresy…which we call Mohammedan” is
“caught “as the imitation of a Christian imitation of true religion.
Such images of the orient as this of are images in that they represent or stand for a very large
entity, other wise impossibly diffuse, which they enable one to grasp or see. They are also
characters, related to such types as the braggarts, misers, or gluttons produced by Theophrastus,
La Bruyere, and Selden.

The didactic quality of the Orientalist representations cannot be detached from the rest of the
performance. Orientalism thus comes to exert a three way force, on the orient, on the orient list,
and on the western “consumer” of orientalism.
For the orient (“out there “towards the east)is corrected , even penalized , for lying outside the
boundaries of European society,” our ”world; the orient is thus orientilized, a process the only
marks the orient as the province of the Orientlist but also forces the uninitiated western reader to
accept orientalist codification as the true orient.

Yet the Orientalist it his work to be always converting the orient from something else: he does
for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of oriental.
Orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the overriding impression is of
orientalism’s insensitive schematization of the entire orient.

Dante’s achievement in The Divine comedy was to have seamlessly combined the realistic
portrayal of mundane reality with a universal and eternal system of Christian values. What Dante
the pilgrim sees as he walks through the inferno, purgatorial, and paradise is unique vision of
judgment. Paolo and Francesca, for instance, are seen as eternally
confined to hell for their sins, yet they are seen as enacting, indeed living, the very characters and
actions that put them where they will be for eternity. Thus each of the figures in Dante’s vision
not only represents himself but is also a typical representation of his character and the fate mated
out to him.
Dante of course, admires their great virtues and accomplishment, but because they were not
Christian he must condemn them, however lightly to Hell. The discriminations and refinements
of Dante’s poetic grasp of Islam are an insistence of the schematic, almost cosmological
inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creature of western
geographical, historical, and above all moral apprehension.

The European encounter with orient and specifically with Islam strengthened this system of
representing the orient and, as has been suggested by Henri Pirenne, turned Islam in to the very
epitome of an outsider against which the whole of European civilization from the middle ages on
was founded. The decline of the Roman Empire as the result of the
barbarian invasion had the paradoxical effect of incorporating barbarian ways in to Roman and
Mediterranean culture, Romania, whereas, Pirenne argues, the consequence of the Islamic
invasions beginning In the seventh century was to move the centre of European culture away
from the Mediterranean, which was then an Arab province, and towards the North.
In other words, we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the
orient and the orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but because it is not
even trying to be accurate. What it trying to do, as Dante tried to do in the Inferno, is at one and
the same time to characterize the orient as alien and incorporate it schematically on a theatrical
stage whose audience, manager, and actors are fore Europe, and only Europe.

Thus Mohammad is an imposter; the very phrased canonized in d’Herbelot’s Bibliotheque and
dramatized in sense by Dante. Orientalism is absolutely anatomical and enumerative.
Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of other kind, say, from ordinary
historical knowledge.