Orientalism

This blog is reflection of given task. It has Five concept of Orientalism by Edward Said, which I like most from this video. 

(1) How Said’s Interest emerges in Orientalism

EDWARD SAID: My interest in Orientalism began for two reasons, one it was an
immediate thing, that is to say, the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, which had been preceded by a lot of images and discussions in the media in the popular press about how the Arabs are cowardly and they don't know how to fight and they are always going to be beaten because they are not modern. And then everybody was very surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated that like anybody else they could fight. That was one immediate impulse. And the second one, which has a much longer history in my own life was the constant sort of disparity I felt between what my experience of being an Arab was, and the representations of that that one saw in art. I'm talking about very great artists, you know, like Delacroix and Ang and Gerome and people like that, novelists who wrote about the Orient like Disraeli or Flaubert and you know the fact that those representations of the Orient had very little to do with what I knew about my own background in life. So I decided to write the history of that.

  (2) Idea of Difference

The differences between different kinds of Orientalism  are in effect the differences between different experiences of what is called the Orient. I mean the difference between Britain and France on the one hand and the United States on the other, is that Britain and France had colonies in the Orient. I mean they had a longstanding relationship and imperial role in a place like India, so that there's a kind of an archive of actual experiences of being in India, of ruling in a country for several hundred years. And the same with the French in North Africa, let's say Algeria or Indochina, direct colonial experience. In the case of the Americans, the experience is much less direct. There's never been an American occupation of the Near East. So I would say the difference between British and French Orientalism on the one hand and the American experience of the Orient on the other is that the American one is much more indirect, much more based on abstractions. The second big thing, I think that differs in the American experience from the British and French of Orientalism, is that the American. Orientalism is very politicized by the presence of Israel for which America is the mainally.


(3) Said’s Conclusion on the world Trade Centre 

[TV: Nightline] Only eight days ago I concluded a broadcast on the World Trade Center bombing by telling you what senior law enforcement officials were telling us, that the threat of Muslim extremists operating within the United States is an ongoing danger, something we'll have to live with from now on.

EDWARD SAID: And repeating the lines of the people who have the most influence, for
whom Islam is a useful foreign demon, to turn attention away from the inequities and
problems in our own society. So, as a result, the human side of the Islamic and
especially Arabic world, are rarely to be found and the net result is this vacancy on the one hand and these easy, almost automatic images of terror and violence. There is a handy set of images and clichés, you know, not just from the newspapers and the television, but from movies.

(4) Views on Terrorism

Is the Arab world full of terrorists? Well, I mean, all you have to do is
break down the question into common sense and say, there are terrorists as there are everywhere, but you know, there's a lot more going on there, I mean we're talking about 250 to 300 million people and one of the great problems with Orientalism to begin with is these vast generalizations about Islam and the nature of Islam. There is very little in common that you can talk about as Islam,let's say, between Indonesia andSaudi Arabia, I mean they are both Muslim countries but, you know, the difference is in history and language and traditions and so on. It's so vast that the word Islam has, at best, a tenuous meaning. The same is true within the Arab world. I mean Morocco is very different from Saudi Arabia. Algeria is very different from Egypt. And I would argue and in fact have argued, that the predominant mood of the Arab world is very secular. It's easy to attract attention and certainly the media's attention for some of the political
reasons that are obvious.

(5) The authoritarian, hierarchical Model

I say, not all of us say, well they should be thrown out. Because we have been

thrown out and so we have another vision, which is a vision of co-existence, in which

Jew and Arab, Muslim, Christian and Jew can live together in some polity, which I think it requires a kind of creativity, and invention that is possible – vision that would replace the authoritarian, hierarchical model. But this idea that somehow we should protect

ourselves against the infiltrations, the infections of the Other, is, I think, the most

dangerous idea at the end of the twentieth century. Unless we find ways to do it, and

there are no short cuts to it, unless we find ways to do this, you know there is going to

be wholesale violence of a sort represented by the Gulf War, by the killings in Bosnia,

the Rwandan massacres and so on. I mean those are the pattern of emerging conflict

that is extremely dangerous and needs to be counteracted and I think therefore it's

correct to say that the challenge now is – I wouldn't call it anything other than co￾existence. How does one co-exist with people whose religions are different, whose

traditions and languages are different but who form part of the same community or polity in the national sense? How do we accept difference without violence and hostility?