Orientalism - autonomous learning

330 ORIENTALISM
understand. There was a remarkable and still controversial Arabic
translation by the gifted Syrian poet and critic Kamal Abu Deeb; I
shall say more about that in a moment. Thereafter Orientalism appeared
in Japanese, German, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Spanish,
Catalan, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and Swedish (in 1993 it became a
bestseller in Sweden, which mystified the local publisher as much as
it did me). There are several editions (Greek, Russian, Norwegian,
and Chinese) either under way or about to appear. Other European
translations are rumored, as is an Israeli version, according to one or
two reports. There have been partial translations pirated in Iran and
Pakistan. Many of the translations that I have known about directly
(in particular, the Japanese) have gone through more than one edition;
all are still in print and appear on occasion to give rise to local
discussions that go very far beyond anything I was thinking about
when I.wrote the book.
The result ofall this is that Orientalism, almost in a Borgesian way,
has become several different books. And, insofar as I have been able
to follow and understand these subsequent versions, that strange,
often disquieting, and certainly unthought-of polymorphousness is
what I should like to discuss here, reading back into the book that I
wrote what others have said, in addition to what I myself wrote after
Orienta/ism (eight or nine books plus many articles). Obviously I
shall try to correct misreadings and, in a few instances, willful misinterpretations.
Yet I shall also be rehearsing arguments and intellectual developments
that acknowledge Orientalism to be a helpful book in ways
that I foresaw only very partially at the time. The point of all this is
neither to settle scores nor to heap congratulations on myself, but to
chart and record a much-expanded sense ofauthorship that goes well
beyond the egoism of the solitary beings we feel ourselves to be as we
undertake a piece of work. For in all sorts of ways Orientalism now
seems to me a collective book that I think supersedes me as its author
more than I could have expected when I wrote it.
Let me begin with the one aspect of the book's reception that I
most regret and find myself trying hardest now (in 1994) to overcome.
That is the book's alleged anti-Western ism, as it has been
misleadingly and rather too sonorously called by commentators both
hostile and sympathetic. This notion has two parts to it, sometimes
argued together, sometimes separately. The first is the claim imputed
to me that the phenomenon of Orientalism is a synecdoche, or a
miniature symbol, of the entire West, and indeed ought to be taken
Afterword 331
to represent the West as a whole. Since this is so, the argument
continues, therefore the entire West is an enemy of the Arab and
Islamic or for that matter the Iranian, Chinese, Indian, and many
other non-European peoples who suffered Western colonialism and
prejudice.
The second part of the argument ascribed to me is no less farreaching.
It is that a predatory West and Orientalism have violated
Islam and the Arabs. (Note that the terms "Orientalism" and "West"
have been collapsed into each other.) Since that is so, the very existence
of Orientalism and Orientalists is seized upon as a pretext for
arguing the exact opposite, namely, that Islam is perfect, that it is the
only way (ai-hal al-wahid) , and so on and soon. To criticize Orientalism,
as I did in my book, is in effect to be a supporter of Islarnism
or Muslim fundamentalism.
One scarcely knows what to make of these caricatured permutations
of a book that to its author and in its arguments is explicitly
anti-essentialist, radically skeptical about all categorical designations
such as Orient and Occident, and painstakingly careful about not
"defending" or even discussing the Orient and Islam. Yet Orientalism
has in fact been read· and written about in the Arab world as a
systematic defense of Islam and the Arabs, even though I say explicitly
in the book that I have no interest in, much less capacity for,
showing what the true Orient and Islam really are. Actually I go a
great deal further when, very early in the book, I say that words
as "Orient" and "Occident" correspond to no stable reality that
exists as a natural fact. Moreover, all such geographical designations
are an odd combination of the empirical and imaginative. In the case
of the Orient as a notion in currency in Britain, France, and America,
the· idea derives to a great ext~nt from the impulse ~ot simply to
describe, but also to dominate and somehow to defend against it. As
I try to show, this is powerfully true with reference to Islam as a
particularly dangerous embodiment of the Orient.
The central point in all this is, llOwever, as Vico taught us, that
human history is made by human beings. Since the struggle for
control over territory is part ofthat history, so too is the struggle over
historical and social meaning. The task for the critical scholar is not
to separate one struggle from another, but to connect them, despite
the contrast between the overpowering materiality of the former and
the apparent otherworldly refinements ofthe latter. My way of doing
this has been to show that the development and maintenance ofevery
culture require the existence ofanother, different and competing alter