Orientalism - autonomous learning

332 ORIENTALISM
ego. The construction of identity-for identity, whether ofOrient or
Occident, France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct
collective experiences, is finally a construction in my opinion-involves
the construction of opposites and "others" whose actuality is
always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation
of their differences from "us." Each age and society re-creates its
"Others." Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of "other"
is a much worked-over historical, social, intel1ectual, and political
process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions
in all societies. Debates today about Frenchness and Englishness
in France and Britain respectively, or about Islam in countries
like Egypt and Pakistan, are part of the same interpretive process,
which involves the identities of different "others," whether they be
outsiders and refugees, or apostates and infidels. It should be obvious
in all cases that these processes are not mental exercises but urgent
social contests involving such concrete political issues as immigration
laws, the legislation of personal conduct, the constitution of orthodoxy,
the legitimization ofviolence and/or insurrection, the character
and content of education, and the direction of foreign policy,
which very often has to do with the designation of official enemies.
In short, the construction ofidentity is bound up with the disposition
ofpower and powerlessness in each society, and is therefore anything
but mere academic woolgathering.
What makes all these fluid and extraordinarily rich actualities
difficult to accept is that most people resist the underlying notion:
that human identity is not only not natural and stable, but constructed,
and occasionally even invented outright. Part of the resistance
and hostility generated by books like Orientalism, or after it,
The Invention of Tradition, and Black Athena,l is that they seem to
undermine the naive belief in the certain positivity and unchanging
historicity of a culture, a self, a national identity. Orientalism can
only be read as a defense of Islam by suppressing half of my argument,
in which I say (as I do in a subsequent book, Covering Islam)
that even the primitive community we belong to natally is not immune
from the interpretive contest, and that what appears in the
West to be the emergence, return to, or resurgence of Islam is in fact
a struggle in Islamic societies over the definition of Islam. No one
person, authority, or institution has total control over that definition;
hence, ofcourse, the contest. Fundamentalism's epistemological mistake
is to think that "fundamentals" are ahistorical categories, not
subject to and therefore outside the critical scrutiny of true believers,
Afterword 333
who are supposed to accept them on faith. To the adherents of a
restored or revived version ofearly Islam, Orientalists are considered
(like Salman Rushdie) to be dangerous because they tamper with that
version, cast doubt on it, show it to be fraudulent and non-divine. To
them, therefore, the virtues of my book were that it pointed out the
malicious dangers of the Orientalists and somehow pried Islam from
their clutches.
Now this is hardly what I saw myself doing, but the view persists
anyway. There are two reasons for this. In the first place no one finds
it easy to live uncomplainingly and fearlessly with the thesis that
human reality is constantly being made and unmade, and that anything
like a stable essence is constantly under threat. Patriotism,
extreme xenophobic nationalism, and downright unpleasant chauvinism
are common responses to this fear. We all need some foundation
on which to stand; the question is how extreme and
unchangeable is our formulation of what this foundation is. My
position is that in the case of an essential Islam or Orient, these
images are no more than images, and are upheld as such both by the
community ofthe Muslim faithful and (the correspondence is significant)
by the community of Orientalists. My objection to what I have
I, called Orientalism is not that it is just the antiquarian study of
I:· Oriental languages, societies, and peoples, but that as a system of
thought Orientalism approaches a heterogenous, dynamic, and complex
human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this
suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no
less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar
and from, so to speak, above. This false position hides historical
change. Even more important, from my standpoint, it hides the
interests of the Orientalist. Those, despite attempts to draw subtle
distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor
and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire, can never unilaterally be
detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern
global phase with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798.
I have in mind the striking contrast between the weaker and
stronger party that is evident from the beginning ofEurope's modern
encounters with what it called the Orient. The studied solemnity and
grandiose accents of Napoleon's Description de I'Egypte-its massive,
serried volumes testifying to the systematic labors of an entire
corps of savants backed by a modern army of colonial
dwarfs the individual testimony of people like
al-Jabarti, who in three separate volumes describes the French