Orientalism - autonomous learning

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110 ORIENTALISM
"literature," or "the humanities," and despite its overreaching
aspirations, Orientalism is involved in worldly, historical circumstances
which it has tried to conceal behind an often pompous
scientism and appeals to rationalism. The contemporary intellectual
can learn from Orientalism how, on the one hand, either to limit or
to enlarge realistically the scope of his discipline's claims, and on
the other, to see the human ground (the foul-rag-and-bone shop
of the heart, Yeats called it) in which texts, visions, methods, and
disciplines begin, grow, thrive, and degenerate. To investigate
Orientalism is also to propose intellectual ways for handling the
methodological problems that history has brought forward, so to
speak, in its subject matter, the Orient. But before that we must
virtually see the humanistic values that Orientalism, by its scope,
experiences, and structures, has all but eliminated.
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Orientalist Structures
and Restructures
When the" seyyid 'Omar, the Nakeeb el-Ashnif (or chief of the descendants
of the Prophet) ... married a daughter, about forty-five
years since, there walked before the procession a young man who had
made an incision in his abdomen, and drawn out a large portion of his
intestines, which he carried before him on a silver tray. After the
procession, he restored them to their proper place, and remained in
bed many days before he recovered from the effects of this foolish
and disgusting act.
-Edward William Lane, An Account of the Manners
and Customs of the Modern Egyptians
... dans Ie cas de la chute de cet empire, soit par une revolution a
Constantinople, soit par un dcmembrement successif, les puissances
europeennes prendront chacune, a titre de protectorat, la partie de
l'empire qui lui sera assignee par les stipulations du congres; que
ces protectorats, definis et Iimites, quant aux territoires, selon les
voisinages, la surete des frontieres, I'analogie de religions, de moeurs
et d'illterets . . . ne consacreront que la suzerainete des puissances.
Cette sorte de suzerainete definie ainsi, et consacree comme droit
europeen, consistera principalement dans Ie droit d'occuper telle partie
du territoire ou des cotes, pour y fonder, soit des villes Iibres, soit des
colonies europeennes, soit des ports et des cchelles de commerce....
Ce n'est qu'une tutelJe armee et civilisatrice que chaque puissance
exercera sur son protectorat; eUe garantira son existence et ses
elements de nationalite, sous Ie drapeau d'une nationalite plus forte ....
-Alphonse de Lamartine, Voyage en Orient