Albert Hourani,"The Road to Morocco,"

NYRB, Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979The Road to MoroccoBy Albert HouraniOrientalismby Edward SaidThe theme of this powerful and disturbing book is the way in which intellectual traditionsare created and transmitted. They do not simply arise, Edward Said argues, in the solitudeof a thinker's or a scholar's mind. The scholar may "attempt to reach a level of relativefreedom from…brute, everyday reality," but he can never quite escape or ignore his"involvement as a human subject in his own circumstances."…the possibilities for work present in the culture to a great and original mind are neverunlimited…. The work of predecessors, the institutional life of a scholarly field, thecollective nature of any learned enterprise: these, to say nothing of economic and socialcircumstances, tend to diminish the effects of the individual scholar's production. A fieldlike Orientalism has a cumulative and corporative identity…the result has been a certainconsensus: certain things, certain types of statement, certain types of work have seemedfor the Orientalist correct."Orientalism" is the example Mr. Said uses to illustrate his theme, and by it he meanssomething precise. The scholar who studies the Orient (and specifically the MuslimOrient), the imaginative writer who takes it as his subject, and the institutions which havebeen concerned with "teaching it, settling it, ruling it," all have something in common: acertain representation or idea of "the Orient," defined as being other than the "Occident,"mysterious, unchanging, and ultimately inferior.This representation has been created by the Western mind in more or less completefreedom, for "the Orient as a genuinely felt and experienced force" has been almosttotally absent from Western culture. It has been developed and maintained by a kind ofimplicit partnership between scholars, writers, and those who have won and governedempires. Scholars and writers have been conscious of the sheer fact of Western strengthin a passive and powerless Orient waiting to be ruled or manipulated, and the men whoruled have drawn a moral justification, and therefore a kind of strength, from the Westernidea of the Orient. The partnership has been mediated through institutions—certainformalized ways of teaching and writing—which have limited what can be thought andsaid about the Orient.It is this cumulative way of thinking about the Orient and acting toward it that EdwardSaid calls "Orientalism." Of course, any kind of thought involves making distinctions,and distinctions establish limits, but it is his contention that this kind of definition hasbeen particularly harmful. It may have acted as a spur to the European imagination andhelped to shape the Western sense of identity, but since it is a distinction based ultimatelyon religious and cultural difference it has led to a misunderstanding of historicalprocesses. It has made it impossible to see "orientals" as individual human beings, sincetheir identity has been absorbed into the idea of "the Muslim," "the Arab," or "theOriental"; and, like all very simple binary oppositions of "us" and "them," it has given

ise to judgments of moral worth. The Orient is seen as strange and distant, malignant anddead unless we bring it to life, the haunt of "monsters, evils, heroes; terrors, pleasures,desires."The germ of this vision of the Orient Mr. Said finds in the first encounters of WesternEurope with the world of Islam: the struggle for control of the Mediterranean basincaused a recurrent trauma in the Western mind, and it could only be controlled by tryingto explain Islam in familiar terms, as a false revelation or a Christian heresy. Then, in thesecond half of the eighteenth century, structures of thought inherited from the past were"secularized, redisposed and reformed": under the influence of a new kind of intellectualcuriosity and the expansion of European power, the image of the Muslim enemy turnedinto the modern image of the "Oriental." There appeared the first modern "Orientalists,"the Frenchman Anquetil-Duperron, who discovered and translated Avestan texts, and theEnglishman Sir William Jones, who translated Sanskrit poetry and studied Hindu laws,and who "before he left England for India in 1783…was already a master of Arabic,Hebrew, and Persian." Jones was particularly important because his career was bound upwith the first effective and permanent rule of Europeans over an Oriental society, that ofthe East India Company in Bengal; in his life and work, the link between politicaldomination and the urge to understand becomes explicit.A generation later there came a European incursion into the heart of the Muslim Orient.The French occupation of Egypt in 1798 was not only an incident in the revolutionarywars, it was a movement of the imagination. Bonaparte had read the Comte de Volney'sVoyage en Egypte et en Syrie and other writings about Egypt, and they helped to shapehis actions there: he was conscious of forty centuries looking down on him and hissoldiers: he thought of himself as coming to bring back life to a lifeless world, and thescholars and scientists who went with him carried out the first systematic appropriation ofan Oriental society and culture.The French expedition perhaps did more for the "imaginative geography" of the Orientthan for the real Egypt. To represent the Orient intellectually and imaginatively, todominate it and bring it back to life: these endeavors were to create the Orientalist "field"during the next seventy years or so. Scholars discovered, edited, extracted, translated, andinterpreted texts: at first an individual effort, their work was later codified and embodiedin institutions and traditions…Parallel to the process of scholarly investigation went that of exploration. Some travelersto the Orient, like Lane, went as scholars to gather materials; some, like Chateaubriand,to discover or assert their identities; others, like Burton, from a mixture of motives. In asubtle analysis not only of what they said but of the ways in which they said it—arrangement, style, and "tone"—Mr. Said uncovers the "latent Orientalism" beneath theirdifferences of approach. For all of them, the fact of empire, the assertion and dominationof Europe, was a present reality; the Orient appeared as a fallen being, attractive but fullof danger, in particular sexual danger.

The modern Orient that they found was not the real Orient but a dead shell into whichonly Europe could breathe life again; travel in the Orient was a kind of pilgrimage, whichbore fruit only when the traveler had encountered dangers and overcome them, seenstrange places and turned his back on them, and returned to his own self enriched. In spiteof the similarities, Mr. Said is aware of differences between British and French attitudes,and perhaps he overstates them. For the British, securely established in India, he says, theMuslim Orient is a region of potential domination; for the French it is haunted by a"sense of acute loss." But in this period the French had not irretrievably lost the MiddleEast, and they had won for themselves a new province of the imagination in Algeria.In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a new phase begins. The imperialgovernments take on new responsibilities, the British in Egypt and the French in Tunisia;then the division of the Ottoman Empire, foreshadowed before the First World War, isaccomplished at its end, and the Arabic-speaking provinces fall under British and Frenchcontrol. The relationship between scholarly work and political action becomes closer andmore complex. The institutions through which the Orientalist tradition is transmitted arelarger, more formally organized, and more closely linked with governments. Within thistradition, new human types of the "Orientalist" emerge. In the generation before 1914, theage of light-hearted, combative, and self-assured expansion, there appears the "imperialagent," the man who puts his knowledge and ideas, his feelings and impulses, at theservice of empire.In the years after 1918 the Orientalist vision changes. Europe is in control of the Orient;its ultimate power cannot be shaken, its right to rule is scarcely questioned, but theresurgence of the peoples of Asia is now seen as a challenge, and the typical Orientalistof the age is the adviser who, while accepting the ultimate reality of Western domination,tries to show the way to a peaceful resolution of differences, a kind of mutual acceptance.The English and French traditions culminate in two figures who seem to sum them up:the first is the Frenchman Louis Massignon, whose evocation of the mystical writer andmartyr Mansur al-Hallaj has been formed not only by the European tradition of Islamicstudies but by an aesthetic sensibility and a Catholic consciousness typically French andof that time; the second is the Scotsman Hamilton Gibb, whose lineage goes back throughThomas Arnold and Robertson Smith to the same origins, and whose vision of thecontinuity and development of the Muslim community through history would come mosteasily to a mind conscious of imperial responsibilities and holding a certain Protestantview of the Church.Mr. Said writes of both of them with respect for their culture, the quality of their thought,and their courage, but regards them both as being caught within the "Orientalist" cast ofmind: "Oriental studies" had not turned critically upon their own tradition, as otherhuman sciences were doing at the time, and for both Massignon and Gibb the ultimatereality was something called "Islam," eternally present, always different from the West,in which the individuality of human beings, the differences of times and places, weredissolved.Massignon died in 1962, and Gibb in 1971; for those of us who knew them and cancompare our memories with what Mr. Said writes of them, doubts and questions may

arise. His writing is forceful and brilliant (sometimes too forceful for comfort, sometimestoo brilliant to be clear); and he has the skill to penetrate human wills and to delineate thestructure of human visions. But can it be that he himself has fallen into the trap which hehas exposed, and has sunk human differences in an abstract concept called "Orientalism"?What is the status of this concept? What kind of validity can he claim for the generalstatements he makes—such statements as these: "Orientalists are neither interested in norcapable of discussing individuals"; the Orientalist is marked by "absence of sympathycovered by professional knowledge"?In a sense, the answer is simple. What Mr. Said has done is to construct an ideal type of"the Orientalist," made up of a number of elements logically connected with each other,and free from extraneous and accidental elements. But as every social scientist knows,such ideal types must be used with care and caution in order to explain particular eventsor human beings. No person fully exemplifies one type: each must be seen in the light ofseveral types. One of them may explain him more than others, but in the end someirreducible individual flavor will remain. Having admired the elegance of Mr. Said'sconstruction, we must still ask how far it will serve as a principle of explanation of thehuman beings about whom he writes. The politicians and colonial servants? On thewhole, yes… It may be, however, that he is not treading on such sure ground when hewrites about scholars. Here too he has found some telling quotations: Theodor Noldekesaying that his life's work had only confirmed his "low opinion" of the Eastern peoples,or Gibb claiming that "the Arab mind" is incapable of rational thought. Some element of"latent Orientalism" was indeed present in the minds of most of the Oriental scholars ofthe period he deals with; if it was not a certain contempt for those about whom theywrote, it was at least a conviction that they understood these people, knew their languagesand beliefs, better than they did themselves. We must still ask, however, to what extentthis conviction entered into their work and determined its direction and limits.Said's thesis is that the tradition of European "Orientalism" has now been transplanted tothe United States, expressed in the language of the social sciences, embodied ininstitutions closely linked with American interests and policies in the Middle East, andused as a weapon in the conflict of Israel and the Palestinians. Once more, he is probablyright in so far as he is dealing with popular images: for the movies, the politicians, andmuch of the press, the Arab is the creeping, mysterious, fearsome Oriental shadow. Butonce more doubts arise when he writes about scholars…Today's work still expresses, to a great extent, a European and American conception ofthe Muslim East: "the Arab and Islamic world remains a second-order power in terms ofthe production of culture, knowledge and scholarship." There are some exceptions: noOttoman historian would neglect the work of Halil Inalcik and other great Turkishhistorians, and no student of North Africa in future will be able to ignore the profoundand original ideas of Abdullah Laroui. But in general it is true that the Western student ofthe Arabs and Persians still works within a structure of ideas created by other Westernstudents. Arabs and Persians, "as a genuinely felt and experienced force," are still notpresent in Western culture; but it would need another book to explain why this is so.