Chapter 1

Preliminaries

This is a draft version © Ivan Kalmar 2005, meant exclusively for the use of the author’s students. Do not quote or refer to in print without the author’s permission.

Bible, harem, empire: this book is about sacred texts and political domination and, in between the two, sexual fantasy. All three – religion, politics, fantasy – combine to make up the character of my subject matter: “orientalism.” In its broadest sense orientalism is a style of thought or imagination that sees the world in terms of a sharp contrast between “the Orient” or “the East” and another region called “Occident” or “the West.” In practice the Orient we have in mind when we speak of orientalism is primarily not China or Japan, as the unitiated might think, but the Middle East and North Africa, and to a lesser extent India. Edward Said’s trend-setting eponymous book (Orientalism, published in 1978) was essentially an exploration of western ways of imagining and speaking (“discourse”) about the Middle East and Islam. To Said, orientalism was an inalienable element in the practice of western domination over the Orient so defined. It was a “style,” as he put it, “for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”[1] Of bible, harem, and empire, it is the third term that captured the politically inspired writing of Said and of the burgeoning literature on orientalism that followed his work. The connection between western discourse on the Orient and western imperialism that was made by Said turned out to be one of the most productive insights of the late twentieth century.

Indeed, it was the general point about discourse and imperialism that fascinated the scholarly public, even more so than the specifics of the relation between the Muslim East and the traditionally Christian West. To many of Said’s readers orientalism came to be a synonym for “colonial discourse” about the Middle East or, in some versions, even about almost any part of the world that has been subject to domination by others. (One collection of essays on orientalism is actually about northern Italian attitudes to Italy’s south.)[2] What I abbreviate as “Bible,” the religious aspects of discourses about the Orient, did not seriously enter Said’s discussion, and “Harem” – the gendered construction of sexual fantasy - even less so. The lay public on the other hand still remembers, even in a period of post-colonial military conflicts and terrorism, what some of the experts have forgotten: the stock of images known as “oriental splendor,” “dream of the Orient,” and other such phrases still bandied about by travel agents and hoteliers. Images of the pasha’s court, the harem and its inmates, the eunuchs who guard it, of veiled women and belly dancers, all belong to a psycho-sexual complex brilliantly explored by Alain Grosrichard in The Sultan’s Court, a book that should be read along with Orientalism, not just to complete the picture but because the two things – orientalism as a discourse of domination and as a flight of fancy – are related.[3] As Grosrichard explains it, the “dream of the Orient” is not just an erotic wet dream but also a gendered political fantasy. The figure of the all-powerful male despot who treats his subjects as slaves is indispensable to the figure of the sensuous odalisque waiting obediently on her harem divan. More recently, this essential link between political domination and gender politics has been explored by Reina Lewis and others.[4] I would like to add – again following upon some recent work on the subject[5] - Bible to Harem, and reach what I think is the fountainhead, historically but also to a large extent conceptually, of both the political and psycho-sexual discourses of orientalism: the Christian construction of the Orient as the location of its own origins in biblical Judaism.

To add Harem and Bible to Empire is emphatically not to deny the importance of the last-mentioned, and this book is not a polemic against Said. Said has received his share of both fair and unfair criticism, but no one would seriously doubt any more that his major point – that orientalism goes hand in hand with domination – is correct. This remains true even if, as I will show, it was often orientalist scholars, artists, and writers that spoke most loudly against imperialism in the West, and even if anti-imperialist thought in the East often took over and reworked orientalist notions. The contrast between a modern West and a backward-looking East underlies the very possibility of western domination and as such is inherent to it, but as long as the contrast was taken for granted (as it still mostly is) it also governed the parameters of resistance to that domination. Notions of a secular and individualist West and a religious and self-sacrificing East underlie the ugly notions about Islamic “fundamentalist” suicide bombings that resurfaced after the ill-famous “9/11” attacks, and it is not wrong to suggest that such notions are the bedrock of orientalism. But the same notions have worked at other times and other contexts as a critique of the all-too-materialist West. We can easily ridicule notions of “Eastern spirituality” held by yoga-mat toting members of the upper middle class, but similar notions undoubtedly contributed not only to widespread western support for decolonization (and probably the personal motivations of western critics of imperialism even today) but even to “oriental” resistance itself. For as a well-known freemason saying puts it, ex oriente lux, i.e. Light comes from the East. The Orient was, after all, the birthplace of the West’s defining religion.

I think of this book as a “prequel:” the existing installment seems to have already told the story but now we are learning about its earlier phases. These add rich contexts and meanings that we had not anticipated. Writing a prequel to Said means also that I do not start with Said but, in a sense, end with him. Though Said’s work is one of the main subtexts of this book, it is not the only one. It is not my intention to either build on foundations laid by Said or to structure the book as a response to him.

Said’s conclusion, that orientalism is a discourse of western domination, is not a premise in my scheme, but a conclusion. The conclusion, as it will turn out, stands (even though with important qualifications). But if we start rather than end with it then it will surely be less rather than more convincing. It will then be validated regardless of the evidence, simply by how we have defined orientalism in the first place. Perhaps worse still, we will leave out of sight significant types of empirical evidence whose connection to the material is obvious. In order to avoid the circularity of defining orientalism as a discourse of domination at the very beginning of our investigation, it is better to work with a formal rather than a functionalist definition; that is, to begin with a concept of orientalism that deals with what it says or shows and not with what it is for.[6] What all orientalism says and shows is, to repeat, the belief that there is a distinct region of the world called “Orient” and that it can be contrasted with “the West.” The Orient has no pre-existing unity; it has been “produced” by the West, as we shall see, in response to the conflict between it and its Muslim neighbors. (The same conflict also first “produced” the idea that there is a distinctive region labeled “Europe” or “the West.”) This does not mean of course that there are not real people and real territory in the Orient, nor even that those people do not think of themselves as oriental. It means only that the classification of the Orient as a unit comes not from facts on the ground, but from a tradition of western “discourse.”

The term “discourse,” borrowed from Michel Foucault, has come to mean, both in Said’s work and in general academic parlance, something like “habits of thinking, imagining, and talking about something” (in this case about the Orient). It is probably not all that Foucault had in mind,[7] but I will use “discourse” in this sense, following what has become common practice. So my deliberately minimalist, formal rather than functionalist definition of orientalism is: a discourse about the distinctive nature of a region labeled “the Orient.”

My data mix different “codes” from scholarly to burlesque, and different media from written texts to art to dance performance. In this way I am going beyond Said’s practice in Orientalism but I believe that such a broadening is in the spirit of what in recent decade has been meant by the concept of “discourse” which Said adopted. In recent decades “discourse,” probably but not necessarily in keeping with Foucault’s notion of the term, has been used to refer to an underlying amalgam of ideas and practices, usually in the context of the exercise of power, which is separate from the texts that might actualize it. In other words, the linguistic expression of a discourse is only one possible way to actualize it; others include images, movement, and the built environment. In contemporary parlance there is nothing unusual about recognizing the “discourse of western domination,” in film, architecture, or advertising as well as written texts. I will be using “discourse about a distinctive Orient,” i.e. “orientalism,” in this same broad sense, and include both textual and non-textual examples.

Preliminary examples

Let us, then, begin with a few randomly chosen examples to evoke the different settings in which the Orient has been imagined and talked about in the West.  I use them as an initial survey of the relevant historical facts and also to set up, in a preliminary and informal way, the theoretical and descriptive apparatus developed in the rest of the book.

 A Venetian Miniature, after 1475

First, an example from what I will argue is the earliest stage of orientalism, in the Renaissance.

In the late fourteenth century the Ottoman “Turks” (actually a very mixed lot ethnically) established what must have seemed to even remotely realistic Christians as an insuperable Muslim hold on the Orient, including the Holy Land. In earlier centuries Christian crusaders managed here and there to gain a foothold in the biblical territory, but now it appeared matter-of-factly as a Muslim land. Never too pedantic about anachronism, Renaissance Europeans therefore began to visualize the biblical narrative as unfolding in Islamic territory, and the biblical Israelites as little different from the Turks that ruled it. Christian artists began to use what they knew about the Turks as a model for their biblical characters. By the sixteenth century, when the charming miniature below was created by a Venetian master (Figure 1), the practice was common in southern as well as northern Europe.

Figure 1. Anonymous Venetian artist, Transporting the Arc of the Covenant, after 1475, illumination.  Folios 4 verso and 5 recto, Psalterium, Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana (Cod. 2161).

The turbaned Israelite remained a persistent part of the orientalist imaginary. Many of the most impressive examples are found in the biblical work of Rembrandt. And the convention of depicting ancient Jews as Muslims has stayed with us to this day. From Hollywood’s biblical spectaculars to the nativity crèches ordinary Christians erect at Christmas, the Arab head scarf (which has replaced the Turkish turban) is a visual cliché of the biblical Jew. Only with the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East was the western tradition of imagining Jews and Muslims together gradually broken (although not completely) and replaced with the concept of a common “Judeo-Christian civilization.” I shall argue that the Jewish connection in orientalism has remained fundamental to our day, though in very different contexts and with different consequences for East-West relations.

Charles Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721)

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (which became Istanbul) is the most salient illustration of the fact that in the Renaissance the West did not face the Orient from a dominating position; in spite of Christian successes in Iberia the Muslim East was stronger. Only in the second half of the seventeenth century did Christians slowly begin to gain the upper hand. In the eighteenth century the passing of the “Turkish threat” allowed occidentals to imagine the Orient in playful, even frivolous ways. Princes and courtiers enjoyed dressing as Turks or Persians for fancy balls and even incorporated oriental features into their daily dress. Composers of light hearted music made use of childish parodies of oriental chords and melodies. A good illustration of this carnivalesque trend is Montesquieu’s famous Persian Letters, first published in 1721. It is a satirical novel based on the correspondence of two Persians who spend six years in Paris, making often acerbic comments about its social and political life. This highly successful book was part collection of curiosities about the East (Montesquieu followed reports by the then experts, principally travelers) and part critique of French politics put in the mouths of the two travelers.  In the following excerpt, one of the two Persians, Usbek, writes to his “chief black eunuch” at Isphahan:

You are the faithful keeper of the most lovely women in Persia; I have entrusted you with what in this world is most dear to me; you bear the keys of those fatal doors which are opened only for me. Whilst you watch over this precious storehouse of my affections, my heart, at rest, enjoys an absolute freedom from care. You guard it in the silence of the night as well as in the bustle of the day.  Your un-relaxing care sustains virtue when it wavers. Should the women whom you guard incline to swerve from their duty, you would destroy their hopes in the bud.  You are the scourge of vice, and the very monument of fidelity.
        You command them and they obey. You fulfill implicitly all their desires, and exact from them a like obedience to the laws of the seraglio; you take a pride in rendering them the meanest services; you submit to their lawful commands with reverence and in dread; you serve them like the slave of their slaves. But, resuming your power, you command imperiously, as my representative, whenever you apprehend any slackening of the laws of chastity and modesty.[8]

 The passage is characteristic, not only of the Persian Letters as a whole but of the orientalism of the period, in its twin interest in the politics of state and the politics of gender. Europeans at the time were digesting the sensational appearance in 1704 of a French translation of the Thousand and One Nights, soon to be translated from French to English and other European languages. The influence of this cycle of stories on the orientalist imagination is inestimable. Undoubtedly Montesquieu himself, writing less than two decades after the appearance of the Nights, was inspired by their obsession with the relationship between black slaves and the white wives and concubines of their masters. Mastery over the subject races and over the subject gender combine in the eroticized political fantasy of the “oriental despot,” a character who was to figure centrally in subsequent political thought in the West.

Carsten Niebuhr’s Oriental Journey (1762-64)

If the eighteenth century added an explicit political problematic and a lubricious gender dimension to orientalism, it did not thereby replace its original biblical foundation. In the Arabian Nights, when King Shahriyar’s brother finds out that like his own wife the king’s wife betrayed him with a black slave, the formidable nineteenth century scholar-adventurer Richard Burton translates him as exclaiming, "By Allah, my calamity is lighter than this! My brother is a greater King among the Kings than I am, yet this infamy goeth on in his very palace, and his wife is in love with that filthiest of filthy slaves. But this only showeth that they all do it and that there is no woman but who cuckoldeth her husband.”[9]

Cuckoldeth? Other translators of the Nights, such as Edward Lane, also echoed the King James Bible. It might be suggested that they merely meant oriental texts to sound archaic. This is true as far as it goes, but the cultural and scholarly context suggests that there is more to it than that. The translators’ projection of the Bible into the Arabian setting merely mirrored the continuing habit of orientalizing the Bible, which we have seen followed in the Renaissance illumination that was our first example. In the late eighteenth century serious scholars took over the practice, in the form of the revolutionary movement known as “biblical criticism.”

The practitioners of biblical criticism subjected the Bible to modern philological research, as if it were an ordinary document composed without divine inspiration. What was crucially orientalist about them is that they firmly believed in a drastic contrast between the oriental, “Semitic” methods of composition that produced the Bible and western, “Aryan” ones. The contrast reflected, in their minds, a radical difference between styles of living and thinking: what we would now call “culture.”

In order to learn more about Semitic culture, biblical critics looked for populations in the Orient that would have preserved unadulterated the lifestyle of the ancient Israelites. They found them in the tent-dwelling Arabs living in the more remote parts of the Orient, where unlike their urban brethren they were thought to be outside the corrupting influence of western civilization. In the opinion of the orientalist and biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791; who, incidentally, liked to compare himself to Montesquieu),

One will hardly find a people that has kept its customs the same for so long as the Arabs; which is a result of their never having been brought under the yoke of other peoples.  Everything we know about these customs coincides so exactly with the most ancient customs of the Israelites and thus gives the richest and most beautiful elucidations to the Bible.  In contrast, the customs of the Jews themselves among the Persians, Greeks and Romans, and since their European Diaspora, have changed so much that one can no longer see in them the descendants of the people of whom the Bible speaks.[10]

The idea of the rural Arabs as living relics of the Bible suggested to Michaelis that ethnography must supplement philology as a tool of biblical criticism, and he convinced the king of Denmark to send a mission to “Arabia and other Countries of the East.” The five adventurers (not including Michaelis) who were sent on the mission did not live to tell the tale, except for the engineer, Carsten Niehbuhr (1733-1815).

Niehbuhr recounted that upon encountering the Arabs “one can hardly help fancying one’s self suddenly carried backwards to the ages which succeeded immediately after the flood. We are here tempted to imagine ourselves among the old patriarchs, with whose adventures we have been so much amused in our infant days.”[11] The expedition achieved great fame in Europe[12] and became the mother of all expeditions to the East and of that branch of scholarly orientalism – Middle and Near Eastern ethnography and archeology – that relies on them.

Niebuhr’s tone is sympathetic, quite at odds with the deliberate hate speech that careless interpreters of Said expect to discover in every sample of orientalism. Niebuhr recognizes that prejudice against Arabs exists, and his intention is to combat rather than to advocate it:

Nor should anyone allow oneself to be kept from a journey to Arabia because of the opinion that the Arabs are immoral, eager for possessions, and given to robbery. I have found this Nation to be not so bad. We Europeans are too hasty in judging foreign nations, before we get to properly know them. (…) When one deals kindly with the Arabs then one can expect just as much politeness from these Mohammedans as rational Christians offer the Jews in Europe.[13]

Edward Lane

Niehbuhr was older than Silvestre de Sacy (1758-1838) and Edward Lane (1801-1876), the authors who according to Said established the stock of knowledge to which all subsequent orientalist scholars referred to (“Orientalists after Sacy and Lane rewrote Sacy and Lane”[14]).  But his method of work resembled quite closely the scholarship of the two.

Lane is the more relevant in an English-speaking context. He was the son of a prebendary of the Church of England. Certainly, the Christian lining of orientalism was well in evidence in Lane’s work. Paolo Horta has commented on how Lane’s project in translating the The Thousand and One Nights and providing it with extensive commentary on its oriental context was akin to the goals of the biblical criticism.  Lane’s translation of the Nights (1838-40) was from the point of view of his sponsors, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, akin to their Pictorial Bible (1836-38): both works aimed to educate the British reader on the nature of an eastern people with an eastern faith.[15]

Yet if it is true that Lane’s, like Niebuhr’s, vision of the East was colored in biblical hues it is also true that the East rather than the Bible was their primary interest, contrary to the priorities of their sponsors back home. Lane resided in Cairo on several lengthy occasions, always living apart from the foreigners’ quarters, dressing like the Egyptians, speaking Arabic. His work An Account of the Manners and the Customs of the Modern Egyptians is typical for the modern form of oriental ethnography (pioneered, as Jonathan Hess has suggested, by Niebuhr), where the visitor’s impressions are arranged by topic (“climate,” “character,” “children,” “music,” etc.) rather than narratively as a sequence of personal experiences. The organization by topic reflects what Said referred to as “Western confidence that descriptions of general, collective phenomena [in the Orient] were possible” and lends the author’s observations the impersonal character of a scientific investigation.

To Said, scientific detachment was the essence of Lane’s style; it also contributed to Said’s view of his life and work in Egypt as “the very essence of bad faith.”[16] As Said has it, Lane affected to identify with Islam to the extent that he prayed in mosques, especially with an Egyptian friend whom he identifies as Sheikh Ahmed. Said, unlike subsequent researchers, was quite convinced that Lane did not actually convert to Islam, and that his outwardly Muslim habits were no more than “audacious mimicry” that allowed him to “enter the Muslim pattern only far enough to be able to describe it in a sedate English prose.” The goal was to make his report seem “accurate, general, and dispassionate” and to convince the English reader that “… Lane was never infected with heresy or apostasy, and finally that Lane’s text [cancels] the human content of its subject matter in favor of its scientific validity.”[17] To Said, this cold, arrogant detachment from Muslim humanity culminates in Lane’s refusal to marry a local Muslim woman in spite of offers to do so. “He literally abolishes himself as a human subject by refusing to marry into human society,” judges Said, “Thus he preserves his authoritative identity as a mock participant and bolsters the objectivity of his narrative.” Lane was, Said writes, “disengaging from the generation of Egyptian-Oriental life: this is the function of his subduing his animal appetite in the interest of disseminating information, not in and for Egypt, but in and for European learning at large.”[18]

But here Said is ignoring a known fact: Lane did marry an Egyptian woman, Nafeeseh. He took her to Britain and then went back to Egypt for long sojourns with her in the company of his sister, Sophia Lane Poole, who recorded her impressions there.[19] Nafeeseh was, however, a Christian and of Greek descent. Perhaps Lane inserted himself into the Egyptian context neither as a haughty European nor as a genuine Muslim, but as something in between, and one may speculate that what in part attracted him to Nafeeseh, who was oriental and Christian at the same time, was that she represented to him an in-betweenness that was for him the felt locus of his existence, as it was for most oriental scholars after him.

It was from this liminal position as an Englishman who speaks from within the real world of Egypt that Lane constructs his report. The pedantic recall of scenes and events – at which Lane, who wrote far better than Niebuhr or Sacy, excelled – has not only the function of confirming his reports as scientifically accurate. It also has a less modern, indeed traditional function, of the exotic travelogue, which is as present in Modern Egyptians – or in Niebuhr’s report - as in Marco Polo’s Travels, to recount a “wonderful” and “marvelous” foreign world, to inform but also to titillate and shockSaid opens one of his chapters in Orientalism with the following quote from Lane:

When the seyyid ‘Omar, the Nakeeb el-Ashráf (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.[20]

Lane’s use of words like “foolish” and “disgusting” is another example of his “Western confidence” but it would be wrong to conclude that he thought that Egyptians were foolish or disgusting in general. Quite to the contrary. Chapter XIII (“Character”) opens with the statement that the Egyptians “are endowed, in a higher degree than most other people, with some of the more important mental qualities; particularly, quickness of apprehension, a ready wit, and a retentive memory.”[21] As for what is disgusting, Lane cautions that ignorance of local conditions can lead to erroneous judgment.

With the exception of those of the wealthier classes, the young children of Egypt, though objects of so much solicitude, are generally very dirty, and shabbily clad. The stranger here is disgusted by the sight of them, and at once condemns the modern Egyptians as a very filthy people, without requiring any other reason for forming such an opinion of them; but it is often the case that those children who are most petted and beloved are the dirtiest, and worst clad. (…)  I … was informed that the affectionate mothers thus neglected the appearance of their children, and purposely left them unwashed, and clothed them so shabbily, particularly when they had to take them out in public, from fear of the evil eye, which is excessively dreaded, and especially in the case of children, since they are generally esteemed the greatest of blessings, and therefore most likely to be coveted.[22]

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Indeed, culturally unsophisticated disgust goes both ways. Lane came to Egypt with an aversion to eating with his fingers, but renounced knives and forks when he saw “the really delicate mode” of eating thus in the East, and grew to find “wine and swine’s flesh” as loathsome as did the Muslims.[23]

If, then, Lane used the epithet “disgusting” to end his description of a voluntary self-disembowelment his purpose was not to denigrate Egyptians but to increase the sensuousness of his writing. Lane makes us visualize a splendid procession headed by the self-mutilating personage and then employs a term to add another physical sensation to the visual effect: “disgusting” here is not meant in the moral sense but in the physical one of being “sick to the stomach.” (In truth, oriental tales, at least those that are well known in the West and especially The Thousand and One Nights share with the orientalists this predilection for the sensuous and the spectacular, the wonderful and the marvelous; it is in the hope of more such thrills that King Shahriyar grants another, and then another, day of life to the virtuoso story-teller, Sheherazade.)

The spectacular nature of orientalism means resorting to as many senses as possible – which, incidentally, makes it imperative for a student of orientalism to examine art and performance as well as written sources. Lane demonstrates that oriental writing itself has to be very visual and refer liberally to sounds and scents. He refers to music liberally, but above all includes a large number of superb sketches. His description of the Muslim prayer ritual has the character of an instruction manual; anyone using his verbal description complemented by his illustrations (Figure [incorporate in print version*]) could confidently perform the rites.

As Said remarked regarding Ferdinand de Sacy, the meticulous compilation of data that is the habit of the modern orientalist reflects the orientalist’s “powers as a Western authority deliberately taking from the Orient what its distance and eccentricity have hitherto kept hidden.” It is, however, no use to take them without displaying them. Having gained access to the secrets of the Orient the orientalist must allow them to be seen.

Ingres, Odalisque with Slave (1842)

What has just been said about Lane – his attention to ethnographic detail and his ability to excite the senses, to shock, and to stimulate lascivious interest – was equally true of a contemporary movement in the visual arts, the so-called “orientalist school,” also referred to in art history manuals as simply “orientalism.”  While some of Delacroix’s orientalist canvases have the near-abstract, blurry character of much of his art, the majority of orientalist artists aimed for quasi-photographic verisimilitude. It is worth noting that in order to increase the veracity of his illustrations Lane used the camera lucida.[24]

Orientalist art, whose homeland was France, followed thematically not as much on Lane’s work, however, as on the established tradition of oriental fantasy that derived from the Arabian Nights and The Persian Letters, as well as the Christian conventions I mentioned earlier, whereby biblical personages were visualized as “Turks.” The major focus was the harem and the “odalisque” or harem inmate, typically a stylized Venus or Diana transported into an imagined oriental context.  Jean-Dominique-Auguste Ingres (1780-1867) was if not the founder certainly the earliest celebrity among the orientalist painters. His Odalisque with Slave, (Figure 2)*, with its triad of white slave, black slave and voluptuous marble-white harem girl was, along with other Ingres creations such as the even more famous Grande Odalisque or the Turkish Bath, prototypical for orientalist art.

Figure 2. Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique, Odalisque with Slave, 1842. *

The odalisque as a subgenre of orientalist art sexualized the politics of inequality: of class (the oriental despot owns a coterie of sex slaves), of gender (the obliging sex slaves exist only for his pleasure), and of race. The castrated black guard indexes the deep psychosexual references that are seldom if ever absent in orientalism, not just in art but in general. The ego is founded in the psychosexual and, as Homi Bhabha and others have argued, this may be true of the group ego as well as of the individual.[25] When western men and women viewed images of the harem they were learning as they were being entertained: they were learning to imagine the Orient and they were learning their own place opposite the Orient as “the West.”

As Lacan taught, the imaginary is closer to this psychosexual foundation than the symbolic. The image is more elementary in ego formation than the word; the making-visible of the Orient that is characteristic of orientalism demonstrates that. In this one sense the old-fashioned phrase “western image of the Orient” is more appropriate for describing orientalism than such otherwise more sophisticated terms as “discourse” or “epistemological field.”

Orientalist genre painting, it must be added, included several less patently sexual themes than the harem, such as the Bedouin rider, the oriental girl drawing water from a well with camels parked nearby (evoking the biblical story of Rachel), or the praying bearded, turbaned Arab prostrated by the side of his camel on a prayer rug.  Along with the odalisque such scenes were endlessly reproduced both in academic and in kitsch form in a deluge of kitsch versions and carnivalesque parodies of orientalist art that lasted the entire colonial period. (Exemplars are still manufactured today, but to a much lesser extent and with nostalgic intent.) Such things were as common in the homes of the well off and of those just scraping by as were oriental carpets on the floor: probably only chinoiserie could compete with their popularity as artwork for the home, at least if one ignores the pictures of Jesus, Mary, or the saints hung inside the typical Catholic house. Such commodity orientalism fits not only the essential orientalist tendency towards display, but also the (related) state of western societies at the heyday of imperialism: what Guy-Ernest Debord has called a “society of the spectacle.” In the society of spectacle the “real” world is masked by sellable displays that may have little relation to what they purport to represent.[26] The commodified sign replaces reality and becomes, in Debord’s words, “all one sees: the world one sees is its world.” The Arab in the painting on the parlor room wall, prostrated on his prayer rug next to a kneeling camel, was the kind of thing a typical bourgeois – haut ou petit – in the West saw as his or her Orient. 

Gioacchino Rossini, L’italiana in Algeri (1815)

Said argued that the spectacle in orientalism was meant to substitute for, and so mask, the crude violence of the colonial enterprise. His remarks came in his critique of Verdi’s famous – and very spectacular - opera, Aida, whose premier took place in the new Cairo Opera House, erected soon after the completion of the Suez Canal. [27] To the spectacle of visual orientalism opera adds words and music, choreographed movement and sometimes even scents (dry ice, gun powder). The operatic stage allows writers, composers, stage designers and choreographers to live up to the full potential of the carnivalesque, grandiloquent trope of “oriental splendor;” here one finds in addition to sensuous harem dancers spectacular sets, huge casts, and the acrobatic exhibitions of warriors and slaves. “Classical music” in general has been fond of mock-oriental themes (usually used as decorative motives in a basically western minor scale): one need mention only Mozart’s famous “Turkish March” or later Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherezade. In the Magic Flute (as in the Abduction from the Seraglio) Mozart demonstrates that he shared with his freemason brothers a fascination with the “wisdom of the East” when he portrays oriental despots as benign philosopher kings, and he was probably also trying to flatter his own despotic patron, Austria’s “enlightened” absolutist ruler, Joseph II. Even more serious about “Eastern spirituality” are several of the romantic orientalist operas of Meyerbeer, Verdi and a host of other leading composers.

Still, in Mozart’s time as in the period immediately following, the grotesque image of the Orient in his Goose of Cairo was more typical. A grotesque orientalism characterized much of the opera buffa. Libretti were typically farces on the commedia dell’arte pattern, where the “Turk” had been a stock character along with a whole cast of occidental buffoons like “the doctor” or “the captain” who were to be outwitted by a young couple in love. This is the formula for Gioacchino Rossini’s large stock of operas with either an entirely orientalist plot or at least some appearances of an oriental theme. In L’italiana in Algeri, the silly Turkish despot Mustafa who rules Algiers wants to discard his wife Elvira, the better to enjoy the amorous company of the italiana[IK1] [IK2] Isabella, whom he foolishly expects to consent to his designs. He orders Lindoro, an Italian slave, to marry Elvira. Haly, the bey’s assistant, is shocked:

HALY:  What? He is not a Turk.

MUSTAFA:  I don’t care. A wife like this, goodly, docile, modest, who thinks of nothing but to please her husband is a common enough thing for a Turk, but for an Italian such a wife will be exceptional indeed.

HALY:  But Mohamed’s law forbids such a pastiche.

MUSTAFA:  There is no other law than my caprice, you hear?

HALY:  Yes, sir.

Political despotism is coupled with erotic patriarchal domination in the standard orientalist formula, but this time in a farcical version and challenged by a western woman. The theme reappears in many of Rossini’s other operas with an orientalist character, such as Il turco in Italia, Mahometo II, Torvaldo e Dorliska, Semiramide, La Cenerentola, Tancredi, Mose in Egitto, Ricciardo e Zoraide, Zelmira, La gazza ladra and Otello, or il Moro di Venezia.

Incidentally, these orientalist operas by Rossini were the most popular works of all places on the Mexican opera stage in the early 1800’s. The mestizzo population there, ever fascinated with racial categories, saw in them a delicious reference to racial mixing.[28] (“Moorish” – morisco - was one of more than a dozen anxiously defined racial categories in early Mexico, referring not to a North African but to the offspring of a Spaniard and a mulatto.)[29] The example illustrates the complex ambiguities of orientalism: not just a “western discourse” used unambiguously to put down the Orient.

Little Egypt at The Chicago World Fair (1893)

But opera was but one genre of orientalist performance, and it was not the most popular one.  Orientalist themes were central to nineteenth and early twentieth century world’s fairs, huge events that aimed to demonstrate the whole gamut of western knowledge and were by far the period’s most popular entertainment (according to some estimates, over 27 million visited the Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition in 1893). At the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, “Cairo Street” had been the second most popular exhibit after the newly erected Eiffel Tower. The organizers of the Chicago exposition used the same formula: artisan’s shops and restaurants where “natives” served customers or paraded down “a street in Cairo,” often with donkeys or camels. This street was the fair’s most expensive and also most popular attraction, and among the street’s attractions the most popular was probably the “exotic dancer:” Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, who gyrated with an exposed belly in the “Egyptian Theater.”

Spyropoulos was probably “authentically” from the Middle East, although like many future belly dancing stars not a Muslim Arab but, judging by her name, a Christian Greek. Her state name “Little Egypt” became practically synonymous with belly dancing. In Spyropoulos’ life time her sobriquet was usurped by a number of impostors. Decades later, Rhonda Fleming starred in the title role of the movie "Little Egypt," a 1951 Universal International Production. Elvis Presley wrote and performed a song entitled "Little Egypt" extolling the virtues of belly dancers. Eventually belly dancing became a popular sport for women, an activity typical of the subversive appropriation of phallocratic stereotypes that characterized some feminisms of the late twentienth century.

Before Little Egypt belly dancing had already been popularized by orientalist painters: Gérôme, for example, produced several works featuring her under the Arabic term almeh. Opera audiences were also familiar with the idea of Hindu priestesses dancing to their gods, as in Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine (first staged in 1865), a sanitized fantasy of the Hindu temple prostitute, the devadasi, a character that was familiar tease for the Victorian imagination . Eventually in the image of the belly dancer was assimilated to the biblical dance of Herod’s daughter who demands the head of John the Baptist. In Oscar Wilde’s Salome, first performed in 1902 and the subsequent Richard Strauss opera of 1905, Salome dances the “dance of seven veils,” a belly dance with suggestions of strip tease. This orientalist invention was so successful that today many people imagine a belly dancing Salome in the New Testament. In fact the Bible does not name Herod’s daughter and, although it does present her as dancing for Herod, it leaves no description of her choreography.

Eventually the success of the belly dance as an orientlaist formula combining the erotic with the exotic as well as the religious was adapted to the broader needs of popular entertainment, and female dancers in the twentieth century were routinely added to portrayals of exotic culture and religion from all over the world, including Africa and Native America. The ill-fated Mata Hari, a Dutch dancer masquerading as a Hindu priestess, was a femme fatale who was executed in France as a German spy. The African-American Josephine Baker, one of the greatest dancing stars of the first half of the twentieth century, capitalized on the craze for exotic dancing in her much-appreciated topless performances, whose crude pandering to racial stereotypes is obvious to us today but looked like genuine africanité to her white contemporaries. It is the cinema, however, that has provided some of the most outrageous examples. To pick a relatively recent one at random in George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) the slug-like giant Jabba the Hutt lives in a desert palace with a harem-like coterie of semi-nude dancing girls including, temporarily, his prisoner Princess Leia Organa. But nothing outdoes the scene in the Japanese film Godzilla versus Mothilla, in which miniature native girls in Hawaiian-style grass skirts must dance in front of their master, a skyscraper-sized moth.[30]

The example throws an unusual light on the so-called “westernization” of Japan. But there is a more general significance to the example of the “exotic dancer” as used to portray “primitive” women worldwide. The exotic dancer is one of the great many points at which orientalist constructions of the “East” have been generalized into constructions of the non-West as a whole. (I will argue in this book that such a generalization has, however, never been nearly complete.)

The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino (1921)

There are, predictably, dancing girls in what was possibly the most influential orientalist film of all times, The Sheik starring Rudolph Valentino. Diana Mayo (played by Agnes Ayres) is a free spirit who secretly invades a private party organized by Sheik Ali ben Hassan. She wears an Arab habit and a veil. To her horror it turns out that the entertainment consists of suggestive dancing on stage by the women present, and that if she stays it will soon be her turn to belly dance. Before she can figure out how to escape the Sheik discovers her identity, and unceremoniously escorts her out of the gathering. The drama that now unfolds sees the impetuous English woman kidnapped and ravished by the hero. The smiling Arab sheik is turns out to be a charming mix of aristocratic subtlety and the cruel masculine will to dominate. The Sheik locates the crude masculinity in Ali’s Arab side. When Diana in typical romance novel fashion at last helps him to bring out the sensitive side and restrict the untamed passion to the divan, it is revealed that he is actually of European racial descent.  The Sheik and Diana get married and live happily ever after, producing little sheiks in their desert haven.

The oriental chieftain, a charming seducer and benevolent despot, defined the image of male sexual power in the nineteen twenties and thirties. At the height of colonial power and of anti-Semitic and racist “theories,” The Sheik fascinated largely through its gender and racial ambiguities. Valentino’s effeminate posturing and heavily made up visage provide an illustration of the film’s ambivalence about masculinity. But its gender tensions are exacerbated by racial ones as it toys dangerously with the taboo of inter-racial love and marriage. Diana falls in love with the Sheik thinking that he is a true Arab, much before his French descent is exposed. It is true that by this revelation the script narrowly avoids glorifying “miscegenation.” What, however, makes the plot exciting for the audience is not the banal racism that is inherent in this patch-up solution and some other elements of the film, but the central theme of a genuine passion that a western woman feels for a man whom she thought to be of the East.

Just how outrageous the portrayal of Diana’s sincere love for a Bedouin was at the time becomes apparent if we compare her story to those that appeared with regularity in some of the popular pulp magazines of the interwar period, such as Detective Stories and other rags, whose racial caricatures of bearded, hook-nosed Arabs were, in this period, often indistinguishable from those of Jews in the growing anti-Semitic literature.[31]. Valentino’s film Sheik was not the first one. There was at least one earlier example made in Germany in 1920 by Ernst Lubitsch. The future Hollywood director’s Sumurun, based on a popular play, is much more in tune with Detective Stories than with the Valentino classic. In it the sheik is a brute who forces an innocent dancer into his harem and then kills her out of unjustified jealousy.[32]

Hollywood’s Sheik was based on a 1919 novel by an English pig-farmer’s wife, Edith Maude Winstanley, who wrote under the pseudonym E.M. Hall. (In addition to the Sheik she also penned The Sons of the Sheik, The Shadow of the East, The Desert Healer and other orientalist romances.) Her Sheik appeared as Britain was reaping the fruit its victory in World War, a triumph that in the Middle East meant the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement by “mandates” and semi-independent states whose dependence on Britain was internationally recognized. Britain owed much of its power in the area to its Arab allies, Bedouin sheiks who had fought valiantly on its side against the Turks, in part under the much romanticized influence of E.T. Lawrence “of Arabia.” The al-Saud clan became rulers of a new country, Saudi Arabia, and the sons of Sharif Husayn, Hashemite king of the Hejaz, became kings of Iraq and Transjordan (which later became the Jordan of today.) The Saudis and the Hashemites were rivals, but both made accommodations with the British, so there was reason for English men and women to regard the desert sheik as a friend. This explains the rejection of pulp stereotypes and the return to the earlier tradition of idealizing the Bedouin as the unspoiled oriental, a living specimen of the biblical age.

The web of references that converges in the “sheik romance,” as the genre is still known in the romance novel trade, is dense: the biblical subtext ("Why art thou here?” one of the sheik’s sons asks his beloved, “ … I bade thee meet me on the plateau at dawn”)[33], the trope of the oriental despot, the romantic novel, travelogues, colonial domination, the imperialist struggles between England and France, racial prejudice and worries about gender roles are joined here by yet another, less obvious factor: the parallels between discourses about the Orient and those about the Mediterranean south of Europe. For Rudolph Valentino’s sheik was among other things an orientalization of the Latin Lover.

Valentino, or more likely his ghost writer, capitalized deftly on the mix of Italy and the Orient in his autobiography, which opens with the following lines:

Where the hot and sand-laden breath of the Sahara Desert sweeps across the Mediterranean Sea, turning red the white walls of the dwellings, and filling the air with crimson-tinted dust - in the little agricultural town of Castellaneta, Italy, I first saw the light of day. (…) The home of my parents was called a "palace" and in America would probably be termed a mansion or an estate; it was very large, I know. (…)The lower portion was given over to the stables and coach-house, and the entire structure was of soft stone, the exterior painted white to throw off the heat. Yet, as I have intimated, when the African desert sent its winds across the sea, they were tinted pink by the dust.[34]

Louis Massignon (1883-1962)

The Latin lover is perhaps not quite the macho man he believes himself to be: in terms of normative northern masculinity there is something a bit too smooth, a bit emotional, a bit too sugary – in short a bit too effeminate - about his well-groomed appearance and debonair demeanor. His heterosexuality is, in other words, somewhat suspect. Valentino’s sheik is in an allied category. His mannerisms (above all perhaps, his soft, even coy smile) appear to evoke a western habit of associating homosexuality with the Orient, a tradition on which much has been said, and much more could be said still.[35]

The Orient’s gay appeal may be why the young Louis Massignon (1883-1962), who was to become probably the most celebrated French orientalist of the twentieth century, went to Algeria and Morocco shortly after failing his aggrégation in history (a school-leaving examination notorious for its markers pedantic cruelty.) Massignon was married and for most of his life not a practicing homosexual, but as a youth he, like so many Europeans before him, had a number of same-sex liaisons with Arabs and with Europeans resident in the Orient. One of them involved a young Arab by the nickname of Djabourri[a3] , whom Massignon accompanied on an adventurous raid to the desert in 1908, in the course of which Djabourri saved his life from an attacking force.[36]

Jacques Derrida finds Massignon’s homosexual experience (“brief in actuality … but interminable in its temptation”) to be inseparable from Massignon’s idiosyncratic Catholicism. This centered around the experience of “sacred hospitality” whose central figure was the patriarch Abraham, the “Father of All Believers.”[37] The biblical anchor here is the story of Sodom. Popular Christianity associates God’s destruction of Sodom specifically with the town’s men attempting to forcibly “sodomize” three male strangers – actually angels of God - who were offered shelter in Abraham’s home. On Massignon and Derrida’s reading the most important sin committed by the locals of Sodom was not their wish to engage in homosexual practices, but that they refused the hospitality due to visitors, a hospitality that Massignon considered to be a chief virtue of the oriental character. And Abraham’s merit was to atone for their sin by offering to substitute himself as the victim. (A somewhat questionable reading, since it is his virgin daughters that Abraham offers up to the men’s lust and not himself; later we see him willing to offer up his son to God.)

Derrida quotes Massignon’s exegesis of Abraham in terms of a contrast between Christian Europe and Islam: “Whereas degenerate Christianity sees in Abraham no more than an incoherent folk image, the Muslim world in its entirety believes in its father Abraham.” And again:

The European no longer understands that, thanks to the heroic manner in which he has practiced the notion of hospitality, Abraham deserved as his inheritance not only the Holy Land but also the entering in it of all the foreign hôtes [the French word means both host and guest] who are “blessed” by his hospitality …. Abraham’s hospitality is the sign announcing the final completion of the gathering of all nations, all blessed in Abraham, in this Holy Land that must be monopolized by none.[38]

Massignon’s choice to make Abraham the universal host and so to guarantee the accessibility of the Holy Land to all was a means to cope with the ages-old problem of the election of Israel as the Chosen People, the fact that unlike Jews and Arabs Christians cannot claim to be the descendants of Abraham in flesh and blood. It was also an intensely political move, aiming to delegitimize the State of Israel, which was founded in 1948. “The Catastrophe,” as Palestine’s Arabs called it, was an event that Massignon opposed with a passion. He was among the first westerners to link the Zionist effort with colonialism and to link it with Christian “crusades.” “All crusades by the Judeo-Christians against Islamic `fanaticism’,” he stated,

are bound sooner or later to fail. (…) I understood this very well as I went to pray at Hebron to the God of Abraham amid ninety thousand refugees, all Muslims, surrounded on three sides by the front ranks of the Jews. Abraham intercedes for them; their liturgy invokes daily this founder of the double Islamic covenant of circumcision and sacrifice. One day or another all of Islam will rise to deliver Hebron to the Arabs if one ever takes it from them.[39]

Interestingly, delivering Palestine to Arabs is not, to Massignon, in contravention of the fact that it “must be monopolized by none,” perhaps because they, practitioners of hospitality that the “European no longer understands” would be the ones who would guarantee its openness.

One would think that Said, a Christian Palestinian-American whose Orientalism shared with his political activism and much of his other writing the goal of defending Palestinian interests, would have liked Massignon very much. He did not. Even a friendly reviewer of Orientalism, Stuart Schaar, was surprised. Schaar pointed out that Massignon espoused not only the Palestinian but also other anticolonial and Arab-nationalist causes; for example, he was manhandled by police or French-Algerian mobs for his writing and speaking in favor of Algerian independence.[40] Schaar might have added that for the same “offense” Massignon even served time in jail.

We need to put this in the historical context. Orientalism was in many ways a liberationist document, claiming the Middle Eastern Arab voice in the manner that women had earlier begun to claim the feminine and African-Americans the black. In 1978 there was much resonance among liberationist writers of the anger that minority activists felt against patronizing liberals claiming to speak for oppressed groups but, as the critics saw it, managing only to drown out those groups’ own, authentic voices. “To us, the man who adores the Negro,” wrote Frantz Fanon, “is as sick as the man who abominates him.”[41] Substitute “Arab” for “Negro,” and you have a picture of what Said seems to have thought of Massignon.

Patronizing Massignon was indeed. He and his Melkite (Eastern Catholic) friend Mary Kahil established, in 1943 in Egypt a “union of prayers, between weak and poor souls” called Al-Badaliya or “The Substitution.” The substitution was that of this Christian prayer union for the Muslims,

… cut off long ago from the promise of the Messiah as children of Hagar, for, in their Muslim, imperfect, traditions, they preciously keep something like an imprint of the sacred face of Christ whom we adore, of “Issa Ibn Mayram” whom we want them to rediscover in themselves, in their heart.

In this mission of intercession for them, where we ask God, without respite nor interruption, for the reconciliation of these dear souls, for whom we wish to substitute ourselves “fil badaliya,” by paying their ransom in their place and at our expense, it is in replacement [suppléance] of their future “incorporation” in the Church that we wish to assume their condition, by following the example of the Word made flesh, by living among them each day, by partaking of their lives – we, baptized – like salt partakes of the taste of food.

These words are from Badaliya’s mission statement. In Massignon and Kahil’s view, Badaliya was true to the “vocation of Christians in the East of Arab race and language, reduced by the Muslim conquest to being only a small flock.” The statement continues,

A role is reserved for us in this mysterious duel, where for centuries Christendom has been facing the refusal of the Muslim world. Through many an ordeal and many an apostasy, this struggle has provided Christendom with many a joy and much glory for Eternity, with the institution of liturgical festivals, the founding of religious orders and the death of many a martyr.

… [we affirm] the mystery of divine Incarnation that the Muslims wish to deny; at the same hours the call to prayer of the Muezzin gathers the hearts in the same adoration of the one God of Abraham; during our Friday communions, day of Christ’s Passion, which is also their day of gathering, chosen unconsciously to testify of their own faith. [42]

No more need be said. To all appearances interested in the union of Christianity and Islam under the heading of Abrahamic hospitality, Massignon in fact clearly privileges Christianity. Indeed, his case is a throwback to an important medieval Christian attitude which considered the Qur’an, as a distorted record of what the Bible recorded correctly, a corroboration of Gospel.[43]

Massignon’s prayers partly confirm and partly deny Said’s dictum that “Formally the orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Orient and Occident, but mainly by reasserting the technological, political, and cultural supremacy of the West.”[44] Massignon did desire a union that reasserted a supremacy, but it was not the technological or political, and not even truly the cultural, supremacy of the West. Rather, it was the religious supremacy of Christianity: the original historical motive, as we have seen, of orientalism as such. Everything he knew about the Orient, Massignon felt, confirmed his idiosyncratic Christian reading of the Bible. Said was correct, for example, in deriding Massignon’s political naiveté, for the latter considered the Israel-Arab conflict as nothing more than an unfortunate fraternal conflict among fellow Semites.

Yet Massignon’s case suggests considerable caution for those who would reduce orientalism, in an oversimplified reading of Said, to an apologetical discourse on behalf of colonialism and Zionism, two things Massignon fought all his life. This orientalist so loved his Muslim enemy that he learned from him, prayed with him, and – in an age of incipient terrorism – offered himself to him as a hostage, believing to imitate the life of Christ. Patronizing to Islam he certainly was; hateful or colonialist he was not.

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986)

Massignon was neither the first nor the only orientalist to look for religious inspiration to Islam; as we have seen Edward Lane prayed in mosques as did many after him, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of at least some of them. But the home of “eastern spirituality” is more often thought of as India. The reasons are many and will be taken up later. Suffice it to say that when Annie Besant (1847-1933), an English feminist and ex-socialist, and a prominent leader of the hugely popular theosophist movement, traveled to India in 1893[a4] [IK5] she was by far not the first of the western pilgrims who came to seek enlightenment there. The founder of theosophy (a teaching originating in the West but with many “native” Indian followers, combining a religious universalism with spiritualism, freemasonry, and some Hindu tenets such as reincarnation),[45] Helen “Madame” Blavatsky, had lived there frequently and for extended periods of time.

In Madras on December 31, 1909, Besant, one of her chroniclers reports, made the public statement that a great "Teacher and Guide....will deign once more to tread our mortal ways."[46] She and her traveling companion and fellow theosophical leader C.W. Leadbeater announced that the new messiah was be a [a6] fourteen year old Indian boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom “Bishop” Leadbeater discovered by the seashore at Adyar in 1909.[47] Besant and Ledbeater then took the young boy with them to America along with his brother in a murky transfer during which Ledbeater, it has been alleged, may have sexually abused the boys, and which set off an unsuccessful legal challenge by Jiddu’s father, who accused the theosophists of kidnapping.

In 1929 Krishnamurti announced a break with theosophy and declared that he was not Christ, the Lord Maitreya, the “World Teacher,” or any of the divine personalities that he had been invested with, and wished to be an independent, secular teacher of wisdom in the East and in the West. His fame and success was to outlast that of any other “guru” in the West. Most versions of “Eastern spirituality” taught in the West today owe something to Krishnamurti’s teachings. Krishnamurti spent the last decades of his life in Ojai, California. He was fond of fast cars and tailor-made suits - but then so were his sponsors - and though a spiritual teacher he did not disdain physical love. Yet he managed to preserve an aura of detached, other-worldly wisdom. There was scarcely a hippie who had not heard of him.

Krishnamurti’s teachings were a radical version of individualism. Rollo May, the American existential psychologist who had been much in vogue during Krishnamurti’s lifetime believed that “These calm searching thoughts of an eastern thinker pierce to the roots of our western problems. A profound and fresh approach to self-understanding and deeper insights into the meaning of personal freedom and mature love.”[48] Ironically, but typically, western liberal capitalism is believed to need, as a fundamental solution to its problems, more “self-understanding,” “personal freedom” and “love” – all of them demonstrably core concepts of western civilization. These staples of the western spiritual wish-list sell better when wrapped in “eastern” packaging, allowing the consumers religious or quasi-religious experiences without having to support “organized religion.” The opposition to the power of the churches was very important to the development of “eastern spirituality” in the West in the nineteenth century, a process that was in turn rooted in late eighteenth century deism. Krishnamurti and other eastern spiritual leaders still attract a large number of religiously inclined people who mistrust Christian politics. It appeals to as well to a significant number of Jews who mistrust the politics of the Jewish establishment, yet do not want to capitulate to centuries of pressure by converting to Christianity.

Of course, there are important elements of oriental thought, Hindu, Buddhist, but also Islamic, that emphasize “detachment” from the world and so can be recast as teachings of personal improvement. This disguised westernization does often please Hindus and Buddhists as well, for it buys them a sort of associate membership in the western club, where they are received with something like respect. Blavatsky and Besant inspired thousands of Indians. Both championed home rule for them. In fact Besant was one of the founders of an organization that agitated for Indian independence, and later became the Indian National Congress, independent India’s governing party.

Bernard Lewis (1916-

By now it must be clear that I do not think it true that orientalism is to be equated with advocacy for western rule in the Orient or of western cultural superiority, much as a careless reading of Said might suggest that. As for professional orientalists, i.e. scholars of the Middle East in the modern period, it is true that the knowledge they amassed was an indispensable element in the imperial enterprise, and in that sense orientalism was as Said wrote “a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”[49] But the implication that domination was the goal of orientalist scholars is, even if intended by Said (which I doubt), false in most cases. We have seen that in fact western scholars often aimed to eliminate prejudice, and sometimes even fought the colonial administration. If their expertise was nevertheless instrumental in the imperial enterprise, if it still denied the “native” voice, if it was still imbued and even deepened western prejudice, it was because they were, as are we, creatures of a specific place and time.

Not that history lacks examples of orientalist scholars whose work was explicit anti-Islamic propaganda. There were in fact plenty of people who disagreed with the likes of Lane or Massignon and defended western prejudice and domination, but these were relatively minor voices, justly forgotten today. Who for example remembers today Adolf Wahrmund, the Persian and Arabic scholar and a founder of the Austrian National Museum of Ethnography, and his proto-Nazi invective against the Semitic races, entitled The Law of the Desert?[50] It seems more interesting to see what made leading orientalist take a fond interest in the Orient in spite of the rantings of colleagues like Wahrmund, than to prove the obvious point that even the most tolerant orientalist scholars shared at some fundamental level the self-centeredness of the society they lived in.

If, then, the orientalist profession was to an important extent a counterweight to western schemes on the East, then why has Said not said so? Why was he generally content to be misinterpreted (for I think it is a misinterpretation) as someone who condemned all orientalists as  deliberate ideologues of imperialism?  The answer is a sensitive one but must be recognized with honesty if the important legacy of Edward Said is to receive its due. Said had a political agenda: he was writing against Israel and Zionism. Although he recognized that orientalism and western depictions of the Jews shared common historical roots, he knew that, since the growth of Zionism and the eventual establishment of Israel, the Jews and their state came to be equated on both sides of the Arab-Israel conflict with the West. Since Said’s death in 2003 the conviction among many in the Middle East that Israel and America are twin enemies has only grown: many among the insurgents in American-occupied Iraq could be seen on television declaring that they were fighting “Jews.” But even at the time when Said was writing Orientalism, millions of Americans and Israelis considered their countries’ alliance to be fundamental to their respective foreign policy goals.

We must realize that for Said modern orientalism (in the sense of a “style for dominating the Orient”) included Zionism, as it still does for many of his followers, including perhaps the majority of scholars in “colonial and postcolonial studies.” Said was passionately a Palestinian-American, and his nearest target was not western imperialism in general (which in its old-fashioned colonialist form was a thing of the past) but specifically Israel, which he considered to be a neocolonial power. His opponents understood this, and Said was certainly right that the mostly American-Jewish Middle East specialists who attacked his Orientalism were motivated largely by a desire to support Israel against the accusation that it is a fruit of imperialism and the associated, centuries old “discourse of domination:” orientalism.[51] It helps to recall that in 1975 the United Nations had passed Resolution 3379, declaring Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination” (it was rescinded in 1991). Orientalism and the responses to it were part of a polemic in which Israel’s opponents aimed to discredit the Jewish State as not only a political enemy of Palestinians and Arabs but as an embodiment of the western tradition of racist oppression and as one of the major avatars of colonialism in the postcolonial age.

There have always been many Jews among western orientalists, probably out of proportion to their share of the general population and even, probably, of the teaching staff of western universities. Ignaz Goldziher and Maxime Rodinson are perhaps the two best known among the top orientalist scholars of earlier generations. Both were genuinely committed to battling anti-Islamic as well as anti-Jewish prejudice, which had long been closely connected. Arabs and Jews were both classed in the fictitious “Semitic” racial family. Anyone looking at the facts of history will soon discover the reason why Said said that in writing Orientalism he found himself “writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism,” and why he stated that orientalism was the “Islamic branch” of antisemitism. In America, too, Jewish orientalists have continued to figure prominently among Middle East scholars. Not surprisingly, their ethnic background has often influenced their judgment as Said’s did his; and in recent decades the global context of Jewish life has been marked with concerns about Israel. Many Jewish orientalists have been sharply critical of Israel; but many, too, were not, and reacted sharply to the suggestion that the Jews, once universally considered to be an unwanted oriental presence in the West, were now the agents of western oppression in the East. None among these pro-Israel orientalists has been more prominent than Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor whom many consider to have been the dean of Middle Eastern studies in the United States. One suspects that the historical analysis of Said’s Orientalism was in terms of the author’s emotions a true “history of the present,” concerned more with Bernard Lewis than with a Ferdinand de Sacy or an Edward Lane. Lewis headed an important group among academic orientalists who have reversed the tendency of orientalist scholars to be critical of their governments’ imperial policies and of the general anti-Muslim feelings of the public. These American orientalists (who were by no means all or mostly Jewish), while careful to distance themselves from the commonest racist clichés, wrote analyses of the Arab world that increasingly confirmed, rather than denied, the prejudices of the lay public and the government’s desire for intervention in the Middle East. Often they served in a more or less official capacity as advisors to the U.S. government or its agencies. None were more important than Bernard Lewis, the eminent Middle East historian who has, at least to non-specialists, personified Anglo-American orientalism of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

Lewis was born in England in 1916, and went to Princeton University from the University of London in 1974. By then he had produced a prolific body of scholarship, including but not limited to The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), and The Assassins (1967). At Princeton followed (again the list is partial; and some of his publications are anthologies of older work) The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (1986), Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry (1990), Islam and the West (1993), The Shaping of the Modern Middle East and Cultures in Conflict (1994),  The Future of the Middle East (1997), The Crisis of Islam: From Holy War to Unholy Terror, What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam, Modernity in the Middle East (2003), and From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (2004). Some of this work belongs to the category of popular non-fiction, but Lewis’ mastery of the Arabic and Turkish sources combined with an easy writing style had long ago earned him the status of one of the greatest “stars” among Middle Eastern scholars in America; indeed, some would say the brightest star of them all. Yet for his increasingly unflattering generalizations about Arab culture and politics Lewis has gradually lost respectability with probably most of his colleagues, at least the younger ones, a development that appears to deny the accusation that Middle East scholars in America tend to support anti-“oriental” positions.

In Said’s view Lewis’ writing was “almost purely political” and comparable to the even more openly ideological work of the major neoconservative thinker and Middle East specialist, Daniel Pipes. Lewis and Pipes were able to gain a popular American audience well beyond anyone’s expectations when the tragedy of September 11 entrained unprecedented American military involvement in the Muslim world and also generated an insatiable demand for work that would explain what Islam was all about. (The enormous literature that was the result is impossible to review in this or any other single book.)[52] Pipes was to be linked to the Bush administration during the invasion of Iraq. His 2004 collection of essays, Miniatures: Views of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics, joined Lewis’ books on the list of high-demand hawkish tracts implicitly or explicitly advocating energetic U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.

I will return to the topic of recent American policy, Israel, and the Middle East in the Appendix, for much as this is a burning issue it is historically largely beyond the scope of this book. I am writing mainly what happened in orientalism before Pipes and Lewis and before the establishment of Israel. Incidentally, it was then rare to find a Jewish scholar of the Orient (and there were many) with a deliberately and explicitly negative view of Islam. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the qualifications of a liberal rabbi frequently included a doctorate in oriental studies, and this did not necessarily mean a specialization in Hebrew; many rabbis studied Syriac, Arabic, etc. Most people who knew about orientalist scholarship agreed that its foremost practitioner was the above-mentioned Hungarian Jew Ignaz Goldziher, who wrote most of his work in German. Goldziher privately called Christianity a “detestable religion;” in contrast he idealized Islam as a source for rejuvenating Judaism. In his home he led his family in idiosyncratic Jewish rituals of his own invention which were influenced by his vast knowledge of Islam: when the teacher’s of Cairo’s Al Azhar , the world’s leading Sunni Muslim academy, heard what he had to say about details of Islamic jurisprudence they allowed him to be the first ever non-Muslim student at the institution. John Efron has shown how Goldziher’s orientalism fits into the pattern of a Jewish philo-Islamism in the nineteenth century, which combated the joint misperceptions of Judaism and Islam as theological blind alleys left behind by the progress of Christianity.[53]

Beyond their specifically Jewish flavor, such ideas bear a family resemblance with the long tradition of orientalism from Renaissance art to Louis Massignon, which possesses a commonality that in spite of deep differences will impress most people with its coherence. The late work of Bernard Lewis and the other orientalist apologists and advisors supporting contemporary anti-Muslimism thus confirms ex post facto the widespread but oversimplified reading of Said, according to which orientalism is single-minded in its support of western power in the East, of which hawkish American policies in the Middle East are the latest manifestation. But Lewis and Pipes’ orientalism does not in this respect figure in the same category as most of the earlier orientalism. The difference can be summed up under two headings.

First, the anti-Muslim writing of today largely lacks the ambiguity that Homi Bhabha considered an essential feature of the otherness that is the object of colonial discourse – “that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision.”[54] Contemporary anti-Muslimism confirms ex post facto the erroneous reading of Said according to which orientalism was all vilification, and which ignores Bhabha’s advice that in studying colonial discourse “the point of intervention should shift from the identification of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the processes of subjectification made possible (and plausible) through stereotypical discourse.”[55] The writing of Bernard Lewis and similar experts utilizes long-standing orientalist stereotypes in a singularly “negative” fashion. Today’s Middle Eastern “dictator” is associated with the “oriental despot’ of yesterday, and proponents of sharia law are equated with the so-called “fanatics” of Islam who were already derided and ridiculed a century and more ago, as was the maltreatment of women and children in Islamic countries. Above all, it is maintained that twenty-first century Islamist terrorism is not primarily, as one might think, the outgrowth of modern Arab nationalism or of Muslim frustration with either the West or Israel, but rather the continuation of a long Islamic tradition. (Lewis is able, for example, to use a medieval Persian text on religious assassination to preface his observation that “The suicide bomber, so to speak, has a long history.”[56]) The reification of the Orient and the ignoring of differences within it continues, and the whole complex is made even less appealing by the addition of standard derogatory images about the “Third World” as a whole: the poverty, the corruption, the dirt. Such denial of complexity makes it impossible to identify and fight the real abuses and their causes, since anything we do not like in Islam is attributed to some eternal essence of the religion or its people, and not to the circumstances of a changing, complex world. But what most concerns me at this point that in this black-and-white picture of “Islamic rage” and the like we no longer find almost any traces of classic orientalist notions of Eastern spirituality, of sensuous hospitality, of the liberating aspects of an allegedly premodern civilization, and none of the color and excitement of it all. Gone is the potential that orientalism has always had as a critique of western mores and politics.

Second, and not unrelated to the first point, is that the anti-Islamism of today is singularly devoid of biblical references. (Understandably perhaps, since the people of the Bible, the Jews, are in the political context of contemporary debates on the Middle East relegated firmly to the western side.) The Bible, and with it Christianity and Judaism, have been substantially de-orientalized. 

But this was not always so, and it is a mistake to project the simplicities of present-day anti-Islamism on the entire history of orientalism. And that suggests a thought that is well worth exploring. What if Bernard Lewis was no more typical of orientalists than Lane, Goldziher and Massignon? What if being anti-oriental is not essential to orientalism? What if, in fact, orientalists were at times the force that placed a brake on western societies’ hostility to and exploitation of the Orient, within the strictures, of course, of what was thinkable in a Christian world bent on first defending itself against, and later dominating, its Muslim nemesis? This is not to deny the obvious: the history of western Christian constructions of Islam is heavily marked by malice, suspicion, and falsehood. It is not in spite of anti-oriental prejudice but along with it that orientalism contained elements that have worked, historically, against that prejudice. I mean merely that being orientalist did not necessarily mean being clearly and unambiguously anti-Orient. Orientalism, I suggest, like all discourse, limits what can be thought within its confines, yet rather than straightforward propaganda it is a site of ideological struggle. Said’s merit is to have shown how limiting the essentializing opposition of East vs. West was; but, as long as that opposition reigned, both pro- and anti-imperialist sentiment had to be articulated within its confines. This, it is likely, was true even of anti-imperialist sentiment in the Orient itself. In this book I focus on how it was the case in western culture, high and popular alike.

Joseph Conrad, a life-time focus for Said as a literary critic, was not an orientalist. But as Said’s life was closing he expressed an attitude to the Polish-English author that is worth emulating when we judge the products of orientalism surveyed in this chapter and those to come. “As with all such extraordinary minds,” Said suggested about Conrad, “the felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it is what is most profoundly at stake (…) Texts that are inertly of their time stay there:  those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation.”[57] I do not know if one can extend this appraisal to Daniel Pipes, but it applies quite well in my mind to Lane, Burton, Goldziher and Massignon, and perhaps even to Rossini and Little Egypt.

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[1] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3.

[2] Jane Schneider, Italy's "Southern Question:" Orientalism in One Country (Oxford ; New York: Berg, 1998).

[3] Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan's Court : European Fantasies of the East (London ; New York: Verso, 1998).

[4] Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism : Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

[5] To my knowledge there is no work that connects the psychosexual to the religious aspects of orientalism, but the religious aspects of orientalism have been explored by a number of scholars. One may mention, rather randomly, James Pasto, "Islam's `Strange Secret Sharer': Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question," Comparative Studies of Society and History 40 (1998). and Richard King, Orientalism and Religion : Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East (London ; New York: Routledge, 1999)..

[6] Said himself proposed both functional and formal definitions. A good example of the latter, and one that approximates my own definition, is: “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between `the Orient’ and (most of the time) `the Occident.’” (Said, Orientalism, 2.

[7] A thoroughgoing negative review of Said’s adoption of Foucauldian concepts is found in Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory : Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1994), 166. See also Ivan Davidson and Derek J. Penslar Kalmar, "Orientalism and the Jews: An Introduction," in Orientalism and the Jews, ed. Ivan Davidson and Derek J. Penslar Kalmar (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004). page *.

[8] Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Persian Letters, Penguin Classics. L281 (Harmondsworth, Eng. ; New York: Penguin Books, 1973), Letter 2. * confirm right translation, the above is from an old edition on the internet.

[9] Richard Francis Burton and Bennett Cerf, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments; or, the Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, A selection of the most famous and representative of these tales from the plain and literal translations by Richard F. Burton. The stories have been chosen and arranged by Bennett A. Cerf and are printed complete and unabridged with many of Burton's notes. Introductory essay by Ben Ray Redman. ed. (New York,: Modern Library, 1959).* The Bull and the Ass – find page nos.

[10] Letter from Michaelis to Baron von Bernstorff of August 30, 1756, Literarischer Briefwechsel 1: 299-324, as translated in Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2002), 76. Hess discusses the satirical perception of Michaelis as the “Jewish Montesquieu” (he was an anti-Jewish Christian) in Chapter 2: “Orientalism and the Colonial Imaginary. Johann David Michaelis and the Specter of Racial Antisemitism.”

[11] Carsten Niebuhr, Beschreibung Von Arabien Aus Eigenen Beobachtungen Und Im Lande Selbst Gesammelten Nachrichten (Kopenhagen,: Möller, 1772), 2. * wrong ref. (not on p. 2)  quoted in Hess, 69

[12] See Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, 73.

[13] Niebuhr, Beschreibung Von Arabien Aus Eigenen Beobachtungen Und Im Lande Selbst Gesammelten Nachrichten, 9-11.

[14] Said, Orientalism, 177.

[15] Paolo Horta, *.

[16] Said, Orientalism, 161.

[17] Ibid., 160-61.

[18] Ibid., 163, 64.

[19] Sophia Lane Poole and Azza Kararah, The Englishwoman in Egypt : Letters from Cairo, Written During a Residence There in 1842-46 (Cairo ; New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2003), Sophia Lane Poole and Edward William Lane, The Englishwoman in Egypt : Letters from Cairo, Written During a Residence in 1842, 3 & 4, [and 1845-46] with E.W. Lane (London: C. Knight, 1844).

[20] Said, Orientalism, 111. Said does not give the edition or page number of this passage, and I have not been able to locate it.

[21] Edward William Lane and Jason Thompson, An Account of the Manners and of the Customs of the Modern Egyptians : The Definitive 1860 Edition, 5th ed. (Cairo ; New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2003), 276.

[22] Ibid., 56-57.

[23] Edward William Lane and Jason Thompson, Description of Egypt : Notes and Views in Egypt and Nubia (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2000), 90.

[24] Lane and Thompson, An Account of the Manners and of the Customs of the Modern Egyptians : The Definitive 1860 Edition, vi,ix.

[25] The psychosexual analysis of the group ego is a cornerstone of Bhabha’s work and is found practically throughout his opus. See, for example, his essay *.

[26] Guy Debord and Donald Nicholson-Smith, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). Emphasis added.

[27] Edward W. Said, "The Empire at Work: Verdi's Aida," in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). * page no.

[28] Nancy Vogeley, "Turks and Indians: Orientalist Discourse in Postcolonial Mexico," Diacritics, no. spring (1995). * fix ref.

[29] Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting : Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

[30] The more common English version of this film’s title, Godzilla vs. Mothra (dir. Takao Okawara, 1992), misses the fact that in the Japanese title, gojira rhymes with masura.

[31] On the parallels between anti-Jewish and anti-Arab stereotypes during the oil crisis of the 1970’s, see Edward Said, *.

[32] It is sadly ironic that this film, which is anti-Semitic in the broad sense just mentioned, was made by a Jewish director who came from the Yiddish theater.

[33] E.M. Hull, The Sons of the Sheik (1925), 18. In addition to invoking the Bible such “seventeenth-century” language probably also recalls Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet, and in general supplies the air of antiquity associated with the Orient.

[34] Rudolph Valentino, “The Life of Rudolph Valentino by Himself,” Movie Weekly * [http://www.geocities.com/~rudyfan/rv-auto-bio.htm] *

[35] Ref * Matar etc.

[36] Christian Destremau and Jean Moncelon, Louis Massignon (Paris: Plon, 1994), 65-7.

[37] Jacques Derrida and Gil Anidjar, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 375. Louis Massignon, Jacques Keryell, and Mary Kahil, L'hospitalité Sacrée (Paris: Nouvelle citâe, 1987).; “Les trois prières d’Abraham père de tous les croyants, transl. Allan Cutler in Testimonies and Reflections: Essays of Louis Massingon, ed. Herbert Mason (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 3-20.

[38] Ref. * from Derrida 370

[39] Attributed to Massignon on http://www.moncelon.com/Massignon.htm (recorded January 16, 2005), and dated November 2, 1949. 

[40] Stuart Schaar, “Orientalism at the Service of Imperialism,” Race and Class 21 (1979), find page no. *

[41] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 10.

[42] Derrida and Anidjar, Acts of Religion, 377-8. I have modified Gil Anidjar’s translation insignificantly.

[43] See, for example, Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, Rev. ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 1993). Daniel thought that this pseudo-argument had become extinct after the Middle Ages, and missed its presence in Massignon Daniel, Islam and the West, 303, 31.

[44] Said, Orientalism, 246.

[45] I am speaking here of theosophist practice. In terms of its official program theosophy did not require its adherents to subscribe to any specific religious beliefs or practices.

[46] Arthur Hobart Nethercot, The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant ([Chicago]: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 128.

[47] Anne Taylor, Annie Besant : A Biography (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 290-91.

[48] According to http://www.kinfonet.org/, retrieved on January 16, 2005.

[49] Said, Orientalism, 3.

[50] Adolf Wahrmund, Das Gesetz Des Nomadenthums Und Die Heutige Judenherrschaft (Karlsruhe and Leipzig: H. Reuther, 1887).

[51] Orientalism Reconsidered, MacFie 352*

[52] * ref. NY Review / Geertz; NY Times article given by Zoe Wool

[53] Efron, ref. *

[54] Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question," in Location of Culture, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1994), 67.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Bernard Lewis, “Religion and Murder in the Middle East,” in Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans : Interpreting the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 102.

[57] Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European, with an introduction by Christopher Bollas and a Response by Jacqueline Rose (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 26-7.