Orientalism as termed by Edward Said

Introduction

Orientalism as termed by Edward Said is meant to create awareness of a constellation of assumptions that are flawed and underlying Western attitudes towards the Muslim societies. Evidence from his 1978 book “Orientalism”, states that the culture has been of influence and marred with controversy in post colonial studies and other fields of study. Moreover, the scholarship is surrounded by somehow persistent and otherwise subtle prejudice of Eurocentric nature, which is against Islam religion and culture (Windschuttle, 1999). In his book, Said illustrates through arguments, that the long tradition in existence containing romanticized images of Islamic stronghold regions i.e. Middle East, and the Western culture have for a long time served as implicit justifications for the European and American Imperial ambitions. In light of this, Said denounced the practice of influential Arabs who contributed to the internalization of Arabic culture ideas by US and British orientalists. Thus, his hypothesis that Western scholarship on Muslim was historically flawed and essentially continues to misrepresent the reality of Muslim people. In lieu to this, Said quotes that, “So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Therefore, very few details such as human density, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered the awareness of even the people whose profession revolve around reporting of the Arab world. Due to this, we have instead a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression” (Said, 1980).

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... assertions that no European or American scholar could know the orient are criticized largely by Landow, however, in his view, whatever the European and American have done have resulted to acts of oppression. Moreover, Said is considered as a person who never took tie to welcome other scholars’ views which he would use to feature in his analysis. According to Landow, he considers this as the greatest single sin committed by a scholar in orientalism (Landow, N.d).

Using judicious satirical criticism by Daniel M. Varisco to defuse what has become an acrimonious debate, he surveys the extensive criticism of Said's methodology and his extensive use of Foucault and Gramsci criticisms, he argues that the politics of polemics needs to be superseded to move academic discussion of real cultures in the region once imagined as an "Orient" beyond the binary blame game.