Orientalism

I was curled up next to my whole clan – Cole, Amina, Sina, and Rawy – on our yellow playroom’s gray couch as we embarked on a cozy family ritual: Cole playing Zelda while the kids watched and squealed in excitement/fear, prodding him to do this or that. Even my three-year old seems to follow and often talks about “Gibdos” – whatever that is.

Almost for sure this would be…frowned upon in the Waldorf community. But oh well. Cole and the kids absolutely loved this set up. I tried to get into it and failed. But I still wanted to join. How could I not seeing Rawy perched right next to Cole with his little dancing toes, furling and unfurling, as he intently followed Link’s every move. And Sina tightly cloaked in his red blanket occasionally poking a leg out to cool down. Then there’s Beano enthusiastically co-narrating with Cole in a higher-than-usual pitch. Sometimes she sings jingle bells when things get intense in the game, just to lighten the mood.

I couldn’t not join. But how?

I found snuggling in with a book to be just about the perfect way to fold myself into that ritual. Distracting as shit. But perfect.

***

I have been in reading mode these past few months. Mix of fiction and non. I often lose myself in books. Typically, in a fun way. Like with House on the Cerulean Sea. Charmingly whimsical, sad, and sunny with a healthy dose of magic, that book is a balm to an aching soul.

But other times I lose it in less-fun-but-still-necessary ways. Like with Edward Said’s Orientalism. That book along with Amin Maalouf’s Deadly Identities (الهويات القاتلة) and Mohamed Kamel Hussein’s Dark Village (محمد كامل حسين - قرية ظالمة) are all swirling together in my brain in a way that feels defining.

I never intended to read Orientalism. Felt like it would be too abstract and scholarly. I was more interested in his other work on Palestine. Nonetheless, I still read the Orientalism excerpt in Said’s Selected Works. But I found I couldn’t easily follow his argument all the time, and it was more intriguing than I thought it would be, so I decided I needed to just read the whole thing.

I’m glad I did. Quickly, I realized I was approaching it as a self-help/parenting book (as opposed to an academic project). It gave me a framework to process thoughts and feelings I was having but did not quite have the words or concepts for. It was immensely helpful in that sense. But it also ripped open a whole bunch of identity-scabs that I had more-or-less stopped picking at. Until October 2023 and everything it dredged up.

I have not fully processed the book yet, and I don’t know that I ever properly will, but I’m hoping writing about it will help me digest it more.

Before I get into the points that stuck with me most, I’ll set the scene to what I understand to be Said’s arguments. Orientalism is a scholarly field that originated in the late 18^th century. Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt is often seen as a watershed moment that prompted further interest in and study of “the Orient”. Depending on the era, this constructed category of geographical space (“the Orient”) expanded and contracted to encompass Asian countries farther east like China and India, as well as nearer spaces like Turkey, the Levant, and North Africa. Orientalism as a field typically encompassed a range of reductive – and often hostile - views of Islam. It was never a purely academic endeavor because it was promptly employed to serve nefarious political goals. Along with its stigmatized interpretation of Islam, Orientalism shaped colonial policy in the Orient. Orientalism was published in 1978. Although a lot has changed and the term has largely gone out of fashion (and was never really popular in the US to begin with), some of the core themes persist till today.

OK now on to the points that I came away with.

- Text is not best. Orientalist scholars originally almost exclusively relied on text to understand the Orient and Islam. This textual interpretation of a people is necessarily reductive because it either ignores the diversity of people’s lived experiences (both in a single moment but also over time) or incorporates them as an exception or a qualification to the original textual interpretation. Text is important, but it is but one component.

So, if in our household we have a home rule of no garbage on the floor, Amina might read that to include Sina’s tangled yarn, Sina might include Amina’s scribbles, and Rawy might include a spoon on the floor. That’s not even factoring in what each of them might do when they’re drained (say 5 pm on a Winter Wednesday) versus not (say 10 am on a Summer Saturday). I might throw a piece of broken plastic that ends up being some really critical part of Cole’s project. So on and so forth. Point is my household’s interpretation and implementation of rules varies and changes. It’s not static. It’s not uniform. But someone walking in and seeing just the written rule might miss all the messiness of how we actually interpret and implement it. And I think the same applies to any type of rule-setting text – religious or not.

- Popular culture pervades and perseveres. Themes and tropes created by Orientalist scholarly endeavors were affected by biased literary depictions from olden days (Said cites Dante’s Inferno, which I never read and I barely know anything about other than that it was a 14^th century work). Similarly, these Orientalist portrayals often leak into popular and political culture (via literature for example) and there they tend to dwell and germinate. Said cites Mark Twain and Agatha Christie among others. Importantly, I don’t think he’s saying that Twain or Christie were intentionally seeking to promote certain tropes as part of some diabolical conspiracy. I think he’s saying that they might have unwittingly picked up certain themes and incorporated them. Then those themes get unwittingly picked up by casual readers and passed on through conversations or jokes or articles and so on. Point is ideas take a life of their own. They metamorph and are hard to quarantine and that’s life. But certain Orientalist ideas were defective and weaponized from the get-go so having them float about unchecked was problematic. Just like Samsung recalled its faulty battery phones, this was maybe Said’s version of “recalling” some those defective orientalist tropes.

- Golden-Age pigeonholes. There is an Orientalist trope that isolates certain achievements that happened in the Islamic world between the 8^th and 16^th century as worthy of noting. These include Al-Khwarizmi who is considered the father of algorithms and algebra, Ibn Sina (or Avicenna), al-Kindi, al-Rumi, amongst others. Acknowledging important Muslim contributions to the world is not a bad thing. It’s good and is (I think) intended to counter the reductive Orientalist trope that tends to associate Islam with bad things like terrorism. Yet it is also one of those things that I knew bugged me when I came up against it but didn’t quite understand why.

As a disclaimer, I’m not entirely sure if this is the point Said intended to relay, but this is how I thought of it after reading the book.

One way that this is also reductive is that it pegs the good “Muslim” things to a fixed time that is long past. It’s like if I was talking to Amina in her thirties and reflecting on how the period when she was between 4 and 12 was really when she was at her best. I imagine it would feel to her like what I’m NOT saying is, “that’s when you peaked, and it’s been downhill ever since”.

That said, I definitely don’t want to be in a mental space where I greet every “al-Khwarizmi was a great Muslim scholar” with a “f**-you lady” type of attitude. It’s helpful for me to have a way to process a gut-feeling I experienced but it’s not helpful to dwell on it nor is it helpful to internalize it as a defensive mechanism. Not for me at least. This is of course easier said than done, especially because I trend aggressive and confrontational. But I’m really hoping that better understanding why the Golden-Age trope irked me will help me unclench and breath my way into a more flexible (and maybe productive?) space. Like with a hard yoga pose.

- Selective filters. Another thing that is also related to the Golden-Age theme is this: too often it’s only things perceived by “the West” as worthy that end up making it on that list of universally commendable Muslim achievements. It’s not that “Muslims” would disagree that these achievements were indeed supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (Amina’s just started playing the song on the piano so the word’s been used a lot in our house lately). But maybe other things that Muslim lore would consider important and good do not make it onto such lists. For example, if I’m talking to an older version of Sina and I’m emphasizing how quickly he seemed to pick up reading. It was your best achievement, I say. But maybe for him his biggest achievement was when he crocheted his first hat or when he made that Origami flower with his papa, or whatever other million and one things that stand out in his memory. Maybe it’s all of them. The point is me creating a narrative on behalf of Sina that his best achievement as a young boy was as a reader might not quite line up with how he perceives his own achievements and may unintentionally trivialize other things that he deemed worthy.

- Representation as Misrepresentation. Here’s how I understand Said’s position on this: if the purpose of representing a people is to capture the “essence” of those people, then it is necessarily a misrepresentation because there is no essence to capture.[1] No one person nor even a group of people can aptly represent the whole of those people. I can never presume to speak of “Viroquans” as a people, much less Wisconsinites, much less Americans. (Ironically, I can much more easily speak of “the west”, which I think Said would say is similarly reductive to orientalists speaking of “the orient”.) In contrast, orientalists would come and reside somewhere in “the orient” – say Cairo, Egypt – for a few months or years and from there comfortably proceed to make assertions about Egyptians, Arabs, and Muslims. Representations are necessary and inevitable. But they can become insidious if used as a key to understanding something much broader and bigger than the thing itself.

- Muslim things/people VS. things/people who are Muslim. Because Orientalism made it OK to think of things that are as big and diverse as “the orient” as one homogenous thing. It made speaking authoritatively of “Muslims” and “Arabs” accepted common parlance. This comes up in different ways but perhaps a familiar way is in American movies. Too often, there is no distinction made between Muslim or Arab. Both seen as interchangeable. Moreover, when either are featured, it’s often as a stereotype in a galabeya maybe and turban-esque head wrap. Deserts are often involved. Women (if presented) are silent and submissive. Then of course there is the terrorism motif. I remember one of the first times that I came across something that was NOT that. In Mr. Robot, one of the side programmers was a veiled woman. I remember it caught my attention because that was the extent to which her being Muslim was relevant. She was a programmer who happened to be Muslim. She was not a Muslim programmer. The latter suggests that being Muslim qualifies the fact that she’s a programmer in any relevant or meaningful way when (at least in this show) it didn’t.

- Different but not opposite. One of my key takeaways was that orientalism creates an imaginary line that separates “east” from the “west” and pegs each collective group as not just different but opposite than the other. But I think Said would say differences exist yes, but they abound within and across cultures.

So instead of

It’s more like

Seems pretty obvious. But it still felt like a little epiphany (to me) when I thought of it visually like that. To my mind, that also fits with Amin Malouf’s point about how one person’s identity can be cut along many different lines – not just big lines like class and race and religion, but also smaller lines within those broader classifications like whether you grew up in Cairo or Ismailia, went to English or French schools, took piano classes or oud, played soccer or swimming, liked math or not, had a single parent or both, etc.

- The Orient internalizes misrepresentation. Many of the tropes created by orientalists were processed by “orientals” prompting the whole line of counterarguments that goes along the lines of “Islam is not this, it’s that”. A whole range of arguments adopted by liberal, conservative, or radical Muslim thinkers agrees with/accepts the underlying premise that there is one core unchanging thing that is Islam. And then they (the different arguments) disagree amongst themselves as to which core is the “true” core. I think Said would be similarly critical of those thinkers as he is of orientalists, at least on this point.

All in all, it was an intense book and though Said explicitly says in his 1994 afterword that it was not his intention to stoke up anti-Western feelings, I did feel more hostile to “the west” reading it. But that’s on me. And likely has to do with when I read it (2024/2025) what with “the west’s” staggering moral and institutional failure to hold Israel accountable for its violations. It was natural I think to react to that with an anti-“west” attitude. But that’s not a helpful place to be.

So. Though the book certainly gave me a helpful way to sift through thoughts and feeling I’ve had, I was also ready to be done with it. It felt like when I would read about a disease and then start seeing all the symptoms in myself and others. I started seeing more things that prompted me to unnecessarily snap at friendly faces. And that just made me feel more stuck. I wanted to let it sit and see how I could incorporate it in my daily life. Make it my own. To help me navigate minor episodes as they come up.

***

I was sitting on our couch clutching Orientalism and I remember feeling very strongly like I wish I had read this earlier in my life. I wish someone had told me to. So I turn to Amina, hold her face in my hands and tell her that when she’s older she has to read this book. She nodded earnestly and continued watching Cole play Zelda.

I wonder if she ever will, and I wonder if she’ll find it as relevant. I kind of hope not.