“Orientalism” is essentially a European system of knowledge about the “Orient” (geographically from the Mediterranean to China) developed primarily by historians like Renan, Sacy, and Lane. It is an “Orient” known intertextually, with a frame of racism as well as a variety of stereotypes developed through text rather than experience. Though Britain sought to dominate through economic control, and France, in its frustration, settled for an intellectual and pedagogical role, little was really known about the “Orient” because it was culturally so inadequately penetrated. There are of course degrees of knowing the “Orient” as exemplified by Sir Richard Burton, who spoke the language flawlessly, penetrated Islam disguised as a Muslim doctor, took a wife and even accomplished a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Said's position on Burton was “he was preternaturally knowledgeable about the degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and codes"1.
This French-Anglo Orientalism” eventually came to the United States through men like Sir Hamilton Gibb, who “from his early career at London, to the middle years at Oxford to his influential years of Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies”2 brought with him an intertextual “Orientalism”3. “The Orient for Gibb was not a place one encountered directly, it was something one read about, studied, wrote about within the confines of learned societies, the university, the scholarly conference.” (Roland Barthes has said all operations of language are deformation) Presently there exists a French-Anglo-American Orientalism, however, it is now the United States that dominates the “Middle East”4. It is also important to note that men like Gibb and his successors in the past and at present advise and influence policy making in the US government. Much of our knowledge of the “Orient” is the product of colonialism. However, there is a decolonialization surfacing as evidenced by members of the Hull group on Middle Eastern Studies, Anwar Abdel Malek, Homi Bhabha and Edward Sa'id.
