I LOVE the Middle East, yet I still fall victim to the fetishes of Orientalism.
The Importance of coming to terms with your personal biases, with some help from Edward Said.
Brilliantly colored scarves and Aladdin-esque oriental garb, mythical, fire breathing creatures, opulent castles, and endless sand dunes that deliver ruthless storms as well as beautifully sunkissed goddesses. Olive-colored women that radiate sexuality and beauty from underneath concealing hijabs and traditional dress, lounging about enjoying succulently fresh medjool dates. Men in pure white, a flattering contrast to their dark features, sipping strong “Turkish coffee”. These rather questionable images – ones that could describe fantastical versions of not only the Middle East, but India and lots of other parts of the non-Western world – come to mind when I read One Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps because of my visits to Israel and interest in the Middle East, I like to think I am able to conjure more real images of the cultures and people that inhabit this part of the world, but even my own experiences don’t protect me from borderline racist and obnoxiously romanticized images that are triggered by a text like One Thousand and One Nights. This phenomena is directly related to arguments put forward by Edward Said, an Arab literature professor credited with founding the academic field of postcolonial studies, and completely revolutionising the discourse of Orientalism in the West.
Said was born in Palestine, and although raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, he was always schooled in British and American settings. He claimed this bicultural perspective helped him to illuminate the gaps in Western understanding of Eastern geopolitics as he sought to change how the cultures of the Middle East were described, studied, and defined. Orientalism is his most famous work, a critique of the cultural representations that form the bases of the West’s perception of the Orient, or the geography of the Middle East and the East. Said didn’t discriminate in his criticisms; he was against US and Israeli policies, but also addressed Arab countries where Muslim leaders act against the national interest of their people. The central thesis of Orientalism suggests a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture”, while simultaneously criticizing the regimes led by Arab elites that have internalized false or romanticized depictions. Said’s model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of literary theory, analysis, and critique. He catalysed an overdue recognition that the Western study of Islamic civilization is not about objective academia, but instead a self-affirmation of European identity which encourages the sentiment that Westerners are not only superior, but somehow have more knowledge about Orient cultures than Orientals themselves. These misrepresentations have existed since antiquity, and stereotypes depicting the Orient as irrational, weak, and feminized – the antithesis of the West – instigate all the wrong kinds of imagery whenever an average person looks to the East.
Orientalist thought is established around a central division; the world is split in two with the larger and more “different” part being the Orient, and the other, known as “our world” is the Occident or the West. It is inherent human nature for these types of self-centered divisions to occur when studying cultures and other parts of the world, but the issue derives from the Orient uniformly being considered the inferior of the two. Especially after the second World War, the US inherited the role of dominant Western power, along with a massive hegemony over the Islamic, world from Britain and Europe. This saturation is unprecedented, and few other non-Western geographies have been so dominated by the US like the Arab-Muslim world. This imbalance of power and representation allowed the West and Orient split to engulf the media and popular culture. Given the widespread consumption of Western, and specifically American news, third-world and even Islamic countries were subconsciously feeding into information about the Orient that was created by the West, and without realizing, adopting extremely self-destructive narratives. As a result, Islam has become synonymous with anti-human, antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and antirational. Arabs are seen as potential oil suppliers or terrorists; no detail of the passions of personal life enters the scene. Just as Westerners divided the world, they also divided Muslims into two groups: good Muslims, and Muslims that don’t serve their purpose who are reduced to backward fanatics.
Said addressed this issue in Orientalism, and he was applauded by many aspiring politically correct academics who invited him to come and speak in defense of Islam. He would frustratedly respond that they were missing the entire point of his book. The “real” Islam could not be explained discretely as “x, y, or z” and he was attempting to communicate how severely misrepresented an entity it was, something complex and manifold – like most religions, races, and groups around the world – that should not be plagued with further oversimplifications. Said took “great pains to show that current discussions of the Orient or of the Arabs and Islam are fundamentally premised on fiction”, and to point out these concepts were so ingrained in our society that even educated individuals fall victim to the trappings of orientalist thought. It is worth noting that Said also put forth that the solution was not to propagate beautiful images of Islam, images similar to the ones that surface in my mind when I imagine the Middle East. Encouraging exoticisation only serves to support the foundationally harmful concept that “reductive images can be used as substitutes for entire, complex, and diverse cultural realities.” He was adamant that this strategy only perpetuates the ideological fallacies surrounding Islam.
In one of Said’s essays from 1980 titled “Islam through Western Eyes”, he re-emphasised the media’s detrimental obsession with Islam. It is either depicted as a menacing return to the Middle Ages, implying the destruction of Western democracy as it exists today, or spoken about in the context of its endless campaign to separate the majority of Muslims from the radical actions of a few that tend to popularly characterize the entirety of Islam. Said argues that the desire to better understand another culture should have nothing to do with an exchange of power and dominance, and that Islam needs to exist in more dimensions in the West before productive conversations and attitudes can develop. If you aren’t rebutting the standard anti-Arab or anti-Muslim rhetoric, or trying to combat the idealization of Islam, then virtually no constructs exist for further consideration of the topic, and this is where Said found the existing Orientalist discourse to be ineffective, even exacerbatory.
Returning to One Thousand and One Nights, although the plot is far from peaceful, I can happily say that I am not haunted by the media’s depictions of terrorist, jihadist, and wickedly deceptive and violent Arabs, or radical, fundamental Islamic organizations. That side of Orientalism is very much an issue today, but not one that immediately comes to mind when reading the collection of Arabian folklore. In fact, to take an optimistic approach, I think some critical analysis of One Thousand and One Nights can help to defy some of the detrimental perceptions of the Arab world that are promoted by orientalist thought. Women are often cunning and powerful characters within the stories, a lot of their power over men may have a sexual basis, they are not subject to the will and abuse of men in every single story. In the end, Shahrazad, the main female character who does the story-telling for all one thousand and one nights, uses her intellect and emotional manipulation in addition to her sexuality to free herself and win her life back. If only somewhat, this counters the all-too-familiar construct of a weak, oppressed woman clad in a black Burka, helpless behind her husband, that is circulated around the Western world.
Said had a lasting impact in many ways, partly because his influence extended beyond the scholarly field as a quasi-pop star in America. The complexity of his background as privileged yet marginalized, and wealthy yet powerless enabled him to empathize with people of dispossessed groups, yet ironically, he found a niche cohort of supporters that were victims of Zionism and its supporters while still enjoying the full riches of New York – a city that screams Jewish achievement and success. He received plenty of hatred and criticism himself, though generally scholars agree that his “choice to use Orientalism as a discourse [was] persuasive as it allowed for all of the oriental myths and visions to be put under the scrutiny of a global and humanist lens”, and that it was important for such deeply ingrained biases to at least be acknowledged, even if he didn’t always go about it ideally. Most of his arguments were undeniable. If you were to ask an average literate Westerner to name an Arab writer, musician, or intellectual, you would likely be met with silence, but if you were to ask an average literate Arab for the same from the Western world, they would probably produce quite a long list. This is a simple example that demonstrates the greater magnitude of the issue, and the tragically one-sided nature of the relationship between the West and the Islamic world. Unfortunately, Said’s work also offered an opportunity for many non-Western “upwardly noble academics” to channel his new political correctness, engender themselves to his narratives of oppression, and create careers out of transmitting and debating the issue, which does not help the masses of Arabs and Muslims suffering the consequences of Orientalism. The divide between the Orient and the West is still a prominent issue today, one that constantly bombards us, whether we are always conscious of it or not. However, Said may be pleased with the gradually increasing diversity with which the Arab-Muslim world is depicted, whether it be from scholars, university courses, social media, or even forms of entertainment… I personally recommend giving the Netflix TV series titled Fauda a thorough vetting, to practice consuming popular media while actively battling against the Orientalist stereotypes and negative Arab-Muslim preceonceptions the West has developed for us.
*for anyone interested in further reading, here is the link to my original paper with all of the footnotes and sourcing
