Representative image -
Nasir Al-Mulk Mosque, also known as Pink Mosque; Shiraz, Iran. It was built during Qajar Dynasty in 1888 CE.
Ustad Dr. Rafeeq Ali Hudawi in one of his lecture on Anthropology of Islam, a paper in the course outline of Civilizational Studies, Darul Huda Islamic University, assigned a CCE (Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation) work based on a video on YouTube titled Edward Said On Orientalism.
The assignment contained three questions in the following:
What kind of experiences of Said that made him write a critique of Orientalism?
To what extent his experiences are anthropologically significant?
How did his work affect the nature, scope and methodology of studies in Humanities and Social Sciences?
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(The answers to these questions were published here considering its importance aligning to the contents of this blog)
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What kind of experiences of Said that made him write a critique of Orientalism?
According to the interview on YouTube (Edward Said On Orientalism), the Columbia University professor Edward W. Said (1935-2003) underwent some harsh contradictory experiences that made him write a critique of Orientalism. Mr. Said explains in the interview two of his experiences that led him to reconstruct the idea of orientalism.
Firstly, the immediate period after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 was full of discussions about the Middle East on popular media and press. All these presented Arabs as cowards who don't know how to fight. They are always going to be defeated as they’re still traditional and far from modernity and modern war equipment. However, everybody was surprised when the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal in early October of 1973 and demonstrated their fighting skill.
Secondly, the experience of Mr. Said as an Palestinian-Arab. He was baffled by the representation of his Arab people in the Western arts in contrast to what he grew up as an Arab. With this background of personal but practical experiences, Edward Said decided to write the book ‘Orientalism’ decoding the vicious portrayal of the Orient by Western scholars.
To what extent his experiences are anthropologically significant?
Experience is an important approach which works as a basis of knowledge generation. Many anthropological findings are purely based on experience and participatory observation. Actually, direct experiences help to get the research purpose to get as close as possible to reality. That’s why anthropological theories of phenomenologists also uphold the experience as a reliable source of knowledge.
Similarly, experiences of Edward Said that inspired him to write a critique of orientalism became anthropologically significant as they eventually called for a relook at the perceptions about the East and its culture. At the same time, Mr. Said work exposed the biased representation by the West which distorted and precipitated the image of Eastern people and their culture.
In another viewpoint, experiences are purely subjective phenomena. When the experience of Western scholars about the Eastern people are mostly Eurocentric, Mr. Said’s experience about the East is more realistic and indigenous.
How did his work affect the nature, scope and methodology of studies in Humanities and Social Sciences?
Edward Said popularized the theory of orientalism to describe how Europeans portrayed the East including Asia and Africa with distorted reality that posits the West as superior and civilized while labeling the latter as inferior and uncivilized in terms of culture, religion, ethnicity, arts, literature and all other aspects of civilization.
This threatening stereotyping of East is prevalent in various European and American presentations including history, literature, anthropology, social sciences and even modern media with a vested interest to legitimize their cultural hegemony over the East. In this regard, the work of Mr. Said challenged the European perspective of misrepresentation creating a new epistemological shift to study about the Orient.
Secondly, Mr. Said’s 1978 work ‘Orientalism’ is regarded as profoundly significant as it revolutionized the study about Middle East and helped to create and shape entire new fields of studies like Post-Colonialism and other Deconstruction theories while influencing diverse disciplines like anthropology, sociology, history, literature, cultural studies and other social sciences.
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