An Introduction

There are only a few figures at a time that are so efficient and influential in their own professional domain that they virtually change the overall future process of that domain. Among such figures is the American-Palestinian scholar and intellectual Edward Said who specializes in sociology, culture and literature and who treats a variety of other disciplines at the same time. His work is based upon his interpretation of the opposition of “imperial-colonial” which follows an almost archetypal pattern of antitheses such as North-South, majority-minority, male-female, intellectual-layman, and so on. Such oppositions have existed since the genesis of human society, but Said’s treatment of the relationship between Empire and colony is significantly different. Orientalists before Said and probably after him have built a body of more or less patterned activities which can be considered as the outcome of their age-old scholarship. Said, on the other hand, revolted against his colleagues, “debunking the great monuments of their own academic discipline.” Crystallizing Orientalism in such a systematic way is like a revelation. On the one hand, knowledge from different fields of study such as history, sociology, philosophy and literature are widely deciphered; on the other, a great deal of responses resulted, whose effect was a conversion of Orientalism from a general “philological discipline” into “a social science specialty.”

A point of importance about Said’s character and writing is that he always remains generous in his judgments and conscientious and thorough even in small matters. He is punctiliously fair in his tone despite his sympathy for the plight of Palestinians. He is never overwhelmed by his analyses. His love for colonial writers such as Kipling, E. M. Forster, Conrad, and Flaubert remains undiminished despite the fact that he recognizes their complicity in the imperial project.

Edward Said is the most outstanding practitioner of Orientalism. His ideas on this topic have really been influential in different fields. He is present largely on the current cultural and literary stage. The influence of this American Palestinian intellectual and sophisticated critic is so great that the whole world is familiar with his ideas and commentaries on Western literature, art, cinema, music, history, society and politics. These are frequently cited in different forums and publications. More than anything else, Said holds sway over the criticism of the novel in the nineteenth century. His Culture and Imperialism (1993) is a critique not only of authors like Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster and Joseph Conrad who wrote openly about the West’s colonies, but also of a few quintessentially domestic writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens whose novels Mansfield Park and Great Expectations respectively, are concerned with the colonial-imperial question.

Nevertheless, Edward Said made a big splash on the literary stage with the publication of Orientalism. After that, he achieved world renown as a writer. Orientalism is a critique of the academic field of Oriental Studies, which itself is a field of learning purveyed at the most prestigious universities of Europe for several centuries. This field of study is a broad and complex arena of scholarship; it incorporates different disciplines such as philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts.