Ooof. You like the big questions, don’t you? ;)

Historians have what I’d describe as a love/hate relationship with Orientalism. Some love it, some hate it, some love to hate it, but the thing that’s kind of interesting here is that the one thing that historians can’t do is ignore it.

Said, of course, wasn’t a historian himself; he was a professor of comparative literature. His framing is a useful tool—the way in which the orient has been thought of and constructed in the European mind—and it is something that historians should be aware of (this is my own opinion).

There are all sorts of takes on whether or not this means that orientalist scholarship has any worth or value - and herein lies much of the criticism, because there are a number of historians, anthropologists, scholars on literature, etc., who answered this question “no.” And, indeed, in some fields of scholarship calling someone’s work “orientalist” is meant as basically saying it’s worthless and not innovative.

To take but one of many examples - Said has a lot to say about Edward William Lane, a British orientalist who went off to Egypt in the early/mid 19th century and wrote an Arabic dictionary and at least two encyclopedic works, the more important of which is Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Inasmuch as Lane did view Egypt through a particular lens, I also happen to like Manners and Customs - I think it’s a very useful text that provides a snapshot of life in Egypt at the time, and I think that one can work through some of the problematic aspects of it.

That said, it’s not perfect (for starters … you can read the intro and get the point. It’s a very dense book), but no book is. I think part of the issue is that Orientalism came out at a time when scholars were trying to grapple with the very issues that Said goes into, and a number of them enthusiastically embraced the book uncritically (and I don’t mean this as a slight against Said - I have this issue with nearly every theorist out there, but I’m also very skeptical about the utility of theory in history). This led others—some of whom (Bernard Lewis) were named by Said in the book—to reject it outright as being the angry ranting of a Palestinian scholar of literature who didn’t want to stay in his lane (as much of his criticism was lobbed at historians).

I think the debate between Lewis and Said is now on YouTube somewhere, actually.

I’m sure others will have things to say about Orientalism, so a lot of this is my own take. I think it’s a tool which, like any tool, has to be used for the right purposes and employed at the right time.

As an aside, I was in the front row at a plenary session at the Middle East Studies Association conference in 1998, on the 20th anniversary of the publication of Orientalism (it was my first academic conference), at which Said spoke — and one of the things he said (after dryly admitting he’d had MESA in mind when he wrote the book) was that he himself had intended the book to be a conversation starter, and that he’d been surprised at how it had been received — he’d expected more dialogue and responses to it. Instead, people either loved it and embraced it, or they hated it and rejected it. And, in many ways, that’s still the case. Even if you’re in the “hate/reject” camp, it’s hard to deny that it’s an important work.