Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid

III. Verbalizing an Orient

Initsconnotationsperhapsnosinglewordhasbeensoloaded with emotion, even passion, as has the term“Orient.” —Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance “ E ast is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” I remember this white-man-ly burdened ditty as coming from my grandmother at a time when my knowledge of east and west centered on which side of the house her porch faced.147 Through sheer geographic accident, the very notion of an orient or an east stems ultimately from historical exigencies . When Europe as ground zero for the invention of Orientalism began representing Orientals, it was the self-proclaimed center of a rather flat and closed-minded view of the world. For those who start intellectual history with the Greeks, the idea of an East has often been elicited, à la Said, out of Homer’s Iliad and Aeschylus’s The Persians, two texts assigned as required reading in the formal schooling of earlier Orientalists. “Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant,” Said concludes in his reading of Aeschylus.148 But Aeschylus is not concerned with a generic Oriental; his literary nemesis is the historically significant Asiatic Persians led by Xerxes against Athens. There is no European imagination in this play, only the hubris of a Greek praising the gods for the prowess of his own civilization’s warriors. In expanding the notion of a specific cultural group to later generic usage, Said conveniently overlooks the fact that this Greek portrays the Persians sympathetically, recalling their past glories.149 “Certainly Homer, Euripides, Dante, St. Thomas, and all other authorities that III Verbalizing an Orient 63 one may care to mention,” cautions Sadiq Jalal al-ªAzm, “held the more or less standard distorted views prevalent in their milieux about other cultures and peoples.”150 Real-time enemies are always ripe for imagining. Nowhere in Orientalism does Said discuss the etymology of the term “Orient,” although the evolution of its use in Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages had been thoroughly documented at that point. The reader is reminded that “Orient” is one of those commonly sensed truths conjured by Herodotus and his ilk.151 If indeed Europeans over time created a false idea of Orient, then it is useful to examine what the term originally meant to the Greeks themselves. The classical origin of the term “orient” points to an astronomical role: to speak of the orient is to designate where the sun rises or mark a nodal point for coordinating the stars.152 The Greeks used “orient” for the direction of the rising sun rather than for a space, real or imagined, for some surrogate other. Following the Greeks, Roman administrators spoke of an oriens-occidens orientation, but not in the later Christendom[inated] sense of a civilizational clash with divinely fired proportions . It is highly dubious that a notion of Orient captured a meaningful geopolitical reality for the phalanxes of Alexander or the legions of Pompey. As Madeleine Dobie warns, “When we examine the historical record, it is clearly important to look for historical breaks as well as patterns of continuity, for we otherwise risk transforming an historically limited relationship of inequality into a quasi-ontological affirmation of the differences between two opposing cultures.”153 In this regard, it is significant to note that the motto Ex Oriente Lux, not to be taken lightly in framing a modern sense of the East as a spiritual homeland, is itself a modern turn of phrase.154 In writing his history, Herodotus described the customs of numerous peoples outside Greece, but those toward the rising sun as he saw it were geographically Asiatic (Asiatikos) rather than oriental. Of the many groups to be encountered, it was the Persians who invaded Greece and thus took pragmatic oriental precedence for this Greek intellectual.155 The relevant term used in classical Greek to define and at times denigrate the collective non-Greek other is barbaros, from which European languages derived the highly pejorative sense of barbarian and by which the indigenous North Africans were later grouped by outsider logic as Berbers. The origin of barbaros is a philological trope, generally accepted as a reference to anyone who could not speak Greek and thus produced sounds that came across as nonsense, a kind of barbarbarbarbaristic stuttering.156 This had not been an important designation in Homer’s day, when the Trojans inhabited a joint Grecocentric sphere, even though modern-day geography would locate them in what Said at times...