ORIENTALISM

ORIENTALISM True Picture T HERE are two phases of Orientalism. Modern Orientalism began after the Crusades that continued from the 11th to the 14th centuries. In the Crusades, the European nations were defeated. After this defeat they were not in a position to retaliate against their ‘Muslim enemies’. They started a campaign that was based on negative propaganda against Islam; they adopted Islamic disciplines like history and the commentary of the Quran, not as a scholarly research but only to deface Islam by distorting the facts. It will be of relevance to understand what Orientalism is, to look at it from the right perspective. Orientalism has been described in Wikipedia as an ‘exaggeration of difference, the presumption of western superiority and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the oriental world’ (the Orient is a historical term for the East, traditionally comprising anything that belongs to the Eastern world, in relation to Europe). As such, Orientalism is the source of the inaccurate cultural representations that form the foundations of western thought and perception of the eastern world, specifically in relation to the Middle East region. The principle characteristic of Orientalism is a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture”. The first Orientalist who broke this tradition was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a British scholar. He published a book with the title: Heroes and Hero Worship. This was the first attempt of giving an objective picture of Islam. He tried to dispel those misgivings about Islam. This was the first book in this series and it marked a departure of Orientalism from negative Orientalism to positive Orientalism. Then there were a host of Orientalists who changed this trend and published such books that were based mostly on real historical data like E. E. Kellett, David Samuel Margoliouth, Philip K. Hitti, Michael Hart, etc. Now Orientalism is not just a negative discipline as it was in previous centuries, but the scholars who adopt this field today are Orientalism is the source of the inaccurate cultural representations that form the foundations of western thought and perception of the eastern world, specifically in relation to the Middle East region.