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Author: Ziauddin Sardar

Publisher: Open University Press, 1999

Pages: 118

Picture Madam Butterfly, the tragic story of love, power, and death set in China. In fact, picture just about any film, play, book, or even painting that involves the Orient and try to imagine what sort of images they conjure in your mind: snake charmers, spices, silks, magic, mysteriousness, mystique, harems, … Think more: submissiveness, backwardness, subservience, barbarism, suicide… You would be unusual if none of these descriptions came to your mind.

Ziauddin Sardar’s book, Orientalism, discusses the roots of these perceptions and conceptions. In this book, Madam Butterfly makes an appearance. But it is not portrayed as the classic theatre piece it is traditionally known as. It is the film M. Butterfly, which provides a “complete discourse” on Orientalism in an allegorical manner. Sardar uses the parody of M. Butterfly as a stage for the concept of Orientalism.

Among the concepts of Orientalism presented here is the view that the West is the custodian of ancient culture, which nostalgically presents the Orient in a perpetual past. The image is itself mystical and intriguing but more often than not partnered with darkness and backwardness.

This power is also asserted with the concept of “white man as a god syndrome.” Here we find the white man as the one who imbues the ‘native’ with knowledge and direction. Sardar points to Indian Jones in the Temple of Doom and The Man Who Would Be King as typical examples of film where white men are mistaken as god. In a modern day analogy the white man is presented as the god of science and technology who is held in awe for the wonders he creates.

Through the similitude of M. Butterfly Sardar introduces many other concepts of Orientalism including the submissive Oriental woman and the hopelessness of the Orient when it is without the powerful West to nurture it.

Before giving an excellent short history of Orientalism, he emphasizes that the ‘Orient’ is basically an object of the West formed to comply with the fears, problems, and concerns of the West. “The Orient of Orientalists is a constructed artifact through which the West explains, expounds, objectifies and demonstrates its own contemporary concerns.”

In stressing this point Sardar then goes on to name the culprits history books have so often vindicated in tainting the history of the East. Although he mentions the contribution of Marco Polo to visions of China, it is Islam as the deviant East that Sardar focuses on, starting with the saintly sounding figure of John of Damascus who lived in the eighth century. John of Damascus, as with many Christians in his time and in medieval times, had a problem with Islam: if the message of Muhammad was to be believed by them then it would nullify the Christianity they knew. The mission of John of Damascus was to pollute the Islamic message and in doing so he claimed it as nothing more than a pagan cult.

Sardar goes on to discuss other contributors spanning the Crusades, which in effect opened the gates for travel writing. Thereafter, in the Renaissance and Reformation period the quest for knowledge began to adopt a different purpose. Studying the Orient was taken along with studying Arabic in order to understand Hebrew and thus enhance their knowledge of the Bible.

In the 18th Century and later there is a surge in evangelism and missionaries to the Orient as well as others who quell on its mystery and intrigue. Many historians and travel writers such as Edward Lane, T.E. Lawrence, Richard Burton, Doughty and others had such a powerful impact that their effects of their writings are felt today.

Sardar also presents the view of contemporary orientalists who, although present arguments with a certain amount of academic weight rather than the old, blatant, racist diatribe, are still implanted with the same misconceptions as their traditional counterparts.

Crone and Cook are two contemporary orientalists whose book Hagarism is resurfacing due to the Islamophobic fervor post 11/9. They claim that Islam is a barbaric conspiracy with Judaic roots. Sardar suggests that there is a connection between their thesis and the views of John of Damascus. Their theory even found its way to the cover story of a recent issue of The New Statesman titled ‘The Great Koran Con Trick,’ which Sardar incidentally is also interviewed in to contest their view.

Sardar’s Orientalism goes on to discuss the important contribution of the critics of the subject. He gives considerable space to Djait and Al Tibawi who have postulated their own definitions and conclusions on Orientalism. Scholars have largely overlooked their valuable theses, in particular another critic, Edward Said, of whom Sardar devotes a section to.

In the section on Edward Said Sardar includes Said’s definition and criticizes his book Orientalism for some of its weakness. However, what Sardar does not seem to acknowledge is that it is precisely Said’s book that has caused the subject of Orientalism to be more than a debate between academics. Spot Said’s Orientalism carefully placed among journals and books in a choice home in Beautiful House. This might appear a bit pretentious, but at least in the last ten years or so the subject of Orientalism has moved from the cloisters of departments of theology to wider circles. Credit where credit is due, Said’s book has enlarged the debate and circle of those interested.

The book goes on to discuss other contemporary practices like film. Aladdin, according to Sardar, is the worst of all Hollywood animations in presenting a typical orientalist’s vision of the Orient. At least, as he says, in the old film versions of the Arabian Nights there was a moral behind the story. But in Disney’s Aladdin many misconceptions of Islam and Muslims are employed in the animation to provide nothing but entertainment.

Although Sardar does make an excellent analysis and description on film - including the script of some films - that contain images of Islam and the Orient, in the section on contemporary film he does tend to concentrate on films that are blatantly anti-Islam and aggressively fitting into the orientalist garb. There are other films that are insidiously negative, but not as arrogant.

Award winning films such as The English Patient and Gandhi, although set in mainly Muslim countries, portray Muslims as passive and almost superfluous characters, and sometimes merely as part of the set-props.

The films that Sardar mentions like True Lies, The Siege and Delta Force, are, after all, not everyone’s taste. As an indication of this the well-known British actor Juliet Stevenson refused a role in True Lies because she didn’t agree with taking roles in films that incorporate racist profiling.

On the subject of choice of film more examples and analysis could have been used in films and cartoons for children since it is in childhood that most of the misconceptions about Islam are embedded. However, Sardar’s analysis of the many films he selects is invaluable. We can’t expect the author to be watching films all day.

Sardar’s more expansive geographical scope enlivens the debate, unlike other critics, showing that even Hinduism, the early Americas, and Chinese and Japanese culture are all affected by Orientalism.

The section on “Brown Sahibs and the Orientalized Orientals” highlights that the people of the Orient have also fallen pray to Orientalism. Sardar appropriately criticizes brown sahibs such as Rushdie and Naipaul, which is reassuring after Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for literature.

The book finishes with the chapter on the postmodern future. Orientalism neatly fits into the essence of the postmodern world, which encompasses globalization and the pleasure principle cleverly marketed through multi-media like CD-Rom games, talking books and arcade games.

Orientalism, although for readers of social science, is easy reading. Anyone unfamiliar with Orientalism will easily be introduced to it and in no time grasp the argument. Its short history is excellent. After reading this, anyone with traditional western concepts of the Orient, however small, will in future be more skeptical. Let’s hope that books like this help in reformatting these misconceived images into nothing more than a mirage – a mirage unlike the one that the West has so cleverly painted of the Orient.