Orientalist Quotes

The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the orient could not do was to represent itself. Evidence of the Orient was credible only after it had passed through and been made firm by the refining fire of the Orientalist’s work.

فلم يكن القصد من وصف شخص ما بأنه شرقي، على نحو ما دأب عليه المستشرقون، ينحصر في الإشارة إلى أن لغة هذا الشخص وجغرافية بلاده وتاريخه من موضوعات الدراسة العلمية، بل كثيراً ما كان ذلك التعبير يرمي إلى الحط من شأن الشخص ويعني أنه ينتمي إلى سلالة دنيا من البشر، وإن كان ذلك لاينفي أن كلمة "الشرق" كانت ترتبط في أذهان بعض المبدعين مثل نيرفال وسيجالين ارتباطاً رائعاً وخلاباً بالغرابة، والبهاء، والغموض، والوعد، ولكن الكلمة كانت بمثابة تعميم تاريخي مغرق في شموله.

It remains the professional Orientalist's job to piece together a portrait, a restored picture as it were, of the Orient or the Oriental; fragments, such as those unearthed by Sacy, supply the material, but the narrative shape, continuity, and figures are constructed by the scholar, for whom scholarship consists of circumventing the unruly (un-Occidental) nonhistory of the Orient with orderly chronicle, portraits, and plots.

The new fans of Japan won’t be Orientalists, but they will be anime-savvy.

We should strive to focus our lens on what connects us as humans as opposed to our differences. In doing so, not only can we challenge the Orientalist and colonial aspects of traditional photographic narratives, but we can also create a new visual legacy marked by equitable discourse.

Does everyone here introduce themselves with their languages?" Ramy asked. "Of course," Vimal said. "Your languages determine how interesting you are. Orientalists are fascinating. Classicists are dull.

... the Orientalist attitude in general [is profoundly anti-empirical]. It shares with magic and with mythology the self-containing, self-reinforcing character of a closed system, in which objects are what they are because they are what they are, for once, for all time, for ontological reasons that no empirical material can either dislodge or alter.

All Leningrad Orientalists of the middle and younger generation were arrested. The entire staff of the Institute of the North, except for its NKVD informers, was arrested. They even went after schoolteachers. In Sverdlovsk one case involved thirty secondary schoolteachers and the head of the Provincial Education Department, Perel. 37 One of the terrible accusations against them was that they had made arrangements to have a New Year's tree in order to burn down the school. And the club fell with the regularity of a pendulum on the heads of the engineers—who by this time were no longer "bourgeois" but a whole Soviet generation of engineers.

This is why Said means so much to me, he said. You see, Said was young when he heard that statement made by Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinian people, and when he heard this, he became involved in the Palestinian question. He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You can wait forever, and no one will give you that value.

The final complexity associated with building of a negative character lies in the fact that the image of a subject is often an outcome of parochial, ethnocentric, and orientalist viewpoints. In other words, it can be argued that historical or mythological villains might also have been treated in paradoxical manners. Their negative characteristics would have received much more attention by dominant intellectuals than their positive traits.

South Asian men from the west who sought South Asian brides in the East, often played out the orientalist fantasies of a demure, subservient woman who could restore the brown masculinity robbed by white men in the West- as colonialism advertises.

Edward Said summed up “the principal dogmas of Orientalism” in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that portray “the West” as “rational, developed, humane [and] superior,” caricature “the Orient” as “aberrant, undeveloped [and] inferior.” Another dogma is that “the Orient” lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes “that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective.’ “And the final dogma is “that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).

It is a sad commentary on the state of Muslim scholarship that Ibn Khaldun remained a virtual nonentity until he was discovered by Orientalists. Now that he has their stamp of recognition, many scholars - excepting Arab racialists and the extreme orthodox - have entered into a competition to see whose encomiums are the loudest

When a learned Orientalist traveled in the country of his specialization, it was always with unshakable abstract maxims about the “civilization” he had studied; rarely were Orientalists interested in anything except proving the validity of these musty “truths” by applying them, without great success, to uncomprehending, hence degenerate, natives.

To people unfamiliar with the last thirty years of post-colonial academics, this might seem a ridiculous word, without meaning or substance. They may be right. It’s a fancy word for racist, but implies much more: an Orientalist is someone who invents exotic fictions about the East to prove a point about western superiority. Orientalism is a very serious charge to lay at the doorstep of a left-leaning academic.

Unless we get the Baku oil, the war is lost,” Hitler shouted at a top commander, and he sacrificed the entire German Sixth Army at Stalingrad rather than redirect a single division out of the Caucasus to come to its aid.

Some individuals came right out and accused me of being a Neo-Orientalist (in a pejorative Edward Said sense of the term). So of course eventually I bristled at the questions themselves. They seemed to stem from an obsessive political correctness that wished to brand every Western photographer working in Asia as a neo-colonialist, an ethnographer, or a culprit secretly advancing a hegemonic agenda. The idea that people of one culture cannot create valid art in another I found ludicrous and restrictive to say the least.

In short, from its earliest modern history to the present, Orientalism as a form of thought for dealing with the foreign has typically shown the altogether regrettable tendency of any knowledge based on such hard-and-fast distinctions as “East” and “West”: to channel thought into a West or an East compartment. Because this tendency is right at the center of Orientalist theory, practice, and values found in the West, the sense of Western power over the Orient is taken for granted as having the status of scientific truth.

Languages were his principal study; and he sought, but acquiring their elements, to open a field for self-instruction on his return to Geneva. Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew, gained his attention, after he had made himself perfectly master of Greek and Latin. For my own part, idleness had ever been irksome to me, and now that I wished to fly from reflection, and hated my former studies, I felt great relief in being the fellow-pupil with my friend, and found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I

Du reste, la majorité des orientalistes ne sont et ne veulent être que des érudits ; tant qu’ils se bornent à des travaux historiques ou philologiques, cela n’a pas grande importance ; il est évident que des ouvrages de ce genre ne peuvent servir de rien pour atteindre le but que nous envisageons ici, mais leur seul danger, en somme, est celui qui est commun à tous les abus de l’érudition, nous voulons dire la propagation de cette « myopie intellectuelle » qui borne tout savoir à des recherches de détail, et le gaspillage d’efforts qui pourraient être mieux employés dans bien des cas. Mais ce qui est beaucoup plus grave à nos yeux, c’est l’action exercée par ceux des orientalistes qui ont la prétention de comprendre et d’interpréter les doctrines, et qui les travestissent de la façon la plus incroyable, tout en assurant parfois qu’ils les comprennent mieux que les Orientaux eux-mêmes (comme Leibnitz s’imaginait avoir retrouvé le vrai sens des caractères de Fo-hi), et sans jamais songer à prendre l’avis des représentants autorisés des civilisations qu’ils veulent étudier, ce qui serait pourtant la première chose à faire, au lieu de se comporter comme s’il s’agirait de reconstituer des civilisations disparues.

certains pourraient s’étonner de nous voir affirmer que la réincarnation est une idée exclusivement moderne. Trop de confusions et de notions fausses ont cours depuis un siècle pour que bien des gens, même en dehors des milieux « néo-spiritualistes », ne s’en trouvent pas gravement influencés ; cette déformation est même arrivée à un tel point que les orientalistes officiels, par exemple, interprètent couramment dans un sens réincarnationniste des textes où il n’y a rien de tel, et qu’ils sont devenus complètement incapables de les comprendre autrement, ce qui revient à dire qu’ils n’y comprennent absolument rien.

The disdain shown toward these texts by most of the modern Orientalists, who wanted to relate everything back to the Vedä(s) (as, moreover, the Western world does to the Greeks), has led them to make monumental errors in dating and describing the evolution of religious and philosophical concepts. Many passages of the best-known texts of philosophical and religious brahmanic literature written in the Sanskrit language are derived from the Âgamä(s). This is the case with, for example, the Bhagavat Gîtâ, of which over half the verses are borrowed from the Parameshvarä Âgamä and three of which passages are quotations from the Shvetâshvatarä Upanishad, which is itself based on the Âgamä(s).2

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern”—and in my case, Islamic—culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic—other than those of what they consider “their own” government—is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities—and I use that word deliberately—to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser—or more culturally “authentic”—standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” where the only thing their members aspire to is being tin-pot community leaders, like ghetto chieftains. The “fellow-travelers” fetishize these “Muslim” ghettos in the name of “cultural authenticity” and identity politics, and the ghetto chieftains are often the leading errand boys for them. Identity politics and the pseudo-liberal search for cultural authenticity result in nothing but a downward spiral of competing medieval religious or cultural assertions, fights over who are the “real” Muslims, ever increasing misogyny, homophobia, sectarianism, and extremism. This is not liberal. Among the left, this is a remnant of the socialist approach that prioritizes group identity over individual autonomy. Among the right, it is ironically a throwback from the British colonial “divide and rule” approach. Classical liberalism focuses on individual autonomy. I refer here to liberalism as it is understood in the philosophical sense, not as it’s understood in the United States to refer to the Democratic Party—that’s a party-political usage. The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims—all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm.

Many esotericists are, indeed, familiar with the story – translated by the distinguished philologist and Orientalist Sir Friedrich Max Müller in the nineteenth century – in which the ancient Indo-Aryan Gods decided where best to hide divinity from humankind. After discussing the options of concealing the Great Secret atop the summit of the highest mountain, burying it in the further recesses of the earth, or sinking it at the bottom of the widest ocean, the Gods came to the conclusion that, irrespective of where they would conceal the Great Secret, humans would eventually discover it due to the human nature‘s inquisitiveness and restlessness. However, ultimately, the oldest and wisest Gods suggested that they should wrap divinity within the human being itself, because that is the last place in which humans would ever look; this was and is actually the case.

On a souvent dit, au vu de ces scènes irréelles, que les hommes de Hassan [Sabbah] étaient drogués. Comment expliquer autrement qu'ils [l'Ordre des Assassins] aillent au-devant de la mort avec le sourire ? On a accrédité la thèse qu'ils agissaient sous l'effet du haschisch. Marco Polo a popularisé cette idée en Occident ; leurs ennemis dans le monde musulman les ont parfois appelés haschichiyoun, "fumeurs de haschisch", pour les déconsidérer ; certains orientalistes ont cru voir dans ce terme l'origine du mot "assassin" qui est devenu, dans plusieurs langues européennes, synonyme de meurtrier. Le mythe des "Assassins" n'en a été que plus terrifiant. La vérité est autre. D'après les textes qui nous sont parvenus d'Alamout, Hassan aimait à appeler ses adeptes Assassiyoun, ceux qui sont fidèles au Assass [أساس], au "Fondement" de la foi, et c'est ce mot, mal compris des voyageurs étrangers, qui a semblé avoir des relents de haschisch.

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses.

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted. I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep. There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.

A cet égard, il faut remarquer, en outre, que de nos jours que les doctrines du Tasawwuf ont elles-mêmes besoin dans les pays islamiques d'une justification intellectuelle renouvelée et adaptée de façon à répondre aux conditions de la mentalité moderne qui s'est étendue de l'Occident à tous les milieux de culture du monde oriental. En dehors de l'esprit exotériste, il faut donc compter maintenant avec l'esprit anti-traditionnel tout court des progressistes de toutes sortes, et surtout avec la présence d'une génération de savants « orientalistes », d'origine orientales, mais de formation et d'inspiration occidentales et profanes. Par un curieux retournement des choses, l'enseignement de René Guénon peut faciliter lui-même beaucoup cette justification, car il contient les moyens spéculatifs et dialectiques qui permettent d'y aboutir dans toutes les conditions de mentalité qui ressemblent à celle de l'Occident contemporain ; ce travail de justification intellectuelle se trouve déjà en essence dans les références doctrinales que l'œuvre de René Guénon fait à l'ésotérisme et à la métaphysique islamiques.

It is useful to distinguish hindsight from fast-forwarding. Hindsight often misreads an earlier phenomenon by assuming that it meant then the same thing that it meant later, reading the past through the present, forgetting that we cannot simply lay the present over the past like a plastic map overlay. The false Orientalist assumptions that India was timeless and that the classical texts of the Brahmins described an existing society led to the equally false assumption that the village and caste organization of colonial or even contemporary India was a guide to their historical past.

According to this scenario, one branch of this group traveled down the east side of the Caspian Sea and continued east through Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab before the middle of the second millennium BCE.9 But to say that the languages formed a family is not to say that the people who spoke them formed a race. There is nothing intrinsically racist about this story of linguistic migration. On the contrary, the eighteenth-century discovery of the Indo-European link was, at first, a preracial discovery of brotherhood; these people are our (linguistic) cousins. But then the nineteenth-century Orientalists, who now had a theory of race to color their perceptions, gave it a distinctly racist thrust. Their attitude to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of India came to something like “Well, they are black, but their skin color is irrelevant; they are white inside, Greek inside, just like us.

There isn’t, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And let’s not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own. What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.

Trust me when I tell you that he has no idea about what’s really happening in Egypt. None of his people do! They found themselves in the middle of these events by accident. Things went too far, and they deluded themselves into believing they actually had the power to change the nature of things. Theirs is not a true revolution like the ones we have had here.

matter of form, rather than substance.

Guénon’s analytical project then not only exceeds that of Said in its diagnostic force of Orientalist and Western scholarship and its genealogy, but also offers possible solutions for the future that only match the depth of his diagnostics. If I am interested in briefly dwelling on these proposed reforms, it is not for their actual value for my overall argument as such, although, I think, we would do poorly to dismiss them out of hand. Their value instead lies in further explicating and pinning to the ground the deep structures of Orientalism and its intimate and dialectical ties to modernity as a new phenomenon in human history. Because Said navigated mainly at the conventional political level, and shirking -unknowingly to be sure- the engagement of the full weight of “undercurrents” in Europe that gave rise to the unique phenomenon called Orientalism, he had nothing to offer in the way of a solution other than comforting words aimed perhaps at engendering a glimmer of hope, but little else.

Although Semper, an amateur ethnographer, may have been influenced by primitivist and Orientalist imaginations, he also came to see the history of ornament as the breakdown of ethnography, by understanding ornaments not as pristine cultural or national signifiers but instead as “portable ecology

You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no.

The success of [D. T.] Suzuki's work was not related to its literary or philosophical qualities; it was rather the result of a historical coniuncture that prompted the emergence in the West of a positive modality of Orientalist discourse, which found in the image of Zen fostered by Suzuki a particularly appropriate object.

For what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his readers' eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions.

Quand il s’agit de se défendre contre un danger quelconque, on ne perd généralement pas son temps à rechercher des responsabilités ; si donc certaines opinions sont dangereuses intellectuellement, et nous pensons que c’est le cas ici [celles des orientalistes], on devra s’efforcer de les détruire sans se préoccuper de ceux qui les ont émises ou qui les défendent, et dont l’honorabilité n’est nullement en cause. Les considérations de personnes, qui sont bien peu de chose en regard des idées, ne sauraient légitimement empêcher de combattre les théories qui font obstacle à certaines réalisations ; d’ailleurs, comme ces réalisations, sur lesquelles nous reviendrons dans notre conclusion, ne sont point immédiatement possibles, et que tout souci de propagande nous est interdit, le moyen le plus efficace de combattre les théories en question n’est pas de discuter indéfiniment sur le terrain où elles se placent, mais de faire apparaître les raisons de leur fausseté tout en rétablissant la vérité pure et simple, qui seule importe essentiellement à ceux qui peuvent la comprendre. Là est la grande différence, sur laquelle il n’y a pas d’accord possible avec les spécialistes de l’érudition : quand nous parlons de vérité, nous n’entendons pas simplement par là une vérité de fait, qui a sans doute son importance, mais secondaire et contingente ; ce qui nous intéresse dans une doctrine, c’est la vérité, au sens absolu du mot, de ce qui y est exprimé. Au contraire, ceux qui se placent au point de vue de l’érudition ne se préoccupent aucunement de la vérité des idées ; au fond, ils ne savent pas ce que c’est, ni même si cela existe, et ils ne se le demandent point ; la vérité n’est rien pour eux, à part le cas très spécial où il s’agit exclusivement de vérité historique.

Les orientalistes qui soutiennent l’hypothèse d’une origine non musulmane du Soufisme soulignent généralement le fait que la doctrine soufique n’apparaît pas, dans les premiers siècles de l’Islam, avec tous les développements métaphysiques qu’elle comportera par la suite. Mais cette remarque, pour autant qu’elle est valable à l’égard d’une tradition ésotérique – donc se transmettant surtout par un enseignement oral –, prouve le contraire de ce qu’ils prétendent, car les premiers Soufis s’expriment dans un langage très proche du Coran, et leurs expressions concises et synthétiques impliquent déjà tout l’essentiel de la doctrine. Si celle-ci devient, par la suite, plus explicite et plus élaborée, il n’y a là qu’un fait normal et propre à toute tradition spirituelle : la littérature doctrinale augmente, non pas tant par l’apport de nouvelles connaissances que par la nécessité d’endiguer les erreurs et de ranimer une intuition faiblissante.

Despite Acton's optimism about the long-term future of humankind, he raised the alarm against ideas and institutions of his time that menaced the liberty that was the proper human destiny. The most serious was the racism recently advanced by the French Orientalist Joseph Gobineau. Acton attacked racism as "one of the many schemes to deny free will, responsibility, and guilt, and to supplant moral by physical forces." "Nationality," newly flourishing in Europe in Acton's day, was a similar diversion of the great current of human liberty. "The progress of civilization depends on transcending Nationality....Influences which are accidental yield to those which are rational....The nations aim at power, and the world at freedom." And the State (as in Bismarck's Prussia)-the modern fellow conspirator of Nationalism-was "a vast abstraction above all other things" (invented, he said, by Machiavelli), which oppressed all its subjects and consumed their lives.

and less than three years later, Soviet armored divisions, tanked up with Baku oil, were at the gates of Berlin.

unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written.

most of its existence, Mussolini’s regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler’s racism—probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen.

the regime had been notably anti-anti-Semitic.

(Hitler responded by calling Mussolini’s movement “Kosher fascism.”)

1938, Italians from Milan to Naples had opened their newspapers to discover that they were all “pure Aryan Nordics” and that their Jewish colleagues were dangerous aliens. Jews, including die-hard Fascists, were dismissed from all military, university, and government posts. By that fall, Italian Jews were not allowed to have listed phone numbers, presumably because it corrupted the sea of pure Nordic names in the Italian telephone directory.

likely explanation for Elfriede’s connection to Kurban Said first presented itself to me a few weeks after I visited the castle.

Dr. Barazon had maintained that Elfriede would not have needed to provide an Aryan cover for the real author of Ali and Nino, because the book contract was signed in April 1937, almost a full year before the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.

What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world’s great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.

Allah Is Great concludes with advice and warning: since

Allah Is Great concludes with advice and warning: since Europe clearly does not want to ensure its hegemony through undisguised force, there is no alternative but to form a “community of interests with the Islamic world,

this fails—then woe to Europe!

the Stefansplatz, where the largest spontaneous demonstration in Austrian history was held—to celebrate the Anschluss and Hitler’s surprise tour of the city—in the spring of 1938.

Nazism and use the alliance among Fascists to steer the Nazis away from the racial policies.

eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini’s brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.

the perfect preparation for active Zionism. Von Weisl’s early journalism is full of prescient observations of the Middle East power struggle. His article called “Islam’s Iconoclasts at Mekka’s Gates,” published in the fall of 1924, warned of the growing power of the Wahhabis in Arabia, and stated that “Hussein will have reason to regret that he refused to sign the Anglo-Hejaz Treaty, and to recognize the Jewish rights in Palestine. For Jews in Erez Israel—Israel—are far less dangerous enemies for him than are Wahhabis at the gates of Mekka.

He also gives a good picture of the profound chaos unleashed in Muslim countries in 1924 by Ataturk’s sudden abolition of the caliphate, an institution they had superficially not taken much notice of but which was central to a Muslim’s whole identity.

considering that lexicons and dictionaries are practically a high art form in German- speaking countries. The entry merges Essad Bey and Wolfgang von Weisl into one person. It explains that “Wolfgang (von) Weisl” also used the pseudonyms Leo Noussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said—and hence the Austrian journalist, who otherwise had only a travel book and a book on Austrian artillery to his credit, suddenly was the prolific author of approximately twenty works of fiction and nonfiction

Mussolini’s mistress, a leading Fascist intellectual and theorist of the movement, was openly Jewish. Perhaps less well known is that the Israeli Navy was born out of a 1930s Fascist training program, and the Duce even endowed a Fascist chair at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

in the end, I found that the proportions obtain­ing in Colebrooke (British Orientalist, d. 1837)’s 1818 donation to the India Office Library generally held up. Out of a total of some twenty thousand manuscripts listed in these catalogs on Yoga, Nyaya­ Vaisheshika, and Vedanta philoso­phy, a mere 260 were Yoga Sutra manuscripts (in­cluding commentaries), with only thirty­ five dating from before 1823 ; 513 were manuscripts on Hatha or Tantric Yoga, manuscripts of works attributed to Ya­jnavalkya, or of the Yoga Vasistha; 9,032 were Nyaya manuscripts, and 10,320 were Vedanta manuscripts. (...) What does this quantitative analysis tell us ? For every manuscript on Yoga philosophy proper (excluding Hatha and Tantric Yoga) held in major Indian manu­script libraries and archives, there exist some forty Ve­danta manuscripts and nearly as many Nyaya­ Vaisheshika manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries account for only one­ third of all manuscripts on Yoga philosophy, the other two­ thirds being devoted mainly to Hatha and Tantric Yoga. But it is the figure of 1.27 percent that stands out in highest relief, because it tells us that after the late sixteenth century virtually no one was copying the Yoga Sutra because no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts, and no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts because no one was interested in reading the Yoga Sutra. Some have argued that instruction in the Yoga Sutra was based on rote memorization or chanting : this is the position of Krishnam­acharya’s biographers as well as of a number of critical scholars. But this is pure speculation, undercut by the nineteenth­ century observations of James Ballantyne, Dayananda Saraswati, Rajendralal Mitra, Friedrich Max Müller, and others. There is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sa­cred or secular literatures of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions. Given these data, we may conclude that Cole­brooke’s laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali’s system had become an empty signifier, with no traditional schoolmen to expound or defend it and no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference. The Yoga Sutra had for all intents and purposes been lost until Colebrooke found it.

Richard Francis Burton was a British consul, Orientalist, explorer, best known today for translating the Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra into English. He was the most educated explorer of the Victorian age, a time when only men of rough disposition set out to discover foreign lands, in stark contrast to the landed gentry, who were uninterested in international travel, unless it was in the comfort of a steamship to go administer a colony for the sake of the Crown or as a military officer deployed to extend the global landholdings of the British Empire. He

a kind of Turkish parallel to the German idea of lebensraum, the future was to be found in the East—in an invasion of Russia to reclaim ancestral lands from the thirteenth century and earlier, not only those of the Ottomans but of the other great Turanians, the Mongols and the Huns.*21

bluster—Enver sent Turkish troops to fight in the Caucasus in winter with no overcoats and without even boots—but the increasingly fanatical Young Turk junta looked for someone else to blame for the failure of the Turanian dream. Thus, the infamous Armenian massacres of 1915 were set in motion.

He was the more moderate kind of nationalist. He did not sport a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache or excel at massacring Armenian civilians.

Thus, the armies that would slaughter each other in the 1940s in the most massive mechanized battles in history trained together in the 1920s.

secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German “work commandos” would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react.

[Putzi’s contribution to the Harvard cheerleading repertoire], to show how it could be done by adapting German tunes,

he

Wrangel

Hitler’s core—“The fact that a man is decent is no reason why we should not eliminate him.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Jews of Europe began to take on the new role of interpreters of the East. In addition to their own search for identity in the Orient, they were encouraged by Europe’s new openness to the East, now that the Muslims were in a state of decline and not threatening

Literary scholar Hamid Dabashi notes the curious case of the English language novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, written by a traveler named James Morier, who pretended he had merely translated a Persian original. Morier used a ridiculous diction in his novel to lampoon Persian speech and depicted Iranians as dishonest scoundrels and buffoons. Then, in the 1880s, an astounding thing happened. Iranian grammarian Mirza Habib translated Hajji Baba into Persian. Remarkably, what in English was offensive racist trash became, in translation, a literary masterpiece that laid the groundwork for a modernist Persian literary voice and “a seminal text in the course of the constitutional movement.” The ridicule that Morier directed against Iranians in an Orientalist manner, the translator redirected against clerical and courtly corruption in Iranian society, thereby transforming Hajji Baba into an incendiary political critique.2

He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You can wait forever, and no one will give you that value.

The ancient name for India is Aryavarta, literally, “abode of the Aryans.” The Sanskrit root of arya is “worthy, holy, noble.” The later ethnological misuse of Aryan to signify not spiritual, but physical, characteristics, led the great Orientalist, Max Müller, to say quaintly: “To me an ethnologist who speaks of an Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist would be if he spoke of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.

In this analysis, under the misleading Orientalist equating of modernism with liberalism, and of traditionalism with authoritarianism, Western democracies are thus granted legitimacy to discriminate against their non-Western minorities.

For most Westerners, 'harem' is a word which conjures up a heady image of some kind of closely guarded Oriental pleasure palace, filled with scantily clad nubile virgins, stretched out on pillows in languid preparation for nights of sexual adventure in a sultan's bed. It is a world of scatter cushions, jewels in the belly button, gyrating hips, and fluttering eyelashes set above gauzy yashmak (face veils). These cliches find their most vivid expression in nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings and in popular movies. This vision of Eastern sensual excess has often led scholarship to dismiss the notion of the harem as a Western fabrication, an open sesame to an Arabian Nights fantasy world. If we want to utilise the word 'harem' in its correct context and use it to consolidate some legitimate facts about royal women in the Persian empire, we must dispense with the Orientalist cliches entirely and understand what, in historical terms, a 'harem' was all about.

How could the word Oriental—derogatory to East Asians in modern parlance—ever be expansive enough to contain the vast histories of Africa, Asia, the Middle East? Another perfumer in the discussion sent the Master Perfumer a copy of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” to re-Orient why discontinuing his use of the word Oriental mattered. “Orientalism,” a revolutionary text, became a revelation to me as a young feminist, mind-blowing as a perfumer. As Orientalist scholars embarked on their translations of ancient texts, languages, civilizations, they helped colonial rulers make sense of Empire. Knowing their subjects made it easier to categorize, divide, and conquer them. Perfumers summoned these faraway lands into temporal sensory experiences. Perfume as little museums of the colonies, a fragrant addition to the social and scientific discourse, yet another generalization, an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type.

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

Happiness is not lame sex with diseased dickheads from the internet with no social or sexual charisma, whose entire personality is PureGym, and then finding yourself constantly dashing off to 56 Dean Street to make sure you haven't contracted chlamydia or worse. Happiness is not the School of Oriental and African Studies, or the Royal African Society, or any Africanists and Orientalists who schlep to cities like Kolkata and Kampala, and find endlessly inventive ways to weaponise their whiteness by explaining decolonisation to folks their own ancestors are still fucking over from beyond the grave.

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source.60 Many of the early English Orientalists in India were, like Jones, legal scholars, or else, interestingly enough, they were medical men with strong missionary leanings.

The word ‘Majapahit’ rings like a bell through the halls of Indonesian history. The name of no other realm before or since resounds as this one does. This is, in part, down to the way in which it has been used and abused in the long centuries since its fall. Later Javanese kings, nineteenth-century European orientalists, and strident Indonesian nationalists have all retooled its reputation to fit their own prejudices and purposes. But despite the static of later fantasy that crackles around it, the historical Majapahit really was very impressive indeed.

The point here is not that Marco Polo should thus be seen in a good light, according to leftist expectations. It is rather that the ‘Orientalist’ charge is wrong, and that this Italian of the Middle Ages was a typical European in showing greater curiosity about other cultures, while exhibiting a unique European disposition to seek out and learn about the world. By contrast, Larner judges that Ibn Battuta’s tale ‘is not a geography like Marco’s work, but essentially an autobiography.’ Visiting unknown or unfamiliar lands, writing about the ways of others, was not Ibn Battuta’s ‘overriding impulse’; rather, it was to visit ‘illustrious sanctuaries’[40] in the Muslim world. He makes the crucial point that Ibn Battuta ‘is always at home’ in his travels, ‘wherever he goes he is in the House of Islam’.

My problem in replying to you is that Velikovsky always tosses with a two-headed coin. If ordinary orientalists like myself simply leave him aside & get on with real work, he complains of their disdain (& the public are left unprotected). If, conversely, orientalists like myself (who happen to be burdened with several thousands more facts than Velikovsky even dreams of) actually dare to stand up & expose him, then of course he snidely implies that we are some sort of closed caucus with interests at stake. It’s always “heads you lose, tails I win”…. Would you, I reflectively wonder, publish a book that insisted on the identity of Harold Wilson and Harold of Hastings, of Napoleon, Bismarck & Charlemagne, and on the role of your firm as secret HQ of the IRA, all as absolutely genuine historical fact, with “proofs” (e.g., all aunts in France are large, because tante is the feminine for tant)? Because that is, comparatively, the level of historical fraud that V. represents.

It is notable that this was founded by an English convert, William Quilliam (d. 1932), rather than by a migrant community. At the same time, the first purpose-built mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, was commissioned by the Jewish-born Hungarian orientalist, Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (d. 1899), in Woking, Surrey. From these two examples alone, we see hints of the deep impact that Muslim spaces can have beyond a proximate Muslim context.

Although our countries have been changed by the hegemonizing influences of both Iran and Saudi Arabia, the headlines in the Western media have always reduced matters of extraordinary depth and complexity to a mere snapshot, which more often than not has catered to an orientalist audience that regards Arab or Muslim cultures as backward and to security-focused policymakers. Over time those two groups have worked to reinforce each other, merging to such an extent that everything was viewed through the prism of the security of the West, especially after 9/11.

This is a problem in the research method of Orientalists — they often refer to the wrong sources on a subject and consequently come to the wrong conclusions. It is not applicable to refer to works of tafsir in order to research the history of Hadith. Tabari’s tafsir is not a place to find anything on the science of Hadith. His style is to mention a verse, list all the narrations about its interpretation and then give one interpretation more weight over the other.

some might be surprised to see us say that reincarnation is an exclusively modern idea. Too many confusions and misconceptions have been going on for a century so that many people, even outside "neo-spiritualist" circles, are not seriously affected by them; this distortion has even reached such a point that official orientalists, for example, routinely interpret in a reincarnationist sense texts where there is no such thing, and that they have become completely incapable of understanding them in any other way. is to say that they understand absolutely nothing.

At first glance, few writers embody this intense solipsism like Lesley Blanch (1904–2007): travel writer, novelist, painter, Vogue editor, socialite, and unashamed orientalist. Blanch’s writing—be it travel narrative, history or biography—was always a form of autobiography. And the women she profiled in her most famous work, 1954’s The Wilder Shores of Love, were Westerners who found themselves drawn to a lushly, if vaguely, drawn East; they always had something of the self-portrait in them. But Blanch’s brilliance lies in her honesty about the subjectivity of her work. For her, travel carries none of Crispin’s “masculine force”: it’s neither an act of discovery nor an explication by an “expert witness,” but the endless attempt to bridge that vast land of otherness with the worlds we’ve created in our own minds, the interior place where our experiences, from the books we’ve read to the people we’ve loved, came to reside long before we first set foot there.

Seven years after Swirski’s social class explanation of Mizrahim oppression, Ella Shohat, a radical cultural critic, published her essay, “The Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.”23 After mentioning Swirski’s analysis of the class divisions between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Shohat discusses the Zionist project as a Eurocentric, Orientalist effort that oppressed its third-world subjects, Palestinians, and Mizrahim alike. Following in the footsteps of Edward Said’s Orientalism,24 Shohat emphasizes the need to consider the negative consequences of Zionism upon Mizrahim, in addition to the Palestinians. “The Zionist denial of the Arab-Muslim and Palestinian East, then, has as its corollary the denial of the Jewish Mizrahim, who like the Palestinians, but by more subtle and less obviously brutal mechanisms, have also been stripped of the right of self representation. Within Israel, and on the stage of world opinion, the hegemonic voice of Israel has almost invariably been that of European Jews, the Ashkenazim, while the Mizrahi voice has been largely muffled or silenced.” Both Edward Said’s book and Shohat’s essay made little impact on the established social sciences in Israel. Additionally, Swirski’s deviation from the cultural-based analysis of mainstream sociology was completely ignored.

For the Orient (“out there” towards the East) is corrected, even penalized, for lying outside the boundaries of European society, “our” world; the Orient is thus Orientalized, a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codifications (like d’Herbelot’s alphabetized Bibliothèque) as the true Orient. Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself,

My earliest perceptions about Iran under the Pahlavis, as a young student of Middle Eastern history and social sciences in the 1990s, were absorbed in these contradictory (and often confusing) evaluations on the backdrop of overwhelming paradigm shifts and critical theories, especially those provided by subaltern studies, and the legitimation of the academic study of popular culture genres by feminist scholarship. Calls for a necessary de-westernization of Orientalist frameworks coupled with the introduction of multi(s) and posts- in contemporary literature gave way to rethinking about identity and multi-culturalism, feminisms, and post-feminism instead of feminism, gender as a replacement for sexual differences, modernity in terms of “multiple-modernities,” post-modernity or late modernity, and the conceptualization of the world’s nations as “imagined communities.

The matter of the East African trade would come to be viewed through an orientalist lens: a confirmation of the essential barbarism of the East, of Arabs, Turks, and Egyptians, and indeed of the Islamic faith.

L'orientaliste regarde l'Orient de haut, avec l'intention de saisir dans sa totalité le panorama qui s'étale sous ses yeux : culture, religion, esprit, histoire, société. Pour cela, il doit voir chaque détail à travers le dispositif d'un ensemble de catégories réductrices (les Sémites, l'esprit musulman, l'Orient, etc.). Puisque ces catégories sont avant tout schématiques et visent l'efficacité, et puisque qu'aucun Oriental ne peut se connaître lui-même comme le connaît un orientaliste, toute vision de l'Orient en vient à reposer, en fin de compte, pour sa cohérence, et sa force, sur la personne, l'institution ou le discours dont elle est la propriété. Toute vision globale est fondamentalement conservatrice, et nous avons noté de quelle manière, dans l'histoire des idées de l'Occident sur le Proche-Orient, ces idées se sont maintenues sans tenir compte des témoignages qui les contredisaient.

(...) aucun des grands périodiques consacrés aux études arabes n'est publié actuellement dans le monde arabe, aucune des institutions d'enseignement arabe n'est capable de rivaliser avec des centres comme Oxford, Harvard, UCLA dans l'étude du monde arabe, moins encore dans n'importe quel domaine non oriental. Résultat à prévoir : les étudiants orientaux (et les professeurs orientaux) souhaitent toujours venir s'asseoir aux pieds des orientalistes américains, avant de répéter devant le public local les clichés que j'ai décrits comme des dogmes de l'orientalisme. Avec un système de reproduction comme celui-ci, il est inévitable que le savant oriental se serve de sa formation américaine pour se sentir supérieur à ses compatriotes, du fait qu'il est capable de maîtriser le système orientaliste ; dans ses relations avec ses supérieurs, les orientalistes européens ou américains, il ne sera qu' "informateur indigène". Et c'est bien en cela que consiste son rôle en Occident, s'il a la chance d'y rester une fois ses études supérieurs terminés.

C’est là une des raisons pour lesquelles l’idée, émise par certains sous prétexte de « commodité », d’écrire l’arabe avec les caractères latins, est tout à fait inacceptable et même absurde (ceci sans préjudice d’autres considérations plus contingentes, comme celle de l’impossibilité d’établir une transcription vraiment exacte, par là même que les lettres arabes n’ont pas toutes leur équivalent dans l’alphabet latin). Les véritables motifs pour lesquels certains orientalistes se font les propagateurs de cette idée sont d’ailleurs tout autres que ceux qu’ils font valoir, et doivent être cherchés dans une intention « antitraditionnelle » en rapport avec des préoccupations d’ordre politique ; mais ceci est une autre histoire…

Strange, how seldom a person knows which days of his life are tragic and which are happy,

Cunninghame Graham, having sold his Highland demense and moved to London in 1900, was a regular visitor to Cromwell Place, and together they plotted their Fez adventure, for which they would enlist the help of Walter Harris, and enable Lavery to revive his Orientalist ambitions. The Sultan's harem, a fantasy that had fired the Wetern male imagination, required exorcism. When the voyeur finally got within plain sight of this forbidden world in the Sultan's palace at Fez, with a large canvas concealed in an adjacent room, he was overwhelmed by its ennui. Fantasy, he was compelled to conclude, was more powerful than fact.