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Apology for Orientalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Francesco Gabrieli
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Until a few decades ago the study of the peoples and civilizations of the Orient did not appear to require any apology, since it was considered one of the most uncontroversial and innocuous branches of the science. The orientalist was, and still is in some of the less up-to-date sectors of European communis opinio, a scholar who chooses as the object of his research one of the most remote fields of knowledge, far removed in space or time, or both, barred from access by incomprehensible languages and writings, whose religions, philosophies and literatures are quite apart from the main stream of classical and Western tradition. This was the conception of orientalism among the Bouvards or Pecuchets of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In reality, the interest in oriental civilizations itself constitutes a brilliant chapter in contemporary European culture and civilization, developing from this modest level of estimation to a more important historical concern. This is illustrated in certain respects, if not yet in its entirety, by works that are at the same time a history of ideas and a balance sheet of the results achieved. Orientalism has been respectively an aspect of Enlightenment and of Romanticism, of Positivism and of European historicism, and to sketch its complete history would be tantamount to going through the entire evolution of Western culture. It was precisely in this latter field that it had projected itself outside of itself, toward something other than itself, and by this very act (this should appear obvious and should not be the object of polemics or raised eyebrows) establishing its own view of civilization and history, politics and religion, society and poetry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 13 , Issue 50 , June 1965 , pp. 128 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 The book by R. Schvab, La Renaissance orientale, Paris 1950, should be mentioned here. Many other studies on this subject are mentioned in the recent article in Diogenes, No. 44, "Orientalism in Crisis," by Anouar Abdel-Malek, an article with whose thesis we for the most part differ, as the reader may gather, but which we do not deny contains broad information, sincere feeling and singularly acute observations. For an overall historical perspective we refer to our article "Oriente e Occidente, e la loro conoscenza reciproca," in La comu nità internazionale, XVII [1962], No. 2.

2 The process is extended to the concept of orientalism itself, which the East no longer accepts, sensing a note of condescension in it. And in fact the words Orient and orientalism tend to disappear from the Soviet scientific and propagandistic terminology, which is most sensitive to these moods. For example, the former Institut Vostokovedenja in the Academy of Sciences the USSR has become the Institut Narodov Asii, and the official line is precisely "to disorientalize the study of Asia."

3 In the above-mentioned article by Anouar Abdel-Malek, which is presumed to be familiar to the reader. Of a considerably more measured tone, but not any less instructive in this regard are the observations of M. Arkoun, "L'Islam moderne vu par le professeur G. E. Grunebaum" in Arabica, XI [1964], 113-124, which contest the legitimacy of the Western islamist's diagnosis of Islam, by taking as its point of departure an explicit or implicit consciousness of the superiority of the West.