Orientalism
"Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: Knowledge and power, the Baconian theme. As Blafour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with "our" knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power." He describes the desire for knowledge about the orient as being spawned from the desire to colonialise effectively not to decipher the complex nature of a society which is inherently different, thus bound to do things a little differently. By comprehending the Orient, the West justified a position of ownership. The Orient became the subject, the seen, the observed, the studied; Orientalist philosophers were the apprentices, the overseers, the observers. The Orient was quiescent; the West was dynamic.
This is a rather unfortunate position both for the West and the 'Orient'. The students used their position of perceived understanding to further compel 'Oriental' people into subservience while simultaneously justifying their actions. They protected their conscience by convincing themselves that the 'Orient' was incapable of running itself, thus their territory must be administered for them. "It dose not occur to Balfour to let the Egyptian speak for himself, since presumably any Egyptian who would speak out is more likely to be the "agitator [who] wishes to raise difficulties" Said makes some vivid, passionate and striking points however, he seems to be lacking of a little objectivity. The general tone of his book "Orientalism" depicts western Orientalists as persistently reinventing the near and Middle East in self-serving, eurocentric terms; as seen through Western eyes, "the Orient" emerges as a passive, backward world, monolithic in nature and exotic in its alienism, a realm ideally created to sustain the West's daydream of supremacy. Said brutally charges Western scholars for perpetuating the notion that the Orient should...
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