The Scope of Orientalism 49 Arabs live “naturally” in a world “characterized by anxiety expressed in generalized suspicion and distrust, which has been labelled free-floating hostility”; “the art of subterfuge is highly developed in Arab life, as well as in Islam itself’; the Arab need for vengeance overrides everything, otherwise the Arab would feel “ego-destroying” shame. Therefore, if “Westerners consider peace to be high on the scale of values” and if “we have a highly developed consciousness of the value of time,” this is not true of Arabs, “In fact,” we are told, “in Arab tribal society (where Arab values originated), strife, not peace, was the normal state of affairs because raiding was one of the two main supports of the economy.” The purpose of this learned disquisition is merely to show how on the Western and Oriental scale of values “the relative position of the elements is quite different.” QED." This is the apogee of Orientalist confidence. No merely asserted ° generality is denied the dignity of truth; no theoretical list of, Oriental attributes is without application to the behavior of Orientals in the real world. On the one hand there are Westerners, and on the other there are Arab-Orientals, the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things. Out of what collective and yet particularized view of the Orient do these statements emerge? What specialized skills, what imaginative pressures, what institutions and traditions, what cultural forces produce such similarity in the descriptions of the Orient to be found in Cromer, Balfour, and our contemporary statesmen? Il Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental Strictly speaking, Orientalism is a field of learned study. In the Christian West, Orientalism is considered to have commenced its formal existence with the decision of the Church Council of

50 ORIENTALISM Vienne in 1312 to establish a series of chairs in “Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca.” Yet any account of Orientalism would have to consider not only the professional Orientalist and his work but also the very notion of a field of study based on a geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic unit called the Orient. Fields, of course, are made. They acquire coherence and integrity in time because scholars devote themselves in different ways to what seems to be a commonly agreed-upon subject matter. Yet it goes without saying that a field of study is rarely as simply defined as even its most comI mitted partisans—usually scholars, professors, experts, and the like —claim it is. Besides, a field can change so entirely, in even the most traditional disciplines like philology, history, or theology, as to make an all-purpose definition of subject matter almost impossible.*This is certainly true of Orientalism, for some interesting reasons. To speak of scholarly specialization as a geographical “field” is, in the case of Orientalism, fairly revealing since no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it called Occidentalism. Already the special, perhaps even eccentric attitude of Orientalism becomes apparent. For although many learned disciplines imply a position taken towards, say, human material (a historian deals with the human past from a special vantage point in the present), there is no real analogy for taking a fixed, more or less total geographical Position towards a wide variety of social; linguistic, political, and historical realities. A classicist, a Romance specialist, even an Americanist focuses on a relatively modest portion of the world, not on a full half of it. But Orientalism is a field with considerable geographical ambition. And since Orientalists jhave traditionally occupied themselves with things Oriental (a specialist in Islamic law, no less thau an expert in Chinese dialects or in Indian religions, is considered an Orientalist by people who call themselves Orientalists), we must learn to accept enormous, indiscyiminate size plus an almost infinite capacity for subdivision as dne of the chief characteristics of Orientalism---one fhat is evidenced in its confusing amalgam of imperial vagueness and precise detail. All of this describes Orientalism as an academic discipline. The “ism” in Orientalism serves to insist on the distinction of -this—— discipline from every other kind. The rule in its historical development as an academic discipline has been its increasing scope, not its greater selectiveness. Renaissance Orientalists like Erpenius and