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Edward W. Said. Orientalism. 1978. Reprinted with a New Afterword, London: Penguin Books, 1995.

Said's scholarly, passionate book, Orientalism, is a seminal work for a wide range of fields in the humanities and social sciences. It has changed the way many scholars think about their fields and, more importantly, their attitudes towards the people they study. The book has also sparked an immense debate about Western, particularly European, academic culture and its relationship to non-Western peoples, a debate that has continued down to the present. Many even credit Orientalism with having given birth to the field of post-colonial studies. More to the point here, it is a book that is of significant value in helping us to reflect on the study of the churches of Thailand.

The purpose of this review is to introduce the reader to Said's Orientalism. Those who are conversant with the book and the subsequent debate that erupted around it will probably find little new here. My sense is, however, that Said's work has had little influence on Christian scholars and students, particularly those engaged in the study of Christian missions. Hence this review of a book published 25 years ago!

Edward W. Said is an articulate, erudite scholar who writes with depth and clarity and uses even postmodern jargon profoundly. He is insightful. He is also both a Palestinian Arab (born to a Christian family) and an American citizen who feels very deeply the prejudices most Americans and Europeans have against the Arab people and against Islam. He believes that the West fundamentally, often maliciously persists in misunderstanding and mistreating the Arabs and other Asians, and Orientalism is thus a demand for justice, an exposition of prejudice and oppression. The book focuses on the idea of Orientalism, which Said defines as being a Western, especially European, scholarly tradition regarding the peoples of Asia, "the Orientals.” As a scholarly tradition, Orientalism reflects the main currents in Western cognition since its earliest modern beginnings in the 14th century. It has to do with how Europeans know the truth, especially the truth about Orientals. To put the matter briefly and more superficially than Said does himself, Orientalism encompasses a

traditional body of false knowledge about Orientals based on Western Christian notions of the non-Christian, non-Western Other including an intensely self-serving dualistic distinction between supposedly progressive, dynamic, moral, Christian European civilization and backwards, static, immoral, non-Christian Orientals. As a scholarly tradition, Said argues, Orientalism represents the collective "wisdom" of many centuries of study of Orientals by European scholars and has in latter days assumed the status of unquestionable, unchanging truth.

Said makes his case by conducting his readers on a tour of the writings of Western orientalists, beginning briefly with ancient times and working his way down to the present. While Said claims that his portrait of Orientalism as a "discourse" is relevant to all Western thinking about all Asians, he limits his study to the scholarly traditions of French, British, and, more lately, American orientalists. He also focuses almost exclusively on Western knowledge, so-called, of the Arabs and Islam. Said carries out his analysis of Orientalism, in part, by borrowing Michel Foucault's concept of "discourse" and applying it to orientalists. He argues that Western orientalist discourse has over the centuries "constructed" a picture, an image of the Oriental that has little or nothing to do with western Asian realities. Said calls this construction a "mythic discourse," one that pervades nearly all Western thinking about the Arab Middle East.

Western Orientalism, Said argues, defines Orientals as being an unprogressive and backward people. It makes no distinctions between Arab states, tribes, communities, or individuals. An Arab is an Arab is an Arab, a people who are supposedly ignorant especially of themselves. It is thus the self-assigned task of the orientalist to define Orientals not only for Euro-American scholars and diplomats but also for Orientals themselves. Orientalism draws on a static, traditional body of knowledge that has been passed down from generation to generation of Western orientalists virtually since the fourteenth century. that traditional wisdom about claims that Orientals are emotional, not rational. They are not trustworthy. They have no legitimate scholarly traditions of their own, nor can they rule themselves justly or wisely.

Said himself summarizes Orientalism as consisting of four dogmas. First, he states that Orientalism is premised on the "fact" that there is an "absolute and

systematic difference" between the rational, superior West and the undeveloped, inferior Orient. Second, orientalists prefer their traditional knowledge of the Orient, which is taken from classical texts, to contemporary study of Asia. Third, orientalists treat the Orient as a single, unchanging phenomenon that can be best described by "a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary." This vocabulary is taken by orientalists to be scientific. Finally, Orientalism assumes that the Orient is dangerous and has to be controlled. Orientalism is a body of invented knowledge, in sum, that is in and of itself an academic form of control that also facilitates actual political and military control over western Asia. (pages 300-301).

The last of Said's four dogmas concerning Orientalism is a crucial one. The book is far, far from being simply an academic exercise. It is, rather, a scholar's declaration of opposition to a system of knowledge that has underwritten European and more recently American political and military domination of the Arab world. Said identifies Orientalism with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He sees it as the source of ignorance that allowed Britain and France to establish their colonies in western Asia (a.k.a. "the Middle East") and that, today, encourages the Western nations, particularly the United States, to support Israel. Thus, he writes, "The nexus of knowledge and power creating 'the Oriental' and in a sense obliterating him as a human being is therefore not for me an exclusively academic matter." He goes on, "Too often literature and culture are presumed to be politically, even historically innocent," but it seems otherwise to Said. Society and "literary culture" have to be studied together, and what Said hoped to accomplish in writing Orientalism is to contribute to our understanding of how Orientalism's literature and body of knowledge have assisted in the cultural domination of the Orient by the West. (pages 27-28).

A book of this scope, depth, and fervor is inevitably flawed. Dr. George Landow of Brown University has summarized the main points of Orientalism's critics on his website (http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/post/poldiscourse/said/orient14.html). Agreeing that the book is a seminal work, Landow still contends that it is based on shoddy scholarship, focuses too narrowly on the Arab portion of the Orient, is biased and one-sided, ignores women's issues, and is too sweeping in its condemnation of all

Western knowledge and scholarly study of the Orient. The book also fails to see that Asians treat the West in much the same way as the West treats Orientals.

Some critics argue that Orientalism betrays a fundamental, damaging ambivalence concerning the relationship of orientalist discourse to the "real" Orient. At points, Said seems to think (following Foucault) that "the Orient" exists only in orientalist discourse; it is nothing more than a self-serving, self-gratifying myth made up ("constructed") by European scholarship for its own ends. There is no such thing as a "real Orient." Yet, at other points Said claims that Orientalism as a body of false knowledge has blinded the orientalists to the real nature of the Orient, strongly implying that there is a real Orient. While many of his more sophisticated critics are upset by the fact that Said sometimes treats the Orient as a reality and sometimes as merely a matter of discourse, the more important point is that Said has himself fallen victim to the habit of treating both the Orient and orientalists as single entities. He speaks of the Orient, even though he contends that there is no such thing as a single, timeless Orient—there is only a multitude of Orients. He himself treats the European tradition of orientalist discourse as if it is a single, unified, unchanging discourse rather than a complex body of shifting, changing discourses. Critics also point out that Orientalism has in some cases had a positive reflexive impact on the West itself, citing German Orientalism as a particular example. They also argue that Asians have played an important role in accepting, perpetuating, and influencing the course of Orientalism.

Orientalism, as a result, ignited an ongoing debate that has contributed a great deal to our understanding of how East and West have related to each other and created each other over the course of history down to the present. Said may have been wrong in the particulars, but he was right in the main; and both his being right and being wrong have provided the impetus for rethinking all manner of things that needed rethinking. When one considers all of the learned books and articles that are published each year, it is rare indeed that one book could have such an impact.

It is troubling, therefore, to discover that Said's Orientalism has had little impact on Christian academics including, most particularly, the academic study of the foreign missionary movement. Whatever the weaknesses of Said's presentation, Orientalism contains a number of significant insights that help us to better understand

the ways in which Western missionary "discourse," often in unintentional dialogue with their converts, "constructed" the "native" church. Discourse, in this sense, includes missionary behavior as well as missionary words. Said himself indicates in several places that the discourse of Orientalism has some of its roots in Christian thinking. He argues, for example, that Orientalism grew out of a "set of structures from the past," which were "naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism." (page 122). He states that Orientalism retained a "peculiarly polemical religious attitude it had from the beginning." (page 260, emphasis in the original). In other places, he writes somewhat gingerly of Orientalism's religious background, never specifically indicting traditional Christian thinking about the non-Christian Other as a source of Orientalism but, now and again, pointing in that general direction. Surely, it is worth more than a pause for Christian scholars to look at the history of the church and consider the extent to which the church has participated in and even fostered Orientalism. Such reflection should keep in mind that, in spite of Said, not all Orientalisms are necessarily evil and oppressive and that orientalists have at times also had a more positive influence on Western thinking about the Orient. Christian theologians, social scientists, historians, and missiologists would do well, in this light, to study more closely the nature of historical and contemporary Christian discourses about people of other faiths and places to discern the relationship of those discourses to Orientalism.

Bringing the matter home to Christianity in Thailand, Said challenges us to look, first, at the ways in which missionary "discourse" (words and behavior) has historically "constructed" the Thai church. How, that is, did missionary values, attitudes, and prejudices influence the founding and early history of the churches of Thailand? To what extent was that discourse similar to Said's Orientalism? What role did the first generations of converts have in translating missionary discourse into Thai (and Karen, Lahu, Chinese, etc.) ecclesiastical discourse? How did they modify and change the missionary discourse as they adapted it to the societies and cultures of Thailand? My sense is that missionary discourse was very much like the Orientalism described by Said, but we must also keep in mind the corrections Said's critics have made of his discourse and not treat missionary discourses as just one timeless, relentlessly oppressive entity.

When viewed from the distance of twenty-five years since Orientalism was first published, the consensus of many (most?) scholars is that Said's description of Orientalism and its consequences is much more correct than mistaken. Even where mistaken, it is still challenging and useful. It would seem only judicious for Christian scholarship to engage in its own debate on Said, taking into account the rich treasury of commentary that has collected itself around Orientalism.

On a more personal note, one of the things that I find most appealing about Said's critique of Western systems of knowledge regarding non-Western peoples is the depth of feeling and of self that Said invested in Orientalism. He uses the language of scholarship with an uncommon passion to judge supposedly dispassionate, neutral, objective European scholarly discourse about the Other. The feeling, the passion, the self-investment does not detract from his arguments in the least but, rather, lends them a power than goes beyond being merely articulate. The book has integrity. It is principled. It is a call for, a demand for justice and compassion. Most importantly, it brings Western academia to account for the way it talks about the Other and uses that talk from behind the scenes to sustain oppressive international political structures and military campaigns of suppression. While it is true, as some critics note, that Said makes the same points over and over throughout the book, it is the depth of feeling and the call for justice and compassion that sustain the reader and carries him through to the last page.

Passion is an important ingredient in good scholarship. It motivates the scholar and keeps her burning the midnight oil. It inspires new thoughts, new perspectives. Passion should not be equated with self-interested scholarship that is politically or theologically biased for a self-serving cause. Scholarly passion is about caring, dedication, and investing all that one has in "getting it right" as best one can. Scholars must, of course, be aware of their passion and try to keep it focused on the goal of telling the story or interpreting the data fairly, but a scholar without passion is a tasteless non-entity. It is the passion in Orientalism that makes it a great book and a good (scholarly) read.