uting these defects to Islam or race. Although
there were exceptions, as a group they wanted to
clearly differentiate their own European civiliza-
tion and Christianity—the religion with which
they most closely identified by heritage if not by
personal conviction—from “Islamic civilization”
or “Islamic society” and Islam.
Among the key Orientalist scholars to emerge
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were
Edward W. Lane (d. 1876), Richard Burton (d.
1890), W. Robertson Smith (d. 1894), and Wil-
liam Muir (d. 1905) in England; Ernest Renan
(d. 1892), Jean Sauvaget (d. 1950), and E. Levi-
Provincal (d. 1956) of France; Julius Wellhausen
(d. 1918), Theodor Noeldeke (d. 1930), Carl
Becker (d. 1933), and Carl Brockelman (d. 1956)
of Germany; Reinhart Dozy (d. 1883), Arent J.
Wensinck (d. 1939), and C. Snouck Hurgronje
(d. 1943) of the Netherlands; Leone Caetani (d.
1935) and Giorgio Levi Della Vida (d. 1967) of
Italy; Miguel Asin Palacios (d. 1944) of Spain;
Ignaz Goldziher (d. 1921) of Hungary; and Henri
Lammens (d. 1937) of Belgium. By the 1950s the
fields of Oriental and Islamic Studies had become
firmly established in major universities in Europe
and North America: Cambridge, Oxford, Edin-
burgh, London, Paris, Leiden, Berlin, Leipzig, St.
Petersburg, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and
Los Angeles. It should be noted, however, that in
North America the term ‘Oriental’ pertained more
to the Far East rather than the Middle/Near East.
Orientalist scholarship regressed during the
1960s and 1970s, becoming a marginal field
while academic interest was drawn to modern
topics such as nationalism, economic develop-
ment, social change, educational reform, secular
politics, and postcolonialism. Growth in the num-
ber and size of universities in the United States,
coupled with the strategic challenges posed by
the cold war between the countries of the Western
bloc led by the United States against the Commu-
nist bloc countries led by the Soviet Union and
the People’s Republic of China, gave rise to area
studies programs in many major American uni-
versities. These areas included that of the Middle
East (from Egypt to Iran) and North Africa (from
Morocco to Egypt), which had become a strategi-
cally important region, particularly because of its
oil
. Some scholars began to point out Oriental-
ism’s shortcomings at this time, while recognizing
how it had shaped the ideas and knowledge many
educated Europeans and Americans had about
Islam and the Middle East.
The most forceful criticism of Orientalism
was made by Edward Said (1935–2003), a Pal-
estinian-American intellectual who had become
a leading scholar of comparative literature and
literary criticism at Columbia University. In his
path-breaking 1978 book, Orientalism, he argued
that it was not just a field of objective research,
but a formation of knowledge interlinked with
political power that had given Europeans and
(more recently) Americans the means by which to
justify and perpetuate domination over non-Euro-
pean peoples, especially those living in the Middle
East. Said supported his argument by showing
how Euro-American scholars, travel writers, and
journalists had been deeply implicated in the
colonization and governance of Muslim lands,
and how their writings had shaped Western biases
in the aftermath of colonial rule. Though the book
does not lack critics, Said and his supporters have
been able to document how Orientalist stereo-
types about “the Arab” and “the Muslim” were
revived again and again in the aftermath of the
1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Iranian hostage crisis
of 1979–80, the s
alman
r
Ushdie
affair of 1988,
the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the 1990
Gulf War, and, most recently, the global “war on
terror” launched by the United States after the
attacks of September 11, 2001, which had been
perpetrated by members of the radical Islamist
organization
al
-q
aida
. A good deal of this war has
been conducted on Muslim lands, including i
raq
and a
Fghanistan
, which created a new context for
reviving old Orientalist stereotypes and develop-
ing new ones. Said’s critique of Orientalism has
been embraced in various degrees by specialists in
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