Orientalism and Edward Said

Abstract

My thesis is studied a well- known book named “Orientalism” written by the famous Palestinian thinker Edward Said. I started by presenting Edward's life, the evolution of his ideas toward Islam and Arab’s, moving then to his book and why he wrote it. At the end I discussed the effect of the book in changing the stereotyped picture of Arab in the west and specifically in the oriental field. Edward Said's book is an exploration of the West's attitude to Islam and the East, an ideology that goes by the name of Orientalism- a mixture of prejudice, racist assumptions, intertwined and underpinned with scholarship and archeology. Often the scholarship has been controlled, almost dictated by racism. Indeed, Mr. Said, the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, would maintain that many of the institutions of Orientalism- academic departments, learned societies and the like- still support it, and he would argue too, that the works of outstanding Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis or the late Sir Hamilton Gibb are as much imbued with the West's distorted vision of the Orient as Ernest Renan's, Edward William Lane's or Sir Richard Burton's.