Word: orientalist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...angry, provocative new book called Orientalism (Pantheon; $15), Edward Said, 43, Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, argues that the West has tended to define Islam in terms of the alien categories imposed on it by Orientalist scholars. Professor Said is a member of the Palestine National Council, a broadly based, informal parliament of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He summarized the thesis of Orientalism in this article for TIME...
There were, however, great Orientalist scholars; there were genuine attempts, like that of Richard Burton [British explorer who translated the Arabian Nights], at coming to terms with Islam. Still, gross ignorance persisted, as it will whenever fear of the different gets translated into attempts at domination. The U.S. inherited the Orientalist legacy, and uncritically employed it in its universities, mass media, popular culture, imperial policy. In films and cartoons, Muslim Arabs, for example, are represented either as bloodthirsty mobs, or as hooknosed, lecherous sadists. Academic experts decreed that in Islam everything is Islamic, which amounted to the edifying notions that...
Under the vast idea called Islam, which the faithful look to for spiritual nourishment in their numerous ways, an equally vast, rich life passes, as detailed and as complex as any. For comprehension of that life Westerners need what Orientalist Scholar Louis Massignon called a science of compassion, knowledge without domination, common sense not mythology. In Iran and elsewhere Islam has not simply "returned"; it has always been there, not as an abstraction or a war cry but as part of a way people believe, give thanks, have courage and so on. Will it not ease our fear to accept...
DIED. Philip K. Hitti, 92, Syrian-born Orientalist and professor of Semitic literature at Princeton (1926-54) who pioneered the study of Arabic and Islamic cultures in the U.S.; in Princeton...
...does so much honor and self-esteem hinge on this aspect of men's daily lives? The late Marshall Hodgson, a noted Orientalist, writes that this situation often obtains "when there are few other sources of assured status than sheer masculinity. Presumably in a society where social status on the basis of class was relatively precarious, sensitivity about a man's honor was reinforced...