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ORIENTALISM
Author(s): Edward W. Said
Source: The Georgia Review , Spring 1977, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 1977), pp. 162-206
Published by: Georgia Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41397448
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Edward W. Said
ORIENTALISM*
I. Imaginative Geography and Its Representations :
Orientalizing the Oriental
STRICTLY
InIn the
the Christian
Christian
speaking, West
West
Orientalism
Orientalism
Orientalism is a is field
is considered
considered
of learned totostudy.
have
have
begun its formal existence with the decision of the Church
Council of Vienne in 13 12 to establish a series of chairs, as
R. W. Southern notes, in “Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syraic
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
♦Whereas “Orientalism” usually refers to the study of the whole Orient
(including the civilizations of China, Japan, India and the Muslims), it is
used in this essay mainly to refer to the Near Orient, that is, the lands of
Islam, or the Arabs, or both. Until the eighteenth century the “Orient”
was considered in Europe to be Islam, or Turkey, or the lands of the
Saracens. After the discovery of large new portions of Asia during the
second half of the eighteenth century, the “Orient” explanded accordingly,
but in order to retain the coherence of the traditional idea of the Orient,
“Orientalism” is treated here as Western attention to the Near Bast, an
attention that includes academic study, imaginative literature, commerce,
and attempts at geo-political domination. This essay is part of a book
on the same subject to be published by the University of California Press
in 1978.
[162]
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EDWARD W. SAID 163
most committed partisans- usually scholars, pro
and the like- claim it is. Besides, a field can cha
in even the most traditional disciplines like phil
or theology, as to make an all-purpose defin
matter almost impossible. This is certainly true
for some interesting reasons.
To speak of scholarly specialization as a geog
is, in the case of Orientalism, fairly revealing
likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it calle
Already the special, perhaps even eccentric, attitude
becomes apparent. For although many learned d
a position taken towards, say, human material (
with the human past from a special vantage point
there is no real analogy for taking a fixed, m
geographical position towards a wide variety of s
political, and historical realities. A classicist, a Ro
even an Americanist focuses on a relatively mod
the world, not on a full half of it. But Orien
with considerable geographical ambition. And si
have traditionally occupied themselves with th
specialist in Islamic law, no less than experts in
and Indian religions, is considered to be an Orien
who call themselves Orientalists), we must learn
mous, indiscriminate size plus an almost infin
sub-division as one of the chief things about O
of the chief things about its confusing amalg
vagueness and precise detail.
All of this describes Orientalism as an acade
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 Guillaume Postel were primarily specialists in the
languages of the Biblical provinces, although Postel boasted that
he could get across Asia as far as China without needing an
interpreter. By and large until the mid-eighteenth century, Orien-
talists were Biblical scholars, students of the Semitic languages,
Islamic specialists, or, because the Jesuits had opened up the
new study of China, Sinologists. The whole middle expanse of
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IÓ4 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
Asia was not academically conquered for Orientalism u
later eighteenth century when Anquetil-Duperron and S
Jones were able to reveal the extraordinary riches of
Sanskrit. By the middle of the nineteenth century Or
was as vast a treasure house of learning as one could
There are two excellent indices of this new, triumphan
ticism. One is the encyclopedic description of Orientalism
from 1765 to 1850 given by Raymond Schwab
Renaissance Orientale (1950). Quite aside from the scien
coveries of things Oriental made by learned professiona
this period in Europe, there was in addition the virtual
of Orientalia affecting every major poet, essayist and ph
of the period. Schwab’s notion is that “orientale” ident
amateur or professional enthusiasm for everything Asia
was wonderfully synonymous with the exotic, myster
found, seminal; this is a later transposition Eastwards of
enthusiasm in Europe for Greek and Latin antiquity du
High Renaissance. In 1829 Victor Hugo put this c
direction as follows: “Au siècle de Louis XIV on était he
maintenant on est orientaliste.” A nineteenth-century O
was therefore either a scholar (a Sinologist, Islamici
Europeanist, etc.) or a gifted enthusiast (Hugo in
Orientales,” Goethe in the “West-östlicher Divan”),
(Richard Burton, Edward Lane, or Friedrich Schlege
The second index of how inclusive Orientalism had become
since the Council of Vienne is to be found in nineteenth-century
chronicles of the field itself. The most thorough one of its
kind is Jules Mohl’s Vingt-sept ans ďhistoire des études orientales
(1879-80), a two-volume log book of everything of note that took
place in Orientalism between 1840 and 1867. Mohl was the secretary of the Société Asiatique in Paris, and for something more
than the first half of the nineteenth century Paris was the capital
of the Orientalist world (and, according to Walter Benjamin,
of the nineteenth century). Mohl’s position in the Société could
not have been more central to the field of Orientalism. There
is scarcely anything done by a European scholar touching Asia
during those twenty-seven years that Mohl does not enter under
“études orientales.” His entries of course concern publications,
but the range of published material of interest to Orientalist
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EDWARD W. SAID l6$
scholars is awesome. Arabic, innumerable Indian
Pehlevi, Assyrian, Babylonian, Mongolian, Ch
Burmese, Mesopotamian, Javanese: the list of ph
considered Orientalist is almost uncountable. M
talist studies apparently cover everything from
translating of texts, to numismatic, anthropol
sociological, economic, historical, literary and c
every known Asiatic and North African civi
and modern. Gustave Dugat’s Histoire des Orient
du XII au XIX siècle (1868-70) is a selective h
figures, but the range represented is no less imm
Such eclecticism had its blind spots neverth
Orientalists for the most part were intereste
periods of whatever language or society it was t
Not until quite late in the century, with th
exception of Napoleon’s Institut d’Egypte, w
attention given to the academic study of the m
Orient. Moreover, the “Orient” studied was a
by and large; the impact of the Orient was
books and manuscripts not, as in the impress o
Renaissance, through plastic artifacts like sculp
Even the rapport between an Orientalist and
textual, so much so that it is reported of so
nineteenth-century German Orientalists that th
an eight-armed Indian statue cured them com
Orientalist taste. When a learned Orientalis
country of his specialization it was always w
shakeable maxims about the “civilization” whic
rarely were Orientalists interested in anything
the validity of these musty “truths” by apply
great success to uncomprehending, hence deg
Finally, the very power and scope of Orientali
only a fair amount of exact positive knowledge
but also a kind of second-order knowledge-
places as the “Oriental” tale, the mythology of
East, notions of Asian inscrutability- with a
what V. G. Kiernan has aptly called “Europe
dream of the Orient.” One happy result of this
of important writers during the nineteenth ce
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l66 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
talist enthusiasts: it is perfectly correct
genre of Orientalist writing as exemplifi
Goethe, Nerval, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, and
goes with such work, however, is a
mythology of the Orient, an Orient tha
contemporary attitudes and popular p
what Vico called the conceit of nations and of scholars.
Today an Orientalist is less likely to call himself an Orientalist
than he was at almost any time up to the Second World War.
Yet the designation is still useful as when universities maintain
programs or departments in Oriental languages or Oriental civi-
lizations. There is an Oriental “faculty” at Oxford and a
Department of Oriental Studies at Princeton. As recently as
1959, the British Government empowered a commission “to
review developments in the Universities in the fields of Oriental,
Slavonic, East European and African studies. . . and to consider,
and advise on, proposals for future development.” The Hayter
report, as it was called when it appeared in 1961, seemed
untroubled by the broad designation of the word “Oriental”
which it found serviceably employed in American universities
as well. For even the greatest name in modern Anglo-American
Islamic studies, H. A. R. Gibb, preferred to call himself an
Orientalist rather than an Arabist. Gibb himself, classicist that
he was, could use the ugly neologism “area study” for Orientalism
as a way of showing that area studies and Orientalism after all
were interchangeable geographical titles. But this, I think, ingenuously belies a much more interesting relationship between
knowledge and geography than is really the case. I should like
to consider that relationship briefly.
Despite the distraction of a great many vague desires, impulses,
and images, the mind seems persistently to formulate what
Lévi-Strauss has called a logic of the concrete. A primitive tribe,
for example, assigns a definite place, function and significance
to every leafy species in its immediate environment; many of
these herbs and flowers have no practical use, but the point
Lévi-Strauss makes is that mind requires order, and order is
achieved by discriminating and taking note of everything, placing
everything of which the mind is aware in a secure, re-findable
place, therefore giving things some1 role to play in the economy
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EDWARD W. SAID 1 67
of objects and identities that make up an environm
of rudimentary classification has a logic to it, bu
the logic by which a green fern in one society
grace and in another is considered maleficent are n
tably rational nor universal. There is always a m
purely arbitrary in the way the distinctions betw
seen. And with these distinctions go values who
one could unearth it completely, would proba
same measure of arbitrariness. This is evident
case of fashion. Why do wigs, lace collars and
shoes appear, then disappear, over a period of
of the answer has to do with utility, and part wit
beauty of the fashion. But if we agree that all thi
like history itself, are made by men, then we
how possible it is for objects, or places, or times,
roles and given meanings that acquire objective
after the assignments are made. This is especially
tively uncommon things, like foreigners, mutants
behavior.
Obviously, some distinctive objects are made
and these objects, while appearing to exist obj
only a fictional reality. A group of people liv
acres of land will set up boundaries between t
its immediate surroundings on the one hand, and
a land beyond theirs which they call “the land of t
In other words, this universal practice of desig
mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an un
beyond “ours,” which is “theirs,” is a way of mak
ical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I
arbitrary here because imaginative geography of t
barbarian land” variety does not require that t
acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for
these boundaries in our own minds; “they” be
accordingly, and both their territory and their me
nated as different from “ours.” To a certain extent modern
and primitive societies seem thus to derive a sense of their
identities negatively. A fifth-century Athenian was very likely
to feel himself in a negative sense to be a non-barbarian as
much as in a positive sense he felt himself to be Athenian. The
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l68 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
geographic boundaries I have been disc
social, ethnic, and cultural ones in ex
often the sense in which someone feels h
is based on a very unrigorous idea of wh
one’s own territory. All kinds of suppos
tions appear to crowd the unfamiliar an
one’s place.
The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in an analysis of
what he called the poetics of space, noted how the inside of
a house acquires a sense of intimacy, secrecy, security, real or
imagined, because of what experiences come to seem appropriate
to it. The objective space of a house, its corners, corridors, cellar,
rooms, is far less important than what poetically it is endowed
with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative
value we can name and feel: thus a house may be haunted,
homelike, prisonlike, magical, and so forth. So space acquires
emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process,
whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. The same process occurs when
we deal with time. Much of what we associate with, or even
know about, such periods as “long ago,” or “the beginning,”
or “at the end of time” is poetic, made up. For a historian of
Middle Kingdom Egypt, “long ago” will have a very clear
sort of meaning, but even this meaning does not totally dissipate
the imaginative, quasi-fictional quality one senses lurking in a
time very different and distant from our own. For there is no
doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind
to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance
and difference between what is close to it and what is far away.
This is no less true of the feelings we often have that we would
have been more “at home” in the sixteenth century or in Tahiti.
Yet there is no use in pretending that all we know about
time and space, or rather history and geography, is more than
anything else imaginative. There are such things as positive history and positive geography which in Europe and the United
States have impressive achievements to point to. Scholars now
do know more about the world, its past and present, than they
did, for example, in Gibbon’s time. Yet this is not to say that
they know all there is to know nor, more important, is it to
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EDWARD W. SAID IÓÇ
say that what they know has effectively dispelle
geographical and historical knowledge I have bee
We need not decide here whether this kind
knowledge infuses history and geography, or w
way it overrides them. Let us just say for the t
it is there as something more than what appe
positive knowledge.
Almost from earliest times in Europe the Orien
more than what was empirically known about it
the early eighteenth century, as R. W. Southern
shown, European understanding of one kind of
the Islamic, was ignorant, but complex. For cert
not quite ignorant, not quite informed- alwa
gathered around the notion of an Orient. Con
demarcation between Orient and Occident. It alr
by the time of the Iliad. Two of the most profou
qualities associated with the East appear in A
Persians, the earliest Athenian play extant, an
Bacchae, the very last one extant. Aeschylus por
of disaster overcoming the Persians when they
armies led by King Xerxes have been destroyed
The chorus sings the following ode:
Now all Asia’s land
Moans in emptiness.
Xerxes led forth, oh oh!
Xerxes destroyed, woe woe!
Xerxes’ plans have all miscarried
In ships of the sea.
Why did Darius then
Bring no harm to his men
When he led them into battle,
That beloved leader of men from Susa?
What matters here is that Asia speaks through and by virtue
of the European imagination, which is depicted as victorious
over Asia, that hostile “other” world beyond the seas. To Asia
are given the feelings of emptiness, loss, and disaster that seem
thereafter to reward Oriental challenges to the West; and also,
the lament that in some glorious past Asia fared better, was
itself victorious over Europe.
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170 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
In The Bacchae, perhaps the most Asiati
dramas, Dionysus is explicitly connected wit
and with the strangely threatening excesses of
Pentheus, King of Thebes, is destroyed by
and her fellow Bacchantes. Having defied
recognizing either his power or his divinit
horribly punished, and the play ends with a
of the eccentric god’s terrible power. Moder
The Bacchae have not failed to note the pl
range of intellectual and aesthetic effects;
no escáping the additional historical detail
remarks, Euripides “was surely affected by
the Dionysiac cults must have assumed in the
ecstatic religions of Bendis, Cybele, Sabaziu
which were introduced from Asia Minor and the Levant and
swept through Piraeus and Athens during the frustrating and
increasingly irrational years of the Peloponnesian War.”
The two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West
in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European
imaginative geography. A line is drawn between two continents.
Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is defeated and distant.
Aeschylus represents Asia, makes her speak in the person of the
aged Persian Queen, Xerxes’ mother. It is Europe that articulates
the Orient; this articulation is the prerogative not so much of
a puppet-master as of a genuine creator, whose life-giving power
represents, animates, constitutes the otherwise silent and dangerous
space beyond familiar boundaries. There is an analogy between
Aeschylus’s stage, which contains the Asiatic world as the play-
wright conceives it, and the learned envelope of Orientalist
scholarship, which also will contain the vast, amorphous Asiatic
sprawl for sometimes sympathetic, but always dominating scrutiny. Secondly, there is the motif of the Orient as insinuating
danger. Rationality is undermined by Eastern excesses, those mysteriously attractive opposites of what seem to be normal values.
The difference separating Elast from West is symbolized by the
sternness with which, at first, Pentheus rejects the hysterical
Bacchantes. When later he himself becomes a Bacchante, he is
destroyed not so much for having given in to Dionysus as for
having incorrectly assessed Dionysus’s menace in the first place.
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EDWARD W. SAID. 1 7 1
The lesson that Euripides intends is drama
in the play of Cadmus and Tiresias, know
who realize that “sovereignty” alone does
is such a thing as judgment, they say, whi
correctly the force of alien powers, and exp
with them. Hereafter Oriental mysteries w
not least because they challenge the ratio
new exercises of its enduring ambition a
But one big division, such as that between
Orient, leads to other smaller ones, esp
enterprises of civilization provoke such
travel, conquest, and trade. From at l
tury B. C. on, it was lost on no traveler
and ambitious Western potentate that Her
exhaustibly curious chronicler, traveler- an
scientific conqueror- had been in the Orien
is therefore subdivided into realms previo
conquered, by Herodotus and Alexander as w
and those realms not previously known, vis
tianity completes the setting-up of main in
there is a Near Orient and a Far Orient, a f
René Grousset calls “L’Empire du Levant,
The Orient therefore alternates in the min
being at times an old world to which on
or Paradise), there to set up a new version
at other times a wholly new place, to
Columbus came to America in order to
(although ironically Columbus himself thou
a new part of the old world). Certainly ne
is purely one thing or another: it is the
tempting suggestiveness, their capacity for
fusing the mind, that are interesting.
Consider how the Orient, and in particu
which is the main focus of this essay, b
West, since antiquity, as its great complem
were the Bible and the rise of Christianity;
like Marco Polo who charted the trade r
a regulated system of commercial exchange
vico and Pietro della Valle; there were fabu
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172 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
there were the redoubtable conquering Eastern m
cipally Islam of course; there were the militant
the Crusades. Altogether an internally structure
up from the literature that belongs to these ex
this comes a restricted number of typical en
journey, the history, the fable, the stereotyp
confrontation. These are the lenses through w
is experienced, and they shape the language,
form of the encounter between East and W
the immense number of encounters some unity,
vacillation I was speaking about earlier. Something p
and distant acquires, for one reason or anothe
rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judg
as completely novel or as completely well-know
category emerges, a category that allows one to
things seen for the first time, as versions of a p
thing. In essence such a category is not only a w
new information, it is also a method for contro
to be a threat to some established view of things
the mind must suddenly deal with what it takes
new form of life- as Islam appeared to Euro
Middle Ages- the response on the whole is c
defensive. Islam is judged to be a fraudulent
some previous experience, in this case Christian
is muted, familiar values impose themselves, an
mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommo
itself as either “original” or “repetitious.” Isla
“handled.” Its novelty and its suggestiveness ar
control so that relatively nuanced discriminatio
have been impossible to make had the raw n
been left unattended, are now made. The Orien
fore, vacillates between the West’s familiarity
its shivers of novel delight (or fear).
There is nothing especially controversial or rep
such domestications of the exotic; they take
cultures certainly, and between all men. My
is to emphasize the truth that the Orientalist,
one in the European West who thought abou
the Orient, performed the kind of mental opera
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EDWARD W. SAID 173
discussing. But what is more impo
vocabulary and imagery which impos
The reception of Islam in the West
and has been admirably studied by
straint acting upon Christian thinker
Islam was an analogical one; since Chr
faith, it was assumed- quite incorrectl
Islam as Christ was to Christianity. H
the polemic name Mohaamnedanism
automatic epithet “imposter” appli
such and many other misconceptions,
formed a circle which was never broke
sation. . . . The Christian concept of I
sufficient.” Islam became an image- t
seems to have remarkable implications
whose function was not so much to
in itself, as to represent Islam for the
The invariable tendency to neglect
or what Muslims thought it meant,
or did in any given circumstances,
Qur’anic and other Islamic doctrine
that would convince Christians; and m
forms would stand a chance of acce
the writers and public from the Isl
was with very great reluctance that w
believed was accepted as what they
Christian picture in which the details
of facts) were abandoned as little as
the general outline was never abando
difference, but only with a common
rections that were made in the interest
were only a defence of what had ne
vulnerable, a shoring up of a weake
opinion was an erection which could
to be rebuilt.
This rigorous Christian picture of Islam was intensified in
innumerable ways, including- during the Middle Ages and early
Renaissance- a large variety of poetry, learned controversy, and
popular superstition. By this time the Near Orient had been
all but included in the common world-picture of Latin Christianity
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1 74 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
(as in the Song of Roland the worship of Sara
as having included Mahomet and Apollo) . By
fifteenth century, as R. W. Southern has bril
became apparent to serious European thinkers
would have to be done about Islam,” which
situation around somewhat by itself having m
eastern Europe. Southern recounts a dramat
1450 and 1460 when four learned men, John o
of Cusa, Jean Germain, and Aeneas Silvius (P
between them to deal with Islam through c
“conference.” The idea was John of Segovia
been a staged conference with Islam with Chr
the wholesale conversion of Muslims. “He saw the conference
as an instrument with a political as well as a strictly religious
function, and in words which will strike a chord in modern
breasts he exclaimed that even if it were to last ten years it
would be less expensive and less damaging than war.” There
was no agreement between the four men, but the episode is
crucial for having been a fairly sophisticated attempt- part of
a general European attempt from Bede to Luther- to put a
representative Orient in front of Europe, to stage the Orient
and Europe together in some coherent way, the idea being for
Christians to make it clear to Muslims that Islam was just a
misguided version of Christianity. Southern concludes,
Most conspicuous to us is the inability of any of these systems
of thought [European Christian] to provide a fully satisfying
explanation of the phenomenon they had set out to explain
[Islam]- still less to influence the course of practical events in
a decisive way. At a practical level, events never turned out
either so well or so ill as the most intelligent observers predicted;
and it is perhaps worth noticing that they never turned out
better than when the best judges confidently expected a happy
ending. Was there any progress [in Christian knowledge of
Islam]? I must express my conviction that there was. Even if
the solution of the problem remained obstinately hidden from
sight, the statement of the problem became more complex, more
rational, and more related to experience. . . . The scholars who
labored at the problem of Islam in the Middle Ages failed to
find the solution they sought and desired; but they developed
habits of mind and powers of comprehension which, in other
men and in other fields, may yet deserve success.
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EDWARD W. SAID 1 75
The best part of Southern’s analysis,
his brief history of Western views of
it as not surprising that it is finally W
becomes more refined and complex, not
Western knowledge which increases in
fictions have their own logic, and their
or decline. Thus, onto the character of M
Ages was heaped a number of attribut
that corresponded to the “character of
prophets of the ‘Free Spirit’ who did a
and claim credence and collect followers
hammed was viewed as the disseminato
he became as well the epitome of lecher
and a whole battery of assorted treacher
“logically” from his doctrinal impost
acquired representatives, so to speak, an
one more concrete, more internally congr
exigency, than the ones that preceded it
settled on the Orient as a locale suitab
infinite in a finite shape, Europe could
the Orient and the Oriental, Arab, Isla
whatever, become repetitious pseudo-inc
Original (Christ, Europe, the West) th
to be imitating. Only the source of th
Western ideas about the Orient chang
character. Thus it was commonly belie
thirteenth centuries that Arabia was,
fringe of the Christian world, a natur
outlaws” and that Mohammed was a cu
in the twentieth century an Orientalist s
has pointed out how Islam is really no m
Arian heresy.*
Our initial description of Orientalism
acquires a new concreteness. A field is o
The idea of representation is a theatrica
stage on which the whole East is conf
appear figures whose role it is to represen
*D. B. MacDonald, “Whither Islam,” Muslim World , XXIII (January
1933), 2.
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176 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
which they emanate. The Orient then seems to
unlimited extension beyond the familiar European
rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to
Orientalist is but the particular specialist of a kno
which Europe at large is responsible, in the way that
is historically and culturally responsible for (and res
dramas technically put together by the dramatist (the O
In the depths of this Oriental stage stands a prodigi
repertoire: the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy, Sod
morrah, Astarte, Isis and Osiris, Sheba, Babylon, the
Magi, Nineveh, Prester John, Mahomet, and doz
settings, in some cases names only, half-imagined, h
monsters, devils, heroes, terrors, pleasures, desires. T
imagination was nourished extensively from this rep
tween the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century s
authors as Ariosto, Chaucer, Milton, Marlowe, Tasso, S
Cervantes, the authors of the Chanson de Roland, and
del Cid drew on the Orient’s riches for their prod
ways that sharpened the outlines of imagery, ideas,
populating it. In addition a great deal of what was
learned Orientalist scholarship in Europe pressed ideolo
into service, even as knowledge seemed genuinely to b
A celebrated instance of how dramatic form and learned
imagery come together in the Orientalist theater is Bartholemé
d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale, published posthumously in
1697, with a preface by Antoine Galland. The introduction to
the recent Cambridge History of Islam considers the Bibliothèque
along with George Sale’s Preliminary Discourse to his translation
of the Qur’an (1734) and Simon Ockley’s History of the
Saracens (1708, 1718) to be “highly important” in widening
“the new understanding of Islam” and conveying “it to a less
academic readership.” This inadequately describes d’Herbelot’s
work, which was not restricted to Islam as Sale’s and Ockley’s
were. With the exception of Johann H. Hottinger’s Historia
Orientalis, which appeared in 1651, the Bibliothèque remained
a standard reference work in Europe until the early nineteenth
century. Its scope was truly epochal. Galland, who was the
first European translator of the Thousand and One Nights and
an Arabist of note, contrasted d’Herbelot’s achievement with
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EDWARD W. SAID 177
every prior one by noting the prodigiou
D’Herbelot read a great number of w
Arabic, Persian and Turkish, with th
was able to find out about matters hitherto concealed from
Europeans. After d’Herbelot had compiled a dictionary of the
three Oriental languages Galland says th
