Don’t quote me out of context
“Said’s book licenses the claim that any and all statements by westerners about the Middle East can be dismissed as worthless and racist. Anything a European says about a range of subjects from the Pyramids of Giza to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor to the nature of Islamic art can be assumed from the start by readers of Orientalism to be orientalist - or latterly, Islamophobic.
In fact, the very writers and scholars analysed by Said tell a different story. One of the first works of Orientalism that he discusses is the vast Description of Egypt, ordered by Napoleon and researched by a team of French scholars whose work was eventually published in a series of monumental volumes by 1828. From this staggering work, Said quotes no more than a paragraph of its preface. In this one paragraph, he finds evidence that Napoleon’s scholars saw Egypt as a theatre of colonial power. In fact, the paragraph, itself fairly anodyne, looks irrelevant when you examine the Description as a whole with its meticulous drawings of stingrays and snail shells and careful records of engineering machinery used to pump water from the Nile, ploughing techniques, and costumes. Can all this be lumped together as one colossal discourse about a fictional Orient? Was Napoleon saying Egyptians were like fish?”
Orientalism is not racism | Art & architecture | guardian.co.uk | Jonathan Jones
In essence, it’s very easy when writing a discourse to not bother reading the book and just read the preface or introduction, pull a quote from that and have it support your argument, as if that one quote distills the complete opus.
