The theory of Orientalism, derived
by Dr. Edward Said, is centered on the stereotypical views of western
civilization towards the cultures and people of the East, once under British
Imperialism, from the regions of the Middle East to Africa, and India. While negative stereotypes exist in western
civilization towards people in Africa and India, and people of color in
general, these two geographic regions take a backseat to the mental imagery of
the Middle East within the minds of most westerners. In modern Western society, especially the
United States, the stereotypes that the mass population has subconsciously developed
towards people in the Middle East, for example that Israeli Jews are often
innocent victims and that all Arabs are raving terrorists that are hell bent on murdering westerners,
are predominantly consumed through the abundance of media and television
entertainment. During the era of British
imperialism and military occupation just over a century ago, the equivalent of
television media was the distributed printed written word.
Alfred
Egmont Hake
The
Hake account of the General Gordon evacuation mission in Khartoum in 1885 is a
prime example of skillfully bias reporting that paints the Arab people of Khartoum,
in modern Sudan, as blood thirsty savages.
Without explaining that Sudan was under military occupation by the
British Protectorate Egypt, and that General Gordon himself had previously held
the Governor-Generalship of Sudan from 1876 to 1879 when he angered a good
majority of the population by removing a pillar of the local economy by
abolishing slavery, Hake opens his account by capturing his British audience by
creating a British protagonist that must rescue “Europeans, civil servants,
widows and orphans, and a garrison of one thousand men, one third of whom were
disaffected” from troubled Khartoum [1] .
The Hake account is obviously pro-British imperialism in nature and
portrays the foreign occupiers almost in a defensive light while portraying the
indigenous uprising as an act of aggression.
This is a common media reporting tactic which is still in heavy utilization
today. Take for example the Hake account
of the steamer that had a “volley was fired into her, wounding an officer and a
soldier. The steamer returned the fire, killing five”. Hake’s report here focuses on the volley
being fired and the two injuries instead of the five Arabs killed by machine
gun fire, reminiscent of modern news reports of stray missiles being fired from
the Palestinian territories into Israeli fields, with an Israeli response of
shelling the entire civilian infrastructure [2]. There is a pro-British political slant in
Hake’s account that portrays all Arabs as barbarians, and these types of spins
have been commonly used on citizens of imperialist empires and states as one of
the heavy components of Said’s concept of orientalism.
Charles
James Wills
The
same type of orientalism opinion shaping and stereotyping can be seen on a
socio-cultural level within Wills’ account on the Persian Wedding in 1815. Wills clearly plays on his British reader’s
Christian indoctrination, and unfamiliarity of Islamic culture to paint an
absurdly bizarre, and even twisted, perception of Islamic marriage and Islamic
society. There is no attempt at
unveiling cultural relativity between Britain and Persia in Wills’ account, nor
any attempt at understanding cultural history outside of Christian culture in
Britain. Wills reports the account from
a view of complete British cultural superiority toward any colonial element
that is different from that of the British Empire.
Wills
is quick to take subtle negative jabs at the modesty of the Islamic bride with
his description of her dress “which hangs down like a long mask in front of the
Persian woman's face, when clad in her hideous and purposely unbecoming outdoor
costume: which costume, sad to say, is also an impenetrable disguise. In it all
women are alike”[3]. I am certain that
Wills, while recording his judgments on this wedding for future popular print,
never considered that Muslim men and women in Persia may have regarded the
immodest dress of British women in the same manner in which Wills was viewing
their conservatism. One interesting
aspect of Wills’ account is his strong interest in the procedures of the
marriage contract, and British readers must have viewed this process, through
Wills’ descriptive opinions, to be exotic and barbaric economic bartering even
though these types of marriage contracts are recorded as far back into history
as the biblical Old Testament, a book regarded by British Christians as
sacred. Again, it is the printed report
during this era in history, long before the technology of television, which
shaped the minds of the British masses and created what Dr. Said would eventually
term, a century later, Orientalism.
Colonel
L. du Couret
Couret’s
report on judicial procedures in Arabia continues the trend of stereotyping and
orientalism within 19th and early 20th century British
media with an outlandish printed account on two particular judicial cases he witnessed
during an Arabian court session he was privileged enough to view. Instead of actually describing the most
common judicial procedurals “of the women who complained of ill treatment on
the part of their husbands; men who accused their wives of frailty; divisions
of inheritance to adjust; thefts and frauds to punish”[4], which would have
provided a realistic estimate of justice, social trends, and judicial sentencing
in Arabian society for the British people to understand, de Couret provides his
audience of media consumption with accounts on the two most irregular and
ridiculous events of the evening and provides no information at all on regular
the judicial structure, trends or procedures.
Instead of portraying an unbiased view of this foreign justice system to
the British people, Couret relates the 19th century Arabian judicial
court to “tales related to us in the ‘Arabian Nights’" which was
originally written over five hundred years prior and enhancing the subconscious
ideology of orientalism [5].
Closing
Imperialist
states often control the views of their subjects and people, through propagated
media such as print in the 19th century and satellite television in
the 21st century, in order to justify their own actions and create
unfavorable images of the people being exploited or conquered. Said’s concept of orientalism is a reality,
but the term ‘orientalism’ is only applicable due to the historical power
distribution of the geographic globe. If
certain historic events would have developed different results, power roles on
the international stage could have been different and the same media
instruments of imperialism might create cultural stereotypes that a person such
as Dr. Said might term “Europeanism” or “Americanism”.
Notes
1. Hake, Alfred. The Death of General Gordon at Khartoum,
1885. Islamic History Sourcebook,
Fordham University. Accessed on February
23, 2013 from
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/1885khartoum1.asp
2. Hake, Alfred. The Death of General Gordon at Khartoum,
1885. Islamic History Sourcebook,
Fordham University. Accessed on February
23, 2013 from
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/1885khartoum1.asp
3. Wills, Charles. A Persian Wedding, 1885. Islamic History Sourcebook, Fordham
University. Accessed on February 23, 2013 from
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/1885persianwedding.asp
4. Du Couret, L. Justice in Arabia, 1890. Islamic History Sourcebook, Fordham
University. Accessed on February 23, 2013 from
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/1898arabiajustice.asp
5. Du Couret, L. Justice in Arabia, 1890. Islamic History Sourcebook, Fordham
University. Accessed on February 23, 2013 from
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/islam/1898arabiajustice.asp
No comments:
Post a Comment