Orientalism and Early Depictions of Muslims
"From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself." -Edward W. Said, Orientalism
Origins of Orientalism
For many centuries the Western world has constructed an illusion of non-Western, or Oriental, civilizations and cultures by depicting them as exotic, backward and immoral. With its origins in the expansion of global European empires, Orientalism became what it is today with the expansion of Europe into the Middle East and North Africa. Orientalism was created as a purely Western study of foreign cultures in order to subjugate even more efficiently. Western Stereotypes are thus intrinsic to Orientalism. In order to justify this invasion and subjugation, the West determined that the Orient was so uncivilized that they required salvation in the form of Western civilization.
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Early Depictions
In order to cultivate this exotic illusion, Europeans would utilize art and literature that stereotyped the Orient as a backward society. For example, in Adrian Henri Tanoux’s Namouna a lecherous old man is leading a reluctant-looking, naked young woman to a bed where a naked man and woman are laying in the shadows. This depicts the Middle East as a place of sexual immorality and as a place dangerous to women. In addition, the naked young woman being reluctantly lead to bed is significantly whiter than the other figures in the painting, furthering the dichotomy of “Orient” and the “West,” as the innocent, Western-complexion woman is being violated by the Oriental “barbarians.”