In 1978, the literary theorist Edward Said (d. 2003), a Palestinian Arab and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, published Orientalism, outlining a post-colonial theory showing how imbalanced power relations between “The West” and “The East” has dictated the representation of Arabs, Muslims, and others, in particular ways. In literature and the arts, orientalism refers to a European convention of portraying “The East” as exotic, historically frozen in time, sensual, feminine, weak, dangerous, eccentric, irrational, and undeveloped.
Said argued that the trend reflected a wider attitude in European thought—linked to the experience of imperialism and colonialism and the perceived project of “civilizing” the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—in which Europeans, particularly white male Europeans, imagined themselves as superior to non-Europeans. The most important feature of the orientalist tendency is the assertion of the cultural authority to describe others. In particular, it gave Europeans license to define Islam and Muslims, in the process ignoring or obscuring Muslims’ own authority to represent themselves. This sense of superiority provided the cultural foundation for colonialism itself, and remains a pervasive legacy of the colonial experience in the realms of cultural and intellectual production.
The experience of orientalism impacted ways that colonized peoples identified themselves, and in many instances Muslims of the 19th and 20th century came to adopt the orientalist perception of their societies, such that reform required European-style modernization, using European languages instead of their mother tongue, the replacement of traditional forms of education with western educational models, adopting new styles and conventions in clothing and culture, and so on. These pervasive changes inspired Islamic reform movements that resisted the loss of traditional cultural modalities to what was characterized as Westernization or “Westoxification."
Sources:
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).