Thirty years in print connotes a lifetime for any modern academic text. Orientalism is still widely read after three decades, as befits a book now available in three dozen languages.
His seminal polemic brought a new awareness of the political agenda pursued, consciously or not, by contemporary social scientists coming to terms with an explosive part of the world. Appearing on the eve of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but after the 1973 Ramadan War and Arab oil embargo, Said’s thesis resonated across disciplines and in public culture. No one reading his Orientalism can fail to appreciate that much of the previous writing and lecturing about Muslims, Arabs, and stylized ‘Orientals’ reveals more about those doing the writing than about real people inhabiting a geographical space east of Europe.
More than any other individual scholar in recent history, Edward Said laid bare the discursive ideological undertones that have infested the public and academic representation of an idealized Orient.
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