Knowledge of the Orient constitutes authority and domination over it

Evidence

Two great themes dominate his remarks here and in what will follow: knowledge and power, the Baconian themes. As Balfour justifies the necessity for British occupation of Egypt, supremacy in his mind is associated with “our” knowledge of Egypt and not principally with military or economic power. Knowledge to Balfour means surveying a civilization from its origins to its prime to its decline—and of course, it means being able to do that. Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; this object is a “fact” which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it”—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it. British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour, and the burdens of knowledge make such questions as inferiority and superiority seem petty ones. Balfour nowhere denies British superiority and Egyptian inferiority; he takes them for granted as he describes the consequences of knowledge. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 107

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core scaffolding move of the entire field: knowledge-as-domination, where knowing the Other is itself an exercise of power that denies the known entity autonomy.
• XREF: Connects forward to the entire Islamophobia reading list that builds on Said’s construct of the ‘Other’ as an object of authoritative Western knowledge. — connects to: European knowledge about the Orient served domination rather than truth. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 262
• DEEPTHINKING: The equation ‘British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt’ — knowledge constituting the object rather than merely describing it — is the paradigm-shifting core that resists one-line summary.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 107