Orientalism reduces Arab presence to biological reproduction and sexual drive

Evidence

Two things: number and generative power. Both qualities are reducible to each other ultimately, but we ought to separate them for the purposes of analysis. Almost without exception, every contemporary work of Orientalist scholarship (especially in the social sciences) has a great deal to say about the family, its male-dominated structure, its all-pervasive influence in the society. Patai’s work is a typical example. A silent paradox immediately presents itself, for if the family is an institution for whose general failures the only remedy is the placebo of “modernization,” we must acknowledge that the family continues to produce itself, is fertile, and is the source of Arab existence in the world, such as it is. … If Arab society is represented in almost completely negative and generally passive terms, to be ravished and won by the Orientalist hero, we can assume that such a representation is a way of dealing with the great variety and potency of Arab diversity, whose source is, if not intellectual and social, then sexual and biological. Yet the absolutely inviolable taboo in Orientalist discourse is that that very sexuality must never be taken seriously. It can never be explicitly blamed for the absence of achievement and “real” rational sophistication the Orientalist everywhere discovers among the Arabs. And yet this is, I think, the missing link in arguments whose main object is criticism of “traditional” Arab society, such as Hamady’s, Berger’s, and Lerner’s. They recognize the power of the family, note the weaknesses of the Arab mind, remark the “importance” of the Oriental world to the West, but never say what their discourse implies, that what is really left to the Arab after all is said and done is an undifferentiated sexual drive. On rare occasions—as in the work of Leon Mugniery—we do find the implicit made clear: that there is a “powerful sexual appetite … characteristic of those hot-blooded southerners.” Most of the time, however, the belittlement of Arab society and its reduction of platitudes inconceivable for any except the racially inferior are carried on over an undercurrent of sexual exaggeration: the Arab produces himself, endlessly, sexually, and little else. The Orientalist says nothing about this, although his argument depends on it: “But co-operation in the Near East is still largely a family affair and little of it is found outside the blood group or village.” Which is to say that the only way in which Arabs count is as mere biological beings; institutionally, politically, culturally they are nil, or next to nil. Numerically and as the producers of families, Arabs are actual. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 788

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Arab as mere biology, nil culturally’ move parallels the racialization-of-the-Other mechanism that later Islamophobia readings will deploy.
• DEFINE: Establishes the key Orientalist maneuver: reducing ‘generative power’ to sexual/biological rather than institutional-political potency — a load-bearing concept for the toolkit.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 788