Said assigned Orientalism vague origins spanning from classical Greece to the fourteenth century

Evidence

The first piece of evidence pointing to Said’s fuzzy conception of chronology is the nearly infinite historical roots and geographic scope he assigns to what he regards as the discursive activity of Orientalism. Early in the book, he seems to suggest that Orientalism started a “thousand years” ago (17). A few pages later, Orientalism is taken as far back as the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, a supposedly “non-Oriental” who flourished in the fifth century BC (21). Thirty pages later, Orientalism is claimed to have “commenced its formal existence” in 1312, when the Church Council of Vienna of that year established a series of Chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, in cities as far-flung as Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Avignon, and Salamanca (49). Thus Orientalism, plotting “Oriental history, character, and destiny for hundreds of years” (95), represented Islam to medieval Christianity (60), although its “schematization began … in classical Greece” (68). What the difference is between “formal existence” and “schematization” we are not told; nor are we told how these two phenomena, separated by more than one and a half millennia, relate to each other. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 54

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader postcolonial-studies debates over Orientalism’s periodization — notably Ahmad’s ‘In Theory’ and the Black Athena controversy Hallaq himself references.