The Suez Canal completed the Orient’s transformation from hostile distance into submissive possession

Evidence

In the Suez Canal idea we see the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and, more interesting, of Orientalist effort. To the West, Asia had once represented silent distance and alienation; Islam was militant hostility to European Christianity. To overcome such redoubtable constants the Orient needed first to be known, then invaded and possessed, then re-created by scholars, soldiers, and judges who disinterred forgotten languages, histories, races, and cultures in order to posit them—beyond the modern Oriental’s ken—as the true classical Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient. The obscurity faded to be replaced by hothouse entities; the Orient was a scholar’s word, signifying what modern Europe had recently made of the still peculiar East. De Lesseps and his canal finally destroyed the Orient’s distance, its cloistered intimacy away from the West, its perdurable exoticism. Just as a land barrier could be transmuted into a liquid artery, so too the Orient was transubstantiated from resistant hostility into obliging, and submissive, partnership. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 259

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the full Orientalist procedure in one mechanism: knowing, then invading, then re-creating the Orient as a classical past usable to rule its modern present.
• XREF: Connects to later Islamophobia scholarship on how the constructed ‘classical’ Orient is weaponized to legitimate present rule; also to the biopolitics/necropolitics framing of how subjects are administered.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 259