Oriental studies is а composite area of scholarship comprising philology, linguistics, ethnography, and the interpretation of culture through the discovery, recovery, compilation, and translation of Oriental texts.
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient – and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist, sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or its general aspects, is an Orientalist, and what he or she does is Orientalism.
Orientalism is а movement which influenced the world of the 19th century, first in the field of science and scholarship and then literature, theatre, music, architecture, and the fine arts.
…until the mid-eighteenth century Orientalists were Biblical scholars, students of the Semitic languages, Islamic specialists, or, because the Jesuits had opened up the new study of China, Sinologists.
This interest in the Orient was stimulated by political and commercial interests, by scientific and archeological expeditions, by the increasing number of European visitors making their way to the Orient <…> and by the growth of Romanticism in literature and painting.
The Orient is <…> one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.
Orientals or Arabs are thereafter shown to be gullible, “devoid of energy and initiative”, much given to “fulsome flattery”, intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals <…> Orientals are inveterate liars, they are “lethargic and suspicious”, and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race.
For European Romanticism <…> the Orient appeared as a place of refuge and sanctuary. It was pre-industrial, its cultural values appeared to be simpler and closer to nature.
The European imagination was nourished extensively from this repertoire: between the Middle Ages and eighteenth century such major authors as Ariosto, Milton, Marlowe, Tasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the authors of the Chanson de Roland and the Poema del Cid drew on the Orient‟s riches for their productions <…>