I’d like to place a content warning on this article, as some of the history and ideas are going to be very difficult to read. Terrorism, hate crimes, and racial stereotypes are included among the content of this article, and may be traumatizing to read. Please take care of yourself.

The Middle East seems like a headline waiting to happen. A crucible ready to explode any moment. If you were to ask the 24-hour news cycle, the place (not separate countries and cultures) is full of war, famine, and terrorism. Unfortunately, the plane attacks of September 11 in the United States solidified the definition of who was a terrorist. 

Prior to this, the name was given to people like Timothy McVeigh and his buddy Terry Nichols, the white US citizens whose bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed almost 200 people, with more injuries and damage besides, in 1995. In 1996, another white US citizen, Eric Rudolph, bombed the Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, Georgia in a terroristic act, killing one person and injuring 111 others in a scary, publicized event.

But, if you were to ask Americans, or even most of Western Europe and the UK to describe a terrorist, they will think of the almost Bond villain-like Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated those attacks on September 11, and kind of branch off from there, with some very stereotyped images and sounds of Muslim chanting. 

Violence by people of Middle Eastern or even African and Indian descent has become very charged in the past two decades, even causing multiple hate-fueled attacks on people who look Muslim, including a recent stabbing of a Muslim mall employee in Utah by a man who admitted he really wanted to do it because of the man’s religion. As of writing, this was only a few days ago.

Those of us of a certain age have been raised on the frankly frightening portrayals of Muslim and Arab people (men and women) that we see in the news. For years, we’ve tacked “terrorist” on people walking down the street in their traditional garb, because we think of the organized violence that made attacks like September 11 happen and what their perpetrators look like. 

Literary critic and public intellectual Edward W. Said (1935-2003) might suggest that this profiling of Arab, Muslim, and other people who fit the terrorist archetype is a new form of orientalism. Said, one of the founders of post-colonial studies, took a look at these tropes and stereotypes in his foundational text, Orientalism (1978), in which he specifically criticized the West’s portrayal of people of Arab and Muslim descent.

The Stereotypes of Empire

Said, who was Palestinian, but with American citizenship thanks to his father’s work in World War I, moved to the United States after the 1948 war between Arab and Jewish communities that would establish the state of Israel, making it difficult for Said, whose parents were Christian Arabs, to go to school and survive. Said went on to study at big names like Princeton and Harvard, and became a professor of literature at Columbia University.

A controversial, yet timely figure, Said was outspoken against the inequality and humanitarian issues in this new state, for the Palestinians, who had occupied the land for generations. Interestingly, Said’s chucking of a rock at a watchtower from Lebanon into the Israel border would probably be considered as controversial today as it was in 2000.

In Orientalism, Said turned fury into academic work, surveying history of the Orient, that is, of the Middle East and Asia, and its relationship to the white academics who explained it to the West. Said saw depictions of Muslim and Arab people in particular as through a lens. The lens of colonizers and empire-tainted views of societies and cultures foreign to these same colonizers.

For instance, Said remarked, the pretty stereotypes in art, of odalisques, harems, and certain architecture, are views from the outside, romanticized yet dehumanized ideas of a people who are not allowed to speak for themselves. Again and again, Said reiterates that these cultures should be allowed to speak for themselves in works of cultural or historical importance. They should not be filtered through the white lens of oppressive colonizers.

Since the knowledge that we had of these places and peoples was offered to us by European colonists, who made sure to let their ideology shine in their studies, literature, art, and travel logs, those who live in places in the Middle East, for instance, are seen as different, or Other, from the European colonists, grabbing up land and resources in the name of Empire.

Harmful stereotypes are made when hegemony, or a global dominance by one society, is desired. During the 19th century, in particular, European people were trying to find all the reasons to call themselves superior, citing their rationality, their disinterest, as a juxtaposition to the irrational and weird “Orientals” (excuse the term, as it is what Said himself uses). 

Furthermore, Said argued, these values could end up placing ideas on cultures that are either not completely understood, or whitewashed to be palatable to Westerners. For instance, ascribing humanism to societies where conceptually, for people living there, it doesn’t exist. In its place, a rich and valuable religious tradition exists, but this is thrown to the wayside in favor of the seemingly more important views of the “disinterested” observer from Europe.

Palestinian Cultural Mural in honor of Edward Said at San Francisco State University, by Fayeq Oweis and Susan Green, 2007. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Art, Literature, and Harmful Portrayals

Said cites Western European works of art and literature as integral to the portrayals we in the West have of Oriental culture. The cover of his book houses one such image, The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gerôme (1879), in which a naked kid encircled by a snake, shows it off to some mildly interested guy in a turban and his creepy bros. This is one of many paintings in the “orientalist” tradition, that sexualize and otherize people in foreign countries that the painters probably never visited but thought looked cool. The linked Wikipedia entry explains the hodgepodge of cultures The Snake Charmer frankly just throws together to make a disconcerting painting.

Literature and film reiterate these weird ideas of people who are odd, probably evil, yet also romantic. Think anything from William Beckford’s fever dream of a gothic novel, Vathek (1782) to that famous Rudolph Valentino movie, The Sheik (1921), where a white woman, Diana (Agnes Ayres). is abducted by the titular character and romance ensues. The film, based on an earlier book, offers Sheik Ahmad Ben Assad (Valentino) a way for his love to be sanctioned by Western society. Spoiler: He turns out to be a white European guy parading around in the desert, so it’s totally OK.

In both of these instances, people coming out of North Africa (the Sheik’s residence), and Arabia (the vague home of Vathek), people who live there on the daily, are never consulted. Actual Bedoin are neither consulted nor appear in The Sheik, for instance, which was filmed somewhere in the United States.

As a result, Said himself calls out working scholars in the field of Oriental studies, naming and shaming, and receiving a lot of flack as a result. By calling out these biases that exist in Western scholarship on the East, he found himself charged with biases of his own, because, according to his critics, he was wrapped up in his own biases as a man from Palestine, who was just cranky about things.

Bitingly, for instance, Said remarks: “It is sobering to find, for instance, that while there are dozens of organizations in the United States for studying the Arab and Islamic Orient, there are none in the Orient itself for studying the United States, by far the greatest economic and political influence in the region.”

The imbalance of power in scholarship is echoed by the imbalance in political power.

From Silence to Speaking: Changing the Stereotypes

Let’s wrap this up by returning to the present day. While the naked odalisques and weird people with their hookahs depicted in art and literature of the West certainly gave a foundation for otherness in people from the Middle East and Asia, silencing the peoples who have inhabited those geographical locations for hundreds of years, even with Said’s outspoken voice, we perpetuate new stereotypes and silence a multitude of voices who could tell us very interesting stories and explain their own heritage with their own words. They could set the record straight. And they are.

As voices increase in support of Palestinians who are dying just for going about their daily business, it’s important to understand that people like Said threw stones as a way of speaking. Voices are raised in anger not always in support of violence, but in hope for its end. How that will happen is anyone’s guess.

Considering the recent unrest in Belfast, Northern Ireland (a place with its own violent history), I found myself amazed at the hatred leaking from people furious that a Sudanese nationalist had attacked someone in the street, ignoring that the majority of stabbings in Belfast came from people like them. I listened in horror as I read about people recounting having to hide in their homes because they happened to be immigrants. They were targeted, traumatized, and brutalized, houses burned down. These people didn’t even target Sudanese immigrants in particular. They saw “foreign” homes and businesses and destroyed them by fire in some kind of racist orgy of violence, or, more aptly, a pogram.

I’ve written before on the ideological history of race theory, and have mentioned the work of Frantz Fanon, yet another founder of post-colonialism. The truth of the matter is that holding onto these abhorrent racist stereotypes of certain types of people, just because they look the same or come from the same place doesn’t do anyone a favor or a kindness.

Said tells us to sit down for a moment and listen instead of speak. Western European culture is not the end all be all in the world. We are lucky that we can access accounts of different places from the people who live there just by watching a TikTok video, for instance. Why not start to listen?

I’d like to leave you with a story of an immigrant from Iraq, whose family had fled because of the violence done by the Islamic State. Noora was a sweet woman in a black abaya, who used to visit my self-checkout when I worked in a grocery store. I would talk to her often, listening to her stories about her family in Iraq, and her granddaughter. 

Her son, I soon found out, had been murdered in the United States, in my hometown. Someone decided to steal his car, and at his protest, he was shot and killed. I remember Noora telling me that she was so depressed that she had put the Thanksgiving turkey and the rest in the freezer, with no heart to cook. Her son liked Thanksgiving.

I thought to myself, how can this be, that people escaping violence in a faraway country a bunch of evil guys want to destroy, end up losing a son in a country that is supposed to be modern and safe? The irony wasn’t lost on me, nor on Noora.

The last text I received from Noora invited me to come out and protest for justice for her son. They finally found the killer. A child predeceasing you is unspeakably hard. I wasn’t able to go, but kept her in my thoughts, and do even now.

Noora gave me a way to connect with someone very unlike myself. She was a devout Muslim, I was a Catholic. She gave me a persimmon once, which I was curious about, but didn’t eat out of my own squeamishness around new food. I gave her a bag of chocolate and a coloring book for adults. And I opened my eyes more about taking kindness as an initiative, especially to people who may receive hatred on a daily basis for existing.

If you do anything out of anger, kick the injustices aside by listening to those silenced by the hegemonic empire some of us want to perpetuate. Be the first to throw a stone at damaging stereotypes that not only malign people, but also instill bigger, more harmful ideologies that perpetuate violence against people who never asked for it.