Chapter 17

Orienta l i s m a n d t h e
study o f r e l i g i o n s
Richard King

Introduction
How often have you watched a news report on television, read a newspaper article or been
exposed to an advertisement conveying some image of ‘Eastern’ culture? Whether it is a
scene of crowds of angry Muslims burning an American flag, a shaven-headed Buddhist
monk clothed in a saffron robe and quietly meditating, militant Hindus attacking a
mosque or a billboard promoting a perfume that evokes the ‘mystic sensuality’ of India,
what all of these images have in common is their involvement in a long history of Western
representations and stereotypes of Asia as an ‘other’ – that is as essentially different from the
West. One consequence of such images, whether positive or negative in their connotations,
is that ‘we’ (the West) become clearly separated from ‘them’ (the East). The acceptance of
a basic opposition between Eastern and Western cultures characterizes what has been called
‘Orientalism.’
Indeed images of the East have often functioned as a means of defining the cultural
identity of the West, however differently that has been conceived throughout history.
The Christian identity of medieval Europe was bolstered by concerns about the incursion
of Turkish Muslims. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Asia represented both a
mysterious and timeless realm of wisdom and spirituality, but also the site of unspeakable
social depravities and primitive religious practices. In this regard the West was able to comfort
itself that it was progressive, civilized and thoroughly modern in contrast to an ahistorical and
unchanging Orient. Widespread beliefs about the indolent and despotic nature of Oriental
societies also justified a Western sense of superiority and the belief that it was the duty of
the West to civilize the savage and aid the Oriental in their progression away from tradition
and dogmatism and towards modernity and civilization. In the modern era, whether it is
the threat of the ‘yellow peril’ (Chinese communism) in the 1970s, or the militant Islamic
fundamentalist of the 1980s and 1990s, the West has always maintained its own sense of
cultural identity by contrasting itself with a radically different ‘Orient’.
The latter part of the twentieth century has seen the demise of Western political rule of
Asia and the emergence of countries such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as independent
nation-states. The British Empire, for instance, has become the British Commonwealth.
However, many still question whether the world has really entered a ‘post-colonial’ era,
arguing that Western political, economic and cultural dominance represents continuity
rather than a fundamental break with the colonial past. Are we living today in a post-
colonial or a neo-colonial age? Although the influence of Britain and the rest of Europe has
292â•… Key topics in the study of religions

receded to a significant degree since the end of the Second World War, it is clear that with
the demise of Eastern European communism, the United States of America is the new global
power in the West. Capitalism, consumerism and multi-national corporations continue to
influence an increasingly global marketplace. Western dominance is apparent not only on
an economic and political level, but on a cultural one also, having an inevitable impact
upon traditional beliefs and practices in non-Western societies. What are we to make of
the cultural impact of the ‘new technologies’? When American television soap operas
are beamed into middle-class Asian homes via satellite, punctuated by advertisements for
Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, where does one draw the line between the modernization of
Asia and its Westernization? Is the ‘global network’ of cyberspace a realm in which Asian
and Western cultures can meet as equal participants in a worldwide celebration of human
diversity or does the rhetoric of ‘globalization’ mask the continued dominance of ‘the rest’
by the West?

What is Orientalism?
Orientalism refers to the long-standing Western fascination with the East and the tendency
to divide the world up into East and West, with the East acting as a kind of mirror or foil
by which Western culture defines itself. The question of the complicity between Western
scholarly study of Asia – the discipline of Orientalism, and the imperialistic aspirations of
Western nations – became a subject of considerable attention in Western academic circles
after the publication of Edward Said’s work, Orientalism (1978). In this book, Said offered a
stinging indictment of Western conceptions of and attitudes towards the Orient. According
to Said ‘Orientalism’ refers to three inter-related phenomena (1978: 2–3):

1 the academic study of the Orient;

2 a mind-set or ‘style of thought’ founded upon a rigid dichotomy of ‘East’ and ‘West’;
3 the corporate institution authorized to dominate, control and subjugate the peoples and
cultures of the East.

For Said the mutual intersection of these three dimensions of Orientalism demonstrates
the complicity between Western discourses about the Orient and Western colonialism.
Orientalism then is primarily a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having
authority over the Orient’ (Said 1978: 3). Although credit has usually been given to Said
for highlighting this dimension of the Orientalist enterprise, his work was certainly not the
first to suggest complicity between scholarly analysis of the East and Western imperialist
aspirations. Said’s work is also clearly indebted to earlier studies (Schwab 1950; Pannikar
1959; Abdel-Malek 1963; Steadman 1970).
The study of religion, both in the concern to explore comparative and cross-cultural issues
and themes, and in the more specific attempt to understand and examine the religions and
cultures of Asia, has had a seminal role to play in the development of Western conceptions
of and attitudes towards the Orient, particularly from the nineteenth century onwards.
Western intellectual interest in the religions of the East developed in a context of Western
political dominance and colonial expansionism. It is perhaps surprising then to discover that
it is only in recent years that the discipline of religious studies has begun to take seriously
the political implications and issues involved when Western scholars and institutions claim
the authority to represent and speak about the religions and cultures of others. Recent
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 293â•…â•…

collections of scholarly articles such as Orientalism and the Post-colonial Predicament (1993)
and Curators of the Buddha (1995), explore the impact of Western colonialism upon South
Asia and the study of Buddhism respectively. Such developments have occurred in response
to the growing post-colonial agenda to be found in other academic disciplines such as literary
studies, anthropology and history. Specific studies such as Philip Almond’s The British
Discovery of Buddhism (1988), Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Richard King’s
Orientalism and Religion (1999) have taken up the mantle left by Edward Said and applied it
to the disciplines of Buddhist Studies (Almond), anthropology (Asad) and religious studies/
Indology (King). It is likely that the trend toward post-colonial approaches to the study of
religion will continue, if only because the issues highlighted by such an orientation remain
central to international politics and debates about globalization, modernity and the future of
cross-cultural analysis in a post-colonial world.

Knowledge and power

Edward Said (1935–2003) was a diaspora Palestinian educated according to Western
conventions and standards. He was a professor of English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University from 1963 until his death in 2003. This background in Western
literary studies is reflected in Said’s work, which displays the influence of a number of
Western theorists and writers, most notably the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault
(1926–84). The importance of Foucault in this context resides in his comprehensive analysis
of the relationship between power and knowledge. In a number of critical studies on the
history of madness, the birth of the clinic and the history of sexuality in the West, Foucault
argued that all claims to knowledge involve an attempt to establish a particular set of power
relations. Foucault described his method as a ‘genealogy of knowledge’ (supplementing
what he describes in his earlier works as an ‘archaeology of knowledge’). This involves an
examination of the socio-historical roots of an ideology or institution in order to highlight
the ways in which certain groups within society have constructed discourses which have
promoted their own authority (Carrette 1999).
The impact of Foucault’s work has grown as postmodernist and poststructuralist
approaches have gained support in contemporary academic circles. Critics of Foucault’s
approach have questioned his apparently relativistic stance towards all knowledge and truth
claims. Foucault seems to be arguing not just that knowledge is always associated with power,
but that knowledge is power, i.e. that what we call knowledge is merely a manifestation or
reflection of the will-to-power within any given society. It is this aspect of his approach,
clearly influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), which has
drawn the fiercest criticism of his work, with the suggestion that Foucault’s approach makes
it impossible to establish any definitive truth about the nature of reality. From Foucault’s
perspective the concern is to overturn the modern ideal of an objective and value-free
knowledge of universally applicable truths. But as other critics have argued there are many
notions of truth at work in Foucault’s writings (Prado 1995: 119). Nevertheless, in place of
the notion of absolute and universal ‘truths’, Foucault advocates an approach that focuses
upon a diversity of localized ‘truths’ and a concern to explore their complicity with power
structures within that specific locality. Thus, for Foucault:

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its own régime of truth, its
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‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes
function as true.
(Foucault 1977, translation in Gordon 1980: 131)

Said found Foucault’s analysis and his equation of power and knowledge useful conceptual
tools for articulating his own conception of Orientalism as the West’s exercising of its will-
to-power over the East. He remained unwilling, however, to adopt Foucault’s general stance
since it seemed to allow no room for ethical judgements based upon universal truths and
humanistic principles. Moreover, if there is no truth ‘out there’ one can offer no basis for a
critique of Western representations of the Orient on the basis of their unrepresentative nature.
Thus, Said argued that:

It would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with
no corresponding reality … But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals
principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the
internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career)
despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient.
(Said 1978: 5)

T he truth is out there or is it?

The ambiguities of Said’s analysis and methodology have been a central theme of many of
the responses to his work. Some critics have argued that Orientalism reflects theoretical
inconsistencies in Said’s account (al-’Azm 1981; Lewis 1982; Clifford 1988; Ahmed 1992),
with the author arguing on the one hand that ‘the Orient’ is constructed in Western
imaginations and yet attacking Western characterizations of the East as misrepresentations
of a real Orient ‘out there’. Other reviewers have celebrated such ambiguities as
deliberately disruptive and anti-theoretical (Behdad 1994; Prakash 1995), a position that
Said himself came to endorse when reflecting, some years later, upon his own work (Said
1995: 340). Indeed, Said’s reluctance to offer an alternative representation of ‘the Orient’
is grounded in his firmly held belief that the division between ‘East’ and ‘West’ is an act
of the imagination, and a pernicious one at that. This, however, does not mean that the
social and human realities that these images of ‘the Orient’ are meant to refer to are also
imaginary. Far from it, it is precisely because representations of the Orient are essentially
imaginary that they can be said to be unrepresentative of the diversity of Asian peoples
and cultures (King 1999: 209). Said’s challenge to his successors, therefore, is to find
alternative and ever more nuanced ways of representing cultural diversity to replace those
founded upon a simplistic and oppositional logic of ‘Occident vs. Orient’ – of ‘us’ and
‘them’:

Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be genuinely divided,
into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive
the consequences humanly? By surviving the consequences humanly, I means to ask
whether there is any way of avoiding the hostility expressed by the division, say of men
into ‘us’ (Westerners) and ‘they’ (Orientals).
(Said 1978: 45)
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 295â•…â•…

Other scholars, however, have been more willing to embrace a postmodernist or

poststructuralist view of knowledge, with its rejection of any unproblematic appeal to a
reality ‘out there’ beyond the play of representations. Anthropologist Ronald Inden, for
instance, agrees with Foucault in rejecting a representational view of �knowledge. There is no
privileged or unmediated access to reality.

[K]nowledge of the knower is not a disinterested mental representation of an external,

natural reality. It is a construct that is always situated in a world apprehended through
specific knowledges and motivated by practices in it. What is more, the process of
knowing actively participates in producing and transforming the world that it constructs
intellectually.
(Inden 1990: 33)

Inden maintains that the study of South Asia has been based upon a misleading search
for essences such as ‘the Hindu mind,’ ‘the Indian village,’ ‘caste’ and ‘divine kingship’ – as
if entire cultures could be represented by such basic categories. These approaches also imply
that the Western scholar has some special ability to discern the central features of Asian
cultures in a way that is unavailable to Asians themselves. Inden advocates the abandonment
of approaches that search for cultural essences and ‘fundamental natures’ because they ignore
historical change and cultural diversity and therefore provide stereotypes of Asian culture. In
their place Inden proposes an emphasis upon the historical agency of indigenous Asians. This
approach, he suggests, would avoid the tendency to conceive of the Orient as an unchanging
and timeless realm – as if Asian cultures and peoples were subject to rather than agents of
historical change. The critical response to Inden’s work has been varied. Some scholars have
questioned his universal indictment of Western scholarship on the East as an example of the
very essentialism that he attacks: ‘If, as Inden says, India and the Indians were “essentialized”
by the Indologists, it is certainly no less true and obvious that Indology and Indologists are
being essentialized by his own sweeping statements’ (Halbfass 1997: 19).
Other critics such as the Marxist literary theorist Aijaz Ahmad (1991) worry that Inden’s
appeal to indigenous agency lends itself too easily to appropriation by right wing Hindu groups
in contemporary India. Indeed, the work of scholars such as Robert Sharf (1994; 1995) and
King (1999) demonstrate that indigenous spokesmen for Asian religious traditions, such as
D. T. Suzuki (Zen Buddhism) and Swami Vivekananda (Hinduism) were implicated in their
own forms of ‘internal colonialism’ in the manner in which they represented their respective
religious traditions at home and abroad. Moreover, many scholars have highlighted Western
colonial influences upon contemporary forms of Hindu nationalism and communalism
(Pandey 1990; Thapar 1992; Chatterjee 1986; van der Veer 1994).
Questions have also been raised about the poststructuralist theory of knowledge expounded
by Inden. Is it possible, following Inden, to make any sort of appeal to a ‘real India’ underlying
the various representations of it? In a similar fashion David Ludden criticizes Edward Said
for believing that ‘there is to be found in the East a real truth’ (1993: 271). What we are
dealing with are more or less powerful images of the Orient and not a ‘real Orient’ out there.
Indologists such as Wilhelm Halbfass (1997: 16–17) have been quick to reject this approach
on the grounds that it is self-refuting. Such a claim, he argues, prevents any critique of
Orientalism based upon the misleading and unrepresentative nature of Orientalist accounts.
How can one offer a critique of representations if there is no way of appealing to a real Orient
or India ‘out there’?
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Orientalism in South As ia: the As i a t i c S o c i e t y o f B e n g a l

Such has been the influence of Said’s work in the decades succeeding the publication of his
study that ‘Orientalism’ has now become a pejorative term, suggesting academic complicity
with Western colonialism, rather than a neutral designation for the Western study of the
East. For critics such as Bernard Lewis and David Kopf, Said’s work has meant that the term
‘Orientalist’ is now ‘polluted beyond salvation’ (Lewis 1982: 50), representing ‘a sewer category
for all the intellectual rubbish Westerners have exercised in the global marketplace of ideas’
(Kopf 1980: 498). Indeed before the publication of Said’s study, the term ‘Orientalism’ had a
specific meaning in a South Asian context, referring to the academic discipline which came into
being as a result of the work of Sir William Jones, judge of the East India Company. Orientalism
began with the formal establishment of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in 1784.
The administrative and academic work of the Asiatic Society has been credited as the prime
instigator for the Bengali Renaissance, a resurgence of intellectual interest in Hindu culture
and reform among the Hindu intelligentsia of Bengal in the nineteenth century.
William Jones, the first President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, is best known for his
early work on Sanskrit – the ancient sacred language of the Hindus. Jones was a founding
father of comparative linguistics and established links between Sanskrit and the European
family of languages. In this sense he was an important catalyst for the explosion of interest
in the cultural splendor of India’s past, and also in the Romanticist tendency to conceive
of India as the cradle of European civilization. Indeed under the influence of Romanticism
India increasingly functioned as the canvas upon which a number of idealized representations
and images were painted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. India represented ‘the
childhood of humanity’, an image which had positive as well as negative connotations.
For the German writer Schlegel, India was ‘the real source of all tongues, of all thoughts
and utterances of the human mind. Everything – yes, everything without exception has its
origin in India’ (cited in Iyer 1965: 194). For his contemporary the German philosopher G.
W. F. Hegel, however, the infantile nature of Indian culture meant that it had nothing to
teach Europeans about modernity. India remained lost in an ancient fog of unprogressive
mythologies and superstitions.

T he An glicists and the Orientali s t s

Assessment of the role, impact and motivations of Western Orientalists in India has become
a subject of considerable debate in South Asian studies in response to Said’s indictment
of the Orientalist project. Historian David Kopf suggests that Said has missed his target
with reference to the South Asian context. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, far from being
a handmaiden to European colonialism, ‘helped Indians to find an indigenous identity in
the modern world’ (Kopf 1980: 498). Early Orientalist scholarship on India, Kopf argues,
was overwhelmingly attracted to and fascinated by its object, and defended the study of
the indigenous traditions and languages of Asia when criticized by anti-Orientalist groups
such as the Anglicists. This latter group, best exemplified by Thomas Babington Macauley
(1800–59), argued that the most expedient means of educating Indians was to introduce
them to Western ideas and literature and to teach these through the medium of the English
language. Babington believed that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
whole native literature of India and Arabia’, a view that he claimed would not be refuted by
the Orientalists themselves. In his famous ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835) Macauley
declared his vision for the transformation of India under British imperial rule:
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 297â•…â•…

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and
the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.
(Harlow and Carter 1999: 59)

Af firmative Orientalism
Kopf contrasts the attitude of Anglicists such as Macauley with the more enthusiastic and
positive attitude towards India to be found in the writings of Orientalists such as Sir William
Jones, Max Müller and Henry Thomas Colebrooke. The ensuing debate between these two
positions, he argues, demonstrates the diversity of motivations and attitudes towards India at
this time. Said’s sweeping generalizations about the complicity of Orientalist scholarship with
a Western colonial agenda wildly overstep the mark. Many Western Orientalists were often
deeply sympathetic towards the object of their study (Clifford 1988; Fox 1992). Richard
G. Fox argues, for instance, that Said’s own analysis ignores the fact that ‘resistance to
Orientalist domination proceeds from within it’ (Fox 1992: 153). A similar point is made
by Bernard Lewis when he argues that ‘The most rigorous and penetrating critique of
Orientalist scholarship has always been and will remain that of the Orientalists themselves’
(Lewis 1982: 56). However, as Ulrike Freitag notes, this response by Lewis reiterates ‘the
exclusivist Orientalist stance’. This only serves to reconfirm ‘the idea that only outsiders –
that is, Orientalists – could really represent “rhe Orient” and [are] the only ones competent
to review their own scholarship’ (Freitag 1997: 630).
Despite its obvious fascination and affirmation of Oriental culture, Ronald Inden
(1990) describes examples of ‘affirmative Orientalism’ as ‘the Loyal Opposition’ precisely
because they do not question the basic opposition between Eastern and Western cultures
that underlies the Orientalist enterprise. Many of the stereotypical presuppositions of the
Orientalist project remain intact, even if treated sympathetically. What this demonstrates
is that it is misleading to see the critique of Orientalism initiated by scholars such as Said
and Inden as a simple rejection of the negativity of Western attitudes towards the East. The
love affair that Western Romanticism has had with the Orient (and which persists to this
day in New Age conceptions of ‘eastern mysticism and philosophy’) is equally problematic
because it continues to represent the diversity of Oriental cultures in terms of homogenized
stereotypes.
Furthermore, in India the nationalist struggle for home rule (swaraj) and independence
from British rule often built upon the legacy of colonial stereotypes rather than uprooting
them. This has led some (mainly diaspora) Indian historians to advocate the writing of a
‘history from below’ that focuses upon the meanings and actions of ‘subaltern’ (non-elite)
groups within Indian society. The subalternist movement has similarities with Marxist
approaches but rejects the universalism of the Marxist theory of ‘class consciousness’. Instead
the subalternist historians examine the localized context and aims of oppressed groups rather
than reduce their history to the grand narrative of Marxism. According to subalternists such
as Ranajit Guha (1988) and Partha Chatterjee (1986), Indian nationalist (and Marxist)
accounts, like those written by the European colonialist, represent an elitist approach to
history because they ignore or suppress the specific agency of non-elite groups within Indian
society. The subalternist approach therefore offers a potential ‘third way’ beyond the options
of Orientalism and Occidentalism (‘Orientalism-in reverse’). This is achieved by rejecting
298â•… Key topics in the study of religions

the elitism of both Western colonial histories and indigenous nationalist histories. The latter,
although usually anti-colonial in nature, exercises its own form of domestic or internal
colonialism by replacing colonial rulership with a new elite – that of indigenous elite groups.

Hybridity and the diversity of O r i e n t a l i s t d i s c o u r s e s

Recent scholarship has also emphasized the diversity of Orientalist accounts. Lisa Lowe
(1991) rejects Said’s portrayal of Orientalism as a monolithic project. She argues that there
are a number of factors impinging upon Western representations of the East, including race,
nation, gender and sexuality. Similarly, Homi Bhabha (1996: 42) questions Said’s one-sided
emphasis upon the power of the colonizer. This, he argues, gives too much power to the
Western Orientalist and ignores the role played by the colonized subject in the production
and interpretation of Orientalist discourses (see also Hallisey 1995: 32–3). For Bhabha
the encounter between the Western colonizer and the colonized Asian subject is complex,
producing a hybrid representation that is always beyond the control of both the colonialist
and the native. Influenced by the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida, Bhabha’s point
is that the authors of texts cannot hope to control the meaning attributed to their writings
once they enter the public domain. Once an author provides an account of the Orient it
can be interpreted in a variety of ways and pressed into the service of a number of different
agendas. Bhabha makes much of the example of the English educated Indian. For Angliclists
such as Macauley this figure represented the ideal for the future of India – civilized according
to British cultural standards. However, in his mimicry of the English colonizer the Anglo-
Indian represents a hybrid form of ‘Englishness’ that confronts the colonizer in unexpected
ways. Frankenstein has created a monster that he can no longer control!
A good example to illustrate Bhabha’s point is the ‘discovery’ of the Ezourvedam. This text,
circulated in the form of a French ‘translation’, was said to be an ancient Hindu scripture
and caught the attention of a number of eighteenth-century European intellectuals. The
Ezourvedam proclaims the superiority of monotheism and rejects the polytheism and ritualism
of the uneducated Hindu masses. Voltaire vigorously promoted the text as a testament to
the superiority of ancient Hindu culture in comparison to the decadence of Christianity.
However, the Ezourvedam was a ‘fake’, produced by French Jesuits in Pondicherry with
the probable aim of discrediting Hindu beliefs and practices and convincing Hindus of the
superiority of the Christian message. Thus, a text that was initially produced by missionary
Christians to spread the ‘good news’ of the Gospel, was adopted by French intellectuals such
as Voltaire and used to demonstrate the inferiority and decadence of Christianity. How
ironic! Similarly, Western notions of India as ‘backward’ and undeveloped in comparison
to the material and technological might of the modern West were adopted and transformed
by Hindu intellectuals such as Swami Vivekananda in the anti-colonial struggle for Indian
independence. The West may be materially prosperous, Vivekananda argued, but this only
serves to highlight that it lacks the spirituality of India. In one simple move Vivekananda
took a standard Western stereotype about India and used it to counteract Western claims to
superiority. What examples like the Ezourvedam and Vivekananda illustrate rather well is the
multiple meanings and directions that can be attributed to Orientalist discourses.
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 299â•…â•…

Problems with the notion of ‘reli g i o n’

The colonial domination of the West over ‘the rest’ in recent centuries has caused many
Western categories and ideas to appear more universal than they might otherwise have
seemed. An important feature of recent scholarship, therefore, has been to cast doubt upon
the universal application of Western ideas and theories. Even the appropriateness of the
notion of ‘religion’ in a non-Western context has been questioned on the grounds that it
is the product of the cultural and political history of the West. For Talal Asad (1993), the
modern Western tendency to conceive of religion in terms of belief – that is as something
located in the private state of mind of a believer, leads Westerners to think of religion as
something that is essentially private and separate from the public realm of politics. When
Islamic or Hindu leaders in Asia express political views, this is often seen in the West as a
dangerous mixture of two separate realms of human life. Next time you watch a television
news report about politics in the Middle East or India notice the style, presentation and
reporting of events. How does the media portray foreign religious leaders in positions of
political authority? Often news reports contain implicit assumptions about the ‘normality’ of
the separation of religion from politics. However, as ex-BBC journalist Mark Tully suggests in
his discussion of religion and politics in modern India:

If we are really serious about coping with India’s poverty we too have to show far greater
respect for India’s past and perhaps even learn from it ourselves … Many will say I am
trying to drag India backwards – to deny it the fruits of modern science and technology
and to rob it of the freedom of democracy. Such critics are, I believe, in effect accepting
the claim that there is now only one way: that Western liberal democracy has really
triumphed.
(Tully 1991: 12)

We should bear in mind then that the separation of religion from politics is a feature of
modern Western societies, reflecting eighteenth-century northern European disputes and
the eventual separation of Church and State in modern Western nations. It is problematic
therefore to impose this model of religion onto Asian cultures. Indeed for Asad all attempts
to find a universal definition or ‘essence’ of religion are to be avoided because they imply that
religion is somehow able to operate in isolation from other spheres of human cultural activity
such as politics, law and science (1993: 28). Moreover, the sheer diversity of human cultures
mean that the search for universal definitions of terms like ‘religion’ is fruitless. In its place,
Asad advocates an approach to the study of cultures that focus upon embodied practices and
the specific power-relations in which they operate.
King (1999) has also questioned the usefulness of the category of religion in the
study of non-Western cultures. Modern notions of religion reflect Christian theological
assumptions, in particular the preoccupation with orthodoxy and truth (rather than
practice and forms of life) and with a canon of authorized scriptures as the location of
the true essence of religion (King 1999: Chapters 2 and 3). As a consequence of colonial
influence, world religions such as ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ have come to the fore in
the colonial and modern periods, reflecting Western (Protestant and secular) assumptions
about the nature of religion (see also Almond 1988; Fitzgerald 1990). It is not that these
religions were simply ‘imagined’ by Westerners without the input of indigenous elite groups,
but rather that their representation and subsequent developments within South Asian
culture continue to reflect Western Orientalist concerns and assumptions. King argues
300â•… Key topics in the study of religions

that academic disciplines such as religious studies and Indology (the study of India) should
work to extricate themselves from the Christian categories and secular assumptions, which
continue to influence representations of the Orient, particularly the emphasis that is
placed upon the so-called ‘world religions’.

Orientalism and the study of Isla m

Given that Said’s work in this area focused almost exclusively upon the Middle Eastern and
Islamic dimensions of Western Orientalist writings it is not surprising to find that his work
has had a great deal of influence upon modern debates about the role and impact of Western
Orientalism upon modern representations of Islam and Muslims. The debate has generally
focused upon the legacy of Western colonialism in the Middle East and the continued
existence of a number of negative stereotypes of Islam in the West. What is the relationship
between modernity and Western culture? In Western culture modernity and traditionalism
are usually seen as opposed to one another. Can one be modern and still align oneself with
Islamic traditions? How is Islam to respond to the economic and political dominance of the
West and the legacy of Western colonial rule in the Middle East?
Broadly speaking, there have been two main responses to these issues and the challenge
laid down by the work of Edward Said. Some Arabic intellectuals and scholars of Islam
have argued that Western scholarship should be abandoned in favor of an Islamicization
of knowledge. Why, such proponents argue, should Muslims feel obliged to conform to the
intellectual conventions and secular presuppositions of Western scholarship? This strand of
Islamic scholarship has increasingly described itself as ‘Islamism’ as an indigenous alternative
to the negative connotations of the Western term ‘fundamentalism’. The Islamists tend
to reject Western scholarship as a cultural attack upon Islam. In its place they advocate
continuity with older traditions of Islamic scholarship, the use of Arabic as the primary
linguistic mode of expression and an ongoing exploration of the truth expressed in the holy
words of the Qur’an. Critics of this approach argue that Islamism represents the development
of Occidentalism – a reversal of the Orientalist approach and a denigration of the West
as inferior. Edward Said made it clear, however, that this was not the intention of his own
analysis, concerned as he was to overturn and reject the dichotomy between Occident and
Orient rather than reverse it. Nevertheless, for writers such as Akbar Ahmed this has been
the result of Said’s analysis:

One inevitable consequence is the rejection of Western scholarship by Muslims. Muslim

scholars in the West, whether Arab or Pakistani, are deeply suspicious of Western
Orientalism. They are thus pushed into the hole, Said has unwittingly dug for them. For
Muslims in Africa and Asia, imperfectly grasped bits of Marxist dogma, nationalism, and
religious chauvinism create incorrect images of the West … Said has left us with what
he sets out to denounce: stereotypes and large blocks – Orientalist, Oriental, Orient.
(Ahmed and Donnan 1994: 5)

Islamism represents a contemporary response to what has been called ‘westoxification’

(the pollution of Islamic culture by Western influences) and a reassertion of Islamic values
and beliefs in a context of Western economic, political and cultural dominance. Scholars
such as Mahmûd Hamdî Zaqzûq (1983) for instance, have called for a scientific response
to Western Orientalism founded upon the truth of Islam. Others, such as Hasan Hanafi
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 301â•…â•…

(1991), call for the creation of Occidentalism, that is the academic study of the West, as a
post-colonial response to the cultural and intellectual
� dominance of Western scholarship.
In contrast to the Islamists, there are also a number of Arabic intellectuals engaging with
the concerns and issues of Western scholarship. In most cases such scholars are migrants,
often educated by and now working in Western universities. The main concern for such
writers remains the mutual proliferation of stereotypes about Arabs and Westerners and the
question of the impact of globalization, cultural interaction and politics upon representations
of Islam. Clearly these two strands of contemporary Arabic scholarship do not sit easily with
each other. The Islamists direct much of their criticism towards those Arab intellectuals who
have adopted or utilized Western methodologies in their analysis. This is seen as a rejection
of Islam and complicity with the secularism of the Western colonial aggressor. Similarly,
Western influenced Arabic scholars tend to reject Islamist approaches as ‘Orientalism in
reverse’, questioning the privileged insulation of Arabic culture from wider international
debates concerning modernism, postmodernism and globalization.

Orientalism, gender and religion

In the concern to highlight politics and the marginalization of the Other, the post-colonial
agenda in scholarship has much in common with the development of feminist approaches
to the study of religion (King 1999: 111–16). It is not surprising then to find that recent
works have shown an increasing awareness of gender as a factor relevant to the Orientalist
debate (Miller 1990). Lata Mani (1987) argues that nineteenth-century debates about the
legality of sati (the ritual burning of a Hindu widow on her deceased husband’s funeral
pyre) – a practice abolished by the British in 1829 – did not allow the women concerned
to emerge as either ‘subjects’ or ‘objects’. Instead the Hindu widow became the ‘site of
contestation’ in a debate which centered instead upon the question of whether or not the
burning of widows was sanctioned by ancient Hindu sacred texts. All participants in this
debate, whether abolitionists or preservationists, accepted without question the authority of
Hindu brahmanical scriptures as the definitive source for ‘the Hindu position’. The location
of the ‘essence’ of Hinduism in ancient texts clearly reflects the Protestant presuppositions
of the early Orientalists and gained further support from their reliance upon the scholarly
community of brahmanical pandits as the authorized spokesmen for Hinduism (King 1999:
Chapters 5 and 6).
Similarly, recent work has also paid attention to the images of the ‘sexualized Orient’
found in Western fantasies about the Oriental ‘harem’ and ‘the veil’ (Lewis 1996; Mabro
1996; Yegenoglu 1998). Notions of the seductive and sensual nature of the Orient and of
the Oriental woman in particular also continue to this day in media advertising and popular
culture. Whether this involves popularized accounts of the ‘secrets of the Kama Sutra’
(which is thereby transformed from an ancient Hindu text on the etiquette of courtship
and lovemaking into an exotic manual of sexual positions), or the commodification and
sexualization of Thai therapeutic massage, modern Western consumer culture continues to
build upon much older colonial legacies and Orientalist stereotypes.
Attention has also turned to the role played by women in the Orientalist and imperial
enterprises. Reina Lewis (1996), taking her lead from the work of Lisa Lowe (1991),
argues that an examination of the location of female Orientalists in a complicated and
sometimes contradictory network of power-relations demonstrates the diversity of the
Orientalist project. Female Orientalists took up a variety of stances with regard to Western
302â•… Key topics in the study of religions

imperial superiority over the East at the same time as being involved in a complex series
of domestic debates about the status and role of women in Western society. Her analysis
suggests that an adequate critique of Orientalism should avoid the tendency to focus upon
the expressed intentions and motivations of individual Orientalists and consider instead
the broader structural relations of power that Orientalist discourses maintain: ‘When we
look at European women’s representation of and participation in processes of othering, we
are looking at representations made by agents who are themselves partially othered (as the
symbolic feminized other of men in Europe)’ (Lewis 1996: 238).
The most recent work within the field of post-colonial studies has focused upon the
mutual involvement of a variety of factors (including race, class, gender and sexuality) in the
study of the cultures, histories and religions of Asia. Anne McClintock (1995: 6–7) argues for
instance that ‘imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of gender power’. Similarly,
Mrinalini Sinha (1995) has examined the ways in which nineteenth-century British notions
of ‘masculinity’ developed in opposition to the perceived ‘effeminacy’ of the Bengali male.
Sinha’s work demonstrates rather well the complex interaction of Hindu and British notions
of gender, race and sexuality in the colonial period. Attention has also turned in recent
works to the existence of manipulative strategies and representations in pre-colonial Asian
societies (Pollock 1993: 96–111; Killingley 1997; King 1999). These works suggest that the
Orientalist tendency to stereotype and diminish the ‘Other’ is by no means an exclusively
Western practice.

Concluding remarks
One of the most important insights to be drawn from the Orientalist debate is an awareness
of the political nature of knowledge itself. Fundamentally, what post-colonial approaches
teach us is to be more aware of the ongoing influence of colonialism upon the representation
of others, and also of ourselves. Like feminist scholarship, post-colonialism is diverse but
remains grounded in an awareness of the politics of knowledge, that is the involvement of
scholarship in issues of power, authority and justice. This is especially relevant when dealing
with the cultures and traditions of others, but ‘indigenous’ accounts by cultural ‘insiders’
are no less implicated by issues of authority and representation. Moreover, such has been
the impact of Western domination over the last few centuries that indigenous traditions
have themselves been transformed by the material and cultural violence of Western
colonialism. Rejecting the separation of religion and its study from political concerns, post-
colonial analysis opens up the possibility, indeed for such theorists the necessity, of exploring
alternative ways of understanding and representing human diversity. How are we to make
sense of differences between people in a pluralistic rather than an oppositional way? How might
we try to understand the diverse ways of living that represent our common global heritage?
This is perhaps the central issue confronting humanity today and no doubt will continue to
influence debates within the study of religion. In this regard the comparative study of religion
has a key role to play in the quest for greater understanding of the various cultures, peoples
and forms of life that make up the world in which we live.
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 303â•…â•…

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Suggested reading

Asad, Talal (1993), Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam,
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
A scholarly examination of Christian monastic discipline, the history of anthropological concepts of
religion, and the Salman Rushdie affair from a post-colonial perspective. Not for the general reader.
Batchelor, Stephen (1994), The Awakening of the West. The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture,
London: Aquarian Press.
 Orientalism and the study of religionsâ•… 305â•…â•…

A readable account of the interaction and reception of Buddhism in Western culture. Highly
recommended.
Inden, Ronald (1990), Imagining India, Cambridge, MA and Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Inden is an anthropologist specializing in South Asia. This book offers a wide-ranging critique
of the study of South Asian religion and society, and is strongly influenced by Edward Said and
poststructuralist theory. An important work.
King, Richard (1999), Orientalism and Religion. Post-colonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’, London
and New York: Routledge.
An exploration of ‘the Orientalist debate’, postcolonial theory and their implications for the
comparative study of religion. Chapters explore the nature of religious studies, Orientalism, the
study of Hinduism and Buddhism and the comparative study of mysticism.
Lopez Jr, Donald (ed.) (1995), Curators of the Buddha. The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A collection of six scholarly articles examining the Orientalism question in relation to various
aspects of the study of Buddhism. The work presupposes a great deal of knowledge of Buddhism and
its study and is aimed at the academic scholar rather than the student or general reader.
Mongia, Padmini (ed.) (1996), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, London, New York, Sydney
and Auckland: Arnold (Hodder Headline Group).
A collection of important contributions to contemporary postcolonial theory, though with no
specific reference to religion.
Said, Edward (1981), Covering Islam. How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of
the World, London: Routledge.
A readable discussion of Western media portrayals of Islam.
Said, Edward (1978; 2nd edn 1995), Orientalism. Western Conceptions of the Orient, London and New
York: Penguin.
The classic text examining the link between Western colonialism and representations of the Orient.
Turner, Bryan (1994), Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, London and New York: Routledge.
An examination of the impact of postmodernism and globalism on Western sociological studies of
Islam.