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jasaday.bsky.social
Not a bot. Most of my posts are from a book I am reading. This year it's Edward Said's 'Orientalism'.
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Shortly after we hear about Egypt's salubrious climate, for instance, we are informed that few Egyptians live beyond a few years, because of fatal illness, the absence of medical aid, and oppressive summer weather. 1/3

submitted 3 hours ago • 1 comment

As mediator and translator, so to speak, of Muslim behavior, Lane ironically enters the Muslim pattern only far enough to be able to describe it in a sedate English prose. His identity as counterfeit believer and privileged European is the very essence of bad faith, 1/4

submitted 21 hours ago • 1 comment

Nothing illustrates this better than the last tripartite episode in the preface. Lane there describes his principal informant and friend, Sheikh Ahmed, as companion and as curiosity. Together the two pretend that Lane is a Muslim; yet only after Ahmed conquers his fear, 1/3

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Unlike the French and Burckhardt, Lane was able to submerge himself amongst the natives, to live as they did, to conform to their habits, and "to escape exciting, in strangers, any suspicion of…being a person who had no right to intrude among them.” 1/3

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Moreover, certain motifs recur consistently in all three types. The Orient as a place of pilgrimage is one; so too is the vision of Orient as spectacle, or 𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘶 𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘵. 1/2

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient. It is as if the individual mind (Marx's, in this case) 1/3

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism, of course, but coming from the same writer who could not easily forget the human suffering involved, the statement is puzzling. It requires us first to ask how Marx's moral equation of Asiatic loss 1/2

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Karl Marx identified the notion of an Asiatic economic system in his 1853 analyses of British rule in India, and then put beside that immediately the human depredation introduced into this system by English colonial interference, rapacity, and outright cruelty. 1/3

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

As material for study or reflection the Orient acquired all the marks of an inherent weakness. It became subject to the vagaries of miscellaneous theories that used it for illustration. Cardinal Newman, no great Orientalist, used Oriental Islam as the basis of lectures in 1853 1/3

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

His attitude is salutary: Mohammed is no legend, no shameful sensualist, no laughable petty sorcerer who trained pigeons to pick peas out of his ear. Rather he is a man of real vision and self-conviction, albeit an author of a book, the Koran, 1/4

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Neither a demon, nor a prototype of Cagliostro, Caussin’s Mohammed is a man appropriated to a history of Islam (the fittest version of it) as an exclusively political movement, centralized by the innumerable citations that thrust him up and, in a sense, out of the text. 1/3

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Characteristically, Renan was one of Dozy's supporters, just as in Dozy's four-volume 𝘏𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘭𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘴 𝘥'𝘌𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘨𝘯𝘦, 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘲𝘶'𝘢̀ 𝘭𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘦̂𝘵𝘦 𝘥𝘦 𝘭'𝘈𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳 𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘈𝘭𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘴 (1861) there appear many of Renan's anti-Semitic strictures, 1/4

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Indeed the very project of restriction and restructuring associated with Orientalism can be traced directly to the inequality by which the Orient’s comparative poverty (or wealth) 1/2

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

Indo-Europeans are the touchstone here, just as they are when Renan says that the Semitic Oriental sensibility never reached the heights attained by the Indo-Germanic races. 1/2

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment