Shortly before his death in 2003, Edward Said came to the American University of Beirut on his farewell tour of Arab academic institutions and, as a student there, I was fortunate enough to attend. The lecture hall was filled with politically-active Lebanese who came to listen to the pioneer of Arab, post-modern, colonial deconstructionism.

Instead of a scathing critique of neocolonialism – so far as I recall – we heard Said’s fond reminiscences of AUB, and a general call to academia. In those heady days immediately prior to the invasion of Iraq we were accustomed to listening to something more rousing from our public speakers. I remember that although I felt touched by greatness, I left the lecture hall faintly disheartened. The student body went back to streets to protest and face tear-gas and water-cannons. In the end, those protests hardly mattered at all; while Said left a legacy which continues to define the critical analysis of western misadventure in the Middle East.

If you have not read it, in his seminal work, Orientalism, Said critiques the ideas by which westerners have come to view the lands to the East of Europe. The East is set upon a nostalgic pedestal in the collective consciousness of the West and this foments an anachronistic view of the land and its people, which ends up translating into exploitation or ill-conceived policy decisions. By this mechanism, the land of a thousand-and-one nights is overtly colonized at worst, or at best treated paternalistically via local political elites who share similar romanticised views.

More than a decade of entrenched military deployments later, we have seen the destruction of Aleppo, Sana’a, Baghdad, Mosul, and other historic cities in the Middle East. Further afield we have seen the military rise of nuclear states (China, Pakistan, India, North Korea), a proto-nuclear state (Iran), and more. We see reports of a form of subversive economic activity conducted wholesale against western states in a manner hitherto unseen previously, e.g. see Johnson Testimony before the U.S. – China Economic and Security Review Commission (https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Johnson_USCC%20Hearing%20Testimony012617.pdf). With all this in mind, I find the idea of any new graduate or foreign policymaker wearing rose-tinted glasses to view the East as an increasingly unlikely concept.

Instead, the Orientalist view has forked. Along one path, a new Occidental discourse has been steadily emerging in the western world; a discourse that is perhaps even less advantageous to the so-called East than the traditional, Orientalist one.  While the new discourse might still be described as paternalistic, it features criticism, threats, vulnerabilities, isolationism, and aggressive, single-issue interventionism. The western body of literature surrounding the East today is less Lawrence of Arabia, and more Breitbart News.

In the second fork of the narrative: the traditional, Orientalist view persists, not amongst westerners, but amongst easterners living in the West, i.e. those persons and groups with enduring personal or cultural relationships to the East. The policy of western multiculturalism of the last three decades obfuscated an accurate cultural representation of western culture – which has always been relatively fluid – and this provided a fertile ground for the coherent Orientalist concept of the East to change hands and develop within the West. Built atop centuries of Orientalist-heritage, and in-cases driven by religiously-sourced maxims, it is a framework that can reverse the idea of ‘western superiority’, and in which Oriental idiosyncrasies are the tools of policy implementation as opposed to eastern structural weaknesses. Stories, ideas, and concepts, such as the golden age of the Islamic Caliphate for instance, continue to generate a positive, emotional resonance amongst those groups that view it as their heritage, and do less so amongst those that do not.

In other words, this discourse fork is not just characterized politico-religious content and a reaction to contemporary western foreign policy, it is a systemic phenomenon and a product of western domestic policy as much as anything else. This is potentially useful. An understanding of the ‘foreign’ (read: westerner of eastern descent) jihadist struggle, for example, can be informed by the familiar terms of western-Orientalism, but viewed from the other direction. This idea is by no means restricted to political Islam – which is just a component of a new frontline in the contemporary Occidental-Oriental divide (as much as a frontline exists): conceptually and geographically.

Said’s work has been, and still is, very important; it empowered the Palestinian narrative in the occupied territories for example, and it generally helps to expose previously hidden aspects of neocolonialism, cultural or economic. Now, perhaps, using his analytical framework, and applying a nuance an analysis of eastern Occidentalism in the West – it could be used to better understand the so-called ‘new threats’ to western states as well as threats to-and-from states in the East.

In any event, using Said’s work as a baseline, it would be exceptionally interesting to determine – as specifically as possible – how the wider Orientalist narrative has been changing in an era of globablisation, (more) ethical economics, a reduced dependency on hydrocarbons, human rights, and so on.  Are there any takers?