It is true that Amin criticizes and praises Said, and that, nonetheless, their books move in sync.-- in that they believe orientalism exists, that it is larger than the field designated by the word (it is, again, the creation of the Orient and Orientals in the first place, etc); and that it is part and parcel of capitalism, Eurocentrism and Western hegemony. I would refer you to a footnote on page 74 of Amin, and the discussion of Said on pp. 100-1. Said yokes his project to colonialism through-out, and to the Base in the INtro and again in the Conclusion. There are indeed interesting differences b/w them too (some topics here would be the status of "social science" and "universalism" and "ideology" in their work).
As for the image of Islam in the medieval world -- Rodinson v. Said -- I plead ignorance. I can say that the danger of trans-historicizing is matched by the danger of positing a clean and specific break, and by romanticizing the non- or pre- capitalist worlds. I myself take it as axiomatic that there is a tendency, common to "vulgar" marxists and lots of liberals, that the history of the world is the history of industrialization in the C.19 UK. The same narrative, the same backdrop over and over again; Dipesh Chakrabarty is good on this, for one of many. This is not, of course, Amin's version of world-systems theory, though I think Gunder Frank believes he has gone further in breaking from it than SA.
I will note that Amin of course has his own rhetorical pressures; it is no accident that he tends to think there was a shift in consciousness in re Islam and the Orient -- SA conflates these even more than ES -- which just so happens to correspond to Amin's periodizing hypothesis about the transition to capitalism from tributary societies. For SA the "break" of sorts is indeed the latter C. 19., which just so happens to recall a break proffered by Marx. Fancy that! This is just to note the logic of SA's rhetoric and life's-work, not to say he is wrong.
For Said, the "break" or shift occurs a bit earlier, in the C. 18, when Orientalism becomes grossly triumphalistic (as it is today, which is the key point). The large majority of the ppl. he writes of are C 19 and C. 20.
But, as I argued previously, he is nowhere making claims about the origin of Orientalism. Again, Orientalism is not the sum of works by Western scholars, but a structure or "problematic" (cf SA 100). Said's question is not When did Orientalism emerge?, so much as, What is it?, and moreover, How did it emerge? This is not to say that "When?" is not also an interesting question, but it is not such a big big deal in re. the book and analysis at hand, and again, "When" is neither Marx's nor Foucault's question. You can make a periodizer (and a scientist) out of Marx of course, but it is a shoddy one who emerges. Happily (!), everybody now agrees that Orientalism -- now as a field and as this "apparatus" of knowledge-power -- is fully articulated to the core-periphery, capitalist system.
There is nothing transhistorical in that book (that I can see), and if you re-read it I think you'd agree. The stuff on the Greeks was -- quite exactly -- meant to suggest that there was for them *an* Orient out there already, and that this was subtly perceived as a "challenge" to them. ES notes that their attitudes to Islam were "ignorant but complex" (55). This was all that he was saying-- that there was a sense of *an* Orient way back in "Western" history, and that this has changed over time. The "line" b/w "us" (the Greeks) and "them" (their "asia/Orient") can be seen in Aeshcylus et al.; this line will eventually morph into Orientalism. He says this on the first paragraph of page 57, right after quoting the Greek. Before he quotes the play, he announces that it is the above "demarcation" which is his topic. After quoting the play and discussing further, he repeats himself. The point is that "it" was perceived to be "there." He was not dumping on dear old Aeschylus, nor assimilating the Greek World, nor totalizing.
Whatever Yoshie was saying, whatever windmill was being tilted at, it has no bearing whatsoever to Said's book or to his discussion of those pages. She is just screwing around, and issuing declarative assertions which have no relation to each other, or to anything other than the windmill of the moment. Note that if you substitute the words -- e.g., "potato salad" for the term-of-the-moment in her posts -- it matters not a whit. Thus:
"> So, there is no denying potato salad, and denying it rhetorically makes your
> account of potato salad merely implicit."
There is a difference b/w saying there was an Orient to the Romans and the Greeks, and that they were orientalists, let alone racists or etc. Orientalism, as a field and apparatus both, does have roots, but this is not in itself to trans-historicize. There is a history of what Said calls "imaginative geography." Unexceptionable, no?
Also: Pace Amin, ES does not say comparisons are invidious. He slams the guy SA in effect defends (pp 63 of ES) for saying that Islam is "second order Arian heresy". Maybe this is unfair, I'd have to look it up, but it sounds bad. Regardless, it is worth recalling that a/c to SA there is lots of good critical and scholarly work on Islam and on actually existing cultures and societies of the Arabic and Asian worlds. In re. the former, he singles out for high praise: Rodinson, Geertz, and Jacques Berque.
Me, I think the best tension/ambiguity/lacunae in the book centers on the ontological -- Real -- status of the Orient and orientalism. These are constructs, composed of ideological beliefs and values, as well as what counts as _knowledge_ about "them". But there is no actual Orient, or a real orient/-als which they and we distort. But the core acts otherwise, as if they were Real, and in so doing, help make it so. Therefore, the Orient, etc is true and false, real and not-real or what Marx would have called, in a lovely, paradoxical phrase, "socially objective."
--dfv
------------------------------------------------------ Daniel F. Vukovich Dept. of English; The Unit for Criticism University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 ------------------------------------------------------