Examining the Concept of the ‘Other’ According to Edward W. Said

After the World War II, the world remarks many changes in every aspect including culture, society, literature and so on. Writers around the world wrote about the effect of colonizer/colonized relationship. Edward Said is one of the pillars who deals with such discourse. Said believes that the legacy of the colonizer still exists in terms of civil wars, corruption and labor exploitation. In other word, Said means that the West creates a wrong image about the Orient and considers it as the “Other” in contrast to the ideal West. Said was the one who deconstructs the western’s thinking about the East. So his books : Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981) are appropriate to examine the idea of the ‘Other’ and to show how Said decipher the western wrong image about the East. Thus, this paper will emphasis on the concept of the Other according to Said.

and perpetuated through the Western discourse. In 'The Question of Palestine 1979 has been besides Covering Islam 1981 which Muslims have been identified as the Other. Postcolonial literary theory from Edward Said's viewpoint discusses the wrong image created to represent the East. Therefore, Said believes that there are ways like texts tried to make the East or "other" seem undeveloped and without civilization in the eyes of the West. Orientalism 1978 is one of the famous works by Edward Said. At first, Said defines Orientalism as "A style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between "the Orient" and (most of the time)"the Occident" (Lutfi,2).Edward Said could be cited more than one time East and West as a point to start their theories and assumptions concerning the Orient (Said,2).
Earlier, Said emphasizes on the power of the Orient and the Orient is not fallacy. In this way, he wants to say that the issue is related to power and hegemony: 'Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.  (Said,12). Said still argues that ideas written about the East are wrong. . In order to conquer and defeat the East, the Western world labeled the Orient, as the "Other". This idea can be summarized in the notion of narrative, the West has the power of narrative and the power of knowledge that is why it is granted the status of a center. Said says "The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony" (Said,5).
Moreover, Said mentions that the world is built up of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed (Said,26). In his point of view, during the nineteenth century and after the World War Two, media played an important role to depict "the mysterious Orient" (Said,26). In a word, Said assumes that Orientalists' intention to wipe the Oriental world as a human being because of academic and intellectual matters. He also adds, Orientalism persuades Said himself and his colleagues to say that society and literary culture can be understandable only if they are studied together (Said,27).
In Orientalism, Said claims that literary texts are tools used by the colonizer and those texts misrepresent the image of the Orient. In this sense, Said goes back to an earlier time when talking about the Athenian play of Aeschylus's the Persians and The Bacchane of Euripides.
Aeschylus depicted the sensation of the risk when the Persians heard that their armies were destroyed by the Greek. Said demonstrates using the two works from an earlier time how Asia has been depicted as the "Other," a world beyond the seas or Asia speaks out of European imagination (Said,56 defects, virtues, barbarisms and shortcomings in the language, the people and the civilization" (Said,142). In a review untitled Western Media and Islam, Said's work of Covering Islam testify the view of American media and scholars while presenting such "caricature" of the Islam and to all the Arab world in a way to show it to the US public (Reilly,2). As a part of this book seen as familiar to the Orientalism 1977, Said's idea is that to check the historical relationship between the Islam and the West, and he concludes saying that the West during its age has discussed Islam "outside" the scope (Reilly,3). Also, Said puts his attention to the US media covering Iranian Revolution. Besides in his chapter of Knowledge and Power, Said wonder although the fault of the media and academic scholars still exist.
Further, he sees that there is close relationship between the knowledge and power in the United States Middle Eastern Studies foundation. However, he believes that there is a close circle in that idea since many of experts even from the Muslim world who belong to that foundation as it is explained: "such that a young scholar holding an unorthodox point of view which challenges the accepted wisdom on the Middle East is unlikely to receive a hearing, or even find." (Reilly,4). In the end Said composes "the time has come for these ties to be severed completely " Said sketches that there are such association and people in the West seeks "antithetical knowledge" that defies the Orientalist values (Reilly,4 Orient is based on imagination and it is a mere mythology to help the West spread authority over its symmetrical other; the Orient.
To some extent, it is obvious that in order to read any piece of literature with critical insights in terms of the legacy to the other texts, one must check Said's book of Orientalism in which it offers the relation between the West and the Orient. In a way or another, a wellunderstood text will be better to be studied from Said's viewpoint in which he highlights the legacies of the East in terms of history and culture that the West benefited from. Also, the Western scholars and media as said before played a vital role in showing the Orient and that is why until now still exists a misunderstanding of the Orient in the eyes of Western culture as a result of the Western's texts.
In an article entitled "Edward Said: the Postcolonial Theory and the Literature and Decolonization" published in a European Scientific Journal, there is a mention of an article written by Edward Said himself: "Islam through Western Eyes" In Said's paper, he sheds light on the false image of the Islam that has been created by the West in their media and writings.
Also, the West sees the image of the Islam as a return back in the history. Said emphasizes that there has been a mistake created by the previous Orientalists which is still repeated now in hasty generalization of classifying all Muslims into good or bad (Said,4). Said's discussion on the conception of the Orient cannot be separated from the issue of Islam. Indeed, Islam is a "lasting trauma" (Said,59) for the West and it is also associated with barbarism and decadence.
One cannot deny the fact that Said was smart in creating a well chronological order of his books, one can find kind of continuity in his works. After seeing Orientalism and how he portrays the dualism or the binary opposition between the Orient and the Occidental. Indeed Said, mentions that he analyses multiple Orient including French, German, and the British. So Said in his book 'The Question of Palestine ' 1979 which one will explore it in next few lines was a case study for Orientalism .  (Said,182).

In an article untitled 'The Idea of Palestine in the West 'published by Middle East
Research and Information Project. Inc. Ongoing more specific to the relation of Zionism with Palestinians. Said's personifications of the Zionism as he said: Zionism, like its Western ideological parents, drew on this collective representation of the Arabs and Islam ( Said,5).
In this sense Said shows that for them the Arabs and Islam are merely representation of stupidity. What keeps the Zionists superior is that; they believed in themselves as they belong to Eastern partitions in addition to that to explain the West who are the Oriental, Arabs (Said,6).
As always our concern in this paper to see how the West identifies the East. What the Westerner generally sees in the Middle East derives from the scope of Zionism as if Zionists are part of the West. As Said mentions later: 'Israel is the norm, Israelis are the presence, their ideas and institutions the authentically native ones: Arabs are a nuisance, Palestinians a quasi-mythical reality' (Said,8). For Said, the West and Zionist's relation with each other was not a hegemonic relation but it is rather 'acquiescence'. As a result, the Arab had become a non-person due to the fact the Zionist had become the only person in Palestine because of the Arab's negative personality inferior and decadent which lead them as intensified (Said,8 Talking about the pattern as Said believes in the affiliation between politics and language and the Islam is attributed for sure. In drawing link between the Islam and politics, Said's view is that what do say the academic experts in Islam is not far from politics (Said, IVII). From this idea one gets that it is all about politic.
It was very relevant to mention that Said has been influenced by the Emerson's idea of 'Self-reliance'. He says that 'Their image of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and shall never met. Yet for every man these images-provided by strangers and dead man-are the very basis of his life as a human being' (Said,46). Historically speaking the negative thought that has been attached to Muslims precisely in media starts after the World War II. One can see this where the media depicts Muslims during the 9/11, whereby Islam has been linked with terrorist.

Conclusion
To conclude one would say that Islam has always been seen as for barbarous 'other'.
Said in his books was aware of creating such well-ordered chronological thoughts. By starting from Orientalism 1978 in which he focuses on creating the binary opposition