Arab world's dependence on the United States

Arab world's dependence on the United States is, in Edward Said’s account, more than a matter of political alignment or trade: it is a network of educational, scholarly, cultural, and economic relations through which American influence becomes authoritative in the Arab world. The relationship carries forward Orientalism in a new imperial setting. Its effects appear in strained universities and scarce research resources, in the movement of students and authority toward the United States, and in the market and media that help shape both consumption and self-image. Said’s central concern is how this imbalance can lead the modern Orient to participate in its own Orientalizing.

From European to American predominance

Said describes the Arab world as an intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of the United States, while distinguishing the existence of that relationship from its particular, unequal form. The older dominance of Britain and France over intellectual life in the East has given way to an American position of pre-eminence. For Said, this transition is not simply a change in which foreign power occupies the leading place: it affects the institutions through which knowledge is produced and the conditions under which Arab scholars can pursue it.

The institutional inheritance is visible in universities generally organized according to patterns inherited from, or once imposed by, former colonial powers. Said describes classes of hundreds of students, faculty who are badly trained, overworked, and underpaid, political appointments, and an almost total absence of advanced research and research facilities. He emphasizes the absence of a single decent library in the entire region. These conditions limit the capacity to produce and circulate scholarship locally, reinforcing the draw of institutions abroad.

Education and scholarly authority

The few promising students who make it through this system are encouraged to pursue advanced work in the United States. Some Arab students continue to study in Europe, but Said says the numerical preponderance goes to the United States. This is true of students from states described as radical as well as from conservative states such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Their movement toward American universities reflects the broader imbalance: scholarship, research, and business patronage make the United States a virtual hegemonic commander of affairs, and it is regarded as the source of authority even when that authority is not grounded in a genuinely local source.

That imbalance extends to scholarly institutions and the direction of intellectual attention. Arab and Islamic scholars cannot afford to ignore the journals, institutes, and universities of the United States and Europe, whereas the converse is not true. Said points to the absence of a major journal of Arab studies published in the Arab world and to the lack of an Arab educational institution able to challenge Oxford, Harvard, or UCLA in the study of the Arab world—or even in fields unrelated to it. There are dozens of organizations in the United States devoted to studying the Arab and Islamic Orient, he observes, but none in the Orient devoted to studying the United States, despite its overwhelming economic and political influence there; even institutes of modest stature devoted to studying the Orient are scarce in the region itself.

The resulting hierarchy shapes scholarly roles as well as access to resources. Students and professors from the Orient seek training under American Orientalists, then may return to repeat the clichés Said identifies as Orientalist dogma. Managing this system can make an Oriental scholar feel superior to his own people, while leaving him subordinate to European or American scholars. In the West, Said argues, the scholar may be assigned the role of a “native informant”; in American universities, even elementary courses in Oriental languages are often taught by such informants, while power in universities and foundations remains almost exclusively in non-Oriental hands. The dependence thus governs who speaks, who is heard as an authority, and whose knowledge is treated as derivative.

Culture, markets, and self-representation

Said links scholarly dependence to a broader cultural orientation. He recalls that when Taha Hussein described modern Arab culture in 1936 as European rather than Eastern, he was registering the identity of the Egyptian cultural elite. Said sees a comparable tendency among the contemporary Arab cultural elite, though he notes that anti-imperialist ideas from the Third World, influential in the region since the early 1950s, have tempered the Western edge of its dominant culture. Even with that qualification, he argues, the Arab and Islamic world remains a second-order power in the production of culture, knowledge, and scholarship.

Economic exchange deepens the imbalance. Said describes the Arab and Islamic world as integrated into the Western market system and says that its greatest resource, oil, has been absorbed into the United States economy. The relationship extends beyond American control of major oil companies: Arab oil revenues, marketing, research, and industry management are also based in the United States. Oil-rich Arab states consequently become large customers for American exports. The same pattern holds for states in the Persian Gulf and for Libya, Iraq, and Algeria, including states Said describes as radical. The exchange is one-sided: the United States selectively buys a few products, mainly oil and cheap manpower, while Arab societies consume a broad range of American goods and ideas.

The material imbalance has cultural consequences. Said associates regional standardization of taste with transistors, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola, but also with cultural images of the Orient supplied by American mass media and consumed by a mass television audience. One consequence is the paradox of an Arab identifying with the Hollywood version of what an Arab is. At the same time, the consumer economy produces an expanding educated class whose intellectual formation is directed toward market needs. Engineering, business, and economics receive heavy emphasis; the intelligentsia, in Said’s account, becomes auxiliary to trends established in the West.

This arrangement gives local intellectuals a prescribed “modernizing” role: they lend legitimacy and authority to ideas of modernization, progress, and culture received largely from the United States. Said finds this reinforcement not only in social sciences but, unexpectedly, among radical intellectuals whose Marxism adopts wholesale Marx’s homogenizing view of the Third World. Orientalism therefore persists not just through direct foreign pressure but through the consent and participation of institutions and intellectuals within the region. The modern Orient, he concludes, participates in its own Orientalizing.

The knowledge-power pattern

Said connects this contemporary relationship to a longer history in which representations of the Orient have been enabled by differences in power. In his account of Gustave Flaubert and Kuchuk Hanem, a famous Egyptian dancer and courtesan whom Flaubert encountered in Wadi Haifa, Flaubert’s foreignness, wealth, and gendered position gave him the power to speak for her and present her to readers as representative of an “Oriental” woman. She did not represent her own emotions, presence, or history in his account. Said treats the episode as an instance of a wider pattern: unequal relations make it possible for Western observers to define the Orient while the people represented are denied equivalent authority over their own representation.

The institutional form of this authority has deep historical roots. Said identifies Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt as a turning point in the modern relation between Europe and the Near East. The invasion joined military occupation to a large scholarly enterprise, including the Description de l'Égypte, and made Egypt a field in which Western knowledge could be collected, organized, and used. Learned societies, professorships, periodicals, and research paradigms later expanded the reach and prestige of Orientalism. These institutions did not merely record an already settled object: through classification, publication, and teaching, they helped establish what counted as knowledge about the Orient.

Said’s account of Arab dependence on the United States carries this critique into the present without reducing it to the claim that all cross-cultural scholarship is illegitimate. His distinction is between knowledge pursued through understanding, careful study, and a willingness to enlarge human horizons, and knowledge enlisted in self-affirmation, conflict, and domination. The problem is not the study of other peoples as such; it is an institutional system in which unequal power decides whose scholarship travels, whose accounts acquire authority, and whose intellectual resources remain scarce.

Alternatives and unresolved questions

Said does not offer a replacement system of knowledge as a finished solution. He mentions decolonizing departures in area studies, the work of Anwar Abdel Malek, studies published by members of the Hull group on Middle Eastern studies, and innovative scholarship in Europe, the United States, and the Near East, while stressing that his project is to describe a system rather than install a new one. He instead leaves a set of questions about how cultures can be represented, whether categories such as culture, race, religion, and civilization invite self-congratulation or hostility, and how ideas acquire the status of normal or natural truth.

His discussion of postcolonial scholarship points to one form of critical work already challenging inherited authority. Across American and European campuses in the 1980s, students and faculty sought to broaden core curricula to include women, non-European artists and thinkers, and subalterns. Area studies and disciplines including anthropology, political science, literature, sociology, and history were affected by critiques of sources, the introduction of theory, and challenges to Eurocentric perspectives. Said singles out the Subaltern Studies group led by Ranajit Guha for seeking to rescue Indian history from the dominance of nationalist elites and restore the role of urban poor people and rural masses. He urges recognition of such work’s achievement while remaining alert to its possible pitfalls.

The stakes of this alternative are not the erasure of cultural or national difference. Said argues instead against treating difference as proof of hostility or as a fixed opposition between enduring essences. Arab world's dependence on the United States matters in his analysis because it demonstrates how material relationships, scholarly institutions, and cultural representations can reinforce one another—and how the authority to describe a people can follow the same unequal routes as money, education, and political influence. His proposed critical task is to understand those historical dynamics without retreating into a simple East–West stereotype, and to make room for knowledge that serves coexistence rather than control.