Cold War (7806e152)

The Cold War is a political and intellectual context in Edward Said’s account of the transformation of Orientalism in the United States. It helped direct Middle East scholarship toward strategic expertise and policy, carrying inherited assumptions about the Orient into modern institutions even as the language of social science made them appear newly refined. In Said’s analysis, the period also intensified an East–West opposition that obscured historical change and the mixed, interconnected character of cultures.

Area Studies and Cold War Expertise

In Said’s account, contemporary American study of the Near East differed in form from the European philological tradition associated with H. A. R. Gibb and Louis Massignon. What endured was not primarily traditional Orientalist scholarship, but a measure of cultural hostility and the authority of expertise. Its institutional genealogy included army language schools established during and after the war, new government and corporate interest in the non-Western world, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, and a missionary impulse to reform and reeducate people understood as ready for such intervention.

Language study acquired strategic and professional uses within this order, but, Said argues, it was commonly treated as a tool for specialists rather than a way into literature. The regional expert’s emphasis on facts, attitudes, trends, and statistics could leave Arab and Muslim societies conceptually abstract and dehumanized. Literary writing, by contrast, could convey people’s experiences and values, disrupting the ready-made images and generalizations through which the region was represented.

The institutional development of Middle East studies connected scholarship to policy and public security. The Middle East Institute, founded in Washington in May 1946 under federal auspices, became part of a wider network that included the Middle East Studies Association, foundation support, federal university programs, and research by the Defense Department, RAND Corporation, and Hudson Institute. Said argues that these arrangements retained much of the outlook developed in European Orientalism, even as they adapted, normalized, and popularized it in postwar American scholarship.

Harvard and the Policy Turn

Said distinguishes the influence of H. A. R. Gibb at Harvard from Philip Hitti’s earlier scholarly presence at Princeton. Princeton’s department had fostered a large group of important scholars and substantial scholarly interest. Gibb, who became director of the Harvard Center for Middle East Studies in the mid-1950s, was more closely connected to the public-policy dimension of Orientalism; his position helped orient the field toward a Cold War model of area studies.

This change did not require scholars to repeat the older European vocabulary openly. Said notes that Gibb’s own work did not overtly use the cultural-discourse language associated with Ernest Renan, Carl Becker, and Louis Massignon. He nevertheless argues that the discourse and its assumptions persisted elsewhere in American academic authority, including in the work of Gustave von Grunebaum, whose sweeping treatment of Islam presented it as a single, reductively characterized culture. For Said, modern techniques and professional refinement did not by themselves remove older habits of generalization.

Geopolitical Conflict and the Hardening of Identities

Said describes the Cold War’s end as failing to dissolve the conflicts commonly cast as a struggle between East and West. Events and political developments he discusses include the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, challenges to the status quo by Islamic groups in countries including Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, the Gulf War, and continued American support for Israel. He also points to the creation of Islamic brigades to fight the Russians from bases in Pakistan and to the emergence of Islam as a subject of journalism and scholarship that was often alarmed and not always well informed.

In Said’s account, these conflicts and their representations placed people under pressure to identify themselves as either Westerners or Easterners. The resulting opposition strengthened and hardened identities rather than clarifying the histories at stake. He had not known, when his book appeared, that Iran would soon experience a far-reaching Islamic revolution or that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would take the protracted forms he describes, from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the intifada beginning in late 1987. These subsequent developments made the politics surrounding his argument more urgent, but did not, in his view, validate a timeless division between Islam and the Christian West.

Against Civilizational Binaries

Said places the Cold War’s bipolar framework beside later theories that replace it with a division among supposedly distinct civilizations. He rejects Samuel Huntington’s proposition that Western, Confucian, and Islamic civilizations function as sealed compartments, with their members chiefly concerned to keep others at bay. Such an account, Said argues, ignores a major insight of modern cultural theory: cultures are hybrid and heterogeneous, formed through conquest, migration, travel, and the mingling of peoples.

This critique does not deny cultural or national difference. Rather, Said challenges the conversion of difference into hostility, fixed essences, and an adversarial body of knowledge. The Cold War is significant in the book not simply as a period of geopolitical rivalry, but as a context in which older ways of representing the Orient were incorporated into American institutions and a rigid East–West framework gained renewed force. Said’s counteremphasis is on historical experience, cultural interdependence, and forms of study capable of recognizing the people and changing realities that binary accounts suppress.