Renaissance (e25b9862)

The Renaissance is a historical dividing line in Edward Said’s account of Orientalism, but not a neutral marker of chronology: it helps organize competing claims about whether Islam belongs within or beyond the history of the West. Said connects that boundary to a durable pattern in which Islamic influence is acknowledged selectively while representations of Islam and Arabs continue to reproduce older polemics.

The Renaissance as a Boundary

Said describes H. A. R. Gibb’s account of Islam as constrained by an unresolved inside-outside distinction. Following Duncan Black Macdonald, Gibb places Islam definitively outside the West; elsewhere, however, he describes Islam as being reintegrated with Western civilization. The Renaissance is central to that formulation: Gibb characterizes the separation of Western civilization from Islam as artificial, originating at the Renaissance, and presents contemporary relations between Europe and Islam as a forceful reassertion of their unity.

The apparent reconciliation does not settle the question of Islamic historical agency. In Gibb’s 1955 account, Europe took from Islam only nonscientific elements that had originally come from the West. Islamic science and technology, by contrast, could be transmitted indefinitely, so their passage into Europe did not establish them as uniquely Islamic achievements. Said argues that this division makes Islam’s contributions to art, aesthetics, philosophy, and religious thought secondary, while reducing its scientific and technological role to that of a conduit. The Renaissance-era separation can thus be invoked as artificial and reversible even as the account preserves a hierarchy between Western origins and Islamic transmission.

Polemics Across Historical Periods

Said places the modern treatment of Islam against a longer history of European hostility, arguing that books and articles on Islam and Arabs can repeat polemics dating from the Middle Ages and Renaissance with virtually no change. His point is not simply that old stereotypes survive in altered form: he emphasizes the permissiveness with which claims about this ethnic and religious group circulate without challenge.

He illustrates that continuity with material from American education and public commentary. A 1975 course guide from Columbia College undergraduates portrayed Arabic as dominated by words connected with violence and treated the Arab mind as bombastic. An article by Emmett Tyrrell in Harper’s went further, attributing murder and deceit to Arabs as inherent traits. A survey of Arabs in American textbooks likewise documented misinformation and callous representation, including claims that people in the Middle East did not know a better way to live and that hostility toward Jews and Israel was what united them.

Modern Representation and Its Stakes

The textbook examples extend the historical pattern into accounts of Islam itself. One text presented the religion through a crude summary of its origins and founder, then described the Qur’an as a book in which Muhammad’s teachings were recorded after his death. Said includes these passages not as reliable descriptions but as examples of how confident, reductive statements can pass as knowledge about Islam.

He argues that academic authority does not necessarily correct such representations. As an example, he points to a report produced in 1967 by Morroe Berger, a Princeton professor of sociology and Near Eastern studies, at the request of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Berger was also president of the Middle East Studies Association, founded that year as a professional organization concerned with the Near East, especially since the rise of Islam and across the social sciences and humanities. In Said’s account, the juxtaposition of textbook distortions and academic expertise shows how inherited assumptions can persist within institutions that claim to study the region. The Renaissance therefore matters not only as a boundary in Gibb’s account of Western and Islamic history, but also as part of a longer chronology through which polemical representations are reproduced in modern scholarship and public culture.