Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is T. E. Lawrence’s account of the Arab rebellion against the Turks and, in Edward Said’s analysis, a work in which imperial expertise helps set events in motion and then claims authority to define their meaning. Though conspicuously storylike, it ultimately exemplifies a tension between the unfolding of history and the Orientalist panoramic vision that gathers the Orient into a seemingly coherent, static whole.

Political Knowledge and the Rebellion

Some Englishmen, with Kitchener as their leading figure, believed that an Arab rebellion against the Turks could help England fight Germany while also defeating Turkey, Germany’s ally. Their knowledge of Arabic-speaking peoples—their supposed nature and power as well as their country—led them to expect a favorable outcome and to anticipate the rebellion’s character and method. With formal assurances of British Government support, they allowed the movement to begin.

The resulting rebellion of the Sherif of Mecca nevertheless took most by surprise, and the Allies were unprepared for it. It generated divided reactions, powerful friends and enemies, and competing jealousies among those involved; amid these conflicts, its affairs began to miscarry. Said draws attention to the distance between the experts’ confidence in their assessment and the unruly political consequences of the movement they helped authorize.

From Intervention to Interpretation

Said identifies Lawrence’s synopsis of the first chapter of Seven Pillars of Wisdom as a compact account of this reversal. The Englishmen’s knowledge authors a movement in the Orient, but the movement produces mixed and ambiguous results rather than the happy outcome anticipated. Those results—marked by half-imagined possibilities and tragicomic complications—then become the subject of further expert writing.

In this new form of Orientalist discourse, the contemporary Orient appears less as a sequence of events than as a field of complexity, problems, and betrayed hope. The White Orientalist author stands as its articulate, prophetic interpreter. Expertise has thus moved beyond describing the Orient: it participates in contemporary history and then presents that history as something only the expert can adequately understand.

Narrative and Panoramic Vision

For Said, the book’s storylike form does not prevent a defeat of narrative by vision. A narrative follows events as they develop; a comprehensive vision surveys the Orient from above, seeking to encompass its culture, religion, mind, history, and society. To make that sprawling panorama intelligible, the Orientalist sorts its details into reductive categories such as the Semites, the Muslim mind, and the Orient.

This tension reprises Said’s discussion of Lane’s Modern Egyptians. In both cases, a holistic description or monumental record competes with a narrative of events in the Orient. The issue is not simply a choice of literary form: the panoramic account makes diverse events legible through a prior scheme, while the course of events can exceed the scheme that purports to contain them.

Authority, Stasis, and the Orient

The comprehensive vision depends on the authority of the person, institution, or discourse that claims it. Since Orientalist thought assumes that no Oriental can know himself as an Orientalist can, the expert’s perspective supplies the coherence and force of the representation. Said calls such visions fundamentally conservative: ideas about the Near Orient in the West persist even when evidence disputes them, and can produce the evidence that is then taken to validate them.

The vision is static because its categories are treated as final. Neither the Semites nor the Oriental mind offers a way beyond the general scheme that holds different forms of behavior within one view of the field. As a discipline, profession, specialized language, and discourse, Orientalism therefore relies on the permanence of the whole called the Orient: without that stable object, it could not sustain consistent, intelligible, articulated knowledge. Seven Pillars of Wisdom matters in Said’s account because its portrayal of a contemporary, complicated rebellion becomes legible through precisely this tension: history moves and surprises, while Orientalist authority seeks to make the Orient a stable object of knowledge.