When I turn on the news, I see men who look like my father called suspicious, and women who look like my mother deemed oppressed. I see some protests described as peaceful and others as hateful and violent, though to me, they don’t look all that different. This type of binary emerges from a gaze that Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said spent his life’s work attempting to expose.
Said, one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century, was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and lived through the early years of the Nakba. Said spent much of his academic career challenging how the West constructed knowledge about the non-Western world. His seminal work Orientalism, published in 1978, revealed how these constructions are deeply tied to structures of domination and imperialism.
Said’s Orientalism presents a groundbreaking critique of how Western civilization has historically perceived and represented the “Orient,” broadly defined as the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Said argues that Orientalism is not simply a field of academic study but a deeply political and ideological project: a Western style of domination, restructuring, and authority over the Orient. This system of thought produced and reinforced an image of Eastern societies as backward, irrational, barbaric, and exotic, in contrast to a civilized, rational, and enlightened West.
A central claim in Said’s work is that knowledge about the Orient was never neutral or objective. Rather, it was constructed through a lens of imperial power. Said also emphasizes that the Orient was not only invented to justify imperialism but to define the West itself. The Orient functioned as a contrasting image through which Europe could project its own identity. As Said explains, “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate—an underground self.” The Orient, then, became a necessary “other,” essential to reinforcing Western ideas of modernity, morality, and progress. Historical examples, such as Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and the writings of thinkers like Comte de Volney, show how Orientalist discourse was embedded in military conquest and political ambition.
This legacy of Orientalism is not confined to the past. It persists today, especially in how Muslim people are perceived in the West. Western depictions of Muslims have long relied on Orientalist stereotypes, portraying Muslim men as violent and threatening, and Muslim women as helpless and oppressed. Mainstream films like Aladdin collapse the immense cultural diversity of the Middle East and South Asia into a single, exoticized fantasy filled with sultans and magic carpets. After 9/11, these narratives became even stronger as Muslims were increasingly framed through the narrow lens of terrorism, extremism, and a threat to national security. As a result, the Orient continues to be imagined as a monolithic, dangerous, and backward space which is an image that shapes both foreign policy abroad and the lived experiences of Muslims at home.
Edward Said’s later work, particularly The Question of Palestine, makes this connection explicit. Zionist and Western narratives have long framed Palestinians as obstacles to progress, justifying the ongoing displacement and genocide of an entire people. Palestinians were cast as primitive and irrational, their removal made to appear necessary for the advancement of civilization. Said shows that Palestinians were not only colonized physically but were colonized in the imagination of the West, transformed into a racialized threat.
Understanding Orientalism helps us see that these representations are the result of a long historical process that ties knowledge production to imperial domination. Naming that history and resisting the frames it imposes is essential to our existence in the West. The stories told about us are part of a machinery of domination, and when we recognize this gaze for what it is, we can begin to dismantle it. That being said, dismantling this gaze does not stop at assigning it a name. This task can only be undertaken with collective will and action to refuse acceptance and adherence to the narratives imposed on us.