Textbook Orientalism

In January 2020 I thought my academic background in Iranian history would be an asset to the World Civilizations class I was teaching. The United States and Iran stood on the brink of war after the January assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the top general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Instead, the disease we came to know as COVID-19 spread over the world, upending and changing many of our lives. One of these changes is that everyday racism and othering (viewing people or groups of people as wholly different and alien to oneself) has become much more visible through the lens of this mid-COVID world where the “China virus” is a racist moniker for the greatest public health crisis of our time and anyone with Asian ties is viewed with suspicion. 

It’s important that students are able to recognize places in their lives where these systems of racism and othering are propagated and upheld so they can start dismantling them. Textbooks are one important component of reproducing older forms of knowledge. In this same World Civilizations course, my students and I had an opportunity with the assigned textbook to do the hard work of analyzing authority and breaking down the power structures which can be perpetuated by the academy. This is a first step in making knowledge actionable. 

The textbook, The Heritage of World Civilizations, blindsided me with a blatantly orientalist and Islamophobic passage.¹ This book, widely used in survey courses and written by experts in their fields, included a passage which at first blush seemed like throwaway sentences in the broader context of the book. But on closer inspection, the passage is a powerful indication of contemporary biases, and runs the risk of students internalizing these biases as they read. I found myself shaking in disbelief as I read these offensive tropes about the extreme backwardness of Islam. The book states: 

Present-day political movements essentially at odds with the Enlightenment heritage are those linked with radical Islamic groups who define themselves in opposition to most Western values, values that tend to be derived from the Enlightenment. Most particularly these groups oppose the religious pluralism, cultural relativism, and expansion of traditional social roles for women that have flowed over time from the Enlightenment.²

This passage sets up the European Enlightenment as a time of progress and forward positive movement with regard to gender roles and rights for women, religious tolerance, and basic acceptance of those who are different. Furthermore, the passage argues, there are some groups today who are willing and ready to roll back all of this positive change which came from Europe during the Enlightenment. And, to be fair, I agree with the textbook that there are groups today who stand in opposition to these values, but these groups certainly are not exclusive to the Muslim world. But by singling out “radical Islamic” groups and ignoring, for example, white nationalist groups who have similar anti-Enlightenment values, the authors cast Islamic groups as either the worst, or the only groups which have these values and further capitalize on Western orientalist ideas which paint all Muslims in a negative light by association. In our class, students and I used this passage as a jumping-off point to analyze the authority of the textbook, think critically about sources, and start to break down these traditional power structures which dictate that Ivy League professors have authority and mere college students are sponges which absorb knowledge from the top down.³

In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said described the distinction between the West and the Orient, the exotic Eastern other, which are defined and constructed in relationship with each other, not on their own. According to Said, the Orient provided a way to determine what the West isn’t, and thus gives justification for the Western domination of the East seen not only through actual colonization, but also in material and cultural domination. The Orient is constructed as a subordinate “other” through this ideological domination. It’s portrayed in exotic imagery, feminization, and the continued portrayal of Eastern peoples as undesirable and backward. Orientalizing the Orient, or placing it within this dominating power hierarchy, provides justification for exercising control over the Orient.⁴ We see Western control over the East in the form of economic control (through oil and economic sanctions), military control (such as the US military in Kuwait or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), and ideological domination (with portrayals of Muslims in movies: often sensationalized with stereotypical clothing or type-cast as terrorists).

US military vehicles in Kuwait are a dramatic show of Western dominance over the East. (Wikimedia Commons)

For students in my class, all knowledge is actionable. We approach learning in the contexts of having conversations with family members who don’t agree with you, examining the veracity of a news report or social media post, or possessing the courage to go to a protest and stand up for what you believe in. It’s not just policy makers who enact change, and it starts with the practice of what Edward Said referred to as analyzing authority.⁵

Orientalist ideas remain powerful when they’re replicated in textbooks or presented to students in other sources of information such as the mainstream news media. Politicians and intellectuals then reinforce these stereotypes and use them to justify continued poor treatment of non-Western peoples. In order to break down stereotypes and uproot the power system which holds at its base the idea that the West is inherently superior to the East, students first need to recognize where the power is manufactured in the discourse of textbooks, media, and policies. It can be easy to recognize a racist or orientalist policy, especially when they’re given monikers like the “Muslim Ban.” But it’s harder to apply those same skills when reading a textbook, which is presented as an impartial repository of knowledge. 

The fact is that textbooks are created just like anything else is created, and authors intentionally or unintentionally bring their inherent biases and own perceptions of the world into their work. This can even include inadvertently racist or orientalist thoughts. We start talking about it on Day 1 of this World Civilizations course—for instance, asking why the course starts at the year 1500? If we were writing from a more Eastern-centric perspective, we’d use another starting point.

In this painting, the foreign idea of a harem is romanticized as the viewer’s eyes are drawn toward exposed toes and ankles, and the salacious visual of sensual female dance movement and female enjoyment. This kind of portrayal, of the sensual, exotic, and foreign, is a key component of the ideological orientalism that privileges the rational West. Exotic images like these have only continued through the present day. (Wikimedia Commons)

Islamophobia wasn’t the only racist idea we used to practice analyzing authority in this chapter. In its focus on the scientific method, rational understanding of the laws of nature, and classification, the Enlightenment in Europe focused on classifying not only nature, but also humans and human differences, including racial differences. Scientific racism was an important and enduring legacy of the Enlightenment and yet, there is no discussion of scientific racism in this textbook until it’s used to classify Jewish people during the Holocaust.⁶ So not only does this chapter single out differences of Muslims, but it also fails to identify and account for the foundations of modern racism. At the institutional level, I raised this issue with my divisional Chair and the department won’t be using the textbook again.

We had this discussion as a class, going into detail about what the textbook missed both with racism as a whole and Islamophobia specifically. At the time, in February of 2020, we had no idea that a few months later the world would be consumed with anti-racist protests, but we did know that the weekend before this discussion in class, there was a white nationalist parade in Washington D.C. We knew that the Coronavirus was something happening in China and that there was anti-Asian prejudice and stereotyping happening within the U.S., which is a form of modern-day quotidian orientalism. Students shared how after this discussion, they were aware of patients avoiding sitting by Asian families in the waiting room of medical facilities, and the portrayal of Muslims by the news media—“not just the radical groups, but the Islamic people as a whole.”⁷

Once students start critically interrogating the authority from which their textbook speaks, it opens the door to interrogating other authority. Perhaps it’s a question of what or how the news media is covering a certain event. Perhaps it’s interrogating a policy decision: for example, why was it permissible for the USS Theodore Roosevelt to dock in Guam when crew members were infected with the coronavirus, potentially exposing citizens of Guam to the disease?⁸ One possible reason is the US has a colonial legacy in Guam, so that was seen as an acceptable risk.

As we moved through the class, the students and I critically discussed the merits of the textbook, what it left out, and how to apply these concepts in our increasingly surreal life of web-based learning. Students reported what they would take away from this class extended beyond the knowledge of which white man was important in the Enlightenment to the realm of how to evaluate news reports and having the confidence to engage family members with whom they disagreed about the execution of George Floyd. These skills are incredibly valuable and while it would be great if we didn’t have to learn from an example of what not to do in our textbook, that same passage did provide us a door through which we could step and uncover many truths which may otherwise have been hidden under the veil of orientalist and racist authority.

1. “Orientalist” or “orientalism” is often defined as depictions of West Asia (sometimes referred to as the Middle East), in stereotypical  ways that reinforce colonialist attitudes, such as West Asian people being primitive, exotic, despotic, violent, and ultimately inferior to Western culture and people.
2. Albert M. Craig et al., The Heritage of World Civilizations, 10th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Pearson, 2016), 581.
3. The author would like to thank Dr. Sofia Rehman for her early assistance and encouragement in designing this series of lessons.
4. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 1–5.
5. Ibid., 20.
6. Craig et al., Heritage of World Civilizations, 666.
7. Quote from anonymous student evaluation of this class.
8. Matthias Gafni and Joe Garofoli, “Exclusive: Captain of aircraft carrier with growing coronavirus outbreak pleads for help from Navy.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 31, 2020.