Orientalism in the thought of Edward Said, a reading in the Philological method

Abstract

Edward Said is considered one of the most prominent thinkers who uncovered the shortcomings of the Orientalist philological approach, Saeed directed a number of criticisms of the orientalists who used the philological method in an arbitrary and racist reading of the oriental heritage, Calling for a return to philology as practiced by talented thinkers like Vico and Nietzsche in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and Auerbach and Spitzer in the twentieth century as a tool of resistance against various forms of arrogance, And against any intellectual racism based on the negation and obliteration of the other, whether this other is a culture, a society, or a text, That is, philology in its application is not based on alienation and hostility to another time and another civilization, but rather on a human spirituality. To address the issue, it was necessary for us to search for Edward Said's position on Orientalism, and to examine the results he reached and his position on Orientalist philology and its pitfalls, The study concludes by eliciting orientalist goals and employing orientalism for the philological approach as a tool of domination that expresses racism and Western arrogance.