John Scott's Knowledge Summary

Another significant writer to this study is Scott, whom Said classifies among "the most imaginative writers of that age, who were constrained in what they could either experience of or say about the Orient to a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)."(44) Out of a cunning political vision of how the combative relations between the Near Orient and Europe, Scott sets The Talisman and Count Robert of Paris in Crusader Palestine and eleventh-century Byzantium, respectively, "without at the same time detracting from his canny political appreciation of the way powers act abroad" (192). Said contends that "what inevitably goes

A. R. Gibb, who was, praised The Talisman for its insight into Islam and Saladin."(Hourani, 425) Scott showed ignorance of Islam when he turns Iblis into a hero for the faithful. "Scott's knowledge probably came from Byron and Beckford." (Gibb, 7)This vision shows the authoritative, anonymous, and traditional Western attitudes to the East. It has nothing to do with the real Orient- or Islam. Said argues the structure of Scott's prose follows the anecdotal tradition of storytelling; it is all fiction and has nothing to do the real experience with or in the Orient. Said denotes the limited perspective and vocabulary in Scott's words as well. The Muslim man, Saracen, boast of tracing his race back to Iblis, Satan. Moreover, as in Medieval literature, a Christian attacks Muslim theology. Yet, he tries to mitigate the offence saying"I don't mean you in particular." What Said considers a complete

The point to be noted here is that Muslims had no say at all in them. So, it is completely western created world. German Orientalism shared with Anglo-French and later American Orientalism an intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture which allowed them to orientalize the Orient, to generalize artificial attributes about it. Goethe's lexicographical choices are unshakable definitions built up by Orientalist discourse. Yet he was referred to as a source of wisdom on the Orient. "This control had had a general cultural history in Europe since antiquity. In the nineteenth century a modem professional terminology and practice were created whose existence dominated discourse about the Orient, whether by Orientalists or non-Orientalists."