ABSTRACT
Orientalism was a scientific movement whose analogue in the world of empirical politics was the Orient's colonial accumulation and acquisition by Europe. As primitivity, as the age-old antetype of Europe, as a fecund night out of which European rationality developed, the Orient's actuality receded inexorably into a kind of paradigmatic fossilization. As a department of thought and expertise Orientalism of course refers to several overlapping domains: firstly, the changing historical and cultural relationship between Europe and Asia, a relationship with a 4,000-year-old history. Second, the scientific discipline in the West according to which beginning in the early nineteenth century one specialized in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions. Third the ideological suppositions, images and fantasies about a currently important and politically urgent region of the world. Underlying much of the discussion of Orientalism is a disquieting realization that the relationship between cultures is both uneven and irremediably secular.
