Edward Said’s flagship work, the theory of “Orientalism”, has been celebrated as a post-colonial propaganda in which “cultural force” is seen as a crucial aspect in relating the ideology of the West to the East. Both the West and the East, in their observation of the fact of ‘cultural force’, have their own ways of defining and implementing it, though sometimes selfishly and autocratically like the West and sometimes slavishly and spontaneously like the East. In our process of dissecting and supporting the above theme, we will try to define “cultural force” and its importance from both Western and Eastern perspectives.

Defining ‘cultural force’ can admit the idea of ​​encouraging a nation to establish its cultural identity through various means and forms, such as cultural imposition. By establishing its culture, a nation can assert its spontaneous flourishing without dominating other nations or it can stay the course by demeaning or caricaturing other nations to vividly show its superiority over them. And the latter happens in the case of Westerners who are always concerned with their authority over Easterners because of their own identity. Said’s cultural study of the West and the East in his “Orientalism” exhibits the multifaceted application and observation of “cultural force.” In this regard, Said affirms that “cultural force is not something that we can discuss very easily, and one of the purposes of the present work is to illustrate, analyze and reflect on orientalism as an exercise of cultural force”.

For the West, Orientalism is its “cultural force” that manifests itself through dominant differences from the Middle East. Said observes: “European culture gained strength and identity by opposing the Orient as a kind of substitute and even clandestine…”. The West practices its ‘cultural force’ through its atrocity of defining and shaping an East that can never speak for itself as the West thinks: “they cannot represent themselves; they must speak for themselves”.

Western culture shows its strength through its imposition on foreigners or the East. They resent injecting their culture into the brains of the Orientals and even the Orientals are made to think in their own way. This is the very force of their culture, albeit a negative one, that they define others based on their culture, as Said describes it through his theory of Orientalism: “Orientalism is best understood as a set of constraints and limitations on the thought than as a set of restrictions and limitations of thought”. simply as a positive doctrine.” this is orientalism which in this way ensures the authorized practice of the ‘cultural force’ of the west over the east.

Westerners have a strong influence from their culture when they try to define and identify the East as something apart from the East. Their superiority complex culture and egotistical definition of things allow them to delineate the Orient with a misrepresentation that has an exterior idea as Said says, “Orientalism is based on exteriority.” The cultural tendency to generalize an egotistical idea about the whole Orient from a single uncomfortable case is strong enough proof of its vehement force derived from its culture. From a distant and safe point of view, the West looks at Eastern cultures, albeit inappropriately, and concludes that they are petty and fanatical cultures, since their imaginary vision of Orientals is: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), infantile, ‘different’; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature and ‘normal'”.

The strength of Western culture is their belief that they are the most culturally sound in this world and this may be their false ideology to avoid fear of losing authority or power. Their culture bestows on them the ‘white man’s burden’ which they alleviate by schooling, punishing, rectifying and ultimately civilizing the Orient: “The Orient was seen as being framed by the classroom, the penal court, the prison, the illustrated manual.” . This pervasive and powerful invasion of the West’s “cultural force” on the East is subtly illustrated in Said’s comment: “However, what gave the Eastern world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of its own efforts, but more well of the whole complex series”. of clever manipulations by which the East was identified by the West”.

This is the deliberately superficial study of the Orient that gave the West the license to draw conclusions about the Orient on its own. This culture of their superficial and crude study of others through travel books and other similar sources allows them to assume the oriental as ‘fierce lion’ where the fierceness is finally highlighted instead of the lion and therefore “no longer there are lions but their fierceness-“. . And even Arthur James Balfour, an emissary of the Europeans, arbitrarily though absurdly claims the dominance of the West over the East when he says: “We know the civilization of Egypt better than the civilization of any other country.”

This unfair confrontation of ‘cultural force’ will continue until the East dares to expose its ‘cultural force’. Such is Said’s expression:

Such a silent Orient, available to Europe for the realization of the projects that involved but were never directly responsible for the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images or mere descriptions devised for it… a relationship between Western writing (and its consequences) and the oriental silence fruit and sign of the great cultural force of the West, of its will to power over the East… the books about ferocious lions will serve until the lions can respond.

At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, the Orient seeks to manifest its “cultural force” steadily and gradually with the blessing of modern orientalism or “Oriental Renaissance” that ignited a new consciousness of the Orient among thinkers, politicians and artists all over the world. the world. the world. The recently discovered and modern translation and interpretation of oriental texts in oriental languages ​​like Sanskrit, Zend, and Arabic made it possible for the Orient to promote and display its cultural strength.

The unprejudiced, fresh and new perspective on the old arbitrary custom gave it a chance to truly and gradually blossom. Non-Europeans have the right to define and establish their identity as Orientals free of adverse European interference. Its ‘cultural force’ is gradually being emphatically redefined by the Orientals themselves and given its true form as the embodiment of the whole Orient.