Edward Said’s emblematic work, the theory of “orientalism”, has been celebrated as a postcolonial propaganda in which “cultural force” is 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, albeit sometimes selfishly and autocratically like the West and sometimes slavishly and spontaneously like the West. the East. In our process of dissecting and supporting the aforementioned topic, we will attempt to define ‘cultural force’ and its importance from both the Western and the Eastern perspectives.

Defining ‘cultural force’ can admit the idea of ​​a stimulus of a nation to establish its cultural identity through various means and forms such as cultural imposition. By establishing its culture, a nation may assert its spontaneous flourishing without dominating other nations, or it may view the path as degrading or caricaturing other nations to show its superiority over them. And the latter occurs in the case of Westerners who are always concerned about their authority over Easterners for their own identity. Said’s cultural study of the West and the East in his “Orientalism” exhibits the multiple application and observation of “cultural force.” In this regard, says Said, “cultural strength is not something that we can discuss very easily, and one of the purposes of this work is to illustrate, analyze and reflect on Orientalism as an exercise of cultural strength.”

For the West, Orientalism is its “cultural force” that manifests itself in making dominant differences with the Middle East. Said observes, “European culture gained strength and identity by opposing the East as a kind of surrogate and even underground self …”. The West practices its ‘cultural force’ through its atrocity of defining and shaping the East that can never speak for itself as the West thinks: “they cannot represent themselves, you have to speak for them.”

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

Westerners have a strong interference from their culture when they try to define, as well as identify, orient and be separate from the East. Their culture of complex superiority and selfishly defining things allows them to delineate the East with a misrepresentation that has an exterior idea as Said says, “Orientalism is based on exteriority.” The cultural tendency to generalize a selfish idea over the entire East from a single uncomfortable instance is strong enough evidence of the vehement force derived from its culture. From a distant and safe point of view, the West observes Eastern cultures, albeit inappropriately, and concludes that they are petty and fanatical cultures, since its imaginary vision of the Orientals is: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childish ‘, different’, so the European is rational, virtuous, mature and ‘normal’ “.

The strength of the culture of the West is their belief that they are the most culturally solid in this world and this may be their false ideology to avoid fear of losing authority or power. Their culture gives them the ‘white man’s burden’ that they alleviate by educating, punishing, rectifying and finally civilizing the East: “The East was seen as if it were framed by the classroom, the criminal court, the prison, the illustrated manual.” . This pervasive and powerful invasion of the West’s ‘cultural force’ into 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 rather of the entire complex series of reported manipulations by which the West identified the East. “

This is the deliberately superficial study of the East that gave the West the license to draw conclusions about the East 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 fierceness finally stands out 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, if absurdly, asserts the dominance of the West over the East when he says: “We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know 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 an East was silent, available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to 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 eastern silence is the result and the sign of the great cultural strength of the West, its will to power over the East … books about ferocious lions will do until the lions can respond.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the East seeks to manifest its “ cultural force ” steadily and gradually through the blessing of modern Orientalism or the “ Eastern Renaissance ” which ignited a new consciousness of the East among thinkers, politicians and artists from all over the world. the world. The recently discovered and modern translation and interpretation of Eastern texts into Eastern languages ​​such as Sanskrit, Zend, and Arabic made it possible for the East to promote and display its cultural strength.

The unprejudiced, fresh, and new outlook on the old arbitrary custom gave it the opportunity to truly and gradually blossom. Non-Europeans have the right to define and erect their identity as Orientals, apart from the undesirable interference of Europeans. Its “cultural force” is gradually being redefined by the Orientals themselves emphatically and is being given its true form as the embodiment of the entire Orient.