Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

As a department of thought and expertise, Orientalism, of course involves
several overlapping aspects: first, 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 specialised in the study of various Oriental cultures and traditions;
and third, the ideological suppositions, images and fantasies about a region
of the world called the Orient.
The history of Orientalism is old as Orient and Occident as. In this historical
process, Orientalism has acquired its various kinds and characteristics which is well-known.
Orientalism is both a discipline studies Orient, and an instrument that Occident
has realised or discovered his self-conscience through it. Thus, in this process,
Western images about East and Eastern demonstrate a dynamic variability which is
dependent on changes in relationships between this two world or in its self-structure
of West or East. And this paper aims to show these variable images about
Orient, Orientalist discourse’s phases and changings and that Orientalism is about
Occident as it is about Orient, too