Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently.

Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future.This chapter contains an exploration of the meaning of orientalism.

Its history is then traced from relatively narrow roots where one discipline, philology, recovered, studied, published and interpreted texts relating to one region—that which is now called the Middle East—to its gradual expansion to include other disciplines such as philosophy, theology, literature and history and a diversity of areas from the Ottoman Empire to India and China.

An exploration of the rise of anti-orientalism follows where critics from a diversity of sources ranging from Islamicists to Arab Nationalists to Marxist theorists are briefly considered before Lewis concludes by identifying its main exponent in the United States, Edward Said.

[1] Lewis attributes the success of Said's book to its anti-Western stance, its use of, "the ideas, and still more the language of currently fashionable literary, philosophical and political theories."