The issue of art's multiple and shifting meanings is sometimes acknowledged, tacitly or openly, in the texts of the Orientalist critique, but it is never allowed to unravel the net of Western guilt. That is because all meanings lead to the supposed power that the consumer of Orientalist culture can experience through any given artifact. Take all those paintings of naked harem women in their baths, for example, or being sold as slaves. According to many of their critics, these paintings are so much soft-core pornography that served to eroticize the Islamic world, thus empowering the male Western gazers of the work. As Rana Kabani wrote in her 1986 work, Imperial Fictions: Europe's Myths of Orient, "Although Westerners claimed to be horrified by the slave-trade, depictions of it were coveted by a genteel bourgeois public. The image of the captive beauty appealed to patriarchal urges of domination, and to imperialistic urges more generally."
But was the expression of European power really the function of these paintings? That would have depended on who bought them and what use they made of them. Art historian Lynne Thornton notes that most of the original buyers of Orientalist paintings, whether of harems or horsemen or markets, appear to have been nouveau riche industrialists. For these consumers, the colorful, Romantic, and erotic images may have been little more than a portrait of intensity executed in a fashionable style, one that provided a contrast to their otherwise dull daily lives. If a subtext of power is supposed to be central to this body of work, then surely it is noteworthy that the Orientalist school of painting becomes completely unfashionable after World War I. In other words, just as European colonialist power in the Middle East reaches its apogee, you couldn't give these paintings away.
As for the vaunted eroticism of the paintings, it's certainly there. It's present in the slave market scenes and the harem portraits, just as the eroticism of the naked Venuses and Eves is present in the paintings of the Renaissance. The Orientalist critique has revealed the "Oriental" erotic by desacralizing the European art that portrays it, only to mystify the art all over again with a discourse of power. (Some critics harp so intensely on the fascination with harems and slaves that it is easy to forget that these were not Western inventions but Eastern institutions.) Yet even Freud admitted that sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, and it is truer yet that a naked woman is sometimes just a painting.
Still, suppose one successfully subtracted imperial consumer fantasies from the discourse of power created by the Orientalist critique. Who then would become the subject of that discourse? Obviously, it would be the practitioners of the critique itself, because their discourse would end up describing not the culture's original consumers, but rather the culture's contemporary interpreters. It would be, in other words, about the critics themselves and what they think they see in these paintings.
Thus, their interpretive narrative would cease to be about consumer power fantasies, and begin to be about critical submission fantasies. This narrative would no longer center on male Eurocentric superiority, as expressed in sexual terms, but instead on the intellectual's fear of insecurity and alienation, also as expressed in sexual terms. In sum, the Orientalist critique would cease to describe a system that, it maintains, the West uses to "manage" its relationship with a despised East, and stand revealed as being a system used by critics to "manage" their relationship with a despised West.
But that's supposing one can subtract the consumer from the Orientalist trade. Sometimes one cannot. The case against the stereotyping of Arab TV characters as either violent or vulgar, for example--best made by Jack Shaheen in a plain-English study titled The TV Arab (1984)--is undeniable, and is an effective indictment of both the producers and the consumers of such stereotypes. But one doesn't require either Said or Lacan to make such a case; Shaheen mentions neither. By contrast, the Orientalist critique has built its imposing edifice on the problematic roles played by the "exotic" and the "erotic" in the West's imagination. To those critics, these are entrances to vicarious power over Islam, and exhibits of guilt. Those who actually consumed works steeped in the exotic and erotic, however, may have regarded them as exits from the ordinary, including the ordinary Middle East. The Orientalist cultural critique may well have begun with the rich narrative of the West's imperial fantasies. It may just as well be continuing with the equally rich fantasies of the academe.
However important the implications of the Orientalist critique of culture, its effect on Western political discourse has become more immediately consequential. We have already acknowledged at least one praiseworthy consequence that can be attributed, in part, to the critique: the banishing of negative stereotyping and tendentious demonizing from coverage and discussion of the mass murders in New York and Washington. But what has taken the place of stereotyping and demonization? Unfortunately, it has not been an understanding of the relationship between the West and the world from which the murderers emerged; it is, rather, a denial of any relationship at all. Indeed, it is a denial that the murderers have emerged from an identifiable world.
The murderers have regularly been portrayed by media and political figures as isolated fanatics whose actions and motives are at odds with mainstream Islam, which is invariably praised in fulsome terms. There is certainly no denying the many striking aspects of Islam, which in its 14 centuries has generated and nurtured a particularly appealing mystical tradition (Sufism), an enormous and often breathtaking body of poetry, and a history of tolerance that, despite some notorious exceptions, is nonetheless a good deal more impressive than was Christendom's record prior to the secularization of Western societies.
But locating Islam's contemporary mainstream is not a simple task, and cannot be accomplished in the subordinate clause of a Times op-ed piece. That mainstream is a matter of continuing contention within the Islamic community, itself divided into major sects and riven by competing teachings. Indeed, the history of Islam, like the history of Christianity, can be read as a struggle over orthodoxy. Early in Islam's history, for example, orthodoxy was strongly influenced by the Greek rationalist texts being translated by Islamic scholars. Caliphs adhering to this rationalist Mu'tazilite tradition actually subjected fundamentalist theologians to an inquisition in an attempt to wipe them out. Today, a major contender for orthodoxy is the 250-year-old Wahhabi movement, a puritanical and confrontationist interpretation whose spread through the Islamic community, in the United States and elsewhere, is being underwritten by the wealth of the Saudi regime.
In any event, it is futile for the president, the attorney general, or The Washington Post to pronounce on Islam's mainstream; that is a pressing issue that Muslims themselves must now confront and determine. (Deciding for Muslims what the Koran means is in fact an aspect of true Orientalism.) Worse, the attempt by Western elites to define Islam actually obscures the situation in which the United States and the West find themselves. That is because one of the major factions contending for that mainstream has been the "Islamist" movement. This movement rejects secularism and conceives of Islam as a political ideology as well as a source of faith. An attempt to grapple with modernity, the movement dates back to the 1940s, and has achieved power in Iran and elsewhere. In recent decades, adherents in Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have adopted violent means to destabilize the current regimes and bring themselves to power. Their intent is to effect a utopian revolution in social values. The primary enemy of many Islamists is the United States, not only for its alliance with Israel, but because America's seductive and pervasive secular culture undermines their revolutionary goals.
Islamism is not a simple phenomenon; it takes many forms. But those who perpetrated the murders of September 11 are adherents, as are many of those who welcomed the news of so many American deaths, whether in open celebration or in a private sense of solidarity with the attackers. It is obviously vital for Americans--emphatically including American Muslims, hundreds of whom were killed in New York--to confront that form of Islamism that is not merely opposed to aspects of American policy, but has so utterly dehumanized the citizens of the West.
That is where the Orientalist political critique becomes significant. Its practitioners have spent a quarter-century sifting through the sins committed by the West against the East, a rich and often ugly lode. But the critique's point has never been to clarify and improve relations and mutual perceptions. For many critics, the point has been to condemn the West, often by dissecting its imagination. As for examining the East's imagination, to see if it too was cluttered with stereotypes, misconceptions, or other detrimental concepts, that simply was never a sustained part of the critique. Worse, if other scholars did inquire into the dehumanizing trends that may have been present in the East, those scholars were likely to be labeled "Orientalists," an epithet that eventually became tantamount to "racist," and which served to marginalize them in the world of respectable scholarship.
This has turned out to be an agenda with consequences. What makes those consequences worth pondering is what made the critique both pressing and valuable to begin with. That is, Orientalist issues were worth addressing not only for their own sake, but because the East-West encounter has been increasingly problematic for the United States and the nations of the East, with explosive political, military, economic, and cultural dimensions for them all.
If the critique could have provided a better conceptual framework for addressing those issues, it would have been the right critique at the right time. But if the critique merely devised a one-sided apologia about Western sins and sinners without addressing similar issues in the East, then it would have proved merely another adventure in failed left-intellectual rationalization. Worse, if the critique ended up marginalizing or even delegitimizing others who did attempt to address the East's potential problems, it would have left its subject in a poorer state than it found it. It would have helped shape a West debilitated by guilt about its past, yet with no useful framework for understanding those who hate Westerners enough to murder them en masse. Given acts of mass murder by persons whom Reuters News Service refuses to term "terrorists," given a president who seeks inclusiveness while surrounding himself with various controversial Muslim spokesmen, given an intellectual class here and abroad that has been suggesting empathy with mass murderers, the West's conceptual approach to this crisis is at least open to question.
Of course, there are outspoken critics of certain political and anti-Western trends in Islam, and many of them, like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, have access to major media outlets. Some occupy distinguished academic chairs, and many have published extended inquiries into the principles and practices of Islamism. However, they are usually considered hostile to Islam by what has become the academic mainstream. Some critics of Islamic culture and society have indeed been given to sweeping generalizations and overstatements about the East, but then that is just as true of their West-bashing critics. The problem, as is apparent from the post-attack discussion about the East, is that they have been pushed from the intellectual center of the debate.
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