2001 Nights

The end of the Orientalist critique

Charles Paul Freund from the December 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Take the case of Daniel Pipes. He is the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, and has published widely on Islamist issues--especially its anti-Western antipathy--even as he has fended off continuous personal attacks on his motives. Indeed, shortly after the murders in New York and Washington, The Los Angeles Times published excepts from 10 authors who had recognized the magnitude of the terrorist danger, and who had predicted, in some sense, such an event. Pipes, unlike any of his critics, made the list.

Yet in the weeks following the murders, the term "Islamism," never mind an understanding of the complex movement it described, was almost entirely absent from the ceaseless discussion. Why? Politically, the U.S. wished to avoid all mention of Islamism in the interests of coalition-building. Intellectually, confronting Islamism would run counter to the feel-good discussion about Islam that emerged from Western guilt. Yet it is a simple enough matter to make a distinction between Islam as a community of believers, and Islamists as utopian revolutionaries capable of mass murder. After all, Islamists have been killing people in Egypt, Algeria, Israel, Russia, and elsewhere for many years. They'd already murdered hundreds of Americans. Now they've slaughtered thousands more. Even so, it never entered the debate. The West's enemy remained "terrorism," the tactic, not Islamism, the idea.

By contrast, many practitioners of the Orientalist critique have tended to dismiss the term "terrorist" as a usage of Western propaganda. Said himself wrote in Orientalism that "terrorist" was a label used to describe those persons unwilling to obey Israel's orders. After the fall of Soviet communism, Susan Sontag observed that the consumers of Reader's Digest turned out to have been better informed about the communist nightmare than were the readers of the more respected The Nation. Who was better prepared to understand what was happening on September 11: students of the Orientalist critique, or the readers of the scorned neo-Orientalists?

Orientalism, the systematic stereotyping and degradation of Easterners that dehumanized them in the eyes of the West, enabled the colonial powers not only to mistreat whole populations, but also, in some of the West's blackest moments, to slaughter them in horrifying numbers. What makes it possible to commandeer passenger planes filled with innocent travelers, including children, and use them as bombs to murder thousands of people in office buildings? It is a systematic stereotyping and degradation of Westerners that dehumanizes them, and makes their death a pious deed for some and a cause for celebration for others. It is Occidentalism.

The phenomenon of Islamic Occidentalism has received almost no attention from the academe, and less from the Orientalist critique. The term exists in academic discourse, but there is not even a consensus about its meaning. To some, it describes the process by which the West flatters itself in positive terms. For others, it is the process by which people of the East, especially the Far East, idealize the West and overlook its flaws. There are few scholars to whom the term suggests a process by which an Easterner might utterly misconceive the West and its citizens, much less do them an injustice.

One scholar who has begun to study Islamic Occidentalism, based on years of work with the Egyptian women's movement, is Dr. Nadje Al-Ali, a social anthropologist who teaches at the University of Exeter. Al-Ali is careful to note in her work that Occidentalism is not, in her view, the equal of Orientalism so much as a reaction against it. Only last April, Al-Ali organized a scholarly conference in Britain that attempted to provide the study of Occidentalism with some theoretical structure. In the meantime, she has written that the phenomenon is "part of a political ploy," in that "it uses available cultural categories to gain symbolic advantages for 'the self,' and to handicap 'the other.'" It has resulted in what she calls the construction of "an imperialist, corrupting, decadent and alienating West."

If you attach that description to an empowering eschatology and arm it with explosives, you end up with something very like an angry Islamism contemplating its "corrupting, decadent and alienating" enemies.

While a serious, sustained study of Occidentalism lies in the future, its content will not turn out to be a mystery. It draws on the same sources of belittlement and dehumanization from which hatreds--including Orientalism--have always drawn. Indeed, its outlines are visible in the documents of extreme Islamism.

For example, critics of Orientalism have generated an enormous literature addressing the West's reduction of the East in erotic terms. But the Occidentalist murderers and their celebrants have developed a parallel discourse that addresses Western women in terms of erotic corruption, immorality, and decadence. According to some news accounts, Osama bin Laden is reported to have been especially disturbed at the presence of American women soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Islam's most sacred ground.

Critics of Orientalism have accused the West of drawing on negative imagery dating back to the Crusades in addressing contemporary political issues. But Occidentalists are capable of precisely the same rhetorical act. In fact, the murderers evoke the Crusades directly. Bin Laden's 1996 fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans actually refers to Americans without irony as "Crusaders." (In the wake of the September 11 attacks, President Bush referred to the developing anti-terrorism campaign as a "crusade," purportedly committing the sin of insensitivity. Bush unwisely used the term in its generic sense, but that somehow received more attention than has bin Laden's repeated use of the word as a specific historical accusation.)

The critics of Orientalism have charged that the West has traditionally portrayed Easterners in terms of cravenness, contrasting their supposedly boastful-but-cowardly natures, for example, to the stoic courage of Israeli troops. Yet bin Laden's documents are suffused with charges of American cowardice, based on the U.S. government's decisions to pull troops out of Beirut and Somalia following unexpected casualties. Public statements by Mullah Muhammed Omar, head of Afghanistan's Taliban, drew on the same trope when he accused Americans of lacking the bravery to come to that country.

The same critics of Orientalism have long accused the West of depicting authority in the East in terms of a distorted concept of "Oriental Despotism." There are entire studies of this one subject (the most exhaustive is Alain Grosrichard's 1979 work, The Sultan's Court). But Occidentalist notions of power in the West are not merely distorted; they are crazed. They are dominated by an obsessive conspiracism that sees hidden plots--usually Jewish plots--everywhere. While the Orientalist trope of despotism reduces the Easterner to a slavish figure unconcerned with his freedom or rights, the Occidentalist trope of conspiracy reduces the Westerner to a witless puppet manipulated by unseen hands (while simultaneously absolving the Occidentalist of any responsibility in his own political failures). Despite the enormity of the role played by conspiracy fantasies in the Eastern political imagination, there is only one full-length study of the issue in English: Pipes' The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy (1996).

Nadje Al-Ali may be quite right when she argues that these and other aspects of Occidentalism are "deeply informed" by an awareness of Western attitudes and constitute a response to them. But that is not their whole function. Like conspiracism, Occidentalism appears to play a scapegoating role for some, "explaining" Eastern political failure by positing a satanic foe and extending the revolutionary struggle against him, just as Orientalism played an exculpatory role justifying a brutal Western colonialism.

Occidentalism of this sort thus becomes quite useful, because the unavoidable fact is that Islamism has proved a failure. Far from establishing a benign, new relationship between rulers and people along traditional theological lines, political Islamism's most notable characteristic is repression. As the author Olivier Roy argued as long ago as 1992, the two models of Islamism from which to choose are the Saudi model of "revenue plus sharia" (the Islamic code of law) and the Sudanese model of "unemployment plus sharia." But Islamists cannot think that way and continue their struggle. Occidentalism provides part of that struggle's continuing justification.

In fact, the Orientalist critique may have played an indirect role as well. Islamism's failure is only the latest in a string of Eastern political failures that now extend over half a century. The East's own scholars have yet to confront this history in a sustained way. Rather, they have engaged in an Orientalist critique of their own, often drawing on the arguments of Western thinkers and blaming their problems on the West. Western scholars might ask themselves to what degree their work is less a critique of Western power than an enabler for Eastern failure.

One of the more interesting observations made in the wake of the murders is that "There isn't a single Islam: there are Islams, just as there are Americas." That is an invitation to ponder more carefully this global confrontation of values. Some Islams, perhaps like some Americas, offer the prospect of shaping identity through faith in a world of roiling choice. Others may invite the prospect of terror and blood. All parties burying their dead throughout the world would do well to consider the numerous dimensions of their struggle, and the numerous dimensions of their foe.

Who wrote of many Islams and many Americas? It was Edward Said, in his Observer essay. Would that he had said so to begin with.

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