The West has never had an easy time coming to terms
with Islam or Islamicate societies. There was a
long period, lasting more than a millennium, when
the two were seen as existential threats. In order
to mobilize the energy to contain and then roll
back these threats - first from the 'Holy Lands'
and Southwestern Europe and later from Southeastern
Europe - European writers presented Islam as a Christian
heresy, a devil-worshipping religion, Mahomet's
trickery, a militant and militarist cult crafted
for Bedouin conquests. To this list of dark qualities
the thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment
added a few more. Now Islamicate societies were
also seen as despotic, fatalistic, fanatical, irrational,
uncurious, opposed to science, and inimical to progress.
When Europe gained the upper hand militarily in
the nineteenth century, this complex of Orientalist
ideas would be used to justify the conquest and
colonization of Islamic lands.
Starting in the nineteenth century, a small minority
of European thinkers began to reject the standard
Orientalist constructs of Islam and Islamicate societies.
They began to look at Islam and Islamicate societies
as they were described in Muslim sources; they wrote
of Islamic achievements in philosophy, the sciences,
arts and architecture; they emphasized Islam's egalitarian
spirit, the absence of racial prejudice, and their
greater tolerance of other religious communities.
Many of these Europeans who had chosen to give Islam
its due were Jews who had only recently escaped
from the ghettoes to enter into Europe's academies.
In part, these Jews were appropriating for themselves
the achievements of another Semitic people. In calling
attention to the tolerance of Islamic societies,
they were also gently reminding the Europeans that
they had far to go towards creating a bourgeois
civilization based on humane values. Less charitably,
one might say that the Jewish dissenters were undermining
the Christian West by elevating its opposite, the
Islamic East.
A second shift in the temper of Orientalism that
began in the 1950s would become more pervasive.
From now on, a growing number of mainstream scholars
of Islam and Islamic societies would try to escape
the essentializing mental habits of earlier Orientalists.
This shift was the work of at least three forces.
The most powerful of these forces was the struggle
of the colonized peoples in the post-War period
to free themselves from the yoke of colonialism.
In the context of the Cold War, the political and
economic interests of Western powers now demanded
greater sensitivity to the culture, religion and
history of the peoples they had denigrated over
the previous four centuries. A show of respect for
their subjects had now become a virtue in the writings
of Orientalists.
The Orientalists were also being put on notice by
the entry into Western academia of scholars of Middle
Eastern and South Asian origins - including Phillip
K. Hitti, Albert Hourani, George Makdisi, Muhsin
Mahdi, Syed Hussein Nasr and Fazlur Rahman - who
brought greater empathy and understanding to their
studies on Islamicate societies. Edward Said too
was a member of this group; his distinctive contribution
consisted of his erudite and sustained critique
of the methods of Orientalism. Said's critique belongs
also to a broader intellectual movement - fueled
in part by scholars from the non-Western world -
that not only debunked the distortions of Orientalists
but also sought to remedy their errors by writing
a more sympathetic history of Asian and African
societies. In other words, during this period some
sections of the West began to acknowledge with some
consternation the racism and bigotry that permeated
much of the social sciences and humanities.
Starting in the 1950s, Islam also attracted the
attention of several spiritual explorers from the
West who were led hither by their disappointment
with the poverty of living spiritual traditions
in their own societies. The deep understanding of
Islam they acquired through association with authentic
Sufis - Muslims who cultivated, in addition to their
meticulous observance of the Shariah, the inner
dimensions of Islam - allowed them to write several
outstanding books on the metaphysical and spiritual
perspectives of Islam, both as they are practiced
by its living exponents and as they are reflected
in the calligraphy, architecture and the still surviving
traditional crafts of the Islamic world. The writings
of Rene Guenon, Titus Burckhardt, Frithjof Schuon,
Martin Lings, Charles Le Gai Eaton, among others,
demonstrate conclusively that Islam offers an original
spiritual perspective that is fully capable of supporting
a deeply religious life.
Yet, running counter to these developments, a new
Orientalism was also taking shape in the post-War
era. It was not based on any strikingly new thesis
about Islam. Instead, it was mostly a repackaging
of the old Orientalism designed to renew a more
intrusive dual US-Israeli control over the Middle
East. Led by Bernard Lewis, the new Orientalists
claim that the Islamicate world is a failed civilization.
Among other things, they argue that Islamicate societies
have failed to modernize because Islam's mixing
of religion and politics makes it incompatible with
democracy; Islam does not support equal rights for
women and minorities; and Islam commands Muslims
to wage war until the whole world is brought under
the sway of Islamic law. In short, because of its
intransigence and failure to adapt to the challenges
of modernity, Islam has become the greatest present
threat to civilization, that is, to Western interests.
What makes this repackaged Orientalism new are its
intentions, its proponents, and the enemy it has
targeted for destruction. Its intention is to mobilize
the United States behind a scheme to balkanize the
Middle East into ethnic, sectarian and religious
micro states, a new system of client states that
would facilitate Israel's long-term hegemony over
the region. Ironically, the scholars who have dominated
this repackaging of the old Orientalism are mostly
Jewish, a reversal of roles that flows directly
from the creation of a Jewish colonial-settler state
in the heart of the Middle East. Once they had succeeded
in creating Israel, the Zionists knew that its long-term
survival depended on fomenting wars between the
West and Islam. Zionism has pursued this goal by
its own wars against Arabs and, since 1967, a brutal
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; but equally,
it has pulled out all the stops to convince the
United States to support unconditionally Israel's
depredations against Arabs.
The target of the war that the new Orientalists
want to wage are what they variously call Islamists,
Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic militants, Islamo-fascists,
or Islamic terrorists. Whatever the term, it embraces
all Islamicate movements - no matter what their
positions on the political uses of violence - that
appeal to Islamic symbols to mobilize local, national,
and pan-Islamic resistance against the wars that
the United States and Israel have jointly waged
against the Middle East since 1945. These Islamicate
resistance movements, which are both national and
transcend national boundaries, have replaced the
secular nationalists who, after failing to achieve
their objectives, were co-opted by the United States
and Israel to destroy the Islamicate resistance.
The events that have unfolded over the past few
decades - the rise of the Islamicate resistance,
the strategic cooperation between the United States
and Israel, the new Orientalism, and the war that
is now being waged against the Islamicate world
- could have been foreseen, and indeed were foreseen,
when the British first made a commitment to create
a Jewish state in Palestine. An American writer
on international affairs, Herbert Adams Gibbons,
showed more acuity on the long-term fallout of Britain's
Zionist plans than the leading Western statesmen
of the times. In January 1919, he wrote: "If
the peace conference decides to restore the Jews
to Palestine, immigration into and development of
the country can be assured only by the presence
of a considerable army for an indefinite period.
Not only the half million Moslems living in Palestine,
but the millions in surrounding countries, will
have to be cowed into submission by the constant
show and occasional use of force (italics added)."Even
more prophetically, Anstruther MacKay, military
governor of part of Palestine during World War I,
wrote that the Zionist project would "arouse
fierce Moslem hostility and fanaticism against the
Western powers that permitted it. The effect of
this hostility would be felt through the Middle
East, and would cause trouble in Syria, Mesopotamia,
Egypt, and India. To this might be ascribed by future
historians the outbreak of a great war between the
white and the brown races, a war into which America
would without doubt be drawn (italics added)."
We are now living in the future predicted by Gibbons
and MacKay. The Islamicate resistance has been slow
in developing but now its has spread in one form
or another beyond Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and
India to the farthest corners of the Islamic world
- and even into the Islamic diaspora in the West.
The challenge of scholarship is to define, locate,
contextualize and debunk the New Orientalism. We
constantly need to remind the world, especially
the Western world, so mesmerized by the images flashing
on the TV screens, that there is a long history
of Western depredations - wars, colonization, slavery,
exterminations, expropriations, treachery and hypocrisy
- behind the images that disturb their hopes of
peace founded on grave injustices.
History is the ally of tormented peoples; they can
tell it as it was. It is the tormentors who deny
their history; they have to make it up to deny the
torments they have inflicted. They must speak constantly,
unremittingly of the need to put down insurgencies,
terrorist attacks, threats to world peace, and violence
against the civilized order. We too must constantly
revisit the history of Western depredations over
the past four centuries to connect the world's present
miseries to this infamous history. Only a deepening
consciousness of this history, constantly renewed,
carries hope that the powers that use stealth to
manufacture terror can be stopped.
