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| FROM EAST TO WEST: HOW A REVOLUTION IN IDEAS ESTALISHED NEW BATTLELINES |
| 2004-08-06 |
| During the past three years, the 19 Arabs who carried out the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington have received many labels, including "Islamist". Without knowing it, however, they were, in fact, "Occidentalists". This is the message of "Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism"", an engaging essay by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, professors at Bard College in New York and Hebrew University of Jerusalem respectively. The authors define Occidentalism as the "dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies". They chose the term as a nod to "Orientalism", coined 25 years ago by the late American polemicist Edward Said to describe the vision that Western "Imperialists" supposedly developed of the East in the 19th and early 20th century. The word-play is rather unfortunate. The "Orientalists" did not hate the people of the East and, although some developed fantasies about the "Orient", did not belittle the cultures that they studied. Without the "Orientalists", ancient civilisations such as the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Persians and the Chinese may never have been rediscovered and studied. And the most important body of research on Islam has been done, not by Muslim scholars, but by the same "Orientalists" that Said vilified. Champolion, Rawlinson, Goddard and Rypka, not to mention Bernard Lewis today, could not be compared to Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden and Muhammad Ata. Presenting hatred of the West as a form of Manichaean dualism is also problematic. In Manichaeanism, and the Christian dualisms, such as the Paulicans and the Cathares that it inspired, evil is a necessary principle of cosmogony and not an object of hatred. What is this " West" that Occidentalists hate and wish to destroy? The authors do not offer a definition. At some points they sail so close to the wind as to suggest that Aristotle, somehow, represented " the West", because he sought to understand the world through reason while Plato, and his philosophical descendants, given to mysticism, were "Occidentalists". More broadly, ancient Athens represented " the West" while Sparta was "Occidentalist". The "Occidentalists" , we are told, hate the West for four reasons: The West prefers the sinful city to the virtuous countryside; the West replaces heroism with commerce; the West thinks only of matter and not of spirit; the West worships evil. Such juxtapositions, however, are too general to explain the intention of the authors which is to explain why there are people prepared to die while killing Americans, Europeans and Israelis. The city versus country part of the argument dos not apply to Islam because Islam has been a religion of cities from the start. Mecca was regarded as " the sinful city" by the Bedouin who roamed in the " virtuous" desert of Arabia. Today, of the world's six most populous cities three are Muslim. The claim that the West destroys heroism and honour in favour of commerce has been applied to many civilisations at different times. Xenophon thought that of ancient Athens and Juvenal lambasted ancient Rome for it. The Jews looked down at "Chaldae, that land of the traders" (Ezekiel:16:32) while they themselves were later caricaturised in the same way. Napoleon dismissed the English as " a nation of shopkeepers", while the Parsees in India and the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia get similar labels from their Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim compatriots. The charge that the West thinks only of matter, not of the spirit is, as Buruma and Margalit observe, a product of European, mainly German Romanticism, itself an eminently Western product. Finally, the image of the West as evil incarnate is , in origin at least, a product of the schisms that have torn Christianity asunder since its adoption by Constantine as the faith of the Roman Empire. Today's Islamists do not regard Westerners as "evil" but , in the words of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, as "wayward creatures" that must be prodded back onto the right part towards " the Only True Faith", i.e. Islam. The reader ends up by assuming that the term " the West", as used by Buruma and Margalit means all liberal societies while "Occidentalism" is an umbrella term for all forms of totalitarianism throughout history. This leads the authors to suggest that wars waged against Western democracies in the name of the "Russian soul", the "Aryan race", the "state Shinto", Communism, and Islamism have the same origin. An intriguing thought. What makes this elegant essay especially valuable is its core message, as expressed in these lines: " The bourgeois, often philistine, un-heroic, anti-utopian nature of the liberal civilisation can make it difficult to defend
.The Weimar republic did not fall only because of Nazi brutality, reactionary stupidity, military ambitions, or the arguments formulated by {fascist theorists}. It also fell because too few people were prepared to defend it." END |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #1 Nice intellectual article. Thanks for posting. ...This leads the authors to suggest that wars waged against Western democracies in the name of the "Russian soul", the "Aryan race", the "state Shinto", Communism, and Islamism have the same origin..." The bourgeois, often philistine, un-heroic, anti-utopian nature of the liberal civilisation can make it difficult to defend….The Weimar republic did not fall only because of Nazi brutality, reactionary stupidity, military ambitions, or the arguments formulated by {fascist theorists}. It also fell because too few people were prepared to defend it." |
| Posted by: rex 2004-08-06 1:22:39 PM |