ISLAM AND POLITICS

Islam and Orientalism

Edward Said --a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University-- has been applauded as one of the most important literary and cultural critics of the late 20th century. Said's book, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, established his reputation and claimed Western portrayal of Arab-Islamic culture revealed more about Western imperialism than the cultures Westerners observed. Said states that most of what the West knew about the non-Western world is known in the framework of colonialism. This thesis led Said to argue that Western scholarship on Muslim societies essentially and continually misrepresents their reality and their worth. Has Said got it right?

Said and Orientalism

In his book, Orientalism, Said defines orientalism as a system invented by the West on the assumption of a strong distinction between East and West. Europe as represented by orientalism has usually looked at the Orient as a place of romance inhabited by exotic human beings and filled with haunting memories and landscape. Said takes the late 18th century as an approximate starting point for Western orientalism, which he describes as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient --dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, and ruling over it: in short, orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the orient.

Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends.

To Said, orientalism does not study the orient for the sake of establishing the truth of what it describes, and it possesses no disinterested view of the object of its preoccupation.

For Said, orientalism is a discursive phenomenon, internally consistent and self-perpetuating in virtual insulation from any correspondence with a real Orient. In short, orientalism is an ideology, the purpose of which aimed covertly to nourish the political domination of the West. Finally Said sums up his view on orientalism by comparing orientalism to a drama and the orientalist to a dramatist:

Said's argument on orientalism, says Minear, is a complex one. He deals not simply with academic orientalists, but with adventurers, novelists, philosophers; not simply with scholarly interpretations, but with a style of thought; not simply with ideas, but also with orientalism as a corporate institution.

Critiques and Evaluation

Said's analysis of orientalism is a powerful one, and any serious study of the subject has to take it on board. It is presumably true that Said is successful in proving orientalism as an academic discourse which is encouraged by colonialism and imperialism. And it is clear that the purpose of orientalism was not merely the erudite or imaginative interest in a region, but the traditions and vested interests of a scholarly guild (oriental studies) alleged to work hand in hand with colonialism and imperialism.

Overall, Said's thesis is the reflection and proof of Western notions of superiority over the Orient. The history has shown that the Oriental World has been dominated by Western power in economy, politics, culture, ideology, knowledge and technology. In this case, the Oriental World has been "Orientalised".

Said is successful in removing the mask of the European scholar who approached his subject (Orient world) in the framework of Western colonialism and imperialism.

Although Said presents an extraordinary analysis, there are, however, some critiques regarding his thesis on orientalism. Firstly, there is a curious sidelight to Said's thesis. Orientalists may have been employed in quite large numbers by governments intent on imperialist goals or found their way into orientalism through one or other of the colonial services, but this was largely because few institutions other than governments or academies could employ such specialists.

Furthermore, not all orientalists became servants of imperialism, and even of those who were, according to Woodcock, many performed extraordinary feats of disinterested research. Said also provides no support at all for his contention that colonial rule was justified in advance by orientalism because, according to Windschuttle, he fails to cite evidence about the actual causal sequence that led to the annexation of any of the territories occupied by England or France in the nineteenth century.

In addition, the point of origin for Said's argument on orientalism is the 18th century Western discourse of hostility toward the Arab-Islamic world.

Another critique was that to condemn all orientalists as driven by imperialism interest and a pathological hatred of Islam is incorrect. As Ahmed says, the work of the older orientalists was marked by many positive features. In this category are the well-known names of Bernard Lewis, Arthur Arberry, Montgomery Watt, Louis Massignon and Charis Waddy.

Furthermore, Said also neglects to answer why the Orientalist view on Islam was very dominant. This view dominated because there was no correspondingly strong Eastern counter-image of either the Occident or the Orient to oppose and balance this view. As Meyers maintains, Islam is not vitally interested in the structured study of other cultures, either as an end in itself or as a means toward a clearer understanding of its own character and history. In this case, Muslim scholars should improve their effort to counter-attack orientalist writings on Islam by socialising an occidentalism.

Overall, Said's critique of orientalism, though at times excessive, was insightful in identifying deficiencies and bias in the scholarship of the past. However, new forms of orientalism flourish today in the hands who equate revivalism, fundamentalism, or Islamic movements solely with radical revolutionaries, and who fail to focus on the vast majority of Islamically committed Muslims who belong to the moderate mainstream of society. According to Esposito, the challenge today, as in the past, is to avoid the easy answers yielded by stereotyping or the projection of monolithic threat, to distinguish between the beliefs and the activities of majority (whether the be Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jews and Buddhists) and a minority of extremists who justify their aggression and violence in the name of religion, ethnicity, or political ideology.

To conclude, whether what Said presents is objectively true, or whether it is a subjective and slightly paranoid projection of his own situation as an Arab absorbed into a western academic world, the fact remains that he does raise important questions regarding westerners approach to way of life and ways of thinking outside western tradition. Last, it is necessary to note that every one (including orientalist scholars) should see Muslims and the Muslims world as a unity. Similarly, Europe or the West should also be appreciated in their diversity and complexity. Yet, Esposito states, since both sides tend to consider and talk about each other as a bloc, the language of "Islam and the West" will of necessity be employed at times.

posted by Alin at 5:44 PM