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Western
Perceptions of Islam
The
Legacy of Orientalism and the New World: Islam as the ‘Other’ of
the West?
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Ibrahim
Kalin
George Washington University
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14/04/2003
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The
modern Orientalist structuring of Islam, it is to be emphasized, was
a rather substantial improvement on the earlier depictions of things
Oriental and Islamic as sensual, despotic, backward, underdeveloped,
tribal, promiscuous, aberrant, irrational, and mysterious. Some of
these conceptions, however, proved to be persisting and are to be
seen on a day-to-day basis in Western media. While Orientalism
remains to be an important chapter in the history of Islam and the
West, new modes of approaching Islam, ranging from dialogue and
critical understanding to confrontation and rejection, continue to
make their appearances in various forms and arenas.
In
the second part of the 20th century, an exclusive focus has been
placed on what came to be labeled as political, militant and
fundamentalist Islam. The relegation of the word ‘Islam’ to
political and military confrontation in the minds of many Westerners
has also the added effect of reducing Islam to a subcategory of the
Middle East conflict. Ironically, or perhaps tragically we should
say, many people in the West turn to Islam as a way of understanding
the causes of the lingering and violent conflict in the Middle East,
and this approach, perpetuated in Western media on a daily basis,
reinforces the image of Islam as a distant and foreign phenomenon,
as a violent and militant faith, and as a monolithic world prone to
extremism of all kinds.
In
this context, Islam, in keeping with the secular purview of modern
politics, is seen not so much as a religious heresy, even though
many conservative Christians still hold on to this idea, as a global
threat to Western civilization and its values. In many ways, the
historical depiction of Islam as the ‘other’ of the West and
everything the West is presumed to stand for has now reemerged in
the highly articulate and widespread discourse on political Islam,
keeping the image of monolithic Islam within the context of
religious violence.
At
this point, we can distinguish two main attitudes towards Islam as
they have become especially clear in the aftermath of September 11.
The first is the resurfacing of the medireview descriptions of Islam
as the religion of the sword, the Prophet as a violent person,
Muslim societies as power-driven collectivities, and so on. The
second attitude has been to identify Islam as a code of belief and
action that is obstinately irrational, anti-modern, rigid,
religious, traditional, and so on, and expectedly all of these
qualifiers have been employed to account for the root causes of the
current confrontation between the Islamic and Western worlds.
The
identification of Islam with violence and militancy is now a very
powerful image by which things Islamic including the question of
human rights and women in Islam are understood and judged in the
Western hemisphere. It therefore becomes necessary to address,
albeit very briefly, the question of religious violence in relation
to the current perceptions of Islam.
In
recent decades, many academics, policy-makers, the so-called
experts, and their lay readers repeatedly claimed that Islam is the
only religion in the world that condones and produces religious
violence and terrorism on a consistent basis. The images of suicide
bombers, hijackings, assassinations, street riotings and uprisings
inform the coded language of ‘militant Islam’, and their raison
d’etre is related in an astonishingly simplistic way to the
religion of Islam rather than to the particular political
circumstances that have given rise to them.
At
this point, it is crucial to note that the long journey of the
Islamic world in the last two centuries cannot be understood
properly without paying attention to the legacy of colonialism to
which the Muslim world responded in a myriad of ways from
millennialism (mahdism) and reformism to modernism and political
confrontation. These responses, whose full analysis we have to leave
for another study, have had two major results. The first is the deep
impact they have on the Muslim perceptions of the West as a
colonialist power on the one hand, and as a secular civilization, on
the other. The memory of colonialism, it is to be remembered, is
still alive in the Islamic world as it struggles to overcome the
political and economic predicament that surrounds it, and this
memory breeds the anti-Western sentiments in the Muslim world.
On
a more philosophical level, the secular character of modern Western
civilization is seen as a threat and area of confrontation for the
Muslim world which remains by and large more religious and
traditional than any other part of the world. Exportation of modern
consumerist culture, its popular icons, and the modes of behavior
that come with them are perceived to have an eroding effect on the
texture of traditional Muslim societies and propel many to denounce
the West as a materialist and worldly civilization. This view of the
West is nothing new to a conservative Christian living in Europe or
in America who sees sex, drugs, violence, destruction of the family,
capitalism, and so on under the same or similar light as a devout
Muslim, Jew or Hindu. The difference is the deep culture shock that
accompanies a non-Westerner’s perception of modern culture.
Having
said that, it should also be emphasized that the primary target of
such anti-modernist and anti-Western discourse is not so much the
West in and of itself but the West in the Islamic world,
viz., what some have referred to as the “macdonaldization” of
the world. Tropes and commodities of modern Western culture become a
source of contention when they are exported to traditional societies
in the name of modernization, development, and globalization.
Paradoxically, when these criticisms are translated from the Islamic
world back to the West, they are typically presented as bases for
militant fundamentalism and anti-modernism while similar criticisms
in the West are divested of any such militant or political
connotations.
This
leads us to the second impact of the Muslim responses to the
challenges of the modern world and it is the projection of Islam and
Muslims as a menacing power directed at the foundations of modern
civilization. It is usually in this context that the charges of
militancy and terrorism are brought up against the Islamic world.
There is no denying the fact that certain groups that remain to be a
very small minority in the Islamic world resort to violence to
achieve their goals. What is of importance for the Western
perceptions of Islam, however, is the way the coded language of
fundamentalism, militancy, terrorism, extremism, and so on is used
to make essentialist and reductionist statements about Islam as a
religion.
The
obvious cases of violence are picked out from the Islamic world to
bolster the image of Islam as a militant threat to the West in spite
of the fact that such acts of violence committed in the name of
Islam are rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. More
often than not, use of violence in different Muslim countries is
related in one way or another to the religion of Islam itself, and
the so-called experts of Islam and terrorism labor to show that
there is an essential relation between the two, that the Qur’an
contains some teachings that are violent in nature, that the early
history of Islam was entrenched in violence, that the spread of
Islam was the result of Islam’s militant tendencies, and so on.
These claims, which do nothing more than invigorating the monolithic
image of Islam as a violent and militant religion, take us back
where the long journey of Islam and the West had begun, viz., the
medireview perceptions of Islam as the religion of the sword.
The
fact that Islam is singled out among other religions or religious
groups against which charges of violence and extremism can
justifiably be brought up goes to show the extent to which we can
become captives of our own history. In spite of the colonial period,
the golden age of Orientalism, and the massive body of information
about Islam and the Muslim world in Western institutions of
learning, Islam is still perceived to be an alien phenomenon outside
the religious and intellectual horizon of Western hemisphere.
The
lack of knowledge and acquaintance that had obstructed the study of
Islam for centuries during the Middle Ages continues to be a
stumbling block for the appreciation of the rich tapestry of Islamic
culture and history. Since the average Westerner is much more
familiar with the Judeo-Christian tradition, he or she is in a
better position to appreciate the diversity of that tradition and
distinguish between the rule and the exception that proves it such
as the ones mentioned above. In the case of Islam, we scarcely refer
to a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition whereby the historical
unknowing of Islam can be undone and a more improved picture of
Islam can be constructed.
As
the foregoing survey shows in bare outline, Western perceptions of
Islam have a long history and display considerable diversity. From
the early Byzantine polemics against Islam to the accounts of
European travelers in the 17th and 18th
centuries and the current views of Islam in our time, there are
continuities as well as ruptures and discontinuities that inform the
relationship between Islam and the West. Both worlds, we may
justifiably argue, see one another through the eyes of its own
self-understanding as they strive to come to terms with their own
identity and their view of the other.
The
Muslim perceptions of the West are inevitably encoded in Muslim
modes of self-understanding that has undergone a number of changes
throughout Islamic history, generating new modes of perception and
relation towards European civilization. A Muslim’s view of
Christianity or Greek philosophy in the 9th century is
not the same as his approach to modern science and technology in the
18th or 19th centuries.
When
we speak of continuities and discontinuities in the history of Islam
and the West, we can do so only within the context of the
perseverance and/or waning of certain types of self-perception and
self-understanding. In this sense, the encounter of the Muslim world
with the modern West, its science and technology, its military and
economic might, or its worldview is also an encounter with itself in
that the Muslim world’s self-perception informs the ways in which
the ‘West’ as a term of contrast and comparison is constructed
in the Islamic world. Such burning issues as tradition and
modernity, revival of Islamic civilization, economic and political
development in Muslim countries, modern science and its
philosophical challenges and so on cannot be properly discussed in
today’s Islamic world without having the West in the back of our
minds.
By
the same token, the West’s encounter with Islam is also a coming
to terms with its own self-image. Ethnocentrism, universalism versus
particularism and locality, representations of the other, the legacy
of colonialism, globalization, human rights, pluralism, and the
limits of modernism are only a few among the many issues that define
the West in its relation to the non-Western world. In a day and age
in which national and cultural boundaries are crossed over in a
myriad of media, none of these issues can be discussed without
attending to their meanings and implications for cultures and
identities beyond the precincts of the Western world.
At
this juncture, studying Islam and its Western constructions is an
exercise in looking at ourselves and our modes of perception as they
are reflected in the images and categories by which we understand
the other. Whether Islam is conceived to be a religious heresy,
theological challenge, sister civilization, or simply an alien
culture, we can no longer fail to see its relevance and urgency for
West’s understanding of itself vis-à-vis Islam.
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