Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (11 page)

The metaphorical use of idolatry to depict the capitalist West is not in fact new; nor is the view that Jews are its archetypical idolaters. Karl Marx, that bitter grandson of a rabbi, once remarked: “Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and converts them into commodities.” He also believed that the “bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god. His god is only an illusionary bill of exchange.”
¹
This kind of rhetoric was later adopted by radical Islamists, some of whom probably read Marx before they read Islamic texts. But the literal use of idolatry, which emerged among political Islamists, is a lethal innovation.

Lest we blame Islam for everything, it should be pointed out that the idea of idolatry as the ultimate religious sin comes originally from Judaism. In terms of scale, Judaism is not a world religion. It has barely the size of a sect. Yet Judaism has had a huge influence in shaping the idea of idolatry as a key religious concept. Idolatry in the Bible is couched in terms of personal relations. God is the husband and Israel the wife, who betrays her husband with a lover, a false god. Idolatry is adultery. The jealous God of the Bible is modeled on the jealous husband. This is particularly striking in Hosea. Israel, the wife, prefers other lovers to God, thinking they are better equipped to satisfy her material needs. She says, “I will go after my lovers, who supply my bread and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink” (Hosea 2:5).

These lovers are in fact the big powers of that time, ruled by alien gods: “You played the whore with your neighbors, the lustful Egyptians—you multiplied your harlotries to anger Me. . . . In your insatiable lust you also played the whore with the Assyrians; you played the whore with them, but were still unsated. You multiplied your harlotries with Chaldea, that land of traders; yet even with this you were not satisfied. . . .

Yet you were not like a prostitute, for you spurned fees. [You were like] the adulterous wife, who welcomes strangers instead of her husband” (Ezekiel 16:26-32).

This shows that the nightmare vision of big powers as potential seducers, who compete with the reign of God, is as old as the Hebrew Bible. The relationship between husband and wife is not the only formative metaphor for idolatry in religious texts. Religious language is full of metaphors for political sovereignty, describing the rule of God. God, after all, is the only legitimate king of the universe. God the King rules exclusively in relation to His creatures. That is why people should worship only Him. Violating His exclusivity is idolatrous.

Heads of great powers are constantly accused of hubris for trespassing on the domain of God. This is what God told Ezekiel to say to the Prince of Tyre: “Because you have been so haughty and have said ‘I am a god; I sit enthroned like a god in the heart of the seas,’ whereas you are not a god but a man, though you deemed your mind equal to a god’s . . . I swear I will bring against you strangers, the most ruthless of nations” (Ezekiel 28:2-7).

The connection between idolatry and hubris in the big powers surrounding Israel is made explicit by the words of Isaiah (2:7-8): “Their land is full of silver and gold, there is no limit to their treasures; their land is full of horses, there is no limit to their chariots. And their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have wrought.” Chariots and horses were the heavy weaponry of that time and the main symbols of big powers. All we need to do to bring this up to date is to change the names of the big powers and the weapons in their arsenal. The rage against them remains the same.

Idolatry becomes an issue as soon as worldly authority demands a political loyalty that rivals what we owe to God. Islamists see the political reality of our time not only in political but in theological terms. Muslim countries with secular governments are accused by radical Islamists of idolatry, or
tajhil
. Such accusations begin as religious sermons but are quickly translated into political activism against the agents of idolatry in the Muslim world, usually the people in power, and the main operator behind those agents, the idolatrous West.

The term for idolatry, or religious ignorance, is
jahiliyya.
It describes the state of ignorance among the Arabs before the revelations of the Prophet. But the great scholar of Islam Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921) disagreed with the conventional translation of
jahiliyya
as ignorance, and preferred the term “barbarism.” In his view, Muslims believed that Muhammad was sent to uproot the idolatry of the barbarians and thus to wipe out barbarism. This is an important correction, which helps us understand the force of the current use of the “new
jahiliyya
” as a more noxious form of barbarism.

The word
jahili
is analogous to the way the ancient Greeks understood “barbarism.” The distinction between “us,” the Greeks, and “them,” the barbarians, is a distinction between two types of human beings. The Romans used it to refer to those beyond the pale of Roman civilization, rude savages. The barbarians are not quite human. It is this connotation that conveys the full force of the idea of a new
jahiliyya,
as the barbarism of our time emerging from the West. The new
jahiliyya
is a dehumanizing idea, one that fuels a new holy war against evil, fought in the absolute terms of Manichaeism.

 

 

 

MANICHAEISM, FOUNDED IN PERSIA BY MANI IN THE third century A.D., was once a serious rival to Christianity as the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. There were still Manichaeic communities in China in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Manichaeism no longer exists as a religion today, but remnants of its worldview are still with us. It is used as a cliché for any doctrine that sees the world in black and white, dividing “us,” the children of light, from “them,” the evil children of darkness. When Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” and George W. Bush lumped North Korea, Iran, and Iraq together as the “axis of evil,” they were speaking in Manichaean terms.

There is, however, a more profound way in which Manichaeism is still at work. The West, in the Occidentalist view, worships matter; its religion is materialism, and matter in the Manichaean view is evil. By worshiping the false god of matter, the West becomes the realm of evil, which spreads its poison by colonizing the realm of the good. That is why, in 1998, Osama bin Laden called upon all Muslims to fight a holy war against “Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allied with them.” In terms of religious Occidentalism, the struggle with the West is not just a political struggle but a cosmic drama, much like the drama of Manichaeism.

Like many religions, Manichaeism was formed around a creation myth. In the beginning, there were two realms, the realm of the good, symbolized by light, and the dark realm of evil. They were separate, but there was an inherent instability in the realm of darkness, since there could be no harmony and equilibrium in evil. One day, the devil, while traveling along the border of the two realms, caught a glimpse of the realm of light and desired the territory for himself. And so the realm of darkness became the evil empire, invading the realm of the good. This led to a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, and the world, as we know it, was created as the result of that war. One detail of this titanic struggle is worth mentioning. The matter of the world is made from the bodies of the princes of darkness, and earth is made from their defecation; earth stands for matter, and the negative attitude to earth is a negative attitude to matter in general.

The Manichaean picture of two separate, independent realms of good and evil, ruled by equally powerful forces, shared by the Zoroastrian faith in Persia, is unacceptable to monotheistic religions, including Islam. In the biblical view there can be only one source for all existence and that is God: “I am the Lord, and there is none else. . . . I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all this” (Isaiah 45:5-7).

In Islam, too, the idea of two realms is considered a heresy. Nonetheless, since it is hard to reconcile the creation of evil with a supremely benevolent God, there are still strands of Manichaeism in monotheistic religions too, even as the doctrine of two realms is rejected. This can be seen in religious attitudes to matter. God in the Hebrew Bible created matter when He created the world and pronounced it good. But matter was still an inferior form of existence, far removed from the divine spirit. The Christians believe that God came down in the flesh through Jesus, His son, but this story of incarnation only highlights the sacrifice involved in appearing to humanity in the flesh. For the flesh is not just weak, but rotten; matter decays, and can never be the proper medium for God’s eternal being.

It is likely that the children of light, as they called themselves, of the Dead Sea sect, fighting the children of darkness, influenced the Pauline distinction between flesh and the spirit, flesh being on the negative side of the division. In Platonism, too, matter is seen as the lowest form of being. Augustine, who started off as a believer in Manichaeism, later became a fierce opponent. But as a Christian Platonist he retained a negative attitude to matters of the flesh.

The idea that the body is inherently imperfect and prone to corruption continued to have an influence on both Christianity and Islam. The human body is subject to sexual desires that result in moral depravity. The flesh is not only unworthy of God, but unworthy even of man. For man is elevated from matter by the divine spirit in him, by his soul. Because they have souls, unlike other creatures, humans are able to live a nobler, higher, more spiritual form of existence.

This goes to the crux of religious Occidentalism, as espoused by radical Islamists. Matter, in the Occidentalist view, shared by some extreme Hinduists and prewar Japanese Shintoists, is the god of the West and materialism its religion. The East, on the other hand, if left to its own devices, free from “Westoxication,” is the realm of deep spirituality. The struggle of East and West is a Manichaean struggle between the idolatrous worshipers of earthly matter and true worshipers of the godly spirit.

To be sure, the notion of a materialist capitalist West worshiping false gods is not only held by religious Occidentalists. We already mentioned Karl Marx. A dedicated materialist, he rendered “commodity fetishism” as an illusion that commodities have value, much like the belief of religious fetishists in the holiness of their objects. It is the false conviction that objects have an inherent value or sacred content, whereas in fact they derive all their value and sacred properties from human relations. An object is sacred only because we sanctify it. A commodity has a value, an exchange value, because we value it, and not because of some inherent value. Modern capitalism fosters illusions, and the commodity and money worshipers who believe in them are deluded much as fetish worshipers are.

Bourgeois capitalism, then, associated with the West, is accused from opposite directions, by materialists and religious believers, of being fetishistic. Religious Occidentalists see Western worship of money and commodities as something akin to the pagan worship of trees and stones, far removed from the spiritual realm that is worthy of devotion. And Marxists see capitalist commodity worship as something like the illusion of religion itself.

Some religious ideologues, such as Ali Shari’ati, an intellectual pioneer of revolutionary Islam in Iran, tried to appropriate such Marxist themes as market fetishism for Islamist criticism of the West. Shari’ati attributed many ills to the West, and to what was imported from the West by the countries under its spell—imperialism, international Zionism, colonialism, multinational corporations, and so forth—but worse than anything else was
gharbzadegi,
the blind and mindless following of Western culture.

Shari’ati was convinced that there was only one way for people of the Third World to fight the maladies of the West. They had to develop a cultural identity around religion. In his case, this meant Islam, preferably in its Shi’ite form. He saw religion, not Marxism, as a potentially liberating force. While still working as an elementary school teacher in Khurasan in the early 1950s, he translated and published
Abu Dharr: The God Worshiping Socialist,
a book by an Egyptian writer named Abdul Hamid Jowdat al-Sahar. Abu Dharr was one of the Prophet’s followers, who demanded justice for the poor and denounced the rich for deserting the true God for the god of money. Shari’ati regarded Dharr as the hero of Islamic history: “We want the Islam of Abu Zahar [Dharr], not that of the Royal palace; of justice and true leadership, not that of the caliphs and class stratification.”
²

Shari’ati’s attitude to Marxism was complicated. He used it as a tool for analysis of society and never thought of Marxists as heretics. Heretics, in his view, were judged in the Qur’an not by their metaphysical beliefs, but by their actions. But his deviation from Marxism and from secular radical Third World thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, was tactical as well as substantive. On tactical grounds, he thought the masses could be recruited only with the help of an ideology that they revered—that is, by religion. But what Marxists regarded as fetishism metaphorically, he, as a radical Shi’ite, took quite literally to be idolatry.

This is not stated as explicitly in Shari’ati as in the works of other radical Islamist writers, but he laid the basis for making this idea of idolatry hugely influential. He saw radical Islam as an iconoclastic movement that set out to destroy the Western idols, which had become objects of veneration in the Third World in general, and in Islamic countries in particular.

The charge of idolatry is, however, not simply a repetition of the banal contention that the West is secular. The idea of the secular West is dubious anyway, for it hardly applies to the United States, where organized religion still thrives, even in the highest government circles. Still, it is a common assumption that modernization means secularization.