Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (15 page)

“The peasants’ clay hovels were unfit for stables. The children lay naked in the streets, and grew up like dumb beasts.” But now everything was different. For all “benefitted from the progressive measures of the New Society, whether they wanted to or not, whether they joined it or not.” The swamps were drained, canals dug, trees planted. And there was plenty of work for everyone. Only begging was now strictly forbidden.

This is the kind of stuff that filled Chinese or Soviet publications in the 1960s, the idea that human happiness could be bought with foaming turbines and bumper harvests, that nothing so irrational as religious, national, or ethnic pride would stand in the way of the mighty roar of modern progress, and that “primitive” peoples would be only too happy to be taken in hand by more enlightened races marching toward a glorious future. These were fantasies and noxious results. When Herzl wrote his book, they were merely a day-dream.

Altneuland
is still worth reading because it contains so much that is grand and hopeful about Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. From this kind of thinking came the industrial revolution, liberal democracy, scientific discovery, civil rights. But the same Promethean dreams of European rationalists, taken to their logical extremes and brutally implemented, often by non-Europeans who wanted to catch up with Western progress, have ended in the mass graves of the
gulag
and the killing fields of China and Cambodia. Europeans justified their imperial conquests with claims of progress and enlightenment. Asian tyrants murdered millions with the same justifications.

Reactions to the rationalist dreams of Eastern tyrants or Western empires have been just as bloody. The Islamist revolutionary movement that currently stalks the world, from Kabul to Java, would not have existed without the harsh secularism of Reza Shah Pahlavi or the failed experiments in state socialism in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. This is why it was such a misfortune, in many ways, for the Middle East to have encountered the modern West for the first time through echoes of the French Revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins were inspiring heroes for Arab radicals: progressive, egalitarian, and opposed to the Christian church. Later models for Arab progress—Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—were even more disastrous. But to see the upheavals of the twentieth century as a pendulum, swinging from Western rationalism to Oriental religious zeal, would be a mistake, for the two extremes are dangerously entangled.

Most revolts against Western imperialism, and its local offshoots, borrowed heavily from Western ideas. The samurai who founded the modern Japanese state in 1867 did so to defend themselves against being colonized by the West. But it was defense by mimicry. Their ideals could have been lifted straight from
Altneuland
. The Meiji oligarchs were in many ways the perfect pupils of Europe. Changing their kimono for tail-coats and top hats, they set about smashing Buddhist temples and transforming their country in the name of Progress, Science, and Enlightenment. Japan’s own imperial conquests were justified along the same lines. Like Herzl, Japanese empire builders took the gratitude of lesser breeds for granted.

But coiled like an anaconda inside the modern transformation of Japan was a nativist counterrevolution, which sought to save the spiritual purity of an ancient culture from the soulless modernity of the Occident and its slavish Oriental acolytes. Yet the counterrevolution, too, despite its Shinto and samurai romance, was heavily in debt to Western ideas, most particularly the anticapitalist strains of National Socialism. What complicates the picture even further is that Western-style modernity and nativist revolt existed inside the same establishment, and often in the minds of the same people.

This is the problem. No Occidentalist, even the most fervent holy warrior, can ever be entirely free of the Occident. The prewar Japanese conundrum, of revolution fermenting in the heart of the establishment it seeks to destroy, is evident in the Middle East as well. Islamic revolutionaries have been harbored, and sometimes even encouraged, by nominally secular regimes, in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. What makes their terror so lethal is not just the religious hatred borrowed from old texts, which is in any case often based on distortions, but the synthesis of religious zealotry and modern ideology, of ancient bigotry and modern technology.

The furnace for such syntheses is often located in the West itself. Pol Pot melded revolutionary Marxism with Khmer nationalism as a student of radio technology in Paris.

The Iranian revolutionary scholar Ali Shari’ati was only a few years younger than Pol Pot, and also spent some years studying in Paris, where he translated the works of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Shari’ati’s views on “Islam as practical socialism” were a conscious fusion of secular and religious dogmas. His faith was turned into the vehicle of armed struggle. Martyrdom (“red death”) was promoted as the highest form of existence—not just an end, but a goal in itself. He had turned from Marxism to a purist version of Islam. And yet he used the political terminology of freedom and equality.

Ba’athism, the ideology of the Syrian and former Iraq governments, is a synthesis, forged in the 1930s and 1940s, of fascism and romantic nostalgia for an “organic” community of Arabs. It was developed, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of World War I, by such thinkers as Sati’ Husri and Michel ‘Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath Party in Syria. European colonialism was the main enemy of pan-Arab activists. But, as usual, the West was fought with ideas that originated in Europe, the same ideas that inspired radical nationalists in Japan.

Sati’ Husri was a keen student of German Romantic thinkers such as Fichte and Herder who countered the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of an organic,
völkisch
nation, rooted in blood and soil. His ideal of pulling the Arab world together in a huge organic community was directly inspired by pan-German theories that held sway in fascist circles in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. An Arab
Volksgemeinschaft,
bound by military discipline and heroic individual sacrifice, was what he dreamed of. And, by the way, some of the early Zionists were just as much in thrall to the same German ideas. In his memoirs, one such figure, Hans Kohn, writes that young Jews “transferred Fichte’s teaching” into the “context of our own situation . . . we accepted his appeal to bring forth the ideal community by placing all the power of the rationally and ethically mature individual at the service of his own nation.”
¹

Sati’ Husri also used the idea of
asabiyya,
or (Arab) blood solidarity, developed in the fourteenth century by Ibn Khaldun. The aim, in any case, was to overcome “abstract Western thinking” and free the Arab people from feudalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism. This, and a version of totalitarian socialism, is still the official ideology of the Ba’athists today.

Islamism was the revolutionary idea coiled within this secularist revolution, and to crush actual or potential religious revolts against their secular tyrannies, Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athist rulers have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of fellow Arabs, mostly Shi’ite Muslims. Far more Muslim blood has been shed inside Arab nations than in all the wars between Israelis and Palestinians. And yet, the Ba’athists, when it suits them, have also encouraged religious terrorism against the Western “Crusaders” and “Zionists.” Saddam Hussein, for one, liked to portray himself as Saladin, savior of the Arabs, riding his white steed to wipe out the infidels.

The question, then, is how to protect the idea of the West—that is to say, the world’s liberal democracies—against its enemies. And the West, in this sense, includes such fragile Asian democracies as Indonesia and the Philippines. This is not the place for a discussion of military tactics or international diplomacy. The question is what to think, how to conceive the problem. It is perhaps easier to conclude what not to think.

Although Christian fundamentalists speak of a crusade, the West is not at war against Islam. Indeed, the fiercest battles will be fought inside the Muslim world. That is where the revolution is taking place, and where it will have to be halted, preferably not by outside intervention, but by Muslims themselves. There is indeed a worldwide clash going on, but the fault lines do not coincide with national, ethnic, or religious borders. The war of ideas is in some respects the same as the one that was fought several generations ago against various versions of fascism and state socialism. This is not to say that the military war is the same, or that all the ideas overlap. In the 1940s, the war was only between states. Now it is also against a disparate, worldwide, loosely organized, mostly underground revolutionary movement.

The other intellectual trap to avoid is the paralysis of colonial guilt. It should be repeated: European and American histories are stained with blood, and Western imperialism did much damage. But to be conscious of that does not mean we should be complacent about the brutality taking place in former colonies now. On the contrary, it should make us less so. To blame the barbarism of non-Western dictators or the suicidal savagery of religious revolutions on American imperialism, global capitalism, or Israeli expansionism is not only to miss the point; it is precisely an Orientalist form of condescension, as though only Westerners are adult enough to be morally responsible for what they do.

The idea that organized religion is the main problem might come naturally to the newly secularized, disenchanted Western intellectual, but that, too, is off the mark. For some of the most ferocious enemies of the West are secular, or at least pretend to be. Religion is used everywhere, in India no less than in Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, for reprehensible political ends. But it does not have to be. It can be a force for the good. In the Middle East, it might offer the only hope of a peaceful way out of our current mess.

A distaste for, or even hatred of, the West is in itself not a serious issue. Occidentalism becomes dangerous when it is harnessed to political power. When the source of political power is also the only source of truth, you have a dictatorship. And when the ideology of that dictatorship is hatred of the West, ideas become deadly. These ideas are often inspired by religion. But this does not mean that all religious authority must be crushed. Organized religion has a place, in offering community and spiritual meaning to those who seek it. In the Muslim world today, religion might be harnessed to the struggle for political freedom, in the shape of contending political parties, perhaps. The experiment is alive in such countries as Turkey and Indonesia. Success is far from guaranteed. But it is hard to see how any road to freedom can steal its way around the mosque.

Where political, religious, and intellectual freedom has already been established, it must be defended against its enemies, with force, if need be, but also with conviction. The story we have told in this book is not a Manichaeistic one of a civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now, if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We cannot afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occidentalists, and there would be nothing left to defend.

1
For an exhaustive analysis of this conference, see Harry Harootunian,
Overcome by Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

2
H. Trevor-Roper, ed.,
Hitler’s Table Talk,
trans. N. Cameron and R. H. Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 188.

3
Germany, more than any other European nation, has been the battleground and source of these ideas. For a superb analysis, see Fritz Stern,
The Politics of Cultural Despair
(New York: Doubleday, 1965).

2
Quoted in Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 46.

3
Juvenal,
The Sixteen Satires,
trans. Peter Green (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 43.

4
Ibid.

5
Quoted in Elizabeth Wilson,
The Sphinx in the City
(London: Virago, 1991), p. 58.

6
Voltaire,
Letters Concerning the English Nation
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 30. Other Voltaire quotations are from the same source.

7
Quoted in Ian Buruma,
Anglomania: A European Love Affair
(New York: Random House, 2000), p. 96.

8
Theodor Fontane,
Wanderungen durch England und Schottland
(Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1998), p. 332.

9
Friedrich Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
(London: Penguin, 1987), p. 24.

10
Quoted in Bernard Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites
(London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 111.

11
Alexandra Richie,
Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin
(New York: Carroll de Graf, 1998), p. 439.

12
Ibid., p. 550.

13
Trevor-Roper,
Hitler’s Table Talk,
p. 346.

14
Quoted in Williams,
The Country and the City,
p. 303.

15
Quoted in Philip Short,
Mao: A Life
(New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 447.

16
Quoted in Richard Pipes,
Communism: A History
(London: Phoenix, 2002), p. 135.

17
Quoted in Ahmed Rashid,
Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords
(London: Pan Books, 2001), p. 217.