Early Orientalism

Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power

Ivan Kalmar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415782760
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136578908
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The history of western notions about Islam is of obvious scholarly as well as popular interest today. This book investigates Christian images of the Muslim Middle East, focusing on the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when the nature of divine as well as human power was under particularly intense debate in the West.

Ivan Kalmar explores how the controversial notion of submission to ultimate authority has in the western world been discussed with reference to Islam's alleged recommendation to obey, unquestioningly, a merciless Allah in heaven and a despotic government on earth. He discusses how Abrahamic faiths – Christianity and Judaism as much as Islam – demand devotion to a sublime power, with the faith that this power loves and cares for us, a concept that brings with it the fear that, on the contrary, this power only toys with us for its own enjoyment. For such a power, Kalmar borrows Slavoj Zizek's term "obscene father". He discusses how this describes exactly the western image of the Oriental despot - Allah in heaven, and the various sultans, emirs and ayatollahs on earth – and how these despotic personalities of imagined Muslim society function as a projection, from the West on to the Muslim Orient, of an existential anxiety about sublime power.

Making accessible academic debates on the history of Christian perceptions of Islam and on Islam and the West, this book is an important addition to the existing literature in the areas of Islamic studies, religious history and philosophy.

1 The Obscene Father

Allah, Jehovah, and the oriental despot

The relation between Eros and Authority, or Love and the Law, is central to Jesus, to Paul, to Freud. But also it is crucial in Moses, in Socrates/Plato, and in King Lear and all Shakespeare …

Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: the names divine¹

Hegel suggested that when we articulate the sublime we make an “attempt to express the infinite, without finding in the sphere of phenomena an object which proves adequate for this representation.”² This does not, however, mean that we give up trying. We find imperfect, partial representations: figures, personifications of the sublime. One of the most important of these is what I have referred to as “the Lord.” I will now examine in some detail the various aspects of sublime power personified as the Lord, exploring further how the theological aspect called “God” and the political aspect we have called “King” relate to the crucial phenomenological category of “Father.”

“God,” the omnipotent – all-powerful, mighty beyond comparison – is to some of the theologically sophisticated, a name for an abstract force. But to ordinary folks some version of the Old Man With the Long White Beard tends to function as the image of the sublime Lord. The worldly figure of Sublime Power, too, is an abstraction, and this, too, needs to be embodied in a concrete personality for the ordinary imagination. In this case, however, there is not a single, universal personification. Parents, teachers, the government are some of the examples. None of these has power that is objectively unlimited, but it may be experienced as such. In earlier times, a major and almost universal example was the King, which is why I have chosen “King” to be the general label for sublime power in its political personification. An absolute King is, in theory, limited only by the heavenly Ruler of the Universe. But in reality the King known to a western subject was seldom quite as mighty as the theory would have it. It was easier to imagine the figure of unfettered worldly power in the oriental mode: the so-called “oriental despot,” the absolute King in the imagined East.

God and King can both be thought of as a caring father, or as an uncaring authoritarian. To Christians, their own God is a caring one. Allah, on the other hand, is often seen (by Christians) as an irate disciplinarian who shows no mercy to those who break his Law. I will argue that this vision of Allah derives from the “vengeful” “fire-and-brimstone” Old Testament God, “Jehovah,” whom Christianity believes to have left behind.

Much as the Christian God-the-Father contrasts with Allah, so the ideal western government contrasts with that of the oriental despot: the first is mindful of the governed; the second cares only for himself. Allah and the oriental despot are figures that project to the East what all of us fear, at least in the Abrahamic religious-cultural space: sublime Power that does not care.³

The Obscene Father

The strict, uncompromising, unresponsive, cold masculine Power of Allah and the oriental despot corresponds to what psychoanalysts label with the metaphor of the “primal,” or “archaic Father.”

In terms of the oedipal metaphor of psychoanalysis, the Father occupies the position of the author and administrator of the Law. He cuts the bond of identity between the Mother and Ego (who, in the more gender-biased original versions, may be specifically the Son, the Daughter requiring separate treatment). In fact, Ego is created by this cut. In subjecting Ego to the Law, the Father ensures Ego's survival in society as an independent, active entity. But there are fathers, and then there are fathers.

In psychoanalysis the figure of the father refracts into two dialectically opposed aspects. One is the caring domestic father figure, who appears to occupy many analysts today, because they see problems in individuals who did not have such a father present in their childhood home.⁴ At the religious level, this is the Christian God the Father. This figure is the Abba! Jesus cries out to in Mark 14:36, as he contemplates his impending sacrificial death. Paul twice refers, obliquely, to this incident when he refers, in his epistles, to the believer as a son who calls on his Abba.⁵ This Aramaic term for “father” was felt to be more appropriate here, even though the New Testament is in Greek. It was Aramaic, not Greek (or Hebrew), that a first-century Jew would have used in a private, personal context. Paul's intention in choosing Aramaic here was to stress the close familial relation Jesus bore to God. He meant to suggest that, through Jesus, Christians acquire his warm proximity to his and their heavenly Father. Jews who reject Jesus would not be given this opportunity. One of the modern preachers who caught Paul's intent best was Martin Luther King. “Compare the early Hebrew's statement,” King wrote, “‘Let not God speak with us, lest we die,’ with the words of Jesus, ‘When ye pray, say, Our Father.’”⁶ The Old Testament God, as King saw him (which is not, it must be said, how Jews see him), is not (yet) recognized as a father. He will become that only within the Christian Trinity.

The other, opposing aspect of the father emerges powerfully in the classic writings of Freud and his intellectual descendants. This “castrating” tyrant cuts the link between mother and son, not to enable his child to become an independent member of a functioning society, but rather in order to keep the mother and all jouissance, all pleasure and enjoyment, to himself. Freud, in one of his most delirious moments, imagined this father killed (and eaten) by his sons so that they could bond to found society.⁷ Lacan called him le père jouissant or le père jouissance, which Žižek translates as Father-of-Enjoyment or Father Enjoyment. He describes him as the “obscene father.”⁸

The Obscene Father is a metaphor for a very general human experience: the experience of the world as a Power that does not care. Some of the most crucial theological and political concerns during the periods of early orientalism gave this universal fear an expression typical of the age. During the late fifteenth century, when (as I will suggest) early orientalism began, scholars of the via moderna compared the relationship between God and Christians to that of a king and his subjects, both of whom were bound by contractual obligation. In both cases, the Lord was to protect and his servants to obey: like Aristotle's master and slave, they differed in their very nature. In the political arena, this idea defined the ideal relationship between the absolute monarch and his subjects. While the omnipotence of God was an ancient tenet inherent in monotheism and explicit in the Christian Bible,⁹ it became a very topical politico-theological issue at a time, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when kings claimed – by the grace of God – unlimited and therefore rather godlike power over their subjects.

During this long period, soteriology or the theology of salvation tended to dominate theological debate within Christendom. The most powerfully controversial doctrine was that of “justification by faith,” which held that the believer is helpless to achieve salvation (which included eternal life in heaven) by his or her own acts or “works.” Not only was a human being incapable, without God's help, to rise above sin and so merit salvation, but God was needed even to make a person want to defeat sin. This tenet, whose most important proponent was Martin Luther, had its roots in Augustine of Hippo (354–430), but lay more or less dormant until the Renaissance. It was revived in the mid to late fourteenth century – once again, a period that, I will argue, not coincidentally marks the beginning of the orientalist imaginary. Early, proto-Protestant versions of the idea of justification by faith were then formulated by theologians such as Gregory of Rimini (died 1358).

Now it was evident that some kings and other earthly lords (including bishops) did not keep their end of the contract, which required them to use their unlimited power to care like fathers for the bodies and souls of their subjects. Following the Aristotelian definition of a good king as opposed to a tyrant – one who cares for his subject as a father for his children and not as a master for his slaves¹⁰ – this meant that they were tyrants. Criticisms of tyranny became ever more common and ever louder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. But, for obvious reasons, an even more disturbing thought was much harder to articulate. What if God also failed his part, and also did not care to protect us?

We hear the unstated question as a subtext of the agonizing and interminable debates among Protestants and some Catholics regarding the nature of divine grace as the only means to salvation. Is grace granted only to a few, as the Calvinists, especially, insisted? And, once grace is granted, can one lose it through misdeeds or loss of faith (yes, according to the Lutherans and the Arminians; no according to the Calvinists)? Though the highest experience of a Christian, especially in the Protestant tradition, was to rejoice at the security of salvation, the truth is that salvation was actually never quite certain. And, as far as the God of the Old Testament was concerned, before he begot Christ he offered no salvation at all. According to most Christian theology, certainly during the period in question, the Christian God before Christ denies salvation and all men and women are hopelessly sinful (this condition is called “total depravity”). In the chronological and theological sequence from the Old to the New Testament as understood by most traditional Christians, the “pre-Jesus” Jehovah is a god bent on terrible punishment. It is only in the New Testament that God reveals himself as “God the Father” and sacrifices his own son to himself to redeem the punishment due to sinful Man, so that the dead may through that sacrifice enter eternal life with God in heaven.

The Obscene Father had to remain for the most part an implicit characterization of the Old Testament God, an anxiously intuited possibility, for anything else would of course be sacrilege. Calvin, for example, insisted in The Institutions that all three persons of the Trinity were united in substance. When he described the difference in quality among them, he gave God the Father the rather anemic description of a prime mover: “the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things,” compared to the Son, to whom belonged “wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things.”¹¹ Yet Calvin does methodically raise the possibility, of course only to reject it, that God may, in spite of his doctrinal status as the source of all justice, in fact be unjust. To Calvin, punishing the third and fourth generation of the sinner, promised in Exodus 34:6–7, is punishment not for the ancestor's sin but for the descendant's own sinfulness.¹² Yet the argument, which can charitably be called rather complex, barely hides Calvin's anxiety, and establishes clearly that the question of God's possible injustice as a punisher of innocent generations did exercise his mind. The unjust form of Jehovah, the rejected obscene version of the Father in Heaven, is a powerfully implicit character, motivating the theological protestations of God's justice in Christian theology. It is he I call “Jehovah” in the rest of this book: not the professed Jehovah of Calvin, Luther, and other classic Christian theologians, Protestant or Catholic, but rather the divine despot intuited and repressed by theological doctrine.

Allah was the means to imagine this frightening version of Jehovah more explicitly, by projecting him outward onto the Orient. The Obscene Father is a force that frightens. Pretending that he resides in a far-away region is part of the fundamental maneuver of orientalism that we noted earlier: exaggerating the East–West difference so that what we suspect may be true of “our” Lord is true only of “theirs.”

Jehovah and Allah

The imagined Allah is the Allah of imagined Islam; while obviously this figure is not entirely independent of the “real” Allah of “real” Islam, its origins are elsewhere, closer home: I am suggesting that they reside in a common and persistent Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible. We need to discuss further what Christians have thought of Jehovah, before we return to what they have thought of Allah.

Traditional Christian theology suggests that in the Old Testament, before it is “fulfilled” by the New, is located the Law, the Letter, and Death; as opposed to the Love, the Spirit, and the Life brought by the New Testament. This is the theological expression of the deep-seated contrast in western civilization that Harold Bloom describes as the relation between “Eros and Authority, or Love and the Law.”¹³

A reading of the Bible that opposes a legalistic Jehovah to the loving God of the Christian Trinity goes back to the biblical epistles of Paul.¹⁴ It is consistent with the message of the Sermon on the Mount. It is closely related to what one might call, in Roy Rappaport's terms, Christianity's Ultimate Sacred Postulate:¹⁵ that Jesus is the Savior of Man. In western Christianity, more clearly than in its eastern variants, the sacrifice of Jesus is a saving act also in a legal sense: an act of saving Man from the just consequences of a crime. The crime is Adam and Eve's disobedience to God. Many Christian theologians have insisted that we are born not with the guilt of the actual crime, but rather with the general sinful tendency to commit such crimes if not restrained by faith and cleansed by baptism.¹⁶ But sinfulness must be punished. Even God cannot annul the need for a punishment demanded by his own Law (we will see later how this applies to the oriental despot as well). But in the western Christian view, a loving God has taken on the punishment himself, as opposed to administering it to his wayward creation. He sacrifices his own son, who, on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, is a form (persona) of God himself.

On the typical Christian reading of the Old Testament, such self-sacrificing mercy is not necessarily in character for Jehovah, though it is in character for the God who begets, and is, Christ. The point is not that God improves his character over time, which would imply, heretically, that he was less than perfect before Christ, which, for a perfect Being, is impossible.¹⁷ Rather, the traditional teaching is that God himself does not change, but our perception of him does (as a result of the sacrifice of Jesus.) “When I was a child,” Paul writes in the famous passage in 1 Corinthians,

I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.¹⁸

The truth of God, Paul is saying, is timeless, but even his revelation through Christ uncovers it only “in part,” with final understanding coming only at the end of days.

The God of the Old Testament is, while not false, an incompletely understood version of God as a purveyor of a stern Law, but not yet as a Father whose chief characteristic is Love. Though remote and aloof, he has an overwhelming power over his worshippers, for he is the punitive enforcer, whose commandments must always be obeyed to the letter. When humans disobey him he is ruthlessly ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Islamic Studies Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the Lord: God, King, Father
• 1  The Obscene Father: Allah, Jehovah, and the oriental despot
• 2  Orientalism: what has and what has not been said
• 3  Proto-orientalism: ancient and medieval views of the East
• 4  The abduction from Asia: the fall of Constantinople and the beginning of modern orientalism
• 5  The Turks of Prague: the mundane and the sublime
• 6  Rembrandt's Orient: where Earth met Heaven
• 7  The sublime East: the soft orientalism of Bishop Lowth
• 8  The sublime is not enough: the hard orientalism of G. F. W. Hegel
• 9  Letter and Spirit
• 10  The Lord's command is greater than the Lord
• 11  The All-Seeing Eye
• 12  The bad shepherd: pastoral government and its oriental discontents
• 13  Sex in Paradise: what suicide fighters die for
• Epilogue on the value of submission: a eulogy for soft orientalism
• Appendix: table of contents of Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index