Islam in the Eyes of the West

Images and Realities in an Age of Terror

Tareq Y. Ismael, Andrew Rippin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136990182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York to the Madrid and London bombings of 2004 and 2005, the presence of Muslim communities in the West has generated security issues and major political concern. The government, the media, and the general public have raised questions regarding potential links between Western Muslims, radical Islam and terrorism. This speculation has given rise to popular myths concerning the Islamic world and led to a host of illiberal measures such as illegal warranting, denial of Habeas Corpus, "black prisons" and extreme torture throughout the democratic world. This book challenges the authenticity of these myths and examines the ways in which they have been used to provide an ideological cover for the "war on terror" and the subsequent Iraq war. It argues that they are not only unfounded and hollow, but have also served a dangerous purpose, namely war-mongering and the empowering of the national-security state. It further considers the origin and transmission of these myths, focusing on media, government policy and popular discourse.

1
The origin of difference

Edward Said, Michel Foucault and the modern image of Islam

Dietrich Jung

When taking up the theme of Islam and the West, Edward Said’s book Orientalism is an almost obligatory reference. First published in 1978, the book represents a milestone in the field of cultural studies. It triggered ongoing scholarly debates and stimulated the exploration of new avenues of research in fields such as post-colonial and colonial discourse studies. Not that Edward Said’s argument was entirely new. The theme of Islam and the West had a series of predecessors in the decades before Said’s publication.¹ Rather, the outstanding success of Orientalism was due to the particular political, societal and scholarly context in which it appeared. The learned polemic of a “Western scholar with Oriental roots”, was written in the new language of so-called post-structuralist criticism and surfed on the political waves of Third-Worldism.

Said based the general argument in Orientalism on the analysis of academic and literary texts about the Orient. In this body of literature, he discerned both ontological and epistemological differences that distinguish an unchanging Orient from an absolutely different and dynamic West. ² Based on this binary code of difference between East and West, according to Said, the European Orientalists produced a hegemonic discourse over the Orient. They not only created an exotic Other, but they also legitimized the colonial oppression of the East by Western powers. Referring to the work of Michel Foucault, Said viewed the birth of the ‘Oriental’ as the result of a specific nexus of power and knowledge which has characterized the relationship of the East, in particular the Muslim world, with the leading powers of the West. In producing an “imaginative geography”, Orientalist scholars have invented and constructed a geographical space that provided the necessary knowledge for “the mapping, conquest, and annexation of territory”.³ In this way, the scholarly and literary representation of the Orient by the texts of Orientalists became an imperial institution, facilitating and justifying colonial domination. In clear distinction to the mere disciplinary content of the terms “Orientalist” and “Orientalism” in the nineteenth century, Said extended their notion enormously. Once the designations for an academic avant-garde, Said’s book turned them into pejorative labels for stereotypical Western thinkers and concepts that claim the absolute superiority of the West over the East. In short, in Said’s writing, Orientalism became an all-encompassing and ideological concept for the oppression of the Orient by the West.

There is no doubt that contemporary debates about Islam and the West are still informed by some of the stereotypes which Orientalism so aptly described. The modern image of Islam has been, until now, dominated by the essentialist assumption according to which Islamic societies rest on a unified and unchangeable codex of religious, juridical, and moral rules, supposedly regulating the life of both the individual Muslim and the Islamic community in all its aspects. Presenting the Muslim religion as a holistically closed system, as a social and cultural unity resisting historical change, this essentialist image of Islam has trickled down into society at large. Even more important, it has become a building block of globally shared public knowledge about Islam in the Western and Muslim worlds alike. This is apparent in the fact that both Western Orientalists and contemporary Islamists conceptualize Islam as an all-encompassing, determinant, and unchanging cultural entity that is intrinsically different from the modern democratic culture of the West.

In a response to Orientalism, the Syrian philosopher Sadik al-Azm criticized Edward Said for being blind to this form of “Orientalism in reverse”, the apparent self-application of Orientalist stereotypes in the ideologies of both Islamists and Arab nationalists. ⁴ Indeed, in Said’s book, the application of the essentialist image of Islam and of the foundational dichotomy between East and West by Muslim thinkers is almost completely absent. The partisan purpose of his book probably made Said blind to the phenomenon of Orientalism in reverse. Yet in order to understand the relationship between images and realities in the contemporary discourse about Islam and the West, it is important to inquire into the origins of this mutually reinforcing assumption of fundamental cultural difference. Why do Orientalists and Islamists define Islam similarly as an all-encompassing religious, political and social system?

In order to answer this question, I will start with a critique of Edward Said’s application of Foucault. I will argue that in taking Foucault seriously, this reciprocal imaging of Islam by Orientalists and Islamists, whose world-views have emerged from the very same “discursive formation” (Foucault), should not have escaped Said’s attention. In a second step, I shall analyze the phenomenon of Orientalism in reverse, based on a brief assessment of Sadik al-Azm’s arguments. Then, I take the life and work of Ernest Renan (1823–1892) as my point of departure to show in which ways Orientalists and Muslim intellectuals were closely knitted together by a web of discursive and social ties. The chapter concludes with a theoretically inspired interpretation of the common origin of the modern essentialist image of Islam in this network of Orientalists and Islamic reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Discourse theory and the “real Orient”

In his introduction to his Reader containing core texts on the Orientalism controversy, editor A.L. Macfie indicated that a number of Said’s critics, in particular historians of the Middle East, were “firmly wedded to a traditional (realist) approach to the writing of history”. Insisting on the mere validity of so-called historical facts, these historians were, according to Macfie, as a result of their methodological positions, not really able to communicate with Said, who approached his subject with the assistance of postmodern philosophy.⁵ Indeed, given the various audiences that Said’s book addressed, it is not surprising that a good deal of critique was also related to misunderstandings and particularistic readings of Orientalism. Yet some of his theoretically more versed critics raised the question of whether Said himself really understood the theoretical approach he claimed to use in Orientalism.⁶

This question specifically has been posed concerning Said’s application of Michel Foucault’s discourse theory. ⁷ Said claimed to write from a Foucauldian perspective and, on the surface, he seemingly did so in two ways: first, in framing the field of Orientalism as a discursive institution with a holistic and determining character; second, in analyzing the Oriental discourse through the inseparable relationship between structures of social power and structures of knowledge. Contrary to the approach of Foucault, however, Said’s method is characterized by a firm subjectivist component. His strong sense of “humanism” ⁸ clearly contradicts the fundamentals of Foucault’s anti-subjectivist and anti-humanist philosophy. For Said, individual writers play an eminent if not determining role in shaping the discursive field of Orientalism, which he analyses “as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American”.⁹ We will see that this deliberate deviation from Foucault’s discourse theory created some confusion on the side of Said’s reviewers, but also in the argumentation of the book itself.

Edward Said claimed to borrow his “Foucauldian perspective” from The Archaeology of Knowledge and from Discipline and Punish.¹⁰ Like The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge belongs to the early works of Michel Foucault, which in my reading are of a structuralist rather than a post-structuralist nature. In these works, discourses have an almost autonomous character. They are not mentally anchored but they exist in historically specific discursive practices which are not the result of intersubjective exchanges but, rather, are the conditions for them.¹¹ In The Order of Things, Foucault developed his discourse theory with respect to changing bodies of knowledge. He was concerned with the phenomenon of three totally different systematizations of knowledge that separate the epistemé of modern times from previous epochs. In classical times, according to his analysis, knowledge built on a universal science of measurement and order with regard to the relationship between things, a relationship that classical knowledge methodologically ordered according to the intrinsic categories of identity and difference. The classical epistemé, therefore, did not assign a role to the ordering perspective of an observer. Modern knowledge, however, shows a completely different logic. In the patterns of meaning in modernity, the subject enters the field and becomes both observer and observed, that is to say, both the subject and object of knowledge. The modern epistemé introduced the ordering subject into a world of objects.¹²

However, it would be absolutely wrong to consider this introduction of the subject into modern knowledge as coming a step closer to “scientific truth”. For Foucault, the appearance of man at the centre of modern epistemology only indicates a radical change in the historically specific but unconsciously applied discursive structures on which human knowledge generally rests. In this sense, the move from classical to modern knowledge should not be misunderstood as a process of scientific progress. Foucault did not interpret the ontological and epistemological priority of the subject in modern knowledge in terms of a progress of reason, but simply as a historical change in forms of epistemé in modern times. In Foucault’s eyes, both subjects and objects of knowledge are only results of discursive practices. Theoretically, individual actors are nothing more than “discursive effects”.¹³ Consequently, there is no progress in human knowledge and human actors themselves are a product of the unconscious application of historically different, discursive paradigms of knowledge. In The Order of Things, Foucault focused on the order of “networks of concepts”, whereas The Archaeology of Kn...

Table of contents

• Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The origin of difference
• 2 Demonizing the enemy in the War on Terror
• 3 Islam and Muslims as seen by the Christian Zionists
• 4 Vigilante masculinity and the ‘War on Terror’
• 5 Islam in the US
• 6 ‘Jihadiology’ and the problem of reaching a contemporary understanding of Jihad
• 7 Islam, Muslims, neighbors in Asia?
• 8 U.S. politics, media and Muslims in the post-9/11 era
• 9 Self and Other in a time of terror
• 10 Understanding the Muslim world
• 11 Applying “the McCarthy Test” to Canadian and American security legislation
• 12 Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”
• 13 Getting it wrong yet again
• Index