Islam Through Western Eyes

From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism

Jonathan Lyons

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231528146
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

Despite the West's growing involvement in Muslim societies, conflicts, and cultures, its inability to understand or analyze the Islamic world threatens any prospect for East–West rapprochement. Impelled by one thousand years of anti-Muslim ideas and images, the West has failed to engage in any meaningful or productive way with the world of Islam. Formulated in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and courts of the European Crusaders and perfected in the newsrooms of Fox News and CNN, this anti-Islamic discourse determines what can and cannot be said about Muslims and their religion, trapping the West in a dangerous, dead-end politics that it cannot afford.

In Islam Through Western Eyes, Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam, conducting a careful analysis of the West's grand totalizing narrative across one thousand years of history. He observes the discourse's corrosive effects on the social sciences, including sociology, politics, philosophy, theology, international relations, security studies, and human rights scholarship. He follows its influence on research, speeches, political strategy, and government policy, preventing the West from responding effectively to its most significant twenty-first-century challenges: the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations.

Through the intellectual "archaeology" of Michel Foucault, Lyons reveals the workings of this discourse and its underlying impact on our social, intellectual, and political lives. He then addresses issues of deep concern to Western readers—Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women—and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.

1

WAR WITHOUT END?

This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.

GEORGE W. BUSH

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath are just the latest reminder of the West’s complete and enduring failure to engage in any meaningful and productive way with the world of Islam. For almost ten centuries, attempts at understanding have been held hostage to a grand, totalizing Western narrative that shapes what can and, more important, what cannot be said and thought about Islam and the Muslims. This is no less true today, from the political arena to the counterterrorism think tanks, from the academy to the Internet “blogosphere,” than it was in the medieval halls of the Roman Curia and the courts of the European Crusaders.

Further, this same narrative, which reflects what I call the anti-Islam discourse, exercises a profound and corrosive effect on a range of issues across the contemporary social sciences, including sociology, politics, the history of ideas, law, religion, international relations, human rights, and security studies. It casts a shadow over the way social scientists of various stripes think and write and speak about Islam and the Muslims. It shapes how social scientists listen to what Muslims say and interpret what they do. And it guides their research programs and publications, their private advice to governments, and their statements to the press and the public at large. These developments have, in turn, left Western societies both intellectually unprepared and politically unable to respond successfully to some of the most significant challenges of the early twenty-first century—the global rise of Islamist political power, the more narrow emergence of religious violence and terrorism, clashes between established social values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations, and so on.

As a result of these failures, the notion of a looming “clash” of world civilizations, advanced first by Bernard Lewis (1990) and more comprehensively by Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996), is moving steadily from a theoretical exercise—one that the foreign-policy establishment and academics alike initially dismissed (e.g., Mottahedeh 1996; Gergez 1999; Abrahamian 2003)—toward a self-fulfilling prophecy.¹ To see how effectively this notion has captured Western imaginations, one has only to consider the successful Swiss referendum campaign in November 2009 to write into the Constitution a ban on the building of minarets or the decision by Oklahoma voters in November 2010 to bar the use of Islamic law in state courts. Tellingly, in the cases of both Switzerland and Oklahoma, no such “threats” ever existed. In such an atmosphere, it has been all too easy for the contemporary U.S. neoconservatives and their supporters worldwide, who have relied on this anti-Islam discourse to generate fear of the Muslim other, to sell the “war on terrorism” as essential to Western security, and to lead the West into its greatest confrontation with Islam since the Middle Ages.

Properly unpacked, the anti-Islam discourse can be shown to provide more than just the context and imagery that surround the war on terrorism, the present wave of Islamophobia, or the broader cultural project advanced by adherents of Huntington’s coming civilizational clash. despite the interrogatory tone of the title to his original journal article—“The Clash of Civilizations?”—Huntington leaves little doubt that he expects a future conflict, driven not by ideology or economics but by culture: “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural” (1993:22). Perhaps more telling, the book-length version appeared three years later under virtually the same title, but without the question mark.

Although it is a relatively simple matter to “connect the dots” between this discourse and the present state of tensions between Islam and the West, to stop there would be to overlook the profound nature of a discourse that has silently shaped one thousand years of shared history and that seems destined to shape the future as well. Its powers extend well beyond the war on terrorism, and they explain a whole host of subtle but important derivative effects, without which the clash-of-civilizations thesis that underpins this war would quite literally be unthinkable.

Since September 11, 2001, the West has launched two major wars against Islamic countries; contributed directly through conflict to the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and indirectly to the loss of many tens of thousands more lives through disruptions to health and other basic services;² helped suppress popular religious and political aspirations across the Muslim world, from Palestine to Somalia to Southeast Asia; restricted civil liberties at home; and cracked down hard on its own Arab and Muslim populations in the name of counterterrorism.³

The Central Intelligence Agency, meanwhile, coordinated a clandestine campaign to kidnap suspected Muslim terrorists and shuffle them around the globe—often with the help of friendly security services—so they may be tortured in third countries or simply dumped into the juridical no-man’s-land of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay without regard for the Constitution, the Geneva Convention, or many of the founding ideals of revolutionary-era America. The George W. Bush administration, armed with memoranda from like-minded legal scholars, went so far as to authorize the torture by U.S. forces of certain “high-value” prisoners as part of its self-declared war on terrorism. The resulting damage to the rule of law and other liberal values, not to mention to America’s worldwide standing, has been significant.

Central to this anti-Islam discourse is a series of familiar ideas that echo across today’s political arena, on the Internet, on “talk” radio, in the so-called quality press, and, all too frequently, in the academy. Such notions include the following: Islam is a religion of violence and is spread by the sword; its tenets are upheld by coercion and force; Islam’s prophet, its teachings, and even its God are false; Muslims are irrational and backward, “medieval,” and fearful of modernity; Islam is by nature fanatical; Muslims are sexually perverse, either lascivious polygamists or repressive misogynists or both; they are antidemocratic and despise Western notions of civic freedoms; and, finally, they are caught up in a jealous rage at the Western world’s failure to value them or their beliefs.

This phenomenon is not, however, simply a matter of stereotypes—reassuring modes of thought and expression to castigate the Muslim as other and simultaneously reinforce the value and values of the West; if it were, the well-defined boundaries of the discourse would have eroded or otherwise shifted significantly, at least in places, over more than one thousand years of increasing physical, intellectual, economic, and theological contact and contestation between East and West. Rather, we must recognize that fundamental to this discourse has been the creation in the Western consciousness—and thus in Western thought—of an impermeable conceptual barrier constructed from the very tissue of the discourse itself.

Rarely have the central themes of the anti-Islam discourse faced serious critical scrutiny or nuanced analysis. Rather, they are often asserted or simply left unstated and unacknowledged, so that they operate silently in the background as they shape our statements about Islam and the Muslims and define the disciplines that organize and classify such knowledge. In an observation as apt now as when it was first advanced nine hundred years ago, Guibert de Nogent, a chronicler of the First Crusade, noted that it was not important actually to know anything about Islam in order to attack it: “It is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken” (quoted in Rodinson 1987:11).

As a result, the West’s “conversation” with Islam has always been a one-sided affair, essentially a dialogue with itself, revealing much about the subject but little or nothing about the object in question. In the vernacular of today, “It is all about us.” This one-sidedness has meant a fatal decoupling of the Western idea of Islam from the meaning and content of Islam as a vital religious, social, and cultural institution in its own right. Incompatible with the West’s interests or outside its conceptual understanding—or at times merely inconvenient—the belief system of the Muslims has been set aside in favor of a denatured Islam that better fits the established discourse.

Thus a Muslim woman cannot wear the veil simply because she believes that God has so ordained or to express her own religious feelings or identity; rather, her doing so must be the result of patriarchal repression by her husband, father, uncles, or brothers. Likewise, there is little incentive to trace the complex and at times contradictory record of traditional Islamic texts on violence, personal struggle, and resistance—signified in the Western mind under the emotive rubric of jihad.⁴ Instead, a necessary, causal relationship between Islam and violence is posited, and countless examples are adduced to support it, the September 11 terrorist attacks being currently the most spectacular. Put another way, Islam qua Islam is allowed no independent existence but is effectively a creation of the Western mind. Unnoticed in the Western world, this phenomenon has not gone by without comment among the Muslims: for decades, the religious revolutionaries of Iran have referred to this construct dismissively as “American Islam.”

How, then, has the West’s comprehensive idea of Islam persisted intact and essentially unchanged—thrived, even—over the course of one thousand years? What has so far retarded any real development or evolution—whether seen in terms of traditional Western notions of historical change, the “discontinuities” of Gaston Bachelard and the postmodern French philosophers, or Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift”—in the dominant narrative? As I argue in the pages that follow, the answer lies with the formation in the eleventh century of the anti-Islam discourse, which to the present day defines and explains Islam and regulates what it is that we hear and see of the Muslims. The same discourse determines the West’s apprehension of any new observations or information about Islam by shaping them to fit its requirements and demands, by dismissing them as inaccurate or unimportant, or by ignoring them outright.

My central theoretical position is simple: the very idea of Islam reflects a Western discourse perpetuated by those social groups and institutions that stand to benefit from its survival. Three interrelated questions about the anti-Islam discourse provide the underlying structure of my analysis: how is this discourse formed? how does it operate? And, last, that classical problem in the social sciences: Cui bono? Who benefits? This approach moves away from a pure exercise in intellectual history and casts it instead as a matter for broader inquiry that cuts across a number of traditional disciplines. herein also lies its explanatory power: When we open this particular window on Islam as discourse and take a look, what do we see that has not been seen before?

Here, I am largely following the work of Michel Foucault, particularly in the early phase of his career—roughly the period ending with his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970. Foucault has written widely on epistemological phenomena in strictly Western contexts, including studies of the discourses of madness (1961, 1988), clinical medicine (1994a), prison (1991, 1994c), and sexuality (1978). At one point, he proposed a study of what he called the “great division” between occident and orient, but he never carried out this project (1961:iv; see also Rosemann 1999:270). Foucault did, however, venture into the contentious issue of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, supporting it much longer and more enthusiastically than most others among the European Left.⁵

Despite this lack of any specific focus on Islam, Foucault’s methods—what he has referred to as his “toolbox”—can go a long way toward explaining why it is that certain things can be thought and said about Islam and the Muslims and certain other things cannot. This practical strand in Foucault’s work is often obscured by the difficult, indirect, and at times maddeningly cryptic nature of much of his writings. Yet Foucault tells us clearly what he has in mind: “I would like my books to be a kind of ‘toolbox’ which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area…. I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers” (1994c:523–524, emphasis added; quoted in o’Farrell 2005:50).

In an effort to build on Foucault’s work and to address some of its limitations when applied to the West’s anti-Islam discourse, I also take into account some classic studies in sociology—most notably the works of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and C. Wright Mills—as well as the cultural criticism of Edward Said. Whereas Foucault provides particularly effective tools for the excavation of evidence of the formation and operation of the West’s anti-Islam discourse, the sociology of knowledge can help fashion a response to the final element of my analytical framework: Who benefits?

The philosopher and theologian Paul Ricoeur provides a useful definition of the last strand of my theoretical approach, even though that definition was originally presented amid a critique of sociology’s limitations: “The sociology of knowledge rejects an immanent history of ideas which would be governed only by the structure of problems and their philosophical solutions. It attempts to replace the would-be history of ideas within the total dynamics of society” (1965:58). Yet a displacement of this “would-be history” and an examination of the social dynamic at work can best explain the unchanging and persistent nature of the anti-Islam discourse.

This latter approach, then, sets in relief several specific issues: Which social groups and institutions have benefited from excising the enormous Arab cultural contribution to the West from the history books? From the notion that Islam is inherently violent, or that it is fundamentally antipathetic toward women? Who benefits today from perpetuating these ideas? And how can I best account for the periodic ebbs and flows—the occasional ups as well as the predominant downs—in relations between Islam and the West as well as for the larger, more stable narrative arc that reaches from Muhammad’s revelation to the present day? Chapters 4, 5, and 6 address these underlying issues in a series of thematic explorations, which, when taken as a whole, make up this social history of the Western idea of Islam.

A few other prominent features of my approach also bear noting at this time. First and foremost, I have chosen to focus exclusively on the West’s discourse of Islam—that is, the body of accepted and therefore acceptable Western knowledge about Islam and Muslims; any real exploration from the Muslim perspective is beyond the scope of this inquiry. This point cannot be overemphasized, for Western analysis and scholarship too often focus exclusively on what it is They say about us and ignore the baseline assumptions, thoughts, texts, and symbols that make up Western-dominated Islamic studies and its associated disciplines.

Here, too, I want to avoid the fallacy scholars sometimes put forth that the Muslim world saw in the crusading Christians the same existential, civilizational threat that the latter clearly saw in it (e.g., von Grunenbaum 1961:31–63; echoed in Berger 1973:56). In fact, the caliphal court in Baghdad turned a blind eye to the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 despite pleas for help from local Muslims, and it took decades for the forces of Islam to set aside their internal squabbles and repel the invaders (C. Hillenbrand 1999:69–74). This fallacy is a critical error, for it presumes that whatever was going on in the West was mirrored or should have been mirrored in the East and that the two experiences can thus be understood and assessed in the same terms and in the same way. This assumption leads only to a dead end.

Second, it needs to be stressed that an analysis of the anti-Islam discourse can be carried out without direct reference to the West’s claims to any truth-value in its statements about Islam; the truth—or lack thereof—of those statements produced is no defense against the underlying fact that the entire conversation takes place almost entirely within the very confines of the discourse. Many scholars have sought to refute, for example, statements linking violence, coercion, and authoritarianism to the very essence of the Muslim faith (e.g., Afsaruddin 2006a, 2008; Saeed 2006; Khatab and Bouma 2007). Others argue that the same link can be established for other faiths and belief systems, from Judaism to Scientology (Appelby 2000), or that violence lies at the heart of all religious experience (Girard 1977, 1996).

Although weighing in on this and other questions that the anti-Islam discourse has addressed may be instructive, it is not strictly necessary, for the argument of any individual scholar is dissipated in the face of the overwhelming power of the broader discourse at work. It need hardly be said that I do not mean to purvey some idealized universe free of all moral, political, or social values. Rather, I argue that we must first explore the way the anti-Islam discourse operates to produce such statements and to eliminate or bar other statements and why this discourse has remained intact across one thousand years. Only then can we begin to venture into the realm of assessment and evaluation.

Third, I have limited the scope of this inquiry by generally restricting myself to Islam as defined by the historical experience of the early Muslim empires, from Afghanistan, the subcontinent, and western China to north Africa and across to al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain. These areas were, after all, the “Muslim world” as apprehended by Christian Europe at the formation of the anti-Islam discourse, and in many ways they remain so today. The West’s “discovery” of a wider Muslim umma (religious community) has done nothing notable to alter the dis...