Occidentalism: A short history of anti-westernism
by Noel Rooney
[ bookreviews ]
This is a deeply inadequate book on a potentially crucial question. Is there a non-Western view of the West equivalent in form, origin or effect, to orientalism? The fact that the question can be answered initially in the negative makes it no less fascinating. And, given the current disparity in power between the imaginary hemispheres, the possibility of a counterweight to the overweening cultural prevalence of orientalism would be at the least a valid exercise in optimism.
Unfortunately, Buruma and Margalit don't escape their own orientalism for long enough to be accurate or objective, so such answers as they come up with are superficial and ignorant. To start with, comparing the West, a relatively homogeneous cultural concept, with the endless diversity of those cultures we call 'Eastern' is likely to require prodigious scholarship, and the authors show no signs of it. And then distilling the extraordinary breadth of non-Western thought into a bespoke myth suffusing both academic and popular views of the West, and demonstrating its ubiquity, suggests analytic powers beyond the scope of this book.
Their suggested framework of reasons for the existence and content of Occidentalism is just plain wrong. Hatred of the city is a theme more easily recognisable in Western romantic culture than Eastern (and reads here like just such a projection); revulsion for the material life is more arguable, but suggesting that Voltaire is the source for this idea (as opposed to Voltaire being a convenient reference for a Western view of Eastern anti-materialism) is just another specious intellectual export; hatred of rational thought systems - is it me, or has our exposure to Greek thought come about via Muslim scholars, and weren't the Mutazalites rationalists?
Faced with the limitless variety and otherness of the 'orient', orientalists tended to locate the heterogeneity of the other in an exemplar. The exemplar was usually chosen by reference to where Western imperial and commercial interests were focussed, and thus the exemplar changed as that focus shifted. Buruma and Margalit continue this tradition; they locate their Occidentalism in desert Arab Muslims, mere repetition of a default manoeuvre. If bin Laden is the contemporary epitome of anti-Westernism, then it is because Western powers have invented both him and the myth of him. We should surely be ready to move on from here.
The critiques of Western culture which they adduce as the motifs of Occidentalism are actually equally represented in the East and West; and being broadly accurate and well founded, are unlikely to form the basis of a myth (and if occidentalism is truly counterpart, it is a mythical construct). Rampant capitalism, know-it-all liberalism, imperialist exploitation - these are real enough to make real people angry for obvious and just reasons; but they do not represent a worldview of any kind, let alone a specifically occidentalist one.
If we are truly looking to form a concept of occidentalism which might make sense, there are some obvious starting points. If you can locate a common set of myths about the West - as opposed to the plethora of rational critiques (and these from people who are inimical to reason?) - in the words of bin Laden and Asahara, an Aboriginal activist and a Hindu nationalist, you are on the way to constructing an occidentalism which bears comparison to its putative counterpart, not to mention a valid relationship with the real world.
However, when you write a book that is really about Islam, and a Western fantasy of Islam's relationship to the West, you are far from delivering on the subject. There are plenty of Muslims who would like to think that, having taken Islam out of the desert, they might be allowed to take the desert out of Islam; they are not especially helped in that endeavour by Western academics doing precisely the opposite.
Is Muslim fundamentalism truly the archetypal Eastern response to the west? Is it possible for non-Westerners to form an independent myth of the West when the West is so assiduously peddling its fantasy persona globally? Does the canonical homogeneity of the West - whose own values it considers universal - have any real equivalent in the non-Western world? These questions, basic to the enterprise, are blithely elided in favour of views that are at best uninformed, at worst a repeat of the supercilious canon of prejudice which permeates Western scholarship when it comes to the Other.
Someone will address this question with considerably more rigour in the future; in the meantime, Buruma and Margalit have given us a word to conjure with, and very little else.
