"A man asked a colleague, 'Did you hear about the guy who was arrested at the zoo for feeding the pigeons?''No. What's wrong with feeding the pigeons?' his colleague responded.'He fed them to the lions,' the man replied.""Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, says John L. Esposito, will not be eradicated easily or soon. Islamophobia is not a problem for Muslims alone; it is our problem. Governments, policymakers, the media, educational institutions, and religious and corporate leaders have a critical role to play in transforming our societies and influencing our citizens and policies to contain the voices of hate and the exclusivist theologies (of militant religious and secular fundamentalists alike) if we are to promote global understanding and peace," Jasmine went on as looking at the Minaret of Prophet Isa which is on the left side of the Umayyad Mosque, also known as the Grand Mosque of Damascus. It is the first monumental work of architecture in Islamic history and might be the place where Prophet Isa ibn Maryam (عليه السلام) will descend back to earth towards the end of time. The spot where the mosque now stands was originally a temple dedicated to the idol Hadad in the Aramaean era about 3000 years ago. When the Romans ruled Damascus a temple was built for the worship of Jupiter. It then became a Christian church dedicated to John the Baptist, or Prophet Yahya (عليه السلام), in the Byzantine era towards the end of the fourth century. Following the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE, Damascus was conquered by the Muslims under the leadership of Khalid ibn Waleed (رضي الله عنه). The Muslims shared the church building with the Christians for worship. The Muslims prayed in the eastern section of the structure and the Christians in the western side."Nathan Lean expresses that it has become rather easy to identify Islamophobia on the right side of the political spectrum. There, its manifestations both in rhetoric and action are more blatant and glaring. Right-wing parties and politicians, conservative religious leaders, radical bloggers, and zealous activists have all helped entrench anti-Muslim prejudice within the general category of 'the right' in a way that it simply does not exist among progressives, or 'the left.' However, within the past decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that Islamophobia is also found on the left, and though it may be shrouded by overtures about free speech, liberalism, or even wrapped in the language of progressive values, it exists nonetheless and warrants scrutiny. This is especially so given the way that liberals have recently latched onto the issue and aligned themselves with some of the more raucous and dangerous voices that comprise the Islamophobia industry.One of the primary differences between Islamophobia on the right and Islamophobia on the left is that the latter is usually presented with a veneer of benevolence while the former tends to be more deliberate and unconcealed. This is not always the case, and there are examples of liberals who unabatingly bash Muslims and Islam. However, it appears for the most part that liberals know that the progressive camp in which they stake their political belonging does not tolerate openly hostile views toward minority groups, and the 'progressive' mantle entails a forward-thinking that is anathema not only to virulent prejudice but even to more subtle stereotypes that may well fall under the banner of what Edward Said has called 'Orientalism'.According to Walter D. Mignolo, 'Orientalism' as Moroccan philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibbi taught us in the early seventies and Edward Said popularized in the late seventies, was an invention of the second modernity dominated by England, France and Germany both in the economic, political and epistemic domains. Orientals took the place, for the new imperial powers and their intellectuals of Occidentals for Spanish and Portuguese—a reminder that America was named Indias Occidentales in all Spanish and Portuguese documents. Indias Occidentales was the land of the Indians and African slaves. The Orient—an old-fashioned name for Asia, or the East. It's where the sun rises, and, sure enough, the Latin root of orient means 'rising,' as in the rising of the sun—was the land of Arabs Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and of course, Muslims. But at the time of the secular nation states (in which Immanuel Kant and George W. Friedrich Hegel imagined a cosmopolitan world and a world history), ethnicity (e.g. the Arabs) took precedence over religion (e.g., Islam).The Industrial Revolution required 'natural resources.' Capitalism at that point added to the production of 'natural products' (everything related to agriculture for human consumption) to 'natural resources' (everything related to feeding the machines, to machines’ consumption). The invention of the Middle East was an operation to mark territory, within the larger picture of the Orientals, rich in natural resources, particularly oil. The history from the discovery of oil and the invention of the Middle East to the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq has been told many times and it is well-known in its general unfolding. After WWII, it was no longer London (only) but Washington (mainly) who took the lead in public relations and wars with the Middle East. The situation was further complicated by the existence of the Soviet Union.According to Green, Orientalism is a term originally coined to describe the scholarly study of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia; in postcolonial thought, the term refers to a discourse of a power that enables Western empires to rule and have authority over the Orient. As European nations expanded their empires in the nineteenth century, Europeans developed a greater interest in studying the languages, histories, cultures, and religions of colonized peoples. The term Orientalism entered into European languages by the nineteenth century to describe the scholarly study of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.Tracing Orientalism’s origins, particularly Orientalists’ focus on the history and relevant languages of Islam, requires going back even further. Serious attention to the academic study of Islam and particularly Arabic took place already in the late sixteenth century. Regular instruction in Arabic began at the College de France in Paris in 1587. In 1613, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands established a chair in the study of Arabic, with Cambridge and Oxford in England following suit in 1632 and 1634, respectively. With the creation of a special school for the study of Oriental languages in France in 1795, the foundations for Orientalism as an academic discipline were well established.The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a flourishing of European scholarship, literature, and art that focused on the Orient. It is important to stress that some Orientalists held great admiration and respect for the Orient and Islam. For example, Thomas Carlyle, a prominent nineteenth-century British author, presented a famous lecture in 1840 on the Prophet (ﷺ). Contradicting the medieval Christian accounts of the Prophet (ﷺ) as an imposter and false prophet, Carlyle insisted that the Prophet (ﷺ) person of great vision who instilled hope in millions upon millions of people and whose impact qualified him to hold a place of honor alongside other transformative figures in history, including Martin Luther, Shakespeare, and Frederick the Great. Many Orientalists, however, developed images of Muslim and Arab peoples that either perpetuated medieval stereotypes or else reflected more contemporary assumptions, bolstered at times by appeals to science, about the intrinsic cultural and even racial superiority of Europeans over Muslims. An example of the latter type of thinking can be found in the work of Ernest Renan, a French philologist and scholar of religion.Premodern stereotypes and concerns also found their way into Orientalism, even if Orientalists repackaged them to reflect the interests of the age. One prominent example concerns the depraved status of women in Islam. The tendency to construct Muslims as essentialized “Others” over against Europeans, often with the assumption of the latter’s inherent cultural and civilizational superiority, ties together much Orientalist scholarship, literature, and art. The European construction of Muslims as the ultimate 'Others,' of course, was present since the Middle Ages. However, medieval Christians did not necessarily view Islam as an inferior civilization lagging behind the accomplishments of Europe. Rather, as noted in the previous chapter, medieval Europe found inspiration in the achievements of Islamic civilization in areas including philosophy, science, and music.With nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Orientalism, increasing numbers of scholars, authors, and artists were convinced that Muslims belonged to a once great but now separate and intrinsically inferior civilization, one that not only lacked complexity and diversity but also offered little to benefit Western civilization. The fact that the tendency to essentialize Muslims in this way emerged at a time of significant European colonial expansion suggests that Orientalism was neither a disinterested enterprise nor an objective quest for knowledge of non-Western cultures and religions. Of course, not all Orientalists consciously set out to justify Europe’s colonial project, nor did all Orientalists support imperialism. But the political and historical context within which nineteenth-century Orientalism took shape does beg the question: what sort of relationship was there between European colonialism and Orientalism?The most significant attempt in the late twentieth century to describe the relationship between colonialism and Orientalism came in the work of Edward Said, a founding figure in postcolonial studies. Edward Said writes that Orientalism is a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of 'the Other'. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, and personality experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, and even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. In contrast, the American understanding of the Orient will seem considerably less dense, although our recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures ought now to be creating a more sober, more realistic 'Oriental' awareness. Moreover, the vastly expanded American political and economic role in the Near East (the Middle East) makes great claims on our understanding of the Orient.The choice of 'Oriental' was canonical; it had been employed by Chaucer and Mandeville, by Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, and Byron. It designated Asia or the East, geographically, morally, and culturally. One could speak in Europe of an Oriental personality, an Oriental atmosphere, an Oriental tale, Oriental despotism, or an Oriental mode of production, and be understood. Marx and Balfour were also using it.Orientals or Arabs are shown to be gullible, 'devoid of energy and initiative,' much given to 'fulsome flattery,' intrigue, cunning, and unkindness to animals; Orientals cannot walk on either a road or a pavement (their disordered minds fail to under- stand what the clever European grasps immediately, that roads and pavements are made for walking); Orientals are inveterate liars, they are 'lethargic and suspicious,' and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race.Since the middle of the eighteenth century, there have been two principal elements in the relation between East and West. One was a growing systematic knowledge in Europe about the Orient, knowledge reinforced by the colonial encounter as well as by the widespread interest in the alien and unusual, exploited by the developing sciences of ethnology, comparative anatomy, philology, and history; furthermore, to this systematic knowledge was added a sizable body of literature produced by novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers. The other feature of Oriental-European relations was that Europe was always in a position of strength, not to say domination.Many terms were used to express the relation: : the Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different'; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal.' But the way of enlivening the relationship was everywhere to stress the fact that the Oriental lived in a different but thoroughly organized world of his own, a world with its own national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries and principles of internal coherence. Yet what gave the Oriental's world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West. Thus the two features of cultural relationship come together. Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world. In Cromer's and Balfour's language the Oriental is depicted as something one judges (as in a court of law), something one studies and depicts (as in a curriculum), something one disciplines (as in a school or prison), something one illustrates (as in a zoological manual). The point is that in each of these cases the Oriental is contained and represented by dominating frameworks.Said’s study focused primarily on British and French Orientalism from the nineteenth century through World War II. At the very end of his book, he devotes a section to Orientalism in the United States since World War II. For Said, a major shift occurred after the war. The French and British empires began to recede, and the United States emerged as the major empire. He analyzes the work of American Orientalists in the decades before his book’s publication. One of his primary targets is Bernard Lewis, a professor of Near East studies at Princeton University.Said’s nemesis did not fade from the scene as a result of Orientalism. If anything, Lewis became increasingly influential in certain political spheres. His ability to popularize and repackage Orientalist ideas in the last decades of the twentieth century gained him solid credentials in American foreign policy circles in light of the challenges posed by the Arab world to US political and economic interests. By making the case that Islam and the West are involved in a 'clash of civilizations'—the belief that global conflict after the Cold War will result from cultural and civilizational differences, including religious ones, and not economic and ideological differences; the phrase is often invoked to reflect the belief that Islam and the West are bound to be in conflict because of irreconcilable cultural and religious values, Lewis not only inspired Samuel P. Huntington, a professor of government at Harvard University, to develop the clash of civilizations thesis on a larger scale but also helped American and Western politicians shift their focus to a “new” enemy, Islam, as an old enemy, the Soviet Union, was disintegrating. In fact, the clash of civilizations theory that Lewis and Huntington put forth has become so instrumental in defining Western foreign and domestic policies toward Muslims, particularly since 9/11, that it is necessary to devote some attention to the contours of the theory, including the Orientalist assumptions upon which it is built.While Lewis is credited with introducing the clash of civilizations framework into political discourse, Huntington is the scholar who developed and popularized the clash of civilizations thesis. In 1993, Huntington’s article, 'The Clash of Civilizations?,' was published by Foreign Affairs, an influential journal within the US foreign policy establishment. The importance of Huntington’s article cannot be underestimated. The clash of civilizations thesis that he developed in the article, and later in a book by the same name (without the question mark), provided the essential framework in many political circles for understanding and dealing with Muslims and Muslim- majority regions in the post–Cold War era. Driven by ideological differences (American capitalism and democracy versus Soviet communism), the conflict did not involve direct conventional warfare between the two nations, but it did feature proxy wars and a nuclear arms race. By the time 9/11 came around, the Bush administration and its European allies had an accessible and straightforward theory to explain the attacks on the United States and to justify the War on Terror.Huntington argues that we are entering a new phase in global politics regarding the nature of conflict. In the past, conflict took place initially between princes, later between nation-states, and eventually between ideologies such as communism and liberal democracy. With the end of the Cold War, a new source of conflict is emerging: 'It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.'Huntington defines civilizations as distinct cultures possessing 'common objective elements,' including religion, customs, institutions, language, and history. He acknowledges that while the boundaries demarcating civilizations can and do change, civilizational identity is nonetheless the fundamental source of identity for people throughout the world, and its importance in the future will only increase as a result of the interaction between the seven or eight major civilizations: Western, Latin American, Islamic, Slavic-Orthodox, Hindu, Confucian, Japanese, and 'possibly African civilization.'Of these civilizations, Huntington believes the greatest source of conflict will be between Western and Islamic civilizations. This conflict, to be sure, is an old one, dating back to the initial Muslim conquest of Spain, continuing through the period of European expansion into the Middle East and North Africa, and playing out more recently in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and Arab nationalism. This clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is likely to continue, argues Huntington, mostly because Islam is prone to violence and bloodshed. Huntington points out that, almost everywhere you look, Muslims are entrenched in violent conflict with other peoples, from the Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans to Jews in Israel to Buddhists in Burma. Put simply, 'Islam has bloody borders.'Like Lewis, Huntington invokes many classic Orientalist themes. He assumes that the West constitutes a distinct and superior civilization. He defines non-Western peoples mostly in religious or ethnic terms (Confucian instead of Chinese, Islamic instead of Egyptian, and so on). He promotes the imperial interests of the West at the expense of Arab and Muslim regions. He characterizes Islam as violent and inherently prone to aggression. On this last point, his observation that 'Islam has bloody borders' is a not-so-subtle suggestion that Muslims are responsible for all of the conflicts in which they find themselves, including clashes with Western powers.Both Lewis and Huntington have been challenged in many circles, particularly academic ones, for their promotion of the clash of civilizations thesis. Not surprisingly, perhaps the most vocal critic of this thesis is Edward Said. His criticisms are fairly representative of the concerns many other scholars have raised with Lewis’s and Huntington’s work, so it is worth concluding this discussion with Said’s response to both of them, '... But what I do want to stress is, first, how Huntington has picked up from Lewis the notion that civilizations are monolithic and homogenous and, second, how—again from Lewis—he assumes the unchanging character of the duality between 'us' and 'them.'The world is not as simple as Lewis and Huntington want it to be. They desperately want to hold onto a world in which the difference between “us” and “them” is clear. What they ignore, argues Said, is that civilizational identity is not fixed but fluid. All civilizations and cultures, including so-called Western civilization, have intense, often contentious internal debates about how to define themselves. Civilizations are also shaped and transformed by all sorts of migrations and movements between peoples of different cultures. Finally, it is hard to imagine a culture today that, in the past or the present, has walled itself off from other cultures. Every culture has been and continues to be involved in transformative exchanges, contacts, and conversations with other cultures.The rise of Orientalism in the colonial era and the perpetuation of Orientalist ideas in the post–Cold War era have contributed to the Islamophobia that proliferates in the West. Orientalism and Islamophobia, however, are not identical concepts. We must keep in mind that some Orientalist scholars held deep admiration and respect for the languages, histories, and religious convictions of Muslim peoples. An Orientalist is not by definition someone who fears or detests Islam, though plenty of Orientalists did harbor such feelings. Moreover, many Orientalists were academics who studied Islam professionally. Orientalist thought was not confined to the academy. Artists, government officials, and travelers to the East also contributed to Orientalism. However, it is difficult to understand Orientalism apart from its connection to the academic world. Islamophobia, by contrast, is not something that emanates first and foremost from the scholarly study of Islam or Arab peoples.Orientalism and Islamophobia are therefore best understood as overlapping phenomena, both historically and conceptually. But in the post–Cold War era, and particularly after the terrible events of 9/11, the concept of Islamophobia—the fear, dislike, or hatred of Muslims—most adequately captures the prejudices against Muslims and Islam in the West.In the next episode, we will continue with the discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, bi 'idhnillah."
Citations & References:
- Nathan Lean, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Hatred of Muslims, 2017, Pluto Press- Walter D. Mignolo, Islamophobia and Hispanophobia: How They Came Together in the Euro-American Imagination, Arches Quarterly, Volume 4, Edition 7, 2010, the Cordoba Foundation
- Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 2003, Penguin Classic
- Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 2011, Simon & Schuster
[Episode 16]
[Episode 14]
