ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM, AND AMERICAN POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

ORIENTALISM, OCCIDENTALISM, AND AMERICAN POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Buruma, Ian and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New York: Penguin, 2004. 176 pp.

Little, Douglas. American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. 407 pp.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. 394 pp.

Many Americans asked "why don't they like us?" in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. While some of the animosity is undoubtedly a result of American policies and its status as the world's leading power, many in the U.S. government believe that another cause is how the United States portrays itself to the non-Western world. These texts identify a different issue, arguing that the problem is not so much how America portrays itself to the non-Western world, especially the Middle East, but how it perceives and is perceived by the non-Western world. Edward Said and Douglas Little use the term "Orientalism," to describe prevailing Western attitudes. As summarized by Said, "On the one hand there are Westerners and on the other there are Arab-Orientals: the former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion; the latter are none of these things" (Said, p. 49). Moreover, the West is presumed to be superior to an unchanging, uniform Orient yet, somewhat paradoxically, the Orient is something to be feared and controlled. Finally, the Orient is incapable of describing itself and must be described by others. In what might first appear to be a mirror image of Orientalism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit use the term "Occidentalism" to describe the "dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies." (Buruma and Margalit, p. 5). This critique includes "hostility to the City, with its image of rootless, arrogant, greedy, decadent frivolou cosmopolitanism; to the mind of the West manifested in science and reason; to the settled bourgeois, whose existence is the antithesis of the self-sacrificing hero; and to the infidel, who must be crushed to make way for a world of pure faith" (Buruma and Margalit, p. 11).

Orientalism and Occidentalism are not mirror images as both have their origins in the Western intellectual tradition. That this is true regarding Orientalism is obvious, but many contemporary criticisms of the West, too, had their origins there. Just as the West was the source of the enlightenment, capitalism, etc., it was also the source of the "frequently poisonous antidotes" to those ideas (Buruma and Margalit, p. 6). Another linkage between Occidentalism and the West is that some prominent Occidentalists were exposed to the West and/or made conscious adaptations of Western ideas to their circumstances: Cambodian revolutionary Pol Pot fused Marxism and Khmer nationalism while a student in Paris; Sati Husri, an important intellectual source of Baathism, studied the work of the German Romanticists Fichte and Herder as well as pan-German theories of the 1920s and 1930s; Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian and intellectual inspiration to many contemporary Islamic radicals, visited the United States in 1948 and was shocked by its materialism, the chaos of New York City, and the immodesty of American women. Not all Occidentalist ideas draw on Western traditions, however. An important contribution of contemporary Islamists is their view of the God of the West. Scholars such as Sayyid Muhammud Talequani, Abu-1-A'la Maududi, and Sayyid Qutb depict the West as worshiping money, materialism, and individualism. That is, rather than viewing the secular West as godless, these authors accuse it of worshiping false gods, something much worse and something believers are expected to fight with all means at their disposal.

Orientalism and Occidentalism both have distant roots. Said traces Orientalism to the Middle Ages, although the academic study of the Orient only began in the early 180Os. He examines the development of Orientalism in British and French academe, concentrating on the ideas of Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan, two early scholars who focused on the languages and literary classics of the region rather than direct observation. De Sacy, Renan, and others acquired such authority that later scholars studied their work, not the Orient, itself, to come to understand the region. That technique, in addition to propagating both the ideas and the biases of earlier scholars, meant that there was little study of the contemporary Orient by self-described Orientalists. Occidentalism, too, is an old phenomenon. Critiques of the city as symbolizing secularism, individualism, cosmopolitanism, and the power of money, for example, have been expressed by individuals and groups as far back as the 19th century German Romanticists. Later, Occidentalists as diverse as Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge, and the Taliban drew on these ideas. Buruma and Margalit's depiction of the Western mind, similarly, demonstrates the age of these ideas, that they originated in the West, and that they now have appeal in the non-Western world. Thus, Russian Slavophiles of the 19th century were among the first to criticize the Western mind as rational but soulless and incapable of doing anything important, a view later adopted by intellectuals in India, China, and the Muslim worlds.