The dehumanising picture of the West painted by its enemies is what we have called Occidentalism. It is our intention in this book to examine this cluster of prejudices and trace their historical roots.
(Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, page 6)
Some features of Occidentalism
Many groups have queued up to hate ‘the West’ over the past 200 years, for many reasons, claiming that:
- the West is a purveyor of ‘poisonous materialism’
- Westernism is a disease of the spirit
- the Western mind splits human knowledge into soulless specialisms
- Westernism promotes alienated individualism over communal belonging
- Western science destroys religious belief and faith
- Western media are decadent and pornographic
- Western culture is shallow and materialist so destroys spiritual values
- Western society is capitalist, greedy, exploitative
- Westernism is a ‘machine civilisation’ (compared to hand-made rural arts and crafts)
- resentment / hatred of Western imperialism
- of Western colonialism
- of Western (particularly American) global power and selfish foreign policy
- Western civilisation is associated with huge, degraded, corrupt cities (compared with organic rural life)
- the West represents ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ and multiculturalism (compared with homogeneous native traditions)
These are the accusations and stereotypes which the authors set out to analyse and investigate, going much further afield than the contemporary Middle East, and much further back in time than the past few troubled decades, to do so.
The authors
Ian Buruma (born 1951, aged 72) is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the US. Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan.
Avishai Margalit (born 1939, aged 83) is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011 he was George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Both were contributors to The New York Review of Books during the 1990s and in fact this book grew out of an article published in that magazine in 2002, less than 12 months after the 9/11 attacks on New York shook the world of international affairs.
The background: Edward Said’s Orientalism
Buruma and Margalit don’t mention Edward Said in the text but they explicitly state that their concept of ‘Occidentalism’ is conceived as a mirror image of the notion of Orientalism which Said was instrumental in defining and popularising.
The view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity. Some Orientalist prejudices made non-Western people seem less than fully adult human beings; they ha the minds of children and could thus be treated as ‘lesser breeds’. Occidentalism is at least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down. [It reduces] an entire society or civilisation to a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grabbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites… (p.11)
Prior to Said’s book, Orientalism had been the value-neutral name given to a perfectly respectable academic discipline, the study of the languages, peoples and societies of ‘the East’ (loosely defined as lands from the Middle East to Japan) until Said published his landmark study, Orientalism in 1978.
Orientalism was a long, thorough, polemical attack on the entire discipline, claiming that from its earliest beginnings it 1) drew up a clear unbridgeable distinction between ‘The East’ and ‘The West’, 2) invented stereotypes of ‘the Oriental’, ‘the Arab’, ‘the Muslim’ and 3) attributed to them and their world a shopping list of negative qualities, the stereotypical ‘Oriental’ being lazy, irrational, dominated by a simple-minded religion, corrupt, sensual, and so on.
Orientalism was intended to be a comprehensive demolition of an entire academic field which Said proved by showing that the same mental structures underpinned, and the same demeaning stereotypes and clichés appeared in, almost all Orientalist writing, from the late eighteenth century right up to the present day.
This would all have been fairly academic, in the narrow sense – academics squabbling over the epistemological foundations of a particular academic field – but for the real bite of the book which is its highly political approach.
This has two elements. Firstly Said claims that the entire field of research into the languages, culture, religions, society and so on of ‘the Orient’ enabled and justified imperial control of the region. Knowledge is power, and the ever-more comprehensive and intrusive studies done of the countless peoples, religions and cultures of this vast area enabled Western imperial control over them. Orientalist academic studies served colonial power.
The Palestinian issue
This by itself would have been a fairly controversial conclusion, but there’s a second, really inflammatory element to Said’s critique. This is his attempt to show the discredited assumptions and degrading attitudes of Orientalism played, and continue to play, an important role in determining attitudes across western culture and politics to the Problem of Palestine.
This, as every educated person knows, is one of the most contentious issues in international affairs. In 1917 the British Home Secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared that Britain would support the Jews of Europe in their wish to create a homeland in the Biblical Lands of Palestine. Between the wars increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants fled Europe and settled in Palestine, buying land from its Arab owners. Tensions between incomers and natives erupted into regular bouts of violence which the British authorities, given a ‘mandate’ to run the area after the First World War, struggled to contain. After the Second World War, an exhausted, impoverished Britain tried to hold the ring between increasingly violent Jewish and Arab nationalist political parties and militias, until, in 1948, they effectively gave up and withdrew.
The well-organised and well-armed Jewish settlers promptly declared the existence of the independent state of Israel and the neighbouring Arab countries promptly attacked it, seeking to strangle it at birth. The Israeli army successfully defended its country and amid, much bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, or were expelled, into neighbouring countries, especially Jordan.
In 1967 a joint force of Arab countries led by Egypt was mobilising for another attack when Israel launched a lightning pre-emptive strike, crushing the Egyptian army and forcing the Arabs to sign an armistice after just six days. As a result Israel seized the Jordanian-annexed West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip.
As many as 325,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Syrians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, respectively, creating a humanitarian crisis.
In 1973 the Arabs launched a surprise attack on October 6, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Once again Israel faced numerically overwhelming forces but fought them off in what was effectively the Third Arab-Israeli War. In the aftermath of the war the Israelis realised that they couldn’t rely on fighting off Arab armies indefinitely, and so they began to put out feelers for some kind of peace treaty, which was to lead to the 1978 Camp David Accords under which Israel return the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
Orientalist attitudes to the Palestinian problem
The point of this long digression is that Said was a Palestinian. Both his parents were of Palestinian heritage, he was born in Palestine and raised in Egypt, attending English-language schools in Jerusalem and then Alexandria. Said’s father had served with US Army during the Great War and so earned US citizenship so, when he was expelled from his Egyptian private school for being a troublemaker he was sent to a private boarding school in Massachusetts, USA. Thus began his career as an academic in America (in New York).
But as he progressed through the academic hierarchy, as well as his purely academic publications about comparative literature, Said became known for his ‘outspoken’ opinions about the Palestinian issue, namely speaking up for the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, calling for the government of Israel to moderate its policies in the occupied territories and so on.
This, as you might have expected in polarised politicised America, drew down on his head the wrath of numerous journalists, commentators, Jewish groups and so on, many of which didn’t refrain from employing exactly the kinds of denigratory stereotypes he had listed in Orientalism against Said himself and the Palestinians he spoke up for.
In the Introduction to Orientalism Said explains that the motivation to write the book was partly driven by his own personal experience of Orientalist tropes. In New York academia he found himself extremely isolated as almost the only Palestinian and Arab working in an academic and publishing environment dominated by white liberals or Jews sympathetic to Israel and its policies.
So his own personal experience of having anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim slurs directed at himself, his writings and his opinions was a big motivation behind the years of research and labour of love which Orientalism amounts to.
This explains why the huge book, with its mountains of evidence, all work one way, criticising ‘the West’, Western attitudes, Western academia, Western imperialism, Western racism and so on.
In the Introduction Said explicitly says that he is not interested in exploring ‘the Arab Mind’ or ‘the Islamic World’ and so on. That would have doubled or quadrupled the length of the book, plus which he wasn’t professionally qualified to take on such huge subjects. His interest is solely in a deep investigation of how Western attitudes against ‘the Orient’ were created and proliferated throughout Orientalist studies, fiction and so on.
9/11
A lot happened in the real world between Orientalism‘s publication in 1978 and the publication of Occidentalism in 2002, but in the world of academia, magazines and publishing Said’s critique of Western attitudes had become very widespread among bien-pensant liberals. In the academy and liberal journals Said’s view that ‘the West’ continually sees the Middle East, the Arab world and Islam through simplistic, racist ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes, had become very widely accepted.
The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon and (possibly) the White House (the fourth plane that came down in Washington) galvanised and transformed the culture, shocking and terrifying people around the Western world. It led numerous commentators and analysts to claim that we had entered a new era of war between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamofascism’ etc, an inflammatory rhetoric which translated into actual war when, within a month of the 9/11 attacks, in October 2001, US forces invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime there.
Occidentalism
This is where Buruma and Margalit come in. They readily concede that 9/11, like the First Gulf War before it, led to an explosion throughout the media of just the kind of Orientalist racist stereotypes which Said had dedicated his life to uncovering and critiquing. But they point out that there was a gap in the whole discussion. If ‘the West’ could be accused of deploying Orientalist stereotypes against ‘the East’, ‘the Arab world’ etc, what about the stereotypes of the West which could be found in the media and political and terrorist discourse of the East? Didn’t Arab and Palestinian and Muslim leaders regularly rail against ‘the West’, didn’t an endless stream of news footage show enraged mobs burning the American flag and shouting ‘Down with America’, and wasn’t this anti-western rhetoric routinely associated with a predictable shopping list of negative stereotypes? Short answer, yes.
So what are these anti-Western tropes and where did they come from?
The West and ‘the Modern’
Right at the start Buruma and Margalit made a fundamental conceptual decision which underpins everything that follows: this is to identify anti-Western discourse with anti-Modernism. They argue that when nationalist commentators and activists in the rest of the world attack ‘the West’, they almost always conflate ‘the West’ with every aspect of the modern world which they dislike, despise or fear, everything from industrialisation, secularism, capitalism, rationalism through to cultural products such as pop music and pornography.
What many of the anti-Western nationalist movements of the past 100 or 150 years, whether in India or China or Japan, in the Middle East or across Africa, have in common is that they want to turn the clock back. They dream of an era which preceded the arrival of the West with its monstrous attributes of godless science, nation states, brutal capitalism, cultural hegemony and so on, they dream of an era when their countries were untainted by western influence, untainted by godless capitalism, when everyone lived in small rural communities and shared the same simple faith and devoutness.
At the roots of much anti-Western feeling is a deeper resentment at all these aspects of the modern world and a passionate desire to turn the clock back to simpler, more spiritual times. This leads them to a counter-intuitive conclusion:
Anti-westernism is a western product
The first people to loathe and hate modernism i.e the rise of a secular, godless, liberal, pluralistic society based on industrial capitalism, with the uprooting or rural populations and their herding into monster cities which became sinks of immorality and degeneracy etc, were westerners themselves.
It is one of our contentions that Occidentalism, like capitalism, Marxism, and many other modern isms, was born in Europe before it was transferred to other parts of the world. (p.6, emphasis added)
The main opponents to the birth and spread of industrial capitalist society were inhabitants of that society itself. Marx is the obvious epitome of this trend, but there had been plenty of opponents to the rise of godless rationalism and capitalist industrialisation for generations before him, and loads of theoreticians who tried to cling onto older ideas of pre-industrial societies bound together by a common religion
To put it simply, Western society has, for well over 200 years, contained a large number of intellectuals who fear, hate and loath their own western society, and who have developed an extensive set of concepts and vocabulary to express that hatred in.
Communist anti-westernism
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 appeared, at a stroke, to validate the enormous, world-reaching rhetoric of Marxist analysis, to prove the inevitable collapse of capitalism and of communist revolution, and the Soviet regime spent the next 70 years energetically spreading its anti-western ideas and rhetoric around the world.
Fascist anti-westernism
But the Bolsheviks triggered an equal and opposite reaction in the extreme nationalist movements which developed into totalitarian fascism in Italy, then Germany and the other European governments who fell prey to authoritarian or fascist regimes between the wars.
And the fascist, anti-modern rhetoric developed by these regimes and their numerous intellectual defenders and propagandists, continued long after the Second World War, helping to justify and underpin semi-fascist military regimes in, for example, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the generals, or right-wing regimes in South America such as Pinochet’s Chile (1973 to 1990) or the military government in Argentina (1976 to 1993).
So this is the most fundamental thing about the book – Buruma and Margalit’s decision to expand its frame of reference faaaar beyond a consideration of anti-western rhetoric in the Middle East, in the Arab world or as expressed by Islamic terrorists like Osama bin Laden, and to turn it into an investigation of anti-Western thought in its widest possible definition.
Scope
In their introduction, on page 11, Buruma and Margalit briefly consider taking a chronological approach to the subject, tracing the origins of anti-western feeling all the way back to the Counter-Reformation, through the Counter-Enlightenment, before exploring the roots of the various types of socialist, communist and fascist opposition to the modern world.
Mercifully, maybe, instead of the kind of exhaustive multi-volume study this would have turned into, they decide to take a thematic approach. They will look at certain key images or symbols of the decadent, greedy, rootless etc West, and sketch out their origins in (mostly) Western discourse. This helps explain why the book is a light and frolicsome 149 pages long, although some of the explication is so dense and compressed that it sometimes feels like longer…
Contents
Accordingly, the text is divided into six chapters. The headings are neat and logical but I found the text they contain often very digressive, in the sense that it hops between quite disparate topics, times and places and then, just as unpredictably, returns to what they were originally discussing. On the upside this means the text is often as interesting for the sidelights or incidental observations it throws out as for the central points.
1. War Against The West
Introduction, as summarised above.
2. The Occidental City
Contrary to received opinion, people who hold strong Occidentalist views tend to be educated, or at least educated enough to be familiar enough with the values of the West to hate them. Taking the view that ‘Western values’ are undermining this or that set of traditional native values requires you to have a pretty good theoretical understanding both of what your native values are, what Western values are, and how the latter is ‘poisoning’ the former.
Far from being a dogma favoured by downtrodden peasants, Occidentalism more often reflects the fears and prejudices of urban intellectuals, who feel displaced in the world of mass commerce. (p.30, emphasis added)
Re. the 9/11 attacks on hi-tech buildings, Osama bin Laden trained as a civil engineer. the ringleader of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, studied architecture at Cairo University and went on to do a Masters in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology. He hated modern architecture. He thought the concrete high-rise buildings built in Cairo and across the region in the 1960s and 1970s ruined the beauty of old neighbourhoods and robbed their people of privacy and dignity.
The tower of Babel
Tall buildings have been a focus of anxieties and symbols of ill omen from at least as long ago as the Bible. The Old Testament or Jewish Bible has barely got going before, in chapter 11, we are told about Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel with a view to making a name for themselves. God and, it appears, his angels, feared what they might do next, so afflicted the workers on it with different languages so they couldn’t understand each other, and then dispersed them across the face of the earth.
I visited New York in the 1980s and went to the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre which had an observation deck on the 107th floor and an outdoor viewing platform. It was 1,377 feet above street level. You could feel the building moving under your feet since it was designed to have a certain amount of ‘give’. I have acute vertigo and was terrified.
Cities as sinks of iniquity
Throughout recorded history, cities in every culture have been associated with corruption, greed, exploitation of the poor by the rich, decadence and immorality.
It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city. (p.27)
Western sources
Regarding the authors’ focus on western texts, they live down to my expectations. In just the first part of this chapter they quote the Bible, Juvenal, the Goncourt brothers, William Blake (Dark Satanic mills), T.S. Eliot (The Rock), Richard Wagner (despised the frivolity of Paris), Voltaire (admired the liberty of eighteenth century London), Theodor Fontane (disliked London’s materialism), Friedrich Engels (horrified by the poverty of Manchester) and not a single Arab or Muslim voice.
It feels like a fairly obvious sixth form selection of obvious cultural figures (Blake, Eliot, Wagner). I’d so much have preferred an explanation of Islamic traditions about ‘the city’.
Antisemitism
They then move onto antisemitism, long associated with cities, cosmopolitan i.e. non-native culture, money-lending and capitalism etc, citing (again) Eliot, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Marx. The Nazis incorporated late-nineteenth century tropes of seeking to escape the city for a healthier life in the country into their fascist propaganda about racial purity, despising a checklist of big capitalism, cosmopolitan crowds, decadence (nightclubs and jazz), corruption of good Aryan women into prostitution and, of course, managed to blame all of this on ‘the Jews’.
A lot of these concerns and the language they were expressed in were picked up by other nativist nationalists, in Japan (about which Buruma knows a lot and which developed its own form of fascism during the 1930s) and in the Arab Middle East, developing its anti-colonial, anti-western rhetoric (many nationalist Arab leaders allied with Nazi Germany on the twin bases that a) my enemy (Britain)’s enemy is my friend and b) shared antisemitism).
Sayyid Qutb
They make a brief mention of Sayyid Qutb (1906 to 1966), widely considered the father of modern Islamic fundamentalism, to address not his writings, but his miserable alienation when he moved to New York to study in the 1940s and was repelled by absolutely everything about American life, its soulless materialism, its obsession with capitalist consumerism, its degraded immorality. Maybe they felt obligated to wedge him in somewhere, but Qutb’s importance to the development of Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism isn’t developed at all. A paragraph on him before swooping back to Europe and…
The French Revolution
Surprisingly, maybe, they then move to the French Revolution. The French Revolution crystallised Enlightenment trends against medieval monarchs and aristocrats, the rule of the Church, traditions of all sorts, which needed to be torn up and thrown away, replaced by the cult of Reason, modern laws for modern enlightened citizens.
Antisemitism was implicit in Christianity from the beginning, with the Jews being blamed for insisting on the crucifixion of Jesus by the earliest Church Fathers. Buruma and Margalit attribute the birth of modern antisemitism to the French Revolution. Traditional upholders of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church were easily persuaded that the whole thing was a Jewish conspiracy, and so was born a whole modern antisemitic way of thinking about the world, which was to flourish and become steadily more toxic in the heart of Europe as the nineteenth century progressed.
The German Volk
Soon after the revolution, France invaded Germany, or the German states. Ideological opposition to the teachings of the French Revolution became mixed up with patriotic fervour. This all happened to the first generation of German Romantics. France came to represent the modern, godless, cosmopolitan city, riddled with over-clever philosophers and money-grubbing Jews, which was trying to conquer and obliterate the values of the Volkisch, spiritual German town, the German landscape of sturdy peasants, wise artisans and soulful poets. The authors cite the German folklorist Gottfried von Herder (1744 to 1803) as an example of this view.
Japan and China struggle to adopt Western culture
But western ideas of democracy, industrialism, capitalism and so forth were undeniably effective. They provided the underpinnings for the astonishing spread of Western imperialism. The question for rulers in countries from Morocco to Japan was which ideas from the West it would be profitable to accept, and which they needed to reject in order to maintain their culture and traditions, protect their nations from ‘spiritual pollution’ i.e. Western liberal ideas. Tricky.
Japan and China in different ways tried to adopt Western techniques without changing the core of their culture. Japan was much more successful, maybe because its centralised administration was stronger: it imported Western industrialisation while managing to keep a strong sense of national culture. By contrast the Chinese political system had become corrupt and inefficient so it failed to import Western industrialisation but instead found itself infected with all kinds of Western ideas about republics and democracy and the individual etc, ideas which led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1911.
The appeal of Marxism to anti-colonial nationalists
For the central 70 years of the twentieth century many developing countries thought that Marxism offered a way forward. It was modern, industrial, scientific but rejected the soulless materialism, corruption and imperialist mindset of the Western capitalist societies. hence its attraction for many developing countries, especially in the decades after independence in the 1940s and 50s.
Unfortunately it was the dream which failed. The failure of the secular socialist nationalism promoted by the likes of President Nasser of Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria led to a wave of disillusion across the Arab world and opened the cultural space for Islamists who promoted a radical solution, a return to a world before any kind of modernity existed, back to the pure, unsullied, pious and unified world of the early Caliphate.
Mao and the war against the city
The authors devote 4 or 5 pages to Chairman Mao, ruler of China from 1949 to 1976. They see Mao as the biggest exponent in all world history of the war of the country against the city. The corrupt westernised city was epitomised for Chinese communists like Mao by Shanghai, administered by westerners and packed with a cosmopolitanism, capitalism and corruption. Mao thought such places needed to be purged in the name of a peasant communism.
Mao’s promotion of peasant values promised an escape route from Western capitalism, from urban alienation, decadence and corruption, and a return to integrated rural communities, where life and work would have proper, deep human meaning and purpose.
And so during the 1950s he unleashed the Great Leap Forward which involved rounding up and shooting hundreds of thousands of members of the urban bourgeoisie, those who survived being sent to huge rural labour camps. It was, he boomed, in countless speeches, a good thing ‘to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China’ (p.42).
The Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979
This is the mindset which went on to guide the horrific Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, 1975 to 1979. Most of Pol Pot’s soldiers were illiterate peasants, often only boys. When they took the capital, Phnom Penh, they were staggered by the wealth, the size, the swarming multinational population, the coffee shops and fleshpots. All these were ruthlessly emptied and its inhabitants either shot on the spot, or dragged off to be tortured, or marched off to labour camps in the countryside. Only by exterminating the urban bourgeoisie could the country be restored to purity and truth and correct living. It was a kind of logical end point of centuries of anti-city rhetoric.
The Taliban 1996
Same with the Taliban, illiterate peasants in flipflops armed with weapons seized from the fleeing Soviets or donated by America. After a ruinous civil war they took the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, in 1996. First they butchered the leader of the pro-Soviet regime, Mohammad Najibullah, then they banned everything to do with modern life, which they associated with the hated West, in a bid to return society to the ‘purity’ of the earliest days of the Muslim Caliphate.
All music was banned, along with television, soccer, and most forms of socialising. Women had to cover themselves from head to foot and were not allowed out without a chaperone. Kabul was ruled by a six-man shura not one of them from Kabul, not one of them had ever lived in a city.
The Khmer Rouge and the Taliban represented the triumph of ‘authentic’ rural values over the corrupt, decadent modern city.
Germania
The authors then take a characteristic leap in subject, concluding with a page describing a different way of triumphing over the chaotic modern western city: this was to demolish it and build a totalitarian alternative.
Hitler hated Berlin and planned to rebuild it as a totalitarian capital, its alleys and slums replaced by broad boulevards designed for marching armies, its swarming cosmopolitan crowds replaced by the unified adoring Aryan crowd. All the messy attributes of the decadent West – civil liberties, free market economies, democracy, individualism – would be replaced by one Folk, one Reich, one Führer and one Capital City.
The Hitler regime was overthrown before building got very far but other countries have made the experiment. The authors cite Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, as what Germania might have looked like, a neoclassical testament to untrammeled, totalitarian power.
Lastly, they reference the steel and glass cities of coastal China which have mushroomed in the last twenty years, which represent a kind of defiant triumph over the less impressive, shop-soiled cities of the West. We can do it bigger, better and shinier than you, say high rises such as the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates, Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, the Shanghai Tower in Shanghai, the Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower in Mecca, the Ping An International Finance Centre in Seoul and so on.
These are not so much anti-Western, as supra-western, denying old ideas of Western supremacy by outdoing it.
3. Heroes and Merchants
Werner Sombart
This focuses on the roots of Germany’s sustained sense of being different from ‘the West’, which German intellectuals defined as soulless mercantile Britain and godless revolutionary France.
The authors zero in on a book written in 1915 by a German sociologist named Werner Sombart and titled Händler und Helden or Merchants and Heroes. In the book Sombart contrasted the commercial civilisation of Britain and the liberty, equality, fraternity culture of France with the heroic culture of Germany. The Western bourgeois is satisfied with ‘comfort’ (in German Komfortismus) and the soporific sports of the British. By contrast the German welcomes death as the ultimate sacrifice he can make for the Volk.
Similar ideas were shared by the historian Oswald Spengler and the warrior-author Ernst Jünger. Happy happy Germany to have such ideologues of the glory of war. The fundamental trahison des clercs (‘treason of the intellectuals’) is to promote exciting ideas about glory and sacrifice which lead hundreds of thousands of young men to their death. ‘The young must shed their blood,’ write Thomas Abbt (p.58). Other young men, obviously. You need to stay safe in your study in order to produce such intellectual masterworks.
The authors make a direct link between the widespread contempt for bourgeois Komfortismus described by numerous right-wing German intellectuals, and the attitude of the jihadi fighter interviewed early in the 2001 Afghan who said that the Islamists would triumph because ‘You [the West] love life, but we love death’.
Personally, taking a materialist Darwinian evolutionary view of Homo sapiens, it seems unlikely that impatience to make live heroic lives and die in a noble cause, particularly among zealous young men ‘ardent for some desperate glory’, will ever die out. It has been so ubiquitous throughout all human history, in all cultures, that it appears to be hard-wired into the species. I’ve recently read a suite of books about the problems of African society and prominent among them is what to do about disaffected, unemployed youths, hanging round, looking for a cause to redeem their alienated lives…
Military death cults in Japan
The authors go on to trace how German hyper-nationalism and Occidentalism went on to become surprisingly influential in intellectual circles in the Middle East and Japan. The same valuing of a heroic ideal of nationhood which led Hitler to sacrifice an entire generation of German youth, was the one that made the Japanese fight to the death, island by island and send waves of kamikaze pilots in 1944.
Buruma has a counter-intuitive interpretation of Japanese suicide warriors. The phenomenon was considered at the time as being somehow specifically Japanese, but Buruma says the surviving farewell letters of many of the kamikaze pilots (and drivers of the less well-known suicide torpedoes) indicate that most were highly educated students studying the humanities at leading universities, and that a surprising number of them were well read in German literature and philosophy. They dressed up their feelings in tropes about the Samurai and cherry blossom but their fundamental ideas about the diseased decadence of the West and the need for heroic sacrifice are actually Western ideas.
Buruma gives a potted summary of the way Japanese politicians and intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century cobbled together a patchwork copy of Western intellectual, economic, political, military and religious life, not least in the cobbling together of a state religion, Shinto, which they thought would echo the Christianity which seemed to be such a central part of European life. Ditto the transition of the emperor from a remote and powerless figure in Kyoto, who was moved to Tokyo to become a combination of kaiser, generalissimo, Shinto pope, and highest living deity. People talk (dismissively) about the British inventing many of their ‘traditions’ in the nineteenth century (Christmas trees, the kilt) but the Japanese did the same with knobs on.
Regarding the development of a cult of heroic sacrifice Buruma says an important source was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882 which the armed forces learned by heart and included a passage commanding the ultimate sacrifice for the emperor.
A practical consequence of this Occidentalism were that, when Western forces surrendered, as at Singapore in 1942, the Japanese viewed surrendering forces as dishonourable cowards who preferred to save their skins rather than fight on to the death i.e. the exact opposite of Japanese martial values.
As a result the Japanese regarded the surrendering British forces as less than human and treated them accordingly, working them to death in brutal labour camps. My best friend at school’s dad was in the army in Burma at the end of the war. He saw the state of soldiers repatriated from the Japanese camps. As a result he refused to have anything Japanese in the house.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
The authors then move on to India for a quick description of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which means the ‘National Volunteer Organisation’. Founded in 1925 this was a far-right, Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation which aimed to instil ‘Hindu discipline’ in order to unite the Hindu community and establish a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation). Like the Nazis they aimed to create a new society based on racial purity, military discipline and sacrifice.
Osama bin Laden
Then, in this whistlestop tour, we are on to your friend and mine, the demon figure of the first decade of the 21st century, Osama bin Laden. The authors give quotes from an interview bin Laden gave after the 1996 al-Khobar Tower attack in Saudi Arabia. They say the language bin Laded uses of self-sacrifice, of suicide attacks, is emphatically not part of the Islamic mainstream tradition. In mainstream Islam dying in battle against the infidel is what creates justified martyrs; blowing yourself up along with unarmed civilians is something quite different, feared and despised by many Muslims as much as by Westerners.
They slightly contradict themselves by then describing the death cult of the Assassins, created in the 13th century for reasons which are still debated, and the pattern they set for being prepared to die for Islam in taking out an infidel opponent.
Anyway, whatever the precise roots there’s no denying that throughout the nineteenth century Muslim leaders called for jihad against western colonists and their godless capitalism, against their Jewish agents, and against native leaders who had been corrupted by their infidel ways.
Assassination
When I read this I immediately thought of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad for signing a peace treaty with Israel and instigating a crackdown on Islamic extremists, and so was painted as ‘a traitor to Islam’.
Sadat’s fate raises a general principle of Occidentalism which is that often opponents of the West aren’t actually opposed to the distant West, which they had never visited and of which they knew relatively little, so much as against the westernisers in their own society, political or social leaders who they blame for importing Western secular values. So they kill them.
Historically, the main embodiment of Muslim resistance to westernisation was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 with the following manifesto:
‘God is our objective; the Qu’uran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration.’
Then, in another leap, the authors tell us that Japanese kamikaze tactics were adopted by the Hezbollah in the Lebanon with the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings which killed 241 US and 58 French military personnel.
Buruma and Margalit wrote this book before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, an occupation which triggered an epidemic of suicide bombings by Sunni and Shias against the occupying forces.
Weimar
They conclude with a simple but crucial message. The Weimar Republic didn’t die because it was liquidated by Nazis, big business and the Army. It died because too few people were prepared to defend it. See the books on the subject by Peter Gay and Walter Laqueur. Passionate young men from the Right and the Left conspired to attack and undermine it at every opportunity. Nobody stood up for the boring, unromantic business of liberal democratic political life.
4. Mind of the West
Russian anti-westernism
Occidentalists accuse the West of being effective, technologically adroit, economically triumphant, and yet lacking the soul, depth, spirit and godliness which the critics, of course, pride themselves on having. I particularly despise the long tradition in Russian culture of belittling the frivolity and superficiality of France or Britain compared to the Great Russian Soul and its vast capacity for Noble Suffering. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky. Occidentalists.
Dostoyevsky despised the West because it sought happiness and comfort whereas it should have been seeking salvation. And the route to salvation is via suffering. Only suffering brings wisdom. The West is afraid of suffering. The West can never be wise. Only a people devoted to suffering can be genuinely holy. The Russian soul welcomes and endures great suffering. Thus it is superior to everyone else’s.
Dostoyevsky and the propagandists for Russian suffering prepared the way (or just accurately reported the mindset) of the great Soviet barbarism of the twentieth century, the horrific civil war, the mass famines of Stalin, the huge gulags, total repression of civil society, the incredible death toll of the Great Patriotic War caused by Stalin’s ineptitude (and having massacred all his leading army officers) and Russian military readiness to sacrifice soldiers by the hecatomb in ways the Western Allies couldn’t believe. Still. Spiritual superiority, that’s what counts.
The line continues all the way through to Vladimir Putin. Putin sits in the main line of Russian cultural thought in despising, like Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, the decadence of Western liberalism, whose rapid end he has confidently predicted in numerous speeches.
Meanwhile, while he wastes his nation’s resources on a stupid nationalist war, the population of Mother Russia is going into decline as people flee Putin’s dictatorship or just die of ill health due to its wretched health problems.
Russia has the world’s 11th-largest economy but ranks 96th in life expectancy. Life expectancy for Russian men is 67, lower than in North Korea, Syria or Bangladesh. Still. Spiritual superiority, that’s what counts, eh.
The authors spend a long section describing ‘the love affair of Russians with their own soul’ and the achievement of nativist thinkers, loosely termed ‘Slavophiles’.
Anti-westernism’s German roots
In fact, counter-intuitively, Buruma and Margalit attribute Slavophilia, like so much anti-westernism, to German roots, specifically German Romanticism. Humiliated by Napoleon’s victories over them, conscious of their political backwardness (fragmented into scores of little princedom and dukedoms) German intellectuals, in a massive case of sour grapes, said worldly success didn’t matter, what mattered was what was in your soul. They compensated for their economic, social, political backwardness by asserting the supremacy of their spiritual life.
A spectrum
It occurs to me that there was a spectrum in the moving west to east across Europe in the nineteenth century. At the western extreme was Britain, economic powerhouse of the world but almost bereft of genuine art, philosophy or religion (sure it had the oppressive Church of England but this had little or no spiritualist tradition). Then came France, nearly as economically diverse as Britain, a good deal more artistic and philosophical. Then Germany, economically and politically backward but packed with ‘deep’ philosophers and its great musical tradition. Poland, which is never taken account of by anybody in these kinds of surveys. And finally Russia, the most economically and socially backward of European nations and, accordingly, possessed of a self-congratulatory sense of its immense spiritual superiority over everyone else.
In the authors’ view, to be blunt, it’s all the Germans’ fault. Extremely resentful of the military, economic and artistic success of Napoleon’s France, German Romantics compensated for national humiliation by working out the theory of the superior spiritual value of Das Volk and the nobility of dying for it.
Isaiah Berlin on German Romanticism
No less an authority than Isaiah Berlin thought this was the case and, moreover, thought the model the Germans worked out became a template which could be exported to all peoples who feel mocked and humiliated. The template was copied by the Russians during the nineteenth century and, as we’ve seen, adopted by Arab and Indian nationalists between the wars.
Buruma and Margalit summarise Berlin’s model. The German Romantic movement was the Counter-Enlightenment. It valued intuition and spirit over reason and calculation. It preferred heroes to shopkeepers. It looked back to a lost era of national and religious unity and looked forward to its glorious restoration.
On this view Nazism, Japanese fascism and Islamic fundamentalism are all the heirs to the original German Romantic anti-Westernism.
Russian Orthodox Christianity
The authors tell me things about Russian Christianity I didn’t know. They describe the messianic conviction that Moscow is a second Rome and only home to true Christianity. They explain that Russian Orthodox Christianity is far less interested in theology than Greek or Roman Christianity and far more concerned with custom and practice. Icons are more important than intellectual debate.
Intellectualism is suspect. And any kind of change is not needed. The thousand year old tradition of the Russian church suffices. Innovation tends to come from outside, representing threat and betrayal.
The authors give a potted history of Russia, with Peter the Great and Catherine the Great realising they had to import Western technology and ideas. Throughout the nineteenth century Russian intellectuals split into westernising and slavophile parties. They give potted biographies of individual westernisers. And they explain that for these men, the West meant Germany and its succession of Romantic philosophers.
As with Orientalism, all these Russian thinkers worked out their theories and defined themselves against the Other, the Other being a highly simplistic, stereotyped view of The West, a West which was materialistic, godless, mechanical, superficial, divided, corrupt and decadent, which lacked the soulfulness and the unity of people and purpose which characterised Mother Russia.
The triumph of will over reason
One major aspect of Occidentalism is the valorising of will over reason. Timid reason calculates the best course of action, tots up the pros and cons, a shopkeeper mentality. All this contrasts with the will which acts instinctively, in large glorious romantic causes. Following the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hitler and the Nazis famously praised the Triumph of the Will over pettifogging rationalism. And so did nineteenth century Russians.
Konstantin Leontiev
The Russian Nietzsche was Konstantin Leontiev (1831 to 1891). He wrote a big book, Russia and Europe, which made a big splash. He was one of hundreds of late-nineteenth century philosophers and commentators who worked up an ‘organic’ theory of history i.e. that societies are like organisms which have a birth, a youth, a maturity and then a decay.
Surprise, surprise, Leontiev thought that the West with its decadent liberal democracy was in the last stages of decay. Exactly what Vladimir Putin thinks today, 150 years later. Continuities like this demonstrate that this is not a rational belief based on evidence, it is a prejudice, an unchanging tenet of anti-western bigotry, of Occidentalism.
The authors end the chapter with a brief history of the word nihilism which came to prominence, in Russia, in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The chapter ends with more evidence of Dostoyevsky’s fanatical hatred of the West and fear that it’s godless, scientistic values were undermining the noble soul of Mother Russia.
5. The Wrath of God [Muslim fundamentalism]
Buruma and Margalit draw a distinction between religious Occidentalism and secular Occidentalism.
They say that Islamism is the form Occidentalism is taking in our time. What is new or unique is Islamism’s view that the West is guilty of barbarous idolatry and proceed to explain what this means, starting with a definition of idolatry.
They give a pocket history of the concept of idolatry which stems from the Jewish Bible. Here God is depicted as a jealous husband who is hurt when his Chosen People whore after strange gods. But obviously it has a deeper charge than that. God is also king of the universe, master of creation, source of existence. Denying God is the worst kind of blasphemy imaginable. In the Old Testament numerous kings and rulers are depicted as behaving as if they were as powerful as, or more powerful than, their creator, and demanding the veneration which is due to God.
So idolatry is giving to men the devotions and worship which are due to god. They discuss the meaning of Arab terms such as tajhil, jahiliyya and jahili. jahiliyyahas been used to describe the religious ignorance which prevailed in Arabia before the advent of the Prophet Mohammed but also, more metaphorically, as the notion of barbarism, in the same way the ancient Greeks used it to refer to everyone who wasn’t Greek. At school I was told it was a joke term for people whose unGreek languages made them sound like they were saying ba-ba-ba-ba.
To summarise, the use of the term jahiliyya in Islamist discourse can be interpreted as referring to a new barbarism (godless idolatry) which originates from the West and is infecting the Muslim world.
The authors have a digression into the history of Manicheism, first as an actual belief system propounded by the Iranian prophet Mani (216 to 277 AD) then as the strand in most religions which posits an absolute divide between God and Evil. Then they show how ‘evil’ in most religious traditions is associated with the body, with its weakness, tendency to degrade and die, its distracting appetites, worst of which is, as we all know, sex. The body is contrasted with the soul which is taken to be immortal and the part of a human body which can approach or commune with god.
Ali Shari’ati
They discuss Ali Shari’ati (1933 to 1977), an Iranian Shia Muslim revolutionary and opponent of the westernising regime of the Shah. Shari’ati thought the best way for developing countries to fight back against the infection of godless western materialism was by rallying around their religious beliefs and traditions, in his case, Islam. He explicitly linked the influence of the West as encouraging Muslims to idolatry i.e. diverting worship away from God and towards the godless things of man i.e. money, consumer goods.
The industrial revolution made the West rich but it led to what sociologist Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It lost its magic and spirits. It lost God. And so all its goods and products are tainted by this tendency to disenchant and divert men’s worship from God to things. Idolatry.
Sayyid Qutb
The authors tell us about Islamic radical thinkers who fought back against the forces of secularism, for example Muhamed Taleqani in Iran, before returning to Sayyid Qutb, first mentioned in chapter 2.
For Qutb the whole world, from decadent Cairo to New York, was in a state of jahiliyya. He saw the West as a gigantic brothel, steeped in animal lust, greed and selfishness. Human thought, in the West, was ‘given the status of God.’ Material greed, immoral behaviour, inequality and political oppression would end only once the world was ruled by God and by His laws alone. The opportunity to die in a holy war would allow men to overcome selfish ambitions and corrupt oppressors (p.117)
One of the appeals of Islam is its egalitarianism: all men really are equal in the eyes of God in a way they rarely have been in the Christian West, and the Islamic dream is of a society where all men worship God, all laws derive from God, all behaviour is godly, and so it is literally impossible for large disparities in wealth or for corrupt immoral rulers ever to arise.
Qutb is given more space this time around, with a thumbnail biography describing the two years he spent in America to improve his English and which turned him into a West-hating Occidentalist. He also became a ferocious antisemite, literally believing in the famous forgery, The Elders of Zion and the ‘worldwide Jewish conspiracy’ and associating the global nature of finance capital with ‘Jewish bankers’ and so on. Schoolboy antisemitism.
To look at it another way, Qutb thought he was developing an approach which saved the noble and godly in human nature. The West wasn’t just godless, it actively worshipped the things of the body, the West is a cult of physical appetites, valuing food, drink, sex, holidays, fast cars, thus degrading human nature, instead of uplifting it through things of the soul by focusing solely on God. jahiliyya is the culture of animals or, worse, of humans who have thrown away their human attributes in a mad rush to become animals.
So, if Westerners have deliberately denied their humanity and turned themselves into animals, then they can be treated like animals, as worse than sub-humans. It’s this development of a train of thought which led him to consider all Westerners as sub-human which makes Qutb, as Buruma and Margalit out it, ‘the high priest of Occidentalism’ (p.121).
More, the world is in a state of war, between those who seek the righteousness of Islam and the rest. Even Islamic countries have been tainted to some extent by Western or secular innovations, and so jihad must be fought to overthrow idolatrous leaders. This is, obviously enough, an incitement to permanent warfare. You can see why it would appeal to zealous young men disgusted by the West, such as Mohamed Atta and so it explains the never-ending supply of young men prepared to take up arms to defend and assert radical Islam. But it just as easily explains why those societies, Islamic societies, will never be at peace with themselves. Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq. Permanent war.
Abu-l-A’la Maudadi
Then we are introduced to Abu-l-A’la Maudadi (1903 to 1979) Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist and activist, who is described (on his Wikipedia page) by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as ‘the most systematic thinker of modern Islam’.
The thing about all these Islamic thinkers is it’s hard to remember them because they all appear to have had the same pretty simple idea: Islam needed to reject the corruption of the West, purged of Western corruption, in order to become pure. Then everyone will live happy godly lives.
In practice Maudadi opposed Indian nationalism because it was Hindu, and democracy because it would impose majority Hindu values on Muslims. He said in a speech that anyone who voted would be a traitor to the Prophet and to God. He wanted to revive the early Caliphate (what Islamic fundamentalist doesn’t?).
Maudadid founded the Jamaat I-Islami Party which went on to be influential in the politics of the new country formed at the Partition of India, of Pakistan.
Tawhid and Muhammed Iqbal
Tawhid is the doctrine of the Unity of God. One of its proponents was Muhammed Iqbal (1877 to 1938) writer, philosopher and politician, considered by many to be ‘the spiritual father of Pakistan’. In his view human society should practice unity, harmony and justice in order to reflect the Unity of God. Against this settled social background each individual should be able to develop their individuality or khudi.
So, Buruma and Margalit ask, what was it that made Qutb an Occidentalist and Iqbal not? Partly it was personal psychology; Qutb was overwhelmed and disgusted by everything he experienced in America, whereas Iqbal enjoyed his British education and took a degree at Cambridge.
But basically Iqbal was tolerant. He thought there were many ways to God; the best way is Islam but there might be others for men of good faith. Qutb, by contrast took a fiercely Manichean view: there was the world of Islam and then everything else, which was full of sub-human barbarians. Qutb wrote:
Any society that is not Muslim is jahiliyya
And true believers need to take up jihad to enforce the rule of God in their nations. Permanent war.
Protestantism and liberalism
The authors then shift their ground to explain that the Reformation i.e. rebellion against the grip of the Roman Catholic Church, began the long process whereby religion and the personal sphere were separated out, in the Protestant countries of the West. The separation of church and state. The right to freedom of conscience, of belief, of religion.
And this is anathema to Islamists who insist there is not, there cannot be, a divide between religion and private belief or morality. Everyone must believe and worship the same, follow the same morality. This is why some critics of political Islam liken it to fascism. More accurately it might be likened to totalitarianism. Mussolini said: ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.’ Swap ‘Islam’ for state. Note the Morality Police in Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Women in Islam
Buruma and Margalit finally get around to the hugely contentious subject of women in Islam. They claim that many Muslims yearn for a return to traditional and community values. Islamic fundamentalism draws its support from a nostalgia for a return to proper Muslim values, which are associated with tradition beliefs and customs.
One of the central areas is the role and behaviour of women because in a patriarchal culture like Islam, the behaviour of women directly reflects on the honour of their menfolk, in a way most of us in the West just don’t understand.
Countless visitors to Muslim countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries observed the strict segregation of the sexes, the way women were completely invisible in many rural communities, or else were covered from head to foot in towns.
They zero in on the issue of the veil. The veil for women appears to have existed way before Islam there are depictions of it in pictures from the first century. Maybe Muslims copied it from the Byzantine Empire. It came to signify that the owner did not do manual labour i.e. became a status symbol.
During the independence struggle in Algeria many women took the veil as a proud assertion of their Islamic heritage and defiance of the French colonialists. But 50 years later, in the era of the Taliban, women are to be covered in what are effect shapeless sacks, completely denying their physicality, the assumption being that the merest glimpse of female flesh will cause an outbreak of ungodly fleshly thinking among surrounding men. In this respect ‘the veil’ is a symbol of a Manichean tension between the Spirit and the Body.
Wisely the authors don’t propose to delve deeper into the symbolism, meaning and all the debates raging around ‘the veil’, as fully explicating the history and then trying to find quotes in the Koran or the hadith to back up all the different opinions would keep us here till Doomsday.
Their book is not about Islamic beliefs and customs, it has the narrower focus of being about Muslim opinions about the West, in this case, Eastern views about Western women.
Islamic fundamentalists (and, the authors emphasise, Orthodox Jews) regard women’s dress and behaviour in the West as little better than prostitutes’. Here we’re back to Sayid Qutb’s opinion that Western immorality isn’t just bad, but degrades human beings to a level lower than animals. Animals don’t know any better, but humans do, and to reject what they know (of God’s demands for respect and morality) means they forfeit their humanity.
Also, in a patriarchal society, a woman is the ‘protected jewel’ in the crown of a man’s honour. Which means that how a man protects and defends his woman is a large part of his honour or identity. And here’s the point: Western men who relate to Western women as if they were just other citizens without any of the respect due to them in a Muslim country, show that they lack even the most basic sense of honour.
Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia
Three packed little pages which describe the alliance in the eighteenth century of fiercely puritanical preacher Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and warlord Muhammad Ibn Saud. The warlord adopted the puritanical beliefs of the preacher and together they conquered the Holy Places. Then a lot of history as first the Ottomans and then the British took control of the Saudi peninsula, but by shrewd manoeuvring the family of the Sauds took control of the new kingdom and imposed an extremely fierce version of Islam on their population.
Then came the discovery of oil and these phenomenally strict Puritans found themselves among the richest people in the world. The result, say Buruma and Margalit, is an uneasy form of ‘officially sanctioned hypocrisy’, where the Saudi authorities impose a strict morality in public but live like Roman emperors in the privacy of their own palaces, or in their mansions in London and New York.
Saudi ‘hypocrisy’ would be of limited interest or importance if it weren’t for the fact that in the last decades of the twentieth century the Saudis began to export their form of intolerant Islam. As of 2004 the authors thought that:
Saudi Arabia is now the prime source of fundamentalist, puritanical ideology affecting Muslims everywhere, from North Africa to Indonesia. Oil money is used to promote religious radicalism around the world… (p.136)
That was 20 years ago, the trend has only increased since then, with Saudi involved not only in the Arab Spring uprisings and aftermaths, funding groups in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, but also bankrolling sides in the ruinous civil wars in Syria and Yemen; and that’s before accounting for their promotion of their particularly virulent purist form of Islam in Muslim countries across North Africa and central Asia and into the Far East, in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. And part of the package is a virulently anti-Western Occidentalist message.
6. Seeds of Revolution
A 12-page chapter on how the main venom of Occidentalism falls, even more than on distant America, on Israel. Eccentrically, they tackle this vast bottomless subject via a little known, unimportant novel published by the Theodor Herzl (1860 to 1904), the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist who was the father of modern political Zionism.
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Zionism as a Jewish nationalist movement, originating in central and eastern Europe, that had for its goal the creation of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews.
The novel was titled Altneuland which was translated into English as ‘The Old New Land’ when it was published in 1902. It’s apparently a huge text but the core of it is a vision of what Palestine will look like twenty years hence i.e. in 1922, after Palestine has been successfully occupied by Jews. The place has become a technological and economic miracle, the previously barren desert blooming, the previously rundown ports now full of cranes and ships, the rundown towns transformed into European-style cities with wide boulevards and cafes. Religion there is some, but hollowed out to become little more than the civic holidays of a mostly secular European culture.
Visitors to this brave new Jewish world marvel at the gleaming cities and high technology but find time to ask the one Arab in the book what he thinks, and he is overjoyed. Palestinian land-owners sold to the Jews for good prices, Palestinians are employed in all the new works, even the poor are lifted up by the rising standard of living. It’s win-win-win.
Of course it didn’t turn out that way and the modern state of Israel has become the number one hate figure for Arab politicians and Islamists throughout the region, a running sore in the Middle East which will, probably, never go away.
Anyway, the authors don’t really scratch the surface of the issue before proceeding to their rather rushed conclusion: this is that most of the nationalist responses to western imperialism borrowed western ideas to fight it with, whether they be the liberty-equality-fraternity of the French Revolution, the scientific positivism of Comte, the communism of Karl Marx, the anti-Enlightenment tropes of the German Romantics.
They move from Margalit’s home territory (Jerusalem/Israel) back to Buruma’s, Japan. He explains how the samurai leaders of Japan who realised in the 1860s that they needed to carry out a wholesale modernisation of their nation did so by importing selected Western ideas but also sparked a nativist nationalist backlash. But even this, although dressed in Japanese costume, borrowed ideas on how to run society from European fascists and the Nazis in particular.
They conclude that no Occidentalist can be free of ideas from the Occident. The modernisation of Japan gave rise to an anti-modern backlash which borrowed ideas and technology of the modern world in their effort to reject it. Same, they suggest, with Islamic fundamentalists. They loathe and fear western materialism, but communicate using laptops and mobile phones.
On almost the last page the authors start discussing the Ba’ath Party, which gained power in post-independence Syria and Iraq, and how it was forged in the 1930s from a combination of nostalgia for a holistic Arab community and ideas taken from European fascism. One of its theoreticians, Sati’ Husri, was a keen student of German Romantic theorists like Fichte and Herder who rejected the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of the organic, völkisch nation united by blood and soil. This was translated by Husri into the Arab word asabiyya or (Arab) blood solidarity
The end of the book feels rushed and hurried. Only here do they make the big point that Arab ‘nationalist’ leaders have killed far more of their fellow Arabs than all the colonialists and Zionists put together, witness Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, who everyone thought was a cruel mass murderer until the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011 and we all discovered that his son, Bashar al-Assad, is even viler. Over half a million Arabs have died in the Syrian civil war.
What not to think
Buruma and Margalit conclude with some very rushed thoughts. For a start they predict that the war against terror will mostly be fought within Arab states, against extremists.
Secondly, they say the conflict is against a worldwide, loosely affiliated underground movement. (Presumably they mean al-Qaeda, though they don’t say so.)
As to the first prediction, now, in 2023, 20 years after the book was written, we know that America went ahead with its idiotically badly conceived invasion of Iraq, which on the face of it was an invasion by a foreign power, but that this triggered the collapse of Iraq into prolonged civil war and ethnic cleansing. The ‘within states’ thesis was more dramatically proven by the Arab Spring which led to the disintegration of the states of Libya and Syria, turmoil in Egypt, and a cruel civil war in Yemen. Presumably al-Qaeda and all its affiliates wanted to create pure Islamic states or restore the Caliphate, but they’ve turned out to be part of a process which has destabilised and wrecked much of the Arab world. My view is that it’s their culture, they’re their countries, we’ve interfered enough in that part of the world (and too many other parts of the world, too). Let them sort it out.
Buruma and Margalit say we shouldn’t be paralysed by ‘colonial guilt’ but I think we’re way beyond that now. Every time we intervene we make things worse. We turned Iraq into an abattoir. The Yanks spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan over 20 years and look at it now: still the poorest country in the world and back to being ruled by the Taliban.
The West intervened in Libya to prevent Gaddafi massacring protesters in Benghazi but didn’t follow it through by leading and uniting the opposition which, instead, collapsed into regional factions, so that twelve years later, Libya has no one central government.
Total intervention, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, failed.
Partial intervention, as in Libya, failed.
I suggest the only viable policy is complete non-intervention as the West, in effect, is doing in Syria.
If Arabs and Muslims want to spend decades massacring each other, it’s not so much that we don’t want to intervene, or don’t have a moral duty or whatever to intervene; it’s more that we’ve tried intervening, in different countries in different ways, and almost always we make it worse. Non-intervention seems to me the only responsible policy.
This book was written when the Western world was reeling from the 9/11 attacks which everybody felt turned the world on its axis and introduced a whole new era. There was felt to be an urgent need for commentary and analysis, not least explanations of what Islamic fundamentalism was and why the terrorists hated us so much. This book was an interesting attempt to fill that gap.
By the end, although it contains lots of references to specific writers and theories, it feels somehow rushed and superficial. Buruma and Margalit’s thesis, which they repeat half a dozen times, is that German Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century developed a worldview opposing the rational scientific values of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, and this template for opposing all the forces of ‘modernity’ was then taken up by intellectuals in other countries which resented the way the godless materialism of Britain and France seemed to be destroying traditional values, in countries as far afield as Russia, China, Japan and India, and, in the twentieth century got mixed into the anger, resentment and humiliation of a number of Arab and Muslim theorists and theologians.
Their basic idea is that opposition to the West, and the negative stereotypes which its enemies use to characterise it which the authors call Occidentalism, began in the West and always carries the spoor of its Western origins.
However, it’s a long time since 9/11. Now, in 2023, it feels like a lot of the excitement, paranoia and hyperbole of that era has drained away. The Arab Spring, then the Arab Winter, then the collapse of Libya, Syria and Yemen, changed the landscape. Up till then Arab nationalists and radical Islamists believed that all they had to do was overthrow the ageing dictators who in one way or another had imposed Western ideas (nationalism, socialism, science) onto their peoples, and the purified, communal, traditional Islam of the good old days would rush back in to restore the Caliphate. Instead , when the dictators were overthrown, first in Iraq, then Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, with the vain attempt to do so in Syria, the result wasn’t the Unity of Islam but chaos and massacre.
Al Qaeda affiliates across North Africa continue to terrorise their countrymen but they will never be able to seize power; all they do is create the chaotic conditions in which warlords and mercenaries like the Wagner group thrive (in places like Chad, Mali or the Central African Republic or the wretched failed state of Somalia), while political and military leaders with no principles overthrow each other in naked bids for power, as in the utterly pointless Sudanese Civil War.
Piled onto all this is the relentless degradation of the environment of the Arab world, which is only going to get hotter and hotter, with evermore water shortages and the loss of evermore agricultural and even pasturing land. A lot of the Arab world is going to become a hellish place to live.
So the situation is massively more screwed up than when Buruma and Margalit wrote this book and their scholarly shuffling through tomes by Herder and Fichte, Schelling and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, feels like bookish trip down memory lane. Then again maybe they were right to stick to the library; their treatment of the role of Israel in all this, approached through Theodor Herzl’s novel and a half page description of modern Jerusalem, feels entirely inadequate.
Either way, ahead lies total chaos in which the Occidentalism they describe and define will seem increasingly irrelevant to an Arab world collapsing into endless civil war and social collapse. The West wasn’t behind the Arab Springs, that was what so excited the protesters, they were entirely homemade, of domestic Arab and Muslim origin. But so was the chaos and collapse they brought in their wake, of entirely Arab and Muslim origin. It’s their countries, their people, their problems. We’ve intervened too many times. We shouldn’t get involved.
Credit
Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit was published in 2004 by Atlantic Books. References are to the 2005 Atlantic Books paperback edition.
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