Islam, the West, and Othering: The Pre-Modern and Modern Periods Experience - Term Paper Example

Islam, the West, and ‘Othering The Pre-Modern and Modern Periods’ Experience First and College s First and Last Name, Department..., University of... [Student’s First and Last Name] is now at Department of..., University of... This research was in part supported by the grant awarded to [Student’s First and Last Name] by [Sample Grant Programme]. Correspondence concerning this research paper should be addressed to [Student’s First and Last Name], Department..., University of..., [Address] Contact: Abstract The causes and consequences of ‘Othering’ of Islamic culture in the West and of the Western culture in Islamic nations are historically examined in the course of this essay. The conclusions are drawn on fundamentally contradictory nature of the relationship between the West and the world of Islam. Keywords: culture, Islam, the West, Christianity, ‘Othering’. Islam, the West, and ‘Othering’: The Pre-Modern and Modern Periods’ Experience The two great cultures, that of West Europeans and that of the Muslim residents of Asia and Africa, have gone through various stages of mutual balance of power and self-perception. However, in all cases it was a sense of estrangement and bewilderment at each other that dominated the symbolic understanding of each other in those cultures. The purpose of the present essay is to show how such estrangement, or ‘Othering’, played out in the course of several centuries of history of political, economic and cultural ties between the Christian West and Islamic Orient. For the purposes of present discussion, the terms “West” and “Islam” will be used in generalized sense, with the former corresponding to the cultures and nations dominated or influenced by Western (Catholic and later Protestant) Christianity, while the latter encompassing the totality of political and cultural space for which the religion of Islam was the most fundamental unifying factor. The issues of relationship between the cultures influenced by Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity and Islamic civilizations are to be analyzed in this essay to the extent of their impact on the perception of Islam in the West and the attitude of Islamic cultures towards the Christians in general, respectively. The chronological boundaries of the research encompass the historic period ranging from 7 century CE to our times, with special attention being paid to the vicissitudes of change in the models and criteria of ‘Othering’ being employed by both parties. The ‘Othering’ in Pre-Modern Times, a Christian Case: Islam as a Heretical Competitor The rise of Islam as a religion of the new mighty world empire, which managed to destroy centuries-old powers of the Middle East, i.e. the East Roman Empire (Byzantium) and the Sassanian kingdom of Persia, from the very outset led to the increasing feelings of insecurity and dismay on the part of Christian scholars and theologians. Having been previously accustomed to the feeling of utter superiority and ultimate triumph of the Christian faith, they were immensely surprised by the fact that an initially ‘insignificant’ religious group from the Arabian Peninsula managed to assert itself as a viable proselytizing alternative to their own creed. At the same time, the direct connection between Islamic religious doctrine and Biblical teachings concerned the Christian apologists that sought to present a case against Islam, as this meant that the new religion was able to legitimately claim the mantle of the ‘final’ revelation, as opposed to the previous claim of Christianity itself. The Christian theologians finally came to view Islam as the new heresy and apostasy from ‘the true’ Christian faith. St. John of Damascus (c. 675-749), also known as Johannes Damascenus, was allegedly the first to use such pejorative term as ‘the Saracenes’ when referring to Muslims. By this he meant that, in his opinion, that Islam was the mistaken heresy followed by ‘Ishmaelites’, i.e. the descendants of Abraham’s bastard son (which were associated with the Arabs in early Christian discourse). Damascenus was the first to claim that Muhammad was allegedly an impostor prophet who concocted his own ‘heresy’ by combining the fragments of Judaic and Christian teachings – with the help of the followers of more ancient Arian heresy, not the least. Setting the stage for such condescending polemic in the future, Damascenus had a strong impact on overwhelmingly negative treatment of Islam in the future Christian tradition. Moreover, in Western Christianity, the hostility towards Islam was even more magnified due to the absence of reliable first-hand accounts of Quranic teachings and, frequently, the knowledge of Arab language as such. The biased Byzantine polemics against Islam were taken for granted by Western clergy, which was furthermore indignant at the lack of any perceptible church-like structure in Islam and the doctrinal challenges against certain Christian tenets which were of utmost importance to the Western Church. Among these, the rejection of the Trinity concept in favor of the undivided Unity of God was the most shocking to Western Catholics. Gradually they came to associate Islam with the Manichean ideas denounced by St. Augustine and, paradoxically enough, with pre-Christian ‘pagan’ religions. The latter may be explained by the virtual absence of any lasting cross-cultural contacts for the duration of the Middle Ages period, with the exception of (problematic) co-existence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in Spain until the end of Reconquista period, and of the Crusades period. Nonetheless, the Crusades played a role of entrenching the negative attitude of West Christians toward Muslims even further, as the sophisticated culture of Islamic cities of the Mediterranean was now interpreted as a further sign of Muslims’ worldly excesses and allegedly ‘sinful’ nature of Islam as a creed. The first Western translation of the Quran, produced by the English theologian Robert of Ketton in 1143 was specifically designed to support the hegemonic claim on heretical character of Islam, instead of attempting to objectively portray this religion’s scripture. The figure of Muhammad himself came to be associated with that of Anti-Christ in the West Christian folklore and theological writings alike. The Muslim Prophet was depicted as a total anti-thesis to Jesus Christ: as a tyrannical and lustful demagogue who came to prominence due to his knowledge of magic and potent diabolic abilities. As early as the late 11th century this caricature of Muhammad was presented as accurate portrayal of the Prophet of Islam in the vast majority of Western sources. To summarize this section, the pre-modern West Christian notions of Islamic world, its religion and culture, were marked by profound hostility and failure to distinguish between the myth and reality. Such adversary account of Islam fits well with the concept of the ‘Othering’ of Muslim world in the Occidental sources of pre-modern era. ‘The Othering’ in Pre-Modern Period, the Muslim Case: The Westerners as Barbaric ‘Franks’ Just as it was the case with the Christian West, the pre-modern Islamic world constructed its own narrative of intrinsically heretical and false doctrines of the Western ‘Men of the Book’, i.e. the Christians. At the same time, however, the Muslim theologians were much less keen to denounce and caricature their Western counterparts; instead, for the learned Muslims, the main argument in ‘Othering’ of the West Christian peoples was their ostensibly ‘barbaric’ and uncivilized character. This narrative was especially widely used in the times of the Crusades, which was, naturally enough, predicated on the intense hostility felt towards the invading Westerners by the residents of the Mediterranean Muslim cities. The famous account by Usama ibn Munqidh is the best testimony of such a view. Making observations on his tumultuous military life in the Middle East, this Muslim Arab noble and warrior of the 12th century asserted that ‘the Franks’ (i.e. West Europeans) were literally “animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else.” Ibn Munqidh relates a number of stories related to the behavior of the West Europeans that both amused and stupefied their Muslim hosts and enemies. Among these, the majority is connected with the West Europeans’ different attitudes to healing and hygiene. Some more ‘strange’ features of West European character included, for the author, their alleged lack of jealousy in amorous affairs and their distinct judicial procedures, such as the use of dueling to establish the guilt of the defendant or the lack thereof. Ibn Munqidh is especially surprised at the lack of respect towards the Muslim religion expressed by freshly arrived West Europeans. This episode, which is reproduced in his chronicle, demonstrates that the Muslims of that time felt estranged from West Europeans not due to their religious affiliation (as the favorable mentioning of the ‘native Christians’, i.e. the pre-Crusader Eastern Christian residents of Syrian and Palestine, in ibn Munqidh’s chronicle demonstrates), but because of diverse cultural settings that made the mutual understanding of both cultures rather problematic. Therefore it may be inferred that the cases for ‘Othering’ in the pre-modern Muslim and West Christian settings were actually rather different. While the Muslims ‘Othered’ the West Europeans due to alleged lack of civilized behavior, the West Christians viewed the followers of Islam as heretical and profligate denizens of rich cities which were sworn to the impostor prophet, whom the Western theologians connected with the image of Anti-Christ himself. The Western perceptions of Islam and Muslims in Early Modernity The West Europeans’ views of Islam and the Middle Eastern peoples as such underwent a dramatic change in the post-Medieval period. While previously the dominant discourse was of religious heresy and sinfulness, since the 15th century it was gradually overcome by the perception of the ‘East’, or “Orient’, as the land of mysteries and untold riches that were to be conquered by the brave of heart. To be sure, such discourse was firmly grounded in the tradition of the Crusades and was in no way devoid of its religious underpinnings. However, the newly formed tradition of ‘Orientalism’ gradually became firmly associated with the notion of the West’s civilization superiority, which was inherently absent from the previous, strictly religious anti-Islamic discourse. The Orientalist themes became especially prominent in the times of the Enlightenment, as the contrast between ostensibly rational and scientific worldview of ‘the West’ and the backward and superstitious outlook of ‘the East’ came to be fundamentally accepted by the Western philosophers and lay persons alike. ‘The West’ was henceforth viewed as the epitome of civilization, while ‘the East’ was relegated to the status of secondary subject in civilization’s history. The decline of Ottoman Empire, which was previously viewed as the potent enemy, and competitor, to the Western powers, contributed the most to the fall of prestige of Eastern states in the eyes of their Western contenders. While it was previously assumed that the Muslim East was in ascendancy and the West in relative retreat after the fall of Byzantium and Hungary to the Turks, from the early 1700s on the European military capacity clearly outstripped that of their Muslim enemies. From Russian victories over the Ottomans in the Balkans and Crimea to the beginnings of the British conquest of formerly Muslim-dominated India, the Islamic world seemed to be on retreat. One of the examples of such altered attitude towards Islamic peoples may be found in memoirs of General Bourienne who was Napoleon’s aide des camps in the course of the Egyptian campaign (1798-1799). Bourienne depicts Egypt as the land of desolation and the reign of superstitious religion. While he mentions the well-known account of General Bonaparte’s endeavors to secure the respect and trust of the country’s Islamic elite and masses, Bourienne is quick to remind the reader that such concessions were generally made from the military and strategic standpoint, and not due to some infatuation with the Islamic culture or religion. On the contrary, Bourienne’s diary clearly shows that the French had but mostly negative feelings towards Egypt and its residents. The Orientalist view of the Islamic culture was further reinforced in the course of European colonization of the Middle East, as the Muslims came to be treated as ‘uncivilized’ people to be ‘converted’ and Europeanized (see below). The Muslim perceptions of the West in early modern period The early modern Muslims were apparently rather ambiguous in their views on the West Europeans. While previously the learned Muslims regarded the Westerners as uncouth barbarians, this understanding was gradually shaken by increased military successes of the West powers against the Ottomans and other Islamic states, the superior development of European military technology, etc. The French invasion in Egypt really shook the morale of the Middle Eastern commentators, for it was for the first time that the Muslims had an encounter with the representatives of a truly secular philosophy of the government, which was far more alien to them than their previous Catholic opponents. The respective fragments of that period’s chronicle by al-Jabarti shows in detail how the Islamic scholars of Egypt were both fascinated and repelled by such fundamentally non-Islamic and non-religious concepts as ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ that was brought to their attention for the first time by the invading Frenchmen. Ultimately, though, the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt was just the first of the series of incursions and colonization processes that brought to an end the political independence of Islamic states from the West, shifting the bulk of the dichotomy between Western Christian and Islamic worlds to the purely cultural milieu. The 19th century and colonization/civilizing narrative The 19th century saw the definite beginning of colonization and Westernization of the Islamic East. Together with the other ‘non-civilized’ parts of the world, it was deemed to be ‘inferior’ to the Western ‘civilization’ by the world’s new cultural and political hegemons. The French managed to incorporate Algeria into their nation-state’s domains during the period of 1830 to 1880, while the British put the previously independent Egypt under their domination in 1882, wresting it finally from the formal sphere of influence of the Ottoman Turkey. The colonizers’ attitude towards the subjugated peoples of Islamic Orient was patronizing to the extremes. The novel notions of scientific racism were employed to justify the ideas of European supremacy, which were the mainstream of colonial ideology of those times. Lord Cromer, a British governor of Egypt in the late 19th century epitomized such line of thinking by declaring that “the Englishman” has an idea of a “mission to perform”, i.e. that of instilling the notions of “individual justice” and “equal rights before the law” to the minds of supposedly inferior Egyptian population. Such colonial narrative proved to be a base for the subsequent attitudes of the Western elites towards the Middle Eastern nations – even after the era of formal colonialism came to the end. 20-21st centuries: Modernization and the challenge of Islamism The 20th to 21st centuries were marked by two concomitant socio-political and cultural tendencies with regard to relations between the Western and Islamic worlds: that of ‘modernization’ and of the tension between the Western liberalism and various illiberal and traditionalist ideologies commonly referred to as political Islam, or, simply put, Islamism. The former tendency was sustained by the attempts by generally secularized and Westernized intellectuals of Middle East countries to conduct a ‘modernization’ of their nations in line with the supposed ‘Western’ standards of ‘industrial society’. The West was clearly regarded as a model to be followed, even though in some cases it was criticized – but always on its own socio-cultural grounds, as was the case with the so-called ‘Arab socialism’. On the other hand, after the failure of ‘modernizing’ regimes to ‘catch up with the West’, their traditionalist critics and competitors put forward an elaborate critique of the Western society and the West-dominated modes of thinking that had previously been uncritically received by the intellectuals from the colonized Muslim countries. The relative decline in the Western cultural appeal and the resurgence of Islamic religious doctrines in the new, yet fundamentalist, form, led to the new form of the ‘Othering’ that became dangerously all-encompassing in the Western world after September 9, 2001: the identification of Islamic religious tradition and culture itself with ‘bigotry’ and even ‘terrorism’. This new type of ‘Othering’ of the Islamic civilization, together with the residue of the old colonialist beliefs and stereotypes, is the dominant form of anti-Islamic discourse in the West. Conclusion Therefore it may be inferred that the ‘Othering’ represents a traditional type of interrelationship between the Islamic and Western cultural world. The means of overcoming such ‘Othering’ should be left to the future generations to decide on, though, as the modern world is yet too influenced by deeply held stereotypes and culture wars’ clichés to expect the swift solution of this incredibly complicated problem. Read More