Contending Visions of the Middle East
Palestine Chronicle
“The book is without a doubt a forceful presentation of the route taken by western Islamic studies, and allows the reader alternating viewpoints..”
Contending Visions of the Middle East � The History and Politics of Orientalism, Zachary Lockman. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 2004. 308 pages.
Reviewed by Jim Miles
It is a daunting task to summarize or review such a well-written work as Zachary Lockman�s Contending Visions of the Middle East. Eight years in the making, overlapping the events of 9/11, this work covers a broad range of historical and geographical territory, in broad strokes, but with finer lines within that support his main ideas. But it is not a history of the Middle East per se but a history of the views and presentations made in the �West� about the Middle East, the Orient, Islamism, through the course of its fourteen centuries of history. That introduces the main theme, that Islam is not an isolated civilization, monolithic in structure, but rather a diverse, changeable, and globally interactive set of values, although much of its representation in the west would make it appear monolithic and unchangeable. Rather, it is very much homologous with Christianity and the west.
However, I will start at the end of another book, Bernard Lewis� The Crisis in Islam, in which Lewis reveals of 9/11 that �there are few acts of comparable deliberate and indiscriminate wickedness in human history.� He further uses the words �carnage� and �massacre� in describing the event. So why start here? Although there have been many other terrorist attacks against Americans overseas, this was the first and so far only one to hit home, introducing most Americans and a large part of the rest of the world to the concepts of Islam and its many ramifications. As much as Lewis tries to sound balanced in his presentation, his quote comes at the end of his work and is then summarized by quoting bin Laden�s own �Letter to America� as if it was the sole source of reasons for the attack: the �vaunted merits of American way of life become crimes and sins�; the declaration �marks the resumption of the struggle for religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century�; and the �temptation�of human rights, of free institutions, and of a responsible and representative government.� To take bin Laden�s letter as the actual source of why the Islamic fundamentalists are attacking ignores a much longer history that is far more complex and subtle than envy of America�s freedoms and the denial of modernity. In his introduction, Lewis states that �Middle Easterners� perceptions of history is nourished from the pulpit, in the schools, and by the media, and although it may be � and indeed, often is � slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant.� That quote could well summarize Lockman�s review of what is currently happening in the west, substituting �American� for �Middle Easterners�� and his strongly worded summation:
The first years of the twenty-first century thus witnessed an unprecedented convergence in positions of supreme power in Washington of right wing (and in some cases Christian fundamentalist) zealots and neoconservative American Jews united by a common vision of securing permanent and unchallengeable US global hegemony, with a strong focus on the Middle East and a close embrace of Israel, a vision to be achieved by military force if necessary.
Lockman arrived at that statement through a detailed and effective overview of the perspectives from the self-defined �west� in relation to the other defined �east�, beginning with the Greek and Roman empires. From these earliest of times, the images �had little to do with reality� and were largely influenced by Greece�s conflicts with Persia. The terms of reference were �stark and essentialized� depicting the Asians as ruled by depots, and the people servile, within a rigid hierarchical structure, corrupt and immoral; in contrast, the Greeks saw themselves as virtuous, modest, and treasuring liberty. These formulations were adapted by �many western European political theorists�claiming for contemporary Europe the virtues and characteristics which the Greeks attributed to themselves, in ways that still influence Western social and political thought.�
Christianity followed this trend with Christian thinkers like Augustine identifying the three continents with the sons of Noah: Europe was the land of Gentiles, glorious and progressive; Asia the land of Semitics, servile and inferior; and Africa, the Hamitic �servant of servants�. Christianity held sway over most of the remnants of the Roman Empire, by conquest or conversion, and the advent of Islam was at first considered to be �just another pagan horde assaulting Christendom and not�an ideological as well as a military-political challenge.� Quickly though, the new religion spread widely, and at its peak had limited Christianity to western Europe proper, almost destroying the eastern Byzantine church, further emphasizing the dichotomy in political and geographical terms. Lockman introduces a related theme, that rather than acting as two separate solitudes, the mix and mingling of the cultures, that �despite the crusade and continuing religious hostility, a great deal of cultural interaction and borrowing, especially around the Mediterranean basin� took place; �largely forgotten or obscured when…European thinkers and scholars began to denigrate medieval learning and culture� and looked back to Greece as the source of the Renaissance humanism. In other words, the west chose the dichotomy and hid the previous cultural flourishing of ideas.
To jump ahead again through the centuries, the fundamentalist Islam culture has been accused of hypocrisy for using �American� technology for its purposes (Faoud Ajami, �The Falseness of Anti-Americanism�, Foreign Policy, September/October 2003). All cultures at all times have extracted what they want from other cultures and used them to their own best purposes. Besides, what good is an American computer or the internet if not for the Arabic �0�? This is a side argument, but supports Lockman�s view of the west�s desire for a contiguous uninterrupted, untempered culture. The representations of Islam as �other�, as �fanatical, violent, lusty and threatening � images that �have very old roots � still have emotional resonance for many people and can be drawn on and deployed for political purposes.�
These images were reinforced during the Enlightenment, when in a more secular age the two were seen as entirely distinct and on their own historical trajectories, such that the �West valued freedom, rationality, progress and enterprise, Islam was�servility, superstition, stagnation and indolence�. However, some scholars were able to see that the �rise of the West� cannot be attributed to factors internal and of the essence of the west, but must also include external factors such as the wealth that flowed from the colonies to the homeland. From this point in his work, Lockman examines how the �generation of certain images of the Orient in Western culture were linked, in complex ways�with the simultaneous growth of European (and later American) power over Muslim lands and peoples.� He covers three aspects of this development: the first, and the one still linked to Bernard Lewis, is Orientalism; the second, more related to modern American pundits (for example Thomas Friedman of the New York Times) concerns the idea of �modernity�; and finally the aftermath of Edward Said�s Orientalism, which delivered a �an explosion of innovative scholarly work � and vigorous debates � on colonialism and empire�. It is not the purpose here to go over the details of this development but to indicate the author�s overall view of how these topics have been and should be approached.
On the despotism model of the Orientalism, he says we must �resist overarching generalizations based on unexamined premises and meagre empirical data, and be wary of approaches to history and modes of social analysis� that are �misleading.� The Orientalists were overly reliant on philology, the comparative study of languages and literature, from which they extracted their opinions, to the extent of some not knowing any oriental languages and never having set foot in the orient, but deriving all their material from translations and interpretations of others� ideas. Support for these ideas came from the imperial actions of the European nations, and from America, with their views on Western superiority in technology, government, and trade, but also in the attributes of the European as liberal and democratic, acting in the best interests of the colonized, who, in many circumstances were quite ungrateful for the beneficence delivered to them.
The Twentieth Century is considered the American century, as the older empires collapsed the United States became more and more influential globally. By 1945, with the term Middle East now commonly accepted as a defining term, the US State Department described Saudi Arabia as �a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.� The Cold War became the lense through which the US viewed the Middle East, but the area did not readily accept the American position. Using Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq as examples of military interests and intervention (along with the CIA) in the 1950�s, Lockman says the US �had come to define almost any threat to the political and economic status quo in the region as a threat to it interests, putting stability and control ahead of all other considerations.� This postwar period saw a rise in �area studies�, faculties organized to study particular areas of interest. Bernard Lewis arrived on the scene about this time, arguing for the similarities between communism and Islam, as both were autocratic, the ulama or clergy served a similar role as the communist party cadres, and they were both collectivist.
The theory of modernism arrived around this time, the process of evolving from a traditional state to a modern state, those that �were rational, scientifically oriented, democratic and relatively egalitarian.� Some theorists argued on the sociological-cultural level, others on the economic level, both emphasizing that Islamic cultures were static, and both supporting the Orientalists dichotomy of �us� and �them�. One influential modernist, Daniel Lerner, saw anti US Middle East sentiments as illegitimate and pathological, �manifestations of irrational psychic disturbances� inciting murder and terror; although he made no mention of the reign of terror (again, with the CIA) under the shah of Iran. Following on the anti-communist theme, the theorists came to some remarkably absurd ideas such as Samuel Huntington endorsing carpet bombing (as per Viet Nam) to force peasants to move from the countryside to the city, where urbanisation would essentially modernize them.
Theories arose that countered the modernist view. The New Left provided a radical critique of the US roles, �undermining the image of the United States as an essentially consensual, conflict-free and classless society which�promoted freedom and progress and fought communism.� Another dynamic postulated by Gunder Frank was dependency theory, which countered the isolationist theories of Orientalism and modernism, indicating that the poor countries were poor because they were �incorporated into a newly emerging global economic system that was structured in such a way as to drain resources from certain countries and regions�Asia, Africa and Latin America.� This theory had a much stronger relationship to what actually transpired globally than did the modernism theory, relying on questions of political economy rather than traditionalism.
In the late 1960�s and 70�s, changes in the Middle East provided further turmoil to the academic views. Israel had defeated the combined Arab military in 1967; a new Palestinian national movement emerged, with the arrival of Yasir Arafat and the PLO. The related �Nixon Doctrine� provided that US hegemony would be held not through direct military intervention but through supporting local allies, being at the time the Shah of Iran and the Saudi�s of Arabia, and it also brought Israel to the forefront as an area of American interest. Generally, for the academics, this era produced an alienation from and open criticism of US government policy in the area.
Edward Said�s book Orientalism and its aftermath are discussed thoroughly in one chapter. Said argued that �Orientalism emerged as a coherent discourse�about the Orient that was pervasive, powerful and durable, despite having little to do with what actually went on in [that] part of the world.� Said paid particular attention to Lewis as a prime example of �the most pernicious forms of Orientalism.� The critical support for Said�s work was large. One result was �postcolonial theory�, and examination of how the culture of the day interacted with the imperialism and colonialism that supported it. Lockman summarizes �it is clear that from the 1980s onward there was an explosion of innovative scholarly work�on colonialism and empire, in the metropole as well as in the colonies� that looked at the �mutually formative interactions which shaped many of the contours of the world we still live in today.� Said�s work played a �crucial role in undermining, a powerful and long established way of conceptualizing the modern world but also offered a very fruitful alternative vision.�
And so once again we return to the present � and Lewis� rebuttal to Said. Lewis �offered Americans an accessible and satisfying explanation for why there was so much anger and resentment against the United States�, not because of how our actions played out, but mainly to a defect in Islamic civilization. Thomas Friedman, a �less subtle emulator� supported this view, never examining the concepts of colonial interactions but dichotomizing east and west in a neo-Orientalist manner.
The present involves terror, including 9/11, the �most indiscriminate wicked� act ever perpetrated on humans, but Lewis does not recognize, nor wants to, the role of terror globally and historically in most human conflicts. Caleb Carr, while obviously being pro-American, quite readily recognizes the use of terror by Americans in The Lessons of Terror, as do other American authors including Zinn, Stiglitz, Kellner and Caldicott. Mahmood Mamdani�s book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim provides a strong presentation on American terror tactics globally. Lockman very briefly outlines examples of American terror, or American implicit or tacit support of terror through special operatives and the CIA. The British had originally charged Begin and Shamir as terrorists for attacks against the British in Palestine. Current Israeli views tend to reduce Palestinian acts to terror without allowing that it as a tactic used when �more effective options to strike at a militarily superior enemy� are lacking. However, its roots, as they are elsewhere in the globe, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan, are �in ongoing occupation and dispossession and is likely to end only when Palestinians see some other way to realize their national aspirations.� The attacks on the Twin Towers was not because of what the United States was or stood for (as the right claimed) but because of what the Untied States actually did in that part of the world� including the �bitter legacy� from its long involvement since the Second World War.
The present of course also involves the interweaving of political influences in the US � the Israeli lobby, the right wing Christian fundamentalists, the arrival on the scene of the �think-tankers� � Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Cheney, Bolton � who in some respects all called for the military dominance of the Middle East. The mass media play their role in this as well, which should be obvious considering they are owned and operated by major American corporations. Instead of looking towards the academics for information, they searched for the sound bite, the entertainment value offered by pundits, think-tankers, and ex-military personnel. And so in his afterward Lockman acknowledges that little may have changed as only a few Americans asked themselves why they were attacked, accepting the pundits view of an irrational Islamic rage at the good of the west.
And unfortunately for his work, which is one of the best resources I have encountered in the past several years, the same may hold, as he indicated at the beginning that he was trying to broaden the public perception of where the views originated that shaped and are shaping American foreign policy and actions towards Islamic peoples. The book is without a doubt a forceful presentation of the route taken by western Islamic studies, and allows the reader alternating viewpoints, but it is not one that will readily lend itself to public consumption. It should be there �mandatory – however, for anyone who reads at all in this area, as an accompaniment to any book that purports to represent western views on Islam, regardless of the political stripe.
-Jim Miles is a US-based writer and a regular contributor to the Palestine Chronicle.