The author is a Research Scholar,
Department of Islamic Studies, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi 110 062, India. (Editor)
Orientalism, when defined in simple
words, implies the Western attempt to understand the East, particularly the
Muslims and their faith, Islam. On a broader scale, however, it means the
knowledge of Eastern languages, Islamic sciences and literature. For a limited
period, especially in its early stages, it reflected missionary sentiments and
zeal but soon it donned the mantle of objectivity and empiricism with which the
West approached the East. After that it became a movement, an approach, a way of
life. All sorts of topics and subjects came under discussion. Organized efforts
were made in Egypt, North Africa and other regions to revive ancient languages
and cultures so that they may pose a challenge to Islam. Arabic language was
considered to be incapable of fulfilling the needs of modern times; and demands
were made accordingly to focus on local dialects and vernaculars. Arabic script
was sought to be changed and replaced with local dialects and vernaculars.
Arabic script was sought to be changed and replaced with the Roman one. The role
of alien elements in the development of Islamic culture and civilization was
highlighted and concerted efforts were made to prove that Islamic culture was an
amalgam of absurdities.
For a proper understanding of
orientalism, however, a brief account of the Crusades will be in order here. The
Muslim interaction with Christianity goes back to the early days of the Prophet
(sws). After the early Muslim conquests which brought many Christians or
Christian-dominated territories under the Islamic fold, the two religions and
their followers came in close contact with each other. In fact, Islam spread in
its early stages at the cost of Christianity. The early Islamic sway on West
Asia and North Africa gave a big jolt to the Christendom and defeated it not
only on the battlefield but also on political and economic fronts. Moreover the
Christian world suffered setbacks on the religious front as well. For a great
number of Christians, attracted to and impressed by the simple and rational
Islamic faith, embraced the religion of their conquerors. It is apparent that
the church was declining fast in the East. In Europe, however, it was spreading
rapidly. Between 500 and 1100 AD., almost the whole of Western Europe was
cajoled or forcibly brought under the Christian fold. The Christianized or
religiously united Europe gave new life to the ailing Christendom, which
manifested itself in the form of violent medieval Crusades. At that time, the
Crusades were viewed as holy wars. But the scholars of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment have questioned the medieval Christian interpretation, and
criticized the Crusades as a mere outburst of medieval fanaticism and a
demonstration of the bigotry of the medieval mind. Some political and economic
historians of modern times have also suggested that the Crusades were in fact a
migratory movement of needy Western nations to the relatively more prosperous
East. The economic historians, on the other hand, condemn the Crusades as wars
of conquest and expansion launched by the colonialist and imperialist medieval
Europe against the Muslims.
But for the Crusaders who participated
in those so-called holy wars, the Crusades were launched for a holy cause:
deliverance of Jerusalem from the Muslim occupation. The Crusades, probably, had
a missionary character as well. It is well known that the first Crusade was
preached and launched by Pope Urban II which suggests its missionary nature and
orientation. In his sermon at Clermont, the Pope had said that the Eastern
Christians were in peril, their churches were being desecrated and pilgrims
visiting Jerusalem were being harassed. After highlighting the plight of Eastern
Christianity, the Pope urged people to rise up and fight for the deliverance of
Jerusalem. He also admonished that no one should undertake the pilgrimage but
for the most exalted of motives. Furthermore, in his speech, there were
indications about the conversion of Muslims. The Pope’s statements do show that
he had some hope that a successful Crusade might create opportunities for
converting Muslims to Christianity.
The Crusades, as many writers have
suggested, were a misadventure in the sense that they have left an indelible
scar on the relationship between Christians and Muslims. Moreover, they created
the thaw between the two branches of Christianity, Eastern and Western, which
had kept them divided for a long time. The reality is that the Crusaders were an
indiscreet and undisciplined lot who insulted both the Eastern Christians and
the Muslims. They indulged in gruesome massacres and plundered the cities they
conquered.
Now let us consider why the Crusading
movement assumed so much significance in history. The reason is that it
benefited Europe in many ways. The Europeans began to take a keen interest in
Islam and the Muslim world. Moreover, the reverses they suffered in the
battlefield made them realize the great strength of the Islamic faith and its
people. Christian leaders started thinking about the faith, culture and
civilization of their opponents, which broadened their intellectual horizons.
Many missionary-minded authors have argued that through this movement Western
Europe found its soul. There was a great upsurge of the spirit that awakened the
masses and instilled a sense of purpose in them. The fact, however, is that the
Crusaders were a reckless people who behaved arrogantly and inflicted
hair-raising atrocities on the conquered people.
The Crusading movement, nevertheless,
acquired a momentum of its own. Even when the religious idealism evaporated,
political leaders still thought that there were advantages in using the
conception of the Crusades. So powerful was this conception that no one dared to
challenge it and even today, as Professor William Montgomery Watt has said: “in
western Europe, with a metaphorical interpretation, it still has some vestigial
influences”.
A negative aspect of the Crusading
movement was that the Crusaders, unscrupulous and ignorant as many of them were,
took with them false notions about Muslims and Islam, and spread them all over
Europe. Such distorted images of Islam and its people have dominated European
thinking since the twelfth century and even today some of those wrong notions
persist.
A positive outcome of the Crusades,
however, was that they awakened Muslims from their deep slumber. As a result
Muslims became united to a great extent, sidelined the hypocrites and launched a
counter offensive, under the leadership of Salah al-Din Ayyubi. The Ottoman
caliphs carried on Ayyubi’s mission. In fact, the counter-offensive launched by
the Ottomans sent a shock wave of disillusionment right across the European
continent. It is for this reason that many Christian writers have described the
Crusades as a misadventure.
After the failure of the Crusading
movement, Christendom, particularly some far-sighted leaders and intellectuals,
began to deliberate on why the Crusades failed. The motive behind this
soul-searching was not to merely find out the causes of the failure but also to
devise a new strategy to counter and check the advance of the Ottomans and their
faith, Islam, in Europe. They discovered that ignorance was the main cause of
their decline. As a result they decided to acquire knowledge from all sources
including the Muslims. So during the Renaissance i.e., between 13th to 16th
centuries European scholars, and intellectuals concentrated on reviving their
literature, art, culture, and other academic disciplines. This intellectual
awakening also made them rethink about the Muslims and their faith, Islam. As a
result, many people, scholars as well as laymen, embarked upon acquiring
knowledge from Muslim institutions and individuals in Spain and the Fertile
Crescent. Travellers wrote travelogues and scholars produced academic works and
thus began the tradition of studying the East, which is known as Orientalism.
It will be in order here to elaborate
the Western and Muslim conceptions of knowledge, for their respective approaches
to it have left an indelible mark on their attitude, character and thinking. In
Islam the purpose of knowledge is wisdom, the acquisition of intellectual
capabilities to lead a life that ensures success, falah, in this world and the
next. The European conception of knowledge, which developed during and after the
Renaissance, especially during the colonial era, is that it is the obverse side
of power. Scientific knowledge gives man power over nature, but knowledge of a
people, history, culture, civilization and literature, in so far as they deepen
one’s understanding of human nature, enables one to dominate them. Thus the
conception of knowledge as a source of power has an important influence on the
European attitude, especially when they study a religion or the secular history
of other peoples.
If the modern European has to engage in
war against some Asian country, he would like to know a lot about its past, for
he considers that such knowledge will enable him to better forecast the reaction
of his enemy to various situations. Likewise, religion too, as professor W.M.
Watt says: “is an element in knowledge. Sometimes the Christian missionary takes
to strategic thinking of a military type, and considers that knowledge of other
religions will assist him toward his goal of making converts”.
As it has been stated earlier, the
Crusades (starting towards the end of eleventh century and continuing to the
fifteenth) provided a unique opportunity for elaborate interaction between
Muslims and Christians. There took place a kind of cultural inter-penetration
which paved the way for direct contact between the Arabs and the Europeans.
Moreover, the Crusades created a broad spiritual awakening in Europe which gave
Western Christendom a new awareness of its own identity.
W.M. Watt, in fact, underestimated the
significance of the Crusades when he says that they were, for Muslims, merely a
frontier incident or the continuation of the kind of fighting that had been
going on in Syria or Palestine. Both
Muslims and Christians understood Crusades to be more than mere warfare.
Christian scholars especially drew a lesson from it when they saw that it was
difficult to defeat Muslims in the battlefield, hence they should be outwitted
intellectually. The contact that had been established between western Christians
and Muslims was a new experience. Christian scholars took this opportunity to
provide their fellows with more information about Islam, often concocted or
distorted, to enable them to believe in their own superiority. There are still,
admittedly, some vestigial traces of this medieval image of Islam in
contemporary Western European thinking.
Church leaders told the Crusaders that
the Arabs were an inferior race who worshipped Muhammad (sws) and took delight
in persecuting Christians, which made Christendom hostile towards Muslims.
Their assumption that they belonged to a superior race gave rise to racism and
created a false feeling of “us and them”, “we the civilized” and “they the
barbarians”. Oriental inferiority they took for granted both socially and
intellectually. During the colonial period, European racism was at its peak,
which prompted them to wrongly embark upon a civilizing mission. Missionary
activities were, thus, started to remove their religious backwardness while the
imperial rulers were supposed to remove their political backwardness. They
thought that “by adopting Christianity and by accepting the Christian rule as a
permanent phenomenon the Orientals would become civilised”.
W.M. Watt has explained the same point
though in a subdued language and in a different manner. He writes: ‘European
civilization (and Christendom) has behaved as if it was the only section of
mankind that mattered. In the nineteenth century, European culture was the
civilization, and as Europe expanded technologically and politically, other
parts of the world became “civilized”. World history was the history of
expansion of civilization and that is, in effect, of Europe; and the history of
the great civilizations of the world before their contact with Europe was
virtually neglected.
Now it would be proper to mainly focus
on Orientalism. Here the world is perceived to be in two blocs; orient and
occident. Orient stands for the East; the countries lying east of the
Mediterranean are usually described as the Orient.
Occident, on the other hand, means the West; the countries of Western Europe, or
of Europe and America both. Orientialism, as is evident, is derived from the
‘Orient’ and it came to be used with all its connotations towards the end of the
eighteenth century. Now Orientalism signifies eastern characteristics, life
style, values, knowledge, literature, art and culture. It further denotes
learning or knowledge of the languages, religions and cultures of the East. The
person well versed in all these is regarded as an “Orientalist”.
There is a vast abundance of travel
literature, which reflects the image of Oriental people as it was perceived by
the Western travellers. Many times the travellers viewed the things or narrated
the events in such a way as to support their pre-conceived notions. In the
nineteenth century, in fact, deliberate and concerted efforts were made by the
British travellers to justify Britain’s imperialist designs on the Orient as
well as to popularize the idea that the British were capable of managing the
affairs of alien nations including the Arabs.
The travellers usually saw Arabs as
inferior or portrayed them as a people who badly needed the caring attention of
the West. “The Oriental’, according to Gertrude Bell, an English traveller, “is
like a very old child. He is unacquainted with many branches of knowledge, which
we have come to regard as of elementary necessity, frequently, but not always,
his mind is a little preoccupied with the need of acquiring them, and he
concerns himself scarcely with what we call practical utility. He is not
practical, in our conception of the word, any more than a child is practical”.
The nineteenth century European,
particularly British, travellers were influenced especially by the twin
ideologies of imperialism. They looked down upon the Oriental races, branded
them as uncivilized who, in their opinion, deserved to be overpowered,
subjugated and managed by the superior and civilized races of Europe. It is
probably because of this that Benjamin Disraeli was prompted to say that “the
East is a career”.
From what has been stated above it is
obvious that the Western intellectuals, writers, travellers and politicians have
been in the habit of discoursing upon Oriental people, their religions,
civilizations and history. By and large, their attitude has been ethnocentric or
Eurocentric. Consequently “they regard”, writes Dr. Ishtiyaq Danish, “their
civilization as normative. They further believe that their Eurocentric standards
– religious and cultural – are not only a fitting scale to judge other people
but also universally applicable. Obsessed with their erroneous attitude they
have always failed to fully understand other people in an objective manner. With
regard to Islam the question is not that they failed to grasp its real meaning
and message but that they intentionally and impudently tried to disguise and
distort its true image”.
Europe, in fact, thinks that the Orient
is one of its many inventions. On Europe’s imagination, the Orient is always a
place of romance, strange things and remarkable experiences. “ Orientalism”,
says Edward W. Said, “can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution
for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it,
describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it, is short,
Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having over the
Orient”. Europe seems to have
arrogated to itself the right to articulate the Orient. “The West”, as E.W. Said
puts it, “is the actor, the Orient a passive reactor. The West is the spectator,
the judge and jury of every facet of Oriental behavior”.
In his article, Historical Perspective
of the Orientalists’ Perception of Islam, Khawajah Ahmad Faruqi recapitulates
almost the same point in a slightly different way. He asserts that the Orient is
the creation of Western imagination in which there is sheer romance, heightened
sexuality, plenty of luxury, hunger and mercilessness. In its view the Qur’an is
not important but the Thousand and One Nights is. Orient is made out to be a
part of Western material culture. Strange people are living in it i.e. nomads,
barbarians and nudes. The wealth of the Orient is immense. Without its raw
products the “industries of the West” cannot run. Europe has created it
socially, politically and militarily. About it they have written books enough to
make a library.
A reference to Benjamin Disraeli has
already been made who regarded the east as a career. The description applies to
a large number of Orientalists who start their career as philologists. They hold
that languages belong to families: of which the Indo-European and Semitic
languages are two great instances. Thus from the very outset Orientalism has
carried forward two traits: (1) a newly founded scientific self-consciousness
based on the linguistic importance of the Orient to Europe, and (2) a proclivity
to divide, subdivide, re-divide the subject matter without ever changing its
mind about the Orient as being always the same “unchanging, uniform, and
radically peculiar object”.
The attitude of the Orientalists is not
confined to the works they have produced but it can also be seen in the press,
which generally reflects the popular mind. They assume that the Western
consumer, thought belonging to the numerical minority, is entitled either to own
or to expand (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why, because he,
unlike the Oriental, is a true human being, a white middle class Westerner
believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the non-white world also
to own it, just because by definition it is not quite as “we” are.
This “us” and “them” syndrome can be seen or felt all across the Western world.
For a number of reasons, the Orient has
always been in the position both of outsider and of incorporated weak partner
for the West. To some extent, the Western scholars were aware of the
contemporary Orientals or Oriental movements of thought and culture. But these
were perceived either as silent shadows to be animated by the Orientalist,
brought into reality by him, objects necessary for his performance as a learned
man or a superior judge. Almost the same point can be seen running in the
remarks of Lord Curzon: “East is a University in which the scholar never takes
his degree”. What Curzon meant
was that the East required one’s presence there forever.
Similarly, it is assumed that, by and
large, no Oriental can know himself the way an Orientalist can. In fact, there
are four dogmas of Orientalism, which ought to be understood properly. The first
is that there is an absolute and systematic difference between the West, which
is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant,
undeveloped and inferior. Another dogma is that abstraction about the Orient,
particularly those based on texts representing a classical Oriental
civilization, are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern
Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and
incapable of dealing itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized
and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is
inevitable and even scientifically objective. A fourth dogma is that the Orient
is, at bottom, something either to be feared or to be controlled by
pacification, research and development, and outright occupation whenever
possible.
In his Introduction to the
Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (RRTI) (Urdu translation), Sayyid
Nadhir Niazi writes that Orientalism is like an intellectual invasion. Through
it, Europe has sought to emaciate the heart and mind of the Muslim world, in
particular, so that it becomes indifferent towards and averse to its brilliant
past and hopeless about its future.
Efforts were made to overawe the Muslims intellectually so that they are forced
to take toward the West for inspiration and guidance. The aim was to subject
them to scepticism and paralyze them mentally in order that they could neither
go in the right direction nor would analyze things with a correct and
independent outlook.
Having said that, we must also note the
remarkable attitudinal change, which is now discernible under the altered
circumstances especially since the Industrial Revolution in Europe. The
discovery of petroleum changed the equation and made the Arab world the
gravitational point. Early Islam is no more the thrust of their research.
Instead, the religious movements, social trends and economic potentialities have
become major attractions. Understanding of Islamic faith and its ideology are
still essential but the focus has shifted from older themes to new ones such as
analyzing the conditions of contemporary Muslims, both externally and
internally. The elements of nationalism, which could rip apart the religious
unity of Arabs, are particularly considered and explored. The attitudinal
difference is further marked by their realization that in the modern age
extremism and sheer bigotry would not work. That is why they have developed a
semblance of rationality in their approach.
The twentieth century dawned with a host
of new trends. Great changes took place on all levels, political, economic and
social. Awakening of colonized nations after a long slumber, movements of
self-determination, scientific developments and coming together of a variety of
cultures and civilizations radically transformed the nature of problems and
issues. On the other hand Orientalism, having reached its zenith, saw the
beginning of its anti-climax. Now, instead of part-time scholars there have
emerged full timers. Departments of Arabic, Islamic studies, and other allied
disciplines have been opened in a number of Western universities. It is,
however, a testimony of their dedication and industrious efforts. Occasionally,
some positive researches were also conducted in which a great deal of
objectivity was observed.
Courtesy: The
Hamdard Islamicus, Vol. XXIV, No. 4
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