Never the twain shall meet

"Occidentalism" offers a grand theory about why Arabs and Muslims feel the way they do about the West -- but ignores what the West has done to them.

By Christopher John Farah

May 17, 2004 | In 1978 Edward Said's landmark "Orientalism" did something that the vast majority of books, even great ones, fail to do: It literally changed the way we understand the world. By developing a system for conceiving and deconstructing the long and tangled relationship between East and West -- a relationship that Said argued was marked, throughout the colonial era, by the West's systematic portrayal of the East as culturally and racially primitive, exotic, backward and inferior -- Said virtually created an entirely new field, post-colonialism, which continues to have profound effects on academia and international politics to this day.

The new book "Occidentalism" expressly positions itself as the Western-looking counterpart to the Said classic. Its authors want us to believe that it, too, will shatter myths, define a new genre of thought and study, and change the way we understand the world.

The authors, Ian Buruma, Luce Professor at Bard College, and Avishai Margalit, a philosophy professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, define "Occidentalism" as "the dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies" -- in short, as the mirror image of Orientalism. "The view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity. Occidentalism is at least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down."

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with this general theory. In fact, serious academic treatment of the gross misperceptions of "the West" held by many in the Arab and Muslim world is long overdue. During summers spent studying in Jordan, I would discuss politics with my Arab friends, who would vent their ire not only at the U.S. government, but also at complacent Americans and their decadent culture. But all it took was a few probing questions to demonstrate that what little knowledge my friends had of America was derived almost wholly from the Hollywood movies and TV shows they devoured. ("No, Omar, all American women do not have sex on the first date. Unfortunately.")

The current academic climate, perhaps due to lingering political correctness, tends to stifle honest, hard-hitting analysis of the flaws of the Arab world. The time is definitely ripe for a fair, evenhanded evaluation of the Middle East's perceptions of us, and the roots of those perceptions.

Which is why "Occidentalism" is so disappointing. Instead of providing a nuanced consideration of the conflicting forces at work within Middle Eastern society -- where people denounce American "imperialism" even as they gobble up the latest American fashions in everything from clothing to cars to footwear -- "Occidentalism" is an unconvincing, overly theoretical attempt to fit contemporary anti-Western ideologies into a grand historical pattern.

Radical Islamists, the authors say, think America is a country of money-obsessed, citified, extravagant cowards -- heartless, godless, soulless, honorless, virtueless, and pretty much every other -less you can think of. For anyone who has watched one of those grainy videos of Osama bin Laden calling Americans money-obsessed, citified, godless, extravagant cowards, this will hardly come as a revelation.

The original part of Buruma and Margalit's thesis is their assertion that the ideology of contemporary terrorists is merely the latest incarnation of a long history of anti-Western beliefs -- a history that can be traced, they claim, through Imperial Japan, communist Vietnam, Maoist China, Russia during the time of the czars and the communists, all apparently originating with Germany under both Kaiser and Fuehrer. Substantive treatment of the Middle East doesn't really begin until the second-to-last chapter.

Had "Occidentalism" managed to show that these vastly divergent ideologies, in different regions and scenarios, were actually connected, it would have made a significant contribution. But the connection is poorly illuminated in this 165-page book -- a bit short to cover adequately the immense amount of history in question. Aside from their own intriguing insistence that most of these anti-Western ideas were, ironically, actually imported from the West, Buruma and Margalit offer little concrete proof of a causal relationship, merely demonstrating some superficial similarities between the different cases and citing a few philosophers and commentators to back up their claims.

Next Page: The book's villains: Arab dictators

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