“Islam and the West” | Edward Said

Abridged Version [from Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, 3-32. 1981]

Introduction

Discussions about Islam are not all carried on in scholarly treatises. The role of the popular media has drawn a good deal of attention in reinforcing categories that are based not on scholarly critical reflection but upon the acceptance of media images; such images are ultimately expressions of power, often overtly political or ideological.

Edward Said, in his Orientalism argued that the impositions of conceptualizations of Islam were tools in the hands of colonialist powers to control and to manage the “Other” they encountered in their empires. Said saw this happening not only in the work of the Orientalists, but, as he explores in “Islam and the West,” in the image of Islam portrayed in the Euro-American media.

The Con Ed commercial

In order to make a point about alternative energy sources for Americans, Consolidated Edison of New York (Con Ed) ran a striking television advertisement in the summer of 1980. Film clips of various immediately recognizable OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] personalities - Yamani, Qaddafi, lesser-known robed Arab figures - alternated with stills as well as clips of other people associated with oil and Islam: Khomeini, Arafat, Hafez al-Assad. None of these figures was mentioned by name, but we were told ominously that “these men” control America’s sources of oil.

It was enough for “these men” to appear as they have appeared in newspapers and on television for American viewers to feel a combination of anger, resentment, and fear. And it is this combination of feelings that Con Ed instantly aroused and exploited for domestic commercial reasons. There are two things about the Con Ed commercial: One, of course, is Islam, or rather the image of Islam in the West generally and in the United States in particular. The other is the use of that image in the West and especially in the United States.

Basis of Orientalist Thought: Polarised Geography

But let us first consider the history of relationships between Islam and the Christian West. From at least the end of the eighteenth century until our own day, modem Occidental reactions to Islam have been dominated by a radically simplified type of thinking that may still be called Orientalist.

The general basis of Orientalist thought is an imaginative and yet drastically polarized geography dividing the world into two unequal parts: the larger, “different” one called the Orient; the other, also known as “our” world, called the Occident or the West. Even when the world of Islam entered a period of decline and Europe a period of ascendancy, fear of “Mohammedanism” persisted.

Orientalism and the ‘Iconography’ of Islam

There was the longstanding attitude to Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient in general that I have been calling Orientalism. For whether one looked at such recent, critically acclaimed fiction as V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and John Updike’s The Coup, or at grade-school history textbooks, comic strips, television serials, films, and cartoons, the iconography of Islam was uniform, was uniformly ubiquitous, and drew its material from the same time-honored view of Islam: hence the frequent caricatures of Muslims as oil suppliers, as terrorists, and more recently, as bloodthirsty mobs.

Treatment of Islam from an ‘Invented’ or ‘Culturally Determined’ Ideological Framework

Most people, if asked to name a modern Islamic writer, would probably be able to pick only Khalil Gibran (who wasn’t Islamic). The academic experts whose specialty is Islam have generally treated the religion and its various cultures within an invented or culturally determined ideological framework filled with passion, defensive prejudice, sometimes even revulsion; because of this framework, understanding of Islam has been a very difficult thing to achieve.

For Naipaul and his readers, “Islam” somehow is made to cover everything that one most disapproves of from the standpoint of civilized, and Western, rationality.

Labels as ‘Cultural History’ rather than as Objective Classification

Labels purporting to name very large and complex realities are notoriously vague and at the same time unavoidable.

I think it is more immediately useful to admit at the outset that they exist and have long been in use as an integral part of cultural history rather than as objective classifications. Labels function as interpretations produced for and by what I shall call communities of interpretation. We must therefore remember that “Islam,” “the West,” and even “Christianity” function in at least two different ways, and produce at least two meanings, each time they are used.

First, they perform a simple identifying function, as when we say Khomeini is a Muslim, or Pope John Paul II is a Christian. The second function of these several labels is to produce a much more complex meaning. To speak of “Islam” in the West today is to mean a lot of the unpleasant things I have been mentioning. Moreover, “Islam” is unlikely to mean anything one knows either directly or objectively.

The same is true of our use of “the West.” And we must note immediately that it is always the West, and not Christianity, that seems pitted against Islam.

The Western Mind & the Diminished Role of Religion

For the Western mind, conditioned since the Reformation to historical and intellectual developments which have steadily diminished the role of religion, it is difficult to grasp the power exerted by Islam [which, presumably, has been conditioned neither by history nor by intellect.

Islam has never been welcome in Europe. Most of the great philosophers of history from Hegel to Spengler have regarded Islam without much enthusiasm. Apart from some occasional interest in the odd Sufi writer or saint, European vogues for “the wisdom of the East” rarely included Islamic sages or poets.

Omar Khayyam, Harun al-Rashid, Sindbad, Aladdin, Hajji Baba, Scheherazade, Saladin, more or less make up the entire list of Islamic figures known to modem educated Europeans.

Public discussions of Islam Provided only by Political Crisis

More significantly, the occasions for public discussions of Islam, by experts or by nonexperts, have almost always been provided by political crises.

It is extremely rare to see informative articles on Islamic culture in the New York Review of Books, say, or in Harpers. Only when the stability of Saudi Arabia or Iran has been in question has “Islam” seemed worthy of general comment.

Provocative Cover of the Time Magazine

When Time magazine devoted its major story to Islam on April 16, 1979, the cover was adorned with a Gerome painting of a bearded muezzin standing in a minaret, calmly summoning the faithful to prayer. Anachronistically, however, this quiet scene was emblazoned with a caption that had nothing to do with it: “The Militant Revival.”

There could be no better way of symbolizing the difference between Europe and America on the subject of Islam. A placid and decorative painting done almost routinely in Europe as an aspect of one’s general culture had been transformed by three words into a general American obsession.

Wasn’t Time’s cover story on Islam simply a piece of vulgarization, catering to a supposed taste for the sensational? Does it really reveal anything more serious than that? And what had happened to the experts on Islam, and why were their contributions either bypassed entirely or submerged in the “Islam” discussed and diffused by the media?

A few simple explanations are in order first. As I said above, there has never been any American expert on the Islamic world whose audience was a wide one; moreover, with the exception of the late Marshall Hodgson’s three-volume The Venture of Islam, posthumously published in 1974, no general work on Islam has ever been put squarely before the literate reading public.

‘Essentialised’ Caricatures of the Islamic World

It is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially covered, discussed, apprehended, either as oil suppliers or as potential terrorists.

Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Islamic world. What we have instead is a limited series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as, among other things, to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

American Obsession with ‘Modernization’ of the Third World

Almost without exception, the Third World seemed to American policy-makers to be “underdeveloped,” in the grip of unnecessarily archaic and static “traditional” modes of life, dangerously prone to communist subversion and internal stagnation.

For the Third World, “modernization” became the order of the day, so far as the United States was concerned. Huge sums were poured into Africa and Asia with the aim of stopping communism and promoting United States trade, and above all, the transformation of backward countries into mini-Americas. In time the initial investments required additional sums and increased military support to keep them going.

The “Vietnamization” Fiasco

Vietnam is a perfect instance of this. Once it was decided that the country was to be saved from communism and indeed from itself, a whole science of modernization for Vietnam (whose latest and most costly phase came to be known as “Vietnamization” came into being. Not only government specialists but university experts were involved.

In time, the survival of pro-American and anticommunist regimes in Saigon dominated everything, even when it became clear that a huge majority of the population viewed those regimes as alien and oppressive, and even when the cost of fighting unsuccessful wars on behalf of those regimes had devastated the whole region and cost Lyndon Johnson the presidency.

An ‘Illusion’ in Modernization Theory

Among the many illusions that persisted in modernization theory was one that seemed to have a special pertinence to the Islamic world: namely, that before the advent of the United States, Islam existed in a kind of timeless childhood, shielded from true development by an archaic set of superstitions, prevented by its strange priests and scribes from moving out of the Middle Ages into the modem world.

Role of Israel in ‘Mediating’ Western Views of the Islamic World

One more thing needs mention here: the role of Israel in mediating Western and particularly American views of the Islamic world since World War II. In the first place, Israel’s avowedly religious character is rarely mentioned in the Western press: only recently have there been overt references to Israeli religious fanaticism.

This kind of one-sided reporting is, I think, an indication of how Israel - the Middle East’s “only democracy” and “our staunch ally”- has been used as a foil for Islam. Thus Israel has appeared as a bastion of Western civilization hewn (with much approbation and self-congratulation) out of the Islamic wilderness.

The Sets of ‘Illusions’ that Serve to Promote Western Power over the Orient

In these ways, three sets of illusions economically buttress and reproduce one another in the interests of shoring up the Western self-image and promoting Western power over the Orient: the view of Islam, the ideology of modernization, and the affirmations of Israel’s general value to the West.

In addition, and to make “our” attitudes to Islam very clear, a whole information and policy-making apparatus in the United States depends on these illusions and diffuses them widely. A little lower down come the mass media, which take from the other two units of the apparatus what is most easily compressed into images: hence the caricatures, the frightening mobs, the concentration on “Islamic” punishment, and so on.

Conclusion: The Double Bind of US Interests and Covering Islam

When President Carter spent his first New Year in office with the shah in 1978, and said that Iran was “an island of stability,” he was speaking with the mobilized force of this formidable apparatus, representing United States interests and covering Islam at the same time.

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Pic. Courtesy: https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19790416,00.html