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 Muslims 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 rapidily. Between 500 to 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 for any but 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.1
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. Christians 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’.2
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 kept over Eastern Christendom 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 ie.,
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 lay men,
embarked upon acquiring knowledge from Muslim institutions and individuals
in Spain and the Fertile Crescent. Travelers 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’.3
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.4 Both Muslims and Christians understood Crusades
to be more than mere warfare. Christian scholars specially 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.5
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.6 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,
‘by adopting Christianity and by accepting the Christian rule as a permanent
phenomenon the Orientials would become civilised’.7
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’.8
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.9
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 ‘Orientalist’.10
There is a vast abundance of travel
literature, which reflects the image of Oriental people as it was perceived
by the Western travelers. Many times the travelers 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 travelers 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.11
The travelers 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 traveler,
‘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’.12
The nineteenth century European, particularly
British, travelers 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’.13
From what has been stated above it
is obvious that the Western intellectuals, writers, travelers 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 Ishtiyaque 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’.14
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’.15 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’.16
In his article, ‘Historical Perspective
of the Orientalists Perception of Islam’, Khawaja Ahmad Farooqui 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 ie 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’.17
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’.18
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.19
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’.20
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.21
In his Introduction to the ‘Reconstruction
of Religious Thought in Islam’ (Urdu translation), New Delhi, 1986, by
Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), Syed Nazir 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.22 Efforts were
made to overawe the Muslims intellectually so that they are forced to took
toward the West for inspiration and guidance. The aim was to subject them
to skepticism 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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