But, writing in the late 1940s, he found himself commending the ‘traditionalism’ of the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. It was Zapata, he wrote, who had freed ‘Mexican reality from the constricting schemes of liberalism, and the abuses of the conservatives and neo-conservatives’. Such ‘traditionalists’, ranging from Gandhi to Rabindranath Tagore to Liang Qichao, had also emerged in many other non-Western societies in the first half of the twentieth century. They were not anti-Western so much as wary of a blind and wholesale emulation of the institutions and ideologies of Western Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union.
Many others continued to argue in the latter half of the century that the Western model of development – capitalist or communist – was unsuitable for their countries. Some of these traditionalists, such as the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, specialized in demagogic fantasies of redemption. Many others offered practicable ideas. An Indian scholar called Radhakamal Mukerjee developed an economic blueprint based on actually existing conditions in Asian agrarian societies, supporting environmentally viable small-scale industries over American-style factories; he inspired urban planners in the United States as well as Brazil.
But by the 1950s thinkers stressing locally resourced solutions would retreat as Asia and Africa embarked on large-scale national emulation with the help of Western ideas. The advisors of such Westernizing dictators as the Shah of Iran and Indonesia’s Suharto read W. W. Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) and Samuel Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies (1968) much more carefully than they did anything by the Iranian and Indonesian intellectuals Ali Shariati and Soedjatmoko. Among many left-leaning nation-builders, Lenin, Mao and even the Fabian socialists seemed to provide clearer blueprints for self-strengthening than indigenous thinkers. Zapata was forgotten in Mexico itself; Gandhism was reduced to an empty ritual in India.
By the 1970s, however, it had become clear that Western prescriptions were not working. On the contrary, as the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar put it, ‘instead of the kingdom of abundance promised by theorists and politicians in the 1950s, the discourse and strategy of development produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment, untold exploitation and oppression.’ Soedjatmoko claimed that ‘the relationship of many Third World intellectuals to the West has undergone significant change’. This was due to ‘the inapplicability of the communist model, the irrelevance of various scholarly development models, and the growing awareness that the Western history of modernization is just one of several possible courses’.
A politician and thinker called Rammanohar Lohia had inspired some of India’s greatest post-independence writers and artists with his search for a politically sustainable model of development – one that is sensitive to specific social and economic experiences and ecologies. ‘A cosmopolite,’ Lohia charged, ‘is a premature universalist, an imitator of superficial attainments of dominant civilizations, an inhabitant of upper-caste milieus without real contact with the people.’
In Westoxification (1962), a study of the devastating loss of identity and meaning caused by appropriative mimicry and a central text of Islamist ideology, the Iranian novelist and essayist Jalal Al-e-Ahmad offered a similarly critical view of the local Westernizer. Iranian intellectuals, such as Ahmad Kasravi, had started to formulate a critique of technological civilization as early as the 1920s, just as Iran began to modernize under its military ruler. Born in 1928 in poor southern Tehran, Al-e-Ahmad came of age as Iran was transformed from a small, predominantly agricultural economy into a modern centralized state with a manufacturing sector and a central role in international oil markets. As the despotic Shah of Iran, backed by the United States, accelerated his ambitious modernization programme, Al-e-Ahmad wrote about rural migrants in Tehran’s overcrowded and insanitary slums who daily:
sink further into decline, rootlessness, and ugliness … the bazaars’ roofs in ruins; neighbourhoods widely scattered; no water, electricity, or telephone service; no social services; no social centres and libraries; mosques in ruins.
By the time Al-e-Ahmad offered his critique of modernization, even many of the latter’s supposed beneficiaries in the postcolonial world were beginning to question its rising costs. These were the mimic men, as Naipaul called them, who had pretended in their African and Asian schools and colleges ‘to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life’ in the Western metropolis. In Heirs to the Past (1962), by the Moroccan novelist Driss Chraïbi, a French-educated North African outlines the tragic arc of many relatively privileged men in postcolonial societies:
I’ve slammed all the doors of my past because I’m heading towards Europe and Western civilization, and where is that civilization then, show it to me, show me one drop of it, I’m ready to believe I’ll believe anything. Show yourselves, you civilizers in whom your books have caused me to believe. You colonized my country, and you say, I believe you, that you went there to bring enlightenment, a better standard of living, missionaries the lot of you, or almost. Here I am – I’ve come to see you in your own homes. Come forth. Come out of your houses and yourselves so that I can see you. And welcome me, oh welcome me!
Al-e-Ahmad, who published his book the same year, also became obsessed with the psychic damage that modernity would inflict on people unable to adjust to it. He wrote almost exclusively about Iran. Yet his readings in contemporary literature and philosophy alerted him to the general degradation of human beings and despoiling of nature by a civilization devoted to utility and profit. He was deeply influenced by Sadegh Hedayat, whose The Blind Owl (1937) is regarded as the greatest modern novel in Persian. Hedayat, educated in Paris, exiled in India, and influenced by Rilke and Kafka, wrote of the sensitive and perennial outsider, alienated everywhere by the ‘rabble-men’ who bear ‘an expression of greed on their faces, in pursuit of money and sexual satisfaction’.
Al-e-Ahmad’s depiction of slums, like McEwan’s dystopian vision of the English countryside, had a broader significance for the ‘human project’. As he wrote on the last page of Westoxification:
And now I, not as an Easterner, but as one like the first Muslims, who expected to see the Resurrection on the Plain of Judgment in their lifetimes, see that Albert Camus, Eugene Ionesco, Ingmar Bergman, and many other artists, all of them from the West, are proclaiming this same resurrection. All regard the end of human affairs with despair. Sartre’s Erostratus fires a revolver at the people in the street blindfolded; Nabokov’s protagonist drives his car into the crowd; and the stranger, Meursault, kills someone in reaction to a bad case of sunburn. These fictional endings all represent where humanity is ending up in reality, a humanity that, if it does not care to be crushed under the machine, must go about in a rhinoceros’s skin.
Making Enemies: Islam versus the West
Al-e-Ahmad’s invocation of existentialist and absurdist themes in the context of Tehran’s slums underlined a shared predicament. Following Hedayat, he spoke of a universal human condition in a world closely knit together by commerce and technology – what Arendt called the state of ‘negative solidarity’. Yet since he wrote, the emotional and intellectual realities signified by the words ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ have come to be seen as fundamentally different and opposed.
In particular, the attacks of 9/11, breaking into the general celebratory mood of globalization, sharpened an old divide. How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government. Having proclaimed the end of history, Francis Fukuyama wondered whether there is ‘something about Islam’ that made ‘Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity’.
Such perplexity, widely shared, was answered by a simple idea: that these opponents of modernity were religious fanatics – jihadists – seeking martyrdom; they were unenlightened zealots. This answer did not explain the nature of their fanaticism. It simply assu
med that modernity was inherently liberal, if not anti-religious, individualistic and emancipatory, and fundamentally opposed to medieval and oppressive religion.
And so the Bush administration declared a universal ‘war on terror’, breaking with the precedent of Western governments that had responded to the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the IRA in Britain, ETA in Spain, or the Red Brigade in Italy with ‘police actions’. The latter were grim, violent, often extralegal, but based on the assumption that infiltration and arrests could successfully dismantle organizations with specific memberships and locations. The war on terror, on the other hand, aimed to abolish war as an institution with specific laws and rules, including regard for the rights of prisoners; it criminalized the enemy, and put him beyond the pale of humanity, exposed to extrajudicial execution, torture and the eternal limbo of Guantanamo.
Unlike the familiar and comprehensible violence of European left-wing and ultra-nationalist groups, terrorist acts by Muslims were placed in some non-human never-never land, far outside of the history of the secular modern world. Their ‘jihad’ seemed integral to Islamic civilization; and an obsession burgeoned with the ‘Islamic’ roots of terrorism, metamorphosing quickly into a campaign to ‘reform’ Islam itself and bring it in line with an apparently consistent, coherent Enlightened West.
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It is now clear that the post-9/11 policies of pre-emptive war, massive retaliation, regime change, nation-building and reforming Islam have failed – catastrophically failed – while the dirty war against the West’s own Enlightenment – inadvertently pursued through extrajudicial murder, torture, rendition, indefinite detention and massive surveillance – has been a wild success. The uncodified and unbridled violence of the ‘war on terror’ ushered in the present era of absolute enmity in which the adversaries, scornful of all compromise, seek to annihilate each other. Malignant zealots have emerged in the very heart of the democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of 9/11 – Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity – lies in ruins.
Nevertheless, the suppositions about both modernity and its opponents persist; and have actually hardened. ‘They hate our freedoms’ – the claim first heard after Atta drove a plane into the World Trade Center – now echoes after every terrorist atrocity. Collective affirmations of Western freedoms and privileges – ‘We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion,’ Salman Rushdie wrote after 9/11 – have turned into an emotional and intellectual reflex. As the carnage of the Middle East reaches American and European cities, citizens are ushered by politicians and the media into collective grieving and commemorations of the moral and cultural superiority of their nation and civilization.
Thus, the maniacal cries by adolescent jihadists of ‘Allahu Akbar’ are met by a louder drumbeat of ‘Western values’ and confidence-building invocations of the West’s apparent quintessence, such as the Enlightenment. The widespread reprinting of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed is meant to affirm the West’s defence of freedom of speech against its vicious Muslim enemies. Rushdie, who claims that there has been a ‘deadly mutation in the heart of Islam’, wrote after the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo that religion, ‘a medieval form of unreason’, deserves our ‘fearless disrespect’.
It seems that people who cherish their freedoms and those who scorn them are doomed to clash, and that we must choose sides in this conflict between retrograde Islam and the secular, rational and progressive West. As Charlie Hebdo itself wrote after the attack on Brussels in March 2016, the role of terrorists ‘is simply to provide the end of a philosophical line already begun. A line which tells us “Hold your tongues, living or dead. Give up discussing, debating, contradicting or contesting.”’
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The unenlightened Oriental ‘other’ has been frequently invoked since the eighteenth century to define the enlightened Westerner, and dramatize the latter’s superiority. The widespread assumption – that the Enlightenment set universal standards of human behaviour and ethics based on a rational and democratic model of society, and that all those who fail to follow them are politically and intellectually benighted – can be traced back to Montesquieu.
One of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu in Persian Letters (1721) imagined travellers from the fanatical and despotic world of the Muslim Orient in order to criticize the forces of reaction in European society and herald its emerging spirit of freedom. But Montesquieu deployed, like many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers rummaging through travel accounts of China and India, the Orient in order to critique the Occident. The assumption that the West embodies enlightened modernity and the East unreformed religion belongs to our much more complacent age.
It has been most compellingly articulated by the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. As the scholar Bernard Lewis, who first aired it in his article ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, wrote:
We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.
Glossing Lewis’s claim, Samuel Huntington added that ‘this centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.’ For ‘Islam’s borders are bloody,’ Huntington wrote, ‘and so are its innards.’ According to Lewis and Huntington, modernity has failed to take root in intransigently traditional and backward Muslim countries despite various attempts to impose it by secular leaders such as Turkey’s Atatürk, the Shah of Iran, Algeria’s Ben Bella, Egypt’s Nasser and Sadat, and Pakistan’s Ayub Khan.
Since 9/11 there have been many versions, crassly populist as well as solemnly intellectual, of the claims by Lewis and Huntington that the crisis in Muslim countries is purely self-induced, and the West is resented for the magnitude of its extraordinary success as a beacon of freedom, and embodiment of the Enlightenment’s achievements – the ideals of scientific rationality and democratic pluralism. They have mutated into the apparently more sophisticated claim that the clash of civilizations occurs within Islam, and that Western interventions are required on behalf of the ‘good Muslim’, who is rational, moderate and liberal.
The Bearded versus the Clean-Shaven
Undoubtedly, Western intellectuals have invested much faith in leaders who claim to be introducing their superstitious societies to scientific rationality, if not democratic pluralism. The East, as we have seen, was a career for men of letters long before European colonialists invaded and occupied it. ‘There are still vast climates in Africa,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘where men have need of a Tsar Peter.’ History revealed that, regardless of what the Enlightenment philosophes hoped, Peter, Catherine and Frederick were primarily interested in expanding their empires and boosting the power of the despotic state by rationalizing military and bureaucratic institutions.
Tocqueville summed up the ‘modernization’ efforts of Frederick of Prussia in the eighteenth century:
Beneath this completely modern head we will see a totally gothic body appear; Frederick had only eliminated from it whatever could hinder the action of his own power; and the whole forms a monstrous being which seems to be in transition between one shape and another.
Nevertheless, starting in the 1950s, the yearning among many Western intellectuals to play Voltaire to the new, postcolonial modernizing leaders in the East made the latter seem like versions of Peter the Great and Catherine. These bookish proponents of modernization counselling their anti-communist clients – immortalized in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) – were far more influential than the liberal internationalists of our own time who helped package imperialist ventures as moral crusades for freedom and democracy. For the
ir clients wore Western-style suits, if not military uniforms, spoke Western languages, relied on Western theories, and routinely called upon Western writers and intellectuals for advice about how to break open the window to the West.
Huntington, aware of his devoted readers among Asian technocrats, hailed the Shah of Iran as the epitome of a ‘modernizing monarch’. He claimed that Pakistan’s military dictator Ayub Khan came close, ‘more than any other political leader in a modernizing country after World War Two’, to ‘filling the role of a Solon or Lycurgus, or “Great Legislator” of the Platonic or Rousseauian model’ (Ayub Khan was shortly thereafter forced out of power). Bernard Lewis returned from his first trip to Turkey in 1950 lionizing Atatürk and upholding the latter’s enlightened despotism as a great success and model for other Muslim countries.
Lewis’s vision of a Turkey Westernized and modernized by the enlightened autocrat’s ukase was at the core of George W. Bush’s ‘vision’ of bringing democracy at gunpoint to Iraq. Reassuring counsel came from Fouad Ajami, a senior advisor to Condoleeza Rice, who said that the United States was particularly ‘good at releasing communities from the burden of the past, and from the limits and confines of a narrow identity’.
Understandably, many Western leaders and intellectuals are both appalled and baffled when, as often happens, an unfamiliar generation of long-bearded activists and thinkers speaking of Islam rise out of the ruins of failed experiments in nation-building, representative government, industrialization, urbanization and regime change. ‘Political Islam is rage, anarchy,’ V. S. Naipaul charged after visiting the Islamic Revolution in Iran, contrasting Islam’s obsession with ideological purity to the generous ‘universal civilization’ of the West based on the pursuit of individual happiness. Rushdie claims that Iran, a corrupt police state in the late 1960s, was ‘wonderful’, a ‘very cosmopolitan, very cultured society’, and ‘the arrival of Islamic radicalism in that country, of all countries, was particularly tragic because it was so sophisticated a culture’.
Age of Anger Page 12
