Occidentalism

by Ian Buruma

  The Manichaean picture of two separate, independent realms of good and evil, ruled by equally powerful forces, shared by the Zoroastrian faith in Persia, is unacceptable to monotheistic religions, including Islam. In the biblical view there can be only one source for all existence and that is God: “I am the Lord, and there is none else. . . . I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all this” (Isaiah 45:5-7).

  In Islam, too, the idea of two realms is considered a heresy. Nonetheless, since it is hard to reconcile the creation of evil with a supremely benevolent God, there are still strands of Manichaeism in monotheistic religions too, even as the doctrine of two realms is rejected. This can be seen in religious attitudes to matter. God in the Hebrew Bible created matter when He created the world and pronounced it good. But matter was still an inferior form of existence, far removed from the divine spirit. The Christians believe that God came down in the flesh through Jesus, His son, but this story of incarnation only highlights the sacrifice involved in appearing to humanity in the flesh. For the flesh is not just weak, but rotten; matter decays, and can never be the proper medium for God’s eternal being.

  It is likely that the children of light, as they called themselves, of the Dead Sea sect, fighting the children of darkness, influenced the Pauline distinction between flesh and the spirit, flesh being on the negative side of the division. In Platonism, too, matter is seen as the lowest form of being. Augustine, who started off as a believer in Manichaeism, later became a fierce opponent. But as a Christian Platonist he retained a negative attitude to matters of the flesh.

  The idea that the body is inherently imperfect and prone to corruption continued to have an influence on both Christianity and Islam. The human body is subject to sexual desires that result in moral depravity. The flesh is not only unworthy of God, but unworthy even of man. For man is elevated from matter by the divine spirit in him, by his soul. Because they have souls, unlike other creatures, humans are able to live a nobler, higher, more spiritual form of existence.

  This goes to the crux of religious Occidentalism, as espoused by radical Islamists. Matter, in the Occidentalist view, shared by some extreme Hinduists and prewar Japanese Shintoists, is the god of the West and materialism its religion. The East, on the other hand, if left to its own devices, free from “Westoxication,” is the realm of deep spirituality. The struggle of East and West is a Manichaean struggle between the idolatrous worshipers of earthly matter and true worshipers of the godly spirit.

  To be sure, the notion of a materialist capitalist West worshiping false gods is not only held by religious Occidentalists. We already mentioned Karl Marx. A dedicated materialist, he rendered “commodity fetishism” as an illusion that commodities have value, much like the belief of religious fetishists in the holiness of their objects. It is the false conviction that objects have an inherent value or sacred content, whereas in fact they derive all their value and sacred properties from human relations. An object is sacred only because we sanctify it. A commodity has a value, an exchange value, because we value it, and not because of some inherent value. Modern capitalism fosters illusions, and the commodity and money worshipers who believe in them are deluded much as fetish worshipers are.

  Bourgeois capitalism, then, associated with the West, is accused from opposite directions, by materialists and religious believers, of being fetishistic. Religious Occidentalists see Western worship of money and commodities as something akin to the pagan worship of trees and stones, far removed from the spiritual realm that is worthy of devotion. And Marxists see capitalist commodity worship as something like the illusion of religion itself.

  Some religious ideologues, such as Ali Shari’ati, an intellectual pioneer of revolutionary Islam in Iran, tried to appropriate such Marxist themes as market fetishism for Islamist criticism of the West. Shari’ati attributed many ills to the West, and to what was imported from the West by the countries under its spell—imperialism, international Zionism, colonialism, multinational corporations, and so forth—but worse than anything else was gharbzadegi, the blind and mindless following of Western culture.

  Shari’ati was convinced that there was only one way for people of the Third World to fight the maladies of the West. They had to develop a cultural identity around religion. In his case, this meant Islam, preferably in its Shi’ite form. He saw religion, not Marxism, as a potentially liberating force. While still working as an elementary school teacher in Khurasan in the early 1950s, he translated and published Abu Dharr: The God Worshiping Socialist, a book by an Egyptian writer named Abdul Hamid Jowdat al-Sahar. Abu Dharr was one of the Prophet’s followers, who demanded justice for the poor and denounced the rich for deserting the true God for the god of money. Shari’ati regarded Dharr as the hero of Islamic history: “We want the Islam of Abu Zahar [Dharr], not that of the Royal palace; of justice and true leadership, not that of the caliphs and class stratification.”2

  Shari’ati’s attitude to Marxism was complicated. He used it as a tool for analysis of society and never thought of Marxists as heretics. Heretics, in his view, were judged in the Qur’an not by their metaphysical beliefs, but by their actions. But his deviation from Marxism and from secular radical Third World thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, was tactical as well as substantive. On tactical grounds, he thought the masses could be recruited only with the help of an ideology that they revered—that is, by religion. But what Marxists regarded as fetishism metaphorically, he, as a radical Shi’ite, took quite literally to be idolatry.

  This is not stated as explicitly in Shari’ati as in the works of other radical Islamist writers, but he laid the basis for making this idea of idolatry hugely influential. He saw radical Islam as an iconoclastic movement that set out to destroy the Western idols, which had become objects of veneration in the Third World in general, and in Islamic countries in particular.

  The charge of idolatry is, however, not simply a repetition of the banal contention that the West is secular. The idea of the secular West is dubious anyway, for it hardly applies to the United States, where organized religion still thrives, even in the highest government circles. Still, it is a common assumption that modernization means secularization.

  The West, so the story goes, went through an industrial revolution that made it dramatically richer than other parts of the world, but also cut it off from its roots in the traditional agrarian society of the past. Industrialization involved constant application of science and technology, and this was bound to lead to secularization, since rational production in an industrial society called for inquiry into the way things work, into cause and effect. It created what the German sociologist Max Weber called “the disenchantment of the world,” which means the removal of the spell of religion that clouds the relation of what causes what. This picture of modernization, tying economic growth to a break from traditional society and religion, was especially persuasive among reformers in non-Western countries. And they were not entirely wrong. But unfortunately their conclusions drove them to extremes, and the same is still true of their religious opponents, who eventually rebelled against them.

  To many reformers, breaking the mold of tradition had to be total. It usually began with an assault on the way people dressed or shaved. Peter the Great made the boyars, or landed aristocrats, shave their beards. He also made priests deliver sermons on the virtues of reason. But this was nothing compared with Kemal Atatürk, who vowed in 1917 that if he ever came to power he would change social life in Turkey in one blow. And that, from 1923, is precisely what he proceeded to do. Eastern forms of dress, often with a religious significance, were abolished. Women could no longer wear the veil. And like the leaders of Meiji Japan, he encouraged elaborate balls and other kinds of Western-style entertainment. Like the Japanese, he believed that a Western style was essential to becoming a modern nation.

  If dress and hairstyles are superficial signs of change, breaking down the “monastery walls,” to use another of Weber’s meta
phors, was regarded by many, including Karl Marx, as an essential ingredient of modernization. Again, Atatürk offers a good example. Claiming that “science is the most reliable guide in life,” he established a secular education system and closed down all institutions based on Muslim canon law. Under Atatürk, secularism became another type of dogmatic faith. Chinese reformers in the late nineteenth century had a similar belief in scientism. And this rationalist faith played a part in all countries under one form or another of state socialism.

  It may or may not be true that secularization, or at least a retreat of religion from the political sphere, is a necessary condition for modernization and economic growth. The fact is that enough reformers in non-Western countries believed it, and they were prepared to enforce it with sufficient brutality, to make religious people feel seriously threatened. The radical reaction to these secular threats was to see the Occident not as free from religion—literally as the godless West—but as something much worse than that. The West, to the religious radicals, appeared to be in thrall to the false and thoroughly corrupting god of materialism. This radical shift—viewing the secularism of the West not as the end of religion, but as the idolatrous worship of false gods—has to be explained.

  IDOLATRY IN THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS CAN take two forms: worshiping the wrong god, a form of whoring, or worshiping the right god in the wrong way. It is not clear whether the sin of dancing round the golden calf in the Bible is a case of worshiping the wrong god or, as Luther believed, worshiping the right god (“this is your God, the God of Israel”) in the wrong way. The latter would mean that the will of God, who prescribed proper ways of worship, was deliberately violated.

  In Islamic thought, the predominant idea of idolatry fits neither of the above categories exactly. The original idolaters were Arab heathens who attributed deeds that are exclusively acts of God (Allah) to other agents as well as to Him. The belief in the participation (shirk) of these other agents is what made one an idolater. Angels didn’t count, for they were the servants of God’s will. But the Manichaean belief that the world was created by forces from two distinct realms would have been a clear example of idolatry.

  The Islamic idea of idolatry was shaped by the reality of the pre-Islamic pantheon of gods in Arabia. Allah, before the revelations of Muhammad in the seventh century, was merely the primus inter pares, neither alone nor almighty. In those early days of the old jahiliyya, the age of ignorance, idolatry was the belief not in a god who replaced Allah, but in gods who still existed as well as Allah. The Arabs knew no better then. The new jahiliyya, associated with the effects of “Westoxification,” is of course a very different matter.

  Western worship of material life is a far more radical and dangerous form of idolatry, since it is devoted to a “strange” god, meant to replace the only true God. This is not idolatry of participation but a downright denial of Allah, which is clearly much worse than the ignorant idolatry of Arabs before the arrival of Muhammad. In the old jahiliyya, heathens at least recognized Allah, albeit in a distorted manner. The much more toxic new jahiliyya is the main target of modern radical Islam, and thus the core of religious Occidentalism.

  One of the fiercest promoters of a war against the new jahiliyya was an Iranian thinker and activist named Sayyid Muhamud Taleqani (1910-1979). He had an immense influence in shaping the revolutionary ideology of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Taleqani’s father, a learned and devout watchmaker, was responsible for his son’s early studies of the Qur’an. In the early 1930s, Taleqani enrolled as a student at the new and illustrious religious seminary in the holy city of Qom.

  Iran was ruled at the time by Reza Shah Pahlavi, an Atatürk-type military strongman, whose contempt for organized religion was as strong as that of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed in 1979 by the Islamic revolution. Reza Shah took power in a coup d’état in 1921, and immediately instigated radical reforms, such as female emancipation and the destruction of tribal and clerical privileges. Like other zealous modernizers, he first attacked traditional forms of dress, with force if necessary. Soldiers roamed the cities ordering women to strip their veils, sometimes at gun-point, and clerics were made to take off their turbans. Believers were also forbidden to go on the hajj to Mecca, and religious students who protested were gunned down in the streets.

  Taleqani, understandably outraged by these measures, became affiliated with a militant group called Fada’iane-e Islam and helped to hide a serial assassin named Imami. But his lasting fame comes from his revolutionary reading of the Qur’an. He provided a radical religious alternative to the revolutionary ideology of the secular socialist Tudeh Party. In his gloss of the Qur’an (2:105) he identifies “the infidel materialists of this century” as the modern version of the barbarian pre-Islamic jahiliyya. And he blamed the Jews and the Christians for succumbing to the new idolatry by identifying the economic interests of colonialism with their own.

  Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activist, carried this idea of the new jahiliyya to more violent extremes.

  For Qutb, the whole world, from decadent Cairo to barbarous New York, was in a state of jahiliyya. He saw the West as a gigantic brothel, steeped in animal lust, greed, and selfishness. Human thought, in the West, was “given the status of God.”3 Material greed, immoral behavior, inequality, and political oppression would end only once the world was ruled by God, and by His laws alone. The opportunity to die in a holy war would allow men to overcome selfish ambitions and corrupt oppressors. But even though Qutb believed that the war against the Jews would have to be waged by all possible means, he did not advocate a violent attack on Western states. His immediate targets were the Westernized rulers of Egypt and other Muslim nations.

  There was a ready audience for Qutb’s message. He appealed to those who felt humiliated and oppressed by European colonialism and corrupt, whisky-drinking, womanizing monarchs, followed by military dictatorships. One of the traditional attractions of Islam was its egalitarian promise, of a world where economic competition (“selfish ambition”) would no longer divide the Muslim community and tyranny would be abolished. As Qutb put it: “Only in the Islamic way of life do all men become free from the servitude of some men to others and devote themselves to the worship of God alone, deriving guidance from Him alone, and bowing before Him alone.”

  The main secular rival to revolutionary Islam was revolutionary socialism. Religious and Marxist radicalism between them squeezed out any possibility in Egypt and elsewhere of more liberal democratic politics. The failure of state socialism in some countries of the Middle East, and of right-wing police states in others, opened the way to those who advocated Islamist revolution.

  In fact, however, Sayyid Qutb’s transformation into a religious Occidentalist took some time. The son of a provincial schoolteacher, he was interested in English literature, and at one point even advocated nudism as a healthy modern innovation. In the 1940s, he entered a seminary affiliated with the famous Islamic university Al-Azhar, where he began to turn to the Qur’an for serious guidance.

  When Qutb was sent in 1948 by the Egyptian Ministry of Education to study in the United States for two years, to improve his English, this experience made him into a true Occidentalist. There was much about American life that shocked him, not only in hedonistic New York, but even in quiet Greeley, Colorado, whose well-kept lawns disgusted him as symbols of mindless individualism. He found the spectacle of young women dancing to a current hit, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” horrifying. And he was astounded by the frivolous manner in which local preachers tried to appeal to their flock, singing jazzy hymns and the like. Yet he was still able to appreciate some aspects of Western culture. In a New York museum, he was so entranced by a Franz Marc painting of a fox that he spent an hour staring at it, and was amazed that Americans, in a hurry to see all the pictures in the show, gave it only a glimpse. Clearly, he thought, Westerners were incapable of spiritual or aesthetic contemplation.

  These experiences, co
mbined with memories of British colonial rule in Egypt and the aggressive modernizing reforms of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime, made Qutb into a zealous Islamist and religious Occidentalist. His ferocious anti-Semitism was very much part of this. Qutb liked to quote that notorious nineteenth-century Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence of worldwide Jewish conspiracies and was convinced that “anyone who leads [the Muslim] community away from its religion must be a Jewish agent.”4 He wrote that the idea of culture as a common human heritage, transcending religious, racial, and national barriers, was “one of the tricks played by world Jewry,” which sought to “infiltrate into the body politic of the whole world to perpetuate their evil designs.”5 At the top of these designs was usury, by which all the world’s wealth would fall “in the hands of Jewish financial institutions.”

  As we already noted in our discussion of the City of Man, the conflict here was not just religious, but about fundamentally different ideas of human community. The kind of society associated with Jewish conspirators is based on individuals, pursuing their own interests. As long as they abide by the same secular laws, it does not matter what these individuals believe. Qutb’s idea of community is defined by pure faith, just as the Nazi state was based on pure race. “Jewish agents” pollute the purity of these communities and must therefore be eradicated. But in the cultural clash between Islam and the new jahiliyya, the Soviet-style state socialism adopted by Nasser was as much an enemy as Jewish greed and Western individualism.