Occidentalism

by Ian Buruma

  Morteza Motahhari was a leading figure in the Islamic revolution in Iran. His death made the Ayatollah Khomeini cry in public, and call him “the fruit of my life.” He was obsessed with the West and with the issue of women. It was important to him to prove how much more humane and considerate Islam and the East were, in this regard, than the West. He firmly believed that the obvious differences between man and woman were deliberately obliterated in the West, so that women could be exploited more easily in the interests of capitalism. He observed that Bertrand Russell hoped to solve the “shortage” of marriageable men by promoting the immoral idea of single parenthood for women, instead of taking up the moral Muslim practice of polygamy.

  This, however, is still in the realm of cultural criticism, not Occidentalism. But the idea that woman is “the protected jewel” in man’s crown, and bestows honor on the man by the way he defends her, does feed into Occidentalism. The veil is part of this. Being oblivious to one’s role as the guardian of the “jewel” is to be without honor or, more disturbingly, without even a sense of honor. Western permissiveness, to the believers, shows not just a lack of morality, but a lack of the most basic sense of honor.

  PURITANISM AND POLITICS ARE NOT A NEW COMBINATION in Islam. A puritan preacher and a warlord in the Najd plateau, in central Arabia, created a formidable alliance in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad Ibn Saud. The followers of Abd al-Wahhab used to describe themselves as the Muahhidun, those who strictly believe in monotheism (tawhid ). But others called them the Wahhabis and this nickname stuck.

  Wahhabism was an expression of religious zeal against popular religion in Arabia, where the tombs of saints had become the focus of fetishistic cults, which were far removed from strict monotheism. The idea was to purify Arabia, as the cradle of Islam, from idolatry, and to create an Islamic state based on the positive law of Islam, as interpreted by the Hanbali school, regarded as the strictest legal school in Islam. The puritanical Wahhabis were especially strict in their attitudes about sexual morality and other matters of personal life. Interestingly, Wahhabi Islam was puritanical in another sense too, more akin to Protestant Puritanism: the duty of the believer to think over his religious commitments and not accept them blindly. It won’t help the believer, said Abd al-Wahhab, to tell the angels on the Day of Judgment that he is repeating the words of others.

  When Ibn Saud of Dariyah adopted the Wahhabi creed, preacher and warrior were united in their quest to conquer Arabia. The alliance between the Ibn Saud family and Wahhabism continued after the death of the founder, and in 1803 their forces conquered Mecca and formed a Saudi-Wahhabi state, only to be defeated by the Ottoman army from Cairo in 1818. The Saudi state was then established in Najd, one small fraction of Arabia, and defeated again by the Rashid clan in 1891. Then, in 1902, Abd al-Aziz II Ibn Saud conquered the town of Riyadh and, by shrewdly siding with the British in World War I, was able to regain the territories of the original Saudi state with its holy cities. Wahhabism became the official ideology, designed to shape a puritanical Muslim society.

  A great deal of sand has moved in Arabian deserts since the British were able to buy influence with the Saudis by sending them three thousand rifles, four machine guns, and five thousand pounds. Oil brought untold riches to the land, and this put the Wahhabi state under tremendous strain, for it is hard to maintain puritanism when thousands of Saudi princes are suddenly among the richest people on earth. The solution is a kind of officially sanctioned hypocrisy. A semblance of Wahhabism is kept up in public while the rich enjoy all that the West can offer in the privacy of their grand palaces. And what Riyadh cannot supply, palaces in London will have in abundance.

  This has been accompanied by something more lethal. Even as the princes enjoyed all the Western luxuries, Wahhabism was exported abroad, and with it a fiery brand of Occidentalism. Saudi Arabia is now the prime source of fundamentalist, puritanical ideology, affecting Muslims everywhere, from North Africa to Indonesia. Oil money is used to promote religious radicalism around the world while the Saudi princes live in an uneasy truce with the clergy at home. But hypocrisy is an unstable solution, for it has given rise to true Wahhabi believers, such as Osama bin Laden, who view the presence of American women soldiers in Arabia as an act of defilement. To him, and his followers, it is as if the Americans were sending their temple prostitutes to defend the unmanly rulers of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism has been exported, not just as a form of puritanical revivalism, but as a virulent Occidentalist creed, which will come back to haunt the rulers of the very holy places whence it sprang.

  [SEEDS OF REVOLUTION]

  THEODOR HERZL, FOUNDING FATHER OF THE ZIONIST movement, was not a gifted novelist. Nevertheless, his novel, Altneuland (Old-New Land), is one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century. Although Herzl finished it in 1902, the visionary ideas expressed in this “fairy tale,” as he called it, belonged firmly in the century before. Altneuland is a blueprint for the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic Utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, a model of pure reason, a “light unto the nations.”

  By the 1920s, in Herzl’s tale, Jerusalem would be transformed into a thoroughly modern metropolis, “intersected by electric street railways; wide, tree-bordered streets; homes, gardens, boulevards, parks; schools, hospitals, government buildings, pleasure resorts.” Arab and Jew would live happily together in the New Society, working in vast “co-operative syndicates.” And all the nations of the world would meet in Jerusalem at the Palace of Peace.

  The real Jerusalem, where one of us lives, and where we both worked on this book in the fall of 2002, is rather different. The streets of the old walled city are silent; shops are boarded up; dignified old tourist guides, bereft of clients, softly beg for a little cash. Only ultra-orthodox Jews still venture into the medieval streets. In the modern western areas of the city, men armed with machine guns stand guard in front of cafés and restaurants. Hotels are empty, abandoned by the tourist trade. You never know where the next bomb attack will strike: on a bus, in a cinema, or in a discotheque. Arabs do their necessary jobs, cleaning Israeli floors, building Israeli houses, mending Israeli roads, and then scurry back to their homes, each one, in the eyes of a fearful population, a potential suicide bomber. An edgy silence haunts the streets, broken, periodically, by the sirens of police cars or ambulances.

  Israel has to bear some of the responsibility for this menacing atmosphere. You cannot humiliate and bully others without eventually provoking a violent response. Palestinians have been treated badly by Jews and Arabs alike. The daily sight of Palestinian men crouching in the heat at Israeli checkpoints, suffering the casual abuse of Jewish soldiers, explains some of the venom of the intifadas. But Israel has also become the prime target of a more general Arab rage against the West, the symbol of idolatrous, hubristic, amoral, colonialist evil, a cancer in the eyes of its enemies that must be expunged by killing.

  Herzl could not possibly have foreseen this, and yet the seeds of tragedy are already buried in his text, which was well meant, deeply idealistic, and in many ways typical of everything Occidentalists find most hateful. The narrative is carried on the cardboard shoulders of three cut-out characters. A misanthropic American millionaire of aristocratic Prussian origin named Kingscourt pays Friedrich Löwenberg, a depressed Viennese Jew, to be his companion on a tropical island. Löwenberg is much like Herzl himself, a disillusioned dandy. The third character is a poor and virtuous eastern European Jew named Littwak. In a moment of guilty generosity, Löwenberg gives his money to Littwak’s family. So here we have them, the good Jew, the anguished Jew, and the rich and unassailable Germanic goy.

  In Book One, Kingscourt and Löwenberg interrupt their Mediterranean cruise with a visit to the Holy Land. “Your fatherland,” says Kingscourt to his paid companion; Löwenberg cringes. In Book Two, they revisit the Holy Land about twenty years later and are filled with the wo
nder of it all. Littwak is now a sturdy pioneer, helping to build the New Society. By the end, in Book Five, Littwak has become the first president of the Jewish state. Löwenberg marries Littwak’s sister and stops anguishing. And Kingscourt, filled with admiration for the New Society, becomes the loving benefactor of Luttwak’s infant son.

  The tragedy of this optimistic fairy tale lies not in the story itself, but more in the tone, the fanciful descriptions, and the peculiar justifications for Herzl’s ideals. This is how they find the Holy Land on their first visit, before the Jews have built their New Society: “The alleys [of Jaffa] were dirty, neglected, full of vile odors. Everywhere was misery in bright Oriental rags.” The landscape on the way to Jerusalem is “a picture of desolation.” The people of “the blackish Arab villages looked like brigands. Naked children played in the dirty alleys.”

  Jaffa twenty years on is “a magnificent city,” whose “magnificent stone dams showed the harbor for what it was: the safest and most convenient port in the eastern Mediterranean.” Littwak, the happy pioneer, explains: “Never in history were cities built so quickly or so well, because never before were so many technical facilities available. By the end of the nineteenth century, humanity had already achieved a high degree of technical skill. We merely had to transplant existing inventions to this country.”

  A bit of Europe, then, transplanted to the desolation that was the Middle East. And with all those technical skills came many of the ideas that were fashionable then: blinkered faith in economic progress; trust in social engineering by the state; a fetishistic taste for power plants and big dams. Here is the Dead Sea, with “mighty iron tubes” jutting from the rocks, “set vertically upon the turbine sheds, resembling fantastic chimneys. The roaring from the tubes and the white foam on the outflowing waters bore witness to a mighty work.”

  Löwenberg feels a little overwhelmed, even crushed by “all this greatness.” Not Littwak: “We have not been crushed by the greatness of these forces—it has lifted us up!”

  Not only is the New Jerusalem a socially progressive, economically advanced place, but even religion is transformed into something so secular it hardly feels like religion any more. Passover is a time to celebrate the New Society. The song to the Sabbath bride reminds Löwenberg of Heinrich Heine and the great poet’s “Jewish identity.” Contemplating the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, Löwenberg thinks of the right of Jews to feel proud and free.

  This is all most gratifying, but what do the Arabs make of it all? What about their traditions, beliefs, and aspirations to be proud and free? Not to mention their “identity.” The question does in fact come up. Kingscourt, impressed as he is by the Zionists’ great achievements, asks an Arab named Reschid Bey whether his people resent the new interlopers on their tribal lands. “What a question!” he replies. “It was a great blessing for us.” The landowners sold their land to the Jews at high prices, and “those who had nothing stood to lose nothing, and could only gain.” Nothing, he continued, was more wretched than an Arab village in the late nineteenth century.

  “The peasants’ clay hovels were unfit for stables. The children lay naked in the streets, and grew up like dumb beasts.” But now everything was different. For all “benefitted from the progressive measures of the New Society, whether they wanted to or not, whether they joined it or not.” The swamps were drained, canals dug, trees planted. And there was plenty of work for everyone. Only begging was now strictly forbidden.

  This is the kind of stuff that filled Chinese or Soviet publications in the 1960s, the idea that human happiness could be bought with foaming turbines and bumper harvests, that nothing so irrational as religious, national, or ethnic pride would stand in the way of the mighty roar of modern progress, and that “primitive” peoples would be only too happy to be taken in hand by more enlightened races marching toward a glorious future. These were fantasies and noxious results. When Herzl wrote his book, they were merely a day-dream.

  Altneuland is still worth reading because it contains so much that is grand and hopeful about Western thought since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. From this kind of thinking came the industrial revolution, liberal democracy, scientific discovery, civil rights. But the same Promethean dreams of European rationalists, taken to their logical extremes and brutally implemented, often by non-Europeans who wanted to catch up with Western progress, have ended in the mass graves of the gulag and the killing fields of China and Cambodia. Europeans justified their imperial conquests with claims of progress and enlightenment. Asian tyrants murdered millions with the same justifications.

  Reactions to the rationalist dreams of Eastern tyrants or Western empires have been just as bloody. The Islamist revolutionary movement that currently stalks the world, from Kabul to Java, would not have existed without the harsh secularism of Reza Shah Pahlavi or the failed experiments in state socialism in Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. This is why it was such a misfortune, in many ways, for the Middle East to have encountered the modern West for the first time through echoes of the French Revolution. Robespierre and the Jacobins were inspiring heroes for Arab radicals: progressive, egalitarian, and opposed to the Christian church. Later models for Arab progress—Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union—were even more disastrous. But to see the upheavals of the twentieth century as a pendulum, swinging from Western rationalism to Oriental religious zeal, would be a mistake, for the two extremes are dangerously entangled.

  Most revolts against Western imperialism, and its local offshoots, borrowed heavily from Western ideas. The samurai who founded the modern Japanese state in 1867 did so to defend themselves against being colonized by the West. But it was defense by mimicry. Their ideals could have been lifted straight from Altneuland. The Meiji oligarchs were in many ways the perfect pupils of Europe. Changing their kimono for tail-coats and top hats, they set about smashing Buddhist temples and transforming their country in the name of Progress, Science, and Enlightenment. Japan’s own imperial conquests were justified along the same lines. Like Herzl, Japanese empire builders took the gratitude of lesser breeds for granted.

  But coiled like an anaconda inside the modern transformation of Japan was a nativist counterrevolution, which sought to save the spiritual purity of an ancient culture from the soulless modernity of the Occident and its slavish Oriental acolytes. Yet the counterrevolution, too, despite its Shinto and samurai romance, was heavily in debt to Western ideas, most particularly the anticapitalist strains of National Socialism. What complicates the picture even further is that Western-style modernity and nativist revolt existed inside the same establishment, and often in the minds of the same people.

  This is the problem. No Occidentalist, even the most fervent holy warrior, can ever be entirely free of the Occident. The prewar Japanese conundrum, of revolution fermenting in the heart of the establishment it seeks to destroy, is evident in the Middle East as well. Islamic revolutionaries have been harbored, and sometimes even encouraged, by nominally secular regimes, in Syria, Egypt, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. What makes their terror so lethal is not just the religious hatred borrowed from old texts, which is in any case often based on distortions, but the synthesis of religious zealotry and modern ideology, of ancient bigotry and modern technology.

  The furnace for such syntheses is often located in the West itself. Pol Pot melded revolutionary Marxism with Khmer nationalism as a student of radio technology in Paris.

  The Iranian revolutionary scholar Ali Shari’ati was only a few years younger than Pol Pot, and also spent some years studying in Paris, where he translated the works of Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara. Shari’ati’s views on “Islam as practical socialism” were a conscious fusion of secular and religious dogmas. His faith was turned into the vehicle of armed struggle. Martyrdom (“red death”) was promoted as the highest form of existence—not just an end, but a goal in itself. He had turned from Marxism to a purist version of Islam. And yet he used the political terminology of freedom and equality
.

  Ba’athism, the ideology of the Syrian and former Iraq governments, is a synthesis, forged in the 1930s and 1940s, of fascism and romantic nostalgia for an “organic” community of Arabs. It was developed, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of World War I, by such thinkers as Sati’ Husri and Michel ‘Aflaq, founder of the Ba’ath Party in Syria. European colonialism was the main enemy of pan-Arab activists. But, as usual, the West was fought with ideas that originated in Europe, the same ideas that inspired radical nationalists in Japan.

  Sati’ Husri was a keen student of German Romantic thinkers such as Fichte and Herder who countered the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of an organic, völkisch nation, rooted in blood and soil. His ideal of pulling the Arab world together in a huge organic community was directly inspired by pan-German theories that held sway in fascist circles in Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. An Arab Volksgemeinschaft, bound by military discipline and heroic individual sacrifice, was what he dreamed of. And, by the way, some of the early Zionists were just as much in thrall to the same German ideas. In his memoirs, one such figure, Hans Kohn, writes that young Jews “transferred Fichte’s teaching” into the “context of our own situation . . . we accepted his appeal to bring forth the ideal community by placing all the power of the rationally and ethically mature individual at the service of his own nation.”1