Occidental accident

Apart from pushing a new, negative definition of Occidentalism, the book tries too hard to conflate Islamism with Nazism — often ignoring context and ground realities

Andrew Nash Delhi

On November 2, 2004, a Dutch citizen of Moroccan descent named Mohammed Bouyeri followed a countryman, Theo van Gogh, into an Amsterdam alley and slit his throat. In profiles of Bouyeri published after the crime, the murderer's traits conform to the well-known image of the "Islamist terrorist": young, middle-class, male, Muslim; embittered, intolerant, vicious, seething with anger at the debauched, impious society around him.

As for the victim, Theo van Gogh almost perfectly personifies Western hedonism. Ian Buruma, a US-based academic specialising in East Asia and one of the two authors of the book under review, described van Gogh posthumously in The New Yorker magazine as "a heavy smoker and consumer of cocaine and fine wines, a columnist of some style and shocking vulgarity, a disgusting slob adored by many women…". Whatever one might say about Bouyeri, he cannot be accused of randomly picking a target for his rage against the excesses of the West.

Ian Buruma wrote about van Gogh's murder after the publication of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, which he co-authored with Avishai Margalit, a professor of philosophy at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, but the Bouyeri-van Gogh episode neatly encapsulates the phenomenon that Buruma and Margalit examine. "Occidentalism", a term Buruma and Margalit first used in a journalistic piece in The New York Review of Books in January 2002, refers to "the dehumanising picture of the West painted by its enemies". Just as the cavalier van Gogh fell at the hand of an uncompromising enemy, so, too, is the West — which, for Buruma and Margalit, includes "fragile democracies" in Asia — endangered by a fierce anti-liberalism that is now closely associated with the Islamist movement.

In addition to their clever title, a play on Edward Said's famous Orientalism, Buruma and Margalit's contribution to the saturated corpus of writing on the under-siege West is a broad intellectual history of liberalism and its enemies. Ranging from Plotinus of 3rd century BC to our own era's Mohammad Atta, they discern four elements of Occidentalist thought: hostility to the City, to the merchant/capitalist, to the open mind, and to the infidel. Each of these elements can be found at other places and at other times, but Occidentalism, by fusing them in a romantic potion against the West, has driven the hatred of the imperial Japanese, the Nazi Germans and, now, Islamists.

At one level, this effort of grouping together ideas and movements is useful, for it allows us to consider present-day dangers through the lens of history. As Buruma and Margalit show, the language and imagery employed by the fascist regimes of World War II bear some similarity to those of today's Islamists. There is a shared emphasis on spirit-above-materialism, a shared desire to repress the "Westernising" citizens of their own societies. And while the authors distinguish secular and religious forms of Occidentalism, their primary target is the fascist-seeming Islamism, whose followers appear eager to spill American blood.

At another level, Buruma and Margalit's effort seems doomed to superficiality. The individuals who choose to wage war on the West, including those inspired by peculiar interpretations of Islam, such as Mohammed Bouyeri's, are individuals, not states. The movements from which they emerge are amorphous and diverse, though they may enjoy the sympathy of many people. Fascism sought to capture State power to realise its vision of "nation". Islamism, notwithstanding its apparent capacity for spectacular violence against icons of Western State power, is transnational and does not require State power. More importantly, the ground realities — economic, cultural, political — of those societies most closely associated with Islamism differ so obviously from those in mid-century Europe and Japan that thematic and rhetorical similarities ought not to be exaggerated.

More troubling is Buruma and Margalit's contention that Occidentalism "was born in Europe, before it was transferred to other parts of the world". What Buruma and Margalit call Occidentalism — the hateful rejection of modern life and its associated freedoms — is thus, in the view of the authors, a fundamentally European affair. Third World societies encountered Occidentalism because they encountered the West through imperialism and capitalism: so, Third World Occidentalist thought, however parochial or culturally specific it may seem, is really just outsourcing of the European original. This line of thinking comes through in the very structure of the book, with extensive deliberations on European thought and cursory treatment of Occidentalist echoes in Asia.

One of the appealing aspects of Said's Orientalism was the link it demonstrated between knowledge and State power in European colonialism. Only by knowing the colony was it possible to rule it; more importantly, Europe's ideas about the Orient helped to create the very reality the colonials sought to describe. As a result, Said felt that the only crisis Orientalism ever faced was decolonisation: the neat symmetry between knowledge and political domination broke down when the old European empires collapsed.

With Occidentalism, however, there's no political structure to parallel the realm of ideas. So when Buruma and Margalit assert that Occidentalism began in Europe and was later "transferred" to the rest of the world, it isn't clear how this happened. It is also doubtful whether the European debates on liberty and equality are really the best way to understand the many varieties of anti-Western feeling today. Is there one big clash of ideas that began in Europe and expanded outwards? Or, might there be thousands of clashes around the world on the subject of the West that share little in common other than their target?

One way of probing this distinction is to examine the many examples of anti-Western/anti-American thought that do not find a place in Occidentalism.

First and foremost, despite being the most consistently radical region of the world during the previous half-century, Latin America finds no mention. Jacobo Arbens, Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, Hugo Chavez — their ideas are apparently not relevant when discussing liberalism and authoritarianism. This is hard to account for, since 19th century nationalism owes much to the experiences of Latin America's "pygmy" societies. Nationalism interests Buruma and Margalit, but apparently not its multicultural parentage.

Non-Western societies, such as India, that the authors do discuss receive insufficient examination. Setting aside the discussion of the humanist Persian-Urdu poet Muhammad Allama Iqbal and Jamaat-i-Islami founder Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi  — which relates to the larger Islamist theme — Occidentalism in India receives one paragraph, in the form of a short overview of the fascist credentials of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). But the RSS isn't and never has been anti-Western; unlike the Indian National Congress, it was never banned by the colonial State, and today many of its most financially generous supporters are proud Hindu citizens of the USA.

A more puzzling question arises when one considers Gandhi, who finds no mention in Occidentalism. Is the Mahatma an Occidentalist? Like the murderous Mohammed Bouyeri, Gandhi gained intimate knowledge of the West, only to reject it for a radical interpretation of a non-Western culture. Gandhi is arguably the 20th century's most famous critic of The City; he was also a romantic, a spiritualist, and a utopian. On the other side, Gandhi was neither opposed to the open mind nor did he tar non-Hindus as infidels. He was, instead, a person of considerable curiosity and great compassion, especially for his political opponents.

Gandhi is a difficult figure to place in the argument of this book. Perhaps that's because Gandhi consciously defied European categorisations and, thus, can't be bracketed within them. But, to Buruma and Margalit, it is possible to speak of a global anti-Westernism and to move with seamless prose from Japan to Egypt to Russia, because each national debate is just a local variation on the original, European case.

And thus arises the authors' curious approach to discussing 9/11. We learn, after reading 16 lines on the dangers of atheism and cities from one of T S Eliot's less well-known poems, that "blowing up the World Trade Centre" is "but a crude, literal, murderous echo of Eliot's verses". One might find it useful to reflect on the specific cultural and political orientation of Mohammad Atta & Co when attempting to make sense of that event. Instead, Buruma and Margalit offer up a selection of Protestant anxiety from 1934.

Not only does this not appear to be a very fruitful way of investigating political violence in the contemporary world, but it exposes Buruma and Margalit to the criticisms of the very book they are seeking to emulate. Edward Said wrote at some length on the problem of trying to understand non-Western societies in Western terms. Orientalism contains a memorable passage lamenting how, to the Westerner, "the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West".

Buruma and Margalit wish to defend liberal democracy, and would-be liberal democrats in the non-democratic world. The challenge posed by today's Mohammed Bouyeris is not a trivial one, and the authors deserve credit for not falling back on a vague theory of Islam-as-danger, and for attempting to articulate a liberal defence of liberal society. Yet, despite its considerable intellectual range, Occidentalism lacks intense engagement with the ideas of any one place. The sharp binary between Mohammed Bouyeri and Theo van Gogh does not obtain more broadly; local influences decisively shape and transform a general phenomenon. When considering Islamism, a good place to begin an enquiry would be Afghanistan in the 1980s, which finds no mention in these pages.