Khaldoun Samman - Islam and the Orientalist World-System

Islam and the Orientalist World-System

ISLAM AND THE ORIENTALIST WORLD-SYSTEM

edited by
Khaldoun Samman and Mazhar Al-Zoby

Political Economy of the World-System Annuals, Volume XXIX
Immanuel Wallerstein, Series Editor

First published 2008 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Islam and the Orientalist world-system / edited by Khaldoun Samman and Mazhar Al-Zoby.

p. cm. (Political economy of the world-system annuals ; v. 29)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-59451-518-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-59451-519-4 (paperback : alk. paper)

1. Orientalism. 2. Civilization, Islamic20th century. 3. Civilization, Islamic21st century. 4. East and West. 5. Middle EastForeign public opinion, Western.

I. Samman, Khaldoun. II. Al-Zoby, Mazhar.

DS61.85.I85 2008

306.697dc22

2007050056

Designed by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-518-7 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-519-4 (pbk)

Contents

Khaldoun Samman and Mazhar Al-Zoby

Immanuel Wallerstein

Joseph Massad

Marnia Lazreg

Boris Stremlin

Ovamir Anjum

Joshua D. Hendrick

Fouad Kalouche and Eric Mielants

Ganesh K. Trichur

Manuela Boatc

Mohammad H. Tamdgidi

Paul C. Mocombe

This volume grew out the of thirtieth meeting of the Political Economy of the World System Section of the American Sociological Association, April 2730, at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. We would like to thank Macalester College for offering the space and financial support for us to convene this conference in Saint Paul. We would also like to thank the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota for their financial help. Parts of , Civilized or Decadent? Time and the Culture of the Arabs had been published in Desiring Arabs; we thank the University of Chicago Press for allowing us to use those parts in this volume. A number of individuals have generously assisted us with the conference that this volume originated from. We would like to thank Elena Athwal, Habibul Haque Khondker, Samer Al-Zoubi, Mona Bader .We owe all of them, not to mention our patient contributors and editor, Dianne Ewing, a debt of gratitude.

Khaldoun Samman and Mazhar Al-Zoby

I: ORIENTALISM AND THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM

The Middle East and the multiple Islamic regions of the world have been incorporated into a modern historical system that functions on highly supremacist terms. Indeed, from its beginnings, such discourse paved the incorporation of much of the Islamic world into a global and modern racialized system, which introduced a new and hierarchical taxonomy of civilizations, religions, and cultures. The lens through which cultural, religious, and civilizational differences came to be understood was racially tainted. This led to the interpretation of a world in which the Western civilizations religion, race, ethnicity, and culture were deemed to possess some unique trait that produced superior characteristics, placing the West above the rest (see Stuart Hall). Many highlighted, either singly or in combination, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial, Political, and Scientific Revolutions as the ingredient(s) that gave the West its due advantage over all Others, positing that these were qualities which the rest of the worlds peoples had lacked because of their own internal cultural or political obstacles.

Even some of the elites of the global south who were themselves racialized and located in the regions on the losing side of modernity came to measure their standing, in the early phases of incorporation, by comparing themselves to the West, which was believed to have acquired refined qualities that they now desired to emulate. We can call this new global entity the Modern Orientalist World-System: a world-order that is politically, economically, and culturally stratified, with race constituting the very epicenter of the stratification. Such a system ranks the West and whiteness as the superior race/civilization, signifying all those qualities and characteristics in a manner that sets it exactly opposite to those of the Orient (Edward Said 1979, 1994).

While the epistemological origin of Orientalism dates much earlier, we can say with confidence that it was thoroughly in place by the late nineteenth century. As with Ferdinand Tnniess gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, or Emile Durkheims mechanical and organic societies, typing societies and civilizations into ontological binaries became, at that time, the norm for understanding the differences between our modern way of life and those which were relegated to both the past and the Other. From this point on, a list of characteristics perceived to be the sole possession of the West, was used to justify the racial and cultural stratification of our modern global historical system. This included a whole array of social and political practices that made the West not only different from the rest of the world, but superior. Western man thus came to be understood as the supreme perfection of everything progressive and modern that all Other peoples of the world needed to emulate and make their own.

Consider, for instance, what Hegel wrote in 1840 about Africa in his introduction to The Philosophy of History. For him, Africa was a continent enclosed within itself which resembled the land of childhood, removed from the light of self-conscious history and wrapped in the dark mantle of night. Africa was, indeed, so different from our own culture, and so remote and alien in relation to our own mode of consciousness that if we wish to understand [Africa] at all, we must put aside all our European attitudes. For this very reason, he continued, we cannot properly feel ourselves into [its] nature, no more than that of a dog (all quotes from Susan Bordo 1999: 768).

Our intention here is not to simply show yet another example of a racist European philosopher but to illustrate, as Susan Bordo asserts, the deep historical sources of still-living ideologies (Bordo 1999: 80). By juxtaposing the child of Africa to the adult of Western civilization, Hegel was participating in a fundamental discourse that would continue unchallenged well into the first couple decades of American hegemony. As one American stated in a 1960s book on the psychology of development, if we are to understand our mature Self, we must first begin by studying our childhood. For it is only then that we can discover what in reality we are (Doob 1960: 2). In the same way that a parent learns something about himself from his own child, a mature civilization like ours can learn something about itself from the less civilized (Doob 1960:2). With a hint of modernization discourse made popular under post-World War II American hegemony, therefore, non-Western civilizations are in effect seen as undeveloped potential Europeans (Hardt and Negri 2001: