Chris lecture slides
Orientalism &
Islamophobia
ANTH3021
Week 10
Lecture plan
• Our focus today is on a topic that has been of special
interest to anthropology, and that is the problem of the
epresentation of religions.
• Case study: Islam
• For anthropologists the question of how to write about
people is a continuing issue.
• Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient
XXXXXXXXXXSaid’s work is the first systematic analysis of
‘Islamaphobia.’
Orientalism:
Western Conceptions of the Orient
1. Imperialism &Culture
• Imperialism is the context that
conditions or impresses upon the
work of writers, painters and
photographers on the Orient.
Edward W. Said
• “Politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the production of
literature, scholarship, social theory and history writing …
Therefore I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between
individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the
three great empires – British, French, American – in whose
intellectual and imaginative te
itory the writing was produced.”
• “The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the
soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be
there, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part.”
2. Where, when and what ‘Orient’?
• Study is limited to “the Anglo-French-American experience of the
Arabs and Islam, which for a thousand years stood together for the
Orient” (p. 17), or the “Islamic Orient.”
• Said hopes that his insights and method will be taken up and applied
to other places and colonial contexts.
• Insights: the book has been tremendously productive in inspiring
further research, from Western representations of indigenous
people, China, to India or even to the Pygmies.
• Methodology: Said gives a close reading to selected texts, hoping
to show simultaneously how they are both organized by general
stereotypes and ideas about the Orient while still possessing the
individual imprints of their authors.
3. Weak and Strong Theses
• Orientalism is more than just a European (or more recently an
American) knowledge of the Orient that is somewhat tinged by the
gross historical fact of Western imperialism (weak thesis).
• Europe’s Orient is best understood not as a reflection in thought (even a
distorted reflection) of a real Orient out there in the world, but as a
discourse, that is as a set of propositions or representations that derive
their truth value not from co
espondence to reality but from the
power relations they imply and are implicated in (strong thesis).
• “Orientalism is a style of thought made upon an ontological and
epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the
time) ‘the Occident.’”
3. Weak and Strong Theses
• “Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate
institution for dealing with the Orient: in short, Orientalism as a
western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority
over the Orient … Without examining Orientalism as a discourse
one cannot possible understand the enormously systematic
discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and
even produce – the Orient.”
• This discourse on the Orient is “never far from the idea of Europe
[whose major component is] the idea of European identity as a
superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and
culture.”
• Thus “the orient has helped to define Europe or the West as its
contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.”
4. Islam and Orientalism
• Said describes the ‘Islamic Orient’ as the subject and creation of
Orientalist discourse. Claim is then that the Islam imagined by
Orientalism also bears no co
espondence to Islam in reality.
• This distinction opens up an enormous can of worms about the
possibility of different, or of better or worse, or even of ‘true’ or
truer representations of Islam.
• The subject of Said’s book is Orientalism as a Western system of thought
about the Orient and/or Islam, which is intimately related to the
Occident’s domination over it.
• Argument leads us directly into issues about who can legitimately
study or write about Islam or Islamic societies.
5. Key Issues/Problems
1. His collapsing of the distinction between earlier texts about ‘the
Orient’ with 19th and 20th century ‘modern Orientalism.’
“Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical,
historical and above all, moral apprehension.”
5. Key Issues/Problems
2. His disinterest in investigating (European) representations that
imagine the lives of Arabs or Muslims in ways contrary to his
identification of Orientalist ideas and metaphors.
3. His disinterest in the interpretive task of readers who
ing their
own meanings to the texts.
He warns “formerly colonized peoples [of] the dangers and temptations of
employing this structure upon themselves or upon others” (p. 25).
6. Vital Questions
1) The problem of representation and ‘writing culture’ per se.
2) The problem of who these discourses constitute
3) The problem of self-representation by the ‘East’ in Orientalist
categories (Kemalism, Chinese communism etc).
4) The problematic of ‘indigenous’ [self] knowledge: that is, the
question and politics of self-representation. What of claims that
only a Muslim can research Islamic society (Islamic
anthropology)? What about non-religious Muslims and their
analyses of Islam? Do we accept claims about nativity or
authenticity as a basis for a legitimate position from which to
speak? What of the cultural essentialism posited by such claims?
Islamophobia
• Orientalism as Islamophobia
• Islamophobia in the West might be defined as the relentless cultural
epresentation of Islam in negative terms.
• It can be seen as both an extension and a personalization of this
Orientalist discourse about Muslim history and society. In it not just
Islam but Muslims themselves are now presented as expressions of this
civilizational difference and as its ca
iers in the West. Islam is claimed
to engender a worldview among its believers that is “fundamentally
incompatible and inferior to Western culture” (Bunzl 2005).
• Islamophobia, then, when translated into a political programme or
policy, seeks the exclusion of Muslims (individually or collectively)
from the actual or imagined geography of the West on the basis of
their essentially different and unassimilable nature.
Islamophobia
• Islamaphobic discourse imagines an Islam marked intrinsically by veiled
and subordinated women, and by an anti-modern hostility towards the
liberal values of democracy and autonomy -- an Islam portrayed as
adically opposed to the civil and cultural norms supposedly possessed
y the West.
• Remember Pauline Hanson’s call for the banning of Muslim migration
to Australia on the grounds of their radical incompatibility with the
Australian way of life.
Islamophobia
• Islamophobia is more than just a development of Orientalism. It involves
acism against Muslims in the ‘West’, whereas Orientalism involved the
epresentation of Islam derived from the study of Muslim societies.
• Its appropriation of the language of cultural relativism. Anthropology
criticized western colonialism for claiming that modern civilization was
universal to which every other society had to conform. Instead, it
pointed out the value of other ways of life.
• Islamophobia twists this critique by agreeing that ‘western values’ are
indeed not universal but are the particular cultural heritage of the West.
(Remember the recent debates in Australia over the Ramsay Centre).
• Islamophobic discourse thus advocates the ‘right’ of Western society
and culture to protect itself.
Letter to the Editor (The Age):
“The question, however, concerns not immigrants’ race but their
culture. In the course of our immigration debate it is vital for us to
ecognize that some cultures offer ideas, values and beliefs which
are appropriate in Australian society, while the ideas prevalent in
certain other cultures are inappropriate. We are talking about
cultures some of which hold drastically different beliefs about
moral codes, systems of justice, clerical influence in politics and the
law, and women’s rights, as compared with the views of most
Australians.”
• The idea of cultural difference is used as the backbone for a so-
called ‘cultural’ rather than a racial argument for exclusory and
discriminatory migration policies.
Islamophobia
• Islamophobia orientates itself to different political developments
in different contexts.
• According to Bunzil, in the 2000s the most crucial feature of
Islamophobia in Europe concerned Turkey’s possible membership
in the European Union.
Just because 3% of Turkey happens to be in Europe geographically does not mean
that Turkey is a European state … It is a fact that there was no enlightenment and no
enaissance in Turkey, those bases of European culture that form the standards of all
member states of the EU. In addition, one of the most important values of
Europeans, tolerance, does not count in Turkey: there Christians are hassled in
any possible way …
Not without reason did Libya’s head of state Muammar Gadaffi note that Europe
would accept an Islamic Trojan horse if Turkey became a member of the EU. This
Trojan horse will not only cause social tensions of never anticipated proportions
– also the question of Europe’s Islamization is being kept quiet by the fanatics for
membership. Today an estimated 15 million Muslims already live in the member
states of the EU. Turkey’s EU accession would certainly be the end of this
community and it would also foil the basic idea of the process of European
unification …
The fact that Turkey is part of NATO and has close economic ties with Europe
can be no reason for Turkey’s membership in a union that defines its identity out
of a historical tradition (2004)
An example of the discourse of the Freedom Party in Austria
• This discourse on the essential otherness of Muslims and Islam can
e seized upon and appropriated by Muslims themselves. Perhaps
the logic of doing so in the first instance is defensive: ‘if you’re
going to treat us as different, then we will be different and we’ll
make that difference a core aspect of our self-knowledge.’
• Rather than acceding to a position of inferiority, assertive Islamism
and Islamophilia argues for the alternative and superior civility of
Islam.
• In this case Islamist politics becomes a social movement for “the
formation of the Muslim subject and agency which has been
excluded from modernist [Western] definitions of civilization and
history-making” (Göle, 1996: 26).
Untitled
MAHMOOD MAMDANI
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective
on Culture and Te
orism
ABSTRACT The link between Islam and te
orism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds
of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating