Sati’ Husri also used the idea of asabiyya, or (Arab) blood solidarity, developed in the fourteenth century by Ibn Khaldun. The aim, in any case, was to overcome “abstract Western thinking” and free the Arab people from feudalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism. This, and a version of totalitarian socialism, is still the official ideology of the Ba’athists today.
Islamism was the revolutionary idea coiled within this secularist revolution, and to crush actual or potential religious revolts against their secular tyrannies, Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athist rulers have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of fellow Arabs, mostly Shi’ite Muslims. Far more Muslim blood has been shed inside Arab nations than in all the wars between Israelis and Palestinians. And yet, the Ba’athists, when it suits them, have also encouraged religious terrorism against the Western “Crusaders” and “Zionists.” Saddam Hussein, for one, liked to portray himself as Saladin, savior of the Arabs, riding his white steed to wipe out the infidels.
The question, then, is how to protect the idea of the West—that is to say, the world’s liberal democracies—against its enemies. And the West, in this sense, includes such fragile Asian democracies as Indonesia and the Philippines. This is not the place for a discussion of military tactics or international diplomacy. The question is what to think, how to conceive the problem. It is perhaps easier to conclude what not to think.
Although Christian fundamentalists speak of a crusade, the West is not at war against Islam. Indeed, the fiercest battles will be fought inside the Muslim world. That is where the revolution is taking place, and where it will have to be halted, preferably not by outside intervention, but by Muslims themselves. There is indeed a worldwide clash going on, but the fault lines do not coincide with national, ethnic, or religious borders. The war of ideas is in some respects the same as the one that was fought several generations ago against various versions of fascism and state socialism. This is not to say that the military war is the same, or that all the ideas overlap. In the 1940s, the war was only between states. Now it is also against a disparate, worldwide, loosely organized, mostly underground revolutionary movement.
The other intellectual trap to avoid is the paralysis of colonial guilt. It should be repeated: European and American histories are stained with blood, and Western imperialism did much damage. But to be conscious of that does not mean we should be complacent about the brutality taking place in former colonies now. On the contrary, it should make us less so. To blame the barbarism of non-Western dictators or the suicidal savagery of religious revolutions on American imperialism, global capitalism, or Israeli expansionism is not only to miss the point; it is precisely an Orientalist form of condescension, as though only Westerners are adult enough to be morally responsible for what they do.
The idea that organized religion is the main problem might come naturally to the newly secularized, disenchanted Western intellectual, but that, too, is off the mark. For some of the most ferocious enemies of the West are secular, or at least pretend to be. Religion is used everywhere, in India no less than in Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, for reprehensible political ends. But it does not have to be. It can be a force for the good. In the Middle East, it might offer the only hope of a peaceful way out of our current mess.
A distaste for, or even hatred of, the West is in itself not a serious issue. Occidentalism becomes dangerous when it is harnessed to political power. When the source of political power is also the only source of truth, you have a dictatorship. And when the ideology of that dictatorship is hatred of the West, ideas become deadly. These ideas are often inspired by religion. But this does not mean that all religious authority must be crushed. Organized religion has a place, in offering community and spiritual meaning to those who seek it. In the Muslim world today, religion might be harnessed to the struggle for political freedom, in the shape of contending political parties, perhaps. The experiment is alive in such countries as Turkey and Indonesia. Success is far from guaranteed. But it is hard to see how any road to freedom can steal its way around the mosque.
Where political, religious, and intellectual freedom has already been established, it must be defended against its enemies, with force, if need be, but also with conviction. The story we have told in this book is not a Manichaeistic one of a civilization at war with another. On the contrary, it is a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas. This could happen to us now, if we fall for the temptation to fight fire with fire, Islamism with our own forms of intolerance. Religious authority, especially in the United States, is already having a dangerous influence on political governance. We cannot afford to close our societies as a defense against those who have closed theirs. For then we would all become Occidentalists, and there would be nothing left to defend.
[NOTES]
WAR AGAINST THE WEST
1 For an exhaustive analysis of this conference, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
2 H. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk, trans. N. Cameron and R. H. Stevens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 188.
3 Germany, more than any other European nation, has been the battleground and source of these ideas. For a superb analysis, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
THE OCCIDENTAL CITY
1 CNN.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/south/02/05/binladen.transcript/index.html.
2 Quoted in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 46.
3 Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 43.
4 Ibid.
5 Quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (London: Virago, 1991), p. 58.
6 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 30. Other Voltaire quotations are from the same source.
7 Quoted in Ian Buruma, Anglomania: A European Love Affair (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 96.
8 Theodor Fontane, Wanderungen durch England und Schottland (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1998), p. 332.
9 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 24.
10 Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (London: Pimlico, 1997), p. 111.
11 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York: Carroll de Graf, 1998), p. 439.
12 Ibid., p. 550.
13 Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 346.
14 Quoted in Williams, The Country and the City, p. 303.
15 Quoted in Philip Short, Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 447.
16 Quoted in Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (London: Phoenix, 2002), p. 135.
17 Quoted in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords (London: Pan Books, 2001), p. 217.
18 Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 361.
HEROES AND MERCHANTS
1 Quoted in George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 70.
2 Quoted in Gordon Craig, The Germans (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 234.
3 Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden (Munich: Dunckler und Hum-bolt, 1915), p. 55.
4 Ibid., p. 113.
5 Ernst Jünger, Annaeherungen: Drogen und Rausch (Stuttgart: Ernest Klett Verlag, 1978), p. 13.
6 Quoted in Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 76.
7 Ibid., p. 92.
8 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988), p. 245.
9 Jacques Vergès, Le salaud lumineux (Paris: Éditions Bernard Lafont, 1990), p. 42.
10 Ibid., p. 82.
11 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 660.
12 Friedrich Georg Jünger, Krieg und Krieger (Berlin: Junker und Dannhaupt, 1930), p. 25.
13 Quoted in Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), p. 320.
14 Emiko Ohnuki
-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
15 Ibid., p. 139.
16 Quoted in Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 60.
17 Quoted in Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, p. 197.
18 Quoted in Morris, The Nobility of Failure, p. 284.
19 August 23, 1996. Translation by Muhammad Masari.
20 Quoted in Aurel Kolnai, War Against the West (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 116.
MIND OF THE WEST
1 Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 246.
2 Quoted from I. I. Nepluyev’s Memoirs in Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 225.
3 Quoted in Thomas Masaryk, The Spirit of Russia (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), 2:255.
4 Quoted in James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary Barbara Zeldin, eds., with the collaboration of George L. Kline, Russian Philosophy (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), 2:32-33.
5 Ibid., 2:52.
6 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, in Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann (Cleveland and New York: Meridian/World, 1956), p. 67.
THE WRATH OF GOD
1 Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, quoted in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York: Anchor, 1967), pp. 216-49.
2 Ervand Abrahamian, Iran: Between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 470.
3 Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 1.
4 Ibid., p. 68.
5 Ibid., p. 207.
6 K. K. Aziz, The Making of Pakistan: A Study in Nationalism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 105.
7 Anwar Syed, Pakistan: Islam, Politics and National Solidarity (Lahore, 1948), p. 32.
8 Ibid., p. 55.
9 Ibid., p. 56.
10 Syed Abdul Vahid, ed., Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1964), p. 99.
11 Quoted in Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (London: Taurus, 2002), p. 47.
12 Kepel, Jihad, p. 55.
13 Ruth Woodsmall, Moslem Woman Enter the New World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), p. 33.
14 Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie, introduction to Women in the Muslim World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 8.
SEEDS OF REVOLUTION
1. Hans Kohn, Living in a World Revolution, quoted in Amos Elon, The Israelis (New York: Penguin, 1992).
[INDEX]
Abbt, Thomas
Abu Dharr
Afghanistan
‘Aflaq, Michel
Al-e Ahmed, Jalal
Alexander I (czar)
Aristotle
Assassins
Atatürk, Kemal
Atta, Mohammed
Ba’ath Party
Babylon
Berlin
Berlin, Isaiah
bin Laden, Osama
as civil engineer
on Crusader-Zionism
death cult language of
Manichaeism of
religious impulse of
as Wahhabi true believer
on World Trade Center
Blake, William
Blueher, Hans
Britain
citizenship as open to all
“civilizing mission” of
London
and Saudi Arabia
Sombart on
capitalism
anticapitalism in Occidentalism
commodity fetishism attributed to
distaste for
Japanese nationalists on
Jews associated with
kamikazes opposing
local traditions affected by
Mao Zedong’s war against
as not heroic
transmission to colonial subjects
as victory of town over country
World Trade Center as symbol of
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai
China
Beijing
binding of women’s feet in
colonialism in
Manichaeic communities in
Mao Zedong
nativists versus Westernizers in
secularism in
Shanghai
Western ideas borrowed by
Christianity
Christian kamikazes
Japanese modernizers on
Manichaeism and
martyrs
on matter
modernizing without letting in
as people of the book
Protestantism
Reformation
Russian conversion to
cities
fear as haunting
Islamic urbanism
Khmer Rouge’s war against
lonely outsider in
Mao Zedong’s war against
methods of attacking
in old colonial periphery
Taliban revolt against
colonialism. See imperialism
commodity fetishism
community
cosmopolitanism
Crystal Palace (London)
death cult
in Germany
in Japan
among Muslims
in Taliban
Vergès on
democracy
Japanese nationalist opposition to
mediocrity associated with
metropolitan culture promoting
Nazi Germany’s attack on
protecting
transmission to colonial subjects
will to grandeur lacking in
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
dress
economic liberalism
blind faith in the market
Japanese nationalist opposition to
Romanticism on
slums as consequence of
See also capitalism
Edo (former name for Tokyo)
Egypt
Eliot, T. S.
Engels, Friedrich
Enlightenment
Abbt and German
British freedom and
Counter-Enlightenment
Eliot’s pessimism about
French Revolution and
in Meiji Japan
Romanticism contrasted with
Russian officers influenced by
valid criticism of
West as source of
equality
Fanon, Frantz
fascism
as appealing to mediocre men
on will
See also Nazism
female sexuality
Atta fearing
in Babylon
image of metropolis as whore
Islamic concern with
Qutb on American
short skirts
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb
Fontane, Theodor
France
“civilizing mission” of
French Revolution
German Romantic opposition to
Napoleon
Paris
rhetoric of self-sacrifice in
veil as symbol of resistance to
fundamentalism
German Romanticism
French culture opposed by
Husri influenced by
organismic view of society of
Russian thought rooted in
Germany
Berlin
Japan modeling constitution on
liberalism in
pan-Germanism
philosophy and literature as political substitute in
rhetoric of self-sacrifice in
Weimar Republic
Westernization seen as cause
of World War I defeat of
See also German Romanticism; Nazism
globalization
Gowalkar, M. S.
hairstyles
Hayashi Fusao
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Heidegger, Martin
Herder, Johann Gottfried von
heroism
of Leontiev’s poetry
reasonableness contrasted with
See also self-sacrifice
Herzl, Theodor
Hezbollah
Hindu nationalism
Hitler, Adolf
Hollywood movies
holy war
hubris
Human, Mahmud
Husri, Sati’
Hussein, Saddam
idolatry
Islam on
Shari’ati and
two forms of
imperialism
colonial guilt
colonialism
European
globalization seen as
Japanese
justifications of
kamikazes opposing
Mao Zedong’s war against
scientism as
trade associated with
U.S.
Western ideas in revolt against
World Trade Center as symbol of
India
individual freedom
Hindu nationalists rejecting
Japanese nationalist opposition to
in London
metropolitan culture promoting
seen as threat
trade associated with
individualism
Chinese rejection of
cities associated with
Hindu nationalists opposing
Hitler opposing
Iqbal on
and morality
Qutb on
industrialization
Iqbal, Muhammad
Iran
Iraq
Islam