The unenlightened Oriental ‘other’ has been frequently invoked since the eighteenth century to define the enlightened Westerner, and dramatize the latter’s superiority. The widespread assumption – that the Enlightenment set universal standards of human behaviour and ethics based on a rational and democratic model of society, and that all those who fail to follow them are politically and intellectually benighted – can be traced back to Montesquieu.
One of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers, Montesquieu in Persian Letters (1721) imagined travellers from the fanatical and despotic world of the Muslim Orient in order to criticize the forces of reaction in European society and herald its emerging spirit of freedom. But Montesquieu deployed, like many seventeenth-and eighteenth-century thinkers rummaging through travel accounts of China and India, the Orient in order to critique the Occident. The assumption that the West embodies enlightened modernity and the East unreformed religion belongs to our much more complacent age.
It has been most compellingly articulated by the ‘clash of civilizations’ theory. As the scholar Bernard Lewis, who first aired it in his article ‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’, wrote:
We are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations – the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.
Glossing Lewis’s claim, Samuel Huntington added that ‘this centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.’ For ‘Islam’s borders are bloody,’ Huntington wrote, ‘and so are its innards.’ According to Lewis and Huntington, modernity has failed to take root in intransigently traditional and backward Muslim countries despite various attempts to impose it by secular leaders such as Turkey’s Atatürk, the Shah of Iran, Algeria’s Ben Bella, Egypt’s Nasser and Sadat, and Pakistan’s Ayub Khan.
Since 9/11 there have been many versions, crassly populist as well as solemnly intellectual, of the claims by Lewis and Huntington that the crisis in Muslim countries is purely self-induced, and the West is resented for the magnitude of its extraordinary success as a beacon of freedom, and embodiment of the Enlightenment’s achievements – the ideals of scientific rationality and democratic pluralism. They have mutated into the apparently more sophisticated claim that the clash of civilizations occurs within Islam, and that Western interventions are required on behalf of the ‘good Muslim’, who is rational, moderate and liberal.
The Bearded versus the Clean-Shaven
Undoubtedly, Western intellectuals have invested much faith in leaders who claim to be introducing their superstitious societies to scientific rationality, if not democratic pluralism. The East, as we have seen, was a career for men of letters long before European colonialists invaded and occupied it. ‘There are still vast climates in Africa,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘where men have need of a Tsar Peter.’ History revealed that, regardless of what the Enlightenment philosophes hoped, Peter, Catherine and Frederick were primarily interested in expanding their empires and boosting the power of the despotic state by rationalizing military and bureaucratic institutions.
Tocqueville summed up the ‘modernization’ efforts of Frederick of Prussia in the eighteenth century:
Beneath this completely modern head we will see a totally gothic body appear; Frederick had only eliminated from it whatever could hinder the action of his own power; and the whole forms a monstrous being which seems to be in transition between one shape and another.
Nevertheless, starting in the 1950s, the yearning among many Western intellectuals to play Voltaire to the new, postcolonial modernizing leaders in the East made the latter seem like versions of Peter the Great and Catherine. These bookish proponents of modernization counselling their anti-communist clients – immortalized in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955) – were far more influential than the liberal internationalists of our own time who helped package imperialist ventures as moral crusades for freedom and democracy. For their clients wore Western-style suits, if not military uniforms, spoke Western languages, relied on Western theories, and routinely called upon Western writers and intellectuals for advice about how to break open the window to the West.
Huntington, aware of his devoted readers among Asian technocrats, hailed the Shah of Iran as the epitome of a ‘modernizing monarch’. He claimed that Pakistan’s military dictator Ayub Khan came close, ‘more than any other political leader in a modernizing country after World War Two’, to ‘filling the role of a Solon or Lycurgus, or “Great Legislator” of the Platonic or Rousseauian model’ (Ayub Khan was shortly thereafter forced out of power). Bernard Lewis returned from his first trip to Turkey in 1950 lionizing Atatürk and upholding the latter’s enlightened despotism as a great success and model for other Muslim countries.
Lewis’s vision of a Turkey Westernized and modernized by the enlightened autocrat’s ukase was at the core of George W. Bush’s ‘vision’ of bringing democracy at gunpoint to Iraq. Reassuring counsel came from Fouad Ajami, a senior advisor to Condoleeza Rice, who said that the United States was particularly ‘good at releasing communities from the burden of the past, and from the limits and confines of a narrow identity’.
Understandably, many Western leaders and intellectuals are both appalled and baffled when, as often happens, an unfamiliar generation of long-bearded activists and thinkers speaking of Islam rise out of the ruins of failed experiments in nation-building, representative government, industrialization, urbanization and regime change. ‘Political Islam is rage, anarchy,’ V. S. Naipaul charged after visiting the Islamic Revolution in Iran, contrasting Islam’s obsession with ideological purity to the generous ‘universal civilization’ of the West based on the pursuit of individual happiness. Rushdie claims that Iran, a corrupt police state in the late 1960s, was ‘wonderful’, a ‘very cosmopolitan, very cultured society’, and ‘the arrival of Islamic radicalism in that country, of all countries, was particularly tragic because it was so sophisticated a culture’.