Fear of bushy-bearded activists continues to motivate many in the West to shun them, even when they are democratically elected. Tough-minded secular strongmen are much preferred – such as Egypt’s clean-shaven military despot – who can keep the angry hordes at bay and try to bring their countries closer to the West. Many commentators continue to ignore or downplay a century of invasions, unequal treaties, assassinations, coups, corruption, and ruthless manipulation and interference while recycling such oppositions as backward Islam versus the progressive West, Rational Enlightenment versus medieval unreason, open society versus its enemies.
A deeper and broader explanation, however, lies in understanding how intellectuals, starting in the Enlightenment, constituted a network of power and why they invested their faith in enlightened despotism and social engineering from above. It is even more fruitful to attend to the devastating critic of their ideology and practice, Rousseau, whose ever-renewable vision of human beings alienated from themselves and enchained to each other has inspired revolts and uprisings from the French Revolution onwards. For plebeians and provincials, unaccommodated man spurned by modernity, also created the Islamic Revolution in Iran – what Michel Foucault called the ‘first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane’.
Civilizing the Natives
There was actually little talk about Islam from the first generation of leaders in Muslim countries. They had distinguished themselves as anti-imperialist activists: Atatürk, for instance, derived his charisma and authority as a nation-builder from his comprehensive defeat of Allied forces in Turkey. He went on to abolish the Ottoman office of the Caliphate soon after assuming power, pitilessly killing the political hopes of pan-Islamists around the world. He forbade expressions of popular Islam and arrested Sufi dervishes (executing some of them); he replaced Shariah law with Swiss civil law and Italian criminal law. This partisan of Comtean Positivism expressed publicly what many Muslim leaders, confronted with conservative opposition, may have thought privately: that ‘Islam, the absurd theology of an immoral bedouin, is a rotting cadaver that poisons our lives. It is nothing other than a degrading and dead cause.’
Adolf Hitler admired the Turkish leader above all for emasculating the backward elements in his society. ‘How fast,’ he wrote, ‘Kemal Atatürk dealt with the priests is one of the most amazing chapters of history!’ The Nazi leader, who venerated Atatürk as a trailblazing modernizer and nation-builder, a ‘shining star’, no less, claimed in 1938 that the Turkish despot ‘was the first to show that it is possible to mobilize and regenerate the resources that a country has lost’. ‘Atatürk was a teacher,’ Hitler said. ‘Mussolini was his first and I his second student.’
Bernard Lewis was most likely unaware of the Turkish leader’s fan base among Nazis and Fascists when he hailed Atatürk for taking, with his attempted obliteration of Islam, ‘the first decisive steps in the acceptance of Western civilization’. Nevertheless, Lewis as well as Atatürk was working with an ideal of civilization originally posited by salon intellectuals in the eighteenth century, and reworked by various modernizers of the twentieth century.
As Atatürk put it, ‘there are different countries, but only one civilization. The precondition of progress of the nation is to participate in this civilization.’ The leaders of modernizing Japan echoed him exactly. Late-modernizing nations and peoples internalized deeply a legacy of the Enlightenment, which transformed the ‘civilizing’ ideals of Parisian salons into a project, one that can be entrusted to a state, even one as despotic and imperialistic as that of Empress Catherine.
Civilization became, by the late nineteenth century, synonymous with progress and dynamism through individual and collective action – the triumph of the will. Fear of emasculation, cultural backwardness and decadence were counteracted by power-seeking ideological movements. Zionism and Hindu nationalism as well as Social Darwinism, New Imperialism, pan-Germanism, pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism manifested the same will to power and contempt for weakness. Pseudo-sciences, such as phrenology and eugenics, were respectable in Britain and America as well as in late-coming nations.
In its entry for ‘Civilization’ in 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica entrusted the future of humanity to ‘biological improvement of the race’ and to man applying ‘whatever laws of heredity he knows or may acquire in the interests of his own species, as he has long applied them in the case of domesticated animals’. In Sweden, Denmark and Finland, tens of thousands, almost all women, were sterilized after 1935. The old and the unfit, it was widely felt, had to be weeded out in projects of rapid-fire self-empowerment. It’s not surprising that Hitler saw Atatürk as a trailblazer.
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Turkey pre-empted even the Soviet Union with its self-appointed elite outlining what could be and should be done in order to forge a collective instrument for action and change out of the passive masses. As though acting out Voltaire’s intolerance of uncivilized Turks, Atatürk banned the fez, denouncing it as an ‘emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism, and hatred of progress and civilization’; he replaced the Muslim calendar, Arabic alphabets and measures with the European calendar, Roman alphabet and continental European weights and measures.
Much of the postcolonial world then became a laboratory for Western-style social engineering, a fresh testing site for the Enlightenment ideals of secular progress. The philosophes had aimed at rationalization, or ‘uniformization’, of a range of institutions inherited from an intensely religious era. Likewise, postcolonial leaders planned to turn illiterate peasants into educated citizens, to industrialize the economy, move the rural population to cities, alchemize local communities into a singular national identity, replace the social hierarchies of the past with an egalitarian order, and promote the cults of science and technology among a pious and often superstitious population.