Such a tortured figure often ended up searching for a native identity to uphold against the maddeningly seductive but befuddling West; and enumerating Western vices seemed to confirm the existence of local virtues. Russian writers from Herzen to Tolstoy repetitively denounced the Western bourgeois obsession with private property while holding up the Russian muzhik as an admirably altruistic figure; they mourned, anticipating the Futurist obsession with ‘beauty’, the disappearance of idealism and poetry from human lives in the West.
A similar lament appears in the work of Japan’s foremost novelist, Natsume Soseki, who spent two miserable years in fin de siècle London. Novelists as varied as Junichiro Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima sought to return to an earlier ‘wholeness’. Tanizaki tried to re-create an indigenous aesthetic by pointing to the importance of ‘shadows’ – a whole world of distinctions banished from Japanese life by the modern invention of the light bulb. Mishima invoked, more gaudily, Japan’s lost culture of the samurai by dressing up as one. Both were fuelled by rage and regret that, as Tanizaki wrote in In Praise of Shadows (1933), ‘we have met a superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years’.
Gandhi tried to become an English gentleman before going on to write Hind Swaraj (1909), a book pointing to the dangers of educated men from colonized lands mindlessly imitating the ways of their colonial masters. Briefly awestruck by the corporate and commercial culture of Anglo-America, China’s foremost modern intellectuals, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, recoiled into Confucian notions of community and harmony. The early impact on Africa’s tradition-minded societies of a West organized for profit and power is memorably summed up by the title of Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). A more apocalyptic vision of their effect in the Middle East is found in Abd al-Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), which describes the spiritual devastation of Arab tribal societies by American oil companies.
A Crow Trying to Walk Like a Partridge
Travelling to Britain from his ‘village world’, the narrator of Naipaul’s autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival records ‘a panic’ and ‘then a dwindling of the sense of the self’. ‘Less than twenty-four hours out of my own place,’ he remembers, ‘the humiliations had begun to bank up.’ And this ‘rawness of nerves’ lingers, turning his subsequent life in England ‘savorless, and much of it mean’. Exposure to the West usually marked ‘the first beginning of the epoch’, as Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘when our leading people brutally separated into two parties, then entered into a furious civil war’.
This civil war often occurred within the same human soul. In Driss Chra?bi’s first novel, The Simple Past (1954), a student in a French missionary school confronts the violence he has done to his identity:
You were the issue of the Orient, and through your painful past, your imaginings, your education, you are going to triumph over the Orient. You have never believed in Allah. You know how to dissect the legends, you think in French, you are a reader of Voltaire and an admirer of Kant.
Like their counterparts elsewhere, the mimic men of postcolonial countries, the intellectuals of Muslim countries lived out ideological mismatches and conflicts in their inner lives. Emerging into a Europeanized world, they were conscious of their weakness but also galvanized by their apparent power to shape the future using the techniques and ideas pioneered by Europe. Like Russia’s nineteenth-century intelligentsia, and the intellectuals of Japan, India and China, they all initially expatriated, intellectually if not physically, to the West.
Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’. Some others began to think, after close observation of European and American politics and history, that Voltaire and Kant, after all, might not hold the key to redemption, which may lie closer to home, in indigenous religious and cultural traditions.
But, while re-staking their ground, and claiming a nativist identity, intellectuals in Muslim countries absorbed many of the ideas and premises of modern Western thought, such as progress, egalitarianism, justice, the nation state and republican virtue. A fascinating example is Jalal Al-e-Ahmad himself, the son of an exacting cleric, whose piety had acquired a harsh edge as Iran’s secular ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, imposed European ways on his subjects by fiat, banning Muharram ceremonies, replacing the clerical habit and turban with hat and tie. It was Al-e-Ahmad’s fate to negotiate the divide between the traditional religious authority represented by his father and the culturally deracinating secularism of the paternalist Shah.
Supported by Western powers, and inspired by Atatürk, Iran’s ruler not only crushed the country’s many tribes in order to establish a centralized administration. He ordered, and then brutally enforced, the unveiling of women (with the net result that many women never left their homes). The autocratic tradition of double-quick modernization was upheld by his son and successor, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who wanted to make villages ‘disappear’ in his attempt to manufacture metropolitan individuals in his country.
He came to be hated by many Iranian intellectuals as a pawn of the West after 1953, when the American CIA and British MI6 conspired to bring down an elected government and invest the Shah with total authority, and to confer on the Western powers many of Iran’s oil and business profits. Visiting Iran in 1966, a British Member of Parliament called Jock Bruce-Gardyne was typical of the Shah’s breathless, sycophantic guests: Tehran was a ‘Mercedes museum’, the British car company Leyland had ‘established a strong and flourishing bridge head’, and British double-decker buses looked ‘surprisingly at home under the blue skies of Tehran’. (The following year, Western support for the Shah, peaking in a brutal police assault on a demonstration against his visit to Berlin, provoked a radical German student movement into being.)
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