earlier i mentioned before that i was reading occidentalism: the west in the eyes of its enemies. i was actually quite prepared to like this book, but instead it turned out to be a major disappointment.
the title "occidentalism" is a play off edward said's 1979 classic orientalism. in "orientalism," Said argued that the much of what was written about the arab world bore little reflection to the actual arab world as experienced by arabs. instead, western writings about the arab world reflected the west's own cultural biases and stereotypes about the exotic east. "occidentalism" i thought, would do the opposite: examine how the arab world misunderstand the west and views us through the lense of their own cultural biases and stereotypes.
that premise really is a good idea. a book that did that well would be an important book. but "occidentalism" is not that book.
the biggest problem is apparent right from the start: the lack of definition of who exactly is being examined by the book. rather than confining itself to the arab world, or even the islamic world, the book lumps together all of the diverse cultures that it considers to be "non-western." it certainly can be argued that there is an anti-western thread running through many different non-western areas of the world. but because those areas are so different from one another, one needs to at least argue that the different manifestations of hostility to the west in different places are all part of the same phenomenon and not simply different local reactions to the dominant world power.
in other words, while anti-western sentiment in iran may originate from the 1953 american-backed coup that overthrew mossadeq government, the roots of chinese anti-americanism may go more to clashing economic and trade issues today. simply put, the same results (e.g. hostility to the west) does not necessarily imply the same causes. very different localities can reach a similar conclusion for very different reasons. because of that possibility, a book that seeks to examine the roots of hostility to the west and treats that hostility as a single phenomenon at least owes us an argument that it is a single phenomenon.
"occidentalism" never does that. instead it notes that people in a lot of different places are not too happy with the west and assumes it's all for the same reason. this unexamined premise of the book aids the authors tremendously in making their case, for it allows them to cherry pick examples from all over the place to support their various points. e.g. why doesn't osama bin laden like modern science? (which, by the way, it is by no means clear to me that he doesn't) to answer the question the book looks to various 19th century russian romantic philosophers (yes, i'm serious). given the wide world we live in, where most of the world is non-western, you can probably find an example for almost any position you want to put into the mouth of a non-westerner. this methodology reduces the majority of humanity to an amorphous "other" simply defined as "not us." the connections between the constituent members of the "other" are never that seriously examined. thus, the authors make no effort to draw any lines between russian romantics and bin laden. there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he was influenced by them. indeed, its not even clear to me that he has even heard of ivan kireyevsky.
which brings me to another problem with the book's definition of the non-western world: it's incredibly elastic and encompasses places that i think of as western. as you probably noticed from the above example, the non-west includes not only the middle east, india, southeast asia, china and japan, but also russia and even nazi germany. although during the cold war we got used to talking in terms of east vs. west where "the east" meant eastern european countries, when we're using the terms "east" and "west" to talk about europe and north america's relations with the rest of the world, eastern europe is part of the west, not east, because it's still europe. just like how i am an "easterner" when we're talking about american culture because i live in the eastern part of the u.s., and yet i am also a "westerner" if we talk about the western hemisphere vs. the eastern hemisphere. i don't think this is a very difficult concept, but the authors of "occidentalism" seem hopelessly confused by it.
the assumption that nazi germany is somehow "eastern" not "western" is even more shaky. whether we like it or not, nazi germany came out of the western world and thus was a european phenomenon. nazis may not have displayed what we like to think of as western culture: tolerance, democracy, etc., but there's no denying that they are part of the west's history. you can't pretend that the west never had any dictators or any racism. if you define the west that way, editing out its problems, the west ceases to be a real place with a real history and turns into a kind of shimmering ideal of what we like to think our culture stands for. an ideal, i might add, that no "western" country can live up to either.
yet another problem with the book, related to what i just wrote above, is the methodology. in trying to get into the mind of islamic fundamentalists, the authors do not discuss many of the sources that the fundamentalists themselves cite as their influences. the book quotes the bible multiple times, but not the qur'an. it also quotes t.s. eliot, voltaire, friedrich engles, johann gottfried von herder, mao tse-tung and many many others who seem oddly out of place of any discussion of the motives of al-qaeda. it's not until page 110 of this 149 page book that the first muslim thinker is discussed in any detail, and even then the authors seem to favor shi'ite thinkers over sunni for some reason. never mind that bin laden himself is pretty hostile to the shia. mohammed ibn abd al-wahhab, the founder of wahhabism (the intepretation of islam that bin laden came out of) does not come up until page 134. he disappears again on page 136 so the authors can start the final chapter of the book on the seeds of occidentalism by discussing theodor herzl.
there is something seriously flawed with a book that starts by raising the questions about why 9-11 happened and ends up teaching me more about early russian history than anything else. at virtually every step in the books' argument vague definitions of who is not in the west and bizzare citations to out of place sources undermine whatever valid points they may have. when the authors argue that the world trade center attacks reflect the occidentalists' hostility to urban areas, they quote voltaire to support that thesis. in my eyes, this undermines their thesis as it makes me question of they have any insight into the arab world. noting that the taliban the khemer rouge and maoists in china all were anti-city left me scratching my head, wondering why anyone other than the taliban was even relevant to this discussion. but the authors never argue that china and cambodia is relevant. as part of the non-west it is presumed they are. when the authors paradoxically argue that the "non-western" nazis displayed their hostility to cities by building huge monumental buildings in berlin, they had totally lost me.
by the time i reached the end of the book i realized that in writing "occidentalism" the authors themselves were guilty of orientalism. they had all the symptoms: the reduction of the entire non-west as an amorphous other, attempting to understand the other by reference mostly to western thinkers, and a broad conclusion that the other is really just an anti-west, a bizarro-world opposite of the west. instead of looking at the west's enemies to see what makes them tick, the authors are just holding a mirror to their own culture. how this leads us to any insight into the "minds of our enemies" is beyond me.
