Orientalism is a term that is often loosely referred to by those who want to criticise arguments that are generalising, simplistic and even racist. However, despite people’s general familiarity with the concept of Orientalism, Edward W. Said’s book is often not applied in a detailed and direct manner to contemporary issues of Islamophobia. Orientalism can be used to reveal the simplicity behind anti-Islam arguments which overlook complexity and expose the issues of simplistic, right-wing rhetoric.
A consistent theme of Said’s work that I want to explore in relation to contemporary Islamophobia is how Islam is articulated as a concept. It is this envisioning of Islam through Western debates which then shapes social attitudes, cultural perceptions and political ideology. All three of these aspects are related and inter-dependent, they sustain what we have come to know as “Orientalism”. Firstly in Orientalism, Said predominantly analyses 18th-19th Century Orientalist academic writing, which in “the West” has given anyone who reads such works a particular and supposedly “objective” view of the Middle East, North Africa (the near Orient) and Asia (the far Orient). The issue with the content of Orientalist “academic” work was that numerous examples of these writings contained highly subjective descriptions and evaluations of what it means to be an “Arab”, “Semite” (these two terms are used homogeneously) or a “Muslim”. In other words, despite these supposed rigorous methodical investigations into other cultures, in reality they were often no more than personal diaries and contained unfounded derogatory remarks and arguments.
One of these Orientalist scholars was Ernest Renan, an influential French expert on Semitic languages. He viewed Semitic languages as inherently inferior to Indo-European languages. His reasoning was that languages like Arabic are simply of “divine origin” and are not “regenerative” (Said, 1978, p.143). This implied that Arabic was archaic due to its structure and emphasis on religious expression thus sustaining Islam and Muslims in the “past”, hence it fostered the incapability of development, progressive values etc. Orientalist academics reduced the entirety of the “near orient” down to negative stereotypes of “Semitic” people in that they did not have the capability to be as civilised as the West and that Islam is something to be recognised as a holistic entity we should fear. These were not scientific studies but rather ideas articulated in a way that generalised concepts, trends and evaluations constructed by Orientalist thinking. Said refers to the literary critic Roland Barthes to illustrate how the process of misrepresenting a culture or ethnic group(s) was due to intentional or unintentional misuse of language. “All operations of language are deformations”, Barthes said; a deformation in the sense that there is always human perception which can never be truly objective in description within a given language (Ibid, p.273). Said raises the following question from this thought: How can a culture be truly represented?
Like Said’s Orientalism, the purpose of this piece is not to substantiate the differences between Muslims necessarily but show how Said’s notion of the Orientalist narrative still exists and how it elides complex identities into a simple monolith. The “orientalist” debate on Islam, Islamic migration and Muslim communities in Europe requires attention regarding the simplicity of public debate regarding Islam. The contemporary challenge of Orientalism is vast considering the narrative from mass media, populist movements, public opinion and especially the right-wing tendencies in framing debates. Islam is still essentialized in very much the same way Said showed it to be prior to Orientalism’s publication. Islam is still viewed as inferior to Christianity and Judaism throughout Orientalist writings, political party manifestos, journalism, etc. Contemporarily, some mainstream political parties, public opinion and social movements throughout the West appear to have continued aspects of Orientalist thinking.
It is worth noting that Said had always stated that it is not the “West” as a whole which is Orientalist and projecting this “spectacle” of what Islam is; Orientalism is an ideological force like any other. It is merely a familiar trend which is attempting to simplify social groups for political or scholarly expediency, or even control.
How should “Islam” be represented?
There is a heavy emphasis today on “Islamic societies” — which many claim to be a term of convenience — which simplifies cultural customs, ideologies, social movements and religious difference within Islam. An all-too-frequent reoccurrence to illustrate the “reality” of Islamic society is to quote the Quran. It seems to be an Orientalist truism to assume any quote in the Quran is something all or most Muslims understand as having one meaning and subsequently adhere to, otherwise they are not Islamic. The Far-Right infamously quote isolated extracts from the Quran; Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom party wants to ban the Quran for its quotes (RT International, 2016), social movements like Britain First quote the Quran in the same fashion. Quotes regarding homosexuality, the role of Women, the rules for apostasy and even slavery are all commonly cited as somehow being the “true” Islam.
To quote from a religious text and imply it as fact that a religion condones it is not relevant to understanding the extent of slavery, for example, in the context of that religion contemporarily. The concept of slavery is self-evidently a well-abandoned custom in all three Abrahamic, monotheistic, religious cultures around the world. And it was abolished (in the medieval definition and context of the bible and Quran) due to social and cultural change, both adopted by societies of predominantly Christian and Muslim followers.
Furthermore, a significant amount of populations in predominantly Muslim states like Yemen, Sudan and Afghanistan are illiterate as a result of underdevelopment and conflict. Many may even understand how to read Arabic but may not understand the meaning of Arabic in the Quran, if the translation into their native language is not available. How is it accurate to quote the Quran as a means of indicating how different Muslims conduct their lives if social conditions and language can vary to such extremities? Aptly, Said states that Orientalists are dependent upon texts rather than modern academic social science analysis in order to decipher how one religion defines an entire social group’s motivations, desires and ideologies (ibid, p.305). This pitfall of the historic Orientalists is still evidently an unconscious point of reference for right-wing political movements today.
Such Orientalist perceptions of Islam are still conceived in much the same way Said discovered; the pseudo-scientific, negative conclusions about Islam were “an odd combination of the empirical and imaginative” (ibid p. 331). The scholars who composed their evidence of Islam as being barbaric, anti-Semitic, insular and unadaptable to ‘modernity’ simply collated their casual encounters and had this legitimated by the fact they were Western, privileged, and educated Men who were residing in the “orient” (ibid, p.168). It appears that the right-leaning, populist movements of Europe which tend to originate in almost entirely White, non-Muslim areas stitch together a patchwork of negativities from around the world to create an ideologically motivated portrayal of Islam. Whilst there are obviously trends of homophobia, misogyny and death penalties for any perceived infidelities by conservative Islamist regimes and cultural movements, this is not what Islam is entirely, has always been, nor has to be defined by in the future.
Islamic communities in Western Europe
Said repeatedly argues that the “Orientalist can imitate the Oriental/Orient but not vice versa” (p. 160). He observes further that it is the West that can only truly communicate what the Muslim World really is and how it should be represented back to Western audiences. The near Orient (North Africa and the Middle-East) and the “Oriental” (Arab/Semitic person) are replicated as “resistant to change” (ibid p.263) in Western Orientalist thought, according to Said. The notion that Muslims are intransigent appears to be a key and current motivation in the demand to halt or limit “Islamic migration”. Negative images of Muslims are incessant in the right-wing media; in 2015 a best-selling newspaper featured a column referring to predominantly Muslim migrants crossing the Mediterranean in a severely dehumanising manner by calling them “cockroaches” (Saul, 2015). The projected images of being invaded by a homogeneous group creates a fertile ground for generalising about Muslims and their perceived values, irrespective of what their specific cultural, class, gender or any other personal background is.
The notion that Muslims have a particular character and psyche which sustains their inherent “backwardness” has been reproduced since early Orientalist studies. Said highlight’s argument by the likes of Gibbs who talks of the “Arab mind”, as if it were acceptable or even plausible to talk of a “negro or Jewish mind” (Said, p. 262). There are various statistics used to attempt to assert a concept of the contemporary, European “Muslim mind” which has similarities to the concept of Gibbs’ “Arab mind”. A 2015 ICM poll discovered how 52% of British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal — an alarming statistic. Of course the media and headline’s emphasis was overwhelmingly on the slight majority, yet Muslims who are perceived as an inalienable social group are still perceived as resistant to progressive values despite 48% agreeing with legal homosexuality. My point is not that there are no issues to be addressed in the Muslim community regarding tolerance of homosexuality. Rather it is that there is a conscious media presence to emphasise Islam as a resistant monolith despite clearly almost half having the opposite sensationalist headline viewpoint, which has real political implications. This comes especially when the poll only included local boundaries that had a threshold Muslim population of 20%, whilst 50% of Muslims do not live in areas were the local Muslim population is 20%. Hence this is no objective view of “Islam”, yet a poll indicating homophobia amongst a segment of the contemporary (2015) Muslim population.
The perception of Muslim’s as being predominantly one ethnic group with a particular character, as Said identified, has now been attached to ethnicities beyond Arabs. Muslim’s in Europe have been categorised into generalised ethnic groups — this is depending on in which state they reside in. The Muslim population in Germany for example is largely Turkish, in Spain it is largely Moroccan but in the UK it is mostly South-East Asian communities, particularly Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. Using the British Muslim community as the key example, there is Orientalist perceptions of what it means to be Muslim in the UK as ethnicity and cultural background are diluted due to a lack of understanding of the diversity of global Islam.
A recent academic study by Masoovi (2014) examines the relationship between ethnicity and the Muslim identity in the UK and how ethnicity is misrecognised due to the emphasis of being Muslim. He invokes that a process of “reracialisation” of White-British converts from Christianity to Islam occurred when they converted to Islam. The converts and their new visible Muslim identity completely transformed a non-Muslim’s reception of these White British individual’s racial identity; the study explicitly revealed how these people were often referred to as “pakis” in a derogatory manner by casual encounters (ibid, 2014). It is problematic if Islam’s ethnically and culturally diverse nature is reduced down to familiar ethnic groups of particular cultures for convenience and quite obviously negatively associated slurs. The formulation of these racist tendencies in Europe are summarised succinctly by Said: “Imagination does play a central role in these generalisations” (Said, p.157). It is particularly this latent, imaginative quality, matched with a lack of understanding, compelling people part of populist movements to ignore the ethno-cultural diversity which obfuscates the cultural diversity within the religion itself.
This imaginative role appears to simulate the Marxist concept of the society of the “spectacle”, which I mentioned previously. The notion that there is a conscious effort by the mass media, state apparatus (governmental civic institutions) and interest groups to create a superficial manifestation of an idea, concept, commodity, etc. (Dubord, 1967). In other words the culmination of a trend particularly emphasising information on some sort of entity establishes a widely accepted perception in the consciousness and unconsciousness of the target audience.
This concept may explain how modern Islamophobia has become shaped by mass media producing negative and monolithic information concerning Islam. The amalgamation of negative media images has seemingly reinforced the Non-Muslim population’s awareness and suspicion of Islam and Muslims. An Ipsos Mori poll published in 2016 showed on average how the UK, France, Denmark, Poland, Germany and Italy significantly overestimate their Muslim populations. The contemporary common factor between all these states is that their conservative and authoritarian movements are gathering momentum. Poland experienced an anti-Islam, nationalist march with 60,000 supporters demonstrating in Warsaw (Taylor, 2017). France has seen Front National shake off its fringe party status as public identity politics shifts focus onto the 7.5% of the French population (the Muslim community). And Germany and the UK have seen gains in parties and movements criticising Islamic migration, i.e. Alternative for Germany and UKIP.
Concerning these Islamophobic politics and the overemphasis of Muslims accompanied by negative stereotypes, Said made a crucial point regarding identity politics in Europe and how it’s transformed since World War II. “The transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same” (Said, p. 286). We are all familiar with the late 19th century, early 20th Century depiction of the Jew; that eventually became a ‘spectacle’, a popular image which mandated much of the horror of the early 20th Century. The casual and organised attempts to create an essentialized image (or spectacle) of a social group has been a historically repeated event. By continuing to reduce a religion down to texts, a homogenised sense of ethnicity and a particular psyche of values, it is contemporary Orientalists who are creating their “spectacle” of Islam. The identity-driven assault on the global Muslim community (i.e. the Rohingya Muslims at the moment) shows how important it is not to simplify social groups and sufficiently understand complex issues before taking action.
Bibliography
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Taylor, M. (2017). ‘White Europe’: 60,000 nationalists march on Poland’s independence day. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/12/white-europe-60000-nationalists-march-on-polands-independence-day [Accessed 29 Dec. 2017].
