Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (4 page)

Lewis opens
What Went Wrong?
with a reductive discussion of the thirteen hundred years since the birth of Islam in the seventh
century: “the first thousand years or so after the advent of Islam” were followed by “the long struggle for the reconquest,” which “opened the way to a Christian invasion of Africa and Asia.” In the beginning, there was “conquest” and then followed “reconquest.” The conquest was Islamic, the reconquest Christian. No period in history fits this model of “Christians” confronting “Muslims” better than the time of the Crusades.

One of the best studies of the Crusades is by the Slovenian historian Tomaž Mastnak, who points out that it was at that moment in history that the Muslim became the enemy. When “Christian society became conscious of itself through mobilization for holy war … an essential moment in the articulation of self-awareness of the Christian commonwealth was the construction of the Muslim enemy.” Mastnak is careful to point out that this was not true of earlier centuries: “When, with the Arab expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Muslims reached the European peninsula, they became in the Latin Christians’ eyes one among those pagan, or infidel, barbarians. Among the host of Christian enemies, they were assigned no privileged place.”

Militant Christian animosity was initially aimed at all non-Christians; only later did it become focused on Muslims: “It was with the crusade that Palestine ceased to be the Promised Land
(terra repromissionis)
of the Old Testament and became the Holy Land,
terra sancta.”
Only with the Crusades did Christendom define a universal enemy and declare a “state of permanent war against the heathen.” No longer just another earthly enemy, the Crusades demonized the Muslim as evil incarnate, “the personification of the very religion of the Antichrist.” This is why the point of the Crusades was not to convert Muslims but to exterminate them: “The Muslims, the infidels, did not have freedom of choice; they could not choose between conversion and death because they
were seen as inconvertible.” Their extermination “was preached by the Popes” and also by St. Bernard, who “declared that to kill an infidel was not homicide but ‘malicide,’ annihilation of evil, and that a pagan’s death was a Christian’s glory because, in it, Christ was glorified.”

Bernard Lewis treats what is actually a series of different historical encounters—the Crusades, 1492, European colonization—as if they were hallmarks of a single clash of civilizations over fourteen hundred years. Rather than recognize that each encounter was fueled by a specific political project—the making of a political entity called “Christendom,” the Castilian monarchy’s desire to build a nation-state called Spain following its conquest of neighboring territories, modern European imperial expansion, and so on—Lewis claims that these “clashes” were driven by incompatible civilizations. And he assumes that the clashes take place between fixed territorial units that represent discrete civilizations over the fourteen-hundred-year history. To understand the political agenda that drives such civilizational histories, we should question the presumed identity between cultural and political history.

To avoid Lewis’s distortions, one needs more details at key historical turning points. Can one, for example, speak of Judeo-Christian civilization over two millennia as does Bernard Lewis? The Israeli cultural historian Gil Anidjar reminds us that Jewish culture in Spain is better thought of as “Arab Jewish”—rather than Judeo-Christian—and that the separation of “Jews from Arabs” did not occur until 1492. Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) wrote
The Guide of the Perplexed
, “the most important work of Jewish philosophy ever written,” a text “possibly written in Hebrew script, but ‘speaking’ to us in Arabic and/or Judeo-Arabic” in al-Andalus. And it was the loss of al-Andalus in 1492 that produced
the major text of Jewish mysticism, the
Zohar
and also marked the beginning of the second Jewish diaspora.

It does not make sense to think of culture in political—and therefore territorial—terms. States are territorial; culture is not. Does it make sense to write political histories of Islam that read like histories of places like the Middle East? Or to write political histories of states in the Middle East as if these were no more than political histories of Islam there? We need to think of culture in terms that are both historical and nonterritorial. Otherwise, one is harnessing cultural resources for very specific national and imperial political projects.

Modernity and the Politicization of Culture

Culture Talk does not spring from the tradition of history writing but rather from that of the policy sciences that regularly service political establishments: Bernard Lewis is an Orientalist, and Samuel Huntington a political scientist. Orientalist histories of Islam and the Middle East have been consistently challenged since the 1960s by a diverse group of such intellectuals as Marshall Hodgson and Edward Said, Cheikh Anta Diop and Martin Bernal, Samir Amin and Abdallah Laroui. These thinkers came out of the ranks of the antiwar and anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s, and they were followed by a whole generation of historians. But even if discredited as an intellectual anachronism by two generations of scholarship, the Orientalist histories have managed to rebound.

The key reason lies in the relation between history writing and forms of power, and there are two broad forms of history writing: nationalist and metanationalist. If nationalist history writing has been mainly about giving the nation—a very modern and contemporary political subject—an identifiable and often glorious past,
metanationalist writings have given us equally glorified civilizational histories, locating the nation in a global context.

When the sixteenth-century Italian missionary Matteo Ricci brought a European map of the world—showing the new discoveries in America—to China, he was surprised to find that the Chinese were offended by it. The map put Europe in the center of the world and split the Pacific, which meant that China appeared at the right-hand edge of the map. But the Chinese had always thought of China as literally the “Middle Kingdom,” which obviously should have been in the center of the map. To please his hosts, Ricci produced another map, one that split the Atlantic, making China seem more central. In China, maps are still drawn that way, but Europe has clung to the first type of map. The most commonly used map in North America shows the United States at the center of the world, sometimes even splitting the Asian continent in two. Today, the most widely used world map has western Europe at its center. Based on the Mercator projection, it systematically distorts our image of the world: even though Europe has approximately the same area as each of the other two peninsulas of Asia—prepartition India and Southeast Asia—Europe is called a continent, whereas India is but a subcontinent, and Southeast Asia is not even accorded that status; at the same time, the area most drastically reduced in the Mercator projection is Africa.

The civilizational history of “the West” came to a triumphant climax in the nineteenth century, along with European imperialism. Written from the vantage point of a modern power that had exploded into global dominance in the centuries following the Renaissance, civilizational history gave “the West” an identity that marched through time unscathed. From this point of view, “the West” occupied the center of the global stage, and “the Orient” was its periphery. Not surprisingly, initial criticism of Eurocentric history came from scholars whose main focus was the “non-West.”

In the traditional story, as recounted by the University of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson, “history began in the ‘East,’ “and “the torch was then passed successively to Greece and Rome and finally to Christians of northwestern Europe, where medieval and modern life developed.”

Hodgson should have added that the division of the world into “the West” and “the East,” “Europe and Asia” left out a third part—in the words of the Yale historian Christopher Miller, “a blank darkness”—that was said to lack history or civilization because it lacked either great texts or great monuments. This blank darkness comprised Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, and the lands of the Pacific, excepting, of course, Egypt and Ethiopia—which for this purpose were classified as belonging to Asia. In other words, the notion of “the West” went alongside two peripheries: whereas “the Orient” was visible, Africa and the others were simply blanked out into a historical darkness.

Marshall Hodgson made it a lifelong project to counter the West-centered studies of Islam. He began his classic three-volume study,
The Venture of Islam
, by showing how, throughout history, the notion of “the West” had changed at least three times. “The West” referred “originally and properly to the western or Latin-using half of the Roman empire; that is, to the
west Mediterranean lands.”
After the first change, the term came to refer to “the west European lands generally.” But this was not a simple extension, for it excluded “those west Mediterranean lands which turned Muslim.” The second shift was from West European lands to peoples, thus incorporating their overseas settlements. Then, there was the third shift as the definition of “the West” was further stretched to include
“all European Christendom.”
Whereas the second shift referred to a global western Europe, the third extension referred to a global Europe, western
and
eastern. Thus did the notion of “the West” develop from a geographical location to a racialized notion
referring to all peoples of European origin, no matter where they lived and for how long.

Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? Historians have been chipping away at this claim in a number of fields, ranging from the development of science to that of society. Hodgson had earlier remarked that the equation of “the West” with “science” had given rise to an absurdity whereby it was presumed that Arabic-writing scientists in the classical age of Islam were simply marking time. Rather than making any original contribution to science, they were presumed simply to be holding up the torch for centuries—until it could be passed on to “the West.” The notion that the main role of Arabic-writing scientists was to preserve classical Greek science and pass it on to Renaissance Europe was fortified by Thomas Kuhn’s claim that Renaissance science represented a paradigmatic break with medieval science and a reconnection with the science of antiquity. Whereas Kuhn associated the paradigmatic break with the work of Copernicus, recent works in the history of science challenge this presumption. With the advantage of accumulated findings, Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of “astronomers associated with the observatory of Marāgha in northwestern Iran,” whose works, written in Arabic, “reached Europe, Italy in particular, in the fifteenth century through Byzantine Greek intermediaries.” They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: “In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the ‘Marāgha School.’ “The contemporary history of science shows similar re-thinkings in other fields, such as anatomy (the pulmonary circulation of blood) and mathematics (decimal fractions). The lacuna in the history of science points to a larger historical gap: the place of
Andalusia—Arabic-writing Spain—in the historical study of the Renaissance.

We have seen that Eurocentric history constructed two peripheries: one visible, the other invisible. Part of the invisible periphery was Africa. The same political project that produced a self-standing history of the West also produced a self-standing history of Africa. Like the notion of “the West,” that of Africa was also turned into a racialized object. The difference was that Africa was debased rather than exalted, redefined as the land south of the Sahara, coterminous with that part of the continent ravaged during the slave trade. The scholars who questioned the racialized degradation of Africa at the same time further eroded the production of Eurocentric history.

The reconsideration of African history began with the Senegalese savant, Cheikh Anta Diop, who wrote his major work,
The African Origin of Civilization
, in the 1960s. Diop questioned the racist tendency to dislocate the history of pharaonic Egypt—in which roughly one quarter of the African population of the time lived—from its surroundings, particularly Nubia to the south, thereby denying the African historical identity of ancient Egypt. Diop targeted the cherished heart of the Eurocentric tradition, the classics, which not only cast Greece and Rome as eternal components of “the West” but also stripped Egypt of its historical identity. In the study of classics, Egypt faced a double loss: its connection with Greece in ancient times was reduced to being external and incidental, and its location in Africa was denied historical significance.

Diop’s work provided the foundation on which the British scholar Martin Bernal based his monumental two-volume work,
Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.
Bernal showed the ways in which the main tradition of Egyptology
had been shaped by a metanationalist Western way of thinking rooted in the nineteenth-century imperial, particularly, German, imagination. Bernal contrasted this imperial imagination with what Greeks had to say about themselves, particularly about their great historical and civilizational debt to pharaonic Egypt. In particular, he showed how the Greeks’ image of themselves as the product of an invasion from Egypt in the south was reversed in the European imperial imagination to portray classical Greece as the product of an Aryan invasion from the north. Bernal also made it clear that Greece, originally a colony of Egypt, was an amalgam of diverse influences, initially African, Phoenician, and Jewish, later northern European. If early classical Egypt is better thought of as an African civilization, classical Greece is better thought of as a Mediterranean—rather than European—civilization.

Edward Said summed up “the principal dogmas of Orientalism” in his majesterial study of the same name. The first dogma is that the same Orientalist histories that portray “the West” as “rational, developed, humane [and] superior,” caricature “the Orient” as “aberrant, undeveloped [and] inferior.” Another dogma is that “the Orient” lives according to set rules inscribed in sacred texts, not in response to the changing demands of life. The third dogma prescribes “that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself; therefore it is assumed that a highly generalized and systematic vocabulary for describing the Orient from a Western standpoint is inevitable and scientifically ‘objective.’ “And the final dogma is “that the Orient is at the bottom something either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).”