Orientalism in the 21st Century.
Jiayuguan, Gansu Province, China, June 26th, 2014.
Salaroche


The concept of “Orientalism” was first introduced to the world in 1978 by the Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said. In his book by the same name, Said defined Orientalism as the overall patronizing approach the West uses when dealing with North-African, Middle Eastern, and East Asian cultures.

In Said’s illustration of Orientalism, the East was backward and irrational while the West was developed, forward-looking and entirely rational. Thus, the term Orientalism ascribed very different roles to each the East and the West: The West was the observer measuring the East from its cultural heights using strictly Western standards of civilization, while the East was just an ineffective, unimaginative, stagnant subject of study.

Things have changed considerably in the world since Said’s heyday, but the East is still considered in Western sociopolitical circles to be way behind the West by a few measures: Freedom of expression, freedom of movement, equality of the sexes, technological innovations, standards of living, business entrepreneurship, and democratic institutions are factors still seriously wanting in Eastern cultures as compared to Western ones.

The demise of the Soviet Union further sharpened Western ideas of superiority over the rest of the world. American political theorists even went as far as claiming that the pinnacle of ideological perfection had already been reached in the form of Western-style Democratic Capitalism. From that perspective, Eastern cultures now had no choice but to emulate Western models if they ever wanted to get out of their deficient sociopolitical and economic systems.

But 9/11 brought into the picture an additional and critical element which has since then been impossible to overlook: Religion. Muslim extremists came to show the world that the West’s ostensible cultural superiority meant absolutely nothing to them. Western cultural views were of this world, they told us with their well-choreographed attack on American soil, while theirs were of another.

That, however, didn’t make America rethink its Orientalist views. From their blind arrogant Orientalist perspective, the Bush administration thought that Western superiority embodied ideals that the Eastern world would be enthusiastically willing to embrace and make their own. “We will, in fact, be welcomed as liberators”, said Dick Cheney in wrongfully predicting the outcome of the totally unwarranted invasion of Iraq. Liberators? After so much useless expenditure of American life and treasure, Iraq remains mired in a religious civil war that is now fracturing the country in three sections along sectarian and ethnic lines.

Many Western influential individuals still think that to reshape the destiny of Eastern countries according to western standards is an easy thing to do. They’re still very unwilling to admit that there are deeply entrenched traditions within Eastern cultures that make it very difficult, if not outright impossible, to change, not to mention to get rid of, overnight. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of evidence around us to support Orientalist arguments, thus making it difficult for any observer to fully blame Orientalist individuals for adopting such stance.

For the obvious reasons, it is very difficult for most Westerners to look up to Eastern cultures, particularly when the West has bigger guns, bigger warships, better overall technology, much more advanced science, larger amounts of money, and much more varied means of entertainment than the others do, all of which makes it rather easy for Westerners to look down on the East.

From a purely Western perspective, the idea of Orientalism has a few strong arguments to support it. What is perfectly unsustainable is the idea that Eastern cultures have very weak foundations and that they can be easily reshaped at will, just like silly putty in the hands of Western social engineers. Eastern Muslims, for example, are not simply going to give up their religious beliefs in exchange for any secularist Western sociopolitical system, nor will they easily abandon their tribal allegiances in exchange for loyalty to any supra-tribal Western-style concept of “country” that they never wanted to embrace in the first place.

History shows that the essential idea of Orientalism wasn’t born when Said expanded on the subject in his book over 30 years ago. Orientalism had already been going on for centuries before that. European colonization of the New World and of the African continent already contained a strong presumption of Western cultural superiority over those of the people they colonized. In fact, the East-West cultural clash we are presently witnessing is a creeper rooted in the West’s Orientalist policies of the recent past.

As the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was clearly prefigured circa 1916, England and France sat at the table and carved out the Middle Eastern territories that would later be their spheres of influence (Sykes-Picot agreement). Such plans they later put to practice under a mandate of the League of Nations. Thus, England created a kingdom over ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and France took control of the territories now known as Syria. The Brits also took control of Palestine.

Following Orientalist views, however, the borders of those countries were not drawn taking existing religious or tribal allegiances into consideration. They were drawn with Orientalist preconceptions in mind, that is, they were drawn arbitrarily by Western individuals who clearly lacked the necessary knowledge of the internal politics prevailing in the area at the time. As a result, those countries have been plagued by political instability and despotism since their imposed inception.

In contrast, Saudi Arabia has been a relative heaven of stability since 1932. The Arabian Peninsula had also been under Ottoman control for centuries, but the Arabians had already extracted considerable levels of autonomy from the Ottomans over the couple of centuries before the Empire’s demise. The Arabian political success can be first attributed to King Abdulaziz Al-Saud, who was a cunning leader and warrior with enough vision to unify the existing peninsular tribes under his leadership, thereby propitiating the inception of present Saudi Arabia.

In the long run, however, the Arabian Peninsula owes its levels of constant stability to two factors: Its great majority of Sunni Muslims (85-90%) and the fact that its borders were drawn of their own accord and not imposed by any external forces. Of these two factors, the first is, in my view, the most important, as the chasm between Sunnis and Shias is to this day the area’s most destabilizing and most difficult problem to transcend.

The idea of Orientalism has been with us for centuries and everything in sight keeps telling us it will probably be with us for quite some time to come. And that wouldn’t be because the West would like the East to remain stuck in sectarianism and archaic sociopolitical systems, but because the East has been unable to free itself from the atavic forces embedded in its history and traditions. For example, there has never been any liberating revolution within Islam in any way similar to the 16th-century Reformation in Europe. Just that fact by itself is quite telling of the East’s inability and unwillingness to look beyond its ancient traditions which, by definition, are considered antiquated.

The West, on the other hand, should have learnt by now that East Asians aren’t waiting to be liberated by any blind, mistaken, ignorant, arrogant Western fools a la Cheney et al. The Sunnis and the Shias have their own scores to settle and no outside meddling or intervention is going to settle those scores for them. The Orient may remain encased within Orientalist stereotypes forever if they so wish and there’s not much the West can do about it other than put up with it. Try to impose your will over ancient matters pertaining to Sunnis and Shias and what you get is chaos of the sort we’re presently witnessing in Iraq.

Globalization and the widespread network of communications that characterizes it provides an inexhaustible wealth of information to anyone exposed to it and willing to absorb it. The West remains an open source of innovation and progress and an open forum where ideas and concepts, old and new, are constantly debated. In consequence, East-Asian cultures are nowadays perfectly aware of the cultural shortcomings that afflict them as well as of those that afflict the West.

Never before has the contrast between cultures been more clear and obvious than it is today, thereby making the choice between them equally evident. But there is no worse deaf than the one who doesn’t care to listen. And that goes both ways.

Eastern cultures may be doing themselves a big favor in endeavoring to emulate some Western ideas, systems, and methods that may eventually provide their men and women with better ways of living, but Western cultures may also be doing themselves a big favor in accepting that, regardless of how applicable Orientalist stereotypes may still be in the 21st century, Eastern cultures can never be shaped by force to fit comfortably into any Western mold.

Salaroche