If there is a single book which I would denote as required reading for anyone attempting to understand the events and processes of "The Arab Spring" and the debates around Western responses to and interventions in the anti-authoritarian movements at the core of these events, it would be Edward Said's Orientalism. First published in 1978, this seminal work of post-colonial critical theory has spurred vigorous and occasionally vitriolic commentary within both academic and wider public discourse, and Said himself has been alternatively sainted and demonized. This diary is a call for Kossacks interested in the events and processes of "The Arab Spring" to read—or recall—and engage with Said's conceptualization of Orientalism.
Defining "Orientalism" is no easy task, but for the sake of an introductory statement upon which to found a productive discussion I think the following observation by Said will suffice:
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (E. Said. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition. Vintage, 2003: 3)
Orientalism is thus a distinctive and historically conditioned mode of Western thought: the interdependency of Western scientific knowledge, academic narratives, artistic representations and policy formulations which emerged to maturity and unquestioned authority through the nineteenth century, serving collectively thereafter to rationalize and justify Western colonialist and imperialist intervention in the East.
Orientalism was, and remains, a project of post-Enlightenment modernity: a manifestation of the moral certitude that Western civilization was the proper and necessary condition of the modern world. Western civilization was the idealized model of modernity to which non-Western societies should aspire or, if a non-Western society should be found to lack the innate qualities to attain modernity, then it was incumbent upon the West to shepherd that society into modernity. As Western nations encountered resistance to this moral imperative, the optimistic (if condescending) evaluation of subject societies as pre-modern was transformed into the pessimistic (and racist) evaluation of subject societies as anti-modern, inimical by nature to the undeniably compelling logic and telos of Western civilization.
Any attempt here, in the format of a dKos diary, to address the wide and complex range of ideas and ideals structuring Orientalism would be overwhelming. I have elected instead to focus my discussion on what I consider to be an especially pernicious element of nineteenth-century Orientalist thought which has become, by and large, an unquestioned metanarrative underpinning much contemporary discourse on current events and processes in the Middle East and North Africa: cultural typology and the construct of modernity.
A strong component of nineteenth-century physical and human sciences was the impulse to produce classificatory schema—typologies—as a means to order objects of knowledge and thereby provide an analytical framework for the explanation of similarity and difference. In the human sciences, efforts were directed toward typologies of culture, invariably locating Western civilization at the apex of a unilinear evolutionary model of cultural progress. The task then was to explain why some cultures had progressed rapidly while others had stagnated. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to explain cultural variation by means of external environmental factors which acted to either limit or enable progress within cultures. However, beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, cultural variation was more frequently explained by means of internal and permanent factors of biology: in other words, on the basis of the enduring natural inequalities of race.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Middle East and North Africa figured increasingly prominently in Western thought. On the one hand, European politicians and diplomats wrestled with the Eastern Question, the satisfactory (from the perspective of European powers, of course) resolution to altered political circumstances resulting from the slow decay of the Ottoman Empire, "the sick man of Europe." On the other hand, Ottoman territories were slowly opened to Western proselytization through missionaries and to exploration as well, both casual exploration by artists and writers and scientific exploration by archaeologists and ethnologists through whose status as public intellectuals the history and essential character of the populations within Ottoman territories became fixed in the Western public and political imagination.
In the emergent discourse of the nascent disciplines of archaeology and ethnology, the key analytical method for defining, classifying, comparing and ranking cultures was philology, the study of language. The relevant overarching linguistic groups in the context of the encounter of East and West in the Middle East and North Africa were Semitic and Indo-European (variably called Indo-Germanic, Indo-Slavic-Germanic or Aryan). To the extent that language was accepted as a direct reflection of the "mind" or "spirit" of a culture, comparative philology was a privileged scientific method for identifying the essential, innate and enduring differences between cultures. By the 1850s, conventional academic constructions of linguistic "Semites" and "Indo-Europeans" defined the former in negative apposition to the latter. To be Semitic was to be imperfect and stagnant, to lack by nature the capacity for philosophy, science, abstract thought, tolerance, curiosity, nuance, sincerity, plastic arts, literary forms except genealogy and prophecy, higher political and judicial institutions, commerce, military prowess, and altruism. In short, a modern Indo-European West was not only contrasted with but opposed by an anti-modern Semitic East.
The "scientific" determination of the essential character of Semites on the basis of comparative philology was, for the majority of scholars working in the field, intended as a heuristic framework for historical explanation. Yet as these constructs were disseminated into the broader contexts of Western policy-making and popular thought in the last decades of the century, coincident with the rise of romantic nationalism, the intended academic utility of these cultural-linguistic categories was received as scientific proof for the "natural" supremacy of West over East: a simplistic and sinister justification for viewing Semites, both Muslims and Jews, as irremediably anti-modern.
What, you might ask, does any of this have to do with "the Arab Spring"? I assert that many of the perspectives on the anti-authoritarian movements in the Middle East and North Africa are rooted in a profoundly persistent metanarrative, the premise that the proper and necessary telos of these movements is a distinctly ethnocentric vision of modernity, reified in the supposed perfection of a Western-style secular democracy, in the form of the Western nation-state, fully integrated within a Western-dominated capitalist global economy. The proposition that Islam is antithetical to modernity is the crux of "the Clash of Civilizations," that neoconservative call-to-arms to defend Western values and institutions; it is inherent to the recently oft-posed question "is Islam ready for [Western-style] democracy?"; it is tacitly framed by the praise and admiration for youthful, technologically-savvy and relatively secular protesters juxtaposed with suspicion for more religious yet equally reform-minded critics of the authoritarian regimes. In short, the Western evaluation of the success of these anti-authoritarian movements is the degree to which the Western ideal of modernity is embraced, and Islam rejected, a view which I consider an ideological fiction.
I do not know what the institutional outcomes of the anti-authoritarian movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or elsewhere will be, although I anticipate that the outcomes will legitimate neither neoconservative nor neoliberal fantasies. I trust that the citizens of each country will work to build institutions which are best-suited to that country's individual circumstances. I do not subscribe to the notion that Western modernity is the telos, akin to Fukuyama's "End of History," and I am resolved to witness these events and processes and resist judging their success in relation to inherently ethnocentric and racialist ideal-types. I am not indifferent, but rather conscious of the latent power accruing in the West for dominating, restructuring and authorizing the East through the soft, institutionalized Islamophobia that is Orientalism. I will above all heed Said's warning, quoting Blake, that a mode of thought like Orientalism constitutes "mind-forg'd manacles—all too easily made, applied and guarded" (2003: 328.)