Reply to Shashi Thandra
Reader comment on: The Bertrand Russell of Islam
in response to reader comment: Criticisms

Submitted by georgesdelatour, Dec 23, 2007 18:28

You say, "Producing a false picture is precisely "how" the imperial project was accomplished." I thought it was, rather, because, as Hilaire Belloc put it, "we have got the Maxim gun and they have not". Please explain to me, how does it help an invader to have a false underestimation of those he is invading? In 1941 Hitler believed in a false, Orientalist, picture of Soviet Russia, thinking it far more backward, depleted and "Slavic" than it actually was. The result of his Orientalist fantasy was the Red Army in Berlin. I have just finished reading "The Cross And The Crescent" by Richard Fletcher. Fletcher shows how the relative decline of the Islamic Caliphate and ascendancy of Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages was partly caused by the Islamic world's "Occidentalist" attitude of lofty distain towards Christendom. They couldn't believe that the fragmentary kingdoms of Europe, with their earlier, flawed revelation, could ever outperform the Ummah with their later, superior one. Their distain blinded them to the real advances taking place in Europe. How does the Japanese Meiji Restoration fit into a Said-style Orientalist analysis? Here was an oriental nation suddenly confronted by occidental superiority of the Belloc kind. The Japanese did not respond in Said fashion, by convincing themselves this western superiority was all in the mind, a mere product of foreign black propaganda. They decided the superiority was real, and they better catch up as quickly as possible. Soon it was the European powers who would pay for underestimating the Japanese. The economic rise of South Korea, the Asean economies, and now China and India, has come from these nations all learning, more pacifically, what the Japanese learned previously. This suggests that Said's work probably holds back the economic development of middle eastern nations, and actually helps those who would like to dominate and exploit them. Finally, I find your comment about Iraq incoherent. The American Neo-conservatives believed that Iraqis were just like Americans. Get rid of their dictator, give them a US-style federal constitution, and they'll start behaving just like Americans - that was the Neocon argument. It is those who who oppose the Neocons who usually rely on Orientalist arguments - that middle eastern clan structures and first-cousin marriages make western-style democracy unworkable, that middle eastern cultures are not suited to democracy, that Islam is different, etc.

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