The Fetishization of “The West and the Rest”

“The Inverted Consciousness of the World”

The constitution of “Islam and the West” as a civilizational divide was a colonial concoction, an ideological chimera, a mode of false consciousness that centers “the West” (where capital is believed to have accumulated) and marginalizes “the Rest” (where cheap labor and raw material are thought to be located). Both capital and its abused labor and ravaged earth, however, are global and rapidly globalizing; neither has any center or periphery.

This relatively recent ideological concoction, however, has been rooted in the material forces of capital, labor, raw material, and markets. At work has been the accumulated capital that required a normative center and correspondingly the dispersed labor and raw material that were at the service of that accumulated capital. “Islam and the West” was perhaps the most potent component of “the West and the Rest” that facilitated and enabled the operation of that relation of power. I have also put forward the argument that we are no longer trapped at the moment of simply pointing out the abusive mode of knowledge production called “Orientalism” that this “West” had crafted about “the East,” about “the Orient,” about “Islam.”

The far more urgent and liberating task of moving forward and thinking, knowing, and being beyond this trap has in fact been long at work. This is not mere wishful thinking, or political positioning, or counterargument against the lingering ideologues of “the West.” This is based on the fact of the dissolution of any center for the operation of accumulated capital or any fixed continental location for abused labor and raw material. Massive labor and refugee migrations, global pandemics such as COVID-19, and the dismemberment of the planetary environment are among the indices of the disappearance of any meaningful and authoritative “Western” Self to craft any stable Other to believe in Itself.”

To disengage “Islam” and “the West” at the stage of their entanglement, I needed necessarily to pick up from where Edward Said ended in Orientalism and seek to reorient our historical consciousness. It is crucial now to remember that Edward Said was an intellectual product of the Arab-Israeli conflict and his Orientalism very much the result of the animus between the 1967 and 1973 wars. His theorization of Orientalism, pathbreaking as it was, was almost entirely oblivious to any serious sense of history prior to the rise of European colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and perforce was limited specifically to the colonial encounter between crumbling Muslim empires and rising European imperialism.

The radical contemporaneity of the Arab-centrism of Said, in short, replicated the Eurocentricism of his ideological nemesis and radically de-historicized the longevity and globality of the encounter.”

The more we point a finger at “the West” from precisely the fictive space it has created (“the East,” “the Orient,” “Islam”), the more we corroborate it and thus fetishize beyond recognition our own alienated selves.”

No matter how you do the finger pointing, and how deconstructive you might think you are, you are, in effect, counter-essentializing the two components of the false binary, corroborating and thus authenticating them. The time is long overdue to step out of that bicameral cul-de-sac and dismantle the whole worldview that keeps spinning around to catch its own tail, pointing fingers that in effect mark its own dead end. “Islam” and “the West” are not two separate but one bifocal metaphor, created and sustained under conditions of coloniality. To dismantle that metaphor, we need to actively historicize it and show that it has now finally overcome itself. We must, in short, dismantle “Islam and the West” as a single allegorical trope, and stop pointing a finger at “the West” for having misrepresented “Islam.” “The West” did not misrepresent “Islam.”

“The West” coinvented an “Islam” best suited to serve its colonial interests by sustaining the illusion of its own civilizational superiority. This dual false consciousness was not merely a product of a sense of racial superiority; it was also a requirement of the economics of robbing continents of their wealth and wherewithal.

Any and all acts of decolonization are entirely contingent on dismantling all such civilizational divides as “Islam and the West,” “the First and the Third World,” “the West and the Rest,” in all of which the ruling ideological powers of the world have robbed continents of their material and labor resources and the centrality of their place in the world and have rendered them second-rate inhabitants in their own worldliness—or, in my terms, the “Islam” of the “Islam and the West” was always already a figment of a colonial imagination. Without de-fetishizing “the West,” which has fetishized all its others, none of those fetishized others, particularly Islam, will ever resume their moral and material historicalities.

Why Decolonized History Matters

To achieve this de-fetishization of a fictional “West,” historicity must come to the fore to dismantle the myth of civilizational divides. To put an end to the disorienting power of the assumption of such civilizational divides, we must collapse the binary upon itself. Though long in the making, the intensity of the hostility presumed between “Islam” and “the West” reaches a newly alarming pitch every time there is a global crisis between the United States and its European allies on one hand and the population of a Muslim land on the other. This dominant and distorting discourse disregards all other colonial and postcolonial conditions, and the debilitating democratic deficiencies and consequent calamities they have created. Consider a Muslim revolutionary figure like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897) and ask yourself if his life and career as a widely popular transnational public intellectual matches the fixed opposition we assume between Muslims and non-Muslims. Afghani was an Iranian Shi’i who pretended to be a Sunni who hailed from Afghanistan. He systematically and consistently assumed varied identities in order to appeal to multiple audiences. He gathered some significant Muslim followers from India to Iran to Ottoman territories, before he traveled to Europe and engaged in philosophical debates with his European contemporaries, and in doing so he became definitive to his post-imperial Muslim world. Figures like Afghani, who are representative of many more, are the historical evidence of a world we have now systematically erased and overwritten under the false binary of “Islam and the West.”

Disregarding such facts, perhaps no other ideologue has done more than the late Bernard Lewis (1916–2018), most emphatically in his What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002), to posit “Islam” and “the West” as two irreconcilably opposite entities: cultural, civilizational, moral, and normative. Based on Lewis’s ideas, Samuel Huntington later developed his notion of “the clash of civilizations” (1992), which was also predicated on a similar notion of the triumphant victory of “the West” that Huntington’s student Francis Fukuyama had prematurely declared in his End of History thesis (1989) soon after another of his teachers, Alan Bloom, had mourned the decline of “the West” in Closing of the American Mind (1987). Compared to these senior scholars, Niall Fergusson is a relative newcomer, whose hefty volumes have exacerbated that tension and hostility between “Islam” and “the West” by upping the ante in books like Civilization: The West and the Rest (2012). The binary was and remains so powerful that even the master of deconstruction, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, fell into its trap when sitting for a conversation that would later appear as Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (2008). The active hostility is therefore not something presumed merely on the daily headlines. It extends deeply into the scholarly and intellectual debates of our time. Predicated on bad history, the metaphors assume allegorical and even philosophical power.

To be sure, in the more recent scholarship that categorical binary has been studied in far more critical terms and its underlying assumptions exposed and discredited. The publication of two significant books in 2015 marks a turning tide in the understanding of Islam as the doppelgänger of something beyond its own internal dynamics and history. Predicated on the groundbreaking work of Edward Said, Sophia Rose Arjana’s Muslims in the Western Imagination (2015) and Joseph Massad’s Islam in Liberalism (2015) bring out the place of Muslims and Islam in the making of “Western liberalism.” These two polemical books and the body of scholarship they best represent are markedly positioned against the sort of scholarship represented by Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and Niall Fergusson. Arjana’s and Massad’s studies expose the central significance of “Islam” as a definitive trope that has enabled the fictive fetish of “the West.” Their books are studies in kind. They reciprocate argument by argument and document how “Islam” has been essentialized into an antagonistic trope, but stop short of taking “Islam” out of the scare quotation marks and placing it in its own historical dynamics. Two ancillary tasks remained: (1) taking “Islam” and “the West” into two respective historical domains that demythologize and historicize what they refer to and designate, and (2) subjecting the very “Islam and the West” binary itself to deconstructive scrutiny to overcome its corrosive power.

The kinds of deconstructive gestures that Edward Said and his followers have made, crucial as they have been in their time, have also paradoxically (not intentionally) strengthened the metaphoric power of “the West” and thus critically compromised the path ahead for an entirely different mode of emancipatory thinking that seeks to dismantle, not to merely criticize, “the West.” The same is true of “Orientalism in reverse,” a concept advanced by critical thinkers ranging from the Syrian intellectual Sadik Jalal al-Azm to Lebanese academic Gilbert Achcar, which has used that false cross-essentialization to discredit the whole colonial interjection between Eurocentric Marxism and Europhobic nativism evident in militant Islamism. If for Said and his followers their reading of colonialism has overtaken and overshadowed the global operation of capitalism, for their critics their mechanical reading of capitalism has vitiated the centrality of colonialism—and thus their legitimate critique of nativist Islamism borders dangerously with Islamophobia. In between these two diametrically opposed and ossified positions stands the monumental intellectual legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, whose liberating Marxism overcame Marx’s colonial blind spot—which Said had exposed—and foreshadowed the field of postcolonial theory by half a century. For my way of thinking, the critical fusion of the best of Marx and the best of Said is found in Rosa Luxemburg.

To keep recentering the metaphor of “the West” will continue to conceal the liberating thinking that the pre-Islamist and pre-Western history of the Mediterranean world and its larger frame of references entails, as, I contend, the post-Islamist and post-Western world anticipates. I am therefore not concerned with the fact that manufacturing a fictive “Islam” or “Orient” was definitive to the discursive construction of “the West” in general or “Western liberalism” in particular. My concern is rather with the manner in which the binary itself disappears once placed against a longer historical context, both before and after the colonial construction of the “Islam and the West” liaison. In addition to that act of necessary historicity, I also propose that the very constitution of “the West” functioned as a Freudian illusion, perforce making catalytically illusory any other abstraction like “the East” or “Islam” that it touches to cross-authenticate itself. The culprit, in other words, is “the West” itself, the false consciousness of capitalist modernity that has been pulling this smokescreen around itself and all its alterities to camouflage the historical foregrounding of its moral and material forces of self-consciousness and resistance. Seeking to dismantle that false consciousness is precisely to restore that self-consciousness and its ancillary historical agency.

In this task, I have taken my point of departure from Frantz Fanon’s famous phrase that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” That phrase places our critical dismantling of the “Islam and the West” binary at the forefront of contemporary postcolonial history and theory. I therefore balance Fanon’s insight with Edward Said’s fixation with how the Orientals and Muslims were imagined in “the Western imaginary,” of both the liberal and the conservative vintage. This twist will bring us closer to the crucial postcolonial critique of Eurocentric knowledge production, but it will also allow us enough distance to understand the structural transformation of the European bourgeois public sphere on which much of this Orientalism took place. I therefore propose moving beyond that dialectic and working toward the dynamics of a transnational public sphere that these European developments generated, upon which postcolonial subjects have been formed, and from which they are yet to be liberated. Bringing down the false binary of “Islam and the West” is the first crucial step in that emancipation.

Reorienting History, Reimagining Geography, Liberating the Postcolonial Subject”

To dismantle the terrible binary of “Islam and the West” we must overcome the intentional and unintentional consequences of the false interface. 

Edward Said’s Orientalism is about “the West,” not about “the Orient”—and as such, it helps fetishize “the West.” We need to be liberated from that fetish. Via a systematic reorientation of our historical consciousness, in this book I am after a liberation of the postcolonial subject from the very notion of “Islam and the West,” instead of further exacerbating the fortification of “the West” by relentlessly criticizing what I consider to be a dead interlocutor. We need to see how Fanon’s concern was less about the place of the Orient in the European imagination, while Said was entirely fixated with that location. Fanon’s focus was from the other end and about what “the Third World” counter-invents and calls “the West,” and then how that invention becomes instrumental in the making of a colonized mind and thereafter (I wish to add) an entrapped postcolonial subject. 

Without dismantling this false consciousness and exposing its delusional nexus with an illusory chimera that calls itself “the West,” no Muslim person can ever find peace of presence in being in the world. The issue is no longer critiquing “the West”—for the more you critique it the more you corroborate it. The issue is to overcome all the binary oppositions this “West” has historically manufactured to center and believe in itself—most specifically “Islam and the West.”

My primary concern in overcoming the ideological, conceptual, and metaphysical force of the formula “Islam and the West” therefore points toward examining the historical circumstances that have been colonially constituted and then periodically reconditioned, and thereby refocusing our attention on the real history of people whose lives, experiences, shared memories, institutional affiliations, cultural traits, and intellectual trajectories are radically opposed to any generic meaning that “Islam and the West” could possibly generate and/or entail.

It is now completely useless and in fact counterproductive to continue to insist that “the West” has misrepresented “Islam.” All empires generate a kind of knowledge that sustains them in power and legitimizes that power, and European or American imperialism is no exception. Far more urgent is the dismantling of that false binary that has actively misremembered history and sustained its hegemonic foregrounding of how the world understands itself. 

The proposition of “the West” as an illusion in fact links the insights of Freud to those of Marx and his idea of “false consciousness,” and ultimately to Gramsci’s idea of “hegemony.”

Whatever Marx and Freud wrote and theorized about “religion” is even more poignantly applicable to the religion that capitalist modernity invented and called “the West.” They were both theorizing “the West,” the very prototype of “religion” that was defining their age, entirely unbeknownst to themselves.

If we thus subject Marx to a Freudian and Freud to a Marxist reading of each other, we see them both deeply engaged in revealing “the West” as the single most potent illusion that had indeed clouded even their own theorization of “religion.” They were pitch perfect in their theorization—not of “religion,” but rather of “the West” as the single most convoluted myth of their own time, and in which they were themselves integral and implicated.

Rooted in this reading of Marx and Freud, Fanon and Said, one against and for the other, once we look at them through the bold insights of W. E. B. Du Bois, I wrote this book to map out the argument that the “Islam” of “Islam and the West” is a fetishized fiction the Muslim ideologues have wholeheartedly bought into, a chimeric delusion that has nothing to do with the lived experiences of millions of Muslims living a quiet and mostly dignified life around the globe. But even more to the point, I have written this book to argue that “the West” itself is a commodified fetish that capitalist modernity concocted, like the illusion of the color of white in white supremacy, to rule the world with a metaphor that corresponded to a predatory capitalism it sought to serve and sustain in power.

The desire to render the condition of capitalist modernity as preternatural translated into the fetishization of its paramount commodified ideology of “the West and the Rest.” The unfolding Islamophobia plaguing France as I write this conclusion, and the enduring Islamophobia that culminated in the nefarious hatred in Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, are the most recent examples of the “Islam” that the fictive binary of “Islam and the West” has produced. Muslims trapped inside this Stockholm Syndrome who have internalized this “Western” gaze and continue to keep justify themselves accordingly are integral to this systematic distortion of their own faith too. In this book I have sought a deeper and more historical understanding of how and why this dangerous fiction of “Islam and the West” has come about, how it finally self-imploded, and how and upon what specific features of a transnational public sphere do we have the evidence of a far more liberating conception of our contemporary history, of Muslims and their history, and of the changing demography of people all over this earth.

Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi, pp. (ebook version), 2022