The binary opposition “Islam” and “the West”
A presumed opposition between “Islam” and “the West” corresponds to a particular period of globalized capital when its innate and debilitating contradictions are in need of a fictive center and a global periphery cast as culturally inferior to “the West”—ready for abuse, plunder, and domination. Islam, as the inferior of these two ends, was systematically cast as a deranged culture destined to be ruled by white Christians … A false consciousness, rooted in the nineteenth-century concept of Europe as the epicenter of civilization, continues to rely on its authenticity, especially after 9/11.
Precisely at a time when the whole world testifies to a rise in Islamic militancy, I propose the end of Islamism as one of the most potent political ideologies of the last two hundred years. And exactly at a moment when there is a militant crescendo in defense of “Western civilization,” I suggest the final collapse of that colonial fabrication.
The US campaign against Iraq and the military operation in Afghanistan that immediately preceded and then accompanied it, as well as the illusory battle against terrorism, are not wars targeted against Muslims as Muslims. They are ideological wars against an abstraction code-named “Islam” launched from the premise of an even more vacuous abstraction called “the West… It is true that the populations of these Muslim countries overwhelmingly oppose such aggressions against their fellow Muslims, yet their unelected officials are completely incorporated into the US imperial project.
The increasingly globalized migrations of labor, the amorphous nature of the capital it engenders, and the predatory militarism with which US imperialism is seeking to control and dominate these processes are entirely color-blind and faithless.
The binary opposition “Islam and the West” is a very recent historical construct, born of a particular colonial project, and that with its political function concluded it is now entirely obsolete—having vacated the space it once occupied for a yet-to-be articulated set of alternatively dangerous configurations.
The West” was constituted as a viable civilizational category covering and disguising the economic relation of power between globalized capital and abused labor.
Both classical Orientalism and neo-Orientalism have been instrumental in fabricating, perpetuating, and authenticating this binary opposition.
The cross-categorization of “Islam and the West” thus survived [Edward] Said’s intervention, first and foremost because the material basis of its continued validity persisted… Said, due to his own invested interest in Enlightenment humanism, fell short of fully exposing the barbarity that European capitalist modernity has perpetrated upon the world.
Neil Lazarus rightly took the whole postcolonial project coagulating around the concept of “the West” to task:
One of the anchors of the postcolonialist critique, latent in the very term “Eurocentrism,” has been the fetish of “Europe” or “the West.” . . . The concept of “the West” as it is used in postcolonial theory, I want to argue, has no coherent or credible referent. It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one, just as—in the context of modern Orientalist discourse—“Islam” is an ideological category masquerading as a religious one.
Critical thinkers like Lazarus have rightly underlined the fetishized commodity that calls itself “the West” and correctly criticized those postcolonial theorists who have further contributed to this fetishization… The transmutation of Islam into a metaphor is the by-product of the fetishized commodity that calls itself “the West”.
But what Lazarus disregards, and I underline, is that the fetishization of “the West” did not begin with Said or his followers. It began with “the West” itself—with the ideologues of its own capitalist modernity.
Said was not a Marxist and had no such claims either. He was a literary critic through and through, with ingrained liberal proclivities dominant on North American campuses, of which he was an illustrious product. His problem was to take the self-fetishization of “the West” on face value and set upon himself the task of mapping out the contours of its catalytic effect, and he did that task marvelously, but never turning to the material foregrounding of this “Western” self-fetishization as its most potent ideological commodity.
The factual relation of power and production had implicated a fictitious center-periphery binary that Said never cared to dismantle. I do—and once we do that, a globalized pattern of the abuse of labor by capital emerges that is identical in its central European theater as it is at its falsely peripheralized domains in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Colonialism, as I always tell my students at Columbia, is not something that happens “over there,” and capital something that is accumulated “over here.” Colonialism is something that happens here, there, and everywhere. Sweatshops in a Manhattan garment industry neighborhood are as abusive of cheap labor as they are in Guatemala or Honduras. The beneficiaries of the capital are as much in New York, London, and Paris as they are in Cairo, Buenos Aires, or Delhi.
The ideological commodification of “Islam,” when placed right next to this commodified “West,” was not the work of Orientalists alone. Muslim ideologues themselves, from Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, through Muhammad Abduh, down to Ali Shari’ati, were integral to this project…
As a fetishized totem, “the West” fetishizes everything else it touches, guts it out of its historical complexities and by the power of its hegemony turns it into an illusion too.
With the commencement of the spiral crescendo of migratory labor and refugees mutating into globalized capital, that binary opposition that once categorically separated the colonial from the capital is no longer valid or operative—nor is any illusory cultural or civilizational divide that was presumed to accompany it.
Ideology
It has become something of a refrain that “Islam” is in existential opposition to “modernity” and thus to the West. In Gilles Kepel’s estimation, for example, representing a wide spectrum of sentiments in Europe and the United States, the principal purpose of these Islamist movements is toward the establishment of “a global Islamic state based solely on a strict interpretation of the Koran.” I believe that such assumptions, and indeed the generic sentiments that they represent, are wrong. In such analysis “the West” is an innocent bystander, minding its own business, when suddenly erupts this insane “Islam” targeting its venom against it. These are flawed arguments. “Islam and the West” are just one unit. They must be considered together, as two sides of the same outdated coin.
Representing a wider range of similar sentiments, Gilles Kepel’s book traces the rise of Islamist political movements in the late twentieth century, beginning with the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1970s, continuing with the mobilization of Islamist movements in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the 1980s, and concluding with his assessment of the most recent, and more violent, manifestations of the phenomenon at the threshold of the twenty-first century. I believe such decidedly short and selective time spans are historically flawed, analytically limited, and as such theoretically misguided and misleading. “Islam and the West” are not two different phenomena. They are coterminous, both the outcome of an identical colonial condition, in need of a postcolonial critique—simultaneously.
The current resurgence of the contradiction posited between “Islam” and “the West,” I conclude, is a ruse political posture hiding a much more potent geopolitics of power.
Any assessment of the rise of militant Islamism must be in a frame of reference that does not picture Islamic societies in a historical vacuum.
Memory
We need to go back to the earliest literary, philosophical, and historical evidence of our global history to retrieve a reading of our contemporary realities rooted in facts and evidence, informing an alternative vision of how we arrived at this point in our tumultuous history.
It is imperative for us to locate the specific imperial context in which “Islam and the West” came to be and abort any false extension of it into worlds where the concepts could not possibly belong.
Today Alexander’s conquests are falsely taken as a point of contestation between “the West and the East.” It was no such thing.
The West” has neither a presence nor any reference in this world. Darius I’s invasion of Greece (492 BC), the subsequent Battle of Marathon (490 BC), and the Battle of Salamis with Xerxes I (480 BC), now entirely ahistorically read as the hostile encounter between “East and West,” must also all be seen in that categorically different regional and global context, informed by regional geopolitics. It is important to keep in mind that in this era Thebes sided with Persia during Xerxes’s invasion of Greece (480 BC), as in fact later Sparta too allied itself with Persia (412 BC). Therefore, before Alexander finally defeats Darius III in 333 BC we have a much more complicated geopolitics of the region than an “East versus West” paradigm would warrant.
As the center of gravity in the Muslim-majority world eventually shifted from the west in Baghdad to Khorasan in the east under the Seljuqids, “Europe” (still nowhere near its future imperial self-consciousness) plunged into a self-destructive period and was in no position to posit an alterity for the triumphalist Islam and Muslims.
From the First Crusade (1096–1099) to the Fourth Crusade (1201–1204) and the Sack of Constantinople (1204), to the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), to the Great Famine (1315–1317) and Black Death (1347–1352), these cataclysmic events dismantled the very assumption of a European identity or alterity. The very idea of “Europe” was still very much in flux, at a time when the center of the Muslim-majority world had moved east to Transoxiana. The twain simply did not exist, let alone meet.
My footnote:
[The Castilian knight El Cid (d. 1099) fought with both Christian and Muslim armies].
[Ian Almond also records such alliances between Christians and Muslims in Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians Across Europe's Battlegrounds (I.B.Tauris 2009)]
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Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in this city [Constantinople] and the multiple empires it celebrated. The binary of “Islam and the West” was alien within all these contexts. The followers of these three so-called world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were integral to multiple Mediterranean cultures both successively and simultaneously. The assumption that Judaism and Christianity (let alone that fictitious construct called “Judeo-Christian heritage”) are “Western” and stand opposite to Islam is constitutionally flawed and entirely ahistorical.
[During the conquest of Spain, the Muslim commander Tariq ibn Ziyad] landed at Gibraltar at the invitation of heirs of the late Visigoth King Witica (Witiza) who had asked Ibn Ziyad to help him get rid of his internal rivals. Ibn Ziyad used the occasion to form a North African inroad into Spain… The Arab conquest of Sicily was aided by Euphemius, a Byzantine naval commander rebelling against the emperor.
In each and every one of such military encounters between Muslims and non-Muslims there were multiple Mediterranean military forces engaging in rival conquests, thereby mapping entirely different geopolitics of the region than “Islam versus the West.
The very words we use today in describing these events—Muslims, Europe, etc.—are now completely tainted by the much later colonial coloring of history.
Between the rise of Islam in the mid-seventh century and the last three Muslim empires of the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans, the single most important empire, holding much of the civilized world together, was the Mongols, whose political apparatus was held together by Genghis Khan’s code of law, the Yassa (not the Qur’an), with Persian (not Arabic) as the courtly language of their royal historiography.
During these long and formative periods “the West” as a conceptual category, a civilizational assumption, did not even exist to posit an alterity to “Islam,” which was itself not yet fetishized into a monolithic abstraction. In this false formulation, “Islam” becomes a monolithic entity, as Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Indians, Central Asians, and others are all wrapped up together; their political and intellectual histories are collapsed upon each other, their inner conflicts and alternative solidarities with Jewish, Christian, or Mediterranean communities camouflaged.
The rise of “Islam and the West” as a de-formative and dangerous binary happens entirely in the fateful encounter of the last Muslim empires and the encroaching global domination of European empires, which takes us from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
Illusion
Freud: “What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. . . . Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.
I expand it from Freud’s application to “religion” to the very idea of “the West,” which having assumed metaphysical proportions fits perfectly with his conception of the term. As Freud says specifically, “One may describe as an illusion the assertion made by certain nationalists that the Indo-Germanic race is the only one capable of civilization.
The illusory power of this “West” is at the root of its hegemony, and thus any other “civilization” or entity it perforce encounters turns that too into an illusion. So the “Islam” we see facing the mirror of the illusion “the West” also has been turned into an abstract illusion, robbed of its historical vicissitudes, complexities, and conflicting realities. “Islam and the West” are two sides of the same illusory concoction, which fits perfectly with Freud’s definition of the term.
“The West” thus becomes a secular religion with capitalist modernity as its liturgical substance, the ideology of its imperial conquests, the emblem of its white supremacy and civilizing mission, with “Islam” as its chief nemesis.
This particular illusion they call “the West” is a false ideological camouflage seeking to center the world in a fictive field termed “Europe,” thereby morally, imaginatively, and materially subjugating the world at large to its self-raising, other-lowering hegemonies. “The illusion itself,” as Freud says, “sets no store by verification,” for it does not exist except as an ideology of conquest and control. Anything else this “West” touches—Islam, Asia, Africa, Latin America—it turns into illusory constructs as well, bereft and robbed of their historical realities.
The Battle of Poitiers was indeed a victory for the Franks and a defeat for Abd al-Rahman—but it had no serious consequence in either of the two sides. Thanks to much ahistorical militaristic romance, however, and accompanying delusional historiography, today it is remembered as one of the most fateful events in European (and therefore world) history.
The Mozarabic Chronicle [of 754] does indeed refer to “Europeans” but not in the sense that we understand the term today. The term European was entirely ambiguous at this point, compared with the term Christian, celebrating this victory.
It was left for Voltaire (1694–1778) and Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) to think of the Battle of Poitiers in grandiloquent terms of Europe becoming potentially Muslim or put under the “yoke of the Koran,” as Gibbon put it. He dreaded that the Qur’an would be taught at Oxford. Well, the Qur’an is today taught throughout European and US universities—and the earth has not stopped spinning around or circling the sun.
The British historian Edward Shepherd Creasy (1812–1878), whose book The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo (1851) prominently features the Battle of Poitiers. Again, the obscure battle is being reimagined for the British imperial heritage. From there we get to the US president Theodore Roosevelt, who in his book Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916) invoked the memory of the Battle of Poitiers and cited Charles Martel as his great champion. From there it is only a short distance to the retired US Army lieutenant colonel and former member of the US House of Representatives Allen West (born 1961) who in 2011, again as Alessandro Barbero reports, defended the US invasion of Iraq by citing Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours. Among his illustrious deeds while serving in Iraq is the torture and fake execution of an Iraqi inmate. It is not accidental that in every imperial, colonial, and militaristic turn in Euro-American history Charles Martel and his Battle of Poitiers pop up as sanctified talismans of militaristic rituals.
Thus in every atrocity of French fascist, colonial, and racist adventurism, Charles Martel and his Battle of Poitiers have served the most notorious forces laying a white supremacist claim on the continent and its colonial possessions and racist practices.
But the appeal of Charles Martel to European fascists is not limited to France or the French:
This sinister historical crush extends far beyond France. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian neo-Nazi who slaughtered 77 people in 2011, claimed in his online rants to have “identified” with the figure of Charles Martel.
Ahistorical and immaterial, these two opposing metaphors are entirely apathetic about the lived experiences of billions of human beings—Muslim, Jews, Christians, or otherwise—who in fact populate the defiant facts camouflaged by these two false and falsifying illusions. The “Islam” of this “Islam and the West” has scarcely anything to do with the common faith of some 1.5 billion human beings who consider themselves Muslims. The “West” of this “Islam and the West” has even less to do with the lived experiences of a plurality of cultures and convictions of even more millions of people forced into the illusion of “the West.
Two Falsifying Mirrors
The belief in “the West” is even more metaphysical and unworldly than any true believer ever thought of Islam or any other faith. The real illusion is this “West.”
How can a religion of more than 1.5 billion people spread over five continents and developed over fourteen hundred years be considered one solid thing set at odds with an imaginative geography only recently invented and called “the West”?
Today “the West” is no longer a geography; it is a set of imaginary normative mores, a constellation of a colonizing idea, a set of supremacist sentiments, a space of vaguely interrelated cultural convictions and imperatives presumed to be somewhere between Western Europe and North America, with an extension into Australia and New Zealand and a stopover in Israel and, until the end of apartheid, in South Africa. “The West” is in fact more than anything else a metaphor, an allegory, for European colonialism and all its settler colonies.
Hamid Dabashi, The End of Two Illusions, University of California Press, 2022, pp. 16-55 (ebook edition)
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