Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (14 page)

In Algeria and Morocco, after the wars of independence, the veil spread to new classes, aspiring to a higher status. But especially as it was adopted by the North African urban bourgeoisie, the veil also sent a signal of Islam-based nationalism, in opposition to France. Since France represented the West, the veil became a symbol of resistance to the West.

Veils come in different styles. The Iranian veil merely disguises the contours of the body. The Taliban veil made the woman’s body disappear altogether. Behind this lies a rather unflattering notion of male sexuality. A man is like a wolf with women. Left on their own, men and women are bound to be engaged in sex. Only the veil protects the woman and gives her a spiritual dimension. This grim view would not surprise an ultra-orthodox Jew, who is haunted by similar fears of male lust and female seduction. The veil, then, belongs to the Manichaean idea that flesh and the spirit are in a constant state of tension.

The exposed women of the West are the very negation of this idea, which is why they are regarded by devout Muslims, or indeed ultra-orthodox Jews, as whores and their men as pimps. To put it hyperbolically, Western women (and their “Westernized” counterparts everywhere) are the temple prostitutes in the service of Western materialism. The sexual morality of the West, or rather the lack of it, makes Western life look depraved, even animal-like. Sayyid Qutb makes this point: “In all modern
jahili
societies, the meaning of ‘morality’ is limited to such an extent, that all those aspects which distinguish man from animal are considered beyond its sphere. In these societies, illegitimate sexual relationships, and even homosexuality, are not considered immoral. The meaning of ethics is limited to economic affairs or sometimes political affairs, which fall into the category of ‘government interests.’ ”

There is not much sense in pinning down what the Muslim, or the orthodox Jewish, attitude to women really is. In Islam such a question would lead to a battle of quotations from canonical texts, which then results in further battles of interpretation and misinterpretation. Verse 223, from the chapter
The Cow
in the Qur’an, which states that “women are your fields; go, then, into your fields as you please,” was read by some as permission for husbands to choose freely their favorite kind of sex, and impose it on their wives. But there is nothing as infuriating as outsiders invading your intimate texts and telling you what they are supposed to mean to you. The interpretation of verse 223 is such an intrusion. The point here is not the status of women in Islam, however, but the way Islamic Occidentalists view the women of the West, and by implication the men of the West.

Morteza Motahhari was a leading figure in the Islamic revolution in Iran. His death made the Ayatollah Khomeini cry in public, and call him “the fruit of my life.” He was obsessed with the West and with the issue of women. It was important to him to prove how much more humane and considerate Islam and the East were, in this regard, than the West. He firmly believed that the obvious differences between man and woman were deliberately obliterated in the West, so that women could be exploited more easily in the interests of capitalism. He observed that Bertrand Russell hoped to solve the “shortage” of marriageable men by promoting the immoral idea of single parenthood for women, instead of taking up the moral Muslim practice of polygamy.

This, however, is still in the realm of cultural criticism, not Occidentalism. But the idea that woman is “the protected jewel” in man’s crown, and bestows honor on the man by the way he defends her, does feed into Occidentalism. The veil is part of this. Being oblivious to one’s role as the guardian of the “jewel” is to be without honor or, more disturbingly, without even a sense of honor. Western permissiveness, to the believers, shows not just a lack of morality, but a lack of the most basic sense of honor.

 

 

 

PURITANISM AND POLITICS ARE NOT A NEW COMBINATION in Islam. A puritan preacher and a warlord in the Najd plateau, in central Arabia, created a formidable alliance in the middle of the eighteenth century. They were Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Muhammad Ibn Saud. The followers of Abd al-Wahhab used to describe themselves as the Muahhidun, those who strictly believe in monotheism (
tawhid
). But others called them the Wahhabis and this nickname stuck.

Wahhabism was an expression of religious zeal against popular religion in Arabia, where the tombs of saints had become the focus of fetishistic cults, which were far removed from strict monotheism. The idea was to purify Arabia, as the cradle of Islam, from idolatry, and to create an Islamic state based on the positive law of Islam, as interpreted by the Hanbali school, regarded as the strictest legal school in Islam. The puritanical Wahhabis were especially strict in their attitudes about sexual morality and other matters of personal life. Interestingly, Wahhabi Islam was puritanical in another sense too, more akin to Protestant Puritanism: the duty of the believer to think over his religious commitments and not accept them blindly. It won’t help the believer, said Abd al-Wahhab, to tell the angels on the Day of Judgment that he is repeating the words of others.

When Ibn Saud of Dariyah adopted the Wahhabi creed, preacher and warrior were united in their quest to conquer Arabia. The alliance between the Ibn Saud family and Wahhabism continued after the death of the founder, and in 1803 their forces conquered Mecca and formed a Saudi-Wahhabi state, only to be defeated by the Ottoman army from Cairo in 1818. The Saudi state was then established in Najd, one small fraction of Arabia, and defeated again by the Rashid clan in 1891. Then, in 1902, Abd al-Aziz II Ibn Saud conquered the town of Riyadh and, by shrewdly siding with the British in World War I, was able to regain the territories of the original Saudi state with its holy cities. Wahhabism became the official ideology, designed to shape a puritanical Muslim society.

A great deal of sand has moved in Arabian deserts since the British were able to buy influence with the Saudis by sending them three thousand rifles, four machine guns, and five thousand pounds. Oil brought untold riches to the land, and this put the Wahhabi state under tremendous strain, for it is hard to maintain puritanism when thousands of Saudi princes are suddenly among the richest people on earth. The solution is a kind of officially sanctioned hypocrisy. A semblance of Wahhabism is kept up in public while the rich enjoy all that the West can offer in the privacy of their grand palaces. And what Riyadh cannot supply, palaces in London will have in abundance.

This has been accompanied by something more lethal. Even as the princes enjoyed all the Western luxuries, Wahhabism was exported abroad, and with it a fiery brand of Occidentalism. Saudi Arabia is now the prime source of fundamentalist, puritanical ideology, affecting Muslims everywhere, from North Africa to Indonesia. Oil money is used to promote religious radicalism around the world while the Saudi princes live in an uneasy truce with the clergy at home. But hypocrisy is an unstable solution, for it has given rise to true Wahhabi believers, such as Osama bin Laden, who view the presence of American women soldiers in Arabia as an act of defilement. To him, and his followers, it is as if the Americans were sending their temple prostitutes to defend the unmanly rulers of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism has been exported, not just as a form of puritanical revivalism, but as a virulent Occidentalist creed, which will come back to haunt the rulers of the very holy places whence it sprang.

T
HEODOR HERZL, FOUNDING FATHER OF THE ZIONIST movement, was not a gifted novelist. Nevertheless, his novel,
Altneuland (Old-New Land),
is one of the most remarkable books of the twentieth century. Although Herzl finished it in 1902, the visionary ideas expressed in this “fairy tale,” as he called it, belonged firmly in the century before.
Altneuland
is a blueprint for the perfect Jewish state, a technocratic Utopia, a socialist dream with all the advantages of capitalism, an idealistic colonial enterprise, a model of pure reason, a “light unto the nations.”

By the 1920s, in Herzl’s tale, Jerusalem would be transformed into a thoroughly modern metropolis, “intersected by electric street railways; wide, tree-bordered streets; homes, gardens, boulevards, parks; schools, hospitals, government buildings, pleasure resorts.” Arab and Jew would live happily together in the New Society, working in vast “co-operative syndicates.” And all the nations of the world would meet in Jerusalem at the Palace of Peace.

The real Jerusalem, where one of us lives, and where we both worked on this book in the fall of 2002, is rather different. The streets of the old walled city are silent; shops are boarded up; dignified old tourist guides, bereft of clients, softly beg for a little cash. Only ultra-orthodox Jews still venture into the medieval streets. In the modern western areas of the city, men armed with machine guns stand guard in front of cafés and restaurants. Hotels are empty, abandoned by the tourist trade. You never know where the next bomb attack will strike: on a bus, in a cinema, or in a discotheque. Arabs do their necessary jobs, cleaning Israeli floors, building Israeli houses, mending Israeli roads, and then scurry back to their homes, each one, in the eyes of a fearful population, a potential suicide bomber. An edgy silence haunts the streets, broken, periodically, by the sirens of police cars or ambulances.

Israel has to bear some of the responsibility for this menacing atmosphere. You cannot humiliate and bully others without eventually provoking a violent response. Palestinians have been treated badly by Jews and Arabs alike. The daily sight of Palestinian men crouching in the heat at Israeli checkpoints, suffering the casual abuse of Jewish soldiers, explains some of the venom of the
intifadas.
But Israel has also become the prime target of a more general Arab rage against the West, the symbol of idolatrous, hubristic, amoral, colonialist evil, a cancer in the eyes of its enemies that must be expunged by killing.

Herzl could not possibly have foreseen this, and yet the seeds of tragedy are already buried in his text, which was well meant, deeply idealistic, and in many ways typical of everything Occidentalists find most hateful. The narrative is carried on the cardboard shoulders of three cut-out characters. A misanthropic American millionaire of aristocratic Prussian origin named Kingscourt pays Friedrich Löwenberg, a depressed Viennese Jew, to be his companion on a tropical island. Löwenberg is much like Herzl himself, a disillusioned dandy. The third character is a poor and virtuous eastern European Jew named Littwak. In a moment of guilty generosity, Löwenberg gives his money to Littwak’s family. So here we have them, the good Jew, the anguished Jew, and the rich and unassailable Germanic goy.

In Book One, Kingscourt and Löwenberg interrupt their Mediterranean cruise with a visit to the Holy Land. “Your fatherland,” says Kingscourt to his paid companion; Löwenberg cringes. In Book Two, they revisit the Holy Land about twenty years later and are filled with the wonder of it all. Littwak is now a sturdy pioneer, helping to build the New Society. By the end, in Book Five, Littwak has become the first president of the Jewish state. Löwenberg marries Littwak’s sister and stops anguishing. And Kingscourt, filled with admiration for the New Society, becomes the loving benefactor of Luttwak’s infant son.

The tragedy of this optimistic fairy tale lies not in the story itself, but more in the tone, the fanciful descriptions, and the peculiar justifications for Herzl’s ideals. This is how they find the Holy Land on their first visit, before the Jews have built their New Society: “The alleys [of Jaffa] were dirty, neglected, full of vile odors. Everywhere was misery in bright Oriental rags.” The landscape on the way to Jerusalem is “a picture of desolation.” The people of “the blackish Arab villages looked like brigands. Naked children played in the dirty alleys.”

Jaffa twenty years on is “a magnificent city,” whose “magnificent stone dams showed the harbor for what it was: the safest and most convenient port in the eastern Mediterranean.” Littwak, the happy pioneer, explains: “Never in history were cities built so quickly or so well, because never before were so many technical facilities available. By the end of the nineteenth century, humanity had already achieved a high degree of technical skill. We merely had to transplant existing inventions to this country.”

A bit of Europe, then, transplanted to the desolation that was the Middle East. And with all those technical skills came many of the ideas that were fashionable then: blinkered faith in economic progress; trust in social engineering by the state; a fetishistic taste for power plants and big dams. Here is the Dead Sea, with “mighty iron tubes” jutting from the rocks, “set vertically upon the turbine sheds, resembling fantastic chimneys. The roaring from the tubes and the white foam on the outflowing waters bore witness to a mighty work.”

Löwenberg feels a little overwhelmed, even crushed by “all this greatness.” Not Littwak: “We have not been crushed by the greatness of these forces—it has lifted us up!”

Not only is the New Jerusalem a socially progressive, economically advanced place, but even religion is transformed into something so secular it hardly feels like religion any more. Passover is a time to celebrate the New Society. The song to the Sabbath bride reminds Löwenberg of Heinrich Heine and the great poet’s “Jewish identity.” Contemplating the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, Löwenberg thinks of the right of Jews to feel proud and free.

This is all most gratifying, but what do the Arabs make of it all? What about their traditions, beliefs, and aspirations to be proud and free? Not to mention their “identity.” The question does in fact come up. Kingscourt, impressed as he is by the Zionists’ great achievements, asks an Arab named Reschid Bey whether his people resent the new interlopers on their tribal lands. “What a question!” he replies. “It was a great blessing for us.” The landowners sold their land to the Jews at high prices, and “those who had nothing stood to lose nothing, and could only gain.” Nothing, he continued, was more wretched than an Arab village in the late nineteenth century.