Questions for discussion:
1. What are the similarities and differences between Orientalism and Islamophobia?
2. Do Muslim conceptions of Islam constitute a more accurate representation?
please choose one and indicate which one you answer also same as last week need a discussion question (same writer needed from 55967 and recently did 56928 same writer every week )
Chris lecture slides Orientalism & Islamophobia ANTH3021 Week 10 Lecture plan • Our focus today is on a topic that has been of special interest to anthropology, and that is the problem of the representation of religions. • Case study: Islam • For anthropologists the question of how to write about people is a continuing issue. • Edward Said’s Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978). Said’s work is the first systematic analysis of ‘Islamaphobia.’ Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient 1. Imperialism &Culture • Imperialism is the context that conditions or impresses upon the work of writers, painters and photographers on the Orient. Edward W. Said • “Politics in the form of imperialism bears upon the production of literature, scholarship, social theory and history writing … Therefore I study Orientalism as a dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires – British, French, American – in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced.” • “The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part.” 2. Where, when and what ‘Orient’? • Study is limited to “the Anglo-French-American experience of the Arabs and Islam, which for a thousand years stood together for the Orient” (p. 17), or the “Islamic Orient.” • Said hopes that his insights and method will be taken up and applied to other places and colonial contexts. • Insights: the book has been tremendously productive in inspiring further research, from Western representations of indigenous people, China, to India or even to the Pygmies. • Methodology: Said gives a close reading to selected texts, hoping to show simultaneously how they are both organized by general stereotypes and ideas about the Orient while still possessing the individual imprints of their authors. 3. Weak and Strong Theses • Orientalism is more than just a European (or more recently an American) knowledge of the Orient that is somewhat tinged by the gross historical fact of Western imperialism (weak thesis). • Europe’s Orient is best understood not as a reflection in thought (even a distorted reflection) of a real Orient out there in the world, but as a discourse, that is as a set of propositions or representations that derive their truth value not from correspondence to reality but from the power relations they imply and are implicated in (strong thesis). • “Orientalism is a style of thought made upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident.’” 3. Weak and Strong Theses • “Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient: in short, Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient … Without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possible understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient.” • This discourse on the Orient is “never far from the idea of Europe [whose major component is] the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and culture.” • Thus “the orient has helped to define Europe or the West as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” 4. Islam and Orientalism • Said describes the ‘Islamic Orient’ as the subject and creation of Orientalist discourse. Claim is then that the Islam imagined by Orientalism also bears no correspondence to Islam in reality. • This distinction opens up an enormous can of worms about the possibility of different, or of better or worse, or even of ‘true’ or truer representations of Islam. • The subject of Said’s book is Orientalism as a Western system of thought about the Orient and/or Islam, which is intimately related to the Occident’s domination over it. • Argument leads us directly into issues about who can legitimately study or write about Islam or Islamic societies. 5. Key Issues/Problems 1. His collapsing of the distinction between earlier texts about ‘the Orient’ with 19th and 20th century ‘modern Orientalism.’ “Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical and above all, moral apprehension.” 5. Key Issues/Problems 2. His disinterest in investigating (European) representations that imagine the lives of Arabs or Muslims in ways contrary to his identification of Orientalist ideas and metaphors. 3. His disinterest in the interpretive task of readers who bring their own meanings to the texts. He warns “formerly colonized peoples [of] the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others” (p. 25). 6. Vital Questions 1) The problem of representation and ‘writing culture’ per se. 2) The problem of who these discourses constitute 3) The problem of self-representation by the ‘East’ in Orientalist categories (Kemalism, Chinese communism etc). 4) The problematic of ‘indigenous’ [self] knowledge: that is, the question and politics of self-representation. What of claims that only a Muslim can research Islamic society (Islamic anthropology)? What about non-religious Muslims and their analyses of Islam? Do we accept claims about nativity or authenticity as a basis for a legitimate position from which to speak? What of the cultural essentialism posited by such claims? Islamophobia • Orientalism as Islamophobia • Islamophobia in the West might be defined as the relentless cultural representation of Islam in negative terms. • It can be seen as both an extension and a personalization of this Orientalist discourse about Muslim history and society. In it not just Islam but Muslims themselves are now presented as expressions of this civilizational difference and as its carriers in the West. Islam is claimed to engender a worldview among its believers that is “fundamentally incompatible and inferior to Western culture” (Bunzl 2005). • Islamophobia, then, when translated into a political programme or policy, seeks the exclusion of Muslims (individually or collectively) from the actual or imagined geography of the West on the basis of their essentially different and unassimilable nature. Islamophobia • Islamaphobic discourse imagines an Islam marked intrinsically by veiled and subordinated women, and by an anti-modern hostility towards the liberal values of democracy and autonomy -- an Islam portrayed as radically opposed to the civil and cultural norms supposedly possessed by the West. • Remember Pauline Hanson’s call for the banning of Muslim migration to Australia on the grounds of their radical incompatibility with the Australian way of life. Islamophobia • Islamophobia is more than just a development of Orientalism. It involves racism against Muslims in the ‘West’, whereas Orientalism involved the representation of Islam derived from the study of Muslim societies. • Its appropriation of the language of cultural relativism. Anthropology criticized western colonialism for claiming that modern civilization was universal to which every other society had to conform. Instead, it pointed out the value of other ways of life. • Islamophobia twists this critique by agreeing that ‘western values’ are indeed not universal but are the particular cultural heritage of the West. (Remember the recent debates in Australia over the Ramsay Centre). • Islamophobic discourse thus advocates the ‘right’ of Western society and culture to protect itself. Letter to the Editor (The Age): “The question, however, concerns not immigrants’ race but their culture. In the course of our immigration debate it is vital for us to recognize that some cultures offer ideas, values and beliefs which are appropriate in Australian society, while the ideas prevalent in certain other cultures are inappropriate. We are talking about cultures some of which hold drastically different beliefs about moral codes, systems of justice, clerical influence in politics and the law, and women’s rights, as compared with the views of most Australians.” • The idea of cultural difference is used as the backbone for a so- called ‘cultural’ rather than a racial argument for exclusory and discriminatory migration policies. Islamophobia • Islamophobia orientates itself to different political developments in different contexts. • According to Bunzil, in the 2000s the most crucial feature of Islamophobia in Europe concerned Turkey’s possible membership in the European Union. Just because 3% of Turkey happens to be in Europe geographically does not mean that Turkey is a European state … It is a fact that there was no enlightenment and no renaissance in Turkey, those bases of European culture that form the standards of all member states of the EU. In addition, one of the most important values of Europeans, tolerance, does not count in Turkey: there Christians are hassled in any possible way … Not without reason did Libya’s head of state Muammar Gadaffi note that Europe would accept an Islamic Trojan horse if Turkey became a member of the EU. This Trojan horse will not only cause social tensions of never anticipated proportions – also the question of Europe’s Islamization is being kept quiet by the fanatics for membership. Today an estimated 15 million Muslims already live in the member states of the EU. Turkey’s EU accession would certainly be the end of this community and it would also foil the basic idea of the process of European unification … The fact that Turkey is part of NATO and has close economic ties with Europe can be no reason for Turkey’s membership in a union that defines its identity out of a historical tradition (2004) An example of the discourse of the Freedom Party in Austria • This discourse on the essential otherness of Muslims and Islam can be seized upon and appropriated by Muslims themselves. Perhaps the logic of doing so in the first instance is defensive: ‘if you’re going to treat us as different, then we will be different and we’ll make that difference a core aspect of our self-knowledge.’ • Rather than acceding to a position of inferiority, assertive Islamism and Islamophilia argues for the alternative and superior civility of Islam. • In this case Islamist politics becomes a social movement for “the formation of the Muslim subject and agency which has been excluded from modernist [Western] definitions of civilization and history-making” (Göle, 1996: 26). Untitled MAHMOOD MAMDANI Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism ABSTRACT The link between Islam and terrorism became a central media concern following September 11, resulting in new rounds of "culture talk. This talk has turned religious experience into a political category, differentiating