Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Deepa Kumar
the most notable progress in civilization, it is essential to know the political history of the Greeks, the Latins, the Teutons, and the Celts principally.18
In sum, the Orientalist view of the East as it emerged in the nineteenth century was based on a racial and civilizational vilification of Muslims. This is not, however, to suggest that Orientalist scholarship existed or was used in colonial contexts without contradiction. There were Orientalists who rejected notions of racial superiority; at the same time, however, they agreed that race was a useful category of analysis. There were those who admired Islam and others who disparaged it; some actively aided the colonial mission while others saw themselves as producing objective knowledge. Orientalist ideas were used differently in various contexts. Put simply, the relationship between Orientalist thought and the project of empire-building is complex.
However, it is undeniable that the aforementioned assumptions underlying all Orientalist scholarship lend themselves well to the call for colonial conquest. The worldview proposed by the Orientalists is one in which the “West” is seen as a dynamic, complex, and ever-changing society that cannot be reduced to its key religion or any other single factor, while the “Orient” or the “world of Islam” is presented as unchanging, barbaric, misogynistic, uncivilized, and despotic. The only logical conclusion that flows from this is that it is the responsibility of the West to intervene in these static societies and bring about change. The West had acquired a superiority complex and the rest of the world would have to submit to its dictates.
These ideas may have served to justify French and English conquest of the Middle East and North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was the United States that breathed new life into them after World War II. Even today, variations of these ideas can be found in American society. For instance, books like Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind,19 which was used by the US military to devise the torture techniques used in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, are a reassertion of homo islamicus. Modern-day Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have argued that the conflict between the United States and the Middle East is a “clash of civilizations.” According to Huntington, who has done much to popularize this notion, “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic societies.”20 In the following chapter, we will explore the continuity of the classical Orientalist corpus. Here we turn to American imperialism and its vision of empire and language of domination.
American Imperialism
Prior to the nineteenth century, very little was known in the United States about the “Muslim world.” America’s conquests focused more on continental expansion into the West and Southwest; other parts of the world did not matter very much. In the eighteenth century, Americans’ key sources of information about the Middle East were One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the King James Bible.21 The political elite that founded and oversaw the American nation “after 1776 regarded the Muslim world, beset by oriental despotism, economic squalor, and intellectual stultification, as the antithesis of the republicanism to which they had pledged their sacred honor.”22
Greater familiarity with the Middle East in the nineteenth century came from visitors to the Holy Land and from missionaries. Mark Twain, who went on to become a staunch anti-imperialist, wrote in 1869 about his trip to the Holy Land in a book titled The Innocents Abroad, which sold nearly a hundred thousand copies.23 While Twain witheringly (and hilariously) critiqued his fellow travelers for their hubris and lack of cultural sensitivity—a characteristic of American tourists that would continue into the next century and become grist for the Hollywood mill—he also had harsh words to say about Muslims. He called them “a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious,” and saw the Ottomans as “a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, [and] Blood.”24
Romantic notions of the Orient dominated popular culture. Illustrated versions of The Arabian Nights were widely sold, as were books about the Prophet that presented the Arab world as backward and savage. In addition to novels and travelogues, a series of other popular media such as fairs and exhibitions, photographs, and theme parks transferred Europe’s exotic image of the East to the United States.25 In nineteenth-century Europe the Orientalist image and the exotic one coexisted, and the US audience readily adopted the latter. For instance, the American painter Frederick Bridgman produced dozens of sexually charged paintings of the East in line with those of his mentor, the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, famous for his paintings The Snake Charmer and The Slave.26 Hollywood would further these exotic images in early silent films such as The Arab (1915), Cleopatra (1917), Salome (1918), and An Arabian Knight (1920), among others. Rudolph Valentino played a “Lawrence of Arabia”–type sheik in two films, The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Sheik (1926), which among other things presented the East as sexually charged.
Outside of culture, in the realm of politics, little systematic knowledge was accumulated about the East. The American Oriental Society was founded in 1842, but it was not until World War II that the United States began to approach the study of the Middle East systematically, as Europe had.27 Prior to this point, the relatively few US scholars who studied Islam and the East did so primarily through the lens of Orientalism and were situated in departments or institutes of “Near East studies” or “Oriental studies.”28 European Orientalists held cultural prestige within the field.29
The end of the Second World War changed this situation, as the United States emerged from the war as the strongest Western power. It set out to take the place of Britain and France in the Middle East and establish its dominance over the region. To do so, however, the United States needed information to guide its policy. At first, it could rely only on young men who had grown up in the region, children of missionaries or university professors, known as “Arabists.” But in the context of the Cold War, and with the development of national liberation movements, the elites needed reliable information to further their interests in the region. The government and private foundations began to sponsor and fund “area studies” programs and departments that focused on the study of not only the Near East but also more broadly Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was in this context that US universities turned toward the production of knowledge instrumental to serving the needs of empire. Two approaches guided the study of the Middle East: Orientalism, which was still dominated by philologists, and social scientific research, from which a new model known as “modernization” would be developed.
Prominent Orientalist scholars from Europe crossed the Atlantic to take up academic positions at US universities during the postwar era. H. A. R. Gibb, who was central to the development of the Orientalist approach in the United States, left Oxford to take a position at Harvard University in 1955. Gustave von Grunebaum, the Austrian Orientalist, influenced a new generation of scholars at the University of Chicago and then UCLA.30 Between them they brought Orientalist modes of analysis to the United States and continued the work of influential late-nineteenth-century Orientalists like Ernest Renan. Gibb, for instance, argued that the “Arab mind” and the “Muslim mind” had an essence that could be grasped by reading the classical texts of Islam. Grunebaum argued that a static Islamic culture could help explain all contemporary phenomena. Such sweeping generalizations, characteristic of Orientalist scholarship, were influential in the United States because they provided a quick and easy way to grasp a large and complex region.
In the ensuing decades, Orientalism was challenged by social scientific research to such a degree that Gibb acknowledged some of the shortcomings of the Orientalist method and urged social scientists and Orientalists to work together.31 However, despite the publication of a number of works critical of its assumptions and methods in the period after the 1970s, Orientalism survived. Bernard Lewis, the British Orientalist, can be credited with continuing the legacy and influence of Orientalism. Lewis accepted a position at Princeton University in 1974 and has been a key figure in Orientalist thought in the United States ever since.
The United States, however, could not simply accept in toto the language of the old empires. Its own anticolonial history meant that there were voices in the political sphere that resisted the mantle of imperialism. Even though it entered the imperial arena with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the “issue of self-rule was so deeply emplaced