Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Deepa Kumar
military, communication, and so on—which led first to European dominance over world trade and then eventually to colonialism and imperialism.
By the eighteenth century, the once-invincible Ottomans lost their ability even to resist European incursions into their territory. The “Muslim world,” no longer a military threat, saw its image shift again—this time into the realm of the exotic. In the early part of the eighteenth century, the epic collection of folk tales One Thousand and One Nights was translated into European languages. Its stories of the “Muslim world” as an exotic and fantastic land populated by genies, harems, and all things enchanting and amusing to Westerners had a great influence on how Europe perceived the Near East. During the Enlightenment, this view shifted yet again as some accurate accounts of Islam began to emerge.
Romanticism and the Enlightenment
The trend toward the exotic was fueled by the growth of Romanticism, an artistic and philosophical movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The image of an exotic Orient associated with “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, [and] intense energy” can be found in the works of musicians, painters, novelists, and philosophers from Mozart to Byron, Hugo, and Goethe.27 To be fair, the Romantics did not only look to the East for the exotic: they also looked to their own past, drawing from Gothic tales and stories of European barbarians. Rodinson summarizes the Romantic vision of the East as “characterized by fierce and lavish scenes in a wild array of colors; harems and seraglios; decapitated bodies, women hurled into the Bosporus in sacks; feluccas and brigantines displaying the Crescent flag; round, turquoise domes and white minarets soaring to the heavens; viziers, eunuchs, and odalisques; refreshing springs under palm trees; giaours with their throats slit; captive women forced into submission by their lustful captors.”28
This wild, sensual, and exotic image of the Orient would coexist with a more accurate representation of Islam during the Enlightenment, the philosophical movement that argued against Christian dogma and for reason and rationality as the means to achieve human progress. However, the Romantic movement rejected the Enlightenment philosophers’ emphasis on rationality and instead valorized emotion, intuition, and imagination. For Romantic poets, philosophers, novelists, and painters, the East was a source of great wisdom and spiritual advancement. They contrasted this image with their own societies, which had lost these qualities in the mad rush to industrialization and capitalist modernity, and drew on Eastern styles of literary expression, architectures, and other such creative arenas.
The Enlightenment saw the birth of scholarship on Islam that was both realistic and sympathetic.29 For instance, in contrast to the vicious medieval demonization of Muhammad, several philosophers published tracts arguing that Muhammad was not an impostor. Voltaire defended Muhammad as a great thinker and founder of a rational religion even as he (and other Enlightenment critics of organized religion) condemned Islam quite acerbically. Daniel explains Voltaire’s contradictory stances: “We must say that Voltaire first thought an attack on Islam useful for an attack on religion generally; and later saw the advantage of treating the facts less passionately, in order to recommend natural religion at the expense of Christian belief.”30 To be sure, the Enlightenment produced contradictory views on Islam and Muslims.
As the next chapter will detail, theories of race began to emerge during this period, and many leading lights of the Enlightenment—such as Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel and Hume—expressed what today are shockingly racist views. The philosopher Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, in his anthology of race in Enlightenment philosophy, argues that while some thinkers were undoubtedly racist, others advanced theories of race that were neutral—and still others were antiracist. Enlightenment thinkers classified human beings into races and in the process produced a schema in which whiteness came to be associated with cultural and racial superiority, while “unreason and savagery was conveniently located among the non-whites.”31 With regard to Muslims, Rodinson argues that the “eighteenth century saw the Muslim East through fraternal and understanding eyes”; during the Enlightenment, “the Muslims were not singled out as being different from other men.”32 This attitude would shift with the rise of European colonialism and the birth of Orientalism—a new body of ideas that served to justify conquest. We turn to this in the next chapter.
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This chapter outlined some of the key shifts in the European image of Islam from the eighth to the eighteenth centuries. This journey through history shows us that at first, between the eighth and eleventh centuries, Muslim incursions into Europe were viewed no differently from other pagan invasions. In fact, the Saracens were believed to be descendants of Abraham and therefore from the same “family” as Christians and Jews. Yet once other pagans integrated into Christian Europe, the powerful Muslim enemy became an “other” that had to be vanquished through holy wars. The papacy sought to unite a fractious Europe under the banner of Christianity as a way to advance its power.
Even in the eleventh century, however, as the Church was propagating hostile images of Islam to mobilize for the Crusades and the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, a favorable image also came into being through the work of European scholars. As they began to retranslate the great works of human knowledge, they came to appreciate the contributions of Eastern scholars. Muslim rule in al-Andalus not only helped foster enormous intellectual leaps, it also marked a period of convivencia or tolerance when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in relative peace.
When Europe, spiritually united under the leadership of the Vatican, began to fracture along national lines, the focus shifted away from the Muslim enemy. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries therefore saw a turn away from polemic toward indifference—until the Ottoman Empire began to advance into Europe in the early sixteenth century, heralding a new threat. This time, however, the enemy was seen as a secular and political threat rather than a religious one. The Ottomans were presented as Europeans of sorts and admired for their many accomplishments; European rulers forged alliances with them against other European rivals. To be sure, such alliances of convenience across religious lines go back even to the era of the Crusades.
The next shift in perception occurred when Europe arose from its long period of historical decline relative to other powers to begin a period of ascendance. The rise of Europe and the relative decline of the Ottomans turned admiration into contempt. The East in general and the Ottomans in particular were seen as inferior to the West and capable only of producing despotic societies. This polemical image then shifted into an exotic one during the Romantic era. This fantasy coexisted with the more accurate visions of Islam produced during the Enlightenment.
In short, contrary to the myth that the West and the East have always been in conflict, conflict has in fact coexisted with cooperation. Far from the notion that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” what we have seen is that the histories of the East and the West, to the extent we can even talk about a singular East and West, are deeply intertwined. At the very least we have to say that such broad geographical and religious characterizations as “Islam and the West” are extremely problematic—not least because the Christian Byzantine Empire thrived in the lands designated as “the East” up until the fifteenth century, and Muslim rule in al-Andalus lasted for about eight hundred years. Thus, the notion of a transhistoric “clash of civilizations” between a united Christian West and a Muslim East is highly flawed.
The history outlined in this chapter also shows that “the West” has not uniformly harbored negative images of Islam. During moments of conflict, political elites mobilized Islamophobia as a means to advance their larger agendas, whether papal supremacy over Europe or the expansionist ambitions of Christian rulers. Islam-bashing has been a useful tool in power politics for a very long time. In the following centuries, during the era of modern colonialism, the demonization of Islam and Muslims continued. This time, however, it was given new legitimacy in the academy and turned into a science.
Chapter 2
Colonialism and Orientalism
When the film Sex in the City 2, set in Abu Dhabi, was released in 2010, several reviewers rightly panned it for its racist stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims. It was as if the producers of the film had gone back to the 1920s, revived the Ali Baba film template, added a few iPhones and five-star hotels as a nod to the modernity of Abu