Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Deepa Kumar
this view of the Middle East as a place that does not change—a place where, despite high technology and consumer luxuries, the people remain static and essentially “Muslim”?
This view of Islam emerges from a body of work known as Orientalism that came into being in the context of European colonization, which reached its peak in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the Ottoman Empire held on to most of its territories during the eighteenth century, in the nineteenth its grip began to loosen.
Imperial nations, particularly Austria and Russia, started to take over Ottoman territories. Additionally, various Christian provinces under Ottoman rule broke away to form new states, notably Greece. The legendary Ottoman Empire was crumbling.
Other Muslim states seemed equally unable to prevent the onslaught of empire. France invaded and occupied Algeria in 1830, and in 1881–83 seized Tunisia as well. In 1882 Britain colonized Egypt, and in 1898 it took over the Sudan. The Ottoman Empire finally collapsed after World War I. The victors of the war divided its territories, and the Middle East in general, amongst themselves. They drew arbitrary borders around new states—Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq, and Palestine among them—which France and Britain dominated through the mandate system. After World War II, the United States began to take over the reins from the old colonial overlords.
It was in this context that Orientalism, an entire field of scholarship dedicated to studying the “Orient,” was born. While institutes for the study of the Orient had been established earlier, they became a growth industry in the nineteenth century. A large body of scholars dedicated themselves to the project of learning the various languages of the East, translating a range of books, and systematically building up knowledge of the Orient.
This chapter looks at the image of the “Muslim world” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as reflected through the language of Orientalism, examining its assumptions and the ways in which Orientalism has served as the handmaiden of colonialism. We will begin by looking at its emergence in France and Britain, and then turn to the United States.
Napoleon and “Enlightened” Colonialism
France was an early pioneer of Orientalist thought. In 1795, the School of Living Oriental Languages was established in Paris. When Napoleon invaded Egypt a few years later, he was able to take with him Orientalists whose knowledge could be put to use for colonial purposes. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 stands out as the first instance when knowledge about the native people became central to a colonizing mission.
This is not to say that knowledge about the enemy was not essential in earlier periods. Even during medieval times, European rulers gathered accurate information about Muslim kingdoms through spies, officials, and informants in order to develop martial strategies. They did not, of course, share this knowledge with the public. Instead, they used the vitriolic rhetoric of the Holy Wars to motivate the Crusades and the Reconquista.1 While this general method persists even in the twenty-first century, what Napoleon’s invasion inaugurated was the systematic use of scholarly knowledge to serve the needs of empire, both abroad and at home.
This model of enlightened colonialism has three aspects. First, the colonizer must prepare thoroughly before launching the invasion so as to be well set up to handle obstacles. Second, it should enlist scholars to work alongside soldiers in the colonizing process. Napoleon took with him about 160 scholars to help with the day-to-day process of colonial administration and create a body of knowledge about Egypt for French use. Third, the colonizing nation must develop a justifying rationale. France, having just thrown off the yoke of its oppressive feudal monarchy, believed its mission to be one of restoring Egypt to its former greatness. We can see here the precursors of what would come to be known as mission civilisatrice,or the “civilizing mission.”
Napoleon was well prepared for this mission, as Edward Said tells us in his classic work Orientalism. Having been fascinated by the Orient from an early age, he had read European writings on the subject extensively, both recent and classical. Said focuses in particular on the French traveler Comte de Volney’s two-volume exposition Voyage to Egypt and Syria. Napoleon found Volney’s assessment of the Near East as a locale for French colonialism particularly useful, as well as his list of obstacles that the colonial mission might encounter. One such obstacle was distrust among Egyptians toward Europeans. Napoleon went on to use Voyage as a colonizing manual.
In his manifesto, which was widely circulated in Egypt, Napoleon tried to win the hearts and minds of Egyptians:
Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion. This is an obvious lie; do not believe it! Tell the slanderers that I have come to you to restore your rights from the hands of the oppressors and that I, more than the Mamluks [who ruled Egypt at the time], serve God . . . and revere His Prophet Muhammad and the glorious Quran. . . . Formerly in the land of Egypt there were great cities, wide canals, and a prosperous trade [sic]. What has ruined all this, if not the greed and tyranny of the Mamluks? . . . Tell your nation that the French are also faithful Muslims. The truth is that they invaded Rome and have destroyed the throne of the Pope, who always incited Christians to make war on Muslims.2
Other than the obvious fabrications about the French being Muslims and destroying the papacy, what is noteworthy about this manifesto is its attempt to win over Egyptians through praise for Islam. Napoleon repeatedly insisted that he was fighting for Islam. He invited sixty Muslim scholars from al-Azhar to his quarters and impressed them with his knowledge of and respect for the Koran. Everything that Napoleon said was translated for popular consumption into Koranic Arabic. This strategy worked: the people of Cairo lost their distrust of the French colonizers.3
When Napoleon left Egypt, he gave strict instructions to his deputy that Egypt was to be administered according to the model he had set: Orientalists were to be consulted before policies could be enacted, and the Muslim religious leaders he had won over also needed to be part of the arsenal of colonial rule. Napoleon charged his small army of scholars with the task of gathering vast amounts of firsthand information about Egypt. As Said writes, a team
of chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians [became] the learned division of the army. Its job was no less aggressive: to put Egypt into modern French. . . . Almost from the first moments of occupation Napoleon saw to it that the Institut [the Egypt Institute set up by him] began its meetings, its experiments—its fact-finding mission, as we would call it today. Most important, everything said, seen, and studied was to be recorded.4
This work resulted in the publication of Description of Egypt, a compendium in twenty-three volumes published between 1809 and 1828. Its detailed information on every aspect of Egyptian society, from monuments to facial structures, was created for use not by Egyptians but by the French. While there is much accurate and valuable information in the Description, the important point that Said makes is that such vast knowledge was amassed without the input of the native people. This account of Egypt, Said argues, served to displace Egypt’s own sense of itself and its place in the world in favor of a French colonial vision of the same. It was ultimately created to help the French dominate the Egyptians.
The French, naturally, did not see their conquest in such base terms as control and domination. Rather, as the quote from Napoleon’s manifesto suggests, their goal was to restore Egypt to its glorious past of “great cities” and “wide canals.” France would, they thought, save a once-great country from ruin and show the natives what they once were and could become again under French tutelage. This paternalistic logic became more developed as the European colonial mission grew; Rudyard Kipling immortalized it in his 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Its French variant, mission civilisatrice, was used to great success to win domestic consent for colonial conquests in a nation founded on the ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, and fraternity).
The French occupied Egypt only until 1801. It was interimperialist rivalry with Britain that ultimately forced them to leave, but Egyptians had also quickly realized that the French did not have their best interests at heart. Nevertheless, this method of colonization was seen as a model to be emulated. After Napoleon, Said writes, the “very language of Orientalism changed radically”; from then on “the Orient was reconstructed, reassembled, crafted,