What is Occidentalism?

Radical Politics and the Intellectual Affinity for Fantastic Islam in Contemporary Geopolitics: The Dangers of Anti-Western Romanticism.

Disclosure: This essay was originally published in 21/10/2023, before the catastrophe of October 7th. Today, I would have concentrated on the rise of Occidentalism in U.S.’s campuses which still manifests itself in the de facto support of the Hamas regime in Gaza.

I mentioned here recently in one of the discussions that criticism should be attentive and serious, and especially convincing towards its subjects. An example of this kind of criticism is Edward Said's well-known book on Orientalism (1978). Said, a Palestinian intellectual in exile, tries his hand as someone who actually comes from the field of literature in criticizing what he understood as the dichotomous and erroneous representation of the East in Western eyes, a representation whose political and academic influence penetrated deeply into several Western disciplines such as philology, history, and above all - Orientalism. Said's book was criticized harshly several times, and often rightfully so. Like any grandiose attempt to turn against entire disciplines, it is difficult to impossible to direct the arrows of criticism with the precision that would satisfy those who know things firsthand. There was also the problem of the severity of the issue: while Said's historical analysis aroused amazement, his theoretical and operative conclusions were shrouded in fog, and did not really allow for effective and constructive criticism for different Orientalists. Said, a literature expert, based much of his criticism on the monological development of the image of "the East" among Western intellectuals - but with images alone one cannot go to the market, or critique established bodies of knowledge. The disciplines that were at the center of the criticism applied a variety of heterogeneous methodologies that were equally applied to historical Western literature and indigenous literatures, and typically the basic romanticism of "the new and pure culture," which Eastern cultures indeed often suffered from being represented as such, was not unique to them at the "honeymoon" stage of building Western knowledge.

In any case, Said's criticism was effective in several other ways, which do not necessarily include the original goal of turning scientific bodies of knowledge regarding the East into a more dialogical creation. Said wrote Orientalism at the right time and place - the student rebellions on the continent had dried up, and many American justice fighters were in the midst of a stormy romance with concepts of intellectual distributive justice. Said's influence on the formation of the discipline of post-colonial studies, along with the formation of marginal disciplines such as "cultural studies" and "media studies" which provided a rather fertile ground for the reception of his ideas, is indeed a success. The new contexts in which Said's ideas were received were themselves with a history quite amenable not only to "critique of power," but especially to "critique of Western power." You can blame human history for many things, but a lack of irony and sense of humor is probably not one of them. The image of the West in many of these circles is often much more monolithic and monological than is commonly thought.

Avishai Margalit, probably the most senior Israeli philosopher alive today, wrote together with Ian Buruma in 2005 a small and wonderful booklet called Occidentalism (Westernism). In the booklet, Margalit and Buruma try to trace the image of the West among its enemies, and do not hesitate to identify the source of the image of the West as the father of all evil, as degenerate and godless, precisely within the West itself. An interesting point of intersection between the books is the co-extensiveness of many of the sources. For example, Said examines Herder's thought as responsible, among other things, for producing the image of the pure and wise Orient - while Margalit uses Herder precisely to demonstrate the formation of the image of cold and enlightened Europeanness. These Janus-faced aspects of Herder are, in my opinion, indicative. The West is not only the father of the distorted image of the East, it is also the father of the distorted image of the West. However, Margalit makes a move that is not found in Said. Unlike Said, Margalit repeatedly emphasizes that our concern with Occidentalism is not intended to make a critical history of a problematic concept that we would better not use. On the contrary, the West, the USA, Europe, etc. certainly receive justified criticism at times. What Margalit examines is their transformation into a multi-headed monster that encourages radical anti-Western politics.

The emphasis here is important, because indeed, we can dig deeper and deeper into history, certainly, all the way to ancient Rome (where these images of "the East" and "the West" were more or less already fixed in their basic forms). But the analysis is necessary from his perspective only when we encounter a phenomenon that is politically dangerous and evil. The historical analysis is designed to remove the "magic" from Western criticism, the point of "nowhere neutral" from which it ostensibly often emerges under academic guise, and to show that this "nowhere" has a history and motives that are those that may encourage a kind of dangerous politics. Indeed, a similar claim can be attributed to Said - but with Said it often seems that the image itself is the violence of the West.

The Muslim world of today is given a special place in Margalit's book. Like other scholars, Margalit identifies that the Muslim "Occidentalism" is different from its Japanese, Indian, Russian, or Chinese sisters. This image when in the service of a nation is limited to distinguishing between local authenticity and external danger; when it works in the service of a universal religion that offers salvation like Islam, we have a turn that historically is dangerous and may lead more quickly than its sisters to radical anti-Western politics. Margalit points to the dangerous combination between a Manichean worldview of the cosmos and the politics that may grow from this combination, as well as to the actual politics that this combination produced through figures like Syed Qutb (the father of the "Muslim Brotherhood" movement) and of course Osama bin Laden. Margalit's move should be noted: we start with radical politics and then need the analysis of the images it works with to understand it. Not the other way around, as he repeatedly emphasizes.

What is interesting for our purposes are precisely Western extremist figures who made the "full transition" in order to learn about the marginal figures in academia, whose politics are often expressed in quiet or open sympathy for the more fundamentalist manifestations of Islam. As we said before, the crucible of "Occidentalism," just like Orientalism, is found in the West. The romanticism that developed towards the East as an alternative to Western degeneration has been common since about the beginning of the 20th century, and initially not necessarily on the left side of the political map. René Guénon (1886-1951), for instance, was a fairly typical French-Catholic intellectual who tried to seek authentic spiritual opportunities in the big city. After his disappointment with the various theosophical circles prevalent at that time in Paris, Guénon turned to the Orientalist study of "Eastern wisdom" which was indeed common in those years and tried to contribute his part. He expressed his disappointment with the machinated West in the classic conceptualization of Occidentalism that was already quite developed: the West is material, superficial, technical, coldly rational, etc. In Eastern wisdom, he found Islam as one whose tradition allows for authentic spiritual initiation even for a Western person still remained undamaged. The Islam to which he converted is preferable in his eyes. We will return to this point. In time, Guénon would become a key figure for Western "seekers" who were disappointed with the West and chose more radical alternatives such as Julius Evola (1898-1974) who sympathized with Italian fascism and thought systematically about how one could "ride the tiger" of fascism for spiritual purposes. Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), the famous scholar of religions, also owes a considerable methodological debt to Guénon's work, and the political implications of the concept of spiritual-Western degeneration pushed him too to support to some extent the Romanian "Iron Guard."

All this is quite typical of the fascist spaces in which the "new spirituality" of the theosophical circles was expressed in the incessant conceptualization of Western emptiness, which as Margalit points out, became more and more identified with "Americanism." This criticism was widespread in the West mainly in its more right-wing parts, and specifically those that drew their bread from the Romantic movement. In Germany, the movement of "revolutionary conservatism" developed based on this Occidentalist conception, which, among other things - and unfortunately this is the connection that Margalit missed in his discussion of the subject - also reached the Japanese Kyoto School. The revolutionary conservatism movement profoundly influenced how we understand cultural criticism, while bombarding the discourse with a variety of terms such as "authentic," "fateful," "true choice" that actually constituted a secularized substitute for religious discourse (see Adorno's jargon of authenticity). The interesting point is that "revolutionary conservatism," after the years of World War II, underwent a kind of whitewashing whose fruits can be seen to this day precisely in radical left circles. The cultural-Nietzschean criticism that these circles offered was appropriated by the Frankfurt School and French intellectuals as tools for conceptualizing the decay of capitalism. All that was needed was to reverse the cause and effect: capitalism is no longer a product of a degenerate culture, but a degenerate culture is a product of capitalism.

Thus, the romantic tendencies and hostility towards the West received heirs precisely in the place we would least expect. "Occidentalism" - in our region, supporting Balad or the autochthonous-authentic Palestinians without reservation - is formulated by certain circles in terms of post-colonialism whose center of gravity is not economic, but identity-based. The inauthentic but empowering colonial identity attacks the agents of authenticity that still remain in the world. The inevitable expression of such an approach in relation to Islam can be seen in Foucault, who went to cover the Iranian revolution. In a series of articles, Foucault expresses his admiration, and yes, his open sympathy, for the Islamic fundamentalists who managed to show that decadent modernism is not a predetermined fate, and that from their perspective modernism is an anachronistic deviation. Foucault's sympathy for fundamentalist Shia Islam is not an accident. One thread is woven from the Occidentalism of Germany in the early twentieth century to the intellectual influences that shaped Foucault's political preferences.

Foucault was not a "fluke" of the Western romance with Islam. Edward Said himself was interviewed in several places about the "biased Western coverage" of the Iranian revolution and insisted on pointing out the "negative bias" and "lack of expertise" of the reporters. His sympathy for the revolution stemmed precisely from the blind spot of Western intellectuals regarding the danger of "Occidentalism." Any organized opposition to Westernness is sympathized with because it stands against Western "superficiality," which as mentioned is part of Occidentalism. The intention here is not that "the West" is necessarily fair in its coverage. In most cases, that is a completely fair statement. But digging into the mistakes of the West, and specifically its "superficiality," blinds the eyes of intellectuals of a certain kind from seeing that the alternative is sometimes much worse. It is not for nothing, for example, that various critics pointed to the lack of discussion about the place of women in these political events by these Western intellectuals.

But as mentioned, the connection is not just external. Ahmad Fardid (1910-1994), one of the main court intellectuals of the Iranian revolution, read Heidegger and published his doctrine in Iran. What he extracted from Heidegger is not far from what Dugin extracts from him today: mainly the anti-Western sentiment accompanied by ontological jargon concerning the "forgetting of Being." For example, it was he who coined the term "Westoxication" as an expression of the process of degeneration that the West leads to. But these are precisely the more radical expressions of support for fundamentalist Islam. What bothers me here is precisely the leniency that many secularists show towards Islamic fundamentalism out of a post-colonialist Occidentalist conception. This is not the place to do so, but in my opinion one can also expand greatly on the connection between antisemitism and Occidentalism, as Margalit indeed did, but the interesting research on the subject was written by Robert Wistrich of blessed memory in his book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010).

In this context, the revolution in Iran is like litmus paper through which one can examine the depth of the influence of Occidentalism on Western intellectuals associated with the New Left. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, supported the leftist sect of the revolution in Iran, which was Shiite-Marxist. For Sartre, violence against those perceived as oppressors in itself was considered a manifestation of authenticity. This is also the basis for the unconditional love he developed for the psychopath Frantz Fanon. For Sartre too, Western capitalism was perceived as degenerate - and any opposition to it, Muslim or not, was perceived in terms of authenticity that is opposed to Western degeneration. Sartre is an interesting marker for secular intellectuals with no special interest in spiritual revival that they do not see as an essential value - and sometimes the opposite - but they do have the intellectual baggage of Western cultural criticism that they inherited. These intellectuals do tend to be less radical in the Muslim context compared to their colleagues with spiritual sympathy, but in practice they are the ones who politically produce legitimacy and apologetics that grants a rather lenient place to fundamentalist Islam in the political landscape. A current and quite prominent example is Chomsky's ongoing romance with any uprising that has anti-Western and anti-colonialist characteristics.

But these are the big names. The devil, as they say, is in the small details. He is found, for example, in the embarrassing apologetic tone with which Talal Asad, for instance, speaks about Islam, in contrast to the true depth with which he researches Western culture as an anthropological subject. He is found in the self-righteous tone that often accompanies students who have learned that speaking against the West - especially in the US, but I've personally encountered this in Israel as well - is something that earns them the affection of the lecturer, even if their argument on the subject was non-existent or not relevant to the discussion taking place in class. And he is found especially, and this is the great danger, in circles on the American left like BLM or ANTIFA, whose anti-Western rhetoric finds a receptive ear among politicians considered relatively mainstream like Kamala Harris.

Of course, if I'm already putting my soul in my hand and writing something like this, it's impossible without referring to current events. Recently, an interesting development has occurred around the world, but I know how to identify its clear signs mainly in Israel. Cultural criticisms from the left side of the political map, as mentioned, found their way to the heart of right-wing populist criticism. The writing of the populist Avishai Ben-Haim, for example, is full of Occidentalism in its most classic sense. On Channel 14, sweet manifestos about "Eastern Judaism" receive indirect support and approving nods regarding Ashkenazi coldness. What the Mizrahi Rainbow failed to achieve in the 1990s, namely, the introduction of academic criticism of Western culture into Israeli political discourse, is done openly by Amichai Shikli's tweeting of Kimmerling's work on the ASHCNAZIs. As mentioned, Margalit's criticism of "Occidentalism" is limited to radical politics. But in my opinion, we would be very negligent if we do not pay attention to its soft expressions in right-wing populist politics, and the potential they hide.