Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

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Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies Pub. Date: 3/25/2004 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)

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Overview

This “grandly illuminating study of two centuries of anti-Western ideas” (Foreign Affairs) traces the historical roots of a virulent set of stereotypes about Westerners and the West, a cluster of notions and prejudices that Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit call Occidentalism. The path does not lead back to Islam but, in fact, back to the West itself. From nineteenth-century Germany and Russia to twentieth-century Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, Buruma and Margalit track the spread of these noxious ideas. Drawing on their formidable range and gift for synthesis to place modern terrorists in a long continuum of enemies of Western liberal society, Buruma and Margalit have written a book of extraordinary clarity and wide-ranging relevance.

Editorial Reviews

Foreign Affairs

In this grandly illuminating study of two centuries of anti-Western ideas, Buruma and Margalit contend that the hostility of Islamic jihadists toward the United States is but the most recent manifestation of a long-running, worldwide reaction to the rise of Western modernity. They call the cluster of prejudices and unflattering images of the West conjured by its enemies "Occidentalism," a phenomenon that originated within the West itself in the late eighteenth century and only later spread to the Middle East, Asia, and beyond. German romantics, reacting to the Enlightenment and the rise of capitalism, expressed it in their rejection of a coldly rational Europe — a "machine civilization," manifest in imperialism, urbanism, and cosmopolitanism. From there, similar themes appear in Occidentalism's other variants: the sinfulness and rootlessness of urban life; the corruption of the human spirit in a materialistic, market-driven society; the loss of organic community; the glory of heroic self-sacrifice in overcoming the timidity of bourgeois life. Western liberalism is a threat — to religious fundamentalists, priest-kings, and radical collectivists alike — because it deflates the pretensions of their own brand of heroic utopianism. Ultimately, the picture that emerges is not of a clash of civilizations but of deeply rooted tensions that ebb and flow within and across civilizations, religions, and cultures. What the West can do about Occidentalism, however, is less clear. The anti-Western impulses in nineteenth-century Europe and interwar Japan were only transitional, overwhelmed by the forces of socioeconomic advancement. Whether the Occidentalism of present-day Islamic radicalswill also come to accommodate modernity is the great question of our time. Buruma and Margalit do not venture an answer, but their evocative study shows that, whatever happens in the end, it will play out as a long and violent historical drama.

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From The Critics

Well-published scholars Buruma (Luce Professor of Human Rights & Journalism, Bard Coll., and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books) and Margalit (Schulman Professor of Philosophy, Hebrew Univ., Jerusalem) provide a brief but engaging discussion of the East/West cultural fault line. They seek to explain how the "dehumanizing" picture of the West-which they call "Occidentalism"-originated and developed. Using examples from various settings, the authors discuss how Western misconceptions and stereotypes emerged in different countries and how anti-Western cultural mindsets have perpetuated Occidentalism in the contemporary world, especially in Islamic countries. At times, the authors tend to oversimplify modern Islamism and mistakenly treat it as a monolith. Nonetheless, this is an important book on a topic that deserves to be treated seriously by scholars and concerned citizens alike. A complement to the larger works of Bernard Lewis (e.g., The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror), it is recommended for public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/03.]-Nader Entessar, Spring Hill Coll., Mobile, AL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780143034872
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Publication date: 4/28/2005
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 176
Sales rank: 476,199
Product dimensions: 5.19 (w) x 7.75 (h) x 0.46 (d)

Meet the Author

Ian Buruma is currently Luce Professor at Bard College. His previous books include God's Dust, Behind the Mask, The Missionary and the Libertine, Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, Anglomania, and Bad Elements.
Avishai Margalit is Schulman Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His previous books include Idolatry, The Decent Society, Views and Reviews, and The Ethics of Memory.

Read an Excerpt

Occidentalism

The Idea of the West in the Minds of Its Enemies

By Ian Buruma Avishai Margalit

The Penguin Press

ISBN: 1-59420-008-4

Chapter One

In July 1942, just six months after the Japanese bombed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor and overwhelmed the Western powers in Southeast Asia, a number of distinguished Japanese scholars and intellectuals gathered for a conference in Kyoto. Some were literati of the so-called Romantic group; others were philosophers of the Buddhist/ Hegelian Kyoto school. Their topic of discussion was how to "overcome the modern."

It was a time of nationalist zeal, and the intellectuals who attended the conference were all nationalists in one way or another; but oddly enough the war itself, in China, Hawaii, or Southeast Asia, was barely mentioned. At least one of the members, Hayashi Fusao, a former- Marxist-turned-ardent-nationalist, later wrote that the assault on the West had filled him with jubilation. Even though he was in freezing Manchuria when he heard the news, it felt as though dark clouds had lifted to reveal a clear summer sky. No doubt similar emotions came over many of his colleagues, but war propaganda was not the ostensible point of the conference. These men, the literary romantics as much as the philosophers, had been interested in overcoming the modern long before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Their conclusions, to the extent that they had enough coherence to be politically useful, lent themselves to propaganda for a new Asian order under Japanese leadership, but the intellectuals would have been horrified to be called propagandists. They were thinkers, not hacks.

"The modern" is in any case a slippery concept, but in Kyoto in 1942, as in Kabul or Karachi in 2001, it meant the West. But the West is almost as elusive as the modern. Japanese intellectuals had strong feelings about what they were up against, but had some difficulty defining exactly what that was. Westernization, one opined, was like a disease that had infected the Japanese spirit. The "modern thing," said another, was a "European thing." There was much talk about unhealthy specialization in knowledge, which had splintered the wholeness of Oriental spiritual culture. Science was to blame. And so were capitalism, and the absorption of modern technology, and individual freedoms, and democracy. All these had to be "overcome." A leading film critic, Tsumura Hideo, excoriated Hollywood movies and praised the documentary films of Leni Riefenstahl about Nazi rallies, which were more in tune with his ideas on how to forge a healthy national community. In his view, the war against the West was a war against the "poisonous materialist civilization" built on Jewish financial capitalist power. All agreed that culture-that is, traditional Japanese culture-was spiritual and profound, whereas modern Western civilization was shallow, rootless, and destructive of creative power. The West, particularly the United States, was coldly mechanical. A wholistic, traditional, classical Orient, united under divine Japanese imperial rule, would restore the warm organic community to spiritual health. As one of the participants put it, the struggle was between Japanese blood and Western intellect.

The West, to Asians at that time, and to some extent still today, also meant colonialism. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, when China was humiliated in the Opium Wars, educated Japanese realized that national survival depended on careful study and emulation of Western ideas and technology. Never had a great nation embarked on such a radical transformation as Japan between the 1850s and 1910s. The main slogan of the Meiji Period (1868-1912) was "Bunmei Kaika," or "Civilization and Enlightenment"; that is, Western civilization and enlightenment. Everything Western, from natural science to literary realism, was hungrily soaked up by Japanese intellectuals. European dress, Prussian constitutional law, British naval strategies, German philosophy, American cinema, French architecture, and much, much more were taken over and adapted. The modern, then, referred to that "European thing," but also to the Japanese effort to make it their own.

The transformation paid off handsomely. Japan remained uncolonized and quickly became a great power that managed, in 1905, to defeat Russia in a thoroughly modern war. Japan's industrial revolution did not come long after Germany's, with equally dislocating effects. Large numbers of impoverished country people moved into the cities, where conditions could be cruel. The army was a brutal refuge for rural young men, and their sisters were sometimes sold to big city brothels. But economic problems aside, there was another reason many Japanese intellectuals sought to undo the wholesale westernization of the late nineteenth century. It was as though Japan suffered from intellectual indigestion. Western civilization had been swallowed too fast. And that is partly why that group of literati gathered in Kyoto to discuss ways of reversing history, overcoming the West, and returning to an idealized spiritual past.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Occidentalism by Ian Buruma Avishai Margalit Excerpted by permission.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

	War against the west	1
	The occidental city	13
	Heroes and merchants	49
	Mind of the west	75
	The wrath of God	101
	Seeds of revolution	137

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