Orientalism/Occidentalism posted by Richard Seymour

Bernard Lewis, Orientalist par excellence, has produced another pellet of poo for your consumption, as Ian Buruma quotes:

"We talk sometimes as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured. That is not true. Democracy, or what we call democracy nowadays, is the parochial custom of the English-speaking peoples for the conduct of their public affairs, which may or may not be suitable for others."

Not that such attitudes are in any way inconsonant with the neoconservative Jeffersonian revolution in the Middle East:

He said in 2001 that public opinion in Iraq and Iran was so pro-American that both peoples would rejoice if the United States Army liberated them. A year later, he repeated the message that "if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of what President Bush has rightly called the ‘Axis of Evil,’ the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul."

Yes. Those glorious scenes of rejoicing in Kabul that lasted ... three minutes. Nevertheless, if the gorgeous thought of grateful Iranians swishing the stars n stripes doesn't move you, you ought to consider that they're all bloody Muslims anyway:

Lewis claims that the lack of separation between church and state is the basis for Islamist revolutions. But in the non-Arab Muslim world, in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, religious ideologues have so far failed to make much headway. Indeed, more pragmatic Muslims in Indonesia are keen to separate politics from religion. Islamist radicalism is a threat in Pakistan, but this has more to do with a history of authoritarian rule by a small landowning class and military juntas than with any "millennial rivalry between two world religions."

Indeed, it would be surprising to discover learned intellectuals expounding such a thesis (Islamist revolutions have in most cases been directed against secular states; there is no 'church' in Islam; ruling elites in Muslim societies have traditionally operated in a secular fashion, even where they appropriated the sign and symbol of Islam) if Edward Said had not warned us that Orientalist intellectuals are genetically compelled to homogenise and reduce manifestations of cultural, political and economic difference to an "Oriental mind". (Or, indeed, an "Arab mind" ).

Anyway, I strongly urge you to pursue the link above and read Buruma's compelling critique and dissection of Lewis' latest.