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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 Dhabi, and left everything else more or less intact. How do we understand 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, in short, born out of Orientalists’ efforts.”5 The Orient was no longer strange and exotic but a region that could be understood and controlled. And Orientalist scholarship was the key that would unlock the secrets of the East.

The Characteristics of Orientalism

Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars did not necessarily see themselves as agents of empire; they considered themselves, by and large, to be producing disinterested knowledge. Some, however, advised the French government and played an important role in enabling colonization—such as Silvestre de Sacy, an important Orientalist who influenced generations of scholars. Whether consciously or not, Orientalists produced a body of work that aided the project of imperialism. Before we consider some of the assumptions that undergird Orientalism, it is useful to distinguish nineteenth-century colonial rhetoric from its precursors.

Prior to the nineteenth century, European colonialism was explained primarily through the lens of Christianity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans justified their slaughter and exploitation of the “Indians” in the New World through the argument that the Indian “savages” were wild animals, idolaters whom God had ordained to be dominated by Christians.6 They similarly justified their enslavement of Africans through the book of Genesis, arguing that Africans were a cursed people (drawn from the myth of the curse of Ham) whose black skin color marked their curse. The “curse” conveniently meant that even African slaves who converted to Christianity could still be retained as slaves.7

The shift from religious to “scientific” justifications began in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment philosophers divided human beings into various races or “species” with distinct characteristics. Over the course of time, this classificatory system led white Europeans to conclude that they were superior to other “darker, colored peoples,” who were both “ugly” and at best “semi-civilized.”8 This was an important component in the early development of racism as an ideology to justify slavery and conquest.9 Additionally, as chapter 1 explained, the eighteenth century saw the development of notions of European superiority, particularly through the association of the West with democracy and the East with despotism. Yet, as Rodinson argues, “in the eighteenth century, an unconscious sense of Eurocentrism was present but it was guided by the universalist ideology of the Enlightenment and therefore respected non-European civilizations and peoples.”10 By the nineteenth century, however, this Enlightenment universalism was rapidly being replaced by an emphasis on differences between people and civilizations. Europe developed what Etienne Balibar calls an “imperialist superiority complex.”11

This emphasis on differences took ideological form in the body of thought that has come to be known as Orientalism. Orientalism has a few characteristic features. Drawing on the work of Zachary Lockman in Contending Visions of the Middle East, as well as others, I outline four key features of Orientalism. First, it is based on a civilizational view of history—the idea that civilizations come into being, prosper, and then go into decline. Second, because it emerged from philology, the historical and comparative study of language, it assumes that everything one needs to know about a civilization can be found in its texts and languages. Third, Orientalism sees Islam and its classical texts as key to understanding contemporary Muslims and their societies. Fourth, it draws on theories of race and the notion that Muslims are a distinct race.

A widely accepted theory in the nineteenth century was that human society was divided into different and distinct civilizations which existed in isolation from each other, each driven by its own core set of values. This theory held that the West, as a unique civilization with roots in ancient Greece, had certain qualities that differentiated it from all other civilizations. These included “freedom, law, rationality, science, progress, intellectual curiosity, and the spirit of invention, adventure and enterprise.”12 Every other civilization was then defined in relation to this notion of a superior “West.” Predictably, the world of Islam was characterized as premodern, backward, primitive, despotic, static, undemocratic, and rigid.

Closely associated with civilizational theories is the notion that a people can be understood through its languages and key texts. Philologists like Sacy advocated the notion that the study of a society’s written texts could yield insights into the timeless essence of a civilization. Orientalists would therefore learn Arabic, Persian, and Turkish and translate and analyze the texts of the East. Rather than examine the historical context of Muslim societies, philologists simply pursued textual analysis. It is no wonder then, as Rodinson notes, that despite the “tremendous amount of accurate information and precise documentation, which the specialists were able to assemble, the rift between their intellectual efforts and the world of objective reality continued to widen.”13

It followed from this that Islam, as defined by its classical texts, was the key lens through which Muslim-majority societies could be understood. If women were oppressed it was because of the teachings of the Koran; if Muslims supposedly lacked an entrepreneurial spirit it was due to “Islamic tradition”; if modernization was rejected, again the Koran was to blame. In short, a whole host of characteristics associated with the West but allegedly absent from the “Muslim world” could be explained by recourse to religious texts and the mentalities they supposedly created. In this book, the term “Muslim world” has been put in quotation marks precisely to challenge the notion that Islam is the single most important factor in defining the people who live in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, or that there is a single undifferentiated entity called the “Muslim world.” Instead, I try to show that like elsewhere in the world, religion is one factor among others that impact the lives of people who live in Muslim-majority societies (a term I prefer to “Muslim world”).

In addition to civilizational theories, the Orientalists drew on the theories of race discussed above that placed European Caucasians at the top of a racial hierarchy. As Rodinson explains:

The Oriental may always have been characterized as a savage enemy, but during the Middle Ages, he was at least considered on the same level as his European counterpart. And, to the men of the Enlightenment, the ideologues of the French revolution, the Oriental was, for all his foreignness in appearance and dress, above all a man like anyone else. In the nineteenth century, however, he became something quite separate, sealed off in his own specificity, yet worthy of a kind of grudging admiration. This is the origin of the homo islamicus, a notion widely accepted even today.14

Starting from this idea that Muslims are a race, Orientalists claimed to be able to explain the “Muslim mind” or the “Arab mind.” Because race-based theories assume that the members of a race are all alike, scholars within this tradition could make sweeping generalizations about how Muslims think and behave. Most of all, the “Muslim mind” was disparaged; as the British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote, “You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind. And even if you do, it won’t be worth the toil.”15

It followed from this logic of civilizational and racial superiority that the West had to lead lesser nations and peoples. In the late nineteenth century, when Kipling wrote “The White Man’s Burden,” he was simply reinforcing an idea that was by then widespread. Kipling wrote of the inherent superiority of the West and its “burden” to civilize and tame the peoples of the East. Characterized as “half devil, half child,” the colonized were seen both as evil and barbaric and as childlike and therefore in need of protection. When the poem was originally published, Kipling used the subtitle “The United States and the Philippine Islands” as a way to urge the Americans to take on the same responsibilities as the British.16

And take them on they did. An American journalist writing in 1921 brought together Orientalist assumptions about civilization and race in the following way:

Out of the prehistoric shadows the white races pressed to the front and proved in a myriad of ways their fitness for the hegemony of mankind. Gradually they forged a common civilization; then, when vouchsafed their unique opportunity of oceanic mastery four centuries ago, they spread over the earth, filling its empty spaces with their superior breeds and assuring to themselves an unparalleled paramountcy [sic] of numbers and dominion. . . . At last the planet was integrated under the hegemony of a single race with a common civilization.17

Woodrow Wilson, seen as visionary for championing self-determination, put it as follows:

In order to trace the lineage of the European and American governments which have constituted the order of social life for those stronger and nobler races which have made the most notable progress in civilization, it is essential to know the political history of the Greeks, the Latins, the Teutons, and the Celts principally.18

In sum, the Orientalist view of the East as it emerged in the nineteenth century was based on a racial and civilizational vilification of Muslims. This is not, however, to suggest that Orientalist scholarship existed or was used in colonial contexts without contradiction. There were Orientalists who rejected notions of racial superiority; at the same time, however, they agreed that race was a useful category of analysis. There were those who admired Islam and others who disparaged it; some actively aided the colonial mission while others saw themselves as producing objective knowledge. Orientalist ideas were used differently in various contexts. Put simply, the relationship between Orientalist thought and the project of empire-building is complex.

However, it is undeniable that the aforementioned assumptions underlying all Orientalist scholarship lend themselves well to the call for colonial conquest. The worldview proposed by the Orientalists is one in which the “West” is seen as a dynamic, complex, and ever-changing society that cannot be reduced to its key religion or any other single factor, while the “Orient” or the “world of Islam” is presented as unchanging, barbaric, misogynistic, uncivilized, and despotic. The only logical conclusion that flows from this is that it is the responsibility of the West to intervene in these static societies and bring about change. The West had acquired a superiority complex and the rest of the world would have to submit to its dictates.

These ideas may have served to justify French and English conquest of the Middle East and North Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was the United States that breathed new life into them after World War II. Even today, variations of these ideas can be found in American society. For instance, books like Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind,19 which was used by the US military to devise the torture techniques used in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, are a reassertion of homo islamicus. Modern-day Orientalists like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington have argued that the conflict between the United States and the Middle East is a “clash of civilizations.” According to Huntington, who has done much to popularize this notion, “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic societies.”20 In the following chapter, we will explore the continuity of the classical Orientalist corpus. Here we turn to American imperialism and its vision of empire and language of domination.

American Imperialism

Prior to the nineteenth century, very little was known in the United States about the “Muslim world.” America’s conquests focused more on continental expansion into the West and Southwest; other parts of the world did not matter very much. In the eighteenth century, Americans’ key sources of information about the Middle East were One Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the King James Bible.21 The political elite that founded and oversaw the American nation “after 1776 regarded the Muslim world, beset by oriental despotism, economic squalor, and intellectual stultification, as the antithesis of the republicanism to which they had pledged their sacred honor.”22

Greater familiarity with the Middle East in the nineteenth century came from visitors to the Holy Land and from missionaries. Mark Twain, who went on to become a staunch anti-imperialist, wrote in 1869 about his trip to the Holy Land in a book titled The Innocents Abroad, which sold nearly a hundred thousand copies.23 While Twain witheringly (and hilariously) critiqued his fellow travelers for their hubris and lack of cultural sensitivity—a characteristic of American tourists that would continue into the next century and become grist for the Hollywood mill—he also had harsh words to say about Muslims. He called them “a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive [and] superstitious,” and saw the Ottomans as “a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, [and] Blood.”24

Romantic notions of the Orient dominated popular culture. Illustrated versions of The Arabian Nights were widely sold, as were books about the Prophet that presented the Arab world as backward and savage. In addition to novels and travelogues, a series of other popular media such as fairs and exhibitions, photographs, and theme parks transferred Europe’s exotic image of the East to the United States.25 In nineteenth-century Europe the Orientalist image and the exotic one coexisted, and the US audience readily adopted the latter. For instance, the American painter Frederick Bridgman produced dozens of sexually charged paintings of the East in line with those of his mentor, the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, famous for his paintings The Snake Charmer and The Slave.26 Hollywood would further these exotic images in early silent films such as The Arab (1915), Cleopatra (1917), Salome (1918), and An Arabian Knight (1920), among others. Rudolph Valentino played a “Lawrence of Arabia”–type sheik in two films, The Sheik (1921) and The Son of the Sheik (1926), which among other things presented the East as sexually charged.

Outside of culture, in the realm of politics, little systematic knowledge was accumulated about the East. The American Oriental Society was founded in 1842, but it was not until World War II that the United States began to approach the study of the Middle East systematically, as Europe had.27 Prior to this point, the relatively few US scholars who studied Islam and the East did so primarily through the lens of Orientalism and were situated in departments or institutes of “Near East studies” or “Oriental studies.”28 European Orientalists held cultural prestige within the field.29

The end of the Second World War changed this situation, as the United States emerged from the war as the strongest Western power. It set out to take the place of Britain and France in the Middle East and establish its dominance over the region. To do so, however, the United States needed information to guide its policy. At first, it could rely only on young men who had grown up in the region, children of missionaries or university professors, known as “Arabists.” But in the context of the Cold War, and with the development of national liberation movements, the elites needed reliable information to further their interests in the region. The government and private foundations began to sponsor and fund “area studies” programs and departments that focused on the study of not only the Near East but also more broadly Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It was in this context that US universities turned toward the production of knowledge instrumental to serving the needs of empire. Two approaches guided the study of the Middle East: Orientalism, which was still dominated by philologists, and social scientific research, from which a new model known as “modernization” would be developed.

Prominent Orientalist scholars from Europe crossed the Atlantic to take up academic positions at US universities during the postwar era. H. A. R. Gibb, who was central to the development of the Orientalist approach in the United States, left Oxford to take a position at Harvard University in 1955. Gustave von Grunebaum, the Austrian Orientalist, influenced a new generation of scholars at the University of Chicago and then UCLA.30 Between them they brought Orientalist modes of analysis to the United States and continued the work of influential late-nineteenth-century Orientalists like Ernest Renan. Gibb, for instance, argued that the “Arab mind” and the “Muslim mind” had an essence that could be grasped by reading the classical texts of Islam. Grunebaum argued that a static Islamic culture could help explain all contemporary phenomena. Such sweeping generalizations, characteristic of Orientalist scholarship, were influential in the United States because they provided a quick and easy way to grasp a large and complex region.

In the ensuing decades, Orientalism was challenged by social scientific research to such a degree that Gibb acknowledged some of the shortcomings of the Orientalist method and urged social scientists and Orientalists to work together.31 However, despite the publication of a number of works critical of its assumptions and methods in the period after the 1970s, Orientalism survived. Bernard Lewis, the British Orientalist, can be credited with continuing the legacy and influence of Orientalism. Lewis accepted a position at Princeton University in 1974 and has been a key figure in Orientalist thought in the United States ever since.

The United States, however, could not simply accept in toto the language of the old empires. Its own anticolonial history meant that there were voices in the political sphere that resisted the mantle of imperialism. Even though it entered the imperial arena with the Spanish-American War of 1898, the “issue of self-rule was so deeply emplaced in the national psyche,” Sidney Lens writes, that “an anti-imperialist opposition . . . began to form.”32 The Anti-Imperialist League, founded in November of 1898, included not only figures like Mark Twain but also prominent mainstream politicians. This trend of opposition in the mainstream was mitigated over the course of the twentieth century; nevertheless, it gave rise to an image of the United States as being a different kind of world power—different, that is, from the “old-style imperialism” of Europe.

This dynamic was played out concretely in the postwar era. The upheavals of World War II weakened the older empires and created a bipolar world oriented around two new powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In this context, the United States hoped to loosen the aging imperial powers’ grips on their colonial territories. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations therefore claimed to support anticolonial national liberation movements; concretely, they announced their intention to aid developing nations by supporting projects that would build infrastructure and foster economic growth. But this economic aid came at a price—they demanded political allegiance. For instance, the United States first sought to bring Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt under its wing through promises of financial aid. Nasser flirted with the Soviet Union, though, and the Eisenhower administration punished him by reneging on its promise to provide funding for the construction of a dam in Aswan. Nasser promptly nationalized the Suez Canal, which led Britain, France, and Israel to launch a war on Egypt. The United States (and the USSR) then intervened on Nasser’s side, allowing Egypt to finally get rid of its former colonial master—Britain. This example reveals the carrot-and-stick approach that the American elite employed again and again during the Cold War: using monetary incentives to win allies, punishing them when they strayed, but also acting to weaken the hold of former colonizer nations when possible.

Secretary of state John Foster Dulles said of the Suez crisis that what “the British and French have done is nothing but the straight, old-fashioned variety of colonialism of the most obvious sort.”33 In contrast, the United States crafted a new model of imperialism on the basis of what Melani McAlister has called “benevolent supremacy.” This model was premised on the notion that an American-dominated world would ensure liberty and democracy for all through the mechanism of free-market capitalism. Henry Luce, publisher of the magazines Life and Time, captured this new global role for the United States in an editorial titled “The New American Century.” He argued that the United States was a “Good Samaritan” that would bring about “Freedom and Justice” around the world in the postwar period.34

McAlister states that, at the policy level, “benevolent supremacy” meant linking “US economic and military strength to a program that was anticommunist, anticolonial, and supportive of free markets.”35 The policy of anticolonialism was about supplanting the old colonial powers and was therefore highly selective. The United States supported anti-colonial struggles in some cases where its aims coincided with those of the anticolonialists but thwarted other struggles (for instance, it came in on the side of France in Algeria and Indochina), and it had a few of its own colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Above all, newly decolonized nations were not to oppose economic imperialism and the United States’ access to markets and investment opportunities around the world. Sidney Lens explains that Washington’s strategy revolved around three goals: to establish an “open door” policy that allowed the United States to enter into otherwise blocked-off markets and to establish multinational trade as the pillar of economic policy; to weaken and isolate forces that opposed the open door (which included the former colonial powers as well as radical nationalists and communists); and to gain, as President Kennedy put it, “influence and control” over pliant governments, typically right-wing, through “grants and loans with conditions attached to them, military aid, equipment and training of puppet armies, military pacts, CIA-sponsored revolts, and on occasion, when these other methods were inadequate . . . direct intervention by U.S. armed forces themselves.”36

This new form of imperialism required a new language; that language was called “modernization theory.” Area studies in the United States were dominated by this approach from the 1950s to the 1970s. Modernization theory draws on the work of Max Weber, distinguishing between “traditional” and “modern” societies. Traditional societies were agricultural and rural, slow to change, and politically authoritarian. Modern societies, on the other hand, were seen as industrial, quick to change, and politically democratic and egalitarian. The scholars who developed this approach offered various explanations for why traditional societies did not progress; some pointed to cultural factors, others to economic ones. At the end of the day, it was agreed that change would not come from within these societies but had to be brought from outside.

In short, it was a new way to divide the world into “us” and “them.” According to the theorists of modernization, “our” society was dynamic, scientifically oriented, rational, supportive of individual development, democratic, and egalitarian, whereas “their” societies were static, hidebound, despotic, and authoritarian. What was needed, then, was Western intervention to “help” traditional societies make the transition to modernity. This view was not so different from earlier Orientalist notions, but it was wrapped in the credibility of social science. Modernization theorists didn’t speculate about contemporary societies based on classical texts: they conducted empirical research and gathered data which was evaluated using quantitative data analysis techniques. This time it was real science—it had to be correct!

Daniel Lerner, author of the highly influential book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, argued that people who live in modern societies are distinguished by their personalities, which he explained in psychological terms. Modern individuals have “empathy,” which allows them to see themselves in the shoes of others and therefore to visualize and make possible social mobility. Traditional individuals do not have this capacity and are therefore in need of Western influence to help them shed their old, static ways.37 Lerner’s method of analysis was based on social scientific methods and the use of quantitative data. In the field of mass communication, Everett Rogers published Diffusion of Innovations, which studied how new ideas could be spread in traditional societies. Rogers concluded that those who were not open to “innovation” introduced by the West were best understood as “laggards.”38 In short, those who resisted Western propaganda/“innovation” were seen not as individuals acting in their own interests but rather as hidebound traditionalists blocking progress.

While Orientalism and modernization theory each had its own research traditions and methods, both shared a polarized view of the world: the East was inferior and the West was superior. Since neither theory could see change coming about internally in Eastern societies, both argued for Western intervention, which they claimed would benefit native/traditional peoples. Overall, few if any questioned the premise that research on the Middle East (and in area studies in general) should be tailored to meet the needs of the US government. This was the dominant trend until the 1970s. At that point, various factors, particularly the impact of successful national liberation struggles on the field of Middle East studies, led to a flurry of books and articles critical of both Orientalism and modernization theory.

Despite these critiques, the Orientalist and modernization schools of thought continued to flourish. In fact, they came together in the form of Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist. In an essay published in the influential journal Foreign Affairs in 1968, Huntington drew on modernization theory to justify the United States’ massive bombing of the Vietnamese countryside. Later, in the post–Cold War world, Huntington developed Lewis’s concept of the “clash of civilizations” and helped to popularize Orientalist scholarship.

§

This chapter focused on the birth of Orientalism in Europe during the period of modern colonialism, discussing the ways in which Orientalism as a body of thought was tied directly to the project of imperial conquest. While the story starts in Europe, it continues in the United States, which took over the mantle of colonial overlord in the “Muslim world” after World War II. The United States envisioned itself as a different kind of world power than “old Europe,” and its imperial interests were projected through the lens of “benevolence.” In essence, this meant anticommunism and free-market capitalism. Modernization theory emerged in this context to serve the needs of the “new” empire. Yet Orientalism’s prestige and the emigration of Orientalist scholars from Europe to area studies programs in the United States meant that it too was influential in the political sphere. Chapter 4 will look concretely at how the United States used both theories to develop policy in the Middle East. In particular, we look at its “Islam policy” and the ways in which it related to Islamist organizations.

It is now well known that the United States viewed the parties of political Islam as allies during the Cold War. In the 1980s, however, Israeli right-wingers and a group of foreign-policy hardliners called the neoconservatives began to project “Islamic terrorism” as a global threat akin to the Soviet Union (see chapter 7). In the post–Cold War period, these arguments—bolstered by Lewis, Huntington, and others—started to gain so much ground that the Oklahoma City bombing was first pinned on “Islamic terrorists” before the homegrown Timothy McVeigh was identified. In the immediate aftermath of this incident, and building upon the attempted bombing in 1993 of the World Trade Center, the omnibus Counterterrorism Act ratcheted up the climate of fear against Arab and Muslim “terrorists” (see chapter 8). Even so, at the level of foreign policy, the first Bush and the Clinton administrations eschewed this “clash of civilizations” rhetoric in favor of a “balance-of-forces realist” stance. It was not until the events of 9/11 that domestic and foreign policy converged to project the overarching Muslim threat. In the following chapter, we will see that this was not a hard task, given that Orientalist assumptions about the “Muslim world” were accepted and even taken for granted by the liberal establishment.