A Predatory Orientalism

In an earlier era, before the Zionist movement descended on the heads of unsuspecting Palestinians, theleast bigoted voices in the field of Oriental studies were often those of European Jews.

At a time when most Orientalists took Muhammad for a scheming imposter, equated Islam with fanaticism,denigrated the Qur’an as a crude and incoherent text, and claimed that the Arabs were incapable of abstractthought, Jewish scholars of Islam often took opposite positions. They accepted the sincerity of Muhammad’smission, described Arabs as "Jews on horseback," viewed Islam as an evolving faith that is more democraticthan other religions, and debunked Orientalist claims about an unchanging Islam and a dynamic West.

Ironically, these pro-Islamic Jews did not escape the voracious interest of Bernard Lewis, the leader ofthe new Zionist Orientalists. In a 1993 essay, he writes that they "were among the first who attempted topresent Islam to European readers as Muslims themselves see it and to stress, to recognize, and indeedsometimes to romanticize the merits and achievements of Muslim civilization in its great days." It wouldappear that these Jews were anti-Orientalists long before Edward Said.

These contrarian positions had their origin in a variety of motives. Even as the Jews began entering theEuropean mainstream, starting in the nineteenth century, they were still outsiders, only recently emerged fromthe confinement of ghettos, and it would be scarcely surprising if they were seeking to maintain theirdistinctiveness by emphasizing, and identifying with, the achievements of another Semitic people, the Arabs.

In celebrating Arab civilization, these Jewish scholars were perhaps sending a non-too-subtle message toChristian Europe that their civilization was not unique, that Islamic achievements often excelled theirs, andthat Europeans were building upon the achievements of their adversaries in science and philosophy. Inaddition, their discussions of religious and racial tolerance in Islamic societies, towards Jews inparticular, may have offered hope that this was attainable in Europe too. It may also have been an invitationto Europeans to incorporate religious and racial tolerance into their standards of civilizations.

Yet the vigor of this early anti-Orientalism of Jewish scholars would not last; it would not survive thelogic of the Zionist movement as it sought to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Such a state could onlyemerge as the bastard child of imperialist powers, and it could only come into existence by displacing thegreater part of the Palestinian population, by incorporating them into an apartheid state, or through somecombination of the two. In addition, once created, Israel could only survive as a militarist, expansionist,and hegemonic state, constantly at war with its neighbors.

In other words, once the Zionist project entered into its implementation phase after 1918, it wasinevitable that the European Jews’ attraction for Islam was not going to endure. In fact, it would bereplaced by a bitter contest, one in which the Jews, as junior partners of the imperialist powers, would seekto deepen the Orientalist project in the service of Western power. Bernard Lewis played a leading part in thisreorientation. In the words of Martin Kramer, a Zionist Orientalist himself, Bernard Lewis "came topersonify the post-war shift from a sympathetic to a critical posture."

Ironically, this shift occurred when many Orientalists had begun to shed their Christian prejudice againstIslam, and several were making amends for the excesses of their forebears. Another factor aiding this shifttowards a less polemical Orientalism was the entry of a growing number of Arabs, both Muslims and Christians,into the field of Middle Eastern studies. The most visible upshot of these divergent trends was a polarizationof the field of Middle Eastern studies into two opposing camps.

One camp, consisting mostly of Christians and Muslims, has labored to bring greater objectivity to theirstudy of Islam and Islamic societies. They seek to locate their subjects in the matrix of history, see Islamicsocieties as adjusting to the challenges posed by the West, neither innately hostile to the West and Westernvalues, nor trapped in some unchanging obscurantist mindset.

The second camp, now led mostly by Jews, has reverted to Orientalism’s original mission of subordinatingknowledge to Western power, now filtered through the prism of Zionist interests. This Zionist Orientalism hasassiduously sought to paint Islam and Islamic societies as innately hostile to the West, and to modernism,democracy, tolerance, scientific advance, and women’s rights.

This Zionist camp has been led for more than fifty years by Bernard Lewis, who has enjoyed an intimaterelationship with power that would be the envy of the most distinguished Orientalists of an earliergeneration. He has been strongly supported by a contingent of able lieutenants, whose ranks have included thelikes of Leonard Binder, Elie Kedourie and David Pryce-Jones. There are many foot-soldiers too who haveprovided distinguished service to this new Orientalism. And no compendium of these foot-soldiers would becomplete without the names of Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Thomas Friedman, Martin Peretz, Norman Podhoretz,Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Judith Miller.c

I try to visualize an encounter between these new Orientalists and some of their eminent predecessors likeHienrich Heine, Abraham Geiger, Gustav Weil, Franz Rosenthal, and the great Ignaz Goldziher. What would thesepro-Islamic Jews have to say to their descendents whose Orientalism denigrates and demeans the societies theystudy and who work to incite a civilizational war between Islam and the West? Would Geiger and Goldziherembrace Lewis and Kedourie, or would they be repelled by their new predatory Orientalism?

M. Shahid Alam teaches Economics at Northeastern University. His recent book, Poverty from the Wealth ofNations, was published by Palgrave (2000). Copyright: M. Shahid Alam.