2008

I. Buruma, A. Margalit, Occidentalism, Penguin Books, New York 2004, ISBN 88-06-17198-4

What do German Romantics, Friedrich Engels, Sayyid Qutb, Tolstoj and contemporary militant Islamists have in common? "Occidentalism" - sounds the provocative thesis put forward by Buruma and Margalit. Occidentalism is a dehumanising picture of the West, which portraits it as a soulless civilisation based on commodified social relationships and a materialist credo.

Like Orientalism - the tendency to look at the Orient as an immutable block based on a series of stereotypes - Occidentalism is based on prejudices and, as such, it engenders loathing and hatred. Whereas Orientalism, one can observe, is born in the colonising counterpart, Occidentalism - the hate for the West - is here traced back to Occident itself. It is precisely in the critics of European modernity that the authors find the first examples of Occidentalism. After a first introductory chapter, the book reconstructs the major strands of "Occidentalism": 1. the criticism of the alienating life of the modern metropolis, the "occidental city" (Chapter 2), and of its "mercantile" spirit, so strongly opposed to the cult of "heroes" (Chapter 3); 2. the opposition to what the authors call the "mind of the West", a mind without a soul, efficient like a calculator, but hopeless at doing what is humanly important (Chapter 4). This opposition is, from European critics of modernity to Islamist ideologists, the main source of contemporary Occidentalism.

Islamist ideologists certainly added something new to old forms of Occidentalism (the portrait of the West as idolatrous barbarism, as cult of a materialist false god, as it emerges from Chapters 5 and 6) but its source, always according to the authors, goes far back in time, to the Western critics of modernity themselves.

The thesis is very attractive, not least because of its simplicity. In an epoch desperately in search of tools for coping with what seems to be out of the capacity of human understanding (but perhaps simply requires a great deal of work and commitment), it does not come as surprise if Buruma's and Margalit's book appeared as "grandly illuminating" (Foreign Affairs).

However, the simplicity of the thesis, which explains the success of the book, also hides its main weaknesses. First, the analogy between Occidentalism and Orientalism is misleading. Occidentalism cannot be the simple counterpart of Orientalism, because the latter reflects the asymmetry of power between a colonising West and colonised East, which finds no equivalent in all the strands of Occidentalism analysed by the two authors. Neither the German romantics nor contemporary militant Islamists look at the West from the standpoint of a colonising power at the same time fascinated and repelled by the mysteries of the conquered exotic lands.

Second, doubts may arise as the meaning of the enterprise as a whole: how helpful is going back to German Romantics or the Russian Slavophiles in order to understand the contemporary Islamists' hate for the West? Do they have similar reasons for hating it? The point is not simply that such a 150-pages tour de force in two hundred years of worldwide intellectual history cannot but be inaccurate (none of the Islamist thinkers is quoted through his or her own writings, but always through "western" works on them). The problem is that putting together such different authors writing from such disparate historical and political contexts cannot but be misleading. It hides the different reasons, rooted in the different contexts, for hating the West, and in particular the fact that a critique of western modernity that has been done from within (such as that of Engels) cannot be put together with a critique that is done outside of it, from the perspective of someone who sees it as a possible danger but remains fundamentally stranger to it.

Chiara Bottici