A liberal defense of the West

Ibn Warraq is a Pakistani-born, ex-Muslim dissident from Britain, and author of several books highly critical of both Islam and Islamism. His name is a pseudonym. "Defending the West" is Warraq's response to Edward Said's immensely popular "post-colonial" work "Orientalism". I admit that I never bothered reading Said, but this is hardly necessary for grasping Warraq's riposte, which is intended to stand on its own, being a general critique of a certain kind of anti-Western mindset both within secular Western academe and in the Muslim world. Warraq believes, rightly or wrongly, that Said's "mischievous" tome is responsible for a large part of this anti-Western mindset, hence singling it out for special attention.

Warraq's response is written from a liberal standpoint ("liberal" in the European sense of Locke and Mill), so conservative Catholics or fascist nationalists probably won't like this book. The Western traditions Warraq is defending includes belief in the unity of the human race, the universality of human rights, objective truth, dispassionate search for knowledge for knowledge's sake, rational discourse, self-criticism, democracy and (perhaps) free trade. Above all, however, Warraq defends the idea of an authentic melting pot, where different cultures (including "Oriental" ones) influence and fructify each other. In Warraq's opinion, only the West has been a genuinely and consistently open-ended culture of this kind, characterized by curiosity in "The Other", at times bordering on outright "barbarophilia". Thus, there is no static, essentialist, racist, colonialist "West" locked in perpetual struggle against an equally essentialist "Orient". The so-called West has always included traditions willing to learn about and even learn from foreign cultures. Ex oriente lux!

The author points out a number of salient ironies in the West's relationship to the Orient. Thus, Orientalist art (a Western school of painting regarded by Said and his admirers as colonialist and racist) was highly praised in the Muslim and Hindu worlds. Many of the Orientalist painters were based in the Ottoman Empire (hardly a colony), some even worked for the sultans in Constantinople. When the 15th century Ottoman ruler Mehmet Fatih wanted his portrait to be painted, he sent for Renaissance painters from Venice. No Muslim portrait painters existed, no doubt due to Islam's iconoclastic prohibition of pictorial representation. When Muslims broke the rules, they often turned to Western models. Western Orientalist painting influenced Ottoman, Persian and Indian art, especially painted miniatures. Still today, museums and private collectors in Muslim-dominated countries are ready to pay substantial sums for Orientalist art, simply because it's one of the few pictorial documents left of the traditional Muslim world. Yet, Said has used the very word "Orientalism" to denote the Western colonialist-racist mindset! Warraq also points out that some Arabs travelled to the West in order to learn the technique of Orientalist painting, and that one Orientalist was an African-American. Many Orientalists were genuinely sympathetic to the cultures they were depicting, something even Warraq finds somewhat objectionable due to his strong opposition to Islam.

Other sections of "Defending the West" deal with the intriguing fact that the Muslim philosophers Averroës and Avicenna became more famous in the West than in the Muslim world, that rational discourse didn't disappear in the West during the Middle Ages, that Muslim slave-trade and slave-raiding was widespread, that Muslim racism against Blacks really did exist, and that some of the most prominent European experts on the Orient were Germans - a country lacking Asian colonies. He also accuses Said (a nominal Christian) of identifying the Orient solely with the Muslims. What about Eastern Christianity, Judaism or Zoroastrianism? The most controversial part of "Defending the West" might be Ibn Warraq's defense of British colonialism in India, which he paints as an almost wholly positive force. Somewhat confusingly, he also pays tribute to Edmund Burke's opposition to the British East India Company.

A problem with "Defending the West" is that Warraq attempts to cover too many subjects at the same time. This ultimately makes his book somewhat rambling and unwieldy (not to mention a huge "door stopper"!). Apparently, the first part of the book was originally published as a magazine article. A trait that might be negative is that Warraq says very little about Plato, Aristotle or Western philosophy in general. In a very real sense, he presupposes that the reader already knows the basics of the Western tradition, preferring to foray into less well known areas (such as Orientalist art). I'm not sure if foreknowledge of the basics can be counted on today!

Although I didn't always agree with the author, I nevertheless recommend "Defending the West" to those looking for a way out of the postmodernist maze. The so-called West has many ugly sides, but the alternatives are frequently even worse (at least this side of the Bronze Age), and many of the things worth preserving for the future can be found today in "Western", "modern" contexts rather than among the competitors (Russia, China, Hindutva, Islamic State and so on). Therefore, we need a critical defense of the accomplishments of the West, even as we strive to find alternatives to the negative sides which are also very real...