From the mid-1970s, Islamism as a critique of modernity became a contemporary postmodernist idea. It began to grow a prominent cultural branch. At the heart of it was ‘self-orientalism.’ In his hugely influential book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said demonstrated how the West had been concocting distorted views of Eastern cultures, especially ever since the 18th century. According to Said, ‘Orientalism’ was related to and informed by the West’s colonial politics and ambitions. To Said, Western portrayals of Muslims were a political exercise in which the non-Western subjects were viewed and explained narrowly to self-affirm the West’s cultural superiority.
Said lamented that the West presented Eastern subjects as ‘the other,’ and/or as people and cultures operating outside the context of modernity. They were depicted as being ‘exotic,’ impulsive, emotional, dogmatic and irrational. And thus, ‘backwards.’ Said wrote that these were false portrayals.
His ideas attracted the interest and attention of a large number of academics. They expanded them by claiming that many non-Western cultures, after being derided by the West for following premodern traditions, began to adopt Western notions of modernity and thus, undermined their own cultures. But it can also be argued that Said treated the West the same way that he accused the West of perceiving the East. He saw the West as a monolithic whole, ignoring the different cultures and races that reside there. He also ignored the more objective studies of Eastern societies by Western authors that had no political agendas.
Said’s assessments sound postmodernist. However, this was not really a critique of modernity as such, but of colonialism which, nevertheless, is often seen as a product of modernity.
But if Western portrayals of the East were not to be believed, and nor should Western culture be treated as being superior (and then adopted), then what should? If local/indigenous cultures and traditions need to be reinforced in the East, how were they to function in a world that has been dominated by Western economic and political systems, and technologies for over two to three centuries? The situation in certain Muslim societies has come to a point that even science is now derided as a Western tool of oppression.
A decade or so ago, while attending Eid-ul-Fitr prayers at a mosque in Karachi, I heard a cleric declare that ‘science belongs to the West’ and ‘spirituality belongs to the East.’ By ‘East’ he meant Muslim societies. After the prayers, I approached the cleric to greet him. Once done, I reminded him that the ceiling fans, the beautiful yellow and green bulbs inside the mosque, and the microphone that he used for delivering the azaan (call to prayer) were all products of science. To this, he replied, “Son, but what comes from within us is spiritual, and that is more important.”
“But Maulvi sahib,” I said, “what does spirituality produce?”
“Better Muslims,” he replied.
“And what do better Muslims produce?” I asked.
“An opportunity to find a place in Paradise,” he smugly smiled.
End of Orientalism.
Nevertheless, today, one can say that the Muslim world has surpassed being Orientalised by the West. But it has begun ‘exoticising’ itself. This is ‘self-orientalism’ or ‘auto-orientalism.’ This happens when cultures that have allegedly been Orientalised by the West become full participants in the process. Instead of leaving the act of imagining the East solely to the West, the East becomes an active participant in the exercise.
For example, if the West has developed a certain perception about an Eastern culture, the Eastern culture becomes a conscious partner in this endeavour. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the colonial-era perception of India being a region of exotic spiritualists and gurus reached a peak in the West, many Indians became participants in strengthening this perception. It attracted tourism to India, and opportunities for Indians to set up ‘spiritual centres’ in Europe and the US. These centres operated like business enterprises. The perception worked on a political level as well, because it suggested that Indians were ‘peaceful and spiritual people’ compared to their more aggressive Muslim neighbours in Pakistan.
Said’s assessments sound postmodernist. However, this was not really a critique of modernity as such, but of colonialism which, nevertheless, is often seen as a product of modernity
In the early 1970s, a young man Uxi Mufti, son of the famous Pakistani intellectual Mumtaz Mufti, began constructing the building blocks of what would become Lok Virsa — a government-funded organisation dedicated to promoting the country’s ‘folk cultures.’ Uxi had seen ‘Hindu gurus’ whetting the curiosity of thousands of Europeans and Americans. He advised the Pakistani government to promote Sufism and Pakistan’s folk arts in the West. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, Pakistani folk singers were sent to perform in Western countries. Indians and Pakistanis perceived Westerners to be ‘spiritually bankrupt’ after decades of secularism had sidelined Christianity.
They reached out to fill this ‘void’ by delivering to the ‘empty Westerners’ forms of spirituality that were outside the more orthodox contexts of Hinduism and Islam, and thus more approachable. Both were self-orientalising themselves by appealing to the Orientalist idea of the subcontinent being a region of exotic spiritualists, gurus and Sufi masters.
This went on for some time, even though, ironically, societies in both India and Pakistan were increasingly becoming ‘fundamentalist’ and even radical in their religious beliefs. In 1985, when as an 18-year-old I first visited India, I met a group of Belgian and Dutch tourists who had arrived in Bombay via Karachi. They said they were extremely disappointed to see that the people of both the countries were nothing like the ‘Pakistani Sufi masters’ and ‘Indian gurus’ that they had encountered in Amsterdam and Brussels. One of them complained that an Indian tourist guide had taken them to a guru’s place which was ‘clearly constructed to please white Europeans.’ He said the same thing about Thailand, where there were Buddhist temples constructed precisely for this reason. There were Buddhist monks there who were not real monks but employees of Thailand’s tourism department.
During a visit to Istanbul in 2007, when I saw a performance by the ‘whirling dervishes,’ I felt cheated. But I wasn’t the target audience. It was the Westerners with more euros and dollars to spend. I was told by a smiling Turk that the ‘dervishes’ were simply salaried performers who had nothing to do with any Sufi order. This was self-orientalism enacted to draw financial benefits.
Self-orientalism is not just about dressing up to appease Orientalist perceptions to boost the tourism industry. It can also be about forming an identity for deeper reasons, even though the audience remains to be the West (and the ‘Westernised’).
Identity politics, as one understands it today, first appeared in the US. It has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorising founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. It first emerged in 1977 among black feminist groups in the US. Identity politics is based on the belief that some social groups are oppressed, making them vulnerable to ‘cultural imperialism.’ In Europe and the US, women, black, gay and transgender communities have been prominent exponents of identity politics. Muslim communities living in the West entered the fray in the early 2000s, especially after the 9/11 attacks in the US.
When I saw a performance by the ‘whirling dervishes,’ I felt cheated. But I wasn’t the target audience. It was the Westerners with more euros and dollars to spend. I was told by a smiling Turk that the ‘dervishes’ were simply salaried performers
Indeed, the most immediate reason for this was the scrutiny that Muslims residing in the West came under after 9/11. But some cultural movements that first emerged in Muslim regions from the mid-1970s onwards contributed to building what Muslims in the West are using today to strengthen their ‘identity’. For example, in Egypt, as the ideas of Arab nationalism and Islamic modernism began to wither away — especially after Israeli forces decimated the Egyptian army and air force in 1967 — the once repressed and sidelined Islamist groups began to resurface. They began to construct social movements on Egypt’s university campuses. Mosques were built in universities and the wearing of Western clothes was discouraged. Students (mostly male) handed out niqabs and hijabs to female students.
They viewed social modernity – once encouraged by Egypt’s Arab nationalist government – as devoid of spirituality and a way to discourage people from embracing ‘Islamic apparel,’ rituals and thus, identity. Similar sentiments and social movements also began to emerge in Iran in the years leading up to the 1979 ‘Islamic Revolution.’ However, such movements at the time were not present in Muslim communities residing in Europe and the US.
In their 2006 book Sufism in the West, Jamal Malik and John Hinnells wrote that till the late 1970s, South Asian Muslim migrants in the West were almost entirely immersed in European ways of life. There were hardly any purpose-built mosques nor any urgency to acquire ‘Islamic attire.’ A majority of South Asian Muslim migrants in the West were male. According to Malik and Hinnells, these migrants had become integral components of the European working-classes. A lot of their time was spent working in factories, after which they would frequent pubs.
Professor Emeritus Bichara Khader, in his essay for the 2016 book The Search for Europe wrote that Islamophobia in Europe and in the US is, of course, targeted at migrants from Muslim countries that are seen as a threat to Western culture and security. But he added that migration was not much of an issue in Europe till the mid-1960s. Ever since the 1950s, hundreds of Muslims from South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa had been arriving in various European cities. They were looking for work and higher wages. Khader writes that as post-War economies boomed in Europe, these migrants were seen as vital contributors to this boom. It was only when the economies of Europe began to recede, especially after the 1973 international oil crisis, that the term ‘migration problem’ gained increased usage. Yet, it was still not linked to a ‘Muslim problem’ as it is today. Khader wrote that the economic turmoil of the 1970s and early 1980s triggered riots involving migrants and locals, especially in England.
These were explained as ‘race riots’ that involved white locals, black migrants from the Caribbean islands, and Muslim and non-Muslim Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis. The reasons were economic. Neo-fascist outfits accused their governments of allowing non-white migrants to steal ‘white jobs.’ It really wasn’t a clash of cultures as such.
Until the early 1980s, Muslim migrants were not very exhibitionistic about their faith. For example, they were happy with a few basement mosques. But once settled, they began to marry women from their own countries. They then brought them to Europe, even though it wasn’t uncommon for some to marry European women as well. Khader wrote that most of the women who came as wives were from rural and peri-urban areas of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Egypt, etc. They had been impacted by the aforementioned ‘Islamic’ social movements which were initiated in their countries from the mid-1970s. The influence of these movements changed the settlers’ attitude towards their religion and cultural values. Whereas once they were fine with their small basement mosques, they began to demand purpose-built mosques. One should also add that during the Cold War, European powers and the US encouraged and financed many Islamist social groups to keep communism at bay in Muslim countries.
As a consequence, the effects of this also began to impact Muslim diasporas in the West. This saw an influx of Arab and South Asian Muslim preachers who began to set up shop in various Western cities. They were particularly appealing to younger British Muslims, especially from families who had failed to be fully assimilated by European integration policies. This generation began to adopt ‘Islamic’ ideas popularised by the Islamic evangelical outfits. They used these to invent an identity for themselves as Muslims in non-Muslim countries.
As the presence of veiled women and mosques grew, this is when the ‘migration problem’ began to be seen by the European far-right as a ‘Muslim problem,’ triggering episodes of Islamophobia. The Iranian theocracy and the Saudi monarchy played a major role. Social as well as political Islamist movements were bankrolled by the two in their respective Shia and Sunni domains of influence.
The traditional black chador – that was made compulsory for women in Iran after the revolution – was enthusiastically adopted by many Shia women in various Muslim and Western countries. The niqab and hijab that became compulsory for women in Saudi Arabia in 1980 were vigorously promoted through Saudi-funded organisations in Sunni-majority countries and among the Muslim diasporas in the West. Men, too, were encouraged to adopt an ‘Islamic look,’ by letting their beards grow. Saudi Arabia also bankrolled the construction of mosques, not only in Muslim countries, but in European countries and in the US as well.
The ‘Islamic’ cultural products that many Muslims began to acquire and admire, especially in Western countries, were peddled as being rooted in an ancient Islamic past which, apparently, modernisation had conspired to erode. The hijab is an example. In her book Women and Gender in Islam, the Egyptian scholar Leila Ahmed wrote that it was a misconception that the practice of veiling was invented in the ancient Islamic world. According to Ahmed, the roots of niqab, hijab and the burqa can be found in the ways in which “elite women in ancient Mesopotamia and the Byzantine, Greek, and Persian empires wore the veil as a sign of respectability and high status.”
The image of a veiled Muslim woman and a bearded Muslim man, for example, eclipsed the previous Orientalist depictions of Muslims as being part of ‘exotic’ and ‘mystical’ cultures. The new image reflected conservatism and expressions of high morality. This image got embedded in the Western mind from the 1990s, and especially after 9/11. It was also used by many Muslims in the West to flex their bit of identity politics.
Those who were aggressively building an identity by adopting a look deemed ‘Islamic’ were using it as an identity marker whose history was supposedly rooted in a ‘pristine’ past. But to do this, they made sure that a more immediate past was erased. In A Quiet Revolution, Leila Ahmad wrote that by the early 1960s, veiling in the Muslim world had receded so much that only a handful of women practiced it. The tradition of veiling in most Muslim regions had begun to decline from the 1930s. According to Ahmad, by the 1960s, even women belonging to the ‘conservative lower-middle classes’ had begun to discard it.
The British historian Stephanie Cronin in her book Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World wrote that the unveiling was the result of a ‘modernist gender discourse’ in the Muslim world. The discourse was triggered by the impact of European modernity in colonised regions. Local intelligentsias began to investigate the reasons behind the decline of their civilisations and the rise of the one that had colonised them. Science, modern education, integrated economies powered by industrialisation, and religious reform were identified as the main drivers of Western ascendancy.
According to Cronin, Muslim nationalists wanted to provide the same to their communities. They immediately adopted economic and social modernisation models developed by Western powers. One of the learnings that had emerged from the discourse in Muslim regions was that economic progress in the modern world required an educated workforce which could not exclude women.
This meant women had to attend educational institutions so that they, too, could become part of the workforce alongside men. This is one reason why the tradition of veiling began to recede. The modernist-nationalist governments in many Muslim countries posited that Islam was a progressive faith and that the idea of veiling in it was a metaphor for upholding modesty by both men and women. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, regimes in Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and Albania actively discouraged veiling.
In most other Muslim-majority nation-states where veiling was already in decline as well, regimes had left it to the women to decide, even though the need for them to get a modern education and enter the workforce was greatly emphasised. But this past is either actively erased or aggressively derided today, not only by the Islamists but also by the so-called critics of ‘neo-colonialism’ most of who are, ironically, seated in Western universities writing theses after theses on the advantages of veiling among women in ‘conservative’ Muslim-majority countries.
In 2018, when I was stationed as a Research Scholar in the US for a year, one of the many interviews that I conducted there was of a Pakistan-born academic and author who (while sipping red wine with me) tried to convince me that veiling ‘empowered’ women in Pakistan and also why previous campaigns against vailing were a ‘colonial project.’ I wasn’t convinced, but did enjoy the wine.
Birth and Demise of Islamist Self-Orientalism.
In her study of Al Huda — a Pakistan-based Islamic school for (mostly well-to-do) women — the scholar Sadaf Ahmad interviewed a young member of the school who strongly reacted to the type of clothes that her mother wore in the 1970s. The young woman was shocked and claimed that the women of her mother’s generation didn’t know much about Islam.
Most probably, she believed that unlike her own generation which, apparently, has reclaimed its ‘true’ identity, her mother’s generation was overtly smitten by modernity and ‘Westernisation.’
But in most cases, this so-called reclaimed identity, especially among middle-and-upper-middle-class women, is adopted so that it could be exhibited in spaces where the audience is largely Western or Westernised. This identity had risen from the political and economic turmoil that many Muslim regions plunged into in the early and mid-1970s. They were then faced with a world that had ‘entered a postmodern age’ in which modernity, even in the West, was being questioned, and in which ‘multiculturalism’ had begun to be championed. This meant that a non-Western community (in the West) didn’t have to completely immerse itself in the cultural values of the West, as long as it was knitted to an integrated economy and remained productive.
But what happens when such an economy begins to struggle? A publicly asserted cultural identity (especially that of a diaspora) becomes that much harder to be accepted, and it often comes under scrutiny. It is criticised for being purposely alien and even provocative. After economies in Europe and the US began to come under stress in 2008, the number of complaints involving ‘Islamophobia’ there increased. A majority of Muslims who had firmly adopted the identity that was first formulated by Iran-and-Saudi-funded-programmes, and then solidified in the West by postmodernist ideas, found themselves in a quagmire. The way that they looked, or practiced their faith had been accepted by a multicultural West, but now the West is changing again.
In 2003, the former chief of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the late Qazi Hussain Ahmad, was quoted in the Urdu daily Nawa-i-Waqt as saying that Westerners now respect those Muslims who have shunned Western values and adopted ‘Islamic’ ones. To critique General Musharraf’s ‘Enlightened Moderation,’ Qazi said there was nothing wrong in behaving or looking ‘Islamic’ because the West is more appreciative of this than of those behaving like Westerners. But this too is a case of self-orientalism, because here as well, a subject had supposedly constructed a more ‘authentic’ identity, but which was still looking towards the West for validation and appreciation.
So, whereas from the 19th till the late 20th century, Orientalism had meant the West ‘exoticising’ Muslims as spiritual people immersed in quietist Sufi and tribal traditions, from the 1990s onwards, many Muslims began to exoticise themselves as highly ritualistic and pious folk who were supposedly reviving an Islam that got overshadowed by disruptive theological innovations and modernity. This was self-orientalism because largely, it was initiated to shape a new understanding of Islam and/or of a Muslim in the Western imagination.
When I was heading the media section of a British cultural organisation in Karachi between 2010 and 2015, I noticed that in its media paraphernalia the organisation kept using hijab-wearing women to depict Muslim women. Yet, non-Muslims were never defined by the apparel of their respective faiths. A Hindu or a Christian, for example, were never shown in their ‘religious dresses.’ The whole ‘Islamic look’ trope turned into a caricature of sorts. And the identity based on it began to run into trouble. Muslims jumped off the Orientalist stage decades ago, but the era of Qazi Sahib’s self-orientalism, too, is now crumbling.