Congratulations to Sasha Bukhari for winning second prize in the undergraduate section of the Rosemary Hollis Essay Prize!
Introduction
The West has its history etched into foreign sands, its achievements laboured by foreign hands, but its legacies sung with only whispered mentions of their foreign names. Discussing the history of the Middle East is to conjointly tell the story of the Rising West; with encounters spanning over 2,500 years, the essay will focus on colonialism alongside several other encounters that influenced the construction of identities for both regions. The second half of the essay will determine whether these identities have been reconstructed following decolonisation.
Constructing identities:
Creating regional identities for the West and the Middle East arguably begins with the crusades. The First Crusade (1096-1102), initiated by Pope Urban II, was a religious expedition to secure Christian rather than Muslim dominance over Jerusalem.[1] Relying on the antinominalist structure of the 12th century, the pope branded Muslims as an “alien and evil race” to legitimise the venture and rally military support.[2] The demonising of Islam established the ‘other’ while creating the counter-identity of the ‘saviour’; ‘othering’ is a detachment mechanism which absolves the atrocities committed against foreigners that have been reduced to ‘others’.
The ‘salvation/othering’ rhetoric continued to underpin the encounters between the West and the Middle East by identifying the West as a “homogenous entity … necessarily oppositional to a threatening Islam”.[3] Consequently, their future encounters were reduced to various salvation projects: “salvation by conversion to Christianity [crusades], salvation by civilisation [Colonialism], salvation by development and modernization [post-colonial relations], [and] salvation by global market democracy [GWoT]”. [4] Each of these designs solidified the Western ‘defender’ identity by assigning the Middle East inferior identities progressing “from barbarians, to primitives, […] to terrorists”.[5] Thus, propelling the binary cleavage that would organise the world according to two unequal halves.[6]
Colonialism -replacing the Ottoman Empire- belonged to the ‘salvation by civilisation’ design; surpassing the crusades in both methodology and execution, as they were motivated by economic expansion rather than religion and accomplished through cultural genocide rather than solely uncontrolled bloodshed or propaganda. Moreover, the colonial mentality is best understood through Edwards Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (1978).[7] The stereotyped attitude of the Occident (West) towards the Orient (East) is reduced to four main features: a) the Orient are irrational, underdeveloped, and consequently, inferior, as such b) the Occident identifies itself as both its “diametrical opposite” and “protector [or] carer”, and c) to maintain the dynamic the Occident denies the Orients ability for self-identification and instead assigns it a fictional identity.[8] As long as the East remains inherently inferior its dependency on the West justifies the Occident’s control.
Similarly, within the colonial complex, the involuntary acquisition and exploitation of territories are justified as duties of the dominant ‘carer’. To establish a western image of civilisation, the coloniser must eradicate the pre-existing ethnic one, and then establish political and legal channels to ensure control over the colonised group. As the coloniser reshapes the identity of the colonised to ‘inferior’ or ‘savage’, they “defend the requirement for violence” as they are no longer “bound by the principles that apply to humanity”.[9] The detachment mechanism may have absolved the West of its colonial atrocities, but the colonial identities ingrained themselves into the cultural fabric of both regions – where it dehumanises the colonised, it decivilizes the coloniser.[10] When colonialisms violent character was “normalised [by its] European beneficiaries”, Césaire determined “a poison [was] distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceed[ed] towards savagery.”[11]
This perspective is reaffirmed as the systematic ‘othering’ which characterises colonialism has also been the legitimising pillar of the U.S’ foreign policy in the Middle East. President George W. Bush implemented the USA PATRIOT Act legislation to lead the GWoT campaign following the 9/11 attacks.[12] It legitimised measures such as the ‘Guantanamo Bay U.S detention camp’, a facility to illegally incarcerate perceived enemy combatants and subject them to torture interrogations.[13] Reducing enemy combatants to an ‘other’ allowed the U.S to simultaneously “delegitimise their political goals” and legitimised their own extreme counter-measures.[14] The colonial identity instilled a poison that has seeped well into the 21stcentury; the defensive position perpetuates the salvation rhetoric to “acquit Western states of their responsibility to uphold democratic or human values”.[15] Moreover, 21st-century encounters between the West and the Middle East continue to be marketed as Western expeditions to save the Third World. The GWoT, for example, belongs to the aforementioned ‘salvation by democratisation’ design, and consistent with the superior-inferior mentality of colonialists, it was labelled a Crusade by President Bush.[16] The deliberate wording, given its well-known context, reaffirmed that the West had no intention of abandoning the colonial mentality that certifies its global superiority.
In terms of the colonised, when the subordinate group is stripped of their ethnic personalities, they become displaced and receptive to the Occident’s invitation to silently imitate a foreigner’s way of life; [17] the perverse alienation juxtaposes the desire to assimilate with the constant reminder -through degradation- that they cannot claim the foreign structure nor their native lands as their own. Having internalised the colonial system, the natives must then rediscover themselves within the colonial structure and its shared expectations; they are collected into the folds of the western vision, living, and moulding themselves against fault lines erected according to racial logic. In which sense, each group constructs and reaffirms the identity of the other in opposition to their own.[18]
Moreover, the creation of a colonised identity was supported by practises like Edward Said’s ‘Imaginative geography’, which allowed the West to remap the East according to political interests and then formalise it through literature. Rewriting history according to this “Regime of Truth” imposed by the dominant group was not exclusive to geographical designs.[19] Building on Foucault’s theorisation that discourse is a “system of statements within which the world can be known” the immortality of literature records the dominant group’s truth.[20] In which sense, sustaining the Eurocentric/US aberration that places Western civilisation as the pinnacle of human greatness was dependent on creating certain “universal fictions”.[21] For example, the British and French administrators produced articles in the Edinburgh Review depicting the “Arab mind” as “cognitively dissociative fragments, incapable of coherent reasoning”;[22] a stereotype meant to promote the necessity for western civilisation. Said argued that while “the…[Orientalist] writes about [and] the [Oriental] is written about”, the latter silently helps to build themselves into a European contraption.[23]However, Halliday (1995) claimed the Middle East was an active participant in the production and perpetuation of these myths “as much as the west is”.[24] An example is when Tāhā Husayn, editor of the journal Al-Kātib al-Misirī (1945), wrote an article depicting the British versus French powers struggle to control Egypt, in which he “[played] into the stereotypes [of] western colonist discourse that emphasise the rationalist […] activism of the Western Sovereign as contrasted with the irrationality, passivity, and femineity of the colonised ‘other’”.[25] In which sense, where the Middle East previously accepted their assigned Western identity, decades of assimilating to the colonial structure was replaced by an anti-imperialist sentiment that instead worked to embrace those myths and perpetuate them as their own -if only to retake control of their narrative and identity.
Re-constructing the Arabian Identity
The Middle East emerged from colonial rule with “only artificial boundaries, lack[ing] any internal cohesion”, and with the Arabian identity mutilated to fit a Western portrait of civilisation.[26] A constructivist approach treats identity as the heart of state sovereignty, meaning that while the Middle Eastern states were unable to reconcile the region’s foreign identities, they were also unable to build a national identity.[27] The Platonian argument that “states are as the men are, they grow out of human characters” refers to the personified state in which human tensions at the micro-level ripple into state interactions at the meso-macro level, arguably suggesting that the cohesion of Middle Eastern politics is predicatedon the reconciliation of fractured identities at a micro-level.[28]
In 2005 the Foreign Ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council reaffirmed the urgency for an Arabic-Islamic identity, however, creating it was a series of trail and errors.[29] The first attempt to establish a religion-centric identity at the national level failed because the tensions between the various sub-religions made it impossible to unite them under a single identification.[30] Iran, for example, tried to impose a “narrow Shi’a-Islamic identity” despite having a large Sunni population, meaning any successful outcome required excluding over half of the population that didn’t identify as Shi’a Muslims.[31] The second attempt was to adopt a transnational approach, essentially replicating the European identity on a Middle Eastern landscape. However, their colonial history meant that none of the Middle Eastern states had developed a strong national identity capable of then being surrendered for a collective one – as was the case with Europe.[32] As such, pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism identities emerged as “substitutes for individual national identities” thus failing to hold their weight as a collective.[33] The attempts for a regional identity have been top-down approaches by imposing religious or dynastical tropes on a framework too shaky to support them.[34] These failings can arguably be attributed to the fact that their colonial identities were not imposed from above but rather absorbed into the social fabric of each state.
For Walter Mignolo, the turmoil in the Middle East is a result of residual colonialism.[35] Senghor in ‘Le Monde’ (1957) argued that colonialisms’ profound impact on the identities of both parties involved, meant decolonisation couldn’t effectively be measured by just the re-transferring of control. Decolonisation had to be erected against stricter measures, namely, “the abolition of all prejudice…[and] superiority complex in the minds of the colonisers and…inferiority complex in the minds of the colonised”. [36] Mignolo tackles the concept of residual colonialism in the decoloniality framework by forming a distinction between de-colonisation and decoloniality. The former refers to the re-transfer of power – natives reclaiming their states from imperial occupiers, however, according to Mignolo, this illusion of success masquerades a deeper failure as, a) control was passed to the native elite – imitators of their colonial predecessors, and consequently b), the inherited Western institutions remained the active form of governance.[37] In Iraq, for example, ‘Saddam Hussein’s secret police’ -courtesy of British imperialists- remained an active institution of control after the colonial exit.[38] As well as Jordan, alongside other states, having foreign leaders strategically placed to secure “imperial interests in the post-withdrawal phase”. [39]
Conversely, decoloniality explores the “remaining structures of dominance and exploitation” in previously colonised states which are maintained by the destructive relationship between coloniality and modernity.[40] The underlying argument is that modernity is inseparable from coloniality in the same way wealthy classes cannot exist without their impoverished counterparts -each reaffirms the existence of the other.[41] The problem is that if “coloniality [is the] necessary component for modernity” then unlike the history we’re accustomed to which treats colonialism as a concept of the past and modernity as a vision of the future, if the two are inseparable, then the colonial identities “cannot be ended if global imperial designs in the name of modernity continue”.[42] Thus, reaffirming the improbability of the Middle East creating a stable identity while the West maintains its colonial superiority through ventures like the GWoT; the reconstruction of identities cannot begin if there is not a mutual abandonment of the remaining colonial personalities.
Conclusion
The obsession with the West as saviours or gatekeepers of civilised society conversely assumes that the colonised territories had to be reduced to some form of ‘wrong’ which required saving. That image of ‘wrongness’ creates an identity not easily eroded. Even so, the process of removing blood from marble must be a collective endeavour, involving both the colonised and the coloniser, only then could we begin to “tell a better story than it was told”.[43]
Bibliography
Burney, Shehla. “CHAPTER ONE: Orientalism: The Making of the Other.” Counterpoints 417 (2012): 23–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42981698?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents.
Carroll, James. “The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade.” LobeLog, March 15, 2018. https://lobelog.com/the-war-on-terror-as-the-launching-of-an-american-crusade/.
Cartwright, Mark. “The Crusades: Consequences & Effects.” World History Encyclopedia, October 9, 2009. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1273/the-crusades-consequences–effects/).
Césaire, Aimé, and Joan Pinkham. Discourse on Colonialism. JSTOR. NYU Press, 2000. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qfkrm.
De Young, Terri L. “THE INFLUENCE of the COLONIAL ENCOUNTER: SELF, IDENTITY and OTHER in MODERN ARABIC INTELLECTUAL DISCOURSE.” Al-‘Arabiyya 40/41 (2007): 27–44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43195684?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents.
Franz, Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, 1961. https://monoskop.org/images/6/6b/Fanon_Frantz_The_Wretched_of_the_Earth_1963.pdf.
Gada, Muhammad Yaseen. “RETHINKING the IMPACT of the CRUSADES on the MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN THOUGHT and DEVELOPMENT.” QIJIS (Qudus International Journal of Islamic Studies) 5, no. 2 (August 26, 2017): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.21043/qijis.v5i2.2259.
Helfont, Samuel. “POST-COLONIAL STATES and the STRUGGLE for IDENTITY in the MIDDLE EAST since WORLD WAR TWO,” 2015. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/195659/helfont_-_hi_-_post-colonialism.pdf.
Hoffman, Alvina. “Interview – Walter Mignolo/Part 2: Key Concepts.” E-International Relations, 2013. https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/.
Hollis, Rosemary. Surviving the Story : The Narrative Trap in Israel and Palestine. London: Red Hawk Books, 2019.
Khatib, Lina. “Nationalism and Otherness.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (February 2006): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549406060808.
Kortright, Chris. “Colonization and Identity.” The Anarchist Library, 2019. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/chris-kortright-colonization-and-identity.
Kumaraswamy, P.R. “Who Am I? The Identity Crisis in the Middle East.” ResearchGate, 2006. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237526250.
Mignolo, Walter. “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience.” Confero, Vol. 1, no. 1, 2013. http://www.confero.ep.liu.se/issues/2013/v1/i1/130312b/confero13v1i1129.pdf.
Odolczyk, Malgorzata. “Securitising the War on Terror.” E-International Relations, October 30, 2020. https://www.e-ir.info/2020/10/30/securitising-the-war-on-terror/.
Rodriguez, Alejandra. “Is the War on Terrorism Compromising Civil Liberties? A Discussion of Hamdi and Padilla.” California Western Law Review 39, no. 2 (2003): 7. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232621022.pdf.
Ross, Elliot. “The Past Is Still Present: Why Colonialism Deserves Better Coverage.” The Correspondent. The Correspondent, October 9, 2019. https://thecorrespondent.com/32/the-past-is-still-present-why-colonialism-deserves-better-coverage/34856800000-34372b68.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Staël, Madame De, L E L, Richard Bentley, and Isabel Hill. Corrinne; Or, Italy. London: Richard Bentley, 1833.
Endnotes
[1] Mark Cartwright, “The Crusades: Consequences & Effects,” World History Encyclopaedia, (October 9, 2009)
[2] Muhammad Yaseen Gada, “RETHINKING the IMPACT of the CRUSADES on the MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN THOUGHT and DEVELOPMENT,” QIJIS (Qudus International Journal of Islamic Studies) 5, no. 2 (August 26, 2017), 1–23
[3] Lina Khatib, “Nationalism and Otherness,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (February 2006), 63; Fred Halliday, “Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East”, London, I.B Tauris (1995), 214
[4] Alvina Hoffman, “Interview – Walter Mignolo/Part 2: Key Concepts,” E-International Relations (2013); GWoT: ‘Global War on Terror’.
[5] Ibid., Hoffman.
[6] Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 12; Shehla Burney, “CHAPTER ONE: Orientalism: The Making of the Other,” Counterpoints 417 (2012), 25
[7] Ibid., Said, 7; Burney, 1. Edward Said explored the psychological mentality of Americans towards the Middle East, building on Foucault and Gramsci to address the power relations between the Orient and the Occident.
[8] Ibid., four principals are called: “Dogmas of Orientalism”
[9] Walter Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)Coloniality, Border Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience,” vol. 1, no. (2013); Fanon Franz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, (1961), 130
[10] Elliot Ross, “The Past Is Still Present: Why Colonialism Deserves Better Coverage,” The Correspondent (The Correspondent, October 9, 2019);The Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a renown poet in the 20th Century as well as a key political figure in the history of Martinique.
[11] Aimé Césaire and Joan Pinkham, Discourse on Colonialism, JSTOR (NYU Press, 2000)
[12] The USA PATRIOT Act (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, 2001)
[13] Alejandra Rodriguez, “Is the War on Terrorism Compromising Civil Liberties? A Discussion of Hamdi and Padilla,” California Western Law Review 39, no. 2 (2003), 16; Cited in IP2025 Coursework essay (Term 2), 6.
[14] Malgorzata Odolczyk, “Securitising the War on Terror,” E-International Relations (2020)
[15] Ibid., IP2025 Essay, 6
[16] James Carroll, “The War on Terror as the Launching of an American Crusade,” LobeLog, (2018)
[17] Madame De Satël, Corrine; Or, Italy (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 76. “Young people were thus reminded of famous men and silently invited to imitate them”, extract within the context of young people visiting the tombs of ancient Romans, the original conquerors and creators of ‘Colonies’.
[18] Chris Kortright, “Colonization and Identity,” The Anarchist Library (2019); Edward Said, The Edward Said Reader. (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 71-74. Referencing how each identity -Orient and Occident- is established in opposition to the other.
[19] Ibid., Burney, 27. “Regime of Truth” coined by Michel Foucault
[20] Ibid., Burney, 27
[21] Ibid., Mignolo.
[22] Terri L. De Young, “The Influence of the Colonial Encounter: Self, Identity and Other in Modern Arabic Intellectual Discourse,” Al-‘Arabiyya 40/41 (2007), 28.
[23]Ibid., Said (1978), 308.Emphasis removed; Said originally wrote a “European invention” which in this essay was replaced with contraption. The difference between a contraption and invention is that the latter is employed when referring to strange or complicated devices (which are often badly made). The exchanged word is arguably more representative of the inexcusable venture undertaken in the Middle East.
[24] Ibid., Halliday, 204. Emphasis added.
[25] Ibid., De Young, 32.
[26] P.R Kumaraswamy, “Who Am I? The Identity Crisis in the Middle East.,” ResearchGate, (2006), 64. The artificial boundaries refers to the ‘Middle East’ being a western term coined by Adm. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1902) to denote the landscape connecting Egypt and Singapore according to trade routes of western interest. The landscape was butchered and refigured to meet the political interests of the British, French, and Italian colonisers. Further reading on psychology of cartography: Silvia Siniscalchi & Cosimo Palagiano (2018) The Place Names of the Middle East Before and After Ptolemaic Cartography: An Emblematic Selection from Ancient Maps, The Cartographic Journal, 55:3, 205-216, DOI: 10.1080/00087041.2017.1413788; Distribution of territories: France controlled Algeria from 1830-1962, Tunisia from 1881-1956, and Morocco from 1912-1956, through a combination of protectorate treaties and violent conquests; Britain colonised Aden in 1839, Egypt in 1882 and Sudan in 1889; Italy colonised Libya from 1911-1941.
[27] Ibid., Kumaraswamy, 63.
[28] Plato, Republic, book 8, 544d-e. Osler summarises: “Do you know, I said, that governments vary as the dispositions of men vary, and that there must be as many of one as there are of the other? Or do you suppose that States spring from ‘oak and rock’, and not from the human natures which are in them?”
[29] Ibid., 63.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 69.
[33] Ibid., 69. Emphasis added.
[34] Ibid., 63.
[35] Ibid., Hoffman.
[36] Léopold Sédar Senghor, Le Monde (1957); referencing my IP1018 essay from the introduction of Senghor until this reference.
[37] Ibid., Hoffman.
[38] Samuel Helfont, “POST-COLONIAL STATES and the STRUGGLE for IDENTITY in the MIDDLE EAST since WORLD WAR TWO,” (2015)
[39] Ibid., 63.
[40] Ibid, Hoffman. Further reading on differences between Postcolonial and decolonial theory: Bhambra, Gurminder K. (2014) Postcolonial and decolonial dialogues. Postcolonial Studies 17 (2), pp. 115–121.
Modernity definition: Modernity refers to the technological and socio-economic advancements advancements that allow generations to define and themselves from their antiquated predecessors
[41] Ibid., Hoffman.
[42] Ibid., Hoffman.
[43] Ibid., Satël, 67. Full quote: ‘Oswald did not allow himself to share Corrine’s admiration. As he looked at the four galleries [of the Colosseum], the four structures, rising one above the other, at the mixture of pomp and decay which simultaneously arouses respect and pity, he could see only themaster’s luxury and the slave’s blood’ (Emphasis added); Rosemary Hollis, Surviving the Story: The Narrative Trap in Israel and Palestine (London: Red Hawk Books, 2019). Excerpt by Damian Gorman’s “If I was Us, I wouldn’t Start from Here.”, full quote: “If I was us I wouldn’t start from here / For Here’s a swamp we’ve stood in for too long. / We haven’t kept our heads above the water. / And haven’t seen a thing where we have gone … / Each generation has a sacred task: To tell a better story than it was told…’.