Enlightened by the past

When the erudite Edward Said published his hugely influential Orientalism in 1978, perverse critics such as Robert Irwin, Bernard Lewis, George P. Landow rejected the thesis that postcolonial European studies were ethnocentric — even racist. Said wrote that "orientalism" was a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes towards the Middle East. Prejudice against Arabs and Muslims did not impress.

Over the centuries, much of Muslim culture was presented under romanticised images of Asia and the Middle East, even when the stretch of land, from North Africa all the way to Mogul India, was characterised as oriental despotism.

These were allegedly autocratic and absolute governments that distinguished themselves from more moderate forms of rule. In recent times, Muslims and Arabs essentially incarnated either oil suppliers or potential terrorists, which presented more than a billion human beings as caricatures deserving of military aggression and domination.

If Said contended "that orientalism [was] fundamentally a political doctrine [defined] by aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth and knowledge", Michael Curtis perceived the European concept of oriental despotism not as an arbitrary prejudicial observation but rather as genuine processes and behaviours. For Curtis, who is an emeritus professor of political science at Rutgers University, "European views of Islam and their correlation with oriental despotism" affirmed that Western analysts interpreted without bias, or any racism.

According to the author, most researchers "gave credibility to despotism and they were deeply critical of those despotic governments they thought were committed to an Islamic mission to conquer the world" (page 37). Such views influenced many but especially Montesquieu and Marx, Curtis corroborates.

Political and cultural differences

There are fascinating discussions here, including a wonderful examination of Montesquieu, who concluded that Europe "was not only geographically but also politically and culturally different from the Orient and that the political liberty and restraints on the exercise of power in the West starkly contrasted with the restrictions on political and personal liberty in the Orient" (page 71).

Ironically, few referred to the contributions of the "Inquisition", which defined generations of enlightened Europeans.

Still, Montesquieu believed that for republics, the principle that determined the structure of government "was political virtue; for a democracy, the principle was equality and for aristocracy it was moderation. In monarchies, the principle was honour; in despotic government it was fear" (page 79).

These adages notwithstanding, the French monarchy, with the king as sole master, differed significantly from the Muslim Ottoman Empire, where it was somewhat "necessary to persuade people" (page 101). Indeed, the dictatorship was safely nestled in Versailles, not Constantinople.

One of the more interesting chapters, the fifth, focuses on the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke and despotism in India. Burke is accused of glorifying Hindus and of being critical of Warren Hastings — the British governor-general who regularised the nascent Raj.

Both James Mill and John Stuart Mill are also extensively quoted. Mill preferred the Muslim over the Hindu, positing that the form of despotism in the former "was preferable to the Hindu for at least two reasons: One was the regular distribution of functions of government to known officials compared with Hindu ‘confusion all things together in one heterogeneous mass'.

"The second, a more surprising argument, was the closer identification of the power of the priests with that of the sovereign among the Hindus compared with the ‘much less complete' alliance under Mohammadan sovereign between the church and state" (page 137). Intriguing.

Curtis's solid analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville and colonisation is also worthy of attention, especially since we know that de Tocqueville was influenced by events in Algeria, which the enlightened aristocrat thought should fall under French domination to maintain the "international prestige" of Paris (page 157).

Rather than simply defeat the Arabs, de Tocqueville recommended "colonisation and war … together" with the added requirement of importing a European population into Africa (page 165). It was part of the civilising mission, ostensibly to replace despotisms with aristocratic colonisers, to look after "little brown people" as necessary. The author's surprising conclusion is that more often than not the West was the victim of Islamic aggression from the 7th century onwards and it was not until the 19th century that it became imperialist. That may be so, but it is disingenuous to conclude that the balance of power favoured the Muslim world.

In 1978, Said provided a subtle but highly useful answer to the many questions posed by the orientalists in Curtis's book: "How does one represent other cultures?" he asked. "What is another culture? Is the notion of a distinct culture (or race, or religion, or civilisation) a useful one, or does it always get involved either in self-congratulation (when one discusses one's own) or hostility and aggression (when one discusses the ‘other')?"

Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of the forthcoming Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia (2011).

Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and IndiaBy Michael Curtis, Cambridge University Press, 382 pages, $24.99