Opinion: The Occidental Tourist
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Via Arts & Letters Daily: Rolf Potts reconsiders Sayyid Qutb, the fanatical author of In the Shade of the Koran and the intellectual father of genocidal Islamism. Qutb’s essay ‘The America I Saw’ has earned an honored place in religious history for its depiction of Americans as bestial, cowardly, perverted people less capable than chickens (literally) of feeling genuine human emotion—and by inference no more entitled to life than the beasts of the field. Potts seizes on an essential detail—Qutb’s dissatisfaction with a haircut he got in the States—to speculate that he may have also been the model of the philistine tourist:
The setting that so scandalized Qutb, however, was not a place of hippie-era love-ins or disco-era cocaine orgies, but Truman-era conservatism. Greeley, Colorado in 1949 was a dry town, with an abundance of churches and not a single bar. Still, our Egyptian traveler was able to locate a den of licentiousness in none other than a church sock hop. ‘And they danced to the tunes of the gramophone,’ Qutb writes, ‘and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire.’ Qutb then goes on to describe—without alluding to a conversation with any girl in particular—American girls’ knowledge that ‘seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.’ As these passages suggest, Qutb was content to play the role of voyeur during his time in America, interpreting events not as they might have been understood by the Americans who lived them, but as they sparked his fevered and pious imagination. Jazz was ‘music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires’; football fans were ‘enthralled with the flowing blood and crushed limbs, crying loudly, everyone cheering for his team’; sexual choice was ‘a gripping slavery and a relapse to the first primitive levels.’ American haircuts were a disgrace, and the practices of salting watermelon and drinking unsweetened tea (both unknown in Egypt) were revelatory signifiers of cultural stupidity. Indeed, by the end of ‘The America I Have Seen,’ the Qutb comes off sounding less like a nascent Muslim Marx than the Arab equivalent of a floral-shirted American account executive demanding ‘freedom fries’ on the French Riviera.
Potts relates the absurdity of Qutb’s critique with the school of ‘Occidentalism’ that began to gain attention after the 9/11 attacks hinted at the depths of madness in Islamist notions about the West. This new understanding is an inversion of the late Edward Said’s ‘Orientalist’ critique, which indicted western scholars for their cartoonish depictions of Middle Eastern culture. Said’s theory had been under pressure even before 9/11, and is now the subject of a book-length refutation, in Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents...
For an impressive catalogue of Occidentalist critique, dig Chuck Freund’s December 2001 Reason article on Said and the way Middle East studies ignored or mischaracterized the rise of extremism in the Arab world and South Asia. Freund is a philosophical opponent of the Said school, but he makes an important distinction: that the Orientalist critique was an important step forward in cultural studies. This is a point that gets lost in some of the cheaper anti-Said attacks (remember the major dustup over how much time the young scholar had spent at his family house in Jerusalem?), much of which just seeks to roll back the clock to a time before Orientalism was ever written. Ironically, this prevents Said’s critics from locating the real weaknesses and ellisions in his argument; more importantly, it loses the opportunity put Said’s own ideas to new uses.
The Occidentalist critique in my view is an important tool for understanding just how fully articulated and dangerous contemporary Islamism is, but it never would have happened if not for Said’s groundwork. The language of post-colonial theory—of ‘otherness,’ packed texts, cultural representations, and so on—has proven extremely useful, not just in understanding the biases of dead white males but in understanding all sorts of cultural exchange. In that respect, Said won the war, and no amount of shouting is going to change that outcome. Which doesn’t mean Said’s legacy is intact, or that it can’t be turned in ways he would have hated. (The whole occidentalist critique uses his framework for political ends Said would have hated.) I don’t know how well the Irvin book does at dismantling the Said structure—Matthew Hogan, not a friend of neo-imperialists or neo-conservatives, turns his thumb sideways on the book—but it’s telling, and a credit to Said, that people still have to use his own terminology to argue with him.