1. Characterisation

Occidentalism is an ugly word. It is a picture of the West in the eyes of its enemies. Geographically speaking, the enemies are everywhere. Indeed the most important propagators of the Occidentalist picture come from within the West. Some elements of this picture seem to be right. There is a great deal of the West which is ugly. Western colonialism and western imperialism are but two prominent nasty features of the West. Yet Occidentalism is not a picture of an ugly reality but an ugly picture—morally ugly, that is. It contains dehumanising features of the westerners as machine-like creatures, as creatures without a soul.

2. Stereotypes

A Stereotype of one group of people by another is with us from the time herds of naked apes were roaming planet earth. Stereotyping is so banal that we tend to view it as a harmless vice, merely because it is so familiar.

The Oxford English Dictionary, under the heading “Dutch,” writes that the derisive uses of this word are largely due to the 17th-century enmity between the English and Dutch nations. The dictionary is quick to spell out that this has largely to do with the drinking habit attributed to the Dutch. Thus, Dutch feast in English is “where the entertainer gets drunk before the guests,” Dutch comfort means “thank heavens it is not worse” and so on. But those are relics of an old stereotype which by now consists of dead letters lacking any evocative power. Moreover, we should not take this stereotype seriously since the rivalry between England and Holland in the 17th century was, after all, a rivalry between two upper-dogs. It is right that we should take more seriously a stereotype of an underdog by the upper-dog—for example the way the Surinamese were viewed by the Dutch—rather than the reverse. The picture that the Dutch had of the Surinamese should be taken more seriously for the sole reason that it was backed by power.

We tend to think that a picture of the upper-dog by the underdog is pure curiosity and not a political fact of any import. Indeed we are more used in moral and political discussion to highlight the picture that the upper-dog forms of the underdog: the picture of the black by the white or of the Orient by the Occident. Occidentalism might be viewed as mere curiosity for it is the powerful, upper-dog West as it is depicted by the toothless Rest. Yet I maintain that the way the upper-dog West is viewed by the underdog Rest is politically important. Or so I shall argue. September 11th should serve, I believe, as a reminder for this claim, and the arrogant and stupid war of the Americans in Iraq should not blur it.

We should make a distinction between two types of features in a negative stereotype. On the one hand there are negative human traits, such as laziness which is attributed to blacks, or cruelty which is attributed to the Turks, or slyness which is attributed to the Chinese and a lot more and worse that is attributed to the Jews. On the other hand there are dehumanising features that disqualify people from being perceived as fully fledged humans. Viewing a group of people as wild beasts, or as essentially inferior, or as machines, is dehumanising . The dehumanising features are the ones we should find the most troubling morally.

There is nothing wrong as such in having stereotypes. They are, in fact, essential by-products of the need to cluster people. We cannot deal with all humans, as well as with other things in the world, on a retail basis. There are just too many of them. It is not even wrong to hold crude and wrong stereotypes, let alone right but disturbingly negative stereotypes. What is wrong is when a stereotypical trait is treated as an immutable trait. Thus, to think about stinginess of a whole group of people in the way we think about the brittleness of glass is fundamentally wrong.

How easily the perception of group characteristics can change became vivid to me the other day. I was giving a lecture in Tel Aviv University, in memory of Aaron Katzir. Katzir was the admired head of the Israeli academy of sciences, who was murdered at Ben-Gurion airport in 1972 when a Japanese Red-Army fanatic, who adopted the Palestinian cause, opened fire inside the terminal building. The conventional wisdom at the time of the massacre was that only the Japanese can do this sort of thing. No Arab, said the conventional wisdom, will ever dare to undertake a suicide mission: it is not in “their nature,” let alone in their culture. Whereas the Japanese, as the case of the Kamikaze attests, and as their Bushido culture expresses, are more than capable of suicide missions.

Now, after who-knows-how-many Arab suicide missions, you are bound to hear, from the same people who explained with such deftness in the past that “only the Japanese can do it,” that the Arabs who carry out these missions do so because “it is in their nature” to do such things. On top of this you are bound to hear that their nature is enshrined in their culture, with direct link to the medieval sectarian murderers, the Assassins, who advertised the term assassin. Stereotypes do change in response to external events, but as long as they have a sway on us we tend to view the negative traits they impute as immutable.

3. Orientalism

“Orientalism” used to be a good word. It described the research and learning of the Orient, mainly by Europeans. Orientalists were scholars with high regard, people willing to put a great deal of effort into learning languages very different from their own indo-European languages. All this was changed—utterly changed—by Edward Said. Said succeeded in turning the positive concept “orientalism” into an essentially contested one. Some of his adherers may claim for more, namely that he had succeeded in bringing about a complete re-evaluation of the concept, from a positive to a negative one, by exposing the nasty colonial underpinnings of its use.

Orientalism in Said’s account is a picture of the Orient. The paradigmatic creatures in this picture of the Orient are the Arabs. On this picture the men of the orient are femininely weak, treacherous, cowardly and dishonest, and its women are sensually dangerous. The picture includes not just negative features but also dehumanising features, such as essential immaturity. This is due to irreparable irrationality that turns the people of the Orient into fundamentally inferior creatures. All of this, in Said’s account, is more than mere stereotypical name-calling and nasty labeling. The picture of the Orient was developed, he believes, through pseudo-scholarship into a full fledged ideology of domination.

I have no doubt that there exists indeed a strong picture of Orientalism along the lines depicted by Said. I doubt however that the place to find its contours is in the works of generations of scholars who dedicated their life to the study of the various Orients and to whom we owe most of what we systematically know about the Orient. This does not mean that scholars were entirely exempt from being in the grip of an Orientalist picture: prejudices are roughly evenly distributed. What it does mean is that an Orientalist picture is not necessarily an impediment to being a serious or even a great scholar with capacity to contribute to our knowledge.

For example, there is little doubt in my mind that many of the people who were engaged in Bible criticism had strong Protestant prejudices against Judaism. They tended to view the Old Testament as an expression of “Israel in the flesh,” in contradistinction from “Israel of the spirit” as expressed in the New Testament. But it would be silly and utterly unjust to disregard the immense contribution of these scholars to Bible scholarship. The same, I believe, holds with regard to Oriental studies. There is immense scholarship that goes under this heading and it would be unfair to taint it all by the use of the abusive sense of Orientalism.

Yet, it would be unfair to Said to disregard his claim that the strong hold of a pernicious Orientalist picture has fed nasty colonial and imperial ideologies and worldviews. In my account Said is right about the picture but is quite wrong in some ascriptions of this picture. It is, however, more important that he was right in the way he unmasked the Orientalist picture than that he was wrong about its ascription. So much for Orientalism.

4. Clash of civilisations

The hypothesis about the clash of civilisation is the conjecture that the fundamental source of conflict in the world will be cultural and not, as we tend to think, economic or ideological. The charge of Occidentalism does not hinge on the claim about the clash of civilisations. If at all there is tension between Occidentalism and the clash-of-civilisations hypothesis: the Occidentalist picture was and is fed and shared by many civilisations. I am not sure about what a civilisation consists of—It is too vast and vague to be assessed. But whatever it is, Occidentalism is by no means the private domain of a particular non-western civilisation, whether Islamic, Hindu, Confucian or what have you. Indeed, all the main outlines of the Occidentalist picture were drawn within the West and were exported from the West to other parts of the globe. A good metaphor for this is the trail of the colourful cloth that was produced in cheap Parisian factories to be exported to Haiti only to bounce back, through Gauguin’s paintings, as authentic local Haitian dress.

Inbreeding and crisscrossing are the ways cultures work. There is nothing more Russian than Vodka, yet the way vodka came to Russia from the West is the way the cocktail of Schlegel and Hegel, with some bitter drops of Feuerbach, came from Germany to Russia. It is the mix that the Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century consumed in great quantities only to develop from it the most elaborate Occidentalist picture, in the form of Slavophilism. What the Russians imported from Germany was of course more elaborate than what Nabokov made room for, in his funny Schlegel-and-Hegel quip. There are fertile cultural cross-breedings and there are fatal cultural cross-breedings. Occidentalims is the outcome of quite poisonous cross breeding, with the potential to become fatal.

Be as it may, my claim is that there is nothing in the picture of Occidentalism that ties it with one culture or one civilisation. And the fact that it is a very unflattering picture of the West does not preclude it from being part and parcel of the civilisation of the West itself.

Lawrence Lowell describes beautifully the feeling that we have in talking about culture: it is like trying to size the air in the hand knowing that it is everywhere except in our grasp. The fact that the terms I deal with, such as “the West,” “Civilisation” and “Culture,” are vast and vague and volatile may render them unhelpful for descriptive uses, but it does not rob them of their evocative power. What I am interested in is not the right theory about western Civilisation, whatever that’s supposed to mean, but rather the evocative picture of the West held by its enemies. One such evocation which is germane to Occidentalism hinges on the romantic contrast between culture and civilisation. It contends that the West at best has civilisation but it has no culture. The issue I am raising, then, is not the clash of civilisations in Huntington’s sense but a purported clash between culture and civilisation—“culture” being the good word, “civilisation” the bad one.

5. Occidentalism and the clash between culture and civilisation

The two terms culture and civilisation come from Latin but they are tied to two different sets of connotations. These connotations play a role in the romantic rendering of the contrast between culture and civilisation. The term “culture” originally meant cultivation of the soil and is still supposed to retain the organic sense by connoting the deep-rooted creative force of life. In contrast, “civilization” ties with the idea of the city, and further tied with it are the ideas of being artificial, superficial, cold, mechanical, abstract and schematic. Culture has to do not with cultivation of the soil but with cultivation of the soul, which is the spiritual dimension of our existence, whereas civilisation cultivates its material side.

For Spengler, who invested greatly in the distinction between culture and civilisation, civilisation marks the disintegration of culture. It is its last and rotten stage. The West in Spengler’s account is by now in this terminal stage. Its decaying and decadent stage is glaringly and grimly manifested by the western “megalopolis,” where masses of rootless, parasitic and aimless creatures dwell. But there is more to the clash between civilisation and culture. According to Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, culture provides the moral conditions of our being, while civilisation provides mere conventions. Culture provides ethics, civilisation nothing but etiquette. Our moral being is our spiritual dimension and this is the domain of culture. Culture is the domain of the spirit. Civilisation is the domain of matter that is devoid of spirituality.

Many cultural pessimists in the West believed in the great divide between culture and civilisation, and believed that they are caught—against their better judgment and against their will—on the wrong side of the divide. Namely, they believed that they live in a civilisation which has no culture. One does not have to be a cultural pessimist to become an Occidentalist, but it helps. In any case, my claim is that the assumed clash between culture and civilisation, which I regard as a figment of a fervent imagination rather than a description of anything real, feeds very well into the Occidenaltist picture. It is a picture of the West that at best has civilisation but has no culture. The civilisation of the West has no soul, nor do the creatures that created it have a soul. They are at best half persons—the wrong half.

What I am describing as a clash between culture and civilisation is not an empirical conjecture with regard to the west. Huntington’s civilisation-clash hypothesis is purported to be an empirical hypothesis, but this is not the clash I am describing. The clash I am describing is part and parcel of Occidentalism.

Occidentalism is more than just a stereotype couched in a set of labels. True, it is not a fully developed ideology either, but it can and does feed ideologies of the most diverse kinds, from Maoism to various forms of political Islamism. I prefer to refer to Occidentalism as a picture, to allude to Wittgenstein’s stress that philosophical illusions are generated because philosophers are in a grip of a picture—namely, of a model of reality that may have its uses but, when used outside its proper scope, it creates illusions. What I propose to do now is to sketch some of the elements of the Occidentalist picture elaborated in our book and to tie these features with the religious element of Occidentalism. This is the feature which is the most highly relevant to the politics of our time, especially as it is expressed by some influential political Islamists.

6. The corrupt and corrupting city of the West

We have encountered already the connection between civilisation and the city, as contrasted to the pair of culture and agriculture. The occidental city is a corrupt and corrupting place. Money and greed are its motivating forces. One only had to see the countryside army of the Taliban entering the dusty city of Kabul, which to them looked all shimmering and glitzy, to realize what righteous rage this “western” city aroused in them. One only had to watch the tattered peasant army of the Khmer Rouge entering the shining and gleaming city of Phnom Penn and getting into a Savonarola-like fit of murderous “purification” zeal, to realize what a mad picture of the corrupting city these young men have.

The city, especially the colonial city of the past saturated with western fixtures, enrages the Occidentalists no end. The story of the arrogant, corrupting city submerged in licentious sexual behavior is half as old as time. One has only to read the good old Bible to realise the religious effect that the whoring Babylon had on the pure souls of earnest believers. The true etymology of the name Babylon is most likely “the gate of God” (or “the gate to God”), much like the meaning of the Arabic expression Babb Allah. But the Bible itself gives a folk etymology which is very much in the spirit of today’s Occidentalism. Babylon in the bible is from the same root as the Hebrew word for mixing (BLL). The big city is not a pure place. It is a hybrid of communities and languages.

Indeed, the Biblical story of the founding of Babylon (Genesis, chapter 11), which turned into an arrogant capital of many ancient superpowers, can serve as a myth of origin of Occidentalism. Once there was harmony in the world and humanity used one language with one meaning. Then humanity gathered in a valley in the land of Shinar and, in a terrible act of hubris, founded mega-polis. “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven: and let us make us name”. (Genesis 11:4) God viewed this hubris as a challenge to his rule. He ended the state of harmony expressed in one language, mixed (confounded) their language so as to create many languages and dispersed humanity on the face of the earth. The tower of Babel as a symbol of hubris turned Babylon, in the religious imagination of the monotheistic religions, into a “land of idols” and a symbol of a wicked, arrogant, oppressive superpower trying to play God. Babylon in the language of the New Testament is the great whore, that “great city that reigns over the kings of the earth.”

The religious sensibilities that feed the Occidentalist picture of the western mega-city are all there in the story: arrogance, mixed populations, a symbol of powers that competes with the reign of God, sexual promiscuity—the city as the big whore—and decadent luxury. God’s revenge, as the Psalm (chapter 2) tells us, is bound to come. “For the day of the Lord of hosts is upon every one that is proud and lofty…And upon every high tower…”

Much water has gone under the bridges of the Euphrates since the biblical words were uttered. But the religious horror of an imperial city, the seat of power with its towers as the emblem of power, goes directly from these verses to Mohammed Attah heading to crush the hijacked airplane into one of the World Trade towers in New York City. Attah had his own chapter and verse with allusions to Babylon. “He loveth not the arrogant …Allah took their structures from their foundation and the roof fell down on them from above”. (Quran 16:23)

The point I am making is that even though Occidentalism is a modern picture some of its features are as old as the Bible. The idolatrous city is one of them. It can be Babylon with its rebellious tower, or it can be New York with its twin towers. All we have to do is to turn to Osama Bin Laden who, among other things, is a great believer in the doctrine of the clash of civilisations. “The values of western civilisation under the leadership of America have been destroyed; those awesome symbolic towers that speak liberty, human rights and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.” It is not the tower as a phallic symbol that calls for explanation but rather the tower as a symbol within the political theology of the Occidentalists which is in need of explanation.

7. The West as idolatry

Occidentalism is a modern phenomenon. As a conscious ideology we can trace it back to the 19th century Slavophile movement in Russia. But as I already said, some important features of this picture are as old as the Hebrew Bible. This was the point of bringing to our discussion something as archaic as Babylon. The dialectics between old and new in the Occidentalist picture becomes even clearer in a related subject, namely the religious view of the West as idolatry. This view is indeed an original contribution of political Islam to modern Occidentalism. The rest of the picture comes, as I already indicated, mainly from within the West itself. Because of the current political importance of the religious element in the picture of Occidentalism I shall expand some more on this element of Occidentalism, at the expense of the other elements.

The ultimate religious sin in the Hebrew Bible is idolatry. It is a sinful error that affects every aspect of life. The error consists in attributing the ultimate value that only God deserves to lesser entities, or to non-entities. Idolatry has two senses: worshiping the wrong god, or worshiping the right god in the wrong way. In reading the story of the golden calf in the Bible it is unclear whether the sin of the golden calf is a manifestation of worshiping the wrong god, namely the calf, or whether it is worshiping the right god in the wrong way, namely through an unfitting representation of Him. By worshiping I mean engaging in a ritualistic expression of veneration towards that which has ultimate value. Worshiping the right god in the wrong way is a rebellious act against the almighty but it is not as bad as worshiping the wrong god.

Now, between worshiping the right god in the wrong way and worshiping the wrong god there is an in-between form of idolatry, which is adding to the right god an idol as a partner. This idea of adding partners to God is the old Islamic notion of idolatry. The people of Arabia worshipped Allah. But they did not worship Allah alone: they added to their pantheon other gods that are believed to help Allah. In the Jahilyya there was no grand myth to combine all the idols in one hierarchal pantheon, and even though Allah was recognised as the supreme God, still the fact that He had helping partners (shuraka) turned the partnership (shirk) into idolatry. This is the main sense of idolatry recognised by Islam.

The people of Arabia had an option to know better, even before Mohammed. The Q’uran recognizes the category of the unaffiliated monotheist (the hanif) but there were only few of those. What Mohammed found when he entered the scene was idolatry, which he regarded as a state of barbarism in the strong sense of the word, namely he saw himself as facing savages. To be ignorant of the truth that there is only one God amounts to barbarism. This is the fundamental recognition that enables the condition for human existence which is based on doing what is right and refraining from doing what is wrong. Without recognising God as the only source of right and wrong there is no sense in commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, and without this one does not lead the life that is fit for human beings. Being a barbarian is not being fully human.

THERE ARE STRONG Jewish parallels to the idea of idolatry as a state of radical barbarism. The reason I don’t dwell on Judaism has to do with numbers. In terms of numbers Judaism is no more than a sect that is far from being a world religion of true consequence to world affairs. Islam is definitely a world religion: one in six or seven people in our world is a Muslim. For a long time it had seemed that the idea of barbarism (Jahilyya) is an idea from the past and about the past, an idea that had lost whatever evocative power it once had. This did not seem to be the case with regard to the notion of the holy war (Jihad).

With the surge of political Islam we witness a surge both in the idea and in the practice of Jihad. It became the central essentially-contested concept of Islam. It is used by apologetic Islamists as an idea of mere spiritual struggle and by Islamo-phobes as an expression of the inherent violence of spreading Islam by sword—or, more relevantly, by straps of explosives. I am not here in the business of dealing with Jihad but I am in the business if dealing with Occidentalism and this has to do nowadays with the resurrection and evocation of the notion of Jahilyya understood as referring to the idolatrous barbarism of the West. On this account the West is now spreading Jahilyya, by means of Western imperialism and colonialism, like it spread venereal disease to the Islamic world in the past.

The idea developed by Islamic political ideologues like Maududi in Pakistan, Taleqani in Iran and perhaps most importantly Qutb in Egypt is that we live in an era of what they call the “New Jahilyya” which is worse than the Jahilyya that Mohammed had to combat. The idolatry of today is backed by stronger forces than in the past: the idolatrous US is certainly stronger than the idolatrous tribe of Quraish. But this is not the reason why it is worse. The nature of the idolatry that America is now spreading in the Islamic world is worse than the idolatry of the Quraish because it is not the relatively mild idolatry of partnership but the idolatry of replacing the true God with the corrupting idol of materialism.

The charge of the New Jahilyya against western materialism is not just that it is a misguided form of life that is devoid of spirituality—there is nothing new in leveling this charge against the West in general and America in particular. What is new here is viewing this as the utmost religious charge with the full disparaging force that the term Jahilyya carries in the religious context.

Marx made extensive use of the imagery of fetishism in describing various aspects of the capitalist system of the West. He imputed the worship of the idol Mammon to none others than his fellow Jews as part of it. But whatever rhetorical force this had in the writings of Marx it was clear that this was not meant literally. But in the current political Islam the idea of the New Jahilyya is meant to be used literally with all the political and religious implications that go with it—in particular, the command to put the wrong of the Jahilyya right by its radical eradication. This is more than tough rhetoric. What these people have in mind is not just to spread Islam to the West but to eradicate the idolatrous West from the Islamic world. This is not an impossible political project. Being fed by an Occidentalist religious picture of the West as the source of the New Jahilyya this project has the potential to become a true revolutionary ideology.

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8. Occidentalism and terror

In the second half of the 19th century there was a terror scare in Europe and in the United States. The focus of anarchist acts of violence in Western Europe was in Paris. Between 1882 and 1884 eleven dynamite explosions occurred that killed altogether nine people. The impact of these explosions was magnified out of all proportion. One glaring example was the trial of a dyer with the assumed name of Ravachol, who committed among other things a Raskolnikov kind of murder, killing a miser who lived on alms for fifty years but accumulated a great deal of money. Ravachol the heroic brigand used some of the money to help the anarchist cause. If we look for example at what consumed the interest of Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism who was the Neue Freie Presse correspondent in Paris, we see that it was not the Dreyfus Affair—which is what ultimately awoke him from his political slumber—but the trial of Ravachol.

Obsession with anarchist terror was real and intense. Those sporadic acts of violence directed at “the state” and at the “respectable bourgeois,” scandalous and well advertised as they were, had but little social content—let alone little chance to succeed in toppling the state and its institutions. Joseph Conrad, in his hilarious The Secret Agent, gives us a glimpse into the futile cast of mind of the west-European terrorists of the time. One may think that what happened in Russia at the time was not markedly different, and that Dostoevsky’s Possessed was just a prolegomena to Conrad. Yet in Russia of the 19th century and even more so in Russia of the beginning of the 20th century terror was a symptom of something far more important. In a way terror was a smokescreen to that important something, namely the revolution. It may be that for people in the West today terror is the real issue but for many others the issue is not terror as such but the revolutionary potential behind it, much as was the case in Russia. In Russia at the time there was what Lenin called a revolutionary situation. There is of course the wisdom of hindsight in taking about a revolutionary situation in Russia, since we know that there was indeed a revolution in Russia. It is of course very difficult to discern and diagnose a revolutionary situation before the cataclysmic events occur.

THERE WAS A rather strange and intelligent associate of the Baader-Meinhoff band by the name of Horst Mahler. I believe that today he belongs somewhere in the hazy fringes of the ultra-Right in Germany. His idea was that no one can tell what social conditions constitute a revolutionary situation. If you are committed to bringing about a revolution you have in all circumstances to try and propagate it by terror, that is, through “propaganda by action.” Only the success of one’s action will tell that the social and economic conditions were indeed ripe for revolution.

Lenin tried to do better than that. He tried to diagnose the symptoms of a revolutionary situation ahead of the action and as conditions for action. He believed that revolutionary situations, unlike what conventional Marxists thought, include strong subjective elements that have to do with the consciousness of the relevant people, on top of the objective economic situation. Crudely put, the situation has to be such that the masses cannot take the rulers any more, and the rulers cannot rule.

Both Che Guevara and Osama bin Laden became one-dimensional media icons: brown soulful eyes and a non-bourgeois beard. But, under the influence of much better thinkers than themselves (Debray in the case of Guevara and Zawahiri in the case of bin Laden), both of them planned a revolution on behalf of the downtrodden. Very different revolutions to be sure, but revolutions all the same: both were engaged in propaganda by action, Che with his small guerrilla band (focos) in the countryside, and Osama, after losing his base in Afghanistan, with small urban cells. What ultimately makes a Bin Laden-kind of phenomenon important and a Che Guevara-kind of phenomenon colorful but unimportant is that Bin Laden acts within what seems to me a real revolutionary situation in the Islamic world. I do not believe that this was the case in Latin America, where the subjective elements were missing. Because of that a Bin Laden-kind of idiom has a better chance of capturing the imagination of the masses in the Islamic world. An important and seductive element in the ideology that can capture the imagination in the Islamic world is the virulent Occidentalist picture that Bin Laden is so good in promulgating.

Let me hedge my bets right away. What I am arguing is not that al Qaeda the organization and Bin Laden the person have a good chance to succeed. What I do claim is that a political Islamic ideology with strong elements of Occidentalism can make the best bid on revolution in the Islamic world. There was an elaborate winnowing among all the revolutionary groups in Russia until the Bolsheviks were selected to lead the revolution. The same may be true with the various factions of political Islam. Bin Laden the man is most likely an episode; Bin Laden the phenomenon is not.

I CAN ALREADY hear the objections: there is no one Islamic world, there are many Islamic worlds. The Islam of Morocco is not the Islam of Indonesia, as Clifford Geertz taught us, and the same holds for other modes of Islam. Moreover, there is no international political Islamic movement—no Islamic Comintern—and the idea that al Qaeda is such an organisation is a media coup of Bin Laden, not a reality. Both claims are true—and irrelevant. Nothing in what I say hinges on there being one homogenous form of Islam and nothing in what I say hinges on there being one homogenous radical Islamic movement led by Bin Laden.

At one point in his philosophical writings Wittgenstein says, “Let me teach you differences.” An expert on Islam and on Islamic countries is indeed one who can discern differences, more so than the dangerous dilettantes to whom all Islamic countries, like all happy families, look alike. I am by no means an expert on Islam but I am quite aware of the danger of dilettantism and of ideologies that toss all sorts of different things into one big thing. This is not what I am trying to say, or so I hope. What I am claiming is that in many countries in which Islam in one form or another is the dominant religion, revolutionary conditions are developing. And if a revolution will take place in some of these countries the ideology that has the best chance of success is some form of political Islam with a strong Occidetnalist picture. Between the Islam of the Taliban and the Islam of Erdogan (in Turkey) there are all the differences in the world. I happen to believe that the Islam of Erdogan is the right Islamic answer to political Islam, be it Bin Laden’s “Trotskyist” style of permanent Islamic revolution or be it Khomeini’s “Stalinist” style of Islamism in one country first. For one thing Erdogan’s Islam is political Islam free of virulent Occidentalism.

9. Is the Occidentalist talk serious?

This is a serious question. One may recognise a great deal of Occidnetalist talk around and yet deny that it is serious talk. One may take it as something that people say in public but disbelieve in private. After all, one may say, no one really believes that the people of the West are soulless machines, decadent, money grubbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites and arrogant to the core. You only have to see how many of the youngsters raised in societies with a strong Occidenalist picture aspire to immigrate to Western countries, indeed to countries that are the incarnation of the West.

Occidentalism, like its mirror image Orientalism, is accompanied by a great deal of conflict between attraction and repulsion. This tension does not mean ambivalence, namely finding both conflicting sides of the coin valuable. One can be immensely attracted to a brothel without valuing it. The attraction of the West for many Occidentlalists is the attraction the brothel and not the attraction of a valuable competing form of life.

The claim that the Occidentalist talk, unlike the Orientalist talk, is said but not believed sometime comes with an overarching explanation: Occidentalism, the explanation goes, is mere manifestation of inferiority complex. Inferiority complex is an exaggerated and even pathological sense of weakness that goes with the disbelief that difficulties that one faces can be overcome by ones’ efforts. So the claim is that The Rest has inferiority complex vis-a-vis The West. The Rest responds by developing an inverted sense of superiority that is relegated to the sphere of the “higher”: “the West is strong materially or militarily but we, the Rest, are superior on a higher plane as we are far more spiritual.”

This Adlerian type of explanation suffers from what Freud viewed as the country-doctor syndrome. That is, no matter what the disease, the diagnosis is always the same: an effort to overcompensate for inferiority. More to the point, even if the account about inferiority complex as the origin of Occidentalism were true it does not mean that the inverted superiority of the Occidentalists vis-a-vis the West is not intensely believed. Compensation for inferiority complex at best can explain why the Occidentalists believe what they believe but not that they do not really believe it. I believe that Occidentalism is believed. And because of that, in revolutionary situations Occidentalism can be a politically serious matter. The dehumanisation of Occidentalism makes it also a serious moral problem.