I am so pleased that the most excellent Fjordman has written a brilliant review for Atlas readers of Ibn Warraq's groundbreaking tome, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism. The poisonous fruit of Said's mendacious ideas yielded a pervasive
reevaluation of the West's perceptions of Eastern cultures. Fjordman's well researched, seminal essay on Said's enormously destructive influence on Western culture, art, music goes a step further and reaches further back in history to provide empirical evidence of Islam's ruinous destruction of myriad cultures and peoples.
Fjordman money quote (though somewhat understates it), "It is one of the sad facts of this age that intellectual frauds
like Edward Said get so much attention, whereas true intellectuals such as Ibn
Warraq do not get nearly as much as they deserve. If only more people read Ibn
Warraq's books, we wouldn't be in as much trouble as we are." It's more than sad, it's a catastrophe.
Fjordman on Ibn Warraq: Defending the West
I had the pleasure of meeting former Muslim Ibn Warraq in Denmark recently,
where he received a free speech award for his work from the Danish Free Press
Society and gave a speech with quotes from his recent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's
Orientalism. This essay is inspired by his book. It can be read together
with "Eccentric
Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization" by Rémi Brague, which I
have discussed at the Gates
of Vienna blog. Robert Spencer's Religion
of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't and perhaps Global
Jihad – The future in the face of Militant Islam by the former Muslim
Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo could be added
to the list, too.
Ibn Warraq's book was written as a response to Edward
Said's deeply flawed, but highly influential Orientalism from 1979. Said chastised Western
countries for their supposed racist and stereotypical view of "the Other." Ibn
Warraq dubs Said's methods "intellectual terrorism" and demonstrates the logical
inconsistencies of his positions:
"To argue his case, Said very
conveniently leaves out the important contributions of German Orientalists, for
their inclusion would destroy – and their exclusion does indeed totally destroy
- the central thesis of Orientalism,
that all Orientalists produced knowledge that generated power, and that they
colluded and helped imperialists found empires. As we shall see, German
Orientalists were the greatest of all scholars of the Orient, but, of course,
Germany was never an imperial power in any of the Oriental countries of North
Africa or the Middle East. [Bernard] Lewis wrote, '[A]t no time before or after
the imperial age did [the British and French] contribution, in range, depth, or
standard, match the achievement of the great centers of Oriental studies in
Germany and neighbouring countries. Indeed, any history or theory of Arabic
studies in Europe without the Germans makes as much sense as would a history or
theory of European music or philosophy with the same omission.' Would it have
made sense for German Orientalists to produce work that could help only England
and France in their empire building?"
Despite its many serious historical
and logical shortcomings, Said's thesis was eagerly embraced by many
intellectuals:
"Post-World War II Western intellectuals and leftists were
consumed by guilt for the West's colonial past and continuing colonialist
present, and they wholeheartedly embraced any theory or ideology that voiced or
at least seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of
the third world. Orientalism came at the
precise time when anti-Western rhetoric was at its most shrill and was already
being taught at Western universities, and when third-worldism was at its most
popular. Jean-Paul Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the
exploitation of the third world, and that violence against Westerners was a
legitimate means for colonized men to re-acquire their manhood. Said went
further: 'It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say
about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally
ethnocentric.' Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so."
Moreover, "Where
the French presence lasted fewer than four years before they were ignominiously
expelled by the British and Turks, the Ottomans had been the masters of Egypt
since 1517, a total of 280 years. Even if we count the later British and French
protectorates, Egypt was under Western
control for sixty-seven years, Syria for
twenty-one years, and Iraq for only fifteen – and, of course, Saudi Arabia was
never under Western control. Contrast this with southern Spain, which was under
the Muslim yoke for 781 years, Greece for
381 years, and the splendid new Christian capital that eclipsed Rome – Byzantium
– which is still in Muslim hands. But no Spanish or Greek politics of victimhood
apparently exist."
Paul Fregosi confirms this in Jihad
in the West: "Western colonization of nearby Muslim lands lasted 130
years, from the 1830s to the 1960s. Muslim colonization of nearby European lands
lasted 1300 years, from the 600s to the mid-1960s. Yet, strangely, it is the
Muslims…who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which
they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the
guilt. It should be the other way around."
Some observers now think
Europeans should feel grateful for Muslim colonization of their lands. Joan Acocella wrote a review
of David Levering Lewis' book God's Crucible:
Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215. Lewis is a two-time winner of
the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. According to Acocella, he thinks Muslims "did
Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further:
he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe."
This was "one of the most significant losses in world history."
Warraq
explains how Charles Wilkins became perhaps first Englishman to master Sanskrit,
and in 1783 translated the important work Bhagavat Gita. Scholar Sushil Kumar De
"praised Wilkins for bringing Bengali literature into the era of printing.
Wilkins being a 'metallurgist, engraver, founder, and printer' of such elaborate
and different alphabets as Persian and Bengali has already been noted. Wilkins's
achievements were summed up in 1922 by the Indian scholar Shumbhoo Chander Dey,
who highlighted Wilkins's contributions to Indian epigraphy. It must be
emphasized that Wilkins was the first European to study Sanskrit inscriptions
that had baffled even the Hindu scholars. His introduction of the art of
printing to Bengal was also of specific importance, endearing him to thousands
of Indians."
A digression: I am under the impression that printing was
introduced surprisingly late in India. Islamic religious resistance slowed down
the adoption of printing everywhere. However, even prior to the Islamic
conquests the spread of printing was slow. Moreover, one of the few good things
Muslims did in India was to increase the use of paper. Why were non-Muslims
Indians so slow to appreciate the value of paper and book printing, surely two
of the greatest inventions China has ever made? This becomes even more puzzling
if we remember that the development of printing in China was intimately
connected with Buddhism, a religion exported from India. Indeed, printing was so
closely associated with Buddhism in Japan that for nearly eight hundred years,
until contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Japanese printed only
Buddhist scriptures. Was the Indian reluctance caused by caste? Were the
Brahmins afraid that their privileged hereditary position would be undermined by
the spread of printing? I don't know, but it's an interesting
subject.
Sir William Jones was a brilliant linguist who is said to have
known thirteen languages well, and twenty-eight fairly well, at the time of his
death. According to Ibn Warraq, "With his work on Indian chronology, and having
created a solid framework for the understanding of India's past, Jones, in
effect, can be considered the father of Indian history. Jones's translation of
Sacontala (Shakuntala) had an enormous
influence in Europe, inspiring Schiller, Novalis, Schlegel, and Goethe, who used
its introductory scene as a model for the 'Vorspiel auf dem Theater' of Faust (1797). But even more remarkably, the
collection, printing, and translations of Sanskrit texts by Jones and other
Orientalists made available for the first time to Indians themselves aspects of
their own civilization, changing forever their own self-image. Until now, these
texts had only been accessible to a narrow coterie of
Brahmins."
Professor A. L. Basham had praised the small band of Western
scholars who labored to reveal India's past. Most of them met the expenses of
their research out of their own pockets: "The main motive in most of their minds
seems to have been the study of India for its own sake. When Jones translated
Sakuntala and thus introduced the Sanskrit drama to the western world, are we to
believe that he consciously thought: 'I am doing this in order that my country
may dominate a subject people'? Could any such motive have been in the mind of
James Prinsep, when he deciphered the inscriptions of Asoka? Was Colebrooke
inspired in his pioneering work on the Veda chiefly by motives of patriotism? If
these scholars had worked to serve their country or the [East India] Company in
their spare time they could surely have found more effective ways of doing
so."
Ibn Warraq writes that "As [Professor] Kejariwal laments, Indians,
unaware of the importance of historical remains, had left them to crumble and
decay, a fact attested to by the British Orientalists. Similarly, many
manuscripts would have been lost but for the efforts of scholars such as Charles
Wilkins and the German Johann Georg Bühler, who salvaged severely damaged
manuscripts of the rare Sanskrit historical work Rajatarangini. Similarly, Prinsep's tenure in
the Asiatic Society 'was full of achievements in retrieving, restoring and
trying to preserve the ancient historical monuments of the country. Among these
were the Sarnath remains and the Allahabad pillar which yielded such significant
information about Asoka and Samudragupta – two of the greatest monarchs of
India, and in fact, of the world.'"
An emblem associated with Asoka (or
Ashoka) the Great is now the national emblem of India, yet he was virtually
forgotten until the British got there.
The rise of Buddhism as a major
force is often linked to Asoka. As Peter Harvey says in An
Introduction to Buddhism, "During the reign of the emperor Asoka (ca.
268-239 BC), Buddhism spread more widely, reaching most of the Indian
sub-continent, thus becoming a 'world religion'. The Magadhan empire which Asoka
inherited included most of modern India except the far south: the largest in the
sub-continent until its conquest by the British."
Moreover, "While Asoka
had already become a nominal Buddhist in around 260 BC, the full implications of
his new faith do not seem to have hit home till after his bloody conquest of the
Kalinga region, in the following year." He gave Buddhism "a central place in his
empire, just as the Roman emperor Constantine did for Christianity.
Nevertheless, he supported not only Buddhist monks and nuns, but also Brahmins,
Jain wanderers, Ajivaka ascetics, in accordance with a pattern that later
Buddhist and Hindu rulers also followed." He sent embassies to nations far
beyond the borders of India, for instance to Thailand, which has remained a
stronghold of Buddhism to this day, and to Ceylon, or Sri Lanka.
Buddhism
was virtually wiped out from its cradle in Central Asia and northern India with
the arrival of Islam. What is difficult to explain is why neither non-Muslim
Indians nor the deeply Buddhist-influenced nations of East and Southeast Asia
showed greater interest in excavating monuments related to the Buddha. Why
didn't Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Korean or Vietnamese scholars examine the
archaeological sources of early Buddhist history? Why was this done by
Europeans, overwhelmingly of Christian or Jewish stock?
Defending the West includes an interesting
section on Greeks in India and Central Asia. There were several Indo-Greek
kingdoms in the region long after Alexander the Great's invasion, and their
cultural importance was anything but marginal. Menander was the greatest of
these Indo-Greek kings and the best known in India, where he is remembered as
Milinda from the Pali Buddhist work Milindapanha (Questions of King
Milinda).
This is the only section of the book where I felt Ibn Warraq's
treatment of the subject matter could have been even more thorough. Greek art in
the border regions of India had a major influence on Buddhist art during its
formative period. As E.H. Gombrich says in his brilliant The
Story of Art, "The art of sculpture had flourished in India long
before the Hellenistic influence reached the country; but it was in the frontier
region of Gandhara that the figure of Buddha was first shown in the reliefs
which became the model for later Buddhist art."
Through the vehicle of
Buddhist art, Greek impulses spread to distant lands. During the early Tang
dynasty, China was unusually open to outside influences, and Buddhism reached
the height of its influence there. This was a creative period when tea drinking
became popular and when the first books were printed. Japan was in its formative
stages as a nation and adopted many ideas from Korea and China. The first
Japanese capital (itself a Chinese concept), Nara, was modelled after Xi'an in
China. The capital was later moved to Kyoto in 794, where it remained until it
was again moved to Edo (Tokyo) in 1868.
Here is Gardner's Art Through the Ages: "The Japanese dependence
on China during the seventh and eighth centuries is not confined to sculpture
and painting. Buddhist architecture adhered so closely to Chinese models that
the lost Tang style can be reconstructed from such temple complexes as the
Hōryū-ji or the Todai-ji, which still stand in Japan. The Kondo (Golden Hall) of
the Hōryū-ji, which dates from shortly after 670, is one of the oldest wooden
buildings in the world. Although periodically repaired and somewhat altered (the
covered porch was added in the eighth century; the upper railing, in the
seventeenth), the structure retains the light and buoyant quality characteristic
of the style of the Northern and Southern Song dynasties in China. A rather
unusual feature of this building is the entasis of its wooden columns. The
appearance of this feature here is said to be due to Greek influence, as
third-hand knowledge of it may have reached Japan, along with Buddhism, from
India by way of China. Although seemingly more appropriate to elastic wood than
to brittle stone, entasis was a short-lived feature that soon disappeared again
from Japanese architecture."
Greek artistic impulses were admittedly
relatively minor and of limited duration in Japan, but the very fact that such
impulses, however faint, can be traced at all during this early period is
remarkable. Literate civilizations appeared in West, South and East Asia long
before they did in Europe, and during most of ancient history, the flow of
cultural influence went from east to west. Surely, this must have been the first
time any European cultural influence was powerful enough to reach the shores of
the Pacific Ocean?
This Greco-Buddhist influence
reached Japan via Korea and the Northern Wei in China. It illustrates an
intimate connection between Europeans and Asians, both in the formative history
of Buddhism and in the modern re-discovery of that history. I don't think most
Westerners or Asians are fully aware of this connection, and it deserves to be
highlighted. Crucial aspects of Greek culture were never much valued by Muslims.
One of them is the concept of free inquiry and nations governing themselves
according to man-made laws. The other is the artistic legacy. As the examples of
Greco-Buddhist art in Asia illustrate, when it comes to figurative art and
appreciation of artistic beauty, Christian Westerners share more of the
Greek legacy with Hindus and Buddhists than we do with Muslims.
As
Patricia Buckley Ebrey explains in The Cambridge Illustrated History of
China, "Buddhism had an enormous impact on the visual arts in China,
especially sculpture and painting. The merchants and missionaries from Central
Asia who brought Buddhism to China also brought ideas about the construction and
decoration of temples and the depiction of Buddhas and bodhisattvas. In this way
Greek and Indian artistic influence reached China, travelling via the Buddhist
kingdom of Gandhara (in present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan) through the
Buddhist centres along the Silk Road to Dunhuang and later to central
China."
The world's oldest dated printed book, a Chinese Buddhist text
from 868 containing the Diamond Sutra, was discovered by Hungarian archaeologist
Marc Aurel Stein in 1907 near Dunhuang. According to Ebrey, "In 460 the Northern
Wei court commissioned the carving of cave temples at Yungang, near its early
capital in northern Shanxi. Most of the fifty-three caves there were carved out
before the Wei moved their capital south to Luoyang in 494."
A huge
Buddha stone statue at Yungang (ca. 490), one of the largest among tens of
thousands of images carved into the surface of a cliff there, was probably
inspired by the colossal Buddha images at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, a magnificent
example of Greco-Buddhist art. The great Bamiyan
Buddhas were demolished with artillery bombardment by the Islamic Taliban
regime in 2001, aided by Pakistani and Saudi
engineers.
Saladin or Salah al-Din, the twelfth century general loved
by Muslims for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned even in Western
history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to remember that his son Al-Aziz Uthman tried
to demolish the Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt, only three years after his
father's death in 1193. The reason why we can still visit them today is because
the task at hand was so big that he eventually gave up the attempt.
A recent
attack on statues at a museum in Cairo by a veiled woman screaming,
"Infidels, infidels!" shocked the outside world. She had been inspired by Grand
Mufti Ali Gomaa, who quoted a saying of the prophet Muhammad that sculptors will
be among those receiving the harshest punishment on Judgment Day. The highly
influential cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi agreed that "Islam prohibits statues and
three-dimensional figures of living creatures" and concluded that "the statues
of ancient Egyptians are prohibited."
The legend that the missing nose of
the Great Sphinx at Giza was removed by Napoléon Bonaparte's artillery during
the French expedition to Egypt 1798-1801 is incorrect. Sketches indicate that
the nose was gone long before this. The Egyptian fifteenth century historian
al-Maqrizi attributes the act to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. The
French brought large numbers of scientists to catalogue ancient monuments, thus
founding modern Egyptology. The trilingual Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799,
was employed by philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the Egyptian
hieroglyphs in 1822. In this task he made extensive use of the language of the
Copts, the Egyptian Christians, a remnant of ancient Egypt that the Arab Muslim
invaders hadn't managed to completely eradicate.
European scholars also
deciphered the cuneiform writing developed by the ancient Sumerians and employed
by successive rulers of Mesopotamia for several thousand years. The cuneiform
inscriptions carved into the side of a mountain at Behistun (Bisitun) in Persia
had been noticed by several travellers. The German explorer Carsten Niebuhr made
copies of some of them, which were used by his countryman Georg Friedrich
Grotefend to decipher several symbols of Old Persian cuneiforms. The
breakthrough came in the 1830s and 40s when the British soldier Henry Rawlinson,
aided by the work of Edward Hincks and others, managed to translate the Old
Persian and Babylonian cuneiforms of the Behistun inscriptions.
As Warraq
says, "Since by Islamic doctrine, everything – from history to material remains
– predating the arrival of Islam was considered of no intrinsic worth, any
prehistoric sculptures were to be destroyed as signs of idolatry." Because of
this, "Many of the ancient sites were pillaged for their bricks to be used to
build or repair the tombs of Muslim saints, and even sculptured heads were
broken up for building purposes." According to him, archaeology "was a truly
European endeavor, emerging out of English antiquarianism, flowering under the
research of Danish and Swedish prehistorians such as C. J. Thomsen, J. J. A.
Worsae, Sven Nilsson, L. S. Vedel Simonsen, and H. Hildebrand, and coming of
scientific age under Heinrich Schliemann, A. H. Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, and
William Matthew Flinders Petrie."
Austen Henry Layard, who was active in
Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the mid-nineteenth century, recounts this story of
Claudius Rich, a pioneer of field archaeology and British Resident in Baghdad in
1808: "Rich learnt from the inhabitants of Mosul that, some time previous to his
visit, a sculpture, representing various forms of men and animals, had been dug
up in a mound forming part of the great inclosure. This strange object had been
the cause of general wonder, and the whole population had issued from the walls
to gaze upon it. The ulema [Muslim religious scholars] having at length
pronounced that these figures were idols of the infidels, the Mohammedans, like
obedient disciples, so completely destroyed them, that Mr. Rich was unable to
obtain even a fragment."
Rémi Brague explains in "Eccentric Culture" that Europeans were keenly
aware of the fact that other civilizations were older than their own, and that
the roots of civilization were "somewhere else." According to him, "The
consciousness that Europe had of having its sources outside of itself had the
consequence of displacing its cultural identity, such that it has no other
identity than an eccentric identity. It is now fashionable to hurl at
European culture the adjective 'eurocentric.' To be sure, every culture, like
every living being, can't help looking at the other ones from its own vantage
point, and Europe is no exception. Yet, no culture was ever so little centered
on itself and so interested in the other ones as Europe. China saw itself as the
'Middle Kingdom.' Europe never did. 'Eurocentrism' is a misnomer. Worse: it is
the contrary of the truth."
Amidst the praise he gives the West, Ibn
Warraq warns that the "golden threads" running through this civilization -
rationalism, universalism and self-criticism – can sometimes turn into
liabilities: Rationalism can lead to sterile scientism, universalism to the loss
of one's sense of belonging and limitless self-criticism to
self-hatred:
"US foreign policy has nothing to do with the deaths of
150,000 Algerians at the hands of Islamic fanatics. The root cause of Islamic
fundamentalism is Islam. American foreign policy has nothing to do with the
stoning to death of a woman for adultery in Nigeria. It has everything to do
with Islam, and Islamic law. The theory and practice of jihad – bin Laden's
foreign policy – was not concocted in the Pentagon; it is directly derived from
the Koran and the hadith, Islamic tradition. But Western liberals and humanists
find it hard to admit or accept or believe this. They simply lack the
imagination to do so."
Scholar Toby E.
Huff in his excellent book The
Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West has
demonstrated how European universities, which had no real counterpart in any
other major civilization, were a critical factor in shaping the Scientific
Revolution.
Ibn Warraq agrees, but thinks that the university as a seat of
curiosity and free inquiry is
being undermined by ideological and financial corruption: "In recent years,
Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries (e.g., Brunei) have established chairs
of Islamic studies in prestigious Western universities, which are then
encouraged to present a favorable image of Islam. Scientific research leading to
objective truth no longer seems to be the goal. Critical examination of the
sources or the Koran is discouraged. Scholars such as Daniel Easterman have even
lost their posts for not teaching about Islam in the way approved by Saudi
Arabia. In December 2005, Georgetown and Harvard universities each accepted $ 20
million from Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal for programs in Islamic studies.
The Carter Center, founded by former president Jimmy Carter, is funded in part
by bin Talal. Such money can only corrupt the original intent of all higher
institutions of education, that is, the search for truth."
Kari
Vogt of the University of Oslo, widely quoted as an "expert" on Islam in her
country, has stated that Ibn Warraq's classic Why I Am Not a
Muslim is just as irrelevant to the study of Islam as The Protocols
of the Learned Elders of Zion are to the study of Judaism. Tariq Ramadan is to
hold the Sultan of Oman chair of Islamology at the University of Leiden, the
oldest university in the Netherlands. His grandfather was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood
and his father a friend of Sayyid Qutb, the ideological inspiration for
terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. Ramadan has stated that decadent Europe will
give way to an Islamized Europe, while the Islamic world will enter seven
centuries of world domination.
In The
Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris argues that although the West has
enjoyed a uniquely high emphasis in human reason, it is also the first
civilization to turn reason into a fetish. He warns that reason may not prevail
if the unreasonable are more determinate. I could add that I have always been
told that reason and religion are incompatible. Yet when I look at Western
Europe today, I notice that while we have never been less religious, we have
also never been less reasonable in the policies we pursue. If the ongoing
Islamic infiltration continues unabated, maybe at some point in the future Asian
archaeologists will piece together the story of the rise and all of Europe. They
owe us one. After all, we did the Buddha.
Defending the West is a powerful tour de force
through history. It is one of the sad facts of this age that intellectual frauds
like Edward Said get so much attention, whereas true intellectuals such as Ibn
Warraq do not get nearly as much as they deserve. If only more people read Ibn
Warraq's books, we wouldn't be in as much trouble as we are.
In Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith—clear violations of Article 18 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In contrast with the mind-numbing enforced certainties and rules of Islam, Western civilization offers what Bertrand Russell once called “liberating doubt,” which encourages the methodological principle of scientific skepticism.
