Book Review: The New Orientalist: Postmodern Representation of Islam From Foucault to Baudrillard
Ian Almond, in his recent book The New Orientalist: Postmodern Representation of Islam From Foucault to Baudrillard, argues that the strain of Orientalism, as proposed by Edward Said, is far from removed. By rigorously examining the work of Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault,Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek and the fiction of Borges, Rushdie, and Pamuk, Almond attempts to show that ongoing Eurocentric critic of modernity that uses the motifs and symbols of the Islamic Orient, can become a new and even more insidious type of Orientalism. Without defining the "notoriously fuzzy" term postmodernism or delineating on Orientalism, Eurocentrism, or imperialism, Almond brings together these nine names not on the ground of modernity, but on Islam. Almond's main point is that all these thinkers and writers while re-evaluating and critiquing modernity's central tenets, "invoke an Islamic/Arab orient" (p.2) and his primary concern is the subtle nature of such invocation, where critique of modernity / postmodernism (he goes back and forth between these two concepts) inherits "many of the Orientalist/imperialist tropes that had been so prevalent in modernity" (p. 4)
The conclusion based on the detail analysis is that "[w]ith critique of Eurocentric modernity, the European game has not ended, it has simply moved into a second phase" (p. 4). And this second phase does not necessarily has to be harsh criticism or dismissal of Islam: "Whether it is a twenty year old Nietzsche telling his sister how more blessed 'Mohammedans' are than Christians, or Paris-weary Foucault, declaring how free of superficiality Tunisians are in contrast to their French counterparts, the resort to Islam and Islamic cultures as a means of obtaining some kind of critical distance from one's own society will become a familiar gesture, if expressed in a number of different ways." (p. 2)
Almond organizes the nine names in three sections. The first section, "Islam and the critique of modernity" includes Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida. There is an exaggerated sympathy towards Islam from these thinkers, which according to Almond is not so much present in earlier Orientalists. However, this sympathy is self-serving. For instance, Nietzsche's fascination with masculine Islam is mostly in comparison to 'womanish' Christianity - because Islam "fights" and "affirms" (p. 12): "Nietzsche, in whose works not a single quoted line from the Qur'ān to be found (particularly not such familiar Qur'ānic description of the world as a 'plaything and a distraction'), clearly felt there to be something essentially life-affirming about Islam. Never appearing even slightly troubled by the core meaning of word 'Islam' (meaning 'submission'), Nietzsche saw Islam more than not as a faith that refuses to be ashamed of 'manly' instincts such as lust, war and the desire to rule over others (Islam, is afte r all, 'the product of a ruling class')." (p. 14)
Similarly, for Foucault, there is an implicit Orient that lurks behind the explicit Occident. However, Almond is cautious about not repeating the criticism spelled out by Spivak, Said and others. His focus is the 'second phase' mentioned earlier, the 'New' fleet of Orientalist that already created the Orient before even experiencing anything - either by reading their predecessor (Nietzsche in the case of Foucault) or by juxtaposing East beside West, reason with unreason, and medieval Islam with Cartesian modernity: "Foucault perception of the mad energy of Iranians, the extra - (one might say anti-) temporality of their gesture, the affirmative nature of their religion, the millennia-long immobility of their culture, the absolute homogeneity of their collectivity, are all perceptions whose epistemological conditions lie not in what Foucault already saw in Iran, but rather in what he had previously read in Nietzsche and seen in Tunisia before ever setting foot in Tehran." (p. 41)
Derrida's take on Islam is not as clear as Foucault's, it is slightly blurred, "stands of the periphery" (p. 42). With this blurry vision Derrida's Islam helps with the self-understanding of 'we Europeans'. However, it gets more complicated. Derrida's deconstruction of Islam could be seen as a positive reading. Although, the Orientalist strain is there, either in the form of essentialized or de-essentialized Islam: "By refusing to treat Islam as a single, substantial entity, Derrida, 'masters' it and is thereby able to graft on to it any identity he wishes. If he needs to say something generic about sacrifice in monotheistic faith, Islam will be an Abrahamic faith ; if the religious use of technology is the subject, Islam as the background to 'planetary terrorism' can be summoned; if the relationship between civilization and barbarity is the issue, a remark about Algerian massacres will suffice." (p60-61)
From the de-constructive and de-essentializing world, Almond moves into the fictional yet postmodern realm of Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, and Orhan Pamuk. All these writers use variety of Islamic settings and imagery that add allusive colors to the stories - Arabian Night for Borges, correct and incorrect Islam for Rushdie and Sufi melancholy for Pamuk. But no essentializing of the writers for Almond. He differentiates between writers like Borges and Barth and Rushdie and Pamuk: "If Western writers such as Borges and Barth saw Islam nothing more than a tool/palette/box of colours, Rushdie (for all his alleged apostasy) relocates Islam at the centre of his discourse, with Western notions of modernity and the postmodern appearing quite peripherally as mere strategies to help us understand the true, recoverable meaning of Islam. Unseen in Western texts, this inversion of priorities - using postmodernity to clarify Islam, instead Islam to illustrate postmodernity - represents a foregrounding of the marginal which we will meet again in Pamuk and which constitutes the most significant difference between the two categories of writers." (p. 109)
It would be interesing to see how Almond perceives writers like Juan Goytisolo, who should have been in this collection up there with Pamuk. Some of Goytisolo's works invoke similar mystical theme, for example, Ibn Arabi in La Cuarentena.
The third section, "Islam, Theory and Europe" features, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek. Almond labels Kristeva's approach as "dismissal of Islam" (p. 132) while examining her approval of French model of multiculturalism and her recent interest in the crisis of European subjectivity and all these in the broader context of Islam and Feminism. Almond is highly critical of Kristeva compared to other theorists, expect Baudrillard. One problem he finds here is confusing culture with religion. This is in the context of while Muslim women cannot marry a non-Muslim man but a "Moslem man may acquire a non-Moslem woman as an object" :(Kristeva as quoted in Almond, p. 138):The relaxed confidence with which this conflation of cultural abuse with religious doctrine takes place is disconcerting. More worrying, however, is the manner with which 'Islam', quite unconsciously in Kristeva's text, becomes the antonym of 'contemporary'. From the past simple of the Muslim world we move,quickly and neatly, within the space of single parenthesis, to the active present of our own, contemporary Western' democracies. The brevity of the reference, the absence of even the most minor qualifications, suggests Islam is being used here primarily as a tool of demarcation. (p. 138)
Next Almond moves to Baudrillard, the "symptom of postodern thought". Here he takes issue with "semantic hallowing-out of Islam" (p. 175). While defining Islam as the "final bastion of resistance against an increasingly unilateral world order" (p. 173), references to "irrational Arabs" or "hysterical mullahs" (p. 172) is present in Baudrillard's writings. What more alarming, according to Almond, his overt emphasis on "disruption", "extremism", irreducible otherness of Islam" (p. 174) where Islam becomes the "symptom of the decline of the West" (p 173), "hyper-Islam" is just a "peripheral consequences of the West, a side-effect of the Orient, an a posteriori hiccup of modernity." (p. 174)
For the grand finale we have Žižek and his Hegelian legacy. Almond attempts to uncover a "darker version" (p. 182) of Žižek that hides underneath the critic of Eurocentrism:The obscene underside of the politically comprehensible 'Eurocentrism', Žižek pleads for is a complete lack of interest in any aspect of the Muslim world which, as Hegelian excess, does not fit into his own analyses. Žižek's non-book about Iraq, like Baudrillard's non-war in Gulf,
reminds us how representation is the most basic casualty of this 'other' Eurocentrism of Žižek's - the semantic denial of any ontological depth or even tangibility to the marginalized subject.(p. 183)
In the later section, Almond goes into greater detail on Hegel rather than Žižek, to emphasize the indebtedness, that is Žižek was not able to break away from Hegel, as Foucault could not from Nietzsche.
The New Orientalists is an impressive work that examines some major figures of postmodernism. Sadly it is far from a groundbreaking work, as the back of the book indicates. The originality of the work is in combining some of these names and looking at the lineage more carefully, however the conclusion is along the same line as all other works involving Orientalism.
Few of these chapters were separately published in article form and later edited for the book. Although, representation of Islam as a theme is obvious in all the chapters,there is a lack of structure, which Almond tries to overcome by adding an 'Introduction' and 'Concluding thoughts'. Moreover, this work is in the line of literary criticism than actual critique of the theorists in question. While the detail excerpts and examples are helpful to grasp the ideas, it is also easy to get lost in the labyrinth of texts and feel dis-oriented. More structured approach to the theoretical framework of these authors could have been much more helpful to understand how "Islam in postmodern texts tells us more about postmodernity than it does about Islam" (p. 196).
There is no doubt that because of current geopolitical situation Islam occupies a significant ground in the thoughts of these figures. However, within the grand scheme of all the works (perhaps not Rushdie's and Pamuk's fiction), is usage of Islam/Arab Orient calls for such substantive critique? In other words, if there is nothing special about Islam or when Eurocentric modernity writes about the Other it ends up writing about itself, could we conclude that focusing on such representation of Islam is actually a diversion from the critique of modernity? Or there is indeed something special about Islam that brings out a side of modernity that the other 'Other' cannot? Answer to such question requires more detailed analysis of the theory and coming up with alternative theoretical framework. This book is definitely a commendable endeavor but just a scratch in the surface.