What does Occidentalism have to do with Orientalism?

Prof. Dr. İhsan Süreyya Sırma, who after officially retiring served for years as dean of the Siirt University Faculty of Divinity out of a debt of loyalty to the land where he was born, and who, although he has retired from here as well for the third time on reaching the age limit (67, 72 and 75), continues to contribute through research, thought and organizing scientific meetings. Seeing thus that his consolidated retirement has not kept him away from scientific activities, from book fairs, from his readers, but on the contrary has made him more active, makes one say "what love, what passion is this," and of course motivates one in a special way.

Last week, at the Konya Book Days, he and I signed books at the Beyan Publications stand and again chatted together with readers. Yesterday in Siirt because of the symposium, and tomorrow in Batman again because of a book fair, our paths cross. So it seems that we both travel a great deal; within one week we meet in three different provinces.

I suppose I also drop by home; since he hardly does, his colleagues from the Faculty of Divinity surprised him by inviting his wife from Istanbul to Siirt and arranging for them to meet here. It was lived as a pleasant memory of the symposium.

As for the symposium, after the "International Molla Halil Siirdi" symposium that Professor İhsan and the current dean of the Faculty of Divinity, his successor, Prof. Dr. Cemalettin Erdemci, who is also my friend from the Siirt Imam-Hatip High School, organized two years ago, they have now organized an "International Occidentalism Symposium." For two days Siirt University hosted carefully prepared, beautiful talks, one better than the next, by dozens of Turkish or foreign academics who have worked and thought in the field of Occidentalism and Orientalism, particularly under the title "The Other in Islamic Civilization."

By its literal meaning, Occidentalism is "the science of the West." It has been put forward, so to speak, with a revanchist reflex against Orientalism, the name of the science of the East, and expresses the intention of trying to do to the West, on behalf of Easterners, what Orientalism did to the East. We say "intention" because there is not (yet) a discipline, a field or a literature with defined boundaries, appearing before us concretely and by name, called Occidentalism like Orientalism. But there are of course certain interests, certain works that could be brought within this scope if one wished. To make a symmetrical form of the discourse the West produced by objectifying the East, on behalf of the East or of Muslims, about the West… What would this mean? What kind of feeling or motivation could it rest on? Questioning these too is of course included within a possible discipline of Occidentalism.

First of all, of course, one must ask whether an Occidentalism is possible. As soon as one moves beyond the question of whether it is possible, one must also ask how meaningful or valuable it would be. For that, undoubtedly, one first needs to examine a little more what Orientalism, which inspires this idea, is.

Orientalism as a science of the East was characterized by Muslims in particular and by Easterners in general as "the exploratory arm of colonialism." No critique of colonialism was completed without also making a critique of Orientalism. It was stressed that what had made Western colonialism and Western hegemony possible was the descriptive, determining and dominating knowledge that Westerners produced about the East. Logically, if one way of repelling colonialism is to wage a material struggle, then one side of it had to be completed by eliminating, with all its side or direct effects, the ideology, discourse or knowledge, that is, Orientalism, that had made this colonialism possible.

Critiques of Orientalism require, first of all, understanding the Orientalist discourse as well. Science or critique about Orientalism, as knowledge about those who do science about the East, already completes a round within the reflexive cycle of knowledge.

If the one who produces the knowledge about the East is a Westerner, we can say that the science about his personality, psychology and sociology and about the knowledge he produced is already the spontaneous first manifestation of what can be called Occidentalism. That is, in a sense the whole literature about Orientalism can also be counted as Occidentalism, as knowledge, thought or discourse about the Western mode of thought, or about the West's mode of thought about the East. To put it more clearly, one of the clearest manifestations of Occidentalism emerges in the knowledge Easterners have about Orientalism. For Orientalism is in itself a Western knowledge, and the knowledge about this knowledge held by those who feel themselves Eastern is in itself Occidentalism, that is, the science of the West.

However, it must be said that Occidentalism, as a reaction, has in no respect a symmetrical counterpart to the Orientalist discourse that brought it into being. The asymmetric relation in power repeated itself also at the point of mutual recognition. The place from which the peoples of the countries that came to occupy and exploit look, and the place from which the native peoples look, who suddenly found themselves subjected to an attack and for centuries could not get over the chain effects of this first attack, are not an equal line of sight.

We read the stereotyped depictions Westerners made of Eastern societies from ancient Greece onward. The Eastern despotism of the Persians, depicted as the opposite of Athenian democracy, is probably the first known Orientalist discourse. But we do not know of a Westernist discourse contemporaneous with this one. That is, in these periods Easterners did not produce a Western conceptualization as a discourse establishing their own identity. Yet the centuries-long power struggle between Rome and the Persian Empire must always have produced a perception of otherness. But this opposition was not produced along an East-West axis.

Later there is an Orientalist discourse developed by Europeans through the Crusades. However, this discourse is not, as is supposed, homogeneous within itself, a single kind of discourse. One side of it is knowing the East, getting to know it, trying to understand it; another side is thus the prejudices stuffed into the saddlebag when setting out from Europe; but yet another side is a complete admiration for Muslims or the Islamic world. How familiar are we with an Orientalist discourse that admires Islam, or how should we interpret it? Let us continue from these questions, later.