Muslims' perception of the West and "Islam Fascinating the West"

The "International Occidentalism Symposium" took place at the Siirt University Faculty of Divinity as a two-day feast of learning and ideas. We continue from where we left off with our reflections on this feast, which, I believe, took place as a first in Türkiye in its field.

Alongside the generally negative perceptions about Orientalism, there is also a dimension of admiration for Islam that is never brought onto the agenda. The first information about the Islamic world in the West came by way of Andalusia and, in later times, the attractive civilizations that emerged in Baghdad and other Muslim cities. The reports about this civilization were also creating legendary images of Muslims in the West.

The Crusades are a movement that stirred the ambitions of those who sought to discover and seize the riches on which these legends rested. Here, Orientalism had very different functions during the Crusades, and underwent a kind of evolution as well. As Maxime Rodinson describes in his book Europe's Fascination with Islam, Westerners' knowledge about the East is not simply and uniformly a distortion, denial, belittling and othering. If Orientalism were simply something like that, it would not have been so enduring.

We must not forget that Orientalism emerged as the result of an encounter. Every encounter produces the perceptions of those who meet about one another. These perceptions vary according to the situation of the parties. Every encounter has at least two sides. The Crusades too were, in the end, an encounter, and the Muslim-Arab-Turkish-Kurdish-Persian side of this encounter also produced a perception of the Franks who took part in these expeditions. Perhaps the first seeds of Occidentalism too were formed by these gazes and the literature put forth through these gazes.

Amin Maalouf's works, especially the book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, are among the examples that give this perspective.

Just like the first perception on the European side about Muslims, Muslims too saw the Franks as barbarians. They were seen as barbarian hordes who had come to ravage a civilization that had been carefully built and to seize its riches. The Occidentalism here is not, like Orientalism, a highly developed discipline whose boundaries are knowingly and willingly well drawn. In fact, Muslims did not look at the Crusaders as "Westerners," did not see them that way. A perception and identity called Westernness had not been formed at all, such that it could give rise to a discourse called Occidentalism.

Orientalism too, in sum, is the name of a totality and confusion of perceptions. It is a discourse shaped by this confusion. One cannot set out by saying that, since there is such a thing as Orientalism and it produces power, the way to resist that power is to do the exact opposite, that is, to produce an Occidentalism. If one sets out, the same thing will not have been done.

That Orientalism has confronted us as a problem lies in its not being merely a discourse. Orientalism is an accumulation of discourse that accompanies a particular accumulation of power. Moreover, within the first stages of this accumulation of discourse there were, rather than a systematic work that defined Muslims and established power over them, also attitudes such as a kind of admiration, an effort to understand, an inferiority complex.

To start our revenge against the West at the discursive level, ignoring these, is a futile effort. If a reckoning with the West is needed, it begins first of all with objecting, again with power, to the power of Western hegemony. Undoubtedly this objection requires being strong. As power is accumulated, discourse too will accumulate on its own.

Still, if it comes to determining the historical cornerstones, we can say that the first perceptions formed against the Crusades constituted the first authentic data of Occidentalism. Later, in the periods when Muslims acted with the drive of conquest, Muslims never had an East-West-axis perception of the world.

Conquests also produced a perception of a dynamic process. Since a healthy Islamic discourse by its nature has a claim to universality, it does not imprison itself within the East-West axis in a way that would limit itself with geography. Andalusia is the westernmost point, but Muslims wrote a significant part of the most brilliant pages of their civilization's history within this geographical region. This being so, a perception of self and otherness expressed within the East-West axis would in any case have been a perception too narrow for Muslims for centuries.

In return, the interest that the Westerners whom Muslims encountered from the beginning showed in civilizational legacies that meant nothing to their owners of that period is noteworthy. As a result of the intensive translation activity begun in this period, many Greek classics, from Aristotle to Plato, were translated into Arabic and given a new framework of meaning within the Arab world.

At various times of the Ottomans, the Turks on the borders of Europe did not refrain from accumulating the necessary information about Europe. Meanwhile, what was told by state officials or travelers who, though rarely, journeyed into the interior of Europe continued to form an image of Europe and the Franks. Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname can be regarded as one of the most important sources for an Occidentalist literature. When you read carefully what he says about some European cities, especially Vienna, you come across not belittling or othering but, on the contrary, benevolent expressions.

If we take Occidentalism as a systematic discipline of the West, what we would say about it will of course be different. For one thing, such a discipline of Western studies has not yet been formed. The existing examples of Occidentalism develop as a reflex, depending on the manner of encounter with the West and the attitude taken in that encounter: reacting to imperialism, clashing with it, quarreling with it, or the exact opposite, being enamored of it, falling in love with it, not seeing its evils and seeing it as a reality and a truth…

All of these are possible attitudes, and all of them together produce a perception of the West. But the perception of the West is the asymmetric opposite of Orientalism and continues to produce Orientalism as well. There are those who adopt this as a path with a revanchist understanding. For example, Hasan Hanafi's work under the title Occidentalism is counted among the pioneering texts in this regard. But this too does nothing but reproduce Orientalism. In essence, while all the criticisms it directs at the Islamic world are an invitation to internalize certain Western values, the probability that its proposal of Occidentalism as a discipline, as a movement of freedom or independence, as a revenge of Orientalism, will have any other outcome is very low.