Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies
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Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004) is a book by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit.
Occidentalism is a worldview that influences many, often conflicting, ideologies. As a view about the West and about Western civilization, it is infused with strong elements of dehumanization: the western man, on this view, is a machine-like creature. He is efficient yet soul-less, emotionally obtuse and led by a perverse value system.
The novelty in the book is its claim that the occidental worldview is itself rooted in the West. It emerges, the authors argue, out of the Romantic Movement, especially in its German version, later to be taken up by the Slavophile movement. In the 20th century it can be traced to fascism – prominently in its German and Japanese varieties – on the one hand, and to communist Maoism on the other. Nowadays it is political Islam that is thoroughly imbued with a particularly pernicious version of Occidentalism. In it, the additional idea is found, that the West, via its representatives who are currently ruling many Moslem countries, is the carrier of a new Jahiliyya – namely, ignorance and barbarism of the sort that ruled the world before the evangelical mission of the prophet Mohamed.
Overview
In Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004), Buruma and Margalit said that nationalist and nativist resistance to the West replicates Eastern-world responses against the socio-economic forces of modernization, which originated in Western culture, among utopian radicals and conservative nationalists who viewed capitalism, liberalism, and secularism as forces destructive of their societies and cultures. That the early responses to the West were a genuine encounter between alien cultures, many of the later manifestations of Occidentalism betray the influence of Western ideas upon Eastern intellectuals, such as the supremacy of the nation-state, the Romantic rejection of rationality, and the spiritual impoverishment of the citizenry of liberal democracies.
Buruma and Margalit trace that resistance to German Romanticism and to the debates, between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles in 19th-century Russia, and that like arguments appear in the ideologies of Zionism, Maoism, Islamism, and Imperial Japanese nationalism. Nonetheless, Alastair Bonnett rejects the analyses of Buruma and Margalit as Eurocentric, and said that the field of Occidentalism emerged from the interconnection of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions.
See also
- Occidentophobia
- Self-hatred
- Mohammad Najibullah
- Anti-Western sentiment
- Kamikaze
- Industrialization
- Anti-Americanism
- Occidentalism
- Urbanization
