A
Eurocentric Problem: Modernity - How Western?
12 February 2010By M. Shahid Alam
He who knows himself and others
Here will also see,
That the East and West, like brothers,
Parted ne’er shall be.
— Goethe1
In no other major civilization do self-regard,
self-congratulation and denigration of the ‘Other’ run
as deep, nor have these tendencies infected as many
aspects of their thinking, laws, and policy, as they
have in Western Europe and its overseas extensions.2
These tendencies reached their apogee during the
nineteenth century, retreated briefly after World War
II, but have been staging a come back since the end of
the Cold War.
For several decades now, critics have studied these
Western tendencies under the rubric of Eurocentrism, a
complex of ideas, attitudes, and policies, which treat
Europe – when it is convenient – as a geographical,
racial and cultural unity, but places Western Europe
and its overseas extensions at the center of world
history since 1000 CE.3
Unlike the garden variety of ethnocentrism,
Eurocentrism emerged as an ideological project –
shaped by Europe’s intellectual elites – in the
service of Europe’s rising expansionist states,
starting in the sixteenth century. It makes sweeping
claims of European superiority in all spheres of
civilization. In this worldview, only Europeans have
created history over the past three thousand years,
beginning with the ancient Greeks. In various
accounts, this centrality is ascribed to race,
culture, religion and geography.
The central organizing principle of Eurocentrism is
the division of the world into unequal moieties: us
and them, self and the Other. All those qualities that
Western thinkers believe are emblems or sources of
superiority are securely placed in the ‘us’ category;
and their opposites are pinned on ‘them.’ The
arrogance of this dichotomy is breathtaking.
Once these dichotomies are in place, it becomes quite
easy to ‘explain’ Europe’s putative centrality in
history. One set of superior characteristics – innate,
unchanging, unique – account for the Western lead in
all avenues of human endeavor, whether economic,
technological, military, scientific or cultural. It is
a tautological narrative of history par excellence.
In order to ‘explain’ the history of European
superiority, the Eurocentrics first had to manufacture
the history of this superiority. They endowed ‘Europe’
with historical depth by appropriating Greece and
Rome; this was accomplished by defining Europe as a
geographical, racial and cultural unity. In addition,
they denied the eastern origins of Greek civilization,
and, for the same reason, they passed over the
connections of early Christianity to Syria and North
Africa. In order to obscure Western Europe’s extensive
debt to the Islamicate, they devalued the birth of new
cultural formations in western Europe in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, flowing from contacts with the
Arabs in Spain, Sicily and the Levant.4 Instead, this
history was moved forward several centuries to place
it in northern Italy, whose cultural flowering –
defined as a rebirth – was connected to the ‘direct’
recovery of Greek philosophy, sciences and literature.
The Eurocentrics construct a European history that
begins in Greece, migrates westward to Rome, and again
to points in Western Europe. In tracing the origins of
the Renaissance to Greece, the Eurocentrics show
little embarrassment about the fifteen centuries
during which the Greek sciences and philosophy –
mostly forgotten in ‘Europe’ – were being cultivated
in the Middle East.
While they were fabricating a history of the rise of
the West, the Eurocentrics were also engaged in
denying that the rest of the world had any history.
Yes, civilization began in the East but, after these
early beginnings, the Asiatics have been immovably
stuck in the past, forcing history to move westward in
order to make progress. Europe’s most radical thinker
of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, too bought into
this myth about static Asiatic societies whose
despotism deprived them of the engine of ‘dialectical’
change.
Over the last few decades, this Eurocentric history
has increasingly come under challenge from the
‘peoples without history,’ dissenting scholars in the
West, and, most importantly, from new facts on the
ground – the rise of national liberation movements,
the dismantling of Western colonial empires, the
socialist revolutions in China and Vietnam, the
Iranian revolution, and, increasingly, the rise of
several leading centers of economic dynamism in east
and south Asia. Despite this challenge, Eurocentrism
still controls the commanding heights in the think
tanks, media, political discourse and popular
prejudices of nearly all Western societies. The weight
and momentum of Eurocentric tendencies, powered by the
best Western minds over centuries, cannot be
overthrown within a few decades.
Cartographic Violence
Eurocentric distortions have not spared
cartography, the ’science’ of map-making.
Europe is relatively small in relation to the great
landmasses to the east and south, Asia and Africa. The
Eurocentrics might have chosen to argue that Europe
has maintained its centrality despite its smaller
size, proof of its qualitative lead over the much
larger landmasses of Asia and Africa. They chose
otherwise. They could not pass up the opportunities
that maps presented for appropriating the symbols of
superiority in the realm of cartography.
The powerful belong at the top. Eurocentrism demanded
that cartography place Europe at the top of the world.
This was easily accomplished by orienting the globe so
that the North appeared at the top of the globe, or,
in the case of maps, at the top of the page. It is
always a source of some confusion for my students when
I hang the map of the world upside down so that the
North goes at the bottom. It is a bit unsettling to
learn that there is no logic – nothing natural – about
the North-at-the-top globes and maps.
World maps were not everywhere drawn with the
North-at-the top orientation. The Muslims in their
heyday – when their empires stretched from Spain to
Khurasan and India – were making world maps, which
placed the South at the top, even though this placed
Africa above the central Islimicate lands stretching
from the Nile to the Oxus. In their case, perhaps,
orientation of the maps did not matter as much, since
they always came out at the center.
In addition, Europeans gave currency to world maps
that used Mercator’s cylindrical projection. Was this
choice accidental? Admittedly, the Mercator map was
useful for mariners, since a line connecting two
points on this map showed the true direction. But are
we to believe that sea captains had an interest in –
and the power as well – to impose maps useful to them
on the rest of society? More credibly, the Mercator
maps were chosen because they greatly exaggerated the
size of Europe, making it as large as, or larger than,
Africa.
Incredibly, some Mercator maps published in the United
States engage in cartographic violence. In order to
center the United States on their maps, the publishers
are quite happy to tear Asia right down the middle,
pushing its two halves to the left and right edges of
the map. It matters little that this sundering of Asia
greatly diminishes the cartographic value of this
truncated map of the world. This quite nicely
illustrates the first casualty of Eurocentrism – its
disregard for reality, and its willingness to engage
in epistemological violence in order to place Europe
at the center of the world.
Inverting the Paradigm
Growing up, I knew that ignorance was the chief
support behind prejudice. Prejudices, whether
religious or ethnic, diminished with education and
scholarship. And that is how it should be, I thought.
Prejudice is sustained by ignorance. Superior
intellects, combined with wide learning, should have
little difficulty in clearing the web of lies spun by
the powerful. At the time, I little comprehended that
superior intellects could also be bought and seduced
by temptations of power, money and various forms of
tribalism, especially if their culture had not
prepared them to resist these blandishments.
It took a few years of familiarity with the Western
world to overcome my naïveté about the relationship
between tolerance and intellect. My encounters with
Western classics and the Western media slowly
confirmed me in my worry that groupthink in Western
societies ran deeper than in Islamicate societies.
My growing familiarity with the writings of Western
Orientalists and, later, the greatest European
thinkers of the West – Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, the
Mills, Marx, Weber – inverted the paradigm I had
acquired in youth. The prejudices of Western societies
had their source at the top – in the best Western
intellects – not in popular prejudice. They were
supported by reasoning, by learned historical
narratives, by monumental efforts at myth-making.
Indeed, the leading thinkers fed and supported the
prejudice of the populace.
I can still recall my disappointment when I bought
Will and Ariel Durant’s compendious eleven-volume set,
The Story of Civilization, to discover that they had
devoted only one of their eleven volumes to
non-European civilizations. Tellingly, this volume
carried the title Our Oriental Heritage. In the
Durants’ Story, the Orientals make a brief early
appearance on the stage of history, in the infancy of
human civilization, but having launched the West on
its brilliant civilizational trajectory, they
graciously make an exit from the stage of world
history. This was not an oddity, I later learned. It
was nearly the norm, even with modern writers.
Another book I read a few years later, Kenneth Clark’s
Civilization, nothwithstanding its title, is
exclusively about the art, architecture, philosophy
and sciences in Western Europe. Clark succeeds in
talking about such things without scarcely a mention
of how they might be connected to India, China, the
Islamicate, Africa, and the Americas.
Despite my familiarity with Eurocentric biases in
Western thought, I still cannot suppress my
disappointment at new instances of racism in Western
Europe’s best and brightest thinkers. Immanuel Kant
divides humans into four ‘races,’ set apart from each
other by differences in “natural disposition.” “The
negroes of Africa,” he writes, “have by nature no
feeling above the trifling.” In support, he recalls
David Hume’s challenge to show him a single ‘Negro’
with talents. On hearing of a ‘Negro’ carpenter who
berated whites for complaining when their wives abused
their liberties, Immanuel Kant remarked that there
might be some truth in that observation. Then,
spitefully, he added, “…in short, this fellow was
quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what
he said was stupid.” To Kant the hierarchy of races is
clear. “Humanity,” he asserts,” is at its greatest
perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow
Indians are far below them and at the lowest point are
a part of the American peoples.”5
Few of Europe’s most eminent thinkers, especially
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could
escape the siren songs of Eurocentrism. Some Western
thinkers even today cannot confront this ugliness.
French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Octave Mannoni,
boldly claims, “European civilization and its best
representatives are not…responsible for colonial
racialism; that is the work of petty officials, small
traders, and colonials who have toiled much without
great success.”6 Spare the elites: blame the
lumperproletariat!
A leading light of nineteenth century Britain, James
Mill, philosopher and historian, wrote a massive
five-volume history of India, it appears, with the
sole object of demonstrating how deficient the Indians
are in governance, the sciences, philosophy,
technology and the arts. In short, the Indians were
barbaric and quite incapable of managing their own
affairs except under enlightened British tutelage. His
son, John Stuart Mill, remarked, “The greater part of
the world has, properly speaking, no history, because
the despotism of custom is complete. This is the case
over the whole East (emphasis added).”7
How different was the approach of another scientist
and historian, Al-Biruni, an Afghan from the eleventh
century, who – unlike James Mill – traveled through
India for thirteen years, learned Sanskrit, translated
Sanskrit works on mathematics, studied Indian society
first hand, and invited Indian scholars to Ghazni, in
preparation for his two-volume treatise on Indian
civilization. His stated intention in his researches
on India was to provide his Muslim audience with
authentic accounts of its geography, religions,
sciences, culture, arts and manners – and, thereby,
elevate the quality of their discourse about the
Indian peoples. He concluded his treatise with these
remarks: “We think now that what we have related in
this book will be sufficient for anyone who wants to
converse with the Hindus, and to discuss with them
questions of religion, science, or literature, on the
very basis of their own civilization (emphasis
added).”8
Modernity: How Western?
In the eighteenth century, when a small number of
European thinkers were vigorously making the case for
the supremacy of reason in human affairs, they knew –
and were often happy to acknowledge – that they were
following in the footsteps of Confucius who had
preceded them by two millennia.
By the end of the century, however, a stronger and
more confident Europe had forgotten its debt to the
Chinese or any source outside of Europe. Insistently,
they began to claim that reason, science and democracy
were exclusive to European. It was a strange claim
from thinkers who claimed that knowledge should be
based on observation and reason – it should be
objective.
In truth, it is hard to imagine how any society,
including the most primitive, could have adapted to
their ecology without following – at least intuitively
– the scientific method. In practical matters,
knowledge unsupported by experience would have proved
fatal for societies that were exposed more frequently
than ours to life-threatening conditions. Moreover,
the Arab scientists were not only practicing the
scientific method in their studies on optics,
chemistry and astronomy, but in the early eleventh
century, Ibn al-Haytham, known to the West as Alhazen,
had offered a clear theoretical formulation of the
scientific method. Roger Bacon, the putative founder
of the scientific method had read parts of al-Haytham’s
major work, Kitab al-Manazir, in a Latin translation,
and summarized it in his own book, Perspectiva.
If democracy is equated with the counting of heads,
even the United States – the self-declared bastion of
democracy – was counting considerably fewer than half
the heads until 1920, when women gained the right to
vote. Blacks would not be counted until 1965. On the
whole, the counting of heads has come to Europe after
centuries of economic progress; it was not the
foundation of their progress. Monarchic absolutism was
stronger in nearly all of early modern Europe than it
was in the Islamicate, whose rulers had only limited
control over legislation and, in addition, faced
institutionalized opposition from the class of legal
scholars.9 The nomadic tribes in Africa and Asia had
their council of elders, were led by a meritocracy,
and, while their egalitarianism often excluded women,
it generally went farther than in the stratified
societies of Europe. The Indians had local
self-government in their panchayats. The Pashtoons had
their parliament in the loya jirga. The early Arabs
could withhold baya – an oath of loyalty – from an
unacceptable new ruler.
If democracy is defined by its substance, by tolerance
– respect for differences of religion, color,
ethnicity and phsyiognomy – most Enlightenment
thinkers limited its application only to members of
the white race. Tolerance has not been a particularly
visible European virtue. In modern times, but
especially since the Age of Enligtenment, Christian
intolerance was replaced by a racial intolerance that
translated quickly into schemes of genocide or support
for slavery in the Americas, Africa and Oceania.
The Ottomans, with their system of millets – which
granted a great deal of autonomy to their non-Muslim
religious communities – afforded far greater
protections to all segments of their subjects. In
imposing one set of laws pertaining to the affairs of
the family – often of Christian inspiration – modern
Western states cannot equal the tolerance of the
Islamicate which allowed its non-Muslim communities to
order their family affairs according to their own
religious laws. Universally condemned by Western
writers, the tax imposed by Muslim states on its
non-Muslim population was often considered a privilege
by the latter since it exempted them from military
service. When Western powers forced the Ottomans to
grant ‘equality’ to its Christian population, they
rioted against this measure in several Ottoman cities.
The rejection of priestly intermediation, starting in
the fifteenth century, is commonly regarded as the
first blow for modernity: allegedly, it freed the
European to read the Bible in the vernacular and deal
directly with his God. Islam had accomplished this, in
a more radical fashion, in the early seventh century;
and who is to say that Europeans were unaware of this
Islamic precedent, or that there was no Islamic
inspiration behind the Protestant movement.10 Oddly,
however, the rupture with Rome also freed Christianity
to be nationalized, to be appropriated by the newly
emerging states in Western Europe, who proceeded to
establish a national church and doctrine, which then
sanctioned religious wars, persecution and, no less,
colonization and slavery of non-Europeans. In other
words, the freedom of conscience in the early modern
West was generally more circumscribed than in the
Islamicate, where no Church existed to enforced
religious dogma, and Muslims were free to live their
lives according to the legal traditions of their
choice.
The inspiration for the central idea of orthodox
economics – its vigorous opposition to state
interventions – came primarily from the Chinese. In
his time, Francois Quesnay, the leading light of the
French pioneers of this policy – the Physiocrates –
was known as the ‘European Confucius.’ The watch-word
that summed up Physiocratic political economy, laissez
faire, was a direct translation from the Chinese
phrase wu wei.11 Adam Smith, the putative Anglo-Saxon
founder of classical economics, was a disciple of
Quesnay. Few orthodox economists know that the
language they speak – though not its intent – was
invented by the ancient Chinese.
Since machines defined modernity – for a growing
numbers of Europeans starting in the eighteenth
century – it may be worth recalling that many of the
machines that led the Europeans into modernity – water
mills, windmills, the compass, lateen sail, astrolabe,
the armillary sphere, the inner mechanisms of the
clock, seed drills, mechanized mowers and threshers,
iron moldboard plow, printing press, pumps, the
rudder, cannons and guns, and many others – had their
origins outside Western Europe, in China or the
Islamicate.12 If they originated in Greece, they were
refined and improved for many centuries in the
Islamicate before they were passed on to western
Europe.
One of the arch proponents of Western imperialism,
Rudyard Kipling, entrenched in his deeply parochial
thinking, could not imagine that the East and West
would ever meet. Pity, the news had not reached him
that they had been meeting – with the West receiving
most of the benefits of these encounters – since
ancient times.
1.Edgar A. Bowring, Poems of Goethe (John W. Parker &
Son, 1853): 272. [?]
2.E. C. Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader
(Blackwell, 1997); M. Shahid Alam, “Articulating Group
Differences: A Variety of Autocentrisms,” Science and
Society (Summer 2003): 206-18. [?]
3.For a review of this literature, see Andre Gunder
Frank, “East and West,” in: Arno Tausch and Peter
Herrmann, eds., The West, Europe and the Muslim World
( Novinka, 2006). [?]
4.As a noun, ‘Islamicate’ seeks to avoid the confusion
that arises from using ‘Islam’ when speaking of the
world of Muslims, as in Europe and Islam. As an
adjective, Islamicate replaces Islamic; the former
refers to activities or actions connected to Muslims,
differentiating this from the latter which should be
used only when referring to activities which flow from
the normative principles of Islam. [?]
5.Eze, Race and Enlightenment: 47, 55, 63. [?]
6.Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: Psychology of
Colonization (University of Michigan Press, 1990): 24.
[?]
7.John Stuart Mill, Liberty (NuVision, 1859): 60. [?]
8.Alberuni, Alberuni’s India, translated by Edward C.
Sachau, and abridge and edited by Ainslie T. Embree
(The Norton Library, 1971): 246. [?]
9.Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
(Princeton University Press, 2008): 27-35. [?]
10.Charles Lindholm, The Islamic Middle East: An
Historical Anthropology (Blackwell, 1996): 13. [?]
11.Hobson, The Eastern Origins: 195-6. [?]
12.Hobson, The Eastern Origins: ch. 9. [?]
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