Modern Universalism and the Myth Of Westernness

Abdulla Al-Dabbagh

The Comparatist, Volume 27, May 2003, pp. 5-20 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI: 10.1353/com.2003.0017

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THE COMPAKATIST

MODERN UNIVERSALISM ANDTHE MYTH OFWESTERNNESS

Abdulla Al-Dabbagh

I have read, reverend Fathers, in the works of the Arabs, that when Abdalathe Saracen was asked what he regarded as most to be wondered at on theworld's stage, so to speak, he answered that there is nothing to be seen morewonderful than man (nihil spectari Homine admirabilius).

(Pico della Mirandola, qtd. in Makdisi 307)

In a recent address as president of the MLA, Edward Said declared thathe did not "believe that humanism as a subject for us can be evaded,"and asked: "Does humanism now help in our enterprise, or has it servedits purpose? If it hasn't, we need to concentrate on it and reclaim it forour purposes as citizen-members of our profession" (3). It is this paper'simplicit, underlying purpose to answer Said's question in a most positiveway. For a renewed, modern form of humanism, a new humanist univer-salism, is precisely what we need at the moment, as a response both tothe current anti-human onslaught of imperialist globalism, that marchesinevitably, as Said rightly points out, behind the banner of "humanism"and "human rights," and to the anti-humanism that pervaded much ofWestern philosophic thought in the last hundred or so years (the Age ofHigh Imperialism) and has openly re-surfaced once again in the last twodecades. Such true humanism and true universalism would be the onlyapt reply to the philosophic anti-humanism of the past and to theanti-human, unjust, and oppressive politics of the present. It would bea timely philosophy and belief for the twenty-first century.

One indication of the importance of humanism as a subject that can-not be evaded (which at the same time is also symptomatic of the inade-quacy ofmany such discussions) is its recent appearance as a title in theNew Critical Idiom series (Davies). This study, while clearly establishingearly modern (i.e. Renaissance) humanism and contemporary and latemodern (i.e. the last hundred years of high imperialist) anti-humanismas the two distinct poles of debate on this issue, completely neglects theorigins of early modern humanist universalism. Such total neglect, sur-prisingly but just as symptomatically, also marks the Cambridge Com-panion to Renaissance Humanism that appeared in 1996 and has beenreprinted twice since, and Davies's "Forum on the Renaissance," recentlypublished in The American Historical Review.It is the contention of this paper,1 which is based not so much on new

research as on a broad synthesis of a persistent trend in scholarship thatin true comparative spirit seeks to counter the flattering assumptionthat the West developed in "splendid isolation" from other cultures, mostnotably its Islamic neighbor to the east and south, that an important

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part of these origins go back to Islamic civilization. For, in spite of fash-ionable talk about the "clash of civilizations," recent scholarship hasdemonstrated at length the existence of a wide, humanist movement atthe heart of classical Islamic civilization that preceded early Europeanmodernism by three to four centuries. This movement, aptly termed theRenaissance of Islam, was a clear harbinger, and a major force behindthe rise, of the European Renaissance. Among the main features of thisnew humanism, e.g. individualism, secularism, belle-lettrism, and hu-manist idealism, it is universalism that stands out as path-breaking andreverberating in its influence on subsequent developments in world liter-ature and culture through the period of the European Renaissance andbeyond. In other words, early modern humanism has clear roots in highIslamic culture and civilization (eighth to tenth centuries particularly)that laid the foundation for the twelfth-century European Renaissance(Haskins) and its subsequent stages, culminating in the wide EuropeanRenaissance (with a capital "R") of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The classic study in this field defines the principal expression of thisIslamic Renaissance as "a philosophical humanism that embraced thescientific and philosophical heritage of antiquity as a cultural and edu-cational ideal" and elaborates that "along with this philosophical human-ism, a literary humanism epitomized in the word adab, equivalent inmany of its nuances to Greek paideia, was cultivated by literateurs,poets, and government secretaries" (Kraemer vii)2.

Centered in Baghdad of the Abbasids, as a microcosm of the Islamicworld, this renaissance is said to be marked by "a powerful assertion ofindividualism" both in literary creativity and political action, "a remark-ably cosmopolitan atmosphere," "a spirit of skepticism and secularism,"and a "rebellion against convention characteristic of free-spirited poets"that was at times accompanied by belle-lettrism (vii). Situating thisIslamic Renaissance in its proper historical context, Kraemer explains:

The Italian Renaissance witnessed a rebirth of classical learning, culture,and style. The term "renaissance" has accordingly been extended to vari-ous cultural revivals and periods of classical restoration. Western renais-sances (e.g.,Carolingian, Ottonian, Twelfth-Century, Byzantine, etc.) havefashionably proliferated. There is equal warrant for recognizing a kindredphenomenon in the culture sphere of Islamic civilization, which enjoyedin the tenth century a rebirth of the classical legacy and a general culturalrevival. (1)Thus, having located the Islamic Renaissance as the immediate

ancestor to the European medieval renaissance, Kraemer draws thefollowing key conclusion:

Scholars in the Renaissance of Islam were engaged in the absorption ofGreek learning; those of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance were involvedin the absorption ofGreek and Arabic learning. (It may be said, perhaps,that were it not for the Renaissance of Islam, the Twelfth-Century Renais-sance would not have taken place.) (2)

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Furthermore, this cycle of cross-cultural East/West exchange, where-by Arabo/Islamic scholars are reviving Greek (i.e. Western) learning andhanding it once again to the Europeans of the Twelfth-Century Renais-sance and its subsequent phases, is deepened further by the awarenessof the Islamic philosophers that, in their revival of ancient Hellenicculture, they were also going back to the oriental roots of that culture,as Kraemer explains very well:

The Islamic Falasifa (philosophers) believed that they were renewing alegacy that was ancient and also native to their area. According to certainlegends, adopted by the Falasifa, going back to the Hellenistic period, theancient Greek philosophers derived their wisdom from the Near East.Empedocles, for instance, is said to have studied with Luqman the Sagein Syro-Palastine in the time ofKing David; and Pythagoras reportedlystudied physics and metaphysics with the disciples of Solomon in Egypt,and learned geometry from the Egyptians. These philosophers importedto Greece the wisdom that they imbibed in the Orient. The study ofancientGreek philosophy was therefore viewed not as an innovation but as arenovation. (2-3)Indeed, to be even more specific:According to the Muslim philosopher Alfarabi, philosophy had existed inancient times among the Chaldeans of Iraq. It subsequently reached thepeople of Egypt, from whence it was transferred to the Greeks, amongwhom it remained until its transmission to the Syrians, and then to theArabs. Pinpointing Iraq as the birthplace ofphilosophy is significant, forit was apparently in Iraq (the heart of a favorable clime) that Alfarabi andother Islamic philosophers anticipated a rebirth of philosophy. The wheelwould thus come full cycle. (3)Thus scholars have aptly termed this revival of classical learning

"the Graeco-Arabic renaissance" for the astounding quantity of texts"that were recovered, translated and commented upon." Baghdad hadbecome "the nucleus of a massive empire stretching from Spain to India"and Islamic society was "even more cosmopolitan than the Hellenisticand Roman world would have been" (Kraemer 4). The height of the agewas the second half of the tenth century "under the rather enlightenedand tolerant rule of the Buyid dynasty in Iraq and Western Iran." Thisperiod, the true glory of medieval Islamic culture, witnessed Buyidprinces and their viziers who actively patronized the arts and thesciences. But most remarkably it was the age of the towering figures ofAlfarabi (d. 950) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (d. 1037) who widely influ-enced medieval Europe and whose equivalents, among thinkers andphilosophers, even the High Italian Renaissance could not produce (5).

While Renaissance humanism had a very clear, though implicit, phi-losophic program that emphasized the dignity ofman, his individualism,the uniqueness and value of his thoughts and experiences, and, finally,his ultimate unity and common destiny, his universalism, it did not ad-here to any specific, explicit philosophic thought, but was primarily a Ht-

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erary phenomenon that belonged to the Western rhetorical tradition (5).The humanism of the Islamic Renaissance, on the other hand, was dom-inated by philosophic thought and debate, and was very distant, natu-rally, from the Roman rhetorical tradition. Yet, this Islamic humanismremained clearly the root and the fountainhead of all subsequent Euro-pean humanism, because it was itself "an offspring of the humanism ide-al that germinated in the period of Hellenism and Graeco-Roman anti-quity." Thus, its key features, as enumerated by Kraemer, "the adoptionof the ancient philosophical classics as an educational and cultural idealin the formation ofmind and character, a conception of the common kin-ship and unity of mankind and humaneness, or love of mankind" re-mained the essential features of the European Renaissance (10).

Indeed, among the four qualities identified by Kraemer with "thephysiognomy of the Age," individualism, cosmopolitanism, secularism,and the Ideal Human Type, it is this all-pervading humanist universal-ism, this awareness of the unity and common destiny of mankind, thatis the essence of the Islamic Renaissance, and of all subsequent renais-sances. Finally, as a cultural phenomenon, this movement was not lim-ited to Iraq and Western Iran of the Buyid Age, for "a similar spurt ofcultural growth took place in contemporary regions; for instance, inSamanid Khurasan, in Saffavid Sijistan, in Hamdanid Syria, in FatimidEgypt and in Umayad Spain" to the extent that "no period in Europeanhistory seems entitled to be called renaissance more than the tenthcentury"(286).

The most prominent contemporary scholar who has taken up Krae-mer's topic, George Makdisi, argues that although the parallels between"the humanism of classical Arabic Islam and that of the Christian LatinWest" are "striking in both their number and significance," modernscholars have generally not noticed or explained them. When someauthors speak of certain phenomena of the humanistic movement as be-ing "without parallel" and as the result of a "spontaneous and naturaldevelopment," it is because the range of their vision is limited to "theChristian West [...]. The fault for this restricted range of vision lies, inthe final analysis, in the lack of significant comparative historicalstudies on Islam and the West in the medieval period" (294).

Thus, among a number of Western scholars paraded by Makdisi,A.B.L. Ullman argues that in spite of the existence of a French connec-tion, in the case of the Italian Renaissance, the latter is "still to beregarded as something quite new" (295). Similarly, Roberto Weiss, whodetects the humanistic movement as developing "more or less simulta-neously at Padua, Verona, Vicenzia, Venice, Milan, Bologna, Florenceand Naples," generally judges the movement, particularly in its Venetianform, to have been "without parallel elsewhere" (295), and concludes thatItalian humanism, which "was already in existence before Petrarch andBocaccio were born" was "a spontaneous and natural development ofclassical studies as pursued during the later Middle Ages." Anotherscholar, Sem Dresden, puts it even more bluntly, when he declares: "We

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may regard Italian humanism and the Renaissance during the fifteenthcentury as a self-contained whole which developed on its own accord,more or less independently of the outside world' (296). Even when schol-ars, like Reynolds and Wilson, express their skepticism about the hu-manist movement having its rise in Italy—Italy having been in somerespects considerably less "humane" than elsewhere—they fail to provideany comprehensive explanation and simply rest with the clearly unsatis-factory justification of the "Italian origin" theory of modern scholarshipby the larger number of Italian notaries and lawyers in this period. EvenPaul Oskar Kristeller, perhaps the most prominent twentieth-centuryscholar in this field, who has made a more comprehensive study of thecontent of European Renaissance humanism than anyone else and whohas rightly tried to locate the medieval roots and antecedents of themovement, does not go beyond its three European sources: "Italian prac-tical rhetoric, French grammar and poetry, and Byzantine Greek learn-ing" (300). And the trend has continued to the present day if we judge byThe Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (1996) and the"Forum on the Renaissance," published in 1998 in the American Histori-cal Review to which we have already referred.

Ironically, and for reasons that have their roots more in non-schol-arly factors, it is Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilization of the Renais-sance in Italy goes back to the mid-nineteenth century, who, more thanany twentieth-century scholar, has pointed to "the parallel between theworld of Islam and Italy, in the case of the individual as well as in thecase of the state" (Makdisi 304). Burckhardt's chapter on the unique Re-naissance discovery of humanism ends by quoting the passage from Picodella Mirandola which appears as my epigraph.

And, finally, he explains the reasons for the unique relationship be-tween Italy and Islam in the period before the Italian Renaissance:

The knowledge and admiration of the remarkable civilization which Islam,particularly before the Mongol inundation, had attained, was peculiar toItaly from the time ofthe Crusades. This sympathy was fostered by thehalf-Mohammedan government of some Italian princes, by dislike andeven contempt for the existing Church, and by constant commercial inter-course with the harbours of the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean. Itcan be shown that in the thirteenth century the Italians recognized a Mo-hammedan ideal ofnobleness, dignity, and pride, which they loved to con-nect with the person of a Sultan. A Mamluke Sultan is commonly meant;if any name is mentioned, it is the name of Saladin. (Makdisi 307-08)Makdisi himself, after briefly outlining two diametrically opposed

positions regarding East/West relations—one epitomized by Kipling's"And never the twain shall meet" and one that identifies "a commonspirit that hovered over the Mediterranean world in the Middle Ages"(349)—opts for the traditional explanation of influence and concludes:

It is difficult to imagine that anyone familiar with humanism in Sicily andItaly in the medieval and Renaissance periods, and their relations with the

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world of Islam, could seriously avoid at least posing the question whetherclassical Islam had a humanistic movement, and if so, how it could havemanaged to hide it from the Italians for a period well over two centuries.The channels of influence from East to West are well known. Spain,Sicily, Italy, Provence, all were areas of contact between East and West;the routes of trade and commerce in the North and South of Italy; theroutes ofpilgrimage; the Crusades and the Latin States of the Levant; theinternational organizations of the Templars and Hospitallers. (352)The detailed routes and multifarious manifestations of Islamic influ-

ence on European civilization in the medieval and early modern timeshave, of course, long been recognized and recorded by the Western schol-arly community. The articles in the two volumes of 77ie Legacy of Islam,published by the Oxford University Press in 1931 and 1974 respectively,by such figures as Hamilton Gibb, RA. Nicholson, Maxime Rodinson,and others, are among some of the best expressions of this recognition.More recent American scholarship, particularly in the works of JamesT. Monroe, Luce Lopez-Baralt, and Maria Rosa Menocal, have continuedand deepened this trend.It seems, indeed, that we have reached a state where the Islamic

connection of western humanism and universalism and of the culturalphenomenon described as the Renaissance should no longer be a ques-tion of dispute. Thus, the authors (Ibrahim and Sagadeev) of a recentwork on classical Islamic philosophy begin by identifying this phenome-non by its characteristic features of a "degree of urbanization," "the widespread of literacy," "the development of the sciences and the prestige oflearning," "the mutual enrichment of cultures and the coexistence of ahost of religious groups accustomed to religious tolerance, and thespread of a diversity of forms of free-thinking." They conclude that it isin such soil that for the first time a modern universalism began to sproutin the region (of west Asia and Europe), which lay at the heart of aworld-wide cultural phenomenon, at times called the Renaissance:

The general cosmopolitan and humanistic spirit created favourable soil forinculcation ofuniversalism, and for overcoming of religious egocentrism,distrust, and hostility to the sciences [. . .]. It was shaped in the Moslemworld, where, as earlier, in the hellenistic one, the consolidation ofeconomic, commercial, and cultural ties accelerated crystallisation of theidea of the unity ofmankind. (10-11)Another more recent study that sums up the efforts of contemporary

American scholarship, as well as that of the older European scholarship,in this field, focuses on Islamic civilization in southern Spain (al-Andalusof the Umayyads) as the key birth-place of the European Renaissance:

Where Spain is looked upon as a mere appendage to Italy, it was Spain infact, where the activity began that would culminate in the Italian Renais-sance. AU of the characteristics conventionally attributed to the Italian Re-naissance are to be found already in the period of the tenth to the thir-teenth (ifnot fourteenth) centuries in al-Andalus. The Renaissance, as we

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know it, begins with that unique historical, cultural and literary phenome-non that was al-Andalus. [. . .] While the rest of Europe was still gropingat the beginning of its own ideologies, al-Andalus had already reachedpinnacles of achievement which would take other cultures, notably Italy,several centuries to emulate, in much the same way that China had several"Renaissances" before Europe had its own. (Ricapito 56, 67)The topic of al-Andalus raises, indeed, the very important issue of

the unity of human civilization. For, clearly, the culture of al-Andalus isas much a part of the Islamic Renaissance as it is of the EuropeanRenaissance. It is the embodiment ofMakdisi's "common spirit" in themedieval Mediterranean world. Without going too deeply into this topic,which may sidetrack us from our main concern, it is relevant to point outthat a new awareness has now accumulated among European and Amer-ican scholars—with Asin Palacios, Denis de Rougemont, and HamiltonGibb representing an earlier European generation and Maria Rosa Men-ocal, James T. Monroe, and Martin Bernal representing contemporaryAmerican scholarship—that an exclusive and self-enclosed conceptionofWestern culture is not only contrary to the facts, but also detrimentalto any genuine advance in historical, cultural, and literary studies.This awareness has involved, in particular, the recognition of the

existence of a permanent Oriental factor that is deeply embedded in thefabric of "Western" culture, all the way from its roots in West Asian andNorth African, especially in Egyptian and Mesopotamian, civilization,through the great cultural turning points represented by such works andphenomena as The Bible and the Divine Comedy; courtly love notionsand the genre of the tragic romance; the picaresque, the Arabian Nights,and the rise of the novel; romanticism and the new mythic conscious-ness; the universalist trend in the Enlightenment and in German philos-ophy from Herder and Lessing to Hegel and Marx and, albeit now witha modern anti-humanist twist or reversal, to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,and Spengler, and finally to the Oriental impact (that goes beyond ques-tions of mere reflection) on the works of such key writers as Shake-speare, Goethe, Scott, Hugo, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Hesse, George Eliot, Kip-ling, and E.M. Forster.

Even in works based on the denial or neglect of this oriental dimen-sion and on the old-fashioned affirmation of the existence of an "unadul-terated" western culture, such as those by Harold Bloom (The WesternCanon, 1994) and Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations,1996), this factor springs back into existence, being suppressed, uncon-sciously, but no less forcefully. The implications of this new awarenessfor the nature of the literary canon, as well as for critical methodologyand perspective, are enormous.

All this is, of course, deeply related, as the other side of the coin, toanother myth—the myth of the Orient as another self-enclosed culturethat can only be grasped and approached either as the totally alien "oth-er," or, looking at it from the other end, as a closed and totally "unique"culture that can be understood in its own terms only. Most importantly,

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with the increasing advance of the universalist standpoint and the in-creasing signs of the appearance of a new, unified, universal culture, thepolar terms of "western" and "orient" begin to lose their meaning andfail, as concepts, to resolve the multi-dimensional issues (geographic, cul-tural, and historical) that they raise. In the new age of profound, univer-sal synthesis, all primordial East/West distinctions inevitably collapse.

The call for a new humanism and a new universalism based on un-derstanding the ultimate unity and common destiny of humanity, goeshand in hand with recognizing the connection of this program to classicalIslamic civilization and to the Islamic Renaissance, as the integral pre-cursor to early European civilization. Similarly, the denial of the need,and even the justifiability, of this universalism, goes with the denial ofthe unity ofhuman civilization, and by implication ofhuman destiny, theerection of insurmountable barriers between cultures, and the advocacyof the inevitability of the so-called clash of civilizations. The last yearsof the previous century produced yet another, perhaps the most notori-ous, elaboration of the anti-universalist, anti-humanist position in Hun-tington's The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington states categorically inhis opening pages, where he sums up his main theme, that since:

The West's universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict withother civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China [...]. The survi-val of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their western identityand westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uni-ting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-westem societ-ies. (20-21)The proper reply3 to Huntington is not to call, as is conventionally

done, for a dialogue of civilizations, which plays into his hands by im-plicitly admitting that there are basic differences between civilizations,but to confront him directly through the affirmation of the essential andunbreakable unity of human civilization in all its manifestations—Islamic, Chinese, Western, whatever—and the essential unity of humandestiny on the planet. This is the only forthright and categorical answerto Huntington's forthright and categorical remarks, such as:

Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some havepromoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multicultural-ism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroadthreatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness ofWesternculture. (318)And, on Islam and the West, he says:Some westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that theWest does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist ex-tremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. (209)Thus, he postulates the eternal enmity of cultures and religions:

"The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon com-

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pared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islamand Christianity" (209), and, on this basis, he envisions, in the last pagesof his book, a ludicrous, futuristic war of civilizations in which "the Uni-ted states, Europe, Russia and India have thus become engaged in atruly global struggle against China, Japan and most of Islam" (315).In light of such pronouncements that stem basically, it seems to me,

from the denial of the universalist, humanist perspective, it becomes anurgent matter to reply positively to Edward Said's question with whichthis paper started: "Does humanism now help in our enterprise?" It alsobecomes an urgent matter to stress over and over again the unity of hu-man civilization and to point to the integral contribution of Islamiccivilization as a prominent demonstration of this very unity. In this, weare fortunate to have the scholarly support of someone like Maria RosaMenocal4 whose words, which challenge and refute Huntington's wholeperspective, are perhaps appropriate to quote:

The most effective response to the tragedies of the Middle East [and, wemight add here, of the world generally] is to make sure that our best andbrightest know that there can also be a Cordoba and a Toledo and that po-ets like Ibn al-'Arabi are a central part of the western and Eastern tradi-tion, a tradition that resided in a place we can barely see today, medievalSpain. Ibn al-'Arabi saw it, and his poetic vision should certainly enrichours: "My heart has adopted every shape; it has become a pasture for ga-zelles and a convent for Christian monks, a temple for idols and a Pil-grim's Ka'aba, the tables of a Torah and the pages of a Koran." ("Con-tingencies" 31)One pertinent literary experience, in this context, both professionally

and theoretically, is recounted by Eileen Julien in the 1999 issue of theMLA journal, Profession. Asked to teach a course on "The Western Liter-ary Tradition after 1500," she was faced with the immediate dilemma ofhaving to reject the very assumptions upon which such courses arebased: "Not only did I see Europe and the United States as porous andheterogeneous, but I saw the west as an imagined community, aninvention—albeit of immense persuasion and consequence" (226). Amongthe many contradictions inherent in the concept of "western literary tra-dition," she cites Woolf, Walker, and Rimbaud, chosen by her for studyamong those included in the textbook. Born and reared in the "westernheartland" and "heirs to all the pertinent traditions," all three figures"are to various extents antagonistic to the invented West. The originalityof their literary projects derives precisely from the retrieval of repressed,oppositional, or, at the very least other terms" (228).

On the other side of the same contradiction, there are literary figuresin the textbook who could not conceivably—at least, geographically—beregarded as part of what is normally understood by "the west," figureslike Fugard and Márquez. The west is not so much a place as a project,Julien concludes, quoting Edouard Glissant and echoing Edward Said:

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And so Fugard is western, although his work is inconceivable beyondSouth African shores. Garcia Marquez is western, although his is so clear-ly Amerindian imaginary. Both can appear in Literature ofthe WesternWorld. Thus it is that third world writers are western once they havesucceeded. (229)Interestingly, to resolve these contradictions on a theoretical level,

Julien takes recourse to Samir Amin's ideas on Eurocentrism, as thebasis of the development of this "Western model." She quotes Amin'sdefinition:

Eurocentrism [. . .] assumes the existence of irreducibly distinct culturalvariants that shape the historical paths of different peoples. Eurocentrismis therefore anti-universalist, since it is not interested in seeking possiblegeneral laws ofhuman evolution, but it does present itself as universalist,for it claims that imitation of the Western model by all peoples is the onlysolution to the challenges of our time. (Julien 230)In this context, the ideas ofMarshall G. S. Hodgson (especially in his

posthumously published Rethinking World History, 1993), acquire pio-neering significance.5 This can be readily seen if we merely sum up hismajor contributions: Hodgson was a pioneer in emphasizing global inter-dependence and in rejecting western exceptionalism. He was also inno-vative in exploiting the comparison between Islamic civilization andWestern European civilization at various points in order to refute Euro-centrism. Very early in his career, when he was a young scholar justfinding his way, he had planned to write a world history under the title,"There is no Orient," with the purpose of combatting "western provin-cialism." Long before Edward Said, Hodgson clearly understood thebuilt-in sense of superiority that is inevitably found in histories ofWestern civilization. Such discourse (although he did not use that term)always presented the West in terms of freedom, progress, and rational-ity, while it attributed to the East nothing but despotism, stagnation,and airy mysticism.

Islamic civilization, because of its broad geographical sweep acrossmany continents, but more importantly, because of its deep and insepa-rable penetration of the very roots and essence of western culturaldevelopment, became the key object of study for Hodgson. For him, thedevelopment of Islamic civilization, perhaps more than any other majorhistorical movement, subverted the binary opposition of East versusWest and traditional versus modern upon which so much Eurocentricand "westernizing" discourse depended. If anything Hodgson's view ofworld history might be called Asia-centric. For example, he points to thefact that four of the five major world civilizations are Asian, and thatEurope is about the size of India and Southeast Asia, yet it is called acontinent and they are not, and so on.

Hodgson refuted the Eurocentric view of confusing modernizationwith westernization and making the former only an adjunct of the latter.He regarded modernization from a global perspective and clearly pointed

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to its roots in China (where an industrial revolution was about to takeplace) and in Islamic civilization (where universalist and humanist ten-dencies had clearly begun to appear). From such a global perspective, hemaintained, for example, that for most of history Europe was a mere ap-pendage to mainland Asia and that the European Renaissance did notherald the modern age (modernity), but rather brought Europe to thelevel ofother major civilizations that were there before it. Hodgson wouldhave definitely objected to the term "Early Modern" that is nowadaysfashionably replacing "Renaissance." He would have pointed out thatmodernity occurred much earlier, from a global world-historical perspec-tive, in China and in the Islamic world. "Renaissance" would be a betterterm provided that we realize that the European Renaissance of the six-teenth century was not exceptional and that there was an Islamic Re-naissance and a Chinese Renaissance, even a European Renaissance ofthe twelfth century that was greatly influenced by Islam. Hodgson said:

Just as an understanding ofthe history ofEurope cannot be reduced to thatof the history ofEngland because industrialization first developed there,so the history of the world cannot be reduced to the history of the west,because industrialism first spread there, (xx)

Hodgson, in fact, would separate and distinguish "modernity" from "in-dustrialization."

Of course, Hodgson does not have all the answers. The issue of west-ern exceptionalism in world history is still to be resolved. Hodgson's "civ-ilizational approach" (like Toynbee's and, indeed, Huntington's) inevita-bly lands him in difficulties. Sometimes (as in his concept of technical-ism, i.e. the effort to maximize technical efficiency that he saw only inthe West) he might again be bringing in western exceptionalism througha back door, and at other times he might seem too Asia-centric. Yet, inall, his contributions have been pioneering and immense. And his globalperspective has served to redress a major imbalance in historical andcultural studies.In his refutation of Eurocentrism, and indeed of "centrism" of any

kind, Hodgson has a brief, and rather humorous, essay entitled, "In theCenter of the Map: Nations See Themselves as the Hub ofHistory" (29-34). Thus the Chinese, delighted as they were when they first saw a six-teenth-century European map showing the new discoveries in America,were not so happy that China, which they had been accustomed to seein the center as literally the "Middle kingdom," had been pushed asideto the edge. And while the Europeans have liked this map, which showsEurope at the center of the world, "the commonest maps in North Amer-ica show the U.S.A. in that post of honor, even at the cost of splitting acontinent in two" (29). Hodgson then briefly explains the different ver-sions of world history as seen from the Chinese, the Christian, the Mus-lim, and the West European perspectives, concluding that: "The tempta-tion not only to put one's own land in the center of the map, but one'sown people in the center of history, seems to be universal" (29).

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To escape these myopic perspectives, Hodgson was a pioneer in ad-vocating what he called, in the title of another brief essay, "world historyand a world outlook" (35-43). Only this new outlook can fully rival theabsurdity, for example, of both Chinese and European exclusiveness(35), and the ultimate falsehood, in spite of their intransigence, of theterms "East" and "West" as complementary and totally separate halvesofworld civilization (40). Most crucial, however, is the fact that humandestiny can be fully understood only on a world-historical scale. In otherwords, globalism (which preoccupied Hodgson though he died before theterm had entered common usage) in the sense of human interdepen-dence across the globe was there long before the last decade or two of thetwentieth century. As Hodgson points out: "The destinies of the varioussections of mankind began to be interrelated long before the twentiethcentury, with its global wars and cold wars; or even the nineteenthcentury, the century of European world hegemony" (3).

Even the civilization-based approach to world history, according towhich, as Hodgson says, it has been conventional to divide the "Afro-Eurasian zone of civilization into four main nuclear regions, which wemay call Europe, the Middle East, India, and the Far East of China andJapan" (8), admits that there can be no hard and fast distinctions. Thisis particularly true of the Mediterranean basin that serves to link theEuropean and the so-called Middle Eastern regions. Hodgson explains:

The lands north of the Mediterranean were always very closely linkedwith those of the Fertile Crescent and Iran. I have listed the AnatolianPeninsula (the western half of the present Turkish Republic) as part ofEurope, since it was one of the chief formative centers ofGreek culture,and has always shared the fortunes of the Balkan peninsula; but it is com-monly listed as part of the Middle East, and not entirely without reason.The Mediterranean Basin formed a historical whole not only under theRoman empire but also before and since; even at the height of the MiddleAges a land like Sicily brought together Greek, Arab, and Latin. Greekthought became an integral element in the Middle Eastern tradition, whileMiddle Eastern religion had a central place in European life. (9)

And this is also true of India, where "long before the coming of the Indo-Europeans assured a common origin to the languages and myths ofIndia, Iran, and Greece, the Indus Valley civilization had been closelylinked with that ofMesopotamia" (10). Indeed, similar deep connectionsno doubt exist with China and "Far Eastern" civilizations, although hereHodgson allows for what he calls "the greatest breach in continuity" (10).

One major thrust in Hodgson's effort to expose Eurocentrism and themyths of westernness and of European exceptionalism lies in his ex-planation of the role and position of Islamic civilization in world history.His method chiefly entails an exposition of prevalent western misconcep-tions about the role of Islam. Thus Hodgson explains very cogently that,

in the sixteenth century of our era, a visitor from Mars might well havesupposed that the human world was on the verge ofbecoming Muslim. He

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would have based his judgment partly on the strategic and political ad-vantages of the muslims, but partly also on the vitality of their generalculture. (97)

He elaborates:

Some westerners have thought ofMuslims as reaching the peak of theirpower in 732, when a minor raiding party was turned back by Franks inNorthern Gaul. But this is a parochial illusion. On the world scale, theMuslim peoples reached the height of their political power in the sixteenthcentury, when a large part of Islamdom was ruled under three large em-pires, whose good organization and prosperity aroused the admiration ofOccidentals: the Ottoman, centered in Anatolia and the Balkans; theSafavi, in the fertile Crescent and the Iranian Highlands; and the Mughalor Timuri, in northern India. Westerners have focused on the empire near-est them, the Ottoman; but though it may sometimes have been slightly thestrongest of the three, it was not geographically central to Islamdom, norwas it significant culturally as the central empire, the Safavi, or even theIndie empire. The three empires treated each other diplomatically asequals. One ofthem single-handed, the Ottoman Empire, was able to de-feat the allied forces ofChristian Europe, and during the sixteenth centuryit steadily advanced to the northwest. (98)Hodgson correctly emphasizes that "in the sixteenth century and

well into the seventeenth, the Muslims found themselves at a peak notonly of political power but also of cultural creativity" (100), pointing tosuch examples as the new style of painting, the so-called "Persian mini-atures," the Taj Mahal (of 1653), and the general florescence of poetryand literature.

Finally, Hodgson singles out, as an example, Ibn al-'Arabi as a form-ative Islamic mind that was uniquely significant for the development ofthe western Renaissance:

We are coming to realize that the speculation of Ibn al-'Arabi (d. 1240),for instance, which formed the starting point for so much of the thinkingof the next two centuries, was not the passive monism that has been imag-ined, but a powerfully stimulating synthesis in which the human person,as microcosm in an infinitely meaningful cosmos, was assigned vast po-tentialities in every sphere of activity. It can be speculated that his expan-sive and optimistic mood, known in Raymond Lull, may indirectly havecontributed to the expansiveness ofsuch men as Lull's admirer GiordanoBruno and hence to Bacon and the western modems. (121)

With this perception of fruitful cross-cultural influences between globalregions, Hodgson anticipates the findings of such a renowned medieval-ist and Arabist as Maria Rosa Menocal, from whose book, The ArabicRole in Medieval Literary History, I have taken my title phrase, the"myth of westernness."

United Arab Emirates University

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NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the Sixteenth Congress ofthe International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) held in Pretoria, SouthAfrica, August 13-19, 2000.

2In two crucial paragraphs, Kraemer describes both kinds of humanism in

Islamic Renaissance as follows: "The philosophic humanists in the Renaissance ofIslam believed that the sciences of the ancients ('ulum al-awa ' H), in contrast to theArab sciences ( 'ulum al- 'arab), are the common possession ofmankind. Al-Kindi,in the third/ninth century, had called the sciences of the ancients 'the humansciences' (al- 'ulum al-insaniya). The philosophers contended that while grammarestablishes rules for the correct speech of specific nations, philosophy—speci-fically, logic—regulates valid reasoned discourse for all mankind. Love for all men,and pity and compassion for them, is taught by Yaha b. 'Adi in a moving passagein his Tahdhib al-akhlaq. He speaks of men as forming one tribe, linked by hu-manity (insaniyya). The term insaniyya, which is used often by philosophers in ourperiod, has several meanings. It is the quality men share in common, or humannature; it also signifies being truly human, in the sense of realizing the end orperfection ofman qua man, often synonymous with the exercise of reason.

"Along with this philosophic humanism, we find in our period a type of literaryhumanism that is epitomized in the word adab. Adab is a polysemous term, mean-ing (as Francesco Gabrieli explains) refinement and urbanity; the knowledge whichrenders someone refined and urbane—i.e. profane Arab culture and sciences (poet-ry, oratory, history, rhetoric, grammar, lexicography, metrics) and broader human-istic studies (ofGreek, Persian, and Indian provenance); the knowledge required fora specific calling (e.g. adab al-katib); and belles-lettres. In Graeco-Arabic transla-tion literature adab often renders Greekpaideia and has many of its nuances" (10).

3One which the American scholarly community was quite capable ofprovid-

ing very early on, as can be seen, for example, in John Obert VoIPs Middle EastStudies Association Address, delivered in 1993 (the same year as Huntington's For-eign Affairs article that was later expanded into The Clash ofCivilizations) in whichVoll states very clearly his position that "analyses and narratives based on theconcept of separate, clearly identifiable civilizations are no longer adequate, if theyever were. In fact the 'civilizational narrative' may now be an integral part of theproblem rather than a part of the explanation" (3).

4Nor shouldwe forget the unequivocal words ofanother scholar, Luce Lopez-

Baralt: "It would be unfair not to concede that Muslim Spain was a true culturalmiracle within the context ofmedieval Europe. It was the Arabs who took Al-Anda-lus to scientific and artistic heights unattained by any other country in Europe at thisperiod—a period that might be called 'medieval' or a 'dark age' for the continent,but definitely not for the Peninsula" (20). We might end, finally, with the remarksofAijaz Ahmad in his excellent critique of the concept and claims to uniqueness of"postcolonial" and postmodem hybridity: "Against this conception of 'hybridity,'it would be erroneous to posit those claims ofAuthenticity that come to us from somany religious revivalisms and protofascist nationalisms ofour time. However, this'hybridity' must also be sharply distinguished from that very common life-processthrough which people move within national boundaries or encounter each other

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without mediation by colonialism and its aftermath. In one form or another, suchcross-fertilisation of cultures has been endemic to all movements of people, fromcountry to city, from city to city, from one site of labor to another at shorter or long-er distances; and all such movements in history have involved travel, contact, trans-mutation, hybridisation of ideas, values and behavioral norms. Thus it is that notonly Hinduism, which is by its nature multiform, but also Islam, despite its scriptur-alist component, has led myriad different cultural lives, at different times and loca-tions. Far from being specifically postmodern, physical mobilities and culturalcross-fertilisation are woven into the dynamics of historical time itself, in anunending dialectic ofpersistence and change, so that communities and individualsare neither mere repetitions of the past nor ever free to refashion themselves, suigeneris, out of any clay that happens to be at hand" (18).

5Hodgson died in 1968, nearly a decade before the works ofSamir Amin, and

of others like Immanuel Wallerstein and André Gunder Frank, who worked in thesame field, began to appear. Also highly recommended is Shohat and Stam,especially the first chapter, "From Eurocentrism to Polycentrism," 13-54.

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