"The decades of colonialism and postcolonial neo-imperialism have established another kind of hegemony over the Muslim world, which intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi and Ali Shari‘ati recognised long ago (and which was also discussed by non-Muslims such as Franz Fanon), but which is still un-noticed by most Muslims. This is a cultural and intellectual hegemony that takes different forms but has a single net effect: that of encouraging (if not forcing) people to think in terms defined by Western discourses, whatever subject they are thinking about...
"Winston Churchill, a proud imperialist himself, famously said that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”; that unfortunately is where we are today."
(Perspectives, Crescent International, December 2009.)
Muslims all over the world recognise the aggressive, hegemonic imperialism of the modern West in its military, political and economic forms, through the presence of US or NATO troops in virtually every country of the Muslim world, the imposition of pro-Western dictators in Muslim countries, regardless of their illegitimacy and brutality, and the exploitation of labour, trade, oil, gas and other resources. However, the decades of colonialism and post-colonial neo-imperialism have established another kind of hegemony over the Muslim world, which intellectuals such as Malek Bennabi and Ali Shari‘ati recognised long ago (and which was also discussed by non-Muslims such as Franz Fanon), but which is still un-noticed by most Muslims. This is a cultural and intellectual hegemony that takes different forms but has a single net effect: that of encouraging (if not forcing) people to think in terms defined by Western discourses, whatever subject they are thinking about. Their success has been such that in many cases it works even when Muslims think about Islam itself, which should be the one subject on which they maintain some degree of intellectual autonomy.
One of the many areas in which this type of hegemony has been established, and is most dangerous, is that of history. Napoleon said that “history is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon”. The problem in the Muslim world is that our understanding of our history is not one agreed upon by ourselves, based on our own memories and experiences, but one defined for us by others. Three key things about the nature of history are often forgotten. The first is that not all facts and events in history are equally important; history is defined by the selection of facts and versions of events that are thought to be of particular significance, as well as by the tacit assessment of other facts, events and versions of events as being unimportant and not worthy of remembrance. Second is that history does not consist only of events but of processes, which can be regarded as understandings of the unfolding of those events regarded as important. The definition of these processes and the determination as which of these processes are significant and which are not, is crucial. Third is that history does not consist only of narratives, but of discourses; history is defined not only by what is recorded and written, but also by what is chosen to be highlighted in the media of various kinds, including popular cultural media such as films, novels, music and religious literature as much as academic ones.
The result is that even in terms of the histories of our own societies, most Muslims do not think in terms of Islam and Muslim discourses. Instead they have been trained by the dominant discourses around them to think in terms of events and processes selected and defined by others based on their own priorities and agendas. They think, therefore, in terms of the history of the West and of the emergence of modern national states, rather than of the Muslim states, discourses and resistance to the West. Why should Muslims all over the world view world history over the last few hundred years primarily as the history of the rise of the West? Surely we should be viewing the same events through the experiences of Muslims and Muslim powers, such as the Ottoman Empire, and of responses to Western imperialism? Of course, we are all taught the (selective) histories of our own countries first, be they Arab countries, Turkey, Iran, or Malaysia. Beyond that, our knowledge and understanding is generally of the histories of the West rather than other Muslim peoples; and even our knowledge of other Muslim peoples comes via Western histories of them. If Muslims in Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco or the US, for example, want to read about Jamaluddin al-Afghani or Shaikh Usman dan Fodio, say, or even more recent figures such as Said Hawwa or Ali Shari‘ati, they usually end up using English sources published in the US or Europe. Obviously their understandings are distorted as a result.
And history is not only about the past, of course. Much journalism is really the writing of contemporary history and the versions of current events that will be remembered in future. All that has been said about the construction of our understandings of the past is true also of our understandings of events unfolding around us. Anyone writing on recent events in Palestine, for example, as I have done for some years, is fighting a constant battle against the dominant discourse established by the Western media. Even people who sympathise with the Palestinians, and many in Muslim and Arab countries, are taken in by pro-Zionist versions of history, such as the failure of the “peace process”, Yasser Arafat’s rejection of the Israeli “final offer” at Camp David in 2000, and Hamas’s “coup” in Gaza in June 2007. In order to counter the sheer weight of misinformation in the mainstream media, basic issues have to be discussed again and again in our analyses, often preventing the discourse from moving on to more detailed discussions on the basis of what should already be shared basic understandings. And the unfortunate reality is that even these attempts to counter hegemonic discourses are read only by a tiny minority of people and can have only a limited impact.
Addressing these issues is of course far harder than simply highlighting them, and the colonisation of Muslim minds takes many more complex forms than those briefly discussed here. But raising awareness of the problem is the first step. Winston Churchill, a proud imperialist himself, famously said that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind”; that unfortunately is where we are today.
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