Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Book Review: Orientalism and Islam
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Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism
in the Middle East and India. New York: Cambridge University Press,
2009, 382 pp., $22.99 (paper).
Ün e r Dag l i e r
Maltepe University, Istanbul
daglier@gmail.com
Do the views of past political philosophers on a particular
culture, religion, or region carry relevance in the times of diversity that we
live in today? Michael Curtis, a former editor of the Middle East Review,
argues that historic travel narratives and philosophical writings are helpful
in understanding contemporary Muslim societies and cultural identities in
what was known as the Orient. Through a detailed inquiry into the works
of Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, and Weber, Curtis reflects
upon the genesis of the discourse on Oriental despotism, Western perceptions
of the East in the history of modern political thought, and the contemporary
relevance of these perceptions. In doing so, Curtis explicitly defies the postmodern
criticism that Western perceptions of the East are marred by “a desire
for power over the Orient, which implies a hegemonic imperialist or colonial
attitude” (6). The polemical adaptation to Middle Eastern studies of the
premise that “knowledge and ‘discursive practices’ are social ideologies that
function as forms of exerting power and disseminating the effects of power”
has been that the West has “dominated and exercised colonial or imperial
rule over the Orient but also that, through intellectual means, it has created
an essentialist, ontological, epistemologically insensitive distinction between
a ‘West,’ materially developed and self-assured about its superior civilization,
and an ‘Orient,’ which it regards as inferior, backward, and not modernized”
(8). According to Curtis, this “monolithic and binary view” (9) ignores the
diverse variety of literature on the Middle East, the conflicting motivations
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