PREFACE. From Europe I am now space and time travelling East, through what is called The Orient, that mysterious region stretching from the Middle East to the Far East. I want first to explore Orientalism, the ideas that we in the West had and still have about “the other”, the non-Western world, the East, the Orient. In the Mediterranean chapter we have already wandered through lands with a long history of confrontation between East and West. Now I’ll move on to the Middle East, next, to India, Nepal, Hong Kong, Macau, and China, completing Part 5 with some reflections on The Orient. As with the rest of my memoir, I want to understand and compare other human journeys alongside the paths I have trodden. Some of this is really for my benefit, to help me to understand my own journeys, both of travel and of ideas. So skim some chapters and skip to those you know about, India, Hong Kong and Macau.
ORIENTALISM
As the British and French spread their empires across the globe, their scholars began to feel that they really needed some knowledge of the people they were conquering. It might be useful. At first they described The Orient as “separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress…By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it.” (www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism). Post-colonial studies are now rewriting this history; but Edward Said argues that the old Orientalism is alive and well, particularly in the American concepts of “the Arab” and of Muslims generally. But, in Culture and Imperialism, Said does actually shoot at both sides, quoting an Arab poet who criticises his own people for “The ossified, tradition-bound Arab-Islamic heritage, stuck not only in the past but in rigid and authoritative readings of that past…to keep the Arabs from truly encountering modernity…confining history to an exhausting code of endlessly reiterated precedents.” Orientalism was the dominant West’s view of “the other”, the rest of the world, benighted and backward. The Orient, of course, is now making a powerful counter-attack and a counter-criticism under a flag called Islam and, as its epicentre is the Middle East, I will start there.
THE MIDDLE EAST
In this “Cradle of Civilisation” there emerged stable social systems that anthropologists call “tributary” in which peasants pay tribute, that is to say dues, taxes, tithes, and rents to those at the top. Historian William McNeill noticed this on location while writing a book about plagues and therefore he called this system of parasites “Macro-parasitism”. Malina, exploring cultural anthropology in New Testament times, was able to put numbers to this tributary or parasitic social system. Ten percent of those in a farming region lived in the city. Of these, two percent were priests, administrators and absentee landlords extracting rent from the 90 percent. Minor landlords lived on their farms, also collecting rent. In 1948 Warriner found this macro-parasitism largely unchanged, and added further numbers. Rents for un-irrigated lands were 40 percent of produce, for irrigated 60 percent, and where the landlord provided tools and equipment, his share could rise to 80 percent.
On top of this social system raged tribal warfare and the ebb and flow of voracious empires. The Old Testament chronicles those dynastic conflicts over lands that promised either scorpions and locusts or, if you were lucky, milk and honey. Riding on top of this there were half a dozen indigenous empires, from the Sumarian some 6000 years ago up to the Ottoman, not finally defeated until 1918. Alternating with these empires rampaged the foreign ones. The Greeks and Romans, for example, extracted slaves and tribute until this system was challenged by a barefoot preacher from Nazareth. Though his entirely new ideas of peace and justice trickled through two millennia into what we now call systems of human rights and obligations, his ideology was high-jacked and distorted to justify Europe’s Christian empires. For the Middle East, the repercussions from the Crusades are still felt today.
In the twentieth century. Up to now “at all stages of the Moslem era there had been an extraordinary prevalence of large landed proprietorship”. But now there was new wealth and four new problems. Problem one: “sales of oil transformed the lives of ordinary desert sheiks who had once slept in tents and gauged their wealth by counting wives and camels. Now they dwelled in marble halls and flew in private planes…Saddam Hussein reportedly had 60 cars, 50 palaces, and somewhere between $1 billion and $40 billion.” In 1980 Saddam attacked Iran. After eight years and one million lives neither side had won. Problem two: Israel in Palestine. The Jews had ruled Palestine 2,000 years ago, but since then the land belonged to Arabs. And for both Jews and Muslims Palestine is sacred soil. Problem three: the emergence of world-wide Islamist terrorism. Problem four: an unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Solve these four problems and you deserve a Nobel prize.
Today, the Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are called Palestinians, numbering 3.8 million with an average income of $1100. These stateless citizens have very high unemployment and very high birth rates. Israel, lying in between these zones, numbers 6.9 million with an average income of $20,200. Israel has a comparatively very low birth rate and, for this reason, would never annex the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Why? Because this would give Palestinians Israeli citizenship and, in time, demography would change Israel into an Islamic state. Meanwhile, the plight of the Palestinian Arabs is a major cause of unrest in the Middle East, and some think a major contribution to the growth of Islamic terrorism. “The gushing wound of Palestine which worsens the infection of fundamentalism.”
The future? Religious conflict is usually the surface manifestation of identity robbed by invaders but, below this, lie deeper disputes over robbed resources. Always it was, is now and ever will be over land. Right now disputes are also over oil and minerals and, in the future, it will be increasingly over water. Add to all this a thick layer of corruption and bribes going “into outstretched palms and Swiss accounts” and you can see why any hope of reform is like “firing a cannonball into a mountain of mud”. But “ The human, humanistic desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the incredible strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rumsfelds, Bin Ladens, Sharons and Bushes of this world.” (Said, 2003).
But oriental culture and hospitality has continued under all this for thousands of years, and maybe we should try and learn something from its robustness. In Turkey we were lucky to visit the great Byzantine cathedral of Aya Sofya, already influencing Islamic architecture as we found in Sinan’s exquisite mosque in Erdine. But to this creativity was now added the exotic curves, arabesques and intricate geometric patterns that so enthused John Henshaw in his Middle East travels. We missed the Whirling Dervishes but bought two Turkish carpets, and we read Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabic stories. Always, we were graciously offered tea, whether we were buying carpets or petrol, and a generous Turkish family shared their lunch with us on the Bosphorus.
SOURCES
Edward Said, 1994, Culture and Imperialism, London, Vintage.
Edward Said, 2003, Orientalism, New York, Vintage.