english text 176 When myth engenders fright Gema Martín Muñoz There are many facets in which Europe has invented the Orient and has created a myth. It is an old story of attraction and domination. Orientalism is one of the ways by which Europe seeks to define itself in contrast to an Orient recreated and imagined in accordance with its fantasies, its interests and its need to feel superior and modern. The orientalism most directly linked to the colonial enterprise represented the “natives” of the Arab lands as inferior and intrinsically separate from European modernity. Hence the idea of civilising them. And so a moral justification was found for colonial domination, converted into a historic mission of the superior being who felt obliged to bring civilisation to backward nations. The progressive contact made with Oriental countries by travellers and artists generated a Romantic, aestheticist orientalism relieved of the aggressiveness of the previous version, seeking instead to highlight all that was different and picturesque. This exotic, mythical recreation, full of clichés and stereotypes, enacted in a multitude of works by renowned painters and engravers, was no less innocent in its creation of a culturalist packaging of societies that in reality remained unknown. The combination of hostility and reductionism that all those myths recreated was the fertile layer on which the dispossession of those people was to germinate. The orientalist myth was created in communion with the conception of colonialism, so was it not inevitable that the myth would engender fright? Or rather, was not the myth itself a manifestation of fright? The fright induced by assigning the values of rationality and progress to the Europeans and those of irrationality and backwardness to the exogenous cultures. Cultures that were barbaric and backward, and that could therefore be subjected to intervention to change their primitive essence. There is no great conceptual difference between the declaration of the British minister responsible for the colonies between 1895 and 1903 (“our rule is the only thing that can ensure peace, security and prosperity for so many unfortunates that never knew these blessings before. In carrying out this work of civilisation we are fulfilling what I believe to be our national mission, accomplished for the eternal profit of peoples under the shadow of our imperial sceptre”) and that of Samuel P. Huntington in his well-known theory of the clash of civilisations (“it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components … to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions”). Both views were responses to the need to justify an enterprise of political domination based on cultural supremacy and dehumanisation of the “other”. The dividing line between civilisation and barbarity provided a justification in terms of culturalist parameters of the power strategies that the geography of the Orient constantly attracts. To justify the colonial enterprise, the Europeans put forward the principle that Europe was undertaking a civilising mission to create a Middle East ex nihilo, a region populated by primitive Bedouins and archaic systems of communities incapable of selfgovernment (the frightening element), although their exoticism was nourishing orientalist cultural Romanticism (the myth). European Zionism presented its colonial enterprise in Palestine as a “land without a nation”, in which, at most, there were a few ancient Bedouins scattered in the desert (who were not even worthy to nourish the myth). Many decades later, Iraq was the new territory to which the most powerful sector of the West again sought to export virtue by the ex nihilo creation of a nation that would oppose barbarity by bringing civilisation to the Middle East, transported in the trucks of an occupying army. This feeling of fright was accompanied by another myth: a simplistic but intense search for the “good Arab” (lay and Westernised) as the only possible ambassador of his society and culture. One of the fundamental features underlying Western interference in that part of the world was the distinction between the (lay) actors who were wanted and the (Islamist) actors who were not wanted, disregarding whatever might be wished by the democratically expressed sovereignty of the people and the violent, despotic drift that their dispossession might bring with it (Algeria in 1992, Palestine in 2006, Egypt in 2013). The many cities and their people and the religious and ethnic communities in those lands were ignored and despised, and the secular systems of administration, arbitration and government were described as obstacles to modernisation. From the nineteenth century onwards Europe had been constructing a closed identity that proclaimed the myth of being the only depositary of the attributes of humanity, based on considering other nations as inferior (or other races, in accordance with the terminology promoted by Europeans to establish hierarchies between human beings and legitimise their “natural right to rule”). When the historical reality discredited the regressionist cultural stereotypes applied to the “Oriental natives”, European political action intervened to ensure that its prophecy of the choice between civilisation and barbarity was self-fulfilling. The European countries abandoned and helped to suppress the reformist sectors that were emerging in the Ottoman Arab provinces, giving precedence to the archaic systems and supporting the outmoded, ultraconservative sectors, which were more useful for their objectives of territorial appropriation of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The constitutional experiments of the nineteenth century in the Arab provinces of Tunis and Egypt, and even in the centre of the Empire, with the Turkish reforms, were sabotaged by France and England. And they also did not hesitate to
Entre el mite i l'espant
To see the actual publication please follow the link above