Islam Through Western Eyes

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you well good afternoon mark Sweeney I'm chief of the humanities and Social Sciences division here at the Library of Congress and I want to welcome you to another in a series of occasional lectures sponsored by the humanities and Social Sciences Division this event is also being co-sponsored by the African and Middle Eastern Division the humanities and Social Sciences Division provides reference and research service assistance through three reading rooms in the Library of Congress the main reading room the local history and genealogy reading room and the Micra forum reading room we have three other upcoming events that I want you to be aware of so you can mark your calendar one is that on Monday Presidents Day the main reading room will be open to the general public for a visit welcome to have photography children anyone under the age of 16 who are normally not allowed as researchers in our reading room we do this twice a year on Columbus Day and Presidents Day so you're more than welcome to come in and enjoy the room talk to our staff about what it's like to work at the Library of Congress also on Tuesday February the 28th at noon in the Pickford theatre the rare book and special collections division along with the Hebraic session of the African elites turn division and HSS are co-sponsoring a program about a forthcoming documentary the Rosenwald schools by filmmaker Aviva Kempner Julius Rosenwald philanthropist of the Sears Roebuck Empire partnered with Booker T Washington in the early 20th century to build over 5,000 schools for rural african-american communities in the south and our rare book division holds the Lessing Rosenwald collection he was the son of Julius Rosenwald and our manuscript division holds the Booker T Washington papers and also on Friday March the 16th at noon author Joseph Cruciani will discuss his recent book Faulkner and Hemingway biography of a literary rivalry published by Ohio State University Press so enough for the advertisements I'm sorry but so today's lecture connects well the library's collections on religion Christianity in Islam world history and politics this event was planned by our reference specialists and religion Sheryl Adams thank you very much and Sheryl will will introduce the speaker after mary-jane Deeb chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division provides us with some additional remarks so Mary Jane thank you Mark and Thank You Sheryl Sheryl Adams has been just wonderful she has organized the program and I really feel that we have done almost nothing to do to help out but we do co-sponsor programs with other divisions sometimes we take the initiative sometimes the other division takes the initiative in this case HSS has done that so I want to thank shell and mark very much the African Middle East Division holds also programs in its reading room we have three section the African section the Hebraic section and the Near East section and each of those sections has programs readings poetry shows films holds conferences and exhibits in the various fields and regions of the 78 countries for which the division is responsible I would like to make a little push for one of the programs we're going to have very soon and that is we're having a major exhibit on the Union booked and dr. Abdullah on here is the the organizer curator thinker behind this exhibit it would be in just a few weeks and April the openings on April 18th and I would like to invite you all to come and I just want to welcome Jonathan Lyons again the last time he was here he was talking in our reading room he had another book on on Iraq at that time under ed hikmah and he gave a wonderful presentation so I'm sure you must all be looking forward to hearing him but before that trial Adams will introduce him so thank you good afternoon I'm Cheryl Adams in the main reading room a reference specialist for religion are there I guess we've got a few people but as people come in if you raise your hand for you've got a seat near you that would help folks I just want to say that if you have a cell phone on if you could turn that off that would help our speaker I also want to say that this program is being webcast so if you raise your hand for question later on in the program you are giving us permission to to use your image or your voice in our webcast in Islam through Western eyes to quote columbia university press release Jonathan Lyons unpacks Western habits of thinking and writing about Islam conducting a careful analysis of the West's grand total izing narrative across 1,000 years of history pretty complicated but I just want to give you some sense of Jonathan's ability to create an absorbing an engaging narrative about a very complex topic yes thank you sure can you hear me better now is that better I need to be closer is that better okay I want to give you some sense of how good Jonathan is about creating an engaging and absorbing narrative about a very complex topic last summer we discussed this book talk he had not quite that book wasn't published yet and so he gave me a copy of his earlier book which is the House of Wisdom how the Arab transformed Arabs transfer of Western civilization it was summer I took it to the beach and in between swims I was transported to the medieval world quite happily it was fascinating so it was really really good Jonathan is a scholar of the Muslim world but he also spent 20 years as a correspondent and also editor at Reuters much of it in the Islamic world and as Louis H Lapham editor of Lapham's quarterly notes Jonathan Lyons joins the wisdom of a scholar with the knowledge of a journalist and this makes for a very engaging combination of research and experience Jonathan has a doctorate in sociology from Monash University in Melbourne Australia he's taught at Monash University and as well as George Mason University and Georgetown University's Center for Muslim Christian understanding in addition to the books that I have mentioned he has also co-authored answering only to God faith and freedom in the 20 and 21st century Iran Jonathan clearly has the credentials to UM to tackle this very complicated topic relating to how we in the West look at the Islamic world but what I find most interesting is how the question he opposes as he looks at his research and those can be summed up in a couple of questions that he puts on his website which is why do why do we think about the things the way we do and what if we allowed ourselves to think differently please join me in welcoming Jonathan Lyons thank you Thank You Cheryl um thank you Mary Jane and Mark Sweeney I have to be honest I've never really been accused of being the author of beach reading before but I'll take it I might suggest that Islam through Western eyes came through a different channel of creativity so I might not suggest that you take it to the beach but I wouldn't stop you I'm delighted to be back as Mary Jane said I've spoken at Library of Congress before and I'm also pleased to recognize so many faces of the research team that I see on the three to four days I'm in the Adams room and have been for most of the last four or five years of my life I've written all or parts of five books there I have a new one that's 90 percent complete you may not recognize me I understand in a suit and tie I usually wear the sort of khaki clothes that I use as a correspond in the Middle East for so many years so but if you need to find me I usually sitting at Table 326 unless someone's gotten there first so so it's great to be here so I want to begin today is lecture we'll just brief synopsis of how this book came to be because I think that will tell you a lot about where I'm gonna go the two sort of sources one is personal I was posted in Iran I had the pleasure of being the only full-time accredited correspondent in post-revolutionary Iran who was also an American citizen I was there for Reuters which men British in the eyes of the Iranian authorities but they knew I was an American and they were very pleased it was the time of hot to me a lot of anticipation that Iran might be following a path that would be more welcomed among most western states a lot of what I did and the book that I eventually produced to which Cheryl alluded about Iran is grounded in my understanding of Iranian religious politics so I spent a lot of time in a holy city of home and I spent a lot of time with ayatollahs and as you probably know from reading the press these are encompass a series of ranks of clerics who are often in my view lampooned in Western accounts and I found extremely dedicated scholars who were a wealth of knowledge and when I would ask them a question they would break the question down into its constituent parts and they would play it back to me and then they would give me this beautifully reasoned response and I realized this is probably the last true practitioners of a real Aristotelian type of education and so far from being a sort of bloodthirsty medieval throwbacks I thought these people are really interesting so I had this sort of built-in dissonance if you will between what we're told consistently in the media and frankly in academia and in the books that we read and the newscast that we watch and the movies that we see and the still pictures that we get and my own experience so already there was this fissure between what I was seeing and experiencing and what I was being told to experience or to extent to expect to experience so I'm going to take you back to a certain day in 2001 September however not the day of the Terrorism attacks but five days later when George Bush appeared in front of the media and gave this rather remarkable statement which I have here on a slide and he wrote this is a new kind a new kind of evil and we understand and the American people are beginning to understand this crusade this war on terrorism is going to take a while now you may recall the word crusade caused quite a flap the White House rushed out to apologize I was then working as a senior editor Reuters recognized a good story when I saw one if you google it you can probably still find it I wrote it I interviewed all sorts of experts about the meaning of crusade of contemporary resonance in the Middle East and among scholars among Muslims of all stripes I had a lot of fun with it but it never left me and so once the immediate rush of news reporting out of the aftermath in the aftermath of the attacks was over I began to give this pretty serious thought now push despite the apologies repeated this again five months later and his underlings particularly John Ashcroft and some others really engaged in this notion of a east/west medieval religious conflict summed up in what you may recall was very popular rhetorical question of the day why do they hate us and I'll come back to that question later so this discourse remains I would argue common today in the public sphere you can find it on the Internet in the press it's picked up by all public opinion surveys the Pew Research surveys on religion to a particularly good job of illuminating this and just the other day one of the candidates for the Republican nomination for president revived this notion of crusade and in a rather revisionist fashion so it's still that very much out there and I'm going to try to show you how a lot of these ideas his Genesis really sat with the First Crusade are with us today and why that's so important that we need to understand it so now let's go back a little bit further in fact to 1095 when Pope were bound the second in his famous speech at Claremore proclaim the first crusade now we don't have an exact text there are about six accounts that are extent of what he said all of them overlap in certain ways and in the book I talked quite specifically about how these different versions of what he said or may have said evolved over time but they all strengthen my thesis which is and captured in this version God has conferred upon you above all nations a great glory in arms undertake this Brackett's crusade for the remission of your sins with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven so we have this use of the word crusade and this whole apocalyptic tone that surrounds the early days of what became known later as the war on terrorism as I mentioned I was an editor at the time and followed this evolution quite closely but sort of got under my skin and I began to explore this prevailing discourse of Islam or as I prefer to call it an anti Islam discourse over time this journey took me away from journalism I'd been at Reuters 21 years and I had been in journalism for five or six years before that and I wanted to devote myself to this project so not only did I bury myself in the Library of Congress um I picked up a PhD in sociology actually sociology of knowledge or sociology religion is kind of my subfield so you've already heard me use the word discourse once or twice so let's take a look at how I'm using it and why what it means I'm using it in this sense as a totality of images texts ideas concepts and this is a crucial point these discourses define what we can say about Islam or any subject and what we cannot say and I'm also looking at the institutional prep practices that flow from these texts so by that I mean the security laws and the regulations legal rulings briefing papers policy documents I look at patriotic slogans the lapel pin and of course the notion of a war on terrorism and perhaps in the Q&A if you want we can go a little deeper into how I do this but so these institutional practices in my opinion flow directly inexorably even from this discourse so to give you an example botany I came in today it's kind of raining but I gave a talk similar talk at Georgetown recently was a lovely sunny day and I saw crocus now if I came into this room and said there's a crocus popping up through the cold today you might say well that's a nice statement but you would know intuitively in quotes that's not a statement about botany that's just a statement about what I saw involving a plant so the discourse of botany that we don't think about but is out there helps us decide that casual observation about a winter flowering of a plant is not a scientific term it's not a term that is within the value of science of plants and wood see how that plays out with the Islam discourse as well now having defined or attempted to define discourse let me talk about my analysis discourse analysis now they're different types if we have any linguist in the room you probably know about critical discourse analysis people spend their lifetime and it can be very interesting reading how often is the passive voice used in contemporary news coverage or how did doctors write their prescriptions and you can do syntactical analysis I don't do any of that I don't do a linguistic analyses of texts or statements what I'm looking for are these broader epistemological and philosophical questions secondly I focus on what's been called serious speech this lecture classroom lectures or notes textbooks news media serious writing that's meant to teach to be retained passed along absorbed I'm seeking to uncover the rules that oversee the production and reproduction of these statements as constitutive of knowledge so what are the rules to go back to my previous example that leads us to think that an observation about a crocus in February is not a statement within botany to give you another historical example in the middle evil period a period that I've studied quite a lot the beastie area was a very common literary text it would tell there was a morality play grounded in the behavior of animals so in medieval bestiaries the Panther is often seen as a loyal animal we know the Bee is industrious the ant etc those tell us about morality and human social organization but they don't tell us anything about Panthers or bees or ants so I'm interested in that process now it's very important as well to understand and this is a sticking point for a lot of people who do the kind of work that I'm interested is that in my opinion and in this view the authors of these statements George Bush in this case that I gave you earlier is not aware of these rules or the understanding or the effect at which they're controlling his statements or statements about Islam so they're outside their knowledge outside their control and therefore outside their ability to change or to limit and then finally as I mentioned I'm interested in their subsequent transformation into a discipline so what is when you study Islamic studies and university what do you read so I would be asking the question what are we not reading security studies what are we looking at what are we not looking at what are the texts we study what are the texts that we avoid or overlook so where does this all lead me well relying in part on the classic work of Norman Daniel a scholar who who published a wonderful book in the 60s and then revised his work following several decades on Islam and the idea of Islam in the West I developed this little chart and these are the main trends that I've seen in my analysis and research into the early discourse of Islam now before I take you through it I just want to point out that the earliest European Christian encounters with the world of Islam in the form of Arab Raiders or pirates including the sacking of Rome all took place without any reference to what it is that these Arab might believe so they were seen as barbarians if you go and read the Venerable Bede if you go and read some of the chronicles of this period they'll say oh the Arabs came in and they burned our ships God willing they'll go away or the Arabs took this town but with God's help we drove them out and you read the very same references to the Saxons or the Vikings or the mud jars so in other words what I like to say is that the Arab at this point the Muslim Arab was an undifferentiated experience it was a bad thing it was barbaric but it had no meaning as for as far as the existential values and existence of the Christian world now that begins to change that begins to change in the run-up to the Crusades when a mobilizing discourse the one that I'm studying is really developed somewhere around the end of the 11th century and this is what I found what's important to this and you'll notice right away is that Islam here is the inverse or the mirror opposite of Christian values so Christianity is portrayed as a religion of love and peace Islam is invariably portrayed as a religion of hate and violence Christianity is a religion of truth Muhammad is a false prophet Islam as a religion of falsehood Christians are chaste and pure Muslims are sexually perverse in fact there's a whole literature in the early Christian analysis of Islam written mind you before the Christian world had any real experience of Islam or the Muslims and this literature says that it was only by bribing his male followers with the promise of polygamy and other sexual advantages was Muhammad able to secure conversion and then finally we have Christ and again Muhammad is often targeted as the Antichrist so let's look at some more modern or contemporary expressions of this anti Islam discourse and I feel certain that you will recognize these from our discussions among our friends in books and magazines in classrooms and in the media Islam is anti modern and I mean inherently of course I've shortened things a little bit here authoritarian and undemocratic Islam is anti science it's irrational Islam hates women and is sexually perverse sometimes both sometimes one or the other Islam is inherently violent and perhaps you'll recognize from the popular readings of writings rather a Bernard Lewis this notion that Muslims are filled with a jealous rage against the West its freedoms and its lifestyles which is how we got to this rhetorical why do they hate us or in Bernard Lewis's version what's wrong with Islam now before I move on let me say one more word or perhaps not the final word but yet another word about my methodology I'm not particularly interested that I'm happy to discuss it and I'm not void of opinion but I'm not really interested in assessing whether these are true or not true I'm not very interested in what I call the truth value of the discourse I'm only interested in its formation its operation its persistence and its effects so I don't have to engage in a discussion about whether Islam could produce a democracy though I should say for the record that in my book on Iran I argue that it is possible though not likely at this moment that Iran will move to some sort of system that's both the monster bleah Islamic and demonstrably Democratic but that's beside the point in this work I don't need to take that position because what I'm really looking at is what are the forces as Cheryl mentioned in the intro that lead us to think in one way and to avoid thinking or to prevent ourselves from thinking in another way some people may call that a cop-out as well but when I was preparing this book which originally was my PhD dissertation my advisor said you know Jonathan this is a brilliant idea but it's impossible so I actually got rid of one of the advisers the one who was the one who really said it was impossible and I found someone a little more docile in fact I had lunch with me other day he's from Australia of course but he was in town and and he was very pleased to get a copy of the book in that I had proven him wrong so as I mentioned one of the most salient features of this discourse is it's a remarkable historical continuity now I don't really have time today to take you through in detail its progression but I hope to show you the outlines of how I find this progression from its inception in the run-up to the Crusades to today if you have the interest and the time to read the book I think I will I make a strong argument whether I win you over or not it's impossible to say but let's look at this historical continuity we have the genesis of this discourse in the mobilization for the First Crusade we then have the scholastic scholars now one reason I want to run through this is one of the tests I face is not merely to chart Western antagonism towards Islam but I'm trying to account for the ups and downs over the centuries in that relationship because there were ups and downs but there's a general arc in the direction of tensions so the Scholastic's I'm thinking here of Thomas Aquinas Albertus Magnus Thomas Aquinas could not have been Thomas Aquinas without Islamic philosophy and he knew it it's quite clear from his writings Albertus Magnus many of the scholars of that period openly acknowledge their debt to Islamic philosophy in Islamic science now when the humanists come in the humanists are carving out new space in European society outside of the purview of the church and so what they're doing is they're introducing this notion that Greece and Rome are a natural precursor or that Western culture I should say is the natural logical outcome of Greek and Latin cultures so they're kicking not only the Scholastic's out of the picture but they're taking out all its Arab and Muslim roots so you get the father of the human Petrarch saying don't tell me we inherited anything from those shiftless Arabs a very famous letter he writes to his doctor his doctor who was trained in Arab medicine but is an Italian is telling him you have stomachache stop doing this stuff drinking what cold water and apple eating apples I think was his advice Petrarch gets very upset and says don't tell me the Arabs you know and then he goes on a whole rampage and and if you read his early letters you'll see his engagement and pushing the Arabs out of the picture another topic I look at is the French late early modern history accounts of algebra and its evolution and if you what I did is I followed these through for about a hundred two hundred years first French encyclopedia is very open about the Islamic roots of the science of algebra but with each rewriting of the Encyclopedia or each retelling the Muslim Arab contribution gets pushed out and by the end of the process algebra is not only a European creation but guess what it's a French creation so I traced these through and I'm gonna have to move on but I look at the early modern period I look at Montesquieu and the Enlightenment I look at the classic period of colonialism and Orientalism and I I bring it all the way up to today's war on terrorism now in addition to an enduring discourse we have enduring themes and each of these themes with the large bullet point form chapters in Islam through Western eyes I look at Islam and science or modernity which was the subject of my previous book I look at Islam and violence and Islam and women and again I don't except for the odd aside or footnote or when people really get outrageous I don't take sides as it were in this debate I attend so when I write about Islam and science I didn't write about all the great things that Arab and Muslim scientists did I wrote about why we have such a hard time seeing and accounting for and explaining all the great things the Arab Muslim scientists philosophers did when I look at violence I didn't get deeply engaged in whether Islam in either its radical form today or in any form is inherently violent or naturally violent but I look at how it is that this idea became established unchallenged and allowed to go along its way forming one of these rules of discourse and finally the same with women now one of the things I've found and one of things that interests me is the role of what I call the Islam expert Islam is an interesting topic it's certainly been on the Western consciousness for at least a thousand years and yet it's very much what I would call a top-down subject it's not easy to learn about Islam so we rely on the Islam expert today's Islam expert is on CNN and Fox News the Orientalist period Islam expert was working in Whitehall the humanist expert was working in the court or trying to get a job as a Chancellor in one of the Italian city-states are working in the Curia there's always somebody who's telling us what it is to believe about Islam and and for the average consumer and I acknowledge this openly it's there's really not much choice so we tend to accept what we're told so we're gonna look at how that plays out now I've hinted at some of the corrosive power of Islam I'm gonna just run through these very quickly it pervades our history of ideas so our history of science to give you a quick example in Islamic law those topics that get attention in Western study of Islamic law are those topics whose roots are clearly clearly lie in Roman law or Hellenic law or perhaps Syriac Christian law in the middle of Middle East those elements of Islamic law that seemed to be either Islamic or pre-islamic perhaps indigenous to the Arabian Peninsula get very little scholarly attention so my suggestion is we're missing out on a part of the story why might that be and of course this discourse this power of discourse obscures our understanding as far as political aspirations men women in the veil so in short the thesis of my book and my work is that this presence of the discourse denies Islam what we might call its independent existence and in its most radical form what I'm really saying is when we talk about Islam we're talking about the Western idea of Islam we're not talking about what I would technically call the non-discursive reality of Islam in other words we're not talking about the Islamic world outside these discourses as a result power flows to the Islam expert clearly this can heighten global tensions because it gives a lot of credence to this notion of a clash of civilizations by the way when Huntington wrote that book well it first started out as an article in foreign affairs he had a question mark at the end of the title and it was ridiculed by the academic establishment things change he published a book took out the question mark became a best-seller and it became a pocket explanation of what happened with the terrorism tax of September 11th clearly this has the danger of distorting our foreign policy and our domestic policy and it can divide the world into us against them making mutual accommodation ie negotiation or peaceful resolution almost impossible so with the remaining time left I'm going to give you a quick example exhibit a Islam and women I have here a quotation from Gustav la Berra I'll give you a second to read it everybody see it or should I read it look look and you will see the cities with domes of gold now before I read it I should say that Faubert tells us he has climbed the Great Pyramid in Giza under a blistering Sun at noon or not sure how noon fits with the account but in a case under a blistering Sun and he writes look look you will see cities with domes of gold and minarets of porcelain palaces of lava built on plinths of alabaster marble rimmed pools were sultanas bathed their bodies at the hour when the moon makes bluer the shadows of the groves and more limpid the silvery waters of the fountains then he exhorts us open your eyes open your eyes there's only one problem he wrote these lines for years before he ever got to the Middle East so it's telling us a lot about what Flo Bear thinks he's gonna find but not what he's seen because he hasn't yet been there and this was actually remarkably common way that orientalist literature and art is created Giraud in our vow the French writer complains in a wonderful letter to a friend that the Oriental cafes he's found in Cairo are less authentic than the Oriental cafes back in Paris and one of my literary heroes Melville he threw up his hand and he couldn't deal with Cairo there was too much chaos and order and he demanded maps and if any of you been to Cairo maps the Cairo don't really go together so though how did this happen well the Westerner in most cases of the period we're talking about a male Westerner wants to see and write about the Muslim woman is an elusive figure in the upper and middle upper middle classes and the upper classes they are secluded poor women go out and Street have to work and shop veiled of course but the Muslim woman is essentially unavailable to the Western gaze so what we see emerging are two strategies the first one is if you can't see the woman well let's fill in the blanks and create the woman so flow Barre has this idea of oriental womanhood he goes to Cairo and he writes another letter to a friend complaining that all the all the houses all the bordellos are closed it's ironic they were closed because Muhammad Ali was trying to please his French and British masters by modernizing Egypt but any case flerbert' can't find what he's looking for so he hires the famous courtesan cuckoo condom dancer and prostitute to act out his fantasies she creates the basis for an enormous ly successful writing career when he gets home we have the odalisque paintings you I'll show you one in a minute of ingress and dellacroix again most of the early ones painted long before either of them ever got to the Middle East and of course they could never get into the harem or the bath that they often depict and I find it worth noting that they had ready access to the men's bath but we don't get any pictures of lounging naked men and they had ready into access to the men's quarters in the houses but again we get no scenes of male domestic life and then finally the oriental postcard so what's interesting is not even photography which we would tend to think of it an objective medium can overcome the power of this discourse briefly here's a picture agenda de quoi painted in 1827 or 1828 very typical the woman in repose there's a hooker or some sort of pipe often there's a clothes servant either a black eunuch or a female attendant but almost always clothes the kind of reamp emphasize the nakedness of the central figure so let's look at the oriental postcard again they couldn't find these lascivious pictures of oriental women so they hired prostitutes and they went to the Suk's and they bought props and the more industrious ones created whole photo studios to produce postcards which way they then sent back to Paris and London and Germany as a realistic representation of life in the Orient and malecon Dada who studied this has a wonderful quotation which I'll just write here what I read here what the postcard proposes as the truth is but a substitute for something that does not exist I would argue that this happens today and again in the QA I can give you some examples for my personal life as a reporter in the Middle East yet they that which stands for news in the Middle East is often I would argue something a substitute for something that does not even exist another tactic is to break down the harem walls and to tear off the veil so this became the focus of Western colonial policy frequently missionary schools restricted admissions to young Muslim girls unless they took their veils off and pressured their mothers to also unveil became the basis of modernization programs and I would suggest that today's obsession with the veil in the Western media as a barometer of something arguably social progress reflects the same tendency so what do we get what are the effects and I'm trying to show you with the example of women how these discourses corrode our understanding well I would suggest we have an overt sexual ization of the Western view of Islam and this in effect reduces Muslim beliefs and practices and arguably even their entire civilization to this notion of the male-female dynamic and again the veil is the barometer of social progress it's a shorthand for backwardness in mobility the antithesis of human rights and dignity so I want to wrap up and I'll leave time for questions but I want to address probably the most common question I get when I speak at universities or public gatherings like this to talk with my friends or bore my wife or whatever with this kind of stuff is well what can be done well I'm going to try to give you a few pointers that I hope will arm you to be a better consumer of the Islam expert at whose mercy we tend to be so first off I hope even in this very cursory fashion and perhaps even with greater optimism if you read the book Islam through Western eyes to recognize that there is in fact an anti Islam discourse that's the first step but they are rules that govern the production of statements about Islam and the Muslims and that these rules shape our study of the subject and of policies that we make and of responses when we hear something I'm almost out of time but just quickly I was in Cairo when the Oklahoma bombing took place and I was on holiday but my wife was the at least correspondent for the Dallas Morning News and we got to call at some ungodly hour saying you have to go to Gaza they've had all the signs of Middle Eastern terrorism so those of you know that know the region can imagine that we packed our bag like hurry we ran down to the Marriott hotel we hired a taxi to drive us across the Sinai desert in the middle of the night so that we could I just went for fun but she was working that's my idea of fun what can I say you know we got there of course it turned out what not of course but it turned out not to have been Middle Eastern terrorism but I was looking back on that incident I'm interested to see that a major newspaper and we were hardly alone deploying their big resources into before they had any idea of what it actually happened and of course again to underscore these rules miss typo should be rules are outside the knowledge or control of the author's so recognizes a discourse understand its power how it can distort our thinking intellectually politically in academia become a better consumer of text learn to read critically in light of what we've now learned that there may be in fact a discourse operating that's deflecting our understanding of what I'd like to call a non discursive reality challenge the experts as a sociologist I like to ask the classic question who benefits and in fact it's one of the themes I do in the book I try to show how throughout the ages across these different issues of women violence science or modernity there's always been an expert across each cohort a cohort of experts who benefit directly from their discourse and their their interest may not be our interests and then finally practice what I call the strategy a reversal it's actually a tactic that Michele Foucault if some of you in this room may recognize a lot of my theoretical work draws on the philosophy of Michele Foucault he advocates a strategy of reversal which you negate the idea that this discourse is actually revealing it's non-discursive reality and too close I'll just take you very very quickly how this might look in light of contemporary news about Iran and it's apparent drive for nuclear technology it seems to me the West is faced with a conundrum what a nuclear Iran be just another nuclear State China has nukes France has nukes north Korea has news would it be a particularly reckless nuclear state or would it in fact be an Islamic nuclear state and I think how this question gets answered and and you can judge for yourself how it might be answered today but how this question is answered in the long run I would suggest is going to determine the policy reactions public opinion and possibly a decision to use military force or not and if we practice this idea of reversal and what I mean by reversal is even as a thought experiment take the notion that Islam is inherently violent and just set it aside just even if you believe that it is and I'm not arguing at this point but just go with me set it aside for a moment what would you see well you'd see that there might be other motivations or big power motivations traditional nation-state motivations for an Iranian nuclear program this then might opened the way for negotiation and it would eliminate military force as the default option because clearly we can live with certain states with nuclear weapons but we can't live perhaps or we telling ourselves that we can't live with others so finally the way forward and perhaps the next project that I'll take on in this series is to shift the emphasis that's what I tried to do in my previous book the House of Wisdom to show the deep Western connection to Muslim and Islamic culture and relocate Islam in the West in a shared cultural space we would move away from what might be called intra cultural contest to enter I'm sorry from intercultural to intercultural in other words competing within the same space and this would allow us to write a hidden history of Islam and I'm working now with other scholars to look at legal history history of science historiography or history of history history of philosophy Western study of Islamic theology and say ok we're gonna set all these discourses aside what might that free us to do in our academic and intellectual world and that's a project I'm hoping to work on in the coming years so with that I want to thank you and I want to open the floor to questions I should also say I have to say this as a person who relies on his writing that there are books for sale I'd be happy to sign them I also have some business cards if you'd like to go to my website and read about my other activities and I have some flyers here so yes ma'am you had a question right it's a good question and the question in short was what if anything our leaders leading figures in the Islamic world doing to change their own discourse that has us at a tension conflict with the West I can answer that but I have to be honest that's not I'm sorry Oh within their own societies again I can I can wing it and I will that's what I do but it's not a field that I actually study too much which is the internal discourse within Islam they have many of the same problems that a lot of these discourses act and interact outside of their knowledge so they first need to acknowledge the presence of but sort of they would have to get to the genesis of the conflict with their own society I asked the sense that that's still a long way off but again I have to duck out a little bit on that one it's not really a field that I I'm not really an Islamist scholars of Islam and of arrogance as much as I am of the Western idea I was long yes sir no I don't think so always a dangerous thing to say no I understand that sir and I don't want to cut you off but I I do want to cut you off because again and perhaps I need to make this more clear because it often comes up in my work I am NOT a student or not in this case acting as a student of Islam I would disagree with I would agree with you 100% from where you're coming but I would disagree with in my own context because I find the Western apprehension of Islam to be unitary that's what I'm studying yes sir yes friendly religions okay very good question it was asked what is the driving force behind the tensions between Islam and the West historically that did not apply to perhaps two other faiths well part of the reason is the very real threat and I don't mean necessary military threat but a cultural intellectual and political threat that Islam represented over many many centuries to Western I mean a major military and industrial force a major intellectual force and frankly the the language of Islam is extremely powerful in the church recognized very early that this was a very serious arrival that had to be nipped in the bud Buddhism our interaction with Buddhism a completely different and separate from notions of state power Judaism is interesting and I talked a little bit about the discourse of Judaism I felt I had to get into it a little bit in my discussion there's a very important distinction in the Christian worldview the Jew could be persecuted though that's not to say a good thing but cannot be eliminated you know they were called the living figures of the word I guess is the translation number of clerics Church Fathers even write about the importance of the Jew to Christian life look at the Jew went wrong remember our heritage we're going in the right direction so you can't well persecution and pogroms terrible things happen to the Jews in the name of Christian faith and the period that I looking at elimination was never really the point or the object but I think elimination of the Muslim was a value at some point so you had territorial disputes because you had a huge territory but fault lines if you will between the Islamic world and the Western what you never had with Buddhism Judaism until the modern era was not affiliated with any sort of notion of a nation-state and its affiliation with the nation-state is still a very difficult question so I think all the jeanna all of those reasons thank you thank you we had a question well when this project started one of my advisors not the guy who told me I couldn't do it the one who survived he said say well you know when you're done and you should publish this and then you should hook up with a arab mr. Islamist scholar and together yeah and it's a great project there's no question about it and I had no doubt that I would you would find many of the same ideas but I don't want to be rude but I want to focus your attention that the questions so far have always been within what I'm really making my argument for me because that's not what I do I'm here to talk about the Western idea of Islam and you a respectful and respected audience and I don't mean any disrespect this happens everywhere ask me questions that really only reinforce the argument that I've just made for you which is that we have one way of thinking about Islam so you want to know why they hate us I'm not going to answer yes I think it'd be wonderful if it could it's interesting you mentioned that I actually began my life as a scholar of Russian in the Soviet Union and have my undergraduate degree in Russian lived in the Soviet Union as a student when Brezhnev was still in charge so I have some Soviet experience and then went to Reuters Moscow bureau in 1989 and covered the collapse of the Soviet Union and interviewed Gorbachev and all that fun stuff so I have a soft spot in my heart for discussing Georgia Kanin I have a weak spot in my resume perhaps about not knowing quite the dynamic of how that worked but it is an excellent example and I don't want to leave you with the notion that what I'm calling discourses are immutable but I do want to suggest that for reasons that I try to get at in my book and can only sometimes be left guessing or hinting at is that Islam seems to be the discourse of Islam seems to be a particularly immutable one so not particularly amenable to one brilliant guy at the State Department and in academia coming up with a new paradigm if you will for but it is a wonderful example that ideas matter the personalities matter and that there is a politics of ideas out there how that could be well again I would you know I would go back to my my slide here summing up what we all need to do and until the recognition that our idea of Islam is not in fact what I recognize as Islam but a non discursive a Western construct most people in response to your question of people in power and my experience would say well we don't need to rethink let me tell you a quick story I had a colleague who was in Bahrain very recently she's a very good researcher on Islam in islamic politics and she interviewed all the shia activists who were not in jail some who just gotten out of jail and she came back and she went to a Washington think tank and a congressman gave a talk and he dismissed the notion that what's going on in Bahrain could somehow be driven by Shia Sunni tension and it was all Iran's fault it was all about power politics so my friend stood up and said well excuse me senator a congressman you know I'm so-and-so and I write these books and I'm I'm this and that and I just got back from Bahrain and this I interviewed every she a person and the Sunni and every well-known researcher and what did the congressman say he said well you're in Bahrain but I'm in Washington that is unfortunately a true story yes sir there's no question that but I'm just gonna stay true to my discourse and address the western side and I'm gonna run through this list very early on it was Church ideologue a lot of people don't realize that the First Crusade was very much driven by progressive thinkers within the church they needed to revitalize the church they crafted a idea of Christian holy war Gregory the 7th was very instrumental in this his protege eventually became Pope known as Pope or about a second as I mentioned the humanists in the early ma and in the early modern period the humanists used the anti Islam discourse to advance their social intellectual and economic standing by winning positions in courts at universities writing books for lots of money pushing out this notion that Western culture owes any kind of debt to Arab Muslim thinking science philosophy in the Enlightenment Montesquieu writes his famous book Persian letters in which he uses this notion that the harem and what he calls despotism he uses as an allegory for what he sees going on in France so he benefits by casting this notion in the Enlightenment Hegel and others write about how Islam has no history that Muslims created some great things but it never can last and I argue in my book that when colonialism interacts directly with the Islamic world one of the things they do is they step in and fill Hegel's a vacuum and say well there's no Islamic history we're gonna give them a history and so a history is created just like the image of a woman is created and today's war on terrorism very much benefited from the same discourse that how did it benefit well Thomas Friedman one of the most powerful people in this country I don't know if he still does but from a year or more after the September 11th attacks was still insisting in print that the people who perpetrated that attack had no demands why is that important well he then goes on to explain that this was an act of you're evil now setting aside whether it was an active evil a pure evil or otherwise the point is that war demands very well-known you can read them in English you could have read them in English a couple years before the attack PBS website has them if you don't read Arabic they were specific demands so the point is we don't see what we need to see and if someone makes demands say if you don't do this I'm going to strap on a bomb and blow you up that doesn't mean you accede to the demands but if you know that there are demands it's a very different reaction to why someone did this so when we look at suicide bombing which is you know a very complex and emotive issue and I understand that our tendency is to say it was driven by this notion that it will be rewarded with sexual paradise or some other teaching within Islam it allows us to say that could not have been a rational act by a rational person pushed in a condition that we are unable to imagine but I think you could make that argument whether you'd be right or not again is a different issue so the point is are we seeing the real motivations because when you don't see your adversaries motivations you can only do a shoot first and ask questions later so all these groups benefit by perpetuating so what I like to do I'm going to leave you with this thought because I think we're out of time think of the discourse the ante is on discourse as a cookbook I cook a lot I like to cook but I can't cook everything so if I bring him something that I've never cooked or I can't remember how to cook what do I do I go to my shelf take down Julia Child or one of my cookbooks and I get a refresher so the anti Islam discourse it sits on the Shelf there are whole periods of history where it really doesn't matter but when it matters we take down the book we open up the page 37 and we say AHA that's what's motivating this we act accordingly crisis passes we close the cookbook we eat our meal we put it back on the shelf so with that I want to thank you very much this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 62min 21sec (3741 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2012

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According to author Jonathan Lyons, the Western view of Islam has prevented the West from responding effectively to its most significant 21st-century challenges: the rise of Islamic power, the emergence of religious violence, and the growing tension between established social values and multicultural rights among Muslim immigrant populations. Lyons addresses the issues of Islam and modernity, Islam and violence, and Islam and women and proposes new ways of thinking about the Western relationship to the Islamic world.

Speaker Biography: Jonathan Lyons spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters, much of it in the Islamic world. His research focuses on the shifting boundaries between East and West, and his publications include "The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization" and (with Geneive Abdo) "Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-first-Century Iran." He has a doctorate in sociology and lives in Washington, D.C.

For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5466.