>> From the Library of congress in Washington DC.
[ Pause ]
>> Well, good afternoon, I'm Mark Sweeny, 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 cosponsored by the African
and Middle Eastern Division.
The Humanities and Social Sciences Division provides reference
and research assistance through three reading rooms in the Library
of Congress, the Main reading room, the Local History
and Genealogy reading room and the Microform 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,
President's 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 President's Day
so you're more then 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 28 at noon
in the Pickford Theater the Rare Book
and Special Collection Division along with the [inaudible] session
of the African and Middle Eastern Division
and HSS are cosponsoring a program about a forth coming documentary.
The Rosenwald Schools, by film maker Aviva Kempner, Julius Rosenwald,
the 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.
Also on Friday, March 16
at noon author Joseph Fruscione will discuss his recent book, Faulkner
and Hemingway, a 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 specialist in religion,
Cheryl Adams, thank you very much,
and Cheryl will introduce the speaker
after Mary Jane Deit [phonetic], Chief of the African
and Middle Eastern Division provides us
with some additional remarks, Mary Jane.
>> Thank you Mark and thank you Cheryl.
Cheryl Adams has been just wonderful,
she has organized the program and I really feel
that we have done almost nothing to help out
but we do cosponsor programs with other divisions,
sometimes we take the initiatives,
sometimes the other division takes the initiative
in this case HSS has done that so I want
to thank Cheryl and Mark very much.
The African Mideast Division holds also programs in its reading room,
we have three section, the African section, the [inaudible] section
and the [inaudible] 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 Armenian book and Dr. Obdoian [phonetic] here is the organizer,
curator, thinker behind this exhibit,
it will be in just a few weeks in April, the opening is on April 18
and I would like to invite you all to come.
I just want to welcome Jonathan Lyons again,
the last time he was here he was looking in our reading room,
he had another book on Iraq at that time on the [inaudible]
and he gave a wonderful presentation
so I'm sure you must all be looking forward to hearing him but before
that Cheryl 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
or if 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 a question later on in the program you are giving us permission
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 grand totalizing 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 and engaging narrative
about a very complex topic.
>> Can you move the microphone up a little bit?
>> Yes, thank you Sharon.
Can you hear me better now...is that better?
>> [ Inaudible section ]
>> 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 Arabs transformed 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 Reuter's,
much of it in the Islamic world and as Lewis 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 Center for Muslim Christian understanding.
In addition to the books that I have mentioned he has also coauthored,
Answering Only to God, Faith and Freedom in 21 Century Iran.
Jonathan clearly has the credentials
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 questions he poses
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 we think
about the things about the way we do and what
if we allowed ourselves to think differently.
Please join me in welcoming Jonathan Lyons.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you, thank you Cheryl, thank you Mary Jane and Mark Sweeny.
I have to be honest I've never 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 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 that 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 those sort of khaki clothes that I used
as a correspondent in the Middle East for so many years
but if you need to find me I'm usually sitting
at table 326 unless someone's gotten there first so.
So it's great to be here.
I want to begin today's lecture with just brief synopsis
of how this book came to be because I think that will tell you a lot
about where I'm going to 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 meant British in the eyes
of the Iranian authorities but they knew that I was an American
and they were very pleased it was the time of [inaudible] a lot
of anticipation that Iran might be following a path the might be more
welcome 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 the Holy city Qom and I spent a lot of time with Ayatollahs.
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 are 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 the beautifully reasoned response
and I realized this is probably the last true practitioners
of a real aristotelian type of education.
So far from being a blood thirsty medieval throwbacks I thought these
people are really interesting.
So I had this sort of built in dissidents if you will
between what we're told consistently in the media and frankly in academia
and then the books that we read and the news casts that we watch
and the movies that we see and the stealth 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 was led to expect to experience.
So I want 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 the 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 at 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 residents in the Middle East
and among scholars and among Muslims of all stripes, had a lot of fun
with it but it never left me and so once the media 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 Bush despite the apologies repeated this again five months
later and his underlings particularly John Ashcroft
and some others really engaged in this notion
of an east west medieval religious conflict.
Summed up in what you may recall was a 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, today in the public spirit,
you can find it on the internet and the press,
It's picked up by all public opinion surveys, the Pew research surveys
on religion to a particularly job of illuminating this
and just the other day one of the candidate
for the Republican nomination for President revived this notion
of crusade in a rather revisionist fashion so it's still very much
out there and I'm going to try to show you how a lot
of these ideas who's genesis really sat with the first crusader 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 Urban II in his famous speech
at Clermont proclaimed the first crusade.
Now we don't have an exact text, there are about six accounts
that are extents of what he said, all of them overlap in certain ways
and in the book I talk 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 brackets 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 at the time I was an editor at the time
and followed this evolution quite closely, but it 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 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 I picked up a PhD in sociology, actually sociology
of knowledge, sociology of religion is kind of my sub field.
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 what it means.
I'm using it in this sense as a totality of images, text, 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.
I'm also looking at the institutional practices that flow
from these text, so by that I mean the security laws
and the regulations, legal ruling, 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
and 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 rainy
but I gave a talk, similar talk at Georgetown recently,
it was a lovely sunny day and I saw a 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's within the value of science of plants
and we'll 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.
Now there are different types if we have any linguists
in the room you probably know about critical discourse analysis.
People spend their life time
and it can be very interesting reading how often is the passive
voice used in contemporary news coverage
or how do doctors write their prescriptions
and you can do syntactical analysis.
I don't do any of that, I don't do linguistic analysis of text
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, text books, 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 constituent 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 medieval period a period
that I've studied quite a lot the bestiary was a very common literary
text it would tell...it was a morality play grounded
in the behavior in animals
so in medieval bestiaries the panther is often seen
as a loyal animal, we know the bee is industrious, the ant, etcetera.
Those tell us about morality and human social organization
but they don't tell us anything about panthers or bees or ants
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 in is that in my opinion
and this view the authors of the 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 their outside their knowledge,
outside their control and therefore outside their ability
Then finally as I mentioned I'm interested
in their subsequent transformation into a discipline
so what is...when you study Islamic studies in 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 text we study, what are the text
that we avoid or over look.   So where does this all lead me?
Well, relying in part on the classic work of Norman Daniel,
a scholar who published a wonderful book in the 60's
and then revised his work the 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 also plays without any reference to what it is
that these Arabs might believe.
So they were seen as Barbarians, if you go read the Venerable Bead,
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 Saxon
or the Vikings or the Mudejar so in other words what I'd like to say is
that the Arab at this pint,
the Muslim Arab was an undifferentiated experience.
It was a bad thing, it was barbaric but it had no meaning as far
as the existential values and existence of the Christian world.
That begins to change, that beings 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 Christian, so Christianity is portrayed
as a religion of love and peace, Islam is invariably portrayed
Christianity is a religion of truth, Mohammed is a false prophet,
Islam is 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.
This literature says that it was only by bribing his male followers
with the promise of polygamy
and other sexual advantages was Mohammed able to secure conversion.
Then finally we have Christ
and again Mohammed is often targeted as the antichrist.
So it'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 or magazines, in classrooms and in the media.
Islam is anti-modern...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
of Bernard Lewis, this notion that Muslims are filled
with a jealous rage against the west, it's freedoms
and its lifestyles which is how we got to this rhetorical question,
why do they hate us or Bernard Lewis' version,
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 though 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 demonstrably 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 team
of advisors said you know Jonathan this is a brilliant idea
but it's impossible so I actually got rid of one of the advisors,
the one who really said it was impossible
and I found someone a little more docile.
In fact I had lunch with him the other day, he's from Australia
of course but he was in town and he was very pleased to get a copy
of the book and I had proven him wrong.
So as I mentioned one of the most salient features
of this discourse it its 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 till today and 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 tasks I face is not merely the chart western antagonism towards
Islam but I'm trying to account for the ups and downs
of 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 scholastics I'm thinking here of Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus.
Thomas Aquinas could not have been Thomas Aquinas
without Islamic philosophy and he knew it,
that's quite clear from his writings.
Albertus Magnus, many of the scholars
of that period openly acknowledged their debt
to Islam philosophy and Islamic science.
Now when the humanist come in the humanist 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 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 scholastics out of the picture
but they're taking out all its [inaudible] roots.
So you get the father of the humanist,
Petrarch saying don't tell me we inherited anything
from those shiftless Arabs.
A very famous letter he writes to his doctor, his doctor was trained
in Arab medicine but he was an Italian he was telling him you have
stomach aches, stop doing this, stop drinking cold water
and eating apples I think was his advice, Petrarch gets very upset
and says don't tell me the Arabs...and then he goes
on a whole rampage and if you read his early letters you'll see his
engagement in pushing the Arabs out of the picture.
Another topic I look at is the French early modern history accounts
of algebra and its evolution and what I did was I followed these
through for about 100...200 years,
first French encyclopedia is very open about 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 going to have to move on but I look
at the early modern period, I look at multus q [phonetic]
and the enlightenment, I look at the classic period of colonialism
and orientalism and I bring it all the up to today's war on terrorism.
Now in addition to and during discourse we have enduring themes
and each of these themes with the large bullet point from 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 in women
and then again I don't, expect for the ovicide or foot note
or when people really get outrageous I don't take sides as it were
in this debate so when I write about Islam and science I don't write
about all the great things that Arab and Muslim scientists did,
I write 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 don'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 a 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 the 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 expert was working at Whitehall,
the humanist expert was working in the corp or trying to get a job
as a Chancellor in one of the Italian city states or working
in the curia, there's always somebody who's telling us what it is
to believe about Islam and for the average consumer,
and I acknowledge this openly it's really not much choice we tend
to accept what we're told.
So we're going to look at how that plays out.
Now I've hinted at some of the corrosive power of Islam,
I'm going to 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 Islam law are those topics whose roots are clearly...clearly lie
in Roman law or Hellenic law or perhaps Syriac Christian law
from the Middle East, those elements of Islamic law that seem
to be either Islamic or pre-Islamic perhaps indigenous
to the Arabian peninsula get very little scholarly attention.
My suggestion is we're missing out on part
of the story...why might that be.
Of course 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 this discourse denies Islam what we might call it's 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 Islam 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 changed, he published the book,
took out the question mark it became a best seller
and it became a pocket explanation of what happened
with the terrorism attacks of September 11.
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, i.e. 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 hear a quotation
from Gustave Flaubert, I'll give you a second to read it,
can everybody see it or shall I read it...look, look you'll see the city
with domes of gold...now before I read it I should say
that Flaubert has told us he has climbed the great pyramid in Giza
under a blistering sun at noon, I'm not sure how noon fits
with the account but in any 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 where sultans bath their bodies
at the hour when the moon makes bluer the shadows of 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 line four years before he ever
got to the Middle East.   [ Laughter ]
so it's telling us a lot about what Flaubert thinks he's going to find
but not what he's seen because he hasn't yet been there
and this is actually remarkably common way
that orientalis literature and art was created.
[Inaudible section] the French writer complains
in a wonderful letter to a friend that the oriental cafes
that he's found in Cairo are less authentic
than the oriental cafes back in Paris and one of my literary heros,
Melville, he through up his hands and he couldn't deal
with Cairo there was too much chaos and order and he demanded maps
and if any of you have ever been to Cairo,
maps and Cairo really don't go together.
So how did this happen, well the westerner,
in most cases of the period we're talking
about the male westerner wants to see and write about some woman,
an illusive figure in the upper middle classes
and the upper classes they are secluded,
poor women go out in the street and have to work and shop veiled
of course but the Muslim women are unavailable to the western gaze
so what we see emerging are two strategies,
the first one if you can't see the woman well let's fill
in the blanks and create the woman.
So Flaubert has this idea of oriental womanhood, he goes to Cairo
and he writes another letter to a friend complaining
that all the whore houses, all the bordellos are closed.
It's ironic they were closed because Mohammed Ali was trying
to please his French and British masters by modernizing Egypt
but any case Flaubert can't find what he's looking
for so he hires the famous courtesan Kuchuk Hanem dancer and prostitute
to act out his fantasies so creates the basis
for an enormously successful writing career when he gets home.
We have the orderless paintings, I'll show you one in a minute
of [inaudible], 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 mens bather
but we don't get any pictures of lounging naked men
and they had ready access to the men's quarters in the houses
but again we get no scenes of male domestic life
and then finally the oriental post card,
so it's interesting not even photography which we would tend
to think of an objective medium can
over come the power of this discourse.
Briefly here's a picture Eugene De Lacroix painted in 1827
or 1828 very typical, the woman in repose, there's a hookah
or some sort of pipe often there's a clothed servant,
either a black eunuch or a female attendant but almost always clothed
to kind of reemphasize the nakedness of the central figure.
So let's look at the oriental post card,
again they couldn't find these lascivious pictures
of oriental women so they hired prostitutes and they went
to the silks and they brought props
and the more industrious ones created whole photo studios
to produce post cards which they then sent back to Paris and London
and Germany as a realistic representation of life in the orient
and [inaudible] studied this had a wonderful quotation
which I'll just write here...red here.
What the post card 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 Q
and A I can give you some examples from my personal life as a reporter
in the Middle East, yet that which stands for news
in the Middle East is often I would argue 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, it because 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 sexualization
of the western view Islam.
This in effect reduces Muslim beliefs and practices
and arguably even their entire civilization through this motion
of the male/female dynamic and again the veil is the barometer
of social progress, it's a short hand for backwardness, immobility,
the antitheses of human rights and dignity.
I want to wrap up and 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 there is
in fact an anti-Islam discourse,
that's the first step...that there are rules that govern the production
of statements at Islam and the Muslims
and that these will shape our study of the subject,
the policies that we make and the 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 Middle East correspondent
for the Dallas Morning News and we got a call
at some ungodly hour saying you have to go to Gaza, it had all the signs
of Middle Eastern terrorism.
So those of you who know the region can imagine
that we packed our bags got a car and 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...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...well not of course
but it turned out not to have been Middle Eastern terrorism
but I was looking back on the 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 what
had actually happened and of course again to underscore these rules.
This typo, or rules outside the knowledge or control of the authors.
So recognize it as 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 maybe 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 class a question who benefits.
In fact it's one of the things I do in the book I try
to show throughout the ages across these different issues of women,
violence, science of modernity there's always been an expert
across each cohort of experts who benefit directly
from their discourse and their interest may not be our interest
and then finally practice what I call the strategy of reversal,
it's actually a tactic that Michel Foucault if some of you
in this room may recognize a lot of my theoretical work draws
on the philosophy of Michel Foucault, he advocates a strategy
of reversal which you negate the idea
that this discourse is actually revealing,
it's non-discoursive reality and to close I'll just take you very,
very quickly how this might look in light of contemporary news
about Iran and its apparent drive for nuclear technology.
It seems to me the west is faced with a conundrum,
would a nuclear Iran be just another nuclear state, China has nukes,
France has nukes, North Korea has nukes,
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 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 be determined the policy reactions, public opinion
and possibly a decision to use military force or not.
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,
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,
big power motivations traditional nation statement,
nations for an Iranian nuclear program.
This then might open 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're 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 inter...sorry
from intercultural to intra cultural, 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, hysterography or history
of history, history of philosophy, western study of Islamic theology
and say okay we're going to set all these discourses aside what might
that free us to do in our academic and intellectual world
and that's a project that 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.   [ Applause ]
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.
>> I'm wondering if Islamic leaders are attempting
to change the discourse [inaudible]
to take back their perspective [inaudible] from the terrorists.
>> Right, that'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 a tension conflict with the west.
I can answer that but I have to be honest that's not...
>> [Inaudible section]   >> Oh within their own societies.
Again I can wing it and I will because 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 the discourses act
and interact outside of their knowledge so they first need
to acknowledge the presence of a sort of...they would have to get
to the genesis of the conflict of their own society
and I sense 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 scholar of Islam or Arab as much
as I am of the western idea, yes sir.
>> [Inaudible section]
>> No I don't think so, always a dangerous thing to say.
>> [Inaudible section]
>> No I understand that sir and I don't want to cut you off
but I do want 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 I'm not in this case acting
as a student of Islam, I would disagree...I would agree
with you 100 percent from where you're coming from
but I would disagree within my own context
because I find the western apprehension of Islam to be unitary.
>> It's interesting that [inaudible] doesn't have all the
same [inaudible].   >> Yes.
>> So...   >> Friendly religions.
>> Yes, [inaudible] but maybe Islam is unfriendly [inaudible]
and Judaism as well used to be that way,
what do you think is the basic motivation of that.
>> Okay, very good question was asked what is the driving force
behind the tensions between Islam and the west historically
that do not apply perhaps to other faiths.
Well, part of the reason is the very real threat
and I don't mean necessarily military threat but cultural,
intellectual and political threat that Islam represented over many,
many centuries to western...we have our major military industrial,
a major intellectual force and frankly the language
of Islam is extremely powerful and the church recognize very early
that this was a very serious rival that had to be nipped in the bud.
But it is a completely different and separate
from notions of state power.
Judaism is interesting and I talk a little bit about the discourse
of Judaism, I thought I had to get
into it a little bit in my discussion.
There's a very important distinction
in the Christian world view the Jew can be persecuted and that's not
to say a good thing but cannot be eliminated,
they were called the living figures
of the word I guess is the translation.
A 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 while persecution [inaudible] terrible things happened
to the Jews in the name of Christian faith in the period that I'm 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, if you had a huge territory
but fault lines if you will between the Islamic world
and the western world which you never had with Buddhism.
Judaism until the modern era was not affiliated with any sort of notion
of a nation's state and it's affiliation
with a nation state is still a very difficult question
so I think all of this [inaudible].
>> Just a very, very brief comment on that if you happen to be from one
of the Middle Eastern Christian churches you would realize
that statement you made is not quite correct because much
of what [inaudible] said about western attitudes
for Islam could be said about western attitudes towards those...
>> Orthodox.   >> Theoretical [inaudible].
>> Thank you.   >> It's not just religion.
>> Thank you.   We had a question here ma'am.
>> Yes, you have lived in the Middle East [inaudible]
in the Islamic societies and you may be aware of some of the prejudice
against the west, have you ever thought
about writing a book say Christianity Through Islam Eyes.
>> 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 well you know
when you're done Jonathan you should publish this
and then you should hook up with an Arabist or Islamist scholar
and together...and it's a great project there's no question about it
and I have no doubt that you would find many of the same...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...really make my argument for me
because that's not what I do, I'm here to talk about the western idea
of Islam and you are a respectful and a 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.
>> Let me accept your challenge to shift gears there is a new book
on George Kenneth who is the architect
of our strategy during the cold war and when he put forward his idea
about containment of the Soviet Union that was outside the box.
Up until that time Henry Wallace for example said either we're going
to appease Russia or we're going to have a war, yet he was able
to think outside the box.
I'd like to ask your analysis of that in terms of discourse,
it seems to me that was a discourse of analysis
that gives rise to a significant change.
>> Yes, it did.
>> How could that happen again today regarding our relationship
to the Muslim world?
>> I think it would be wonderful if it could,
it's interesting you mentioned that I actually began my life
as a scholar of Russia and 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...Reuters Moscow bureau in 1989 and covered the collapse
of the Soviet Union and interviewed Gorbachev and all that kind of stuff
so I have a soft spot in my heart for discussing George Cannon.
I have a weak spot in my resume perhaps
about not knowing quite the dynamic about 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 a particularly immutable one.
So not particularly immutable to one brilliant guy
at the state Department and then academia coming
up with a new paradigm if you will for...but it is a wonderful example
that ideas matter and personalities matter
and that there is a politics of ideas out there.
How that could be...well again I would go back
to 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 western construct.
Most people in response to your question are people in power
in 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
and Islamic politics and she interviewed all the Shia activists
who were not in jail, some that had 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's what's going
on in Bahrain could somehow be driven by Shia Sunni tension
and it was all Iran's fault and it was all about power politics
so my friend stood up and said well excuse me Senator
or Congressman you know I'm so and so and I write these books
and I'm this and that and I just got back from Bahrain
and I interviewed every Shia person the Sunni
and every well known researcher
and what did the Congressman say...he said well you were
in Bahrain but I'm in Washington, that is unfortunately a true story.
Yes, sir.
>> I was wondering historically [inaudible] and if that's the same
as [inaudible] and also on the western side [inaudible].
>> There's no question that...but I'm just going to stay true
to my discourse and address the western side and I'm going to run
through this list, very early on it was church ideology and 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 [inaudible] was very instrumental
in this his protege eventually became Pope known as Pope Urban II.
As I mentioned the humanists
in the early modern period the humanists used the anti-Islam
discourse to advance their social, intellectual and economic standards
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 [inaudible] 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 Hagel [phonetic]
and others write about how Islam has no history,
it created some great things but it never can last and I argue
in my book when colonialism interacts directly
with the Islamic world one of the things they do is they step in
and fill Hagel's vacuum and say well there's no Islamic history we're
going to 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 benefitted
from the same discourse that...how did it benefit well Thomas Friedman,
one of the most powerful people in this country...I don't
if he still odes but from a year or more
after the September 11 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 pure evil.
Now setting aside whether it was an act of evil, pure evil
or otherwise the point is there were demands, very well known,
you can read them in English, you could have read them
in English a couple years before the attack, a PBS website has them
if you don't read Arabic and there were specific demands
so the point is we don't see what we need
to see in...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 there are demands it's a very different reaction
as to why someone did this.
So when we look at suicide bombing which is a very complex
and emotive issue and I understand that our tendency
to say it is driven by this notion they will be rewarded
with sexual paradise or some other teaching within Islam it allows us
to say it 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 would 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 adversary's motivations you can only
do a shoot first and ask questions later.
So all these groups benefit by perpetuating so what I'd
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 anti-Islam discourse as a cook book, I cook a lot I like to cook
but I can't cook everything so if I bring home something
that I've never cooked or can't remember how to cook
so what do I do I go to my shelf, take now Julia Child or one
of my cook books and I get a refresher
so the anti-Islam discourse that sits on a 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 to page 37
and we say ah-ha, that's what's motivating this, we act accordingly,
crises passes, we close the cook book, we eat our meal
and we put it back on the shelf.
So with that I want to thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library
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