Islamization of Anthropological Knowledge

Abstract

The expansion of Western coloniaHsrn during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought in its wake the economic and political domination and exploitation of the Third World countries. Western colonialism and ethnocentrism went hand in hand. The colonial ideology was rationalized and justified in terms of the white man's burden; it was believed that the White races of Europe had the moral duty to carry the torch of civilizationwhich was equated with Christianity and Western culture-to the dark comers of Asia and Africa. The ideology of Victorian Europe accorded the full status of humanity only to European Christians; the "other" people were condemned, as Edmund Leach has bluntly put it, as "sub-human animals, monsters, degenerate men, damned souls, or the products of a separate creation" (Leach, 1982). One of the most damaging consequences of colonialism relates to a massive undermining of the self-confidence of the colonized peoples. Their cultural values and institutions were ridiculed and harshly criticized. Worse still, the Western pattern of education introduced by colonial governments produced a breed of Westernized native elite, who held their own cultural heritage in contempt and who consciously identified themselves with the culture of their colonial masters. During the nineteenth century Orientalism emerged as an intellectual ally of Western colonialism. As Edward Said has cogently demonstrated, Oriental ism was a product of certain political and ideological forces operating in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that it was inextricably bound up with Western ethnocentrism, racism, and imperialism (Said, 1978). Most of the colonized countries of the Third World secured political liberation from Western powers during the early decades of the present century. Regrettably, however, political liberation was not always followed by ideological, cultural, and intellectual jndependence. For one thing, most of the ex-colonial countries continued with the colonial pattern of education. Secondly, most of them were drawn into the political and cultural orbit of either the United States or Soviet Russia. A subtle but pervasive form of ...