By Levent Basturk

In this article, I will argue that Modernization theory carries fundamental premises of Orientalism with respect to Muslim societies; and Oriental studies on Islam provide infrastructure for modernization theorist in dealing with Muslim societies. The similarity between Oriental tradition with modernization theory is a natural consequence of the influence of international power politics on the content and the direction of social science research. Marxism could not emerge as an alternative approach to modernization theory because it follows the same Orientalist discourse in its explanation of Muslim history, society and culture.

The absence of an indigenous theoretical approach leads these imported ways of thinking to dominate the minds in order to understand society and social forces. Since these Western modes of thinking are alien to Muslim societies, they give a distorted image of Islam and of Islamic movements which claim to be an indigenous alternative to the Western way of thinking.

In the world in which we live, the striking reality is that the structure of power politics has an influence on the content and direction of Islamic inquiry. During the process of the establishment and maintenance of exploitative colonial relationships between societies, the development of anthropology and sociology had played a significant role. By using these fields of learning, the role of imperial politics has been especially decisive in the constitution of Western images of Islam and the analysis of Oriental studies. The need for control over the people required more systematic forms of knowledge. The exercise of power on the subject presupposes new forms of scientific discourse through which deviant groups are defined and controlled. In that sense, “power and knowledge directly imply one another, (and) there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge.”[1] Consequently, the growth of scientific discourse forms the basis of a more extensive form of institutionalized power.

As a direct result of the relationship between knowledge and power (here colonial expansion and interests), Orientalism was born as a discipline. According to the definition of Edward Said, “the function of Orientalism is to understand, in some cases, to control, manipulate, even incorporate, what is a manifestly different world.”[2] Orientalism is a discourse which represents the erotic, exotic, strange Orient as a comprehensible and intelligible phenomenon with a network of categories and concepts.[3] This network defined and controlled the Orient within the principle which says “to control is to subordinate.” Orientalism helped the colonial power to legitimate its territorial invasions and aggressions. There were cases in history in which some Orientalists served colonial administrations by directly involving in policies.

Orientalism provides a framework of analysis in which Orientalism has presented itself as an imperial relationship.  Thus, it constitutes a field of political power. By articulating around the contrast between the rational Westerner and the lazy Oriental, the typology of characters was produced by Orientalism. The main purpose of Orientalism, consequently, appeared as a reduction of “the endless complexity of the East into a definite order of types, characters and constitutions”.[4] In serving colonial interests, Orientalism has been aided by another discipline: anthropology. The motive for the study of non-Western peoples and their cultures was not to produce knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but to help colonialists in exploiting non-Western nations.

Anthropologists provided the imperialist countries with the relevant theoretical model known as structural functionalism. The influence of this theory was not limited within academic circles. It introduced new theoretical methodologies of political change into non-Western societies. According to structural functionalism, certain structures within every society are shaped by the history and traditions of the indigenous people. Functionalism assumes that these structures have political, social and economic functions to perform.

“In order to change any society its structures must be altered or demolished and new ones created or substituted. Its functions would then automatically change. The colonialists took full advantage of these ideas and through coercion, appropriation, negotiation, persuasion and education initiated new political and economic structures in colonized societies.”[5]

Through such studies, the Orientalist posited the inferiority of the Muslims and the superiority of the West. Furthermore, Muslim civilization was considered decadent while Western civilization was considered dynamic. In this sense, colonization was taken into consideration as necessary in order to “civilize” the peoples and institutions. Though Orientalism had a loss of popularity prior to WWII, following the war, with the emergence of the US hegemony in the Middle East, the knowledge of the Orientalist regained importance. It is not surprising that we simultaneously witnessed the dominance of modernization theory in social research. After the 9/11 incidence, Orientalism has experienced another revival that fueled the rise of Islamophobia in the West in particular and the World in general.

Orientalist problematic is “a discourse which underlines economics, politics, and sociology”.[6] We see the central question behind comparative sociology as the uniqueness of the West in relation to the alleged stagnation of the East. It is argued in Western sociology that Islamic society lacked those economic institutions of bourgeois society. According to this view, Islamic society lacked independent cities, an autonomous bourgeois class, rational bureaucracy, and legal reliability. Without these institutional and cultural elements, there was nothing in Islamic civilization to challenge the dead hand of pre-capitalist tradition. The Orientalist viewed Asiatic society as a society whose social structure was characterized by the absence of civil society. In other words, a network of institutions mediating between the individual and the state is absent. The conditions for Oriental despotism were created as a result of the absence of these institutions because the individual was exposed to the arbitrary rule of the despot. The absence of civil society simultaneously explained the failure of capitalist development outside Europe and the absence of democracy. Such an absence fortified the Orientalist explanation of Muslim psychology. For the Orientalist, the psychological effects of Islam were the fostering of attitudes of resignation, acceptance and fatalism.  According to Orientalism, the Islamic faith has not generated any motivation for changing social arrangements or for opposing the political despotism of the ruler. The absence of Western motives such as achievement motivation, innovation and anti-authoritarianism has been connected sociologically with the failure of an entrepreneurial middle class to develop in despotic societies.

The Orientalist treated Islam as an ethos that inhibits innovation. On the other side, Christendom contained the seeds of rational, progressive society which unfolded and matured into democratic industrialism. It was this epistemology which lay behind the principle assumption of Orientalism. Islamdom was characterized by inertia, whereas Christendom was essentially dynamic.

In sum, Orientalism makes its comparisons based on Western society which has privileged possession of a set of essential features such as rationality, progress, democratic institutions, and economic development. Orientalism treats non-Western societies as those which lacked the capacity to develop these features. The defects of alternative social formations are explained in terms of these features. As an accounting system, Orientalism set out to explain the progressive features of the Occident and the social stationariness of the Orient.

How the set of features which originated from Western historical experience were transferred to modernization theory and how any other Western mode of thinking may not be an alternative to the theories generated from Orientalist discourse can be explained through the examination of sociopolitical comparisons between the Occident and Orient. At this point, it is necessary to look at the source of the paradigm of Oriental Despotism. According to Orientalism, the absence of civil society in Islam entailed the absence of an autonomous individual exercising conscience and rejecting arbitrary interventions by the state. In fact, the debate about Oriental despotism took place in the context of uncertainty about enlightened despotism and monarchy in Europe. The Orientalist discourse on the absence of civil society in Islam was a reflection of basic anxieties about political freedoms in the West.[7]

Valenci points out the influence of controversies about different forms of government during the emergence of absolute states in Europe over the emergence of the paradigm of Oriental Despotism. In his article “The Making of A Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism,” he analyzes the relationship between political conditions, political thought and the content of the reports of Venetian ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire. According to his observation, until the last quarter of the 16^th century, the abstract categories used by Venetian ambassadors to describe the Turkish political system were all neutral designations that were used equally to describe other systems. Reports in the earlier 16^th century contained implicit and explicit comparisons between Ottoman institutions and those of Venice and Christian countries. Regarding many items, the comparisons turned to the advantage of the former. But after 1575, the expressions of Venetian ambassadors started to change. Sharp criticism of all social practices, condemnation of a false religion, and diatribes against the form and style of the government combined for a total rejection of the Ottoman sociopolitical order. One of the main criticisms of the Venetian ambassadors was the absence of the notables in the Ottoman Empire as an intermediary class between the ruler and the ruled. A new category was born in the language of Venetian ambassadors: tyranny. Even during the earlier period of this change in language, we see indications of the concepts of despotism and patrimonialism. After the terms of dominio, autorita and monarco, despotico came to existence in the second quarter of the 17^th century.[8]

It is not surprising that the time of this shift in the language of defining the Ottoman Empire was the period in which European powers started to strengthen their position against the Ottomans. The change in power relations brought about the change in vocabulary. Changing political realities has affected the Venetian (and European) state of mind, which convert into a change in the vocabulary. The model of Oriental Despotism finds its roots in Machiavelli’s ideas. According to him, the entire kingdom of the Turks was ruled by one master; the others were his servants. The kingdom was divided into parts; and the sultan sent various administrators to each district. The sultan moved and changed them as he pleased. Machiavelli, however, said that the king of France could not do what the sultan did because he was placed among a group of established nobles who were recognized in the state. Those nobles had hereditary rights; therefore, the king could not remove them without jeopardizing his rule. This period was the one of intense debate on the style of government. Giovani Botero tried to improve Jean Bodin’s argument which defined three types of government: monarchy, democracy and aristocracy. For Botero, the three forms could be mixed when they are combined with other forms. A corruption of the three governments led monarchy to tyranny, democracy to ochlocracy, and aristocracy to oligarchy. As for the Turks, their empire was definitely despotic because the grand Turk is the Master of everything within the limits of his empire in such a way that the inhabitants are called his slaves, not his subjects. Botero concluded that there was no person of distinction who is important enough to be sure of his own life.

In the Venetian ambassadors’ report on Istanbul, two stages of the history of political ideas can be found. In the earlier stage, the imperial form of government seemed legitimate and appeared as a normal development of smaller states. In the second stage, the Ottoman state together with other states fell into the category of tyranny. Simultaneously, controversies about different forms of government arose in the context of religious and political struggles and the emergence of absolute states in Europe. Thus, the development of the theory of Oriental Despotism cannot be separated from the emergence of absolutist states throughout Europe.[9] In France a lively debate was witnessed during the 17^th century about the features of strong legitimate government and the arbitrary despotic rule of the Turkish Empire. According to Bossuet, an arbitrary government can be distinguished from a legitimate government by its four characteristics: general slavery, absence of private property, absolute power of the ruler over his subjects and arbitrary law making. The Aristotelian typology of governments[10] provided a profile for Orientalism in order to explain the political structure in the East in general and in Muslim societies in particular. One of the most important contributors to this tradition was Montesquieu who differentiated between three types of governments: republic, monarchy, and despotism. The fundamental difference between the monarchy and despotism was that, under a monarchy, the ruler (monarch) governed according to established laws, whereas in a despotic order, a single individual ruled in terms of his own desires. Monarchy was based on the inequality of social ranks, despotism involved the extreme equality of an impotent human mass in relation to an arbitrary ruler. Under despotism, channels which tie the people to the ruler were absent. In such a policy environment, political passion dominated social life. The principle examples of Orientalist Despotism in Montesquieu’s views were the Asian empires, especially Ottoman Empire.

German contribution to the debate came from Hegel. According to Hegel, the attainment of self-consciousness in the Orient precluded its structural features. In the Orient no conception of personal freedom and human individuality had developed, so that despotism was the natural form of government. In Hegel’s expression, “the East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; … (this) political form is therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism,…”[11] It was also typical for the Oriental ruler to appear in the guise of a divine overlord. In Hegel’s conceptualization, the individual cannot come to self-consciousness in Oriental empires because the individual is lost within the totality.

“The glory of Oriental conception is the one individual as that substantial being to which all belongs, so that no other individual has a separate existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom… On the one side we see duration, stability-Empires belonging to more space…-unhistorical History;-as for example in China, the state based on the family relation-… The states in question, without underlying any change in themselves, or in the principle of their existence, are constantly changing position toward each other. They are in ceaseless conflict, which brings on rapid destruction. The opposition principle of individuality enters into these conflicting relations; but it is itself as yet only unconscious… This history, too is for the most part, really unhistorical, for it is only repetition of the same majestic ruin. The new element, which in the shape of bravery, prowess, magnanimity, occupies the place of the previous despotic pomp, goes through the same circle of decline and subsidence. This subsidence is therefore not really such, for through all his restless change no advance is made.”[12]

In order to break this vicious circle, the direct intervention of the West becomes necessary. The influence of the West will not leave these “stagnant” societies as they are because, through its economic, social and political relationships with these societies, the previous way of economic activities, and social and political interactions will change.

This tradition of talking about Oriental Despotism would continue after Hegel because, with the sophisticated vocabulary it uses, Orientalism determines issues, approaches and conclusions within a given set of disciplines. “Orientalism infects the perspectives which are conventionally regarded distinct and separate, namely Weberian and Marxist sociology.” Since Marxism itself followed the Orientalist tradition, with regard to Islam and development, it could not break the bias of Orientalism and the approaches originating from Orientalism. In the field of the sociology of development, Marx can be interpreted in Hegelian terms because of his acceptance of Occidental capitalism as a dynamic universal force in history and as a factor which will destroy the stagnant economic systems of China and India. Marx and Engels reiterated the long tradition of Oriental despotism in their treatment of the Asian mode of production. Engels treats Islamic society as an unchanged society. He says that Islam is a religion adopted by Orientals, especially Arabs, on the one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other nomadic Bedouins. Islam played a role as a means in the recurring collisions between the townsmen and the Bedouins. The growing richness and luxury of the townsmen make the poor Bedouins envious and covetous of these riches.

“Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to ch[13]astise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and true faith and appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years, they are naturally in the same positions the renegades were; a new purge of the faith required: a new Mahdi arises, and the game starts again from the beginning. … All these movements are clothed in religion, but they have their source in economic causes, and yet even when they are victorious, they allow the old economic conditions to persist untouched. So the old situation recurs periodically.”

In Engels’ understanding, Islam is a means of social reaction; so it does not have a progressive dynamic. Between the Christian West and Islamic East, there is an interesting distinction which Engels indicated. According to him, Christianity is only a flag or tool in the popular revolts of the Christian West in order to destroy the existing antiquated economic order. This archaic socioeconomic structure is finally overthrown and a new political and socioeconomic order arises by contributing to the progress of the world.[14] The conclusion Engels reaches is that the Islamic Orient was stagnant, while the Christian West progressive. Marx and Engels claimed that societies in which the Asiatic mode of production was dominant were characterized by an absence of private property, by general slavery, and precarious political conditions. According to Marx, the prime necessity of an economic and common use of water in the Orient necessitated the interference of the state because of the low level of civilization and the large extent of territory.[15] In such an environment, the state held the property. In such a society, economic classes did not develop along European lines and the main mechanism of social change, class conflict, was absent.

Oriental Despotism and capitalism were incompatible. Engels explained this thesis through the peculiar uncertainty of property and the person in Oriental society. ”Asiatic societies combined political stagnation and extreme personal insecurity, insecurity of rights and possessions.” So economic stagnation was combined with political despotism. According to Marx;

“ the king is the one and only proprietor of all land in the kingdom, from which it follows as a necessary consequence that a whole capital city like Delhi or Agra, lives almost entirely on the army and is therefore obliged to follow the king if he takes the field for any length of time. For these towns neither are nor can be anything like a Paris, being virtually nothing but military camps, only a little better and a more conveniently situated than in the open country.”[16]

In such a sociopolitical environment “the basis of all phenomena in the East to be the absence of private property in land.”[17] For all these reasons, colonial administration was appreciated by Marx and Engels due to the fact that it functions for the progress of civilization. Engels accepted the conquest of Algeria by the French as “an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilization.”[18]

England was characterized by Marx as “the unconscious tool of history in bringing about … revolution.[19]

In light of this view, the societies of the Orient could only be changed and transformed by exogenous forces because of their internally static condition. This exogenous force is the destructive effect of capitalist imperialism and colonialism. What can be inferred from this belief is that the struggle of colonized nations against the historical growth of the capitalist mode of production was, by definition, a reactionary struggle. Like other major figures of sociology and political economy, Marx and Engels concluded that the economic backwardness of the Middle East resulted from the combination of social and political causes, of which the absence of a middle class of entrepreneurs was especially important.

When Weber’s thought on Islam is analyzed, it is clear that his treatment of Islam is not on the same line with his thesis on Calvinis. Weber’s analysis of Islam, based on patrimonial and prebendal feudalism, is in general similar to Marx’s Asian mode of production because Marx also formulates his discussion around internal characteristics of society, such as the absence of private property, the dominance of the state and the constitution of the village economy. Indeed, profound Orientalist influence in the sociology of development can be seen in the sociological writings of Weber. He argues that many of the institutional prerequisites of economic development were absent in Islamic societies. Weber regards Islam as a polar opposite of the puritanist Protestant ethic because the accommodating ethic of the Qur’an does not lead to an ascetic ethic of world-mastery emerging in Islam. Weber claims that rational formal law, autonomous cities, an independent bourgeois class and political stability were entirely absent in Islam. The prerequisites for an industrial and developed society could not emerge under Islamic Empires due to their prebendal feudal and patrimonial bureaucratic structures. The military and economic conditions of Islamic society were inappropriate for economic development. According to Weber, industrialization was impeded by the religiously determined structure of Islamic states, their officialdom and their jurisprudence. In his conceptualization, Islamic society was one characterized by a patrimonial domain which made political, economic and legal relations unstable and arbitrary or irrational. For Weber feudal Europe guaranteed property rights; nevertheless, prebendal feudalism and patrimonialism maximized the arbitrariness. In this contrast, the economic and political conditions of Oriental society were hostile to capitalist prerequisites. With this stance, Weber becomes part of the European tradition of criticism and analysis of the Orient which also includes Marx and Engels.

According to Weber, Islamic dynasties were dependent upon new successful territorial gains for the maintenance of their financial and political structure and central bureaucracy. A genuine feudal structure could not develop in Islam because of Islam’s essentially prebendal character. The monopoly on power by sultans was maintained and to be protected by preventing the growth of independent economic institutions and groups within patrimonial society. Important social functions were centrally coordinated within ruling institutions. Potential independent social groups were co-opted or assimilated into the military bureaucracy. Then Weber says that Islamic society failed to develop autonomous institutions which were characteristic of European societies. Weber added that the characteristics of Islamic cities were not merchant classes, but military camps and government buildings. Entrepreneurs and craft guilds were under state control. Indeed, Islam was a martial religion that was hostile to a rational economic ethos. Imitation and rejection of innovation were stressed by a political system conditioned by the religious system. Within such a structure, the patrimonial system of domination in Islamic societies did not allow economic and social change and development; societies remained backwards.

Like Hegel, Marx and Engels, Weber heavily emphasized the absence of any process of socioeconomic change and development in Muslim society. In order to stimulate the transformation of society, there is the necessity of the involvement of external forces into the affairs of society; and European capitalism would fulfill this requirement. In considering Weber’s account of the patrimonial system of Islamic society, it has become clear that any assertion which suggests that Weber’s sociology is a critique of Marx is far from the truth. This fact indicates itself in the writings of current scholars. As pointed out by Wiley, “what exists today is a kind of Marx-Weber truce, tending toward cautious interaction. The great surge of comparative-historical research of recent years is partly based on that truce.”[20] Burris argues that Weberian concepts had been used by contemporary Marxists in their efforts to adapt Marxism to the conditions of late twentieth century capitalism. At the same time, there has been a parallel trend among a manner that renders it more compatible with the premises of Marxism.[21] In sum, the Orientalist tradition of Islamic studies, including Marxist and Weberian analyses, has important common assumptions and conclusions:

           --Muslim society has been ruled by authoritarian laws.

           --Islam provided a case of subservience to totalitarian laws and subjection to a despotic policy.

           --Islam offered a stagnant socioeconomic and political structure.

           --Premodern Islamic societies (especially cities) were mainly military organizations.

           --The economic system in medieval Islamic societies was based on land and war (to gain more land and plunder)

           --There was a state monopoly of land; and as a political consequence of this, there was an absolute division of the society into the ruling and ruled classes. Indeed under the patrimonial rule, the state was the sultan himself, with all the remaining subjects being his slaves.

           --Independent economic classes were absent in Islamic sultanates. The nature of the state and its role in social reproduction was fundamentally different from European feudalism. The effect of this difference on society is the missing middle class-bourgeoisie. The absence of a risk taking middle class entrepreneur did not lead these societies to have important socioeconomic change and development.

The heritage of Oriental studies provided three areas for Modernization theorist to discuss: i) As a precondition of socioeconomic change, psychological motivation and value commitment;  ii) a strong emphasis on the continuing absence of an autonomous middle class; iii) focus on an emerging new middle class with special reference to the potential role of the army as a modernizing agency. Investigations in the first area claim that the transition to modernity requires a thorough secularization of the traditional Islamic environment. According to researchers in this category, the cultural and familial environment of the Middle East was not conducive to middle class entrepreneurship. The existing Middle Eastern entrepreneurship is less organized and rational compared to its counterpart in Europe. Business is still organized around traditional and particularistic norms. Research in the second category tried to show that the historically missing bourgeoisie has not emerged within the contemporary system of social stratification. According to this perspective, there was no development of a civil despite the state structure being overdeveloped. As Orientalists argued, the problem of oriental stagnation was a consequence of the absence of intermediate institutions, as modernization literature claimed that the lack of development in the contemporary Middle East is a legacy of Oriental stagnation given that these societies are still unable to create an independent middle class entrepreneur. The absence of a property-owning middle class has also been regarded as an element of the absence of a revolutionary tradition in the Middle East.

In short, Modernization theory appears as a modern version of Orientalism whose theory of Oriental Despotism states that Oriental societies have been dominated by highly centralized, but despotic and arbitrary states. This centralized state apparatus ruled out the development of independent cities, autonomous guilds and an urban middle class of property owning capitalists. Characteristic Western institutions and virtues did not develop. The Middle East stagnated because of the missing links between the factors with which we dealt. The transformations of these societies meanwhile are merely in appearance. The underlying continuity of the centralized state, the state bureaucracy and the military is the all-pervasive feature of the Middle East. The arrival of the new middle class has done little to change the basic structure and the value system of the society. Since active colonial rule was impossible in the period after WWII, the recommended prescription is the wholesale adoption of, and adaptation to, Western values. In the bipolar world of the post-war period, those who share similar values and social structures will cooperate and work together against those who want to change the dominant value system and social structures. In this struggle, there were two enemies: so-called traditional and backward segments within Oriental (in particular Muslim) societies and the socialist bloc. The objective knowledge of this great struggle could no longer be produced in Europe (in particular in England) because Europe had lost its ability and power to manage world affairs in the new era. In addition, the old version of Orientalism could not serve in the interest of status quo alone. Therefore, after WWII, we witness two great changes in comparison to the pre-war period: i) the US became the hearth of the Western capitalist world instead of Europe; ii) a modern version of Orientalism, modernization theory, and a new discipline, international relations, emerged in the US. It is not surprising that with the change of the center of power relations, the center of knowledge also changed in order to produce the “objective knowledge” of new circumstances for the benefit of the user of power. Like Orientalism, modernization theory is fundamentally a political doctrine imposed on the weak because of its weakness. Area studies associated with modernization theory has always carried policy objectives. In this respect, under the aegis of government, the Middle East Institute was established in 1946 as a response to a strategic concern for, and sensitivity to, public security and policy. Consequently, “out of such organizations grew the Middle East Studies Association the powerful support of the Ford and other foundations, the various federal programs of support to universities, the various federal research projects, research projects carried out by such entities as the Defense Department, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson Institute, and the consultative and lobbying efforts of banks, oil companies, multinationals and the like. It is no reduction to say of all this that it retains, in most of its general as well as its detailed functioning, the traditional Orientalist outlook which had been developed in Europe.”[22]

What the modern version of Orientalism, modernization theory, achieved is that it provided the accommodation of the elite cadres with a new imperialism. Active colonial rule is not necessary anymore given that the indoctrination of the elite with the idea of modernization functions in favor of power politics.

Nevertheless, the emergence of a new challenge to the interest of Western imperialism after WWII led to a new field of scientific inquiry emerging. As a new discipline,

“international relations … came into being in the US as a government initiative … to train qualified diplomatic and analytically knowledgeable personnel … concerned with the outside world… Thus there is a built-in a logic for international relations, … leading them to be government and power oriented, and to train young people for governmental positions, rather than to be critical and committed to questioning the existing order to the national interests of their respective states… International relations… should be interpreted within the framework of the historical educational function of American Political Science … : to provide rationale for, and legitimacy to, the working and work of government and governments to make people understand and accept rather than criticize and reject”.[23]

Since US International Relations is so closely identified with the foreign policy concerns of the country, the assumptions of political realism cannot be overcome. Due to the fact that political realism focuses on how to maximize power so as to manage international events, it fits the needs of a hegemonic power. Key elements of realism are well suited to the requirements of American foreign policy. In this sense, realism is the approach to legitimate the existing world order.

In short, the direction and content of social science research is influenced by power politics in order to make the science serve the interests of those who have the means to enforce their desire over others.

[1] Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (New York, 1977).