Islamization of Anthropological Knowledge

Abstract

The expansion of Western coloniaHsrn during the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies brought in its wake the economic and political domination andexploitation of the Third World countries. Western colonialism andethnocentrism went hand in hand. The colonial ideology was rationalizedand justified in terms of the white man's burden; it was believed that theWhite races of Europe had the moral duty to carry the torch of civilizationwhichwas equated with Christianity and Western culture-to the dark comersof Asia and Africa. The ideology of Victorian Europe accorded the full statusof 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 massiveundermining of the self-confidence of the colonized peoples. Their culturalvalues and institutions were ridiculed and harshly criticized. Worse still, theWestern pattern of education introduced by colonial governments produceda breed of Westernized native elite, who held their own cultural heritage incontempt and who consciously identified themselves with the culture of theircolonial masters.During the nineteenth century Orientalism emerged as an intellectualally of Western colonialism. As Edward Said has cogently demonstrated,Oriental ism was a product of certain political and ideological forces operatingin Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that it wasinextricably bound up with Western ethnocentrism, racism, and imperialism(Said, 1978).Most of the colonized countries of the Third World secured politicalliberation from Western powers during the early decades of the present century.Regrettably, however, political liberation was not always followed byideological, cultural, and intellectual jndependence. For one thing, most ofthe ex-colonial countries continued with the colonial pattern of education.Secondly, most of them were drawn into the political and cultural orbit ofeither the United States or Soviet Russia. A subtle but pervasive form of ...