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 ...