Last summer I talked about a novel (here) written by the Algerian writer, Kamel Daoud. I predicted that although its anti-Western mentality fit in with what postmodernists like to hear, they would be uneasy about his book because he hated Islam. I was right. This essay relays the news that Daoud is now being condemned by Western leftists, just as they have condemned other liberals and leftists from the Muslim world:
The Western intellectuals accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of being a racist against Muslims, or an Islamophobe, or a “native informant” and a tool of imperialism. Sometimes they accuse the liberal from the Muslim world of stupidity, too, or lack of talent.
Moreover, regarding the specific case of Daoud:
A group of 19 professors in France drew up a statement accusing Daoud of a series of ideological crimes, consisting of “orientialist cliches,” “essentialism,” “psychologization,” “colonialist paternalism,” an “anti-humanist” viewpoint, and other such errors, amounting to racism and Islamophobia.
Several of these are obscure, and if you aren’t fully immersed in the left’s postmodernism and postcolonialism, they will seem bewildering, but inoffensive. I confess I myself don’t understand to what specifically “psychologization” and “anti-humanism” refer. Essentialism is the idea from Edward Said that the “orientalists” imagined some eternal essence of the oriental world that could never be changed. As to why this should be so offensive, given that most cultures do not change much over the course of a lifetime, is anyone’s guess. As to how it applies to Daoud, I guess it’s because he said that “One of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women.” I don’t read this as insisting that the Muslim world will always have a sick relationship with women, but who knows what the postmodernists read into such statements? One would think that feminists would applaud his candor and condemn the accusers for their sexism, but they remain silent.
One point the authors make that I disagree with is their analogy with the way that leftist intellectuals dealt with dissidents from the Soviet Union, which was to spurn them. But that made a certain amount of sense since the Soviet Union was a leftist entity. The Muslim world is not, and in fact it is a very reactionary sort of place. One would think that leftists would have marked it down as desperately needing progressive reform, instead of which they have decided to defend it. I have given many theories on why they do this (see here and here), but while I think I have the answer, it really defies all rational analysis.
These leftists and intellectuals should be called on to check their privileges for trying to silence the voice of an oppressed person. How racist!
To paraphrase instapundit: why are leftist intellectual circles such cesspools of racist privilege?
Posted by: Terry | 04/01/2016 at 09:01 AM