On Maps and Wests

In an earlier post, I commented on western cultural hegemony and its various forms (here). I argued that cultural hegemony is perhaps the most subtle form of dominance because it acts in the knowledge-sphere.

That is, it acts in the sphere of our minds, on our understanding, knowledge, and values, the way we look at the world, what do we consider good and desirable, and through what thought categories and value judgments do we analyze events and evaluate ourselves and others.

Mahmood Mamdani presents a couple of good examples in his widely acclaimed “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror” (2005) that relate to the above point. These examples point to the eurocentrism that is reproduced and reinforced through our textbooks, schooling, and media.

Maps

Mamdani writes: “When the sixteenth-century Italian missionary Matteo Ricci brought a European map of the world – showing the new discoveries in America – to China, he was surprised to find that the Chinese were offended by it. The map put Europe in the center of the world and split the Pacific, which meant that China appeared at the right-hand edge of the map. But the Chinese had always thought of China as literally the “Middle Kingdom,” which obviously should have been in the center of the map. To please his hosts, Ricci produced another map, one that split the Atlantic, making China seem more central. In China, maps are still drawn that way, but Europe has clung to the first type of map. The most commonly used map in North America shows the United States at the center of the world, sometimes even splitting the Asian continent in two. Today, the most widely used world map has western Europe at its center. Based on the Mercator projection, it systematically distorts our image of the world: even though Europe has approximately the same area as each of the other two peninsulas of Asia – prepartition India and Southeast Asia – Europe is called a continent, whereas India is but a subcontinent, and Southeast Asia is not even accorded that status; at the same time, the area most drastically reduced in the Mercator projection is Africa” (Mamdani 2005: 28).

For an alternative, though not totally free of problems, see Peter’s World Map here.

Wests

Civilizations are not as distinct and unified as presumed in ideologies like that of Huntington's "clash of civilizations".

Mamdani writes: “Marshall Hodgson made it a lifelong project to counter the West-centered studies of Islam. He began his classic three-volume study, The Venture of Islam, by showing how, throughout history, the notion of “the West” had changed at least three times. “The West” referred “originally and properly to the western or Latin-using half of the Roman empire; that is, to the west Mediterranean lands.” After the first change, the term came to refer to “the west European lands generally.” But this was not a simple extension, for it excluded “those west Mediterranean lands which turned Muslim.” The second shift was from West European lands to peoples, thus incorporating their overseas settlements. Then, there was the third shift as the definition of “the West” was further stretched to include “all European Christendom.” Whereas the second shift referred to a global western Europe, the third extension referred to a global Europe, western and eastern. Thus did the notion of “the West” develop from a geographical location to a racialized notion referring to all people of European origin, no matter where they lived and for how long.

Can there be a self-contained history of Western civilization? Historians have been chipping away at this claim in a number of fields, ranging from the development of science to that of society. Hodgson had earlier remarked that the equation of “the West” with “science” had given rise to an absurdity whereby it was presumed that Arabic-writing scientists in the classical age of Islam were simply marking time. Rather than making any original contribution to science, they were presumed simply to be holding up the torch for centuries –until it could be passed on to “the West.” The notion that the main role of Arabic-writing scientists was to preserve classical Greek science and pass it on to Renaissance Europe was fortified by Thomas Kun’s claim that Renaissance science represented a paradigmatic break with medieval science and a reconnection with the science of antiquity. Whereas Kuhn associated the paradigmatic break with the work of Copernicus, recent works in the history of science challenge this presumption. With the advantage of accumulated findings, Otto Neugebauer and Noel Swerdlow, two distinguished historians of science, explored the influence of “astronomers associated with the observatory of Maragha in northwestern Iran,” whose works, written in Arabic, “reached Europe, Italy in particular, in the fifteenth century through Byzantine Greek intermediaries.” They concluded in their now-classic 1984 work on the mathematical astronomy of Copernicus: “In a very real sense, Copernicus can be looked upon as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the ‘Maragha School’ ” (Mamdani 2005: 29-30).

So deeply penetrating is this eurocentrism, and here are our text books and media that too often feed this eurocentrism, consciously or unconsciously, in the minds of our generations. While reading these two examples, I am reminded once again of the poignant comment that Eqbal Ahmed made in one of his articles, which I quote in that earlier post: “Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights.” More on the link between eurocentrism and power in my next post on Orientalism.

What we need is a critical engagement with the western academic and cultural discourse in order to counter their cultural hegemony. And, that would take more than simply adding a chapter at the beginning of our text books glorifying Muslim scientists and thinkers. More on this soon, inshAllah.