Ironically, your critique of Western self-promotion relies on the equally Western concept of individualism. The idea that everyone has his own thought, opinions, and independent value is a very Western notion indeed. Specifically, it is a product of 19th century European and North American liberalism.

To say that the world should treat every person as an individual requires imposing Western values on the rest of the world.

patronization is in a way an even more demeaning form of prejudice or racism. And Salman Rushdie IS a helluva better writer than Dan Brown. Of course, timing has something to do with it... Giordano Bruno and many other brilliant Christian 'heretics' were burned at the stake back in the renaissance.... excessively hellenizing Jews had a tough time at the hands of the  Maccabees...

Islam is just not out of those woods yet.   

David:

Your critique of my critique relies on false boundaries between the "Eastern and Western" intellectual and philosophical traditions. Many consider the first charter of human rights to have been the work of King Cyrus of Persia. The Medina Charter, or Consitution of Medina, was a multicultural social contract. Your critique also demands that we address only one strain of post-12th century Islam (granted, a rather dominant one, but still not the only one). However, the traditions of Greek rationalism thrived in the work of scholars like al-Farabi, Averroes and Avicenna. Islamic society once stretched as far as Spain. Today, quite clearly, Islam is just as geographically present, and its interpretations range from rationalist, individualist, and democratic to anti-rational, communitarian and theocratic. There are humanist and deist strains of Sufism--there have been for hundreds and hundreds of years. There are revolutionary and social justice elements to Shi'ism. If you can point out where this visible line between the Islamic "East" and the Christian "West" is or has ever been, i'd be interested to see.

While it is true that Islamic teaching generally abhors blind pursuit of self interest, in many places it also invites the believer to seek his or her own path to God. The absence of a centralized religious authority actually means that Islam didn't require the Protestant gesture. There are Muslim scholars who maintain that no religious text condones individualism or democracy as much as the Qu'ran--there are some who do not. Any insistence on claiming individualism as the intellectual, social, and political project of a mythical West only recaptiulates the flase binary argument of Islamism: that the West is individualistic, multicultural, rational, and democratic, therefore in retaliation against Westoxification, one must eschew rationalism, fight against democracy, and establish a monoculture. It serves to reinforce the proliferation of iron curtains that obscure the global nature of modern society as well as the interconnection and cross-pollenation that characterized past epochs.

It's true that a certain conception of the individual and individual rights has evolved in Europe and North America, but that doesn't mean it evolved out of ideas and texts that owed only to the minds of Europeans and North Americans (It's also worth pointing out that the so-called "West" has penty of its own anti-liberal, anti-individualist, and/or communitarian ideologues).

In Iran today, many Muslims are reading the work of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arednt, trying to formulate a new vision of liberal politics. Does this mean, if such a vision is successfully instituted, Iran will have adopted "Western" liberalism? Or will it be their own--their own interpretations of ideas they chose to study and adopt (most likely with modifications coming from within as opposed to without), ideas that didn't develop in a vaccuum, and ideas that don't have limitations as to where they can be implemented with the most authenticity? 'No, sorry, those ideas are ours--you're just copying us.'--could saying that possibly be any more culturally arrogant, culturally imperalist, or downright juvenile?

mmausner:

My point is that certain portions of Islam in certain places have only recently been drug back into those woods.

My post isn't about creating strict boundaries between Western and Eastern thought; it's about recognizing that individualism is not universal. Once we recognize that individualism isn't universal, conclusions derived from that premise -- like yours that we need to treat all Muslims as individuals and resist generalizing -- lose much of their strength.

That said, individualism is primarily Western. That association with the West isn't based on something so trivial as "who thought of it first." So, your statements about the earliest records of individualistic thought don't matter all that much to me. It's based on individualism's historical significance in Western culture. I think it's indisputable that individualism has played a more key role in morality and law in the West than the East.

Now you could respond that classifying these philosophical traditions into Eastern and Western is intellectually dishonest and inhibits study, but there's a difference between classification and separation. I'm not saying the traditions should be studied separately or "owned" by any society, just that we should recognize the geographic disparities in significance and how such disparities affect our perspective as people immersed in individualistic values.

Josh good post-- Islam is in crisis partly because from Muhammad through 1923, there WAS some form of centralized spiritual authority. Even as a figurehead, even when there were two (Shia and Sunni) the institution of the caliphate shaped and centralized Muslim identity.

Without it, once modern communication brought home that lack of leadership to the larger Muslim world and Wahabbism and Ayatollah-ism gave radical shape to that lack, Islam entered something NEW.  More akin, I think, to Jewish responsa to the destruction of the 2nd temple and priesthood (which included even the advent of Christianity!) than to the Protestant Reformation.

David:

Doesn't your critique function on the basis of an instrumental Enightenment idea?  Is it not a calculation of majorities vs. minorities as the arbiter of 'significance?'  The minority is an invention of the nation-state and census-taking; the reportage of minority opinion throughout history could hardly be imagined to be accurately representative of diversity within a group (i.e., was al-Rawandi really Islam's only famous atheist scholar?) 

My point is that even though the majority of Muslims may be pious in one sense of what is deemed as piety, and while atheism, humanism, and individualism may belong to the Eurocentric traditions by calculating majorities and total historical influence, it isn't the most excellent calculus--it is important to recognize that these ideas did spring up in the minds of non-Westerners.  While some may be more anomalous in so-called 'Eastern' history, their existence is testament to a certain universalism of thought, of the human mind, even if every idea doesn't triumph equally in every geographical spot (which I will certainly grant).  There may have been more Spinozas and Voltaires than al-Rawandis, but the substance of their ideas is remarkably in tune. 

My argument also isn't one about 'who thought of it first.'  My argument is that for many Muslims, their faith is and always has been individualistic. This isn't solely a modern phenomenon, and for a Westerner to insist that, despite how they see themselves or their belief, the calculations of study define individualism as Western, is to me rather odd.  You say: There were fewer of you, so the idea doesn't inform your history quite as much as it does ours.  I say, there were fewer of you, but one must account for the machinations of power as they stamp out certain ideas and preserve others.  These historical trends and events musn't be seen as the primary means of understanding a culture's identity, nor should it be the primary means for people within a culture to understand themselves (even as Americans, can we really say that the more individualist liberalism of Locke is more definitive than the communitarianism of Rousseau?) 

You claim that it is indisputable that individualism has played a more key role in the development of morality in the West.  But did individualism precede modernization, Gesellschaft-ing, atomising of soceties or vice-versa?  Certainly the two events mutually informed one another and the direction of causation isn't unidirectional, but it is more appropriate, in my understanding of history, to see individualism as an adaptation to material conditions (this also makes sense to me from an evolutionary standpoint as well).  At various points throughout Eastern history and Western, material conditions have called for an individualist perspective.

In the last year or so, I've done my absolute best to immerse myself in the philosophical, historical, poetic, literary and political traditions of the Islamic 'East.'  This began as a curiosity and a sort of personal challenge to certain strains of postmodernism, multiculturalism and Orientalist critiques of difference, otherness, Eurocentrism, etc.  I find that a neglected strain of history, a subaltern history of Islam if you want, reveals that if one shifts focus away from certain majorities in certain periods, the notion that a person of freethinking, individualist, democratic persuasion can find very good company. 

I insist on this because now in the name of progressivism, many now claim that we must respect the cultural traditions of the Islamic East in all their radical otherness--but one may only do this if one sweeps away the subalterns, the feethinkers, those who have been too often silenced thus far.  They effectively insist that we capitulate to the continuance of this in the name of respect for tradition.  But as Anthony Appiah remarked in his excellent response to Charles Taylor's essay, 'Multiculturalism,' it is precisely the one who wishes to create one's own present that we must defend.  

Moreover, I think that while we can certainly make certain valuable historical and cultural assessments according to the categories you designate, it is simultaneously important to advocate a position for the present that is approporiately global and validates the best ideas and thinkers in a culture, not just those who are or have been in the majority.  So in other words, I care little that the Islamic tradition of rationalism was stamped out in the 12th century and that most dominant strains of Islam since haven't held rational analysis in the same esteem as faith.  By this historical analyis, rationalism is Western.  But Islam has a tradition of rationalism, that was commuted to the domain of the minority.  My point is that these minorities disturb the false sense of one-ness that both elements in the East and West would have us believe exists.  They always have, but in the era where one Muslim's individual choice can wreak so much violence, I think we must necessarily think on the scale of the individual.  Muslims today do so and it isn't necessarily Western of them.  I didn't think that the two Muslims who were shot dead in Khartoum for protesting the Islamist thugs were doing anything more than making an individual choice.  Islamic codes do seek harmony within a community, but Muhammad's singular gesture against the whole of Meccan society was, I would say, an act of revolt by an individual--a lesson that clearly exists within Islam, even if it hasn't received it's due focus.      

But if none of that will do, we might then consider Zizek's way out of the multiculturalist slump: to recognize that the claims to freedom or justice of a particular group or culture have relevance to the whole of humanity.   

Thank you for your well reasoned and eloquent response. I see many parallels between your theories and Jared Diamond's, particularly when you analyze the interplay between environment and culture. With that said, I'll let your latest comment stand as the final (substantial) word.