SPEAKING FREELY How Eurocentric is your day?
By M Shahid Alam
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in contributing.
At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in
the social sciences. In one course - on the history of the global economy -
this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading
Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.
This autumn, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students,
“How Eurocentric is your day?” I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can
they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions,
values, technologies and
products that originated outside the West - in China, India, the Islamicate or
Africa?
The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions
about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.
Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in "pajamas", trousers of
Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and
shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their toothbrush
with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point
after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese
inventions of great antiquity.
Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of
the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives?
Not quite.
I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals,
coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in
Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years
BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry - in their etymology - telltale signs
of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to
imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories.
How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the
alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name
suggests, the Arabs, who, in turn, obtained them from the Indians, brought
Arabic numerals to Europe. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the
Muslims.
Obstinately, my students’ day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric
start.
In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who - in his human form -
walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When
her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment,
paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians.
"Paradise" entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.
Of Medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after
the madrassa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier (high
official) in 11th century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at
universities still hold a "chair", a practice that goes back to the madrassa,
where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on
rugs.
When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the
graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten
connection to the madrassa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza -
Arabic for license - given to students who graduated from madrassas in
the Islamicate.
Our student runs into fields of study - algebra, trigonometry, astronomy,
chemistry, medicine and philosophy - that were introduced, via Latin, to
Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific
terms - algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth
and nadir - which have Arabic roots.
If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the king with "check
mate", that phrase is adapted from Farsi - shah maat - for "the king is
helpless, defeated".
When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of
money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in
the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of
paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made
from the bark of mulberry trees.
At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and
foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in
sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood,
the scientific method, and secularism - hallmarks of modernity - are entirely
of Western origin. Are they?
During the 18th century, many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly
aware that the Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some
two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more
confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory.
Similarly, Islam, in the 7th century, made a more radical break from priesthood
than the Reformation in Europe. In the 11th century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen
- his Latinized name - devised numerous experiments to test his theories in
optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method
in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative "founder" of the scientific method,
had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.
When our student reads the sonnets of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser,
she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via
Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for "to
sing") from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student
gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to
remember this.
On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can
watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting
closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains
Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the
multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the "Orient".
M Shahid Alam is Professor of Economics, Northeastern University, Boston.
He is the author of Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of
Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009). You may contact him at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009, M Shahid Alam.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please
click hereif you are interested in contributing.
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