Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

Occidentalism is an effort to reconstruct the "Occident/al", presumed to be
outside the "Orient/al", in a fashion of mirror image, an image that used to be constructed
by the discourses of Orientalism, and in a manner of pendulum rhythm.
The epistemic codes of Occidentalism that are an attempt to compensate and define
itself, the self had been stereotyped for centuries by the Occident/West,
through the otherization of the Occident, can be traced back to the ancient world
to Christian-Muslim relations and to the speculative binary oppositions between the
mystic, exotic, and irrational East and the practical, realist, and rational West. It
would seem that total categorizations and stratifications something like these oppositions
working in the metaphysical domain are meaningless unless power and
hegemony relations are taken into consideration. To attach the humane, religious,
ideological, and theological to the metaphysical (in both Orientalism and Occidentalism)
is, as if, a replica of the strategy of the trans-natural. According to Occidentalism,
the modern urban, centre of arrogance, supremacy, rootlessness, perfidiousness,
and meaninglessness, is the symbol of the neo-pagan West, in which the
material fetishized and evil, whim, and pleasure are idealized, and as such comprises
of the static essence of the West itself. Freezing the West as a static substance
and discovering and reconstructing its identity and memory out of this frozen
substance are to lose the possibilities of change and transformation within
metaphysical dialectical mode at the individual and local levels in the West. That is
to say: Both this Occident is molded as "other" within static forms via objectification;
and the religion, creed, and value system of this "other" cadastralized within
the quantity of topographic parcels. The praxes of this cadastralization are, in fact,
highly "occidental" in form with respect to the wisdom tradition of the East; because
this tradition neither approves of the diabolization of topography, or fetishization,
nor of suspending and othering human being, nor of cadastralizing the
religious domain.