Abstract
The so-called clash of civilizations some parts of the world believes it is currently witnessing between the West and Islam is better described as the latter stage of a process that began in the nineteenth century as “subaltern” resistance to Western imperial and civilizational hegemony. The voices of opposition to Western domination emanating from the Ottoman Middle East (and from other parts of the colonized world as well), fueled by a desire to assert agency in the international order and over their own destinies, expressed indignation at a formerly inferior Europe, which now appeared to have the upper hand in military, economic, and political affairs involving Asians and Muslims. Many non-Western intellectuals in the latter nineteenth century objected to the unjust, inhumane, and socially destructive aspects of “rationalist” Enlightenment thought that justified European colonial enterprises and the Western cultural supremacy that it came to imply. But the ideological principles underpinning the discriminatory framework in place at this historic juncture, including those which organized European, Asian, and African peoples respectively into a hierarchy of “advanced” and “primitive” nations, remained an accepted set of ideas upon which to formulate modernity for most of the West and non-West alike up until the twentieth century. The Ottoman Empire, as a state claiming both succession from earlier Islamic civilization and a history in and with Christian Europe, was intellectually inseparable from these currents of thought.
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References
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Translated terms from Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb (eds.), Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 6. The Japanese slogan “Eastern ethics as base, Western science as means” was coined by late Tokugawa-era philosophers and intellectuals. In combination with Japanese scholars from the Rangaku (Dutch Studies) school who propagated fukoku kyohei — “enrich the country, strengthen the army,” Japan’s path to modernity led to modernization, militarization, and colonization of Asia.
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© 2014 Renée Worringer
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Worringer, R. (2014). Framing Power and the Need to Reverse. In: Ottomans Imagining Japan. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384607_2
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