In our time, comparing Western with Islamic societies is a sensitive, emotionally charged enterprise. As is well known, Samuel Huntington's writings anticipated the likely emergence of a profound fissure or “fault-line” in today's global arena: that between Western civilization and Islamic (cum Confucian) cultural and political practices. Seen against this background, Michael Curtis's book is not only an example of academic scholarship (though it has remarkable scholarly qualities); it is also a political intervention in contemporary debates. The edge of the intervention has to do mainly with the use of the term “Oriental despotism”—a phrase famously employed by Karl August Wittfogel in his 1957 study (subtitled “A Comparative Study of Total Power”). As Curtis tries to show, the substance of the phrase was well known to, and used as a classificatory tool by, European thinkers long before the twentieth century—where “Europe” is defined as Western Christendom, that is, an area “inhabited by Catholics and, later Protestants, but excluding Orthodox, Byzantine Christians” (pp. 2–3). To buttress this point, Curtis relies on “observant” European travelers and a series of thinkers including Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, de Tocqueville, the two Mills, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. In his words (pp. 3–4): “The premise of this book is that the study of past perceptions represented here by six major European thinkers, from Montesquieu to Max Weber, and the observations of travelers … shed[s] light on the true picture of political and religious life in the Middle East, still useful for understanding that area today, and on the nature and motivation of Islam.”

Basically, the book is affirmative and supportive both of “Orientalism” and the phrase “Oriental despotism”—to the point of sharpening a polemical confrontation. What chagrins Curtis, above all, is the assignment of negative qualities to Orientalism. As he writes (p. 1): “This work is based on the premise that Western analysts and observers of Middle Eastern and Muslim societies can discuss and interpret them without being biased or racist.” The thinkers chosen in his book “refute the simplistic and reductionist argument that all European writing about the Muslim Orient is racist, imperialistic, or totally ethnocentric.” The chief culprits associated with this argument are Nietzsche's heirs, especially “postmodern” thinkers, from Edward Said to Michel Foucault. “Since Nietzsche,” we read (pp. 7–9), “the notion of objective reality, and scholarly attempts to portray that reality, have been regarded as suspect and truth held to be a social construct.” In the “postmodern view,” knowledge and the perception of truth are said to be “inherently linked to the seduction of power”; in the terminology of the “late influential French intellectual Foucault,” the production of knowledge and the exercise of administrative power “intertwine”—to the point that Orientalism becomes a synonym for the Western “desire for power over the Orient.” The upshot of the entire argument is that Western Europe, and by extension the United States, “has not only dominated and exercised colonial or imperial power over the Orient but also that, through intellectual and aesthetic means, it has created an essentialist, ontological, epistemologically insensitive distinction between a ‘West,’ materially developed and self-assured about its superior civilization, and an ‘Orient’ which is regarded as inferior, backward, and not modernized.”

For Curtis (pp. 8–10), the sketched portrayal is nothing but a “credulous caricature” of actual Western perceptions. In particular, the “neo-Foucaultian” argument—sometimes “couched in arcane opacity”—conveys only “a monolithic and binary view” of an inherently complex historical process; hence, it ignores “the coexistence of a fluid interaction and cross-fertilization of cultures with continuing rivalry between Europe and Muslims and the Orient.” Curiously, despite these remonstrations, the book in large measure maintains the “truth-quality” underlying the postmodern view: In various shadings, most of the discussed European thinkers subscribe to the hierarchical distinction between West and Orient asserted by post-Nietzscheans. What the chosen writers illustrate, Curtis states (p. 4), is that the Western world “has incorporated values and ways of life different from both the historical and contemporary Orient,” such as “democratic principles, individual rights, balance of power, division of power, and limits to authority.” Historically, such Western cultural and political values “were absent or negligible in Muslim Oriental regimes where individuals were subject to rulers whose power had fewer institutional restraints.” This difference, however, is not only historical. Without claiming to be directly relevant today, the study, in Curtis's view (p. 2), provides “a background for understanding the nature of contemporary Muslim societies and the cultural identities of the peoples in the Orient, particularly at a moment when Western countries are being challenged by groups and organizations stemming from the Middle East, and when the number of Muslims resident in Western countries has been increasing.”

The bulk of the study, as mentioned before, is noteworthy for its attention to historical details. The opening chapter offers some scattered “European views” on Islam. During the Middle Ages, we read (p. 31), Christian theologians regarded the “Other” as “the infidel, the Muslim,” while Islam was seen as theologically false and “the basis of a hostile, different, and dangerous civilization.” This view persisted into the dawn of modernity, when Petrarch praised the Christian West as “the bastion of civilization against the East” and John Milton compared the Ottoman ruler, “anxious to conquer Christendom,” with Satan (pp. 32–33). This negative view largely prevailed during the Enlightenment, with Diderot dismissing the Koran as “absurd, obscure, and dishonest” (p. 36). The treatment of Oriental societies as marked by “despotism” was a common tenor of political philosophers from Marsilius and Machiavelli to Jean Bodin and John Locke (pp. 54–57). Only occasionally were dissenting opinions voiced. Thus, “anticipating some present-day arguments,” the French historian Anquetil-Duperron argued that Oriental despotism was “an imaginary and phantasmatically pure power,” a cautionary fiction used “to justify European colonial rule, particularly British rule in India” (p. 64). Congruent with his introductory statements, Curtis rejects this dissenting view stating (pp. 67–68) that “the ‘Orient’ was a reality, not a fiction devised by the West” and that “Oriental despotism was not a fantasy but, rather, a style of politics and society embodying certain characteristics, such as arbitrary autocracy, opulence, and lack of political and economic development.” On the basis of the surveyed historical materials, it is “reasonable” to conclude (p. 71) that “the concept of Oriental despotism is not an arbitrary exegesis, the result of prejudiced observation, having little relation to Eastern systems, but rather reflects perceptions of real processes and behavior in those systems.”

In subsequent chapters, Curtis presents in succession the views of the selected European thinkers—an account whose details vastly exceed the limits of this review. Summarily one can say (as Curtis does, p. 305), that “all the writers criticized the lack of individual freedom in Oriental governments and societies,” deploring above all “the absence of Western features such as free association, considerable self-governance, representative bodies, political pluralism,” and so on. Among the chosen writers, Montesquieu was somewhat ambivalent, due to his general attentiveness to local and regional differences; nevertheless, recognition of the “arbitrary and excessive power” in the Orient strengthened his argument for a “separation of powers in European political systems.” To some extent, ambivalence was shared by Edmund Burke: While regarding “Oriental despotism as abhorrent,” he also objected to the quasi-dictatorial rule of Warren Hastings in India. Although generally in favor of democracy, Tocqueville “depicted Algeria as backward and chaotic as a result of long years of despotic rule by the Turks.” Whereas Jeremy Bentham regarded colonies as generally disadvantageous to the mother country, both James Mill and John Stuart Mill supported proposals for a kind of “benevolent control” by Britain to prepare Indians for independence (p. 306). In Curtis's account, both Marx and Max Weber chose a developmental scheme in assessing the Orient. Basically (p. 307), both sought to answer the question of “why capitalism had developed in the West but not in the East.” While Marx saw the perpetuation of despotism as “the cause and the consequence” of the inability of the Orient to develop, Weber traced the origin of Oriental despotism to Islamic fatalism, adherence to “patrimonial” traditions, and “state control over public works.”

Without doubt, the main strength of the study is its historical erudition and its attention to subtle nuances of emphasis. Critical queries will inevitably be raised from many quarters. Historians may want to challenge some aspects of the Burke-Hastings narrative, and also some features ascribed to the Ottoman Empire. Students of comparative political theory may complain about the neglect of prominent studies on Oriental despotism, such as those by Wittfogel (mentioned earlier) and Patricia Springborg (Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince, 1992). Missing is also a reference to Roxanne Euben's well-known Journeys to the Other Shore (2006). More important, however, are the book's political overtones—which emerge even more plainly in its concluding pages. In spite of the history of “Ottoman dominance” over the Middle East and parts of Europe, Curtis writes (pp. 300–4) that “some critics of Western behavior portray the Orient as if it were the constant victim of Western imperialism. Current Islamic militant groups have adopted this false view” (a view aided and abetted by the “controversial concept of multiculturalism”). What critics of this kind tend to forget is “the historical reality,” namely, “the constant threat to Europe from Islam since its advent.” Regrettably, postcolonial contemporary writing appears “less interested in this reality and in valid empirical evidence of the relationship between East and West during a millennium, than in emphasizing a colonial or imperialist attitude of the West during the last two centuries.” In particular, what is neglected by “doctrinaire critics of Western policies” is “the almost constant hostility and warfare, mostly the result of Islamic aggression, interrupted by intermittent periods of peace between European and Islamic countries during an era of a thousand years.”

In light of these and related comments, one is bound to wonder about the book's broader effect. Is it likely to lead to more peaceful relations between the West and Islam, or is it going to strengthen widespread symptoms of both Islamophobia and Western-phobia? Is it likely to encourage or impede efforts aiming at reform and democratization? Even while admiring the book's historical scholarship, the reader is prone to finish it with a sense of unease.