The relatively uncritical adoption of first European and then North America cultural and sociopolitical attitudes and practices on the part of the non-European and non - North American world.
Westernization is sometimes inaccurately equated with modernization, and by extension with modernization theory, a construct very much in vogue in "development" and foreign aid circles between the 1950s and 1970s. In spite of a certain estrangement in the early modern period, and because of its geographical location, the Middle East never entirely lost the contacts that it had had with Europe in the high Middle Ages. However, the Arab, Iranian, and Turkish world did not experience the European humanist Renaissance, or any equivalent of the European Reformation, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had lost most of the preeminence in science and technology that it had enjoyed earlier.
More regular contacts between the West and the Middle East were reestablished at the end of the eighteenth century, partly as a result of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798, although the Ottoman Empire was probably as much if not more affected by the territorial losses inflicted upon it by Austro-Hungarian and Russian military superiority earlier in the century. By this time, the West was clearly "ahead" in economic, material, political, and scientific terms, so that the relationship became one of dependency, by the Middle Eastern "periphery" on the Western "center." Between 1798 and 1914, much of the region became politically subject to Britain and France (and to a lesser extent to Italy, Russia, and Spain), and the areas that were not directly colonized became part of the "informal empire," that is, part of the orbit of the capitalist West.
In the course of the nineteenth century, many of the states in the region, particularly Egypt, Qajar Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and Tunisia, underwent programs of administrative, educational, judicial, and finally constitutional reform. To some extent these programs reflected pressures from Europe and incorporated deliberate borrowings from European models, but they were also responses to widely felt local needs to achieve greater administrative efficiency and consistency, to reduce arbitrariness and despotism, and to introduce concepts of legal equality and citizenship into public life. Thus the Hatt-i Şerif of Gülhane of November 1839, one of the key texts of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, declares that all Ottoman subjects should have complete security for life, honor, and property, and that they shall be taxed and conscripted fairly and equitably, but also that "these imperial concessions extend to all our subjects, of whatever religion or sect they may be."
The extent and speed of the changes that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often introduced considerable confusion into the lives and thought of those involved. For example, the growing secularism of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe has not been easily transposed to the Middle East, with the result that the relationship between Islam and modernity, or the West, has never been satisfactorily worked out. It has proved almost impossible for believing Muslims to apply the same critical-historical methodology to Islamic history as most Christians or Jews would apply to discussions of Christian or Jewish history. At the same time, some Western social attitudes, especially those concerned with consumerism, dress, the consumption of alcohol, and the social mixing of the sexes, have either been vigorously embraced or equally vigorously rejected by Middle Easterners. The Persian author Jalal Al-e Ahmad coined the phrase Gharbzadagi, or "Westoxification" to describe this awkward and often disturbing ambiguity. In general, the notion that the Middle East simply copied everything from the West is too simplistic; the reality is far more complex and nuanced.
Bibliography
Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran between Two Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Anderson, Lisa. The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830 - 1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Deringil, Selim. The Well-Protected Domain. London: I. B. Tauris, 1998.
Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798 - 1939. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Hunter, F. Robert. Egypt under the Khedives, 1805 - 1879. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.
Martin, Vanessa. Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution of1906. London: I. B. Tauris, 1989.
— PETER SLUGLETT
