On Lefebvre's orientalism and geography's Eurocentrism in Sidaway's ‘critical Muslim geographies’

Abstract

This commentary picks up on how James Sidaway sets up his ‘critical Muslim geographies’ through a selective reading and critique of Western geography's Eurocentrism. It traces how Isaiah Bowman, Henri Lefebvre, and Neil Smith are used for this purpose, and then homes in on Sidaway's reading of Lefebvre's flippant Orientalism and elision of tier-mondism, suggesting that fuller investigation of this scene is warranted.

James Sidaway's (2023: 337, 352) article makes ‘selected decolonial moves’ to help forge ‘critical Muslim geographies’. His chief move is to question – ‘decolonise’ – three extant literatures on Muslim geographies with their essentialisation as a geography of religion being a key gripe. My quarry here is with a preparatory – historicising – move that Sidaway makes at the start of the article by going back to the discipline's incomplete attempt since the 1970s to grapple with its own Eurocentrism and, in the still redolent words of David Slater (1992), to ‘learn from the periphery’ (cited Sidaway, 2023: 337). Sidaway suggests that this issue continues to ‘haunt’ the discipline, and his gambit in this regard is to pair and critique the American geographer Isaiah Bowman and French Marxist thinker Henri Lefebvre. Can one think of any stranger bedfellows: Bowman, a key architect of what Neil Smith (1984: 70) terms ‘the old political geography’ (concerned with state boundaries, territorial expansion, and geopolitical spheres of influence, and thus questions of nationalism, empire, and race), and Lefebvre, the radical spatial and urban thinker who left a deep and lasting impression on the shape and direction of a ‘new’ critical (especially Marxist and postmodern) geography.

Moreover, the two are coupled via Neil Smith's (2003) fastidious biography of Bowman and theoretical approbation of Lefebvre, and more particularly through the way Smith apparently misses how these two towering and very different influences on geography operated on the same Orientalist playing field. In other words, the pairing of Bowman and Lefebvre is not so odd after all. Is taking Smith's interest in both unawares in this fashion meant to jolt radical, critical, postcolonial, and decolonial geographies – four strands of ‘critical geography’ to which figures such as Lefebvre and Smith have been integral (albeit strands with different genealogies that need to be untangled, and with Sidaway doing little of this himself) – out of complacency, and with Sidaway poking at some previously well-historicised lines between a conventional/imperial geography (Bowman) and critical/progressive geography (Lefebvre/of the four geographies variety). Sidaway does not say if this is his intent – hence the need for commentary! – but the implication in using Smith in this way is that this is the case.

It can – surely? – be suggested, as Sidaway does, that geography's ‘decolonising’ energies have largely occluded and abridged Muslim geographies, and the charge that Bowman and Lefebvre belong on the same Orientalist page should not be toned down. However, Sidaway might have said more about why Bowman and Lefebvre are his chosen pair and whether the Orientalist and Eurocentric connection made between them via Smith is meant to work as a critique of geography in toto.

Sidaway (2023) deems Lefebvre's Orientalist asides in his 1974 La production de l’espace (The Production of Space, 1991) as outlandish and anachronistic – as underscoring the Eurocentric blinkers and racialised boundaries of Western theory and scholarship (and not solely within geography), and, concomitantly, as skewing Lefebvre's engagement with the tier-mondism (revolutionary fervour and internationalism) of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Lefebvre's work has, for sure, influenced critical scholarship on Arab and Muslim cities and urban space (e.g. Rashid, 2021), his magnum opus contains some curt – and in some ways distinctly French (see Hartley, 2023) – Orientalist tropes, and I wholeheartedly agree with Sidaway (2023: 339) that ‘we cannot continue to elide or downplay Lefebvre's discussions of Islam’. Lefebvre represents Arab and Muslim worlds as quintessentially sensual and lascivious (chiefly on the basis of his understanding of the thirteenth-century Alhambra of Granada) and backward and timeless (as holding back industrialisation and holding on to traditional polities). Sidaway (2023: 339) rightly deems the latter passé in that Lefebvre wrote at a moment (the 1973–1974 oil crisis) when the West was in the thrall of a rapidly industrialising petrostate Middle East (pivoting on organisation of petroleum exporting countries) (see Mukoyama, 2024); and, on the former count, because at this time the West was doubling down on the figure of ‘the fanatical Mohammedan’ rather than the exoticism of The Thousand and One Nights (a problem examined more extensively in Chapter 3 of Edward Said's, 1978 Orientalism). My main suggestion in this commentary is that if this critique of Lefebvre and seeming lacuna in the broader wherewithal of critical geography is, as Sidaway (2023: 353) hopes, to furnish an ‘expanded canvas [that] subverts the spatial and civilizational categories that figures like Bowman and Lefebvre mobilized and that continue to haunt geography’, a broader appraisal of Lefebvre (at least) would be fruitful (we shall need to leave Smith, and the forms and extent of the ‘haunting’, for another day). So, here we go.

Lefebvre's Orientalist proclivities in La production de l’espace amount to just a handful of passages in a nearly 500-page book; and the same applies to his semi-autobiographical Vers une architecture de la jouissance (Lefebvre, 2014a), written around this time but only discovered and published after his death, where he draws fleeting and flippant contrasts (and not least on the basis of personal visits to the Daisen-in temple in Kyoto, Iranian palaces of Isfahan, and the Alhambra in Spain) between a sensual and alluring East and morally austere West where pleasure has gone mouldy and mundane (see below) (Lefebvre, 2014a: 12, 45, and passim). Going farther back, and now to provide hints of a broader and perhaps differently berthed reading, in the first (1947) volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Lefebvre (2014b [1947]: 125–129) takes Gustave Flaubert's Orientalist flâneurism as read but adds to it the following reverie, written in the immediate wake of World War II, in which West and East, the secular and spiritual, mundane and mystical, innocence and corruption, and rural and urban, are both connected and separated (or sliced rather than bounded, if still perhaps hierarchical and overdetermined), much in accordance with Lefebvre's dialectical thinking and outlook:

The country church is small and dark, despite its whitewashed walls. A sickly light filters through the grimy little panes of its narrow windows. Small, dark, mysterious, a bit like a cave. An ambiguous perfume – its familiar side: damp; its strange side: incense – hit the nostrils. The mystical, far-away splendour of the incense penetrates the ordinary smell of must and mould. Already I am inhaling the perfume of the Orient, I want to inhale it despite myself, to identify it. Unalloyed it would be overpowering, but here its mystical appeal is tainted with something mundane. (Lefebvre, 2014b [1947]: 234)

In other words, Lefebvre muddies what elsewhere read as parched and hermetically sealed terrains of Orientalist fantasy and disregard.

The aside and the dream are pivotal to the modern production of marginality and ‘world’ of Orientalist assumption. However, La production de l’espace was just one of numerous books that Lefebvre wrote between 1968 and 1974, and several of them, including L’Irruption de Nanterre au sommet (1968), Manifeste différentialiste (1970), and La révolution urbaine (1970) (translated as The Urban Question in 2003, and for which Smith wrote a Foreword) return repeatedly to the relationality of commodification and colonisation, and thus to links between capital, race, nation, tribe, and religion. Kinkaid and Simonsen (2024: 4) comment that during this period, Lefebvre was concerned with ‘the right to be different … [as] the right not to be classified into categories which have been determined by the necessarily homogenizing powers’. He used colonisation to both highlight and question the racialised boundaries and binaries of European modernity that Sidaway also wants to question. Derek Gregory (1994: 403) urges, ‘For Lefebvre, “colonization” is more than a figure of speech’, and Kinkaid and Simonsen (2024: 5) venture that ‘Fanon's critique of everyday racism strongly resonates with Lefebvre's critique of everyday life’ as beseeching a ‘dialectical critique of racialization as a form of alienation in everyday situations’.

Sidaway (2023: 341) alludes to Lefebvre's broader occlusion of tiers-mondism but says little about it. For sure, Lefebvre responded to the tricontinental guerrilla struggles of the late 1960s by ringfencing the city and emphasising its absorptive (abstracting and corrupting) powers:

[c]an such a [anti-imperialist] strategy assume that the countryside will encircle the city, that peasant guerrillas will lead the assault on urban centers? Today, such a vision or conception of the class struggle on a global scale appears old-fashioned. The revolutionary capacity of the peasantry is not on the rise; it is being reabsorbed, although not consistently. (Lefebvre, 2003 [1970]: 113)

Furthermore, as Michel Trebitsch (2014: 662; also, see Merrifield, 2006) notes:

[t]here is a paradox about Lefebvre in 1968, especially compared with the current silence [regarding him and that]. While his contemporaries – or at least those colleagues most opposed to the student agitation – thought they had discovered in him the deus ex machina of the troubles at Nanterre, Lefebvre was rather invisible during the events, particularly after the month of May, when the main action shifted to Paris. Yet even before 1968 his influence was undeniable.

Tom McDonough (2008: 7) suggests that Lefebvre's own chronicle of events, L’Irruption, links ‘theory and praxis, past and future, the colonies and the metropole, into a kind of provisional history of modern revolt’. The book works as a heterotopic and peripatetic text that unravels modernity's racialised boundaries, and that much in the spirit of May ‘68 ‘refuses to be integrated into the hierarchy’ and reads as ‘the linguistic equivalent of uneven development in the capitalist economy’ (McDonough, 2008: 2).

Lefebvre (cited in McDonough, 2008: 7–10) describes Nanterre as a ‘place of damnation … a ghetto of students and teachers situated in the midst of other ghettos filled with the “abandoned” … [where education was] subject to the compulsions of production, and driven into an extra-urban existence’ – a profoundly agitated site from which to observe ‘a dialectical interaction between marginality and urban centrality’. Damnation refers both to a line of graffiti on the walls of the university – DEBOUT LES DAMNÉS DE NANTERRE! (Arise, you wretched of Nanterre!) – and to Frantz Fanon's 1961 Les damnés de la terre, which was published at the time of Maurice Papon's brutal repression of Algerian protestors in Paris in October 1961. Lefebvre was thinking, in 1968, about the shanty town of the ‘abandoned’ surrounding Nanterre's university buildings that was home to a large and impoverished North African (and especially Algerian, Arab, and Muslim) immigrant population, and in L’Irruption (1968: 104–117) draws connections between immediately lived and distant and older struggles, with the Nanterre ‘ghetto’ connected to the ‘immigrant’ (Algerian, West African, and Vietnamese) Latin Quarter. That Nanterre students travelled to the university by passing through some of the most deprived neighbourhoods of Paris was pivotal to student mobilisation, Lefebvre thought; and when they got to the university, they encountered a second grim reality: that ‘daily life replaces the colonies’: ‘Incapable of maintaining the old imperialism, searching for new tools of domination, and having decided to bank on the home market, capitalist leaders treat daily life as they once treated the colonized territories: massive trading posts (supermarkets and shopping centres) … [a] dual exploitation of the dominated in their capacity as producers and consumers’ (Lefebvre, 2014b [1981]: 702).

While Lefebvre's lectures at Nanterre in 1968 on the ‘the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ ‘provided a vocabulary with which to describe the new forms of alienation and its contestation emerging among the students’, they were subject, McDonough (2008: 7–8) continues, ‘to ever more disruptive interventions by the self-styled enragés of Nanterre, who saw him as an academic “recuperator” of radical theory, and who showed their displeasure by interrupting his lectures with catcalls and well-aimed tomatoes’. In short, while the above readings do not touch explicitly on Muslim geographies (immigrant or otherwise), they intimate that, as Kinkaid and Simonsen (2024: 5) summarise, ‘Lefebvre saw connections between the segregation and the urban struggles of immigrants in the French cities and the imperialism and anti-colonial fights in North Africa’. If critical Muslim geographies are to be wrested from and historicised away from the category of religion, and geared to critiquing the hoary metropolitan racialisation of ‘the Muslim’, then all of this matters (e.g. Dawes, 2021).

Finally: Why, since Lefebvre is invoked, is French radical geography not brought into the story? For a different genealogy of critical Muslim geographies would surely emerge if one started with French geographers’ anti-colonialism and tier-mondism: for example, with Yves Lacoste’s (1966) study of the Muslim Middle Ages scholar Khaldun and his idea of Universal History (Muqaddimah) to think about rational explanation in history and geography, and thus to flag the imperialism/haughtiness (bogus objectivity) of Western geography; or Jean Dresch’s (1979) memoir Un géographe au déclin des empires which recounts his scholarly and political engagement with the 1950s and 60s environmental and social interplay between communism, anti-colonialism, nationalism, and Muslim values and practices in Morrocco (also Heckman, 2021). In other words, Sidaway's judicious but spotty exposure of Lefebvre's airy Orientalist anachronisms could be broadened to encompasses other geographical stories within the story of ‘critical Muslim geographies’.