Nagothu Naresh Kumar
As the refugee crisis simmers in Europe, politicians of all hues and media outlets of various persuasions debate on what comprises European values. In this discourse, the forms these values take might be hostage to debate and intense hand-wringing but not their source. There is a tacit understanding permeating all the camps involved that the values espoused/defended are decidedly Western in origin. This familiar trope of ‘European values’ has had a life of its own that has gradually matured to gain unquestionable authority.
In the prevailing discourse, the centrality of encounters and cross-fertilization of ideas in the very constitution of ‘European/Western’ values and identities is given short shrift. This discourse is a serious blight to how coffee and tea got to be the ‘native drinks’ of England and how more importantly at the ideational level notions of toleration and secularism were products of exchanges rather than emanating out of a particular geographical entity.
Material Culture and the Making of ‘Native’ Drinks
Long before the West undertook the project of ‘discovering’ new lands and treading uncharted territory through courage and risk-taking enterprises, traders traversed the Indian as well as Mediterranean seascapes establishing commercial as well as fiduciary networks complemented by a bevy of financial institutions and instruments that continue to be in use even today. These pre-established routes and mediums of exchange would prove to be the crucial blueprint for European traders to fan out across the globe from the 16th century onwards. The maritime routes that were purportedly ‘discovered’ by the trading class from Britain were tread upon by Arab, Indian and Armenian merchants for centuries. In this new vortex of networks, Britain, and its merchants were neophytes.
The reign of Elizabeth I saw an increase in the probability of an average English person meeting and conversing with a Muslim. It was also her reign that saw the establishment of a spirited relationship with the Islamic World on many fronts. The interdependencies these encounters choreographed led to Muslims petitioning the Queen seeking to fight on her behalf against the Spaniards. The material culture also saw remarkable changes, appropriations, and substitutions. Commodities that were imported from the Islamic lands such as tea, coffee and chocolate began to populate the houses and taverns of England gradually graduating to the status of ‘native drinks’. The equestrian culture of this period as well saw conspicuous changes. As hot-blooded horses from various parts were imported, it gradually signaled the emergence and evolution of equestrian culture that saw the rise of ‘thoroughbreds’ leading to the forging of a national sport.
The need for Indian textiles, which was fueled by better quality and inexpensive tags changed and influenced the English way of life. The centrality of textiles in quotidian life is evident from the debates around calico that animated many a decades from late 17th century to 18th. The belief in high profit and the manifest lucrativeness of this trade saw a quantum jump in the making of textile industries which eventually heralded the industrial revolution.
The social and cultural lives of Europeans, as well as others, thus underwent significant changes due to these interactions. Asia thus came to be a lynchpin in the making of Europe and its myriad identities. More importantly, these influences and interactions were not confined to material aspects but evident at the ideational level too which would gradually come to define and constitute “European values’.
The Forging of ‘European Values.'
For many Britons, Muslim lands were preferable to a Catholic Britain for they were tolerant. For writers of this period, Islam, and the lands it flourished in represented a vast canvas upon which the contingencies of time played out. For many, this represented an opportunity to pick and choose and write about the events in England. Many found similarities between the events that transpired in England in the 17th century and the Ottoman Empire.
Thus, Henry Stubbe’s book written in 1671 makes favorable references to Islam through the lens of tolerance. Mary Montagu’s writings in the epistolary genre, Paul Rykaut’s take on Ottoman Empire present tolerance as the important panacea for an intolerant Catholic England. The bane of intolerance haunting England, they wrote, can be remedied by notions of tolerance taken from Islam in toto.
This Islamic metaphor was widely deployed by writers, pamphleteers, and dramatists of various persuasion. George sale opined that the Prophet Mohammed had initiated ‘reformation’ nine centuries before the advent of the same in Europe in trying to argue persuasively for the successful dissemination of Islam. By the end of the 17th century with England wracked by internecine conflict especially along religious lines, John Locke came up with his essay on toleration. Having studied Arabic at Oxford under Edward Pococke, Locke opined that Protestant Britain and Europe too should develop a tolerant attitude toward people of different faiths, mutatis mutandis, as Islam as done so in the case of non-Muslims. The emergence of this Islamic metaphor was instrumental in the development of the British national and Protestant identity, a narrative that gets blotted from conventional histories, textbooks, and popular discourse.
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s magisterial work ‘A Secular Age’ published in 2007 among other things looked at the trajectory of western secularism over the centuries. Taylor, however, does not take into account the notion that western secularism’s development was deeply contingent on its colonies across the Middle East and other regions. It was in the management and control of colonies that the West came into contact with diverse belief systems. These interactions, in turn, helped forge western secularism.
Politics of Cultural Authenticity
The 19th century heralded an age of nationalism that was well supplemented by an irresistible urge to search and cement people’s origins and distinctiveness. The masking of the viscosity of past interactions stems from a desire to project identities and values as indigenously formed and untainted by any outside contact providing fodder for cultural authenticity that in turn acts as the axle in the wheel of nationalism. The pitfalls of exercises in cultural authenticity thus make it necessary to note that “European values” such as secularism, liberty, equality, etc. are forged out of interactions and encounters.
In the European context, an appreciation of ‘European values’ as products of a remarkable dialectic of ideas and material exchanges rather than singular social achievements means puncturing any essentialist conceptions about regions and embracing a topography of shared histories and future that can go a long way in tempering attitudes towards refugees in contemporary Europe. An understanding that follows from such a viewpoint does not search for or brag about stable, well-polished identities or ideas but appreciates fuzziness and fluidity of identities, as well as the forgotten amalgam of boundary-defying encounters that led to the constitution of European values.
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