The Pitfalls of Development Language in Understanding Culture and Civilisation

Culture and Society

William C. Chittick (Connecticut, United States) is a philosopher, writer, translator and interpreter of classical Islamic philosophical and mystical texts. He is best known for his work on Rumi and Ibn ‘Arabi, and has written extensively on the school of Ibn ‘Arabi, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic cosmology.

The following excerpt is from a talk delivered at a conference on Islamic Culture and Civilisation in Tehran, Iran, February 8, 1994, entitled ¨Toward A Theology Of Development¨

Development language is strewn with pitfalls for anyone who wants to speak about culture and civilisation. What sort of problems arise when we employ the language of development? By “development language”, I mean the well-known words that are current in the United Nations and governmental agencies throughout the world. I quote list of these words from the table of contents of The Development Dictionary, a book that should be required reading for anyone who is not convinced that modern Western society provides the model that all peoples in the world must follow: “development, environment equality, helping, market, needs, one world, participation, planni population, poverty, progress, production, resources, science, socialis standards of living, state, technology.”

Development language is strewn with pitfalls for anyone who wants to speak about culture and civilisation

All these words are part of the sacred vocabulary of the modern world. They share the characteristic of being what has been called “amoeba words.” This is to say that they are constantly changing shape according to the needs of the speaker. They have no denotations but many connotations. They can mean anything their speaker wants them to mean, because in themselves they are empty of meaning. However, these words are sacred. To question their legitimacy is to rebel against the gods of modernity and to become an outcast from the religion of progress.

The authors of The Development Dictionary have analysed the history and changing status of each of these words in detail. Let one make a few remarks about the term “development” itself, even though each of the mentioned terms, and many others that are currently in use, deserves detailed analysis.

First of all, it is perhaps unnecessary to point out that there is no word corresponding to “development” in the traditional Islamic languages, just as the modern meaning of the term only appears in Western languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The use of this word itself, or the redefinition of words in Islamic languages so that they carry its meaning, shows that the idea of development was originally conceptualised by Western thinkers. Moreover, the late date of the term shows that the new meanings given to it were intimately connected with the breakdown of Christian civilisation and the Industrial Revolution.

New meanings given to it were intimately connected with the breakdown of Christian civilisation and the Industrial Revolution.

The moment the word development is employed, especially outside the West, those who employ it have surrendered to the presuppositions of modern Western thought. To speak of development is to acknowledge “underdevelopment”. Hence, it is to accept that programs, modelled on those devised in the “developed” countries, must be put into effect. As Wolfgang Sachs, the editor of The Development Dictionary, puts it, the use of the word has “converted history into a programme: a necessary and inevitable destiny”.

The industrial mode of development has thereby been christened as the one and only legitimate form of social life. “The metaphor of development gave global hegemony to a purely Western genealogy of history, robbing peoples of different cultures of the opportunity to define the forms of their social life”. By speaking of development, Muslims have already given up the idea of understanding their history in Islamic terms, since the term has been drawn from outside the Islamic conceptual universe.

Most people will object that, nevertheless, we need development in our world. But what is development? Any study of the use of the word shows that, like other amoeba words, it has no precise significance. It is what you want it to be. The problem is that, although no one knows exactly what it is, everyone thinks that we must have it. As Gustavo Esteva writes, “The word always implies a favourable change, a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better… But for two-thirds of the people on earth, this positive meaning of the word is a reminder of what they are not. It is a reminder of an undesirable, undignified condition. To escape from it, they need to be enslaved by others’ experiences and dreams”. No one seems to doubt that the concept does not allude to real phenomena. They do not realise that it is a comparative adjective whose base of support is the assumption, very Western but unacceptable and undemonstrable, of the oneness, homogeneity and linear evolution of the world”.

In order for “development” to be conceived of, God had to be forgotten, or at least to be relegated to the background. Since no religion had ever envisaged development as understood in scientific and industrial terms, religious categories either had to be abandoned or redefined to fit the new circumstances. Suddenly, we had to discover that religion, all along, had been encouraging “development” in the modern sense.

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