By mid-March, it became clear to Arab regimes in the Gulf that, despite hosting US military bases, they were not going to be nearly as protected by US anti-missile and anti-drone technology as Israel. One would have expected them to get together and think of other protective options—perhaps something of their own, or in collaboration with non-Western states. Instead, they headed to Ukraine and are currently busy signing deals with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Various factors drove this move, but perhaps the biggest was a white saviour complex. Sections of colonised elites everywhere suffer from this complex, but the Arab regimes are particularly prone to it. Theirs is an ingrained sense of inferiority that has grown over the two centuries when material development and scientific progress came to be associated with white nations alone. The deadly consequence of identifying material progress with the West is that Asian and African elites look to white nations for all material solutions. The deadly recto (or is it verso?) of this can be called a symbolic response.

Take, for instance, Iran, whose anti-colonial response sent Arab regimes—left hapless by white America—scurrying to white Ukraine for material solutions. One can blame Iran for a lot of things but not accuse its ruling class of suffering from the white saviour complex. Except, perhaps, sections of their elite: for instance, the so-called Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the suddenly visible son of the deposed Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah was the son of an ambitious officer who crowned himself Shah, whose own father was a common soldier who received attention for escorting the murderer of a previous Shah of a different dynasty and family altogether to Tehran for execution. Well, Pahlavi has lately been calling for an American invasion of Iran to rescue the Iranians. He will obviously be waiting in safety until a white saviour comes to his people.

In contrast, despite what you might think about them, the current rulers of Iran are not waiting for any white nation to save them. If anything, they are fighting back against two attacking white nations, and a number of tactically subversive ones.

Nevertheless, I would argue, Iran suffers the implicit consequence of identifying material progress with white saviour nations by privileging a symbolic response to the aggression of such nations.

We now know that female literacy is as high in Iran as in the US, that 70 per cent of its STEM graduates are women, and the percentage of working female doctors in Iran is higher than the corresponding figures in the US.

But all of this makes no difference to a whole lot of people because Iran has rules about what women can wear in public and had, until recently, imposed those rules strictly and at times even with violence. In every internet discussion I have followed between those who oppose the illegal attack on Iran and those who justify it, the only real argument on the latter side is this: Iran does not allow its women to wear what they want. You can toss data about female education, employment, and so on at your interlocutor, but he will stay adamant: to him, Iran has an evil regime as it controls, sometimes violently, the attire and hairstyles of its women.

So what you have is a lot of material facts on the one hand: education, empowerment, employment, female health, and so on. And on the other, a symbolic fact: the policed attire of women. Iran has repeatedly opted to fight and make its position known and vulnerable to criticism primarily from symbolic solution-seeking white saviours.

Conservative responses to Western colonialism

In general, of course this has been a common problem with nationalist and conservative responses to Western colonisation and its shadow: neo-imperialism. As the West gained control over material life, the colonised sought refuge in symbolic spheres, often imposing the duty of preserving their real “identity” on their women. This was only a predictable response to sudden change.

A similar pattern is evident even in Western history, although in weaker ways: for instance, the bourgeois Victorian domestic space with its angelic wife-mother was largely the result of a rapidly changing, horribly exploitative world that the middle-class Englishmen of the age entered and enabled outside their homes. In colonised countries, things were much worse. The colonisers did not just attack the colonised people’s economy, but also their cultural, religious, ethnic, and other spheres of life.

Much of Islamic nationalism across nations and some of Hindu nationalism suffers from this problem too: they keep fighting to defend a symbolic feature of themselves and, in the process, either subscribe, consciously or otherwise, to the white saviour complex or allow the white nation to erase all discourse about their other achievements, including material ones.

Had the mullahs in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and India not expended their energies on symbolic matters, the surge of history would have been very different. Of course, mullahs ask Muslim women to dress in a particular way, as all conservatives of all religions do. But when they turn such rules into public policy, they allow white saviour spokespeople a propagandic vantage point against anyone who disagrees or is simply neutral.

This is a complex Janus-faced trick played on colonised countries who have been willingly incorporated into enabling the trick on both sides. In the beginning, the “colonising mission” justified itself by projecting the futures of all colonised nations as mere mimicry of the West. This simultaneously involved a dismissal or reduction of “native” pasts as barbaric, dated, stagnant, undemocratic, and so on. The people of colonised countries were conditioned to look towards white nations to enable their future.

The white saviour complex of Arab regimes remains the most obvious symptom today, but so does the bid of all governments that buy and follow Western “development” models without questioning and looking at national needs, ecologies, or economies. Meanwhile, the people of colonised countries remain conditioned to “defend” themselves and their nations by latching onto real or imagined symbols from the past. These symbols have become the mainstay of establishing native national identity.

It is a fatal combination: it not only prevents these nations from seriously contesting in the real and material realms that can help them gain prominence in the future, but it also bogs them down in fruitless “symbolic” battles that are located in the past, so to say, and not in the urgent present or the promising future.

Perhaps more importantly, the obsession with symbolic identities simultaneously enables Western countries to justify and obscure their material exploitation of other nations and cover up the cross-border bullying they indulge in. Whereas 19th century Britain was looting India while being moved to eradicate the backward practice of Sati, today’s US claims it is bombing Iran to ensure that Iranian women can uncover their hair.

Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.

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