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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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 Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 11:31 am Post subject: Why the many Islams cannot be simplified - Edward Said |
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I've been meaning for awhile to post something concerning the spattering, here and there , misunderstandings of "Islams" which many of those screaming blood and intolerance support.
They seem to stem 1) from those who have progated simplifications of Muslim culture and history et al, Bernard Lewis and his tripe Judith Miller, Barry Rubin and the infamous Taheri come to mind.
2) from a sensationalized media/hollywood presentation
3) from our own insecurities and lack of tolerance. an ingrained ethnocentrism which drives all cultures
I think much understanding of cultures and religions would be better done by travel and literature rather than reading "good books" and political tete a tetes......Albert Said says as much in his recent destruction of Bernard Lewis' views (the author of What Went Wrong? and Bush/Wolfowitz aged lackie). I can't find an electronic link but would also send you to some of his other works. His fine understanding of pluralism and his more recent condemnation of extremism and calls for understanding and reconcilliation. Still as always, erudite and learned, he calls it as it is. A good example is his very pre 9/11 review, A Devil Theory of Islam posted below..... He says it adroitly, how the West is misinformed by crude and postering academics such as Miller or Lewis....
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| The answer, I think, is that books like Miller's are symptomatic because they are weapons in the contest to subordinate, beat down, compel and defeat any Arab or Muslim resistance to U.S.-Israeli dominance. Moreover, by surreptitiously justifying a policy of single-minded obduracy that links Islamism to a strategically important, oil-rich part of the world, the anti-Islam campaign virtually eliminates the possibility of equal dialogue between Islam and the Arabs, and the West or Israel. |
Also find a summary of his writings and especially look at his essay, "We" know who "We" are http://themargins.net/said.html
Go here for a celebration of his work and an interview with Christopher Lydon...
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/lydon/2003/10/07
I think, as Said says, we'd much better understand through literature. And not just Lawrence of Arabia or Saul Bellow....... (though it is a start.). To understand Israel I'd much rather read Amos Oz (especially Michael) or Yehoshua than the Talmud or Mafouz, Yashar Kemal or Tahu Hussein's Stream of Days than the Koran.
Here is also a recent article of some authors who oppose Israel's present, violent course......http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/749126.html
This is what their most prominent and learned think.....
I'd also recommend Yehoshua's newest book "A Woman in Jerusalem". More to learn about Israel in one page about the bakery owner than all the commentary of politicians......review here at
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/books/review/Messud.t.html?ex=1156305600&en=265f2f31cdecfe25&ei=5070
I was surprised today as I set myself down by the lake to read the paper (Sunday's Star), to find an article by a very erudite man, Haroon Siddiqqi, who I've had the pleasure to eat a few great Italian lunches on King St. E with. A man of few words, he sums up a lot of misunderstandings of "Muslims" and also suggests how the West could win by addressing the real causes of Muslim anger/inequity..... He begins,
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The Muslim malaise
Aug. 20, 2006. 07:03 AM
HAROON SIDDIQUI
He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.
� Prophet Muhammad
Contrary to the popular belief that the West is under siege from Muslim terrorists, it is Muslims who have become the biggest victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001, as inconceivable as that would have seemed in the aftermath of the murder of 2,900 Americans. Since then, between 34,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have been killed by the Americans or the insurgents. Nobody knows how many have been killed in Afghanistan. In the spots hit by terrorists � from London and Madrid to Amman, Istanbul, Riyadh and Jeddah, through Karachi to Bali and Jakarta � more Muslims have been killed and injured than non-Muslims.
None of this is to say that Muslims do not have problems that they must address. They do. But the problems are not quite what many in the West make them out to be. |
read the Muslim Malaise at
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1155937810425
Why do I post all this? Because I'm very disheartened with the level of "hatred" towards Muslims on this board and how simple and crude the arguements are -- for confining, killing, destroying those of "said" culture. Very ethnocentric and uninformed. It is as if we labeled all Americans red necked misogynists and decided to bomb them all oblivion or drive them into the cornfields of Iowa.....
that the govt of the United States is informed and advised by those of this ilk, is just as incredulous or more so.....
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review | posted July 25, 2000 (August 12, 1996 issue)
A Devil Theory of Islam
Edward W. Said
Judith Miller is a New York Times reporter much in evidence on talk shows and seminars on the Middle East. She trades in "the Islamic threat" -- her particular mission has been to advance the millennial thesis that militant Islam is a danger to the West. The search for a post-Soviet foreign devil has come to rest, as it did beginning in the eighth century for European Christendom, on Islam, a religion whose physical proximity and unstilled challenge to the West seem as diabolical and violent now as they did then. Never mind that most Islamic countries today are too poverty-stricken, tyrannical and hopelessly inept militarily as well as scientifically to be much of a threat to anyone except their own citizens; and never mind that the most powerful of them -- like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Pa kistan -- are totally within the U.S. orbit. What matters to "experts" like Miller, Samuel Huntington, Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Steven Emerson and Barry Rubin, plus a whole battery of Israeli academics, is to make sure that the "threat" is kept before our eyes, the better to excoriate Islam for terror, despotism and violence, while assuring themselves profitable consultancies, frequent TV appearances and book contracts. The Islamic threat is made to seem disproportionately fearsome, lending support to the thesis (which is an interesting parallel to anti-Semitic paranoia) that there is a worldwide conspiracy behind every explosion.
Political Islam has generally been a failure wherever it has tried to take state power. Iran is a possible exception, but neither Sudan, already an Islamic state, nor Algeria, riven by the contest between Islamic groups and a brutal soldiery, has done anything but make itself poorer and more marginal on the world stage. Lurking beneath the discourse of Islamic peril in the West is, however, some measure of truth, which is that appeals to Islam among Muslims have fueled resistance (in the style of what Eric Hobsbawm has called primitive, pre-industrial rebellion) to the Pax Americana-Israelica throughout the Middle East. Yet neither Hezbollah nor Hamas has presented a serious obstacle to the ongoing steamroller of the anything-but-peace process. Most Arab Muslims today are too discouraged and humiliated, and also too anesthetized by uncertainty and their incompetent and crude dictatorships, to support anything like a vast Islamic campaign against the West. Besides, the elites are for the most part in cahoots with the regimes, supporting martial law and other extralegal measures against "extremists." So why, then, the accents of alarm and fear in most discussions of Islam? Of course there have been suicide bombings and outrageous acts of terrorism, but have they accomplished anything except to strengthen the hand of Israel and the United States and their client regimes in the Muslim world?
The answer, I think, is that books like Miller's are symptomatic because they are weapons in the contest to subordinate, beat down, compel and defeat any Arab or Muslim resistance to U.S.-Israeli dominance. Moreover, by surreptitiously justifying a policy of single-minded obduracy that links Islamism to a strategically important, oil-rich part of the world, the anti-Islam campaign virtually eliminates the possibility of equal dialogue between Islam and the Arabs, and the West or Israel. To demonize and dehumanize a whole culture on the ground that it is (in Lewis's sneering phrase) enraged at modernity is to turn Muslims into the objects of a therapeutic, punitive attention. I do not want to be misunderstood here: The manipulation of Islam, or for that matter Christianity or Judaism, for retrograde political purposes is catastrophically bad and must be opposed, not just in Saudi Arabia, the West Bank and Gaza, Pakistan, Sudan, Algeria and Tunisia but also in Israel, among the right-wing Christians in Lebanon (for whom Miller shows an unseemly sympathy) and wherever theocratic tendencies appear. And I do not at all believe that all the ills of Muslim countries are due to Zionism and imperialism. But this is very far from saying that Israel and the United States, and their intellectual flacks, have not played a combative, even incendiary role in stigmatizing and heaping invidious abuse on an abstraction called "Islam," deliberately in order to stir up feelings of anger and fear about Islam among Americans and Europeans, who are also enjoined to see in Israel a secular, liberal alternative. Miller says unctuously at the beginning of her book that right-wing Judaism in Israel is "the subject of another book." It is actually very much part of the book that she has written, except that she has willfully suppressed it in order to go after "Islam."
Writing about any other part of the world, Miller would be considered woefully unqualified. She tells us that she has been involved with the Middle East for twenty-five years, yet she has little knowledge of either Arabic or Persian. It would be impossible to be taken seriously as a reporter or expert on Russia, France, Germany or Latin America, perhaps even China or Japan, without knowing the requisite languages, but for "Islam," linguistic knowledge is unnecessary since what one is dealing with is considered to be a psychological deformation, not a "real" culture or religion.
What of her political and historical information? Each of the ten country chapters (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan) begins with an anecdote and moves immediately to a potted history that reflects not much more than the work of a name-dropping college sophomore. Cobbled up out of various, not always reliable authorities (her pages of footnotes are tainted by her ignorance, whether because she can only cite the sources she already knows she wants in English, or because she quotes only authorities whose views correspond to hers, thereby closing out an entire library by Muslims, Arabs and non-Orientalist scholars), these histories are meant principally to display her command of the material, but actually expose her lamentable prejudices and failures of comprehension. In the Saudi Arabia chapter, for instance, she informs us in a note that her "favorite" source on the Prophet Mohammed is the French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson, a redoubtable Marxist scholar whose biography of the Prophet is written with a bracing combination of anti-clerical irony and enormous erudition. What Miller gets from this in her short summary of Mohammed's life and ideas is that there is something inherently risible, if not contemptible, about the man whom Rodinson says was a combination of Charlemagne and Jesus Christ; for whereas Rodinson understands what that means, Miller tells us (irrelevantly) that she is not convinced. For her, Mohammed is the begetter of an anti-Jewish religion, one laced with violence and paranoia. She does not directly quote one Muslim source on Mohammed; just imagine a book published in the United States on Jesus or Moses that makes no use of a single Christian or Judaic authority.
Most of Miller's book is made up not of argument and ideas but of endless interviews with what seems to be a slew of pathetic, unconvincing, self-serving scoundrels and their occasional critics. Once past her little histories we are adrift in boring, unstructured meanderings. Here's a typical sentence of insubstantial generalization: "And Syrians, mindful of their country's chaotic history" (of what country on earth is this not also true?) "found the prospect of a return to anarchy or yet another prolonged, bloody power struggle -- " (is this uniquely true of Syria as a postcolonial state, or is it true of a hundred others in Asia, Africa, Latin America?) "and perhaps even the triumph of militant Islam in the most secular" (with what thermometer did she get that reading?) "of all Arab states -- alarming." Leave aside the abominable diction and jaw-shattering jargon of the writing. What you have is not an idea at all but a series of clich�s mixed with unverifiable assertions that reflect the "thought" of "Syrians" much less than they do Miller's.
Miller gilds her paper-thin descriptions with the phrase "my friend," which she uses to convince her reader that she really knows the people and consequently what she is talking about. I counted 247 uses of the phrase before I stopped about halfway through the book. This technique produces extraordinary distortions in the form of long digressions that testify to an Islamic mindset, even as they obscure or ignore more or at least equally relevant material like local politics, the functioning of secular institutions and the active intellectual contest taking place between Islamists and nationalist opponents. She seems never to have heard of Arkoun, or Jabri, or Tarabishi, or Adonis, or Hanafi or Djeit, whose theses are hotly debated all over the Islamic world. This appalling failure of analysis is especially true in the chapter on Israel (mistitled, since it is all about Palestine), where she ignores the changes caused by the intifada and the prolonged effect of the three-decade Israeli occupation, and conveys no sense of the abominations wrought on the lives of ordinary Palestinians by the Oslo accords and Yasir Arafat's one-man rule. Although Miller is obsessed with Hamas, she is clearly unable to connect it with the sorry state of affairs in territories run brutally by Israel for all these years. She never mentions, for instance, that the only Palestinian university not established with Palestinian funds is Gaza's Islamic (Hamas) University, started by Israel to undermine the P.L.O. during the intifada. She records Mohammed's depredations against the Jews but has little to say about Israeli beliefs, statements and laws against "non-Jews," often rabbinically sanctioned practices of deportation, killing, house demolition, land confiscation, annexation and what Sara Roy has called systematic economic de-development. If in her breathlessly excitable way Miller sprinkles around a few of these facts, nowhere does she accord them the weight and influence as causes of Islamist passion that they undoubtedly have.
Maddeningly, she informs us of everyone's religion -- such and so is Christian, or Muslim Sunni, Muslim Shiite, etc. Even so, she is not always accurate, managing to produce some howlers. She speaks of Hisham Sharabi as a friend but misidentifies him as a Christian; he is Sunni Muslim. Badr el Haj is described as Muslim whereas he is Maronite Christian. These lapses wouldn't be so bad were she not bent on revealing her intimacy with so many people. And then there is her bad faith in not identifying her own religious background or political predilections. Are we meant to assume that her religion (which I don't think is Islam or Hinduism) is irrelevant?
She is embarrassingly forthcoming, however, about her reactions to people and power and certain events. She is "grief-stricken" when King Hussein of Jordan is diagnosed with cancer, although she scarcely seems to mind that he runs a police state whose many victims have been tortured, unfairly imprisoned, done away with. One realizes of course that what counts here is her hobnobbing with the little King, but some accurate sense of the "modern" kingdom he rules would have been in order. Her eyes "filled with tears -- of rage" as she espies evidence of desecration of a Lebanese Christian mosaic, but she doesn't bother to mention other desecrations in Israel -- for example, of Muslim graveyards -- and hundreds of exterminated villages in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine. Her real contempt and disdain come out in passages like the following, in which she imputes thoughts and wishes to a middle-class Syrian woman whose daughter has just become an Islamist:
She would never have any of the things a middle-class Syrian mother yearned for: no grand wedding party and traditional white dress with diamond tiara for her daughter, no silver-framed photos of the happy wedding couple in tuxedo and bridal gown on the coffee table and fireplace mantel, no belly dancers wriggling on a stage and champagne that flowed till dawn. Perhaps Nadine's friends, too, had daughters or sons who had rejected them, who secretly despised them for the compromises they had made to win the favor of Assad's cruel and soulless regime. For if the daughter of such pillars of the Damascene bourgeoisie could succumb to the power of Islam, who was immune?
Such snide accounts trivialize and cheapen the people whose houses and privacy she has invaded.
Given her willingness to undercut even her friendly sources, the most interesting question about Miller's book is why she wrote it at all. Certainly not out of affection. Consider, for instance, that she admits she fears and dislikes Lebanon, hates Syria, laughs at Libya, dismisses Sudan, feels sorry for and a little alarmed by Egypt and is repulsed by Saudi Arabia. She is relentlessly concerned only with the dangers of organized Islamic militancy, which I would hazard a guess accounts for less than 5 percent of the billion-strong Islamic world. She supports the violent suppression of Islamists (but not torture and other "illegal means" used in that suppression; she misses the contradiction in her position), has no qualms about the absence of democratic practices or legal procedures in Palestine, Egypt or Jordan so long as Islamists are the target and, in one especially nauseating scene, she actually participates in the prison interrogation of an alleged Muslim terrorist by Israeli policemen, whose systematic use of torture and other questionable procedures (undercover assassinations, middle-of-the-night arrests, house demolitions) she politely overlooks as she gets to ask the handcuffed man a few questions of her own.
Perhaps Miller's most consistent failing as a journalist is that she only makes connections and offers analyses of matters that suit her thesis about the militant, hateful quality of the Arab world. I have little quarrel with the general view that the Arab world is in a dreadful state, and have said so repeatedly for the past three decades. But she barely registers the existence of a determined anti-Arab and anti-Islamic U.S. policy. She plays fast and loose with fact. Take Lebanon: She refers to Bashir Gemayel's assassination in 1982 and gives the impression that he was elected by a popular landslide. She does not even allude to the fact that he was brought to power while the Israeli army was in West Beirut, just before the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres, and that for years, according to Israeli sources like Uri Lubrani, Gemayel was the Mossad's man in Lebanon. That he was a self-proclaimed killer and a thug is also finessed, as is the fact that Lebanon's current power structure is chock-full of people like Elie Hobeika, who was charged directly for the camp massacres. Miller cites instances of Arab anti-Semitism but doesn't even touch on the matter of Israeli leaders like Begin, Shamir, Eitan and, more recently, Ehud Barak (idolized by Amy Wilentz in The New Yorker) referring to Palestinians as two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, cockroaches and mosquitoes. These leaders have used planes and tanks to treat Palestinians accordingly. As for the facts of Israel's wars against civilians -- the protracted, consistent and systematic campaign against prisoners of war and refugee camp dwellers, the village destructions and bombings of hospitals and schools, the deliberate creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees -- all these are buried in reams of prattle. Miller disdains facts; she prefers quoting interminable talk as a way of turning Arabs into deserving victims of Israeli terror and U.S. support of it. She perfectly exemplifies The New York Times's current Middle East coverage, now at its lowest ebb.
In her lame conclusion Miller admits that her scolding may have been a little too harsh. She then puts it all down to her "love" of the region and its people. I cannot honestly think of a thing that she loves: not the conformism of Arab society she talks about, or the ostentatious culinary display she says that the Arabs confuse with hospitality, or the languages she hasn't learned, or the people she makes fun of or the history and culture of a place that to her is one long tale of unintelligible sound and fury. She cannot enter into the life of the place, listen to its conversations directly, read its novels and plays on her own (as opposed to making friends with their authors), enjoy the energy and refinements of its social life or see its landscapes. But this is the price of being a Times reporter in an age of sullen "expertise" and instant position-taking. You wouldn't know from Miller's book that there is any inter-Arab conflict in interpretations and representations of the Middle East and Islam and that, given her choice of sources, she is deeply partisan: an enemy of Arab nationalism, which she declares dead numerous times in the book; a supporter of U.S. policy; and a committed foe of any Palestinian nationalism that doesn't conform to the bantustans being set up according to the Oslo accords. Miller, in short, is a shallow, opinionated journalist whose gigantic book is too long for what it ends up saying, and far too short on reflection, considered analysis, structure and facts. Poor Muslims and Arabs who may have trusted her; they should have known better than to mistake an insinuated guest for a friend.
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DD |
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bucheon bum
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 11:44 am Post subject: |
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judith miller's credibility has been shot for awhile now.
but yes, there is a lot of ignorance on this board about muslims and Islam in general. |
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Mastaoos69
Joined: 14 Jun 2006
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 5:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Bravo bravo |
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tiger fancini
Joined: 21 Mar 2006
Location: Testicles for Eyes
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 6:39 pm Post subject: Re: Why the many Islams cannot be simplified - Edward Said |
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| ddeubel wrote: |
I'm very disheartened with the level of "hatred" towards Muslims on this board and how simple and crude the arguements are -- for confining, killing, destroying those of "said" culture. Very ethnocentric and uninformed.
DD |
The really annoying thing is that if you try and reason with this line of thinking, you are accused of supporting terrorism. People, ignorant people, can't make the distinction between Muslims and terrorists  Thank you for posting this. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 8:05 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks DD, some reasoning to oppose the hysteria is always welcome.
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Orientalism is a 1978 study by Edward Said that marks the beginning of post-colonial studies. In Orientalism, Said describes a Western system of thought and cultural production that defined much of the Western ideas about the Orient, particularly Islam and the Middle East. Through unmasking the superstructure behind scholarly, literary, and political texts for 18th and 19th century Britain and France and 20th century America, Said shows that the "Orient" has very little relationship to lives of Middle Eastern and Islamic culture but shows Western sense of superiority and its definition of the self and the Other. |
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"My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient�s difference with its weakness. . . . As a cultural apparatus Orientalism is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge" (Orientalism, p. 204).
Making a point that many have missed, Said wrote:
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_%28book%29 |
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Mitch Comestein
Joined: 13 Jun 2006
Location: South
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 8:58 pm Post subject: Re: Why the many Islams cannot be simplified - Edward Said |
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| tiger fancini wrote: |
| The really annoying thing is that if you try and reason with this line of thinking, you are accused of supporting terrorism. |
What is equally sad is that if you condemn terrorists, you are instantly accused of being a religionist bigot supporting the extinction of all Muslims.
| tiger fancini wrote: |
| People, ignorant people, can't make the distinction between Muslims and terrorists |
You are correct. |
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sundubuman
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: seoul
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 10:11 pm Post subject: |
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I think I can agree with Said's point generally while still holding these opinions:
A) For the most part, Arab dislike of Israel transcends criticism and in many ways invalidates itself by doing so. For example, to applaud Hezbollah's actions in general while harshly criticisizing Israel's response doesn't bespeak and attitude that is willing to deal with Israel once 'Arab greivances' are addressed.
B) The revelation of Islam is problematic in two ways in which the revelation of Christianity and Judaism aren't:
1. The revelation of Islam was violent and predicated and inextricably bound up with military conquest. Islamic leaders have therefore had more interest in militarizing their religion
2. The revelation of Islam, via the Koran, was delivered straight by the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed. Thus, the Koran is absolutely the word of god. This makes reformation well nigh impossible considering that in the Christian canon, the NT was a written and compiled account of Christ, himself an intermediate between God and man (his sacrifice as a God to man is an explicit recgonition of a 'communication/revelation divide'), and yet in Christianity bloody wars were still fought during the time of their reformation.
C) The criticism Edward Said levels against the West (particularly in Orientalism) may be applied back onto Islam. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies is a good counterpart to Orientalism. |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2006 11:36 pm Post subject: |
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Here's a link to a NYT article appearing today on how Pakistani communities in the US have been more effectively integrated thatn those in Britain. It may be of some interest to people in this discusion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/us/21devon.html?ex=1156392000&en=d25c7225c8ec069c&ei=5087%0A
The neighborhood they look at in Chicago (Devon Ave in West Ridge) is around where I used to live. Devon Ave is an amazing festival of diversity and tolerance. My frequent visits there may go part away in explaining my lack of fear of Islam. |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2006 8:42 am Post subject: |
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Woland,
I will read the article. Sounds like something that needs to be noted -- many, many integrated communities and even in France, Britain. Always the brown spots get shown and we need more dialogue, more exposure of all the communities that do foster understanding and a wider sense of community.
It does work both ways and I am glad "Occidentalism" was mentioned. It is not a yes/no issue in any sense but it can be said with confidence that Islam is not about "only" violence" , Jihad, fanaticism and world domination, isolation...... ...... The works of Said and many others , deal with this point adroitly and also point us to ways to see past these quick tempered and simple , ignorant assertions.
I won't again post more arguement here.........people will find what they want but the reality of millions have been driven into the arms of religion rather than religion creating the conflicts. We'd do well to be aware of this point and do what we can to correct it. Understanding is a start, understanding of the diversity, the social conditions, the history of all Muslim communities.....
I finally found an electronic version of Said's very devastating rebuttal and destruction of Bernard Lewis' writings/posturings. That he had the keys to the White House is even more appalling. Said says much that we should commend in this article. He ends with words, a question that those like Gopher and all others concerned about America's leadership role in the world should hear;
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| Above all, "we" cannot go on pretending that "we" live in a world of our own; certainly, as Americans, our government is deployed literally all over the globe�militarily, politically, economically. So why do we suppose that what we say and do is neutral, when in fact it is full of consequences for the rest of the human race? In our encounters with other cultures and religions, therefore, it would seem that the best way to proceed is not to think like governments or armies or corporations but rather to remember and act on the individual experiences that really shape our lives and those of others. To think humanistically and concretely rather than formulaically and abstractly, it is always best to read literature capable of dispelling the ideological fogs that so often obscure people from each other. Avoid the trots and the manuals, give a wide berth to security experts and formulators of the us-versus-them dogma, and, above all, look with the deepest suspicion on anyone who wants to tell you the real truth about Islam and terrorism, fundamentalism, militancy, fanaticism, etc. You�d have heard it all before, anyway, and even if you hadn�t, you could predict its claims. Why not look for the expression of different kinds of human experience instead, and leave those great non-subjects to the experts, their think tanks, government departments, and policy intellectuals, who get us into one unsuccessful and wasteful war after the other? |
Edward Said, "Impossible Histories: Why the Many Islams Cannot be Simplified," Harper's, July 2002
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Discussed in this essay:
Islam: A Short History, by Karen Armstrong. Modern Library, 2000. 222 pages. $19.95.
What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, by Bernard Lewis. Oxford University Press, 2002. 180 pages. $23.
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The history of trying to come to terms with this somewhat fictionalized (or at least constructed) Islam in Europe and later in the United States has always been marked by crisis and conflict, rather than by calm, mutual exchange. There is the added factor now of commercial publishing, ever on the lookout for a quick bestseller by some adept expert that will tell us all we need to know about Islam, its problems, dangers, and prospects. In my book Orientalism, I argued that the original reason for European attempts to deal with Islam as if it were one giant entity was polemical�that is, Islam was considered a threat to Christian Europe and had to be fixed ideologically, the way Dante fixes Muhammad in one of the lower circles of hell. Later, as the European empires developed over time, knowledge of Islam was associated with control, with power, with the need to understand the "mind" and ultimate nature of a rebellious and somehow resistant culture as a way of dealing administratively with an alien being at the heart of the expanding empires, especially those of Britain and France.
During the Cold War, as the United States vied with the Soviet Union for dominance, Islam quickly became a national-security concern in America, though until the Iranian revolution (and even after it, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) the United States followed a path of encouraging and actually supporting Islamic political groups, which by definition were also anti-Communist and tended to be useful in opposing radical nationalist movements supported by the Soviets. After the Cold War ended and the United States became the "world's only superpower," it soon became evident that in the search for new world-scale, outside enemies, Islam was a prime candidate, thus quickly reviving all the old religiously based clich�s about violent, antimodernist, and monolithic Islam. These clich�s were useful to Israel and its political and academic supporters in the United States, particularly because of the emergence of Islamic resistance movements to Israel's military occupation of the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. Suddenly a rush of what appeared to be respectably expert material spouted up in the periodical press, most of it purporting to link "Islam" as a whole to such absurdly reductive passions as rage, antimodernism, anti-Americanism, antirationalism, violence, and terror. Quite unsurprisingly, when Samuel Huntington's vastly overrated article on the clash of civilizations appeared in 1993, the core of its belligerent (and dishearteningly ignorant) thesis was the battle between the "West" and "Islam" (which he sagely warned would become even more dangerous when it was allied with Confucianism).
What wasn't immediately noted at the time was how Huntington's title and theme were borrowed from a phrase in an essay, written in 1990 by an energetically self-repeating and self-winding British academic, entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage." Its author, Bernard Lewis, made his name forty years ago as an expert on modern Turkey, but came to the United States in the mid-seventies and was quickly drafted into service as a Cold Warrior, applying his traditional Orientalist training to larger and larger questions, which had as their immediate aim an ideological portrait of "Islam" and the Arabs that suited dominant pro-imperial and pro-Zionist strands in U.S. foreign policy. It should be noted that Orientalist learning itself was premised on the silence of the native, who was to be represented by an Occidental expert speaking ex cathedra on the native's behalf, presenting that unfortunate creature as an undeveloped, deficient, and uncivilized being who couldn't represent himself. But just as it has now become inappropriate for white scholars to speak on behalf of "Negroes," it has, since the end of classical European colonialism, stopped being fashionable or even acceptable to pontificate about the Oriental's (i.e., the Muslim's, or the Indian's, or the Japanese's) "mentality."
Except for anachronisms like Lewis. In a stream of repetitious, tartly phrased books and articles that resolutely ignored any of the recent advances of knowledge in anthropology, history, social theory, and cultural studies, he persisted in such "philological" tricks as deriving an aspect of the predilection in contemporary Arab Islam for revolutionary violence from Bedouin descriptions of a camel rising. For the reader, however, there was no surprise, no discovery to be made from anything Lewis wrote, since it all added up in his view to confirmations of the Islamic tendency to violence, anger, antimodernism, as well as Islam's (and especially the Arabs') closed-mindedness, its fondness for slavery, Muslims' inability to be concerned with anything but themselves, and the like. From his perch at Princeton (he is now retired and in his late eighties but still tirelessly pounds out polemical tracts), he seems unaffected by new ideas or insights, even though among most Middle East experts his work has been both bypassed and discredited by the many recent advances in knowledge about particular forms of Islamic experience.
With his veneer of English sophistication and perfect readiness never to doubt what he is saying, Lewis has been an appropriate participant in post-September discussion, rehashing his crude simplifications in The New Yorker and the National Review, as well as on the Charlie Rose show. His jowly presence seems to delight his interlocutors and editors, and his trenchant, if wildly unprovable, anecdotes of Islamic backwardness and antimodernism are eagerly received. His view of history is a crudely Darwinian one in which powers and cultures vie for dominance, some rising, some sinking. Lewis's notions (they are scarcely ideas) seem also to have a vague Spenglerian cast to them, but he hasn't got any of Spengler's philosophic ambition or scope. There isn't much left to what Lewis says, therefore, than that cultures can be measured in their most appallingly simplified terms (my culture is stronger�i.e., has better trains, guns, symphony orchestras�than yours). For obvious reasons, then, his last book, What Went Wrong? which was written before but published after September 11, has been faring well on the bestseller lists. It fills a need felt by many Americans: to have it confirmed for them why "Islam" attacked them so violently and so wantonly on September 11, and why what is "wrong" with Islam deserves unrelieved opprobrium and revulsion. The book's real theme, however, is what went wrong with Lewis himself: an actual, rather than a fabricated subject.
For the book is in fact an intellectual and moral disaster, the terribly faded rasp of a pretentious academic voice, completely removed from any direct experience of Islam, rehashing and recycling tired Orientalist half (or less than half) truths. Remember that Lewis claims to be discussing all of "Islam," not just the mad militants of Afghanistan or Egypt or Iran. All of Islam. He tries to argue that it all went "wrong," as if the whole thing�people, languages, cultures�could really be pronounced upon categorically by a godlike creature who seems never to have experienced a single living human Muslim (except for a small handful of Turkish authors), as if history were a simple matter of right as defined by power, or wrong, by not having it. One can almost hear him saying, over a gin and tonic, "You know, old chap, those wogs never really got it right, did they?"
But it's really worse than that. With few exceptions, all of Lewis's footnotes and concrete sources (that is, on the rare occasion when he actually refers to something concrete that one could look up and read for oneself) are Turkish. All of them, except for a smattering of Arabic and European sources. How this allows him to imply that his descriptions have relevance, for instance, to all twenty-plus Arab countries, or to Indonesia or Pakistan or Morocco, or to the 30 million Chinese Muslims, all of them integral parts of Islam, is never discussed; and indeed, Lewis never mentions these groups as he bangs on about Islam's tendency to do this, that, or the other, backed by a tiny group of Turkish sources.
Although it is true that he protects himself at first by saying that his polemic "especially but not exclusively" concerns an area he vaguely calls the Middle East, he throws restraint to the winds in all of what follows. Announcing portentously that Muslims have "for a long time" been asking "what went wrong?" he then proceeds to tell us what they say and mean, rarely citing a single name, episode, or period except in the most general way. One would never allow an undergraduate to write so casually as he does that, during the nineteenth century, Muslims were "concerned" about the art of warfare, or that in the twentieth "it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed gone badly wrong." How he impresses nonexpert Americans with generalities that would never pass in any other field or for any other religion, country, or people is a sign of how degraded general knowledge is about the worlds of Islam, and how unscrupulously Lewis trades on that ignorance�feeds it, in fact. That any sensible reader could accept such nonsensical sentences as these (I choose them at random) defies common sense:
For the whole of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century the search for the hidden talisman [an invention of Lewis's, this is the supposed Muslim predilection for trying to find a simple key to "Western" power] concentrated on two aspects of the West�economics and politics, or to put it differently, wealth and power.
And what proof is offered of this 200-year "search," which occupied the whole of Islam? One statement, made at the start of the nineteenth century, by the Ottoman ambassador in Paris.
Or consider this equally precise and elegant generalization:
During the 1930s, Italy and then, far more, Germany offered new ideological and political models, with the added attraction of being opposed to the Western powers. [Never mind the dangling "being opposed"�Lewis doesn't bother to tell us to whom the models were offered, in what way, and with what evidence. He trudges on anyway.] These won widespread support, and even after their military defeat in World War II, they continued to serve as unavowed models in both ideology and statecraft.
Mercifully, since they are "unavowed models," one doesn't need to offer any proof of their existence as models. Naturally Lewis offers none.
Or consider, even more sublime, this nugget, which is intended to prove that even when they translated books from European languages, the wretched Muslims didn't do it seriously or well. Note the brilliant preamble: "A translation requires a translator, and a translator has to know both languages, the language from which he is translating and the language into which he is translating." (It is difficult for me to believe that Lewis was awake when he wrote this peculiarly acute tautology�or is it only a piercingly clever truism?)
Such knowledge, strange as it may seem, was extremely rare in the Middle East until comparatively late. There were very few [sic] Muslims who knew any Christian language; it was considered unnecessary, even to some extent demeaning. For interpreters, when needed for commerce, diplomacy, or war, they relied first on refugees and renegades from Europe and then, when the supply of these dried up, on Levantines. Both groups lacked either the interest or the capacity to do literary translations into Middle-Eastern languages.
And that is it: no evidence, no names, no demonstration or concrete documentation of all these Middle Eastern and Muslim incapacities. To Lewis, what he writes about "Islam" is all so self-evident that it allows him to bypass normal conventions of intellectual discourse, including proof.
When Lewis's book was reviewed in the New York Times by no less an intellectual luminary than Yale's Paul Kennedy, there was only uncritical praise, as if to suggest that the canons of historical evidence should be suspended where "Islam" is the subject. Kennedy was particularly impressed with Lewis's assertion, in an almost totally irrelevant chapter on "Aspects of Cultural Change," that alone of all the cultures of the world Islam has taken no interest in Western music. Quite without any justification at all, Kennedy then lurched on to lament the fact that Middle Easterners had deprived themselves even of Mozart! For that indeed is what Lewis suggests (though he doesn't mention Mozart). Except for Turkey and Israel, "Western art music," he categorically states, "falls on deaf ears" in the Islamic world.
Now, as it happens, this is something I know quite a bit about, but it would take some direct experience or a moment or two of actual life in the Muslim world to realize that what Lewis says is a total falsehood, betraying the fact that he hasn't set foot in or spent any significant time in Arab countries. Several major Arab capitals have very good conservatories of Western music: Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, Amman�even Ramallah on the West Bank. These have produced literally thousands of excellent Western-style musicians who have staffed the numerous symphony orchestras and opera companies that play to sold-out auditoriums all over the Arab world. There are numerous festivals of Western music there, too, and in the case of Cairo (where I spent a great deal of my early life more than fifty years ago) they are excellent places to learn about, listen to, and see Western instrumental and vocal music performed at quite high levels of skill. The Cairo Opera House has pioneered the performance of opera in Arabic, and in fact I own a commercial CD of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro sung most competently in Arabic. I am a decent pianist and have played, studied, written about, and practiced that wonderful instrument all of my life; the significant part of my musical education was received in Cairo from Arab teachers, who first inspired a love and knowledge of Western music (and, yes, of Mozart) that has never left me. In addition, I should also mention that for the past three years I have been associated with Daniel Barenboim in sponsoring a group of young Arab and Israeli musicians to come together for three weeks in the summer to perform orchestral and chamber music under Barenboim (and in 1999 with Yo-Yo Ma) at an elevated, international level. All of the young Arabs received their training in Arab conservatories. How could Barenboim and I have staffed the West-Ostlicher Diwan workshop, as it is called, if Western music had fallen on such deaf Muslim ears? Besides, why should Lewis and Kennedy use the supposed absence of Western music as a club to beat "Islam" with anyway? Isn't there an enormously rich panoply of Islamic musics to take account of instead of indulging in this ludicrous browbeating?
I have gone into all this detail to give a sense of the unrelieved rubbish of which Lewis's book is made up. That it should fool even so otherwise alert and critical an historian as Paul Kennedy is an indication not only of how low most people's expectations are when it comes to discussions of "Islam" but of the mischievous ideological fictions that pseudo-experts like Bernard Lewis trade in, and with which they hoodwink nonexperts in the aftermath of September 11. Instead of making it possible for people to educate themselves in how complex and intertwined all cultures and religions really are, available public discourse is polluted with reductive clich�s that Lewis bandies about without a trace of skepticism or rigor. The worst part of this method is that it systematically dehumanizes peoples and turns them into a collection of abstract slogans for purposes of aggressive mobilization and bellicosity. This is not at all a matter of rational understanding. The study of other cultures is a humanistic, not a strategic or security, pursuit: Lewis mutilates the effort itself and pretends to be delivering truths from on high. In fact, as even the most cursory reading of his book shows, he succeeds only in turning Muslims into an enemy people, to be regarded collectively with contempt and scorn. That this has to do neither with knowledge nor with understanding is enough to dismiss his work as a debased effort to push unsuspecting readers toward thinking of "Islam" as something to judge harshly, to dislike, and therefore to be on guard against.
Karen Armstrong is the other best-selling author tossed up by the mass anxiety so well traded on by the media in recent months. Like Lewis, she wrote her book long before the September events, but her publishers have pushed it forward as an answer to the problem of our times. I wish I could say more enthusiastically that in its modest way it is a useful book, but, alas, for too much of the time it�s too humdrum for that. Yet her intentions seem decent enough. Most of the book is potted history that chronicles events since Muhammad�s birth without much insight or particularly fresh knowledge. The reader would get as much out of a good encyclopedia article on "Islam" as from Armstrong, who seems to be a very industrious if not especially knowledgeable author. Her Arabic is frequently flawed ("madrasahs" for mada�ris, for example), her narrative often muddy, and, above all, one reads her prose without much sense of excitement. It is all very dutiful and, like Lewis�s book, too frequently suggests great distance and dehumanization rather than closeness to the experience of Islam in all its tremendous variety.
Unlike Lewis, however, she is interested in concrete aspects of Islamic religious life, and there she is worth reading. Her book�s most valuable section is that in which she discusses the varieties of modern fundamentalism without the usual invidious focus on Islam. And rather than seeing it only as a negative phenomenon, she has an admirable gift for understanding fundamentalism from within, as adherence to a faith that is threatened by a strong secular authoritarianism. As an almost doctrinaire secularist myself, I nevertheless found myself swayed by her sympathetic and persuasive argument in this section, and wished that instead of being hobbled by a rigid chronological approach she had allowed herself to wander among aspects of the spiritual life of Islam that, as a former nun, she has obviously found congenial.
Of course one can learn about and understand Islam, but not in general and not, as far too many of our expert authors propose, in so unsituated a way. To understand anything about human history, it is necessary to see it from the point of view of those who made it, not to treat it as a packaged commodity or as an instrument of aggression. Why should the world of Islam be any different? I would therefore suggest that one should begin with some of the copious first-person accounts of Islam available in English that describe what it means to be a Muslim, as in Muhammad Asad�s extraordinary book The Road to Mecca (a gripping account of how Leopold Weiss, 1900�92, born in Lvov, became a Muslim and Pakistan�s U.N. representative), or in Malcolm X�s account in his memoir, or in Taha Hussein�s great autobiography, The Stream of Days. The whole idea would be to open up Islam�s worlds as pertaining to the living, the experienced, the connected-to-us, rather than to shut it down, rigidly codifying it and stuffing it into a box labeled "Dangerous�do not disturb."
Above all, "we" cannot go on pretending that "we" live in a world of our own; certainly, as Americans, our government is deployed literally all over the globe�militarily, politically, economically. So why do we suppose that what we say and do is neutral, when in fact it is full of consequences for the rest of the human race? In our encounters with other cultures and religions, therefore, it would seem that the best way to proceed is not to think like governments or armies or corporations but rather to remember and act on the individual experiences that really shape our lives and those of others. To think humanistically and concretely rather than formulaically and abstractly, it is always best to read literature capable of dispelling the ideological fogs that so often obscure people from each other. Avoid the trots and the manuals, give a wide berth to security experts and formulators of the us-versus-them dogma, and, above all, look with the deepest suspicion on anyone who wants to tell you the real truth about Islam and terrorism, fundamentalism, militancy, fanaticism, etc. You�d have heard it all before, anyway, and even if you hadn�t, you could predict its claims. Why not look for the expression of different kinds of human experience instead, and leave those great non-subjects to the experts, their think tanks, government departments, and policy intellectuals, who get us into one unsuccessful and wasteful war after the other? |
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