The so-called 'culture clash' between Islam and the West is being deliberately ramped up by Pax Americana’s cheerleaders who prefer this familiar narrative to the more complex reality of a clash of interests between Western and Muslim states.
By Khaled Diab |
Sep.23, 2012 | 11:35 AM
Karl Marx once said that history
repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. The riots and Iranian fatwa
calling for the death of Salman Rushdie which forced the British-Kashmiri
author into hiding for 13 years, can only be described as tragic – for him and
for the cause of freedom and tolerance.
In the years since the 1989 fatwa,
the rage expressed at perceived Western “insults” to Islam and its prophet,
Mohammed, have transcended tragedy to become farcical, with often tragic
consequences. Rushdie’s "Satanic Verses" – which, as those who have
actually read it are aware, betrays a profound admiration and respect for the
person of Mohammed, despite its criticism of religion and human nature – at
least had the merit of artistic and literary quality.
Blogger Comment: I have read the "Satanic Verses"' It is based on a story that has been refuted by Muslim theologists basing their refutation on solid reasoning. "Rushdi" for some psychological reasons is a hate-monger, and his book does not have the merit of artistic and literary quality. It is a vulgar and slimy book written in a way that cannot be fully understood by the Western mind, and meant to only anger the Muslim world.
Blogger Comment: I have read the "Satanic Verses"' It is based on a story that has been refuted by Muslim theologists basing their refutation on solid reasoning. "Rushdi" for some psychological reasons is a hate-monger, and his book does not have the merit of artistic and literary quality. It is a vulgar and slimy book written in a way that cannot be fully understood by the Western mind, and meant to only anger the Muslim world.
In contrast, most subsequent
targets of this brand of outrage have been crude and amateurish, such as the
Danish cartoons mocking Mohammed, and consciously out to provoke a reaction,
like the poorly-scripted and badly-acted "Innocence of Muslims,"
which those “pre-incited”, “pre-programmed” Muslim protesters, as the film’s
spokesperson Steve Klein described them, obligingly did.
At a certain level, I can
understand, though I am personally not a believer, why Muslims would find
offensive the infantile suggestions contained in the film that their prophet
got the inspiration to establish his faith by performing cunnilingus on his
first wife, Khadijah, or that the Quran was authored for him by a Coptic monk.
To my mind, the best reaction to
this so-called "film" – which looks like it cost about $10 to make
over a weekend, but was rumoured to have cost $5 million – would have been not
to dignify it with a response, so its makers would have been left to wallow in
the bitter realisation that their endeavour did not capture an audience beyond
the 10 people who turned up to watch its one-and-only public screening.
Blogger Comment: I agree with writer in this regard
Blogger Comment: I agree with writer in this regard
The Muslims who expressed their
outrage peacefully had every right to do so, since freedom of expression
guarantees not only the right to cause offence but also the right to take
offence. However, the minority that chose violence not only went against
liberal, secular values, but also the teachings of their own prophet and an ancient tradition of
mockery of religion in their own societies.
Moreover, the protesters triggered
widespread disapproval and disbelief across the Arab world. “The only thing
that seems to mobilise the Arab street is a movie, a cartoon or an insult, but
not the pool of blood in Syria,”
tweeted one dismayed Syrian activist.
So why did a production that is so
out there that it wouldn’t even qualify as the lunatic fringe provoke such
outrage and violence?
Part of the reason is a simple case
of ignorance. Many Muslim conservatives fail or refuse to understand that the United States
and many other Western countries hold freedom of speech, at least in principle,
in higher regard than religious sensibilities. That would help explain why so
many protesters called on the United States
to apologize for the film and ban it, despite the First Amendment to the U.S.
constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech.
Blogr Comment: Freedom of speech and expression in the West is an open-ended freedom, allowing vulgarity, abuse and chaos to take over. It is no more freedom of speech or expression through reasoning, but through hatred and abuse.Ex.: "that is my opinion. If you do not like it, then fuck off or fuck your self", whether "fuck off or fuck yourself" is bluntly said as such, or put in a fiction form.
Blogr Comment: Freedom of speech and expression in the West is an open-ended freedom, allowing vulgarity, abuse and chaos to take over. It is no more freedom of speech or expression through reasoning, but through hatred and abuse.Ex.: "that is my opinion. If you do not like it, then fuck off or fuck your self", whether "fuck off or fuck yourself" is bluntly said as such, or put in a fiction form.
But before Westerners take too much
of a holier-than-thou attitude toward their commitment to free speech, they
would do well to remember that, up until very recently, Christian conservatives
had a powerful influence on constraining freedom of expression. This shows that
it is religion in general (or rigid secular ideological orthodoxy) that is a
significant barrier to free thought and inquiry, not just Islam.
In fact, a number of European
countries with Christian majority, as well as Israel,
still have laws against blasphemy or insulting religion on their books, and
though most no longer apply them, some still do, such as Poland and Greece. Meanwhile, nearby Albania
is a majority Muslim country which has a long history of atheism and no laws
against blasphemy or insulting religion, and has never prosecuted anyone for
such a crime.
In Russia, the punk-rock band Pussy
Riot was recently convicted for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.”
How their “punk
prayer” was offensive to Christianity is unclear, though it was highly
insulting to Russia’s
earthly deity, President Vladimir Putin.
Further West, cinematic classics,
such as Martin Scorsese’s "The Last Temptation of Christ," elicited
angry protests across the Christian world, including the firebombing of a Paris movie theater, and was banned outright in Mexico, Chile
and Argentina.
Likewise, "The Life of
Brian" also elicited widespread protest – despite Monty Python’s
respectful portrayal of Jesus and their insistence that the film is not
blasphemous but only lampoons modern organized religion and the sheep-like
mentality it inspires in followers – was banned in parts of the U.K., Norway
and Ireland, and British television declined to show it.
The current protests are
paradoxically both about Mohammed and have absolutely nothing to do with him.
The insult to Mohammed was just an issue of convenience and, had it been
absent, another cause would have emerged for popular frustration and fury.
This is not because, as some
Westerners seem to believe, that rage and fury are full-time occupations for
Muslims, but because they are fed up with American hegemony (and local
corruption) and dominance over their lives – from the bloody wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, to the decades spent supporting and propping up corrupt and brutal
dictators, while paying lip service to the haughty ideals of freedom and
democracy.
This fact has been conveniently
overlooked by Pax Americana’s cheerleaders who, despite having been thrown off
kilter by the revolutionary wave which has swept the Middle
East, are now returning to business as usual with their
suggestions that the fury unleashed by the anti-Mohammed film is
incontrovertible proof of the irreconcilability of Western and Islamic values.
Describing herself as a “combatant in the clash of civilizations," Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, the Somali-Dutch feminist, atheist and advocate of neo-con policies uses
the latest flare up to call for more, not less, U.S. intervention in the region
to bring down political Islam “in the same way we helped bring about the demise
of the former Soviet Union.”
Although I admire Hirsi Ali’s
courage in standing by her convictions despite death threats, I cannot abide
her politics, her wilful myopia to the destructiveness of much of America’s
interventions, and her insistence that there is a “clash of civilizations.”
In my view, there are clashes of
many things in this world – trivializations, idiocies, fundamentalisms – but no
clash of civilisations. Although culture and ideology can on rare occasions
lead to conflict, for the most part, societies enter into conflicts due to a
clash of interests.
That would explain, for instance,
why the United States decided to invade Saddam Hussein’s secular Iraq, even
though it was a sworn enemy of Al-Qaida and Jihadist Islam, yet is bosom
buddies with Saudi Arabia, the hotbed of reactionary Wahhabism and the home of
most of the alleged hijackers who took part in the 9/11 attacks. It also sheds
light on why Israel
once short-sightedly backed Islamist Hamas as a counterweight against the
secular Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Despite the mutually exclusive
historical narratives of Dar al-Islam and Christendom, of Crusades and Jihads
promoted by extremists, any deeper reading of history will soon reveal that
conflicts within self-identified cultural or civilizational groups are greater
than those between them. Christians and Muslims have gone to war and killed more
of their coreligionists than each other. Take, for example, World War II, whose
Christian-on-Christian carnage far surpassed anything the Muslims had ever
inflicted. Moreover, the mutual hatred of Catholics and Protestants and Sunnis
and Shia has often surpassed the rivalry between Islam and Christianity.
Add to that the fact that alliances
regularly cut across presumed civilizational lines, such as the Arabs allying
themselves with the British and the French against the Turks, or the Ottomans
fighting alongside the Germans against the British, French and Russians. In
fact, throughout its centuries as a major power, the Ottoman Empire’s alliances
shifted between various Christian European states, including France, Poland, as well as the Protestant
Reformation against the Catholic House of Habsburg.
More fundamentally, despite popular
references to a “Judeo-Christian” civilisation, Islam actually also belongs to
the same civilizational group, with common roots in the Abrahamic tradition,
not to mention the Greek and Hellenistic, Mesopotamian and Egyptian influences.
In fact, Europe and the Middle East, especially the Mediterranean countries,
have more in common with each other than they do with their co-religionists in
Africa and further east in Asia.
Some will undoubtedly protest that,
even if this is true, the Enlightenment and its values, such as freedom of
expression, have largely passed the Arab and Muslim world by. But the reality
is far more complex and nuanced. Although Arabs and Muslims generally lag
behind scientifically, this is not just down to local cultural factors. There
are plenty of geopolitical and economic factors which are beyond their control
holding them back.
More importantly, the values of the
Enlightenment have been an integral part of the secularizing and modernizing
reform project in the Middle East that began in Turkey
and Egypt
in the 19th century. More recently, it was the desire for freedom and democracy
– as well as economic justice – which lured millions of protesters onto the streets,
and even if mainstream Islamists have made the biggest gains for now, they have
had to adapt their discourse to suit this public mood.
What all this demonstrates is that
the clash of civilizations exists mostly in the fevered imaginations of extremists
on both sides. But we are in danger of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy
if we allow ourselves to fall for the divisive, though alluringly simplistic,
logic of the prophets of doom. To remedy and challenge this, moderates on all
sides must join forces to highlight the reality and benefits of the mash of
civilisations in which we really live.
Khaled Diab is an
Egyptian-Belgian journalist, blogger
and writer, currently living in Jerusalem, who has spent about half his life in
the Middle East and the other half in Europe. Follow him at @DiabolicalIdea
Alleged clash
for distraction from the real one; Global economy
and unfair distribution of
the globla bread basket
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