24 - 30 January 2002
Issue No.570
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 24 - 30 January 2002 Issue No.570 |
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Reflections
A cultural thing
Arab and Muslim protestations that we're really "nice guys," that only a few of us are bloodthirsty terrorists, that real Islam is a religion of tolerance, etc. are truly pathetic. We concede the most flagrant racism against us and, rather than confront it as the ugly and ignorant aberration all racisms are, we whine and entreat that it is all a terrible misunderstanding.
Beneath the heaps of learned nonsense, the Western debate about Islam's propensity to violence, authoritarianism, the oppression of women... is nothing but 19th- century European racism, trussed up in ribbons and frills -- especially when PC, feminist, left/liberal "intellectuals" pitch in with their own hotly self-righteous platitudes: George W, the liberator of Afghan women.
What I find particularly absurd about the whole discussion (on "our" side as well as "theirs") is that no religious text I know of is free (at least on the surface) of the "propensities" that are so liberally and self- confidently attributed to Islam and Muslims. Let he, one might say, who is without embarrassing religious texts cast the first stone. Take the story of Abraham/Ibrahim (the legendary ancestor of both Arabs and Jews). One may interpret it in any way one likes. But the attempted slaughter of a child, let alone one's own, does not strike a pretty picture in any "culture" I've heard of. The three great monotheistic religions share many such stories.
In any case, all is not lost, it now appears. "Our" culture and "theirs" seem to have found a common ground -- albeit one reflecting the development gap: torture.
Several years ago, the head of a US-based human rights organisation, in town on a mission to lobby against torture in jails and police stations here, told me of a meeting he had held with the ambassador to Egypt of an important European country. Having listened to the human rights mission's report on torture in Egypt, the ambassador, my friend recounted incredulously, had an interesting take on the whole matter. Unlike Americans and Europeans, his excellency opined, Egyptians were used to being physically abused in police stations and prisons -- a cultural thing, you might say.
I've recounted this story many times since then. It seemed, to my mind, to exemplify both the absolute garbage that all the endless talk (learned or otherwise) of cultural essence actually boils down to, and -- more interesting still -- the amazing complicity between "us" and "them" in defining what "we" are supposed to be like. Essential cultural attributes are invariably used to justify the most hateful forms of oppression and criminal behaviour, for which globalised humanity, in its great and wonderful cultural and ethnic diversity, continues to have a definite predilection.
Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was famous for having said that whenever he heard the word "culture," he reached for his gun. Today, culture (as in our culture, their culture) evokes a very different meaning, one with which the Nazi boss would have been more than comfortable, so easy is it to interchange it with another word that was especially close to his heart: race. So different, indeed, that when I hear the word "culture" today, I immediately look out for the gun, tightly clutched by the person saying it.
The "war against terror," that "monumental battle" in defence of Western civilisation, culture and values, democracy and perpetual freedom has, alas, successfully bridged the civilisational divide. Sure, torture Guantanamo Bay-style has all the slick gloss that the imperial master of the world is capable of -- red sci-fi suits and masks, a remote base in Cuba and total sensory deprivation, instead of the more primitive beatings and hangings. It is doubly horrible for it.
And the arguments in justification are so utterly familiar. The prisoners on the base are "thugs" unworthy of POW status; there has been no due process; they have not been formally charged, tried or convicted; they have been denied the benefit of legal counsel and all the other basic rights upheld by international legal and human rights standards for any kind of prisoner... All this is unimportant. "What about the rights of the innocent civilians they murdered?" We've heard it all before -- just one of the benefits of "our" culture and civilisation.
Hitherto, however, our moral development as human beings had achieved a certain limited success. Torture had become a four-letter word. Torturers abounded, but they had to do their dirty business in secret, issuing heated denials even as they advanced a host of arguments in its justification.
Now it is being done flagrantly, in public. Indeed, thanks to the information revolution and the global supremacy of the torturers, we are audience to the most public torture in human history.
In a horrifying dialectic, the war of civilisations has been realised as a descent into barbarism.
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