Learning about the other
Understanding the United States requires attention to the many historical narratives of its people, argues Abdel-Moneim Said* in the last instalment of his series on the Arabs and 9/11
What would make a group of Kuwaiti youth, however small that group, mount a terrorist operation against US forces in Kuwait when those forces had borne the greatest part of the burden of liberating their country from the Iraqi occupation? One could come up with any number of answers to this question: those youths were an exception to the general rule, one might venture; Al- Qa'eda seduced them, others might suggest. Such acts are a manifestation of the pervasive anger among Arab youth as the result of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories. America's "hegemony" over the world following 11 September has become so heavy- handed as to provoke violent reactions.
Each of these and other possible answers might merit separate consideration on another occasion. However, for the sake of continuity in this series, I reiterate that the Arabs have an incredibly poor knowledge and understanding of the US government and society, which is all the more astounding given the vast political, security and economic ties between Arab capitals and Washington. Last week, I focused on the way the narrow outlook adopted by the Arabs led them to pin unrealistic hopes on an administration whose policy architects and ideological pundits are dreaming of "the new American century".
However, before discussing the effects of this outlook on the relationship between the Arabs and the US in light of 11 September, it is useful, first, to consider the origins of the Arab understanding of the US proper. If the Americans have a distorted view of Arabs and Muslims, the same applies in the reverse. The commonly held impression among the Arabs, as Mohamed Hassanein Heikal once put it, is that the US is a fortunate country: "It has a lot of geography and little history." The Americans are "lucky" because they obtained a vast, almost boundless, territory with abundant sources of wealth, that was without historical baggage and, many might add, without moral baggage.
The fact is, however, that the US is not the largest country in the world, nor the one with the most natural resources. Russia, for example, and certainly the former Soviet Union, is vaster, extending over six time zones, as opposed to four in the US. The same applies to other countries that are larger or approximately equal in size to the US, such as Canada, China, Australia and Brazil. In fact, the Arab world as a whole is slightly larger than the US. Nevertheless, there are oceans of difference between the historical experiences of these countries within the vast territories at their disposal. None of the others developed an economy with a GDP exceeding a trillion dollars -- equivalent to approximately 30 per cent of the gross global product for 2000. Even if we were to take the great empires whose hegemony extended over vaster territories, none of those reached the same degree of prosperity, even by the standards of their times.
It helps little to understand how the US attained its enormous wealth and power to state that the expanse of land the Americans were so fortunate to claim as their own was unspoiled. Its natural resources were still ripe for the plucking, whereas in the so-called old world resources had been tapped for thousands of years. This argument is valid only to a very limited extent, and then only if we consider natural resources to consist of gold, silver and the precious stones that had been largely depleted by ancient kingdoms, as was the case with the Pharaonic civilisation. However, "natural resources" is a far more comprehensive concept. It includes such renewable resources as solar energy, rivers and cultivable land, as well as depletable resources such as copper, oil and other minerals. With regard to the exploitation of these resources, the entire earth was still virgin territory until the 17th century, which is when the first immigrants arrived in America, creating the initial core of what was later to become the US. It was not until the beginning of the first industrial revolution that mankind began to exploit the earth's depletable resources on any significant scale. In our own times, hardly had the Club of Rome announced that there was a "limit to development" because of mankind's excessive consumption of natural resources, than the US -- not any other country -- gave mankind a new industrial revolution that did not rely on depletable natural resources, but rather on two of man's most precious and infinitely abundant resources: ideas and knowledge.
The US, thus, was no more fortunate than other countries in terms of the extent of its territory and its untapped resources. Although it began at the same starting point in terms of these criteria, it succeeded in outstripping the achievements of all other nations, at least until the present juncture in history. It must be that the American people, then, are the key to what the US has become and how it differs from Australia and Brazil, for example, both of which are also nations of immigrants living on vast tracts of land. It was the American people who proved capable of turning the resources at their disposal to wide-scale mass production, serving not only a continent but the world.
The secret to understanding the US, then, must rest on the people that make up the country. However, these individuals, like the rest of mankind, were never free of the burdens of history. It is commonly said that the US was not born until the American revolution against the British in 1776, and that its history began afresh from there, unencumbered by the past. In a sense this is true, but in a greater sense it ignores the larger picture. As historical records indicate, Americans thought of themselves as British subjects until as recently as two decades before the revolution. Moreover, not a small number remained loyal to the British crown afterwards.
More significantly, the US as a modern political entity is no more modern than the concept of the "nation- state", which had its origins in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, but which only became an established reality in the history of nations and international relations in the 19th century, in the wake of the American and French revolutions. Before that, nationhood was not so much defined by geo-political boundaries as by princely loyalties to an imperial centre, which was sometimes remote and not geographically contiguous, or by vague religious affiliations. Therefore, with the exception of, perhaps, Egypt and China, which experienced uninterrupted histories of central authority within a relatively stable land area, most peoples differed little from the Americans. The major difference was that the Americans took their history with them from their old countries to the new world, as the Beni Hilal did when they swept out of the Arabian peninsula to Egypt and North Africa.
The American people, then, have a history as long as that of the nations they originally came from. The only new factor was that American history was continually being re-invigourated with every new wave of immigrants carrying with them the burdens of their cultures and histories, which they unloaded into the pot already laden with such legacies. Perhaps, this accounts for why the Americans have contributed more to the study of history than any other people. In no other country is such priority given to the study of history, anthropology and archaeology.
This phenomenon is not due to some innate American lust for history because the Americans do not have one. Rather, it is because Americans have a deep conviction in the need to learn the lessons from the past and to apprise themselves of the major historical trends in politics, economics, sociology, culture and communications. We also find that in the US the function of history has been redefined to become an expression of the present, and, more importantly, the future, rather than of the past. The purpose of history is not to set down our pains and sufferings, but rather to guide us to better handle the present and, more importantly, the future. The emphasis on history and its re-orientation have combined to make the American experience unique. Americans know more history and they have as many historical narratives as there have been immigrants to the new world.
Therefore, the Americans are never averse to criticising, reassessing and revising their history, whether with regard to the attitudes of the settlers towards native Americans or to the institution of slavery. That such phenomena are entered as black marks in their history is not so much a form of repentance but an expression of the collective determination not to repeat such crimes in the future. History is thus intertwined with the culture of the age, which determines what is or is not moral or humanitarian. Until the 20th century the condemnation of human rights abuses, genocide and war crimes were never an issue in international relations. Mankind had to wait until the 19th century before practical measures were taken to abolish slavery. In fact, in the US it necessitated a full-fledged civil war in order to bring that abominable institution to a halt.
It is surprising that Arab political literature confines the institution of slavery to the US alone, as though it were the only country in the world to have practiced it. There were Arab delegations supporting the demand by African delegations, last year, in Durban at the preparatory meetings of the international conference against racism, for compensation for the crime of slavery. It must have knitted not a few eyebrows among the members of the Arab delegations when the American and European delegates asked them whether their countries would also be footing part of the compensation bill, since they, too, practiced slavery and engaged in the slave trade. Slavery was not a purely American phenomenon. Indeed, it dates as far back as mankind's entire history of wars and conquests. What was new in the history of slavery was that a strong and influential group of Americans took a closer look at that institution, condemned it and began to campaign to abolish it.
It is difficult to find so much as a trace of such moral introspection and efforts to act on it in the Arab world. The Arab and Islamic world has never issued a formal moral condemnation of slavery. Indeed, that institution was not officially abolished in some Arab countries until 1965. Nor has anyone pointed out that the emancipated American slaves who founded Liberia resorted to the very system of bondage they had left behind, using the country's indigenous inhabitants.
In short, we have concocted an American history tailor-made to the spirit of anti-American hostility that has swept the Arab world. While America's international behaviour may justify the rancour, fabrications and distortions will not contribute to a better understanding of and way of dealing with the world's sole superpower.
* The writer is director of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
