Rewriting the text books
An Arab-European encounter in Cairo acknowledged the need for concerted efforts to address mutual misperception. Dina Ezzat reports
The issue of Western misperception of Arabs and Muslims was the subject of a singularly realistic debate this week at the headquarters of the Arab League.
Meeting under the title, "Euro-Arab Dialogue: The image of Arab-Islamic Culture in European History Books", representatives of the Arab League, UNESCO, the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organisation (ALECSO), the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (IESCO) and the Council of Europe debated the misrepresentations of Arabs and Muslims in European countries. The international conference concluded that European culture contained an "erroneous image, if not images", not just of Arabs and Muslims, but also of Arab culture, Muslim civilisation, and above all, of Islam as a faith.
"We cannot ignore the fact that there are disturbing signs of Islamophobia and that we need to address these signs," Arab League Secretary- General Amr Moussa said in his speech to the opening session, that was also attended by Amr Salama, minister of higher education and president of the Egyptian National Commission for UNESCO, and Mohamed Jamil Abdul-Razzaq, director of the UNESCO regional office in Cairo.
The fight against Islamophobia, Moussa and the other participants agreed, cannot be won as long as textbooks in the West, including Europe, continue to offer negative images of Arabs and Muslims. Moreover, there was also a consensus that any cross-cultural dialogue, including the Arab-European dialogue currently being conducted under the umbrella of the Barcelona Process, cannot bear adequate fruit as long as European schools continue to offer students distorted images of Arabs and Islam. The harm inflicted by such negative perceptions go beyond the virtual demonisation of Arabs and Muslims to humiliate very directly those European students who are themselves of Arab and/or Muslim origin.
Papers and interventions presented to the conference by Arab and European participants, including Al-Azhar professors, focussed on three main points: the dissection of the many negative and few positive images of Arabs and Muslims to be found in European textbooks; the social and -- to some extent -- political impact of these images; and how this situation might be rectified so as to encourage more meaningful cross-cultural dialogue between Arabs and Europeans.
Many participants acknowledged that despite the attempts made by a number of European countries to discourage smears against Arabs and Muslims, the end result is often disappointing. Arabs and Muslims continue to be represented in books on history, geography and at times even literature through a range of clichés, from barbarians to Bedouins. The idea is also widespread that Muslims believe it their duty to attack others and convert them to Islam by force.
Many of the papers and documents presented to the conference, including a book entitled The Image of Arabs and Muslims in Textbooks Around the World, noted that Arabs are often portrayed as either filthy rich men who like to spend their petro-dollars recklessly and fail to develop their countries adequately -- especially in comparison to Israel -- or as disturbingly poor, and often uncivilised individuals, who oppress women, indulge in polygamy and fail to address life in a realistic way, since they only believe in the heaven they are promised after death where they will have, as one European textbook notes, "much food, fun and sex". The conference also noted, even when the glorious history of the Pharaohs of Egypt, or the many scientific and literary achievements of Arab and Muslim cultures during the Arab Renaissance period, are highlighted in textbooks, contemporary Arabs and Muslims are still shown in a very negative light, and often linked, either explicitly or implicitly, with terrorism.
"We are ready to work on addressing these issues"; "We are prepared to present accurate information"; "We know that these are unfair images"; and "We should realise that it is not even in our own interest to perpetuate these images with the growing populations of Arab and Muslim origins in our countries" -- these were some of the phrases that recurred in the mouths of European participants during the three-day debate.
Some participants pointed out that several European ministries of education are currently revising their textbooks with an eye on eliminating such misconceptions. But the problem, as many of those attending noted, is not necessarily restricted to the inclusion of bad images in textbooks, but also at times to the presentation of accurate facts within a misleading context, or even at times, without any context at all.
Equally disturbing is the often limited number of pages dedicated to Arab and Muslim history in comparison to the amount of space given to other cultures. Thus the authors of The Image of Arabs and Muslims in Textbooks Around the World lament the failure of French secondary schools -- with their large number of students of Arab and Muslim origins -- to represent modern Arab literature in an appropriate way as part of their required readings in foreign literature.
But the conference also concluded that Arabs and Muslims must take their share of the responsibility for this situation. Arab and Muslim countries -- as represented by their foreign missions overseas -- have been slow to follow up on this kind of European misrepresentation. It is only in the wake of the recent wave of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attacks in European countries that certain Arab and Muslim governments started to give any attention at all to this matter. And even then, they reacted emotionally, rather than taking a pragmatic approach of providing the European officials concerned with more accurate material and following up to see that the errors were rectified.
A set of limited but concrete recommendations were adopted by the conference, in the form of a series of graduated steps to address this concern. Proposing rectifications, providing adequate material, translating good textbooks from Arabic into English, and organising a working seminar with curricula writers and publishers, were among the proposals put forward.
But the most important recommendation made by the conference was concerning human resources: the Arab and Muslim world needs to engage teachers and curricula writers and better acquaint them with the reality of our societies and peoples.
"School books are very important, but what is most important is what we do with them," noted Joseph Huber, director of the higher education and research division at the Council of Europe.
The conference also recommended a follow-up meeting in six weeks' time, and pledged that by then the ideas proposed at this week's meeting will have begun to be implemented.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/721/eg9.htm