DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA The disappearance of the nightmare Arab
By James Carroll
Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster
threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, "God is great!"
Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and
squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality:
that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered
imaginations.
For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice
against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a
blinding combination. Then the September 11, 2001 attack pulled its shroud
across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in
a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first
time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too,
the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.
Absence of Arab perfidy, presence of god
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering
innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of
ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent
discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but
defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Gaddafi's
men.
In
the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual
American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of
Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries
against "Crusaders and Jews" - all have been absent from nearly every instance
of revolt. Osama bin Laden - to whom, many Americans became convinced in these
last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance - has been
appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?
Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has
notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female
leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with
democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented
outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is
essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without
Islamic "fanatics" chanting hate-filled slogans.
Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks
like?
In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and
again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with
the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses
of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested
Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes
and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque
pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no
blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of
Europeans and Americans.
Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with
resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The
Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine
El-Abidine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.)
These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the
mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between
piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.
It's an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad
Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior
"secular". In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered
little but an "afterthought" to the revolution. In this, the media is simply
wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the
Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of
self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as
near to each person - as the Koran says - as his or her own jugular vein. The
call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual
dignity.
A rejection of violence and the old lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been
achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out.
History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just
as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and
naturally as non-violence and peace.
History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred
and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that
hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation
to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with
such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to
"people power," Arabs have given the concept several new twists.
Because so many people have believed in themselves - protecting one another
simply by standing together - they have been able to reject not only violence,
but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence
of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a
telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged
or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both
anti-Semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab
newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the
plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of
Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab
dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their
own citizens).
Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of
Jew-baiting in its wake - in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob
outside the city's main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced
and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of
Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the
word "Jew" at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what
makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.
To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily
identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but
something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the UN
Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of
February's revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely
ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the
spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely
non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah
and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to
behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.
The mainstreaming of anti-Muslim prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular
is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk
suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National
Public Radio (NPR) commentator Juan Williams, who said, "I get worried. I get
nervous" around those "in Muslim garb," those who identify themselves "first
and foremost as Muslims".
Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply
speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to
be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by
forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry
was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various
players.
Scary, indeed - but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber
of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period
when the overheated watchword was "Islamofascism". In 2002, scholar Bernard
Lewis's book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual
respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to
Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at
all, in the Arab context it should be: "we" did - with that "we" defined as
Western civilization.
Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the
Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North
Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798
for Napoleon's arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening
of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest
of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and
Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian
Peninsula - all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are
routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a
religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to
democracy.
How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert
pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start,
although the seventh century Koran was not translated into Latin until the
twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam's
origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly
added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still
at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That's readily apparent in the
fact that a 14th-century slander against Islam - that it was only "spread by
the sword" - was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope
Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been
encouraged.
Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all
religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that
killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the 16th and 17th
centuries is remembered as the "religious wars," even though religion was only
part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well
as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the "age of exploration," also
known as the age of colonial exploitation.
"Secular" sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred
causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic
anti-modernism. "Enlightened" nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly
denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that
their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal
peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as
rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and
is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its North
Atlantic Treaty Organization allies pursue dogmatically ideological and
oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being "religious".
No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be
"against evil", with God "not neutral", as George W Bush blithely put it. And
never mind that US forces (both the military and the private contractors) are
strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that
defines the American enemy as the "infidel" - the Muslim monster unleashed. In
any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America's wars if ancient
rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane
and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.
The revolution of hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great
hope. At the very least, "we" in the West must reckon with this overturning of
the premises of our prejudice.
Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to
erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to
falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas
of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can re-ignite, and the
never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can re-emerge.
But that one of the world's great religions is essential to what is unfolding
across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous
change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and
mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this
means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious - an ancient hatred
of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.
James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine's Sword, is a
columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at
Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem:
How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has
just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio
interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last
acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click
here, or download it to your iPod
here.
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