Reporting from somewhere in Europe...I am reading histories of Venice right now. There is a hugely funded push in the West to make the case that Islam and the West are fundamentally forever, and in their DNA, incompatible. That view supports the vast profits of War Inc. BUT ......Venice is testimony to how wrong and ahistorical this message is (as are Toledo...Seville...Granada in Spain...). Venice was for hundreds of years as an independent Republic, oriented to the East -- to the Ottoman rulers and what is now Turkey -- the source of its vast medieval and Renaissance wealth. It chose for centuries to turn its face East rather than West, that is not to the then-barbaric lands of Europe, for its own benefit as the merchant, sea-oriented power it was. In its architecture you see the Islamic influence...on the fretting like lace of the Doges Palace....in the shapes of the windows that mirror Islamic architecture, that keyhole shape known to us in illustrations of the Thousand and One Nights and debased echoes of Islamic architecture as in Disneys Alladin...Venice had its painters paint sultans....and engrave the portraits of turbaned Arabs and Moors into its public statues and heraldic emblems...Venice reached its great wealth, influence and power (as did pre-Ferdinand and Isabella Spain) by being cosmopolitan, pluralistic, multiethnic, diverse..welcoming trade and cultural exchange with the Muslim East, with Jews and Saracens and Moors....and being vivified by the importation of the high levels of civilization (mathematics, poetry, medicine) that the Muslim world attained while Europe was still in the dark ages..having lost classical learning. It is just wrong, the current right-wing messaging that these civilizations are incompatible and it is so poorly informed historically. Together, East and West, they are more than the sum of their parts individually. Without Islam and Arabic culture there would have been no European Renaissance discoveries in science, math or medicine...not to mention the influence everywhere visible in Venice of the decorative arts - -this is well established among scholars of the Renaissance. Time to look at history again to shred current hate-based mythologies....that foster a narrative of eternal strangeness and mutual incomprehension.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Aug 2014 16:19:26 +0000
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