The late Palestinian American literary theorist, public intellectual and secular humanist Edward Said on how and why Muslims are demonized and dehumanized, from his book Covering Islam: The [Western] label Islam, either to explain or indiscriminately condemn Islam, is a form of attack, which in turn provokes more hostility between self-appointed Muslim and Western spokespersons. Islam defines a relatively small proportion of what actually takes place in the Islamic world, which numbers more than 1.5 billion people, and includes dozens of countries, societies, traditions, languages, and, of course, an infinite number of different experiences. It is simply false to try to trace all this back to something called Islam. What we expect from the serious study of Western societies, with its complex theories, enormously variegated analyses of social structures, histories, cultural formations, and sophisticated languages of investigation, we should also expect from the study and discussion of Islamic societies in the West. Why the accents of alarm and fear in most discussions of Islam? The answer, I think, is that [...] they furnish an additional weapon in the contest to subordinate, beat down, compel, and defeat any Arab or Muslim resistance to United States-Israeli dominance. Moreover, by surreptitiously justifying a policy of single-minded obduracy that links Islamism, however lamentable it is, to a strategically important, oil-rich part of the world, the anti-Islam campaign virtually eliminates the possibility of any sort of equal dialogue between Islam and the Arabs, and the West or Israel. To demonize and dehumanize a whole culture on the grounds that it is enraged at modernity is to turn Muslims into the objects of a therapeutic, punitive attention. I do not want to be misunderstood here: the manipulation of Islam, or for that matter Christianity and Judaism, for retrograde political purposes is catastrophically bad, and must be opposed, not just in Saudi Arabia, the West Bank and Gaza, Pakistan, Sudan, Algeria, and Tunisia, but also in Israel, among the right-wing Christians in Lebanon and wherever theocratic tendencies appear. And I do not at all believe that all the ills of Arab Muslim countries are due to Zionism and imperialism. But this is very far from saying that Israel and the United States, and their intellectual hacks, have not played a combative, even incendiary role in stigmatizing and heaping invidious abuse on an abstraction called Islam, in order to deliberately stir up feelings of anger and fear about Islam in Americans and Europeans.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 16:35:41 +0000
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