Edward Said (fwd again)

[jenyan1 <jenyan1@xxxxxxx>]

     In a remarkable series of three articles published
     between January and March 1999 in Dawn, Pakistan's most
     respected weekly, the late Eqbal Ahmad, writing for a
     Muslim audience, analyzed what he called the roots of
     the religious right, coming down very harshly on the
     mutilations of Islam by absolutists and fanatical
     tyrants whose obsession with regulating personal
     behavior promotes "an Islamic order reduced to a penal
     code, stripped of its humanism, aesthetics, intellectual
     quests, and spiritual devotion." And this "entails an
     absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized,
     aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The
     phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and
     twists the political process wherever it unfolds." As a
     timely instance of this debasement, Ahmad proceeds first
     to present the rich, complex, pluralist meaning of the
     word jihad and then goes on to show that in the word's
     current confinement to indiscriminate war against
     presumed enemies, it is impossible "to recognize the
     Islamic--religion, society, culture, history or
     politics--as lived and experienced by Muslims through
     the ages." The modern Islamists, Ahmad concludes, are
     "concerned with power, not with the soul; with the
     mobilization of people for political purposes rather
     than with sharing and alleviating their sufferings and
     aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time-bound
     political agenda." What has made matters worse is that
     similar distortions and zealotry occur in the "Jewish"
     and "Christian" universes of discourse

     It was Conrad, more powerfully than any of his readers
     at the end of the nineteenth century could have
     imagined, who understood that the distinctions between
     civilized London and "the heart of darkness" quickly
     collapsed in extreme situations, and that the heights of
     European civilization could instantaneously fall into
     the most barbarous practices without preparation or
     transition. And it was Conrad also, in The Secret Agent
     (1907), who described terrorism's affinity for
     abstractions like "pure science" (and by extension for
     "Islam" or "the West"), as well as the terrorist's
     ultimate moral degradation.

     For there are closer ties between apparently warring
     civilizations than most of us would like to believe;
     both Freud and Nietzsche showed how the traffic across
     carefully maintained, even policed boundaries moves with
     often terrifying ease. But then such fluid ideas, full
     of ambiguity and skepticism about notions that we hold
     on to, scarcely furnish us with suitable, practical
     guidelines for situations such as the one we face now.
     Hence the altogether more reassuring battle orders (a
     crusade, good versus evil, freedom against fear, etc.)
     drawn out of Huntington's alleged opposition between
     Islam and the West, from which official discourse drew
     its vocabulary in the first days after the September 11
     attacks. There's since been a noticeable de-escalation
     in that discourse, but to judge from the steady amount
     of hate speech and actions, plus reports of law
     enforcement efforts directed against Arabs, Muslims and
     Indians all over the country, the paradigm stays on.

     One further reason for its persistence is the increased
     presence of Muslims all over Europe and the United
     States. Think of the populations today of France, Italy,
     Germany, Spain, Britain, America, even Sweden, and you
     must concede that Islam is no longer on the fringes of
     the West but at its center. But what is so threatening
     about that presence? Buried in the collective culture
     are memories of the first great Arab-Islamic conquests,
     which began in the seventh century and which, as the
     celebrated Belgian historian Henri Pirenne wrote in his
     landmark book Mohammed and Charlemagne (1939), shattered
     once and for all the ancient unity of the Mediterranean,
     destroyed the Christian-Roman synthesis and gave rise to
     a new civilization dominated by northern powers (Germany
     and Carolingian France) whose mission, he seemed to be
     saying, is to resume defense of the "West" against its
     historical-cultural enemies. What Pirenne left out,
     alas, is that in the creation of this new line of
     defense the West drew on the humanism, science,
     philosophy, sociology and historiography of Islam, which
     had already interposed itself between Charlemagne's
     world and classical antiquity. Islam is inside from the
     start, as even Dante, great enemy of Mohammed, had to
     concede when he placed the Prophet at the very heart of
     his Inferno.

Full article at:
http://www.zmag.org/saidclash.htm

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